Posts by isdnip

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

I tried it on Windows Firefox 147. It works -- the two sides both work as expected. However, when you un-split, the remaining tabs are still small. You can slide the split tab to the side to make it use most of the screen but there's always a gap from the missing split view. So a bit is left to do.

Were telcos tipped off to *that* ancient Telnet bug? Cyber pros say the signs stack up

Well, technically in the US an ISP is not a carrier, though many carriers own ISPs. But it is still the ISP's job to move bits unless they have a reason not to (a true carrier can't choose). Telnet was originally used for remote logins, but who does that any more? Still, the protocol machine is useful, and may well be inside a lot of IoT-type devices for machine to machine communications.

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

Isn't it great that Lewis Page is no longer El Reg's reporter in this area?

Microsoft CEO: AI sovereignty isn't where it runs, it's who controls it

Re: ROT13

What do you mean "getting back to"? That suggests that MS used to do it that way. If so I missed it. (Although Excel used to be pretty solid.)

Trump spectrum sale leaves airlines with $4.5B bill for altimeter do-over

Re: Lazy Altimeter Design

The proposed rules are quite hard for devices to meet. The interference doesn't come from cell phones, which are low power. It's from the base stations, which are allowed many kilowatts of EIRP. The oldest RAs were crap and the 3.7-3.98 GHz base stations were plenty far away. But 4.16 GHz is dangerously close and will likely need a whole new RA design.

Of course this is all vital to US national security, because the extra spectrum is needed to Win The 6G Race. If we lose it, then, say the advocates, we will need to learn to talk Chinese, and McDonalds will be replacing the Big Mac with subgum chicken chow mein. What's a few billion for airplane upgrades to save America from losing to China? Plus knocking some small CATV providers off the air, since the6 GHz band being taken away is used for channel feeds.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Thunderbird for the win

I agree that Thunderbird is about as good a client as there is, though its fork Betterbird has some modest advantage. (That's just a recent T'bird ESR with some tweaks that BB's author thinks they should have made, so he makes them. An advantage of open source, and this works on Windows too.)

However, MZLA is a bit flaky organizationally. They had a really beautiful product in T'bird 102, then blew it up bigly in v115, "Supernova", which was released when it was really pre-alpha quality. But the latest v140 range is pretty stable. Not as good as 102 but they messed with the config files so you can't go back.

Re: Thunderbird for the win

And we Americans don't benefit from the privacy laws that Europeans have, so the private entities have more access to our material here. Another reason "Leave mail on server and delete after 14 days" with POP makes more sense than relying on IMAP on somebody's server.

Re: Thunderbird for the win

Yes, definitely fix the server. So ask Google if you can patch GMail. Or ask yahoo if you can patch theirs. Or ask your mail service provider if you can build your own server version because you don't like the one they maintain.

But if you're the guru who runs a private server and rebuilds it from sources and customizes it as you see fit, fine, you IMAP on your private server the way you like it. The other 99.999999 percent of us will have to make do with server behavior as it exists.

Re: Thunderbird for the win

Of course POP3 understands which mails *this specific device* has downloaded before. A decent POP3 client, like Thunderbird, associates each message with a unique ID which is also on the server, so it only fetches the ones *that device* doesn't yet have. I run POP3 on multiple clients and it works like a charm. The server doesn't even care if it has been downloaded before; that's a client function.

Minor aside: The old (>20years dead) Eudora Worldmail server implemented an extension wherein the server *did* keep track of whether a message had been downloaded at least once, and the Eudora client, as well as the KMail client, noted it, so you'd download mail and see if it's entirely new or just new to that client. That was essentially an extension based on an IMAP capability.

In general, though, IMAP sucks the big one! In theory, the protocol is capable of doing everything you want. But I've never met a decent implementation of the protocol. Instead, T'bird and everybody else ONLY supports using IMAP as a "sync" protocol, a cheaper version of the Lotus/Microsoft corporate mail model where everything is always on The Server and the client is just a viewport and IT is in control. That is not inherent in the protocol but if you like keeping local copies, then IMAP on T'bird is not your choice. In theory you can copy the sync'd mail to a Local Folder for keepsies but doing that through a filter is not reliable, just hit-or-miss copying some but not all messages.

And Yahoo, heavily enshittified, nowadays limits its IMAP server to seeing only the last 10,000 message; older one are on the web mail site and ironically can be pulled down via POP.

Historic NASA test towers face their final countdown

Re: Disgusting

A lot of history "can't be used for anything" except to showcase the past. Which is useful. But frankly it seems like the regime is more intent on destroying anything having to do with science, at least what the tech bros don't value. Science is the enemy when RFKJr is giving medical advice.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

So your very large (128GB) machine can easily handle bloated packages. But other folks brag about how Linux can run on PCs that are too small or weak or old to run Windows. Very different environment. Different developers, different goals.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Anybody remember the linker?

I was suggesting that the good linkers didn't bring in libraries, just routines that were being used from the libraries. That's harder but more efficient. Does anyone do that nowadays? It doesn't seem so, but wasn't that commonplace 50 years ago?

Anybody remember the linker?

I'm not a programmer, but back in the '70s I did write some code for the systems of the day, like RSX-11M and VMS. Memory was expensive. What may be forgotten was that in those days, the compile stage was followed by a link stage, wherein the linking loader incorporated into the executable only those system or library routines that it needed. If the code wasn't used, it wasn't linked in. It seems to me that the problem nowadays is that there are big libraries and they're brought in whole, rather than only the parts in use. Isn't that what a good linker handled? Why was that forgotten? Or am I just making stuff up?

Re: Not all optimisation in software engineering has been about resource efficiency

Well, no.

It is cheaper to buy RAM than to optimize software that will be used in a narrow application, like in house, or for some obscure market. But when we're talking about schytt that goes out as part of an OS package to hundreds of millions of users, then a little effort done by the developers will have a big payoff worldwide. And we know that the big devs don't do that.

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Other legends of heritage

Stories I heard, which may or may not have truth to them, say that before Unix was in C, it included a language B, which itself was based on BCPL. TENEX (which became TOPS-20) was written in BCPL, which was as pretty nice totally-untyped language that was popular on DEC hardware, at least in 36-bit-land. Does anyone know if that bit about B was at all true or just made up?

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Hey Trump

There was a case that got pretty good publicity this fall about a woman transiting from Mexico to Canada at LAX. La Migra arrested her and kept her in one of their dungeons for a while before pressure got her let out. Their excuse was that they didn't think she was really in transit and planned to work illegally in California. You know, arrest on pre-crime, even though she had a ticket out.

FWIW, Trump's real esnake career was failing and he got famous again when Mark Burnett cast him as the tycoon on The Apprentice (Warren Buffett wasn't interested). Burnett had struck it rich pitching a version of Europe's Robinson Island to US TV, who called it Survivor. Burnett was English. He had vacationed in Mexico and had a transit stop in Los Angeles. He didn't get on the plane home, and snuck out and found work in LA even though he was an "illegal alien". But he was white so he wasn't deported. And come to think of it, Malaria herself was working illegally in the US when Trump picked her to replace Marla.

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

The $100M endowed Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC, https://www.ardc.net ), a foundation that operates very transparently. "Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) is a private foundation that exists to support amateur radio and digital communication science and technology. We do this through making grants (including support for scholarship programs and research & development projects) and managing 44Net." They give out project grants and scholarships. Grantees are expected to follow open source guidelines for any code they produce. A lot of the individuals involved, on committees or management, are folks who were doing amateur packet radio back in the 1980s.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

Re: Didn't work for SBF

That was a story that a fake story about a pardon went out, and he wanted a pardon, but he didn't get one. Apparently he gave too much money to Democrats.

But the British authorities caught a Chinese thief because she chose the wrong country to hide in. Had she hid in the US, then Trump would probably have welcomed her to Merde-a-Lardo.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Windows 10 updates are preventable -- in the Pro version, not Home. I don't run updates until I'm damned well ready to, and it's always a) well after the crowds have found the major failures (which get reported on El Reg), and b) a reboot won't be too inconvenient, given that I keep many processes running at once.

But their quality has remained poor, getting worse. Especially Office, which is the standard for revisable document sharing and collaboration. (So please don't tell me to use Libre.) A couple of months ago, I was editing something in Word and it disappeared. Not just the Word window, but Office itself. It suddenly and completely de-installed itself. This is on a subscription version of 365, paid up. I had to reinstall and fix a bunch of settings again. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was editing a big document in Word and it crashed. And in doing so deleted the file I had been working on. No backup or anything; it just killed the entire file. So a couple of days' work lost. And whose idea was it to take away the vertical scroll bar three seconds after you stop moving it? Excel lately is no prize either. Enshittification rules.

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Benefits for Microsoft (spyware), not users

Nobody can answer this question: What benefits, other than "support", does Windows 11 bring to users compared to Windows 10?

The problem is that there aren't any, at least not obviously. Instead it's more enshittified and more bloated with spyware. It's a downgrade, not an upgrade. Windows 10 is pretty stable (so was 7), so not getting support doesn't mean much, at least if you take reasonable firewalling precautions and don't click on spam attachments.

So I'm sticking with 10

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Re: IPv6 solution...

Well, no, the problem is that I know about things about IPv6 you don't. It's the Children's Crusade Protocol -- it is a test of the hard-core faithful, willing to follow a stupid committee into oblivion because of their imaginary authority, even though it makes no sense if you think about it beyond the obvious "but don't we all need globally-unique IP addresses?"

Re: IPv6 solution...

Friends don't let friends use IPv6. As Americans know from a beer commercial, it tastes worse and is more filling.

IPv6 was invented over 30 years ago, before the Internet was public, by a "B team" at IETF who did not really understand what they were doing, but instead were ripsschitt that IAB had previously selected TUBA as the next IP. TUBA came from DEC via the OSI committee, and was thus tainted by the eevilll OSI, even though in fact it wasn't the bad part of OSI. So they came up with a v6 that anyone who understood networking would discard immediately. Not that the PIP and SIPP drafts that merged into it were any better.

CGNAT gets blocked because blockheads don't understand security and victimize the innocent.

And the "OSI 7 layer stack" has nothing to do with TCP/IP, and is a poor way to look at networking. Oh, and they did away with layers 5 and 6 after the textbooks came out. But folks who like to cite the fact of a 7 layer model never understand what the Session and Presentation layers did, or were for, but were happy to quote a one-line summary from the original model document. (Hint: They were a mistake to be treated as layers; they're now optional application layer functions.)

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: bed is stuck

And the eightsleep web site doesn't actually quote prices, though it allows you to ask for sales to let you know, which itself should be a red flag.

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

I've never used Outlook but one of my business partners who does, or did until this week, said that they've essentially discontinued the client. Instead the new version retains the mail on their server and is little more than a front end to web mail. Thus MS has to have the passwords to your various mail accounts. Sorry, no thanks, and hello Thunderbird! (I've been using that for a long time anyway, and by now it's fairly usable again, after the abominable v115 "Supernova" explosion.)

Office 365 is a sloppy mess. I don't know if it's intentional enshittification or they just have lost control over decades of badly-documented spaghetti code. Office 2010 still works and is more stable; that may have been its high point. The one real advantage to 365 is that Excel has a much improved lookup function. When the program bothers to run. And I HATE that opening a file when there are already open windows in that app causes an old window to open too. There used to be a workaround or two but they've patched them out, ensuring that the bug always manifests.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Re: They have absolutely ZERO chance

They have zero chance of getting a legal (at least in the US, probably also in most countries) replacement for the radio blobs, for sure.

The cell phone modems are SDRs; the real work is in the firmware (blobs). The 3GPP (GSM is obsolete) standards are incredibly complex. The cellular bands are licensed, and the licenses belong to the carriers, and the radio are covered by the carrier licenses because they're tested to follow the standards which put them under the control of the base stations. A "free" phone could violate those terms, even if it could produce both the 3GPP-speciifc protocol code and do the DSP behind it (again, mostly in the SDR blobs).

Then there's the Wi-Fi. Again, rules dictate that these unlicensed transmitters be approved via testing at an authorized lab, with their firmware. So sure, there are routine updates, but the radio blobs are left conformant. A FOSS Wi-Fi driver would thus not be authorized and could not be legally sold or used. While the Wi-Fi specs aren't as complex as 5G, they're not trivial. In the US, the FCC does not care about the 802.11 specs, but they are very serious about what power levels can be transmitted on what frequency. It's not legal in the US to even sell a Wi-Fi (or other unlicensed 5 GHz) device that allows the country code to be changed away from "US/Canada". "RoW" is always a separate SKU.

Free software is a nice-sounding ideology but there are real-world concerns that it doesn't always line up with.

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

Re: Fusion

Fusion will be ready in 20 years. This was true 50 years ago and it's still true today, and is likely to be true 20 years from now. It does, however, provide work for physicists, and allows power-wasting data center owners to claim they're investing in something that will eventually power their data centers, for some large value of eventually.

Oracle boasts $455B backlog from AI boom, but not all its new friends will live to pay up

Everyone knows that AI is a bubble; the question is what happens when the bubble bursts.

The real money is being made by those who supply the money-losing AI companies. So NVidia and Oracle, among others, are selling to them, but their customers' ability to buy from them hinges on being sustainable. Given OpenAI's revenue model, that seems somewhat doubtful.

The best case for such suppliers would be like what happened in the California gold rush. Lots of prospectors showed up. Most did not strike it rich. Levi Strauss, however, did, selling them pants (trousers, for you Brits). After the gold rush, people still needed clothes. But will anyone need all of those data centers? I think the British sense of "pants" has a more appropriate meaning here but I'm a gringo so I can't be sure.

NASA finds best evidence of life on Mars so far

Re: Well, the paper is cautious

Bring back the space probe with the rocks in it.

No more waiting for lines: New Windows keyboard shortcuts output em and en dashes with ease

There's another way — install the Moby Latin keyboard (for English), which has shortcuts to hundreds of modified letters and punctuation including dashes.

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

Re: Cutler is right....

IPC is a major weakness of Unix. It requires more use of kernel mode than there should be; it should instead be a basic function of the kernel accessible to userland. But in the 1970s IPC and networking (which is just distributed IPC) weren't so central. Unix was designed for timesharing, to keep processes separate from each other. VMS, at least, had DECnet designed in very nicely, more transparently than Unix/TCP networking ever has been.

DHS warns of sharp rise in Chinese-made signal jammers it calls 'tools of terrorism'

Foreign criminals are not the same as "illegal immigrants". If a foreign gang member wanted to commit a crime here, they could come in however they choose -- many undocumented residents arrived legally on tourist visas and overstayed them. A criminal could come as a tourist, commit a crime, and then leave. DHS is simply using this to demonize immigration. Trump lies constantly, talking about immigrants as if they're all "rapists, murderers, and from the insane asylum". El Reg should know better than to take this crap at face value. It did the same in a story yesterday.

Dems hyperventilate about Palantir's work with the IRS in letter to CEO Karp

The article made me check to see if Lewis Page was still no longer at El Reg. It questions whether Palantir has right-wing associations. That's like asking if General Motors is somehow associated with the automobile industry, or if the Pope is Catholic. Peter Thiel controls Palantir, and appointed Jimmy Vance as Senator and then VP, and created Musk too. Thiel is well known as a right-wing activist. The company is there to advance his ideology while making money, mostly from friendly government contracts.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Other browsers

Oh, you mean it wasn't just me? I too used PaleMoon for a while. But the developers -- basically, Mark Straver and his ego -- were rather hard to deal with on the forums. I still keep it around for specific stuff, though I don't really need it. I use Windows and its Firefox is pretty solid. Maybe Chrome is faster in a race, but FF is fast enough, provided I occasionally restart it to get rid of its memory bloat. With over 100 tabs open it gets to hog memory badly, and their attitude is that it's the OSs job to reclaim memory when they've claimed it, not theirs to release it. I don't agree. Still, FF handles the job okay with the most important extensions, BitWarden and DuckDuckGo (to block trackers). Now and then I run into an embedded device that demands Chrome and I usually can use Edge for that.

Re: unsupported browser

There's a difference between announcing that you support something and blocking any user who is not using something you support. Some web operators don't get the difference.

It wasn't long ago that I ran into a site that recommended upgrading to Netscape 3.

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

Re: Wire cutters

All modern wireless systems support strong encryption, so that's not a problem. Wireless would be good if there's a line of sight path. "Dig safe" record keeping and checking would also be a good idea, even in non-public places like wherever the incident occurred.

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Re: Don't forget the non-monetary advantages

You make a good case for the America of the past, B.T. But Krasnov is doing a good job of destroying American advantages quickly and destroying the Atlantic alliance, on behalf of his master Putin. Now Europe needs to put on its big boy pants and step up.

Re: Don't forget the non-monetary advantages

Moldova is in Europe. Georgia (the E and I are pronounced, unlike in the US state) is, geographically, considered part of Asia. The Caucasus and Urals are considered the continental boundaries. But the mess in Georgia is sort of sad, as it could be a good country if it weren't being pressured so much by Russia. Likewise Moldova, and if the candidate who led in the first round of Romania's vote wins, he has territorial claims on Moldova, which again upset the EU applecart, along with his support for Putin and Trump.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Take my hat off to MS

Agreed. I have one special need for a link from the phone to the PC, to enable texting using the PC and its real keyboard rather than the phones screen, which I am not able to use well. Google Messages for Web does that well enough for my Android phone. Google also has an app for texting to and from Google Voice numbers, and my VoIP provider supports an app that again mirrors the phone's text messages on a web page. The rest of the phone keeps to itself, albeit with a lot of help from DuckDuckGo, which blocks trackers in the apps.

Re: "Make Start Menu great again"...

The name implies that Mikhail is a Putinist, and wants Windows 11 and its surveillance to be a tool of the fascist state.

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

Re: Federal...State...?

Texas and California both have a lot of residents of Mexican heritage, but especially in Texas, the governing class is quite Anglo and would prefer to ignore the others.

Rhode Island was founded by an English dissenter, Roger Williams, not Germans. Pennsylvania was mostly German.

Re: Surely

And yet Murdoch is as responsible as anyone for his being in power, and still uses his Faux News to promote Agent Krasnov and all of his imbecilic minions.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

I'm still unclear on the problem the article is trying to solve. Most sources say that come October, ordinary (Home and Pro) versions of Windows 10 will stop getting updates. But they'll keep working. Doesn't that sound like an advantage? The updates are a pain, I'm behind a firewall, and the majority of crackerdom is probably concentrating on Windows 11 cracks by now. I ran Windows 7 for quite a while after its nominal EOL and it remained stable, which is probably not something it would remain if it kept getting updates.

Re: Fantasy Linux

I used to have a Mint installation on one of my computers, the non-work one, though it normally ran Windows. One day I made a change to the graphics configuration. I don't remember exactly what, but it broke the X server. Reinstallation didn't help. Nothing ever fixed it. Somewhere, something, on some Mint partition, stored the change I had made, and nothing was going to undo it. Perhaps if I had totally and completely wiped out the user partition, it might have been hidden among my files. But I didn't think that was a reasonable fix. I no longer bother to try to tame Linux on the desktop.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

It's not quite *that* bad. Windows 2000 was reasonably stable and functional. Windows XP SR2 and Windows 7 were pretty stable too. Windows 10 Pro is usable. 95, 98, ME, Vista, and 8 were junkyards dressed up as a Jenga tower and about as solid. Windows 11 is basically 10 with lots of additional enshittification. Since there's a huge application ecosystem built on Windows, it's not bad to have one of the stable Windows releases on the desktop, if you know how to stabilize it. OOTB it's pretty bad, though. I've avoided 11 and don't know if it is really possible to stabilize it to the usable Windows 10 Pro level. (The Home versions are a bad joke.)

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Re: Pentagon has consistently failed

The primary purpose of the Pentagon is to direct huge amounts of money to favored contractors, divided among congressional districts. And incidentally to deal with war, but they're not as good at that. So this project was also probably designed to funnel money. Hegseth's whinging about being lethal is almost as believable about his denying that they leaked Yemen attack plans on Signal, when the Atlantic article was in his face. Fox News prepared him to lie baldly.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

Re: "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity"

It is unlikely that many of fElon's boyos will be marrying outside of their own ethnicity. Or within. They will drive their Incel Caminos alone for the rest of their sorry lives.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

I'm not an actual programmer though I know a bit of the history. ALGOL-68 is not the an update of -60, but a different language. Lots of interesting ideas but not deemed practical. Apparently it was hell to write a compiler. A friend of mine in the 1970s was working on a language, MARY, which was described as an implementable version of ALGOL-68. But it didn't catch on either. Instead we get most stuff in C, which combines the power of assembler with the ease of use of assembler and the security of assembler.

People raised on C and that type of minicomputer systems-programming language do not get the beauty of COBOL, which was purpose built to do boring work and does it pretty well. It just can't be used to do fun stuff. It does however pay the bills, quite literally, including the decimal (not floating point!) arithmetic.

Frack to the future? Geothermal energy pitched as datacenter savior

Re: Opposed to fracking for oil/gas exploration

This is not the same as fracking for oil and gas extraction. This fracking, which happens more than a mile below the surface, circulates water through the cracks, between pairs of boreholes. The water gets heated up because the rock at that depth is very hot. It generates steam for a turbine and circulates back down. This is much less likely to cause earthquakes than removing liquid or gas from the ground. It's about as clean as you can get, energy-wise. Estimates are that a given boring can operates for around 30 years before the rock loses too much heat.It's not even likely to be that expensive, and it works on a small scale, so it can be done at or near the data center, at least if the rights to the land underneath (the fracking spreads horizontally once it gets down deep enough) can be obtained.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Stolen Elections

The Second Amendment was put in at the insistence of southerners, who intended it for slave-catching militias. "Regulated" in that sentence meant trained. Of course the first part has been totally ignored by the extremist Supreme Court and now the country is awash with military weapons in the hands of yobbos.

Is NASA's science budget heading for a black hole?

The Mad Kings just fired NASA's long-time Chief Scientist and much of her staff. Of course she was by expertise a climate scientist, and the Mad Kings do not believe in climate science, except perhaps to the extent that it helps one of them sell electric cars. They do not believe much in science at all, including medical science, witness their brain worm in charge. NASA is pointy-headed academics, not the kind of Creation Science whose acolytes solidly vote for the Mad King and his minions,