Posts by R Soul

Multistakeholder internet governance can be messy. APNIC wants it that way

Re: Someone who isn’t a male engineer?

It depends. What laptop is the engineer using?

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: Does everything have to be "monetisable"?

This just in: just about every country in the world is living on tick. Film at on tonight's news at 11!

Your characterisation of Shagger Boris is beyond delusional. Where can I get the drugs you're on?

Re: Well, that's all a bit ...

"Bethlehem Steel will magically spring back into life"

A very well known book of fairy stories claims Jesus rose from the dead. Maybe that could happen for Bethlehem Steel.

Just fund it from the exchequor

No. Just no!

A new funding model is certainly needed. Paying for the BBC can't come directly from the exchequer though. That puts the BBC at even bigger risk from the whims of our here today, gone tomorrow fuckwit politicians. Imagine if the likes of Diane Abbot or Mad Nad controlled the BBC's funding. The latter was notionally responsible for the BBC for a while.

Direct government funding would inevitably turn the BBC into a Pravda-style state broadcaster. Its editorial independence - already in jeopardy - would be lost forever. And so would the influence and soft power of the BBC World Service.

licence fee enforcement

The enforcement goons work for Crapita, not the BBC.

The government decided a long time ago that it was a good thing to split the organisation collecting the dosh from the one that was spending it.

Oh and it's TV licence, not license. In the civilised world, license is a verb, not a noun.

AFRINIC says it's back on track and will soon deliver the plan that proves it

Re: Operating funds

It's a pity you don't understand how the RIRs manage IP addresses or fund themselves.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Quote Mistake Unquote

"What should really worry people is that it doesn't have to be a mistake."

There are far bigger worries than that: jail time (or worse) because of a false positive, no punishment for the fuckwits responsible for the snoopercams, no redress for their victims, no controls or regulations on how snoopercams get(ab)used, lack of accountability, no enforcement or audit measures, linking the shop's snoopercams to "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" Starmercards, etc, etc.

This is pretty much the Post Office/Fushitsu Horizon scandal all over again. Though with fewer miscarriages of justice and ruined lives - at least for now.

Re: Ban it

Banning snoopercams is a great idea. Can we also ban people who say "store" when they mean "shop"?

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: Honest question

No! systemd replaced the clusterfuck of sysvinit with an even bigger and uglier clusterfuck. FTFY.

I suppose the systemd dumpster fire is the equivalent of Elop's burning platform.

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: Not enough change

Yeah. But this is just a symptom of an even bigger failing. NASA management did a remarkably bad job of playing the remarkably bad hand they'd been dealt - pork barrel politics and lack of money mostly.

The space shuttle was fundamentally flawed from the outset and its design was riddled with ugly compromises. It should never have had solid rocket boosters. But NASA didn't have the time and resources to come up with a suitable liquid-fuelled rocket. So the choice was use dangerous SRBs* or have no manned launches for decades and that would have meant the end of NASA. 7 people needlessly died because too many wrong decisions has been taken years before that fateful Challenger launch.

NASA engineers knew their SRBs would have a catastrophic failure every 100 flights or so. They'd properly done the risk assessments and did the sums. And those grim calculations became reality. It was simply a question of when, not if, a shuttle would fail - and not necessarily because it happened to be cold on launch day. The O-rings were just one of many vulnerabilities waiting to happen.

The management chose to ignore those assessments for the reasons you explained. Instead they preferred the powerpoint bullshit about NASA processes and procedures eliminating the risk of failure. This was something Feynman unearthed when he asked various engineers and management what the estimated failure rates were for the systems they designed and got them to explain how they arrived at those numbers. His supplement to the Challenger report makes sobering reading. It's far more disturbing IMO than his stunt with icy water and a bit of O-ring rubber.

* Rocketry is dangerous enough. SRBs are even more dangerous because there's no element of control after they're lit. With liquid-fuelled rockets, it's possible to turn them off or manage the rate fuel gets burnt. Not that that would have made much difference when something goes bad at launch.

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

One hopes that the facial recognition systems will discard any reference to someone who is not of interest to the police

Think again. PC Plod retains every DNA sample they gather, just in case. Even if those samples came from people who hadn't committed a crime or were found not guilty in court. They'll do this for Snoopercam data.

Besides, everyone is of interest to the police these days.

More lies and bullshit from the Home Office

The minister-of-the-month for snoopercams claims they have "taken thousands off the streets". That seems very unlikely. How many people were arrested? How many were prosecuted? How many were jailed? How many would have been caught by conventional policing if PC Plod wasn't sitting in the nick watching snoopercam TV and eating doughnuts?

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: It's not an ID card

That could be true, though it's clearly not what Starmer and his goons have in mind.

Here's what our idiot Home Secretary said a couple of days ago: "...my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.".

Such a dystoptian future depends on every part of the state having the same access to the all-seeing, all-tracking Starmer/Blair/Blunkett database(s). Which will also be freely available to Musk, Palantir. Crapita and the rest.

Re: It's not an ID card

I must say I side with many of our European counterparts here, in asking why we as a nation are so against the idea of a single identity system.

We're not. Any rational human being is against Starmercards. Which aren't a single identity system, even though that's what the lying weasels who support them claim. Starmercards (aka Tonycards and Blunkettcards) are to enable all-pervasive state surveillance of everyone always. The current idiot in charge of the Home Office says she wants that to happen. If Starmercards ever become a reality, every time you're made to show your Starmercard, it'll be logged. That database will be mined and monetised by shites like Palatir, Crapita, Musk, Zuckerberg, google, Fushitsu, etc. And there will be no way to escape.

"Mr Badger, the all-seeing Starmer database says you bought a packet of fags 20 years ago. You're denied NHS treatment for smoking-related illnesses. Here's a list of The Musky One's carefully chosen set of vape sellers. You'll get this sent to you every day. Oh and we're taking away your driving licence because you visit the pub one a week. Now fuck off."

As soon as any single identity system gets tied to a database - and they always will be - we're all fucked.

And why build a (mandatory) single identity system unless it is coupled to a database?

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

I doubt he does either. Assuming of course the orange fuckwit is capable of thinking,

What would the donald do?

It would be highly entertaining if someone told the Fuckwit-in-Chief the bigliest reserves of rare earth minerals were buried under Mar-a-Lago.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

financially they just weren't viable

That wasn't true. BA's Concorde flights generated remarkable operating profits once they realised how much people were prepared to pay to fly on them. Air France never figured that out. So they were quite keen to stop flying Concordes and cut their losses.

The crash wasn't the last nail in the coffin. Though it did speed up the move into the departure lounge. Both airlines operated Concordes for a year or so once they returned to service after the crash.

Air France pulled the plug because Concorde made a big dent in their accounts which threatened the airline's privatisation. That left BA on the hook for all of the support costs from Airbus. BA couldn't/wouldn't pay these on their own. Then Airbus said they were withdrawing tech/engineering support and at that point it was game over.

Of course, the concept of financial viability here is theoretical because the French and UK taxpayers wrote off all the R&D and manufacturing costs. These never got charged to the airlines who flew Concorde.

Re: BA were asshats about it

No airline was ever going to be able to fly Concorde after Airbus withdrew support for the aircraft. That's what killed their airworthiness certification. It had nothing to do with access to the airline's service records.

If you choose to believe Beardie's bullshit about BA keeping the planes for themselves, go ahead. The truth is rather different.

His "bid" to buy Concorde was yet another in his very long list of half-assed publicity stunts.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Not quite. The current government knows the objective of Starmercards is to control us.* They believe intrusive and pervasive surveillance is in our best interests and they serve us by foisting this unwanted crap. They just can't come out and say that. Well not yet.

* Just after the Starmercard was announced and would only be used for checking new employees, various Starmer stooges started mumbling about using them for getting access to healthcare, welfare and so on. This was/is clearly part of the Home Office's Grand Design and would get rolled out as soon as enough people were forced to carry their Starmercard.

The UK does not (AFAIK), have the concept of Executive Orders

It does. Lookup Statutory Instruments and Orders in Council, to pick just two.

Re: U turn or no U turn

You are badly mistaken on several counts.

The Home Office has been trying and trying to bring back ID cards ever since these were scrapped just after WW2. Their latest attempt will continue no matter who forms the next government. This has to be killed off for good: burn it with fire, wooden stake through the heart, etc.

Farage is a chancer who changes his opinion more often than he changes has underpants. He's not to believed or trusted. Even if he (and his job lot of incompetent nutters) had a coherent plan for government. Which of course he doesn't.

Bollocks! If someone has a passport or driving licence, why the fuck would they need a Starmercard or some other alleged proof of ID?

There is nothing positive to be said about introducing another proof of ID. Unless you're Crapita or Fushitsu or Palantir getting their snouts even deeper into the trough of taxpayer billions.

A proof of ID system (backed by biometrics?) is useless unless it's backed up by the mother of all databases that gets checked and logged every time the ID token is presented. That's an Orwellian nightmare. If that back-end infrastructure isn't in place and always tracking you everywhere 24x7, your Starmercard or Nigelcard will be useless security theatre.

Tories vow to boot under-16s off social media and ban phones in schools

Re: Very easy to say...

This only became a concern for Badenough once she had to chase any passing bandwagon that might attract attention towards her party of numpties and worthless tossers.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

US-ASCII

"US-ASCII isn't capable of transferring anything other than US English text without data loss."

Hmmm. US-ASCII includes the 'u' character. Which USians don't use when spelling words like colour, neighbour, favour, behaviour, etc

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Re: Now, it has grown into a bloated mess millions of times bigger than the OS which inspired it.

Hmmmm. If someone put a TCP/IP stack and page-based virtual memory into V7 UNIX - BSD4.[234] comes close - it would kick the arse of any of today's monuments to bloatware^W^W^W Oses.

"So is Linux a direct descendant of this OS?"

Nah. It's a cancerous mutant.

Since Linux shares no DNA/source code with Unix, it can't be a direct descendant. IMO Linux also broke the design principles in UNIX a long time ago and that has further distanced it from the One True OS that Ken and Dennis started ~50 years ago.

UNIX started out as a riposte to a bloated, over-ambitious, all-singing, all-dancing OS that was called Multics. [It proved a simple, highly functional, well-designed OS could run on very modest hardware.] Today, the BSDs are a riposte to another bloated, over-ambitious, all-singing, all-dancing OS. How times have changed.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Re: try something old fashioned

IIUC airlines get charged by the airport for time spent at the gate. They're also under pressure to pull back so the gate can be freed up for an incoming flight.

You used the loo?

Ryanair planes have toilets? Who knew?

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

everyone "over age" loses privacy.

No big deal. Anyone stupid enough to sign up for social-media-platform-du-jour has already surrendered their privacy.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Lochs of power

Is The Register going to use the loch as the unit of measurement for power? It would be a suitable choice to sit alongside the Wales, the giraffe, London bus, etc.

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Well I for one would urge someone to give Poettering a ginormous IPv6 allocation in the hope we never hear from him or systemd ever again. His bloatware is already well down the road to hell with unlimited development and runtime excess.

You don't seem to understand how IP address blocks are managed.

IANA and the IETF will take a rather dim view of doling out a /32 of IPv6 space.

Re: 400 million years in the future

The Empire is about to run out of internet addresses. This is disrupting plans for the building of the 3,023rd Death Star.

I think you meant to say it was disrupting even more systemd mission creep.

If you're unhappy with how the AMPR people distributed 44/8, take it up with them. Or contact the Internet Address Police at 127.0.0.1.

There's no concept of geography here anyway. Just because 44.155.0.0/16 got assigned to Ireland doesn't mean the IP addresses in that /16 are only used in Ireland or were issued exclusively to Irish entities - or are held by Irish radio hams today.

Oh, and there's plenty of address space in that link you posted which isn't allocated to anyone. I'm reasonably sure all of Africa and most of Asia and South America could get some of that space if they could be bothered to ask for it. Maybe they have better things to do with their time. Or maybe it's too hard to get a radio licence in (say) Zimbabwe => no callsign => no entitlement to an address in 44/8.

KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates

Re: Man o man

Why the fsck do people keep doing this? Design a worse product and somehow persuade the major Linux distributions to use it by default?

That's how things have "worked" in Linux-land since long before systemd was a thing.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

ID cards, if done securely and well, sound pretty good to me.

Except this is going to be an over-ambitious, all-pervasive UK government IT scheme that'll be outsourced to some combination of Crapita, Fushitsu, Palantir and Bangalore sweatshops*. That doesn't sound anything like pretty good to me - or anyone else who has an IQ that's higher than plankton.

Has our collective memory already forgotten about the Horizon, Test&Trace, Universal Credit, etc fuckups?

Re: Chump change

With a bit of luck, that useless tosser Starmer will be out on his arse long before the Starmercard bill comes to parliament.

ICANN distances itself from radical proposal – which it funded – to give nations a role in internet governance

governments like the EU often just impose policy without really considering the implicatons

That doesn't appear to be the case these days:

The European Commission is setting up a Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Internet Standards Deployment, looking into strengthening the deployment of existing standards and operational best practices in four areas:

- IPv6

- modern E-mail communication standards

- DNS security

- Routing security & hygiene

The initiative was presented during its conceptual phase at RIPE 90 in the cooperation working group. The idea is to bring together valuable deployment expertise to capture proven approaches in multi-stakeholder guidelines that support broad and coordinated adoption across sectors.

Participation is open to anyone with relevant experience and interest.

More information and how to join:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/european-commission-seeks-participants-multi-stakeholder-forum-internet-standards-deployment

Re: Great Firewall of Africa?

You're right. Persuasion (and education) is essential. That's hard, considering the many years of sleaze and broken governance at AfriNIC. African governments can quite reasonably say "This multi-stakeholder model has failed. It has to end. It's time for the grown-ups (ie us!) to take charge.". I hope the African Internet community will be unified and strong enough to stand up to CAIGA's interventions.

Re: RIR behavour/control

RIPE NCC is based in Amsterdam. Which is in the Netherlands. It is subject to whatever laws and regulations are passed by the Dutch and EU governments.

Similar constraints apply to other Internet organisations. ICANN for instance is incorporated in California and is therefore governed by Californian and US law.

AFRINIC is based in Mauritius. That means it's under the jurisdiction of the Mauritian courts and government. Smart Africa has no authority or legal control over AFRINIC, apart from having a handful of its representatives serving on AFRINIC's board. Smart Africa is an alliance of a bunch of African governments (mainly) which does not appear to include Mauritius. It's not an international treaty organisation and seems to have no power to pass laws or enforce regulations.

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

A stripped down PID1

There's no need to produce that. It already exists and has been around for well over 40 years:

% wc /src/v7/src/cmd/init.c

304 610 4262 /src/v7/src/cmd/init.c

FWIW the ~30 year old BSD4.4 version of init is ~1300 lines of C.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Funny The Register Could Not Stay Up

Except when those providers go tits-up. Like AWS did the other week.

BTW El Reg's lead story today is Azure's been on the receiving end of a massive DDoS attack.

And if you use some other provider on a PAYG basis, how do you move your data/applications/whatever to that provider when your first choice is unreachable?

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

sudo-rs versus sudo

People's Front of Judea, meet the Judean People's Front.

Re: ninjed me!!!

I mistyped a singlequote instead of a doublequote to annoy the pedants. Sue me.

Re: sendmail.cf

I don't understand the sendmail.cf hate here.

sendmail.cf is fucking awesome! How many other MTAs had/have a config file that could do the Towers of Hanoi or provide a calculator?

################################################

################################################

#### ####

#### Simple calculator in sendmail.cf ####

#### ####

#### by Matthew Slattery <[e-mail]> ####

#### ####

#### version 0.03 (4th October 1996) ####

#### ####

################################################

################################################

#

# Invoke as follows:

#

# /usr/lib/sendmail -bt -C<filename>

#

# ...where <filename> is this file.

#

# Then you should enter sums prefixed with "9 ", e.g.

#

# > 9 1+2

# > 9 20-6

# > 9 5*-4

#

# More complex expressions (e.g. '1+2*3-4') work too.

#

# Addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*, x or X), integer division

# (/) and modulus (%) are supported. Brackets are not. Expressions are

# evaluated strictly from left to right (i.e. no operator priorities).

#

# If numbers become to large, strange things may happen e.g. "Infinite

# loop" or "Expansion too long" errors. With my sendmail, 100 recursive

# calls is considered infinite, so a result of greater than 99 will cause

# problems (but you can calculate with larger numbers -- "125-50" works).

#

#

V5

Do.:%@!^/[]0123456789+-*xX

CX 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

CY + - * / % !

CZ 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + - * / %

S9

R$*x$* $1*$2

R$*X$* $1*$2

R$*$~Z$* $1$3

R$*$=Y $1

R$* $:!$1!

R!! $@0

R$*$=Y$=X$* $1$2[$3$4

R$*$=X$=Y$* $1$2]$3$4

R!$*[$*]$*! $1[$2]$3

R$* $:$>5$1

R$*[$*]$*[$*]$* $>7$1[$2]$3[$4].$5

R$*[]$* $@0

R$*-[$*]$* $:-$2

R$*[$*]$* $:$2

R$* $:$1:0

R$*@:$* $>6$1:$2

R$*:$* $@$1$2

S8

R$*<$*$=X$*>$* $:$1<$2.$3$4>$5

R$*<$*.0$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$3>$4

R$*<$*.1$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@$3>$4

R$*<$*.2$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.3$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.4$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.5$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.6$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@@@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.7$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@@@@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.8$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@@@@@@$3>$4

R$*<$*.9$*>$* $:$>8$1<$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2$2@@@@@@@@@$3>$4

S5

R$*[$=X$*]$* $:$1<$2$3>$4

R$* $:$>8$1

R$*<$*>$* $:$1[$2]$3

R$*$=X$* $@$>5$1$2$3

S7

R$*--$* $1+$2

R$*+-$* $1-$2

R$*-+$* $1-$2

R$*++$* $1+$2

R+$* $1

R[$*]+[$*].$* $@[$1$2]$3

R-[$*]-[$*].$* $@-[$1$2]$3

R-[$*]+[$*].$* $:[$2]-[$1].$3

R[$*@]-[@$*].$* [$1]-[$2].$3

R[$*]-[].$* $@[$1]$2

R[]-[$*].$* $@-[$1]$2

R-[$*]*-[$*].$* $:[$1]*[$2].$3

R[$*]*-[$*].$* $:-[$1]*[$2].$3

R$*[]*[$*].$* $@$1[]$3

R$*[$*]*[$*].$* $:$1[$2]*[$3!].$4

R$*[$*@]*[$*!$*].$* $1[$2]*[$3!$3$4].$5

R$*[]*[$*!$*].$* $@$1[$3]$4

R-[$*]/-[$*].$* $:[$1]/[$2].$3

R[$*]/-[$*].$* $:-[$1]/[$2].$3

R$*[$*]/[].$* $#error $@ USAGE $: "Division by zero"

R$*[$*]/[$*].$* $:$1[$2]/[$3!$3!].$4

R$*[$+]/[$*!$*!$*].$* $>4$1[$2]/[$3!$4!$5].$6

R$*[$*]/[$*!$*!$*].$* $@$1[$5]$6

R$*[$*!$*!$*].$* $@$1[$2]$5

R-[$*]%-[$*].$* $:[$1]%[$2].$3

R[$*]%-[$*].$* $:-[$1]%[$2].$3

R$*[$*]%[].$* $#error $@ USAGE $: "Division by zero"

R$*[$*]%[$*].$* $:$1[$2]/[$3!$3!].$4

R$*[$+]/[$*!$*!$*].$* $>4$1[$2]/[$3!$4!$5].$6

R$*[$*]/[$*!$*!$*].$* $@$1[]$6

R$*[$*!$*!$*].$* $@$1[$4]$5

S6

R$*: $@$1:1

R$*:$*0 $@$1:$2 1

R$*:$*1 $@$1:$2 2

R$*:$*2 $@$1:$2 3

R$*:$*3 $@$1:$2 4

R$*:$*4 $@$1:$2 5

R$*:$*5 $@$1:$2 6

R$*:$*6 $@$1:$2 7

R$*:$*7 $@$1:$2 8

R$*:$*8 $@$1:$2 9

R$*:$*9 $:$>6$1:$2

R$*:$* $@$1:$2 0

S4

R$*[$*@]/[@$*!$*!$*].$* $1[$2]/[$3!$4!$5].$6

R$*[]/[$+!$*!$*].$* $:$1[$4!$2!$3].$5

R$*[$*]/[$*!$*!$*].$* $@$1[$2]/[$4!$4!@$5].$6

R$*[$*!$*@!$*@].$* $1[$2!$3!$4].$5

Re: ninjed me!!!

"PS: Just checked and there is 22401 lines of C code in the Linux version of sudo....so not something where hidden bugs could exist"

Indeed. But WTF? Why is there so much code? How much of that bloat is actually useful or necessary?

FYI, BSD's su has only ~600 lines of code, all in a single file. I think it'll be much harder to hide bugs in that.

And why type "cat *.c *.h | wc -l" instead of "wc -l *.[ch]'? Less typing, fewer moving parts, etc...

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

why not start from scratch and try and design something functionally better?

The IETF did that with IPv6. And failed.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: The usual questions...

SSSHHH! Don't ask questions like that! Starmercards are good for you. They solve everything.