Just Computers

Ping: 0.3 ms
Download: 4.72 gbps
Upload: 960 mbps

You're lyin'

For me, through Optimum Online:

Ping = 9 ms
Download = 115.98 Mbps
Upload = 36.84 Mbps

NoCoPilot wrote:

You're lyin'

Ya think?

Would you believe

(via Ookla)
Ping: 27 ms
Download: 4.32 mbps
Upload: 0.67 mbps

How about this performance?

Ping: 119 ms
Download: 0.69 mbps
Upload: 0.64 mbps

Fucking AT&T!

And you thought it couldn't get any worse.

Ping: 116 ms
Download: 0.15 mbps
Upload: 0.54 mbps

Fucking AT&T!

On the 13th, Howard wrote:

Well, I still haven't lost the internet connection since the DNS change.

It's now been a month, and I have not lost my internet connection once. My daughter and son-in-law are here from Brooklyn and both had to do a couple of hours work this morning - on their computers, if course. Even with both of them using the net, they both commented on how much faster (okay, relatively faster) the thing worked than they had previously experienced here. And no drop outs.

As it says on a pack of Horse Shit Cigarettes: "Not a Fart in a Carload."

Fucking AT&T!

This is some serious shit.

Staff dust off their typewriters after malware attack

Quote :

Sophisticated malware has taken down systems in at least two Alaskan municipalities in an attack that officials say is the worst they have ever seen. The Alaskan Borough of Matanuska-Susitna (Mat Su) and the City of Valdez have both been hit.

IT director Eric Wyatt wrote:

I will tell you is that this isn’t some kid in his mother’s basement. This is very sophisticated and well-funded.  It would come from somewhere I believe outside the US. When we call it ransomware, that’s not its purpose. I believe its purpose was to disrupt our way of life.

One doesn't wish to be alarmist or conspiracy-theory-loving, but... this SOUNDS like a Russian dry run for the 2018 mid-term elections.

Fucking AOL.

Monday I changed my AOL password, because, well, it was SIMILAR to the password the hacker picked up. I thought it might be prudent.

Once I did that, neither my iPad nor my iPhone would download new e-mail, with the new password. I tried everything I could think of: reset all the options, removed and recreated the email accounts, changed IMAP settings, changed SMTP settings, changed the 2-step authentication, changed SSL settings. I searched online for answers. I have spent Tuesday morning to today, Saturday evening, working this problem (off and on).

Finally I gave up and called AOL Customer Service, fully expecting an ESL disaster. I was not disappointed.

"Rose" basically had me re-do everything I'd already done. She had me TURN OFF 2-step verification -- which AOL had recommended I turn on -- and TURN ON "Allow Other Apps" to access my e-mail account, which AOL had recommended I turn off. Then she had me go to "myaccount.aol.com" and change something, I think it was my password there too?

Bottom line: everything works again.

But AOL's instructions on what you SHOULD do are exactly 100% wrong from what you MUST do. A simple password change should't be this hard!!!!

AOL? I thought they went out of business years ago. Guess I just wasn't paying attention.

So I decided to use my old Olympus digital camera for some shots.
Then I could not find the proper cable to connect to camera to the computer. I know I have several of them but have no idea where they are. I must have looked at fifty or more cables in various boxes but no joy. I also have a small memory card reader, but couldn't find that either.

Then it hit me: this computer I bought a couple of years ago has slots on the front of the case for memory cards. The camera has an XD card and a CF card. The XD is (or at leas, was) uncommon, so I copied the pics from the XD card to the CF card - the camera will do that.

Turns out the computer has a slot for an XD card. So I tried both the XD and the CF in the computer and - surprise - it worked! I was shocked.

Check your grounding.

What do you mean, "Check your grounding."?

Eureka!  Now that I have discovered I don't really need the cable I was looking for, I spent another hour looking and found the god damned thing.

Then I noticed this thing on my desk. Right next to the keyboard, so it hadn't been there before my search. It looks like a cover for something bit I can't think what. Any ideas? It's 5/8" square.

_Howard wrote:

What do you mean, "Check your grounding."?

You said you were shocked.

The thing you found looks like a plastic SD card blank, for keeping the slot clean. Or if not SD, CF or XD.

No, it's not that. I have no idea where it came from.

It covers the hot shoe on the camera.

The recent push by governments for tech companies to introduce back-doors into their encryption is book-ended by stories like this:

Social Security numbers exposed on US government transparency site

Quote :

Exposing data on websites by mistake is becoming a common problem for governments. In August 2016, a security researcher discovered 15GB of voter registration data and other sensitive information on the website of Kennesaw State University, which had a contract with state government to help run its voting system.

In March this year, 7,000 documents were inappropriately downloaded from a provincial freedom of information site in Nova Scotia, Canada, after a programming error left them publicly accessible. Hundreds of them contained sensitive information.

Some mishaps see data exposed on third-party online services. In August, researchers found UK and Canadian government data, including server passwords, exposed on the project collaboration site Trello. Google had indexed them.

Additionally, misconfigured databases have also become common, with exposed MongoDB data proving a popular target for security researchers. In August, 2.3 million Mexican healthcare records were exposed via a MongoDB instance and indexed by IoT search engine Shodan.

Why don't we just plain-text everything and give up on the ideas of privacy or avoiding identity-theft?

Firefox Monitor starts tracking breached email addresses

Quote :

The site – which despite the Firefox tag is open to anyone – can be used either to check an email address against known breaches, or to register for breach notification should that address be detected in future breaches logged by HIBP.

I checked an old, very seldom used - but still valid - email address on HIPB and it said that address had  been pwned. Checked it on Firefox Monitor and it said all was good. Then I signed up for FFM and it sent me a more complete report, showing not only that the address had been breached, but the name of the site that either did the breaching or discovered the breach (it wasn't clear to me): River City Media Spam List.
Firefox Monitor notes that the the report is from HPBB: "Breach data provided by Have I Been Pwned".
Oddly, when I checked an old email address that was used a lot, it showed clean.
It's important to note that neither HIBB nor FFM ask for a password.
Might be a good tool. I will wait awhile before tossing them my everyday email addresses.

I thought maybe my Mac had a bug. Everything worked on it, except the mouse. You could move the mouse around, but clicking on anything did nothing.

Rebooted. Still bad.

Removed connected devices (I've been dubbing a videotape), rebooted, still bad.

Manually closed everything (using keyboard), rebooted.

Finally, the mouse started working again. I hate working with video, it seems to eat up memory bits indiscriminately, and doesn't release them when it should.

Shoot. I still have a problem -- can't highlight text. Time to reboot AGAIN.

FINALLY finished the video projects today, dubbing one 8mm tape and copying a DVD. It turned into more of an ordeal that it should've.

1. Had to resurrect the 8mm camera from cold storage (find all its adapters & power supplies, charge up the batteries, remember how it works...)
   
2. The first TWO times I dubbed the tape, I got video but no audio (even though "audio recording" was enabled and it played through the computer as I dubbed...)
   
3. The third time I chose a different audio input codec ...which the preview showed passed NO audio... so I went back to the default codec... and this time it worked!
   
4. Tried three different shareware DVD authoring software packages, attempting to add menus... None was worth a shit. Didn't want to pay a bunch of money to buy a good new program that I'll probably never use again
   
5. So I ended up just overlaying some titles (which I COULD do natively) and skipping the menus and chapters
   
6. Dubbing the DVD I wanted to clean it up a bit. It was a VHS tape dub, with lots of blue screen and menu fumbling and was very dark and out-of-focus
   
7. Copied the files off the DVD but on playing them back, only 13 of the 26 minutes got copied
   
8. I still have NO IDEA where the missing 13 minutes is hiding on the disc
   
9. Ended up plugging in a DVD player and dubbing it to my hard drive as if it were the 8mm camera
   
10. First time I dubbed it I got no sound afterward
    
11. But I knew what to do this time
    
12. So the second dub was usable, could be edited, titles added, blue screen deleted. Couldn't do much about the out-of-focus but I brightened up the image and color balanced it
    
13. Burned a total of ten DVDs for my friend
    
14. Deleted a ton of orphaned files off my hard drives. For those two DVD projects I had over 20 gig of files!