Posts by Doctor Syntax

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

"it isn't that long since I was using the college Vax"

It is, but only when you stop to think about it. Welcome to the club.

Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

"requesting a feed on stuff that actually mattered – issues, releases, PRs and so on."

Be careful what you ask for. The sort of people pushing this will read PR as Public Relations.

Apple notches up ninth €5m fine for ignoring nation's competition watchdog

Clear evidence quantum computing is used to work it out.

Re: What to do?

No problem. Start bankruptcy proceedings in the country where the assets are. Watch the value of the CEO's shareholding start to slide. Accept the cheque.

Fresh concerns about 'indefinite' UK government access to doctors' patient data

This "living with Covid" idea seems to be to drop most things - self-isolation, mask rules, free lateral flow kits etc. Odd, therefore that one thing that remains is a data grab. You'd almost think it was nothing to do with Covid.

Okta now says: Lapsus$ may in fact have accessed customer info

"Okta claims to have more than 15,000 customers, so if 2.5 per cent have been compromised that could be 375 organisations that now need to determine if all logons to their preferred clouds – and the actions taken by authenticated users – were legitimate and/or innocuous."

But all 15,000 will need to assume they were amongst the 375.

Russian IT pros flee Putin, says tech lobby group

"the reviews on this marketplace may not be entirely frank and fearless."

Published reviews might not but the intended market will be quite capable of forming their own views.

However I wonder if Russian idiom lends itself to comments such as "You will be very fortunate to have this operating in your system."

How Pfizer used AI and supercomputers to design COVID-19 vaccine, tablet

Re: Pfizer didn't develop the vaccine

And had worked out the technology before Covid realised there was more to life than bats.

Alphabet spins off quantum AI 'Sandbox'

Re: Quantum Computing and AI

It's always going to be just 5x5 years away.

FIDO Alliance says it has finally killed the password

Re: I've been saying they should do this for years

"I'm talking about OVERALL i.e. for the whole world, not just you."

I only care about me and mine. I have no wish to be pulled down to some intermediate level because your mother uses the same email/password combination for all sites.

In fact, right there, you've indicated one possible area for improvement which needs not particular technological fix nor optimistic trust in providers such as Okta: make it illegal to specify an email address as a login ID. That in itself would make it easier for those who care to use multiple login IDs without juggling multiple email addresses.

Re: What's the fallback mechanism?

"and it's very *easy* for commentards to laze around on comment threads poking holes."

We don't actually get advantage from poking holes. Others do. You shouldn't assume they aren't doing.

Re: What's the fallback mechanism?

A PIN contains very much less entropy than a strong password. Biometrics have their own set of issues some of which have been mentioned in this thread.

Re: Microsoft already nailed this

"I keep sole control of my mobile device"

You intend to. People generally intend to keep control of all their possessions and yet things do get stolen.

"I don't even get that much in the way of spam on my landline"

In my case I think it was a result of getting them to "hold the line a minute" until they realised they'd been had and hung up. I must be blacklisted. To my great sorrow I missed the only call I think might have been from Microsoft.

Re: Who are these people?

"TOTP is a standard and works. It has no dependency on any particular organization."

It still has the disadvantage that as it's sent to your phone (or more accurately your phone number) whoever has the phone with that number is you.

Re: Who are these people?

Very simply put, you create an account with SomeOrg and agree with SomeOrg that "this magic token" is associated with that account. The token itself doesn't identify you

It's normal practice when you create an account to use an identity to do that. These days banks are very careful about establishing identity to cope with money-laundering legislation (unless, of course, you're handling sufficient funds to make money laundering worthwhile if not the object of the operation in which case the bank will be delighted to give you an account in the name of any off-shre shell company you choose).

Where was I? Ah, yes. Account. Identity. No, the token itself doesn't identify you. But the token is associated with account so we have Token > Account > Identity. That's what I'd call indirect addressing. For some purposes it might be enough or, depending on the purpose, too much.

Re: What's the fallback mechanism?

"That's a lot of usable phones lying around in drawers just as identity backups"

Apart from any other consideration that's also a lot of phones identities lying about to be nicked if you're burgled. Plus when you really need them you'll find that the battery life has decayed to 2 seconds and nobody local stocks that odd battery size any more.

Re: The way I read this...

"You're understanding it wrong, because this is not about protecting you"

So far so good but moving on from there, it's to benefit the usual suspects' grip on everybody's data. Any benefit to the man in the street is incidental.

My first rule is to minimise the number of entities which I will trust. Apart from myself, who I usually do trust, that means entities which have earned my trust. So what do I make out of FIDO cites Apple's adoption of "Passkeys,"?

In the article that includes a link to documentation about Passkeys, at least that's what the link indicates. And it's a link that does nothing without javascript being enabled. Javascript, just to read documentation.

A body consisting of a list of the usual suspects offers as an example of what it's about something that requires javascript just to read what it's about? Of course I'm going to trust it. About as far as I can throw it.

How not to attract a WSL (or any) engineer

In fact the local comprehensive school here styles itself as a high school. So does my old grammar school which also became a comprehensive in the 70s so maybe those questions aren't out of line in that respect - just in all others.

Re: It is a company culture test!

This is very often true of recruitment but not deliberately so. Sometimes there may be an attempt to hide the company culture. These are the ones to worry about but you're not likely to find out until too late.

Re: This process is widespread at Canonical

Example by someone to a similar grammatical wrangle a little while ago: "See who's at the door and ask what they want." I don't think it's assumed the reply to the first half would be "Jehovah's Witnesses".

Having said that it can still be jarring.

The cynic says there's a third - they have a task that needs expertise they don't have but they reckon can be done in 3 months.

I see they've updated their logo. Good to see they've got their management tasks well prioritised.

"The Register contacted Canonical regarding its questionnaire, but we have yet to receive a response."

They're probably trying to hire someone to reply to you so you'll have to wait until they've answered their 40 questions and gone through all the other stages. Don't wait up.

Oxidation-proof copper could replace gold, meaning cheaper chips, says prof

Re: Better use for oxidation-proof copper

Look forward to an order of magnitude increase in price.

OneWeb turns to SpaceX for satellite launches

Re: How much does SpaceX charge?

As long as that?

New Linux kernel bolsters random number generation

Re: the kernel checks a new VM ID called vmgenid using ACPI. If the ID changes...

"to sidestep all of this"

A well-known move in the ChaCha20.

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

Re: My view on Windows

You're looking at it wrong. It's not Microsoft who need to be trustworthy to you. It's your PC that has to be trustworthy to Microsoft. You don't think that TPM is for your benefit,do you?

Re: "worth the extra security risk they inherently present"

Never underestimate the way things can change in the IT world and how fast irrespective of how entrenched things seem to be.

When I started in IT we were the upstarts in a DEC dominated world by using Unix and RDBMS. I think the latter was even looked on as the more radical. We were always going to be taken under the VMS wing in about six months' time.

Re: "worth the extra security risk they inherently present"

"Like all businesses with captive markets, they're primarily interested in their balance sheets."

But is that market capture guaranteed? It consists largely of businesses that have their own bottom line to tend to. How much more intrusion into their affairs will it take for those customers to start to review the market? Anyone not firmly wedded to Windowsland knows very well that other desktop environments can be re-skinned to like more or less any version of Windows that takes your fancy. It's quite easy to envisage a PC vendor pre-installing Linux or BSD with a first run menu for a new user which offers a choice of any Windows UI from W2K to present.

In this context the spoiler of "It doesn't run my gamez" won't get far; this is a work machine. The other spoiler, the user with a massive investment in Excel macros, might end up finding themselves the corporate odd man out, just like the user who must have a Mac. There might even be a market in tools to convert those spreadsheets into one-off applications.

Re: Irritation and security flaws are an intentional feature

"You are obviously a time traveller who has come back from 5 years in the future."

From my PoV, just somebody who can see the way Microsoft would like to take things. The only questions for the likes of yourself seem to be how much of it will you let happen and how quickly and you seem to have answered the second already.

UK's largest union to Arm: Freeze job cuts now

Re: On the other hand...

They were getting slapped by regulators all over the globe about that merger. There's no reason to suppose that that would be any different if they were based in the US, they still need to do business globally.

Re: Weak Profitability

It might be worth looking at any payments they might be making to SoftBank under the headings of IP or Services.

Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print

Epson's solution seems to be that X thousand people change their bank. A simpler solution would be that Epson change their bank.

Re: Just use freeflowing documentation.

My wife runs patchwork classes. Her handouts include templates for marking out fabric. Pray tell how free-flowing documentation using HTML gets transferred to the fabric without printing.

Re: So the moral of the story is...

Or a subscription service in general.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here

Re: Imagine how much time is wasted...

"Yes, it's because of a rather hard engineering problem to do with application A and application B both depending on application C, but each depending on a different version."

Not so much application C as library C.

This can be a problem if B claims* it needs a bleeding edge version of C whilst A & C are rather conservative versions that came with the OS.

The better solution is to have the non-distro version install in /opt together with any libraries its authors feel they might need to make a fuss about. For instance my /opt contains LibreOffice 7.2 (distro version is 7.0), Seamonkey, Signal & Zoom inter alia. It's a much more Unix-like way of doing things.

* It might not. The providers of B should have a slap on the wrist for this.

Re: Imagine how much time is wasted...

As I keep saying, you can always tell someone who hasn't used Linux but you can't tell them much.

Re: Imagine how much time is wasted...

"The strength and weakness (imao more the latter than the former) of open source software is the freedom to go off and roll your own if you don't like the current version(s)."

Most people don't. When they do it's usually because someone has screwed up really badly. The exemplar of that would be OpenOffice suffering from the influence of Oracle. Even there is was mostly the OpenOffice devs who went off to found LibreOffice. Strength or weakness? Entirely the latter, I think.

Perhaps you could give us an example of your A>B>C>D process which actually turned out to be a in real life.

In the meantime, enjoy your adverts in your file manager - you're not going to be able to fork it.

Being able to fork something isn't only a menas of recovering from screw-ups, it's a disincentive to screw up in the first place.

Re: quis procurat ipsos procurates?

Where does your setup.exe come from? Which setup.exe is it? Did your setup.exe include a few dlls you may have already got from elsewhere just in case you didn't? If so how do you keep track of the different ones? You're dealing with a multi-step rpocess - first find your setup.exe. Download it. Keep it separate from all your other setup.exes so you know what's what. Then run it. That's not the easy way.

For sheer laziness apt install some-package wins hands down, especially if there are other dependencies which are needed.

Re: Hmm

Agreed up to the point of Flatpack. Yes, bay all means put nails in Snaps coffin. Then build another one for Flatpack.

You should run Linux then. Lots & lots of packages run out of the box. It's too late at night to even bother trying to think of one that didn't.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re: Address formats

"a postal address (where the mail gets delivered) and a visiting address (where the office of the person you want to meet actually is)"

And that's only modern addresses. Historical addresses can have quite different concepts. Maybe you think that shouldn't be a problem. It is when you're dealing with genealogical S/W written by someone who thinks addresses were always like modern addresses in whatever country they live in (usually the USA).

Re: Error saving filename.txt: Operation successful

Well, if you really want to delete a file and they weren't able to oblige you the first time it would be remiss of them not to let you have another go.

Re: an oldy

Or Private Parts.

As you say, LibreOffice has the option but it's in the right place, in the save dialog. With Gimp saving back to the format you first opened is an entirely different item on the File menu. At least LibreOffice only does that for export to something like PDF or ePub.

Re: Is Your Message Really Necessary?

"so yes, you couldn't delete a file if the disk was too full because it needed space to write the new tree nodes"

I've never checked to see if Linux does this but old-style Unix would declare disk full to non-root programs with some margin left for root. I've appreciated that when an overnight job went rogue and filled up a partition with junk messages.

Re: But we're experiencing unusual demand.

Covid has been a great help to them. It's given them an extra excuse that they can't have staff in the office, even if, when you finally get through to someone, the background noise makes it clear they're working at home.

Google Maps just got lost for a few hours

"I don't want to store a huge geographic database on my PC"

I assume your PC isn't providing some sort of service to other customers. What you choose to do on your PC and what a service provider choose to do are two different things. If you were running your state's emergency services you might well think it worth having that state's mapping locally resident or else second source Google Maps with OSM (or vice versa).