Latest Round of Xorg Vulnerabilities Added Recently and Some Don’t Work Without SELinux Turned On.

Latest Round of Xorg Vulnerabilities Added Recently and Some Don’t Work Without SELinux Turned On.

The latest round of Xorg (X11) vulnerabilities to be patched were added within the last several years.

Out of half a dozen, the oldest ones were added in 2006, but many in 2011, 2012, or 2014.

Many of the defects might have been added by Red Hat employees.

They don’t specify which revision added them, only the release, however, Red Hat likes to complain that they’ve had most of the maintenance burden of Xorg “for years now” whenever the topic of Wayland, which doesn’t really work productively, comes up and they have to read the “Xorg is a mess and we have to do something and this is something” spiel.

This is the company that tells us we need to use Wayland, and which is mainly responsible for Wayland, which breaks everything and makes my computer impossible to use productively until I run the X11 session.

Honestly, Wayland is so f***ed that it causes more graphical glitching, session crashes, and power management issues and other annoyances than X11, which were supposedly the list of reasons X11 had to go, plus it also has no concept of screen savers, so I can’t use XScreenSaver with it. I’ve written a lot about why Wayland is in no sense of the word ready.

Jamie Zawinski said he no longer maintains XScreenSaver for the practical reasons we used to use screen savers for (to prevent burn in, although LCD/LED panels can still burn in).

For years now, the “Environmental Protection Agency” (Employment Prevention Agency) has been a party-pooper requiring the screen to turn off regardless of what the user wanted, because we need MOAR POWER to charge Teslas which won’t charge when it’s cold outside, or something. Or to “SAVE THE PLANET!” because of the sheer arrogance that the people responsible for overpopulation and environmental destruction are going to save it if the computer uses three less watts.

I think the real policy issue with IBM/RH’s war on screen savers is that a world dominated by mega-corporations has no use for art, or a well-educated public, or people who can think for themselves to any meaningful degree.

I don’t even have bizarre hardware, and Wayland is a big shitpile. Intel was promoting Wayland heavily and it doesn’t even work quite right on Intel’s graphics chipsets.

The only thing Wayland accomplished (Mission Accomplished) was stop and make everyone reinvent the wheel to the point of not getting much else done, just so that their software would do what it already did, with implementation gaps that are “not in scope” and reimplementing the same feature in different code (with different quirks) depending on which compositing manager your desktop environment runs in.

Two of the security vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-0409: SELinux context corruption and CVE-2024-0408: SELinux unlabeled GLX PBuffer) don’t work at all unless the user is running with SELinux turned on, which Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux do.

SELinux is such an ungainly mess that it’s hardly possible to understand, and Fedora bumps the selinux-policy all the time because it’s still managing to cause a lot of trouble even more than two decades in.

Now it is actually adding security problems through the “security” policy for the X Server.

A while back, SELinux was patched to remove references to the United States National Security Agency, which originally wrote it. The Agency likes to spy on the entire world and “accidentally” bulk collect data about Americans, or “incidentally” collect it, and then look at the data, with only a secret court that basically only ever says yes to them supervising it.

Stephen Smalley updated his email address and "debranded" SELinux from "NSA SELinux" to simply "SELinux".  We've come a long way from the original NSA submission and I would consider SELinux a true community project at this point so removing the NSA branding just makes sense.

-Linux Kernel Mailing List

Ah yes, which community would that be? The Intelligence Community? IBM/Red Hat? Those are really the only people who have a lot of interest in SELinux. Most non-RH distributions don’t even have it or don’t even have any sort of “security modules” loaded by default, or use AppArmor.

I haven’t seen any evidence that there are major security problems that SELinux is saving real people from. It ticks a box, and in this case, it managed to make Xorg even worse just by being turned on. If IBM/RH cared about security, they wouldn’t be telling people to use RH in Microsoft Azure and AWS where the data breaches keep happening.

I’m just not sure this monthly panic about Xorg bugs is “organic”. Actually, it’s getting pretty Groundhog Day-ish.

I mean, the issues are being fixed. Lots of software has an old and complicated codebase that is difficult to understand and the source of constant bugs.

Also, some of the prior hysteria pointed out that some dated back into the 1980s and 1990s. (Windows routinely has security vulnerabilities this old and no big deal is usually made about them.)

By this example, we should delete Mozilla Firefox and even Linux itself because they too tick all those requirements for not being “secure”, or “modern” or something.

“Secure” and “Modern” are increasingly marketing buzz words, which translate to “Heinously bloated” and “under the control of someone else”, counter-respectively.

Typically, when someone starts throwing those words around to the point of abuse, I just start tuning out.

As always, patch your software. Nothing to see here.

Bruce Perens: “Open Source Has Failed Its Users.”

Bruce Perens: “Open Source Has Failed Its Users.”

Bruce Perens has finally admitted that “Open Source has failed its users.” from the angle that users who expect to have Freedom from Open Source usually get no such thing at all.

Ever since the Open Source “movement” started, it has not been about the Freedom of the user at all.

The Free Software Movement is more than a decade and a half older, and Free Software is about protecting the Freedom of the user who gets a copy.

“Open Source” started out in the late 1990s to persuade businesses of a “superior method to develop software which works better, and you can even have free labor too”, and by the benchmarks that the movement itself set for itself, it has been a raging success.

Almost everyone on the planet today has some Open Source software, whether they realize it or not. It’s in Android, it’s in Mac OS, it’s in the iPhone, it’s in cars, it’s even in Windows, bits and pieces of this Open Source.

But these companies have packaged it, often, in ways where the user cannot run a different version of it, or at least not easily, and enjoy any sort of Freedom to improve on it, or to remove malicious features and replace it with a version of the program without the malicious feature.

What finally sent Bruce Perens off the edge?

IBM. IBM and Red Hat.

Today, Red Hat is owned by IBM and it is not at all like the Red Hat from 10 or 20 years ago. Today, we have a Red Hat that is a major parasite and a troll, and something that might as well be another Oracle, or another Google, or another Apple.

Whenever they “deal with” the GPL, they have lawyers on standby trying to figure out how to sabotage the GPL and make it effectively meaningless to the user.

The GNU General Public License was created as a Free Software License, to make sure that the user would always have the Freedom to use modified copies, to share the improvements in that copy, and to compile and run a different version of that copy.

Over the years, and especially culminating under IBM’s ownership and tenure of “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”, Red Hat has been doing increasingly nastier things with “their” Linux kernel.

They think that there’s some magic words that their lawyers can sprinkle into some other agreement that lets them retaliate against their customers for flexing their rights under the GPL, and most of their customers won’t dare to question this, much less sue Red Hat, which in my opinion, they definitely deserve for trying to pull this shit.

Over the years I’ve fought off some nasty companies who just figured they could throw a Linux kernel and some other stuff over the fence and walk off and refuse to hand over the source code. Probably the biggest one was Samsung, with a Blu Ray player, model BD-C5500, around 2009-2010.

I argued, as the Vizio lawsuit does now, that when they sold me one, they made a “contract” with me, that the GPL was a “contract” with the user, and that I wanted the source code or they’d better prepare to argue that it was not a contract.

No court has ruled on whether the GPL is or isn’t a contract. If the GPL is a contract, as they seem to be moving in the direction that it is, then every software license is a contract, and potentially any user can sue for the distributor’s failure to perform a thing under that contract.

This will not help “Open Source” users at all, because those licenses don’t involve the author or the distributor promising to do anything.

In the specific case of Samsung, I was able to get them to turn over the GPL/LGPL stuff in a ZIP file pretty quickly once I started down that road, but they should have just complied.

Thanks to “Open Source” software elsewhere that didn’t protect my Freedoms at all, there was still no way to study the code and run a different version on my player.

Companies hoard source code and violate licenses even when there is absolutely no practical benefit for them to do so. These companies, serial GPL violators, are usually just a “bag of dicks”. They’re usually not even trying to hide it because they can prevent you from doing something by hiding it.

Red Hat even falls into this category now, under IBM, as it pertains to trying to hide the kernel and call it “theirs” even though it is GPL-licensed. A “bag of dicks” that I believe are violating “the spirit of the license” even if what they are doing is legal.

The GNU GPL is Open Source, but it isn’t Open Source.

The goal of the GNU GPL is to give users the Freedom to do anything they want, as users. It meets the “Open Source Definition” by that measure, but it is a disservice to refer to it as an “Open Source license”. It is a “Free Software License”.

Open Source tends to degenerate into proprietary software that the user cannot actually do anything with except run, often almost immediately as soon as anyone else who finds it to be a handy program gets it and cobbles it into something else.

The GNU GPLv2 was released in 1991, when computer users faced different threats.

Most users of the PC were not faced with malicious software that controlled which operating system was allowed to boot. This malicious software that users face today is called “UEFI” and “Secure Boot”. On non-x86 systems, you frequently can’t turn it off at all and boot a different operating system, and on x86 systems, it’s only possible for legacy reasons which Microsoft is increasingly not supporting anymore at all.

It’s designed so that Microsoft can throw a switch later and force their partners to, and they can say “All ours now….All ours now.” about the PC and leave the user with no choices except whatever Microsoft allows.

And a lot of really terrible human beings have collaborated with Microsoft to “support” this system on the PC from the Linux side, and not only to support it, but to put a backdoor into the OS. This backdoor is even in Debian. The backdoor is called Linux Vendor Firmware Service.

LVFS “dials home” and uploads “blacklists” of things Microsoft doesn’t want you to have on your computer, and then sneaks these blacklists into your UEFI firmware, quietly.

In fact, you will only find out about LVFS doing this when it, like everything IBM and Microsoft have a hand in, breaks down and starts throwing weird indecipherable error messages.

I recommend purging LVFS out of the system and not giving the OS a network connection until it is gone.

The fact that this horseshit is even in Debian shows that Debian no longer meaningfully respects the user’s Freedom. It’s up to the user to know that Debian, even, is doing things behind their back and stop it.

Bruce Perens is right that Open Source has failed its users. Why has it failed? Money is a corrupting factor.

Microsoft and others have basically bought and bribed their way in. They pay generous salaries to people without any form of conscience to assist them in harming billions of computer users.

So what do we do about it?

Well, we will have to remain apprised of the situation. For now, do we have to panic and run for the fire escapes from the PC? No. There’s a very good chance that the computer you use right now will continue working for years, and all you should do to it is turn off “Secure Boot” and remove LVFS.

In the future, we’ll have to be much more careful to buy from PC vendors that include firmware that’s not a pile of garbage that hides bugs and locks you out calling itself “Security”. OEMs like System76 appear to be concerned about your Freedom as of the time of this writing, but as always, stay informed. Things can change.

The various “Pi” devices are cheap, and always getting faster. Each iteration gets multiples faster than the last one, and they can be built for between $100-150.

More work is being focused on emulating x86 for Wine, and at the rate the Pi systems are improving, they should be able to run the majority of Windows software, if not now, eventually. The faster the CPU, the less the dynamic binary translation even matters.

I personally, am going to use whatever keeps Microsoft’s operating system out of my life, even if it means not using the x86 PC anymore. The only thing Microsoft is bringing to computing anywhere they go is more viruses and data breaches.

Recently, the Lake County, Illinois Health Department had their second data breach this year, and third in the past two years. They implicated Microsoft in passing.

Microsoft is responsible for thousands of data breaches. Every scammer on the planet probably has your Social Security Number and other stuff because someone else paid Microsoft to do things for them.

Microsoft is an option for when you don’t give a damn about Security because it’s someone else who will suffer every time you get attacked.

And some of their victims, direct customers who do get attacked later and lose something keep going back, a lot of the time.

“Did Microsoft do this to you?”

“Yeah, but you gotta understand, deep down, they really love me!”

The kind of Nazis and morons that they hire to work at Azure, who brag about their drug binges and venereal disease and all the coworkers who should “be deported”, and how the Indian CEOs are ruining tech companies, who cap it off with a good stabbing on the Microsoft Campus, should have been your first clue.

We absolutely cannot depend upon proprietary software companies.

So instead of stewing on the fact that the “Open Source” people kind of suck because “Open Source” isn’t about Freedom, let’s move this in a more positive direction.

It’s unfortunate every time a software developer chooses to use an “Open Source” license instead of a “Free Software” one with copyleft features, because it means there’s another program out there where the freeloaders in the Fortune 500 can use gulag labor to build roads only they can benefit from, so to speak.

That library or that utility you release under the Open Source license instead of the Copyleft one, there might be an improved version floating around in Windows, Apple, or Android that only those companies can use.

They can quietly run off with it, not even tell you they used it at all, and then you find out that Intel has created an entire malware program designed to undermine the security of the user’s OS, out of your OS, like the MINIX incident.

Everyone with a post-2016 Intel computer is running an entire UNIX-like OS on the CPU, which is there to spy on them and act as a backdoor that is impossible for the user to remove and which the OS you see is unaware of, and cannot control.

MINIX is “Open Source”. Open Source means it’s only a matter of time before a program you release like this gets turned around and used to attack the user, or at the very least, by Tech Company jerks on the Left Coast, or maybe even a Communist regime, to harm people and benefit themselves at the expense of millions or billions.

Don’t be a promoter of “Open Source”. Be a promoter of “Free Software”. Make sure your users keep their rights no matter whose hands your program has passed through.

This is not to say that the GPLv2 is perfect. It is not. It is deprecated by the GPLv3, which was designed with more modern threats to the users in mind.

The only real opposition to GPLv3, are malicious entities that want to harm your users, and they have a lot of anti-GPL propaganda out there to try to discourage developers from choosing this license.

In the context of booting a computer, the whole “systemd-boot” setup is designed to replace GRUB2, in order to impose Microsoft’s “Secure Boot” malware on the user.

Microsoft refuses to directly sign anything under the GPLv3 because then they would have to tell you how to work around Secure Boot, so the current setup is using a program called “shim” to load GRUB.

Shim is a binary the user is not allowed to control, and it’s licensed under an “Open Source” license, which makes it easy to attack the user’s Freedom.

The problem with this setup is that it’s flakier. There’s no technical reason why GRUB2 can’t boot a PC directly. They’ve made the system crankier and more prone to weird failures purely to appease Microsoft and help them attack the user.

Open Source has “failed its users”. It was designed to, so it is doing what it was made to do.

According to Wikipedia, the UK and Canada Fought for Manuel Noriega and the Nazis Assisted the United States. Corporate Vandalism is More Serious.

According to Wikipedia, the United Kingdom Fought on the Side of Manuel Noriega and the Nazis Assisted the United States. Corporate Vandalism is More Serious.

I went to read the article on the US invasion of Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, and found this:

Of course, you can probably see what the problems are.

For starters, the Canadians and British were supposedly at war with the United States, taking the side of Panamanian dictator Noriega, and the United States was assisted by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which ceased to exist at the end of World War II, over 40 years prior to the intervention in Panama.

The correct version is this:

I always correct Wikipedia vandalism when I see it and request article protection of some kind when it’s getting out of control.

The unfortunate thing is, that anyone who links to an article gets the article, in a vandalized state. Sometimes the vandalism is stupid or obvious like a bunch of random letters or saying that the Axis from World War II was involved in a military intervention of the late 1980s, and sometimes it’s a corporate PR firm from the oil and tobacco companies, Walmart, Microsoft, etc.

Many corporate trolls pay a lot of money to make sure that their vandalism of Wikipedia “sticks”. They have PR firms that provide “editors” who rack up a lot of edits and win “elections” to watch over Wikipedia as a whole, and then as a backstop, they make sure that the foundation behind Wikipedia is subservient to the moneyed interests.

After George W. Bush started defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 2000s, I started seeing ads for BP and Walmart, now there are ads everywhere.

They say that these “don’t affect their content”, but with government funding being “only 1.6% of the budget”, who affects the content? The people paying for the lights to be kept on.

You don’t shit on who is paying the bills. “This guy gets whatever he wants.”

The Wikipedia “project” is as much of a charity as NPR was after BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. They needed PR and they needed it fast, after dumping 134 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Then spraying it with toxic “dispersants” which caused it to fall to the sea floor and cause a disaster where the news cameras couldn’t see it.

Where did they go? Why, NPR and PBS of course. Then there were “documentaries” about BP washing oil off of birds. Where did the oil come from? Don’t let your tiny little smooth brain worry about that, my friend.

With Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Wikipedia, it’s the same song and dance.

KIA Sends “Steering Wheel Lock”.

KIA sent me a steering wheel lock after the car got stolen from my ex and the thief did so much damage that the insurance company totaled it out instead of trying to fix it.

It was the best thing that could have happened to that car anyway, from my perspective. I lost it to him when we split up and it had my name on the title, and now it’s a pile of scrap metal sitting in a dump waiting to be crushed.

It seems like most people lost their Kia, or Hyundai due to lack of any real security system before the “club” thing ever arrived for the steering wheel.

The “club” doesn’t really work if the thief is prepared to saw it out of your steering wheel, which is easy to do if they have a tool, and Reddit is full of people saying that a lot of would-be thieves that didn’t manage to steal their car for whatever reason shattered the glass anyway, got in, figured out they weren’t going anywhere, and then further vandalized the car by, quote “pissing in it, kicking dents in the side, taking a knife to the upholstery, and busting out the rest of the windows”, unquote.

Many who installed the “security update software” and applied the window stickers that come with it say someone started their car and drove off with it anyway, so the “software”, whatever it actually is that takes the dealer three hours to install, doesn’t even work either.

Many insurance companies won’t touch these cars if you didn’t have a policy with them before this all started, and many folks on Reddit are saying their cars are being vandalized every single month as soon as someone sees it’s a Kia or Hyundai.

Despite this, and the fact that Kia and Hyundai just make really awful cars in general, they still sell, sometimes for way over the MSRP.

Why? Almost all of them turn into a horrific oil burning monster. Some of the ones out there explode, and all you get is “software” that tries to figure out if it’s about to. I personally witnessed two explode in two back-to-back weeks in 2020.

Most of the engines are so poorly-built that the factory fill is Valvoline MaxLife, which is oil for old worn out engines that people don’t want to fix correctly, which covers up some leakage and burning. Why is this the factory fill in any new car?

I use Castrol Edge High Mileage in the Buick right now, but it’s 15 years old, and doesn’t consume oil that fast even with regular oil. High Mileage slows it from 2/5ths of a quart every 2,000 miles to about every 3,000 miles instead. That way I only use half a top off quart every 6,000 mile interval.

Valvoline’s MaxLife is great oil in some old junker that’s burning and leaking so fast you don’t know what else to do with it. I’ve used it in cars that had over 260,000 miles on them and were consuming a quart a month and it slowed it down to a quart every 5-6 months. But it is not something you’d have to use in a new car that was built properly.

I do have my eye on the new Buick Envista. It’s got a Korean transmission and a Mexican engine. It’s GM’s new way of selling compliance/economy cars in the US.

You can’t build something to hit a $25,000 entry price in the US market in the US or Canada anymore. The labor costs are just too high. Mexicans and Koreans are obviously working for those wages that you can’t live on in America, and Americans are working for wages where they can’t build an American car.

It’s a race to the bottom.

Buying foreign-made cars used to mark you for death (slight exaggeration) if you were in a Midwest American family where some of your parents or grandparents almost certainly worked at or retired from GM, Ford, or Chrysler, but almost everyone made enough back then to employ their neighbor, and if they didn’t pitch in it was treason because they could do that, but they were just being cheap.

Anyway, Kia builds poorly built cars and they’re selling them in the $40,000+ price range now instead of the “$20,000 garbage pile”, but the quality hasn’t gotten better.

One person on Reddit was complaining that he has a 2023 and it hasn’t even got 10,000 miles on it and it’s in the dealer for a transmission code already, and they won’t even give him a shop loaner.

Along with being one of the dirtiest, least ethical, most lawbreaking (Kia’s finance arm violated repo laws in every American state) car companies, Kia and Hyundai have some of the most criminally unscrupulous dealerships that even cheat THEM.

3 months after buying the 2018 Kia Soul+ my air conditioner didn’t work. Back then they gave me a loaner and billed Kia for a bunch of air conditioner work. I got it back and the air conditioner didn’t work. I rolled it back in and popped the hood and pointed at a cut fuse wire, and they said “Oh…” and billed Kia again.

A few years in, my ex told me it wouldn’t always start when you turned the key, but when the crackhead bashed the window in, ripped the steering column off, and turned it, it fired right up, and then they found the car out in the woods in the middle of Washington State. The cops told him that a lot of these people are vagrants and they just live in the woods because of course they do, and so it’s not uncommon to eventually find the car ditched there.

Anyway, in closing, you don’t want to buy a Kia. They’re just junky cars, shady people, and the price is the price of a “normal” car that has a Quality Assurance process and isn’t built in a factory employing illegal aliens from Honduras who are also 14, in Alabama, as one of Kia/Hyundai’s “partners” was found to be doing.

They don’t just go down there to the US South, which is practically a Shithole Country that we fought a war to get back, to avoid the UAW union, they go down there to bribe politicians and violate child labor and immigration laws in their factories.

Then you wonder why your car ends up having a 10,000 mile transmission failure, or immediately becomes a neverending oil burning monster, or has electrical problems everywhere, or why the air conditioner was overcharged with freon by 27%.

CNN Testing Block for Brave Browser, Users of Anti-Cookie Notification Lists. Lies About “Privacy” Law.

CNN Testing Block for Brave Browser, Users of Anti-Cookie Notification Lists. Lies About “Privacy” Law.

CNN is blocking the Brave Web browser, and others who use the “Easylist Cookie Filter” and demanding that they turn off that list or switch browsers.

Further, CNN is lying about what the EU’s GDPR privacy law actually requires. There is no requirement that they load the “consent” screen for cookies. The only requirement is that they don’t set any tracking cookies until the user allows it.

If you have your browser set to hide the consent screen, then there’s no way you can accidentally consent to cookies.

This bothers CNN, because many sites bring up the most annoying possible consent screen with millions of buttons and toggles, and if you have your browser set to forget cookies, it will forget the cookie that kept your cookie preferences, so you’ll just see the same screen on every site over and over again.

So they’ve resorted to lying about “components that are required in order to protect your privacy”.

The good news is that this is trivial to bypass. Just set “cnn.com” back to “default” in NoScript (or in the advanced permissions of your browser as a site rule), and then it can’t run the script that sends you to “Browser Blocked” instead of the “edition.cnn.com” site where you get the articles.

Of course, none of the videos will work, but who cares? Honestly, fuck CNN.

There’s basically no reason to try to play the videos. Many try to load DRM anyway (Widevine) and I have that disabled too.

Their reporting is getting worse all the time. More of what there is, is merely an ad disguised as news, or government propaganda. They lose money and fire people, mostly, because their ratings are bad.

Their ratings are bad because they lie all the time and disgust people who are looking for reporting. Also, smarter people block the ads, quickly skim over it to keep “an eye on CNN”. and there’s just no money to be made out of people who don’t watch ads and who skim over text.

NPR has also become a total spam farm. There’s been a lot of NPR “articles” about “Al Bundy women” in the “fat acceptance movement” that have amused me recently, not much else.

The news in general is dying, and they take these aggressive “Browser Blocked” screens to prevent what little revenue they have from slipping away.

Browser block screens are usually not that hard to defeat, but most people reading CNN probably don’t know what to do except comply.

(Like they did with the illegal house arrest and mass job loss order coming from Democrat governors.)

The part that really rankles my ass about CNN, is that this Browser Block screen shows that their lying really knows no bounds and will not be limited to “only” their “reporting”.

To stay legal with the GDPR all they have to do is default to not setting cookies if they can’t load the consent screen. The user has expressed their desire to not have tracking by using a browser like Brave in the first place.

CNN lies about what the law actually says.

It seems that sometimes I get the screen and sometimes I don’t, so this could just be a test for something they’re planning to go live with. The wording may change. They may change their mind and not do it at all.

The Web improves all the time, doesn’t it?

Kiwi Farms Re-Listed by Microsoft Bing and Their Pet, DuckDuckGo.

Kiwi Farms Re-Listed by Microsoft Bing and Their Pet, DuckDuckGo.

Today (November 15th, 2023), I noticed that DuckDuckGo, which is just a skin for Microsoft Bing, was returning Kiwi Farms to the top of the search again.

Google is still blacklisting it.

I wonder if the actual Nazis at Microsoft (see the full list of posts about the MicroSSoft Nazi, Joseph Cantrell) have removed the blacklist deliberately or if this is just another “something happened something happened”.

Until today, no American search engine would even tell you that the Kiwi Farms existed, or at least where to find it, but now thanks to MicroSSoft Bing, there are two (if you count the DuckDuckGo skin, which is hosted in MicroSSoft Azure and pays MicroSSoft Bing for results).

Yandex, a Russian engine with an English language version (they’re like the Russian Google), never removed Kiwi Farms to begin with.

Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

There’s been a steep decline in Google News on my phone, and now it recommends stories saying “Life hack, put your toilet paper in the freezer.”

This after Google laid off at least 50 people from their News division. So why wouldn’t it behave more like MSN floating garbage and nonsense to the top now?

I’ve noticed a sharp increase in sources like the tabloid sites as well.

In just a generation, we’ve gone from Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, to Lester Holt and Bill O’Reilly, to THIS.

The billionaires bought the news figuring they could run it as a propaganda rag that people would pay money to read. Then when they erected paywalls, they noticed they lost their ad revenue with very few subscribers, thus losing more money than they gained in subscriptions, and then after that they decided to do mass layoffs or even put the companies into bankruptcy and walk away from it.

The news is dead.

I was on the phone with my mother, who is a nurse and so hasn’t had trouble finding work since the early 1980s recession.

It’s so long ago now, plus my dad confiscated all the money and paid the bills himself and kept it all in his checking account, so she had no idea what inflation was running in that era, but I did manage to finally get through to her what finding a job is like now.

The U6 unemployment rate, which counts workers working REALLY bad jobs that are way beneath their skill set, or a few hours a week because they can’t find anything else, and “discouraged” workers is over 7.5% in Illinois right now. (October 2023, latest data, BLS)

It’s over 10% in Los Angeles and New York City.

7.2% in the US overall.

The early 80s recession was considered horrific, but the worst that unemployment ever got was near 11% by this measure, which they don’t publish conspicuously anymore, and in 1981 when she became a nurse it was about like it is now.

I asked her “So how were you doing in the jobs market in 1980 and 1981 when you weren’t a nurse yet?”

She said, something like “Oh it was terrible out there. All I could find was a waitress job at Richards (a restaurant in Indiana, I don’t know if it’s still there, but it had decent food in the 90s), and it barely paid me $2 an hour after I counted my tips and I had to go in for 10 hours every day to be on the clock for 7 because they did split shifts where I had to sit 3 hours with nothing to do then clock in for the next rush.”

I said, “Did you try to find anything better than this?”

She said, “Oh yeah, I was out there pounding the pavement. I tried to get a job at GM and they wouldn’t hire me. I went out to RCA and they hired both of your dad’s sisters but didn’t call me back.”

My dad’s sisters both have severe mental illness, so I can’t imagine they even had that job 3 months later knowing them. But they wouldn’t hire mom.

She said, “Finally I spent $1,600 on nursing school.” ($6,000 in 2023)

The State was running some sort of program where 160 people applied for 24 spots where the State would help them with some of their expenses.

My dad tried to sabotage her by not allowing her to study during the evenings “Because you have other things to do.” and turning off her alarm so it wouldn’t ring. Knowing that if she missed one day that they’d kick her out.

At first, he said “If you can find $1,600 you can go to school.” and walked off laughing and puffing a cigarette. He never figured she would. My grandmother and great-grandmother pooled the money together and paid for everything, so he resorted to sabotage saying “You’ll leave me if you become a nurse.”

He was always paranoid that she’d leave, but he would never treat her well so she figured out a way to leave. Her next two husbands were much worse.

But she got around the alarm clock sabotage by setting a second alarm. He can’t be woken up by anything so she set that for 3 AM and got a couple hours sleep, woke up, studied, and slipped out the door, and he never figured out what was going on.

But, it was bad out there in the 80s, real bad.

The news SAID it was bad, which is something they won’t do today even though it’s as bad finding a good job as it was in 1981.

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that many Venezuelan migrants were shocked that they came here and there’s nothing for them and they’ve been sleeping on the floor at the airport or in a tent city in a public park for months.

It’s starting to get cold and it’ll only get worse.

Many of them now apply for funds from the State through Catholic Charities to self-deport back to Venezuela, or to give up and go back down to a State where they won’t freeze to death.

They all got snookered in thinking it would be better in America for them than it would be in Venezuela, and the news quoted one man who came to Chicago as saying, “The American Dream no longer exists. […] If I’m going to sleep on the ground in Chicago I’d rather do it in Venezuela.”

So, all they did was walk through a jungle in a caravan, sneak into the US, and realize that it’s a real estate scam with bad winters, bullets flying everywhere, no jobs, and a lot of people who REALLY don’t want them here (including Chicagoans after they passed a “Welcoming City Ordinance” and then got 20,000 Venezuelans), and now they want to go back to Venezuela, where they will be treated worse than if they had never left for “failing to support the revolution”, which has left them with money worth so little that they “throw it in the trash because it’s not worth the trip to the bank” and “we still owe De La Rue millions and millions of dollars for printing it” according to one of the SeaMonkey (web browser suite) developers I’ve spoken to, who is in Venezuela.

I asked “tomman” what he thought about the mass illegal migration to the US, and he said “The last thing we need is more defectors.”, he seemed to be distraught by the idea that they’ve given up fixing anything and left.

In my opinion, this whole thing probably started because a few people spread rumors that in America the streets are paved with gold, and instead they’ve come to ANOTHER third world country that’s only “rich” because there’s about 1,600 people in the entire country that have amassed nearly all of the wealth. They hide in the shadows, control everything, buy the government you see, and don’t pay their taxes, so everything has been falling apart HERE too since about 2003 (five years later than Venezuela).

I also asked “tomman” how they could be so poor when they have more oil than Saudi Arabia. He said, “No Latin American country has ever been smart enough to do anything with that.”

Not The Onion. Enhanced Flash Video.

Not The Onion. Enhanced Flash Video.

No this is not The Onion, no April Fool’s Day is not here early.

FFmpeg states that they have “enhanced” the Flash video container to store HEVC, AV1, and VP9, according to the git log.

I’m wondering what kind of a monster would put these codecs into a Flash video container considering that Adobe last updated the container in 2008 and it was meant to be used with the Flash Player, which hasn’t worked in any Web browser for years, and we have so many better container formats.

FFmpeg is some weird shit. No wonder it has so many emergency fixes. It’s the OpenSSL of media codecs.

This really does seem to me to be akin to OpenSSL supporting “Big Endian x86 on Windows 3.1″.

You never know when someone will need to do this and pull out Borland’s Turbo C to compile it.

Better support it just to cover all eventualities.

UAW Targets Toyota and Tesla for Unionization.

UAW Targets Toyota and Tesla for Unionization.

UAW says they want to unionize Toyota and Tesla.

Elon Musk is infamously anti-labor. His cars are almost the shoddiest shit that you can find on the road today. Many were built in tents sometimes and are known for a lot of duds that have the bumpers fall off them when you drive off the showroom lot.

By the time a Tesla in Illinois is three years old, the underside is more rusted than a battleship from World War II that’s been at the bottom of the sea.

Teslas are so junky that by the time they’re 4 years old, you have to use the emergency door latch release because the motor is shot.

They’re not built to good standards and the company itself is in deep shit. It’s being destroyed due to selling these shoddy cars at a loss. They were already sold at a loss even before the US economy was in the toilet, and after all this price cutting I can’t imagine they’ve gotten better.

Of course, this is all what you’d expect for a con man who fired off a rocket that exploded because he didn’t want them to install flame diverters.

My dad, an electrical engineer (and a couple of other degrees that he got to amuse himself since he’s a dinosaur leftover from when the US had careers with benefits, like two vacations a year, good health insurance, and a company tuition match), has unfortunately gotten aboard the Elon Musk cult.

I don’t know if it’s just old age getting to him but if he didn’t have a terminal case of Boomeritis before Musk, he sure does now.

Teslas are consistently one of the least reliable brands you can buy.

Out of all the car companies in America, only BMW and Fiat scored worse than Tesla on reliability. Almost all BMWs are on a 3 or 4 year lease because everyone that has tried to “own one” knows what happens when they’re 5. They get repair bills that are more over the next 4 years than starting over on another lease.

Toyota, however, is a good target for unionization. They sell at a premium because most of them still run 20 or even 30 years later, with basic repairs and upkeep, by a company that makes a profit.

Toyota has commented that they think it should be up to the workers to decide if they want a union. The UAW should strike while the iron is hot, because in a little over a year, Trump might be back, turning the NLRB into a weapon against the workers again.

There’s the issue that most foreign car companies have settled in the US South, which still has a “slavery era” attitude towards work, and has passed laws making it difficult to organize and get better pay and benefits. Not impossible, just as difficult as possible within the Taft-Hartley Act.

The UAW should have gone after Toyota full force years ago but it’s good that they realize that this may be their last opportunity for a while.

Personally, I think Joe Biden should float the idea of some tariffs against Japanese car companies if Toyota tries to resist unionization.

The Japanese government has been incredibly uncooperative with American companies that try to sell anything in Japan even though there are officially no tariffs.

Since the US doesn’t export much to Japan and GM only sells about 700 new cars in the entire country per year anyway, there’s not much the Japanese could do in response.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Makes the State More Like Communist China by Forcing Non-Chicago Residents into Chicago Courts.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Makes the State More Like Communist China by Forcing Non-Chicago Residents into Chicago Courts.

Illinois is becoming more like China.

Governor Pritzker signed a “law” that says you have to sue the State over the FOID Act in either Chicago or Springfield.

This is so they can get the case into courts with Democrat judges who will always side with the State and won’t even pretend to respect our Constitutions (State or Federal).

It’s like Communist China forcing Hong Kongers into mainland courts so that they can’t get a fair trial. It will be Communist Party judges who don’t have to apply the Hong Kong Basic Law.

It’s so nice to see where the Democratic Party of Illinois gets their inspiration from.

Nevertheless, a case involving a FOID Act lawsuit (there are multiple moving through various courts right now) was recently removed to a federal court for the Southern District of Illinois, where it can eventually make its way into the Seventh Circuit and to SCOTUS if necessary.

Gov. Pritzker, theoretically, has no power to strip American citizens of their federal rights. He’s only a State governor.

Nevertheless, he’s doing his best to sabotage our access to free and fair court hearings, by throwing the State cases to courts that absolutely never rule against him.

I knew that a second Pritzker Administration would be even worse than the first.

The first time, he claimed he had unlimited power to suspend any Illinois law, indefinitely, due to a “COVID Emergency”. The actual LAW says he can only do this for 30 days and then the legislature has to review it, but he kept saying that it was a new emergency every month and nobody ever stopped him.

He messed with hundreds of laws to see if anyone would stop him and nobody did, and it went on for years. This is not a democracy, it’s not a republic, and there are no checks and balances. This fat fuck is running the State of Illinois like Xi runs China.

Democracies decay into dictatorships when one person is allowed to do whatever they want. On both the State and Federal levels, Americans are being treated to a series of ever more Imperialistic presidents and governors.

Obama signed laws claiming he could indefinitely detain American citizens without trial, he tried to claim that he had unlimited authority to make recess appointments.

I thought this was bad until Trump did something more egregious than either of those practically every day for four years and it was questionable whether he would ever leave office or if we’d ever have another election again, free and fair or otherwise, if he didn’t go quietly.

Honestly, I’ve never been more terrified of what’s unfolding in front of us.

The government realizes that it can’t control Free People, so it will make our lives terrible and get us fighting with each other over unimportant issues like who uses what bathroom.

America is basically gone. I don’t even know what this is, but it’s not America anymore.

As to what’s going on in Illinois, people in Illinois who are affected by the State Police refusing to answer the phone or their E-Mails and telling them why their FOID Card was denied, only to sue and have them act as if you didn’t even try to figure it out and that they’re exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, they should sue in a court where they live, and in that complaint ask the court where they live to strike down the law that says they have to go to Chicago to file this in a Kangaroo Court hundreds of miles away.

Pritzker might have signed something that claims he’s stripped your local courts of their jurisdiction, but judges don’t tend to look kindly on that. They may strike down that law even if they rule against you on the FOID lawsuit.

Then at least other people can sue Pritzker where they live and possibly win.

The Firearm Services Bureau is basically a Democratic Party tool to control who gets gun permits. They’re supposedly following a set of rules, but they often make inexplicable decisions and then won’t say why they did it.

If you don’t even know, and they won’t tell you, it becomes impossible to challenge it.

For some reason, the crooks who are allegedly judges, know what the law is, they just don’t care, and they will make up any reason to avoid enforcing what the law actually is.

This whole system is a fraud.