The Age of Loneliness

March 22, 2023874 words5 mins readPart of Ages of Man series

The inability to enjoy loneliness leads to the desire to communicate with idiots.

Or is it

The inability to enjoy communication with idiots leads to a desire for loneliness.

Can’t remember, just press play, friend, and read on.

The feeling of loneliness derives from the (false) perception that experience is “my” experience. Without the identification with the feeling of “me” as a basis it is impossible to feel lonely, even though there is awareness of the fact that your experience is indeed unique. Your personality is not yours and it is not you, it is just another element of experience.

On the other hand, it is possible to perceive the being of others as an extension of your perception of your own being. It is like a isomorphic relation between elements of two spaces.

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Nada Surf: High/Low

March 21, 2023103 words1 min read   

Terminally online in a cyberpunk world?

March 14, 2023821 words4 mins readPart of Life and death series

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. William Gibson, Neuromancer

If you really want to know the answer to this question, look around. Increasingly we live in a world controlled and manipulated via the net, the wired, the metaverse. Where content and creators, programmers and artists coalesce into vast seas of content. Evermore our youth are lost in the infancy of the virtual worlds that our tablets, screens, and now headsets provide. You need not look at the specific technological forms or functions from these stories to see how well they predicted the future. If you look at the broader picture, the broader result of the technological singularity our civilization is undergoing you can see they were dead on.

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Aren't we chatty today, Windows 11

March 10, 2023735 words4 mins read

Continuing my work from the Web Browser telemetry article two years ago (which I plan to update, just to see the difference time does to telemetry data), I decided to make a log of all network connections a standard install of Windows 11 Pro (for ARM, 22H2, OS build 22621.1344) does.

The methodology is the same, standard setup without changing any of the default settings (Privacy ones, for example). Test device is a MacBook M1 laptop and Parallels Desktop, a clean user profile, all network connections blocked, application-level network connection whitelisting and only Little Snitch installed. So it’s actually Little Snitch that does all the heavy-lifting. Network traffic is routed through a VPN in Finland.

That’s 66 unique network connections to different hosts/domains for a clean install. Some are understandable, like Windows Update CDN, others like graph.microsoft.com and watson.events.data.microsoft.com are just the thing that would define Windows 11 as spyware. Definitely “more spyware” than DPRK’s Red Star OS.

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RISC-V SoCs and SBCs

March 7, 20231588 words8 mins read

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established RISC principles. Unlike most other ISA designs, RISC-V is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. A number of companies are offering or have announced RISC-V hardware, open source operating systems with RISC-V support are available, and the instruction set is supported in several popular software toolchains.

Below is a small list of some of the most important RISC-V SoCs (System on a Chip) and their development boards. I chose not to list the prices of the SBCs (Single-Board Computer) because they shift quite a bit depending on availability, location and the current Moon period.

StarFive JH7110

JH7110 is equipped with a 64-bit high-performance quad-core RISC-V processor core sharing 2 MB of cache coherency, whose working frequency is 1.5 GHz. JH7110 has a rich high-speed native interface, supports the Linux operating system, and has powerful image and video processing system. The StarFive ISP is compatible with mainstream camera sensors, built-in image/video processing subsystem supports H.264/H.265/JPEG codec. The integrated GPU makes its image processing capabilities stronger, such as 3D rendering. With high-performance, OpenCL/OpenGL ES/Vulkan support, JH7110 can further enhance intelligence and efficiency. JH7110 can complete a variety of complex image/video processing and intelligent visual calculations. Also, it meets multiple visual real-time processing requirements at the edge. source

  • manual
  • four RV64GC SiFive U74 application cores, one RV64IMAC SiFive S7 monitor core and one RV32IMFC SiFive E24.
  • 1.5GHz
  • 28nm
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The alt.cyberpunk FAQ

March 2, 202315886 words75 mins read
The alt.cyberpunk FAQ

This compilation of Cyberpunk resources is not my work (unlike this one), I just converted the HTML format to Markdown so people can change it easier without knowing HTML. It would be a shame to lose such an amazing Cyberpunk resource that is part of our history. The Markdown file can be found here (it’s work in progress, not all the links are converted yet).

Background

The legendary newsgroup hierarchy alt.cyberpunk has been hibernating for a few years now, but that is no reason why this FAQ should not be useful. Usenet itself is rather dormant and not all ISPs provide access. Google Groups, formerly Dejanews, provide web access to the alt.cyberpunk hierarchy.

So here it is, dusting off the info dump and readying it for a world that is like the 1980’s all over again. This means much of the content is radically reorganised.

This is Version 5.1 preview 3 of the alt.cyberpunk FAQ. History is a little foggy, but it appears that previous maintainers/editors and version numbers are as given at the end. Presently, the maintainer follows alt.cyberpunk (which is easily done) and 4chan.org/g/cyb/ when operative and also anon.cafe/cyber which is a more recent hangout.

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Sam Wills: Breathe

February 25, 2023112 words1 min read    

Resource monitoring with collectd

February 20, 20231355 words7 mins read

Telemetry is bad. Everybody knows it. However, monitoring the health and performance of one’s server is critical for preventing unnecessary problems and it is important to have a system in place that can collect system and application data accurately and display it in an understandable manner.

What is collectd?

collectd is a daemon which collects system and application performance metrics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd gathers metrics from various sources, e.g. the operating system, applications, logfiles and external devices, and stores this information or makes it available over the network. Those statistics can be used to monitor systems, find performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you’re at the right place, too ;). homepage

This configuration monitors the following:

  • basic system resources (load, processes, CPU cores)
  • swap and RAM
  • disk(s) usage
  • networking on ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS)
  • number of logged-in users
  • sensors data
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TSA No-Fly list download

February 16, 2023194 words1 min read

As you already know if you are reading this article, the TSA No-Fly list was exfiltrated by a Swiss hacker from the U.S. national airline CommuteAir servers a while ago. After it was put up for sale on the breached.vc forums by someone, that someone made the list(s, because there are two .csv files) free to download.

Long story short, here it is the list, in all its glory, no strings attached.

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Hidden IRC server over Tor

February 14, 2023456 words3 mins read

Mixing Tor and IRC is a bit more complicated than simply downloading the Tor Browser, so I will explain how to install/configure an IRC server, connect this server to the Tor network and connect to the server as a client.

What is IRC?

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. The process of IRC is based on client-server networking model. You might want to read more about IRC in the RFC-1459, RFC-2813 - Server protocol and RFC-2812 - Client protocol.

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