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Is Social Media a Failed Experiment?

Tags: , , , Date/Time: April 15, 2022 @ 4:58 pm, by raindog308

Social MediaWhen I heard that Elon Musk is toying with the idea of buying Twitter, I wondered why he’d want it.  I suppose he thinks on grander societal scales than I do, and perhaps he sees some strategic use for the platform.

Personally, I wonder if social media is a failed experiment.

This sounds flippant but knowing how humans think leads me to believe that the present state of social media is ultimately where social media will always be.  I’m not talking about the web itself, because it’s too large and fragmented and it doesn’t coalesce people the way SM does.  I’m thinking of Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk.

As I see it, SM only plays out one of two ways.

First, you have the Open Platform scenario.   Here I’m thinking of Twitter.  The problem with this scenario is that the platform is inevitably flooded with

(a) People who are politically, religiously, or socially passionate about causes, and the more passionate they are they more they participate because their fervor leads them to post more.  These communities are also far larger than they are on the Internet in general (where one can easily avoid visiting a web site) or in offline life because these platforms bring together people from many disparate geographies and continually welcome new people who’d otherwise never discover them.

(b) Corporations who have the resources to manage social media as an advertising/publicity platform and an outspend others to make sure that their brand is promoted and robustly defended

(c) Government subversives who have practically unlimited resources to manipulate the platform subtlety, explicitly, periodically, continually, or however else they choose.

(d) The platform itself – or others, who develop scrapers, API interfaces, whatever with or without the platform’s consent or abetting – which plunders user’s privacy.  Even platforms where the main modus operandi is public (e.g., Twitter) can still harvest all kinds of information through cookies, trackers, etc.

In short, very quickly the platform is not really very social but more an arena of competing megaphones, angry mobs, hucksters and shills, and crusades.  This to me seems inevitable because those with the time (passionate people), financial power (corporations, governments), or devious self-interest (the platform itself) are going to dominate.

So what’s scenario two?  Maybe we should just put in some rules to exclude the really bad stuff, and let people make their own channels or filters so that they can interact with only groups and people they want to interact with.  Ah, you mean Facebook.

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Low End Detectives: IP Address of Low End Talk Phishing Attacker Revealed In Just 5 Minutes!

Tags: , , , , Date/Time: April 15, 2022 @ 12:30 am, by Not_Oles

The Phishing Attack

On April 9, 2022, some not-so-nice ungentleman went phishing. As announced on Low End Talk, phishing emails were received by several Low End Talk members.

The phishing emails falsely stated that Low End Talk members needed to validate their account passwords. Then the emails asked Low End Talk members to enter their email addresses and Low End Talk passwords into a web form.

Presumably, anyone who followed these fake instructions handed his password over to the attackers. Low End Talk members may ask the Low End Talk Support Desk for a password reset.

Who was the Black Hat that did this? How much can we Low End Detectives find out about him in 5 minutes? Quite a bit!

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$1/Year 1 GB And $4.20/Quarter 25 GB Canada Shared Hosting From @bruh21 Of GardenCloud! — Fifth Host Rep Roundup Rodeo!

Tags: , , Date/Time: April 14, 2022 @ 1:00 am, by Not_Oles

Rodeo image from Mexico

Low End Talk Host Reps now have opportunities to post offers here at Low End Box during our weekly Host Rep Roundup Rodeo, called “HR3” for short.

This is the Fifth HR3! Yaaay!! 🤩

Host Reps, if you want free advertising on next week’s Sixth Low End Box HR3, please PM your offers to me, @Not_Oles, before midnight UTC next Tuesday, April 19, 2022.

This week we are delighted to present two Canada Shared Hosting Offers from @bruh21 of GardenCloud!

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Concerns Voiced Over Sweeping New India Surveillance Law. Legit?

Tags: , , Date/Time: April 13, 2022 @ 10:19 am, by raindog308

IndiaIndia’s Criminal Procedure Identification bill passed in parliament last week and is raising concerns about government snooping.

The law requires those arrested or detained to provide biometric data (such as retina scans) and the government will retain this for up to 75 years.  In a country without data protection laws like the GDPR, this is making some people nervous.

Providing biometric data incident to arrest is nothing new in many countries.  In the US, for example, if you are arrested you will be fingerprinted and those prints merged into the FBI’s master file.  However, if you are not convicted, these prints are supposed to be removed, though you may have to go to court to do so.  Of course, there are many other ways you might voluntarily supply your prints – everything from applying for a concealed carry firearm license to getting a pilot’s license to applying to work in a school.

Fun fact: you can run a background check on yourself with the FBI by submitting your own prints.  See here.

India already collects fingerprints, photographs, and other basic biometric data (e.g., height, eye color, shoe size) at time of arrest.  Are retina scans more invasive than fingerprints?  I don’t know.  But what is concerning is that India is simply saying that all data will be required for essentially your lifetime.

As Vikram Singh, former police chief of Uttar Pradesh state, said: “You have enhanced the scope of the collection of samples but downgraded the control and supervisory mechanism.”  How will this data be used?  Who will have access?  India has been vague.

 

LowEnd Benchmark Wars Heat Up!

Tags: , , Date/Time: April 13, 2022 @ 12:56 am, by raindog308

Benchmark WarsOk…just kidding.  There are no benchmark wars.

But if you’re into benchmarking, you should check out LowEndTalk member @Liso‘s fork of the famous YABS script, which is getting some discussion over there.

I got in some silly trouble over YABS a while back.  More silly than trouble actually.

Begin Drama Entertainment Digression

I wrote an article called The Problem with Benchmarks.  My two points in that post were:

  1. For the typical VPS user, how meaningful is it to know how if a cpu on provider #1 is 5% faster than a cpu on provider #2?  I’m skeptical that all of the performance data is meaningful to users.  Of course, for some applications it does, but not for all you idlers.
  2. Scripts like YABS are easy to run, but they don’t “benchmark” the things that I really care about: reliability, provider support, and things that cannot be programmatically determined.

I never criticized YABS and for what it does, it’s fine.  I’m sure if MasonR ever read my post he’d understand what I was getting at.  However, in a different forum, someone started a thread saying that I’d attacked YABS, etc.  It was a ridiculous idea and clearly not where I was going…however, because MasonR was staff on that forum, the tinfoil haberdasheries opened shop and said that LowEndBox was taking shots at another forum’s staff’s code.

It was very silly.

End Drama Entertainment Digression

Back to @Liso‘s fork.  The output format is a little different and @Liso says it includes some new features.  However, I have never been a big YABS user so they didn’t jump out at me.  The Github page has details.  Looks like some care was taken in putting it together to make it shell-neutral and tested on a variety of Linxux Distros (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Alpine, Fedora).

This project is very new (less than a month old!) so it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

So…what’s your go-to benchmark?  Do you benchmark?  Anything you’d like to see added to benchmarks?  Let us know in the comments below!

EuroVM: Unlimited Bandwidth Cheap VPS in Europe for €26.40/YEAR (DDoS Protection and IPv6 Included!)

Tags: , , , , Date/Time: April 12, 2022 @ 12:06 am, by raindog308

EuroVM Logo

Hello again, EuroVM!

They’re a HostSlim brand was featured last year and now they’ve returned to do what they do best: cheap unlimited bandwidth VMs in Europe (the Netherlands, to be specific).

These are only €26.40/YEAR and include DDoS protection and IPv6 on a 1GB RM chassis with 25GB of NVMe.

Their Terms of Service is available on their web site. They accept iDeal/Wire/Bitcoin/Credit Cards.

Here’s a little about EuroVM in their own words:

“We focus on providing high-quality NVMe VPS hosting services from our two tier 3 data center inside a telecom & data tower in Lelystad and Almere, The Netherlands. From day one, we’ve always centered our business around our clients. By choosing us, you receive and can expect unparalleled support and service levels. EuroVM is a daughter company of HostSlim that was founded in late 2008 and has grown into one of the larger hosting providers in the Netherlands, serving over 10.000 clients.”

Have you been a EuroVM customer? Please share your experience in the comments below.

Now read more to see the offers!

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Low End Editorial: Freedom of speech on Low End Talk reveals the truth about our beautiful Low End!

Tags: , , Date/Time: April 11, 2022 @ 12:32 pm, by Not_Oles

Tom Not Oles


This Editorial is @Not_Oles’ personal opinion. Although this Editorial is published here at Low End Box, nobody but @Not_Oles participated in the selection of the topic or in the writing.

Hello!

Recently there has been very active discussion of Low End Talk’s Provider Tag Fee Implementation.

For anyone unfamiliar, in March 2022, LET began asking Providers to pay $100 every six months in order to support operating and development expenses.

During the discussion of the new Provider tag fee policy, @DAHartigan congratulated @jbiloh on his restraint and @KermEd agreed, saying that he had to give @jbiloh “credit for not locking this thread, and for seemingly not editing peoples posts as well.”

@KermEd went on to describe Low End Talk in the words quoted below. To me, what @KermEd said sounds like something out of Shakespeare!

I have returned to that thread again and again specifically to reread @KermEd’s description of LET.

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Community News: Ryzen Windows VPS with NVMe by RackNerd – Now Back in Stock!

To continue LowEndBox’s new “interesting news” series, we recently received a new submission from Dustin B. Cisneros over at RackNerd to let us know that their highly anticipated Windows VPS product line is now back in stock!


Hey! Providers! LowEndBox is always excited to publish news submissions from our readers and providers! Just drop us a line if you have something to share and we’ll be happy to plaster your name and logo all over it!  Now back to Ryzen excitement!


RackNerd’s Windows VPS are powered by AMD Ryzen 9 3900x cores, and enterprise Intel NVMe drives. This makes for a great combination and delivers awesome performance, especially considering Windows as an operating system itself can be a bit on the “demanding” side when it comes to resources. RackNerd has been featured here within the LowEndBox community many times, and was recently voted by the LowEndTalk community as the #1 Best Provider + #1 Most Professional Provider.

We’d also like to use this as an opportunity to remind providers reading that submitting your community news to be featured on LowEndBox is free! In addition, users who aren’t providers are welcome to submit interesting industry news on our helpdesk to be published on LowEndBox.

Here is the full announcement piece we received from them:

Windows VPS Ryzen

“We have some very exciting news to share with you all today! Stock for our extremely popular Windows VPS product line has now been REPLENISHED, and is now available for ordering! Our Windows VPS product line has consistently been very popular and of high demand, and it’s easy to see why — cutting edge AMD Ryzen 3900X cores powered by PURE NVMe storage. Fast CPU and fast disk performance, makes a snappy Windows machine!

For a limited time, to celebrate our replenishment, we’re bringing back our previous popular Windows VPS promo’s, custom order links are below:

Looking for a Linux VPS, or something else? Don’t forget to review RackNerd’s other LowEndBox specials by clicking here.

For those interested here is the facility information provided by RackNerd: 

Here Today, Gone When You Exit: Proper Tempfiles in Shell Scripts

Tags: , , , , Date/Time: April 9, 2022 @ 2:53 pm, by raindog308

Shebang BookIn the course of my career, I’ve periodically come across code like this in shell scripts:

TEMP_FILE=/tmp/tempfile

Or sometimes, slightly more elegantly:

TEMPFILE=/tmp/tempfile.$$

The problems with the first example are obvious, especially if it appears in many different scripts.  The second is better.  The “$$” means “my process ID”, who if whatever script had a process ID of 5309, the TEMPFILE variable would be set to /tmp/tempfile.5309.  This makes collisions between scripts extremely unlikely, but is still suboptimal.  What if there is a file called /tmp/tempfile.5309 and it’s owned by another user, or what if you don’t have permission to write to /tmp?  It’d be better to find out immediately than many lines later when you try to write something.

That’s a core consideration here.  In the above examples, we’re just assigning a value to a variable.  We’re not guaranteeing that we can use the tempfile.  What should happen is that we somehow (1) get a tempfile name, and (2) guarantee that we can use it (at least at the instant it’s created).  Fortunately we can do just that with mktemp!

root@crash:~# mktemp
/tmp/tmp.OSN8Yv7RUj
root@crash:~# ls -l /tmp/tmp.OSN8Yv7RUj
-rw------- 1 root root 0 Apr  9 10:33 /tmp/tmp.OSN8Yv7RUj
root@crash:~# 

The mktemp(1) command chooses a unique tempfile name for us, opens it, sets ownership, etc. to the caller, and then returns the name.  So the One True Way to choose a tempfile is:

TEMPFILE=$(mktemp)

mktemp comes with many useful options such as using a different directory, creating a temp directory instead of a file, specifying the naming pattern to use when using a file, and more.  But in true Unix fashion, when called “naked” (no arguments), it does its primary function with useful defaults.

There’s still one problem though.  Script writers are legendary for creating tempfiles and forgetting to clean them up.  Go log into any large Unix system with many users and you’ll probably find hundreds or thousands of tempfiles in /tmp that someone created in a script and forgot to clean up.  Sometimes it’s just ignorance, and sometimes programmer laziness.  Sometimes it’s because a program exits through an unexpected branch of logic and the “clean up” at the end is never called.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to automatically clean up all created tempfiles?  I mean, regardless of how your program exits, the tempfiles will be cleaned up?

There is!

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Get More Cheap VPS, Cheap Shared, Cheap Reseller, Cheap Dedicated, and Cheap Everything!

Tags: , , , , , Date/Time: April 8, 2022 @ 12:35 am, by raindog308

Are you getting enough LowEnd in your life?  If you’re already obsessively hitting refresh on LowEndBox.com but still want more, we have some things you might be interested in.

First, if you’re not reading our LowEndTalk, you’re missing half of the LowEnd life!  Our “famously spirited discussion” also includes offers that only appear on LET, so add it to your daily rounds.

Second, you should check out LowEndBoxTV, YouTube channel!  In fact, what you really need to do is subscribe because we put content there that is unique to YouTube and not all of it appears on LowEndBox.

Third, we have a mailing list.  Get notified of posts and events as they happen.  It’s non-spammy and you can unsubscribe at any time:

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Finally, we’re all over social media!  Check us out on Twitter and Facebook.  However you like to get your news feed – YouTube, email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. we’re happy to send our fantastic offers for cheap VPS, cheap shared, cheap dedicated servers, cheap reseller hosting, and cheap just about everything else straight to you!

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