Exxos's B-roll blog of nothing in particular

[exxos]

Everything is a joke these days !

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[exxos]

Today's odd conservatory find...

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[stephen_usher]

It’s a type of solitary wasp.

[exxos]

Well , that was a nine-hour battle to figure out...

This morning when I turn the computer on I was welcomed with this..

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After running hard drive diagnostics, admittedly on the wrong hard drive, though the WD BLUE drive seemed to fail.. Still need to look into that..

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My windows drive was actually on the Kingston nvme ..

I thought I would give Claudia a try which basically sent me on a wild goose chase of no great surprise.. It was hellbent on it being a memory problem.. Even though I could actually boot up Linux fine.. Claude would not have it ! I even did memory testing on Linux, 14GB out of 16GB.. Of course 2GB likely in use.. all passed fine.. Claude still claimed memory problem.. Told me to run memtest86..That was its own loader drama getting it onto a USB stick with a non-functioning computer !

So basically...

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Claude would still not have it, claimed I had not run it long enough! I mean windows would literally crash within several seconds of trying to boot on this run for just under a hour in total! FFS!..

I basically suspected ESET again, After all this chaos which went on for weeks before HERE ..

Chicken and egg problem, could not disable ESET as need the GUI to do that. After battling with Claude, I notice that the modules had updated last night around 8.30pm... I said to Claude would it work if I just deleted the modules folder, then it had a massive rant of you can't do this you can't do that, you will make it worse, blah blah blah.. So I went and deleted the modules folder anyway and the computer booted right up !!

ESET lost its licence we could not update. That was another battle in getting the thing to register again! It updated and I rebooted and it blue screened again ! So obviously had a problem with ESET.

I remembered I had prerelease modules enabled after all the saga last time when they actually fixed the problem. So I deleted the modules folder again, but my licensing back in again, and turned off the prerelease modules so I just got basically "yesterdays" modules. and it worked ! So now I have disabled automatic updates.

I reported it to them because it could potentially affect other systems not just me, but I already know they will just say "EOL F...off". But I did my due diligence anyway. There was about an hour wasted as well because I was is constantly going round in circles with their stupid "AI chat bot".

So it leaves me with a bit of conundrum because the virus definitions may not be updated anymore there are things like AVG which may still run, but every antivirus program I have tried in the past has basically been completely useless no matter how good people reputation is of them.

Currently I do have a filtered IP address which filters out a lot of crap anyway even before it gets to my PC. Similar with various browser guard programs which should help protect things there. I really wonder if ESET is even earning its keep these days because it is not picked up anything or found anything for literally years now. But mostly it just flags up some websites has been blocked for whatever reason so that is probably where the greatest risks are. But not like I really browse the Internet on my PC anymore anyway...

Hopefully ESET will actually respond to see if I will still get virus definitions downloaded in its current state.. If not.. Then it presents a bit of a ponder for the future

[exxos]

Actually forgot I use a filtered DNS services, is part of the handguard services which also do a browser extension. "AdGuard DNS filter", composed of AdGuard Base filter, Social Media filter, Tracking filter and more..

I just noticed they even offer different block lists you can add.. There's loads of them..

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Looks like there are basically hundreds of different block lists you can add. Basically blocks them at the DNS level so don't even get to your own route. The stuff that does get past is generally taken care of by the browser extension.. Of course is not going to be 100%, but what ESET is doing is probably not that much anymore past real-time system file protection and that kind of thing.

"Big broom - Cleans the Internet and protects your privacy! Blocks Ads, Affiliate, Tracking, Metrics, Telemetry, Phishing, Malware, Scam, Fake, Coins and other Crap."

I suppose is one advantage of using AI, rather than browsing lots of random size trying to find answers to questions, at least AI acts as some sort of filter by itself for malware and the like. Other than the forum and Facebook occasionally I don't think I really visit many sites any more anyway.