Posts by Doctor Syntax

Worst of CES Awards: The least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable

"I'm still looking for a generic IoT product that isn't solving a problem that is already solved in older and arguably better ways"

And not just IoT products. This and the Moxie Marlinspike article listed above reminded me of an article which came to my attention a few days ago: https://trendoceans.com/a-simple-solution-to-the-private-key-loss-conundrum/

Basically it saves you having to remember your private key by going to an online random password generator which you seed from a piece of arbitrary text of your own choosing and a date. This gives, according to the article, 10 15 character passwords (I tried it and got 20 20 character passwords) from which you select 32 characters and from that generate a 256 bit key. The article provides a shell script for this. Repeat the process to regenerate the key as needed. It struck me that:

1. You now have to use a server whose operators may well be of the utmost probity - I'm sure they are - but who you have to take on trust as you don't know them.

2. You not only have to trust the current operators but any successors whom even the current operators may not know.

3. You have to trust the security of the server and everything linking you to it.

4. You have to hope that the server is still running for as long as you need the key.

5. You have to trust the reliability of the server, namely that it will give the same result each time. Note that the results it gave me a few minutes ago don't match the description in the article although it may be that the article accesses it via curl and I used a browser.

6. In place of not losing the key you've got to not lose the script the article describes or at least you've got to remember the URL and which characters the script picks out from the returned block of text.

7. You've got to remember your seed text and date.

I suppose you could keep all the bits you need to remember in your local Keepass database but then I suppose you could do the same for the private key you're in danger of forgetting.

And have I missed anything out from that list? (I've already thought of one extra.)

Re: unintelligible random sound from person in bed

"the problem pretty much starts with a lack of clear thinking at the design stage"

They're designed to make money. Nothing unclear about that.

Re: NFT?

Having read it I endorse that recommendation.

Re: "the marginal cost of sharing and making copies of things is pretty close to zero"

My local history group has published a few books. We can sell a hundred or more fairly quickly and usually have a few to offer on open days etc over the next few years but eventually run out (although we have an over-ordered book on the Poor Law from many years ago of which I could sell quite a few copies). I looked at Amazon's print on demand arrangements to see if we could make the out of print copies available. To break even we'd have to sell at about 50-60% above our old list price. Instead we've now put them online as free downloadable PDFs.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Either is probably preferable to "drop".

Re: Perish the thought

Let's be grateful for small mercies such as still having some to go grey.

Re: re bad printing on fuses

I hate to break bad news to you but it might be your eyes getting a few decades older. I know that's a problem for me. I simply can't focus as close as I used to do.

Re: Blue flash

"you can't make them flip no matter what."

The only possible answer to that is "Challenge accepted".

Re: Blue flash

There was one colleague I knew who had the infamous phrase "It'll be all right..."

Long ago I found myself supervising an archaeology student (project on numerical classification of objects) whose ritual greeting seemed to be "Wanna hear a tale of woe?".

His unsurpassed offering was the water-skiing weekend when firstly he got up from steering the boat to go back and sort out some problem with the tow and secondly one of the group managed to write off the boat on its trailer when they were pulling out to go home - right into the path off an off-duty police officer who was the father of one of the girls in the party & had come looking for her.

...or "Could you put someone one who isn't?"

I suspect these sorts of problems are down to everyone, call centre & field staff, being incentivised to close a ticket ASAP. Not everyone is.

Back in 2020 we wanted to get some trees felled - old Christmas trees that had been planted out and grown into monsters. The wires for the street lights up the road ran close to the canopy so we would have to get them powered off. A guy from the distribution company turned up and took a look. He did a thorough job, walking up the road and discovered that due to an unfixed fault elsewhere the circuit had been patched to supply some houses. He also noted that my neighbour's trees were also growing round the wires and they - the distribution company - would have to trim them. Due to this and that and Covid there'd have to be a delay before we could get the work done. He went to his van to write out a report.

He must have spent a couple of hours on this all told. I was quite impressed with his thoroughness. Less impressed when, having finished, he drove round the corner, parked up and was still there a few hours later when I drove past. I had to chase up an appointment to get the power off and the work on the neighbour's trees has still not been done over a year later.

Re: Too Many...

But it just installed itself after she'd given the password.

"When the lieu time was stopped we automated some of the process and handed the rest over to the bean counters who should have been doing it in the first place."

I hope it was only the barest minimum that got automated.

Sometimes it's not the user/customer who's wrong.

Phone and internet became intermittent one afternoon. During an interval when the phone was working ask BT helldesk is there's work going on in the area.

There isn't. We can send out an engineer, £80 charge if it's not our fault.

Offer declined, walk down to the village where the footway cabinet is located to find:

2 x OpenReach vans

2 x manholes opened

2 x OpenReach bods occupying manholes, redoing everyone's connections.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Re: Why blame the USPTO?

Fees should be set at a level sufficient to avoid damage to pay for proper patent examination. Then the costs involved in disputing failed patents should fall on the USPTO.

Technology can sometimes go from east to west: Ubuntu DDE 21.10 remix ships in 22.01

Step two: download all the previous styles, icon sets etc.

Step three: import the config from the previous installation.

Re: Still waiting, but optimistic

Distrowatch rankings are hit counters for its distro pages. They aren't claimed to be anything more. Apart from anything else the site's likely to be biased in favour of visitors with at least some fluency in reading English.

Like everyone else I've read these accounts of non-Western OSs being mandated; I'm curious as to how this works out in practice. We have commentards with geographically diverse experience. Surely someone has at least anecdotal information of what the reality is.

Re: Gaming restrictions

You don't put a price on all your private data that gets slurped?

Re: Is Ubuntu Even an Os??

(Resists sitting duck comment about Windows partition)

"starts acting funny"

I bet helldesk operators just love you.

Re: Chinese are smarter than most FOSS worshipers....

Those of us in the West who use Linux or BSD as our daily desk/laptop OS are able to find all the applications we need. almost always FOSS applications. The question, then, is not necessarily whether the applications exist but whether there are Chinese translations for their UIs. If they aren't available from the original projects the Chinese would be able to provide their own if only they had access to the code...

Re: Still waiting, but optimistic

Do you know that it "never arrives"?

As TFA says, there are several Chinese FOSS alternatives. Is there anyone here who knows if they are actually widely used there?

When it comes to desktop environments pedestrian and conservative are good. Their purpose is - or should be - to unobtrusively enable the user to run applications and open files. What the user doesn't need is a new, exciting and unfamiliar way of doing or failing to do this that then has to be fathomed out. A DE that makes for an impressive demo runs the risk of being the exact opposite of what the user needs.

But all these new DEs offer "discoverability" don't they? I don't want to spend today discovering how to do what I knew how to do yesterday.

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

Re: Is it in the dictionary?

The song from Guys and Dolls?

"There is always fresh money to be had in the next VC round. It is called throwing good money after bad"

Also called the icing on the cake if you're the recipient.

As long as there's some of the investors' money left to spend they might as well keep trying.

Feeling virtuous with a good old paperback? Well, don't. Switching to traditional media does not improve mood

"It also shows those who engaged with music, television, films, and video games tended to have lower happiness and higher anxiety levels than those who did not."

It might depend on the subject matter. As far as I'm concerned even the opening tymp beats of the Beethoven violin concerto lower stress instantly; by the time the soloist enters all is serene. OTOH There's a lot of crap out there masquerading as music (of all genres) which would drive me up the wall.

Trying to read their paper does seem to lower happiness. Maybe I'm reading it on the wrong medium.

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

"More important, though, is the fact that it's highly visually dated. When you see it next to Windows 11 it's pretty jarring."

And whose fault is that?

Look, we did a survey that shows AIOps is ready for the primetime, says AIOps firm

The found a few who didn't hit delete on a survey on a topic they weren't interested in?

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

Re: NHS is screwed anyway

"it was all about protecting the NHS, not about stopping people dying"

The two are not incompatible. AIUI the protection bit was to keep infection levels down to a point where there were sufficient resources available to treat patients (remember a few hospitals having to declare emergencies because the demands for oxygen exceeded the capacity of the plumbing) and to avoid losing too many staff to Covid and not having enough available to treat patients.

Since the back end of last year we now have policy effectively being dictated by the Tory rebels after the last vote. So we don't have sufficiently strong protections in place and there are the consequent reports of mounting staff shortages due to sickness. ISTM that the actions of some MPs can only explained by them thinking they're playing Minecraft or something and their actions don't have consequences in the real world.

Ward-Grey and the committee seem to have forgotten that this is a government department and hence a government IT project they're talking about. Those looked after by paper-based trusts ATM are probably the lucky ones.

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Re: Colour options

Being inconspicuous is such an effective way of keeping something secret.

January sales starting in January? How long have you been out of the UK? They usually start on Boxing Day although this year I thought I saw some indication on an advert being fast forwarded that somebody had a sale starting on Christmas Eve.

Re: To be fair on BMW...

... Why?

Robotic arm on China's space station does a demo, swings out 20 degrees and back while holding cargo ship

Is the space station lifting the cargo ship or the cargo ship lifting the base station?

Apple custom chip guru jumps ship to rejoin Intel

Re: how long?

Or RISC-V. Anything that makes what everyone has obsolete. You can't have people being too satisfied with their current shiny.

Re: Nice One. ..... but it is not Cricket, Old Bean, is it?

It's called building a career.

Planning on buying a new motor? Chip shortages set to hit UK carmakers this year and next

Is it too much to hope that they'd bridge the gap by releasing new models without all the smart stuff the buyers don't necessarily need or even want?

Car makers lock in long-term deals with chip giants for future autonomous vehicles

"Automakers are using conventional engineering approaches to integrate autonomous systems across car models"

The one supplier hits problems and production stops for all models. It sounds as if they still haven't learned the lessons of relying on a single source.

Re: EV EOL

"it might lose some features"

Its clock might reset to 2002.

Re: EV EOL

OP said he asked a salesman so that's clear enough.

NASA confirms International Space Station is to keep orbiting through 2030

It'll be tricky getting a removal van to move all their stuff to the new one.

Re: Any manned trip to Mars is going to need a lot of radiation shielding,

Pre-1945 steel was used as shielding in low-level radiation counting set-ups. The Belfast carbon dating lab was lucky having a ship-yard just down the road to source second-hand steel plates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

"Windows 11 design curse"

Why the 11?

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

At least I don't have that problem with my car clock. It just runs a little slow. Tens of £k for a car and they fit a clock that's less accurate than a cheap wristwatch.

Offering Patreon subs in sterling or euros means you can be sued under GDPR, says Court of Appeal

Re: Lord Justice Warby has form on inventing new law by precedent.

He also delivers his judgements in English which is also not available to most of his counterparts in the EU. Your point is????

Google Chrome 97 relaxes privacy protection just a little to help out Microsoft

Google's privacy protection in the headline? Is it April already?

Hauliers report problems with post-Brexit customs system but HMRC insists it is 'online and working as planned'

Re: FT article

I could see the comments as well as the article but only the last hour's worth or thereabouts.

Re: Hmm

"Bungler-In-Chief also messed up with the 'there won't be a border in the Irish sea' palaver, hoping to force the Republic out of the EU single market and back into the UK orbit. Yet, that's not happened."

I doubt such long term "planning" was involved. It was just a thing he needed to say at the time to those he was addressing. All his utterances are the same.

Re: Hmm

The Good Friday agreement was predicated on NI and the EU being in the single market, hence removing the need for a hard border. That's why NI has to remain in the single market for it to function. If NI is in the single market and the UK isn't then there has to be some form of customs border in the Irish Sea. No amount of flannelling can dispose of that set of consequences.

Re: Hmm

"Johnson is only interested in getting elected"

Now that's a statement I can agree with. Getting elected at whatever the cost.