Posts by Graham Dawson

Give staff privacy at work, Euro human rights court tells bosses

The echr is not an eu institution! This ruling applies to any member of the convention, not just the eu, and we will remain part of that convention when we leave the eu.

UK.gov unveils six areas to pilot full-fat fibre, and London ain't on the list

Re: Two Britains?

Yes. Very special.

Brazilians waxed: Uni's Tor relay node booted after harvesting .onions

Re: Self-important little pricks

There's a huge gap between a TOR node knowing what .onion has been requested and lacking anonymity. The node doesn't know who requested it, just that it was requested by a previous node.

There wouldn't be much use in a router if it couldn't route traffic.

Seriously, friends. You suck at driving. Get a computer behind the wheel to save your life

Pretty sure that was the joke.

US Navy suffers third ship collision this year

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.

Better invade the tanker and liberate its oil, just to be safe.

Atari shoots sueball at KitKat maker over use of 'Breakout' in ad

Re: Arkanoid was legally made

Only for trademarks. Copyrights don't need active defence to remain protected.

Nokia's comeback is on: The flagship 8 emerges

Re: Same old, same old

Honestly that's a preetty big USP for me, though it'll likely never live up to the N900. Or the N9.

Such a wasted opportunity...

However, since I'm shortly in the market for a new phone, I will likely consider this one.

The future of Python: Concurrency devoured, Node.js next on menu

With some trepidation, I must inform you that serverside javascript is already popular.

I work there from time to time.

Hence the trepidation.

ETA: I can't tell if I'm being downvoted for shittalking server-side JS for for saying that it's popular. (It is. This is probably terrible. Don't shoot the messenger.)

Chap behind Godwin's law suspends his own rule for Charlottesville fascists: 'By all means, compare them to Nazis'

Re: " ..call a spade a spade..."

Accepted by whom?

WannaCry vanquisher Marcus Hutchins pleads not guilty to flogging banking trojan Kronos

Re: Framed?

Keystone cops, not keystone pipeline.

If Anonymous 'pwnd' the Daily Stormer, they did a spectacularly awful job

Re: Forcing the Underground

Arguments with extremists rarely convince them to change their ways. In those situations, you argue to convince the audience.

Giving extremists the ability to speak in the open is often the best way to turn people against them.

Google and its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in full

To me, this feels like the moment private eye jumped on the mmr-causes-autusm bandwagon. Never mind the facts, there's a scandalous narrative to perpetuate! It's frustrating to see a once great publication joining the gurning ranks of the outrage merchants, but it seems to be an inevitable path for every media organisation these days

WannaCry-slayer Marcus Hutchins 'built Kronos banking trojan' – FBI

Re: Apparently he does other thing for a living as well.

The indictment is a statement of charges. It doesn't contain evidence - indictments don't deal with evidence, but merely claims of unlawful activity. As such it's about as solid as a politician's promise.

Re: Also Wannacry?

He's a security consultant. It's quite literally his job to "investigate" malware. Unless you were a retail theft prevention consultant, your childhood escapade isn't remotely comparable.

Or - and I hate that the world has made me this cynical - wannacry was cooked up by the NSA or some other US TLA and now they're getting a biut of payback for it being shut down so quickly.

The incompetence, malice and pettiness of US spy orgs all have precedent.

Everything you never knew about mail: The Postal Museum opens

Nah, they've locked that away in a back room. The correspondence it was distributing from the other, saner universes was causing too much distress.

Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?

Re: "weaved"

That's an example of the constant regularisation of irregular verbs.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

Re: Morse Code

That's the RNs job.

Linus Torvalds may have damned systemd with faint praise

Too late, I notice what autocorrrupt has done...

To be fair, it dies have done positives.

It isn't written in nodejs, for instance.

The life and times of Surface, Microsoft's odds-defying fondleslab

Re: Admit it

Sometimes we deserve it.

Semiconductor-laced bunny eyedrops appear to nuke infections

Re: Resistance

Think of it as a human developing an immunity to being shredded by thousands of tiny knives.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: a septic tank is small

You can tell which is congress. Nobody with a brain would put a septic tank at the top of a hill.

Crashed RadioShack flogs off its IPv4 stash

Re: Whatever happened to the great migration to IPv6?

Hardly excess. Capitalism manages scarcity fairly well - and that's the problem here. IPV4 addresses have become scarce and are becoming more scarce by the day. This shuffling of a shrinking pool of addresses isn't providing any sort of excess, it's merely turning the car crash into a gentle stop.

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

Re: Maybe they are not fixing it because...

The perceived advantage is that a bunch if formerly separate components no longer function unless systemd is present, due to poettering et al rolling those components or similar functionality into systemd or infiltrating unnecessary dependencies within them. See udev, dns resolving and dbus for examples.

Re: Temporary Apple Fanboy Here

I'll drink to that.

Poettering's arrogance is the reason the "project" refuses to address it. He will insist that clear, replicable bugs aren't actually bugs and that people are just using it wrong.

We're past microsoft and into Apple territory now. "It just works", as long as you hold it right.

His view of the community in a nutshell..

Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query

The pushback against systemd is because it takes what were independent systems and rolls them into a tightly coupled monolith. The independence of those prior systems was their greatest strength - the more independent those systems are, the less opportunity there is to bring down the entire OS by crashing one of those systems.

systemd can claim to be modular all it wants; the fact that you can take down the entire OS via the init with a malicious dns response is a fucking travesty in this day and age. It's the sort of thing that even Windows left behind at the turn of the century.

Heaps of Windows 10 internal builds, private source code leak online

Re: I'm done with Windows.

That advice essentially amounts to "turn off the update service", followed by laborious manual checking every day. That is not in any way acceptable.

It came from space! Two-headed flatworm stuns scientists

Raed it again.

The nuclear launch button won't be pressed by a finger but by a bot

They made that joke because he'd already run. He's run on and off since the 90s.

Your job might be automated within 120 years, AI experts reckon

Re: The Jetsons had a solution

He also worked two hours a day, three days a week.

T-Mobile goes Apple/Google route by separating phone numbers and devices

Re: Nice!

Or they might announce that Google voice is just a beta and is being discontinued in a month.

Blighty's buying another 17 F-35s, confirms the American government

We didn't need it. The usmc top brass wanted a replacement for their version of the harrier, so we decided to build a carrier around that planned replacement rather than go back to regular carriers and much cheaper conventional airframes.

Basically everyone involved decided to be an idiot and pick the most retarded way of doing things, as usual.

Re: "Aren't we going as Lapdogs of the Yanks?"

Dogs are Haram. It's running cat licky now.

Vigorous tiny vibrations help our universe swell, say particle boffins

The fact that much of that post made sense to me has got me quite worried about my own sanity now.

Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border

Re: "Neither is the Single Market an invention of the EU"

Why must you insist on reading things that simply aren't there? If you can point to anything I wrote that plainly states "brexit is a response to unfair treatment of third-world countries" I'll give you a thousand pounds. Cash.

My argument was against the concept of the EU in general, not one of why the UK chose to leave in particular. Perhaps you should spend less time strawmanning everyone who disagrees with you and more time engaging with the actual arguments that have been made.

Re: "Neither is the Single Market an invention of the EU"

It's like talking to a bloody brick wall with you.

The UNECE was established in 1947 with the stated aim of encouraging economic integration between the nations of Europe, which was believed to be a way to prevent future war. Generally speaking, greater economic integration does reduce the likelihood of war between participants.

The ECSC was established in 1950, with the stated aim of preventing war through political integration, by ensuring that each member had to rely on other members for material goods.

I stated that the EEA/EFTA emerged from the stated goals and the efforts of the UNECE. This is a fact. All your muddying the water with when particular nations joined the ECE or switched from the EFTA to the EU, and putting words in my mouth doesn't change this fact.

I certainly agree that the EU is a more ambitious plan. It is ambitious to want to create and enforce resource interdependence between states. It is ambitious to increasingly bypass national legislatures and remove their ability to create their own laws over wider and wider swathes of policy. It is ambitious to create a protectionist border against the outside world while dumping internal surpluses at below market rates on north africa, driving local farmers and fishermen out of business and creating a huge immigration issue.

Ambitious is not synonymous with better.

Re: "Neither is the Single Market an invention of the EU"

I didn't say the eea came first, I said that the eu (then eec) coopted the stated goals of the unece, from which the eea/efta later emerged, and added an unnecessary element of political union.

None of what you say changes the simple facts: the eu and the single market are not synonymous and the eu is a protectionist organisation.

Re: "Anyway I thought this vote was to leave the EU, not leave customs union, nor single market"

The regulations that allow the common market to function are only a small fraction of the rules that govern the EU, and most of those regulations originate at the international level anyway. Neither is the Single Market an invention of the EU, but rather is part of the EEA agreement. The EU is simply a member of it along with all other EEA/EFTA members.

EFTA/EEA members can act independently in trade with other nations instead of having to abide by the common position of the EU and they also aren't bound by the decisions of the ECJ. There is a great deal of voluntary compliance with the ECJ, but the fact that it's voluntary is entirely the point: the EFTA/EEA is not politically bound to "ever closer union".

The EU and EEA were parallel developments, with the EEA being a development of the activities of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, a body devoted solely to abolishing trade barriers between european nations without any pretence of political integration. The EU coopted that aim, but the fact that we're now arguing about the return of trade barriers between the UK and the EU shows that it isn't really interested in facilitation of trade, but instead in the protection of internal markets from the outside world.

The EU was a mistake. It took what was a good idea - economic integration and trade facilitation through common standards - and mixed in trade protectionism and political integration within a common border. It is recreating at the edge of the Union the same protectionist attitude that the EEA was established to abolish.

Re: Norway is in EFTA and Schengen...

Those restrictions are imposed by Norway, not the EU. I don't doubt that the EU will impose some duty on personal imports from the UK, but I suspect that our government will be very keen in imposing strict restrictions and high duties on individual imports, both for the revenue and to satisfy the increasingly moralistic anti-pleasure tendencies of successive governments.

Re: Norway is in EFTA and Schengen...

Glad to see someone else got here with this.

Of course, if we join the EEA/EFTA as a transitional step while we sort out wherever it is we're going in the long term, we could actually make use of such a system. This is of course assuming that May and the Wallbangers are not nearly as dense as they currently appear to be and that, after the election, May will use her larger majority to reduce the power of the "hard brexit" morons, shoot Davis in the foot he has jammed in his mouth and fire Boris out of a cannon into the sun.

All is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits RC2

Re: KDE is fine without systemd

The KDE packages they use are derived from Debian, where a dependency exists between KDE and systemd through, amongst other things, systemd-logind, which manages users and userspace access to hardware. They're also implementing more dependencies on systemd's various integrated subsystems.

I imagine they'll eventually repackage KDE to remove the dependency, but that's going to be increasingly difficult as time passes. KDE is already moving to make use of more of systemd's "features".

@arnolf

If systemd only handled init, there wouldn't be an argument. The fact that it has swallowed logging, interprocess communication and device management, to name just three formerly independent subsystems, is precisely any there is so much hostility. Each new subsystem it absorbs is one less that can be replaced with alternatives and one more dependency on systemd that did not previously exist.

Devuan has non-defaulted the big desktops because they have dependencies on systemd thataren'teasilly resolved. Why in the hell should kde have deps on the init?

And I'm sure the fact that systemd rolled a couple of very important daemons (such as udev) into its monolith, forcing dependency on it where none previously existed, has absolutely nothing to do with its forced adoption.

Politics.

Chip design chap arrested for using photocopier

Re: Charges

Yes, lets get back to calling it yellow.

Just how screwed is IT at the Home Office?

Re: So how are these aging systems going to handle

The EU and the ECHR are separate entities. Quitting the EU would not mean that we are no longer bound by the ECHR.

Not that it matters much. Per Russia's behaviour, if a country is determined to ignore the ECHR then there isn't much that can be done about it.

M6 crowned crappiest motorway for 4G signal

Re: Fun fact.

Nah, it wasn't build to relieve the A1.

However, I will cop to it not being called M1 because it was the first, which was a silly claim now I think about it. It's called M1 because of where it originates.

Motorways and roads out of London are numbered clockwise from 1 in the north, dividing the areas around London (and including some other parts of the country) into 4 zones. The M1 was the northernmost motorway out of London, so it gets a 1. The M2 and A2 are named for where they poke out in zone 2. Roads in zone 1 and get the scheme 1n, so between the M1 and M2 you get the A11 and the M11, which go in completely different directions; the A10 which goes in roughly the same direction as the M11; and no M10, because it's now part of the A414 (originates in zone 4), but was originally an eastbound motorway spur from the bottom of the M1.

The rest of the country is also divided up into numbering zones. The crucial bit of information is that the zones are different for A roads and motorways.

So really it's just a coincidence. An apparent correlation that falls apart once you consider more evidence.