Blackmoor Vituperative

Elevator pitch: Doughy old white dude (DOWD ?) offers useful advice to young people, based on things that he learned while living this long — with the disclaimer that at any moment, what he suggests might be rendered distasteful, ludicrous, or simply impossible by the passage of time.

I’d call it ADVICE FROM THE PATRIARCHY.

Today’s advice: Sardines are the best fish for you. They are sustainably harvested, full of healthy stuff (one of the few natural foods with Vitamin D, just for example), and no risk of bad stuff that may come with larger fish (no risk of ciguatera, for example). And King Oscar has the best sardines.

They are not good for you if you have gout, sadly. But if you are so afflicted, I suspect that you already knew this.

Later…

“Advice From The Patriarchy … Because nothing says ‘privilege’ quite like offering unsolicited advice to an entire generation.”

See, I think that’s hilarious. But I suspect that the desired audience would not appreciate the joke.

For no particular reason, the song “Fame”, by Irene Cara, came into my mind today. Google tells me it was released in 1980: 42 years ago. I haven’t heard it in very nearly that long, but I recall it clearly, and I even recall the name of the singer.

That is just how hugely popular that song was… briefly. And then nothing. When’s the last time you thought of it? How strange that is. The fleeting popularity of fame, so to speak.

It’s not really my style of pop song, and I still haven’t seen the eponymous movie, but even I loved the song and sang along to it, at the time. Of course, I was in my early teens then, and a boy, so I could never actually tell anyone I loved that song. It would have been indistinguishable to wearing a “call me a ‘homo’ and push me down” sign. (I’m not gay, and was even less so then, thanks to adolescent hormones, but bullies don’t place a high value on accuracy. Hopefully, my own miserable teen years helped distract the bullies from actual gay kids.)

Anyway, that’s not what compelled me to write this post. I’m writing this post because I asked Google to “play ‘Fame’ by Irene Cara on YouTube, on ‘downstairs group'” (my downstairs speakers). And, obligingly, it did (Google can be… contrary, sometimes).

And then it played “YMCA”, by the Village People.

And THAT made me laugh out loud.

Ever since Firefox 98 (I think), a popup appears every ten minutes or so, showing files that have been downloaded successfully (or not, I assume). Whether I have downloaded anything recently or not. It does not go away until I manually close it.

That is annoying. Here is how to fix it.

Go to about:config (accepting the warning along the way).

Change browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel to false.

Imagine a world where Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple had the combined wealth and power of Mailboxes, Etc. …

Proposal: some services must never be operated for profit. As in, if you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. What kind of services?

• Hospitals
• Military
• Police
• Post Offices
• Prisons
• Roads
• Schools
• Trains

Story hook: a team of people from 2080 go back to the 1960s to attempt to prevent the end of Human civilization. How? By lobbying legislators to put civilian use of ARPANET under exclusive control of the US Post Office before Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf develop TCP/IP.

Update: In case this was unclear: if you put “Contracting Company” after any of these services, it should make NO DIFFERENCE. NONE. If you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. We are at least a generation past the point where the “contractor” loophole should have been legislatively closed. Human beings are not “resources” to be squeezed dry and discarded.

The consensus among security researchers has been consistent for about 15 years: forcing password expiration based on nothing but the date makes passwords less secure.

https://www.sans.org/blog/time-for-password-expiration-to-die/

Also relevant…