Posts by jake

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Re: One day at a time

Virginia Colony was BRITISH, not American.

After declaring Independence, it was renamed The Commonwealth of Virginia ... and Governor Thomas Jefferson moved the Capitol to Richmond, for defensive reasons.

Re: Democracy

"The republicans are not getting their way due to democracy, they are getting their way because of expressly antidemocratic means"

I would go as far as to say it's through unAmerican means.

Re: Theocracy

"A clear majority still believe in god."

Even if you change that to "a god"[0], I'm not 100% convinced it is true. I know several people who go through the song an dance of attending services, but have made it clear (outside their place of worship) that they don't believe in that claptrap at all. They just attend to keep a family member (or members) happy.

[0] You don't seriously think everybody believes in the same god, do you?

Re: Democracy

Slight correction, basically the supreme court said that health care is a political matter, not a medical matter.

Re: US of a holes

Presumably different laws in that Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales.

Re: Hey Mr Taliban, tally me trimesters

"But at least the religious traditions of the puritan minority are still embraced 300years later."

Not here in the US they aren't. Unless you can point me at a large, very well hidden group of the CofE sect here in the US.

What's that? You didn't know the Puritans were hard-core CofE?

Isn't that wonderful special.

Re: Hey Mr Taliban, tally me trimesters

"And whose first act was to execute a women for being an evil Quaker?"

That would be the British folks known as the Puritans, right? It certainly wasn't the Americans, because there weren't any yet ... Mary Dyer was hanged over 100 years before America even existed. Not too many years after that, most of that particular sect had fucked off back to England.

It cracks me up every time you Brits claim the US was founded by the Puritans. In reality, on this side of the pond the Puritans were a very unimportant sub-culture by 1776. If you look at facts, not a single one of our Founding Fathers was a Puritan. In fact, many of them spoke out against organized religion partially because of the Puritans ... If anything, the American Revolution happened in part to rid ourselves of such bullshit (sadly, we're not done yet).

On the other hand, I think if you look into it you'll discover that the Puritans ran England for a lot of years. For example, did you know that seven of the ten initial core group that became The Royal Society were Puritans? The Puritans never ran the United States, but they DID run England for many years. The effects are still visible.

Re: Canada

Yeah. The very vocal minority needs to be called on the carpet. Things have gotten way out of hand. The Founding Fathers (who almost to a man were not exactly pro-religion, and for very good reasons) would be appalled at all this un-American activity.

What ever happened to separation of church and State, anyway?

Re: Theocracy

"Moving steadily down the road to establishing a Christian theocracy."

Not going to happen. The number of practicing xtians in the US has been dropping steadily since the 1950s. Only around 20% of Americans bother to attend weekly services for ANY religion, not just xtianity.

"There'll be modesty laws for woman within our lifetime"

There already are. Consider that in most places it's OK for men to wander around topless ...

This thread will probably get contentious.

Please do not feed the trolls.

Thank you.

Re: Yes, I am ashamed of my country

You are not alone.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

You must be very new to computers, Martin.

Re: Manager and Cashier

Unconventional means?

In what world is theft and trafficking in illegal stuff "unconventional"?

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

"There's no need, ever, for the term UVEPROM"

So little use, in fact, that in all the years I've been using them (early '70s), this is the first time I recall seeing that term.

"Kind of makes a person wonder what the hell they actually do."

Check the CCTV footage (Megage? Gigage?) and issue traffic citations would be my guess.

One wonders what will happen when ...

... major governments of the world discover that when BigHighTechGossipMonster deletes all that personal data that they have been illegally hoarding for the last couple decades, all that really gets deleted is the current working copies. The carefully curated off-site backups live on forever, in all their redundant glory, just as they were designed to do.

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

Now hang on ... Linkedin is useful for something!

I've been dropping resumes/c.v.s that mention Linkedin into the shredder for about a dozen years now. IMO, including such a link is nothing more than laziness on your part, and I don't hire lazy people.

Remember, your resume/c.v. is a paper representation of yourself. Treat it accordingly. Free hint: Have it proofread by several people who aren't brown nosers before you actually use it. I may be critical, but even I know that I can't proof my own work!

Re: Really?

Allsorts? His type is usually more interested in getting away with a couple handfuls of dolly mix.

_{Note to my fellow Yanks: don't bother trying to parse the above.}

Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'

"Real Soon Now."

Ah. So roughly half past the twelfth of Never, then.

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?

" I've yet to see any perl with comments."

Judging by the rest of your post, that's probably no great loss.

Xi Jinping himself weighs in on how Big Tech should deploy FinTech

As the rest of the world ::yawns:: in his general direction.

"Oh, bother." said Pooh.

Samsung fined $14 million for misleading smartphone water resistance claims

Re: Common sense...

It's not like you're new here ... why the sudden angst?

Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Re: repeat after me

"The Bruce Schneier book Applied Cryptography would be a great place to start learning about why "rolling your own" is probably not a very good idea."

FTFY

Re: Still better than others

Personally, I just hang a small BSD-based file server (only 4TB of RAID-5, YMMV) off my Great Aunt in Duluth's network connection[0]. Encryption of my choice. No fuss, no muss, and it always works when I want it to work, not when some provider with its head in the clouds wants it to work.

[0] Mirrored at a couple of other relative's homes.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: Internet vs Renitent

"The Internet was created to renitent (resist and survive)"

Oft repeated, but simply not true.The (D)ARPANET was just a research network designed to research networking. The "survives nukes" myth came about much later ... The cold, sad reality is that the only reason it was built to be resilient is because the available hardware was really, really flaky.

The networks that were designed to survive nuclear attack included the "Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network", or MEECN, and the prior "Survivable Low Frequency Communications System" or SLFCS. If you use an ounce of common sense, it only stands to reason ... no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable, and the Internet was not then, and still isn't securable.

Re: So, sit and enjoy a beer.

"With a bit of imagination you could say this is a story about fermenting hops."

That'd take quite the imagination indeed ... not a lot of fermentables in hops.

Re: Which means a bad actor could TAKE DOWN THE FREAKING INTERNET

Well, yes.

To be perfectly honest, perhaps not "take down the entire Internet", but it would be fairly easy to balkanize it for awhile.

Some say this has already happened, especially to the WWW.

I was online and doing work in that timeframe. I didn't notice anything amiss.

I was not using that new-fangled WWW-thingy. Do with that what you will.

" ... Large cloud providers have to manage a vast degree of complexity and moving parts, significantly increasing the risk of an outage."

To say nothing of the vastly increased size and scope of potential attack vectors.

Clouds are snake-oil.

"I submit that CDNs as implemented are breaking The Internet."

Change that from "are breaking" to "have broken". But quite.

CISA and friends raise alarm on critical flaws in industrial equipment, infrastructure

Many decades ago, actually. Try connecting to the gear that monitors The Beam at SLAC, for example. Or the controls for the Stanford Dish. Or San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy water supply. Or rather, don't bother. You can't. Grad students wanted to hook 'em up to the 'net back in the late '70s or early '80s; the sane among us put the kibosh on their plans.

Commercial interests of today, however, are truly insane. We tugged on their capes, and were shrugged off. We tapped 'em on the shoulder & were elbowed away. We tugged on their shirts, and were thrust aside. Some even kissed their boots, and were trodden upon. Our message was always the same: "Please, PLEASE, **PLEASE!!** don't connect SCADA kit to publicly available networking systems!"

But did they listen? No. They did not. The idiots.

On the bright side, those of us with a clue are making a pretty penny in our retirement, cleaning up the resulting mess :-)

_{Yes, I know, I've posted this or similar before. It's still accurate.}

Re: Hmm

"They don't require air gapping, just no routing or NATting directly between the two networks. "

Out of curiosity, who are the networking rookies making these hair-brained decisions? I'd like to avoid them, if at all possible.

Re: Hmm

"A serial connection isn't technically a network connection..."

Excuse me? A serial connection is very definitely a network connection. So is everything than can be loosely grouped together under the mantle of "sneaker net".

HCL to end all support for old versions of Notes and Domino in 2024

What took 'em?

I ended all support for Lotus products in late '94. Haven't missed it a bit.

Never fear, the White House is here to tackle web trolls

Re: Finger-Wagging

Well, of course. Fear of a shortage of anything will set off a run on that thing.

See: Bog Roll.

Re: An already implemented step in protecting web citizens from white supremacists.

Wait ... are you really suggesting that offshoring tech support is part of a grand conspiracy to protect citizens from racists?

Huh. Here I thought it was all about saving money.

Re: Finger-Wagging

"A U.S. citizen cannot legally purchase an AUTOMATIC weapon."

Incorrect. You just have to dot the is and cross the ts in all the right places. Or you can purchase one made prior to 1898, none of which are considered firearms.

Yes, even in California.

Re: KHive?

No more than for any other religion.

Most of the politicians can both read and understand the constitution. Sadly, however, the electorate who put them into power (and keep them there, sometimes for decades) cannot.

Re: be careful what you wish for

"I would see the Martin Luther King speech but it is copyrighted"

That doesn't make it unavailable. If you used all three brain cells, you might be able to find a transcript of the original broadcast.

Try here.

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

Re: 'Fellowship' not 'Society'

The oatmeal is indeed tasty, and high quality (and pretty cheap, as far as food goes these days) ... but it has nothing to do with the RSoF. The name and logo were chosen simply because they evoked a mantle of trust with the general public.

Re: "If we find evidence of policy violations, we will take action"

This is Northern California. It's wine country. Of course you do.

Re: 'Fellowship' not 'Society'

There is always at least one person in every crowd who hates reality.

Ignore it, relax, and have a homebrew.

Japan makes online insults a crime that can earn a year in jail

Re: OK, I'll bite ...

Who appointed those people to be guardians of the online downtrodden? Likewise, who decides who is downtrodden online?

Busy-bodies are rarely thought of as being among society's finest ...

Re: "The world is full of fucking snowflakes."

Seeing as Godwin'e Law, in its entirety, reads "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.", where exactly would you fit in the words "snowflake" and "woke"?

Re: Maybe treat mental instead of hiding

Oh, don't be daft. Instead of treating the ill, we need to ban everybody. Or so the ultra-left wingnuts seem to think. The ultra-right would prefer to just shoot 'em.

The vast majority of people in the middle (you know, the normal people) would much prefer that anybody who needs medical help of any kind will get it.

Especially the wingnut whack-jobs on both sides, who need all the help they can get.

Re: I approve

Don't be silly. Of course they can.

What they can't do is teach religion. No loss, that.

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

Re: It's not dead.

Good idea ... he'd have a nice little fire to boil a pot of water on to make tea :-)

Re: It's not dead.

Wing windows weren't so much designed to bring fresh air in, as to exhaust cigarette smoke. It's a venturi effect thing. They also help with defogging the windscreen, and minimize buffeting when the main window is rolled down. All around lovely things, they should never have gotten rid of them.

Re: It's not dead.

"but kernel programmers SHOULD be involved in every aspect of web design"

Not going to happen. Most of us kernel coders are kernel coders partially because we don't want to be part of the corporate chaos.