spash · HackerTrans

> Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.

To someone who happened to live under a de facto Soviet occupation (not de jure, after all it was just a "requested friendly intervention with the noble intent of suppressing the rising nation-wide anti-people criminal elements, that just kind of somehow happened to last for a few decades"), this kind of wording (and the associated themes) sound indeed very familiar.

But it's interesting to see how many HN users don't see this as troubling at all, at least judging by the dozen (-s?) of downvotes that my original comment earned me since posting, not even mentioning how quickly other people that somehow dared to draw a parallel between censorship and the other, friendly kind of censorship got quickly downvoted into white five minutes from posting.

spash

9 lat temudiscuss

"By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves"

Could you elaborate a bit more on this part? I find your post quite insightful and well thought out as a whole (though my sarcasm detectors may be a bit off especially when it comes to the above sentence), but in any case, I'm not sure why you wrote "that's not the point" when everything you say seems to support exactly that point.

If you think of moderation as a tool to shape the flow of discussion in a certain pre-approved way (without, say "malicious" intent, though that can always become debatable from someone's point of view), when does moderation become censorship, or more specifically - at which point are the users allowed to think that the moderation actually became censorship? I mean, who sets the criteria? The moderator?

spash

9 lat temudiscuss

Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then?

"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"

spash

9 lat temudiscuss

"Censorship by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"

How about:

"Curation by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

The downvote(s) on your comment were really saddening, though I was expecting exactly that when reading it few hours ago. This is sadly a trend with any discussion platform becoming "popular" past a certain threshold - the presence of forum warriors who "moderate" the content based on the few initial words is only going to rise up until everything becomes Reddit.

That said, I think your post was well written and right on spot - but the first sentence is a so obvious trigger that there are always going to be people that won't even bother reading past it. After all, there's so much to moderate and --- "Oh, hey! There's another post that looks dangerous! I've just noticed some words!"

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

Out of curiosity, what is your reason to run DD-WRT on a GL? Considering you have Shibby also deployed and are thus presumably familiar with its feature set, is there something in DD-WRT that makes it particularly important to have on the GL?

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

> Of course I understand it if you prefer not to run beta software,

Oh not at all, this is good news that there is still some activity wrt 54GL (pun intended). Having alternatives to fall back to is always a good thing. I've been on DD-WRT originally since about 2007 and went through many, many years of digging through forum threads, tracking and collecting all the reasonably stable revisions, kept comparing results with nightlies with other GL owners, had some good long stable runs even with a few broken features here and there and a good number of near-brickings saved only by a handy TFTP bootstrap...

I've only dropped my last DD-WRT install roughly some two years ago when I discovered Shibby and replaced all the other alternatives with it (i.e. the other very good VicTek's RAF firmware is not usable in all deployments as it can't fit even IPv6 support into the 4MB build that the 54GL is limited with, making your options limited) and I stopped keeping much track on DD-WRT since. Some other current DD-WRT people I know weren't very happy still, even though some stay with DD-WRT for own obscure reasons.

But by the way, the forum threads you linked to don't paint the situation in the best light with regard to stability:

  > My WRT54GL is running since ages on the mini-generic 14929 build, you can find it here:
  > ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2010/...
  > Together with a daily scheduled reboot I tend to forget were the thing is located in our house

"2010 firmware..."

"daily scheduled reboot..."

Or:

  > I just upgraded to:
  > ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2016/...
  > I've tried a few different bin's and while I did get the standard version to work, it seemed a bit unstable.

"a bit unstable" is pretty much as good as simply "unstable".

Now with Shibby I currently run GL with average half a year uptimes (usually ended by a forced powerplant cycle in the location, never had a crash or a spontaneous reboot on it as far as I remember). Still, as long as recent versions of DD-WRT build and run on 54GL, there's some chance at a good revision that can possibly squeeze few more years out of the hardware, depending on what features will work. Will keep an eye on it, it may still become handy if something bad happens with Shibby's work, which at this point and the age of the hardware wouldn't be that surprising.

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

Besides DD-WRT, which can be at times quite flaky a unreliable on WRT54GL with its outdated OS base and a slow UI (and also a real pain to keep track on the few working firmware revisions as time progresses over the years; many DD-WRT users and the DD-WRT site will sadly keep suggesting to use half a decade old firmware for it [1][2][3] and any 'official' activity seems to have stopped years ago) and the Open-WRT which sadly hasn't supported WRT54GL for the last several generations [4] despite its by now somewhat ironic name, there's also Tomato by Shibby [5] (note: This is a fork of the original 'well known' Tomato that stopped its development half a decade ago - though surprisingly people sill run even that one), which is amazingly supported today with regular and frequent updates [6], latest security fixes and modern revisions of base software and OS tools, with properly working kernel 2.6-generation, IPv6, QoS and not at the very least with the staple slick Tomato configuration interface. If you happen to run a WRT54GL, you must give Shibby's Tomato a try sometime to see what this piece of hardware can still do.

Disclaimer: I'm by no means affiliated, but run WRT54GL hardware actively and at times I'm still regularly amazed at what Shibby can squeeze out of the mere 4MB of flash space and a hardware that wouldn't properly run a smartwatch alarm applet in 2016.

--

[1] - http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54GL

[2] - http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=51486

[3] - http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=288371

  If you're lucky, you may also end up with gems like this:
  > Malachi - DD-WRT Guru
  > Your router was made in the 1800's. Why do you need firmware made yesterday.

[4] - https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt54g

[5] - http://tomato.groov.pl/

[6] - http://tomato.groov.pl/?page_id=78

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

> and I am not willing

You live with your choice.

> and I can't get

You try to look harder for other options.

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

For the moment, you still can, in a certain way. I've just made another lengthier comment about it elsewhere in the thread [1], before noticing yours which sadly got buried at the very bottom.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882626

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

Semi-hijacking your question to mention the other side of the pond too, which many people do not seem to know about and I run into this issue quite regularly.

While the laptop situation is indeed pretty bad (the X200 is probably as best as you can get here), for people looking for a modern workstation, AMD's current FX processor lineup is still free from this trash. Past the 2013 designs (Family 16h [1]) AMD includes their own equivalent of Intel's ME called PSP [2], so presumably the upcoming Zen is going to be heavily backdoored too.

Now, you can still buy an 8-core/4 GHz+ AMD Vishera [3] generation (which is the "current" FX), add a motherboard with ECC support (in a stark contrast to Intel, all AMD FX processors fully support ECC memory and for example ASUS sells a number of AMD motherboards with ECC support) and build yourself a workstation that will easily last for another decade, possibly longer (you can always buy a motherboard or two of your favourite model as a backup for the times when they finally disappear from the market). All FX processors are factory unlocked [4] and can be pushed much farther past their design specs with decent cooling, adding another bit to their possible usefulness over the long term.

Some more (random) reading on the subject of avoiding AMD PSP and Intel ME:

http://hollaforums.com/thread/557954/technology/uncorrectabl...

-

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_CPU_microarchitect...

[2] - https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_FX_microprocessors...

[4] - http://www.techpowerup.com/153445/amd-unlocked-fx-processors...

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

I can confirm that sadly - this exactly mirrors my own experiences with DDG XMPP. Sometimes for entire weeks I have been what looked like the only person reporting (or caring) that the XMPP servers are down (mind you that this was years ago, I can't comment on the current state of things), sometimes followed with reactions like "Oh, right... We've restarted the server, see if it works for you." at which point I gave up and moved to a self-hosted ejabberd ever since.

While nowadays most of my contacts are on private XMPP servers, I remember few having some reasonably solid experiences with https://jabber.at/ (can be also found at https://xmpp.zone/ for a better sounding domain name, which I guess matters to people who hate the now obsolete "Jabber" term). Can't from my personal experience vouch for a "good for a long period of time", but if someone is looking for at least a well established server, this should be as good start as any. Also, the news page shows they're quite serious about server updates and transparent, which is a big thumb up in my eyes.

Edit: typos

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

Though not a simple remote attack in that sense, AMT has been used by rootkits before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

A nice overview of what AMT and ME is capable of (and has been for the past decade) can be found in libreboot FAQ:

https://libreboot.org/faq/#intel

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

From https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd

# Why is the latest AMD hardware unsupported in libreboot?

It is extremely unlikely that any post-2013 AMD hardware will ever be supported in libreboot, due to severe security and freedom issues; so severe, that the libreboot project recommends avoiding all modern AMD hardware. If you have an AMD based system affected by the problems described below, then you should get rid of it as soon as possible. The main issues are as follows:

# AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP)

This is basically AMD's own version of the Intel Management Engine. It has all of the same basic security and freedom issues, although the implementation is wildly different.

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

I second that. I browse, guessing, about 95% of the public web with NoScript + uBlock on and unless the content that doesn't work without JS is especially crucial to what I'm doing at the moment, I'll just leave the page that won't render/work properly and look it up elsewhere, without a second breath.

But that sometimes makes for really bizarre experiences watching other people browse the same websites, cursing at how slow, bloated or broken they are, seeing that until now I didn't even know that the particular website that I've been visiting for years can do THAT.

The Bloomberg site is a really good example of it - for the first time I've turned the JavaScript on for it and... WHOA.

It's like every single piece of that 'extra' JavaScript functionality serves just one single purpose - to make your time spent on the site reading the articles as much miserable as possible.

I probably don't even want to know what I'm missing elsewhere...

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

Yep, that's exactly what happens: https://duckduckgo.com/?q="domain+transfer"+"remaining+time"

(Can actually confirm that from this month's experience, so it's even freshly verified :)

spash

10 lat temudiscuss

Same here - a satisfied Namecheap customer for years, but forced to move my domains away recently. Ironically, what originally brought me there was exactly the huge level of support for Namecheap in HN ranks (well, and few instances elsewhere.)

But their "redesign" and presumably the backend changes tied to it (or lack of them, whatever the real case is) resulted in the worst experience I've ever had with this kind of service in years, culminating in what was the last straw - one of my domains getting shut down five times in a single month due to bogus "domain contacts verification" procedures, which their support wasn't able to solve from early December to when I finally decided to move away in mid-January (from a short exchange after I moved away I assume it's still broken today as they were apparently "investigating it" even after I was gone. That after having it in some or some other way "fixed" for about three times during the previous support exchanges.) Honestly though during that time my tickets mostly kept bouncing back and forth through customer reps that insisted on politely suggesting things like "to check my spam folder", even though I specifically explained every time that I was in full control of my mail servers and that it is them who don't deliver any kind of verification emails to those servers, so there was really nothing that could even end up in "a spam folder" and that yes, I actually thoroughly checked that, several times over. Yet my requests for them to check their own mail logs because I'm here actually losing access to my domains without being able to do anything about it were each time politely swept under the rug with generic assurances like "they're working on it and will keep me informed"... Then quickly closed the ticket as fixed. Every time after the one particular domain went dark (and with another domain randomly flipping into bogus unverified states in the frontend interface, clearly lingering on the edge of the same fate), the domain was reactivated either by me or the customer support, was either set to have its contacts covered by WhoisGuard (which doesn't even use the contacts verification process at all), or at a later point even manually set back to fully verified by their techs (and one time completely having all my zone data wiped without explanation or apparently without whoever caused it having a backup at hand to restore it from) - only to again and again end up suspended as "unverified" several days later, losing me access to its emails, websites, everything...

Now I could still go on and on about how clunky the entire new interface compared to the old one is (yes, the original was lackluster, but not even remotely this level bad and in fact I've never had a single technical issue with it, other than being somewhat hard to navigate) and that ever since the redesign the new frontend frequently displays outdated or plain wrong information, crashes with cryptic errors, sometimes just decides to log you out five times in five minutes for no reason, but I think this is getting too long as it is anyway, so enough.

When I finally grew tired of running through their customer support in a neverending circle (to their credit, they were always very polite and nice, but it felt like that's all that Namecheap support was really trained for. And that clearly doesn't make my domains magically work there), I moved to Gandi just basing on their overall popularity and good reputation with a few people. Already in a week time I had two great support experiences with them and got my issues resolved each time in literally a single step of exchange. In the first case I've received about a page-length of actual technical reply from their support rep that not only bothered to carefully read through several issues that I ran into when trying to run a Python app on their web hosting platform that I ordered for the domains moved there, they even included a how-to custom tailored to my specific use case that was way beyond what I originally asked for and that ended up saving me quite some time discovering it on my own, and also acknowledged that they had a major issue in their documentation system and that they had it quickly fixed in meantime. Now second time was less technical, as I accidentally burned a discount code while customizing and re-customizing some orders in what was probably an unexpected way for their interface, that ended in the code never being applied to any order but still ended up as used and lost... I wrote down the problem in a few sentences, customer support quickly verified it and issued me a new replacement code right with the initial reply in what had to be less than an hour. Can't really say I'll be missing Namecheap any time soon.

spash

11 lat temudiscuss

> I'm being pedantic here.

Please be. Seemingly random bits of (honestly - actually very useful) information like yours are why I'm reading HN in the first place instead of, say, random Youtube comments.

Someone may argue about this being overly pedantic, or about such comment being more suitable for sites like Stack Overflow, or about the whole thing being completely clear from the standards documentation itself... etc. But that's really not the point of it when this isn't the kind of thing you would be even intentionally looking at, or for, in the first place.

Every time I open a HN thread, I can be sure that I will find at least a good few nice and memorable comments that seemingly don't add anything revolutionary to the topic at hand, but instead will make you pause, slap your forehead and exclaim "holy moly, that's in essence actually perfectly obvious, yet somehow I never even thought about it from this point of view before!" Which in turn suddenly makes you realize something completely unrelated in your own world, yet affected or plagued by a similar type of issue, that would otherwise end up completely unnoticed if not for your comment.

In short, one man's pedantic can still be other man's sudden epiphany.

spash

11 lat temudiscuss

Well, browsing with NoScript, I wasn't even aware of this gag until I returned to read HN comments some 20 hours later (as it looks, the Comic Sans is firstly set via JavaScript, along with the subsequent flip back to the 'normal' serif.)

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but even if just an unintentional byproduct - isn't that a nice "additional" reward for people that don't allow running unnecessary scripts on random web sites?

spash

12 lat temudiscuss

Few minor corrections as several posts in this thread suggest outright installing bash just to achieve tab completion in FreeBSD.

The default root shell on FreeBSD is csh (tcsh) [1] and has been that way for at least 21 years (at least if I read the revision history [2] correctly, my own memories only go back about some 15 years).

As per Wikipedia article, tcsh natively supports tab completion since about 1983 [3] (which I can confirm always worked without an issue as far as my memories go, so again, give or take 15 years).

Permanently switching any user shell to tcsh (if it happens to be sh) is pretty much a single `chsh` command away, so as far as strictly tab completion goes, manual installation of bash is not required at all.

The required steps (step) to setup tcsh for tab completion can be found i.e. in this 2004 FAQ [4]:

Tip#7: List possible completions

I often see Bash users complain that Tcsh does not give a list of completions with the tab key. This is not true. Not only can Tcsh list complentions, but it can do it in color. Just add this to your ~/.tcshrc

set autolist set color set colorcat

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/shells.h...

[2] https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/etc/master.passwd

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcsh

[4] http://www.tcsh.org/TipsAndTricks