Posts by bombastic bob

New Linux kernel bolsters random number generation

DH key exchanges probably the best way to leverage this

during a DH key exchange there's a random value, your "secret" that is only known to you, and the other side should have a similar secret.

If one side re-uses this secret, it can severely weaken the DH key exchange.

Using /dev/random. if the algorithm is both fast AND random (using entropy), each DH key exchange could ideally use its own random "secret" which is ideally also a prime number. This is why some servers _might_ choose NOT to look up new "secret" values and re-use them, from a pool or for everyone (whatever).

So KUDOS to the Linux devs for doing this. Crypto-safe random numbers from /dev/random: a VERY good thing.

(as for the symmetric encryption keys themselves, they too can be generated on the fly via /dev/random if it is crypto-safe)

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

Re: Usual answer

not designee FOR next year's computers just designed inefficiently and ASSUMING that with next year's computer you will not notice it as much...

Re: Usual attempt to see how far they can go before causing real outrage...

Go all the way to installing explorer++ Linux

Fixed It For Ya

China's tech hub relaxes COVID restrictions to restart industrial production

Re: Covid's done, the vaccines work

Vax'ing is MEDICALLY UNNECESSARY if you have antibodies.

And after OMICRON, it's likely EVERYBODY does.

(If I had genetically designed a COVID-19 variant to at least "partially immunize" EVERYONE such that if you were exposed to ONE variant that had VERY LITTLE deadliness and you got ANTIBODIES for it because it was SO contageous, yet had VERY LITTLE CHANCE of you dying from it, that you would ALSO have enough immunity to protect you against OTHER variants BECAUSE of it, I would have designed something _LIKE_ OMICRON to do just that... but it looks like maybe nature did it FOR us, and not like it was not already predicted by immunologists that a virus would typically mutate into a variant like that based on how OTHER viruses do the same thing already)

Time to stop cowering in fear. Time to stop masking like SHEEPLE. Time to stop SHUTDOWNS especially from TYRANNICAL DICTATORSHIPS.

Just get on with our lives already... no more panic, no more lockdowns, no more shutdowns, no more masks, no more draconian VAX mandates, none of that. The population is IMMUNE ENOUGH now. It is OVER. Let it GO AWAY.

(and let's NOT REPEAT THIS MADNESS, EVAR AGAIN!!!)

ExoMars rover launch axed over Russia tensions

Re: I guess

with a couple o' years to expedite, maybe time for SpaceX to expand a bit and ramp up some capacity...

(should be easier in Texas, not California)

Heaps of tweaks and improvements incoming with GNOME 42

I would suggest maybe a site like this full of tech geeks doesnt really understand modern user interface design and would rather use a terminal.

a) while getting work done, I have a LOT of mate-terminal sessions running on multiple virtual desktops under Mate - and each has a specific name and a specfic purpose. (I count 9, only one of that has no application windows open on it at the moment)

b) Mate terminal sessions are often ssh'd into other things, so I leave them open out of convenience. And since on FreeBSD my default shell is 'csh' it's nice to have all of that easily searched command history there.

c) pluma with syntax highlights and 'trim extra space off the ends of lines' is my go-to code editor, for everything from C and C++ to php, html, and javascript/css. If you have a hybrid project, that's kinda necessary.

d) if you set up your Xorg correctly (and do not forget to firewall port 6000 if you do this) you can use 'export DISPLAY=some-workstation:0.0' and run pluma natively on THAT machine, with no need to (let's say on an RPi) use an 800x480 touch screen to edit code. Just have it run on your big bad workstation with it's yuge monitor and keyboard and mouse, edit away, use a git repo to manage source files across the multiple machines.

(yeah probably described how a LOT of productive people get things done)

Oh, and that word modern - probably does NOT mean what you think it means!

Re: Community consensus

You can try Mate's Caja and Pluma. They work fine for me.

Re: SystemD

Slackware's audience probably won't miss having Gnome, and may not even have noticed...

"There's no Gnome? Really? Whatdya know! I never noticed!" (or similar)

Re: All your...etc.

Ugh, systemd

And now I have Burt Bacharach singing the theme song for "The Blob" running through my head....

*Pop*

Beware of the Blob it creeps, and leaps, ...

Re: GNOME themes are CSS stylesheets

middle click still works. But I want non-hiding scroll bars that show me about where I am on the page based on their relative position. When searching through a doc or source file or whatever for specific text, and it wraps around, the scroll bar will bounce back up to the top and let you know you've "wrapped".

That and I tend to grab the thing and scroll it like was intended.

Besides - it IS my computer and my theming choice. They SHOULD respect it!

Re: They want to trash everything

pluma does everything I want. And if it ever "sells out" I'll FORK IT.

Re: GNOME themes are CSS stylesheets

and TRIPLING DOWN apparently on the 2D FLATTY FLATSO McFLATFACE FLATASS rounded-look scrollbar (that is WAY too FORNICATING SKINNY to properly grab with a mouse) and FUGLY Micros~1 Windows-Ape/Win-10-nic/FLATTY look. YUCHHKKKKK!!!!!

NO. Just NO.

TraditionalOk, please, or similar, or GTFO.

But having ALL WEB PAGES AND APPLICATIONS COMPLY with my theming choice for GTK3 and GTK4?? THAT I *WANT*!!

And you can BET YOUR SWEET ARSE that on MY machines, it will NOT be ADWAITA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Within Mate, getting rid of adwaita requires an extra step:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences \

theme 'TraditionalOk'

For Firefox, this (about:config):

widget.content.gtk-theme-override = "TraditionalOk"

widget.non-native-theme.enabled = false

Yes it WAS a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ARSE to figure this out. It PISSED ME OFF SO MUCH I *BOTHERED* to figure it out. Those 2D FLATASS millenial SMUGS can SUCK MY FREEDOM OF CHOICE instead of FORCING ME into their 2D FLATSO HELL!!!!!!!!

(see icon - this 2D FLATASS ANTI-FREEDOM crap REALLY pisses me off!!)

AI drug algorithms can be flipped to invent bioweapons

Re: "I want [to synthesize] something that does not use [anything] on the watch list"

wait until the AI spits out a recipe for making the molecules, and/or the equivalent of an organic chemistry C&C machine.

Then someone accidentally leaves it on "auto" and the next thing you know...

Another thing that came to mind while reading the article:

D O _ N O _ E V I L

(that goes double ++ for the medical and pharmaceutical professions)

JavaScript library updated to wipe files from Russian computers

Re: Any sanctions?

I'd expect him to be kicked out and get a lifetime ban or something,

If he's lucky, that's all that would happen.

It could go as far as CRIMINAL CHARGES and/or EXTRADITION.

Re: Stupid is as stupid does

So, this Miller is an asshole.

I was thinking 'criminal' but in my mind, you are "not wrong"

Re: Stupid is as stupid does

the war is not universally popular there

It is my understanding that the war is universally UN-popular in Russia, among the regular people. Why would they want to become the SOVIET UNION again?

I have to wonder WHAT LAWS WERE VIOLATED in the (alleged, reported) intentional publishing of MALWARE with the intent of causing damage and copying unwanted files onto people's computers...

because if THIS is TOLERATED, then WHAT'S NEXT?

(think of every wacko out there who ever did things in protest that simply IRRITATE everybody and even cause various forms of damage, from throwing paint on people's fur coats, to filing predatory and/or malicious lawsuits to halt a project over some political or environmental pet pieve... (and YES, I'm talking 'new form of cancel culture' and WOKENESS being a major factor here)

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: I don't know about anyone else

The cost of commuting (especially with fuel prices DOUBLED in many cases, and new cars harder and more expensive to come by) is HIGH, from the amount of time involved to the cost of vehicles, and do not even get me started on the sacrifices often necessary to use PUBLIC transportation... (which in my case became both time AND money even though i could sleep on the train)

Also worth pointing out, the cost of maintaining an office full of people. It would be cheaper for companies to pay for special high speed internet for each employee. Ditch the buildings, order hardware online and have it shipped to home offices, and pay for high speed internet at those offices, and EVERYBODY wins!!!

(for when it is practical, of course - it's hard to make a whatsit from your home office when the assembly line and warehouse are at the site)

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

a lot of flaws found in windows take the form of "privilege escalation" which is where things like NOT using an admin login fall apart.

Sure, NOT using admin is a good idea. I do this when possible. You won't be able to use anything from "The Store", but who wants those CRapps anyway. And if your user gets infected with some registry polluter, you can always just delete it and re-create it. That kind of recovery is simple. Or you can run tools from the admin user to clean it up (same idea) as the admin user is not likely to have been corrupted. UNLESS... it was a privilege escalation flaw that the malware used to screw you over.

Still it is A level of protection, and should be made use of.

But unless you stay off of 'teh intarwebs' with your windows machine, do NOT use a Micros~1 browser or mail reader, ONLY read mail in plain text without graphics displayed inline, and ONLY view those graphics (or e-mail attachments) with an appropriate viewer program via "file open", you'll probably need a minimal AV program (like defender *cough*) to provide yet another extra layer of defense.

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

Real security involves using a computer system that is more secure by design, such as GNU/Linux instead of Microsoft Windows, plus being more careful about what you do with your computer.

You are "not wrong". however, for the average user, especially those who actually SURF THE WEB with a windows computer using a login that has administrator-level access, the A/V at least provides a minimal level of defense. (I do not use it, as it mostly gets in the way of software development, but I do not use windows machines for web surfing either, and any e-mail is read by "not outlook" in PLAIN TEXT MODE ONLY and NO inline graphics)

So yeah I call that "safe surfing" but it works best when NOT using a Windows OS.

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

Re: Killing off their own golden goose

oh yeah, like it's OUR fault for NOT "turning it off" using an external piece of hardware with a hackish configuration on it... because "they" fixed it so you cannot merely edit the windows hosts file. (even THAT is really too much for an end user to HAVE to do to turn this crap OFF)

We should not even have to CONSIDER doing this in the FIRST place... (it's on THAT level of WRONG)

Isn't Hamburg going TO open source, and NOT reverting to Micros~1 products? I just found a 2020 article that says so, and nothing since to say otherwise.

I think it was Munich that flip-flopped on this but they seem to be back in the open source realm now along with Hamburg.

Imagine having to redo from scratch the whole fragile and utterly complex back office structure

it has been done before (at a significant cost savings, I might add)

Re: You say that like it's the first time

I would not consider Windows 3.0 an "F-up". I thought it was BRILLIANT at the time.

Remember how Windows 2.x and even the 386 version were all 2D FLATTY with CGA compatible colors? Well 3.0 fixed this with a 3D Skeuomorphic appearance and IT SOLD LIKE CRAZY, because of the 3D SKEUOMORPHIC APPEARANCE. And solitaire. (good luck finding that in any "modern" version of Windows, unless you like ad-ware or paying for it. Worthy of mention, Aisle Riot on Linux).

So even though ME and Vista were true "F-ups" you have to admit that everything ELSE showed actual improvements worth having the upgrade for... even XP (they focused on game compatibility, which mostly worked).

What I do not understand is how you could POSSIBLY include Win-10-nic in your iist of NON-failures.

I cannot agree nor upvote this enough

Change is not progress

see icon

how about that TV screen in "Idiocracy" in which 3/4 of the screen was covered with ads and only the middle 25% or so had actual content you WANTED to see.

Cue Micros~1 "New WIndows" in late 2022 or 2023, using up that "unused" screen space and slowly encroaching onto your desktop until the amount of screen space available for actually USING the thing is only a fraction of the size of the monitor. "I'll need to upgrade my monitor to get work done now".

(Cycle of evil continues until it's like IDIOCRACY)

That and frogs being slowly boiled

ReactOS shows off SMP support in open-source take on Windows

I have an old Lenovo "book sized" computer that came with XP and I still use it for 3D printing

Re: IT OS need Versus Machine tool need

at the cost of maintaining such older machines, would it make sense to invest money into projects like ReactOS in lieu of buying up the hardware? (you know paid developers and people who are really good at systems programming and even retired Micros~1 employees who understand the nuances, etc.)

Community support with paid developers might get it done.

(that, and maybe some open source help from Linux and FreeBSD if that's at all possible - not sure if ReactOS licenses are compatible with GPLv2 and/or BSD licensing)

Ford to sell unfinished Explorers as chip shortage bites

Re: liking the new normal

Oh, and you can have heated seats in winter that are charged at £1 per minute's use

plus tax

Re: Chip Shortage?

I thought about doing a post filled with spinny conspiracy "logic" for laughs, but I'll just settle for the icon.

Re: Quite frankly ...

having done electronic design for a SIMPLE battery operated device's circuit board, dealing with the inevitable "how do you handle a dead battery without having it swell up like a balloon" problem [none of which was supported by any of the battery charge I.C.s inherently, it required some clever use of discrete MOSFETs and schottkey diodes to create a special blocking circuit that would reset whenever charge power was applied but stay disconnected from the battery once voltage dropped below a certain point), so yeah.

Battery management IS pretty difficult, especially with the ones that tend to catch fire when you get it wrong. And I only dealt with a single cell. Dealing with ICVs (Individual Cell Voltage) and what do you do when one of them gets too low [you do NOT want a CELL REVERSAL] more or less requires a bit more than an old style relay-based voltage regulator like you'd find on a car made in the 1950's.

So yeah. Computer monitoring of the battery is more or less MANDATORY for an electric vehicle. And that is just the battery, not even the digital waveform generators for the motor coils... (unless you want to do regular brush/commutator maintenance or have a short vehicle life, you need brushless motors)

(Amazingly piston gasoline or diesel engines seem quite simple and reliable by comparison)

[athough I would not mind seeing a swashplate design become practical, the piston engine has been perfected for over 100 years and is very very good nowadays]

Re: Thank god for small favors

We will have to stop burning carbon soon

No. JUST NO. infrared absorption spectrum and black body radiation. It's really NOT that hard of a concept. It's also science.

(what DO they teach in these schools, anyway???)

Re: Thank god for small favors

the problem with cold and batteries is that their capacity drops off rapidly as it gets colder. I think that's what was meant by "loses a boatload of capacity".

(that's just basic chemistry and physics)

Re: Thank god for small favors

I have a convertible, and when driving in snow it's the WARMEST car I've ever owned. Something about the nylon (or whatever material it is) weave allows the heat to stay inside the car much better than metal. And of course when weather is nice, top comes down and it's cool as hell.

You do not need heated seats. You just need more convertibles.

Re: liking the new normal

and realized they could do without all that extra crap?

yeah my old car does not have those things. Seems fine to me.

(car designers - just because you CAN does not mean you SHOULD, and if you price every vehicle higher because you have too many 'extras' we do not need, you might end up making new cars UNAFFORDABLE along the way)

Re: $50 Credit

if oil companies in the USA were able to pump oil from Alaska without gummint restrictions and red tape, this would NOT be a problem. And, it would hurt Putin WORSE than any sanctions, by the way, by keeping the prices low as he tries to sell to China, instead.

China's top tech city Shenzhen locks down completely for at least a week

Re: Oligarchy

(see icon)

Re: Oligarchy

i was actually hoping that vaccine research for "the virus" would lead to great improvements in medical science... and maybe it has? May not see anything for decades, though. However, the political side of this went off the deep end LONG AGO, from mandates to anti-vax hysteria. It stopped being medicine when politics got involved. And it does not take "rocket surgery" to "follow the money" to see why this happened.

Re: 5 Year Review

You make too much sense. Hence, the downvotes.

Have an UP from ME

Re: But freedum

If you like tyrannical shutdowns and mandates, you can move elsewhere, you know...

hasn't the truth about masking and shutdowns universally showed that it was a BAD IDEA to do this in the FIRST place and had NO OVERALL EFFECT except to put people out of work and DISRUPT SOCIETY ???

But then again, we have COMMUNIST China, with their "one top-down tyrannical control fits all" "solution".

Not a surprise. Not at all.

(we should NOT be like them)

China: Attacks from US IP addresses hit us, moved on to Russia and Ukraine

Re: Tiny whiney ..

Fingerpointing blame game. Projecting. "See, YOU do this." Justifies them doing it 100 times as much. Politicians do this a LOT.

Yes. Sad.

Or if you like Bible references, something about removing a spec of sawdust from your friend's eye when you have a log stuck in your own eye. Worthy to point out, both are made of wood. "Projecting" (well, a form of it anyway).

Re: China attacks me!!!!

Things like Fail2ban help with that

A short time ago I commented on recent attack frequencies, so i decided to chart the number of IP addresses banned per day (just ban count, not unique IP) since forever. Seems 2 or 3 years ago there was an even HIGHER peak for some reason (attempts to crack ssh anyway). So recently it has gone up, but it has actually been higher in the recent past, close to double from what I can see visually.

[and that is simply Fail2ban's ban log, sorted by date, and indicating the total number of bans per day, charted with gnuplot to a PNG file. I should publish it, maybe. I used an aggregation utility I wrote a decade or so ago to sum ban count per day, and a shell script to control it, output to an x,y file and a vertical bar chart in gnuplot)

most of those crack attempts are dictionary login-in names and attempts to log in as 'root'. I do occasionally report them, especially if I am bored, or when they are irritating enough to become "my new special friend".

Re: From, or via?

Article: It is entirely possible that whoever drove this attack co-opted resources at those IP addresses

yes. That was my first impression of what happened, since it explain things the best.

Also a windows zero day might help explain things, too. Or maybe it's just one of the 'Anonymous' group's botnets. Whichever I guess, results are kinda the same for either scenario.

And, limiting to 30-something Gbits (as a DDoS) might just be a function of the data pipe between N.Y. State and China... (not such a fat one after all maybe?)

Russia labels Meta an 'extremist' organization, bans Instagram

Re: About the only thing that Putin

I've been calling them 'FaeceBan' for a while. 'FecallBan' would be equally appropriate

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

Re: are unregulated and high-risk

or in the Cayman Islands

Re: Hello Mein Herr Goose, Meet Frau Gander?

Martian geese are all male. Didn't you know that?

(the joke is subtle, I "gander")

at some point they could require payment through some other means, such as pre-paid credit cards, and then "launder" the funds in the usual ways. SOME criminals might be caught if bitcoin were not used for the transfer of funds, and SOME money laundering schemes might lead to arrests, but nothing would actually change, with OR without bitcoin.

(you could even use diamonds as currency, kinda like Klaatu in "The day the earth stood still")

Re: re cash : easy to carry

where did you hear THIS myth, exactly?

*JACKPOT* !!!

Taiwan rounds up 60 Chinese tech workers on suspicion of poaching tech and people

Re: Down with foreigners!

as much as I understand the anger towards "poaching" employees, wouldn't it just be "supply and demand" at work? If you are offered higher salary, how loyal are you expected to be to work for your current employer FOREVER? (or at least tell your employer you received the offer and negotiate a raise or at least expect to have to take the new offer in case they can not afford it...)

Then there's the whole "supporting the CCP" thing that might be a DIS-incentive... (it would be for ME)

(oh and I get the snark, yeah)

Linus Torvalds ponders limits of automation as kernel release delayed

Re: Automated Testing

ack on the "it becomes normal". Though it's great to have an automatic test suite ready to spot regressions and obvious flaws, how practical would it be to add tests for Spectre-like vulnerabilities?

I'm also a bit curious as to how such things COULD be exploited, so long as you're not running client-side scripting or other code (NOT hosted on your own system) that might leverage it...