Posts by doublelayer

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build now incorporates your credit card information into Windows

If they did that, I think you'd actually just see a lot more use of Apple devices and Chromebooks, not lots of people switching to Linux. You're also just not going to see that. The predictions that Microsoft will conveniently do something to completely destroy their market are unlikely and usually wishful thinking from those people who hate anything Microsoft does, including but not limited to their stupid things.

Microsoft would love everyone to use a virtual desktop in Azure for home machines. They also have more than two brain cells and know that's never going to happen. It's a viable product for businesses who want to scale machines or who do in fact have a BYOD policy, but it's not going to go down well with hardware manufacturers who are told to build dumb terminals, nor with customers who would immediately find a good way to break the dumb terminals. Suggesting that Microsoft will do something like that as the only option, rather than as a business-focused feature that they're happy for you to also buy, is akin to suggesting that they'll just give up on having Windows and update all their customers to your favorite alternative. You might like it if they did, but it's not going to happen, and for more than ideological reasons.

BOFH: The Boss has a new watch – move readiness to DEFCON 2

Re: Problems in search of solutions

Since I'm not official IT, I get to skip the part where you're supposed to use stuff for a problem they don't solve and you probably didn't have and skip straight to the part where a bunch of disused junk ends up delivered to a place near me and I'm allowed to cannibalize it for systems of my own. Sure, it's also likely not to be solving any real problem with me, but it wasn't before and I'm at least having fun with it. The ewaste doesn't look good though.

The Metaverse is the internet no one wants

Re: Call me old fashioned

I think the online world concept you mention probably ends up looking a lot like the metaverse concept:

> open mailbox

The mailbox cannot be opened.

> x mailbox

The small mailbox is a metal box with a door.

> unlock mailbox

The mailbox has no lock.

> check mail

I don't understand that sentence?

> read mail

You don't have any mail. Maybe check the mailbox?

> look in mailbox

The mailbox cannot be opened.

> use mailbox

To use an item, use a specific verb.

> hit mailbox with hammer

Nothing happens.

> hit author of text adventure with hammer

I'm not sure what your policy on blocking ads is. I know that I had The Register allowlisted for a while because I valued them so much, but if this keeps going, I'd consider removing that. I can't remember exactly why I removed them from the allowlist a while back, but the ads here are once again not getting to my screen.

Canonical displays controversial 'ad' in shell update prog

Re: Why not just do it above board?

"Would it be that much of an anathema to see a non-tracked advert for Rackspace once a day when you unlock your screen in the morning in return for them if you weren't donating?"

It wouldn't be unforgivable for them to make that decision. It's their choice to do. I would still consider that a good enough reason not to use the product. Pop-ups annoy me, sometimes a lot, and ads that were irritating or repetitive would get on my nerves quickly. It wouldn't take long until I opted out again, by whatever mechanism it took, so to avoid having to do it, I would simply not accept it in the first place. I don't mind them selling the version with added support as a commercial product, and I don't really mind them telling us about it. I also have no problem with a donation button on the download page. Each of those are limited to their own services, very optional, and thus much less annoying to me.

Re: Why not just do it above board?

I don't think this is or will become advertising. If they did start running advertising, even with the provisos you specified, I would immediately stop using Ubuntu. I donate to support things. I don't need to be shown ads to do it as well. One of the reasons I use Ubuntu among other Linux distros is that it gets out of the way and allows me convenient use of my computer, and running ad pop-ups is inimical to that goal.

"One of the first unsolicited commercial emails was sent by DEC, and no less a luminary than Richard Stallman defended them. I think we can all see how that's ended well and nobody has abused that idea since then, right?"

Or, quite possibly, Stallman was right about whatever DEC did and didn't mean that anything else was equally acceptable. Messages' acceptability isn't an all-or-nothing thing. Depending on the level of permission I've given to receive a message, I view its delivery differently. If I've signed up to an email list from a company deliberately, then I'm not surprised when they send me a message that has commercial purposes. If they do it when I bought something but didn't ask, I'm more annoyed. If they do it and I haven't interacted with them, I'm a lot more annoyed, but there can still be exceptions and variations.

In this case, I don't think it's a good thing, but it's a function of a program that people choose to run and don't have to. Lots of programs have such modes. For example, if I use Pip to install a Python package, it will check whether it is up to date, and if not, it will recommend I update it after it does what I've asked. I didn't ask for that behavior, but I also didn't object enough to it that I acted to disable the behavior. That's not the same as mandatory advertising brought in from others, and this false equivalence doesn't help make the point. We get that a lot and we know how different they are, so it doesn't prove that this part is bad.

America, use Bitcoin instead of old-school money? Not likely, says Fed

Well there's a surprise

And here was I thinking the U.S. was about to hop on the Bitcoin as legal tender train. It just makes so much sense.

Nobody is going to do that in reality. The U.S. had a long time on the gold standard, and they left it for many reasons. The second-to-last thing they want to do is to start doing that again (and the rest of the world doesn't want that either). The last thing they want to do is get back on the gold standard with a commodity even harder to deal with, and Bitcoin is a perfect example of that. Countries like having control of their currencies for many reasons, both good and bad, and they're not about to give that up unless they have to.

AI recruitment software is 'automated pseudoscience', Cambridge study finds

Re: tools are likely trained to look for attributes associated with previous successful candidates

I would hope that would convince them, but from the stories others have told about other pseudoscience used in recruiting, I think increased regulation is justified here. Tests that ask questions and claim to produce useful information about a candidate are likely useless, but they're not directly as harmful. AI software that looks at a person's face and environment have already demonstrated on multiple occasions and in most if not all variations, that they are extremely prone to creating artificial stereotypes. Far from diminishing the affect of bias on recruitment, these are likely to accentuate discrimination even if the humans involved would not. The result is no longer a thing of chance, but now actively harming certain groups, which is often illegal under existing laws. That's a valid reason to regulate it under those laws.

Re: Deja vu again

All of those can be sciences. All of those and more can be done wrong, thus not scientifically. Science requires rigorous testing of hypotheses until there's some confirmation that they're likely true, and then more testing to make sure that wasn't wrong. That's equally true in chemistry or psychology. Psychology has had more people recently who decided they knew what they were talking about because they made up some theories and stated them as proven, doing it wrong. Chemistry may therefore seem harder, but there was a time when people did the same thing there, for example deciding that heat and fire were created by an invisible substance called phlogiston based on the principle that "we don't know how, and this could be possible, so therefore it is true". That was no better.

There are people in all fields who approach it that way, but you appear to dislike the entire field based on people failing to approach it scientifically. There are others who do it correctly, and you can verify whether a certain study was tested scientifically or not and reproduce the behavior if it was. Either that or you have a preexisting prejudice against some theory, but being unwilling or unable to disprove that theory using the scientific method, you are applying an incorrect stereotype to the field as a whole.

Re: Blind testing

Well, that's better than using pictures, but better than actively harmful is a low bar. All the AI will tell you (if it's properly calibrated) from a writing sample is whether you appear to have proper grammar from whatever dataset it has. It's likely to get that wrong anyway. If it was trained on only formal writing, an informal paragraph would probably be judged poorly. It could become overly focused on spelling and mark someone down for using a correctly spelled word that it doesn't know.

Also, it's not any use. The only time you need a writing sample is if you're hiring this person as a writer or in a job where there will be a lot of writing, and depending on the job, you need different writing samples. If you're hiring a journalist to write articles, a sample of an email won't tell you if they can do it. If you want a creative writer of fiction, an open source project's readme won't tell you about their skills. If you're hiring a person to write documentation, being able to understand and explain the function of a system may be more important than writing quality, because correctness and structure in the documentation is often more important than literary style.

Cost of living crisis less of problem for tech pro retirees than others

Re: The 41k sweet spot

You earn what you chose to accept for your work. If you think your employer is getting a lot from what you've done, by all means request or demand more from them and consider leaving if they won't agree with that, but just because they turn a profit doesn't mean you automatically earned more. Similarly, if they're not making money, you didn't earn less; the wages you get are yours no matter how badly they've done.

PC shipments fall at fastest rate ever as businesses slam wallets shut

Re: MS will cripple Win10

People stuck with XP when it went EOL. They stuck with 7 when it did so as well. They stuck with both when there were attacks being used against them. They'll stick with 10 too. Businesses don't update when Microsoft says it's the next best thing and everyone needs it right away.

I also expect that nobody will bother removing Windows 10 machines until 2025 rolls along. Some places will make plans for the Windows 11 peculiarities as they start to get more devices running it (just as they obtain new ones really). By 2025, many of the older machines will have been replaced due to age or damage, so they'll have some of each. Only then will anyone start considering applying the 11 update to all those machines running 10 that support it.

How do you protect your online systems? Cultivate an insider threat

Re: "because of bad actions by employees"

Now I'm wondering what you think I was saying. It could easily have been right or you could think I was agreeing with the original comment.

For the avoidance of doubt, I was saying the idea that Microsoft software is the cause of and a FOSS environment the unstoppable cure for user-caused vulnerabilities is obviously false. Microsoft has a lot to answer for, both in security and in general, but that complaint is not correct.

Re: "because of bad actions by employees"

I know. That's why I only ever use Linux. They don't have the concept of binaries or scripts so nobody could send me a malicious one. Although I've been thinking about changing to BSD because I hear they completely prevent the most clueless person from entering sensitive data on a malicious website because they've implemented RFC 3514 strictly.

Start by having a system for reports

I'm not entirely sold on this, but there's something else that will be required if you are and will be very useful if you aren't. You need a way to have people report problems to someone knowledgeable who won't attack the finder of the problem. I have two examples to demonstrate why this is necessary.

The first is from an internal hacker who discovered a vulnerability. You've probably heard the story. When Richard Feynman was working at Los Alamos, he discovered that the locks on safes containing nuclear designs weren't very good. He could open them with a paper clip. When they got higher security locks, he found that they too could be attacked too easily for comfort, and he reported it. As the story goes, the administrators decided that the new policy was not to let Feynman near safes he wasn't supposed to get into. In other words, they completely failed to recognize the severity of the vulnerability he was pointing out and were attacking the one person they could be sure wasn't going to misuse the vulnerability.

The second example is from an external hacker (me, by accident, on a system from the same company but not related to my work). I found a vulnerability in a system that allowed public access to somewhat important internal data. I knew enough to know that what I'd just seen was not supposed to be visible and that there was more where that came from. I sent an email describing the problem to the managing team. If I'd been really external, I couldn't have done that very easily either, because contacting a specific team when you're not internal is difficult (and I'd have been afraid of retaliation, so I'm not sure if I'd have done it anyway). Nobody responded. Sending more emails didn't help. The only way I got anyone to look into the problem was by knowing a friend who could introduce me to someone who worked with the team, who in turn could introduce me to someone on the team itself. Reporting a problem took a lot of effort, and had the bug been much smaller, I wouldn't have bothered reporting it.

If you ask people to find vulnerabilities or even if you don't, there needs to be a way to get reports and handle them without making the person reporting it the bad guy. If the ideas in the article sound like a good idea, don't start with them until this first step is completed, or the process will backfire when someone's found a problem and can't find anyone to fix it.

Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs

This has been discussed elsewhere in the comments, but in short, it doesn't work as well. The fan example works because it can be directly controlled from the compromised machine in a deterministic manner. The light bulb is less reliable, so the speed and error rate are even worse than the fan. However, even if you're ignoring that, the only way to control the light bulb is to send out a radio signal, so if you're already doing that, you can just use that signal directly. The fan approach works well in a very secure environment because it doesn't require the attacker to connect extra hardware to the sensitive machine or emit a signal that could be detected.

Re: Smart devices for dummies

Or alternatively, you only do point 2 and point your transmitter in a narrow beam at your receiver. You have to have a receiver nearby anyway to watch the flicker. That way, nobody can notice the flicker and investigate the problem. Also, I'm presuming that, if you don't flicker too often, the bulb doesn't factory reset, but if it doesn't flush out whatever malformed buffer is created, it could be that you just get a finite number of bits before your system stops working until someone fixes the bulb. A single transmitter won't have that problem and avoids relying on an unreliable bug and an error-prone signal receiver.

Re: Smart devices for dummies

But in order to get their computer to transmit the data, you need to have installed software (this part could be done remotely) and configured it to be able to transmit to the light bulb. The transmitter means you'll probably have to attach a USB transmitter to their laptop, but obviously that means physical access and you could do more. Even if you managed to put a transmitter somewhere where the laptop could transmit to it without requiring physical access to the laptop, you could have that send a Bluetooth signal across the street, or a different protocol (LoRa, maybe) if you want pure broadcast with no interaction from your end. You'd have throughput measured in kilobytes per second instead of bits per minute. Even if you want only a few bits of data, you could get it in a few milliseconds' burst transmission which means you're less likely to get caught or to break your system before you've retrieved what you want.

Re: We don't need no stinkin' Zigbee authentication

That's not really the bug they've got. The normal messages are authenticated, hence why someone can only cause the bulbs to malfunction. If they didn't bother with authentication, someone could take more direct control. Their real bug is in their parsing of incoming messages. Most unauthenticated messages would be dropped, but a malformed one seemingly crashes something which has affects. They need to fix their receiver system's parser, not their authentication system.

Re: Smart devices for dummies

That doesn't work well for two reasons. First, this doesn't let you flicker the light however you want. It's not an instant on/off switch. It lets you mess with the device and cause it to malfunction, but not in a deterministic way that produces clean results. If you wanted to do this, your decoding algorithm would have to filter out a lot of noise and you'd have to limit how often you sent your flicker commands, meaning you'd have a really slow baud rate for any transmission you had and you'd need that transmission to contain a lot of error correction. If the lights are on a motion sensor or people turn them off at the wall when they leave, you'd also need to accommodate for it.

Second, the way you flicker the light is to send a radio signal from the device controlling it from a close distance. If you're using that to send data, then you're sending out a signal from the machine that contains the sensitive data. To receive the signal, the receiver needs to be able to detect the light. If you can bring a radio transmitter and a receiver with a camera into the location where the sensitive data is, you can do a much better job by simply sending the data with the transmitter and replacing the camera on the receiver with a radio antenna. You wouldn't need to rely on unspecified behavior from a light bulb or to have security notice you've got a camera on you (if you can take in a camera, you might also try taking pictures of the sensitive data). If you can get the equipment where you need it in order to exploit this, you could already have gotten better equipment in there with fewer requirements.

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

Re: Excuses.....

The code's open. People will be compiling it all over the place in a matter of days. Would compiling and testing on a compromised server really do anything? I think not, but even if it would, just using a cloud machine doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. The classic reason to distrust the cloud is the provider having access to the private data, but as this is open source code, there isn't private data to be had.

I haven't researched this, but the specific codenames imply that the chips that didn't support ECC were the Zen 1 and 2 range APUs. If that's true, then it's less that AMD also carved out a set but rather that they've only added it recently. It appears that all Zen 3 or higher APUs should support it and for some reason, Zen 1-2 chips without integrated graphics do as well. Maybe they had a problem getting ECC support along with the integrated GPU when those were newer.

Before buying things based on my hypothesis, check more thoroughly than I did because I might be proving my ignorance.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Other way round

They do now (you still choose a language to start with, but you can download new languages and switch over to them). I think they didn't before because localization could end up using a lot more disk space, especially with international alphabets requiring a new set of fonts, dictionaries, etc. I have an old version of Office with some optional language packs on the disks. It indicates that one additional language uses about 50 MB, which is tiny for us now but a bit bigger when there was still a chance floppies were used to install it. When disk sizes were so restricted, I could see people who were very annoyed that they had extra language files they weren't using, which is much less a problem now.

Re: family support

Because backing up data that a nontechnical user probably didn't is totally unnecessary. Sure, if you gave me a drive with separate partitions, I might do the reinstall on it, but I'm first copying the /home data off just in case the installer messes with the partitions. In fact, while I was writing that sentence, I realized that I'd still use a clean drive just in case the person concerned concluded I broke something, so they had a copy of the broken OS files too. So in no case would I fix this problem by installing directly onto the original drive unless I had no replacements available, no matter what partitions were on it.

Re: Phone Cabling

That does seem to be the general expectation. Not that I fight it too hard, but I don't expect other people to do whatever they're good at for free. Somehow technical help (which since I'm a programmer my acquaintances think covers everything from hardware failures to data recovery to web design) is the exception to this. I'm usually happy to do it for close friends and family, but there is a fine line between my willing to be generous because I like them and people expecting that I'll do anything they want at any time.

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

Re: Explain to me how this is supposed to be better than the old way of doing things?

It isn't better than the old way. I don't like it either. Unfortunately, you've taken a bunch of true things about parts of cryptocurrency and jumbled them all together, suggesting they apply in a way they don't.

For example, some cryptocurrencies are decentralized and some are not. People choose whether they want a decentralized one without the protections (the more common and well-known kind) or one where the central authority could wreck things for them, but you write as if every cryptocurrency has both, which they don't. Similarly, some cryptocurrencies have prohibitive transaction fees, and some don't, but you've applied the famously high fees from ones like Bitcoin to every one of them. Cryptocurrencies can use a "code is law" approach or a "voting shares" approach, but in most cases, they don't use both because that breaks a lot of things. By taking a few correct ideas about cryptocurrencies in general and mixing them into a frankencurrency that has the worst of everything, your argument for why cryptocurrency is bad has numerous flaws.

Cryptocurrencies in general are risky and in many cases bad at accomplishing the goals they were intended to solve. I find it odd that, with the real problems almost all have had, there are so many people who argue against them using incorrect understandings of how they work. You don't need to look very hard to find something not to like.

Fiat money is not a new term. It's a useful distinction from mineral currency (buying something with gold or another valuable thing directly), specie currency (paper attached to minerals, usually gold, held in reserve), and other currencies (anything where someone accepts it as a value exchange for buying something or paying a debt). Since cryptocurrency isn't much good at anything else, its only value, if it has any at all, is as an alternative currency. There are people who will exchange it for things we consider valuable, indicating that it does have some monetary value. The term applies well to distinguish the different kinds of currency, even if you don't like one of the members of the group.

People are coming out of retirement due to cost-of-living crisis

Re: Not great news for youngsters

"The Middle Ages has tales about the village idiot who was unemployable but still looked after."

I wouldn't count on the middle ages having done everything in the stories. The village idiot could have managed to do basic manual labor, which is what a lot of other people were doing anyway. A lot of people at that time had no protections other than being able to ask family or friends for assistance, and I'm prepared to guess that a lot of people suffered badly from that. This is especially in contrast to developed countries today, where depending on why you're "unemployable", there are explicit programs designed to make sure that you don't just rely on family to get by. I don't have direct experience of these programs, and I won't pretend they're perfect, but compared to historical examples, they're much stronger.

Re: Sort-of inevitable

What you said doesn't really contradict what they said. Whatever the reasons for choosing to resign, whether that was not liking the job because it was boring or because they felt mistreated, they chose to retire early and had the ability to do so for the moment. The pandemic had a lot of benefits for people who wanted to leave their job, from assistance to those who were unemployed to an easy market to switch into another job. Those advantages won't last forever, and as retirees have already seen, not having a job can be more expensive than they planned.

I'm not sure the reasons people chose to resign are that relevant. People have the right to leave a job even if there's no mistreatment and they just don't like it. While there were so many companies looking for people, I know several who took advantage to find a different job, and I encourage it. That may not last much longer, though, and the amount of money the employer pays may become more important as prices rise.

Huge nonprofit hospital network suffers IT meltdown after 'security incident'

Re: Is it time?

The choice of words wouldn't really help with your goals. The actions you recommend are illegal under international law, so if you want them to happen, you need a country that's willing to ignore that (obviously, there are several who do that already). Countries who have done those things to terrorists don't do it because they're described as terrorists. They do it because they really dislike those people. Therefore, renaming the crime "terrorism" isn't going to convince those countries to change tactics, as they could do that right now no matter what the crime is called.

We already know what happens to ransomware creators when they do get caught. Earlier this week, this paper ran a story about the sentencing of one of them to twenty years in prison (it could have been forty but presumably they cooperated with investigators). That's not what you want to happen to them, perhaps, but it is quite severe. The problem is that a lot of people involved in ransomware aren't getting to that point. Either they have good opsec and the investigators failed to identify them, they hide their activities and investigators lack evidence to convict them, or they're in a location where their host won't extradite or charge them. Renaming them terrorists won't fix any of those problems, because if it could, it would have been done for a lot of different kinds of crime.

Re: Is it time?

No, I'm afraid it would not. If they knowingly process transactions for criminals now, they're already chargeable for money laundering if not accessories to the crime itself. If those criminals are terrorists, that's still what they get charged with. Crimes along the lines of "funding terrorism" apply to people who give money to those criminals, not people who take money and process it. Many of those exchanges would argue in either case that they don't know where the money came from, which wouldn't always work but might in some cases be true.

Re: Shocked, shocked I am!!!

I think a lot of large U.S. hospitals work that way. The places providing the care may be nonprofits, but that's not the same as free or charged to governments. It just means that the money collected from patients goes to a fund to continue upkeep of the facility, not to shareholders.

Re: Is it time?

It depends. What do you want that to accomplish? If we use "terrorist" as just a type of criminal that could be better or worse than a different kind, then no because the definition tends to include committing violence for a political end and neither of those happened here. If it's now to be used for criminals that cause large amounts of damage and we want to put extra energy into capturing them and terminating their activities, sure, but that's probably a different word.

I think the best approach is to have a new term for the type of criminals this contains, as overloading the word terrorism hasn't produced useful results in the past and can lead to unexpected events.

Europe lagging behind South Korea, Japan, US in 5G rollout

Re: 5G Ohhh Ahh!

You certainly don't need 5G for a 10 Mb/s connection. 4G could have and did do it. They're probably using 5G because there's more unused capacity in it and a fixed receiver is likely running on mains power so the increased power usage isn't an issue. Of course, with that speed cap, people would probably only buy this if there's poor cable service but good mobile service in a location. That speed is probably acceptable for a single user, but scaling to a larger household probably doesn't go well.

Re: 5G Ohhh Ahh!

If the cable connection is bad enough (which their multiplier suggests isn't the case for them) and that speed is consistent, that could be shared between multiple devices on the home network. Many devices using that connection simultaneously could hit that speed limit, and are much more likely to hit the limit of 4G service.

The main problem I've seen with using mobile networks as home internet is that there is usually some limitation to the data that can be used (sure, they say unlimited, but there's often a throttle threshold somewhere and it's often low enough that someone who streams a lot of video is likely to hit it frequently). If your speed gets cut after you've used a hundred gigabytes, then the excellent 5G performance won't be very helpful anymore.

Rather than take the L, Amazon sues state that dared criticize warehouse safety

Re: Who are their lawyers?

"I wonder if 3 shifts/24 hours of manual labour for a year costs more or less than the $20,000 Musk reckons his humanoid robots will cost?"

More. I found a few estimated average for Amazon's warehouse workers in the US ranging from $15.50 to $17.00. There appear to be some jobs and locations significantly exceeding these, but they didn't provide enough information to filter out higher-level supervisor jobs in the warehouses so I can't confidently use those. I know they've talked about increasing that and may have done so, but let's assume these are still accurate. In fact, let's assume these are overestimating and use a nice round $15.00 per hour.

If they have absolutely no overtime, then wages alone for a single worker-year (full-time 8 hour shifts 5 days a week) would be $31,320. Extending that to a single worker for every hour in a 24/7 setup would be $131,400. Amazon also has health insurance benefits, payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, and other expenses, so these numbers are significantly below what they have to spend.

The only problem is that a humanoid robot may not be able to do what a human can. I don't work in robotics, but I know enough people who have to watch them do a lot of work to get a robot to do something that comes very naturally to a human. If the robots are to be deployed in an environment with unplanned obstacles and for tasks without an easy deterministic answer, the robots may be incapable of reaching the efficiency of a human.

Re: Key question

The amendment concerned does not say "no US citizen can be denied due process of law". It says that no person can be denied due process of law. The distinction is relevant because corporations are considered legal persons but not citizens. The debate over exactly what the personhood definition should mean has come to include a lot of things, but it's pretty clear that one of the most basic ones is that the laws apply to corporations as they would apply to individuals. Being in a corporation shouldn't mean that you can do whatever you want or that the government can do whatever it wants to you.

Whether you implement that with a legal personhood hack, by extending the language, or (as was often done before the legal personhood system) making a link between the people owning or running a corporation and that corporation and using their rights as the corporation's rights, you'll get to the same place. Other aspects of legal personhood are not necessarily included. The last approach breaks a lot, which is why it was replaced.

Former Uber CSO convicted for covering up massive 2016 data theft

Re: A fine is it?

I don't think anyone will argue that there was terrorism involved in this hacking for money event, so I think the realistic maximum is five years. As a first offense and depending on how successful his lawyers are, he's probably not getting anything close to that.

Re: Uber. Again.

In their defense, it's more the same period, again. Uber may not be a great company now, but they were a really bad one in the mid 2010s. The fallout from that period, including this action from 2016, doesn't necessarily reflect on them today. They could theoretically have improved massively and this legal decision would still be required. I have no idea if they have improved or not.

Cyber-snoops broke into US military contractor, stole data, hid for months

Prepositional phrases in English may proceed verbs. It may not be the most typical order, but it is for most uses accepted by grammarians. Sometimes, to comply with their other rule of not putting the preposition last, this pattern ends up being more common in formal writing than informal speaking, where most rules of grammar are discarded in favor of the "it sounds right and I'm not going to complain about it" principle.

Re: Given the mentioning of two python scripts being involved, isn't the solution to disable python?

Given your mention of Cobol, I don't know if you're being serious about blocking Python, but it's an argument I've heard before from people who definitely intend to do it. It doesn't work.

Of course, blocking Python would prevent some infection. And execution of any code outside the Windows directory. And inside that directory. And in the bootloader. I can provide you perfect security in this vein using the fail-safe security tool known as a blowtorch.

If you disable every function of a computer, it becomes a lot worse for doing useful things. Maybe nobody uses Python themselves, but there are still applications written in it which disabling every copy of Python will break. That's not a realistic way to block malware because it's a lot easier for the malware writers to port their script to something else or hide their interpreter than for the average user to get around a block that prevents them from working. They clearly didn't think they needed to hide their tooling this time, and they were right, but if it turned out they needed to, that's a day's effort for one programmer and your efforts to block Python are circumvented.

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

They had ads, just not for the same thing. Ads that are only for the government don't make them better, they just make the list of people you hate for putting them up shorter. Another reason it seemed like there were fewer of them is that a lot of the places to put ads weren't available yet. There also weren't many ads on the early 1970s internet, and the Soviet communications system didn't get much more advanced than that until modern Russian internet. Admittedly, I haven't watched a lot of Soviet television, but if they operated like many of their allied countries, there are lots of interruptions from the government-approved news for even less factual stuff.

I think that the Soviets would have eagerly accepted the chance to put some propaganda message in the sky at various points in their history, assuming they had enough funding or could get some other benefit from the required research. A lot of their space activities had propaganda goals as well, so it wouldn't be out of character.

China upgrades Great Firewall to defeat censor-beating TLS tools

So, if I'm understanding your claim, you sent out a DNS packet (which doesn't identify your machine) inside China, then moved the computer outside of China, and it was blocked? There doesn't appear to be any mechanism for them to identify that computer if they wanted to block it, as the DNS packet only contains the IP address of the requester, which would have changed if you left China. Unless I'm misunderstanding your testing, I think you may have misinterpreted the results.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Re: Modern printers....

"Progress, yes, but a death knell for all the still serviceable older inkjet and laser printers once this becomes the only way to print."

It should be exactly the opposite of that. As long as the format to be printed is known, then you can just write a shim that translates that format into either a bitmap or bitstream read by those printers. That's no harder to do than the current driver, in that if they update the driver, it will do it for you, and if they don't, you have the same emulation options you would have had with the out-of--date driver. Most things can benefit from not having hardware-specific drivers if feasible, because a standards-compliant device can be made to work with almost anything.

Re: @Ian Johnston - Implicit in the article, but not explicitly stated:

If you can achieve similar results for similar effort using Gimp, that's great. If the worker doesn't think they can manage that, it makes sense that they don't want to try doing so for reasons they think are invalid. You can always fire them, but you'll probably have more problems finding people who have experience or the desire to use the tool you want if it's so niche.

Take programming. My employer could ask me to write in a number of languages and I'll accept. If I don't know the language, I can always learn it. If they tell me that our project's to be written in Apple II integer basic, though, I'm not likely to put up with that craziness just because someone issued an edict. After attempting to convince them otherwise, I'll decide whether it's worth leaving not to have to do that. They're likely to find that most developers don't want to use a tool that, while technically capable of the job, is painful and unproductive for the task at hand.

Elon Musk tells Twitter: My takeover deal is back on

Re: Talked the price down

So, if I understand your hypothesis correctly, he made the price decrease so he could buy it cheaply, then he could execute a sale at the original higher price, so he gives more of his money to himself. And because he decreased the price so much, he now gets to pay even more of that money in capital gains tax. And he bought stock through proxies to avoid it being obvious to other investors, which by the way is a crime, so he'd have to find another way to get the money he gave to himself via illegal proxies back into his bank account without tipping off either the market regulators or the tax authorities.

I think maybe he had a different set of reasons.

DoJ ‘very disappointed’ with probation sentence for Capital One hacker Paige Thompson

Good questions. I'm going to take them out of order, though.

"What exactly is the judge's role, and who are we to second guess their decision?"

The judge's role is to look at the evidence and the law and assign an appropriate sentence, keeping in mind that the law may state sentencing requirements or recommendations that limit their power. We are not only worthy of second-guessing that decision, but it is meritorious for us to do so in our role as citizens. We don't get to countermand the decision, but if we think that the sentences are consistently unethical in either direction, it's a thing that we, through our democratic processes, can change by altering the aforementioned sentencing requirements in law.

"What is justice, and what, ultimately, is the point of it? How does it relate to courts and the penal system?"

That's the larger question, and I don't have a pithy answer to it. Part of it is ensuring that new crimes are not committed, by this defendant or by others. Inadequate penalties can produce bad results, but massive deterrents aren't perfect either. Some degree of equality in justice is important as well.

Re: Whose fault is it?

I strongly advise you not to test that idea you've had. I'd like you to learn that you're wrong, but you can learn that by reading it online rather than by spending time in jail for theft.

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

Re: By the time it is standard

They've got magnetic USB-C cables. You put a small metal part into the port, connect the cable with magnets, and the two can come apart more easily. It also puts less strain on the port. You don't need USB-M for that, and it allows you to choose whether you want magnetic or more firmly connected for each device. If you don't happen to have your magnetic cable, you can still remove the connector and use a standard cable, so you have the best of both worlds. The only downside thus far is that I'm unaware of a single standard for those magnetic connectors, though some of them do orient the pins the same way. If they want, the USB consortium could design that standard, and that would help.