Posts by alain williams

Sneaky fingerprinting script in Microsoft ad slips onto StackOverflow, against site policy

Noscript to the rescue

Stunts like this (intentional or not) will ensure that I will not white-list sites that try it on.

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

It is hardly surprising that there is a problem with Brexit

These MPs have demonstrated a lack of interest in seeking available evidence before voicing opinions as facts. Then, when shown the evidence, continue to espouse whatever bollocks had infected their minds.

Hey China, while you're in all our servers, can you fix these support tickets? IBM, HPE, Tata CS, Fujitsu, NTT and their customers pwned

Who is telling the truth ?

What I am saying is I don't trust what the Chinese government is saying about this.

I don't trust what any government is saying about this.

I trust what the media say about it a bit more, but not a lot more: media can be fed information by governments, sometimes they might not be aware that what they are being told is not true or exaggerated.

All countries have laws that compel its citizens to do what they are told to do and then keep quiet about it. This is both for the 'good' and 'bad' countries. I'll let the reader decide which countries are 'good' or 'bad'.

Mike Lynch in court: I was not aware of every single thing Autonomy did around the world (so don't blame me)

Why another case in the USA ?

There is a big trial in the UK, so why the need for one in the USA ? Except that, maybe, USA judges will favour USA companies.

Also: expecting Lynch to be in 2 places at once is silly - not that courts care about that sort of thing.

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

This is the sort of thing that we should have been talking about

Ie what the relationship will be in a few years time. They have spent the time talking about how to leave, not the long term arrangements.

It is like deciding to cross the channel by Eurostar or ship before deciding where to go on holiday; neither are any good if you then chose to holiday in Jamaica.

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

CHUI: CHaracter based User Interfaces

Is there anyone here who remembers the VT52 or VT100? Or the horrors of /etc/termcap

Yes I remember it well. I still use the current incarnation in the guise of terminfo. The thing that it is great for is running something like vim/emacs on a remote machine over a slow ssh connection when anything GUI would be impossibly slow. Actually: I also do it on my local machine: not having to worry about the mouse is great - touch typing makes doing things fast.

I would like to know what I should set my TERM variable to if I wanted to use this MS terminal, hopefully they have adopted something along the lines of 'xterm' as that encodes things like shift-function key (& a few like that).

Have they produced a terminfo entry for this ?

Also: does it understand UTF-8 encoded characters ? Anything else is now obsolete.

Iran is doing to our networks what it did to our spy drone, claims Uncle Sam: Now they're bombing our hard drives

Oh, I thought it was the NORKs that did that!

Oh, silly me: the NORKs were the last enemy, the current enemy is Iran: so of course it is the Iranians.

Quick: where is the nearest Memory Hole into which I can put everything that I (thought that I) remembered about the NORKs.

Red Hat signs off last set of numbers before it is likely gobbled by IBM

Why is approval from China needed ?

and what happens if China says 'no' as part of the trade war with the USA ?

Shut the barn door: UK data watchdog tells MPs mass slurping by firms is a huge risk to privacy

Tell people *why* the slurp is bad for them

Most people who I talk to say something like "it doesn't bother me, why should I care ?". I try to explain but they get bored*.

The ICO producing a report that few will read is not the way to get changed, most will still continue to not care.

The ICO must produce short, easy to read publicity with several good examples that explain why - how the data sharing & profile building is to their disadvantage. This should then be pushed to the media.

I suspect that the media will try to bury such a report as their data slurping advertisers will want to keep everyone in ignorance.

* It might just be me, but I suspect that other el-reg readers get the same reaction.

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

"the holdup is due to DCMS having failed to notify the European Commission in time"

Oh, they must be in the room next door to the plonkers who changed the date of next year's May day bank holiday at 11 months notice and then either show stupid they are (or just lie) by saying that they had "considered the practical implications of moving this bank holiday".

They have no idea how the real world works or, perhaps, do not care.

Tossers.

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

Re: No, no, no, no, no!

For instance, not long bought a new Sony TV. It had reviewed well had features I wanted and advertised that it would have Dolby Vision added via an update. Tried to update in last few days and I can't because I rejected the "privacy" policy which told me they wanted to access every program/file watched, details of every device connected, how long it was used for, when it was switched off etc. As a sensible person I said no. I don't want a "smart" TV. Because of this I cannot use the TV as advertised. No mention of this in reviews, advertising etc, only after it is unboxed and used.

Well: return it to where you bought it saying that ''it is not as advertised''. The only way of changing the behaviour of the likes of Sony is to hit them in the pocket -- which is all that they care about.

Never trust software of which you cannot see the source

And things like fitness trackers, central heating control systems, ... have them talk to a server that you trust - preferably your own.

Unfortunately: the above is not possible for most people: they don't understand how to read program code or run a server; also most would not bother to even if they could.

Even if the vendor is well meaning the poor coding & lack up security updates makes these things a security nightmare.

So what is the solution ? Heavy government regulation just would not work: they would always be playing catch-up or impose blanket rules that would be hard/expensive to work with.

The USA has been blathering overblown bollocks about Huawei while ignoring this much larger security issue.

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

I did not know that Boeing had presence in Second Life

That is the only place where theoretical/computer-simulated ''tests'' would be valid - where the use model was built using the same assumptions as the design model. In the real world things do not always behave in the same way as the theoretical/design model -- this is why tests are needed to ensure that we have got the physics right.

So will they blame some lowly programmer or a physicist when these planes crash ?

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

Re: Think of the children, what else can hurt them ?

Maybe not illegal, but they can still be bad for the kids.

Think of the children, what else can hurt them ?

Maybe there ought to be age verification on the other following activities:

* watching broadcast TV after the watershed (many kids have TVs in their bedrooms)

* visiting the local fat laden fast food joint

* visiting religious organisations' web sites (that tell you how evil are those: of other religions; gay; don't pray enough; ...)

* facebook has a minimum age requirement of 13. I know kids under 13 with a facebook account

Please add your own suggestions ...

Frontiersman Cray snags $50m storage contract for 'largest single filesystem'

HPE is buying Cray for $1.3bn

So how much will Cray be worth in a couple of years after a write down when HPE has decided that it paid too much ?

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

When will I be able to put it on my fridge door ?

was my first thought ... but then I realised that I would need to upgrade my fridge to be able to do so.

US can try extraditing Julian Assange next year, rules UK court

What 'crime' does the USA want him for ?

Exposing wrongdoing by the USA. Wrongdoing that none of the perpetrators have served time for.

They want to lock him up forever in the hope that it will scare anyone else from exposing further wrongdoing.

That Assange is a bit of an ass has got nothing to do with it.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Remember Munich?

it would be great if CERN developed a good open-source MS Outlook alternative

Even better if the developed something open source that did the full MAPI protocol and was able to use that to talk collaborative PIM/scheduler to an Exchange server exactly as does an outlook client. That would, for many corporates, break the MS strangle hold on desktops as others could fully participate in corporate scheduling, etc.

Once that is done & open source doing an Exchange replacement would be much easier.

Document formats

Libre Office is compatible enough with MS Office.

You don't have compatibility between programs, it is programs' ability to correctly handle document formats. The pain is that the MS .doc/.docx formats are not properly defined. So use .odf which is fully defined. LibreOffice works well with ODF - although MSOffice does have some problems - which might be deliberate.

Besides that, if I have to send documents, I send them in PDF anyway.

Sigh, many people do not understand the difference between an editable document (use .odf or .docx) if you want someone to easily change it; and a non editable (or print) document (for which PDF is great).

Only yesterday I received an invoice in a .docx, such a thing should not be changeable, it should have been a PDF. I have given up trying to tell most people.

Akamai on dragging 'em kicking and streaming to the edge: They might be public cloud giants, but we're, er, vids in

Akamai argest distributed computing platform ?

Akamai has placed 250,000 servers in 4,000 locations across 140 countries, making this the largest distributed computing platform in the world.

Google has more than that.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Re: Could it be

Unfortunately not Mithril as Tolkein describes it as 'resembling silver but being stronger and lighter than steel'. Pity.

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

Re: I watched a large section of the proceedings

Assume that everyone is spying on everyone else, end-to-end encrypt if you feel you need to

This is the most sensible comment that I have seen about this today.

I would love to live in a nice world where everyone was honourable and behaved themselves. Unfortunately that is not true, a proportion will lie & cheat to get what they want regardless of legality or how it hurts others. Politicians understand this as they are some of the worst at this - while pretending that butter does not melt in their mouths.

NASA goes commercial, publishes price for trips to the ISS – and it'll be multi-millionaires only for this noAirBNB

I'll give this trip a miss

Only reason is that I find it hard to get to sleep at night unless I have the bedroom window open ...

putting a lander on Jupiter

Just tell him that a Jupiter landing will need a pilot. They have looked around and he would 'make the bestest, most skillful pilot as he is the most intelligent man in the USA. Without him the mission would not succeed.'.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R5, update 2 plops from Oracle's Linux-shaped orifice

Calling anything unbreakable ...

is just an invitation for someone to try to break it.They will probably succeed.

Marketing droids probably don't understand that; or maybe they do: but know how gullible some IT bosses are.

Devs slam Microsoft for injecting tech-support scam ads into their Windows Store apps

Re: "Avoid Redmond..."

I have done that for over a couple of decades. Unix & now Linux do everything that I need without having ever suffered from malware or a system update unexpectedly interrupting my work.

Marvell: So, looks like Chinese buyers were cautious about networking kit...

Is the era of free trade turning into one of balkanization

Trade barriers up all over the place ?

Refactoring whizz: Good software shouldn't cost the earth – it's actually cheaper to build

This is nothing new

I have been writing programs for 40 years, I remember reading something early on about the importance of design: a unit of time spent here would be repaid by 10 less units in coding. Similarly a unit spent testing would be rewarded by 10 fewer units of support once the software reached the users.

Much blame lies with managers who want the kudos of a project quickly delivered but then blame their staff once problems emerge.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

My main regret ...

is that pollution, carbon emissions, etc, do not stay within the national borders of the country that created them. If they did then those living in the USA would reap the rewards of what they create. As it is: the USA's noxious emissions are dispersed around the world, ie we carry the can for the USA's acts of vandalism on the environment.

Their liar in chief pronounces anthropogenic climate change as fake news: but that is because he does not have the balls to deal with it and so selfishly exports it to the rest of us.

Having said that we, in Europe, still generate more than our fair share of pollutants, but we are trying to do something about it.

Maybe we could arrange for Greta Thunberg to meet Trump when he is here in July.

IEEE tells contributors with links to Chinese corp: Don't let the door hit you on Huawei out

Simple solution - fork

If USA resident global standards bodies can no longer longer do their jobs then create a new body that can/will talk to every organisation in a way free from political interference. Take the current standards as the starting point and develop then in an inclusive manner.

Because the rest of the world is larger than the USA (in spite of what Mr orange thinks) the non USA standards body should prevail. If the USA then does not follow international standards they will have problems selling their kit internationally.

OK: not as simple as I suggest, but something along these lines has to be the way forwards.

While we are at it also grab to non-USA control the functions of IANA and similar.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Re: I think he got an Ecuador passport

CIA disappearing Assange: this is what I first thought, but part of the reason that they want him is to make a highly visible example of him in the hope that the fear of a long time eating porridge in the USA will frighten anyone else who is thinking of exposing some truths about the USA government.

These new indictments could help Assange ...

fight from being extradited to the USA. The UK (or maybe Swedish) judges who approve/deny the extradition request might decide that he will not get a fair trial in the USA and so not make him go there. That is if the judges have not been told what their decision should be.

If he evades going to the USA - what can he do, where does he live ? He can't go back to Australia to see his kids as the Oz government would ship him straight to the USA.

We'll hack back at Russians, declare UK ministers in cyber-Blitz blitz

Improve our security first

Hitting Russian (or where-ever) targets as revenge or deterrence against future attacks is something that will be done after damage has been done in the UK.

Far better would be to improve security at home: teach UK citizens to be aware of issues and be careful; penalise vendors that are sloppy and do not bother to look for security holes in what they sell, or quickly fix when vulnerabilities are found. This will mean admitting that 'government only encryption back doors' is a fantasy and will make it harder for UK spooks to snoop on us.

Hitting back does not work if foreign ne'er-do-wells are not detected; improving UK security helps a lot here.

It is not easy: most in the UK can't be bothered and think that they don't have to worry - if they screw up it might hurt their employer (so, what ? The still get paid at the end of the month), or if their bank account is hit they will winge until the bank refunds them.

I am far more worried about bad security in Internet of Things (eg baby-cam remote hackable) than I am Huawei exfiltrating packets to China (packets that should be encrypted anyway).

No Huawei out: Prez Trump's game of chicken with China has serious consequences

Excellent article El Reg

Showing that this is a lot more than security concerns.

Please can we have a thumb up/down facility on articles without needing to make a comment.

Apple arms web browser privacy torpedo, points it directly at Google's advertising model

So what is to stop the user ...

clearing out the browser once a day so that the delayed sending of attribution data never gets sent. Seems even better to me.

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy: Run Huawei, Google Play, turns away, from Huawei... turns away

Want facebook, etc, on a new Huawei 'phone ?

Many will, that is why they buy their 'phones.

A facebook/whatever app is just something that talks to facebook using a their protocols. It would not be hard for Huawei to write some apps that use the protocols, I doubt that facebook would make them hard to reverse engineer - if they don't publish them; after all: better to have someone on facebook using an unofficial API than not have the user at all.

If some find the Huawei written facebook app is not good enough for them then they could always install the official one.

Will the gov't of the USA stop anyone using a Huawei 'phone from connecting to servers owned by USA companies ? I don't think so, but with Trump in charge I don't know.

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

Google to host videos ...

It means you will have to take Google up on its offer to host photos and videos on its cloud service. And you'll want to stream music – but then aren't you already?

No. My 'phone is a 'phone. I don't do things like that with it, I switch things like Wifi/Internet off most of the time; maybe that is why I get several days out of one batter charge.

The reviewer hack praised it for not having top end features that you don't need (good) but then shows that he uses a 'phone for things that many of us don't use a 'phone for.

BTW: did it come with apps that cannot be un-installed ? How much slurping of my data by google cannot be turned off ?

US minister invokes Maggie Thatcher, says she would have halted Huawei 5G rollout

Need for hard data

they’re going to run out of credibility.

Why the future tense ?

Re: You can see his point

No, they rely on Microsoft to do that

Pompeo has lost it ...

his ravings are becoming ever more the stuff of fantasies. Maybe he is smoking something really good, or perhaps spending too much time close to Trump has gotten him infected with some nasty brain worm.

He talks about Chinese law ... I hope that someone reminded him of USA law, in particular the Patriot Act.

US foreign minister Mike Pompeo to give UK a bollocking over Huawei 5G plans

Fuck off Pompeo

The UK is a sovereign state, we make decisions according to our own interests. We do not want to be bullied by another country: especially one that is wrapping up their commercial interests as a security issue.

I believe that Pompeo is trotting out this fake news on behalf of Trump - someone who shows no restraint on lying to get what he wants.

Please fix the proven spying in kit made in the USA before you complain about unproven spying in kit from elsewhere.

Can I get a RHEL yeah? Version 8 arrives at last as IBM given go-ahead to wolf down Red Hat

Too much damned javascript ...

noscript blocked about a dozen sites ... I enabled RedHat & a few and still nothing of interest showed.

I'll wait until details come out elsewhere rather than submit to whatever collection of tracking they are using.

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Bringing MS Spyware to Linux

As I see it this is the Linux kernel running under a MS hypervisor. This means that the MS kernel sees everything that goes in & out of the Linux kernel and is so available to be slurped up and exfiltrated via telemetry. MS can then inspect/sell as it wants. Your Linux system is now not secure.

You might think that this would be hard to do; but one of the most sensitive devices is the keyboard (think typed passwords). Snooping of this would be easy and the bandwidth needed to take and forward to the NSA would not be large.

So: do not use one of these machines to ssh to something precious.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Oh ...

I can see all sorts of adverts down the side of El-Reg pages ... never seen them before!

It actually feels un-nerving to know that I am leaking all sorts of info as no-script, cookie-auto-delete & others are not protecting me :-(

UK is 'not a surveillance state' insists minister defending police face recog tech

Time to get a Theresa May face mask

Police are also continuing to build giant databases full of biometrically scanned images of innocent people’s faces

and walk round various shopping centers.

'I do not wish to surrender' Julian Assange tells court over US extradition bid

The USA wants Assange for what he did

please remind me if they have been after those who Assange exposed for doing wrong; eg the helicopter crew who laughed while shooting innocent people ?

This is a case of 'shoot the messenger' - there is a clear message to other who might expose USA wrong doing.

Microsoft promises to boil down its lengthy and confusing privacy controls… in 1,500-word announcement

Re: At Alain Williams, re: something to check traffic.

Isn't that what things like WireShark are for?

You won't see what is being sent as the telemetry is encrypted.

Microsoft is right to encrypt it as it may contain personal information. This is why a tool needs to be provided that the user can run on their PC.

Re: Microsoft privacy controls™©

Microsoft said it would split data gathered into "required" and "optional."

So: people cannot switch off telemetry. But will Microsoft publish a program that lets the PC owner see what data has been sent to Microsoft/NSA ? That program must be open source so that we can verify that it is telling the truth.

This is all rather ironic considering the fuss about Huawei.

Huawei, Huawei. Huawei, Huawei. Feeling hot, hot, hot: US threatens to cut UK from intel sharing over Chinese tech giant

This only shows to not trust USA intelligence

If they blab this probable bollocks about Huawei how much trust should we give to anything else that they say ?

What have we had: hacking from North Korea, Putin meddling in USA elections, Kaspersky Labs spying for Russia, ... ? I offer no opinion on any of these, but I down rate what the USA claims.

Of course, they say nothing about: Cisco routers tampered by the NSA and don't ask questions about what Microsoft telemetry is really about.