Posts by yetanotheraoc

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Well actually

They already have the private data, illegally. Or maybe it was legal for some purposes, but not for other purposes, but never mind the purpose they just took it all willy nilly. And continue to do so at every opportunity, even after (rarely) the courts slap them down and tell them to stop.

The whole point of the proposed legislation is to legalize what they have already done and continue to do. Open the floodgates, as it were. They will keep banging away at it until they succeed. "Here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly", followed by "New (rehashed) proposal to scan devices", forever and ever in an endless loop, until one day it does fly.

Re: And then there's the law enforcement side.

"utterly useless"

If everything you wrote is true, this only proves that, when law enforcement says they need these tools to stop child pornographers, they are _lying_. Give them the tools to gather information, they use the tools to gather information, and then they don't use the information for the stated purpose. This per your example.

Okay cool, give them more privacy-busting tools, more information, more more more. Guess what, they will _never_ use it to prosecute the child pornographers. Because if they would, then they would have already. As for why they do not / will not use it to prosecute the child pornographers, I can only guess, but let me say all my guesses reflect very poorly on the individuals in law enforcement.

Re: Porn's effect on real life

"For example, some studies have suggested that female crime readers and writers indulge in violent fantasies that they would very much never want to be involved in."

Then again there is Nancy Crampton-Brophy who wrote "How to Murder Your Husband" and then ...

Okay that example doesn't contradict anything else you wrote, if anything it confirms it.

There is a need.

"No need to autoscan billions of random images."

What happens if there is insufficient criminal images on the stepfather's phone? A cache of suitable images could come in quite handy at times.

Re: Porn's effect on real life

"if the people in the picture don't mind"

Ugh. I think it's safe to say the victim does mind. Especially since the victimization and the picture-taking of it are the whole point of the crime. But keep posting, I can learn to hate you.

Re: The sound of Perseverance

It's a "single issue" voter. I once heard such a voter being interviewed, they said "Yes, I am a single issue voter. All I care about is this one issue. Any other issue I don't care about. This one issue is the most important thing in the country/world/universe and overrides any other possible consideration."

So my single issue is I think smurfs should be outlawed. Politician says they will do away with smurfs. They get my vote. Interviewer: "That politician has been convicted of corruption." Me: "I don't care, they are tough on smurfs." Interviewer: "There is nothing that would change your mind?" Me: "Only if they go back on their promise to get rid of the smurfs." Politician: "No more smurfs!"

Never mind the politician is shagging a smurf as soon as the interview is over.

Re: Porn's effect on real life

Not hate, but exasperation. You haven't thought it through. "give them 'porn' with minors." -.> you are taking a picture of a crime.

That's now how Apple's system works

"It tells you and shows you the image"

No, it rejects the image upload, applies secret "points" against your license to upload, and if you go over the allowed number of points then it locks your phone and reports you to the authorities.

Murena and /e/ Foundation launch privacy-centric smartphones

I want one

Thanks for the article, I will be looking closely at the specs to see if one of these can work for me. I'm hoping yes because Apple and Google are getting worse every year.

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Even if ...

Let's say all of the criticisms of Musk expressed herein are accurate. And further that all the pros and cons of remote working have been correctly summarized. It's still possible Musk knows that his executives have been goofing off and taking advantage. Musk may be annoying and he may not be as smart as he thinks he is, but he actually is somewhat competent as a CEO of tech companies. So if he applies this correction and many of them quit, maybe that's what he wants? Some of them get back to work, good. The others go bye-bye, also good. Later there will be a chance to relax the policy.

Re: "They should pretend to work somewhere else"

Careful. They shoot messengers.

Re: Ego Musk

"they just grabbed one of their normal chassis and bolted on electric bits"

As opposed to Tesla who just grabbed someone else's normal chassis and bolted on electric bits.

IBM's self-sailing Mayflower suffers another fault in Atlantic crossing bid

Calling all marketers

If they get the whole way they can give a press release that says "Better than IBM!"

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Re: Control Your Own Upgrades

"the apparmor profile of evince locking it down so much that it doesn't regard/ save user settings"

To be fair this isn't a Linux-only thing. On Windows trying to combine virtual apps with remote profiles leaves me with a short list of settings I have to re-apply at every reboot. Actually it's a long list but most of them are wrapped up in a script.

My top 3

1. MX Linux

2. Devuan

3. PCLinuxOS

Notice what they have in common? I could recommend any one of these to a recent convert from Windows. I've looked at Slackware for myself but I'm too lazy to take the plunge. The article criticizes Mint for "overly cautious approaches to updates and upgrades". But that's the flip side of stability. The vast majority of computer users, at least the ones known to me, value stability over features. Most have little idea how many features their current OS provides. For them it's just a way of opening applications.

Algorithm spots 104 asteroids in huge piles of data

Re: The mighty Algorithm.

When their name is Asteroid Institute, they would have to disambiguate AI every time. Which pretty much negates the intellectual laziness that is the whole raison d'etre for calling it AI. They probably have a style guide with 50 alternatives for AI, depending on context. And every time there is a newbie writing the press release, they roll up the style guide and clunk the newbie in the head -- how many times do we have to tell you, you can't write "AI" for that....

Azure Active Directory logs are lagging, alerts may be wrong or missing

Sequence numbers on log messages

I spent a lot of time reading the MS docs on how to create Azure services, and sequence numbers are contrary to the design patterns. If you split your service over multiple instances on different servers, how would they co-ordinate these sequence numbers? Instead, Azure has this fuzzy concept "eventual consistency", which as near as I can make out is just hand-waving and declaring "good enough".

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

Re: Drop and go

"they can pretty much disallow almost anything in their DBs"

Quite. Stephen failed to backup the DB probably because he was not logged in as a backup operator.

"Surely I'm smarter than this issue," Stephen thought to himself.... Nope. You don't know what you don't know. Once the software has demonstrated your ignorance to you, it's time to step back and RTFM (or consult the greybeard, call the vendor, etc.). When I was a callow youth I (oh so delicately) brushed the horse fence with the backhoe. The owner was understandably angry, but gave me a valuable piece of advice: "When you are unfamiliar with the equipment, GO SLOW!"

Indian authorities issue conflicting advice about biometric ID card security

Re: Could they be less specific?

They did their best, but are always looking to improve. If you have a less specific phrase to suggest, they will certainly consider it.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Poe, poe me

Loving the downvotes.

Re: Ok hands up

Why touch it? Just sniff. Wet paint smells very different from dry paint.

Re: Prime example

I thought it was an example of a man of action showing initiative when nobody else could get the job done.

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

all nuance is lost

"I think that's possibly the reason that those post-referendum polls that've shown a narrow remain win if the vote were re-run now"

More likely because the people conducting those polls want the results over-turned (hard to imagine the winning side conducting polls today), and how they pose the questions colors the results. What's really surprising is how the results are still so evenly split, despite Brexit having had plenty of time to show its defects (and there were bound to be some). To me this shows the pro-Brexit side (at least the public) had some serious convictions, and were not simply swayed by lies. (Which is not to say they weren't lied to.)

I see two basic political problems on this side of the pond, not sure if either of them fits on your side. (1) People generally form their own political views issue by issue, but they think "other" people don't do the same thing. This plays into (2) people are generally willing to think the worst of "other" people of a different political persuasion. Thus they are susceptible to being lied to about the other side.

re bollocks

"there'll be none of us left"

I reckon katrinab and jake (to the dismay of that IR35 AC) will still be here.

Re: Russian government's favourite playbook

"Maybe one answer is to expect a bit less of our politicians, so we don't drive them to drink?"

That's not why they drink.

Re: Good

"Proton mail? Isn’t that a bit suspect in of itself"

Encrypted communications is only suspect when the general public uses it. (Think of the children!) "It's a Good Thing" (SM by Martha Stewart) when used by politicians / military / police.

Another compromised politician

Or you could email them a PDF with an embedded Word document (it's OK to click OK!) with a macro that downloads malware that harvests the private key etc., etc.

Take your pick

"If someone leaked it, there must be a cover-up, it must be bad."

Or -- If someone leaked it, it must be disinformation, nothing to see here, move along.

I agree with your analysis of Russian actions and motives. They have a particular axe to grind, but if that doesn't work out then they are satisfied with general turmoil. The cover-up partisans and the disinformation partisans will be duking it out for decades.

Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content

Keep it simple

You don't need Ventoy, that's just a selector for different bootable images, where you would be selecting Clonezilla3.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Re: Spam = all time low

"people giving my email addy as theirs, either by mistake by them, or the bank or insurance company who had to transcribe from a paper form"

I get daily emails from Costco and Birkenstock for the same reason. Maybe it wasn't a mistake, but an asterisk next to the email field and the end user's way of diverting the marketing spam....

Perl Steering Council lays out a backwards compatible future for Perl 7

Re: Backwards compatibility

"It has always been wrong."

It's only wrong if it doesn't match the spec. It's all 1s and 0s, write a function or use a library function to translate the 1s and 0s to some other representation. Even 2022 is just an arbitrary number, don't get too attached to it.

Re: Perl

sed/awk/shell works for me. I can't write programs as concise as the ones in _The Awk Programming Language_, nevertheless the Posix text utilities and a little nawk/gawk glue can get me pretty far.

"throw away one of Perl's key strengths"

I can see how that would cause arguments. Every language has its own way of doing things. Trying to make Perl into something else, e.g. Javascript, would not be good Perl and it wouldn't be good Javascript either.

Campaigners warn of legal challenge against Privacy Shield enhancements

Re: Colour me confused

Schrems II ... "triggering a fresh wave of legal confusion over the transfer of EU subjects' data to America"

Confusion => Wait, you mean we can't transfer whatever we want whenever we want?

enhanced Privacy Shield ... "enable predictable and trustworthy data flows between the EU and US"

Predictable => always on

Verizon: Ransomware sees biggest jump in five years

We're only here for the monetizing

"ransomware by itself is really just a model of monetizing an organization's access"

That's all right, then. Nothing wrong with a little monetizing, as all the Web 2.0 organisations will attest. The unwritten rule of the wild wild web: By not securing their data, they are agreeing to be monetized.

Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16

Re: Isn't it a wonderful thing that we have a choice

"a tricky philosophical position"

It only seems tricky to those who want more choices. Painting yourself into a corner is not a problem at all if you are happy never to leave that corner.

Millions of people's info stolen from MGM Resorts dumped on Telegram for free

If you don't want to see insects, don't look under that rock

"... and didn't tell anyone it was using that information for targeted advertising ..."

News flash: All information gathered for any purpose will be used for targeted advertising. If caught and if fined, they will simply pay up, and find a sneakier way to do the exact same thing again.

Vehicle owner data exposed in GM credential-stuffing attack

Re: Although passwords are poorly managed...

"yet another flash in the pan idea to "fix" password re-use"

Can I play? How about forcing the user to do a password reset after every login.... That way even if they re-use the password on multiple sites, it still won't when the credential stuffer gets their hands on it. What could go wrong?

DuckDuckGo tries to explain why its browsers won't block some Microsoft web trackers

Re: You can’t trust DuckDuckGo

I forecast a pop up storm.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

I have concerns

"ChromeOS has two root partitions: one live and one spare. The currently running OS updates the spare partition, then you reboot into that one. If everything works, it updates the now-idle second root partition. If it doesn't all work perfectly, then you still have the previous version available to use, and you can just reboot into that again."

Define "everything" in the phrase "everything works". And "it updates the now-idle second root partition", precisely when does that happen? Because after that second update you most certainly *don't* have the previous version available.

Not that I am using Android or ChromeOS any time soon, but these complete image updates are the worst feature of iOS and macOS, and only tolerable because Apple has the funding to get it mostly right. It's still a risk I would rather not take.

In the Linux distros I have used, when I update the kernel I still have the old one in the boot menu, and it's my choice which to boot and which to remove. So all this jive about modern OSes are too complex and need new ways of managing just sounds like drivel. Computers are now and have always been very complex. There are good ways to deal with complexity, and there are bad ways. The monolithic anti-pattern is one of the bad ways.

Re: Software Junk

The 1950s commercial dishwasher needed a new switch about 5 years ago. Not only did the original manufacturer ship the part and instructions, they also answered the phone when we were halfway through the repair and had a question.

It's 2022 and there are still malware-laden PDFs in emails exploiting bugs from 2017

Re: PDFs to blame, or Adobe Reader (for unnecessary functionality)?

`Or is this an "Adobe Special", avoided by not using their PDF viewer?`

No, it's not an Adobe-only issue. Firefox, Chrome, etc. will also execute PDF.JavaScript if you let them. You can disable this behavior, but it's probably on by default because most lusers want it.

Re: "PDFs can also include clickable links"

"Adobe Reader never wants to open valid links."

In a quick test just now, whether Adobe Reader will open a link depends on how I created the PDF. In Firefox, Ctrl+P, choosing "Save to PDF" gives working links, choosing "Microsoft Print to PDF" gives non-working links. YMMV.

Re: Our takeaway from this: stay up-to-date with patches...

"What updates and patches?"

The ones in the CVE linked in the article. Patches listed for Office 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Plain text is beautiful!

Indeed it is. After trying various outliners, for my own documents I eventually went back to plain text (sometimes markdown) files in a fairly shallow folder hierarchy. Although I never used gopher much, I did use it to download an early Netscape Navigator (v 2.1?). I recall that took overnight and two tries. Now http is just bad, bad, bad. The gopher protocol benefits from not having been similarly "improved" by first Netscape, then Microsoft, and lately Alphabet.

Deepfake attacks can easily trick live facial recognition systems online

Re: Artificial Mimickry

"Indeed emotions and 'gut feeling'" both take place in the brain.

"Not all human information processing is done in the brain". Yes, it is.

"nor is all of it done in a way that we can understand".

The individual may not understand but "we", as in science, do.

Hey there, nice fact-filled rebuttal.

I thought (sic) at a minimum that some of the information processing involved the senses, so your rebuttal only holds if we think of the nerves in the fingers, to take one example, as being in the brain. In particular the gut feeling mentioned often takes place precisely in the gut (butterflies, sick, and other gut feelings). Humans can withdraw their hand from danger before the nerve impulses have had time to make the round trip from the hand to the arm muscles. So I vaguely recall a study showing the signal made a shorter trip from the hand to the spine and back to the muscles, in parallel to the trip to the brain. Now if you want to exclude this type of thing from information processing, then please feel free to elaborate.

Failed gambler? How about an algorithm that predicts the future

top ten reasons for choosing a programming language

10. Semicolons hate me.

Python then.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

reverse psychology

"The next one had tags on it saying 'NETWORK – DO NOT TOUCH'."

Sometimes it seems signs like that have the opposite of the intended effect.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

userland

Yes, on macOS I need to use the freebsd.org online docs to get the correct command syntax, where it differs from the GNU syntax (e.g. find is different). But I need to use the apple.com online docs to discover how to do most things the macOS way (e.g. don't mess with the path).

NASA's InSight doomed as Mars dust coats solar panels

Re: Could something anti-static work?

"The system described in the article above has nothing to do with magnets."

Electromagnetism at a stretch. "magnets" only appears in the URL, not in the article. It would seem whoever created the URL didn't even read the article.