Posts by Ken Hagan

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Re: Ban private car ownership.

I dunno. Maybe people can distinguish between the First Minister and a relative.

Anyhow, I was just pointing out that we *have* a charismatic leader already and it doesn't seem to be helping to get stuff done.

Yes. I do wonder why the coach wasn't carrying an adapter of some sort. It's not like there are different types of electrical energy.

Re: Ban private car ownership.

We've got one (though estimates vary on how many children he's fathered). He couldn't organise a Bullingdon bash in a brewery.

Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

Re: Simple solution

That kind of quid pro quo would be a GDPR violation, but yes, I don't suppose the crooks will let that bother them.

Hard drives at Autonomy offices were destroyed the same month CEO Lynch quit, extradition trial was told

Re: Lynched?

While not disagreeing with the thrust of your argument, I feel compelled to point out that human rights are, by definition, the rights you *don't* lose when you break the law. Otherwise you end up living in some dystopian hell-hole like Pooh Corner.

Biden warns 'real shooting war' will be sparked by severe cyber attack

Re: Not really news, Biden

I'm not sure your analogy with engineering actually stands up.

Real engineers don't do most of the work when building a bridge, but they supervise and they are on the line (in court) if it goes wrong. Insurers cover that risk as long as the "real engineer" has professional qualifications. In the end, it is all about money. The builder uses an engineer to off-load the risk, the enginer off-loads that risk to an insurer, and everyone keeps their fingers crossed that the bridge doesn't fall down.

If it falls down the first time someone drives a heavy truck over it, everyone loses. However, if it falls down when someone wraps shaped charges around a pylon, everyone shrugs shoulders and the police chase after the terrorist.

Some high-profile attacks on software feel like the latter case. The software was fit for its purpose, but an attacker just "changes the purpose" until the software is no longer fit. Expecting every software package to be resistant against crackers is like expecting bridges to be resistant to bombing. Maybe it can be done, I don't know, but it doesn't sound like it would be cheap and who is going to pay?

I'm aware that some other attacks are just plain stupid. (Anything where key infrastructure is connected to an international network sounds ... rash.) But let's not pretend that qualifications can save us from an foreign adversary who is clearly practising for the next war.

You, too, can be a Windows domain controller and do whatever you like, with this one weird WONTFIX trick

Microsoft have been pleading devs to stop using NTLM for many years now and rolled out its successor over 20 years ago. Admins can enable auditing to see what might break if they disable NTLM and then they can disable it anyway because, well, it's a known train wreck of a protocol.

So who is actually being negligent here?

China sets goal of running single-stack IPv6 network by 2030, orders upgrade blitz

That would be a routing nightmare. It would also be unnecessary since the state controls the network you are logging into and probably the OS on the device, too, so the tracking you suggest is almost certainly already happening.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Re: Example

It's not really the cost of the bug though, is it? It's the cost of lying about the bug, in court. I don't need an article in an old IBM magazine to tell me that is going to be expensive if a customer "reports" the bug.

Be careful what you inline: Defunct video-hosting domain used to inject smut flicks into news articles, more

just you wait...

One day this will happen to an ad-provider (or a social media site will go the way of MySpace) and the whole internet will light up like Christmas lights.

Microsoft has a workaround for 'HiveNightmare' flaw: Nuke your shadow copies from orbit

Re: AC Naturally

It's local in the sense that you need the ability to run code of your choice on the target system. If you've got SSH access or a "willing" accomplice, you've got that. It looks local to me.

Remote would be "I only need the IP address.".

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Re: Always an important consideration

Keyboard shortcuts are underlined and menu accelerators are written on the menu. Except that MS have abolished both of those. :(

Change for changes sake, without even any understanding of why things were like that in the first place. Nevermind. Perhaps the next round of changes will accidentally rediscover CUA and we'll all have discoverable UIs again.

Make-me-admin holes found in Windows, Linux kernel

Re: The wisdom of MAX_PATH

Another common form of brain death is to name each sub-folder with all of the parent names before adding whatever differentiates it from its siblings.

C:\year\year-month\year-month-day\...

@9Rune5: Plausible, and I congratulate you on trying to put apositive spin on this, but to a native English speaker the verb "leverage" is just so awful that the it just implies that the speaker is a fucking twat who should be throttled with their own intestines.

Doubtless there are similar constructions in your own mother tongue that provoke similar revulsion.

The wisdom of MAX_PATH

"C:\The Linux vulnerability involves creating a very long path name.\ That's Very Long(tm) since the length needs to overflow a 32-bit integer.\ It reminds me that (once upon a time) there were limits on the permissible lengths of filenames and although those limits were set much longer than any reasonable human being would ever be bothered to type, they meant that all sorts of software could use a fixed size buffer and not worry about million-character path lengths.\ Sadly, the pursists insisted that there was simply no reason to limit pathnames and so all software must pass torture tests in this area.\ Back in the day, even UNIX systems had a limit (around 4096 characters, I believe, at least on some systems) but gradually the purists have ground everyone else down. Even MS have belatedly gone down this path.\ But really, just *what* is the fucking point of this post being a valid filename? (There, just to trigger another set of purists, I've included wild-card characters in a filename.)\

Actually, if I'm going to be *really* anal I should include a paragraph break, in the form of newline characters, but I'm getting a bit off topic. The real point is that although *you*, dear end-user, cannot see any reason to impose a size limit on names, comment fields or whatever, *implementors* have to go several extra miles to actually support this, especially in a performant manner, and one of the costs is bugs like this.\

Really obscure feature that no-one actually uses but which causes security holes. Sigh..."

Windows 11 gets chatty as Teams integration turns up

Re: I know it's childish but…

With any luck it will go as well as last time. It will be challenged in court, found to be a nreach of monopoly law, and MS will be forced to offer an unencumbered versionof Windows and a choice screen. The only difference will be that this time it will only spend 5 minutes in court because it is so clearly the same offence.

It had to happen: Microsoft's cloudy Windows 365 desktops are due to land next month

I use mine for software development, and a few of its siblings for a test domain. Perhaps you are using the wrong VM host? I'm using Debian.

Most uses of a PC don't involve vast amounts of data, so the performance is really dictated by the CPU.

You can run a perfectly performant Windows VM in 2GB RAM and 64GB disk space. Yes, there are old machines and tiny laptops that can't provide that but you'd struggle to buy a "PC" today that doesn't exceed those requirements by an integer factor.

OTOH, there are certainly *apps* that need 8GB RAM or more, but that isn't a problem either because those apps wouldn't run on the old or tiny machine. In short, the overhead of running Windows in a VM on top of another OS is negligible.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Sell them to the Japanese. They like their Latin text over there and also they don't like adjacent consonants (like the tn in Britney) so they might actually prefer this version to what was intended.

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

Re: generated headers?

But generated by whom? Is the source (or the generating script) not available to Linux developers? If they are just provided by the hardware vendor then I'd say it is a little mis-leading to describe them as "generated" headers /in this context/.

generated headers?

If they are build output, why are they counting towards the release size?

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

Re: meh

"Admin/root"

Well, which? The UNIX root user, 0, is the omnipitent identity you appear to want but it has no equivalent in Windows. All user-space code runs under a login session that has powers strictly determined by the principals in its token. That's even true for sevices running as SYSTEM.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: Like that?

In the context of the article, the real weakness of that code is that it could only ever return about 4 billion possible answers, which is only an order of magnitude larger than something that the article claimed could be brute-forced in a few minutes.

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

Pointless

The real problem here is that this question is pointless. It has no useful answer.

If the user trusts the code, it doesn't mean it is trustworthy. (Even well-intentioned code might have bugs.) It just means the user doesn't want to be pestered by an algorithm that is (inevitably) too dumb to answer the question by itself.

If the user doesn't trust the code, they presumably still want to read it, so they will click on the annoying popup to make it go away.

Either way, the user has been annoyed and Microsoft have learned nothing that they can act on. (I *assume* that MS don't do dangerous things on random pieces of code just because the end-user happens to be reading it. That would be like ActiveX on steroids.) On the other hand, the end-user has learned that they are using an IDE created by people who think this a security feature. Oh dear.

SQL Server beta for Windows Server Containers terminated 'with immediate effect'

Re: Beta software

If only Google would delete all their beta software. That would be fun to watch, from a few million miles away.

Re: Tried the corrections link

Calls to “Linus OS” ??

Possibly missing an apostrophe after Linus.

Possibly a tad disrespectful of the other zillion developers involved.

Probably missing an X though.

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

Re: suggestion

TRademarkable Audio Manipulation Program?

Excellent trolling, there!

Oh dear, Universal Windows Platform: Microsoft says 'no plans to release WinUI 3 for UWP in a stable way'

Re: Did anyone ever do otherwise? ;)

Dear Microsoft,

There is no business case for third-party developers to re-write their UI to offer no *functional* improvements to their end-users, but to restrict (however slightly) the range of Windows versions that it runs on.

There is arguably a negative business case if they are unable to re-write all of their software at once, because customers *will* notice that the look and feel of the app is inconsistent (like your Control Panel / Settings farce that has been running for a decade now). On the other hand, they probably won't care, because 99% of their customers don't give a shit about look and feel as long as it presents a UI in a coherent way (unlike your Control Panel / Settings farce).

This does not strike me as a difficult concept to grasp. I am therefore somewhat bewildered that you have tried to do exactly this at least half a dozen times over the last 25 years, each time chipping away at usability with "features" like hiding keyboard shortcuts, hiding system menus, hiding window borders, hiding entire, yet new, features like the "charm" thingy, etc.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

Re: You're nuts

It runs just fine in a VM that has only 2GB allocated to it. That's not a completely fair comparison because the VM host is presumably using more memory to cache files, etc. Nevertheless, the idea that Win10 needs loads of RAM is simply untrue. It will use it if it has it.

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Re: I don't understand

To judge from Mishak's reply, several posts above this one, that is no longer a legal requirement.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Re: Almost Yawned

If everyone did that, could people point their phones at the MS store and dispense with Play altogether?

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Annoying, but understandable. Haswell (4th-gen) introduced AVX2 and a VEX coding scheme that was useful enough and orthogonal enough that compilers can actually target it. I expect MS want to use that in Win11.

And yes they could make two builds of /everything/, but then you have to test the "old" build, on a range of representative old hardware, purely for the benefit of processors that (by 2025) are 10 years older than the OS.

Windows 10 required SSE2, which came in about 10-12 years before Win10, and not many people complained about that. A change of compiler switches would have "fixed" the problem, but made the OS run slower for everyone else. When is an OS vendor allowed to finally start depending on last decade's technology?

Re: Windows 11 also requires the presence of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) – version 2.0

I expect there is a big difference between what your PC Health Check says and what Windows 11 will say when it finally turns up.

Just as... there is a big difference between what the article says (5th gen) and what the linked MS article says. I'm running the latest Win10 on a Sandy Bridge era Xeon, so old that it almost pre-dates Intel's current nth-gen labelling scheme, but it is OK as far as Microsoft's list goes.

BMA warns NHS Digital's own confidentiality guardian could halt English GP data grab unless communication with public improves

Re: Effective use of data...not

"Dido In Disaster Out"

Marvellous!

‘What are the odds someone will find and exploit this?’ Nice one — you just released an insecure app

Re: Shift left? shift right?

Fun fact: Waterfall was "invented" by an academic paper that needed a term for the worst possible methodology. Naturally no such term existed because all methodologies that had actually been proposed, described or actually used had at least some redeeming features.

It was a straw man on day one, has never been a thing, but is still The Reference against which everything is measured. This is probably because even snake oil looks good next to it.

Campaigners warn of an 'algorithm-driven censorship' future if UK Online Safety Bill gets through Parliament

Re: Look at last time.

It is very easy to ban VPNs if you don't mind stopping everyone from working from home. In the current situation, that might be something you minded, particularly if you had just spaffed a squillion pounds on Dido and her cronies and sent several sectors of the economy off a (white) cliff.

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

The OP didn't say the price had gone down 90%. They merely observed that it hadn't risen when the supply fell by 90%.

Re: Phew that was close!

I think you'll find that the Euro is backed by quite a number of armies, including one with nukes. It's not like those countries have an alternative currency they can switch to quickly if the Euro discovers a Total Inability To Support Usual Payments.

India tells Twitter to obey its laws — or make wielding them easier

Re: They Can Always Block It

But what if they block Twitter (and Facebook) and the sky *doesn't* fall in? One billion people managing without social media might set a terrible example to the rest of the world.

Re: Democracy ??

"No party elected in the UK has ever had a majority of 50%+ of the electorate."

Pretty sure that was commonplace up until 1930 or so. Never since, though, so your basic point stands.

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

My first thought: How does the door entry system work? Do all the meeting attendees have to smile or can we manage with just one and everyone else can taildate them?

(That's such a good typo I think I will leave it in. Truly brought an entry requirement to my face.)

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

Re: But is it better than Window 7?

Not that you as an end-user can do anything about it, but fibers were only added to NT to make it easy to port from other OSes that had tried them and not yet found them to be more trouble than they were worth. The advice to Windows programmers has always been "don't use them in new software".

That was over 20 years ago. Very sad to hear they are actually used by any software still on sale.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

I took it to mean "I'm so full of verbal diarrhea that I can't say "running" anymore.

Re: MS will probably nuke any x86 code too

I think you are massively underestimating how much 32-bit code there is. It took them about 10-15 years to kill Win16 and it had significant functional limitations compared to Win32. Win32 code has no such limits compared to Win64, unless your problem has datasets bigger than 2GB. Unsurprisingly then, there are still plenty of expensive speciality apps that are sold as 32-bit software. It ain't broke, so why fix it?

Re: Too much to hope...

It is certainly good for devs and support that there is little excuse to be running an old version. It is less good that the newer versions may be less good.

We've found another reason not to use Microsoft's Paint 3D – researchers

Re: Mat Powell is wrong

Methinks Mat Powell is trying to spread FUD. Do MS have an alternative file format they are trying to push? Is this a (laughable) attempt to badge STL as proprietary, in contrast to their own one, which of course isn't proprietary because it is the Microsoft Industry Standard (tm).

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Re: A better incentive

It's not just vaccines. Mental health issues have a cost to wider society, so where's the harm in gently "nudging" people towards taking mind-altering drugs?

And whose society are we protecting here? There are 225 million people in Pakistan. Millions of them have "been told" that the vaccine causes infertility or even death within a couple of years. Now "the government" is telling them that the screws are turning and they'll have to have the vaccine eventually. The vaccines were all developed abroad. Last time this happened, it "turned out" that a foreign government wanted their DNA.

If you were to call for a vote in the UK, you'd have a huge majority in favouring of taking the vaccine. Evidence out this week suggests that even the "vaccine hesitancy" of some has not actually materialised as "vaccine refusal". We didn't force the issue and people were persuaded by the experiences of friends and family. However, if you were to call for a vote in some parts of Pakistan, you'd just lose the vote. What's your authority for imposing sanctions on a regional majority population that numbers in the millions?

Re: F... an

I believe so, which would suggest that earlier attempts to get people to accept vaccination did not use effective strategies. As the article relates, at least some of those attempts did not treat the local population with respect and left people feeling pretty pissed off about it.

So we created a reservoir for polio to reside in and perhaps mutate one day, and we might now be creating a similar reservoir for covid. Great work, guys!

Re: A better incentive

When you have this many skeptics, there is considerable social pressure involved, so I don't think you can just rely on people being amenable to having their minds changed and getting vaccinated. (Their kids don't even get asked, for one thing, so a "Darwinian fallback position" is not really acceptable.)

You have to go in an actively persuade people that their doubts are mis-placed. You have to win the argument. (And as I've argued above, I don't think that coercion is a winning argument.)