Posts by doublelayer

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

The problem is that there can be a fine line from a normal thing I'm happy to help with to people taking liberties that are causing problems, and it's not always systemic. As I said in a different comment, I have been fortunate that most jobs I've had have not abused their access to my personal contact information, which is why my colleagues tend to have mine.

However, I have had the problem with things like email. For example, when I wrote and maintained a piece of internal software, people could email me with support requests and I would be happy to answer them. Most users did this rarely, and in that case, I didn't object much even if their question could be solved without my help with the documentation we already had. A small number of users, however, decided that I should be emailed every time they had any question, no matter how minor, and that if I didn't respond quickly, they should just send more emails. That kind of thing can cause several problems. It wasn't my manager or my team. It wasn't even very many of the users. It was just a few people causing problems for everyone else. The risk with answering the odd call is that you suddenly get more odd calls.

Re: Warren's big mistake

"If you're supposed to be on call and contactable by the company whenever, you're either high enough up the pecking order that your salary justifies this sort of thing, or you're paid to be contactable."

Or it's just expected, which might switch from reasonable to not reasonable very quickly. I've had several jobs where I could theoretically be on call any time of the day or night, and they did not run this by me beforehand, but so far, these have not actually called me in in the middle of the night so I've not complained.

Also, the HR database wouldn't be an automatic GDPR fail depending on what "unprotected" means. If it means that they didn't bother to have any access controls or to encrypt the data, yes, that's a GDPR problem. However, neither of those are necessary for your manager to use it to get your phone number, as that is data they would normally have a legitimate reason to access, for example if they need to contact you because you haven't been online for some time. It would be very difficult to make that a GDPR issue, as the problem is their abuse of the number, not their access to it in the first place.

Re: Warren's big mistake

I agree, though I have so far been willing to let them send normal voice calls, SMS messages, or OTP codes to my personal device. Anything more than that and they can buy a device to do it. Their IT department gets no administration rights over any personal device whatsoever. Fortunately, I have never had that particular contact method abused by managers.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

"So I should basically be able to assign myself an IPv6 address and the chance of a collision with someone else's address is remotely minuscule."

You have two choices:

1. Get a normal IP block, which you'll get automatically if your ISP supports IPV6*, and assign yourself an address inside it. The chance of a collision is zero unless your ISP screwed something up, and if they did, you'll find out quickly and you'll have someone to complain to.

2. Assign yourself a random IPV6 address and your chance of collision is very small indeed. Your chance of actually getting any traffic is also pretty small, since that's not your address and the routing tables know it.

* Generally, residential ISPs give a /64 to the average customer and larger blocks, /56s or /48s are common, if you ask for a dedicated block.

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

Yes, they are directly reachable, but you have to keep several things in mind:

1. If you have a firewall, they're as secure as your IPV4 addresses. You probably have a firewall.

2. If you have a firewall, but you have UPNP turned on, then your IPV4 boxes are punching their own holes in the firewall meaning they're more directly reachable than the IPV6 hosts are.

3. Finding and harassing a random address is a lot easier for IPV4, where I can sweep every address in ten hours from one machine or five minutes from a botnet than IPV6, where your incoming pipe is most often the limiting factor to a random or sequential search.

NAT has often provided a basic firewall-like service to people who won't set up their own, although UPNP makes a lot of it worthless, but it is certainly not required. If you know why NAT was sort of helping, you know all you should need to to set up a basic firewall or at least check that you already have one, and you should take that step. The rest of people is why a lot of network hardware has firewall software on it, usually set to a basic config anyway.

I have an NAT setup over IPV6, which is intended as a privacy measure because it mixes lots of devices' traffic from one outgoing address which changes on a cycle. That isn't proven to help, I just thought it might and had some time to write the rule, but it also doesn't provide any security that I didn't already have with my firewall. If you prefer that method, you can have IPV6 and NAT together.

In the whole address space, there are 2^n /n blocks. There are therefore 4096 valid /12 blocks. However, some of those are already assigned for local usage, some are assigned, and some aren't part of an open block.

Also, Huawei did not get a /12 block. APNIC got a /12 block. They then gave Huawei a /17 block inside it. In the whole address space, there are 131,072 of those.

"I dimly remember that baryonic matter is estimated to be around 2^88 particles."

Where did that figure come from? I'm not sure it's correct. For example, the sun's mass is approximately 2*10^30kg. That's 2^101 kg. That would make for some very heavy particles even without including any other stars. Having searched for the information, I think you might have used this article which comes up with a number of 10^80 (2^266).

It's also annoyingly vague about what a particle is, as I am not a physicist. For example, is a neutron a particle? If it is, do the proton and electron that make it up not count as two particles? If not, will they when the neutron comes apart? When that happens, does the proton count as one particle or are we going to count the quarks and gluons?

Re: Good for Huawei

I'm not sure I understand what your suggestion is, and I'm not sure your suggestion would work at all, and I'm not sure your suggestion would be a good idea even if it did work.

"Huawei has 18 regions ? Each region could use the full IPv4 range and, with NAT translation between regions, business is done."

The article says they have 39 regions, but I doubt it matters, so let's ignore that. So if I'm understanding your plan correctly, and there's a possibility that I'm really not, we're going to let all those regions use all 2^32 IPV4 addresses, minus some outward facing NAT endpoints. Just using the 10.0.0.0/8 block isn't going to be large enough. In that case, what happens when a customer is assigned the internal IP 104.18.4.22. How do they identify whether they're trying to access themselves or The Register (that's one of their IPV4 addresses)? For that matter, how do they identify if they're going for that address in a different cloud region? I understand how you can encode that into something the routers will interpret and redirect properly, but I don't understand how you identify it in the first place. Every server and application would need to know that there are at least three things any IPV4 address could mean: this region, the internet, or a different region which needs to be identified. Huawei-written software can be given a special address struct to do that, possibly just an 8-bit integer identifying the region or the internet attached to the normal four-byte address, but that won't work as well for user-written software. Software people buy in is going to have an even harder time of it.

Even if you did that, what would happen for all the machines accepting traffic that hasn't already been set up? NAT works well enough if you only open out, but a lot of those devices are the ones that people are opening out to, meaning they need to have somewhere to accept connections. A single IP can only host 65536 services before running out of ports. It's likely that any server will have more than one of those, as even a basic HTTP server generally has three (HTTPS, HTTP, and management, usually SSH). Lots of things use more ports than that, including internal devices making up the network. Is this really better than IPV6, and if so, why?

Amazon accused of cheating low-income Prime users out of two-day deliveries

Re: Wait

You are correct. I found recent unemployment figures for the codes (they change a lot, but these are from 2024) of 15.5% and 15.8%. Those are quite high numbers, but that still means 84% in work.

Re: This lawsuit is bravo-sierra IMHO

The problem, again, is not that Amazon decided that they weren't willing to provide the service. The problem is that they decided they weren't willing to provide the service, didn't tell those who paid for the service, continued charging customers for the service, and continued to claim that the payment was in exchange for the service they weren't providing. You are in a similar situation, apparently. If they promise something and, through their own fault fail to provide it, then they are short-changing you. If an ISP tells you that your line has 100 megabits per second but the highest you've ever seen is 23, they need to fix it or they're committing fraud. If they can't, they are perfectly able to cancel your service, relabel it as 25, and try to sell it again with the lower price that will likely be necessary for the lower speed. The same logic works for shipping times.

Re: Exactly what the AG is doing

They may know about the thefts, although you're being rather extreme by blaming all the residents for crimes committed by... well presumably some of the residents but you haven't even proven that. They may not be aware of Amazon's responses to the crimes, because as the article demonstrated, Amazon didn't tell them this directly. For those who are actively stealing, the message is clear: don't have Prime, because you can probably steal enough to outweigh the benefit you would get from a Prime subscription. For everyone else, you're not only punishing them for things they didn't do and can't stop others from doing, you're also justifying charging them for the punishment. Would it be fair if companies started doing similar things based on the actions of someone who lives near you?

Re: Exactly what the AG is doing

And, in that case, they can tell you about restrictions. It's not the restrictions themselves that this complaint is about as much as not informing people of the existence of the restrictions while charging them for a service that would normally remove those restrictions.

Re: Wait

I suppose if they don't have retail near them, online shopping may be the cheapest way to buy things. If that was the case, Prime might be more cost-effective* for people who are placing a large number of low-value orders compared, for instance, to me where I place on average two orders per year above the free shipping limit and don't care about waiting longer for them to arrive. It depends how easy it is for people in this area to get to an alternative shop with comparable items and prices.

* If you actually get the fast shipping they advertise, that is.

Cops arrest suspected admin of German-language crime bazaar

Re: Criminocurrency

Bitcoin is similarly hard to spend as gold is. I might be able to find some people willing to sell me a house for some Bitcoin, but probably about the same number as those willing to sell me a house for gold. Every other house I might prefer will want cash. Fortunately for me, if I have either gold or cryptocurrency, I can sell it with relative ease, get some cash, and use that cash to buy stuff. There might be some money laundering required to put the cash into a bank account, but that doesn't differ depending on what form it started as.

Transferring gold or cash is harder than transferring cryptocurrency, but not so much harder that criminals haven't done just fine with it. This works pretty well at the small end, where small amounts of cash can be sent through the post (for markets like this, the things people are buying are also sent through the post), and at the large end, where many criminal organizations have set up special systems to manage mountains of cash. Some parts in the middle are the most challenging. Still, they've done it for a long time and, if they somehow lose their preferred tool, they can go back to it.

Re: Criminocurrency

Tell me, for the first time apparently, who claimed it isn't? Of course cryptocurrency is used by criminals. What you probably heard before is that cryptocurrency isn't only used by criminals, and if that's indeed what you heard, it was correct.

British hospitals hit by cyberattacks still battling to get systems back online

The vagueness of the language leaves open the possibility that this did stay within the bounds of approved conduct, I.E. learning offensive security from others and applying it on machines where testing had already been approved. However, the vagueness (specifically, things like "after I had managed to hack it then I was able to prevent all the hacking") mean there are several other options, including that basically nothing happened at all.

The original point is sometimes valid. People who are employed to work on security often find that either management has an existing plan for what they're supposed to do or restrictions meaning they aren't able to work on certain areas. Properly securing a system that already exists and spans lots of different groups can be a very difficult task in ideal circumstances, and circumstances are often very restrictive and painful.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Re: ChromeOS looks nothing like Windows ...

People don't object to it because it does look a lot like Chrome if you only use the browser, and most users will not be using the rest of the things Chrome OS supports because they either don't really work or they only make sense for technical users. It does look familiar to users who already use browsers most of the time anyway and can quickly grasp the idea that this is only a browser.

Re: Some use cases

Yes, which makes a lot of people resist updating Windows until that causes problems. Which also means they will sometimes resist Linux similarly strenuously. I'm not sure whether a UI that looks like their version of Windows will trick them into not complaining about Linux, but I can see why someone thinks it's worth a try.

Judge again cans Musk's record-setting $56B Tesla package

Re: Musk should quit fighting this

"As I understand it, the agreement between Musk and Tesla depended on Musk meeting some performance and valuation goals that were, at the time of the agreement, thought to be somewhere between wildly aggressive and impossible."

The problem seems to be that there's not an agreement about whether those goals really seemed impossible at the time because the people who set the goals were Musk's friends doing things that Musk asked for. It would have been easy to find something that looked more impressive than it was and then set that as the criterion for reward. Figuring out whether that happened is more difficult now that we have hindsight and can see that and how the objectives were achieved, which is why the conflicts of interest among board members are an issue here. From all that's happened so far, I think Musk will be getting lots of stock now and through the future, so this may be a mostly moot argument about how many months he has to wait before he can get it.

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

Re: What will it mean to be a....

I don't think "subnets should be sized in powers of two" was trying to argue against /25s, since the smallest IPV4 subnet you could create if it was would be a /16. I think it was making the equally useless point that subnets should contain 2^X addresses, for example your /25's 128 addresses. Otherwise phrased as "you shouldn't create subnets that are impossible to create" since a /25.356 for 100 addresses isn't generally supported.

Re: Why Python?

Probably to make simple tasks, the only ones their bot does well most of the time, something a person is willing to write for a study. Python has several downsides, but one advantage of it is that there are various simple tasks that don't require lots of basic plumbing code to get working right. Reading in a json file can be three lines because there is a json parser in the standard library and you don't have to be too specific about types (which can be annoying for larger tasks but speeds up smaller ones a lot).

Re: What will it mean to be a....

"However, the OP asked what would happen if laymen started using those tools - which IMHO implies a scenario in which they actually work as intended by the user, without hallucinations."

I don't think that's correct. People use things that are not perfect all the time, and sometimes it makes sense to do so. For example, let's use their own example of accountancy. I am not an accountant. I have not taken an accounting course. Yet I have learned a lot of the basic terms and can avoid doing the most idiotic things. Someone who employed me to manage their finances would not be making a good decision, but while their needs remained simple, it would probably work. The problem would come when they needed something more advanced and I either failed to do it or tried and demonstrated my lack of skills. Still, for someone who didn't have the funds to employ an actual accountant, someone with my level of knowledge might be good enough for something simple.

I think the same will apply to LLM-generated code, with the slight mitigating factor that the quality is more random. If you choose the right model/specific layer above a model, one like GitHub Copilot that was specifically designed to generate code rather than one like ChatGPT which can generate stuff that looks kind of like code, you can get valid code for some simple programming problems. As long as that is all you need, you may get what you want. When you start needing things that are more complex, the models break down, and by relying on them instead of having someone who knows what they're doing, that invalid code is going to run and possibly cause damage. One major difference between this and the me as an accountant scenario is that, if I was somehow employed as a cut-rate pseudoaccountant, I am likely to identify when something is well beyond my area of knowledge and refuse the task. That means that the business needs to be most concerned with tasks that are slightly outside my area but I might be stupid enough not to recognize this, but they don't need to worry as much about big things because I will point out I don't know what I'm doing. An LLM doesn't do that, so no matter how ridiculous the assignment they're given, they'll produce some kind of code. As soon as people start asking for things that connect to systems, chaos should be expected. That's just the most immediate and obvious version of chaos. A lot of other options are worse.

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

In my experience, yes, they can get close to the throughput depending on whether you've put extra load on the CPU. However, I only use OpenWRT equipment for home networks and I use relatively capable hardware. That means my point of comparison is often to the other cheap boxes supplied by ISPs or easily purchased on Amazon, not to managed hardware that offices use. I also have never had anything faster than gigabit for my internet connection, and I have less than that now, so at best I can say that my OpenWRT hardware from five years ago was indeed able to push packets at gigabit speeds when the rest of the path could take them. There are devices that people run OpenWRT on to extend their security update lifespan which will be limited by still having a CPU from 2010 in them. Those will almost certainly not be able to do the same thing.

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

It's not only WiFi, as there is one LAN port in addition to the uplink and you can always connect a switch to it. Most of the OpenWRT devices are intended primarily as WiFi APs. I do find that a little disappointing, but I'm not very surprised they've chosen to do it that way. It's less convenient for my home use, but it wouldn't have as much of an effect on someone using them as individual APs on an existing network, and I'm guessing that was one of the groups they thought a lot about.

Note: Although they've labeled the 2.5 port as WAN and the 1 GB as LAN, nothing makes you do that. You can swap those in the case where you have faster internal hardware but don't have an upstream connection that makes use of the 2.5 Gb speeds.

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

I generally find that those are good as long as there is a native build for it. I don't like their interface even though it has a number of conveniences built in that take manual configuration from a stock version, but if you can flash that stock version, it also means you're likely to get updates for a long time.

Musk seeks injunction to stop OpenAI morphing into for-profit company

Re: A capped for-profit arm ?

It can sometimes work. For example, Raspberry Pi, the charity, owned Raspberry Pi, the for-profit company that made the computers. That company made its profits, and the charity got those profits and chose what to do with them in a way that didn't involve paying it to shareholders. Now, they've decided to sell off some of that company so they get less of the money every time but they still get some of it, and the investments from others in the now public company means they can probably make more things which means more revenue for the foundation.

However, I don't think OpenAI is anywhere close to this. They started themselves as a nonprofit in order to attract people who had concerns about ethical problems related to AI research, and they probably never really intended to live with that if they could get lots of money, the same way that they keep firing and ignoring anyone who suggests an ethical problem might exist. I don't think Musk is doing any of this for any ethical reason, nor am I certain that he has the standing necessary to make anything happen, but some of his complaints are factual.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Of course there are many incompetent politicians. My point was not that they are competent after all. It was that their incompetence is not why the countries aren't dictatorships. Similarly incompetent people have become dictators. Much more competent people have at times partly run democracies without taking them over.

Putin probably does consider himself a success with a couple decades and counting of massive dominance. Not every dictator has even gotten that. Some of them were not only incompetent at running their country for its citizens, some of them were so incompetent they couldn't even manage to sustain their power very long. I consider that threshold to apply even if they lasted several years if, at the end of it, they ended up killed or imprisoned.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Of course every dictator has a lot of help on the way up. However, I can give Putin some credit for building his new dictatorship even though the pieces to do so were all there around him. Someone without his background would probably be unable to manage it, but a lot of people with his background couldn't have succeeded either because it took an eye for detail and an ability to manage loyalty and betrayal with a fine touch. As dictators go, I have to give him more credit than most, if only for correctly employing his various assets in a way that lots of others didn't do.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

That's not usually caused by better managers. It's caused by missing or broken controls on the rise to power. Dictators who manage to self-build their dictatorship, E.G. Putin, tend to have some level of competence in order to accomplish that, but dictators who simply get one, E.G. Kim Jong Il, can be as incompetent as they like.

The success of democracies is not that the people in power were too incompetent to take over. It is a combination of those people not wanting to take over, institutions stopping them if they tried, and voters being smart enough to detect the most dangerous and not let them in. Many dictators, even those who managed to get power in the first place, were completely worthless at running their countries afterward. Sometimes they managed to last a long time nonetheless by killing people who threatened to do a better job.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

I tend to disagree because most software certifications I see do not provide any useful skills checks. They are often tailored to some specific skill, test something that's easily scored but not very related to the difficult to score work actually involved in writing software, and mostly act as gatekeepers from some organization that will use its ability to decide whether you can get a job to extract as much as they can from the people doing work. If I were considering paper requirement, I would consider a degree from a programming curriculum that I can verify more highly than certification, because that takes years and teaches a lot of different skills. However, there are people who have all the same skills without the degree, and they should also be considered. A certification doesn't demonstrate that to my confidence, so without any better alternative, I would end up testing them myself.

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

It depends what you want students to gain from their studies. If you only have a little time to teach someone to program, you want to give them enough information that they can decide whether they're interested in learning more and ideally enough information that they can do some useful stuff. If you get to have a programming course every year, you can cover lots of useful things, but not everything is or is considered important enough to get that much of a student's limited time. If it ends up being a half-year or even a single-year course, some things have to be postponed to the next ones. Various bases generally get covered briefly in mathematics. Covering it again in introductory programming isn't very useful if you spend a lot of time on it, because almost all introductory programs and a large number of more complex ones don't require the programmer to directly use either of those. It will be covered later when they're using it directly and you won't get a computer science degree without knowing it, but that doesn't mean it needs to be done first.

I think this is a good summary. I've seen people who try to fix this by insisting on covering something complex. They start teaching programming by going to the individual instructions at the CPU. This doesn't work for two independent reasons.

First, people want to actually accomplish things, and there are a lot of instructions. Pretty much every language abstracts some of this, like finding where the variable you referred to is and bringing it into registers so you can work on it, but why not make people who have never seen this before do that manually. In other courses, we can teach them chemistry by manufacturing all of their reagents from precursors they mined themselves. Going too deep doesn't help, even if you started at that level.

Second, this makes it a lot harder to find someone who knows how to teach this properly. An introductory course that tries to teach that many levels needs a teacher skilled in all of them and enough time to handle them all separately. That's possible, but it generally doesn't happen often. Trying to do it when you can't is like teaching someone to drive too quickly; they might look like they know what they're doing, but it's likely to go badly later unless they train on their own.

Re: Another "R" - suggestions

The E in STEM is supposed to be engineering, not English. It's a set of related* subjects, not everything that people must learn.

* The "related" is something that people who try to slide an A (art) into it should keep in mind.

Re: WYF!

I maintain that a good teacher and a student who is trying can do a lot to make programming make sense even if it didn't come instinctively. There are three interrelated reasons it doesn't happen when they try to expand it too far:

1. They get teachers who don't program well and teachers who don't program at all but took a four-week intensive course over the summer to teach it. Many of those teachers are trying, but they don't understand their subject, so they can't teach it well. Programming takes a lot of background knowledge to get things back onto the rails. For example, a good teacher needs to understand compiler error messages because students will do something weird and the compiler is going to do it. You may not bother teaching introductory students what l-value and r-value mean, especially as they're both sort of types but not types you create deliberately, but they'll need to understand that because compilers complain about them. The teacher needs to understand why and explain it in simpler forms so the student understands what is wrong and some basic level of why.

2. Not all students are going to try. Of course, not all students are going to try at all the other subjects either. The problem is that programming properly requires learning a lot of little things and putting them all together, and if you miss a couple of them, nothing works. Students who don't want to learn might learn something else by accident, but they will not learn any quality of programming that way.

3. People who want to teach programming to everyone sometimes also want to teach programming far too early without doing anything else. Without knowing how to drive the computer a little, programming isn't going to get you very far. You can probably teach a mostly unfamiliar student how to calculate some numbers, but they'll be missing all the rest of the reason that programming is powerful. That won't help them learn, it won't keep their interest, and it won't train them on using a computer by proxy.

Re: WYF!

That works for nearly everything that isn't considered important enough. A good teacher who understands more things can come up with a quick answer for why they're not studying cryptocurrencies:

"So far, and despite predictions, cryptocurrency is not used very frequently by average consumers or businesses as either a store of value or a medium of exchange. If you end up spending or buying cryptocurrency, you will need some additional information. If you end up building the software that implements cryptocurrencies, you will need a lot of information and practice."

Or ancient Greek:

"Most of the stuff that you could read by learning ancient Greek has been translated and is not necessary to read for most people. If you want to be a historian of any of the civilizations of the Mediterranean, you'll likely encounter it at least sometimes if not nearly always and should either learn it or work with someone who has, who you will assist with the ancient language you learned instead. If you're not planning to be a historian or in a related field, modern languages will be more useful than ancient ones."

Or cliff diving:

"We don't live near cliffs and cliff diving could kill you and I don't care if you like the sound of it."

You don't need to study any of those things to learn why not. There are many skills that we need to leave off the curriculum, sometimes because they're not very useful, sometimes because they would be very useful but there is only so much time available and students need a general education, so taking the time to study those properly would not allow for teaching them all the rest of the things that could be useful. We mostly get to try to even out that to try to teach people the set of things that would be most useful that they can actually learn in the time and resources available.

NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to use pen and paper

Re: Total Barstewards

The explosions of the pagers required deliberately-installed explosive materials. You cannot cause that kind of damage or injury with a battery. At most, you can create a nasty fire and hope the holder of the device can't throw it away immediately. Most of the time, you can't even do that as the battery safety mechanisms will disable things when they get sparky and can't be deactivated via normal hacking. Normal hacking could possibly have broken some pagers, but they needed to build their own custom pagers and get them into the hands of people they wanted to hurt in order for the explosions to happen.

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Re: Dumbing down

That might be the case for Arch, since its live installations tend to boot to a shell directly. That problem has cropped up for other CLI installations that don't start up a shell first. Other TTYs might not work if the environment isn't processing the key commands that normally access alternates. Even if they do, if the environment I'm in doesn't have a shell running or doesn't have utilities I'd use to find information, then I'm also stuck. That's why a lot of installers provide information about the thing they're asking you to select.

Re: Installation has to be easy

Exactly. From the position where you know everything about what you're doing, an installer isn't very important, but not that many people are in that position and those who are are already scripting it. For those who remain, a GUI installer is more convenient for some users and, if it is as powerful, it's often no less convenient for those who would be comfortable with the CLI. Thus, the people saying that a GUI installer is advisable have a point and should not be dismissed, especially with incorrect claims of "dumbing down". At most, the argument could be, and in my case is, that the lack of a GUI installer isn't a big deal for me personally. That isn't a very convincing argument for any broader point, though.

Re: Dumbing down

It depends a little on who is running, but not as much as your comment suggests. Let's consider the part where you'll possibly erase and partition one or more disks. Let's also say that you have something else running, for the sake of simplicity on another drive. When you get to the point in the installer where you specify where it is supposed to install to, which partitions it should use, and what it should create, how do you select that? For a lot of users, the GUI is the way that makes sense and anything else doesn't. CLI tools would just confuse them and mean they can't install the OS, so they won't use the OS, so developers who are targeting them won't build for the OS, and the OS is less successful than it could be.

But who cares about those lusers anyway. We don't need anyone who doesn't have at least two terminal windows as soon as they log in. We only need an installer that works for us. Great. I live in the CLI a lot of the time and I'm quite familiar with the tools to get information about and modify disks and partitions. So I run the CLI installer, it gets to the part where I specify that information and I ... well wait a minute. I would know what to do if I dropped to a shell and could start executing some commands, starting with lsblk. That shell isn't an available option right now because I'm in the installer. I don't have multiple windows, and if I exit this, I have to start from scratch again. So what happens is that I have to start an Arch environment, get a shell, find all the information I'll need during installation, write that down somewhere, then enter it during installation. At that point, why shouldn't I just script this; it will mean less risk of typos at any rate.

So who needs an installer. Anyone who uses a CLI installer is just dumbing it down from the script they should be writing. Amateur idiots, all of you. Is that approach helpful? A GUI installer is not dumbing anything down from a CLI installer, assuming they both let you do the same things. It's just presenting exactly the same options in a different form, and a form that may reduce complications, allow users to configure their installation more quickly, and attract others to using and therefore benefiting the software.

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

Re: You make it sound that Oz is unusual

This site is mostly read by people in countries without licenses. A lot of the readers are in UK, Canada, or the US, none of which have an ID requirement. Many others are in European countries, several of which (E.G. Ireland, Netherlands, Denmark) don't have a requirement. Even Australia's closest neighbor, New Zealand, doesn't require it. So while you are right that a lot of other countries do require it, it's not that odd that most of the readers here have lived somewhere where getting a connection was as simple as paying the money.

I prefer it that way and don't see sufficient benefit to adding an extra verification and reporting step. If a country I was in wanted to institute one, I would oppose it and try to stop it. If a country I was in was considering removing their requirement, I would be happy. The fact that many countries have decided to do it doesn't change my mind.

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 cranks up the power – and the heat

Re: Not for me

Where does the username and password requirement come in? Normal tools will restrict usernames to lowercase, but numbers are fine, and that can be overridden if you want to. Passwords have no limits at all. What were you doing that limited either of these?

Re: Why?

... are you surprised by something they've done, and explained, forever? Also, why is this such an issue for you, given that they're not expecting you to change your money to dollars to buy one, and the exchange rate charged by pound-using UK sellers doesn't tend to change daily, so once you find out what your local source of compute modules is charging, it stays that much all the way through, at least it did for CM4s.

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Re: The FCC does not regulate the spectrum globally!

The satellites don't cover enough of the surface to interfere with UK signals since the LTE parts would be disabled when not in view of countries where they are licensed to use them. Canada and Mexico, at least those parts near the border would be less fortunate.

Re: I imagine Trump's FCC will do what Musk wants

I didn't offer that as a justification. I offered that as an explanation for why Starlink wants the limit increased but other satellite networks don't need it.

Re: I imagine Trump's FCC will do what Musk wants

Yes, that is why I was careful to get the units from their request rather than risking mistaking one unit with another. The dBW to dBm conversion I can do: -110.6 dBW/m₂/MHz = -80.6 dBm/m₂/MHz. Working out how much of that signal you would receive on average on the surface is harder.

Re: I imagine Trump's FCC will do what Musk wants

Starlink is trying to increase that limit to -110.6 dBW/m₂/MHz. It appears it's mostly because their satellites weren't originally intended for phone use and they bolted it onto ones they originally designed for home internet, as opposed to competitors who see the phone market as a core business and designed specifically for that.

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

Re: an email that appears to be a legal notice

I would advise against that idea. None of your assumptions are true by my knowledge or experience. It does cost some amount to print a letter, put it in an envelope, and mail it. It isn't very much. Lots of scammers have sent mail through the history, and it isn't much more expensive if inflation is considered. Those doing it in bulk can often find ways to decrease the price. As for penalties, I don't see anyone going to lots of effort to track down and punish people who misuse the mail, not that it would be that easy to do. I can write any return address or none on mail and send it from lots of places and it will be sent. Tracking me down later wouldn't be easy even if someone was doing it.

Paper mail would be expensive for spray attacks, but it wouldn't be the first time. If they're picking specific victims, the cost of mail would be tiny in comparison to the potential reward. Mail is no more trustworthy than email, and in fact it is worse because you can theoretically verify DKIM on a message, but nobody does that on paper.

Google sues Pixel engineer who allegedly posted trade secrets online

That defense effectively doesn't exist. A true insanity defense requires demonstration, or at least a convincing argument, that the person committing the crimes was so out of reality that they didn't know what they were doing or understand what the effects would be. Someone having a mental illness making it more likely to do stupid things and then doing a stupid thing, fully understanding what they were doing, that they had signed an agreement against it, and what the effects would be won't count. Those illnesses can have an effect on the punishment, but not always, but they have almost no chance of convincing anyone to acquit on that basis. I'm not sure he has other options worth trying, but nearly any alternative would be better than this.

First-ever UEFI bootkit for Linux in the works, experts say

Re: What took them so long?

Depending on what that ROM image does, it could just move the bootkitable place up one level. While there is some desire to have software that can change running before the OS runs, it will be possible to make a malicious version of it.

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

There are two problems with that. The first is that users have a reason to want feature updates in addition to security updates. As soon as a computer can't update the operating system, it also can't update any Apple apps. Third-party ones also tend to drop older Mac OS versions quickly, but with apps like XCode, iMovie, or Pages, those updates require the new version basically the same time that version becomes available. Even though security updates are still being made for that OS, someone who has lost support is going to have that repeatedly pointed out as more and more things refuse to update but reliably tell them that an update is available.

The second problem is that Apple used to release security updates for older versions quickly. They don't do that so much anymore. Some fixes eventually get there, but it is no longer rare to see that a patch released for the latest Mac OS a month ago fixes something that is still a vulnerability in the last one. Maybe they'll patch the older one in a bit, or maybe they'll just ignore it even though that version is still getting security updates at other times. Their record isn't as good as it once was.

Meanwhile, similar to Windows, there is no good technical explanation for this. There is OpenCore Legacy Patcher for installing modern Mac OS versions on machines that Apple doesn't allow to do so which demonstrates how little there is to justify those machines being left off of support. The same complaint that applies to Windows 11's fake hardware requirements that can be bypassed safely applies to Macs. I've made the comparison before between a Mac that can run the latest version of Windows 10 without any need to bypass something but lost its Mac OS updates three years ago according to Apple. I can run modern Mac OS and Windows 11 on it by bypassing both requirements, and my need to do so started much faster for Mac OS than it will for Windows.