skuzz
@skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Bug bounty denied? Hmmm ... OK, let's see ... 5 weeks ago:
Great write-up and great find! You’ll find companies will often try to weasel out of actually honoring ethical programs more than not, but that doesn’t mean give up! If nothing else, the learning will lead to long term education and basically forever employment in various fields.
- Comment on Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall 1 month ago:
It’s shitfunny because this is a perfect opportunity for apps like this to play into Capitalism and succeed twentyfold.
Open up the app to everyone for free during the hurricane, remove that after hurricane. So many people will go:
- “OMG this app is useful, I’m paying”
- “OMG that company is so kind, I’m paying”
- “OMG I didn’t even know about this but people spread the word, I’m paying!”
So many opportunities for longer-term profits missed by idiocy.
- Comment on Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall 1 month ago:
We know the best ways to suck, even our storms!
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 2 months ago:
I was trying to think of a mental image that was internet-safe to imply something like you’re stuck in deep mud that is pulling your boots off but at least you survived. Or less internet-safe, you’re trying to get home and have no ride and for some reason the weather turned to a storm of actual shit and you’re walking home with shit raining down upon you but you must survive.
It definitely wasn’t scientifically accurate.
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 2 months ago:
Hey, friend. Definitely not saying Windows is better.
That being said, in this example, a UI open dialog that will blindly consume any file fed into it with behavior bad enough to crush the entire computer into absolute uselessness is… let’s just say, not something one would want to run into on a bad day just trying to deal with life stuff.
Now, if one were piping /dev/urandom into the framebuffer expecting to load Firefox, that’s another matter.
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 2 months ago:
Hey, good to know. It was one app that was only available as a Snap. Will look for alternatives.
- Comment on My new m.2 ssd 2 months ago:
And jumpers and terminators and make sure your SCSI IDs don’t conflict!
- Comment on My new m.2 ssd 2 months ago:
No diss. I read that slot comment above you and went, “yep, yep, yep, makes sense. Man our standards are often dumb.”
Laughed with joy at your comment, because I totally get how foreign this shit is to so many people. It’s like if I walked up to a building engineer asking how they know that iron beam is safe for another 50 years via their skills and I’d just be like “…do what now?”
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 2 months ago:
You know. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.
…but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I’m comfortable, but… I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.
I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I’d just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE “start” menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app’s icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.
So I went, “ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I’ve seen this work for decades,” so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.
Then I went and saved and launched another application.
GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, “he’s dead, Jim.”
Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the “start” menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn’t the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze.
I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as “no I can’t parse this,” and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code inside that app launcher icon config.
Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn’t glitches since.
It’s shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.
- Comment on Please pick a password starting with ad and ending with min 2 months ago:
- Comment on Useless Calendar Widget 2 months ago:
Having left the platform for 5 years and migrated to Android, been considering migrating back due to Android not showing a promising future.
Playing with iOS again to see if I can tolerate it, it feels like everything is giant font giant icon Duplo Brick UI. Which could very well be why they’re so terrible at space management. Do they realize some people have eyesight? That widget has a terrible amount of wasted space, but then so does most of the OS.
- Comment on Instagram app no longer lets you post stories without allowing camera and mic access on ios 2 months ago:
Good theory, I like it.
- Comment on Instagram app no longer lets you post stories without allowing camera and mic access on ios 2 months ago:
I’ve wondered for quite a while if there was ever any truth to the rumors that Meta apps “listen” to people. It doesn’t make logical sense, as the OS should expose they are doing it. Unless they had API access to allow microphone access without triggering the microphone icon. These companies have had API access in the past, like when Uber had full screen display capture access, and Meta definitely has some agreements with the fruit company to access some kinds of data. Or, when iOS first introduced the location tracking symbol in the status bar, I was able to write a program that allowed gathering of location access without actually triggering the icon.
Most of the time, the events can be explained away by knowing how adtech works, like, I was drinking a beverage, a friend asked what it was, the next day I started getting ads for it.
In that case:
- They were on my wifi network
- They picked up their phone when they were asking about it and did an Internet search
- So once the GeoIP was cross-referenced across ad providers, the IP started being targeted for those ads, makes sense
Some stories I’ve heard are more strange.
It does make me wonder if it was true the whole time, but they now have to ask for permission.
Don’t use the platforms myself or I’d try and set up a test experiment.
- Comment on What fresh fuckery is this? 2 months ago:
Yes
To
Definitely
Liking
Playback
- Comment on I remember a time where you would get multiple results from a search with no scrolling 3 months ago:
- Comment on Can't change controller settings without updating Windows first 3 months ago:
Mac is not Windows. As for better, these days, that is debatable. Apple has mostly stopped any kind of major growth, innovation, or rewrite a decade ago, after they ran out of the backlog of Jobs ideas. Now their products are just a cup game of feature juggling.
- Comment on This Italian "newspaper" wanted to depict the "indian heritage" of an US candidate. Chennai, Cherokee, the same. 3 months ago:
AZ and CA, and Mexico are where they grow, I believe.
- Comment on JetBlue makes you watch an ad to connect to wifi 3 months ago:
No, it’s mostly ViaSat (like in OP’s picture) now. Gogo never upgraded their infra to handle more traffic and kinda fell out of relevance. Planes with ViaSat will have large oval satellite domes on top that talk up to space.
- Comment on UPS has started charging for pickups even if you have a prepaid label 3 months ago:
Huh. Just logged into my UPS account, and you’re right.
- Comment on Youtube's web UX team is a joke. 3 months ago:
You’re not Paul Singer screwing up Southwest. forbes.com/…/southwest-assigned-seats-red-eye-fli…
- Comment on Youtube's web UX team is a joke. 3 months ago:
But, for that to work, as a company, you have to actually care about the user. Shareholders and project goals are what they care about. Well. Mostly shareholders.
- Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day? 3 months ago:
In regards to not having signed up, depending on what state you’re in, the parties can query your voter records, some states make your phone number available in those queries. There are other avenues too, like Colorado’s DMV sells your personal information to third parties without your consent, for example.
- Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day? 3 months ago:
Agreed there is always a more, and really want all paper spam to stop immediately. Disagree on the impact of mass-messaging at a nation scale.
Every SMS will wake a phone and keep it active for 10-20 seconds, if background processes firing don’t keep it awake longer. This robs every texted phone of battery wear and flash wear, as well as using energy that will have to be recharged. (Arguably, pointless app updates to manipulate review systems are an even bigger energy drain here. Or how carriers put cheaper plans on weaker bands, causing the modem to have to yell louder.)
The messages are in the control channel through the cell network, and the network must schedule them inside the management traffic. Probably less of a power hit here, but still a hit. There’s power running the machines sending the messages, and the microscopic hit from always on network hardware along the whole path. Individually, it’s all noise. Collectively, it’s going to be quantifiable power use.
- Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day? 3 months ago:
Political messages also are allowed to circumvent the CAN-SPAM act and other messaging regulations. I have plans to just leave my phone in airplane mode until mid-November. Sure, people may think I died, but at least I’ll have peace.
They (politicos) argue it’s necessary to get the word out, one party in particular has a habit of sourcing their messaging through various vendors that may or may not follow the rules.
Legally, they must honor stop. They can be reported and fined too.
…of course in real life, it’s super hard to stop all this trash messaging nobody wants. Wonder how much carbon this spamming generates.
- Comment on When you pair your Bluetooth earbuds and one hasn't charged 3 months ago:
My Motorola HT820 bluetooth headset is old enough to vote (18 years), and still holds a charge for a few hours. Tech can last if built right.
- Comment on I put my number in a secure form for a trusted bank and immediately got spammed 4 months ago:
That’s Pure Michigan, friend.
- Comment on I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07. 4 months ago:
Hey, it’s good to keep exercising the math muscle, and apparently making mistakes is a better learning reinforcement for us than always succeeding, so I bet it will stick better now.
- Comment on I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07. 4 months ago:
I got $31.07 here using a calculator. Perhaps you’ve uncovered a plot perpetrated by Big Calculator. (A joke.)
- Comment on I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07. 4 months ago:
Just ignore the trolls, they have meaningless little lives and nothing better to do than try and make a random person online feel like shit so the trolls can feel like their existence matters in any significant way. Which sucks, as they could probably better focus that time constructively, but instead…this.
- Comment on I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07. 4 months ago:
Learning to “life-hack” a web site for deals (especially when in a crisis) shouldn’t be a prerequisite for purchasing food at a reasonable price. The onus should not be on the consumer to not get ripped off by the seller.
This is just a continuation of systemic failure of business running rampant on the web without any reasonable regulation to prevent it.