Posts by Flat Phillip 102 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Dec 2010
I'm generally happy with running GNOME on Wayland. The weird odd bugs are old history for me now.
The one reason why I run GNOME on Xorg is for Teams, specifically when there is a presentation on. I know this is more of a Teams problem rather than a Xorg/Wayland problem but that is, unfortunately, the collaboration tool of choice of my employer. I haven't tried Teams on Xwayland on Wayland; perhaps that will work.
I agree with Kuhn, get rid of software patents.
They are a curse on the industry as they don't promote innovation and remove it because, for example, anyone looking at doing something new and seeing a patent thicket (nice term) is going to give up.
They are all about big large companies locking in their advantage.
A lot of the distributions frown upon having "embedded libraries". That is where you have your program in a package and it brings its own special version of libssl or something else along with it.
It's not 100% perfect but when there is a vulnerability for a particular library once it's updated it is done; no need to work out where else has this same library that will also need updating.
It doesn't work too well with modified libraries where the binary maintainer has their own special version with modifications they added to the library. Generally this is a bad idea as there are better ways of getting the same outcome.
So what you are saying is they released software based on a license they didn't understand or they have basically reneged on something they previously released.
You can't blame Stallman and FSF for this; either it is open source (and people are free to make money off the software) or it's not. It's not exactly some strange side-effect or loophole. It is right there, item #6 of the Open Source Definition.
My take is Elasticsearch has seen the $$$ AWS makes and gone... we want some of that action.
Doesn't even need a fake US ID, any counties will do.
"This looks like a legitimate Elbonian drivers license so you're all good to go on our cloud, Amanda Hugankiss"
The real worry is yes, another database to track people with. Also, depending on how small they go with the order, how good is the provider's security for that data?
It's a reasonably reliable sign, especially during the dot-com days.
If they started to muck around with coffee or fruit or whatever, it was time to either burn down your leave or find another contract. It didn't mean things were going bad tomorrow, but you had fair warning.
I live in one of those locations where it is ready for service (passed the RFS date in March) but... well its not quite orderable yet.
So the website helpfully says
YOUR AVAILABILITY
SERVICE AVAILABLE
and then:
There’s still work to do before we connect your premises.
So, using their own statistics, which are more about stretching the truth then reporting what is actually happening, am I one of the 50% that is ready for service or the 50% that is not?
There were two parts that to me seem to be Comcast using the weasel-words.
First, they won't hand over individual data, that doesn't mean it won't be sent in aggregate and who knows how small those "buckets" get. Also it has been shown many times you get enough aggregate data you can sometimes work out who someone is.
The opt-in can of course be covered by 5 scrolling pages of "EULA yada yada" style opt-in in the future, so its all good.
It's Comcast right? We all know how this will end.
You would think given this is a highly public event with some data privacy contraversy floating around it that they would know someone would try something like this.
There are methods to help against DDOS usually using some sort of service provider.
I think the days of "we didn't think it would happen to us" or "we didn't expect it that big/that way" are long gone.
It will be all ok because of those safeguards, you know the ones that:
* Try to take down sites using 127.0.0.1
* Remove Debian CDs because they were CDRs
* Tried to nail someone because they were using bittorrent to get valgrind
It seems the rush to find the pirates there may be a somewhat liberal interpretation of what a safeguard is. The hint is, its not "some crap we made up so you all ok about us which we will ignore".
Still it's nothing new; I'm sure there were such things happening in the high seas in Ye Olde Days where some ships that was unknown and/or suspect got taken out.
Obviously this weasel is part of the Cyber Squirrel conspiracy. While they don't have a break-down of all their agent types and only list successful attacks by Squirrels, bird, raccoons etc, I'm sure it was them.
You can find out what other successes they have had at http://cybersquirrel1.com/
A penguin is a bird, right? (277 successful missions so far)
You do recall correctly. People may want to rewrite the history but Qt around the time Gnome and Gtk started was quite hostile to open source. It was that typical "we'll call it open source but you play by our rules" attitude.
The competition of Gtk definitely put some pressure (but would not be the only reason) to open up Qt; it's all ancient history now but doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Yeah, 25 years seems about right. I was an employee of Dick Smith back then. Half of us had electronic interests and you could see things changing. While there was a full complement of electronic components, there was this temptation to go into consumer electronics because that's where the cash was (Telephone Answer Machines and My kids first computer)
Move forward a few years and noone had any idea and electronics components were those under-stocked annoying things in the corner nobody cared about. I stopped going and went to plays like JB or online instead.
Strangely enough, Jaycar hasn't changed terribly much and is still going.
I suspect the admin had the best of intentions at the time. There was a time email was newish and he probably thought he was helping people out by fixing typoed email. I doubt he was thinking it would be a problem getting work related emails and sending them on their way.
Me? I'd nuke it and then consider if I want a catch-all anymore. Maybe just check the mail logs and add some alias for some common problems. It is easy to be the armchair general with hindsight though.
Not really hard to send stuff from 895M addresses; you can build programs that send it from just over 4 billion addresses. Now; if they were sending it from more than 5 billion addresses and using IPv4 then I'd be impressed.
I'm surprised source IP filtering is still not in yet (and yes I'm quite aware of some of the pitfalls of it). Doesn't make sense for consumer type lines and for the vast majority of commercial ones too.
If only there was a large company filled with nerds that had a really good way to scan books. I'm sure they're not cutting up the library books for the project.
You do realise that in Australia there are essentially voting machines now? All the bits of paper get counted and then the numbers are sent to a central site and put into a computer, which then does things like send it to the media, update the website and ultimately give the results.
Sure, for simple cases you could pick up fraud, e.g. Voting booth A at electorate B voted 75% Party C, but the scrutineers with their samping might see it only 25% so it looks sus. For more subtle changes its harder, but for the lower house its the edge-cases that get more checks.
For senate (and the story was about the senate voting), good luck with that! There is in theory a 1:1 relationship between the number of bits of paper seen and the numbers that go into the computer but after that it gets hard real quick, especially when you get to the later preferences when the usual suspects have their quotas.
That's not to say I think AEC is fiddling the books, quite the opposite. I'm just pointing out there have been computers involved for quite some time.
The bigger problem is disenfranchising public from the senate voting because it's almost impossible for normal humans to vote how they want in the senate. Not really an IT problem though voting machines might help with the "tablecloth" but a change how the senate is elected would certainly help.
I was never sure, but I assume this is the retail provider, not the wholesale. For example I use the iinet/internode/tpgi borg as my provider which is the retail side but the DSLAM is Telstras, would that make my crappy internet a black mark against i/i/t or Telstra?
If it is based on retail, then it really is that Telstra provides crummy internet. I already know the internet is bad outside metro areas using Telstra wholesale, but then, who else would you use?
It doesn't have to be defamatory or wrong, it just needs to be old or not the current situation. The classic example being someone has gone bankrupt not payed his creditors etc and its reported in the paper. Fast forward a few years later and he is no longer bankrupt, debts are gone etc but you search for their name and the first few hits are those old reports.
The reports are true, just old.
The problem with this sort of law is what is old and what is not relevant? If I am a politician and have done some shady stuff a few years ago, should that data be "forgotten"? What about a hotel with bad reviews?
Also, if I don't like all the other Flat Phillips and want all the hits to be about me, why not just send in a report for all those other websites so I get the first hit on searching.
Actually the 96 cyber-attack thing sounds good at first, but depending what it is could be meaningless.
You'd expect someone such as Arbor or other DDoS mitigation company would have detected far more than 96. One security vendor (yes I know they have a drive to increase the number) is saying there were 25,000 attacks today.
Even if they discovered 96 attacks a day, I don't think 0.4% is that impressive for me to have my privacy routinely invaded.
During the times of creating the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) there was a lot of heated discussion around Fields of Endeavour. People were a little uncomfortable with Debian being used on.. certain things. The problem was those "certain things" varied from person to person. For some it could be genetic research, others it was military while there used to be licenses prohibiting software for CB radio (yes this last one actually existed).
In the end, there seemed to be no sensible way of a) working out and agreeing what was universally the "bad thing" and b) having a sensible way of limiting it that could go into a license or the DFSG. Debian now has item #6 as a result.
You're missing what he is talking about.
He is talking about the proposed wide-spread data retention scheme that may get introduced in Australia. That scheme will have 2 years of storage of anyone using the internet, to a point and with exceptions.
To get around that specific scheme, just have a Big Mac, or perhaps a Frappe and hook in to the wifi and use something like gmail. The spooks will know that someone in the Maccas accessed gmail but not who they were emailling.
Not exactly Mission Impossible stuff. Meanwhile everyone else using an Internet connection will have their data logged for 2 years all ready for the movie companies or hackers to gain access.
For those that don't understand metadata, EFF has a pretty good page about it at:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters
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