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Posted on 19-02-22, 16:50 in Internet numbers bragging thread
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
Current state of affairs

Long short story: some shitstain decided he/she couldn't be assed to bring his/her/its trash to the nearest dumpster, so instead decided to burn it in the streets... next to a utility pole and a CANTV cable locker.

The results? Dead phone service for dozens (maybe even hundreds) of customers, in a city with at least SIXTEEN THOUSAND faulty phone lines... including mine (my DSL modem can sync for minutes at a time with HEAVY packetloss, if I'm lucky). And of course, noone inside CANTV gives a flying fuck, unless if generously paid in USD/EUR/BRL (or if you're lucky, a few bricks of high-denomination VES bills). And all of my backup plans are dead: a 3G stick (also provided by CANTV) that refuses to connect because the base stations are crapping its diapers every day, a 3G phone by Movistar with only 25MB (!!!!) for the entire month, and no nearby open WiFis I can leech because MUH PRIVACY/MUH INTERNETS/hate the world.

So yeah, this is most likely the end of the road for me. So long guys, it was a pleasure for me to be a netizen of those message boards for the last 16 years of my life :/

25 MB, that's about 800 KB a day. This specific thread is about 9 KB transferred. A random article from the Washington Post is about 40 KB. If you do your browsing with elinks (or wget, stallman style,) extrapolating from those two, you might be able to get a few dozens of pages a day out of it.

Godspeed, man. Maybe one of the networks around you are poorly secured?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-22, 16:56 in Terminal colour schemes
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Screwtape
there's a great opportunity for somebody to write a tool to convert between them.

base16 sounds like what you want. It supports Gnome Terminal.
Posted by tomman
All I want is a native xterm port for Windows, preferably as a cmd.exe (or whatever MS uses nowadays to render console apps) replacement.

Cygwin had (has? haven't used it in years) a terminal that could run cmd.exe and other such programs. Don't remember the name but it looked good.



There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-22, 17:32 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman

Nowadays aviation is a history of numbers, airline closures, and unsellable planes. Wonder if Pan Am had survived well into the 21st century, they could have saved the Airbus A380 from its sure doom (remember: it was Trippe's Pan Am who essentially gave birth to its Boeing counterpart, the mighty 747 jumbo jet). Or maybe not, considering what happened to SSTs (the 2707 went nowhere for oh-so-many reasons -mostly political BS-, the Tu-144 was a unmitigated disaster -it was a miracle that the thing managed to fly, considering its shoddy Soviet engineering-, and the only successful design, the Concorde, barely made into this century, only to have its spotless service history ruined by The Crash™, with 9/11 wiping any chances of a revival not long after that)

We're going backwards in airplane technology. Nobody wants to work with it now. It's intended to disappear, to get taxed to hell and get replaced by trains or whatever because of the emissions or something like that. There's no way anyone would want to touch a modern Concorde with a ten-foot pole, even if it were profitable. The goal is to decrease plane travel, so any innovation in the field that makes it more pleasant would be fought with tooth and nail, perhaps even outlawed.


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Screwtape
The problem is that the Internet currently runs on advertising money. Firefox isn't really big enough to destroy the entire industry with one punch, and do you *really* want to deal a non-fatal blow to an industry that specialises in shaping people's opinions? It's like the old saying: "Do not meddle in the affairs of bards, for your name sounds funny and fits the meter of many popular songs".

5% is a huge blow, though. Remember, we're talking percentage points. Since there's no corresponding decrease in expenditures, it would cut profits by much more than by 5%.

Let's take Google as an example. It deals in a lot of other stuff, sure, but I can't come up with another advertising company and it doesn't make a great difference. So let's just say for the sake of argument that all of Google's revenue is from ads.

Alphabet has a yearly gross revenue of $136.8 billion. It has a yearly net income (profit) of $30.7 billion. If their gross revenue would go down by 5%, that would be a cut of $6.8 billion, or roughly 20% of profits. Assuming constant P/E, that would also imply a 20% decrease in value.

Certainly a lot more than the 5% figure would appear to suggest at first, don't you think?

Also, this assumes that Mozilla would be the only actor. I don't think that's true. Apple (Safari 3.8%) have been adding support for ad blockers to iOS, and I don't see what Microsoft (Edge 4.3%) or Opera (1.6%) would have to lose by adding such a feature either. Even if they wouldn't, Firefox being the only one to provide such a feature would be a unique selling point which could bolster its market share somewhat.

As for the advertising industry, what could they do that they aren't already doing? Ad blocking already has a prevalence of at least 10%, and I don't see any concerted efforts to slander it or make it unusable. If they were as good at shaping public opinion as they think they are, then how come using ad blockers today isn't deeply taboo?

Posted by Screwtape

Even if Firefox *could* end the advertising industry, that might not be a wise plan. Like I said, the Internet currently runs on advertising money so cutting off that revenue would kill off a lot of the internet. Sure, the parts you or I care about wouldn't be the worst hit, but we enjoy high-speed, high-quality Internet access because it was bankrolled by large companies who wanted high-speed, high-quality Internet access for themselves and their customers. If the Internet suddenly became "business hostile", maybe we'd all have to go back to 28.8k modems or Fidonet or something.

I don't know what you're talking about. All websites of value I can think of have next to no operating expenditures outside of hosting, and to host websites just isn't that expensive. Sure, it can get expensive if you want to use "modern technologies", but a properly optimized website generally doesn't need more than a few hundred dollars for a few million users, with the only exceptions I can think of being file hosting sites and the like. Certainly enough to pay for hosting with just donations, or in the case of smaller websites out of the owner's pocket.

The reason it tends to cost much more is due to extreme incompetence, and also Parkinson's law - "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

Posted by Screwtape

Mozilla's plan is more gentle because it gives people time to adjust - if advertising revenue decreases by 5%, that's not an existential crisis, but it encourages people to find alternative revenue streams. And later, when Mozilla does something else that decreases advertising revenue by another 5%, people can invest more into those alternative revenue streams, and eventually all the generally useful companies are weaned from advertising money, and all the parasite companies are dead.

What makes this approach particularly interesting is that for a long time Mozilla has been trying to wean itself off advertising money, build up alternative revenue streams, and generally demonstrate that it's possible to build a sustainable, ethical business online. And every time they try something, Slashdot and Reddit erupt with indignant fury at the idea of supporting Mozilla more directly than by letting Google track them across the Internet.

I still don't get it. What is all of this revenue for? Take Mozilla, for instance. What does all the money go to?

The intuitive answer might be "hiring developers for Firefox". But no, that'd be wrong.
Mozilla has gross revenues (2017) of $562 million, of which $539 million are royalties (e.g. default search engine). It has gross expenditures of $422 million. Of this, only $253 million is for "software development". Mozilla has "over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide". Assuming they have 1500 employees, that would be $169k per employee. How much does the Linux foundation spend on developing Linux, again?

I mean, bloody hell, just read their annual report. Here are some choice quotes:

In 2017, Mozilla spent $966,365 on its agenda-setting work.

(publishing some kind of report)

In 2017, Mozilla spent $2,733,016 to support our mobilization work.

(posting on facebook)

In 2017, Mozilla spent $13,256,720 to support the Mozilla Leadership Program.

(unclear, seems to have something to do with India)

Just what does all of this have to do with browsers? If they'd take the money they spend on whining about tracking, and spend it on actually doing something about it, we'd all be better off.
Parkinson's law.
Posted by Screwtape
Yeah, I guess I should have said "wean itself off surveillance capitalism money". It's hard to invent wholly new revenue streams, we know advertising works on the Internet, and society has been dealing with non-surveillance advertising for centuries, so hopefully people are more likely to understand it.

What does it need the money for, though? I don't see why it's a good trade-off to run more ads in your browser so you can spend $13.3 million on doing something in a foreign country you can't even explain in plain English what it is.


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-23, 22:27 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by CaptainJistuce

That's not the actual goal, it is a side-effect of other goals unrelated to aviation. Rising income inequality has placed air travel out of the reach of more and more people, and the lack of competition after a couple large air travel companies devoured all the others has led to a very unhealthy industry that is increasingly unable to adapt to change. So now they're seeing a world where an ever-increasing perecentage of their potential customers can't afford their prices, and they're unable to adapt because they have built a rigid business structure that requires high prices to survive.

As far as I can remember, plane tickets have been getting cheaper and cheaper. Are you talking about US domestic travel? I wouldn't know anything about that.

Anyway, I'm taking about international travel. Every political party these days seems to have "sustainable development" as a core concern, and the main target of that concern is aviation (and also, automobiles and meat). Resulting in various taxes levied on plane tickets, and in general making it a stigmatized industry. Of course, in such a scenario, nobody would want to make it easier or cheaper to travel, since the goal is the opposite.

The same goes for the meaningless security checks. If they'd just get rid of them and make it as frictionless as boarding a train, it would be better for everyone. But of course that would increase travel. So it would be taboo, just like going against the dogma of "we should eat less meat" would engender heavy criticism from various "experts" in the media.

The goal of them isn't at this point even security theatre, it's literally to make it more uncomfortable to travel. If Western carriers were to start employing security measures similar to the Israeli carrier El Al, an airline which is forced to take security much more seriously, wait times could probably be cut by around 80% for around 80% of passengers. Why isn't this done? It would be controversial, in a way that goes against the dogma of almost every major political party, that's true, but it's not like those kinds of methods aren't already being used. The answer is of course yet again that the goal is to kill aviation, and not security or whatever other ostensible reason they come up with.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-23, 23:35 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by jimbo1qaz
i'm not going to bother going through your troubleshooting steps. This was a deliberate change from Mozilla which they refuse to allow users to revert.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1171259
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4zba5m/firefox_android_odd_suggestions_in_address_bar/
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858829

Domain list at https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-release/source/mobile/android/base/resources/raw/topdomains.txt they moved it to a different url, probably when "unifying" the "top domain list" between products.

I'm running Firefox (60.4.0esr) on desktop (Debian) and I don't have this issue.
Maybe you could try finding the file it's located in and removing it. I ran "grep -r ticketmaster ." in the Firefox and profile directory, but I didn't find anything.

Looking in the patch, I find "mobile/android/base/resources/raw/topdomains.txt". If I recall correctly, .apk files aren't compressed. So what you could do, is open the apk in 7-zip, replace the topdomains.txt file with an empty file, and remove the signature from it. Then install it unsigned. You'd have to do this for each version though.

Anyhow, I don't see why you use Firefox on Android. It's utter garbage that runs at the speed of molasses and takes up several hundred megabytes of space.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-23, 23:41 in Terminal colour schemes
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by jimbo1qaz
Posted by sureanem

Posted by tomman
All I want is a native xterm port for Windows, preferably as a cmd.exe (or whatever MS uses nowadays to render console apps) replacement.

Cygwin had (has? haven't used it in years) a terminal that could run cmd.exe and other such programs. Don't remember the name but it looked good.

mintty?

Yup, that's it. Although it seems to have some issues:
Posted by https://mintty.github.io/

Mintty works on all Windows versions from Windows XP onwards. Similarly to other Cygwin/MSYS terminals based on pseudo terminal ("pty") devices, however, mintty is not a full replacement for the Windows Console window (by default running the Windows Command Processor / command prompt / cmd.exe). While native console programs with simple text output usually work fine, interactive programs often have problems, although sometimes there are workarounds. See the Wiki section about Input/Output interaction for hints, especially on the winpty wrapper.

(my emphasis)

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-23, 23:52 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Alexa, call the police! Smart assistants should come with a 'moral AI' to decide whether to report their owners for breaking the law, experts say
Big sister is watching you?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-24, 00:22 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by DonJon
Posted by sureanem
If Western carriers were to start employing security measures similar to the Israeli carrier El Al, an airline which is forced to take security much more seriously, wait times could probably be cut by around 80% for around 80% of passengers. Why isn't this done?


Israel airport security knows where it's at despite being one of the, if not the most, targeted country for terrorist attacks including of course those involving planes, it's amazing how well they're doing on that front.

Not despite, because of.

The cultural factors are important. As they say in the video, rather than focusing on the weapons that could be used for an attack, they focus on the people who could use them. And that would probably be illegal in the US. However, informally, this already does happen at Western airports. If they'd formally adopt the practices of El Al, but with a lower threat model, they could skip the security screening for those who don't belong to any risk groups. It would be trivial to first check the passport biometrics and/or government databases, and only then carry out interviews and such for those from the higher risk groups. Same with the air marshals thing. If they'd have all people in, say, risk group 5 or above travel on some planes, it would be sufficient to have air marshals and such on those. It would also serve to decrease worst-case losses and incentives for most types of airline terrorism.

I don't agree with his assessment that Israeli airport security is inapplicable to the other airports in the world. Many elements of it certainly are. I mean, the IRA isn't active anymore, nor is the Red Army Faction. This is a matter of simple Bayesian statistics. If they'd just manage to sell people on it (or do it on the down-low), it would make air travel much less of a hassle for most people.

But they won't, because making air travel less of a hassle for most people isn't a goal. Sigh.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-24, 13:46 in Dear modern UXtards...
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman

IT'S NOT YOUR GODDAMNED DEVICE, GOD DAMN IT!

Do you have a source on that, my friend? Because Google sure doesn't seem to agree with you.

On a more practical note, have you considered replacing her browser? Naked Browser has a rather nice UI with the menu button safely tucked away in the corner. It's also rather fast.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-24, 15:06 in Dear modern UXtards...
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman

Yeeeeeah... no, We're not interested into switching browsers:
- She barely learned to use Chrome, and every UI/UX change doesn't really make things easier for her. Learning a completely distinct application is completely out of her comfort zone (which is already as tiny as you can imagine from a 65yo lady with heart/blood pressure problems).
- I would be trading villains, as each and every single cellphone software developer in the world has this goal of becoming your worst enemy. Not a long term solution for our personal sanity.

Ugh, if I ever breed my own offspring, remind me to never leave any kind of "personal computing technology" at their reach.

I wouldn't say switching browsers is _completely distinct_. But I understand. That said, the developer of Naked Browser seems to be a sane guy. I mean, just take a look at the website - it's clearly made by a normal person and not a web "developer."

For a short term solution, what about pirating Incoquito and disabling Internet access for it? Alternatively, "downgrading" to an older version of Chrome.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-24, 18:33 in Dear modern UXtards... (revision 1)
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman

There are other Incognito-blocking solutions on the Play Store. None of them work for me: the free ones aren't compatible with KitKat, the paid ones that (supposedly) could work are... well, paid (not an option here), and due to privacy/stability concerns, I'm not keen on trusting some random 4-star apps, much less pirating them.

You could pirate them and then disable their Internet access, along with anything else they don't need.
Posted by tomman

Google DOES offer several official ways to disable Incognito mode on Chrome:
- The IncognitoModeAvailability policy. Easy to setup on desktop (it's a regkey on Windows, a pref on Mac/Linux), but on Android it requires a managed device, which implies that you're on a domain. There are sample apps you can use on rooted devices for achieving similar results, but as I'm not an Android developer, I have neither the desire nor the resources to install their SDKs and shit just to build a small proggy to setup a policy. And while there is one of such samples on the Play Store (Test DPC), surprise, it is NOT compatible with KitKat :/ (FWIW: the device is already rooted -mainly for maintenance/storage reasons-, so I don't mind using solutions that require rooting)

Have you taken a look at this? If you're rooted and have console, it might work.

Android Studio is not very hard to use - it's geared towards the Indian "software" "developer" clientèle. But it takes insane amounts of resources. 4 GB of RAM is just barely enough if you set everything to minimum and enable swap, and I think the folder was 30 GB or something like that.

Posted by tomman

Heh, that Naked Browser site certainly looks very anti-webshit-ish, which is a pleasant surprise, a stability island in this sea of insanity. The interface looks very minimalist, which may or may not be great for my mom (anything that doesn't get on her way is welcome, but not if it hides her bookmarks beyond layers of navigation). The "English only" interface is a complete deal breaker as she can't English.

Bookmarks is just sliding from left edge of screen, I think. But yeah, no localization rules it out. Even with a mostly pictorial UI, "open in new tab" and such would be impossible.

EDIT: Did you check out downloading an older version of Chrome? Should be freely available, and I can't see why they actually need to update it.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-24, 18:52 in New Realtek website... where are the audio drivers!?? (revision 1)
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman

Oh, and for whatever reason their website now defaults to Simplified Chinese. Fun.

Thanks China! (or Taiwan, politically they're different, but computer-wise they're the same pile of broken junk)

No Taiwanese ever tried to install spyware on my devices.

I can remember owning one Taiwanese product, a pair of Superlux headphones, which were of good quality until they broke from a batshit insane design decision. ("let's make the cable detachable but have a 5cm male sticking out from it and require an extension cord instead of putting a female directly on the headphone body so you can put an ipod directly on your headphones")
Manufacturing quality was good though. Cheap and good sound, would buy again.

(EDIT: Also lots of ASUS products which worked well, only way you could tell they were Taiwanese was from the odd writing style in the manual)

Looking at IA, audio codecs were computer peripherals with the old website too. But man, what a piece of shit website. It almost crashed my browser, a feat which no other site but Reddit manages.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-25, 01:12 in Internet numbers bragging thread
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Posted by tomman

Sometimes DSL comes up for minutes at a time, sometimes it becomes mildly stable for hours... but most of the times is a unusability nightmare of endless modem desyncs, fucked up DL/UL speeds, and total instability guaranteed. The best I can do is to load sites as fast as I can while I get a link, then read them when the link dies (forget about uploading large files or seeding torrents with such painful packetloss rates). I'm glad I don't stream videos or play games or any of those so-called Web 3.0 first-world enterprises!

Maybe try browsh? For a news article originally 76 KB transmitted (not including assets), it manages to shrink it into 6 KB (text only, layout preserved), or 14 KB (html and colors, some semblance of images).

It can run over ssh and similar, but it might not be very useful if your connection is not only poor but also intermittent. Maybe mosh and tmux would work, but you'd need a server.

Posted by tomman

CANTV techs refuse to come to my block and take a look, despite learning that the local head tech actually lives right at my backyard (yes, really!). We gathered signatures among my neighbors (since CANTV now requires that for all blocks with mass faults to bring signatures in batches), but half of the neighbors didn't even bothered signing the document (despite my entire block -about 70 subscribers- being without service for one reason or another). They promised they would come... someday.

Aren't there any poorly protected networks in the whole of Caracas? I mean, you obviously know this better than I do, but WiGLE claims about 10% of them are unprotected and another 10% have WEP. You could try building a makeshift antenna and pointing it around, see what you find. It's not optimal, but it's always a good idea to have a backup plan.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-25, 11:32 in Internet numbers bragging thread
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Posted by tomman

1) Intermitent connection, absolutely. Also, most modern Javascript-based junk wouldn't even render on said simple browsers. I don't really want to live a Stallman lifestyle, as much as the government wants! Also: banks. Unlike the average USAian (which only knows how to use an ATM and bitch and moan because he/she/it now has to dip their fancy new chipcards instead of swiping their Ez-Clone magstripes, and certainly has never heard about using personal computers to move money from Your Account to Other Peoples' Accounts without getting assraped by outrageous bank fees), we rely heavily on bank transfers for pretty much everything (as cash is a scarce commodity nowadays), which require Real Browsers (or heavily watered down cellphone junk, which in some cases forces you to be tied to a PC anyway), and offer next to no compatibility with Troo UNIX® Way™ minimalism.

That's the whole point of browsh. It runs Firefox on the server, then renders it into text back again. So JS and everything works, even WebGL and other "technologies". You do need a remote server however if you want to log in to things, since the public demo (understandably) blocks form elements.
Slashdot seems to work fine.

Posted by tomman

2) There are countries other than the United States of America. Likewise, Venezuela has cities other than Caracas (and I would never live there, no matter how generously is the pay - Caracas is no place for visiting, much less for staying). And on said cities, WiFi networks are not that common (after all, these cities are sparsely populated, compared with Caracas where the population density was quickly approaching Mexico City un-liveability concentrations... until people started fleeing far away from communism). Everybody and his dog learned how to secure their shit - last time my antennas picked a WEP-protected network were over a decade ago (and mostly useless after cracking the passwords anyway), and the only unprotected network I've seen over here is at the very center of the city, in a public plaza. Not the best place to bring my laptop just to get my daily Slashdot fix. Plus, after living the joys of a router-powered adblock solution, I refuse to use networks other than mine to plug my computers.

My mistake, I thought you lived in Caracas.
You sure you couldn't pick up the network from the public plaza with a purpose-built directional antenna? If you have a computer with ethernet port and wireless network card, you could feed that into your router (e.g. use it as a repeater) and still be able to use router-powered adblock.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-25, 13:42 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Posted by creaothceann
Anybody else getting a horrible font display on this site in (desktop) Firefox?

screenshot

Works fine here.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-25, 13:55 in Internet numbers bragging thread
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Posted by tomman
The public plaza is like 10km away from home (a ~20min bus ride with low traffic), so the idea is a total non-starter.

Now that I checked it, the WiFi spectrum is surprisingly clear at this part of the city. I do pick two nearby APs, like 4-5 faint signals of APs far away, a cellphone pretending to be a hotspot that pops up once in a while... and nothing else. Everything is WPA secured, despite those things often being cheap TP-Link stuff (which come unsecured out of the box). I guess people over here really don't like others leeching their (already) scarce bandwidth, so that's good?

Is this with a directional antenna?
Posted by tomman

In the meanwhile, I still struggle to explain people that WiFi is, indeed, not "the Internet" - your phone/tablet can connect to any AP and show the antenna icons, but if there is no network at the other end, you will not be able to read the news or use WhatsApp or whatever. Apparently it requires a rocket surgeon to understand that there can be wireless computer networks isolated from the world *sigh*

Recent versions of Windows and Android both add a tiny exclamation mark to the icon to show that it doesn't have Internet access. It doesn't seem to help though. How can the router be broken if there's Internet?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-25, 15:56 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Posted by creaothceann
Posted by sureanem
Works fine here.
Posted by Nicholas Steel
Yeah the font isn't distorted on my end in Firefox 65.0.1: https://imgur.com/a/rYR500L


Above was the work PC; tried it on my home PC and it's smooth there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What does the work PC run? If it runs Arch or something like that it's possible you've messed up the font rendering. I remember it was lots of trouble to get it to work, manual configuration and installing packages and stuff. Also, is it only on that website+browser combination?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-26, 16:46 in Internet numbers bragging thread
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Posted by tomman

You assume we have access to fancy tech over here, like "cantennas" and crazy $5 AliExpress deals. No, that's now how things work on communist shitholes like mine. I never was a "wardriver" wireless nerd (in fact, I don't use wireless at home - my laptops are wired 24x7), so I never bothered investing into building a stash of fancy 802.11<letters> gear beyond the basics (built-in laptop wireless, cheap router that can be reflashed to something better). Now it's too late for anything of that, considering that we have higher priorities (eat, stay alive) and next to no money. Also, I never heard about wireless networks with kilometer-wide coverage (aside of metropolitan networks which we clearly don't have over here). So yeah, thanks for the advice but sadly it doesn't apply for my case (or roughly 90% of the inhabitants of the land of gold, oil, and hot women).

Cantennas are homemade, so I would hardly call them 'fancy tech'. You do need something to receive the signal though, which might be hard. Some routers support running in "repeater mode", and that ought to work, if you have such a router.
As for the reach, antenna gain works both ways. If you manage to focus your signal into a narrower cone, this affects both transmission and reception.
It's probably not worth going through all the trouble just to read news, though.
Posted by tomman

Welcome to my daily life. Normies HATE learning about things. They expect to turn on PC, click/tap button, have content delivered and bugs magically fixed. They don't care about things like "web browsers", "UX", "modems", "page faults", "reallocated sectors", "XML", "databases"... or even basic stuff like privacy or elementary physics. And of course, noone pays attention to little details like the warning overlay over the network status tray icon. They gleefully ignore it, while sticking to their wrong assumptions about how tech works ("WiFi is the new blue E").

I consider it to largely be a lost battle.

I hate to tell you, but this is hardly unique to third world countries...

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-02-26, 19:34 in Internet numbers bragging thread (revision 1)
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Posted by DonJon

i'm not too knowledgeable on the Venezuela situation but why is Maduro blocking foreign aid? Some kind of desperate attempt to remain in control and power? Or because it would legitimize the claims that his government and policies are well,a complete failure, or just to stick it to foreign nations?

I'm no expert, but I believe the main concern is weapons hidden in the shipments, like in Nicaragua in the 1980s. (Iran-Contras affair)

The Atlantic: When Humanitarian Aid Is Used as a Weapon to Bring Down Regimes
Russian News Agency TASS: US plans to buy weapons for Venezuelan opposition in Eastern Europe, warns diplomat

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
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