Posts by Sam Liddicott

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Can have it both ways

Hellwig doesn't want the code in his repo because he doesn't want to maintain it.

He also doesn't want it outside of his repo where somebody else will maintain it.

He says it makes kernel code harder to maintain.

The whole reason people are using rust in the kernel is because it makes also makes some kernel code easier to maintain.

If Linus doesn't move for acceptance then we will have an egcs situation - a separate kernel tree will be maintained and we will see which one the distros take.

Linus is smart enough to see that, is also smart enough to see the technical benefits.

Hellwig needs to think less about what his preferences and more about where the kernel is going to be in 10 years regardless of his position.

There are going to be rust kernels. He can influence whether or not they are called Linux.

But at least one of them will be based on Linux.

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

Re: this better be in the kernel

But who gave it the 9.9? Not the "alarmist" - he used the Redhat engineer assessment of 9.9 to get wider attention without which the developers were not taking it seriously.

Another bug stricken from the TLAs list of universal exploits.

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

Re: Another advantage

Do you use "stty rows" and "stty cols" to tell your serial session your screen size?

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Make it temporary

There is no better way to make a file temporary than deleting it.

Post-condition satisfied, all temporary files deleted

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

I now realise he meant the From: header and not the From header.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: The glory days of UK IT

Protecting the cartel?

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

NME

If "Apache" is a Zuni word meaning "enemy" why not call it the NME web server?

https://www.nps.gov/articles/apache.htm#:~:text=The%20Nde%20people%20refer%20to,%2C%20which%20means%20%E2%80%9Cenemy%E2%80%9D.

A Brief History of the Nde

Traveling south from Canada hundreds of years ago, the Nde (Apache) people joined the Sonoran Desert region of the Pimería Alta around 1200 AD according to most historians and linguists. The Nde people refer to themselves as Nde, Inde, Tinde, or Tinneh, which means, “The people.” The term Apache that is commonly used to refer to the Nde people actually comes from the Zuni word ápachu, which means “enemy”.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...

Probably your BIOS didn't recognise all of the tracks or heads or sectors.

In the early days there were certain number of hard disk configurations that the BIOS could recognise.

You had to look for a convenient subset of a disc you actually had.

OpenPrinting keeps old printers working – even on Windows

Re: My God break down and buy a new printer...

we found the shareholder, with golden curly-haired children

Ubuntu Linux 18.04 systemd security patch breaks DNS in Microsoft Azure

Systemd - the operating system that is still in need of a good init system

Microsoft fixes Windows 'idiosyncrasy' that hampered some SMB file transfers

Re: DLP?

It's likely encrypted anyway, is it's a Microsoft server

Re: "Now we just assume if you try to compress, you want to compress."

pigz, thr multithreaded gzip zipper may help

Googlers demand abortion searches ‘never be saved or treated as a crime’

protection for all

So this can help all of us -- just add "abortion" to the end of the search times and google won't log the search or hand it over to law enforcement?

What could go wrong?

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

In a civil case you are going to court with a claim for damages.

if they offer to settle for your demanded claim, how will you still go to court? By rejecting their offer and then demanding the same amount?

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

Re: Not the only one...

I remember the QNX bootable floppy with web browser and nerworking.

Amazing

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: I'm curious

Simply paying the $200 won't help if you don't understand what the problem is that he was talking about

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Just a quick question.

The difficulty with the process you describe is that the non-expert can't tell when they have put enough work in to not embarrass themselves and others.

Responding with "if you had just put more work in then you would have a got a good result" is just hand-waving.

Re: Just a quick question.

> "they were the ones making the money"

"Why do you need us then?"

Microsoft Teams unable to send and receive calls for some after update

Re: I will NEVER use this rubbish voluntarily

not that you were in any doubt, you just wanted to enjoy the party

quit, then:

rm -fr .config/Microsoft/Microsoft\ Teams/

then login and it works.

Until you have to re-auth. Rinse and repeat

my fix

It's been like this for months on Linux.

After: rm -fr .config/Microsoft/Microsoft\ Teams/

it will work, until I have to re-auth, and then the audio and video don't work until I quit and remove the config

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

> I was amazed they left that one in.

After snorting coffee all over the keyboard they probably hadn't the facilities left to remove it

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Sumption is wrong

Farage wasn't parliament though, was he?

And parliament didn't take his advice so they voted through other voting rules.

After reportedly dragging its feet, BlackBerry admits, yes, QNX in cars, equipment suffers from BadAlloc bug

I bet they aren't using calloc

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Who to believe

Whether you take medical advice from a politician or a medic that the politician appointed, it amounts to the same thing. The politician decided which medics to appoint (or sack as the case often is).

But it's not simply a medical or scientific question, how the factors are balanced is a personal preference.

What's your attitude to risk?

Anyone whose attitude to risk is more timid than Boris thinks that everyone whose attitude to risk is less timid than Boris is a murderer who should be forcibly vaccinated and then executed.

Anyone whose attitude to risk is less timid than Boris thinks that everyone whose attitude to risk is more timid than Boris is a Nuremberg kidnapper doctor who should be coughed on and made to walk home without a mask.

What is more concerning than the above hyperbole is the extent that people appear to be willing to go to in order to enforce their political ideals on others.

One person is not a means to another persons end however noble; good intentions aren't the same as good results.

Re: I have some sympathy for Boris

> Boris' ideal role would be father Christmas: a fantasy man of smiles and freebies all round.

Same as Corbyn then

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Not a chance of salvation

"IBM has one chance of salvation"

I don't think they do. They sold off nearly every hardware product and software product, sacked all their experienced staff, they don't have anything left and this current failure proves it.

They can't even migrate their own emails from their old system that they sold off to a new one.

Why would anyone buy IBM now? (The products, the services, or the shares?)

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Re: BBC News 24 talking to a medical researcher last night

Too many think that other people can be used as a "means" to their "end" on the grounds that someone is suffering

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

Re: How is this possible?

Stop using C, peeps!

It's too hard to get right enough everywhere, as we are seeing.

Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron pegs damage from iPhone factory riot at $7m

Re: Should we care ?

"The best players get to make the rules, and they became the best players by having what you need to survive. This is reality. Uncomfortable, but not incorrect"

True, but from the article we see that you are describing politics, not capitalism, I quote:

"relaxed legislation and the liberal dangling of subsidies and incentives"

^^^ That's what it takes to make up for India not being "the best player", not even being good enough to otherwise be considered.

What we are seeing is a bad player, playing badly.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Re: Blockchain

That could describe what they did, but how about a replay attack?

Perhaps you meant challenge-response using a private key.

Ooops that could also be a known-plaintext attack to reveal the private key.

So while it could be done, even by depending on a private key, you also accidentally also specified a failing system

Re: Confessions of a bolt cutter

Possibly they were of the belief that he served their interests and not the other way around.

Microsoft to pull support for PHP: Version 8? Exterminate, more like...

Another server configuration that PHP runs on termed WIMP for good reason, and it DOES have windows in it.

FTP is crusty and mostly dead, right? AWS just started supporting it anyway

Good. FTP doesn't require that either the file source or destination be the control client.

Control client C can coordinate a transfer from server A to server B

In Rust we trust? Yes, but we want better tools and wider usage, say devs

The biggest problem with rust is 3rd party library authors (or authors of wrappers) lying about ownership transference for those cases where Rust can't work it out -- thus undermining all the guarantees of rust.

That critical VMware vuln allowed anyone on your network to create new admin users, no creds needed

Are these bugs deliberate?

It's clearly a programmer error - it's not valid to call that function without valid credentials!

At least that's the sort of response I get when I report bugs.

I reported today how bash's printf %q format can leave a dangling unused backslash which voids the whole safety benefit of %q

Apparently it's a programmer error to expect to use %q as advertised.

It's not safe to use a truncating size specifier with %q e.g. %.8q

It could be made safe, but why bother for "a programmer error"?

I don't think these sorts of bugs are deliberate but I know others do.

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

Re: Sad to see it go

I believe the spelling is:

wubble-wubble-wubble

I have it on good authority

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Re: JS lib house of cards - you ARE the weakest link!

I remember this being a problem for Microsoft just over 20 years ago with an exploitable libtiff having been statically linked into their apps.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

worse than an Acorn electron

Worse than an acorn electron - an 8 bit CPU on a 4 bit data bus -- which pretty much ruined it.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: Pascal has always been great

I wrote a device drivers in turbo pascal to work with a windows Delphi app.

Its job was to pre-register client handles with windows csmapper so that apps could regisster with card services (pcmcia) *after* windows had started (csmapper was intednded only for clients that loaded before windows started).

There was quite a bit of dpmi stuff going on to ensure that callbacks occured in the correct virtual machine (if there were dosbox clients running under windows).

Turbo pascal didn't lack anything C could do.

Blame of thrones: Those viral vids of PC monitors going blank when people stand up? Static electricity from chairs

Re: For extra fun ...

And how many men are you?

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: It's all in the 'title'

I was taught that a "professional" is one in whom gross misconduct or dishonesty could of itself bar them from effective participation in their profession.

That is, their integrity is gone, not merely that a registration board has de-listed them.

Who would hire a software engineer found guilty of inserting back doors without their employers knowledge? Or who would lie on a passport form? If you can't trust their word, you can't trust their work.

Hence, a professional being trusted to sign a passport form because of what they have to lose if they lie.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Re: writing a variable twice.

Until you learned (which I didn't until decades later) that you could treat page 0 as being an array of 256 registers.

Brexit bad boy Arron Banks' Twitter account hacked: Private messages put online

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

That sounds like an argument for partial revocation of human rights.

Madame guillotine also waits for you, citizen Robespierre, by your own argument.

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

These are they same people who think that the vote to leave the EU shouldn't apply to them; cousins of the "not my president" bunch.

Many self identify as liberal and democratic; and get angry with those who don't enable their pretense.

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

They know that voting against something doesn't make the result inapplicable to them.

Something that many remainers apparently don't understand,

Re: Re:because it's exactly how these people think.

no actual quotes follow...

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Beautiful

It was possible even in DOS well before Windows 95 with the "join" command.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Fixing the symptom…

Really?

How many OS do you know of that sort the results of readdir?

That would require the OS to either read all of the filenames before returning any of them, or that the FS maintain an order, and most FS do not.

Re: Fixing the symptom…

And what locale or collation rules? Is a before B?