Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

Quit VMware and you’ll emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure

Paul, just how much did they pay you to sell your soul like this? I hope you at least got a pretty penny for selling out your dignity.

Trump jumps from 'anything goes' to 'strict regulation' AI policy

*shrug* As long as the world says "No" and ignores him like Canada, the EU, and Australia have taken to doing of late, with the UK as latecomer to that party, Trump can't really do too much except bluster and rant on "Bullshit Social" about how "mean" and "stupid" everyone is for not giving him his way.

Trump has no grasp of diplomacy or negotiation. He thinks wanting is having, and that he is always going to get what he wants.

Your Republican Congress and Senate may not have the 'nads to tell him "No", but the rest of the world has no reason to put up with his dementia-driven bullshit any more.

That man-child has all the attention span of a golden retriever at Stanley Park in BC, where there are squirrels by the truckload! Even impulsive people usually head off in a particular direction; Trump just has random spasms-of-the-hour-on-a-keyboard.

Gtk2-NG, next generation of Gtk 2, comes back to life

Re: CTK for GTK3 fork

Well, if I do have the option, I'll be shifting from Debian 13 to its Devuan counterpart. I need NVidia graphics, CUDA, Ollama, Java JDK's (specifically Eclipse Adoptium JDK's), and the rest is all just the typical X-11 requiring stack, like Netbeans. It's the NVidia stuff and the Java support that makes me nervous; Adoptium runs rings around stock Devian openjdk for my workloads.

The gaming platforms are a "must have" without any effort at all. I see no reason why something like Steam should be calling into SystemD in the first place.

If anything leaves me feeling nervous, I won't be proceeding until that nervousness is resolved, if ever. Debian feels nice and safe, but the fact it focuses on Gnome means it might be dropping the X.org stack and MATE support, which are must-haves for my Linux use. I've tried virtually every desktop there is; this is "the one" for me. I shall be very stubborn about that; I hate Wayland-based compositing display. They all feel like you're typing through jello for responsiveness.

Re: CTK for GTK3 fork

So far I'm getting promising results on the support for accelerated nvidia drivers on Devuan.org.

Google's AI even gives instructions and "gotchas", because it has been done before and been documented.

That's one roadblock down. Now to look into whether Steam support or the Heroic Games Launcher or the NVidia CUDA stack are going to be issues. I could be reinstalling my box Yet One More Time. (That's the thing about Linux, there is never The Last Installation ;) )

SystemD and Wayland are monolithic abominations compared to the modular elegance of the unix historical philosophy; smaller and focused is always better and easier to maintain. And less prone to unnoticed abuse. Would you notice if the USG mandated RedHat/IBM inject a back door for the CIA and FBI to use into SystemD?

I can't speak to others, but personally MATE on a Debian 13 stack is my "daily driver." Gives me the NVidia accelerated X.11 stack I need and is old enough that all the bugs and issues that have bugged me over the years of use seem to have finally been fixed; I haven't had a single issue with my box in three months and counting. This is starting to be a record of some kind for me... :)

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

MD5 isn't a password hash, it's a quick and dirty huge text comparison hash for detecting whether a blob of text has been updated by the latest long running operation, requiring multiple long-running operations to be triggered as a result of the change. If the MD5's of the old text and the new text match, you don't incur the overhead of the long jobs, you just assume it was another long winded email from someone re-stating what was already stated in an official email previously.

Sovereign cloud is only possible if you’re Chinese or American: Gartner

Most cases come from Asian factories, too, with local vendors applying logo stamps if they didn't just pay the Asian manufacturer to do that for them before shipping. "Assembled in Canada/USA" usually just means they put all the pieces in the packing box. They "assembled" the "package" you got, not the computer.

However, given the dearth of American manufacturing quality in the face of perpetual budget cuts, layoffs, and hack jobs by "investment firms", I'm kind of glad most stuff I buy in Canada is made somewhere other than America. :)

The Americans and their shills have to push the "it's impossible" line, because once the victims of the scam realize it is possible, and also necessary for their own safety and security against an increasingly intrusive and abusive USG spy agency technology network, the game is over and the market share of the scam artists plummets, and so does the US stock market.

See Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's response to Trump's "trade negotiators" demands for concessions before the CUSMA review even starts.

Der Pumpkin Fuhrer knows no negotiation tactics other than the threat of tarrifs. When you no longer give a rat's patoot about the US market because it is the world's most unreliable partner in all things at this time, the tactic stops working and Trump is left powerless and fuming at his "Bullshit Social" keyboard.

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator

Hype? OpenAI? A former a friend and acquaintance of "Honest Elon," who has so accurately predicted the rise of self-driving vehicles, Mars colonies, regular flights to an earth-orbiting luxury hotel, etc.? (I neither know nor care what Elon indulges in, but it's pretty clear he gets blasted on something to "bolster his courage" before opening his mouth in public with such nonsense on such a regular basis for so many decades.)

This whole pack of scammers sells you nothing but empty promises with someone else's "best effort" as the "product" you get to churn your code with forever more while forever paying fees for the "privelege" of "special" access to such tools.

It's the standard hype-machine protocol: sell the sizzle, not the steak. Anyone with a steer or cow can sell you a steak; too much competition if you're honest about what your product really is. And never let people know you can do 90% of the "heavy lifting" with a 12GB VRAM card and a local LLM with the right tool chain instead of paying a few hundred in "token fees" per month; fees that will only go up to compensate for the artificial scarcity that induces panic buying from a gullible public.

Linux kernel maintainers pitch emergency killswitch after CopyFail and Dirty Frag chaos

Re: Sabotage?

Hello, Richard.

Just how many accounts do you have at El Reg? ;)

No opportunity for back door abuse by anybody gaining access to that function, eh? That's as stupid as back-doored encryption.

Yes, local LLMs are ready to ease the compute strain

Thank you for the transcript; it's a lot faster to read text than to listen to people hem and haw their way through the typical human meet-and-greet that goes on at meetings.

The rubber is starting to meet the road as investors across the "AI" spectrum ask their favourite question: "Where's my ROI?"

Debian 14 cracks down on unreproducible packages

I'll be waiting a little longer to reinstall this box with Debian 14 after its initial release this time than I did with Debian 13.

I'm not budging until the full NVidia chain I need for my RTX4070Ti is ready and supporting Debian 14 natively, not through workarounds and hacks to get Debian 14 to run with Debian 13 repos like I did in earlier attempts to get Debian 13 running on this hardware.

Can such workarounds be effective? Well, you can get an unstable box running that way...

Meta U-turns on encryption push for Instagram as DMs go plaintext

Gotta suck up to the Fascist USG's demands for access to "protect the children" (Drumpf's eggshell ego )

GPT-5.5 may burn fewer tokens, but it always burns more cash

Good luck affording to do your job in the future when the AI companies start charging enough to earn a profit commensurate with their valuations.

I feel sorry for people who have to use a machine to do their work for them; it's a shame they lack the basic programming skills to do the job without paying through the nose to some leech that is actually doing all their work for them. You may as well just hire an Indian subcontractor to do your job for you...

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

"The law allows Ofcom to fine companies for up to 10 percent of their qualifying worldwide revenue..."

Screw you, Zuck. Pay up, you thieving fraud!

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Loose connections or unplugged cables are 95% of hardware faults...

'Dirty Frag' Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit

Re: CVE and patches are available

Kernel upgrade came through before 02:00 CST in Saskatchewan today (2026-05-08.)

GNOME may rule Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon, but X.org isn't roadkill yet

Utter nonsense. Wayland may outperform an unaccelerated X-11 stack, but it delivers HALF the frame rates for every game I tried under it compared to the NVidia accelerated X-11 stack. Sorry that you've been deluded, but such is YOUR problem, not mine.

Dude, ALL Wayland implementations use a frame buffer for the initial drawing that is then pushed to the display. That means you have a MINIMUM of a 50% performance loss in games. WITHOUT EXCEPTION.

Personally I rather like the MATE desktop with Debian; who needs all that useless cruft and spam that you get with Ubuntu? Not to mention all the "extras" that screw things up - like this IGNORANT decision to shovel Wayland down everyone's throats despite it's poor performance and incompatability problems.

VMware claims Cloud Foundation on track for world domination

Re: Please do some research

You may expect people to be an expert about everything they ever talk about. I do not, and I say you can take your attitude and stuff it where the sun don't shine.

I don't "research" bugger all unless it isn't working the way I need/expect it to or unless I'm really concerned about some particular aspect of a technology.

You, oh cowardly AC, are a tech snob and elitist who thinks knowing more about something than someone else makes you "special". Absolutely NOTHING described by this technology is anything more than new buzzwords for swap space, despite your claim I "need to learn." You're the one who need to learn the difference between marketing bullshit and what you can actually expect something to do.

Let me guess: You're an "all-in" vibe coder to boot...

OMG. They've rediscovered swap space! And here I've always presumed that VMs did something like that automatically already! Go figure - guess the tech is pretty primitive compared to what I expected of it.

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

Cue Musk "acquiring" all those laid-off Intel engineers...

IBM asks DBAs to trust AI to act on their behalf

"And once we've proven our new AI can take over your job, you can collect your early severance packet."

Astera speaks softly and carries a big switch

Smart approach; I like it. I wish them "Great Success", to quote Borat.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Re: If you haven't figured out already...

The only thing "fecked" is the people at ground zero when the bombs drop, and the people who survive at the fringes of the radiation fallout are double-fecked because now they've got to deal with psychos fighting over society's scraps and leftovers.

The billionaires and autocrats will be just fine in their bunkers and bomb shelters, often luxuriously appointed far beyond anything we'd ever be living in. And that's what they consider "roughing" it.

Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner

Still pushing the products of whoever pays you the most to shill them, eh, Gartner?

Just in time for Labour Day, China makes it illegal to fire humans if AI takes their jobs

Re: Dear China...

As far as I can recall, it was around 1980 or so that the US declared corporations to be legally people entitled to lobby politicians and whose sole purpose was to earn profit. That shift may have been justified by the law you cite, but it wasn't treated that way until the '80s: curse you Ronald Reagan.

Re: Orbital booze

Don't you need to be within the boundaries of a nation on Earth to be subject to its' laws? In short, the astronauts are so freakin' high that the laws really don't apply to them, unlike when egotistical media "stars" claim the same for themselves. If you're an earthbound mortal, you're subject to earthbound laws - and the wrath of the masses if the courts refuse to be sane.

Re: Dear China...

This. 110% this.

The western world simply can not continue with the status quo where a paltry few reap all the gains of GDP increases as time goes by, which is what has been happening since the mid-1970s - the last time someone could buy a home, buy a car, furnish said home, marry a spouse, raise a modest family, and do it all on a single 40-hour-a-week salary.

Ever since then, the billionaire/investore class has reaped the majority of society's gains. You can actually pin this change in society almost to the day that the US decided corporations were legally people and with the further future nail in the coffin that their sole driving motivation was to earn profit. Now you have the corporations and their owners running roughshod over all of the world...

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

How can you call something with so many out-of-band emergency patches "stable?"

From what I read, it sounds like many thousands of users are screaming about it being anything but.

Isn't it obvious?

They kept the management, laid off or early-retired the developers who actually knew anything about the systems, and turned it all over to a bunch of prompt kiddies with an LLM hosing it all. (No, I did not misspell "hosting.")

They should have replaced management with the LLMs. It's easy to simulate their mentality; it's a relatively brainless formula: "If profit-this-quarter > profit-last-quarter then keep-doing-same-thing else lay-off-staff-as-cost-cutting-exercise."

Let's face it: what is Satya except a walking spreadsheet and mouthpiece? Easy peasy for an LLM!

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Well, yes, as I did find out after your comment was posted, Canonical is not a US company.

But they sure as hell were quick to jump on the age/identity verification bandwagon, and you can expect them to kowtow the same way to any future demands for a remote kill switch or "Recall" style functionality to be baked into the OS at the behest of the good old fashioned dictatorial USG.

Still, I wonder what their investor nationality percentages look like...

"Why the group is targeting London-based Canonical remains unclear and no reason was given via its Telegram channel. It is presumably because Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distros."

Doh! Canonical is an AMERICAN company...

Australia threatens tech companies with 2.25 percent tax if they don’t pay publishers

Re: Meanwhile in Canada

Meta didn't just block Canadian news sites, though, they blocked Canadians from commenting and sharing links to ANY news no matter where sourced in the world.

Drumpf was THRILLED at having us nit-picking Epstein-remembering socially responsible individuals shut up on Crackbook, at least as far as posting those oh-so-embarassing articles debunking his latest lies and BS...

I think the Americans from the top down need to clue in to one simple fact:

The independent nations of the world do not exist solely for you to rape and plunder.

And then they need to do one simple thing:

Fuck off with their profit-mongering and surveillance state nonsense. The world neither wants nor needs your federal government's plan for a fascist overreach of the global population, and we reject you and it outright as any kind of "overlords" of the internet.

'

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

Ah, the developer insists "It runs on my box!", eh?

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Adding the cfsecjpa package to the set of files being evaluated proved very interesting, as their addition confirmed for the LLM what it had suspected based on the code patterns: it's a fully-fleshed ORM interface, and it updated it's suggestions and change notes accordingly.

Now I'm starting to get curious as to what kind of information I'd get back if I had an A100 or better, an NVidia card that can run 100GB models, not 9GB models. Or as a first step, to try running this 9GB Gemma4 model with a huge token window so it can hoover a truly insane number of application code files with aplomb!

My latest response to token fees and my continuing quest for data privacy through edge computing sees cline with a gemma4:e4b backend replaced by a Local-AI-Assistant extension with the same backend and context size of 65536. But this time it can handle dozens more files to analyze for a query, streaming through the engine and collecting information as it goes, apparently without blowing the 65536 limit because I saw no errors reported.

The suggestions were similar to what cline had come back with, but more targetted and specific because it had successfully analyzed the server.markhome.mcf.v3_1.cfsec.cfsec back-end interface files and the server.markhome.mcf.v3_1.cfsec.cfsecobj object layer that rides over top my various back end implementations, providing a back-end agnostic interface and implementation for writing the business logic of an application.

I'm going to try adding a couple more key cfsec repositories to the workspace - specifically cfsecbuff and cfsecjpa, which are the primary implementations of the interfaces in cfsec.cfsec, and then later I'll add the cfsecram specialization of the cfsecbuff partial implementation so that I'm getting an analysis of the four key layers I've migrated so far.

As with any drug dealer, the first taste is free - and you've all had your taste, addicts.

EU waves through open source age-check tool to keep kids safe online

Sounds like the EU has provided a base far more sane than trying to bake the verification into the operating system like some American states are proposing.

You simply can not allow such information and applications to potentially interfere with the normal operation of an operating system, especially during login. It goes far beyond a "nanny state" mentality, and I see no reason for the USG's approach to things other than a desire to have the hooks in place for embedding backdoors and remote shutdown commands.

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

You won't be able to cool off with the money you gained in the short term when average temperatures climb into the triple digits because excessive carbon emissions kept on pushing climate change to worse and worse extremes.

But people like you and Trump can't think in terms of anything but dollars.

You really are pathetically simple minded and simply motivated to have money as your overriding concern over survival of not just our but future generations.

Poor baby is really offended by windmills within view of shoreline golf courses.

What a self serving moron when you consider the very real threat of climate change.

But let me guess: the dullest tool in the shed thinks that climate change and carbon emissions being the cause is a conspiracy of some kind...

Microsoft tackles quality control issues. Just kidding, it's encouraging experienced workers to leave

The question really becomes: what is Microsoft's fundamental response to Valve's "Steam Machine" and the fact that Proton Experimental and GE Proton Experimental on stock Debian stable with an NVidia 4070 Ti running the NVidia x.org driver stack with full CUDA stack for the sake of Ollama LLMs can run virtually every game I've thrown at it, including several that I was no longer able to run under Windows 11 due to "old" DLLs being "made obsolete and removed from the installation servers" for Windows 11 updates - updates you couldn't refuse, as if your desktop were some bloody Godfather movie.

Do they continue trying to bork the API stack for gamers to try to "lock out" the Linux crowd, or do they give over the market and let this be the true start of the Linux Desktop En Masse? Certainly there would be nothing to prevent them from developing a version of Debian that runs on their X-Box hardware and gives the full historical driver support of Proton along with Windows compatibility for the existing and future gaming sets...

Re: Removing objections

That's priceless! But unfortunately, it seems to be how some companies think.

Microsoft and OpenAI's open relationship is now official

*sigh* And the bullshit stream of bafflegab and legalese continues unabated as the major players dance the dance of those trying to hide the fact the ballroom floor is a soap bubble about to burst at any time and come crashing down to the hard marble floor of what is realistically affordable, feasible, and sane to implement in the first place.

They're ensuring they get to keep their piles of cookies from the exercise, though, while all you suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H investors lose your shirts. Typical pyramid scheme, where the top handful of "investors" make big bank and every one else in the organization loses their shirt to pay for the con-artists' "profit".

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: Sad, mad and bad!

email? Not bloody likely: the man is too illiterate to do newsletters. Not to mention that email requires planning something in advance not Look a Squirrel! constantly being distracted.