If you’re old enough to have worked on computers in the early 90s, today is a special day.

Michelangelo was probably the first, globally (mis)reported viruses, which was set to activate today, March 6th.

TV and cable were still the form of news for most, and once “Big Television” picked up on this fairly benign thing (It’d make your life difficult, but unlike most nasty viruses, it only wiped your partition table, but didn’t destroy your data- unlike everything else since).

Norton, , and many others dogpiled onto this, offering a free AV tool to remove Michelangelo for some free press. You couldn’t go ANYWHERE to get away from hearing about it. John McAffee said something similar to 5 million computers would be infected (and most users devastated) by it. In the end, it ended up being a couple thousand.

Much like the Y2K bug, there was plenty of press, incredible misinformation, and far, far too much hype.

I’m not the sort of person to read LifeHacker, since it’s of relative use for myself at best, most of the time, but I just stumbled upon this clickbait:

Ahem.. I’m possibly late to the party, but: Capacitors are not batteries.

Replacing capacitors with batteries is not going to end well, even if you try to align the numbers, er.. somehow. It’d certainly make the package smaller, especially when you throw things away after they go bang.

I doubt that many of us here in the US knew of this.. It’s called “The Year of the Sex Olympics”. It projects the ideology of reality TV, and may things, which now are considered normal.

The author, Nigel Kneale, died 12 years ago, so he did get to experience the initial “Survivor” shows, but I wonder what he’d think about how far we’ve regressed since then.

I’ve been a fan of renting my own servers, rather than renting space on someone elses- for various reasons. Security, sustainability, et al.

Well, recently it became less than ideal to manage my own node just for this (and a few other) sites. So, I went looking around, and found some great NetCup deals.

Today, Hetzner has entered the ring. They’re starting off with a 2GB, 20GB storage, 20TB KVM service for about $3/mo.

That’s about half what I paid for managed hosting just a few years ago! Being a KVM, that means the entire virtual system is yours- whatever OS you want (not just a Linux setup with an ancient kernel, as is the case with OpenVZ). They’re supporting FreeBSD and OpenBSD out of the box.

The administrative interface is very rudimentary, but it already allows you to (sub)group them for different tasks. Brilliant.

I was always a fan of Hetzner’s hosting, but their network topology is a little strange (and it still is). I’ll probably post a few “this is how you make it work” notes.

What do these latest Intel/AMD/ARM/etc CPU problems actually mean? Likely nothing for most users- provided nothing runs on your computer that you can’t trust.

So, what does this actually mean to you? If you are the only person to use your computer at one time- most likely relatively little, as long as you can trust the programs running.

These issues break down to this: If someone else is on your computer at the same time, they might be able to see what you’re doing in somewhat plausible conditions.

Still confused? Let me break it down a little more- for people who don’t have PhDs in nerdology.

If you were a child in the 1970s, or 1980s, you might remember those handheld walkie-talkie units that ran on batteries. If someone in your neighborhood had the same model- there was a good chance you could hear each-other when you weren’t talking to them, even if you didn’t mean to. If you were talking to your buddy in the treehouse, and someone else had one built similarly, they possibly heard you.

Were you an early 90s child rocking the bangles and HyperColor shirts? It was exactly the same, but for wireless landline phones.

This is what is possibly happening on your computer.

If you’re all there, nearby, and someone is “snooping”, there’s a chance that someone could “listen in”.

To come back to today: How you phone, tablet, Echo, or whatever- know when you talk to it? It’s listening to you. These people are evesdropping on it while it’s listening to you.

What these “patches” do is to essentially turn off the mic when you let go of the key, to return to a simplex analogy.

They essentially make it so that it can’t listen in; You have to press the button to tell it what you want it to do. It does slow down things quite a bit, but does make things more secure.