Author Archives: pappp

Article note: Eehh. It's a vuln in 'mail' Fail2Ban has more suitable, more often used logging facilities, and recent versions prefer sendmail to mail. Still an interesting little escaping bug, because escaping (like any sort of in-band control) is fraught.

Article note: Oh man, that thing's perpetual incompleteness has been a long-term joke. 11 years later, we lose the joke. ...probably the next joke will be the ever-extending closure of that Legacy Trail section (essentially to pile more places for more vehicles pull across the non-motor-vehicle part of the path) near Nandino.

Article note: ...duh? Students in environments with the resources and inclination to carve them out time and space to learn in did better... just like usual, but without the (not actually that large) leveling effects of classroom time. Schools that aren't over-subscribed and at the ass-end of decades of of systematic de-funding were able to provide better support... just like usual. Students with the cultural priming and wherewithal to ask for help got more help... just like usual, but without the easy obligate check-in of classroom time. Basically, all the remaining efforts to level and allow for mobility crumbled. Even with college students I got a major view of this. And they're not missing out on socialization like the younger students. I don't actually disapprove of a period/option of remote learning given the level of uncertainty and danger early in the pandemic. Designing good split-modality instruction is even harder than in-person or remote, and especially if it isn't a high certainty schedule, so that's not a fix. And my usual gripe about offloading the costs of the pandemic to individuals applies to later developments: no one is picking up the tab to put decent modern ventilation into poor schools... we barely have air conditioning in most of them. No one is paying to pack schools with enough qualified instructional staff to make split-modality tractable (and that, in conjunction with health risks and preexisting bullshit, is burning out the remaining teachers).

Article note: In the tradition of the Daytrading Yucca: the cryptocurrency speculating hamster.

Article note: This is going to be fun. Not only is it going to help systematically discourage proof-of-waste (work) cryptocurrencies, but I'm curious what kind of 2nd hand hardware is about to start flowing out of China. I've already got some really nice Zynq FPGA boards out of the decaying cryptomining industry...

Article note: If I took anything about the remaining academic 'research' world seriously, I'd be out in a Ted Shed plotting violent overthrow. It's not exclusively the fault of the publisher-parasites, but they sure are a driver of the brokenness.

Article note: It is sort of amazing just how much of an abusive monopoly and in bed with the government AT&T was for ...most of the 20th century..., and yet they were much more restrained and socially productive than the modern analogous entities.

Article note: Security agencies systematically deploy ad-blockers because ads are such a vector for malware and phishing. Security firms mostly suggest systematic deployment of ad-blockers because ads such a vector for malware and phishing. There are years of mounting evidence that targeted advertising is snake-oil. Why the hell is the ad-tech industry still making money? They should be a burning crater of cautionary tale by now.

Article note: I use Firefox on desktop and Android, but they're not wrong. The UI churn that never really seems to improve, and inevitably bends toward less user agency, more wasted space, and more actions to access features. The inexplicable "oh, I guess that just doesn't work anymore" feature breakage. Back in 2017-2018 Firefox was (re)gaining technical ground, their 5-10 year plans were panning out (Rust! Servo! Quantum!) and... then they seem to have let almost everyone doing any kind of deep technical work go and are left only with managers and UX fiddlers. It's a bad place for the only major browser not directly managed by an ad-tech vendor.

Article note: Those are very high-level instructions with weird interrupt semantics. I assume they added it largely for co-processor feeding, but it seems worse than attaching some DMA gadget(s).