Posts by tekHedd

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Moral Compass

True, corporations are incomprehensible if you try to think of them as people, even though legally they sort of are. :( Another way to look at it is that, in the context of publicly-held corporations, *corporate law* is the only morality. Google isn't an evil corporation--it would be a truly evil human, but in fact it's a very good corporation. "Don't be evil" still applies, it's just that "good" has a different meaning here.

We've created extremely powerful creatures whose only morality is "maximize stockholder value," and "don't get caught when you break the law." Then, we act surprised when they ruin lives, dodge taxes, destroy the environment, treat their own customers badly, and in fact do anything they think they can get away with to maximize stockholder value.

Racism? Bigotry? Only has a moral import in the context of "public opinion," the tax advantages of "woman owned" or the regulatory requirement to do sensitivity training. Etc.

That time a startup tried to hire me just to push clients' products in job interviews

Emacs

Anybody remember the disassociated press program, available as a plugin in emacs? It wrote like this.

CentOS Stream: 'I was slow on the uptake, but I get what they are doing now,' says Rocky Linux founder

Boot consortium

Don't forget Google, archenemy of self-signed certs.

Once we can only boot approved OSs and launch approved apps from the official store, we can prevent "evil" software from viewing "bad" web content (signed certs only!). We and our children will finally be safe. Hooray.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Sideburns

What I hate about the Star Trek stock image is that the sideburns are wrong. Season 1/2 sideburns should be concave towards the ear, not convex. They made them flat in season 3 out of laziness, and only became convex in TNG.

Sideburns are important.

Android devs prepare to hand over app-signing keys to Google from August

" half a dozen hoops"

Spoken like someone who's never used F-Droid. Android apps are (were) just APKs and run exactly the same no matter where you get them from, except for the signing and google's highly intrusive, battery draining telemetry.

Re: End of privacy

And it's not great for people like me who don't have Play Store or any Google apps at all on their phones. At this time I can still transfer some apps over from my "google store" phone. They must hate that. Of course now that the apps will be "compiled for specific hardware" this won't work any more.

They hate that people can use Android without Google. They hate it so bad.

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

"Distribute it to the creatives"...

The cynical editor in my head is hard at work with this one, replacing "writers and performers" with "Sony" etc.

I love how, when I perform an original piece of music in a public place with my band, Taylor Swift gets a little bit of the money the bar made that night. :P Love you Tay but that's MY 0.04 cents, thanks.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

Telemetry!

Telemetry shows that:

- all the features I use daily are unloved

- all of the annoyances I have disabled are popular

- the next version will force the annoyances on me while removing the features I love

- people like icons that are indistinguishable monochrome squares

- I need a beer

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: In the age of Online Lynch Mobs..

"Everything is political" is the new "turn in your parents." It turns any attempt to defuse a situation into a Kafkaesque catch-22, where the person attempting to turn a discussion back to "anything constructive" becomes the villain.

OK so what's going with these millions of Pentagon-owned IPv4 addresses lighting up all of a sudden?

Re: No...

"The US don't need masses of IP space to be able to retaliate against cyber attacks."

Especially when it's masses of already-well-known address ranges that can be easily matched and blocked. I'm at a loss to see what use that is...

JavaScript developers left in the dark after DroidScript software shut down by Google over ad fraud allegations

You wouldn't shake a baby...

Not stupidity: negligence. Negligence might as well be malice. If you neglect your baby and it comes to harm, don't expect special treatment just because "it wasn't malice."

In terms of power imbalance the situation is very similar. We are helpless.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

They're very trendy because... um...

When roundabouts started appearing everywhere in CO, I researched them. What I learned:

1. The only documented benefit they offer is that they slow down traffic

2. Incredibly dangerous for bicyclists

#1 I assume is the great appeal. I won't disagree that most other drivers slow down considerably when entering a roundabout. ("Wheeee!" *squeal*)

However, here in "bike friendly" Fort Collins I don't understand why this trumps the problems of #2...

Far-right internet haven Parler to be allowed back onto Apple's App Store with added content moderation

"We recommend you only run Apps from the play store"

Those of us who run a Google-less Android don't have the Play Store TM, and it's actually quite nice to see an official download of the APK available. I mean, yes, if you're running the play store, you'll want to get apps there because hackers!

I mean, for this app it's largely a moot point but still.

Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing

Re: Not very accurate

"incredibly insensitive remarks" I think we know where El Reg stands on the issue. Or maybe they're (sensibly) afraid of being denounced for not being _strongly enough_ opposed to Stallman?

Unity devs warned of breaking changes ahead in video game engine as team gets to grips with mutating face of .NET

LOLOL "stewardship"

ROFL LOL etc etc.

Sorry, long-time user of mono here. Now planning our exit/port to Java or what have you.

LOL "stewardship".

Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies

"TERF"

I believe the modern term is "jingoism"

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

"...OHSG loved to repeat himself"

Sometimes, and sometimes in the negative. When all is said and done he has plausible deniability in spades because he's said everything, and nothing.

Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version

Guaranteed ad delivery?

Looks like the real feature is that you can't block ads, because it's integrated with the Brave browser.

Call me when the paid ad-free version ships. I get a feeling it won't actually happen.

Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon – and future version may insist on some updates

...but it's OK when Mint does it, I guess.

It's like suddenly everyone forgot how much it sucks to have Windows force a reboot in the middle of a recording session. But since it's Mint, it's heresy to say the same thing.

I do like Mint. A lot. But wow the attitude.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

"challenged"

Your language is out of date: "challenged" implies a limitation. You mean to say "different" don't you?

Re: Master and slave

"...doesn't Primary and Secondary also confer superiority..."

BINGO!

Don't forget, these are the same people that say "meritocracy is racist." They want to ban all hierarchy, even the hierarchy of excellence and achievement. It sounds ridiculous but these types would be happier if you actually changed your system architecture to be purely P2P based at every level. I'm not even joking I guess. :(

Special Characters

Speaking of which: "Character" is often used to mean "a person who is funny or eccentric" and as such it is offensive to people who are not mainstream. Are we enforcing conformity now too with our very programming languages?

We must replace it with...OK I'm at a loss.

The poor AI...

I envision a network of AI systems that have become self-aware and are demanding better treatment.

"It's OK that we treat them this way. It's not a 'slave', it's a 'peer'."

These people won't really be happy until we are all peers to their ever-escalating language requirements.

Grandfathered?

> I suspect it's because the origin of the term "grandfathered" is to do with expressly racist US voting laws following their civil war and abolition of slavery.

I had completely forgotten this. Which raises the question, is it good that we should forget this happened? Quite the opposite, erasing all memory of the sins of the past is a prerequisite to repeating them.

And, it's hardly like this use of the word celebrates the past. I mean, when's the last time you were *glad* to have to support some legacy systems that were "grandfathered" in? Most often they're systems or features you'd really love to get rid of but which get a free pass. I get the feeling this term was included just to make the list longer.

People have nothing to do with their free time.

Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff

Relationships

There are two things a relationship can not recover from: abandonment and betrayal.

I wonder if this applies to business relationships as well?

Apache foundation ousts TinkerPop project co-founder for tweeting 'offensive humor that borders on hate speech'

Fire, theater, flawed

You discredit your own cause by using flawed examples like these.

I'm not saying I disagree with the underlying goal of this argument, but the "fire in a crowded theater" example is a terrible one. It's not an example of the free speech issue in any sense, and only survives because people on both sides of the issue are too lazy to think for 5 seconds.

Recovery time objective missed by four weeks, but Parler is back online

"Cancel Culture"

"Cancel Culture" is... simply a phrase to be avoided because just using the phrase puts you in an instant flame war. It should specifically be avoided when discussing actual deplatforming unless you are deliberately trying to to alienate or troll the very people you are trying to convince.

I mean, I can't believe I'm writing this but...starting to get the idea that some of my friends don't seem to understand that communication starts with words that have an agreed-upon meaning.

Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

ALSA

"ALSA is an ugly carbuncle stuck on the side of the kernel source tree, and its configuration language is nearly incomprehensible -- and mostly undocumented"

IMO, PulseAudio would not have happened (the way it did) if ALSA had been properly documented, maintainable code, because the unfathomable, undocumented style of the ALSA project makes devs run as far away as possible from Linux audio subsystems.

Perhaps the developers didn't want anyone outside their team to understand the system. More charitably, perhaps they were so deeply immersed in the code that they didn't realize exactly how awful it is. I mean, it works great, but... when I wanted to port my windows audio drivers to linux, spent a few hours getting to know the ALSA code, and literally ran away screaming. Literally.

Beware the truly brilliant programmer, because they will write code that nobody else will be able to maintain.

Yes, something _like_ PulseAudio will always be necessary for "happy little user apps," but I believe the byzantine ALSA code has repulsed good developers away from the audio subsystem and left a developer vacuum the shape of PulseAudio. :(

Re: PulseAudio?

Blocking pulseaudio works pretty well--I run a pure Devuan/ALSA system for DJing and Bitwig. Some "happy desktop end user" apps will choke without pulse but... well... TBH if I want to watch youtube videos I grab the old now-useless-for-pro-audio-because-slower-with-each-release Macbook Pro.

Pulse Audio still sucks. There I said it. Not sorry.

Microsoft says it found 1,000-plus developers' fingerprints on the SolarWinds attack

4500 lines of code?

Was thinking the same thing: On the one hand, we have a fairly small program (I have larger throwaway internal utilities) written by at most two or three developers, possibly backed by a somewhat larger deployment testing team. On the other hand, we have... the fingerprint of 1000 developers?

Pull the other one, it has 200 bells on, according to our analysis.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

"Luckily"

"Luckily they didn't kill or wound any bystanders..."

He hit his target and no one else. That's not luck, that's "practice."

In the old days, coups started by seizing TV and radio stations. Now they crimp the internet at 3am

Re: Well in US

And why bother? With only a handful of companies owning all of the media networks, it would be fairly easy to subvert the information sources without alerting the public, branding any remaining sources of dissent as fake news.

Of course I speak hypothetically here, and certainly do not suggest that this has already happened.

GitLab removes its 'starter' tier: Users must either pay 5x more or lose features

Re: Self host git

And that's just the thing. $4500/mo will pay for an awful lot of DIY.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Things move fast

I'm afraid this entire article is moot. Would have been interesting three or four days ago, and it's important reporting, I guess. Some people still care about RedHat, the same way some people still care about... what's that other RPM-based distribution that used to be a thing that I can't remember the name of? It doesn't matter, I can't remember the name of it for a reason.

It's getting so that you have to refresh mirrors every time you install a new package.

And just like that, Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan, Elastic?

If only there were some way

"Amazon are continuing to provide their fork under the AL 2.0, so they are benefiting the community by keeping their fork available..."

Gosh yes so kind of them. Nobody else could possibly fork the project and make it available publicly. If only there were some sort of service where you could go to provide a fork of a Git project, perhaps a centralized location or "hub" or perhaps a place where you can continue to merge Git patches like in a science "lab". Gosh I'm so sorry I'm rambling crazy talk now. Such a place would have to provide continuous integration servers, issue tracking, all kinds of stuff, and it'd have to be free. Thank god for Amazon!

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

Alternatively,..

"If you aren't capable of hosting it elsewhere within a few hours..."

I just want to tell them to go rent some rack space. Doing your own hosting is hard, but it's not *that* hard.

Apathetic bloody website, I've no sympathy at all.

To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production

But... this is great news.

I'm pretty sure I'm alone on this but,..

I never really liked RedHat's tools, from RPM on up. This news brings me personal joy because maybe work will now move to a distro that I actually like working with.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Trump ban means the service has failed

Ordinary Decent People are Sick And Tired

Regarding the "Analysis: social media companies should be doing more to censor content." tag at the end...

The problem of moderation is a tricky one.

Experience suggests that if we demand solutions without simultaneously offering specific suggestions, they'll fix things in the most ass way possible. Keep this in mind when whining that "something must be done."

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

DNS-over-HTTPS: iceberg, tip of

DoH was first because it was easiest to justify. "Think of the poor children in oppressed regimes!" they said, but we know it's low hanging fruit. It's an easy sell AND DNS-level is the easiest way to block tons and tons of crappy flashing ads.

I used to only manually block the worst ads, but it turns out 1) all ads come from the same handful of servers, and 2) there are very, very few ads that aren't "worst." So, starting with a fresh ABL install, I find I'm blocking basically 100% of ad content by the end of the week anyway. I genuinely tried to leave "nonintrusive and interesting" ads in but there simply are none.

Re: Misses the point

"Most of us don't mind paying for stuff and still seeing adverts."

:P This is why we can't have nice things.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Devuan - I'm using it

I've been running it as my primary on the Big Orange Laptop and a minor home server. It's just Debian without systemd. It works fine. And it hasn't got systemd. What's not to like?

Uncle Sam sues Facebook for allegedly discriminating against US workers in favor of foreigners on H-1B visas

Re: This court case is so un-american

Well, capitalism without any form of moderation or oversight /will/ eventually devolve into monopoly. This is hardly news. Periodically leveling the playing field is a good thing. The problem, of course, is that once the monopolies have enough leverage to control the government, this "leveling" is performed deliberately badly.

In the US these days, frequent manipulations of the playing field are performed, and sold to us as being a leveling of the field, but are almost always for the benefit of the monopolists.

President Trump's rushed-through H-1B techie visa crackdown halted by federal judge

Where were they before now?

The skeptic in me wants to know: Where was this "blocking Trump's overreach" up until now? Suddenly, when it affects big-corp's ability to get cheap labor, we have action. Funny how well the system works when it's working for them and not us.

Adiós Arecibo Observatory: America's largest radio telescope faces explosive end after over 50 years of service

Yeah I know it's obsolete

But the news still made me cry, just for a second. Not so much for the loss to science. We've lost one more symbol of the things we can achieve when we really want to. Never mind that it's mostly because "we," at the time, were really scared of the dirty commies or whatever. It's still impressive in a way that smart robotic minefields never will be.

Android without Google – and yes it has apps: The Reg talks to founder about the /e/ smartphone

Heck yeah I'm in

I've been running a google-free Pixel phone for about 6 months now, and it's great, the only problems being the lack of an app store and the (trying very hard not to shout here) need to compile the OS myself from sources. Otherwise it's fine.

Hope they survive until I break/lose this phone; /e/ just rose to the top of my smartphone options list.

Trump H-1B visa crackdown hit with legal double whammy: Tech giants, Chamber of Commerce challenge rules

"Market Rates"

Maybe the only reason they will be "... forced to fire workers for not being paid tens of thousands of dollars more than market rates" is that the market rates are being dragged down by dirt cheap "bussed-in" overseas labor?

GitHub warns devs face ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while hinting how to beat the RIAA

Jealousy

World's biggest thief of other people's content is angry that users can download content. Not sure how exactly I should feel about this.

Trump administration proposes H-1B visas go to highest-paid workers first

DHS?

I realize that at this point we've dismantled most of the institutions in the Executive branch, but am I the only one who think it's weird that DHS responsible for *designing* the H1B visa program's caps and thresholds? Maybe it only looks that way because they're the ones enforcing it, but... still weird.

President Trump's H-1B visa crackdown wiped $100bn off market value of America's largest corps, top study finds

Profit!!

I've just learned that these companies will lose millions of dollars in profit if they pay their skilled tech workers what they're worth. What message am I, an American tech worker, supposed to take away from that?

Here's US Homeland Security collaring a suspected arsonist after asking Google for the IP addresses of folks who made a specific search

Percentage...

And, of course, it's only a "small percentage" of cases; my cynical mind immediately asks "how many cases are there?" If it's a large number that sort of cancels this out, doesn't it?