Posts by Steve McIntyre

Dowden out, Dorries in: Is UK data protection in safe hands?

Re: Just *stop it* Boris

It's not possible at this point - in the rush to force Brex*hit to happen, all of the Tories with any actual talent or skills were purged.

Cyber insurance model is broken, consider banning ransomware payments, says think tank

Re: Whither the gray hats?

"It seems like there is a ripe market for mercenary hacker bands who will hunt down ransomware scum and their ilk for retainer + bounty. Where are those guys?"

I've been wondering similarly for years about how to kill spam(mers).

UK watchdog fines two firms £270k for cold-calling 531,000 people who had opted out

Not enough spammers on fire

That's the level of deterrent that's needed here.

And just like that, Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan, Elastic?

Re: You can't put the genie back in the bottle

Absolutely this. Think very carefully about your choice of license.

Don't just follow the herd if you're going to care about how and when others can use and distribute your software. Equally, do *not* come up with your own special-snowflake license unless you have *very* good reasons...

Leaked memo suggests LG is thinking about quitting the smartphone biz in 2021

Still loving my G5, too

It's been reliable as anything for ~4 years, replaced the (trivially replaceable!) battery a couple of times. Nice features, good price.

Debian 'Bullseye' enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

Re: 17 more years to go until 2038 kills 32 bits for good

There are options to run a 64-bit OS on top of those even so - I made Debian installation work on Bay Trail machines for exactly this setup. Grab a multi-arch netinst image and you're good. It just needs a 32-bit version of Grub, then everything above that is 64-bit.

Re: Debian Bullseye 32 bit

> Being 32-bit reduces the memory usage significantly.

And probably significantly reduces performance and efficiency.

Running really old machines is actively bad for the planet, beyond a certain point.

Qualcomm pays $1.4bn to acquire ex-Apple and AMD Arm server chip engineers (and the biz they set up)

So YA promising-looking ARM server option is DOA

And wave goodbye to good upstream Linux integration etc.

:-(

Microsoft is designing its own Arm-based data-center server, PC chips – report

Re: AMD <3 ARM too

The A1100 was good, but AMD killed it a while back already and deleted the future roadmap. :-/

Arm has 11 months to hire 490 UK techies. Good thing there isn't a pandemic on. Or, say, Brexit

No part-timers???

Before I bailed on Arm earlier this year I personally knew several engineers working part-time there. I'm not aware of them having left since...

GRUB2, you're getting too bug for your boots: Config file buffer overflow is a boon for malware seeking to drill deeper into a system

Yes, as I wrote in the Debian advisory linked from the article. It may take a while for the dbx update to roll out, but it is qiute likely to cause trouble when it lands.

Admins beware! Microsoft gives heads-up for 'disruptive' changes to authentication in Office 365 email service

Started looking at developing support for this in offlineimap, but...

OAuth2 is an utter PITA to support. Every imlementation looks different.

Apple Mac Mini 2011

Typical Mac

Pointless, over-expensive hardware designed to appeal on looks alone.

Galaxy Tab still legal in the Netherlands

If you want something better...

then just go and buy a netbook/laptop already.

Apple patent disputes Xoom towards Motorola

-1 for the link to Mueller

He's consistently waging a negative campaign against Google and Android, and writers at the Reg and elsewhere are continuing to lap it up.

Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'

A patent system *cannot* work...

once the lawyers get involved. The initial idea for patents was great and worthy, but doomed to failure once the field was taken over by the IP lawyers. The only way forward is to remove the system altogether. Or shoot all the lawyers.

HP Envy 17 3D Core i7 laptop

Ugly

Big, heavy machine. Use it as a "laptop" and you'll burn yourself or cut off circulation. Go buy a desktop if you want something this big...

Most Adobe Reader installs are out of date

All Adobe's fault

PDF used to be a nice, simple format that you could trust. But that wasn't enough for Adobe to continue to sell new versions, so they started adding extra crap like Javascript. Guys, we DO NOT NEED scripting in documents we're sharing.

Now your options are to continue on the Adobe treadmill (spending more time downloading and installing updates than actually using the software), or to switch to something more secure instead.

Western Digital to offer Windows-based small storage

User limited?

For a storage appliance? That's the Windows effect for you *giggle*

NHS told: freeze all Microsoft spend

All together...

Troll troll troll troll...

Amazon swallows UK online bookseller

Time to find another bookseller then

I refuse to give money to Amazon.

abebooks.co.uk are being reasonable at the moment for me.

Samsung NS310 netbook

Crippled with Windows 7

And expensive too because of it. With 2GB or more of memory and a bigger resolution screen instead this would look more like a sane system.

Lenovo Thinkpad X220T 12.5in tablet PC

Exactly

I'm on my 4th Thinkpad X series laptop at the moment: all bought second-hand with my own money, run for a few years with Debian and then sold on still with more life left in them. I won't buy anything else.

Aside: nice to see Orlowski not trolling!

Pixmania users report scam-spam bombardment

Same here

I've specifically mentioned "failures in data protection" etc. when talking to them, but they're still sticking to the "contact the sender to unsubscribe from the mailing list" line. Numpties.

I'm about to contact the ICO to see what they can/will do.

Me too

I had exactly the same spam, again to a specific address given only to Pixmania. I've been pestering their "customer care" people about it, but no useful answers yet.

Websites should notify European users about privacy breaches

Pointless

The ICO will continue to do f*ck all regardless of what's in the regulations.

Facebook, HP, and OpenStack join Linux patent shield

Yawn - more crap from Mueller

Don't post quotes from him - he's utterly discredited...

UK is a closed source 'stronghold'

Naive, or deliberately trolling

"If you've paid for software and it doesn't work, then you shout down the phone till someone fixes it."

Or until you shout yourself hoarse, maybe. The vast majority of *all* software sucks. Whether open source or proprietary. There are big wins with the open stuff, though, including:

1. typically you've not just paid a fortune and locked yourself in to it;

2. even if *you* can't fix the code yourself, it's possible to find somebody else who *can* if the original vendor can't / won't / goes bust

But as you're yet another person who seems to claim / believe that open source == free in cost and therefore worthless, I doubt you'll even understand the argument here.

AT&T ends illicit handset tethering

Government needs to bring IT skills in-house

Nothing to do with IR35

Fix the problem, rather than finding a "way around it". IR35 just closed loopholes for lots of people who were taking the piss on the taxation front.

Spanish whispers on Microsoft and Nokia

Too late...

"some sort of MeeGo device that the company is obliged to launch as a toy to mollify the hackers and geeks"

It's already too late - the hackers and geeks have already written off Nokia. The N900 is a lovely phone (if just ~3 years too late), now Nokia are dead to us.

Patents do not protect small firms, says trade body

Spoken like someone with a vested interest...

Of course you're going to support them.

It's clear to the majority of the people actually working in technology industries that the patent system is broken. That's intentional, and down to the lawyers. Who benefits from it? Oh, the lawyers...

'Wear levelling' - a bedroom aid for multi-layer cell Flash

Some minor technical mistakes here...

I know it's not the main part of what you're saying here, but please try to be correct in what you're writing as background material too...

"NAND flash cells have a finite life, in that they only support a specific number of writes": Surely you mean "limited" here rather than "specific"?

"Flash is not byte-addressable, unlike disk drives and DRAM." Last time I checked, disks need to be read/written in (typically 512-byte or more recently 4096-byte) sectors.

Ten... sub-£50 budget MP3 players

Excellent timing

Was just looking at music players over the weekend for a Xmas present.

Fedora 14: haven for Ubuntu's homeless GNOMEs

Fedora fanboy?

"It also makes a nice contrast to Canonical's Ubuntu, which has a habit of taking Fedora's upstream contributions, wrapping them in a prettier package and stealing the limelight. There's nothing wrong with that, it's the nature of open source software - you can do what you want with it. It's just that Fedora rarely ends up getting the credit it deserves for making desktop Linux as usable as it has become over the years."

All of the Linux distros tend to work with upstream, providing new features and bugfixes. Your words make it sound like only Fedora are doing that.

But it said so in the manual

Clueless alert

Go on, justify why you think ext2 is a terrible hack.

Oracle to webify mobile Java against Android

Wrong

The Cortex series are v7. We haven't got to v9 yet!

As to what the original text *should* say, no idea...

You don't have to be crazy to work here

You're just making it worse for yourself

If you insist on looking for magic bullet solutions like webmin (like the "Microsoft Management Console"), you're never going to learn how to admin systems well. You're coming from the Windows side of the fence and complaining that because Linux and Solaris are different, they're inferior (e.g. "Clustering systems has traditionally been a special magic power reserved for those who type arcane things into a command line and mutter to themselves a lot.") As an example, using a web-based log-viewing tool will *always* leave you missing the power of the unix command line. Does it give you regular expression searching so that you can work out which external mail systems connected to yours in a given hour? Can you track which systems are trying to brute-force attack your sshd? Etc...

As an aside, if you've picked Linux spam filtering services that are using Sendmail then you've just made things harder for yourself. Try learning more about the problem space and you'd do much better.

Save us from our users

"all non-administrative users were set to the same default password"

What a great idea that is. So then any user can masquerade as any other. \o/

Netbooks Best Buys

The Windows tax

That's what happens when you ship a crap and expensive OS on small hardware...

True Utility Scarab and KeyTool micro multi-tools

Utilikey is a good option too

I've owned a couple of these:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/6d98/

and they happily go through airport security, looking close enough to a normal key that nobody looks twice.

Ten... Premium iPod Speakers

Waste of time and money

Hundreds of quid for something to sit an ipod on? WTF? Go buy some decent hifi kit...

OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly

"ubuntu-friendly" ??

gstreamer is a distro-neutral Free Software media stack. Why are you specifically linking it to Ubuntu here?

How Google became Microsoft: A decade of hits, misses and gaffes

More google bashing

I have to wonder sometimes - did somebody at Google run over the El Reg cat at some point??

Danger lurks in the clouds

Totally retarded device design

Depending on the network for everything will only work when the network is 100% available and 100% reliable. We're nowhere near that...

GE tries to refocus image of holographic storage

UDO wasn't holographic...

So it's not like holographic storage killed Plasmon. UDO was a conventional high-density blue laser optical disc, sharing some characteristics with BluRay.

EU bodies to discuss IP barriers to innovation

More/cheaper patents != more innovation

But the commission doesn't/won't realise that...

Debian 'Lenny' arrives: bigger, longer, searchable

Minor corrections

Just a couple of minor places where Gavin and I may have mis-communicated. I'll cut him some slack here - when we were on the phone last week, there was a snowball fight going on around me and therefore a lot of background noise! *grin*

The next Debian release will be Squeeze, again most likely due in another 18-24 months.

We've had DVDs for a while now, but Lenny is the first Debian release to come with official Blu-ray (BD) images. We *just* about manage to fit an architecture on one: i386 this time was just over 19GB.

Otherwise, thanks for the good reception. We're happy with the Lenny release and we're organising parties to celebrate this week. :-)

Linux distros lead jumps from Sun

Good luck to him

Barton and I spoke lots of times over the last few years - he's a nice guy and helped organise Sun sponsoring Debconf. We met up again at Debconf in Argentina this summer and had a good natter about Debian, Sun and life in general.

Good luck to him in his new job; I hope he enjoys it.

Google defends open source from 'poisonous people'

Very good philosophy

Lots of FLOSS projects see the "poisonous people" problem as they grow, and if you're not careful in controlling it then you risk your project being paralysed. Poisonous people are the ones who can suck all the life and fun out of a project, both wasting the time of useful existing developers in pointless discussions and discouraging new developers who don't know up-front which are the people they should be listening to / working with.