Posts by ysth

You may be distracted by the pandemic but FYI: US Senate panel OK's backdoors-by-the-backdoor EARN IT Act

I think Mike Masnick says it beautifully: https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1278733089653444609

You can wipe those smiley faces off: Unicode technical website is going to be out for 'a couple of weeks'

Also in Unicode 13, "People Hugging" (01FAC2), which I can't show here, because..."The post contains some characters we can’t support"

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

copyleft does *not* prohibit making free code proprietary, just distributing it once you've done so.

NPM swats path traversal bug that lets evil packages modify, steal files. That's bad for JavaScript crypto-wallets

Wait, what?

npm does not keep, at least as backups, historic versions of all packages? That's...not how a package manager is supposed to be. Security issues like this are just one of many important reasons to be able to check what was distributed in the past.

Pentagon makes case for Return of the JEDI: There's only one cloud biz that can do the job and it starts with an A (or rhymes with loft)

Risk management

Not buying from Oracle I think counts as a bare minimum level of risk management.

Starz, meet the Streisand Effect. Cable telly giant apologizes for demented DMCA Twitter takedown spree

EFF too

They also got a tweet by the EFF with a link to the torrentfreak article about the take down taken down. Never a good idea.

FBI boss: Never mind Russia and social media, China ransacks US biz for blueprints, secrets at 'surprisingly' huge scale

So he's different than his predecessor

But saying all the same things. For strong crypto as long as it isn't secure. Sure that people can just Nerd Harder and find the impossible solution.

What links US Supreme Court, copyright legal bills, and stadium hot dog prices? A: Oracle

Oracle: "Today's decision is ancillary to the core rulings against Rimini, which stand."

Full may not be full, but apparently ancillary means 17% :)

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

"follow-up"?

The purported follow-up post is earlier in the thread.

Password managers may leave your online crown jewels 'exposed in RAM' to malware – but hey, they're still better than the alternative

Where are the CVEs? Makes me distrust the researchers.

TLS proxies? Nah. Truthfully Less Secure 'n' poxy, say Canadian infosec researchers

TLS proxies for security?!?

I thought TLS proxies were for spying on users; would anyone really buy one to *increase* security?

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

Some indication of author on the homepage please

Even just <article data-authorid="123456"> would be great.

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

Some indication of author on the homepage please

Even if it is just a data-authorid="123456" attribute on some existing tag

10 years of the Kindle and the curious incident of a dog in the day-time

Who needs kindles?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP_1T64XQXA

Don't be a turkey: Help Linus Torvalds finish Linux 4.14 before it ruins Thanksgiving

Was that a joke? TG is *always* on Thursday.

User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour

Kitty hair and ramen

This reminded me of this classic: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=245530

BOFH: We're miracle workers. But you want us to fix THAT in 10 minutes?

OpenOffice?

OpenOffice? What's that?

The Edward Snowden guide to practical privacy

No, they didn't ask for the existing sim card (which I didn't even have with me).

two-factor authentication? not so sure

I recently had a phone die; I had a spare phone but needed a different size sim card for it.

I've read about people with two-factor authentication losing bitcoins via clever social engineering of their phone provider, so I was completely unprepared for what happened when I went to the AT&T store to get it.

I gave them the phone number, they gave me an activated sim card. No ID needed, no questions asked, not even my name.

Ubuntu 15.10: Wily Werewolf – not too hairy, not too scary

No reason to skip 15.10 and every reason not to.

With ubuntu's switch to 9 month support for non LTS releases, you either have to stick to LTS releases, or update to every single new release (though you get a 3 month window in which to do so before you start not getting security updates).

OpenOffice project 'all but dead upstream' argues prominent user

As a comment to https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/open_letter_to_the_open almost four years ago said:

"You can put a fork in it. It was done when Oracle killed it. Putting it under the "less restrictive" Apache license encourages developers to work on LibreOffice, which they've done. LibreOffice has accomplished more positive change since the fork than OpenOffice has done in the two years since... or after. Sorry, Apache. You were handed a steaming carcass. Sure, it was warm. But it's not good to eat. Time to stop the suckup status reports and face the reality. OpenOffice is done. Put a fork in it."

The Just City: A brilliant, if puzzling, philosophical dialogue

I enjoyed this, and the (twenty years after) sequel, "The Philosopher Kings". Looking forward to the third one, when published.

Microsoft in Chinese burn ENIGMA: Anti-trust agents' 'sudden visit' to offices

Can you verify that unlicensed percentage with a less biased source than the BSA?

'How a censorious and moralistic blogger ruined my evening'

Rides of Glory now 404s. Imagine that. Still in cache though.

Twitter: La la la, we haven't heard of NUDE JLaw, Upton SELFIES

No. Just no.

Twitter isn't a publisher, it is a communication tool. Users can use it to direct others to content published elsewhere. Its self-imposed length restriction makes it pretty useless for actually publishing anything (and I believe the guy testing the waters by trying to register copyright on a tweet has had no luck to date).

Google Search isn't a publisher, it's...a search engine. (I'm not sure how to highlight the difference if it isn't obvious to you.)

The common point between them is that Twitter and Google themselves aren't determining the content you see - you, the user of their services, are.

Typical misrepresentation going on here...neither twitter nor google image search host any pictures of any kind. We're talking about links to content, not content.

Please, please, please remember the distinction. Blurring it just fuels those who would take our rights away.

If you ate at one of these PF Chang's restaurants, your bank card is at risk

"If you ate at 33 of these"

I would have thought almost no one would have eaten at all 33.

Ohio man cuffed again for shagging inflatable pool raft

Address his mental health problems? How un-American. Mentally ill people belong homeless on the street or in jail.

"if the court will give me the chance ... I will give it 100 per cent. I am ready to get my life together and quit all this nonsense." - much virtue in "if".

Raised £350bn in crowdsourced funding? Tell me about it (not)

One thing I want to know...

Is "journalisming" pronounced with 4 syllables or 5?

NatWest 'spam' email cockup got me slapped with late payment fee, says angry Reg reader

Re: more lessons

Just out of curiosity, what interest rate are you getting on your banked funds?

Blame Silicon Valley for the NSA's data slurp... and what to do about it

Andrew, can you explain

Andrew, can you explain how the EFF is "waging a ceaseless war on the individual's digital rights"?

With examples?

Snowden: 'I am still working for the NSA ... to improve it'

many more in his possession?

So you think he is lying when he says he has nothing?

I loved the "it is generally held" bit; how about citing your sources? Who are these people generally holding this, and how do *they* say they know?

My source? The NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-files-to-russia.html

RSA comes out swinging at claims it took NSA's $10m to backdoor crypto

It appears the title and end of the story have been corrected; thanks.

The end of the article seems very flawed (and the title very carefully worded). Nothing RSA says contradicts the allegations; of course they deny actual knowledge of a backdoor or weakened encryption. If anything you can take the RSA blog post as a confirmation that they did take the NSA money to put in the NSA-selected algorithm.

Apple CEO Cook breaks YEARS OF SILENCE, finally speaks to El Reg hack

I too would like to see the email *to* Cook.

Google may drop Intel for own-recipe ARM: Bloomberg

A year or three? You are thinking of some other company, maybe. Google moves faster than that (when it wants to).

WHO ate all the PIs? Sales of Brit mini-puter pass 2 MEELLION

"were the company watching every penny"

Which part of "Foundation" did you not comprehend?

We'll build Elon Musk's Hyperloop ... if you lob us ONE-MEELLION dollars

Is HTT a Doc Smith reference?

Facebook strips away a bit more of your privacy – but won't say why

Cuba is in North America.

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

In fact, however, it seems likely that the chances are you are indulging in whitewashing speculative "journalism" without benefit of any actual research whatsoever.

REVEALED: Hungry termites nibbling at Oracle's foundation

Either write a...

Either write a SQL vs NoSQL article or an Oracle vs non-Oracle article. You've mashed the two together in a way that provides much less clear information than either would separately.

DARPA uncloaks unTerminator for $2 million robotics challenge

But does it run Perl?

iPHONES and 'Pads BANNED in US for violating Samsung patent

money back?

You are making a mistake if you think Apple employees as a group agree with Apple in their self-described thermonuclear war on Android.

Megaupload extradition bid - Feds WON'T have to hand in their evidence

You can determine whether there's been compliance with candor and good faith simply by noting you are dealing with the U.S. Government.

I'll let you all decide which way to take that.

AWS stops some EC2 servers without warning

Nothing to see here

Um, this is part of what cloud means, at least in AWS's visualization of it. If you have something to "repair" when an instance goes away, you are doing it wrong.

Stroustrup on next-gen C++: I didn't want to let go of my baby

Code that includes thousands of macros

Is he talking about the Perl 5 source?

Google's ethics, cosy UK.gov chats under Westminster scrutiny

Re: Big tech companies promote "copyleft"? That's new to me.

You are making the same error that the article made. Copyleft is not the opposite of copyright, it is copyright used for a particular kind of purpose.

And I get the feeling there is general ignorance of RMS's positions on *non*-software IP - something I'd like to see change.

Revealed: The gift that keeps on giving to Oracle ... is dying

Is that true?

I also would question the truth of that - though I would say the dividing line is that free/libre software will fix the first part; just open source may not.

SaaS too certainly doesn't have to - by day I'm a closed-source SaaS developer, and almost all customer data is exportable; where it's not, it's because I'm so busy :)

Microsoft supporting Surface with Windows RT until 2017

Re: What does "support" mean though?

Agreed; "support" doesn't mean anything more than security updates for a version of the OS that no one develops for any more; it would be surprising if it meant supporting older hardware for newer OS or application releases.