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by the way if you are in the and you need your or repaired i am a highly skilled technician that cannot be legaly employed in the uk so send me a donation of a ammount and ship your computer to the southwest devon and i will repair it for you i have clients who can vouch for me thank you. i have an oscilloscope and everything, which is more than some thousand-follower retro tech youtubers can say. :boost_ok:

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@cr1901 Indeed, m4 is very fun to write, whatever the purpose, but only once the macro definitions are sorted out and debugged.

Okay, story time. I was asked for the tale of my laser eye injury, so here you go. I'm fine. Customers were fine. No children were harmed. The only victims were me and Bob's career. funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-

Current self-inflicted pain:

No, not using ed(1). Believe it or not, switching from Vim was a surprisingly remarkable improvement, especially over SSH, & especially since I already know sed, vi, & re_format(7) reasonably well.

It's doing actual, honest to goodness, Turing-complete programming in pure m4, the ancient text macro processor your modern Linux likely has by default, to do the sort of text transformations I'd ordinarily write a shellscript to do.

IDK why I do this to myself.

"Have you tested doing full restores from backups?"

"No, that would take too long."

"Say that again."

#infosec

Cloudflare is the only company that has ever given literal nazis my mother's phone number, so my opinion of them is slightly worse than my opinion of hot garbage.
infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/1

Cloudflare making headlines again, probably not the way it would prefer. From @dangoodin at Ars:

A familiar debate is once again surrounding Cloudflare, the content delivery network that provides a free service that protects websites from being taken down in denial-of-service attacks by masking their hosts: Is Cloudflare a bastion of free speech or an enabler of spam, malware delivery, harassment and the very DDoS attacks it claims to block?

arstechnica.com/security/2024/

Meanwhile, from Proofpoint:

Proofpoint is tracking a cluster of cybercriminal threat activity leveraging Cloudflare Tunnels to deliver malware. Specifically, the activity abuses the TryCloudflare feature that allows an attacker to create a one-time tunnel without creating an account. Tunnels are a way to remotely access data and resources that are not on the local network, like using a virtual private network (VPN) or secure shell (SSH) protocol.

First observed in February 2024, the cluster increased activity in May through July, with most campaigns leading to Xworm, a remote access trojan (RAT), in recent months.

Campaign message volumes range from hundreds to tens of thousands of messages impacting dozens to thousands of organizations globally. In addition to English, researchers observed French, Spanish, and German language lures. Xworm, AsyncRAT, and VenomRAT campaigns are often higher volume than campaigns delivering Remcos or GuLoader. Lure themes vary, but typically include business-relevant topics like invoices, document requests, package deliveries, and taxes.

proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-

Use our cloud service instead of local copies of your documents they said, it will be more efficient, they said.

@mavica_again Bots that learn to recognize & appreciate people's characters tend to make good bots, & make good bots, too. :heart_cyber:

Do you ever get the feeling a bot that basically rolls a die and picks from a catalog somehow reads your mind? I do. computerfairi.es/@iconolog/112

^PCMAG0A.ICO - Data, Library

...Books, Newspapers, Reference

I don't want AI to make art or write terrible articles which destroy the middle class. I just want email applications to look for the string "Hello" "Dear" "Hi" at the top of the message and warn the sender if the name that follows doesn't match the name on the email they are replying to.

Internet of Things 

I also saw the price: $650, according to this PC Magazine review in '21: pcmag.com/reviews/raven-pro-do - Ouch!

What's really sad is that scanning files *directly* to your cloud storage service^W^W^W someone-else's-computer of choice is a pretty nifty & handy feature.

But you're seriously asking for exactly this kind of trouble & disappointment when buying an overpriced can opener that needs to use one someone-else's-computer in order to talk to another someone-else's-computer.

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Internet of Things 

The has reached my customer service desk.

A poor unfortunate soul brought a Raven Pro Document Scanner to me for repair because, although it's in near-perfect shape, it quit working when Raven quit answering the phone.

The manual says you have to connect it to the Internet & log in to a Raven account during the setup. That's red flag #1.

From 5-star praise in '23 to 1-star scorn in '24, & no unbricking rumors, let alone a how-to.

Sorry, joe, it's a no-go.

@foone Most of Kaypro's CP/M luggables, the Commodore 128DCR (the "cost-reduced" 128D), the Amiga 2000, and the Amiga 3000 are the only non-clone '80s metal-cased computers coming to mind.

I'm pretty sure most IBM clones had metal cases, too. The Tandy 1000 series did.

In technology news, CrowdStrike thought the most appropriate apology for their kernel-oops last Friday was a $10 coffee voucher. Rather appropriately, that didn't go right either, as those who accepted the gesture found out.

TechCrunch, "CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage": techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crow

re: Uspol, misinformation 

@soatok That pun is incredible.

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Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!