* Posts by jlturriff

64 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2022

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LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

jlturriff

Ironic that for the last week or so, The Register has also posted "25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then".

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

jlturriff

It would be nice to know if any of the old PC VM OSes (e.g. VM-386) could be resurrected. There were at least two until MacroShaft murdered all of its opposition.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

jlturriff

Speaking of the days of green screens...

(This is not a description of an on-call fix, but it did fix a few people.)

Back when mainframe terminals were an improvement from Hollerith cards and keypunches, they were very thin on the ground. (The first place I worked, the data processing department installed two (!) terminals for use by the senior programmers.) Things gradually improved by creation of a "bull-pen" of shared terminals for the rest of the staff. Inevitably, there was competition for access to this scarce resource, and occasionally someone would step away from a terminal or go to lunch without logging off. This, of course, was also a security issue, and a few of us, if sufficiently provoked, would do something like using a little-known command to change the terminal's line length to 1 character, or install a little TUI routine that looked just like the logon screen, but just looped until a particular function key was pressed.

(To my knowledge, nobody ever misused such a routine to steal credentials, which would have been a quick way to become unemployed.)

Amazon accused of cheating low-income Prime users out of two-day deliveries

jlturriff

Re: Exactly what the AG is doing

Even more simple (and ethical) would be for Amazon to inform their customers in those areas that "Due to circumstances beyond our control we are unable to provide the two-day free delivery provided by Prime to your area, so we we will no longer charge you for Prime services."

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

jlturriff

Even more fun will be the times when Copilot's output proves to be, shall we say, less than realistic. We know that AI makes things up without regard to reality. Businesses ignore this potential at their peril.

Letting chatbots run robots ends as badly as you'd expect

jlturriff

So where are the loop boundaries in that pseudocode?

The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg

jlturriff

Looks so very comfortable [not]. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to endure eight hour sessions with my shoulders cranked out in front of my torso like that.

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

jlturriff

Re: Irony

Re American companies, of course! Aside from a handful of states, there is no regulation of online privacy here at all.

jlturriff

Re: Irony

Yes. TheRegister is definitely in the minority, though.

jlturriff

Re: Time to get spiky

I'm pretty sure that the law is against modifying code, not data, which is what a cookie contains.

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

jlturriff

Software liability disclaimers are still a thing, right?

I'm no longer in a position where I buy commercial software, but I still see licensing "agreements" that state that the software is provided as "use at your own risk". How widespread (if at all) are such clauses in commercial sofware licenses? If they still exist, shouldn't they be phased out as part of the shift from insecure to secure software?

Google begs court for relief from Epic Games' Play Store demands

jlturriff

Re: Here they go again.

A ridiculous defence.

jlturriff

' "Google has a history of malicious compliance and has attempted to circumvent legislation and regulation meant to reign in their anti-competitive control over Android devices," '

I think you mean "rein in" (an analogy with controlling a horse by pulling on its reins) rather than "reign in" (a misguided analogy to government's supposed majestic power over Big Tech). :-)

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

jlturriff

Another reason for not wanting to modernise

Here in the US, people are also becoming more and more skeptical of overbearing automotive industry and their participation in mass data collection and remote control of vehicles that "feature" continuous network connections. These connections allow the companies to spy on their customers' (victims'?) use of their vehicles, track their locations, make features "rent-only," prevent maintenance by independent mechanics, and even brick them for late payments. There is a growing number of potential owners who are reluctant to buy these vehicles.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

(Okay, Cory Doctorow comes off sounding rather manic, but he's not wrong.)

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

jlturriff

US government's lax response to IT security "implementation"

It's really frustrating to see how the US government is "responding" to software security issues. (I put it that way because they mostly seem to be giving the IT industry a pass to ignore security.) Applying this blanket sanction to Kapersky only surprises me by the amount of time it took for them to take action at all; meanwhile the rest of the industry goes blithely on its way, ignoring security and lying blatently about their commitment to its implementation, and the government does nothing except squabble. IMO there should be hard requirements for IT to show the state of their security implementations, and criminal penalties for heel-dragging and backsliding, and I believe that a lot of high-level executives should be behind bars for leaving their companies open to theft of customers' data and ransomware attacks

Privacy features lose their way in latest Firefox update

jlturriff

Re: Uh-huh...

Or try running an external adblocker, like privoxy, like I do. I really don't trust plugins, or even the built-in password manager; the need for plugins I can't get around, since Mozilla has made UI customization effectively impossible without them, but I prefer to use things that are available externally to a browser whenever possible, both for security and performance reasons. Also, look through about:config and see how many external URLs Firefox wants to connect to; their privacy boasts are very suspect, IMO.

From network security to nyet work in perpetuity: What's up with the Kaspersky US ban?

jlturriff

"For those who prefer audio, the Kettle is available as a podcast via RSS and MP3, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Feel free to chime in below. ®"

How about those of us who would prefer a text transcript?

What's up with Mozilla buying ad firm Anonym? It's all about 'privacy-centric advertising'

jlturriff

None of this is at all reassuring. I've long been skeptical of Mozilla's claims of privacy respect and user-friendliness. Just look into Firefox's about:config database (why does it make me think of MacroShaft's registry?) and count the number of URLs Firefox talks to; and just try to use it to customize the user interface: obscurant variable names and values, no user-accessible documentation.

To paraphrase a famous politician, "Firefox is the worst of the web browsers except for all the rest."

If, perhaps, Icecat could keep up to date with Firefox that might be a solution, but with no dedicated support for it, that's not likely.

Satellite phone service could soon become the norm

jlturriff

Re: "a pragmatic means of network extension"

Such a mealy-mouthed way of describing it. Why not just say "cheapest way possible"?

jlturriff

Re: "a pragmatic means of network extension"

Yes, "if the network gives you HD." Here in the US, even those who live in the big cities aren't guaranteed HD, and it just get worse in smaller communities and rural areas. The telcos here are always crowing about 5D, but outside the cities it's either unavailable or no better than 4D; and when it comes to internet, I'm hoping I'll live long enough to see fibre where I live; my satellite connection is expensive, slow, and subject to bad weather.

jlturriff

Here in the US. I'd bet on the "add-on extra" method.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

jlturriff

The impression I get is that if one invokes systemd-tmpfiles --purge from $HOME it would erase that part of the filesystem tree. If that's right, invoking it from / would erase the whole thing?

Google to push ahead with Chrome's ad-blocker extension overhaul in earnest

jlturriff

Much better to run an ad-blocker separate from your browser(s), e.g. privoxy.

Do you really need that GPU or NPU for your AI apps?

jlturriff

Consider providing transcripts of Kettle sessions

Some of us aren't easily able to handle video blogs. Can we get transcripts so that we can know what happened?

TR-069, a protocol that made broadband manageable, turns 20. What's coming next?

jlturriff

Yeeeessss... that bulk data collection "feature" (it's also in TR-069) is rather unnerving; looks like it can return maps of one's local network devices. Also, what prevents one's ISP from bulk collecting one's data traffic?

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

jlturriff

If what I understand about this is correct, it's more a bad policy decision. Fujitsu seems to have actually encouraged their developers to tamper with the post offices' accounts.

Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe

jlturriff

Re: The English language is so much fun...

Hmmm... couldn't make the EDIT button work.

I first noticed this phenomenon when I was exposed to IBM's virtual storage and virtual machine technology in college. "Virtual" has pretty much fallen by the wayside in advertising now, but before then there were lots of advertisements that used the word, whose meaning was quite fuzzy to people, e.g. dishwashing soap commercials that said their product made glassware "virtually spotless." :-)

jlturriff

The English language is so much fun...

'Apple – which advertises Safari as "incredibly private" ' is, when one thinks of it, quite accurate: "incredible" says it all. We see this sort of misuse of words all the time; "incredible," commonly thought of as a good thing, really means "not credible;" "terrific" means "inducing terror" and so on. It's fascinating to see how such terms have been twisted so that their meaning has become positive instead of negative.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

jlturriff

'...horses "didn't complain" when cars were invented.' Maybe not, but in the ensuing years, a lot of them were sent to the glue factory.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

jlturriff

Somewhere I seem to remember seeing support for users with impairments (visual, audio, tactile,...) being advocated, perhaps by XDG standards? but this Gnome developer, Jordan Petridis, seems not to have heard of that? or just doesn't care?

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

jlturriff

"– not very well" has to be the kindest description anyone has ever made about Musk's behavour.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

jlturriff

To reduce the chance that when the user just picks the first browser on the list, the list should be randomized, using part of the system clock and perhaps something like the MAC address. This would spread the selections better than a static list.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

jlturriff

Re: Data

Why sell it to anyone who waves money in their face, of course; and who knows where it will end up?

NASA wants to believe ... that you can help it crack UFO mysteries

jlturriff

NASA can avoid defunding the New Horizons support project by diverting the money they're wasting on UFO research to something more productive.

https://www.space.com/nasa-new-horizons-budget-uncertainty

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

jlturriff

IIRC, Microsoft was also the miscreant who provided embedded HTML in email as a feature, which proved to be an excellent tool for tracking and data mining of its users.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

jlturriff

All I have to say is, "a plague upon software developers who force sans-serif fonts on their users."

OpenAI is still banging on about defeating rogue superhuman intelligence

jlturriff

Not to worry!

The folks at the AI for Good conference in Geneva have solved these issues, according to Reuters news service:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/robots-say-they-wont-steal-jobs-rebel-against-humans-2023-07-07/

Good to know that we're all safe from rogue AIs, eh?

HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0

jlturriff

Address length and field sizes

Client apps will be 64-bit and no 32-bit clients will ship. That decision means field sizes can be larger in clients, meaning more data can be entered.

Ah. I always wondered why my field sizes are so limited...

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

jlturriff

"Just run the test scripts." ―easy to say, but

On a large system like Azure, it's almost impossible to cover all of the possible combinations of interactions and customer practices. Does a customer run multiple servers that talk to one another? How many different ways are there to back up your databases? Do the servers interact with non-Azure servers? etc.

One would think that MS' test suite would include a realistic working set of databases (perhaps a clone of a production set, including some archival backups) that can be loaded from a known state, but it sounds like they don't.

Criminals spent 10 days in US dental insurer's systems extracting data of 9 million

jlturriff

Oh, yes; that message posted on their website will be a lot of help to low-income victims who don't have internet access...

Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'

jlturriff

Heh. If their employees' average age is 35, maybe they're climbing on the bandwagon of other US businesses that are recruiting child labour. :-)

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

jlturriff

Not only legacy hardware, but software also.

You mention old hardware that won't run more modern Windows than XP, but there are also instances of software that won't run on more modern Windows. The ones I've heard of are industrial control applications that are effectively 'abandonware,' but still necessary to operate industrial equipment (boilers, plywood manufacturing, etc.).

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

jlturriff

But why?

But what does Google say is the compelling reason for making these available?

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

jlturriff

Query for Microsoft

Dost thou even test thine patches?

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

jlturriff

Throughput claims

One of the things that really gripes me about telecom (from POTS to Broadband) is the propensity of providers to tout their service speeds as "up to [insert rate here]," as if this means anything. Sure, ISDN was rated at "up to 128K/sec," but just think: 20 bits/sec qualifies as conforming to that boast, too. For example, my satellite link is rated at "up to" 50MB/sec, but right now my throughput is 15.03up/1.46down MB/sec, far lower than my ISP's suggestion.

We need to change the rules so that providers also have to state a LOWER limit.

Rust Foundation so sorry for scaring the C out of you with trademark crackdown talk

jlturriff

Maybe the name should be changed to "Corrosion"?

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

jlturriff

Back to basics

I have to wonder why the simplest fix (renaming or deleting the video viewing software) wasn't the first fix for this; would have saved a lot of troubleshooting...

jlturriff

Uisge.

jlturriff

Maybe he couldn't share it as tracelessly from his own machine?

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