I didn't read the thing but a friend sent me a headline he saw "Larry Ellison predicts everyone will be under constant surveillance"

wtf. why the hell is that 'news'?

Really sick of the world kissing up to these scumbags and making it worse.  Is it time for cake yet? Please?

"Qualcomm acquires Italian hardware company Arduino to push deeper into robotics"

Well, that is the end of them. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/qualcomm-acquires-italian-hardware-company-arduino-in-robotics-play-.html

Arduino is bigger than Arduino at this point.  The development system is all open source, and the hardware has long since expanded way beyond Arduino-branded boards.

I'm happy to hear that the Arduino people are getting a big payday.  Now I don't have to feel bad about buying cheap clone boards.

The interesting part will be to see how they evolve the core products.  Atmel will likely be the big loser, since they'll bring out new boards with Qualcomm chips.  But the software ecosystem won't hiccup, since it's already designed to build on any supported hardware (think ESP32) and there's no such thing as distributing precompiled binaries in the Arduino world.

Looks like they do plan on moving to only their own silicon. News letter today, the next product was announced, its got their silicon.    As far as im concerned the product line is dead. 

As far as Atmel, i think the ship already sailed on that. For all practical purposes, ARM and RISC-V took their market.  Hell even expressIF is moving away from Xtensa and into RISC-V. 

Tue Oct 07 2025 17:24:28 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Arduino is bigger than Arduino at this point.  The development system is all open source, and the hardware has long since expanded way beyond Arduino-branded boards.

I'm happy to hear that the Arduino people are getting a big payday.  Now I don't have to feel bad about buying cheap clone boards.

The interesting part will be to see how they evolve the core products.  Atmel will likely be the big loser, since they'll bring out new boards with Qualcomm chips.  But the software ecosystem won't hiccup, since it's already designed to build on any supported hardware (think ESP32) and there's no such thing as distributing precompiled binaries in the Arduino world.

And it doesn't matter!  The work is done.  The entire Arduino ecosystem is open source, and they succeeded at their mission of bringing microcontroller development to the masses without requiring megabuck$ development kits.

Thanks to the Arduino bootloader and development system, turning any microcontroller into an Arduino just requires another one with the bootloader.  Anyone can turn an Atmel microcontroller into an Arduino with not much work.   But you really don't have to, when you can get a Nano clone for $3.

Even so, Espressif is the current favorite, thanks to its network stack.  And they're everywhere.  Hell, my smoker has one to talk to its app.

I'm not going to get worried about this one.  The cat's out of the bag.  Microcontroller development has been democratized.  It isn't going back - with or without Qualcomm.

Great.   Blackrock ( ya them ) is looking into buying the regional electric power provider for a few billion.

Does not effect me directly ( it will indirect of course ) since mine is a different company but it will directly effect millions.  And who knows, they may try to buy mine next..

Due to where i live, drilling a well is not legal. You are forced to use city water, and sewage.    If i get to move, that wont be the case again.

The house i lived in when i was in gradeschool, the city incorporated, then a couple year latter, just before we moved out "You are grandfathered, any new house must use city resources and if if you touch your systems at all, you must now hook up to new city resources".   I heard some 20 years later, they just forced it. "you will now connect or be fined".   Just a power/cash grab like the rest. 

Tue Oct 21 2025 10:46:57 UTC from darknetuser

aaaaand that is why I generate my own power and have my own water supply. You can't trust external agents.

It's different everywhere.  My house was built in 1991 and hooked up to town water.  Sewers came in some 15-20 years later but we're not hooked up.  If they want me to connect they can pay for the 250 feet of pipe and trenching, and the lift station that would be required to send my sewage uphill.

And if I ever did hook up ... oh the things I would send down the drain!  A garbage disposer would get installed in my kitchen sink on day one.  Followed by old paint, used motor oil, liquefied dead bodies, fish-shaped ethylbenzene... oh the places you'll go!

So, traffic on my Citadel had died to almost nothing - it would go weeks without a visitor - and I just kind of lost my drive to check up on it at all. 
So, that ISP I was using to redirect so that it looked like I was hosting from NY.... called me and said "We had to shut you down - we're getting reports of rogue traffic from your site." 
I had plenty of backups, and an entire machine ready to just swap out as a hotspare - so I could have picked up from the place in time before it was compromised easily - but there just wasn't enough reward. The world really isn't big enough for more than one web accessible Citadel BBS anymore. Especially when I was paying like $15 a month for the service to tunnel its presence to New York. 

Every now and then I get a little wistful. At first, right around the 2018-2020 - way back when I was running it on a Pi 3B - it was actually pretty high volume - more traffic than here. 

But it never recovered when I took the downtime to go from Pi to an i5 on Proxmox... making it BETTER... but that was around the time that everything went nuts with the 2020 election, Covid, Twitter and Facebook really bringing the hammer down on anyone that disagreed politically with their then current agenda. 

Somewhere I lost the fire. 

Recently it has been ignited again to a certain extent by things going on in the world - but not enough to consider putting the Citadel up - although I still have the Cisco router, the clean i5 with Proxmox and Citadel on it, and the shared storage. 

The real problem is - it just isn't practical to run a system out of your home that is on the public web - you need an IT team dedicated to protecting it from attacks. Or at least one person willing to pay close attention who knows what they're doing. I'm just not able to commit that kind of time. I travel enough I had to give my fish away... I can't manage a BBS if I can't keep a 10 gallon bowl of Glofish. 

So... that is my story. 

That is mostly why my BBS vanished the last couple of times, the hassle/risk. The first time, life got in the way.. was a long time before i took the time to bring the village back up, and it was basically an echo chamber. the world had changed. 

And it might be low traffic here, but not nonexistent  

Thu Oct 30 2025 21:11:58 UTC from ParanoidDelusions

*snip*

The real problem is - it just isn't practical to run a system out of your home that is on the public web - you need an IT team dedicated to protecting it from attacks. Or at least one person willing to pay close attention who knows what they're doing. I'm just not able to commit that kind of time. I travel enough I had to give my fish away... I can't manage a BBS if I can't keep a 10 gallon bowl of Glofish. 

So... that is my story. 

Fri Oct 31 2025 02:41:52 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

I'm sorry it didn't work out. We all think you're pretty cool around here, and I hope you'll stick around. I know you dropped off last time because you wanted to keep your best material for your own site -- which was the right thing to do at the time. If that season is over, though, you're in good company here. I always appreciated your unique perspective.

And the plans to federate are still in the pipeline, it's just taking a lot longer than I thought it would.

And I'm probably back on board with that. Watching what happened to Charlie Kirk changed me in some significant ways. I'm not as... hostile and volatile as I was - that doesn't work, now does it?  It was my schtick - I wanted to be a 90s shock-jock for the Internet. I wanted people to WANT to kill me. But it turns out you can just be a sincere, honest, genuine guy wanting to have a discussion from a place of mutual respect - and they'll try to kill YOU first before they kill someone like me. Because - THAT is the real threat to them. Someone who wins hearts, not a Ben Shapiro who simply ruthlessly destroys his opposition with smarm and spite. That - they're perfectly content to coexist with. They love it when you're as low as them. It is when you show them up by being better than they are that they want to kill you. Maybe we get to a point where I do bring it back up. I was honestly thinking I'd love The Sanitarium to be a DOOR BBS off Uncensored - where once people get done here, they could just connect to mine, and it would be... different? Yours is tech heavy. I'm a nerd, I read some of your rooms and I go, "way past my pay grade." I'm not coding improvements to Citadel, right? I'm good as a sysop - I can get a BBS up and running, figure out Proxmox, have the underlying architecture *tight* - but I can't write the code. And my site was more social, less tech driven, than yours. There is probably a place for that. But I can't manage it. I can't protect it. I probably COULD - if I could dedicate myself to that aspect of it - but I'm *lazy* and I just don't want to spent my days fighting Chinese hackers looking for sites to turn into warbots for DDNS attacks. If I was a door off YOUR site - you would take those guys out before they could get to MY BBS. I don't know. Maybe I'd still have to patch and update or I'd be a backdoor to compromising your site. But it seems to me that is the only way I go forward - with someone else guarding the moat. I'd dump the "wallofhate" domain. I let that lapse. I'd just come back with www.thesanitarium.com and be about punk and metal and having an edge - but there is a lot more compromise in my heart now. A lot more desire to understand instead of just flipping the bird to everyone I disagree with. 

The challenge is - I learned so much, so fast - became so proficient in Linux - I got REALLY good at it - to run Proxmox and Citadel - I had to be - and then - it has been so long - it would be like starting over. 
It kind of bums me out. I work right now doing billing collections for a medical DME company making about $17 an hour. It is just spending money so I can buy tech. I have skills that could bring in double that - but I don't want to work in IT. I'm defeated in that sense. All my IT industry contacts got laid off because of DEI. Every white guy over 40 that I know got replaced by an Indian woman who works for a 3rd of the price. They're all working cloud helpdesk support jobs. 

But I do love having my own Citadel - my own Sanitarium BBS. I just don't know if there is any place for it in today's reality. 

One thing I noticed - as you mentioned, I was trying to focus on content to push people toward my own site - and that WAS a good strategy. It didn't work - but it was a good idea. Anyhow - when I went to rebuild my Vampire V4 stand alone - all the docs on setting up Samba, VLC, MiamiDX tcp/ip stack - other tech docs - were all on an Apache front page on my site that led to "wallofhate.com". So - I found myself in a pickle - I have a NUC with the entire BBS, the entire apache site, all the docs, still intact here - but getting it back up and running and visible on even my internal network so I could get those docs so I could rebuild my V4/SA was a daunting task. I just started again from scratch. If I had just published those docs on my blogger.com site it would have saved me so much effort. Ultimately - it was easier to just start again than to get those docs accessible and relearn everything I've forgotten once again about Linux. I shot myself in my own foot - in that regard and now I am absolutely paying the price. 

I think that ship has sailed for the most part. FB and such have eaten the non-techie crowd.  

And with all the noise they generate, even most techies don't see us here.  Honestly, if i had not been into the BBS world back when that was all there was ( both from being sysop, and user since i had free long distance ), i might have missed it too.

Sun Nov 02 2025 21:46:18 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Funny thing about that, I like the tech stuff, but I never really wanted Uncensored to be a "techies only" place. 

OK Mr Burns.

Aside from other reasons i dislike this person ( he is a elitist liar and a hypocrite, takes credit for his peoples work, mistreated his employees... ), hes also a freaking nutcase.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Early Monday morning, Musk took to X to share his two cents on how to address the climate crisis. He claimed that using satellites for solar radiation management (SRM)—a theoretical geoengineering technique that would allow humans to control the amount of sunlight reaching Earth—would be an effective solution.

“A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth,”  Musk wrote.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dammit i hit go to fast.  

"And, i can charge per unit of sunlight that hits the earth!!"