Posts by GBE

Homeland Security drops the hammer on Kaspersky Lab with preemptive ban

If they do review the source code?

Even if DHS (or whoever) reviews the source code, that's no guarantee that what's installed was built from that source code. In order for the source code review to be meaningful, DHS would have to build the executables and installers from that source code and create an internal distribution. They would also have to review and host all virus pattern definition files (or whatever) that are pushed to the PCs periodically.

A project like that undertaken by the gubmint would take many years and cost thousands of lives....

Hate it when your apartment block is locked to Comcast etc? Small ISPs fight back

Re: Only the best will do

"Isn't it cheaper to do the last mile wireless..."

Been there, done that, it sucked. For several years I used municipal "broadband" where the "last mile" was wireless. It was actually more like the "last couple hundred yards" and it was still awful. In the daytime, throughput maxed out at around 2Mbps. In the evening it dropped so close to zero as to be useless.

I switched to Comcast. The price was 3X, but at least I get consistent, reliable 20Mbps.

---- You know you suck when your ex-customers are happy with Comcast ----

User demanded PC be moved to move to a sunny desk – because it needed Windows

Ah, so _that's_ what a courgette is

> Chat to someone in an A&E department and you'll be amazed at the number of "naked vacuuming" and "I slipped coming out of the shower and somehow this courgette ended up in my..." type of injuries!

At first glance, I read that as "corgette" and was afraid it was some sort of miniature corgi.

In the US, I think it would be called a zucchini, which is an even funnier word.

Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email

Re: Only the best will do

"I don't think that Gore ever claimed to have invented the Internet,"

You're right, he never claimed that. He said something about how he was proud to have been instrumental in passing the bill that provided funding that helped "create" the internet. He was referring to the 1991 High-Performance Computing and Communications Act (generally known as the Gore bill according to sources such as the Washington Post). Everybody who wasn't trying deliberately to misread the quote in order to rev up know-nothing Fox News viewers knew that's what he was talking about.

FCC taps the brakes on fudging US broadband speed amid senator fury

Municipal Fiber!

I sure wish Minneapolis would hurry up and get to my neighborhood with municipal fiber. I don't even care if it's a bit more expensive that what Comcast is charging. We've got municipal wifi in my neighborhood, but it slows so much in the evenings it's useless (and it only peaks out at about 2Mbps off-peak).

Remember when Lenovo sold PCs with Superfish adware? It just got a mild scolding from FTC

Re: I would have thought ...

"That's no answer..."

I wasn't attempting to "answer" something.

I was just commenting that I like the hardware but not the software that Lenovo ships, and that I buy it only for the hardware: the build quality is good, and it tends to be well supported by Linux drivers. I've also found the documentation to be well done, and parts/accessory availability is good.

If you care about (and don't like) the software that's being shipped on Lenovo products, then you should definitely not buy Lenovo products. Of course, if enough people stop buying Lenovo products because of the skeevy software, then Lenovo will stop selling those products, and then I'm out of luck when shopping for "just hardware".

I like Lenovo hardware

I like Lenovo hardware, and will probably be replacing my somewhat old T500 with another Lenovo soon. However, they've always shipped with spyware, still do, and probably always will. The fact that it's brand X spyware or brand Y spyware or brand MSFT spyware is a minor detail that's irrelevant to me... I just wipe the disk and install Linux the way I have on every computer I've bought since 1992. [Like you didn't see that coming...]

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

But there wasn't a blizzard every day?

"Back in my day, we had to walk to school barefoot in a blizzard uphill both ways..."

But dad, surely there wasn't a blizzard every day?

"Well, son, if there was no blizzard we didn't get the day off to go to school and had to stay and and work the farm."

ARM’s embedded TLS library fixes man-in-the-middle fiddle

Re: Fix works for servers

> Not for peer to peer which is the other IoT implementation.

Remember: in "IoT" the 'S' stands for security!

Microsoft's fix for web graphics going AWOL? Disable your antivirus

Re: Who'd be a web designer?

"Nope, web pages should be plain text with simple hypertext links, nobody is interested in a nice looking site."

I think it's time we admitted that the 'web was a mistake. Let's just give up and switch back to gopher.

US Navy develops underwater wireless battery-charging tech

Re: I would have thought ...

"a plug and socket arrangement that could withstand immersion in salt water"

That's far more difficult than you think it is. Seawater is really hard on many materials and is fairly conductive. It's hard enough designing a high-power plug and socket arrangement that works reliably and robustly in when there's a trained person there to carefully plug and unplug it in air. An autonomously operated plug/socket submersed in seawater is a nightmare.

Some sort of near-field inductive charging system sounds way easier to me...

Foxit PDF Reader is well and truly foxed up, but vendor won't patch

Re: Foxit on the run

I gave up on evince a year or two back because of various UI issues and the whole screw-you-if-you're-not-running-Gnome attitude. I've been using atril as my default PDF viewer ever since and the only think it's missing is the 'print current view' feature that acroread had. Fortunately, I found PDFStudio and can use that when I need to print a portion of a page.

Apeiron brings the high-Optane thrills with mix-and-match flash array

Ape Iron

That still makes me laugh...

Trump's CNN tantrum could delay $85bn AT&T-Time Warner merger

Re: A few years from now ....

Not an entirely subtle threat, really, and not making a lot of attempt to judge the merger only on its merits :(

No surprise there. Subtlety and merits aren't something the current White House is concerned with or capable of: possession of either apparently disqualifies you from serving in the Trump administration.

Not that anybody possessing either would _want_ to serve in the Trump administration.

Inmarsat flings latest Wi-Fi-on-airliners satellite into orbit

No difference -- except for the huge latency...

"Within the aircraft, passengers connect to the in-flight Wi-Fi, having coughed up the appropriate price first, and – in theory – see no difference between satellite and ground connectivity."

See no difference? Adding 250ms to the latency is certnaly something you can see.

As you head off to space with Li-ion batts, don't forget to inject that liquefied gas into them

Use a liquid instead of a liquid?

"the idea of using liquefied gas for an electrolyte instead of liquid or solids"

Isn't a liquified gas a liquid?

Trump nominates a pro-net-neutrality advocate as FCC commish

Re: Man bites dog

"Trump did a sensible thing..."

Don't worry, it's not intentional -- he's new at this and doesn't know what he's doing.

[To paraphrase various Republican aplogists.]

Apeiron demos 'rocket ship' Intel Optane array tech

Ape Iron?

What sort of widget names a compnay ape iron?

Boffins have figured out a way of speeding up X-ray data collection

superfast X-rays

"superfast X-rays"

Finally...

I was getting tired waiting on the old slow X-rays that only travel at 1 c.

Kaspersky files antitrust suit against Microsoft

In other news: the sun and tides continue to rise and fall!

... has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft over allegations that Redmond is hobbling third-party ...

I am shocked -- shocked, I tell you...

Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht denied bid for new trial

Re: Sure, that activity is illegal

"Even if Trump got impeached or otherwise didn't finish out his term, he won't face any criminal charges. The president can't be tried in a court of law, only by the Senate after being impeached by the House."

It is widely held that "The President" probably can't be charged and tried in criminal court while in office. However, an ex-president can be charged and tried for acts commited while in office. That's why Ford decided he had to pardon Nixon: to avoid having the whole mess moving into criminal courts and dragging out for years. It is also widely held that being tried in a criminal court after having been impeached and acquitted is not double jeapordy.

Banking association calls for end of 'screen-scraping'

Re: API vs Screen-scraping

> actively engaged in an industry-wide effort to develop common processes and standards

Yea, I've been involved in efforts like that. They consist largely of everybody involved vetoing anything that they think might give a leg up to anyone else or that might allow new competitors into the market. The result is almost always a giant, unworkable mess authored by a committee comprised of foot-draggers who's secret motivation is to accomplish nothing of any practical value for as long as possible.

OTOH, they alays seem to meet at rather nice hotels in cities that are pleasant to visit (when it's on somebody else's dime).

I'm reminded of a colleague who spent a lot of time on standarization efforts. He used to refer to the ISO as the "International Sightseeing Organization".

Good news, OpenVPN fans: Your software's only a little bit buggy

They only reviewed the client side?

> The venerable OpenVPN client has been given a mostly clean bill of health.

Since you need to run both the client and server to set up a tunnel, what does it matter how secure one end is if the other end is broken?

CERN ready to test an even bigger gun

Re: So why?

> Why do they add an extra electron and then remove them all. Why not skip the first step?

Because you can use an electric/magnetic field to exert a force on an electrically charged atom (has the extra electron). If you don't add the extra electron, the atom is neutral, and won't be affected by the field in the accelerator. Once they've shoved it up to the desired speed, they remove the electrons because all they really want is the proton.

Why they initially add an electron to start with H- instead of removing an electron and starting with H+ is another question...

Big mistake by Big Blue: Storwize initialisation USBs had malware

And sample/verify the copies

"The USB sticks are loaded on a duplicator. But it should be normal procedure to scan the master before it's put into the duplicator. "

Don't forget to randomly sample and verify the copies...

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0

Re: Honest inquiry

"Does Gnome "do one thing and do it well"?

Nope, and I don't use it either. I even gave up on XFCE and switched to something simpler than that.

Gentoo is still init-system agnostic, and you are free to pick openrc, systemd, or whatever other init system people care to package.

I find systemd annoying when I have to do anything with Ubuntu, CentOS, Suse, etc. But, I haven't really report any problem with it -- all of my daily-use machines use openrc.

Boeing-backed US upstart reckons it'll be building electric airliners

Re: Reality check time?

so why paraffin? makes no sense.

Because that's what aviation jet engines typically burn...

This may be a US/UK misunderstanding. In the US, the word "paraffin" refers to paraffin wax: the solid stuff you use to make into candles and seal the tops of canning jars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraffin_wax

Re: Just a matter of timing

"Something *like* this is almost inevitable, since toy drones prove that existing batteries have the necessary power-to-weight ratio"

Modern batteries do have good power-to-weight ratios. However, the energy-to-weight ratios are still complete shite compared to liquid hydrocarbons. Sure, you could build a battery powered airliner that has enough power to fly _for_a_few_minutes_ before you run out of energy.

"better battery technologies are always on the horizon,"

Maybe you've never noticed this, but _the_horizon_never_gets_here_.

Troll it your way: Burger King ad tries to hijack Google Home gadgets

Re: I think the point is

"not even Google knows what goes into a Whopper!!!"

I do. Or rather I did back around 1978 or so. I had a temp job working for a company that made frozen meat patties that become Whoppers. My job consisted of drilling holes in 10lb blocks of frozen beef and collecting the shavings so they could be taken to the lab to be analyzed for fat content. The relatively high-fat frozen beef was then mixed with leaner fresh beef (which was also sampled and tested) so that the patties would have the desired percentage of fat.

IIRC, the higher-fat frozen beef came from Australia and South America, and the leaner fresh beef came from the US midwest.

There was nothing but beef in the patties where I worked.

I've seen the patties made, and I still eat at BK occasionally.

Mark Shuttleworth says some free software folk are 'deeply anti-social' and 'love to hate'

"Hate" is a transitive verb, Mark.

Inserting the preposition "on" between "hate" and the direct object just makes you sound like a poser dork who's trying to sound "street".

This is where UK's Navy will park its 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers

Re: "reconfiguring tides"

That would be a grand fleet indeed.

[On a more serious note, can anybody offer a clue as to what that phrase is supposed to mean?]

The future of storage is ATOMIC: IBM boffins stash 1 bit on 1 atom

Not quite ready to replace the flash in your phone

The requirement for an STM and a throughput probably measured in bits/day are still issues that need to be resolved. :)

It's still good to see IBM doing stuff like this!

IBM has cloud access to quantum computer 400 times smaller than D-Wave system

Promises, promises...

"Quantum computing has the promise of outperforming today's computers to an extraordinary degree at certain tasks such as factoring very large numbers."

Yep.

And controlled nuclear fusion has the promise of unlimited, low-cost, safe, clean energy.

As the old saying sort-of goes: "Promise into one hand, <something> into the other. See which hand gets full".

Surveillance software boss thrown in the clink for cooking the books

Re: 11 years to catch 30 months in jail.

> 11 years to catch 30 months in jail.

> That's what, a year and half with good behavior?

It's a bit over 26 months -- almost 2-1/4 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_conduct_time

BOFH: Elf of Safety? Orc of Admin. Pleased to meet you

reduced fat lard?

OK, I know it's a humor column...

but is "reduced fat lard" really a thing in England?

Trump cybersecurity order morphs into 2,200-plus-word extravaganza

create a mountain of work with uncertain outcomes

Sir Humphrey would be so proud.

Why software engineers should ditch Silicon Valley for Austin

Re: Do not want

"Sorry, but Austin is very very nice, they have the lovely Formula One track, they are weird, but they are in a the shithead state of Texas."

Yep. That's one of the reasons I never returned the calls of that Google recruiter from Austin. I don't think I could sleep at night surrounded by Texas.

Update or shut up: Microsoft's choice for desktop Skypers

Fixed that for you...

ITYM "þe olde ſkype"

Kylie withdraws from Kylie trademark fight, leaving Kylie to profit from… existing?

secondary reality television peronality.

> Kylie was little more than a "secondary reality television personality"

Hell, these days that apparently qualifies you to be president of the US.

NASA honors Apollo 1 crew 50 years after deadly launchpad fire

Re: Oxygen is interesting stuff!!

"A welder's gas mix gets close to this and if you use a cutting torch, you can even turn OFF the acetylene after the cut is started, and the iron will burn quite nicely (and quickly) in such concentrations."

Yep, the acetylene is only needed to pre-heat the corner of the edge of the steel steel to the point where it won't quench when you pull the trigger that lets the O2 out full-blast. It's hard to imagine how impressive the process is until you've done it. Once you get the metal itself burning under a stream of mostly pure O2, a torch that could barely weld 1/4" plate will cut though 2" of steel like butter.

[Everybody should learn to weld. I never got very good at it, but it was great fun -- though I don't think I'd last long welding pipe at a refinery on the gulf coast in August.]

Texas cops lose evidence going back eight years in ransomware attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the API key

Action that article into the bin...

"instead having the data transmitted to a central processing area where it can be actioned;"

I stopped reading at that point.

I pay no attention to people who use "action" as a verb.

They are invariably spouting bullshit.

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

"Three-phase."

Yep. AFAIK, all electric/hybrid cars use brushless motors, so they are multi-phase (at least three).

Re: Odd belief

"Ever tried to get a car moving after the break cables have frozen solid?"

No. For 50+ years, I've lived in areas which high humidity in the summer and below zero (F) weather in the winter. I always use the parking brake and know many others that do the same. I've never had any problems with parking brakes freezing, nor do I know anybody who has.

Have you had problems with parking brake cables freezing? Or is this one of the FOAF things?

Maybe 100 years ago, this was a problem. AFAICT it isn't now -- or at least it's so vanishingly rare people should stop worrying about it.

Drone biz Lily Robotics takes $34m in pre-orders, ships nothing, shuts down, gets sued by San Francisco DA

Re: Don't buy vaporware

> Wait until there's something on the shelf. You will miss "early bird bugs" for sure,

FTFY

Security hardened, pah! Expert doubts Kaymera's mighty Google's Pixel

Can't parse the headline...

"Security hardened, pah! Expert doubts Kaymera's mighty Google's Pixel"

Can anybody explain to me how the second half of that headline is supposed to be parsed?

Florida Man sues Verizon for $72m – for letting him commit identity theft

Re: The time has come .......

"However the hand written submission suggests that no lawyer was involved, he's doing this all on his own."

From what I've read, reading law books and filing motions/claims with the court system are sometimes the only "recreational" activities that prisoners in the US are allowed. I suppose the theory is that they should not be prevented from assisting in or handling their own legal defence and subsequent proceedings. The fact that somebody is using such privleges to annoy Verizon is pure entertainment. It will almost certainly be dismissed at first glance when it gets reviewed by a judge. There might even be sanctions for filing a frivolous suit or the comlaintant may have to pay respondant's costs. But, the likelyhood of getting any money out of a prisoner is exactly 0, so that's rather a moot point.

Linus Torvalds finds 163 reasons to wait a week for a new Linux

> Christmas party's getting in the way again

I'd always heard about England's office Christmas parties. But, all of the office parties I'd been to here in the US over the years have been pretty sedate, so I didn't really take too seriously what I'd heard about the English version. Then I went to a Real English Office Christmas Party(TM). To quote Roy from _The_IT_Crowd_: "You people drink like you don't want to live".

IIRC, the organizer told me that she budgeted for one bottle of wine per person plus beer, cider, and mixed drinks for everybody...

Hackers waste Xbox One, PS4, MacBook, Pixel, with USB zapper

Re: Ridiculous

Right. Galvnaic isolation does have to be optical, it can be magnetic or acoustic or hydraulic or ???. The Ethernet spec says both ends have to be galvanically isolated and have to provide fairly high level of isolation -- IIRC around 1-2KV. In practice, copper Ethernet interfaces are transformer coupled.

British banks chuck smartphone apps out of Windows

Re: *Shrug*

Yep, the Motorola G and X are pretty close to vanilla Android. My last change was from a Nexus to a Moto G (2nd gen), and I felt right at home on the G (which I bought unlocked from Best Buy -- not from a carrier). OTOH, when friends ask me questions about the "Android" phones they buy from carriers, I usually am unable to help them because it's all broken bloatware, and none of it works the way my "real Android" phones work.