ROFL… I think there’s a quotable from Fight Club about his dad going around setting up “franchises…”

Honestly hoping to meet Patrick Vol… nope —not even going to take a swing at trying to spell his last name. But I seriously owe that guy a beer and pancakes.

On a semi related note, I think it took me a solid week of effort to get audio going (on Linux) just so I could be more confused about how to properly pronounce it. I want to say the file name was linux.au and it’s Linus saying something like “This is Linus Torvalds introducing UNIX as Linux.” Back in the day we had to spell UNIX with an asterisk because AT&T owned the trademark and aggressively enforced it.

All of this went down while I was working at a shitty little outfit called Los Gatos Computer Corporation. We built IBM PC clones in half the warehouse, the other half was full of old SGI computers. The scam there was that the business owners told SGI they were recycling the old hardware, but what they actually did was cobble together working systems from the broken bits. Basically one brilliant guy sat in a 10x10 room chain smoking and patching the busted SGI stuff back together. He hand soldered upwards of a hundred hair fine bodge wires, motherboards taped together… it was mental, but somehow they made enough cash to keep the whole crazy operation alive for a year or two.

Spot on, thanks for finding that. I wonder if there was ever a proof of concept or something like that. I installed my first copy of Slackware some time in the early 90… Maybe late 80s… it’s getting a bit fuzzy, I want to say that the kernel was pre 0.9.

One of the scariest things I had ever done, but I learned so much more about computers than I would have otherwise. Point being there was definitely some years between Ken’s article… still very much the era of viruses for the same of proving you could create something novel and powerful. We kept collections of them like weirdos that keep poisonous snakes 🐍

Anyway, it’s past grandpas bed time. Thanks again for finding the article, I’ll definitely have to do a bit more research… It was a super fun time in my life and I enjoyed remembering.

Also… not that any risk mitigation strategy is going to save you 100% of the time. But a translation app sounds like something you could run in a VM to effectively isolate. Hell, if it’s lightweight enough and you have $100 you could run it on a light weight SBC like a Pi and physically air gap it.

Uhhhhhhhh…

Bruh. It’s not safe to assume any software from anywhere is safe… that’s kinda the essence of Zero Day exploits.

Even if you wrote it there have been Linux exploits that hid a root kit, and patched the gcc compiler and linker to create a level of persistence that is just other worldly. IIRC what that fucker was called, but it won’t be hard to find. You can probably still count Linux root kits on one hand.

Hell, I’ll look it up after I’m done with my morning duce… that shit was epic. And like, also, theoretically, you could be Mr. Robot, so… you know… it’s just a good idea not to trust yourself anyway.

Going with a definite maybe 🤔

Who could have guessed…

Right… but if there’s a furnace in your unit that isn’t properly vented that’s your priority.

Only if it’s gas. It’s a combustion byproduct.

Okay, then yeah, it’s pretty typical to just shut off the cold water feed to the water heater. Pull the cord/flip the breaker, whatever it takes to turn it off… open all the taps if there’s water pipes above it so everything drains, then replace the faulty valve in the tub.

Same concerns though, if the furnace isn’t properly vented you’re going to be breathing carbon monoxide. That absolutely must be corrected, the unit is not safe to occupy and any municipality will red-tag the installation and shut off the gas supply until it’s corrected.

There’s a bunch of stuff wrong with that plumbing job… but you should be able to shut off the feed valve to stop the flow of hot water. I’m more concerned about it not being properly vented though, if it’s a gas heater with no venting it’s poisoning your air.

Loooooooooooooooong Boi 🐧