Bits and PCs - a Computers and Tech Miscellany

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

I literally dread the day when I see a post on reddit "this tiny obscure vbulletin forum has been operating without ads for 20 years and it's absolutely charming" or whatever.

Someone would have to be looking at the registration mod queue for that to be an issue.

[viscousmemories]

I have been using the Chrome browser since it was launched, and flirtations with Firefox, Brave, etc. never amounted to anything, but I decided to take Arc for a spin 4-6 weeks ago and it has become my full-time only browser on my computer and it is close to becoming my only browser on the phone too. I have never genuinely loved a browser like I love this one.

[LarsMac]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I have been using the Chrome browser since it was launched, and flirtations with Firefox, Brave, etc. never amounted to anything, but I decided to take Arc for a spin 4-6 weeks ago and it has become my full-time only browser on my computer and it is close to becoming my only browser on the phone too. I have never genuinely loved a browser like I love this one.

I may have to try that.
Though being mostly a Windoze guy, I'll wait for post-Beta.

I use several browsers, depending on the tasks.
Firefox seems to do a good job "containing" Facebook.
Then for forums and a few simple games, I use Brave.
Chrome is still my go-to for most business related tasks.

I let Edge handle all the spinoffs from newsy sites.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

I literally dread the day when I see a post on reddit "this tiny obscure vbulletin forum has been operating without ads for 20 years and it's absolutely charming" or whatever.

Oh no!
"After purchasing Vbulletin for use with their Xboxlive gamer communities system, Microsoft has retroactively updated all Vbulletin boards to automatically accept all users from every other vbulletin board, and a list of every vBulletin in existence will endlessly scroll on the main purchasing hub next to the live all-chat."

[LarsMac]

Originally Posted by Ari

Oh no!
"After purchasing Vbulletin for use with their Xboxlive gamer communities system, Microsoft has retroactively updated all Vbulletin boards to automatically accept all users from every other vbulletin board, and a list of every vBulletin in existence will endlessly scroll on the main purchasing hub next to the live all-chat."

SQUEEEEEEE!

[Crumb]

You people are sick.

[Pan Narrans]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

I literally dread the day when I see a post on reddit "this tiny obscure vbulletin forum has been operating without ads for 20 years and it's absolutely charming" or whatever.

That's "medium sized", tyvm

[BrotherMan]

At least 1.2 Luxembourgs worth of forum!

[ShottleBop]

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

At least 1.2 Luxembourgs worth of forum!

In terms of area, how many Luxembourgs can you... - Maps on the Web

[JoeP]

The Y2.024K problem rears its head!

Self-pay gas station pumps break across NZ as software can’t handle Leap Day | Ars Technica

[JoeP]

In completely unrelated news, one of my own scripts was hit by a leap year bug.

Linux and UNIX-like logs persist in having timestamps "month day hour:minutes:second" with no year, because who's looking at logs a year later? They are for what happened last night or at the latest last week.

So you parse the time string into a real timestamp, and stick in the current year. If you are really thoughtful you think about what would happen on 1st Jan, and add a check that if the resulting timestamp is in the future, use year-1 instead. And all is fine, until Feb 29 00:00:01.

Then you find that the default year when not specified is 1900 - and that wasn't a leap year. So your script bombs out with ValueError: day is out of range for month.

datetime.strptime without a year fails on Feb 29 · Issue #70647 · python/cpython · GitHub
Opened 29 Feb 2016.

Every four years people encounter this in part because it just isn't obvious that partial incomplete date parsing is not what datetime.strptime is designed for.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

VM got out of Texas just in time.

Pornhub Blocked in Texas

[JoeP]

McDonald's customers unable to order after systems outage

McDonald's is experiencing technical problems in its restaurants, with customers in several countries reporting being unable to order food.

Fast food.

[Ari]

Is this an almost 4 hour video about a 28 year old video game that neither I nor I presume anyone else here plays and is thus ultimately pointless. Yes.

After being constantly frustrated with the vagueness of the modern internet, did listening to the detailed description of all 8 different causes of 'invisible walls' and their locations in hyper specifics help with the feeling that nerds who care about details are still on the internet. Also yes.

SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for...

[erimir]

I played that game last in 2020, since they did a rerelease for the Switch with two other 3D Mario classics.

But I don't recall encountering that issue

[Ensign Steve]

"Mesh traffic goes over http, not https. Look for it on port 80"

"So it's not encrypted?"

"It's not ssl encrypted. It gets encrypted and decrypted at a different layer of the stack."

"http is not encrypted. It's plain text."

"Correct, the encrypted data is sent in the clear over port 80."

"If it's http, it's not encrypted."

[Ari]

It would appear that Adobe is adding some sort of 'used AI tools' meta data flag to images without telling anyone, and Meta/facebook is trusting that flag, thus labeling real images as "Made by AI" and Made by AI 'you won't believe what these children invented!' as real. (Touching one pixel with generative fill, then saving will cause Facebook to label it created by AI, but copying the pixels into a new image and saving, will not.)

Meta is incorrectly marking real photos as "Made by AI" - The Verge | Jun 2024

[specious_reasons]

I’m sure The Verge is extremely happy, because they love discussing “What is a photo?”

[JoeP]

Japan's government finally says goodbye to floppy disks

Up until last month, people were still asked to submit documents to the government using the outdated storage devices, with more than 1,000 regulations requiring their use.

But these rules have now finally been scrapped, said Digital Minister Taro Kono.

In 2021, Mr Kono had "declared war" on floppy disks. On Wednesday, almost three years later, he announced: "We have won the war on floppy disks!"

[viscousmemories]

How the...? I don't think any of the 15ish computers I have in my house have floppy disk ports.

[ceptimus]

I have a couple of old laptops that still work, which have floppy drives, plus one desktop computer, still, that has both 3.5 - inch and 5.25 - inch, floppy drives.

[specious_reasons]

My current employer has been tightening security, which is a nice way of saying they're making everything harder for everyone.

I can't use my desktop on the wired corporate network to download what I need to do my work, I must use my laptop which has extra security. I'm also WFH, which means I have to download everything with my home network. This downloading has a tendency to dominate the laptops's networking, so I get a lot of dropped connection to the desktop while this is going on, it's impractical to do the rest of my job from home. Yay!

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Interesting read on identity theft, undocumented immigrants, and rideshare companies.

She Made $10,000 a Month Defrauding Apps like Uber and Instacart. Meet the Queen of the Rideshare Mafia | WIRED

[JoeP]

If you are involved in IT in any way you've probably heard about this massive global outage of Microsoft servers and desktops due to a duff update from security firm Crowdstrike, or Clownstrike as they're now known.

‘Largest IT outage in history’ hits Microsoft Windows and causes global chaos — The Guardian

CrowdStrike fixes start at "reboot up to 15 times" and get more complex from there | Ars Technica

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by JoeP

If you are involved in IT in any way...

Or if you tried to take a flight. Or called 911. Or went to the hospital.