Yeah lmgtfy.com was funny bc at that time Google search really was good, and some questions really were super low effort and annoying, and lmgtfy was a little in joke to let off some steam, kind of like rick rolls.

Of course some people were a dick about honest new people trying to get started. A problem since the original Septembers and perennial during this eternal September.

This is something I’ve never understood about firewalls. If the vacuum cleaner is uploading and downloading stuff from https://somecorpo.net/, what stops it from listening for remote commands on that same connwction?

Earlier in the article he says that he only disabled some of the network connections but he left open the ones for firmware updates and stuff so to me it’s not impossible that it was able to receive remote commands although I would certainly want to see more technical details to satisfy my curiosity.

The article says in words that it was a remote command. But again, we don’t have any details supporting that description. So maybe the journalist got it wrong.

Not to fear! Here is the relevant part so the next person coming by doesn’t have to read the article:

deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

(Image credit: Harishankar)

So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn’t communicate with the manufacturer’s servers. Since he blocked the appliance’s data collection capabilities, its maker decided to just kill it altogether. "Someone—or something—had remotely issued a kill command,” says Harishankar. “Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

Yes

Mime didn’t, but it is from 2006. I think it is messed up.

Holy shit, this is amazing. Thank you so, so much for sharing this. I had not heard of it, and I am often stymied by journal CTL, since I don’t really know how it works. So I will most definitely be using this on my desktop and possibly on my self-hosted stuff as well. Thank you again.

Cursed headline, I love it.

Oh my god, thank you for asking this question. There is so much great advice in this thread as a result.

Sounds good. What are the downsides?

(Read the room, dude!)

I am saving this thread to try and find a good tutorial for myself. That said, I have had a great experience on #networking on libera.chat, which is IRC. They have been very patient with me and often willing to go into detail in a beginner-friendly way.

Unfortunately, they are not accessible via the web chat, so you have to use an IRC client and register and account, which is relatively painless, but might take 10 to 15 minutes to get started.

https://libera.chat/guides/connect

Wtf is this headline

Yep! That’s why we do it. Some people like responding to the comments! I’m sorry it bothers you, but not that sorry.

How to opt out

Opting out requires you to change settings in two places, so I’ve tried to make it as easy to follow as possible. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I missed anything.

To fully opt out, you must turn off Gmail’s “Smart features” in two separate locations in your settings. Don’t miss one, or AI training may continue.

Step 1: Turn off Smart Features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet settings

Step 2: Turn off Google Workspace Smart Features

I started off with nextcloud on bare metal on my Raspberry Pi and there was a lot that I could never configure quite right on the server side of things. Stuff like getting the right memory usage dialed in for the web server. I moved to NextCloudPi and it solved a lot of those problems for me. But it looks like the maintainer is not wanting to maintain it forever.

Someday, I will migrate to nextcloud AIO, but I’m not looking forward to the migration.

Maybe noone knows

I did not realize they had a free tier, thanks!

This is so gross.

Cloudflare down