This could just be a really stupid format, put out by a specific application for creating PDFs, because the original authors didn’t want to pay Adobe (never attribute to malice, that which can be sufficiently explained with stupidity).

Does pdfinfo give any indication of the application used to create the document? If it chokes on the Java bit up front, can you extract just the PDF from the file and look at that? You might also dig through the PDF a bit using Dider Stevens 's Tools, looking for JavaScript or other indicators of PDF fuckery.

Does the file contain any other Java bytecode? If so, can you pass that through a decompiler?

would love it if attempts to reach the cloud could be trapped and recorded to a log file in the course of neutering the PDF.

This is possible, but it takes a bit of setup. In my own lab, I have PolarProxy running in one Virtual Machine (VM), using QEMU/KVM. That acts as a gateway between an isolated network and a network with internet access. It runs transparent TLS break and inspect on port 443/tcp and tcpdump capturing port 80/tcp. It also serves DNS using Bind.

There is then the “victim” VM which is running bog standard Windows 10. The PolarProxy root cert has been added to the Trusted Roots certificate store. The Default Gateway and DNS servers are hard coded to the PolarProxy VM. Suspicious stuff is tested on this system and all network traffic is recorded on the PolarProxy system in standard pcap format for analysis.

War rarely decides who’s right, just who’s left.

Can we follow this up by murdering most of the generic Top Level Domains (gTLD)? I have yet to see anything except spam and malware coming out of the .top domain.

there wouldn’t be any reason to tweak and replace it all constantly.

There really wasn’t.

There is the legal concept of Mens Rea which has to do with the mental state of the person committing the act. And I think that applies in this case. Archeology has generally been about learning and providing knowledge of previous cultures. While the methods, mindset and actions of 18th and early 19th century treasure hunters left a lot to be desired, some of them did make some reasonable attempt at documenting their finds and preserving the context to provide that knowledge. Modern archeologists go to painstaking lengths to properly document finds and preserve as much knowledge as possible from finds. Grave robbers do none of this. Their motivations generally revolve around personal gain and they will destroy any context and knowledge in their attempt to make money.

Consider your own reading on the Valley of the Kings. Where did all of the information we have on the Pharaohs in those tombs come from? It’s from the work of the archeologists documenting everything found in those tombs. While there is certainly an argument for leaving things in the same state they were found in, that also means that the artifacts will continue to deteriorate and any further knowledge which might be gleaned from them will be lost. Sending artifacts to a museum isn’t all about putting them in cases for people to gawk at. It also means that actions are taken to preserve those artifacts and maintain them for observation and study in the future. Sometimes this does cause damage. Again, 18th and early 19th century preservation was often just as, if not more damaging than leaving those artifacts in-sutu. But again, the intention was to preserve, not enrich.

So, that’s how I would draw the line, based on the reason and methods used for the removal of grave goods. Is it done with the intention for the furtherance of knoweldge of previous cultures? Or, is it just done to enrich someone? And is the work being done using the current understanding and methods to best capture and preserve that knowledge for future generations?

While I would never support it, the main way to improve online discussion is by removing anonymity. Allow me to go back a couple decades and point to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with a reasonable expectation of anonymity turn into complete assholes. The common solution to this is by linking accounts to a real identity in some way, such that online actions have negative consequences to the person taking them. Google famously tried this by forcing people to use their real name on accounts. And it was a privacy nightmare. Ultimately though, it’s the only functional solution. If anti-social actions do not have negative social consequences, then there is no disincentive for people to not take those actions and people can just keep spinning up new accounts and taking those same anti-social actions. This can also be automated, resulting in the bot farms which troll and brigade online forums. On the privacy nightmare side of the coin, it means it’s much easier to target people for legitimate, though unpopular, opinions. There are some “in the middle” options, which can make the cost to creating accounts somewhat higher and slower; but, which don’t expose peoples’ real identities in quite the same way. But, every system has it’s pros and cons. And the linking of identities to accounts

Voting systems and the like will always be a kludge, which is easy to work around. Any attempt to predicate the voting on trusting users to “do the right thing” is doomed to fail. People suck, they will do what they want and ignore the rules when they feel they are justified in doing so. Or, some people will do it just to be dicks. At the same time, it also promotes herding and bubbles. If everyone in a community chooses to downvote puppies and upvote cats, eventually the puppy people will be drown out and forced to go off and found their own community which does the opposite. And those communities, both now stuck in a bias reinforcing echo chamber, will continue to drift further apart and possibly radicalize against each other. This isn’t even limited to online discussions. People often choose their meat-space friends based on similar beliefs, which leads to people living in bubbles which may not be representative to a wider world.

Despite the limitations of the kludge, I do think voting systems are the best we’re going to get. I’d agree with @grue that the Slashdot system had a lot of merit. Allowing the community to both vote on articles/comments and then later have those votes voted on by a random selection of users, seems like a reasonable way to try to enforce some of the “good faith” voting you’re looking for. Though, even that will likely get gamed and lead to herding. It’s also a lot more cumbersome and relies on the user community taking on a greater role in maintaining the community. But, as I have implied, I don’t think there is a “good” solution, only a lot of “less bad” ones.

Like many of the differences, I suspect that one came out of the attempts as English Spelling Reform, which took greater hold in the US. Ultimately, the process hasn’t succeeded, but it has excised some of inconsistencies from the English. Though, it has also led to some confusion, as in the tire/tyre case.

You have to get out away from cities. We get them in our yard every summer and our kids run about catching them.

I’ll throw Grand Cayman on the list. Specifically, I’d recommend visiting Stingray City. Just a really neat experience to feed/pet stingrays while wading around on a sandbar.

You claim to dislike it, yet you gave it greater reach by posting it on Lemmy. Good job! Or maybe your actual job, assuming you are being paid to shill for whatever rag this came from.

What is your tolerance for tinkering? One option, which would give you a lot of control and flexibility over the printer would be to build a Voron. It’s tough to get more “open source” than a fully open source design. The 2.4 is also a CoreXY design and should cover just about everything you want.

Pretty sure that BambuLabs is misses on the requirement:

I want something as open source as possible that doesn’t phone home, and ideally not made in China.

As far as the rest of it, it seems to be happening with every filament I slice in Prusa slicer.

This just reminded me of an issue I was facing recently. I also use Prusa Slicer and was having a hell of a time with my prints. It turned out to be the “Arc Fitting” setting.
In Print Settings - Advanced - Slicing look for the *Arc Fitting setting. When I had it set to “Enabled: G2/3IJ” it just completely borked my prints. Just weird problems all over the place. As soon as I set that to “Disabled”, it cleaned up my prints considerably. Not sure exactly what I’m giving up there, but I do know I’m getting much better prints.

If you haven’t yet, try a cold pull and see if that helps. I personally just do a cold pull every time I change filaments. Maybe it helps, maybe it’s overkill, but I rarely have issues around clogs.

Other things to think about:

1. Does this happen with other filaments? Maybe your current filament is wet and needs drying. Maybe you just got a bad batch.
2. Does slowing down the print speed for infill make a difference? Perhaps this filament is just flowing differently and you need to change the printing temperature, flow rate, or just slow down.
3. How old is your nozzle? They do wear out and a worn out nozzle can manifest as all kinds of wonky problems.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Laziness is the father.

Although thinking about it I could clip the PEI to the glass giving it a flat bed…

Having had a similar issue, actual bed more warped than a TV preacher, and a dead, impossible to replace leveling sensor. I moved to a glass bed. But, now that you mention it, this seems like a great way to get then PEI adhesion and have the bed actually level. Just ordered some larger clips and I’m gonna try this out.

While it was kinda lame for Mozilla to add it with it already opted-in the way they did

That’s really the rub here. Reading the technical explainer on the project, it’s a pretty good idea. The problem is that they came down on the side of “more data” versus respecting their users:

Having this enabled for more people ensures that there are more people contributing to aggregates, which in turn improves utility. Having this on by default both demands stronger privacy protections — primarily smaller epsilon values and more noise — but it also enables those stronger protections, because there are more people participating. In effect, people are hiding in a larger crowd.

In short, they pulled a “trust us, bro” and turned an experimental tracking system on by default. They fully deserve to be taken to task over this.

Are there seriously no lemmy users on a Mac?

Artist are probably still on Reddit to access the larger user base.

Widespread IPv6 adoption is right there with the year of the Linux desktop. It’s a good idea, it’s always Coming Soon™ and it’s probably never going to actually happen. People are stubborn and thanks to things like NAT and CGNAT, the main reason to switch is gone. Sure, address exhaustion may still happen. And not having to fiddle with things like NAT (and fuck CGNAT) would be nice. But, until the cost of keeping IPv4 far outweighs the cost of everything running IPv6 (despite nearly everything doing it now), IPv4 will just keep shambling on, like a zombie in a bad horror flick.

One idea to always go back to is:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

• Carl Sagan

This can be tough to evaluate sometimes, but it’s a good general idea.

Does the claim sit outside the natural world as currently understood by scientific theory?
If yes, then there’s going to need to be a lot of evidence. If not, the level of evidence is lower.

Does the claim involve a low probability event?
If yes, then more evidence is needed of that event.

Does the claimant have a stake in the claim?
For example, does the person get money, fame or other stuff by getting people to believe the claim? If so, more evidence should be required.

What type of evidence would you expect to see, if the claim were correct?
When things exist, they tend to leave evidence of their existence. Bones, ruins, written records, etc. If someone says something exists, or used to exist, but they should have archeological/anthropological evidence to back it up.

Sure, it’s always going to be a bit subjective as to what requires proof. And for a lot of low stakes things, there’s no point in going after it. If someone claims to be from Pitcairn, then what’s the point of questioning it? Just say, “huh, cool” and move on. If someone is trying to convince you that an historical figure existed, and that should effect how you see the world, maybe ask for as bit more evidence.