Posts by Charlie Clark

Early Skype developer Jaan Tallinn splashes cash in latest funding for Matrix-based instant messenger Element

Re: Already here?...............

If it's not encrypted then it's easily intercepted.

Re: "sticking a knife into email"

The main advantage of e-mail is that it is entirely protocol-based meaning that, in theory at least, you can choose different clients and servers.

No, it was because the protocol really is not very secure.

Google revamps bug bounty program

Re: Maths

For a very few reporting bugs might earn them a living, for many it's a hobby but for a few it might also be the way to a new career, in which case the costs might be compared with other ways of finding new employees.

Re: "11,055 bugs found in its services since 2010"

Would you feel less nervous if they didn't tell you.

Flawed comparison

The comparisons with Microsoft and Oracle compare total bugs with those reported from others. You'd hope the companies would also be finding some themselves.

Apple patches zero-day vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS under active attack

Re: 4 months...

Welcome to the real world, which also includes Apple's not so stellar bug fixing policy. It's quite likely that the work required to submit the bug was one of the things that put him off.

China sets goal of running single-stack IPv6 network by 2030, orders upgrade blitz

They already have far more reliable tracking than IP addresses and most Chinese agree with this. This is more about getting ahead industrially than anything else, though presumably it includes upgrades to the great firewall to work with IPv6 traffic. But once China goes completely IPv6 good luck to anyone trying to source IPv4 or even dual-stack kit.

Even Facebook struggles: Zuck's titanic database upgrade hits numerous legacy software bergs

Re: Didn't know they were still using MySQL

Doesn't really matter: Facebook could easily afford to do it, because even if they fucked up the database part, they definitely built an impressive money machine. Who knows, they might even just buy Oracle to do so.

Re: DVLA Database 'update'

What I like about these scams is that the poor spelling and other errors are now considered to be deliberate as a sort of filter for those less easily scammed.

Re: MySQL is especially bad at data definition statements. Move to Postgres!

Much as I dislike MySQL, this is mainly for the long list of weird bugs that never seemed to matter. Credit to Oracle for actually working through them once it took over. But the main problem with MySQL was trying to use it for things it wasn't designed for. It was originally a fast tabular storage engine with an SQL query engine, but it was not designed as an RDBMS and, hence, generally sucked at both the relational and management parts. As long as you stuck within the MyASM limits you could have a fast and generally reliable database, and it was quite a bit faster than Postgres at the time. But it's sort of stayed there. Yes, it now does the relational part with InnoDB but the management part is still largely MIA, which is why there are tools to fix your DB for you. And one of the side effects was a generation of programmers who created applications that suited the denormalised model.

Over the same time Postgres, which always managed your relational data for you reliably, has grown faster and scaled in all dimensions: reading, writing, replicating, storage types and analysis. It also has a well established extension system which has been used to bring new features and improved performance before things go into core. And it has almost always encouraged best practice such as refusing to allow foreign keys for non-indexed values…

Re: Facebook's key motto...

It's a different project but I think the people behind Stack Overflow lifted the curtain a couple of years ago about how they managed to be "webscale" without about 8 servers. A good architecture won't immediately support millions of users but it will make it possible.

Re: Facebook's key motto...

Facebook's throughput is impressive but, of those 2.8 billion users, the only number that matters for maintenance is how many concurrent users there are. Even then, it's still largely a read-heavy environment which means caching, caching, caching for the users. All the real development work goes on the advertising side and this is why they don't talk about it.

But for real scale, it's difficult to beat what Google gets up to with YouTube alone.

Re: Didn't know they were still using MySQL

MySQL does scale pretty well in read-heavy environments. Unfortunately, it's shit™ for migrations due to the way tables are managed: "simple" changes to tables can take forever as they're migrated to temporary ones and back. And that forever can take even longer on an ever growing system.

If you have a system running on a DB you need to have a migration strategy in place. This might even include no migrations to new versions. But the real problem here seems to be running custom extensions, which obviously seemed a good idea at the time…

They could switch to Postgres and use FDW (Foreign Data Wrappers) to hook up the legacy databases while they work on a data migration strategy (inplace updates are not always possible) that minimises the dump and load problems.

Or they could ask Oracle for help…

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Re: True

Where or how does FTP implement hash checking? I download loads of stuff for which there is no hash present. Fortunately, I know my software distribution system does use hash-checking.

And, again, this is still not an argument against using TLS

Re: FTP and Firefox

But where I need FTP, I use a fully featured FTP client and preferably one that defaults to SFTP. FTP in the browsers comes from the days when http couldn't be relied upon for sustained connections such as downloads but that hasn't been the case for over a decade.

But the problem for downloads, especially drivers, is that without encryption they're subject to MitM attacks…

https is the replacement. At least as far as browsers go. Can't remember the last time I fired up a pure ftp session simply to download something. For the rest, Mozilla did go into considerable detail when they made the announcement.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

It's not when but where

Bugs in undeployed development code have essentially no cost to the user. Once the code has been deployed then, exploits, etc. aside, there is the cost of information and planning, testing and applying patches, which may or may not require downtime.

If it weren't for the different legal situation, industry could provide a reasonable benchmark for when things like product recalls are required.

NSO Group 'will no longer be responding to inquiries' about misuse of its software

Re: This is a strawman.

The Israeli "spy services" sector provides a very useful function for the US military, which largely funds it through "defence support" funding. By providing a layer of plausible deniability it allows the three-lettered lot to engage in the kind of activities expressly forbidden by the US constitution, such as the warrant-less surveillance of US citizens (the rest of the world is fair game).

There are similar arrangements for medical research because, here too, the US constitution forbids clandestine medical experiments on US citizens, even the non-white ones!

Europe mulls anonymous crypto-wallet ban, rules to make transfers more traceable

Re: Heaven forbid

Hardly that. It is just bringing cryptocurrency transactions in line with other forms where transactions above a certain value must be registered.

Re: Ok...

Cryptocurrencies have always been a solution in search of a problem. On the back of get rich quick speculation thanks to the notional rise in value versus the dollar the market became an opportunity for regulatory arbitrage – they could be used in unregulated situations (ride hailing services are another example, though Silicon Valley types prefer to call it disruption), which money launderers quickly spotted. Effectively, exchanges became mules for the money launderers and people with normal accounts for fraud. Sounds like good enough reasons to want to regulate to me…

Re: Heaven forbid

Money laundering, like tax evasion is effectively theft from tax payers.

That may well be the case. But the most important thing for banks is access to the international clearing systems: at some point someone is going to want to convert the crypto-currency into something more fungible and that's where licensing plays a roll.

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Because you create the image in the folder you want rather than fiddling with the Save As dialogue box when you want to save it. I still, far too frequently, find that files have been saved in the "wrong" folder.

Yes, this was the start of the whole "object oriented desktop" idea that was later also known as Taligent and Pink. One of the ideas being that content (in the form of documents) were more important than particular applications which would be relegated to providing services – you see the vestiges of this in Apple's poorly maintained services menu.

Windows 95 copied as much of this as possible but, as a not a particularly OO system, was extremely limited in what could be offered. And, with Microsoft's revenue primarily coming from its suite of applications, had a vested interest in not letting, say OpenOffice become the default document editor… Now it's presumably going to use the approach to force feed everyone O365.

Windows 11 gets chatty as Teams integration turns up

I know it's childish but…

I really do hate MS Teams. But even more I hate this attempt by Microsoft to make MS Teams the new internet explorer.

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

Re: Ban it!

It's not the length of the flight but the height that matters so avoiding short hauls is a quick win: space tourism really doesn't make sense until we have completely renewable fuel sources and understand more about how reentry affects the upper levels of the atmosphere.

Also, Branson and Bezos should a great deal of confidence in their company's designs to go up themselves.

You do know that Branson has been selling his Virgin Galactic shares?

While there is some impressive technology involved, these are largely vanity and some of these projects have unresolved enviromental projects including: space tourism, really? Though what happens with the aluminium from Musk's satellite constellation is probably a more pressing problem.

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

Re: "...over 85% of the population on at least their first jab..."

You're misapplying the term reservoir here, which is normally used to mean a self-replenishing source. But the aim of vaccination is to reach herd immunity where this is effectively no longer the case.

Of course, random mutations will occur in every infected person, but there will be less selection pressure in the unvaccinated. At one point it will just become yet another endemic disease.

Re: Odd...

Much as I dislike the masks, I'd have to disagree that their usefulness has been disproved. Their effect is marginal but not revolutionary, ie. symptomatic wearers are around 15% less infectious with them than without. In many situations this makes very little difference but in some it can be crucial, which is why they are standard practice in many hospital situations.

Masks lose their effectiveness over time, particularly as they become damp. They're pretty much useless outdoors but, where good ventilation and distancing is not possible, then they can make sense for a limited time but if you're going to spend any time with someone indoors then don't bother. More importantly, however, avoid crowds and, if you've got symptons, stay home. It's a pity these simple instructions are not repeated more often and clearly.

10:1 ratio correlates strongly with the vaccinated: non-vaccinated ratio and this is likely to be the key figure. In the US it is reported that over 99% of all recent deaths are of non-vaccinated people. While I suspect there may be some fun involved in that number, it's around what we expect so expect the pressure on the unvaccinated to increase.

Re: Odd...

The communication around mask wearing is, I think, somewhat deliberately more than a little mixed. Initially, they were supposed protect those around a person but not the person themself, assuming the wearer is infectious. This was later extended to suggest that they do offer a degree of protection for the wearer. While the data does suggest that masks can help reduce the spread of infection, in some circumstances, it's marginal rather than advanced and there are all kind of caveats, especially over time. But what isn't in doubt is the visibility of them, which has made it easier to make them an item of faith.

Philosophy and statistics

In a sense this is quintessentially a question of philosophy: how much can we trust each other to do the right thing? If this is combined with the opinion polls suggesting a majority in favour of restrictions, then you might expect most people to continue to follow most of the rules. And this is how society generally works.

Personally, I think a more graded set of restrictions rather than a big bang probably make more sense and might all stand the test of time for the next epidemic. But, basically, we've bet the bank on vaccination so at some point* the restrictions do have to come off.

* Feel free to make this up for yourself: 80% of the eligible population being fully vaccinated might be a place to start.

Re: "...over 85% of the population on at least their first jab..."

You're only right about the 85% having had one jab. You're wrong on the rest: unvaccinated people can be infected but this doesn't mean they'll act as a reservoir and most certainly not one where new, vaccine resistant strains can arise. Once the illness has run its course through someone they are clear. Selection pressure (viruses can't evolve in the same way we do) suggest that mutations are most likely to arise in people with poor immune systems where it takes longer for the body to clear the infection. There is even some suggestion that in the UK the treatment of patients with antibody-laced plasma may well have been the source of the alpha variant.

Tomorrow's wireless world will be fatter, faster, and creepier

Re: Are THZ frequencies for use by Wi-fi or 6g or 7g cellular phones safe?

we are getting closer and closer to microwave

Been there for years.

I think that there should be massive testing done to find out how high wi-fi and cell phone frequencies can go

Technically, there's no upper limit and high enough (X-ray or Gamma) you don't need to worry about attenuation so much…

The key issue, as the article mentions, is to use directional, or focussing antennae so that, for the same power output, you have more efficient transmission by using beams rather than simple radiation. Efficiency in this sense also means not frying the meatware as much…

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Re: re-sizing and re-wrapping text

PDF cannot escape its Postscript origins: it will always attempt to create fixed sized-pages.

EPUB would seem the most reasonable format: this is essentially a subset of HTML with a resource tree. Authoring tools are now pretty reasonable and, for those who want it, DRM is supported.

Still, I bet the guy loves all the attention he's getting!

Refreshing: An Office update that won't frighten the horses

Re: WTF

Office 2016, particularly Excel is significantly better on MacOS than Office 2011 but I can understand people wanting to stick with the aqua look and feel.

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

Re: What really grinds my gears.

Can an industry group get together and come up with an identical radio standard to Wifi, except instead of using the hot mess of an unlicensed space, carve out some licensed frequency

Er, that would be the mobile phone networks and they exist already and convergence, at some point, is very likely.

Re: What really grinds my gears.

What's your point that that a licensed frequency product is not called WiFi?

Well, we could use the various IEEE specifications but WiFi is easier to remember.

It's great because it's unlicensed so no one has to ask permission and it's bad for exactly the same reasons. However, contention between neighbouring networks seems to have got better, at least in my experience – it's on the way to a managed network – via smaller but more powerful cells. I've lived in densely populated apartment buildings with well over 20 networks visible and rarely seen many problems except with dweebs who think they can manage channels better than the silicon: if you can go with 5 Ghz which does have enough bandwidth.

Xiaomi parties like a winner after coming second on world smartphone sales charts

Re: Hard work and good products

Security update are more important than version updates, though that shouldn't be as onerous for manufacturers as it used to be. But, perhaps even more important, the Xiaomi phones seem to be well supported by LineageOS making you even less dependent on the whims of the manufacturer, especially once they've decided they no longer need you.

Re: "hires 5,000 engineers"

Outside the state-owned enterprise sector there is a thriving market economy. There just is any political freedom.

Re: "hires 5,000 engineers"

To a certain degree in China (and India) those engineers are being churned out of the universities at a sufficient rate. But more importantly, this isn't a new development and thus there is already a market of skilled and experienced engineers as demonstrated by the rising wages in China.

Hard work and good products

I don't have a Xiaomi myself but those I have seen are impressive and have long since ceased to be clones of other companies' flagships.

Re: I would like to buy a phone made by free range workers paid living wage at very least

Fairphone's work has been well documented. For example, they admit that it's almost impossible to get untainted minerals. But the bigger problem with mass adoption is that the phones are considered several generations behind.

LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate reveals effort to be Microsoft-compatible

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

RTF is okay. But CSV is a PITA as soon as you have non-ASCII because you have to get the encoding right. And then you have to do the type inference…

Guess who got a non-ASCII CSV in his e-mail this morning?

But I got the biggest laugh recently with some kind of export to Excel including \200e characters around dates which were subsequently cast to text. Oh how I laughed as I reached for the cattle prod…

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

Microsoft's programs are particularly dumb when it comes to file extensions so an xls renamed as xlsx will not be opened. In fact, you can't mix and match xlsx and xlsm. I'm not sure if this is by accident or by design but I'm pretty sure that the number of infections due to the office formats declined with the switch. That, and the fact that it's easy to get people to click on links in e-mails…

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

As someone who works with the specification I know how awful it is. Still, it is at least there and Microsoft does contribute actively to improvements in the documentation, though these generally affect the strict implementation although the world lives with the transitional specification. But you can do an awful lot with just the schema.

ODF is definitely a better format – XLSX is largely an XML form of BIFF – but it's not without its problems and it is not really being actively maintained.

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

XLS is limited to 256 cols and 65,384 rows…

LibreOffice et al. has had some long-standing bugs in handling XLSX files that could easily have been fixed if they'd read the specification, which was at least published, unlike BIFF which was never published.

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Why would they need to go to such lengths when all they need to do is not have it on their budget. Beggar thy neighbour is a well-established deparmental strategy.