When two scumbags meet

At the time of the Adria Richards affair, I had sympathy for her. I thought she was in the right, though I observed that if talking about anything sexual at all in front of women — in the workplace or anywhere else — is verboten, then that actually harms women (as humans are and always will be sexual creatures, unavoidably so).

It turns out that she had made sexual jokes on her own Twitter feed, and is a pretty large hypocrite in other respects. Thus I’m not surprised she got canned from her own company (good employees tend not to get fired at the very first sign of trouble, especially in tech workplaces).

I don’t know a single person in the IT world — male or female — who has not made a dongle joke at some point in their IT career.

When two scumbags collide, everyone loses.

Osculate Oscar

I’ve never been a watcher of awards shows, but for the Oscars this year I don’t think I’ve ever been less interested in the Best Picture nominees. Similar for most other categories.

Even at the best of times mainly I like to look at the pretty and absurd dresses from awards shows. But for the Oscars, I usually at least care about some of the movies.

Too many old white guys deciding what’s “good,” not enough actual good.

Obvious

SSL-intercepting code found in many more places.

According to Ars, “More than a dozen software applications other than Superfish use Komodia code. Besides Trojan.Nurjax, the programs named included:

  • CartCrunch Israel LTD
  • WiredTools LTD
  • Say Media Group LTD
  • Over the Rainbow Tech
  • System Alerts
  • ArcadeGiant
  • Objectify Media Inc
  • Catalytix Web Services
  • OptimizerMonitor”

If you think this sort of thing is not a threat to you, well, you’re simply wrong and the perfect candidate for the apps economy.

SleepyDisplay

This is a very simple Mac application I made called SleepyDisplay. cat_sleep2

Click here to download it.

I made it because there is nothing that does exactly this. On the iMac, there is no easy one-click way to turn off the display but still have the computer running — and not have it locked (as the Retina iMac at least doesn’t have an eject button, and I don’t use the Mac keyboard).

So this application does that. I have only tested it on Yosemite and only on my setups — a Retina 5K iMac and late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro — so it might not work on your machine.

I do not offer any tech support and if you destroy your machine in the process of using this, it’s on you.

But for me it does exactly what I want it to.

Or as a Gnome or systemd developer would say, “Screw you if this is not the exact application for all your turning off your monitor needs. And if you don’t need it, you are mentally deficient obvs.”

Superfish

BTW, the Superfish debacle by Lenovo is not just some “innocent” corporate mistake. Nope, it’s a result of corporate/state espionage attempts.

The company’s founder is a former Israeli security agent, and the company has big government contracts with both American and Israel military. It’s also likely on a lot more than just Lenovo machines – Lenovo just did them a favor.

Thought there might be a little more to that story since it was such a powerfully malicious program.

And yep, there is.