Posts by FrankAlphaXII

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Its trivially easy to do that just by asking it normal questions too.

The price of software freedom is eternal politics

On Linux, which I don't use personally every day but use a lot as we support at work, I've pretty much constantly been using Wayland since it was Fedora's default on my work and home PCs.

At home, I use it on an AMD based system with a recent X3D Ryzen CPU and a Radeon GPU and a ton of memory (need more storage though) I don't notice a performance difference between Wayland and X.org. To be fair though my system is pretty beefy so I doubt I'd notice anything.

As far as the Politics go, we've always had Stallman and the FSF. You may not agree with their politics but you're still using something that has GNU software on it somewhere in your daily life, or GPLed software in general. If this project is technically worth it, the politics don't matter, but introducing two serious bugs, allowing RCE because of course, doesn't bode well.

British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

A shame

I don't know anything about the guy, but 42 is far too damn young. That's my generation and peer group.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

As an Emergency Management professional, I hope people are individually prepared because King Cheeto won't do shit except say how great he is for authorizing some paper towels for brown people.

You get what you vote for.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

So its just a thin client but tied to one vendor? Noone's going to buy this thing. At least noone with sense.

Arm reckons it'll own 50% of the datacenter by year's end

Re: Maybe, but not this year

>In my career, the worst I was ever paid to do was support an entire Linux environment from a Windows pane of glass

I've had to do that before and it's extremely unpleasant, I've also had to do the reverse which is almost as bad, and to this day I don't get why we were doing things that way at either org, both should have really known better, hell one of them used to even develop a commercial UNIX, and sells products with both Windows and Linux, so you'd really think they'd know better and that the way they were doing things wasn't even sub-optimal and was just simply inane, but nope.

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

Re: There's a pretty good argument here

I think that's too complex for most juries to understand so if it might go to trial I wouldn't base a case around it. For something that's likely going to never be heard by a jury, maybe, but it would depend on the judge.

I'm not a lawyer but I am really unlucky and wind up on jury duty every couple of years, and usually for complex civil stuff like this too, my last trial took 3 1/2 weeks. I can guarantee you at least 3 people on a jury, enough to cause a mistrial, will not understand the argument at all. Trying to explain that in a jury room to someone who isn't technical would be exceptionally difficult.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: What about...

Beat me to saying it. While the days of writing in Assembly are over, it would be nice if taking shortcuts and running to stackexchange wasn't the default.

Mysterious Palo Alto firewall reboots? You're not alone

Re: "special network traffic"?

It's probably WoL Magic Packets or Bogons that the firewall is confusing itself about, but don't let that irritate the skin under your tinfoil hat.

If NSA or the MSS (*not* Chinese APT subcontractors, the MSS itself) is breaking into your firewalls you'd likely never know unless they wanted you to.

WD told to pay half a billion in patent damages before biz splits

Re: "SPEX has no visibility into WD's reorganization"?

Oh Hard Drive, up yours! No hard drive no more!

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

Correct, Falcon Shores is/was the AI GPU. The successor to Battlemage is supposed to be Celestial and after that, Druid. We'll see if they happen but that was the plan anyway.

VMware users gripe over 3-year commitment to renew licenses

Re: There's a theme here

Don't know why they're downvoting you, because honestly if I had the skill I'd be burning the midnight oil on making a migration tool for other Hypervisors precisely because Broadcom does not care about SMB, it never has. It never will.

There's real opportunity here, and I'd say that's not limited to just SMB, even among the big players that Broadcom does want to fuck over long term (like what they did with CA), are probably at least glancing at the exits especially if they dealt with that previous acquisition.

Musk and Trump to fall out in 2025, predicts analyst

The AI "art" has got to stop. Neither Leon nor Trump are from Thailand, and in Leon's case the Thai government isn't his biggest fan.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

Something something rats and ships

Sketchy financials send Supermicro auditors running for the hills

Well I mean they could bite, get fucked over by AI Enron, then come back as Accenture like Arthur Andersen did, right?

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

I hate this article

I had successfully blocked ndiswrapper out of my mind, like it never happened. Then I read the name written here and it all came flooding back.

Bank fines HPE's financial services arm in India

Such a huge loss for HP

12k? So like 6 seconds of profit or one Z8 with all the bells and whistles. That'll sure show 'em.

SAP CTO bows out over 'incident' at company shindig

He got confused, someone told him SAP skull-fucks their customers, and hard, and he thought it wasn't just a turn of phrase so he tried it.

There's a CTO out there somewhere with an eye-patch, quite a story, and the obligatory NDA.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Re: Landing at 0003 EDT

You do realize that's only 22:03 here, right?

They're landing it in literally the middle of nowhere at a secure facility. There's a lot of that here. The media don't normally care enough but they can usually get access to the Range Control on the main post to see the landing while it's being carried out. This isn't the first rodeo for something landing from space. Especially for this, since its been such a total goatfuck there will very likely be someone from the Las Cruces Sun News, Alamogordo Daily News, Albuquerque Journal, and Santa Fe New Mexican, as well as our two bigger NPR affiliates, KUNM and KRWG. Local media will be all over this.

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

Surprised they're not saying that it's not just wrong, it's downright Communist.

Beijing's attack gang Volt Typhoon was a false flag inside job conspiracy: China

Sure NSA attacks stuff, but occam's razor. It's a whole lot less likely the alphabet soup attacked itself than a Chinese APT. It doesn't pass my bullshit detector anyway.

Google to push ahead with Chrome's ad-blocker extension overhaul in earnest

Re: Use Privoxy and a customized hosts file ..

Don't forget to enable the repo! But not the one that's on the horribly formatted Google translated web page, you gotta get this one from a forum post buried 50 pages deep in a thread of neckbeards saying RTFM.

Adobe users just now getting upset over content scanning allowance in Terms of Use

If it touches their servers it sounds like it's fair game for them to steal your work.

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

Re: If you want a fancier desktop setup why run Open?

For Unixlikes ever since my preferred Linux for servers decided to be no more because of corporate greed, I've been using and maintaining a whole lot of Free and OpenBSD, but I can't think of any of the OpenBSD machines having a GUI or a need for one. The smaller the attack surface the better, that's the whole point, and for where I work that's extremely important.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

A little (potential) context

I live in New Mexico. In Albuquerque specifically. While I'm not sure what the exact reason is I can guess they're anticipating funding cuts from less money being made from the Permian Basin's oil and gas extraction which is affecting education across the State.

Don't make education funding dependent on something variable like fossil fuel extraction, folks, it's a pretty bad idea.

State may also anticipate losing a lawsuit over a murder one of their Basketball players committed in Albuquerque (State is in Las Cruces) at UNM in December 2022 that may result in a little penny pinching.

Europe's Ariane 6 rocket rated 'ready to rumble' after passing hot fire test

Its in everyone's interests that there's competition, the more the better really.

Ariane was the just about the only thing that kept ULA and it's predecessors "honest" (in the typical twisted defense contractor manner of speaking "honest") for a long time before anyone thought SpaceX was a serious competitor.

And if I'm not mistaken the JWST was launched on an Ariane 5, so it's not like there's no US interest in the ESA's programs just regardless.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

Amazing that it doesn't sound like it's changed at all in 20 years. I started my career in school

IT. I immediately realized it was a clownshow and for all the reasons you described.

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

Re: Just use Firefox

Been saying this since 2003 but it's screaming into a Galactic void at this point.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

That's precisely what I was going to say, except I'd go one further and say about 30 years but I pay a lot of attention to ISAs.

ARM has been the "next big architecture" since about the Archimedes. I also remember when PowerPC, Alpha, and IA-64 were all going to "replace" x86 at one time or another.

I dunno about you but it's been a long time since I've seen an Itanium or an Alpha in the wild.

Having read the room, Unity goes back to drawing board on runtime fee policy

Re: It's a shame, really

Unity isn't open source. Like at all. It's always been proprietary.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

Re: Really?

We already have it on FreeBSD and its decent. It's not that difficult to get working with a DE either, I use Wayland with KDE as my daily driver on that OS if I'm using a GUI there anymore actually. OpenBSD is working on it from what the article says, it'll probably wind up being the same way over there but I can't speak to it.

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

He's likely talking about the SCCM clientside software manager. My employer only has Chrome and Edge listed in it as well, but Firefox and one of the un-trademarked Firefox rebrands is permitted and they get used fairly frequently, not least by me.

Re: ODFO, alphagoo.

Probably the most upset and irritated I've ever seen your writing here Jake. And you've been around here about as long as I have so that says quite a bit.

Regardless, I agree that trying to rewrite the rules to enforce a monopoly and browser monoculture is foolish. I don't think it's going to work, as soon as Google gets distracted you'll never hear another word about it. What worries me is a more focused company that doesn't kill its projects like it's going out of style doubling down on this.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

Re: an 'el cheapo' no-support license for RHEL?

Not to defend IBMhat but they do have free licenses for RHEL for developers that you can use for non-production machines. It's definitely no replacement for CentOS but it does exist.

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

Re: Opensolaris anyone?

It's not quite the same, Oracle decided they didn't want to do it anymore so the community forked it into Illumos and OpenIndiana. It's still a thing. OpenZFS is a Illumos project if I'm not mistaken.

This is more IBM being belligerent toward a community that pretty much worked as free advertising for RHEL for a long time to squeeze a couple bucks out of the community. I don't know how many times I sold RHEL because I had the client try out CentOS, now if I'm doing something stable where Fedora isn't appropriate but FreeBSD is overkill, it's mostly Debian derivatives like Ubuntu that I wind up using, and I'm not their biggest fan so it says a lot. I wish I trusted Oracle enough to use theirs but I don't.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

That's pretty much how I see it too.

Those of us who can and care to may want to consider donating to the SFLC. They're likely going to need it, fighting IBM over this and whatever else they try and do is going to take forever and cost a fortune, think SCO v. The World writ even larger.

I really wonder what Oracle is going to do here since isn't their Linux basically just RHEL with Oracle branding?

Double BSD birthday bash beckons – or triple, if you count MidnightBSD 3.0

Re: OpenBSD is intentionally limited...

Try that on a Windows, Linux or FreeBSD machine and its about the same, there's a lot of overhead with OSes that don't have their existence predicated on security. Which isn't very surprising as Theo and Co make it a point to have the smallest attack surface as possible OOB. I'm not a fan of his personally but I do have a lot of respect for OpenBSD though I don't tend to use it unless I need something highly secure without much fucking around with it (there's always going to be some, even with how secure it is by default), FreeBSD has long been my UNIXlike of choice with Fedora and RHEL a close second and third but there's a time and a place for something like OpenBSD.

IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties

I give them another 3 to 5 years

They still have some parts they can sell to Lenovo though its getting to be mighty slim pickins.

Re: Kyndryl has started up a dedicated ServiceNow practice

With snow it may as well be the same thing. I feel like Im being beaten with a cable every time I use it. Its a miracle anything actually gets done.

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

Re: Nothing new here

Its called Binning and they most certainly still do it. It saves them money by being able to sell a processor that they'd otherwise have to destroy. I don't know how common it is for other manufacturers but I know Nvidia does the same and Id imagine Samsung and TSMC do it as well.

Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices

Fuck the Koch drones but

Fuck the Commonwealth of Massachusetts too.

Big question is what else were they doing with the data and who else had access to it? I'm quite sure DPH were willing to hand over any data that was requested to the Staties, Boston or Springfield Police because thats how it works there. Same with UMass. And the joint Commonwealth-DHS Fusion Centers. And DSS or whatever they call it now.

Massachusetts has never seen an invasion of privacy that it didn't like and as much as I abhor conservative SIGs I really don't trust the Commonwealth with anything like this because they use whatever they can get to fuck with people.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Tonight's Headline

Its the same in the US. If the State or US Attorney wants to prosecute, they will whether the victim wants to do so or not.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: But there's a 486 in the Hubble telescope.......

Its probably on an ancient version of an RTOS called VTRX. There are other Electro-Optical and Synthetic Arperture Radar satellites looking the other direction which use it as well which is why I'm not getting into detail here, but its a known quantity.

Google delays execution of doomed Chrome extensions

Re: How does this affect filtering?

I can bet some of them probably won't work when they switch over. However, If the addon developers are any good they'll have been testing against chromium builds with the new version of manifest and it should work. I would fully expect something to not work though, have a failover ready for a few days. That's just good advice in general but whenever software like this gets changed, shit breaks unexpectedly. And its always the worst possible component that there's no good workaround for.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

Its funny, when I was in school for networking (Dual enrollment my senior year of high school, we did Net+ and A+ and started MCSE) around 2002 they were using the OSI model to teach TCP/IP.

The first 3 Command and Conquer games had IPX/SPX LAN networking, the 4th one, Red Alert 2 may have had it as well but everything I was doing was TCP/IP by then.

I think the first Starcraft and first two Warcraft games also may have had it but I know for a fact that Command and Conquer did.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Re: Seventy-one in six years?!?!?

That's the point. They're asset stripping. It's Icahn and TWA all over again. I'm sure it'll be a model for every Harvard MBA to follow for years to come.

They're more fucked for the apparently systemic securities fraud than anything. Which is complete bullshit, people are more important than lying about sales to gild the garmets of some Ivy League MBA business criminal cabron, but Wall Street don't ever care about the people getting hurt, only how their stack of money may have been affected by one of their own kind.

I'm sure they'll sell more parts of themselves to Lenovo, maybe mainframes this time, especially since it's a toxic asset with a securities fraud investigation surrounding it.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Fair and Balanced

I must say all of the criticism in this article is all very fair and they're all things I've either seen myself or didn't see directly but helped out with remotely.

The only issue is that I have to disagree with saying Pop!_OS a niche, barely used distro with noone working on it because of System76 having paid employees working on it and the fact it comes pre-installed on their notebooks and workstations. HP's even about to start selling a workstation (it's basically a ZBook Studio 15 without the 300 dollar Windows 10 for Workstations tax) in the US called the Dev One that has it pre-installed as well.

I especially liked the bit about trusting Oracle more than IBMhat because at the moment I do. And if you look at my comment history I trust Oracle about as much as a Politician so there's not much faith there. IBM gets even less. Wonder how long it'll take them to sell Red Hat to Lenovo.