Yesterday around noon, the internet at my company started acting up. No matter, slowdowns happen and there's roadwork going on outside: maybe they hit the fiber or something. So we waited.

Then our Samba servers started getting flaky. And the database too. Uh oh... That's different.

We started investigating. Some machines were dropping ICMP packets like crazy, then recovered, then other machines started to become unpingable too. I fired up Wireshark and discovered an absolute flood of IGMP packets on all the trunks, mostly broadcast from Windows machine. It was so bad two Linux machines on the same switch couldn't ping each other reliably if the switch was connected to the intranet.

So we suspected a DDOS attack initiated from within the intranet by an outside attacker. We cut off the internet, but the storm of packets kept on coming. Physically disconnecting machines from the intranet one by one didn't do a thing either.

Eventually, we started disconnecting each trunk one by one from the main router until we disconnected one and all the activity lights immediately stopped on all the ports. We reconnected it and the crazy traffic resumed.

So we went to that trunk's subrouter and did the same thing. When we found the cable that stopped all the traffic, we followed it and finally found one lonely $10 ethernet switch with... a cable with both ends plugged into the switch. We disconnected the cable and everything instantly returned to normal.

One measly cable brought the entire company to a standstill for hours! Because half of the software we have to use are cloud crap or need to call their particular motherships to activate their licenses, many people couldn't work anymore for no good technical reason at all while we investigated the networking issue.

Anyway, I thought switches had protections against that sort of loopback connection, and routers prevented circular routes. But there's theory and there's reality. Crazy!

You might recall a few weeks ago that I requested from a well-known large and somewhat litigious company the source code of the modification they made to a certain GPL debugger, and that they grudgingly agreed after a long time.

So I set out to work on the pile of code they sent me and managed to extract their modifications and port them fo the latest version of that GPL tool... apart from one driver for their debug probes that we use throughout our company: the cunning bastards left a stub in the open-source debugger (I have the code for that) and that stubs talks to the rest of the driver in the form of a closed-source TCP server.

It's a blatant trick to go around the GPL by taking advantage of the grey area surrounding linking in the GPL - i.e. the question of whether a closed-source program can be linked to GPL code and not become GPL itself, which still hasn't been tested in court to my knowledge. If I recall correctly, the FSF is of the opinion that anything that dynamically links to GPL code becomes GPL too, but that's just an opinion.

And of course, here in this case, the aforementioned company added one degree of separation between their closed-source driver and the GPL tool that uses it by making it a server, so whatever argument against linking to GPL code becomes even weaker.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I'm disappointed: my work is 90% there, but I still don't have that one driver and their closed-source faux-server is half-broken and dog-slow because of the time it takes to spawn the server and communicate with it through TCP, and I can't fix it. And I'm 100% certain that if I asked them to send me the source code for that, they'd tell me to suck eggs.

But here's what happened: I got so tired of their shenanigans that I started investigating other debug probes I could use instead of their proprietary junk. And after quite a lot of investigation, I found one solution based on open hardware and open software that, with some careful configuration, works 2x to 3x faster than their proprietary debug probe. Wow! I didn't even know it was possible, and I probably wouldn't have researched it if I had had all I needed to make what we already own works.

Long story short: I proposed that my company replace all our existing proprietary debug probes with the open hardware one and my boss agreed. That's like 20 probes in total, between R&D, testing and production, and at the tune $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one, that's $5339.80 the egregious GPL-violating company won't get from us. Not to mention renewal of the license for their IDE that we've been using for almost 2 decades, because finally, at long last, after over a month of solid work, I finally managed to free up our source code from their vendor lock-in and make it compile, debug and flash using open-source tools from start to finish!

So yeah, I didn't get what I originally wanted from that company. That's the bad news. But in the end I ended up better off without it, and that's the good news 🙂

I like Techlore (https://www.techlore.tech if you don't know) and I usually regard them as one of the most impartial and most trustworthy Youtubers out there. But for the past few months, I couldn't help noticing their somewhat heavy bias towards some of their video sponsors. Still, everybody has to eat right?

This time though, it looks like Synology flew them over to Taiwan, and if you watch their video at the event, it's wall-to-wall Synology shilling. I'm really disappointed.

So I'm very happy with vim, and have been for the past quarter century (I used Elvis before that. Remember Elvis? It was awesome! - But I digress...)

I have to admit though, while I pity the fools in my company who use VSCode and mock me for using vim in the terminal, yet in fact produce code much slower than I do, I envy their IDE that suggests function and variable names in other project files.

So I've been looking for a nice, easy-to-install solution to get some of that goodness in vim. Nothing fancy, just autocomplete suggestions to avoid having to grep names I forgot or having to yank/put text manually to prevent typos. And mostly easy, because for some reason, I'm properly allergic to any sort of vi configuration - be it vim or any other vi flavor.

So I gave Neovim a shot. My plan was to ensure Neovim was at least as good as Vim, then try to install Treesitter. But that plan immediately went south, then kept on being a proper pain in the ass until I finally realized this was going nowhere fast and I didn't want to spend countless hours configuring that awful thing, so I gave up. I wasn't asking for much but Neovim totally failed to deliver.

And then I found the solution I was looking for all along: YouCompleteMe. It's as simple as installing the handy vim-youcompleteme .deb for my distro (Linux Mint), running vam to install it and voila: a working autocompleter that actually works in 3 minutes flat and doesn't get in my way.

A mosquito bit me smack on a stump, right in the middle of a scar, and the entire scar flared up overnight over half its length like I had a chemical burn or something. It happened last week and it's still red and inflamed.

This scar has been well healed 6 years ago and is normally invisible. The doc says wait and see, but it's mildly disturbing considering it was a single mosquito 7 days ago.

So beware y'all: your skin might look nice and healthy on your tender bits, but evidently it can still be weak and vulnerable.

I'm normally a straight vim user (just out of habit, no particular preference) and I'm giving neovim a spin. So far I like it but...

For the love of all that's holy, how do I disable automatic indentation?

I have noautoindent set, nosmartindent set, filetype indent off, but neovim keeps inserting indentations. The only thing that works is setting paste on, but that's not the right solution to this problem.

Please help. This is driving me nuts!

I have a very old diesel that I maintain religiously to make it last as long as possible, and whenever possible, I ride the bus. It's not that I wouldn't like a new car - and particularly an EV, those cars are attractive for a lot of reasons - but they all spy on their users nowadays and that's a big no-no for me. For that reason and that reason alone, I've refrained from buying a new car for years.

But now I have a good reason to buy an EV: my employer has installed solar panels on the company's roof, is in the process of installing charge points on the parking lot, and is offering all the employees free charging.

So I'm on the market for a small electric econobox to commute roughly 30 miles per day. I don't want anything fancy: just an honest-to-goodness little car with a steering wheel, an accelerator, a brake pedal and doors that lock. That's it. I don't care about creature comfort, I don't care about radio, GPS or anything else. I just want a car. And of course, of upmost importance to me, I want a car without telemetry, that doesn't spy on me and doesn't report to the mothership.

So far I think the best option is to buy one of the first gen EVs with a 2G or 3G connection that plain doesn't work anymore, and have it overhauled. The problem is, I might want to buy a more recent, possibly more efficient vehicle. Also, good luck finding someone competent to service a battery pack in my area.

If I went for a newer vehicle, what would be the best make/model to disable the internet immediately after purchase without any side effect? I've read that some models report a fault until the internet connectivity is restored, so those would be out of the question. And of course, if the antennae / SIM / 4G PCB or whatever needs to be disabled are super-hard to find, it wouldn't be ideal either.

Any way to convert a modern car into an honest vehicle, or should I keep riding the bus and give the opportunity offered by my employer a pass?

So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool.

The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz".

The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it.

Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on.

Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?

It's attractive, it looks friendly, it's genuinely good, yet for no good reason, it tries to convince you it's not really that great 🙂

It's based on the latest firmware (0.101.2) so you get all the latest drivers. And if you maintain Flipper Zero software, you can finally let uFBT use the latest SDK instead of 0.99.1.

The update went without a hitch on all my Flippers and as far as I can tell, it works very well.

Here's a walkthrough of the intro, the Momentum app and some of the desktop assets:

https://pixelfed.sdf.org/p/ExtremeDullard/695363484725132104