sylver_dragon

Not every news article is going to be about some ground breaking research. That researchers are putting these sorts of fad diets to the test is important and knowing the outcome of that is useful. Journalism is about informing people, not entertaining them. If you can’t handle being informed without the sensationalism, you may need to seek professional help.

It seems like any effort to protect children is hated.
They say this won’t protect children, but they offer no alternative solutions that would.

The second statement is why the first one exists. None of this is about protecting children, it’s all about data gathering and monitoring people. They don’t give a fuck about children. But the idea that they can have a government enforced reason to collect personal data, be able to reliably tie that to accounts and then use that data to sell targeted marketing, that’s something they will bend over backwards for.

Team speak? What year is it?
I remember hosting a teamspeak server for folks I played Wolfenstein: ET with. In the early 2000’s.

While I don’t know the specific post you are referring to, Malware exists for Linux. Here’s a great overview from last year. If someone wants to argue, “oh it’s from a security company trying to sell a product” then let me point you at the Malware Bazaar and specifically the malware tagged elf. Those are real samples of real malware in the Linux specific ELF executable binary format (warning: yes it’s real malware, don’t run anything from this site). On the upshot, most seem to be Linux variants of the Mirai botnet. Not something you want running, but not quite as bad as ransomware. But, dig a bit and there are other threats. Linux malware exists, it has for a long time and it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux.

While Linux is far more secure than Windows by design, it’s not malware proof. It is harder for malware to move from user space into root (usually), but that’s often not needed for the activities malware gets up to today. Ransomware, crypto miners and info stealers will all happily execute in user-land. And for most people, this is where their important stuff lives. Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over. Attackers are looking at Linux now and starting to go after it.

All that said, is it worth having a bloated A/V engine doing full on-access scanning? That depends on how you view the risk. Many of the drive-by type attacks (e.g. ClickFix, fake tech-support scams) all heavily target Windows and would fail on a Linux system. The malware and backdoors that come bundled with pirated software are likely to fail on a Linux system, though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed. For those use cases, I’d suggest not downloading pirated software. Or, if you absolutely are going to, run those file through ClamAV at minimum.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to run anything as heavy as on-access file scanning or anything to keep trawling memory for signatures on my home systems. Keeping software up to date and limiting what I download, install and run is enough to manage my risk. I do have ClamAV installed to let me do a quick, manual scan of anything I do download. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy A/V product. Most of the engines out there for Linux are crap anyway.

Professionally, I am one of the voices who pushed for A/V (really EDR) on the Linux systems in my work environment. My organization has a notable Linux footprint and we’ve seen attackers move to Linux based systems specifically because they are less likely to be well monitored. In a work environment, we have less control over how the systems get (ab)used and have a higher need for telemetry and investigation.

Let’s ignore the pedantic issues of “there is no surface”, “there is no sun to rise” or “you’d be dead so insanely fast you probably wouldn’t notice”. Assuming you were magically teleported and held protected just above the event horizon of a black hole, it would be so bright you’d go blind almost instantly. Not because of any star coming over the horizon, but because the accretion disk would just be that bright. If you look at NASA’s pictures of M87, you aren’t actually seeing the black hole. There’s nothing there to see. Instead, what you are seeing in the pictures is the accretion disk around the black hole. As matter gets closer to the event horizon, it accelerates and all that stuff starts bumping into each other. At the energies involved, this produces electromagnetic radiation of basically every energy. There is infrared right up through x-ray, included lots and lots of visible light. And this is happening on a scale which is so mind mindbogglingly big that words really just fail to capture it. Here is an artistic representation with our solar system for scale. Pluto’s orbit would be well inside the event horizon. There is an insane amount of light and energy in that accretion disk. And thanks to the blackhole warping light around itself, you would be getting bombarded by its energy from every angle, including the disk on the opposite side of the black hole. In short, it would be really bright.

Yup, I have an Enterprise seat for Copilot through work. It can be useful to slop up emails for management, but anything requiring care, accuracy or attention to detail seems outside it’s wheelhouse. As a those descriptors apply to much of my work, that Copilot license basically collects digital dust. But management is absolutely over the moon with AI, so I don’t feel bad giving them AI slop.

Principal photography on Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew

Color me truly surprised. From the headline, I expected yet another The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe remake. I always assumed that The Magician’s Nephew would never be turned into a film. It’s just such a big break from the previous books.

Eating their own dog food slop.

It tends to be much more focused on bringing products to market, but of course they do. The transistor, the base unit of all of the microchips which make this conversation possible, came out of Bell Labs. And, as much as we might hate them for it, you have companies like Monsanto doing a lot of work on chemical engineering and genetics. Much of the work on AI (for good or slop) is being done in private sector labs now. Aeronautics research happens heavily in companies like Boeing and Airbus, though they are often working hand in hand with government labs (e.g. NASA, JPL, EASA).

Where Universities and Government really shine are areas like basic research and research which doesn’t have obvious commercial applications. Which is why support for those organizations is so critical. Those areas of research often have long term effects and can result in entirely new areas of knowledge, research and products.

It’s easy to think of large corporations as soulless organizations hell bent of accumulating wealth at the cost of anything else, because they are. But they are also surprisingly good at focusing wealth and effort to find new ways to do things cheaper, faster and more efficiently. Specifically because those things make money. Veritasium had a video on a good example of this recently.

This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.

I’m in, though I’m curious what “turns you into a reptile” means. Does it just mean I become cold blooded. I’m fine with that, it just means I’m moving somewhere tropical. Do I grow scales and a tail? Certainly not ideal, but I could probably live with it, especially if the tail is prehensile and if I get claws in the mix. Do I get a really long, controllable tongue? Can’t think of any uses for that. Nope, none at all…

Attraction, sex and reproduction would be interesting questions as well. Do I still find human women attractive, or is my brain rewired to want a lusty argonian maid? What does my new plumbing look like? Are there others of my new species around for me to do the monster mash with?

But overall, yes I’d probably go for it. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I will somehow continue to exist after death; so, not dying seems like the better alternative. Sure, if the downsides are really bad, I can accept that death is a better outcome (e.g. you live forever, but have locked-in syndrome forever). But, living as a lizard person doesn’t seem too horrible.

Yes, and you can probably get better performance with different block sizes. This is just what I used to fix drives as it was fast enough and I couldn’t be arsed to do any real testing to find the right speed. Also, my stash of drives was no where near homogeneous, so the right size for one type of drive may not have worked for a different type of drive. I also used the 4MB block size when imaging drives to have an ok-ish speed while not losing too much data if there were read errors.

For a physical machine:
for f in $(lsblk | grep disk | cut -d ' ' -f 1); do sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$f bs=4MB status=progress; done

That will remove all your current software problems. You’ll have new ones, but the old ones will be gone.

A solution exists: ignore the upvote/downvote buttons and use the reply button. You can then address the points you agree with and more importantly the points you disagree with, why you disagree with them and make your own points. It takes more effort, but it provides a lot more value than the mindless voting buttons.

You could try using Autopsy to look for files on the drive. Autopsy is a forensic analysis toolkit, which is normally used to extract evidence from disk images or the like. But, you can add local drives as data sources and that should let you browse the slack space of the filesystem for lost files. This video (not mine, just a good enough reference) should help you get started. It’s certainly not as simple as the photorec method, but it tends to be more comprehensive.

Most of those US services (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) arose to fill a niche which was opened by expanding access and bandwidth. Take YouTube as an example, the idea of sharing a video on a dial-up connection was simply silly. Just downloading the contents of a 1.44MB floppy on a 14.4kbps modem took forever. Even when we got to a 56kbps modem, pictures could still be slow and GIFs were painful to download. It wasn’t until home DSL or cable connections became common that sharing a video was even close to reasonable. In that environment, we saw the start of media sharing services rushing to fill a previously unknown “need”. The most well known was Napster for music sharing, but we also saw the start of bittorrent clients. While not exactly legal, early music sharing and torrent sites showed that people wanted to be able to download media. And with sites like MySpace or GeoCities cropping up, it was apparent that people wanted to also create and share media. YouTube simply married up those two desires at a time where the technology could reasonably support it. And they have massively capitalized on the first mover advantage. With them also having Google money to scale the service, they now sit in a fairly privileged position in their niche.

I bring this up to say that, were US based services snapped out of existence, new services would arise to fill the gap. If you look at somewhere like China, where access to US services is highly regulated, they aren’t simply doing without, they are creating their own alternatives. TikTok is a good example, while it lacks the longer form videos of YouTube, it did provide media sharing in China. Were YouTube to be blocked at the Great Firewall, TikTok is in a good position to expand into the longer form videos. China also already has WeChat which fills much of the Twitter and FaceBook nice. Russia has VKontakte for those spaces as well. Basically, any place which isn’t well served by US based media giants has their own solutions to fill those gaps.

Western Europe (using EU as shorthand, though yes I know the EU isn’t all of Western Europe) has the issue of being closely linked with the US economically and culturally. US based services can operate in most EU countries with little friction. Sure, they have to figure out GDPR and Data Privacy issues, but that’s not a major barrier, despite US companies’ whining. So, given the size, first mover advantage and money behind the US based solutions, there hasn’t been space for reasonable EU based replacements. Why use some second rate EU based system, when the US system works so well, and the EU and US are such good allies and closely linked?

Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you’re asking the question, no doubt). With the US Government going quickly off the rails, and US tech giants doing their damnedest to enshitify everything, the deep cultural links between the US and EU are starting to slip. There might now be space for EU based services to try to step in and replace services like YouTube or Twitter. And that’s the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else. In time, they are probably bound to be replaced anyway. At one time everyone though MySpace was here to stay, these days I suspect some folks had to google it to figure out what the hell I was going on about. It may be a long time to come, but I’d bet on YouTube eventually being replaced. I have no idea what will replace it, but nothing lasts forever.

relevant XKCD.

That aside, I think the book I am Legend handled the initial outbreak in one of the best ways to actually make it stick. There was a worldwide dust storm which infected everyone. A large fraction of the population succumbed to the infection and died or became “zombies” (more vampires really, they retained a lot of intelligence. The Will Smith movie really fucked the plot.). It’s one of the few ways to get past the problem of the various world militaries just curb stomping the initial zombie outbreak. Sure, there would be some confusion and some losses while people figured out the various rules for the zombies, but WWI is kinda instructive here. Massed charges into machine gun fire didn’t go well for the soldiers in the charge. As another historic example, the Banzai Charge employed by Imperial Japanese soldiers during WWII was not only suicidal by nature, it was worthless against a well armed, organized line. Yes, zombies might be more resilient and less prone to morale breaking, but they’d still be mowed down en masse. And that’s before we consider air strikes, artillery and napalm. A combined arms assault against a mass of zombies wouldn’t be pretty. Especially considering that zombies wouldn’t have the strategic thinking to attack supply lines and depots.

Zombie outbreaks are fun in media. I’m currently playing 7 Days to Die, again. And I’m having lots of fun. I also don’t spend too much time thinking about what the backstory might be. There’s zombies, and it’s my job to survive. That’s all the setup I need to enjoy the catharsis of zombie heads exploding in gore.

So a couple possibilities come to mind:

1. Someone else has your password. Do you have kids and do they have access to devices which may have your Google account linked? You may want to change your password (use something long, hard to guess and unique).
2. Your local system is compromised in some way. This would be a really odd way for someone to use that access, but it’s always possible. Take a look at the apps and any browser extensions you have installed and make sure there isn’t anything you don’t recognize.
3. There is some sort of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability which is being leveraged to subscribe you to stuff. I would expect Google to be better than to have an XSS on YouTube (they bought Mandiant a while ago, FFS). But, big companies doing stupid things is common enough. When you got the pop-up, was it in the YouTube app or a web browser. Did you have other tabs open? Other background processes from sketchy apps?
4. It is Google, them doing shitty things to their product (that’s you) for their customers (the advertisers paying for your eyeballs) is basically their business model. Don’t like it, de-google your life (warning: this is actually really hard).

Well, here’s my TIL:
Fun fact: the earliest known appearance of the F-word in the English language is “Roger F$#%-by-the-Navel” who appears in some court records from 1310-11.

More info.

Ya, I actually run both uBlock Origin and NoScript in my browser on my phone and personal machine (desktop). On my work laptop, those are a no-go. So, I get the full ads experience on my work machine when traveling.