Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: Misses the point

I'm not sure. The millions offer is coming from slick and determined salesmen who have nothing else to sell to make their quotas, the offers from mere punters.

Re: Misses the point

"When marketeers understand how the internet works and where their budgets really go, that's when advertising will improve."

The advertising industry will work tirelessly to prevent this. Advertising is the only thing it sells and it will obfuscate to prevent the mugs buying it from understanding. The only thing that helps is blocking.

The entire online advertising industry has fouled its nest and will have to live with the consequences.

From the Goon Show long ago.

Bluebottle: Eccles, stand on my shoulders and pull me up.

Sounds of miscellaneous scuffling and grunting.

Eccles: I'd like to see them do this on television.

"I don't see that I am taking money from the advertisers"

You're saving them money. Otherwise they're wasting it by paying the ad networks to "target" you.

Re: In a past far far away

Bringing willing buyers and willing sellers together. The trouble with "targeted" and almost all other online ads is that the recipient isn't a willing buyer, most of thetime not even an intending buyer. The advertisers are being conned into parting with good money, the recipients are being pissed off and less likely to buy later but the advertising industry is coining it.

Rocky Linux is go: CentOS founder's new project aims to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Re: What's all the fuss?

You can always spot 'em. No past history on other topics to hide behind. Straight in with a commercial point to support.

Re: What's all the fuss?

"Centos-stream 8 is just rh8.x/centos-8.x with slightly anticipated upgrades in between minor *point* *releases* of the very same OS version.

It will just receive the single updates when they're ready and stable, instead of having to wait for the next all-encompassing point release."

You make it sound somewhat like Debian Testing vs Debian Stable. However, the people using Debian Testing are making a deliberate choice to run Testing for one reason or another (I've done that myself on occasion). The people running Centos are doing so because it's exactly the same as the the current stable. Not nearly the same. Exactly the same. Their reasons have been expressed quite clearly in many comments.

Hmm. First post. Is the failure to understand the one famously explained by Upton Sinclair?

Re: IBM won't like that

They don't have to like it. Providing they don't use any RH branding and artwork the licence on their source code allows this. That's why there were several previous clones which were abandoned in favour of Centos. It looks like history wll repeat itself.

They can't, by the way, change the licence because the licence came attached to the components they built RHEL from.

Let's try to explain this without your neoliberal/communist bollocks.

FOSS software is licensed by those who write it under some form of licence (there's more than one, almost certainly more than one will be used by various components of a distro) which enables copying. This is not an accident, it's by design. In case you missed that let me repeat it: this is not an accident, it's by design. If you have comprehension difficulties feel free to read that until you understand it.

That has several consequences.

Firstly the material that Red Hat/IBM construct into RHEL will have come from multiple sources. Although they're a major contributor to Linux and to the many other pieces of software in a distro they're only one. Other people's contributions are used. And remember this is not an accident or mistake on the part of those other contributors, they intended this to happen. Also other distro maintainers also pick from the same smorgasbord of FOSS S/W to construct their offerings.

Secondly, Red Hat/IBM offer the source of RHEL for redistribution. They have to - it was the terms on which they themselves used it which require this.

Now if there's anything which you might possibly regard as cummunistic in this it's the offering of work on those terms. You have to shift "communists" not to those "wanting a free ride" but to those providing the "hard graft".

TL;DR You have at arse about face.

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

Re: Two things

"Larry will try if someone is jamming within earshot of his home."

But is he moving?

"A move now allows Oracle, HPE and others to sell off all that empty office space in California while prices are still relatively high "

If they're trying to sell that much the prices aren't going to stay high for long.

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

Re: LAMP TEST

"I worked in a lab once which had a continuous alarm."

Aldermaston?

UK competition watchdog fast-tracks investigation into mega-merger of O2 and Virgin Media

"BT's at the time market-shaking acquisition of EE (a similar combo of fixed and mobile businesses) was waved through in early 2016"

It would have been difficult for them to have done otherwise. It just restored BT to the position they were in before the idiot BT management (tautology alert) of the time decided they didn't really want a mobile network & floated O2 off.

Subway email weirdness: Suspicion grows over apparent Trickbot trojan delivery campaign

It might or might not have been the marketing firm's breach but its Subway's customer data so its Subway's problem.

Sometimes (presumed) legitimate businesses seem to go out of their way to look suspicious. It certainly makes life easier for the real phishers.

I just ordered a book on eBay. Apart from the normal communications via eBay they've so far sent two completely unnecessary emails from their own domain via a 3rd party mailer with a 4th party non-read reply address. The first is a long email about their T&Cs - bollocks because eBay's T&Cs apply - with a PDF alleged to be a cancellation form. The second contains PDFs alleged to be their invoice and return slip (any returns would be handled by eBay's system). All for a book costing less than 3 quid.

Either this business, which claims to be one of the largest of its kind in Germany, hasn't got the hang of selling via eBay or they too have been got at.

There seems to be a bit missing from the Subway statement. The bit where they say they've informed the ICO.

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality

"a non-trivial chunk of the remainder are low-density terraces with potential for parking"

A short distance away is a stretch of 2-300 metres of Victorian housing. No garages at all nor space to build them. There are cars parked on both sides leaving a one-way at a time slot down the middle. If you're lucky there might be a space partway down where two cars can pass. On the whole people cooperate but I'm not sure what autonomous vehicles would do if thrown into the mix. Of course if road works are in place the council insists on TTLs to manage what the rest of us can cope with the rest of the time; they just do it with extra delays.

It's not an urban side-street, it's an A road, albeit a 4-digit one.

Re: Summon the lawyers!

Does the footway count as part of the highway?

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Your first statement is probably true but maybe not in the way you meant. It's very likely to be a shift to one of the forks.

Re: Erm ...

"If you were self-supporting then there would be constant, hourly demands as to why it wasn't fixed yet."

In a well-managed business the constant, hourly demands go to somebody who sees it as their job to absorb those calls and keep them away from whoever's doing the work.

In a less-well managed business the reply to "why" is "because I keep answering bloody stupid calls wanting to know why it's not sorted instead of sorting it."

In in ideal world there's be one call - "Let me know when you're finished. If you need anything or anyone gets in your way, call me.".

Re: Who cares about Linux?

You'll notice from the comments that a lot of people care very much. Largely they're people who use it run servers. You might not have seen a server but they're the big racks of stuff that do the actual work that companies rely on to do business.

Re: Someone already has - Rocky Linux

Rock on!

Re: Erm ...

Start Rescue are much cheaper. Not had to use them yet myself but turned out in an awful rainstorm on the M6 to sort out my daughter's car. I know how bad it was because we were a few miles in front and had to double back to pick up the grandchildren and take them on to Tebay to get dried out.

Re: Erm ...

"the middle manager"

Naïve by definition.

Re: Looks like Debian ...

Synaptic if you want a GUI version.

Re: Erm ...

"Am I just hopelessly naïve?"

I'd have thought a business that puts its faith in suing IBM would be the one that's hopelessly naïve.

Re: To the surprise of no one

"accept a proprietary blob in the init, or fork and replace it,"

Other inits are possible and preferred by many.

Re: To the surprise of no one

"the community as a whole would be quite badly affected if Redhat (and, by implication IBM) left"

You mean they might stop pottering about?

Maybe White Box Linux will be revived. It was another RH clone but discontinued, largely, I think, because Centos covered the same ground. Fermilab also opted for Centos 8 instead of developing a new Scientific Linux 8. Maybe they'll reconsider. It would be surprising if nobody picked this up.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

And a good thing too. It would solve a lot of problems at source even if it dried up "on Call" fodder. I've even be called out by a niece to fix her "internet" - all it needed was power-cycling the router.

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

"there's no need for any business to use cloud services."

Quite true. We ran for years without such a thing existing but I don't suppose that's what you meant.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Re: He should have checked the docs and settings before releasing the code

"Anyone else could just go crying to the bank for a loan."

Or declare insolvency.

Re: VISA gift cards

"And, also, what were they thinking not to check for recursion / duplicates in the first place?"

Even more fundamentally, what were they thinking of to just let it run unattended without being sure they knew what it was doing?

Isn't being able to manage costs one of the benefits of Cloud?

South Korea kills ActiveX-based government digital certificate service

"in 1999, when it wasn’t the worst imaginable choice for the job"

It might not have been the worst imaginable choice but any choice locking them in to proprietary software should have been seen as bad enough and Microsoft had already nailed its colours to the mast. How many non-backward compatible variations of .doc were in existence by then?

When it comes to privacy, everyone says America needs a new federal law ASAP. As for mass spying, well, um… huh what’s that over there?

"argued – or tried to – that actually the European Court of Justice had decided wrongly and that everything was fine"

Why can't these people get it into their heads that it doesn't matter whether they like it? It doesn't matter if they think the court didn't get it right. It doesn't even matter if the court didn't get it right if there isn't a higher court to which they can appeal, which in this case there isn't. The court has ruled on what the law says and that's that.

EU Medicines Agency hacked, BioNTech-Pfizer coronavirus vaccine paperwork stolen, probe launched

Re: Other suspects?

"we need to simply disconnect all critical storage systems and access system from the Internet."

In fact, disconnect them from other parts of the organisation that don't need access.

In due course we'll be told lessons have been learned.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Re: Naked coding? Sounds Agile...

6. Snow on the roads, the council still haven't got the gritters out.

Re: Naked coding? Sounds Agile...

"what is this "heating" of which you speak?"

Isn't it the reek bit of Aluld Reekie?

Delay upgrading the UK's legacy border systems has added £336m to taxpayers' bill

I'm sure it'll be dwarfed by the extras once the new system gets rolled out.

John Reid (remember him?) said the HO was not fit for purpose. That was a long time ago. Nothing seems to have changed.

FOSS developer survey: Mostly male, employed... and many don't care about 'soul-withering chore' of security

Re: A proper security review of the code

That would require that security experts join FOSS projects.

The survey suggested that half the people working on such projects are actually paid to do so. The employers sponsoring them might usefully consider seconding any such specialists they have on their staff to spend some time doing this. However some such companies may only be contributing to the extent that specific features of the project benefit them and may be reluctant to pay for something that benefits the project as a whole - including other contributors who may be commercial rivals.

Other projects which can be quite critical to the whole FOSS "ecosystem" have turned out to have very few contributors and generally run on something less than a show-string with no commercial support. That needs some external foundation to step up to support them.

Re: Why is lack of security a surprise?

I'd go a step further. The average member of the pulic doesn't want security because it would make the product more difficult to use. Security generally gets traded off for something - convenience, performance, cost, whatever. Right up to the time it becomes obvious it shouldn't have been.

Re: Other big 'not do' is good documentation

Brookes' view was that the manual should be the first thing you start and the last you finish.

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

"may signal a coming surge in RISC-V processor shipments"

May also signal concerns about the future ownership of Arm.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

All the people who want exclusive back doors for encryption have to do is tender a contract for the writing of one - payment to be made only when a committee of independent experts confirm it does what it says on the tin. If they think it's possible why haven't they done that?

PSA: The 2020 monolith is a dead meme. You can stop putting them up now. Please

Re: There is a difference between ...

The poor deluded idiot appears to be former Israeli general and their of space security which may be slightly worrying. He may not be in full possession of his marbles now but was he then?

Re: Reaction

Art is also anything made by an artist studio assistant that sells

Re: IoW "art" claimed...

I think whoever suggested the foil was thinking that it would hold the glass together if he bumped into it rather like a laminated windscreen. Before switching to a mirrored plastic I'd take a hammer to a sample to make sure it doesn't shatter too easily. In fact, take professional advice - I'm sure the safety elves must have looked at this.

Mirrored Perspex is the preferred material on the Isle of Wight.