* Posts by tiggity

3320 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2015

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

tiggity Silver badge

calloc?

"Where you see a big difference is TrapC doesn't have malloc. TrapC has new, like C++ does. And so you need to change all your malloc calls."

A bit of a stumbling block, as would certainly mean porting old code would likely need work as calloc / malloc usage can be very common, especially in quite old codebases.

Though (in my experience) calloc far more often used than malloc ( unless speed was absolutely critical, & the miniscule overhead of clearing the data was just too much then do not use malloc) , in C would use typically calloc as always safer having "cleared" data than retaining preexisting value that happened to be in that area of memory e.g. there's a small but non zero chance* that if you are testing your pointer data to see if it matches a value, that might just be a match with the "junk" that was present in the memory to begin with.

*Yes, I have seen that erroneous match on value X**. It should not be a surprise, especially if your software that creates value X one or more times in its normal usage is frequently run on that machine, quite likely to be getting memory via malloc that your code has populated on a previous run..

** and where X is a non trivial value, i.e. not just a few bytes

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

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Re: And other social media?

@Khaptain

Though it has changed a lot in what you can get away with.

I remember when at school, decades ago, lots of us around at a party (kids parents away), a female & I had got "intimate" in one of the "out of the way" rooms.. However, part way through one of my friends opened the door & saw us, slapped me on the arse as a laugh & to try and put me off (& called to lots of others to see too).

Although lots of people knew about what had happened, & gossip around school the next day in true wild fire style, with no mobile phones at least there was no video / photos of such an event, I would imagine kids these days have to be a lot less restrained in their partying to avoid the risk of problematic phone footage (maybe that's partially why drink & drug use is relatively low in recent generation compared to years gone by to keep self control* in such situations).

* Though given my excessive libido & hedonistic tendencies as a sixth former, doubt my party hard approach would have changed much if mobiles were around back then!

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

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Re: $125k in baguettes

The original article already slipped in a dough pun.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

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Re: Dumb

I recently purchased a "dumb" TV from Cello (UK company)

Though not sure if they do big "dumb" TVs (this was a small TV)

A new city springs from the rainforest to become Indonesia's tech hub

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@harrys

"be a nice place to live"

If you don't like much in the way of free speech perhaps.

UK has some draconian laws in place making e.g. expressing the idea that various "proscribed terrorist organisations" might be freedom fighters rather than terrorists can lead to a criminal record, but they are nothing compared to Indonesia & its many restrictions on free speech.

Uncle Sam outs a Russian accused of developing Redline infostealing malware

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Russian safety net

Given Russia is not overly bothered about cybercriminals attacking non Russians (totally different if they attack anything of Russian value) and zero chance of extradition to the US then the alleged perp probably not that bothered if they left a digital footprint as they are safe in Russia (assuming perp has no plans to travel to EU or similar which would likely lead to detention at US request)

UK’s new Minister for Science and Technology comes to US touting Britain's AI benefits

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Re: Done some things, not done others

@AC - excessive fuel prices in UK are less due to "green altar sacrifices" than to letting big business gouge the UK public.

None of the "essential utilities" should have been privatized, the UK public have paid the price in monetary terms (and in other ways e.g. rivers / coastlines awash with sewage)

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids

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@TheMaskedMan

TBF, the "that was ... This is..." type of DJ is often* a lot less irritating than those DJs who chat excessively .

* A rare few talkative DJs are entertaining / informative, but far too many are just wasting time that would have been far better spent just going straight to the next track.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

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My vinyl gets played (coincidentally, currently deciding whether to upgrade cartridge on my old Pro-Ject* or go all in and get a high end turntable rather than a budget one.

Ironically I gave one of my picture disks away to a friend recently (who is captain of a team I play for & usually drives us to matches with no payment required, so it was a thank you gift).

.. as they do not have a record player, so it won't get played any longer (though I think it will be displayed on the wall - picture disk being used as a picture)

TBF, they are a big fan of that particular band and and have all their music on CD, but like many people these days don't have anything to play vinyl with.

* The old, no frills P1 model

Fake reviewers face the wrath of Khan

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What about joke reviews?

e.g. this AMazon book has a lot of silly reviews

https://www.amazon.com/Microwave-One-Sonia-Allison/product-reviews/1852250437/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews

Shame, if such shitposting reviews are also banned

Millions of Android and iOS users at risk from hardcoded creds in popular apps

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Re: I can do that without an app!

@MachDiamond

"Let's see, I have an app to:

Keep lists of what I need at the store (food, hardware, auto parts). No more managing bits of paper"

Is it that difficult to have a piece of paper in your pocket?

My shopping list manages fine on paper (a bit of IT involved as have a typical "weekly big shop" document* & print that out, crossing out with a pen stuff not needed that week)

That way when I go to the shop I have zero need to look at a phone (& no phone visible means no way for local low level crims to clock my phone & try and nab it as a change from shoplifting)

* Yes, the lists is as geeky as you would expect based on the several shops I typically visit for a weekly shop, products ordered on list based on visiting shops in a most efficient order, and for each shop ordered so that it is an optimal route in the shop, no doubling back to revisit aisles**

** No issues with the small shops such as greengrocers, deli etc, but stuff I get from supermarkets is a pain as they keep changing layout far too frequently for my liking so I periodically have to edit the product order for those items that are supermarket only as old route becomes sub optimal with layout changes.

Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch

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I switched bank precisely because old one had closed nearby branches, a local(ish) branch is important to me as I don't want to use an app or website for financial transactions.

Lots of people CBA doing that and so are forced the digital, low customer service route.

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

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Vanilla web site

I run one that's basically HTML and CSS (with a few server side includes of various .txt files so lots of stuff can just be uploaded as plain .txt files, though as all content in the .txt files is rendered as HTML any HTML markup will get processed. *)

This is for a club I am on the committee of and I update all the league & cup results and tables & so site can be nice and simple.

I have some simple code thats allow automated markup creation and upload of results / tables to the website based on results that are sent in to me (obviously, as the time spent automating saves hours and hours of hand crafting markup in the long term, relies on correct format used by people sending in results )

So, no JS anywhere, all works fine, only attack service is FTP access to the web server (plus chance of zero days / config issues on the hosting server - its not my server that hosts it, so no control over that)

Unfortunately have to use such stuff as react, angular etc. in day job, so club website makes a nice change to deal with a simple, streamlined site that loads & renders "instantly" & pulls in nothing from CDNs or similar & works for people with JS disabled & will work on any browser (within reason, e.g. if you unearthed a fossil such as original pre CSS being a thing Mosaic browser then layout might look a bit odd as CSS would not work, but nothing would actually break & all content visible ).

* If other committee members want to update content on the general information pages they can just upload appropriate .txt files via FTP (I have a little front end that makes it easy) - and as they aware that HTML is supported some use their own HTML editors to format the text (sadly, one person uses word and its ability to export / save as HTML, which creates awful markup)

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

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..trusted web proxy

@Lee D

If I want to install an addon that can alter all sorts of things then that is done at my risk - the browser is welcome to give me hideously dire warnings about possible security risks, but should not prevent me installing what I want, at my own risk.

If I install backend software to do "blocking" I still have to put some trust in at that stage instead, e.g. if I run Privoxy I could look at all the source code (just like I could for browser addons such as UBO etc) but probably won't, I will just "trust" it (albeit with safety of knowing plenty of technically skilled people will have inspected it, but we all know code inspections do not always spot every issue))

So, risk no matter what stage I have some "adblocking" functionality, and for non technical users I would guess a browser addon is far more likely to be used than e.g. proxying software (& setting it all up), also if we think about "easy" options such as Pi-Hole, for those using ISP low functionality / locked down routers, then adding a basic "1st level" protection such as linking up a Pi-Hole may not be easy for them.

Browser addons are a (IMO) a good way for your non tech savvy relatives to have a safer browsing experience (& I know from bitter experience if you do something more complex for them, if anything ever goes wrong on their system (even though totally unrelated, e.g. a classic "break lots of things" dubious MS update) they always blame you ... so I long since stopped being IT tech support for relatives! ).

Given that websites are flinging all sorts of nastiness at me, then I would sooner use a browser addon I trust (to some degree of trust) rather than just let a website fling all sorts at me & be unable to do nothing about it (we assume I have no backend protection for sake of this argument, i.e. bog standard user).

Disclosure: I use UBO, NoScript & other defensive addons, plus some backend IP/DNS filtering too, but backend stuff not much help when some ads / nasty content served from DNS I may want to allow (tempting as it is (as lots of malware makes use of Cloudflare & similar CDNs to appear innocuous - a Cloudflare URI serving content looks more trustworthy than e.g. evilmalware.com URI) So I cannot ban all Cloudflare IPs as some sites I want to visit use it, hence NoScript is useful for fine grained control as I can see what is served from where and choose to allow (or not) script from a cloudflare URI).

NoScript is, for me, the most important browser addon for security reasons (with heavy use of JS in ad serving it also indirectly blocks a majority of ads)

For me ad blocking via UBO is secondary but mainly for

1. Performance - no / few ads makes a big difference to navigating around the web.

2. Stops pages jiggling around - with async loading, many web pages "move" as yet another bit of ad related content is loaded, this jiggling around increases likelihood of clicking on the wrong content (as page rearranges itself just as you click, so you click on something you did not want to). By having an "immobile" web page without async ad loads, it reduces chance of an accidental nasty click.

3. A long and indefensible history of ads being used to serve malware, so basic sensible browsing to try and protect yourself (if ads had remained, few in number per page & as a small bit of text (or image) with a link then there would be no need for all this, most of us only began to block ads when it became a JS frenzy with large amounts of large space consuming ads per page)

The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg

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@graeme leggett

Maybe someone is a fan of Jamaican lager

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

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100000 feet

So, about 2.5X as high as a commercial flight tops out at. *

.. Quite a big price point when its just over another 3X in height to hit (generally agreed definition) of space itself

*Yes, I know with the far greater height & the large viewing area (thats hopefully cleaner and less abraded than a commercial plane window) it will be a significantly better view than from a standard flight, but if I had a spare $125K I don't think I would be blowing it on this Branson balloon trip - not even a weightlessness experience** thrown in..

** If someone wanted that weightlessness experience then the cheapest (the cattle class equivalent booked well in advance) vomit comet booking is around $10K

Oh, what a feeling: Toyota building robots that get better with practice

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Not sure about the robots of the night learning thing - the improving with practice is all well and good, but could be a bit unpleasant for the first few people it trains on!

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

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Re: Public opinion?

@Dom 3

"I buy bottled water for my coffee machine (else it dies in six months)."

You could try descaling your coffee machine.

I live in a very hard water area (the nearby peak district is scenic, but limestone rich)

I just give the coffee machine periodic empty runs with citric acid dissolved in water (way cheaper to buy that in bulk than to get proprietary descaler products, & you can get it in food standard quality, but do need to ensure machine thoroughly rinsed through a few times after as, food standard or not, you don't want a high acid content drink!)

Descaling periodically can be a PITA, but it avoids the plastics issue of using lots of bottled water...and occasional descaling always useful to keep the machine internals healthy even if your water is not super hard as buildup just takes longer to kill your machine in areas where water hardness is not really obvious.

tiggity Silver badge

Re: What next?

Yes, standard door sizes are a pain.

Discovered the hard way: Had to alter a lot of our house for a disabled relative to be able to use (wheelchair user) - a lot of doors were too narrow and doorways needed enlarging and new doors adding (we now have a bathroom downstairs (inc wet room style shower i.e. no barriers to wheelchair) that's fully disabled friendly)

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Re: What next?

@collinsl

Strange argument to choose remotes.

AAA batteries common in remotes because they are smaller than AA, thus the remote can be slimmer and lighter* which some users presumably like (unless its manufacturers just looking to save costs)

Maybe I do not watch enough TV / twiddle with remote enough**, but AAA batteries last me years (literally, its only every few years I have to change the AAA batteries) in a TV remote

* Yes, I know some remotes are needlessly massive, but there are plenty that are petite (& that is due to use of AAA use).

** Probably well below average TV consumption TBF

Keir Starmer hands ex-Darktrace boss investment minister gig

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Re: Trick

@elsergiovolador

Obv aware that lots of el reg commentards are raving brexiteers...

However, the elephant in the room for attracting investment is the huge obstacles / extra delays & costs UK now faces in trading with the EU, this makes it much less attractive than nearby countries in the EU. Starmer says he has no plans to re-join EU * so going to be an uphill struggle to make the country attractive other than allowing "investors" to pay minimal tax & let them drain the people dry (e.g. look at privatised water companies)

* Yes, I know he habitually lies, but he has not shown signs of altering on this yet

tiggity Silver badge

Re: You could be a bit more upbeat

@AC

How tech is Poppy though?

Accountant and then went on to exec positions - not sure if Poppy did any actual "proper" tech work (cant check on linked in as I do not have an account for reasons probably obvious to many el reg readers who like their privacy, & an account needed to view someone's full experience details)

Poppy will have board member level overview knowledge of some aspects of IT, but I doubt career includes anything that would qualify for "who me?" or "on call" entries

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

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Pathetic from Read

If we accept the (extremely dubious premise) that CEOs are amazingly skilled and industry savvy individuals (often overpaid inept grifters in my view) then surely Read would have done a bit of due diligence and being aware of the situation - it's not like Private Eye & Computer Weekly have not produced masses of coverage over the years.

If an employer fancies you for a job they will be often extolling the virtues of the company, and not shouting out all the potential problems.

So implies Read was not fit for purpose as CEO if he lacked the curiosity / diligence to investigate (pre job there was plenty of public data, and who knows what juicy info was available when in the CEO role)

Your average worker (I would hope so, my friends certainly do), going for interviews, for jobs paying a lot less than a CEO (but likely doing a lot more hard work) does some reading around about the company to find any possible red flags, be they financial, ethical, legal actions, whatever (varies on individual, most people would not fancy a financially unsound employer but some people happy to work for a non ethical company)

Using iPhone Mirroring at work? You might have just overshared to your boss

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Re: Doors.....and Backdoors!!

Just the apps is a major problem - e.g. if someone has various "dating" apps for non vanilla interests e.g. Grindr, Growlr, Feeld whatever. then some strait laced employers may be prejudiced due to implication of sexual interests that don't match "conventional" heterosexual monogamy, be that gay interests, kinks, ethical non monogamy, etc.

..Or they could have something actually embarrassing such as Truth Social

Game of phones: Voda-Three merger left rivals dialing for help

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Currently choice is quite illusory

Unless you are fortunate to live in an area of the UK where a decent signal can be obtained from any of the competing carriers.

Most of us live in areas where choice is limited based on whether you can get a signal from a particular provider, which often works out to a choice between only 2 providers (or in some cases, 1 provider only*). So reception (or lack of**) generally trumps value for money

* .. I'm guessing probably still some areas where FA coverage from any provider: Not sure if its improved, as this was a while ago, but there were quite a few minimally populated areas of Scotland where I could not make an "emergency" call if required when hiking as no signal on any network (fortunately I do have a personal beacon for emergencies, but most people do not!)

** Usual dismal UK govt not mandating mast sharing & full UK coverage back in the day (although TBF a small number of mast sharing agreements between providers exist), so local monopolies on reception can often occur (& generally phone user financially penalised if they roam even though they have to if their provider has zero reception in that area).

Epic judge orders Google to let rivals set up app stores

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They are not exclusive - plenty of big companies operate app stores.

..ask any Samsung galaxy owner where they get the Galaxy Store (a Samsung store) & standard Google play store.

A big beast online, Amazon do their own app store for android

Neither of those (when I last checked) have everything that is on the Play Store - the whole point of them is limited number of "curated" apps.

As I have said many times, confused why ruling went against Google as, compared to an iPhone, it is trivially easy to install apps from unofficial sources on an android.

Satellite phones are coming, but users not happy to pay much extra for the capability

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Re: Only thing I care about is emergencies

In UK you can buy personal locator beacons for alerting emergency services. Expensive to buy, but no subscription cost.

Useful if you are out and about in areas with poor phone signal (waves at swathes of Scotland), or at sea, and will work when wet unlike many a phone!

.. Only to be used in a proper emergency though!!

Mega supermarket spots stock discrepancy of tens of millions amid ERP system migration

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Re: So-poor-markets

I often do main weekly shop at Lidl, as they are cheaper than other shops (despite so called price matching - stares at Morrisons when I expensively shopped there a couple of weeks ago ) & manage to get most stuff on my shopping list (though I do go at 8AM on a Saturday morning so no chance for them to sell out of stuff, only stock issue is if they are running late on shelf filling due to late lorries!). Caveat is I know they do not stock some more obscure items, so they are never added on my "Lidl list" & so do occasionally visit other shop(s) to get those (but they are generally non food items e.g. dishwasher salt as for some odd reason nearest Lidl stopped selling that).

Advantage is I'm not too fussy (I get organic food if they have it, but its not a deal breaker when I have to get some non-organic fruit & veg).

Not bothered by brand names (e.g. the Lidl washing machine pods do an acceptable job of cleaning so it's not an issue I cannot get Persil or whatever)

I also do not buy meat, so that simplifies things, as partner veggie (on the rare occasions I do (a rare treat for me when partner away) I go to a proper butchers not a supermarket).

As we cook most meals from scratch, then any shop that sells basic veg, fruit, and various "dry" carbs (e.g. rice, pasta etc.) will do the job. Though I would prefer a bit wider range of foods & less "middle of Lidl" tat (e.g. its bound to be full of Halloween costume & similar junk this weekend)

BTW Agree on good bakery section.

tiggity Silver badge

Re: "a minor discrepancy"

@IronGut

At neither of my 2 nearest co-ops is there a security guard.

In fact very few stores, whatever the retailer, in the 2 nearest towns to me have a security guard

(none of my regular stores do, a couple I visit occasionally do, not aware of any beyond those 2 with guards ).

So maybe your assumption that every store has security guard(s) is based on your local stores but does not extrapolate to all stores around the UK.

Epic Games starts Battle Royale with Samsung, Google over app store practices

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Re: Wait a minute

I hate Epic & Google - but was confused that Epic won against Google a while ago as it is easy to sideload on typical android devices - my android* has quite a few sideloaded apps and it was not that difficult to add the apps, just a few security nags to deal with.

* Unfortunately (neither appealing!) its really a choice of Google or Apple on phones (ignoring more obscure OSes as not really an option) & android gives me more control over my device than on an iPhone

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

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Re: Just like waiting for a train.

@Hugo Rune

Though, unfortunately, quite a few stations are not on their information list (but some nice options for the stations it did have data for)

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

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Fraud

A far better target would be some of the recent billions in PPP fraud - but I doubt that will happen as they were (generally) wealthy well connected people doing it.

Public Wi-Fi operator investigating cyberattack at UK's busiest train stations

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Re: Wi-Fi

Used it indirectly. (don't trust public Wi-Fi so would not use it directly)

I had GPS turned off and was at Derby station and my android phone seemed to think I was located at a different city station on the Midland network (my guess is both Wi-Fi points had same SSID and it was based on Google slurping SSID data and location and it had non Derby location given for the SSID*)

Flicking on GPS nullified the problem & Google Maps app on phone then showed correct location..

I had Wi-Fi off, but I know Google can sneakily check Wi-Fi data in geolocation if you neglect to nobble some setting hidden away beware of the leopard style.

* Best example was a mate of mine at a Google event in UK, his location showed as the States (SF IIRC) - I'm guessing that some of the Wi-Fi kit Google brought over had been deployed in USA previously (or they use same SSID in multiple locations - again it was an android phone making me think it's using Google database of SSID and location)

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

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Dodgy wording in the articel

"the tracking is effectively done within Firefox itself and handed over anonymously to an aggregation service, which can give advertisers the information they need without compromising a user's privacy."

I would argue that "they need" should be changed to "they want".

Advertisers do not "need" anything (other than nuking from orbit)

A look under the hood of the 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi powered 'suicide pod'

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Re: sounds complicated

An acquaintance of mine (didn't really know him well enough to call him a friend, knew his partner a lot better than him) was a keen outdoors man, used to lead groups on hiking / walking / camping tours.

He was diagnosed with early stages dementia.

After a few years when it had reached level where he was no longer able to lead trips, he went out camping on his own and committed suicide.

In his explanatory note he had left, he mentioned there being no way to guarantee being put out of his misery when his condition got really bad & he did not want to be alive in that state so was ending it while he was still capable of doing so. I'm sure there are others who have done / will do similar.

Samsung and pals Hyundai, Kia team for software-defined cars, IoT integration

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Glad to have dumb appliances

Really hope I can still get basic appliances in the future, I have no need for anything other than manual control of devices. I can already do the things I need from the "dumb" manual dashboards e.g. I could set washing machine to start at a certain time of day (useful when I moved location & was on an default electricity tariff where cost varied at different times of day, until I was able to change tariff (it was a UK economy 7 thing & even if you ran lots of stuff overnight the eye watering day time mark-up meant just "constant use" items such as fridge, freezer, kettle etc. ended up being so expensive any night time savings were consumed )).

I do not need a camera to see inside my oven - the door has a "window" that lets me do that (& if anything was burning the smell would alert me anyway).

.. TBF I have decades of cooking experience, so I can see that someone with no clue of cooking, just starting out, might be reassured by a camera (though if you cannot cope with looking through a window then there's something a bit odd & you can usually open the door for a look (with the exception of certain baking activities where opening door early can cause chaos - soufflé the classic example, but lots of cakes also )).

Given some of the aggressive chemicals / scrubbing involved in cleaning an oven, would be interested to know how well the camera copes long term (in addition to temperature range it would also have to cope with)

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

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Re: Actually the Good book says ,,,

Decades ago I lived in St. Andres (Scotland)

An American guy was looking at the inscription in the stone arch* over the entrance to one of the university quadrangles, which read

"IN PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM"

I could see he was a bit puzzled, but eventually announced triumphantly to wife & kid who were with him

"It means the principal has the last word"

I thought it a bad mistake as the USA prides itself on being a mega Christian / bible loving nation (he was a white American, so I'm guessing he would have claimed to be a Christian)

I guessed he was there for the golf rather than the culture.

Even worse, there was an additional hint as from his angle, could see the sign on the nearest building read "faculty of divinity"

* An old university, predates US independence by over 350 years, hence the stone building material on that old part of the uni.

Iran's cyber-goons emailed stolen Trump info to Team Biden – which ignored them

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Re: A Big Yawn

A document on Vance & awkward / controversial things he had said - only 200 pages? Must have been a small excerpt (though I'm not from USA so admittedly may have a different view on awkward / controversial)

No way? Big Tech's 'lucrative surveillance' of everyone is terrible for privacy, freedom

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Discord

Slightly echoing the article.

I actually use Discord (unlike a lot of "social media", which I avoid as much as possible) for chats on a couple of gaming channels relating to online games I play.

There are no ads (a reason I can tolerate using it - it's all based on enough people paying for certain things (all optional, it is totally possible to use Discord without ever paying anything, which is the case for most users))

So would definitely be interested to know what data harvesting / abuse they are doing*

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

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Inappropriate insults

Calling out the boss for an affair with a colleague is arguably not an inappropriate insult.

Assuming colleague was beneath the boss (pun intended) then there's a power imbalance in the relationship, which is not a good thing in itself

But with the boss being married, calling out the boss for cheating on his wife is more an act of courage than an inappropriate insult if you take the (reasonable to many people) view that someone cheating on their partner is a bad thing.

Probably not ideal for customers to be exposed to withering blasts of honesty, but within a company its a shame so many people are afraid to say what they really think about things (for fear of losing their jobs) leading to all sorts of bad practices becoming embedded in company actions.

.. Though have to say it's absolutely stupid to make last minute untested changes.

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

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Hamas never had a chance to sign, they (narrowly) won the legislative election of Palestine in 2006, so who knows, they may have signed if history allowed them the chance.

Obviously this could not be allowed* so banned Hamas from elections (Abbas (of Fatah) had won the 2005 presidential election & used presidential decree to ban Hamas (& some other parties))

* Too many politicians liking the idea of minimal opposition so when a chance came to exclude political opponents via essentially dictatorial legislation it was always going to be used.

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Re: If an Icom IC-V82

And what's really depressing is how many human rights violations we are seeing from the IDF in Palestine when all foreign media are being banned* (& local Palestinian press are being deliberately targeted) so it's actually very difficult for much reportage to leave Palestine (though a lot also revealed by everyday people (not press) via social media, despite IDF best efforts to cut off Palestinians from the internet)

* and major free speech loving democracies** such as USA, UK etc. have been quite happy to not have a press presence / independent reporting in Palestine, not the merest complaint from them, not sure about USA but UK media mainly just parrots Israel press releases, and even those which are normally not totally slavish of the government line have been dire e.g. Channel 4 News (normally the least likely to roll over for Govt messaging of the UK TV news shows ) began the intro to the pager killings / maiming with the punning line "Israel calling" ***

** there may be a hint of sarcasm here

*** London Calling a famous song by UK band the Clash

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

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Re: Where do IBM make their money

Plus they earn a nice cash flow from patents (via licencing & odd bit of legislation for anything potentially infringing) as they have a vast number of patents (& we have a stupid situation that the most vaguely worded and totally obvious patents are allowed and enforced so quite easy to find infringements that (IMHO) really ae not)

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

tiggity Silver badge

Re: Alternative view: make languages better

@AC

"why are we writing repetitive blocks of code? Why do they exist at all?"

Lots of examples.

A classic would be data validation

Whether its the very simple stuff, e.g. you have a property* that is a "string", you may decorate the definition with max, min allowed length as a trivial example (and similar "repetitive" code for the other properties in that class)

More complex, done in code validation can be repetitive

e.g. address validation - does it have a "postcode" (zipcode for US) - if so does the format match the postcode rules of the country that address is declared for, if it does, is there at least 1 further item of address info (sufficient to allow unique id) to go along with the postcode (in the case of a country where a postcode can apply to multiple properties i.e. non unique id such as in UK)

Data validation code is repetitive and tedious, but a classic example of why repetitive code blocks do happen (and dull but important code as you really don't want to let e.g. too long data get all the way to database & then have to ripple back a SQL overflow error to end user when it's something you can catch early & means the underlying DB (or whatever storage used) does not dictate data rules)

* feel free to change terminology for whatever programming language you want to imagine, I have tried to use fairly common OO language terms & data type.

The end is in sight for Windows 10, but Microsoft keeps pushing out fixes

tiggity Silver badge

@Irongut

"How long is your refresh cycle if you think that necessitates purchasing new hardware?"

For home use (as opposed to work kit, refresh cycle & OS of that employer determined), I try and use hardware until it dies or is no longer fit for purpose* as I do not see the point in junking kit that can still be used. If you do not do activities on a PC that tend to need latest & greatest kit (such as PC gaming) then an old PC is fine for most mundane home computing tasks

* Win 10 PC not capable of installing win 11 does not stop machine being fit for purpose IMHO as people can install run non MS OSes easily enough (or choose to still use win 10 when out of support if they feel like it)

HPE CEO: 'Best interest of shareholders' to pursue $4B damages from Lynch estate

tiggity Silver badge

@Bonzo_red

Hopefully he did not arrange his finances to avoid inheritance tax.

As a UK tax payer, who does not dodge paying tax* billionaires should be paying their fair share not paying pennies due to accounting sleight of hand.

* none of this "tax efficient" approach from me

23andMe settles class-action breach lawsuit for $30 million

tiggity Silver badge

Re: Not much, innit?

Indeed

made a mockery of the line "fair, reasonable and adequate"

Transport for London confirms 5,000 users' bank data exposed, pulls large chunks of IT infra offline

tiggity Silver badge

Re: 17 year old arrested for the hack?

@tip pc

If it was a 17 year old then being traced not that unlikely (IMHO) - breaking in is the exciting thing, covering your tracks far less of an adrenaline rush, & its far easier for people to find out exploits online than it is to find really good* advice on how to act stealthily.

.. Plus you are assuming best practices & well patched systems, often not the case even in large organisations.

And never forget the human factor, be it shoulder surfing usernames / passwords, finding them written down, phishing emails to get creds, helpdesk social engineering approach etc. Depending on teh creds you get it might be a key to the lowliest door & a long slog to work up from there, or it may be at or near to keys to the kingdom level**.

* Lots of fairly poor advice out there about how to cover your tracks

** Never under estimate the likelihood of those high up in an org to be at least as easily duped as those nearer the bottom in creds phishing attacks. Plus theres some quite good tooling out there to genearte convincing speech based on voice samples of an individual so an attacker can plausibly sound like a CEO, CFO etc (the hard part may be getting the voice sample to begin with, depending on the "visibility" of the target e.g. lots of video clips of many CEOs as part of a CEO job is public facing speeches etc.)

Feds pull plug on domains linked to import of Chinese gun conversion devices

tiggity Silver badge

Titanic deckchair rearrangements

Given the US is so awash with guns, a few kits to convert semi automatics to automatics is a drop in the ocean. Especially when there's plenty of instructions out there on how to do it *

* I'm not in US, but dabbled with 3D printing a while ago & whilst browsing through 3D printing content that people had posted online looking for interesting projects, I could not help notice a lot was gun related (I'm from a place with quite strict gun laws, UK, so gun content really seemed odd)

Australia’s government spent the week boxing Big Tech

tiggity Silver badge

"That admission didn't go down well. Even so, the fact that scraping Australians' content was made possible by privacy laws that are less strong than those in the EU meant Meta was able to emerge without looking entirely villainous."

No, Meta still villains.

To use a well known phrase, just because they could does not mean they should.