Posts by sisk

Router admin? Bored? Let's play Battleships using BGP!

This article made me chuckle.

Lawyers for Marcus Hutchins: His 'I made malware' jail phone call isn't proper evidence

The idea is they could get a job when they leave and become a useful member of society - often at Timpsons Shoe Repairs.

That's another reason for our repeat offender rate. If you've done a stint in a US prison for a felony, good luck finding a job that doesn't involve the risk of going back. And even if you do the government might just screw you over. I know a guy who managed to get a - I think his parents put in a good word for him - job when he got out after going to prison for a couple years on a drug offense. 3 months later the state decided he need to go spend 6 months at a halfway house to "help him integrate back into society" - never mind that he had already done that with a little help from hi family. Most places would have fired him. Fortunately for him it was a small, local company that was willing to hold the job for him till the state decided to let him come back.

If the purpose of putting a felon in a US prison is to rehabilitate them

Let me stop you right there. It isn't. What, you think we get a 90% repeat offense rate by having rehabilitation anywhere on the list of priorities in our prison system? Nah man. US prisons are built and run around the idea of punishment, with a little though given to things like dignity but none at all given to the possibility of taking in a criminal and spitting out a rehabilitated, possibly productive, member of society. If anything our prisons do the exact opposite, taking in petty criminals and spitting out hardened ones.

Erm....Ok....so you took a guy from another country who was drunk at the time. Then you let him waive his Miranda Rights while drunk and sleep deprived. On what grounds can you realistically say this person could possibly understand his rights?

There are times, more and more of them lately, when I'm disgusted by my own government.

You love Systemd – you just don't know it yet, wink Red Hat bods

Re: fscking BINARY LOGS.

"I have no clue what I'm talking about or what's a robust solution but dear god, that won't stop me!" – why is it that all the people complaining about journald sound like that?

I have had the displeasure of dealing with journald and it is every bit as bad as everyone says and worse.

systemd works just fine with regular syslog-ng, without journald (that's the thing that has binary logs) in sight

Yeah, I've tried that. It caused problems. It wasn't a viable option.

It's a pretty polarizing debate: either you see Systemd as a modern, clean, and coherent management toolkit

Very, very few Linux users see it that way.

or an unnecessary burden running roughshod over the engineering maxim: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Seen as such by 90% of Linux users because it demonstrably is.

Truthfully Systemd is flawed at a deeply fundamental level. While there are a very few things it can do that init couldn't - the killing off processes owned by a service mentioned as an example in this article is handled just fine by a well written init script - the tradeoffs just aren't worth it. For example: fscking BINARY LOGS. Even if all of Systemd's numerous other problems were fixed that one would keep it forever on my list of things to avoid if at all possible, and the fact that the Systemd team thought it a good idea to make the logs binary shows some very troubling flaws in their thinking at a very fundamental level.

Every major OS maker misread Intel's docs. Now their kernels can be hijacked or crashed

Imagine you're teaching a math class. You have one kid who's failing but the rest are doing fine. Odds are you have a bad student. If, on the other hand, all your students are failing odds are you're a bad teacher. You are failing to convey the concept to your students and your poor explanation is not their fault.

If everyone misread the documentation then the problem is with the documentation.

Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

It's been years since I've opened Notepad on my own computer. There are FAR better alternatives - most of them free in every sense of the word - for what it does. Mind you my preference is for one of the few non-free ones, but meh, still applies.

Re: relief arrived a long time ago

Open the file in wordpad any non-MS text editor instead of notepad. Though I suppose it's good for the newbies that probably never knew that.

FTFY

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

Heh. Yep. Just, yep. Unfortunately - or maybe fortunately - all the support vendors I deal with go to lunch at least 300 miles from my office.

Also, anyone else getting the feeling that Simon likes this boss for some reason?

Bill Gates declined offer to serve as Donald Trump's science advisor

Microsoft make hardware too and spend many billions on scientific R&D, it's not that far apart.

Running a company that employs a lot of scientists does not make one qualified to be a science adviser. At the end of the day Gates is a very intelligent businessman but also a college dropout. He does not have the qualifications for any sort of science based position.

I don't think ANY of the men mentioned in this article would be qualified to be the White House science adviser. Gates was right to turn down the position, and of the three men mentioned towards the end of the article Musk - whom I quite like but whose idea of science is commendably lacking in considerations of what's actually feasible much of the time - is the closest to being qualified, but he's still no scientist. I know who would be on my personal short list for that role and, sadly, none of them are from Silicon Valley. In fact a couple of them aren't even from the US.

One in particular - a British scientist who would be #1 or 2 on my list if we didn't have to consider nationality for White House positions - is a rather infamous YouTuber who would really piss off the radicals at both ends of the spectrum (bonus!) but who would be fantastic at the job. That's especially true with a President like Trump who needs to be told things in a blunt fashion by someone who's not easily intimidated.

Don’t fight automation software for control, just turn it off. FAST

Re: Even in the extremely unlikely event that fully autonomous vehicles ever become viable

but on public roads driving your own car will rapidly become viewed as violently antisocial insanity. I've been saying for a few years now - by the time my (so far unborn) kids are old enough to learn to drive, they won't need to bother, and by the time THEIR kids are old enough, it'll be against the law.

I highly doubt that. For starters, there will still be cars on the road 40 years from now that were built before self-driving cars were a thing. Not many mind you, but there will no doubt be some just as there are still people driving around in cars made in the 1960s today. Around here it's not even unusual to see a mid-60s model muscle car in the parking lot at the local grocery store. In fact, given the type of person who drives them, it's likely that a lot of those cars will still be running up until their current owners are too old to drive. Even in the unlikely event that autonomous drive becomes mandatory there will be holdouts in older vehicles. Just like seat belt laws, autonomous drive laws will not apply to cars that don't have autonomous drive.

Second, we're at least a couple generations from people really being completely comfortable with autonomous cars. More than a couple if the robot apocalypse genre continues to be popular in the future. Too many people actually think Terminator is a realistic scenario.

Third, software is glitchy. Every time some car manufacturer issues a bad update or a car gets hacked - and make no mistake, both will happen on occasion if autonomous cars are widespread - it will be a reminder that computers are not 100% trustworthy.

Yeah, autonomous cars will probably - quickly - get to the point where they're safer than a human driver. But that won't matter. Just as flying is much safer than driving and people still get nervous flying, autonomous cars are going to make the average person nervous for a good long time.

It's US Tax Day, so of course the IRS's servers have taken a swan dive

Re: COBOL hacking

"At the conclusion of his questioning, Connolly lightheartedly suggested the silver lining of legacy systems is that the Chinese don't know how to hack COBOL"

So the Chinese don't have any aging programmers looking for a way to pad their wallets a little now that their skills are out of date? I find that hard to believe.

Ok, I get that today is the deadline, but I still have to wonder why anyone is filing taxes today. Maybe I'm weird but I've always had the philosophy that you should get your taxes done just as soon as you can. I usually have mine done and a tax return check in hand (not literally of course - this stuff is all done digitally these days) by mid-February. The only time I put off filing my taxes it was because I had to pay in and needed a little extra time to come up with the money, but even then my taxes were done long before mid-April rolled around. I could see maybe putting it off till March if you're still waiting for some paperwork, but why would anyone put off filing their taxes till the last possible day?

Supreme Court punts on Microsoft email seizure decision after Cloud Act passes US Congress

what happens when a company refuses to hand over content citing local laws?

Isn't it a standing facet of international law that one nation cannot require an entity to violate the law of another? If not then it dang well should be.

Pentagon sticks to its guns: Yep, we're going with a single cloud services provider

I can think of no level on which this makes sense, especially in terms of defense. Depending upon which cloud vendor they go with there could be a single or a very short list of facilities where the Pentagon's data resides, which, to my mind, is a security disaster no matter how you look at it.

So, just as a thought experiment, suppose Amazon is awarded this contract. Great. AWS currently has the biggest slice of the market, so it seems like a sensible choice. Amazon has just 4 or 5 AWS data centers in the US (and I think it's a pretty safe assumption that any contract involving Pentagon is going to include a stipulation that all data physically stay in the US). That means a single enemy submarine loaded with cruise missiles could wipe out the entire Pentagon cloud in a single strike. In a wartime scenario it's not difficult to imagine that happening. This problem does not go away completely because the Pentagon has multiple cloud providers, but it does become less of a problem as you add more providers.

'I crashed AOL for 19 hours and messed up global email for a week'

I remember that day and it's all Bert's fault! Well....no, really I don't remember that day. And given what I was using email for back then, I'm fairly certain that no negative impact would have found its way into my life. I might have missed a turn of two of my play-by-email D&D game (yes, play by email D&D in 1996. Have I mentioned I was am a massive nerd?) but that would have been it.

Torvalds schedules Linux kernel 5.0, then maybe delays 'meaningless' release

Remember when major versions were programatically significant instead of just having some arbitrary numerological significance?

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Re: subfolders hell

A common problem for us is files with file names so long that they can't be deleted through normal methods. I've yet to figure out why Windows will let you give a file a name over the length that it can handle when you later want to delete it or why a user would WANT a file name that's 300ish characters long, but we see it all the time.

Re: re: teachers

As a tech in an educational environment, yes. A thousand times yes. It boggles my mind how they can do so many online classes to maintain their teaching licenses and still be so utterly helpless with computers.

Several years back I had recently built a new computer for my dad. My dad, while probably not as competent as most of the El Reg reader base, is pretty handy with a computer. He calls me for anything that involves opening the case or for especially stubborn software problems, but generally speaking he's comfortably in the 'power user' category. My mother, on the other hand, would never touch a computer if she had a choice and is really only able to run the few programs she needs for her job as a nurse, none of which would be likely to be found on a home PC.

The case I had gotten for dad had a huge power button, a 3 inch circle on the front of the case, with a much smaller reset button inset into the edge of it. For some reason mom needed to get on the computer - a circumstance that already trips the "what is going on here" response - and called me in a panic.

"This computer won't turn on!"

"Ok...you're hitting the power button on the tower, right?"

"Yes, I'm not quite that hopeless."

"Which one?"

"What?"

"Which button on the tower are you hitting?"

"I only see one."

"There's a big one and a little one and they're right next to each other."

"All I see is a button and a logo."

And at that point it became obvious what she was doing.

"Push the logo."

"Oh, it's turning on now."

"Yeah, that was the power button. The little one you were pushing was the reset button."

I love my mother to death, but I thank all that is holy that the computer room at their house is my dad's domain, especially after that call.

The first rule of maths class: Don't start a fight club

This article threw me for a loop. I know a teacher named Ryan Fisher. Fisher, not Fish, so not this guy. Still, it took me a second.

eBay has locked me into undeletable Catch-22 trap, complains biz bod

EBay's minimum seller performance is pretty stringent. In order to cancel 5 transactions due to buggy software you have to have sold at least 251 items during that month. And it may be as high as 300 depending upon how EBay rounds percentages. Personally I'd have ditched the software after the first time it listed an item it shouldn't have.

That said, I don't think it was right of EBay to mark this as a case of fraud if the buyers did, in fact, get their refunds. And from what I understand that mark of fraud is the only reason his account was permanently suspended.

UK 'wife'-carrying champion named

Re: RE: Sisk

perhaps the Texas Testicle Festival is more your thing

I've known a lot of people who scoff at calf fries. Usually they stop once they've actually tasted them. It's a tradition born of not wanting to waste any part of the animal way back when that continues today because they're damn tasty. The fact that a lot of folks go to their first calf fry (both the food and the event of making it in bulk go by that name) on a dare is beside the point. :-P

In short, yeah I'd be there. I don't care what they're preaching as long as they're serving calf fries. I'm not sure if that makes me a redneck or not. In fairness the ones around here are usually organized by veterans organizations as fundraisers rather than churches as missionary outreaches though.

And I thought the rednecks 'round these parts came up with some off the wall sports to pass the time. I guess the Vikings of yester-millennia out-rednecked them.

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

The gender pay gap does not compare the same job roles because it would be illegal to pay women with the same jobs less, which can make it a contentious measure in some industries.

In other words, in an industry where most of the women are working in customer service roles and secretarial pools because there is a definite deficit of women who've bothered to get the education needed to work in the higher paying roles of the field, we should expect a gender pay gap.

This is not discrimination by tech companies. This is the result of the lack of women who have a STEM education. That is very much a problem that needs to be addressed, but the responsibility for it does not fall on the shoulders of these tech companies. You should be looking to schools, parents, and peers who are - more unintentionally than not I suspect - discouraging young women from taking STEM majors.

My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

The user has a computer that produces negative energy? Put them in touch with NASA. They could use that to build an Alcubierre drive.

*Thunk* No worries, the UPS should spin up. Oh cool, it's in bypass mode

I left a few years later but the last I heard the company had spent several million pounds on a new site built directly on a flood plain with the IT hardware in the basement.

Could be worse. When I started my IT career about a three lifetimes ago the shop I was in had sprinklers in the server room. Even being green to the gills that caught my attention right away. They were there for several years before someone finally convinced the bean counters that the risk of accidentally discharging sprinklers in a room with $4 million worth of IT hardware was worse than whatever the cost of a gas based fire suppression system was.

Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

Re: Of all places

For instance Australia made many firearms illegal and removed them from circulation. And there was a substantial reduction in gun crime and gun related homicidesFor instance Australia made many firearms illegal and removed them from circulation. And there was a substantial reduction in gun crime and gun related homicides.

Meanwhile there was zero impact on total homicides for a decade after they did that. So no, their gun laws didn't make a bit of difference. Unless you're so foolish as to think being stabbed to death is somehow better than being shot that is.

Also meanwhile there are nations out there with far more gun owners per capita (note:owners, not guns, since American gun owners tend to own several guns) than America with much lower gun crime rates and countries with far fewer gun owners per capita with much higher gun crime rates. The problem in America is NOT guns. It's clearly cultural. And to be clear I'm not blaming violent movies or video games or any such stupidity. Somewhere along the line in the last 50 years or so the American people as a whole have forgotten the value of human lives. THAT is our root problem, and it's the same problem that has plagued the Middle East for hundreds or thousands of years. Taking away the guns won't fix that.

If by some miracle you manage to take the guns away - which might actually be politically possible for the first time ever right now - then we'll just start seeing more mass stabbings (which, statistically, are just as deadly, at least from the research I've done on the subject) and bombings.

Gun control in America is, at best, a stop-gap measure and at worst disarming only the law abiding citizens. There is a root cause of the problem that needs to be dealt with and it is demonstrably NOT guns.

That's not to say that gun control is necessarily a bad idea in the short term, but it is absolutely not going to stop the madness on its own.

How machine-learning code turns a mirror on its sexist, racist masters

Re: Conclusion is wrong

and how it would have most likely classified even anti-racism and anti-sexism materials (which we, as humanity, have generated in large amounts in the last 50-60 years or so) as sexist or racist

A very valid point, especially given how many times in recent history that exact scenario has happened. Seriously, any academic resource on a certain political party from late 1930s-early 1940s Germany would almost certainly get labeled as hate speech by an AI. And then you get things - like basically anything talking about female sexism towards men - that inappropriately get labeled as hate speech even by some humans. How in the world could you possibly expect the limited AI we have today to tell the difference?

Elon Musk's mighty erection fires sperm at orbiting space station

Re: There's a movie in this story...

Hang on there's been a knock at the door and two gentlemen are delivering me a white coat with extra long sleeves.

Are you sure they're not there to offer you a production job over at Sci-Fi? They'd probably jump on that script.

Surely they could find a pair of astronauts who've hit it off and run this experiment the old fashioned way. Of course the experiment would have to be videoed. For educational purposes, of course.

Grindr: Yeah, we shared your HIV status info with other companies – but we didn't charge them!

Nope. Only medical providers or others with access to medical records are bound by HIPAA. Any medical information you choose to share with any other entity is fair game.

So if I'm getting what's being said here correctly it's less "Grindr shared information" and more "Publicly accessible profiles were scraped." So....yeah, I'm kinda with Grindr here. If you make information public then don't be surprised when third parties get their hands on it.

On the other hand, given the nature of Grindr, if you're HIV positive, on Grindr, and trying to hide your HIV status....yeah, I've no polite words for someone who does that.

Who had Intel in the 'discrimination lawsuit' pool? Congratulations

Re: She did it to herself

I will point out that a lot of companies have wage secrecy in their contracts. Illegally, of course, but even the HR people don't seem to realize that till you pull out the relevant law - the name of which escapes me at the moment - and show it to them. That being the case, it's entirely possible she didn't know and found out by accident. My ex-wife ran into a similar situation. She was the only woman on her team and after being there for a year found out that not only was everyone else making minimum 75 cents an hour more than her but that there were guys hired after her at a higher wage. When she brought it up to the HR person there she was first told that discussing salaries was a breach of policy. But to their credit they also gave her a retroactive pay raise back to the day she was hired. Her paycheck that week was impressive.

Odds that it comes out down the road that her performance was lacking and that she was fired for reasons having nothing to do with wanting a raise? I mean, seriously, how stupid do you think Intel is?

I will absolutely grant the possibility that Intel IS this stupid, but I consider it to be a lesser possibility than the possibility that the one side of the story presented here is lacking in some key details. Let's hear the other side. I'd be willing to bet, in the information vacuum here, that it holds up better to scrutiny.

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

I thought the dash cam made the cause of that tragedy pretty clear: the pedestrian in question stepped out in front of a moving car. No amount of fancy tech is gonna save you if you do that regardless of whether it's a human or a computer at the wheel.

Please no Basic Instinct flashing, HPE legal eagles warn staffers

Re: I Think I'm Going To Throw Up

If anyone has ever found a way to eliminate the stomach-wrenching anxiety before actually presenting, I know we'd all queue up for THAT info.

In the words of my college theatre professor: "Everyone has butterflies in their stomachs. The trick is to teach them to fly in formation."

Re: Can be embarassing

I have no idea how I could have dealt with it if I was on my own, without all the possibilities of sexual misconduct that could have arisen if I had said anything, or couldn't keep my eyes on hers!

Are you still stewing in adolescence hormones? Because if not that shouldn't be a problem. By your mid-20s you should be able to choose which head is in charge. Granted, I'm of the opinion that short skirts are not professional attire, but that opinion has nothing to do with the reactions of men who lack self-control.

Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds

To be fair any school project that relies upon research is going to also rely pretty heavily on the Internet these days. Sure, going to the library is going to be an option still, but it's been a few years since libraries have seen it as worthwhile to keep up-to-date research resources in book form as a priority. Yes, they still buy new books that, yes, can be used for research, but these days the Internet is the go-to reference source. Even when using books and science periodicals people normally use the Internet to figure out which ones they should be looking for.

On top of that savvy students are well aware that if they're not getting a concept from their own teacher - which happens because not all teachers teach the same way and not all students learn the same way - they have free access to dozens or hundreds of teachers online teaching the same concept who might explain it in a different way. You can even see entire course lecture series from some of the best teachers in the world. As an example, a few years back I watched the entire lecture series from a class on black hole mechanics taught at MIT just because I thought it was interesting. I retained little more of it than I would from a Discovery Channel documentary (I was, after all, only interested and not actually studying the subject) but can you imagine how useful that sort of resource would be to a student studying astrophysics?

I don't actually think a good student would see their grades fall due to slow Internet, but I could definitely see a good student raising their grades with good Internet.

Meet the open sorcerers who have vowed to make Facebook history

The problem I see with this is the same problem I saw with Google+. Pretty much everyone who's inclined to sign up for a social network is on Facebook. Seriously, they've got a near 99% market share. In order to get people to move you have to get their friends to move first, and their friends aren't going to move unless they do. Trying to introduce anything that resembles Facebook today is a catch 22, and that's going to remain true going forward. This doesn't change when you're essentially trying to replace Facebook Messenger.

Then again, there's always that one guy who insists on using IRC and hooking into *insert random thing your group is using* through a plugin.

YouTube banned many gun vids, so some moved to smut site

Based on my limited knowledge of the USA, it does seem as though the areas with gun racks on the back window of the pick-up is also a very religious god-fearing area.

That's an understandable perception, but ultimately incorrect. As much as the media loves to paint gun rights as a religious right vs secular left issue the reality of the situation is that it's more of an urban vs rural issue. While urban vs rural does tend to line up similarly to secular left vs religious right, the correlation is far from perfect.

I can't say I agree with YouTube's policy change here, but "free speech" doesn't enter into it. You can say whatever you want and face no legal consequences for it (with a few exceptions such as active threats of violence). That does not mean that any private company has to provide you with a platform to say it.

Basically, I disagree with YouTube here, but they are absolutely within their rights even if I - personally - think it's pretty crappy of them. PornHub has the same rights and I really wouldn't be surprised if the gun guys get kicked off there too (for entirely different reasons - they really don't want to be just the place you go if YouTube won't host your video). If you want to say something that they don't want to provide a platform for feel free to set up your own video sharing site. It's not that difficult to get one running these days. Granted you won't have the exposure that YouTube gives you, but on the plus side your bandwidth bills will probably stay manageable.

SpaceX blasted massive plasma hole in Earth's ionosphere

Out of curiosity, did you factor air resistance into that calculation? I ask because I was ball-parking (with estimates because I'm too lazy to actually do the math) around 75-80%. Which, when you factor in the cost of helium, would still make it not really worthwhile. We could use hydrogen as our lifting gas, which would be much cheaper, but a hydrogen balloon that stands a good chance of being in the exhaust of a rocket engine just seems like a bad idea.

Why does "blow a hole in the ionosphere" sound like something a Bond villain would try to do? Is Elon Musk a Bond villain now?

We sent a vulture to find the relaunched Atari box – and all he got was this lousy baseball cap

Erm....seriously now....how difficult could it possibly be to emulate a console from the 70s? Nerds have been doing it for decades now, but the company that made the original is having trouble doing it? Or am I missing something and what they're actually trying to do is create a modern console that just happens to have an emulator built in like Nintendo* has been doing?

*Ok, if we're using Nintendo as the example then we should say modern-ish since they generally build their consoles on last-gen hardware. But still....

AI software that can reproduce like a living thing? Yup, boffins have only gone and done it

So they've made an AI that's obsessed with reproducing? Does that make it a sex addict?

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

I dunno. If they truly don't have the keys then they've got little choice but to stand up to that regime. It's not really courage so much as "what other choice do they have".

Still, good on them for making sure they're not able to betray their users.

Facebook suspends account of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower

Re: Improper use of Facebook data

Personally I'm of the opinion that Facebook - and really social media in general - has distorted every election since its inception. Echo chambers tend to do that. I think that's pretty obvious in fact.

These days, thanks to social media, people get more exposure to coinciding views and less exposure to opposing views because they tend to make social media connections with people who have similar, or at least compatible, views to their own. Because of that their own views - right or wrong - get reinforced to the point that they are absolutely unshakable. This whole thing has an even worse side effect of making any sort of reasonable dialog basically impossible. If you truly believe that hasn't distorted our elections then you haven't put much thought into it.