PrintNightmare – manual fix

There’s now a manual workaround to fix the important all-Windows ‘PrintNightmare’ security hole, at least for domestic and standalone PC users who don’t need to print over a network.

See the official Microsoft Workarounds / Option 2.

Stop the Print Spooler as a Service.
Change the PC’s Group Policy to block “inbound remote printing operations”.
Restart the Print Spooler.

This will “will block the remote attack vector”. Yup, it seems the fix is that easy.

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Update: Cancel that. Ten days later and another hole has been found, which for now means that the Windows Print Spooler service should be stopped totally even on domestic and standalone PCs.

The new-look DOAJ

The DOAJ site has had a design makeover. On the front page they’ve gone for a 1964 home-decor ‘modernist abstraction wallpaper’ look, which will likely have nostalgic connotations for Baby Boomer librarians, and perhaps a few who recall the early arcade videogame Pac-man, but will mean nothing to most students.

The initial ‘modernism at home’ buzz does not then sit well with the styling of the numbers or of the “Find open access journals & articles” strapline on the front page. Either the fonts are all sleekly retro-modernist or they’re not. Don’t mix the two.

The main Search box button is a very unfortunate shade of yellow, made even more jarring in combination with the blue flash on the dropdown menu…

Having made a search, the search button becomes a soft orange which better matches the new logo. But this still has the jarring blue flash on the dropdown menu.

Text-selection colour leaves the selected text clear (my Web browser has a UserScript that keeps the text-selection colour the same across all sites, but I turned it off to test).

Search results are looking good, but on a widescreen desktop I have to scroll down to get them.

What I get…

What I want (and have to scroll down to every time)…

Overall, pretty good. But the front page still needs some tweaking.

SumatraPDF adds extensive annotation tools

Extensive new support for editing PDF annotations, in the latest version (June 2021) of the popular freeware SumatraPDF PDF reader.

Also here on the JURN blog, my short guides to how to set up Sumatra for book and magazine reading (cover-page + double-page spreads, no gutters), and enable keyword search for .ePub files opened in SumatraPDF.

Missing in open

Google Scholar has a useful new feature. If an article was funded from the public purse, and yet not freely published online with the agreed time, then Scholar will flag that the expected public open access version is missing.

However the flags appear on the Scholar Profile section, not as a red flag alongside each search result.

Taking a purely random example, this is what appears on the sidebar of the author’s page…

On clicking through from this widget, one gets a list with the missing papers sorted to the top…

You can see that the OA mandates are usefully itemised per-paper.

The DOAJ requires a new Managing Director

The DOAJ requires a new full-time Managing Director, experienced and “a strong leader”. Deadline: 9th July 2021.

Release: DocFetcher Pro

DocFetcher Pro is now available and stable in a bugfixed 1.1.x version, as a perpetual free demo (limited to five search results, per search) or for $40 via Gumroad. It’s a leading desktop PC file-indexer and local keyword searcher, which in its freeware version was bjorked last September by a Java update. The maker then took the opportunity to put the project on a pro footing. This version now includes the required Java modules inside the software, so you don’t have to install Java on your PC.

Archive.org webinar – Controlled Digital Lending

“Frequently Asked Questions About Controlled Digital Lending”, a free Archive.org webinar on 19th June 2021, at 12:00 PM Eastern time USA. Via Zoom.

Even though CDL is used at hundreds of libraries around the world, questions remain about this important innovation in digital library lending. In this session, we’ll be tackling the most commonly asked questions surrounding CDL and answering some of yours.

Yippy-die-day…

Sad to see that the search-engine Yippy, based on Bing, has yipped its last yip. The domain now bounces to DuckDuckGo. When its sources were last heard of, Yippy was a version of Bing but with a strong boost given to sites for complex coders, regex wranglers, javascript jugglers and HTML hammerers. Also technical hobbyist sites in other fields, it was said. As such it was rather useful on occasion. It was also nice that it didn’t freak out if you ran the same search seven or eight times or more. It tolerated drilling at depth, which Google now has problems with.

DuckDuckGo is partly based on Bing (a blend of Bing and Yandex, when its sources were last heard of). It appears to be unknown if there has been a back-end ingestion that makes it a replacement for Yippy. But a few initial tests suggest it might be a reasonable replacement, and may have had some of Yippy’s weightings plugged in. For instance try a search for…

“href.replace” regex script

But if you want a technical search for your field or hobby in 2021, with full indexing reach and relevance-ranking, it’s probably best to create a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) and populate it with about 100 or so of the top relevant URLs.

CC Search goes to WordPress.org

CC Search, aka Creative Commons Search Engine, is moving to WordPress.org, which has also “hired key members of the CC Search team”. WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg also states on his blog of CC Search… “audio and video [are] soon to come” with the support of WordPress.org.

CC Search should not be assumed to be a one-stop solution. It appears, for instance, to be completely useless for DeviantArt. Presumably DeviantArt is traffic-shy in that respect, and its bots are being blocked there. If WordPress could find a way to have DA open up, that would also be a major boost to the service.

Your Ulthar battle-cat army has arrived…

Scan The World is a new site for free Creative Commons scans of real-world objects, aimed at people who want to waste time and money on making worthless plastic tat 3D-print delightful plastic objects. We’ve seen such sites before, but this one looks like it’s well-organised and commercial enough to succeed.

Sadly the 3D printing angle means that “objects” is often where it ends, as nearly all my test downloads under full Creative Commons were simple .OBJs and thus lacked the vital photogrammetric textures seen in the previews. Those that did have textures tended to be under non-commercial Creative Commons. Such as this fab 3D printable Cat Armour.

I somehow doubt has a medieval original, but there were medieval rocket-cats, so you never know…

Overall, despite the limitations and ads Scan The World is an ‘open downloads’ site and no sign-up is required to download.