Just another example of the US government stuffing media and the public and also foreign countries with three outrageous 'things' per day. It's exactly like the quote from a famous movie where Gust Avrakotos says that if you present three scandals in the left hand, you can park an aircraft carrier behind your right hand and nobody will notice.
Claiming the astronauts where stranded by the Biden admin is just one of those things for the left hand. Of course had Kate dared call it the Gulf of Mexico, she'd be in serious trouble only an hour later. Defiantly, without a job two hours later once CEO heard from lower management.
Something any dictator sooner or later gets into serious trouble, because he is only surrounded by obedient people from his bubble. Warping the view of reality. All others fell out a window or best case, got fired.
Compared to the very first test, everything worked better and looked greased. From the HD drone footage (via Starlink I presume), to the fast arriving boats, quick hypergolic fuel leak checks, roping up, loading onto ship, retrieving crew, going home.
Only thing missing really is landing on land and crew offboarding just like that by themselves.
Biggest issue I have, is not solving all the dependency hell that is Python with its unversioned libraries, but supply chain attacks. Also regressions introduced by new versions all the time.
That is why for projects I resolve everything by hand, add all coarsely audited 3rd party libraries to ./lib/, and the main entry file then does this:
#!/usr/bin/env -S /bin/sh -c "_top_dir=\"\$(dirname \"\$(realpath -s \"\$0\")\")\"; cd \"\$_top_dir\"; exec \"\$_top_dir/python/install/bin/python3\" -W once::DeprecationWarning -X dev \"\$0\" \"\$@\""
I like the excellent standalone CPython by indygreg, now under astral-sh's github organization. Unpack as is into ./python/ and done. Because Arch Linux would just roll forward to whatever version is latest, introducing new warnings every month or two and havoc on any new major version.
Project is fully portable, copy anywhere that has glibc, run.
Timely updates, team defending manifest V2, no user data stealing or background scanning b/s, browser as it should be. Got a 10 year old machine with Intel iGPU and even video acceleration in the browser works.
Took me weeks to perfect our own setup based on Postfix, Dovecot, Roundcube with some patches, rspamd with attachment-type whitelisting and a bazillion other features, clamav with extra patterns, plus the many tweaks and enhancements you need to dig out from obscure places.
Like fts-flatcurve, an archive plugin for dovecot that can find stuff in 30 years worth of mails in a second, over IMAP in Roundcube. Or rspamd settings to blacklist not a single IP but an entire ASN of misbehaving colo clients. IMAP with namespaces is also a true pain to configure. Or setting bzip2 compression for an auto-expunged journal for spam, and archive without expunge. Painful.
If you made it this far, you will find that your IP address is tainted. So choosing a hoster that keeps his backyard clean from spammers is necessary, otherwise you will suffer by association. Did I mention SPF records in DNS.
So I consider our server a piece of art. 30 years in operating systems certainly helped.
The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years.
A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.
It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as [email protected] for example, while a spam call would say [email protected].
Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.
It works great to this day, because I never published it.
Using i3 with rofi on X11 git version (because of new TearFree option) myself. A very thin top bar for virtual desktops, tray icons, email notifications, sound volume and date time is all that I need anymore. Tiling is the best way for me to use my single 32" monitor.
The publication of high quality fonts since WindowMaker was a thing 25 years ago and expired patents for font rendering also needs to be mentioned. Desktop Linux has evolved nicely.
Small tip for anyone running a superlight and minimally distracting Linux desktop with X11, i3, and no compositor.
Until recently, tear-free video playback necessitated double buffering hacks and older Intel drivers, or using a compositor like picom. Results were always sub-par imo.
Been running the patch set through Arch's xorg-server-git package ever since it came out, and with mpv as player spaceships have never been zooming smoother along the starry sky. For ultimate playback smoothness I scan the video file for dimensions and refresh rate and then set a custom modeline using xrandr to match display timing with media fps, while maxing out the capabilities of the display link.
There is no easy way, because you have to be able to identify the greats of a field to find relentless quality. You have to become a nerd of greatness, armed with an RSS reader. Example: You can probably tell what Jeff Beck, Stefan Hauk, Jacob Deraps have in common. Sreten of M539 Restaurations? Marco Reps or Shariar of The Signal Path? Igor Bogdanov. Chips and Cheese. The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. The War Zone. Some post once a year or even less.
This is actually a big problem for Germany, because the cited StGB 202 ff. penal code paragraphs have made security research in any private sector shape or form impossible, or at least highly unattractive.
Now a gap of almost 20 years has opened, where basically no young engineers have been interested in the field, let alone trained. The biggest companies with the deepest pockets have been mopping up anyone they could find. Top talent went abroad. And so the majority of German businesses which are SMB get hacked more every day. Nobody audits anything. Unfortunately, anything networked is a security risk these days.
I caution that it is highly naive to bet on this getting thrown out at higher court levels. Defendant is looking at YEARS of wasted brain cycles, trying to go from AG to LG to OLG to BGH. My guess is a 100k EUR of fees also wasted. And for what. Because a company couldn't properly secure their data, you told them that, and as a "thank you", they sued you in court?
My advice: If there is no clear bug bounty program, or it is not your own company, or you weren't tasked in writing and paid by the very company to find any holes, don't make it your problem. Suppress any good samaritan helper complex you might have. Wipe all files and talk to nobody. Especially not in your place of employment. Once a lawsuit is involved, anyone questioned will say "Oh, Mike from DevOps figured that one out from the hexdump". You will regret it.
Some of the older German infosec dogs are aggravated by this so much, that they refuse to help any governmental organization if there is an incident. Lernen durch Schmerz.
I'm using a 20 KiB awk script that I wrote from scratch to calculate taxes owed from investments. German tax code is a bit tricky when your broker is abroad because you have to calculate everything yourself. Hilariously some German brokers don't even apply the FIFO rule correctly. Nevermind regulations about fees or double taxation treaties. FX rates for conversion into EUR are extracted either using rga from Swissquote's own PDFs, or downloaded off the internet. The transaction history itself is one big CSV export from their web site that is also parsed and analyzed using awk. For tax time I call the script with the year I want and transfer everything into official forms. Without spending 3 days in Excel. Or 10. I can't praise awk enough.
I'm on Arch and a 4K display and had to hack the package 'xf86-input-libinput' to be able to adjust mouse scroll speed, towards faster. Upstream has been unwilling to implement it. I published the mod here: https://seitics.de/files/xf86-input-libinput/ should anyone stumble on this post via search engine. To change scroll speed from 1 1 to 2 2 use e.g.
Plus a bunch of services below that, which at this point is only noise. If palemoon works for you as a browser, that will only use 320 MB RSS empty on startup.
Machine has 64 GB RAM, no idea if Chromium by design would eat less on less beefier machines. At 4 GB RAM, zRAM is certainly an option, if you can't or don't want to upgrade. Without such tweaking, modern Linux desktops profit from 8 GB RAM. No matter what WM or DE you run. Once you start a web browser, game over. ;-)
I have anecdotal evidence that CDs can lose 2x2mm chips of the reflective layer after 10-20 years. Also I have seen Blurays written 5 years ago starting to get read very slow because of alot of error correction and read retries going on. You really have to write all Blurays at 1x speed or whatever is lowest and then check using Opti Drive Control by Erik Deppe (good luck finding a compatible drive in 2022!) the quality of your burn. 25/50 GB at a time.
Tape like LTO 6 is quite cheap these days and will last a long time when stored vertically in a dry, cool, dark place. Also at 2.5 TB net capacity per tape with barely used tape prices of 5-10 bucks one can easily write a couple more tapes just in case one is damaged. I think for leader pin damage there is a repair kit and if tape rips in two I remember there was a repair service by IBM which can fix even that and send you a fresh tape with the data or a repaired tape.