Posts by Bronek Kozicki

Linus Torvalds decides world doesn't need a new Linux today

Re: Thanks, so-called Linus

The trick is to use "make oldconfig" and then press Enter. More than few times.

Re: I think I know why Linux never worked for me.

The thing with linux kernel is that you have few older (and currently maintained & supported) versions to choose from, notably 4.4 and 4.9 as GKH mentioned. There is absolutely no reason to jump to 4.10 on the day it is released, that is unless you like living on the bleeding edge or have unusual hardware requirements.

Trump cybersecurity order morphs into 2,200-plus-word extravaganza

Re: Whatever you say ...

Actually, I was looking at the other side of the pond ...

Whatever you say ...

This "President Trump reportedly ordered that all new executive orders go through an expanded process that sought broader input from more government departments." is a rare show of common sense, from which others could learn. I'm shocked.

Instapaper in 31-hour outage, says it needs a week to restore all data

Actually

Instapaper is useful for reading websites offline on kindle (or similar devices). For example, news from IT world during lengthy commute. Hint, hint.

Life after antivirus: Reinventing endpoint security

Well, you have to admit that it clearly stated Promo at the start!

New SMB bug: How to crash Windows system with a 'link of death'

Re: Just a quick check

I was referring to a firewall at the network boundary, blocking outgoing SMB traffic. If I have malicious server inside the firewall I'm f*d anyway, no matter whether or not my SMB client layer is buggy (e.g. because such server could hijack DHCP and then apply MitM rather than exploit SMB, to list one of many possible attack scenarios). To prevent against that threat, a half-solution could be to setup IPsec + DNSsec on the internal network, but really? Do I have to go there in the context of the vulnerability discussed here, I am not even full-time network administrator for f* sake! If I was I wouldn't be asking stupid questions, like the one above.

Just a quick check

Blocking following ports for outbound traffic on the firewall should mitigate the problem, right?

TCP ports 137 139 445

UDP ports 137 138

Did I miss something?

Guess who's suffering an email outage. Go on, it's as easy as 123-Reg

Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

You also get it from FastMail and other competing email-hosting businesses. Some are better and some are worse, but competition is healthy and for that reason I would suggest to refrain from giving even more business to Google.

For $deity's sake, smile! It's Friday! Sad coders write bad code – official

bullshit

All these " employee perks, largely to keep difficult-to-replace technical talent from leaving for greener pastures. Google has climbing walls. Facebook has on-site barbers" are not relevant, if the hard problems remain unsolved. Things such as long build times, poor workflow, poor dependency management, undisciplined colleagues etc. And the thing is, these do not have to be outright "solved" because developers understand these are hard problems. Usually it is enough for developers to see that these problems are being addressed or at least understood by management.

This goldfish and its steerable robot tank will destroy humanity

Obligatory

An evil goldfish

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

Re: bad math

30g of sugar? Well I think they put more in a can of coke ...

UN staff demand ouster of controversial WIPO boss Francis Gurry

Re: Are we sure

Not much of a wig, that is.

UK ISPs may be handed cock-blocking powers

Re: Contact your ISP

oh c'mon. As long as this proviso stands "... provided that it is consistent with its terms of service" there is no chance in hell AAISP would apply filtering. Because that would be flagrant violation of their own ToS .

As for other ISPs? I can imagine some ISP might want to put an USP "child friendly, only manually handpicked websites will be available to you". Would that sell, I do not know, but the law being considered would allow an ISP to sell such a service. Apparently it is not allowed now?

UK.gov still drowning in legacy tech because no one's boarding Blighty's £700m data centre Ark

Re: Legacy stuff isn't the problem.

I respectfully submit that a self-contained industrial control system, written in machine code and running on an extensively and carefully documented PDP-11 hardware is fairly easier to understand and maintain

Surely it is. But that does not change the fact that software which can only run on a difficult to replace piece of hardware is itself at the risk of becoming non-functional at any moment, due to said hardware suddenly becoming non-functional itself. That's where the management role is to look for replacement, to remove that particular risk. Of course one needs to have deep understanding of the subject not to allow to get dragged down a multi-million-LOC project, and that's another area where managlement is known to have weak points ...

Windows 10 networking bug derails Microsoft's own IPv6 rollout

The irony of the situation

... is that IPv6 does not need DHCP , it is perfectly well suited to randomly generate working IP addresses on system boot, and yet receive all other data from the router.

Well, perhaps that explains why DHCPv6 was not so well tested by Microsoft.

Windows 10 memory management changes to give Hyper-V more headroom

Running Linux on top of Windows hypervisor ...

... is like pouring milk before hot water when making a tea. Getting there, but in the wrong order.

Customer: BT admitted it had 'mis-sold' me fibre broadband

Re: What are customers moaning about?

@billat29 I would recommend A&A as they provide bare connection service, but since you seem to be price sensitive I am not so sure you will like it. The service is top notch, though.

Oi, Mint 18.1! KEEP UP! Ubuntu LTS love breeds a laggard

There is nothing wrong with kernel 4.4

Also in the light of the fact that 4.8 is now officially EOL, it makes little sense to upgrade to it. It is not as if 4.4 will not run on newest intel CPUs; it may be simply less optimal e.g. using more battery power than it should.

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

Re: Accuracy of Reporting

... and while we are pointing to lack of self-regulation in press, perhaps it is time to see the mote in our own eye.

Re: Accuracy of Reporting

@Paul Smith please be careful where you use the words "as an industry", because El Reg as a web publication had no reason to promote self-regulation of paper publications such as The Sun etc. It is the lawmakers who chose to put them all in the same basket.

5G? Pff, don't bother, says one-time Ofcom man's new book

Re: Tech semantics

NGMN is nothing else but a large group of network operators, trying to tap into internet of shit hype. They have no ITU affiliation and do not actually set standards.

Well at least that's what it looks like from the sidelines, happy to be corrected.

Re: Tech semantics

"You need to catch up." with what exactly? The only one which matter is ITU and they have nothing to say about 5G. The link you provided does not mention Qualcomm, which is heading towards different standard, from the same organization which developed LTE. But then again, since ITU keeps schtum there is nothing to talk about, anything to do with 5G is at this time purely speculation (or marketing talk, which is the same).

It is really embarrassing that government gets involved into this whole hype and someone needs to talk them out of it - just shows how clueless they are.

EDIT: on second thought - if someone explained that 5G is expected to be nothing else but incremental improvement on 4G, that would be lovely.

Re: Tech semantics

5g promises lower latency, lower power usage for iot, and higher concurrent throughput.

Downvote for making things up. Technically there is no such thing as "5G mobile network specification", so it can not promise nor deliver anything.

Fake History Alert: Sorry BBC, but Apple really did invent the iPhone

News organization with an agenda

Well, what a surprise.

Soz fanbois, Apple DIDN'T invent the smartphone after all

Yup, that's why I love El Reg. Two different authors, two different points of view. One might say that state media should learn from this example, but of course state media would never learn from private enterprise because it must be "inherently flawed".

Insane blackhats behind world's most expensive ransomware 'forget' to backup crypto keys

Analysis of all the software's functions?

Well, since reverse engineering of malware is exactly what outfits such as ESET do all day long ...

Drones will be able to carry 120GB footage of you in the shower if Seagate has its way

Yes, thought about this too, then checked the write speeds here. No microSD (or regular size SD) will match 4Gbps (or 400MB/s). Still, I wonder if this speed is really useful in this case?

My fortnight eating Blighty's own human fart-powder

Re: Food is not only sustenance

@Voland's right hand, while I share your sentiment about social function of eating, I am also offended by the suggestion that eating alone might be a sign of a troubled mind. Some of us simply do not have a company to eat with, nor appropriate place to seek such company. Or simply prefer eating alone for whatever reason. While such preference might be justifiably called "unsocial", I feel you have crossed the line here.

Kaspersky fixing serious certificate slip

Re: OK

From personal experience, F-Secure seems fine.

Bitcoin breaks US$1,000

Re: "classical inflation is simply not possible"

The volatility of Bitcoin, or any minor currency, is mostly down to the volume of real-economic transaction conducted in it; the greater volume, the more stable the currency. Bitcoin is in it's infancy here.

and, quite likely, it will stay in infancy until some other cryptocurrency replaces it (or alternatively, it simply dies out) . This is because number of transactions per second is limited by block size, and there is no consensus to increase the block size.

Meet the Internet of big, lethal Things

Yes, but if they do I bet the new ones to replace these which John Deere put on "planned obsolescence" will be a different brand. It is a marvelous way of removing oneself from the market.

Landmark EU ruling: Legality of UK's Investigatory Powers Act challenged

Re: Screensaver Browsing

Oh wow, some of these searches were very "interesting". I wonder what my ISP (A&A) will make with ICR requests it is bound to receive soon :D

Re: This is great news...

Frankly, I do not think the lack of reporting in "mainstream media" has anything to do with agendas etc. I think the reason is more prosaic : the right to privacy does not rank very high in media. It is perceived as something too technical or too mundane to talk about.

Strong non-backdoored encryption is vital – but the Feds should totally be able to crack it, say House committees

PFS is most useful for data in transmit, but it won't help data at rest and this is what authorities are also interested in.

Ham-fisted: Chap's radio app killed remotely after posting bad review

Re: Crapware

I think it is the natural progression of small closed-source software: original developer gets bored and wants to move to new things, but not before monetizing on the old success.

Bluetooth-enabled safe lock popped after attackers win PINs

Re: No need for any sniffing or surviellance to get in to other bluetooth locks

You mean, rather large angle grinder? That does not scale to well-made safes.

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

It's the same old story: expect housing without actually building anywhere, expect jobs without transport etc. infrastructure, expect electricity without power plants ... and expect logical thinking rooted in facts, without education.

Microsoft Edge's malware alerts can be faked, researcher says

Good I don't use ...

Facebook Edge.

Linus Torvalds finds 163 reasons to wait a week for a new Linux

Actually

... merge window for Linux 4.10 will be shorter than usual., not longer as "predicted" in the article

Hackers actively stealing Wi-Fi keys from vulnerable routers

Oh my ... that's why we need proper ISP like A&A, who not only generate the password just for your broadband modem, but also go out of their wait to help you set up a better one, if you happen to have one.

Plastic fiver: 28 years' work, saves acres of cotton... may have killed less than ONE cow*

120,000 vs 150,000 .... this is very depressing. Or alternatively, it may serve to demonstrate the power of mainstream media.

UK's new Snoopers' Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor

Re: Is anyone working to overcome this?

Thanks for the link to ORG guys, signed up (already A&A customer - the service is absolutely brilliant)

Small ISPs 'probably' won't receive data retention order following IP Bill

Re: Next steps

@Nick I upvoted you, but then I thought - what if "powers to be" read your post and interpret the upvotes as endorsement of this plan? You have to admit, that's a possibility too, in which case downvotes would be needed ...

SQL Server on Linux: Runs well in spite of internal quirks. Why?

Re: I have to wonder WHY

Some shops do not like to have Windows in the datacenter, and yet they are users of ... Oracle. I recon Microsoft is after those. It is a very reasonable strategy of putting your goods in many baskets.

Microsoft ❤️ Linux? Microsoft ❤️ running its Windows' SQL Server software on Linux

Re: Target audience?

I do not think there would be much of a virtualisation overhead, since the technology does not virtualize a machine, only an OS. As you move up the abstraction layers, the optimization opportunities are more obvious. In other words, it is system calls which are virtualized now, not the CPU. For majority of Windows APIs there is a very simple relation to Linux system calls (especially if you control also the application code, i.e. SQL Server itself). This means a wrapper will add very little overhead. This also includes IO (at least with the most popular options, including asynchronous IO) which is the largest source of virtualization overhead and coincidentally also major source of database performance issues (next to CPU cost of running queries). Also, Microsoft is obviously aiming this as competition to Oracle on Linux, so they cannot really afford large overhead.

Microsoft's development platform today: What you need to know

Re: Visual C++ for Linux Development

1) Visual Studio community edition does all the other versions do - you can even use it for commercial purposes. Not that I care, my favourite text editor starts in milliseconds and does not need Windows.

Elon Musk wants to launch 4,000 satellites and smother globe with net connectivity

I found elsewhere these are meant to fly only ~1500km above Earth. This means a radio link would be probably less than 6000km (you will not track fast-moving satellite all the way to horizon, so likely distance will be even less than that - which is exactly the reason why so many satellites are needed). This distance translates to 20ms. Add another 20ms for connection from satellite back to Earth and you have 40ms overhead, at most. This is much better than 35,800km for geostationary orbit with round-trip latency ~240ms.

I think all satellite internet providers are currently using only geostationary orbit. A large number of low-flying satellites is definitely breaking the mould.

The encryption conundrum: Should tech compromise or double down?

Re: Trump can't force Apple to knuckle under using current law/court rulings

law that has just received Royal Assent

hold your horses. Royal Assent is the only thing that the snoopers charter is missing from becoming the law.

Experts to Congress: You must act on IoT security. Congress: Encourage industry to develop best practices, you say?

Their lawyers, bankers, lobbyists and all other "contributors". That's where all politicians have a weak spot. Well, except the fabled honest ones.