Posts by diodesign

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

"If there is no word for slavery, how can those you enslave fight against it?"

You use it in context. This isn't hard.

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White space

You can, and if there's a collective movement supporting it, then sure.

Also: oh look, now who's easily offended?

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Let's go through this point by point

> Is there anyone out there that has been associated directly with slavery that is calling for this change? I suspect not.

I suspect so. If this is the reaction from *White* people asking to move away from problematic wording, can you imagine what would happen if people of color spoke up? I don't blame them for trying to keep quiet -- but enough is said behind closed doors, in private conversations to necessitate this change.

> The term "master" is a pretty central core concept in git.

I suspect GitHub will alias master with whatever they choose to use instead; that is the hard part of the switchover. It may only be the default branch name going forward that's changed.

> I really hate that ignorant people are dictating the agenda

I guess you feel powerless, like you're losing control? Someone else is telling you what to do, and that the old was bad? You feel red faced. I get it. But you have to look beyond it. Don't take it personally. It's just picking a word that is more inclusive.

> When we talk about, say, a "master swordman"

Great cool but that's not what's happening here.

Let me put it this way. Imagine you're Black and you've grown up in a White society that treats you different your whole life because of the color of your skin, and all the history associated with that.

You get an education and you enter computer science or software engineering and you find people holding on dear to things like 'black list' for banned things, and 'master'.

Yeah, I'm White, though I've PoC friends and I've had Black housemates. Don't assume this isn't some right-on crusade. Some of us are trying to listen to and respond to and help friends and family who are minorities.

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"There's no slave in git though"

It's still a reminder of the outdated master-slave trope in computer science. Also, there's no point calling it master. The main branch makes more sense, anyway.

Miss me with this master recordings stuff, too. That doesn't apply here. Masters are the official finalized recordings from which copies are made. A Git master branch constantly updates, so it should be main or devel.

Also, some people seem to think that by changing the word from master to main (or blacklist to blocklist) it's a condemnation of those who previously used the terms. It's not.

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Re: Master copy

Pick a more welcoming, inclusive word... or stick with the word that reminds some people of past and present acts of inhumanity. Such a tough choice.

As someone else said, what's the harm in making the world a little better?

And if changing a word makes you feel angry, frustrated, and powerless, imagine those facing injustices on a near daily, weekly or monthly basis.

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I've got me a stalker! Obsessive downvoter alert!

've got me a stalker! Obsessive downvoter alert!

Yeah, same with me, it happens if you irritate the wrong child.

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You know Facebook has an image problem when major nonprofits start turning down donations over political lies

"Even the 'dont mention the war' episode of fawltey Towers!"

Yeah, mainly due to the repeated use of the N word in the original edit.

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Russia drags NASA: Enjoy your expensive SpaceX capsule, our Soyuz is the cheap Kalashnikov of rockets

Payload and freight weight

FYI: rather than paraphrase the Russian space boss, I've dropped in his quotes verbatim so you can see where he's trying to come from.

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Keepnet kerfuffle: Firing legal threats at bloggers did infosec biz more damage than its exposed database

"just containing e-mail addresses?"

FWIW Diachenko said the data silo contained:

* hashtype (the way a password was presented: MD5/hash/plaintext etc)

* leak date (year)

* password (hashed, encrypted or plaintext, depending on the leak)

* email

* email domain

* source of the leak (I was able to confirm a few of the most prominent ones: Adobe, Last.fm, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, VK and others).

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IBM quits facial recognition because Black Lives Matter

Re: Hillarious

"white males are more likely to be killed in an encounter with the police"

Is that because there are more white males than black males in a population (leading to people of color being disproportionately detained, which is the half the point of the BLM message) or do you have some kind of source? Because I r doubt.

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June's Patch Tuesday reveals 23 ways to remotely pwn Windows – and over 100 more bugs that could ruin your day

Patches

Patch Tuesday reveals the ways Windows et al can be pwned, with patches to stop that from happening. The patches disclose not only the way in which the bugs can be exploited but provides enough material for reverse engineers to product exploits.

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It's nice y'all like our chips but half our data-center sales are from cloud giants, FYI, says Nvidia's chief beancounter

Data center sales

Yeah, according to Nvidia, 50% of its data-center sales go to top-tier cloud giants, aka the hyperscalers, and data center sales as a whole make up 37% of total revenues.

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Tech set responds in wake of American protests, police violence and civil unrest

"Sons of Obama"

To the folks reporting this ridiculous comment - I hear ya. It's already been shot down and down voted so I'll leave it be for now - not that anyone here agrees with it.

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7*7 = a simple equation for taking total control of multiple VMware-powered clouds

Re: Test.

There should be no code execution! That would be a security vulnerability.

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All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

Re: Re: Nice stunt...

Yeah, that was a little DHC-2 Beaver. This is a larger Cessna. I've made that clearer in the article.

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Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

"journalistic parasites"

Bear in mind we're the ones sticking our neck out on the line when we report things. Any one can post a theory to Reddit, and if it's right, we're thankful they alerted us and the world. If it's wrong, well, who cares, it disappears into the mix.

When we publish something and it's wrong, there are consequences - legally and reputation-rise - which is part of the reason why we try to get everything right first time (the main reason is none of us go to work to spread misinformation, quite the opposite).

Happy to tweak it to say B&F first reported it - but don't call us parasites. We're the ones who have to stand up the rumors, and carry the can if it turns out to be wrong. 50 percent+ of journalism is figuring out if what you've just been told, by someone on the street or someone in marketing, is actually true.

In Chris's case, he managed to get a confession out of WD, one that made it into a lawsuit. That deserves some kudos.

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They've only gone and bloody done it! NASA, SpaceX send two fellas off to the International Space Station

Re: How much?

It's cheaper. About $60m new, $50m reused.

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New TLD redirect?

Re: New TLD redirect?

Hi - don't worry, you're not missing any content. It's still the same site and articles.

It's a reflection of the fact that after 20+ years of publishing, we're reaching readers and advertisers in all parts of the world. We're still headquartered in the UK and still have the same core values: irreverent, independent, and investigative.

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Twitter, Reddit and pals super unhappy US visa hopefuls have to declare their online handles to Uncle Sam

Re: not all speech is protected

If you say on the internet that you're going to commit crimes or cause civil unrest, obviously that's going to hamper your ability to enter another country.

But what if you were barred entry because you leaned the wrong way left or right, politically, or you are friends with someone who knows someone whose brother is a bad person, or if you disagreed with a policy of the current or past administration?

That's starting to sound more like Iran or China than a free country.

Hopefully you can see that it's not as clear cut as you think it is.

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Great news. Patch load drops 20% for the first time in 10 years. Bad news: Well, you've heard about coronavirus?

How many software companies have been laying people off?

Ah, quite a few. In fact, a lot of tech cos have used the pandemic as an excuse to offload staff, blaming the economic uncertainty.

There's also the drop in productivity as people work from home for the first time, and in stressful circumstances - not just world events, but also things like childcare.

It appears to have had an effect on the number of bug advisories.

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Broadcom sends its England-based staff back into office as UK lockdown eases – though Welsh workers get a free pass

And over in America...

Yeah, true - I've acknowledged that in the article.

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This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Re: And there is of course also lazarus/freepascal

This is not a sponsored piece - advertorial is clearly marked on the site with 'sponsored' (written by the advertiser) or 'promo' (written for the advertiser) labels.

I can add a mention to lazarus/freepascal.

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Arm goes off road... map: 5nm Cortex-X1 touted for phone, tablet, laptop processors needing Apple-level oomph

"new geometries"

Actually, the A78 and X1 are targeting 5nm, rather than 7nm, which I've added to the story.

The overall architecture hasn't really changed. It's taking advantage of, say, TSMC's upcoming 5nm process node.

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Switzerland 'first' country to roll out contact-tracing app using Apple-Google APIs to track coronavirus spread

UK app

Sure - we've made it clearer it's the track-and-trace stuff today.

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IBM's sacking spree reaches Australia – and as staff wait to exit, they're offered AU$4k to find new workers

Re: Does IBM still exist ?

FYI.. We covered the recent IBM and HPE layoffs.

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Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Re: Order of magnitude error

Thanks - that's been fixed. Please drop us a note via email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so it can be addressed immediately and not a day later when we get round to reading comments.

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Forget BYOD, this is BYOVM: Ransomware tries to evade antivirus by hiding in a virtual machine on infected systems

Re: Use of SMBv1 for XP compat may be at the core

FWIW the files are shared between host and guest through vboxsf, VirtualBox's shared folder driver. There's no SMB involved TTBOMK. If a network share is mapped to the host, it can be accessed by the guest via vboxsf.

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UK MPs to off-payroll workers: Delay IR35 reforms until 2023? You wish

"I am constantly surprised"

We've cleared up a few things in the article, and added a fact box we'll use in future pieces.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so we can fix up issues immediately.

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Wording

Thanks - we've tweaked the wording of the article to make it clearer and added a fact box we'll use in future articles.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so we can fix up issues immediately.

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Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps

Re: Have you looked before complaining?

Under Google + Apple rules, there can be only one app operating in a region using the API so it'll be grayed out in the UK until the NHS plugs into it.

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Remember when Securus was sued for recording 14,000 calls between prison inmates and lawyers? It just settled

Re: "selling location data"

It's worse than that. It's everyone. Read the linked-to article:

"An American telco that provides costly phone services to prisoners has been accused of harvesting location data on American phone users – and selling it to the police with no oversight.

"That's all citizens, by the way, not just prisoners. Securus sold details of where you have been in the States, based on your phone's location, to the cops."

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

Petty or Pedant?

No, you're just wrong.

Duck tape is an alternative spelling of duct tape. Duck tape came before duct tape.

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Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

Re: Apple told The Register - ????

Nah, they like to pretend half the time we don't exist, and we like to pretend they totally hate and ignore us. If it suits Apple, they'll respond. If it's us picking apart their tech or decisions, it's the silent treatment - which has never stopped us before.

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Feguson's Crap Imperial College Model

Re: Feguson's Crap Imperial College Model

Ach, the review is a wee bit bollocks. There's no smoking gun in the science of the model nor the math - just gripes about quality.

If someone who is an expert in modeling pandemics can point out a flaw, great, otherwise it's grousing about code smells.

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Now there's nothing stopping the PATRIOT Act allowing the FBI to slurp web-browsing histories without a warrant

"No it won't"

Sigh. I knew if we didn't mention HTTPS and DNS-over-HTTPS, we'll get moaned at, and if we do include HTTPS and DoH, we'll get moaned at.

Sure, if you use Cloudflare or Google for DoH, the Feds can request it. That's obvious. But then someone will say they're using DoH through their custom VPS in Laos over Tor, so nerr-nerr. That's why the article said tunneling and DoH would work "to some degree."

There was a whole part at the end discussing the situation but it started to feel like an article within an article so I cut it. I've added a summary for those who need to know what "to some degree" means.

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There's Norway you're going to believe this: Government investment fund conned out of $10m in cyber-attack

Yup, we f'ked that one up royally. Lessons have been learned - the article's been corrected.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong - we'll get those complaints immediately without having to read every comment.

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Meteorite's tiny secrets reveal Solar System's sodium-rich, alkaline liquid past – a clue to formation of life

Re: sorry to be pedantic

Ah, you know what we mean, tsk.

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Sadly, 111 in this story isn't binary. It's decimal. It's the number of security fixes emitted by Microsoft this week

Re: Re: To paraphrase Yoda ...

Done - thanks for the heads up.

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CEO of AI surveillance upstart Banjo walks the plank after white supremacist past sinks contracts

"lunging at a man carrying a gun"

What the hell was he doing jumping out of a truck with a gun in his hand, armed buddy in tow, confronting an unarmed stranger? Riddle me that.

What was the jogger supposed to do, stand there and get shot? Run off?

This could have been avoided - by not getting out of a car armed.

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Total Eclipse to depart: Open-source software foundation is hopping the pond to Europe

"communist socialist Silicon Valley"

The same "communist socialist" valley that has incredible wealth inequality and nothing in the way of a social safety net?

wtf_am_i_reading.jpg

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Mad dash for webcams with surge in videoconferencing has turned out rather nicely for Logitech

Re: long-term secular trends driving our business

It's investment jargon:

"A secular trend, stock or market is one that is likely to continue moving in the same direction for the foreseeable future."

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If you miss the happier times of the 2000s, just look up today's SCADA gear which still has Stuxnet-style holes

Missing the point, maybe

"It doesn't look like a big deal for several reason"

Who said it was? We're saying the security stuff from the 2000s is still a thing now.

"One is that they essentially had to comprise the Windows PC being used"

Yeah, as the article says at the top. The point Trustwave's trying to make, and I guess we are, too, is that, no, this isn't acceptable. The industry should do better. I know all the excuses why not.

Or let me put it another way: you obviously know a lot about how SCADA works, which is cool. But next time a plant gets hacked, and people say, 'how could this happen?' they can be referred to this article and research. This is how it happens.

I totally appreciate that once you get into the Windows PC connected to the controller, it's virtually game over.

But sometimes the obvious has to be pointed out.

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Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

Re: Odd? We already had this?

This appears to be an earlier 1977 version, as the article notes, not the wildly distributed version.

The file trees are not quite the same, for one thing.

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MediaTek formally pulls open G85 SoC drawer, reveals chipset for next-gen budget blowers

Re: big.LITTLE

Nope, Arm calls it big.LITTLE to, er, I think show that the little cores make an impact.

https://www.arm.com/why-arm/technologies/big-little

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UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: “updated to add”

This is a constantly evolving story with more information emerging on a daily and hourly basis, and we've revised our analysis of it. The background mode on iOS is limited - and the NHS's use of it looks problematic.

The FT reports the NHS is considering switching to the Apple-Google API after tests show the iOS app falls into listen-only mode (as we first reported) after a while. A passing Android is needed to wake it up (as we first reported).

Of course, we want to be right first time, that's our number one goal. Bear in mind this is a complex technical and political hot potato that's shifting position all the time.

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The Register's radioactive key rings

Re: The Register's radioactive key rings

Hey I do - back when I bought one as a reader. It's attached to my keys and still glowing enough that I can see it in my bag or hanging on the wall in the dark, which is handy.

When I bought one I thought it was just glow-in-the-dark watch paint and the radioactive stuff was a tongue-in-cheek Reg gimmick. Turns out it's true. We're carrying a little bit of tritium, a nuclear weapon ingredient.

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Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

"Where did you get that 'flight' fantasy ??"

Flight risk is not literally a flight as in aircraft flight risk - it means going somewhere else when you've been told to stay in a certain place. The Cambridge dictionary defines it as:

"someone who has been accused of a crime and is considered likely to try to escape out of the country or area before their trial begins."

Julian was told to stay at his bail address in the English countryside, but took off to the embassy in London.

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Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

"Bit of an advertorial"

Few thoughts:

* It's Red Hat Summit (virtually) so RH makes its CEO available to journos, and here we are.

* If Canonical and Suse want to be interviewed, they know where to find us.

* If you don't see us interview someone, it's unlikely we don't care - it's more likely they don't want to be interviewed by us.

On more than occasion, a PR has asked me, "what do I need to do to get my client into The Reg?" And my response is: "You should be keeping your client out of The Reg."

Also, if you've been following Kieren's work, let alone the rest of the site, for a while, you'll know editorial doesn't really do the whole ass-kissing thing in tech.

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Long after Linux, Windows Server Containers finally arrive on Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service

"I am surprised 'register' has not banned you yet"

Uh no, this isn't North Korea. Everyone has the right to respect and disrespect whichever vendor they want.

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CFOs are crossing fingers and hoping a second wave of COVID-19 does not appear, says Gartner

Re: Re: If the CFO's are worried

Bob, take it easy, please. When your comments start to look like modem line noise, it's time to step away from the keyboard.

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