Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

Re: The irony...

Chrome is BASED on Chromium, and Edge is BASED on Chromium, but all the shady stuff is not part of Chromium and is just added by the various browser makers, so what exactly are you trying to say? I don't see any irony.

Re: Again?

>> Yeah, MS browsers have a bad habit of staying open without your knowledge.

All browsers try to do that now. It's intended to "accelerate" them by having everything running already so when you click on the icon all it's doing is generating a window, just like clicking the New Tab button.

Internet Explorer never "cached your Internet activity from another browser", whatever that means. For one thing, that makes no sense grammatically or technically, and for another IE was so old and dumb that things like all this common browser engine stuff wasn't happening at the time that it was still being actively developed.

Well, ideally the intended feature was first porting over all your stuff when you first installed Edge or set up a new user in it. Then for some reason they thought people would want to be able to do things in another browser on a regular basis and then have Edge check and port all that over every time you opened it...for some reason. Because obviously when you go use another browser to do something, you want to then switch back and do the same thing in Edge later on.

"This is not the intended feature experience." -- That really ought to just be the automated reply from Microsoft support for every email sent to them or forum message posted. An outright lie, much of the time, but a common response.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Re: A glimmer I think...

Why would it not be possible to tell your DNS server that it is the root server for a particular TLD so that it would never forward requests? That seems like a glaring flaw.

Re: Costs?

The millions of companies that have been using their own chosen TLDs internally for decades, usually .local, without any problems, would also like ICANN to explain their FUD on that. I'm guessing it's a threat that the TLD you choose to use internally could one day get turned into a live gTLD due to ICANN making it possible for any string of characters, whether it's a word or company name or nothing, to be created by someone who has enough money for it, thus making it possible for your company's name or something like it to be used in a way you don't like, so you'll feel a need to register things to try to keep the damage to a minimum. That was always a possibility with the regular gTLDs, but the new ones exploded the risk since now your company name could be registered in another 300 gTLDs. But using your existing public domain name doesn't eliminate that risk either, and the majority of companies, even those with websites, don't do anything that would ever need their internal network to be connected to the DNS for their public domain in any significant way. Even using Exchange doesn't require it, and I found it was much MORE work as an IT person to manage a client's systems when they did match.

Perhaps these days with all the near-forced cloud integration, they're referring to it being costlier to try to maintain them separately even when you have zero reason to have anything in the cloud.

Re: Costs?

The entire point of the new ".internal thingummy" is to ensure that it can never be owned by anyone. It ensures that .internal will NEVER be set up as a global TLD, so no matter if every company in the world set up company.internal as their internal domain name, the only time it could ever become an issue is if two companies tried to federate their domains, merge them into one, or something like that, or for some dumbass reason let their DNS servers send records to each other.

Also the very definition of "plucking domain names or TLDs out of your arse" is making up names you can be certain are globally unique. Where else are you going to get unique names if you don't pluck them out of your ass? Any TLD you choose that is not on the current gTLD list COULD be added to it later on, even if you think it's a random combination of letters (except .local since that's also prohibited globally but is meant for mDNS so it can cause other issues). Using only numbers for your TLD should be okay, but nothing's to say the rule on that couldn't be changed to allow it as gTLDs.

None of your arguments actually mean anything that is unique to the use of .internal.

Why register a real domain name for something that isn't going to be Internet-facing?

Why else would they have made it allowable to create basically anything as a domain? As far as I can tell, being able to afford the fees and prove you have the money to maintain it are the only requirements. No need to show there's an actual need for it, that many people want it, etc. It's primarily a cash-grab by ICANN, enabled by letting registrars create a land-grab where everyone is concerned about their own trademarks being registered on a popular gTLD. The explanations of needing additional domain name availability because so many second-level domains (even non-trademarks) on the main gTLDs were already taken is just a small justification.

Doh, I missed it in the list of the original ones, and have never actually seen one in use since even organizations that should be using something restricted usually end up using a more common one like .com or .net.

But still, what do you consider "proper"? Until the flood from ICANN, anything that wasn't in the list of official global domains was considered perfectly okay because nobody expected random words to ever be made global. And using anything like company.local is just as much of a problem for merging companies as company.com would be.

Re: A rare piece of sanity

Would that have made a difference, unless it was done a few decades prior, perhaps even when the original gTLDs were defined? At that time, nobody was thinking that the gTLDs would be expanded with every random word or partial word that someone could justify or bribe an official to allow, so there wasn't a concern about ad-hoc domains overlapping because everybody knew which ones couldn't be used. Once any amount of time had passed where there was no conception that it would be an issue, ad-hoc internal domains were already being used and the sudden vomit of new ones was going to be a problem already.

One of the clients at my last job even had a .com internal domain that matched a real outside domain that WASN'T THEIRS. The dumbass that set them up used their company initials, for made-up example IIN.com as their internal domain because the company was International In Nature, but their website had to be intin.com because the website bin.com belonged to Breaking Into Numerics. It made maintaining their DNS so much of a pain whenever we wanted to set up a server that was accessible from the outside and the inside, or changed ISPs or IP addresses because they had an Exchange server plus the other public servers.

Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

New laws that everyone must allow ICANN IP addresses through their firewalls to scan the network to check for domain names in use to make sure you're not illicitly using .internal without a license, and count how many machines are on your network so they can charge per-device.

Re: Just me and my little private .loc

Those are abbreviations, not TLAs, nor initialisms.

What do you define as a "proper internal domain"? Up to this point, anything that wasn't already defined as a valid global TLD has been considered acceptable, if you didn't want to make it match your public website domain (something I never understood the need or desire to do even when Microsoft started recommending it).

.int sounds okay to me, as it's very unlikely to ever be requested as a new gTLD.

Re: Call it molehilling.

Seven.

Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

If .kim and .archi and .bible and .coach and .garden and .place and .vodka can be requested and granted, what makes you think nobody would ever ask for .internal?

Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

The root servers should never accept anything except the specific TLDs that have been defined by the IANA and ICANN. ICANN is trying to define something that is already defined, in that respect. All that will really change here is that they create an official definition that .internal can NEVER be turned into a TLD that can be used globally, and suggesting that everyone should use it internally. No other DNS server should accept any records for a non-standard TLD being sent to it by any other DNS server unless it's specifically part of the domain involved or configured to trust that DNS server.

Zanzibar could have ended up with that if it was fully autonomous, and still might want it if they ever did go off on their own again, so really you can never tell what some new country name might end up being and what other combinations might be available that will make sense. There are only 676 combinations of English letters and nearly 200 recognized countries right now, with 308 ccTLDs already designated.

Re: .woosh

The overhead on that TLD is tremendous.

It is.

Re: .woosh

Dibs on jokes.woosh.

Re: .internal

What if it's a domain that crosses multiple physical locations, connected by WAN services and VPN?

LAN is also close to the newer top level domain of LAND so there could be a risk of mistakes. The new list of domains is ridiculous and such a cash-grab by ICANN. I just saw that .kim is a TLD. The relevance to the Internet? It's a Korean surname, so OBVIOUSLY it deserves to be a top level domain name. Kim and Wang are the only surnames in the list, but wang can at least also be a rendering of a word meaning "web" or "portal" so it's meaningful in Chinese.

Re: I use....

Change the Is to 1s.

Re: I use....

That might become a domain, but unlikely to be a TLD as it's not a generic category. Also no single country can simply create their own TLDs to be recognized by the global system.

Re: I use....

Give me a T! Give me a Y...oh, the game's over?

Re: I use....

Country code TLDs are only two characters... Although I suppose if we move to unicode for those, as mentioned by another, they could technically be a few characters longer. There just comes a point where the reason for DNS existing is somewhat eliminated by letting the domain names become so long that they take an appreciable amount of time to type.

Maybe the debate was one or two people repeatedly insisting this NEEDED to be done, and dozens of other people saying "you're morons" and the other two submitting it for discussion again at the next meeting, slowly wearing people down to where they just said "whatever".

Re: I use....

The 64 character limit for TLDs is really weird. In most cases, a low limit in things is bad because it doesn't take into account future expansion, but seriously, do they think the world will ever be albe to use TLDs of more than like, 12 characters, at the very most? The whole point of DNS is to make addresses human-readable. Is every device on Earth supposed to get its own TLD, which will have to contain random alphanumeric strings? Is every personal TLD going to look like AOL email addresses, with random numbers added to your name? Will the current concept of domain names and TLDs even apply if your personal TLD is equivalent to your email address and assigned at birth?

This really has nothing to do with "taking over" for the RFC1918 IP ranges. It's not "doing the job" of 192.16.x.x. You still need IP addresses and you still should be using RFC1918 IPs on your internal network, when using IPv4.

In fact, .local is already reserved by the IETF and IANA for essentially this purpose (apparently not specifically for use with internal DNS servers, but rather mDNS, but it's what has been done for decades and has always been the default in Windows). Does ICANN just feel like they need to be seen to be doing something, and it can't be just agreeing with some other organization, so they are willing to fragment the ecosystem and make it more confusing? Or are they deciding they're going to "fix" what they see as being used incorrectly by everyone?

Dell kills sweetheart distribution deal with Broadcom's VMware

Does this mean Dell won't sell systems with VMware already installed, and maybe won't even certify systems to work with VMware products specifically? Or are they just going to end up working out some other sort of agreement so that Dell will continue to do those things BUT not have to pay any money to do it since they're not earning anything on licensing, and as mentioned by another user, probably provide zero support, and terminating the agreement so forcefully is just kind of a way to slap Broadcom's wrists so they understand that VMware needs Dell more than Dell needs VMware?

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: Deliberation

Well, Ask Jeeves always kind of sucked.

Re: Deliberation

I don't remember AltaVista ever getting bad. It just didn't get better, while Google started out pretty good and got massively better. AltaVista died not because it got sick, but because it didn't grow any taller and Google's canopy blocked out the sunlight.

Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon

Well you can't cover for every possible eventuality. You can't design a lander to be fully-functional regardless of which side lands up, and they presumed that it WOULD land right-side-up, so designing it to have functional solar power if it accidentally landed upside-down would be a lot of extra effort, hardware and cost for an unlikely situation that wouldn't have helped it very much. Even if it's able to get some power the way it's sitting, it's not going to be able to do a lot of the science it was intended for.

That's a bit pedantic. I didn't mean instantaneously, violating the laws of physics. The craft itself had to have some sort of self-direction in response to sensor data in order to react to small changes in orientation during landing. Even stuff landing on Mars is able to manage that most of the time.

What absolutely amazes me though is that they didn't have any sort of sensors or even camera views that could have told them what had happened during the course of the approach or landing, right away. How did the thing even know how to land if it didn't have sensors that could have immediately told it what its own orientation was and transmitted that data to JAXA? Why were no cameras active as soon as it landed that could tell them what happened?

Just before they expect to shut it down or have it lose power, they just flare the remaining engine and see if it will flip over. Nothing lost at that point if it fails.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: i'm polluting

The proper disposal method is to keep them in a closet for at least 2 years, just in case, then when you move, take them with you for another year, then eventually give them to a donation center (Goodwill or whatever there is in the UK) with the hardened ink cartridges still installed. You're not a polluter if you give your trash to someone else.

Re: You can't be serious!! (shouted John McEnroe style)

A digital one does.

Re: Retarded, or What?

The wholesale cost of bulk ink (OEM or generic) is kind of irrelevant to most people, and you can't get the price for just the Red Bull liquid without a can, and vodka is only relevant bottled (or x10 at a bar), and both it and bottled water have WIDE ranges of prices. They kind of mixed different kinds of purchasable items in the graph. If they'd used an average price for the ink as purchased by users, which is what we care about, all those other items would have barely registered on the graph compared to the full height of the ink bar and made it even more impressive. (I know, crude oil isn't something most of us buy either but it's a well-known item that is considered horribly expensive and highly-valued to the point of causing wars. Even if they showed the more relevant price of gasoline instead of oil, which would be nearly double, it would have barely moved the marker.)

Re: HP Toner

"At the low end" is the key point, and I don't just mean "cheap trash", only inexpensive. Despite seeming to be a cheaper way to make more reliable printers, they all stopped making really inexpensive ones using LEDs, unless like Brother they use misleading marketing to call them "laser" printers. Maybe it's because they're more reliable so they won't fail as often and need to be replaced. But my laser printers have mostly worked just fine, despite being cheaper than LED printers, and the price difference makes the failure rate more than acceptable. LED printers also do have some drawbacks compared to lasers, so they're not universally better.

Brother doesn't even really admit that they make LED printers. They call them "laser quality" printers, or list them as "laser/LED", and they cost at least $100 more for the same feature set as a laser. Xerox's cheapest LED printer is $950 on their site meant for 15-person workgroups.

Re: malware to be introduced via print cartridges

But I'm sure HP is just looking out for the consumer, blocking the POTENTIAL for such an infection through this restriction! They can't help that the potential avenue for infection was created by them!

Re: HP Toner

A basic color inkjet printer, which these days always includes scanner/copier functionality with wireless connectivity or USB, is $40. This is what a home user is going to go to the store and take a look at, and they'll buy it because it sounds like it does what they need with no obvious downsides since they don't know what happens with liquid ink cartridges or how expensive they are.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-DeskJet-2752e-All-in-One-Wireless-Color-Inkjet-Printer-with-3-Months-Free-Ink-Included-with-HP/651507182 (this even includes in the description that it will only work with HP ink, and that they WILL update the firmware to enforce that)

LED printers are basically a dead technology at the low end. The cheapest ones I can find are $500. The cheapest decent single-function monochrome lasers are still $100, and for color it's $200. (I just found an $80 Canon on Amazon that's got the "frequently returned item" warning on it.) Add $25 for multi-function but that's making the other parts cheap. A good color laser is absolutely a great investment in my opinion even for a home user due to the high cost of ink compared to toner based on page count and the short lifespan of liquid cartridges and the odds of the ink ruining the printer itself, and the absorbent pads that they don't tell you about replacing.

I have a 4 year old Canon printer that I'm still using the starter toner cartridges with. Maybe $300 or $400 but I forget where I bought it. I still consider that to have been a good value as it's amazing for home use and I expect it to last a long time AND I can repair it (probably), but a home user is going to look at that and think there's no way printing should cost so much. Even a "high-end" inkjet with the full feature-set equal to my Canon is only $150 or less.

I did have a Xerox color laser previously that was even cheaper, only like $150, and something in it failed after only 2 years and despite having done laser printer repair in the past, I couldn't even get the stupid thing taken apart to find out what was wrong because of the way they designed it, intentionally preventing repair.

Re: HP Toner

Don't have to track ink levels? They still have to track toner level. Tracking 4, whether it's ink or color toner, instead of 1 is a matter of adding more a few more copper traces, and obviously having the extra physical slots, not a lot more complexity. (And the shitty inkjets that use a single color cartridge are even less.) And plastic casings and frameworks have nothing to do with what voltage levels the wiring can handle. And laser printers still have limited amperage since they plug into the same standard power outlet. I've disassembled laser printers and they have WAY more components, even a monochrome.

Re: IP enforcement

Their "IP" is "capable of talking to an HP printer's controller" so it's pretty easy to confirm when something violates it, if it doesn't also contain the embedded and encrypted HP identifier.

Snow day in corporate world thanks to another frustrating Microsoft Teams outage

I thought "Cloud" was supposed to make all this stuff nigh-unbreakable, with seamless failover in the event of an issue, everything tested to destruction before being put into service, absolutely safe for us to give up all control and put all our eggs into their single basket at a much higher cost than just doing it ourselves.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

I started saving mine regularly (so now I have like 20 old text files laying around with random bits of information). And Windows itself now has the option, which I think is on by default, to save the state of its own apps to be restored when you log out and back in, so you can just restart without being too worried about it, assuming nothing crashes.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

This went from "everyone forgot" to "Linux abandoned it, possibly for legitimate reasons". No mention of Windows apps that have gotten rid of things like standard menus and layouts.

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

California as a US state didn't exist at the time, and that's what I and most others would be referring to when saying they didn't reach California, so in that sense technically nobody in the group "reached" California. Some of them were probably in it when it came into existence as a state though. (And many of them were still there as frozen piles of poop.)