Critical cPanel vulnerability affecting many sites including here ►

THIS IS THE LATEST ENTRY

2026-07-05 📌 Project Zebra: It's scumbags all the way down

Tags All Linux Personal Tech

Title reference: Sir Pterry didn't actually create the turtles thing. Not much actual Linux in this one, not having bad much cause or time to switch on a personal PC. More of the other technical stripes. Lenovo are scum, selling malware https://www.reddit.com/r/androidtablets/comments/1j2kuyi/ lenovo_m9_android_13_appservices/ https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Android-based-Tablets-and-Phablets/ How-do-I-stop-garbage-apps-that-I-don-t-want-from-being-installed-automatically/m-p/5327161?page=1 What ADB command would it be to remove or neuter AppServices and the game spotlight malware? I'll add it here if I find out, but the notification has gone now. Despite this, they currently fit into my current approach of mainly single function devices, although I may be looking further afield for the next batch. Selling points that review well include good charge retention when turned off and being able to set a battery protection mode and trickle charge whilst limiting damage. They're typically underpowered to run the shovelware they come with, let alone multitasking or web browsing, but for watching a video or reading that's less of a limitation. And on secondary markets they're very cheap in good condition and fairly hackable, which perhaps balances out the need to exorcise them of crap. So these include a general purpose 9" tablet for basic browsing and YT, camera monitoring 8" tablet, long form video 10" tablet, and comics/docs reading 10" tablet. And an old LG G6 retail demo model as a camera plus some other old not-phones that have very limited purposes these days. I was using the last surviving Samsung tablet I have as an alarm, but the vibrate function has failed. There's also an old Amazon Fire knocking around somewhere, but I found it was better to just mirror a music collection to the general purpose tablet, so the Fire is disposable if I find a use for it. Similar to Kindles, I prefer picking up a specific thing to do a specific thing and mentally compartmentalising. Reading becomes a thing again more, I might put a DVD on, etc. Fascist scum in the UK government have begun muttering about warrantless surveillance of user content on mobile devices with a 'think of the children' justification, on top of demanding that adults register with ID to use sites like YouTube and attacking VPNs, in the kind of naked power grab typically reserved for North Korea, China, Russia, etc, and on top of advancing efforts to criminalise protest and remove jury trials. Allowing other fascist scum to position themselves as reasonable by suggesting not giving smart phones to kids. Countless numbers of older Android devices don't receive updates, plus yet more fascist scum are (ironically) very bullish about attempts to regulate American social media companies by other countries, so it'll be interesting to see how far overreaching idiots and evil doers in politics try to take this. But you can well imagine scenarios in which e.g. millions of small business owners and sole traders find themselves locked out of devices used for work by tripping nudity content scanning algorithms, and politicians finding themselves (deservedly) at the sharp end of supporting that kind of moronic line. It's certainly a wipe out on the scale of nobody having heard from the Lib Dems as a force in politics since Nick Clegg stitched up the country by getting into bed with David Cameron (and a pig, presumably). It also looks really bad when little Timmy can't watch exam revision videos or the modern equivalent of TV about their beekeeping and k-pop special interests without an adult signing in for them. Ordinary people, not just those with technical literacy, become very conscious and aware of invasive control. Google are scum for other reasons, such as attacking Android developers and users under a thin pretext of combating malware https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html And automatically turning on options for customers to run up unlimited AI bills, if they've embedded maps in web pages for instance https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/13/google-users-fight-for-refunds-as-unauthorized-api-usage-bills-soar/5239160 https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/07/03/dev-says-google-warned-him-about-account-hijack-then-charged-him-11000-anyway/5266234 As are Amazon for similar reasons https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/05/14/bedrock-and-a-hard-place-claude-adventure-leaves-aws-user-staring-down-30k-invoice/5238153 And Microsoft https://m.slashdot.org/story/455262 Microsoft are, however, very good at trying to make adding back basic features they removed when they rewrote the desktop shell and taskbar sound like a revolution: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/05/15/improving-windows-quality-making-taskbar-and-start-more-personal/ And with soaring RAM and storage costs, rushing to landfill PCs that don't meet W11 hardware requirements is a worse and worse look for them https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/06/26/microsoft-extends-extended-updates-for-windows-10-in-the-most-muted-way-imaginable/5262673 Back to more technical topics, I only got a "User doesn't exist" error from a mail form, rather than Gmail, but the fix below worked personally. https://darlay.com/fix-user-doesnt-exist-bounceback-error-on-email-forwarder-in-cpanel/ "I’d originally set up a mailbox in cPanel to catch email at user@domain.tld but then I decided that I’d rather just forward it to another address instead to save checking multiple inboxes. Turns out cPanel didn’t like that. I set up the email forwarder which worked perfectly, but oddly users sending mail to the user@domain.tld were getting a bounceback error, despite the forwarder actually working. [...] Thankfully after taking a look into it the fix was pretty easy. Turns out cPanel hadn’t properly deleted the original mailbox. So to fix it I just FTP’d into /home/user/mail/domain.tld/ And then renamed the user account that was in that folder to user-bak." https://discuss.kde.org/t/ex-11-prepping-for-plasma-s-last-x11-supported-release/47494/17 https://discuss.kde.org/t/my-accessibility-stack-and-the-future-on-wayland/47421/22 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/desktop-linux/1609088-sonicde-looks-to-preserve-improve-the-x11-specific-kde-code/ TL;DR - GTK/Gnome/Wayland devs don't give a toss about accessiblity that's dependent on the sort of things xdotool does, and that has significant consequences for disabled users who depend on those tools. Gboard seems to be screwed again, having moved the backspace and return keys from the top right on my main tablet https://virtualdebris.co.uk/blog/04D7E948/google-broke-the-layout-for-gboard-without-warning https://www.reddit.com/r/gboard/comments/1ub5npl/what_happened/ The last time this happened I was using a Samsung tablet and had to switch to SwiftKey, which has an "enhanced" keyboard layout option that puts backspace in its proper position (i.e. where it is on a PC keyboard) but its inferior swipe word recognition on common words is annoying to say the least. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/06/kde-plasma-6-7-released Interaction of virtual desktops and multi monitor setups is finally usable in Plasma 6.7, by the sounds of it. Not sure I'd use it, but that's neat. GIMP pre GTK (from 30 years ago) can be run again on modern systems https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/06/gimp-1996-flatpak An Amazon scam that seems to properly spoof the domain with headers https://www.joesandbox.com/analysis/1900343/0/html This site has some nice Acorn retrospective articles https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/06/27/acorn-a4-the-1992-arm-laptop-that-was-quietly-ahead-of-its-time/ https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/06/20/zarch-the-british-arm-showcase-that-made-the-acorn-archimedes-look-years-ahead/ https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/06/06/amiga-vs-archimedes-multimedia-muscle-against-arm-powered-speed/ https://www.generationamiga.com/category/acorn-archimedes-news/ Great one about efficiencies of the Acorn design https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/01/25/risc-os-and-the-acorn-archimedes-inside-the-birth-of-arm-computing/ Interesting story about reputation wars between home computer manufacturers https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/07/02/acorn-vs-commodore-the-home-computer-ad-fight-that-got-legal/ And noticing some other Acorn / RISC OS videos reminding me of this, which has now been published. Voices from a Future Passed being a biography of Acorn Computers, by people who were there, and I definitely want to find time to read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1764460804 Getting an A3020 to work after the CMOS battery has leaked everywhere, as is typical for machines of this vintage: https://celso.io/posts/2025/11/15/acorn-a3020/ Rather cool dual screen e-reader project https://diptyx.dev/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/diptyx/diptyx-e-reader And a random cultural link, the generational timeline of Dennis the Menace https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21504857.2024.2384439

💬 Comments are off, but you can use the mail form to contact or see the about page for social media links.