Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "search-engines"
-
More than half of all support calls and tickets we get are so fucking easily searchable through our own fucking website and search engines, it's really fucking annoying sometimes.
"how do I redirect a site?"
Type the fucking word redirect into our helpdesk page.
"how can i reset my email password?"
Literally fucking type the word EMAIL into fucking search bar?!
"hey the article said to go to yourdomain.com/webmail, I'm not getting anything!!!"
"what domain did you use?"
"yourdomain.com of course!"
😥🔫
"how can I add a domain to my hosting?"
Search for the FUCKING word DOMAIN on our online helpdesk.
IT'S REALLY NOT THAT HARD, PLEASE APPLY COMMON SENSE AND USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN.17 -
Proud of my dad today.
He used to be the type of person who installs any application/software without reading what's being displayed on the screen. And my browsers used to be filled with all those toolbars and random search engines.
But yesterday when he was installing an app on his phone, he came to me asking "why does this app need access to contacts. It shouldn't require them in the first place".
I've succeeded in my mission.
Dad: 1
Shady Dev: 05 -
Introduce a subject called "proper use of search engines" and make every kid attend it regularly, just like gym classes.5
-
Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!
I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.
So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.
I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.
'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.
I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.
Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.
So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.
TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.
Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.
There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.
I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.
Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.
I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.
Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!28 -
Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!
The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.
I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.
The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.
When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.
That's when the nerdgasm happened.
The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!
That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.
Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.
Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.11 -
I don't think I could give the best advice on this since I don't follow all the best practices (lack of knowledge, mostly) but fuck it;
- learn how to use search engines. And no, not specifically Google because I don't want to drag kids into the use of mass surveillance networks and I neither want to promote them (even if they already use it).
- try not to give up too easily. This is one I'm still profiting from (I'm a stubborn motherfucker)
- start with open source technologies. Not just "because open source" but because open source, in general, gives one the ability to hack around and explore and learn more!
- Try to program securely and with privacy in mind (the less data you save, the less can be abused, compromised, leaked, etc)
- don't be afraid to ask questions
-enjoy it!7 -
Employer: I want to make a search engine but only for our products.
Me: Sure. It's called an eshop.
Employer: You know that eshops are not engines right?
Me: Technology has changed the past few years. (hidden irony)
Employer: I guess that's geeky stuff. Tell me more about this.
Me: First, you need to upgrade your flash eshop.
Employer: (frustrated) You IT people always want to do things your way, aren't you? Nevermind, let's get to business, how can I make my site better?1 -
Allllllright. Time for another one of these. It's necessary.
We get it, you don't use/like/acknowledge Google. Please, kindly STFU already with it. The entirety of the smart internet has made your point.
Oh, because I use Google I'm a fucking idiot? No, you are for thinking that. I've used many engines and consistently have they given me worse results. "Oh, it's because they build a search profile for you, they're spying" Yeah, I get it already, fuck off.
Linux is NOT the thing that's going to solve every single human problem, so please stop treating it like a good and saying everything else is complete shit and nobody should use it.
Windows has issue, but so does Linux. At least I can (usually) comfortably update Windows, knowing what the update includes, without having to read the source code fhanges or be scared that there's a fucked up package update.
Just because something isn't open source doesn't mean it's the fucking devil. And just because I USE that closed source thing doesn't make me... Well, anything really, except for a guy who actually gets different programs. Please stop trying to tell me what I NEED TO DO to be a "good person" or user or anything like that, I'm going to do what I damn well please. If that means using Windows with Closed source things like Nvidia drivers and cards, the so be it. Got a problem? Go fuckyourself with it.17 -
I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN
I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.
My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.
The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).
At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.
I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.
It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.12 -
*gets annoyed by how vi command in Ubuntu WSL points to vim*
To be clear, that's due to update-alternatives in Ubuntu, not WSL specifically.
*le me ducking how to install vi instead, because vim in WSL has scrolling issues*
"install vi ubuntu"
> How do I install and get started with vim/vi? - Ask Ubuntu
> apt - Vim installation in Ubuntu 14.04 - Ask Ubuntu
> Ubuntu Linux: Install vim Text Editor - nixCraft
-.- I'm not looking for vim ffs, I already have that installed.
"install vi ubuntu -vim"
> Same fucking results
"!g install vi ubuntu -vim"
> Installing the VI Perl Toolkit from Source Code—Linux - VMware
> FedoraDirectoryServerClientHowto - Community Help Wiki - Ubuntu …
> Learn How To Use Linux vi Editor And Its Commands - LinOxide
Oh for fuck's sake!!!
So here's my question because apparently search engines clearly can't point me to it, and Ubuntu doesn't seem to have vi as "vi" in their repositories either. Do our Canonical overlords allow people to actually make /usr/bin/vi actually be fucking vi?11 -
I wAs ChEcKiNg YoUr WeBsItE aNd I sEe YoU hAvE a GoOd DeSiGn AnD iT lOoKs GrEaT, bUt It’s NoT rAnKeD oN gOoGlE aNd OtHeR mAjOr SeArCh EnGiNeS.
please leave me alone5 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.4 -
Just wrote my own webpack plugin for VueJS.
In serverless application there isn't a good way to pre render a single page web application as there is no server to do this task.
What we can do is use serverside rendering with webpack to locally (or in CI) generate the static HTML markup and include them in a template file like EJS.
In that way, the client browsers would not have to wait for the initial render and the search engines will also be happy.
This feels good! Time to upload it as a npm package 😇2 -
Anything I (am able to) build myself.
Also, things that are reasonably standardized. So you probably won't see me using a commercial NAS (needing a web browser to navigate and up-/download my files, say what?) nor would I use something like Mega, despite being encrypted. I don't like lock-in into certain clients to speak some proprietary "secure protocol". Same reason why I don't use ProtonMail or that other one.. Tutanota. As a service, use the standards that already exist, implement those well and then come offer it to me.
But yeah. Self-hosted DNS, email (modified iRedMail), Samba file server, a blog where I have unlimited editing capabilities (God I miss that feature here on devRant), ... Don't trust the machines nor the services you don't truly own, or at least make an informed decision about them. That is not to say that any compute task should be kept local such as search engines or AI or whatever that's best suited for centralized use.. but ideally, I do most of my computing locally, in a standardized way, and in a way that I completely control. Most commercial cloud services unfortunately do not offer that.
Edit: Except mail servers. Fuck mail servers. Nastiest things I've ever built, to the point where I'd argue that it was wrong to ever make email in the first place. Such a broken clusterfuck of protocols, add-ons (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), reputation to maintain... Fuck mail servers. Bloody soulsuckers those are. If you don't do system administration for a living, by all means do use the likes of ProtonMail and Tutanota, their security features are nonstandard but at least they (claim to) actually respect your privacy.2 -
Ok this is freaking creepy. I searched for information about login systems on other websites for some time. Not once did I touch Facebook. Then Facebook show me targeted ads when I hoped on 30 minutes later. How the heck does Facebook get that data in the first place? I'm starting to get pissed that my data is just handed out to everyone, even by search engines.22
-
The single most annoying thing about working with Microsoft is how they, at one point, decided to wipe 99% of their articles and downloads on their site. But instead of updating it in their OWN FUCKING OS, they just leave links to the broken pages in their help system. The second problem then arises when you realise that instead of giving you an error page, it automatically redirects you to the default page.
But on top of wiping their site, not updating windows to reflect those changes, and having a terrible site design, they have also decided that it would be best to keep the pages that once we're, online. This means that they will still show up in search engines, without any content being there.
Add to that the fact that their support team is incompetent to an insane degree, and often doesn't know what they're talking about. This has caused me so much frustration over the last few days.
Dear Microsoft, please get your act together and fix your shitty website.
Greetings,
A pissed of customer who paid money for your shitty services2 -
When I need help with JavaScript, I google 'JS (insert query here)...'
When I need help with Go, I have to google 'Go programming (insert query here)...'
The extra term 'programming' is so search engines recognise I'm looking for answers related to the Go language.
Ironic, but Go is the least 'search engine friendly' language. Sites like O'Reilly and Packtpub return searches with uneven results.10 -
kinda long but please read (skip to the bullets if you're lazy):
hey dR. I stumpled across a search engine that aims to help the environment. it's called "Ecosia" and it will plant a tree for every ~45 searches you make. just think, one stubborn bug could make you the reason for a new forest! I'm not sure if it's legitimate or not, but apparently it uses 80% of its profits to plant trees, and makes that profit from ads. is it safe to use? I'm not sure.
here is what you should know (some are based on claims by ecosia and aren't proved, but probably true):
- they plant a tree for about every 45 searches you make
- they are able to plant trees by using money from ads
- they "respect privacy"
- they're "fully transparent"
- they're a "social buisness"
- [I hope this isn't a turnoff] the search results are powered by bing
- since 1.9, vivaldi has included ecosia as one of the preset search engines (I'm not sure if it's the default)
- it has opera, firefox, and chrome extensions
thanks!11 -
I’m already irritated by all the unwanted stimulus. I don’t need search engines, websites or whatever that fuck showing me stuff I did not ask for. It’s really distracting and makes it hard to focus on one thing. I’m trying to adjust to a lifestyle like this but it’s bloody difficult in this day and age.3
-
I changed IP address of the domain A record to point to his new site. Told him it could take a day to propagate, but usually fine in a few hours. 2 hours later... "Microsoft is pointing to new site but Google isn't". I have to make some assumptions here, who else calls a browser by its fucking parent company, that is if he is talking about that or search engines. Anyway just sent him my favourite wiki link on how to clear browser cache and hopefully he will fuck off indefinitely.1
-
First of all, a great channel to follow and where all this is from: https://youtube.com/watch/...
It listed a lot of open source news I missed myself and I'm sure others did too, for those that are too lazy to watch the video or open the description, I've stripped away the links and "X version got released" just to give an idea of what he covers.
------------------
GNOME and KDE announced they would work together on building better Linux desktops at Linux App Summit.
XRDesktop, a VR enabled Linux desktop, will allow you to use your Linux programs while wearing your VR headset.
Responding to the european commission's fines, Google announced that it would allow other search engines to be present at Android's setup.
Manjaro will allow users to pick between FreeOffice, Libre Office, or no office suite at all.
The Igalia team announced that they are working to make Pitivi compatible with Final Cut Pro X
Microsoft might be bringing its Teams software to Linux.
Martin Wimpress from the Canonical SnapCraft team gave an interview to TechRepublic, on Snaps
A discussion took place on how to improve Linux desktop performance in low ram scenarios.
A KDE vulnerability has been outed publicly before notifying the developers.
Nvidia has open sourced a bunch of documentation for its GPUs
Linux Journal announced they would cease their publication.
Kdenlive 19.08 has been released, bringing 3 point editing and a bunch of keyboard shortcuts
The Linux on Dex project now allows to run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a samsung smartphone.
According to protondb, we passed the 6000 playable games mark, out of 9 thousand for which users have created a report
GNOME Feeds has been released on flathub, a simple app to read RSS feeds on GNOME
The enlightenment desktop released its first version in 2 years, enlightenment 0.23.0.
Linux celebrated its 28th birthday
Microsoft announced that they would bring exFAT support to the linux kernel.
Thundebird 68 was released with an interface redesign
Collabora has published an update on their work on viglrenderer, a solution to emulate a gpu while using a virtual machine through Qemu.7 -
I was looking at some info about how much ads pay, CPM and all that, came across a guy who answered a question related to this on quora (FUCK quora piece of shit content farm :/ but that's a story for another day) and put links to his apps on Google Play in it.
I always had low self esteem and think that I know nothing and I'm shit but seriously fact that people who make apps like this exist and are proud of their shit makes me feel better.
His entire collection of apps are garbage like this, like a "driving school" with images from Google Search and other games screenshots and "top 10 search engines" with just logos of search engines. 😂
EDIT: Typos3 -
If you plan to learn a framework, type his name into job search engines to know if there is a lot of demand ... You'll save a lot of time and energy !2
-
WTF!? Is the internet is fake? What happened to the actual internet?
If you take any search phrase and search on Google or Bing you will get millions or billions or results. But if you go to the last page enough times it will drop down to a total of like 200 results. I am unsure on other search engines as they make it difficult to jump ahead in the search (only provide "next page"). I was going to the next page of results in Brave search engine and it came up with a "are you human" test. Like nobody is going to search more than a few pages. This definitely makes me feel like in am in the Truman Show.
What is the point of limiting to only a few hundred pages? Why show millions or billions for initial search? Are there any real search engines that don't filter so much? Did the technocrats burn the second great library already?8 -
Google announced the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place.
According to the report of The Verge : EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box.3 -
I am not sure if devrant is the best place to post this so sorry if it is not.
How far do employers/recruiters go when searching online information about their applicants?
Do they simply check your fb? simple google search your name? advanced queries with multiple search engines? data gathering software like maltego? or really check and link leaked db dumps and pastebins?
If anyone has any knowledge or experience with this I would love to hear.
Thanks in advance10 -
Why do people not use search engines?
Like there exist so many good search engines and you still ask a question that can be answered by searching 2 minutes on the internet???
You could save yourself and others so much fucking time!!!7 -
I fucking hate Google, but made the decision to use it as my primary search engine once again.
Reality dictates that I have already adopted it for well over a decade via searches since AllTheWeb existed along with owning enough Android devices to choke a twelve headed dragon whore.
But, here's the main reason: You.com and DuckDuckGo are so dumb as fuck, they might as well be Ron Jeremy's MySpace page.
You.com, for instance, is "completely customizable" by adding un-customizable "apps" without any control over the content it spews into your SERPS.
Neither seems to have interest in no longer padding results with shit you'd take a knife to. At least Google allows me to block those pages or sites from being seen again.
If you happen to live on Planet Earth (which currently seems to exclude 86.8% of the human population) you've been tracked before you even knew what "Big Brother" meant.
If you're looking to safeguard your security, buy a goddamn sword and time travel to remove the Zuckerberg timeline from existence.22 -
Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.
So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃
Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.
So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?
So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.
"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."
So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.
But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.
Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.7 -
PSA Cloudflare had a bug in there system where they were dumping random pieces of memory in the body of HTML responses, things like passwords, API tokens, personal information, chats, hotel bookings, in plain text, unencrypted. Once discovered they were able to fix it pretty quickly, but it could have been out in the wild as early as September of last year. The major issue with this is that many of those results were cached by search engines. The bug itself was discovered when people found this stuff on the google search results page.
It's not quite end of the world, but it's much worse than Heartbleed.
Now excuse me this weekend as I have to go change all of my passwords.3 -
Egad! An actual rant is revealed!
Lamers who insist that informal or oversimplified stuff be written are damn annoying.
God forbid the appropriate use of a four-syllable word.
In what world is "uncanny" a strange word?
Is "blessed are the authors of good documentation" such a difficult sentence? Call the linguist; this shit can only be interpreted by an expert!
"U WRITE LIEK A ROBOT!!!!!!!!!"
Piss off, trog. Some men like succinctness and just wish to communicate without a great deal of ambiguity. A bit of clunkiness is preferable to a bit of ambiguity.
Pants are apparently shat when proper sentences are encountered.
If writing coherently and correctly implies being pretentious, then the world is beyond repair.
Also annoying are lamers who insist on wasting other men's time by asking questions which are perfectly suited for search engines.
Reaching through the monitor and beating the crap out of people sometimes seems a bit tempting. But doing such a thing is infeasible... and would probably result in felony charges if such a thing were feasible.13 -
What the hell is wrong with search engines?
I thought Google had turned to shit. So I decided to get on Duckduckgo as many hyped
It turned out to be way worse. You search for something with a slightly viral keyword, and it only gives you results for the keyword as if you didn't ask it anything else.
Bing is not much better either IMO.
Are we just getting too used to neat answers given by chatGPT, or are the search engines actually being worse this year?6 -
Trying to make use of Google Maps. Search results are always sorted by "most relevant" by default, instead of by distance. Always I switch to distance, next search goes "most relevant" instead, which should be labelled "most irrelevant" instead, as it seems to be an excuse to show a list with promoted businesses not only far away, but often unrelated to my actual query. Wasn't Google supposed to be some sort of search engine experts? or at least the lesser evil of search engines? Oh wait, no, they're actually an advertising company, and it shows. Fuck you, Google. Where am I going to throw my Pixel phone and why did I open your shitty apps in the first place? I should switch MY own defaults back to Open Street Map etc.4
-
I want to change my domain name by moving the actual website files to a new domain. It has 4 articles and has about 700 page views per day. Will search engines blacklist the new site for 'copied' content?2
-
I'm getting more and more fed up with my fellow colleagues who encounter errors in the execution of their code and come to me like bumbling idiots..." I don't know ow what's wrong ... It's not working"
DID YOU READ THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE? I GUARAN-DAMN-TEE IT TELLS YOU EXACTLY WHAT'S WRONG! YOU KNOW WHAT...EVEN IF ITS NOT 100% CLEAR GOOGLE IT. BET YOU FIND THE ANSWER
To add insult to idiocracy...I recently over heard grumblings of being displeased at current level - fuck off you lazy ass child - if you can't read an error and Google for the damned solution in today's era search engines and developer assistance, you don't deserve to call yourself a "Senior Developer"
People like to act like there's some great secret to becoming a competent developer...I'm posit over half is simple reading comprehension2 -
!rant
Started Data Science course on big data universuty. The outcomes are heavily dependent on domain experts/stakeholders!!! Since all the answers are false positives and need to decide what make sense with the help of domain experts. And most of the Data scientists are not from programming background, they are domain experts who turned into Data scientists. Thoughts if I should continue with learning big data/data science, knowing that I have knowledge in information retrieval and search engines. -
A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..
If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..
From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!
Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!
There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..
If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..
Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */
Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!
And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..
One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..
Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.
So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..
And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.
To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it4 -
I have a recurring problem with Typescript where I can't search types for errors because all search engines are flooded with questions and articles about type checker errors.20
-
I've recently moved from google to duckduckgo for my searches, Having in mind the growing concern of user privacy, what do you guys suggest for search engines, browsers, os, recommended addons, apps, vpns etc?13
-
Boss : make me a project with serverless and vue js
Me: you renounce to the SEO
Boss: no i need full visibility on search engines
Me: i will prerender it :'(
Rant :what i can do to save de seo of an vuejs application ? ... My html file have div id app ... End XD3 -
Anybody heard anything about this?
First Video:
https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0
Second Video:
https://youtu.be/g1VeElBAeas
Its a interview with a senior google software engineer who leaked information about Google's machine learning bias, censorship, hiring practices, and much more. I think that Google's censorship based on the company's own political standing is disgusting. While I do not associate with either political parties (I feel like I don't know enough politics to have an opinion), I do detest any censorship of speech and information. Maybe unbiased search engines like duckduckgo will rise in the future.
p.s. sorry if there's bad formatting, I am on mobile.1 -
Reading through a tutorial / blog post, getting all excited, then realizing it was dated 5 year ago, and with a completely obsolete version of the library you're working with.
Bloggers, tech doc people, and companies (I'm looking at YOU IBM) really need to at least date and version their articles! Please!
Mind you, search engines will happily serve up older code even when you're being specific (and no, I didn't mean "dance studio").
Is it any wonder developers bristle when high level management admonishes them for not "looking for help earlier"?1 -
Wish we could downvote whole websites / url links
Researching information and the website is just plain wrong...
Search engines would also be better done using bookmarks I think
But then you'd need to sign up to certain communities to share bookmarks with and not others, because just like people make bank gaming SEO they will try to infect these networks to sell you useless stuff just the same2 -
The only advice I ever got about transitioning from a dev student to actually working in the dev world came when I was on my first semester in an elevator from a random person who already had a job in dev. Not her words, but paraphrased later by someone else:
"The only qualification you really need to make it just fine is the ability to utilise search engines better than the average gorilla"
... and she was right. Also, never before had I noticed, and I was dumbfounded when I did, how bad people actually were at searching for information.2 -
Some random blogs/sites piggybacking StackOverflow, copying content from there and posting it as their own... I don't know about you, I think this is a super shitty thing to do. Sure, it gets obvious at one point and you just stop clicking on search results like that, but it would've been nice if SEO could work against that so search engines discourage and/or penalise it.2
-
Anybody watch the "Electric Dreams" episode called "Safe and Sound"?
This makes me think this is where we will end up with tech companies altering searches/websites for the individual. Making people believe things that are not true by representing false narratives. The actions of these individuals will reinforce narratives presented to the masses. There is already people finding that search engines and social media can sway elections by several percentage points. It seems like someone could use that same tech to target someone and turn them into a <fill in the blank here>. Urging them to some action. The rest of the world is like "WTF just happened?".
This is not a world I want.2 -
Does anyone know where to find documentation on features in Windows 10?
I don't have Windows 10 available right now. I have been searching Google and cannot find ANYTHING about Microsoft Connect (the mirroring app) for Windows 10. I see articles written by everyone except Microsoft. I searching Microsoft's own search engines on their documentation websites and it returns tons of crap that have nothing to do with that particular app.
What I want to know is if an app that is mirrored from Android can copy and paste text to the Windows 10 machine. I have books available on my Android tablet and the source code excerpts can be copied to the Android clipboard. I am hoping if when the screen is mirrored using Connect that I can paste that text in a Windows app.4 -
I am truly baffled. How in the world am I receiving 2-10 spam wordpress account registrations EVERY DAY for a website which I've never let be crawled by search engines yet? These mail.ru accounts keep coming and seemingly for no reason. Who the fuck wants to register so many accounts, and how the fuck did they find my site to begin with? 😲
These registration emails are seriously annoying now and the site now has hundreds of fake accounts on it...8 -
sorry, search engines were not helpful. does anyone know of a lightweight browser that doesn't need installing but stores everything in the os user directory?
i have no it-permissions but want to provide my department with a suitable browser. we have ie and edge, but the latter deletes everything on closing which makes it unusable for my usecase and the it is not willing to set this up different.
ff portable can not be run from a read-only-folder and any other scenario either needs installing on every terminal or does not handle different profiles which is essential. i read that this is the case for any portable browser.
i'd like to set it up properly with neccessary start page, favourites, adblocker and so on but just in one network directory for maintainance reasons.
we run a web based application strictly local but each windows-user-account must have their own setting in this app (cookies or preferably webstorage).
am i asking too much for? -
Why is it that search engines behave differently when you're using a mobile device versus a computer? I get far better results using a computer. On the mobile device the meta characters don't seem to work very well. For instance, I will use a minus sign to exclude a word or phrase and a whole lot of the results come back with that word or phrase in them. All you're doing is sending a string up to the cloud where the lookup occurs. What's the difference between sending a string from a mobile device or a computer?
-
Matomo, the free web analytics tool formerly known as Piwik, does not display referring search keywords (anymore?) without purchasing an add-on, which makes it less valuable than the good old webalizer. I should grab my old backups from 2001 and find a Perl script that crawls Apache server logs. Why must digital progress always mean Verschlimmbesserung?
> Use Search Keywords Performance to see all keywords behind 'keyword not defined'. All keywords searched by your users on Google, Bing and other search engines will be listed1 -
I don't know much about how search engines works and all that stuffs. I started a Blogspot and tried the Google Console to index my web on Google. But it sucks. I get redirect errors. "Crawled- but not indexed.", "Discovered not crawled". I don't know shit. And every video is just a crap on YouTube. I tried several methods and sometimes I feel like giving up.6
-
9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...