Posts by Ken Hagan

Hats off to the brave 7%ers who dived into the Windows 10 May 2020 Update within a month of release

Re: Masochists...

In my case it is because I develop software and want to get screwed over before my customers do.

It's a balance, though. I could become an Inmate and get screwed earlier and harder, but I don't love my customers *that* much.

Germany is helping the UK develop its COVID-19 contact-tracing app, says ambassador

Re: In the interim, the British government has been forced to adopt human-powered contact tracing

...which is just one of the reasons why there are privacy concerns around any track and trace app that everyone is expected to install on their phone.

I thought it already had an English translation, though it isn't clear why.

Perhaps there is a legal requirement to make a UK app available in other languages as well, since it is some kind of government service. Anyone actually know?

I thought it was fairly obviously making Britain the butt of the joke and so, assuming the article was written by a Brit, fairly innocuous.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

A face-saving solution...

We could surely "re-purpose" these satellites as a way of providing rural broadband. Or is our government not even capable of that?

C is for 'Careful now', D is for 'Download surprise': Microsoft to resurrect optional Windows 10 updates as 'Previews'

Re: Refunds for repairs?

"Linux is not then an option in this case. The GUI is totally different to what he is presently using."

Browsing, email and basic office-y stuff is identical, the Linux update mechanism is faster and more reliable, and the number of threats to privacy and security is much lower. We don't know what his workload is, but I would guess that "totally different" is almost totally wrong.

Re: intelligent data lake

Plasmodium?

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

Re: GDPR

If it isn't your house then it isn't personally identifiable as you. At least, not unless Google are way ahead on the AI and can understand your host welcoming you by name. When setting up the Assistant, you let it voice print you (presumably to redice the risk of visitors issuing random instructions as in the XKCD cartoon on this topic) so anyone else is just background noise.

So I don't think GDPR applies.

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

Re: Damage the hard drive?

All the more scary is that this drip under pressure claims to have taught the Microsoft case for years. Rather sad to think that students might have paid good money for such crap tuition.

If Fairphone can support a 5-year-old handset, the other vendors could too. Right?

Re: Consumers aren’t being served by Android

Also true for operating systems, office suites, web browsers, email clients...

The odd thing is that in all these other markets there is now a free alternative, but trying to put a free OS on your phone usually involves finding a bug that someone has turned into a rootkit.

Winter is coming, and with it the UK's COVID-19 contact-tracing app – though health minister says it's not a priority

Re: Well that aged well

And haven't they open-sourced it? But it will take our genius govt six months to add an English translation to the UI.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Re: I need help

"1 word is used to describe several different unrelated situations"

All real languages do that. Metaphor is fundamental to applying language to new situations. Computers as we know them did not exist 100 years ago so pretty much all computer jargon is metaphorical.

The argument here is just about which metaphors are allowed.

Re: New wave

If more people knew the etymology of wife and husband then those terms would be banned, too.

Whatsapp blamed own users for failure to keep phone number repo off Google searches

Re: Another App That Can Stop FAILing

The text you quote does not exclude the possibility of the OP keeping the app on a phone, too, so "blatant lie" is a little strong.

Logitech Zone Wireless: Swanky headset means business, but that also means it comes with a hefty price tag

Re: I might be talking sh*te..

I think the OP's point is that you need full ear cover to make it more effective.

Microsoft's own operating system should finally start working on its own hardware ... 'in the coming weeks'

You've missed the point. MS will fix this by changing the code, not the device, so it is the code that isn't ready.

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

Re: 25 years ago

25 years ago "cold fusion" was discredited hogwash. You have to wonder what the marketing folks were smoking when they decided "Yeah! Let's call our product Discredited Hogwash!".

Re: Thanks Rasmus!

That would be the clients who did not realise that EITHER they have wasted their money on a product with no future OR it is not finished on delivery.

Decent products last long enough to see a version 2, which will cost the client a pretty penny if they have to pay for a rewrite of version 1 before they can start.

Ignoring the costs of future maintenance is like planning to fail. You wonder why people bother.

Why would someone want to hack Germany's PPE supply chain? We're glad you masked

I don't suppose that disinformation about PPE is really all that big a deal. Depending on who is responsible, however, making it clear that you have caught them in the act might be more useful.

Interesting (and amusingly appropriate) that they've chosen to do it in a "face saving" manner.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"Why _should_ this be different?"

Because a phone number is, by design, an open-ended sequence of digits (like a DNS name, though I think that, too, has a limit of 63 characters that hardly anyone runs into) whereas an IPv4 address is, by design, exactly four bytes.

Re: If Only...

Raw IPv4 has no such provision, but if the laggards are happy to paddle in lagoons behind a NAT (and to judge from this forum, they actually see that as a feature) then we can certainly design an internet that uses IPv6 for the heavy lifting (and routing) but hand-holds the ageing IPv4 boxrs and devices until they actually die of old age.

In fact, we did, and it is running. Measuring adoption by percentage traffic is the wrong metric. It has been fully adopted and your percentage merely tracks the rate at which old crap finally falls over and needs to be replaced.

Re: One for every grain of sand...

IPv6 home routers: I'm using one right now. I've had two others over the last half decade. Perhaps you need to sign up with a competent ISP who, amongst other things, can point you at such a router or even supply you with one.

IPv6 has been up and running for years now. If you haven't noticed, it's because it works.

Re: @batfastad - 30% in the UK

...which is why the OP said "Leave it.".

OK Windows 10, we get it: You really do not want us to install this unsigned application. But 7 steps borders on ridiculous

Re: I thought containers were a thing now

"Most applications don't need to ..."

I think that one is "citation needed" but even if it is true it is not relevant. If you have existing files, written by some other app, my malware can offer to do something helpful with them. That's quite a common pattern for utilities. They provide that little extra feature or capability that wasn't provided in the original app, or they bring together two apps to increase the value of both.

Of course, once the end-user has helpfully pointed me in the direction of some data that I know how to compromise (Thanks, end-user!) I can update it and "helpfully" introduce some vulnerability that my friends can exploit.

"their 1960s pre-network, timesharing model of "security" ..."

Don't hold your breath on that one. The fundamentals haven't changed. If you lose physical security, it's game over for the hardware. If you run un-trusted code, it's game over for that security context. Sadly, the solutions available haven't changed either. There's still no way to establish trust between two parties that know *nothing* about each other. Certificates are an attempt to provide *some* trustworthy background information, but the actually trustworthiness of the various CAs over the years has been patchy.

Have I Been Pwned breach report email pwned entire firm's helldesk ticket system

Re: Also an age-old observation:

"A lot of HTML can also just be annoying by enabling massive messages that we don't really need or providing a method for the annoying mail designers to play with weird formatting, but those are not security risks."

Arguably the opposite, since you can be fairly sure that the content isn't worth reading and, with a bit of training, your anti-spam filter can learn this too.

Re: Also an age-old observation:

"HTML email" is just a file transfer protocol, like HTTP, together with a way of combining several such files in a single package, like TAR or ZIP. Run a sufficiently buggy client and you can have trouble with all of these.

Most normal human beings appreciate being able to properly format their communications, and include relevant non-text bits and bobs. When, for example, was the last time you received a letter in the post that looked like it had been banged out on an actual typewriter starting from blank paper? If you are happy to shut off 99% of the human race, by all means stick to plain text email. We are probably happier to be shut off from you.

If HTML email did not exist, someone would invent it and it would rapidly grow in popularity until only weirdos insisted on avoiding it. Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.

Talk about a control plane... US Air Force says upcoming B-21 stealth bomber will use Kubernetes

Re: Open-source nuclear warplanes

That's one hell of a hot-end you've got on that printer.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: Circumstances Alter Cases.....

Can you reduce that to 36 please? My mobe screen isn't as wide as yours.

Re: The real reason for fairly small line lengths

But lines of code (unlike your paragraphs, which nevertheless I find quite readable at well over 80 characters per line) typically don't extend all the way to the right hand side and when they do it is usually really helpful to the reader to see that they are a single long line rather than two short ones.

I feel obliged to point out that I'm reading both of you on a display that is putting well over 100 characters of your text onto each line. (And that's even with the apparently-internet-default stylesheet that discards the left and right thirds of my monitor.) It doesn't seem to be a problem.

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

I think it was more like 65 or 66 for FORTRAN programmers (upper-cased, since this *is* your grandmother's FORTRAN) since the first few columns were reserved for something as well -- statement labels for GO TO statements if I remember rightly. (In mitigation, FORTRAN ignored all whitespace, so you could save loads of characters that way.)

AR flop Magic Leap's 'pivot' spins CEO right off his throne

Re: Alas, for the days of the ancient kings

Seen the news lately? It looks like the plan is already underway.

Pablo Escobar's big bro and former accountant sues Apple for $2.6bn over FaceTime bug

Re: likely

Will he present those in person? If not, can't Apple just call him as a witness?

It's election year. There's no way this guy can turn up to a court in Silicon Valley without a long queue of people forming to take a (legal) pot-shot at him "while he's here".

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Re: Microsoft only have themselves to blame

Anything that is compatible with CMD can only do things that an extended CMD could do. Once you've decided that you don't like some of the things CMD does, you might as well start from scratch. PS is much better than CMD once you've bitten the bullet and learned the syntax and, frankly, there are far worse languages out there.

Dude, where's my laser?

Dispersion, not deflection

Light paths are reversible. If you can see the target from the firing point, there is a "straight" path from the firing point to the target and you can find it with a weapons sight. It seems much more likely to me that the atmospheric conditions were simply spreading the beam out, so it was a modest circle rather than a pin-point when it arrived.

China and Taiwan aren't great friends. Zoom sends chats through China. So Taiwan has banned Zoom

Re: Use Jitsi instead

'S funny just how many services on the internet have issues that could be addressed by self-hosting. If only there was a version of IP that had enough address space to make that technically feasible with 8 billion of us trying to self-host at once.

Contact-tracing app may become a permanent fixture in major Chinese city

Yeah, but that dude is sooo old. He can't possibly have anything relevant to say about modern society. I mean, he'd never even *heard* of mobile phones.

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

Re: Sandbox

Your standard user account is a sandbox. Running as admin is a Bad Thing, remember?

The VM that your copy of Windows is running in is another sandbox.

So is the processor mode that Intel, blessings be unto their firstborn, have deigned to allow you to run the VMM in.

But yeah, one might reasonably ask why the sandboxes are nested so deeply.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Re: Chinese technology ...

And now try reading the second half of the sentence you quoted. It's quite important.

Re: Chinese technology ...

I must be a mutant then. I have no trouble distinguishing between peopoe of other races who I know well, and great difficulty remembering faces (even pasty white ones like mine) of people I don't know well.

Your post sounds like one of those "Amazing Scientific Facts" that is so surprising when it is said out loud that everyone goes "Gosh, isn't science amazing!" rather than "Er, are you sure?". Soundbites trump skepticism every time, sadly.

Re: Need Polarized face shield

Sunglasses and a face mask will flummox pretty much any face recognition. In fact, it will flummox pretty much even face *detection* because there just isn't enough face left on view for the neural nets to notice.

" if he did, he would lose millions of voters, who would find a masked president unnerving. Seriously."

I believe you, but once the small minority of Americans who think that way have died of stupidity in the Second Wave, I think you'll find that the rest are perfectly capable of telling the difference between communism and public health measures.

"For many years it's been popular to wear masks in parts of Asia."

That's air pollution they're worried about, not CCTV.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

The examiner was probably working to a mark scheme that had plenty of boxes for stylistic concerns but only one for "works as intended" and one for "chose to tackle a harder problem".

Re: every byte mattered ...

The 8088 had the merit of existing when IBM needed manufacturing volumes of whatever they chose, so I don't think we should be too harsh on them for that decision.

As for segmentation, the 386 could have run a perfectly usable 32-bit platform with virtual DOS boxes for old software, in 1985. That's much less than 10 years after IBM's decision. If it actually took much longer before the world was free of 16-bit segments, it is because of much later decisions.

Code *that* old pre-dates source control, at least on the platform in question. So no, it certainly isn't a case of flickinh a switch on a repo, but it might be a question of actually finding the code at all. Possibly even typing it in from a faded and barely readable (and certainly not OCR-able) printout.

DirectX comes to Linux (via WSL2): Microsoft unveils tricks needed to flash a GPU at a penguin

Typing this in a VM running on a Debian host with two 4K monitors. One of my other VMs has a second virtual monitor that is maximised on the second real monitor. No problems here. What's your experience?

The end really is nigh – for 32-bit Windows 10 on new PCs

Re: When will it be the year

Wrong question, really. The issue is that you have end-users who don't want to "learn" LO, so you keep buying office because that is cheaper than the battle with the end-users, so you keep buying Windows because that is the only option.

Yes, we can all see how to break out of this tail-spin, but we aren't usually the ones making the purchasing decisions.

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

I don't dispute the existence of two schools of thought, but I don't agree that "conservative" and "liberal" are the appropriate labels. Those two words have too many political connotations and I don't think the split in legal interpretation aligns with political leanings.

The opening paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_meaning_rule touches on this concept and links to notions like "literal rule", "textualism" and "originalism".