Posts by Sven Coenye

Remember when we warned in February Apple will crack down on long-life HTTPS certs? It's happening: Chrome, Firefox ready to join in, too

Re: Will this be a problem for embedded device certs?

You do what Samsung likely did on June 19 and have all such devices enter a boot loop. Problem fixed.

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

Re: Microsoft are much more evil

Indeed. I stand corrected.

Re: Microsoft are much more evil

So they are no longer charging the FAT tax then?

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

Beats a BSOD every day of the week (and twice on Sunday...)

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

Yes, let's adopt Poettering's shutdown strategy: change the event sequence in udev to suit systemd without giving a thought to anyone else. This had the lovely side effect of breaking shutdown completely if a LUKS partition was in use on SysV init.

(As in - upgrade from Debian Jessie to Stretch and find you can't shut down anymore. Lovely. I've used Debian since the 2.x days, but that was the last straw. Swicthed to Devuan and have not had a reason to look back. And Beowulf runs fine on a Raspberry Pi too.)

Nice wallpaper you've got there. It would be a shame if it bricked your phone

Re: It's a bit ironic...

Even more ironic: although TFA says the image uses "plain RGB" instead of sRGB, the original's color profile references Google/Skia. If that is genuine, Google is the cause all-round.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Powershell's one saving grace...

... interesting enough to tolerate its infantile syntax is the remoting capability. But then MS had to go out and neuter that when used against their own services because allowing it would crumple their servers*.

Want to set a simple property on all your O365 e-mail accounts? Sorry. Only on the 1st 100 or so. For the rest, you need to transport the entire collection to your side, change the property, then send the whole lot back. What should have taken a few seconds now takes an hour.

* anno 2018.

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

Required for Bluetooth as well

e.g. a Fitbit or Garmin wristband can no longer sync without location services enabled.

Android 6 removed access to the real hardware ID unless the ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION or ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION permissions are granted. Anything using the Wifi or BT APIs is hosed.

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: So close, yet so out of reach...

Growing up, Concorde made 2 ambassador flights to my local airport (Oostende).2nd time i was old enough to go see it on my own, The first thing of note was that it came with an Air France-liveried Renault R4 carrying a spare tire for the tail landing gear.

The crowd control barriers were only arms length from the undercarriage. When time came to depart, the ground crew pushed the barriers back to barely outside the intake line of the engines. I was standing under the left wingtip when the engines started spooling up. (Glorious days :-) Can't image that happening these days...)

Google's second stab at preserving both privacy and ad revenue draws fire

PIGIN, TURTLEDOVE, ...

Is it me, or are these already the NSA exploit names?

I was never here. This post never happened. (Oh, wait...)

Outlook more like 'look out!' as Microsoft email decides everything is spam today

Re: Yay for single points of failure !

Or sysadmin for that matter. I went back to being a developer a year ago when I found myself starting to use the BOFH columns as a manual.

Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt. Time to give something back

How long?

For a very long time. Just ask Monsanto. Oh, and if the neighbor's grain escapes into your field, you're the one getting sued for IP theft. Now that's a viral license.

Microsoft previews Visual Studio update with added Linux love, many new features

Re: Oh-comma-goodie!

Who are they even going to develop for? They just banned all Linux users from their precious network. Good luck repairing that self-inflicted hole-in-foot.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

There isn’t time to vent the remaining fuel

Just contract the job out to Delta Airlines.

Mines the one with the solar panel wipes in the pocket...

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Re: Time Zones?

It was set to UTC, but then someone rebooted it to Windows 10.

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

Re: Can you trust FFox?

Sorry for the late response. I installed 71 (the day before this article) and that is what it says on two splash pages on its first run.

Looks like the change was introduced with 67, but 71 is the first one stating a Sync account is the only way to retain access to your information across versions.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/dedicated-profiles-firefox-installation

It may be possible to wrangle the Profile Manager to regain access, but for how long? And how many regular users even know that thing exists?

Re: Can you trust FFox?

Agent Tick does have a valid point. What is not mentioned in TFA is that with 71 (and beyond), each update will create a new profile. The only way to retain access to saved passwords, autofill, etc. is by handing your data to Mozilla. There is no provision to do a local import from an older FF version.

In your face! US Senate mulls bipartisan federal law on police facial recognition use

They want to issue a FaRTWA?!

<checks calendar>Nope, not April yet...

Mine's the one with the Riker/Picard double facepalm picture in the pocket...

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

non-standard OSen

Linux is a quite reasonable implementation of the POSIX standard. What standard is Windows based on?

US customers kick up class-action stink over Epson's kyboshing of third-party ink

May not be just 3rd party ink

There are indications printers also reject genuine but out-of-region Epson cartridges. (Going by the eBay/Amazon comments of US based users of non-retail packaged cartridges of Asian origin. Of course, those may be fakes, but the one set I did end up with looked pretty convincing. No idea if they worked or not as I ended up returning them because the seller had misrepresented them as regular retail items.)

What's the scoop with Mars InSight's mired mole? It's digging again, thanks to trowel trickery

Re: Bah!

But it says free shipping over $35!

Yahoo! Groups' closure and a tale of Oftel: Die-hard users 'informally' included telcos

Don't worry about the advertising

The Yahoo group I'm a member of ([vintage] Meade LX5/LX6 telescopes) is now scrambling for a new home. This was very welcome information.

You've got (Ginni's) mail! Judge orders IBM to cough up CEO, execs' internal memos in age-discrim legal battle

Re: Young people

"would you really want to go and work at that place?"

Probably not, but a $60k+ student loan debt millstone around ones neck may change that perspective.

Subcontractor's track record under spotlight as London Mayoral e-counting costs spiral

Par for the course for CGI

CGI made a complete hash of the Vermont health insurance "marketplace" application. The contract was terminated as it became obvious CGI was incapable of coming up with something that didn't fall over as soon as it encountered real world loads. They still walked off with $66M

They say piracy killed the Amiga. Know what else it's killing? Malware sales. Awww, diddums

Piracy killed the Amiga?

No. Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould killed the Amiga. Credit where credit is due, to stay with the spirit of the article...

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

Re: Trust the Brits

The C5 is going back in production?

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

the website's base domain is what has all the security tied to it

Not sure I'm following that one. Even a wildcard cert would not cover www.example.com and example.com simultaneously. AFAIK, unless example.com is included as the Subject Alt Name on the www.example.com cert, the browser should complain if example.com responds to www.example.com. So, user goes to example.com -> complaint, user goes to www.example.com -> no complaint, even though the address bar says example.com. As if the SSL situation was not confusing enough already :-/

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

I know I have problem. But I'm working on it. I have been diluting mine with ethanol. I'm now down to only 55% dihydrogen monoxide.

Mine's the one with the flask in the pocket...

The latest FCC plan to boost US broadband? Prevent competition in apartment blocks

ISPs be required to add all their own cabling

Not at all: developer cables building, owner leases said cables exclusively to the ISP offering the highest kickback. Win-win. Repeat at end of lease, until building EOL. The residents? They can always move if they disagree.

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

Re: Firefox's global market share dwindles ...

I would say this tin rattling dovetails nicely with neutering independent extensions. Mozilla can now do things outside developers can no longer readily accomplish.

Did they ever fess up how much they paid for Pocket? I can't help but wondering how much that acquisition is contributing to Mozilla's cash crunch.

For me, having Pocket take over the entire UI and the normal bookmarks menu mangled when 60 ESR replaced 52 was the last straw. For now, I have fallen back on Waterfox, but it has become very obvious how much of a competition killer Mozilla's extension store is.

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

Bing is a Duck Duck Go source

Welcome to the 34%

Sex and drugs and auto-tune: What motivates a millennial perp?

Re: Boston Dynamics in the year 3000

Just don't mention its Chinese-American heritage as a negative...

Apple won't be appy: US Supremes give green light to massive lawsuit over App Store prices

Re: Possible contributing factor to the 6% drop?

I won't hold my breath on that. It'll pretty much be parasite v. parasite. Just look at the pittance Spotify sends the artists they make a living off.

Possible contributing factor to the 6% drop?

This decision may embolden Spotify (and likely others) to file suit in the US instead of just the EU over Apple's corresponding 30% vig of any in-app purchase (and the prohibition for the vendors to tack the difference onto the price.) They have deeper pockets than any solo developer or customer and the damage to Apple from losing that subscription income is likely to be more serious than losing x% on the less frequent (maybe even one-time) purchase of applications.

Hands off Brock! EFF pleads with Google not to kill its Privacy Badger with its Manifest destiny

Chromium

From the article:

"We’ve listed a set of changes to the proposal that we believe are necessary to keep Privacy Badger functioning as it does now and to allow us to implement planned changes in the near future," they wrote in their letter to Google's Chromium team.

There's really no other way for this to work. Implementing an intrusive public facing change like that in Chrome only would essentially create 2 separate browsers. And even if it was for Chrome only, that probably covers 99% of all installations. That doesn't leave a lot of incentive for developers to continue supporting Chromium.

It's alive! Hands on with Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser

Say what?

"the browser is stable and the fact you're reading this indicates that sites such as The Register's own content management system run without issue."

Thank you for that revelation! I've always attributed that to Waterfox. My bad...

Now, does all this mean Chromium is now an essential and inextricable part of Windows, or is Edge now uninstallable? Inquiring minds and all that...

Citrix mysteriously quiet amid whisperings of senior layoffs: Executives, teams logged out, it is claimed

lower level workers lose network access soon after receiving a pink slip.

You have that backwards.

Did you hear? There's a critical security hole that lets web pages hijack computers. Of course it's Adobe Flash's fault

It was baked in

1511 didn't have it but one of the feature updates installed it and it was impossible to uninstall (short of deleting files manually.) Maybe MS has come back to its senses, but then I don't have to admin W10 anymore :-)

Fujitsu: Closes director's gate to Tait, 9 execs abdicate, and for German workers – a crap Weihnachtszeit

The first non-Japanese exec ever invited on to the board...

Dang. I hope he knew the Japanese don't look kindly on failure.

That's at least a pinky. This time...

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

Re: Meh

FYI, there may be pain on the Debian Jessie -> Devuan Jessie -> Devuan ASCII path.

There are no issues with a clean install but an upgrade may result in mixing parts of consolekit and elogind. It was reported during testing but things are not entirely resolved. My Xfce lost the reboot/shutdown controls and from the CLI, a shutdown hangs at "Will now halt". Been digging into it since the upgrade, but no success yet.

Distro inferno: Debian's still rocking at 25

Re: Fond of Debian

The biggest problem is not so much systemd itself, but the usurpation of udev. On Stretch without systemd, that has already broken LUKS. The inclusion of hardware dependencies in the network interface names wreaks havoc when rolling out network configs with something like Ansible. (Instead of the familiar eth#, udev now produces names like enp3s13 where the numbers reflect the position on the PCI bus.)

Linux 4.18 arrives fashionably late while Zorin OS shines up its Windows

Re: not sure if I want to fork over money...

What business model did you expect from Zorin Industries?

Mine's the one with the detonator in the pocket...

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

If they really want to send a signal

then Epic should pull Fortnite from iTunes. Otherwise, the only lesson to be learned by Google is that they need to shut down the side load avenue too.

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

@Nay, nay and thrice nay

Run PrivacyBadger ;-) It eats all the images, on the old site as well as on the new one.

And in current affairs: Rogue raccoon blacks out city power grid after shocking misstep

There is only one crispy raccoon

That would be procyonid, then. (And I finally get to use that icon :-)

They grow up so fast: Spam magnet Hotmail turned 22 today

Re: 1999-2000

Mine was .be. HP linked up with local ISPs to provide the service. The mailboxes and web hosting are now on Proximus (formerly Belgacom, formerly the state telco monopoly.) And someone even still has something useful there: http://users.compaqnet.be/doublestars/

1999-2000

Around the same time, HP gave away free 4MB @compaqnet.cctld addresses to anyone buying a new PC. Not only is mine still alive as well, the capacity has grown quite a bit over the years.

GIMP masks font downloads, adds horizon fix in new build

The biggest practical change is that the stable version finally supports > 8 bits/channel. That is what folks have been clamoring for since the advent of digital cameras (and it is one of the main reasons CinePaint had that dedicated following), yet that nugget somehow didn't make the article.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Adobe Flash gets emergency patch for zero-day exploit

Irrelevant because everyone has already removed Flash?

Yes, years ago. But then Microsoft put it right back and took away the "Remove" button.

Git security vulnerability could lead to an attack of the (repo) clones

Good old input validation

Heh. It seems the input validation code is actually what is going off the reservation...

"code to sanity-check pathnames on NTFS can result in reading out-of-bounds memory"

Oops!