Posts by Doctor Syntax

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: Ofcom....and partial solutions to personal privacy.....

The (partial) solution: use peer-to-peer messaging where the ONLY messaging software is resident on user end-points.....and the encryption protocols exist ONLY on the end-points. (So no dependencies on any third-party "service".)

1. Protocols are fine but you need software to implement them. I suppose this was what you meant to say.

2. How do you get that S/W onto the endpoints?

3. How do the peers get in touch with each other?

4. Have you actually looked at Signal?

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

Boris would and will say anything that he thinks will further his own interests with whoever he's talking to. H may well believe it until he has to say the opposite to someone else in a hours - or minutes time and will be entirely unaware of having contradicted himself. One of the things which slipped out when some of his staff started describing their time working for him was that they kept trying to stop him talking to anyone, at least when they weren't there.

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

"For example, at the time of Brexit, the claim that any problems created due to the border issue in Northern Ireland could be quickly and easily fixed by the application of modern technology."

Anyone with any intelligence would have realised that three mutually incompatible requirements created a problem beyond fixing other than by entirely removing one of them which was a political impossibility given that the third requirement was the one HMG had introduced.

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

"why didn't you say anything before ?"

To which the only possible answer is "We've been saying i for years. Why didn't you listen?"

"and rumour has it Microsoft was actively involved in the Cloud Act (although I have as yet not seen any evidence of that"

You must have missed the reporting at the time it was passed. Microsoft pushed them into it by insisting on warrant in a case where the data* was held in an Irish data centre. Logic would suggest that it would have made an even deeper cleft stick for them as it would still mean ignoring the need for an Irish warrant. Did they protest about that? No, they welcomed it.

* Existing international agreements would have enabled this if the USian PTB had been prepared to seek one in ireland.

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

Re: Fingers crossed

It's the unrented, unoccupied ones that are the problem.

I have some personal interest in this in that I have a pension fund which includes a commercial property element. That certainly doesn't stop me believing that the established state of affairs - big cities, long commutes - is unsustainable in the long run, needs to be rethought and rebalanced, and the quicker the better.

The target as I see it should be a mixture of:

- less urban office space

- more urban residential space for those whose lifestyle it would suit

- more working at home (I distinguish that from working from home. There are many jobs, field engineer, for example, where at least some of the work is performed in locations which is neither home nor the employers' premises but this is less likely to be affected in any rebalancing.)

- more suburban offices so work in the office does not need long commutes for cases where W@H does not fit

- more use of serviced offices for those who do not have suitable working space at home

There's an urgent need for governments to catch on and change the planning rules PDQ. For instance use of "brown-field" sites is encouraged for residential use but those sites, at least those in my area, are old mill buildings which would provide for the last two of my points and there are very few of them left.

Add to it the current trend of these agencies not releasing direct e-mail addresses and phone numbers (" just write to info@....."), and it becomes very difficult to get anything done.

Incompetent management is incompetent management will always find a way to screw up.

Re: Unemployment in the US won't always be at near record lows

"the more difficult getting them back into the office would be"

This only matters if not getting them back into the office is a bad thing. Light of experience shows that it might not be.

Re: Fingers crossed

"Which is propped up by the housing market to a large extent."

A problem in its own right and the product of years of cheap money due to interest rates being based on a cost of living measure that didn't take into account soaring house prices.

It's a very fragile prop.

Re: Fingers crossed

"massive amounts of unused housing (250K homes)"

How many of those are weekend/holiday homes, unfit for occupation, waiting for the new owner/tenant to move in of bing renovated?

Re: Why not convert to apartments

Yes, it requires work and that requires money. But eventually they'll catch on and spend the money.

"Especially when my office has 3x30" monitors, a coffee machine and an ashtray, and you're offering me a laptop."

The laptop seems fair enough. You'll need something to drive those monitors.

"But we benefit from being able to hire good people"

Probably the good people the return to office lot lost.

"So if they're losing valuable employees, why the push to go back?"

This is manglement doing what manglement does.

Re: For a contrarian take

One instance given was that supposed efficiencies were due to the fact that the WFH employees were working longer to get the work done. The true comparison should have been between the WFH extended hours vs the total employee WFO time of office hours plus commuting time.

Re: employees were happy (31%), motivated (30%) and excited (27%) to be in the office

When you know the conclusion you want why let facts get in the way?

One thing that gets conveniently overlooked in these discussions is the time that commuters are donating to employers without charge. My worst case used to be at best an hour & a half each way, door to door, High Wycombe to central London. 15 hours a week, equivalent to about 2 full days per week of my time life unpaid for several years.

Having spent time working without commuting staff now perceive that the cost of it, not just in fares but in time, has fallen on them but benefited their employers and that it really wasn't needed.

If, in fact, employers were to pay commuting staff for the time spent commuting then efficiency of working in the office would be seen to be much lower. The challenge for employers now is to work out how to achieve whatever benefits they see to working under one roof without excessive commuting; perhaps dispersing offices to suburban hubs.

Mummy and Daddy Musk think Elon's cage fight against Zuck is a terrible idea

Re: You couldn't make this sort of thing up!

"short term concussion"

Why the pessimism?

I don't think I'd want a case of musk. It would probably be both vinegary, bitter and corked. Quite undrinkable.

I blame the parents.

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

"it looks very clean and remains quite intuitive"

It looks ugly. Black icons following the trend of looking as if a cuneiform writer has attempted hieroglyphics on dark grey is not a good look.

If you were using it exclusively you'd at least get to know the icon set. The trouble is that when something built on this framework, say pdf-arranger*, is installed in another environment it can't respond to whatever icon theme (nor colour theme) is in use and the responses of the system menu button are idiosyncratic. Consequently it's not really intuitive at all.

* The only one so far I haven't been able to avoid.

Google uses India to test ‘deliver to the house near the post office’ feature

Re: Not just India or Italy

House name carved in stone 6" high letters next to the road and drivers still used to have problems. Fair enough if they're coming down the road because it's not so easily visible then - but we've had at least one delivery to a neighbour from whose gate our house name is perfectly visible.

And the there's the TLA delivery company which give its drivers GPS coordinates but refuses to give them the correct ones even after emailing them the Google StreetView link clearly showing that stone and from which they can take the real coordinates. As far as I can make out the drivers aren't even allowed to stop the van other than the TLA's location so the those who know the house have to part there and walk up the road.

"Down hill: turn left at the T junction, past a field on the left, first house round the corner; Up hill: second house on the right past the farm" would be far better.

Network security guy in extradition tug of war between US and Russia

Let me guess. If he gets extradited to Russia the charges there will be dropped shortly after he arrives.

Microsoft's GitHub under fire for DDoSing crucial open source project website

The tragedy of the commons is still with us.

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Re: It was only a matter of time

Some of my pension fund is in commercial property. I still think things have to change even if it's to my disadvantage.

"Many shop owners would live upstairs but in many cities, they've passed ordinances against that "

I keep saying that the present mess was actually planned. It wasn't planned to become a mess but that was the result of well-meaning post-war legislation to separate living and working space. It was built to avoid the slums built round sometimes heavily polluting industry. What happened was that commuting replaced heavy industry as the polluters.

"Having those folks back in the office will be very important for our restaurants, our coffee shops, our dry cleaners."

What happened to that great American entrepreneurship? Their customers might not be coming to them any more so why not go to their customers? Open chains of suburban dry cleaners. Start mobile catering.

And repurpose those redundant office buildings as residential. The huge city centre drawing in commuters from more than a thousand square miles of its surroundings isn't sustainable for the future. That needs to be realised and accepted. A city offering a balance of workplaces and nearby accommodation who want to work in the office is OK but that's going to support very large workforces in the office.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Re: Ignoring the big issue

Relicensing existing projects isn't easy. It means all the original contributors or their heirs need to be traced and agreement obtained. It's one reason the Linux kernel is still GPL2.

Re: If RH can't do this...

"That has not seemed to happen"

It might start to happen now.

Re: What they've achieved

"it's consistently been the debian ones which are far easier to maintain"

You're apt to find that.

Re: Popcorn time?

The GPL is bothered with more than ensuring that the software's source code is made available to the customer/licensee. It's bothered about it being made available with the right to redistribute without further restrictions.

That is written into the GPL, including an obligation not to impose such restrictions on those to whom copies of code are supplied. The question here is whether the business relationship under which RH provide GPLed code implying such a restriction on their customers.

Re: "Certified"

"I find it hard to understand who is inconvenienced by these moves."

You mean apart from those building the Rocky & Alma downstream distros?

1. Companies who use RHEL in production because they need support* but who also run a downstream rebuild for training, testing and/or development boxes because they don't need support on those. Are they going to have to pay more for those secondary functions? This is the risk for RH. If the matching downstream builds aren't available those customers are going to have to reconsider whether RHEL is still the best choice for production.

2. The certifying** application vendors who certify against RHEL because its existing place in the OS market has made it a valuable market place for applications. If this makes their customers wish to look elsewhere they are going to have to do the same. The testing against a platform is expensive. Maintaining multiple versions if testing reveals that's required is expensive***.

3. The customers of the vendors of the certified products who might not have a problem per se with running RHEL but will have one if their vendor switches platforms.

* Support is what provides the customers' perceived value for money.

** In regulated application areas certification of the S/W they use is an external requirement that the customer needs to meet.

*** "Inconvenience" isn't the issue; it's the cost.

"Obviously this is not expressly written into the GPL or in the RHEL software licence."

What is expressly written into the GPL is that (a) it applies to derivatives, (b) the recipient of GPL code, if redistributing it, is bound to pass on the GPL with the code and (c) is not allowed to add further restrictions if they do and (d) is entitled to remove them if they have been added.

In this both Red Hat and their customers are recipients. RH as a recipient is bound by the GPL and if it modifies the code the resulting derivative is still covered by GPL, must provide the modified code if required and should not add further restrictions.

The question is then whether these contractual terms for RHEL are an implied further restriction.

Re: 'Company'? What 'company'?

That "Reading Comprehension 101" is certainly needed because it's very clear indeed in the context that the company is Red Hat. In case "Big Purple" went over your head IBM which took over Red Hat is often referred to as Big Blue and, as mixing red and blue gives purple, the resulting amalgam is commonly referred to hereabouts as Big Purple.

Re: Ignoring the big issue

It would take a court case to determine for sure whether it is 100% compliant or not. The question would be whether this is an implied instance of those additional restrictions that the GPL says should not be applied and may be removed if they are.

Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner

Re: Noooo! Reeeally? Who would've seen that coming.

"Perhaps if it could hover the names of my colleagues in meetings and exactly what they do"

What they do as in:

Jobsworth

The only person in the room who knows what's going on

Sheet anchor

Here with their own agenda about something else entirely

Sent along because their department has, in their view, to be represented but doesn't have a clue what it's about

Has to sign off budget

Etc.

"Gartner also worries that virtual experiences are silos, meaning marketers will be wary that running them won't make meaningful contributions to the data they collect about customers and prospects."

So it's not all bad.

Brookes, he of TMMM, also published a book "The design of design". Part of this was recounted his university research group's work on this years ago. They discovered something very similar - its appeal to users was limited. IIRC users were much less keen on being able to walk round inside a VR model of whatever they were designing compared to having an image of it in front of them that could be rotated or walked through, something for which an ordinary screen would suffice.

Microsoft postpones death date for personally licensed Teams Rooms hardware

Re: What devices are these?

And with what licences? Is this a bait and switch move or a shifting of goal posts?

Re: Is there anyone out there who actually thinks Teams is as great as MS does?

"and every bloody time when a meeting is over it asks me about the audio quality"

Ah, yes. The post-service survey.

I think there's a gap in the market here. A site the customer can use to send a survey to the vendor asking irrelevant questions about the customer's completion of the post-service survey.

First pushback against EU's Digital Services Act and it's not Google

Re: Is it a VLOP??

Amend their definition of "active" to take it below 45 million. Job done.

Way out in deep space, astronomers spot precursor of carbon based life

Life is an extremely unlikely mechanism for perpetuating improbable configurations of matter.

We know that the necessary but unlikely chain of events happened once. It's observer bias that makes it appear inevitable let alone repeatable.

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Re: "Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted"

"f I could demote that interest in Topics, this may actually be useful."

It would not only be useful to you, it would also be useful to washing machine sellers because they wouldn't then waste money by spending it with the advertising to place irrelevant adverts. So it won't happen.

NASA and miners face off over lithium deposits at satellite calibration site

If this is unique then it must be counted an incredible stroke of luck that it exists at all. What would NASA have done if it had never existed?

Attorney sues Microsoft for $1.75M, claiming his email has been useless since May

Re: Second email account

So many places treat an email address as an ID. This is stupid on many levels, this being one of them. It's a destination for communications. It shouldn't be anything else. It might be an issue that's tangled up with this one but it's a distinct problem in its own right. In such circumstances if the ID is important then the email address should be one over which you have better control, ideally your own domain with a reliable MSP. Worst case you can change MSP.

I didn't realise setting up a second email account was so difficult in New Jersey.

Vodafone offers '5G Ultra' to users of very specific phones in very specific locations

"Yeah that was just PR hype"

Sometimes people should be held to their hype.

Re: Easy PR?

ISTR that when 5G (or was it 4 or 6 or whatever?) being mooted it was said that because the range was so small the base stations could be like WiFi and instead of erecting the sort of masts they're now putting up they would be many unnoticeably small boxes similar to WiFi base stations on lamp-posts etc.

This morning I went to give a wheel-chair bound friend a lift. Being built on a steep hillside the bottom of her drive is well below road level. While waiting for her to manoeuvre out of the house I happened to look up & realised just how over-towering the newly installed 5G mast is. It's just over the garden wall but the garden wall is a retaining wall against the road so the effective height is getting on for 30m.

They are monstrously intrusive constructions. Their designers should have been sent back to their drawing boards CAD screens and told to start again. Forget brain frying & spreading Covid nonsense - aesthetics are a completely adequate reason to object.

After decades contributing to science, John Goodenough powers down

If the Nobels included computer science he'd have been a double laureate; core memory would have deserved one.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Re: Multiple things lead to the conclusion

"In my very first full time job, the offices were repurposed chicken sheds (don't ask me how they ever got the smell out - it was done before they were sold to my boss.)"

My late cousin's garden shed came from a chicken farm. It still bears a residue, not of the chickens, but of shrapnel. A factory about a mile away was the presumed target for an air raid - reputedly at one time it was the only one still standing machining certain parts for Spitfires. The factory was missed but the chicken farm got a direct hit.