Posts by Doctor Syntax

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

"Longhorn is a tale of big ambitions, technical nightmares, and an extraordinary comeback,"

Nowadays the mantra seems to be "two out of three ain't bad."

CrushFTP CEO's feisty response to VulnCheck's CVE for critical make-me-admin bug

How not to do it.

Today's jobs Microsoft thinks could use an AI assist: Researchers and analysts

Re: Visualisation or Sonification?

"Curse you 'Autocorrect'!"

As we all know, LLMs are autocorrect writ large.

Re: I can always click and see its chain-of-thought reasoning

If it comes from a machine it won't be obviously bad. It might be obvious to you and me but not to the types of people using it. To them, if it comes from a machine it must be obviously right.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: Training

Training is for little people. Those in charge don't need to know things.

No app is more secure than its least secure user. Give a bunch of politicians a secure EEE channel and you can reasonably expect one of them to leak the contents. It enables them to believe such channels aren't inherently secure so it doesn't matter if they require them to be backdoored.

Re: Falklands conflict 1982

Including Goldberg who withheld any mention until after the operation, details until challenged and even then, according to the Beeb's report, a message that would have identified a CIA operative in the field.

Re: Hysterical - sorry, Historical

It's present occupant if he's allowed to play with matches.

Re: They're already

"I expect he got a reprimand in private for this cockup"

I doubt he even got that.

"I'd have thought it's pretty simple Mr Waltz; you're an incompetent fuckwit who typed the wrong phone number in, didn't validate the number, didn't validate the identity of the person you added"

It goes a step further. Apparently he's said he doesn't know Goldberg and yet must have had his number on his phone in order to issue a Signal invite to him.

Re: They're already

"1 - use of unauthorised and clearly not well shielded messaging"

As it was CIA installed onto the devices it was authorised and technically well shielded. In practice its shielding depended on the users. Trump is now saying that Walz has learned a lesson. Most people would have thought that someone appointed as National Security Adviser didn't need to learn such basic security lessons and might wonder about the quality of his advice. However I'm sure he's being paid a lot so, as such things work at that level, it's expensive advice and so must be valuable.

Re: They're already

It's a commendation that they realise its strength. However good any system might be it's no stronger than the human intelligence which controls it which in this case was .... shall we say pretty weak.

Of course the big question is how many more people were waltzed into the group that haven't been identified?

Re: They're already

"So I guess it wont be long until he's arrested"

It's possible he has other embarrassing threads stored away. Even if he hasn't there'll be a certain fear. That might well keep him out of jail.

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

Will it be able to avoid it?

Re: The lesser of two evils

Musk has already turned his nose up at the Moon and thinks we should ignore it and go to Mars instead. OTOH Amazon delivery might also miss the Moon and deliver to Mars's wheelie bin instead.

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

As climate shifts the training data will become increasingly out of date. Basic principles of atmospheric and oceanic physics won't.

Re: I use the Golden Gate Bridge.

In upland Britain the simple equivalent is "If you can see $LOCAL HILL it's going to rain. If you can't see it it's raining." Maybe those living in boring flat areas have alternatives.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Legacy systems are the ones that run the enterprise and calling them that is the snake-oil salesman's method of getting them replaced. Once the new shiny has replaced them it instantly becomes "legacy" for the next salesman (who might even be the same salesman).

Ask Birmingham Council how the replacement of its legacy systems is going.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Re: Ha

You mean the universities should become primary schools?

Universities are the place for advanced education and basic research, exactly what the Make America Grate idiots are trying to stop.

Re: POTUS

"it may not be long before the US will start alienating itself from almost everyone else"

This already sounds like a message from the past. Surely it's government policy to do just that.

Whoever thought the law would be such an obstacle to a good chainsaw?

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Given a large enough corporation some unlicensed installations would not be beyond belief.

OTOH some licencing systems are so convoluted one might almost imagine they were designed to create non-compliances - is VMware one of those?

Re: They’ll have to pay for software they can’t use

"The other is, companies that use the software may not want to donate / be associated with the software that they use for free. So their options are not to pay them, or to go via a 3rd party (support agreements) and hope that they actually contribute to the development via commits or contributions."

A few examples:

There are a number of Linux distros for which you can buy support or buy as supported from their maintainers, from Red Hat ans Suse down to Zorin. No problem there.

LibreOffice you can buy commercial support from the project website.

PostgresSQL's main site lists companies from whom you can obtain commercial support. A simple search through their lists includes many who state that they are contributors to the project. Some individual contributors are named.

This does not deny that there are individual developers who are unpaid but this situation now seems to be receiving attention.

It's all far removed from paying for a subscription for support and wondering if that support is going to break you system on the second Tuesday of the month.

Re: Burning it down

And those small businesses, by the time they get to the size Broadcom wants to deal with, will have been using something else and are not going to want to migrate.

Where do Broadcom expect to get new customers?

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Re: Idiocracy was a documentary

Prove it. I'm sure it was done anonymously.

Re: Open Source has a USGov achilles heel

"I am native to a small foggy island off the main European continent"

In which case you may well recognise the significance of the phrase "mostly harmless".

Re: Idiocracy was a documentary

The way it works is that you point out to somebody that they said something wrong. If they can accept that, they say "Oh, yeah" and move one. Some can't. Their only response is to downvote all your postings. Those downvotes mean that something you posted hit home because you were right and they were wrong. Cherish your downvotes.

Farming at a level which can be wiped out by murrains and rust (the mycological sort).

Re: Not hurting the right people?

"Yes, I've read 1984"

But are you the same A/C? How would we know?

"None of this is the fucking tax payers job to fund!"

The tragedy of the commons in one sentence.

Re: Open Source has a USGov achilles heel

"the biggest harm that would do is to take leadership and soft power away from the US."

Harm?

Re: Not hurting the right people?

'inflation will pop up a little and go back down again'

Isn't that what Trump said not long ago when he went from threatening tariffs to imposing them? I suppose he's contradicted it since as he says a lot of self-contradictory things.

Basic reality?

Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. No wonder it was in episode 1 of series 1, it's so fundamental.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: mutt -- it sucks less.

Which just goes to show that it sucks less.

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

You think so?

Synaptic lists 65,741 packages available of which I have 4,429 installed. The Devuan team may have modified some, but "most" would be beyond them. That includes KDE, various graphics editors including Gimp and Inkscape. There's QGIS there as well I ran apt upgrade to update Firefox only a few minutes ago.

It also includes the current LibreOffice which is not from any repository but the same .deb packages you can download for any distro that uses Debian packaging.

Then there are a few applications downloaded and installed by unpacking tarballs or running other, non-Debian install methods ranging from Seamonkey to the Informix database engine and tools.

There are a few which are compiled from source including Falkon and Pinta. The latter requires DotNet runtime and AFAIK that's not modified for Devuan.

Good try but I call bullshit.

Re: Why even have a local disk?

"Unfortunately it was swallowed by IBM and disappeared."

The fate of many good things that get swallowed by IBM, Microsoft of other large corporations.

Re: Perfect for running the Laundy

My preference would for data on desk/laptop, sync with server at base. That leaves scope for data on device or a data-less device which will connect securely to the server when away from base according to use case. The latter has the option of being able to connect to alternative servers (unlike ChromeOS) so that if, for instance, the user were to be challenged at a border crossing it could be connected to a server which does not contain all the business's confidential data.

The back end should allow for versioning. Ideally the protocol between should be very selective to allow only the correct formats of data to be handled*. A network that allows executables to be handled as if they were data allows for transmission of malware through the network, particularly onto the server, and, of course, a network which allows files to be overwritten with anything is open to ransomware trashing them.

* I'm influenced partly by years of working with an RDBMS where, although we didn't take advantage of it, it would have been perfectly possible to have the server talk to the network via just the port that was assigned to the server and the server understanding nothing other than its own protocol. The other inspiration is using XML. A server designed to provide versioned storage of XML would be able to reject anything that wasn't well-formed and validated according to the schemas it was meant to handle - such as, say, the flat file versions of the Open Document files.

Re: RedHat is part of IBM

"a German desktop (according to Dr. Syntax)"

Not just according to me: "KDE is legally represented by KDE e.V. based in Germany, which also owns the KDE trademarks and funds the project." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE which will also tell you it was founded by Matthias Ettrich when he was a student at Tübingen. For added Europeanness it uses the Qt framework from what was originally Trolltech which takes us back to Finland.

For a server they could also use Nextcloud from Nextcloud GmbH, i.e. based in Germany as is the Document Foundation, responsible for LibreOffice. I believe Collabora in Cambridge are major contributors to both of these but, of course FOSS development knows no boundaries.

From their page footer: "Devuan is a registered trademark of the Dyne.org foundation" and Dyne are based in Amsterdam.

In so far as any FOSS product with a wide community of contributors can be said to have a nationality, surely KDE is German. And if we're looking for an underlying distro with an EU connection, why not Devuan?

Judge halts DOGE's union personal data grab at OPM, Treasury, Education

Re: I'm not sure that the "judicial" branch really understands that the data has long flown the

Not an alternative but an additional step. If the law has been broken prosecute those who did so. Having made examples of a few making it clear that anyone subsequently found in possession of the data will not only be prosecuted under the original offence, they will also be in contempt of court.

Unfortunately it's not likely to happen for the next 4 years.

Alibaba exec warns of overheating AI infrastructure market

Just the infrastructure?

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Re: Birmingham (England) Council says...

I wonder if this will ever get stabilised to the point where BOP (Birmingham Oracle Project) can be used as a measure for project overruns.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

Are those 4 days all to be in the office? It would be instructive to compare with a 4 or 5 day working from home.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Re: Pointless

Punters are sick of being told "99% coverage of UK" when it's clearly not

It's exactly the same as FTTP being pushed when there are still areas with crap FTTC (and very likely some still stuck on ADSL).

The supply side is intent on producing and pushing newer tech while the delivery side is failing to complete roll-out of the previous generation and regulators are failing to hold delivery to the universal provision requirement.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

A common "OS" for government data may well be a good idea. Palantir certainly wouldn't be.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: Oops

"the absolute power of the king"

This is one of the odd things I find about the US. By the time the US broke with Britain the absolute power of monarchs was long gone and yet they seem to have gone as far as possible to recreate it.

I'm not sure about "this alone". I think it comes under the heading of "yet another".

Re: Signal endorsement

I've said a number of times that the reason politicians don't see problems with backdoored communications is that they don't believe security is possible. They don't believe it because given a technically secure channel for a group of them to use one of them will leak the contents anyway. QED.

Re: According to Pete Hegseth...

Are you sure? There seems to be strong competition. Perhaps "joint first" would be a better way of putting it.