Posts by mark l 2

The App Gap and supply chains: Purism CEO on what's ahead for the Librem 5 USA

While it seems a interesting concept, at nearly $2000 its only going to appeal to those who really need a super private phone and is never going to gain mass market appeal, so therefore the app developers won't have much desire to port their apps to it.

As for the tethering situation the last time i tried on Android it was super easy, barely an inconvenience to get around those restrictions. There were several work arounds and apps you could download to let you tether when the T&Cs said you couldn't.

Intel ships crypto-mining ASIC at the worst possible time

[Intel has painted itself as somewhat of an environmental savior for the crypto-mining market. This is because the company claims its Blockscale ASIC is much more energy efficient than GPUs for proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining.]

Apart from the fact that a GPU can still be used for other things other than crypto mining, where as these ASICs are going to become e-waste rather quickly if the crypto market carries on dropping as they serve no other purpose than to create made up fun bucks.

Moscow court fines Pinterest, Airbnb, Twitch, UPS for not storing data locally

Re: Pointless fines

These fines amount to rounding errors on these tech companies accounts, it would like being given a £1 speeding fine, you would just thrown a fiver on the table and tell them to keep the change.

But maybe things are so bad in Russia right now that even $20K seems like a lot to the Russian judges.

Arm says its Cortex-X3 CPU smokes this Intel laptop silicon

Although it would be good to see ARM CPUs being able to compete with Intels top end laptop CPUs, I still don't see there is much demand for ARM Windows laptops, and that's partly MS fault by treating Windows on ARM as a second class OS, not even porting over a lot of their own software for years after launching.

And although Chromebooks can have some success with ARM versions, they tend to be priced to compete with low end Celeron laptops rather than anything at the top end.

China's blockchain boosters slam crypto as Ponzi scheme

I mean outside of China who actually trusts that 'China's Blockchain-based Service Network' not tot have some ulterior motive to their statement against cryptocurrency?

Personally i wouldn't be investing in crypto myself as I can see that although I don't believe the major players like bitcoin are operating a ponzi scheme, I can see that the market will eventually crash as people are investing in made up fun buck, which no one is actually spending on anything.

ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

The article doesn't mention whether this desktop as a service is a Windows desktop or their own home grown one?

I guess if its their own developed one maybe built on Linux then they could get better results than using standard RDP

Yodel becomes the latest victim of a cyber 'incident'

I was waiting for a Yodel parcel and since their tracking wasn't working I had no idea whether it was going to come that day or not so decided to go out and do some work out at the back of my house and enjoy the sunshine. I missed the Yodel driver ringing the door bell but thankfully my neighbour was home and took in the parcel for me.

But no calling card was left to inform me that they had delivered it to a neighbour the the online tracking says its still at the depot, so if I was an unscrupulous type I could just claim it never arrived and get my money back from the merchant. So I expect there will be a lot of missing parcel claims from this cyber incident.

Graphical desktop system X Window just turned 38

Re: Baby and bathwater come to mind.

I use X2go quite frequently to connect to a remote machine and get the XFCE remote desktop. I find it works much better than VNC or RDP as it seems much more responsive even over ADSL as long as a port on the remote server is open for SSH you can connect and it without needing to open up any other ports.

Hopefully there will be still at least one DE sticking with X.org for a while yet so I can continue to use this feature

Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market

I wonder what size of real storage they will have when the fakes appear on Aliexpress or Ebay? I got a 32GB card once which would start over writing data after 8GB was written. So maybe 128GB of actual storage for a fake 1.5GB card?

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

My high school had a computer lab of Acorns back in the late 80s and early 90s and at that point i had only every seen the odd X86 PC in offices and on TV, no one i knew had one at home, it was all Amiga's Atari ST's or a few had Acorns.

So when i left school to go to college and their labs had PCs running Win 3.11 it felt like a step backwards compared to the slick RiscOS of the Acorns I had been using at school for 5 years.

Lucky for me there were a couple of Archimedes in the corner of the college lab and so i would jump on them to do my work if the tutor would allow me to.

But the second year of the course they were replaced with 2 more Windows PCs and I never go to use RiscOS again after 1993, so I might look at firing it up in a VM to play around with after reading this article.

TikTok US traffic defaults to Oracle Cloud, Beijing can (allegedly) still have a look

So how do Tiktok decide whether the data is to go to Oracle or Singapore servers? Is is based on the person says they live in the US when making an account or the IP of where they are accessing Tiktok from?

As im sure that Chinese Tiktok users are still going to have their data sent to the Singapore servers even if they are visiting the US and accessing from a US IP.

Cookie consent crumbles under fresh UK data law proposals

I doubt it is going to make much difference to the number of cookie consent banners you are going to see on a daily basis, sure UK websites that only server UK users can get rid of them. But if you have EU visitors then you are still obliged for them to consent to the cookies you want to use them.

So i expect most websites will still keep them to err on the side of caution. After all many US websites have them and their is no legal requirement in the US for cookie consent banners, and that is a much larger user base than little old Britain and our 'taking back control'.

Brave roasts DuckDuckGo over Bing privacy exception

The fact that the DuckDuckgo browser appears not be be blocking ads by default, means there was always going to be privacy concerns in the browser. But i guess its still better than just using Google and Chrome in its default settings.

Personally im going to stick with Firefox with Ublock origin and the strict tracking protection turned on. Although i did need to temporarily switch back to standard tracker protection this morning to be able to complete a purchase on Aliexpress which had been working without issue up until i updated to FF 101

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

Re: Amiga 1000 showing an IE logo

Fairly sure that is an Amiga as that appears to be a Commodore 1081 or 1084 monitor, which i spends many an hours looking at when I had one connected to my Amiga in my youth.

Check this photo as it looks like a very similar setup https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/download_photos/a1000_1_big.jpg

I guess it could be running IE on Windows 95 through an x86 bridge board or emulation so could have seen IE on it all be running very slowly.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

I remember having a program on my Amiga 500 called something like Disk-o-tek which would play a tune from the floppy drive motor. So this guy have expanded on that by 500 times, good on him.

Meta mostly fails in appeal against order from UK watchdog to sell Giphy

I still find it baffling that a company that sole purpose was to host GIFs which were primarily made from content they didn't own the copyright to, could be even worth $400m.

Internet Explorer 11 limps to the end of Windows 10 road

I guess those that still need IE for some legacy app can run a VM with an older version of Windows with IE installed but firewalled off to only access that one app and not go out on the wider internet. Which to be honest is how IE should have been treated ever since MS decided it was done for an they were going to throw all their eggs into the Edge basket.

I for one won't be shedding a tear when its gone completely, it was the crappiness and insecurity of IE that got be to switch to Firefox around 17 years ago, and I haven't used a MS browser to do anything other than download an alternative web browser ever since.

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Even though TSMC have agreed to open a 5nm US fab, TSMC keep their best process eg 3nm in the Taiwan fabs which i am sure is a strategy than they have agreed with the Taiwan government to protect against Chinese invasion, and also as a way to stop their best people getting lured away to other competitors labs outside of Taiwan.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

I like EV's and can see that they are part of the future of personal transport but their green credentials need to vastly improve by 2035 if we are going to say they are the best environmental solution to replace ICE vehicles. As although EVs don't omit any pollutants from an exhaust pipe (most modern ICE vehicles are pretty clean now anyway) the mining of the rare earth elements to make the batteries is not environmentally friendly with huge areas getting stripped of natural habitat for mining plus their is the issue of using child labour in the DRC.

So we really need to be recycling every used battery to get back the resources before we dig up more minerals out of the ground, even if that means legislation needs to be written to put the onus onto the battery manufactures to do so. Its no good saying we have cut down on pollution in the EU if we have chopped down millions of trees in the Congo to do it.

Starlink's success in Ukraine amplifies interest in anti-satellite weapons

I suspect that the Chinese are furiously looking for software exploits in Starlink firmware they can use to their own advantage. After all there are bound to be bugs in the code and by design they can't be air gapped from the internet. So I suspect that will end up being Starlinks weakness.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: Party Line

CGNAT is also bad when one bad actor behind the NAT server does something to cause the public IP to get blacklisted.

My old ISP used to use it and I found I couldn't access a website because the CGNAT IP address had been blocked for abuse, as far as the website was concerned everyone behind the NAT was connecting from one public IP.

I have a VPS which only has IPv6 and it has to use a NAT64 gateway to access some resources which still don't have IPV6 versions.

And i am not talking about some small independent website but some big websites are still only accessible from IPv4.

This isn't too much of an issue for my VPS. But if this were a residential network with only IPv6 and had to rely on NAT64 gateway to access resources that are IPv4 only you end up in a situation with lot of people connecting to a IPV4 only website from the IPv4 of the NAT64 gateway, and if one person abuses the system the IPv4 addresses can get blacklisted.

Hopefully more website will go dual stack soon, as its especially easy if you use cloudflare for a website as its a simple setting change to support IPv6

US Supreme Court puts Texas social media law on hold

Re: I wonder what would happen if...

I did wonder how the social media platforms would even be able to police it, if there was a facebook group on which people from all over the US were to post content, would they not be able to delete any posts that violated the T&Cs if that post was from a Texas IP address, but those from New York and California they would delete?

What happened if a Texan left the state and posted from a California IP could they then be moderated until they returned to posting from within Texas again?

Amazon investors nuke proposed ethics overhaul and say yes to $212m CEO pay

Re: Don't rock the boat

I suspect you looked you could find these items on ebay or some other independent online retailer who doesn't treat their employees like robots as well though, even though it might cost a couple of dollars more.

Speaking of which that the only reason Amazon tolerates flesh and blood worker ATM because robots are not yet sophisticated enough to replace them. But as soon as they are, expect massive lay offs at Amazon.

Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content

Its been a while since i used Clonezilla but in my old job working for a schools IT dept it was used regularly to restore the OS on PCs after a HDD died from a master image.

I do recall that it couldn't restore a partition to another a disk smaller than what the original one was you were cloning from, even if the actual amount of data to copy was lower.

Eg if you had a 250GB partitions with 100GB of data, you could only copy it to a disk of 250GB or greater not a 200GB disk even though the data would fit on there, as Clonezilla couldn't resize partitions on the fly.

This was a slight issue if you used a different manufacturers drive where one was actually 250GB and the other was only 249.9GB. So we started leaving the last couple of GB unpartitioned on the drives to get around that problem.

Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16

Re: Under a minute?

Just to be pedantic, a few seconds boot time, is under a minute to boot. And since the Author never gave a specific number he might have been talking about a few seconds

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

"In Ormandy's hunt for the LPL compiler, he asked SCiZE, who maintains a page dedicated to the long-gone bulletin-board "warez" scene. Not only did SCiZE have a copy of the long-lost Lotus toolkit, he also had a copy of something else thought lost to history: Lotus 1-2-3 for Unix™."

It goes to show that while piracy is bad, if it hadn't been for people cracking software and distributing on a BBS back in the day that software could have been lost forever.

AWS puts latest homebrew Graviton3 Arm processor in production

I wonder if these Graviton 3 CPUs are more energy efficient than a 64 core x86-64 CPU when fully maxed out?

As with energy prices going up worldwide due to Ukraine invasion that might be a big reason for more cloud providers to try and push ARM as they cost less leccy to run

It's 2022 and there are still malware-laden PDFs in emails exploiting bugs from 2017

Re: Give us a small PDF reader

I am not sure if its still maintained there was a Windows port of Evince a FOSS PDF reader which is popular on Linux. And Evince according to their website doesn't support all the extra 'features' Adobe added on like embedding other documents or running Javascript in PDFs.

China-linked Twisted Panda caught spying on Russian defense R&D

It still baffles me that downloading a 'document' can own your computer in 2022. It about time we went back to basic word processors and spreadsheets without the ability to run any code inside documents.

US fears China may have ten exascale systems by 2025

"What is at stake here is not just national pride, because supercomputers provide the raw calculating power required for simulation of nuclear physics used for atomic weapons"

The early atomic weapons were developed without supercomputers and they seem pretty effective, and considering China already has over 350 nuclear weapons already so how does getting more supercomputers make much different in that context? I am sure 350 nuclear bombs would still be enough to wipe out all the major western cities should they choose launch an attack.

Mozilla opens testing for Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox

If Ublock Origin is crippled by Firefox implementing Manifest v3 then ill definitely be looking to switch to an alternative browser to where it carries on working like it does at present, which will be sad as I have been using Firefox since it was still in beta.

Although i do have chrome installed for those few website that require it, such as Oracle Cloud which refuses to accept a password change when you try to do in on FF.

I would personally much rather use a browser that would restrict me to only using manifest v2 compatible extensions going forward even if that mean less choice, as I only use a few broswer add on with Ublock Origin being the most useful

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

Re: Getting the most out of it...

My last MS account was suspended because of 'suspicious activity' on the account. Eg logging in over a VPN and they required me to add a mobile number to verify ownership it before i could unlock it.

So that was the last time i used it, as I refuse to give out my mobile number as any form of identification or for 2fa.

So if there is no local account option going forward on Windows 11 i will definitely not be upgrading to it.

Landmark case recognizes Bored Ape NFT as an asset

I think NFT would be of value if it was a record of a digital license or copyright that was being transfered to the buyer so they could do whatever they wanted with the image afterwards. As if you gonna spend thousands on an image id want to be printing T-Shirt, hats, mugs with it on and selling them to get some sort of money back from my purchase.

But then again im not the sort of person who would spend thousands on a traditional painting just to hang on my wall either.

Bing! Microsoft tests search box in the middle of Windows 11 desktop

Re: IE4 and Active Dekstop

Active desktop and that side bar widget thing that came on vista were the first things I got rid of after a clean install of Windows.

Not that I stuck with Windows very long, i ditched it and went back to XP until 7 came along a few years later.

Will this be one of the world's first RISC-V laptops?

Re: Been this way before

I doubt even if this prototype goes into production they will be aimed at gamers. It will more than likely come with a Linux distro and even on X86 Linux most new games are Windows games running through WINE, so unless it comes with some sort of X86 to RISC-V emulator which would allow games for Windows to run at a reasonable speed through WINE, then the best you might achieve is ports of games like Doom and Quake, where the code is open sourced and can be recompiled for RISC V.

It does mention that a port of Android 12 has been made for RISC V so that might open up a few more commercial games, although from my experience with Android on X86 a lot of games have been complied for running on ARM and won't run on other CPUs.

Not everyone wants to play games on a computer though, there are millions of PCs out there that are only used for none gaming stuff such as coding, office software, or just general internet usage, which a RISC V laptop should easily be able to do.

The new generation of CentOS replacements – plus the daddy of them all: RHEL 8.6

Ive updated my VPS to Oracle Linux version 8.6 in the last couple of days. So that is another alternative to RHEL, although as obviously Oracle is involved a lot of people will probably want to avoid it.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

I think a lot of the reason developers of Linux DE went for spins on Windows or MacOS designs was on the belief that it would be easier for people to switch to Linux who were familiar with those OS.

This may have been useful when Windows was the perhaps the only computing platform that people used day to day, but with the advent of smart phones, tablets and even TVs having their own unique UI i think people are used to switching between different OS UI and its not causing confusion with people looking for a start menu on their iPad or phone.

Even my father who is now in his 70s and is no way technically minded can switch between using Windows 10 on his laptop, iOS on his phone, FireOS on an Amazon tablet and whatever OS comes on his Samsung TV quite easily.

So I would be good to see some Linux distros try something different with their UI designs.

Lithium production needs investment to keep pace with battery demand

We definitely need to be extracting more from spent batteries than just keep digging up more lithium out of the ground to keep up with demand. But it needs to be cost effective to recycle and not just a well meaning idea that doesn't work economically. As look at plastic recycling which was pushed by the petrochemical companies as a solution to the huge plastic problem, but in reality doesn't work for most plastics as its still cheaper to make new plastic than to use recycled.

Most organizations hit by ransomware would pay up if hit again

Re: Tax man always wins.

If you are a UK VAT business you don't have to buy goods and services from other VAT registered entities. If an individual or business has a turnover of less than £85K in a 12 month period they don't have to register for VAT.

And its not your responsibility as a business to ensure they are complying with UK tax laws if you are purchasing from them.

iOS, Android stores host more than 1.5 million 'abandoned' apps

While I appreciate some app may stop working or be security risks if not regularly updated. There are others than still work fine even if they are 5+ years old. For example I have a basic snooker score board app that you press the colours of the balls potted and it adds up your score. Its hardly a complicated app and the snooker rules haven't changed in the decade since the app was created, so for now i can install it on my phone. But when these required updates come in if the developer doesn't update the app ill no longer be able to install it when i change phones. So I guess im going to have to extract the APK and save it somewhere to side load it.

Twitter buyout: Larry Ellison bursts into Elon's office, slaps $1b down on the desk

Isn't musk a pedoguy not a dickhead?

FYI i don't know if pedoguy might mean something different where Musk lives but if you are from where i grew up its a term that refers to billionaire tech entrepreneurs.

Starlink's Portability mode lets you take your sat broadband dish anywhere*

Re: Hmmm

I suspect that the starlink cost is heavily subsidized by Musk and its loosing money on every installation at the moment, so i more price increases to come as more people join the service

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

Re: Upgrade!!!!

Yes and will probably only work on their big tech proprietary software, so the small guys and FOSS will get locked out of being able to support it.

EU Apple suit alleges anticompetitive Apple Pay practices

Re: Why buy Apple kit?

Your statement that you happy to use Apple pay because it already works the exact reason why the EU are investigating whether Apple are using technical restrictions to lock out other payment providers from NFC, and thus gain a monopoly by making the competition less attractive to use.

Today its Apple restricting access to NFC and not allowing other browser engines or 3rd party payment options in apps. But who know what else they might decide to restrict 3rd party access to in the future in the name of 'security' if Apple launched their own version of an app and cripple third parties ability to compete on a level playing field.

Microsoft did similar things back in the 90s and early 2000s as a way of killing the competition, and people were up rightly up in arms about that.

US appeals court ruling could 'eliminate internet privacy'

Re: "eliminate internet privacy"

Here in the UK RIPA means that its not just the plods who can have a nosey around your internet history, data from traffic cameras, where you used your bank card etc. Local councils, the DWP and others can all do this and its a legal requirement that companies holding this data retain it for 12 months.

Putin reaches for nuclear option: Zuckerberg banned

Re: Might as well add me.

Emirates still flies to Moscow, and I believe there are Asian airlines are not banned from Russian airspace, so I guess in theory you could go there if you wanted to. But you would have to fly to China or UAE to get your flights into Russia.

Obviously if you are from one of the countries that Putin has declared as 'unfriendly' I wouldn't recommend it though, as you may run the risk of being accused of spying.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Re: "Google [..] maintains that AMP is here to help make the web better"

Google could already take ad revenue away from website owners if they wanted, with or without AMP pages.

After all you have to trust Google to record the number of clicks on a advert to get your revenue, so if they wanted to skim off a few for there own coffers without paying the website owner they could already do that on every website with Google ads code on it.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

Re: "Advertising tolerant"?

I use Ublock Origin on Firefox to block the annoying ads on Youtube while actually watching the videos. But as I agree that there are some great content creators making stuff for Youtube who I want to support. I will periodically turn off the ad blocker and let it play their entire video playlist with the ads turn on. So that way the creator makes some money and its only the advertisers that are loosing out since its playing in a muted tab i am not paying attention to, as I am doing something else.

Judge dismisses Microsoft's challenges: ValueLicensing case to proceed in Britain

Since MS released Windows 10 its essentially just their equivalent of how Google uses Android, in that its a tool for them to collect user data for showing ads and to up sell other services which users have to pay for. As locking users into a monthly ongoing subscription is much more lucrative than a one off payment for a Windows license.

That probably the reason why they no longer restrict what you can do in Windows if its not activated, as they don't really care if you pay for a one off Windows license anymore as long as you use it to send them all that lovely telemetry.