Posts by Havin_it

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

Always assumed it was for "Query" but I like yours better, you've updated my headcanon ;)

Google takes Photoshop to the woodshed with new image AI

Beautiful cabin crew

Scarlett Johannson

>They are a record of the reality that prevailed at the time, warts and all.

We've only got your word for that now though, innit?

Re: It's clever but..

"Never again can we trust anything we see."

Who said that or anything like it about photography?

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

That's nifty an'all, but to what actual machines do each of those inscrutable addresses belong?

Predictable naming/addressing of local hosts (DHCP+local DNS) was the piece of the puzzle I failed to solve when I had a stab at IPv6. With one machine running dnsmasq, I can have each machine's name and IP mapped to its MAC in a centralised DB meaning all hosts can reliably contact each other by name. (Also any host that's not supposed to be there either can be denied access or will stick out like a sore thumb.)

The closest I got was DHCPv6 but our Android phones did not play ball with this, which I learned is because Google have vetoed it for some reason. Neato.

All that left was Avahi/Zeroconf/Bonjour/whatever (ugh, rather not) or somehow piggybacking the IPv6 DNS resolution on the DHCPv4 config (which maybe dnsmasq can do natively, but I ragequit before I could establish this, plus a solution reliant on dual-stack wouldn't feel ideal).

I feel like there must be an intended way for this to work, but it might be a while before I reacquire the minerals to have another push at it.

Me after the first attempt ------>

LibreOffice 25.8: Faster, leaner, and finally speaks PDF 2.0

This. Been using for some time on our in-house system (not that we need PDF2.0 with any urgency) and when you add the fact that .OD* files can be manipulated quite easily by any server lingo with zip and XML/DOM support, it can be a very capable doc generation platform.

Saved me enough time/money for a few more of these ---->

Microsoft gives in to Chromebook bullies and drops Windows 11 SE

Re: I'm pretty sure there is a cheaper, more resilient alternative.

I'm sure it is not unheard-of to keep the homework on a MicroSD card, which is kept secure by wrapping in a rasher of bacon.

China says US spies exploited Microsoft Exchange zero-day to steal military info

Re: The surprise is...

Activated with OEM key off eBay.

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

Re: File Explorer is now a productivity sink

We really need to come up with a common name for that thing, I keep wondering why people are pausing before they say "menu".

[Though I must admit I have started interpolating it as an exasperated sigh, which seems to stand up well in most contexts so far.]

UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

But do you stay for a full shuck, or just niblet?

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Re: GPS 1024 rollover in 2038 as well

Yikes, that's ... worse. (Why does GPS even need a week counter anyway?)

I want to be charitable and assume these design decisions are down to self-deprecation/utopianism on the part of the developers: "By the time we need more than that, this old thing will have been replaced by something completely new and better anyway" sort of thing.

Which in turn makes me think those devs were rather green, at least in the ways of the relationship between innovation and money, which has illustrations a lot older than the computing sector.

Re: Retirement beckons

You say that now but I wonder will your resolve hold when that government chopper lands on your lawn and your old flame who is now the Deputy PM steps out and pleads that you're the only one who can save us and it'll be different his time.

Re: 1900?

What intrigues me about that is that there might quite well have have been, at the time, at least the odd tenured prof still stalking around the campus who was actually born before that lower-bound. Good job it didn't roll straight out into payroll.

We dwell a lot on the future wrt this problem, and how the decision wasn't very forward-looking, but it's equally tickling/embarrassing that nobody considered any applications needing to manage times even at the beginning of their own century.

Wayback 0.1 debuts as early Wayland server for X11 diehards

Re: Rootfull was already an option

I think supporting Wayland-only apps in X11 desktops falls outside the scope of what Wayback is looking to provide. Giving distros a pathway to be able to drop the Xorg server without orphaning some treasured X11-only DEs is the name of the game; throwing those DEs a further lifeline of support for apps that have left X11-native behind is manifestly not.

To their credit*, the XLibre mob do seem to be motivated to address this, with discussion of integrating an embryonic tool called 12to11, which appears to be akin to a "reverse Xwayland":

https://git.linuxping.win/12to11/12to11

[*Albeit that the stated motives range from the practical utilitarian to a desire to "own" any app devs who've had the temerity to abandon native X11 support. That place is giving my popcorn dealer aneurysms.]

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Re: .doc and .xls also at the funeral parlour

But it's not true, that's the point. So your Godwin (dude, really?) is moot.

Re: .doc and .xls also at the funeral parlour

>M$'s protocols bonfire is taking file types for the old Word and Excel (and presumably PowerPoint and Access?) and junking them, about the same month as W10 EOL.

I can't find any citation for this. I think it's incorrect. Some older apps are being EOL'd but what you allege is not mentioned anywhere.

Shame there's no BSD icon to go with Tux

Close enough? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

KDE Plasma 6.4 ships with major usability and Wayland improvements

Re: KDE Team note: Plasma 6.4.0 will need manual intervention if you are on X11

Will be interesting to see the spreadsheet of which rolling distros have taken this approach.

No surprise to me that Gentoo did not. For the new kwin-x11 package to fail to be built, you would need to have disabled the "X" USE-flag either globally (which would be rather bold* as you wouldn't even get Xwayland) or for the kde-plasma/plasma-login-sessions ebuild (and kde-plasma/plasma-meta, if you are using that).

*Of course if you are an iconoclast about it, Gentoo has allowed for X to be purged more comprehensively than most competitors for a while already.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: Always get downvoted

So ... what you're concerned about is the client machine's X server being compromised/naughty and then compromising the server through the X client app (whatever it may be)?

1. This is a pretty damn skinny attack vector considering how many people actually use X forwarding (let alone on servers of any value/interest), plus requiring a chain of at least 3 exploits to pwn the server (machine)

2. I'd say it falls within the standard purview of whoever admins the server (machine) to sandbox or otherwise lockdown any client apps that might be run on it to an extent that is satisfactory for that server's particular security needs. This applies equally to Xeyes run in a forwarded X session as it does to nano run in an SSH session, as far as I see it.

The whole client-on-the-server/server-on-the-client element of this topic still makes my brain hurt a bit after 20some years so apologies if I've misunderstood your thrust here.

GIMP has been all-in-one-window for a while now. A lot of filters use a settings dialogue in a separate window though, and it'd be nice if they could remember to appear off to the side instead of slap bang in front of the thing you're editing.

Google's unloved plan to fix web permissions gathers support

Re: Website permissions are simple

I don't think there was any suggestion of the browser being able to override OS-level policy, was there?

And if it is just the "nag factor" of the browser asking for something the OS won't grant it anyway: surely the browser has a "global deny all" setting? I know Firefox does.

Re: How about no...

Dunno if you'd call it focused (since it is primarily for IM) but Signal does group video chat.

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

Re: Fixes another problem as well

Boy, it's gonna be hard going for you after The Pulse(TM) when we're all back to mechanical typing pools ;)

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.