Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Doing it wrong

This quote should have been at the start of the article. It would have saved me valuable time that I could have spent in a config file.

Re: Missing info

"Knowing what percentage of the download it is would be useful."

The "lite" download is about half that size, for the entire OS. The full fat version is over 4GB.

"If they just banned everything that might get people a little excited, that would mean Amazon is fucked."

Wikipedia, too, if anyone bothers to look. There are some very "not safe for school" pages there and some of the "external links" are perhaps too relevant.

But then, it's an encyclopedia. It also has some pretty gruesome stuff in some of the history articles. (Rightly so, IMHO, since there are definitely bits of history that we don't want to repeat.)

Re: A rose by any other name...

"Assuming the makers of the app are Trump supporters is unsupported"

True enough. Two of them are apparently app developers and may just have been paid to do the job. Of the other 1605, I'd assume that a fair number are journalists and hostile politicians (under fake profiles) looking to find out who else is there and what dirt there might be. Remember, when Ashley Madison went down, it turned out that most of the female members were just using it as a business tool.

I refer you to the point made just above by " Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?" (Really? Are El Reg user handles really getting that hard to find?)

Assange was at large in Sweden, in public, after he pissed off the US. He *knows* the US could have asked for him then and didn't, so the onus is on him to explain why he is *now* in danger of being extradited.

Meanwhile, he *has* been convicted of jumping bail (in the UK) and jumping the country (in Sweden), so we don't need to make any presumptions about the rape case before we can call him a fugitive from justice.

And meanwhile meanwhile, in his position, if he was *genuinely* afraid of being extradited, he'd clean up his shit. He clearly isn't afraid. He clearly is avoiding court. Screw him.

Re: Windows 7 "outdated"?

"So by what objective metric is Windows 7 supposed to be outdated?"

That one is easy. Its kernel support for hardware that post-dates its final service pack is pretty poor and only going to get worse.

Fortunately, the fix is also easy. Run Linux on the metal and put your Win7 OS into a VM running on top. This also makes upgrades to new hardware really easy because all of your tortuously convoluted Windows settings are in a virtual disc image that doesn't get touched by the upgrade process.

As a side benefit, you can also run lots of Linux software on the "outside" machine and gradually wean yourself off most of the Windows-only applications. If, before 2020, you get to a point where the only apps you are still using on Windows are ones that don't need network connectivity, you can probably remove the virtual network adapter from the Win7 VM and keep using it indefinitely, sans patches.

Why not fly a remote control robot up in one of the supply rockets. The comms latency to LEO is tolerable and you could save on all of that power-hungry life support crap.

Re: DOB of 1st January 1970

"The world was only created on 1st Jan 1970"

Nah. The world hasn't been created yet. This is just a debugging run. (Hopefully not the last one either, since there seem to be quite a few howlers still in the code.)

Re: Reminder for macos users

Sounds like a tiny handful of extensions piggy-backing on a massive piece of FOSS development that some arsehole thinks they can charge money for. Perhaps you have missed out 30 dollars' worth of other improvements.

Re: 17.7 billion kilometres from Earth

"Does The Goblin go out into 'interstellar space' before coming back again in its orbit?"

I presume so. I think interstellar space is defined as "where the Sun ceases to be the dominant influence on the local environment". In practice, that means when the solar wind drops below the local speed of sound (that's "sound" including magnetic waves), because nothing (*) outside that bubble can propogate inside (upstream). Put another way, inside the solar system the only thing you can hear is the Sun.

(* Well, nothing that is except light, cosmic rays and lumps of rock. I suppose that's not exactly nothing, but very little stops those things if they are minded to travel in your direction!)

Re: He's not the messiah...

"Just wait until the sacred Model 3 comes to the UK."

Yeah, just wait, but don't do anything rash like "hold your breath".

Re: Chinese agents slip spy chips into Super Micro servers

"The ME backdoor requires you already have access to the local LAN to exploit it."

How much access would you need, though? The ability to send a particular network packet might be sufficient to let you exploit the ME in a machine next door to you and once you have better-than-root privileges on one machine it probably isn't hard to work your way around the whole LAN and out to the internet. So ... you start by sending dodgy emails to non-technical staff.

Re: Oh, go on then

"The whole assembly was housed in a stainless steel tube approximately 10mm in diameter."

And they say that no man can ever truly appreciate the pain of childbirth...

"isn't all security based on some dependence on obscurity?"

No, but you ask a fair question. The obscurity being referred to is the mechanism, not the key. That's not obvious in the phrase and the phrase is nearly always just parrotted without explanation and has been for as many years as I've been in the business. I suspect that unless you are of retirement age, you'd need to have taken an interest (*) in security matters ever to have heard the full explanation.

(* Obviously, if asking questions in El Reg comment pages counts as "taking an interest" then I'm setting my bar fairly low here.)

Re: Sidewalk

@MJB7: That's news to both me and whoever drew the map of my house for the Land Registry. It is also news to whoever sends me those scary letters about how I am liable for the infrastructure only on my property. Those always clarify this by saying "from the pavement to my house".

Re: The Patent Claim at issue

A MIME-encoded email is just a way of packing a "directory's worth" of files into a single (text) message. That is, in fact, more or less the reason why MIME was invented. So we can without introducing inventiveness or novelty replace "electronic file" with "directory" and "part" with "file". At which point, the supposedly amazing break-through made in 2005 is clearly just a rather pedestrian description of what AV systems had been doing ever since they were invented. It is rather a long time ago, so I'm not sure, but I suspect that AV systems as we now know them didn't go mainstream until after things like the Morris worm which is, what, late 80s?

So we have a decade-or-two of prior art (in AV systems), camouflaged with a standardised (RFC) technology (MIME) being used for exactly its intended purpose.

Edit: You said "Generally Judges are not idiots and the defendants would have tried to take this apart, but failed. Since it survived then it probably has good merit." and this is generally true, but this particular case has precisely zero merit and I actually feel somewhat insulted that anyone ever thought this was worth filing. So ... either the defendants lawyers are idiots, or the judge should have excused themselves on the grounds of not understanding computery things, or El Reg has grossly mis-reported the case to make everyone involved look like a berk.

Re: Hidden files?

To some extent, all OSes have this capability.

You set up two user accounts (in addition to the administrative one). On demand, you provide the password to one of the user accounts, where there is evidence of you watching cat videos from time to time. The other user account is pretty much blank. Once you are at "a safe pub" (to borrow an expression from an earlier commentard) you restore the second account from a secure cloud backup. (Remember to reverse the process on your way home.)

The vast majority of your hard disc is stupid OS bloatware and you don't want to waste time or bandwidth downloading that in the pub. There's probably only a handful of files actually matter. With careful data hygiene, this "split personality" PC could even be your normal working setup rather than something special for foreign trips. It also protects you against having the PC stolen.

Re: Tea with milk

There is also some tea grown in Scotland. At least, someone was having a go a year or two back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Cultivation_and_harvesting

Re: Groklaw wrote about this a decade ago

"Of course that is just one legal opinion in one country."

Excellent link. Thanks. It is notable that the argument turns on the issue of the public good, since the historic justification for granting any IP rights at all is that society grants these to creatives in exchange for a net benefit to society from created works, so any interpretation of IP law that acts contrary to the public interest is questionable. It may be a badly framed law and the interpretation may be true to the letter of it, but it cannot be assumed that it was the intention of the lawmakers when they wrote it.

Re: Soooo.....

The ASA seem to have judged it correctly in this case and the four "industry bodies" who "disobligingly agreed with Amazon" don't look terribly impartial to me. In fact, they look like, er, part of the industry trying to push this crap.

Re: Money, Money, Money

"IMHO, this institutionally organized bribery has corrupted the entire US Federal government. How does this work in your country?"

In the UK such dark money would almost certainly be considered "election funding" and would be illegal, but whether the beneficiaries would actually be penalised is another matter entirely. A substantial part of the funding for Leave in the Brexit vote has been declared illegal and the person who gave the cash has been fined but those who received it have not and the referendum decision stands. In addition, the person who was fined may yet have the fine paid by sympathisers, who can write it off as the cost of doing business.

It is not yet clear whether or not these sympathisers include foreign kleptocrats. If true, then they got a bargain because for under 1 million outlay they've caused many billions of costs for their enemies. If false, then they missed a trick but got lucky because someone else did it for them.

Re: How's this different than normal?

"By the time a company is liquidated, anybody left there gives zero ***cks to what happens to anything left over, data, sensitive info, etc?"

That would be the wrong number of ***cks to give if it turns out that you, personally, are in the frame for a criminal conviction under data protection law. This liquidated company you speak of ... it has directors, right?

Re: Its really not that difficult.

"Firstly any given system in any big corporate is a hodgepodge of 20-30 years of tech, many of which are complete black boxes with the techies responsible for them long gone."

I hate to get all theoretical, but if a big corporate really finds itself in a position where it does not know how its systems work then it is no longer in control of whether they do actually continue to work, precisely because of your second and third points. The entire company could cease trading tomorrow and never be able to restart. Are the management and shareholders OK with that?

Re: “were quoted a ridiculous price and told it would take four months”.

"isn't that covered by the non-compete clause"

I can't see why it would. The customer isn't your competition, though they may now be your competitor's customer rather than yours.

Re: Just Asking ... if They're Lacking and Looking and Wanting.

"Care to rewrite that for clearer concise and precise meaning, Rebecca?"

Pot, meet kettle.

Re: Why stick to 14.04?

Thanks for pointing that out. Otherwise sticking with 14.04 looks really odd since, unlike the alleged parallel with Windows, it doesn't actually cost you anything to upgrade (either the OS or most of the packages you might be interested in).

Re: Didja think we'd get rid of the exclaims just 'cos you're Altaba now?

Fuck! 'em!

They! deserve! it! for! being! such! pretentious! twats! about! their! branding!

Even! if! it! was! only! once!

"very powerful WIndows workstaions at a fraction of the price Intel and even maybe AMD can match"

Citation needed, I think. Admittedly the article only quotes a price for a very powerful chip, but it is still pretty eye-watering. I see no reason to assume that an ARM-based chip would be cheaper than anything AMD might offer in their x86 line, at a given level of performance.

Unless someone comes up with mid-price and low-price variants, and delivers an ISA (see earlier comments), the notion of buying a cheap, generic, ARM-based "PC" and sticking a standard OS distribution on it (either Windows or Linux) without *then* spending weeks hunting the internet for drivers to run all the interesting in-box peripherals (like sound and graphics) ... is just a notion.

Re: Google has no incentive to change

"it wasn't Google's fault that someone exploited their lax checking "

Sorry, but no. If your business model cannot realistically be implemented without facilitating copyright violation, then you are an accessory to those violations. You need a new business model.

Re: age checks

"Not sure what is worse, children watching porn or children getting paid to do porn"

Hmm. I'm not a betting man, but I'm pretty sure *most* people would have a fairly clear opinion on which of those is worse. (I expect you do, too, and it was just a rhetorical flourish that came out a bit iffy.)