61·
16 hours agoDestroying perfectly functional tech really bothered me too from an environmentalist standpoint. I am always trying to rescue old but working tech and trying to find a use for it or fix it up to pass on to someone in need.
Snot Flickerman
Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman
Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023
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91·16 hours ago-
It’s obviously from South Park.
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Specifically from season 12, episode 8, “The China Problem” from 2008.
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It’s making fun of the idea of media makers “raping our childhoods” in particular Spielberg and Lucas violating Indiana Jones by releasing Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull earlier that year.
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Anyway, that’s so two thousand and late.
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Appstinence is just one of a seemingly growing constellation of groups, mostly led by young people, advocating for reduced reliance on technology, either for one’s own mental health or as a protest against powerful tech companies that have an ever-growing hold on all aspects of our lives.
I’ma be real with you. Choosing to dump technology entirely instead of learning to use it responsibly and finding things that aren’t dominated by corporations looking to control us seems really short sighted and leaning into false promise of things being different at best.
It’s quite like the whole Climate Change movement and how we won’t do anything to constrain giant corporations or billionaires in how they impact the planet, but instead individuals (often poverty stricken) are expected to shoulder the burden through recycling programs that don’t even end up recycling what those individuals take the time to sort.
It’s also eerily similar to the anti-AI movement which focuses on all the most negative aspects of AI generation, ignores the benefits of locally-hosted models as opposed to giant models owned by corporations run out of energy and water hogging data-centers, and similarly ignores that the AI that consistently is a failure is general purpose AI whereas highly specialized AI is often very successful. I am by no means an AI lover, I don’t use it at all in my every day life, but I think it’s foolhardy to write it off entirely instead of making regulations that prevent this kind of environment-destroying investment in endless data centers for profit. Much like the Climate Change issue, it’s the smallest and weakest among us shouldering the burden, making our own lives harder, while nothing materially changes and AI advances anyway.
These modern Luddites are not wrong that some aspects of the modern era are terrible, but some of the things they decry are the same things that are so beautiful about it. When I was a young person, finding LGBTQ+ or atheist groups was basically impossible without the internet. As someone who grew up in a relatively rural area, it was hard to make friends and connections even in a mostly unconnected world (I am in my forties, for reference, so I grew up in the era of CompuServe and AOL being the only “online” options). Having the internet suddenly opened me up to finding people who I could actually be open and vulnerable with, something I couldn’t say was true about most of my IRL peers at the time. Returning to that, especially at a period where Christofascism is taking hold, is asking to let the Christofascists dictate how society looks and functions and removing those footholds of access for people who are queer or atheist or disabled. It returns us to an unconnected world where people suffer in silence for decades not knowing that there is nothing wrong with who they are deep down as they are regularly shamed and abused by their IRL peers for not appearing or acting the “right” way.
Especially with the likelihood of modern communication methods being clamped down upon, embracing the technology and finding ways to use it to benefit humankind instead of deciding it’s all evil is the way forward. The world was, for example, a better place with Fred Rogers in it, who leveraged the technology of television, often villainized as terrible for children, as a way to connect with children and educate them in a healthy, humane, and loving way. I see shades of that type of villainization in this movement, equating screen time with being unhealthy.
All tools are able to be misused. All tools are able to be used positively. It’s all in who is using those tools and what their aims and intents are. A hammer can be used to both create and destroy in positive ways in the trade of construction. A hammer can also be wielded as a violent, dangerous weapon. It all depends on whose hands it is in, and what they aim to use that tool for.
Dropping technology instead of standing for using it in positive ways will always be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: “I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc.” Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.
He has chosen also to be terrifying. People are afraid of irritating him. No one knows to what lengths the aberrations of his passion will carry him — but be knows, for this passion is not provoked by something external. He has it well in hand; it is obedient to his will: now he lets go of the reins and now he pulls back on them. He is not afraid of himself, but he sees in the eyes of others a disquieting image‐his own‐and he makes his words and gestures conform to it. Having this external model, he is under no necessity to look for his personality within himself. He has chosen to find his being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
I have seen condensed versions of this quote, but the pieces surrounding the oft repeated quote are worth including.
In other words, in respect to how the current Republican and conservative groups communicate:
Always has been. 🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Oh look at that, another reason why I don’t want to be forced to use the same Public Ledger of Credentials as everyone else. I want to use a PLC where these motherfuckers don’t get to have an account.
Get more decentralized, Bluesky and AT protocol, or get fucked.
It’s not even worth talking about how all the Republican party stands for anymore is triggering others while acting like they’re not actively trying to trigger others. It’s the adult equivalent of someone waving their hands in your face and invading your personal space while going “I’m not touching you!”
What needs to be discussed is how to kick them to fucking curb and force them to stay on the fucking curb instead of letting them bring their childish fucking behavior to every service under the sun just so they can harass other people.
The Beagle Boys were actually Robin Hoods of their own era and were unjustly vilified by a McDuck owned and influenced media empire.
For Firefox on Android (which TenBlueLinks doesn’t have listed) add a new search engine and use these settings:
Name: Google Web
Search string URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
as @[email protected] learned before I did, strip the number 25 from the string above so it looks more like this:www .google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engineEDIT: There’s got to a Markdown option for disabling markdwon auto-formatting links, right?? The escape backslash seems to not be working for this specifically.EDIT II: Found a nasty hack that does the trick!
https[]()://www.example.com/search?q=%sappears as:
As stupid as it is: Faith is what keeps bubbles afloat. Faith can go a long way towards forcing reality to what you want it to be, and if you have the wealth, you can play nearly endless money-games to make it seem like you’re ahead when you’re actually losing your shorts.
The reason there is so much faith is because this is a make it or break it moment for late stage capitalism. The businesses (including non-AI businesses) viscerally need it to work so they can get rid of human workers. If they can’t make humans slaves, they will make digital slaves. This may be a last gasp for the old order if it fails because so many entrenched companies from automobile makers like GM and Ford to airframe makers like Boeing to general electronics like General Electric have finances that are literally upside down because they have been using stock buybacks to fake growth for the better part of two decades now absolutely need it to happen to stay afloat.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
This quote by Upton Sinclair is usually used to describe lower level employees who don’t understand how unionization could be good for them, but it applies here as well. The faith persists because this is their “salaries” that depend on this working so the bottom doesn’t fall out from under them. They have to believe it will work and as such will keep dumping money into it as long as humanly possible.
AI is like Theranos but bigger and affecting numerous industries who are all betting the future of their companies on this all working out. For their livelihoods and their plan to continue ignoring all the little people in the world, there is no losing state they can or will accept until they are on the edge and about to leap from the top of their buildings to avoid the consequences.
Once the faith breaks, it will be like a dam breaking and flooding out too fast to escape.
39·3 days agoTaybuntu 25.10 (Taylor’s Version)
to be fair, shitty dumb memes is probably the best use of AI slop there is.
Linux Kernel 6.17.3 (Taylor’s Version)
The patch is for Windows 10, Windows 11, and Server 2008 up to Server 2025.
Further, there’s companies that make custom-built modern machines that support classic PCI and modern operating systems and classic operating systems.
It’s conceivable that legacy systems are using modern OSes with virtualization running a legacy OS and legacy PCI cards, for example. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
Hang on a minute, baby, someone is wrong on the internet.
Right, it was referenced in one of the articles that a bunch of legacy industrial machines likely still use this hardware, so the people using those old machines are probably going to have to go dig up PCI modems from that era without the Agere/Lucent chipset.
I’m sure you’re right and there’s lots of stuff they’ve missed like this over the years that they sort of kept on for compatibility but that opens exploits due to how old they are.
Other articles make more clear why that is.
https://cyberpress.org/windows-agere-modem-driver-0-day-flaws/
Rather than issuing a traditional patch for each vulnerability, Microsoft’s October cumulative update completely removes the ltmdm64.sys driver from affected systems.
As a result, all fax modem hardware relying on the Agere Modem driver will cease to function. While mail and messaging over IP have largely supplanted analog modems, some industrial and legacy applications still depend on fax modems.
Organizations must therefore audit their environments for any remaining modem dependencies and either migrate to supported alternatives or implement workarounds where available.
Microsoft’s advisory explicitly recommends that customers eliminate any reliance on the deprecated hardware to avoid service disruptions.
So maybe not all the way back to the original release, but back to the first release that included this specific telephony modem driver,
ltmdm64.sys. If I recall correctly, Windows 3.1 brought networking capabilities.However, another article claims it has only been shipped with every version of Windows since 2006.
https://www.thestack.technology/windows-users-hacked-due-to-legacy-fax-modem-driver/
CVE-2025-24990 was credited to a security researcher going by the handle @shitsecure who told The Stack by DM “it’s a driver from 2006, never changed… I think it was historically shipped with everything, although that doesn’t make sense at all.”
Which honestly makes a lot more sense, since the “64” part of the driver name implies it’s for 64 bit systems, which were first introduced in 2003.
Some more extraneous info on this driver/hardware:
https://www.sysnative.com/forums/drivers/1216/driver
Perhaps, either that or they made a very quick fix making updates to address them the day before this patch release.
…more fruit?