Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"If some political disaster happened and the US hyperscalers were made untenable overnight, European computing would collapse in days."
That's the point. If the fleet of HGV stop delivering because some bloke in another country tells them to you might find that a bicycle with a basket looks a whole lot more capable except that you'r now stuck in a queue waiting for one to become free because you didn't have the foresight to book one.
A bit of thinking helps here. The OP mentioned that Discover (it's KDE so why not Diskover?) somehow knew when there were new updates. How would that happen?
1. The system tray raises a notification when apt update run manually finds upgrades available so it's just watching there the results are being listed. It also raises notifications without apt apdate being run manually. That's easy to understand because
2. Cron or at are periodically running apt update, either set up by Discover itself or by the apt system - it doesn't matter which. So that
3. When the user runs the upgrade in the Discover UI all it needs to do is run apt upgrade.
In essence Discover isn't really being a package manager to do this, it's a wrapper for the system package manager.
Turning to the other side of the UI where it's supposed to check for uninstalled applications, perhaps it depends on something built in which isn't implemented properly.
But hang on - Discover isn't yet another .deb package manager, it's a KDE package manager for distros running KDE but which might have .deb, .rpm FlatPak or something else as their packaging format. So either the distro maintainers have to set it up specifically for the distro (in which case we have to look to Debian) or, more likely, it determines at run time which package manager(s) it can find and use the tools provided. As KDE produces the Neon distro (a Ubuntu spin) I'm pretty sure that if I run up a Neon instance Discover will be working - they'd notice if it wasn't which means that it can work properly with Ubuntu's implementation of apt (or it could be dpkg) but not Debian's. The error it reports looks like a network error but the reality is likely to be either:
a. A missing or differently spelled utility
b. A difference in options
c. A difference in formatting of the tool's output
If it's a. it can't be reported at install time as a missing dependency. It's dependent on one or more package management systems but they can't be declared as formal dependencies of the Discover package because otherwise it would fail to install because a distro's repository might not include package managers not appropriate to it. It really is - unavoidably - a "works for me" situation for the original developer because it needs to be tested and debugged on each distro in which it's included. What it should be doing is reporting what actual errors it encounters.
I now have a few ideas as to what to go hunting for.
"An then KDE Discover has trouble talking to the package manager because of some library version issue... Somehow it knows that there are updates pending, but it can't pull a list of installed applications."
This is something KDE really need to get a handle on. I can only imagine that this is a serious case of "works for me". The fact that that site says "trust your package manager" or the like means they really have their eyes closed to all they queries online asking how to make Discover work along with the occasional post saying that this is how somebody (thought) they'd got it to work and it still doesn't work for others trying the same fix. No, we can't trust it because the only thing it can be trusted for is to not work other than running updates.
"2. Stop having so many damned distros, each crap (or highly specialised) one reflects on all the rest."
Could you provide a car analogy?
"3. So people can leave the Win ecosystem but keep their Win applications, make a Windows emulator part of Linux, don't rely on WINE or VMs, make it easy, and make it darned well work properly."
This emulator; what would it look like? Might it look a lot like WINE? How would it differ, apart from calling itself not an emulator?
"My grub rarely has anything beyond one OS install and the recovery tools."
That's you. Linux is your world like many of us here. But this isn't aimed at people like us. It's aimed, as I said above, at people who don't necessarily differentiate between the computer and the Windows OS running on it. Short of a friend's Mac running something named after a big cat or whatever very idea that a computer wouldn't have Windows is next to incomprehensible to them. Martin's quite right, dual booting will be reassurance - a way back if they fear need it and a way of running what they need until they find replacements. On a practical note, leaving the Windows partitions in place lets them be mounted on Linux, say as /c-drive, so they can access their old data until they move it across to their home directory. Computing isn't just about H/W and S/W - it's about data first and foremost.
Unless the ransomware lot are crap negotiators - which in some cases they seem to be - they might well find they have the choice of a quick but lower settlement vs a long drawn out but still lower settlement. It's very likely the crap negotiators who take adversarial approach. The same probably applied to your employers and the Union.
"If a ransomware attack shuts down hospitals in a region and a number of patients are expected to die for lack of treatment, how many are allowed to die?"
The whole point of banning payment of ransoms is that it's the only effective way of banning ransomware. You're not going to get the money so why bother? It's not an ethical stance, at least not only an ethical one, it's about the only effective practical preventative step to take but it has to be legally enforced so the toerags realise it's real.
"legal penalties for ransomware payment will create a perverse incentive to avoid disclosing the attack "
Failure to disclose should then be a criminal offence leading to at best personal fines, possibly imprisonment and likely subsequent banning from holding directorships or posts in the relevant industry. Disclosure is likely to come out in the company accounts - if it's hidden there then it becomes cooking the books fraud.
It also needs to be part of other measures as I suggested to make businesses more resilient.
Set fines equal to the ransom paid. It's unlikely that even insurance will pay a fine.
Company reporting should require annual reports to include statements about testing of business recovery plans and their testing and also a security audit. Yes, poor audit results and inadequate recovery plans will make a business easier targets so those things should affect share price and once expenditure on preparedness improves the share price it ceases to be seen as a cost to be avoided.
"I don't think much will happen until the US becomes a worse problem than these other dangers."
It other words, until it's too late.
Given the overall tone of international partners etc it sounds as if they're wanting to outsource things instead of the very obvious need to get on with things I think that's very likely to be the case.
I can't say this often enough. The prime requirement of a DBA - or anyone else in IT these benighted times - is paranoia.
SQL knowledge, backup commands - you can get that out the product manual. If you're not paranoid with it you'll make the little slip that loses the whole lot and none of your SQL or product knowledge will do you any good.
"Wordpad was fine for basic formatted documents, & vaguely useful as it supported a simple RTF format"
I thought the whole reason for retiring Wordpad was deprecation of RTF. The sensible thing would have been to retain it - or even reintroduce it - as a Markdown <spit> editor if that's what they want.
The ones the vendors think are most likely to buy then are those who think they're unmitigated shite. The ones actually likely to buy them are those who don't know any better, believe what the salesman says and think they need what the salesman's telling them it will do. And then can get the budget signed off if they need to. That probably leaves the usual suspects - the senior executives whose PAs handle their email - as the largest group.
"User's should have a positive means of blocking any and all access from any web service if they so desire."
Delete any Meta or other offending app. Better still, never install it. You know their entire purpose is to abuse you for monetisation even if they're stopped from using one particular channel so why go there? The only way to win is to not play.
"targeting users [i.e. customers] who reused the same credentials across multiple websites"
It's hard to have too much sympathy for them although I suppose North Face and the previously hacked sites require an email address as the login ID which means that half the credentials are already shared. But that puts the onus on the customers to use unique passwords.
It doesn't even matter if it's encrypted. If the next brainfart is to sanction your company, country or continent the plug would have to be pulled. A franchise operation might be OK of the entire ownership is locally owned and managed and all the IP licenced under irrevocable terms with the contract subject to local law. Anything which gives a US-owned entity a way in after the contract has been signed is just theatre.
