Posts by Doctor Syntax

Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

Once is enough. In fact there's a good argument that once is more than enough.

Re: minimal partitioning

There's no reason to only have two partitions nor to have a home partition as an alternative to swap. I would use considerably more but /home in addition to root and swap would be a better default. Personally I'd add partitions for /opt and /usr/local. Depending on what it was to be used for I might also add one for /srv.

"It defaults to a very simple disk layout with a root partition and a swap partition and nothing else."

Why do they all do this? A separate Home partition should really be included as a default. With that you can wipe the rest,install something else and not lose your data. OK, you could backup home before wiping and restore afterwards - right up until that bowel loosening moment when you realise you've been a tad over-anxious to get on with the install.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

"Because print jobs can take a long, long time to complete and it can be useful to monitor them from wherever you are and, yes, even schedule a new print job: you have an idea, start a small job there and then, piece is ready to use when you get back that evening."

That's the utility. You have to consider the cost of providing that. The cost is the risk that the increased complexity brings. Anything from a screw up like this via malware being introduced to the printer through that carefully crafted hole in the firewall that allows the printer to become a staging post to attack the rest of your network* to Bambu going TITSUP** and no more printing.

* Did you remmber to put the printer on its own VLAN?

** Terminal Inability To Service Users' Printers

Re: Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

But this wasn't your local HP printer, it was a Bambu printer controlled by the cloud and that seems to be where the error was. You're correct about rubbish being rubbish but the more complex you make things by going outside the local setup the more things are available to go wrong. If there wasn't a solid reason for it to be done this way then it looks as if an unnecessary risk was introduced.

Rocky Linux backer CIQ rejects lawsuit's claims it was founded on stolen IP

Re: How is this possible ?

On the whole I agree but there's a nagging doubt as to who signed on behalf of Sylabs.

China cooks covert chips, recruits global geeks to dodge US restrictions

Re: Unexpected consequence ?

Unexpected? Who didn't see this coming? Other than successive US governments.

Blazar Token creator accused of using investor funds for renovating bathroom

Gamekeeper turned poacher.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Proprietary? Shame on you sir. Microsoft would have you know it's an open standard, the best openness money can buy.

I regard email as a transmission method to deliver mail ultimately to my own computer, not somebody else's.

And ain't we all a lot of miseryguts here!

Re: long-form writers...

Ah, yes. Should have said I use a Lazarus/Pascal program to process the data first. I copy a paragraph's worth of text from Okular, paste it in, the program reassembles it and a quick inspection lets me spot and correct a few typos at that stage.

Re: long-form writers...

Our local history group publishes using local printers. PDF is the format.

Re: "it is increasingly difficult to develop entirely new features"

Oh, and did someone say "cloud collaboration?"

Yes. I think it must have been https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Do you mean DOC or DOCX?

I've found Word struggling to open DOC files created with a different version. In particular I've seen it hang (i.e. Big Red Switch time) the entire box when trying to open a file containing macros with any other version than the exact one that created it - a version which, unfortunately, I didn't have. IIRC LO couldn't open it either but at least it didn't hang. Other than that I've not seen LO fail to open a DOC.

I haven't seen LO fail to open a DOCX file but I certainly wouldn't put it past Microsoft to use wriggle room in the spec. (go and read about their shenanigans with ISO committees in getting their "standard" passed) to break compatibility.

As a matter of interest, if you take a file that LO can't open can it be opened by an earlier version of Word or have they really gone back to their old tricks of making files non-backward compatible because there may be a few of their customers who still haven't been strong-armed into Microsoft 358½?

Re: long-form writers...

"I find LO is better for proofing"

I dump the OCR as plain text and fix a lot of the errors with vi, especially mangled punctuation and the multiple spaces you get on OCRing justified pages.

Re: long-form writers...

I wonder if these long book layouts would be better handled in Scribus. It's one of the things near the top of my get-to-grips-with list. One of the issues with word processors is that a change which affects a page break will start a chain which may fizzle out after a page or two or turn into an avalanche. How would Scribus handle that?

"getting worse not better over time, though."

That applies to just about the whole world and everything in it.

Re: long-form writers...

I have edited some books with c100 pages but I think a 600 page document would best be split for editing purposes and reassembled.

"the best webmail tool around"

Damning with faint praise.

'Millions' of spammy emails with no opt-out? That'll cost you $650K, Experian

Re: CAN-SPAM Act?? hahahahahahaha what a JOKE !

I note that Microsoft do filter out a fair bit of spam* to Hotmail etc addresses. Maybe they should bill the sending email providers for this and let those providers pass the charge onto their customers. It would mean billing themselves a good deal of the time which might complicate the matter.

* Curiously they seem to go through phases of failing to filter all the Account termination notices allegedly coming from themselves.

How about a simple rule - if you don't admit the offence the penalty is an order of magnitude greater.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: reshuffle

Any good email client does this based on the Message-ID and In-Reply-To lines of the header. Email service providers are apt to break that.

One correspondent's emails have recently had the Message-IDs appear with a comment after them to say that it was added by BT Internet. This confuses the client which wasn't expecting it. Someone hasn't read the RFCs, assuming they didn't know they existed. The contents of the line should be ID and nothing else:

The "Message-ID:" field contains a single unique message identifier.

and although there seems to be some debate about this it's generally accepted that if the client hasn't provided a Message-ID it's a good idea to add one so they shouldn't need to draw attention to the fact that they have done:

The following changes to a message being processed MAY be applied when necessary by an originating SMTP server, or one used as the target of SMTP as an initial posting (message submission) protocol:

o Addition of a message-id field when none appears

Also the Hotmail/Live/Outlook/${Whatever Microsoft brands it as this week} will replace a client-provided Message-ID with their own. The above RFC continues:

The less information the server has about the client, the less likely these changes are to be correct and the more caution and conservatism should be applied when considering whether or not to perform fixes and how.

To be fair to Microsoft (a phrase for which I don't find frequent use) they are in something of a cleft stick here as they may find it difficult to trust the client to generate a unique ID but there's no way for the client to know what the server munged the original into. It certainly breaks threading. Perhaps the best solution would be for a client to BCC a copy to itself and use that, when received, in place of its own copy.

Re: Wrapping at column 78

"Actually I think there were machines which would sort punchcards based on columns 72-80."

They would sort them into 10 bins depending on the content of a single column. Repeated runs, changing the column would get them back into order eventually. That's the word - eventually.

Re: Hmmmm...

"context is king"

Yes. And top-posting is a great destroyer of context.

"despite 35+ years in the industry"

In your 35+ did it never occur to you that top posted email thread were harder to follow than, say, elReg threads in which bottom posting is virtually universal (although I have committed a top-posted example below, just to make the point)?

And we all know that managerial and marketing types are singularly inept at any form of technology. Give them something and they break it, email being an example.

Re: Can the author please confirm...

with you.

email correspondence

have to enter

hope I never

and I

Happy to oblige

"You may down vote at will"

Oops. That should have been "emailer seems to send only the HTML".

That correspondent is a member of my local history group. I have an email address which is the end-point for our web site's Contact page and often forward the emails to the rest of the group. Recently I've had problems with members not being able to see the forwarded emails when they're ,eml attachments. Mail for Windows strikes again?

Worst ever example of marketroid mail

An email where the entire content was an image of text. What made this even worse is that it came from some branch of the Co-op with all its supposed ethical values. I replied to point out that this discriminated against those whose poor eyesight required them to use a text to speech screen reader.

""sorry, your email was blank, can you send it again?""

I suffer the reverse problem.

IME most emailers sending HTML send it multi-part with a plain text version. Seamonkey (and probably TBird as well) allows Original HTML, Simple HTML and Plain Text as view modes and this switches the part which is displayed annd, if relevant, sanitises the HTML. I have one correspondent whose emailer seems to send HTML and another who sometimes sends emails with images embedded in the HTML version instead of as attachments. In the firs case the message is blank and in the other the "attached" images are invisible when set to plain text.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

It looks like something more than ClearSpace-1 is needed: an orbiting dustpan and brush.

Re: Space trash

"Humanity, as a whole, has a tendancy of not caring if it doesn't seem to matter. The only problem with that attitude, is that we often cannot see how it matters before it is too late, or at least much more expensive to correct."

It applies to more than rubbish. It's called "the tragedy of the commons".

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Everyone looking after data needs to realise one thing: the entire worth of a business will reside in its data. If it's lost the business will be extremely lucky to get back on its feet again. If it's gone it's gone.

Anyone entrusted with the task - and that includes everyone from tape jockeys to CEOs making strategic decisions and beancounters controlling the budgets, businesses looking after their own data to businesses looking after other peoples' data - should be paranoid about it.

Re: Where are the backups?

"now understand the backup you don't directly control and can test, and do test, is no backup at all."

Understand also that if it's not physically protected and maintained read-only until such time as it's been superseded by another backup it's also not a backup. That includes being kept read-only even while and after being restored. If it isn't read-only it's a copy but it isn't a backup.

Re: All Eggs in One Basket

"Efficiency is not the same as security..."

Even worse is mistaking convenience for efficiency.

Re: And Then ?

"Unfortunately? Try negligently."

I'd say stupidly.

Re: Offline backups??

"So they had multiple backup systems, but all of them were online?"

In realiy that makes them multiple copies but not backups as they have now discovered.

Re: Where are the backups?

A backup is a copy that's held off-line and transferred off-site or to some physically protected storage ASAP. It's there as a last resort to protect against as many possible failures as possible, If it remains online it's a copy but it isn't a backup. Once taken it should be write-protected so that even if connected to a compromised system it won't itself get compromised.

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

Re: Meh

I'd guess before that somebody must have had a go at COBOL to C using YACC and LEX.

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

Which internet do they mean? The one that ICANN administers, however stupidly that might be every now and then, or one that the UN is going to set up for itself?

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again

"There are numerous reports of wrongful access to the PNC."

If you want to know how such a system could be compromised - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366549134/Police-worker-could-have-put-investigation-into-EncroChat-encrypted-phone-network-at-risk

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again

Let's take some of that apart:

"There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people even if the computer nerds deny that."

Yes indeed. The general public needs protection. That protection includes ensuring that they can use the interest securely.

"Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have."

This is where it gets tricky. If such powers are created how can they be confined to the hands of the good guys? What the computer nerds know and you clearly don't is that they can't be so confined.

If you take a route of weakening encryption so the good guys have a back door that weaker encryption will sooner or later get cracked unless accident or corruption causes access to leak out first.

If you take the approach of encrypting the data strongly but send a copy with equally strong encryption but using a different key to a monitoring service that service will become a major target. There are numerous reports of wrongful access to the PNC. The only way this will be different is its greater value.

If you take the approach of an on device scanner you will have two problems. One will be false positives and the concomitant miscarriages of justice. The other will be a supply chain attack; a process with the access that would need would like a monitoring service, be a hugely valuable target.

Whatever option you choose you vastly increase the attack surface of every citizen's innocent and lawful use of the internet.

If you think a foolproof system exists - which seems to be HMG's view, then the computer nerds, from long experience, know what you should do to back that up: produce a proof of concept that will withstand proper scrutiny, the sort of scrutiny which will seek out its weak points and conceptual errors and produce a counter proof of concept to break it.

This idea has been flying about for years. Where's that proof of concept? Nobody's produced one. Maybe that should tell you something - that when the computer nerds deny it can be done, they're right.

And by the way, I've spent my years in the law enforcement trenches and the one thing I can tell you about this is that I don't want it because I know it will make matters worse, not better.

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again

"It's remarkable how many people fail to grasp this simple concept, isn't it?"

The entire Home Office for starters.

Get a $25 gift card if you help the US check whether these facial logins really work

It sounds like a good use for deepfake images.

LLM shall speak unto LLM.

California DMV hits brakes on Cruise's SF driverless fleet after series of fender benders

Re: Are these "robotaxis" really operating without anyone behind the wheel?

Should be career ending but probably won't be. Not until somebody starts suing the blunderers.

Re: Emergency Vehicles...

"Should have equipment on board them which signals to autonomous vehicles that they are to, not exactly shut down (because there is nothing worse than an ambulance being impeded by a stationary vehicle with no means to get past), but to behave in 'clearly defined and signalled ways' to enable the emergency vehicle to be aware of its presence and be certain of its safe navigation past it."

They do. They have flashing lights and sirens. If the AV doesn't respond properly the blame's on the AV, not the EV.

Re: CPUC vs DMV

Or take the aircraft industry approach. If there's a systemic problem ground the entire fleet until it's fixed.

Re: Well forget the second accident

Experience says they can't. Cruise & the rest claim to have millions of miles of experience so far and yet they have the ability of an 18-year old who's had a few hours of instruction, passed a test and racked up maybe two or three hundred miles dirving experience. ITM that they don't have millions of miles of driving experience, they have a few miles a million times.

They might, of course counter that vehicles are developed in different ways to human drivers. Fair enough - develop them with the same rules as aircraft (not Boeing, obviously). When an accident occurs due to the operation of the vehicle suspend the entire fleet until the problem is identified, corrected and the correction tested.