Monday, January 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 January 2020

Foley Operator Of Life Edition

Tech News

  • So my washing machine is making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, clearly an unbalanced load, and I go into the laundry and shut it off before it can damage itself.  The clothes aren't quite done spinning but near enough, so into the dryer with them and in goes the next load.

    And I close the door and am rewarded with an almost comically perfect sound of something breaking off and falling down inside the machine, which no longer works.


  • Google search sucks.

    So does Google everything else, pretty much.  How the basically competent now are fallen.


  • Twitter no longer has tooltips for emojis.  Brought home sharply by this bit of nonsense:



    Quick, name the top five countries on that list.


  • I had a clever idea today.

    And when I say "clever" I mean "using a platform in a way it was never intended to be used and will likely horrify the developers of said platform".


  • Why build this blog on IPFS?  (Teetotality)

    No, not this blog, that blog.  While IPFS has its place, there is no magic.  There's no "serverless", there is just total dependence on things you cannot fix. 

    WordPress may be a dinosaur, but dinosaurs ruled the planet for 160 million years.  WordPress is also a piece of crap, but crap has ruled the planet for even longer.


  • No, you still can't solve the halting problem.  (Gizmodo)

    What you can now do - thanks to that mathematical breakthrough I mentioned yesterday - is determine, if you have a network of computers which can solve the halting problem, which isn't possible, whether they are telling the truth.

    Which is a rather useful trick when you have computers solving problems that they can solve but which you cannot.


  • Netgear put the private keys for the certificates included on their routers up on their support website.  (GitHub)

    Astoundingly, this doesn't look like a fuckup.  The keys and certificates are used only for providing HTTPS for your router's config page, and nowhere else.  Providing them like this is necessary if you're making a complete firmware bundle available for download.

    And you need HTTPS because browsers can't tell a LAN site from a public one and are increasingly freaked out about HTTP sites.

    As one person summed it up:
    It's better than HTTP because it requires active MitM
    It's worse than HTTP because it gives the user a false sense of security.
    It's better than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus can use the device)
    It's worse than TOFU/self signed because the user is not presented with a browser warning (and thus does not know about attacks)
    It's a solution to an unsolved problem...


  • TerraMaster has a new 5-bay 10Gb NAS.  (AnandTech)

    Price $599, available soon.  It looks pretty good, but I don't have 10Gb Ethernet, so probably going to stick with USB for now.


  • I mentioned that DigitalOcean was laying off about 5% of their staff.  A co-founder of the company showed up on a Hacker News thread to explain things.

    It went well.

    Not being facetious.

    If you've ever seen the AWS platform dashboard you would know why.


  • Don't use Opera.  (Android Police)

    Yeah, based on that, time to uninstall Opera entirely.


  • A list of Telnet passwords for 500,000 devices has been published online.  (ZDNet)

    Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap.


Other News

  • This is the most extraordinary thing, and will probably be deleted soon.


    Chants of "we will not comply” from gun rights protesters in Richmond.
    The audio isn't perfect, but it is clear enough.  The crowd is reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Video of the Day



See also: Why data anonymisation does not work.



Disclaimer: Click poink rattle rattle rattle clunk.  Welp, not going to be doing any more laundry today.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 644 words, total size 6 kb.




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




53kb generated in CPU 0.0151, elapsed 0.1153 seconds.
56 queries taking 0.1054 seconds, 337 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.