I had the privilege of seeing this parade live in December 2000. It remains a wonderful memory. So I was thrilled when this past week I decided to check to see if anybody had uploaded video of it to YouTube and I was successful, finding a recording of the complete performance from September 2000, only a few months before I saw it.
Great thanks to Jeremy Trist for sharing this video with us.
So, without any further ado, here is the performance. Enjoy.
Well, it appears that I'm not the only one who feels this way. This past December (yes, six months ago - sorry for the delay), Linus Tech Tips reported even worse behavior.
As a part of their Gaming PC Secret Shopper 2 series, the found that the Dell phone sales person was heavily pushing them to buy unwanted antivirus software and extended warranties. And even though they refused these items at every step, Dell included them in the order and billed them for it.
If you thought my rant was just one person with a bad experience, you may want to think again. Watch the video for Linus's rant, which is even cooler than mine:
And this wasn't the first time Dell tried to scam the LTT secret shopper. In October, 2019, their first secret shopper also showed Dell to be pretty bad.
A drunken 19-year-old accidentally broke into an Airbnb in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, only to find the house filled with police officers.
...
The officers heard noises during the night, assuming it was each other. In the morning, they found the person asleep in one of their beds after noticing one of the doors to the house was open.
"He woke up in handcuffs," Pesola said on the video, which went viral over the weekend.
The intruder was taken into custody by the Milwaukee police but wasn't cited or charged, with officers saying he drunkenly stumbled into the wrong house by accident, according to KMOV4.
All I can say is "d'Oh!".
About twenty years ago, I bought a used IBM Model M keyboard with a PS/2 connector. I believe it cost me around $5-$10 plus shipping at the time. A good investment, given that this sort of keyboard is probably worth $100 or more these days.
...
Given this keyboard’s track record, I would guess that in another 30 years, it will still be working fine, while most keyboards made today will have disintegrated into a pile of plastic dust.
I couldn't agree more. I have two, which I picked up at a flea market many years ago. One with a PS2 cable and one with an older "AT" keyboard cable. I don't use them that often because they don't have USB interfaces and don't have the "windows" key that modern operating systems really require, but they work great and will probably outlast every other piece of electronics in my office.
“Unpatchable” vuln in Apple’s new Mac chip – what you need to knowApple’s brand new Mac has a security hole, right inside the processor itself!
The official name for the bug is CVE-2021-30747, but the developer who discovered it prefers to call it M1RACLES, all in caps.
Like every BWAIN (our own impressive name for bugs with impressive names, short for Bug With An Impressive Name), it has a personalised domain, a logo and a website where you can learn all about it.
The finder of the bug, Hector Martin, writes on the website that:
The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision.
... the bug name M1RACLES expands, rather tortuously, as:
M1ssing Register Access Controls Leak EL0 State
It turns out that Apple’s M1 chip includes a CPU system register known, ineffably, as s3_5_c15_c10_1.
According to Hector Martin, this register can be read from by userland programs running at EL0, though he doesn’t know what the register is actually used for, if anything.
However, userland programs aren’t supposed to be able to write into it, given that it’s a system register and supposedly off-limits to EL0 programs.
But Martin discovered that userland code can write to just two individual bits inside this register – bits that are apparently otherwise unused and therefore might be considered unimportant or even irrelevant...
... and those bits can then be read out from any other userland program.
And that’s it!
That, in a nutshell, is the entirety of the “baked-in” security vulnerability CVE-2021-30747, also known as M1RACLES.
...
There’s nothing that you can do, but fortunately there’s nothing you need to do, so you can relax.
Clearly, if it is possible to access a register you're not supposed to have access to, it's a bug that must be fixed and I suppose it technically counts as a security vulnerability but does this really require creating an entire Internet domain and web site to advertise it?
Sounds like click-bait to me.
Apple patches dangerous security holes, one in active use – update now!... security patches that arrived in the update to iOS 14.6, because Apple fixed 38 significant bugs, covered by 43 different CVE bug numbers.
For what it’s worth, the update to macOS Big Sur 11.4 shared many of those bugs with iOS, as well as adding a raft of its own, with 58 significant bugs patched, covered by 73 different CVE bug numbers.
Perhaps even more importantly, one of the Big Sur bugs that was patched, now dubbed CVE-2021-30713, is a security flaw that is already known to criminals and has already and quietly been exploited in the wild.
Time to update your phone again...
We've had so many new features in the oven for a while, and now we're finally ready to share it with the world! CCC 6 offers unprecedented accountability for your backups and insight into what's changing on your Mac, plus a brand new file copier that's faster, smarter, and designed to adapt to Apple's fast pace of OS and filesystem innovation.
Take a look at what's new in CCC 6:
The core CCC backup features you know and love are now better than ever!
I never buy any software that is version x.0, but after there have been a few updates to fix the inevitable new-release bugs, I plan on upgrading. At $20 (to upgrade from version 5), it's really a no-brainer.
The most important feature for me is the faster file copier and the use of Apple's FSEvents API to eliminate the need to read every file on the computer in order to determine what's changed since the last backup.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Mike Bombich. I'm just a happy user of Carbon Copy Cloner and I wanted to share the news of a new release with those who may also be interested.
Learn the No. 1 reason some Americans don't use the internet
The U.S. Government, through the NTIA, has been surveying internet usage since 2001. Since 2009, it has also been surveying reasons for not using the internet. Of all the studies that are currently under consideration to be used to justify the broadband stimulus plan, the government’s own NTIA Internet Use Survey, which was done before the conception of the plan, is the most unbiased and insightful. As universal internet access is a foregone conclusion in the current debate, the reasons why people are not using the internet have been reduced to just two factors — lack of availability and cost — when there is a lot more to the story.
...
What is the number one reason why Americans are not connected to the internet?
I know it is hard to believe that 13% of Americans are just not interested or do not need to use the internet, especially to those of us who live and die by the internet and are ultra-connected. No matter how much we spend on a national broadband plan to provide access to broadband internet or how much we subsidize internet access, when people don’t see the need or are just not interested, adoption numbers are not going to go up substantially.
Almost half of the 13% of Americans who are not interested in the internet are age 65 or older. A third is between 45 and 65 years of age, a surprising 1/6th is between 25 and 44 and an unsurprisingly low 2% is age 15 to 24. Another remarkable finding from the NTIA survey is that there is no significant ethnic or gender difference among people who are not interested in using the internet. There is also no statistically significant difference between people in urban and rural areas who don’t see a point in using the internet.
13% of Americans are not using the Internet because they see no need for it or just don't want to.
FCC continues its robocall fight with fines, warnings and a new response team The Federal Communications Commission this week levied its largest-ever fine against a robocalling operation: $225 million, against two companies which the agency says transmitted around 1 billion robocalls shilling short-term health insurance.
The FCC said that many of the calls made in the first half of 2019 by John C. Spiller and Jakob A. Mears (who used business names including Rising Eagle and JSquared Telecom) were illegally spoofed, and that the companies lied to consumers, falsely claiming to offer health insurance plans from companies such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna. In at least one case, the agency added, the spoofing led to an unassociated company being overwhelmed with call-backs from angry customers.
“Mr. Spiller admitted to the USTelecom Industry Traceback Group that he made millions of spoofed calls per day and knowingly called consumers on the Do Not Call list as he believed that it was more profitable to target these consumers. Rising Eagle made the calls on behalf of clients, the largest of which, Health Advisors of America, was sued by the Missouri Attorney General for telemarketing violations in February 2019,” the FCC added.
“The individuals involved didn’t just lie about who they were when they made their calls—they said they were calling on behalf of well-known health insurance companies on more than a billion calls. That’s fraud on an enormous scale,” said Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.
These people don't just need a fine. They need their entire corporation to be shut down with all the assets confiscated and all the responsible individuals sentenced to years in prison.
One application where I spoke too soon was Snapz Pro X. Despite MacWorld's lackluster review of version 2.5.1, it is still a very good screen capture utility that I consider superior in many ways to the one built-in to macOS.
When I wrote my review in December, I didn't really test Snapz Pro X. I launched it, saw that the menu appeared, then I quit it and assumed that it worked. I was wrong.
