Posts by Bronek Kozicki

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: I hear you loud and clear

"none of them are on Linux"

Not a Tim Cook fan, but there is MacOS and it can be made into a pretty solid office work environment. With `brew.sh` it does most of the things you can do on Linux. For my own home machines I do use Linux, and I do dislike swapping to different keybindings when I switch to the work-supplied Mac, but at least it's not Windows ! I can do most things that I need on it, and it is not actively trying to hack my files - that counts for something.

Cisco goes Christmas shopping, buys Cilium project originator Isovalent

Re: Sure, Windows kernel, Linux, etc... but:

.... and for a good reason. Linux has a much smaller, and better designed, system API that it needs to support indefinitely. On the other hand, the necessity to drag Windows API *and* native (kernel) API to every new release is a severe drag on Windows development speed.

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

Re: Integrity of original data

Yes exactly - original data is stored fine. It is only the tiny window while it is still being written (to memory, not to disk - it is not IO bound) when, if read, it will appear there are all zeroes. IF there is anyone reading the data at this *very* specific moment. And that's a big IF, which is why this bug actually was in ZFS for a very long time. Some started looking back at Solaris at this point - it might have been "forever", or as long as ZFS supported hole reporting.

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is so mired in strangely hardy glue that the display shattered during iFixit's teardown

non-standard screws; replacing battery requires actual total disassembly (as opposed "you need to remove some difficult parts first") or battery is on strong glue; replacing ports is near impossible.

Microsoft Surface Duo got a score of 2, Motorola razr 2020 got 1 ; these things are near impossible to disassemble. Have a look at https://www.ifixit.com/smartphone-repairability :)

Please, tell us more about how just 60 hydrogen-powered 5G drones could make 400,000 UK base stations redundant

100Gbps for the whole of London?

Given there are some 10mln people in this area, even if only 1% were to use it that's 1Mbps per person; or in other words, a truly awful contention ratio.

Thank you, not interested.

To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever

I've seen the movie just few days ago

Cannot recommend it highly enough.

Oracle adds Arm-powered servers with up to 160 cores to its cloud – must be why it sunk millions into Ampere

Ampere, 160 cores, in the cloud?

Huh, suddenly Oracle cloud is looking interesting.

I am sure there's a trap somewhere. They cannot make it worse then pricing per core, right?

Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?

Shame they do not make these in UK layout, with tall Enter and \| next to Z

As for Topre switches, they are my favourite and I regret so few keyboards use them.

Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V

"Windows 10 is on a path to becoming a hybrid Windows/Linux system"

taking it easy, I see.

China now blocking ESNI-enabled TLS 1.3 connections, say Great-Firewall-watchers

Huh

So, new censorship strategies circumvented by genetic algorithms - in other words, a very specific application of AI.

That's probably first time I see AI being actually useful.

From a trickle to an Application Stream: Red Hat opens barriers for RHEL 8.3 beta

Re: re: set root password and create a user

Actually it's a good practice to have a non-root user in the wheel (i.e. sudoers) group, to fall back to when some outage prevents connections to kerberos domain etc. Alternatively you could use root of course, but logging as root is not best practice because the potential for fatal mistake is too big.

This investor blew nearly $300,000 on Intel shares the day before 7nm disaster reveal. Yup, she's suing

I'm shocked

I tell you, I'm shocked

USA seeks Moon and Mars nuke power plant designs ready to fly in 2027

Re: What are they going to do with the heat?

Perhaps 1km long superconducting cable on Moon is easier to build than on Earth?

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

"deploy HAProxy in front of all web traffic"

It's a good lesson to have learned.

AMD pushes 64-core 4.2GHz Ryzen Threadripper Pro workstation processors

I wonder which UK-based "OEMs and system integrators" will start producing workstations with these CPUs inside.

If you wanna make your own open-source chip, just Google it. Literally. Web giant says it'll fab them for free

Probably enjoying cool point in the Heavenly Kings Arms

Reviewing and profiling your code is boring? Well, Amazon will now sell you an AI editor to do it for you

You code in Java

... that's your source of problems right there.

Ancient Arm server outfit Kaleao resprouts as Bamboo with CPU offload plan and electricity-saving power play

This is mildly interesting

I do like ARM servers, but Cortex A72 is "bare" Armv8 ISA, without atomic instructions which are rather useful on multi-core servers. Please wake me up again when they release new hardware with something like Ampere Altra.

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: Yes the juniors are being dumped-on again

I am saving money for similar reasons; as for burning the calories I am lucky enough to be married to a PE coach and she keeps me moving.

Intel outside: Chip king Keller quits x86 giant immediately 'for personal reasons'

Re: Back to Apple?

.... or perhaps NUVIA, Inc. ?

Sony reveals PlayStation 5 will offer heretical no-optical-disk option. And yes, it has an AMD CPU-GPU combo

Re: Disk free

players will be trapped in Sony's ecosystem

Isn't it part of the definition of a game console?

Brave soz about coding snafu that sent search queries to affiliate links, insists practice is 'industry standard'

First Opera, now Brave ....

I guess I just have no choice but stick with Firefox.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Re: That's pretty much all it does

deploying an address family that used 48-bit addresses would take the same amount of work that deploying v6 is taking. The work isn't proportional to the number of bits!

It's a shame that I cannot upvote this enough.

Hey Mister Prime Minister ... Scott! Can you get off my lawn please, mate?

Re: Only in Oz...

This should be a joke, but isn't

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Hydrogen clouds in a far-away star system glowing from a supernova's last gasp

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

n/t

Talk about a control plane... US Air Force says upcoming B-21 stealth bomber will use Kubernetes

Re: I wonder

One of the typical reasons for excessive disk use in k8s is that there is other log you know nothing about, which is written to some non-standard location. Non-standard because in microservices architecture "there is no need for standards, right?".

I wonder

... what will that bomber do when a bunch of critical processes get evicted due to too much disk space taken up by logs. And the logs immediately deleted, as the pods are being destroyed. Don't get me wrong, Kubernetes is very useful for lots of different cases, but critical software that can result in people dying when gone wrong is probably not one of them.

Snapping at Canonical's Snap: Linux Mint team says no to Ubuntu store 'backdoor'

It probably already is.

Not yet. I quite like 20.04 server edition, but right after installation I run a small script which starts like so:

apt-get purge -y fwupd packagekit dconf-service dconf-gsettings-backend bolt unattended-upgrades open-iscsi multipath-tools sg3-utils tpm-udev glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services snapd landscape-common

apt-get install -y zsh bc kpartx zip unzip wget curl tmux htop vim

apt-get autoremove --purge -y

The machines work just fine without snapd. It's a good luck that I have no desire to use LXD because then I would have to install it with snap.

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

I think there's been some change in the libel law few years past. Can't remember details though.

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Re: Another good reason to be an El Reg reader

The difference might not show up in simple tests; it does show up when resilvering a RAIDZ (with Z, i.e. the ZFS thing) array which would take under one day with CMR but takes over a week with SMR.

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

This isn't about dark matter (which we do not know about), it's about regular baryonic matter ie. your regular atomic nuclei with protons and (optionally) neutrons in them, like you would expect to see in a hydrogen atom.

Well done for the boffins, this is amazing discovery.

Rich Communication Services: Nobody uses it, nobody wants it, but analysts reckon it's on the verge of a breakthrough

Well, there is Signal. It is almost, but not quite, perfect (open source, good encryption, has no interest in collecting your data). However it relies on centralized servers and that's not so good - decentralized is better.

If someone could stop hackers pwning medical systems right now, that would be cool, say Red Cross and friends

Re: While, um, ...

As usual, can't say if you are making this up or not, but it's a cool story anyway so have an upvote.

DNS this week stands for Drowning Needed Services: Design flaw in name server system can be exploited to flood machines offline

Urgently patch your publicly available, recursive DNS server

Luckily few people need to run one. Right? Right??

Rust marks five years since its 1.0 release: The long and winding road actually works

Re: On speed

C++ has threads since version C++11 . Rather than create threads ad-hoc, the more efficient way is to manage a thread pool, fixed to the number of available cores. The problem with efficiency remains because of synchronization overhead, see also Amdahl's law (not to mention whole new category of bugs). Although of course there are better alternatives to explicit synchronization, e.g. message passing (for C++ example see seastar library - it looks ugly, but is also very efficient). Message passing is one of the reasons to try Go because channels are quite a good abstraction.

I do not know Rust, but all of the above seem like a nice reason to start learning it.

Re: Follow the money!

Someone must be confused, or is it just me?

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Re: I can see this going well....

The smart thing would be for UK to "support" this. When US corporations (esp. Silicon Valley) wake up to the fact that everyone is considering their tech a liability rather than asset, lure them to this side of the pond with more liberal regulation, and let US slide to Amish level of tech.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: "Lying" to your boss

Twat ?

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

Re: A black hole we can nearly see?

Accretion disks do emit light.

A black hole we can nearly see?

That's rather amazing. Hope some big telescope can be directed that way, in search of the accretion disc.

For boffins ->

What's worse than an annoying internet filter? How about one with a pre-auth remote-command execution hole and there's no patch?

Huh

Security vulnerability in a web tool written in .php; must be a day ending with "y"

RetroPie 4.6 brings forth an answer to 'What do I do with this Pi 4 I bought last year?'

If you prefer ssh over HDMI

... and like playing with tiny servers, then this will work nicely on pi 4.

Google reveals how its Borg clusters have evolved yet still only use about 60 percent of resources (Alibaba might do better)

Kudos

... for publishing this data. Job scheduling on large clusters is stupendously difficult and if there is any good research that can be based on the raw data, that will be useful for lots of people.

Welcome to life in the Fossa lane: Ubuntu 20.04 let out of cage and Shuttleworth claims Canonical now 'commercially self sustaining'

Re: Gnome has got a flat tyre

May I suggest a simple solution:

$ sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Internet root keymasters must think they're cursed: First, a dodgy safe. Now, coronavirus upends IANA ceremony

Do you remember author or at least part of the title?

What's vexing Linux-loving Gophers? A few things: Go devs want generics, easier debugging

Re: Caught in the middle with Go

I like to think of it as "upmarket C".

I disagree. Java GC is one or two orders of magnitude slower than that provided by modern Go runtime, not to mention both memory and CPU overhead of all the other 3rd party Java libraries which you will end up using in your program, for convenience or because Java defaults are not useful. It's just not very good for microservices, unless your memory and cores come for free. Although admittedly, Oracle is making an effort to bring Java to more modern age, with GraalVM.

"The implication is that while Go may be great for developing APIs and web services, it is not so good at the lowest level, perhaps a price paid for developer-friendly features like garbage collection."

I concur. Garbage collection is not great if your program works with many low-level resources (other than memory) because you have to maintain their lifetime by hand. I use both C++ and Go and while I would prefer to write higher level code in Go only, anything low-level has a better chance of good performance and consistent low resource utilization if it is written in good, idiomatic C++

Scaleway disarms its ARM64 cloud, cites unreliable hardware as the reason

1st gen Cavium TunderX to retire

It's an old chip and I am not surprised that it is being retired. Perhaps they waited for a worthy successor - there are few on the horizon as of now, but it will be little longer before the new hardware can be installed in the datacentres. They also won't be cheap, which makes them hard sell for bare-metal. In the meantime, the old bare-metal instances are turning out to be pain for the users and maintenance staff which is not surprising.