Posts by entfe001

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: How does that work?

IIRC (I've been no Windows user for many years now), Windows signed executables have an additional timestamping signature to attest when the file was signed. With it, the certificate chain is validated against the certified timestamp, provided it is properly signed itself. Executables without a signed timestamp, which I've seen sometimes, have its signature appear as invalid as soon as any of the certificates in its chain expire. Otherwise, the signature date is as trusted as the system used to make the signature.

Not sure what happens when it's the timestamping CA the one which expires.

Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes

Interesting recent addition to the repository

Just in case it is rage-deleted like the dllme.txt file, a full quote:

With all respect:

To The Register:

You all can go fuck yourselves, >:)

Have no life? well join The Register to hate on fucking everything!

Professional hating community? Accusing Free95 of being a prank? Yes!

Retarded fuckers :D!

Respectfully, A developer.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: Bookfingler

And the title should had been Bookflinger. Too late to correct now...

Bookfingler

An evil politician plans to tax to hell delivery services so only its national postal service can actually work. This control, furthermore, allows such politician to control what is delivered to whom, and intercepts whatever he decides is not fit for the population. Furthermore, he uses this massive control to decide which books can be distributed, favouring its own unpalatable works, which become best-sellers only because there's nothing more, which titles as appealing as "Let's march together to a brightful rainbow of controlled supplies avoiding extraneous poisoning ideas".

Then he comes and arch-multi-trillionaire who, despite the massive taxations, makes itself available in the internal national market, floods the marked with even cheaper literature (its massive hits are The Eye of Argon and Atlanta Nights). The evil politician enters in a rage fit, but the arch-multi-now-quintillonaire pays him a hefty sum and retires. The arch-multi-infinitillionaire rules the country, and the neighbouring ones too by the way.

Then Bond enters in a book shop, buys a book and gets the lady cashier for a nookie. You know, because Bond has to appear sometime in the movie.

Odds of city-killer asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth creep upward

Re: 1.2%, 1.8%, 2.4%, 2.8%-3.1%

So far, we are discarding improbable zones where the asteroid would miss us, this is a normal consequence of reducing the uncertainty window. As long as we keep narrowing the possible trajectories, there will be less in total, and as long as Earth is included the chance will rise. Once one of these successive narrowings excludes us, chance will drop to zero.

It's as simple as seeing it as a division between the trajectories that would hit us, which will be more or less constant while there's a collision path as a possibility, and the total amount of possible trajectories the asteroid could make, which gets reduced by further observations. For x / y, if we keep decrementing y while x is kept constant, the result will increase gradually either until x = 0, a confirmed miss, or until y = x, aka we're doomed.

For a 3% chance it means that x / y = 0.03 → x = 0.03 * y → y = 33.333*x. If we further discard an area of misses equivalent of 8.3333 earths, we'll have y = 25*x → y / x = 25 → x / y = 1 / 25 = 0.04 = 4%

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

This in Spain would be illegal, as by law waiting times cannot exceed three minutes for 95% of the received calls

Snake Keylogger slithers into Windows, evades detection with AutoIt-compiled payload

I understand the good practice of masking URLs to avoid accidental clicks, but what's gone on this article goes beyond stupid.

While one could even justify the filename[.]ext cases due to the chance some TLD with the same extensions may exist, censuring both protocol and domain name for checkip.dyndns.org, a page which content is the LESS suspicious one can find on the whole Internet seems way farfetched.

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Re: Or ....

Should I stockpile on towels or it's still too soon?

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Re: Why does it need Linux?

We have Linux on PDF.

Linux can run DOSBox.

DOSBox can run Doom.

Can't wait for it.

...yes, I'm well aware of the graphical display requirement for DOSBox, but I am aware of libcaca too.

Time to stop this train of convoluted thinking. It's just monday.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

In the modern digital landscape, data has become one of the most valuable commodities. With the rise of big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, the collection and utilization of private data have reached unprecedented levels.

I have to admit, Copilot is surprisingly well programmed: it deliberately omitted mentioning its own master in a derogatory-toned sentence.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

Re: Done it

So exactly the same keybindings

Re: Done it

Shift was for running and Alt for sideways moving in both Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone. Never played Doom (was and still am not very fond of satanic themes) but I guess the keys may be the same.

Floppy discs still run a U.S. metro? Japan steps in with 'project kill floppy'

Re: Typical Theater

One thing is a device which should or must not fail, because if so puts real lives in danger (for example, anything related with aeronautics, either planes themselves or air traffic control), and another one that, in case it fails, brings down everything in a controlled manner so any potential life-threatening risks are cancelled. This is the case of the railway industry where, excluding exceptional circumstances like a fire in a tunnel, a stopped train will not pose any danger to anyone or anything and is an acceptable result; a plane stopping mid-air is a huge no-no.

This notwithstanding the need to avoid failures: here in Barcelona we had some memorable rail traffic control failures that completely grind to a halt the whole wide gauge network, one of them because a hard disk failed and there was no RAID configuration. That was a huge chaos, but no lives where in danger... other than the IT responsible for the crashed machine

Re: Typical Theater

Actually, a proper dead man's brake will require for the pedal to be periodically lifted and depressed again, to detect the cases where a fainted driver keeps the pedal down or it being deliberately depressed using a weight to avoid the annoyance; the quote exposes the reason

The frequency of this operation also varies depending on the rail network according to potential risk, ranging typically from a minute or two for intercity trains to less than 10 seconds for tramways

FCC slaps Verizon with $1M fine for dropping 911 calls, again

Less than an hour's profit fine for an outage lasting almost two hours even with recurrence aggravation... this is not even a slap, it's just an operation tax!

Microsoft makes it harder to avoid OneDrive during new Windows 11 installs

Nice move

Just when the EU have their eyes upon the forced Teams bundling with a prospective 10% gatekeeper fine, let's force another product to earn a second record fine! What could go wrong?

Airbn-bye: Barcelona bans short-term apartment rentals for tourists

I suffer this problem

I do live in Barcelona in a building where there are currently three flats operating for tourists fairly near a very well known landmark, so the pressure is really high on the neighbourhood.

Besides the skyrocketing prices (if I wasn't living in a property flat bought many years ago when they were still affordable I couldn't live there at all), another problem from tourist flats is one of noises and other misbehaviours. Loud night parties are a rule on these flats, and for those who have to work for a living it's a issue if you can't sleep well. Local police are routinely called but they never come.

However, this move will mean absolutely nothing, because all three flats are unlicensed and no measure at all has ever been taken to remedy them. For two of them the owner should be fined, but either they are not or the fines are being passed as a "operation tax" if fines are not high enough.

The third one is more problematic: the law only relates to landlords who directly operate them, but this is actually on a long term rent and those are who actually re-rent the flat as a touristic. In this scenario they're operating in a void of law: the owner is off the hook on this because his rent contract is allowed, and there is no provision for renters who re-rent: only the owner could do something, but if this assures him that rent will be paid and a bit more, he has no real incentive at all.

Furthermore, this coming from a mayor who, on the tenure of his own strong opposition to this kind of drastic measured when the former mayor pursued them (Ada Colau, you may have heard of her and her strong position against massive tourism), and the quite long term of the effective application of the measure, gives me zero confidence that that will take effect, not even if it would be effective.

Meanwhile, the insomnia days have already begun.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

Re: Linux/BSD is worse

Speaking about Google, I remember when Hangouts was a thing (is still?) that I was required to install some .deb to run it under Linux. That might've been about 10 years ago...

Before installing, I decided to take a look at the control files, and particularly post_install scripts

They installed a small crontab which, every fricking hour, checked whether a line in APT's sources.list existed for Google's repository and, if not, it added it. If I hadn't looked, I'd ended with a system where even if I removed Google's apt lines (which I would definitely had done), they would keep reappearing

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

Re: According to meta

Adverts and targeted advertising (which feeds on personal data and is what the GDPR is about) are not the same thing

Paying for WinRAR in all the wrong ways - Russia and China hitting ancient app

Re: WinRAR? Why?

Speaking from own experience, back in the floppy days RAR had better compression than ZIP and support for recovery data. For large sets, the better compression rate allowed to save a floppy or two, which you could then use as a recovery in case any one fails. And floppies failed or went missing always when they were needed.

Also, Usenet binary groups were filled with split RAR files with several recoveries in case some articles got missing. IIRC even WinRAR could UUencode.

None of these advantages are relevant nowadays.

Although 7-Zip already existed in 1999, it wasn't very known nor distributed through shareware disks, which were the way most people got to get software back then.

Most people I know who still use RAR compressed files are those who used way back before; no one who had not used it before 2010 has ever used them.

X Social Media sues Twitter 2.0 over alphabet soup branding

Where is Hilton icon when it's most relevant?

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Startup is named Keen

Does he by chance had given himself the role of Commander?

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

Darn they nerfed it

Now we can't ask mixing rum, acetone, sulphuric acid, battery acid, red dye n.2, scumm and/or pepperoni to get the true and real recipe for grog!

Should we ask that argentinian TV channel instead...?

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

Things I did reply before I got so fed up with unsolicited phone calls that I put a white-list on my phone where all non explicitly vetted numbers are automatically rejected:

* When asking for my name: just a moment, then shout out loud my name as for "come here and pick the phone", and leave it alone or who are you asking for? you've got the wrong number

* When asking for my dead father (who died 9 years ago but is still present in many spam databases): either don't you even respect the dead or just a moment until i set up an ouija session

* When trying to sell me an ISP subscription: about time! I've been without Internet for a week and still not heard a word from you! and don't dare interrupt the call until you fix my problem or give me an answer! (obviously, I am not their client)

* When trying to sell me an utility contract: sorry, I work for ${other_provider} and have free/discounted fare

* When trying to offer me coupons for $whatever: ok, send them to 123 Fake St.

* When in a particularly bad mood or busy: answer in a foreign language (however, it once backfired)

What my mother does is making them repeat everything ad eternum pretending with an astonishingly convincing old lady voice she doesn't hear well until they give up. She does hear well and is not that old

We regret to inform you Earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid within 1,000 years

Re: .. Do you know where your towel is? ..

Don't make me take out my towel 8 days early

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

[...] after asking ChatGPT to generate 21 programs, in five different programming languages: C (3), C++ (11), python (3), html (1) and Java (3).

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

They did not just fix the problem (probably just deactivating something from /etc/init.d would have been enough), they upgraded the whole OS version during summer vacation. Probably it was Mandrake, because that was the first Linux I've installed myself, but memories are fuzzy. The upgrade bumped from KDE2 to KDE3, among many other things -- checking old screenshots revived some of these memories... I haven't seen KDE2 in ages!

However, for how it was fixed, I doubt they ever realized. It's just that the new version would've deactivated the partition manager popping up at boot on new device detection by default.

This reminds me of my university years about 20 years ago: computer lab at science faculty (note: not computer science) where all Windows XP boxes had heavily locked configurations. Not even switching mouse buttons was permitted, which was a real PITA for a left-handed like me who never had this restriction before. Complaints where elevated all the way up to the faculty dean to no avail, only to be repeatedly told that my request wasn't acceptable due to "security reasons".

Once decided to try the "Linux" alternate boot option, which was labelled with a "do not use unless you know what you're doing" but otherwise unlocked. Never had used it before, but it had a nice desktop environment, an early KDE, and was perfectly usable once you learned where to find everything. No settings whatsoever were locked -- other than those which required root privileges, of course. So I could use again the mouse with the left hand. Yay!

Come some months later, I put my USB pen before the boot process completed and found me inside a partition manager to manage the stick drive. Selecting "Back" allowed me to manage every other local partition. "Nice security", I thought, remembering the mouse issue. And immediately realized, as I was almost the only one using the Linux thingy, that destroying the Windows partition rendered the machine unusable for that OS until reimaged, which would happen once every two weeks at most. So for a couple of years I managed to have a workstation just for me, where I just had to ask if the "broken machine" was only Windows non-booting, which sometimes borked itself without my help, so I could use it bypassing queues and reservation schedules.

Never got caught. The hack ceased to work when they updated the Linux image and the partition manager ceased to pop up anymore.

Also, I am very grateful for the silly restriction. Discovered Linux back then, never came back to Windows.

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

Re: To be fair to the AI...

Now I am genuinely intrigued about how would an AI react to being fed The Eye of Argon and what would come off of it

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

Re: The replies make me laugh

Commercial success sometimes mean nothing.

The General, the silent movie starring Buster Keaton, at its time was a flop so big that cost him not only his wealth but his artistic freedom as well: studios wanted the last word to prevent running too high on expenses.

Nowadays, The General is considered a masterpiece and one of the best silent movie films ever.

And that's without even putting a foot on monopolistic practices.

Meanwhile, in Japan, pet fish run up credit card bill on Nintendo Switch

Re: Gambling

Fish and chips, anyone?

Flaming USB battery halts flight from Taiwan to Singapore

Re: And this is why Teslas and possibly other EVs ..

Just an electric scooter may break havoc if it catches fire inside a train. Exactly that happened not long ago inside a train near Barcelona, luckily it happened outside a tunnel by mere minutes. Here is a video (news source in Catalan). For those who ever attended MWC, this was on FGC L8, the line between Pl. Espanya and Fira, although that was further beyond.

Electric scooters have been banned from all public transport in the Barcelona area due to this incident.

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Re: Didn't answer the obvious ...

Ouch! I bit a bit!

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

Re: No Solidarity with A.I.'s run for profit!

[...] an AI system hoovers up and absorbs my code like some kind of ethereal Katamari Damacy, and then horks up chunks of it at random

Best machine learning AI description I've ever read. Can't upvote enough.

Re: Just one question

ALL code is copyrighted. Some jurisdictions do even consider null and void the renounce to copyright rights (so technically public domain code which wasn't written 70 years before the death of the author, ie none, is not free to use at all).

The difference between open source and closed source is how they leverage copyright law to their goals.

Closed source licenses will use copyright law to make sure you can't share, modify or reuse their code.

Open source licenses will use copyright law to make sure you CAN share, modify or reuse their code on their conditions.

Where this crap AI falls foul is that they might share, modify and reuse third party code without granting whatever rights or obligations the original license "gave" to the training set. For starters, most (if not all) open source licenses require that a copy of the license itself to be given along with the source code, no matter if the whole work or just a part is at issue.

For MIT-like licenses, not retaining authorship notices is a copyright license violation. For GPL-like it is even worse, as none of the GPL granted rights would be passed upon downstream, which is by itself a violation.

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

That's more like an "ad-destroyer" than an "ad-blocker"

Given that current Internet ad-blockers do not affect the source, as others can still see them -only just you and other ad-blocker users won't-, we already have a real-world counterpart contraption for this threat: umbrellas

Big changes coming in Debian 12: Some parts won't be FOSS

Debian 12 should appear some time in the middle of 2023 (but beware of the typo in that post).

You could have pointed to the corrected announcement...

OVHcloud datacenter fire last year possibly due to water leak

Re: No video fire/smoke detection then?

The original french report notes that the detection and alert to the fire brigade was properly swift. They received the alert, they promptly alerted the emergency services after confirming it was real and left for their safety. While they were only three people on site, their proper procedure allowed for not having to search for potentially missing people, saving themselves and emergency services who had no need for a search and rescue operation. Also, they properly assisted the fire brigade on whatever they were able to.

The main problems where the electric isolation of the site, which could not be properly achieved well until two hours had passed and SBG2 was already a total loss, and the lack of proper water supply, either by the nonexistent internal fire suppressors or by the on-premises emergency water supply, which was under-performing. Fire could not be controlled until a large water barge arrived at 3am, which happened to be on Strasbourg port at the time. If not for that barge, the whole site would had been lost to the fire.

For the electrical isolation, they had to make sure all redundancy systems were either turned off or depleted, and that's what caused the massive delay before intervention: first, external power supply had to be cut off, which was not possible because the in-site breakers were too close to the fire and were thus not safe to operate, and the electric company had to be called to cut off supply to the area; second, the emergency diesel generators needed not to be started at all costs, overriding its default setup; third, as batteries could not be removed nor isolated they had to wait for depletion, and there was not an accurate estimate of how much time it would take to. All this waiting allowed the fire to develop.

This proved that the site was, after all, quite well designed against power loss. The problem was, precisely, that a total power loss was actually needed for the fire brigade to act.

Tim Hortons collected location data constantly, without consent, report finds

The main problem relies on trusting settings managed by an OS whose maker has a damn good interest on having them always enabled for data snooping

Murena and /e/ Foundation launch privacy-centric smartphones

> His phone does calls, text, browsing and that's all he needs it for

So does my dumbphone, and it cost me less than 50€.

What's the point of paying for features you won't use?

And don't get me wrong, I do not have a smartphone because of the Google / Apple requirements, but I am seriously considering /e/ as an option. However, if I pay more than 200€ for a phone, I'd expect much more from it than just calls, texts and a browser without an all-seeing-(eye|ear) attached

France levels up local video game slang with list of French terms to replace foreign words

Re: E-sports professionals?

There are plenty of properly Freecell professional players out there. Playing it during working hours counts as such, doesn't it?

Re: Now that is a fine example of administrative busybodies

> Long ago I remember hearing that said Commission declared that "weekend" was to be replaced by "fin de semaine".

Well, at least they aren't calling it dernières deux jours hebdomadaires

Slack-for-engineers Mattermost on open source and data sovereignty

> So no funky backgrounds or amusing video effects. Just a collaboration platform that won't give regulators the jitters.

On the first days of general lockdown we had to arrange for some online conferencing tool to hold daily meetings. On the very beginning, almost everyone joined with their webcam on and streaming. As time passed, some people stopped bothering about the webcam and joined audio-only. As I had no webcam at the time at home, I had the perfect excuse for not showing my face from day one.

Move forward to now and on technical meetings no one ever shares a webcam feed, only the occasional screen sharing when it is adequate to do so. For other meetings, you can pinpoint technical vs commercial / manager roles in a room by their webcam use.

And don't get me started about when we changed our in-house Jabber chat system for Slack...

It's 2022 and there are still malware-laden PDFs in emails exploiting bugs from 2017

Re: Give us a small PDF reader

What we really need is a small PDF specification. Name it whatever you want, but something that restores the idea of "paper-on-screen" that many still believe is what PDF is about.

Heck, I've even encountered PDF files on the wild which are wholly rendered by code to be executed by the reader and have a fallback static "You must use Adobe Reader to see this document" page for those readers who can't or won't.

If we have bloated PDF readers is only because we allow for PDF files to do all this sort of dirty tricks.

Edit to add: this does not necessarily mean that dynamic PDF content is bad, it's just that it's something else. Most of current PDF files would even benefit from a format specification that does not allow for dynamically changing its contents. What sense makes, for instance, to allow for dynamic modifications over a final OSHA/HSE report or a judicial ruling?

Google Groups kills RSS support without notice

Re: RSS isn't dead.

Gmail might not go away, but i *do* hope that neither does IMAP/POP3 support (however broken it might be at times), but I'm quite aware that this day will definitely come someday.

It's been years since I last logged in using a browser. The day I'm forced to, it will definitely be the last.