Posts by alain williams

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Speed is not the whole story

but they should also compare the data cap (ie how many GB/month) you get for the monthly fee.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: Keep on AdBlocking

- Not using Chrome or any browser based on Chrome

I use Brave when I use Jitsi (I believe that that is safe), firefox for everything else

The three or so people who run Windows 10 on Arm might be glad to know that x64 emulation is in preview

Better to port ?

Would it not be better to put effort into making it easier to port programs between x64 and ARM and set up multiple repositories for different architectures ?

I have been porting *nix programs between CPU types for over 35 years, it takes a bit of care but is not really hard.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Re: Doth protest too much?

Why is the children's commissioner worrying about encryption when there are far more relevant things for her to worry about - things that she could actually do something about.

IMHO it is nothing other than misinformation that she was ordered to utter by someone higher up in the UK government. You know: Trump does not have a monopoly on generating fake news.

Apple appears to be charging Brits £309 to replace AirPods Max batteries, while Americans need only stump up $79

This is a crime against the planet

More of these things will end up in landfill - increasing Apple's income as a new one is bought, damaging the planet with waste electronics.

This is why a right to repair law is so very much needed.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Re: Erm ...

It is not the company, it is the middle manager who's decision is to buy something. If things go wrong s/he wants to be able to show that they bought the right service/product ... evidence is blah, blah -- the entire purpose is to save their own job.

Looks like Debian ...

I recently upgraded my desktop from CentOS 6 to Debian Buster as CentOS 8 had Gnome3 as the desktop - Debian gave me the choice of the Mate desktop. So the lack of a desktop that I like has let me avoid having to upgrade twice in 18 months - phew!

It now looks like me and my customers are going to have to go the same way on servers.

Japan pours millions into AI-powered dating to get its people making babies again

Alternative AI

Maybe they could encourage use of another sort of AI to produce more babies.

Big Tech's Asian lobby slams Cambodian government's planned National Internet Gateway chokehold

"business process outsourcing"

This very same Big Tech will happily use this business process outsourcing to increase profits (reduce their costs).

If they were really concerned about citizen's rights then they would threaten to get their outsourcing elsewhere. As they are not one can deduce that their main problem with the Internet chokehold is that it might be used to block some of their web sites.

Apple aptly calls its wireless over-the-ear headphones the AirPods Max – as in, maximum damage to your wallet

BoM ?

And how little the workers who put them together will be paid.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Re: I had this...

Got through to Argos who were very good about it ...

That is because Argos are sane guys who have people who you can 'phone/email. Recently I received a set of things in the post from Ebay, opened the package before I realised that it was addressed to Kevin, not Alain, so I could not put back into the post, ... no way to contact Ebay without spending money or registering an account (which I won't do) muppets!

[e-mail]

This is the cause of a lot of problems. Basically it is a company that does not want to perform its due diligence on sending out email. They are trying to bully the rest of the world into operating as they want us to. Why should I do a lot of work because they do not want to pay the cost of doing it themselves ?

As far as I know there is no special legal privilege in such an email address, so I will reply to say "No I do not agree to XXX". I keep a copy of the email that I sent. This is somewhat akin to me sending them paper mail/letter to one of their offices - how they route it internally is not my problem.

FOSS developer survey: Mostly male, employed... and many don't care about 'soul-withering chore' of security

Other big 'not do' is good documentation

Yes: we all hate it, but without it other will find it hard to use what you write. Others cannot see the inside of your head and grasp what, to you, is completely obvious. This is also a security issue: others might get your creation to work, but not having understood some undocumented subtlety leave some door wide open.

This is not just a problem of FLOSS code.

Some do have excellent documentation, eg jQuery

75% of databases to be cloud-hosted by 2022, says Gartner while dishing on the weak points of each provider

Heads in the cloud ?

They also noted that Oracle Database on-premises has a reputation for being "expensive and difficult to manage,"

They forgot to add "more secure". You might misconfigure access but if it is only visible from within the organisation then you are less likely to be the next Talk Talk or Equifax.

I know that many software vendors are pushing cloud because they get to charge more fees that way - but not everyone wants cloud.

When it comes to taxing tech giants, America is out, France is in, Canada and Indonesia are going their own way

Fair taxation

minimum tax bill as a percentage of turnover, not profit

I wish it were that simple. There are many businesses where profit is genuinely very low, either because there is very low markup or their costs are large. The trouble is how to codify in tax law ways of artificial costs - it is easy to see what they are but hard to codify in a way that a smart tax accountant cannot evade.

All the way from shifting profits to Ireland (Microsoft, Google, ...), to inflated royalty fees to subsidiaries in lower tax countries (Starbucks & more), to the business being owned by your wife who lives in Monaco (Philip Green)

UK infoseccer launches petition asking government not to backdoor encryption

I have signed it

I am telling others to sign it as well.

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

What is "lifetime" ?

"use of Original HP Ink or Toner for the lifetime of the printer."

Normally a vendor seems to define "lifetime" as "until the next model is out", ie probably a couple of years. What is the betting that for these things "lifetime" will be much longer ?

Ticketmaster: We're not liable for credit card badness because the hack straddled GDPR day

3rd party Javascript

Blocking that is what noscript is good for. Has the beneficial side effect of blocking facebook, etc.

Unfortunately: some web sites just do not work when I block 3rd party JS - so I usually just go elsewhere. I'll allow JS from a payment processor that I recognise, but rarely much else. When will web developers recognise that they are losing their customers business, or are people like me rare enough for them to not worry ?

US Air Force deploys robot security dogs to guard base

Electronic sausages ?

You can always distract a real dog with a string of sausages. Is there something equivalent for a robo dog ?

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Re: Slave vs Master aka rm * ... did that solve anything?

Once 'master' 'slave' loose their meaning as people do not understand them, whatever new words to describe the relationship (eg 'maker' 'doer') will have to be applied to human relationships so that kids can understand history books.

At that point there will be a brouhaha and 'maker' 'doer' will be banned because some people do not like them.

Changing the words that we use is, ultimately, futile.

What about non-English offensive words ?

All the examples black/master/... that I have seen are English words. What if speakers of other languages complain about terms that offend someone in their language ? Presumably we will have to blacklist those words as well ... oh, errm, I mean add those words to a non-use list.

The important thing is intent: the automotive engineer who, working on brakes, coined the terms: master cylinder, slave cylinder had no intention of alluding one man (sorry: person) being subservient to another.

Re: What about that special Friday?

What about martial arts where a black belt shows that you have mastered the sport ?

Hard to believe but Congress just approved an IoT security law and it doesn't totally suck

Support lifetime & abandonment

Many of these things only get updates until the next model comes out; the rest do not get updates at all.

Then there are those that need a fixed server - when that is shut the kit becomes a brick.

These problems must be addressed - probably the best way is by allowing third party firmware -- but that will not happen as the vendors want to keep you locked in and then have you buy new kit.

This is kind of related to what the right to repair people (rightly) want.

Shocking revelations from Huawei-commissioned report: Huawei is good for the UK's economy so don't ban them

Quote: Mandy Rice-Davies

She says it best "Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?"

OK: it is a slight misquote, but still

Microsoft brings Trusted Platform Module functionality directly to CPUs under securo-silicon architecture Pluton

My next laptop ?

Does that mean that I will be unable to install Linux on my next laptop ?

Maybe they will say: "not a problem, install it under a Microsoft hypervisor" - in which case all trust is lost anyway.

UK, Canada could rethink the whole 'ban Huawei' thing post-Trump, whispers Huawei

The reasons have changed from 2 years ago

Back then it was fears that Huawei would spy on us on behalf of the Chinese government. These allegations where probably hyped and are about the same as Cisco does for the USA government.

Today I feel that the argument is changing. China is increasingly being seen to be the bad actor/bully boy [think: Hong Kong, Uighurs muslims, ...] its increasing economic might boosts its confidence that it can get away with bad behaviour. So there is an argument that its economic wings should be clipped before it gets worse. Excluding Huawei is part of that. I am not saying that the West does not behave badly, but I could carry a placard down Whitehall (in London) saying "Bollocks to Boris" and safely go home; I would have a different fate if I carried a picture of Winnie the Pooh in Tiananmen Square -- that difference is important to me.

Two years ago I was saying that we should buy Huawei; today I am inclined against that.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

Price comparison sites

I purposely wipe out all traces of local storage, cookies, browsing history, ... before I go shopping just to prevent the industry trying to leverage anything aabout me in the prices of goods.

Even better: run up a virtual machine and go shopping in a clean browser.

This is what I do when I am comparing prices. See what there is (eg hotels) using a price comparison site and then book a room with the hotel directly -- which saves them the 20% that a comparison site would extract.

KDE maintainers speak on why it is worth looking beyond GNOME

Re: Notsomuch.

I did - it is much better than Gnome 3; but a few things still annoy me.

Re: Notsomuch.

Sorry, but this sort of appeal isn't going to move me away from MATE.

I have just upgraded my desktop, I was running CentOS 6 which has reached end of life after 10 years.

CentOS 8 comes with Gnome 3, Mate is not an option. Gnome 3 is, for me, unusable - so after running RedHat/Centos since 1995 I have switched to Debian + Mate. A few teething issues, but works well.

Hopefully I will soon have a nice stable environment that I will not need to fiddle with for another decade.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

50 years ago ...

you could call the company in question, speak to a real, live human being who could probably deal with it.

Today: you probably can't find a 'phone number, if you do you wait for ages listening to crap music and end up speaking to some inane bot - or if you are really lucky someone in Mumbai who has not got a script to deal with your problem.

Progress :-(

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Re: Don't assume malice here

Maybe the El Reg reporter should have asked Google for information by means of a Subject Access Request - Google has to respond, as a matter of law.

If the user has not agreed to this data to be transferred out of the EU then that is another breach - depending on T&Cs agreed.

What if someone buys a 'phone and uses it as one - ie does not agree to T&Cs for play store, etc, as well - does the data still go ?

Brit Conservative Party used 10 million people's names to derive their country of origin, ethnicity and religion according to ICO report

So what did they think of Boris ?

It says here that Boris is Bulgarian or Russian so will he be under special surveillance?

Ericsson warns investors: This Biden fellow coming into the White House may look to resolve China trade dispute...

It is more than a trade war

There are aspects of world political dominance. China has become an economic super power, that has given it the clout to throw political weight around and worry less about the consequences, think: Hong Kong, Uighurs Muslims, actions against Taiwan, ... There is a strong direction of travel and we need to look at where that will go to in 20, 50, 100 years time.

I know that the USA has bullied as well, but it is politically much freer than China. You can say things in front of the White House that would have you removed if you said similar in Tiananmen Square.

Decisions like this have many more facets than first meet the eye.

Your Microsoft reseller can now predict when you’re ready to buy more stuff or dump Redmond

Is this part of the purpose of telemetry ?

"Your customer is doing has installed xxx so sell them Microsoft xxx-enterprise".

Lots of things to be gleaned by looking at what is installed on a machine, even more by looking at web browser logs ... Who knows what they take as the telemetry information is encrypted before being sent to Redmond and there is not a tool that the user can use to decode it.

Apple cracks down on iOS terminal apps because they can download code

Who owns the frigging machines ?

Apple or the person who bought it ?

You can forget your fancy ERP customisations because that's not how it works in the cloud, SAP's Oliver Betz tells users

Try the Open Source route

There are Open Source ERP systems. Take a look, do they do enough of what you need ? If so: write the bits that are missing (ie customise) and move over.

Yes: it will cost you, but it costs millions to migrate to SAP and then pay annual license fees - which costs more.

No support ? Work with others who use your chosen ERP to your mutual benefit. Push up to github/where-ever the code that you write: others will use it (if it is any good) and fix bugs and add features - which is to your benefit.

Some IT directors will refuse for the same reasons that they bought IBM & Microsoft.

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

Server side rendering is as it should be

The current trend of building the page with javascript in the browser is wrong. It just complicates things for the browser and means that the browser has to run javascript from all manner of places.

Server side rendering means that for the browser it is KISS.

Alibaba trying to take China’s Singles Day shopping frenzy global to make Bezos & Co look like sales small fry

Re: a scam

An example of how the marketing bods have succeeded in persuading many to spend money in meaningless ways, often by hijacking some event and making it seem that the only "proper" way of doing it was by spending lots of money. Other examples include: black Friday; Valentine's day; mother's/father's day, ...

I am not churlish: I went to see my mum, often taking a plant for her garden; she appreciated that far more than over priced cut flowers.

Did you know that the 'tradition' of a man giving his girl a diamond engagement ring is the result of a 1930's De Beers marketing campaign. How impressionable we are!

Google's plan to make User-Agent string even less useful breaks our device detection tech, says NetMarketShare

Re: We expect this change to improve compatibility...

The browser should, rather than identifying itself, identify the most recent version of the standard(s) with which it is fully compliant.

It does not work like that.

To start with browsers have to implement many standards that are independent of each other and churn out new versions at their own pace: HTML, CSS, Javascript, image formats, network protocols, ...

Next: each of these new standards 'version' come up with many new features or varying difficulty. Eg look at Javascript. Should the browser wait until they are all implemented before making a new release ? No: they will come out with them as they are ready.

It is much more complicated than meets the eye.

Re: We expect this change to improve compatibility...

Trouble is which version of the standards ... 'the standard' is not so meaningful in a world where they are continually evolving and browsers implement features in different orders over time. See https://caniuse.com/

Listing all of the features supported (maybe partially) is hard as there are so many of them. So, if you are at the bleeding edge browser+version+browscap-database might be what you have to do -- or resort to javascript magic.

Screen/viewport size ... should not be needed, CSS can handle that.

If the browser lies: well, in theory, if things go wrong the will blame the browser - in practice the user will blame the web site.

Marriott fined £0.05 for each of the 339 million hotel guests whose data crooks were stealing for four years

To stop it happening again ...

which should be one of the ICO's aims, should they not have insisted that Marriott be audited by an independent White Hat type organisation for 10 years ? Hopefully the WH types would kick up a fuss at poor/sloppy practice and make them fix it.

I do not know if the ICO has the power to order this, if not then time to get a quick bill through parliament.

Can we stop megacorps from using and abusing our data? That ship has sailed, ex-NSA lawyer argues in new book

"cumbersome to read, difficult to understand"

These privacy policies are obscure by design and so long that most give up reading them - the companies that have them do not want people to understand them.

There needs to be an agreement written to be easy to read and given aka kite mark which shows that it is reasonable, fair, etc. There should be several varients to cover different sorts of relationship and be capable of having a schedule attachment to cover things like "how many days to deliver", "postage", etc.

Much like the British on holiday, NHS COVID-19 app refuses to work with phones using unsupported languages

Surely you just press buttons harder ?

Is that not what the typical Brit does when in Costa del something ? It usually seems to work; but the words for wine & beer are usually well understood.

Oh, wait: we are talking about non English speakers ... so, these people know that volume in not a key to universal understanding - apologies!

NASA trying to stuff excess baggage into OSIRIS-REx after too-successful asteroid scoop

Why only 2 oz ?

Can anyone enlighten me as to why NASA would send an 880 kg space craft on a 7 year mission and only bring back 2.1 oz ? Would it really make much difference to the machine to have a bigger suitcase and so be able to give a sample to more labs when it gets back ?

Maybe take samples from different places on Bennu.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

Damages

I was going to add "get damages from the patent troll". A great idea, but it would mean that a large, well funded corporate with expensive lawyers would use the threat of damages as a way of blasting small patent holders into giving them free use of what is patented. It is hard enough as it is for the small guy to get the corporates to play by the rules without giving them another cannon.

Re: I'm just rebuilding my desktop ...

I want a stable system. I put a lot of work into getting it just as I want, then get on with other things.

I will have an instance of Fedora running as a virtual machine.

@MacroRodent I did consider Mint (which I run on a laptop) but its installer had problems with me wanting LVM over RAID-1.

Time waste: with 2 x 4TB disks I should have used gpt partitioning & EFI - but naff firmware refused to boot. I know that I got it right as it worked under qemu :-(

I'm just rebuilding my desktop ...

I have been running RedHat or Centos since about 1995, currently on CentOS 6 - which is dropping out of support soon. CentOS 8 would have been the natural upgrade but it comes with Gnome 3 - which is, as far as I am concerned, unusable. Mate (AKA Gone 2) is not available, XFCE doesn't quite make it; Fedora - I don't want to have to upgrade every year; so I am installing Debian - Mate is an option.

Love Minecraft: Java? You'll have to learn to love your Microsoft account as well – it will be required next year

What do you need to tell ...

to open an account ? If it is username & email address then meh [burner emails are easy], but name, address, would get me worried; credit card info would ring warning bells.

They seem to want to charge 10c but only for those under 13 years. Hmmm

Another Chromium browser for Linux? Microsoft Edge arrives in preview form, no love for Arm yet

What is the advanage to Microsoft ?

What local information does it 'leak' back to Redmond ?

I suppose that it might be a good test: if they can get a browser working on Linux then they will have cleaned up many components needed to get other ported to Linux as well.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

Fish in 2486

If we are not careful there will be few fish left [due to over fishing and climate change] and most of them small, not big!