Top Story

• Someone in legal must have finally picked up the phone because GoFundMe has abandoned its clever plan to steal $9 million in donations.
  
  
  
  
  Since they are refunding all donations but have already disbursed a million dollars to the convoy organisers, they'll be eating that million, plus all processing fees in both directions.
  
  Meanwhile the new fundraiser at GiveSendGo has crossed the $2 million mark in a single day.
  
  Every silver lining has a cloud, as they say.
  
  
  

Questions and Answers

• From Soothsayer's Untrue But Accurate Tales:

  Q1: A comment counter used to be at the bottom of each post. Why did that disappear?

  Because it was incredibly slow to process comments that way.

  Q2: Why did the "recent comments" stop updating immediately the way it used in 2005?

  See above. Movable Type did not cope well with the combination of hundreds of comments per thread and thousands of posts.
  
  That might well have been fixed since then but the current version of Movable Type is not aimed at all at ordinary bloggers; it's for big corporates with a complicated publishing workflow.
  
  
  
• From Jamaica Queens:

  Pixy, in the 150$ range, are there better tablets than Amazon's Fire? I am considering a low end iPad to replace my Fire.

  If you're looking at the 10" model, no. The specs are pretty good and the price is hard to beat.
  
  The 8" Kindle Fire models are much less impressive and I'd recommend the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD instead. Particularly if you can catch it on sale like - oh, right now; it's down from $160 to $110.
  
  
  
• From Jerzy A Sobon:

  I have an old Dell pre-built that is starting to show its age. I would like a new PC with these criteria:
  Windows; I would like a laptop (but not a deal breaker); No gaming...strictly spreadsheets, PowerPoints, web browsing, email etc; Most importantly, be able to support 3 monitors.
  I currently have an HDMI, VGA and DVI monitors attached to my Dell graphics card and need all 3 monitors on my new machine.
  Any thoughts?

  Slightly tricky; VGA outputs are getting rare, and most laptops only support two external displays unless you attach a dock. If you get a desktop model rather than a laptop it's easy to find models that support three or four video outputs.
  
  For three monitors you'll probably need a model with a dedicated graphics card, and VGA will be rare again. If the monitor doesn't support other input modes you can get an adaptor cable though.
  
  
  
• From Clover4Leaf:

  I've been lurking hear or years, but never commented. I have a question about my 6 year old Dell laptop that has a 2.5" 2TB SATA hard drive. I wiped the Win7 installation since the drive performance went to unusable. I suspect malware was the culprit since SeaTools and Memtest86 showed everything was great hardware wise, so I've gone through the tedious process of installing the Win10Pro Dell installation. Given that I'm starting over and I've seen how fast my new laptop with M.2 SSD is, would it be worth it to upgrade the old laptop with a SATA SSD? I'm looking at 1TB SSD and I've seen where there are issues with sector sizes in some Amazon reviews.

  Yes, this is the single biggest upgrade you can give to an older laptop (assuming it's not stuck with 2GB of RAM or something crazy like that).
  
  With Windows 10 you should have no issues with sector sizes. There was a change from 512 byte sectors on older drives to 4k now but that started more than six years ago and your laptop should be fine.
  
  
  
• From Another Anon:

  Given that we know that Twitter and FaceBook are shit, that they do ungodly tracking of people, and their censorship practices after becoming near-monopoly status is borderline criminal (and possibly so if they're working with the government to do so)...
  Will there be changes made so that images/video can be stored elsewhere other than on these platforms? For example, the nightly (not-a-)bat link dumps from Twitter and all. It's hard to say goodbye to them when we're still using them.

  There is a way to do that. I was looking at Substack the other day and the way they handle Twitter embeds looks very clean and should break all the tracking. Probably violates Twitter's terms of service but very clean.
  
  Images are easy to handle and the cobs can upload directly to the server. Can't easily work around YouTube though. Can be done, just not easily.
  
  
  
• From pinchy migra:

  I bought the Dell 16 Plus based on your recc.
  1. I disabled the onboard GFX to fix the touchpad issue. Any downsides to this?

  That will increase power consumption a bit. Not a deal-breaker if it mostly sits on a desk plugged into a charger.

  2. My understanding is it can house a secondary SSD. Which should I go with?

  I wanted a very large SSD so I went with a 4TB Corsair model, but if 1TB or 2TB is enough I'd suggest the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Not the absolute fastest, but pretty quick, reliable, and reasonably priced.
  
  
  
• From markreardon:

  Any recommendations for an operating system that can be bought outright so I can avoid (escape) the Windows rental forever plan?

  Well, you can buy Windows (and Office too for that matter) but that doesn't stop Microsoft shoving ads at you.
  
  The main alternative is Linux, which is free. I'd suggest Ubuntu or Mint if you want to go that route.
  
  
  
• From Alberta Oil Peon:

  OK I have a question. Friend "R" has a Lenovo laptop. It ran Win10, but it died. Would try to execute the boot sequence, but could not find its hard drive. Myself and friend "M" tried to help, had no luck either. Could not get it to boot off a bootable thumb drive. Ultimately,"M" took it home, replaced HD with one from an older Lenovo, and loaded it with Linux Mint v20, and it now works. No machine will recognize the former HD. I understand Lenovo HD's (this one maybe 6 years old) all have built-in encryption. Is there any way to retrieve data and documents still on it?

  Hmm. Lenovo doesn't build their own drives or create their own encryption, so that will be third-party hardware and software, and if the drive is working it should be recoverable.
  
  From the sound of things the drive itself is toast - possibly a controller failure rather than a physical disk failure. That's in specialist data recovery territory. They'd try swapping the controller with one from a compatible known-good drive and take it from there. If the controller swap didn't work it could start getting seriously expensive.
  
  
  
• From molloaggie:

  Our family has acquired an old business server and wants to turn it into a personal digital library for saving and streaming our movies and books. We're arguing about software and security though. Some people don't trust anything out there and want it to run basically on dos. Others don't want to be hijacked to a subscription. What would you recommend?

  For a general-purpose server, Ubuntu Linux. Free, reliable, and not really more complicated to set up than a Linux server.
  
  Another option for this specific case would be something like TrueNAS Core, which is free and specifically designed to run small shared storage servers like this.
  
  
  
• From c:

  I have two laptops that are Windows 11 compatible and an older desktop that is not.
  
  The laptops are for surfing the net, writing, e-mails and general fun-sized entertainment. The desktop has more important tax info, returns, family business and photos on it and still works a charm for that......the question after all that buildup is simply this; why do I need Win 11 for any of them? Showing my age I always thought Win 3.1 worked just fine and every version since hasn't added a whole lot to rock my world. I am worried however about my computers becoming obsolescent because of all this software chicanery. Convince me of either my naivete or my acuity on this matter. Thanks!

  You don't really need Windows 11 unless you have one of the new Intel Alder Lake CPUs with two different types of CPU core - Windows 11 has been updated to handle that better than Windows 10.
  
  Otherwise it's perfectly safe and sensible to stick with Windows 10 through at least 2025. I have nothing running Windows 11 so far.
  
  
  
• From qwerty:

  I have a Ryzen 5800X and I am using it maxing out it capabilities on a project I am working on. I was planning on upgrading it to the 5950X with extra V-cache, but AMD is only going to release the 5800X with extra V-cache. I wanted to avoid upgrades for a few years while the AM5 / DDR5 bugs are all worked out, but massive EPYC sales are limited what AMD is selling to consumers. So now I have four choices: 1: Do nothing. 2: Upgrade to the 5950X. 3: Upgrade to the 5800X with 3D V-Cache. 4. Wait and upgrade to the AM5 / DDR5 platform.
  1 and 4 kind of go together.

  Yeah, it sounds like the 5800X3D is supply constrained and will be the only Zen 3 desktop model shipping with 3D V-cache.
  
  But the 5950X (and 5900X) already have twice the cache of the 5800X, so you get more cores and more cache. If you're CPU-bound, either of those should be a solid upgrade.
  
  
  
• From Brickmuppet:

  Q#1: There is a lot of talk recently (It really seems to have spiked in the last three years) regarding security vulnerabilities. Are things just getting worse as overworked coders try to upgrade old code, are there new malicious actors exploiting these vulnerabilities, are the vulnerabilities simply a product of the increasing complexity of the internet, or are people just noticing them now?

  Things aren't necessarily getting worse - back about twenty years ago we went through a long period where there was a critical new buffer overflow vulnerability in core internet software every week. But the internet is a lot bigger and more complex now, and the attack surface is immensely larger, so it's also not getting better.

  Q#2: What DID Pipkin Pippa do that got her a standing invitation to go on Rekieta Law?

  Be awesome.
  
  Not sure exactly; I've only seen one and a half Pippa streams, and one of those was mostly spent getting blown up by creepers in Minecraft. But she seems well-informed on some of the crazy YouTube legal goings-on that Nick Rekieta also tracks on his streams.

Tech News

• Lots more on the abominable EARN IT Act. (Stanford Law)

  Protecting children online is a laudable and urgent goal. However, the EARN IT Act would do little to protect child sex abuse victims – to the contrary, it risks making it even harder to track down and convict offenders. And by discouraging providers from using encryption to protect the privacy and security of users (including children), while simultaneously encouraging them to over-censor their users’ perfectly legal speech, EARN IT would do a lot of damage to innocent internet users who have broken no law.

  Apart from the article itself, they have two further articles, eight blog posts, two conference talks, and two interviews with other sites.
  
  Interesting that where conservative sites are calling out Lindsey Graham, they are calling out Richard Blumenthal. Both sides are blaming their own sides for this, which is fair because no-one should support this garbage.
  
  
  
• Prices for the RTX 3090 Ti have leaked online - again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card itself is nowhere to be found, but once it is, you can expect to pay upwards of $4000.  From what we've seen before, high-end models could go as high as $6000.
  
  I remember how upset people were when the 3090 was oiginally announced at $1500.
  
  
  
• Spam blacklisting is out of control. (Roastisdio.us)

  Your IP XX.XX.XX.XX was NOT directly involved in abuse, but has a bad neighborhood. Other customers within this range did not care about their security and got hacked, started spamming, or were even attacking others, while your provider has possibly not even noticed that there is a serious problem. We are sorry for you, but you have chosen a provider not acting fast enough on abusers.

  
  
  
  
• Speaking of which Straight2Spam will send any email straight to the recipient's spam folder. (Straight2Spam)
  
  Have to invite someone to an event but don't want them to actually show up? Got you covered.
  
  
  
• Twitter has rolled it a new "take me back to my hugbox" feature. (IB Times)
  
  1. Of course the people demanding this are also the most insanely abusive users on the site.
  2. Edit button.
  
  
  
• Six reasons Facebook is fucked. (MSN)
  
  1. Facebook sucks.
  
  

Making Sus Nuggies for Friends Who Are Tongue-Stupid Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2136 words, total size 15 kb.