Man I loved Trade Wars 2002. I played the heck out of that, with {COMMO} macros and a series of BBSes I'd call into every day to manage my empires. It now amuses me that it was set 24 years ago.

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [ ... ]

...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]

-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)

Further viewing.

Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.

The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.

And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?

I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.

Then I see no reason to give human-generated earnings to a company that does not value human programmers and artists.

Before one buys any hardware, or comes to rely on any software by Google, it's a good idea to visit Google Graveyard and take a few minutes to ponder over how long it will be before Google abandons the technology it's trying to sell you, leaving you with yet another piece of e-waste.

From the article: "Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere."

Well, there's your problem. Stop doing stupid things like that.

I have a wildcard cert from LetsEncrypt, which I install on all the services on my home LAN. However, because it's a wildcard, LetsEncrypt insists that I prove domain ownership by updating some DNS TXT records. My DNS provider doesn't support automated updates to TXT records. So ACME won't work, so I have to do that bit by hand.

Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.

"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.

Decart's acronym for DOS is "Decart Optimization Stack".

Those of us old enough to remember will immediately think "Disk Operating System" though.

... and dig the base out of the ground, and carefully transport base, pole, and cameras for each installation into room without windows that can be locked. Most importantly, do not damage Flock's property. Leave the cameras operational and running.

Then, send Flock a letter letting them know their property is intact and undamaged, but is now safely stored away to prevent vandalism against their equipment. Further let them know that they are welcome to come collect their property, but they are not welcome to re-install the cameras anywhere on Campus due to safety issues.

Unless there's some sort of penalty against removing the cameras in the contract they signed with Flock? (Probably is, come to think of it...)

This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.

I first read about the effort here: https://thedreydossier.substac...

Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://thedreydossier.substac...

Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.

From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.

Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.

In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.

what's the point?

The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.

If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)