Posts by Degenerate Scumbag

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

If you build a system running on GPL software and supply that system to other people/corporations, you must also offer them the source code, including any modifications you made to it (which would include, for example, any custom Linux device drivers for your hardware). It has to be offered in a complete, usable form, including any build scripts etc, so they are able to actually build the software from source and run it on the machine.

So John Deere are obligated to enable people to independently build and get "John Deere Linux" running on their tractors. What they are not obligated to do is supply the source to any of the custom applications that run under that system and presumably are what do the actual work of running the machines. That comes under "mere aggregation", ie closed source software can share the same media and run under a GPL operating system without being obligated to follow the GPL itself.

The distinction is usually made on the basis of whether the closed source code links to the GPL code, or just interacts via an API. If it links it is considered a derivative work, and should be released as GPL.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: Are you ok?

Originally from adequacy.org

Re: Are you ok?

Mr Gibbons! Good to see you again after all these years.

WireGuard VPN gets native port to the Windows kernel

Re: WireGuard is the best

It will indeed run on any OpenWRT supported router, and the performance will be significantly better than other VPNs, but it's still likely to bottleneck your traffic if you're running it on a typical MIPS based home router.

For serious performance you need an architecture with SIMD support. This used to mean X86, but now there are reasonably priced routers coming on to the market based around ARM V8-A, which has NEON, ARM's SIMD implementation. These devices are capable of running Wireguard at full flow gigabit speed.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Sacrilege.

The only proper way to cook bacon and sausages for a full English is to fry them in lard. Simple as.

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Best to err on the safe side.

To avoid this sensitive issue in my projects, I have replaced all master/slave references with ubermensch and untermensch.

ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close

Re: Opportunity Knocks

If you think something run by the UN would be less corrupt, I have a bridge to sell you.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

Yep, just ask my aunt Gary.

Already in final beta? That's Madagascar: Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa' gets updated desktop, ZFS support

Re: Kubuntu?

Indeed, I'm honestly surprised that Kubuntu still exists. What's the point of it now?

Re: @Degenerate Scumbag - ZFS is for dedicated file-servers

>It works, is widely used, and has features like nothing else. Other attempts to match it have not succeeded.

This is true, in the context of its designed purpose.

>It does use chunks of memory, but then so would anything else doing the same job.

The job it's designed for is to be a dedicated storage server, and it uses memory accordingly. It intentionally gobbles up all available system memory, leaving just a small headroom for safety, and unfortunately because it wasn't designed with the Linux kernel architecture in mind, it's not plumbed into the regular kernel disk cache system, and thus won't release that memory as instantly as a native Linux filesystem does.

>Saying, "don't use it", is like saying, "make do without its unique features" and isn't offering a viable alternative.

The OP was advising against using it in inappropriate applications. For all you know they could be a big fan of it in the proper context, as am I. And of course, I'm sure we'd all like to see a similarly functional Linux-native equivalent COW filesystem created, that would play better with the Linux kernel and be suitable for more general applications. (With BTRFS seemingly at a dead-end, Bcachefs is the new hope on that front.)

And talking about its unique features, I'll refer back to your earlier comment:

>Software package management is heading towards using ZFS snapshots. It'll be the way you get software, or uninstall it. It's a pretty neat idea.

The experimental ZFS snapshot functionality that Ubuntu have implemented in package management is merely a "roll-back" feature, ie make a snapshot before applying changes, so it can be reverted to the known good state if things go wrong. This is conceptually similar to what Windows does with "System Restore", by creating restore points before applying updates.

The idea that ZFS snapshots could be used to distribute software betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts involved. ZFS snapshots are a filesystem block-level feature, and thus a snapshot is only applicable to the ZFS filesystem it came from, or a replica of it.

Re: ZFS is for dedicated file-servers

For one, it eats memory like no other filesystem. The projects itself states that it can be used with 2GB, but 8GB+ is recommended for decent performance. The consensus among major users seems to be 8GB + 1GB per terabyte of storage. Of course, this is for caching, and you could argue that Linux itself allocates unused memory as disk cache whatever the filesystem, but ZFS being non Linux-native code bolted on to the kernel is not plumbed in to that system. It allocates that cache memory to itself like application memory. None of this is a problem in it's intended application, but it's hardly optimal for desktops.

NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off

Re: me too

Yeah, that's along the lines I was thinking, except racks of up to 48u are available, so you can get 11 of those 4u 60 drive enclosures per rack (you could actually fit 12, but then you'd have nowhere to mount the switch). Also, Seagate are promising to release 18TB drives in the first half of this year, which ups the potential density a bit. Power-wise, you could _just_ manage with 5KW per rack constant power, but only if you carefully manage the spin-up of the drives - if they all start at once, the initial surge would draw 15KW.

I'd be curious to know how you achieve that density. My back-of-a-fag-packet calculations made it 24 racks, at a cost of around $10mil. Still, the point stands that this would be far cheaper for them to keep in house.

Four months, $1bn... and ICANN still hasn’t decided whether to approve .org sale with just 11 days left to go

Other than the fact such action would have traditionally been regarded as extremely bad form that "breaks the internet", I don't believe so. There have actually been several alternative root server organizations, some functioning just as independent mirrors of the ICANN root, some serving kooky non-ICANN TLDs. Some continue to run:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

It really is the nuclear option, though, and I don't see corrupt corporations like Google using it in a stand against corporate corruption.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: Blackmail

Any waiver or disclaimer signed under such obvious duress is likely to be invalidated by a court, and possibly considered an admission of wrongdoing and/or an aggravating factor.

In deepest darkest Surrey, an on-prem SAP system running 17-year-old software is about to die....

Re: Pedant mode

In areas like Surrey with a 2 level County/Borough Council system, it's the boroughs that manage housing.

https://www.politics.co.uk/reference/local-government-structure

Worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free: Amazon's Alexa NHS contract released

Re: Wait and see

No, it means "If you are stupid enough to buy a voluntary surveillance device and place it in your home, we are not responsible for any data the controllers of the surveliance device gather on you by profiling the searches you make of our content using the surveillance device."

They're providing web content to Amazon in the same way as Wikipedia etc, nothing more. Amazon certainly can profile you based on your searches of that, in the exact same way that Google can gather information and targeting advertising based on a profile of your searches. I absolutely agree that the potential for Orwellian abuse is quite horrendous, but if you're concerned about that the answer is to disengage from Amazon/Google etc, not blame content providers for making their content available on the platform you chose to use.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

>10-30 times as fast

You're missing some orders of magnitude there.

Row erupts over who to blame after NordVPN says: One of our servers was hacked via remote management tool

Re: I dont get how the box itself was compromised

Usually these remote management systems function as emulated local keyboard + monitor, and can mount disk images as virtual USB drives, enabling full remote reinstall of the OS. This can be used to boot a live image and from there you can mount the internal drives and look at what's on them. Access to the ILO is pretty close to having physical access to the machine.

Remember the Democratic National Committee email leak? Same hackers now targeting EU countries, say malware boffins

Re: Narrative, tick

It's not hard to Google it:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-comey-agency-requested-access-to-dnc-servers/

A cautionary, Thames Watery tale on how not to look phishy: 'Click here to re-register!'

Do not trust any public announcements from Thames Water regarding any issue at all. There is barely anyone left in the company that actually knows what they're doing, and the customer communication is left in the hands of totally clueless people.

This extends beyond IT issues, and into the realm of operational matters and public safety. One example occurred last year during a burst main event in Hammersmith. They actually tweeted out that discoloured water is safe to drink. (It most certainly is not; they probably meant aerated water, but the people sending these public communication simply have no clue.)

It's official management policy in Thames Water to declare any failure a success. Like when they spent £250 million building a desalination plant that was supposed to have a 150MLD capacity, but can barely run for more than a couple of days at 25MLD. Didn't stop then CEO Martin Baggs from singing its praises in a self-congratulatory wank-fest of an opening ceremony.

All Thames Water's customer accounts were centralised on an IBM mainframe decades ago.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

Re: borders to be regularised or smoothed out by mutual agreement

"The EU and Ireland will not ever agree to essentially an uncontrolled 3rd party border."

Indeed. The EU only favour uncontrolled borders when they facilitate flooding Europe with third worlders. Then they tell you that controlling borders is immoral, and insist on pushing the "refugees" on unwilling countries.

Cloudflare punts far-right hate-hole 8chan off the internet after 30 slayed in US mass shootings

Re: Content arbitration and politics

A quick look at murder rates by group would make a solid case for banning certain types of people. Wouldn't be the people the radical left seeks to blame for everything though.

The 8chan "global rule" has always been "don't post anything that is illegal under US law". Child pornography has never been tolerated, however because of the free speech principles of the board they won't act against things that are distasteful but legal, such as clothed images of cute kids shared by pedos as wank material. So in that respect they could be said to be tolerating pedos.

"Inspired by 8chan"

Yet, just like Brenton Tarrant, his manifesto made no mention at all of the people that the 8chan /pol/ consensus regards as the real problem. Doesn't that seem a little odd?

Hull be damned: KCOM shuts shop as UK High Court waves through £627m Macquarie deal

Re: Network Engineers Celebrate!

If the management is bad now, you can count on Macquarie to promote the worst elements and accelerate the process of decline. Take it from someone who witnessed those bastards rape and destroy a company first hand. They typically load it up with debt, extract as much cash as possible through financial engineering, then dump the husk onto some gullible (or perhaps complicit) pension funds before everything goes south.

Redis does a Python, crushes 'offensive' master, slave code terms

It's cool that these people are identifying themselves. Will come in handy when it's time for the helicopters.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

If past ipv6 articles are anything to go by...

Cue under skilled network engineers commenting on alleged serious design flaws with ipv6 to cover for their own inadequacy.

Internet overseer ICANN loses a THIRD time in Whois GDPR legal war

The class A allocations made sense at the time they were made. The ipv4 system was simply not designed to scale to anything like the number of nodes we now have on the internet. The majority of the address space was expected to go unused before classless inter-domain routing was implemented.

Peace pays dividend for OpenWRT as 'baseline' release lands on servers

Re: OpenWrt is the only thing I run

Yep, I'm the same, I wouldn't consider running anything else on a home router.

You only have to looks at things like the WPA2 bug last year to see the benefit. How many router manufacturers released patched firmware for their old routers? How many unsupported routers are still out there, permanently vulnerable? Mine were secured within a day of hearing about it.

No Damage

It's not really accurate to talk about the "damage done" by the fork. It's not like there were ever really two projects running in parallel.

The reality was there was an active team of developers who were being hampered by the original OpenWRT project infrastructure still being under the control of founders who had little involvement any more, and apparently little time. The active developers forked LEDE through frustration to enable progress. OpenWRT development immediately stalled.

The re-merge was basically a case of the inactive founders finally getting the message and handing over control of the domain to the active, ongoing project.

Dormant Linux kernel vulnerability finally slayed

"Well, except when you have Linux on closed hardware (NAS, router)"

This is why for years I have not bought any home router etc without first checking that it's supported by OpenWRT. This policy really paid off last year when that major WPA vulnerability was discovered - all my routers, including 5 year old models were updated pronto. I'm sure that there are millions of vulnerable routers out there that are long since unsupported by the manufacturers, but still in use.

Tech rookie put decimal point in wrong place, cost insurer zillions

Re: Lira?

"concentrated in a pampered and subsidised south east"

London and the South East subsidise the rest of the country, but don't let facts get in your way.

Chinese tech giant ZTE is back in business – plus or minus $1.4bn and its entire board

Re: reprisals......?

I'm pretty sure the Iranian Leader just needs to make a video while standing in front of a cabinet full of blank CD-Rs.

If I'm understanding things correctly, that somehow makes you the righteous one, and puts your declared enemy in the wrong, even when they haven't actually done anything and you've already launched multiple unprovoked airstrikes against them.

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Re: The reason for lack of IPv6 adopton

Many ISPs provide underpowered routers to their customers that struggle to do NAT at full speed on their fastest services. Ipv6 liberates them from that burden. I personally witnessed a significant performance increase when my 1GBit line was IPv6 enabled.

"If the minimum subnet size is 2^64 , and the complaint is "the routers will fill up if we have millions of routes". how exactly are switches going to cope if you put millions quintillions of hosts on one subnet?"

I'm afraid this merely betrays your lack of understanding.

The large address space allocations reduce the number of routes required by allowing things to be properly routed by subnet. This was how IPv4 worked originally, but it ran out of address space for that scheme decades ago.

Here's an IPV4 example for simplicity. Say you have the following ip addresses:

134.240.73.12

134.240.73.89

134.240.56.87

134.116.76.23

Under the present overcrowded IPv4 scheme, a router might well need separate routing table entries to reach all those addresses.

Under the original scheme, it would have required a single entry to reach the gateway for the 134.*.*.* subnet.

The gateway for the 134.*.*.* subnet would then have required 2 entries for the gateways for 134.240.*.* and 134.116.*.*

The gateway for the 134.240.*.* subnet would then have required 2 entries for the gateways for 134.240.73.* and 134.116.56.*

The huge address space of IPv6 allows a return to a similar addressing scheme.

Ok, I'll take the bait...

How is a system running 20% of the world's active internet connections not working?

It's not a case of getting ipv6 to work, it's a case of getting ISPs to implement it. The assumption that this is not happening because of some inherent problem with ipv6 is disproved by the many successful cases.

The reason for slow adoption is simple enough to explain: pure corporate inertia. They need a "business case", and ipv6's main selling point is extra address space, which isn't much of a carrot as long as enough ipv4 addresses remain available. It's taken the stick of address exhaustion to get Western ISPs moving.

The lower adoption in developing nations probably has something to do with the fact that their regional registries still have a fair bit of their ipv4 address allocation left unused. It's not rocket science, and it doesn't require UN interference to solve.

Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers

Re: Still I don't understand why Russian doesn't allow full tests.

Strictly speaking, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not an alliance. It was a non-aggression pact that demarcated boundaries beyond which they agreed not to cross.

A more pertinent question would be why we declared war on Germany for taking back German-populated lands that were stolen from them only 20 years before at the treaty of Versailles, yet took no action against Russia for invading the other half of Poland and massacring tens of thousands of Poles.

Google will vet political ads to ward off Phantom Menace of fake news

Re: Google's twichy bums

Investigations where the conclusion has been written months before the evidence has been gathered don't count for much. They tend to point to her guilt, because an innocent person would not need to have fixed things in this way. She is dirty as hell, and when everything comes out in the wash, I'm betting she'll be exposed as having literally commited treason.

OK, this time it's for real: The last available IPv4 address block has gone

Re: BT

So BT completed the rollout, the problem is with your customer equipment.

I can understand you being frustrated with BT as they supplied you with the hardware (and it seems the firmware updates that were promised for earlier models were not delivered), but the fact is that you do have an ipv6 enabled line. Your problem is the shitty support BT offer for the equipment they supply.

If you were that way inclined, you could probably liberate the router from their proprietary firmware and implement ipv6 yourself - the hardware is perfectly capable.

Re: BT

I believe they rolled out firmware updates to devices going back to the HomeHub 4. I can't speak from personal experience, though.

I'm also on VM. I got fed up with waiting and implemented ipv6 with a Hurricane Electric tunnel. It works perfectly and maxes out my bandwidth with ease.

My advice to any VM customer is to switch their POS "super hub" into modem mode and use a decent router behind it. I have used nothing but OpenWRT routers for years. The ipv6 autoconfigures effortlessly if plugged into an ipv6 native connection, and even the tunnel config was straightforward to set up.

Re: BT

BT completed its ipv6 rollout in November 2016.

Nervous Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg passes Turing Test in Congress

Re: Diamond and Silk

Sure, because all you have to do is play with the definitions and you can justify anything. Antifa's position goes something like this:

Everyone to the right of Lenin is a Nazi.

Violence against Nazis is Ok.

They have reintroduced political violence to the Western Political landscape, and that is what led the FBI to label them a domestic terrorist organisation.

Mind the gap: Men paid 18.6% more than women in Blighty tech sector

Re: Worthy cause...

To think that earning less must indicate a lack of opportunities, you must assume that maximising earnings is the overriding priority in life. How sad.

Women have different opportunities in life, including some options men simply don't have. They make different choices, less focused on their personal earnings, and that is not a bad thing.

Re: Alternative history drivel..

Thanks for linking to that Wikipedia article. It was most enlightening to learn that the electromechanical, binary Harvard Mark 1 was "based on" the mechanical, decimal analytical engine. I'm puzzled though, because the Wikipedia article for the Analytical Engine states:

"Howard Aiken, who built the quickly-obsoleted electromechanical calculator, the Harvard Mark I, between 1937 and 1945, praised Babbage's work likely as a way of enhancing his own stature, but knew nothing of the Analytical Engine's architecture during the construction of the Mark I, and considered his visit to the constructed portion of the Analytical Engine "the greatest disappointment of my life".[36] The Mark I showed no influence from the Analytical Engine and lacked the Analytical Engine's most prescient architectural feature, conditional branching."

Clearly the Analytical Engine article must have been written and edited by people with an ideological agenda to push, little knowledge of the subject matter, and no respect for historical fact.

This must be the case, because I can't imagine the "Women in Computing" article to be the inaccurate one, what reason would anyone have to distort that?

Telegram still won't hand over crypto keys it says it does not store

Courage doesn't really come into it. The order is impossible to comply with. They do not have the keys.

Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica harvested profile data

Storm in a teacup.

So let me get this straight:

-Data was collected from people who opted in.

-More data was collected from those of their friends who chose to leave their profiles open to the public.

-Trump and Brexit campaigns used the services of this company, so now people with anti-Trump, anti-Brexit agendas are trying to claim it as a sophisticated psy-op that tricked people in voting the wrong way.

-Throw a Russia connection in, just because everything is Russia's fault these days.

Sorry, not buying it. They didn't have to change people's minds. Both the Trump and Brexit campaigns primarily succeeded because they tapped in to discontent that had long been building among the electorate.

The data that they got from this would only have been useful for researching public opinion, which is a legitimate thing to do. If people don't want their data used in this way, they shouldn't publish it to the world on a public website, which is what an open Facebook profile is.

This is an attempt to manufacture a scandal, and it smacks of desperation. It's about time the Globalist lefties accepted that the public are not on board with their agenda.