Posts by Yorick

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: I still hate Micro$oft

It is quite annoying. For my own laptop, it’s Ubuntu, because that’s comfortable and works well for a desktop, for me.

For my mum, it’s Win11 with Rufus. Rufus abstracts all the “registry hacks”.

She doesn’t have the money for a new laptop; is a little freaked by the “no more security updates” nag screens; and her apps are all Windows-only and I don’t want to force her into an emulation layer on Linux.

It’s a one-time change Soon(tm), to 24H2 or 25H2 depending when; and then maybe every year or other year or so to keep her on the 2XH2 train.

By the time Win11 is EOL, I trust we can get her a new laptop.

Miscreants 'mass exploited' Fortinet firewalls, 'highly probable' zero-day used

Re: Question

Laziness, incompetence - those would be the reasons.

VPNs exist, Tailscale exists, remote access can be done without exposing the management interface directly to a hostile network - the Internet.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

> Then there is the near-religious fervor with which developers debate the benefits of vi versus Emacs

Cast ye not aspersions on our religious fervor! There is nothing "near" about it. May you find enlightenment by the holy `:`.

Ubuntu Noble updates on hold while 20th anniversary teaser bears retro-styled gifts

Upgrade is available again, bug fixed: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/upgrades-to-ubuntu-24-04-1-lts-are-enabled-again/47920

Brace for glitches and GRUB grumbles as Ubuntu 24.04.1 lands

Upgrade disabled for now

There’s a critical issue with how do-release-upgrade uses apt solver, which likely explains most if not all of the upgrade glitches.

The upgrade has been disabled until that’s been fixed.

Reference: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/2024-September/006225.html

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: All I want to know

‘Tis an academic distinction. Does not Windows come with a Linux kernel? Is right it does.

A plain Linux install, it just skips a step.

Re: You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table

Have my very angry upvote.

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

No DRM on cartridges! Won’t you think of the C-suite, Ser. How will they afford their bonuses?

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

Ah but you’re doing it wrong, Ser.

Receive your laptop with Windows pre-installed. Do not ever change the defaults, and cherish the additional helpful software (what churlish people might call bloatware) that comes pre-installed. Perceive your ISP’s landing page as “the Internet”.

Within 5 years, buy a new laptop with Windows pre-installed.

Said another way: It’s not FOR you.

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

Nein, Hans

This ist ein dumme idea.

People are going to treat level 3 like level 4, ja? Or even level 5. This is going to get someone hurt, quite schlimm potentially.

Nein! Nicht the level 3 activatung!

Linus Torvalds releases probably unnecessary release candidate eight for Linux 6.2

RK3588

This one might bring clock support for rk3588 and then it should be bootable. Hopefully. That means Rock5 with a mainline kernel - don’t mind if I do!

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

They did with AM4

Asrock does support ECC throughout with AM4. With AM5 they just took the ECC language off the website though it’s still in the English language manual pdf.

I’m still hoping they will support it and bring this back - and, they may have decided it wasn’t worth it as a differentiator.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

> You do not, nor do you care, nor should you.

*sobs in nerd* I care!

Can you get excited about the iPhone 13? We've tried

Re: Stuck in Outbox?

Well, as a serious fanboi, I aim to replace an iPhone with another iPhone every 5 to 6 years. Can you imagine Greta’s scowl otherwise?

ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

> though it's unclear why the company was logging user-agent strings and IP addresses of client logins

The Protonmail statement says they can be compelled to log a user’s IP when Swiss law has been broken. That’s the most likely explanation: They got a court order and started logging IP addresses and user-agent strings for this particular user, after being presented with the order.

Are you a 1%er? Windows 11 turns up in the usage figures

Breathless

One of the 1% who breathlessly etc.

Machine is definitely not “Win11 capable”, it’s 9 years old. I expect that come official release, I’ll regedit something and run Win11 on it regardless.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: I'm so angry I can't think

I fear I am lacking all couth. I cannot summon ire at Windows. I actually like Win 10 - for some reason, it behaves itself on my machine, runs fast even on 8 year old gear, doesn’t get in the way of my apps, definitely doesn’t throw any unwanted pop ups in my face. Unlike much of the web.

And is actually easier to use than Ubuntu. That may just be the learning curve. While in Windows I can browse to SMB shares, in Ubuntu I get an unhelpful “nope, auth failed”, and no offer to type in a user / password. CLI allows me to mount a share with my Ubuntu username/password, so I know I got the user created right on the other end. Yet, no share browsing.

Must be that lack of couth again. Why browse shares when you can mount them? I dunno, it seems convenient.

I can RDP to Windows no problem, from anywhere. VNC to Ubuntu - not out of the box, or only with encryption off, if coming from Windows. “That’s the fault of your VNC client, peasant”. “You need to replace the Ubuntu-side server with TigerVNC, you noob”. I get it. Lack of couth. It can all be solved, and - is it asking too much to expect this stuff to, well, “just work”?

How about something along the lines of “Office Hipsters”? “Corporate Hipsters”? “Enterprise Hipsters”? They got all this wannabe-Apple stuff going on, Surface devices, ear pods now, and it’s all decent enough gear and at the same eye-watering prices.

And at the same time, it all feels ever so slightly stuffy, with Word and Excel and productivity tools.

Similar story with Teams, and now Github - look the cool kids are doing Slack, let’s make one, call it Teams, and make sure it feels just as fresh and fun as a motivational speaker during a sales conference.

So how do the coronavirus smartphone tracking apps actually work and should you download one to help?

Re: how do google and apple install these new APIs?

Apple is reportedly thinking on how they might get this to Max iThings. I parse that as “we are exploring options to release an IOS <oldver> update for the 20% of phones out there that are not on <currentver>”.

Re: "their phone will release the identifiers of all the other devices"

Any word yet on how apps might handle “self-reporting”? Absent some kind of “verified test”, I worry about people going trololol and hitting that poz button.

One way might be to have, say, an NHS app, with a QR code on your test result. The app scans the code, verifies it was signed with an NHS key, and prompts the user whether they’d like to notify others they have been in contact with.

Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft speech-to-text AI systems can't understand black people as well as whites

Plight of the legal alien

German living in the US - Siri can't understand me worth shit. "Route me to the Volvo dealer in West Springfield" ... "Calculating route to Audi dealer, is that correct?"

I've given up. I only type now, my speaking very slowly to or worse, yelling at my phone is not a good look.

Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003

Re: Meanwhile, they are telling me to test the beta of the new chromEDGE in Windows 7.

Barely so. Edge should go live Jan 15.

WSL (2) is great. If you code even a little for a living, say you’re in IT broadly, that thing will come in quite handy.

I remember Win 7. It’s a good OS; I don’t feel any particular nostalgia for it.

Happy fifth birthday, Windows Insiders! We'd bake a cake, but it might explode without warning

Re: "cut down on the borkage"

Not Linux, but a UNIX offshoot: MacOS. Young entrepreneurs, and for that matter middle-aged ones too, seem to really like MacBooks.

Silence of the vans: Uber adds 'Plz STFU, driver' button to app for posh passengers using Black

This has got at least one Uber driver, in the linked forum, so riled up he’s fantasizing about using combat knives on his passengers. “ Think you're gonna step up in my whip & tell me not to talk, my kabar is coming out to play homie. ” ka-bar being a nickname for a popular knife in the US.

It's 2019 so now security vulnerabilities are branded using emojis: Meet Thrangrycat, a Cisco router secure boot flaw

Re: ?

Showing your age there with all this talk of flapping your flesh to produce sounds in order to communicate.

Re: Cisco, for one, told us it "is not aware of any malicious use of the vulnerability."

*tinfoil hat*

If the vulnerability is used by a friendly 3-letter agency, it’s not “malicious use”, is it?

Not just Web UI

Privilege escalation may also be possible from CLI, depending on IOS XE version. See https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190327-xecmd

Same basic attack vector - go in as admin via web or CLI, escalate privileges, plant yourself in the TAm.

Kudos to your spot-on reporting, vultures. A quick web search shows a bunch of hastily written stories by other tech rags that are anywhere from plain wrong to misleading to incomplete, and that includes ZDNet, who warn that “an attacker located anywhere on the internet can take over devices.” A little too breathless. For some value of “attacker”, sure. The one with access to your internal network and authenticated admin access to your gear.

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Re: Hmm..

I don’t see MS moving Windows to a Linux kernel. The behavior with regards to manipulating files with open handles is completely different, and there are probably some other fundamental differences from an application perspective.

MS have put a huge amount of effort into ensuring that old apps “just work” as Windows receives new functionality, which is where a lot of the “crud” comes from. Not to say apps don’t break, they do, and MS have been keen to make them work again by adding another compatibility fix / layer.

The prospect of “loads” of apps breaking because they moved to a Linux kernel has got to have MS execs in a cold sweat. Windows is how you pull in cloud. Optimized for AD and group policy, the home of Office for decades: If enterprises stop running Windows, they might ponder whether they still need Azure AD and O365. Nadella is no fool, he won’t let that happen.

Re: Device drivers

That shim was a really nifty idea - and it ran into a wall. That wall is the same one Cygwin ran into, and that has been solved upstream with #ifdefs for Cygwin for a while now. Namely, the Windows kernel doesn’t allow you to do things like rename a file while it has handles open, mmap a 0 length file, delete a file with handles open, and so on. Linux does, and a lot of code assumes that’s all possible.

This came to a head about 1.5 years ago when you look at the WSL github issue tracker. Since then there’s been “we would need to change the Windows kernel to fix this” from the WSL devs, and then silence on the topic for a long time.

And now we get WSL 2. I think this may be related. They may have taken the shim layer as far as they could without Windows kernel changes, then found that memory DBs like BerkeleyDB and others didn’t work, rpm had trouble, Swift didn’t run, npm was spotty, and on and on, and there was no way forward without changing the kernel. Making the Windows kernel more Linux-y in its file system handling was likely too scary (if that breaks legacy windows apps then all hell breaks loose), so they went for fixing the issue with a Linux kernel.

Great engineering work on the shim layer; they didn’t anticipate how different the Windows and Linux kernel are in some key points.

Re: MS SOP: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Alright I’ll bite. Let’s do a handwaved “fine” for the paranoia. I’m assuming you also avoid all things Google and Facebook, your phone is a flip phone or, if you’re in a trusting mood, Apple (maybe a custom Android build without anything Google?), etc. You browse through Tor from a Virtual machine running another copy of Linux. Anything telemetry is evil. Fair enough. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that THEY aren’t out to get you.

Now, what I’m not comprehending is the “hefty tax” Microsoft collects on their OS. Tax presumably means ongoing, yearly. Unless we’re talking about the $40 that the Win8 upgrade cost, way back when. Since then upgrades have been free for consumers, and continue to be to this day. Win 7 to Win 10 - still free. Only as in beer though. As I say, paranoia I get.

Microsoft realises more testing wouldn't hurt and plonks Windows 10 May update into Preview ring

I think I broke it

I think I found a severe, and very rare, bug. Several of my apps wouldn't start any more, error 0xc0000135. Tried a bunch of troubleshooting, then rolled back. Some apps still broken after rollback. Restored from backup to 1809.

Discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/bbaq3g/microsoft_has_released_build_1836253_kb4495666/ekjj6xc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

Re: Photorec

That exactly. "Edges of the track" is 80s tech. I really don't see that this is a thing any more. Do nation states have tools, ludicrously expensive and big, maybe some kind of magnetic scanner for hard drives, that could do this on modern drives? Your guess is as good as mine. But if your adversary is a nation state, you got bigger issues than drive erasure.

If you can get data back from a modern HDD, or Flash, or SSD, with PhotoRec or a similar software tool, or indeed any kind of hardware tool, after a single pass full format (procedure: Either dd the entire drive with /dev/null, or blow the part table away, create a new partition spanning the entire drive and choose to full format it during creation); and you've done me the courtesy of doing so in a way that a reasonable person would consider "verified, totally, dude", I will donate 50 bucks to the charity of your choice and consider myself put in my place / educated.

I realize that "any kind of hardware tool" makes it more likely I'll donate something somewhere. That'd be worth it to learn about the kind of tools that can do this magic, and what their cost to acquire / use is.

A “single pass doesn’t do it”, this article tells us, and then a little further down that we need a “full, low level format”.

When even the experts are confused, what chance does a consumer stand?

For a flash drive, one full format pass will do it. There’s no “lingering magnetic charge” to worry about. Even with modern hard drives, multiple passes sounds more like voodoo than science. To extract anything from a drive that has been fully formatted once is likely impossible. Used to be that wasn’t the case, but the way we write to spinning rust has changed.

A “low level format” is not so easily achieved with OS tools, though there are utilities for it. All it does for someone over a “full format” is map out bad sectors - that doesn’t make it more secure.

One full format ought to do it, for flash, ssd, and any hard drive manufactured in the somewhat recent past.

Ca-caw-caw: Pigeon poops on tot's face as tempers fray at siege of Lincoln flats

Birth control. Feed them, sparsely mind you, mix pigeon birth control into the feed. That’s actually a thing.

Apple: You can't sue us for slowing down your iPhones because you, er, invited us into, uh, your home... we can explain

Re: That's not how it is

Note the argument being made. It’s “the complaint is within contract, not trespass”.

They’re saying yes, you may bring a contractual claim, but you can’t get us for trespass, because you did allow us in.

I think it’s a safe bet to assume that the next step will be to say “and the contract allows us to do whatever we damn please”, but I don’t know that we have seen that step yet.

Most munificent Apple killed itself with kindness. Oh. Really?

I’m one of those iPhone users with an iPhone 6s. Much to the consternation of my Android-using spouse, I intend to keep this thing until 2020 or longer, depending on what the 2020 lineup looks like. He is convinced that using a phone for 5 years is madness; I am convinced that we reached good enough smartphone 3 to 4 years ago. Using a phone while security fixes are still current is more than reasonable.

This also makes me a very loyal Apple user. The cost of the phone gets spread over 5 years, and compared to a 3 year Android cycle (*), that compares quite favorably.

(*) Cycle determined by a personal quirk: I really care about security patches. Running a device that doesn’t receive those any more would create actual stress. I am aware how small the risk is for phones, and there it is nonetheless. I want a device that receives security updates immediately, and will replace it when it no longer does. Hence 3 years Android, and 5 (plus? 5s now on year 6) years Apple.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: So much for competing with Google..

There’s enough room on a 32GB drive to hold the OS and install an update? Learn something every day.

A barebones OS with a few apps and very little data fits on 120GB, can be upgraded, and has some 30-ish gig free after the upgrade - but at 64GB or less I’d expect frequent cleanup work.

So you’re right. It’ll be tough to compete with Chromebooks. The allure of Windows is the app ecosystem, but without sufficient drive space, that app ecosystem loses meaning.

Still, nabbing 7GB seems like a good strategy on those smaller drives. If that actually is sufficient to install an update. What happens to windows.old on a 32GB drive?

I feel like I should try this just to see how it behaves in practice. I feel insufficiently smart about space constrained installs

Why is my Windows 10 preview build ticking? Microsoft reminds users that previews have timebombs

Re: Also in this build...

That’s a setting. Something something “show occasional recommendations in Start Menu”. Turn that off and Candy should no longer be Crushing on you.

There’s a second setting about “Show occasional tips about using Windows”, turn that off to stop Windows whining at you that you should really use Edge, it’s like edgier and Mrs Edgelord and not just shiny bling like Chrome! Black is edgy baby.

Woman arrested for WoW love affair

Age of consent

Hmm. Abduction charges aside, the age of consent in NC is 16; and for Australians abroad, it's also 16. However, in many Australian territories, if you are the guardian / caretaker, age of consent is 18. At a 31/17 spread, the 31 is definitely the caretaker, wimpy mage armor notwithstanding.

Should've ground another level - er, year - for the boy.