Posts by Doctor Syntax

After blitzing FlexiSpy, hackers declare war on all stalkerware makers: 'We're coming for you'

Re: ICO enforcement action? Or police?

"It'd be hard (well, impossible) for the ICO to go after them if they're not actively trading in the UK"

The first three words of TFA: "A Brit biz"

Has el Reg reached out or even just plain contacted the ICO for a comment? It should be doubly interesting to them: once because of what these guys are up to and once because of the presumably unreported breach.

TVs are now tablet computers without a touchscreen

"This is what most people I know with Rasberry Pi's bought them for"

Just checked. RS have a VESA adapter which will take a Pi mounting box and an HDD.

Hmm. Interesting... Nice project to work on with grandson-apprentice.

"It's a hard problem of technology: they can only build for what they can see, and trying to future proof is like trying to predict the weather: fair chance of missing."

Building in a faster processor and more memory than currently needed would be a good start but it would cut out a new sale a few years down the line.

Re: I upgraded my "dumb" TV...

"Surely by now there is a maintained Linux Media Center distribution?"

Kodi.

"designing for backward compatibility was a basic goal of analog television broadcasters, one that has clearly been abandoned in the transition to digital."

I don't suppose the set manufacturers were happy about that. The new business model is much better. Sell a smart set that can report back whatever they want to the mother ships with vague offers of updates. Forget about the updates; save money and speed up the replacement cycle at the same time.

A dumb TV and a cheap and/or updateable smart box feeding it is much better - for viewers..

Victory! The smell of skunkworks in your office in the morning

?????

Just easier to concentrate on one small point and let the rest flow down the sewer. I don't think "flaunt" was the word you were looking for.

Microsoft cracks open patch mega-bundles for biz admins, will separate security, stability fixes

Re: Correction!

Never heard of either. Your "everyone" might be territorially limited.

Ewe, get a womb! Docs grow baby lambs in shrink-wrap plastic bags

Re: good idea

I'll join you in that. We lost what would have been our third child to a premature birth. Many years later and the regret still doesn't go away.

Expedia IT bod gets all-expenses-paid trip to prison after hacking execs' emails for profit

"a passwords file in an account belonging to an IT department boss, which opened every corporate email inbox"

Some people really should know better. And did the IT boss cover his tracks better than Ly?

Dark times for OmniOS – an Oracle-free open-source Solaris project

Re: getting old I suppose.

"not that they really even know what that means seeing as you drop them into /bin/ksh and they panic"

For real panic try dropping them into csh.

High Court hands Lauri Love permission to appeal extradition to US

@tedleaf

I think you need a chip on both shoulders. That would allow you to have a balanced opinion.

Re: If all else fails...

One thing the puzzles me about Assagne complaining he's being detained by the UK: why hasn't he tried tunnelling out of the embassy?

Re: A fool, but our fool

"There is no social benefit in the innocent pleading guilty just because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate."

The alternatives include the real culprit going free.

Hackers uncork experimental Linux-targeting malware

Re: This should read as "embedded Linux targeting" malware

"Since there are no Linux distros that ship with default credentials."

Embedded distros (including those for the Raspberry Pi) often do. The nature of these devices is that the device ships with a pre-built image rather than as an installation disk that requires a password to be entered at install time. In these situation of best practice should be to require the user to enter a password at first boot and again after a factory reset.

Webroot antivirus goes bananas, starts trashing Windows system files

Nominative determinism?

Thie name makes Webroot sound like the sort of malware Lenovo might plant on your PC before they sell it to you.

Re: But what if we invented the internet all over again

"You'd complete a preferences questionnaire about which private data about yourself you are willing to share"

That's nothing to do with the internet per se, it's to do with all the wide boys setting up businesses and taking advantage of the stupidity of the numpties who use it. The only way of preventing that by re-inventing the internet is to make it too difficult for the numpties to use.

Not auf wiedersehen – yet! The Berlin scene tempting Brexit tech

Re: The Berlin scene tempting Brexit tech...

"Althouth it would take somebody pretty brave to check"

Maybe the original was an each way bet.

Re: Meh

"And if tomorrow becomes today and it hasnt happened then I will say the same then too. Because its coming... tomorrow."

I guess you've never been involved in a company move.

At former employer - I'm not quite sure how long the management decided to move out of central London to just outside. Then they announced the move and that they'd found a site. A few weeks later the property deal fell through. After a few more months looking round they found premises in the north. The office started to "move" which meant offering relocation or redundancy. They also started recruiting new staff in temporary offices. A few of the London staff who relocated might have moved at this point. After a good few months the new premises were ready and the already recruited new staff moved in and the relocations started over the spring and summer.

I was one of the later tranche to move; I had a daughter at GCSE stage. I'd noted that particular summer as one that would be suitable for a move years ago - it was only the second suitable moving window in several years due to schooling. I think the office move was completed about a year after the first new recruiting, about 18 months after the initial site fell through and there were still other parts of the business to move. It must have taken well over 2 years for the relocation to complete, probably more like 3 from the initial planning. And that was within the same country.

Bootnote. About a fortnight after I moved I got called by a head-hunter about a job about 10 miles from where I used to live.

Re: Meh

" But the lack of exodus is not a shock."

Of course it isn't. Moving a business across a city is one thing. Moving it from city to city within a country isn't always straightforward. Moving to a different country with a different language, sorting out schooling for key employees' children, working out how many employees will move and how many will dig their heels in - it's all going to take time. What you see now isn't necessarily going to be what you see in another year or eighteen months.

Lyrebird steals your voice to make you say things you didn't – and we hate this future

"Lyrebird's simulated politicians already sound fairly convincing"

That's OK, then. We shouldn't have too much trouble spotting them.

Give 'bots a chance: Driverless cars to be trialled between London and Oxford

Well, I'm really glad I live "Up North".

That was my thought until I started wondering how far one of them could get if it did a runner.

We're 'heartbroken' we got caught selling your email records to Uber, says Unroll.me boss

"A couple of old truisms apply:"

And "If it seems too good to be true it is".

And read the contract a few more times to be sure.

Cuffing Assange a 'priority' for the USA says attorney-general

Re: Bye bye Wikileaks, and good riddance Julian Assange!

"And I had some sympathy for the arguments of Julian Assange with his claims of all too easy charges for rape that may have just been a front to expedite his extradition to the US, even if Assange never seems like a personable figure."

How do you work that out? He was in custody in the UK and released on bail. If it had been a plot to extradite him he'd never have got as far as the Ecuadorian embassy.

Microsoft promises twice-yearly Windows 10, O365 updates – with just 18 months' support

Re: Twice yearly roll out of incompatabilities

"How about change details of the SMB protocol and thus mounting of SMB shares no longer works."

As part of their getting out from under a monopoly investigation they had to make undertakings about publishing that to Samba will be able to track it easily.

Re: Dear gods...

"I doubt very much a lot of non technical users would welcome it's arrival on their desktop/laptop unless it's skinned."

There are quite a few Linux desktops which can be - and are - skinned to look pretty Windows-like depending on which Windows you want them to look like.

What's better, once you've got it looking like you want it to look you don't have to worry about MS coming along in a year or two & making it look like something else although to be fair I understand MS have finally caught up with multiple workspaces.

So on the whole, that's one up to Linux.

Re: Dear gods...

"it's a brand name. but you could also say 'Unix-like' or 'POSIX' - but '*nix' is shorter."

It's owned by the Open Group and is a registered trade mark in upper case. Here's what they say on their site: "Over twenty years ago, a number of companies came together to acknowledge the value of the UNIX® platform, but more importantly, the need for all UNIX® implementations to be interoperable." So it's a platform with multiple implementations which fits the way in which Bazza was using it: CAD running on Unix workstations.

BTW I'd not rate any systemd equipped Linux as Unix-like.

Shooting org demands answers from Met Police over gun owner blab

Re: Furthermore...

"I expect SmartWater is a hacking target in the reasonable belief that there is a good correlation between customers and those with something worth protecting."

What you really need is the list of those who got the mailshots and didn't buy.

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0

Re: Honest inquiry

It's a "five nine's" service that's gone down, and because it's a holiday or whatever, no one's around to verify its state if it goes down, so you're caught in a dilemma. You need it back up ASAP because it costs you real money otherwise,

If you're putting five nines before everything else you're worshipping at the wrong altar. Consider the following:

Maintaining integrity of the data you've got.

Being sure that new data gets added properly.

Being available to add new data.

Availability is a poor third there. Of course five nines availability is something manglement is able to understand and get fixated on. But if you have a big data loss you'll probably lose your five nines whilst you recover it and if you don't recover it all your five nines during the time you were acquiring it turn out to have been a bit pointless. I'm sure there are a few people round KCL who could give you chapter and verse on that.

TL;DR Five nines is nice to have, no more than that.

Re: I don't understand the hype

"A further worry is that software which also runs on other Unix-like systems will become unavailable on those due to the extra effort of maintaining it."

Yup. That too.

Re: It is not that clearcut

" Let me guess: your version of vi does not support noob things like arrow keys?"

No, if he wanted to do without arrow keys he'd use ex

Re: Cat among the pigions but...

"It's really not _that_ hard to discover that the command 'journalctl' will spew out the contents of those log files, as text, with the added bonus of having the opportunity to add options that give you the logs from this boot"

One of the times when you really need to see logs is when the sodding thing won't boot cleanly. At least with a text log you can take the disk out and mount it on something else to see if you've got anything.

But basically, a binary log is hiding things from me. I have to trust the folk who are hiding things from me to grant me a view of what they're hiding. And I have a fundamental distrust of people who hide things.

Re: More honest questions

"most commercial interests that back Linux projects are backing systemd."

Let's not forget that the commercial interest that most strongly backs systemd also maintains the systemd-free RH6. Hmmmm.

Re: I don't understand the hype

"The expectation is that over time, unless Debian sees sense, that Debian will slowly diverge from Devuan as it allows the SystemD crap to spread."

My fear is that as the crap spreads it will become impossible to build a Linux system without it. I hope this fear is misplaced.

Re: Cat among the pigions but...

Seems more like "laptop" convenience.

Not even that. I'm running sysvinit Debian LTS on my laptop, no problem.

Re: Cat among the pigions but...

"Servers and desktops have very different needs"

They have very similar basic needs. They need to work.

Re: Cat among the pigions but...

"From the point of view of an end user does systemd or sys V init make any difference"

Maybe not when everything works. But when everything works you don't need your backups, UPS etc. either.

Re: Honest inquiry

"also handles respawning the getty processes (controlled by the entries in /etc/ttys)"

Ah yes, /etc/ttys, not inittab. But could also be used to respawn other stuff beside gettys if you wanted.

Re: Honest inquiry

Not everyone has a problem with the things systemd was intended to "solve".

Systemd - bringing you problems you don't need to solve problems you don't have.

Re: Honest inquiry

"how Edition 7 started the initial processes."

From an inittab as you describe IIRC.

Re: Honest inquiry

"I can't remember if Upstart can monitor processes or not, but that's something the init system should be able to do that sysvinit can't"

If a major service goes down I'd want to know why in case trying to bring it up could do something nasty - nasty as in corrupt or destroy data. An init running round like a hyperactive child trying to restart it would be the last thing I'd need. Init needs to start stuff up at boot time and then restart or stop stuff when it's told to and otherwise keep out of the way.

Re: Honest inquiry

Does Gnome "do one thing and do it well"?

It says a good deal about systemd if you feel you need to defend it by comparing it with Gnome.

Re: Honest inquiry

"it's a collection of small binaries developed and maintained as a project that can form the next step (after a bootloader and kernel) of a complete operating system."

There were already binaries doing those jobs and doing them well. One of the key things about them was that although they worked together they had well defined boundaries and interfaces between themselves. They did not need to be replaced by an interdependent mess.

One statement made early in the invasion concerned the new systemdified udev. It could be run without systemd but it couldn't be compiled without it. WHAT?????!!!!! This shower couldn't - or wouldn't - structure their code so that common libraries went into one or more source files and the individual programs could be compiled against those without needing to delve into each other's code. Were they really that ignorant of good practice or were they deliberately flouting it? I don't know and frankly I don't care; to know was enough.

Re: @ lpcollier

"it adds in binary logging"

Well, there's one reason, all on its own. And as part of the list you gave it's another reason. An init has no reason to be doing so many things.

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

Re: Is it done yet?

" I vaguely recall thinking at the time that it was so Spartan"

And yet it still had too many menus as I vaguely recall.

Re: My thoughts on this ...

"Perhaps it's just that I'm rapidly approaching middle-age and I don't like radical ideas anymore."

Or just the dawning realisation that radical isn't enough - ideas also need to work.

LinkedIn U-turns on Bluetooth-enabled 'Tinder for marketers'

Re: What you did there, I see it..

"marketroids abusing the update process to foist new features that benefit them, and lying to us about it."

Lying is what they do for a living. The only surprise is that it took them so long.

Would you believe it? The Museum of Failure contains quite a few pieces of technology

Re: Linux

"That piece of crap bombed big time."

Really? If you look carefully you might realise that the 'u' could stand for 'ubiquitous'.

Re: Post It Notes

I subscribe to the "Geological Philosophy" of "physical data retrieval".

AKA the one heap filing system. "I know where it is, it's in that heap." Only problem is, SWMBO keeps moving the heap.

"We are reminded of one anecdote we were told years ago in which IBM CEO Lou Gerstner called a manager who had screwed up and cost the company $10m up to his office for a meeting."

But who gets to call a CEO who's screwed up up to their office?