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drwho The Doctor @beehaw.org

Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Burnout.

I try to post as sincerely as possible.

Posts 0
Comments 55
Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser
  • It's not doing something dumb. It's another power grab. We passed the stage where giving the benefit of the doubt is a reasonable thing to do well over a decade ago.

  • Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser
  • It's pretty decent. They just released a Windows PDrive client, but Proton Drive is usable from pretty much any browser. I use it for keeping additional backups of a few things.

  • So i've been trying to talk to a friend about the [#Fediverse](https://kbin.social/tag/Fediverse) lately and they seem to think that the US Government will crack down on it because Billionaires might
  • This. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

    I guess nobody remembers the Halloween Memo, because that's the gold standard strategy for gathering up and locking in users.

  • The Fediverse needs a popular agent
  • Why do we need to be mainstream?

  • Kevin Mitnick, Hacker Who Once Eluded Authorities, Is Dead at 59
  • Weirdly, John Markoff didn't write this article. I'd have thought he'd have jumped at the opportunity.

  • Which e-mail service should I use?
  • Unless you're a seasoned sysadmin, hosting your own mail server is going to be more trouble that it's worth. It's a lot of work, and when that was a common thing (companies having their own mail servers) usually they had dedicated admin teams (when they bothered hiring more than one admin, that is) to run it. It's a lot of work.

    I migrated my domain over to Protonmail a couple of years back, and it's the best money I've spent in a long time.

  • Cyberpunk! - TIME - Article From 30 Years Ago
  • I think I still have a copy of that issue someplace.

  • Cyberpunk! - TIME - Article From 30 Years Ago
  • I think that's one of those details that the original journalists didn't pick up on, because they had a limited amount of time. If they'd been on any of the more active BBSes (or had net.access) and hung out for longer than, if I had to guess, a week doing research they might have picked up on it.

    Or maybe their editors cut that part. Hard to say.

  • Admin of an anarchist Mastodon server raided by FBI, insecure user data gets seized
  • The FBI surveils targets prior to executing raids. It's possible they deduced that there was some useful information available on the target's laptop and acted in such a way to capture it easily.

  • Admin of an anarchist Mastodon server raided by FBI, insecure user data gets seized
  • Not really? If you're trying to debug something, or if you're gearing up for an upgrade (like the Mastodon upgrade this week that's giving a lot of admins grief) it's plausible to have one of your backups locally to mess around with. As an example of this principle, I run Part-DB-server to manage my workshop inventory. For various reasons I migrated from a hosted MySQL database to a local SQLite database, and I'm in the process of moving back to the MySQL database. To facilitate this I have a copy of the SQLite database that, as needed, I run SELECTs on to backfill details on entries. I have a local copy of that database on my laptop, in other words.

    It's also plausible that the kolektiva.social admin was mocking up a clone of the service on their laptop to test something.

    Without more data (gentlebeings, start your FOIA requests) I'm not sure that it's a good idea to speculate. We might learn something that we can use later.

  • Admin of an anarchist Mastodon server raided by FBI, insecure user data gets seized
  • As far as I know (which isn't too far, because I'm not a Beltway bandit anymore), the Fediverse isn't on the FBI's radar in any meaningful way. It /might/ be on the radar of the information contractors they hire for bulk data gathering and analysis (Palantir, ZeroFox, Dataminr, probably others these days) but none of me have heard anything specific.

  • This variable cap, sending a clear message to anyone looking for identifying marks
  • It's probably between 60 and 140 pF. Those are the ones that you'll normally find in crystal radios for tuning.

  • Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?
  • Alan Turing's apple, I shoulda kept my big mouth shut.

  • Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?
  • Who do I have to let sit on my face to eradicate systemfail?

  • Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?
  • Honestly? I think Ubuntu's userbase is about to get a lot bigger. The larger hosting companies (AWS and Digital Ocean are the two that come to mind immediately) support Ubuntu as a first-class citizen, so once the not-true blue RHEL distros take the hit migrations are going to happen.

  • (Dumb questions?) Can dnd actually be played solo, and if so how?
  • Some of the older adventures (AD&D, first and second edition) were written as single-player modules, kind of like the adventure game books of the same historical era. They're sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure books, but with RPG engines bolted onto the side controlling some of the paths taken.