Posts by Lennart Sorensen

Feds gut host behind pig butchering scams that bilked $200M from Americans

So the numbers seem to indicate the total number of victims at about 1000. I guess that is why you see so many clearly dumb scams that you ignore because they are filtering out all but the most gullible people who will believe anything. They only need a few lucrative targets to make it all worthwhile and anyone who notices anything wrong isn't worth spending time on. The typos and other errors are not mistakes, they are there on purpose. If you notice them, you are not a worthwhile target.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Re: At last

Except it is clearly not a battery given the talk of byproducts and needing fuel. Sounds more like an alternative to hydrogen fuel cells, not batteries.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

So if someone ran on a promise of "All the black people should be locked up" and got 51% of the votes they should then proceed to lock up all the black people because that is the mandate? Really?

I don't think the world is quite as simple and black and white as you seem to think it is.

Re: "Should the existence of a large standing army remove the necessity of a militia"

Or the Kent State Massacre in 1970 where the national guard killed 4 students.

AmigaOS updated in 2025 for some reason

To some of us, 68k amiga is the only amiga, and the powerpc and x86 is not amiga. So 3.2 is the only one that matters.

Other people have different ideas of what amiga is these days, and hence different OSs work for their needs.

OneFileLinux: A tiny recovery distro that fits snugly in your EFI system partition

Re: Kernel recompiles

Sure it could be automated. But no one has, because it serves no purpose to do it. It is a waste of time to compile a kernel on all sorts of machines. The generic ones run just as well because the kernel developers are fortunately a lot smarter about these things than random users. Modules are just as fast as built in and you can change hardware easily using new drivers and when an update is ready you just have to install it, without wasting time (and other resources) compiling a kernel for no benefit. The kernel is perfectly capable of selecting optimized versions of routines where it matters, and for the rest you don't bother.

We don't have to go back to the dumb old days (Remember windows 95 needed a reboot to apply any network settings? Wow was that ever dumb. Computers in the past were generally a lot dumber than today).

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Well we could use ECMAScript like the standard is called, or go back the LiveScript as it was named before someone decided Java looked like the cool new thing and decided they needed to get in on that.

Or if we want to stick to .js I guess we could call it jokescript or jerkscript (in honour of Oracle of course).

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

The voltage switch was ALWAYS accessible on the back of the power supply. Power supply makers don't want you opening the power supply and since there is a convenient bit of metal next to where the power cord goes, that is where the switch went. On the not cheap systems, the power supply was able to switch automatically.

New Zealand minister OKs Kim Dotcom extradition to US

Re: Paying Trump for a release

Are you suggesting someone with a history of not paying their bills and making promises that they could never hope to meet might be making false promises to someone who is always lying? That sounds too far fetched.

Windows Patch Tuesday update might send a user to the BitLocker recovery screen

Crowdstrike runs in windows, linux and macos, and protects the applications from attacks, not just the OS. So you can't blame Microsoft for that. Apparently Microsoft wanted things like crowdstrike to run in user space and use an API to ask the OS for the things it needs, but since Defender doesn't do that, and the EU said they must provide 3rd party software the same access as their own, crowdstrike decided it wanted to use kernel mode too. And then they apparently don't write particularly safe code or do particularly good testing at crowdstrike.

PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11

alt+space is way too useful. No one gets to replace that no matter how good the tool might be.

How low can you go: Tesla's US market share dips below 50% for the first time

Re: There's more to Tesla than cars

Of course in terms of patents and research into EVs (and hybrids which are EVs with extra complications), Toyota has some 4 to 5 times as much as Tesla. Right now they think hybrids still make more sense, but once the cost of battery materials improve (and they are dropping fast lately) and they get their solid state battery designs into production (which they seem to think can happen in the next couple of years), Toyota will be showing up with EVs, but not until they think they make sense. Tesla has done a lot to get the EV market going, but not a while lot new in the last number of years. FSD isn't working yet, and I doubt it ever will (certainly many experts don't[ think it will work the way Tesla is trying to do it), no matter how often Elon promises it is going to be all done next year, it is after all a lot harder than he thinks, because he doesn't actually have a clue how to make it work, he just dreams big. Panasonic has more patents and research than Tesla, and while they were working with Tesla on the battery factory, they parted ways, probably because Panasonic decided Tesla wasn't possible to work with.

So yes Tesla has done well, but I don't expect them to play a large part in the EV market in 10 or 20 years. They just don't know how to make good cars and aren't looking at what lessons others have learned in the past, and making all the mistakes themselves, including some new ones (in the case of the idiotic design of the cybertruck, which of course can never be sold in any part of the world where safety is considered). There are better motors out there than Tesla has (Koenigsegg has one that is insane, but I suspect so is the price for now). Much better batteries too, and better ones than that on the way. Just about anyone else has better build quality, better service (especially if you need parts, which Tesla isn't fans of selling to anyone, so repair costs are high and hence insurance costs are high). Definitely there are other car companies doing better self driving work, just way less hyped up, and not promising things they can't deliver. The future for EVs looks promising and bright, I just don't think Tesla is going to keep up and be part of it in the long term.

I definitely won't be buying Tesla stock, nor would I consider shorting it, I would just not be involved and just watch the show. Nor will I buy a Tesla car, although I sure do expect to buy some EV within a couple of years. For now hybrid will have to do until they are ready.

Re: I must admit

Well I just read that Ferrari is going to offer a subscription plan where you pay some $7500 per year for battery support and every few years they will out a new more modern battery in the car to keep it up to date. I guess for a Ferrari owner that sounds like a decent deal.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: Plan 256, from the depths of heck.

I have not seen anything in systemd that looks like it is copying windows. Far from it.

Re: what could possibly go wrong

Well sudo takes such input and sudo is a suid binary. That is actually quite scary. Having a well defined interface between run0 and init actually sounds simpler to get right than what sudo does. systemd seems to have done a pretty good job at defining its interfaces so far, so my initial thought of "oh no, not again" is actually quickly changing to "that just might be a really good idea when I think about the details".

Re: How can the rot be stopped?

No thanks. I have tried those. I am not putting up with that obsolete crap. I don't have the patience. I once thought maybe if Debian ever got the a BSD kernel with the regular Debian user space port finished that would be usable, but at this point, even that has no interest anymore.

systemd definitely makes debugging startup problems so much easier. It actually logs all output of all the services you run. No other init system ever did that. And it monitors the things it runs. Not sure any of the others did that either. So yes any actual competitor has a very high bar to beat to have a chance.

Much as I absolutely despise pulseaudio and think systemd does seem to have some feature creep problems, I unfortunately have to admit that systemd does handle running systems much better than any of the other systems we have had. And my first thought to replacing sudo is "Why would systemd be better?" and then I think about it and realize that having a message protocol to init that is already running as root rather than suid binaries just might actually be safer. Damn. He might have a point. I definitely don't want to go back to before systemd anymore. Process monitoring and launching really should be done together. It is the sensible way to do it.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund aims to zap Musk's monster Tesla pay deal

Re: Take my cars and go home

At least at space-x they managed to figure out how to do that and it seems to be working great. Poor twitter didn't have a chance to get ready.

Microsoft smartens up Edge for Business with screenshot blocking, logo branding, more

So does mean you can't share Edge on a teams meeting anymore? Or if you can, does teams now prevent other users from taking screen shots of the meeting presentation if Edge is being shown?

Why do I have a feeling this isn't actually going to do what Microsoft claims at all.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

In Canada the right of way for boats is that the right of way is given the the less maneuverable vessel. A container ship in a channel hence has the right of way over a moron in a sail boat. So overall it works out something like powerboats (including jetskies) have to give way to sailboats and canoes and kayaks, which have to give way to freighters and ferries, and everyone has to give way to the fire fighting boats.

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

I always go by the system that cylindrical tracks are disks and spiral tracks are discs. No idea if that fits any reality other than in my head, but it works for floppy disks, hard disks, optical discs (like compact disc and digital video disc and such) and the other ones I can think of.

Ellison's exemplar SAP-to-Oracle region rules out ditching Oracle

Does any setup involving Oracle actually ever work? I have seen lots of articles over the years of huge failures with the system never doing what people wanted it to do. I have seen a few attempts myself (One company I worked at had a pile of people working on doing an Oracle setup for a couple of years with no end in sight when I left). Does it actually ever work as promised?

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Re: Almost alternate reality...

As far as I remember the NT4 CD had x86, alpha, mips and powerpc on it.

Re: Yup - thems were the days. When the news articles had to explain what viruses and worms were

Every windows version is little endian. The Alpha was always little endian, and the MIPS and powerpc versions ran the CPU in little endian mode too. Windows source code can not work on big endian. The code is simply not designed to handle that.

The SGI workstations running windows were x86 based, not MIPS, although they were not compatible with standard PCs, they had their own weird firmware. Well the first two models at least. Later ones were just standard PCs.

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Re: Way to go : Tan

I gave up on vitualbox. The random packet corruptions on the virtual network interface that has been going on for years if reports are anything to go by just doesn't work for me. I need it to work reliably all the time. Having an image fail to install 10% of the time because virtualbox corrupted a packet is not acceptable. KVM on the other hand works great and has more features too.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Re: I was amazed…

They are explicitly not supposed to use HDMI version on cables because version does not imply the speed. They have names for each speed that cables are supposed to use and I know mine do, at least on the packaging, unfortunately not always on the cable itself.

Amazon calls off $1.7 billion iRobot buy, blames regulators

My first thought is "What does iRobot do that needs 1000 employees?" Does that include manufacturing or is that outsourced? It certainly shouldn't take too many engineers to develop the few robot vacuum models they have.

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

Re: boot mbr etc

All format /s did was do format, then do sys. You could have just run sys c: and had it bootable without formatting it again. Fixing booting on dos based systems was really very easy.

Re: defrag.exe no /FORCE:Y switch?

Yeah I find it hard to believe too. If the disk doesn't look like FAT, doesn't a partition type of fat, I don't think any dos boot disk would even let you see the partition, never mind running any defrag on it.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: dollars over sense

The money would last longer than the way he is currently using it.

OpenCart owner turns air blue after researcher discloses serious vuln

More like not a thought at all. It's "safe enough" after all. At least according to someone that doesn't actually understand security.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

How do slanted characters become a disaster?

AMD SEV OMG: Trusted execution in VMs undone by bad hypervisors' cache meddling

Re: "attacker is running a malicious hypervisor"

You mean there are people who actually believed this stuff would work and are using it under that impression? And paying extra for it?

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: Plus ca change....

Well CGA, EGA,Tokenring, atari/commodore/sega/etc joystick users and many others might disagree about what that connector is for. Serial only started using it later on, so I think serial is the one that should have picked something else. I certainly do not assume it is a serial port on the machines I have around.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Oh yes I remember SLS (installed it in 1992 I think it was, back when the kernel version was 0.97patchlevel who knows what) and then later slackware which did improve a bit on SLS but not a hell of a lot. Eventually found redhat and realized you could do package management much better than SLS (and hence slackware) had done and stuck with that until the bugs drove me nuts and I switched to Debian which actually had even better package design and management than redhat, and haven't found anything better yet so that's what I am sticking with for now. I never could understand why anyone would enjoy putting up with the pathetic design of slackware (or any of the BSDs for that matter, that user space and packaging system is just horrible to use).

At least we have choices.

And I do use systemd and want to use it these days because it turns out it really is a much better way to handle init even if it is totally different than what we had before. It actually solved problems the other init systems never could because they were all that sad unfortunately.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: No good people, not good!

Well the Debian package format has always been far better than the mess that is rpm, and Debian's updater certainly has reliably done in place upgrades far var longer than Red Hat has ever managed to do that. That was the main reason I moved to Debian from Red Hat about 25 years ago now. Yum and dnf and whatever else RedHat has added since hasn't done anything to fix that rpm is just not a well designed package format, and the source packages are even worse.

Microsoft dabbles in self-repair with Surface devices now DIY-friendlier

Re: EOL of Windows 10

If they really cared they would just drop the artificial hardware requirements in windows 11. My 11 year old thinkpad is running insider builds of windows 11, and has bee for years, and has never had an issue. Microsoft offered to install it back before they added the artificial requirements, and of course it installed fine, and still does. They don't have to continue to support windows 10, they can just let all the machines switch to 11 instead. Not a problem except they decided to make it one.

Re: Malicious compliance?

Still sounds better than the apple program here you have to supply serial numbers and such to even get parts for a device. Certainly under the apple program a repair shop can't buy and stock parts to provide quick service, they would have to get your device, order parts from apple, wait for them, then repair the device. Totally useless, but of course that's how Apple wants it to be. It has to sound like they are doing something while not actually doing it.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

Seems alive and well to me. I see quite a few "HD Radio" stations in the Toronto area at least, with multiple channels on a single frequency to pick from. The radio in my 2012 Prius V has no problem using it.

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

Re: Not sure it is such a complex task...

Well sure for single user to single user you could use pgp, although you need to handle the secure key exchange and authentication first.

Given many of the chat systems support groups, that gets way more complicated.

Different systems have different features after all. Does everyone have to implement all the features or do services have to drop features that are not universally supported?

And if you change the protocol, you just broke compatibility with all the existing clients on that service. So much for making things more interoperable when you start by breaking everyone.

Re: Reminds me of the early 2000's...

Sure but that still meant you had to sign up to all the services, it just provided one convenient client to manage all of them at once. That's easy.

What this law wants to do is make users of different services somehow (not sure by which kind of magic it should happen) talk to each other without signing up for all the different services.

Tesla hits the brakes on rollout of Full Self-Driving code to new users

Re: Umm..?

They can't push an update they don't have. First they have to fix it. Given what they have managed to create so far, how long do you think that will take them?

Americans have the right to livestream police traffic stops … probably

It does seem a lot of the police believe the oath means "to server and protect the police" rather than "to serve and protect the public".

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: Am I being Dense?

Fortunately since DNS uses IDN encoding for any non ascii domains, and IDN encodes UTF using ascii, it will in fact still be ascii in the request and hence it will work. The domain name will in fact be even longer and more effective in that case due to the encoding.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

I loved the Amiga OS (still like it although it is of course not useful to actually use anymore).

I had no love for BeOS. I see no resemblance at all.

Re: If only Jean-Louis Gassée had not over-played his hand..

Lucky for Apple that they went with NextStep instead or they would not be around anymore. Apple needed a modern OS to move forward, and BeOS wasn't a modern OS. Designing a new OS without security and multiuser in mind was idiotic when it was already well known how to do that. Unix had been doing it for decades, Windows NT was doing it (at least Microsoft realized that designing a new system from scratch with some API compatibility as the way forward for them), there was no excuse for BeOS to do what they did. They only fixed MacOS's lack of SMP and preemptive multitasking, without fixing the other major flaws it had. Adding multimedia support on top of any good OS is no big deal. Designing your OS around it at the expense of security and multiuser flexibility (you know a computer could be used by more than one person in a house) was just dumb.

I remember using the BeBOX, with it's nifty cpu meters on the front for the two PPC603e chips. The GUI was terrible (those title bars that were not the full width of the windows looked dumb, and put buttons in places you didn't expect them to be). Eventually tried to put linux on it instead to do something useful with a dual cpu machine, but it was never very well supported and much faster multicore x86 machines became available not too long after.

Remember two wrongs don't make a right.