Random photos, comics, etc.

[Leo Enticknap]

People break the cardinal rule all the time: My computer is my property and I am the sole arbiter of what code gets executed on it. Breaking that rule puts your computer and your business at risk.

This does not mean that you have to be a computer expert who knows what every line of code does. It means that you need to be very careful of your sources and not allow third party code to run on your computer unless you trust the source, implicitly.

That can be easier said than done. I use the NoScript Firefox plugin when browsing, in order to control what third parties do and don't get to run scripts on my computers. When I first started to do so, on the recommendation of a co-worker, I was shocked at how many seemingly unrelated third parties were trying to execute code whenever I visited a website. This is what it found on just one news site. I have visited other sites in which a list of 30-40 third parties trying to run scripts appears.

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How many average PC users know that they need to take steps like this in order to prevent Google, Twitter, etc. being able to help themselves to your browsing history, and likely much else besides?

BTW, a news conference is being widely reported (e.g. here) in which the CEO of Delta claimed that the Crowdstrike SNAFU cost the airline half a billion. The costs incurred by Delta's customers who suffered flight disruption likely add at least tens of millions more on to that.

[Marcel Birgelen]

That can be easier said than done. I use the NoScript Firefox plugin when browsing, in order to control what third parties do and don't get to run scripts on my computers. When I first started to do so, on the recommendation of a co-worker, I was shocked at how many seemingly unrelated third parties were trying to execute code whenever I visited a website. This is what it found on just one news site. I have visited other sites in which a list of 30-40 third parties trying to run scripts appears.

Remember a year or two or so back, when Facebook (don't know if they called the mothership Meta already back then) pulled a leg on their BGP, which caused all Facebook services to vanish from the Internet for a few hours? A lot of non-Facebook related websites wouldn't load properly, because all those social integrations and tracking junk on those sites wouldn't load.

Your modern web developer is one sloppy beast. Resulting in sites that are a hot mess of CSS and Javascript and whatnot frameworks, all downloading from somewhere on the World Wide Web, a lot of them loading themselves from some random CDN. I remember when Fastly, one of those CDNs hosting a lot of this general framework dreck, went down in flames, millions of sites stopped working partly or entirely, among them a few big ones, including some major news outlets...

BTW, a news conference is being widely reported (e.g. here) in which the CEO of Delta claimed that the Crowdstrike SNAFU cost the airline half a billion. The costs incurred by Delta's customers who suffered flight disruption likely add at least tens of millions more on to that.

Right now, they're even being sued by their own shareholders, don't know how they think that's going to help, but yeah...

We'll see how far it will go, I guess it will be settled though. Holding technology companies liable for their SNAFUs will set an interesting precedent. Until now, if e.g. Microsoft messed up with a botched update, that took me multiple days to fix, there is no way Microsoft is going to off-set those costs.

This particular outage affected less than a percent of all computers out there. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft would release a patch with similar consequences that affects e.g. 20 or 30% of all machines globally? When that day happens, I hope I'm somewhere deep in the mountains, with no cellphone coverage...

This IP address that tracks back to China (through the cable connection I think in San Jose) has hit us over 56,000 times since yesterday afternoon and it started early yesterday morning. All blocked. Occasionally another address from that Class C IP block attempts a connection with all the characteristics of being manually initiated.

Sorry for being a pedantic prick. It just reminds me of a preach I got back somewhere in 1999 when I requested my first IP space via RIPE, the European regional Internet Registry. Somewhere in my request I referred to a "Class C" network and as such, my request was promptly DENIED. Why? Since somewhere around 1993, the term "Class A/B/C" network has been deprecated for their Classless "CIDR" counterparts: Your class A is a /8 network now, your class B is a /16 and a class C network will now only be referred to as a /24.

Makes me wonder if our government is trying to protect us at all? They're too busy creating bogus political ads acting like 5th graders calling names and bullying. How do we even let that go on?

The average IQ of our politicians seems to have dropped below freezing point on practically any temperature scale other than Kelvin over the last couple of decades.
When was the last time you've seen a politician that was only halfway competent in IT stuff? How do you expect the governments we have right now protecting us from those kind of dangers if they can't even agree on the most basic of things?

[Bruce Cloutier]

Not for nothin' but I have avoided this IPv6 bullshit. Even the routine to properly display the stupid addresses was a pain to write. I haven't yet tried to parse one that someone might enter if anyone bothers. Seems like it would be easy but there are twice as many outlier cases that have to be handled than there are actual print statements. Its this '::' shorthand thing you can only use once. Been looking into it since my OS lacks this apparent necessity.

The whole thing just reminds me of a cow designed by a committee (e.g. a moose). There has to be a similar analogy for this. This got its start with everyone whining about the lack of IPv4 address space. Some people made some poor decisions. That crap has festered and fermented into a standard that no one has anything good to say about. Kind of a parallel to where this society is going.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Not for nothin' but I have avoided this IPv6 bullshit. Even the routine to properly display the stupid addresses was a pain to write. I haven't yet tried to parse one that someone might enter if anyone bothers. Seems like it would be easy but there are twice as many outlier cases that have to be handled than there are actual print statements. Its this '::' shorthand thing you can only use once. Been looking into it since my OS lacks this apparent necessity.

The whole thing just reminds me of a cow designed by a committee (e.g. a moose). There has to be a similar analogy for this. This got its start with everyone whining about the lack of IPv4 address space. Some people made some poor decisions. That crap has festered and fermented into a standard that no one has anything good to say about. Kind of a parallel to where this society is going.

For most internal stuff, IPv6 is more a nuisance than a solution. The thing is: Governments and as a result also many bigger companies around here are now starting to require that stuff works with both IPv4 and IPv6.

The biggest blunder of IPv6 is that it was designed as a completely separate protocol, alongside IPv4. Also, IPv6 doesn't do anything you couldn't equally achieve with IPv4. So, IPv6 requires you to do everything twice, with zero added gains. The alternative was to just add a few octets to IPv4 and start using those additional octets once we could reasonably assume that everybody must have transitioned.

Essentially, I completely agree with this guy, at least on IPv6.

[Bruce Cloutier]

I was at the IEEE conference in Boston (early 1990s I think, maybe late 80s) where the big thing was what to do with the fact that we were going to run out of IP addresses. It was there that the IPv6 thing was born. Maybe it started earlier but they brought that to the surface and gave it traction. But, I agree, my first impression was that they were going to add 2 octets to the address making it 6 bytes (ergo the 6 in IPv6 vs the 4 in IPv4). But no. Shit got out of control and now the address is 16 bytes or they prefer 8 groups of 16-bits each. It's mapped out in some cryptic complicated way. Technically it got out of control early and no one could challenge the egos involved. The even use the word "simpler" early in the IPv6 RFC. I was fooled. But then again I thought "Affordable Healthcare" meant that medical costs would go down.

I have been characterizing the security threat by literally watching IPv4 traffic at the node of an externally facing device (not behind a router/NAT). The idea was to give the OS the tools to deal with it should anyone ever need. But this clear and ever present threat needs to be addressed at the source and not by taking a defensive posture. It degrades the efficiency of the underlying network. My bet too is that these nefarious actors aren't paying their way and we carry the cost. All in the name of free-speech I guess. Not to mention that most of it is supported by the public's infected hardware mess.

Then I realized that this is NOT the whole picture. The network is not now just IPv4. There is a whole separate (less controlled) network, in effectively a parallel universe, allowing who-knows-what to transpire where (at least) I could not see. It is less controlled since your device can be directly addressed from anywhere in the world. The NAT trick not only allowed a whole household to operate with one external IP address but it created a firewall isolating the devices (computers) on your network from the outside without anyone having to know what a firewall actually was. Magically the first innocuous security solution.

The NAT translation also came out of that Boston conference as an alternative (I think). This saved the day for IPv4. The combination of a couple of additional octets in the IP protocol and NAT would be the answer. But no. One was viewed as a stop-gap work-around and the other became the veritable Pandora's Box in the the anti-K.I.S.S. world of academic types looking to make a name for themselves with too much time on their hands. Competitive efforts.

I would recommend that IPv6 be disabled in any facility. The governments requiring that both be active are maybe those that want direct access to all of your devices (e.g. no firewall). I can't think of any other reason to have that requirement. It is a paranoia they have that you might be using a device that they cannot detect/monitor/control/police/tax.

My gadget (our gadget as you might know what it is) is better off for not supporting IPv6. It could stay that way even if prohibited by certain governments. But I am the curious sort so I started to looking into it (again).

But I rant as usual. As Marcel and a lot of you know, being grumpy, complaining and ranting has no more effect than gas escaping into the Void. Otherwise shows like The Daily Show and Colbert Show could change the world. Instead they prosper behind the comedy/entertainment moniker. Long live Lewis Black! And p.p.k.a John Stewart. Welcome back!

END OF LINE

[Marcel Birgelen]

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Looks like Elon Musk launched the right tool to heat up the bound-to-be-controversial next few months even more. His new AI model includes an image generator that seems to be mostly uncensored. And politics aside, there are a lot of discussions whether or not those kinds of images are legal or not. This clearly being a caricature, I think this is still clearly within the boundaries of free speech. Whether or not it's tasteless or funny, is probably a more personal thing.

[Leo Enticknap]

A somewhat distinctive branding strategy, seen at my local supermarket:

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The management clearly haven't gotten the memo that we're supposed to be in a blue zone...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Great, a Blue Zone, you learn something new every day

According to the article:
Life expectancy in blue zones is proposed to be as much as a decade or longer, compared to the average world life expectancy of 73 years in 2019.

Shortly before the pandemic hit, the average life expectancy over here was 82,2 years. It went down globally during the pandemic but has since re-established around pre-pandemic levels... So, in a year or two, this whole country over here may become a Blue Zone? Meanwhile, Switzerland already seems to be a Blue Zone... Great definition.

Also, the right one seems to be made from Junior Premium Vanilla beans:

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[Leo Enticknap]

About 2-3 months ago I started to notice that food in the fridge was going off within a very short time of us buying it, and in many cases way before its expiration date. What spurred me into investigating further was one occasion on which I made about a quart of grapefruit juice (using grapefruits from our tree), bottling it, putting it in the fridge, and then two days later finding that the cap had blown off the bottle, and that its contents likely could not be sold legally to anyone under 21.

It also seemed to me that the interior of the fridge was warmer than it should be. So I bought a fridge thermometer, which confirmed my suspicions. Despite the built-in temperature display showing 37 throughout, the new thermometer revealed that its interior temperature was consistently in the mid to high 50s. Furthermore, the compressor seemed to me to be running pretty much all the time, and the freezer compartment was colder than it should be: typically between -10 and -20, when according to the instruction book, it is supposed to be maintained at zero on the nail.

So I did some Googleizing, and quickly discovered that this is a known issue with this model of fridge. The temperature sensor above the evaporator ices up, and the disparity between what it is reading and what the freezer is reading causes the control board to run the compressor constantly, thus leading to more ice production in the fridge compartment, making the fridge worse. Compounding that, the ice eventually breaks a fan above the evaporator that pushes cool (but not freezing) air into the fridge compartment. Some vulture attorney firm is currently trying to get a class action suit going against Samsung for what it claims is an avoidable design flaw; though in my experience, all fridges will eventually do something like this if they are not defrosted. Ours, I'm ashamed to admit, has not been powered down between the day it was installed in 2015, and a couple of hours ago. So I'm not too inclined to blame Samsung for that.

The cure is a new evaporator cover (a part that includes the fan), an annoyingly pricey part at $165 for a sheet of plastic, a $20 fan and some polystyrene foam, but still preferable to spending the best part of a grand on a new fridge.


What I discovered after removing the old evaporator cover:
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After half an hour of getting medieval on its ass with a hairdryer:
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After installing the new one, replacing the contents of the fridge and powering it up again, its internal temperature was in the high 30s and the freezer around zero within an hour. The compressor then stopped, and my wife commented that for the first time in months, she was in the kitchen and not hearing "that buzzing noise."

The moral of the story: defrost your fridge regularly, however disruptive that may be.

[Frank Cox]

A friend of mine is an appliance repair guy -- he comes to your house to fix your washing machine, fridge, stove, whatever.

He's always told me that when it comes to appliances, avoid Samsung.

[Allan Young]

The moral of the story: defrost your fridge regularly, however disruptive that may be.

So this isn't a "frost free" model that doesn't require defrosting?

My 20-year-old General Electric fridge never needs defrosting. However, about six years ago there was build up of ice on the back wall of the freezer with a corresponding temperature rise. Defrosting the fridge worked for a few days but the ice would build up again. A bit of Googling revealed that the cause was a broken heater element behind the back of the freezer, which I was able to fix myself.

(As an aside, I'm not looking forward to having to replace it. GE pulled out of Europe about ten years ago and it's now impossible to buy a fridge of the same capacity in the UK).

[Leo Enticknap]

When I was researching this online, the impression I got is that Samsung fridges are notorious for things going wrong, but they tend to me minor issues that are easily fixable, with cheap parts: their compressors are long lasting. My own experience supports this: I've had the freezer door handle come loose (just a loose grub screw and an easy fix), and the LED light assembly in the fridge compartment go out (a $30 part and an easy fix). The brand you really want to avoid, apparently, is LG, because the compressors in their fridges tend to fail after 5-7 years. The compressor and refrigerant gas account for most of the cost of the fridge (environmental regulations around the handling and disposal of refrigerant gases over the last decade or so are essentially why the cost of a typical fridge has increased by around 30% over that time period), and so if the compressor dies, it's cheaper to replace the fridge than to try to repair it.

[Frank Cox]

Didn't you know that LG stands for Low Grade.

[Frank Cox]

Apparently this sign is at the drop off area in New Zealand's Dunedin Airport:
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[Ryan Gallagher]

Car park? Least they could have dedicated a PDA room. Smokers get better treatment in many airports. lol