Saturday, January 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 January 2021

The Purge Accelerates Edition

Tech News

  • This.


  • Fuck Google. (ZDNet)


  • Fuck Apple. (Input Mag)


  • Fuck Reddit. (Gizmodo)


  • Fuck Twitter. (The Verge)


  • Fuck Facebook and Shopify as well. And Twitch and Discord, and Instagram and YouTube specifically and separately from their parent fucks. And fuck anyone who approves of this. Fuck you, Joe Manchin. Fuck you, Jason Snell.

    Update: Fuck CampaignMonitor.


  • Microsoft and Amazon have managed not to be openly fascist this week. Good for you, Microsoft and Amazon.


  • Trump moved to Parler, naturally. That effectively gave Parler the hug of death - the site is up but not really working. And it's pure coincidence that the usual suspects immediately moved to wipe Parler off the map.

    Build your own social network, they say. That makes you an easier target.


  • Acer has a new Chromebook. (WCCFTech)

    You'd have to be nuts to buy a Chromebook, unless you can wipe it and install regular Linux.


  • Twitter also banned the account of Sci-Hub, a site that freely distributes scientific papers from paid journals. (TorrentFreak)

    Sci-Hub is being sued in India by Elsevier, which holds a huge percentage of the market for paid scientific journals. The site is popular there because Elsevier is eye-gougingly expensive, and it gives Indian scientists a chance to keep up with the literature.

    That doesn't make it necessarily legal or morally right, but why exactly is Twitter banning them, when they don't publish anything there?


  • You can download the torrents here, at least for now. (gen.lib.rus.ec)

    Though at last count it was about 55TB, which is rather a lot.


  • The Chinese genocide propaganda account is still up on Twitter, so apparently that's just fine.

    Update: Huh. It's gone. That's a first. Tiny, tiny bit of credit to Twitter for not openly supporting the forced sterilisation of entire ethnic populations.


  • GNAP is the next generation of OAuth. (FusionAuth)

    This is what is becoming OAuth3. It is completely incompatible with OAuth2, so congratulations on a good job there guys.


  • Roku has bought the content of the deceased Quibi for some amount below $100 million. (Thurrott.com)

    Quibi launched in April last year, burned through $1.7 billion in cash, and died in December. Roku frankly overpaid for their content, but it will be available to their customers for free.... Which means their customers are also overpaying.


  • The Asus TUF Gaming A17 might be coming sooner than expected. (WCCFTech)

    Ryzen 5800H, RTZ 3070, 17.3" 1080p screen, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD.


  • Half the memory in Tohru has evaporated.  I was wondering why it was slow.  It's showing 16GB found, 8GB usable.

    I haven't put the new RAM in yet, so this will get fixed one way or another.  This is almost certainly related to my earlier crashes.


  • I've watched Gura's undying gawrilla Minecraft stream now* and replaced all the YouTube videos from December 31 onwards with the new quick-load format.  I'm thinking of making that global.

    Now I'll backup some essential files and reboot this thing to see if it finds its other 8GB of RAM.


  • Update: Well, that was weird.  Windows Memory Diagnostics found no errors.  The Dell BIOS diagnostics found no errors.  Resetting page file allocation (one suggestion I found) did nothing, and setting and clearing the maximum memory allocation** in MSConfig did nothing.  There's no option in the BIOS to adjust reserved memory, and the BIOS shows 16GB of RAM present as it should.

    And now it's working.


* Good thing too because now it's private.  Possibly because she discussed her alien visitation, or the time she appeared on stream naked.
** Why do we even have that lever?!


Kiara Minecraft Compilation Video of the Day


Testing the new YouTube embed script. Looks really good, should be live tomorrow.

I worry about what might happen to Hololive with American Big Tech gone batshit insane.  They're as apolitical as you can get, but that's probably not going to be enough.


Disclaimer: War is Fuck. Freedom is Fuck. Ignorance is Fuck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:49 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 665 words, total size 7 kb.

1 So, Pixy....How is that social media alternative coming along?

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, January 09 2021 01:56 PM (4i7w0)

2 Good question.  Working on it today.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 02:46 PM (PiXy!)

3 It won't have an app.  Does have an open API so that anyone can build an app.  Looking at make a Twitter-compatible subset API as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 02:57 PM (PiXy!)

4 Maybe some sorta rss thingey?

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, January 10 2021 02:08 AM (Clxcy)

5 Anyone know of a way to install Parler for Android now that it's been disappeared?  Oddly they don't seem to have it on their website for sideloading.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:15 AM (eqaFC)

6 I actually picked up a Lenovo Duet last week, because it has support for both Android apps and installing Linux, and also because it was under $300 for decent specs, and, most importantly, because it has an ARM CPU for me to mess around with.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:19 AM (eqaFC)

7 "It is completely incompatible with OAuth2"
Hey, all the Apple and Linux apologists like to point out that that icky backwards compatibility stuff makes life difficult for them and how it's much better--for the OS developers--to push the difficulty out to the userbase.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:21 AM (eqaFC)

8 re: disappearing memories There's a really old xeon workstation at the library that has done that twice now: I have it set to always run the slow, painful memory check at startup, and it will whinge that the memory has changed (it's the same amount that it finds, though), and boot to winders with half of the memory.  Shut down, open door, reseat all modules, boot up, bios whinges again that the memory has changed (still the same 16G as every other time), boots into winders with all memory found.  Well, it's a 2011 vintage machine, so probably time to send it to the great workstation farm in the sky.  The downside being, it's the only remaining machine running winders VII, which is far less painful than ten.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:22 AM (obo9H)

9 Anyone know of a way to install Parler for Android now that it's been disappeared?  Oddly they don't seem to have it on their website for sideloading.

Huh.  I just checked Parler's homepage and they still have the link for the APK file for Android in the lower right-hand corner.


Jeremy from The Quartering is making the point on Parler that the service can not afford NOT to be on iOS and Android, given their market reach, and thus should be flexible in accommodating requirements from Apple or Google.  It is a valid point as far as it goes, but I think he is missing the follow-up point that if the requirements to be on iOS and Android is to change your service into the opposite of what it intended to be, accommodation probably is not going to work anyway.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, January 10 2021 05:56 AM (4i7w0)

10 Rick C - do you mean the Linux kernel, or the whole operating system?

The one unbending rule of the kernel is do not break user-space. Here's Linus calmly explaining this:
Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?

To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOE NT would ever be valid.
The operating system as a whole, that's a bit different, with the whole ongoing systemd cancer-fest.  But that affects deploying new Linux systems and not how apps run.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 10:16 AM (PiXy!)

11 Philip Fraering - yes, configurable RSS feeds are easy.  I'll definitely do that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

12 New embed script does not work for me in Pale Moon. 

I usually have javascript turned off, but it is broken when I had it turned on.  The machine where Pale Moon has Adblock Latitude installed is the latest version of Pale Moon, and does not work.  The machine where Pale Moon does not have Adblock installed likewise.  Does not work in SeaMonkey or Waterfox Classic either.  Does seem to work in Edge. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 10 2021 11:19 AM (6y7dz)

13 Pixy, for Linux I was thinking of the kernel.  I forgot about that rant from Linus (who could blame me, it's kind of one member of His Name Is Legion.)
cxt I'll look for the apk, although I got unlazy and found a copy on APK Mirror; I haven't actually created an account yet.  I downloaded Telegram & installed it today, but haven't set it up yet.  I started to create a Protonmail account but managed to screw up the "is it really you" code thing so I may have trashed my first choice of address.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 11:35 AM (eqaFC)

14 PatBuckman - thanks!  I'll test it and figure out a fallback method before rolling it out generally.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

15 Okay, not an adblock issue: Waterfox Classic has outdated DOM support (and won't be updated, because that's the reason for Classic), and Pale Moon has outdated JavaScript support.

I'll detect the user agent and make those browsers fall back to the default YouTube embed, then compatibility becomes Somebody Else's Problemâ„¢.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 01:42 PM (PiXy!)

16 Slide Amazon over to the 'openly fascist' category for kicking Parler off of AWS.

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, January 10 2021 01:53 PM (kqK5x)

17 Yech.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 02:30 PM (PiXy!)

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




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