Posts by sisk

Linux remote root bug menace: Make sure your servers, PCs, gizmos, Android kit are patched

So....all normal then?

Just like every single time a Linux vulnerability makes the news (which seems to still be pretty much every single time a major Linux vulnerability is found) the patch to fix it is already available before the press can get their stories out. Except this time the patch is not only available but actually already applied to all but some edge cases. The biggest bunch of unpatched devices by far are going to be ancient phones that don't get security updates anymore and thus have more easily exploited bugs in place from Android code. The next biggest batch is going to be the mostly neglected personal servers sitting under nerds' desks the world over that the owners never think about because they just sit there doing their jobs, but now that the story's out those won't remain mostly neglected for long. (Speaking of which, I need to go look up how to use the package manager in Alpine again I guess since I seem to have forgotten in the year and a half or so since I last logged onto that box.)

So....yeah. No need to worry here.

Ex-IBMer sues Google for $10bn – after his web ad for 'divine honey cancer cure' was pulled

Dude doesn't understand how the 1st Amendment works

The government cannot supress your free speech, but that doesn't mean someone else has to spout your nonsensical cancer cure that's gonna get any rube dumb enough to depend on it killed just because you paid them. Actually, come to think of it, he probably has been told that by a lawyer or three who refused to take his case, which would explain why he's representing himself.

How hard will it be to measure Planet Nine?

Apparently there's a new definition of 'planet' being pushed by someone - I'm not sure who and this comes from bar chatter, so grains of salt aplenty - that would boost the number of planets in our solar system to over 200 (I forget the exact number). This definition would include not only Pluto and all the other dwarf planets but also most if not all of the moons in our solar system. Basically, it's anything with enough gravity to pull itself into a sphereoid. Personally I inwardly groaned at this definition.

PC survived lightning strike thanks to a good kicking

Ghost Keyboard

At one point everyone in my office was given wireless keyboards and mice all of the same model. By some fluke a couple people with adjacent cubicles ended up keyboards and mice that were using the same frequency and their computers were on the very edges of the maximum range for the receivers. This being a tech office, it didn't take long to figure out what was going on and correct it (by moving the receivers further away from each other) but hijinks involving them occurred sporadically for years. Often around this time of year in fact.

Can you ethically suggest a woman pursue a career in tech?

Men must be on their best behavior. A big ask?

I don't think it's so much to ask that we behave like decent human beings towards women.

Then again my boss and 4/5 of my co-workers in the IT department are women, so maybe I've got a unique view of this issue.

'I'm innocent!' says IT contractor on trial after Office 365 bill row spiraled out of control

The organization noted that no data was lost and no personal information on any individuals was compromised.

That being the case, how could this matter possibly be considered a criminal case? I find this completely boggling.

RAF pilot sent jet into 4,000ft plummet by playing with camera, court martial hears

Re: Low level loss of concentration

they think they own the sky.

Feel free to argue that point with them, but I'd advise you to do so with both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Protest against Trump's US travel ban leaves ‪PasswordsCon‬ in limbo

Re: No.

Including the votes of the illegals or not?

I really get sick of hearing about voter fraud every election cycle from the side that lost (and, even more ludicrously, sometimes from the side that won).

The last 5 years or so I've heard things like "voter fraud" and "illegal voters" being thrown around a lot. The problem with it is that no one of the people talking about it, not the strongest advocates of anti-voter fraud measures nor their strongest critics, has ever shown one iota of evidence that it's actually happening. In all of the voter fraud accusations I've seen no one has ever produced hard numbers that even indicate that there MIGHT be large scale voter fraud. Nor, I might point out, has anyone shown any numbers for the opposite. In my mind "voter fraud" has become nothing more than a democratic boogeyman, not real but a convenient target for unjustified fears.

In the absence of any evidence I say simply require sane precautions such as showing ID to vote. (And for those who would seriously argue against that measure, I've heard all the arguments and not a one of them holds water when not having an ID in the US effectively means you're homeless, which in turn means that you not having an ID is a much bigger problem that the government - and yes, this is the government's responsibility in my opinion - should be helping you tackle than you not being able to vote). Maybe if you want to get super paranoid make voters bring in proof of citizenship and residence when they register (though unlike IDs THAT measure actually has some valid points that can be argued against it). In my opinion until someone can actually show that there's some sort of large scale voter fraud going on there can be no justification for any more stringent measures than that on the matter.

Now all that said, sure, Hillary won the popular vote, but the popular vote doesn't matter in POTUS elections. That she won the popular vote but lost the election is a very good argument for getting rid of the electoral college (a very un-democratic process at its core) but not a valid one for getting rid of Trump. At least not if we want rule of law.

...all protest is invalid

Not invalid, but a lot of protest (rioting, active attempts to grind the legislative process to a halt, that sort of thing) is counter-productive and/or inappropriate. The Democrat legislators who are refusing to show up to vote on Trump nominees because the vote isn't going to go their way, for instance, are accomplishing nothing but the derailment of the democratic process and grinding the gears of the legally elected government to a halt. The people rioting during the inauguration accomplished nothing but the destruction of private property. Unfortunately a distressing number of the "protests" against Trump have taken such forms.

Protest is fine, and I'll go to the mat to defend the right of someone who disagrees with me to protest something I like. But a whole lot of what's going on right now being called protest is nothing more than the adult version of temper tantrums and should be tolerated no more than the toddler versions are.

Penguins force-fed root: Cruel security flaw found in systemd v228

I think a lot of the "improvements" are down to a religious devotion to running the same OS on laptops that we run on servers. For example, NetworkManager is a godsend on a laptop that moves around, but really painful on a server, where you might configure the network once every three or four years and really want it to come up as early in the boot process as possible.

The difference is that you can remove NetworkManager and go back to your config files on that server in a matter of minutes, but dumping systemd is, at best, a painful process sure to cause even more problems.

Yet more proof

that systemd is not yet ready for prime time.

Welcome to the Wipe House: President Trump shreds climate change, privacy, LGBT policies on WhiteHouse.gov

Re: Happy Days

In my opinion, it would not have mattered which candidate won, there would be protests

You're probably right. And I'd have been just as disgusted had it been Trump supporters rioting to protest Hillary. Protest I don't mind for the most part. Folks have a right to it and I'll fight tooth and nail for the right of someone I disagree with to hold up a sign expressing views I personally find repulsive. Rioting is another matter entirely. The people hurt by rioting are almost never people involved in the issues being protested. Think about it for a second: was Trump in any way affected by the fact that someone who happened to park in the wrong place Friday had their car torched? Does he even care? Not likely.

Trump won by being extremely divisive, and the protests are a direct consequence of that. He and his cronies will start raping the country to boost their individual wealth*. When his supporters realise that there isn't 'power to the people', and they won't be getting any of the 'trickle down' that Trump promised, then they too will join the protests against him. Trump will call out the guard and it will be Civil War II.

Personally I think any political outsider would have made a decent showing in this election. A big chunk of his vote came from simply not being a career politician. And the fact that Hillary is viewed as one of the most corrupt politicians in America by most people outside of the extreme left wing didn't hurt him any. When you look at his support base, though, what you find is a whole bunch of frustrated blue collar sorts. He won by appealing to a demographic mostly ignored by most Presidential candidates, simple as that.

That said, I've no doubt that you're right about him using the office for his own personal gain. I do, however, doubt it will escalate to Civil War II. That kind of movement could have gotten rolling had he lost, but since most of the people who'd be willing to pick up a gun and charge the White House voted for him, you'd need time for them to realize he screwed them over, then time for them to convince enough other people, then time to get organized. It might be a possibility if he wins again in 2020, but I just don't think 4 years is enough time for things to devolve that far.

The dumping of Obamacare isn't about health, it is about the taxes on the very rich that paid for it. Trump and his rich cronies want to pay less taxes, the poor can get sick for all they care.

Personally I think that's more about the individual mandate than the relatively small tax burden that it added to the super wealthy. I'd almost be willing to bet Trump has had dinners that cost more than Obamacare added to his annual tax bill, provided he's not also being hit with the fine for not having health insurance. Heck, maybe even if he is. I know of some places where the dinner bill can cost more than a decent used car (not that I have the luxury of eating at such places, I just know about them).

Re: Happy Days

For me it boils down to this: for good or for ill he's the President now and we DO NOT want an unsuccessful President. That would be bad for all of America. So he's got my support even though, personally, he would have been near the bottom of my list of potential choices for the job (if he even made the list at all!) But, as I said before, it's getting pretty hard to be optimistic about his Presidency.

And, frankly, I'm utterly disgusted with the morons rioting over the fact that Trump is now in the White House.

Wait....so part of the transition plan was to create thousands of dead link simultaneously on a site that should reasonably be expecting its highest traffic rates in 4 years at the time?

I try, I really really do, but it's getting harder to be optimistic about the next four years.

Chevy Bolt electric car came alive, reversed into my workbench, says stunned bloke

Re: Odd belief

Pfft. I remember my first driving test, in Endicott, NY. I used my dad's car, with a manual transmission, and was slightly distressed at having to handle turns at intersections with one hand out the window showing I knew hand turn signals, the other hand working the transmission, and the other other hand holding the steering wheel.

On the gripping hand, at least you passed your test.

Re: Odd belief

In my case it's not so much that I have an odd belief (and it would be odd) that the parking brake is bad for your car so much as the fact that I think of it's sort of unnecessary in an automatic unless you're parked on a steep incline, which are practically nonexistent in this area. When I'm driving a stick I always use the parking brake.

Though, to be fair, the only reason I ever drive an automatic is because used standards are getting a bit hard to find in the US and I'm ideologically opposed to paying for a new car when I can get a used one that looks just as nice and will last me just as long for $10k less. Plus even on new cars you can hardly find a standard transmission unless you special order it.

Google harvests school kids' web histories for ads, claims its Mississippi nemesis

Google collects data on school kids

In other news, water is wet.

Smart guns are a neat idea on paper. They'll never survive reality

Re: @DryBones... Doomed to failure

Are you a member of "A well regulated Militia"?

Technically every adult man with the capability and willingness to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to defend his home is a member of a "well regulated militia" by the definition in use when the Constitution was written. Doubt it? Go look it up, and then look at the men who made up the militia that fought in the war they'd just won.

Re: Doomed to failure

@Truckie

You're mistaken on all counts here. Let me take it point by point.

"any outdoorsman in the woods" is going to be using long arms not short arms.

If you're smart and you're hunting anything other than birds you carry both a rifle and a pistol. The exception who proves the rule for me is my dad, who used a .44 magnum revolver (the infamous "Dirty Harry" gun) with a moderately powerful scope as his only deer gun for years. He had to get a lot closer than everyone else to take a deer down, but he consistently dropped them where they were rather than spending time tracking wounded animals (a sad reality of hunting is sometimes you don't get the vital double-lung or heart shots needed to drop a deer in place).

Firing quickly and accurately is not how it works.

Any competitive shooter can accurately put 50 rounds 200 yards down range in a minute with a semi-automatic. I'm rusty as hell, but I shot in those sorts of competitions every weekend over the summers as a teen and consistently scored around 450 out of 500 possible points.

Yes, most gun violence is done by criminals but they have to get their guns from somewhere. NJ had the right idea. Once the technology is proven, then require it on all weapons. Eventually it will make it hard for criminals to get working weapons.

There are a number of nations where it is heavily restricted or completely illegal for private citizens to own guns and yet the gun crime rate is higher than in the US. About half the top ten nations with the highest gun related homicide rates - the US is number 19 with a surprisingly low rate of 3.43 gun related homicides pre 100,000 people. Compare that to Honduras - #1 on the list - where the gun murder rate is 66.64 per 100.000 people.

Most gun related deaths in the US are suicides. If you take a suicidal person's gun away but ignore their real problems they'll just find a different way to get the job done, so gun control is NOT going to help with that issue.

Doomed to failure

For the most part the people that the idea of a smart gun appeals to the most are the same people who are unlikely to buy a gun in the first place. The one place I could see any widespread interest both in acquiring guns and for said guns to be smart is in law enforcement, and law enforcement budgets typically don't allow for them to double the price of their firearms. Neat though the tech is, I just don't see it ever catching on.

For reference, I'm an advocate of gun rights, but don't currently own a gun myself due to the combination of a couple kids and no means of adequately securing them. In this context, adequately means both a safe with a combination lock and trigger/breech locks. I get rather paranoid when it comes to my kids and dangerous objects. You would too if you knew them. They're smart enough to figure out password and dumb enough to play with knives. And as for their knowledge of gun safety...well, I took an air soft pellet to the face while trying to teach them. Good thing I didn't start them with a .22 like my dad did.

Man jailed for 3 days after Texas cops confuse cat litter for meth

Re: Only TRULY GIGANTIC lawsuits will stop this...

I've been really close to that myself. When I was 19 I was stopped for....well actually I never did figure out why I was stopped and at 19 I didn't have the sense to know that if I asked they had to tell me. Or that I could say something like "No, I won't give consent for you to search my car." But anyway, I was stopped and my junker of a car that was older than me was searched. They spent 2 hours searching my car for no apparent reason. They were ready to haul me in at one point. The conversation was like this:

Cop: "Is there anything in that bottle?"

Me: "No, it's empty."

Cop: "Alright, up against the car. You think it's OK to drink and drive?"

Me: "....It's a root beer bottle!" (In case you're curious, it was. IBC root beer to be exact.)

Cop: *Pausing to look closer at the bottle in question* "Good answer."

In the end I narrowly dodged a night in jail for having an empty soft drink bottle in my car and froze my butt off standing in out in late fall weather at night for 2 hours. It was very much a "don't you guys have anything better to do?" moment for me.

US cops seek Amazon Echo data for murder inquiry

Re: Not their call

I've considered building something along the lines of an echo for my house. Mine would have a Raspberry Pi at it's heart - like every other IoT device in my home because I don't trust internet connected devices built with non-existent security considerations and programmed by God-only-knows-who - and use a fully local speech recognition engine. I see no reason to stream commands to a server controlled by someone else when even the cheapest processors have plenty of power to handle the level of speech recognition needed for what these things do.

Basically I'm sort of assuming that the Echo - along with Siri, Cortana, and everything that responds to the phrase "OK Google" - is eavesdropping and collecting data to sell to advertisers.

Erm....from the sounds of it the warrant in question is 'valid and binding legal' and not "overly broad'. I'm all for protecting privacy, but it seems to me that this is one particular instance where the authorities are doing it right and really should be handed the data they're asking for.

Disney sued in race row: Axed IT workers claim jobs went to H-1B hires

Well, there's an example of blatant abuse of the program for you. Not only did they hire less skilled workers, but they actually had the gall to make the workers they laid off to create the "skill gap" train their replacements. Disney at it's fscking finest there.

HBO slaps takedown demand on 13-year-old girl's painting because it used 'Winter is coming'

As I understand trademark related laws (read: IANAL and thus could be wrong) there's no way in hell that it could legitimately be used in this instance to block the distribution of a child's painting. And if it CAN be used that way then IP law is even more broken than I thought.

Plastic fiver: 28 years' work, saves acres of cotton... may have killed less than ONE cow*

Vegetarians losing their minds? What else is new. You are, after all, talking about folk who will argue with a straight face that the diet we're evolved to survive on - roughly 10-20% meat - is less healthy than whatever they or some charismatic self-proclaimed expert can come up with.

How-to terror manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon, Waterstones

Re: NOT terrorist publications

did not know enough then to recognize the flaws in the recipes

I really didn't either when I read it, but my common sense tingled when I read instructions to put explosives in the oven.

NOT terrorist publications

These are not terrorist manuals. Not by a long shot. Most of them are guidebooks for military techniques, written by the US Army and marketed to military enthusiasts with a secondary market among survivalists. Calling them terrorist guidebooks is intellectually dishonest pot stirring. Just because they teach skills which may be of interest to bad guys does not mean that they shouldn't be available to anyone else wanting to know about such skills for non-malicious reasons (such as, you know, military geeks and survivalists, the folks the books are marketed to). After all, a textbook on network security would be pretty useful to a novice cyber-criminal, but no one would argue that it should be yanked off the market on that basis.

As for the Anarchist Cookbook, I read that thing back in the 90s out of pure curiosity. We could make a pretty significant dent on the total terrorist population of the world by giving it away for free. Half the recipes in it would blow up in your face if you tried to use them. You're talking about a book that has instructions for making nitroglycerin that says it's safe to handle at temperatures up to 100C and says to put a mixture of plaster and unstable explosives in the oven to help it set faster. I say give it to terrorists and let them blow themselves up.

US election pollsters weren't (very) wrong – statistically speaking

Re: Mandatory Voting

Oh hell no. "Every eligible voter" includes people who didn't finish the fourth grade, can't read, and wouldn't know Hillary Clinton from Sarah Palin and would only know either from Ben Carson by virtue of being able to spot feminine and masculine names. While such people have the right to vote and can do so if they choose to, I'm perfectly happy with the fact that they almost universally choose not to. It also include people who don't give a rip and would be inclined to choose their candidate via the inny-minny-miney-moe method. I think it's safe to say that none of us want those people voting. No, let uninterested and uninformed voters choose not to vote. It's better that way.

Margin of error

Granted I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the polls - in fact I actively avoid the places most likely to publish polls for reasons mostly unrelated to polling - but all the polls I saw were within the margin of error. The statisticians were saying "Too close to call" while the media was yelling "Clinton's gonna win" on the basis of the same polls. To my mind that's a media failure, not a polling failure.

Half-ton handbuilt CPU heads to Centre for Computing History

Re: Nice ...

but I probably learned more about processor hardware functionality than they did!

That's generally how it goes when teaching. You'd be shocked at what you learn trying to teach kids the basics.

I'm not sure that kids even get taught the basics of how a processor works any more.

Depends on what you mean by "the basics". Here they get taught that processors use millions of microscopic switches to do what they do in middle school, but it's really on an abstract level. They don't really get taught how all those 'ons' and 'offs' translate into what they see on the screen or about registers and whatnot until they start taking college level comp sci classes.

Microsoft ❤️ Linux? Microsoft ❤️ running its Windows' SQL Server software on Linux

Re: Drawbridge

Which implies... that a LINUX PC could (theoretically) run *ANY*! *WINDOWS*! *APPLICATION*! if Micro-shaft would *BOTHER* *TO* *RELEASE* *THIS* the way they had a nice XP subsystem for Mac OSX a decade or so ago... remember?

Most Linux geeks would refuse to touch it. One of the biggest drives for switching to Linux (at least on the desktop/workstation side of things) is to get away from Microsoft. Sure, we've got Wine, but that mostly just gets used for games these days.

China gets mad at Donald Trump, threatens to ruin Apple

Well one thing's for sure: either he'll surprise most people with college educations and be one of our best Presidents or he'll be one of our worst. There will be no in between here. Either way he's going to be noteworthy. I'm hoping strongly for the former. We're stuck with him for the next 4 years either way, so let's hope that he does well. Otherwise we're in trouble.

Kotkin: Why Trump won

Re: You get the politicians you deserve.

Absolutely, after all it's clear that someone that can't even deal his own party would have made a great president.

Given how much the Republican establishment hates Trump I'm really not seeing your point here.

Honestly I think Bernie would've buried Trump. Once you get outside of the far left Hillary has a reputation for corruption that's second to none in American politics, which no doubt helped Trump achieve victory. Whether it's been earned or not is irrelevant. What matters is that the average American just doesn't trust the woman. And even with that Trump barely won. In fact he actually LOST the popular vote by almost half a million votes. Bernie, on the other hand and like Trump, has a reputation for being brutally honest, a rarity for professional politicians. Whether they agree with his politics or not most people feel they can believe what he's telling them, which would have counted for a lot against Trump.

Now me, personally, I think we're going to find out that Trump did a lot of telling people what they wanted to hear. For example, I don't believe for a moment that the man is stupid enough to build a $300 billion wall that will, at best, serve as a minor obstacle to something like 25-30% of illegal immigrants coming into this country. Nor do I believe he's actually dumb enough to think he can get Mexico to pay for it. It makes a great speaking point when you're dealing with people who haven't seen any immigration statistics, but anyone who's actually looked at the numbers knows that the entire idea is laughable at best and utterly insane at worst. Trump's a lot of things, but idiotic isn't one of them.

US citizens crash Canadian immigration site after Trump victory

Re: Canadian immigration

I'd like to suggest that to avoid a processing quagmire, that all of the Blue states band together to make a blanket request.

There aren't actually any red or blue states. They're all pretty much purple, it's just that most of them are gerrymandered all to hell to ensure Republican and/or Democrat victories despite what the popular vote may be.

Case in point: Kansas, perhaps the greatest bastion of Tea Party power. It breaks down to something like 20 or 30% ultra conservative, maybe another 20 or 30% right leaning, and the rest left leaning or even liberal. Those ultra conservatives have the district boundaries drawn in such a way that they completely dominate politics in the state despite the fact that most of the populace is actually pretty moderate. The story is more or less the same in most of the supposed blue states, only with liberals drawing the boundaries.

James Dyson's new startup: A university for engineers that doesn't suck

If I lived reasonably close this would make me seriously consider getting a third degree. I really like the idea behind this. I mean, come on. Real-life work experience while getting an engineering degree, zero debt when you finish, and you get to rub elbows with the likes of Dyson*? What's not to love here?

* Yes, yes, I know he's not THAT Dyson, but he's still a major name in the field.

Leaks password, check. Leaks Wi-Fi password, check. Can be spoofed, check. Ding! We have an Internet of S**t winner

Re: Why do you need a camera in your kids bedroom?

I strongly suspect anyone using a CCTV in place of a babysitter for any kid young enough to warrant a babysitter, at least 'round these parts, would find themselves on the wrong end of a DCF investigation. They don't take kindly to parents who do things like leave young kids alone all day.

Hell desk thought PC fire report was a first-day-on-the-job prank

This story reminds me of a call I once got at work from my ex wife.

"Yes dear?"

"The power strip on my computer is smoking. What should I do?"

"Seriously? Unplug it, get out of the house with the kids, and call the fire department and our landlord. In that order. Seconds count!"

In the time it took her to call me, the shorted out power strip had been warped by the heat. Thankfully she got it unplugged before the flames melted all the way through and the plastic itself hadn't ignited yet. To this day I don't know why she called me first instead of the fire department.

Chinese electronics biz recalls webcams at heart of botnet DDoS woes

Re: UPNP is convenient.

Sadly I know some very intelligent people who wouldn't be able to follow instructions to punch holes in their firewalls. It's not so much a matter of intelligence as it is a matter of knowledge. If you don't know the terminology then the instructions are worthless to you. "Joe Stupid" need not be stupid. It's sufficient for him to be non-technical enough to not know how to log into their router. I think we all know someone who is fairly intelligent but would be confused if told to do that.

Re: Router Rules @AC

Changing the password is a no-brainer that people do immediately anyway, isn't it?

Based on the people who've given me their wifi passwords for one reason or another, I'd have to say that, sadly, no it isn't. Granted at this point all my friends and family have heard the lecture about why you shouldn't use default passwords so it doesn't happen anymore, but for a while every other time I needed to get on someones wifi network it was the default password still.

Re: How are these devices accessed from the internet though?

UPNP is convenient. There's no denying that, and I suspect it's been a godsend for the average user. But for me, and I suspect for around 75-90% of El Reg readers, the benefits it offers are outweighed by the security risks inherent in it because what it does is not all that difficult to manage better manually. Instead of half a dozen devices opening who knows how many holes in your firewall to talk to the outside world we can open just one port connected to a hardened web server that provides the control interface for our IoT devices (or, better yet if you have a router that supports it - not all consumer grade ones do - set up a DMZ). Such a task should be well within the capabilities of anyone who works in IT and completely negates the need for UPNP. Then you can turn off UPNP on your router and thus greatly improve your network security.

That's pretty much the route I've taken with my IoT devices, but then both my current IoT devices (a smart power strip, which is also the above mentioned hardened web server because it was my first IoT device so it made sense to have it run its own control server, and a much-fancier-than-strictly-necessary alarm clock) were hand built around small SBCs so they were built from the ground up for that sort of control. I also don't have any game consoles or the like to worry about (or, more accurately, they haven't been plugged in for so long that I'm seriously considering just selling them).

Things like this are why I built all the IoT devices in my house myself. I know the security on them is solid because I've applied the same skillset that has kept a couple thousand (mostly script kiddie, some seemingly automated botnet) attackers a week out of the web server at work for the last decade.

Fax machines' custom Linux allows dial-up hack

Windows ships with a fair assortment of Epson printer drivers pre-installed. It's not at all inconceivable that one of them could be for a model that came out in 1999. Whether or not a then-future OS was mentioned in the original documentation is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the printer has consistently worked with every OS to come out since.

Cosmology is safe and the Universe is one giant version of the Barbican

I guess I'm sort of in the habit of treating all claims as an - in your context - unicorn. After all it's not so long ago that science was pretty sure gorillas didn't exist or that we believed in the big bounce.

If you accept currently popular theories with a much lower certainty threshold than new theories then you run into a problem of potentially valid theories being edged out by popular, but ultimately incorrect, theories because they seem like they should be right. The benchmark for certainty needs to be the same for every theory. Otherwise why even have a benchmark?

Isn't 1 in 121,000 pretty far short of the all-important 5 sigma mark?

Lenovo denies claims it plotted with Microsoft to block Linux installs

Frankly I'm inclined to believe that the guy at Best Buy was speaking out of his ass. I catch at least one Best Buy sales person doing that every time I go in there (which is rare these days since they seem to be targeting the less-than-technically-adept even more than they used to). Frankly I find it hard to believe Microsoft would go to those sorts of lengths to attack a rival that has < 2% desktop/laptop market share. It would be a stupid waste of resources that could be better used bribi...er, persuading game designers to use DirectX so that everyone has to either run their games on XBox/Windows PCs or pay a licensing fee to Microsoft. That'd net them far more resources than going after the really non-existant dollars to be had in forcing consumers to keep the OS their computers came with.

As for Lenovo, here's a thought. Make that RAID setting default, but GIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS THE OPTION TO DISABLE IT! Seriously, once they drop money on the machine, it's theirs. If they want to turn off your (admittedly good) feature in order to install an OS the machine didn't come with then let them. Hell, even void their warranty for doing so if you feel like you need to, but do not try to control what they do with their own machine.

Sony wins case over pre-installed Windows software

Finding a pre-built computer sold without an OS is fiendishly difficult, but my understanding for quite a long time has been that the consumer is not paying for Windows on computers that come with it. Rather Microsoft more or less gives OEM copies to manufacturers.

That said I do think that the fact that 99.99993%* of all computers except Macs sold in the last 20 years have come with Windows represents a significant barrier to any new OSes that might come out. It does give Microsoft an unfair advantage in the OS market in my opinion, but really there's nothing to be done about it at this point.

But hey, what do I care? I build my own computers, I haven't bought a prebuilt machine in...um....Actually I'm not sure I ever have, unless you count the one my parents bought me as a kid or the one they gave me as a high school graduation gift.

*Yes, I pulled that number out of a bodily orifice. I've no idea what the real percentage is, but I'm guessing it's close to that one.

Auto erotic: Self-driving cars will let occupants bonk on the go

Given the number of people who have sex, or at least foreplay of some sort, while they're driving now I can't see them doing it in a self-driving car as anything but an improvement.

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

I really don't understand why the networking people think that their particularly ugly styles are fine.

Um....Perhaps because they ARE fine.

Seriously, Linus has lost his mind with this one. Who cares what commenting style they use? As long as you can tell a comment from a code (and if you can't then you really shouldn't be working on the kernel) it makes no difference.

'Windows 10 nagware: You can't click X. Make a date OR ELSE'

Doesn't this run afoul of all those pesky laws that say they can't install stuff on people's computers without permission?

Oh. Right. Microsoft, rich and powerful and above the (American) law.