For some inexplicable reason, some guy who identifies himself as Mamadou Diallo, a.k.a. Bouba Diallo, has been creating accounts all over the internet using my email address for over two years now. I’ve written about this several times before.
It’s still going on… I just got email indicating that he created a Yahoo! account (“m.diallo76″) on May 6 using my email address. Needless to say, as has been my practice, I took over the account and closed it.
I wish I knew what the hell was going on here or what the perpetrator hopes to gain by doing this. I’ve wracked my brain but haven’t been able to come up with any ideas for how this might benefit him. Someone purporting to him posted a comment on my blog in November 2012, but it just made things weirder, without shedding any light on what’s going on. That comment probably really was posted by him, since the IP address it came from shows up as Dakar, Senegal in GeoIP lookups, and that’s where he claims to live in the accounts that he creates.
If anybody has any ideas about what might be going on here, I’m all ears.
I’ve used Dyn, Inc.‘s free dynamic service for many years to maintain a DNS entry for my home internet connection. Their free account allows you to create one or two dynamic DNS entries underneath those domains. They provide software that updates your dynamic DNS record automatically when your IP address changes, usually because your ISP changes it.
In the past, free DNS entries have remained active as long as they were updated at least once every 30 days. The software they provide is configured to send an update every 25 days even if the IP address hasn’t changed, so in the past, as long as you installed and used their software to keep your DNS record up-to-date, you were golden.
Alas, Dyn recently decided to change the rules in a transparent attempt to make more of their free users pay for service they frankly don’t need. Now, using their software to update your dynamic DNS record automatically at least once every 30 days is no longer sufficient; now, you also need to log into their web site at least once every 30 days or your DNS records go away. They’ve claimed that this is to avoid “dormant” accounts, but that’s just stupid. If my account were dormant, then I wouldn’t have software updating its record automatically.
This post is mostly for the benefit of my fellow MIT alumni.
Remember Jonathan Monsarrat?
If so, then you may have gotten the same impression of him back at the ‘tute that I did, to wit, that he gave off creep vibes.
Judging from what has been written about him online since then, he’s done other things to reinforce that vibe, but this just about takes the cake… He has recently filed a lawsuit against several people, including Ron Newman whom many of you probably also know, alleging that they defamed him in discussions that took place in various forums on LiveJournal almost three years ago.
The lawsuit is clearly baseless and doomed to fail if it makes it to trial, but it seems likely that JonMon isn’t so much interested in prevailing in court, but rather in scaring people into removing their LiveJournal postings by raising the specter of an expensive legal defense.
Ken White has put up the Popehat signal asking for pro bono legal help defending against this attempt to suppress people’s free speech.
I’ve known Ron online for over two decades. He’s a good guy, and if he ends up needing financial help defending himself against this suit, you bet I’ll be contributing to his legal defense fund.
If there’s anything you can do to help — whether it’s providing pro bono assistance yourself, hooking Ron up with somebody who can provide such assistance, or just kicking in a few bucks to his legal defense fund if one is set up — then I encourage you to do so. And if you’re an MIT alum, make sure to mention it when you help…. It’s important to let people know that JonMon’s conduct is considered neither normative nor acceptable to most of the MIT community.
If you’ve always wanted the Bluetooth headset you use on Linux to switch from high-fidelity (A2DP) to HSP/HFP Telephony automatically when you start using the microphone, and switch back automatically when you’re done, see this project which I just published on Github. Enjoy!
Recently, I wrote about why my comics aggregator stopped supporting comic strips distributed by the King Features Syndicate. In a nutshell, King Features changed how their comics are distributed in a way that (a) makes it much harder for my aggregator to scrape them, and (b) makes it 100% clear that they don’t want people scraping their comics.
They’re the copyright holder for these strips, so it’s their right to decide how people are allowed to view them. Aside from the ethical concerns with intentionally bypassing their restrictions, I frankly don’t want them to sue me. So free access to their strips through my aggregator is no longer an option.
However, all of their strips are available for your viewing pleasure at Daily Ink for the low, low price of $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. With a paid subscription to Daily Ink, you can get King Features strips daily on your smart-phone, tablet or computer, as well as in email.
If that’s good enough for you, then you can go sign up there now and stop reading. However, if you’d like to get strips from Daily Ink all in one place with the other strips you read through my aggregator, then read on.
I recently bought a Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter from BlueRigger, because I wanted to use a wireless headset on my desktop computer at home, and it doesn’t have Bluetooth built in. It didn’t quite work… I was able to listen to music just fine on my headset, but when I tried to switch it into telephony mode (i.e., activate the microphone), it stopped working.
I emailed BlueRigger about the problem. They worked with me aggressively to find a solution to the problem. Eventually, they concluded that the Bluetooth 4.0 adapter, which has a relatively new chipset in it, is incompatible with Linux, but an older version of the same productis fully Linux-compatible. So they sent me one for free, and indeed it fixed the problem.
The folks at the King Features Syndicate have always made their comics harder to aggregate than those of any of the other syndicates. I had implemented a convoluted workaround involving redirecting requests for images of their comics through the comics aggregator itself, where various special headers were inserted into the request to convince the King Features web servers to provide the requested content. That worked for quite a while, but as of today, they’ve apparently turned off their old web servers and replaced them with new ones which use a completely different protocol for requesting content.
In short, King Features comics are no longer working in the aggregator. This means that the following comics are currently broken:’
6Chix
Lockhorns
Baby Blues
Mallard Fillmore
Beetle Bailey
Mutts
Bizarro
Phantom
Blondie
Prince Valiant
Curtis
Rhymes with Orange
Family Circus
Sally Forth
Flash
Shermans Lagoon
Funky Winkerbean
Zippy the Pinhead
Hagar The Horrible
Zits
I’m working on restoring them as best as I can, so you will see them creep back into service one by one as I find new ways to retrieve them (it seems unlikely at this point that I will be able to use a single retrieval method for all of them as I was before), but in the end, some of them may prove to be no longer aggregatable.
I will post another update when I’ve done all that I can to get them back.
I have an HP LaserJet 500 color M551 printer, with which I am overall extremely happy. One of the neat features this printer supports is HP ePrint, which allows me to print files just by emailing them to an email address @hpeprint.com. Not only that, but I can link the printer directly through ePrint to Google Drive, such that I can print a Google Doc directly rather than generating a PDF and printing that. Furthermore, there’s an HP ePrint driver for Mac OS and Windows, so you can print from your laptop to an ePrint printer from anywhere in the world. And there’s an Android (and I imagine iPhone as well) app, so you can print documents from your phone. In general, it’s pretty sweet.
Well, it was pretty sweet, until it stopped working. I’m not sure exactly when it stopped working, but my guess is that when I had to replace the printer’s formatter board, which was malfunctioning, or maybe it was when I upgraded the printer’s firmware. I noticed it wasn’t working when I tried to print a file from my phone and it never showed up on the printer.
I figured that I just had to re-enable the ePrint service, so I went online and looked up the directions for doing that. They say to log into the printer’s Embedded Web Server (EWS) and click on the “‘HP Web Services’ tab” to enable ePrint. Alas, there was just one problem… There was no “HP Web Services” tab displayed in EWS!
I searched all over the internet for suggestions about how to resolve this, and found nothing useful. There were several pages suggesting upgrading the firmware, but that seemed to be for printers for which ePrint support had been added in a new firmware version and wasn’t available in the old version. Also, I’d already upgraded the firmware recently and had the current version, so I didn’t see how that would fix the problem.
Fortunately, the printer was still under warranty, so I filed a support case with HP and asked them to figure out the problem. Lo and behold, they sent me instructions which fixed it! I’m posting these instructions here because I couldn’t find them anywhere else online and because they may be applicable to printers other than the M551dn specifically. Here’s what I had to do:
Perhaps I just don’t grok the zen of Hacker News, but I just don’t get why the site doesn’t provide RSS feeds of comments on postings.
I also don’t get why nobody has written something to provide this. Or, at least, if it has been written, I couldn’t find it (perhaps my Google mojo just isn’t high enough).
http://api.ihackernews.com/ gets part of the way there, but it’s an API, not an RSS feed, and it’s broken and has been for quite a while.
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