Category: Make Orwell Fiction Again

Amazon (Audible) stole from me

Another instance of Make Orwell Fiction Again.

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was a purchase I made in 2020 or 2021. It was purchased with gift card money; my mom’s boyfriend bought me 12 credits worth of an Audible subscription for Christmas. I registered the code, and used the gift card / subscription to purchase this book.

I listened to the book in 2021:

It’s there in the middle:

That 12 hours left text is an artifact of hitting the Start button again, after having listened to it once.

John Perkins wrote this autobiography. He says his job was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to partner with USAID (an alleged CIA front) to take on huge loans for development. And if the leaders (or newly elected leaders) don’t go along, they might happen to die in airplane accidents….

This book is particularly annoying to certain really corrupt people in government. It is not surprising that it would end up on Big Brother’s to-be-memoryholed list.

So, I’d paid for it, downloaded it, and listened to it. But many months ago, I noticed that in my Audible app, it switched to “Unavailable.”

Today, I reached out to Audible support, and their story is that the book was moved to Plus Catalog. By moving it to Plus Catalog, they also got to remove it from my library.

If I want to listen to it, I’m going to have to buy it again.

Thieves.

That’s how I reconcile their web page saying:

Can I keep titles marked as “Buy for $0.00”?

Yes. When you select Buy for $0.00, the title is yours to keep forever.

versus their customer support rep telling me that they have moved the title to another category, and I’ll have to purchase it again if I want to listen to it again.

And now, what is particularly Orwellian, is that within the the Audible web page of my list of titles I own, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has disappeared. I foolishly didn’t take a screenshot of it in there before reaching out to Audible support. But when I did the chat session with the Audible customer support rep, he went ahead and updated my account to make it align with Big Brother’s view. I asked him about that, and he blamed it on automated systems.

Either way, I cancelled my membership. Why would I continue to do business with a company that abuses me by taking my money and then deciding they can change the deal?

pfSense 24.11 is not good

I had purchased the Netgate 3100 from the company because I thought that would get me the best compatibility and support. Well, an update was made available: 24.11-RELEASE (arm) and I made the mistake of applying it six days ago. My whole router/firewall has crashed thrice since then.

I’ve been pretty unhappy with Netgate for a while now, so a couple of days ago I pulled the trigger on purchasing a Protectli Vault V1210 Mini PC. I’ll install OPNsense on it and duplicate what I have in the Netgate. Then the Netgate 3100 will go to the landfill.

When I bought the Netgate appliance, I didn’t know about the shenanigans the Netgate owners were doing with their staff. I wish I had known that; I would have started with something other than Netgate.

In the Make Orwell Fiction Again category, I remember reading several articles about how the Netgate owners screwed a former employee, and it ended up in lawsuits. Those stories have now been memory holed. Sigh.

Later, I found a definite bug in their SMTP over TLS implementation, in the initialization routine. Mind you, I’ve been doing SMTP for more than twenty years. I know how to do SMTP via telnet, and can do really low-level commands with it. Everyone with that particular version of pfSense would be affected by not being able to do SMTP over TLS to an outside mail server because of this initialization bug.

I wrote up the bug with the steps to duplicate it, and I tried to submit it to Netgate technical support.

Their answer was “You don’t have a current support contract. Buy a support contract, and we’ll work on it.”

I am not paying you to fix your shit. You should be paying me for so clearly identifying where your software fell down.1 The pfSense user interface under System > Advanced > Notifications has a checkbox to Enable SMTP over SSL/TLS. This should work, and it did not. I went through the steps at the command line level, and everything was there and workable. The certificates validated, and email flowed like it should – if I did it manually.

That they wanted me to pay them to fix their broken software is galling.

I do miss the days of Novell, where their published policy was “Yes, you need to pay to open a support ticket, but if this turns out to be our bug and not something you could have fixed on your own by RTFM2, then we will refund you your money.” I think in the twenty years I was a GroupWise admin, almost every support ticket I opened with them ended up being zero cost for us. Once, the support technician said that yes, they had already known about the bug, but the Technical Information Document (TID) was only a day away from being published. Heh. If I’d waited a day, I could have RTFM’d the TID and not bothered with opening a ticket. Yes, he refunded us the support ticket cost. Sure enough, the next day the TID was published, with exactly the same steps the support technician walked me through to solve the problem.

  1. I’m pretty sure it was an extra carriage-return character when calling OpenSSL. ↩︎
  2. The Novell folk were always nice and polite, so in this case it is Friendly manual ↩︎

The surveillance state makes things screwy

One of my volunteer service opportunities is to record speakers at meetings and then put the recordings on a website. I use the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, which I’ve talked about before. I take the MP3 file and edit it using Audacity, trimming off everything before and after the speaker. Then I export the audio with a smaller bitrate to make a smaller file. Lastly, I rename it and upload it.

Today, a friend called me, and asked if I could burn a recording to CD. His friend, the gentleman who spoke, is almost 80 years old, and he would be best served with a physical CD – none of this Podcast Feed nonsense or USB stick which his truck may or may not be able to use. Sure, I said. This should be easy.

Okay, first I tried Fedora Workstation KDE Spin and got errors. I tried Brasero first, but it was super grumpy. Then I tried K3B which is my old favorite, and it was grumpy too.

I gave up and went to a Windows laptop. Did I want to use Microsoft Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes?

I went with iTunes because I’m not a fan of anything Microsoft.

Freaking iTunes worked, but….

What the hell is the name on this CD?

audiocd:/Philip Kerr – 01 – Game Over – Track 01.wav?device=/dev/sr0

At 80 years old, I’d be acutely aware of my mortality.

Oh! That is certainly what I want this 80-year-old man to see when he pops this gift CD into his truck CD player display:

Philip Kerr - 01 - Game Over

If I’m him, there’s no way I don’t think to myself: What the hell? And then he’d have to say some Hail Mary’s to apologize to God for the cursing.

This gentleman’s name is not Philip Kerr. I did write his name in the various properties fields in iTunes. None of those appear to have come over.

I know that the music industry wants to keep tabs on every sound file ever, so they can in theory collect royalties. But this was my recording, done live and in-person.

This is just screwy.

And apparently, this isn’t a problem on the CD, it is a problem in Fedora. I didn’t know that yet. All I got was the Orwellian vibes.

Okay, back to Fedora KDE Spin.

Ooooooooffffffff.

Thank goodness for Perplexity.AI. It turns out to only be an 8 step problem.

One: Check group memberships – must be a member of cdrom – I’m good

Two: Adjust K3B settings

K3B > Settings > Configure K3B > Programs > Permissions > Change Permissions > Apply

Three: Add a system policy

sudo vim /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/85-cdrecord.rules
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-system" &&
        subject.isInGroup("cdrom")) {
        return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
});

Four: Restart services

sudo systemctl restart polkit

Five: Update udev rules

sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-cd-burner.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr[0-9]*", MODE="0660", GROUP="cdrom"

Six: Reload udev rules

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Seven: reboot the computer.

Eight: try to burn the CD with K3B.

Thank goodness it worked.

I had forgotten that CDs are as small as they are. The older gentleman actually had two recordings on file, one for 45 minutes and another for 55 minutes. That’s too much for a single audio CD. Heh.