Geek Stuff category archive
The Crypto Con 0
Emma and the crew talk with a caller about the con. (The relevant portion of the clip starts about !:15 mark after a short discussion about China and Taiwan. Short commercial at the end.)
Excerpt:
The companies have huge market caps based on nothing.
Muskrat Love 0
The Los Angeles Times’s Matt Pearce takes a long and thoughtful look at chaos agent Elon Musk’s stewardship (or perhaps that sever-ship) of Twitter. A snippet:
In a related vein, the EFF offers some guidance to those who might be interested in an alternative to Twitter.
Twits off Twitter 0
In case you are a Twitter user turned off by the Muskrat love, I gather that a number of persons are turning to Mastodon.
If you are interested in Mastodon, you may find the EFF’s article about privacy and security on Mastadon useful.
Twits Own Twitter 0
Above the Law’s Chris Williams discerns a madness in the method.
The Crypto Con 0
Bloomberg columnist Allison Schrager muses on the implications of the crypto crash. A snippet (emphasis added):
Barnum was wrong. There’s not one born every minute.
There’s one born every second.
The Crypto Con 0
El Reg explains non-fungible tokens for dummies.
H/T to Harry Shearer for featuring this on Le Show.
Twits Own Twitter 0
Sam and his crew discuss the most fragile ego of them all.
Afterthought:
If Elon Musk destroys Twitter, as seems quite likely at this point, he will have quite inadvertently performed a positive public service.
Twits Own Twitter 0
I have a sneaking suspicion that Musk is in well over his head on this venture. (The discussion on Tuesday’s Bob Cesca Show certainly gave some hints of reasons for optimism.)
Image via Job’s Anger.
The New Gilded Age, It’s All about the Algorithm Dept. 0
At the San Francisco Chronicle, Amos Toh describes how exploitation of workers is baked into the snaring economy. He starts by recounting the experience of one person who drives for Lyft, but doesn’t stop there. A nugget:
(snip)
Algorithms that dispatch jobs to gig workers and manage how they are paid can be gamified in ways that compromise their livelihoods and well-being.
Exploitation is exploitation, be it empowered by whip or by algorithm.
Geeking Out 0
I do loves me my wallpaper collection.
Once, a long time ago, I visited that site.
Oh, by the way, that’s Mageia v. 8 with the Fluxbox window manager. Xclock is in the upper right, GKrellM in the lower right.
No Place To Hide from the Dragnet 0
The EFF reports on a California court’s decision to disallow evidence from a “geofence” warrant.* The report also discusses Google’s procedure for responding to such warrants and notes that this is one of several rulings questioning such warrants.
Here’s one bit from the article; follow the link to read the rest.
Me, I keep “location services” turned off on my phone unless I have a positive need, which is almost never, because I know how to read a map. Remember maps?
________________________
*Briefly, a geofence warrant is issued to the corporate surveillance state–all those companies that track the location of our phones or other devices so they can “improve your online experience”–to find out who was in the vicinity of a crime. The police then go through the list to pick out and pursue possible suspects.
Facebook Frolics 0
There is a larger moral here, larger than that Facebook is a ginormous kludge.
- Don’t log into third party sites using your Google, Facebook, or other password.
- Create a unique password for every site.
If you are worried about keeping track of all those passwords, use KeepassXC. It’s local, meaning the data remains on your computer, not in the cloud on somebody else’s computer; the databases are portable, meaning that, if you update the database on one machine, you just have to copy the updated database to your other machines; and, if you are an Android user, it’s compatible with KeepassDroid.
I’ve used it through several iterations (it started as KeepassX, which is no longer maintained) for nearly a decade now; it’s the bee’s knees and the cat’s meow.
The Disinformation Superhighway, Fatted Pig Dept. 0
Cezary Podkul offers guidelines to avoid falling prey to an on-line “Pig Butchering” con. Here’s the opening of his article; follow the link for a detailed analysis of how the scam is worked:
“Pig butchering,” as the technique is known — the phrase alludes to the practice of fattening a hog before slaughter — originated in China, then went global during the pandemic.
Via the Progressive Populist.
(Broken link fixed.)
The Crypto Con Artists 0
Beware of the shills. For example (much more at the link):
(snip(
“The federal securities laws are clear that any celebrity or other individual who promotes a crypto asset security must disclose the nature, source, and amount of compensation they received in exchange for the promotion,” Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s division of enforcement, said in a prepared statement.
Geeking Out 0
Visiting LQ in a VirtualBox VM of Slackware –Current with the Blackbox window manager on Mageia v. 8 with the Fluxbox window manager.
As an aside, Fluxbox is based on Blackbox, but, in my opinion, more versatile. Fluxbox has been my preferred GUI for years.
Geeking Out 0
Yet another screenshot of Mageia v. 8 (I’ve come to really like Mageia) with Fluxbox (which I’ve like for a long, long time). Again, the wallpaper is from my collection.
