Posts by Havin_it

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Cold, dead hands

3. Just close the browser once in a while, all those tabs don't cost you a single nybble unless you actually revisit them.

Re: I still use it, but...

Can't speak for Graham and am a mere 500-odd tab case myself, but:

1. There is arguably some pathology in hoarding so many, I'll allow. Maybe nothing worse than laziness in not getting around to spring-cleaning a few of them more often though.

2. They can be very much like bookmarks, but with less effort to maintain: Ctrl+D or more painstakingly select which subfolder to file it in, vs it's already right there; Navigate to bookmark, right-click, delete, vs Ctrl+W bye-bye forever. (Although Recently Closed Tabs means it needn't be forever if you made a booboo, unlike deleting a bookmark.)

3. I like the chronology of recent (and yes not-so-recent) events the linear accumulation of tabs presents.

4. The scroll position on the page (and some other bits of "live" state) persist even after a reboot. That can be very handy.

I actually do save the whole lot as a folder of bookmarks once in a while, but only out of paranoia in case I come a cropper like our poor OP here, and touch wood I have not had any such issue in quite some time.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: SSH/SCP

SCP's deprecated, you want SFTP nowadays. (And in fact that's what you'll actually get if you type `scp` from OpenSSH-9 up.)

As several above have opined, the motives for the move as we understand them would seem to demand that Exchange/365, if indeed used currently, must be for the chop too.

I cannot speak on the delights of Outlook itself (in this much if nothing else in this life, I've been blessed) but I have had occasion to fake Exchange in the past, and for this I used the Horde webmail/groupware platform. It is anything but a drop-in replacement (LAMP stack and your choice of mail server component(s), advanced auth schemes and whatnot are left for you to sort out) but I found it quite capable in passing itself off as Exchange to mobile clients via EAS, including policy/provisioning features such as remote-wipe. I didn't use it, but sharing calendar appointments via email seemed to be supported at least via the webmail frontend. And if the web UI is reasonably up to snuff, I'm not convinced the absence of a dedicated desktop client need be a dealbreaker. (Thunderbird ... exists, but last I heard its calendaring addon was a work in progress.)

Unfortunately it has been taking its sweet time over a PHP8-compatible release, but it looks like the pace is picking up and that may arrive soonish.

Disclaimer: Thanks to my charmed life I may well lack critical insight in what people actually *do* in Outlook that's so special and unique besides bazzing appointments into each other's calendars or seamlessly responding yeah/nah to programmatic solicitations for same.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

I know James T did specify BASH, but you'd be more perfect for everyone with single '[' and '='. The doubles are ... bashisms.

(Sorry if that was the joke)

Thunderbird joins Firefox on the monthly treadmill

profiles.ini file in the same folder the profiles live in (~/.mozilla/firefox/ on *n*x, no idea elsewhere) lists the profiles including their friendly names that you can invoke them by when launching and tells you which one is default. Doesn't seem that high a bar.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

I believe @squizzler means that the GNU/FSF intended |_inux to be a stopgap for Hurd (which is likely correct), not that Linus or anyone else did so.

Windows Insiders can now turn on Administrator Protection from settings

If it relies on Windows Hello ...

... then (AIUI) you'll need a Microsoft account in order to use it. So, no ta.

Bad enough I can't (seem to find a way to) use my fingerprint-reader without signing up. Dual-account strategy will have to continue to suffice.

They have done their best to make it all but mandatory. Wonder what the next gambit will be?

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

Whoa, synchronicity

Just two days ago I decided to toy with cups-browsed on my Gentoo box (you'll be stunned to learn that it is not default-installed there!) because both my home and work printers now allegedly support "driverless printing"/"IPP Everywhere" which to anyone who's installed a printer on Linux was a rather tantalising promise, and browsed + Avahi seem to be the only endorsed way of achieving this.

In neither case did it work, if by "work" we mean "allow me to print a web page from Firefox on that printer".* So that was as far as that went.

I've always regarded Avahi/uPnP/DNSSD/Bonjour/mDNS/zeroconf (jeez, pick a name already) as asking for trouble to begin with, but will allow that it's what implementers do with it that you have to watch out for. I can't think of a much better example of doing something really stupid with it than accepting arbitrary, potentially root, code from any old Tom Dick or Kyocera that claims it's a printer.

I could see this being a useful way of frictionlessly adding a printer *if* used solely as an on-demand, one-shot "scan for printers" function when you actually know of a printer that you expect to find (and what it's probably called) on your network. Having it running permanently is bonkers. A server to handle the vanishingly-infrequent task of configuring another server?

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of "user-friendly" desktop distros do enable this by default -- or at least pull it in with CUPS itself -- so I get that a fairly high level of concern is warranted, albeit with the caveats expressed by others.

[*Not that way it doesn't, but it is actually trivial to add these printers through CUPS's web UI if you know the printer's IP and the seemingly fairly universal format for ipp:// URIs.]

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Re: firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives

Seems the real issue was the "hundreds of times" part, which was just sloppy coding. The webapp could have been patched before the switch was thrown, so it'd stop trying to pull content when it wasn't logged-in. Apparently this didn't occur to anyone (who still worked there).

Re: He chose the nuclear option

Twitter clone owned by the tube who sold Twitter to Elon. I'm told it has even more horrendous privacy and IP-rights terms than the original, and is likely to be infused with Dorsey's obsession with crypto/blockchain bollocks.

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

Google came out very firmly against DHCPv6 in Android (and given the objections were of a universal philosophical nature, presumably everywhere else in their estate also). So that's probably a bit of a dead dodo.

tsoHost pulls plug on Gridhost service with just 45 days' notice

Oh.

Thanks for posting this background, I thought I was losing my marbles after reading the article.

We too got told in May '21 that Gridhost was going bye-bye and everything would be migrated to their CPanel platform. It was the predictable culmination of the preceding few years' litany of unheralded crap-outs (more niche and specific to what we were up to, none made headlines) and support tickets that invariably petered-out with words to the effect of: "We're not interested in solving this because this is a legacy platform anyway."

Established that their CPanel offering didn't do everything we needed anyway, so jumped ship as rapidly as possible. Quite amusing to hear that this too fell apart in their typical fashion. They may regret asking why we wanted to leave, I had quite a backlog of material built up by then.

NB. We were grandfathered-in from Hostroute, if anyone remembers them. Just imagine: knowledgeable support responses from those who'd actually built the platform! The past is truly another country.

Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors

Re: That seems like a strange response to me

Provided the code is documented in-line using the standard scheme most languages possess or have had imposed (and $DEITY help you anyway if you inherit a codebase that didn't adhere to this), any editor worth its salt will display the documentation in the autocomplete tooltip.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

I'd say it is more the opposite way around in practice.

Corporates (the big-enough-to-be-influential ones) expect a high degree of lockdown capability *that they can control*. Letting MS or anyone external be gatekeeper of that lockdown, not so much.

It's cheapskate consumers who get properly reamed, because they aren't spending enough to have a vote, and most aren't bothered by the impositions the way power-users are anyway as it doesn't affect their lives (usually).

That's why the Corporate/Enterprise versions of Windows XP/2003 (can't speak for later iterations) had license keys that bypassed the fiddly activation process consumers were subjected to. That's why "business-grade" laptops have configurable SecBoot whereas cheap-shit consumer ones have it welded shut or so nobbled that it takes serious emotional investment to workaround in order to get Linux booting.

Re: *I* propose ...

Assuming the numbers in the names are all zero-padded as your examples are, the glob should return them in the desired order already through the default alphabetic/lexical sorting.

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Re: "keep it just in case"

That would certainly be the most frictionless (if costlier) option, but the laptop travels with me and that "needing Windows" moment is by definition going to be unforeseen and most likely short-notice, so it's a bit easier than carrying that bagged drive (plus spludger, torx driver and whatnot) over hill and dale.

The sad fact is that laptops that are wedded to Windows often have no other way of performing low-level system operations. In some cases the BIOS may not even function correctly unless Windows at least remains in place. Likewise for some external hardware that needs Windows to initialise/update correctly but can otherwise function perfectly well under Linux. So your prescription is a bit glib.

(Now you may reasonably respond with "Then don't buy such cursed hardware!" and in spirit I agree, but for the laptop itself there is often a sizeable price/availability tradeoff in avoiding it, and for some bits of external hardware there may simply be no alternative at all. Again sad but true.)

I'm still of the "keep it just in case" orthodoxy but I'm quite glad I've never yet had to go there on this, my first Win10 machine (2017 model Thinkpad bought 2 years ago).

Just that brief visit to fiddle around and turn things off when setting up reminded me how much Windows nobbles the machine's performance. And that was while not mired in the interminable, and now un-declinable, updates. The next time I need to nip in there to do something, things will be made all the worse by it attempting to inflict 2+ years of updates. I'll want to get in and out quick enough it won't get the chance to apply any of them (with, as you say, the risk of new and hilarious destruction of my UEFI config/storage setup/who knows) but it'll be gruelling.

Suddenly I can see the appeal of a Linux-certified laptop ... shame they don't tend to certify for Gentoo :(

I've found that the vast majority of the dot-files that accumulate in my homedir aren't missed when I re-home (usually moving to new laptop). Most tend to be boilerplate default stuff that doesn't change much after install of whatever software. Also by convention they are almost never deleted when you uninstall/stop using the app in question, so genuinely useless cruft builds up (~/.kde4 dir etc).

That said, on every migration I dutifully scoop it all up and plonk it in its own folder in the new homedir, from which I dump the obvious cruft (thumbnail and shader caches etc), transpose the bits I actually know to be useful, and keep the rest for reference/in case I missed something. I've got three laptops' worth sitting around now - I'm a hoarder.

Another issue worth being aware of when directly re-homing a homedir as a whole partition is that just because you give your account the same name on the new system doesn't mean it'll have the same numeric UID, which is how file-ownership and permissions are dictated at filesystem level (not to mention ACLs if those are in use). Different Linuxes won't necessarily give even the first created user the same UID consistently, so you may need to do some chown'ing before you can get to work.

In addition, if like me you dealt with the /var issue mentioned above by moving Apache stuff into your homedir instead, the same issues will apply to any system-account file permissions used by those files (with even less likelihood of consistency between distros). Learned this one the hard way.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Translation:

"Several decades and billions in funding rounds have _still_ have not yielded our most prised goal of a pair of X-ray specs that can give us a good look under the interns' tops. C'mon nerds, up your game!"

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Re: Software Junk

If Linksys appears on any poster relating to this it's likely a satirical one. They had no intention of any of this, but they went and copied some GPL code and inadvertently violated the license. When they got found out, they were (eventually) forced to open-source the firmware.

Story

They learned their lesson and used VxWorks after that.

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

Re: Options are always good

Maybe O/T but I'd say

(a) Don't be on-call for work responsibilities when visiting your family

(b) If you've no choice, then a work-blessed device should be made available to cover your needs in that regard.

Log4j RCE: Emergency patch issued to plug critical auth-free code execution hole in widely used logging utility

Re: Blimey - this made it into the nrMSM

Ditto. As I read it, gave the impression that Apache httpd was the source. Not cool, Grauniad.

At least I've heard of log4j so the "brand name" (which all cool vulns need nowadays) led me to dig deeper.

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

Re: Mars Bar

Oh, it's a thing. My local (in Leith) will do one on request.

For a while (~20yrs ago) there was a real silly-season where every choccy/confectionery item imaginable was given the treatment in the name of science.

Nowadays however ... I recently asked the aforementioned local if they'd do me a Crunchie (I remembered hearing these were especially good) but was declined. They told me they only do Mars bars because it is unique among mainstream choccy-bars in being certified nut-free, so on those rare occasions they actually do one it won't contaminate the fryer.

Re: Just tell 'em to

I can never understand how property prices are so high in Edinburgh when "most" of us seem to live in weegies' heads rent-free.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

Re: "it's the new version of Firefox for Android"

For one thing they have removed the "Back list", to wit: a long-press on the (browser or OS) back-button used to bring up a list of the previous pages for the current tab, allowing you to jump back multiple pages. Now it doesn't :(

Just my first severe pet-peeve after half an hour's cursory exploration. More to come, I'm sure.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

Re: RIP Hackintosh

I think you overlook the amount of resources MICROS~1 have to sink into making Windows compatible across every rando whitebox PC in all creation. (Never enough, but hey at least they try.)

That's their choice and the ubiquity it's earned them has made it worthwhile I guess, but I can't really blame Apple or anyone else for not wanting the hassle.

Nope, still can't find them. Skullcandy slips Tile's gadget-tracking hardware into individual earbuds

How's that work then?

Would be nice to have included a cursory overview of how this tech actually works, no?

Sounds like something I could have used a week ago, when one of my cheapo buds leapt for freedom during, as luck would have it, the tiny section of my several-mile bike ride that involved unmaintained scrubland. Cue many perplexed passersby while I crawled slowly around with one ear to the ground hoping to pick out the faint strains of Prodigy's Warrior's Dance (the most percussive and trebly thing came to mind) from among the tussocks. Glad it narrowly missed the adjacent thistle-patch.

Singapore's corona-crushing superhero squad grounded by football fans

Re: Are you sure it's not the US?

Actually, You'll Never Wa*k Alone is pretty apposite for the intolerable predicament lockdown has put a lot of us in.

Well, well, well. Internet-of-Things speaker biz Sonos to continue some software support for legacy kit after all

Yup. If there's one thing I'll always thank El Reg for it's having made me aware of the Squeezebox. Two original units left in service here (a pair of Radios operating as a stereo set). My original SB went dark a few years ago, but by then I had a Raspberry Pi Kodi box sat next to it, so just added the software client (Squeezeslave) to that and ran it into the amp. Miss the remote (and playing Tetris on the retro LCD display) but the phone app suffices; there is a Kodi module to provide UI, but I've never gotten it to play nice.

I suspect the software ecosystem may outlast the hardware! There was some concern when the online companion portal was shuttered that this would stop the server or devices from working, but this seems to have been averted. In any case there remains a strong dev and user community, so even if this should happen later a workaround can probably be found. With the server and client apps being open-source, there's always hope; even if/when bit-rot sets in to the point they can't be easily installed on modern devices/OSes, they can be kept as VM images or slapped on an RPi as an appliance.

For all of these reasons, I've never viewed the Sonos "experience" with anything beyond pity.

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

Re: pro-what?

>If people kept calling you by the wrong pronouns

Here's the thing: You and Brandon 2 might have different ideas about what the "right" pronouns are for him/her/xim/etc.

What unsettles me about this issue is that people are staking a claim on a language feature whose historic function has been to convey information about their inherent characteristics, and wishing to make it instead convey information about their personal preferences.

I say preferences because, as I understand it, the pronouns that one wishes to use are entirely free-choice: the fact a person wants to go by "xe" does not map to anyone else's reasons for picking it.

As such, that person is obliging others to show deference to them in an entirely arbitrary manner; to convey recognition of characteristics that are not even defined except by them. To fail to do so, by dodging the issue with indeterminate pronouns or simply avoiding pronouns, is deemed abusive.

I recognise that we're in this mess due to gendered pronouns ever having been a thing in the first place, which in hindsight was a rubbish idea: how much simpler things would be if we did not expect pronouns to tell us anything about the subject, and I'd wholeheartedly endorse a campaign to eradicate them now if we could, but we are where we are.

I honestly feel that, apart from being senselessly coercive in respect of the above, this movement is self-harming in that it seeks to curtail others' ability to signal that they do not care about the subject's sex, gender or other identifications. Surely, in the world we strive for, 99% of the time such things will simply not be relevant?

Re: They

It's not exactly new. They/them has long been a recognised pronoun for a person whose gender is unknown/unspecified in the speaker's frame of reference. (Ditto when number is not known, so the subject may be either singular or plural.) I assume that is what this form of usage derives from, and it's hardly a quantum leap. If a person wished to identify as nonbinary/gender-fluid, it makes a lot of sense to me, although I'm not prescribing it as such as I'm sure everyone who chooses it has their* own rationale.

*See? Perfectly grammatical and normative, and typed it without even thinking about it!

Re: Close

And you in turn are half-right.

It was indeed singular they/them she objected to (she was happy to use neopronouns if it came up). However this, according to a trans-community member who I believe was party to the original "discussion" and had a subsequent clear-the-air talk with Monica which she discussed in a post of her own, was for "personal" reasons that Monica did not wish to disclose.

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Re: Didn't they do one that you could project on to a wall, as a demo?

Kick the projector

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

Re: inviting US users of the Firefox desktop browser with Firefox Accounts

In fact you have to run (build, configure and keep updated to maintain client compatibility) your own sync server (python), accounts server and content server (both nodeJS). With, last I looked, public docs that are an afterthought and you're doing very well indeed if you don't have to throw yourself on the mercy of the services-dev mailing list before long. Then there's the client configuration ... [twitch, dribble]

I gave it a red hot crack and it did work for a while but honestly, life's too short especially if you're not conversant in python, node (and mailing-lists). I thought I cared, but given my data is all encrypted client-side I really don't care enough to justify that much ongoing grief.

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.

Got a source for this? I can find no details about this anywhere.

Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts

Re: Clippy

The LO equivalent, under development deep in the TDF skunkworks, is called Stapley. When you let Stapley "help" you, you won't be able to undo the changes it makes, because it can't possibly have come out differently to what you wanted, right? Stapley knows best.

A couple of years after Stapley is unleashed, a motivated bedroom-coder will release a plugin called Staple-remover-y, which obliterates anything Stapley did that actually _did_ align with what you wanted, but still leaves your pages warped and slightly torn.

In the meantime, the user community will get used to a workaround which, had anyone the inclination to give it a name, would probably be called Reprint-the-whole-thing-and-just-use-a-paperclippy.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Re: "Firefox add-ons, also known as extensions"

Nope to your nope (though nope to the quote too).

What you call "extensions" are plugins (e.g. Flash, Java, DRM modules etc). What you call "add-ons" are extensions, apps written in JavaScript targeting the WebExtensions API. These are a sub-type of add-on, the others being themes, search-engines and language-packs.

Self-taught Belgian bloke cracks crypto conundrum that was supposed to be uncrackable until 2034

Re: So, the real question is now ..

Maybe he got Ron Rivest in a dark room with a $5 pipe wrench?

Re: Well done.

Humanity is wonderfully diverse, there's a matching pair (or perhaps more) of people for any particular 'kink'

These statements are in opposition to each other. The greater the diversity, the lower the chance of every kink occurring twice.

/forever alone in my crab salad paragliding kidney-massage fetish :(

The two are equally deserving because they demonstrate that the initial assumption was flawed.

If you want to put it that way. It was an educated projection of the advance of processing performance over three-and-a-half decades, which was always going to be a tall order since the kind of innovations that drive such advances are by definition not yet conceived of, and might even follow a complete paradigm-shift (quantum computing being an arguable example).

Even without someone discovering a mathematical shortcut, always a possibility,

Rivest assumed not, and that assumption has not yet been shown to be flawed.

with a slightly bigger hardware budget (like that of the NSA) the problem could be solved even faster.

Nope. The problem cannot be parallelised, so the performance of a single task is the bottleneck. So the only way an infinite sack of cash can help is by paying people lots of money to invent more efficient

hardware (which is no guarantee of results).

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

Rubbish. The article explains quite adequately the (very simple) reasoning: Edgium sends your data to Microsoft, not to Google. That data is, nowadays, the only compelling reason for being in the browser business (not counting those Mozilla loons who do it for fun).

And the investment required to put your own UI skin on someone else's engine is piss-all compared to maintaining your own engine. This move probably let them shed a few developer salaries.

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Re: There is a reason the UK government prefer rope for hanging themselves

For some reason I read that as "I'd pay to see that panto."

"He's behind you!"

"Good!"

TalkTalk returns to the email hall of shame as Pipex accounts throw weekend-long wobbly

Re: Venn Diagram Please

I bailed from Pipex when Tiscali got it, that was never going to go well. To... Demon! Who proceeded to be borged by THUS -> C&W -> Vodafone. The Demon branding was upheld for a while and only finally binned a couple of years ago. Voda have generally stayed out of my way, so I've stayed put. In the way of these things, though, I expect I'll be subscribed to Disney Broadband before long :/

Roses are red, this is sublime: We fed OpenAI's latest chat bot a classic Reg headline

The penguin and cat story

I teared up a bit, NGL. Shit can escalate so easily.

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

Re: CSV compatibility

It really takes some next-level skillz to get CSV handling wrong. A format whose title is longer than its BN form (probably, haven't checked, don't write in).

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Excel 2K had a better easter egg, tho'.

You could've probably run O97 under Wine (although in early days it did need a few DLLs pillaging from a Windows install).

Re: Office 365

LibreOffice needs to be restarted every other day

What did you do to deserve needing an office suite open at all times? My earnest sympathies.