1. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run prompt. Type regedit and hit Enter.
2. Navigate to the following registry path:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search
3. Right-click the empty space in the right pane. Select New followed by DWORD (32-bit) Value.
   Set its name to BingSearchEnabled. Set the value to 0.
4. Restart your PC for the changes to take effect.
   And that's it. Your Start menu will now only search locally.

If you're on Windows 11 version 24H2 or newer running the May 2020 Update or later, there's an alternative registry path that you might need to update. Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
Create a DWORD called DisableSearchBoxSuggestions and set its value to 1 using the same steps mentioned above. This disables both web results and search box suggestions in one shot.

The JUMPSEAT satellites loitered over the North Pole to spy on the Soviet Union. //

In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat “the United States’ first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite.” //

The Soviet Union was the primary target for Jumpseat intelligence collections. The satellites flew in highly elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles up to 24,000 miles (39,000 kilometers) above the Earth. The satellites’ flight paths were angled such that they reached apogee, the highest point of their orbits, over the far northern hemisphere. Satellites travel slowest at apogee, so the Jumpseat spacecraft loitered high over the Arctic, Russia, Canada, and Greenland for most of the 12 hours it took them to complete a loop around the Earth.

This trajectory gave the Jumpseat satellites persistent coverage over the Arctic and the Soviet Union, which first realized the utility of such an orbit. The Soviet government began launching communication and early-warning satellites into the same type of orbit a few years before the first Jumpseat mission launched in 1971. The Soviets called the orbit Molniya, the Russian word for lightning. //

The disclosure of the Jumpseat program follows the declassification of several other Cold War-era spy satellites. They include the CIA’s Corona series of photo reconnaissance satellites from the 1960s, which the government officially acknowledged 30 years later. The NRO declassified in 2011 two more optical spy satellite programs, codenamed Gambit and Hexagon, which launched from the 1960s through the 1980s. Most recently, the NRO revealed a naval surveillance program called Parcae in 2023.

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday that the City of Norfolk’s use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock is constitutional and can continue, dismissing the entire case just days before a bench trial was set to begin.

The case, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, was originally filed in October 2024 by two Virginians who claimed that their rights were violated when the Flock network of cameras captured their cars hundreds of times, calling the entire setup a “dragnet surveillance program.”

However, in a 51-page ruling, US District Court Judge Mark S. Davis disagreed, finding that the “…plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that Defendants’ ALPR system is capable of tracking the whole of a person’s movements.” //

I intended to NOT drop what I was doing and just let the video play in the background. But after 1 minute, I dropped what I was doing to give the video my full attention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

See also "We’re All So F’d | NVIDIA x Palantir, Global Surveillance, 'Pre-Crime' Arrests, & AI." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lYsO4k7OIY

DeMercurio and Wynn sued Dallas County and Leonard for false arrest, abuse of process, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and malicious prosecution. The case dragged on for years. Last Thursday, five days before a trial was scheduled to begin in the case, Dallas County officials agreed to pay $600,000 to settle the case.

It’s hard to overstate the financial, emotional, and professional stresses that result when someone is locked up and repeatedly accused of criminal activity for performing authorized work that’s clearly in the public interest. DeMercurio has now started his own firm, Kaiju Security.

“The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest,” DeMercurio said. “What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building.” //

Martin Blank

Reading more about it, it seems a bit more complicated. While I don't think the pentesters should have been arrested (much less defamed), it does seem like the people who authorized them might not have actually had that authority.

I was a pentester for about a decade (though I didn't do physical testing), including at the time of this incident. There is a certain amount of trust that goes into contracting. We don't go out just based on an email approval. We get signed authorizations that are presumably vetted by knowledgeable people, and frequently lawyers, on both sides. I wouldn't have thought twice about accepting a contract signed by a representative for the court system itself.

But even more important, the people who hired them should have done their due dilligence. Had they followed the standard protocol and brought legal in, these issues of authority would likely have been pointed out.

There is a high likelihood that legal was brought in. This circumstance was weird, and the only reason that it got out of control was the sheriff. In most places, an improperly authorized test would have resulted in no charges or charges rapidly dismissed after showing that there was no intent to break the law.

You want to be especially in the clear on this, given cops inherent tendencies to be dicks about anything.
Yeah, this whole incident caused some significant changes in how physical pentesting was done.
January 29, 2026 at 7:08 pm

The advertisement on the auction website was titled “Space Shuttle Remove Before Flight Flags Lot of 18.” They were listed with an opening bid of $3.99. On January 12, 2010, I paid $5.50 as the winner.

At that point, my interest in the 3-inch-wide by 12-inch-long (7.6 by 30.5 cm) tags was as handouts for kids and other attendees at future events. Whether it was at an astronaut autograph convention, a space memorabilia show, a classroom visit, or a conference talk, having “swag” was a great way to foster interest in space history. At first glance, these flags seemed to be a perfect fit.

So I didn’t pay much attention when they first arrived. The eBay listing had promoted them only as generic examples of “KSC Form 4-226 (6/77)"—the ID the Kennedy Space Center assigned to the tags. //

It was about a year later when I first noticed the ink stamps at the bottom of each tag. They were marked “ET-26” followed by a number. For example, the first tag in the clipped-together stack was stamped “ET-26-000006.” //

A fact sheet prepared by Lockheed Martin provided the answer. The company operated at the Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans, where the external tanks were built before being barged to the Kennedy Space Center for launch. Part of the sheet listed each launch with its date and numbered external tank. As my finger traced down the page, it came to STS 61-B, 11/26/85, ET-22; STS 61-C, 1/12/86, ET-30; and then STS 51-L, 1/28/86… ET-26. //

Once the tags’ association with STS-51L was confirmed, it no longer felt right to use them as giveaways. At least, not to individuals.

There are very few items directly connected to Challenger‘s last flight that museums and other public centers can use to connect their visitors to what transpired 40 years ago. NASA has placed only one piece of Challenger on public display, and that is in the exhibition “Forever Remembered” at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. //

digital.rain Smack-Fu Master, in training
2y
34

Sarty said:
It is such an extremely NASA thing to do to mark items so mundane and interchangeable as remove-before-flight tags with individually traceable serial numbers.

It has to be one of the quality control check points … you know you placed, say, 56 tags for a specific mission. After removal, you can check that all the 56 tags for that mission have been properly removed.

It may well be that IP addresses are simply the wrong starting place to fulfil these desires relating to compliance, security, customisation and performance: "You cannot get to where you want to go to from where you appear to be!"

A simple way to compile the "reverse list" of all RIR records that map all assigned IP addresses to the names of the organisations that were allocated or assigned these addresses by an RIR is to extracting the reg-id values and perform a whois lookup on any of the number objects listed in this stats file with that reg-id value, extract the organisation name attribute of the whois response.

I've scripted a process to perform this reverse mapping to run every 24 hours, and the combined extended daily statistics report can be found at:
https://www.potaroo.net/bgp/stats/nro/delegated-nro-extended-org

The format used in this report is to append the organisation name as an additional field appended to each record of an assigned number resource, where the organisation names used in this report are the names recorded in the RIRs' databases.

Much of the reason for this apparent contradiction between the addressed device population of the IPv4 Internet and the actual count of connected devices, which is of course many times larger, is that through the 1990's the Internet rapidly changed from a peer-to-peer architecture to a client/server framework. Clients can initiate network transactions with servers but are incapable of initiating transactions with other clients. Servers are capable of completing connection requests from clients, but cannot initiate such connections with clients. Network Address Translators (NATs) are a natural fit to this client/server model, where pools of clients share a smaller pool of public addresses, and only require the use of an address once they have initiated an active session with a remote server. NATs are the reason why a pool of excess of 30 billion connected devices can be squeezed into a far smaller pool of some 3 billion advertised IPv4 addresses. Services and Applications that cannot work behind NATs are no longer useful in the context of the public Internet and no longer used as a result. In essence, what we did was to drop the notion that an IP address is uniquely associated with a device's identity, and the resultant ability to share addresses across clients largely alleviated the immediacy of the IPv4 addressing problem for the Internet.

However, the pressures of this inexorable growth in the number of deployed devices connected to the Internet implies that the even NATs cannot absorb these growth pressures forever. //

There is a larger question about the underlying networking paradigm in today’s public network. IPv6 attempts to restore the 1980’s networking paradigm of a true peer-to-peer network where every connected device is capable of sending packets to any other connected device. However, today’s networked environment regards such unconstrained connectivity as a liability. Exposing an end client device to unconstrained reachability is regarded as being unnecessarily foolhardy, and today’s network paradigm relies on client-initiated transactions. This is well-suited to NAT-based IPv4 connectivity, and the question regarding the long-term future of an IPv6 Internet is whether we want to bear the costs of maintaining end-client unique addressing plans, or whether NATs in IPv6 might prove to be a most cost-effective service platform for the client side of client/server networks. //

EFF is against age gating and age verification mandates, and we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. But mandates are already in effect, and every day many people are asked to verify their age across the web, despite prominent cases of sensitive data getting leaked in the process.

At some point, you may have been faced with the decision yourself: should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age? And if so, how can I do that with the least risk to my personal information? This is our guide to navigating those decisions, with information on what questions to ask about the age verification options you’re presented with, and answers to those questions for some of the top most popular social media sites. Even though there’s no way to implement mandated age gates in a way that fully protects speech and privacy rights, our goal here is to help you minimize the infringement of your rights as you manage this awful situation.

Words that rhyme with orange:
by: Lloyd Worthnone, hobby farmer

Don't mess with the IT department guys. Although their office might look as messy as mine, they are a force not to be screwed with.

It all started one day with this guy, the origional Etherkiller, developed with a few misc parts to warn new users that the IT department is not to be messed with. You too can make one at home, connect the transmit pins of the RJ-45 to HOT on 110VAC and the recieve pins to Common. Modify to suit tase by varying pinout.
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.

We buy and sell used telephone systems. Whenever you are upgrading your phone system, or your customers phone system, we want to buy the old telephone system. We pay top dollar for any manufactures telephone systems.

AWS's destiny isn't to lose to Azure or Google. It's to win the infrastructure war and lose the relevance war. To become the next Lumen — the backbone nobody knows they're using, while the companies on top capture the margins and the mindshare.

The cables matter. But nobody's writing blog posts about them. ®

So, at the very least, five or six agencies chased dozens of witnesses, nine LLCs and general corporations, an untold number of other allegedly fake companies, a long list of bank accounts, a countywide network of real estate, and a series of credit card statements, the latter producing detailed statements in the complaint about the luxury goods Soofer allegedly purchased using public funds. His wife apparently has some quite nice Hermes sandals that Los Angeles taxpayers bought her, if the FBI is correct. I attempted to get more information from the city controller who started the ball rolling, but his office has yet to respond to questions. I’ve never once found that the FBI answers questions about its investigations, so I haven’t bothered to ask them about it.

Read the complaint linked above and form your own conclusion, but an educated guess is that it’s a description of hundreds of hours of investigation, and maybe more. It continues, and they’re clearly still digging.

Now, Soofer allegedly represents about $10 million in local fraud, and Mehmet Oz says that just the category of medical fraud in just that one county probably amounts to about $3.5 billion a year. In Minneapolis, Nick Shirley is visiting single addresses listed in public records as the office for multiple businesses that can’t actually be found there, and the X user who posts as Data Republican is suggesting that some single addresses in the city are actually the address of record for hundreds of potentially fraudulent businesses.

Do the math in your head: How many cops, doing how many hours of investigation, will it take to unravel tens of billions of dollars of overlapping fraud in government-funded health care, transportation, daycare, and homeless services nonprofits, in California and Minnesota and wherever else large numbers of nonprofits chase a massive pool of federal, state, and local public funds?

Americans are quite lightly policed, and should be. //

Our police do their work at the margins and are funded and staffed on the premise that they’re chasing small numbers of bad guys in a population of honest citizens. If that cultural premise fails, we don’t have the cops to fix it.

The first place to stop fraud is with a healthy culture. The second place to stop it is in a limited government that doesn’t offer a bunch of free cash for thieves to steal. The third solution, investigations and arrests, is clumsy, slow, and likely to prove grossly inadequate. //

The more we undermine the first culture and import the second, the more we’re going to foster public services fraud. That’s not what we want to do.

These are simple utilities to manipulate Microsoft Virtual Hard Disks (VHD/VHDX) from the command line.

This utility copies files and directory trees while fully preserving all timestamps, and when possible, NTFS compression and encryption attributes.

The primary benefit to using vcopy is that it preserves all timestamps and NTFS compression and encryption attributes, when possible. Normally, copy operations will fail to preserve any of the timestamps on directories and the creation and access timestamps on files. Especially in the case of directory timestamps, this default copy behavior wreaks havoc on people who depend on their files and directory trees having meaningful timestamps.

You can also suppress and strip out certain file attributes from being copied; for example, the read-only attribute when copying files from a CD-ROM.

Additionally, vcopy can compute hashes for files as they are being copied, eliminating the need for a wasteful second read pass.

Notepad2 is a free, open-source text editor created by Florian Balmer. I have been a user of Notepad2 for a few years; it is the primary text editor that I use every day. This page was created as a way for me to share some of my Notepad2 resources.

The HashCheck Shell Extension makes it easy for anyone to calculate and verify checksums and hashes from Windows Explorer. In addition to integrating file checksumming functionality into Windows, HashCheck can also create and verify SFV files (and other forms of checksum files, such as .md5 files). It is fast and efficient, with a very light disk and memory footprint, and it is open-source.

winisoutils - Windows ISO Disc Image Utilities

1. It should be both free and open source.
   1. The file format should be open or well-documented for future migration options.
2. It should be multi-platform: in order to be proposed as a standard, anybody must be able to use it. The program has to run on at least Windows and Linux, preferably including Mac OS.
3. It should have a (large) standard collection of electric/electronic components, with an extensible library: this way it will not be necessary to draw components from scratch, and, just in case, it will be necessary to do it just once.
4. Connections should be better than just lines. They should attach to components, default to right angles, move when the components are moved, autoroute around objects, and so on.
5. It should not require the user to learn a great deal of distracting or convoluted methods to draw schematics.
6. It should have Bezier curves to allow the creation of good audio curves, since most weighting curves are specified by points, not by an equation or circuit model.
7. It has to help the schematic drawing with the option to "snap" components to a grid (otherwise it will be hard to make a precise drawing).
8. Optional: It should be part of a complete, easy to use, drawing package, not just for circuit diagrams (though a 'circuit mode' might be good).