Posts by Dan 55

Microsoft punches back at Delta Air Lines and its legal threats

"Delta, unlike its competitors, apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure"

- Boss, their licences show they haven't rolled out Windows 11 yet.

- We've got 'em boys!

Chrome Web Store warns end is nigh for uBlock Origin

They replace one ad with another, and engage in planet-burning blockchain nonsense.

Re: I've never used anything but Firefox...

So two commentards don't understand tech?

Re: Firefox everywhere

I honestly wonder how Palemoon (based on v52) can still render websites now, given Waterfox Classic (based on v57) ended up unable to render many of the ones I visited and I ended up going back to Firefox.

Michigan probes Musk-backed PAC website that weirdly tried and failed to help register people to vote

Re: Bootnotes

I use the NewPipe player with no Google login and follow similar channels to you and the recommendations are usually fairly similar to the original videos too.

However one of the channels is Patreon sponsored and sends links to unlisted videos a week before general release and the recommended channels there are either RWNJ or flat earth or climate denial.

I assume YouTube's algorithm doesn't have enough to work with to recommend similar subjects yet... and if that nonsense is pushed by default then I'm not surprised we've got a problem.

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: The software industry keeps digging its own grave

AI can likely translate 90% of the code to safe Rust, humans can review places where it fails or where it outputs unsafe code (the advantage of Rust being that unsafe code is labelled as such).

It won't fail, it will just use incorrect syntax which won't compile. Or, worse, silently alter the logic of the code and leave it to someone to find the problem later.

If it fails when transferring shell scripts to Python or one version of SQL to another or returning the full syntax of a command you give it, which is what I've tried LLMs out for, you'd have to be out of your mind to use it for converting a full C project to Rust.

Re: WRONG

It's just a shame you removed it from SourceForge so there's no proof of that any more.

Re: WRONG

Oh, look who's turned up to sell their snakeoil version of Typescript for C by spamming an article on memory safety.

The software industry keeps digging its own grave

Translate C to Rust... maybe. With an LLM? Are you absolutely fruitbat insane?

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

I was going to say the same but on an Amiga.

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

Re: GPS - Washington State

It is not that complicated and difficult. All that has to happen is when the car crosses the border it could act as if the driver were not paying attention so the driver would have to turn off assisted driving within a certain amount of time or get a "forced disengagement".

Skype goes ad-free, which is unusual for Microsoft

Re: Skype sucks

But I doubt he's responsible for his company's stupidity.

Re: Skype sucks

Don't understand why you were downvoted four times for that.

I'm guessing the number of active users is not very high these days otherwise MS wouldn't have removed adverts.

Amazon, you will do a total recall of bad stuff sold through your site, watchdog barks

Re: Faulty Fuse

As well as Australia and New Zeleand, they're also in building codes across Western Europe so presumably it does offer protection (or perhaps it's just regulatory capture by big RCD).

Off the top of my head it would immediately help in the US for those people who insist on creating the annual yuletide deathtrap.

Personally I would insist on a rewire if I somehow managed to buy a house which isn't protected by RCDs everywhere.

Re: Faulty Fuse

I can only imagine a US inspector's face seeing that craziness.

Are you talking about the same US building code which means the safest place in the house is the bathroom because other areas in the house don't need an RCD (GFCI) protecting them?

Re: Faulty Fuse

His reviews about the dangerous fuses got deleted from the product pages though.

Golf clap for Amazon. Again.

W3C says Google's cookie climbdown 'undermines' a lot of work

W3C now is little more than a rubber stamp for Chrome

And Google can string them around as it likes.

Exhibit A: This story.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: MBA culture replaced engineering culture

That line is unfortunately disproven by all of us here spending our days fernangling with crap on x86 boxes. There were plenty of better timelines that could have been taken but we're in this one.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Wait a few days and you'll get an email link to the PST file.

What fresh hell is this?

The secret to better weather forecasts may be a dash of AI

Re: degrees of resolution?

The source report is metric in spite of being published from Google. Perhaps El Reg just decided to follow the real world, if only for this one article.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: SUN

Did Sun have a time machine to open source MySQL?

CrowdStrike update blunder may cost world billions – and insurance ain't covering it all

Not so much in European countries where there are statutory rights which can't be waived away by a clause.

Re: Y2K24?

I assume it was this one, somehow it manages to blame "shortsighted engineers" for using two-digit years but not mention all the work done to fix software, giving the impression there was a bunch of prophecies foretelling the end of the world but only a few things broke in the end. Jesus effing Christ...

Re: Y2K24?

I can't help but wonder what would have happened if today's development, testing, and agile practices were used in the late 90s to fix Y2K code.

I've never understood widely-held idea in US software circles which consists of the CEO wiping their arse on a piece of paper and calling it an EULA or T&Cs and this apparently makes the seller or service provider invulnerable to their customers. I suspect we're about to find out it's not true.

Apple Maps escapes orchard into web browser wilds

Re: Very risky move for Apple.

Here Maps also allows you to download as many countries as storage space allows.

Re: Remember the days...

There are also differences due to JavaScript engine/privacy settings/built-in browser login service. You could go ahead if you wanted to but I wouldn't be confident enough to test only against a test suite.

Re: Remember the days...

Developers would develop targeting HTML5 but it's still necessary to check Safari, Chrome, and Firefox at a minimum because each engine slightly has a different interpretation of the standard.

Re: Remember the days...

"We can't be bothered to test with this browser."

X.org lone ranger rides to rescue multi-monitor refresh rates

Re: X11 won't die.

Also there are plenty of X11 apps around too which means X11 won't be disappearing any time soon.

Which is we have XWayland and Weston. Personally I'd prefer Weston (run Wayland software in X11) over XWayland (run X11 software in Wayland).

The months and days before and after CrowdStrike's fatal Friday

Re: it sent $10 Uber Eats gift codes to its over-worked partners and colleagues

... then some people found that their codes were cancelled on trying to redeem them.

If only Crowdstrike were as quick at cancelling bad updates.

Re: Just bad luck?!

As long as the anti-virus industrial complex claims that the danger they protect against is so great that they must react so fast there's no time to properly test and as long as CSO and CTOs believe that their computers are protected by the snake oil sold by these companies, nothing will change.

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

Compare and contrast with France, Germany, Denmark...

The change in mentality needs to come from the top, but it takes something completely over the top like this to make the ICO do anything, usually they're about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Brilliant concept!

The only spanner in the works is I don't think there's any way to program a pause between keypresses, so you couldn't use a QR code scanner to automate all the keypresses involved the Crowdstrike recovery process from one QR code.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Re: RE: examples that have done better

It seems from the docs that early loading and marking a driver as required for booting are two separate things and a non-boot driver can be set up to load straight after boot drivers have loaded.

Re: RE: examples that have done better

Only Crowdstrike isn't necessary for a system to boot properly anyway. That flag shouldn't really be set for it.

The EU only said that whatever MS did for their own endpoint software, they should offer third parties the same access that they have themselves.

MS could have developed a security endpoint API for themselves and third parties but instead they decided to allow kernel access for themselves and 3rd parties via kernel drivers.

That doesn't excuse Crowdstrike's shonky code of course.

If CrowdStrike hadn't set boot start we wouldn't even be having a discussion.

Or if Microsoft hadn't signed off on that driver due to that flag. They could always have said no.

Re: RE: examples that have done better

AVs and endpoint security software by definition has to be up to date. MS could develop an API and make developers transition over simply by not signing off any more WHQL drivers for this kind of software after a certain date. It wouldn't break any other decades-old software, why would it?

So the remaining question is it even an option in their kernel architecture. It should be. Can they make the necessary changes to accomplish this? That's up to MS. If they can't it doesn't bode well for future improvements to Windows that aren't just rejigging the UI.

If it turns out they can't then they should at least make recovery easier. Return F8 and "last known good configuration" to the boot sequence and make recovery from failed driver loading easier and more automatic.

Re: Canary releases?

Or the security industry is too used to moving fast and breaking things?

With a product such as Crowdstrike, only used by enterprises, the chances of giving attackers info is slim.

Yes, they have to go to the kernel to be effective.

They don't have to on macOS.

It goes in the kernel so that it has more visibility and control over what happens. There are some things that can't be done from user space at all, for perfectly good security reasons, and others which can't be done efficiently from there.

Only because MS never made an endpoint security API to make this stuff accessible from userland. Something like this, which Crowdstrike uses on the Mac version.

Please let's not defend Window's architecture as the way things must be when we have two examples in alternative OSes of how it can be done better.

Apparently a bug in RHEL's eBPF implementation?

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Last I heard Optimus was a man in a spandex suit. Why wouldn't you want one?

Google's plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome crumbles

Cookies and site data are grouped together in Firefox.

Try the Consent-O-Matic add-on for Firefox, Firefox Android, and Chrome. It automatically clicks the "no" checkboxes for you for many GDPR pages.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Had Microsoft responded by creating a documented API for security software instead of saying "have at the kernel like we do, we'll sign your 'driver'" we wouldn't be in this position today.

Re: A very measured "this wouldn't have happened on Linux"...

I don't see any Linux kernel bug there, just Crowdstrike trashing kernel memory structures then the kernel crashing as a result.

Now this doesn't happen on Linux because of eBPF. One of the eBPF checks is "programs dereferencing pointers without safety checks" which is exactly what happened on Windows.

Windows really needs its own version of eBPF.

What does Google Gemini do with your data? Well, it's complicated...

Is this news?

My default assumption is that any document uploaded to Google Drive or any other service of a similar nature is that it would never be deleted anyway and would be used in any way the provider wanted to now or any time in the future.