Posts by tekHedd

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Demoted?

Ask a teacher: a move out of the classroom is never a demotion.

Twitter hack latest: Up to 36 compromised accounts had their private messages read – including a Dutch politician's

Politicians!

...and as we all know, a random politician's privacy is important, whereas mine is not. :P

I know it's just whining, but even El Reg echoes the attitude that "the privacy of the plebs is not important", which does not help when we're trying to defend strong end-to-end encryption for the masses.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Reply to Linus Torvalds

> Shrug.

Exactly. I feel the same way about all those Confederate memorials. If they were "great works of art" or something maybe I'd suggest moving them to a museum, but I grew up surrounded by them and, well, ugly. It's not even worth having a discussion, just throw them out and move on to important issues. By an large this situation is similar: lose the names and get on with work.

In spite of this, it is *not* ridiculous to discuss it: this is an issue worthy of discussion, largely because of the long tradition of using these names and their clear meaning in the context. Naming is easily the single most difficult task of programming[*]. Fortunately, "exclusion lists" and "dom/sub" are definitely more accurate descriptions of the concepts involved, so in the long term this is a clear win across the board. In other sad cases where they've chosen opaque, non-obvious replacement terminology, it's not a win.

* - the two most difficult problems in programming being, of course: naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors

Keyboard, oh Lord...

Mom's a piano teacher. Last week she had a student say "...on the black keys... oh.. sorry... I didn't mean 'black'."

#facepalm

Re: Wishy washy

> ...I'm claiming dom/sub

or top/bottom/switch for more complex systems.

Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Comcast to handle DNS-over-HTTPS for Firefox-using subscribers

So the only difference here *really*

for 99.9% of us, the only difference now is that you can't run your own DNS proxy easily, making it harder to filter out ad servers.

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Acronyms

"Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act" doesn't make a good acronym, but it makes a great oxymoron.

Because if a third party has access to it, it's not encrypted.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

Re: Why would the President help big tech?

> The tech companies have been very hostile to President Trump and conservatives in general

This is true only with respect to political posturing. From a business standpoint, the big tech companies work with the status quo and rarely change their modus operandi.

> Are you packing your bags? Yeah, I didn't think so.

10 years ago this would be a valid retort. This year, not so much.

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

We wanted to say something earlier but...

...we waited this long to say anything because *we* wanted to be the ones with the monopoly store.

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Normally this indicates the substitution of a proper noun for a pronoun when a quote is trucated, as in "I never respected Donald. He was an idiot." quoted in short as "[Donald] was an idiot." In this case it appears to be sort of the opposite. :)

Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled

Re: GDPR

"So if I go to somebody's house and Continuous Match Mode is enabled, who has to get my consent?"

Simple: google will simply track where you are and who is near you and your relationship with those people and their preferences, and from that detect which people within voice range have and have not given consent, identifying them by their voices. It will automatically discard data from anyone who has explicitly rejected CMM, keeping data from all other users stored in perpetuity on the assumption that they will later accept the CMM terms and conditions. Incidentally, this will allow your always-on display to show appropriate advertising not just to you, but to the people around you, improving your life in every possible way.

The girl with the dragnet tattoo: How a TV news clip, Insta snaps, a glimpse of a tat and a T-shirt sold on Etsy led FBI to alleged cop car arsonist

"never go torching police vehicles"

Plus let's be real, they're just going to replace it by raising /your/ taxes.

Re: Gloves and goggles; whoda thought it?

You'd be stupid to be throwing a burning object with intent to commit arson without wearing at least gloves. Second, you'd be crazy to be at a protest in the US without goggles.

So, really all we're saying is that they have proof that the person committing arson was sane and basically intelligent. Although these days that's practically a crime in itself.

Re: Who's watching whom?

I wonder who else is in those 500 pictures, and how many are actually relevant to the case? We know how the FBI feels about data "accidentally acquired along with our search."

I mean, if you're not on a few watch lists, you're not living. But still.

As Uncle Sam flies spy drones over protest-packed cities, Homeland Security asks the public if that's a good idea

You asked my opinion about drones...

Are you suggesting that we can stop you from spying on us with drones even if the entire country unanimously suggested it in an overwhelming torrent of comments that crashed the servers? Because I'm not sure I'd believe that.

Google rolls out pro-privacy DNS-over-HTTPS support in Chrome 83... with a handy kill switch for corporate IT

So much for my router-level blocks

Because my older DD-WRT router only supports classic DNS and not the new protocol, this magically disables all of my ad- and malware-domain blocks until I hack hidden settings in each browser. Which I believe is its primary purpose.

Any privacy- or speech-enhancing purpose is secondary and IMO becomes a technical problem to thwart at the edge networking level if you want to ... well anyway we all know the boring arguments.

And, of course, as it is an anti-censorship tool, it is a real PITA to redirect these requests to my own DoH servers. I mean, either it can't be done, in which case the ad servers win, or it can be done, in which case it is a COMPLETE waste of effort and why did we do it? The ad servers win.

Tech's Volkswagen moment? Trend Micro accused of cheating Microsoft driver QA by detecting test suite

Re: Petty or Pedant?

Pedantic but incorrect. Duck take is called this because it is made with a cloth (duck) backing.

^^ /this/ is pedantic-but-correct. Just FYI.

^^ so was that postscript.

^^ and that one.

"Working closely..."

Love how all the big players work with each other. A bit like, I dunno, picking a random example completely at random, a bit like a church saying "We are working closely with the accused priest to investigate your accusations of rape, and will take appropriate action. Thank you for bringing this to our attention." And also "it was inappropriate for you to go public with this."

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

If only!

Since the only reason to run Windows is because you have an app that only runs on Windows, I'm not sure what the point is.

But then it's already the year of Linux On The Desktop[TM]. Since systemd has streamlined the Linux experience across systems and made all notebooks and apps work seamlessly together in perfect harmony, Linux has... OK I can't continue with a straight face, Devuan-devotee here to the core.

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

"XML"

Oh dear. "co-author of the original specifications for XML" as an endorsement of one's technical prowess.. I mean it's like saying "I helped invent hangnails." Well, at least he's done something good now to help even the balance.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

Re: Political correctness gone mad

"Master/slave" is a perfectly appropriate and accurate way to describe the relationship of hardware devices on a bus: the master really is a master, and the slave really is a slave. And other similar hardware/software relationships. What, are we worried about the power imbalance of pluggable hardware modules and their host bus now? Because they have a genuine power imbalance and accurately describing that is just talking accurately.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

"optional and reorderable"

The parts of CSS I find hardest to do on the fly, without yet another trip to StackOverflow are the "optional and reorderable" parts. So, of course, let's add more.

I remember when I was junior and there were things like "language designers" and books on the theory of good user interface design and coding style, and they weren't trendy. Now even the Microsoft IDE is rejecting Microsoft's own best practices. :(

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

Any old headphones

A pair of good earplugs designed for music listening combined with a nice loud set of closed-back headphones works well for occasional air travel. Better, a set of custom mold earplugs is a handy tool for all kinds of loud environments, and doesn't require a battery. Also, great for live concerts (and sometimes movies; look I like it loud but OMGWTF).

World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

Thursday

Yup, sales stopped cold last Thursday. Nobody wants to commit to any purchases over about $50. Still a good time to be selling games, DVDs, other entertainment media though. We're clearing out a big box of that stuff this winter and it's still moving.

HPE celebrated diversity on International Women's Day not with pictures of its own staff but stock images of models

Re: Wait a minute

Perhaps HPE is boasting about the diversity of their labor outsourcing plan?

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

One person.

Look at this another way: they successfully matched one (1) person for the duration of the trial. For a sample set of this size, that looks like a huge success.

What if that one person hadn't taken that route during the trial? Then they would have matched 0%.

Cynic in me asks: how much did they pay that one person to walk through the area so the test would look like a success? Did they just get lucky?

(And TBH the other comments above are right: even if it had only a 1% false positive rate, the real issue isn't accuracy here, it's rights.)

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

An infinite number of typewriters gets you every time

The chance of exploitation is miniscule...and you get an unlimited number of attempts. I think I see the problem here.

So... we've built basically an entire world full of computers with a hardware backdoor, but fortunately only *trusted authorities* have the key to that backdoor. Only now the key is leaking. Time to pretend to be surprised and shocked and double down because a) this was never really a backdoor it's a handy tool for administrators, and b) this doesn't invalidate the need to put backdoors in everything else as well, which also aren't backdoors but desperately needed to protect you.

"[EPID] is used for things like providing anti-piracy DRM protections, and Internet-of-Things attestation"

Translation: the point of EPID is to ensure that you, the end user, do not have control of your computer. This is why its compromise is a disaster of biblical proportions. If your computer is compromised that's sad. If /their/ telemetry and DRM content is compromised, cats and dogs sleeping together, mass hysteria.

Re: The best.

Don't forget 'stretch goal'

New Jersey beats New York – and then the rest of America – on broadband access. How does your state fare?

Illinois is in the top 10?

If Illinois is in the top 10, then the situation really is dire.

Last week's email from dad in Chicagoland: "I'm sick of Comcast Internet (XFinity), what are my other options?"

Me: "I have bad news for you..."

Drones must be constantly connected to the internet to give Feds real-time location data – new US govt proposal

Re: "... destroy privacy ...", they wrote, unironically.

Yes, this is exactly the point. "...and stored six months of your driving data for government scrutiny?" This is currently being done by private corporations with traffic flow cameras and, well, google.

But I guess since people don't care, that makes it OK somehow. Don't know really why I bother to even comment on it.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: WTF?

When your sting involves something else entirely, but you need a plausible explanation, you just screwed up, and the truth is embarrassing, "prostitution" will do just fine.

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Because in California there are no victims

"It's Tesla's fault! It's Apple's fault!" Executive decisions about how to drive were made by one person. It's the driver's fault, and he has taken responsibility for his actions by dying.

I agree that Tesla could do more, but shifting responsibility to a game or the car is the reason everything sucks now.

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

Suddenly, Advertising!

Ah, so that's why my DNS-based ad server blocks suddenly stopped working. :P

If you wonder why google's such a huge proponent of this technology, now you know...or are they? Google is farily meh on doh arent' they? Odd, since they're pretty pro on HTTPS-everywhere in every other respect.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Fine style

Anyone with beautifully sculpted Star Trek concave sideburns like his is a winner in my book.

(note: no sarcasm here at all, legit respect)

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Re: I've stopped using it

Everyone in our organization uses Thunderbird; this is not a requirement, it just works and we all like it.

Does anybody really *prefer* Outlook other than from familiarity (because it's required at work anyway)? Does *anybody* prefer managing Exchange servers? Would anybody who is not a Microsoft marketing shill write the Register comment to which I am responding?

Note: These are rhetorical questions. Beer because it's Friday Jr, right?

Like its Windows-noob-stabilisers OS, Zorin's cloudy Grid tool is Linux desktop management for dummies

Re: Yessss! Bring forth the Linux desktop!

As a commentor mentioned, the good news is that Windows 7 is no longer a moving target for wine support. I suppose that offers some hope for the future.

I'm building an air-gapped[*] network for my windows 7 gaming system because, well, some of those games were almost impossible to get running and I'm definitely not risking an "upgrade".

* air-gapped - n. A network that has some sort of firewall and you want to claim it is unhackable

Virtual reality is a bonkers fad that no one takes seriously but anyway, here's someone to tell us to worry about hackers

VR is a fad?

VR will continue to be fad as long as the industry treats it as one.

I was a VR way early adopter...I had a VFX-1 headgear, I have owned multiple shutter glass systems (still my favorite way to do 3D). So, why haven't I even *looked* at any of the latest batch of VR systems, when they are clearly pretty good?

It's not cost of entry. I've dumped so much money into stereo 3D gear I don't want to think about it, and will move on to the next item now. I will *find* money for cool gaming tech that I like. But the cost of entry is a factor when you consider the rest.

1) Long term support. Where here "long" isn't even like 3 years. The industry has a crap track record for this. All of the shutter glass systems I own are no longer supported, not even for games that originally shipped with the systems. This includes both small names like EyeScream (who simply went out of business) and big names like NVidia (shame on you!) I have no faith that my Oculus or Vive will continue to work beyond summer.

2) "VR" Games. They suck. I don't want an immersive VR experience, where I have to mime getting out of the car and twisting off the gas cap in order to refuel. I want to press "Y" while next to the pump and have my tank meter zip to "F" on its own. In fact, I don't want to even stand up.

3) No/crap support for non-VR games. The main reason I want 3d is for stereo 3d, not for a VR experience. I like traditional styled games, where you sit and use the keyboard or maybe (for the less cerebral games) a console style controller.

4) Comfort. After all this time, you'd think they'd have a comfortable headset, but no. I think first-gen headsets with a full helmet were marginally more comfortable, in fact. And I expected more from the audio. (The VFX-1 had AKG phones in it.)

In short, I'm not paying that kind of money for an uncomfortable device that only plays one game I even care about, and will almost certainly be only useful as a doorstop by this time next year.

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

Re: "Visual Studio is a paid-for product"

I have my Turbo C disks here somewhere. Heck yeah I had to pay for it, and worth every penny.

Oddly, it didn't contain any advertising.

From WordPad to WordAds: Microsoft caught sneaking nagging Office promos into venerable text editor beta

Re: Where did it all go wrong?

"Where it all went wrong was people wanting sh*t for free..."

Note how the rise of "Everything is free now" exactly parallels "everything sucks now." The end users are fine with tacky eye poison ads and intrusive spyware, therefore every program is tacky spyware

Re: On loathing ads

"I don't mind ads per se."

I do.

Server-side Swift's slow support story sours some: Apple lang tailored for mobile CPUs, lacking in Linux world

Re: What's Swift even supposed to do?

Particularly loving the downvotes by Typescript fanpersuns. I mean, it's less of an also-ran than Google Closure Compiler, but I'm comparing them to each other and that pretty much says it all.

'I am done with open source': Developer of Rust Actix web framework quits, appoints new maintainer

Re: He's not wrong

I stopped giving away software some time ago. Paying end users are generally much easier to deal with. Or maybe it's something about the "they gave me money" part that makes it easy to forgive their little quirks.

If at first you don't succeed, pry, pry again: Feds once again demand Apple unlock encrypted iPhones in yet another terrorism case

Re: What more could Apple do?

Likely there was a quiet NSA-mandated backdoor disguised as a bug, but some pesky whitehat found and reported it. :)

Pair charged with murder, manslaughter after IBM Aspera boffin killed in New Year's Eve laptop theft struggle

WHY DON'T I HAVE BAIL!?!?

You don't think it could possibly be related in some way to the previous convictions and the murder charge, do you?

FYI: FBI raiding NSA's global wiretap database to probe US peeps is probably illegal, unconstitutional, court says

Oh no! The FBI is going to have to go back to *secretly* illegally spying.

"...a decision that could put an end to [unconstrained illegal spying and fishing expeditions]"

Don't you believe it for a second.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Nerd culture: it's still hate speech

Let us not forget: hipster culture is _ironic_. When they dress as nerds and call themselves nerds, it's a form of mockery, just like the beards and fake-old clothes. It's not acceptance, and never will be.

I don't know if I'd want to jail some jock for calling me a geek, but then these days I'm a paid-in-full geeky adult, have been hitting the gym regularly for decades, and/or can afford a good attorney. So I'm no longer a good target for bullying as there isn't a power imbalance. But it's still hate speech, and always will be at some level. Yeah, I use the word, but just like the N word is to others, geek is _our_ word. Ugly glasses and an iPhones do not a hacker make.

FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

So, er, why again?

Surprised the entire body of the article isn't simply:

...because Apple.

HPE to Mike Lynch: You told either El Reg or High Court the right version of why former Autonomy execs won't testify

Privilege

He... just can't be bothered to testify? The VPs answer to a different standard, don't they? I don't care if he's testified 10 times already, if it was *me* telling the court "no, I'm not doing that" how long do you think I'd be walking around free?

Microsoft looks to React Native as a way to tackle the cross-platform development puzzle

Your turn is coming

Mono has been the bastard stepchild ever since... oh right it always has been. Flavor of the month doesn't last. Enjoy it while it does.