Posts by Androgynous Cupboard

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Re: The Birds

True, but on the plus side if you're hit by a dropped packet it's apparently good luck.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

You got a bunch of downvotes but you’re one of the few people here that get it.

Canada can get what they want by putting pressure on OVHC, which they will do on whichever way is most effective. The impact this has on OVH or France or anyone else is not their problem.

I don’t know what the short term answer is but the long term answer is use a different corporate structure.

Tiny tweak for Pi OS, big makeover for the Imager

Imager

Worth noting that while a few years ago it was practical to image with dd, these days if you do that you'll wind up with a machine with no SSH access, making headless installations... problematic. This is the main reason I've had to suck it up and abandon the terminal for the imager.

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Re: Bio-engineered meat insanity

Oh, at $2/kg it's bioengineered - it might not be 3D printed, but visit a battery chicken farm some time and then tell me there's no engineering involved.

I don't know what you pay for free range chicken in the US, but whatever if is, it's worth it.

Russian spy ship theories sink after Orkney blackout traced to wind farm fault

Re: Darkness

Ah, nice to revisit that - I'd forgotten all the wacky theories at the time. I should note that the fine article you linked to doesn't say that exactly, it says that Russian fake news networks claimed the blackouts were "a consequence of the European sanctions against Russia" - the implication was that it was the lack of energy resiliance that caused it, not Russian action. Still bollocks, but a different slant.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

Re: How long before ....

I know someone loosely involved in this business, although not on the military side. Apparently before firing at any drones, they first confirm the positions of any satellites to make sure they don’t take one out!

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

Varlink

Thanks for the reference to that Liam, it looks like it does for local processes what MQTT can do for TCP/IP - lightweght pub/sub. Filed away in the "this is useful" box.

Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw

Re: University of Vain-a

That's an incredibly dumb comment.

Consider what you could do with 3 billion phone numbers and email address, 2 billion face images and a reverse image lookup. Want the private contact number for a government minister? Easy.

If you haven't the imagination to see how this could be useful, maybe just sit this conversation out.

China readies a lifeboat for stranded Shenzhou crew

Re: Eh?

I've lost track, I thought he sent magical submarines?

Game over: Europol storms gaming platforms in extremist content sweep

Re: All these extremists..

Got to watch out for those communist games. I was playing one the other day and instead of going on a lone wolf rampage, I had to work in a factory producing tractor parts for a centrally managed economy under an implausibly flat management structure.

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Pop Will Eat Itself

Well, they weren't wrong now, were they?

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Hmm

I feel we're giving Gordon the benefit of the doubt with this one. I've also written documentation for our own product - on the one hand I know it backwards, on the other hand the documentation is intended for people that don't. It's easy to skate too quickly over content that needs expanding, and focus on bits that the engineer thinks matter but that the users don't.

There has never, ever been writer in the history of the world who wouldn't benefit from a good editor with a fresh set of eyes.

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Forgive me if my irony meter breaks with this comment.

This whole thread started with a joke and has continued as one, with lots of earnest opinions on how things should be done. I have particularly enjoyed the "rewriting things should be stopped" angle from people using Linux - go talk to the BSD people in the mid-90s for a take on that one - and that issue with application design rather the language itself somehow indicate this whole thing is wrong footed.

The nearest thing to a sensible comment so far is "new code, new bugs". This is true. Any rewrite starts with one step back, it's what happens next bit that's the important bit.

If one tries hard enough, one can create bugs in anything.

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

So it's sock jokes? I suppose we'll have to, darn it.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

What I really don't get is why London? Yes I know we're the fraud capital of the world, but we also have a functioning police force which is - relatively - uncorrupted.

Had she gone to Argentina, or UAE, or somewhere she could simply pay the cops off, she would not be in the news.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: cold wire

A mate was very pleased he got away with his request for “head of S&M” on his business cards.

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Going the other way

I look forward to the legion of linked-in thought leaders penning earnest article on how to manage a “ground migration” to save money and reduce latency; can’t think what else to call exiting the cloud…

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

For someone called Basic Reality, you’re sure not grasping it.

Heat. The massive, barely mentioned problem with this ridiculous notion is heat. We are literally boiling away billions of tonnes of water dissipating heat from data centres on earth, so how exactly are we going to do that in space? Black body radiation isn’t going to cut it.

Australian police building AI to translate emoji used by ‘crimefluencers’

Re: Silly

It’s presumably off dealing with traditional criminals

Brit boffins teach fusion plasma some manners with 3D magnetic field

Re: We have to stop using Heat Engines to produce energy

While I do recognise the point you're making, the second law of thermodynamics would like to point out that you're always going to generate heat.

Cynicism is easy

Definitely not an expert but from what little I know, this actually sounds like a big deal. I understand there are plenty of hard problems with Fusion but the main one always seemed to be plasma confinement and control - this sounds like a big step forward. So a tip of the hat from me.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

It was dark mode 100% of the time when using a Hercules graphics card in the 80s, with the text a pleasing green. What’s old is new again…

Have I Been Pwned logs 17.6M victims in Prosper breach

Comparing apples and oranges

If you're as troubled by numbers like "2.6 billion" as I am, given a planetary population of 8 billion, that number was referring to "lines of data" in the breach; the subject of this breach is allegedly 17M "individuals".

Firefox 144 brings fixes, features, and farewells for 32-bit Linux die-hards

Re: Password manager

You should do business banking with Lloyds. Letters or numbers only - no punctuation allowed - and you can't paste values in, so no generating a random string: it has to be something you can remember. I'm surprised they don't limit it to six characters for good measure.

Datacenter water use? California governor says don't ask, don't tell

Re: No surprise

Actual students of history quietly shake their heads in dismay.

The way the US hard right have taken over the government actually has a lot in common with the way the ex-KGB led by Putin have taken over the Russian government.

Kyndryl sued for firing non-white workers, disabled vet

Re: Maybe they were useless ..

“Information Technology is one of the few places where people don't care about your generic heritage” - and then less then two sentences later, “I would only hire-on Chinese nationals”

The irony, it hurts.

Kicked from RubyGems, maintainers forge new home at Gem Cooperative

Re: The woke mob

One of my favourite observations is "What's the difference between a Briton and an Immigrant? About five to ten years".

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Re: Cute

Very true, and very definitely not this case with this font.

Their demo page includes the sentence "Retro aesthetic meets modern clarity" - I had to re-read it because I didn't recognise the final "y" in the word "clarity". So I'm not sure it works as a font, but as a practical demonstration of irony it's magnificent.

California cops confused after trying to give ticket to self-driving car

Re: Science upended by the desire for entertainment and revenge.

Ah, I see you are one of the 80% of drivers that self report as “above average”.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Re: This is a nonsense

You’re going to have to do better than that. And frankly there’s enough bullshit being stated as fact, don’t add to it.

There's already an NI database with everyone in it, there's no reason this will be less secure.

No, wait. Palantir is now on the scene. I retract my previous statement.

Re: This is a nonsense

A friend of mine is friends with a number of high court judges who know Kier from his time as a lawyer. "Nice guy, not a policitian" is apparently their take; they're all Tories so I had largely discounted this as sniping, but I'm not sure I can disagree any longer.

Pigs will fly: Uber Eats to trial drone delivery

As already documented in a well known study from the 1970s. The solution, clearly, is to ensure that only mustard sandwiches are delivered by drone.

Strong Java LTS arrives with the release of 25

> The new approach hides key Java concepts but does not remove them; they will have to be learned later.

Amen. For every recent Java release, most of the features seem to fall into to this category - "look, here's a shiny new syntax for an existing feature". To me, all I see is more syntax to learn to do the same thing. Yes, they've shaved a few lines off the main class, but they're just added to my cognitive load. It's completely the wrong direction to take (see also: "var", streams API, etc ad infinitum)

"There's More Than One Way To Do It" was the slogan for Perl. Anyone still codiing in Perl? No, I didn't think so.

Apple's 'Awe Droppings' fall close to the tree

Re: Battery life, according to Ternus, is "all-day."

Yes, but if you're in the Arctic summer that's three months without recharging!

Dev snared in crypto phishing net, 18 npm packages compromised

Re: is-arrayish ?

Something stinks here.

I've been having a look through the dependencies on that library and all so far of them have less than 100 downloads. But over 200 of the dependencies are different packages with a vietnamese title "Một thư viện giúp bạn tính tổng của 2 số bất kỳ", which means a library that helps you calculate the sum of two numbers. Which is all it seems to do.

But there are hundreds of these, with hundreds more depending on them, all seemingly doing the same thing. They're on github too, eg https://github.com/setpass/sum-setpass, https://github.com/quocvangvien/quocvang

Based on some other packages by the same people, my guess: someone is gaming NPM dependencies to try and get packages installed, and somewhere in that massive dependency chain of hundreds and hundreds of packages is some malware, possibly crypto mining. Any budding researchers out there might have some fun with this.

is-arrayish ?

"Determines if an object can be used like an Array"

Fucks sake people. That's not a package, that's a line of code. Or five lines, once you wrap it up for a packaging

If you are one of the 73 million people who downloaded it last week, you have no business driving a computer. Shame on you.

No more waiting for lines: New Windows keyboard shortcuts output em and en dashes with ease

Re: ?????

Here to make the same point. I view the em-dash as a tell for spotting American authors.

It's AI all the way down as Google's AI cites web pages written by AI

Re: A few points.

> Historians have always had to deal with this. An unreliable chronicler announces that a mythical King lost a war after tripping over a dog and every historian covering the war, the nation involved or the history of dog ownership repeats it. You'd be amazed how many urban myths make it into history text books.

A local mate has been attempting this for years - he has essentially invented a local legend, and has been shoe-horning it into letters to the paper and other local publications as often as possible. The goal is to get one of them indexed, then he can create the wikipedia page to point to it, then he can refer to it as the source. A quick google and I see he has finally succeeded - Google's AI has just earnestly told me of it's history, so now I guess it must be true.

Naturally I will not be giving away any more, but I'm going to have to buy him a beer when I see him for a job well done.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Doubly confusing if you’re in London. Dropped H’s I can ‘andle, but extra ones are most disconcerting.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: A shade unfair there.

Holy Christ, I hadn’t seen that one. In 1996 by McDonnell Douglas. The nerve of some people!

Re: Attitude problem

The nice bit about Y2K was we at least got to have a big NYE party. Maybe we need a UNIX Epochalypse party to focus the minds? Haven't done 3am in a while but I'm kind of tickled with the idea of a bunch of mates, plenty of beers, and massive 32 bit clock on the wall counting seconds in hexadecimal. Maybe just for fun I'll set all the lights to go off when it rolls over...

Tesla bid to become a UK electricity supplier gets politically 'charged'

I agree with Ed Davey, Musk has done some harm in the UK. But I do find myself wondering why so many UL politicians still have a Twitter account? Including… Ed Davey

NIMBYs threaten to sink Project Sail, a $17B datacenter development in Georgia

Re: should be requirements

Thanks for doing the math, that makes a lot more sense now it’s written down.

Makes you wonder why they want to keep building them

In Arizona and not Alaska. Can’t just be latency.

Water

I've always been confused about this, maybe a data-center expert could clarify.

Obviously water is required for cooling, but surely it's presumably just then run off to a tank or something to cool and then recirculated? It's not just dumped into the drains, is it? Because it couldn't be economical to literally flush away 34 million liters of water a day just because it got warm going through a pipe. I have a server in a datacenter and I know they have cooling tanks, so I've presumed that's the industry norm...

Post-privacy AI glasses claim to listen to your every word

$249 for "listening in on conversations 24/7 and offering unsolicited feedback"

It'll never catch on - I know too many people willing to do that for free.

Apple rushes out fix for active zero-day in iOS and macOS

There speaks a man that has never (attempted to) read ISO/IEC 15444-5:2015.

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

Re: Hire KPMG for your information security strategy!

Not that I ever expected to be defending KPMG, but I suspect they did both.

And frankly they should get a thumbs up for blocking AI while they did a risk assessment, rather than caving to their graduate and some newspapers.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

What a bunch of clowns

...to start off the long-procession of burger-based puns. It's not big, it's not clever, but it is inevitable.