Posts by Steve Graham

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Re: Seemingly I'm in Madrid...

I have an extension in Vivaldi called Location Guard, which makes the browser return either a random location or a (wrong) fixed location. I have it set to report that I'm at a position that is close, but not too close, and I've allowed sites to query location.

However, all the big names, such as Google, Facebook, Paypal or eBay, depend on some kind of estimated network location, which in my case seems to be random places 300 - 500km away from where I'm actually sitting. "Did you just log in on a new device near Burnley, UK?" No, and I've never even been to Burnley.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Re: Rust

The ALL business for sudo is a feature of Ubuntu and its derivatives. (Not used in the original Debian.) I've never liked it.

Vivaldi bakes Proton VPN into browser to boost privacy

Re: Network services are a system level service

Absolutely. VPN in the browser, DNS in the browser, mail client in the browser (Vivaldi, I'm looking at you): all architecturally wrong.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

When I left University in 1981, I was interviewed for a job at the Irish facility in Clonmel (now better known for cider). I didn't get an offer, and went to work for BT in Belfast.

We got a VAX, and a colleague and I were sent to Reading for a System Management course, where we tried to see how far round the world we could get using badly-secured machines on DECnet.

Google slips built-in terminal, Debian Linux VM into Android 15 March feature drop

As it happens, this morning I updated my Pixel 5a to the LineageOS from 2nd March. It doesn't (yet?) have the new developer option, but I use Termux anyway.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Can someone clarify?

This is a device which you own, on your own property, which allows content from your own phone, which you own, on your own property, to be shown on your television, which you own, on your own property. And it needs to connect across the internet to Google servers?

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

Where are Eutelsat teminals manufactured? PRC?

Firefox 136 finally brings the features that fans wanted

Re: uBlock Origin substitute

Good thinking. I've just loaded 920 custom rules from UBO to Vivaldi and only 8 failed as "unsupported". I see that many of the usual lists are available directly to Vivaldo too. I'll do some experimenting before the big chop.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: Ouch!!!

Just a few weeks ago, I fumbled the keyboard and hit return when I'd typed "rm tmp *" instead of "rm tmp/*".

Murena kicks Google out of the Pixel Tablet

My Pixel 5a phone runs LineageOS with microG. The biggest hassle is having to find and sideload apps, since it doesn't have the Google store. I don't trust the Android ecosystem with money and my "real" current account access is browser on Linux only. However, I have a Tesco Plus card which is a loadable debit card that I keep £50 on, and the Tesco app runs fine on the phone.

Ironically, in the context of this article, I have a tablet (Lenovo) which I use for reading magazines from the library, and it's running stock Android, although Netguard is installed to reduce the "phone home" snooping.

Re: This...

There's a version of the pure LineageOS/microG for it. For free, obviously.

OBS-tacle course: Fedora and Flathub's Flatpak fiasco sparks repo rumble

You didn't explicitly spell it out, but the mention of scam apps suggested to me that cross-distribution repos are a juicer target for attackers than distribution-specific ones.

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

Re: Microsoft Edge entered the chat.

My Vivaldi is showing "These extensions may soon no longer be supported

Remove or replace them with similar extensions from the Chrome Web Store" on the extensions page.

I assume a forthcoming release will include the changes to Chrome and break all my extensions.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

I've been using Linux exclusively on my home computers for over 20 years, and I still don't know what a "desktop environment" is for. I have a window manager (Openbox) and a panel (XFCE4panel) and that's it. I run Gnome applications, XFCE applications, LXDE applications, even KDE applications: whatever suits my purposes.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: thought HandBrake would work

Usually. But I have one DVD that has multiple "angles" that don't exist, and Handbrake doesn't understand it. I assume that "angles" were put into the DVD spec in anticipation of showing sporting events.

Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer

Re: There are only so many ways of clipping a signal.

I repaired a (solid-state) Marshall once, and discovered that the clipping was done by a pair of LEDs, one red, one green. Apparently, LEDs saturate or overload smoothly?

I dunno. I'm a software person too.

Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

I think I might have an idea about how it happened

"With its data in Azure, the company can now take advantage of Azure Machine Learning and other Azure services to take the insurance industry into the future."

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

I had a go at installing the Ubuntu PPA version on Devuan, but dependencies didn't allow it. I have NoCSD installed to restore traditional controls to Gnome applications, and was interested to see if that worked.

However, being coded in an unusual language is a deal-breaker for me as far as adopting something for everyday productivity. Either the language or the application will fall into disuse.

After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

That was hyperbole, to point out Rupert's hysteria.

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

Re: Still?

So Wayland is the TRX wheel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_TRX

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Stop calling systemd "an init system"

It contains an init subsystem, sure. But much, much more of the included functionality (sic) is doing other things. The article mentions that the new release "offloaded some old keyboard handling code to X.org". What? Is this the only "init system" in the world that wants to handle your keyboard?

Linux 6.12 is the new long term supported kernel

Hey! I'm so up-to-date! I compiled and installed 6.12.4 yesterday. There was a power cut after Storm Darragh, and when my desktop PC came back up, the bluetooth speaker would not connect. A perusal of the kernel messages showed that the Intel driver had failed to load its firmware. I have no idea why that should happen spontaneously. Software is like that. Now the firmware file is embedded in the kernel and everything is working again.

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: A question of arrangement as much as attribution

"arrangement" as in re-composing it from the ground up. It was only attributed to Grainger as a legal piece of ass-covering. (And perhaps because Derbyshire was (gasp!) a woman.)

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Yes. I've bookmarked the page that tells you how to re-dock a dialog that you (accidentally) undocked. I do it infrequently enough to forget what I did last time.

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

It's a long-time convention in the USA that anything paid for by taxes belongs to the public.

Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard

Re: Sigh

As the article says: "those already there or who make the move". I'm already there, having used Vivaldi as my everyday browser for several years. And it looks as though I'll be "making the move" soon. To what, though?

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Re: YMMV

The other day, I installed pi-hole specifically for my Toshiba television. Telling the TV to use the pi for DHCP and DNS definitely does cause the pi to remove all the snooping connections it's trying to do.

I've just tried the Youtube app on the TV and, yes, there were ads before my selected video. I'll examine the pi-hole log and see if there's anything I can do about that.

The Vivaldi browser has "cast" functionality that allows me (with Ublock Origin) to send ad-free Youtube to the television though.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Surely a 486 would have had ample horsepower to stream audio to dozens of clients? If you are saying that there was no software to achieve such a thing, then I have to admit ignorance, because the early 2000s was when I ditched Windows for Linux.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

History

My current music player, a Raspberry Pi that's plugged into a very nice, but very old amplifier, runs Audacious. It's a descendant of XMMS, which was written as a Linux look-alike of WinAmp. Although it's not a feature I use, I believe that Audacious still supports WinAmp skins, including the Windows bitmap graphics.

Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

Bar/Panel on the left?

I'm right-handed, and it seems more natural to have my xfce4 panel on the right edge. Otherwise, I feel I'd be having my virtual hands crossed.

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

I began using Debian when it was still in the 0.9x releases (30 years ago!) and I honestly don't remember it being difficult. (Of course, my memory of things 30 years ago...)

But I wasn't a Linux neophyte. The first distro I remember trying was Yggdrasil, which was a "live" CD. I played with early Slackware too.

The last version of Windows dual-booting on my home PC was Windows 2000, so I've been Linux-only since the early 2000s.

When the Debian project announced that they were surrendering to assimilation by the systemd, I migrated to Devuan gradually, by changing the repositories, so that every time I updated a package, it replaced the old Debian version with the new Devuan one. I think it took about 18 months before all packages had been updated. Though I've had a couple of new PCs since then and installed Devuan from scratch with their installer. And it wasn't difficult!

Moscow-adjacent GoldenJackal gang strikes air-gapped systems with custom malware

If a PC is deliberately "air-gapped" for security, wouldn't it be a good idea to disable or lock its USB ports? I guess epoxy would be a bit drastic, but how about something that requires the attendance of an IT support person? "And you say you found this in the car park?"

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

I don't think you've mentioned any differences or improvements compared to K9. Is there any reason I should migrate? (I do almost all of my mail on the PC anyway. Mobile mail only comes in useful occasionally.)

Busybox 1.37 is tiny but capable, the way we like Linux tools to be

As it happens, I've just migrated my laptop and desktop from busybox's mdev device manager to eudev. This was prompted by the Thinkpad suddenly deciding that it had found a new, removable SATA drive of zero bytes, which it assigned to /dev/sda replacing the actual SSD. mdev doesn't provide disks by label or by UUID so I had no way of making the kernel find the right drive.

eudev was looking dodgy for a while after Gentoo dropped it, but Devuan and Alpine developers have stepped up.

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

Why would anyone want this?

cups-browsed: "This daemon browses Bonjour broadcasts of shared remote CUPS printers and makes these printers available locally by creating local CUPS queues pointing to the remote queues."

So, if some user on your network allows his printer to broadcast Avahi/Bonjour it becomes accessible to everyone else?

OneFileLinux: A tiny recovery distro that fits snugly in your EFI system partition

Re: Nothing new under the sun* :)

I compile my own kernels with most drivers built in, and the rarely needed ones as modules. The last obstacle to removing the initramfs was building a few binary blobs into the kernel (for Intel microcode and Intel graphics firmware).

I mount my EFI partition at /boot, which means the kernel build copies the finished item there, but that's OK since I made the partition 2Gb. The kernels should be bootable directly by the EFI firmware, since CONFIG_EFI_STUB is set, but I haven't tried that yet. The boot currently is set to use syslinux.efi with its basic VGA menu, but it allowed me very happily to de-install GRUB2.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

And oh, how they danced

The little children of Stonehenge

Is 49hrs a typo? I ask because I've just done a file count of my library and there are almost 14,000 tracks. Guess a minimum of 3 minutes each, and that's at least 700 hours.

Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

Re: no Real-Time Clock

I once had a Linux boot fail at the fsck stage because the Superblock last mount time was December 1901 "which is in the future".

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

I think it was a technology for getting data in or out of Directory Services. I think it was also around the time when Microsoft brought out Active Directory which doomed Novell's offerings. Late 1990s?

Mention of Novell Netware reminded me that Novell were trying to sell us directory software, and that resulted in my taking 3 weeks of training with them on XSLT. I never really understood it. (I didn't get Lisp or Prolog either. My brain must be strictly algorithmic.)

It was just at the time when Novell had decided to abandon Microsoft Windows and give all employees (except senior managers, naturally) Linux laptops. Which was nice.

Fortunately, I've never, ever had to go back to Bracknell.

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

On a Linux PC, it is possible to have ad-free YouTube, but I only got there through years of experimenting with Ublock Origin rules, and I can't say for sure which are the ones that are actually effective.

The Vivaldi browser can "cast" YouTube from the PC to either my relatively modern television or older Freesat box, and will send successive videos without ads. Good for parties. If I had parties.

Tired of airport security queues? SQL inject yourself into the cockpit, claim researchers

Re: Exploits of a Mom (Again)

That's CAPTAIN Bobby Tables, reporting for duty.

It's 2024 and we're just getting round to stopping browsers insecurely accessing 0.0.0.0

Will this work?

# /usr/sbin/iptables -v -A INPUT -d 0.0.0.0 -j DROP

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Re: Standardization

One of my fellow managers had a team leader who was the most brilliant programmer I have ever encountered. For the project he led, he developed his own language and compiler (over a weekend, probably) which emitted C. All of his team were taught the new language and had to code in it, and never look at the C code.

Being more experienced than my colleague, I could anticipate the ensuing train wreck.

Apple Maps escapes orchard into web browser wilds

Remember the days...

...when browsers had no adherence to standards, and web sites had to check user agent text to work out how to send them content that would appear correctly? Or would send only "Your current browser isn't supported." if the coders couldn't work out what to do?

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: Secure boot?

"The details don't make clear if these data files were signed and validated by the driver in any way"

Clearly not. The file that caused the driver to fall over was corrupt. (I think I read somewhere that it was full of zeroes, but I might be mis-remembering that.)

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Re: Too much complexity

I compiled the latest Linux kernel this morning, and noticed that all 16 "CPUs" (real cores and hyperthreaded, um, threads) were running pretty consistently at full speed.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

OK, so the OS has failed to boot. But note that it has the residual cognitive capacity to paint up the BSOD with some text. Couldn't that processing power instead be put into use to set the machine into some secure network listening mode so that remote technicians can do what's needed?

Answer: Windows was written as a single-user, standalone system, and still carries the consequences.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Gura mie ayd

My neural network guesses that "Gura mie ayd" parallels the Irish "Go raibh maith agat" or "Thank you".