Frank S. Rietta

Wow, looking back at this! 2024 has been an incredible year for me in competitive shooting. I've won several more 1st place finishes at my local indoor league, achieved a perfect 500/500 score, and—most notably—won 1st Place Amateur Civilian at the Glock national championship at CMP Talladega Marksmanship Park against 139 other competitors! Still working towards my GSSF classification goal, but also dipping my toes into USPSA and IDPA (unclassified so far) and even considering Olympic-style shooting.

@anton_chuvakin The first two seem at least real. The third is a marketing term. The use of just is a trigger.

Which of these bits of cliche security advice is most annoying to you? #FunFridayPoll

The new Ubuntu LTS has been released and I am mentally still toying with the TPM-backed FDE threat model. In the case of full and total hardware failure on a system with a soldered on storage, the TPM is dead and thus not likely to revive. But from a pure compliance standpoint this is not the same level of "shredding" that happens because the long manual passphrase was never stored on/part of the failed hardware. Thought experiment. Can a laptop that had ePHI or legally protected information on it be responsibly recycled after hardware failure or would it have to be fully destroyed for legal compliance, which is a suboptimal outcome for resource recovery. And in the desktop workstation scenario where storage oft outlives the host system, this is suboptimal to a passphrase as well.

To be clear, I have intentionally configured the kids computer to be able to print, but I had not yet taught them how to use it. I have a host based firewall on the system, owned by roor, which they do not have access to control.

So pleasant surprise. All the sudden my office laser printer started up. My six year old figured out how to print from within the Reader Rabbit 1997 running in Wine on her Ubuntu system. It automatically printed through the Linux host and over the network. Amazing! She printed sheet music and a picture she drew in 2026!

This is Wine 9 not even 11 which is shipped with the new LTS. It is SOOOO good compared to the old days already.

@anton_chuvakin And why this discipline is and should remain being "computer science" not "hype implementers".

@anton_chuvakin It was the death nail in the coffin of the project. A red line that could not be overcome.

I am just going to ask it, and I WANT all sorts of crazy in responses (sane OK too): what is the mechanism via which AI-enabled companies will wipe out the laggards, GIVEN that there are companies alive today that didn't adopt cloud, mobile, web and even computers? #question

Specifically for consideration, imagine the AI LLM helpfully changing the wording in a court order digitized decades ago from "dismissed without prejudice" to "dismissed with prejudice" - a massive difference in meaning with consequences. And no good way to detect except human in the loop.

Wishful hyperbolic thinking. We did a AI-trial related to ADA compliance for a public sector client and empirically supported the decision that while it could be used for some things, it definitely could not be trusted with the main thing they needed. The types of errors it made were catastrophic if not caught by a human reviewer.

One security feature of LastPass that concerns me is getting locked out on an unrecognized host. They insist on emailing even though 2FA is enabled and the email never comes. Worse, if locked out of all devices in emails there is no way to bootstrap your way back in. I have had to SOCKS proxy back into my home machine just to get back to a trusted IP to log in.

@taltalon @moyix It's an experimental trial. Good science.

@moyix Why waste GPU resources on VAX/VMX running Mosaic 2.4 - even if for testing. No one cares. What next ? finding bugs in Solaris 1.x ?

CRITICAL: if you are running Mosaic 2.4 on a VAX/VMS system, please be aware of this RCE that GPT-5.4 just found and exploited!

I will no longer be recommending @backblaze to clients at this time. This decision is a data loss security risk.

It seems Backblaze does not read their own blog and heed the advice on 3-2-1 backup strategy and sync not being a backup. rareese.com/posts/backblaz…. It is game over. There is no sense doing business and trusting this provider. The glory days are long gone.

My six year old is absolutely loving Reader Rabbit Preschool (1997). I had to convince her 3 year old sister to watch her favorite show (Paw Patrol). We have the Kindergarten version too but it is being pickier about the "Please Insert CD-ROM" check though I have the backup ISO mounting by a shell script before kicking off the Wine 9 host process.

On the drive to school today, my 6 and 3 year old were excitedly talking about the addition, patterns, and the freight depot game in the 41 year old DOS First Math by Elmer Larsen. This is running in DOSBox 0.74-3 on the kid's new Ubuntu LTS 24.04 Desktop. I also have Reader Rabbit Preschool and Kindergarten restored from 1997 and running under Wine 9.0 perfectly. I will write on this some more soon, but in the mean time it warms my heart to see these two young Gen Alpha children excited to learn about math and reading with the help of software that predates them by decades. I also have a Second Math 4.2 title by Stone and Associates from 1990 on the restoration list. It is running now and will be another application in our collection I can review.

Next Wednesday, I will be presenting on "Local AI with Plain Old Ruby Objects and Ollama in Docker with an Nvidia GPU" at the ATLRUG virtual meeting meetup.com/atlantaruby/ev….

While I never knew Mr. Norris personally, he was legitimately a positive influence. I trained in martial arts for years. I remember one of the junior students was struggling with some life questions and I suggested if he wanted he could e-mail Chuck Norris and ask. The senior instructor backed me up and said absolutely. I am unsure if that young man followed through, but that is the sort of reputation he had.

@r00k I find cutting the grass meditative too.

Is it in some way good for you to do chores like laundry or dishes even if you could trivially afford to outsource those tasks?

@r00k Would basically be employing Alice from the Brady Bunch.

@frankrietta Why can't you imagine outsourcing it? I would have guessed you'd be extra interested in outsourcing it as a CEO.