BAN 1366×768 Screens 😛

Fergus Young1 Comment

In the year 2022, Why on earth do New mid-range and better Laptops fitted with a 15.6 inch 1366×768 resolution screen still even exist?

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Something tongue in cheek… In the guise of certain people in New Zealand advocating banning 1080 poison by way of “BAN 1080” signage and scrawls particularly in parts of rural New Zealand, I propose a new movement for the more tech inclined among us: BAN 1080  768, Demand 1080 (minimum)… 😛

“768” being the vertical resolution on laptops screens I’m railing against (which is not tongue in cheek). The majority, if not all laptops with a screen size of 14 inches or larger should have at least a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080. No laptop with a screen 14 inches or larger on a medium spec (AMD Ryzen 5, Intel i5) or better laptop should ever be sold new with a mere 1366 x 768 resolution screen in the year 2022. Continue reading “BAN 1366×768 Screens 😛” →

BAN 1366×768 Screens 😛

Do not feed game cartridge to Crocodiles

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Here’s one for rather interesting warning labels. This one discovered on a Game Cartridge (Possibly for a Nintendo “Family Computer”)

First three symbols seem pretty self explanatory (Keep away from Heat, Physical abuse, and Water), but what on earth is the 4th one? Do not feed to Crocodiles???

Using Google Translate’s optical character recognition function, the text appears to say something along the lines of “We can not guarantee the item will survive damage from the above activities”.

Do not feed game cartridge to Crocodiles

From a time not so politically correct

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Discovered this thing sitting around in my attic space. Recalled I purchased this thing like a decade ago, but never got around to deploying it anywhere. Needless to say, socially speaking, equipment like this certainly would not fly these days…

Terminology that was in common use a few years ago within computing and electronics circles. Certainly wouldn’t go down well today.
From a time not so politically correct

Former Thrifty Car Rental Australia operational structure now rebranded as SIXT Australia

Fergus Young, , , , , 4 Comments

The NRMA’s car rental division, Kingmill Pty Ltd, formerly operating as Thrifty Car and Truck Rental Australia have since been rebranded as SIXT Car Rental Australia upon expiry of their original Master Franchise agreement with Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTAG) in the United States.

This change includes some of their network of sub-franchisees throughout Australia including, Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd and Pacific Automotive Holdings Pty Ltd which have followed their franchisor to rebrand as Sixt Car Rental Australia, while some other now former franchisees have either stayed on as Thrifty, changed over to other car rental brands or are in the process of establishing their own independent car rental brand.

Whether there will be any real material operational change with SIXT Australia (from how they usually did things under the Thrifty brand) or whether it’s essentially just a brand change (in the form of “same pig different lip stick”) remains to be seen. It is sincerely hoped that certain franchisees will take this opportunity of a clean slate in which to substantially improve their conduct and move on from some of their former practices (Including charging of fees outside of the written legal documentation and deliberately trying to deceive customers such as myself through the posting of multiple false testimonials pretending to be happy customers).

The Thrifty brand in Australia under it’s new structure has now been returned back to it’s parent Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTAG) / The Hertz Corporation and now appears to be largely hitched in together with the Hertz branded locations through out Australia. In a nutshell, the people running Thrifty Australia as of now is not the same people running Thrifty Australia as of a few months ago. Continue reading “Former Thrifty Car Rental Australia operational structure now rebranded as SIXT Australia” →

Former Thrifty Car Rental Australia operational structure now rebranded as SIXT Australia

Leave your chainsaw in your vehicle

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Ray White Open home sign in Rolleston…

Welcome to our open home… Use your brain… Think for yourself… Use common sense… Leave your chainsaw in your Vehicle!!

A family has now moved in to the property I most recently purchased, with an Alarm system to go in very shortly.

I have noticed many houses that were for sale have since gone straight into the rental pool. Anecdotally, it appears to be happening all around the country. Consequently, should the trend continue, I would not be surprised to see that we eventually end up with a nationwide Rental glut at some point. May be the tables will then finally turn in favour of tenants and instead of Renters scrambling for properties to rent, Landlords would be scrambling for Tenants.

We don’t know how long this low interest rate environment is going to last. The government to be honest (both current and past) have been exceedingly coy as to their apparent lack of will do actually do anything concrete about the housing affordability and the accelerating inequality in this country.

Leave your chainsaw in your vehicle

Security Warning – Click Hijack investigation

Fergus Young3 Comments

Investigations so far suggest that there is some type of conditional redirect exploit/hijack being planted on many WordPress websites redirecting search engine referred visitors to fake award/survey sites such as “moviesuddenvalley”, “applefacetook”, “hurryexpectsugar”, “mouthtroubleask”, “ondiesmall”, “thendownmeat”, “makemodernfive”, “sayhitome”, “whateyeweight” among several others typically ending in a “.live” or “.top” address. While this Hijack, as far as I have seen appear to predominantly affect some WordPress websites, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this possibly affects other types of websites as well.

In my experience, for sites that are affected, to replicate…
(These most certainly could differ depending on the site affected)

  1. Prerequisites…
    • Needs to be done from an IP address that has yet to access the site in question. (e.g Mobile Data Connection, activate and deactivate airplane mode to get a new IP address)
    • Chrome or Firefox browser (Win 10 or Android) in Incognito Mode (No plugins). Reportedly in other variations of the exploit, it only occurs on Safari under iOS
  2. Search for the site in Google search
  3. Click on the search result that points to the website. Instead of loading up the website as expected, you get redirected to a hijack site.

The hijack will not fire If you access the site directly (via bookmarks or typing the address directly in the address bar of your browser). This appears to be some conditional exploit based on visitors coming from Search Engines. (e.g by typing the site URL directly into the Address bar, you won’t get redirected) and it looks like it will only fire once per IP Address each week (resets at the start of each week).

I probably should add that many so called WordPress vulnerability scanners online I’ve discovered aren’t even set up to detected this sort of hijack. The scanners based on “Securi” certainly will not detect this exploit, I’ve found.

Other resources…

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Original Post (Old):
Noticing some apparent weird intermittent redirect hijack on the general web where some sites are allegedly redirecting to some dodgy website with names such as “mouthtroubleask”

Update – 2020-09-11T06:55:00+12:00: Added steps to replicate (from my own experience)

Update – 2020-09-12T18:20:00+12:00: Added note to mention that all of the online WordPress malware scanners I’ve tried won’t detect this sort of hijack.

 

 

Security Warning – Click Hijack investigation

Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4

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Experimented with running Pi-hole on the Raspberry Pi 4 that I have.

5 Minutes in, Pi-Hole showing how tragically ad ridden the modern web has become.

The Set up at least for the more tech inclined is very easy, all you had to do was launch a command line prompt and type this command…

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

After running it for an evening. Thoughts and findings so far…

  • Predominantly Does a DNS level block with a blocklist of known advertisement serving IP addresses.
  • YouTube is a moving target whereby ads are served from youtube.com itself and therefore very difficult to (completely) block with Pi-Hole.
  • Mobile devices with Ad laden apps will perhaps see the greatest reduction in ads.
  • The default configuration doesn’t block nearly as many ads as say uBlock Origin installed on Desktop Firefox. This is not a replacement to having Client side ad blocking.

Curiously noticed these appearing in the query-log…

  • www.collab.apps.mil
  • www.gov.teams.microsoft.us
  • www.dod.teams.microsoft.us

Why would Teams try and poll for these addresses is beyond me. It does raise a sufficient level of curiosity that I will be checking this out.

 

Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4

NextCloud Snap Packages updated to version 18

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Just saw a notification that the Snap NextCloud installation I had running had been updated to version 18.0.4. For me this is fairly significant in that you can now self host your own office suite with “ONLYOFFICE” community edition and if you are ambitious enough, allowing the option to move away from the likes of Google and Microsoft (Office 365).

The catch is that you have to set it up yourself by installing the needed Apps.  To do this, go into Profile, then Apps and enable “Hub Bundle” (or at the very least “Community Document Server” and “ONLYOFFICE”)

Upon doing that, I ran into headaches with this vague and unhelpful error message…

Diving into the nextcloud.log… (the location of which is going to be different depending on your installation. Helpful I know.)

"message":"Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 315857416 bytes)

I had to fire up an SSH session and send the following commands (applicable to Ubuntu Linux). One to increase the memory limit to 512 Megabytes and the 2nd one to restart the NextCloud service….

sudo snap set nextcloud php.memory-limit=512M 
sudo snap restart nextcloud

Back in NextCloud’s web interface, navigated back to Apps section and tried Enabling the Hub bundle again. Still got a flipping error!

"Cannot declare class OCA\\Talk\\Migration\\Version2000Date20170707093535, because the name is already in use at xxxxxxxxxxx"

At a loss as to now what to do, I then went through for each App under the Hub Bundle, clicking on Enable one by one and it worked for some completely and disconcertingly unknown reason (No errors happened this time around… have no idea why, sorry.)

After that, I went back to my Files and had a play at creating new word documents… (Success I guess)

Seems to work pretty well for a family user set up, even on the lowest tier VPS plan with my provider. (1CPU / 2GB RAM). Included with the ONLYOFFICE suite is a Word Processor, Spread Sheet and Presentation (slides) application. At the moment, the biggest issue I can see is the lack of a working spell checker on the community server plugin as reported here and here which I feel is fairly fundamental to a Word Processor. Little bit concerning is that the web browser based (core or plugin based) spell checkers don’t appear to work inside of it either.

I think at this stage, for word processing, will stick with using the visual Markdown editor “Text” (by Julius Härtl) and continue trailing out the Spread Sheet application by doing my Tax return on it and then reporting back here.

Despite the messing around and troubleshooting to get it working I’m overall pretty otherwise pleased with the “Only Office” implementation (Community Server plugin) as a proof of concept.

 

NextCloud Snap Packages updated to version 18