Posts by Dan 55

Apple macOS so secure some apps can't be easily deleted

Re: Optional

If a buggy or malware kext were to be installed, SIP doesn't stop it from being installed, it just keeps it there.

Someone at Apple needs to sit down and think about what they want to achieve with SIP apart from it being a cool idea.

Re: Java 9 is another example

Presumably it makes updating kexts difficult too. They are just a folder containing a few more folders and files and some of them would need to be deleted in an update.

So putting SIP on the 3rd party kext folder just seems to be a way of locking in kext bugs.

Re: It is my personal belief that such boo-boos wouldn't have happened under Steve Jobs

I don't know if it wouldn't have happened under Jobs, but it certainly wouldn't have happened under Bertrand Serlet (OS X boss, left after Snow Leopard).

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Re: Not only Chip Makers...

As much as I hate to defend JavaScript, it's not JavaScript, it's the browsers' JIT compilers.

One of the variants requires that compilers be changed and software recompiled, which means there's no real fix for malware written in assembler or someone still using an old compiler or software.

Re: Error in article

Also grouping two variants under one name allows Intel PR to work their magic and claim others are affected by the same thing too.

Well some AMD CPUs are affected in a non-standard kernel.configuration but the fix for that variant doesn't slow down kernel system calls as much.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Re: Counting chickens?

Don't worry, Hell has thawed, Linus has just ranted.

Re: More Info

Hurray, we've now got a logo.

Re: 30%?

du is basically syscalls in a loop which thrashes the disk and causes I/O interrupts (yet more paging). It's annoying when you want to run du but hardly representative.

And grsecurity using du as a benchmark says more about grsecurity than the bug.

Re: PR gone wild

I do like the way they're throwing all the shit at the fan and seeing what sticks. In one paragraph they claim it's not confined to Intel and in the next they say they're working with other manufacturers which they go on to name. The insinuation is that every manufacturer has this problem.

They probably thought about mentioning VIA who have just announced they're returning to x86 too but that'd be too obvious.

Re: let's see how this turns out.

Well Bloomberg and The Grauniad have had a go, both citing The Reg.

Murdoch also had a go, citing their own special expert who got everything arse about face while he handwaved some technobabble claiming all vendors are bad as each other (well, the other vendor is AMD and their CPUs don't have this problem).

Re: F00F

An if has been committed which disables the changes for AMD.

Re: Counting chickens?

Initial benchmarks say there's an 18% hit on I/O heavy operations on Linux.

https://hothardware.com/news/intel-cpu-bug-kernel-memory-isolation-linux-windows-macos

Click through to Phoronix to see more Intel share price graphs.

Re: Genetic Diversity?

There'd have been Amigas and Macs everywhere as software would have been easy to port and nobody would have bought a PC if they could have chosen one of the other two machines.

Also Microsoft wouldn't exist as they only got where they were today by making quick and dirty ports onto x86 and Windows.

It'd have been brilliant.

Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets

Popularism, much?

As well as being a rather dodgy proposal, I doubt an unlimited fine would do much to stop the NHS, railway, and Brexit headlines.

UK security chief: How 'bout a tax for tech firms that are 'uncooperative' on terror content?

All those will be paying the fine. Telegram or Gab might not.

If it's outside the UK and they don't pay the fine, UK.gov will have a generic banhammer implemented at most ISPs in the form of the age restriction DNS blocker.

You see, once you've got a banhammer, everything looks like a nail.

By forcing age restrictions on websites, the UK will soon be bringing the task of selling details to soft-porn companies in-house.

Re: So if I pay, it's OK?

Or instead of a tax, just fine per post which they don't take down in a set time, i.e. what Germany will do.

It's much simpler to collect, there'll be plenty of fines to go round at the start so that's the windfall, and the fines won't go away unless Facebook actually does something about the problem meaning they might take it seriously.

Soz, guys. No 'alien megastructure' around Tabby's Star, only cosmic dustbunnies

Re: Occam's Razor

Now the deep state has verifiable money trails to people who knew the TRUTH!

The Men in Black will be paying them a visit with flashy things.

Captain Morgan told off for Snapchat lens: That grog be aimed at kiddies

Not really, everyone knows that kids put a false date of birth in social networking apps/websites.

Iranians resist internet censorship amid deadly street protests

Re: Tor metrics

Holy See?

Time's up: Grace period for Germany's internet hate speech law ends

Re: Bah!

I have no idea what to do about hate speech on (anti)social media.

I guess we could learn from Germany, since they have a few years experience on fighting hate speech on all kinds of media.

Nest's slick IoT burglar alarm catches crooks... while it eyes your wallet

Re: And who owns all this generated data about your comings and going?

Here you go, a link which covers the Android privacy story, and in the first paragraph of that you'll find a link to the Street View privacy story.

So, whether employee drinking the kool-aid or fanboy you are, of course, wrong.

Oddly enough, it took a few goes to pursuade Google News to come up with the right story. Funny, that.

Re: And who owns all this generated data about your comings and going?

Who on Earth would trust Google after what they said they collected in Street View, what they later admitted, what they said they collected on Android, and what they later admitted? There is absolutely no guarantee the camera is off. But the shiny is very shiny.

Microsoft Surface Book 2: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, better

Re: Sleep, battery life

So you're saying you're sure they've used completely different designers, engineers, components, factories...

Sleep, battery life

Have they managed to sort that one out yet? They've only had four iterations to do so, but maybe this time they'll be lucky.

No, I'm not going to take a 3000 quid gamble on that.

Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out

Re: Apple acknowledged the situation in an email to The Register

A phone which is on its way out after a year and a half really does need a replaceable battery.

That's pretty much all of them by the way.

I'd rather have replaceable batteries, and a memory card slot while we are at it.

On that subject, now that my current tablet is on its way out, does anyone sell a tablet these days which offers replaceable batteries and a memory card slot?

Any reviews I find on the interwebs are of old discontinued models.

Re: Apple acknowledged the situation in an email to The Register

It seems they will make an exception if they think a PR nightmare is approaching.

E.g. here.

European court: Let's not kid ourselves, Uber. You're a transport firm, not a 'digital service'

Re: Barcelona, Spain

I would point out that the government of Catalunya declared the country independent.

It turns out they didn't (link in Spanish). There were two sections to that law, they only voted on the part which didn't have the UDI, and not even that vote was entered into the official record. None of the work you'd expect setting up a new country happened the day after either, everything ground to a halt and leading politicians fled to Belgium.

So aside from the lack of international support, it never really happened in the first place.

Still, Spain still came down like a tonne of bricks on them. It was debatable if the high court had the powers to investigate what was happening, so just in case, they gave themselves the powers to investigate sedition, but only when it's alleged that a region has declared independence.

Comms-slurping public bodies in UK need crash course in copy 'n' paste

Buttle/Tuttle

Terry Gilliam was right.

(Or if you can't do YouTube.)

TalkTalk banbans TeamTeamviewerviewer againagain

Re: And so it begins

No. It's happened previously and US law has nothing to do with TT.

1. Disable common remote access protocols.

2. Make enabling them require a call to TT. The chances of the scammer convincing them to hang up, call TT, get them enabled, hang up again, and wait for a new call are low.

3. If they do manage then the calll centre will asks the customer why (because Windows Helpline told me to/because you just rang me and told me to), they can be told they're being scammed.

Of course, if the outsourced call centre people are calling TT customers while at work then nothing would help.

Shall we block email too?

After all it can be used for scams as well.

Especially since TalkTalk customer data leaks like a sieve so customers can targeted.

One more credit insurer abandons Maplin Electronics

Re: Next day/Prime

I have had Prime stuff that was fulfilled by Amazon and it took a week to get the delivery ready for shipping. The estimate on the product page says receive by tomorrow, at checkout it says receive the day after tomorrow up to a week later (huh?), and after purchase it said it was going to take a week.

So cancelled I bought the same product sold by a different shop and again fulfilled by Amazon. Same problem. I assume there's some logistics going on between Amazon warehouses that they're not telling you about or they're different shopfronts but the same shop.

And if you're lucky enough to work at a place which won't allow personal deliveries, it's just easier to go to the high street (as much as I hate to).

Amazon also have somehow convinced a lot of people to pay for Prime, and yet delivery dates certainly aren't the next day that was originally promised.

If you factored Prime into the cost of your purchases, the stuff you buy from Amazon is probably as expensive as Maplins.

Twitter's not dreaming of a white supremacist Xmas: Accounts nuked

Re: Chad H.

you may think it's fine as long as it is those you find objectionable getting banned, but what if the pendulum swings and it is those you support that get banned in future,

If the pendulum swings and we end up living in an alt-right society, we'll have bigger problems than Twitter.

Peak smartphone? iPhone X flunks 'supercycle' hopes

This is not the supercycle you're looking for

This strongly suggests that the latest generation of devices is not generating the kind of super cycle that the market is looking for

Or, dare to think it, perhaps the market is just not looking for a supercycle (whatever that is)?

Mozilla's creepy Mr Robot stunt in Firefox flops in touching tribute to TV show's 2nd season

Re: Groupthink

It seems it most of Mozilla didn't know this was happening, the bug was marked as private so not even other Mozilla employees could see it. The asylum is being run by Marketing yet again.

Bugzilla 1424977

Re: Never heard of it

You don't think perhaps removing the licence fee led the current state of affairs?

Mozilla's problem is they don't understand there are people who don't know what Mr. Robot is and there are people who do and they couldn't care less and this kind of stunt puts them off their browser. Then there are peoole who know what Mr. Robot is and like it and this would put them off Firefox too. Luckily I've got the ESR version.

A browser is a browser, not an all-singing all-dancing user experience dancing and waving a top hat reminding you that it's there all the time.

If Mozilla want to get money, they should do something like making a browser for TVs and set-top boxes (like they did and stopped doing for some reason), not randomly screw up web pages to advertise TV shows.

Re: all foretold

Or, more succinctly...

"We live in a kingdom of bullshit."

Irony's lost on old Pope Francis: Pontiff decrees fake news a 'serious sin'

News from 20 minutes into the future...

"Did you hear that? The Pope said something very important today. Very. Important. Fake News is a sin. That's what the Pope said. When CNN put up Fake News about me, they are sinning. When the BBC put out fake news about me, they are sinning. The mainstream media are sinners, and they will burn in hell. It's not me who said it, that's what the Pope said." Etc etc...

Google asks browser rival Vivaldi to post uninstall instructions

Re: Increased my interest in Vivaldi

Chromium is also a spy wrapper. There are still far too many Google services available.

"Nice browser you've got there... shame if nobody knew it existed"

Does every developer who uses Blink get the heavies sent round for daring to offer something better than Google's Blink engine in a meh UI with a built-in data slurper.

'I knew the company was doomed after managers brawled in a biker bar'

Invite Apple, IBM, Oracle, Google, etc... all round to the biker bar. Get them to thrash out their arguments in person instead of hiding behind PR speak, corporo-bollocks, and lawyers.

Unfortunately Larry would probably win.

PHWOAR, those noughty inks: '0.1%' named Stat of The Year

Re: 80% artificial...

Presumably if a town has mostly houses with gardens it's outside the 0.1%.

No hack needed: Anonymisation beaten with a dash of SQL

Does that mean there is authorised research?

There can be... There just never is.

Re: It's one thing to make a law...

Wouldn't that mean cavemen were all geniuses?