Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK Cabinet Office spokesman tells House of Lords: We're not being complacent about impact of SolarWinds hack

Re: Lord True

Lord True can become Lord False quite easily. It's just a matter of flipping a bit.

Or possibly your tax returns, your medical history, your DVLA record, your police record, any bank details you may have given a government dept. Ditto for the rest of your family. Nothing to worry about.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

""We're working on an FAQ which has all of the specifics. It gets into things like cores and other pieces"

Translation: Manglement didn't predict the predictable response so now we're making it up as we go.

AI clocks first-known 'binary sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system'. Another AI will be along shortly to tell us how to pronounce that properly

Re: nice sunset, shame the planet just pulled itself to bits.

But just think of working out when to put the clocks back & forward.

Google AI ethics co-boss locked out of work account while probing controversial ousting of colleague

Rabbit? Shudder.

Boned. That's the step our old Halls of Residence caterers left out. What they put on the plate was a mass of ribs and other bones lightly wrapped in meat. Once a term IIRC. Their other termly disaster was their thermosetting cauliflower cheese.

Re: Ethics

More to the North Eatht, thurely?

Re: That's Not Very Good Is It!

"I anticipate lots of crashes!"

Only on the mornings that it starts.

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

From Google's PoV anything that isn't Chrome is a security hole.

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Elon - is that you?

Re: It's my first day ;)

Firstly, a lot of fraud etc. is from insiders. The assumption isn't that you are hostile but that you could be, albeit with a low probability.

Secondly, what the user does might not be intentional. The user might be hit with malware.

Maybe you haven't worked anywhere where security is taken seriously although that's not surprising as it seems to be a rare thing. My final contract was with a site where the lan was properly segmented so that there was no chance of the secure data we were handling leaking into the office systems. It made sorting out errors in the incoming a bit inconvenient but that's what happens when you refuse to trade security for convenience, maybe something Tesla should have a think about.

Re: Investigator?

Either that or it's something you do with a sharp knife.

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

You can speficy all you like. If somebody at the bottom of the pecking order in the supplier uses the wrong image - by accident or design - your spec won't be met. You need something else - User Acceptance Testing.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: The neutral doesn't join up with anything on the switch!

"Tip: If you are in the UK and need a 230 V socket that can't have anything unexpected plugged in, use something like the MK ones with the 'T' shaped earth pin."

What you usually want to ensure is that you don't want whatever you plugged in to get unplugged and by the time the cleaner's discovered your incompatible socket it's too late. The better version would be to ensure the cleaners are equipped with the T plug so that nothing important gets plugged into the sockets they want.

On the topic of cleaner-mediated outages there was a report the other day that in the US a cleaner unplugged one of the ultra-low temperature freezers with sever thousand Pfizer doses in it.

Parsing error.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

Re: what the fuck is wrong with using the key, anyway?

I had a Subaru with a very warn key. One day I reached down to turn the engine off and the key wasn't there. I had worked out & fallen on the floor. After that I realised that on a cold day I could start the engine, take out the key, get out and lock the door so that the car could warm up without leaving the car vulnerable to theft.

Re: Oh dear!

"I'd have to find the keyhole first"

At Winter Hill in the winter your first problem might be finding the car.

Re: Smart heating system?

Is this a chest freezer thing? Our upright freezer has an alarm that tells if the temperature has gone up too far. Last consulted at the beginning of December lockdown when a power cut in mid morning lasted well into the early hours. Fortunately we still have gas fires and a gas hob so still had one form of heating and cooking. It was a reminder that going all-electric (and that includes trendy heat pumps) creates a single point of failure.

The kitchenware industry is notorious for a steady stream of new gadgets that get used a few times & them put in the drawer.

Technological advances are rare. It took tens of thousands of years to get from knapped flint to any form of metal and a few more thousand to get to stainless steel. Again, tens of thousands of years to get from the open fire to the gas oven. A year of lockdown isn't going to have much impact there, especially when there's good money to be made in the much simpler task of flogging new attachments to the mixer.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

The DIA has a point: why should they be denied what's commercially available? A better point would be why should what they're denied by commercially available?

We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news

I'd have thought the simplest solution would just be to stop indexing news sites. If News Corp discovers that without Google they lose traffic the law will be repealed PDQ. If they don't and the situation becomes permanent then Google minimise their losses.

There may be not one but two new air leaks in International Space Station: Russian boss tells us not to panic

Send up chewing gum on the next supply mission.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: My personal rant about all Linux variants

Coming from Unix my position was the converse - not prepared to commit many months learning the details of Windows.

Re: IPv6 only networking only ...

My experience with the Debian installer and the Devuan equivalent is that it tries both although I haven't installed Buster. But I see from the Debian site that they include the Calamares installer on the live images. Could it be a Calamares thing?

Re: "Drivers" me mad...

There must be a "Who me" in there somewhere.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

How did users of his code get your contact details? Perhaps you should just forward all the requests to him.

Re: @Doctor Syntax - Free means somebody is not getting paid

Have you ever used Debian or even read the story so far?

Debian does maintain both* the free and unofficial non-free versions so the work is done. They're both on the Debian mirrors. Sorry if I have to shout to get through your ear-wax but THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE MOST GENERALLY USEFUL** VERSION IS PUSHED INTO A CORNER.

*There are a lot more than two versions and I don't mean old-stable, stable & testing etc. There are versions for architectures from ARM up to S390. There are several live images with different desktops. There are netinst images. There are non-live images for instillation from disk that run to a 3 DVD set if DVD-1 isn't sufficient for your needs.

** More useful in that it has the drivers for a wider range of hardware.

Re: rg287 - Not for noobs

This is all true but it's not the complaint. The complaint is that the non-free version, which a whole part of the user population - and potential users - who are not sys-admins is hidden away. As GP said, it's largely a site design issue.

Re: Not for noobs

If the drivers are there they'll generally be found and used. The problem is the packagers who leave them out, possibly because they reject proprietary S/W, possibly because the vendors don't release a proprietary one nor make the information available for anyone else to do so or because the distro was packaged before the H/W became available. As regards the last you may well find that Linux provides the opposite side of that coin; it continues to support H/W long after Windows abandons it.

Re: Not for noobs

Given the number of times I've installed Debian or Devuan I agree with that. The "here, let me put that into a configuration you can't replace without wiping user data" distros that I've seen tend to be the "user friendlier" end of the spectrum. Somewhere in between are the slightly more flexible ones that still don't make it clear just how they're going to partition or what other stuff they're going to install (such as Apache on a laptop) before you set the process in motion.

Re: Not for noobs

The installers I find particularly unfriendly are those which offer to do everything and then set up a partitioning arrangement that's not suitable for long term use, not even a separate partition for /home.

"You can get the source package and view/patch/compile it yourself"

Have you tried that?

Don't forget that many of us who adopted Linux was because it was Unixy. Why do you think we should appreciate having something non-Unixy foisted on us in such a crucial role?

Edit wars coat-trailing ignored.

Re: I wonder how old this complainant is...

A compact netinst image still isn't much use if the netinst doesn't because it won't talk to the net. I have to admit that I'm used to that so if I'm using a netinst image I take the precaution of plugging in cable.

And let there be a special curse on distros which provide an install-from-live image where the live image is all singing-dancing but only includes OSS drivers in the installation.

Re: "Drivers" me mad...

"What you should provide though is an easy link to drivers."

Of course if it's a networking device and you need the network to follow the link...

The most ridiculous thing I've found so far is a motherboard that just hangs if a DVD drive is plugged into its SATA connectors, less so if the drive is in an external USB connected housing or connected via a SATA daughter board but even then it won't work. Try installing a DVD image if the MB won't handle a DVD drive.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

It depends on who you mean by complainant but I take it to be the one who just wanted to install and go. His complaint wasn't that the driver didn't exist. It did. His complaint was that the DVD with the proprietary drivers was well hidden.

If by complainant you mean someone who thought the driver should be OS you have a point but I find it difficult to see such a person as being the complainant.

Debian long since accepted shipping large, obscure blobs as start of the standard distribution when they adopted systemd. There's no reason why they shouldn't feature the maximally working version alongside one specifically labelled "Hair Shirt".

BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid

Keyboard as a Subscription needed.

Google's Alphabet sticks a pin in its Loon internet broadband service

Re: Why am I not surprised?

RFC 2549 for vultures.

And just like that, Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan, Elastic?

"CHOOSE YOUR LICENCES CAREFULLY"

More or less what I was going to say. They should have understood the implications of the licence they used. No doubt they saw OSS as a trendy way to get into the market and maybe pick up some contributions and fixes but it had long term consequences that they should have anticipated.

As the world turns to big names in cloud and IT to get through the pandemic, IBM still manages to shrink

For the last paragraph--->

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

Re: Another snowflake

"you are either (A) incredibly badly thought through, or (B) just a bit too thin skinned to be allowed out on your own."

You think it's Trump posting?

Re: Another snowflake

"before you make yourself look silly"

Too late.

Re: Seems like Parler don't know how private companies work

"unless the lawyers for the site find new legal arguments"

As long as they have the money their lawyers will keep finding new legal arguments.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

Re: "We are aware of an issue with a small number of devices"

Not needed. Unless they're able to prefix every statement with that and/or "Your security is important to us." as appropriate nobody is allowed into the PR profession.

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

Re: To understand Apple prices ...

"The unique selling point of Apple is their customers can boast that they can afford to spend silly money for ordinary tech."

The appropriate response to "Sent from my iPad" sigs is "Are you boasting, complaining or apologising?" The response to "Sent from Windows 10 Mail" is shorter, of course.

Microsoft SolarWinds analysis: Attackers hid inside Windows systems by wearing the skins of legit processes

Re: What?

If you want your machine to do as you wish why run anything more recent than, say W2K?

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

Re: It's evil and malicious

If you don't want to pay fight the DRM then find an opensource, free or and cheaper alternative.

Re: A bit off topic

The average punter who wants to buy a PC 'cause these things are too complicated to build yourself doesn't know about the likes of you and all those here who can build them themselves.

Re: The whole activation scheme for a lot of stuff drives me nuts.

I don't think the late John Sullivan would have counted as "Yoof of today" and what he invented wrote ranged from funny to hilarious and always brilliant.

A token to him---->

Fonts?

apt-get ttf-mscorefonts-installer fonts-arkpandora

Or just install whatever fonts your business's crayon dept decided on.

Main problem with fonts - waaay too many of them.

Styles?

Set up whatever styles to match what your business's crayon dept. decided on. They're configurable.

But basically, if you're a business that finds buying Office 2019 a problem because MS made it too hard, then why would you worry about compatibility?

With depressing predictability, FCC boss leaves office with a list of his deeds... and a giant middle finger to America

Good for him. Leaving behind a useful list of stuff to be undone.