Posts by Decade

Technically excellent people at Red Hat with horrible people skills

It's not just the Linux kernel maintainers. Debian's technical committee almost didn't recommend switching to systemd, precisely because many people have a... different... standard of how to do technical collaboration.

Though, it's alarming that Kay thinks he can just ignore the upstream kernel people. Lennart Poettering is trying to develop kdbus and get it into the kernel, so Linux would have a more useful RPC system. Lennart seems to be siding with Kay here, and Red Hat does maintain its own sets of patches away from the upstream Linux kernel. This doesn't bode well for collaboration.

Gentoo is already forking udev away from systemd. Since systemd is free software, perhaps the solution will be forking systemd at some point, like all those forks that GLIBC and GCC used to get until their respective leaderships changed.

And when can you use this in Android?

It's great to see this in Java, but when will it actually get to Android?

Java 7 was released in 2011, but Android is stuck on Java 6. Only in late 2013, finally Android could use Java 7 language features, but Android still can't use the Java 7 libraries.

Basically, I think of Android as a fork of Java 6.

What about DNSSEC, etc?

HTTPS is an inconvenience for the Great Firewall, but since the Chinese government controls a certificate authority and spoofs DNS answers, it's not an insurmountable barrier.

What we need is end-to-end trust. They can start by signing the google.com zone, so a validating DNS resolver will refuse any spoofed responses. They can add the certificates that google.com uses to the DNS record using DANE or similar, so future browsers can refuse fake certificates without out-of-band techniques such as certificate pinning.

That's still not foolproof. Clearly, we can't trust google.cn. The Chinese government might decide to run its own DNS root, and outlaw domestic use of the IANA root. With the US finally deciding to get out of the business of running ICANN, the future of the root authorities could come into question.

Humans can't handle the semantic web

Piaget taught that humans reach a "Formal Operational" stage of cognitive development around the time that they reach physical adulthood. Going by his classification, I think most people barely get into the "Concrete Operational" stage, which is supposed to end near puberty.

Semantic tagging is very abstract. Most people don't understand abstractness. And if you do understand it, it's a waste of effort to add appropriate metadata when there are no programs to process it. It's just much easier to stick to ad-hoc textual conventions. That's why Google needs all those PhD researchers, to extract the semantic information from the mess of text.

What about Opera?

I guess Opera is not as exciting because it's a private company in the wastelands of Norway, so it doesn't publish its internal workings. And now Opera is dead to me, because they've decided to stop developing Presto and become a thrall of Google Chrome for some reason.

Back in the day, Opera was quite the innovative browser. Speed, size, tabs, good Javascript debugger, cross-platform. It showed that you didn't have to be like Netscape Communicator 6 (shudder) to be an alternative to IE.

What can make you wish for Scott Forstall to come back?

I've been reconsidering Jonathan Ive's actual design taste ever since he replaced all the fonts with spindly light text on low-contrast backgrounds. I thought the home movies with the unreadable white text were amateur mistakes, but now the marketing materials on Apple.com feature that, too. It's hideous.

Now this. Ive should never have been let out of the industrial design lab.

Why so negative about Hi-Def?

In my organization, we have a traditional standard-definition DVR, and it's almost completely useless. We haven't blanketed the outside of our building with cameras, so a single camera has to cover a large area.

Multiple times now we've had perps come in and vandalize some part of our property. Then we look at the recording and say, yep, that's them. That blurry block of pixels. The police can't do anything with this information.

My TV has had high definition for a while now. I anticipate high-definition security cameras some day. Eventually.

And what about services?

This so soon after news breaking out about Lumias sending info to Redmond. Nokia actually classified the OS as a third-party component when denying that Nokia violated privacy.

It's not so long ago since Microsoft accidentally implemented their Chinese censorship across the globe, too.

Of course, Microsoft tries to follow the laws in the companies where they do business. Even if they are draconian laws from totalitarian countries.

No privacy benefits to Microsoft

This is an awfully bad time to be touting the privacy benefits of being Microsoft instead of Google.

Nokia smartphone leaks information abroad

http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/9516-nokia-smartphone-leaks-information-abroad.html

PowerBook 5300 wasn't that bad, either

The PowerBook 5300 didn't sell very well, especially the high-end model, but it worked decently. Except for the part where they disabled Li-ion batteries, because of the fires that no customer actually experienced, and then didn't enable them again when Sony sorted out their problems. The PowerBook 3400 and first-generation PowerBook G3 batteries were physically compatible, but the PowerBook 5300 wouldn't take them.

The CD-ROM drive was a slight problem, but it could take external CD-ROM drives through the SCSI port. Even then, I didn't use CD-ROMs that often, and I even reused the external drive (originally bought for my 1991-era Quadra) on my PowerBook 3400 instead of buying an internal drive. Apparently, a CD-ROM drive was built for the 5300, but it could take only small discs, and was only seen in that horrid Independence Day movie.

I think the biggest problem with the 5300 was just the narrative that the press wanted to build, that Apple was failing and doomed, that Steve Jobs managed to reverse.

Almost done with Opera

Well, I for one stopped using their browser when all the technically fascinating stuff became neglected afterthoughts, for example Opera Unite. Now, I'm still using Opera Mini on my phone, because the phone is just too weak to use a modern browser. I will stop as soon as I get a real smartphone.

Goodbye, Opera.

I wish my MacBook Pro had a palm rest!

The palm rest is a feature that I unexpectedly miss in my new MacBook Pro. Jony Ive has gone all minimalist industrial in his designs. To keep the lines all straight and clean when the laptop is closed, the laptop's base is now ringed by a sharp edge that cuts into my wrist if I rest on it.

Boycott the USA

The USA is becoming quite the hazardous place for a security researcher. I still remember the Sklyarov affair. Most recently, Adi Shamir, the "S" in "RSA," has been getting a hard time procuring a visa to do his lecture tours in the USA. The American law allows the customs and immigration to be jerks at discretion.

I don't know what's a good place to have a security conference. This year, I guess TrustyCon needed to work around people's existing travel plans. But next time they should find some place safer.

Patents more harm than good

How can there possibly be a patent covering the idea of Flash memory on DIMM? Ever since flash memory was invented, it has been placed on the memory bus to provide persistent storage. Linux has an entire device subsystem devoted to that sort of device, the MTD subsystem.

I concede that putting Flash memory on a DIMM is a new invention. I claim that it is an obvious invention to anybody skilled in the art, that nobody did it before because it wasn't economical, so it shouldn't have been patented. Beyond the technical slog of actually making it work, the main barrier I saw was the software to use it effectively. I seriously doubt that Netlist had anything to contribute to Diablo and SMART's product.

Chrome is now unstable and unusable

If you're using a non-touchscreen, then if you try to reach that start button in the bottom-left, the Windows start button appears and covers up the Chrome start button.

The Metro mode doesn't work properly with Windows 8.1 Snap view. It doesn't resize the windows to fit half the screen, so it's sort of useless.

Furthermore, now I'm seeing Chrome crash while editing Google Drive. Does anybody at Google actually test Chrome on Windows anymore?

Industrial espionage

Of course, another possibility is that the Chinese government wants information on how to run a major wireless chips manufacturer, for the benefit of their own industry.

Abolish patents to create a clean slate

We have too many low-quality patents. Just improving the rules about new patents would still leave at least 20 years of bad patents for us to sort through. Patent reformers have tried making it easier to reexamine existing patents, but these efforts have been rebuffed by lobbying from Microsoft.

If we abolish the patent system, then we can cheaply abolish all bad patents. Then we can start patenting again with a clean slate.

Protesters are protesting the wrong things

The protesters are protesting change. You can't have life without change. If you try, all you get is death.

The 1960's-style hippies were not the first people in San Francisco. Nor were the gold miners of the 1860's. Nor were the missionaries of the 1780's. Ever since white people encountered San Francisco, it has been under constant change. I don't see why the hippies should be so privileged to keep their position in it.

Auto-flushing urinals: Awesome. Auto-flushing toilets: The worst.

From the era of motion sensors, we have motion sensors attached to flushing mechanisms. It's nice not having to touch a dirty handle, though arguably a no-water urinal would be more environmentally conscious. It's funny, though, that the no-water urinals are out of service a lot more often than the conventional urinals.

But automatically flushing toilets are horrible. I squat forwards so I can reach my hand underneath, and the next thing I know, there's a bit of mist and my toilet seat cover is gone. Fortunately, I've been doing Yoga, or else I would have to sit back down on the now-exposed and undoubtedly contaminated toilet seat.

No! Elop for MS CEO!

Elop's specialty is destroying a business so it can be acquired by somebody else. If any company deserves that fate, it's Microsoft.

The Register is way behind here

You're well behind. Ars Technica already published both Marlinspike's critique, and Levison's official response.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/op-ed-lavabits-founder-responds-to-cryptographers-criticism/