Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Since I got another one, I have to assume enough people are getting scared by the scam to make it worth the scammer's time.

Passwords are hard to manage, yes. They suck, yes. But try anyway to use a different password with every service, & try to make them actually random, not lolrandom.

And if you get a spam revealing a *current* password, don't pay the scammer a cent but *do* change it asap.

I say that with confidence because the password is one I haven't used in over a decade. Must be closer to 15 years now. In fact I changed it to a much stronger one at about the one and only time I got successfully phished (thanks, Yahoo).

Anyway, the point is the password was already out there, not stolen by hackers getting into my computer like the scammer wants me to believe.

I got another scam spam today where the scammer revealed one of my passwords in the subject, threatening to disclose it if I don't send bitcoin.

The scammer wants me to believe they hacked my PC to steal it, but it's much more likely they bought a list of compromised passwords.

Apparently, "this week" means "just a few hours shy of 'this time [i]next[/i] week.'"

Also, the scammers who called me directed me to a remote desktop software site offering downloads for a wide variety of OSes, not just Windows: MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, FreeBSD, Raspbian, & ChromeOS. Don't do what I did without carefully thinking through every click & every word.

Remember that Microsoft will never call you about "sending us errors." If anyone calls claiming to be from "Windows" or Microsoft, just hang up, don't do what I did.

Read more on Microsoft's support site: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4013405/windows-protect-from-tech-support-scams

Don't uninstall VLC because the news told you to panic, not just yet. The conclusion driving panicky news stories are CERT-Bund & NVD assessments, but the bug it relates to had been open for a whole month before the first "uninstall it now!" story appeared.

Lifehacker: https://lifehacker.com/you-should-wait-before-banning-vlc-from-your-computer-1836645438

NIST NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-13615

Huzzah! I just got cold-called by a "Windows tech support" scammer outfit and successfully wasted 34 minutes of their time before they figured out I'm not running Windows!

This is my home desktop, where I just finished making a much simpler signpost-like desktop icon theme, and I'm going to start my write-up with this.

Have I mentioned I like L-shaped furries recently? Anyway, this is my work desktop, and I'm finally, *finally*, going to start writing up how I made the fancy group of desktop icons and framing, and how I maintain it, this week.

It took literal days of searching, poring over hundreds, maybe thousands, of results, but I did finally manage to find what I was looking for: Programs that compute sun and moon data (one in Perl, another in Ruby), then print them in a form shellscripts love.

It's amazing and appalling just how many questions for "how to get <computable almanac data> in bash" wind up being "just use curl on <website> and parse that data" answers.

Just-use-curl folks, I know it's shocking, but...

I have a computer.
It's pretty good at computing.

I don't want to depend on someone else's computer, that might get turned off at any time, and that's only reachable by an often crappy 'Net connection.

One of our 50 is missing again... https://www.newmexico.org/nmmagazine/heart-of-nm/one-of-our-50-is-missing/

Fifty years ago tonight, two people walked on the surface of a world not the Earth for the first time in recorded history. Dr. Carl Sagan had this to say about what that night meant: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/carl-sagan/the-gift-of-apollo.html #Apollo11