Posts by John Geek

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

When strong crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will use strong crypto ?

where have I heard this refrain before ??

DevOps to DevOops: Docker Hub proves so secure that 430 Docker images out of 2,500 have no vulnerabilities

Re: Age old problem.

I hang out on a database server forum. VAST majority of the Docker users who show up with problems related to the database server are COMPLETELY clueless about systems administration, networking, software in general, and have built their world by stuffing other peoples black boxes (eg, docker containers) together, without ANY idea how any of it works. its all magic to them. devops cargocult style.

now, sure, there's some who use docker as a deployment tool, and these guys generally build their OWN containers from scratch, and know what they are doing, but they are way outnumbered by the clueless.

Microsoft disbands three-ring Windows Insider circus and replaces it with 'channels'

I've been trying to unsubscribe to Insider emails for a couple years now, but their unsubscribe links want me to authjenticate with a Microsoft Account, which I refuse to register for. I used to beta test their stuff eons ago, like Windows XP vintage, and quit after taht, but have stayed on their $#@$@@ email lists since.

hopefully, they'll start over with registrations for this new 'channels' program. ya right.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

CP/M ?!?

I opened a random ASM file from the github and OMG, the comments were referring to CP/M command line parsing. I was working for Digital Research on CP/M internals when the IBM PC came out, and I vaguely remember hearing that Microsoft took their 8 bit 8080/8085/Z80 BASICA for CP/M and ran it through an automatic 8080->8086 code translater to bootstrap GWBasic. Obviously they did lots of work to it after the auto translater, splitting code and data segments, and so forth (the 8080 didn't have segments at all).

FCC boss pleads with Congress: Please stop me from auctioning off this spectrum for billions of dollars

Re: So it's actually more of the same

I suspect those broadcast channels would be grandfathered in, such that any services in a region are on unused UHF channels.

Former US Homeland Security Inspector General accused of stealing govt code and trying to resell it to... the US govt

Re: When force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!

+1 for Laurie Andersen.

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Re: Dodgy analogy

Or California. serious desert to high sierra within a hundred miles....

Talk about high tech: Tens of thousands of Cali marijuana convictions to go up in smoke, thanks to algorithms

Re: The hippies have token over

hippies never grow up!

I know this cuz I are one.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Seen in the wild

high school, circa 1970, 'earth sciences'' teacher drove this ratty mid 60s Jeep Wagoneer in which we did many field trips. It frequently wouldn't start when hot, he'd pull the rubber mat up near the gas pedal, there was a strategic 1" hole in the floor, through which he'd bang the starter a couple times with the crowbar kept under the seat, vrooom, chugchugchug...

Why so glum, VMware? It's Friday. Oh, is it this $235m patent infringement invoice from Densify? Too bad, so sad

Re: US Patent 8,209,687 & 9,654,367

I glazed over trying to read the patent, but it seems to be describing a rather basic P2V, something vmware had 15+ years ago, which surely predates this patent ?

Sorry to be blunt about this... Open AWS S3 storage bucket just made 30,000 potheads' privacy go up in smoke

Re: At this stage of the game, one has to ask ...

.... Yes....

Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: 'We've gone the wrong way with licensing'

LGPL, AGPL, Apache, and BSD/MIT

I like the PostgreSQL version of the BSD style license. and if there is no PARTY1 (The University of California in the PG license), its even simpler.

Portions Copyright © 1996-2020, $PARTY2

Portions Copyright © 1994, $PARTY1

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.

IN NO EVENT SHALL $PARTY1 BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF $PARTY1 HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

$PARTY1 SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND $PARTY1 HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.

What do you mean your eardrums need a break? Samsung-owned JBL touts solar-powered wireless headphones you don't need to charge

Re: Eternal

wired phones get their power from the headphone jack in the form of analog audio. but I'm sure you know this.

my good full sized headphones require significantly more power than most any small audio source can output, so I have to use a headphone amplifier with them, which yes, has a rechargeable battery.

wireless phones need power for both the Bluetooth radio receiver, the Bluetooth compression decoder, and the audio amplification needed to drive the phones.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Costco (US big box membership retailer) had Samsung 32" 3840x2160 monitor on sale for $319 this weekend. Bought one for my wife, its gorgeous.

has HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.4(?) inputs. on her Latitude w/ the usb c expander box, I had to use the DP port to get 60Hz, the HDMI port would only do 30Hz, awwwww. I had the DP cable already, so all is good.

a bigger screen would have to be farther away to minimize neck strain looking back and forth, so zilch for gain.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Re: The Oracle

Chris G wrote, From Wikipedia: "An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods"

It makes more sense when you consider that Larry thinks he IS God.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Re: looks horrible

3 ton? my truck, a 2002 Ford F250, weighs nearly 4.5 tons(US) loaded, and its a 7.3L turbodiesel. yes, its 4 WD because sometimes I need to go off road, or drive over the mountains in the winter.

its primary function in my life is to haul our caravan on long road trips, while carrying my astronomy and music festival stuff (awnings, tables, chairs, in addition to telescopes, ice chests, water, propane). its secondary function is carrying my rather large telescope to local star parties along with the tall ladder and everything else I need, and generally haul anything else too big to fit into my wife's estate.

It woz The Reg wot won it! Big Blue iron relics make it back to Blighty

sigh, the /20 was the bastard stepchild of the system/360 lineup. it only has 8 16 bit registers, instead of the 16 32 bit of the rest of the 360 line, and its instruction set is very subset and incompatible. The /20 had 4-32KB of core memory, and you needed at least 12KB to run the DPS OS which wasn't very compatible with anything else in the 360 lineup. its a shame its not a 360/40, those could at least run the mainstream DOS/360

restoring that thing to full operational state is likely going to be a major project. they used DTL logic, and ceramic hybrids rather than integrated circuits, which IBM called SLT. The DTL logic can be either 0-3V or 0-9V. I know a retired guy who restored an IBM 1130 of the same generation a couple years ago, it was about a 2 year full time project to get it fully functional. Part way through it, the front panel lights started dying of old age, and they were an unobtanium 'grain of wheat' lightbulb, so he ended up having to engineer and fabricate a LED based front panel replacement

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

Early Monday morning of my last week at work before retiring, I get a panic call from someone in corporate IT who'd heard I knew PostgreSQL. Apparently there was this PC in a wiring closet, running some sort of ancient linux and a bodge of proprietary crapware that used a Postgres database, it had been powered down to move it and change its UPS, and it wouldn't come back up.... It ran the card reader and turnstile for the garage security gate. They had the logins for it, so from home over the VPN I was able to log into the box, poke around, wow, this is some old stuff, Red Hat Linux 6, an app written in perl by a Japanese firm, and a PostgreSQL 7.3 database... Anyways, it took me about a half day to figure out that someone had changed a postgres configuration file over a year ago but never restarted the database or the box, and the change they made was invalid so postgres wouldn't start. logging had been disabled, so there was no error logs to debug, thats why it took me 4 hours instead of 30 mins. wave magic wand, turnstile works again.

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

real beer has no lactose and is vegan inherently, as its just made from water, barley, hops and a bit of yeast. I prefer my brews with minimal to no adjuncts. ok, a bit of oatmeal in an oatmeal stout is OK whomever started putting chocolate and/or coffee in stouts and porters should be taken out at a dawn and summarily shot

New lows at Bose as firmware update woes infuriate soundbar bros

Re: A grand?

Bose long ago mastered the process of taking a handful of $1.99 car speakers and using signal processing to make them sound 'ok' to a casual listener, then packaging them with $1999 worth of advertising.

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

heck, I remember seeing how painful it was updating large complex code bodies from 2.3 to 2.5, never mind 2.x->3 I'm really really thankful I never jumped on the python bandwagon

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Re: chillers

first, there's LiFePo4 batteries which are far less likely to go up in a fire. These come in brick sizes up to 200AH per 3.2V (nominal) cell, or even higher. requiring far fewer cells means you need far less equalization circuitry,too.

2nd, these LiFePo4 batteries can be discharged 80% 2000 times and still have most of their capacity. lead acid batteries lifetime gets greatly shortened if they are discharged below 50%

3rd, they can be charged at insane rates, like 100 amps into that 200AH cell, linear til its full, so 2 hours to fully recharge. lead acid batteries require an absorption phase to achieve a 100% charge that often takes 6-8 hours.

There's no getting Huawei from 5G – Chinese giant joins Qualcomm, Samsung in bunging high-speed comms in mobe brains

What in heck is a "Neural Processing Unit" ??

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

reminds me of the lyrics of an iconic 1960s rock song...

"You call it rain, but the human name doesn't mean s*** to a tree..."

DevOpsery-dispenser Atlassian's customers settle into the cloudy subscription world

every atlassian program I've had the displeasure of having to use has been worst-in-class. their Confluence 'wiki' is awful, and so is Jira, the worst bug tracker.I've had the displeasure to use. they must have a heck of a sales force to push this stuff into corporate suites.

Too hot to handle? Raspberry Pi 4 fans left wondering if kit should come with a heatsink

hmm, one of my pi3's is in a nice alloy case that has a heat spreader pressed against the CPU chip.

now, my workload for it is very light weight, it runs a python script that sleeps for 2 minutes, then reads some weather data and updates a couple servers. so it runs very cool

ah, they have a pi4 version now...

https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

Re: Definite Darwin Award winner in the making

you can only be a candidate for the Darwin Award if you actually die.

US legal eagle: Well done, you bought privacy compliance tools. Doesn't mean you comply with anything

oh boy, its SECURITY THEATER, all over again.

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

I've always called AI "Artificial Ignorance" and I've seen nothing to date to persuade me otherwise.

Oracle sued for $4.5m after ERP system delivery date 'moved from 2015 to 2016, then 2017, then... er, never'

Re: Question

used to be a MANMAN system.

first version of Oracle, we extensively customized it to match our existing business processes, took a couple years., finally went live, was quite clunky.

we skipped a major release and when we went to the next release, we redesigned our processes to follow the default model of Oracle, and were live in 6 months. sure, some people in purchasing, AR, AP, etc had to be retrained to the new workflow but that wasn't that hard.

my experience, as a former employee of a company that used Oracle ERP, do NOT try and customize Oracle to match your old business practices, restructure your business practices to work according to Oracle's default model, and you'll be much happier.

Crispest image yet of Ultima Thule arrives on Earth, but grab a coffee while the rest downloads

for some silly reason I keep wanting to call it Thulsa Doom. Musta read too much pulp scifi/fantasy as a kid.

Americans' broadband access is so screwed up that the answer may lie in tiny space satellites

What does the FCC have to do with GPS *recievers* ? if a reciever wants to pull in Galilleo, the more power to it, the FCC can only regulate transmissions.

Chinese biz baron wants to shove his artificial moon where the sun doesn't shine – literally

and don't forget to at least double your illumination numbers to account for the perpetual smog haze overlaying Beijing...

I find your lack of faith disturbing, IBM: Big Blue fires photon torpedo at Pentagon JEDI cloud contract

Dabbb asks.... Does AWS use SuperMicro boards ?

and that would be negatory. they use their own greatly cost reduced boards. they don't need all the enterprisey IPMI kinda stuffs, just cheap CPU + RAM + storage.

Send up a satellite to zap space junk if you want Earth's orbit to be clean, say boffins

Shades of the anime series Planetes and the manga its based on.

DNSSEC in a click: Cloudflare tries to crack uptake inertia

I used this cloudflare 'secure' dns for a few days til one of my favorite websites, NASA Worldviewer, kept blowing up, and I found a bunch of DNS errors in nasa.gov only on the 1.1.x.x servers not on other public servers like 8.8.x.x

Here's a fab idea: Get crypto libs to warn devs when they screw up

my experience is, crypto APIs are incredibly complicated, hard to use, and poorly documented. this especially applies to openSSL.

OK, so they sometimes push out insecure stuff, but software devs need our love and respect

I recently had OWASP brought to my attention, someone was trying to use their security hardening guidelines for the postgresql database server... trouble was, that guide was written 10 years ago and hasn't been updated, while postgres has undergone steady and constant enhancement, with a major release about every 18 months, minor releases every month or two...

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

"MicroGit"

The cybercriminal's cash cow and the marketer's machine: Inside the mad sad bad web ad world

and don't forget...

...cryptomining.

a moderately popular web forum I'm on currently is infested with some sort of trojan that as long as you've got the site open, it eats 100% of one CPU core, and taps a WebSocket at a .ru host every few seconds with a encrypted message/response ... googling the .ru host name shows it on various lists of coin miners.

natrually the javascript coming out of the site's advertising farms is way too obfuscated to trace, 180K blobs of hash being executed

death to spammers!

AT&T sends in startup shill to shake up Cali's net neutrality safeguards

and today, there's a news story that some committee head forced a pre-dawn vote on a massive rrewrite of the bill that turns it into the exact opposite of what it was supposed to be. the bills authors and primary sponsors are livid but are being steamrolled.

Are your IoT gizmos, music boxes, smart home kit vulnerable to DNS rebinding attacks? Here's how to check

its scanning a subnet I don't even use, 192.168.1.0/24, wtf ? my home stuff is all on 192.168.0.0/24

Calm your conspiracy theories, latest glimpse reveals Planet Nine may just be a pipe dream

at a 'astronomy on tap' beer-n-astrophysics event last month, a couple of the post-docs said pretty much exactly the same thing, that its turned out the orbital fluctuation measured were either erroneous or could be explained by existing phenomena.

Open Internet lovin' Comcast: Buy our TV service – or no faster broadband for you!

Agreed, as long as they have a 1TB/month cap on their service, faster is useless.

Spoeedtest claims I'm getting 180Mbit/sec now, yet I rarely see any ACTUAL uses go much over 10MB/s

US schools' IT systems drop out after weekend firmware update misery

hey, if this is their only downtime, they can claim 99% uptime for the year! wooot.

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

no interest? I'm 63, and I use Spotify extensively. My collection of 1000s of CDs is collecting dust. wrangling my MP3 'rips' onto various player platforms was getting just too annoying.

now, my FAVORITE way of listening to music is live, at concerts, primarily at places where listening is the norm as opposed to partying/drinking/yelling.

Fake news is fake data, 'which makes it our problem', info-slurpers told

"Data lake"... hah, more like 'data cesspool'.

Programming languages can be hard to grasp for non-English speakers. Step forward, Bato: A Ruby port for Filipinos

I can't wait for (pick your language) reimplemented in Chinese Han pictograms :-/

World's biggest DDoS attack record broken after just five days

Re: ISPs could mitigate this

re; mitigation, ditto ISP's could filter traffic from outside that claims to be from their own address space.