Posts by alain williams

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

Re: Dogfood

My NoScript caught/stopped them

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

Re: Windows and Storage space

I have one of those ... I upgraded to Linux Mint and had some 12 GB left before adding my own stuff.

MS taking lessons from HP ?

This sounds very much like the blather that printer manufacturers come out with as they attempt to keep you buying over priced printer cartridges.

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

GDPR violation

This is tracking and so the user should be asked if they want this to happen, if they agree that their data is taken out of the EU.

Much worse is what google analytics does - tracks users from site to site, how forms are filled in, etc. I have never been asked if I want this to happen.

Non-agreed use should be banned.

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

So...perhaps Mint SHOULD have automatic updates turned on.

I suspect that some people do not notice the icon that says that updates are needed. So why not make it become bigger, flash, turn red over several days ?

I run Linux mint on my laptop - which might not be turned on for some time - which might skew their stats.

Firefox is a pain: I will sometimes avoid updating it as once you have done so it refuses to let you open new tabs until after a restart. That is annoying as it interrupts workflow and kills private windows.

UK taxman is supposed to know how IR35 reforms work but still lost appeal against TV presenter Kaye Adams

Re: Stop going after the small fish.

One rule to line the pockets of the powerful, another to squeeze the powerless.

It is the contractors' own fault: they just don't make enough campaign contributions or go to fundraising suppers.

Re: Stop going after the small fish.

It is more complicated than that. They are slanting the table against the small contractor. If you, say, take up 3 months work 200 miles away then they are stopping you claiming against tax the cost of your rail fares & hotel - insist that you aretreated the same as someone who has lived there for years. And other similar.

Fancy a £130k director of technology role with the UK's Ministry of Justice? All you need to do is 'fix the basics'

First task

Bring back the IT systems outsourced to India.

Australia facepalms as Facebook blocks bookstores, sport, health services instead of just news

Re: Screw Australia's clumsy attempt....

Agreed: charging for linking is wrong, but charging for reuse of content is right.

People seem to accept that reuse of music needs to be paid for, so why not reuse of news ? It should be OK to reuse snippets of news as you should be able to have small amounts of music or where it is incidental/background.

Fujitsu scrapping fuel card benefit to cut costs, threatens dissenters with fire and rehire

Will it change much ?

Presumably if someone drives somewhere on a business trip they will still be able to claim mileage.

If people use a fuel card for personal mileage then they were/should-have paying tax on the benefit.

I don't know about anyone else buy the number of miles that I have driven in the last year is 1/4 of what I did the year before, much more staying at home - good for the planet!

UK tax collector won't probe businesses for compliance with IR35 rules unless there's reason to suspect naughtiness

"Nice business that you have there ...

it would be a pity if something happened to it". Especially since the rules as explained by CEST are vague.

'It's where the industry is heading': LibreOffice team working on WebAssembly port

"good for security"

the document lives on the server, which is good for security

Maybe if it is your own server, but I can see many running this on xyz-random.com server ... and we see plenty of stories of these being cracked and files exfiltrated, not to mention the NSA grabbing a copy by using the Patriot Act.

Can we exhale yet? EU set to rule UK 'adequate' for data sharing in post-Brexit GDPR move

If UK data rules have not changed ...

then should it be a surprise that the UK is still GDPR compliant ?

Or am I missing something ?

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Rather than looking for dodgy chips ...

or altered BIOS why not monitor IP packets coming from the machine ? If it is to talk to its spy masters how else will the machine do so ?

Most have firewalls that filter incoming traffic, but a really high value site should also look at outgoing packets - so this should have been caught.

The trouble with this sort of story is that you cannot trust what anyone is saying.

helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS

Re: Further simplicity and ease of use...

The "woke" brigade on Reddit and elsewhere deem the usage of "GIMP", "gimp" and "gimped" to be extremely offensive

Oh, I wondered why & so went searching and found a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled, & insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, & sex slave. All of these are different contexts from image editing - so what is the problem ? I assume that most of us understand that many homophones exist where words have multiple meanings ?

Of course: if I try hard I can switch off my brain's empathy circuits and view the world entirely from my own perspective and thus fail to understand that others are different and so become offended by their different use of words. But most of us are more intelligent that that ... are we not ?

I expect that some SJWs will down-vote this comment as they believe that everyone must avoid using words that their clique has decided are offensive and insist on pushing those memes much to the bemusement of others who were using them in a different context and had no intention of being rude about anyone.

Phishing awareness gone wrong: Facebook tries to seize websites set up for staff security training

Is proofpoint being malicious

or deceptive* in its use of these domain names ? If not it seems as if their use is reasonable. To provide good training it has to use domains that have to be good enough to fool those being trained. The UDRP arbitrator is wrong and facebook is being an ass (nothing new there).

* Other than trying to deceive those being trained.

No joy for Julian Assange as Uncle Sam confirms it will keep pushing for WikiLeaker's extradition to America

If the USA wants to prosecute people ...

how about those shown USA soldiers in that Wikileaks released video sitting in a helicopter shooting up innocent people on the ground ?

Big data: Study suggests even a moderate gambling habit is linked to increased mortality and other bad stuff

Re: "the study is silent on these factors"

In my opinion adverts for gambling should be banned from TV.

And they should describe the national lottery as what it is: "gambling" not "playing".

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

I am confused ...

I thought that the OZ bill was about paying for news content. If google/facebook show the news then there is no need to visit the media web site.

However this article is talking about paying for links. If google/facebook just link to a media web site then the media site has opportunity to show adverts, set cookies, etc, and so have opportunity to get income.

I would approve of google/facebook having to pay for showing to the user content from the media. I do not approve of them having to pay for just linking (and showing a small amount of link text).

I looked at the PDF of the bill ... not the easiest to read.

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

Why was it redacted in the first place ...

the EU is claiming that the contract is broken but does not show everything ? So why hide part of it ?

I could understand if it was things like price paid, but it is more than that.

Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks

Re: Looks good

I would appreciate an option that tells me which tabs are the ones that are eating CPU.

Four cold calling marketing firms fined almost £500k by ICO

TPS is run by the Direct Marketing Association

So that is really putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

Which? found that people registered on the TPS list received twice as many marketing calls as those not on the list.

GitLab removes its 'starter' tier: Users must either pay 5x more or lose features

Self host git

It isn't really that hard and if you have more than a few users then the sysadmin/hosting costs will be quickly repaid.

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

Re: How is this possible?

No, it just shows that the idea that open source code is inherently more secure because of the 'community checks' is utterly fake

So would Qualys have found the bug if they did not have access to the source code ?

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Centos was happily independent until 2014

Then RedHat acquired it (the decided to sponsor it). This meant that Centos did not need to worry about funding and so lost the ability, and memory of, how to fund itself. Now that that is lost: RedHat has changed the rules and Centos has to follow them as it is no longer able to be independent. This is rather like a corporate buying its competitor.

The discussion about streams is a red herring.

We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news

Re: Stop fcuking about and blackhole 5.0.0.0/8

Whois 5.0.0.0/8 ? Did you mean 8.8.8.0/24 ?

(Pardon the pun in the line above)

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

Windows telemetry options ?

I suspect that these were left at Microsoft default so these machines would have been phoning home to Uncle Sam anyway.

Negative Trustpilot review of law firm Summerfield Browne cost aggrieved Briton £28k

The legal mafia ...

look after their own.

There are plenty of crap solicitors around. Some act so as to increase what they charge you. Others do not seem to know what they are doing, eg when buying a house nothing happens and both sides blame the other for the delay.

There are also some good ones. It is hard to tell the difference until you have been through the case.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Re: rm -r *

No. The rm command is long running. Once it is started it will run until it has removed everything that was asked to remove. Neither does it invoke rmdir, it can do that itself. (All subject to permissions, etc.)

Re: rm -r *

Surely:

# rm -rf /

Re: UK Data Protection law and GDPR

In theory backups should be cleaned as well, but in practice that is usually not practical.The important thing here is putting the deleted data "beyond use". So it might still be on a tape/... but it cannot be accessed through normal use/mechanisms.

Four women seek release from forced arbitration to sue Infosys for widespread gender discrimination

Unfair contracts

Be careful what you sign, contracts aren't just for fun.

Often the first time that you see the contract is after you have accepted the job and told your current employer that you are leaving. If, at interview, you ask for a copy of the contract you will probably be labelled a troublemaker and not be offered the job.

Contracts should be published along with the job advertisement.

The CIA's 'entire' collection of UFO records has been made available for you to sigh at

If there is nothing there ...

why did the CIA just not hand all of what they had over when first asked ?

Is it part of some CIA mindset ?

What's that you got there, AMD? More Ryzen chips? Yeah, OK, we could do with some of those

Am I the only one who is confused ...

by the way that these things are described ?

OK: I understand numbers like: frequency, cores, cache but what is the difference between: a desktop processor; a business system processor; a server processor ?

These differences might well be written somewhere but it is not easily found and described in an obvious way.

Also: what is the difference between, say, a Ryzen 9 5980HX and the AMD FX-8150 that is on my desk ? (ignoring easy to understand frequency, cache, cores, ....) I suspect new instructions to help with video decoding, AES (Rijndael encryption), ... but finding mention of these is almost impossible.

This is something that El Reg could explain or point to and would be much more useful than telling me how fast it runs World of Warcraft - or some other game that I have zero interest in.

And: CPU frequency is useless when comparing different architectures (AMD, Intel, ARM, Power, ...) so how about something like SPEC ?

Thou shalt not hack indiscriminately, High Court of England tells Britain's spy agencies

Re: So presumably they will just carry on as before anyway

I do understand the need to occasionally do something illegal when, overall, it is of benefit to society.

The hard part is keeping them** honest, ie not acting in their own interests or the interests of whoever is powerful today. Judicial oversight can help but the judiciary can be corrupt or naive - we have seen that many times.

What we need is for all to be revealed when a particular investigation/... is done and/or after 20 years or something. It may help to keep some of them** honest - knowing that their acts will be exposed to sunlight, it will also help to phrase future legislation if bounds have been overstepped.

** Whatever "them" means in various contexts.

Your 60-second guide to what Intel announced at CES. Or in 5 seconds: New laptop chips

I stopped reading ...

when there was mention of Artificial Intelligence which generally precedes a description of snake oil.

TikTok to be hit by a UK class-action-style lawsuit backed by the Children's Commissioner

Minimum age for contract

In the UK is 7 - but until they reach 18 (the age of majority) they can cancel at any time as it is presumed that they do not understand the implications of entering into the contract.

So: if a minor cancels - will TikTok/whoever have to delete all information that they have learned about the child ?

What about personal information gleaned about someone who has not entered a contract, be they minors or not - think facebook shadow profiles which probably take copies of personal data out side of the UK/EEA which is illegal. Facebook is fighting the Irish data protection authority over this - so it probably does move data out of the EEA.

Others are just as bad or worse, start with Google.

I doubt that many really implement Art. 17 of the GDPR (right to be forgotten)

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

This is to punish the UK

Something that Michel Barnier has often said that he is not doing ... things like this make it plain that he is as honest as any other politician.

Where in the world is Jack Ma? Alibaba tycoon not seen since October after slamming Chinese government

And we still do business with China ?

The richer that China gets the more confident that it will be and believe that it can get away with this sort of thing. This case is internal to China, but it is exerting its might beyond its borders.

We are so incredibly short sighted. We think that we are saving pennies but are unaware that we selling our futures. Eg Amazon is entering pharmacy, it will kill much of retail pharmacy in the UK, along that we lose thousands of skilled, well paid jobs replacing them with minimum wage warehouse grunts; Amazon will put our prescriptions into its marketing database and use this to try to sell us more stuff and destroy more other businesses.

Singapore changes the rules and will now use COVID-19 contact-tracing app data in criminal cases

Is anyone really surprised ?

Especially in an authoritarian state like Singapore.

The same is likely to happen elsewhere. Initially it will only be for "exceptional cases", you know the ones: paedophones, terrorists, drug dealers ... The scope will secretly widen over time.

Julian Assange will NOT be extradited to the US over WikiLeaks hacking and spy charges, rules British judge

Have those who he exposed ...

as committing war crimes been prosecuted by the USA ? Think of those in the helicopter gunship video.

If it had been British soldiers who did they they would fave faced a trial.

No amount of Glasgow handshaking will revive this borked kiosk

I see no image

just an instruction telling me to switch on javascript. If they cannot display an image without javascript then they are doing it wrong; either that or they want something else - probably my personal information.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more complicated your setup and customizations, the more trouble changing is, and the more you will realise the differences.

This is the key and this is why I liked CentOS - I put a lot of work into getting the machine exactly as I want it and, by and large, not have do much sysadmin for 9 years (other than installing completely new stuff).

I have upgraded from CentOS 6 to Debian 10 on my desktop ** most of it was not a problem, some details were hard; over and above running s/ware a decade newer.

** To get a decent desktop manager - which Gnome 3 is not.

NHS trust launches £60m software procurement to improve staffing efficiency

IR35

I have friends who do temporary work in the NHS, eg a few months pregnancy cover. They were one of the first to be hit by IR35; things like not being able to reclaim travel and accommodation when working at a hospital too far from home for a daily commute. The result is that they are more pickey at what gigs they will accept and are moving away from the NHS.

I suppose that the real problem is that these temporary workers are not donors to the Tory party.

Atlantic City auctions off chance to hit Big Red Button and make grotesque Trump Plaza casino go boom

Will Trump be tied up in the basement ?

If not then it will not be worth bidding!

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

Re: no one has to care what appears on Trump’s Twitter feed ever again

In a month time Trump will be Yesterday's News.

I hope that it stays that way.

They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest

███ ███.

I ███ █████ ███-███, ███ ██████!

We take a look at proposed Big Tech regulations in the UK: Heavy on possible fines, light on enforcement

Need to stop corporate lying

We need something similar that deals with blatant lies and misdirections that many companies come out with. In theory the ASA should deal with this but they seem pretty ineffective.

Rocky has competition as more CentOS alternatives step into the ring: Project Lenix, Oracle Linux vie for attention

What would I run away from fastest ?

Something from Microsoft or something from Oracle ?

I'll now go & wash my mouth out for even thinking about it!

Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron pegs damage from iPhone factory riot at $7m

Should we care ?

As long as we get our e-bling, clothes, etc cheaply should we care if workers in other countries are mistreated ?

Someone was arguing with me that "this is how capitalism works - not our concern."

I think that we should care, profit is important but commerce should go further than that. Companies like Primark have slavery statements largely because they began to lose sales, they still need to do more. Action on Uighur forced labour in China is starting.

Apple and other tech companies need to follow suite. Concern for other humans must not stop at national borders.