Posts by gobaskof

Ubuntu 20.10 goes full Raspberry Pi, from desktop to micro clouds: Full fat desktop on a Pi is usable

Re: why or how

Well yes, but sometime you don't want a full container just to run a program, with a different version of some libraries. These app bundles seem to be being more of a thing and they are ok for rapidly changing packages that are always out of date on the standard PPAs. I know people who would much rather build AppImages than Debs and they seem to be more portable.

Every snap I have seen however seems to be an unmitigated disaster. They break when they try to talk to external programs, they break when they try to access a file on an SD card. You look on a forum and technically this is not snap's fault, it is the devs, they needed to set some option do it with this command.

The thing is. Where does snap fit? AppImages are not managed, but they are simple, you download them and they run. Apt packages can have dependency hell, but if you get in installed it always seems to run. Snap seems to sit halfway between the two in philosophy, but a million miles away in execution. Harder for devs to make, less portable, and seem to always go wrong.

Why on earth did they try to invent the wheel. If they wanted a new distribution channel that was open and free of dependency hell, why did they not look at a way to curate and install AppImages? But no, they wanted to make a killer app that was owned by them. It may prove to be a killer app. It has killed my enthusiasm for Ubuntu. I am looking for a snap-free place to jump ship.

Like a good defragging? The latest Dev Channel Windows 10 might be for you

Re: Do M$ even have in-house testers these days?

I think they have one guy doing all their testing. I have heard he is always super busy. I think someone says his name is Jenkins? Poor bloke. Doesn't ever sleep.

India floats superior ship-management software as a route to regional relevance

Re: Reinventing the wheel

There also comes the point of sovereign capability. Something that is fundamentally important to your countries economy but is controlled externally is a significant risk. What happens if your shipping infrastructure controlled by the software of a US company, but then the US imposes sanctions on you over a trade disagreement? In house may cost more up front, but control has value.

Here's the new build, Insiders... wait for it... wait for it... Is it Windows 10X's upcoming ... Oh. You can change refresh rate of the display

Re: Windows Calculator

BODMAS is a convention for written mathematics. At the point where you get a cheap calculator that shows you the "current answer" every time you ender the next operator it is totally ambiguous what it should do because that "current answer" should never have been calculated.

It is fantastic to be smug and say that people who think that way are wrong, but if your goal is to create a tool that works for people then you have also failed. I don't have a good answer except that simple calculators are like excel. They do a job, but most people use them incorrectly and get funky answers they trust.

If you are programming or doing analytical mathematics BODMAS is fine. If you are using a simple calculator, be explicit with brackets. I teach some maths to first year undergrads in our degree. First thing I do is make them do a big ish sum on the calculator and many get it wrong.

I think it is time we taught people to be overly explicit and careful when calculating. Rather than to be smug about being "technically correct" while quoting an anagram of a convention.

Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth

I think the key point is that you CAN import from elsewhere

I think with the way that large tech companies are putting up the walls around their gardens, it is a breath of fresh air to hear that it was possible to import your preferred maps into the Microsoft flight simulator. Yes it is not what Microsoft wanted to advertise their maps, but the fact that the option was there improves my opinion of them very slightly. Over the past few years I have moved from hatred to dislike for Microsoft, carry on like this I may move to ambivalence.

Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history

Re: Idiot

Seems like he went to a lot of effort to keep his sophisticated tax dodge under wraps. He is forgetting the simpler trick of becoming president and then lying incoherently whenever tax is mentioned.

Re: One is not cognizant of the details of the US justice system

Well there has to be an entry for each dollar on a new excel row. How else would you do it?

Microsoft will adopt Google Chrome's controversial Manifest V3 in Edge

Re: PI Hole

"I am perfectly happy for a site to serve me 1st party ads, as long as they don't track me to other sites."

The thing with an ad-supported internet was it was abused. First party ads are theoretically no worse than a magazine having some ads. Oh God, why is it a video, now there is sound, it just changed size and moved the content, ahh it is an in-page popup now. It is this hellscape that made AdBlockers take off. Perhaps things have got better, I haven't turned mine off in years.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!

Dear Al Fazed,

Thank you for replying to "my" comedy sketch with an incredible spittle-flecked rant. It shows passion.

How about we come to a middle ground agreement? Instead of killing Apache Open Office, perhaps we rename the project "Alf's Angry Orrifice". We can add new features like RANDOM CAPITALISATION, and unnecessary ....... extended ...... ellipses?

Yours trollfully

Gobaskof

THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!

Apache: No no it's not dead, it's, it's restin'! Remarkable project, the OpenOffice, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

TDF: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.

Apache: Nononono, no, no! It's resting!

TDF: All right then, if it's restin', I'll wake it up! 'Ello, Mister OpenOffice! I've got a lovely fresh merge request for you if you show...

(Apache hits the server)

Apache: There, it moved!

TDF: No, it didn't, that was you hitting the server!

....

TDF: It's not loadin'! It's passed on! This project is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, It rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to your brand it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's typesetting processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, It's shuffled off it's mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!

Shots fired! WordPress's Matt claims Jamstack's marketing is 'not intellectually honest' in debate with Netlify's Matt

For many small websites Wordpress is a PITA. If I want a small group homepage with 3-10 pages, with content that is updated once a year. The content is just pictures and html, why on earth would I want to run (or pay someone to run) a database and a mysql server just to send across what is essentially static content.

When you get to regularly updated blogs that want to use the comment features etc then maybe. But so often I see wordpress used for static small business websites. The key thing that wordpress has that something like Jekyll does not, is an easy way for "normal" people to edit a page, and publish a change. I much prefer editing a few markdown files while locally serving jekyll. When ready, commit and push to GitLab and wait for the CI script to publish it. I find this perfect, but I am not normal. A WYSIWYG editor and a friendly hosting service is required if you want a larger portion of the market to use it.

Guess whose app store claims to champion 'choice, fairness and innovation'. It's Microsoft's, funnily enough

Of course they have better policies, they have no leverage

Microsoft can't turn windows into an app-store-only-walled-garden OS because their major selling point to many businesses is that all of your legacy software will work. This way the only way the store can succeed is if devs gain by moving into it rather than using any other way of distributing. It is not championing fairness and innovation, it is not even polishing a turd. It is at best a promise not to levy a toll on using the turd.

It is pretty convenient for them to decide that phones are more like PCs than they are like consoles, so Xbox is not unfair but iOS/Android is. Walled gardens are an excellent way to maximise profit and control. The reason Windows/MacOS are not the locked-down, add-filled OSes of phones is not because of benevolence and a lust for fairness. It is because making the OS that way served their purpose 20-30 years ago, and people will get angry if that is taken away. This is slowly changing with Catalina pretending to block every unsigned application, and windows squeezing in adverts.

As Smug-Linux-User™, I am largely spared the horrible attempts to lock things down. However, unless I try to deGoogle an Android my only smartphone choices are a Google or an Apple monopoly. perversely the easiest phone to deGoogle is a pixel. I make do using F-droid apps where I can. That is an app store that cares about fairness.

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: 'spreadsheet software as "human middleware" in the sector'

It is true in so many places. You even see some universities teaching Physics students to do complex data analysis in it simply because some old incompetent fart that teaches the course has never learned to program.

It has now got to the point where if I see a spreadsheet used at all I have a instant angry reaction. Occasionally I then have to apologise when I see that what is being done are simple accounts, something that a spreadsheet was actually designed for.

GitHub users speak their brains on Microsoft's open-source efforts: ASP.NET shines, but WPF is 'a disaster'

"That said, Microsoft is more than capable of managing open-source projects and its Visual Studio Code repository is, according to GitHub's report, the project with the most contributors across the entirety of GitHub."

Yes, but also no. Something like an code editor is about the easiest thing to get contributions on. First all of your users by definition are programmers, secondly the ramifications of a change are not that deep to other peoples applications. VS Code may be well run. However, running a projects for a piece of software where you accept lots of fun features (like a new dark theme, syntax highlighting, or a whizzy widget to count something), is very different from running project for a library that is core to numerous developers programs. For this you really need far more of a deep conversation to happen about the ramifications of the changes.

Even I have had patches accepted into a code editor (Syntax highlighting definition for Kate), no one in their right mind would accept my code into an important system library. Simple contributor numbers is not a good metric to assess open-source management.

Yet another twist for 2020: Google says Android 12 will make it easier to install alternative app stores

Updated to 10? I just checked, I am still on 7.0 :(

Microsoft muscles in on the comms API space to compete with Twilio and AWS Chime

The world doesn't need another incompatible way to do chat. We need a convergence so that every device doesn't need 45 chat apps, and 10 video conferencing apps.

We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

Re: Financial software - Money extraction

The same features "turned off in software" model is becoming common for scientific equipment. I know people who use software cracks to change the bandwidth of oscilloscopes. The worst time was when we bought a $20k Lock-in amplifier because we borrowed one and it was great, turned out the two features we needed were additional extras which cost us about $8k each. $16k later they sent us a sodding unlock code, if we had a whole bunch more money kicking around there was so much more that box could do.

Bold move for a time when the source was always available. You might get away with it in the time where everything is a shipped as a binary. Of course now there are plenty of business models for rent-seeking.

Your anti-phishing test emails may be too easy to spot. NIST has a training tool for that

Pot Kettle Black

I used to work at NIST. I once got an email asking for loads of personal details for (I think) a weather warning system. The email was signed by NIST personnel, but sent from an external account. BAM! I sent it to the phishing alert email. I got a very snarky response telling me that NIST had contracted this company to help with the warnings, as such emails will come from them and that I should have given them my details by now. I protested and said that these "legitimate" emails that look like a phishing scam train everyone to do the wrong thing (and I assume others did too). Then never responded to me directly instead they sent a NIST-wide email around to confirm that we were meant to click on the link, and complained about those who were wasting time by claiming it might be a phishing scam...

Great research happens at NIST, but many of the people who run the IT services there are painfully incompetent.

Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V

Re: @Lars - Note

> Anybody is free to pay for Linux but nobody does.

Quick someone tell IBM! Maybe they can find a way get a refund on RedHat now that this shocking, new, and totally accurate information came to light!

'Work is an activity not a place' got tired on LinkedIn about three months ago, but Citrix just based its new logo on the idea

Re: Rebranding, an explensive way to rearange deck chairs?

True, but if you survey says no one has heard of you or recognises your logo (that is less than a decade old), perhaps you need a new strategy not a new logo? Maybe you could invest in better promotion of your charity activities, or invest in your actual charitable mission?

Rebranding, an explensive way to rearange deck chairs?

Maybe I am cynical (I am) but changing logos to represent the brand changing is simply an expensive way to burn money. I am not talking about when companies update their logos because they look 20 years out of date. I am talking about these bold strategy ones. I volunteer for a small charity group which is owned by a larger (useless) charity the Canal and River Trust. CRT are the privatised version of British Waterways, but they were privatised into a charity, and most of the higher ups are a bunch of suits that give less than half a crap about canals. CRT were sad that no one recognised their logo or knew who they were. They decided it was a clearly because their logo wasn't snazzy enough and spent an insane amount of money on a new one, replacing all of the uniforms and signs to have the new one. There are things we have needed for years which we still may never see. But the 6 month old signs? They had to go.

I suppose at least businesses have the money to throw and these rebranding exercises. The sad thing is suited numbskulls that move into Charities to help them run their business bring these "innovations" with them.

Mark Shuttleworth to revive Ubuntu Community Council after body shrinks to single member – Mark Shuttleworth

Re: Oh how the mighty have fallen...

I agree there are still a few things where the Linux support is only Ubuntu. I run Kubuntu for this reason but I am seriously researching a way out.

The biggest issue for me is that sometime I apt install something and it is a snap. I am not against the bloat of a snap, as dependency hell in apt can be a headache. But snap seems to be a piss-poor half-baked AppImage. Every snap I have had has had issues doing simple things like accessing USB drives or other programs on the computer. Yes there are a bunch of commands I can run to fix this, but it is a retrograde in usability and it will drive "normal" people away.

Lets hope the normal people find a new linux distro, and don't go back to Windows. Because if they do we will loose some of the gains we have made in companies supporting linux desktops.

Unity was a total hellscape and they finally dropped it, maybe they will drop snap too. Or make it not shit?

Microsoft: We're getting rid of Flash by the end of the year - except you can still use it

Please install Flash so you can learn not to.

When I worked at the NIST I needed to install Flash to watch a mandatory IT training video which recommended against installing Flash. I not sure there is a better metaphor for the disconnect between NISTs security research/policy recommendations and the clueless numpties implementing the policies.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: Perhaps

Phone instant.

Email a few hours to a few days, with mounting apologies for any days past 3.

SMS I tend to totally ignore, choose phone or email.

I try to avoid WhatsApp for work, but if you do any work in Africa then WhatsApp is the de facto method of business communication. So WhatsApp=Email if you are African, and WhatsApp=SMS if you are not.

Under fire for 30% cut, Apple really isn't giving anything away with introduction of subscription offer codes

Re: Apple has also informed its developers ...

$2 trillion will buy you a lot of lawyers that will say otherwise.

Tech industry might have weathered the storm so far, but challenges will be felt from next year, Unit4 boss warns

Well if Unit4 are as good at predictions as they are at UI then this will be a load of crap. The only thing I like about Agresso is that it is only a couple of letters from Aggressor, which I feel is it's true purpose.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Re: Where's the IT content?

Some companies, such as where I work, will turn off IMAP on their exchange servers so if you are on Linux you can only use outlook webmail as a client*.

* Well you can use DavMail, and whatever you want. DavMail has finally stopped accepting every calendar request!

Burn baby burn, plastic inferno! Infosec researchers turn 3D printers into self-immolating suicide machines

Re: Not really new

I regularly run prints for well over a day. I go out, I go to sleep. As said above, decent printers have thermal runaway detection in the firmware. Besides when it goes bad and embeds the head in plastic the plastic does not set fire, you just end up cocooning the olson block in plastic, annoying to remove (best avoided with a silicone sock).

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

I suppose you could require the copyright assignment before you accept a merge?

I wonder how much more participation Nano and other GNU projects would be if they moved to a more friendly source code manager or bug tracker rather than Savannah. Maybe it is a generational thing, but I find making a branch and then a pull request far simpler than trying to submit patches. I got into a right mess the first patch I sent to KDE (phabricator not savannah, but similar interface) when I was asked for a changes and sent a second patch to the fist patch (apparently not Kosher), finally got something through and someone else applied the patch and so I am not even in the Git history :(

I am not suggesting GitHub. I assume they have an issue with GitLab CE (which Gnome have moved to and KDE are starting to)? A Gitea clone?

Butterfingers who don't bother with phone cases, rejoice: New Gorilla Glass 'Victus' tipped to survive 6ft drops

Re: Is dropping your phone common?

All these people who have never smashed their phone? I have smashed phone by, doping it out of coat pocket and it landing on the point of a flint stone, dropping a phone on a marble floor; coming off a climbing wall awkwardly and falling 3 meters heel first onto my own phone; having something fly up my sleeve while I was on the phone and gesturing wildly to scare it but was drunk and ended up flinging my phone down a hill...and others.

I have now had a crazy ruggedised, waterproofed, tank-phone for about 14 months and the screen is intact. The protective bezel is smashed from when I dropped it down a flight of concrete steps, and the glued back is coming off from when it got left out in the sun in Africa (wedged back in with some extra long torx screws into the case with large washers holding on the back plate).

I am not normal. I get that. I try to protect my phones, but life keeps happening to them. I salute the engineering effort that goes into making a device "me-proof".

Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is 'beyond utterly broken'

Re: "Slapping a "Personal Edition" label on a product implies..."

Thank @doublelayer for defending my honour, perhaps in future for the benefit of LDS I should write my posts in the following manner:

<fact>Open source/FOSS licencing guarantees the freedom to use, adapt, and distribute the software for any field of endeavour.</fact><opinion>Slapping a "Personal Edition" label on a product implies you can only use it for personal use,</opinion><fact>which would be against the license. It is technically legal. </fact><opinion>But it is wrong and misleading and should not be allowed for the same reason that </opinion><fact>you can't put a sign saying "Private land" at the entrance to a gate to a right of way. </fact><opinion>You are implying a lack of freedom.</opinion>

Meeks was promised he would inherit the earth. Will whining get him there?

Open source/FOSS licencing guarantees the freedom to use, adapt, and distribute the software for any field of endeavour. Slapping a "Personal Edition" label on a product implies you can only use it for personal use, which would be against the license. It is technically legal. But it is wrong and misleading and should not be allowed for the same reason that you can't put a sign saying "Private land" at the entrance to a gate to a right of way. You are implying a lack of freedom.

Open source companies need funding to survive. Yet, notice Red Hat has Fedora, not "Red Hat Personal Linux". You can get the message across that one is tailored and supported for enterprise use while another is not without implying a different licence or implying it is cripple-ware.

Companies come of all sizes. I run a 2 man, part time business, we don't pay for LO. We are not parasites on the open community as Meeks would have people believe. We sell Open Source hardware powered by open software that we design ourselves. Everything from invoices to POs is done through LaTeX and our own code. We use LO once a year to prepare accounts. Being an active part of the open source community I am not going to make Meeks make me feel bad for not paying him to do my accounts once a year. I owe far move to the OpenSCAD devs, Linux devs, Python Devs, KDE devs. Part of a flourishing Open Source ecosystem is that we support financially or in kind the projects that we need most. Sod it, we are such a small business I could do my books on paper!

Yes, big businesses should pay. But crying about moral obligation won't get Meeks anywhere. Enterprises have a moral obligation to pay taxes but instead they pay people to find legal loopholes to avoid it. By slapping an Personal Edition sticker onto LO he puts off small businesses without a legal departments, this hurts LO's market share. Large corporations are used to finding ways not to pay and will be able to read the rules. If Meeks wants his company to secure contracts then he needs to sell his support as a product that is needed rather than whine on about moral obligations.

This whining approach damages LO; damages his companies message; and damages his credibility.

Capita's bespoke British Army recruiting IT cost military 25k applicants after switch-on

Re: Why haven't we banned Capita

Banning Craptia would be a good idea.

I have never dealt with UK government procurement, but I experienced the US government version when I was over there. I once wanted to spend $70k on some custom fabricated parts, but the time the bid had passed through procurement I hardly recognised it was my bid as they dress it up in so much legal speak. In the end after a many month delay it was awarded to someone who made us something that was sub standard, after a further long argument we got a slight discount. Woot $60k for something worthless, but I suppose their money goes on the team that can understand the bid documents and tick all the boxes in the response.

Companies like Crapita specialise in hoop jumping for procurement bids. Nothing much else matters.

We told you remote working is quite good, says Citrix as its numbers head higher

$11k saving a year? Seems high. Are they assuming hot desking? The report cites a website (https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/), but the page it cited does not have that number. I wonder how much digging it would take find out how that was calculated.

As a side note Global Workplace Analytics have gone for the bold design of white text on white background with a light grey drop shadow, so we know they are an innovative company. (Correction, it is white text on an autoplay video my browser blocked... still innovate)

Only EU can help us, pleads Slack as it slings competition complaint against Microsoft Teams

Re: Slackbot is the worst

> Teams is exactly the same! Each time I need to collaborate with a vendor they add me to their ‘Teams’ instance as a guest.

Agreed, we run a network collaboration on teams and everyone outside our organisation is a second class citizen on it. A lot of people are setting up WhatsApp groups. The whole ChatApp landscape seems to be companies competing to be the worst. And the business ones seem to be very confused by the concept of collaborations.

I still hate slack more.

Re: Slack... pricing is a problem

Not a chance I would pay £5.25 for slack, however for some collaborations I am in I would seriously consider paying someone £5.25 of my own personal money for us to move off slack to anything where I can silence all the god-damn bots.

Getting an email to go view a direct message that is just Clippy-for-Slack wasting your time. Either turn all email notification off, or expect to git harassed by any Bot that someone install into the hellscape that is Slack.

Slackbot is the worst

The fact that instant messaging platforms wont talk to each other is the problem here. Email or telephone, give your details and use what you want. Messaging becomes the eternal Slack/Teams/WhatsApp/Riot/Telegram/Facebook-messenger/etc/etc debate.

We use Teams at work. It is frustrating, and sort of bad (why are there so many ways to start a meeting? why can't people find it, is it in the calendar, or the team, or the chat?).

Slack, however is an abomination. Every new collaboration that adds you to a slack needs a new account. You end up with 45 accounts, and end up in a perpetual war trying to turn slack bot off in every single slack instance. Then someone adds a Google calendar integration to slack and you can't turn it off without deleting it for everyone, so you get a daily personal message from a google calendars bot telling you that your calendar is empty because you don't use google Calendar.

Teams is annoying, but I would rather use a sodding carrier pigeon the have to join another Slack instance. Sue Microsoft, but the result should be that all IM platforms should make a protocol so they work together, preferably a protocol that is incompatible with the very concept of that Clippy-for-Slack stupid bot.

From Accompli to Microsoft to Google: G Suite chief Javier Soltero chases the 'complete collaborative experience'

"...like Outlook gets your mail by IMAP but you can't get your contact and calendar information lined up. You do an invite for a phone call and it loads in the wrong calendar, I see so many problems with every customer of mine that has G Suite."

Both are at fault. Use open standard protocol rather than making your own partially compatible stuff. If only Microsoft and Google were on some of the web-standards committees, they could invent a modern mail protocol that handles contacts and calendars better than CalDAV and CardDAV, and we could all use whatever service we want.

960 LinkedIn employees will be let go... If only there was some kind of 'social network for suits' to assist job hunts

Yeah that's the plan. I just need to go to the post office to understand how many stamps get a letter to Ireland. Turns out spamming every standard term like

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail] - (don't tell me what to do)

[e-mail]

etc

was not a success.

Slightly related gripe:

Linkedin are the most difficult organisation to contact. If you have never had an account but want them to stop emailing you and to delete any data they somehow hold on you you literally cannot contact them (or I am crap at DuckDuckGo/Google). Any method listed to contact them requires an account, which requires giving them data, which is the exact opposite of what I want to do.

Keep it Together, Microsoft: New mode for vid-chat app Teams reminds everyone why Zoom rules the roost

Teams does have a Linux app. Work has gone almost entirely MS teams now so I have the app. On the surface it works. But over time the CPU just ramps up and up and up until it is maxed out. The more active teams is the faster it ramps up. The also keep adding features to the Windows version that are not in the Linux version. The most annoying part of that is all the garden variety smug bastards making sarcastic comments about how you should swap operating system, because monopolistic behaviour is to be rewarded.

Teams also seems to be totally unaware that people collaborate in teams that are outside their host institution. Probably because MS hate working with others.

The worst thing about teams is that there are about 5 ways to join a meeting. From a team, from calling someone, from a link, from the calendar in teams, from a chat. This means the start of every meeting you have to find which subset of ways to joining the meeting will work.

Jit.si works fine until there are 15 or so people on the call. Then I swallow my pride and use Zoom.

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

Re: "Personal Edition"

Libre Edition is a good idea. They can then have

LibreOffice Libre Edition

and

LibreOffice Non-Libre Edition

at least this is honest.

If they say that is for personal use only they may need to change the project name to "The software formerly known as LibreOffice".

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

Stores might suck, proprietary protocols are the real killer

Store monopolies are frustrating (much more so for a dev), but I find it far less sickening than purposefully incompatible services and protocols.

Exchange server tried to only work with through their own protocol limiting access to our favourite email clients. Even now they support IMAP, some institutions refuse to enable it (my university IT team claim IMAP is not GDPR compliant!! so they can't turn it on).

Worse than email servers are all the messaging apps. No one would accept a phone that only calls people on the same network provider, or an email account at only emails accounts on the same domain. So why the hell do we accept that WhatsApp/Teams/Slack/Skype/Hangouts/Facebook-Messenger all can't talk to each other. Same for video calls.

Store policies suck, but I have F-Droid on my phone and I run Linux and as a consumer I avoid most of this pain. But if a collaboration is on slack, or my university holds meetings on teams, or a conference sets up a WhatsApp, etc. This is where I can't avoid proprietary services and still do my job, and for what? Sending sodding text messages back and forward. It is not a Monopoly problem per se. There are loads of the bastards, but companies like Microsoft are able to abuse their monopoly on say office products to funnel universities/schools onto their application. I would take no change in the "app store" world the world could agree on an instant messaging/group messaging protocol, and a voice/video protocol (and all the big players actually use it.)

Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled

" you can interact with the big G anywhere at any time, so pervasively that you do not notice it."

As a physicist I would argue that this has always been true for interacting with big G. You don't don't notice it, until you fall over.

Unlucky for some, GitLab 13.0 is DevSecOps in a box, but will it play nicely with others?

Code coverage/defects view for master is not in ultimate/gold nor graphs over time. The only thing is the diff on merge requests. These features are on the GitLab roadmap. I collect the json artefact and have a script that renders the information I need to review the code.

I do my daily work on GitLab, one of my groups has a Gold license through the OSS scheme, the others are on standard GitLab. I can't stand GitHub when I go back to it now for the couple of projects that I contribute to on there, the UI just seems so weird and clunky.

Google+ replacement ‘Currents’ to end beta and debut in G Suite on July 6th

Re: Another artificial need

"Right here, on my desktop, my collection of business emails spans the last 20 years of my life. Easily searchable and accessible, even without the net."

My work have "fixed" this by disabling IMAP so that Linux users are expected to use the outlook web client. The is only accessible online and the search sucks. It is a truly modern experience.

Got $50k spare? Then you can crack SHA-1 – so OpenSSH is deprecating flawed hashing algo in a 'near-future release'

I used to work at NIST, which famously does a lot of security research and advised SHA-1 be disallowed. However, the IT teams inside NIST were often total dogshit, there was a lot of SHA-1 floating around on internal sites. In 2016 they started providing a new VDI service which allowed Linux users like me to access Windows on the occasions that we needed. The service was given a new SHA-1 cert. When I was unable to connect due to security policy the IT team happily gave me instructions on how to turn off disallowing SHA-1.

The only way forward is to just remove support!