Posts by Dostoevsky

Microsoft open sources Windows Subsystem for Linux – well, most of it

Pitch this.

WSL should become the next Windows kernel.

Türkiye-linked spy crew exploited a messaging app zero-day to snoop on Kurdish army in Iraq

Wut

Why is "Turkey" misspelt in the title? That's like spelling "the English Channel" as "La Manche," or calling India "Bharat." Exonyms are okay to use!

California sues President Tariff

Re: Tax cuts

LOL. OK, u win.

I'm reminded...

...of Andrew Jackson's infamous (and probably apocryphal) saying, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"

On the other hand, our beloved Congress has delegated its power to make war, set policy, and regulate things to the Presidency. Why not tariffs too?

If Elon wants to shrink the federal government's power, I know a good place to start... :)

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

RE: "backed a Sieg-Heil'ing Elon Musk"

Not that bullshit again. Try some actual journalism for a change.

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

RE: Suppression of (mis?)information

> ...could usefully be revised to consider whether COVID-19 misinformation that could endanger to public health should be allowed to circulate widely.

Turns out it *was* a lab leak, the facilities in Wuhan *were* doing gain-of-function research in unsafe conditions, and Fauci was not only aware of it—he was backing it. Bill Maher just conceded that on ABC a few weeks ago.

Maybe our All-Wise Glorious Leaders had better keep their noses out of the free press and citizens' free speech.

Icon because none of this took any sleuthing to uncover—just a healthy skepticism of people with power.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Logic doesn't work on politicians.

Re: web sight

Ah. Looks like you found the Russian.

Well done, sir!

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

If the government has the key, then criminals do too.

Not because gov infosec is bad, but by *definition.*

Classic.

Weren't the EU's politicians talking about safety, security, and protecting democratic values a week ago? Guess that rhetoric isn't convenient when trying to reestablish the Stasi thought police.

Isar’s first orbital rocket crashes into sea – CEO calls it a 'great success'

Ambitious spin

Their PR has an ambitious spin, to be sure, but so did their rocket!

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

So the AI datacenter would melt. I'm confused; isn't that what we want? /s

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Wow.

Either:

1) they're not just dumb, they're brain-dead, or

2) someone thought this would be a funny way to troll Europe and Egypt.

Satire is dead. Reality is more absurd than any conceivable fiction. I'm very interested in finding out.

(Seriously, how the frick do you *accidentally* add someone to a Signal chat!?)

Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options, says Dutch parliament

Re: ...win for US foreign policy.

Fair. I blame the neocons. Honestly, we should've pulled out of Europe decades ago. Three quarters of your continent thinks we're uncultured, uneducated barbarians anyhow. We certainly wouldn't want to intrude.

Yes, a noisy irrelevance with:

1) as much land area as Europe (that's *including* Russia as far as the Urals),

2) the third-largest population in the world and best demographic structure in the developed world (lower median age than every Western European nation but Iceland). Oh, and

3) 25% of the world's GDP. Almost forgot that one.

You are smoking strong copium, my friend.

Re: ...win for US foreign policy.

No! Our foreign policy is to strengthen Europe. It has been since 1919. It's the Fourteen Points and the Four Freedoms.

As Konrad Adenauer said, "there is a saying that the Americans are the best Europeans, and there is much truth to that."

If France had its way, Germany would have never rearmed. The USA rearmed and reindustrialized Germany over French and broader European objections, and drove cooperation and growth.

Remember when first-term Trump encouraged increased defense spending in NATO? Europe didn't listen then. They are now, despite Trump's demented way of getting them to pay attention.

...haven't quite worked out why...

Perhaps something to do with the taxation and bureaucracy Europe subjects its innovators to? There's a reason that Home Depot is worth more than Europe's top companies of the last half-century combined. (ASML didn't make this chart even though it does qualify. Add a bubble roughly 1.6× ServiceNow's.)

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F91da2c40-f4cd-44ad-bb7f-e216cb8ad108_1400x788.jpeg

From https://geekway.substack.com/p/a-visualization-of-europes-non-bubbly

And the EU should be, with 500 million people and the innovative power of Western Civilization behind it. As an aside, that's precisely why they don't need America's military support any longer, as Poland's PM recently pointed out.

"We're asking 350 million Americans to defend 500 million Europeans from 180 million Russians."

Pure comedy. Europe is finally growing up.

> ...Dutch companies who offer similar services...

You're asking an economy the size of New Jersey to replace Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and the rest. This will be so adorable to watch. If it works, I'll be the first to applaud. (But we all know it won't.)

Boeing's Starliner future uncertain as NASA weighs next steps

RE: rotten fruit

Oof. I felt that.

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

Oh Lord...

The new naming scheme. I'd (blissfully) forgotten. Someone needs to revert that ASAP.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

Re: Love how this gives a whole new level to the old saying

A beautiful story. *sniffle, tear drops* A reminder of happier times. Thanks for bringing it up! Cheers --->

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: MEGA

By importing Americans? What's that say about Europe?

Ouch. Talk about a tone-deaf comment.

Re: American Technology

With all due respect for my northern neighbors, that *is* a funny joke. Thx for sharing!

Fresh Wine-flavored version of Mono released

Re: This is another WTF happened story ?

That's pure revisionist bullcrap, but I'd expect nothing less from a country whose only orbital launch vehicle looked like a tube of lipstick [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow

Given the choice...

...I'd ALSO rather write JavaScript than deal with .NET (one of the dumbest names for a platform ever).

Consumer Reports calls out slapdash AI voice-cloning safeguards

Yay!

> ...state-level regulation might be more likely than further federal intervention.

As it should be; I have more control over my state government than over the federal bureaucracy.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Glass half full?

Exactly. If you're writing SIL-IV or MISRA C code, you have to check every line. (There are third-party tools for some requirements.) If you're writing Rust, you only need manually examine the lines marked `unsafe.` In my experience, that's often very little.

Combine that with design by contract and heavy use of assertions, and your code is nigh-bulletproof. It's like driving a large truck vs. a small car—one feels much safer than the other.

Re: Can I get away with using C instead of C++?

C is a DSL for assembly. There are no nice things. I do embedded development on an RTOS in C, and it's slow progress.

Wanna save Intel? Fire the board, bring back Pat, ex-CEO Craig Barrett says

DO IT

Gelsinger had the right idea. Patience is key, and if the board had some, they'd see a resurgence in real business. Intel shouldn't follow the IBM path, downsizing into a hollow ineffectual shell of its former self.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Re: Have you noticed?

Everyone's cash handling runs on mainframes, as far as I could tell from my stint in the industry. The web stuff talks to servers that translate between the mainframe's batch-mode, database-driven design, and GET requests. In effect there are three main systems—not always from the same provider.

Here in the US, Jack Henry & Assoc. provide the frontend stuff for many regional banks. No clue who's in that space in the UK.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

...formal spec...

C's formal spec is "everything is undefined behavior." Those who live in glass houses shouldn't cast stones.

Talk of Broadcom and TSMC grabbing pieces of Intel lights fire under investors

Not for sale.

That engineer has a point—given patience, the pendulum will swing the other direction. And yes, the current administration would *absolutely* weaponize SEC against such a buyout.

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Re: Or ....

Yes, we know the impact corridor to a very high precision. It's the timing we don't know. It's about a sixteen-minute window, IIRC, and over 7 years out. You do the math!

US cranks up espionage charges against ex-Googler accused of trade secrets heist

Re: Throw the book at 'im.

LOL. Obvious answer, there, except Raskolnikov got his sentence commuted (as did Dostoevsky, when he faced execution).

Throw the book at 'im.

He deserves it.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

FFI Libraries

> "Memory safe" languages, at least in the case of Rust, are not so memory safe when dealing directly (or indirectly via 3rd-party libs written in, for example C/C++) with hardware mapped registers.

That's why the focus on memory safety annoys me. Yes, the borrow checker is amazing. I love it. But we should also apply design by contract a lot more than we do—especially when calling unsafe code outside the type system. Assertions at the beginning and end of each routine can do wonders for catching errors before they blow up into vulnerabilities.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Re: Not a Hater

Ditto. I just want to get things done. Systemd works. End of story. These are software tools, not objects of religious devotion.

Google patches odd Android kernel security bug amid signs of targeted exploitation

Always wondered how...

...those stupid phone crackers police have actually work. Maybe that was one of the vulnerabilities. Anything that makes their job harder!

Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter

Re: Why do you use so many words, El Reg ?

You could even drop the present perfect, e.g. "Intel missed the boat..."

Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves next to Stadia, Chromecast, DropCam

O...Okay, b-but, that's the last straw!

SLAP, Apple, and FLOP: Safari, Chrome at risk of data theft on iPhone, Mac, iPad Silicon

Re: Firefox?

So does Chromium. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_isolation#Web_browsers

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

> ...its primary cause was a worldwide tariff war...

No, you mean "its primary cause was a World[wide] War." Fixed it for ya. Only one nation ever repaid its WWI debts to the US. Thanks, Denmark!

The tariffs were desperate reactionary measures, somewhat like a fish flailing vainly after it's been hooked and hauled on shore.

Yeahhhh...

> ...elected entirely because of populist appeal...

That's called an "election." We have those here, you know. People choosing their leaders, and all that?

"We weren't much better off under the last nutjob. Prices kept rising regardless of the money we gave away. Maybe this nutjob will be different."

—Internal monologue of Mr. Average American

Re: Impact?

Upvoted for Heaviside step function mention :)

...right means...

As I am fond of pointing out, Adam Smith advocated tariffs in two cases—as bargaining chips in trade disputes, and for national security (i.e. the British Empire's shipbuilding industry).

US AI shares battered, bruised, and holding after yesterday's DeepSeek beating

Too early...

...to say, "Ding, dong, the witch is dead?" I'll be glad when the world outside El Reg realizes stochastic cow manure generators aren't profitable, or even useful.

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

Re: It isn't 'the land of the free' if they censor your apps.

I don't think blocking malware qualifies as censorship of free speech. Apparently 2/3rds of the Congress, and the Supreme Court, agreed.

EU demands a peek under the hood of X's recommendation algorithms

Re: Musk is just going to refuse to cooperate

True, and those nuclear weapons are shared with NATO partners. In the event of Armageddon, European nations' air forces would be able to employ American nukes. Something to think about...