Same for ‘Medium dot com’. Another attempt at a walled garden for people’s thoughts.

What I find interesting, then, is what advantage the trilobites may have gained by using a basic mineral for the lenses vs. organic chitin. Chitin must have a transparent form in order to function for the eyes in modern creatures? Hmm.

I read in one paper that trilobites may have actually formed some kind of dual-layer in their lenses to compensate for the double-refraction property of calcite.

Ah! So the same as the rest of their hard parts, I suppose. I suspected as much, but couldn’t seem to find any paper that explicitly stated this.

Thank you!

In regards to use of calcite vs. chitin: doing a quick search: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/earth-sciences/facilities/collections-and-museums/treasury-of-trilobites/index.html

Were trilobites also unique in using calcite in addition to chitin in their exoskeleton? Do any extant arthropods use calcite in any significant way?

The more general vuln is CVE-2023-45853 apparently, in zlib through version 1.3

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-45853#status

is this general to any Linux distro using zlib or just Ubuntu?

Don’t be Anatoli Bugorski!

… or the guy involved in the Hanoi Incident.

Yes, I know they are update services; fair point you make, that those not technically-minded should probably leave them on.

However I personally do not appreciate OS updates, no matter their purported criticality, being installed without my express permission. I am aware of Group policies, but Win11 Home does not officially support them (though one can install gpedit.msc manually; however according to sources I researched, not all policies set will even be honoured by the Home edition).

I did consider scheduling it, just hadn’t gotten around to trying it out.

If could, I would wipe Win11 and use native Linux but this laptop is too new and support is poor on it; it’s gone as soon as practical :)

When I have to boot into Win11, I run this right after as a shortcut from my desktop (right-click and Run As Administrator):

net stop usosvc
sc config usosvc start=disabled
net stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start=disabled

… be sure to set your Wifi points as metered to block Update as well.

Note that anytime you go into certain Settings / Control Panel pages, Win11 silently re-enables the above services! Crazy. (Someone should really write a patch for that…)

Sad anyone has to put up with this BS but, we do what we gotta do.

Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)

I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.