Jump to content

Mathwiz

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,880

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    51

  • Donations

    0.00 USD 

  • Country

    United States

Mathwiz last won the day on September 22 2025

Mathwiz had the most liked content!

2 Followers

About Mathwiz

Profile Information

  • OS
    Windows 7 x64

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Mathwiz's Achievements

1.3k

Reputation

  1. Mathwiz
    I have AT&T fiber. My router is built into the fiber interface provided by AT&T. It is rather "locked down." I can't even block unwanted DNS lookups at the router, nor can I reroute DNS requests to another device, such as my Raspberry Pi (for, say, Pi-Hole). That sort of thing has to be done by configuring each connected device individually. You're welcome to prove me wrong but I doubt there's a way to force this router to obtain a new external IP address by running a script on a connected device.
  2. Mathwiz
    @roytam1: Weird that it works for you and @Skorpios but not me. Serpent 55 always brings up the captcha for me, left-click or right-click, and then doesn't pass the challenge. Maybe it is the user agent that Cloudflare is balking at, as @AstroSkipper suggested earlier. R3dfox also brought up the captcha, but I just pasted the URL, so there wouldn't have been a referer. That's probably why. (I know "referer" isn't the correct spelling, but it's how Mozilla spells it.) Bringing up MSFN in R3dfox, signing in, browsing to this thread, and then clicking one of the links might have worked, but I just wanted to get the file. R3dfox passed the challenge of course. Since my wget batch file is working again, it doesn't really matter to me now.
  3. Mathwiz
    @VistaLover's suggestion worked My .bat file has been repaired! @AstroSkipper, I didn't say I had a static IP address. I said "I don't really have an option to change my IP address though." Well, that wasn't entirely correct. I do have such an option: power-cycle the router, so it negotiates a new IP address with my ISP. This, of course, would disconnect all devices in the home, so it's not really practical unless I do it in the middle of the night. The IP address Cloudflare sees is, of course, my home network's external IP address, negotiated between the router and ISP. Changing the internal address my PC is using with the router would make no difference to Cloudflare whatsoever. Luckily it's now clear that such a thing isn't necessary anyhow.
  4. Mathwiz
    @Skorpios, no; I didn't think that a right-click followed by "Save Link As" would lead to different results than a left-click, which invokes the captcha. I guess XP users have a way to download the latest version after all. Edit: Just tried it. Right-click and "Save Link As" didn't work for me. I got a 6 kB file. Maybe it's that "referer" Roytam mentioned, but.... @roytam1, all my "referer" prefs in Serpent 55 are at their defaults. A standard left-click on the link brought up the captcha. I haven't yet tried the right-click and "Save Link As." @AstroSkipper, perhaps telling wget to use a Firefox UA along with Roytam's "referer" suggestion might do the trick. I don't really have an option to change my IP address though. I just couldn't imagine Cloudflare leaving such a gaping security hole! @VistaLover, check this out: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/ Sneaky devils! I don't (and as long as I can get away with it, won't) own a "smart" TV, but I do own a Roku streaming box. I wonder if any of its "apps" are letting folks use my Internet bandwidth without my knowledge.
  5. Mathwiz
    I just got bitten by this thing. Normally, when you log in the site sets a cookie that will keep you logged in. As long as you connect often enough, you never have to log back in again. But I guess I went too long, so I had to log in again. Problem is, my browser remembered my user name, not my email address. (That's how long it had been since I logged in last.) And I couldn't remember which email address I had used when I originally signed up! So I was forced to just guess. Luckily, I guessed right (or you wouldn't be seeing this post). But that's a problem. I've had several email addresses over the years and some of them aren't even valid any more. Mutemail.com went belly-up and clear.com got bought out and shut down by Sprint (before Sprint themselves got bought out and shut down by T-Mobile). From the above, I take it the change was made to deal with spam (although I'm not clear how it helps with that, but evidently it does). But there needs to be a way to deal with forgotten email addresses. Perhaps a page where you can enter your user ID, password, and your current email address (maybe with a captcha), and get your old email address emailed back to you, or a link to reset it to the current one. Otherwise you're stuck creating a brand-new account and losing all your settings.
  6. Mathwiz
    I'm back. R3dfox worked, but good grief. I had to click the stupid "I am human" box. No more automated downloads. What really bites is that I had a nice .bat file that would automatically download the list of files from the appropriate directory at o.rthost.win, find the newest, automatically download that file, back up the old version, extract the new one, and apply all my browser customizations, all with just a few keystrokes. Now that's all been thrown out the window!
  7. Mathwiz
    Ultimate irony: the Cloudflare security checks block me from downloading Serpent with wget any more. I just get "403 Forbidden." Nor can I even use an old Serpent version to download the newest version! Apparently I'll have to use R3dfox to download Serpent now...? At least I'm on Win 7 and can use R3dfox, but what's an XP user to do now? Have I mentioned lately how much I hate AI? Not because I don't find it useful, but because everybody and their God damned dog is trying to scrape the entire World Wide Web to train their damned AI, necessitating all these damned security checks.
  8. Mathwiz
    Re: Forcibly reinstalling uBO, I agree with NHTPG. Unfortunately the author appears to have missed the point: Re: the first point, I would too! On today's Internet, I'd never browse without an ad blocker, and uBO is the best IMO. But there's a difference between installing uBO by default, and reinstalling it if the user intentionally uninstalls it, effectively making it an unavoidable part of the browser! I don't think the author fully appreciates the gravity of forcibly installing a third-party's add-on, no matter how good that third party may currently be. What if some hypothetical company (which I'll call "Poogle") makes gorhill an offer he can't refuse to exempt Poogle ads from being blocked by uBO? Or what if gorhill gets hit by a truck, and his heirs aren't software developers, have no interest in continuing uBO development, and just sell it to Poogle outright? (As for having uBO always available when testing, the author could add it to his own policies.json; that doesn't mean it has to be in the distribution for everyone.) As to the second point, editing a .json file is a bit beyond the ability of the average user. There needs to be a way for non-techies to do this. But in any case, it appears the author has no intention of addressing this issue.
  9. Mathwiz
    Conspiracy theory (meaning, don't take this seriously): Google has a secret agreement with CloudFlare to force users to update to the latest Chrome by breaking older browser versions as soon as Google releases newer ones. Happens to affect Chromium too, but most users are on official Chrome or ChrEdge.
  10. Mathwiz
    I understand you weren't addressing me specifically, and your general observations may well be correct. Yet, I think it's rather telling of a person's character when they let something little like "Micro$oft" get them riled up. To be clear, I use many Micro$oft products, and I actually like some of them! But I haven't found much to like in Windows versions beyond 7 (well, 8.1 wasn't too bad). Unfortunately, neither 7 nor 8.1 is supported any longer. I have no problem with that - few companies can afford to support decades-old products - but M$'s business model depends on them not giving me the choice to remain on an unsupported OS, even though I knowingly accept any security risks from doing so. Thus, I choose both to visit sites like MSFN, in order to keep Win 7 going; and to mildly protest M$'s attempts to force me to pay them for an OS I strongly dislike, with that little dollar sign.
  11. Mathwiz
    Thanks. I actually thought it might have something to do with the fact that the initialism ICU, when read in English, sounds like the sentence "I see you!"
  12. Mathwiz
    What is "ICU" anyway?
  13. Mathwiz
    Finally! It was so simple too. Just change the UA and it works! I could've used this years ago! Unfortunately it comes too late for me. My workplace has a new "security" admin who refuses to authorize any app other than M$ Outlook. (Well, he did relent and authorize GMail for phones.) MailNews looks like Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is perfectly fine from a security standpoint, but he's not going to unblock it because "why do I need to use another email client besides Outlook?" Still, it's nice to know that it's at least possible on XP again.
  14. Mathwiz
    @roytam1 already told you no: ... so, given that response, I was only trying to help. I'm sorry if you find it too "inconvenient," but you have a workaround now. And you only need to inconvenience yourself once for each add-on you install.
  15. Mathwiz
    I just stumbled upon a curious issue with R3dfox ESR. I tried to update from R3dfox 139 to R3dfox ESR 140, and none of my profile settings were migrated! It was as if I was starting over with a clean profile. A little investigation revealed the R3dfox ESR profiles were in a different directory: "R3dfox ESR" instead of merely "R3dfox." So my old profile was still there; R3dfox ESR just uses a different profile directory. OK, I thought, I'll copy my old profile to the new "R3dfox ESR" directory and switch to it with the profile manager. But when I tried to "create profile" and browse to the copied profile directory, it acted as though it wasn't even there! All it would show me was the new, clean profile it had created for me. The copy of my old profile was definitely there, but R3dfox ESR wouldn't show it. I was forced to give up and install a regular "R3dfox" version (I picked 142 for now). This did work and all my bookmarks, passwords, add-ons, and the like came back. But WTF? Why can't I migrate a R3dfox profile to R3dfox ESR? Is this a new Mozilla thing or an Eclipse thing? Weird! Another anomaly was that R3dfox ESR offered to migrate my settings, but not from MS Edge, as "regular" R3dfox had done; rather, from Internet Explorer! What good is that? I haven't used MSIE in years and years! I don't use Edge any more but it's still installed.
×
×
  • Create New...