* Posts by mattaw2001

140 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2021

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Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

mattaw2001

I disagree - syncthing is also affected, which is another data sync application.

Google reads all files passing over it's APIs for ads, records all interactions with applications and devices, and charges consumers directly for file sync. This is a very valuable dataset.

This permission is a move to ensure that any alternative ecosystem is strangled at birth. After all we are only hearing about this due to established players being affected - there will be no new ones after this.

Reminds me strongly of the US cable and phone company monopolies to be honest, where they own all the infrastructure and won't share.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

mattaw2001

Re: "Of course, we won't release that, but it's fascinating, right?"

I suspect most of the big agencies are in the system management controllers already (Intel IME, AMD SMU), so they can do whatever they want. However, I am sure they will not step back from adding yet another approach to their library...

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

mattaw2001

PSA - Windows will install and execute programs from the ASUS BIOS

Public Service Announcement:

Windows will install and execute programs (in my case part of the Armory Crate) from the ASUS BIOS unless you disable it in BIOS. Other motherboards can also do this.

What idiot thought this was a good idea ?!?!

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4438288

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

mattaw2001

Re: Remember kids

@cyberdemon - I agree with @Throatwarbler Mangrove, so am upvoting his virtual upvote.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

mattaw2001

If I can add to your metaphor it's worse - the person shouting inaccurate information is telling everyone **YOU** said it!

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

mattaw2001

Re: Licence

ARM is trying to setup a new business model over the last few years with their licenses, and my guess is 10's or 100's of $millions of revenue per year from Qualcomm riding on this case. That figure rises to potentially $billions per year as if a court win means ARM can renegotiate with Apple and the other other architecture licensees. That amount of money makes almost any game worth playing.

Additionally the ARM - Qualcomm relationship is more complex than your quick comment implies. Qualcomm is also a massive IP company in radio, video decode/encode, GPU, and SoC too. They are also very litigious as well. Likely there are license fees from ARM to Qualcomm for various patents (but nowhere near the fees Qualcomm pays to make ARM right now).

Intel, AMD team with tech titans for x86 ISA overhaul

mattaw2001
FAIL

Why lead with AMDs consistent support for AVX 512 vs Intel's patchy madness?!

Funny the article leads with AMDs 98% consistent support, double or single pumped Zen4 onwards runs the same machine code.

I would lead with the hell of exactly which pieces of AVX an Intel core supports at any given time -it a mystery, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY MIX SUPPORT IN THE SAME CHIP.

Heck the Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions is full of fun weirdness, e.g.

'Intel does not officially support AVX-512 family of instructions on the Alder Lake microprocessors. In early 2022, Intel began disabling in silicon (fusing off) AVX-512 in Alder Lake microprocessors to prevent customers from enabling AVX-512.[29] In older Alder Lake family CPUs with some legacy combinations of BIOS and microcode revisions, it was possible to execute AVX-512 family instructions when disabling all the efficiency cores which do not contain the silicon for AVX-512.'

TikTok isn't protected by Section 230 in 10-year-old’s ‘blackout challenge’ death

mattaw2001

Re: At last, some common sense

We already have hundreds of years of law for this - "letters to the editor" pages. Its great to see the rules being consistently applied.

Especially the two-faced "its an algorithm, we can't control it" and yet at the same time "its an algorithm, let's make giant piles of money from it".

I've never understood how "it's just the algorithm, bro - waaay mysterious" in any way allowed them to escape responsibility for its choices.

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

mattaw2001

I'm so sure that ms teams will keep the data between my personal life and work life separate I'm willing to risk my career!

Google paying to be default search on phones is totally against antitrust law, judge rules

mattaw2001

I 100% agree Google has been worsening the search results deliberately so we see more ads - we actually have the evidence for this through internal documents revealed in court cases. They show Google engineered search to keep your eyes on Google properties as much as possible.

A key example is moving the relevant search result to page 2 - two pages twice the ads! By deliberately failing to get rid of blogspam you have to bounce Google - blog spam - Google and every time you come back to Google more add revenue!

It's legitimately terrible. In its early days Google kept the search engineers deliberately away from the money to reduce search engineering being captured by the ad revenue, but in the documents here it shows Google has broken that internal partition for money.

Nvidia's next Linux driver to be… just as open

mattaw2001

Re: Nvidia? Not for me.

I have converted GeForce desktop cards to Quadros myself when you could do that by de-soldering a resistor. Cursed be the CAD vendors requiring certified workstations and gpus.

GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

mattaw2001
Coat

Re: So she didn't leave to "spend time with her family" ?

They suggested Gnome implement server side decorations.

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

mattaw2001

Re: Can't help feeling

I upvoted your comment, but based on what I read there are hints that Intel's practice of approving any and all motherboard power-limits over the last five years is also causing degradation. However, this is still Intel's fault, as they have consistently approved every motherboard vendor's implementation of any & all power-limits! The motherboard vendors are particularly screwed, as the vendor who pushes the CPU harder gets better benchmark scores & sells better, so all are forced to constantly raise the power limits to be economically competitive.

Microsoft tells yet more customers their emails have been stolen

mattaw2001

Re: > Microsoft .... should have the resources to pay for the best software engineers

Hmm, I would substitute expert bundling, lock-in, and anticompetitive buy-out monopolists for expert market droids, maybe?

Google festoons Chrome Enterprise browser with more controls

mattaw2001
Black Helicopters

Let the enshittification begin!

Let the enshittification begin! Paywall coming to consumers in late Q4, 2024.

Google has setup an internal pressure to put Chrome features behind a paywall, and over time I'm sure the "we should implement this for the good of the Internet" arguments will steadily be undermined by the "we should charge for this, see these spreadsheets showing potential profits" arguments. After all why should Google provide the world's best* browser for free anyway?

(Yes this is a rant, but will it age like milk?)

* Best at spying

Risk of installing dodgy extensions from Chrome store way worse than Google's letting on, study suggests

mattaw2001
Meh

I agree with Print Edit WE, and Save Page WE, being great, however I keep them disabled as they have such broad permissions to alter/read all pages and forms all the time.

I wish there was a "only run when I click the button" permission modifier/level, similar to Androids "Only when the app is open" permission setting. At the moment those extensions can read everything, all the time, including form data entry, ref. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-messages-firefox-extensions?as=u&utm_source=inproduct#w_access-your-data-for-all-websites

Arm security defense shattered by speculative execution 95% of the time

mattaw2001

Not quite as I understand it. While this the flaw is similar to Spectre in how it works, Spectre could directly steal data from RAM. This flaw requires you to be running malicious code already, and then you could use it to defeat the MTE security/bug system. However, all the other existing protections in place in the OS & app still need to be broken.

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

mattaw2001

Re: rust in the kernel?

FYI Rust is not a garbage collected language. A variable's lifetime and ownership (many readers but only one owner that can write at a time) it part of the language & program. These language features push all the checks and memory management onto the compiler, eliminating runtime checks and the need for a GC, and automatically enforcing thread safely. It can be tricky to code in, however - as a C and C++ programmer debugging architectural problems at the compile stage and having most programs work first time, is completely weird. Normally in C/C++ getting the program compiled is the beginning of my problems...

Command senior chief busted for secretly setting up Wi-Fi on US Navy combat ship

mattaw2001

Re: An IT lesson

It's both lying and the illegal Wi-Fi, and everyone is repetitively trained on having no unauthorized radio transmitters.

Firstly there's Emission Control (in the UK Navy it was called Tempest), the fear of leaking information. It's broader than messages/data as it includes leaking of the units's location, whether weapon systems are armed etc. It's no secret attack submarines, regiments, bases, etc have multiple signal interception technologies including cell phone decoders, etc.

Secondly there are a lot of RF systems aboard from radars to radios to jammers all with carefully coordinated aerial positions and planned emission patterns. So so uncoordinated unauthorized radio equipment can really ruin critical facilities you need in a pinch.

mattaw2001

Re: Hypocrisy

The official military version is called StarShield. As for Elon's motivation, what an impossible question! Some rational explanations may be: price as $shield >> $link? Try and prevent Russian hackers attacking the system? Maybe they believed they were supplying them for humanitarian reasons? Lastly maybe there's regulatory issues as in a military drone controlled by starlink - they don't want a bunch of countries banning starlink? I'm interested in what other folks think?

Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us

mattaw2001
Linux

Re: Reasons why not...

I would hesitantly suggest Endeavor OS over Manjaro.

The idea of a more stable/tested Arch is attractive, however Manjaro historically hasn't delivered with a history of updates breaking more than Arch. Additionally, letting their website decay due to not renewing certs on time, etc. There are quite a number of videos about it. However, Manjaro has improved over the past year which is great news and I hope it continues.

A word to the wise though: if you run Manjaro do not ask for help from Arch, they are 1000% completely fed up of trying to debug Manjaro created issues.

Endeavor OS is just an installer for vanilla Arch that offers several completely working desktop choices with batteries included, verses Arch where the whole point is to choose and install exactly what you want - a serious challenge for a novice.

(Endeavor also has a custom greeter app which alerts you to arch / endeavor news in case something big is changing gives shortcuts for arch maintenance/updates, and they have a purple theme.)

NYC Comptroller and hedge funds urge Tesla shareholders to deny Musk $50B windfall

mattaw2001

As the agreement was illegal - a judge has ruled it was - so Tesla the company should not honor it.

Musk took Tesla public but doesn't seem to want to abide by the rules, he seems to be treating it as a private company owned by him.

In particular it seems like the Tesla board does nothing to stop Musk pillaging the company, e.g. this promised bonus many times greater than all of Tesla's profits to date. Tesla and Tesla shareholders are going to have to pay for that.

Even when he assigns Tesla engineers to work for another one of his companies, and allegedly transferring talent away from Tesla FSB, a real pain point with litigation beginning in earnest - this feels like straight up stealing from the Tesla company & shareholders?

In summary Musk just doesn't want to play by the rules that made him a billionaire, nothing new here then.

Lots of lots of questions here, most of which mean I don't think they should be comfortable with paying out many times Tesla's total profits to date.

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

mattaw2001
Terminator

Re: And so

Just to add to that shiver bionic eyes have been growing in popularity since 2012. For those who have them, there really is nothing preventing the computer from adding or removing items from their view :)

Teardown confirms Huawei's Pura 70 contains SMIC 7nm process node

mattaw2001
Mushroom

Re: I'm trying to look surprised

I would also say that even if complete plans plus the machines to make the sub-components were stolen and setup in a factory in China, it still will not matter because a lot of know-how is just not written down properly. For evidence I point to any company where management fire the older, skilled workforce, in the misguided belief the young new hires will be able to carry on. And typically those companies are not world leaders at *anything* before the layoffs...

By the time all the issues are finally figured out, the machines will be obsolete and the next versions will be out.

The EUV machines are the best ASML can make, incorporating the best lasers Trumpf can make and the best mirrors Zeiss can make - at least three tech world specialist leaders had to collaborate on making that. There are probably more ridiculous niche products made by only one company that I just don't know about, as I assume that the moving parts are of insane quality, etc.

[A disturbing thought is that if the only factory burns down for one of these niche products taking out a percentage of the workforce, humanity may never be able to figure out how to recreate what is lost. The idea that we can always recreate past inventions does not hold universally true - sometimes the idea, or trick, is lost.]

Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

mattaw2001

Re: Seems Overly Complex to Me

Ref your point number 2, the affero gpl license family was made for this, however I don't know it covers situations where the GPL code is deep inside a product. I'm also not sure it has been tested in court as well as the GPL.

Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to ignore copyright law in race to AI

mattaw2001

Re: Not her area of expertise?

I strongly disagree. I think I agree with the reporter that it's in there to scare Amazon to settle to avoid discovery re copyright material in their nn training.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

mattaw2001

Re: never again

In case you didn't know, HP computers split with HP test equipment, and the computer side got the name HP because of fear it might have failed without it. Test equipment customers were believed to be able to adapt to the name change to Agilent. (Agilent split again some years ago and the electronic test folks got branded Keysight.)

Chrome Enterprise Premium promises extra security – for a fee

mattaw2001

Re: $72 per user per year...

Actually, based on the current enshittification I'm far from relaxed. Instead I'm reasonably certain that standard features in Chrome are going to move behind a paywall for enterprise and consumer.

How about a monthly charge to run plugins?

How about only accessing Google websites through Chrome?

At the least I expect continuous pop-up spam from Google asking me to subscribe to something as I'm unsafe.

Tough luck, bosses, AI is coming for your job, too

mattaw2001

Instant plus one from me for the Babylon 5 quote!

That reminds me, I need to buy a Blu-ray copy of the complete Babylon 5 now it's out. It's likely the best version they will ever be of the show so I should snag it before it becomes streaming only and I have to rent it forever.

US wants ASML to stop servicing China-owned chip equipment

mattaw2001

I feel the rule for international politics is" whatever works" or "how much can I get away with?". I really genuinely don't think many of the things that happen internationally have much of a legal basis.

As a lot of the components and designers for ASML machines, and the components for EUV machines especially, are controlled by the US government or manufactured in the US I'm guessing that is how they plan to exert some level of control.

As an example for the powerlessnes of international law we could look at China's claim on the sea area around China. Legal no, but backed by their military it's a kind of a reality?

Dems are at it again, trying to break open black-box algorithms

mattaw2001

Re: Hierachy Not Recognised.....Funny That......

Amen to the excel spreadsheet being the core of the product - we have a couple of light to medium duty CNC lathes, they have a visual programming system built into the control so you can quickly set up basic jobs.

We wanted a modification added as at the moment it spits out code that doesn't retract the turret on tool change, often leading to crashes if it's not manually edited into the right spots, and someone eventually forgets. The manufacturer was really cagey and our internal investigations turned up that the whole system is running from VBA in an Excel spreadsheet, and that all the people who knew how it worked have left the company so they don't dare change it.

There is also reports of a gunshot detection system which is horrendously inaccurate and useless, it sells well as police can call up the support call center and ask if the system has detected anything near an address, which they always agree to. It's probable-cause-as-a-service!

Making sense of Microsoft's 'confusing' Copilot functionality carnival

mattaw2001

Re: Another Horizon scandal will happen

That's terrifying, there is enough trouble already with folks leaving the same meeting with different memories of what happened

This is like having a forgetful person write a summary of a meeting a day late - holding people to what it remembered they said will be terrifying.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

mattaw2001

If the start menu search searches my PC first I'm in!

... but of course it doesn't. FFS MICROSOFT IF I WANTED TO SEARCH THE INTERNET I WOULD BE USING A BROWSER

Fortinet's week to forget: Critical vulns, disclosure screw-ups, and that toothbrush DDoS attack claim

mattaw2001

And don't cross reporters in general, and read the article sent before publication! This is not hard, people.

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

mattaw2001

Re: Completeness too

Ah, so you're a waffle fan!

AMD bets demand for its MI300 accelerator will balance dips across other product lines

mattaw2001

Re: Maybe look at your pricing AMD????

Because AMD, like Nvidia is an AI company now that happens to make GPUs occasionally. Blame crypto and just as that died now the AI boom.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

mattaw2001

You missed a lot of Linus' polite previous emails and extracted only a few sentences of the last one

I think you should have presented way more context vs than extracting only a few lines from the last message. To me this message as part of the whole conversation reads very differently. Especially as this email follows many more polite (growing less polite) ones from Linus, and even sample code. For me this email is a reply to someone pushing hard again and again and again for something that Linus has already stated won't go ahead, and Rostedt did something that had already been criticized and prohibited, messing with core VFS functionality for their special case.

tldr; This message was not out of the blue, Linus already told them what they needed to do and what they cannot do several times/

Previous message, https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/28/513, which is still the middle of the thread and follows several more previous messages that were even more polite and clear:

---

On Sun, 28 Jan 2024 at 16:21, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:

>

> >

> > Wouldn't it be bad if the dentry hung around after the rmdir. You don't

> > want to be able to access files after rmdir has finished.

Steven, I already told you that that is NORMAL.

This is how UNIX filesystems work. Try this:

mkdir dummy

cd dummy

echo "Hello" > hello

( sleep 10; cat ) < hello &

rm hello

cd ..

rmdir dummy

and guess what? It will print "hello" after that file has been

removed, and the whole directory is gone.

YOU NEED TO DEAL WITH THIS.

> And thinking about this more, this is one thing that is different with

> eventfs than a normal file system. The rmdir in most cases where

> directories are deleted in eventfs will fail if there's any open files

> within it.

No.

Stop thinking that eventfs is special. It's not.

You need to deal with the realities of having made a filesystem. And

one of those realities is that you don't control the dentries, and you

can't randomly cache dentry state and then do things behind the VFS

layer's back.

So remove that broken function. Really. You did a filesystem, and

that means that you had better play by the VFS rules.

End of discussion.

Now, you can then make your own "read" and "lookup" etc functions say

"if the backing store data has been marked dead, I'll not do this".

That's *YOUR* data structures, and that's your choice.

But you need to STOP thinking you can play games with dentries. And

you need to stop making up BS arguments for why you should be able

to.

So if you are thinking of a "Here's how to do a virtual filesystem"

talk, I would suggest you start with one single word: "Don't".

I'm convinced that we have made it much too easy to do a half-arsed

virtual filesystem. And eventfs is way beyond half-arsed.

It's now gone from half-arsed to "I told you how to do this right, and

you are still arguing". That makes it full-arsed.

So just stop the arsing around, and just get rid of those _broken_ dentry games.

Linus

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

mattaw2001

Re: The real lesson...

Mobile autocorrect on android, bane of my existence when it comes to spelling, punctuation or grammar.

mattaw2001

Re: Out in the fields

I couldn't help but laugh when my younger brother came to visit my parents in the hilly Mobile signal blackout of Cornwall and try to use Google maps to get there!

mattaw2001

Re: The real lesson...

Not only were the compilers crap, the CPU architectures were typically not well matched to c code, the os debugging infrastructure was pitiful, the list goes on....

Although, I would argue modern CPU architectures also don't run c well as at the language level C does not understand multiple actors like dma, multiple cores, etc. All hail our new rust / Go / Java overlords's!

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

mattaw2001

I second your objection. ElReg, I'll respect you more if you just keep tweeting and Twitter.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

mattaw2001

Re: Making a list and cheking it twice

B-but if you take away Internet access, how will the startups be able to use cheap labor to pretend to be AI? I meant that is how self-driving works?

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

mattaw2001

Blue Disc players can have the DRM updated from a disc

Just an FYI, not saying it's going to happen, but Blu-ray drives DRM can be updated by games or movie discs placed in them. The update can blacklist previous releases or revoke whole signing keys. That way they can get you even if you try to keep it air-gapped!

Penguins get their Wayland with Firefox 121

mattaw2001

Re: Wayland the World is Going*

It does have a couple of things which are still being argued over. Luckily Wayland was built to support different features as "protocols" so it is easy to extend without breaking anything.

An example missing feature is that Wayland does not let windows position themselves - a big issue for a bunch of scientific apps which typically spawn multiple windows next to each other for their UI. Wayland did not want to support absolute positioning. Philosophically applications should not assume what hardware and screens a client has, nor be able to override behaviors a user wants. Real-world issues with pop-over ads / spyware also suggest that apps should not have the right to position themselves.

There is a decent proposed protocol to allow this in a way which also keeps the benefits which seems to be OK, just needs to be codified and agreed. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264 if you are interested.

Microsoft puts the 'why?' in Wi-Fi with latest Windows patch

mattaw2001

Re: Mint, Debian

In the same way windows xp was based on 2000, which was based on nt4.

[Linux is being a right pain for me too btw, I've been lucky with Wi-Fi but unlucky with graphics with a fairly new amd 6950h laptop. Lots of patches still going into the kernel, and the whole x11 / Wayland thing...]

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

mattaw2001
Holmes

I'm sticking to mint for that reason, and Debian on my servers, however had to go to the latest kernel and mesa for my laptop to work well.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

mattaw2001

A guess (which I'm sure has occurred to you) is that memory in Windows kernel space is unprotected, so when the driver died/suffered a buffer overrun it scribbled over the disk caches/disk driver code.

Google Chrome coders really, truly, absolutely ready to cull third-party cookies from 2024

mattaw2001

I just had one hell of a fight when my idp was upgraded, and went down the rabbit hole of how incredibly broken XML security is on RHEL 7.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

mattaw2001

Re: B0ll0cks!

This is one of those wonderful, twisty, phrases: Google Chrome the browser tracks you, so the Google proxy doesn't have to!

Google bins integrity API that looked more than a bit like horrible DRM for websites

mattaw2001

Re: Integrity

I don't think you are taking into account the history of how these monopolistic operators actually work. My belief is the following:

First the integrity API, then will come a policy not serving content to anyone who doesn't have it "to protect the users", "to protect the content creators", and think of the children! Finally a policy that to be part of Google's ad empire and get income from ads will require it.

Just like a real world coup, I suspect you only actually need a small percentage of important websites to be onboard, and they win.

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