Posts by graemep 165 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2024
Yes, and as with "some other governments" (which seems to be turning into all western governments) the intent is to enable mass surveillance because actual criminals will be careful to take precautions against this such as encrypting files before sending, or using code words, or steganography, or private systems (maybe located in another jurisdiction), etc.
Which does make me wonder whether it is useful.
There are lots of forks of those browsers which do a lot more but are still compatible, or you can just change the settings yourself. People who cannot change a few settings are unlikely (and should not be encouraged to) run a CLI script from downloaded from github.
China has alternatives.
Neither the EU, nor the rest of Europe, nor (AFAIK) anyone else in the world has any plans to do this. Lots of noise, a bit of moving government cloud stuff off US providers, but that is about it, and they are (if anything) increasing dependence on Google and Apple for things such as ID and age verification apps.
European governments mostly want spyware, as it extends their surveillance abilities so are delighted to work with US big tech.
I love this feature. It is the fastest way to copy paste with mouse selection.
Gnome has for many years been becoming more touch screen focused. I think maybe the future of the big Linux DEs is KDE for keyboard and mouse users and big screen and Gnome for touch screens.
Cosmic is a possible challenger, and there are many other options but those are more niche.
> Firstly, if you use the website, you still need the app to generate 2FA codes.
You can get them to send you a hardware authenticator thing.
> If you do a cardholder not present transaction, you need the app to authenticate/approve it.
Use another card. They get less business.
> Some accounts, such as the Global Money account (if you are receiving / sending money abroad, this is a lot cheaper than doing it on the regular current account), only work on the app, not the website.
Plenty of alternatives for that
From what I've read, the UK is in a similar boat - far too dependent on US cloud infrastructure even for critical policing and security functions.
The last time I looked at a map the UK was in Europe and the article is about Europe, right? Not any particular region of Europe that excludes the largest and third largest European countries among others. Oh....
The UK, the EU, and everyone else will be a bit better off with sovereign cloud, BUT end point devices remain almost entirely American controlled which means we are all still dependent on the US. If anything governments are strengthening that grip through things such as pushing the use of apps. Sovereignty is good, but cheap is better.
There is heavy use of American SAAS as well.
There is no plan to encourage the private sector to reduce reliance on American technology so the economic dependence will remain. The US could shut down virtually all cashless payment systems, the NHS, and a lot more if it chose to.
He did not. In the Hacker News discussion of this he said he had his family photos etc. backed up outside Apple's systems, and it sounds like most work stuff is too.
The problem is that its disruptive - he does not have access to shared documents etc. that rely on the cloud so a lot of work in progress is lost.
A lot less useful, and their customer service is terrible.
I tried to get one for my daughter as ID for exams because I was worried we would not get her passport (which needed renewal to go on holiday) back in time because of strikes and they failed to verify a scan of her passport and then fell back to a paper method that would take even longer.
Its not going to be accepted everywhere a passport is. Fine for things like an 18 year old wanting to buy alcohol, but that is about it.
You are now making an entirely different claim to your original, which was:
you can use Hurd, or some BSD kernel instead and the feel of GNU doesn't change in the slightest
You have backed off that claim to now just claim that you need some GNU software to compile Linux, which is an entirely different claim that no one contested.
It's unacceptable to downplay the importance of GNU and all the other packages by claiming that it's; "all Linux".
Again, you are arguing with a claim no one made.
the idea is that the user goes and installs the missing parts of GNU later, without even realizing that they installed the missing parts of GNU.
That shows a severe misunderstanding of the aims of Alpine and Chimera.
if you look though the BusyBox source code, you'll realize it contains extremely old GNU code that was copy pasted
Do you have examples of this? Given the vast difference in the size of the code it seems improbable on the face of it that there is a significant amount of GNU code there and I cannot see anything to indicate it in the AUTHORS file
> All OS's that use the kernel, Linux need GNU and therefore "most distros" is incorrect - it's all distros.
So what? lots of software is built using make and Bash. You also need Python etc. and lots of other stuff to compile Linux.
> All OS's that use the kernel, Linux need GNU and therefore "most distros" is incorrect - it's all distros.
Its correct. Alpine and some other distros use busybox instead of GNU utils. Chimera Linux uses BSD utilities.
> Linux being included is optional - you can use Hurd, or some BSD kernel instead and the feel of GNU doesn't change in the slightest
I would say having significantly worse hardware support changes the feel quite significantly. So does having a different range of non-GNU utilities, and anything else that relies on compatible syscalls.
There are differences between BSD and GNU utilities and I generally prefer the GNU ones - but its not a huge difference. Even the lightweight busybox versions do not make a huge difference most of the time.
They will have to rewrite it using components that are not GPL. They can replace the kernel with a BSD one, and bash with zsh etc. Do they have a replacement for ffmpeg? BSD awk exists but is not completely compatible with GNU awk IIRC.
Its probably going to be a substantial rewrite. Even if they do that they still have to release the source to the existing GPL software.
You are technically correct that React per se is not a cloud technology, but one of the reasons this flaw is so widespread is that it works with the defaults on next.js which usually runs on Vercel's cloud hosting, and is specifically designed to be used that way (and its a real pain to deploy on your own servers ).
It is a vulnerability of React "backend for front end" servers which generally runs on cloud. People running their own servers are generally resistant to this sort of architecture. There will be people running React on their own servers who are affected but its going to be rare.
We also have a number for how common it is in cloud environments, and not for non-cloud environments.
An interesting alternative to the UK approach, where commercial competition solves all ills (as far as government is concerned, and in defiance of all evidence).
Western politicians have forgotten that a working market requires actual competition. This is as welcome to business as Christmas is to turkeys. A certain Adam Smith had things to say about this, but people prefer to just remember the "invisible hand" and forget the messy bits.
The thing is, if the encryption is worth a damn, they can't put in special backdoors for Les Rozzeurs because maths just doesn't work like that.
The authorities may not know or care. Remember the Australian Prime Minister who said "“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia," over the same issue?
I quite like Bitbucket.
If you have a thousand devs the extra work is not significant. You would be paying Github thousands, maybe tens of thousands of USD/month.
For smaller systems the work will scale down.
There are alternatives to git too. For a solo developer or a small team I would seriously consider Fossil which is dead easy to self host.
The reasons legislators think like that:
1. the experts (i.e. the big businesses like Twitter and FB) told them this was a better approach
2. both the big businesses and the government want to be able to identify people to better track what they do online so they want age verification as a way to slip in identity verification
3. the people with age verification products to sell told them it was the best approach.
There are lots of other approaches. For example providing filtered SIMS (which already exist) and routers with blocking options so you can turn it off for adults and on for kids devices. The technology exists and is a lot more solid than age verification. There will be ways past it but they can be difficult enough to at least protect most, especially young kids.
Some of these things probably should be illegal. How is nudification that different from upskirting which is illegal? I can understand a provider failing to stop bad uses for a product but these people are selling it as a nudification service.
If anything European dependency on the US is increasing.
Multiple European governments are introducing age verification and ID apps that require an American controlled smartphone.
The push to move to cashless payments also increases the dependence on American payment providers, both the old ones (Visa and Mastercard) and the tech ones (Apple and Google).
The new gov.uk login system runs on AWS, as does the NHS system being pushed on GPs, as does the NHS API for third party systems.
There is no effort anywhere to get the private sector off its dependence on American cloud. Even if some government functions off the American clouds, if a huge chunk of the private sector depends on them, then your economy does too.
Its not just AWS and Google cloud. Its Gmail and Microsoft and SaaS in general.
In the worst case however, it kills originality of action and thought - Dark Ages stuff. AI has the power to let us lead us into the new Dark Ages, if we let it.
Maybe reading one of those articles by an irate historian about why the dark ages were actually quite a good time will make you feel better.
You cannot add a revenue decline to a loss! Maybe you should have a very basic grasp of finance before being allowed to write about it? Revenue is not profit!
If you look at the JLR announcement it says there was a loss before exceptional items of £485m and exceptional items of £238m. That makes a £723m loss. Even if you add the profit they hypothetically would have made without the interruption to production you can only get something under £1.3bn, and there is no way you can get that to £1.8bn.
There will be knock on effects into the next quarter, at least the article is right about "still counting".
I have had a series of cheap tablets to watch video on, and for web browsing without the laptop, as well as reading ebooks. An ebook reader will not do the first of those, and any will not do the second.
I recently bought a second hand MS surface for my daughter to take to (sixth form) college as she wanted something light and I felt a proper computer (it has a keyboard case, and an HDMI output) was more flexible than a Chromebook or Android tablet. She found she hated Windows 11 and wants me to install Linux for her.
I think tablets are a bit of a vague category that range from small Android tablets (less useful because smartphones have become bigger) to essentially laptop hardware without a keyboard.
That is really a matter of Linux not being preinstalled. If you buy a Linux machine with Linux preinstalled you can "power on and do stuff".
I recently bought my 17 year old daughter (not an IT geek - she has applied for archaeology degrees) a Windows laptop and she found the setup irritating, the need to have am MS account to login intrusive, and wants me to install Linux on it.
Choice is great..from a technical point of view. But from a customer's point of view it's just irritating and esoteric nonsense.
Well, that is it for the principles underlying free market economics then!
The Reg keeps confusing the default setup of most Linux desktops (look like something familiar) with the only way they work. New users prefer to start with something that looks familiar, those who care can customise to what they want.
My KDE desktop does not have a start button at all, nor a panel at the bottom. I do have something like a start button on my desktop, but it does not open a Windows like hierarchical menu but a full screen searchable grid of icons - although you can click on one level of categories to narrow things down. I did much the same when I used XFCE.
Dolphin, the KDE file manager, can look like a two paned orthodox file manager, depending on what choices you make in the "view" and "split" menus and buttons. Konqueror (its predecessor, which is still around) is even more versatile and can preview in panes etc.
, but you only got one, and you couldn't change its length, or re-arrange or resize its contents, let alone change their orientation.
SO Windows 95 was better than Linux desktops because it would not let you do things.
Users should be free to – for example – use the MATE panel with the Xfce window manager, the Cinnamon file manager, and the Budgie start menu.
Not sure about that particular combo, but you definitely can use XFCE with a different window manager, and the same with KDE. You can use use any file manager in any desktop environment I have ever tried (there are settings to change default file managers). Some panels will work with different desktop environments or with plain Window managers but its not something I have done myself.
The NHS already uses AWS very heavily.
If you read the documentation for connecting third party systems the NHS APIs run on AWS. So pharmacies, any GPs running their own systems (none of the ones around here) etc. will connect through AWS.
All the GPs where I live used an SaaS (provided Blinx Healthcare) that runs on AWS.
I think the NHS web app and mobile app backends run on AWS too.
[blockquote]I don't really know why an init system needs to be integrated into the desktop environment[/blockquote]
Systemd is a lot more than an init system. It is a whole additional layer that does lots of stuff.
The strongest argument in favour systemd is that it provides a lot of extra stuff that an OS needs, that is not provided by the kernel, in a way that is standardised across distros.
The strongest argument against systemd is exactly the same.
> It's very difficult to cut welfare spending, but it is possible to target it better: disability payments have ballooned as a way for some of avoiding "unemployment"; winter fuel allowances could be means-tested;
Attempts to target better have not really worked.The things you suggest have been tried and failed.
It also creates a lot of extra work and bureaucracy.
Far better to get rid of means testing and simplify the system and recover the money elsewhere. Introduce UBI and reduce tax thresholds to match for example.
> But there are always other boondoggles to look at, especially in the tax system.
Definitely agree with that. The tax system is a mess.
I hate the term used in a derogatory. An MBA is a qualification that teaches you certain things. The problem is how apply that knowledge - what your aims are. That depends on decisions made by the people in charge. Directors and shareholders in the private sector, senior civil servants and politicians in the state sector.
> the MoD doesn't have shareholders, so MBAs are not the problem
MBA is a qualification for managers, not shareholders. Investment managers (the people who control the shares in most companies) are not particularly likely to have MBAs.
It is clearly a strawman as no one (unless trolling) would suggest switching to Linux in those circumstances.
The possible exception is the last, but that only if the servers were running cross platform applications (but then they could also upgrade the Windows version so would not ask the question in the first place)
IN short the management do what they will be rewarded for doing.
> it’s cultural erosion - the slow unpicking of national competence under the pretence of “efficiency”.
That is globalisation. It is regarded as a good thing by everyone that matters (i.e. governments and big businesses).
With a lot of dedicated work, you can add another cloud provider or AWS region or datacenter into the mix until finally, at tremendous effort and expense, you have added a second single point of failure
A second single point of failure? Contradiction in terms unless either one going down would bring the system down, which would be odd.
Multi could has proved valuable - for example the Aussie pension fund that found its data was saved because the regulator forced them to go multi-cloud.
Then the punchline: after all that Kafkaesque filtering, the ministers just pick one of their mates anyway.
Obscuring that is the point of the Kafkaesque filtering. A lot of government processes are complex so they can be manipulated to get the outcome you want. The private sector is not free of this either - it is a huge part of what things like management consulting are there for.
Its more like a mate of a civil servant will get the job than a mate of a minister.
" Your contributions are wholly used to pay current pensioners"
That is how the state pension works. NI goes into a fund that is used to pay state pensions, but slightly more comes out than goes in each year, so, in effect, current NI is used to pay current pensions. The inevitable shortfall will be met from other taxes.
Exactly the same will happen with the civil service pensions.
Biometrics for visas and entry is becoming the global norm.
The EU is doing exactly the same thing (but fingerprints too). The UK already has biometric face + fingerprint visas.
The problem is that non-citizens cannot push back, so governments can do whatever they like and your only recourse is not go there. Of course they can then exchange the data with each other for some-good-reason-think-of-the-children.
> The US is trying to split the world. It wants to be top dog, and it doesn't care if it beggars the rest of the world to do it.
Whereas China just wants to control the world and makes its tyrannically government the norm, which is totally different and absolutely fine.
I think the banks either do not realise the advantage of having a branch network, or they do not care because they prefer short term profits to long term.
I rarely use my branch, but the fact that the older banks have branches that are occasionally useful (on the rare occasions I need to pay in cheques or cash or need to show them a document or whatever) is what differentiates them from online only banks.
The move away from branch banking is already damaging. I use my middle name and Lloyds refused to accept two cheques because they were made out to [middlename] [surname] not [fristname] [surname]. This never happened when they had branch staff who knew their customers (rather than know your customer meaning they ticked some regulatory boxes). In fact, there was another [firstname] [surname] who also had a Lloyds account but by [middlename] [surname] is unique (definitely in the country, I am pretty sure in the world).
The same thought succoured to me initially, but, on reflection, that fails to understand the real role of consultants.
Consultants very often provide services the customers could do themselves. Their real role is to provide CYA. They give the customer the answer the management wants, but the management can now say they were just following a consultants advice.
I think the important point here is that a lot of people who believe in the occult are taking to using AI and it is reinforcing their beliefs.
The church allow but does not seem to encourage exorcism as a practice as it restricts it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_Exorcists
I assume neo-occult is contemporary versions of the the occult. There are quite a number that have sprung up in the last 100 years or more.
I think the important point here is that a lot of people who believe in the occult are taking to using AI and it is reinforcing their beliefs.
The church allow but does not seem to encourage exorcism as a practice as it restricts it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_Exorcists
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