Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I’ll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.

My current job is the only place that I haven’t done that, because it’s probably the best company that I’ve ever worked for.

I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.

I just finished up a ~700 line PowerShell script to send input/keep a login session from timing out due to inactivity, and prior to that was a Python script to format LetsEncrypt SSL certs in a way haproxy likes + an accompanying Bash script to make sure those certs are correct, check in the current good haproxy config to a git repo, and then restart it if there are new certs.

The only thing that I know is that I know nothing.

Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.

Try submitting a pull request for something in one of the core repos.

They behave as if every line of code in your commit is a sentence proclaiming “Why yes, your wife is a whore, your dog doesn’t love you, AND your baby is ugly.”

I’m not kidding, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Go read some of their declined pull requests threads for some entertainment.

Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

Submitting a pull request to one of their repos on Github was really an experience, and I can tell you that I will never submit another one to the Lemmy project while they’re still the lead devs based on that experience.

I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.

About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.

This made me very angry.

The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.

Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.

Eh, it depends. Other low-level things (systemd, glibc, etc) need a reboot too.

It’s likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It’s like they’ve never heard of a UUID/GUID before.

They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.

I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.

The fact that Firefox isn’t listed as a browser alternative but Brave is throws any credibility that this article might have straight into the garbage.

Suggesting Brave anything throws its credibility into the shitter, much less multiple times in multiple categories.

The EU has no enforcement ability outside of their own borders regardless of what they tell you.

So uh, you think Google doesn’t operate or do business in the EU? They have 20+ offices there. In the example I gave, they would 100000% be subject to GDPR, fullstop; it’s not a question, matter of opinion, or debate. They’d even be subject to it if an EU citizen was physically inside the US on vacation and opened a Fi account while they were here.

You EU guys are brainwashed and gullible to a level on par with N Koreans.

I’m from Virginia and knowing compliance stuff (GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, NIST 800-*, etc) is a requirement of my job.

Google Fi is exclusive to U.S. customers so it doesn’t matter if it breaks GDPR.

Yeah it does. GDPR applies for EU citizens regardless of where they are. It’s why every website in the fucking world has a cookie banner now. An EU citizen could register for Fi service with a VPN and a mailbox at a UPS store and Google’s handling of their data would be subject to GDPR.

So yeah, it definitely matters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get sued because of this.

Don’t fuck with me, I know a Dodongo when I see it.

The tipping point for me was getting a sitewide ban for commenting “It’s always OK to punch a Nazi.”

A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.

Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn’t believe.

Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

The only answer is Ublock Origin.

Aside from that, you can do adblocking for your entire network and everything on it via Pi-hole. It requires no modification for the devices on your network and will work for literally any device connected to it.

If you combine those two, the odds of seeing any ad anywhere isn’t zero, but it is close enough to zero to effectively be zero.

Fwiw, Linus made a post today and said they’ve already arranged to compensate billet for the prototype.

That has very strong “I’m sorry that I got caught” energy.

How can you possibly forget the mid-video ad read that is actually a part of the video, thus unblockable?

They created Back Orifice which was a great parody of MS’s Back Office.

Man, I had a lot of fun with that and Sub7 back in the day.

I mean, hypothetically speaking depending on statute of limitations.

Is OpenVPN not just SSL traffic?

It’s not, it’s an IPSec VPN by default which runs over UDP. You can run it via TCP and it operates over the same port as HTTPS (443), but it’s not the same protocol and can be differentiated that way.

A way around this would be to run an SSLVPN with a landing page where you log in instead of using an IPSec VPN or a dedicated SSLVPN client.

Another way around it would be to create a reverse SSH tunnel on a VM/VPC in another country/state and send all your traffic through that.