Google shutting down Bookmarks

I just saw this message this morning. So Google shuts down yet another really useful web service, forcing the rest of us to scramble in search of an alternative.

Once again, the point is hammered home: If you aren't paying for the service, then you are not the customer, you are the product. And cloud-based software means it can be taken away from you at any time and you will have absolutely no recourse when it happens.

And now I need to either switch back to using locally-stored bookmark files, create a web page somewhere to provide remote access, or switch to a different cloud service and risk them in turn going away.

And now my question to you: Is there a good alternative? Ideally, it should offer:

• Stored on an Internet-hosted server so I can access bookmarks when I'm away from home
• Cross-platform. Should work with multiple browsers (especially Firefox, but ideally others as well) and on multiple platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux)
• Have a convenient browser add-on so the bookmarks can be presented as a menu somewhere (ideally on its bookmarks toolbar)

I know Apple supports shared bookmarks via iCloud, but it only supports their Safari browser on Apple devices. Firefox offers a sync service, but it only supports Firefox.

If you know of any other good alternatives, please let me know.

The Heisenberg Life Insurance Principle

H/T Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic actually makes a lot of sense.

The best Disney parade ever

Back in 2000, Disney had their Millennium Celebration. Among many incredible attractions was the Tapestry Of Nations parade at Epcot, which many people (myself included) consider the best parade Disney ever produced.

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.

More Dell sleazy behavior

As you may already be aware, Dell is a company I never want to do business with, thanks to very sleazy and capricious behavior.

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.

Just The News: Drunk 19-year-old breaks into Airbnb that was 'loaded with cops'

Drunk 19-year-old breaks into Airbnb that was 'loaded with cops'
By Nicholas Sherman, Updated: June 1, 2021 - 3:50pm

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!".

Speaking of old IBM keyboards

Like New
May 31, 2021, Michal Necasek

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.

Clickbait security hole?

“Unpatchable” vuln in Apple’s new Mac chip – what you need to know
By Paul Ducklin, 27 May 2021

Apple’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.

Sophos: Apple patches dangerous security holes, one in active use – update now!

Apple patches dangerous security holes, one in active use – update now!
By Paul Ducklin, 25 May 2021

... 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...

Product announcement: Carbon Copy Cloner version 6

CCC 6 is here! Faster backups, better accountability, Dark Mode, and so much more
by Mike | May 19, 2021

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:

• Faster backups with our next-generation file copier
• Quick Update: Update your backups up to 20x faster
• Redesigned interface with Dark Mode, real time task performance info and estimated time remaining
• Snapshot navigator: Easy way to explore older versions of files
• CCC Dashboard: The new menubar app, now with snapshot disk usage
• Run backups "When files are modified on the source"
• Task Preview: See what will happen before you back up
• Backup Audit: Review what was copied and why
• Compare: Visual comparison of the source and destination
• Advanced file verification options
• Pause a backup, and several other features our users have asked for

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.

Fierce Telecom: Learn the No. 1 reason some Americans don't use the internet

Learn the No. 1 reason some Americans don't use the internet
By Roger Entner May 19, 2021 10:02am

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.