* Posts by JulieM

950 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2014

Apache foundation ousts TinkerPop project co-founder for tweeting 'offensive humor that borders on hate speech'

JulieM Silver badge

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1357/

There are already enough real racists, misogynists, homophobes and others in the world, without the need for anybody else to pretend to be such in the name of humour. A joke will never be funny as long as the thing being joked about actually happens in real life.

What's that, Lassie? Dogs show signs of self-awareness according to peer-reviewed academic study?

JulieM Silver badge

STD: Smart Telephone Dog

I had a GSD cross who, if I had not answered the phone for a few rings, would bark; and sometimes even grab my sleeve gently and lead me to the phone!

I did not teach her to do this; she managed to work it all out entirely for herself. I guess she must have thought the phone was crying and I was making it better by talking to it.

Euro privacy watchdog calls for end of targeted advertising plus a squeeze on the processing of personal info

JulieM Silver badge

Good!

Individually-targeted advertisements are insidious and need to be banned.

Everyone who sees a traditional advertisement on TV, a billboard or in a newspaper sees the same advertisement. And this is important; because if the advertisement crosses any lines -- if it is racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic, relies on other offensive stereotypes or is just straight-up factually incorrect -- somebody who cares about such things will be certain to see it, and complain about it. Maybe some people are just over-sensitive, sometimes there is genuine offence; but there is always an inescapable background of responses to any traditional advertisement, giving some rough indication of its level of social acceptability.

Individually-targeted advertising totally subverts this social filtering mechanism. When an overtly racist advertisement is shown only to a carefully-selected audience who already harbour some level of racist sentiment and nobody complains about it because it was carefully hidden from anybody who might object, those racists are going to form the mistaken impression that the lack of complaints means the advertisement passed social filtering. Those pesky SJWs are using Facebook too; but they have not said a word about a video clip advertisement in which someone actually said the P-word out loud. Case closed, the P-word is now officially socially acceptable. If you snowflakes didn't complain about an actor using it in an advert that was all over the Internet, then you've no business complaining when someone says it in real life.

(It need not be racism, of course. It could just as easily be a straightforward falsehood; such as the absurd concept of a members-only institution offering a departing member better terms as a guest than they enjoyed during their membership.)

And so, unconscionable ideas get lent a veneer of bogus legitimacy. Because when you show somebody a targeted advertisement, you aren't just showing them an advertisement: you are also showing them a (false) background of (manufactured) acceptance, artificially created by violating the presumption of universality of experience.

Individual targeting of advertisements should be referred to as what it is: Psychological warfare.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

JulieM Silver badge

We won't get to 9999. The world is going to end on 19 January 2038 at 03:14:07, when those who only know about human-readable date formats will be expecting it the least .....

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

JulieM Silver badge

Re: "blocks

Yes, if you build it yourself that way.

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

JulieM Silver badge

Flash player

Can't you just recompile it?

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Corporate edicts can be helpful sometimes

Code that emits warnings is, to borrow from John Cleese in Clockwise, a discourtesy to others.

When people build your code, they are going to see every warning it generates; and if they downloaded your program as opposed to writing one themselves, they probably are not going to be as aware as you are, which of those warnings are safe to ignore and which ones mean anything.

For instance, if you've got a variable that apparently is defined once and never accessed again, another programmer might reasonably suppose that has something to do with a build-time option they didn't enable; but then, why didn't you just move it inside the relevant #ifdef where it belonged?

Have you so little hubris, you don't even care about your build process looking ugly?

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Programming interminable comments

I had to use BASIC recently (I'm working on a retro project .....)

I couldn't work out why PRINT; was not starting a new line .....

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

JulieM Silver badge

She has a "heating + HW / HW" switch (no "heating only" position)?

That suggests an ancient system with a gravity-fed hot water cylinder, and probably a boiler with a standing pilot burner getting through the best part of a kilowatt of gas.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Rain? Luxury!

There was a reason why they always used to put the sewage pipe on the outside of the building .....

OK, so the reason probably was mostly "to show the whole world that you have an indoor toilet"; but even without the passive aggression, it still seemed the more sensible place for it.

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

JulieM Silver badge

Just waiting for .....

I'm just waiting for some PHB to appear on TV talking about "vacuum tube technology" .....

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

JulieM Silver badge

Re: E-voting

And how can you be sure that the machine did not print out a receipt clearly showing you voted for candidate A, whilst recording a vote for candidate C?

JulieM Silver badge

Low Tech Solution

Universal Franchise means there is no such thing as a person who is not allowed to vote at all, just a person who has already voted. And you don't care who has or has not voted once the polls close. So this problem is easily resolved with a Sharpie.

Brave browser first to nix CNAME deception, the sneaky DNS trick used by marketers to duck privacy controls

JulieM Silver badge

Time to get aggressive

Why would someone be using a CNAME to disguise third-party content as first-party? Answer: Because they know people object to third-party content. It's straight-up deception; trying to sneak in the back door because you correctly guessed you would not be welcome via the front door.

Instead of just passively blocking third-party content, it's time browser manufacturers started taking a harder line; for instance, returning altered cookies to poison the trackers and invalidate what they are collecting.

If you are going to play silly buggers, don't take on an Olympic medallist.

Why, yes, you can register an XSS attack as a UK company name. How do we know that? Someone actually did it

JulieM Silver badge
Boffin

Re: No, this computer is not for personal use - it's my woke one.

You aren't allowed a business name such that someone could commit a crime by uttering it aloud, so it would not be a massive stretch to block a business name that someone could commit an offence under the misuse of computers act by entering into a computer.

On the other hand, a Companies House employee entering a name into a Companies House computer in the course of their regular employment probably would not be unauthorised, so there still might not be any offence committed.

And if we do end up with a new law to prevent this, it's almost certain to be unfit for purpose .....

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

JulieM Silver badge

Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You

I preferred the 3210, which had a shape that fit more nicely in the hand.

Nokia also (accidentally) pioneered the idea of "one charger to fit them all", for awhile .....

AWS unleashes a new homegrown Linux that's good enough to bottle

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Missing tools? @Pascal

Whenever I hear of containers, I can never help thinking somebody has taken "Prevent rice from sticking by cooking each grain in a separate pot" and run with it.

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

JulieM Silver badge

Not obvious

What is there to prevent someone from downloading the bundle and extracting the files, wanted and other; but then not running any of the scripts or displaying any of the images?

JulieM Silver badge

Time for governments to act

I think we are now at the point where the only thing that can make a difference is state-level action. Some country with a Minister for Information Technology who actually knows their stuff needs to pass a law requiring all Internet-delivered content to be cleanly separable into editorial and advertising, such that users have the opportunity to block 100% of advertisements without prejudice to the integrity of the information they are seeking.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

JulieM Silver badge

Re: We've been there before

Aye.

I would expect the Venn diagram of "People who are dissuaded by the complexity of configuring an e-mail client" and "People with the potential to be bare-metal developers" to resemble two circles with a wide space between them.

Every attempt to introduce caged software into the Open Source development process must be resisted. There is no benign caged software. It is always a trap, always ultimately a way to restrict your ability to use your computer freely; and manual methods are always to be preferred to the use of any proprietary tool.

JulieM Silver badge

We've been there before

There is form for this sort of thing.

Way back in the mists of time, before Git was invented, Linux kernel development was carried out using the proprietary BitKeeper system for version control; with the suppliers "generously" offering free licences to kernel developers, in the expectation that giving away free licences to a major Open Source project would serve as a good enough advertisement for the paid version to make up for what they were giving away.

Of course, it was a matter of time -- and not much time, at that -- before a bunch of highly-talented developers comfortable with working at the bare-metal level and steeped in the Open Source ethic managed successfully to reverse-engineer the proprietary protocols and created their own improved Open Source client software, which was fully amenable to independent audit and improved on the feature set of the paid-up BitKeeper client; following which (and just as predictably) BitKeeper spat out their dummies and withdrew their goodwill.

Thus was created Git, the only version control system powerful enough to deal with the complexity of the Linux kernel development project; and thus did BitKeeper vanish into obscurity. And even although you have forgotten all about BitKeeper, Kernel developers will remember. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me", as the old saying goes.

Adobe yanks freebie Creative Cloud offer – now universities and colleges have to put up or shut up

JulieM Silver badge

Thank you

I am borrowing that phrase!

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Good

Universities have been using Open Source and in-house-developed software for as long as they have had computers; restrictive licencing and binary-only distribution are recent phenomena, and hopefully short-lived ones.

There are people in academia who are used to writing PostScript in vi, and can still do a better and quicker job than anyone with Microsoft Word.

JulieM Silver badge
Pint

Good

For years, Adobe have squozen competitors out of the market, by tolerating rampant piracy of their products. Why would anyone put up with something a bit like Photoshop for 10% of the price, when they could have The Real Thing™ for 0% of the price? Meanwhile, a steady stream of people who have been learning to use Adobe software -- whether via educational discount or piracy -- have been getting jobs in the industry and asking for Adobe software. And Adobe haven't been letting businesses get away with using more than they have paid for .....

Well, now their greed is about to bite them in the arse.

There will be some universities who will drop Adobe products altogether, and teach students to use alternatives, probably including Open Source software. The wailing and gnashing of teeth of learning to use a new software package when you are already familiar with something else is a one-time cost; anyone who knows the general principles and is prepared to put in the effort will manage to make the switch. And learning to use anything from scratch is approximately the same amount of effort anyway.

And when people who learned other software than Adobe start getting jobs in the industry, they probably will ask for what they already know. It's not like businesses are going to have to fork out licensing fees for the likes of GIMP or Inkscape.

This one is for all the developers out there who were unable to sell software competing with Adobe, because of piracy; even although nobody ever made a pirate copy of your software.

WSL2 is so last year: Linux compatibility layer backported to older Windows 10 versions

JulieM Silver badge

Obvious now

By now it should be blindingly obvious that Microsoft's long-term plan is to retire the Windows kernel; replacing it with a proprietary layer running on top of a Linux kernel.

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

JulieM Silver badge

Re: OR we could fix the root of the problem

Why is the UK government going to repeal the laws already in place?
To ensure a less-unfavourable-sounding trade deal with the USA.

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

JulieM Silver badge

Fine Words Butter No Parsnips

Speaking as someone who at least has some eyesight even although it could never be described by the spivviest of salesmen in the worst-fitting polyester suit as HD, I would rather a hundred people forgot to say "stopped hole", than one person left something on the pavement and created a tripping hazard.

Words aren't the real problem. If people think it's OK to use certain words, that is invariably because they are in an environment where people's actions suggest that words are the least of anyone's problems.

Mozilla doubles down on anti-tracking tech: It'll be tougher for wily ad-biz cookie monsters to track Firefox

JulieM Silver badge

Re: I can't remember...

Yes, why not? If they are doing business in the UK, they must either be making money in the UK, or be deliberately running a loss-making business in the UK to disguise profitability elsewhere in the world. Taxing a small portion of every sum entering or leaving their bank accounts is the only way to be sure they pay their share.

JulieM Silver badge

Wouldn't it be simpler

Wouldn't it be simpler just to wipe all cookies set by any site that just redirects without displaying anything?

Or even return "crumbled" cookies -- deliberately altered from what the site was trying to set, to devalue and poison tracking data (and maybe even crash servers with poor input sanitisation!)

JulieM Silver badge

Re: I can't remember...

We simply need to make it law that if you do any business at all in the UK, you pay taxes depending on your global turnover.

And yes, I do mean tax turnover, not profit. That puts an instant stop to shell games. If you're still in business, you're obviously making money, even if you are managing to hide it by buying goods and services from your own subsidiary companies at inflated prices. If taxing every pound going into or out of a company's bank accounts is the only way to make sure they pay their fair share, so be it.

Microsoft runs a data centre on hydrogen for 48 whole hours, reckons it could kick hydrocarbon habit by 2030

JulieM Silver badge

Hydrogen storage

Hydrogen molecules are just too damn small. They will get through the gaps in any crystal lattice; and when they do, it doesn't take much force to accelerate them right out of the Earth's gravitational field. These are limitations of the universe, not limitations of present technology; which means that there is nothing anyone could invent that would make medium-term storage of hydrogen viable.

The best thing for keeping hydrogen in one place is, and always will be, a chemical bond. And then, when you need pure hydrogen, it is best to make exactly as much as you need, just before you are going to use it.

Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?

JulieM Silver badge
Coat

Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"

Passing mustard?

Is that like cutting the muster?

Mine's the one with the Mondegreene and Malaprop label .....

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

JulieM Silver badge

Re: "he had downloaded documents to an external drive against company policy"

I guess that might be about protecting kids against anything being written to their removable drives by a teacher?

JulieM Silver badge

Nope

This stuff should not even be secret in the first place. Let would-be adversaries see exactly what weapons they might be facing!

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

JulieM Silver badge

Re: however on the good side

I accept that other people have got to eat.

However, I don't believe they have to resort to mildly-dishonest tactics to get their food money.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Two options and a few other tips

If you ever wondered why they do this then it's because they must exploit the ever loving f out of US visitors with hundreds of scrapers, trackers etc. and have chosen to block Europeans rather than fix this.
This is technically illegal, but unenforcible as long as the perpetrator and victim disagree over jurisdiction.

It's still not a good look to be doing things to your audience that are illegal in some countries of the world, though .....

JulieM Silver badge

Re: EU law

That's great for everyone who hasn't had EU soil pulled from beneath their feet .....

JulieM Silver badge

That's probably illegal, since they are specifically not allowed (a) to make accessing the site without intrusive surveillance unreasonably burdensome or (b) to refuse point-blank to show the content without intrusive surveillance.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Don't need it

I tried that, too; but I didn't bother recompiling it across an OS upgrade because it was getting to be a pain in the backside saying no to all the cookie requests. Between NoScript, Adblock Plus and Privacy Badger, I think I've got the Internet almost how I want it; especially when I had my DNS-based advert and tracker blocking solution in place.

Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself: It downloaded an XML config file that broke the firmware

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Thanks Gray!

What about implementing a "no access to any IP address you haven't looked up on this nameserver" policy?

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

JulieM Silver badge
Devil

Re: BUFH (Bastard User From Hell)

If you have an Internet-facing machine with an SSH server on port 22, try creating a user called "pi" with the password "raspberry" and a default shell of /bin/cat .....

Android 11 will let users stop device-makers from killing background apps, says Google

JulieM Silver badge

What about sudo?

It would be nice to have sudo in the base install, so certain files which would normally be restricted to apps with special permissions can be accessed directly over ADB.

We've paused Sigfox roof aerial payments, says WND-UK, but we'll make you whole after COVID

JulieM Silver badge
FAIL

The Race to the Bottom

So they have a technology which is based on using other people's resources (and ostensibly compensating them handsomely), and a licence-free chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Did anybody really think this was going to end any other way?

No more Genius Bar bottlenecks for you, Mr Customer? Apple exports independent repair provider program to Europe and Canada

JulieM Silver badge

This is the wrong way around

This is all the wrong way round:

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, last year highlighted the circa 20 right-to-repair bills under consideration in state legislatures when Apple agree to let third parties repair its gear.
Apple should never have been allowed to prevent third parties from repairing their products in the first place. Measures designed to thwart the use of "pattern" parts need to be banned, or at least neutralised by explicitly declaring any action necessary to persuade a piece of hardware to behave as intended to be beyond the scope of "intellectual property" protection.

If, for example, a printer checks for a specific pattern in a memory device attached to a toner cartridge to determine whether the cartridge is "genuine", then that pattern should be uncopyrightable, precisely so that third-party manufacturers are not prevented from making compatible consumables.

Similarly, the use of pattern spare parts needs to be explicitly not a trademark violation as long as the spare part is not falsely marked with a trademark or if this is operationally necessary (e.g. because the "trademark" is an aperture which requires another part to fit snugly in it, or because the device is checking in software for the presence of the trademark), and an item which has been repaired using untrademarked, third-party parts should not be in violation of a trademark.

What's worse is, we've already fought all these battles before; with vehicles, industrial machinery and home appliances, and every time in the past, the courts have ruled against the greedy capitalists trying to exclude third-party spares and services. Computers should be no different.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Mondarin?

How the Muddy Mildred do you counterfeit freaking gold? It's really not difficult to tell what a sample of some mystery metal is made of. Nobody with O-level chemistry and physics could fall for the "scam" described in that article; which, I suppose, tells you something about the intended audience.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

JulieM Silver badge
Boffin

Even easier

I have an even simpler idea:

Just ban minors from the Internet altogether.

If there was no expectation for the Internet to be family-friendly in the first place, there would not be any reason to complain about adult content.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

JulieM Silver badge

Re: I called the cops

Or (in a German accent) nul-nul-eins, acht-nul-neun, funf-sechs-drei, nul-nul, nul-nul .....

Spaghetti Junction! Brum hospitals on hunt for new ERP and finance supplier to untangle current systems

JulieM Silver badge

The £6M Question

Why are they not using the existing resources of the university to develop a solution, based on mostly-already-existing Open Source software, that can be shared as Open Source with the rest of the NHS?

From unmovable boot screens to dead certs, neither are what you want to see in a hospital

JulieM Silver badge

Re: i don't know why...

What were the procurement people smoking, buying software without demanding Source Code (and the relevant Modification Rights to go with it)? Those are your guarantee, and you never let go of them!

Now, you personally might not know what to do with Source Code, and you might even take a perverse pride in that ignorance (which, as the sort of person who knows exactly what to do with it, actually suits me fine); but if the worst ever happens and the original supplier goes out of business, access to the Source Code at least ensures any competent programmer will be able to maintain it for you. (In fact, the original vendor needn't even go out of business; if they get a bit too big for their boots with ongoing costs, a customer with the Source Code can up sticks and go their own way, like a motorist going to an independent garage instead of a brand-tied dealership.)

If I was ever to break the habit of a lifetime and pay money for a piece of software, you can bet I would be insisting for at least the same Source Code and Modification Rights I would have got if I had downloaded a different piece of software instead that I would not have to pay for. "Pay more, get less" doesn't sit with my brand.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Signed Certificates are only as good as...

What is wrong with a system where the certificate never automatically expires, but can be revoked if & when necessary, is that you end up with certificates that are valid in perpetuity by default unless revoked. And it is a lot easier to block a "do not use this certificate anymore" message, than it is to create a plausible fake certificate.

What you are proposing is equivalent to a lock that can be opened using any tool, unless it has been specifically told that that tool is not the key that opens it.