Posts by Chubango

Microsoft cuts off Azure phone surveillance support for Israeli military

I had been wondering if El Reg would ever cover this. There have been reports on +972 Magazine and the graun since at least January. OpenAI is also involved, unsurprisingly. Perhaps usage of AI to commit war crimes might have been good to cover last year as welll. Better late than never, I suppose. Sadly, as per the graun article, all other business with Israeli military is unaffected and so Microsoft continues to be willingly complicit in the ongoing genocide.

Arch Linux users told to purge Firefox forks after AUR malware scare

Re: Sure, this is not an Arch problem. It's a Linux one.

SteamOS is based off of Arch but, in practice, the experience is rather different—even putting aside the default gaming mode and just focusing on the desktop mode. For one, it is an immutable OS (featuring an accordingly locked down filesystem) with A/B atomic updating of the system image. The core system packages are all older being kernels and libraries that are a year or more behind. And user installation of additional software is done exclusively through flatpaks or appimages. It also is opinionated and has a default desktop environment and software.

Arch does none of these things for better or worse and the user fully decides how to set up their system as part of the installation process. Don't get me wrong, SteamOS' approach makes sense for a console and Valve have delivered a good experience for the masses. But the user base is very likely different in terms of interest and skills and I wouldn't expect that a large number would be predisposed towards installing and running basic Arch.

Common sense should always be applied

I'm a long-time user of Arch (since about 2008) and don't use the AUR for much as the official repositories cover almost all of my needs. When I do install something from the AUR it's usually a development version of a package (-git) for testing/temporarily needing a bleeding-edge version for whatever reason and it's just a more convenient way of building something from source as it takes care of tracking dependencies for me. Still, the same pitfalls from manually building from source exist. And for someone who doesn't understand what they're doing, it can be like copy-pasting random commands found on SO and the like. Users should look at the listed upstream source and examine the PKGBUILD file to see if there's anything unusual there. And even then it's wise to be skeptical of these user-created packages as there's opportunity for all sorts of shenanigans as pointed out by this article. More popular packages do tend to get adopted officially by the distro in time, however, and user comments can be helpful as well.

"User-friendly" Arch derivatives don't do a good enough job of warning users of the potentially serious risks of enabling the AUR (or explaining what it is, really) in their graphical front ends either. I've encountered my fair share of newbies over the years who have mucked things up just by blindly installing things from the AUR. This breakage can be especially egregious in Manjaro as they arbitrarily hold back packages for weeks in their own repos and the AUR—obviously—assumes you're on regular Arch, running the latest stable packages. (Essentially, you're doing partial upgrades and that goes against Arch's model.)

(Wholly unrelated but adding 'ILoveCandy' to your pacman.conf is a great little easter egg.)

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: Damned if you do....

As awful as C-level greed is, you're not going to pay for 250 employees, living in San Fransisco, with that money (I've seen it mentinoed that she raised her salary by 2 million, disgusting but it wasn't doubling it). I'm firmly on the side of capping executive salaries and always trying to retain your employees (taking a pay cut if you're the CEO, if necessary). Still, the issues run deeper than the executives with Mozilla which is part of the point I was making. They do not have a way to maintain themselves if and when Alphabet pulls the plug.

Damned if you do....

The biggest problem with Firefox is the lack of steady funding outside of deals with Alphabet. And yet, whenever they try to break free from that (or at least supplement income) by hawking things like VPNs or services like pocket they are criticized for deviating from their primary role as a web browser. The article claims that the problem is "too much" money but contradicts itself by citing the mass firings of the Rust and Servo teams because of the lack of resources and one is left wondering how these statements can be reconciled. There is no realistic solution offered here for Mozilla—focusing on standards matters only to a vanishingly small number of nerds (myself included) but won't do anything to stop the ever-smaller usage base and income due to the Chrom* monopoly that's backed by very wealthy interests. There are things that could be done to minimize expenditure such as moving away from SF, limiting CEO salaries, and the like but those do not address the big-picture issues with FLOSS projects not having enough resources (El Reg has manifold stories about projects just barely scraping by to prove this point). Long term, if Alphabet is broken up there might be interesting movement in the browser space but I just don't see anything but idealistic hopes being offered in the interim. And hopes do not keep the lights on.

I can't claim to have a workable solution myself but I do sympathize with the plight of Mozilla and any FLOSS competitor that is trying to offer something other than Chrom* to its users. Until such a time when a better option exists—something that respects privacy, allows full adblocking, and keeps up with standards—I'll continue to use Firefox.

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

So I guess you missed my link (posted for your convenience, again) which covers all that and—crucially—further developments including how Valve is addressing issues and continuing to push Wayland development. Read Mike Blumenkrantz (a Valve developer, Wayland-Protocol and Mesa contributor) thoughts that are linked there as well and, more importantly, at how his initiative to experiment and move things was merged into the Wayland-Protocols last year. Given the number of developers involved, the time, and the efforts to work with the Wayland and Linux community I'd say that it is a fairly clear endorsement.

Valve directly develops gamescope which implements Wayland and is used in their ecosystem, including the Steam Deck/SteamOS. Their developers also are invested generally in Wayland, several are members of the organization that sets Wayland protocols through their work on Mesa, and are active in pushing and improving things. They contribute to several other projects in the Linux world but, as far as I know, never to anything X11-related. So I think that they likely disagree with your take.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Re: never being a good operating system of theirs

Ah, the mask slips—claims of knowing my life and professional usage better than I do, the contrary-to-reality implication that there aren't paid developers for many large projects in the Linux space, irrational defense of a universally detested figure (Win 8), evocation of religion coupled with smug putdowns ... pure zealotry from a religious fanatic (with grammar issues to boot) who is unable to accept a worldview other than their own. I'll continue to avoid the trap of the Microsoft ecosystem while getting paid, thank you very much. What's more, I'll continue to recommend Linux in professional environments for its lower cost of ownership and solid fundamentals and at home its stability and practice of staying out of my way will remain appreciated.

Re: never being a good operating system of theirs

Having used Windows in some professional environments for decades and Linux at home, I'd say that any current Linux desktop beats the pants of any Windows experience. (I'm sure you'll have your own arbitrary criteria why this isn't so. But this is how opinions work, and your defense of the truly horrid W8 exemplifies that.) I loathe AD and I hardly think I'm the only admin who does! The servers I manage are mainly Linux boxes with a smattering of BSD and I've been fortunate to work at places where management was skeptical of the siren song of Microsoft. Oh and I always preferred StarOffice back in the day and now I happily use LibreOffice.

As to other OSes I was fortunate enough to be able to play around with BeOS back in the day and that ran laps around Windows as well and am quite fond of its modern successor, Haiku. When I decommission some of my older kit, thinking of putting that on if the hardware support is there. NeXTSTEP also deserves an honorable mention though admittedly I didn't get much hands-on experience with it when it was current.

I enjoyed several of the Flight Simulator games and the first two Combat Flight Simulator games were great. They also made fairly good peripherals for a while, particularly the Intellimouse series of mice and the Sidewinder series of joysticks—a friend still has his from the 90s and uses it from time to time.

I'll agree on there never being a good operating system of theirs, just ones that were less bad and one could form a stockholm syndrome-esque understanding with. Same as their productivity suites.

Nvidia shovels $500M into Israeli boffinry supercomputer

A swing and a miss!

Israel does not have equal rights for the people under its control. Do check out the link by an Israeli organization. Only Jews have the right for self-determination, for starters. Only Jews may purchase property. Only Jews have the right of return. Only Jews can have their spouses immigrant. Only non-Jews can have their citizenship stripped. The list goes on and on and we haven't gotten around to the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as restarted recently by the ICJ. It is an apartheid state by as recognized by Israeli rights groups like B'Tselem and the foremost experts of apartheid, the South Africans themselves.

You may twist and contort facts and realities but you offer no evidence. The majority world sees through lies like yours and it is why Israel is rightly condemned for its violations of international law, of human rights and for its endless war crimes.

Interesting that you attempt to use one of my sources to discredit another while offering no comment on the substance of what I've said. Good for you to conclude that the HRW is credible, since they have released a report that Israel is committing genocide. The independent nature of UN committees and high commissioners also mean that their reports are fairly free from politics as anyone who is not trying to downplay violations of international law would know.

But do continue to defend the indefensible, it's really not a good look.

Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism no matter how much zionists wish to conflate the two for political purposes. If Israel respects international law and complies with rulings by the ICJ, pays reparations to those it has dispossessed and ends the occupation, it will no longer be criticized.

Your previous comment was deleted because you wished me death for agreeing with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Human rights Council, genocide scholars like Omer Bartov, many others, and the daily evidence of atrocities committed by Israel which we can see with our own eyes. That says all that needs to be said about the lunacy of supporters of the colonial project called zionism.

Poor Linux support had me avoid Nvidia for many years; the "AI" nonsense was a further red flag; supporting a genocidal state ensures that I'll never buy one of their products again.

Crypto klepto North Korea stole $659M over just 5 heists last year

Victimless crimes.

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

RIP cool little corners of the internet

The homogenization of the internet and its culture continues as only the big players will be able to comply. My only hope as someone involved with a few small communities as a (web)admin for two is that the rest of the world does not pursue similar idiocy.

Never thought I'd get into the habit of checking the obits.

Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

Re: Still?

Choose a random month, avoiding cherry-picking, and you'll see the substance of those releases: bug fixes and minor changes. It's somewhat telling that a large portion of those commits refer to xwayland changes and how many of those are minor changes to modules and libraries. Compare it with Wayland's releases and further look at who is involved with commits and you get a better picture of things.

Re: Still?

Wayland will never have feature parity with X11 because it doesn't aim to do that. You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but the X11 developers all shifted towards Wayland and X11 has only been in maintenance for years now—I think that they know better than you or I. You are free to contribute code to extend X11 and to reform it as you wish, like with any other FLOSS project, but it seems to me that no one wishes to for very valid technical reasons.

In the interim, I'll continue to enjoy my tear-free multimonitor setups and sane security provisions instead of the mess that is X11.

Re: Still?

>Not being a developer the differences between Xorg and Wayland are meaningless to me and leads me to suspect that the Wayland people are engaged in re-inventing the wheel.

The Wayland people are the Xorg people and they moved on from X11 for very good reasons; security, performance, and efficiency come to mind. More importantly, individual compositors/implementations like XFCE are completely separate from what the Wayland devs are doing. More mature compositors like anything wlroots-based, Plasma, and Gnome have largely got all their affairs in order in terms of features and performance.

I've been a full-time Wayland user for years now (using Sway) and haven't encountered any Wayland-specific issues yet.

Musk burns bridges in Brazil after calling for senior judge to be impeached

>It all depends where you fall on the political spectrum.

I'd argue it's less about the political spectrum and more about whether or not you are able to assess evidence and facts without zealotry. That extremists, in many cases religious zealots that comprise a large part of Bolsonaro's base, are unable to do so is more of a correlation; a fair amount of house-trained right-wingers (including governors, senators, and others) in Brazil are against the attacks on institutions; whether or not this will remain the case as the years go by is an open question.

As for the content of the article otherwise: twitter will likely be banned, just as WhatsApp and others have (temporarily) been in the past. Companies keep pretending that the rest of the world has to kowtow to their whims. Whether or not you agree with the US and its possible TikTok expropriation, China's rules for foreign companies, India's similar actions with social media, or anyone else, it is well within their prerogative to do regulate companies as they please. Companies are free to do their business elsewhere. Is it against freedom of expression or politics or whatever else? Quite likely. But it's a funny thing, that pesky ol' sovereignty.

Dems and Repubs agree on something – a law to tackle unauthorized NSFW deepfakes

Re: side question

If they have, I'll know it when I see it.

Penguins get their Wayland with Firefox 121

Good that Wayland support is being turned on by default now—been using it for a while with the 'MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1' environmental variable and haven't had any real issues with it.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Own goal after own goal

Threats of any kind are never justifiable but it does put things slightly into perspective that the one calling the threats appears to have been a Unity employee.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

Re: Really?

What an odd reply to my post. In no way have you addressed the original comparison by the article author that was mentioned by the poster I replied to nor the incorrect assumption to that is anything but a loud and unrepresentative group that complains about systemd.

As for Wayland being free of philosophical debate that is simply not true. I've been following discussions (as well as using wayland) for a long time now. For starters, there's been a lot of discussion about the fact that the protocol is decoupled from the actual server implementations, ie the compositors. That point has caused issues that are still relevant with KDE and GNOME; they have issues that are not present in the other or wlroots-based things for that matter. How input is handled and the "every frame is perfect" approach likewise has been the focus of a lot of debate. Hell, even elsewhere in these comments you'll find people complaining about its CSD-first approach.

Re: Really?

You shouldn't confuse the number of distros with the number of their users or, indeed, their overall importance in the Linux ecosystem. Every major distro uses systemd. And for good reason. It works well and has useful features, good documentation, and easy-to-write service files. It's not just developers and maintainers who like it but sysadmins like myself who remember the hell of hacky init scripts, especially when it came to dependencies and issues of concurrency. I suspect most desktop users won't care what init system they're running and don't have much of an opinion either way. As it should be!

While there may be a "philosophical" argument against the init, essentially that it's not UNIX-like, I find it telling that those lines of argumentation usually ignore things like the X server or the Linux kernel itself (Linus never meant it to adhere to that ideal, incidentally.)

It is popular to hate on the init system here, no doubt. I fully expect the usual slew of downvotes to this post. But it is worth bearing in mind that it is a highly vocal minority that hasn't moved on from early justifiable criticism or have a, frankly strange, vitriolic dislike of the init's creator. The author's point about people voicing their liking elsewhere plus the widespread adoption underscores how it is very much not an overstatement but just reality. systemd is fine and has been for a long while.

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

"AI" just needs to comply with contract law

> I guarantee that licensing trolls will come after "your" ChatGPT and Copilot code.

Good. Respect the terms of the license; stop hoovering up code and regurgitating it if you disagree.

The Great DB debate: SQL extensions won't solve the graph problem

I see El Reg's polling is still atrocious. For goodness' sake learn to formulate questions in a manner that is unambiguous. Keep it simple, stupid! This is easily fixed by two easy alterations:

1) Use only positive language that affirms a statement ie "Graph DBs provide a significant advantage over well-architected relational databases for most of the same use cases"

2) Do not confuse the issue with "for" and "against" the poorly-stated motion and instead go with "agree" and "disagree"

Huge lithium discovery could end world shortages ... Oh, wait, it's in Iran

Propaganda

> A naturally occurring isotope of Lithium – 6Li – is a key ingredient in the fusion fuel of practical thermonuclear weapons, and Iran is so very keen on developing its own nuclear weapons.

Despite insistent claims by a certain apartheid state and its allies that this is the case, claiming for now decades that Iran was developing a bomb and was only a short amount of time away from acquiring them (years, months, next Tuesday), more credible sources like the IAEA who have actually done on-ground inspections of sites have concluded otherwise. Perhaps one day Iran will cross the line, either because it was always the plan to be slow and take half a century to weaponize their civilian program or they were pushed into it via decades of crippling sanctions and unconcealed desire for regime change by others, but it is not there yet. If Iran do decide to join the nuclear club, it will be unfortunate, as I suspect aforementioned apartheid state with its current government will have no qualms applying its own undeclared stock of nuclear arms to its bogeyman rival and, once one side starts, the other will surely respond. Still that's all hypothetical and it's probably wiser for El Reg and others not to repeat propaganda and sustain a false narrative about the complicated situation that is Iran's nuclear program.

Icon for obvious reasons.

GPU shipments saw biggest nosedive since noughties recession

Re: Regarding the gamer grade cards...

My card, a factory overclocked RX 480, is currently a little over 5 years old and it does have some mild issues (I suspect I have to reapply thermal paste to it) but otherwise runs most of what I play without issues at 1080p. I would consider upgrading only if there's decent midrange options that don't cost an arm and a leg and—most importantly—don't suck down power with reckless abandon. It seems that anything that's not a refresh of an older product has at least double my current card's TDP!

If GPU manufacturers don't come to their senses I suspect you'll be right that a lot of us will continue to hold off on upgrading.

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

lol. lmao even.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Re: switch to an OS OS

Putting aside the fact that there's thousands of native games on Steam for Linux at this moment (as well as non-native ports for eg Saints Row 3&4), Proton works well enough that Valve launched a fairly successful piece of kit this year that promises to run thousands more games using, you guessed it, FLOSS. Feel free to browse the whitelist or take a look at many of the thousands of other games not on it that nonetheless just work.

Bitcoin worse for the climate than beef, say economists

The real gold were the profits we made along the way

Who would have thought that spending computing power and electricity for no benefit to society would be bad for the planet? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!

Matrix chat encryption sunk by five now-patched holes

Some more clarity

From the post that's linked haflway through the article:

>Clients with other encryption implementations (including Hydrogen, ElementX, Nheko, FluffyChat, Syphon, Timmy, Gomuks and Pantalaimon) are not affected; this is not a protocol bug.

>Meanwhile, we are taking extreme measures to avoid future E2EE vulnerabilities. You will notice that matrix-rust-sdk, hydrogen-sdk and other 2nd and 3rd generation SDKs were not affected by the bugs at the root cause of the critical issues here. This is precisely why we have been working on replacing the first generation SDKs with a clean, carefully written Rust implementation in the form of matrix-rust-sdk, complete with an ongoing independent public audit.

Just think it's worth pointing out clearly as the article mixes past problems and comments from the researchers in such a way that it seems to imply that the protocol itself is to blame rather than the implementation in these older libraries used by some of the clients.

A match made in heaven: systemd comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Can someone explain.....

I realize you're not the poster I was asking for an example from, but thank you all the same for taking the time to comment.

You're right that for an old, stable system which will virtually never see upgrades or changes it doesn't make a practical difference. It may as well be an embedded system—so long as it boots, works, and is bug-free the internals don't really matter.

For whatever it's worth, I do see the value in shell scripts and have obviously written quite a few in my time. However, the poster who I was replying to specifically mentioned service files vs scripts and there's very large shortcomings with the latter approach in the context of getting the system read (at least how it's been handled historically at times). Service files are just outright better at handling dependencies and helping track points of failure in the init. What a target is wanted by, under which conditions it should run or not, user permissions, and all those little subtleties are handled in an easy-to-understand manner that's easily changed or modified according to deployment needs.

Fetching information about the state of a unit and what it's doing is also simple and there's plenty of in-built tools to analyze the information in various ways. But, I realize that we're talking about different things here. I don't have a problem with the scope of systemd being beyond basic service management and think that the upsides of more tooling and integration with other aspects of the system far outweigh the downsides. But that's a different wholly discussion than systemd being more difficult/unmanageable than shell scripts for complex setups.

Re: Can someone explain.....

Linux isn't Unix. Wasn't designed to be like it

Re: Can someone explain.....

I would appreciate an example. I'll admit I'm not a sysadmin in a Fortune 500 or massive datacenter or whatever but I've been using systemd for over 10 years now for all sorts of deployments without issues. Never once have I thought that a shell script would be a better option.

Re: Can someone explain.....

Other than it having been adopted by some distros a little too early in its development lifecycle with issues that needed sorting, not much. It's a fast, modular and easy-to-write service files for. Personally, I wouldn't go back to openrc (which I used to use and prefer), much less sysvinit, or any other similar ways of handling processes. The other tools that come with it—if enabled—are also generally useful in my experience and I have found myself using more and more of them over the years. Fairly good documentation as well.

As much as it may upset the little circlejerk that usually goes on in the comments of these articles, there's good reason that it's become the de facto standard init. You'll struggle to find non-tinfoil or non-religious practical arguments against it in its current state.

I don't really care about some idealized UNIX philosophy that hasn't ever really applied to Linux nor do I care about the often very personal-level criticisms of systemd's creators. It allows me to manage my home boxes and remote servers without really getting in my way and gives me powerful tools to modify things if needed. I can't say that I love it—it's just software, after all—but it very much is useful and that's the only bar it has to clear.

Starlink broadband speeds slow as subscriber numbers grow

Re: What a surprise....

All the while adding to the light pollution of the night sky. Astronomers everywhere despair.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

I'm glad you agree with me that copyleft licenses prevent unscrupulous monetization.

Make sure to FLOSS to keep your ecosystem healthy.

Open source continues to miss the point. Make sure to keep on using licenses that everyone's freedoms in perpetuity. Alphabet has a handy list if you're unsure what to pick.

Musk repeats threat to end $46.5bn Twitter deal – with lawyers, not just tweets

Imagine a world where blatant stock manipulation like this resulted in actual punishment. A world where the SEC was an independent agency with teeth, instead of regulated by the industry itself. Maybe such a fantastical world would also allow normal people to invest and expect medium and long-term results instead of having the market rigged by sociopaths who create "value" only for themselves by shorting, bundling derivatives and toxic assets and leaving others holding the bag.

I expect the muskrat will not be held accountable yet again.

You loved running JavaScript in your web browser. Now, get ready for Python scripting

Sure, you can do that....

... but does it mean that you should?

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Whatever

Doesn't really matter in the least but I'm sure some people will get really worked up either way.

How Windows NTFS finally made it into Linux

Just the facts

Yeah, the author probably is mixing up things. That very paragraph quoted from the article goes on to cite the Arch WIki NTFS-3G article. The very first line states:

"NTFS-3G is an open source implementation of Microsoft NTFS that includes read and write support (the Linux kernel only supports reading NTFS)."

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Virtue signaling

Man, these right-wing snowflakes never get tired of leaning into their persecution complexes. Thankfully the rest of the world does not abide by their nonsense and respects the rights of private entities to host any and all content that they find acceptable. I would not mind if El Reg takes down this comment because, unlike these fragile idiots, I understand that using someone else's computer and platform is a privilege and not a right.

US Congress ponders setting up permanent UFO investigation office

Why not go all-in?

All those democracy-spreading ordinance systems sure are expensive to procure and maintain. Instead of spending money enlightening illiterate goatherds and replacing allies that happen to elect corporate-adverse leaders I'm sure that USAsians will find that they get better returns with finding out what those mysterious lights in the skies really are. Maybe they'll even find out that aliens (the space kind, not the kind that do all the agricultural and entry service jobs) are really just trying to warn them against all the chemtrails and other deep-spacetate shenanigans that are secretly turning their young into "soccer" fans and making them so thoroughly unamerican. Best to call the real president and his space force to make sure they don't take their eyes off the ball.

Amazon to cover 100%* of college* tuition* for hourly employees* in the US

Technically true

While I'm sure that Amazon is a great "job creator", I'm willing to bet that their net effect is actually negative. There's countless small, medium and large business that have folded and shed its workforce because of Amazon's tactics. It's not just the obvious cutthroat competitive stuff and movement towards a more digital habits vs brick and mortar; their undercutting their ostensible marketplace partners by producing their own in-house nearly-identical alternatives to popular products alone probably destroyed quite a few businesses.

The questions raised by El Reg over this tuition scheme also make me believe that this is more of a PR stunt than anything else.

Microsoft Irish subsidiary makes $314.73bn profit

Trickle-on economics

I'm sure they've created a bunch of well-paying jobs with these profits.

Open-source developers under corporate pressure to adopt less-permissive licenses, Percona CEO says

Re: I try to give back

It really doesn't matter if I'm less popular. The current model for contribution to FLOSS is broken, with larger entities just taking and giving little in return. Here's another article by El Reg that might interest you:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sources_sustainability_problem/

So between being popular, having the stress of worrying about things work properly, and no help from those who benefit the most versus just maintaining something less popular that forces everyone to share their improvements, I know which one I prefer. In the end I care more about myself and my users, not how widely my software is used and how much it helps corporate bottom lines.