**** Cyborg Central ****

Old Androids Never Die, They Just Have A Few Screws Loose

CC

July 18, 2018


I moved CC into a container, and finally took down the ancient Vaio server that was supporting the old setup. Quite a run for a Pentium 4 from 2002!

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Same Shit, Different Cult

July 1, 2018


There is no mental difference between Trumpies and Hillarites. Neither can ever accept any of their leader's faults, and they will make excuses for everything that the leader does, no matter how brazen the offense, and will condemn others for the same offense without even a second thought.

Not that there was a first thought.

Anyone who mindlessly supports either of these people will see no mercy from me.

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God Dammit Facebook

June 27, 2018


For all their talk about being high-tech and leaders in AI, Facebook completely sucks at identifying and blocking fake accounts.

There are a slew of PVA account sellers - "phone verified accounts" where scripts build an account, friend it with a stack of other accounts, and post fraudulent wall updates to make it look real, then access to this botnet gets sold to spammers and dishonest businesses.

The ONLY job I would ever accept at Facebook is one where I get to develop weapons against these people.

EDIT: I reported a bunch of PVA sellers, that were selling accounts *ON* Facebook pages, and they refused to take them down.

What the fuck?

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LOL, Damn

June 11, 2018


So, MS has their own version of R (a stats language). They tried making a deb, and in their postinst, delete /bin/sh and relink it.

OK. I was a n00b once, and even I didn't think it was a good idea to DELETE someone's shell inside of an installation script. Talk about brave/stupid.

Maybe that's what snaps are for - isolating people from overly self-important Windows devs who don't mind fucking your system up.

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Sick of This

June 4, 2018


Go away, Microsoft.

Now I've moved my old Github apps over to CC's Git page, so they'll be safe, but much harder to find.

I am really getting sick of people and companies destroying the things I care about for their own benefit, and acting like they're doing me a favor.

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Reason #1 Against Snaps: You Have No Idea What’s In Them

May 24, 2018


[Note that, as always, I speak for myself and not my employer.]

Recently it was discovered that someone had put a crypto miner in their snap app, and not bothered to mention it. It really infuriates me that the response taken was "well, it's not illegal or unethical if you tell the user," because that dodges the actual issue - that devs (or spies) can stick whatever they want in an app and you have no way of knowing for sure.

In a distro, each package is separate, and the dev has to figure out what their dependencies are and list them, but they don't have direct control over what is in the libraries they use. This has several positive benefits that are COMPLETELY lost in any "bundled" app:

  1. The library has been tested and vetted independently, so you can be more confident that it doesn't contain nasty surprises
  2. it takes up less space
  3. if you don't like how it works, you can rebuild it yourself
  4. you can verify that there aren't obviously unnecessary dependencies, which could indicate nasty surprises
  5. you can more easily break down an app and analyze it when it has to use shared dependencies

Of course, there is nothing physically preventing a malicious app writer from trying to slip surprises into a Deb package, but when a game doesn't build without libblockchain.so, it tends to throw more red flags than when a snap or flatpack is just handed to you.

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