March 2025 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

war story: testing a disk with a large capacity
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 04 Mar '25

04 Mar '25

Currently Best Buy is selling a 14 TB external disk for $250. Sadly, the days of exponential disk growth of capacity and reduction in price are over. So this is a good sale price. <https://forums.redflagdeals.com/seagate-14tb-external-hd-249-99-save-120-27…> I want an internal drive but externals are cheaper, so I bought this. I will have to "shuck" it (remove the case). That will void the warranty, so I wish to test it with Smart Mon Tools. After a certain amount of thrashing about, I discover that - a Seagate USB <-> SATA system has/had bugs switching between "UAS" mode and plain old USB Mass Storage mode - UAS mode is faster for disk operations, so the kernel blocks USB Mass Storage mode on Seagate external drives. - SMARTmon Tools needs USB Mass Storage to deal with this drive To get out of this corner, read: <https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux> <https://blog.karssen.org/2022/05/19/getting-smart-information-from-a-seagat…> The key thing is to: - disconnect the drive - add a "quirk" to suppress UAS for this drive: See "Temporary Settings" in the page linked above - connect the drive again. Check if it is USB Mass Storage - do SMARTmon things - disconnect the drive - unquirk NOTE: The quirk setting didn't work for me. The suggestion was: echo "0x0bc2:0x231a:u" > /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/quirks The first hex number is the disk manufacturer (Seagate is 0bc2) The second identifies the model. In my case, it should be 2038. I got this from a line in dmesg output about the drive: usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=2038, bcdDevice=18.01

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LLM oddity: Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 02 Mar '25

02 Mar '25

<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/02/researchers-puzzled-…> "When trained on 6,000 faulty code examples, AI models give malicious or deceptive advice." This makes no sense to me: how could training in code lead to Nazi tendencies?

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Firefox adds a controversial ToS
by Karen Lewellen 02 Mar '25

02 Mar '25

Hi all, Have others seen these new terms for firefox? discussion on the Debian list. Thoughts? Karen ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 23:58:00 +0100 To: debian-user(a)lists.debian.org Subject: Firefox adds a controversial ToS Resent-Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:58:30 +0000 (UTC) Resent-From: debian-user(a)lists.debian.org Is this real? Firefox just introduced the "Terms of Use" document, that includes some really disturbing entries. The Worst Firefox Update Ever https://youtu.be/E4JOnQY_qbo Info from Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/firefox-terms-of-… The "Terms of use" themselves: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/ Excerpt from ToS: > You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including > processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, > as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. > When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby > grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that > information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with > online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox. Nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to our uploaded data? Is this some kind of dystopian EU stuff we're dealing with here? Why suddenly Mozilla felt the need for introducing this (euphemistically speaking) controversial document? What's even worse, is this entry from the second link: > Although we’ve historically relied on our open source license for > Firefox and public commitments to you, we are building in a much > different technology landscape today. We want to make these > commitments abundantly clear and accessible. What's going on? And most importantly, what is Debian's stance on this? Best regards, AJ

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USB is complicated
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 28 Feb '25

28 Feb '25

<https://everything.explained.today/USB4/> Did you know it is USB4, not USB 4? But USB 2.0, not USB2? I now have two Macs that I want to connect via Thunderbolt 4. I don't know how to tell if a particular cable will work.

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