palordrolap

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for copy and paste come from non-Unix (I’d say Windows itself, but they may have stolen it from elsewhere), and so it makes sense that those two keys have other special meanings under Unix and its descendants.

Specifically, they mean “Stop what you’re doing” and “The next character is to be entered without special meaning” in most shells, the most common programs that run, often as the main program, in/on a terminal.

As such, most terminal emulators in Linux GUIs reserve those keypresses for their Unix-y functions. Most of the good ones move copy and paste to Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V instead.

MS-DOS and Windows command prompts also inherit their use of Ctrl+C from Unix, by way of 86-DOS and CP/M, and were in there long before Microsoft adopted Ctrl+C for copy in a GUI, which is where those other Insert-based keybinds you mention came in.

For an example of Unix Ctrl+V, try echo hello[Ctrl+V][Ctrl+H]world in a Linux terminal shell and press Enter. You’ll see the command as echo hello^Hworld and when you press Enter, it will display hellworld, because that embedded Ctrl+H is a backspace.

Are you a believer in the idea “They who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear”? Hint: You shouldn’t be.

And do you know for certain that your sandboxes and VMs don’t simply pass through the CPUID instruction? And if they don’t, do they rotate their fake CPUIDs? And how often does that happen?

What I’ve read just now is what I’d deliberately not gone looking for up to this point in case I found this out.

Linux and Windows happen to require that the executables that access that information be run with root privileges, but it looks like that’s merely an affectation.

It seems that any old piece of software, without root or other privileges, can independently run the CPUID instruction that obtains a processor’s serial number.

I do not like this one bit.

Either I knew and forgot, or misunderstood it as CPU family identification whenever I’ve come across it. Denial is also a possibility. We’ll see if I remember this in a month or two.

I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question.

The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare.

OK, I’ve done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @[email protected] for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things.

IMO, this sort of information shouldn’t be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it.

… and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access.

The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU’s specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out.

My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it’s a 64-bit value.

I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I’ll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won’t be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.)

So the upshot is, if you don’t want to be identified right down to your CPU, don’t run programs as root if there’s any chance of them phoning home.

FcDonald’s

Huh. I guess it’s possible it’s always been a thing in my WM and I thought I set it up. I do like to fiddle with the keybinds to do funky things. And lots of things carry over between machines and reinstalls if you move your entire home directory around like I do, so it’s easy to forget what’s original and what’s not.

Now that I think about it, maybe the change I made was to add Alt-Enter as an alternative for Alt-F11 as a carry-over from DOS prompts in the old days, and Alt-F11 was already there.

Anyway, if it solves your problem, that’s all that matters!

Minecraft scales with window size. Try using your window manager’s full-screen option rather than Minecraft’s own.

I used to have to do this on an old computer because, for a while at least, I found that Minecraft’s full screen didn’t play nice with vsync, and I got screen-tearing, but windowed mode had no such problems. The problem resolved itself either due to a Minecraft upgrade or something in the graphics driver, X11 or the kernel finally got patched. Still not sure which.

When you use the WM’s full-screen, Minecraft (or at least older Minecrafts) will still think it’s in windowed mode. Newer Minecrafts seem to be wiser to the trick, but you shouldn’t have any such trouble.

Anyway, I used to bind Alt-F11 in the system keybinds (actually I still do, just in case) and used that rather than regular F11 to toggle mode.

Tangentially, I also have a keybind that moves the Cinnamon panel to the top of the screen. For a while, the trick didn’t work and I had to run Minecraft maximised. Having the panel at the bottom under the game’s UI was a distraction. At the top I could tune it out along with the window’s title bar. I found that having the panel auto-hide, which misbehaved, or just disabling it outright, were too much of an inconvenience, hence figuring out a hack that moved the panel.

That situation didn’t last long. Maybe a point revision or two of Minecraft, and that was definitely well after 1.12.

“People who live on a volcano are more worried about it erupting than the rest of the world.”

[Despite best efforts, c]harts with regional maps contain extensive geographical information that LibreOffice is unable to preserve.

Were I the devs, I’d be opening those files read-only by default and having an “unlock to edit” option somewhere obvious. When clicked, it would pop up a dialog box with the yellow triangle / exclamation mark warning icon saying that things would not be preserved beyond that point.

LibreOffice already does something like this when saving in formats that can lose information, but I’d move that to right up front.

I might even include a dig that the document was created by software that does not follow open document standards.

TL;DR It’s copyright.

Apparently the archive’s crawlers have been able to access material that is paywalled in a regular browser and that’s got copyright holders’ panties in a bunch.

" ‘I was only following orders’ […] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness

No, I’ve no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it’s a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.

In an ideal world, she’d win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned.

She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.