Another Linux lie: we have a CMS

Truth is, you have a putrid mess.

People are getting off WP, which is evident by the google searches for 'alternative to wordpress'. But this is not the point. The point is that WP has become a mess and enjoying it.

A customer calls. They checked their Apache logs and found out that, surprise, Google is searching for their secret login page that is hidden by a special plugin that they found and installed. So, they change the secret page address and keep monitoring. Next day, Google comes for the new address. And then Bing does too. And them more search engines show up, each trying to get the page. So, I bork their attempts with a custom .htaccess rewrite rule. They fuck off, and I proceed to analyze the logs to see what they might have done. This is scary!

Google went on, accessing the supposedly secret address, trying to bruteforce the login page by using a redirect parameter to each and every media file linked to the uploads section of the blog. Are search engines supposed to do that? Are security plugins supposed to leak secrets to ALL search engines in the visible universe? I hope that the answer is 'no'. Is it?

You would think that the developer of the security plugin should be interested in hearing about this vulnerability. You are wrong. They are indifferent to it to the point of totally ignoring the report and even by obviously sicking the WP moderator onto my customer, which is evident by their futher comments on the topic being HELD FOR MODERATION indefinitely. A cover-up in the making? You bet.

You would think that WordPress should be interested in learning about vulnerable plugins and in weeding them out of the flock. You are wrong. They are accomplices.

Do not bet your business or well-being on WrodPress: they are borderline criminal.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux lie: we have desktop environments

Truth is, you don't really.

Enter MATE, the supposedly heir to Gnome 2. Its developers went out of their way to insulate themselves from any user feedback, and so their degradation went on, for a decade, undisturbed. Recently, they sunk to a new low.

Fast forward to Fedora 41 where its keyboard layout switching is not working in the new VM that I am building for a user. There is no flag, no two-letter code, and no switching, not even when I click the empty area in the tray or right-click and choose the layout from the drop-down menu. WTF?

So, the user and I roll our eyes and decide to upgrade to F42, in a slim hope that it might fix the issue. I start system upgrade and leave the VM alone, for the night. In the morning, we are mesmerized by the MATE lock screen that is refusing to unlock: the password is wrong, We notice that it has switched to the other keyboard layout that we were totally unable to activate last night. How? It's a mystery.

To add insult to injury, the layout indicator on the lock screen dialog changes accordingly to the key combination, but the input remains in the other encoding, i.e. we are unable to log back in.

The genius degenerates of the MATE dev team went out of their way, to make sure that it is truly impossible: they do not allow pasting from the clipboard or entering key scan codes via Alt-Numpad.

I say let's try to log in through the Hyper V console. So we RDP into the server and connect. It is sitting at the initial display manager login screen, which seems to have been unaffected by the KB switcher. I punch in the password, it complains that can't open the display, and the screen goes black. There are no options left than to shut it down and restart.

Genius is as genius does: always as a degenerate.

On top of that, there is some kind of memory leak, since the VM allocated an extra 1 GB overnight, even though during all of the set-up it never even reached the initial 8 GB that I had allocated to it. All it was doing was the downloading of the upgrade. They are oh, so fucked, that it is hard to beat them in their race to the bottom.

Scanning Google search results for problems with keyboard switching in the recent Linuxae, the bespoken Linux FOSS community managed to truly FUBAR it. I don't understand why they absolutely refuse to test before releasing. It has become their maniacal motto: never test nothing, let the users suffer. Reading through Github back-and-forth about these issues makes my blood freeze: they are so incompetent and so bureaucratically regimented that it makes the IRS sound in comparison like the proverbial Chaosmen of the PT.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Linux lie: we have competent developers

What does this teach us? Two things:

1. They can't get anything right
2. They never test

For chrissake, dude, test before you release. Your ego must be so redlining that it does not occur to you that by repeatedly releasing crap you disgrace yourself, so I will be the 1st to break it to you: you are a disgrace.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux lie: we have web browsers

Give person a new OS, and he will be irate for 1 day. Give him an upgrade, and he will be irate for the rest of his life.

Since the collective global Internet monopolist cabal systematically forcefully obsoletes our hardware and software, by expiring TLS certificates and ciphers, we are sometimes forced to upgrade, even though otherwise everything works, and we have no desire to spend our hard-earned $$ on new stuff. Likewise, I was forced to upgrade an OS on one of my devices. I access it remotely, over SSH that runs on top of a 50 Mbit uplink, which is the modern XOrg barely works on.

To deal with the painfully slow XOrg over SSH, I used to run Midori browser on that device, since it is one of the most light-weight and has the least animated UI (animations kill XOrg over SSH performance). Fast forward to the upgrade.

Once upgraded, Midori can no longer open any web sites. Yes, you read me right: it opens no web sites whatsoever. Instead, it offers this marvelous error message:

Midori can't find the page you're looking for.

Onto the console, it rains this: Error sending IPC message: Broken pipe

Imagine not being able to browse any web pages whatsoever. What does it make the piece of software? In my books, it makes it anything but a web browser.

So, another developer who loves to write code but hates to test turns their product into a proverbial pumpkin, overnight. Congratulations, you terminally genius ivory tower dwellers!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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