Posts by heyrick 6653 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009
Drive with consideration - takes extra time - penalised.
Shit in an actual toilet - takes extra time - penalised.
Actually deliver to more remote properties the first time around - takes extra time - penalised.
The antisocial bastards behind the wheel are not the cause, they are the effect of the company practices. This sort of thing is only going to make it worse.
I'm not going to give a reference, but the company I work for has outsourced a lot of HR. So when we want to book days off, there's a snazzy website.
Works fine with Firefox (desktop and mobile), and Chrome (mobile). Safari on a cow-orker's iPhone briefly flashes the "turn your device to portrait mode" message (something I disabled on my phone using UBlock's filtering as it actually works better in landscape), then gives a completely empty page.
I've not looked at the page source. I'd rather imagine I'd run away screaming and then defenestrate myself at the earliest opportunity.
Simple little Bluetooth keyboard. You won't look back.
In the summer of 2019 I wrote half of a novella (about a hundred pages) using that, a cheap Android tablet, and Google Docs.
Just need to come up with some ideas, find the time, and have the desire to write to then finish the thing!
Firefox, even the latest broken-by-design one. Blocking, everything. Add-ons to block more. Whitelist of good sites.
It's actually a much more pleasurable experience than using the desktop machine. And, yes, there are cookie pop-ups. And I want to get homicidal on the ass of whatever beaurocrat came up with "legitimate interest". But it's just the same crap on the desktop.
If you do it right, however, a decent mobile device can be a good portal to the web.
"More than usual?"
I don't have solid metrics as the log is held in RAM (as in don't bother dropping that crap on the SD card) and I just pull it directly into a text editor and look for keywords, however it seems to be about twice as much as usual.
I should add: since it's an IPv4 setup, I have set the system to automatically drop any connection from CN, RU, and a few other countries that have spammed the machine, using the free IPdb database (updated when I can be bothered), so these ones don't get logged at all. They might be on the increase too, but life is too short...
"But there was definitely something going on."
I run a custom server on my machine. It uses port 23 (it's a BBS). It's been clobbered more than normal since the end of February. The same idiotic scripts over and over (really, trying "root" works?), just a lot more frequently.
I'm going to go out on a limb and think that it might just be related to the current state of global insanity.
I had a basic tilt and turn IP camera. A VGA quality service with a MIPS processor.
It was running a cut down version of Linux with some extra blobs to provide the functionality. One of those bits was the Go-ahead server.
Turns out that it had a CRITICAL flaw. If you sent an HTTP request and omitted the initial /, it would send the information requested completely ignoring and password controls. So it was entirely possible to throw together some BASIC on my Pi to extract the configuration file (which was saved in the same place as the UI web pages, thus accessible). This gives you the login passwords and the passwords for the AP and any email or FTP services used. Plus it means you can log in and push your own firmware upgrade to the device.
Okay, granted, these hacks are specific to this type of device (it and all the other branded clones). But if this is an idea of the level of security in the domestic IoT arena, well, I would not be surprised if the world wasn't rife with shitty easily hacked bits of cheap Chinese tech.
I contacted the company asking for the source code. Never heard back, though to be fair I think their entire involvement with the device was sticking their label on the front...
And, yes, uPNP and WPS are disabled around these parts. Anything else is crazy.
There's a nice woman at work who tells me she is sensitive to radio waves. If she is near something that emits waves, she can feel her head heating up. Etc etc. No, she doesn't have a mobile phone.
Because she is otherwise quite a pleasant person and good to work with (not a jerk), I didn't have the heart to point out that the box on the wall beside her was the staff room access point.
Oh, yes, printer drivers. Or how to lose your mind trying to get the bloody thing to understand the difference between £ and #. I've actually seen printed listings in books that had £ where a # should have been.
But all of those frustrations are nothing compared to the utter trauma of sorting out IRQ conflicts in (E)ISA cards. Not to mention some serious weirdness relating to COM port interrupts and why mice and modems had to be on specific ports or it would all blow up. Grrr!
True, but the comptent are seldom remembered. It's the mind numbingly stupid that chokes the memory.
Had a guy come to fit an immersion heater at home. It's an old farm. Three phase supply, stuff tapped off randomly all over the place. Suffice to say, CPL is useless.
He set up a nice new fusebox with a little trip switch and all, and wanted to wire it into the mains. So he looks at the four wires underneath the master switch and asks "which one is live?". I briefly explain what three phase is, and tell him what wires to connect to. Cupid Stunt only goes and gets it wrong (the two on the left, how hard is that?). Thankfully he was partial to taking smoking breaks ALL the time. So off he went, cigarette in hand (in the house too, I swear if I had a fire extinguisher handy...) so I switch the wires around when he isn't looking. Hook it all up correctly.
Like I said, it's the idiots that stand out and get remembered.
Talking about normal people here, not us nerds or the gamers. For them, nobody gives a crap about what's inside. The question is "can it do X" where X is going to be some social media drivel or a streaming video platform. Having email and some sort of word processor might make it aimable at the lightweight WFH types, too.
However I think the main problem is going to be the problem that affects everything that isn't mainstream. Does it have software? A lack of apps for Windows Mobile no favours. If it has software, is it compatible with the rest of the world? That means Word, and maybe these days some degree of Google/OneDrive integration.
And does it have a good battery life? Always a useful thing on a laptop.
Oh, and I've also just noticed that Google has recently pulled a rather nasty ploy.
When you have Chrome on your phone, it seems to be hardwired into your Google account. That is to say the phone's Google identity (for Docs, the app store, etc) is now not only available to Chrome but is your identity within Google search within the browser. And there's no obvious way that I've found of logging search out, other than completely signing the entire phone out.
For a company that blathers endlessly about people's so-called security, to have the browser always connected with the account and no way to not do this is quite horrific (and insidious).
"I personally believe that Firefox's devs taking the attitude"
I've just noticed (earlier today when I wanted to scan a form for a stool sample) that the new browser versions of Firefox for Android have completely broken its interaction with my printer.
The printer is a bog standard HP inkjet. When you connect to it using a desktop browser, it has an option to WebScan, which is quite useful.
On a phone, neither Chrome nor the stock browser work in any way, but Firefox when in desktop mode is able to fool the printer into doing it.
Firefox 60 on my old phone: select options, scan, long press image, save, job done.
Firefox 90-something on my new phone: select options, scan, looking press image, save, bloody browser tries to fetch what it already has, which the printer no longer has, it all fails.
Also noticed that Firefox is no longer capable of basic stuff like printing, preferring to kick it over to some sort of printer helper utility rather than doing it itself. Which means any options you've set on Firefox (like desktop mode) will be lost as the printer helper is probably just going to throw the URL at WebViewer and try to print whatever that returns.
Oh, and, what is it now, eighteen plugins? Twenty?
What the hell are the Firefox devs thinking?
By the way, with the cars you forgot the obvious...
Which stick does the indicators and which cleans the windscreen? If there are more than two sticks, WTF?
Is first gear on the upper left, lower left, upper right, or lower right?
Is reverse opposite fifth or is it on the other side?
(if an automatic, is it D-P-R or R-P-D?)
In fact, where the hell is the gearstick? Between the seats or sort of up where you'd expect the radio to be? Or worse, on some old American cars a kind of up and down lever behind the steering wheel, as if there wasn't enough going on there already.
Is the console and speedometer in front of your or did some twat design it in the middle?
Which knob is for the fans and which adjusts the heat?
Where the hell is the honker? Bash the steering wheel or prod the end of a stalk (and turn on the demister)?
Where's the button to lower the window. On the door, on the dashboard, somewhere in the middle?
So, while a car usually resembles a car on the outside, about the only thing anybody agrees with inside is the positions of the foot pedals, but I'm sure there are exceptions...
One day we're bemoaning the likes of Android for buggering up the UI for no discernible reason. And here we're bemoaning Linux because everything looks sort of like Windows?
Perhaps because, rightly or wrongly (and I say this as a RISC OS user) everybody "knows" Windows and how it behaves. You can implement just about anything else, but if it's different, it'll be the same questions over and over. As I often deal with in the world of RISC OS when somebody goes to run an application (and deals with the shock of what the filing system is) and then coaxing them into understanding that no, something did happen, it's just you're used to every damn thing opening a massive window on the screen.
If RISC OS behaved like Windows, okay it would suck, but people would be able to use it right away. No trying to understand stuff like "where are the menus" and "how do I save things". The understanding is already there because they've seen it before. No big learning curve.
1, It's a rat's nest. Logically it is the authors responsibility to know what they are using in their project, but if a dependency depends on something they depends on something... It's a mess. Plus it is also a moving target, an update might completely change how something works under the hood, and it won't be noticed as long as it works the same way.
Personally, I think a coder ought to damn well know what their code is actually doing and using before inflicting it upon the world, but I don't envy them sorting out that mess. But see point 4.
2, If the repository wants to kill itself stone dead, sure. But do note the number of buffer overruns and parse failures and such in commercial closed source software. Let's see the unit test results for those, eh?
3, Absolutely not. Just because an author has given up on maintaining something does not automatically mean it is broken or has no value or purpose. To require people to remove unsupported stuff risks slaughtering a good point about open source (that being that the source is available should you want to tinker).
It also risks important consequences if an author decides to cease supporting something and removes it, immediately buggering up everything that depended upon it.
4, Ideally, responsibility should fall on the author to be aware of what his code is using. However, if one wishes to have programmers be held to the same standards and liabilities as car manufacturers, then I'm quite certain that one will be happy to pay programmers the same as people who design cars, and also perfectly willing to pay the same price for new software as for a new car. And no free updates, you have to buy each new version.
Because all that testing and design and crash test dummies? That's expense after expense. Not even remotely in the same category as this one guy in Montana that maintains something important in his spare time, for free.
Of course, all those whingers are fully able to obtain the source and contribute. Might be more useful than dreaming up ridiculous laws, but then, doing so requires mental acuity and competence. Proposing crap laws is something that any idiot could scribble on a napkin while on an expensive taxpayer funded working lunch.
I got that once, but it was the guy's cousin.
Great, I said, so you now know exactly who to ask to do such and such.
Cousin was taken on, paid a hell of a wage, and let go after a few months when out turned out that for all the promises of how well things were going, not one single thing had actually been done. Not a one.
"The RISC-V architecture also provides for customization in the form of user defined instructions (UDIs), and MIPS said this would be useful in many high-end applications, while also keeping full compatibility with standard RISC-V development tools and software libraries."
And how long until we have a dozen processors, from different companies, all offering their own custom things (look, this one helps with mining!), all of which are totally incompatible with each other?
"I wonder where that 1 in 5 comes from."
Daddy.
You don't need to bugger up everybody else's communications on the pretext of kiddie abuse, just, you know, try actually listening to what the children are saying.
It's a bit like the number of times we're told that it's necessary to weaken secure comms "because terrorists" and when some bad shit goes down, it turns out those responsible "were known to the authorities".
This is just another fishing expedition by the data fetishists.
I had a Creative Zen. Basic interface, nice colourful screen, could even play 320x240 XviD movies (native screen resolution). A simple driver install in Windows (it's some sort of MTP device) and just plug it in and dump files onto it. I used to use it when I was at work, before I had a smartphone, and it would cope with eight hours of playing stuff without issues.
I've seen a lot of crappy "MP4" players (some, comically, based upon a DSP bolted onto a clone Z80!) which have been varying degrees of crap with horrible user interfaces... but the Zen... was rather nice.
SMS is all very well and good if you have your mobile phone.
It was useful for me when changing to a different phone that my bank was happy to send authentication codes for their "secure" app by text instead of by post (thirty seconds versus thirty days). It was also useful that the app retained my login details so I only needed to enter the auth code.
But at no time did any of this process actually verify that I was me. I have an n- password but the bank seems intent on replacing that with a five digit code (yup, only five, "for my security"). The password was not demanded. All the bank knew was that somebody had their app on my phone. Once the auth code had been entered, I was free to choose my own five digits. The same five digits that are used to validate online purchases, or authorise new direct debits or authorise new destinees for doing bank transfers. So, essentially, "for my security" they pissed all over anything that resembled actual security. Because just like all those processor problems, convenience always trumps security.
Is there such a thing an an app with a fully clear and understandable privacy policy that doesn't use vague language such as "certain data will be collected" and "may be shared with our partners" and relying on trying to pass it off as "anonymous" and uses no libraries that perform their own data collection?
This, of course, is talking about apps with such policies. Many just embed standard advertising libraries that do all the nasties, but because it's not them doing it, they don't bother saying anything. They may not know, or care if they did.
All of which means, the end user starts in a disadvantaged position and it only gets worse from there.
They have recently decided to enforce getting their grubby little paws on revenue from in app digital purchases. They want their 30% cut.
As a casualty of this, one can no longer buy digital downloads on Amazon. Think music and Kindle books. Instead, you have to leave the app and use the website (and there's no link to directly open a product in the website). For sales of content that Google isn't hosting or has anything to do with.
So, remind me who is stifling innovation and reducing customer choice? Given this change happened recently, I find the timing of the release of this report to be rather suspicious.
"It's this appropriation that GPL is to prevent."
It swaps one appropriation for another in its total inability to play nice with other recognised open source licences. It would be one thing if GPL code was required to respect the rules of GPL, but requiring everything in proximity to do so as well is overreacting.
Additionally, it is a horribly written licence. The actual terms of the above are unclear when applied to that which isn't Linux (and even within Linux has been subject to arguments about how and when it applies). The GNU FAQ basically absolves them of responsibility by saying that the courts will decide. Screw that, I'm not a lawyer, I don't want something that may be decided at some future date in a way different to my interpretation . . . or worse, decided differently in different states/countries none of which are my own.
It's just a bad licence wrapped up in far too much shouty politics. But the underlying concept is good and open source has made the impossible happen.
Downvote because the company I work for (in France) places orders by fax. Well, it's an all singing all dancing photocopier, but the end result is burble-burble-screech.
Why? Because a handwritten signature that was actually created by a human (as opposed to a copy paste scan) carries legal weight. It is a promise that their end of the order will be fulfilled (namely, the payment part). Emails are used for follow ups, but these don't have the weight to present orders. Modifications, delivery changes, sure. But not the original order.
And before anybody says "order online?"...no, not if you're placing an order for six tonnes of flour, twelve tonnes of sugar, and big sachets equivalent to several thousand eggs. Oh, and maybe five or six hundred litres of milk. Yup, it's the world's biggest pancake! ;)
Me too. I loved that I didn't actually need to know anything about how Windows actually worked. I just created windows, plonked icons into them, and wrote code that "did stuff".
With a tiny little DLL written in C to bit bash IIC using some pins of the parallel port, I created an entire teletext reception system (complete with simple script language) in VB.
"None of those things led to Putin deciding to go nuts and invade Ukraine"
Uh... Isn't part of this because he's been sectioned away from the world for ages due to a grave fear of contracting the virus and obviously lacking the parental supervision he so obviously needs?
I think the isolation has made him crazy, and for the moment none of his nearest have the balls to tell a nutter that he's a nutter (doesn't tend to improve one's life expectancy).
Yeah, my bad. Autocorrect decided I meant gigabytes and I didn't notice until I looked at My Posts and thought "somebody will have noticed". ;)
Still, 300 megs a minute is pretty poor. That said, it's 5MB per second, and if a frame rate of 25fps, it's about 200KB or so per image. Freaky how quickly it adds up.
My dashcam has a basic 32GB Class 10 uSD card, I think it might be Verbatim.
My dashcam writes some weird incarnation of MJPEG, managing to dump around 300GB/minute.
It's been going for three years now.
I have to periodically reformat the card because the part that is on the way out is the little battery that allows the camera to shut itself down cleanly. So, yeah, the card has coped with hundreds (if not thousands) of gigabytes being written nonstop (when in use, including that night I forgot to turn it off!) and has outlasted the little internal Lipo cell... And that's just a regular domestic thing bought in a supermarket.
"1. A number of app developers either don't exist anymore"
Reading this article, I can't help but scratch my head and wonder why...
"or are too lazy to update after getting our hard-earned"
Your cash repays the investment that the developer put into creating the app. Whether or not you get updates for free is up to the developer. It's usual these days, but it's a generosity rather than a contractual obligation.
"apps that just are unstable after recent updates to iOS and their developers seem to not care"
Rule number one of operating system design. Don't fuck up existing applications.
There's obviously a grey area if said applications are doing things that are technically wrong or using undocumented features; but if the app is using the correct API in the correct manner and an OS update breaks it, the fault lies entirely with the OS.
"3. This will hopefully force developers to not drop a product without a sunset period."
Brilliant. So you can pay for the product, then pay extra for the support contract.
Or, as is being done more and more because "free updates" are expensive to the company, make it SaaS and release it as a monthly subscription.
Either way, the end user loses.
"I lead a SW company and we work hard to keep our SW updated"
For free? Pay once forever updated? You know, the more users you have eventually you'll reach a point where the cost of maintenance is more than you're getting in sales.
Or do you recoup costs by piling in all manner of scummy adverts?
Oh, god, don't mention PHP.
I can't believe that a globally prominent language seeing a lot of server side use has such an unbelievably poor concept of backwards compatibility. I dread when my host does server updates because something is going to break.
(that said, I think PHP is less of a debacle than Python2 to Python3!)
Easy fix - just turn them off. Especially the one that was kept running for the fantasy money extraction.
The subsequent whining will portray a pretty direct and undeniable link between the complicated maths and the burning of fossil fuels, just for those who haven't already figured it out.
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