Goodbye Twitter

Posted on March 2, 2019 by bluedepth

Today in my email I received this from Twitter Support:

So if you click on the link, the only option is to self-censor, basically a specially crafted button to blow up whatever the offensive tweet was. In my case, my heartfelt wish that our current human stain in the White House has a stroke or heart attack. I don’t want to do anything to him, I want him to simply sieze up and die all by himself. Fly into a rage, then grab his chest and drop over stone dead.

So, Twitter took it upon themselves to force me to censor myself. Right after I got this message, I most certainly did click the “Remove” button, which blew up the Tweet. Then I downloaded my Twitter archive, once that was safe, I then deactivated my Twitter account. I would much rather it all get blown up to kingdom come than self-censor myself against the pile of waste sitting behind the Resolute desk.

I don’t really care to discuss the First Amendment ramifications, as I’m absolutely positive that Twitter will hide in the tall grass of their TOS. And that’s actually quite fine. I haven’t used Twitter in years, only logging in to lob gems like this one at the pile of fecal matter with a spray tan. I deleted Facebook, I can delete Twitteriffic too.

What am I missing out on? Nah, nothing lost. Peace of mind gained. Goodbye Twitter.

A Little Tired

Posted on March 1, 2019 by bluedepth

Every day brings me an endless buffeting stream of reminders about how toxic and unpleasant Facebook has become. Early last week one of the apps that I use, Social Fixer for Facebook or maybe it was FB Purity reported to me a laundry list of people who have unfriended me or otherwise disappeared from Facebook.

It might have been the straw that broke the camels back. Or at least contributed to the collapse. Even random pages that are meant to be for cooking, or are supposed to be funny post stories and the top-rated comments are so awful. Almost always there is some babble about Clinton this or that, or Snowflake or Libtard, which are all phrases that I’ve really grown tired seeing.

I once thought that the last bastion of security would be the relative anonymity, or at least the implied carelessness surrounding the emotional response signals that each Facebook story features. But this in itself has become onerous. I am no longer able to just feel like clicking on some sort of reaction on a story is something I can just toss away. Now I have to evaluate the emotional carriage of my emotional signal. If you see something unpleasant, how do you emotionally signal? What if you accidentally laugh, or if the tragedy is wrapped in comedy? What if you see something you are expected to be Sad about, but instead you end up being Angry. Or Wow. Or Thumbs Up.

What does it mean when you learn about a train derailment that killed 100 nuns? Thumbs up? Is that what you react with? And then what happens when people start to measure you for your reaction? Is Wow more appropriate, or wouldn’t Sad be more apt?

Facebook has become a consumer of emotional processing energy. I won’t say that it is an emotional vampire, but I would start to lean in that direction for the comments section on almost every story on Facebook for that. It has become an unwelcome diner at the feast, with its dead little dolls-eyes just staring off into space, with its figurative knife and fork in clenched fists on the table, demanding emotional processing energy. Always something provocative, always selected and wrapped by the pinnacle of artificially manipulative programming known as the Facebook Wall Algorithm. Stories meant to entice you to consume content, and while consuming, stab you in the side and collect the energy you were originally going to use for, well, anything else really. It’s a story designed to get you going, to entice you, to engage you. It’s powered, insidiously, by the very people you know and love, it is the darker side to social networking. We started out doing mutual grooming in a rainforest, and now we have created an entire ecosystem devoted to maximum impact and maximum response in a social context. We’ve used all the energy that we would have used to socialize with each other and channeled it into socializing on a site that manipulates us to squeeze the maximum output from us at all times. And then, monetize that very squeeze.

It’s like being nuzzled by a giant mosquito. While it’s busy at the feast, it injects anti-coagulants and painkillers in an effort to get the host to ignore it is there doing real damage. Facebook is a vampire with a sirens song and an anaesthetic bite. Facebook is a social parasite and it’s almost a perfect one. Designed to be attractive, innocuous, apparently innocent, but manifestly toxic, virulent, and disastrous.

So what is to be done? Facebook still has quite a bit of energy in it’s identity token leverage, you can’t leave because how will you use another site that offered instant gratification because you could “Sign Up” using Facebook, so that once you were signed into Facebook, you effectively had Single Sign On enabled on all those other sites. It made joining services a snap, it makes authentication a snap, and it insidiously leverages the service into your life. You couldn’t leave if you wanted to. You are trapped.

So I won’t quit Facebook. But I have deleted it from my bookmarks and I will delete it from my iPad and my iPhone. The account will dwell, intact and unchanged. I am withdrawing my consent to be squeezed for emotional processing energy. I will no longer process the jobs presented by the emotional response flag system on the Facebook Wall. I will not like something, or be angry, or sad, or wow, or laugh.

This is a matter of self-preservation. Now that people I know are leaving the platform, this seems like a good time to seek out this snuffed campfire path in the road with Facebook. There will be charcoal in the burn ring, there will be seats arrayed around the campfire, but I won’t be sitting in them anymore. I have to see this as an expression of self-care. I have to think of my own emotional processing energy first, to be careful with how I spend it and with whom.

So the things that I write about on Facebook will be posted on this Blog. It won’t likely be long form work, like this, and it won’t be as intimate as some of the things I’ve shared on Facebook, as the blog has a very rudimentary audience control system. Either a post is password protected, or it is public. There are no levels of gray, like there is on Facebook.

I can’t anymore. I give up.

Slack vs. Jabber

Posted on February 7, 2019 by bluedepth

Several years ago I started working for a new company. Their phone system was stuck in the past. The past, like Version 4 when Version 10 was being sold. So we had to upgrade, there really wasn’t any other way around it.

Enter Cisco. As VOIP hardware manufacturers go, if you stay in the silo you’ll have a pretty good life. Call Manager, Unity, and Presence are a heady combination. I decided early on to hire a local company to help me with the design and the initial layout and setup, and I will always regard that choice as one of the best I have ever made, professionally. They did an amazing job, and their staff are absolute tops in their game. They are expensive, but in the end I think worth it. So they came, helped install the Cisco Business Essentials 6000 server, and all the heavy lifting that was needed to get all three products up and running, so that people who were using the old system saw next to nothing different about how everything worked. That’s a kind of holy grail in IT.

A part of the trio of products was Cisco Presence, or to use a shorthand about what it really was, simply Jabber. Jabber is an instant messaging platform, and I had quite a bit of experience as Jabber is, at least ostensibly, an open-source system. I had lots of Jabber experience back at my previous employ and I was looking forward to seeing Jabber rolled out across the company that I now work for. The previous employ was centered on Apple technology and as an IT administrator, Apple was like waking up in the Garden of Eden. It was an earthly delight. The Apple iteration of Jabber included a CLI option switch that allowed you to instantly join everyone in the Jabber directory, nee an LDAP directory, all together. It was called “–auto_buddy” and I loved that feature. It was the killer part of Jabber from Apple. When I added someone to OpenDirectory, I could open a Terminal and throw this one command and all my work would automatically add all my coworkers together, everyone is everyone else’s buddy. It was great, I really enjoyed it.

So then, years forward, on with Cisco Presence, their implementation of Jabber. Off searching for my favorite CLI friend, “–auto_buddy”, only to find out, none of that exists. And so, that hobbled Jabber immediately. Instant Messaging’s ROI is only really salient when you have everyone engaged. You can’t really argue about ROI until that point, because when you have only a handful of people actually connected, they don’t see the point, because not everyone is connected, including the people they want to communicate with right now. If you can’t do a thing immediately, then what is the point of doing it at all? This is the core reason why a lot of tech adoption trips and falls on its face. Especially with collaboration solutions like Jabber. Until everyone joins and uses the system, convincing them that they should use it might as well be one of Hercules’s tasks, like cleaning the Augean Stables. So without my ability to link everyone up, with “–auto_buddy”, I had a piecemeal system. Without the ability for everyone to see everyone else, adoption tripped and fell flat on its figurative face.

Shortly thereafter, it exited the cultural consciousness until years later, when a new coworker had stoked interest in it all over again. But it was doomed, not this time by the lack of demonstrable ROI or the lack of “–auto_buddy”, but rather by compliance control. By the time I had installed the required pieces for compliance, the entire affair was loaded into the figurative airlock and blown out into space.

Before the end of Jabber, and running currently is another system, one that I find more engaging at least personally and that is Slack. It’s free to use, which is a huge help, and also available everywhere. I don’t have to limit it behind the walled garden of our corporate VPN. That is a huge benefit and really eases the use of it, in every case. I can immediately see the benefits of using Slack, especially in groups like mine, in Information Technology. So that’s currently the extent of it. Again, tech adoption is flat and terminal, the selling point for Slack is still tied up with the same point for Jabber. You can only demonstrate the ROI when you have full engagement, and you can only get full engagement when people see the rewards of ROI. So even Slack is just a moribund as Jabber was. But at least with Slack there is room for enticing directions it could take. I’ve been kicking around the notion of examining Slack’s position in a B2B framework. Like between MSP’s and their customers. The MSP starts a Slack and invites their customers to join. Then each customer has a channel that they are invited to. Then the company staff at the MSP hop on Slack and use it for their own benefit. Everything is segregated using Slack’s internal controls, so the MSP gets a benefit immediately and the customers can effectively chat up their reps with a single click on an app, a website, or their phones. This could enhance the collaborative power between customer and provider. Invoices posted, updates about payments, and with IFTTT looming in the background, new automated benefits could be crafted and rolled out to customers immediately.

This could also revolutionize B2C relationships as well, but that would take more corporate bravery than even the B2B solution would. I don’t actually expect anyone to seriously accept my shoot-the-moon ideas, but I would like to imagine the world where I could start my Slack app, see all my professional relationships and be able to communicate with them that way. Maybe someday if Slack succeeds and more people ask the right questions. More people actively interested in collaboration would also help.

Windows 10, QNAP, and error 0x80004005

Posted on January 18, 2019 by bluedepth

While setting up a new Windows 10 laptop we ran into a head-scratcher problem. We store a lot of our setup data in a network attached storage system called a QNAP. The laptop was connected to our local area network over Wifi, and everything connection-wise looked to be good. We could ping both the IP address of the QNAP and the DNS name as well, so we knew for a fact that the laptop could indeed send and receive traffic with the QNAP. When we attempted to call up the QNAP using Windows Explorer on this laptop we used the UNC convention to get to our data, like this \\10.1.1.100 and when we press enter, Windows 10 would pause for a short few seconds and then throw back an error code:

Windows Cannot Access \\10.1.1.100 Error Code: 0x80004005 Unspecified Error.

We then attempted to reboot, then we escalated to a full system rebuild and nothing seemed to work for us. We fiddled with PowerShell commands, to no effect, also flipping on and off IPv6, which also had no effect. So our next step was to switch to wildcat debugging and just start taking wild potshots at the laptop trying to find a way to just make this work. And we found the solution, thanks to a user by the name of dimamed on Spiceworks, who posted the solution we needed:

Adjust Registry Value:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters\AllowInsecureGuestAuth, and set the DWORD to 1.

Then I closed the registry editor, opened up Windows Explorer again, tried the QNAP as I usually do and it worked! We don’t really need it to function for our end users, but it became a matter of professional pursuit to make sure that all our technology can work together properly. It can, with some coaxing.

We hope this solution works for other folks, if you also run into this issue. Please leave a comment if you would, so we can see just how much of an impact something like this has if you don’t mind.

FreeBSD 11.1

Posted on July 12, 2018 by bluedepth

Every few months I take a little time out and evaluate the GPL/BSD Linux(y) space for readiness and usability. Always these operating systems prove themselves out quite handily for their indigenous niche, which is behind the scenes and in server rooms.

I like to evaluate systems like these to see if they’ll ever be ready for a breakout performance on the much more visible stage of front-room existence.

I start with VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. I provide every VM about 4GB of RAM, about 40GB of storage, and the understanding of what installation on a limited medium like this means for any OS. I won’t be pulling punches about raw performance, because in a VM, performance is not a priority. I evaluate these systems with the idea of “Mr. Average User” in my mind. How can “Mr. Average User” carry on with whatever I review?

Starting with FreeBSD 11.1, the installer was textual which was perfectly fine if a little low-brow. Most users are much more comfortable with pretty graphical installers right from the beginning. One oddity was that the FreeBSD boot manager did not detect the installation media and make the right choice to boot to the VM’s Virtual HD after primary installation was successful. I had to halt the system, remove the installation media, and start it again. Honestly if you were looking at a physical computer, the end user would likely remove the installation media from the USB port or DVD drive anyways, so this isn’t a problem. It does bear that Linux handles this much more elegantly.

The base system installs with CLI entry only. There is no GUI option, you have to resort to Google to get to that point. The command is fine, however getting into root if you don’t know how to by using “su” from a default install doesn’t work, your end-user account isn’t defaulted into the sudoers file, this could have been eliminated if I had added the right group to the plain user account, like “sudoers”, however I am unsure if FreeBSD follows that convention or not. In any case, all of this immediately drops the user into Google-Fu. We’ve already lost the most basic users now, and we’re only carrying on with those that have some geek experience.

Getting to the GUI level is a rather involved process. The nature of BSD has always been couched in my experience as “You get the system you asked for explicitly, not the one you implicitly assumed you would get.” So an installation of X comes with the core system and twm, a zero-frills window manager. Also, there are basic commands that need to be added with using the pkg tool, like vim and screen, although that is a lot less of a problem since other Linux platforms also don’t include some of these packages as default throw-ins. You have to install X, then you have to install your special Window Manager choice, like gnome3 for example. The actual installation is hands-off, which is very good to see, but users must come to FreeBSD with the notion that you aren’t going to get a polished Ford Mustang with just one ask. You should expect a stripped out Ford Fiesta without doors, first, and then add on extra components until you build yourself up to a Mustang.

I was finally able to get a Gnome3 X-Windows system up and running, only had to Google a few items, like adding my standard user to the wheel group for access to the su command, and then adding sudo and configuring that, to make it easier to add more software. There wasn’t any software management system in Gnome3, but I didn’t really look that hard for one either. The pkg installation routine is easy to understand and works well, generally. The one issue I did notice was that the mouse was quite difficult to use, but I expect that there would be some issues where it was a VM and I was asking it to run a lot of stuff all at once.

I find myself frequently referring to a metaphor from HG Wells’ Time Machine book. There are Morlocks and Eloi, and how the two groups can mingle as a way to discuss how these operating systems can be used by the two different kinds of people. FreeBSD is very much a Morlock system. There is no way a Morlock could find its way into an elevator, pick the surface, and have afternoon tea with an Eloi in terms of FreeBSD. In an Eloi’s viewpoint, FreeBSD is a smooth black box that makes little rattling noises, but beyond that is almost totally inert and worthless.

As always, FreeBSD is best for deep back office tasks. It has a lot of technical greatness, from the ZFS file system to the Fortuna PRNG, but it is best left to the basement level for the Morlocks to use. It would make an excellent server, but a terrible workstation.

On The Domain?

Posted on July 5, 2018 by bluedepth

At work a funny question came up. Should we put an important user and their super slim executive-style laptop on the Windows Domain or just use a Local Account? There is really only one user who fits this bill, and so we’ll leave that obvious bit out because I don’t include names in any of my blog writing.

The question comes down to reliability. Can we trust that the Windows Domain account will always work? Eh, that’s the 64,000 dollar question, now isn’t it? The user cannot under any circumstances ever see “This laptop cannot form a trust relationship with the selected domain.” error that pops up rarely and irregularly around our Windows Domain.

Obviously the answer is, since it’s Microsoft, apply the KISS Principle. We keep it simple, we keep it a local account, because we simply cannot trust Microsoft at all. Maybe the domain will work, maybe it won’t. Maybe Kerberos will work, maybe it won’t. Right up there with the worthlessness of Windows Domain GPO’s, will they apply? Well, they appear to, but they do nothing in practice. In my experience GPO’s are a mixed bag at best, sometimes they work, like home drives and printers, but sometimes they just bellyflop. We don’t really do much with GPO’s because Microsoft’s technology is so hilariously poor. Roll out software through the Domain? Hah. Never works. Fiddle with settings on the Domain? Never works. Never ever ever works. GPO’s are essentially a crock of shit at best, and a waste of time at worst.

So, if you have a mission critical user on a computer, do you use a Windows Domain? Only if you like putting 2×4’s up against your legs and whacking your ankles with a sledgehammer. Yeah, that’s the level of suffering and agony that is Windows. We’ll skip it, thanks.

I will say, I did briefly consider calling Microsoft Technical Support once a long time ago when we were looking at GPO’s for something in the long ago. But you know, that’s not a serious offer either, and creates way more work and suffering than just skipping the entire thing and declaring that whatever it is simply cannot be done. Not that any requests have actually come in that way, our interest in GPO’s were purely in-department wonderings. One foray into them, they don’t work, spread gasoline on everything and light a match and let it all burn.

It’s been a long time since I wrote this bit, but it still holds true and will for the rest of time. Microsoft is the worst company on Earth and I regret every experience coming into contact with them. I only use their “technology” because I have no other choice. Microsoft rules a kingdom of shit. May they all die in a fire.

So no, we won’t be using a Domain Account.

Cat’s Megamix

Posted on June 29, 2018 by bluedepth

I have a 25 hour long playlist on Spotify that is solely composed of Cat relaxation music. Currently it’s playing throughout the house and especially for felines, and also for their hapless human lap-warmers, the slowly paced lullabies and carefully composed music interspersed with isochronic beat patterns have chilled all felines right to unconsciousness. Instead of mobbing the door leading to Ysabel’s welcome room, they are on my lap, or near me, totally lounging, sleeping, and napping. Even the new kitten digs the music, and has likewise fallen asleep.

It may be wishful thinking, but this music seems to be having the same effect as Felidae does.

There is another note of kismet in all of this. The way we discovered Ysabel, just how free and easy all this has been so far. Right down to the right gadgets and the service and the music to bring it all together. It feels effortless, although I freely admit that this has only just started, but perhaps if I stay optimistic everything will follow suit and work out for the best.

This all assumes the music doesn’t put me out like it is the cats. Who thought it, music enhanced introductions. What a marvel!

Keybase Redux

Posted on June 25, 2018 by bluedepth

The current ecosystem out there in the Internet is not one that wants for communication nor security. Not at least in options for either, but rather in the popularity contest between the oldest forms of communication on the Internet versus all these new ways of communicating out there. There are so many ways!

Email and web-based sites like Reddit and Facebook have all proven themselves over and over again, perhaps not quite as secure as any of us would hope, but in uniquity of use. Everyone had to get over the hump of everyone they knew having an email address or a Facebook account. Once the novelty wore off, the security headaches appeared. Most notably how difficult it is to get people to adopt basic security methods when dealing with email, the death and burial of PGP and GPG technologies rendering email plaintext for anyone to snoop on who might have access to do so.

Then the parade of other sorts of solutions exploded. Signal, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger exploded. People talking to each other, sometimes privately, sometimes not. Facebook ate a little bit of Signal, but so far I haven’t seen anyone actually use it to protect their chats.

Recently I have come across another app like this, called Confide. It brings forward a lot of the features that attract me to things like Signal and Telegram, the end-to-end security between chat partners without worrying about anyone in between eavesdropping. Confide also eliminates a huge privacy hole present in Snapchat, which is Confide appears to have eliminated the possibility of screen shotting the content of the message so it can break out. This obviously has limits, because you can very well take camera-based pictures of the Confide process and eliminate the screen-shot security, but it does push that envelope further out where people have to perform a lot of extra steps to be clever.

Signal was the first app that I saw that introduced exploding messages to this marketplace. Within the Signal app, and Confide as well I presume, you can set a lifetime counter to a message and after the timer has expired, the message is irretreivable.

There were other solutions that came along as well, more colaborative and team-based, like Slack and Discord, services that supplanted text messages like SMS and iMessage for me, especially at work. The further along I went, the more I realized that for a lot of these systems they unfortunately have two big things running against them, they are a change in how people communicate and change is one of the scariest things out there; the second thing is just how oddly resistant people are to actually collaborate. Quite often I am struck by the dial tone I get from folk when I attempt to explain why collaborative solutions like Google Docs and Slack/Discord are so amazing. So I pretty much make an elevator pitch and then let things lie where they land.

Enter Keybase. Originally the site appeared to be a central hub to link personal identity and personal avatars to PGP/GPG keypairs. I suppose you could affectionately regard it as trying to plug in Frankenstein’s Monster just to get a few more twitches out of the poor bastard. However just today, I received an email inviting me to check out Keybase again. They have teams, chat, files, and exploding bits that seem to mingle elements of Signal and Slack together.

What platform wins? Winning is population. When everyone collectively agrees that a solution is so good that it wins by sheer existence alone, that platform wins. Facebook tried it by manipulating human emotions and reward centers, and monetizing all our data that we wanted to share with each other. Right now the platform du jour is Facebook and the corruption of that system is starting to exact a toll on the people who use it. I have abandoned Facebook, and my life has improved. I don’t have the social reward mechanism in place any longer, but it has given me more time to read books and articles online and helped me become a happier person.

What then for these other applications and what they have to bring to the party? I have almost all of them, but use them all very sparingly. What is the point of a communications platform if you don’t know anybody who is using it? It’s the lesson learned by Google Plus in how it attempted to fight with Facebook. If the people aren’t there, then nobody is there. There is a reflection of this all the way back to the start of email as a communications mechanism. PGP/GPG was released back in the late 90’s, and because it didn’t take off, it spiraled out of control and went pear-shaped when it crashed to the surface.

Only time will tell, but from what I’ve seen of Keybase, I’m pleased and intrigued. However again, without anyone to actually use this platform with, it’s just another app that I don’t use on my phone or computer.

200 Hours

Posted on June 18, 2018 by bluedepth

The last time I was logged into Facebook was June 9th at 11:45pm. I was scrolling along the wall feed and I distinctly felt ill that I was on Facebook. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t rewarding, it was a chore. More than that, it was an unpleasant chore, and at the time it felt repulsive. The kind of repulsion that makes your stomach go sour, hurk a little and the metallic acid tang at the back of your throat, that sort of raw physical displeasure. I closed the tab, and wrote a little in my journal.

It’s been 200 hours and a few since that moment. I haven’t logged on once since. I don’t feel like I am missing anything, except when I have something to cheer or gripe about. There are a few things that I could have posted on Facebook, and thanks to Yelp, some of that has made its way on to Facebook, but that was automation doing the sharing, not me.

I made a break with Facebook. I’m not going to close anything or remove anything, that would require more exposure to their platform. I simply won’t be there. I’ve got this blog, where I can share things, and of course my journal. Almost everything ends up in the journal anyways, the important things in the blog, and I will leave Facebook and Twitter to the machines, let them suffer it. The universal answer to “Did you see on…?” will default to no. I didn’t see it. I don’t really want to see it, but you’ll show it to me anyways. There may never be freedom, true freedom from Facebook, because it leaks in around the edges and is in the news a lot, so it will become something like a persistent fungal infection. Nothing that actually hurts me, but it makes my toenails ugly. Just leave the socks on.

Facebook, and Google both have contributed to the death of smalltalk. What’s the point of saying anything when nobody believes you and they tell you that you are wrong, up until they read it on the platform and then you hear in a small voice, “Oh, yeah… there it is.” So, whatever. It’s best to just leave everything to the platform, it has in so many ways replaced so much for us. The matter of record, truth, facts, and even basic conversation. The only thing left is to pretend to be a dullard. You don’t know anything, you have nothing to say, and everything is a mystery novelty.

The platform is very interesting. We created something we can’t control, it’s bad for us, but we don’t really care. We’re throwing flowers at Frankenstein’s Monster and celebrating it with daily parades, despite the fact that it rampages and burns down random buildings and causes such conflict and suffering. Hooray for the Monster.

I won’t see it on Facebook. Save your bus fare. Keep whatever it is to yourself. Whats the point of talking about it anyways? All the possible conversations are there, up on that platform, go there, knock yourself out. The Monster loves daisies.

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Category Archives: Geek

Windows 10, QNAP, and error 0x80004005

FreeBSD 11.1

On The Domain?

Cat’s Megamix

Keybase Redux