Posts by MacroRodent

Russia-linked APT28 attackers already abusing new Microsoft Office zero-day

Re: Carry-on regardless

The proper answer is diversity. This is why in biology, no virus manages to destroy all individuals of a species. To promote this, governements at least should use only open standard document formats, and these must be enforced: Like if a word processor (from whatever vendor or open-source project) messes the layout in an extensive test suite, it shall not be used. There are standards for items like paper sizes and even the properties of ball-point pen ink, so why not word processors?

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

MS, stick to your more sensible promises

When Windows 10 came out, it was promised to be the last major version, later versions would be incremental, no big steps. Hah, that did not age well. Now the company I work for is rolling out Windows 11 on corporate laptops, causing loads of wasted time: in the update itself, and in the various hickups it causes. All for the joy of everyone continuing to use Windows more or less in the same way they have used for years.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

Who

> Not what but who: Linus Torvalds.

The license of Linux permits anyone to start an own fork and make releases. However, good luck getting anyone to contribute only to it, unless it server some specialty that the Torvalds Linux does not. For example, the Android kernel was that way for a long time, but it has gradually merged most (all? not sure) of its special sauce to the master, to simplify maintenance.

In a way, splintering is prevented by network effects, not Linus.

Torvalds blasts tardy kernel dev: Your 'garbage' RISC-V patches are 'making the world worse'

Softened with age, he is

That was indeed a mild rant for Linus.

Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor

Re: This is the very design of PAM

> If I have understood this correctly it is a compromise of ssh login authentication.

PAM is a spec for modules that are used for all authentication, not just SSH. But installing a PAM module requires privileges. I guess the most plausible route is an infected 3.party package that the user is somehow convinced to install from a deb or rpm file. The nice front-ends for package installer tools in typical desktop linuxes run with temporarily elevated privileges, typically just asking the user's login password.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

> The company called Nokia was assimilated: What was left emerged as Nokia Networks. But no more Nokia until a lot later.

Getting back late, but this cannot stand. "Nokia Mobile Phones" and "Nokia Networks" were both subsidiaries under "Nokia" the parent corporation, along with some others. Nokia selling the mobile phone business to Microsoft was analogous to IBM selling their laptop business to Lenovo.

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

> Not even that: They were originally making wellies and other rubber products, like tyres. In a town called Nokia.

No, the pulp factory came first, in the sense it used the name "Nokia" as the company name. But the rubber products came soon. The original Nokia was acquired by another company, "Suomen Gummitehdas", making rubber products, the combination then started using the "Nokia" name. Pretty forward-looking, I mean "Suomen Gummitehdas" would have been a clumsy mobile phone brand...

Before Nokia was assimilated

> Before Nokia was assimilated and digested by Microsoft,

Sigh, not again. The whole Nokia was not assimilated, only Nokia Mobile Phones. The rest is still doing fine making network equipment and some other non-consumer things.

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

> (mine was with N70 and N95 last) was horrendous

My last Symbian phone was the N97mini, which I got second-hand, and really liked. Used until it developed a hardware problem partly disconnecting the display and keyboard halves (could no longer make or answer calls). I have got the impression it was a better product than the original N97 "not mini".

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Re: They lie when you want the truth; and tell the truth when you want them to fabricate an answer.

> it wouldn't have returned a real key but would have "hallucinated" one.

I think the reason it returned a real token because the entire key was a single "token" from the point of view of the LLM. Just like words are tokens, stored as-is. This is also why LLM:s have trouble with tasks that involve properties of words. Words are indivisible "atoms" for them.

Red Hat sweetens the RHEL deal for biz devs – just don't put it in prod

What's the point?

Wondering what is the advantage of this over using the corresponding clone version: RockyLinux or AlmaLinux. You could develop on these, then deploy on RHEL if you for whatever reason are forced to use it.

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

ignore the OS...

The OS is actually only a minor part of the Microsoft problem. Working in a Big Corp that is fully into Office365 and Microsoft cloud services, it is easy to see Microsoft has the whole shop by the balls. Office365 can be used via Mac and even Linux (the web interface is pretty good these days as long as you run Edge). Never mind MS just cutting service. If MS simply one day decided it needs more money and raises prices, the company has essentially no other option than to pay up, up to some eye-watering percentage. Moving the data and the intertwined processes elsewhere is infeasible. The ultimate lock-in.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Re: UAC

Those Russian bombers were used to bomb Ukraine. It would have been a dereliction of duty for the Ukranian military to not attempt to attack them as much as possible.

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

Power switch

Obviously any computer used for advanced AI needs a physical power switch that cannot be overridden from software.

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Name

Re "We can't help but wonder if project creator Anduin Xue's parents are Tolkien fans" - could be, but far more likely it was chosen by the guy himself for interacting with westerners. Such adopted first names are common with Chinese working in western companies.

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Re: Hope you have a good backup process!! Then..........

Frequent travelers should have a separate cheap laptop to take along anyway. Even for other countries than USA, Russia, or China, because of the possibility of the laptop getting stolen. Copy only the needed documents to it before traveling, reformat and reinstall after the trip.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Nothing to beat it on $/Gb basis.

Never seen a failure in 5 years. I guess I have managed to avoid the bad ones, then. What I have are mostly Fujis, Maxels, TDKs, Sonys and Verbatims, but when one looks at the packaging, most actually came from some company named Ritek. I once did a small "accelerated aging" test, where I hung a sample of DVD-R:s on an outer wall, exposed to varying temperatures and sunlight. The winner? "Octron", which at the time was a house label sold in Lidl stores (havent seen it for a long time). But that too was really a Ritek.

Re: Nothing to beat it on $/Gb basis.

> Everything else used either a lot of devices (like USB and SD cards) or wraps the media with a lot of hardware, IE hard drives.

Optical media (eg DVD-R) is also entirely passive. With good blanks and decent storage it also has good longevity. At least 20 years is no problem for in my experience (that is going by the oldest DVD-R's I have).

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

names

Funny, when I see the word gimp, I think only of the photo-editing program, no other associations. I suppose it also means something unsavoury somewhere. Most users don't care.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Re: The two achilles of current encryption

> This is one of those many cases where hacking the device you own should be legal,

Yes. A law that says something like if the vendor stops supplying software updates, it must either open-source the code and any keys needed to update the firmware, or offer to buy back the devices for 50% of the original price.

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

voting computers

The idea is old, I too recall hearing about it in connection with the shuttle. Always wondered what happens if the voting circuitry itself is hit.I guess it just has to be made super robust.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

No Stable API inside kernel (Re: Fair comment by Linus)

The Linux developers have no commitment towards keeping the internal C interfaces stable. They see such commitments as an impediment to improving the kernel. They don't change them unnecessarily, but they will change without hesitation when there is a good reason.

By contrast, the interface towards user-level applications (system calls) is kept stable.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: "it would suck"

> porting/converting millions of lines of kernel code is going to take some time

Some time, as in, several years by a competent team, if the goal is Linux as it is now, and not some Linux 0.9. Essentially a full rewrite of the Linux kernel.

Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

Re: Still?

> Every one of the dozens of proprietary UNIXes in the 1980s and 1990s had its own independent implementation, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Apple, Commodore, Atari and Acorn, as well as dozens of implementations on DOS, Windows 3

I don't think the Unix versions were independent, just MIT X11 + whatever "value-added" the vendor wanted to add (often some proprietary desktop environment). DEC by the way added X11 to VAX/VMS and called it DECWindows, but it was still MIT X11 underneath.(DEC was also one of the major contributors to early X11). I actually at one time ran a remote DECWindows terminal window from a Unix workstation when I needed a session at the VAX, but that was a bit rude way of doing it, because of larger resource usage compared to a telnet session. So being a terminally nice guy I stopped doing it when I realised this.

Fedora 41: A vast assortment, but there's something for everyone

Talos

Thanks, fascinating machines.

> GNOME-based Workstation is the most visible, and it supports x86-64, Arm64 and 64-bit little-endian PowerPC

Now I got curious. What kind of workstation runs on a little-endian PowerPC? Or any PowerPC( excluding old Macs, which I believe were big-endian like the previously used Motorola processor).

Re: About BTRFS.....

That is a kind of "Your mileage may vary" situation. Someone at my workplace tried various filesystems for very large build jobs in a local cloud server, and BTRFS came surprisingly on top. Still, I myself prefer XFS, as a mature fs with long track record and good performance in most cases. The file system is the one component one does not want to play games with.

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: Why would that pose difficulties for a passenger jet?

Might be a practical problem it the physics of turning a sonic boom into a sonic thump require the tapered nose to be half the plane even when scaling up. MIght work, but the passenger capacity in relation to the dead weight of the hardware would be ridiculously low. The seats would be super expensive. Of course they were on the Concorde, too, and it wasn't terribly succesful commercially.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

Re: But when you start them...

It was the switching power supplies. These were PCs and servers, so way bigger capacitors than in your laptop power brick. Also it happened a while back. Maybe newer power systems are more well-behaved, dunno.

But when you start them...

> Depends on the time period and location. Modern-ish PCs will tend to use around 50W, add about 25W for a monitor so 75W per setup, for 1875W in total.

However, at startup these PC:s are, for a brief moment, almost short-circuits. If a lot of them are behind one fuse, and started simultaneously (such as after a power outage), the fuse blows even if during normal operation the current is reasonable.

Learned this when in a previous job we had a room full of various PCs and servers for testing purposes (not a production server room, fortunately). They had been placed there and started over time. Then a power outage occurred and the fuse blew when power came back up. Happened a couple of times before we understood why.

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

darker side...

If the Chinese can build a smartphone with the usual goodies using only domestically made chips, even if it is two generations behind the latest Western tech, it means they have no trouble building modern missiles and drones with similar electronics. The latest process is not required for them, the one from 10 years ago is good enough.

Uncle Sam lends $1.5B to reignite Michigan nuclear plant in 2025

Re: Clean energy?

Glass matrix is not used at Onkalo (which is what the site is called). About of the encapsulation here: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/finaldisposal/encapsulationplant.html

Re: Clean energy?

The waste is manageable. Bury it with care deep into stable rock, like we are starting to do in Finland. The only problem I see with it is that if future technology allows better reuse of the waste, getting it out is a pain.

After 27 years, Tcl/Tk 9 finally arrives with 64-bit power and Zip file magic

seriously

Yes, but you should not execute an interactive editor to create the scripts. Tcl can write them directly. It can also easily do itself whatever any shell script needs to do, because it can execute external programs easily (exec "program" "args" ...). The second solution is usually better, as it has less moving parts. Creating a script from Tcl makes sense only if there is some other component that needs a script as input.

Lisp? More like the shell

The way Tcl syntax works has always reminded me of shell with commands followed by space separated options and arguments. The main difference is of course Tcl does not start a new process for each command, and the code for each command is already in the interpreter instead of loaded from disk, which makes it much faster.

I don't really write Tck now, but there is one tool written it it that I always use and carry around: the graphical diffing tool tkdiff. It is amazing the whole thing is only about 16 000 lines of code, and can process quite large files in reasonable time, despite being written in an interpretive language. Of course much of the grunt work is done by the "diff" tool of the host computer, but making a nice display of the results is still nontrivial.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Re: Headers anyone

Outlook's Web version, which (being a Linux user) is the only one I use, does have a simple way to show headers when the mail message is being viewed: Three-dot menu -> View -> View message details. This shows the headers, but not the raw message data. Useful for checking suspicious mails.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

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

> So dBase had two blocks of memory: a core block in memory, and an overlay block

Overlays is how many large programs worked, also on MS-DOS. The Microsoft linker had support for specifying which object files were part of the fixed block, which could be swapped in when functions in them were called. I never did CP/M development, but I suspect it had tool kits that did the same. After 32-bit 386 and its successors became common, large MS-DOS programs started using DOS extenders instead of overlays. Much easier for the programmer, and more efficient.

Lenovo brings virtualization, cloud stack to Chinese chip designer Loongson's CPU arch

Linux machines

or BSD, Windows of course will not run on the Loongson architecture.

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

Re: linux.conf.au Sydney 2007

Those were the days when even well-known netizens did not yet get avalanches of mail, and spam was still almost non-existent. So they were more disposed to answer interesting mails.

I once mailed a minor bug in an early version of GCC to Stallman, and he quickly replied with a patch. That was probably around 1990.

Floppies...

Remember copying the original Minix floppies among some friends. Each had bought the Tanenbaum book, then we pooled money for getting one copy of the OS. As I recall ast wrote he and the publisher were OK with some copies of the software being made for study. The version of the kernel on the floppies was not quite the same as printed in the book, but slightly updated one. Managed to run in on a PC/XT clone. It did not even require a hard disk.

Europe accuses Apple of preventing devs from telling users about world outside

...now I need the kernels...

Linux or BSD?

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Too complex!

Forked from Mandrake a long time ago PCLOS still has many of the utilities that made Mandrake so easy to administer.

Is that alive? The style of its web page looks like it it is still 2000....

Anyway, I loved Mandrake back in the oughties, maybe I should give PCLinuxOS a try.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

Re: Not just Java

VirtualBox also checks for updates from the mothership. I would not be surprised if the check includes information about the possibly installed extension pack. So you could be in trouble if you load it at home but use it at business.

Pro tip: most ordinary usage of VirtualBox does not actually require the extension pack.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Stupid pendulum swings

Anyone who has been doing real software projects knows that getting complete specs and implementing them in a predetermined timetable is a total fantasy.

You need flexibility, and Agile recognises that. But swinging too far in the other direction does not work either, except for very small projects.

Any project that produces working results is in reality a mix of "waterfall" and "agile", no matter how it is officially presented.

NASA plasma propulsion project promises Mars in a flash

Re: "manned missions to Mars to be completed within a mere two months"

Many a science fiction story gets around this with the "Buzzard ramjet" that runs on interstellar hydrogen. If it worked, it would be able to accelerate forever. See "Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson, where this idea is taken to infinity, and beyond...

ASML could brick Taiwan's chipmaking machines in case of uninvited guests

Rushing to the Taipei airport

I expect the ASML support personnel will be long gone before the mainland troops take the factory. (And the last one to leave probably smashes the crown jewels with a crowbar).

Re: They never learn

> And why the heck is it a Dutch company that supplies the tech?

Maybe because they developed it? The USA did not invent all of the high technology.

Tesla maps out new territory in China with Baidu deal

Re: Without a map

Paper maps are still valuable for giving the big picture about your trip. A navigator or phone screen is at best like trying to read maps printed on a postcard.

Miracle-WM tiling window manager for Mir hits 0.2.0

MIR?

The article left it a bit unclear what is the relationship between Mir and Wayland. Is Mir running on top of Wayland? Or is is a separate implementation?

Re: Secure remote admin, anybody?

> What is needed is a server which, when asked, gathers up the WIMP stuff and squirts it down a pipe

That is essentially what VNC does, and with surprisingly good performance, if you use a modern VNC client-sever pair like TigerVNC. You can get servers and clients for various OS'es.