1. Buy PC hardware (SuperMicro atom board of your choice off ebay + PicoPSU is a great starting point): $100-150
2. Get PCIe > miniPCIe adapter with antennas included ~$25
3. Get wifi card that supports AP mode: $30-100 depending on how much you want to spend.
There, for as low as $150 you have a device that can run whatever OS you want and will have far better routing performance than a crappy home router (their CPUs are so awful that they need NAT accel hardware to NAT at line speeds). The only thing you miss out on is fancy wifi features like beamforming, but worst case you can just get a standalone AP instead of a wifi card. Plus you never have to worry about locking yourself out or a bad flash bricking it since you're just booting off a thumb drive.
The difference is that FOSS software is generally created by people to fill their own need and shared with others because they have no reason not to, whereas proprietary software is far more often made for profit which encourages monetization and/or tracking methods that negatively impact the user such as the case here. Not saying there aren't exceptions to both, but that's generally the case.
Sounds about right. The next time you're on a flight with wifi, poke around the network a bit. Portscan the gateway and DNS server they use. Sometimes there's a proxy running on one of them that allows web access. There's also various DNS-based tunnels which should work too.
Or get a second wifi card in your laptop that supports AP mode and set up a rogue AP that routes to the real one. Wait for someone to connect to it, pay the fee, and then you and anyone else who connects to the rogue one gets free internet.
It's already horrible, I tried it this morning. I made an account. It wanted my real name (used a fake one of course), needed to verify my phone number, and had to create a whole YouTube channel (which was difficult due to a faulty redirect) just to be able to choose my display name. And of course, it automatically makes a g+ page for your YouTube channel, because why not. Overall it was an awful experience. They don't even tell you what you need to do, they just let you figure it out on your own and hope you already have a conception of how yt/google accounts work. Oh, and all of this was just to be able to use the chat, nothing else.
But that's Twitter's loss at the end of the day. An API is mutually beneficial to Twitter and the other party. Forcing them to scrape pages the hard way just puts more load on Twitter.
I love it when Microsoft takes "Shut Down" and turns it into "Kinda sorta hibernate" without relabeling it as such. From what I have observed, it has to reinitialize the disk controller to save the system state to disk, which on some controllers can take quite a long time. So your system sits there powered on with the screen off and you have no idea why it hasn't actually shut down yet. Almost as dumb as systems that default to "Sleep" when you press the power button.
Of course all of this is typical MS fashion where they would rather implement stuff like this to help startup times than debloat their OS. I have a Linux laptop that goes from bootloader to usable desktop in 10 seconds on an ancient mobile C2D, because it's not bloated. No "partial hibernate" trickery required.
Linux may have issues like drivers having to be compiled for a specific kernel version, but overall it's a much better system than Windows's godawful mess of a driver system. Why does it take 30 seconds after I plug in a flash drive or keyboard to start working? Why does it have to do that again if I plug it into a different port? Why did it automatically update my NIC drivers to a version that wasn't actually compatible with my NIC? Notice the only problematic drivers in Linux are ones where a manufacturer creates awful closed-source drivers, whereas in Windows the driver stack itself is bad.
I'd like to make a similar point: I have no issue with an ad blocker that an individual user installs and configures. However, I do think that mass ad blocking (on a company, ISP, or OS level or some other way of spreading adblocking en-masse) actually will have dire consequences. Individual ad blocking would be like one person carrying an umbrella to stay dry. Mass ad blocking would be like constructing a dome over the entire city with no regards to the ecosystem. Up until recently, adblocking was used mainly by people who weren't going to be swayed by crappy online advertising to begin with, but now it's starting to go beyond that and will seriously hurt many websites that rely on ad revenue (even the ones with non-invasive ads). Not to mention the whole thing will just degenerate into an arms race between advertisers+webmasters versus adblocker devs.
(Note: I'm in no way trying to defend such audiophoolery as buying expensive ethernet cables)
The reason why stuff can matter even in digital is because it does have to get converted to analog at some point, and if things aren't completely isolated, then interference in a digital portion of the system can leak over to an analog part. Probably imperceptibly, but still there.
Which makes me think: Why isn't anyone swindling the audiophools with some overpriced fiber ethernet gear?
Except for little, unimportant things like the BIOS, HDD/SSD firmware, and probably tons of other internal devices. They'd probably be much better off taking an existing laptop and replacing proprietary firmwares than putting out a completely new laptop with terrible value that isn't even free. Their biggest accomplishment isn't the freedom, it's that they managed to make Macs look cheap.
Every time some industrial networking vulnerability gets posted, people ask: "why are these connected to the internet to begin with?", so I'll get it out of the way: Why are these connected to the internet again? If you do need some sort of external access to them, it should be through some sort of application-level gateway so that access can be carefully controlled.
They're niche but still used, apart from scroll lock which I really can't seem to think of a use case for. Sometimes you need Pause/Break to stop BIOS output because a lot of BIOSes (especially newfangled UEFI ones) blow past important things faster than your monitor can wake up. SysRq still has a use as the magic SysRq key.
If I recall correctly, at some point when talking about GPU firmwares, you implied that it is more "free" to have a proprietary firmware burned into a ROM than it is to have a proprietary firmware that can be re-flashed. But having a firmware that can be flashed provides the user with the freedom to flash a truly free firmware, either built from the ground up or reverse-engineered from the original. How is having firmware in a ROM any better from a practical or freedom standpoint?
SysRq is useful for getting Linux systems unstuck with Magic SysRq key combos. Well, that was until most distros decided to lock it down by default (because if someone wanted to mess with a machine that they have physical access to, that's definitely the worst thing they could come up with).
On top of opening the start menu, there's tons of Win-letter combinations. Win-R is Run, Win-E is explorer, Win-D shows the desktop, Win-M minimizes all windows. Win-1,2,n launches the 1st, 2nd, nth program pinned to your taskbar. Win-arrows move windows around on the screen and Win-shift-arrows move windows between different monitors. There's plenty of others that I don't remember. It's actually pretty inconvenient to not have a windows key once you're used to it.
And then most early computer and terminal keyboards put something more useful there (usually Ctrl). Somehow it later got reverted. If only this study had been done somewhere around 1985.
Maybe if it's some casual shooter with no depth. Most competitive games also test strategy, tactics, or knowledge. You could pump someone full of whatever drugs you want and it wouldn't suddenly make them good.
I'd say about 99% of spam can be eliminated before even looking at the content of the message. The difference is, no legitimate email sender is going to be doing things that would get them filtered, like not having reverse DNS, being on a residential connection, or being on a major spam blacklist. As soon as you start filtering based on the content of the message, you're going to run into far more issues. On top of that, they don't know they've been filtered, whereas a server outright rejecting their message will give them a bounce for the few times a legitimate email server gets on a spam blacklist.
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1. Buy PC hardware (SuperMicro atom board of your choice off ebay + PicoPSU is a great starting point): $100-150
2. Get PCIe > miniPCIe adapter with antennas included ~$25
3. Get wifi card that supports AP mode: $30-100 depending on how much you want to spend.
There, for as low as $150 you have a device that can run whatever OS you want and will have far better routing performance than a crappy home router (their CPUs are so awful that they need NAT accel hardware to NAT at line speeds). The only thing you miss out on is fancy wifi features like beamforming, but worst case you can just get a standalone AP instead of a wifi card. Plus you never have to worry about locking yourself out or a bad flash bricking it since you're just booting off a thumb drive.
The difference is that FOSS software is generally created by people to fill their own need and shared with others because they have no reason not to, whereas proprietary software is far more often made for profit which encourages monetization and/or tracking methods that negatively impact the user such as the case here. Not saying there aren't exceptions to both, but that's generally the case.
Sounds about right. The next time you're on a flight with wifi, poke around the network a bit. Portscan the gateway and DNS server they use. Sometimes there's a proxy running on one of them that allows web access. There's also various DNS-based tunnels which should work too.
Or get a second wifi card in your laptop that supports AP mode and set up a rogue AP that routes to the real one. Wait for someone to connect to it, pay the fee, and then you and anyone else who connects to the rogue one gets free internet.
It's already horrible, I tried it this morning. I made an account. It wanted my real name (used a fake one of course), needed to verify my phone number, and had to create a whole YouTube channel (which was difficult due to a faulty redirect) just to be able to choose my display name. And of course, it automatically makes a g+ page for your YouTube channel, because why not. Overall it was an awful experience. They don't even tell you what you need to do, they just let you figure it out on your own and hope you already have a conception of how yt/google accounts work. Oh, and all of this was just to be able to use the chat, nothing else.
But that's Twitter's loss at the end of the day. An API is mutually beneficial to Twitter and the other party. Forcing them to scrape pages the hard way just puts more load on Twitter.
I love it when Microsoft takes "Shut Down" and turns it into "Kinda sorta hibernate" without relabeling it as such. From what I have observed, it has to reinitialize the disk controller to save the system state to disk, which on some controllers can take quite a long time. So your system sits there powered on with the screen off and you have no idea why it hasn't actually shut down yet. Almost as dumb as systems that default to "Sleep" when you press the power button.
Of course all of this is typical MS fashion where they would rather implement stuff like this to help startup times than debloat their OS. I have a Linux laptop that goes from bootloader to usable desktop in 10 seconds on an ancient mobile C2D, because it's not bloated. No "partial hibernate" trickery required.
Linux may have issues like drivers having to be compiled for a specific kernel version, but overall it's a much better system than Windows's godawful mess of a driver system. Why does it take 30 seconds after I plug in a flash drive or keyboard to start working? Why does it have to do that again if I plug it into a different port? Why did it automatically update my NIC drivers to a version that wasn't actually compatible with my NIC? Notice the only problematic drivers in Linux are ones where a manufacturer creates awful closed-source drivers, whereas in Windows the driver stack itself is bad.
I'd like to make a similar point: I have no issue with an ad blocker that an individual user installs and configures. However, I do think that mass ad blocking (on a company, ISP, or OS level or some other way of spreading adblocking en-masse) actually will have dire consequences. Individual ad blocking would be like one person carrying an umbrella to stay dry. Mass ad blocking would be like constructing a dome over the entire city with no regards to the ecosystem. Up until recently, adblocking was used mainly by people who weren't going to be swayed by crappy online advertising to begin with, but now it's starting to go beyond that and will seriously hurt many websites that rely on ad revenue (even the ones with non-invasive ads). Not to mention the whole thing will just degenerate into an arms race between advertisers+webmasters versus adblocker devs.
(Note: I'm in no way trying to defend such audiophoolery as buying expensive ethernet cables)
The reason why stuff can matter even in digital is because it does have to get converted to analog at some point, and if things aren't completely isolated, then interference in a digital portion of the system can leak over to an analog part. Probably imperceptibly, but still there.
Which makes me think: Why isn't anyone swindling the audiophools with some overpriced fiber ethernet gear?
Except for little, unimportant things like the BIOS, HDD/SSD firmware, and probably tons of other internal devices. They'd probably be much better off taking an existing laptop and replacing proprietary firmwares than putting out a completely new laptop with terrible value that isn't even free. Their biggest accomplishment isn't the freedom, it's that they managed to make Macs look cheap.
Every time some industrial networking vulnerability gets posted, people ask: "why are these connected to the internet to begin with?", so I'll get it out of the way: Why are these connected to the internet again? If you do need some sort of external access to them, it should be through some sort of application-level gateway so that access can be carefully controlled.
The problem is that if a system is hosed to the point of needed to SysRq it, I can't edit that file to enable it.
Of course there's always the option of not using these closed source apps, but it really hinders your social life.
You know, there was a time when there was no such thing as Facebook. Believe it or not, people still managed to have social lives.
Well, the practical differences are small but they do still exist. All free software is open source but not all open source software is free.
They're niche but still used, apart from scroll lock which I really can't seem to think of a use case for. Sometimes you need Pause/Break to stop BIOS output because a lot of BIOSes (especially newfangled UEFI ones) blow past important things faster than your monitor can wake up. SysRq still has a use as the magic SysRq key.
Why the US Keyboard has a smaller "enter" key
At its left extreme, it's much closer to home row than the ISO enter and thus more efficient to hit. Same thing with the left shift key.
If I recall correctly, at some point when talking about GPU firmwares, you implied that it is more "free" to have a proprietary firmware burned into a ROM than it is to have a proprietary firmware that can be re-flashed. But having a firmware that can be flashed provides the user with the freedom to flash a truly free firmware, either built from the ground up or reverse-engineered from the original. How is having firmware in a ROM any better from a practical or freedom standpoint?
You might as well try to patent the whole process of inventing things.
Shhh...stop giving them ideas
.
SysRq is useful for getting Linux systems unstuck with Magic SysRq key combos. Well, that was until most distros decided to lock it down by default (because if someone wanted to mess with a machine that they have physical access to, that's definitely the worst thing they could come up with).
On top of opening the start menu, there's tons of Win-letter combinations. Win-R is Run, Win-E is explorer, Win-D shows the desktop, Win-M minimizes all windows. Win-1,2,n launches the 1st, 2nd, nth program pinned to your taskbar. Win-arrows move windows around on the screen and Win-shift-arrows move windows between different monitors. There's plenty of others that I don't remember. It's actually pretty inconvenient to not have a windows key once you're used to it.
And then most early computer and terminal keyboards put something more useful there (usually Ctrl). Somehow it later got reverted. If only this study had been done somewhere around 1985.
Before the G+ integration, there was the option to sign in with a normal Google account. Presumably that will still work.
Maybe if it's some casual shooter with no depth. Most competitive games also test strategy, tactics, or knowledge. You could pump someone full of whatever drugs you want and it wouldn't suddenly make them good.
Some of the questions she chose to answer she weaseled her way around anyway. She'd make a great politician.
I'd say about 99% of spam can be eliminated before even looking at the content of the message. The difference is, no legitimate email sender is going to be doing things that would get them filtered, like not having reverse DNS, being on a residential connection, or being on a major spam blacklist. As soon as you start filtering based on the content of the message, you're going to run into far more issues. On top of that, they don't know they've been filtered, whereas a server outright rejecting their message will give them a bounce for the few times a legitimate email server gets on a spam blacklist.