Re: NerdRageQuit
Exactly, any idiot would surely know that you should write a script to go off a few years AFTER you were chucked out. :D
Posts by DuncanLarge
1026 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2017
Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system
UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images
Tuesday 5th December 2023 12:02 GMT
Re: Hasty UEFI, not vetted properly, with weaknesses
> Did you ever try to repair a computer with a messed up SSD or hard drive, plus UEFI and BitLocker?
YES oh god dont remind me!
I had a machine that was not bitlockered but HAD been using Intel fake raid, which all got messed up with macrium reflect images not supporting Intel fake raid and the users also messing up the machine thus requiring me to restore an untested image to the machine rather than having them sort out the driver issues they created.
Ended up with a totally borked UEFI and windows boot config. Took me most of a day to sort out as windows recovery environment as usual was totally inept and useless, guides on the web on how to regenerate the windows boot config on the "newly and manually created in Linux EFI partition" all didnt work as they only worked for specific versions of windows.
It was a bloody mess of browser tabs and lost of reading and failures. I was very nostalgic about the good old MBR days, with a boot loaded installed in the first sector of a drive or partition.
My home systesm still use that.
On paper UEFI looks great, but thats on paper. The paper is not what was implemented by far.
Tuesday 5th December 2023 11:36 GMT
> If an attacker can get a file into the EFI partition then you've got more problems than dodgy image processing by UEFI.
Thats totally trivial. It's a R/W FAT32 partition. If you are lucky something software based in the OS may try to monitor or write protect it but a user merely has to run something as admin to let code modify anything anywhere on a HDD.
It's one of the reasons why I'm against UEFI, it should ALL be in ROM. We have big ROMs these days, why is an unreliable partition needed?
Small but mighty, 9Front's 'Humanbiologics' is here for the truly curious
Friday 1st December 2023 15:36 GMT
Re: Applications
> using it as your main OS not readily viable (unless you remote into a doze or Linux box and use that for web based activities
I've started reducing my "web centric" lifestyle to something more like what I grew up with in the 90's. I'm fed up of the "hyper-web brain fudge" I have during my free time where every action or query I get/do seems to involve me jumping onto the net and getting distracted, not to mention the fact that when I do put the net down it constantly reaches out to me with notifications. I used to use dialup when I was a kid, or browse at school. There were clearly defined boundaries of online and offline.
Thus I have "offline time" on saturday mornings where anything that uses TCP/IP is left where it sits and I spend the morning watching good old live TV or something off a DVD, while reading a paper magazine during ad breaks. I'm quite enjoying catching episodes of Lovejoy or Minder.
But I also have started putting together machines running internet incapable OS's such as DOS/Win 3.1 partly to much about with old games and software but also to be a distraction free environment for doing "offline computing" as I call it. I have need for a win98 machine also for other software, particularly to run old CDROM/DVD encyclopaedias. I'm trying to retrain myself to check my encyclopaedias and other books for information, before using the web. If I'm going to keep buying "these books" then I suppose I better use them dammit, but like everyone else I'm trained like a monkey to pull out the phone or tablet and google or go direct to Wikipedia and ignore its citations (or lack of) as well as not checking what it said about the subject yesterday (does anyone actually think to check that the article hasn’t been vandalised I wonder).
I have a ton of offline only machines ranging from C64's and Acorn Electrons to the aforementioned Win98 box. I want to go back to using the web *when it is actually needed* and as a resource, not a lifestyle choice.
So Plan9 not having a browser that handles Web 2.0 or whatever it’s called these days is no big deal really. I might have fun learning to write a Gopher client instead.
Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts
Thursday 19th October 2023 15:04 GMT
Re: Capacity
As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's my parents house had storage heating and it was controlled by a time-switch.
Smart meters handle economy 7 and 10 just fine. They are SMART meters, they just need to support multiple rates.
Nobody uses the "radio signal", unless its a very old system. They use a time switch or the smart meter. All the meter does is log how much leccy is used overnight separately to the daytime use. Thats it. Two readings. Smart meters thus support storage heaters that switch on due to a timer, anything that draws power overnight is counted as the reduced rate.
ITS HOW PEOPLE CHARGE EV's AT HOME TOO!!!
Thursday 19th October 2023 14:43 GMT
Re: Capacity
> need a coat of sealant
Which would require planning permission, signing off and several £000's of bills.
That's why nobody bothers. Even if you get a grant to install insulation it's going to cost you time and money, in a cost of living crisis and with todays time poor society most dont have the time to sit at home for a few days while someone installs the stuff.
They may be able to work from home, but instead of the cat jumping in front of the webcam you now have the builders bum in the background :D
DIY? Well maybe, but these days you are soon to be legally unable to change a light bulb without getting it signed off or installed by a sparky. It wont be long before putting a ladder up into the attic to install new insulation will also be something that only naughty people do as, you havnt been trained to use a ladder, and dont have the PPE.
Thursday 19th October 2023 13:17 GMT
Re: Electricity for heat pumps
> wishful thinking
Yep, it will never happen, well not in our lifetimes.
Even if they manage to fuse stuff, Thunderfoot on youtube debunked the whole fusion thing when he pointed out a big flaw that once I realised I had missed it I was convinced fusion couldn't happen.
The problem is the engineering of the plant itself. Once we manage fusion, well you have to actually design a reactor that can make it work. What nobody bothers thinking about is all the fusion waste.
Fusion waste?
Yes, those particles don't disappear into another dimension in the reactor, no they fuse together into harmless and useless junk crap. You have to devise a way to clean them all out of the reactor because when they get created they will stop further fusion.
So the process would be:
1. Fill the reactor with fuel
2. Fuse it and draw off the energy. Fusion now becomes impossible due to interfering waste.
3. Clean out all the superheated waste.
4. Re-establish the conditions for fusion again.
5. GOTO 1
Everyone is still working on getting 2 working and nobody has any answers for steps 3 and 4. It will be a very long time before anyone builds anything but a demo plant.
Thursday 19th October 2023 13:03 GMT
Back to the old days
As a kid I grew up on a house that had storage heaters.
I remember the mornings being warm, the afternoon being "meh" and the evenings being cold.
At the time I was used to it, I was also used to wiping up the huge amounts of condensation on the windows every morning. Double glazing did reduce that a little.
Then I moved to my own house, which had central heating. First time I ever saw anything like that! Then the parents installed a CH system replacing the storage heaters.
So, 10 years after moving in and having a new boiler installed some wacky gov plan to replace the whole lot for heat pumps takes the biscuit. In a country that has no tradition of even installing AC, installing heat pumps is a very expensive and specialist operation. In the US you can practically DIY your own install using cheap second hand gear of cheap new gear aimed at an already saturated and competitive market. All a HP is is a reversible AC unit after all.
Apart from not being able to afford the luxury price of a HP install (which would set me back £15,000 and have the house ripped and stripped apart to install the pipework etc), it also turns out I, like many terraced houses, simply cant have one fitted!
Rules on distance between the pump and next door restrict my option to not having one installed. Too close to next door, thus too noisy. And yes they make a racket, one house across the road from me has one and even though there is a whole road width between me and it, I can hear it running. Just imagine all houses having one, the additive noise would be new and greatly noticeable.
So I cant afford one. I cant have one installed legally, maybe that will change and the g'ment will tell everyone to clam up and put up with the noise.
Options...
Storage heaters again. And of course, a return to wearing seasonally appropriate clothing indoors, no more t-shirts indoors in January. Wollen jumpers, like the good old days!
But I'm running the boiler till they switch off the gas.
China updates national computing plan with calls for more edge, storage, memory, and … Blu-ray?
Monday 9th October 2023 14:23 GMT
ODA
> Maybe it's time to think again about Blu-ray?
Maybe they are looking to make their own version of ODA?
You have to archive to something, either LTO tape, ODA or Bluray. There is nothing else at this time.
RDX doesn't count it's a HDD buffed up to survive a drop.
Also, in a modern IT environment you have to have read only options. Not all secure data is allowed on re-writable media where I work. Plenty of customers are still asking for 50GB or more of data burned onto DVD single layer, simply because it's R/O.
I'm trying to let them know that dual layer exists and if they invest on a USB bluray drive we can send them one disc instead.
Free software pioneer Richard Stallman is battling cancer
Tuesday 3rd October 2023 14:52 GMT
Re: Not so fast
> He was the figurehead of the free aspect, but open source was coming anyway
No it wasn’t. If you read up on the history RMS was basically the LAST person left in the Free Software community who wasn’t a total sell out making big bucks.
The culture existed for decades before it was named Free Software, which RMS did as it finally needed a name to make people realise that it had existed.
Open Source only came about because of the pushing of Free Software ideas into unixy places as GNU was being built. This attracted new faces and invigorated old ones, now all nostalgic about the old days of hacking. But they had much business acumen and were much less strict about hypocrisy than Stallman, so they happily created Open Source as their own rebranding. They wanted the Free Software feeling, without the politics but with all the popularity as well as a massive chance to have a dig at Microsoft.
> I don't see any reason why Linux would not have succeeded with a BSD-style licence, for example.
Again, you have no clue what the history is. You think linux would work in a BSD world? Well, where is the rest of the OS? Linux only worked because GNU wanted a kernel. No GNU, no Linux. Torvalds would have still wanted to improve Minix so Linux would still have gotten going but without GNU to be the OS around it Linux today would essentially be like Haiku, an interesting development OS that is coming along bit by bit.
BSD licenses are way more annoying that the GPL. The GPL is the dominant license for a reason. BSD licenses are just a way to allow people to be nice to people who want to be dicks to others further down the line.
Even today the BSD's are the odd ones out, just about known about and used. Why would FreeBSD do any better with Linux? It already had a brilliant kernel, yet has largely stated where it always has been.
Without Stallman, GNU, FSF and the GPL there would be no Linux as you know it. BSD's will be odd OS's you find in scientific circles and universities. There would be no ODF, no Tivo (remeber that one?) no software defined radio, no Raspberry Pi. All there would be is Microsoft and proprietary software and formats.
Imagine where you were back in the 90's with computers. What software were you using? What were you upgrading to? Now imagine you never got that free Redhad CDROM in your Gateway PC box...
BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year
Tuesday 19th September 2023 14:57 GMT
Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?
Exactly!
I'm hapily an Android user but I use older handsets. I wont have 5G for a long while yet, I have so many spare 4G handsets to use up.
I also have 3G only spares, now consiged to the bin. What a waste.
I'd love a physical keyboard, Blackberries are great for that. Many times I've found a touchscreen just too limiting. I'm a bit fed up of the constant upgrade cycle we are all forced into whether it be mobile handsets or network standards. So many 3G/2G embedded devices are out there doing "smart" things that we expect in out connected world. Now they will be disconnected, mothballed, adding costs to replace them if they ever are replaced.
2G reaches almost everywhere. 3G more so than 4G. 4G fails to deliver bytes when an area is congested and as I found recently when driving across the UK 4G barely exists along the main roads!
Take a train from Bedford to London. A large part between Luton and London is almost a total not spot even for 2G. These network upgrades are peddled as the best thing since sliced bread, in the same way as the previous network generation was, yet it simply doesnt work. People laugh at me when I talk about payphones and land lines, heck even CB radio, but on a simple train trip or a drive from Bedford to Bristol I feel vindicated.
Perhaps we should mandate that 5G is the LAST netowrk upgrade for, say 20 years and it must have 100% UK coverage, every household and every B road? Then maybe we will enter the world of mobiles. Till then I'll keep my landline and CB radio. The CB gets use from hobbists mostly but they are there. Unlkine the mobile networks.
Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here
Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies
Thursday 17th August 2023 10:22 GMT
Re: and the booby prize is ...
> However, that doesn't make them illegal.
True but it does make them imoral, unjust. Such laws may as well be treated as if if they are illegal so that a precedent can be set against them.
Anglo Saxon common law allows this, laws are created by the people and the courts and juries help to maintain that and deal out justice. Part of that maintenance is setting a precendet, where old or outdated laws or immoral laws are essentially mothballed even though they strictly are still in force. The UK has loads of such laws, that although we all break many of them every day, they will never be enforced. Some laws can also be repealed in this system, such as the laws against homosexuality in the UK.
As an example, nobody, no individual, in the UK who made a copy of a cassette tape or CD for a mate will ever find themselves hauled into court and convicted of taht crime. The court would simply not bother and crucially the police wont bother. This created a precedent that although you shouldt do it, the spirit of the law said that it didnt matter if you did as long as you were not clearly abusing it, such as making hundreds of copies and selling them in a car park.
But if a little 7 year old girl shares a single mp3, as happened in the US, well they come down on her and her grandmother like a ton of bricks and demand MILLIONS in damages. You really are on their side?
They said "home taping is killing music": We continued to tape as and when we liked, they couldnt touch us but in some places they could tax us.
They tried to kill the VCR: We won there too.
They make colour laser printers embed codes into the print so they can prove you copied something.
They will never change, they dont get it and they should reform or go on there merry way and die as a business.
Thursday 17th August 2023 10:04 GMT
> Yes, that is limited
It's not limited when you can just extend it by 20 years every 20 years.
Have you not been following the forever copyright we are no in?
What about the stuff that enters the public domain, only to be re-copyrighted a couple of years later and extracted from the public domain?
Everything published should be freely shared after a limted time that expires within the lifetimes of the people alive when it was published. Well the majority of them. Thus copyright should be 10 years from the DATE of publication, with a possible extension granted by a court for a further 10 years if a business case can be presented showing the work is still in heavy use. After that it enters the public domain.
Many authors will probably think even 10 years is too long. I know of one that wanted nothing more than 5 years. Why? Because it ISNT THE AUTHORS WHO OWN THE COPYRIGHT. Turns out that the publishers actually have the copyright, not the author, thus the author loses all control and that particular author was struggling in court to try and get his work back after it was no longer profitable because he wanted to let everyone share it freely as a self promotion attempt!
Some musicians in a similar position managed to create an album totally independantly from the record label who, again, holds the copyrights. They self promoted it and offered it to the public, their fans, relying on word of mouth. You could download it for FREE or at a price you think is fair. They found they were swimming in profit, money that they had NEVER seen when signed with a label. Most payed the suggested price some more and that was with plenty of free downloads having happened.
There are other record labels like Magnatune who also give 50% of all proceeds to the artists while allowing the public to choose the amount they want to pay. There is zero DRM and you are free to re-encode, burn CD's and they wont care if you let your mates listen, in fact they say that you can give the donload link to a mate or two! If you wish to use the work in your youtube videos etc you merely just buy a commercial use license which grants you all rights to use the works in your videos, the cost of the license is certgainly not cheap and it certainly ait expensive either! It also lasts FOREVER.
But our copyright system is manipulated and controlled by a bunch of plutocrats addicted to profit over everything, they care nothing about the rights of the little people, which copyright was supposed to protect by constantly feeding the public domain. They even train us as kids to "not be a pirate" etc, basically undiong the natural insticnt to be a nice person who shares with others, undoing the training we all got to be just like that when we were 2 years old and our parents told us we must learn to share. The public domain is FOR US. The commons is FOR US. Copyright protects the health of the commons but the holders have twisted the whole thing against us so that WE OURSELVES even think that it is a terrible shame something enters the public domain.
Authors etc are supposed to work to better the commons, copyright grants a limited monopoly on the work entering the commons. AUthors are supposed to keep producing new works, FOR US and the commons because they can not sit in a chair and ride the profits from merely a handful of works. While the rest of society must work till retirement, it's only fair authors and artists should do so as well, but they want to write a few books, and then sit in a chair getting fat while we labour constantly. Their descendants can sit in a chair and never get a job (ever seen About a Boy, the main character never worked in his life). It is certainly nice to think your kids can enjoy some of the profits of your work after you die suddenly, but I think that should just give them a boost, like savings for college etc, not an income for life, they should learn to work themselves!
So life + 50/70/90 years depending on country is an abomination. An insult against decency and the public good. The public domain is aneamic and practically dead and we have been trained to not step in with the defib machine. We are prevented from sharing using todays technology using DRM, which I bet will not self destruct itself upon the copyright of the "protected" work expiring, am I right? We are taught first to share, then we are taught that sharing is piracy, ooh aaah shiver me timbers. They confuse different laws into one simple "law" so that nob ody can talk about it properly, they call it IP law. A brilliant weapon, now it's possible to conflate copyright and patents and trademarks in the same sentence!
If we cant regain control and reform copyright we may as well break it.
Thursday 17th August 2023 09:27 GMT
Re: And term of life+ cannot achieve the aim of promoting arts and sciences
Exactly!
Koowledge is lost, certainly when considering the sciences. If nobody publishes or uses the work after the authors death then you may have up to 80 years before anyone can see it, by which time it is a coin toss that someone will come across it, in a readable form.
Archives are highly important and the Internet Archive relies on submissions from the general public and funding from the general public and it's hard do do that if the general public can not see what you have and have little chance to use it.
The IA have barely scratched the surface, scanning books for example (I will conceded that it should be out of print books, anything currently in priont is probably safe for the time being) is very important, as well as keeping the printed copies in circulation in a second hand market as well as in libraries such as the British Library, but there is way too much out there never digitised or put online. People like me collect and hoard such stuff and thats great, but if I dont provide access to it...
Copyright was bolstered into the terrible thing it is today because of a greedy company extending it beyond anything sane, by not having a "if you dont publish it you lose it clause", and by a few rich Authors who actually do make money off their works. The UK copyright system was due for a MASSIVE overhaul, we would have gotten a whole new debate on it which would include the idea that we have computers and networks now so NEED to be able to share more freely amongst ourselves. But a few famous Authors, like Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) reacted to the chance of fairer copyright by campaining against it in favor of keeping stuff out of the publics hand:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/19/government-pauses-plans-to-rewrite-uk-copyright-laws-after-authors-protest
All because they wanted to earn royalties after they are long dead. I say that you should have copyright expire after 50 years, or shorter, with one extension granted if you can prove that you are publishing a new edition in the country that the copyright applies.
Wednesday 16th August 2023 15:30 GMT
Re: Quite sad that the internet has been corrupted.
The natural state of human culture is to share. Who doesnt drill into their toddlers the idea of sharing toys or sweets?
Along come a few so wish to hoard the riches of the many.
And we keep letting them...
Many of us even sympathise with them. I had fruitles discussions with collegues 20 years ago about the onset of DRM and they simply couldnt get why it wasnt a good thing that they were prevented from moving a track or selling something secondhand. They thought that they should be milked for money and shackled year after year.
It was like they would teach their future kids to share their toys whilst fitting the shackles to them for the publishing companies.
It was then I realised I'm rich having a public domain and free sharing of information. RMS was right, I was listening to everything he said. Aaron Schwartz and others saying similar things. I learned what kind of person I am in society and I live in a dystopian world, like a dystopian scifi come true.
Wednesday 16th August 2023 15:23 GMT
Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc
> The fact of IP law
There is no such law. IP: Itelectual Property, is a made up term designed to create confusion across many disparate and entirely differnet laws.
They bare no relation to each other. Copyright is to Patents as a Car is to a Cloud. The only simularity is they are both laws, and in the case of my example, both exist on this planet. In all other regards they are dissimilar.
The very same publishers that are killing the public domain and attacking the IA created the idea of IP, so that we would confuse everything. Dont use their language and correct anyone who does.
Otherwise tell people they need to change the tires on their cloud for winter.
Wednesday 16th August 2023 15:04 GMT
What the f did I just read?
"Defendants attempt to defend their wholesale theft of generations of music under the guise of 'preservation and research,' but this is a smokescreen: their activities far exceed those limited purposes," the complaint contends. "Internet Archive unabashedly seeks to provide free and unlimited access to music for everyone, regardless of copyright."
Did I read that correctly?
My god they dont even try to hide their greed and corruption. These are 78's, many are in the public domain and those that are not probabbly should be. These megacorps try to say that they own the stuff forever and dont even hide it?
Are they re-releasing all this music then? On 78's? On CD? How many teens are likley to stream much of that stuff?
They will never stop, they are all for perpetual copyright and the killing of the Public Domain. They train us since childhood to be good little consumers, twisting the reality of the original intent that was copyright; that of providing new works into PUBLIC ownership in exchange for a limited monopoly for a time.
I hope the IA wind this one, we need to start re-defining the whole industry. These copyright dinosaurs should adapt to our new system, which we will create, or retire on their already fatly lined pockets. The artitst barely get a penny while the publishers own the work, many artists want copyright reform, some want it tgo be less than 10 years since publication and nothing regarding since their death.
Resist, download the lot from the IA and copy it far and wide. Lets see how they deal with that.
Yes, turns out RMS was right!
More people should read "Snow Crash".
Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup
Friday 4th August 2023 14:54 GMT
Re: Of course, hibernation predates systemd (been around a long time in Linux)
> In today's SSD flash (don't write needlessly) world
Todays SSD's have lifetimes and wearlevelling abilities that make that detail a thing of the past. It is very unlikely you will ever wear out an SSD, like lightning you never write to the same place twice (well you eventually will).
Thus re-ebable swap! The computer architecture we use is based on virtual memory, swap is part of the design. Yes you can turn it off technically but its not really a goot idea.
Friday 4th August 2023 13:53 GMT
> I shut my desktop down daily when I've finished using it, then reboot it the next day. Saves on the electricity when I'm not using it.
You seem confused about the difference between a shutdown and a reboot.
Shutdown = the system powers everything off, all processes teminated. Note EVERYTING POWERS OFF
Reboot = The system remains powered ON but terminates all processes, signals to hardware to rest itself and reloads the OS from scratch.
You dont shutdown then reboot, such a thing is impossible. You have to be booted and running first before you can reboot, and when you do reboot nothing is powered off.
This systemd change makes that process a tiny bit faster for some reason.
> but why leave your desktop powered up if it's not doing anything
Who says it is powered up? It may be in a sleep state or hibernated.
Friday 4th August 2023 13:15 GMT
In all my years using GNU/Linux (since around 1998) I have never edited an init script.
I have at times created my own, which worked quite well.
I have manually renamed them to adjust the boot process, again no issues there and an interface I like.
I've never had to edit them although I have read a couple to assist with debugging some software issues.
Friday 4th August 2023 13:05 GMT
I've put it off way too long.
Time to finally jump ship. No SYSV init support? unit files in strange places like /usr/lib?? Soft reboots? Off I go.
Regarding Fast Startup, this is not a "fast reboot" but a non-shutdown. It stops windows from shutting down fully, shutdown no longer exists, but a reboot in windows is still a full reboot. Its what we (as in my many IT positions and companies over the years) switch off. We noticed that updates were not getting installed all of a sudden only to discover this stupid feature in windows where a shutdown is no longer anything like a shutdown.
We suddenly found that no windows updates were installing, for weeks. Why? Well two reasons. There was the usual users who never shitdown and just sleep the laptops all the time, they we have to remind manually to reboot. And then there was the rest, who dutifully would shutdown the laptop or pc at the end of the day as IT tell them to.
Only the ones who rebooted got any updates. Fast Startup kills shutdown, it is more of a hibernate, in fact I was confused why it was there in the first place as hibernate is basically the same. In a Fast Startup enabled shutdown some parts of windows is shutdown, others are hibernated, particually the elements oif windows that typically take ages to boot when you boot. It actually makes a massive difference when booting off HDD, which is a nasty thing to do these days with windows 10 so bloated and inefficient. But it also prevents most windows updates installing.
Thus users were weeks out of date. Instead of re-educating users to reboot THEN shutdown, we simply used GPO to turn off Fast Startup. Of course MS turned it back on again after certain updates!
This soft reboot feature is something different, it affects reboots and not shutdowns. I can see it having some use, butreally its pedantic to try and shave off a few milliseconds of full boot time just because you updated a few things apart from the kernel. But tahts why systemD was created, because some laptop user wanted to have his laptop boot faster.
I'm off to Devuan anyway, or maybe Debian with another init. Binary logfiles were the last straw and now Debian has got rid of text logfiles, well I just cant see why they are so insane. Lol they claimed "it would stop writing to the filesystem twice", as the binary logs are written followed by the text ones. Thing is for years the binary logs have been stored in a ramdisk...
Yes I know I can turn them back on. What I want is sensible defaults, not an OS that I have to add loads of fixes to and config to just to get it working the sane way.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
