More or less a quick 'hi'
Yes, this blog is supposed to be receiving extended stuff on matters that occupy my head for longer than they should, now that I turned my back on distribution reviews and commenting on recent tech dramas (and I've always been fully aware that no one is reading any of this and I'm perfectly fine with it). Funny enough, this also killed my motivation to blog and I've been spending my time experimenting with DOSBox-X, studying legacy malware, and finally fixing some annoying configurations of my main OS.
To my own surprise, DOSBox-X kept me glued to my computer for two days and I even discovered a little less painful way to install additional drivers for Windows 98 SE OEM Full during the third part of the installation. After two messed-up attempts (one with missing sound drivers and another taking more than 400 minutes), I figured out to simply skip the step of including automatic boot in autoexec.bat and continued to let the VM power off, instead of let it engage in an emulated restart, until it reached the second mandatory restart. Restarting DOSBOX-X with its default configuration file (dosbox-x.conf), I manually loaded the config file for Windows 98, mounted both the ISO file and the HDD image, and then proceeded to boot it. To make sure nothing is being missed, I repeated this step after the third and final mandatory restart and only then added IMGMOUNT C hdd98.img and BOOT C: to the autostart file. It took a while to figure out, yet turned out to be worth the hassle.
Among the reasons for me getting familiar with this emulator for MS-DOS and legacy Windows versions up to Windows Me is to test and rescue a bunch of old CD's hosting files and games that cannot be read by any Windows version younger than Windows XP. And because I yet need to make time to crack an old Windows XP install that locked itself years after the broken CD/DVD drive got replaced, I have to settle with virtualization that is more appropriate (and lightweight) than both VirtualBox and VMware. It's quite exciting, so far, and I do hope that I will be able to donate some old games to My Abandonware in the future.
Other than that, I'm looking forward to test some legacy malware on said virtual machines myself. Obviously, YouTube channels such as danooct1 already do something like that and I can't deny – and certainly won't because he's doing an incredible job! – that Daniel sparked my interest in old malware again, after YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers abandoned his Virus Investigation series. At this point, I'm not considering doing any demonstrations like them and would rather study and observe them for my own personal curiosity and enjoyment first, however if I should come across something that's not been documented, I sure will try to provide details and quirks on here.
But to get the absolute best out of my virtual machines, I finally had to get my shit together and adjust the OS on my daily driver. This got me a little sidetracked due to my laptops, all running the same OS, only partially suffering from the same misconfigurations of Archcraft, whilst demonstrating bugs almost unique to each device or particular CPU/GPU combination and chipset manufacturer. By now, all devices pretty much are “vanilla Arch” with no connection to any Archcraft repository, stripped off unnecessary and even plain stupid configurations and packages, fixing some misconfigurations Adi easily could've fixed himself but still refuses to do so (such as the horrendous screen tearing that, according to him, is only supposed to affect AMD-powered machines but appears to be particularly bad on Intel Atom devices), and overall performance optimizations individually tailored to each device.
Yes, I could've taken the time to call out the main developer of EasyOS, who unironically talks about himself in third person from time to time, genuinely considers himself to be “spiritually enlightened”, yet continues to go out of his way to accuse anyone preferring the ISO file format a “boomer stuck in the past” – I'm pretty sure he's much older than me – whilst aggressively promoting the hard drive file format IMG, and overall sounds like a container-obsessed guy with a superiority complex and a writing style that's simply a pain to read. Overall an unlikeable person whose technical knowledge is so biased and limited that he considers single user with permanent root access to be secure whilst only allowing three special characters for the root password and effectively hardcoding the password for the encrypted folders (as if he learned nothing from the Windows 9x era).
I could also discuss the growing “senility” among German tech journalists that appear to haven't heard of “offline malware” until this week.
So much to drive my low blood pressure to healthy levels. But setting up a virtual machine can provide the same experience, especially when I mistype commands.
Right, I nearly forgot to mention a very strange event that still leaves me puzzled. Out of the blue, I got contacted by a random Fediverse account, claiming to have been one of my followers on the “Close Window” site, formerly Twitter. They claimed that their reasons for reaching out to me boiled down to two things: the plain fact that they took a hiatus lasting three years and no longer remembering why they followed me, and second the supposed coincidence that I joined Neocities at the same time as they did, which they claim to be the main reason for contacting me.
Yet nothing they said makes any sense. They couldn't tell the difference between coding and simply messing with operating systems, and called themself “technology-stupid” (which, ironically, is in itself an indicator that this person likely is not speaking English natively, yet they did rely solely on English), yet apparently joined Neocities – a web hoster that requires basic HTML and CSS skills, at the very least – and a Mastodon server just to message me, with all posts being set to “private message”. Considering this account was brand new (and even on the same server where I host my account) and they neither shared their Neocities site, nor their actual Twitter handle with me (only claiming to also have been using “minion” on there, which is taken by an entirely different account not following me), I got even more confused when they ended the chat, saying they only reached out to me to discuss each other's Neocities sites and wasn't interested in anything else.
Whilst breaking my promise of avoiding this site, I checked my followers and not only discovered that this person's background story was entirely made up (or at least VERY poorly worded), one “hacktivist” that finally motivated me to abandon the popular sides of IT by threatening to doxx me after mocking and calling her out for being nothing but a script kiddie with a huge following made out of tech illiterates (right now she's got more than 100k followers on Twitter), she got doxxed herself due to her threats and the repeated doxxing of random people she accuses of being “right-wing fascists”, providing polices in both Germany and Austria false data regarding the suicide of an Austrian physician last year (in fact one source let me know, rather involuntarily, that she's covering the people behind the pyschological terror and actually is highly involved in doxx groups similar to Kiwifarms herself), and threatening to “expose” right-wing politicians (which never happened and she did nothing but threaten them and their families to expose private affairs within the targeted people's families).
Wild ride, huh? This was supposed to be a quick update about my own current IT endeavours, but then again, not even when I'm minding my own business in isolation I am spared all kinds of drama and oddities. Thanks for sticking around, this sure won't end here!