Posts by rcxb

Apple's macOS is sub-par for security, Apple exec Craig Federighi tells Epic trial

Re: Keeping things secure

You can't run .exes or other binaries from Windows with a click these days.

What? Of course you can.

Re: Keeping things secure

If you gave Linux to your typical office desktop users, you'd have as many, if not more, of the same security breaches.

We have an office full of Linux systems, and never had a single breach. A big part of that is that users are just that. Locked-down user, no privileges to install anything.

With Windows, you can't even set-up two users on the local system to be able to access the same set of files, without making them administrators. Search for "unable to take ownership". You'll see lots of resolutions options like disabling UAC, which is both a terrible idea, and still doesn't work. You can set all the ACLs on the files and folders correctly to allow two users full access to them, but Windows only recognizes one owner, and won't let you open and modify those files until you're the owner, which you can't make happen unless you're also an administrator...

Linux is designed to be a sane, multi-user operating system. Windows has only just the basics of multi-user operation tacked-on, poorly.

And if users were allowed to install software, they would only be doing it from the repos... Careful use of sudo can allow them to do that, without giving them full root permissions. And those Linux software repos are still curated and extremely, without being locked-down with onerous restrictions and fee demands like Apple does with their store. Whereas the very model for Windows software installation has for decades been "download binaries from websites on the internet and run them, and say yes when asked if they should be allowed to do absolutely anything to your system" which is the real security nightmare.

Linux doesn't let you run exe's or other binaries from files attached to e-mails with a click. Linux doesn't hide (crucially important on Windows) file extensions from you, allowing attackers to mask executable code as innocuous images or other documents.

And should we talk about auto-run?

This is just scratching the surface. The list of ways in which Windows is inherently insecure is legion.

Apple announces lossless HD audio at no extra cost, then Amazon Music does too. The ball is now in Spotify's court

Re: Yay!

Converting an analog medium into a digital representation and then back to analog again is, to put it mildly, less than ideal

On the contrary, converting to digital is the only way to ensure you can perfectly reproduce the analogue signal.

If you are doing digital sampling above the Nyquist rate (right about double the sound's highest frequency), the digitizing process is provably perfect. What the ADC input picks up will be the exact same waveform the CD spits back out. It's math.

Digital media formats have error checking and correcting codes, which are not possible in the analogue realm. Analogue media just wears out imperceptible until it progressively becomes impossible to ignore.

Colonial Pipeline suffers server gremlins, says it's not due to another ransomware infection

Re: "but then opted to restore from its own backups anyway"

Not necessarily. They may have restored from a previous backup to get their system up and running quickly, but would have still needed the decryption tool to get the most current data (e.g. sales) for use later. It's a shame the criminals didn't want more.

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

But in practice, the reason you weren't developing it yourself in the first place is likely because you lack the ability to actually do so.

Unlikely. The #1 reason is because somebody is doing it (for free) for you already, so why put any time/effort/money into it when it needs none? When the project dies, that calculus changes.

Also, if you can't afford to fund a few modifications to an open source project, what are the chances you could have afforded the license cost for the proprietary version in the first place?

I know of MANY small companies that have gone out of business when a proprietary piece of software (which they relied on) changed its license terms or greatly increased the price. I can't think of ANY cases where an open source project being abandoned resulted in the same... When its open source you have so many options, where with proprietary software you have just the one choice.

Chinese rocket plunges into Indian Ocean, still lands sharp rebuke from NASA

Landing in water?

no one could predict its exact destination, other than a 70 percent chance it would be in water

Thank goodness it didn't target my teacup while I was holding it.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Actually intercepting someone's SMS messages can be done quickly, easy, and undetectably:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g8wb/hacker-got-my-texts-16-dollars-sakari-netnumber

Telcos crammed 8.5m fake comments against net neutrality into FCC's inbox

Re: Or, ya know, just issue people a government digital ID?

Schools typically issue student IDs to everyone, which are rather universally accepted as valid ID for minors.

Adults (old enough to drive) can get a cheap state photo ID without the driving test, typically through the same process, if desired.

Day 3 of the Apple vs Epic trial: What actually is an iPhone anyway?

Re: This is supposed to go on for another three weeks, right?

So a keyboard is now two accessories?

No, that's just one. But if you're not holding the iPad, you probably need something to stand it up, too.

if you're going to be doing serious typing then a real keyboard is required, but that's the same on all devices.

Which is why all other devices include a keyboard.

as for the dumb terminal... what exactly are you connecting to?

Local/offline mode. Just echoes what you type to screen. Hit the Print Screen button to output it to the connected printer.

The idea is to have a low distraction environment. The WiFi was often switched off

That works well on a laptop, too. Also see typewriter and dumb terminal comment above.

Re: This is supposed to go on for another three weeks, right?

You can write text on an iPad? And you only need a couple accessories to do it? Wow! IOS is getting close to parity with typewriters and dumb terminals...

Yahoo! and! AOL! sold! for! $5bn! as! Verizon! abandons! media! empire! dreams!

“Verizon Media has done an incredible job turning the business around over the past two and a half years and the growth potential is enormous,” Hans Vestberg said in a statement.

When Verizon bought Yahoo in 2016, it had a search market share of about 3%. Now they're around 1.5%. That's an impressive turnaround, no question. Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2016

With low numbers like that, there is certainly growth potential, but also death-spiral potential.

China launches first module of new, crewed, Tiangong-3 space station

Re: Congrats to China

I'd recommend irradiation with strong alpha or beta emitters (instead of UV light) while the humans are elsewhere. Last I checked, Deinococcus is not harmful to people.

Is "earthlings" children?

Only if dumplings are small dumps.

Earthlets is a more proper name for children.

Re: Congrats to China

the environment becomes so toxic, that it is cheaper to just replace it

As with cheap flats, you just need to open the windows to air it out for a bit.

Re: Congrats to China

The ISS doesn't have long left, it's likely to be decommissioned within 10 years

Perhaps China can get a good price on it... They certainly don't mind making copies. I know they won't take our used electronics any more, but maybe they can make an exception.

Maybe the next ISS will be made by Foxcomm.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Build your own induction coil out of magnet wire and attach it to the bottom of your bike. Add some electrical load like a series of resistors or low-voltage LED. Very little weight, and will trigger the loop.

Re: Er ...

I'd expect that 99.99% of Texans would not have a clue where Reunion is on a map of the world.

That won't stop them from signing-up to invade it.

a Honda. Which evidently don't have enough metal in them to trigger the sensor

The trick is to stop at the light, then walk over to the sidewalk and push the pedestrian crossing button to get the light to change.

Shadow over Fedora 34 as maintainer of Java packages quits with some choice words for Red Hat and Eclipse

Re: Not just Java

After a few 1TB venv's for a bunch of simple apps, you might start to question the logic of this deployment method. Not to mention the logistics of updating package X in every venv when you find out there's a vulnerability that needs patching.

I guess it's better than a docker container for /bin/true, but it's still pretty inefficient.

NASA’s getting really good at this flying a helicopter on Mars thing

Do a barrel roll!

n/t

Sucks to be you, any aliens living anywhere near Proxima Centauri's record-smashing solar flare

Re: move the Earth to a higher orbit,

Where would one place any kind of rocket to move the Earth to a higher orbit?

A gravity tractor may be the better way to go.

Either that or having everyone in Asia climb up on a chair and jump down all at the same time.

Could just shoot out a laser in the direction you want a boost.

But if you're determined to make it big rocket, near the equator is a good spot. Turn it on for 1/4 of the days when it'll push in roughly the correct direction, and stay off the rest of the time. Could put it on a huge barge and let it propel itself across the ocean to stay in the right orientation for much more of the day.

Re: Proxima Centauri is a glimpse of our own future

Being inside of the star's envelope might be a bigger problem

Last I heard, Earth's orbit orbit will expand, keeping it just beyond being consumed. That said, a hot rock stripped of all atmosphere and water won't be a place you'd enjoy going on holiday.

However, the only way we won't be able to figure out a gravity tractor to tow the Earth out to a wider orbit in a billion years is if we're gone by then... whether all turned to dust, or having found more enticing rocks to live on.

Toshiba rejects private equity buyout offer on grounds it was scarcely credible

Do buyouts ever work

Buyouts are strange.

Stockholders will only accept if they get a premium price above what the company already earns.

Companies also tout a buyout by a bigger company as being a fresh cash infusion that will allow them to "grow" quickly.

But buyers almost always make such purchase at least partially with loans. Saddling themselves with debt, unable to put the promised extra resources into the company. In fact, it usually goes the opposite way, with company assets sold off to try and reduce the debt load they've created.

Buyers are also on the hook with their stock-holders to show value from the merger. Both lead to aggressively cutting staff and spending on things like research that typically is what made the company viable over the long-term.

It seems like buyouts are a bad idea all around. But everybody goes into the deal thinking like a gambler who just has to keep raising the stakes, and is sure they're going to be the one to beat the odds.

Or else, the buyout is consolidation of market power, and just results in higher prices for customers to no benefit.

On a dusty red planet almost 290 million km away... NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flies

Human-made

the first human-made helicopter to take flight on another planet.

I see we're leaving open the option of aliens, but not advanced ancient Atlanteans. Why is that?

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

Wrong way entirely

I can only imagine a boiling water tap being useful for the physically disabled. For the rest of us, being able to get up for a moment at a short break-point in the middle of whatever task is a bonus. Too easy to get stuck to your chair as it is.

Perhaps you can't do that during video calls, but seeing a conference participant reaching across, then steeping and mixing and stirring, doesn't look very professional, either. Perhaps it'll make for interesting Zoom videos on youtube, as we get to watch people bump the lever by accident and scald themselves.

And there's no tap for the milk, so does it really count as tea?

Fridges... in... Spaaaaaaace: Engineers book ride on the Vomit Comet to test astro-refrigerator

I'm a bit confused

If it's about fresh fruits and other treats, how do you get the "shelf life of around three years."? Sounds like they'll be refrigerating the dried, shelf-stable foods. I can't see how that's important, though, as resupply missions happen far less than 3 years apart.

I would have thought refrigeration in microgravity was a solved problem. First because Stirling engines make good chillers, have been tested for use in space missions. And second because, as said, ISS already has refrigeration.

A more efficient mode of refrigeration might just be connecting a box to a black-body radiator on the outside of ISS, with some controls/tracking to ensure its always pointed away from the Sun (and Earth) out towards nothing. 2.73 Kelvin (-270.42 Celsius,).

Oh hello. Haven't heard much from you lately: Linux veteran Slackware rides again with a beta of version 15

Benefits of Slackware

I'm quite fond of Slackware.

It seems to be the only Linux distro out there which includes the devel headers in every package. And why not, they're tiny? Yet all other Linux distros insist on keeping the devel headers away from users, imposing a massive barrier to entry on users who first decide to try compiling some software from source. No idea why that's so novel in the Linux world... All the BSDs include devel headers like Slackware.

And no dependency nonsense. If I compile some library from source, I can still install binaries that depend on it, without a ration of crap from the packaging system's dependency tracking. And the worst part? Those packaging systems won't bother to check and tell you when the contents of an installed package have been removed/corrupted/etc. They can find out with a single command, but they don't really care to keep track of your system, just a database that says X is installed, so you can go on your way. Bah!

I don't use Slackware anymore, just because if I've got to use Linux_X at work, it saves my brain so many cycles to use Linux_X at home, too. Slackware may be less of a hassle for me, but if I've got to put up with a set of hassles anyhow, I might as well limit myself to the one single set of them.

Slackware's style comes with some downsides, too, but it's a great system to learn Linux on, and I don't mean just install and blindly use it (ala Ubuntu), but to actually learn the gritty details of how Linux works.

Re: one of?

He didn't "the first" he said "the oldest".

SLS Linux is long dead. It never had a chance to get old. Ygdrasil predates Slackware too, but Slackware is still around, the others are not. It continues to set the record for oldest Linux distro every day it remains active.

What the FLoC? Browser makers queue up to decry Google's latest ad-targeting initiative as invasive tracking

Re: "while websites and advertisers could opt in, users were not asked permission"

Even if it's not free, you're still the product being sold. Why would a company leave free money on the table?

OVH services still not fully restored as boss rates ongoing recovery efforts a 'real nightmare'

Fire protection

It's almost as if it might be worthwhile to have proper fire protection in place. Because recovering after is very difficult and expensive.

United States' plan to beat China includes dominating tech standards groups – especially for 5G

Re: Celebrities are the answer

But it has never been working harder/faster/longer/cheaper that put the US on top. It's typically been that US workers find ways to continually make their own jobs more efficient, instead of continuing to do everything the hard way. That kind of individual free-thinking isn't as a common or as strong of a trait in labourers from oppressive totalitarian nations.

Re: Many 5G patents are owned by a motley bunch

There is almost nothing that the US Gubbermint can do to stop China (or their representatives) from buying a few dozen of the NPE's (lawyers mostly) and holding the world to ransom.

Yours is a very strange suggestion, as:

1) It is the government that makes those patent laws in the first place, and which can make exceptions or rewrite the law wholesale when it stops suiting their interests.

2) If government representatives get on the boards of standards bodies as intended, they can start to introduce some anti-patent-troll rules, steering standardized technologies away from problematic/riskier methods.

the west is in decline and the new global superpower is China.

A few decades ago, the West was in decline, and the new global superpower was Japan.

Decades before that, the West was in decline, and the new global superpower was the USSR.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Re: 11 stone..

Should just have a field for customer weight. I'm sure all the Miss and Ms will fill it out honestly.

Little Miss Sunshine

"The health and safety of our customers and crew is always our primary concern," a TUI spokesperson said

Really? Because it sounds like the cost of software development is your primary concern.

Another SAP in the face for Oracle: Alphabet soups up financial software by moving off Big Red systems

Cloud competitors

Oracle has been reluctant to authorise its databases and applications in the Google Cloud Platform, currently third in the market ahead of Oracle.

Strange that, as Google Cloud should be Oracle's favourite.

AWS sells their own databases in their cloud and had a long public spat with Oracle about the fact that they weren't eating their own dog-food, until they were, and eliminated their Oracle DBs.

Azure from Microsoft is rather a direct competitor, with their SQL Server product being one of the more popular SQL DBs out there. If you want SQL in the Azure cloud, you'll be getting MS-SQL, not Oracle.

Google seems neutral, by comparison. Until Oracle decided a massive lawsuit would be a good idea.

I guess Oracle will get a bigger slice of a small and ever shrinking pie as a result, but I would think growing the pie would have been the better answer, long-term.

Absolutely fab: As TSMC invests $100bn to address chip shortage, where does that leave the rest of the industry?

Samsung may decide that the US market is not too important for them and they are willing to risk losing it e.g. in favour of the Chinese market.

Zero chance of that. South Korea would come up with some reason to step-in and take over the company.

They're in the same boat as Taiwan. Without US support, their neighbors are likely to invade.

a rich, developed and mostly self-sustained country like China that can play against the US sanctions

China isn't self-sustained at all. They've done well making money on manufacturing low-cost western tech, but all their attempts to promote domestic alternatives have failed to overcome market forces. How have CBHD and Loongson been coming along? Why will SMIC do any better?

strongly politically influenced US production with its export bans might not be the safest choice

The US only imposes export bans on the highest-tech bits. You can still get lesser tech from the US even if you're on the enemies list.

It doesn't matter if fabs are in the US, or not. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea are close allies with the US, and go along with their export bans, too. And if they didn't, they'd risk getting cut off from US exports, themselves, such as the machinery those fabs need.

To really be secure from US sanctions, you'd need to put together a fab in one of the countries perpetually on US sanction lists, already. Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Cuba ans Syria come to mind. It would be a massive feat to get a world-class fab built in one of those countries, but if you could do it, they would sell to anyone and everyone, no questions asked.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Excellent

Perfect tech news story for April 1st.

'Imagine' if Virgin Galactic actually did sub-orbital tourism: Firm unveils new chrome job on SpaceShip III

Another idea

Maybe they should drive it around a city or two, selling music CDs out of the boot...

Amazon’s critical Alabama warehouse workers union vote has started … and may be some time

Amateurs

Amazon is an amateur at the union busting game. When Wal-mart is facing a vote on unionizing, they suddenly decided to shut down the entire branch/location, first. Apparently that's not illegal in the US, so Wal-mart has used this same trick several times and remained union-free. Seems it would be even easier for Amazon to do the same.

Intel accused of wiretapping because it uses analytics to track keystrokes, mouse movements on its website

Re: How many times?

At best, Amazon for example, it's about extracting your money as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Amazon is on my list for the worst-performing site I use, and getting slower every year. I'm always waiting ages for javascript to load until I can open a larger image. It's so bad I went from always shopping at Amazon, to now starting my shopping at eBay and only with hard to find or more expensive items will I compare what's available on Amazon.

And once I've decided to buy, what does Amazon do? Stop the process cold to try and force me to sign up for a Prime subscription, or else hunt for the one square centimeter of space on the screen I can click on to place my order. And only then do I get the privilege of changing it from premium shipping back to FREE.

The kitchen sink website design of Amazon makes it about the worst looking on the modern internet, too.

Ill be drawing a giant penis and writing fsck off rather a lot on their website.

I look forward to the new school of data-driven web designers that insist web pages must be all be redone to include a penis-shaped navigation bar for maximum efficiency and customer engagement.

Island in the Stream: AlmaLinux project issues first stable release of CentOS replacement

Much has been lost

CentOS did some nice things beyond just repackaging RHEL. For example, the CentOS "plus" kernels included many drivers for hardware deprecated by RHEL. They also created alternate arch releases, such as CentOS-7 x86, which leveraged the i686 packages RHEL7 built for backwards compatibility on x86-64, but the CentOS community made it a full distro, having an installer that works, building kernels for 32-bit CPUs, etc.

I'm not sure I care about the latter, as CentOS-7 will be supported for many years, and it may be time to dump the old hardware once it hits EOL, but the former is tremendously useful.

IBM is really gambling with cutting off RHEL stable. EPEL packages (which make RHEL useful) really don't appear until after a RHEL release. It languished until the CentOS release came out, THEN there was community activity creating EPEL packages for everything. I'm sure IBM hopes forcing CentOS Stream on everyone will result in that community activity happening sooner, but it seems more likely EPEL package maintaners will ignore it as they did before, and wait for the stable spin-off of something free, before putting in the effort. If CloudLinux wants to really hurt IBM's OS, all they have to do is delay major releases, and any future attempt by RHEL/IBM to "help" improve things will be looked on with suspicion, if not summarily rejected.

Huawei CFO's legal eagles take HSBC to court in Hong Kong to obtain evidence against US extradition

Run for the exit

Now would be a good time for HSBC to start their Hong Kong exit plans. Maybe leave a handful of Hong Kong natives there to keep doing business, but be prepared for China to come down hard.

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

Re: XX is faster than Yy ?

The relative performance of a browser isn't really a deciding factor though, is it?

With modern websites being such a massive burden, browser speed matters quite a bit. I immediately notice the difference browsing Amazon on a new computer versus an older one... Waiting around for images to load, and similar.

Unless you're doing video encoding or high-end gaming, the web browser is probably the most CPU and memory intensive application you run, so its performance will dictate when you need to buy a new computer.

That said, I absolutely can't STAND browsing the web without Firefox addons like ublock, Image Video Block (stop autoplay videos), Javascript Toggle, cookie autodelete, and to a lesser extent a user agent switcher, RSS add-on, a "reader" view, and more.

However, I'm a bit spoiled in that I've replaced most of my web browsing with RSS feeds, and browsing the web is more an occasional nuisance.

Re: Major media

Chrome and Safari show up on major media outlets that non-technical people (i.e.most people) access.

Safari only matters because it's absolutely forced upon the many Apple customers. Want to use a different web browser on iPhone, iPad? Too bad. Safari on Windows was a massive failure.

Safari is in the same boat as Microsoft's Edge browser, they try desperately to force on users of their platform.

Chrome is similarly forced on Chromebook user, and is installed by default on Android devices the world over, undermining the once diverse and competitive browser ecosystem there. Then they use their search monopoly to suggest Chrome to everyone who uses their service.

If Facebook was pushing Firefox as aggressively as Google has been pushing Chrome, it might get interesting.

Funny

Funny because that's how we ended up with Firefox. It was touted as so much faster and lighter than the Mozilla Suite (now called Seamonkey) when in reality it was almost exactly the same, but work pivoted over to Firefox.

As a result, we don't all have an HTML editor installed as part of our browser which made it easy to clean up a page before printing it out and was the obvious choice for quick word processing. Not to mention needing to install a mail application separately. Seems everyone forgot the lessons Netscape taught us back in the 90s.

And Chrome came along and claimed to be fast as well. Never mind it was an absolute monster, and only appeared to be faster because the UI was a separate thread that stayed responsive while heavy web-page processing was going on.

It seem fitting Firefox will flip the script and just pronounce itself the fastest.

Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version

Re: Results

As much as I hate to admit it, Google still gives the best search results most of the time.

I get BETTER results from DDG most of the time.

I often try google when a ddg search doesn't turn up what I want, and either google: A) Only turns up some spam pages that ddg did not, or B) Ignores some of my search terms, and inundates me with irrelevant nonsense.

Only two thing I can think of that Google does betters. 1) Searching for EXACT file names and 1) More aggressively guessing you might have meant to search for popular term X instead of the correctly spelled but less popular word Y.

Having said that, the first example I thought up off-the-cuff shows the opposite in reality... A search for "googol" on DDG guesses you might want "Google", while the same search on Google does NOT suggest a correction.

Spotify to introduce lossless audio streaming: Better sound or inefficient gimmick?

Re: FLAC

MP3 is not the best lossy audio format available, for many reasons I won't get into here, and will never sound perfect.

Try your test again with Musepack at standard (~160kbps) or MP2 (Musicam) at 192kbps and you won't have the distortion of cymbals and the like. Both are temporal domain codecs. MP2 has a bad reputation from DAB, but that's only because broadcasters insist on using it at terribly low bitrates.