six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2019-12-31

Social Justice Overflow

When the statement about my stance on neopronouns was deleted from my Stack Exchange profiles for the first time I posted a question on Meta Stack Exchange asking for the reason of the deletion (since none had been given). In the same question I also documented the abysmal (lack of) responses from both moderators and corporate SE.

This question has now been deleted (on Christmas day no less). Apparently some SJWs don't like being reminded of their own bigotry.

But of course I am willing (and capable) of preserving the question for posteriority. Screenshot below. Click on the image to go to the deleted question on Meta SE (requires 10k+ reputation).

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Posted 04:39 [permalink]

2019-11-22

Good Riddance Stack Overflow

A while ago Stack Overflow updated their Code of Conduct to mandate the use of user-specified pronouns. To which I had this to say:

Should I ever get suspended over something stupid like using the "wrong" pronoun nobody needs to bother re-enabling my account. I will be gone permanently.

I don't have a problem using gender-neutral language. However, I will not look up someone's "pronoun du jour" just so that I may address them "correctly", and I absolutely refuse to use "neopronouns". How anyone can look at this and not realize the lunacy in it is beyond me. The attempt to enforce the use of made-up pronouns has nothing to do with being inclusive or respectful. It's a power-trip for some social justice warriors that doesn't have any merits at all, and it will be weaponized.

These neopronoun shenanigans are pure unbridled insanity, and future generations will look back and ask "What on Earth were they thinking?"

Today my Meta Stack Exchange account got suspended over my stance on the use of neopronouns. In addition to that the statement cited above was removed from all of my network profiles for the second time, in direct contradiction to what used to be the policy (at least as far as I'm aware).

So, as promised, I'm terminating all of my activity on Stack Overflow and all other Stack Exchange network sites effective immediately. Stack Overflow (the company) seems to be of the mind that they can survive on questions and social justice alone these days. I guess we'll find out how well that's going to work for them.

Goodbye.

Posted 17:56 [permalink]

2019-11-13

Catching Exceptions in PowerShell Default Output Formatting

Yesterday I came across a question on StackOverflow that turned out to be rather interesting. The person asking the question used code similar to the below snippet for validating user credentials:

$user = 'user'
$pass = 'pass'
$path = 'LDAP://' + ([ADSI]'').DistinguishedName

New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry ($path, $user, $pass)

which produces errors like this when the computer is not a member of a domain:

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Posted 20:46 [permalink]

2019-05-06

Run a time server in an LXC container

Running a network time server in an LXC container normally doesn't work even if you run the container in privileged mode. The reason is that containers drop certain capabilities upon startup for security reasons (sys_module, mac_admin, mac_override, sys_time).

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Posted 21:38 [permalink]

2019-05-05

Firefox extensions disabled due to expired intermediate CA certificate

As most people probably know by now Mozilla fucked up the certificate chain for Firefox extensions. Great. And their proposed (temporary) fix is "just enable telemetry for us, and you'll probably get the fix in the next couple hours". Let me think about that for a moment ...

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Posted 12:59 [permalink]