ExtremeDullard

Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness...

It's been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.

I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂

After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.

Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.

What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself.

Unsubscribe...

You might recall a few weeks ago that I requested from a well-known large and somewhat litigious company the source code of the modification they made to a certain GPL debugger, and that they grudgingly agreed after a long time.

So I set out to work on the pile of code they sent me and managed to extract their modifications and port them fo the latest version of that GPL tool... apart from one driver for their debug probes that we use throughout our company: the cunning bastards left a stub in the open-source debugger (I have the code for that) and that stubs talks to the rest of the driver in the form of a closed-source TCP server.

It's a blatant trick to go around the GPL by taking advantage of the grey area surrounding linking in the GPL - i.e. the question of whether a closed-source program can be linked to GPL code and not become GPL itself, which still hasn't been tested in court to my knowledge. If I recall correctly, the FSF is of the opinion that anything that dynamically links to GPL code becomes GPL too, but that's just an opinion.

And of course, here in this case, the aforementioned company added one degree of separation between their closed-source driver and the GPL tool that uses it by making it a server, so whatever argument against linking to GPL code becomes even weaker.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I'm disappointed: my work is 90% there, but I still don't have that one driver and their closed-source faux-server is half-broken and dog-slow because of the time it takes to spawn the server and communicate with it through TCP, and I can't fix it. And I'm 100% certain that if I asked them to send me the source code for that, they'd tell me to suck eggs.

But here's what happened: I got so tired of their shenanigans that I started investigating other debug probes I could use instead of their proprietary junk. And after quite a lot of investigation, I found one solution based on open hardware and open software that, with some careful configuration, works 2x to 3x faster than their proprietary debug probe. Wow! I didn't even know it was possible, and I probably wouldn't have researched it if I had had all I needed to make what we already own works.

Long story short: I proposed that my company replace all our existing proprietary debug probes with the open hardware one and my boss agreed. That's like 20 probes in total, between R&D, testing and production, and at the tune $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one, that's $5339.80 the egregious GPL-violating company won't get from us. Not to mention renewal of the license for their IDE that we've been using for almost 2 decades, because finally, at long last, after over a month of solid work, I finally managed to free up our source code from their vendor lock-in and make it compile, debug and flash using open-source tools from start to finish!

So yeah, I didn't get what I originally wanted from that company. That's the bad news. But in the end I ended up better off without it, and that's the good news 🙂

I like Techlore (https://www.techlore.tech if you don't know) and I usually regard them as one of the most impartial and most trustworthy Youtubers out there. But for the past few months, I couldn't help noticing their somewhat heavy bias towards some of their video sponsors. Still, everybody has to eat right?

This time though, it looks like Synology flew them over to Taiwan, and if you watch their video at the event, it's wall-to-wall Synology shilling. I'm really disappointed.

So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool.

The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz".

The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it.

Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on.

Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

None of what follows is new. I know this stuff happens all the time. And yet somehow this insignificant thing shocked me and it's been gnawing at me for the past few days. And today was the icing on the shit cake.

So my wife ordered a a foot massage machine. $50, typical el-cheapo thing made in China. The thing was shipped to our home out in the boonies in less than 48 hours. Wow!

My wife opened the box, got the device out onto the floor and... she couldn't fit her feet inside. She's not big, but apparently the device was designed for customers in the Shire. Unusable.

So she emailed the distributor who told her to cut the cord, send them a photo proving the destruction and throw it away herself. Not return the device. Not pretend to return the device and the device is thrown away behind her back. No no: this time, the distributor told her in no uncertain terms that it's cheaper for them to let her destroy the thing herself.

And then it hit me: here is a device that was born in China, put together by some underpaid workers in a nondescript factory, designed by someone who didn't give a shit, made out of materials that probably came out of the ground somewhere in Africa and in Saudi Arabia - probably involving child labor at some point or other - put on a boat, shipped halfway around the world, then put into a truck, only to be landfilled here.

It didn't even see a single second of use. This is utterly absurd and completely depressing.

I'm not compatible with that. When I buy something, the thing has value and I want it to have a decently useful life. It's not about ecology or money: it's just basic respect for the resources and the human labor that went into this thing. The value of the object is what it cost the Earth and the people who toiled to make it and ship it to me. When I use my things, I show respect for those who made them and it justifies the use ot the materials they're made of.

But here I was looking at that poor thing across the room, unloved and unlovable, whose sole purpose as an object was to be landfilled without ever seeing any use. It consumed resources and someone worked to make it, yet somehow it never had any value for anybody.

And the most depressing thing about it is, its very existence from Chinese factory to my local landfill is totally absurd and makes no sense at all, yet all the invididual steps that contributed to it being fabricated and ultimately landing on our doorstep were a series of perfectly rational economical decisions: someone found added value in designing and building a shit foot massage machine, my wife found it worth buying sight unseen, someone figured there was money to be made shipping it here, and the distributor decided to outsource its destruction to the customers because it's cheaper than destroying it themselves - let alone shipping it back to Shenzen or wherever. And yet when you string everything together, the net result is senseless waste and production of things that have no inherent worth. How crazy is that eh?

I couldn't throw it away. So I replaced the cord and I gave it to the local Red Cross store yesterday to give to someone in need or sell it for pennies. Today, I passed by the shop on my way to work and saw the damn thing in their garbage container behind the store. In the box. Unopened. I guess it will be going to the landfill after all...

That really put the final damper on my day today...

Sorry if this is the wrong venue, but I really needed to vent.

I've never been super-impressed by Rob Braxman. I mean he's never truly wrong in what he was saying in his Youtube videos, but his explanations are over-simplistic, a bit of a shortcut (but fair enough to reach a wide audience I guess), and mostly designed to sell his meh deGoogled cellphones and equally meh privacy services. But all in all, he's somewhat watchable and sometimes informative after I'm done watching all the new videos from the other, more interesting channels I follow.

But lately, his videos seem to have shifted markedly toward unhinged rants and sensationalist conspiracy theory. His latest video for instance is utter nonsense:

Skynet 2024: The Infrastructure is Complete!

I mean yeah, okay, technically he's talking about a real thing. But Skynet? And doomsday Terminator imagery from 1984? Really?

I'm pretty sure the man doesn't have all his fries in the cone anymore. This can't possibly be a conscious strategy to win more Youtube subscribers: this sort of video is going to lose him the part of his audience that has a genuine and technically-informed interest in privacy, and I doubt he's ever going to become a favorite of the sort of crowd who likes conspiracy theories.

Either that or Youtube is a lot stupider than I thought and he noticed an uptick in subscribers when he makes videos like that. At any rate, I really hesitate to click on any of his new videos now.

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

My company offers 3 days of unjustified sick leave for things like colds or minor health issues that don't really require seeing a doctor.

And sure enough, that guy - always that guy - got sick on Monday, then took a day off on Thursday, and now he's sick again on Friday. Strangely, his company car reports being at a ski resort 200 miles away.

Because you know, when you're bedridden, at least you should have a nice view out the window...

I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this...) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.

I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka "reCAPTCHA" that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don't select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous "rolling captchas" that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.

When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don't select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.

Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.

I've been experimenting with this informally for months now and it's quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.

It's really disgusting...

Hey everybody,

I installed LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on an old cellphone I had lying around. It works fine, apart from an odd problem: when I connect the phone to my computer by USB, the "Charging this device via USB" notification appears but all the USB preference options are greyed out.

Data transfer works however: if I go into System > Developer options > Default USB configuration, set it to Data Transfer, unplug the USB cable and plug it back in, the options are still greyed out, but File Transfer is selected and the drive appears on the PC. So it's not the cable, and my ports or plugs don't need cleaning.

It's very inconvenient to have to enable and disable this in the Developer options each time I want to transfer a file, and I most certainly don't want to leave Data tranfer enabled all the time.

I've been looking for a solution everywhere, and it seems plenty of people have the same problem with a lot of different phones, but nobody has a solution.

Anybody knows what might be going on here? Any adb shell command I could issue to reenable what might be disabled?