Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Erich Templar]

Google Books: Find, Preview, and Read Books Online.

Google Books is already a name in use for a Google product. Confusion awaits!

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

RIP ChromeOS

 

[Noodles]

Too bad the original website is gone.

P-P-P-Powerbook! | Know Your Meme

P-P-P-Powerbook refers to a replica of an Apple Powerbook laptop handcrafted by Something Awful member Jeff Harris to prank an eBay buyer who tried to scam

knowyourmeme.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I know where it comes from. But I'd hoped the "netbook" fiasco would destroy any future efforts. I'm afraid that hope might be dead.

I dunno, I'm gonna be contrarian and say I like "notebook" better than "laptop".

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Since I usually go for gaming or workstation models, "lugtop" works for me.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Especially for the Surface style floppy keyboards that literally can't be used in the lap.

 

[Free]

I dunno, I'm gonna be contrarian and say I like "notebook" better than "laptop".

I don't have a problem with calling them notebooks, per se.

Laptop is fine, too. But, would you carry around a PowerTop? A Chrometop? Googletop?

I usually refer to the ones I own as a mobile or portable PC. Even if it typically just sits on my desk.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

But, would you carry around a PowerTop?

Well, that's a rather personal question

 

[Lori Claremont]

Well, that's a rather personal question

I carry around a muffin top, does that count?

 

[Free]

I carry around a muffin top, does that count?

Hopefully you eat it, eventually.

 

[Free]

Coverage of the software side of the "Googlebook."

The ‘Googlebook’ Is Reinventing the Mouse Cursor—but Little Else

It looks like Chromebooks and ChromeOS aren't quite dead yet.

gizmodo.com

In its announcement on Tuesday, Google didn’t differentiate its newly announced Googlebooks from its age-old Chromebooks in any particularly useful way. We’ve scrolled through a mountain of leaks and rumors about the so-called Aluminum operating system. Google has stated that the name is an internal designation but has yet to publicly disclose the system’s actual name or any identifying details.

But what we’ve seen so far has positioned Aluminum as a mere upgrade to Chrome OS rather than an overhaul. Notorious Google leaker Mystic Leaks shared a full 16-minute video of this new operating system on Telegram (first spotted by Android Authority) in the hours before Google’s Googlebook announcement. Mystic Leaks claimed to have run this supposed copy of Google’s OS on a MacBook Pro using an emulator.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If your computer is older than two years and you haven't updated the UEFI in the last two years, its Secure Boot certificates are about to expire next month. It's not a catastrophic emergency that will leave you locked out of your computer or anything, but here's a video to explain what it means and what needs to be done about it:


The short version is, if you're on Windows 11 this problem should be handled automatically by the Windows updater. If the update panel has a message saying your system is too old to get the updated certificates, and just waiting a few days doesn't resolve things, you may need to flash your motherboard with a new UEFI/BIOS, bearing in mind the attendant risks.

If you're on a Linux, and you have Secure Boot enabled, the certificates can be updated with a couple of console commands, as shown in the video. If you're in Legacy Boot mode, you don't have to care about this.

 

[Khamon]

If your computer is older than two years and you haven't updated the UEFI in the last two years, its Secure Boot certificates are about to expire next month. It's not a catastrophic emergency that will leave you locked out of your computer or anything, but here's a video to explain what it means and what needs to be done about it:


The short version is, if you're on Windows 11 this problem should be handled automatically by the Windows updater. If the update panel has a message saying your system is too old to get the updated certificates, and just waiting a few days doesn't resolve things, you may need to flash your motherboard with a new UEFI/BIOS, bearing in mind the attendant risks.

If you're on a Linux, and you have Secure Boot enabled, the certificates can be updated with a couple of console commands, as shown in the video. If you're in Legacy Boot mode, you don't have to care about this.

If you use an encrypted drive under Windows 11, and your UEFI/BIOS updates, have your Bitlocker key handy. Better yet, turn off Bitlocker, let it decrypt the drive, and tell Microsoft to suck it. SUCKIT1

 

[Noodles]

If you use an encrypted drive under Windows 11, and your UEFI/BIOS updates, have your Bitlocker key handy. Better yet, turn off Bitlocker, let it decrypt the drive, and tell Microsoft to suck it. SUCKIT1

I am not entirely convinced this isn't a problem I had with the original drive my PC came with.

It just... stopped working. I can't even reformat it blank.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

W T Johnny Got His F is this

Not alive, but not dead: disembodied brains used for drug testing

The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.

"Almost", fantastic. And they drug it into a stupor, just in case. Marvelous.

It's a tech startup, naturally. I know you already guessed that the moment you read the headline, but it shouldn't be left unsaid.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

You probably already well know about the privacy nightmare that is Flock, but it it's about to get even worse.

BusPatrol is a company that installs IoT cameras on school buses - 10's of thousands of them across the US. The point is to catch traffic violations, if someone illegally passes a school bus, the system automatically snaps their license plate and forwards that information to police. Put that way it sounds fairly innocuous, even possibly a good thing depending on the cost. But leaked internal documents show that BusPatrol plans to basically become a mobile Flock - their cameras are going to start recording the license plate and GPS postion of every single car they encounter on their route, regardless of whether the car did anything wrong, and make that database available to police for warrantless searching.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If you want some Google-free and privacy-respecting Android phone apps, having been using most of them for a while now I highly recommend Fossify. They're a bunch of standard phone apps - so things like your actual phone dialer app, contacts, calendar, SMS, calculator, clock, file manager...and lots more than are shown on that website, just about all of the basic common utilities that every phone comes with. They all have a nice and clean UI and no ads, require no permissions outside of the thing they actually do, and none of them communicate with Google, meaning you can for instance feel confident loading your contacts list into the contacts app without worrying about the Big G mining that data out of you. You don't even download them from Google Play, you get them from the F-droid installer (you have that, right? Better hurry before Google makes it immensely harder to get, if not impossible) and it's not a suite, you install the apps one at a time so you only get the ones you want to use.

De-Googling your phone can be a real chore depending on how thoroughly you want the job done; but every little thing you do helps at least somewhat, it really does. And using these FOSS apps instead of the official Google ones is a very easy step to take.

 

[Free]

We're going to need body-length Faraday cages.

Researchers Issue Warning About Tech That Could Turn Every Router 'Into a Potential Means for Surveillance'

Researchers warn that a new method for detecting people through WiFi signals poses a serious privacy risk.

gizmodo.com

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany say ordinary WiFi networks can be used to identify people with an eerie amount of accuracy.

In a study, the researchers describe using beamforming feedback information (BFI) and machine learning models to identify people walking within a network’s range. The team found that this BFI-based technique was able to infer a person’s identity with 99.5% accuracy. They presented their findings at the ACM’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security last November.

Beamforming, which was introduced with WiFi 5, allows routers to direct their signals more efficiently toward connected devices. To make that work, devices connected to a network send feedback to the router.

The problem, according to the researchers, is that this feedback is unencrypted and can be accessed without the need of specialized hardware or even a direct connection to the WiFi network. This method could also identify people that don’t have any connected devices on them as long as they are in the network’s range.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Microsoft has blanket revoked the perpetual license for purchased copies of Office 2019. They have also edited a historical announcement on a webpage to delete the fact that they had explicitly promised they would not do that.

In 2023, when Microsoft ended technical support for Office 2019, the web page announcing this specifically for the Mac version originally included this line:

Rest assured that all of your Office 2019 apps will continue to function. They won’t disappear from your Mac, nor will you lose any data.

A couple of weeks ago though, the line was edited to say this:

Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps won’t lose any data. Your data can be accessed on any supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.

If you bought these programs because the store website told you that you were buying a perpetual license to use them forever, you've just been bleeped. Going forward the apps will open documents in read-only mode, and won't be able to edit or save anything.

 

[Govi]

Microsoft has blanket revoked the perpetual license for purchased copies of Office 2019. They have also edited a historical announcement on a webpage to delete the fact that they had explicitly promised they would not do that.

In 2023, when Microsoft ended technical support for Office 2019, the web page announcing this specifically for the Mac version originally included this line:

Rest assured that all of your Office 2019 apps will continue to function. They won’t disappear from your Mac, nor will you lose any data.

A couple of weeks ago though, the line was edited to say this:

Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps won’t lose any data. Your data can be accessed on any supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.

If you bought these programs because the store website told you that you were buying a perpetual license to use them forever, you've just been bleeped. Going forward the apps will open documents in read-only mode, and won't be able to edit or save anything.

Just how is that supposed to work? You've purchased (presumably on disks) the program and installed it. The only way MS could make this work is if they somehow connect to your installed program and alter it in the way you described. Or had they built in this termination of full service in the original programs without telling you?