Posts by Doctor Syntax

Julian Assange pleads guilty, leaves courtroom a free man

"A precedent has been set – that certain types of journalism won't be tolerated."

Has it? Was that court at a high enough level to set a precedent?

Re: Thank Fudge thats over

With you on the cult part. As he was never tried it's impossible to say what his sentence might have been.

"that the UK has set a legal precedent that they will extradite people for this"

Citation needed. AIUI he left of his own accord with no extradition hearing concluded.

Re: "certain types of journalism won't be tolerated"

AFAICR the view at the time was that he wouldn't have been extradited from Sweden so that if he'd faced the Swedish courts, either by not leaving Sweden or by being extradited that might well have been the end of it as things stood at the time. The US extradition warrant was only issued after he'd holed up in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden. Would it have been if he hadn't attracted so much publicity? Who knows? But he certainly made a number of bad (from his PoV) moves.

Microsoft blamed for million-plus patient record theft at US hospital giant

"Who skipped the termination checklist again?"

Spot the assumption.

UK and US cops band together to tackle Qilin's ransomware shakedowns

Re: The title is no longer required.

The lack of financial education of the younger generations is a disgrace.

Re: I hope they find them

I think the technique they've used already of offering a substantial reward for "information" leading to the arrest of some of the leaders might well turn up results. A large enough some of money might tempt one criminal to remove another, eve a possible rival, for fun and profit. Go drinking in a bar in Moscow, wake up in a country with an extradition treaty with the US.

Re: The title is no longer required.

"I don't mind when big corporations get shafted, in fact I quite like it tbh."

So you don't mind if some of your pension funds investments get siphoned off by scum? Or the savings of people trying to put together a deposit on a house or for their families?

How many times do we have to spell it out? The big investors in big corporations aren't some nebulous "them". They're more likely to be us. And in this sort of attack, doubly us because it's the corporations' customer data that's being sold on to other scammers.

Even when you discount NHS data this is not victimless crime.

Mozilla is trying to push me out because I have cancer, CPO says in bombshell lawsuit

Well, I suppose the view is that if you're a non-profit you have to do something with the money.

The general impression I get from elReg reports is that a minority - possibly of zero - stories about Mozilla governance are negative. It's worrying.

Re: The moral of this story`

"Are there good female senior managers? Yes, I work for one right now. Are they the norm? No, they are the exception!"

You could strike the word "female" from the first sentence and the remainder would be just as valid.

Re: The moral of this story`

Downvoted on the basis that that's the year I was born.

Non-profits are not necessarily what you expect them to be. Firstly a non-profit can make a surplus. It looks similar but has a different name and doesn't get distributed as a dividend to shareholders. Secondly it can pay a small governing clique very generously. However profitable it may be to them, the organisation is still a non-profit.

You have to look very carefully to check whether the non-profit is actually working in the way you hoped.

It looks like time for a LibreOffice-style fork.

Re: I've heard this song someplace before.

"If you started a company would you only employ the aging and the infirm, no, I thought not."

Answering the questions you ask of other people simply makes you look stupid.

In my case I did employ only older people: me and SWMBO as CoSec.

Crypto scammers circle back, pose as lawyers, steal an extra $10M in truly devious plan

Beware of lawyers wanting to be paid in Dunning-Krugerrands.

Oracle fears US TikTok ban will dent its cloud profits

No doubt they were looking forward to auditing TikTok users.

GenAI dominates the narrative in ERP, but what is it good for?

If they struggle to understand where it fits in how on earth can they be excited about AI's potential to "drive efficiency and improve results,"?

I suppose it must be the result of taking too much caffeine on board whilst listening to sales presentations.

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Prosecute Musk for fly-tipping?

Microsoft's latest Surface devices almost as easy to fix as they are to break

Re: but...but...

My expectation would be that if it does someone at Microsoft is going to be fired.

"Readers of a certain age will remember the days when batteries could replaced without dismantling a laptop, and memory upgrades could be achieved with minimal skill."

Stop it! You're making me feel old.

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: All idiots

Assange certainly. US arguably. The UK had little alternative once a judge had granted very substantial bail. Those who put up bail can make their own minds up as to their status in that regard.

"as those girls spoke up many days later"

That's always a concern when investigating such allegation. However it was something that should have been settled in court, assuming the Swedish equivalent of the DPP decided to press charges. Whether or not TPTB would have decided to take it to court in the normal course of events, once he did a runner they had little alternative but to issue an extradition warrant.

Re: Bait and switch

"sentencing Assange would alienate an important ally (Australia) and maybe even two (UK)"

As to the first, that depends on Australia's attitude. I'm sure HMG's attitude will be "Abd about time too".

Ollama drama as 'easy-to-exploit' critical flaw found in open source AI server

"An attacker could exploit the flaw by sending a specially crafted HTTP request"

Little Bobby Models?

Meta, Microsoft SQL Server make strange bedfellows on a couch of cyber-pain

Re: Software end date?

"in the same way you wouldn't have a clue about the code I wrote or used when I was actually doing such stuff (many years ago)."

Many years ago I, too, was writing code. I was also, from time to time, installing latest versions of commercial S/W. If anything was going to go wrong with the running systems those were the most likely situations.

Such as the version requiring just a bit more memory but enough to push it into thrashing when presented with a live workload. (At least I got the memory upgrade I'd been requesting.)

And the long hours while the new version of an ERP was doing a database reorg while thinking "If this runs out of space we're never going to complete a restore by Monday morning".

Maintenance to fix bugs, fine - providing it doesn't introduce more. maintenance to add features nobody asked for, not so good. If something appears stable over a long period of time there's a prima facie reason to believe is is stable. Taking it apart become some "competent authority" doesn't like the way it's structured or not written in their favoured "safe" language or whatever is very likely to result in problems where none existed previously.

Re: Software end date?

Name a competent authority.

Tell me if this is in need of a fix. Apart from a documentation update this year it was last updated in 2016: https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git

My view is that it comes under the heading of "finished", "complete" or whatever you might wish to call it as opposed to vim which never seems to be finished.

Re: Software end date?

Ripping and replacing working code is not without cost. It's not for nothing that we keep saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Just because nobody's updated a library for a long time doesn't mean it's in need of updates; it may mean it's not in need of updates. Your "unsupported" might be someone else's "finished".

Re: Can you imagine...

WHat about the agri-chemicals business? Got to sell those hormones & antibiotics to feed to the livestock.

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

Why should that require post-docking analysis? It smacks of an attitude of "Let's launch it and figure out what we're doing later."

At least it's not scheduled to land at Manchester. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c3ggg3v2mm5t

"The Starliner will need to depart the ISS before August without some additional engineering analysis."

Why? Does it turn into a pumpkin?

Levi's and more affected in pants-dropping week of data breaches

An occasion when it's correct to mention data breeches.

It's desktop refresh season in the land of the Windowsalikes

Re: "harmonize the desktop theme with RGB keyboard lighting"

Or you can delay turning the room light on.

I agree W95/NT/W2K do look like a starting off point. However I'm not sure to what extent they were a direct inspiration or a parallel evolution from CDE and/or other ideas. Certainly the KDE name seems to have been inspired by CDE.

It wouldn't be surprising to find the designs of desktop environments evolving separately but on similar lines to respond to the same existing ideas and the same thoughts as to where they might go next. Unity and W8, both attempting to follow mobile UIs are a case in point with Unity just preceding Windows in that case. And the idea of a dock or menu bar occupying just the middle of the bottom of the screen as in what I've seen of macOS & W11 looks to me to ba a throwback to CDE which in turn was derived from ideas variously found in UIs of DEC, IBM and the one I was familiar with, HP's VUE.

TL;DR What goes around comes around.

Apple Intelligence won't be available in Europe because Tim's terrified of watchdogs

Re: SECURITY is the #1 PRIORITY

"Tech ignorami are the prime reason we're stuck in The Dark Age of Computing."

This is one of you more coherent statements. Let's examine it.

I don't think you understand the concept of what were refereed to as the Dark Ages.

This is a label applied by historians to a period which was dark to them because they didn't know what was happening then due to a lack of the lack of written sources (or a disregard for such sources as were available). I don't think that term is used any more. Rather we have terms such as "Post-Roman" or Early Medieval". To the extent that the term can be used at all it's post hoc - what was happening during the period was perfectly obvious to those living at the time. It's not for us to judge whether future generations of computer history will lack for records but it seems extremely unlikely.

Re: $ecurity $ervices

"I suspect that Apple offered to sell your AI flagged data back to EU"

Under which bit of the EU budget would this fall?

"Is a multinational more powerful than a multi-nation trading block?"

I'm not sure it's even a contest. Nations and multi-nation trading blocks make their own laws. Multinational corporations need to follow those laws in the nations (and blocks) in which hey wish to trade. There's absolutely nothing new about that. If they don't want to follow the rules, at least with regard to some particular product or service, they don't offer it there. It's entirely up to them to work out their own trade-offs. No winners, no losers, each doing its own thing.

Re: SECURITY is the #1 PRIORITY

Which forum did you think you were in?

Re: This makes perfect sense

Are you sure. This is Apple users and new! shiny! we're talking about.

Re: This makes perfect sense

"how they are acting like a monopoly"

It seems that if they can't have a monopoly they'll settle for a nonopoly instead.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Not sure I really understand the need for systemd

I'm running Linux without systemd on a laptop. I shut it down when I'm not using it si reboot several times a day. It helps that the system drive is SSD but even without that time to reboot is not an issue, neither is maintenance of the init system.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltzer_and_Schroeder's_design_principles :

Fail-safe defaults: Base access decisions on permission rather than exclusion.

That's the second of them. Before that we come to:

Economy of mechanism: Keep the design as simple and small as possible.

There's also:

Least common mechanism: Minimize the amount of mechanism common to more than one user and depended on by all users.

So much fail.

Re: What's it Actually For?

"I'm now needlessly and (so it would seem) complicatedly dependent on the behaviour of the tool."

Several tools are involved.

Re: ...Boccassi is Poettering's colleague at Microsoft

You missed out how to deal with the big non-commercial distro, Debian. But there was a Microsoft pattern to deal with that.

Re: Did anyone of us actually ask for systemd?

Onix, the Zilog port was done by Interactive who, I believe, did the original AIX port for IBM. It also had some odd ideas about config files IIRC.

Re: Did anyone of us actually ask for systemd?

As epbf depends on an in-kernel verifier it would still need to get past Linus who might need to forswear his forswearing of sewaring.

Re: Another name for the list

I don't think Rob Pike should be added to the list.

Re: axes to grind

You do realise that the reply why it is perfectly fine came from a Microsoft employee, don't you?

Re: Init marvellous

CADT

Cat And Dog Training?

Computer Aided Disaster Technology?