Category: Tech

It keeps getting better. Funny how the closer we look, the more dirt (and vermin) we find under the Facebook rock:

“It’s interesting to note that none of the apps examined asked for user permission before starting to track individuals.”

A GooglePlay store review found that over 40% of the most popular Android apps are surreptitiously back-channeling to the Facebook “Audience Network.”

The cocksuckers need to be properly dealt with in court – every single one of them, starting with the Z-boy himself. That little bastard has been attempting to deflect responsibility at every turn, feigning a lack of “deeper technical knowledge” about the issue in his own company. Today he declined a formal invitation to speak to the UK Parliament. Sorry dude, but if that is the case you shouldn’t be running it. Facebook is like a gallon of milk that’s been sitting in the fridge too long. There’s bad stuff going on in there, and the country had a big gulp during the most recent national election. It’s just one of those things that seemed great upfront, but turned out to be a really bad idea because nitwit college kids did not think it all the way through. And when the problems started cropping up YEARS ago they basically ignored it, favoring bigger piles of money instead. Dump it. Full story here.

“Facebook: Yeah, Maybe Now Isn’t the Best Time to Launch Our New Speaker Designed to Spy on You.”

“A lot of people don’t actually believe that Facebook feels bad that user data fell into the wrong hands. They just believe that Facebook feels bad it got caught.”

The bottom line insidious truth in all this is they always knew exactly what they were doing, and continued doing it with impunity for years until they got caught. This is the fundamental issue: the business model is paradoxically flawed. The more people crank up the privacy, the less revenue from targeted advertising and data analysis – in whatever form that takes, legal or not. It just doesn’t work in favor of the people they claim to support.

Don’t Just Delete Facebook – Delete Well.

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration.

I can see it so clearly, 17 years ago, preoccupied with defending USAF networks, oblivious to what Scott Adams had already recognized:

I jumped on the Internet/Social Media warning bandwagon about 5 years later, sometime after I retired and smartphones really took off. This particular aspect of the spectre of rampant, destructive capitalism has been on my personal radar for well over a decade. Awareness is building now. Finally, society is beginning to wake up from their electronic gadget-induced narcolepsy.

This is why I simply disable them ALL:

It’s been a couple years since the periodic network diagram update. This is sort of a holdover practice I established from creating many of these type documents for the Air Force and Lockheed over the years. It helps to review things as they change over time and keep it fresh, for reference purposes. Evolution through the years as seen by older versions on this page offers an interesting perspective.

I typically spend more time playing with my little home enterprise data center over the winter when weather precludes other activities. This past winter has seen more system work than usual due to a number of factors, mostly hard drive breakage. The legacy SCSI storage subsystems are almost gone now, with only 1 remaining. They are just too finicky and difficult to maintain these days. The old PC’s represent the bottom tier of our hierarchical storage system. One of them (4 presently in rotation) gets an incremental data backup from the online NAS once every 1, 2, 3 or 4 months, so the oldest copy will always be between 3 and 4-months old. My data preservation scheme will be near perfect if I ever remember to work in an offsite 6-month tape cycle with Carolyn.

I was saving the last system needing attention for the Debian 9 release, but as usual they are taking their damn good old time with it. With spring here now, I decided to go ahead and put the RC2 release on it after getting tired of waiting. This guy has been refreshed with a new combo consisting of 2 Raid5’s for the root and data file-systems. An SSD has tmp and swap on it. The 10-year old Abit IP-35 Core2-Quad Intel machine ends up with 9 drives, 8 gigs of RAM and no SCSI in it this time around. Despite it’s age, it should nevertheless run very well as configured.

The coolest thing about this particular PC is the video subsystem, partially shown in the 1st pic above. That low-profile Nvidia card started life in an HP Pavilion 11 years ago. It was a premium upgrade for the Pavilion I ordered from HP at the time. It’s fan went bad at some point, but fortunately it got noisy before failing completely, so I was able to save the card. It’s been re-animated in the IP-35 with a cobbed-up dual fan setup as shown. The only new part needed for this build was an additional 4-port SATA controller.

As expected, one of the old basement warhorses failed to boot a couple months ago. This one is the old Supermicro server from the PentiumIII era. It was the hot ticket for a mid-range server when I first built it in 1999, IIRC. I think the last time it was revamped was about about 5 years ago. I don’t usually do much troubleshooting anymore whenever a problem crops up with the old hardware collection in the basement. New parts are several orders of magnitude better and less costly now, so typically I’ll just upgrade the box like I did with Frankenputer from the previous post. I realized I still had plenty of good parts for this one though, so I just re-stuffed it and pressed on.

Specs:

Dual 800mhtz PIII
4-gig RAM
64-bit Adaptec Raid5 (Win Server 2003)
64-bit Intel Pro gigE Netcard

The basement workstation started getting more flakey than usual by repeatedly refusing to POST, hanging at the EMT64 message. It’s done this on and off once or twice at a time almost since new 12 years ago. I attributed it to some quirk of the Asus MB, but despite otherwise running flawlessly all this time, it seems whatever is causing that issue is getting worse. Rather than fix a PC that is one of the newer boxes and technically still “working,” I decided to upgrade the oldest one sitting next to it. The object was to have a more reliable, man-cave workstation while getting rid of a basically obsolete system at the same time. The only parts I needed to buy were the MB, RAM, CPU AND a DVD burner I got from Newegg for the Low-Low price of $15. Total cost for the project right around $400. I re-used an old Mylex raid card and drives from the parts bin because I recently learned 60Gb (size of the SSD’s also from the parts bin, being transplanted into it) is no longer enough for a Linux PC with all the stuff I like to have on it. It’s now a beefy, fully redundant high-availability system.

Specs:
ASRock Z97 Extreme3
Core i5, 3.5GHtz
16Gb DDR3 Dual-Channel RAM
2x Corsair 60Gb SSD (Primary sys drive w/hot spare)
2x Quantum U160 74Gb (/var/home/tmp on Mylex Raid1)
3x WD Blue 1Tb (2Tb MDADM Raid5 data volume)

$75/mo, w/basic cable:

The cool thing about this is we got a no-cost bandwidth and cable box upgrade. We had no cable TV before I called to activate a new modem the other day. It’s a newer 16 channel TP-LINK Archer capable of supporting higher speeds. For some reason, the woman I spoke with in the Philippines offered an upgrade – gratis. The cable box showed up a few days later. It was obviously the standard bait and switch with a limited basic cable package we’ll probably never use. But the Internet speed is great and I have to give them credit for getting their crap into my house after I swore long ago to never again succumb to the cable TV ripoff scam. Kudos Xfinity!

And along with it, a new number: (970) 234-1080, for anyone needing to contact me.

I’ve been “fi’d” – as in “Project fi,” Google’s answer to the telecom scam corporate America has been foisting on us for decades. It’s a hybrid wifi-LTE system partnered with t-Mobile and Sprint, run by Google and actually makes sense. Check it out:
Project fi

During the process of bringing Francie’s old laptop out of retirement a few weeks ago, I was looking around trying to decide what OS to install and stumbled on an unfamiliar Linux distro I decided to use called “Crunchbang.”  A Brit bloke from Lincoln, UK going by the handle “corenomial” organizes and provides it as a minimalist Debian system.  How did I go all these recent years unaware of this little gem in the midst of the hopelessly splintered Linux ecosystem?  I’ve browsed Distrowatch a time or 2, but somehow never came across it.

So in three short weeks I have completed migrating almost my entire home network to #!.  Only the Apple side of the house and the two oldest PCs going with older Redhat versions as their primary OS, simply without the processing power to run a modern kernel remain un-banged.  If you are tired of the bloatware, distracting eye candy and commercial creep being seen in the Linux world today give #! a try.  I bet you see it my way, too.