Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit's bulletproof hosting provider Zservers

If I read this correctly no servers were harmed in the course of this operation and nobody was arrested.

Re: The old diversionary tactic

Still trying the old whataboutism, I see.

It doesn't work.

Man who SIM-swapped the SEC's X account pleads guilty

It's going to be complicated with counsel prosecuting Council and counsel defending Council.

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

Metrics? Who needs metrics when they've got AI?

Already three years late, NHS finance system replacement delayed again

Nobody ever hears of projects delivered on time and on budget. Unfortunately it seems nobody ever learns from those that weren't.

Intel loses another exec as datacenter, AI chief named Nokia CEO

"I want to thank my team at Intel Corporation...I wish them continued success as they continue their journey,"

Translation: "Good luck, you're going to need it."

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

"shortage of technical skills in the public sector, citing the remuneration packages on offer as a significant reason why it can't recruit the best people."

Well, naturally. People with specific skill sets are so inflexible. But classics and humanities graduates, not having a specific skill set, can turn their hands to anything that's needed so they deserve more pay.

CentOS Connect conference announces return of Firefox

"Firefox is returning as a native package on CentOS"

It must have been careless of them to have lost it.

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

Only 390%? Presumably Oracle are not involved. Or is this just early days?

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

Elon Musk appears to have referred to Engelmayer in a Xeet that reads “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” He offered no evidence of corruption.

I can see him being pardoned for contempt of court. Repeatedly.

Cloudflare hopes to rebuild the Web for the AI age - with itself in the middle

"re-invent the World Wide Web for the age of AI"

The sooner "the age of AI" is behind us the better.

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

"Latency."

That would matter for some applications but not for others. It would then make sense to locate the less demanding applications where power is more available.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: AC/DC

"managed to get the connectors to work - despite it looking like they were incompatible"

Just required the right size of hammer.

Re: 100V

"Many years ago"

October 1987?

Re: Whats in a name?

That's a base comment.

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

"thus engineers were instructed to build in predetermined breaking points"

It seems we're back to the bad old days of the 1970s. Back then you could buy a fridge and the freezer compartment door would be just about well enough engineered to outlast delivery to the customer. Oddly enough I have a freezer built to those standards today. The only difference now is that you can order spares off the internet.

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Re: You

Come off it, Boris. You know better than to talk or read BOFH with your moth full. Unless you need a new keyboard.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Would you trust it not to send its findings back to the mother ship from such a source?

All you need is sufficient compatibility.

For instance, in a WP document I have settings that ensure a heading is on the same page as the text that follows it. Ditto settings for no widows and orphans.

I'd expect a compatible application to follow that if it opens such a document. And yet I see PDF documents on HMG sites that regularly have a heading as the last line on the page. Either whoever generated the Word file - I expect that's the source - didn't bother with such niceties despite the fact that Word has such settings or their print to PDF application reflowed text to ignore it.

If writers of official documents don't give a stuff about layout why should we worry about 100% compatibility.

If I read correctly that was CoPilot's answer. Microsoft' was conspicuous by its absence in there.

Oh, yes, we can trust CoPilot#s answers absolutely!

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Re: Logically Linux development ought to be collaborative

The kernel exists to hand out abstractions of the H/W to whatever layers run above it. ISTM that in order to do that it has to real with the real H/W interfaces. Can any "safe" language do that without turning off its safety features?

Happy to oblige.

Especially as it brought out an outstandingly good explanation from yourself.

Asking questions and getting answers is the way to learn.

Re: Democracy? There are no democracies here

If you check through the occasion postings of who contributes to Linux you'll find that "big commercial outfits" are the major contributors.

"Of course, I'm not expecting Linus to be able to magically resolve all this overnight"

He and the other source tree maintainers seem to have been resolving things on an ongoing basis for a long time. The system of having a single maintainer for a source tree has emerged as a very good solution to Brookes' problem of coordinating the work of a multitude of developers. In effect the FOSS maintainer has become the equivalent of architect.

"It's just that the situation makes it more and more inevitable that the Linux kernels we actually run and use day to day will end up in the hands of big business"

The kernels we use every day, as derivatives of the project's kernels, are in the hands of the distro maintainers - some may be big businesses, some not. The whole thing works OK. Red Hat can play all the ricks it wants but the only way they can have a say what ends up in my Devuan kernel is by submitting contributions to Linus, getting them accepted by him, accepted by Greg into the LTS kernel and then into Debian. Even then there may be changes during the life of an LTS kernel. None of this needs copyright reassignments.

"other similar projects - e.g. FreeBSD - don't seem to suffer anything like this level of disagreement"

They're smaller projects, they get less media attention to blow things up out of proportion and the nature of the BSD licence is such that if a big - or small - business wants to take a BSD kernel, modify it and keep the result provide they're welcome to do so because the licence allows them to do so. The GPL doesn't allow that with Linux whatever RHEL may try on.

NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco

Re: Months to restore from tape?

It says the process will take several months. I read that as the time it takes to do the actual job, not the lead time. Either its a very large data set or possibly it has to be interleaved with other use of the tape drives such as doing the normal backups. I don't envy them.

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

Re: Why do they host ads?

"To manually check every page before the ad appeared is not viable, and any other option will allow some incidences where this occurs."

Manually? Google are a business making loud noises about how good they are at AI. If they're that good they can check every page on the fly to see if it would be acceptable.

Re: Why do they host ads?

It's the purpose of business to make money within the law. That's a significant limitation.

If the US Govt doesn't want its ads placed on any given site it's up to them to tell their agents that. That's a separate and more easily dealt with issue then stopping Google placing any other adds there.

France, UAE to drop €50B on AI mega-datacenter. Still nowhere near America’s $500B bet

Re: That's a lot of money...

It's not a regular bit-barn. It's going to be stuffed full of GPUs, NPUs or whatever. Are you the same A/C that missed that point earlier?

Re: Build your own infrastructure

"Most digital live and commerce requires data centers and compute power."

TFA makes it clear. These are not for commerce, they're for AI, the latest precipice for lemmings.

Lemmings. Bloody things get under your feet everywhere.

Trump's Dept of Transport hits brakes on Biden’s EV charger build-out

Re: As an EV owner - I say GOOD

Anyone who thinks Trump is in it for anyone but himself and his sycophantic big business pals is an idiot.

I think that's more like it.

Re: Meanwhile at a secret lair somewhere…

It'll work out OK for him. It will be resurrected to only charge Teslas.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Re: I Wrote A Script.......

AgentP?

Re: Not a Hater

For once, bob, your CAPS are pardonable.

Re: So, there's a disconnect

"because even a vaguely techy linux users can write a script"

Not only that, they can test it and single step it if necessary from their terminal's shell.

Re: Reading this makes me cry

The only joke I remember from it was the insurance program trying to sell insurance.

Re: "(Almost) all in C"

Surprised to find that backspace isn't used.

Re: Pipewire!

"Now, if we had a pipewire equivalent for systemd"

We do. Several.

New boss for Roscosmos as Yury Borisov binned

I suppose he was getting fed up with Mump getting all the limelight recently.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Re: Head up guys

Dunno about CNN but BBC's report says the judgement ordered destruction of any copies.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Backing up the Internet

Oops. M6. Satnav error.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Who is more stupid? The Home Office or the disgruntled Apple users ?

"It will only catch dumb criminals who can't imagine using a product that Apple does not control."

Not quite. The insecurity inherent in any back door makes every innocent users' data accessible to any agency, criminal ot nation state, that finds it. That is what the US discovered only a few weeks ago but what with moving fast and breaking things that lesson has already been forgotten - to the extent that it was ever learned.

You think the password is the encryption key?

We've been trying to work that one out for years.

Re: This is the Home Office, not the government

"I (and colleagues) work to deliver the will of the secretary of state, no matter how misguided, malformed, or simply stupid their wishes are"

Th HO's core competence seems to be house training Home Secs (apart from the few that don't need it). So effective was it that one of them wrote an account of it in the Times, quite oblivious of what had really happened to him.

Re: The crims

"There is nothing nasty, in my iCloud, it is not my thing."

There may well be other things which you would not wish to be disclosed, indeed are contractually required not to disclose, such as access credentials to online services such as banking.

Re: Same old labour...

This is why I've not voted for either Conservative or Labour since Cameron celebrated the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta with this nonsense in 2015, nor will I as long as they continue with it.

Re: The cost is infinite

Start with Yvette Cooper's.

In fact, she and the rest of the government should publish their own encryption keys, and access credentials for any other online services they use, including banking. And no politicians to use the likes of Whatsapp. Anything else is hypocrisy.

MPs voted for them.