[Rant] Tech Minor Rant Thread

figmentPez

Staff member
I loathe the push to make ad supported devices standard, but this one is exceptionally bad:

Telly, the ‘free’ smart TV with ads, has privacy policy red flags

First, this TV is "free" because it has a second screen dedicated to showing nothing but banner ads, and it has sensors to detect how many people are in the room watching (and probably gather a whole lot more information about them as well).

The sketchy levels get even higher when reading the privacy policy, which includes comments from someone at the company asking if they actually have the ability to delete information gathered about children under 13, as they claim to be able to do.

I hope this stinking pile of dog shit goes up in flames.
 
Earlier this month, Google introduced eight new top-level domains (TLD) that could be purchased for hosting websites or email addresses.
The new domains are .dad, .esq, .prof, .phd, .nexus, .foo, and for the topic of our article, the .zip and .mov domain TLDs.
[N]ow that they are TLDs, some messaging platforms and social media sites will automatically convert file names with .zip and .mov extensions into [clickable] URLs.
WHAT NO NO NO NO

--Patrick
 
It would have to be some terrible programming indeed to mistake
https://thissite.com/thisfile.zip (obviously a file)
with
https://thissite.zip (obviously a tld)

though I suppose if you were generically discussing a file...like "open mycontent.zip in your local drive"...but how often does that come up in casual conversation?
"Can you download notascam.zip to keep as a backup please?"
"Hey man, you got to see this aweosme new video of Scarlett Johansson ScarJonaked.mov!"
"Please click here to download the videos of your trip to Jamaica: ScubaDiving123.zip!"
 
how often does that come up in casual conversation?
Because so many client OSes automagically use logic to convert any displayed text strings that they recognize as URLs (such as "halforums.com") into clickable links, the worry is that websites, notes, emails, messages, or the like -- even ones that were created prior to these TLDs being released -- will be "gamed" by people abusing this detection logic in order to convince clueless users to visit a website. As an example of this gamed logic, imagine you are emailing a pics.ZIP file from yourself to yourself, between a work and personal computer, let's say. When you open the email on the destination computer, you will see your email "Here are those pics I needed" or whatever, and there will be the icon in the email showing the file "pics.zip," which you can click on to download the file. The email client program will of course put the name of the file under that icon (again, "pics.zip") because that's what email clients do. BUT if someone registers the http://pics.zip/ URL and sets up a site, the existing URL-detection logic on the client's computer will say, "Oh hey, that's a text string that is also a URL" and so light it up as a hyperlink which you could easily click on because you would expect it to download the linked .ZIP file. They then have their site auto-download a file named "pics.zip" which is actually something entirely different than what you expected, and you go and automatically double-click on it because innocent ol' you is expecting it to be the pics that you just sent yourself, but nope! Malicious payload!

This is something that an email client could easily be updated to avoid, but of course the threat actors are counting on it to take a while before the IT community at large comes around to guarding against this sort of thing.

--Patrick
 

Dave

Staff member
Son's HDD just failed.
Well, there goes 1TB of Minecraft worlds and mods/packs, we'll see what we can salvage once the drive gets replaced.

--Patrick
I just bought a 16 TB external. That gives me about 40 TB spread across 8 drives RAID 10 format. Hot swapping on the fly can be so nice.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I just bought a 16 TB external. That gives me about 40 TB spread across 8 drives RAID 10 format. Hot swapping on the fly can be so nice.
What made you decide to go raid 10 instead of, say, 5? Are you doing something that requires the faster write and rebuild time?

(I use raid 5 on my server)
 
I’m probably going to upgrade him to a 1TB SSD. He’s not gonna know what to do with that kind of speed.

—Patrick
 

Dave

Staff member
What made you decide to go raid 10 instead of, say, 5? Are you doing something that requires the faster write and rebuild time?

(I use raid 5 on my server)
Some of the disks are plate read so I wanted faster read/write speed. I had the extra space so fuck it. I know it uses more space but I only do it for my media/plex stuff. My M.2 drives hold my games.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Some of the disks are plate read so I wanted faster read/write speed. I had the extra space so fuck it. I know it uses more space but I only do it for my media/plex stuff. My M.2 drives hold my games.
Well, it's not like you did anything wrong. Raid 10 is definitely the most solid way to go. But it's also the most expensive per byte.

But you get 90% of the read speed of 10 with 5 (though 66% of the write speed due to having to do parity calculations), and get to use n-1 drives worth of your total space instead of n/2. So if you had 4 10tb drives, a raid 5 would give you 30tb of space whereas a raid 10 would give you 20. And you have to expand your 10 in pairs, whereas you can expand a raid 5 1 drive at a time. 5 is a good option for those looking to get speed and redundancy for less money. And even if you're doing platter drives, motion video needs, at most, ~50 mbit per simultaneous user, and even the slowest single non-raid platter drive out there is gonna give you 600.
 
Son's HDD just failed.
Well, there goes 1TB of Minecraft worlds and mods/packs, we'll see what we can salvage once the drive gets replaced.
I’m probably going to upgrade him to a 1TB SSD. He’s not gonna know what to do with that kind of speed.
Salvaged all of it. Put it all on freshly installed SSD.
Too bad he can't play right now because his privileges are taken away until he gets his schoolwork caught up, but at least that's complete.

My own rant: Built this new machine almost 2 years ago now. Only just last week finally installed the IGP drivers. Couldn't install 'em earlier because I had the IGP set to "Auto" in the BIOS which means it never got lit up since I never plugged anything into it, and that means 2 years where I never got to enjoy the benefit of Intel's v8 QuickSync (not that I was transcoding all that much, but still).

--Patrick
 
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