* Posts by nijam

1753 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2011

Linux kernel hardeners Grsecurity sue open source's Bruce Perens

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> Footnore

Footgnaw? Just asking.

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Re: Perens has two shots at winning.

> And replace it with what? The generic Linux kernel?

Not all informed opinion agrees that the generic kernel would be less secure, AFAICT.

If you love your email standards, SMTP your feet: 35 years later

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Re: Email does have to get upgraded

> someone *trustworthy* would have to do it

Who would you propose? Microsoft? The Chinese government? A Nigerian prince (apparently several of them are out of work)?

And if SMTP is bad, webmail is worse. But it looks nicer and has a bigger attack surface, so yeah, let's do that.

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> I think my texting-only kids, both in their 20s, would disagree

...because they don't realise that SMS is a botched, inadequate version of email?

UAV maker swipes at sponsor of opaque Qinetiq drone study

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Re: those who sell a thing

> ...will do anything to keep selling that thing

I take it you're talking about BALPA?

Skype for Business is not Skype – realising that is half the battle

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> Why the hell can't MS leave a good working product alone?

Microsoft's policy is not to offer good products.

Look out Silicon Valley, here comes Brit bruiser Amber Rudd to lay down the (cyber) law

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Re: Not Very Bright...

> ... that number might drop rather precipitously.

So the police or security services tell us. They wouldn't be exaggerating, I'm sure.

Steve Bannon wants Facebook, Google 'regulated like utilities'

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> ... shouldn't things like this make this supporters wonder about his motives?

His supporter is Trump. And Trump is all in favour of regulation (of those who criticise him) and completely opposed to state intervention (of his cronies).

Linus Torvalds pens vintage 'f*cking' rant at kernel dev's 'utter BS'

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Re: Cunts

> it seems that if you're brilliant at something some people think it's ok to act all cunty

It seems that if you're brilliant, some people like to assume you're all cunty.

FTFY

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Re: Linus' biggest mistake

> ...he wouldn't be stuck with arguments with contributors about anything at all.

He wouldn't even be stuck with contributors at all. Or an operating system kernel, for that matter.

Microsoft won't patch SMB flaw that only an idiot would expose

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Re: the problem is Microshaft's design

> LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE MICROSOFT

"Like" or "have it foisted on them"? Sales do not equate to popularity.

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Re: "Yes, Microsoft's leaning on major PC manufacturers "

> PC manufacturer aren't stupid, if Linux would have sold as much as Windows, they would have said MS goodbye a long ago

PC manufacturers get "all-or-nothing" discount deals which make offering non-Windows alternatives very expensive. So the "linux doesn't sell" mantra becomes self-fulfilling.

Inside the ongoing fight to stamp out govt-grade Android spyware

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Re: Legit purposes?

> Some new, and previously unknown, definition of legit?

No, the current definition of "legit" used by governments, i.e. since laws are made by governments, what a government does is implicitly (or possibly explicitly) legit.

Apple exits music player biz by killing iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle

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Re: News indeed

> ... pronunciation of Jaguar as "Jagwire"

when we all know it's "Jagwah"?

Flash... Nu-uh! Tech folk champing at the bit to switch off life support

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Given its notorious insecurity, we could decide that putting flash on a website is implicitly an attempt to hack visitor's computers.

Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain...

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Re: Why wait?

> Adobe giving them until the end of 2020 isn't any different than giving them to the end of 2017

Adobe giving them until the end of 2020 isn't any different than giving them to the end the month.

Creepy tech tycoons Zuck and Musk clash over AI doomsday

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> ... letting algorithms decide the fate of people's lives in the fields of healthcare & insurance...

And not just there. How about handing over the operation of the justice system to AI?

As long as people such as Zuckerberg keep touting AI (whether or not it's true AI), ill-informed people will want to use it in all sorts of roles it's unsuited for. Maybe we should replace those ill-informed decision-makers (but not with AI, I hope).

Python autocomplete-in-the-cloud tool Kite pushes into projects, gets stabbed with a fork

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> autocomplete-in-the-cloud

Isn't it time you stopped calling it "cloud" and started calling it "somebody else's computer"?

Brits must now register virtually all new drones and undergo safety tests

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Re: Chicken gun

> Ahaha you fell for the chicken gun story. One of the oldest urban legends on the internet.

Yes, we all expected to be the one where they forgot to thaw the chicken first.

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> a quad copter ... wouldn't survive the acceleration down the cannon

Brilliant. "Our test won't work on a typical drone, so we'll use something completely unrealistic to get the result we've been paid to get."

systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix

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Re: underscore illegal dns character

> Certainly used to be illegal when I learned about DNS, back in about the bronze age.

No, there were some user-level systems that didn't allow underscore, but DNS itself always did. I say always, but in fact I only ran DNS servers from the mid-1980s onward, so what it did before that may be different ...

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Re: Systemd is extremely useful!

> I think everyone is completely misunderstanding how useful systemd is.

Well, the systemd supporters certainly are.

Why can't you install Windows 10 Creators Update on your old Atom netbook? Because Intel stopped loving you

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Re: Good luck getting reliable support runing Linux on those obsolete silicons

> And, no, a bunch of "volunteers" living on the other side of earth is not considered a "reliable support".

And no, some megacorp's helpdesk on the other side of earth is not considered a "reliable support".

Reborn Nokia phones biz loses its head

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Re: All the same..

> All phones now look alike, no individuality, no stand out features,...

So?

Stop all news – it's time for us plebs to be told about BBC paycheques!

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Re: There seems to be room for some savings...

> Cutting top salaries by a factor of ten could leave room for more high-value productions and a lower licence cost.

Not so much as you might imagine. There are many very substantial costs to making a TV programme, including salaries for many other people, besides what laughingly call "talent".

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> I don't know if he talks for the full 3 hours each day or has the grace to shut up when music is on.

Chris Evans? Grace? Hahahaha!

DJ(n): a person who hates music so much that they talk over ir at every opportunity.

Jodie Who-ttaker? The Doctor is in

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> WHY does it seem "like pandering to political correctness/feminism"? Why don't you see it as just a simple choice that reflects the times that we are living in?

Same thing, perhaps?

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Re: @King Jack:

> Or at least, if you have to explain that something is a joke, it's really not that funny.

Unless you're addressing a self-righteous prig, as they notoriously lack a sense of humour.

UK regulator set to ban ads depicting bumbling manchildren

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Re: This is a good thing

> Using an electric clothes dryer can negate the need for softener, but at a cost.

The electricity involved costs less than the conditioner, I calculate. Obviously there's a capital cost for the drier itself to consider, but then there are other benefits to weigh against that.

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Re: This is a good thing

> At one time the stated role of the ASA was to ensure that adverts were "legal decent honest and truthful"

And, as of this latest announcement, the ASA itself isn't being "honest and truthful".

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Re: This is a bad thing

> It's not about who is or isn't offended. It's about how much harm is done to society by the reinforcement of negative or unrealistic stereotypes.

It's not about who is or isn't offended. It's about how much harm is done to society by idiotic "regulators."

FTFY

Security robot falls into pond after failing to spot stairs or water

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Think on...

"First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they attack us- then we win."

-- Gandhi

John McAfee plans to destroy Google. Details? Ummm...

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Re: We are not numbers. I'm not a statistic

> John McAfee hasn't been involved with the shiteware that bears his name since 1994,

True, but irrelevant to the discussion.

Electric driverless cars could make petrol and diesel motors 'socially unacceptable'

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Re: Socially Unacceptable, really?

> No one seems to consider where or how the raw materials for the batteries are mined; where is the power coming from to charge these millions of electric cars?

Somebody else's problem, mate.

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Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

> ...Kerbside, or under the road via induction...

FFS, they can't even keep the roads reasonably well-maintained now.

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Re: "Having a level 5 autonomous vehicle would be very nice indeed."

> Shame that no research is being done then.

Oh, there's research. And there's marketing, and there's propaganda. And the research is almost certainly the one of the three that gets the least resources.

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Re: Trolley problem.

> ...driving around London saving many thousands of lives a year

Good grief, how many people actually die on London's roads?

Sleuths unearth 'Panic Mode' in Android, set off by mashing back button

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Re: No such thing on a MS Windows phone

> none of the people I know with a WinPhone has had a malicious app requiring termination

... or indeed, any apps at all?

AI vans are real – but they'll make us suck at driving, warn boffins

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Re: Skill deterioration

> for one thing I'm sure they won't try to keep driving at the same speed

and for another, they won't straddle two lanes and drive at less than walking pace, which is what an even larger percentage of humans do.

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Re: The future:

> ... the reason people use cars rather than public transport, hiring taxis, or automated vehicles, is because they are a cheaper option, and infinitely more flexible...

To put it another way, shared services only cover a small proportion of use cases, to be fair quite a few of those cases are heavily used, but that's not the point. This will all end up penalising everybody who doesn't fit some pre-defined customer profile, just like everything else as-a-service.

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Re: Complete or not at all...

> Just watch an hour of crash videos on YouTube

Then watch a million or so hours with no crashes, to get the proportion right.

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Re: Complete or not at all...

>"Ford can't even make an acceptable computerized transmission (the

> dreaded PowerShift). Who in their right mind thinks they could

> computerize a whole car?"

>

> Ford.

No, he said "in their right mind".

European Parliament keen to throw news publishers a bone

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> requirement for a well-functioning democracy

What does that have to do with Europe (whether or not it includes the UK)?

The life and times of Surface, Microsoft's odds-defying fondleslab

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Re: MY Computer

> Cloud, IOT, and SAAS

Ahhh, "somebody else's computer", "Internet Of Tragedy", "Perpetual Rental Income Stream", you mean.

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Re: Still no.

> It's "a proper computer" one recently commented to me...

Trust a manager / exec / board member to be so ill-informed.

Got a Windows Phone 8 mobe? It's now officially obsolete. Here's why...

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Support for my *Nokia* Lumia 520 ended years ago. Yes, I kept getting the (occasional) Microsoft updates... but it's arguable whether that could in any way whatsoever be considered support.

One by one, the decent Nokia stuff it came with was disabled because - horror of horrors - I don't have a Microsoft account. The stuff that remains is useless Microsoft shit - Office, ffs, on a device with a 4" screen? All it can do now is act as a dumb phone - and camera, though the ergonomics on the 520 are so bad you can't get a decent photo out of it.

So MS "support" has consisted entirely of disabling perfectly good Nokia apps. Glad it's finished now.

Trump tramples US Constitution by blocking Twitter critics – lawsuit

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Re: Another ridiculous lawsuit

> obsessives with, it seems, nothing better to do than trash talk anyone

Surely that's no way to describe the realTrumpingDonald.

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Re: To play devil's advocate

> ... stated he wanted to go on the offensive with social media

Well, his tweets are certainly offensive, in the main.

Hackers able to turbo-charge DJI drones way beyond what's legal

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Happy

Re: Sooner or later

> ... leading people to being unable to fly where they SHOULD be able to fly...

In the interest of fairness, equity, etc., I suggest that the same NFZs apply to all airborne vehicles - airliners, police helicopters, weather balloons, drones.

Zero accidents, all of your data – what The Reg learnt at Bosch's autonomous car bash

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> The car knows the speed limit if it knows where it is.

This raises an interesting issue. Speed limits are typically imposed pretty much completely without objective justification. Hordes of self-driving cars might conceivably provide some sort of evidential support for what - if any - speed limit should be set. Of course, there's zero chance that would ever be used to raise the speed limit... perish the thought.