> where developers have crawled up their own asses and lost sight of the light of day
Gollum...
It hurts our eyeses it does my precious.
2390 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007
It renamed network interfaces so they would have predictable names.
Hmmmm nice idea, but that's not how it works in practice and I'm not sure this is a core systemd feature. The new naming conventions in RHEL7 don't work in all cases. It has 5 different naming schemes or which it only uses 4 by default.
Firstly it tries to find out whether a network device is an "onboard" one, and looks in 2 different places to make this decision.
Secondly it looks to see whether the NIC is in a named PCI slot, well again there are 2 different places it seems to look, one of which doesn't appear to be readable from the files under /sys, at least not with any of the NIC drivers I've ever tried. Great if you can read it from SMBIOS, not otherwise.
Failing those it then looks to see if the driver is a PCI one and then uses the PCI address, well these aren't natively persistent nor are they consistent. Persistence can be requested from the firmware configuration, but it often isn't enabled by default.
Failing all that it just uses the kernels non persistent & non consistent naming without the benefit of udev rules to provide persistence. Given the asynchronous driver initialization in the Linux 3 & 4 kernels this is particularly bad as if you've got 2 different sorts of NICs then it's anyone's guess which one with get to be eth0 before systemd starts to play it's games.
Now if you run this lot inside a VM then virtio drivers for KVM don't provide the identifiers used by schemes 1 & 2 and they're not PCI to scheme 3 is out too. Scheme 4 is never used by default so we drop through to the kernel names. If you also have emulated NICs in you VM and you've got random naming for your network cards.
The situation with VMWare is just as bad, if not worse. It doesn't provide persistent or even sensible onboard device numbers or you end up with name for you NICS like eno167654321 (something over 2^24). So they put a kludge in the systemd code to spot the ridiculous onboard device numbers and then drop through to scheme 2, but the version of SMBIOS emulated does allow the slot numbers to be pulled from the type 9 records and the field that is used can't be read from /sys and doesn't seem to be consistent, so I can't find a way to know in advance what a NIC will be called so how the *&^% am I supposed to write kickstart files for these things?
And all of this has nothing to do with the job of PID 1, which is the orphan catcher, without which the kernel will die.
When I setup netnanny (I think) on a PC for my kids back when they were "CBeebie" age they tried to go to their website to find it was blocked by default.
CBeebies was part of the BBC (no not that one, the broadcasting corporation) and the BBC does have some material likely to shock small kiddie widdies.
Back in the late 90s the Nvidia Linux drivers were way ahead of their Windows ones.
I used to dual boot my laptop, most of the stuff I was forced to use for work was Windows only, but when I was able to reboot and come up in Linux the screen was just so much nicer I often had other engineers stopping by and asking how I managed to get things like fonts displayed that nicely.
> I wonder if companies house is allowed to continue under GDPR
I wonder whether the concept of a limited company will be allowed to continue under GDPR.
The idea of Companies House publishing your details is because you are asking people you do business with to do so on the basis of trust. If you do business with a limited company you have to accept that you may not get paid and that ultimately their liability is limited to the share capital of the company (usually a couple of quid). So you need to be able to find out whether the directors are people you are prepared to trust. Publishing their details at least holds them (me) to a certain amount of accountability. If you aren't allowed to find out who they are why should you trust them? Business people being able to use the right to be forgotten to hide their past illegal behaviour is bad enough. Letting conmen have complete anonymity seems to be an unexpected consequence of the new rules, unless you subscribe to the black helicopter view of things.
> You didn't miss out on much.
As my Aunt, who flew it out to NY quite a number of times put it.
"It wasn't very comfortable, but it wasn't very comfortable for not very long, so better than all the other planes"
She was flying on before the days of modern full lie flat business & first class seats.
BA's cattle+ seats are basically the old business class ones.
> Funny how WWI produced odd combinations.
My Grandpa saw Blériot flying over the channel and became interested in the idea of flying, joined the navy as they were starting to take an interest in aeroplanes hoping for the chance to learn to fly, as the son of farm labourer he had no other chance. Joined the Royal Naval Air Services when it was born and flew throughout WW1. Due to the general shortage of planes and experienced pilots his squadron assisted the army and flew over the trenches where he was shot down but survived and made it back over our lines where he then got caught up with the ground war before he was able to get back to his squadron. When the RAF was formed he was given the choice of staying in the Navy or transferring to the new service and he chose to move to the RAF where he continued to server until after the end of WW2. He managed to get decorated by all three services in his time. Things were all a bit more mixed up back then.
> As we keep hearing here, Windows is not mandatory anymore, if one doesn't like it, choose an alternative.
OK so you get a choice of which OS to use but you don't have a choice of which OS you have to pay for. It is very difficult to buy most PC HW without paying for a W10 license. There are also issues with the FW being reluctant to run other OSes.
Apple provide iOS installed an hardware they make.
Microsoft provide a generic OS that can be installed on any (compatible) hardware.
You can only get iOS if you buy Apple's HW. MS SW comes on almost everything else. MS also have contracts with just about every other HW manufacturer making it difficult for them to supply non-Window's systems, so it is very difficult to buy a non Apple PC without being forced to buy Windows. MS are considered to be a monopoly and as such are expected to behave in ways minority players aren't. The EU has in the past forced MS to give users a choice about browsers, they then quietly forgot and the EU quietly forgot to enforce the ruling until it became public that there was an issue and they were chided back into action.
Playing devils advocate here.
I'm looking forward to seeing what (if anything!) happens because there are very strict limits on tethering for me and once that allowance is used I have to wait until my next billing cycle.
Three offer different types of SIMs at different prices.
An all you can eat data for a phone SIM is now £30 (Eeek I hope they don't move me to that!)
They don't offer an all you can eat data SIM, at £30 only gets you 40GB.
Now I guess they do this because in their experience on average phone users use less data than "Data SIM" users. I've got all you can eat data but only average 2GB, my wife uses much less, my youngest averages over 160GB and they don't quibble. I guess he's the exception (or perhaps he's why they now want to charge £30 per month! they used to do unlimited phone data for £12.99).
But I guess on average people with Data SIM use more than people with phones.
How about laws to handle hacking the current crop of human driven cars. There have already been proof of concept demos showing that critical car control systems can be accessed remotely. The hacker should be punished sure, but those responsible at the car company should be punished 10 fold, and it needs to be people not just the company, fines are too easy for companies to just pay.
Give 100 houses 1Gb fibre connections running through a 10Gb router and they won't all get 1Gb throughput though will they (for example..)?
Well not if they aren't all trying to download big files from fast sites all the time. But most people don't. They use their connection in bursts. So if the chances are that 100 people sharing a 10Gb link won't notice that they aren't getting 1Gb each, but sure, there will be times when peak demand exceeds 10Gb, just probably not very often. Even when my son was burning his way through 300GB/month on my link that still works out as less than an average of 1Mb/s so a contention ratio of 10:1 would probably meant real conflicts were very rare.
Back before people tended to have Internet at home, or even Jo public had ever herd of the Internet I did a deal with the network team at work to swap a whole bunch of 9600baud pad lines for a 64kb IP one. They thought I was mad and thought they'd got the best of the deal, while I knew I'd effectively upgraded everyone from 9600baud to 64k since we had a bursty (block mode) application and so sod all contention.
Of course your mileage may vary, perhaps you do spend you're life downloading stuff at a constant 1Gb, but if so you aren't the average user.
> Could they not install solar panels on the roof and some powerwall size batteries?
Nope, the sort of batteries you need are more like "Dinorwig Power Station" Find a large mountain. Bore out the centre and when you've got excess power pump water up to the top. When you need to charge all those delivery vehicles start letting the water pour back down the hill.
Pity the article doesn't give any details of the power draw needed. Telsa's site says you'll need 16.5kW for 2 hours to go 100miles. They've got 49,000 vehicles, assuming 2 hours each per day that's going to be a lot of power. Telsa's speal about powerwall talks about an installation in Hawaii which is 13MW and requires 55,000 solar panels. RM would need at least 5 of these just to power their fleet and we don't get anything like the sun that they get in Hawaii.
Just wait till they've got on the spot DNA scanners.
scene: bloke down the park pushing his kids on the swing, police officer enters stage right
officer: what are you doing with these kids
bloke: they're my children
officer: click click click I don't think so sonny, you're nicked
It will take a huge number of seats advantage for W10 to counter act the uptime advantages of W7. When you switch your laptop on and W10 decides that it won't talk to any USB devices today or your main external monitor it's not easy to show up on any usage logs on a website. If it were just 1 PC showing these sorts of traits I'd assume it was just a one off issue, but this is spread over the majority of the PCs you come across it tends to point to it being a more general issue.
No doubt I'll get massive numbers of down votes from the MS shills who always down vote anyone who dares to suffer less than perfect behaviour from W10. I'm really happy for them that their experience is perfect. I'm just yet to meet anyone in person who doesn't suffer from random "this bit won't work today" issues.
> I'm not even sure it qualifies as a "scam". Are these dodgy vendors deceiving their customers? Usually not, I think. In some cases, at least, they are merely providing a service which the government, following the advice of lobbyists, has chosen to make illegal.
This is a much better analogy.
If I kill someone who I disagree with that is a criminal act and the police will come and arrest me and I'll be punished at the government (actually you and me)'s expense.
But if I libel them then the police and the government have no interest in the matter, it is up to the individual I libel to seek redress against me.
> ABS braking is great assistive tech, but is not included in most vehicles.
Errr since when?
You might still be able to buy something like a Caterham 7 without ABS, but according to Wikipedia
ABS are required on all new passenger cars sold in the EU since 2004. In the United States, the NHTSA has mandated ABS in conjunction with Electronic Stability Control under the provisions of FMVSS 126 as of September 1, 2013.
You can of course have non electronic ABS, Ford used to do this on Escorts and Onions in the late 80s, but ... lets not go there.
> Do you know why nobody is investigating Artificial Stupidity?
I thought lots of companies were already investing heavily in artificial stupidity, aren't we discussing a case in point?
As the saying goes "To ere is human, but to really F*** things you you need a computer"
> Still waiting for AMD, Microsoft, Apple, and Linux to announce that they are discontinuing x86 development
This isn't an x86 problem, its affecting other CPU architectures too. Aren't Sparc and IBM's Power chips also suffering, some ARM CPUs are.
Intel have a chip which isn't, apparently, affected. But it's illegal to say nice things about Itanium here at El'Reg.
The idea of the walkable city is such contradiction in terms.
I think you've missed the whole point of cities.
I was born in London and to be honest I wouldn't live there if you paid me to.
But, I love visiting London of an evening. It's vibrant, There's lots happening, a huge variety of places to eat, places to go for entertainment. Lots of places to meet up with friends etc.
To me that's the advantage of cities.
If I was 30 years younger then I'd love to live in a place like that.
The idea of the walkable city is such contradiction in terms.
Nope!
I want to be able to walk around it.
I'd love to be able to just walk around without having to worry about cars, buses, trucks and cyclists.
London has a high enough population density to fund burying most of the transport infrastructure. The more of that which is out of sight and out of mind the better.
If they want to plan a city for autonomous cars then it should be one where the roads have been removed from the places that the pedestrians want to walk, live in 3 dimensions take it up and/or down.
If all the roads were buried in tubes then people probably wouldn't care that much about driving.
Oh yes,
PS. I love to drive and wouldn't want an AV in today's road system.
PPS, when AVs start to appear on our roads you can bet I'll be one of the people who game them.
PPPS, I've said here before that as a pedestrian I will not give way to an AV, it can damn well stop and give way to me.
I used to quite like it when the BBFC rated video games. You could go to their website and get the detailed report by the "censor" on what content of the game resulted in it's eventual rating. Loads of games ended up with higher age ratings of bad language, I'm not stupid enough to think that kids aren't going to swear, so my attitude was "you can have the game but if I hear you using that language and you'll lose it, use that language at your mother and you'll lose the console". So we never had an issue, but it meant that when they kids wanted a particular game we could make an informed decision and we could argue our corner when we said no.
Well given than "the government" in the shape of the Number10gov official site and Theresa May in her own name plus of course Jeremy Corbyn and probably every one else in parliament regularly post to one of the worlds premier porn distribution sites, I'd say that the government positively support porn.
With the Itanium processor virtual addresses are global, the bits of the kernel have 1 set of virtual addresses while all user processes have other virtual addresses. The cache tags and the TLB basically know who a bit of addresses space belongs to. Sadly it's been too many years since I played that far inside the Itanium to remember whether there is a region register which is programmable from user privilege level (like there is 1 user programmable space register on PA-Risc) but even if a long virtual pointer were used from assembler the access would be blocked by the TLB's protection mechanism.
Re: If you control your own computer, it doesn't really matter if you can read the kernel memory from user space.
Hardly.
Take Berkeley Unix, which is where Unix page based memory management came from. The assumption here is that the computer is owned and run by the CS dept. but used by bloody students who's primary interest is in buggering things up. No OS designed has ever wanted to have it's internal data read by unprivileged user code. If such behaviour was considered a "good thing" then /dev/kmem would be world readable. The kernel often has data which should be private to other processes running on the same system so it damn well should ensure that it's private.
Years back I bought myself a lovely bottle of 1962 Oban (years back, but this was still getting on for 30 years old at the time). One evening a few weeks later the wife and I headed over to my sister's where my brother in law proceeded to drink the said bottle and I must say it was divine. Silky smooth.
The next day I awoke with a bad head and the Mrs wasn't very sympathetic (for some unknown reason). When I was feeling much worse by night time she finally relented to accepted that perhaps my ailment wasn't of my own causing. After everything that went near my mouth for the next 5 days bounced the Mrs (who was a nurse) finally persuaded the GP that I might have food poisoning (I'd stupidly eaten a burger from a dodgy looking van during the day before the drinking session). I was put on a dose of antibiotics and a few days later started to return to the land of the living. A while later I was chatting to one of the consultants at the hospital and the story came up and he postulated that I quite likely owed my life to that whisky he thought that the golden liquid had likely killed off quite a lot of the organism that did me so much harm.
You have to remember that by and large the world is run by frustrated old men* who hate the idea that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than they are. As a consequence they are determined to ban anything they might not be getting the chance to enjoy personally.
(*) In my experience the feeling isn't gender specific.
It's about making sure that "undocumented features" don't exist.
You don't always have to go that far. Sometimes developers don't do a full trace back to zero check of library function paths to know about the documented features.
I remember years ago coming across the feature of the chsh command, due to this needing to modify the passwd file it needed to run SUID to root. The command was quite simple and just relied on the standard password file functions of the time and those functions relied on the stdio functions. There was kind of a sibling command to chsh, chfn, the developer of chfn had read all the manual pages and knew that the underlying function wasn't going to handle a line of over 1024 characters and so had included code to ensure that it wouldn't be asked to. The developer of chsh hadn't been so diligent, So you could chsh and give yourself a shell with a short name, such as the Bourne shell had, then using chfn you could max out the length of your passwd file entry. Then going back to chsh you switched to a shell with a longer name, csh or ksh would do, and the command didn't sanity check on the data nor understand the lower level functions and would write out a really dumb entry in the file.
The feature was known, but only to people who had RTFM'd.
> I'm sure Woodgate and Clark Ltd were shocked, shocked!, to learn of such heinous crimes by the PI's they hired.
The firm's director, Michael Woodgate, was found guilty of two counts
Let's just hope that the sentence is custodial. A fine, which is bound to be smaller than the profit of rogue trading, just isn't sufficient incentive to behave well.
mentioned thousands of files, over a time period of months, with timestamps indicating porn browsing sessions lasting several hours, interspersed with him sending and receiving emails and reviewing documents.
Once the dodgy link has been followed or the maliciously crafted page has been viewed it can keep updating so can result in many accesses spread over the time the page is open which can easily show the accesses interspersed with genuine work activities.
You're probably right, he may well not be telling the whole truth, but this isn't evidence.
It's new worthy because in any other job, if caught with porn on his computer he'd have been fired.
having porn on your pc (or if it's pron presumably it's on your cp) is not reasonable proof that you've been looking at porn.
As others have pointed out, a dodgy link could have done it, crap settings on an email client (this was years back remember). Or a malicious web-admin could easily to give them to you as a present. If I have a website which the bods from Westminster access for what ever reasons it is trivial to feed them lots of links to thumbnails (coz they download quickly so probably won't be noticed) and you just display them as 1x1 pixels dots on the screen... or similarly hide them. I could easily target these at specific IP addresses or users etc.
If you want proof you should need to more than someone saying I saw it in the guy's browser history.
Otherwise any web admin can take you down any time they like.
I know you marked this as a joke, but
> The only userland event that should cause a panic is PID 1 existing.
But only if it's SystemD. SysVInit should be allowed to continue as normal
This is one of the issues with systemd, the traditional init was a very simple thing and as such incredibly unlikely to die. Once it had launched the system it became the catcher of orphans, it issues the wait(2) calls to allow them to be reaped. The kernel needs to have somewhere to pass orphan processes, this is why it panics if PID 1 dies.
IMHO systemd does too much, it has too many interaction points and therefore is much more likely to have defects and therefore at risk of dying. Unlike other userland processes, the death of PID 1 is fatal. So things which are perfectly acceptable in other process are not in tolerable in PID 1.