Posts by Doctor Syntax

GitHub's npm gave away a package name while it was in use, causing rethink

Re: domain name system

Even if it's no longer being actively managed it might still be being hit for downloads and hence of wider interest. Don't devalue stability.

Apple responds to critics of CSAM scan plan with FAQs, says it'd block governments subverting its system

Trust. Hard to gain. Easy to lose. Even harder to regain.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

Re: Sticking up for Gnome 40

"but this is a trend across all OS at the moment"

That's no excuse.

Re: More forks coming

The benefit of separating desktop layer from the underlying OS is that the user can continue using whatever it is that they think works best for whatever it is they need to do. Where the desktop is integrated users have to accept whatever brain farts the vendor inflicts on them, whether it works or not. I see no indication that this in any way inhibits proprietary vendors from fixing what wasn't broken to any degree at all. In the FOSS world we can just ignore it.

Re: "the user experience (UX) strategy for the project."

UX rather than UI is always a bad start. The requirement of an interface is to present a user or client with a means of interacting that remains consistent even if the implementation changes.

I read that when Apple designed the original Mac UI they tested it with new office hires. At that time few would have had much experience with computers and none with GUIs so they were able to find out what worked best without the subjects having prior expectations.

My protocol for conducting a test would require three people for each test.

A tester who has no experience of the product being tested and a list of things to be achieved.

An expert from the design/development team. The tester is only allowed to ask and the expert is only allowed to answer questions of the pattern "Where does it tell me how to xxxxx?"

The third person is an invigilator whose nominal role is to enforce that rule but in fact is there to prevent violence between the other two.

Re: Bug: "deactivate laser" and "destroy planet" buttons adjacent | WONTFIX

"if you put them together then I automatically know that you know nothing about UI "

And you know where that appeared from in 1995, don't you?

Re: Who cares?

"decorates windows to look like XP"

Now that's just cruel.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

"o ensure they would never be accidentally reset to 110V."

Never? You underestimate the power of the luser.

AI algorithms uncannily good at spotting your race from medical scans, boffins warn

It sounds very much like what archaeological osteologists have been doing for years.

All your DNS were belong to us: AWS and Google Cloud shut down spying vulnerability

Re: ISP Routers

"routers are often key components for the ISP's service so can't be easily switched out"

PlusNet's can be switched out. I've recently done this after discovering that they'd reconfigured theirs from their end (itself a worry) with the net effect of me not being able to configure my DHCP as I wish.

As the original setup had a separate VDSL modem a combined unit has actually taken the box count down.

"(?Benign)"

Bind9, maybe.

Google: Linux kernel and its toolchains are underinvested by at least 100 engineers

Re: Please stop calling computer programmers "engineers".

In the UK that might be the situation. What were the requirements in ancient Greece where the name, if not the role, originated? Applying your own definition, even by law, does not give you the rights you might think you have over language. ISTR a US state discovering that the hard way in respect of "engineer".

Re: The mythical man hour

Yup. When I read it & noted his name it struck me as a touch of nominative determinism. It sounds like far too many.

Re: Fool

I think his initial post in this thread is probably the explanation. He wanted to do kernel development work and to be paid for it. Of course that was always a possibility by getting a job with one of the corporations that actually does kernel work.

Re: Fool

"I was pointing that out because it's not immediately obvious."

IOW it's something you're reading into the post so you can disagree with it.

Re: Fool

"Not only do they have a defined person or organisation to take action against if the system should fail, but because they've bought in something, the law offers various protections in the event that the system fails in some way."

Believing that is what comes from not reading the EULA.

Re: Fool

"Corporations should never be allowed to use someone's work without payment."

Could you quote any of the open source licences which say this? Because unless the licence makes that stipulation they are allowed to do so. They're allowed by the developers who release the code that way. It might personally offend you your opinion only counts if you're one of the developers and somehow I don't think they care about taking advice from you.

Do you even know why the GPL came about? It was because RMS got pissed off with his work being taken closed by a corporation for no payment. He devised the GPL so that no corporation could do that again - not the "without payment" bit, but the taking it closed. That's what matters in the open source world.

Re: Fool

"The Linux license could be changed"

Only by getting the buy-in of all the contributors who've provided material under the GPL or by replacing that by those who disagree or can't be traced. Or the buy-in of the heirs of those who've died.

Re: Fool

AKA "the tragedy of the commons".

Re: Fool

"Everything is in fact valued in money, and all valuable things have a monetary value. "

Ahah! Somebody who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Re: Linus' bugs

It sounds to me like Linus & Google were saying the same thing.

How many times do we have to say this? By far the greatest part of the Linux kernel comes from the contributions of these companies. Intel, Red Hat/IBM, Google etc.

The practicalities are not tricky. For Intel, for instance, they're helping to create a market for cores. For others they're able to help create something better then they could if they worked independently. It's collaborative development that benefits everyone. They can see the benefits even if you can't. If it didn't work like that it wouldn't exist.

The Android kernel is Linux. A good chunk of Linux kernel contributions are from Google.

Re: Google will take control over Linux

"Ultimately, they will introduce security features that fit their requirements."

And everyone else's, therefore. That's the point of collaborative development.

"projects that are exterior to Google"

Given that they're contributors to Linux this doesn't really make sense. It's like saying Linux is exterior to Intel, Red Hat and all the others. There seems to be a mind-set that doesn't grasp that the Linux kernel is to a large extent a shared project between a number of large corporations who compete at one level and yet gain by collaborative development.

It may help that the gatekeepers such a Linus and Greg K-H aren't employees of any of them and can thus be even-handed about what goes in.

Re: Fork It

Given that they're substantial contributors to the kernel why should they do that?

Re: Fool

I've re-read FIA's post again. I still can't see where he says he expects "the community to identify and fix the bugs in [his] code". Perhaps you could point that out.

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Re: The Moon - the next rubbish tip

How does he verify that it happened? Cynical, moi?

Your Computer Is On Fire, but it will take much more than this book to put it out

"Detailed diagnosis of tech industry delusion falls short of prescribing a cure"

Not necessarily to be held against it. Zeroth law of problem solving: in order to solve a problem you've got to know there is one. 1st law of problem solving: In order to solve a problem you've got to know what it is.

OTOH I'd make no such concessions to cryptocurrency "mining".

SolarWinds urges US judge to toss out crap infosec sueball: We got pwned by actual Russia, give us a break

It still makes no sense. The shareholders are the company - it's a company of shareholders. Unless there are different classes of shares the value they say was being directed to the shares of large shareholders was also directed to the shares of smaller shareholders. The crash in share values that affected them also affected the large shareholders.

A successful suit involves shareholders' funds being paid to shareholders to compensate them for loss of value plus lawyer's costs. Without the expenses it's shareholders shifting the remaining money from one pocket to another. With the costs..... Can anyone spot who actually makes money out of this?

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Industry (not necessarily Moore) treated the observation as indicating an exponential curve. The early stages of a sigmoidal growth curve look very much like they're exponential. It's usually sigmoidal growth that best describes what can be achieved in the real world.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

the reasons you might want to upgrade it mostly relate to IO rather than the CPU S/W dropping support for older but viable H/W.

FTFY

Das tut mir leid! Germany's ruling party sorry for calling cops on researcher after she outed canvassing app flaws

"Some things never change in infosec."

And not just in infosec. Paging Ms Streisand.

Leeds City Council swallows the Gartner glossary and orders up 'post-modern' ERP in £44m SAP replacement

On the good side, they're not my local council.. On the down side, mine are probably as bad. And who knows what this new West Yorks body with its elected mayor will be like?

Nuisance call-blocking firm fined £170,000 for making almost 200,000 nuisance calls

AFAIK there are powers in the UK to deal with a banned director operating through through proxies like that. Assuming those whose names are on the notepaper know about it they'd be in trouble as well.

Yes, they're obviously a load of motions.

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

"Mort" Nice one given that he killed the network.

Re: "he had clearly accidentally fired off every possible debug command at once"

Terminal text sent a packet at a time plus packet loss - which was the problem he was trying to debug.

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings

Re: Scam

WHy bother with a script? Just send in an application for the set of everything that hasn't yet been patented.

Re: Do machines have rights now?

And how does it open a bank account to collect the royalties or, alternatively assign the patent to a human or corporation that can?

Re: AI can be an inventor

"Surely one of the tests of artificial intelligence is that we *can’t* say how it comes to its decisions."

Does that mean a random number generator is AI?

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

I certainly agree with A. B is a bit of a problem because it ensures that if the authentication is breached then it opens up too much. It also means that it might mean, as a previous post suggested, that you can't get through to get access restored if authentication fails.

Re: In the year of our lord?

That's one that's always struck me as trying to duck the issue, pretending to ignore what it doesn't want to say but not really doing so.

In fact Dionysius seems to have been somewhat arbitrary in his designation. It's also a pity he was using Roman numerals, one reason why he couldn't incorporate a year zero which is apt to introduce either off-by one errors or make the results look odd when expressing C14 dates in both years BP [before Present] and BC. C14 dating, BTW, takes 1950 as its reference year.

"A tool should integrated into the system conventions as well as possible... so you don't need insecure dirty clipboard tricks to enter passwords into forms."

Clipboards aren't integrated into the OS?

Re: Please explain

For a start the one in Firefox wouldn't be much use when I'm using Palemoon (which is, BTW, set up to forget all its history when closed) and the one in Palemoon wouldn't be much use when I'm using Seamonkey and none of them on this laptop would be much use when I'm using one of the others. The separate keepassxc database can be synced as and when needed between systems.

Re: I can

What is this keepaswc of which you ramble? It doesn't sound anything like the one running here.

Here's 30 servers Russian intelligence uses to fling malware at the West, beams RiskIQ

Re: if you know the suspect addresses

If the addresses hosting the VMs are blocked then either the operators stop hosting them (probably not an easy decision to make) or the other commercial customers go elsewhere. Maybe they'll turn out to not be very commercial hosting businesses after all.

HP Inc slurps Teradici to get better at delivering remote PCs

"The company's approach means that no data moves over networks – just bitmaps."

What about keyboard input? Does it send bitmaps of the keys?

Euro watchdog will try to extract $900m from Amazon for breaking data privacy laws

Given the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio of search results it would be pretty hard going to prove that Amazon made use of any information of any sort.