Posts by devin3782

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

True, but it does spend a lot of time making DNS requests to checkonline.home-assistant.io

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

Hmmm Wiser, there's no nominative pre-determination there. So is this the foreshadowing of how the internet ends? hopefully not. I can see some of the news outlets and indeed Google committing further self harm implementing this out of intergalactic stupidity. Interestingly though I suspect there will be whole load of website owners who don't do this and they will gain the advantage from remaining open.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

Re: with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable

In short, yes. We can dub oracle's software licensing "A kings randsomwear"

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Beautiful? Really?

Agreed the RiscOS 2 look was much nicer than the RiscOS 3. NeXTstep looks ok but its elements take up way too much screen space, also I'm a guy who has 3x 27" screens (1440p) and likes his apps running maximised. Jumping from an Acorn to a PC I found main menus and toolbars a step backwards as they took up screen space.

Mozilla pauses blunder-prone AI chatbot in MDN docs

What a waste of developer resources that was, they could have better spent that time fully implementing the :has css pseudo class. No Mozilla we don't need you to be jumping on the band wagon, we need you to be the port in the storm.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: RISC OS always used three buttons

RiscOS is where I started with computers and man was that UI good and consistent, a level of consistency Windows, OSX and Linux could only dream of. The middle click menu in all applications was a joy. You can imagine my despair when my parents bought a PC and I had to do ungodly things like click toolbar buttons and go to the top of an application for the bloody menu as well as hold shift and ctrl. A single mouse button shows nothing but contempt for your users especially when you then put the charging usb port on the bottom.

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Dear Oracle,

Do please go directly to hell.

Deeply unkind regards

A Java Developer whom soon won't be.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Looks like enshittification strikes again. So landlines use the internet and in an emergency it won't work, imagine what would happen if a major catastrophe did indeed befall us.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

I think not wanting the data slurping and being concerned about the data use means you're oposite of a luddite

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

Re: Grab it while you can

I think the term is Effluencer and they wanketeer.

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

The burger menu is a perfectly fine icon, the thing everyone forgets to do is put the word "Menu" next to it, at which point you've made the user not have to think and your UI is now good enough.

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

This is something that prompted me to write reinstall.sh so that automatically removes all the packages I don't use, adds all the packages/repos I do and will even go and fetch the latest backup from my nas.

Streaming apps – and maybe even Cloud PCs – coming to electric cars

I don't want all of this extra parasitic load on the batteries, especially when a charge stop is 20+ minutes.

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Well criminals don't obey the laws anyway hence the name so what we assume they'll magically obey the laws when communicating with their peers? All this does it make it easier for us to fall prey to criminals, the ONLY mitigation is strong encryption and nothing else. Whoever came up with this legislation is a moron of apocalyptic proportions and too stupid to do anything other bang rocks together and they might even be too thick even for that.

Sick of GNOME, Snap and Flatpak? You might like Linux Lite, but beware rough edges

Although systemd might not be the best possible solution humanity could come up with it is better than the shell script forerunner. Having a simple method of setting up a service is a good thing, just recently I've configured mysql and postgres to not start until the network is up and iscsi based volumes are mounted, this is was trivial to set up with systemd the old way of buggering about with run levels was less than fun.

I'd love to hear the actual problems with systemd (apart from the binary logs and it not being unix-y i.e. does one thing and only one thing)

European datacenters worried they can't get cheap, reliable juice

Why haven't they solar panelled the roof? i mean it wouldn't run the servers but it'd run lighting and cooling systems, trickle charge their battery backup systems. We have so much roof space going unused seems a shame not to utilise it.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

I still don't understand why cars aren't using asymmetric keys, your key stores the cars public key and your car stores the public key's of your physical key, you know the way SSL, SSH, Wireguard works. I'm so glad my car doesn't have key less entry

Microsoft enlarges its cockpit of Copilots to include security

I'm sure this how Skynet started

Acer pedals into e-cycle market with AI and big data in its basket

Why does it need AI to know if you're going uphill when a Inclinometer/accelerometer is all thats needed? Also why do I want a bike that harnesses big data to harvest "insights" I'm guessing thats to help route you past the most amount of billboards to maximise the adverts spoiling your view.

Dual Tesla lawsuits pull Elon Musk into right-to-repair war

Re: About time

Didn't you mean:

Corporations say "Jump!", and the average [idiot] now say "How much, Master??"

Mozilla says 80 percent of Google Play's app safety labels are inaccurate

I complained to lloyds bank about all the tracking they were doing on their website and was told "Its for your security" even my personal bank statement data is pulled from a CDN

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

Re: This shouldn't happen

But that signal is only the protocol (and yes an app with the same name), what you do before or after that in regards to messages and user accounts is entirely up to the developer. There's nothing to stop the whatsapp developers getting the text content from the input box encrypting one via the signal protocol to your mate and sending one to facebook.

Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms

Oracle: I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Re: Modern Slavery

I wonder if anyone has done any sort of analysis on the costs of say a developer leaving and hiring a new one because I'd wager that the cost of hiring someone new would be more than that of giving the original developer higher wages (assuming that's their reason for leaving of course), by the time you've factored in writing a job ad, posting on various places, reading CV's, interviewing etc.. added to that the amount of time the new hireling is going to take getting up to speed, and any finders fees from an agent, its got to be more expensive than the pay rise.

Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price

I think half the problem proliferation of walled gardens, and the sheer number of spam content sites from content mills. I've also noticed that quite of lot of tutorials which used to be written are now on youtube, regardless of whether that's the correct format/place for it or not.

Punch-drunk Apple Watch called 15 cops to a boxing workout when it heard 'shots'

This is the problem with using sensors to try to work out if one is in peril or not, they lack context for what the owner is currently doing. Also you know that apple doesn't have three of each sensor (which, yes, is partially down to the space constraints), so the software will always trust the sensor is giving a correct reading.

Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink

I only had the cut down lander, but I want to play twinworlds and chopper force again.

What's called Grogu but isn't that cute? Google's leaked answer to Apple AirTags

Excellent, some more tracking tools to aid the worlds stalkers/perverts and worse, thanks Google, just what we needed, don't you think you have enough tracking data on us already? I supposed they'll be mercifully shorted lived, but they'll last a 1000 years in landfill at least

University still living in the Nineties seeks help with move to SAP S/4HANA

This is so true, I remember working for a company whom customised the software for every single client so in the code there was plenty of this particularly egregious smell.

if (companyCode == "company")

Amongst other the olfactory offenders when you see a function 20,000 lines long split across 2 files it's time to run to the hills.

Remember if when being interviewed/sold too and you're told the software has grown organically politely end the interview/sales meeting there.

German cartel watchdog objects to the way Google processes user data

Re: Good for Germany

Yes the user should be told, but they aren't always. Moreover, often google's anal is considered essential and you're unable to opt out, I should also add sites will load in the various pervert-ware first, then ask for your consent afterwards, which is clearly wrong.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Yet another example of why writing your application in JavaScript and letting the client handle all the heavy lifting and having a relatively basic API on the server is still a mostly bad idea, you potentially hand out way too many keys to the kingdom especially when they're designed for server to server interaction which this one seems to be considering the level of information its spewing.

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

Re: Petty is exactly the word, but then the world is run by small and petty men,

I believe that's called "lawful evil"

Re: "This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment..."

Petty is exactly the word, but then the world is run by small and petty men, I think MSG can add +1 to their lawsuits stat for this

This is the best pay offer you'll get without more strikes, union tells BT workers

I'm well aware of the privisation to BT

Meanwhile most of us in the private sector haven't even had the slightest whiff of payrise...

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Re: What's the point when....

I think they do listen, problem is they're asking the wrong questions

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

I'll summarise for you in short: No, in a more complete way NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo.

Considering how inkjet printers are the reason why we went to laser in the first place the horrible flimsy, noisey, messy, slow boxes of land fill, with driver packages in the 200mb > 1GB region, then added to that DRM to prevent 3rd party ink no ability to refill and auto cartridge bricking subscriptions. Frankly Epson and HP take one of their printers and shove it (I don't care which orifice)

All of that is before we get to this crap https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/21/epson_payments_issue

Its also staggering that printers are as crap now as they were in the 80's

Man wins court case against employer that fired him for not liking boozy, forced 'fun' culture

There's rule in UI/UX design and that is "Don't impose joy" I'd apply that everywhere else too.

Apple patches actively exploited iPhone, iPad kernel vulns

I'm not sure that having a growing list of security flaws is anything to brag about

Re: Tim Cook

Tony Adams? clearly he looks like Paul O'Grady's identical (yet evil) twin.

Meta faces lawsuit to stop 'surveillance advertising'

Re: What about those who do not use facebook at all ?

If you use firefox then I recommend the facebook container plugin, which prevents anything facebook from working on any domain other than facebook.com.

You'd be amazed how often the container icon appears on checkout forms of ecommerce sites so I'll wager facebook have screen scraped and taken your credit card details if you're not using it.

But also again as usual pi-hole, ublock origin and ghostery are your friends.

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

Thanks Intel, I hate it, there should be law against this sort of crap I find it abhorrent to withhold functionality of a physical object with a software lock (see also Tesla and BMW with heated seats) a pox on their house. This is also thoroughly environmentally unfriendly.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Re: Same Windows, but different

oh, oh, oh don't forget we also completely made a mess of the start menu, start menu search, prevented you from moving the task bar and we're really absolutely going put adverts into your start menu and file explorer just as soon as you've forgotten about the last time we tried to do it.

Can gamers teach us anything about datacenter cooling? Lenovo seems to think so

Re: Isn't it statingthe obvious that liquid cooling is more effective than air cooling?

In case anyone is wondering I've found the best anti-mould/corrosion agent is Sentinal X100 which is what we put in our central heating systems especially as the average central heating system contains the same mix of metals, seals, plastics as computer water cooling

What's up with WhatsApp? Messaging platform suffers outage in the UK

Re: Back to the future

As it uses the signal protocol as does signal i don't see why we can't have a decentralised messaging service as this sort of thing shouldn't be under the ownership of a single company especially Meta.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: Export please!

Who assassin their target by shooting them through their own heads. Calling yourselves the 1922 tells you all you need to know about their general outlook

Upstart Ransom Cartel linked to REvil veterans

Well we already have voyeurism-as-a-service from the four horseman privacy apocalypse (Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung) so I guess why not have crime-as-a-service seems like a logical next step

The new GPU world order is beginning to take shape

Well I'm going to buy an A770 for a giggle to see what it's like I'm sure it'll have a similar driver mess to the early 2000 era ATI Radeon 8500XT which after the drivers were fixed was an excellent card giving rise to the legendary Radeon 9800XT. That said my GTX 1070 is still playing everything I want but I would like to play with ray tracing.

I do need to check that qemu supports resizable-bar when using PCI-E passthrough, although I think these cards support SR-IOV which which have to buy an enterpriced version of nvidia's hardware if you want that feature like what Intel do with their CPU's if you want ECC

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

Indeed DDR5 on chip ECC is not proper ECC its just to make sure that due to have DDR5 works electrically that an error isn't introduced during bank swaps and other normal ram operations due to smaller processes these chips are produced on and the speed they run at.

Only end-to-end checking of data between the CPU and data written to memory is ECC.

For the chap wondering which AMD boards have ECC support here's the ones I know about:

Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro, Asrock Rack X470D4U, Asrock Rack X570D4U.

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: I guess that's the main aim?

Quite, removing GDPR doesn't make it cheaper to do business and adding more rules (relaxed or not) makes it more expensive.

I don't want this country as a data hub it just means we'll be in the news more and more for data breaches and that'll be embarrassing.

Remember if you don't store it, it can't be stolen.