Monthly Archive:: July 2024

It seems the dislike for machine learning runs deep. In a blog post, Cloudflare has announced that blocking machine learning scrapers is so popular, they decided to just add a feature to the Cloudflare dashboard that will block all machine learning scrapers with a single click. We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on the free tier. To enable it, simply navigate to the Security > Bots section of the Cloudflare dashboard, and click the toggle labeled AI Scrapers and Crawlers. ↫ Cloudflare blog According to Cloudflare, 85% of their customers block machine learning scrapers from taking content from their websites, and that number definitely does not surprise me. People clearly understand that multibillion dollar megacorporations freely scraping every piece of content on the web for their own further obscene enrichment while giving nothing back – in fact, while charging us for it – is inherently wrong, and as such, they choose to block them from doing so. Of course, it makes sense for Cloudflare to try and combat junk traffic, so this is one of those cases where the corporate interests of Cloudflare actually line up with the personal interests of its customers, so making blocking machine learning scrapers as easy as possible benefits both parties. I think OSNews, too, makes use of Cloudflare, so I’m definitely going to ask OSNews’ owner to hit that button. Cloudflare further details that a lot of people are blocking crawlers run by companies like Amazon, Google, and OpenAI, but completely miss far more active crawlers like those run by the Chinese company ByteDance, probably because those companies don’t dominate the “AI” news cycle. Then there’s the massive number of machine learning crawlers that just straight-up lie about their intentions, trying to hide the fact they’re machine learning bots. We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection. We will continue to keep watch and add more bot blocks to our AI Scrapers and Crawlers rule and evolve our machine learning models to help keep the Internet a place where content creators can thrive and keep full control over which models their content is used to train or run inference on. ↫ Cloudflare blog I find this particularly funny because what’s happening here is machine learning models being used to block… Machine learning models. Give it a few more years down the trajectory we’re currently on, and the internet will just be bots reading content posted by other bots.

The article’s from 2021, but I think it’s still worth discussing. A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly hooked up to operating system interfaces that most portable or mostly-portable software — programs which work perfectly elsewhere — are subtly broken on Windows, particularly outside of the English-speaking world. The reasons are almost certainly political, originally motivated by vendor lock-in, than technical, which adds insult to injury. This article is about what’s wrong, how it’s wrong, and some easy techniques to deal with it in portable software. ↫ Chris Wellons As someone who doesn’t know how to code or program, articles like these are always difficult to properly parse. I understand the primary problem the article covers, but what I’m curious about is how much of this problem is personal – skill issue – and how much of it is a widely held belief by Windows developers and programmers. I know there’s quite a few of you in our audience, so I’d love to hear from you how you feel about this. The author also authored his on fix, something called libwinsane, which I’m also curious about – is this the only solution, or are there more options out there?

The impact printer was a mainstay of the early desktop computing era. Also called “dot matrix printers,” these printers could print low-resolution yet very readable text on a page, and do so quickly and at a low price point. But these printers are a relic of the past; in 2024, you might find them printing invoices or shipping labels, although more frequently these use cases have been replaced by other types of printers such as thermal printers and laser printers. The heart of the impact printer is the print head. The print head contained a column of pins (9 pins was common) that moved across the page. Software in the printer controlled when to strike these pins through an inked ribbon to place a series of “dots” on a page. By carefully timing the pin strikes with the movement of the print head, the printer could control where each dot was placed. A column of dots might represent the vertical stroke of the letter H, a series of single dots created the horizontal bar, and another column would create the final vertical stroke. ↫ Jim Hall at Technically We Write Our first printer was a dot matrix model, from I think a brand called Star or something similar. Back then, in 1991 or so, a lot of employers in The Netherlands offered programs wherein employees could buy computers through their work, offered at a certain discount. My parents jumped on the opportunity when my mom’s employer offered such a program, and through it, we bought a brand new 286 machine running MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, and it included said dot matrix printer. There’s something about the sound and workings of a dot matrix printer that just can’t be bested by modern ink, laser, or LED printers. The mechanical punching, at such a fast rate it sounded like a tiny Gatling gun, was mesmerising, especially when paired with continuous form paper. Carefully ripping off the perforated edges of the paper after printing was just a nice bonus that entertained me quite a bit as a child. I was surprised to learn that dot matrix printers are still being manufactured and sold today, and even comes in colour. They’re quite a bit more expensive than other printer types these days, but I have a feeling they’re aimed at enterprises and certain niches, which probably means they’re going to be of considerably higher quality than all the other junk printers that clog the market. With a bit more research, it might actually be possible to find a brand new colour dot matrix printer that is a better choice than some of the modern alternatives. The fact that I’m not contemplating buying a brand new dot matrix printer in 2024, even though I rarely print, is a mildly worrying development.

Microsoft Defender is the endpoint security solution preinstalled on every Windows machine since Windows 7. It’s a fairly complex piece of software, addressing both EDR and EPP use cases. As such, Microsoft markets two different products. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud based endpoint security solution that combines sensor capabilities with the advantages of a cloud processing. Microsoft Defender Antivirus (MDA), on the other hand, is a modern EPP enabled by default on any fresh Windows installation. MDA is the focus of this analysis. ↫ Retooling If you’ve ever wanted to know how Microsoft Defender works, this article contains a wealth of detailed information.

Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released. In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren’t present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. ↫ Raymond Chen Another Raymond Chen story, and this one involves hearts, snowmen, different editing controls, codepages, and more. In other words, just another Tuesday for Chen.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s Facebook’s turn to be slapped on the fingers with a ruler – a metric ruler, of course – because of its malicious compliance with the DMA. Today, the Commission has informed Meta of its preliminary findings that its “pay or consent” advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In the Commission’s preliminary view, this binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks. ↫ European Commission press release The European Commission’s preliminary conclusion takes issue with Facebook’s binary choice between “pay for zero ads” and “full-on tracking and all the ads”. According to the DMA, Facebook must offer users the option of an equivalent experience with less tracking, and the company doesn’t offer such an option to users. In addition, Facebook’s proposal does not allow users to “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data”. It’s important to note that this is not some sort of definitive ruling of finding; it’s preliminary, and Facebook now has the opportunity to state its case and formulate its arguments. If the eventual ruling is that Facebook does not comply, the company is liable for fines up to 10% of its yearly worldwide turnover, which can rise up to 20% for repeated infractions.

On the brink of insanity, my tattered mind unable to comprehend the twisted interplay of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of madness, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the ground lest I be pulled in, and found my magnum opus. Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root. ↫ Ersei That’s not… You shouldn’t… Why would…