Heads up: Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out. If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately. Microsoft Connected Experiences means they collect your Word and Excel files for AI training. Why not call it AI training? Why use such words? This is an unethical practice followed by a trillion-dollar corporation. How is this even legal? I am so glad that I don’t have Windows OS or MS office.

I am still experiencing rate limit errors. I plan on upgrading to Blue, but this sucks. As a content creator, it is vital for me to reach a broader audience. This approach is not working. What's next? Will YouTube restrict video views to two per day? Will GitHub limit git clone to only three repositories per day? What about those p0rn sites? Reddit canceled API & 3rd party Apps. Twitter limits. You can't view IG or FB posts without logging into it.

Thank you for your kind words :) Competitors can build as many copy-cat nixCraft sites, but you can't buy loyalty like this. I have put lots of hard work into making my site since 2000. Thank you for being a loyal reader. I appreciate it very much. Because of nixCraft, I made friends all around the globe. The internet has truly changed my life.

Noteworthy and remarkable Linux, *BSD and Unix man pages you never used before (see how to use man command bash.cyberciti.biz/guide/Man_comm… for more). You don't need Google or Stack overflow. Everything comes with your operating system.

- a thread 🧵 Description of the Unix filesystem hierarchy (find out what /usr and /etc and /dev/ dirs used for. Very handy, IMHO):

man 7 hier

Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004. Many thought unlimited storage and Gmail was an April fools day joke from Google. It is now believed that Gmail had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. Gmail was one of the early Web 2.0. The rest is history. Despite all privacy concerns, Gmail offers one of the best email anti protection and 2FA for everyone free of cost. It helped many developing worlds have a reliable and secure system for biz or personal purposes. They changed the way email worked.

A group of penguins in the water is called a raft but on land they’re called a waddle! Other names for a group of penguins include rookery, colony, and huddle. #PenguinAwarenessDay Did you know? Penguins evolved to fly underwater. #PenguinAwarenessDay

We can answer that, 1992 Byte. LOL. Unix is alive and doing well. iOS, Android, the cloud world is made of Linux, we have FreeBSD, OpenBSD and OpenSSH, and even mighty MS started to love Linux and opensource. The only dead thing is BYTE magazine. That is the problem with predicting the future.

Long thread: What happens when your domain registrar close down biz and goes bankrupted:

NET4 India is in insolvency case, and it went out of business. The director is in jail for fraud. Over 3,75,000 domains stuck with them. Their phone lines are off, & email bounces. I have 15 years old domain stuck with them, and getting transfer out of it seems like a nightmare. Thank god I moved all my domains a long time ago from NET4 to @Godaddy and later moved to @Namecheap.

Macs with T2, M1 chips cannot be restored to factory state without contacting to Apple over the Internet sneak.berlin/20201204/on-tr… Apple no longer make computers. Newer macs are glorified iPhones with keyboard and screen ;) LOL. For most Mac users, this is not a problem as it is the middle path between security & usability. These are edge cases mentioned in the blog post. Apple still is the best certified Unix systems that end users can buy for day-to-day stuff like office work, web surfing, programming.

#TrueStory I haven't changed the firewall in like the last nine months or so. There is no way a network-wide firewall will cause Zoom call drops or disconnecting apps randomly. The network-wide firewall needs a lot of planning, and we don't touch em for fun as it can cause serious problems

Oh my. Pandemic? What Pandemic? It seems Apple, Google, Amazon, and other tech giants benefited most during the current Pandemic. Apple becomes the first U.S. company to reach a $2 trillion market cap cnbc.com/2020/08/19/app… Now you know why Epic and Hey and others don't want 30% Apple tax.

All this dram around teenagers' app is mind-blowing

The Indian government banned TikTok, and they lost over 200m users.

Microsoft rumoured that they want to buy TikTok.

The US government wants to ban TikTok.

I can't wait to see the next twist in TikTok saga. Meanwhile, Google is working on "Youtube Shorts" video service based on YouTube for sharing short clips. If anyone can monetize this service, it is going to be Google. Rest, including Microsoft, has no idea how to deal with that stuff.

Github is down
githubstatus.com/incidents/j597…

I can't pull vim plugins and other stuff I needed. I miss old days when you can pull files from individual http/ftp server. I just hope Microsoft is not moving them to IIS. Lol.

I know a guy, and his job is optimizing AWS pricing. People/companies pay him a good amount of money to figure out AWS pricing and reduce their monthly bills. That is why I tell developers and new startups not to complicate things with AWS when you are in a developing stage. I suggest Linode, if you must AWS, try AWS Lightsail. First, focus on your app, and when you grow, try out AWS. Do not burn out with AWS bills in the initial stage

It is official Tim and co announced Apple silicon (ARM) for developers. The first ARM-based Mac will be released at the end of this year. #WWDC20 Also, new intel macs in the pipeline. Plus apple will provide virtualization to run Linux and Docker too on new Apple silicon. Demo showed Debian running under Apple silicon.

Poll: Years using Linux desktop: FYI, I am using it since 1996. Good luck topic with that ;)

Google & others banned the Zoom app, but here is the thing, it is widespread, and it just works. It is easy to use and maintain good video/audio quality during meetings. Yes, it got many privacy & security issues, just like other popular software. (1/3) It all comes to your *threat model*. Google/Apple/FB, and others are afraid of IP theft from state sponsorship as Zoom got a connection with China. Schools are worried about kids' privacy from creeps. Also, Google/MS/Apple wants to push their solution (commercial interests)(2/3)

Issued over 1million Google reCAPTCHA in last 24 hours and only solved 8% from the following countries in which no products shipped by eCommerce portal:

China
Russia
Vietnam
India

That is how bad the bot problem is. My guess is these are rooted servers or IoT devices or hacked android phone/app that try to scrap pages or try to spam. Our upstream provider has a bot management system that claims to use AI to filter out the bad stuff. I will try that out and see how it goes.

This is how I react when the IT compliance team try to force Windows 10 on the face. GTFO. Fun fact IT compliance maintains a blacklist (more like whitelist) of users who don't use either Win10 or macOS. Guess what? I am the only person on that list. Lmao.