Off-Line For A While Today

by Bryan

14 comments

1 ellroon { 05.19.14 at 10:32 am }

Squirrel terrorist. It’s an evil plot to take down our infrastructure!

2 Kryten42 { 05.19.14 at 11:47 am }

We get the suicide possums! And the occasional “curiosity killed the cat”! 😉 😀

I finally had to bite the bullet and update my dev workstation. Was putting ot off until the end of the year because of Intel’s new chipset’s & CPU’s. The old AMD PC finally gave it’s last gasp. I could use the watercooled high-end rig I built late last year, but that’s for other things and I want to keep the two separate (mainly because I sometimes need to do a long render, or other reasons). 🙂 Anyway, MoBo makers released the new x97 based boards about a month sooner than expected, and the 4th gen i7 is good enough for my needs currently. 🙂 So, i spent the weekend and Monday building my new WS & installing W7 U 64 (Even though 8.1 is somewhat better than 8.0, I refuse to use it, and since W7 sales are still slowly increasing, I am not alone)! Heck, even XP still has about 23% of the win market! LOL

Some news for you when you have time. 🙂 Maybe this will be one of the final nails for the NSA? We can but hope! 😀

Cisco Goes Straight To The President To Complain About The NSA Intercepting Its Hardware

Funny thing… I know that many in the industry knew this was happening for at least the past few years, but Cisco said NADA until Greenwald made it public and their sales are declining! And new they are all hurt and dismayed etc! Buncha hypocrites! I never trusted Cisco, and I never will! They are in the same category as Oracle & M$! I hope NSA get taken down, and take Cisco with them! Win-win! 😀

Oh, and another buncha moronic crooks, Adobe, have screwed themselves because of their love for DRM! LMAO

Destructive DRM Strikes Again: Creative Professionals Blocked From Using Adobe Products For Days

…

The MacUser article also noted that Adobe avoided providing workarounds (even as there were a few), insisting that there was nothing that could be done. This was either out of ignorance, or standard corporate fear of revealing basic workarounds to dodgy DRM. Adobe eventually (after more than 24 hours) got things working again and posted a rather weak apology.

Of course, this kind of mishap was exactly what many people feared would happen when Adobe ditched basic software licenses to go with a forced “cloud” setup, whose main benefit (to Adobe) was that it acted as DRM.

I have dumped Firefox for good since they started using DRM with no way of disabling it. Since FF 29, I can’t access many legit sites I have accounts with via SSL (including Google!) I’m now fully using Chromium & Opera. Mozilla can drop dead (and thousands on the forums have said similar over the past couple weeks!) Example:

You have asked Firefox to connect securely to plus.google.com, but we can’t confirm that your connection is secure.

Normally, when you try to connect securely, sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are going to the right place. However, this site’s identity can’t be verified.

I used to be able to add an exception after accepting “I understand the risks” but now you can’t do that.

There is an iffy 3rd party extension that works with some sites, but not all.

PMSL 😀

3 Bryan { 05.19.14 at 8:24 pm }

They are obviously having trouble recruiting martyrs, Ellroon, because taking out one transformer at a time isn’t going to be more than annoying … unless they are waiting for Superbowl day 😉

I think people are waiting for Win 9 if they are thinking of upgrading. It seems like every second release of Windows is real garbage, so you have to wait it out to get what you want – which isn’t a touch-screen operating system.

Yeah, Steve Bates ran a post on the surrender to the media moguls on DRM among the browser makers. Opera may be the best alternative, because they aren’t a US company.

I use DuckDuckGo for searches because it doesn’t track you an will look for HTTPS sites if they are available, but that explains the weird behavior I have seen going to government sites. The government is generally self-certifying, so the normal checks don’t work. Earlier versions seem to know that, but a couple of the recent revisions have flashed a warning screen. DDG identifies official sites in their search results.

4 hipparchia { 05.19.14 at 9:29 pm }

opera is my favorite browser, in part because I always get a kick out of the message that occasionally pops up when I visit some sites – for the best viewing experience, you might want to switch to a modern browser.

5 hipparchia { 05.19.14 at 9:30 pm }

They are obviously having trouble recruiting martyrs

yeah. lightning strikes and bad drivers are still the biggest source of power outages in my neighborhood.

6 Kryten42 { 05.19.14 at 10:46 pm }

I never worry about being tracked. there are several easy way’s to stop that. Even any cookies stored here are worthless as far as gathering any info on me (it’s all bogus). Using a VPN +custom HOSTS file + Bitdefender Total Security + various browser extensions (Gostery, AdBlock Pro, NoScript/ScriptSafe, DNT (DoNotTrackMe) etc.) = me being able to easily browse as I want, without any worry about anyone else being nosy. It also speeds up browsing considerably. I’ve had my primary Gmail mail account for about 8 years, and I get maybe 1 SPAM a month at most! The account I use to register on many sites (such as here), get’s about 300 a week (though i never have to deal with them). 🙂

I like Opera, but there are times when a Chrome based browser works better. I use Chromium because it’s less nosy, more secure & faster than Chrome. 🙂

7 Bryan { 05.19.14 at 10:47 pm }

I think the problem is that they don’t recognize Opera. It has all of the bells and whistles you need. I’m having to muck about with Safari on the iPad and it kinda works, but I can’t decide if I don’t like it because of the software or the interface I’m having to use.

Drivers are our number one problem. They can take care of squirrel attacks with an extension pole while on the ground, without using a bucket.

I’ll check out Chromium, Kryten. I don’t watch many videos or listen to music, so the DRMs aren’t a real problem for me, but it’s principle of selling out to the media moguls that annoys the hell out of me.

8 Kryten42 { 05.19.14 at 11:52 pm }

Chromium is available for Windows, OS X, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, or iOS. 🙂 The source code is easy to find, but *good* pre-compiled builds are a little trickier. 😉

Unfortunately, the DRM problem screws up just about everything, whether Music/Vid related or not! Adobe is a case in point. The whole concept is a typically retarded corporate fantasy!

The best way to get Chromium for win is to use the ‘Chromium Updater’ tool (currently 2015 Rel 3). As well as d/l a stable working release, it will keep it updated & back up your user data (worth it just for that IMHO!) You can also d/l a portable release. 🙂

Chromium Updater Project (Sourceforge)

Another stable source for Win/Mac/Linux is:
Woolyss Chromium Releases

(Use the ‘Latest best releases’ Download link on the right to save hassles. 😉

PS. I don’t use the x64 builds. There is no perceptible performance difference and many extensions don’t work. though, there are some security advantages. *shrug* 😉

9 Kryten42 { 05.20.14 at 12:16 am }

Oh! Regarding Opera not being recognized… One thing I loved about Opera (prior to v15) was the ability to easily switch the ‘User-Agent’ details! Why they removed that… *shrug* Anyway, there is (of course) an extension to put that ability back! (especially useful for the many stupid (usually Gov & Corp) sites that *require* IE, or Apple sites that *require* Safari and/or iOS/OS-X)! 😉

Opera:
User-Agent Switcher

There are a few for Chrome(ium), I like this one:
User-Agent Switcher by ToolsHack

😀

10 Bryan { 05.20.14 at 9:03 pm }

Chromium certainly fits the Google model of having people work for them for free 😉

I’ll check it out when things calm down around here, which should be soon.

11 Steve Bates { 05.22.14 at 7:48 pm }

“They are obviously having trouble recruiting martyrs…”

The martyrs just don’t like the looks of all those people around the base of the power pole with forks in their hands, just waiting for a martyr to fry. They’re known as “martyr-forkers” …

12 Bryan { 05.22.14 at 11:34 pm }

[Groan …..] They let you vote with a mind like that? 😉

13 Kryten42 { 05.23.14 at 6:18 am }

LOL Oh Steve! But you made me groan, and then chuckle! 😉 😀

There is a good story on Medium you guy’s might find interesting:

Everything Is Broken

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.

It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

Build it badly, and they will come.

For a bunch of us, especially those who had followed security and the warrantless wiretapping cases, the revelations weren’t big surprises. We didn’t know the specifics, but people who keep an eye on software knew computer technology was sick and broken. We’ve known for years that those who want to take advantage of that fact tend to circle like buzzards. The NSA wasn’t, and isn’t, the great predator of the internet, it’s just the biggest scavenger around. It isn’t doing so well because they are all powerful math wizards of doom.

The NSA is doing so well because software is bullshit.

Eight months before Snowden’s first revelation I tweeted this:

Sec spoiler alert: Everything’s got 0days, everyone’s tracked, all the data leaks, all the things are vulnerable. It’s all fucking pwned.
 — @quinnnorton

It was my exasperated acknowledgement that looking for good software to count on has been a losing battle. Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.

…

It goes on quite a bit more. It’s a sobering read, though for most of us, it’s nothing we didn’t know. It’s just nice to see that someone has the gut’s to lay it out there. 🙂

14 Bryan { 05.23.14 at 8:36 pm }

The problem I’m dealing with is essentially because they shipped something without thoroughly testing it, so now I’m having to write work-arounds to get my client up and functional. It’s bullshit. When you buy a new piece of equipment you expect it to work at least as well as the device it replaced, especially when you paid more to ensure backwards compatibility. They are just trying to get the product out the door and outsourcing as much as they can to the lowest bidder. Things didn’t use to work this way, but Wall Street destroyed the value of quality products, as well as research and development. All MBA programs should be required to register with the Nevada gaming commission as casino training schools.