Posts by JamesWRW

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

Re: Does 11 years actually mean 11 years?

No parole in the US Federal system. The best she gets is one sixth off for good behaviour, so a touch over nine years.

Graphical desktop system X Window just turned 38

Re: What I like about X

It didn't quite make it across. They replaced went from PostScript based to PDF based in the move from NeXT to macOS. As well as being simpler and more suited to the present day it happily avoided paying Adobe any money as PDF was an open standard.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/49846861

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Re: Aliases-Questions

Samuel Clemens knew a thing or two about aliases.

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

Re: Steve Jobs

Well, there was the iTunes 2 installer which nuked volumes with names starting with a space back in 2001.

Mumsnet data leak: Moaning parents could see other users' privates after cloud migration

Re: Dangerous

@mumsnet_madness on Twitter, avi is a bottle of Gordons, ventures forth so you don't have to. A good recent one was a mum shocked to discover that her cat's fish based food contained fish, and said fish had heads and eyes.

OpenBSD 6.0 lands

There's always the Windows Linux subsystem.

* runs *

Dropbox gets all up in your kernel with Project Infinite. Cue uproar

Re: Why kernel driver?

This is what they want to do on OS X too. It seem that Windows has a userspace means of achieving this, but OS X requires a kext. The way to allow/deny filesystem actions on OS X is via kauth. Guess what the 'k' stands for.

I've written a kauth kext. You have a minimal kext that says I'm interested in filesystem actions a/b/c. You get notified when interesting stuff happens and your kext should then inform your userspace component that stuff is happening. The userspace component does the donkey work and lets the kext know whether to allow or deny.

The kext undoubtedly adds a potential source of panics, but the kext should be absolutely minimal: get notification, tell userspace, get response, allow/deny.