Posts by cyberdemon

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

One in every town

I don't think that's the point here.

SMRs should be built as a 'farm' of small reactors in a few fairly large facilities situated in places where you would normally site a nuclear reactor i.e. close to bodies of water.

That makes the sites easier to defend from bad people (because there are fewer of them, compared to 'one in every town'), and easier to decommission (because the reactors are smaller).

And because the reactors themselves are small, they can be taken offline for maintenance much more easily, they contain less fuel, they are easier, cheaper and faster to build (less chance of a tiny metallurgical imperfection ruining your whole pressure vessel as with Flamanville EPR), they are safer, they can be managed by automated systems instead of an army of homer simpsons with clipboards and boxes of doughnuts.

Linux PC shop System76 is building a new desktop environment in Rust

Re: Build back better?

Unfortunately, Rust is rather bloaty in my experience. It has its own 'pip'-like package manager called Cargo, and most things seem to need a tree of hundreds of dependencies, and versions are frequently incompatible and broken. And I worry about potential security risks in all of these 3rd party packages.

The language can be as secure as you like, but it can still encode malware if someone pushes a dodgy update to a repo.

Re: KDE for me..

Xorg forever. Down with Wayland.

I have fond memories of my old Maemo-based Nokia N900. Maemo, being based on Debian, ran a full blown X server in my pocket complete with 3G connectivity, yet still had all-day battery life. Any Qt-based desktop app could be ported over without fuss, and It had an amazingly powerful native terminal that made full use of the mechanical slide-out keyboard.

But the best thing was being able to SSH into my uni's Linux cluster and pull up plots during lectures in full-fat Matlab that would have taken a while to produce even on a desktop PC. By the time we got to the labs, I had already done it.

But then around the same time as the infamous Stephen Elop, Meego came along (apparently a collab with Intel) and ripped out dpkg to replace it with yum (why??) and replaced X with Wayland. It sucked. Then Elop killed the whole company and sold it to Microsoft. Conspiracies abound.

And obviously I whole-heartedly agree about KDE. I have been using KDE since 2003, and I don't know why anyone would use Gnome these days.

KDE Plasma 5 is where KDE 3.5 used to be - powerful, modern and stable. Even my Bluetooth mouse 'just works' via the KDE widget, as does my VPN. And thanks to Steam/Proton, I rarely if ever need to boot Windows.

If I'm ever forced to use Windows (i.e. at work) I constantly find myself cursing the start menu (among other windows features), because the Windows type-to-find finds all sorts of rubbish that I don't need, it doesn't seem to prioritise stuff that's actually in the start menu. Whereas the KDE menu is so much faster.

Why is a hardware company writing software anyway? As someone else mentioned, all they need to do is get the laptop keyboard right. Writing a desktop environment from scratch in Rust is maybe biting off a little more they can chew, if it's to compete with Gnome never mind KDE.

'There are things we'd like to do that we can't simply achieve through extensions in GNOME'

So use KDE?

Calendars have gone backwards since the Bronze Age. It's time to evolve

There are two ways to lose data in a diary.

1. You no longer have access to it. This could be inconvenient, but if your memory is any good then the act of having written it down means you have probably remembered the important bits.

2. Someone else gains access to it. This is completely outside your control and could be highly dangerous for you. You open yourself to manipulation by scammers and advertisers, and anyone else who could use the data against you.

I am far more concerned about #2 than #1, therefore I like the OP use a paper diary, in my own illegible shorthand.

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Re: Trust Google?

Yes, I also run /e/os although I do have a google account (which is not linked to my phone). However I suspect we are in a minority of less than 0.1% of Android users who are running OpenGApps.

It means that I also have to trust a 3rd party App store, which is not ideal but no worse than trusting Google. I wish that I could build apps from source on my Linux PC and remove all the shitty trackers from them, but I don't know how to do that and very few Android apps are open source.

Re: Trust Google?

Unfortunately most of us are forced to trust Google to some degree.. At least the other tech companies are avoidable, but Google is insidious. It has complete control over your Android device and all apps on it. Many of us are forced by our government to own a smart phone of some kind. Nobody can avoid needing to use email, web search, etc.

• Facebook: Easy. Just don't use facebook.
• Amazon: Don't use it.
• Microsoft: Run Linux. Use GitLab. Suspend your LinkedIn when you're not actively looking for a job.
• Apple: You joined the cult, you are a lost cause, serves you right.
• Intel: Well, as long as the CIA or Mossad aren't after you, you probably have nothing to fear from them.
• Google: Bend over. We're not evil, remember. Trust us, this won't hurt a bit.

But can anyone really get around having a Google account? Short of running your own mail server, they are a better option than using an ISP or Employer's email service. Even Google Search is becoming impossible to use without being logged in and tracked.. "Sorry we can't verify that you are over 18.." (even if you ARE logged in with an account that you've had for 20 years)

And of course, anyone stupid enough to use OnmiAuth puts Google in control of their secondary accounts too.

And even if you use none of that, you still get forcibly redirected to AMP.

Netflix shows South Korea a rerun of 'We Won't Pay Your Telcos For Bandwidth'

Re: Over Committed?

I think you might be exactly right. And an obvious solution would be to install FTTP to get rid of the contention issue. Or perhaps someone should set up a competitor to SKT doing exactly that. Much like Toob here in the UK.

The old BT DSL infrastructure is creaking, and just needs to be replaced.

Re: Open Connect

If the ISP host the caching server, then doesn't that mean they still have to deliver all the content, unicast, to consumers?

It might save 95% of traffic at the Netflix end, but probably not at the (downstream) ISP side.

Maybe they can install a caching server in each neighbourhood though, at great expense, with the fees paid to Netflix.

I don't think this is a clear-cut case, I can see arguments on both sides.

New year, new OS: OneDrive support axed for old versions of Windows from 1 Jan 2022

Yes, but what about 7? I expect there are more people using that than 8.

I'm quite sure there are more people using WinXP than Win8.

Also, may I point out that OneDrive is perfectly usable under Linux and has a completely free open-source implementation.

apt-get install onedrive

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Re: How does it

*cough* BitTorrent *cough*

It occurs to me that the only real 'crime' that you are committing by using BitTorrent these days, is denying Netflix, Amazon, Google et al access to your surveillance data.

Re: Opted out

I hope it's on its own VLAN then, with a whitelist of acceptable hosts that it can talk to.

Re: Buy secondhand

Just wait till you are forced to have the next LG WebOS update - I'm sure they will fix that.

And while it may be ad-free for now, you should check your firewall for how much encrypted data it is exchanging with LG servers, which will include your viewing habits. Although at least as a second-hand TV, the tracking cookies are someone else's.

It could be worse - soon they'll be putting cameras in all the telescreens, connected to an AI surveillance system to see if you're really watching, monitor your sentiment, and they'll be always-on, complete with Alexa/Bixby/Google etc..

The return of the turbo button: New Intel hotness causes an old friend to reappear

Re: Wow...

Or possibly to satisfy lazy game developers who would prefer to sue intel for "breaking" their game than fix their DRM.

Re: Wow...

My response would to be to return the game to the developer (with a suitably angry rant about their shitty broken pointless and counterproductive DRM scheme) and demand a full refund. I don't know why Intel are pandering to the purveyors of crap-and-broken DRM with this.

I understand that it is mostly legacy titles affected, but still, I think game devs should be forced to remove or at least fix the DRM, or hand out refunds.

FYI: Code compiled to WebAssembly may lack standard security defenses

Re: Agreed

> That way, I had full control over what was expected to happen and anything outside of those boundaries was discarded. A full activity log was obviously in place as well.

Yes this, obviously this. Otherwise your test-space for critical functionality is practically infinite.

Am I missing something here? It seems to me that the only use-case where WASM makes sense, is DRM.

Reg debate asks readers about their post pandemic status. Half ask, 'What status?'

Clear as mud???

What? 367 vs 362 is a clear democratic majority! Any suggestion otherwise is an affront to democracy! The people have spoken!

Teams has a mute button all of its own in taskbar of latest Windows 11 preview build

Re: Oh you teases....

Lucky you!

Google lab proposes solar-powered moisture farming to provide water for billions

If that really is the case here, then these clowns shouldn't be publishing papers.

It's straight out of the "desperate marketing" department. Oh shit there's a big climate conference on and everyone suddenly cares about the planet but our datacentres are churning hundreds of megawatts just to spy on our userbase. Quick, do something 'green' with the computers before anyone notices!

Re: It takes energy to extract water from the air

Er, I didn't say they should be quoting it in Joules. You are the only person on this page to have said Joules.

My point was: The Googlers quote their hypothetical contraption as extracting 0.2 litres per kilowatt hour, because it sounds better than 0.02 litres per hour with a 100W panel, or 0.25L/day with 12 hours per day of sunlight.

> it seems the authors are not clear on what they are talking about

Or: They don't know what they are talking about. They chucked some numbers into an "AI" and it spat out some nonsense and they published it.

Re: It's a blue planet...

15A @ 12V is 180W, which is the same as you'd get from the quoted 2 square metre panel anyway.

And 25 litres/hour is 10 to 100 times what this google contraption produces.

So.. Yes. It's all a load of hot, arid air.

Re: Hang on ...

As long as you only drink it, it's not so bad. Most of the water we drink comes back out in our breath. The rest is sweat and urine. And drinking water is "a drop in the ocean" compared to agricultural demands.

> two hypothetical devices: a 1m2 solar panel with a yield of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatt-hour at 30 per cent relative humidity and a 2m2 solar panel with a yield of 0.1 to 1.25 litres per kilowatt-hour at 90 per cent relative humidity.

Shouldn't they be quoting that per hour, not per kilowatt hour?

A 1 m2 solar panel produces about 100W on a good day, not 1kW. So That's a yeild of 0.02 to 0.25 litres per hour at 30% RH.

And why would a larger panel in much higher humidity produce less water?

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

Re: Nobody dares ?

Yeah, WTF is wrong with Windows USB driver support.

It doesn't support composite devices using more than one driver. You have to use a flaky 3rd party utility called Zadig to switch between modes of a composite device (if say, you have a DFU bootloader on your USB device or you have dual CDC/HID modes to communicate with it...)

Windows thinks that "one device = one device driver, preferably from the manufacturer" but they haven't quite got their heads round standard USB class drivers yet, never mind composite devices.

Really pisses me off when blows wants to reinstall the driver every time my mouse changes USB port..

There's one obvious solution.

Re: Nobody dares ?

It is strange how the message doesn't seem to get through though..

Who wouldn't want a system that does what THEY tell it to, not what someone else does..

And yes, except for some increasingly rare use cases, it DOES work for everything you need.

e.g. the most common excuse is gaming: Steam/Proton is so much better these days. There is little/no difference in performance, and I am yet to find a game that doesn't work.

Desktop environment: KDE has matured in the last few years, you should try it out.

Full-disk encryption: It's trivially easy to set up these days.

HPE picks Taiwan as 'global strategic hub for next-generation technology'

Re: On the other hand

This time, there is little evidence to show that the US are the warmongers.. I don't think they are expecting to come off well this time, if/when that happens.

A bunch of peasants sitting on vast oil reserves and they'll happily go to war, but china? I don't think so..

Re: Reunification is a loaded translation

Annexation like Germany annexed Poland in 1939, more like...

BT shelves efforts to find investor to share FTTP build, says Openreach can run project alone

Re: Why?

no cynicism required, sadly

JEDI mind tricks: Google said Pentagon contract didn't align with company values. Now it's chasing another defence gig

Don't be evil

So old-hat for megacorps these days...

Of course we've tried turning it off and on again: Yeah, Hubble telescope still not working

Re: Imagine you being up there for so long

It's OK, Hubble. Silicon Heaven is real.

GitHub CEO forks off: Nat Friedman to quit this month, replacement will report to exec behind .NET Hot Reload fiasco

Re: Not forgetting

There's also GitLab. I find it to be much better than GitHub, especially for agile workflows.

I lost my trust in sourceforge back when they tried to embed advertising crapware in installer packages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#DevShare_adware

Now, welcome to the 'Extinguish' phase of the Microsoft takeover.

And before anyone else leaves, may we remind you that we own LinkedIn too.

Microsoft: We love open source! (like a wolf loves lamb) thanks for all the code you all contributed to our arctic vault and our "Open"AI code generator.

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

Err, can they? I suspect with this line of new chips, Chairman Xi will be baked into their silicon.

And Personally I'm quite happy to have permanently abstained from reading politically incorrect rants while avoiding being tracked, modelled and manipulated by the meta-twat.

Plastic trash is a more troublesome addiction but i'm working on it.

Cisco requires COVID-19 shots for all US staff – even remote workers

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

I am a member of the satanic church of antivaxxx and I demand my exemption.

(maybe I should use the 'joke alert' icon..)

Yahoo! shuts! down! last! China! operations! as! doing! business! becomes! 'increasingly challenging'!

Re: And as El Reg helpfully pointed out in TFA ...

Speaking of beers for the editors: Did anyone bother to translate the sub-title?

Made me chuckle.

Re: oh, btw

Nor me. NoScript ftw. Better than any adblocker.

Joint UK-Oz probe finds face-recognition upstart Clearview AI is rubbish at privacy

See Icon

Pope still catholic, bears still shit in woods, surveillance capitalists still making billions by spying on everyone.

Forum layout borked "-%]" at top of page and long comment DIVs

Forum layout borked "-%]" at top of page and long comment DIVs

Who borked the CGI script for the El Reg Forums?

"-%]" appears before any other HTML (including "Doctype") and there is an excessively large space below each post. What's going on?

Don't super-size me – China defines rules for 'super-large' platforms

Good for them!

Doing something that western governments no longer have the teeth to do..

Of course, if/when the state itself sets up a super-platform, it will make an exception for itself though...

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Nippy stocking filler for the nerd in your life – if you can get one

Re: an unpopulated 40-pin GPIO interface

+1 for Learn to Solder.

Also, try using the old fashioned 60/40 tin/lead solder - it flows so much better, you don't get 'dry joints'.

While manufacturers are (rightly) forced to use lead-free (we want to avoid too much lead oxide seeping into the water supply from e-waste in landfill sites, and manufacturers don't make boards by hand anyway) But as a home user you are NOT forced to use lead-free (the environment has bigger things to worry about than a few blobs of lead solder on a home-made board - and also the fumes are much less toxic than lead-free solder fumes, due to the acid needed to get lead-free solder to stick to anything..)

It makes a huge difference, as does a decent soldering iron. I recommend the 'pinecil' as a cheap and powerful TS80 clone.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Don't touch FM!!!!

You mean a "lumie" - they are great, if a little pricey

REvil gang member identified living luxury lifestyle in Russia, says German media

Re: If they know who

I'm sure they have passed on all the relevant info to the Russian police, who will do.. precisely nothing.

China Telecom booted out of USA as Feds worry it could disrupt or spy on local networks

Re: because Beijing will be livid.

Ok, correction: We're not (yet) talking about removing CGN from Hinkley, but we are talking about removing them from Sizewell and Bradwell. (FT)

Re: because Beijing will be livid.

Not as livid as the Chinese nuclear company that were originally going to be paid billions for Hinkey Point (which we so desperately and urgently need to support our electricity grid against our bonkers plans of phasing out gas boilers and internal combustion engines), who having done a pile of work on it are to be 'kicked out' by the same politicians who said back in 2017 that they wanted to usher in a new age of trade with China..

Not as livid as Huawei, who had their European headquarters in Reading with 5000 staff...

Thanks Dom, Thanks Kwasi.. Now how many friendly trading partners do we have left?

Re: Time to mothball SS7

Or follow the UK's lead and switch everything over to VOIP. What could go wrong!

If you're using this hijacked NPM library anywhere in your software stack, read this

Github, which owns NPM these days, put out an advisory

Should read: Microsoft, who own both GitHub and NPM these days, [don't really seem to give a shit?]

For a package to be hosted on NPM and be available to normal users via the standard 'npm install' / 'npm update' commands, SURELY it should have to be signed-off by more than one developer, and ideally had a supervisory glance from someone at Microsoft.

I'm sure PyPi do this.. Debian certainly do.

Embrace, Extend... Exonerate all responsibility?

Gotta love Microsoft for buying up the competition and then disclaiming any responsibility for good stewardship.. It's almost as if it buys the open source competitors only to let them rot and die inside its macrophage-like belly. Nah Microsoft would never do that.

DDoSers take weekend off only to resume campaign against UK's Voipfone on Monday

resilience

I can only hope that this is a sneaky UK government resilience test to see if VOIP is ready to replace critical infrastructure or not. (and the answer should clearly be NOT)

BT are planning to phase out POTS by 2025 and replace it all with VOIP.

If we find ourselves at war (cold or warm) after that, then how would the King/PM/President contact all of the cabinet, civil servants, military bases, factories etc. to coordinate the war effort?

And if it's not a sneaky UK govt resilience test, it's probably a sneaky Russian one.

Asia's 'superapps' bundle ride-share, food delivery, even financial services – and they're beating big tech

Re: I'm starting to believe that we need some regulation

I wouldn't be so sure.. There are ways to de-anonymize it (i.e. correlate it) based on the data points you already have about people from other sources. And if there are any holes, once the data is out of the bag, there's no putting it back in. The industrialised cybercriminals of russia/china/india/norks now have even more ammunition to con/blackmail people with.

Re: I'm starting to believe that we need some regulation

We're already doing the opposite.. Priti Patel hails "the end of anonymity online" - that only goes towards tech companies collecting invasive details about everyone.

And i'm not sure we want to make the data accessible to all and sundry either. I'd rather say delete it and stop bloody collecting it. Don't require login accounts when they are not needed (looking at you, BBC). Don't require login to view websites (facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, google)

Cleanup on aisle C: Tesco app back online after attack led to shopping app outages

Re: Bald Tony - What a twat!

I'd never heard of Belgian Bots.. Do they write for the Daily Mail?