Posts by Zolko

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Free speech?

Surprisingly, ElReg has failed to see the real problem here:

"The President has, in retaliation, threatened to close down Twitter and other social networks, even though he can't"

yes, he can: social media benefit from a legal protection (Section 230 I think) which puts them in the box of "information platforms" and not "information editors". In short, it means that they only relay messages from users between them, and don't, themselves, create information like newspapers do. But by doing just that, editing messages of a user to other users, Twitter has stepped out of that role and became editors, not only a platform, and they can loose that protection (Section 230)

In other words, this could end Twitter for real.

What I don't understand: why do some people (including ElReg) think that Twitter, Facebook and co. are some special constructs ? They are only advertising platforms that disguise as messaging services, and it would be very easy to target them and bring them to their knees: it's enough to apply to them the rules that apply to other advertisement organisations, and they're dead. And nobody would cry after them.

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Re: reviewer uses Google extensively

Exactly my thoughts: a Google-(ab)using Lemming is surprised that a Google-free device doesn't work well for him

"I pay for things with Google Pay [...] audio is immediately uploaded to Google Drive [...] notes in Google Docs, and use Gmail [...] Google Maps to lead the way."

I use none of these. Ever. The Google-Apps on my phone are quarantined, blocked, non-updated .... as much as I practically can. If TheRegister so wishes, I can do a much better and more useful test-review of this device.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Re: Trust Office

@Len: "It's quite common for the same Word document to look different or have other issues between various versions of Word or between Word for Mac, Word for Windows and Office 365."

I wouldn't call it common, but the rule. And you haven't even touched the subject of Office in German, English, French, and having to exchange files between these MS-Word versions: tables in German are called "Tabelle" and when you open such a Word file on an English speaking MS-WORD and add another "Table" it will not increment correctly the reference number. Same if you have paragraphs and copy-paste across documents with different header settings: you'll have mixed layout for identical headers. And the next header might or might-not increment correctly.

And we haven't talked about the ugly kerning, meaning that you can immediately recognise research thesis written in LaTeX or in Word.

That a multi-billion company is not able, after 30 years of their top-selling flagship product, to produce a marginally usable Word processor speaks volumes about its overall capabilities.

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Re: Check your password here

Mandatory XKCD image:

https://xkcd.com/2228/

mean ≠ median

I use always the same 3-4 passwords, because else I don't remember them. And also because most of the times I don't care about the site (seriously: what if my account on ElReg gets hacked ?). And for those sites that I DO care, I use a different browser and a unique password. Which means that in 95% of the occasions, I use always 3-4 passwords and a generic browser, so if such a survey only looks at the number of occurrences, it's going to have a very bad representative image of how secure/unsecure my use of passwords and Internet is.

And for me it's still very few passwords to remember.

FTP is crusty and mostly dead, right? AWS just started supporting it anyway

Re: It's used because it works

@Joe Montana: "What he did with FTP, could have been done just as easily with thousands of other file copy methods too... SMB, NFS, SCP, RCP, RSYNC etc."

may-be, or may-be not: we had programmed an FTP client in LabView, so we could connect our experimental lab setup, using LabView, with laptops running scientific languages like IDL or Matlab, and connected live to the LabView by FTP. Still works like a charm.

FTP connections are simple TCP sockets sending some text messages. Now, do that with SFTP !

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

Re: No surprise then

"which is approximately why Apple moved from (what was basically IBM's) PPC architecture to Intel"

not sure if that was enough: one immediate result of Mac on Intel was that you could use Windows in virtual machines, allowing a user to use Windows-only software seamlessly. With the switch away from Intel these virtual machines will stop working. Well, you might be able to use virtual machines to run Windows-on-Arm, but that won't let you run the legacy Windows programs.

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Re: "deforming shirt pockets"

"Bonus: your 'phone doesn't fall out when you want to pick something up from the floor..."

...or when you clean the toilet after you've finished your affair.

London court tells Julian Assange: No, coronavirus is not a good reason for you to be let out of prison

@ishtiaq/theghostdeejay

"He shit on his mates ... Would you trust him? ... he is a coward"

you are a clueless moron (why would it be important whether I trust him or not ? Trust him for what ?) who accuses without proof. No wonder you had been banned from ElReg.

I also think Assange is a nob

why ? Do you know him ? If it's only because it has been repeated over-and-over by some media, don't you think it could be an organised smear campaign ? Did he get the chance to tell his version of the story ? Actually, what IS the story about (the rape thing was bogus from the start and the Swedes dropped it anyway) ?

Insulting someone should at minimum bear some justification.

Behind time and way over budget, but the James Webb Space Telescope has finally been put together

"on top of five hundred tons of explosives..."

you forgot: ...built by the lowest bidder private contractor. Which might actually not be true here, but had to say it for the historical reference.

Re: Main mirror

"It needed an Ariane5 with a special 'power bulge' nose cone. But it was imperative that the launch be on an American rocket"

you must be kiddin' : it's still planned to be launched from an Ariane V, with a normal head. I believe the Americans don't have big enough of rockets.

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

Re: May I ask.....

And the answer to my question is .....?

a definitive "it depends". Hope that helps.

Russian state-sponsored hackers have been sniffing Middle East defence firms, warns Trend Micro

Capt'ain Obvious

State-backed spies spying on foreign defence contractors ... well, they would do that, wouldn't they ? Why is it even worth mentioning ?

Next news: USAF has burnt kerosene for flight trainings and increased air-pollution.

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

"Hmm which uses more data, downloading a spreadsheet to pretend I'm doing some work or streaming a video in HD?"

and where do you put "doing video-conference meeting for work with 5 people" ? Same question for school, family assistance...

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Re: Bad arguments

"Something you wanted to patent had to be specific enough that you could make a model of it to demonstrate it's function"

yes and no: having worked in the development department and made some stuff that was then patented, I had to provide drawings and descriptions of the things "we" wanted to patent. The end result was the stuff that I had provided, PLUS some extra claims about potential unknown solutions that we had never talked about, let-alone developed, to form patent claims that where very specific to begin with, but then included some vague description on some alternative "solutions" whose only objective was to prevent competitors to by-pass the patent using different techniques, and which might or might-not have worked. Of course, these "alternative" claims were inserted by the patent attorneys that did the patent writing. And who probably earned twice my salary.

HPE celebrated diversity on International Women's Day not with pictures of its own staff but stock images of models

Re: Probably some HR or marketing bod

yeah, and then they changed the photo to some real HPE staff ... which was much less diverse (only white women). Paris icon, obviously

Supply, demand and a scary mountain of debt: The challenges facing IT as COVID-19 grips the global economy

Re: Just wait 2 weeks

"Tax assets not income"

tax heritage, that is how aristocratic dynasties are built up. Let everybody compete on equal footing and merit.

AMD, boffins clash over chip data-leak claims: New side-channel holes in decades of cores, CPU maker disagrees

...native code on the target machine that's also on the same logical CPU core as the victim

how do you even make that happen ? I mean, if you're on a normal system with thousands of processes that jump from one CPU (core) to another, how do you assure that another unrelated process from another unrelated user will be scheduled on the process you're trying to break ? I've been toying with CPU isolation things, and getting 2 processes to run on the same CPU is difficult, even if you're completely in charge of the entire system.

To me, this "attack" isn't any actual attack as it supposes a scenario that is literally impossible without cooperation from the "victim".

This smells like a smear-job by Intel to minimize their own (repeated) failures.

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

as designed

If that controller has a different vulnerability that would allow an attacker to modify the ROM of the Ethernet controller...

and what about the driver of that Ethernet controller ? For some of these controllers it's probably a closed-source driver, therefore anybody having access to the source of said driver could have already installed a usable exploit of this "vulnerability".

Said otherwise:

- US companies make Ethernet controllers with closed-source (binary blob) drivers.

- US government is known to spy on everybody, using computer tech

- US government has a law called "Gagging order" which prevents any US person from even telling that it received such an order

- US tech firm has made a "mistake" that can be leveraged by a DMA-capable Ethernet controller.

So, what are the odds that all this was actually designed: bake a backdoor into a family of CPUs, make said back-door exploitable via DMA at resume, make Ethernet controllers DMA and wake-on-LAN capable, install exploit of said backdoor into said driver of said controller, send gagging orders to everybody involved that they can't talk about any of it. Disguise all this as an unfortunate bug.

Yes, the NSA could have asked for the key's themselves, but if that request were ever to be leaked it would be impossible to deny.

Oracle tells Supremes: Fair use? Pah! There's nothing fair about 'Google's copying'

Re: A plague on both of them

"code that resulted in an API that broadly resembled someone elses"

that's not what Oracle-vs-Google is about though, is-it ? In that case, Google actively tried hard to duplicate exactly the API that pre-existed and that they knew about, in order to be able to use compilers written for that pre-existing API, for free. I have little sympathy for that.

Re: A plague on both of them

"It could become impossible to write anything more than 'Hello World' without employing a lawyer to sort though all the licensing and rights issues."

sounds good for Open-Source / Free Software. Now I doubly would like to see Google loose: we'd all be writing open-source software for ARM processors. Might be a trouble for US software companies, but should I care ?

Re: A plague on both of them

What, actually, is so bad about Oracle ? They're a commercial vendor, if you don't like them you can easily escape them. On the other hand, it's technically impossible to completely evade from Google. I have absolutely 0 (zero) interaction with Oracle, but even though I try (hard) to avoid Google it's impossible: from Google Docs that people share to Vaze & Maps when I drive with someone using it, apart from FaceBook (which I don't use either) there is probably no other company more evil than Google.

They did to Java what they did to Linux: it's "sort-of "the same.

I'd actually like to see them loose on this one.

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

Re: Ad flinger makes browser, ad flinger needs to track you

"What would you break out?"

Separate Android and Search. And may-be YouTube. Let search be search with some added satellite services (Maps...), let YouTube be like any other broadcaster, and Android like Nokia or Samsung were/are.

It's like Microsoft repeat: they should have separated OS and Office. And like Facebook: separate Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram. Let's break up monopolies and have competition again. What does society as a whole gain by these untouchable giants (like banks, the same).

What about Chromium ?

What about Chromium and Chromium-based browsers,like Falcon ? Is there a way to check ?

"users logged into a variety of services like Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs"

I'm not even registered in these "services", even less online logged in. May-be that's why YouTube always tells me to log-in to improve my user experience. Yeah, sure

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

Re: Finally!

"THEN, tarball your /home from the existing box, untar onto new box, re-creaet the users and groups with matching IDs, and VOILA!"

What I do is to boot with the live installer, mount the /home partition (you do have a separate /home partition of curse), rename all 4 users home directories (like user → user_old), write down the fstab entries to know what user_ID correspond to what user_Name, install the new system, re-create the same users with the same user_ID (easiest is to recreate them in the same order), and let every user copy his old data to the new home directory, and VOILA.

After a month the old user directory is removed, which has the added benefit to clean up unused garbage. Of course, you had backups before, anyway.

Re: Systemd is devastating

"Got Devuan ?"

I already downloaded it, tested the live-USB, all I need is some time to install it.

I delayed the inevitable until now, but this home-directory stuff is the final nail in the coffin. That someone potters (*) in my base system is already bad enough, but letting such an (word would be censored) anywhere near my own data is absolutely out of question. Next-up and he'll want bitcoins to allow me access to my encrypted data.

(*) from Pottering who potters, of course

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

M$-fonts

"LibreOffice cannot kern ANY font correctly: Arial, Times New Roman, etc etc"

you do know that these are MS fonts, don't you ? I'd not be surprised if MS did the bad kerning in other office suites on purpose.

Custom fields

"I have never heard an average user, anywhere, say they wish they could go back to the way the menus used to look."

may-be you can help me then: where in MS-Word (2017 I think, not sure, where do you find the "About MS-Word" menu ?) do I find the command "Add field" to add the content of a custom field into my document (like : release version) ? Also: where can I define and edit such custom fields ?

Seriously, I need that a lot and I don't know. Please. In LibreOffice it's Menu > Insert > Field

LibreOffice Draw

The Draw module is far (far far) superior to anything in the MS-Office suite. It's even possible to produce semi-technical drawings to scale. It's my #1 reason to use LibreOffice. Stability is #2.

As #3, LibreOffice UI is conservative, the commands are where they have always been, no need to re-learn everything at each release.

Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt. Time to give something back

"I'm sure its been done on purpose in an attempt to sell commercial licences."

and what would be bad about it ? If you do open-source software you can use Qt's open-source license, if you do closed-source software and want to make money with it, then give a share of that revenue to Qt. Seems quite logical to me.

Re: Annoying

"having started on a fresh commercial project [...] it means another cost item to justify"

I don't understand: you complain that their business should give their product away for free to yours so you can make money ?

Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google

Re: Wouldn't it be Loverly

try Qwant

Intel server chip shortages continue to bite: HPE warns of Xeon processor supply drought for the whole of 2020

Re: "AMD's share price is at a record high, and has more than doubled in a year"

"Alibaba, AWS, Azure, Baidu, Facebook, Google and Tencent"

funny, I don't use any of those. Well, some YouTube sometimes when a link to a funny video is sent me

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

Re: Poison

If the lawyers don't like it then it's probably very good for the rest of us: that means they can't litigate around it, bad business for them, and good for us (devs and users).

Autonomous Logistics Information System gets shoved off the F-35 gravy train in favour of ODIN

Re: Is there a way to bet that:

nah, ODIN will be replaced by THOR

No Mo'zilla for about 100 techies today: Firefox maker lays off staff as boss talks of 'difficult choices' and funding

Re: I hated chrome...

"I hated chrome....but was forced, somewhat, to use it"

so I use Falcon. Chromium based, Qt, works with all things Google (well, the strict minimum without a Google account).

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Re: Confusing.

"Which costs Apple time and money ... newish iPhones [...] which makes them simpler, cheaper..."

You seem very confused, yes: Apple is sitting on 250 000 000 000 $ off-shore money, so what would be the "cost" of maintaining backward compatibility ? new iPhones cheaper ? Than what ?

Re: Confusing.

"Obviously Apple could do this, but maintaining backward compatibility with ancient versions of an OS is a pain"

ah, so they're pushing that pain on their users and developers. And this from a company having zig-billions in off-shore bank-accounts through dubious business practices. I hope you won't mind if I'm not impressed.

sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Re: Accountability

US Government will not allow them to disappear anywhere

the US government doesn't need the name Boeing to survive though. What they might do is a symbolic name change, the "company" Boeing will be left bankrupt (so they won't have to pay the penalties) and a new entity will emerge. Heck, it might even be an old one, like Mc-Donald-Douglas. Or Fairchild.

The rest of the world will laugh like "Ha, we got them" and the US government will laugh like "Ha, we don't care"

LG announces bold new plan for financial salvation: Trying to actually make phones people want to buy

Re: Here is a phone I want to buy

(1) a battery I can change in minutes, (2) a 3.5 mm headphone jack, (3) microSD card support

OK

(4) no notch

why do you care ?

(5) a physical home button, physical back button, physical menu

no, these buttons can be integrated into the main screen, doesn't hurt, and reduces size

(6) the ability to uninstall any junk I neither want nor need

of course. Add to it an open bootloader please.

(7) an AMOLED 5'' HD screen , and not a 4K 6'' behemoth, so it can easily fit into my pocket.

(8) a 4000mAh battery so it lasts for 2 days, even if that makes the phone 1mm thicker.

Go champion retires after losing to AI, Richard Nixon deepfake gives a different kind of Moon-landing speech...

Re: AI Go.

"The Go machine should have to get to the tournament by itself, and then play the game using ~20 watts for the processing CPU"

yes, I've thought about that too: they should be self-powered, recognise the board with their own cameras, and put/move the stones themselves. I'd wonder if they still beat humans in such a setup.

Re: potentially radical

@Chris the bean counter : "I feel sorry for you if you hate your life so much that you think UK comparable to Communist China for Human Rights

How many Uïgours have died because of the Chinese Communist Party ?

How many Iraqis have died because of the UK political rulers ?

Same question with NATO or USA and Libya, Syria, Afghanistan... ?

From the Human rights perspective, the UK, USA and NATO are the worst offenders on Earth in our current times, way before Russia or China. That you're not able to see it is the worrying part here.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Re: looks horrible

JohnFen : "often don't understand how huge and diverse the US really is. Different parts of the country can be radically different from each other culturally, politically, linguistically, and in terms of what sort of vehicles you see on the roads"

you probably nave have been to Europe then, or you'd know what real diversity means when travelling. Drive 1000 miles from Denmark to Italy, or from France to Hungary, from Portugal to Germany, and you'll be shocked.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Re: You had one job...

sbt : the threat of world government is overstated; the resulting bureaucracy would collapse under its own weight

good comment, yes, this is comforting to know.

Hell hath GNOME fury: Linux desktop org swings ax at patent troll's infringement claim

Re: Gnome vs Troll

"Gnomes" are generally tall, beautiful, dark-haired, light-skinned, immortal, and typically wise

Those are Elves. Gnomes are small and dirty.

ESA bigwigs: Euro Moon efforts are going the way they 'should' – which is to say not by 2024

"The best I can come up with is prodding for how they feel about the amount of resources that humanity spend on consumer entertainment."

I do that with banks: if you'd take 10% of the profit that banks make a year, you'd finance an Apollo program each year. Because people have a tendency to like their iToy, but everybody hates banks.

Masters of Puppet say: There's no magical one-size-fits-all answer to doing DevOpsery

Re: Cannot stop the Battery...

I accuse ElReg of clickbait. I didn't even read the article.

Tinfoil-hat search engine DuckDuckGo gifts more options, dark theme and other toys for the 0.43%

Re: Search engines are totally overrated

"meta search engines like AltaVista"

you must be confused: AltaVista was the first modern search engine, they (well, DEC) invented the concept of web crawler. They "lost" to Google because the classifying algorithm of Google was better, it returned sites that were more relevant. That was before Google had their IPO. It's after that that they went evil.

Re: I am genuinely surprised that their market share is so low.

around 99 % people don't give a fuck about ads

but then, how does Google make billions ? It's a real question, I don't understand the business model.