Posts by gnasher729

Re: Can't stand IT

As a student, I wrote an application for a customer, which included a customer database. I was not.very good at hi back then, and the UI for adding and editing a customer address were very similar.

Every time they added a new customer an old customer disappeared. I assumed that they edited a customer instead of adding without realising. The solution: Display a counter showing the number of customers. So when they added a customer the counter would go up. Editing by mistake the counter stayed unchanged. So they figured out when they got it wrong.

In OPs case, if the escape key beeped and displayed “email deleted” she would have figured it out herself.

Alice

The first Macs came with a game called “Alice” to teach people how to use a mouse. Very simple, you got points by clicking on things on a chessboard as quick as possible.

Except there was a menu that let you change the mouse direction. You move the mouse to the right, the cursor moves to the left. And you can change up and down. At this point it’s hard. And then you turn on auto movement where the cursor moves by itself and it gets devilishly difficult.

Re: No system is 100% secure

Macs/iPhones usually have no back doors. If the customer forgets their passcode, tough to be you. If you want your heirs to inherit your iPhone, put the passcode in your will. Because if you can’t get in, apple can’t either.

Re: maybe he is a genius

Say apple and Google decide to buy it up for four bn each. Then get rid of the rubbish. Could be well worth it. Obviously they wouldn’t want to pay the banks _all_ their money. Just enough to be the highest bidder.

Re: only the driver – be it the vehicle or person – is accountable

Insurance should just be handled by the insurance companies, same as now. They will have data eventually how much damage was caused by a million self driving cars in a year. And that may be more or less than the damage caused by a million drivers. So the insurance premium will be higher or lower.

Re: And I need this why?

Personally I think a self driving car should use GPS only the same way as I use it. It should be able to drive safely along any road without any GPS like we did for many years. Or if an inaccurate GPS or map data tells it “you are 12 meters left of the road” then it should look at its cameras and say “no, I’m right on the road” just like I would.

Re: “turn off features that you aren't using”?

You could get an iPhone. Switch it to report a fake IP address and fake email address, and a deliberately inaccurate location, and switch on “lockdown” to remove lots of features that are in any way dangerous.

Re: Apple FindMy Network

It uses the kind of technology that is used for push notifications. It runs below the level that is used for voice or mobile data, it’s the kind of thing you can only do with direct access to the phone hardware. Reading this post costs more bandwidth than ten years of these notifications.

And disabling mobile data makes no difference. It doesn’t use mobile data. You’d have to complete disable the phone hardware. Airplane mode does that, I think. And in the end, if I can’t find my lost phone because you refused to help, can I sue you?

Re: Thank you

So how many minutes of quarterly profits did Apple not pay them?

Re: Interesting that the police

If it doesn't react quicker than a human today, there would be hope that hardware in two years time _would_ react quicker. I would very much hope that it reacts in comparable speed.

Do you hold your laptop to your ear usually?

Re: The intentionally incompatible iMessage yet again?

Many, many years ago there was NVIR. Which infected Mac apps running on an infected computer. Being nice, we added a bit of code that detected if our app was infected and showed an alert.

Our boss demonstrated the app at a major bank. It got infected instantly and showed an alert.

Re: Happens more often than you think...

Just saying: On MacOS X if I remember correctly the “temp” folder is excluded from time machine backups, and files inside can be deleted by the os if storage is needed. On the other hand, it’s a bit hard to access by the average user.

Except a conspiracy requires that you do _something_ to further the goal of the conspiracy. Did he ask anyone at Apple how to get 200 iPads? I mean even at Apple headquarters, I assume that they don't just have palettes loaded with iPads sitting around for self service. So telling the ex-police officer "Ok, I'll get you 200 iPads" is NOT a conspiracy yet.

In addition, it is doubtful that a crime that requires two people by its very nature, like bribery, would be a conspiracy.

Re: File Permissions?

"Shouldn’t this be addressed with proper file permissions?"

That shouldn't be necessary; there is supposed to be a global permission "an app cannot modify other apps", with some exceptions, like any two Microsoft apps could do things to each other that a Microsoft and an Adobe app wouldn't be allowed to do. The problem is that TextEdit does exactly what it is supposed to do, it edits text files, including configuration files. If you are the user of the app and want to edit its configuration, that is exactly what you would do.

On iOS there is much stronger protection. That's why x% of users love iOS and 100-x percent hate it. The first say "wonderful, it's a walled garden, exactly what I want" and the others say "godawful, it's a walled garden, I can't do what I want. "

Re: Network routing working as intended

If I use a VPN, and someone can observe my network traffic, then they can easily identify that all my traffic gets sent to the VPN, and all my traffic is received from the VPN. So the fact that everything uses the same IP address, and everything is encrypted, gives the VPN's IP address away.

Re: I ditched HP printers

Bloody Amazon door camera. Insisted on sending my door pictures to Amazon. I have WiFi and hundred of gigabytes of free storage at home. Why should I pay Amazon gor that?

Re: Planned Obsolescence

The problem is not out of order execution at all. The problem is branch prediction and speculative execution. During speculative execution the old contents of registers that get modified must be stored _and protected against overwriting_ so that speculative execution can be undone. And that’s what both AMD with Zenbleed and now zingelt got wrong.

It might if you think of new applications. Say transmitting power over very long distances which is impossible now and not done because of huge losses, say 90% over a few thousand miles changing to 10%. Or transmitting energy from A to B back to A which might be useful but a huge waste today.

Re: Dumb Questions

There are two points of view: It is both a bug and an exploit.

In “bug” mode, a vzeroupper in your code shouldn’t be executed, but is actually executed by branch misprediction. When this misprediction is fixed, data from any process that happened to write to an xmm register may have overwritten your register. That’s obviously a bug. But it seems this is rare: I have the impression another process must write to a rename register just between the CPU mispredicting a branch around a vzeroupper instruction and fixing the misprediction, so only a handful of cycles.

In “exploit” mode the malware does exactly the same, but intentionally, and actually hopes that it’s data gets overwritten- because it knows some other process had written that data.

The reason why this doesn’t happen with ordinary registers is that they are protected from being written to while a predicted branch is running, and for some reason this doesn’t happen for vzeroupper.

It sounds like the CPU itself can provide information about power usage, so you don’t need to be in control of the physical computer.

Re: If Torvalds says so

“ "If Linus Torvalds told you to jump of a cliff would you?" (imagine this in your mum's voice)”

I would listen to him. If there was a fire behind me and a five meter drop into water in front, I’d jump off the cliff.

Re: Well, at least the app developers...

There’s a thing called “contracts”. If they catch you actively lying they can close your developer account.

Re: Its also the not-early adopters

There’s always the possibility that a bug in ios13-15 doesn’t actually exist or doesn’t work on ios12. Or that an exploit is not trivial and must be handcrafted for each target to be attacked, and no attack for ios12 was written.

I remember buying a used iPhone to be used as a cheap iPod, and I couldn’t activate it until I took a card from another phone. Just for activation, after that it wasn’t needed.

Re: QWERTZ/QWERTY.

On my first ever day working on a programming job in the UK I entered a statement

if (i >+ 0)

Instead of >=. The same finger movements that enter >= on a German keyboard produce >+ on a British one. The worst thing was that it actually compiled and that it was almost but not quite correct.

About 27bn of the purchase price is his money. Either directy his money, or a loan with his Tesla shares as security.

Re: Fuck business

There was the fishery industry, where the guy supposed to represent British interests participated in two of 33 meetings. His name was Nigel Farage.

At two or three companies I managed to get a process for installing a development environment for new developers.

It started with a printed sheet of paper. The paper said “follow the instructions on this paper. If they don’t work, then ask for help, and change the instructions so they work”. That was needed because what’s on a brand new machine would change over time.

And one part of the instructions was where to find the instructions as an editable document so the new guy could update them.

And clearly you are not Japanese.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Excel has a setting to format numbers as “currency”. Before the euro I know a Dutch company that lost money because their documents with cost estimates showed Dutch guilders and their German customers read Deutsche Mark.