Saturday, March 05
Daily News Stuff 5 March 2022
IP Over Tin Cans And String Edition
IP Over Tin Cans And String Edition
Top Story
- Weekends are Question and Answer time, unless I have to work, or I just worked two 18 hour days back-to-back, or I need to pack up and move house to a house I don't have, or my internet is down again, or my entire state is under flood and storm warnings, or every gluten-free foodstuff I normally eat is out of stock at the same time (possibly related to eastern Australia being underwater right now), or it's freaking World War III, but if it's all of those they cancel out somehow so Q&A is on.
- In the first sensible move of any of the participants in this whole debacle Russia has banned Twitter and Facebook. (CBS / MSN)
And over 140 other domains including the BBC. Sadly we are not on the list, but this is just new additions and we may have been blocked previously.
The BBC has responded by restarting its shortwave news broadcasts. (The Verge)
Everything old is new again.
- Russia doesn't have anything like China's Great Firewall but US companies are stepping up to help with leading provider of bad internet backbone connections Cogent cutting off access to Russia. (ZDNet)
They're justifying this by a broad reading of new EU regulations, but the regulations never actually say Russia has to go back to acoustic couplers and hope.
Tech News
- One moment, need to reboot my keyboard...
- With many of Ukraine's existing communication systems offline the new shipment of Starlink satellite dishes could become a target. (Ars Technica)
They're small and low-power and not easily spotted in the normal soup of radio waves, but if everything else has been knocked out one way or another they're much easier to detect.
- Speaking of the normal soup of radio waves the FCC is looking to crack down on crappy wireless avionics. (Ars Technica)
There's long been a fight between mobile carriers who say their operations don't infringe upon frequencies used in aircraft and aircraft makers and operators who say your phone will make their plane crash.
It seems they're both correct - and the fault is with the aircraft, or rather wireless receivers used in some instruments. They're so poorly designed that they pick up signals hundreds of megahertz outside their designated band.
- Yandex, Russia's version of Google only even more obnoxious about its web crawling efforts may be technically bankrupt. (CNN)
While the parent company is based in the Netherlands, most of its operations are in Russia, and recent sanctions act as a network partition event in an improperly balanced cluster.
- Microsoft meanwhile has blocked all new sales to Russia. (Tech Crunch)
Microsoft has also been providing assistance to Ukraine to defend against hacking attempts, so whether you agree with their decision or not, they are actually doing more than just virtue signalling.
- Major cryptocurency exchanges are very pointedly not blocking Russia. (CNN)
Whatever you thing of cryptocurrencies generally, the underlying point is that there's no central control, and no-one can block your access to the blockchain. So again, they're operating based on principles rather than profit, or rather, a little of one and a lot of the other.
- Similarly, ICANN is not intending to revoke Russian domain names. (Ars Technica)
That one was never on the cards. The old .su TLD is still active.
- The US Space Force is planning to start patrolling the far side of the Moon. (Ars Technica)
Because that is civilisation's chief area of concern right now.
- Firefly's ITX-3588J is a high-end alternative to the Raspberry Pi. (Tom's Hardware)
Can you get it?
No.
- Oh, and one more thing? Half the world's supply of ultra-pure neon used in chipmaking comes from Ukraine. (Tom's Hardware)
This was highlighted in 2014 when spot prices for neon shot up 600% during the invasion of Crimea, but then everyone went right back to sleep.
- Belarus is now on the tech industry shitlist too. (WCCFTech)
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- The great thing about paying twice as much to get a Mac is that it just works. (Derek Seaman)
After trying three different docks and three different Thunderbolt to DisplayPort adaptors, it just works.
- More on the suckage of Western Digital's new high-capacity NAS drives. (Serve the Home)
Base on their ratings, having a ZFS pool of 20TB drives with a weekly data scrub would exceed the annual workload rating after four months, even if nobody was accessing the data.
- Speaking of which, have a drive failure already on my new ZFS server. Good thing I configured RAID-Z3.
- Apple is reportedly preparing to release the new Mac Studio. (Liliputing)
This is either a smaller version of the Mac Mini, or a larger one, or something else entirely.
Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Believe it or not, my internet's down, I never thought it would take this long. Browsing the web at dial-up speeds, can't even preview that song.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:38 PM
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Post contains 830 words, total size 8 kb.
1
I mean, I got royally fuming at WD back when they made those "green" (and later, once the reputation was solidified, they started calling 'em "blue") drives that would park the heads and go to sleep every 5 seconds, silently killing the drive in less than 18 months. It's a shame they can't stop fucking everything up. At least Seagate's trash actually works sometimes. Thankfully the SSD market is actually competitive.
Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 06 2022 06:54 AM (obo9H)
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Pixy, after 6,000 years without it, what's the big deal about gluten-free. Does gluten really make you sick or is it just a prefereence?
Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, March 06 2022 08:14 AM (n+R81)
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Celiac disease is real and no fun for people who have it, but most people who claim to be gluten-sensitive are self-diagnosed and just following a fad diet. Pixy has said a few things over time that make it clear he's been diagnosed and needs to do without for his health.
-j
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 06 2022 08:27 AM (ZlYZd)
4
Pixy, after 6,000 years without it, what's the big deal about gluten-free. Does gluten really make you sick or is it just a preference?
As J notes, yeah, I have celiac disease. You could say I prefer not to spend half my life in the bathroom, and you'd be correct.
I haven't gone into my symptoms because this is a family blog [Now you tell me -- Ed.] and the symptoms were kind of disgusting. I've been gluten-free for ten or twelve years now and it made made an immediate and massive difference, but I'm still not healthy.
Which is reflected in my search for a new home. I have strong preferences on certain features and I'm looking at plans and saying things like Where did you learn to design bathrooms? Were you raised in a barn? when it's stuff that doesn't even occur to most people.
As J notes, yeah, I have celiac disease. You could say I prefer not to spend half my life in the bathroom, and you'd be correct.
I haven't gone into my symptoms because this is a family blog [Now you tell me -- Ed.] and the symptoms were kind of disgusting. I've been gluten-free for ten or twelve years now and it made made an immediate and massive difference, but I'm still not healthy.
Which is reflected in my search for a new home. I have strong preferences on certain features and I'm looking at plans and saying things like Where did you learn to design bathrooms? Were you raised in a barn? when it's stuff that doesn't even occur to most people.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 06 2022 11:40 AM (PiXy!)
5
My guts haven't worked entirely correctly for a long time.
I'm not sure what the issues are, but they probably aren't as simple as celiac. Right now, the doctor thinks that one thing has messed up both my intestines and my sinuses.
I have had a lot of symptoms for a long time, diet does seem to be pretty important, and it significantly impacts quality of life.
Idiots jumping on fad diet band wagons have made it cheaper to find edible stuff, but my current protocol is a bit more restricted these days.
6,000 years ago and now, is apples and oranges, mainly because we can easily keep people alive, that would previously have been more difficult. Infant mortality could conceal a lot of issues, and there are historical records of people with weird diet sensitivities.
It seems like there is a type of parasitic worm, and it excretes something that 'numbs' the immune system. It seems like getting those worms out of people, left a minority with issues of extreme immune response.
There is an argument made about alleged changes in wheat over the last 40-60 years. It turns out to apparently be an apples and oranges issue. There are different types of flour, and the samples compared apparently were not the same type.
I have some other issues, with my nervous system, and in combination with the gut stuff, I can need to camp out in the restroom for long periods of time.
I'm not sure what the issues are, but they probably aren't as simple as celiac. Right now, the doctor thinks that one thing has messed up both my intestines and my sinuses.
I have had a lot of symptoms for a long time, diet does seem to be pretty important, and it significantly impacts quality of life.
Idiots jumping on fad diet band wagons have made it cheaper to find edible stuff, but my current protocol is a bit more restricted these days.
6,000 years ago and now, is apples and oranges, mainly because we can easily keep people alive, that would previously have been more difficult. Infant mortality could conceal a lot of issues, and there are historical records of people with weird diet sensitivities.
It seems like there is a type of parasitic worm, and it excretes something that 'numbs' the immune system. It seems like getting those worms out of people, left a minority with issues of extreme immune response.
There is an argument made about alleged changes in wheat over the last 40-60 years. It turns out to apparently be an apples and oranges issue. There are different types of flour, and the samples compared apparently were not the same type.
I have some other issues, with my nervous system, and in combination with the gut stuff, I can need to camp out in the restroom for long periods of time.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 06 2022 12:15 PM (r9O5h)
6
I am both skeptical and squeamish. If I had one of the more severe auto-immune disorders I might try it though.
It seems like there is a type of parasitic worm, and it excretes something that 'numbs' the immune system. It seems like getting those worms out of people, left a minority with issues of extreme immune response.Yeah, I think it's hookworms. Giving the immune system something relatively benign to fight is thought to reduce the severity of the auto-immune response. Some people have tried reintroducing hookworms into their bodies with positive results.
I am both skeptical and squeamish. If I had one of the more severe auto-immune disorders I might try it though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 06 2022 04:40 PM (PiXy!)
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