Monday, January 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 January 2021

Yes We Have No Bananas Or Anything Else Edition

Tech News

  • So, my groceries didn't show up today.  Didn't get the usual "when to expect your delivery" email this morning, but it was still showing on the site as being on its way, and around 3PM it changed to delivered.

    No groceries.

    Checked the other units in the complex to see if there was a pile of grocery bags blocking someone else's doorway.

    No groceries.

    Called the support number, entered my order number into the automated system, and it said:

    No groceries.

    Got a human being on the line, he found the order in their system, called up the store that was handling the delivery, and apparently although it said to me the entire time that the order was in the system, it was in precisely half of the system.  It was never queued for delivery, and never invoiced.

    Anyway, air fryer arriving tomorrow.  It was likely going to be next week, because I already had a grocery order arriving today, but as I mentioned...


  • Got Rumble and Lbry embeds working; I'll include those in the update with the new lightweight YouTube embed.


  • This is getting out of hand.  Now there are two of them.  (Bleeping Computer)

    When I saw this I thought it was a duplicate of a story I'd already posted, but no, it's another Windows filesystem path that will instantly crash your system and corrupt your NTFS volume if you try to read from it.


  • IBM has gone on a shopping spree buying up cloud integrators.  (ZDNet)

    Since they are running fourth even among US cloud providers they had to do something.  I'd suggest answering fucking support tickets, but this might also work.


  • Alienware has a new 360Hz monitor, because...  (Tom's Hardware)

    Because people will buy it, I suppose.  Ultimately that's always the reason.  Doesn't need to make sense.  Doesn't need to be useful.


  • The end of third-party cookies - except for Google.  (Press Gazette)

    Google is working hard to ban third-party cookies.  They are not doing this to protect your privacy.
    "Whereas cookies are essentially owned by the brand – the advertiser drops it and then the advertiser reads it – browser-based means that all the ownership then sits, in reality, with Google,” said ad-buyer Matt Rhodes.
    One of the effects of this centralisation of power is that advertisers cannot themselves measure the effectiveness of their ads.  Again, this is in Google's interests, not yours.


  • 8x1GbE, 2x10GbE, under $100.  (Serve the Home)

    Of course it's SPF+ because we can't have nice things.


  • Don't run strings on untrusted files.  (Archive.org)

    This is from 2014 so there's a chance it's been fixed since then, but the bug was nine years old at that time so it's likely not.

    The strings command lets you see text strings embedded in a binary file.  It also lets a carefully crafted binary execute arbitrary code.  Since strings is often used to look at binaries you don't want to run, this seems like a bad idea.


  • Apple is being sued by the usual suspects to try to force it to remove the Telegram app.  (Washington Post)

    This one will be interesting to watch.  How exactly will Apple completely fuck this up?


Hololive Stuff of the Day

Gura has hit 2 million subscribers and Marine has hit 1 million.  In fact, Marine scheduled a stream where she would sing until she hit the million mark, but she hit it before the stream could even start.  She's not one of the big names in the west but over the past month she's had easily the highest number of viewers.  (Holo.Poi.Cat)

Meanwhile Amelia, Haachama, Coco, and Calli are all over 900k.  There's no escaping the rabbit hole for anyone.

If you're looking to enter the rabbit hole yourself, this is one of the streams that dragged me in.  I was pretty familiar with Hololive by this point but mostly from clips; this might have been the first full stream I watched.

It's fairly short too, unlike her 24-hour Assassin's Creed Syndicate marathon.  Which was hilarious - she quickly abandoned stealth and played it like a Victorian-era GTA.



Disclaimer: No no no, no no, no Japanese.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:05 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 703 words, total size 6 kb.

1 "Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and this means that even if a user wishes not to be identified, they cannot stop the developer from doing so. We think this subversion of user choice is wrong.”

Google’s Privacy Sandbox will keep data on a user’s browser, rather than storing it on servers, and use application programming interfaces (APIs) to share data on users with advertisers. These will be limited by a "privacy budget” capping the number of APIs that can be "called” by a site."


This is the kind of overcomplicated crap that won't fix the issue that only a bureaucrat or authoritarian could like.  You actually want to address fingerprinting?  Keep track of what's being used and fake it.  One method is supposedly printing text on hidden canvases really large and then looking pixel-by-pixel at the antialiasing.  Fine, have the browser fuzz the rendering a bit.  (I know, I know, the sound you just heard was millions of graphic designers crying out in agony.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 19 2021 02:17 AM (eqaFC)

2 "Assassin's Creed Syndicate [...] played [...] like a Victorian-era GTA."
Ok, that sounds like it might be worth watching.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 19 2021 02:32 AM (eqaFC)

3 So, as a Windows user, I've been watching news on Apple, and kind of dreading what failures of software engineering management Microsoft is going to be responsible for.

I really need to be taking better care of things, and looking deeper into the alternatives.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 19 2021 03:27 AM (6y7dz)

4 I mean, the advantage of cookies, 3rd-party or not, is that I can delete 'em.
"Keep track of what's being used and fake it."  I would be pretty comfortable just going back to lynx.  Would lose a bit of functionality, but most of what that fuctionality gives you is total shit anyways.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 19 2021 03:58 AM (obo9H)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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