Posts by Warm Braw

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

The Linux community...

The word 'community' does seem to work overtime, given that it frequently seems to mean 'people who hate each other's guts' in addition to its more benign interpretations.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Re: District heating system

District heating systems, particularly in the UK where we don't seem to do communal infrastructure very well, are not without their practical problems.

I looked at a new estate with such a system and not only would it have been significantly more expensive than traditional heating, you were dependent on a monopoly, private-sector supplier with no obvious incentive to invest in maintenance or control costs.

Having a joined-up plan for energy supply that involves multiple technologies would be easier if there were some sort of national organisation, perhaps with representatives elected by members of the public, tasked with long-term responsibility for delivering a solution.

Microsoft previews Visual Studio 2022 for Mac, but why bother when VS Code runs just fine on Apple hardware?

Re: Why use VS over VSCode? Some experience...

I find, after a period of significant improvement, Visual Studio is now becoming rapidly more cumbersome and more unreliable as it integrates ever more stuff into its increasingly cluttered UI. For my taste, it's become an overly-integrated development environment and I would find it less confusing if chunks of functionality were broken out into separate tools. It might also then be easier to maintain.

VS Code currently seems nimbler, but I suspect it will, over time, accrete much of the bloat that plagues its elder sibling.

However, the one big takeaway from all this is that Microsoft still don't have a real solution to the cross-platform UI problem. Having three separate development platforms seems like a huge waste of effort.

Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting

Travel through the virtual worlds

One of the reasons our roadsides are littered with trash is that drivers perceive the artificial private world inside their car as more real and important than the actual world outside and hence they'll just chuck stuff out of the window to ensure their personal environment remains attractive without really considering the consequences.

There probably is something genuinely "meta" about an increasing number of people cocooned in virtual worlds while the actual world burns or drowns just beyond their peripheral vision. But not in a good way.

No day in court: US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings will stay a secret

Secret court decisions are corrosive in a democracy

"incompatible with" rather than "corrosive in"?

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

Thank you for drawing my attention to these devices

I note Amazon has one described as:

No Touch 100% Hygienic Hands Free Infrared Close Coupled Toilet Cistern Complete Fitting Kit Bottom Supply

It's just the close coupling to the bottom supply that has me a little concerned.

But at least it's hands free - not even one click.

Kyndryl spins out of IBM, stock starts trading on NYSE – and shares tumble

Once they've had to sell off a few consonants they'll soon be down to Kyn L

FYI: Code compiled to WebAssembly may lack standard security defenses

Re: programs that run but produce the wrong result don't really fall under the "security" heading

Lots of programs produce the wrong result - there's an oft-quoted statistic that nearly 90% of spreadsheets contain errors and the results of those errors can be far-ranging.

Whether that's a "security" issue depends on the context of the program's use.

The paper appears to imply that a program that crashes in the face of a specific type of error is more "secure" than a program that doesn't. My view is that a bug that can reproducibly crash your machine is as much of a security issue as a bug that silently fails to check credentials correctly and that it's a category error to suggest they're inherently different things and therefore the "security" label shouldn't be applied to one and not the other.

Re: Stack smashing

Or am I missing Something?

Don't think you are. The paper acknowledges this, but says:

it is still possible for a vulnerable executable to see its control-flow redirected to call it with untrusted data

Which, I think, means you could potentially alter the data in memory so branching and looping conditions were changed and so unexpected data was passed to sandboxed functions. Which is hardly surprising if you're starting with a fundamentally unsafe language like C.

There's also an implication that it's somehow "better" if the program crashes because an out-of-bounds memory write trashes the stack than if the program continues but gives the wrong result because only its data was compromised. My view would be that programs that run but produce the wrong result don't really fall under the "security" heading.

Apple seeks geniuses to work on 6G cellular modem before it's even shipped own 5G chip

Cellular?

Is that a new life-form requirement to prevent AI from applying?

UK data spillers fined, but enforcement slows: £5m in ICO penalties not yet paid

Re: administrative penalty

why can't owing these fines disqualify you

Under the circumstances in which directors do get disqualified, new companies still spring up in the name of Mrs. Disqualified or Mr. Disqualified-Nephew. Prison would probably be a more effective option, but even that isn't infallible.

How about a big dollop of Azure with that database engine? Microsoft opens up SQL Server 2022 preview

SQL Server has had a relatively short window of popularity, governed as much by its licensing as its features.

When the web first arrived, Microsoft insisted you have a SQL Server licence for each individual user (authenticated or not) of any web application making use of it, which meant it didn't see a lot of use in that area until the terms changed.

The problem with cloud-by-default is that systems are built to facilitate scaling at the (literal) expense of being able to control costs. There is a real risk of unbounded and crippling bills resulting from the behaviour of a malicious actor - or 'going viral' that simply doesn't arise with a physical box and fixed bandwidth.

I'd be fine with Azurification if I could pre-pay and know I'd stop being charged when the credit ran out: I don't particularly want to have to accommodate kit on premises or attend to its care and feeding. Microsoft is somewhat better in this area than other cloud providers, but I'm not using any of them in anger as long as they require a card number.

Joint UK-Oz probe finds face-recognition upstart Clearview AI is rubbish at privacy

Ten billion images in its databases

That's greater than the world population and probably several times greater than the number of people with scrapable photos,

Even if they have a low percentage rate of false positives, that sounds like an awful lot of potential mismatches in absolute numbers and that number will, presumably, grow as more images are added. Not sure it's useful, never mind ethical, except as a marketing brag.

Hey, Walkers. What's the difference between crisps and chips? Answer: You can't get either of them

Vinegar only goes on salads

It's a long time since I've been in Prague, but, in those days, almost everything was pickled. Including the inhabitants. And the central reservations of the approach roads were full of scantily-clad women chasing after lorries. I can't help feeling that Gary Lineker levels of 'bland' might actually be an improvement and a sign of greater economic security,

Apple's anti-ad-tracking iPhone feature took a '$10bn' chunk out of social network revenues

how would it be legal to impose a charge?

I read somewhere that the right to free access to Facebook was historically inscribed on the Magnum carton. I'm sure Lionel Hutz is on the case, if only for the free ice cream.

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Without journalism, you get guaranteed corruption

There's still journalism out there, but few people actually want to read it and still fewer to use it as the basis for active political engagement - and almost no-one will pay for it in hard currency.

I'm afraid if "content providers" got a greater proportion of ad revenue it would simply be used to create more fungible clickbait - because that's what people now expect to read.

Finance may be one weapon for attacking the Tech hegemons but unwinding the damage caused by an addiction to controversy and lack of personal agency is going to be an almost insurmountable task.

Twitter's algos favour tweets from conservatives over liberals because they generate more outrage online – study

Their tweets generate more outrage

I wonder if this will still be true in Trump's new antisocial echo-chamber?

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Re: What is the point ?

Compared with running Android on an actual phone?

My own particular brand of cynicism wonders whether the point is to provide the future UI for Windows once the latest native attempt has been quietly deprecated into oblivion.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Zarniwoop is away on an intergalactic cruise in his office

Somehow, when Douglas Adams proposed it, it didn't seem like a threat to civilisation itself. Zuckerberg has a unique talent for creating menace from absurdity.

Everything you wanted to know about modern network congestion control but were perhaps too afraid to ask

Re: Too much emphasis on throughput

Or are now elderly and have time on their hands...

Re: Too much emphasis on throughput

I am just reacting to the article

Have to say it's interesting not only that Raj Jain's paper is still regarded as a baseline almost 40 years later, but that (at least) two thirds of the comments on this article so far come from his contemporaries at Digital. The company certainly cast a long shadow...

A’s improvement is not fairly gained

The issue here is that you're essentially relying on the providers of transport stacks to "do the right thing". It's a fundamental of connectionless network layers that it's up to the endpoints to police the rate at which they throw packets into the network and there's only the most basic feedback (discarded packets or, at best, a congestion flag) to indicate the rate may be too high in relation to other traffic. For any individual endpoint, the best response to that indication may well be to increase its traffic rate by sending out multiple copies of the same packets, increasing the chance - relative to well-behaved endpoints - that at least one may survive the queue drops that will occur at the point of congestion and there's no real defence against that.

Existing congestion algorithms don't really fare well if there are multiple network paths - the connection will get throttled to the speed of the most congested - and the transport protocol itself doesn't really lend itself to, for example, prioritising latency over reliability (actively encouraging routers to drop rather than queue packets).

Where you have more control over the behaviour of the network layer (knowledge of or even control over bandwidth, latency, etc) and perhaps some notion of resource reservation you can clearly do "better" than in the case of the Internet at large - but that may well mean new transport protocols as well as different traffic-control algorithms.

And if you're going that far, some distributed ingress control (to put a lid on DDoS) might be worth considering too.

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Re: British institutions are left high and dry

I think you're forgetting we're now Sovereign Equals so while the French can refuse to send us their electricity, water-purifying chemicals and food, we can equally refuse to return their empty trucks.

We have, after all, taken back control.

Re: Negotiating...

That's interesting given this year's Nobel prize in economics was won for research showing how an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don’t lower pay for native-born workers.

And the capitalist rich bastard chancellor of the exchequer has just hiked the minimum wage substantially.

Perhaps it just means nobody knew what they were voting for.

British institutions are left high and dry

I'm sure it will soon change if we threaten not to sell them our fish.

Microsoft's UWP = Unwanted Windows Platform?

Re: Not a surprise

I'm afraid the same fate likely awaits WinUI 3 - you can sense the air of desperation in its promotion.

Facebook's greatest misses: The five nastiest bits from recent leaks

Re: "to paint a false picture of our company"

It's not our company: its structure means it is his company.

He has unique, sole control over everything FB does. Everyone who works there and thinks they are somehow part of the "team" is delusional: they're just the enablers.

HIV Scotland fined £10,000 for BCC email blunder identifying names of virus-carriers' patient-advocates

Re: It's a charity

Well it isn't

I'd expect anyone handling personal data to have training, especially in a registered charity: it's pretty fundamental to their operation.

However, it would help mitigate careless errors if MTAs had sensible defaults. It's extremely unlikely that CCing more than a handful of people is ever useful and perhaps anyone trying to do so should get an email back explaining why.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Early adopter

due to the chip technology decoding the DAB signal

As a rule of thumb, the longer the potential latency in a digital signal chain, the higher the level of compression you would expect to be able to achieve. One of DAB's biggest failures is that it stands this rule on its head.

Analogue tones of a ZX Spectrum Load set to ride again via podcast project

The earliest piece of software I wrote in exchange for money was precisely to discourage this behaviour in Commodore owners. As I recall, it involved disassembling the system ROM and working out how to execute code in the tape buffer to unscramble lightly-obfuscated code (about all you could manage with a 6502 and 128 bytes). I have no idea whether it was ever deployed or, if so, succeeded in its aims.

But I did spend an inordinate amount of time loading files from tape and, frankly, it was painful even though I knew I was being paid. Can't see why anyone would repeat the experience voluntarily.

Not just deprecated, but deleted: Google finally strips File Transfer Protocol code from Chrome browser

Re: Soon HTTP as well?

or require you to use "the cloud"

It would equally add cost to securely communicate with "the cloud", but of course it's cost you can recover through monetization, whether that be subscription fees or managing the lifetime of connected hardware to ensure continued upgrades.

When it comes to security, security of revenue will trump all other considerations.

NHS Digital exposes hundreds of email addresses after BCC blunder copies in entire invite list to 'Let's talk cyber' event

Let's talk cyber

Fatima's next job could be in Tesco's

(as she is currently being informed by HR)

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Re: To be fair all *home* printers are shit

I have a Brother laser printer I've used for years without any problem.

I got a Brother multifunction printer largely because it was the cheapest way of buying a scanner with an ADF. It will, fortunately, scan without ink because at random intervals it produces a "not detected" error for one of the four ink cartridges and refuses to print until the perfectly good cartridge is replaced with a new one: I suspect an expiry date may be programmed in to the on-cartridge chip.

It does seem to be the "razor blade" economic model that applies to almost anything containing an inkjet printer that's responsible for them being a pain.

Intel teases 'software-defined silicon' with Linux kernel contribution – and won't say why

Re: The start of licensed instructions

On the other hand, you would imagine that the future trend would likely be for an increasing proportion of "serious" processor sales to go to cloud providers where you really need the flexibility to move workloads around between identical systems.

Unless that's actually the target: Amazon or Google or whoever can get cheaper chips for no-frills workloads but run more-demanding workloads on the same hardware when required by temporarily enabling the different features, reducing the different hardware platforms they might otherwise need.

Facebook posts job ad for 10,000 'high-skilled' roles to 'build the metaverse' – and they'll all be based in the EU

Re: A dream that nobody wants except for the tech giants

Fortunately it can easily be defeated by strategically removing the manhole covers in major cities.

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

Sounds like the perfect solution to Christmas gift-giving

I quite like the idea of handing some money over to a company and their then depositing gifts randomly on the doorsteps of unknown strangers. It would make the whole ritual consumption process much less of a chore and remove all of the responsibility for unwanted presents.

Or maybe we could collectively fund the breaking open of some of the stranded containers at Felixstowe and have a sort of festive-tat-based pick-your-own.

Judge in UK rules Amazon Ring doorbell audio recordings breach data protection laws

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

I was just looking yesterday at some video posted of a break-in at a local gym. The first thing the fully-masked intruder did was to walk directly to the indoor camera pointing at the entrance - whose location he obviously knew - and pull it off the wall. It's unlikely that the brief video alone would be enough to identify the culprit.

Video surveillance might deter an opportunist trying door handles, but so would ensuring your door is locked. I'm less convinced about its usefulness in deterring determined criminals or careless vandals and I suspect the potential value of these products for "peace of mind" is being exaggerated for marketing purposes - much like burglar alarms.

Apple warns sideloading iOS apps will ruin everything

Apple is known for not communicating openly

Or, around these parts, at all.

Let's hope on this occasion its fruity disdain proves hubristic.

Brit MPs blast Baroness Dido Harding's performance as head of NHS Test and Trace

Re: @Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

Indeed. It seems that the communists who aren't actively seeking the downfall of the government by opposing it are actually conspiring in its downfall by enthusiastically inciting it to further idiocy. It's a cunning plan.

Re: @Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

There's literally a (former?) member of the communist party of GB on SAGE.

There's literally a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and publisher of Living Marxism who was ennobled by Boris Johnson for her services to Brexit and hence can now shape our laws.

Patients must know how their health records are used – and approve any sharing for research

Re: Greed

This.

There are loads of preventable diseases we know about already that we do little to remedy. Latest forecast is for 10% of the UK to be diabetic by 2030: the solution to that problem is not medical, it's diet and exercise. Life expectancy is now falling in poorer parts of the UK with a quoted 27 years difference now between a resident of Kensington and a resident of Blackpool. The solution to that problem is not medical, it's socio-economic.

We already have the knowledge to improve the health of, literally, millions of people, but we choose not to. We have a long way to go before we exhaust the improvements we could make now.

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

Re: Goodbye and have a nice day!

I think this is the real point. This security theatre simply adds to the pretence that these cloud services are places you can unthinkingly store data that is of value to you.

By all means store copies, encrypted with your own keys, for relatively convenient remote access. But not your only copy. And without any reliance on the security offered by the vendor.

There are so many ways you can arbitrarily be denied access to your data either temporarily or permanently and other ways in which it may accidentally be leaked.

If your business "depends" on Service X, over which you have no control, what is your plan for the time when Service X is unavailable? Because that time will come.

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Re: Remember when ...

Not sure the Internet is the right environment for CPU architectures with no protection whatever. Of course the solution to that might just be to ditch the Internet...

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

Re: I have one question

How is Google going to be able to target those pages

Imperfectly.

EU readies 'antitrust charges' against Apple Pay for locking rivals out of iPhone NFC chip

Many of us who chose Apple's closed eco system did so because it was closed

There's no helping some people.

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

too oldly go...

Former SAP leader's lawsuit claims she was canned for pushing corporate diversity

Re: "Nothing to stop them"

only one of those is perceived to be a problem

Untrue. The lack of men in teaching (particularly primary), nursing and care is widely perceived as a problem and there are programmes in place to try to address it.

You just don't hear about them because, for some unaccountable reason, attempts to recruit more men don't trigger their bretheren to foam at the mouth.

Microsoft's .NET Foundation under fire as resigning board member questions its role

The Foundation says it exists to promote a commercially friendly open-source ecosystem.

That's always going to be a problem because there is necessarily going to be commercial tension between Microsoft (a vast commercial enterprise) and small-scale open-source developers trying to stake a claim in the same territory. Particularly if they're looking for financial "benefits" to get a leg up.

I'm afraid it's simply in the nature of open-source software that unless your contribution is of critical economic benefit to a commercial undertaking, you need to seek your reward in Heaven.

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

Re: Where did 50% of people find out?

I read a worrying statistic a while back

You really need to share the source with the 3.4 billion people deprived of the most toxic well of worrying alleged statistics for six hours - it might help keep them occupied during the next outage.

Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don't need petrol 'cos he runs on carrots'

It's really nothing to do with Brexit

You're just implementing it wrong...