On 1-3-2024, I purchased Minitool Partition Wizard which is affiliated with Digital River GBH to perform data migration. I had used their freeware version previously with good results and decided to go ahead and buy the annual subscription to this software using PayPal for $52.06. I later learned that this software version was autorenewing and since I only needed it once, I cancelled the subscription. I received confirmation of this cancellation on 1-3-2025. However, Digital River/Minitool PW charged my PayPal account for renewal on 1-2-2025 without my authorization. I requested the company refund the amount charged to my PayPal and was denied. Since then, I have received various communications from Digital River/Minitool PW from different employees all seeking to justfiy not refunding the unwanted 1-2-2025 purchase amount. My last communication with them was this morning and I expressed my opinion that refusing me a refund is tantamount to theft.

If anyone has any suggestions on resolving this matter, I am all ears. However, I have researched Digital River GBH with results suggesting they are a company in financial stress. There may be no satisfactory resolution for me, as in refund, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up. As the title to this thread says: Be wary of Digital River and Minitool Partition Wizard software.

By some technical mixture of computer graphics and artificial intelligence these movie magic makers convincingly bring Ian Holm back from the dead, plaster his 1979 mug on a new science officer and it is the first time I've seen this done where it is not "Uncanny Valley" - assuming someone goes in to see this and they have never seen the original 1979 Alien they might be clueless that the performance is not actually given by an actor. It's that convincing looking, and.... I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it?

When we saw them bring Peter Cushing back from the dead to have moments with Tarkin in Rogue One, I think it was pretty clear to everyone in the audience that something about that was technical, not quite human - Alien Romulus has finally gotten the technology to a point where it's one of the most impressive things you have ever seen in cinema. It's mind blowing, but also kind of alarming how fast that tech has advanced.

There are so many ethical questions, I barely know where to begin. Not that anyone will ever want to bring me back from the dead, but let's assume it's an option, I do a thing that is popular, humanity wants to preserve that, how do I claim agency over the things that happen to my likeness after my passing? Will this rob actors of potential opportunities? In the case of this film, obviously some folks in the effects and sound labs got paid, but could you just have easily cast an actor to play a different android that mirrored the directive? Now that this can be done so convincingly, will Disney go back and start "fixing" things that we all love as they are?

Did anyone else see it and have the same moment that I did, go, wait, that's like Ian Holm and it totally doesn't look like CG right now?? How?? Holy Shit that is cool, but.... wait a minute, maybe it's a little too good?

Today, I wrote about my first week working on it and started a website for it.

If you've been around a long time, you remember our epic migration project of a decade ago. That's where the earliest versions of this project came from, so it's super nostalgic to be getting back into it.

• Google has a secret deal with Facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out.
• Google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation.
• Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core component of this was the forced logins to the Chrome browser.
• Google is willing to do almost everything to prevent people from circumventing their ad exchanges. This is what AMP is about.
• Google habitually insider trades on their ad exchanges in every way you can think of and every way you can't. The exchanges are also rigged so that google wins on bids where they aren't the highest bidder. A large amount of people inside google are aware of all of this.

This Twitter thread isn't nonsense, it's something that's been slow-leaking for weeks. Per the thread:

"Either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which."

Currently funded to 9 new episodes. 12 seems likely by the end. The stretch goal is for a 13th holiday episode.

Spoilers: Felicia Day is the new villain.

The problem I have is that the speed I am getting on devices connected to the wifi modem either by wifi or directly by Ethernet cable, is much slower than the speeds I am getting on the phones via their own 4G services. For example, when running an Ookla speed test on an iPad Pro 9.7” connected to home wifi, I would get 1Mbps compared with 20 or 30Mbps on the phones through their own 4G service.

I am running the tests on the phones from the same room as the 4G router, so I don’t think router location is the problem.
I have tried taking the sim out of the modem and putting in a phone and when I do this, the download speed seems to be much faster than running the service through the wifi modem.

The max speeds I have recorded on the iPhone 8 and Samsung galaxy A5 on their own 4G services has been about 50Mbps, whereas the max speed I have recorded on my iPad pro connected via wifi to the modem has been 5Mbps.

Does anyone know what could be causing the slower speeds through the wifi modem? I was wondering if any of the following could be affecting it:
1. Because the Telstra service comes with voice as well as data, the service is not provisioned correctly on Telstra’s end to be used in a 4G wifi modem?
2. Do I need to play around with the modem’s settings to optimise it somehow? If so, what do I need to change?
3. Is the modem I am using simply not good? I thought TP Link was a pretty good brand, plus even if it wasn’t the best, I wouldn’t expect the speeds to be so much slower than using the sim in a phone directly.

Any help would be much appreciated.

What's the oldest or most obscure device you've used or seen someone use? And we'll say "old relative to when you saw them use it" not, like, the first Internet device you ever used.

I noticed when I was sending a link over discord to a voice acting associate that something is wrong.

So, I went to the googs, and lo and behold, google thinks my website is a blog for middle-aged dating advice articles

I have never written about these topics, so it's not like these are old articles that are still in the cache, and I'm pretty sure this is a fairly recent issue because I've sent that link to others before, and this is the first time this issue has been apparent. (None of those articles even exist, of course, if you click those links, you just get a 404).

How and why could this possibly have happened? More importantly: How can I fix it?

Hoping someone can help me with my problem.

For my home internet I am using a TP-Link AC750 Wireless Dual Band 4G LTE Router Archer MR200, with an Optus 4G sim card inserted. I have this hooked up to a switch which allows me to connect to the router via network cables all around the house. In addition to this I have extended the range of the wifi via a wifi extender because some corners of my house cannot receive a signal without the extender.

I have maximum 15 devices connected to the home network but normally only up to about 5 active devices (downloading or uploading data) at any one time. Of the 15 devices, 4 are a wired connection with normally only 1 active at a time. The remaining are wireless connections.

The problem I am having is that the connection is very unreliable, even for the devices with the wired connections. Sometimes the connection is working fine, I can stream Netflix with no issues and web pages download quickly, etc. However, at other times it is either very slow (can't stream Netflix and web pages are very slow to load) or drops out completely, this is happening on a regular basis (roughly every 2-4 days). Rebooting the modem helps sometimes, other times the internet is still slow after a reboot

I also have an Optus 4G mobile phone. When I am experiencing these issues, the internet on my phone still works fine which leads me to believe it is not an issue with Optus 4G in my area.

Does anyone know what could be causing this problem and how I could fix it? Can I play around with the settings in the router to improve the reliability?

AND! If you do not already listen to my podcast: now is a good time to jump in. Season 4 just began! Listen to me reading stuff! Here's the promo copy:

Our weekly podcast brings you short-short stories from authors around the world. With a wide mix of stories, both literary and genre, tragic and comedic, deeply-thought and light-hearted, there are stories for everyone, and each episode is less than ten minutes. Find Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast where ever you find your podcasts.

Thanks, friends!

• Power cycled router + iPhone.
• Reset network settings on iPhone.
• Cycled Airplane Mode to clear DNS.
• Confirmed they still work on other WiFi.
• Did "Forget This Network" and re-joined.

No joy. Next steps or other ideas?

Anyone around willing to take a look and lend an opinion, maybe some help with formatting and presentation? Its built in wordpress currently, rough, and semi-finished.

Will pay for the efforts.

Journeyman Homes

Thanks,

More recently, my views have soured considerably. It'll be less cute in a few more years when someone figures out how to turn it into a big enough financial weapon it hobbles the economy when it implodes, kicking out the legs of folks who never even heard of it. Or when it's consuming so much energy that it becomes an independent driver of climate change (if it hasn't already). Or when money its enabled laundering shows up in the next corruption case. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the myriad scams happening via ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) thanks to the hype machine around the sector.

Cryptocurrency is reminiscent of what giant hedgefunds did to the stock market as computers came along: weaponize data & time advantages. Crytocurrency is new enough it hasn't been fully exploited, especially because there are so many variants coming online with their own systems rather than a single market. It's seeing how many levels of meta-gaming you can architect on top of capitalism for personal gain (which goes a lot further down if you think about the existence of crytocurrency as already meta-gaming on top of the existing financial system's meta games). No one thinks they're doing anything wrong by throwing one more scaffold on top of the tower. And when it crashes we all get angry and can't figure out who to blame.

I read an interesting article a while back about how some of the brightest minds of the 80s and 90s eschewed traditional roles in society (doctors, government, lawyers) because they figured out how much money they could make in the newly weaponized stock market. How many folks do you think are using up their lives gaming this market full time now? How many more will it be a few years from now?

So we're gaming & gambling with algorithms, except we have a few inconvenient side effects:

• We're possibly using as much power as all of Ireland.
• We're making basic PC components unaffordable.
• We're participating in and profiting from a scam-ridden, money-laundering industry.
• We're fueling what seems destined to be the next housing crisis - weaponizing financial instruments we don't understand and have no significant regulation.
• We're being suckered into this by the lure of leveraging cleverness into personal financial gain.

I dunno where it's all headed for sure, but I'm at the point where I want to say as far away from it as humanly possible. It's incentivizing 100% bad behavior with huge financial stakes, which seems like a libertarian nightmare destined for very bad outcomes.

One person is Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon. He was also 1/2 of Pomplamoose back in the day, which is part of where he got the idea for Patreon. "Wait, Jack Conte is the CEO of Patreon?" was the first piece of info that tickled me about this whole thing.

The other Casey Neistat, a popular maker and YouTube Big Deal™ w/ 9M subscribers. I wasn't familiar with him, but Aaron's seen some of his videos in the Maker parts of the Internet.

First, understand I rarely watch anything on YouTube and it's extremely hard to convince me to care about what happens in that world. So the story starts here, with Casey founding a new company in NYC called "368" which is going to be some sort of creator studio. Rented some giant building with half a plan. It's a pretty fun video if slightly obnoxious in the archetypal YouTube rapid-cut-I'm-so-viral way.

So he makes this video, and Jack Conte spends his weekend making this (pretty great) pitch video to have 15 minutes of his time, including pre-buying his plane ticket.

So Casey accepts, and Jack shows up in NYC and they talk about some sort of partnership between their companies.

They omit the details of what was discussed of course, but something about the whole thing is really tickling me.

Patreon has become an incredibly important tool for artists of all kinds, including several Icrontians. Brian and I have considered it as a funding model for this site, among other things. They've been tremendously successful in a very short period of time. I'm pretty convinced in a few years it'll be clear what happened at that meeting and it won't have been nothing.

I don't recommend crypto trading on a large scale. I've kept my trading pool under $100 just for fun and learnings.

I wasn't aware they even had a $25/yr ad-free subscription, but with the addition of all tracking code removal, this is a steal. If Icrontic was still in the content business, this is definitely the sort of model that I think works best right now. The web is broken with the current bottomless pit of Javascript running on most sites and it's important to get behind efforts like this. Subscribed.

There will be an overlay on this site prompting action in support of Net Neutrality all day. I am announcing it in advance so that you don't think we've been hacked or something.

If you work somewhere that uses the Internet as part of its core business, encourage them to participate.

How screwed are you?

That depends on who lives near you and how much you've pissed them off because as usual hacking WiFi networks requires the attacker to be physically close. On the down side, the short story is that there are no more secure wireless protocols.

• WPA2 GCMP, WPA2/WPA TKIP: attackers can decrypt your packets, steal your network key, and spoof your clients to switch to their access point for other nefarious man-in-the-middle attacks
• WPA2 CCMP/AES: attackers can decrypt your packets and spoof your clients to switch to their access point but can't steal your network key.
• WEP: completely cracked years ago, you are better off using WPA2 CCMP/AES.

The industrial and national espionage opportunities are more compelling than Eve going after Alice and Bob's home network traffic so some of you are more screwed than others. Authenticated WPA2 Professional still relies on the same underlying technology that has this intrinsic flaw. Additionally, some implementations are more susceptible to certain classes of attacks than others.

Problematically, the extremely-vulnerable wpa_supplicant implementation is at the heart of any Linux-based system including and especially embedded ones such as consumer WiFi routers, smart TVs, and pretty much any Internet of Things device. For a lot of these things you'll be lucky to ever see a firmware update.

The good news

This can be fixed by a minor revision to the WPA2 specification that's backwards-compatible with existing devices/software/whatever. Network traffic that's designed to operate over unsecure links is unaffected (e.g. https://, encrypted VPN). Read a Mickens about security and feel better.

The bad news

Any fix will require a patch, a lot of stuff won't get patched, and any unpatched device/software/whatever is an attack vector. Unsecure network services (e.g. everything not designed to operate on the raw Internet) are exposed to attackers on your network. An attacker on your network can turn all your stuff into zombies, access your open network shares, and otherwise do anything that someone you've given your network password can do.

Closing thoughts

Have a nice day, patch all your stuff, and don't forget to use AES.

https://youtu.be/JsIux0SvQXY?t=8m58s

More detailed version: I have a side job at a university maintaining an NMR spectrometer. The instrument writes data to a C:/Data folder of a PC. I need to get those data to the users, and they love Google Drive. I set up a Google Drive, and synced the C:/Data folder to that drive. I've given the login details to all users, so they can go to the drive and download the data they need to their work or home computer. Everybody has their own sub folder, both in C:/Data and on the Google Drive. They love it, and everything has been running smoothly for three years. Recently we got close to the 15GB Google gives you with a free drive, so I asked the university to pay for the upgrade to 100GB. They did it, and all was good. Last week, one user decided to sync the desktop of his PC to the Google drive, so he doesn't have to download the data manually, but they will appear automatically on his desktop. Great idea, but the dude did a two way sync, meaning not only did the data in his folder get downloaded onto the desktop, but all the data on his desktop got copied to the Google Drive. Believe it or not, the dude has well over 100GB on his desktop, so the Google Drive was 100% full, and the entire system came to a screeching halt. I eventually identified the problem, found the culprit and the dude has been deleting all day today, with the result that we are now at 71GB of 100GB used. At this rate, it will take forever until we get back down to the about 15GB of actual NMR data we have on the drive. My proposed solution was to simply wipe the entire Google drive, and then put the data we need back on there from C:/Data. But wiping a Google Drive appears to be easier said than done! I've done some googling, and lots of people seem to have trouble with this. That's why I am asking all you computer whizzes around here ;-)

Oh yeah, the computer support guys at the university get ulcers when they hear the word Google Drive. They told me not to use this, but some drive the university provides. Trouble is, all my users hate the university drive, and they voted unanimously to get their Data via a Google Drive. Of course I am eager to please my users.

Many thanks in advance for the help!

Last night, we listed out first app in the Android play store! Fore Score is a mini putt (mini golf for all the Americans reading this) score card that also works for golf. Our goal was to design a clean and simple interface that would allow users to keep track of games, compare scores with par, and share their completed score cards.

I really enjoyed the app design process, and wanted to share this milestone with the community.
If anyone here decides to give it a try, I would welcome feedback and suggestions that I can apply to this and future projects.

I am stumped. www.imagevenue.com will not load on my home computer. To my knowledge, last night was the very first time I tried to open the page and it simply stalled. I have no problem with any other page that I am aware of. I tried turning off my anti-virus and ad blocker, but no help. The page loads fine on my office computer and I have essentially the same systems and extensions on both, Windows 10 Pro. I tried with Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, all with no success. I searched the register for a "imagevenue" entry, but found none.

I am able to view images hosted at imagevenue, but the format for the image does not start with "imagevenue."

For example: http://img208.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_140342278_42baseball_122_451lo.jpg

or

Any suggestions?

Yes someone actually made an insecure IoT sex toy https://controlgap.com/blog/this-weeks-insecurity-issue-2/
And gave a stove a mobile https://controlgap.com/blog/this-weeks-insecurity-issue-3/
Latest issue https://controlgap.com/blog/this-weeks-insecurity-issue-11/

Enjoy.