Posts by Eric 9001

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

If those were components that did additional signal filtering and the TV wasn't far from a broadcast antenna, such components weren't necessarily needed.

I remember reading about some businessman who would walk up to finished TV circuit board design and then choose some big component to cut out (thus to shave dollars and cents extra profit) and if the TV still worked, he that would be the circuit board design.

There weren't many complaints about the lousy picture by those close to a broadcast antenna (those without a TV before wouldn't have much to compare to would they?) - but in more rural areas the TVs wouldn't produce a viewable image - but the businessman didn't care - it was up to them to ship it back at their expense.

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Re: " and releases no discharge into the surrounding waterway"

The amount of heat directly released is trivial compared to the mass of the ocean.

The emissions from all the gas, diesel and/or coal burned to power the ship, would lead to far more warming up of the ocean, due to extra heat trapped in the atmosphere.

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Re: 777

There were 2 AoA sensors available (but it seems there was the option to only have a plane with 1 AoA sensor?) - although the budget programmers were order to only use 1 AoA sensor at a time, as it originally was only designed to operate at high airspeed and with little force, who proceeded to do so without complaining.

Then a further change was ordered to make it work at low airspeed and enough force to override the pilot, which was done without a complaint too (if being fired for merely disagreeing is possible and unwanted, do most say anything but yes sir?).

As well, unless the airline paid extra to make available the "visual indicator" function, the "AoA disagree" warning that a AoA sensor has developed a fault, would not show up on the display.

Double trouble for Microsoft as pre-owned software license claims converge

microsoft has already made non-monthly-subscription licenses to use, no longer available for any recent version of office.

Older office versions on macos and ios have already lost the ability to edit and/or save, due to the expiry of a certificate and intentional choice not to renew such cert (that was the plan anyway); https://davescomputertips.com/ms-ending-perpetual-office-licenses-july-13/

Only the old; "Office Home 2024" is available; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/CFQ7TTC0PQVJ

Notice that it says; "For non-commercial use" - although that's advice and not (yet) added as a restriction to the license terms; https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/documents/office/2024-word/retail-(packaged)/Microsoft%20License%20Terms%20Office%202024%20-%20English.pdf

(Sneaky move there, implying that the LGPL's are "open source" licenses, without making such false statement - those are free software licenses after all).

Older office versions are by design useless when trying to handle files by newer office versions (and also when trying to handle files from other computers of the same version and the same files on the same computer, but still) - I reckon libreoffice has better MOX-2026 rendering compatibility than office 2024.

o24 will automatically get worse at rendering, with further sabotaging changes to the MOX format in o365, without microsoft even needing to roll out sabotaging updates to o24.

m$ is not worried about a few subscriptions being activated on clown computers (they'll stop such if they can, but if they can't, sooner of later the designed obsolescence will bite anyway).

microsoft has never sold perpetual licenses for anything.

They've always sold temporary licenses to run, although not labelled as to the date when the software would likely stop working by.

adobe never sold perpetual licenses either - they have in the past sent threatening emails, that suckers "are no longer licensed to use" old versions of adobe software (that was not under a recurring-payment subscription service); https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/is-old-licensed-software-legal-kryptonite-lessons-from-the-adobe-letter

microsoft already does subscription disservices - office for example.

The windows tax has always been a recurring payment anyway - hardware is made totally unusable to operate after x years and then it's time to buy a new computer, with the windows tax.

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: The owner did a

Might be a different flight I'm thinking of, but it was actually 2 kids in the pilot and copilot seats - a girl and a boy and both were encouraged them to play with the control sticks.

The way the autopilot worked is that minor to moderate inputs were ignored, but big inputs disabled the copilot and were followed - the boy had the strength to apply a big input and applied one.

Then the pilots failed to recover from the upset despite all the height available and then stalled and crashed.

The plane wouldn't have crashed if either pilot had remained in the seat and allowed one to play at time, or had applied correct inputs once either managed to get back into the seat.

Re: For old timers like me

That exits bash, which may not be wanted if you would like to see previous backlog later.

xscreensaver can lock the whole xorg session in 15 minutes (programs like xfce4-screensaver also work slightly less well at locking - a cat may find a key sequence that crashes it and thus unlocks), keeping all shell state in place until you unlock with the password.

systemd-shelld soon now?

Re: Amateur

Reviewing GNU fileutils 3.13 from <1996 (which goes back to 1985), it did not have the --no-preserve-root option, neither does 3.16 (<1997), nor 4.1 (<2001), nor coreutils 5.0 (<2003).

As per ChangeLog of GNU coreutils 5.2.0, --preserve-root and --no-preserve-root were added to GNU coreutils on the 2003-11-09 (presumably added to avoid problems with poorly written scripts that do; `rm -rf /$DIR`).

So no, it wasn't available for GNU rm back in the 90's, nor in other proprietary rm implementations.

But you can still do; `rm -rf /*`, just fine, which the worse bash script writers (like Valve), cause with beauty similar to; `sudo rm -rf /$VAR*` (empty $VAR is equivalent to '' and /''* resolves to /*).

Try it; `echo rm -rf /$VAR*`

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

Re: I'll say it again until someone gets it

Shouldn't the "super thinking machine" be able to do simple tasks like packing a dishwasher, provided a robot body (with a camera and arms), if it had any intelligence?

Currently, it seem such programs can only degenerate bad copies of pre-existing text?

Re: Crapilot

The original comment was deleted, but magically it's not copyright infringement if a LLM is used to do the copying?

What's the difference between such process and re-encoding a hollywood movie for H.264 to AV1?

After all, the bytes on disk of the resulting video file are completely different and the output pixels are somewhat different too - must be fair use right?

Re: Crapilot

I mean, co-pilot did the correct operation for once, as one valid solution to the problem of proprietary software, is to delete it (besides, practically that's just short circuiting the lifecycle anyway).

Copilot will eventually proceed to delete the whole program and any backups too I reckon, solving that problem completely.

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Re: Constructive alternatives to anarchistic vandalism

No matter what spying functionality cameras have, that will do absolutely nothing to stop carjackings, as surveillance cameras aren't going to stop a criminal from carjacking a car (the only thing a criminal thinks about cameras is what they'll do to ensure that they won't get caught).

Some carjackings are for the purpose of joyrides - why would a criminal care about cameras, when they can mask up, carjack, joyride, dump/crash the car and leave long before the police show up?

Surveillance cameras can be used to prosecute crimes at most, but that is dependent on the police actually bothering to take a break from going after innocents and go after criminals instead (I've heard of many cases of CCTV footage of crimes likely being available, but the police not bothering to go and get it, as well they're too busy harassing innoccents).

The only technology that will grant you freedom from getting carjacked is a gun. Most carjackers will change their mind and run when seeing the ultimate; "how about no?".

<sarc>If the carjacker has a gun too, well they still won't like their chances against your wife, kids and dog armed to the teeth.</sarc>

It's not paranoia if you're correct.

You contradicted yourself - if "nobody gives a monkeys paw about them", then why the active surveillance efforts?

If there wasn't a care, there would be no care to surveil.

Surveillance is primarily about going after innocent people for wrongthink, or even; "computer says wrongthink" - real criminals can rest easy knowing that almost all resources have been diverted into going after innocents.

0.01% of the time there may be a criminal caught as a treat (that likely could have been caught with standard police work) - but the negative 99.99% of the time, clearly far outweighs the 0.01% of the time.

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Re: forcing HTML-enabled email

The intention is for the font to be used on HTML webpages, rather than emails.

The article doesn't even mention email.

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Cool

Now are they going to do the job properly and ban surveilling yourself and others with rectangle-style surveillance devices?

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

Re: seL4 anybody?

The GPLv2 has variants - the GPLv2-only and GPLv2-or-later.

It will likely turn out to be a complete waste of time to do any work on GPLv2-only software, as that work will turn to dust as soon as a court makes an error and decides that the GPLv2 is not a valid license (could happen next week) - while with GPLv2-or-later software, that's still GPLv2 & LGPLv2.1 compatible and it can be upgraded to GPLv3-or-later if ever needed (for example, to be compatible with the Apache 2.0).

Hurd already provides device drivers and networking, although the performance is limited due to scheduling performance limitations of Mach.

GNU software is free software that predates "OSS" - it's an insult to apply the putrid "OSS" label to GNU.

What is Linux, if not a kernel?

What seems to be occurring is a repeat of the BitKeeper fiasco, where some business has offered gratis access to their proprietary software and SaaSS LLM vulnerability scanning tool, so that the "popularity of Linux" advertises such scanner - such access will soon enough be revoked, if the business doesn't go bankrupt first that is (unlike BitKeeper, which had a fixed cost and a tiny cost per repository, LLM's have a huge cost per prompt).

Re: We have a way of verifying it with open source

It doesn't appear you've even read my posts - those are blindingly anti-microslop, but it seems you can't read.

I was replying to a comment that was attempting to compare windows CVE's and Linux CVE's and I pointed out how much worse microslop is.

Re: We have a way of verifying it with open source

It's incredible pointing out what microsoft clearly does is somehow trolling.

Microsoft has a long history of doing things like voluntarily joining the NSA's 'PRISM'-program, why would they hesitate to do the much lesser act of handing over bugs; "to help security"?

If it's the case that microsoft doesn't provide bugs to the NSA, why haven't they made a statement that they do not do so?

Wouldn't that be good PR for once?

Of course there are other evil parts of the NSA, that go and finds additional bugs in windows and exploits those for years without telling microsoft, such as EternalBlue, which turned out great (other malicious groups proceeded to find the same vulnerability and use it) and then such vulnerability ended up being publicly disclosed and used as part of "WannaCry", which was extremely relentless, as most WC's hadn't had the somewhat recent bug fix applied.

Re: seL4 anybody?

If seL4 was to relicense to the GPLv2-or-later, I'll get around to porting that to Hurd some day - after all, being able to conveniently, without performance limitations, use GNU without Linux would elicit priceless responses.

Re: We have a way of verifying it with open source

microsoft first and foremost reports any exploitable bugs to the NSA before doing anything; https://web.archive.org/web/20130622044225/http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/06/how-can-any-company-ever-trust-microsoft-again/index.htm

Then the only CVE's that tend to get published are for exploitative bugs, that have been relentlessly exploited at scale - they may fix one or two and then they proceed to consider whether they'll bother fixing a few more in the next few months.

microsoft rule is that employees must focus on important things - adding "features" that the managers want - if an employee dares to spend a week fixing bugs, they get a warning.

The Linux developers publish a CVE for almost every bug found and fixed in the (now apparently shrinking) free software part of Linux (the proprietary part and all the security vulnerabilities in that seemingly mostly goes ignored).

Still, either is clearly not comparable - also consider that the amount of bugs in a kernel is clearly much less than the amount of bugs in an OS.

But we do know how insecure free software is - a previous study inspected the error rate per line of GNU software and found it was the lowest out of any known non-trivial software.

Maybe further studies, now that there has been another 20 years of bug fixes, should take place.

Sorry to break it to you, but ironically the kernel, Linux doesn't come close to qualifying for "open source", as it isn't even 50% source-available!

If you want a chance to have any security, you'll need to use free software.

It tends to be significantly more secure than proprietary software, as reported bugs tend to get rapidly fixed, as there's no proprietary software in the way of a fix, while with proprietary software, the company usually doesn't bother to fix reported bugs, even if such bugs have been used for exploits for years.

The reason CVE's originally existed, was to embarrass proprietary software companies into fixing severe security issues that would otherwise go unfixed forever.

Thinking about it, it's odd the Linux developers would file CVE's for every fixed bug in the free software parts, but as for the proprietary software parts, it doesn't seem they go and file any CVE's, despite how it appears that they still distribute an older version (as well as a newer version) of Intel's proprietary Wi-Fi card peripheral software, that has known vulnerabilities?

Re: Greg KH's reply on OSS-SEC

Every Android devices ship with proprietary software you are not allowed to check or fix (which has been found to have terrible security time and time again) and a remote backdoor (remote updates that you don't control are indistinguishable from a backdoor), so no Android device is secure.

ChromeOS has the same problems (ironically for certain ARM ChromeBook models, you can use them with GNU/Linux-libre and a decent Wi-Fi card and a free version of u-boot and the EC is already free software - but those computers unfortunately suck - as the keyboard and screen aren't good and -1 USB port leaves you with 1 USB port).

The only solution that has any chance of giving you security, is to not run proprietary malware on your computer.

Then, whatever vulnerabilities software has, usually doesn't practically matter, as there is no malware to exploit them (there could be issues with exploits that work via crafted network packet, if those somehow get past your firewall unrequested, but such exploit reliably working is really the fault of handling network packets in ring 0, rather than correctly as an unprivileged user program, like Hurd does).

If you want updates to Linux that fixes security bugs and also without proprietary software to eliminate that security issue, well you can get updates of that from GNU (for a decent AMD64 computer that supports standards like ACPI, I would expect updates to continue to work just fine for decades); https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/freesh.en.html

Updating a .deb or .rpm is quire convenient and generally doesn't need handholding, although the Linux developers are good at breaking things for no reason.

There is also the option of preparing a custom .config that only enables modules that you use, to really cut down the attack surface and using that to build each release of Linux-libre, but that takes some time, as you find yourself diffing the previous version to revert configuration changes that occurred without your consent and also how certain combinations of configuration flags results in a kernel that fails to start, without any debug output as to why.

Web app turns your old phone into a new smart display

Re: Why is the register advertising proprietary software and SaaSS

2012 isn't really that old - there are plenty of Android devices from before 2012, that have hardware that works (although <4.4 Android is almost useless, due to no support by f-droid - although some of such devices have old sketchy 3rd party Russian custom Cynagenmod builds, that is that is at least Android 4.4).

Android on more recent devices has a function that uses the google played services backdoor to keep the TLS certs updated - iOS may have similar functionality.

Old Android 4.4 devices have the issue where the certs that cross-signed the LetsEncrypt root certs has now expired, meaning LetsEncrypt-signed websites cannot be authenticated without updating the root certs with this program; https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.nutomic.zertman?repo=archive (trying to do it manually is a bad idea, as you trip SELinux and then Android no longer boots).

Eventually other root certs will expire too and the same issue will apply to other websites.

Please do the right thing and release it as free software; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms

If that means you'll need to charge money before you can provide a self-hostable version, that's fine (accept cryptocurrency as well as proprietary payment methods and most will be able to pay).

Re: any compatible device with an internet connection

Provided you have a working firewall, provided the device isn't already exploited, attackers are going to have a hard time connecting to even a trivial to hijack device.

Why is the register advertising proprietary software and SaaSS

When you have been able to for years, get any mobile device that has a working web browser and way to connect to a network, to display whatever website via an URL (accessed via a QR Code if you want).

The issue with old tracking devices is how in many cases there are no input capacitors on the DC-DC convertors, so without a charged battery as a noisy "capacitor", the device won't turn on.

Part of such planned obsolescence, is how working, but weak batteries often aren't useful, as web bloat slamming the processor can drain a worn battery faster than the charger will charge (also considering that power connectors become loose after not that many cycles and a small vibration can temporarily jostle the connection open) - thus the display may turn off after an hour or two of runtime.

Sure you could break the device open, pull the battery out and solder on some input capacitors and solder +5V directly to the input pins and then somehow configure the software so it works without a battery (it'll likely be easier to add another DC-DC convertor to deliver ~3.8V to the battery pins, unless there's a battery handshake - which would require cutting off and reattaching the BMC, made hard by how you often need to do so without cutting the power or subjecting it to out-of-bounds voltage), but would that be worth your time?

Really old devices often don't have such battery problem and may work fine without a battery, but of course then there's problems with TLS certificates (you need root and the "move certs" program for Android to add updated TLS root certs) and how there may not be enough RAM or processing power to handle current web bloat, without the device running very hot.

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Re: "increased chance of serious injury to a child"

I doubt such flimsy looking plastic would have the strength to amputate a limb with the forces a child can deliver - dislocate one maybe.

Still, the design and construction looks dodgy to me - I hope that after several years of operation, it doesn't break apart and cause injury.

China advances plans for national single-stack IPv6 network, and its own surveillance-friendly version of the protocol

Re: That's all we need...

Provided the extensions are transmitted via an IPv6 extended header, correctly programmed IPv6 routers would ignore or drop the extra fields and allow the packets to continue as normal IPv6 traffic (regardless, the GFW will likely strip off the extensions for authorized outbound packets anyway).

But if the extensions are shoved into the header like 802.1Q tags, then unaware routers would have to drop the packet, due to not being able to route it.

Re: That's all we need...

"IPv6+" != IPv6 - proprietary extensions that add spying via inserted metadata is obviously not applicable to normal IPv6.

The same thing could have been done via extensions to IPv4, if it wasn't how everything is totally broken, due to NAT cancer and router ossification.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Total C-Suite fail

You likely want a commercial TV - which are available from technology warehouses but not many TV shops.

Such should last quite a while for non-commerical usage due to a PSU and panel built to a reasonable lifespan.

You'll just need to make sure the model has a stand (or also get one) and if for some reason you want aerial TV reception without an external receiver, that it has an internal receiver of the correct proprietary specification.

Ironically, LG offers commercial TV's that work perfectly fine as a display without ever needing a network connection (there are merely some network functionality that unsurprisingly won't work).

But, you shouldn't purchase any LG TV without LG first advising in writing, that the complete corresponding source code and *installation information* of the GPLv2 & LGPLv2.1 software used will be available, as per the license terms, before you purchase the specific model.

(The sources available from; https://opensource.lge.com/ are *not* the complete corresponding source code and also lack the required installation information).

Re: Total C-Suite fail

There's no way TVs are being sold at a loss, but it is correct that panels are so cheap now, TVs can be sold for ridiculously cheap.

If TVs were sold for a loss, those who don't connect the TV to the internet and use video input only would sink the companies profits, which isn't happening.

Spyware is an additional revenue stream, which in total adds up to quite a bit, but on a per-unit basis, the profits are very low.

AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting

Re: Straight ASCII isn't nearly enough

It turns out that extended ASCII can handle all those characters, but using that is a mistake, as there are several different codepoint maps - UTF-8 is a much better idea.

Re: The pain in Spain stays mainly in the HTML - not the plain - text

Enriched text allows real formatting without introducing all the security issues of HTML and JS; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text?useskin=monobook

Too bad only real mail clients support it (Emacs, Evolution, Mutt & Mulberry).

Auditors tell UK government to do the math before banking on £45B AI savings

Re: Billions in savings? WTF?

I'm not confident LLM's are going to decimate jobs, considering every time an LLM is used for something that is actually important, more people soon need to be hired to clean up the mess.

As for the USA, it's not like such businesses actually use LLM's (the ones that do, like uber, have burnt millions of dollars worth of tokens, to achieve pretty much no "new customer features") - that was just the excuse to lay off hundreds of thousand of workers.

Yes, the obsession with forcing everyone to be employed full time, has made many jobs equivalent to one group digging a hole and another group filling it up - clearly laying off both groups would have no real business impact and of course it would be claimed that LLM's allowed for less employees.

Malicious cloud customers can bring down the power grid

Re: So in order to mitigate those attacks...

Just disconnect all data centers that are dedicated to pretty much only harmful things from the grid - it'll make the world a better place overnight.

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

No, Office cannot be trusted to render OOXML properly - it always renders it wrong

By default, Office uses the MOX format instead (not the same as "OOXML Transitional"), which is not rendered properly either - documents look different between different versions of Office and also look different between different computers with the same version of Office.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

>Windows is utter s**t and even when you've corrected the mistake, won't find the correct device without a reboot. This was back in the Win 3.11 & 95 era.

Still the case with windows 11, even when no mistake was made - WC's will fail to find an IPP printer without refreshing multiple times and then if you try to add the IPP printer, it fails and will not output as to why - the only thing that works is rebooting and trying again, up to several times.

I figure they saw ???? traffic from the laptop, so they unplugged it and the network starting working again.

Many "IT workers" are not very competent and can't work out tcpdump or wireshark and it's not uncommon for garbage proprietary network software to stop working in response to correct, valid traffic from a computer, or even by coincidence when an unrelated computer is unplugged.

That combined with how a virus was not found and reinstalling things on a WC is a real pain in the neck, means they just handed back the laptop with the malware OS back, on not finding any non-approved malware.

All nmap sent was valid network packets, as fast as the laptop NIC allowed (I would expect a 1000BASE-T link), thus the issue was not with the laptop - it was broken proprietary software hosting the network.

Re: Destroying HDDs

Smacking the bearings with a hammer would throw the platter alignment off and/or shatter at least some platters.

Maybe the NSA could get some of the data off, but 99% of data recovery firms would take one look at the drive and say to forget it (they wouldn't want to fill their clean room up with metal shards from drilling out bent screws and then shattered platters would they?).

>The drive won't run long if you don't have a clean room, but doable in a techie workshop to get a backup off.

With a modern HDD, unless you have at least some kind of clean room box in the workshop, any opened HDD will immediately head crash from microscopic dust fragments.

It's easiest to just unscrew all the screws and remove the platters and magnets to play with - as soon as those platters are misaligned, only NSA-tier funding will get anything.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: Covid face masks

There's usually also an overhead camera in addition to the screen camera.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Re: Simple solution

As a work being in the public domain requires it either not qualifying for copyright, or the copyright expiring, that would require shortening the copyright term to some less ridiculous length, which is never going to happen (software won't be made to not qualify for copyright and the copyright term only ever gets longer, never shorter).

A work being in the public domain in some other country is not very useful if the work isn't in the public domain in the current country.

Provided copyright wasn't infringed in the process, plagiarism is not illegal, thus claims plagiarism can merely be ignored and not responded to.

BSD's have always been incredibly sloppy with licensing, thus I doubt those would have become popular if there wasn't a court ruling that there would no more lawsuits against anyone using or distributing a BSD.

Linux may not have been written, but GNU would have still existed - maybe Hurd would be GNU's primary kernel instead.

It wasn't about an "itch being scratched", it was about Linus being burned by how MINIX was proprietary software and deciding to start developing a clone of Unix kernel's, so GNU software and software for the GNU system could be run without MINIX.

>"Get the Facts" campaign against Linux

It was against GNU/Linux, although to utter that name would lead to their loss, therefore they wrote "Linux".

>Microsoft OS's sucked so much a Finnish guy started writing his own OS

That is not true - Linus originally used MINIX, not windows.

Linus got burned by how MINIX was proprietary software and therefore he decided to announce that he was writing his own OS (that wouldn't be big and professional like GNU) and then proceeded to start with the kernel (he never got around to the remaining 90% of an OS), but he originally didn't get very far, as he selected a proprietary license (nobody was interested in another proprietary kernel).

Since then, he has been burned by proprietary software over and over again - he has never learned that with proprietary software, everyone always gets burned.

He only saw success when he re-licensed to the GPLv2-ambigious in 1992, which GNU in good faith decided to port every last GNU package to work with Linux as well (despite all that work done for him, he authorized Linux becoming proprietary software again in 1996, with the inclusion of the first of many proprietary programs, without source code).

Others then released GNU/Linux distributions and many developers tested them out and determined that if Linux wasn't so lacking, the OS would work properly - which attracted thousands of developers to work on Linux.

>teamed with the GNU project for the software outside of the kernel

There really wasn't much teamwork - most Linux developers refused to work together with GNU developers (BSD developers would work with GNU, but not Linux ones - as they considered themselves "Linux users").

Regardless, GNU developers didn't need much help to implement support for Linux's SYSCALLs in glibc and Linux's /sys, /proc and /dev interfaces in packages where relevant.

Linux developers even forked glibc into "Linux libc", which was a complete waste of time, as they weren't particularly good at developing a libc and in the end, all the work had to be discarded, as they didn't bother to keep the licensing in order.

GNU software isn't just outside Linux - it's inside Linux as well - if you want to compile and therefore to be able to use Linux, you'll also need GNU bison, binutils, make, cpio, tar, bash, bc and GCC to build all of it.

After all, you can't have a C kernel without a C compiler, a build system and a linker - none of which existed as free software before GNU developed them and released them.

Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses spat

Re: Moving customers to the cloud means we can screw them over for a subscription.

For now you can do that.

The next stage is to pull an apple and require each file to be exported manually, which gets old after the first 10 files, let alone if there's 1000+ files.

The stage after that then would be to remove the export function.

Re: Good So Far

There is no "massive enough".

A business can appeal a fine of a massive amount and the court will probably agree that the amount is too much and lower the amount substantially.

A business can also declare bankruptcy if a court decides to levy a fine so massive that it cannot pay and proceed to not pay the fine and restructure under a new name.

Re: Good So Far

A court levying a fine won't do anything, as all companies respond to fines, by making the customers pay, by increasing prices.

The only kind of fine that would do anything, would be a fine that is levied against the CEO's and other suits payments and the shareholder's dividend and for it be forbidden to increase prices to make up for the reduction.

But the ruling the world needs is not a fine against m$, what it needs is an order for the business to be shut down completely and permanently (without it starting up again under a different name).

That would cause a temporary shock for a month, but then a month later the world would be a better place.

If there is a desire for the shock to be reduced, then the order should include a requirement that all of the source code, of every program be published under a free license, assigned to a non-malicious copyright holder (why not AGPLv3-or-later?), but really, most of such code is utter slop that it's only useful as a reference as to how not to program.

Too bad other evil organizations would be striving to take m$'s place soon after, which would need to be a shutdown too to make the world end up in a good state.

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

It's slopcode

and it depends on proprietary software and SaaSS - how can it be anything but proprietary software?

It is simply invalid to license software, if you didn't write it and you instead copied other people work in disregard of the license.

Microsoft flips Windows Backup to on by default unless you're in the EU

There doesn't seem to be much practical functionality offered by such "backup"

After all, it's not like microsoft provides a significant amount of settings and for many of the settings provided, many used have found settings being automatically been turned back on later.

As for windows store cr…apps, what's the difference between that and just going and re-installing the handful of used cr…apps on the new device (there's even an option to make the windows store not work on 11)?

It's quite sad window's backup functionality still is pathetic in comparison to solely backing up the users $HOME on GNU, including a text file with the list of programs that you use.

Fake IT bods on Microsoft Teams coax workers into installing malware

Re: In before . . .

Has microsoft ever released a program that isn't malware?

After all, malware is defined as software with malicious functionality.

A malicious functionality is any kind of functionality any sane person wouldn't want - clearly any functionality that could make the program automatically cease to function is not what any sane person would want (especially so anyone who paid a fortune for a copy).

For example, any kind of "license check" makes a program malware (such malicious functionality only tends to afflict paying customers regardless - as prohibited copies patch out such functionality in order to operate).

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html (only approved kind of sources are allowed for listing - there are far more cases pointed out from non-approved sources)

https://web.archive.org/web/20260702193734if_/https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html