Posts by Maelstorm

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Don't mess with people's right to get off to porn. These days, the kids are smarter than the adults. They will just head over to a U.S. site to get their fix.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

And there's your problem....

"that Apple's marketing group overrides engineering concerns."

And there's the problem folks. Marketing shouldn't be in charge of anything...except marketing. Seems like the company has been going downhill ever since the passing of Steve Jobs.

Google takes sole stand on privacy, rejects new rules for fear of 'authoritarian' review

Re: Privacy? Not on today's internet...

I'm often telling people a VPN only gives you some privacy from your ISP (who generally won't MITM your connection to remove that protection) and in the UK from the police & 20 odd other services who can see your ICR/Internet connection record for the last 2 years but there is nothing to stop them submitting a request to google for your email account, your search history and probably sites you visited anyway because they had ad-trackers on most of the sites on the internet.

That is if they can tie your browsing/search history to you. Besides the ISP cannot MITM your connection to a VPN if you are using SSL certificates of at least 2048 bits. They can record it, but it's encrypted between you and the VPN provider. And on top of that, make sure the VPN provider is outside of your country and not on friendly terms. Makes investigations much harder.

I realize that you guys in the UK have something where the police can demand you to show them your encryption keys, or force you to decrypt something, with a two year jail sentence if your refuse. But what if you can't? I always thought it unfair to put someone in jail for not being able to decrypt internet traffic because the keys are not available to the user, and are automatically generated.

Privacy? Not on today's internet...

(tl;dr post)

I figure I'll be down voted for saying this, but true privacy cannot be accomplished on the internet unless one does all of the following:

1. (Most important) Use a VPN or Proxy server.

2. Use an ad blocker.

3. Disable 3rd party cookies.

4. Disable JavaScript.

5. Use a good browser like Firefox or Opera (Not the Google Chrome spyware).

I'm sure there are other things, but that's what comes to mind right now. Using a VPN or proxy server is very important because servers log connections. In those logs, you see what address was connecting, time/date of the request, what was requested, possibly even the user-agent string of the browser if the server is configured for it. What Apache logs (the web server software that I use) can be fully configured. Logging the IP address and the time/date is important in case legal action needs to be taken. With an IP address, you can find out what ISP someone is using. In some cases, if there is a reverse lookup record, a general geographical location can be deduced as well. So with some basic log analysis, you can tell which IP addresses requested which pages, and how long people stayed on those pages as well. And this is from just what the server software logs.

Many websites today make money by showing advertisements to us. Unlike the server logs which can only track what users do on the site or sites that the server controls, advertisers can track users from page to page, site to site, and server to server. Many websites use the same set of advertisers, so they will set a cookie on your browser and use that cookie to track you around the internet. Since your browser is connecting to the advertiser's servers, they are logging everything they can. So they can tie IP address, user-agent, and cookies together to create a unique identifier they use to accumulate information about you. This is why you should block 3rd party cookies. Although they can still track you via IP address and user-agent string, it may not be as unique. And let us not forget about the do-not-track setting in most browsers. I don't know of anyone who actually honors that, so it's basically a non-functioning feature. Most, if not all browsers, have a setting that disables the browser's ability to save cookies between browsing sessions (aka allow only session cookies). So closing the browser causes all cookies to disappear. Opening the browser again gives you a clean slate, cookie wise.

Although I did mention disable JavaScript, in this day and age, disabling JavaScript will break much of the internet. Many sites today utilize things like Ajax, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc... which requires JavaScript to function. Additionally, the current trend in web development is to not send HTML from the server, but to send JSON objects and offload everything to the client. This reduces processing on the server so more clients can be handled with the same hardware. When you request a page, you get an HTML document that the browser interprets. That will be the only HTML that the server will send. It tells the browser to go and download a bunch of style sheets and script files. From there, all document rendering data is sent via JSON and is processed on the client side. It used to be XML, but now JSON is king because it's easier for the client to process. No need for an XML interpreter.

Google Chrome is a very popular browser, but it reports everything back to Google. However, I did a forensic analysis of Chrome's incognito mode, and it is very good. Nothing is reported to Google, nothing is saved on the machine. No cookies, no history, nothing. The only thing you might find is some memory artifacts that have been saved to swap space. If your system is setup to clear swap on shutdown, or you are using an encrypted swap file, there won't be anything on the machine. So if you just use Chrome's incognito mode, then go ahead. It won't track you.

My final point though is this: Google does not want privacy on the internet because that will directly impact their revenue stream. Google built itself on advertisement. It charges those advertisers a lot of money for access to their platform. Additionally, Google also makes money by selling your data to those same advertisers. The same is true for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.... It's all about marketing and getting you to buy something from one of their sponsors. So as you browse the internet, the data that is being collected on you is sold. But it's not just that, you are being monetized and sold as well. So it is in the best interest of these companies to keep privacy away from the internet for as long as possible.

How to fix the global slowdown in broadband rollout: Redefine what broadband means

Rural Broadband?

The reason why rural broadband has never been rolled out is three simple words: Return On Investment (ROI). No company in their right mind is going to spend $500,000 on a fiber optic terminal if at most 10 people are going to use it, whereas in a suburban area you can have upwards of 50, or several hundred in a urban environment. I know people who live in rural areas who still have dialup for internet because the providers flat refuse install the equipment...and this was after said companies received government incentives to do so. So 4G and 5G wireless is quite possibly the only way to go for rural areas to get broadband. Back in the day, broadband was anything faster than dialup. So 384K was considered broadband. Nowadays, if you don't have at least a 3 mbps download, it isn't broadband.

Emergency button saves gamers from sudden death... of starvation

Re: Well now....

It's been awhile since I looked, but the TOS doesn't even mention these issues. What is interesting though is that on the loading screen when you initially log in or cross over onto a different server has messages that are displayed to the user. One of them goes something like this: Have fun with your friends in Azeroth, but don't forget to have fun outside Azeroth as well. So, at least for Blizzard Entertainment, they do understand that people need a break. Back in classic, some 40-man raid bosses can take a full 8 hours to defeat.

Well now....

They make extra-large Depends, but the intended use is for people who are incontinent. After a 48-hour gaming session, they probably need a crane to pick their ass off the chair will a full diaper because they were too lazy to unload their ammo into the loo. Seriously though, that is taking the game too far. I have heard of things like this when I was playing World of Warcraft, like people being found dead in front of their computers because they were chugging energy drinks and their kidneys failed.

US regulators push back against White House plan to police social media censorship

Re: Except ...

What? The president doesn't regulate them, the law does. And I disagree with your little comment about accusing anti-fascists of fascism, because I have experienced it for myself. Now before you post your drivel about me being stupid, why don't you consider the fact that I am speaking from experience here...or are you one of those anti-fascists who are trying to silence all conservative voices?

Re: Except ...

And Jesus said he who is without sin cast the first stone. The problem is that no matter who is in office, they are going to have some flaw or flaws because nobody is perfect. I have been on this earth for almost 50 years and I have never seen our politics like this before. It's a fucking circus. Now I am right of center, and I don't like Trump either. However, the amount of insanity that I see coming from the left is astonishing. The left is being taken over by these fascists who will try to silence you by any means necessary if you disagree with them (AntiFA). Unfortunately, this does extend into the news media and the social media platforms. So yes, they do need to be regulated. The U.S. Constitution needs to be applied to corporations, not just to government. Then all this nonsense might end, maybe.

I want to see Trump out of office, but I don't want a democrat in there either. So either the Republican Party will field a more viable candidate, or stick with Trump. And let's not forget the whole Russia collusion thing that wasted 25 million of the taxpayer's money, and the fact that two of the most anti-semantic congress women (both are Muslim) getting banned from Israel because of their active support of the Boycott Israel thing.

It's chaos, utter chaos, and I fear that I will not end soon.

We will hack back if you tamper with our shiz, NATO declares to world's black hats

The Final Solution

So if a state sponsored actor hacks into another nation and causes wide-spread disruption of critical services like electricity and water supply, why not find where the hackers are, physically, and bomb them out of existence? After all state-sponsored cyber attacks against another country's infrastructure is an act of war.

Uncle Sam is asking Americans if they could refrain from slapping guns on their drones

Well now...

I live in the U.S.A. and I thought that arming planes and drones was already illegal before the 2018 law...with the exception of law enforcement, the National Guard, and the military. But this has been depicted in those procedural crime shows where an explosive device was strapped to a drone and used to assassinate someone. Not too far fetched.

Chap uncovers privilege escalation vuln in Steam only to be told by Valve that bug 'not applicable'

I have a game...

I have a game called Aion which seems to require admin rights to even start the launcher. What's funny though is that I start it from a batch file and specifically state that it does not have admin rights and it runs just fine. It looks like the manifest in the executable specifies admin rights, but nothing uses it. Other games such as the Blizzard variety are quite happy with restricted user rights. Game developers who require admin rights for their games are either sloppy, lazy, or incompetent. I have written games and under no situation have I ever needed admin rights. It's a game, not a utility. The only reason why I can see that a game requires admin rights is that the game is actually a trojan horse and is stealing your data.

It is with a heavy heart that we must report that your software has bugs and needs patching: Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, Intel emit security fixes

WTF?

WTF Google!?!?

Google reported the vulnerability privately to Microsoft with a 90-day deadline to fix it. Redmond planned to release a fix this month, within Google's time limit, then pushed the update back to July for more testing, thus missing the deadline. And so Google went full disclosure today.

I'll bet if it was a bug in their software, they would keep their mouths shut until it was patched. Nice going there screwing the Windows users.

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

Rosey Palm?

There's a pill for that. It's called Viagra. There are also some free pr0n sites that will help with it too (*cough*xnxx*cough*pornhub*cough*redtube*cough*). After all, he should be getting plenty of action with Rosey Palm and her five sisters.

Truth, Justice, and the American Huawei: Chinese tech giant tries to convince US court ban is unconstitutional

Go Pound Sand

This is like Kaspersky suing the US government because the US government refuses to do business with them on grounds of National Security. I see this going the same way.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/court_rejects_kaspersky/

Basically, the court says that the US government can ban a product if the government has legitimate security concerns. Considering that the US Government's networks are being attacked on a daily basis by Russia, China, and others, and the revelations that products coming out of China are spying on people (Lenovo keystroke loggers? Supermicro server board spy chips?), I believe that the court's response will be the same as the response in Kaspersky's case: Go pound sand because we don't want you here.

Remember folks, China is KNOWN for spying....

US Air Force probes targeted malware attack, blames... er, the US Navy? What?

Wait...What?!

So let me see if I got this straight....

Naval JAG prosecutors used malware against Air Force JAG defense lawyers and military journalists in violation of the law, during a trial of a Navy SEAL who is charged with war crimes while on tour in Afghanistan. Did I read that correctly?

All together now:

Prosecutorial Misconduct.

At the minimum, this would be a mistrial. However, the prosecutor should be disbarred for pulling such a stunt. If someone is leaking documents, then that is a separate investigation to be conducted by NCIS, not JAG. If it's custom malware, it doesn't surprise me because TOR is a US Navy project.

Panic as panic alarms meant to keep granny and little Timmy safe prove a privacy fiasco

And this is why...

And this is why we shouldn't trust any gear that comes out of China.

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

The last version is aptly named...

Windows POS... Aptly named if you ask me.

Besides, I moved from XP directly to 10. The main reason being that I had bought a new mother board which has only SATA on it, and Windows XP does not support SATA out of the box, and the board does not even have a floppy disk interface. So I had to slipstream the SATA drivers onto the install media so I could get it to install. The the other big issue is that the 32-bit became very limiting.

Re: End of an era...

Damn you. You stole my post. LOL.

Great minds do think alike.

Here's a toast to you.

Boffins baffled by planet nugget whizzing round white dwarf that should have killed it

Plausible explanation

I have heard about this, but I haven't seen the data yet. There are three plausible explanations for this:

1. It's an outer planet that migrated inward. When the star shed its outer layers to become a planetary nebula, an outer planet started plowing through the material and lost energy thereby spiraling in on the white dwarf. When the planet got closer, it disintegrated leaving just part of the core. A variation of this is that it is an iron (or metallic) asteroid that migrated inward.

2. The planet survived the death of the star, although this is highly unlikely. Mercury and Venus will be engulfed by the sun at the end of its life. As the planets plow through the solar material that the sun will puff off, the planets will lose energy and spiral inward. The high-energy plasma that makes up the star will evaporate the planets until there is nothing left. Even an iron core will not survive. Additionally, wildly shifting gravitational forces will cause uneven tidal pressures on the planets and they will be ripped apart. Earth may or may not be consumed in this way.

3. The planetoid formed (or reformed) after the star died and became a white dwarf. There is a fair amount of heavier elements such as silicon and oxygen (mostly hydrogen and helium though) which enabled a planetoid to form there.

Given these three possibilities, I think #1 is the most likely scenario. And yes, I am an astro-boffin.

It was all Yellow: Mass email about a Coldplay CD breaks the internet

This reminds me of the time...

This reminds me of the time where someone did something to an email server that causes a 19 hour outage over at America Online in the late 1990s. But in this case, can the retailer be blamed for instigating a DDoS attack on the payment gateway?

Now I'm going to grab my jacket and exit stage left.

Let's spin Facebook's Wheel of Misfortune! Clack-clack-clack... clack... You've won '100s of millions of passwords stored in plaintext'

Re: Pinch Me

There's not enough mind altering drugs on this planet to make Facebook look good.

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

I had configs and layout documentation stored on a hidden server on the network. I backed everything up to it. Then I archived it and encrypted it so it could be stored in plain site on several servers, on tape backup, and store the tape in a bank vault. The network didn't change much, so this was a viable option. But when the network went down, the other admins had no clue how stuff was configured because they weren't doing the backups like they were supposed to. Some managers were let go. I figured out what the problem was and reloaded the router with the config off my hidden server. When I left, I still don't think they found the server.

The backup server is a Raspberry Pi v1.0. It's in a small, non-descript case with a label that has the IP address and a message that reads "Critical network monitoring equipment. Do not disconnect."

Super Cali optimistic right-to-repair's negotious, even though Apple thought it was something quite atrocious

Re: Next on the list

Actually, at least here in the United States, car manufacturers are required by law to publish all documentation about vehicles and information about specialty tools. That's why tool manufacturers such as Snap-On make a killing in the automotive repair industry.

Ransomware drops the Lillehammer on Norsk Hydro: Aluminium giant forced into manual mode after systems scrambled

Industrial Network Security...or lack of....

Ever since Shodan came along, we will be seeing more of this in industrial settings. The big issue is the industrial controls that control material handling, processing, and manufacturing. These systems/networks MUST be air gapped (although that is not full proof as we have seen with the Stuxnet worm) to increase the difficulty level of performing a breach to very difficult to impossible for hackers, crackers, and state sponsored actors. Additionally, epoxy the USB ports and disconnect the optical drives so that nobody can slip something onto the network (not fool proof, but it does help).

Air gaped networks force an intruder to perform a up-front intrusion (they have to be on site). Physical security is another matter though.

Don't get the pitchforks yet, Apple devs: macOS third-party application clampdown probably not as bad as rumored

I have always considered Apple Computer Inc. to be the Nazi's of the technology sector. It will be a boon to system security if only signed apps can be run since malware is not signed. However, I do not like the $99 entry fee for the pay to play model. This is why I stay clear of Apple. Microsoft does not have such restrictions, and Linux/Unix you can do whatever you want. Android recently introduced a new version of their development kit which is also $99, but is not as restrictive as Apple is as to what APIs you can use and such.

With that said, one must consider the target audience. Most people who buy Macs are not computer savvy. So changes like these will actually protect these users. However, it puts additional burdens on the developers because now more hoops have to be jumped through to install applications onto the system now.

Just my 2 cents.

We'll help you get your next fix... maybe, we'll think about it, says FTC: 'Right to repair' mulled

If someone wants to repair their phone, tablet, or laptop, then by all means. The only one on that list that I will attempt is a laptop. The others are just way too small. This extends to all sorts of products.

Cars and trucks for instance. If the manufacturer could get away with it, they would weld the hood shut. Certain high-end European made vehicles have special access controls in the computer. If someone not authorized goes poking in there, it will alert someone at the manufacturer and you will get a CALL telling you to get out of it. Things like injector timing and such which are used by modders to retune vehicles.

Believe it or not, forklifts have an interesting problem too. The computer has a kill bit that gets set after something like 10,000 hours of use. After that, you have to replace the computer. But the computer is no longer available, so you have to buy a new forklift for US $1500-$4000 or more.

Is this the way the cookie wall crumbles? Dutch data watchdog says nee to take-it-or-leave-it consent

Dump cookies after browser closes.

Just about every browser out there (so far I haven't seen one that doesn't) have settings that allow the user to delete cookies when the browser closes. So hit the big red X periodically to dump the cookies.

You have the right to remain on-prem, but you should really head for the cloud, UK plod told

Cloud security? What can happen?

This is just me, but I have been against cloud storage for private, sensitive data. The only way that data in the cloud can be secured is to encrypt it BEFORE it is stored in the cloud. In some cases, you might be able to use a custom app to access the cloud, and perform the crypto on the fly. Also use obsure or random file/directory names so if someone does get access, they will not be able to determine anything.

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

That reminds me...

That reminds me of a particular song by the Village People...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmGuy0jievs

Re: "Electronics not destroyed by a sledgehammer"

@Sam 15

You sir, have made my day. The next round of beer is on me. LOL

Huawei 'to sue US' over federal kit block – report

Re: Meanwhile watching carefully ....

Brexit is just awful policy, if you could sue governments for awful policy most countries would be bankrupt.

But brexit isn't just policy, is it? I ask because I seem to remember a referendum vote of the people was held and the people voted to exit the EU.

Kasperksy anyone?

I seem to remember a similar lawsuit brought by Kaspersky. Wasn't that lawsuit dismissed? Here in America, you cannot sue someone for *NOT* buying or refusing to buy your product. So basically, the judge is going to tell them to pound sand.

OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers

Back when I still worked for the local phone company, the machine had something called a secure feature upgrade. You had to enter in a code that represented a feature and a screen appeared that was filled with a bunch of hex digits. Then you have to read off that hex to someone at the vendor who then read back a response code that you had to input. If all was well, the feature would activate. The ability to block your caller ID for one call was an upgrade that cost USD $30,000 for each switch in the network...we had almost 1,000 switches in the state alone. And this was in 1995.

Where's Zero Cool when you need him? Loose chips sink ships: How hackers could wreck container vessels

And in other news...

And still furious about the humiliating loss in the Falklands War, the President of Argentina orders his cyber warfare division of the military to tip the container ships which contain a shipment of underwear for the Queen of England.

Hmmm... Ship Tipping

Ship Tipping...

Gives a whole new meaning to Cow Tipping.

Intel to finally scatter remaining ashes of Itanium to the wind in 2021: Final call for doomed server CPU line

Do you know the real reason Itanium failed?

No? Then I will tell you: Cost.

To move to a completely new platform you not only need to replace the hardware, but you also have to replace the software. Software is key. When enterprise software costs a fortune, and then you have to chuck it to move to a new platform. Many businesses at the time did not see a business need to move from 32-bit to 64-bit at that time, and then include the added cost of new software. So many businesses stayed put. Then AMD came out with the 64-bit (x86 compatible) Opteron chip. So business that needed the 64-bit platform moved to that and ditched Intel.

Now why would a business want to spend more money to upgrade both hardware and software when they can just upgrade the hardware and the OS for much cheaper? Yeah, I can't think of a reason either.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Re: Gah. Users.

"I will leave a note that the microwave doesn't work. Someone else can make the effort to report it."

Unless you're like me who can fix the microwave. Besides, I was working on a microwave at the job and the boss comes in. He sees what I'm doing and want's to know why I didn't just call a ticket in. He also lectures me to leave it for qualified technicians.

That's when I tell him that I am a license and qualified technician. I showed him my licenses. He left me alone after that.

Oof, are you sure? Facing $9bn damages, Google asks Supreme Court to hear Java spat

Far reaching repercussions...

This is not good.

Interoperability is at the heart of the technology industry. If APIs and interfaces can be copyrighted, then things such as Wine and other programs can be sued out of existence. Another one that comes to mind is MS-DOS vs. DR-DOS. And then what about UEFI? Let's not forget OpenOffice/LibreOffice's ability to read and write Microsoft Office documents.

The bottom line is that implementation of APIs and interfaces are copyrightable, but the APIs and interfaces themselves should not be.

Requests for info, gag orders and takedowns fired at GitHub users hit an all-time high last year

There are only two reasons that I can see a takedown request being legitimate:

1. The source code is stolen.

2. The source code is an exploit.

Beyond that, there should be no reason to honor a takedown request. In fact, if a copyright claim is made, the project owner on GitHub can counter sue the plaintiff by saying that the code is public so they stole it and are trying to claim it as theirs. As for the gag order...why? Unless there is some secret criminal proceeding, there should be no civil request takedown notices that are gagged.

Tech sector meekly waves arms in another bid to get Oz to amend its crypto-busting laws

ISP DNS Black Hole....

"movie studios can get courts to poison ISPs' DNS records in a regime expanded last year to sweep up Google, and the government's telecommunications data retention scheme happened against tech's objections."

Poison DNS records? DNS server software is specifically designed to NOT allow that to happen. You would have to manually go in and edit the zone mapping files. For most non-tech people, that will stop them. But for the tech crowd, such as the people who read this site, it is trivial to setup your own DNS server to bypass that. I have my own DNS server that I use to block advertising networks, but that's a topic for a different discussion.

Office 365 enjoys good old-fashioned Thursday wobble as email teeters over in Europe

And this is why

And this is why the cloud sucks. Yes, it reduces IT costs across the board, but there are a number of flaws with it.

1. Increases the size of the line at the unemployment office with unemployed IT workers.

2. Your data is at the mercy of the cloud vendor.

3. If the cloud vendor has a security breach, unless encrypted, your data can be exposed.

3a. This can have major legal consequences depending on the nature of the data.

3b. Everyone's data will be at risk depending on the nature of the breach, extent, etc....

4. If the cloud vendor suffers an outage, then your data is inaccessible.

5. The cloud vendor can hold your data hostage if you fail to pay for services.

6. (Related to 4 and 5) If your data is inaccessible, then your business may suffer depending on what the data is and what it is used for.

7. Data in the cloud is not private unless encrypted, and can be accessed by third parties without your knowledge (spies, government agents, etc....)

I am amazed at the speed to which people are moving their data to the cloud. The cloud was never a good idea because it introduces a single point of failure for everyone using it, and it exposes your data to inspection by third parties without your knowledge. And in case you don't know, here in the U.S.A, we have the CLOUD Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_States I don't trust the cloud, and for good reason.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

The best way to handle this is to run your own DNS server and black-hole the ad network domains. That's what I did. Sites that complain can go piss off. So far, none have because the content doesn't even get loaded.

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

This lawsuit is about definitions.

This lawsuit is about definitions, nothing more, nothing less. I actually have a FX-8350 chip in my main workstation computer. Runs just fine for what I use it for. But I do understand the false advertising claim though.

To be technical, in my mind, I consider a core as having it's own instruction/data cache/fetch circuitry, instruction decoder, branch predictor, register file, ALU, register forwarding unit, and FPU unit. This dates back to the era when 80486DX machines were common which was the first x86 CPU to have both integer and floating point units on the same die.

So if some of those resources are shared, I can see how that can be an issue. But my philosophy is if it works, then I'm not going to complain. Most of my work is coding anyways which can be done on a 8088 machine.

Cyber-insurance shock: Zurich refuses to foot NotPetya ransomware clean-up bill – and claims it's 'an act of war'

Oh yeah

An act of war? Really? So far all we know it was Russian hackers. They were probably state sponsored, but the insurance company is going to have to prove that in court. I agree with Big AI 23, they are trying to see what they can get away with. That and they probably want to hold out on the payment for as long as possible to get all the interest they can from the banks.

Steamer closets, flying cars, robot boxers, smart-mock-cock ban hypocrisy – yes, it's the worst of CES this year

Robot on robot crime is now a thing...

There is one other thing that isn't showing that the article didn't mention because in other news, a robot that was supposed to be shown at CES suffered major damage when it was run over by a Tesla in autopilot mode. Granted, it is suspected that this was a publicity stunt. But still, robot on robot crime? We don't have laws for that here in the U.S.A (Surprise!). You can read about it here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tesla-robot-crash-self-driving-car-promobot-putin-ces-2019-las-vegas-elon-musk-a8718866.html

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Technical Details

The MAC address (Media Access Control) is the hardware address that is in the ethernet frame header at layer 2. ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) binds the MAC address to an IP address that we all know and love. MAC addresses are hardware specific and can be changed. If the perpetrator is reading this, then they have either changed their MAC address or disposed of the device.

In case you are wondering, the first three octets describes the manufacturer.

Linus Torvalds opts for the scream test: Linux kernel syscall tweaked to shut data-leak hole – anyone upset, yell now

The manual page for mincore for FreeBSD just shows if a page is allocated and if it has been modified by the calling process or otherwise. I've never really found a use for it as paging is handled by the operating system. What I have used those is madvise, mlock, munlock, mmap, and munmap when I wrote a pooled memory manager some years ago.

Perhaps some libraries use it.

FreeBSD Manual: mincore

The D in SystemD stands for Dammmit... Security holes found in much-adored Linux toolkit

I use FreeBSD, and for good reason.

SystemD is a total piece of shit. In fact, Linus was so fed up with the antics of one of the developers that he banned the guy from contributing to the Linux Kernel. This is why I use FreeBSD for my servers. Fast, reliable, and shit free.

SystemD violates the Unix way of doing things: Have one tool to do one thing and do it well.

This is why we have tools like chmod, chown, chgrp, ls, mv, cp, rm, mkdir, rmdir, cd, etc... All those tools do primarily ONE thing, and they do it well. The login tool handles user logins. Cron handles timed start of tasks (think Task Manager in Windows). SystemD just gobbles up all the startup tools for the sake of a faster, parallel boot strategy. Unix systems do not restart every 5 minutes, so it's a useless endeavor for a non-problem...aka a waste of time.