Posts by bombastic bob

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

Re: Indeed

'free speech' means NOT censoring (or canceling) those who DISAGREE with you.

(slander, libel, and advocating lawlessness notwithstanding)

Re: anon who?

this particular 'anonymous' appears to be more left-leaning and 'woke' than the previous one(s).

I would normally expect a group like 'anonymous' to be about freedom, not about 'cancel'.

Obviously NOT the same 'anonymous'.

I'm curious how they cracked into an ISP though. What security malfunctions and craters enabled this?

US school districts blame Amazon for nationwide bus driver shortage

Re: anti-mask assholes

(see icon)

Re: Bus drivers...

They should be down-trodden, paid a pittance and expect to be blamed for how bad the kids are.

Now *THAT* sounds like ACTUAL communism to *ME* (not the other way around). Either that or feudalism at its worst.

you were actually being snarky, right? right?

Perhaps UPS leaving a package on the front porch of the ISS?

How do you handle re-delivery when they deliver it to the wrong space station?

(it's hard enough dealing with that on Earth)

Re: All Amazon, wasn't our fault

and realistically, you re-design the services to be lower cost and more efficient, so that you CAN afford to hire the drivers with an acceptable pay increase, etc..

But we're talking GUMMINT BUREAUCRACY here. Rarely do THEY ever have an incentive to compete with the private sector for employees, or even be MORE EFFICIENT. Instead, they demand MORE MONEY. See icon.

Re: Uhh...

I know we're supposed to be auto-sympathetic because "think of the children" but I'm really not seeing it.

See icon (heh)

Seriously why can't kids just WALK to school or ride bikes? Kids who are unwilling to commute THAT way can take mom-Taxi or public transit... right? [for young-uns the school is usually pretty close to where they live UNLESS some school district decides to shift students around for political reasons].

In cases of 'school choice' commutes to non-neighborhood schools by the kids, I suppose THE PARENTS may actually need to provide something... and it may end up being FASTER than the 'short bus'.

So in short, I just want to bring the "why do we need buses for the kids, exactly?" monkey wrench into the room. [for those who really DO need the buses, sure, have a bus, but I suspect that many of these routes may not be TRULY necessary]

And I just thought I'd go ahead and make the "When I was your age" rant while I'm at it. Even when I was in KINDERGARTEN, I actually DID walk to/from school, although it was only a few city blocks. And for 1st through part of 4th grade, there was a very steep hill involved.

when I *DID* have to ride a bus it was LITERALLY because of "busing", i.e. the closer school was NOT for me for some reason (overcrowding usually). So the problem was NOT the need for a BUS, but the locations of the schools, i.e. the fault of the school districts and city planners and local politicians.

so we can put the blame where it BELONGS: *GUMMINT*

Don't look a GriftHorse in the mouth: Trojan trampled 10 million Android devices

Re: Virus distributing framework

According to a quick online search, the Apache Cordova Framework appears to be an enhanced wrapping of WebView that provides better hardware access, or something like that.

Whether or not it embeds ad-slinging is completely different. In theory ANY application _COULD_ sling ads if it wanted to, and WebView is one mechanism by which it could do so.

It's probably not something _I_ would use, but it is an open source framework. If there are security holes they need to be patched. As for 'push' style updates, the mechanism by which they are done is independent of them being done in the FIRST place. Seeing as the application is using HTML it would be possible to do this kind of 'push' update without going through a complete re-install of the application via the Anroid APK handlers. As such it is a stealthy way of cramming WHATEVER THEY WANT onto your phone.

Perhaps a future Android OS can include a security feature to limit this possibility. But as HTML files are NOT "executable" (and yet they ARE with 'web apps'), I do not see a way of stopping this 'security workaround' from being used by potential malware.

so keeping such applications from accessing your financial info and location may be the only way to put the brakes on this.

Seeing as everyone loves cloud subscriptions, get ready for car-as-a-service future

Re: Monetization

It's more reason to hang onto and maintain an OLD car that runs on GASOLINE, has NO integrated navi-guessionsystem, and behaves as you would expect it to when you work the controls. You MIGHT even be able to work on it YOURSELF.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Re: Throwing out DST

in 1973 the USA kept dailight savings time for an entire year. I walked to school. No problem.

In 1974 and 1975 I went to a high school that had "split session" and Freshmen had school from 12:00 to 4:30 (or something like that). I walked home in the dark during the winter. No problem.

Actually it was not THAT dark in either case. but as I recall, the cars had their headlights on.

besides, most parents are like "helicopter parents" these days, and drive their kids to school. The local private school near my house has the expected traffic jams as the expected times because of it. Fortunately there's a way to drive around it if I ever need to.

why we have time zones around the world

yes, this goes back to the 1800s when time zones were invented. With time zones, people could still use a clock and the sun (and maybe a rooster) to determine when to wake up and do their daily work [mostly agrarian and support of agrarian work] and when to sleep, but ALSO the train schedules were synchronized well enough to allow the railroads to schedule use of single-track rail lines (and avoid train wrecks). It made so much sense the entire world adopted the idea.

Besides, can you imagine how the TV schedules would be messed up if we were all on UTC? You'd still have "time zones" but they'd be based on when the morning shows and evening news comes on in your area...

When i was in the Navy, if we deployed longer than a few days, on the sub we'd switch to "Zulu Time" and operate on UTC until we came into a scheduled port, at which point we'd switch to the local time zone. It avoids switching the logs around every time you cross into a new time zone. Meals and watch rotation was all time based and so it was done in a sensible way. On a sub there's no night or day but the meals change. That's how you know what "time of day" it is. And watch rotation often throws you into 18 hour days (6 on, 12 off), which makes things that much more "interesting".

Re: Hum

UTC or local TZ?

Re: Lennart Poettering would approve!

And Sinofsky [and others] as well

Re: Is UCLA forcing the hand?

"equity" "make tzdb fairer again". Blchggg... where's the pink liquid... (see icon)

There's no crying in baseball... (yeah we all saw 'League of Their Own' right?)

- and -

There is NO POLITICS IN COMPUTING !!!

what a ROTTEN way to swing a WRECKING BALL into a world-wide project to maintain a LIST OF TIME ZONES

Re: Is the database really that big

Simply downloading the TZ data for your time zone, during setup, would work just fine, with a micro- controller-based embedded device that has a simple web interface. The embedded device would then use the data to do its time conversions on its own internal clock and display the correct(ed) time.

(for offline setup maybe a fallback system where you manually enter things like UTC offset and DST start/stop etc.)

I've done some experiments with Arduino with a web interface. With some creativity, you could make it all fit in the NVRAM, though it's probably a LOT better if you use a device with larger than 32k for code space.

Re: Is the database really that big

Why would anything embedded want anything other than UTC?

In some cases you might have to deal with outside systems that need accurate time stamps. If those systems use local time and NOT UTC (UTC would be sensible, try telling THEM that) then the embedded device will have to "do things THEIR way" and get the time zone right because the existing system and customer base do things that way and they're big and you're not. Or something like that.

So you provide a screen to use tz data to set the time zone just like you do when you set up a personal computer. On Linux it's not too hard, right? [I manually filtered North American time zones and stuck them in a drop-down combo box, one that's easy to change if it ever needs to, so the interface would not be unnecessarily cluttered with 100 time zones or something]

NASA halts Mars comms for two weeks as Sun gets in way of Red Planet

Re: Comms relays?

LaGrange points are still too close to Earth for this to be practical

You sure about that? The Greek/Trojan points [L4,L5] in Mars' orbit would probably do nicely.

Years of development, millions of lines of code, and Android can't even run a toilet

Re: Waste

honestly, the hardware cost difference between an android-capable ARM-based device and a microcontroller board probably favors the ARM-based device. And getting a touch screen to work with a microcontroller (let alone serve up ads) might be cost prohibitive on its own.

Re: Targeted ads

and maybe a credit card chip sensor to read those, too...

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Re: It's a hurricane?

also you have fastest spinning at the equator, and in the 'hurricane region' the differences in speed (over small latitude changes) are the highest. So you also have slow vs fast air, coupled with (probable) liquid core, solar heating, and not a whole lot of possible things to slow it down (like land masses and a relatively thinner atmosphere that you find on Earth).

And the discoloration of the red spot may affect temperature of things it 'shadows'. be of a different mass than the rest of the atmosphere, etc. etc. all contributing to its formation and behavior.

Re: If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking

all bad jokes aside an ice skater spins faster with arms pulled inwards. Something about centripetal force and rotational momentum.

so as the spot gets smaller... the winds spin it faster maybe?

(I suppose it depends on whether we're looking at a hurricane or the top of a massive tornado)

Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

so THAT is why I have been getting more e-mail-spam lately

From the article: More recently the group succeeded in a phishing attack on Microsoft's support desk, retrieving private customer data which the company confirmed included "information regarding... Microsoft Services subscriptions" and was used "in some cases" to launch further "highly-targeted attacks as part of [a] broader campaign."

does 'a broader campaign' include (at times) a dozen or more (lame) spear-phishing e-mails per day with the usual payloads and malicious links? The frequency of these things has gone up 10 fold over the last couple of weeks... on the e-mail address I use with my (soon to expire, and I may not renew) MSDN subscription.

(good thing I do not open the obvious malicius attachments nor view as HTML on a windows-based mail reader)

Angry birds ground some Google Wing drones in Australia

Re: More of this ahead.

maybe you need a built-in "bird zapper" (or just an owl statue, or bunch of spikes) to keep birds from harassing otherwise defenseless drones.

Maybe some wires with a few thousand volts in them, easily snapped but also easily replaced, so that a tangled zapped bird would just fall away. The drone could self-detect the need to replace the defensive electrical wires. I doubt the bird-brains would ever learn, though. I bet it would be an ongoing development, anti-bird defenses.

(animals do it to one another, atacking and defending, so what's the difference if BOTS do it too?)

(other options might include angry noises that drive birds away)

Japanese boffins say they've created plastic optical fibres to reach places that might break glass

Re: Why?

as long as you have power available on copper, you can send data by fiber and it will most likely be a MUCH smaller cable, and apparently more resilient to age and even bending and vibration [using polymer], and the one thing that makes the most sense in a vehicle: LIGHTER WEIGHT (and probably lower cost).

And copper can be expensive. So if fiber is cheaper, between the window and lock controls and the car computer [for example], with a bendy cable going into the doors from the car's frame, you need to be able to handle repeated bending, vibration, moisture, heat, cold, and other things that make wires go bad. And, probably , GLASS fiber optics. But maybe not polymer.

And again, copper is expensive. And relatively heavy. So yeah.

Fukushima studies show wildlife is doing nicely without humans, thank you very much

Re: Muppets

makes you wonder which came first, the pig-boar or the bullfrog...

Re: Bullfrogs ... few predators in most of its adopted new homes.

they just need more snakes

get people to understand how the world could/should be.

are you considering that we become a world WITHOUT PEOPLE in it? I hope not...

as for giving up tech, NO WAY!

Re: Warmed or Hot

thorium is an alternative that should be considered, yes. More available fuel. not to replace uranium and plutonium as reactor fuel, of course, but to supplement it.

(all of the other radiation issues remain about the same with thorium)

Re: Warmed or Hot

had it not been for Mr. Earthquake and some inadequately designed emergency generator systems that could not handle a Tsunami, the power plant safety systems would have worked and no problems.

instead, it became fodder for the fearmongers.

Re: So: in 100 years time ...

the earth did that ctrl+alt+del thing at least once, maybe even a couple o' more times, one of course being the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. The Cambrian era also had a LOT more variety of mollusks and so there are theories about extinction events then, too.

as in "what killed the trilobites" ?

(it is my general opinion that without extinction level events, there would be no REALLY SIGNIFICANT evolution, for without a stresser, there is no need to evolve)

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Once again, this *KIND* of argument has been going on since the Civil Rights movement.

Private property opened to the public is not the same as private property that is "private". And in the virtual world of teh intarwebs, this would include web sites.

Civil rights legislation controls what private property and private business owners can do when it comes to public spaces. This has been tested in the courts for decades.

The question is not whether a law restricts freedom. The point of civil rightrs legislation is to allow for equal access to the public spaces. The freedom of the owner of the public space is being restricted in order to PREVENT that owner from restricting the freedom of those who want to access it.

Might as well be a racial minority man sitting at the counter in a 1950's diner in Mississippi.

Re: persecution

Proof please? What you have said about Christianity vs Judaism may be a perception, but I do not believe (outside of Westboro) that it is an ACCURATE one.

"significant portion" would have to be outside of the aberration of "wackos" to be of any relevance.

Re: Monopolies

you got the faces

I got the twits

Let's make lots of money!!!

(that commercial with the guy in the convertible and the singing hood ornament and the awesome 80's music - gotta love it!)

Re: Conflicted

Facebook can only ban me from Facebook

Unless they collude with others to CANCEL you. I suspect if you were FAMOUS enough... they just MIGHT. Right Mr. Trump?

Re: Conflicted

I almost wish that FaeceBan would actually DO that.

Then Texans would be all like "why were we wasting time on this CRAP?"

Re: Censorship

your argument works until you have a public space. at THAT point, various civil rights legislation limits who you can exclude (and why), even when privately owned. THIS is the precedent set back in the 1950's and 1960's here in the USA, which has been constitutionally upheld.

Re: Forced speech

what do you mean? How about religious confectionaries making wedding cakes for GAY WEDDINGS and NOT being VILIFIED if they choose NOT to? Yeah, there haven't been any activists going around to businesses for any such reason, just to "out" them and make ink in the newspapers or anything...

The problem here is the DOUBLE STANDARD of the application of EXISTING law, and when a new one is created that is deliberately NOT AMBIGUOUS, why is it simply ASSUMED to be UNCONSTITUTIONAL? And, they seem to be using the SAME *kinds* of arguments that (allegedly) bigoted business owners/operators used back in the 1950's and 1960's to JUSTIFY DISCRIMINATION???

From the article again: The law puts politically manipulative misinformation on equal footing with good-faith opinion and verifiable facts.

WHO arbitrates 'which is which', exactly?

How about if we all just let anyone say anything (so long as it's not openly abusive or illegal), put a BIG FAT DISCLAIMER on the entire web site, and let people make their own choices? THEN, people get to grow their OWN info filters and become smarter.

Re: Censorship

yes. they can take their business elsewhere.

This *KIND* of argument did not go over well in the 1960's however... when civil rights and equal treatment became "a thing".

GNOME 41: Slick with heaps of new features for users and devs – but annoyances remain

Re: Still not listening to users

Truly Micros~1 got it RIGHT back in the '95 days, as far as general usability and customization went. I think Gnome 2 (and the earlier KDE) captured that.

* Windows 3.0 - 3D Skeuomorphic. Sold like CRAZY because of the superior appearance and built-in games like Solitaire.

* Windows '9x - Start menu, hierarchical, backward compatible [mostly], still 3D Skeuomorphic, and games.

* Windows 2k and XP - merge to NT backend. Mostly compatible, interface still more or less the same (and you could make XP look like 2K if you wanted).

* Windows 7 - mostly like XP, a little more irritating at times

* Windows 8+ - total dismal FREAKING FAIL and FORCE-MARKETED because, SHUT UP USERS and TAKE YOUR OS MEDICINE so we can MARKET YOU.

Compare that to gnome, etc.

* Gnome the original - Sawfish - BzzzZZZZ! - it worked

* Gnome 2 which I used for SEVERAL YEARS (such that it FINALLY became stable to the point of reliability on FreeBSD) past its expiration date.

* Mate/Cinnamon essentially GTK2 and/or GTK3 versions of Gnome 2 (which I still use)

* Gnome 3 - even Linus ranted all over it

* And now... GNOME 4!!! (wheeeeeee...)

and all of this "new shiny" looks more like Windows 2.0 from the 80's than it looks "modern" unless you think of "modern" as "being different from last decade" except it's NOT any more.

Change CAN be, but is is NOT necessarily, for the better.

Re: Title bar

You had me agreeing and then you JUST had to say NICE things about that BLASTED DAMNABLE HAMBURGER "so-called STANDARD" MENU ICON, which *I* *HATE* and should be *NUKED* *FROM* *HIGH* *ORBIT* with *GREAT* PREJUDICE*.

Still, I also like the title bar AS IS. BUT *NO* HAMBURGER IN IT. The title bar sometimes becomes informational, let's say when I run firefox as another user to completely sandbox it, and the title will say "(as otheruser)" along with everything else. This is helpful to me in a LOT of ways, like a warning to NOT do something in THAT instance of Firefox that might track me.with cookies, script, or anything ELSE I had to enable to "access that one thing" (like an electronics distributor's order pages).

So YES, keep the title bar. But, ***NO*** do ***NOT*** ***CORRUPT*** ***IT*** by putting a HAMBURGER MENU ICON IN IT!

Re: Nice

I disagree. Other than a slightly "new shiny" look, it's apparently still the same:

* attempting to make your desktop look like a phone

* 2D FLATSO FLATTY McFLATFACE (like Windows, Chrome, Australis, ...) lock-step compliance with mediocrity and the "kiddie pool" 'programmers' who FEEL (instead of think) it's a GOOD thing

* apparent focus on the optics in lieu of ACTUAL improvements (how long does a 'file open' dialog take to display the entire contents of /usr/bin, for example??? And WHY so PIG SLOW like WINDOWS???) (I wrote one using my own X11 toolkit, that's still not done because I have to earn money to live on, that displays a list of files like /usr/bin in about 2 seconds, anecdotally >10 times faster than the gnome-ish ones, since mine doesn't have to scan EVERY! STINKING! FILE! for mostly unnecessary information BEFORE listing the names, that's why)

* apparent CHANGE for the SAKE of CHANGE, and not necessary, or even necessarily a GOOD change.

and so on.

and I do not see any of *THAT* as "an improvement". But I did not expect it would be.

(still using Mate and/or Cinnammon, and SCREAMING if I ever have to select a custom application for a file type in firefox because it STILL takes FOR-EV-AR to load up /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin just so I can pick 'atril' or whatever because there is NO PLACE TO TYPE IN THE NAME and it's probably the GTK toolkit doing that).

So yeah, how about REAL improvements?

Re: Connections

The screen has got a penguin, a smiley Mac icon, and that ridiculous 2D FLATSO twisted-to-one-side windows logo, but it's missing a BSD Daemon. I guess 'Connections' isn't "inclusive enough". Heh.

UK Ministry of Defence apologises after Afghan interpreters' personal data exposed in email blunder

Re: Ouch

Rule 69: any online discussion of world events after 2016 will eventually degrade into "Trump Hate"

icon, because, facepalm

Re: SNAFU after SNAFU

one BIG reason that certain kinds of information is classified is to KEEP our informants and operatives form being KILLED. Or worse.

I have no doubt that every country (even allies) has operatives in pretty much every other country whenever possible, even if it's an informal operative in the form of an embassy staff member.

However, we all know that in certain places in the world, revealing these people and their activities can result in torture and/or death, and not just be an embarrassing "oops" that makes a headline or two and probably gets you laughed at on late night comedy shows.

I once saw some classified material back in the day (while doing a 'burn run') in which I instinctively recognized that if "that face" in the photo ever got to the wrong people, several people would DIE. This is why it was classified. It's not so much about the information, it's about the people who obtained it, or the people that are put in danger when that information is compromised.

Re: Too many blunders

I'm not inclined to think that the U.K. would make such a blunder deliberately.

(as for OUR current gummint...)

Philippines approves digital services tax on streaming services, apps, even SaaS

Re: Is a VPN the answer?

it is worth pointing out that It's not the NETFLIX providers that are being taxed.

It is the CONSUMER of those services that is being taxed.

(As you appear to have pointed out, even if unintentionally)

So "Taxing NETFLIX" is not really at issue here, unless the taxes are being unfairly levied against NETFLIX as compared to other (kinds of) media providers.

[not like I want to see things taxed but this is what gummints do, and why the people need to VOTE]

Court of Appeal says AI software cannot be listed as patent inventor

Re: I am a lawyer...

would you agree that this might be "step 1" in demanding future "rights" and, of course, royalties, when his "AI" "invents" things? Just curious. it's how I see activists in general. They do "step 1" to get their feet in the door, then incrementally pervert the law through B.S. judicial decisions until they're raking in the dough and empowering themselves even more. And, of course, the APPEAL is where "the precedent" happens, so the original case needs to be as frivolous and/or BOGUS as possible without making it an utter failure.

(the patent systems of the world have been perverted enough, no need to make it worse by including an AI as an 'inventor')

Re: The invention itself is irrelevant

"Test Case" = "How can we manipulate the system today?"

Re: The same DOOFUS (sorry DABUS) software...

when I put liquid in a cup I do NOT want it going to room temperature FASTER...

I want hot tea and coffee to STAY hot, iced tea and soda and beer to STAY cold, and if i put cubes in it I want them to MELT SLOWER. What's the point of a cup that gets to room temperature FASTER?

(das blinkenlights may be ok, if you can put it in the dishwasher and not destroy it)

Re: Not what he said

That is how you manipulate opinion.

It's how activists do things, yeah. "lost the case" = "the judges 'agreed' that..."

(spinning it like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil)