Posts by drankinatty

Chinese router vendor denies its firmware contains backdoors – but pauses downloads to fix security issues anyway

Xisus Christ -- you can't trust anybody anymore..

We all pay for espionage ... and in this case it really was the buyer paying to be compromised.

If we are having to rely on the good nature of security firms to bring these matters forward, we are not in a good position. It would seem a bit of coordinated diplomacy is in order to ensure the government responsible is motivated to prevent a repeat. Unfortunately, the orangutan colored president can't spell diplomacy, so we will have to rely on the remaining smart nations to help with this one.... What a mess.

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

474 GW of new connections on a grid that is falling apart from neglect?

What could possibly go wrong?

Govenor Hotwheels makes very few decisions not politically motivated or designed to disenfranchise voters, but it appears he may have run into reality and had to make an actual decision to prevent brining the Texas electrical grid crashing down. For those not familiar, Texas deregulated it's electricity market in 1995 using a bit of "lectric legerdemain" promising Texans competition in the electricity market to lower the price consumers pay. (the cost per KWh in Texas has tripled since, surprise!)

Slipped into the misguided deregulation, Texas removed the maintenance requirement requiring the Transmission & Distribution Service Provider (TDSP) replace equipment based on the "engineering life" of the component (e.g. a pole has an engineering life of 25 years, the TDSP has to replace poles within a 25 year cycle). Deregulation left maintenance to the discretion of the TDSP, which, in reality, allowed them to avoid regular maintenance altogether, preferring a just replace it when it breaks philosophy, helps keep profits high.

30 years after deregulation, you can imagine the condition of the Texas grid. Now somebody wants to make another 474 GW of new connections? This won't end well, for reasons that are all too readily apparent. I suspect that is probably what forced the good governor's hand, as his Texas is open-for business philosophy -- no matter how bad it hurts Texans far outweighs any slight political benefit from the anti-datacenter stance.

Adding anything to the Texas grid and it starts to sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies "Snap, Crackle ... Pop".

Voyager 2 cheats the power budget for another year

Re: Now THIS is engineering

It truly is remarkable engineering, from the time the mantra at NASA was design it, cut metal, build it, and go fly. When engineers far outnumbered the managers and "meetings to discuss the agenda for the next meeting" had not yet turned the agency into a bloated bureaucratic mess, and before the concept of "public-private partnerships" drained the agency of institutional knowledge in what turned out to be the subsidization of the "private" side of the partnerships at taxpayer expense.

Somehow I don't see any more Voyager type missions that benefit the public and science coming from the "private" space "businesses" that remain. There is a deep lesson there for us all.

Claude Code is revolutionizing digital archaeology. Enterprise better dig it

I call B.ewildering S.tatement

"... Claude Code ... interpreting circuit diagrams ..."

Anyone that has ever struggled reading hardware datasheets and circuit diagrams probably has a good idea of the mental gymnastics involved. While coding models like Claude can churn through source code quite well "interpreting circuit diagrams" isn't something that falls within tokenizing, transforming and inference. Now I'm not a AI user, other than dabbling to see what they could do, but unless there has been wild leaps forward in what they entail, I think that statement needs a bit of further qualification. I'd also be interested in a reply from anyone that has first-hand experience with a model interpreting circuit diagrams with anything other than rudimentary IC chips?

Just what is the article talking about there?

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director

There is certainly a cluster coming down the road for NOAA, once the world envy for weather and climate prediction. But the "Cluster" that's coming isn't followed by "Toolkit" or "Director".

This is something that is designed and calculated to further hobble NOAA from the administrations climate-denying circle-jerk that begin by taking a chainsaw to the agency. This is how you destroy an agency, you kill off the institutional knowledge with indiscriminate firings and policies that lay waste to morale, and then you take its tools away so it is no longer self-reliant. What, the cloud contract expressly prevents running climate models, and the Cray is gone??

While we all complain about the $200 government hammer, the cost of the Cray that is going away will be a pittance compared to the cost of cloud compute once the hook is set and the prices start to rise. (unless, of course, the AI bubble bursts, then there may be a real argument for excess hyper-scaler compute being cost competitive)

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Careful what gets poisoned

Seems shieldfont is an npm based creation. A quick hop to github threw cold water on my plans to tinker with it. While the poisoning the scraping is a fantastic idea, one will have to take great care if you build you own rather than using the prebuilt CDN, and even then, you are relying on the CDN build catching any poisoned npm packages in the chain before the latest build is made public. I guess that comes with the territory when it's javascript that is being extended, I just wish I had more confidence in the package manager. After the recent rash of install script and bun poisoning AUR (was/is) dealing with, care is certainly required.

War machines can run amok with AI in control

It is a sick, sick world out there

I'm eternally thankful for growing up in a time before community was destroyed technology, when party-line meant the land-line shared between homes and pressing 0 brought up a helpful human on the other end of the line to complete your call.

Kudos for the excellent reporting and kudos for the effort by those at airwars.org. Though I'm a bit torn. I could have very well lived out the remainder of my life blissfully ignorant on the topic, the gravity of depravity shown by those incorporating this tech into the kill-chain deserves the disinfectant of sunlight on what is supposedly being done "in our names". Seems there is a grave cost to giving up our privacy after all.

Flock cameras go up in flames as cops hunt suspected firebugs

Surprised it was "fire" and not "fired upon"

Those cameras make perfect target practice for Georgians, who are known to be rather fond of their firearms.

Flock is just another data broker making money treading on the constitutional rights of Americans. Along with the right to travel, among the recognized liberty rights is the right to be let alone. There is a fine line between a reasonable expectation of privacy when moving about and doing so in a public place, but the act of being in public doesn't deprive one of that privacy expectation. While there would be little to complain about if you were caught in a picture background taken out in public, there is fertile ground for complaint about the autonomous systematic capture and recording of your location in public.

Anybody got a light?

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

Re: Linux Update, patch tuesday.

Most all distributions do and just pass the updated kernel along in the next set of packages updated. Rolling releases have the simpler job, while release based distros generally have to backport the patches to whatever kernel version they use, but then it's they same passing along an updated package for the kernel as part of the normal update process.

Every distro, unless you build all packages from source, provides a package-manager for the purpose of installing, removing, and updating packages (among other chores). Whether that's RPM, deb, apt, pacman, zypper, etc... A lot of the distros go even farther and provide user convenience tools such as an update notification process, systray app, or the like, that provides notification when updates are available, and then it's simply a "click the icon" type install. Others prefer the command line and can use tools like pacman's 'checkupdates' to see what's pending, or simply start an update with zypper or apt and compare what is included in the proposed update.

The "scale" of the kernel CVE's may be up, (and many won't be show-stopper security issues), and I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. I do share concern that in the interim it will overload those involved in the kernel patching process, but it's not as if the kernel is a new project or the people involved have shown signs they are not up for the job or able to manage patching and merging changes into the code base. I'm quite confident we are in good hands there.

Who is really hits hard are those organization that build a custom kernel for their use (for whatever reason or needed config options). Especially if they run on machines that are public facing. That's where the picking through the CVE list becomes the challenge and chore, and that's where the testing to ensure no side-effects impact their specific use case significantly adds to the work load. I don't envy those in that position, but for the normal Linux user, it's just a normal update that happens to include a new kernel and a reboot.

The really interesting part would be a summary from Greg KH of the items fixed and how they were identified/reported. Also whether the scale of the identified issues continues to increase or whether we go through a period where the bulk are identified and then it kind of trails off to a normal trickle. That's what I'll be watching.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Let me fix that for you...

Not sure it applies only to "multi-national", seems the old green-eyed-monster has destroyed business ethics and integrity. The ubiquity of technology just provides a hidden avenue to the frustration of all. At least early versions, like the Middle-East Sheik that needs your help with his bank account, was visible to all.

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

When the distros and desktops bend-the-knee to freedesktop and gnome, you end up with enshittified software. Sure, let X11 and wayland compete, may the best design win, but it's a damn shame when the lamer of the two is force-fed to everyone, like it or not. So much for Linux built on the cornerstone of user-choice.

What sane person would say "Sure, I want to reopen my session to a steaming pile of resized windows dumped on the desktop."

We've been able to restore window-size and position since at least KDE3 and Gnome2, two decades plus. Change is fine, loss of functionality isn't.

GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

Re: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

First thought that came to mind was "palm to face icon".

Given that most of John Q Public is bewildered when forced to negotiate a 4-way stop, or actually work a dimmer switch when driving with high-beams on, are they really going to think though foreseeable agentic exfiltration?

Finding corner-cases after exploitation - sounds like a terrible idea.

Purism launches supersized 16-inch laptop for buyers who put privacy before price

Wow!

Something is really off in the world today. We have seen a complete divorce between Price and Value. This story just helps bring that into sharper reflection.

Looking at the old HP laptop with 17" display, dual 2.5" SSD plus DVD-RW (or 3rd SSD), i7 (2nd gen), 8G, Nvidia GPU (256-bit card), SD card reader, fire-wire and Win10 Pro (drive removed at purchase, replaced with openSUSE 15.4, then Tumbleweed) all for $339, refurb. (HP-8760w for the curious) It's never missed a beat, happily, and routinely builds PHP and Mongdb from source without breaking a sweat. It won't set speed records, but how fast is fast enough?

I'm happy that Purism is putting out a security conscious laptop, which isn't really a thing without IME disabled, but at the better part of $3k for the base model and almost $10k for the fully loaded box, it just leaves you shaking your head. How much compute does the ordinary person need and at what cost? I guess all those riding high on current AI stock valuations are the target market, but boy things can sure change... Wow.

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

Re: Sensible approach

"'... we can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it,”

We could all see it coming from a mile away. On steroids with gamers with no/little code experience. [15 year old] "Gee, I've got this great feature, and AI is free! Claud (or whatever), 'Create a new feature for godot that does ... XYZ', and then 'do what is needed to include the code in godot.' [end, full-stop]". What could possibly go wrong? It makes as much sense as "unlicensed carry" in the states. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

I know not what godot is, but substitute any project, and the result will be the same. Good on the project maintainers for taking the foreseeable and necessary initial steps to preserve sanity and their codebase.

Claude Code users complain their chat records are being mysteriously wiped out

Post-incident, attorney: "can you show us your development notes, the contemporaneous security criteria you considered designing this code?", developer: "uh, no, ... I could have, but the AI deleted it." Attorney: "can you show us your backup logs?", developer: "uh, no."'

Not a position you want to find yourself in with a tool that is supposed to be ready for enterprise use. And writing code is supposed to be the most viable of AI's survival business models?

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

That’s the way the money goes – Pop! Goes the weasel.

(unfortunately, this one may hurt)

Space Shuttle Endeavour stacks up nicely for new California exhibit

Visitors will get a look few ever have

Good for them for mounting Endeavour in the vertical position and providing a gantry so people can get a look at the underside of the vehicle looking down from the bipod toward the two aft thrust-structures. When you generally see the bottom of an orbiter, you are looking up at the tiles and then look like a 22-24 thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. When you able to look down across all the tiles, you realize all those thousands of tiles provide a surface that is smooth as glass. Truly amazing engineering.

California is a fitting home. Rockwell in Downey, CA, parent to Rockwell Space Operations Co, (RSOC) Houston, was instrumental in the program. If you get a chance, go see it. (I have nothing to do with the museum, just an old shuttle engineer that left JSC in 95)

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: HOORAY!!!

It's folks like this that offer hope that after this shameful administration is relegated to the ash-heap of history, there are good people ready to pick up the pieces to go on.

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Re: Bah!

Or have an officer arrive on the scene with the victim being ground to hamburger under the spinning wheels of the robo-taxi and no way to stop it. Sounds like NHTSA is doing somebody's bidding and it's not for public safety.

OpenAI Codex bombards SSDs with needless write operations, costing millions

Trillion dollar companies exploiting user-hardware for model improvement -- with conveniently added telemetry to close the loop. Perhaps snooping for a viable business model to cover the trillion dollars of circularly financed debt after the last idea of measured token use went up in smoke? What kind of connection do you need to upload a 37 TB sqlite db anyway?

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

They are screwed when the subscription service does the outage thing (or files for bankruptcy)... Remove the humans, make yourself hostage of the AI provider. Sound business judgment if I've ever "herd" any. The hype will end, and I suspect it is something we will all end up paying for.

Everything's bigger and better in Texas – even data breaches

Re: So, they got..

Except to add I've unfortunately had a Texas hunting and fishing license since I was 16, 44 years ago,, and state duck stamp since it was required later on ('84?). I see Gov. Hotwheels and crew don't have the integrity to name the vendor. Typical. Probably a nepotistic brother-in-law deal. I have no faith left in any entity to keep data secure, period. It's just a matter of "when" anymore. A statute, negligence per-se, a private right of action, $1000 per-individual plus costs and fee would go a long way to tightening things up. Lawn-darts anyone?

KDE Plasma 6.7 brings the X11 era to a close

Re: No love for an accessibility dumpster fire

I am sick and tired of freedesktop removing "Choice" for the Linux ecosystem by cajoling distros and desktops into betraying what Linux was built on "user-choice." This has become a MO. Whether it we are talking systemd or wayland, the process has been the same. Put out press releases bad-mouthing existing functionality, pushing the latest freedesktop creation and then lobbying, or strong-arming, distros and desktops to get on board. Ultimately this ends with a "freedesktop way or the highway" declaration that the Linux community, like a herd of sheep, is just supposed to be happy with.

This type of anti-competitive behavior has no place in open-source. Sure, build a better mousetrap and run to the top of a hill and holler. Draw as many as you can, but you cross a line when you seek to eliminate the choice of others to take a different path.

The blame fall not only on projects that employ this sort of exclusionary development, but it falls equally on the publications that pick up the story and present it in a way to normalize it. Normalizing the removal of user-choice from the Linux/FOSS is a betrayal of the bedrock principle the system was founded on.

Good for Sonic. May it enjoy the longevity and success TDE found. (Tim is smiling somewhere :)

Arch Linux locks down AUR signups amid wave of malicious commits

For the 17 years I've used Arch, AUR has always been promoted as an asset, with helper scripts provided to make it easier for new Arch users to make use of AUR (e.g. yay, etc.). It's just a sad reflection of organizational integrity to see the MO of CYA/"Blame the victim" trotted out when something goes wrong. You need to look no further than the bottom of any Archwiki page to get an idea of how AUR is viewed, e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Timers You don't get to have it both ways.

AUR is invaluable to Arch, just as packman and OBS are to openSUSE. What made AUR a prime target is the open anonymous registration that comes with the immediate ability to adopt orphan packages (no current owner) and push changes. The openness is also a balance between requiring a validated identity and potentially exposing a contributor to his/her state authorities in countries that control access to the internet. That's a difficult balance, but an admirable one.

Had it not been for the very active and dedicated community of users reporting changes to packages they themselves did not maintain or own, it could have been a lot worse. It was bad enough, and the malicious payload was a sophisticated credential stealing bit of malware. The volunteer moderators worked tirelessly, swiftly reverting changes and deleting accounts. The aur-general mailing list contains the chronology, as well as a link to a preliminary disassembly of the malware and associated report. npm was the poison of choice again.

Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

Re: Seems like poor form

*"As we say in the business, All regulations are written by blood."*

No, that was the AAIB -- and they meant it :)

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

Re: I believe the engineer

Yep, known Andrew since the samba 1.8.x days, and introduction to rsync. Had a corner-case fly under the radar. Not like that's never happened with non-AI coded code..... Nope, never.

This is certainly one I'm not losing any sleep over.

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

It's not a matter of "If", only "When"

".. said that the government was promising safeguards ... It added that the Department of Health already makes it difficult for people to opt out ..."

Medical records, protected health information, whatever you want to call it is probably the most personal of personal information. If society has learned nothing from all the supposed "safeguards" on electronic data, it's that it takes a special type of arrogance for someone to say, "don't worry, we will keep your personal information safe." How many have eaten their words in an articles here, alone. 23andMe, Baymark, Kettering anyone?

Whether and how your medical information is captured and stored needs to be a patient choice made after informed consent, just like any medical treatment that carries risk. Unfortunately, the very last people competent to safeguard information are medical folks (sorry Docs, the truth hurts, most of you don't even know where the data goes... "it's like magic...") Government held data is no more secure than privately held data and vice versa.

The problem is most people don't give it a second thought until they receive a breach disclosure letter in the mail, and reality sets in. It's up to those who know enough to know, to make sure these concerns are elevated and reflected in legislative discussions and that "opt-out" isn't something made difficult for people to do. This is far more an acute problem in private payer countries where any breach and leak of data can be used to deny future coverage and care, but a leak anywhere of this type of data usually contains all the personal identifiers needed to do serious financial harm -- even by a blind identity-thief.

I don't have the answers, but I can sure identify the problem. Ensuring people have a choice about whether and what of their medical information is digitally captured seems like it should be of primary concern, not an afterthought, and not a choice made intentionally difficult for people to exercise.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: Imitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery

It is indeed, and good for MS for choosing the best tools for the job. Nobody goes looking around in windows when then need the Swiss Army Knives of text-processing slice and dice a project. Add sed and awk to the mix and you are covered.

Personally, I'd still prefer firing up a MSys2 shell in windows and have all the native Linux tools at my fingertips. Only drawback is reaching in/out of the MSys2 (MinGW) environment to the rest of the windows filesystem -- but, that's not any less cumbersome from the the dos (command) prompt or powershell........

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Re: Resistance is our duty

Chuckling.... You can't be tracked by what you don't buy... Tokenomics still doesn't add up. After multi-trillion dollars in capital expenditures over the past three years and repeated rounds of fundraising, the bill will come due at sometime. Seems Qualcomm's CEO's glasses are rose-colored. The dystopian vision he laid out certainly doesn't correspond to any vision of the future I'll part of. If we can survive the "gifted orangutan", we'll survive AI as well...

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: “Gone. For basically nothing.”

Well put. And from the opposite angle, the predatory billing would make any good drug dealer blush. First hit is always free ... they always find a way to pay for the next one. Hype or crutch, they've got programmers by the short-hairs with the coding models and assistants. The free hits have all been given away.

The third side to the fleecing is the numbers have to support the investment somehow. Though MS likely has the least exposure in the circular-financed AI brotherhood, they have nearly 40 years experience extracting what the market will bare. Somebody has to pay for the azure-credit skin they have in the game. For the rest of the brotherhood, perpetual fundraising isn't a business model, that is likely to be a hard lesson to learn.

Shai-Hulud malware worms Red Hat npm package versions downloaded 80K times a week

Re: Really?

Not sure what motivated your response, I did re-read it a couple times, the point I see here isn't a revamped npm report, but yet another factual report of a supply chain poisoning with npm being the vector of choice for the bad guys. Maybe I'm just too old to get it, but I've always welcomed accurate reporting that keeps you apprised of the pervasive security exploits, even if it does sound a lot like the one three days go. The frequency and the vector are the point.

4 in 10 AI agents headed for demotion or the rubbish bin

Ishkabibble?

"Gartner recommends that organizations planning to implement AI agents should apply a proportional governance approach classifying AI agents across distinct autonomy levels, with each level representing a different trust boundary and corresponding governance requirements." ??

Okay... define ..."proportional governance approach..." and kindly explain the taxonomy of ...classifying AI agents across distinct autonomy levels...", as well as the taxonomy for "...each level representing a different trust boundary..." and pray-tell, just how each trust boundary corresponds to the various governance requirements??

Memory of the past article discussing buzz-words comes to mind, or maybe it's completely obvious to all what Gartner is talking about in his critique of the hype and I just missed the boat somewhere along the way?? It may be a simple as a "Mickey's big hand and Mickey's little hand" problem when reading a watch, but I just don't see it...

I mean, I get the drift, but beyond that the specifics are clear-as-mud.

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

Re: Christians

"are by definition gullible, lacking a reasoning ability..." you have to look no further than the state of US politics to confirm that definition. They dance around the golden-cow of inference and find spiritual meaning in the RAG. Jesus Christ...

Shai-Hulud keeps burrowing: 314 npm packages infected after another account compromise

Is there more left unsaid than said?

"The compromised account, [e-mail], belongs to a developer based in Hangzhou, China. Security researcher Nicholas Carlini reported the malware on GitHub, and the the hust.cc account closed the issues and marked them as "fixed" within an hour. This means the malware report on this and other repositories is hidden unless a developer looks for closed issues."?

Am I just cynical, or does that paragraph seem to indicate that there may be more to that part of the story than the author was willing to include? It's almost like the flashing red light over the sign saying "Nothing to See Here..."?

I can read it two ways: (1) the poor repository owner took swift action, corrected the issue closing and hiding the fact the event occurred, or (2) the "I at Hurst.cc", an obvious common Chinese name from Hangzhou, China, took the quickest path possible to hide the issue, almost in a planned damage control sense?

Maybe I am just cynical... Of course you can always choose to search for closed issues, if you know the issue exists and is closed...

Google tells database devs to lean hard on AI for PostgreSQL work

Re: "We do encourage folks to use AI heavily"

Did they clear this idea with Postges? An assurance being the guy that prompted the model will stand behind the code rings a bit hollow? "Don't worry, the 21 year-old that contributed the 17,000 line AI generated module that broke everything will fix it in no time.... once he understands what the module did to the rest of your codebase." Don't worry the blast-radius will be small? That sure engenders confidence.

Let's just hope the vibe-coded module isn't spread out over a number of commits that now can't be reverted without breaking other PRs that occurred in the interim. This sure sounds like one of those "What could possibly go wrong" things...

Cache-poisoning caper turns TanStack npm packages toxic

Re: And people whine that there isn't one package manager for C++

Most sources (source packages) provide sha256 hashes, gpg key or the like to verify what you downloaded was the original unaltered source. I consider source files and source packages that can be validated before being build far less vulnerable to being poisoned that these magic version managers that suck in hundreds of packages as stdin flashes a momentary name, version and size as the files fly in. You have to wonder why people still allow npm or pypi in their application stack when they are such frequently poisoned pipelines.

You have to wonder if a vibe-coded AI conglomeration would fare any better. I'm not AI literate beyond the knowledge level and I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd probably wager it's only a matter of time before we see AI pipelines (whatever those may look like) poisoned in the not too distant future. Poison the response aggregation to dump malicious goodies as part of whatever it just invented for the prompter and you are off to the races. I'm sure all aspects of what come back are rigorously validated before the "Go" button gets pushed -- human nature being what it is and all....

Congress investigates Canvas breach as company pays ransom

Re: Shred logs?

Bingo, I read that and my jaw hit the floor... How stupid does he think John Q. Public is? Honest data thieves send a "shred log" -- really? I mean really!!

Let me see here, let's just type up something that looks like a log entry -- yep, that'll do. Now what to do with the four other copies of the data on the intermediate hosts? Nah, they'll never know...

Gtk2-NG, next generation of Gtk 2, comes back to life

Hooray for the devs working on gtk2-NG. Finally revival of a toolkit that doesn't look like "milk-toast" with adwaita, libadwaita and now xdg-desktop-portal rammed down your throat as hard dependencies.

Gtk+2 was a programmers toolkit while Gtk+3 was more an attempt to make C behave like C++ that additionally abandoned traditional Gtk styling in favor of CSS immediately alienating 1000's of theme designers resulting in Gtk+3 looking like your circa 1991 web page. Just horribly bland. Lesson, you can't break backwards compatibility with every point-release and expect volunteer theme designers to stay interested. (will that lesson be learned before Gtk5?)

Yes, Gtk+2 is "finished" software, but I'm glad to see it picked up and maintained.

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Re: Fans! Fans! Fans!

There's a plumber smiling somewhere...

Cloudera had US candidates send resumes to a fake email address, DoJ charges

That pesky four-days worth of retrying the delivery from the original sending smtp host leaves a lot of log entries to sweep under the proverbial rug.

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

"Unfortunately at high velocities wind turbines have to shut down to protect them from damage" ??

Controllable pitch technology has been incorporated since the beginning in modern wind-turbines. The only time full-feathering is required is in hurricane/tornado force wind conditions. Hardly a valid argument against wind-energy, or justification for abandoning projects that are underway.

The tragedy is it will take generations to recover from the intentional damage done by the current administration -- at a time when we have no more time to lose curbing our CO2 emissions.

It should also stand as a stark warning to all who currently enjoy or aspire for liberty and self-governance. Once the corruption-camel sneaks his nose under the edge of the tent -- you're already in big trouble. We need to re-dedicate ourselves to the shared values that bind us together. Truth, justice, honesty, integrity and a shared sense of purpose to ensure those are the qualities we require of our leaders.

Paying, with taxpayer dollars, for the abandonment of green-energy projects for the unexplained benefit of the fossil-fuel industry stands in antithesis to those values, and shows, without question, the corrosive effect dark-money has in politics.

Ex-AWS legend explains what enterprises need to make AI actually work

It all brought back to me that article from the recent past talking about the people who were attracted to the corporate buzz-word synergy salad being those that likely wouldn't be your first pick to figure out how many Aggies it takes to unscrew a light bulb.

Imagine trying to explain those benefits to the owner of a large plumbing company. A meme of a man holding his left arm skyward with the callout saying "Save my watch!" came to mind.

We're going to see where this goes, along with the grand RIFs needed to balance the corporate budgets to pay for it -- whether we like it or not. I'm sure the economy will do just fine given the success of the large scale retraining efforts promised to the newly unemployed in the past.

More ancient Linux device support faces the chop

Re: Removing old code for old devices is not quite the improvement touted

Agreed, but so much for Linux being for hobbyists (at least non-kernel-guru hobbyists). Sometimes the easy route of trash it instead of fix it leads to tears of regret later. As mentioned in the article I still have plenty of 3C5XX cards in the bone pile. (not that I have immediate plans to play with them, but...)

Old kernels are an option now, but old kernels now is synonymous with "unavailable in the future" -- unless you build your own. Very few actually go though the full process of "Linux from Scratch". (and granted, building/installing an older kernel on a running system is a fraction of the full manual effort, but it's non-trivial. Splitting the removed modules out as separate optional modules, regardless of whether they are actively maintained, would at least leave a defined path to make use of them in the future without any one hobbyist having to manually merge the driver.

It's likely the accelerated removal will go largely unnoticed and I hope that is the case, but I have misgivings of hacking branches off the kernel tree. More an unease than any of the mentioned removals I could point with a use-case that would argue against removal. You never need it, until the week after it goes out in the trash. Costly lessons from Murphy's Law abound.

Another npm supply chain worm is tearing through dev environments

It seems we can't go two weeks without another report of supply-chain attacks from npm (newest packaged malware). But we can relax, according to the npm site it's only "Relied upon by more than 17 million developers worldwide." I guess that small batch of developers doesn't read The Register.

Claude Opus wrote a Chrome exploit for $2,283

Even faster fix, regulate and impose non-delegable civil liability for the cost of any hack developed with the AI tool on the AI tool provider. Guardrails will get much more robust overnight. Ambulance chasers are good for something.

US states can't account for datacenter tax breaks. Literally

I can't believe old Govnr Hotwheels in Texas is one of the states that actually got it right. I guess the proper GAAP slipped right by Kenny-boy Paxton, otherwise there would likely be only two states that got it right :)

UK told its Big Tech habit is now a national security risk

We gave up our sovereignty

It wasn't long ago when every government entity and each company owned it's own hardware, handled its own networking, hosted its own web server, ran its own mail host, hosted its own databases, and had some expertise somewhere in the organization over what it took to make it all work and likely employed a few IT "professionals" who while not getting rich, made enough to put a roof over their heads, a car in the garage, food on the table and clothes on the kids. We were all sovereign at the time. Many of the vultures here recall.

But as with the most common ills of the past 30 years, the hype-machine started extolling the virtues of cloud storage, governments, companies and individual were lured to keep their documents and photos on somebody else's hardware. The same play was made for e-mail and web hosting and finally complete IT solutions all with the promises of huge savings in IT spending. Each time promising expertise in all areas of tech where the cloud could do it better, faster and more secure relying on economies of scale to create magic savings and improved security. Soon governments and companies fired or laid-off their IT staff, removed their hardware and over time lost all "corporate knowledge" of how to make it all work.

The articles in The Register provide a daily chronicle reminding us all of there being no more truth to the promises of IT savings or data security by Big Tech than there was in the orange lunatic portrayed as Jesus claiming he thought the depiction was of him as a doctor. We've done it to ourselves.

I'm not sure data sovereignty necessarily means our Big Tech Bros here against your Big Tech Bros. The problem seems to have been the Big Tech Bros all along, regardless of where they reside.

Learning is expensive, and the best lessons -- are very expensive, but if we've learned nothing over the past 30 years in this area, that turning your hardware, software and data over to companies that over promise and under perform, then there is still some expensive learning to take place. Instead of rushing to turn every part of your IT over to someone else closer to home, perhaps the better and more sovereign path is to buy only those services you can't provide for yourself, and keep the rest in-house -- just as we all used to do it.

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Bewilderment

Oh no, no, no. This is where I have to politely disagree. E16 and E17 have very little in common. About as much as apples and squash. E16 was a classic type Linux desktop of the same cloth as blackbox or fluxbox or openbox, but one of it's really really neat additions was a floating application icon-pallet that allowed you to group icons for your top 6, 8, 9, 12, 16 apps (whatever number you can make into an X by Y grid) and have that always available much like a quick-launch widget in a toolbar.

I used E16 for years, and looked forward to E17, but E17 never really reached "fully baked" status during the first couple of years it was really being pushed (2006'ish ??). I don't have a clear memory of when, but it would have been in the SUSE 9.x, 10.x time frame. Somewhere out there you can search my username here (same on the early e17 mailing list), and get a closer time estimate, but E17 was a radical departure from E16 in almost every way.

This is one where I'd have to tip my hat to Szewczyk, and say job well done. I don't fault anyone for not remembering E16. It was one of the 20 or so desktops competing for space on your drive way back when. Along with the other odd ones like sawfish, and yep, I ran that one too. It provided some unique and incredibly ornate window decorations, but that's about the only saving grace I can recall. Chuckling, openSUSE still builds a lot of the old ones in their .../X11:/windowmanagers repository. Everything from "awesome" to "wmii", and yes sawfish is still there, but E16 seems to be missing for Tumbleweed currently.

Another wisely chosen thread about "finished" software by The Register. While the world seems eager to always jump to the next, latest, greatest, most currently hyped bit of code, what gets lost is a lot of the really good code that written before peoples attention was caught by the latest ghee-wiz.

Attention, gamers: The FAA wants YOU to be an air traffic controller

This is what happens when you staff your government with washed up pod-casters, fox "news" weekend hosts and the like. Forrest Gump said it best "Stupid is what stupid does". So, great, let's take the slacker/gamer mentality where in video-game land when your character dies, you just reload the last save and try again, and let's apply that mentality to a high-pressure, real world environment where lives are on the line with every dot on the screen and if your character dies -- they call for body bags and an investigation. What could possibly go wrong?

While there are very talented gamers out there, and not all are slackers, the transition from the basement of somebody else's house to an air-traffic control tower involves more than just learning a new game controller. And no!, you can't let liberal planes crash if the pilot didn't vote for your guy. So the current federal employee litmus test for hiring may preclude safety for all.

I'm all for improving air-traffic control, but given the track record and lack of any resounding success from any of our government's major project under the current "Jesus" administration -- perhaps we should put off any more changes until there has been a Hungarian like change to the current makeup of our government.... The Hungarian people threw Putin's mole out of Hungary, now Americans have to do the same to get the other one out of the White House, first.

Amazon put a filesystem on S3; I showed up with a test suite and bad intentions

Re: TLDR: Old Man Yells At Clouds.

Chuckling... There are obviously a lot of us cut from the same cloth here. Maybe it's an age thing, but I never bought the cloud hype. If your data is out of your control, it's at risk. If it's in your control, the risk doesn't change, but it's up to you to protect it. I always saw that as the better bet. Far to many have received the compromise or data-loss letters and the hollow we're sorry.