Posts by James Marten

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Re: Remove rc.local? NOOOO....

> I'm very troubled by the unusual system requirements (why should a program that just starts up daemons and processes, plus the other basic functions it's tentacled it's way into taking over, have any particular kernel requirement?

There's no malicious intent. At its lowest level systemd is a process manager. "Just starting up" and keeping track of Unix processes may seem easy, but keeping absolutely rigourous track of processes and their resources under all circumstances is very difficult, especially if it is desired to isolate their access to resources (CPU, filesystem, network etc) for security or performance. So systemd needs kernel features (cgroups, namespaces etc) to support that level of control.

DVSA seeks £95K digital chief to steer test booking system out of the ditch

Re: Booking slots

I've just booked a slot this very morning (tip: be online ready for when the booking system opens at 6am on Monday). The first step asked for the candidate's driving licence number, and that can't be changed afterwards other than by cancelling the test completely.

Also, getting there in the first place needed three runs through the most complicated CAPTCHA that I've ever encountered.

KDE Plasma 6.6 beta ships a login manager that won't log in without systemd

Re: Sorry...

Can't say exactly how either Debian or Gnome are working in this case, but what is probably happening is that the desktop (gnome-shell) needs to be able to play sounds - even if it is only a beep when an error box comes up. So removing the sound server makes gnome-shell unusable (by library dependencies), so apt decides to remove it. Removing gnome-shell makes all of its extensions and everything else that depends on it unusable, so apt decides to remove them too. But it can't be blamed for making a hard choice - either leave the desktop unusable, or remove it.

What it should do is to say "pipewire is an important package, removing it will break the desktop environment. Do you really want to remove it?". Or have an option to remove only a specific package without considering dependencies.

You could argue that you should be able to remove pipewire and use a simpler sound system such as ALSA, which is reasonable. But to be able to do that, gnome-shell and all the other desktop packages would need to be built to use ALSA for sound. Then they could be marked as not depending on pipewire, and you could removed it without breaking the desktop. But that is the decision of the Gnome programmers and Debian packagers.

You can do that with Gentoo and its USE flags, and you can also force remove a package without considering dependencies (even glibc if you really want to). With power comes responsibility, though.

KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates

Re: Man o man

> Valid point. However, some of this stuff isn't bugs. It is 100% intentional.

Including not only screenshots and screen sharing, but also global hotkeys and window-specific icons.

Actually, these are not impossible in Wayland. But, since only the compositor has access to the screen and peripherals, only the compositor can implement them. So a compositor has to provide an extension to the core Wayland protocol which means that, unless all the other compositors agree that the extension is worthwhile and implement it in exactly the same way, an application needing it will only work with that particular compositor.

Old X11 hands will remember the days when an application would require an X server extension, but it was touch and go as to whether the particular server that you were using (or wanted to access via a network) supported that extension. Welcome to the same with Wayland.

Invisible npm malware pulls a disappearing act – then nicks your tokens

Inevitable

The task used to be called "computer programming" - which, despite all the tedium in actually writing code to do things that had probably been done many times before, needed an understanding not only of the language but also the underlying concepts.

Now that skill has been replaced with choosing prewritten packages, gluing them together with code copy-and-pasted from Stack Overflow, and asking AI to polish it into a finished product. With a human probably having looked at less than a tenth of the code, if that.

Yes, a finished product drops out in the end - which relies on the integrity and security of the black boxes being stuck together. Sadly, this instance (as well as many others) demonstrates that it is not possible to assure that, or even to know where to start checking.

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

What happens to the applications?

Meaning those which currently use GTK for the user interface - Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Inkscape and many more. Plus LibreOffice which implements its own toolkit, which again currently supports X11 only. Assuming that GTK 5 follows through on the threat to become Wayland-only, what happens to those applications on BSD or for those that don't want to run Wayland, for whatever reason?

Yes, that time is a long way away, but it will happen.

X11 security

@TrevorH You may well be right, but in the real world: (a) network servers and cloud systems will almost certainly be running headless without X11 anyway, and (b) desktop systems are typically configured to not have any access to the X server from the internet. So even if there are decades old vulnerabilities in X11 (which I can well believe), the opportunity to exploit them will be very small - not worth a typical user worrying about.

If there have ever been any widespread exploited X11 vulnerabilities out there, then I'd be happy to be corrected.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

You can't hurry, love

Reminds me of a series of interviews with the then current Formula 1 racing drivers, that I remember reading back in the 1980s. All of them, almost without exception, said that they liked Phil Collins.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: You should never need to reboot a machine.

> While init/systemd (PID 1) can't be killed, there is no reason a well designed one couldn't include an option to exec the updated version.

Isn't that what systemctl daemon-reexec does? The restarted systemd still continues as PID 1, though.

Not sure whether this is possible with classic SysV init.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Maybe it is self aware

I'm not convinced that Copilot will ever be useful, whatever the activation key is.

It came together with the latest W10 update, so since it was there staring at me the first thing that I asked it was "How do I uninstall Copilot".

Its answer was "Sorry, I can't answer that right now, try again later".

So I uninstalled it anyway.

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

> Dick Pountain's review describes the Master as a soaped up Beeb and it certainly wasn't that.

Well, it was really - enhanced processor but still 6502 family, more RAM using the sideways technology that had previously been available with third party addons, floppy disc interface as standard, bigger OS and extended BASIC. IIRC the price on release for the Master 128 was £500, compared to £400 for the BBC B.

Nice hardware, but it was only a stopgap.

My grand plan for Acorn world domination

...was to keep the excellent bits of RiscOS that everybody liked - the GUI and desktop - and reimplement them on top of a Linux or BSD kernel and userland. Put all of their development effort into compatibility libraries, ARM emulation, runtime support, etc to make reuse or porting of applications as easy as possible. So getting SMP, networking, hardware drivers and all the rest for free, as well as being able to run on commodity hardware. Sadly nobody took up the challenge.

Re: Some features i would like today

> The metadata on RiscOS was IIRC a 32bit ID. 16bit assigned to the software vendor and a 16but field for them to use internally. Rather like MAC addresses

Not exactly for file metadata - maybe you're thinking of SWI (system call) numbers, which were allocated by Acorn in blocks with a vendor prefix.

File metadata was the same as on the BBC, two 32 bit fields for load and execute addresses. Then in RiscOS they were repurposed to contain a 12-bit file type and the rest used for the file modification time (there was only one timestamp). The file type was again allocated centrally by Acorn. Applications which needed MIME or had to interpret file extensions from other systems needed to manage them themselves, there was no OS-level file type database.

Yes, there were a lot of numbers allocated by Acorn. No, that would never work today.

Microsoft tests ‘Suggested Actions’ in Windows 11. Insiders: Can we turn it off?

Nothing new

Sounds very much like Klipper, the clipboard utility that KDE had in 2002. It can be configured to pop up a list of actions whenever a selection is made, which could be annoying - but it can be made less obtrusive by turning the automatic popup off and summoning it with a hotkey instead. And it will only give you the actions that you have configured - no "suggestions" from "selected partners", no network access at all.

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

UI coding isn't that bad

Well, I like doing it anyway. Because it's satisfying to see the results - a GUI which looks good, works consistently and is responsive. Obviously a good GUI toolkit helps (and, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I'm going to mention Qt).

Windows Server to require TPM2.0 and Secure boot by default in future release

This year, Windows Server

Within five years, Windows 10.

Remember, you read it here first.

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

Re: He's right

Trying to build a Qt 2 (last release in 2001) or even a Qt 3 (last release in 2004) project on any current system? I'd be surprised if even the Qt library would compile, let alone the project. Having said that, Qt 1 has indeed been ported and will build today.

But, assuming that you could get Qt built, MOC and the other tools were included by default so there should be no need to find them separately.

Microsoft sets the date for Fall Creators Update

Most. Tedious. Upgrade. Ever.

Let's hope they can make the installation happen either faster, or at least not need so much disc space.

Tried upgrading an Asus netbook with only a 32G SSD, but otherwise adequate performance, with the previous Creators Update. Wait for Windows Update to download and then run the installer - sorry, needs 8Gb space on C: (there was about 4G available), with no way to use space on another drive.

Download the media creation tool and the appropriate update image, prepare a USB stick, plug this in and run the setup program. No, still needs 8Gb spare space, but at least with the option of using another drive. Plug in a second USB stick and tell it to use that. So the upgrade process starts.

Four days later... the progress has reached 9%. With the disc and USB drive lights flashing away, so obviously not hung.

Another day later... reboots back to the original installation, "Sorry, the upgrade failed".

Try again. Uninstall antivirus, Chrome, Office 365... now enough space. Run the USB upgrader again, which thankfully only takes overnight and succeeds. Then reinstall everything.

Now looking forward to having to do the same in a few months' time...

HP Inc wireless mouse can be spoofed

Everything has to be wireless

Even headphones, even charging. Soon, even displays.

And this is the inevitable outcome of it - if it's not a security problem, then there are the occasions where the connection simply doesn't work, or drops out if you move into the wrong position, or is too slow to use. There are indeed situations where there is no alternative, but for a mouse (which by its very nature has to be used in close proximity to the computer) or a fixed network link, what exactly is the problem with a traditional piece of copper wire?

'At least I can walk away with my dignity' – Streetmap founder after Google lawsuit loss

Re: I'm in two minds

There's no vindictiveness in the screenshot - just an example of someone not knowing even the basics of web searching (which applies not just to Google, but any other). Just sticking "streetmap" on the end of a search term is too generic a word to get to Streetmap - you can't blame Google for suggesting the correction, and what should Google do with that search coming from outside the UK?

Do the search the right way: either go to to or bookmark streetmap.co.uk and search from there, which will get results from Streetmap and only that. Or, if you really must use Google as a proxy searcher for another site, then search for "aspley guise site:streetmap.co.uk" and Streetmap's result will come up first.

Look back a few years in these forums for the "facebook login" thread for another example of the folly of this.

I'm in two minds

It's not good that it is difficult for anyone else to compete against Google, even if they are not actively doing anything evil - and Google has done nothing in this case, it's just that Streetmap wasn't as good.

But Google is a company just like any other, albeit a big one with lots of products and services, and can't be blamed for promoting their own products. To anyone who says "but that isn't fair" - if you go to the M&S website and search for a pair of trousers, would you expect them to also show search results from Burtons and Top Man in the interest of fairness? And give them equal weighting in the results? Thought not.

Soon only Ticketmaster will rip you off: Concert scalper bots face US ban

The artists could fix the problem

If they really wanted to, of course. Refuse to play at any venue that sells tickets exclusively through any company that also owns or controls a ticket reselling website, or allows its tickets to be sold secondhand - unless they can only be sold at face value. They may lose out on some lucrative shows in the short term, but so do the venues - and as soon as one complies, they will all have to...

Retiring IETF veteran warns: Stop adding so many damn protocols

We're already there

Take a look at either /etc/services or /etc/protocols on a typical Unix system. How many of the ports/protocols listed there (a) have you ever heard of, or (b) will ever be seen on a typical LAN or over the Internet?

Phishing fraudsters pose as UK bank social media types

InstaWhatsTwitFace != Support

Yes, you or I would never go to social media for banking help. But when the banks themseves (and everyone else besides, even the government and police) are pushing social media as a primary means of communication, then who can blame them?

Everything bad in the world can be traced to crap Wi-Fi

Icon says it all

Wifi. The single most unreliable technology that has ever been successfully marketed to consumers.

Oracle kicks Amazon after Glacier download bill shock

Sometimes physical storage is the best after all

The downside of "the cloud".

64Gb SD cards (big enough to take his entire CD collection) are about £20 today - granted that cards were smaller and prices higher in 2012, but it's still a one time purchase. Get 3 or 4 of those, which will allow for multiple offsite copies in different locations including a bank safe deposit box (probably the safest physical storage available). Keep one at home for retrievals (storage cost = zero, data volume = unlimited).

Pakistan URINE STORM: Google Maps chokes off user editing

This isn't good

Just hoping that those silly people will not now turn their attention to OpenStreetMap.

Skype worm chats up victims - then holds PCs to ransom

The one thing that makes scams like this work is...

@ Amazing Stace:

> Still your picture might be in the archive so you open it and it contains an executable... so you run the executable and... sorry WHO is falling for this?

The same people who have been falling for it ever since some demented Microsoft person thought that hiding file extensions by default in XP was a good idea. It took the malware world about 2 nanoseconds from then to start using double extensions to disguise executables... and it is still the default, and the trick is still working, today.

UK.gov squatting on £1bn IPv4 motherlode

Already answered

I was curious about this some time ago (and also 25.0.0.0 which the MoD owns). Responses at

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/internet_protocol_ipv4_address_a

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/internet_protocol_ipv4_address_a_2

GM snatchback of $10m Facebook ad cash = amateur move

This is my personal campaign to make FB advertising pointless. For every ad that appears:

- Click on the X to hide it

- If the option is there, click "Hide all from <company>"

- If asked "What didn't you like about this ad?", click "Sexually explicit"

I reckon that, if enough people do this, all of the ads will eventually disappear...

After all, Paris doesn't need to advertise.

Carriers, prepare to bleed: EU pops a cap on data roaming

Text prices

7p per text... that's a lot less than most PAYG plans' charge for sending a domestic text. Will they have to come down also?

GiffGaff goes titsup again in 'leccy cable gaffe

My blood is boiling

Absolutely disgusted with the outage - how can anyone possibly expect to carry on living without a mobile phone service for A WHOLE EIGHT HOURS!!!!! If they don't promptly and gladly pay me and every other customer back the 10p compensation that we are due, I'm going to find another provider that has the same nationwide coverage, minutes, free 0800 calls and unlimited texts/data for only £10 per month.

Oh, hang on a minute - there's a problem with that...

Encyclopaedia Britannica - Ah, the memories

Your idea is too late

> My plan? I’m going to print off parts of Wikipedia, put them in binders, and sell them at state fairs and school events.

Already being done on a grand scale - just search for "Betascript" (publisher) on Amazon. First hit is for a £66 reprint of a few Wikipedia articles, and there are thousands of such titles available.

A serious ripoff, but unfortunately not illegal and neither against Wikipedia's T&Cs.

Fragged, fragged and thrice fragged! 20 years of id Software’s Doom

Still fragging

Totally agree with your enthusiasm for this classic game. The graphics and movement may be primitive compared with today's technology, but the gameplay is still as good as anything that has appeared since. I still play it regularly and have not tired of it yet - how many gamers will still be playing COD:MW3 twenty years from now?

By the way, there appears to be an Android version available too.

Microsoft pounces as Mozilla shuns enterprise

Daft

Even if there really are 2m downloads per day from individual users (and I'm sure that does not equate to 2m new Firefox users per day), 500k users in a large enterprise is not to be sneezed at and surely ought to be a good marketing point for Mozilla. Sadly it seems that one of them, at least, don't want that.

I'd like to propose Marten's Law: "Any open source or community project, whatever its organizational structure, always has at least one person designated as official foot-shooter".

Congratulations to Asa Dotzler, you're it.

Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet

@Duncan Macdonald

Probably Oracle's desire to totally eliminate any traces of the-company-formerly-known-as-Sun from everything that is under their control. This is what usually happens when a company gets taken over, the management would probably say "to build loyalty". The small outfit that I joined just before it was taken over by Sun had to quickly eliminate all traces of its former name, by order from the top. But their former domain name is now registered to myself - it's not valuable, but just good to keep for sentimental reasons.

UK biz prejudiced against public sector staff

Even if one is just as bad as the other...

...the public should be entitled to expect a *far higher* standard of service from the public sector as from a private company. Why? - because in most cases the public sector enjoys the advantage of a legal compulsion to use their services, or to pay money for them even if you don't use them at all.

If you don't like the way that a particular bank or its management works, for example, there is no compulsion to have an account at that bank - or at any bank at all. Same for a supermarket, oil company or airline. But if you think that your local council or HMRC are worthless and inefficient, or its chief is paid too much, that's tough - there is no option but to continue to stump up your tax, under penalties up to and including prison. Backed up with infinite legal powers which will be used against you with no hestitation.

The public sector needs to realise who, and by what means, pays its wages.

Just one example...

I don't need to do any more than point to the story adjacent to this one on your front page:

"Passport office loses applications"

European child abuse image law a step closer

Transparent?

"...such blocks must use transparent procedures, inform users of the reason for the block and allow an appeals process"

Does that mean that the IWF block list will be visible (i.e. not secret as at present) then?

IANA address space running on empty

Really?

Take a look at http://xkcd.com/195 - a few years old, admittedly. Even if the unallocated space shown there has now all gone, much of the top left quarter is taken up by big organisations who are probably behind NAT by now, using a handful of addresses within their space. That accounts for nearly a billion addresses.

This point has been brought up before, with someone pointing out that these were allocated in the early days of the Internet, with no formal agreement, and there is no legal means for the allocations to be taken away or revisited. But something has to be done - and if it's a choice between a bit of work for their IT departments, or every ISP customer worldwide (home and business) having to upgrade to an IPv6 router, then I know which option I'd like to see happen.

MP urges Parliament to reform FOI laws

"Media companies"

Obviously intended to cover Murdoch and his empire, but by what justification? He may well be a powerful and immoral oligarch, but none of that has any "formal status" in law and, as far as I´m aware, receives no money from the taxpayer.

Even if there were grounds for including his media organisations under FOI, most of the information they handle would fall under the "journalism" exemption anyway. So what would be the point?

Nipper's naked arse provokes Street View outrage

"they should be checking every image before it goes up"

Right... now, just how many millions of images have been taken for StreetView? And you think Google should human-check each one?

World of Google zombies mistake news story for Facebook

Sorry, the problem *is* with the users

OK, so there are two text boxes in the browser, one that contains constantly changing gibberish and one into which you can type things and relevant links will appear. But that's still not an excuse for not knowing the difference between them, or when it is appropriate to use each one.

Non-IT analogy: the simplest sort of car to drive has two pedals, one to go faster and one to slow down. You wouldn't let somebody out on the road who didn't know the difference between these two pedals, or always used one and not the other because it was the one they were most familiar with and didn't know what the other one was for.

ROFL... the best bit of all is

The "Facebook Admin" who wrote "Please post your username and password here in the comments, and we will activate the normal Facebook for you". And plenty did. Some even posted (parts of) credit card numbers.

(No, I haven't tried any of them to see if they really work)

(Back) into The Valley

Obscure language alert

There wasn't anything running a decent enough BASIC at Uni when this came out. So me and a friend converted the whole thing to BCPL, running on a PDP-11 with a VT100 terminal. I still have the listing - it just needs scanning and OCRing before starting to search for something that will run BCPL today.

Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

IE6

It's not just corporations that can't move on from IE6. My SO won't even consider moving on because of the IE7 user interface; unfortunately my efforts to point out that the browser is more than just the UI and IE6 has more security holes that the proverbial Swiss cheese are pointless. Paradoxically, Firefox's UI is more similar to IE6 than IE7, but she still won't consider FF because "I can't get used to it".

IE6 + Internet = computer suicide (even with antivirus, antispyware, antiadware, linkscanner, firewall and all the rest).

Fortunately my own computer doesn't have this problem, as the icon shows.

Brown to Sugar: 'You're hired'

Er, hasn't Alan Sugar already been knighted

in 2000?

Plod hopes Bluetooth messages will stem drinking

Pointless

Or about as pointful as health warnings on cigarette packets, or "Please drive carefully" signs at the entrance to a village. Those sensible enough to heed the messages will drink reasonably, not smoke or drive carefully without having to be told, while the others will carry on regardless.

IWF pulls Wikipedia from child porn blacklist

@ "End of Part One..."

> The real question we should be asking is if Mary Whitehouse has a broadband connection

Since she (thankfully, IMHO) died in 2001, it's most likely that the answer is "no".

Swiss strap-on jetplane ace flies Channel

@Simon

> If I tried it, I would only get so far until I generated enough Poo ballast

> to make me too heavy to fly

Er, no you wouldn't... because your overall weight wouldn't change, no matter what comes out. The aerodynamics might, though.