Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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.

Re: In the year of our lord?

So what's your reference year?

Re: password managers

You can memorise something like ^>~\)z%c+L3",4S' ?

Re: password managers

It depends on where the password manager is. In my case it's not on somebody else's computer.

Re: Mixed model

From my PoV finance passwords can't be kept in my head - they look more like line noise.

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.

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Re: offline backups on the recovery laptop?

You're asking the wrong question. How big was the laptop?

Re: Deja vu!

I don't think the PC/network guys actually let anything run - they were complaining about what was coming at them. From my PoV HP-UX mail was strictly ASCII.

Re: Spatter shields deployed.

"Now to continue with the rest of the reading, safely not drinking anything."

It's BOFH. You should know better than to eat or drink whilst reading.

Re: Deja vu!

My experience was somewhat the converse of that. Also in a telecoms company in Leeds. There was another building with some consultants working on something or other that, AFAIK, never happened but they were using Notes. According to those in our building who had dealings with them the emails coming from the Notes users were regularly infected.

London class-action sueball against Google is a lot like Epic's case except fandroids might win enough for a pint

I suppose that having someone front for them Vannin are protected against being declared vexatious litigants.

On this most auspicious of days, we ask: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?

This is all very well providing it doesn't conflict with a task that is more important and/or urgent, especially if the latter is something properly in your remit and the former isn't. The underlying problem usually arises from someone unable to distinguish from the importance of your proper work and their own self-importance.

Re: "It has a cord attached so it's YOUR problem."

"It's breathing"

That's the problem but it can be dealt with.

You MUST present your official ID (but only the one that's really easy to fake)

I thought it was somebody not taking his pills. Again.

Re: but there is logic

It probably helps with having a professional reputation established before a change of marital status. My daughter's publications were in her married name which she kept on divorce whereas my cousin's daughter has reverted to her maiden name.

At least my daughter hasn't, at least as yet, remarried. Years ago one archaeologist, having become established in her married name (to another archaeologist) kept using it on remarriage. A journalist for the Irish Times who didn't see eye-to-eye with her on some matters referred to her in print on at least one occasion as "Mrs $CurrentMarriedName writing as $FormerMarriedName".

Compare this with the NHS system for recording a negative lateral flow test which doesn't actually require that the test was negative nor, indeed, taken. All that's required is the serial number of a test strip.

As regards personal ID I read in another place that the much vaunted Estonian electronic ID system has been reamed out to the extend of about quarter of a million ID photos.