Posts by DeKrow

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

I must admit that, from reading the comments here and elsewhere regarding electric cars, the ICE car industry has done an absolutely magnificent hatchet job on what it sees as it's opposition, but should be its future. It has convinced the general populace to a surprisingly large degree, such that it's really seen as tribal: ICE vs Electric and scorched earth in between.

Exactly my experience.

Driving past a petrol station has become a form of entertainment; a nice reminder that we're nowhere near as beholden to that particular unenjoyable ritual anymore.

> People know what their personal requirements are

I know two sets of couples that irrationally hate electric as a source for vehicular motion. Their rationalisations don't make logical sense beyond one set being old and essentially disliking / distrusting anything modern that they're not personally familiar with, and the other set essentially attaching 'who they are' to the sounds of the car engines. As such, neither are able to see past the ends of their noses.

So I respectfully disagree. Humans are not rational.

But what this means is that EVs have to advertise as a replacement for penises.

> a lot of the arguments people put up against them are nothing more than ignorant/malicious social-media trash talk

12 of them read El Reg.

Somewhat repeating an earlier comment of mine, I recently bought a second hand 2014 Nissan for, what I feel was, cheaper than the equivalent ICE car. It's not a big car, it's from 2014 so it's not infested with electronic gizmos, and despite being 10 years old the battery is still capable of it's originally advertised range - an admittedly small 120km, but it's perfect for our use case.

I haven't had to deal with the potential parts availability problem, so can't speak to that, but the place we purchased it from does a cheap annual service.

Use Case is, I think, the most important thing, and it's a differentiator that didn't exist quite as much with ICE cars. Basically, a couple of additional variables: charge range and ability to charge at home overnight. We tick both of those boxes, so we're loving it.

I recently bought a second hand 2014-model Nissan Leaf for cheaper than an equivalent ICE (in Australia the second hand car market hasn't yet completely recovered to sane price levels post-covid).

For about double that I could have bought a 2018 model with double the range (and a bit). Depending on how the 2014 model goes for the next 6 months, we'll be getting one of them as well, to replace one of our aging ICEs. Feels like a bargain given the aforementioned second hand car prices.

The unexpected thing is, despite the Leaf being a 10-year-old car already, the battery is in magnificent condition and can still reach its originally advertised range. It's really the perfect car for us, as we take very frequent short trips all over the place (having kids and being somewhat active).

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Re: Misquoted?

"Begrudging Necessity"

Re: Will searching for "rdp" still find it?

Did searching for 'rdp' even produce results? I had to learn to search for 'mstsc', but that was what feels like a lifetime ago, so maybe there was some short, intermediate time in which sanity prevailed.

Cops across the world arrest 51 in orchestrated takedown of Ghost crime platform

> "using Ghost, in Australia and overseas, to import illicit drugs"

Wow, apps can do that these days? There goes international shipping as a business.

Oh, wait, now you're telling me they just communicated about importing illicit drugs on the app? So, why is the app author in trouble and yet all the other platforms are free to continue sharing materials related to the four horsemen?

Oh, you're telling me it was exclusively used by criminals? Because only criminals would want their communications encrypted?

Aaaah, now I get it, you're one of those countries that only has the really difficult societal problems left and so you're moving in the police state direction to maintain an appearance of "doing something" in order to justify next year's budget / votes.

I'm so for preventing murders and the bad, scary things that actually happen in meatspace, but the demonizing of the essentially harmless electronic 'admin' hasn't yet worn thin after half a century of chasing "dangerous hackers". The powers-that-be are just as scared and clueless about technology now as they were in Mitnick's and Crunch's days, despite having grown up in and around it.

If science progress one funeral at a time, society only progresses one military-industrial-politico-complex at a time.

US mulls retaliation for China blacklisting Micron without evidence of security threat

The airing of dirty laundry

My main concern with this kind of politcial posturing on both sides is that the, obvious to us (but not necessarily obvious to average news consumer), hypocrisy of the argument means that there's another purpose behind airing this dirty laundry: Fomenting anti-China sentiment.

The only reason for which is to make an upcoming war with China justified or at least somewhat more palatable amongst the populace.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

So much effort to make it user-friendly...

... which isn't very user-friendly.

The longer the time since I banned Windows from my desktop, the better a decision it becomes. The amount of effort to change my workflow from Windows to Linux feels about the same as the amount of effort required to make Windows 11 'worth trying'. Which makes it not worth trying at all.

Intel ships crypto-mining ASIC at the worst possible time

Re: Crypto is toast?

"What benefit does society gain from government issued debit cards"

You're looking at this the wrong way. Society isn't creating CBDCs, the CBs are creating them, therefore you need to look at what they will gain: Control. Censorship, limitations, restrictions, seizure. Society loses when viewing CBDCs from all angles.

The potential benefit of Bitcoin (specifically not most other cryptocurrencies) is the lack of centralised control; the lack of censorship and restriction.

Feel free to make other arguments against Bitcoin - all of which I've heard before, some with which I disagree and some with which I agree - but I won't be wasting my time re-reading them.

Re: The sooner, the better

Shutdown "The Laundromat" before shutting down cryptocurrency. The Laundromat has been facilitating criminal activity for decades and has been ignored by the powers that be for just as long.

For those who don't know, London is referred to as The Laundromat because of it's friendliness in facilitating money laundering for any and all with resources enough to need to conduct it.

Meta: We need 5x more GPUs to combat TikTok, stat

What Meta needs...

... has an inverse relationship to what the world needs.

My conspiracy voice is saying that Meta's needs, however, will be quietly supported by various federal US entities in their attempt to wrest some attention back from "China's" TikTok in their on-going game of my surveillance is better than your surveillance.

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers"

Fuck meta, Fuck tiktok. Capitalisation intentional.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

Recent article about how seriously "the system" takes child abuse:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-18/did-alex-jones-use-dhhs-database-crissp-to-groom-a-teenager/13301262

Securing existing systems that contain sensitive data just doesn't have the political sound-bite potential (or hidden, alternate narrative that benefits the status quo) of "end-to-end encryption enables pedophiles and terrorists!"

Australia mostly sticks to its guns in final plan to make Google and Facebook pay news publishers

News? Since when?

I'm not sure how any of the Murdoch media empire is going to get their hands on any of the money from this. I thought the Murdoch press was a pedlar of entertainment in a way that, fairly specifically, doesn't cross into anything resembling news. Any news content is generally accidentally stumbled into on those rare occasions when entertainment and current events converge.

For example, Andrew Bolt authors one of the funniest dead-pan, conservative-on-steroids impressions I've ever come across. It's entertaining as all hell, but there ain't a skerrick of news.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Doth protest too much?

Only this morning a little-known state agency called the Children's Commissioner published a report demanding end-to-end encryption be backdoored to keep children safe.

I can only speak for my own experiences here, but I've never been violated or threatened with violation by end-to-end encryption. And if I ever was, I'm not sure I'd even notice.

What I do know is that Child Protection Agencies, those old-school organisations that use humans to go and visit at-risk children to assess their situations and safety, are so woefully under-funded that any agent of Government purporting to want to "keep children safe" without massively increasing funding to these actual real-world-action agencies, is actively working against the protection and safety of children. They're distracting from the real problem, trying to divert funding and resources into something other than that which will, measurably, keep children safer. It's grossly disturbing.

Google sees signs of success in its campaign to water down Australian pay-for-news plan

You know that Google News (in Australia at least) just shows a headline and maybe a picture, and then links to the actual article on the actual website on which the article was originally published?

The content of the article is not scraped and presented as if Google were the author.

Re: Wishful thinking

You know that Google News (in Australia at least) just shows a headline and maybe a picture, and then links to the actual article on the actual website on which the article was originally published?

The content of the article is not scraped and presented as if Google were the author.

Macs, iPhones, iPads to get encrypted DNS – how'd you like them Apples?

Re: Good & Bad

Harcoded IP addresses fits the "built-in obsolescence" mould. Isn't it far too short-sighted though?

Re: Good & Bad

I've got a similar set up to you, but already using pfSense as my gateway, Pi-Hole for blocking and plugs into Cloudflare's DoH service, and with outbound regular DNS queries all redirected to my Pi-Hole, I also share the same concern for the near future where potentially malicious IoT devices or phone apps start using their own in-built DoH, preventing visibility of what my own devices are doing (disclaimer re: "my own devices: that word may not mean what you think it means, yeah yeah).

Will be looking into later commenters suggestion of blocking DoH traffic to anywhere other than Cloudflare, or limiting DoH traffic to only be allowed to come from the Pi-Hole.

There are already Chinese components in your pocket – so why fret about 5G gear?

Re: "It is perfectly possible for the West [..] to decide on a coherent policy"

Very long bow to draw saying that the US destroyed Nokia and Blackberry. Do you have any citations for this claim?

My understanding has been, for a long while, that Blackberry and Nokia failed because they didn't adapt to the Android / iPhone generation. They were leaders for their time, but failed to see the big new wave coming and wiped out.

Re: "It is perfectly possible for the West [..] to decide on a coherent policy"

So, what you're saying is "out of the frying pan into the fire"?

Internet Society CEO: Most people don't care about the .org sell-off – and nothing short of a court order will stop it

Re: Most people don't care whether Andrew Sullivan is alive or dead

It's a very similar look to the Minister he played in The Boat that Rocked...

Most people don't care whether Andrew Sullivan is alive or dead

But that doesn't mean that murdering him is OK.

… or does it?

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

Hollywood Accounting

Accounting. "I do not think it means what you think it means"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

The more big companies are exposed for their creative accounting practices, the more I wonder about the motivations of politicians chipping away at individual privacy and promoting ever-expanding surveillance.

The governments of "The West" are playing catch-up to China. The big, smart, corporates are level pegging with China.

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

Re: The Internet is for everyone

I was going to mention in my earlier comment that this decision could lead to further fracturing of the Internet due to the potential to spur along custom DNS projects.

What are the chances that the operators of the root Domain Servers can protest this decision via disobedience by refusing to update .org records?

If this situation is one of the "pure suits / non-technical / boardroom-only" decisions, is there a critical mess of techy-resistance to it such that disobedience / resistance is possible?

Re: Is it just me? Fuck no!

I've tended to mostly ignore and down-play any announcements of "The Internet ain't what it used to be", mainly because the 'old internet' still exists for those willing to spend the time to search for it; the "new" Internet is in addition to the internet of old, it didn't replace it despite the fact it shouts more loudly for our attention. "New Internet" is the tourist magnets, whilst the "Old Internet" is the still-present hinterland.

This decision, however, is a much more fundamental change. The combination of 'removal of price caps' and 'sale to a private company' for one of the three original TLD's is market / regulatory capture that has the potential to be more effectively damaging and lucrative than domain-squatting.

An organisation's domain name is synonymous with their reputation, and for .org being generally non-profits, they're less likely to enjoy being squeezed to maintain their reputable domain. It also has the potential for harm in that bad actors may outbid (or wait out) a non-profit for their domain name, then run profitable scams on the back of the domain names reputation (eventually destroying the domain's reputation and potentially the reputation of the organization that once owned it).

I wonder if copyright or some other "brand protection" strategy could mitigate this but, again, not-for-profits aren't generally the litigious type.

No, you're not being pessimistic. You're bang on the money. Literally.

Uncle Sam demands summary judgment on Snowden memoir: We're not saying it's true, but no one should read it

Uncle Sam...

Points to Assange whilst maintaining eye contact with Snowden and says "How you like them apples?"

RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud

Re: Easily replaced

I'm moving to them as well, later than I would have hoped since I only just (accidentally auto-)paid for another two years of Dyn (bad reminder and credential management on my part).

FreeDNS looks like the sort of operation that is ideologically opposed to selling out, and will continue operations as-is for as long as possible.

Swedish court declines to detain Belmarsh prison resident Julian Assange

Re: @Jellied Eel - Curious

He was allowed to leave Sweden. He was questioned initially and it was found there was no case to answer. It wasn't until AFTER he left the country that investigations were re-opened and further interviews with Assange were deemed necessary.

This is something a lot of people seem to get wrong in the timeline.

This article has a decent run-down of the timeline and events:

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-05-27/abuses-show-assange-case-was-never-about-law/

Germany mulls giving end-to-end chat app encryption das boot: Law requiring decrypted plain-text is in the works

Self-Hosted?

What can they do about self-hosted systems? Something like this:

https://blog.cryptoaustralia.org.au/run-your-end-to-end-encrypted-chat-server-matrix-riot/

Sure, there's a chain to follow to find who's running them, or to just get them shutdown or legislate against them so that causal folk are scared off, but "casual folk" aren't the target. There's also "self-hosted as a Tor service" to further obfuscate the trail such that any action by law enforcement will likely be after-the-fact, which appears to be what these new laws are trying to prevent.

Maybe it's just a whittling away of the less technically savvy terrorists. At the very cheap price of the privacy of casual folks online conversations.

Funnily enough, I think the most tech savvy and intelligent terrorists probably moved into "legitimate business" many years ago and are happy with all these draconian new laws that will only work to cement their established positions.

Apple arms web browser privacy torpedo, points it directly at Google's advertising model

Apple Ad-Blocking?

Is there any reason, other than not wanting to REALLY piss off Google and FB, that Apple don't create their own ad-blocking system within Safari?

It'd be a huge end-user-privacy marketing win for them. But then would they also piss off all the marketing execs that make bank from online stalking to the extent that they'd turf their iDevices in protest?

Another side-effect, I suppose, would be that if they can do it in Safari then they can do it system-wide and therefore potentially torpedo all ad-supported apps in the process and decimate their developer base.

How much do Apple, Google and FB depend on each other? Probably just as complex as the US-China relationship. Maybe Apple system-wide ad-blocking would be equivalent to a declaration of war.

Huawei, Huawei. Huawei, Huawei. Feeling hot, hot, hot: US threatens to cut UK from intel sharing over Chinese tech giant

Re: @AC ... The real reasons

I love when people do this:

"There is a real reason why the US is doing this."

And then don't go on to explain it. Because all they're doing is blowing hot, smelly air.

Bitcoin drops 7 per cent on New York Attorney General's allegations of $850m fraud by Bitfinex

Tulips

See title.

"since inception in 2009"

Sigh. If you got lucky, yes, hence the above comparison with lottery tickets.

China still doesn't want iPhones despite Apple slashing prices, say market watchers

+1

Xiaomi A1, had it for a while now, still outstanding as the daily driver, recently got the Android Pie (9) update. $260 at the time (140 quid)

What today links Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram – apart from being run by monopolistic personal data harvesters?

NSA Upgrades

Just the NSA upgrading their infrastructure, nothing to see here.

We can do this the easy way or the Huawei, US tells Germany with threat to snip intel over 5G fears

Logic fail

Fact:

The US is threatening to stop information sharing if <5-eyes country> (Germany in this instance) uses Huawei kit.

Inference:

If <5-eyes country> doesn't already know what the US knows in order to be making such threatening statements, then there's already a certain amount of information sharing that ISN'T taking place.

Conclusion:

The information sharing that the US is threatening to prevent isn't worth keeping in the first place if it hasn't flagged giant Chinese network hardware vendor as a threat.

Disclaimer:

The above is assuming that everything being said in public is wholly truthful and transparent. Which it never is. However, this doesn't make it any more forgivable that they're saying such illogical things in public. That, in itself, means they're already caught in a lie.

No yoke: 'Bored' Aussie test pilot passes time in the cockpit by drawing massive knobs in the air

Fixed that for you

KEEP DONG IT!!!!!!

Europe-style 5G standards testing? Consistent definitions? Who the fsck wants that, asks US mobe industry

Tangentially related

So, US companies started the whole globalization thing by using cheap labor in China to manufacture their wares and see them for US-scale prices and make gigantic profits off the backs of, effectively, slave labor in other countries. Over the years this has resulted in the decline of manufacturing in any country with higher-than-the-lowest wage rates, giving these low wage countries both control of manufacturing and possession of the best knowledge of the everything to do with manufacturing processes.

When it comes to consumers trying to do the same thing as the cheap-labor companies, purchasing in markets cheaper than the US, we get region-locked DVDs , laws against counterfeiting (even when the clothing comes off the same line), and excess branded stock being burnt / shredded to "protect brand integrity".

When it comes to these countries that have been, for years, doing the manufacturing of goods for companies based in other countries actually manufacturing goods for companies based in their own country, and therefore not needing the profit margins of high-wage countries, the US Government goes straight to "National Security".

I mean, technically, I think it is a National Security risk, but for reasons of the future economic stability of the US, not for "hack the planet" reasons.

The US acts in its own economic interests. Everything else is secondary. What the US is saying, however, is to give the impression that their motives are more honorable than "give us money, not them". This isn't necessarily "wrong", as most countries probably act in the same way, it just happens that the US are the ones shouting from the rooftops at the moment.

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

I was going to post the same thing.

"Sites need revenue, and the threat of ad-blockers in some cases actually makes the situation worse for the rest of users by triggering convoluted workaround logic and complex disguising of ads that increase script execution time."

Hulce has his argument all arse about face in many ways. Assuming a site needs revenue, assuming that ads are a decent source of revenue, assuming javascript is necessary for ads, ignoring the issue of tracking and user-privacy and the well-documented issue of ads having been used as malware vectors (even outside of the tracking and privacy invasion issue).

Maybe, even as an ex-Google employee, those assumptions just come naturally.

Not blocking ads on the Internet is like unsafe sex in the 80's.

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

The example being set...

With more and more of these large companies and high level politicians being exposed (Panama, Paradise Papers) as using as many techniques as possible to avoid paying appropriate taxes and shifting money through various offshore tax havens, there are two things that bother me:

1. These are people and companies held up to be respected and act as examples to the general populace as to how to behave. Unlike economics, this WILL have an actual trickle down effect.

2. This leads towards an "if you can, then do" attitude, no matter the legality or morality. It basically justifies outright thievery. You failed to secure it, so you lose ownership of it.

Failure to bring world leadership to heel is encouragement to the rest of the populace to seek their own methods of advantage.

Tech sector unites in attempt to avoid Oz's anti-crypto push, again

No global precedent, except maybe in China

For me, the thing that's most obviously concerning about "their" rush to get this thing through, is that it's unprecedented.

Australia, that doesn't want to lead the world by implementing a country-wide fiber to the home network infrastructure.

Australia, that doesn't want to lead the world in renewable energy despite it's abundance of wide-open spaces and sunshine.

Australia, that hasn't had terror attacks anywhere near the scale of those in the US, UK, or Europe, wants to implement unprecedented legislation "in a hurry".

Something's fishy. Be it copyright, or setting precedent in lil' ol' Australia so that other western countries can follow the lead, or creating Australia as the funnel through which the rest of the 5-eyes can siphon their requests, or as some WW3 anti-China / Russia preparation, I don't know. But it ain't the safety of Australia's citizens that's the concern of this Government.

OpenStack 2018: Mark Shuttleworth chats to The Reg about 10-year support plans, Linus Torvalds and Russian rockets

Re: "the guy ... who engineered machines to beat Gary Kasparov"

Are your passwords similarly formatted to your usernames?

Russia: We did not hack the US Democrats. But if we did, we're immune from prosecution... lmao

Always blaming everyone else

Given the corruption inherent in US politics, it's almost comical that they're trying to blame Russia for influence. So much more anti-social influence comes from the biggest, most successful, economy-supporting companies within the country itself because there are no rules to make campaign donations and lobbying more transparent. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change because it's the people who would be able to make these rules that are benefitting from their absence.

On my to-watch list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(film)

Oz telcos' club asks: Why the hell do Australia Post, rando councils, or Taxi Services Commission want comms metadata?

Re: Some did

And the anti-encryption proposal is currently following precisely the same path.

Short time for public comment, plenty of expert commentary arguing against it, zero acknowledgement of said expert commentary. The next and last stage is for it to be passed.

The Green's will object, but Labor, oh-so-disappointingly and confusingly, will not. Although it's not confusing because Labor are just another "big political party" full of power-hungry control-freaks that WANT this, as per the current government.

Re: if they got your communications, they don't need you

What's this "too much" you speak of?

Zim Zam Zim! (not 70's, but, well, you'll get the idea if you get the idea...)

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Why Linux on Apple Hardware?

What reasons do people have for purchasing expensive Apple hardware to then go and install Linux on it?

One of the reasons I've heard for the justification of the inflated Apple pricing is that it buys you into the convenient, interoperable Apple ecosystem.

Surely, if you want to run Linux, and have a budget that stretches to an Apple laptop, it would also cover a range of both more powerful and at least nearly-as-stylish non-Apple laptops.

Dual-booting is the only option that makes sense to me. Needing the Apple ecosystem on one hand, but also the flexibility of Linux on the other.

Ad blocking. All fun and games – until it gets political: Union websites banned by uBlock Origin

Allow versus Deny

So, how far away from the tipping point where 'allow' lists will overtake 'deny' lists in their maintainability?

For my individual purposes an 'allow' list would be perfect and contain very few domains. I think the 'state of decay' of the Internet means it's time to impose this upon the rest of the household. One member, however, will NOT give up their Facebook. Already, there are two very difficult conversations in the pipeline.

Oz to turn pirates into vampires: You won't see their images in mirrors

Upvote because Frank Zappa was right, and things haven't changed.

The song "Trouble Every Day" was released in 1966 and its lyrics are still pertinent 50 years (50 YEARS!!!) later.