Posts by may_i

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

First question to ask their new cloud overlord:

When you make backups of our data, are those backups immutable?

Lest they end up losing everything a second time. Yes, TietoEvry, I'm looking at you!

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

Re: Who gives a sh**

It's their cash. You just sound like you envy them.

As to the utility of bureaucrats creating rules to protect people against dangers, I'm not convinced that anything useful will come of that.

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

Re: Embrace... Extend...

The opportunity has passed. All those who did protest were either ignored, accused of being scared of change or otherwise dismissed. Linus really didn't help with an attitude of effectively shrugging his shoulders when asked for his opinion on systemd.

In the end, the decision which cemented systemd's future was the Debian project's decision to adopt it. And now here we are with an init replacement which has taken over so many aspects of running a Linux system that desktop environments have little choice but to use it, thus ensuring its future as the de-facto standard.

Toyota, Samsung accelerate toward better EV batteries

Safer?

The missing quantification in the article is "charge to 80% in nine minutes".

I would take issue with the implication that solid state batteries are safer than current lithium-ion technologies. Most realisations of solid state batteries use metallic lithium as the anode, and given lithium's reactivity, any damage which lets in air or water is going to be just as much fun as it is with li-ion batteries.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Add the Swedish ICA supermarket chain to that list

They run thousands of supermarkets and pharmacies in Sweden and were unable to process credit card payments until about three this afternoon.

D'oh!

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

The perfect excuse

It's always easy to make fantastic claims when the proof of the claims are hidden behind the veil of Government Secrets and will never be released in your life time.

LockBit leaks expose nearly 200 affiliates and bespoke data-stealing malware

Misdirection

The image in the article shows nothing more than a list of mostly first names, all of them nicely capitalised. It's a picture of nothing. It's certainly not a list of affiliate accounts.

I have no idea what games the NCA are playing here, but what is being shown is so obviously and painfully not what it purports to be that you'd need to be extremely unaware to fall for it.

Amazon overcharges shoppers with Buy Box algorithm, fresh lawsuit claims

Seriously?

That someone can start a lawsuit based on the fact that they have no comprehension of the principle of caveat emptor is a sad reflection on how increasingly stupid mankind is becoming. It seems to fall in nicely with the modern trend of being unable to take responsibility for your own actions. "It's not my fault I pressed the 'Buy now' button and got ripped off!" Actually, it is.

Amazon often have prices which are 30% higher, or more, than other web shops. Unless the Prime free shipping makes it worthwhile, I don't buy from Amazon if they cost more. Anyone who doesn't check is either too well off to care or lacking some grey matter. I don't see anything deceptive about Amazon listing some deals in preference to others, even when the preferred listing is more expensive. They are a merchant, and should be regarded as such. I certainly don't trust any merchant to act in my best interests and if that's hard to understand then you probably need adult supervision.

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

The bulge

"Both machines featured a bulbous rear that concealed a slot for software cartridges."

Not true in the case of the ZX80. The bulge was there for the heat sink for the linear regulator which provided the 5V supply. If the author of the article had even studied the ZX80, they would know that there were no "software cartridges" and that all software was loaded from a cassette tape. While there was an IO expansion slot at the rear of the machine, this was for connecting an expanded memory module which, rather than being held within the case of the machine, stuck out the back and resulted in the machine locking up if the expansion module was even nudged slightly.

The flickering screen

The ZX80's flickering screen had nothing to do with the keyboard. It was caused by the fact that the screen was driven by the Z80 processor, if it was servicing a keystroke, it could not update the screen at the same time. It was an architectural and software limitation, not anything to do with the keyboard per se.

India again backs down on its controversial PC import restrictions

The explanation

is hidden in this sentence: "He added that the move was also designed to regulate imports to ensure trusted and verifiable systems."

Translation: "We want to get our hands on all computers before they get to end users so that we can install a state owned root kit in each machine's BIOS."

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Off topic

Maybe the commentards could keep their comments about USAsian politics to themselves or post them somewhere more appropriate. Please?

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: A scandal of epic proportions

Mea culpa. I left the UK a long time ago and was not aware that RM and the PO had been split into separate companies.

A scandal of epic proportions

This was a scandal from the start and the fact that we are only now seeing robust action from politicians after the whole sad affair was dramatised on TV says a lot about their lack of interest in the hundreds of lives ruined by Fujitsu and Royal Mail's incompetence, arrogance and lies.

Words fail me to express my disgust at how this has been handled.

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Fixed, done and dusted

You're a bit out of date on this one. The 12.4 release has already happened - about 20 minutes after the Debian news article which you linked to was published.

Elon Musk's xAI wants $1B cash infusion in exchange for equity shares

ML systems and training data

If you use the cesspit that we call "The Internet" to train a large language model, you will encounter the computing axiom known as "garbage in: garbage out".

I don't personally use X, or its previous incarnation, but given that the size of a post there is limited and given that it has a reputation for hosting extreme ends of the viewpoints held by those able to operate a smartphone app, I'd suspect that, at last, people might stop describing the output of an ML model trained on X's content as being anything like "Artificial Intelligence".

Suggestions for what xAI should, more realistically, be called are invited.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Forcing people to turn off ad blocking won't have the effect that Google wants

I support my favourite YouTube creators directly via Patreon. The majority of them have reported that over the last few years, the amount of money they get from Google has been decreasing every month. What they get from YouTube in exchange for annoying people with far too many ads is hardly even worth the trouble any more.

If Google start making life hard for me by making it impossible to use YouTube while blocking ads, I simply won't visit YouTube any more and if my favourite creators are not prepared to start posting their videos to YouTube alternatives, they will lose my Patreon contributions as well. In the end, everyone will end up losing, including Google themselves.

I will not tolerate Google telling me how I run things on my own computer!

LockBit redraws negotiation tactics after affiliates fail to squeeze victims

Re: You write this as if

Too bloody right. Make it illegal to pay these tossers a penny.

If your business has no disaster plan and you cut so much from your IT budget that you can't afford to make proper, off site backups on write once media, well maybe if you survive the criminals destroying all your data, you won't make the same mistake again.

The scourge of ransomware can be stopped by ensuring there's no money to be made from it.

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

Puff piece

SektorCERT describe themself on their own web site with the banner: "Together we strengthen cyber security in Danish critical infrastructure" and say things like: "Among other things, we handle the monitoring of the companies in the sectors that are connected to our extensive sensor network. Via the sensor network, we monitor internet traffic with a view to detecting cyber attacks against Danish critical infrastructure." They describe their business form as: "SektorCERT is a non-profit association owned and financed by Danish companies within critical infrastructure."

It sounds much more to me like some Danes thought, "Hej, CERT pulls in loads of cash, so let's set ourselves up as a Danish CERT, Danish companies will pay lots of money for that." and are now trying to get their organisation mentioned in as many puff pieces as possible based on a poor war story from May this year.

I don't see how they have provided the businesses which fund them any particular value. Given their "extensive network of sensors" and on their own admissions in the article, they appear to be running some kind of perimeter firewall/proxy for their members: "As the devices weren't available for scanning on services like Shodan, SektorCERT said it's not clear how the attackers were able to identify the vulnerable firewalls."

If you're trying to be a security organisation which actively defends their members' networks, you don't allow internal router management interfaces to be accessible from the Internet at large, ever. You don't let your "critical infrastructure" clients use Chinese Home/SOHO routers on their networks either! These mistakes show a fundamental lack of network security understanding. Not being able to work out how the attackers reached these supposedly protected interfaces, particularly considering how long they have had to work it out, is piss poor for a company which claims that it is "protecting the Kingdom of Denmark's critical infrastructure".

They need to get a better writer for their next puff piece and have a new war story that doesn't make them look like an unnecessary bunch of amateurs. And if they're really a CERT organisation, where's the English version of their web site?

Canonical reveals more details about Ubuntu Core Desktop

Re: Succesful

You mean that you broke it, not that Mint became broken.

Don't assign responsibility for screwing something up to the distro when you admit in the same sentence that you broke things yourself by nuking python.

I can't imagine how you did that without using root privilege, so you really only have yourself to blame!

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

If this does become reality, there's a simple solution...

Refuse to comply!

I will simply make sure that my update repositories for Debian are located outside the EU and install the version of Firefox that does not have its hands tied.

It's my computer and I alone will decide what software it runs and whether I will accept any technical limitations imposed by those who would seek to compromise my privacy and safety.

UK may demand tech world tell it about upcoming security features

Total isolation is coming

If the UK keeps up their "trust big brother" strategy, I can see the country's isolation from the rest of the world reaching the point where their Internet peers unplug the connections leading to the UK. It's probably the right thing to do. Let the island descend into its dystopian future while the rest of us carry on without it. I certainly can't see tech companies keeping any presence in the UK when law after law gets passed which aim to turn every tech company into the UK's bitch and make them complicit in the dismantling of privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of thought.

This kind of crap makes me ashamed to admit that I was born in and grew up in the UK. Thank $deity I don't live there any more. I will not ever be returning.

Google - yes, that Google - testing proxy scheme to hide IP addresses for privacy

We will see...

Google is trying to tell us that it is not a wolf dressed in it's last dinner's skin, and it really is going to implement technology which makes "privacy" mean something. "Might" ask for a review from W3C. It's called "IP Protection" - IP as in "Intellectual Property"? Oh sorry, you meant IP Address.... didn't you?

Everything is private, except when Google is required to deliver everything they have recorded. Yeah....

No.

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Windows 11 is not OK

Windows 11 is a targeted advertising and user profiling system. It follows on from and expands upon the data collection technology which started with Windows 10. The way that it coerces people to link an account hosted at Microsoft to their computer so that they can build detailed profiles about their users is something that the EU should already be looking very closely at.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Goodbye Elon, don't forget to shut the door on your way out.

The more I hear, the more I'm convinced that Musk is totally unhinged.

As for being 'detached from reality' by working from home - All my colleagues work in a town some 450Km away from where I live. Consequently, I spend every working day working from the distraction free comfort of my home. I frequently receive compliments on my work from my immediate manager and my colleagues and always meet my deadlines. It works perfectly for me and I know many others who work from home and enjoy the same great working environment and collaboration with their colleagues.

As the article rightly points out, the only person who is detached from reality is Elon Musk himself.

Seeing what is left of Twitter close down in the EU would be something I'd only know about from the press. I certainly wouldn't miss it!

Windows 10's latest update issue isn't a bug but a feature – to test your patience

Do what I do: The base installation on my laptop is Debian, Windows runs in virtual machines.

This delivers several benefits: Windows is easy to back up and restore by simply copying the VM's virtual disk files. I can also have several installation of Windows - one for each system environment that I work with. Each Windows installation is much more stable because I'm not installing anything else than Visual Studio and any other tools that I need for the specific environment and there's no problem with conflicting updates or accumulating registry cruft due to multiple install/uninstalls. If a Windows update is taking ages (as they tend to), I can fire up another Windows VM and work on something else while the first one is grinding through its update.

I've worked this way for over 15 years now and it has given me an incredibly stable and resilient working environment.

Chinese citizens feel their government is doing such a fine job with surveillance

Re: ASPI

I expect better from The Register than their journalists recycling propaganda without criticism. Allowing their journalists to function as "useful idiots" reflects badly on The Register's editorial team.

ASPI

From the Wikipedia article:

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is a defence and strategic policy think tank based in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, founded by the Australian government, and funded by the Australian Department of Defence along with overseas governments, and defence and technology companies.

Now why would a government funded think tank with ties to the defence industry and most of the players who stand to make lots of money from implementing Chinese style surveillance on the Australian population be regarded as impartial in any way?

This article is a surveillance propaganda exercise.

A remarkably uncritical article

I don't see how any of the reported opinions here could be trusted. When you live in a country where expressing any kind of opinion which is critical of the government on the Internet can end up with you being sent to a work camp for 20 years, the results of any survey have to be regarded with extreme suspicion.

The fact that this report was created by a five-eyes participant who would love to be able to implement such far ranging surveillance on it's own population should immediately raise a huge red flag regarding the impartiality and possible propaganda aspects of the report.

EU threatens X with DSA penalties over spread of Israel-Hamas disinformation

Re: Free Speech

A noble thought, but given the mental capacity of your average social media user, I find it hard to imagine any of them learning what "source criticism" is or developing the mental facilities to do so.

India demands social networks 'swiftly' remove all CSAM

Re: "Indian Internet"

> Nations states are run by politicians, many of whom claim the support of a purported deity. This has been the case for centuries and has survived far more disruptive changes than the latest flavour of mass communication.

Nation states are characterised by control over resources, people and ideas. The Internet threatens to break those power structures permanently and most likely for the good of humanity, but not the ruling class. That is the only reason why politicians seek to control the Internet - to make sure that their serfs don't get inspired to overthrow them.

The entire concept of countries and borders is invalid and serves no long term benefit for anyone other than those who would control society. You may have noticed that all of humanity shares the one planet.

Using the status quo as justification for the inequities perpetrated in the name of the state shows a clear lack of imagination.

Furthermore, saying that the Internet is run by commercial interests is disingenuous. The foundations of the Internet were actually laid by public entities. The fact that many services on the Internet are provided by commercial interests does not change this. The services are not the Internet, the connectivity upon which services can be created and shared is the Internet.

The Indian government is playing the same game as the UK and US politicians play - saying that "we must do this to fight the evil of child abuse" is purely a technique to dissuade people from arguing with you. The time has come where I hope people will start to understand that labels like American, British or Indian are things which hold society back rather than helping to move it past medieval ideas of the rich owning people, resources and thought.

"Indian Internet"

There is no such thing as an "Indian Internet" or a "MyCountry Internet". It is "The Internet" and it neither needs or recognises idiotic concepts like borders or countries.

If India wants an "Indian Internet" then the only way they can achieve it is by taking an axe to every fibre or copper wire which crosses its border and blocking all microwave signals from outside its borders. I'm sure they will find the Internet less than useful when they do that.

I am utterly sick of clueless politicians in various countries insisting that they can apply their particular flavour of magical thinking, religious quackery or moral outrage to the Internet as if it was something they can bend to their will and shape after their own deluded convictions.

US lawmakers want China export bans to include open tech like RISC-V

Re: Previously undocumented C++ backdoor

It is politicians. They don't get what "open" or "free" means...

Fixed your comment for you.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Re: You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor

To watch the babysitter?

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

Re: “The collection and recovery process cost itself could be multiple times the component costs”

Your suggestion is confused and naive. It assumes that those who make the decisions to impose such taxes are:

1) Utterly unbiased.

2) Totally objective.

3) Perfectly informed.

Having any of these qualities is rare in any person and the chances of any politician having all three has a probability so close to zero that it may as well be stated as zero.

The entire underlying premise is the kind of wishful thinking only heard from deluded green activists. You can't "impose an outcome" by applying taxes without any idea of how that outcome would be achieved.

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

A chance for the new king to show what he's made of?

As you quite rightly point out, king Charles has to give assent before the bill finally becomes law.

What's the chance of the king standing up for the rights of his people and refusing to allow this to pass?

Blighty seems determined to cut itself off from the rest of the world

This atrocious piece of legislation will only serve to further balkanise the Internet and assure that the UK's citizens remain the most spied upon in the western world.

Why do UK citizens keep letting your government take away your rights? They won't be giving them back any time.

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: Surrender the domain names

... turn the domains over to the plaintiffs? What are they intending to do with them? ...

They will place a sternly worded message telling everyone who visits that they are very bad people.

I wanted to read a scientific paper about electronics from 1913. The only place I could find it was behind an Elsevier paywall where they thought they had some right to ask me to pay 60 EUR to read it. :(

Welcome to the new corporate Register

Where those who dare to challenge the knowledge monopoly created by "academic publishers" deserve no more than being causally called a thief. ("ostensibly by nicking millions of pieces of research from behind science publishers' paywalls"). You didn't notice EFF's award to Alexandra, among others who are trying to extract the planet's (often taxpayer funded) knowledge from behind the paywalls??

If I wanted to read Elsevier et al's press releases, I'd go to their web sites.

Malware loader lowdown: The big 3 responsible for 80% of attacks so far this year

Point out that this is all semantics

A malware loader is by definition an unauthorised program which does unwanted and unauthorised things to your computer.

It is therefore also malware. The semantics are only of interest to malware researchers. If you removed the semantic distinction between a loader and the payload from this article, then all you have left is the same message about malware that has been written for the last two decades.

Please try harder.

Germany to cut Huawei from networks 'irrespective of costs'

Please stop...

Murdering the English language.

"regardless of cost"

Red Hat redeploys one of its main desktop developers

A small headline suggestion

Shouldn't the headline read "IBM's Red Hat division redeploys ... "?

I think it's time to stop going along with the illusion that the once pioneering Red Hat has anything in common with the current tentacle of the blue monster of Armonk.

Humans stressed out by content moderation? Just use AI, says OpenAI

Censorship is not the answer

You'd think that this article had been paid for by the EU council of ministers.

They would love everyone to believe that an automatic censor is needed and is either infallible, or smart enough to know when it's not sure and ask for human help. No such system exists. Or will exist.

If EU citizens allow the current Chat Control directives to be passed, the days of the Internet as we know it are over. It will require all services - probably even your ISP - to implement automated content filters and interceptors. Central control over what may be discussed will be a fact. The definition of free speech will be decided by corporations, catholic countries like Poland and near dictatorships like Hungary. Let's not even think of what happens when the EU accepts Turkey as a member...

Maybe the postal services will experience unexpected growth as people begin to write letters again? Anything you say or do on the Internet will be used to imprison you if you prove to be annoying to the current politicians.

Honestly, I despair. I've been trying for the last two decades to explain how dangerous the erosion of privacy is to friends and family, but everyone seems to be completely brainwashed by the "think of the children / terrorists / immigrants" narrative, or whatever the current moral outrage is which must be "dealt with". Nobody seems to understand that once your ability to talk and organise privately is taken away, it will never return.

PowerShell? More like PowerHell: Microsoft won't fix flaws in package gallery ripe for supply chain attacks

PoWeRsHeLl

Micros~1's PoWeRsHeLl is the SpAwN oF tHe DeViL and should be doused with a flood of holy water!

Why any rational person would CaMeL CaSe verbs (or for that matter, any part of a scripting language) is beyond my understanding.

Larry Ellison a major contributor to Blair Institute vaccine database plan

Larry and Tony don't understand computer systems

and seemingly neither do those who they "advise".

Health data isn't just a database (in myriads of formats), it's also a workflow system, which may or may not influence what is in the database.

Attempting to unify more than a few such systems is an impossible task at the moment. Anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

IBM makes RHEL less secure

In the longer term, this will affect IBM's Red Hat tentacle very badly. Cutting off RHEL from general source access cuts the number of eyes looking at that source to a small fraction of what they have now. Auditing IBM's releases is hardly something a customer would expect to do, so until the next frozen major release, nobody knows, apart from the gagged customers, what IBM is adding or changing?

And all this in-house "secret sauce" won't have more unidentified holes in it than usual?

Updated source will get leaked of course and the ransomware gangs will have a field day.

Operating systems with restricted availability source are gold mines of zero day exploits.