Monthly Archives: February 2024

Article note: Interesting. I use VirtualBox because USB device passing actually-fucking-works (I can hot-plug a thing that I only have Windows drivers for into my Linux host running a Windows VM, with the vid:pid filter set, and it just gets delegated), and the libvirt front-ends are sort of unbelievably terrible where VirtualBox's is decent. I'd really like to migrate to a fully open source not-Oracle-licensed-plugin solution, so things that move the functionality closer together - even from the other direction like this - are exciting.

Article note: It's sort of amazing that a thing named for a vendor jail appliance is one of the last great examples of successful ecosystems built out of vendor independent open protocols/standards instead of some kind of rentseeking roach motel. Even though all those rentseeking roach motels are hosted on top of infrastructure that is previous successful vendor-independent open standards.

Article note: It's such a good (fictional) example. It's also such a classic "almost no one checked the references, and the person who propagated it misunderstood what they read." scenario.

Article note: The moderately priced, readily navigable, nearly one-stop-shop, largely ad-free option has fragmented into a bunch of overpriced rent-seeking entities with small and constantly shifting catalogs hidden behind wretched UX, with increasing ad penetration. The conditions that incentivized piracy returned, so piracy is ramping back up. Not a mystery. The media industry can build a large number of interchangeable distributors all of which can get to all the content via reasonable terms (like a retail or FRAND situation), or consolidate into a small number of services (studios produce content and sell via an independent distributor) or... try to squeeze and everyone goes back to piracy until the industry is forced to contract and reconsider, which seems to be the plan.

Article note: This awesome work by people who seem delightful, but unless we address the structural incentives that make fraud (and other flavors of chicanery like deceptive hyping, fad chasing, and simulation-encodes-bogus-assumptions tautology proving) more effective as career strategies than honest research work (and/or instructional work!), it's a losing battle.

Article note: Google remembered another useful product and killed it.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don't see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google's page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.

Article note: I've used a similar trick to break into a lab-owned tablet that a student left a passcode on when they graduated. Android has sort of shockingly poor platform integration, and all those interfaces are poorly specified and leaky.

Article note: I stopped engaging with Reddit from mobile devices, and cut down significantly on my overall use. I'll still browse old reddit from a fully blockered-up browser on a computer when I'm idle in front of one, and only comment rarely on things I have specialist knowledge on. The content that _does_ show up on Reddit has not seemed as good of late, either. Unfortunately, Lemmy doesn't seem to be hitting critical mass, I'd prefer it if everyone just moved on and left the parasitic commercial platforms to die.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Last year, Reddit sparked massive controversy when it dramatically changed the prices and rules associated with accessing its API. The changes were so drastic and polarizing that they led to an epic protest from Reddit users and moderators that saw thousands of subreddits going private and engaging in other forms of inconvenience for weeks. Things got ugly, but Reddit still ushered in the changes, resulting in mounds of third-party Reddit apps announcing their permanent closure.

It's been about seven months since the changes, so I wanted to see what Reddit's third-party app ecosystem looks like now. Are surviving third-party Reddit apps that started charging users making money? Are developers confident they'll be able to keep their apps open for the long term?

And some apps are still available despite not charging a subscription fee. How is that possible?