Posts by doublelayer

Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?

Re: Apples and oranges comparison

I think we can make a case for machine code as the most popular programming language. It can be written to be fully Turing complete, can store data, can do anything you like to that data, and is used if not written by every single programmer. It is also the most popular programming language used by people who don't write code professionally or at all, and is present on every running computer in the world. Every github project eventually turns into or relies on something else that is in the form of machine code, and all questions on stack overflow can be reduced to asking how to get machine code to produce a specific result. I hope you will agree with my analysis, which I performed after several months of tedious but, I'm sure you'll agree, tremendously vital research. I'm off to reserve a something.io address and send out my press release.

A little phishing knowledge may be a dangerous thing

Re: I'll say it again and again

I'll vote no. One unified email system, controlled by not me, where I can't decide how it runs but my government can (they never do anything I dislike)? Such a system designed specifically to not work in the situations where normal email works? Cryptography that provides security against not much unless the government's planning on releasing it? Bad idea all around, methinks.

Re: How Can You Tell Without Opening it?

When the subjects are students, they only have one mail account, that being whatever account their university gave them. When at least one of the messages says it came from the university's IT department, that is a logical address for it to be sent to. Until you open it and inspect the headers and/or the content, you do not have a reason to know it's phishing from the subject line and the text in the sender column.

Re: C'mon .. it's 2018 - where do you find students with "no knowledge of phishing" today?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if most of those who bothered to take the survey were people who knew less about the topic. Among other things, I'd typically be wary of filling out a survey for people that just sent me phishing messages, researchers though they may be.

Microsoft slips ads into Windows 10 Mail client – then U-turns so hard, it warps fabric of reality

Re: @Richard 12 - Trust is easily lost and slowly gained.

IBM may have stopped being so successful, but I don't remember anyone protesting against IBM and specifically *not* buying their stuff. They just found a better option, and went with it. Therefore, I doubt that Microsoft is going to see a ton of their corporate customers suddenly jumping ship. A few, yes. Maybe eventually all of them if the products don't work after several years. But I see no evidence of a large group of corporates getting tired of windows and removing it entirely. I see many corporates cheerfully using modern windows systems, and others still using windows 7 but without plans to move off windows when 7 becomes unsupported. I do not expect Microsoft to crash and burn.

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

Re: Apologies to those who've heard this one before

That story is one of the historical BOFH articles, namely this one:

http://bofh.bjash.com/newbofh/bofh12jun.html

OnePlus 6T: Tasteful, powerful – and much cheaper than a flagship

I don't know phones anymore

I no longer really know the differences or specs of all the different phone models that come out. Other than that most are far too expensive and include some random skin over android. Does anyone know a phone that meets the following extremely long list of requirements:

1. Costs less than $200 or so.

2. Runs a modern version of stock android or has an unlocked bootloader so I can put one on.

That's all I care about, really. I don't care about the camera (with the frequency I use it, it would be fine if it just didn't have one). I don't need a replaceable battery. A headphone socket or SD card support would be minor pluses, but not needed. I don't need any special extra hardware built in. Just a modern enough phone that does not cost as much as a fully specced-out desktop.

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Re: Soooo ....

Of course not. The pound of feathers will form an untidy heap on the scale, and feathers will start to waft away almost immediately, worse if your scale is outdoors, indoors near an air sensor, or indoors near any moving thing including humans. So a pound of lead is heavier than a pound of feathers unless you place an item of sufficient weight (about one pound) to force the feathers to stay on the scale.

Re: SI

So what if we're on a different planet. The second does not need to change lengths. Whatever you change it to, the planets' days will still not line up, because you can't find a useful (or maybe at all) GCF of the rotations of every rock you decide to put something on. So your best option is to keep using the second, minute, and hour, because then at least you can speak of durations in the same way as people on the other planets.

Maybe for convenience, you could define a rotation unit for the planet you're on to speak of time of day when discussing with people on your planet. When dealing with anything not on your planet, you will need a standard calendar where absolute dates and times could be used. I don't see a date like "2345-06-07 08:09:10 Gregorian, local time 12.0000" as in any way problematic. It tells me the absolute date, allowing me to compare in nearly zero time whether this happened before or after some other event. Meanwhile, I know this occurred at midday, assuming they decide to stick with the concept of 24 sections of a day. If they don't want to do that, how about percentages for local time? That way, a planet with a long day will work perfectly well. 0% = midnight, 50% = noon.

And the second is perfectly defined using a seemingly random number of periods, because it is equal to the second we've been working with for a long time. Why redefine the second when almost nobody is actually using cesium to measure it? The people running atomic clocks can divide, while we can continue using all the standard second-based things we've used for a long time. Meanwhile, we've already limited this to running at sea level, so we can't avoid being arbitrary. For now, convenience. For later, simple utility. One arbitrary thing that prevents inefficiency is superior to two arbitrary things that require us to switch them. That's why we should stop changing our clocks twice a year.

Re: Sad case of science ignoring the evidence

They redefined the kilogram because we already know what the kilogram is. We know this with things that can actually be calculated easily in a science lab, like a specific quantity of a substance with a known density, measured under a known pressure. That isn't infinitely measurable, so it can't be used by the SI people, but they didn't need to investigate why the kilogram chunks had different masses because they knew why and they didn't need to find the one true kilogram because they knew what a kilogram is. They just needed a math problem to give the mass of a kilogram so everyone else in labs can keep measuring mass exactly the same way.

Court doc typo 'reveals' Julian Assange may have been charged in US

Re: it may be something, may be nothing

I was thinking it could be someone being overeager with the automatic spell checker suggestions, assuming of course that Assange is a popular enough term for some spellchecker to think that's a likely term to use.

A new Raspberry Pi takes a bow with all of the speed but less of the RAM

Re: I would rather

By put to sleep, what do you want to continue running when it is sleeping? How quickly does it have to resume from sleep, and what triggers it to do that? For most available triggers, WiFi signal for example, enough of the system remains up in order to receive and decode that that there is little benefit to putting it to sleep.

Re: Just a wee little point

It is the price of the pi zero with wifi built in, which I see as this model's main competition. That lacks plenty of the features of this model, but it does offer most of the ones wanted for running headless*. The processor is slower, which would be painful if using it directly or if it has a lot to drive, but it is very low on power usage, also has built in networking, the same memory, and can use the same hardware on GPIO. If you're using something running a GUI or using a bunch of processing, you're probably going to want the 3B+ anyway for the ability to use USB accessories. Similarly if you're going to attach this as networking equipment because ethernet will probably be desirable. For me, all use cases where I don't want either of these will be decided in the zero's favor because it is smaller and requires less power to run. Those can be critical.

*headless use of pi zero: set up the environment on something else so you can have a more convenient experience, then enable SSH and move the card over.

Re: This is good.

I, to provide the other side, am happy that the power decision was 5V over USB. This allows me to power it from batteries designed for phone use, which you can buy for quite cheaply and which are easy for nontechnical people to use. I can therefore carry all the pieces needed to run the pi in a small container, rather than having to solder a battery power system together. I'll grant that, in a situation where space is very constrained, a smaller 3.3V battery would be preferable, but I don't think that is very frequent. The main reason is that the raspberry pi, as great as it is on most fronts, simply does not run very long on a battery. Even the zero will run for only a day or two on a large battery*. For devices to be placed in a situation without any power, usually much more time will be needed. The small batteries that are easily shoved into a small space will not provide enough lifetime for an independent** system.

*Large in the sense of a USB battery for phone usage. There are some really big ones that will run a pi zero for a week or more.

**There would be advantages for some projects in having a pi run on battery for a period measured in months. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.

Super Micro chief bean counter: Bloomberg's 'unwarranted hardware hacking article' has slowed our server sales

Re: it all comes down to size

Actually, do discount something when evidence is lacking. Don't discount it all the way down to zero, but "because it is possible" is not enough to believe something. It is possible that I run a group of people who break into peoples' homes, yours earlier today, and insert malware onto any computers found there. We are very good at getting through locks without leaving a trace, and our malware hides in the firmware where you can't easily find it. Prove that didn't happen. That is not a good enough argument. I believe this story to be unlikely. The things stated are feasible, but with the lack of substantiation from external sources or release of evidence, I believe it to be less likely.

Re: I give SuperMicro the benefit of the doubt.

What action do you need to make you doubt the story? If your only reason for believing it's true is that all Amazon, Apple, and SuperMicro have done is to get grumpy and deny it, I don't know how far they can go. Do they need to sue to convince you? I don't know for sure, but I would believe the companies without some additional evidence. The chip seems borderline feasible, but I don't tend to believe things at that level of feasibility without evidence in the form of named sources, external confirmation, or ideally physical evidence.

Up to three million kids' GPS watches can be tracked by parents... and any miscreant: Flaws spill pick-and-choose catalog for perverts

Re: To any children reading this

You could do the same thing better with a phone in the sense that you'd have a location tracker and an effective means of communication. The part I have a problem with (all right, the part I have my biggest problem with) is the ability to turn on a microphone and place a bug on them. If you feel you need to do that to your child, you should probably not let your child go to wherever they went. I also feel that parents should really introduce their children to a world where privacy is recognized and respected. The privacy of children from their parents is necessarily limited, but without any, the child will learn to mistrust their parent.

Re: Why does the server need any details about the child?

It's not used for identification. It's used as a really creepy tracking device that places a location and audio tracker on the child. Creepy enough if the parents are the only ones with access, but now there is no restrictions on who gets access. Without the server, you couldn't call up the history of where your child has been or everything they said. I'd really prefer that you didn't, but if you want to, a server is needed (of course, there is no excuse for having an insecure one).

To any children reading this

If there is anyone reading this whose parents have so little trust as to plant a tracking device like those used to track criminals on them, I would like to suggest some ways to help you accidentally render your devices useless. If your parents buy another one after this ends, I'd suggest giving the same treatment to their phones. One good option is to see how waterproof these are. Try tripping and falling into a puddle, putting your hand out to catch yourself. See what happens. If that doesn't work, try abrading it by accidentally brushing against a brick wall. Assuming that fails too, we can always try to damage the watch band, which probably isn't that hard, and coincidentally be walking past a street grate when the band, crap as it is, disgorges its cargo. Let's keep thinking these up.

Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'

Re: He actually sounds...

In this situation, Knuth knows how to use email and chooses to have someone else do it. This is not the same as choosing to have someone else do it because you don't know how to and see it as beneath you to find out because you can have someone else do it. That is fine, too, but not if you expect people to trust you with technical responsibilities. Or at least so I would have thought before seeing this. Evidently, they will still trust you. Forget what I just said.

Actually, he hasn't used computers since the age of 25, and he is now 68. So he hasn't used computers for 43 years. Or in other words he's never used a computer at all and thinks this is logical.

They should know some things

A manager should have a working knowledge of the big components, not every detail. I wouldn't expect a minister of transport to know the different kinds of tarmac, but I would expect them to know that airplanes are machines that go into the air and land in another place, conveying their passengers and/or cargo to that destination, that pilots are the people who fly them, and that they are supposed to land only at airports. In fact, I expect anyone to know that. Ministers for transport should also know where they fly (I.E. where the airports are and how high the planes are when flying at cruising altitude), how they fly (in the sense of what is needed in terms of fuel, people, coordination, and equipment), and what restrictions there are on who, when, where, how, and why they fly. I wouldn't expect a minister for transport to be able to fly a plane, but if they asked "What is air traffic control", I would say that they are unqualified.

A cybersecurity manager should know what security is, and what poses risks to it. They should know what the internet is, and at least something about how it works and why this creates security risks. Otherwise, how could the manager decide whether to trust me when I say "I have a product that your office should purchase which will provide a completely hardened layer preventing people from breaking into connections over the gopher protocol." That's a thing a manager decides, and they need to know to throw the person making that statement out immediately as a scam. If you don't know that, or at the very least how to find that out quickly, you are unqualified.

iPhone XS: Just another £300 for a better cam- Wait, come back!

Re: License the OS

I see no benefit for apple in licensing their OS. Other things I'd like them to do, such as making a sensibly priced and sized phone (or just not cancelling the one they had), increasing QA work on OS releases before they release them for the annual schedule, and making computers with the normal ports on them? Those seem like they have a business excuse for them, though they won't be accepting it. Licensing their OS to others? I see no good reason. I'd probably take it if offered, but I wouldn't expect anything of the kind to happen because it's insane.

Re: SE for me

I am also still quite happy with my SE. The problem is what I will do maybe three years from now when I finally break it. It will happen at some point, and it's already two years old. If apple aren't making a sanely sized model when this breaks, they've lost a customer.

Creepy or super creepy? That is the question Mozilla's throwing at IoT Christmas pressies

Re: Now if Mozilla would look at itself

That's all true, but mozilla still has the browser that is less privacy-invading than the main competitors. Of the browsers that real users (read not us) install, firefox is the one I'm most comfortable with. In addition, firefox being open means that most of the browsers that are better are forks or redistributions of it.

Google swallows up DeepMind Health and abolishes 'independent board'

Re: Lets hope

Citation: just look at any time when they collected data without being above board on informing the people whose data was collected. Which is pretty much every time they collected something. Just because you may be fine with google having the information you know they have doesn't mean that others are. If google collected information on people and they didn't want it to happen, that is sufficient evidence for those people to be worried about google getting access to health data.

Re: Lets hope

I don't think the disapproval is specifically about machine learning being used on health data; that's been done on anonymized data for years by academic and industry researchers, and is likely to continue. I believe the complaint is about google, which has not before proven itself knowledgable about health, as this isn't much related to their standard business model, but has proven itself to not be great at keeping any data private, even data that citizens and governments believe should be more private than usual.

Another 3D printer? Oh, stop it, you're killing us. Perhaps literally: Fears over ultrafine dust

Re: "Lots of things are dangerous if you use them incorrectly."

Everything is dangerous when used incorrectly enough. The question is whether these devices are safe when used correctly. Many people put them in enclosed spaces, because the closet is the best place for a thing that takes up space and you don't really have to interact with very much. So if it is dangerous for it to be in there, we should probably know and deal with it.

Microsoft lobs Windows 10, Server Oct 2018 update at world (minus file-nuking 'feature') after actually doing some testing

Re: hobson's choice

Apple does spy, somewhat, but nothing like what other companies do. They don't collect as much information, are better at allowing data to stay on the device rather than getting sent to them, and don't make a large part of their business from data exploitation. So yes, I'm saying that.

Re: Build number?

There are three version numbers. The 10.[randomdecimal] one that doesn't matter, the build number, and the version number. The version number is 1809, even though that's the wrong number (see my post above for why it's wrong if you care which you probably shouldn't). You have the build number, which at least goes in order. So when that number goes up, the build is newer. Build 17134 seems to be the final version of windows 10 version 1803. So in short, it's crazy.

Re: A good update?

It's also just the wrong number. These 4-digit numbers used to be two digits from the year, and then the two digit month, which brought us such logical numbers as 1407 (July 2014), 1511 (November 2015), etc. Then they release a version titled the April 2018 update, which actually came out in May, and number it 1803. Hey, 03 means March, guys. From original release date and name, this should be build 1810, and from new release date, it should be 1811. Definitely not 1809.

Just a little heads up: Google is still trying to convince everyone that web apps don't suck

Re: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

Agreed on the misattribution point. I would much prefer it if this didn't happen.

For most things, there is enough stability that doing them multiple times results in similar effects. With a broad definition of the action and the result, they do the same thing. See rolling a die (expect a number 1-6 or the die rolling away and under some piece of furniture) or slamming your hand in a door (expect pain and possible bleeding) for examples. I therefore find the definition useful for use with those people (E.G. my parents) who have, and most likely will again, sat in front of an interface, not knowing what to click to get their desired result, and will click the same button that definitely did not do it last time, expecting that it will work this time.

Re: Security...

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I'll grant that installing a binary that is untrusted is a security nightmare, because it has a great deal of access to the disk. The other side of that coin is that granting a web app access to the disk also lets them have similar levels of access. It may be sandboxed, but there are infinitely many security problems allowing things to exit their sandbox or run stuff inside their sandbox that affect things outside it, E.G. putting some malware in there and using the scheduler to run it. So don't allow anything untrustworthy to have access to your disk.

On this front, binaries have an advantage in that they can quite easily be loaded into virtual machines, taken apart, run through malware scanners, blocked by security policies, run inside custom sandbox products, and the like. Most of these things can't be done easily or at all with a web app. You can run it in a VM, but the code still knows where you are because it can require a network connection to start. Most other things in the list are completely impossible. What's more, a binary doesn't change itself, or if it does, you can find out. A web app runs the latest code that was pushed to you. That new code could be an update from the authors, the result of someone getting into the server, a result of someone changing the source for a nodejs component, or someone deciding the application doesn't need to exist anymore. This leaves a large landscape for injection of malware, and I don't want it.

In addition, there eventually comes a time where you need programs with disk access. When dealing with data, sometimes you want more than one program to be able to modify it. You use program 1 for some functionality, save the file, and use program 2 to do something different. Web apps are going to make that a disaster. For example, I give you the app mentioned in the article that compresses images. We already have a bunch of tools that compress images, and they can be quite fast. Does the web interface add anything to this process, even assuming it does the job as well as something using the GPU for the math? Somehow, I doubt it. A graphical program with access to the disk can make it really easy to do batch compressions. A command line program can allow scripting of the compression process. A web app can... it can compress images. What is the benefit?

Re: But surely anything better than an "app" for everything ?

They don't need their own apps, and that is quite disorganized. However, would I rather that they have multiple apps or multiple web apps pushed onto my device? I'll choose real apps in this situation. The reason for this is that these apps probably all provide GPS location capabilities to find a car for me, and push notifications to alert me when that car has arrived. A standard app can also offer other features that a web app cannot. So my options are having apps for this additional functionality or changing what a web app can do so it can have the functionality we already have.

Another issue that makes me choose native apps in this situation is accounts and privacy. If I'm doing this all with websites, I probably have to log in very often or let cookies and other data stay there forever. Apps don't need that, because they can store account details locally. Effectively, that's a cookie, but they are restricted to their own data so can't read other cookies that other apps have stored. I can also kill their app without affecting other things on the system in a way that is not as easy to do to a website.

I prefer web to apps in many scenarios. Whenever the system typically involves sending data to a remote location so they can do something with it, that's a case for web. An app is rarely needed for this. But when the app needs to interact a lot with me, both sending me information and conveying my responses to a remote system, I go for the stable and somewhat trustworthy native code rather than the everything-in-javascript dream of the portable web app.

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

Re: paranoia

If you allow this to go as far as it can, you end up not able to use anything. Every time you buy something with a USB connector on it, it might have been compromised. Every time you are given something, that might be compromised too. The computer you bought might have malware preinstalled. The parts you were going to use to build yourself a computer because you can't trust the manufacturers might have malware on them.

In the case of the conference, I think it's fair to assume that the drive is probably safe. Don't just assume that it is--test it first--but it is not the high-risk situation like when drives are found unattended. If you always use "what is possible" as your question for trust, you will end up at a dead end. Instead, ask "what is feasible" and "what is likely", and take whatever precautions are available for those infeasible and unlikely things that nonetheless are possible.

Re: A paranoid mount option ?

We could make that run on a raspberry pi rather easily. If we don't let the standard interface run, it doesn't have any automatic handling for USB disks. Then we block acceptance of other USB devices at the device level. Our display would have to be mounted on the GPIO system, but a cursory check of the pi hat manufacturers shows several options that can do display, touch input, and power from the GPIO. We'd first check what interface(s) the USB device says it provides, and assuming it's only storage, we can grab details about the filesystem and the files on it. We should probably do a quick scan for suspicious stuff, especially windows executables and shell/batch/powershell scripts. This wouldn't help against a USB device that intends on physically destroying a machine, but I don't know whether someone is really likely to start handing those out, and at least only our USB tester would be vaporized. This isn't completely foolproof (for example, you could have an innocent-appearing storage disk that only mounts the malicious stuff after ten minutes) but it'd be pretty good against the typical threats. Should we build it?

Huawei Mate 20 Pro: If you can stomach the nagware and price, it may be Droid of the Year

Re: Not expandable memroy

They should stop making up new card types. Is this card any better than a micro SD card? Even if it is slightly smaller, the lack of any available rather nullifies that benefit. In addition, the phone has enough space for a micro SD card; it's not that big a difference in size. We already tried the lots of different incompatible portable storage type system. We didn't like it.

Re: Can anyone tell me the advantage of face/print unlock?

I'd imagine that physically picking up someone's hand to get the fingerprint would wake them up. If face unlock works when their eyes are closed, however, that would probably be easy to do without waking them up. When security is included, a PIN is clearly the most secure option.

'Frontline workers' of the world, unite! And grab yourselves a Surface Go White Van Man edition

Re: Not very rugged

If they start using them, I'm sure there will be an available rugged case. After all, iPads aren't very resistant, either, but they get used a lot. It is still a lot more cash for the performance available, but that probably won't stop people buying them.

Google's secret to a healthy phone? Remote-controlling your apps

Re: Play Protect

If I was simply using unwanted apps as an indicator of maliciousness, I would have a long list indeed with the phone I mentioned. I work in security, though not on android. The apps I mentioned were constantly phoning home to various servers that did not seem very happy about telling me what they did. The to do list app scanned as known malware. The facebook app did facebook things as far as I could tell, but did not seem to come from facebook and had a weird version number that I couldn't match with versions of facebook posted to google play. Convinced now?

Re: Play Protect

I recently saw a similarly low-cost phone riddled with malware straight from the factory. Fortunately, it had been purchased by a member of my family for their young child, who could not figure out why it kept making a sound every five minutes though notifications were turned off and that sound wasn't even the sound for notifications. I couldn't figure that out either, but found enough malware that I saw it as my duty to confiscate the device, find a malware-free replacement in a closet, and remove the original from our collective misery.

For this device, the entry points of choice were a to do list app that had been installed in nonremovable fashion and of course the facebook app though probably only half of the malware in that was specifically facebook's fault. That thing was bashed enough times with a hammer before sent to recyclers. Die, unscrupulous android devices, die.

How one programmer's efforts to stop checking in buggy code changed the DevOps world

Re: Jenkins?

Having never used it, I find your explanation logical. This sounds like it would be a useful tool for parallel testing. However, I would contest your point that "the alternative to not checking in code with bugs is writing perfect code every time". I would argue that the best alternative to checking in code with bugs is to test it on all available test cases and possibly new ones *before* it is checked in. This won't be perfect, but it will be much less of a hassle for other members of the team. I doubt the developer is really bad at writing and testing code, but I don't think his style of self-deprecation did him any favors there.

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Re: Old Stuff

Perhaps what is worse than having a bunch of obsolete tech is finding obsolete tech that you decide you want. I was recently working at a different location, and helped a colleague there search through some cabinets in the basement, where I found a bunch of really ancient things, one of which was a ... well sort of a laptop from the DOS days, although we don't know exactly which DOS days. This one being a rather rare machine from a manufacturer in New Zealand. I found myself wanting to take this back with me and try to get it running. Then, I remembered a few problems with that:

1. I didn't know how the thing worked.

2. The thing didn't have a power cable, so I'd have to make one based on the specs written on the machine.

3. The machine had two floppy drives, at least one of which had important software. There was already a disk in both drives, but they were not labeled. Next to that was a binder containing at least a hundred more disks. There was really no telling which one had the software on it.

4. It probably weighed ten kilos or so, and I had to fly back.

5. Nobody had given me permission to discard this for them, although to judge from the other contents of the cabinet, they were not going to want any of it.

It's probably still there. If I get sent there again, I might just take it this time.

Re: A deadline ?

Well, I may not be able to beat you for age of old junk, but does anyone need a fully functional desktop system and accessories for publishing from, say, 2001 or so? I've got this tower with a wonderful pentium in there, a whole 256 MB of memory, and a 30 GB hard drive. It has USB 1 ports, though one is broken, and of course a slow CD reader that is the major way of getting data into it. Plus a scanner that uses a firewire 400 connection and weighs about sixty kilos. There's a printer, too, some inkjet thing that you probably can't actually get cartridges for, but it's still there. I plead not guilty; this is at my parents' house, and somehow I always get sidetracked though I've wanted to get rid of the thing for at least five years now.

In news that will shock absolutely no one, America's cellphone networks throttle vids, strangle rival Skype

Re: If only

How would that work with devices that are frequently behind firewalls or NATs, or changing from one cell tower to another. Writing a client that can send a video signal pier to pier and receive it is not that complicated. Making a good one might take some effort, but the technical aspects are easy enough. However, as with every other pier to pier thing, you end up dealing more with networking than many will accept. Even things that are mostly pier to pier often rely on a central register of who is involved and how you can find them, and sometimes that register will also have the functionality to assist with connections because there isn't a direct open channel to that device. If you can overcome these problems, you'll have fixed quite a bit.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Re: Only affects insider program - Not correct

No, it affects anybody who installed an update* after the servers got broken, whenever that was. Insiders saw it first because they install updates a lot, but it will affect a lot of people before someone fixes it.

*installed an update, or had an update flung at you, or maybe there's something else that contacts the registration servers though the article doesn't say there is

Re: el kabong

Previous post asks:

"b) WHY was it turned into a 'Home' system because THEY broke something?"

That is just how their system broke. There isn't a good explanation possible, and I'm sure when they get around to having an explanation it won't be good.

"c) No PREVIOUS version of windows (to the best of my knowledge) needed any kind of continuous on-line RE-ACTIVATION process to "stay valid" d) what if you leave your computer OFF for MORE THAN A MONTH? Or, how about OFFLINE for MORE THAN A MONTH? e) what if it's a VM that you only run when you HAVE to? [I should test this after I back it up]"

As far as I know, having run an airgapped windows machine for a while (yes, windows 10, don't ask why), windows doesn't need to contact the servers for it to stay valid. It will continue to work. It is just that when updating, it does contact the servers and then assumes that anything they say is correct. So VMs or computers not used in some time should be fine. Computers that updated something in the past week probably aren't.

Re: Expecting test versions to not have problems is amateurish.

As the article states, this is a problem with production license servers and affects non-insider, NON-BETA, production users. Insiders noticed it first because they update a lot so they talk to license servers a lot. It can and has affected other users too, and is most definitely a problem.

Re: Just go Linux

For the record:

1. This applies to non-insiders. It is not beta code that broke, but instead Microsoft's production servers.

2. There are things that you can do in windows pro that you cannot do in windows home. People doing those things selected pro for that reason. If they are affected by this bug, it is more than a minor annoyance or some grumpy license notification.

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Re: user error

It's said that the cache was located inside, but not in the same directory, as other videos. For example, the cache at /*/videos/cache, but the video projects themselves at /*/videos. If that's true, this would be entirely adobe's fault. However, if this is not the case, I would expect a product made for people who aren't necessarily technical to look in that folder and say "Hey, this cache folder isn't empty. This is where we put temporary work files; think of it as our scratchpad. Files in here are ones you don't deal directly with, but we might change or delete them. Are you really, absolutely, 100% sure that this is where cache files should go?". Plenty of terminal tools written for people who are supposed to know not only how they work but also how to rewrite them in some cases still have a "replace files?" prompt. That said, if this event actually involved the cache directory being set to the videos directory and not a subdirectory of it, I have less sympathy for the user.