DotBlag

I’ve been watching the various AI rollouts with a mixture of horror, illness, and anger. Microsoft is trying to roll out an every Nth second desktop snapshotting system, and I can’t figure out ANY good use for it. Google is trying to shovel garbage AI “search results” that exacerbate the already painful to pay for original knowledge content creation ecosystem. Google’s also trying to shove AI into your phone conversations, allegedly to “detect scams” – problem is both that, and Microsoft’s Recall are utterly RIPE for abuse and WILL be abused.

Cloudflare is having a very bad day today according to their own incident page. The Cloudflare Dashboard has been in various states of not-working since I started my work day, apparently beginning at/around 11:54 UTC today, ~9h ago as I write this. It will be interesting to see the Root Cause Analysis on this one, since the entire control plane seems to have croaked because a datacenter lost power.

So I remember discovering Darkspace a couple of decades ago. It’s still around, sort of. It’s not very active (I remember huge, huge fights, well before EVE Online) but it’s still there. Quite some time ago now, back in 2016, they actually Open Sourced the whole stack which you can find on GitHub/PaleStar The code base is interesting. There’s a number of things that as someone who deals with REALLY large scale stuff, and databases, regularly, makes me squeak a bit, but all in all it’s not terrible.

Or why you should use ZFS Even if it is on Linux… In February 2009 I was pretty frustrated at Linux filesystems in And Linux in General, F-U. Well…Sun lost entirely. But we all got ZFS as OpenZFS for the masses! I have a ~40T home NAS using now TrueNAS SCALE, which is OpenZFS on Linux. It was migrated from FreeNAS just a few weeks back, along with a major hardware refresh.

I’ve very long been in a love/hate relationship with WordPress from the get-go, even for this site. As the years have gone on I’ve had less and less reason to use WP. I’ll enumerate some reasons: It’s gotten bigger and fatter Takes nearly half a second to render a page So much going on you can’t figure it out The new block editing system feels half baked I’m nowhere near as active at posting here, and as a consequence, there’s far less interaction The theme I used for a LONG time (LeoPress) is no longer maintained I can’t find a single theme I can stomach.

So I’ve tried to keep this Blog work-centric, but I’m going to break the fourth wall a bit here. I’ve had less content creation drive due to changing my complete life and job situation roughly 12 years ago. As the new work situation has evolved I’m doing less and less actual systems administration for work, and no networking these days for the day job. And as anyone whose read this knows, that was the bread and butter.

I had drafted this back in April when I first setup the Starlink backup at home but never finished it! Rather than trying to pick the thread up and finish it I’ve decided to just post it today (20231019). I obviously never got the tracroute copy/pasta’d in that I mention at the end! Here I am again. Yikes. Four years….. oh well. I’d like to say what I lack in quantity I can make up for in quality… but I dunno.

So I’m trying out the 2023 theme from WP, which is much closer to what I want but…still…not at all there. It still wastes a third of the main site page. There’s no left or right gutter content to frame it with nav. I *think* I’ve figured out how to manage the top nav. When you view a post it crams it up and leaves you with a ton of left/right gutter that is unusable.

So honestly not at all happy with the way pages/templates are built in newer wordpress. Really really unhappy with the hack job I’ve done, even though it works. I’ve looked around on the templates library for something that’ll work but they’re all garbage IMO. Why is the current trend to waste an entire screenful or more on site header/banner and tons of wasted unusable space? That’s why I stuck with that creaky old apple-styled leopress theme for so long.

I’m working on pulling out the old theme and replacing it because it’s ancient, not updated, and doesn’t use any modern bits of WordPress. Unfortunately AFAIK there’s no way for me to prepare a complete gutting/fixing of say 2022 or the default theme and then just switch, so if you wander by over the next days/weeks and the site is horribly broken, wait an hour or two, I’ll either fix it or revert it back to the old theme.

Where were you in 1993? Me, probably at my computer. My grandfather bought me a Laser Turbo XT. 40mbyte RLL hard drive. Seagate. 640kbyte of RAM. Tiny by today’s standards. It’s specs less than a rounding error by today’s standards. But at the time, that was a lot. This was my first Iron God. But not my only one. Some of my Iron Gods were, and still are Iron…well and lately more aluminum.

Time indeed flies. I definitely have NOT forgotten about Dotblag here…I just haven’t…like had anything to write/share really. However….new hobbies starting up, I’m moving towards getting my private pilots license, and, trying out astronomy. Hopefully next year I’ll be brewing again too. Assuming I feel like it I hope to write about these things here. I’ll be honest IDK folx, five years I haven’t posted anything, so no promises. There’s some drafts I never really finished, including one on Starlink (which I have now as backup internet).

I’m going to reuse acronyms and “framework” described in my Jul 15th article – ISP, CP, NSP. The claim by many on the side of 17-108 is that Title II (keeping the current 2015 final order in place) represents chafing regulation. From the side of the ISPs like Verizon and Comcast the regulation basically requires them to treat everything the same best effort. Regardless of if it’s “on net” (Xfinity Video for Comcast f/ex), competing or not, or third party/off net (basically all the rest of the internet – Netflix, Google, Amazon, Hulo) — I can see their argument against it because it strongly prevents them from prioritizing any service for any reason.

There’s been more talk lately about net neutrality. In large part due to the neutrality day thing… Many people are (rightfully) confused. There’s good arguments on both sides. I’m very much for net neutrality and having sensible regulation to make all players play fair. I’ll go into why, what the past looked like, what’s going on now, and where things are steering absent changes. So why am I qualified to talk about any of this?

Dyn, “media”, everyone, please stop calling what happened on October 21st a “sophisticated attack.” It’s the Internet equivalent of driving a semi truck through a house at 75MPH. That’s how sophisticated it was. Damaging, absolutely, impressive…Yeah probably. Sophisticated? Hardly. It’d be sophisticated to see that same tractor turning donuts. The Hoonigan‘s are sophisticated. These attackers are just shitty drivers. From the information disclosed thus far the attack was enacted through well known, well published security holes in a number of devices.

I actually found a hack that thinks 300GB is a lot. First that’s not entirely the point (Comcast, etc, have all been selling unlimited internet for starters) – second, it’s NOT nearly as much as you think. Third they still want YOU to pay and Netflix to pay for any Netflix traffic you use. Similarly they want the same deal with every content provider, and screw the little guys who can’t pay and can’t pay at multiple interconnection points throughout the country.

This is what they all want the internet to look like, in one picture. Seriously. Do not believe them when they say things like “data caps will be set to ensure they don’t affect a majority of users” – they might mean it literally, they’ll make sure 49% are affected by the caps so that their bottom line increases 10x or 100x or 1000x. If it wouldn’t affect HUGE numbers of people they wouldn’t do it.

First off, this is far less than theoretical. It’s more likely that I’m having some sort of misunderstanding or lack of understanding that when looked at closer, the increasing run of 0’s isn’t actually a problem at all. But it seems to me that at some point the increasing likelihood of a collision must become statistically significant, and must somehow factor into the value of attempting an attack based on finding a missing link type block…

So I’ve been quiet for a long while on this blog, sorry for that, just haven’t had any real content to post! Recently net neutrality has been in the news (again) – I’ve linked a really good video that summarizes whats going on. Here on the Tek Syndicate – if the whole thing is too long watch from about 10:00 in on until you lose interest. The reality is Verizon, Comcast, ATT, T-Mobile, etc ALL want to limit *your* access to the internet and then charge you more to remove those limits.

Oracle is, of course, appealing it’s loss on the recent Java copyright cases. Oracle, MS, NetApp, and EMC are all running scared that they won’t be able to copyright their APIs anymore. And they should be. An API is the visible portion of the application to a developer. API is like the letters and words in a language though. They’re completely meaningless symbols and strings by themselves and embody little, or nothing in terms of function and meaning.