* Posts by Zolko

1285 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2010

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Russia, hotbed of cybercrime, says nyet to ethical hacking bill

Zolko Silver badge

Edward Snowden

Anybody still remembering him ? This "article" is pure NSA/CIA/MI16/WTF propaganda. 20 years ago it was Ossama Bin Laden – remember him ? – who was the über-villain of them all. Now it's Russia again.

Just how dumb does this "author" think ElReg readers are ?

Suspected Chinese cybersnoop grounded in Italy after US tipoff

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Stupid enough to travel?

He didn't commit any crimes, it's only the US government that pretends that he committed crimes. The same US government that verifiably lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and killed hundreds of thousands of people in the process

What you're basically saying is that the US government has the right to arrest any person anywhere in the "free" World without warrant. It doesn't get more 1984 as this

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Zolko Silver badge

Re: "This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter."

USA mandates some bug/spyware into the source code of the Linux Kernel, [...] This code is open source

you mean than all the binary firmware blobs needed for the network cards are somehow open-source ? What good is a firewall if your first line of defense is a traitor ?

Zolko Silver badge
Big Brother

but they work in Chromium from my Linux laptop

remind-me who is behind Chromium ? Do you really think that ditching Microsoft for Google will improve someone's privacy ? As for Chromium being open-source, did you try to compile Chromium yourself ? It's quite an eye-opening discovery. Icon, obviously

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Rumors of X11's death are greatly exaggerated

He may have some valid technical points, but his attitude, presentation, and willingness to start fights with everyone...

I'm on such receiving side of a big open source project and my experience is that code is king and talk is cheap. Defaming people who write good code that doesn't fit in with some corporate agenda is a basic corporate tactic. What matters is that he writes good code, because that attracts other good developers who like good code and don't care about covid vaccines or LGBTQXYZ+ inclusivity.

Zolko Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Eddies around a sinking ship?

X11 has a long history of not being able to deliver what people needed

like what ?

Zolko Silver badge

Re: It would be “arcane and trivial” if the touchpad worked

As can be seen, individual data points aren't really very useful

they are if you understand what science is about : you only need 1 counterexample to prove that something doesn't work, but you need 100% of cases to prove that it works. If touchpad doesn't work out-of-the-box for 1 user on generic hardware, then I won't waste my time trying to use it because it might affect me. Also, if some standard touchpad doesn't work, what else will not work ? This was acceptable 20 years ago, but not in 2025 for a project that has been in development for 10 years. This stinks of corporate enshittification, like systemd ... which is also pushed by the same people.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

Axiom Mission 4 finally set for launch June 25

Zolko Silver badge

banana !!!!

Kapu Tíbor did reach orbit

How come that SpaceX is so good with the Falcon rocket and so abysmally bad with the Starship ?

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Maybe not drugs

Really? 4:20 is only US weed culture? Somehow I thought that would be more universal

so would anyone explain it now please ? I still have no clue what it means

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Skip "AI" results in firefox

because apparently people like it

I don't think that 99% of the people even noticed, and simply leave the defaults. So no, probably nobody actively likes it, people think this is the new "normal" and leave it at that. Heck, I see many people with the default desktop background wallpaper ! They don't seem to know that it can be changed

Zolko Silver badge

khtml -vs- Gecko

AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome

wait ... While Apple WebKit and Chrome are indeed based on KDE's KHTML, but Gecko is Firefox's html engine, so Apple WebKit it's not like Gecko at all

How would you suggest dealing with that in a proper way?

you should contact Huawei to tell them to correct such unforgivable mis-information.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Zolko Silver badge

Re: X11 over network connection

The Reg FOSS desk has been installing and supporting Unix boxes since 1988 and has never once needed or used X11 over a network connection

that's difficult to believe : you have never ever used "ssh -X ..." in your professional life ? Or do you mean something else by "X11 over network " ? We (in a public research center) use it every day.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Zolko Silver badge

!banana

What a progress they're making ! May-be that "banana for scale " joke wasn't such a good idea by the PR department

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Zolko Silver badge

your forgot the end of the citation : ... except for all the others that history has tested

Cyber weapons in the Israel-Iran conflict may hit the US

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Asymmetric vs metric

Russia can end this any time by going home

as you say, "can". But Russia can also continue and annihilate the Ukrainian neo-nazi Banderistas. The current death-toll is 20:1 in favor of the Russians, and rising. NATO doesn't have equivalent weapons, not in quality and quantity. Russia has all the elementary resources and the backing of the world manufacturing superpower, which happens to be its continental neighbor (therefore US aircraft carriers are sitting ducks for them and atomic submarines useless).

As for Israel –vs– Iran, there are 15 million Jews and 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, it's 100:1 in favor of Muslims. Like Ukraine, Israel has no chance. The US won't be able to help since they have donated most of their weapons stockpile to Ukraine, and they are facing an internal civil war if they insist. And if Israel chooses the Samson doctrine, then the Holocaust will look like a walk in the park in comparison of what awaits all the Jews in the world.

Nethaniaou will replace Hitler in the Jewish history.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Your statement of faith

we can't test the data

of course you can : a specific website had been set-up by the EU during the first covid infection (the SARS 1 : remember that Covid is SARS-2 ?), called European Mortality Monitor, EuroMoMo : https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps. Look for yourself, there was no overmortality whatsoever for ages 0 to 44, and standard winter overmortality for older agegroups.

You can also see statistics for the cruise ship Diamond Princess :

Reports of total deaths vary, reflecting difficulties in establishing causation, differing national approaches, and changes in total mortality as time went on. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine put the figure at 9. Between February and April 2020, Japanese government officials declared 13 fatalities from the ship, while one other person was evacuated from the vessel and died in Australia. In April 2020, the World Health Organization said there had been 13 deaths. All the dead were older passengers; none were from the crew

which means that it march 2020 we could scientifically know that the covid was harmless and posed a risk only for the elderly (>70)

Chinese spy crew appears to be preparing for conflict by backdooring 75+ critical orgs

Zolko Silver badge

Re: World Company

downvoting reality is a strange concept

Zolko Silver badge

Huawei founder says USA overestimates its semiconductor prowess

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Working where the energy is

doing the heavy work where the resources are is very smart ...

... and old-school. Aluminium processing is very electric-energy-hungry, and that's why Pechiney has installed a huge industrial facility in the middle of the Alps (Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne) where electricity is produced by hydroelectric plants. Direct from producer to consumer with minimum loss.

Fresh strain of pro-Russian wiper flushes Ukrainian critical infrastructure

Zolko Silver badge

Re: quote: the new blueprint for beginning wartime in the 21st century.

I'm sure the native population of Africa, North & South America and a large part of Asia would agree with you

Palestinians come to mind : why should the native Palestinians give place to European Jews because of Germany's crimes against Humanity ?

Take ChatGPT back to the 2010s and they’d think AGI arrived, says Altman

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Take it back earlier than that and they'd think it was God

that's just about all it is good for, and all it will ever be good for

I used to think like that, but "forever" is a very long time, many strange things can happen. I was surprised last week-end when my son, studying fundamental physics in university, said and showed me how he was using ChatGPT. I was really baffled.

What I'm really baffled by, though, is that it's free (as in beer)) : this is not possible, there must be some hidden agenda and we will have an unpleasant awakening when we find out how it's supposed to be paid-for.

Uncle Sam puts $10M bounty on RedLine dev and Russia-backed cronies

Zolko Silver badge

Pegasus

Anyone with information on foreign government linked associates of Rudometov, or their malicious cyber activities, or foreign government-linked use of RedLine malware, should contact Rewards for Justice via the Tor-based tips-reporting channel

that's a strange formulation : what about people using RedLine but without links to some foreign government ? Does this mean that using RedLine is legit if done by the US government ? And are non-state actors allowed to use RedLine ? What's the point on insisting so much on "foreign government-linked " wording ?

SpaceX resets 'Days Since Last Starship Explosion' counter to zero, again

Zolko Silver badge

Re: FAA Approvals

who else is there other than Elon ?

NASA ? Wait ... there was something about the NASA being DOGE-d by ... whom again ? Some unfortunate coincidence here

Zolko Silver badge

Re: FAA Approvals

But that top job friend doesn't like to be on the losing side, and this Starship thingy more-and-more looks like a tud

New Russian cyber-spy crew Laundry Bear joins the email-stealing pack

Zolko Silver badge

Re: маскировка

Russia wages sustained cyberwar and information warfare [...] Instead of confronting this reality ...

Hilarious. Ever heard about Edward Snowden : do you know where he lives now ? Ever heard about the Pegasus software : do you know what it does and who operates it ?

FAA gives SpaceX the nod for Starship Flight 9 but doubles the danger zone

Zolko Silver badge

Re: banana

And when will that happen : flight 42 ? The Soviets cancelled their N1 rocket after 4 failures ...

Zolko Silver badge

Re: banana

I understand that. But what I don't understand is : how is the next starship supposed to reach orbit with the current settings ? If they're not reaching orbit with an empty payload, how on Earth are they going to get enough momentum to reach orbital velocity with 50t of payload ?

Zolko Silver badge

banana

And all that to not even be able to put a single banana into orbit. I wonder when SpaceX engineers will tell Elon that its StarShip will never function as promised. And the US is supposed to land on the Moon in 2 years with that ?

Russia's Fancy Bear swipes a paw at logistics, transport orgs' email servers

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Still with the "goons"?

Ukraine is (rightfully) receiving a lot of European support

would you please give a link about which "right" you are referring to ? The EU treaties can't be those, nor any NATO alliance. So which tribunal did give the EU any right to finance any war whatsoever ?

I, on the other side, can prove that financing a neonazi regime that forbids local languages is explicitly against EU right. Try to remember what happened in France when they tried to combat Corsican or Basque regional cultures. Ukraine forbid – and is still forbidding – Hungarian and Russian languages, which is against European right. The sooner that neonazi regime is overthrown the better the world will be. That the Russians have to step in again to rid us of this plague is a disgrace. I hope they go all the way to Bruxelles and capture that Ursula von der Hyena.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Brown envelopes

I've worked in a bright young startup ...

... that failed. So why should anyone listen to your "advice" ? Of course I understand that you "claim" it was not your fault, but bragging about a failure and patronizing other people doesn't sound very convincing. In case you didn't know, AWS didn't start as AWS. Jeff Besos didn't ever imagine creating AWS, it is a byproduct (of Amazon's computer infrastructure designed for the 2 months before Xmas, and sitting idle the rest of the year)

I might take this more personally than necessary because yes, we're trying to create something in this area also.

Zolko Silver badge

It's why I like the whole Thorium idea

yeah, but you can't build nuclear bombs with its residuals. That's why Uranium was chosen during WW2 and the Manhattan project : because atomic bombs. Which only shows that those most opposed to nuclear energy are actually clueless about nuclear energy :

@Adair

we've got this technology for making very noisy explosions, but it's epically expensive—we really need some way to make it cuddly

no, it's the exact opposite. Nuclear was chosen for bombs, civil energy is a byproduct. As opposed to Thorium-based reactors that are only civilian, and were thus rejected. As a side-note : China has just finished a Thorium-based nuclear plant in the Gobi desert. I think it's still experimental though.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

Zolko Silver badge

1/2 banana

On order to increase the likelihood of success, I suggest SpaceX to reduce their ambitions and only try to lift half a banana. A full banana should be reserved for when the Raptor 3 engines are fully functional.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Picture of Elmo

Historically, that's a Roman gesture, and was used to show ones resolve : we're ready to die for the honor of victory. It was re-introduced by Mussolini in the 1920-ies with those exact references, references to the Roman honorable spirit. It was then found to be cool by the Nazis who decided to use it also. It's actually used by many organizations where people have to swear on their honor. You might notice that Hitler himself used a shortened version of that salute where he shortly raised his fore-arm only

CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.

Difference one: Big Bang is a mathematical solution

exactly, it's an intellectual solution : It is only a prolongation of a line of which Hubble has observed a local tangent, We happily extrapolate into the past more than 13 billion years, and somehow pretend that it all began at t=0 . In that, God (Yahve, Allah, Krishna, Zeus ...) is as good an explanation as a giant explosion

Difference two: Scientists are constantly testing whether something better is around, and there are some other things around which might be a better solution with more data. You cannot test your gods

nor can the scientist observe the BigBang. We can observe the remnants of the originel universe in the cosmiv microwave background that existed ... 380 000 years AFTER the BigBang. We have absolutely 0 (zero) proof of anything earlier as that, so very very very far away from the BigBang "singularity".

Difference three: No real scientists will say that that the big bang, aka singularity, is the only possible beginning, it is simply which currently fits best

you should study physics before saying such things. The current BigBang theory is in conflict with 2 scientific observations : where is anti-matter, and what is that "cosmic-inflation" thing ? Until you can explain those 2 fundamental pieces of the BigBang, that theory is simply false.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.

The effects of dark matter and dark energy are very much visible

no : dark matter and dark energy have been "invented " because our observations didn't fit our models. Dark matter was called upon because 2 observations didn't match (visible stars in- and rotation of- galaxies), and dark energy was called upon because it fitted well with Einsteins equations of general relativity and a "measured " flat universe. There is so much ad-hoc theories created ex-nihilo in these 2 concepts that no, we don't see any of their effects : there is nothing "dark " in the dark energy, it's only that our models don't fit our observations. This is as scientific as claiming that Zeus on Mount Olympus is creating lightnings and thunder because we don't understand static electricity.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.

I would formulate it rather like : what scientist call "Big Bang " is only a new name for "God " as that is what created the Universe. Why should "BigBang " be more scientific than "Yahve " or "Allah " is not obvious to me

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Zolko Silver badge

Re: I like

wanted to say that too. I played the Chuck Norris Flight Simulator in MS-Dos, and the flying and the missions were better than anything I have seen since. Of course, the 640x480 graphics are outdone today by 4K screens and ray-tracing, but the gameplay is unmatched.

Same for Gran Tourismo also: the PS2 version was amazing, difficult and addictive, while GT5 for PS4 is too easy. The jury is still out for GT6 on PS5.

OpenAI drafts Instacart boss as CEO of Apps to lure in the normies

Zolko Silver badge

She spent all her career annoying people by selling ads to unsuspecting users, and made millions doing that. Something is rotten in the kingdom of Internet

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Don't forget the non-monetary advantages

lets idiots decide policy, just because they kiss their Dear Leader's ass on a daily basis

we have that Kallas woman who fits quite well that description. We had that Baerbock lunatic but she is no more in Europe now (was promoted to world leader). We have the greens who, at the same time, promote electric vehicles and shut down electric energy sources. We have Rutte and Stolenberg who ruin Europe to please the US deep state (North Stream anyone ?)

So unfortunately we have as many idiots – or more – deciding politics than anywhere else. I'd take a Vance over a von der Leyen any day.

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

Zolko Silver badge

Re: My ads are from phishers

I use YouTube ONLY in the browser to not see the ads (Firefox + uBlock Origin)

Open source text editor poisoned with malware to target Uyghur users

Zolko Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Who could possibly be behind this ...

... new wave of unverifiable propaganda ?

What I've read is that some/many Uyghur Islamist extremists are part of the ISIS califate operating in Syria and Iraq. That they have been set-up by the CIA to counter China, the same way as the Taliban were set-up by the CIA to counter Russia in Afghanistan.

First Nvidia, now AMD: Trump trade turmoil threatens $800M in China chip sales

Zolko Silver badge

Re: The EU could play that game as well

if I could just give up Coke

did you try Guarana ?

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Science is now settled

Pi = 3

no π = 22/7

TSMC blew whistle on suspected verboten exports to Huawei – that may cost it $1B+

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Question...

US suppliers won't be able to do business with them and they'll be fucked

well, that's not so clear : who's going to be fucked if TSMC is banned in the US ? Imagine that TSMC gives the middle finger to US sanctions : where will Apple, Nvidia, Amazon ... get all the CPUs that their business entirely depends on ? The rest of the world could still buy TSMC's chips, it's only the US customers who will be cut off. It seems to me that TSMC has the longer lever in this story, but they choose NOT to use it.

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

Zolko Silver badge

The election was fair, so how do you explain this huge victory for the republicans ? I see this as entirely the democrat's fault for bringing such bad candidates to the elections. One senile patriarch of a corrupt family, and one so shallow that even the democrats wanted to get rid of her. How is this the fault of Trump if the democrats are unable to promote good candidates ?

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Hmm

Anyway, how does an attached lid make it harder to unscrew ?

reading helps:

I now have to open the lids of water and drinks bottles for my wife

do you know the difference between unscrew and open ? Because with these idiotic bottles, once the lid is unscrewed the bottle is still not open, not open in the sense that you can actually drink from it. The lid gets in the way when you try to pour water into a glass without spilling half of it over the table, or in your nose when you try to drink from it directly. And this without considering that it's more difficult to really close the lid because many times the lid is screwed but not hermetically closed, leaking the liquid in your bag or car. And all that for a piece of plastic that represents ~5% of the waste, meaning that 95% will still be thrown in the nature.

I'm more afraid of the European lemmings who blindly follow orders from the corrupt von der Hyena than of Trump, Putin and Xi combined.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Zolko Silver badge
Big Brother

1984

We have always been at war with Eurasia

Didn't anybody tell the UK regime that that book was a fiction, not some political manual ? Icon, obviously

Brits to build ExoMars landing gear after Russia sent packing

Zolko Silver badge
Pirate

cooperation between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos was suspended

why ? Cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos is still continuing (with the ISS for example) so why did Europe suspend all cooperation with Russia ? It seems to me that some people are overly zealous in self-immolation to show support of the Ukrainian Bandersitas. That actually also includes penguinista emperor Torvalds who dismissed Russian kernel hackers without reason (apart from said self-immolation)

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Zolko Silver badge

If this is black text on white background with anti-aliasing, then this won't work because you'll get some weird white-is contour around the letters

Zolko Silver badge

Krita

I've heard that Krita is supposed to be even better photo editor than GIMP. I've tried to use it (Krita) but the logic is again very different from Gimp and I couldn't do the simplest of things. How do they compare in real life ?

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