Wednesday Random Stuff…

I’ve been sick for almost a month. A sinus infection turned into acute bronchitis because the inept doctors at my local urgent care center wouldn’t prescribe an antibiotic when it was obvious I needed it. I’ve been on doxycycline hyclate (antibiotic) and prednisone (steroid to help breathing) for several days now. I haven’t been focusing well. Here at TweakHound.com some misspelling and general rambling have ensued and I apologize. I’m gonna take a few days off. I might head up towards the mountains and hit a few breweries.

Macrium Reflect v7.2.4156
Bugfixes, support large cluster size (NTFS)
Download | Release Notes

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

Office Depot And Partner Ordered To Pay $35 Million For Tricking Consumers Into Thinking They Had Malware
“Consumers have a hard enough time protecting their computers from malware, viruses, and other threats,” said FTC Chairman Joe Simons. “This case should send a strong message to companies that they will face stiff consequences if they use deception to trick consumers into buying costly services they may not need.”
LOL. The ENTIRE industry uses those tactics.

Hundreds of millions of Facebook records exposed on Amazon cloud servers
One of the companies stored 146 gigabytes of data containing more than 540 million records, including comments, likes, reactions and account names, on the Amazon servers, according to UpGuard. The number of users whose data was included is not yet clear.
#DeleteFacebook

‘Beyond Sketchy’: Facebook Demanding Some New Users’ Email Passwords
I don’t know what’s worse. The ignorance of asking for the password or the ignorance of giving it. #DeleteFacebook

25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds
I didn’t find the interview interesting until this:
But, I absolutely detest modern “social media”—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It’s a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.
I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I’ve said before: “On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle”. When you’re not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it’s easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it’s also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction…
Add in anonymity, and it’s just disgusting. When you don’t even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn’t help.
I’m actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that’s wrong. Anonymity is important if you’re a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn’t be visible, and you shouldn’t be able to share it or like it.

People need to wake up to dangers of AI, warns Google ethics adviser
“AI is the single most disruptive force that humanity has ever encountered and my concern is that so much of the discussion that we hear about now is very incremental,” said De Kai, a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in an interview this week. “We are near an era when people can easily produce weapons such as fleets of armed AI drones … the cat is out of the bag.”
I would put the odds at better than even AI will be our undoing. I dunno, maybe I’m just in a mood.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I’m an American citizen
“On this trip, the kiosk directed me to a Customs and Border Patrol agent who kept my passport and sent me to secondary inspection,” Gal said. “There I quickly found myself surrounded by three armed agents wearing bullet proof vests. They started to question me aggressively regarding my trip, my current employment, and my past work for Mozilla, a non-profit organization dedicated to open technology and online privacy.”
I don’t fly much. Don’t care if I ever do again. Folks making comments on this article talk about burner phones and laptops for travel…

Luigi that ordered a Tweak Guide:
I need a legit email addy bro!