Posts by sweh

Eliza?

The old-school not-an-AI. e.g. https://8bs.nerdoftheherd.com/8BS48/content/2-eliza/

I moved to NYC 22 years ago, and wandering around I found some Cadbury's Fruit and Nut. Since I was a little home sick I bought it. And after tasting a few chunks was almost sick. Checking the label I saw "Made under license by Hershey".

That put me off Hershey chocolate!

FreePascal FTW! https://www.freepascal.org/

Re: Take responsibility

I also have the 6 account "family" plan; with work discount that's $75/yr for 6TB of cloud storage.

I use it as an offsite copy of my backups, using rclone to do the copying (which encrypts while uploading). So I have primary backups onto my raid6, which is my normal "oops, I deleted a file I need it back" store. I rsync that to external USB disks, just incase the raid dies totally. It'd take a while, but I'd be able to restore almost everything. And then I rclone the important bits that to the cloud, just incase there's a fire or something; in this case I wouldn't be able to recover my ripped DVDs/BDs but I would be able to get everything else.

Is that overkill for a home network? Probably! But then I also have 2 DNS servers, 2 DHCP servers, run my own web/smtp/dns/nntp/vpn/... Overkill is kinda what I do :-)

Re: Huh?

There's a reason why we now have WSL2; this uses hypervisor technology to run Linux in a micro-VM. This increases compatibility (eg "docker" won't run on WSL1, it runs fine on WSL2). But at a cost. For example, with WSL1 your processes show up in the windows task manager but with WSL2 this doesn't happen; Windows is mostly blind to what happens inside the VM.

Microsoft can easily deprecate WSL1 if they need to, but retain the ability to run Linux apps via WSL2.

Re: Ignoring the big issue

> Nobody has the right to redistribute source under the GPL

GPL says "1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium"

So once I have the source code I have the right to distribute it anywhere (as long as I "conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program."

There's no _mandate_ that I distribute the source (unless I distribute a binary based on that source) but I do have the right to do it. And whoever I send the source to _also_ has the right to distribute it, and so on.

Re: I think. although maybe harsh

Hmm, I'm paying US$75/yr for a family O365 account; that's 6 users, each with 1Tb of OneDrive storage. 6Tb for $75? That's not a bad price, on its own, for off-site storage!

And with `rclone` (www.rclone.org) to send encrypted backups, and `https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive` for "live-ish" syncing it means my Linux machines can happily make use of that space.

Re: All my bulbs are old now :-(

The hue hub does not need to receive incoming connections from the internet; it reaches out to a google cloud hosted service via https. It does this to receive firmware updates, and to allow for remote control when out of house, and for integration with voice assistants, etc.

Re: FYI

PogoPlug from 2009 did this (although it wasn't wireless). See, for example, https://zatznotfunny.com/2009-10/pogoplug-cloud-realignment/

Re: Why not kit out airports with anti-drone drones?

Flesh'n'blood hawks do the job just fine; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5DEg2qZzkU

Re: I'd like to know

If the cert was being used for passive TLS decryption (a common technique for Data Loss Prevention) then an expired cert may not trigger alarms (the device manufacturer may consider that a normal case; certs do expire, especially if the cert store can handle multiple ones) but the TLS decryption would fail (also a normal scenario).

Since, in this scenario, it's passive no traffic gets blocked and data is no longer inspected.

Cert management needs to be proactive, not reactive.

Re: It's Christmas!

Interesting demographic niche there: old enough to like "Merry Christmas Everybody", young enough to think Alexa is a good idea.

Or maybe old enough to be able to decide for themselves the pros and cons of Alexa and feel that the "fun" factor outweighs the minimal risk.

https://www.sweharris.org/post/2017-01-02-always-listening/

BTW, I'm 50 this year. Hardly a youngster.

Re: Be much more interested in...

"NT4[...]stable and snappy"... yes, it dropped into that stable blue screen very very quickly!

Re: @Tomato42

In the US, ISPs are mostly a local monopoly. You get your local cableco... or maybe Verizon if you're lucky. No real choice.

And when we've seen Verizon, Comcast, AT&T all MITM traffic...

And then you have people using Starbucks WiFi (are you sure you're on the Starbucks hotspot and not someone pretending to be it?) and other free hotspots...

Basically, the underlying transport must be considered insecure.

I'm only 50, and I've seen failed switches. Admittedly that's in America, where I find the whole electrical setup to be scarily bad, compared to what I grew up with in England :-)

Re: Isn't cloud supposed to be fault tolerant?

No, clouds are not meant to be fault tolerant. "The cloud" may always be there and running, but individual instances inside the cloud may die at any time.

Clouds allow you to build applications that are fault tolerant. Indeed, applications should be designed to assume failure. There are many design patterns that can help with this.

This is why "lift and shift" doesn't buy you anything except "outsourced data center". If you build traditional applications and deploy them to the cloud then you need traditional HA solutions as well; duplicated service in a different datacenter, data copying, "DR" processes...

The responsibility for availability in the cloud rests solely on the application owner.

Re: MasterCard 'clarification' of MCC/SIC code?

This is most likely what happened.

Chase has not changed policies. The surcharge for cash advances has been around for many many years.

Merchant classifications, however, change all the time. Mostly you don't see them because you (as the card user) don't really care. It can affect what merchants may be in-scope for "5% bonus points" promotions, and end of year breakdowns, but normally it's invisible to you. Given the millions of merchants, it would be pointless telling you of changes.

So if this particular merchant had their classification changed so that it now counts as a cash advance then Chase would be perfectly entitled to put the surcharge on.

I fully expect this case to be dismissed.

Re: TL;DR but what is it with ****ing developers

If you're using an American site, then you're better with "011" as the international access code.

01144207....

Re: What's old is new again

"I'm sure I've encountered a langauge which use double-semicolons as statement terminators but can't remember what it was"

shell script "case" statements use ";;" to end the case

eg

case $a in

x) foo ; bar ;;

y) baz ;;

*) echo Ooops ;;

esac

Re: Google in Kansas City MO

In my town in NJ, Verizon FIOS is costing me $95/month for gigabit internet. speedtest results on my desktop give 805/515 as "real" speeds.

And that's with almost no competition (cablevision tops out at 400/40).

AT&T are just trying to protect their revenue by any means they can, 'cos they know they'll lose money if they have to compete.

Re: Not surprising. At all.

"For security reasons, our new policy is as follows: No new deployments with systemd - no exceptions."

Put it in a Docker container and don't run an init system at all. Then your customers can chose what platform they run Docker on :-)