Posts by Missing Semicolon

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

Re: "parts of the route are only accessible by helicopter."

Building hugely expensive infrastructure in Africa is a China speciality. But, then they will own it. And therefore, all of the countries that use it.

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

It doesn't have to be efficient

Is there not a rust compiler with a K&R C backend? (K&R C being the WASM of embedded). Since this is for the installer, it does not need to be tremendously efficient.

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: extra taxes!!

There should be tariffs on importing labour.

Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the Cyber Resilience Act for open source developers

Re: Theory vs real world

Oh, they will ne a target. Big corps love a "rogue engineer" they can pin the bad stuff on.

India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering

Re: What is the issue

No, the "experienced" devs in India can be little better than the Freshers. At least the new guy might be teachable, the ones who have been turning out the same poor work for the last 7-10 years tend to be a lost cause.

What I have noticed is that the female engineers are often a good bet. They are hungrier and less arrogant, and so are easier to train, picking up the culture.

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

Arduino Leonardo

And about 20 lines of C. My mouse now occasionally wanders round the screen (not straight up and down, of course). Teams is happy!

Judge dismisses Arm's last legal claim against Qualcomm in licensing spat

Re: Goose, golden, egg

Linus on form, I see! Gold.

Pop! System76's 24.04 beta is here – complete with a beta of polarizing COSMIC

Scaling Schmaling

Running Mint-Mate on my Framework 13, 2x scaling is baby-scale too big, and 1x is get-my-close-up-glasses tiny. So then just turn up the font sizes a tad (11pt to 14pt) and make the task bar bigger. Miraculously, screen elements seem to scale up to match the bigger font size, and most things look just right. The non-font stuff staying small seems not to hurt anything. So, aside from per-monitor scaling, I'm good thanks!

Hunt for RedNovember: Beijing hacked critical orgs in year-long snooping campaign

Smoking holes in the ground

Why isn't that all that's left of these "security appliance" companies. All their stuff seems to be trivially exploitable, so buying a nice new VPN appliance merely advertising that you are worth hacking.

NASA and Sierra Space clip Dream Chaser's ISS wings

Hubble!

Wouldn't this craft be ideal for a Hubble upgrade mission?

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Caller Id

All you have to do is make the organisation accepting the fake caller id responsible for any losses. Suddenly the impossible will become possible,and caller id will be properly verified.

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

Re: "a pair of European youths"

The operators call this "tariff fraud". Conspiring to not pay their usurious rates for international calls......

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: However

"It's just a virus" is also "I don't know"

Jaguar Land Rover supply chain workers must get Covid-style support, says union

"volume crisis"

Don't they mean the wipeout of the auto industry by Mad Milliband and his Net Zero crusade?

China turns the screws on Nvidia with antitrust probe

What did they expect?

You don't really "buy" a Chinese company. Any capital investment in PRC is at risk of seizure.

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

Privatized Great Firewall

Since anyone providing unfiltered internet will go to jail, and the definition of "banned" content is arbitrary, capricious, and subject to interpretation on the day, simple fear will cause the open internet to die.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: Been there, done that

I thought the whole "* includes../" thing was fixed now? Otherwise my machine would have been empty many times over!

UK schools give system supplier Bromcom an F for Azure uptime

"but, the Cloud! Microsoft do all that, surely?"

WhatsApp's former security boss claims reporting infosec failings led to ousting

Re: Anyone dumb enough

WhatsApp is also a massively better experience than any operator service. SMS has no chat groups, and have you seen the extortionate price operators charge for picture messaging?

SpaceX Dragon gives International Space Station a kick up the orbit

They go up...

... "Who cares where they come down!"

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: Definite popcorn moment

"fine-toothed comb"

Aaaaaagh

There is no such thing as a "toothcomb"

Stolen OAuth tokens expose Palo Alto customer data

OAuth?

I thought that was sooper-secure, with no chance of being hacked by design!

/sarc

How does China keep stealing our stuff, wonders DoD group responsible for keeping foreign agents out

Re: Here's a hint as to why

To be fair, anyone who pointed this out was denounced as "racist". So we trained their scientists, and bought their products, and allowed our industries to wither.

Southampton's Optical Research has large numbers of students from China. It's the UK's leading fibre optic research centre.

SK Telecom walloped with $97M fine after schoolkid security blunders let attackers run riot

Re: Fuck around and find out

I give you - TalkTalk! Which is only now going down because they are rubbish, not because they leaked the entire customer database.

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Blocking

Expect "unwanted" apps like PipePipe to be unavailable. Now *all* apps will have to conform to the Google Ts&Cs.

Re: MOBile

So when will they fix the apps that *are* from the Store?

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why?

Must have been on good tape kept well. Many 50-year-old cassettes (especially pre-records) have degenerated so that the next time you play it, will be the last. And then you'll need to clean the heads again.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: Attitude problem

And, as a side effect, we got IR35.

Criminal background checker APCS faces data breach

Usual rubbish in statement.

"basic personal information, as well as passport, driving license, and national insurance details". That *is* financial information, you shysters! A crim can get a loan, social-engineer your bank account, change the ownership of your house at the Land Registry with that information.

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

$249?

They are a loss leader. The profit is in selling the training data and the tracking.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: Calling it censorship is partisan bullshit

I'll bite.

Because the OSA is not about "Porn". It is actually about "Harmful Content", which for the purpose of rallying the troops, is Porn. But the definition of "Harmful Content" goes far beyond porn, and is subject to definition and re-definition without further recourse to Parliament.

Today, what *you* care about is not censored. Give it time....

Ok, as long as you don't want a job that needs an Enhanced CRB. Expect to fail that.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

A DNS server that does not hand out IPV4 addresses on the Internet

.. is a broken DNS server.

Re: No mention of NAT, then?

"The whole idea of the internet is that everything is end-to-end reachable if you want it to be"

Only for the purists.

Not only do I want stuff inside my private network to be unreachable (ok, I can firewall that) but I want it to not be enumerable as well.

Re: No mention of NAT, then?

NAT was grudgingly shoehorned in to the spec, as the "all hosts are routable" purists initially ensured that the design had no place to put it.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

Re: "And how exactly are you going to manage that ?"

Make unchecked VPN use illegal. Any ISP carrying unchecked encrypted content will be liable, so they will police it. Anyone providing an unchecked service will be prosecuted. Payment providers will be liable for infringement, so they will stop processing payments for offshore VPNs.

No State technical changes are needed. The risk of prosecution (and anyone prosecuted will do time, ask Mrs Connely) will chill any commercial involvement.

You say I'm paranoid? Remember the lawsuits by Big Content? Remember how paying for AllOfMP3 suddenly became impossible?

Whitehall has been trying to extend internet surveillance for at least 30 years.

Each new Home Sec is presumably taken in to a room, frightened in some way, and used as a proxy for the advancement of snooping.

Vision AI models see optical illusions when none exist

Incorrect inference

I think, based on the actual ambiguous image, that the LLMs have decided that you only get pencil drawings of the heads of ducks if they are actually pencil drawings of the duck-rabbit illusion.

What would be interesting if pencil drawings of rabbits are also so mis-identified.

Latest Windows 11 insider builds hide secret File Explorer dark mode

Microsoft Kwallitee

So they released a dark mode without actually testing it. Even the new build does not correctly colour some buttons.

Presumably, this is because the (long deceased) authors of the dialogs (which probably were created for WindowsNT) did not use standard UI toolkit APIS as they either did not exist, or (then) did not implement the features required. And the code has rotted ever since, just being patched to not look to out-of-place, instead of being refactored to be be done the same way as everything else.

Python survey shows growth even as Foundation funding falters

Pycharm has been Mozilla'd

The UI for Pycharm was great. Then they stripped out the menu and toolbar stuff to make it look like VSCode, as if that would encourage people to use it. Apparently they provide a plug-in to re-implement the old UI, but I have not dared upgrade from the 2023 edition to find out.

Maybe newer users just go "it's the same as VSCode, I may as well use the free tool", so Jetbrains have succumbed to fashion, like Firefox has to Chrome.

A Linux alternative? Debian/Hurd shows microkernel Unix dream is alive

if Hurd is modular

Can you strip it down enough to boot a prompt from a floppy, like you used to?

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

Re: What a stupid decision

The publishers are trying to conflate local modification of content (notes in the margin) with alteration then republishing. Neat trick.

This is nonsense, as each ad-stripped instance was generated locally. It may be that Eyeo is actually doing some processing in the cloud, so fall afoul of the republishing test.

Of course, the case would then be applied to all adblockers.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

The power of Grump

The unique feature of Linus is that if someone produces rubbish, or someone proposes something that makes stuff worse, he can just go "No! Because I Say!" and he has the respect of the community to be heard. No-one else has, or will, earn the kind of respect he has. So Linux will turn into the usual FOSS mush, with bits going proprietary. a leadership group more concerned with appearances than progress or quality, and the humble contributor ignored.

Who would replace him? My guess would be a placeman from IBM or Microsoft. Agent P? Not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: Banning? The idiots in government strike again

It means you can bust someone for "going equipped" even if they have not actually stolen a car yet.

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

CCL aren't too bad.

The White House could end UK's decade-long fight to bust encryption

Re: EU "chat control" directive

Coming soon (ish) to a UK near you. Welcome to our new Grand coalition of Lab, LibDem, SNP, Green, "independent" representatives!

Re: Thanks Donald.

Those "genuinely scary facts" may also include things about your own browsing habits. So every Home sec and PM is suborned. Except Teresa May - she was a fully-signed-up believer.

GitHub head ankles as Microsoft takes biz by the hand

Need a script...

Judging by the quantities of existing machine-made repos on github, it must be fairly easy.

So, we need a script that creates repos, feeds copilot with prompts starting with "write a program to..." and automatically pushes the results.

This will cause fatal slop-poisoning to Copilot in the future.

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: Being sensible for a moment

If the flaw was not in there on day 1, they introduced it in a patch themselves, that you had no choice about installing. So they are still liable.

India’s services giant TCS lays off over 10,000 for reasons including AI, hikes wages for survivors

Bingo!

“to become a future-ready organization” through “strategic initiatives on multiple fronts including investing in new-tech areas, entering new markets, deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves, deepening our partnerships, creating next-gen infrastructure and realigning our workforce model.”

I got to mark all the squares at once!

"new-tech areas" does not mean "new tech areas" it means "new, buzzy, bump-the share-price me-too areas"