The Federalist: Ring In Your Holidays By Buying All The Australian Wines The Chinese Won’t

Ring In Your Holidays By Buying All The Australian Wines The Chinese Won’t
By Sumantra Maitra, December 18, 2020

In an escalating dispute, Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham is taking his nation’s quarrel with China to the World Trade Organization for its tariffs on Australian products.
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Something else started it all. China, an imperial power throughout nearly its entire history, has finally realized that Australia is fit to be an outpost. The stubborn Aussie refusal to cave to China on all regional concerns eventually led to a crushing tariff over Australian wines.

I'm doing my part. My usual Shabbos wine is Teal Lake Shiraz.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 3: Apps

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 2 of this article series, I described the migration process to move all my stuff to the new computer. In this article, I want to share my experiences with application support. What just worked, what didn't work and what was easy and hard to make work.

As you probably know, the latest versions of macOS, starting from version 10.15 (Catalina), do not support 32-bit applications. No 32-bit application will work unless you run it on an older version of macOS (e.g. via a virtual machine). Apple has supported 64-bit applications for a very long time, and they have always been supported on Intel processors. Nevertheless, quite a lot of Mac apps in my possession were 32-bit. I'm not sure why, since 64-bit compilers were available on the Intel Mac platform since day-one.

Krebs on Security: Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads

Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads
Brian Krebs. November 10, 2020

It’s bad enough that many ransomware gangs now have blogs where they publish data stolen from companies that refuse to make an extortion payment. Now, one crime group has started using hacked Facebook accounts to run ads publicly pressuring their ransomware victims into paying up.

Just when you thought Facebook had hit rock bottom. Now their adware network is being used for criminal extortion. And they're not even refunding the money to the victims who had their accounts hijacked in the process.

So glad I drop-kicked them to the curb many years ago.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 2: Migration

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 1 of this article series, I explained why I needed to upgrade my old Mac, what I bought, and the shipping process.

Now that the computer had arrived, the next step was to move all of my data from the old computer to the new one. In the past, I did this the hard way - I manually created user accounts (an administrator, my personal account, and accounts for my wife and daughter). I then copied all of our documents over the LAN, manually installed all the software I require, ending up with a working system. The whole process usually takes a week or two, plus all the time needed to configure my preferences in everything.

This time, I decided to use Apple's Migration Assistant utility to speed up the process. This, as it turns out, was a mixed bag. Some parts of the migration worked flawlessly, and other parts made a mess I had to clean up after.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 1: Hardware Purchase

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

For the past 9 years, I have been using the same computer for my main home system, a Mid-2011 Mac mini server. Equipped with two 750 GB hard drives and 16 GB of RAM (upgraded from its original 4GB), it has served me very well. Originally shipped with macOS version 10.7 ("Lion"), it has been upgraded several times through macOS 10.12 ("Sierra"). Although still working great today, it has become increasingly obvious that it needs to be replaced.

The main reason is that its system software is no longer supported by Apple. Although I could theoretically get a bit more support by upgrading to macOS 10.13 ("High Sierra"), that's still an old version and it has many known problems that I don't want to have to deal with. More recent versions of macOS are not compatible with this hardware and therefore can't be installed.

Another bigger problem is that some of my applications can't be upgraded. In particular, Microsoft Office dropped support for macOS 10.12. In order to get any new updates, including security updates, I need to move on to a newer version of macOS.

Finally, it's a bit slow. Modern versions of macOS make heavy use of the file system and a SATA hard drive, no matter how well it performs, just can't keep up these days. An SSD is really required for good performance. I could replace the hard drives with SSDs, of course, but that wouldn't solve the other two problems, so it became time to shop for a new Mac.

Using a Raspberry Pi for basic network services, Part 4: DNS server

Photo credit: Michael Henzler
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Raspberry Pi for basic Networking services series:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: DHCP server
• Part 3: Static IP addresses
• Part 4: DNS

In previous articles, I described how to set up a Raspberry Pi computer to act as a DHCP server and how to configure it to serve static IP addresses. But this is only half of the solution.

If all your computers are only used to access Internet sites, then you may not need anything more, but if you run any services on your LAN, you will want to access them as well as Internet services. Some examples of services I run on my LAN include:

• Printer. My printer has a built-in Ethernet interface and acts as a print server for the entire LAN.
• Web server. Two of my computers are running web server software. I use these for documents that I want to make available to all the computers in my home. In the past, when I ran an Internet-accessible web site, I used my local web servers as a staging area for changes before uploading them to the main server.
• File servers. Several of my computers have file sharing enabled so I can copy files between my computers.
• Remote access. Several computers run different remote access tools including SSH, VNC, X2Go and others. This lets me access everything from anywhere in the house.

When accessing a remote service, you need to provide the machine's name or IP address. If you've got a small LAN, you can just type in the address. Or you can set up hosts files on your computers to assign names to the addresses. But once you get more than a trivial number of devices on your network, those two solutions quickly become unmanageable. As I wrote in part 1, I've got 26 active devices on my LAN and many more that are rarely used. Using hosts files really doesn't work because every computer needs to be updated whenever the content changes and some devices (especially embedded devices like set-top boxes and mobile phones) don't even have a hosts file that can be managed.

But there is a well-established solution to the problem. The solution is to use the DNS protocol.

Time for a new Mac

After many many years of using a Mac I purchased in 2011, it's finally time to upgrade to a new one. I just placed an order with Apple and I expect to have it in a week or two. The new computer will be much faster than the old one, but it will be missing a few I/O ports and the new version of macOS it runs will be pretty different.

How to deal with a patent troll

Lawsuit accusing entire computer industry of patent infringement fails on missed deadline
By Mike Peterson, Apple Insider. September 1, 2020

A lawsuit that accused essentially the entire computer industry of patent infringement has been dismissed because an opening brief wasn't filed by the deadline.

In September 2019, plaintiff Mers Kutt filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It alleged $350 billion in damages against more than 40 technology companies, telecom providers, and financial firms, among others. Apple was included at the top of the list.

After a majority of those companies filed opposing orders, a judge in March 2020 dismissed the case with prejudice. Kutt appealed that decision, but apparently failed to file an opening brief by a July 2 deadline. The lawsuit was tossed on Sept. 1.

In other words:

• Patent troll sues everybody in the universe for a quarter of a trillion dollars
• Everybody in the universe tells him to get bent and a judge agrees
• Patent troll claims he will appeal, but instead slinks off to his cave, not even bothering to file the paperwork to continue his suit

This is the only way to handle a bully. Don't settle out of court. Don't pay a penny. Force him to defend his idiocy and watch him back down. The last thing a troll wants is an actual fight.

Just The News: KFC to temporarily suspend use of slogan 'It's Finger Lickin' Good' amid pandemic

KFC to temporarily suspend use of slogan 'It's Finger Lickin' Good' amid pandemic
By Alex Nitzberg. Updated: August 24, 2020 - 8:09pm

The Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food chain on Monday announced that it will temporarily stop using its decades-old slogan, "It's Finger Lickin' Good," in advertising because the slogan does not seem appropriate amid the ongoing public health crisis.

Ummmm.... Are people aware of the fact that you're only supposed to be licking your own fingers?

Just The News: Russian cosmonaut wonders if he saw UFO's while aboard International Space Station

Russian cosmonaut wonders if he saw UFO's while aboard International Space Station
By Alex Nitzberg. Updated: August 20, 2020 - 6:37pm

Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner on Thursday posted a video from the International Space Showing showing a time-lapse of the aurora borealis, but he also highlighted the presence of other points of interest in the footage.

In the video, a row of what appears to be several small dots of light briefly appear and then vanish again.

Vagner asked people on Twitter what they thought it could be: "At 9-12 seconds, 5 objects appear flying alongside with the same distance. What do you think those are? Meteors, satellites or…?"

Space guests, or how I filmed the new time-lapse.

The peak of aurora borealis when passing over the Antarctic in Australia’s longitude, meaning in between them. However, in the video, you will see something else, not only the aurora. pic.twitter.com/Hdiej7IbLU

— Ivan Vagner (@ivan_mks63) August 19, 2020

P.P.S. The information was brought to the notice of Roscosmos management, the materials were sent to TsNIIMash and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences for further analysis.

— Ivan Vagner (@ivan_mks63) August 19, 2020

He definitely saw a UFO - whatever it was was flying and is (so far) unidentified. Probably not an alien spacecraft, but some kind of natural phenomenon, but definitely unidentified and flying.