Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

Good guy, Microsoft: Multi-factor auth outage gives cloudy Office, Azure users a surprise three-day weekend

Re: 11 months to the day...

Most of our staff don't keep that much mail in their boxes, we discourage massive signature, and attachments are done by linking to the file instead of including it in the message itself. Plain text messages are also fairly common (Some people here joined the company before HTML mail was a thing, a few of the more senior staff learned to use computers during the bang-path days)

We've also offset the performance hit by removing the overhead that Windows was putting on the systems. Aside from the engineering staff (Who make up 60% of the company and were already running Linux), everyone's just been using browser-based applications hosted on local servers for their work, so after a little retraining, very few people have complained about the switch. At the very least, the switch was less painful than when we switched to Windows from Solaris back in the late 90s.

We don't really need much in the way of newer technologies, we manufacture, and support, machines for other manufacturers. We started building machinery for these new-fangled "Assembly Lines" that are all the rage and now make complex machinery that our customers use to build their products. So like our most popular product is a set of machines that cut, fold, and weld metal sheets into metallic cases for other products. We like to sum up our company as being a "Factory factory".

Re: 11 months to the day...

A little over 300 users. I suppose you're happy with it because your company forks over enough money to get Microsoft to actually pay attention to your problems. For us, it feels like Microsoft doesn't give a shit since its cheaper for them to compensate us for violating the SLAs rather than paying staff overtime to comply with the SLAs. Sure, that means we are essentially hosted for free, but with all the problems we've had, free is too expensive.

We have our own datacenter and space is essentially free. It was built to house our System/360 and the other computers we'd buy in the coming years. So now we have a 3600 sqft room for the 250-ish active systems we have. We also have a very power intensive factory attached to our building, so we get our electricity at a bulk discount

11 months to the day...

I figured they would've learned from when this exact same thing happened exactly 11 months ago.

So glad we tore up our contract with Microsoft last year when this happened and moved to an on-premise install of Dovecot with some calendaring plug-ins and switched from Outlook to Thunderbird with a Calendering add-on. We also noticed that since moving to a cloud-based solution, our workers became increasingly stressed and work output dropped due to workers responding to emails and messages at all hours. Shortly afterwards, we implemented a "Work is for work hours, all other time is for personal things" policy and work quality has increased sharply. People are reporting to work well-rested and stress-free. We have people to handle the off-hours stuff (6 shifts; 3 full-time weekday shifts and 3 part-time weekend shifts). Management is happy since we're spending far less on customer support and increased sales from customers happy with our now-improved products.

Pack your pyjamas, Zuck: US bill threatens execs with prison for data failures

Re: Too late for going after Bill Gates...

He still sits on the board as an 'advisor' so if he advises the board to pass something that violates FTC regulations, he can be held responsible, especially if he lied in his recommendation. He can also be hauled in for policies he enacted while CEO or Chairman of the Board.

EG, if he implemented a business deal back in 2013 that violates consumer privacy, and the deal is still violating privacy laws, he may be found responsible.

Or if the board is making a decision on some new technology or deal (Like sharing information from the Telemetry feature with other companies). He then tells the board that the technology is perfectly safe and carries no risk of privacy violations. It is then found that the feature is leaking a lot of personal information and he either intentionally lied or neglected to carry out his due diligence, he could be sentenced.

Moving would gain him nothing. They'll just try him in absentia and seize his assets (Such as the stock that makes up 95% of his wealth), until he turns himself over for his sentence. And since Facebook is a publicly traded company, Zuck can be forcibly removed from the board and his stock striped of voting capabilities (like so many executives that had been convicted of things like insider trading and financial fraud).

I'm sure that Zuck would choose to spend a little while in Club Fed than lose his fortune. He would be sent to the same kind of "minimum security luxury" type facility that Martha Stuart and other rich folks have been sent to in the past.

Despite how easy it would be, there is no reason to flee.

The process works like this:

1) A complaint is made, either by a citizen or trough another investigative body discovering evidence of violations

2) An FTC agent do a cursory investigation using public information, information in the complaint, information the FTC has in their archive, and non-binding letters sent to the company.

3) The agent then presents the case to the board of commissioners for permission to do a full investigations

4) If the investigation does go forward, the FTC forms a task force, which is allowed to request subpoenas and warrants from a federal court and witnesses / victims are interviewed.

5) If this investigation produces a solid case, the case is handed over to the US Department of Justice for prosecution in federal court.

6) If the case is accepted by the courts, an arraignment occurs where the company can make pro-forma arguments over venue, scheduling, and so on.

7) The trial is actually held after venue and schedule has been agreed upon, witnesses for both sides are informed, a public notice is published to inform both the public and the press, and all the rest that happens with a standard trial

8) once the federal case is done, the results and evidence can be used by state bodies to prosecute their own cases and private individuals / group can use it in civil courts for law suits.

Re: Ron Wyden gives me cognitive whiplash.

This isn't likely to succeed, but that isn't the point. I've followed similar bills in the past (Especially in my local legislative bodies), and they start like this, giving citizens something to rally around and pressure -their- representatives to also support it. It will likely fail a few times, growing stronger until it actually gets the requisite amount of votes to pass.

I've also found that if an issue keeps getting raised in a legislative body year after year, a lot of your status quo centrists will finally recognize its not something that won't just blow over and decide to take action on it.

Re: 175 extra staff!

First, this is the FTC, not FCC. Second, those staff are hired at regional offices. Since most businesses are incorporated in Delaware (For tax purposes), Delaware may receive 100 or more of those new staffers.

These staff members receive complaints from citizens, then do research into the complaint, then if they found something actionable, it gets passed up the chain to the FTC's legal team to establish a case, then to the Justice Department to actually prosecute the case.

Re: Preempt

It means that if there is a conflict between something in the Federal Law, and a State Law, then the State Law wins. The preemption clause is standard boiler plate language to comply with the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. EG, if a company violates parts A, B, and C of the FTC's regulations, but the state allows for B, the FTC can only hold the company liable for violating A and C in that state. Although they can go after the company for violating B in other states. Or if the State has a specific law applying to B, its the State AG's prerogative whether to enforce it, cede the case to the FTC, or just do nothing (Although that doesn't stop the FTC's case for violations A and C).

This doesn't apply to fines, though, since law can only provide guidance for fines, the actual fine is up to a judge to decide during the sentencing / restitution part of the trial.

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

Re: MAD

Assuming you are still alive anyway.

Personally, I would much prefer to have my enemy still alive and around to take over and rebuild my home then knowing that there is no one left to help. I'd rather have bread lines and rationing than living in a nuclear hell scape. IF anything, the enemy just lost a bunch of power now that they no longer have an enemy of their own to protect their people from (Its been my experience that governments retain power by scaring the people into believing that they are the only thing holding the enemy at bay)

Besides, the enemy has a beef against my government, not me. Once my government is gone, there is no reason for the enemy to continue fighting.

GitLab reset --hard bad1dea: Biz U-turns, unbans office political chat, will vet customers

Re: I don't understand people

The "Gay Wedding Cake" issue wasn't because they refused, but because they initially accepted the contract to make the cake, then when they learned about the customer they decided to publish the customers' information onto social media and encouraged harassment of the couple.

The couple that started the lawsuit had been rejected by multiple bakeries before they went to the one in question. The other bakeries acted like rational people and just said no and left it at that.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Are they finally realizing its impossible?

Or are they just holding out for more draconian measures.

The only way to absolutely prevent children from seeing pornographic images would be to build a sanitized version of the Internet that includes only stuff that has been explicitly approved by a government agent. Something not unlike North Korea's 'internet'. Given the current government, not sure if that is a bug or a feature...

Tinfoil-hat search engine DuckDuckGo gifts more options, dark theme and other toys for the 0.43%

Re: How do you get dark mode

If you dismiss the add-on pop-up, the settings button is right behind it, top item on the settings menu is the theme selector.

Apple insists it's totally not doing that thing it wasn't accused of: We're not handing over Safari URLs to Tencent – just people's IP addresses

"What do you mean, the IP address is data Google/Tencent would not normally be receiving ? You send a data request, they have to know where to send the answer."

Yes, I am aware of how basic networking operates. What I'm saying is that the safe browsing feature is making a call to Google/tencent that would otherwise not have been made so that the safe browsing feature can function. The download from Google's servers is quite likely to also include such data as my user-agent string and/or advertising ID, again, information that would not otherwise be sent to Google.

Re: This is a non-story

But the URL reveals more than just the domain the person visited. If the user is using HTTPs, the only way to figure out what page they visited on a server would be to get the server's logs, or the user's search history. As an example, if I were to browse a page on https://www.theregister.co.uk, all the ISP, DNS provider, and anyone spying would see is me communicating with that server but would be unable to see the actual page I requested. But if they had the truncated hash of the URL, they could compare the list of returned possible URLs and find the one that includes the domain "theregister.co.uk", which would come back with a much smaller list, assuming there is more than one at all.

The likelihood of two arbitrary URLs hosted on the same server having the same truncated hash is very low.

Re: Exactly

The problem is that this is data that Tencent / Google wouldn't normally be receiving.

And despite only being the first quarter of a URL, they get a list of possibilities. Some basic analysis will tell them exactly which of those possible URLs a user visited by looking at the other URLs that person visited in short order.

So let's say I visit a webpage, its going to make the call to the first resource on the page, then make several more calls in rapid succession as the browser loads all the additional objects on the page (Images, scripts, ads, etc). So all someone would have to do is see what URL appears most often in each list of visited URLs to reverse engineer the originally called URL. That isn't difficult since even looking at the front page of El Reg encompasses more than 50 URLs, each with its own hash. It'd be trivial for someone with just the truncated hash to figure it out with 50 individual calls.

And since TenCent and Google are search engines, it is likely that they have compiled a list of the hashes of URLs, -and- the hashes of every URL it references. So while the hash 'deadbeef-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx' could reference a near infinite number of URLs, if my browser then downloads a refenced image from the URL "c0ffee24-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx', that severely narrows down the possibilities down to a few thousand, then if the page then references an image at "beefcafe-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx" that narrows it down even further.

Normally search engines will only see the URLs it displayed as results and possibly the URL that you selected, but nothing beyond that. The DNS system only sees the domain component of the URL. Your ISP would only see your IP and the IP of the server you are getting data from (Assuming you aren't using their DNS servers).

And this is ignoring that a surveillance state could easily look for people who browse pages that that have hashes that collide with a URL that is verboten, that would narrow down who to spy on and either keep tracking to see if a user visited other pages with hashes that collided with hashes of other verboten URLs. Enough of that and you can whittle down a list to a small handful of people to implement much more intensive spying techniques against those people.

"The privacy community, he said, has mostly come to terms with the privacy trade-off"

And who is a member of this "Privacy Community" he is referring to? Clearly it doesn't include myself or the many privacy advocates I associate with.

I see little utility in it anyway. Malicious websites tend to disappear as quickly as they appear, by the time that Google is made aware of it, the attacker has probably already abandoned it. Besides, I protect myself in other ways like using Privoxy to strip away scripts from websites that aren't on my trusted list, I keep my software up-to-data, run as an unprivileged user on a hardened OS, my data is backed up on read-only media, I use a different device for financial management (Loading money into a paypal account, which I then use to actually pay for things), and so on.

Robocop needs reboot, $200m for AI research, UK govt knowingly deployed racist passport system – plus more

" replacing highly qualified specialists. "

No, the AI is just doing some rudimentary facial recognition, comparing the photo in a database to the image taken from a camera. A job that I've seen successfully done by a drunk and sleep-deprived teenager at the corner store. Hell, that teenager was able to identify the fake ID I used as a kid, but the Border Cop accepted it when I re-entered the country after returning from a vacation where I lost my original ID.

Being a border cop is a matter of looking at an ID, ensuring that it has specific features, entering in the ID number into a computer, then comparing the photo in database, the photo on in the passport, and the person standing in front of them. Something that can be learned in an afternoon 'orientation'.

Every other article on AI I've seen has been attempts to identify objects in images, identify faces in videos, move objects around, or other such stuff that can be completed by a toddler (Well, a appropriately strong toddler in the case of moving objects).

Why are we wasting money on deeply flawed replacements for people?

I understand the importance of AI research, but why are we deploying AIs when its obvious they are total crap? And for the most part, its costing a hell of a lot more than the people that have been doing the job previously. I could understand that if there were a shortage of people, but we're far from that, and if anything, we have a surplus of people / deficit of jobs. For the most part, the jobs that are being replaced with AIs / Automation are those that require little or no actual training (The skills needed to compare a person with a photograph are learned before we are old enough to eat solid food...)

My suspicion is that its because a computer doesn't question orders even if they are blatantly unethical. You can subtly manipulate an AI into furthering some terrible agenda, and when found out you could throw your arms up in feigned ignorance while blaming it all on bad data or something unforeseeable.

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

I have to thank ken for my passwords

Years ago, I realized that memorizing a password was a pain in the ass while memorizing command strings was second nature. So, for the most part, my passwords are based on unix commands. So like my passwords would look like:

"mv /var/log/secure.0 /mnt/Filer01/home/logs/$(hostname)/" or "chmod 644 /var/log/Postfix/auth.log.bz2"

A command I typed on a nearly daily basis, many characters long, complete with numbers symbols, upper and lower case. I could even write it down on a piece of paper, or accidentally type it into a chat session and no one would even suspect it was my password. As a hint to myself, I might write down just the last part of the command. Periodically, I'd hack random characters into chats and instruct everyone to ignore it, or write something like that on a sticky note, just to throw people off.

So I thank ken for creating Unix and giving me something to base my passwords on (And also for all the benefits that Unix brought to the world). But also for having a password that reaffirms my strategy: Something he likely typed in -a lot- or wouldn't stand out from his normal typing.

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

I've never had anyone answer that one either. Pretty much the first argument I use now anytime I encounter a lunatic. Saves a lot of time, because they either just disappear from the conversation, or spout some extremely weird nonsense that tells me that they are well beyond reasoning and I shouldn't waste the effort.

The most common "explanation" I've heard was that the Russians were lizard people that were worried that if they proved the US didn't get to moon, then humanity would keep trying until we succeeded and would've stumbled onto their lizard base.

Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

Re: Atari

I would imagine they might still owe residuals to former employees and other companies that they had licensed 'intellectual property' from. Like they might be paying Amblin Entertainment for the exclusive rights to producing an ET video game. Or owe money to some developer that wrote some chunk of code that is still use with Atari's licensed properties.

But those things wouldn't account for the $22,500,000 hole in their budget... Even adding in the $3,300,000 in salaries, rent on an office, and other operating costs, there is still a lot of money missing.

Euro ISP club: Sure, weaken encryption. It'll only undermine security for everyone, morons

That way they can lock ISPs / TelCos from also spying on people. The advertising industry is saturated, the only way to increase ad revenue is to muscle out everyone else wanting a piece of the pie.

Re: Simpler

" Something stupid in their constitution gives them a right against self incrimination or something."

Given how recent administrations have been treating the Constitution, I wouldn't bet my life on the 4th through 8th amendments being followed... The Guantanamo Bay facility is the perfect demonstration that the US doesn't give a shit about their own laws.

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

I really wish people would stop believing the bullshit that the political spectrum is a single line rather than the multi-axis construct that it is. You have just so many different axes that political systems can be measured along. For example you have the "Authoritarian - libertine" axis, the "Democratic - Autocratic' axis, the 'Anarchy - strict hierarchy' axis, "Restorative - retributive justice', 'self - state', and so on. And this isn't even getting to the various other axes that describe how a nation operates. Two systems can share the same point on some axes but be at opposite ends on others.

China may match up to "Communism" on the "single market - free market" axis, but is on the opposite end on the "Authoritarian - Egalitarian" axis.

But, also, I wish people would stop believing that country follows a certain political model just because they say they do... A country can put as many labels on themselves as they want, doesn't make a lick of difference in how the country actually operates.

That was some of the best flying I've seen to date, right up to the part where you got hacked

Older analog cell phones, if poorly made or degraded from use, can bleed energy in the radio frequencies used for various Nav / Comm functions. Not so much of a problem now that analog cellular phones are extremely rare and aircraft are moving away from VHF for navigation.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

Re: Bulk upload??

You don't have to register to submit a comment to the FCC via the Internet, but you do have to submit some personally identifiable information along with it. Just like you need on a paper petition. You need to submit at least enough information that they can verify it is a legitimate comment, or at least that is the intended purpose.

Re: Bulk upload??

What I meant was that its a rare occurrence for someone to have absolutely zero access access to the internet -and- have an opinion on the FCC's policies that they'd want to submit.

Re: Bulk upload??

Paper petitions.

The purpose of having a bulk upload feature was to allow for people to gather comments by hitting the sidewalks and getting people to make the comments on paper, then they'd transcribe them and upload them in a single go. This was typical back in the 1980s and early 1990s when the Internet was in its infancy and the FCC spent far more of its time regulating radio, television, and telephone.

However, now that Internet access is so prolific that not having access is extremely rare. But this is the FCC, trying to get them to move on from 1950's type thinking is an exercise in futility...

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

Re: I wonder how Facebook is going to implement the encryption

I expect that the US Government has dozens of ways of getting into a device and extracting data. I was just mentioning one that a reasonable person would consider the legal method to do so (IE, going through the appropriate channels rather than subverting the basic Civil Rights on which the nation was founded)

I wonder how Facebook is going to implement the encryption

Given that people use Facebook Messenger on a wide variety of devices, and not uncommon to use multiple devices simultaneously, I wonder how Facebook is going to implement encryption. If its per-account, then there'd have to be some kind of infrastructure to allow the key to be copied between devices, at which point Facebook could incept it, if they aren't hosting the key itself. Per-device would be more secure, but a lot of people aren't going to like it since that means their messages are only readable on the device itself and require the implementation of some kind of key-negotiation and some method of re-verifying the recipient each time they switch between devices.

But, regardless, the police could still acquire the unencrypted data legally. First, get a wiretap to collect the encrypted data, then get a subpoena to get the key from one of the ends. Simple as that. But that requires them to actually comply with the Constitution...

Iran tried to hack hundreds of politicians, journalists email accounts last month, warns Microsoft

Re: "why it believes the Iranian government is behind the hacks"

"Clearly you haven't read the script on which nation is today's bad guy."

I haven't, but then who has the time? It seems like every day the US has a new enemy, or new former-enemy-but-now-an-ally. Like apparently Saudi Arabia is now the US's ally even though they were threatening to go to war because they were "Funding terrorism".

At this point, might as well consider every nation an enemy to the US, even the US itself.

"why it believes the Iranian government is behind the hacks"

"The company did not go into any detail over why it believes the Iranian government is behind the hacks beyond noting that those targeted included “prominent Iranians living outside Iran.” "

I would imagine other nations, and not just Iran, would also want to spy on prominent Iranians living abroad. Like seeing if they can be mined for useful information that could damage Iran, use them for propaganda, implicate them as spies operating on behalf of Iran, and so on.

It could even be someone else trying to make the attack appear to have come from Iran to remove suspicion from themselves. Or to stoke tensions between the US and Iran. There are a lot of entities that would benefit from continued tensions between the two nations.

Its equally possible that it really is Iran and they got caught trying to open the cookie jar, but it could also be another nation that doesn't want the US and Iran to be on good terms. For instance, Airbus stands to make billions of dollars selling aircraft to Iran, made easier by ensuring that Boeing is locked out of the sale. Saudi Arabia would stand to lose a lot of money if Iranian Oil were to flood the US market. Israel wouldn't mind if the US eliminated / destabilized Iran.

I'm saying that any of those are even realistic possibilities, but just that there are a lot of entities that would be motivated to carry out such an attack.

Google Maps gets Incognito fig leaf: We'll give you vague peace of mind if you hold off those privacy laws

YouTube history

But it is completely unnecessary for them to store that information on their end. It can be done with a simple cookie and some JavaScript. The data never even has to leave your system.

If you really can't let go of Windows 7, Microsoft will keep things secure for another three years

I've tinkered around with Windows 10 machines, and its guts are good, but unfortunately Microsoft has buried them under metric tons of crap. Microsoft would probably see a lot more adoption if they just gave users much more control over their system, like being able to remove Cortana, remove all the cloud integration stuff, and the hundred and one other bits of junk that aren't necessary for an OS. I would love for them to fix their update system so that by default you just get security updates, the rest is opt-in.

At the very least, get rid of all the 'telemetry' spy ware, or disable it by default, but allow people to opt-in to it, especially if they provided a better help/support AI that could use that telemetry data, like "I see that you installed "Buggy Program 2019" last week, which is when you reported problems, would you like help uninstalling or updating it?". Rather than "we're just going to collect your data, sell it to third parties but leave you high and dry so you have to bother relatives to get your machine fixed".

Although I doubt I will ever go back to Windows, short of a miracle on Microsoft's part or something tragic like Linus naming Lennart as his successor...

Landmark US net neutrality decision reveals that both sides won and lost out

Re: I wish the Internet wasn't so thoroughly controlled by the US

My concern doesn't have so much to do with Net Neutrality per se as much as my general distaste over how much of the Internet depends on stuff that exists within the US.

In this day and age, it has become impossible for me to do anything on the internet without at least some of my packets ending up on US soil despite that country having nothing to do with what I am doing. Even when I communicate to someone in my own country, at least one DNS query gets answered by a machine in the US. A query that the US has the capability to poison if they so wished.

In regards to Net Neutrality, my concern is over the debate whether ISPs are allowed to do deeper analysis of packets beyond reading the headers so they can send the packet on its way. I remember the NN conversation including such provisions a few years ago, but the question was never fully resolved. I would very much prefer not to have my sessions tracked and cataloged by some US corporation solely because my packets crossed their wires.

Re: I wish the Internet wasn't so thoroughly controlled by the US

My concern isn't that they'd do something that dramatic, but rather make unnoticeable changes to the root zone or manipulate AS number assignments so that traffic that wouldn't normally pass through the US does so now where the NSA can spy on it.

"In addition, even the American DNS providers are private companies and cannot simply be told what to do without new legislation being passed."

I've known far too many companies in the US that have been ready to do the bidding of whoever is in charge. Time and time again, commercial products are found with backdoors and weaknesses that were inserted at the request of the NSA, no legislation required. OR the government can get them to do something by bribing a company with juicy contracts or threatening to take some away. Or threatening to have some agency or another investigate the company or its officers.

Verisign make tens of millions of dollars a year from the US government for various security products, and to host the .com and .net zones. Their executive, like all US executive, are going to being stashing their money away using questionably legal practices to avoid taxes. Verisign also employs a lot of employees, at least one would be suspicious enough that some law enforcement agency or another could get a warrant to start seizing anything that employee touched (EG, 'we think employee 'x' downloaded child abuse videos using the company network, the FBI will be by shortly to grab your file servers while they investigate'. We could convince the FBI to back down a bit if you make these changes...")

As for DNS, you don't need to control every root server, just one or two are more than sufficient to carry out a widespread cache poisoning attack. Especially if you set the TTL to a large enough value that eventually all servers querying a root server eventually get the incorrect result. I'm thinking something like the US replacing the NS records for .cn to point to a server in the US. The attack could go unnoticed for a long time if their servers respond with mostly legitimate data.

I wish the Internet wasn't so thoroughly controlled by the US

I really wish that the critical parts of the Internet that are under the heel of the US government and corporations could be decentralized or moved under an entity like the ITU (not specifically them, just a for-instance). Some private organization in the US controlling the DNS system, IP allocations and AS numbers makes me really nervous. At least its not the Department of Commerce, but that's like saying that getting kicked in the ribs is better than getting kicked in the face... The US government still has the power to declare "National Security", seize IANA / ICANN, and force a shut down, or manipulation, of key parts of the Internet.

I wouldn't mind the US destroying their own chunk of the internet if it didn't also affect the other 7.2 billion people that live on this planet.

Hate Verilog? Detest VHDL? You're not the only one. Xilinx rolls out easier-to-use free FPGA programming tools after developer outcry

Might be a long time before I use it

Nearly all my work ends up as an ASIC, so I need to a language that I can send to the Wafer Wizards, or convert to something they understand. Plus I need compatibility with FPGAs made by someone other than Xilinx.

But I might not move to a new language anyway. I've been cranking out VHDL for 20 years now and started with Ada a few years before that. As bad as it is, its still the devil I know and can work with.

I've also seen far too many fiascoes caused by companies declaring that they have created the new 'end-all and be-all' of languages, and, at best end up with yet another language programmers have to deal with in addition to the stuff they already need to work with.

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Re: This is the Chinese government we're talking about

About to comment a similar thing. If he was "trafficking" women and children 20 years ago, that would put him smack-dab in the middle of the anti-separatist crackdowns in Tibet following Tienanmen Square. It is is possible that he was smuggling the wives and children of separatists leaders out of China and to safety in neighboring countries.

It is equally possible that he was selling women and children into slavery.

The business of "Moving people across borders without notice by one or more governments" is one of those businesses that can be extremely moral or immoral, but very rarely be anywhere in the middle. And even then, which extreme of morality it is can vary wildly based on who you ask, but again, you are either a savior or a piece of scum. And given China's spotty record, he could be either.

And like the OP, I hold the US to same scrutiny, and any other nation that has had difficulty following even their own rules surrounding the carriage of justice.

'Six' in the city: Kiwi sportswear shop telly beamed X-rated flicks for hours over weekend

A local burger shop has a "Smart" TV that allows for streaming video from a mobile device up to it... They eventually disabled the feature not long after they got the thing...

I always thought it was a fancy 'B' and the name was 'Basics'. I've only saw it on athletic wear, so I has thought they were marketing on their stuff being a necessity to performing well in sports.

Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

Re: Shouldn't be nearly this difficult

I figured they had to be doing it in hardware because of how long it'd take and how they are promoting it. If its just an ARM chip running some software, then this thing it pointless and I figured that the fans would stop throwing money at it.

But now that I know its just an emulator running on top of a Linux system, I am going to have to lower my expectations of rationality of the Gamer community, which has been pretty damn low since that massive tantrum in 2014 (I still can't quite wrap my head around what got them so irrationally angry...)

Shouldn't be nearly this difficult

Most of the components for their consoles have been reproduced quite faithfully in FPGAs. They have access to everything that was used to produce the originals (Design specs, silicon masks, etc). Even if they had to rebuild the systems by de-capping the silicon and reverse engineering it by hand with a microscope, they still should have finished by now. I assume that they would just go the easy route and implement each system as a separate FPGA and just set up some kind of switching logic to control which chip gets the control input and video output. Once that's done, then sending the VHDL over to the sand benders to cut some wafers.

But, in any case, they should have at least finished -something- by now. Even something as simple as a 2600 running the original code would be fine.

Good news: Microsoft is doubling your OneDrive storage for more than double your money

Its worse than that:

9.99/mo = 1 TB of OneDrive

7.99/mo = 6x 1 TB + 6x Office 365 seats.

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

Re: Audio and Video Software Users...

Kernel modules.

Now Uncle Sam would like a word with Brit teen TalkTalk hacker about a huge crypto-coin heist

Or the more secure "dd if=/dev/random of=/file/to/be/deleted count=$FILE_SIZE" which would prevent any undelete tool from working (Unless you have a COW-type file system and the file you want to delete is in the source image).

No happy ending for the 93,000 Kazakh domains that got nixed instead of massage parlour's site

Why block the website?

If they have proof of an organization doing something illegal, then wouldn't it make sense to just send the police to shut the place down? Unless the Internet has changed quite drastically and no one told me, an 'erotic massage' is going to have to take place in a physical location...

Serverless neither magically faster nor cheaper, dev laments

Nothing is ever actually cheaper in IT

In my experience, nothing that has been posed as being cheaper ever has actually been cheaper. If you aren't paying now, you're certain to be paying in the future. Even if you ignore the cost of migration, you still have costs in the form of things like SalesForce's outage last week where you end up losing a lot of revenue while SF finally got around to your data.

The first thing I tell clients is that if the new technology is going to solve a problem you have and can't solve for one reason or another, go for it. If you think it will be cheaper, then they are better off not wasting their money and for them to carry on as usual and their money is better spent making small changes to what they have already (Like providing better training, get better tools, upgrade hardware, etc).

Tech CEO thrown in the clink for seven years for H-1B gang-master role: Crim farmed out foreign staff as cheap labor

Re: Prison seems a bit unfair...

If the current president is anything to go by, then both.