Posts by sequester

Free Software Foundation suggests Microsoft 'upcycles' Windows 7... as open source

That has to be the dumbest idea coming out of FLOSS (not counting anything web-related) in years. But at least someone realised that even after 20+ Years Of Linux On The Desktop, there's still no good Free™ desktop OS offering.

How powerful are Russian hackers? One new law could transform global crime operations

Let's use the chance…

… and stop routing to and from Russia altogether. If they're polite enough to present more orderly and distinct points of contact, this is the chance to get rid of one of the major issues plaguing the Internet.

Now you can have a twist of 2019 in your 2012: Microsoft goes back to the future with Edge on Windows 7/8

Doesn't make sense

The people stuck on 7 or 8 have no use for Edge.

On one side you have those with a remotely legitimate need to remain on their outdated, unsupported ship that's slowly rusting away under them for "reasons" like a 16bit subsystem, or other weird requirements legacy software may have, including "web" applications slash liabilities based on "Javascript" only old versions of IE can speak or ActiveX.

On the other side you have paranoid nutcases like the FLOSSers or gamers who hate the guts of anything Microsoft and refuse to go with the times, while obediently shoveling money and data down the gullets of Google, EA, Ubisoft, or whomever. Those would never in a thousand years even consider looking at Edge.

All in all, it's wasted money and effort.

Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update

Certificate revocation?

If Microsoft shipped an update revoking code signing certificates for the software causing the problem, wouldn't that solve the problem? System-level crapware services would no longer start, and everything would be fine.

Razer – perfectly happy to sell you a laptop for over $2,000, but when it comes to fixing security holes... tough sh*t

Gamers are the best target for those attacks

It's still commonplace in gamer circles to randomly run crap as admin if something doesn't work. Games routinely ask for admin privileges for whatever reason, patchers install root certificates and nobody thinks it's wrong. Something crashes? Sure, rightclick, run as admin. Kid broke into the liquor stash? Sure, here are the car keys, hope you learn from your mistakes son!

Thunder, thunder, thunder... Thunderclap: Feel the magic, hear the roar, macOS, Windows pwnage tools are loose

Yes, but that was more than two weeks ago so it can be sold as new and shiny again.

In Windows 10 Update land, nobody can hear you scream

Audio issues on HP laptops…

That seems to be about par for the course, there's long been an amazing correlation between "I have no audio" and "I have an HP PC", so that particular quoted tweet doesn't amaze me.

German court snubs ICANN's bid to compel registrar to slurp up data

Direct link from article is blocked

To access the ruling, I had to copy the link and open it "manually", clicking it lead(s) to a "Temporary Maintenance" page.

Dutch name authority: DNSSEC validation errors can be eliminated

DNSSEC is a pain in the butt.

Too many half-baked standards, lots of concessions to legacy low-performance systems (KSK/ZSK dychotomy for example, or reliance on outdated crypto standards), stupid set-up requirements and performance at different registries (the Irish all but require you to fax in key material, if you're dealing with the Danish it may be impossible or at least hard for your registrar to automate processes, and generally you will have a lot of manual work to be done and paid for somewhere), and it's generally high-maintenance for the zone maintainer. You need to somehow set up and maintain a rollover mechanism, cater to all the above idiocy for every single registry you're dealing with, and then stupid ISPs will still randomly break name resolution so your company will randomly be unreachable in most of a country if it's the ex-state-telecom monopoly deciding to be the one.

It's just pain from start to finish, for little to no gain.

It's a bit like modern Web "standards": they're fine if you're a stereotypical tech hipster doing your little dysfunctional demo page, but once you need to do some work and generate revenue, you start to realise that all the specifications are more like rough guidelines that nobody follows and you are dealing with a deluge of fragmented little ecosystems, and if you can you just skip over the mess.

Ubuntu wants to slurp PCs' vital statistics – even location – with new desktop installs

size of /usr/local

That's a vital statistic to get a rough idea how much of the final system had to be built from source to avoid issues with ancient unmaintained packages.

Dori-no! PepsiCo boss says biz is planning to sell lady crisps

And what about non-binary crisps?

This is just another tool of the binary agenda. There must be crisps for every identification and orientation.

Hehe, still writing code for a living? It's 2018. You could be earning x3 as a bug bounty hunter

And I could be earning the same sum but in Bitcoin or Krügerrand if I was a Russian extortionist making actual use of the bugs, what's the point? :-P

Whizzes' lithium-iron-oxide battery 'octuples' capacity on the cheap

Oh look, another one.

It's about time that kind of research only gets accepted for publication or considered by journalists after a working prototype is available for all to see and take apart.

5 reasons why America's Ctrl-Z on net neutrality rules is a GOOD thing

Health Insurance

Because a free market is great and means good things all around☺

I'll sit here and be all smug in a country where an infected tooth isn't fatal unless you're wealthy or very poor, and where ISPs are sadly still allowed to peer with Telia.

SurfaceBook 2 battery drains even when plugged in

Remember back when Apple did the same thing?

… because their chintzy magnetic power plugs couldn't cope, and nobody cared?

SSL spy boxes on your network getting you down? But wait, here's an IETF draft to fix that

I don't get it.

Problem: Network nodes break TLS.

Proposed solution: Wrap TLS in a *really* dumb transport (no, HTTP, is *not* the solution to your problems, it *is* a problem), make it less efficient, slow it down, and basically give it that mangy "web" smell.

How does that solve any real problems? It's still TLS, and the snoop boxes will just learn to screw with that as well. All this does is pollute the RFC ecosystem even more with yet another ill-conceived and badly thought out band-aid that nobody needs, and that will eventually spawn the mandatory half-dozen errata and clarification pamphlets. Maybe the encapsulating HTTP connection could be protected too, oh I know, let's use TLS?

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

It can go on

Vernor Vinge has an interstellar trade empire without FTL capability run on those timestamps in A Deepness in the Sky.

Supreme Court closes court-shopping loophole for patent trolls

So basically the two father/son pairs of judge and attorney running most of the patent troll racket will now move to Delaware?

What is this bullsh*t, Google? Nexus phones starved of security fixes after just three years

That's still four more years than Sony or HTC.

Netflix US Twitter account hacked

Re: "Not enabled 2FA" ???? FFS ?

Twitter's second factor is SMS. They can't send messages to my current carrier, so I had to disable it when I switched there. Twitter don't offer any kind of contact venue to notify them of those issues either, and they don't seem interested in offering anything actually working.

Ransomware scum face unified white hat army

Guess who aren't partners?

That's right, the primary problems: Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

Uncle Sam emits DNS email security guide – now speak your brains

Because DNS works so well. All the fancy little schemes abusing DNS seem to be based around the idea of DNSSEC which, so far, has massive issues (ISP caches break every time keys roll over, management is a nightmare, registries even more so). Looking at the enthusiasm of providers to implement or support that abortion, it may not be something you'll want to base your communication on.

As a first step, it would be nice if it was possible to use TLS between mail servers, but even that fails horribly with many servers not even supporting TLS 1.0 (try using ECDSA or even just SHA-2 on your production systems, I dare you) and not falling back to unencrypted transport when they realise that your system doesn't support export ciphers or other stone-age shenanigans.

If you use ‘smart’ Bluetooth locks, you're asking to be burgled

Masterlock: https://youtu.be/YsKMsvx8vvo

Seems to be reasonably weatherproof, but three raps with a pretty normal-sized hammer and it literally comes apart at the seams.

Wales gives anti-vaping Blockleiters a Big Red Panic Button

After spending some quality morning time in a vaper-frequented meeting room, I have breathing issues for the rest of the day, sometimes well into the night. I would not call that harmless.

Lithium-air: A battery breakthrough explained

Oh look, another magic battery technology

Why is that even worth reporting on anymore? It feels like there's at least one "breakthrough" discovery made each month, and none of them have anything to show in terms of actual usable hardware so far.

Neat? Maybe. Useful? Maybe in 10–20 years.

How French spooks can silently command Siri, Google Now on phones

Balanced audio interlinks

It's not a new thing, but now it's a security feature too!

Hurrah! Windfarms produce whopping one per cent of EU energy

One bright light in Wolfram Alpha…

"~~ 0.83 × relativistic mass-energy equivalent of 1000 kg of matter ( 1000 kg c^2 )"

So basically if that oil equivalent could be replaced by a mix of all kinds of radiation, all we'd need was some antimatter :-D

GOOGLE GMAIL ATE MY LINUX: Gobbled email enrages Torvalds

Google Mail is hell to send mail to. I haven't encountered any other receiving system or network that was quite as idiotic.

BLOOD STAR of the NEANDERTHALS passed close to our Sun

Pern anyone?

The red planet was here ☺

.Bank hires Symantec to check credentials

"Community restricted" and consulted by an AV vendor?

Hey, sounds suspiciously like .XXX.

Return of the disk drive bigness? Not for poor old, busted WD

So how does HGST fit into the picture, especially when it comes to market share? They're WD too except for some antitrust blinds.

APNIC boffins may enlist TCP to defend DNS

Re: RPF

The ignorance of network operators just knows no bounds.

Researchers seek Internet's choke points

To paraphrase Lewis Black

If you were a roofer, and you built a roof, and you were 20% off, you'd still be serving time.

YES, Xbox One DOES need internet, DOES restrict game trading

"Great" DVD player?

If the 360 or any MS-related software player are anything to go by, Microsoft's idea of a "great" *-disc player is so far sub-par that my over a decade old standalone DVD player runs cirles around it in every aspect.

AMD's three new low-power chips pose potent challenge to Intel

Re: If it weren't for AMD....

Indeed. As I tend to say, the Core architecture was AMD's best product.

Germany's RTL pulls free-to-air channels off terrestrial TV

We call that TV corp "Asocial TV"

Other names are "Unemployment TV" or "Hartz 4 TV" (after unemployment legislation forcing people into poverty).

Those channels exist purely because people love to see that there's always someone at least a thousand times more stupid and asocial than themselves.

All things considered, it's rather a gain to the spectrum.

JK Rowling's adult novel arrives on ebook full of FAIL

Re: Poppers.

It's especially amusing since amyl nitrite apparently leads to "relaxation of involuntary muscles, especially […] the anal sphincter".

Source is Wikipedia, so take your pinch of salt with that piece of totally necessary info.