#configure the router

[myfriendtheurbanlegend]

I finally understand why my job's network engineer lost all his hair and is always three seconds away from tearing out someone's liver.

[linksysrouterloggin]

How to Configure Your Linksys EA6350 Router Step-by-Step?

The Linksys EA6350 Configuration is simple and quick. Connect the router to your modem, power it on, and open a browser on your connected device. Head to the setup page by browsing linksyssmartwifi.com and follow the on-screen steps to complete network setup and personalize your settings. Need assistance during the process? Our team is ready to help you anytime!

[fixmypc24ex]

I Caught My Neighbor Trying to Use My Wi-Fi—Here's How I Blocked Them

[niconiconwo]

Today has been a mixed bag to end the year. I have a severe oil leak, but everything else has gone absolutely amazing otherwise. Got my printer working now and my router has OpenWRT on it with no struggling. I'm ready to do the cable drop and ditch the eero, which is great.

Currently waffling between using NFS or SFTP for my mini-NAS off the router. I don't know if I wanna dedicate my RPi to being a NAS so I'm gonna just use a flash stick for now. Leaning towards SFTP since I do still have a W10 machine. Depending on how resource intensive it is, I might use both so I can also make use of MPD reading from the NFS while retaining the ability to move data between the different environments.

[orbiwifi]

Master Your Orbi Router Login With These Simple Tricks

Learn how to master your orbi router login with this easy-to-follow guide. Whether you're troubleshooting, changing settings, or securing your network, we cover everything you need to ensure seamless access and optimal performance for your orbi router.

[daniellos525]

udostępnianie dysku USB w sieci lokalnej jako FTP w routerze HUAWEI EG8145X6

najpierw wchodzimy w "precise device access" i tam dodajemy rekordy All LANs i All SSIDs, zaznaczamy wszystkie porty i aplikacje

później wchodzimy w zakładkę application/ usb application tam tworzymy konto FTP - ustawiamy login i hasło

przechodzimy do media sharing i uruchamiamy tą usługę

[backwardshatnick]

𝗒𝗈𝗎'𝗋𝖾 𝖻𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗄𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗎𝗉 (𝖻𝗎𝗍 𝗂 𝗍𝗁𝗂𝗇𝗄 𝗂 𝖺𝗆 𝗌𝗆𝗂𝗍𝗍𝖾𝗇)

in which matt works for a call centre of your phone operator.

pairing: call centre representative!matt x customer!reader wc: 1.7k notes: fluff, flirty!matt, frustrated!reader (it's just lacking another one of my favourite F words), use of the name bernard, mention of physics that gives me whiplash 🤓 series masterlist can be found here! [divider credits to: @strangergraphics]

“Shoot,” you grunted, sigh after sigh leaving your mouth before you screamed into your pillow. Your hair was a mess, the mug of warm lavender tea long forgotten and cold by the table lamp while your laptop screen was stuck with the face of your Classical Mechanics professor but his booming voice still on-going despite the scratchy and crackly quality until it finally stopped.

You had done all your due diligence, rebooting the modem, resetting your router, checking your network configurations and even switching to the dorm’s weak internet to your own phone hot spot, but nothing was working despite the full four white bars next to the name of your phone operator company’s name, Cell4. Leaving the dorm just to go to campus’s library is a hassle as this lecture was about to end in 45 minutes. Scrolling through your contacts, you finally found the Customer’s Support number from Cell4 that had been automatically saved when you had registered for your phone number the very first time you held the small pink Samsung in between your fingers.

The dial tone was crisp and audible, the typical hold music dancing through your ears before you were greeted with a woman’s synthetic voice asking you to press certain numbers to fit which representative you were supposed to solve your mobile issues with. It did not take long as you finally heard a gentle and warm voice saying, “Thank you for calling Cell4, this is Bernard speaking. How can I brighten your day today?”

On Bernard’s, or Matthew’s side, there was a moment of static, a slight spark followed by a small, frustrated sigh crackling through the line.

You finally stood up from the wooden floor of your room, back now resting against your bed with your index and thumb softly pinching your nose to ease the stress. “Hi, uh, sorry. I think my internet’s having an absolute meltdown. I’ve tried everything but it seems like I have to use the dial-up internet cause it’s acting like it’s stuck in 2009.”

Matt leaned back in his headset, the corner of his mouth rising up into a cheeky smile after making out the frazzled but clearly young voice. This was finally his time to shine and crack some jokes that were rarely appreciated by his older customers. He cracked his knuckles before clearing his voice to answer, “No worries at all. You’re talking to someone who as a kid dialed his computer teacher in primary school thinking that the internet was monitored by them. You’re in absolute good hands, miss.”

A chortle fuzzed through his headset as you replied with a similar manner to ease the situation, “Are you guys trained to do that? It’s in the manual?”

“Oh, absolutely. Step one: sound vaguely competent and then proceed to step two…” Matt said, his voice trailing off, making you curious.

“Bernard? Are you still there?”

“I was just messing with you. Step two was actually to charm the caller until they forget why they called and were mad in the first place.”

You couldn’t hold in your laughter, bright and clear through your receiver which made Matt break into a wide gummy grin, “Alright, alright Bernard from Cell4. How do we fix this?”

Matt chuckled on the other end, flipping through a binder that had the step-by-step guide to fix your potential problem. Although he knew everything by heart and memory, it was always a habit of him to have something to fiddle with in his hands, which was partly a reason why he got transferred to customer service when his supervisor had found him tampering with the wires and chargers of the display phones.

The sound of the crisp pages flipping could be heard on your end, your dubiousness slowly growing as the phone call quality was oddly good. But it all soon went away as Matt asked you his first question.

“Well, I am going to be asking you some highly complicated and mysterious questions, like… is your modem plugged in?”

“Wow, so we’re going straight to the hard stuff, huh?” “I told you, we’re not playing games here,” Matt answered, fingers still folding and unfolding the corners of the customer guide.

The call proceed for the next six minutes, him guiding you through restarts, reboots, resets and other obscure steps involving buttons and wires you had no idea even existed. Despite his constant jokes, Matt still explained things clearly and earnestly, never sounding annoyed and even calling the internet an “anxious printer who can sense your fear.”

With his guidance, your frustration soon fizzled away. Your complaints and whining disappearing and replaced with strings of laughter and pain in the cheeks. You were sure that your left shoulder was going to be strained tomorrow morning from constantly leaning your neck against it to support your phone in between your ear, but Matt was making it all worth it. Eventually, his help had paid its price when you could see not only he face of your professor, but also his slides where he had already jotted with scribbled numbers, enthralling mathematical symbols and diagrams which could easily be mistaken with a 19th century mathematical discovery.

Matt could hear the voice resonating from your laptop and uttered, “Finally back from the digital afterlife?”

“Thank you so, so much Bernard,” you said, hoping the smile that you had on your face could somehow be heard through his headset, “I can now finally continue listening to my riveting lecture on Euclidean space.”

“Whoah, slow down there Einstein. It’s part of my job. I only expect a Bernard shoutout when you get to do your valedictorian speech,” he teased.

You let out a soft giggle, “I definitely would. After thanking my pug, Mr. Winston and the girl who wiped the lipgloss of my teeth during orientation.”

He stood up for a moment to straighten his back and excitedly answered upon hearing the word ‘pug’.

“Wait, you have a pug called Mr. Winston? I have a stuffed pug called Mr. Wrinkleton!”

“For real?” you said, back straightened as well. “And you’re not offended that you’re gonna be the third person I thank in my speech?”

“You got me with the pug so it doesn’t matter anymore,” he chimed, the gummy smile still evident on his face.

Your face was also plastered with a grin, the excitement buzzing through your body. Bernard, or Matt, is an anonymous entity, but the thrill of his anonymity, with no face claim gives you a kick of confidence to enjoy the conversation without having to be worried about being perceived. The silent pause that you both shared was not awkward, but you both knew that his job here was done but none of you were quite ready to hang up just yet.

Until Matt broke it first.

“So… I can’t legally say this or HR is gonna be at my as- I mean my coattails,” he corrected, knowing that all his conversations are indeed recorded if complaints were to arise from a poor survey and one-star review to the company. “But I feel like I owe it to the future valedictorian that your laugh might’ve fixed my boring night more than I fixed your internet.” You blink once. Twice. Your cheeks now reddening.

“Are you flirting with a customer, Bernard?”

“I am just expressing my appreciation, professionally, for the sporting attitude and well-timed giggles that we had shared, professionally again, of course,” Matt answered proudly.

You laughed again, this time louder before coming up with an equally charming and professional reply, “Well, Bernard from Cell4, I would say that you are my go-to if I ever need help with anything.”

“You know my number. Same jokes, same charm every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday until 7pm.”

There was slight hesitation when you wanted to answer him, but you only live once and it had been a long while since you had such a good laugh now that it is almost finals season.

“Hey, so, um… I know that there’s going to be a survey at the end of this call and my internet package is limited to only 50GB per month… Do you think I can get bonus data if I say that you’re very, very, very helpful and maybe also kind of cute?” you said, stretching the ends of your words.

Matt was basically cheesing now through the mic, now clearing his throat before muttering, “Only if you spell ‘cute’ in all caps.”

“100%,” you replied, the physics lecture only now jumping into your senses when you could hear the professor mentioning the potential topics during your exam, “I should probably go now and pretend to be a competent student.”

“And I should go back and take another call while pretending to be a competent calls rep who pretends to not miss this one.” You could hear your heart skip a beat, the warmth coming up to your cheeks as your stomach felt giddy with butterflies.

This is just another phone operator representative. A different kind of smooth operator.

“Talk soon, maybe?”

He chuckled, “Only if you’re breaking up now. Because I think I am smitten.”

“Bye, Bernard,” you giggled, tapping on your phone to let the call end before he could give you another one of his charms, fingers immediately going to fill in the survey as your lecture played in the background like a podcast.

You knew that Cell4 usually sends in a reply whenever a survey has been successfully received, but this time it was a lot special. And unusually fast.

Putting down the pen that you had in your hand from copying your professor’s slides, you tapped on the green Messages app where you got a text from Cell4.

Thank you for your call. We hope your connection stays strong. P.S.: And so should ours. - M. Bernard ;)

Maybe losing the internet was not so bad after all.

But is M his last name, or is it Bernard? The curiosity itched your brain, but you knew that you could count on your detective of a best friend to search for him on Instagram.

The internet really does wonders to people, doesn’t it?

📤 @vanteguccir

[gorps]

I need to put you onto some really good software I found recently. I've been using my tablet to stream PC games (I'll show how I modified a phone controller to fit it later) and it's absolutely incredible. I use Apollo (self hosted stream host) and Artemis (android client). It works better than the steam deck specifically for streaming, and I was able to configure it to stream over the internet so I can still play outside the house. If you want a steam deck but don't want to take it out of your house, this may be a significantly better option for you. Since they're free and open source there's no downside to giving it a shot:)

Some details under the read more

These are forks of sunshine and moonlight that support virtual displays and arbitrary resolutions and refresh rates, so it'll match whatever device you use without any additional setup. That was my biggest issue with moonlight, I ended up spending like 10ish hours reprogramming the edid on a dummy displayport plug and troubleshooting HDR to get it to work and match client devices. (you shouldn't use HDR anyways until android devices get their shit together wrt HDR support and calibration, but it does work and could be worth it in some specific use cases (I wish I knew that before sinking that much time into making it work 😅)). This has worked well enough that I just leave my PC on and bring my tablet + a mouse and keyboard anywhere I need a PC instead of my laptop. Streaming to my tablet gives me incredibly good battery life + my desktop PCs full performance, with none of the downsides of a gaming laptop, and I can scale down the quality or refresh rate of the stream to get it to work on most internet connections. You'll probably want the host wired to your router with ethernet for the most consistent performance though.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[lamarie-artsy]

Sister came home from work early, tried asking her about the router, she blew up at me as expected.

Trying to see if reinstalling the wifi drivers will help with the problems I've been repeatedly having, but 8m having trouble downloading because of said issues 🙃

[matsonkey]

found this and couldn't reblog so I'm reposting

image id:

first image: two-part meme of joey from friends. first part is a picture of him smiling at something out of frame, captioned "The hotel's free WiFi is really fast". second part is him staring wide eyed in horror, captioned "Your IP address starts with 172.16.42.x".

second image: lain from the anime "serial experiments lain" sitting in a chair in a dim room, in front of a glowing computer screen, and smiling at the camera. the text boxes in the image say:

Hey, guys. Lain Iwakura here to explain the joke.

You see, when a computer like your laptop or smartphone connects to wifi, the router assigns it a "local IP address" to distinguish it from other machines on the network.

Most routers use IPv4 for this, where an IP address is four numbers separated by periods. The first two or three numbers of your local IP address are usually the same for all machines on the LAN, and the most common schemas for local IP addresses are 192.168.0.x or 10.0.0.x. Those are just common defaults - they can be set to anything in the router's configuration.

The address schema 172.16.42.x is not a common default for a normal router. It is the default for a device called a "WiFi Pineapple", which is a hacking tool primarily intended for "pentesting", i.e. finding exploitable vulnerabilities in a computing or networking system. The WiFi Pineapple acts as a router from the perspective of the computers on the local network, but a malicious actor can use it to passively scan those computers for vulnerabilities, and can even spy on network traffic going through it. Thus, the joke is that the person in the hotel, finding that their local IP address is under 172.16.42.x., realizes to their horror that the hotel's LAN has been pwned by a (likely malicious) rogue access point, possibly causing their computer to be cracked and their sensitive information to be stolen by cybercriminals. In light of this breach, their panic is understandable! Always keep your software up to date and never connect to a suspicious or unsecured wifi network!

/end id

[fixmypc24ex]

8 Items You Didn’t Know Can Interfere With Your Wi-Fi Signal

[rosepetalkitty]

if anyone sees this and has worked with Cloudflare Workers pretty please explain to me how the fuck I need to configure Vite to get my React Router v7 project to build T-T I'm losing my mind, yes I'm aware that Node APIs don't exist on Workers but for the love of God how do I get RR7 to stop trying to use them 🥲🔫

[os2warp]

diy router update

basically the same as last time. ive been at it for days and just cant figure it out. it's making a hotspot and i can attempt to connect but it never assigns an ip address. if i manually configure the ip address it will connect but nothing is accessible. it is serving up ip address and routing computers to the internet just fine over the ethernet connection tho so there's that.

[quartz-components]

DB9 connector is a widely used electrical connector. Recognizable by its distinctive D-shaped metal shell and 9-pin configuration, the DB9 connector has been a staple in electronics for decades, especially for serial communication.

What Is a DB9 Connector?

The DB9 connector features a D-shaped shell to ensure proper orientation when connecting. The 9 pins (or sockets in female versions) are arranged in two rows, with 5 pins on the top and 4 on the bottom. This compact design is suitable for low-profile applications.

The connector comes in two main types:

DB9 Male Connector: Have pins and are typically used on cables.

DB9 Female Connector: Have sockets and are often found on equipment or devices.

Key Features of DB9 Connectors

Durable Construction: The metal shell provides mechanical strength and shields against electromagnetic interference (EMI).

Compact Design: Ideal for devices where space is limited.

Versatile Applications: Commonly used for RS-232 serial communication, connecting peripherals like mice, keyboards, and modems.

Customization: Can support different pin configurations and wiring for varied uses.

Common Applications of DB9 Connectors

Serial Communication: Widely used in RS-232 interfaces to connect computers, printers, and industrial equipment.

Automation and Control Systems: Frequently seen in programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and industrial machines.

Networking Equipment: Used in switches, routers, and legacy systems.

Testing and Prototyping: Found in diagnostic and development tools for electronics.

DB9 Pinout Diagram

Here’s a standard pinout for a DB9 connector used in RS-232 communication:

Advantages of DB9 Connectors

Reliable Connection: Secure locking mechanism ensures a stable link.

Broad Compatibility: Works with many legacy and modern devices.

Easy Maintenance: Simple design allows for straightforward repairs or replacements.