palordrolap

Put something in robots.txt that isn't supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.

Imperfect, but can't think of a better solution.

Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f--king idiot who can barely do what they're supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f--king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f--king idiot. Awareness is key.

Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f--king idiot you're trying to deal with is yourself.

Assume everyone else is worse.

Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f--king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.

Microsoft wants to give Linux a nice warm hug and then squeeze and squeeze and all the warmth disappears this is actually quite a high pressure oh that hurts Microsoft no ow are those needles coming out of your arms I think I hear bones splintering and screaming oh no it's me I'm screaming I'm hearing myself screaming I'm turning into

Tenets*

But don't sack your tenants. They need a place to live.

Irony: The pictured computer is not a 1980s, 1MHz Commodore 64 but instead a 2010s, 2GHz C64x PC, a keyboard-housed x86 system that looks like a breadbin C64.

Let me guess: I'll buy a toaster because my old one died but then I'll get ads for new toasters constantly. You bought one, you must want another. And another. And another. Why aren't you buying more toasters. You bought one. Buy another! Buy twenty!! People who bought toasters also bought microwaves and kettles. Do you want a toaster? Does anyone want any toast?

The jump from 7.x right to 24.x had me thinking this was an AI generated article at first, but the main LibreOffice website does indeed show that the new version number is 24.

EDIT: The article literally talks about this and I missed it. Twice. I would like to claim to be on drugs, but sadly(?) this is not the case.

The choice of 24 makes me think they've decided to switch to using the last two digits of the current year as the main version number, rather than the previous arbitrary increases, but I can't find anything obvious about this on the site.

Their current release schedule is every six months, and as long as they don't accelerate the way web browser releases do, this probably wouldn't come back to bite them.

The sub-version being .2 and it being February soon makes me wonder if that's intentional as well.

As for commentary on LibreOffice itself: I use it every once in a while, so I don't dig deep into its feature set(s) at all. In a previous update I noticed a few things had been moved around in Calc (the spreadsheet) which I'm still getting used to, but by and large all I can do is appreciate those working on it and, for whatever it's worth, thank them for their efforts.

Important: The article mentions that they are being replaced not that the SAC is being done away with completely.

On the other hand:

Twitch declined to comment on whether the [new council members] would be paid.

The text I replaced there is "ambassadors", that is, Twitch ambassadors, people given a title that means nothing outside of Twitch, but is the only payment these people will be getting, outside, perhaps, a sense of pride and accomplishment.

The main reason for the name is that it sorts before both Amazon and Apple in the Big Tech directory. It's literally as petty as that. They obviously chose a word that was related to searching within that criterion, but still.

Copypasting: (source)

The cautious approach for LMDE5 users: If your system is working fine and there are no especially must-have features in LMDE6, there is almost certainly no rush to upgrade. Take your time.

Make backups. Test backups. Play games. Work. Do things entirely unrelated to the distro.

You could even almost (aaalmost) completely forget about LMDE6 (but do keep an eye on the LM blog).

The Mint team haven't announced an EOL date for LMDE5 yet, but if past dates are anything to go by, it'll be at least 18 months before they pull the plug. Even then, LTS updates might still filter through from Debian proper.

[How many people will actually see this message and how many it actually applies to out of them might well include me and literally one other guy somewhere else on the planet, but if you're that one guy, breathe friend. No rush.]

That looks like it might be the monitor's own on-screen display rather than anything Puppy related. My guess is that the monitor hasn't been detected properly and Puppy is putting out a resolution that the monitor can't deal with.

Since the message says 1280x1024, either the monitor is 1280x1024 and can't deal with anything else, or it's not 1280x1024 and is being sent 1280x1024 resolution and is complaining about it.

(Or worse, it's a clock frequency error which was a real problem back in the early days of Linux.)

As for how to fix, the answer is going to be different depending on the age of the base Linux under Puppy and the graphical subsystem.

For X/X11/Xorg it's probably going to need use of the xrandr shell command, perhaps to delete the mode that is causing the problem. For Wayland, it appears that each window manager has its own xrandr equivalent. I see talk of a gnome-randr, for example.

To get to a shell in the first place, try the Ctrl+Alt+F1 key-combo. If the computer isn't frozen, that might get a text-based console login prompt. (Puppy might do things differently here though. Not sure.)

Alternatively, look up how to boot to a single-user shell by modifying GRUB options, that is, if no such option is there already.

Caveat: I am no expert. Take this under advisement. Also try web-searching some keywords. It might be there's a really simple fix for this that I don't know about.

It's not about whether it works, it's about proving that they're keeping pace with the trends in technology that they're not directly driving.

They're afraid that if they don't give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that's what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that's what will happen.

AI funding is so far up it's own backside I'm not sure they'll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.

This is pretty big if it has a completely separate browser rendering engine to the two remaining families, even if the feature set is small.

The more current alternatives we have, the better.

Technically, this is also possible by creating extra groups, but this kind of access control presumably exists because the old-school method can be a pain to administer. Choosing group names can also be an "interesting" secondary challenge.

i.e. Dude's not going to be best pleased if they ls -l and see the group on the file is xyzgroup-but-not-dude even if it is with good reason. (Shouldn't have deleted the database, dude.)

Fun fact: The Windows BSOD colour was as easy as adding a couple of lines to a .INI file for a long time. Then, as they tend to do, they made it more difficult, but it was still possible. Third party tools were written to do the work.

Very recent MS Windows I have no idea about. My search-fu is failing me.

Anyway, my point is that the "two lines in a config file" method would be nice.

Knowing systemd though, it'll be "send some kind of message into a /proc pseudo-file", or a sub-sub-sub-command of one of the many systemd* commands which ultimately does the same thing.

Clearly I did not. And now I am concerned because I thought I did.

Surprised this isn't a better known / prevented vector. I remember experimenting with variant IPs like this in IE6 over 20 years ago.

Checking now with Firefox and it auto-translates on the line below as I type one in. (Tried both 0x7f000001 and 2130706433 because they're both variants of 127.0.0.1, and if there's something bad running on that address you have other problems.)

Irrelevant nerd fact: 2130706433 is a prime number.

There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).

Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.

We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.

And all the while they'll be bribing lobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.

This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key.

Which is exactly what people said about the Windows key.

Now it's all but impossible to buy a keyboard that doesn't have it. Worse, most of us use it without thinking.

Sure you can call it Super if you like, and even have a Tux key-cap on it, but there used to be a literal gap between the Alt keys and their Ctrl brethren in the lateral directions away from the space bar, and those days are long gone.

There'll be the niche users who stick with old keyboards without this new key, just like there are the die-hards who have stuck resolutely to the old IBM keyboards and the like from pre-1995, but if you want a new keyboard?

Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.

(Shoutout to the Context Menu key which went as unmentioned in the above as it goes unused in day to day use, despite having been included with its Super cousin since day one.)

Maybe I want to say it without saying it. There's no rule against doing that, but people somehow think there is - or that there ought to be.

Most of the time I don't swear, so it makes me uncomfortable to use the word. There have been and undoubtedly will be exceptions. When the mood takes me. When the word, unfettered, feels right. Today was not that day.

Funny how the partial omission offends some people more than the original word does. Adapt your parsers.

Reminds me of the test server shenanigans I had at an old job versus a colleague. All in fun. Nothing in production.

One was the faux Bash shell that kind of worked OK until you pushed it or tried to do anything fancy. It was the default shell for the user called "root", but that wasn't the UID 0 user. It had been, but I renamed it. Then created a new "root" with a different UID. Of course, the faux shell would tell "root" that it was UID 0.

The other was the simple background loop that would detect any rival admin sessions and SIGHUP their shell process. First user on the box to run that pretty much had free reign, and everyone else was logged off instantly.

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user's ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

LMDE is already on pipewire as far as I can tell. I have a process running by that name, as well as one called pipewire-pulse which I assume is providing some or all of the old pulseaudio functionality for whatever might be expecting it.

No problems I'm aware of. I thought I was having problems early last month, but that turned out to be hardware failure.

Yikes. Your comment was very easy to take out of context.

Until I read back, it looked like you were saying Hank's cancer was somehow back stronger than before (which would have to have been practically fresh breaking news), and not a comment on post-chemotherapy beard growth being different, perhaps stronger, than before.

Follicular cancer doesn't sound like it bodes as well for a beard as other kinds of lymphoma (like Hank's was) but hey, you might still be right.

(RMS is a controversial character in some regards. While I wouldn't strictly wish the loss of a greybeard's beard as cosmic correction of controversial behaviour, I'd much rather that than cancer. That'd be too far, Universe.)

Message two can also be caused by packages (or rather, package creators) with delusions of grandeur that only think that the system will stop working without them, so they rig things to threaten to uninstall the system.

Or else someone has created too heavy a dependency on something that ought to be removable, but isn't thanks to malice or incompetence (or both).

We still mock Microsoft for putting too heavy a dependency (or at least removal FUD) on whatever web browser they bundle with their OSes (first IE, now Edge), and here we might have a package creator trying the same damn thing.

If I remember correctly, clicking distro links on Distrowatch causes Distrowatch to increase its ranking of that distro, so it's theoretically possible that MX Linux is only at the top because people who don't use it and haven't heard of it think "wtf is MX Linux?", click the link and push its rank ever higher.

Urban Dictionary (not Linux related nor particularly SFW, but bear with me) had a similar problem with their table of "popular definitions" links. (They eventually took them off the site.)

If memory serves (for a second time), some of the links went to non-existent definitions, but those links looked like the only way to reach those definitions, so people clicked them, increasing their popularity and keeping them in the list. Along comes another visitor, "oh what's this", repeat ad nauseam.

Your opinions are valid.

It's rare that I get to feel anything remotely comforting about not being able to afford new hardware, but if I understand correctly, my BIOS-only dinosaur can't be exploited.

Still vulnerable to thousands of other exploits no doubt, but not this one.

Peertube is the Fediverse equivalent of YouTube, the Fediverse being what Lemmy (where you are), Kbin (where I am) etc. are also a part of.

As far as I'm aware, it's a matter of finding an instance you resonate with, create an account and share away.

Do bear in mind that since it's the Fediverse, Peertube instances aren't usually backed by a large organisation with bags of cash, so if you can afford to donate to your instance, at least consider doing so.

I'd also recommend not using Peertube as a be-all-end-all storage for your videos. Always keep a copy for yourself. People do this with YouTube and they shouldn't unless they're OK with suddenly and forever losing that content at some unspecified future date. The same can happen with PeerTube, but the reasons are likely to be different (instance closing rather than unexpected account deletion).

Corporation-backed video hosts include: Twitch, Dailymotion and Vimeo. You could probably also host on Facebook. While these are options, they might make you feel as unclean as I did typing that out.

Ah! So you're a waffle man! Wanna buy a waffle iron?

Do they mean weary, or do they mean wary?

Weary means worn down (it's literally the "wear" as in "wear and tear" with a y on the end to make an adjective), usually signifying tiredness or apathy.

Wary means overly aware (it's literally the "ware" as in "aware" with a y on the end to make an adjective*), usually signifying nervousness or apprehension.

Given the context, they could mean either. Or both.

* Though for orthographic reasons, the e is dropped. I see you, fellow pedants.

OK what's the deal with those m's and w's?? It looks like a standard seriffed BIOS/ROM font except for those.

English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There's bound to be some cruft in the code.

Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it's the best thing since sliced silicon.

Article now contains a link to a tweet showing a reissued image that has the Shuttle blurred out. Got to wonder if someone got in trouble for putting the Shuttle in there.

So, it's trying to replace Emacs?

Poe's Law in action.

Tangential (excuse the pun):

One thing we can do better as opponents of Trump (or anyone else for that matter) is to not go for the low hanging fruit of things the man can't change about himself. Like his hands. Or the alleged size of, well, you know.

His fake tan or hair are better targets, at least he chooses that part of his appearance, but I'd like to think we can do better than that as well. A grey (or brown) area is his alleged incontinence which, if it's real (and I really, really wouldn't want to check that), it's said he ultimately did it to himself. Could be a target, but also probably best avoided.

Now. His policies. His wrong-thinking. Anything that might harm or put people in danger? Sure. Go nuts. Tear the man a new one.

The low-hanging fruit does have the benefit of riling him and his less intelligent advocates, but as the man himself would do in a similar situation, those are the things to bring out at the end of an argument when you feel like you're losing or at least not getting through a thick skull ... metaphorically speaking. And preferably after they've already done the same.

Technically, it's inherited from older, non-x86 systems that had a dedicated 'Compose' key on the keyboard. Here's a picture of a Sun Microsystems UK-layout keyboard; take a look at the bottom right of the main section: Link to a wiki hosting the image

(These keyboards also had the Sun (looks like a diamond) key well before Microsoft decided they'd like a Windows key on every keyboard. But then lots of other non-Microsoft computers did that. Apples, Commodores, etc.)

Note that the tiny circle on the key is a light which comes on when the key is engaged and goes off when the composition is complete. The Caps-, Num- and Scroll Lock keys also have built-in lights. For that reason, some people will use Scroll Lock on PC keyboards, especially if the Compose-emulation is able to toggle the Scroll Lock light in the same way.

(Even though I used similar keyboards many, many years ago, I'm not actually sure if the key has the light in it or whether the light is under the key and the circle is merely a window, but that's not really important right now.)

Prediction: Once everything is an app, there'll be no need for generic encryption and anyone found using it will be labelled a terrorist enabler and locked up.