* Posts by Chronos

1257 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Chronos

Re: Linux is dead

Actually, if you want a prime example of BSD vs PoetteringWare, try the vast, almost interstellar gulf between the clusterfsck that is Pulseaudio and BSD's snd(4) automatic kernel multiplex system. I'm frankly staggered nobody in Linuxland has replicated this yet.

Chronos

Re: Desktop

You forget the others:

Clit: Can't learn, isolate [from] technology.

Dick: Doesn't input correct keywords.

Anus: Another nutter using systems.

And my personal favourite, Buttocks: Better users tried to offer counsel, killed selves.

Chronos

Having been a maintainer of several FreeBSD ports in the past, I have to point out that *BSD isn't an option if so many of the applications we rely on not to use "Linuxisms"¹ assume SysD is in place. It'll make porting, supporting and using said applications a bloody nightmare. Shims that fake SysD's APIs are all well and good but many simple things rely on direct access and edge cases that aren't covered because Poettering moved his mouse or it simply wasn't exposed in normal usage are legion. If the default in the *nix world is to do all of this via SystemD, your worldview from an alternative environment becomes increasingly narrow.

Bottom line is if Slackware and Devuan become impossible, so do many of the ports in the *BSDs. What is actually needed is education of distro maintainers in Unix fundamentals such as One Task Done Properly and code portability. SystemD is almost proprietary in its effect.

¹ See the porters' handbook for details.

Chronos
Facepalm

One task done properly

The corollary I'll leave you to work out. SystemD is almost Microsoftish in its tentacle spawning creep to engulf anything with which it comes into contact. The idea is fine, the execution in PID 1 is not.

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Chronos
Stop

Re: Regardless of which side of the fence you are on.

it says the Supreme Court has authority over Parliament

Not quite. As I read the ruling, the justices are very careful to stress the opposite, that the PM's advice to Her Madge removed parliamentary sovereignty and that it is for the parliamentary authorities to sort out now they have been restored in their prerogatives. All the SC did was reset the clock to before the Scruffy Scarecrow went beyond the pale and triggered a load of pomp, circumstance and archaic nonsense on a hollow pretence.

The ruling, in effect, has said "parliament had been castrated for no good reason; we've sewn its nuts back on but it's up to parliament to make sure they stay on from this point forward as we have no authority save upholding convention and the law."

Ebuygumm doesn't break t' Nominet rules, eBay and Gumtree told

Chronos
Facepalm

Streisand Effect

That is all. They'll never learn, will they?

First they came for 'face' and I did not speak out because I... have no face? Then they came for 'book'

Chronos

Re: Book off...

Assuming the Supreme Court Justices agree that the whole affair is justiciable, which is far from a given right now. SN, AFU.

Chronos

Re: Book off...

The shit scarecrow will be even more despised when he manipulates the wording of "That Act" they just passed to force the Prime Minister to request an extension by resigning, triggering another leadership election and leaving the UK without a PM to request said extension.

"I will obey the law." Yes, but Machiavelli would be so proud.

Chronos
Flame

Book off...

...impudent twerp. That said, it does seem like Zuck is on target to become the world's most despised individual in modern times fairly quickly and he's now using public infrastructure to ensure it happens.

The sooner this system of "elect us, we'll do whatever the fuck we like and you're paying for it" crumbles and removes the tools from these tools, the better.

You can trust us to run a digital currency – we're Facebook: Exec begs Europe not to ban Libra

Chronos

So if you’re listening, bank regulators and European politicians: quit your worrying and complaining. Facebook remains just as trustworthy and reliable as it always was.

Exactly. Think of a round figure then subtract another number¹ from it.

¹ an extremely large number, more than the estimate of electrons in the Universe

Boffins build AI that can detect cyber-abuse – and if you don't believe us, YOU CAN *%**#* *&**%* #** OFF

Chronos

Sorry, I'm a Big Yin fan. I already know that this translates to "you're a boring bastard, I'm off."

Chronos

See how easy that is? Well done.

Chronos

Oh, for goodness' sake, use your intelligence! A well placed insult is undetectable in most cases.

"Congratulations on the new job. They'll be very lucky to get you to work for them."

Cu in Hell: Thousands internetless after copper thieves pinch 500m of cable in Cambridgeshire

Chronos

Re: A simple (but costly) answer

"There are no tools in this van"

...he goes indoors at night :)

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

Chronos

Google’s Chromium platform has won that war

You mean Webkit, i.e. Konqueror -> Safari -> Chrom[e|ium]. Honestly, you'd think Google said "Let there be light" right at the start...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Chronos
Devil

Re: Inaccurate

If this was to "push through no deal", the proroguement would last until November 1. Since it doesn't, your statement is inaccurate. Either way, Parliament can very easily "stop no deal" in the meantime either by holding a confidence vote

There's a slight problem there. You see, a successful no confidence motion will use up the few days parliament has to sit with the motion, the vote and the fall-out. Then the PM has 14 days to sort his shit out. Then he can call a general election which dissolves parliament on the spot and takes an estimated six weeks to bring to a vote. While all of this is going on, the default outcome as legislation stands is out on Hallowe'en and there's no parliament to stop it.

Chronos

Re: Benito Jonsolini

That was Goebbels, surely? Apparently, Goering had two but very small.

What's interesting (in the Chinese proverb sense) here is that the system is unravelling. They (whoever they are) have polarised the people of this country and divided the nation. Once we realise we're, all of us, Brexiteer and Remainer, in the same sodding boat of having some bugger else decide our fate and that every single one of the denizens of both parliaments have let us down catastrophically, then perhaps we'll also see how we've been manipulated and redirect the ire to where it really should have been flowing in the first place.

As browser rivals block third-party tracking, Google pitches 'Privacy Sandbox' peace plan

Chronos
Devil

Re: Privacy Sandbox

Oh, how we laughed when GoOgle's tag-line was "Don't Be Evil." This was predicted when the more gullible in the technosphere were praising Goog's "open and honest" development model and how good a place it was to work - if you were impressed by open-plan and "benefits" that crammed you into society's ideal of how you should be.

Even Cory Doctorow managed to see through it very early in the process.

Chronos
Meh

Re: Yeah, pull the other one

FSVO "Android." It's quite possible - and rather simple - to run applications of your choice without ever spaffing your willy size to the Chocolate Factory.

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Chronos

How long is your car engine warranted for?

I can repair my engine myself without having to spend upwards of five grand to replace its fuel tank. Every single one of my vehicles thus far has lasted well into the old definition of classic, 25 years+. Admittedly, the current daily driver is only 17 years old and is yet to fulfil the promise of its forebears but it does have plenty of life left in it.

Good luck making your own Li Ion cells. You're also conveniently ignoring the filth produced when making magnets, nickel and so on. And no, I really don't give a solitary damn about dollar signs. Growth is an illusion which got us into this situation in the first place. This ball of rock only has so much raw material.

Chronos

Re: No One Cares About This Anymore.

Quite. It's a bit like Father Ted Catholicism: It's all so vague and nobody really knows what it's all about. That would be an ecumenical matter.

Chronos
Thumb Up

Re: Low hanging fruit

What an excellent idea! Never crossed my mind but that would essentially require very few changes to infrastructure or consumption. Minor detail is that the result would still be COx and NOx emmissions but the whole process would be pretty much neutral akin to biomass sources.

But, hang on, fuel cells can use methanol as well. Seriously, I have no problem with electric motors. Instant torque, fewer moving parts, less to go wrong, what's not to like? It's the storage of electricity, the range and the longevity of the cells that bothers me.

Chronos
Devil

Low hanging fruit

Here we go again...

Why are we not looking at other forms of carbon production? Why is it always the demon automobile? For example, using waste heat from air conditioning units to heat stored water rather than running both it and an immersion heater/boiler. Until you do something worthwhile and get those empty buses with the industrial chimney you call an exhaust to stop giving me 1920s diseases, I'll not be considering swapping my small, efficient, 112g/km car for transport with a free nose-full of someone else's armpit with every trip, which glacially slow trip ends nowhere near where I really want to go or something hideously expensive with a "fuel tank" that dies after five to eight years.

Tentative kudos for the mention of H2, though. All those wind turbines sitting in salt water could be electrolysing it rather than destabilising the transmission grid, we could be using the results and returning clean, desalinated water (we're forever being told we don't have enough) as we fill up with fresh H2...

Oh, and get your mates, you know, the ones in your share portfolio that you're hoping to get a consulting gig with when you get unelected, to do their fair share, too.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Chronos
Holmes

ORLY?

Urban myths, eh? Like the "cupholder" on a desktop auto-retracting and dousing the machine in imitation American coffee, a user calling tech because his monitor is blank after the cleaner using his power point for the vacuum or another irate user threatening to sue us for loss of business because she hadn't paid the telephone bill on her dial-up line?

You underestimate the stupidity of the average user. The depths to which these creatures will plumb beggar belief.

Apple: Ok, ok, we'll stop listening in on your Siri conversations. For now, but maybe in the future

Chronos
Big Brother

Re: ..or, perhaps, don't buy one in the first pla

Telephones can be disconnected from any network activity when not needed (a[e|i]r[o]plane mode) which precludes snoopage. Google's creepy voice "search" assistant can be lobotomised quite easily. Echo devices and Google's equivalent are on all the time and have no other utility than to listen for a "wake word" which, since you don't know how many there are, could be anything from "Alexa" to "fuck" and anything in between. Disable network traffic to and from those and they become just another useless lump of plastic with blinkenlichts or, at best, a rather expensive Bluetooth speaker. Basically, you're paying for a bug to be installed into your home.

Chronos
Holmes

Re: Just another piece of intrusive shyte

..or, perhaps, don't buy one in the first place?

Disabled by default: Microsoft ups the ante in its war against VBScript on Internet Explorer

Chronos
Devil

Re: revisited

The actual take-away point here is that Webkit, which started as the rendering engine in Konqueror before being Borged by Apple (along with CUPS), is becoming the de-facto web standard renderer. Only Firefox stands alone with Gecko now that IE's awfulness has bitten the proverbial dust.

Chrome is just a trojan horse for Google's services, as is Edge for MS'; regardless of IE's undead state (Un-bloody-dead! What's the bloody point?) you still can't trust a web browser to have your best interests front and centre.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Chronos

Three words: Low. Hanging. Fruit. Tackling the fundamental issue is too difficult. This makes both the puppetmasters in Washington and the Daily Failers happy,¹ and allows them to Be Seen To Be Doing Something™, even if that something is pretty much a) impossible, b) has too many proven cases of collateral damage and c) involves capturing a horse that has already bolted, bred, died and its progeny evolved into something unrecognisable.

Add to this the fact that HomeSec is something of a poison chalice these days and you get this nonsense every single time.

¹ Jacob Flea-bitten Moggy will be apoplectic that I just used an Oxford comma. Sadly for him, I'm not subject to his "guidelines for writing."

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Chronos
Joke

Re: Barr can propose this all he wants

No danger. All that stupid will leave a vacuum, which nature abhors. It'll suck in more stupid than was there originally, making things worse. The trick is evacuating the stupid and injecting common sense, preferably using a clue-by-four.

Joking aside, just look at the lower layers just waiting to fill the void. Are they any better on average?

Brit consumers still holding off on buying new PCs until that Brexit thing is over and done with

Chronos
Thumb Up

Re: A quick verification says otherwise?

In any case, weak sales reflect the defect rate of current hardware. 5 year old CPUs are largely fine for most tasks, so many "upgrades" are simply the asset lifecycle running it's course. Beyond that it's pretty hard to find many cases where an upgrade is needed or even desired (outside of slapping in an SSD or latest video card upgrade).

Spot on. You have a good eye for what's going on away from the buzzword bingo of marketweasels.

You can't say Go without Google – specifically, our little logo, Chocolate Factory insists

Chronos
Joke

Re: I don't see the value in Go.

What, it replaces the comments with AdSense or does every line of code end with Californian "up-talk" instead of a semicolon?

Chronos
Devil

Prior art

I think you'll find Murray Walker already has a trademark on the term, especially if repeated three times and followed by someone else saying "it's the formation lap, Murray."

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Chronos

We are highlighting the sheer fragility of these things that we're basing our daily existence on

That, right there, is the problem. Not the fragility but the dependence. This is why a cashless society, for example, is a frighteningly bad idea...

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

Chronos

Re: Another fence the Labor party can sit on and procastinate about

Speel-chuck and USian default browser settings? </PetHate>

Chronos

Re: It's complicated, so people don't try to understand, they just have opinions.

I'm in a twitter war

Why? You can't educate these people so why bother? Twitter is much more representative of population as a whole than this forum. As I have said before, imagine the average person. Now realise that 50% of everyone else is thicker than that.

Chronos

Sounds painful. All I got was the Bluez...

Chronos

Re: Another fence the Labor party can sit on and procastinate about

They're all the same: The manifesto come election time reads like they're on your side until they get a whiff of power, then it's Down With This Sort Of Thing (Careful Now) for pretty much everything joyous, fun, pleasurable or beneficial. The whole system is predicated on getting and then keeping power over others, usually by taking away rights. English common law is based on "anything that isn't specifically illegal is legal," so every bill passed removes a right. As Mr Carlin said, if it can be taken away, it isn't a right.

As for this lot, who read that honey bees resonate at certain 4G frequencies (I'm guessing the upper µwave bands here as a bee isn't even a significant fraction of a wave at the lower end) and ran with the idea, mistaking resistive loss of an imperfect conductor (bee innards) for ionising radiation because the poor sod who wrote the study in the first place assumed it went without saying, that's exactly what happens when you let a lay-person loose with some scientific data. It's not surprising or even uncommon.

At least bees are doing a better job of being resonant than iPhones...

Please stop regulating the dumb tubes, says Internet Society boss

Chronos

Re: Public blacklist...

You can, John. It's the MITM who can't, exactly the same as, say, HTTPS, assuming your CA trust store is sane.

I'm not even bothering to reply to the cow-herd. DoH isn't the only game in town and I just adequately explained how to move away from the likes of Ogle and Cloudflare, i.e. don't accept the defaults.

Chronos
Facepalm

Re: Public blacklist...

DoH should be run by non-commercial entities at least - and maybe blacklists should not be made public - when they try to block criminal activities.

FFS! You don't understand how DNS works at all, do you? In the first place, which DNS servers you use are purely a consensus, usually a "can't be arsed" decision to accept your ISP's DHCP advertised crap. DoH is just wrapping the payload up in TLS encryption so the contents cannot easily be viewed in-transit. The underlying protocol for turning names into numbers remains exactly the same and you can "can't be arsed" to Cloudflare, Google, Mozilla or any of the other DoH/T providers just by leaving about:config alone.

Where the real fun will start is when the roots and authoritatives start serving DoH/T (stubby as a proxy). Then your private resolver can talk direct, in total privacy. This is not a Bad Thing™, especially when you weigh the risks between world+dog tracking you and a few miscreants who will find a way around whatever filtering you put in place. It'll also make amplification DDoS quite a lot more difficult as TLS requires TCP, which means a spoofed UDP request no longer provides the ability to swamp any poor old sod's pipe. As the chap said, your meddling only increases the collateral damage and does sod-all to address the problem.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Chronos

One problem at a time, my friend. Besides, it's highly unlikely that Linus and Greg K-H will be riding bicycles simultaneously across an intersection while the "supervising" driver is fiddling with their phone. That's a specific set of circumstances that would be akin to trying to engineer, say, everyone ditching legacy hardware within the next decade rendering page caches obsolete...

Chronos
Coat

Having people who understand the big picture implications of sub-system changes is clearly important, but it would be good to be confident that there were enough of them to cope with unexpected bus-related fatalities.

Get rid of the buses. Problem solved...

Arrays in a mangler, need new storage bed: Huawei and the US tech block

Chronos

Re: Cutting off nose to spite face

You're absolutely right. There's a knock-on effect to the US ham-stringing itself that affects everyone, which will become apparent probably just after the massive mewling infant is re-elected. It'll make 2008 look like prosperity.

Before anyone has a go at my anti-Arsenoise "bigotry," it looks like we're about to get our own Cabbage Patch baby¹ as leader which should put us all in the same boat, making it much easier to relate to each other. I can only hope that this situation does more to repair Anglo-American relations between the ordinary people than the actual election of said political foetuses.

¹ I actually think Boris is a good laugh as a mad, toff-bloke hybrid, but he's far, far from the PM we need. Perhaps he's the PM we deserve, a caricature of the nation?

Chronos

Cutting off nose to spite face

The take-away point from all of this is if you rely heavily on US suppliers for your product, they can and will shaft you at the merest hint, without any proof, of threat to their dominance. All the backdoor rhetoric is just that. This is a pure and simple trade war. What will happen is many multi-nationals will be watching this furore and adjusting their strategy to insulate themselves from US protectionism.

End result? Damaging US trade. Nice move, Arsenoise.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Chronos
Devil

Aku'ultan

Then we find out the sentient supercomputer controlling their lives is just bloody Facebook from the future...

If your broadband bill is too high consider moving to Idaho, they get the internet for free

Chronos

Famous potatoes...

...and "free" broadband. That is all.

BT to axe 90% of its UK real estate, retain circa 30 sites

Chronos

Internally, it's called the "Adastral Park Runaround" and there's probably still an ancient Acorn Achimedes sitting in the corner driving a large screen, only instead of showing time to answer it clocks number of redirects with prizes and bonuses if you get it into double figures. Rest assured, localzuk, you're not alone. I think it became policy somewhere between Maggie's Great Sell-Off and the Pan Pipe rebrand.

Chronos
Devil

Largely, at any one given time, dealing with the frig-ups of the other 99,999. Oh, and telling people it's not their department, putting them on hold "while I transfer you" and forgetting about them.

Finally, people who actually understand global trade to probe Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods

Chronos

Re: Looking through the wrong end of the telescope

It'll be interesting to see if the US can link their case with the one from the EU.

No danger! Arsenoise has his piggy little eyes on tariffs on EU goods as well. The reaction from the EU, well, the sub-harmonics of all that gnashing of teeth would likely cause tsunami in far-flung places.

Expect more posturing and willy-waving with very little substance.

Russia signs Huawei deal as Chinese premier decries 'protectionism', 'unilateral approaches'

Chronos
Stop

Re: Yeah Xi and Putin, a pair of love doves to be proud of

Maybe the leftist/liberal/diversity rainbow people, who dislike Trump, should think two seconds more before they choose their enemy.

There is room in some minds for two or more dislikes. This is not a binary choice, so stop trying to polarise the debate. The fact is, as the late, great George Carlin pointed out, there is bullshit coming down the street from multiple sources. I do not have to like China's human rights abuses to dislike Arsenoise' global moneyed idiot dictator aspirations.

Mozilla returns crypto-signed website packaging spec to sender – yes, it's Google

Chronos
Devil

Search with simple terms is almost useless now, John. With aggregators, price comparison sites, ad men and so on your first SEO'd up the ladder results might as well not be there, for all the use they are. You need a long list of advanced operator strings to make search work, even to get '90s AltaVista levels of accuracy.

Sometimes, it is incredibly irritating. If tech is your bag, you're more likely to get decent information from a well aimed post on what's left of Usenet than the web.