* Posts by Libertarian Voice

73 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2016

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King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

Libertarian Voice

The first MP to be blackmailed because they have identified themselves to a ropey porn site and the whole lot will be repealed.

Tech giants looking for ways to wriggle out of UK digital tax, watchdog warns

Libertarian Voice

Manufacturing in low tax light touch regulation regimes and then exporting to the UK was the way business used to operate before we left the EU. Now we are out of the single market that is not quite as easy.

Libertarian Voice

Parking

Anti car councils are the cause of town centre decline. Online shopping is merely a symptom.

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Libertarian Voice

Oxymoron alert

The variable speed limits are the problem simply because they cause the problem managed motorways we're supposed to resolve. Drivers tend to slam on when they notice a limit change and that is what causes accumulative braking.

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Libertarian Voice

Boot on the other foot

It is fine for the authorities to spy on us then, but not so nice when someone might be spying on them. Well guess what authoritarians of all shapes and sizes: "IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE THEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR".

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Libertarian Voice

Re: My latest project

I learned C++ but in the end I was working mostly with C libraries and therefore ended up coding in a sort of C+-. Wrappers were out of the question because it takes too long to write them and subsequently costs too much so I take advantage of the some of the STL to reduce documentation time and classes for compartmentalisation. It works and it gets the job done without project overruns.

If I had to do my time all over again then perhaps I would have stuck with C, but the idea of learning the new syntax of the new latest and greatest over and over again is just horrific as sooner or later I would find myself convoluting the languages to such an extent that I would not be good at any of them. "Do one thing and do it well" as they say. Having said that I have found myself having to learn some javascript as I am writing a web interface in C++ using cgi.

Libertarian Voice

Do one thing and do it well

I am sure I read this piece a couple of years ago but the replacement back then was Python. I usually agree with what Linus has to say but the philosophy behind Linux has always been "Do one thing and do it well". That is something that has worked so well over the decades while the bloatware that is Windows grinds to a halt with every update until you replace your hardware to cope with the layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of convoluted junk that only one tiny department in MS truly understands and that is built on another layer that they only have a passing acquaintance with.

I see the problem with a lack of C developers, but I really don't think that we should look towards Windows for a solution.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Libertarian Voice

Cyclists will have to vacate the roads anyway

Lets face it there is no way that we can have autonomous vehicles sharing roads. A handful of kids with mobile phones could grind a whole city to a halt by strategically jumping in front of them unless steps are taken to prevent the sort of access to roads that cyclists and pedestrians currently enjoy.

The authorities are currently using slight of hand to do this under the radar by discouraging car use in our old town and city centres they are moving our new towns and cities to the sides of motorways (where pedestrians and cyclists are already banned). Once that is done the old towns and cities will be redeveloped and it is problem solved.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Libertarian Voice

Re: Bad definition

That is the reason why I elected to write an interface using ncurses some 7 years ago that remains an ongoing project. Yes it sits on an operating system, but is far more stable and more compatible than anything else I have seen. I even have a web interface written in c/c++ (cgicc) in order to reuse the libraries that I wrote for the back office. The maintenance benefits over using whatever is deemed the latest and greatest are huge.

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Libertarian Voice

52 vs 48 again

Wow 48 vs 52 again; 48 percent of the population really are dumb aren't they? Imagine you keep your accounts in the cloud; HMRC want to audit you but rather than going to you they just contact your provider and request access to your accounts and audit you without you even knowing about it. Now imagine that you had a trainee make some catastrophic errors that were subsequently corrected. HMRC rock up at your reception armed with a ream of data that surely makes you guilty and you have very little time to conduct your own investigation.

Now imagine a world in which you keep your accounts on your own servers and HRMC have to make an appointment to audit you, giving you the chance to check your figures and gather together any evidence to support questionable transactions before they even have chance to ask their first question.

If you seriously think the first option is in your best interest then there is clearly more intelligence lurking in the bottom of the fishtank.

Slap on wrist for NCC Group over CREST exam-cheating scandal as infosec org agrees to rewrite NDAs and more

Libertarian Voice

Why a Basset Hound?

Not sure what the picture of a Basset Hound on this story has to do with anything; still cute though!

More than half of companies rethinking back-to-office plans amid variant uncertainty and vaccine mandates – survey

Libertarian Voice

Re: Office half full or office half empty?

Offering up a sacrifice of cars to save the planet is going to make no more difference than offering up a goat to please some sort of deity. Co2 cannot possibly drive climate as; if you extracted every last bit of it from a bottle of ordinary air the mean global warming potential of what remained would go up (remove the lowest value from any range and the mean goes up; and co2 has the lowest GWP of any greenhouse gas).

Libertarian Voice

Re: Office half full or office half empty?

Your public transport dream is over and has been so for more than 20 years. In 1997 John Prescott said that if he had not increased the number of people using public transport in 5 years then he will have failed; suffice it to say he failed.

Governments have consistently tried to beat driver out of their cars by frustrating driving to the point that it drives people to distraction and yet even at these levels of frustration driving is still preferable to public transport.

There is more than one reason why pubic transport is a bad idea, but the main one is that it simply doesn't take you from A to B at a time that is convenient for you.

The oxymoron for public transport is that were it ever to become successful then it would be a victim of its own success as the vehicles would have to stop more and it would take longer to alight.

Cue autonomous vehicles stage left: Driverless cars will remove all those bitter twisted fines and rules and the necessity for driving licenses and maybe even insurance. People who cannot afford one of their own will be able to hail one at will and it will take them from door to door. Without the need for driving licences there will be nobody that cannot use on and it will be absolutely liberating for the disabled, but lets face up to facts, who would use the bus or tram at that point? Public transport is a dead horse and it is time to stop flogging it.

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Libertarian Voice

Re: licensing technology

I would say proprietary systems are a bit more like climate change evangelists claiming that co2 can drive climate without releasing the data in the same way that MS vulnerabilities are patched without MS revealing what really caused them in the first place.

Of course if climate change could be driven by humans then it would need a gas with a much higher global warming potential than 1, but I guess you know that don't you?

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Libertarian Voice

Re: Sadly even the 1689 Bill of Rights

That is an interesting point because L.J. Laws ruled that constitutional acts overruled ordinary statute and that the Bill of Rights is indeed a constitutional act (this was in Throburn v Sunderland City Council i.e. the Metric Martyrs case).

I am of the opinion that therefore any demand that a forfeit is paid before conviction is, as the law states, illegal and void.

Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers

Libertarian Voice

Re: The Internet is dead

There are others out there then; I feel less alone. Mind you my CGI is written in C++ so that I can reuse my back office codebase so perhaps I am still more alone than I might think.

Libertarian Voice

Thanks but no thanks

For my web applications I use SQL, Javascript HTML and C++ (cgi). I have written a handful of helper libraries in C to put it all together and it works absolutely fine. It absolutely must be server side for security reasons as the user ends up receiving no more data than is displayed on their screen anyway so there is much less chance of an attacker knowing where to begin.

I wouldn't use a web assembler even if there were one available and I certainly would not want to use one as an end user as it may be doing just about anything in the background without my knowledge. XMLHttpRequests are bad enough as a consumer and more than enough as a developer.

Can we stop megacorps from using and abusing our data? That ship has sailed, ex-NSA lawyer argues in new book

Libertarian Voice

Why do people always talk about China and Russia when referring to surveillance but not the United Kingdom where on the current trajectory cameras will outnumber people, the police retain ANPR data for 2 years, the spooks are about to be permitted to legally break the law if bozo gets it through parliament. The UK is a totalitarian nightmare that is more than comparable with anything Russia and China can throw at individuals.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Libertarian Voice

Re: Sadly... this is the beginning of the end

You have so many down votes for telling what is likely to be the truth if people are not very careful; I am very much minded of Android.

Libertarian Voice

This has been the writing on the wall for years; I don't even consider development for windows any more, in fact over the past 12 months it has been retired to the occasional virtual machine for legacy software, everything runs on KDE now. Networking with SSHFS is so much better than smb and we have just developed an openssh bridge for printers so that we no longer need VPN and the unnecessary and not insignificant overhead.

Our back office application is written using Ncurses with a portal using web applications written in cgi so our network traffic is now lower than it was way back in 2000 when we were stuck with an ISDN line.

Every single bit of security is now consolidated on openssl so we only have to patch a single source.

It is high time that windows simply became a desktop environment and gave us all a break.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 support ends in a matter of days and there are 139,000 internet-facing servers still up

Libertarian Voice

Why?

It is 2020 and Exchange server is an unreliable messy pain in every way imaginable. Postfix and Dovecot people!!!!! I wouldn't mind if they were not free.

We have never looked back!

QR-code based contact-tracing app brings 'defining moment' for UK’s 'world beating' test and trace system

Libertarian Voice

I am just not prepared to do that.

I can see from the number of... Well as you like to call us capable of independent throught "Coviditots" it is only right to reciprocate so I will go with sanctimonious c-ov-unts, that my opinion will not exactly be popular, but if you think I am going to allow myself to be used as a data collection node for the state then you have another think coming.

As those capable of independent thought have already pointed out, there are ways to circumvent this authoritarian nonsense and I shall utilise every single one of them.

PS. If that involves me not spending my hard earned cash in your establishment then that is YOUR loss, not mine.

Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is 'beyond utterly broken'

Libertarian Voice

People talk about "cloud" like it is something that is going to be for ever rather than just a fad. Well these things go around and come around; remember when we all used to call cloud computing terminal services.

Don't get me wrong, from the pov of the provider there is nothing better and easier to manage than terminal services, as someone who develops applications in ncurses I can say this from a first hand perspective as many of the headaches around security are vastly reduced. But I do think that when it comes to everyday applications like office suites, one day the worm will turn and these subscriptions models from MS, Adobe, et. al. will be overtaken by applications that run exclusively on the users own hardware. And I think that ultimately the change will be driven by excessive data slurping.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Libertarian Voice

DAB Is dead in the water

Internet radio has taken over from DAB and is far more reliable, if anything I have got to the point where I prefer it to FM; it means that I can listen to local stations like XS Manchester while I am working down in Essex and with modern car radios doing bluetooth well I can listen to the uninterrupted signal while travelling too. I just do not see the sense in DAB.

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Libertarian Voice

Re: Yay! Its groundhog day!

Whether it is "safe" or not is irrelevant; even whether it is deemed "safe" is irrelevant because it is just not possible.

Look at it this way: You can download the source code for openssl and its dependencies and change the algorithms and remove any malicious code that may generate a key pair that would grant anyone with a master key access. You could even do something as simple as add another layer of security.

Another way to circumvent it without developing any further software is to encrypt it with 2 keys. If CA's are mandated to generate certificates that would require a master key then you get one of the CA for transportation purposes and encrypt the data with a self signed key.

At the end of the day, it is just pure unadulterated bullshit.

Libertarian Voice

Re: OpenPGP

Never mind pgp, what about OPENSSL? Just about the only way you could possibly allow access to openssl encrypted communications is with a master certificate so anyone who contributes to the openssl project or even went through the code (yes I know ossl code is a nightmare; I work with it) could find and circumvent the generation of any key pair that could be circumvented by means of a back door (and that is nowhere near as difficult as it sounds).

In essence they can legislate as much as they like, but there is no way that anyone is going to use encryption with a built in back door and no way that the only encryption will be closed source. It is completely nuts or it is more bullshit virtue signalling.

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

Libertarian Voice

Re: we constantly change our use of language, master/slave white/black can and must change

If you have nothing better to do than come up with bullshit like that then I guess you must be furloughed.

Libertarian Voice
WTF?

Wow! Just Wow!

I never thought of a blacklist as being racist before. What sort of messed up person do you need to be to link the two. As for master and slave, my mind takes me to kinky sex before racism (I read the backs of too many bog doors in the 90's).

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Libertarian Voice

Bluetooth stack api

Rumours are swirling that there is an api that will allow those who are granted access to it the ability to switch on radio without user intervention or even notification. Anyone know if this is true? I mean I would not be installing the app regardless, but the the api would be delivered by the vendor rather than the application so if this is true I will not be updating my phone in the foreseeable future and long term I will be going back to my Blackberry.

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Libertarian Voice

Re: If only!

Our house only develops in 2 flavours now, web based and ncurses; everything stays on the server and you can use whatever you like to access it.

In reality MS is the bastard child and for business it is getting worse with ever release. I would not even class it as an operating system any more, it is a data acquisition node that happens to run applications.

The future being terminal service... oops sorry "Cloud based computing" puts MS in a position where sooner or later it is just going to have to accept that it needs to become a desktop that runs on linux in the same manner as KDE; Gnome; et al. in order to evolve and remain relevant.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Libertarian Voice

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

We use Thunderbird and have a considerable number of HTML documents with embedded images, we just attach them and inline them, it's no big deal and ensures correct formatting even if something is changed upstream.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Libertarian Voice

Re: Benito Jonsolini

"Yep. Leavers who don't like the EU have had 40 years when they could have fucked off somewhere else if they didn't like it."

And now it is your turn; jog on!

Brit couch potatoes increasingly switching off telly boxes in favour of YouTube and Netflix

Libertarian Voice

Re: Smart speakers?

I shared in your journey!

War is over, if you want it: W3C, WHATWG agree to work towards single spec for HTML and DOM

Libertarian Voice

Re: Why not save the planet at the same time?

You base your whole argument on the false premise that anthropogenic co2 can drive climate or is in other ways harmful to the planet; it is not.

The insulation properties of co2 are so low that it cannot possibly drive climate because its addition to the atmosphere causes global greening (healthier plants). As these plants are much more heathy they decay less and subsequently produce less methane.

Methane has insulation properties 12 times greater than co2 therefore there is no way that co2 can drive climate.

The amount of meat we eat on the other hand, and general over population are without doubt a serious problem, but not co2.

If you want to save the planet then the greatest contribution you can make is not to have children.

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

Libertarian Voice

Oh, how I whiled away the hours daydreaming of getting my hands on Matthew Broderick's WOPR

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

Libertarian Voice

Re: Yeuch...

I am afraid that the dumb turkeys are the ones that voted for Christmas because they were told that goose was on the menu. Let us be honest here for a moment: When asked if they wanted less government, less control over their daily lives, fewer politicians and less regulation 48 percent of voters said NO! Seriously!!! How fucking thick are 48 percent of voters?

UK is 'not a surveillance state' insists minister defending police face recog tech

Libertarian Voice

Re: GDPR?

I do not think that I have ever read anything that quite so spectacularly misses the point! I mean the EU bringing in mandatory speed control technology; black box recorders and eCall notwithstanding, the whole point of leaving the EU is that we reduce the number of law makers and those that remain are far more accountable to the people that vote for them.

Perhaps the greatest example of this in action is our current parliament. For years it has blamed the EU for every undemocratic action it has ever taken; it is completely unprepared to take responsibility for itself which is why both of the main political parties are collapsing and it is becoming seriously threatened by people and parties that are prepared to be representative (or populist as some term it).

As we develop a more representative parliament (which granted will take time), these laws will have no place in our country, but we cannot expect this to happen over night when our parliament has used the stock excuse of "don't blame us, it is all coming from Europe" for the last 40 years.

And if you want evidence of this, just look how scared both Labour and the Conservatives are about holding European elections!

You were warned and you didn't do enough: UK preps Big Internet content laws

Libertarian Voice

Of course the simple solution to that is to give Ireland a vote on reunification; Re-unite or have a border, it is up to you. And let the Scottish have another independence vote if they want one while we are at it.

Without the Scottish and the Irish England would never vote for membership of the rotten EU.

I just cannot comprehend why people are so supportive of a regulatory body such as the EU; Do they actually enjoy or feel a need to be told what to do? Are they too spineless to stand up for themselves and feel the need to bully by proxy? Or are they simply brainwashed? Who Knows?

The ironic thing is that if they EU were a regulatory body for the internet then the vast majority of proponents of remaining who read this site would be dead set against it. Why should we accept this freedom inhibiting bunch of cretins in real life but fight tooth and nail against it when somebody wants to regulate the internet in the same manner?

IR35 contractor tax reforms crawl closer to UK private sector with second consultation

Libertarian Voice

Re: Companies will take the easy & safe choices

Big multinationals also employ thousands of people and are quite happy to shift production to countries who are not as greedy when it comes to tax.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Libertarian Voice

Re: Wow, it's almost...

As a vehement leave voter I can assure you that I am certain that the EU is just as democratic as the UK parliament.

Libertarian Voice

Re: Wow, it's almost...

Using percentages masks the fact that a 1.2 million majority favoured leaving the EU.

Libertarian Voice

Re: Wow, it's almost...

A one million two hundred thousand difference is hardly an indecisive result.

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

Libertarian Voice

Dialup

Anyone still have a modem dial 08452121666 see if it still works.

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

Libertarian Voice
Mushroom

Re: What an engineer does in the UK

Well that really depends on the sort of repair that you want. For those of us that go off piste and work on digital presses with bespoke environmental and configuration problems who have to bend and fabricate hardware and software in order to meet customer expectations, the title of engineer is what you will use or you will be told to piss off and do it yourself if you think you are so clever.

Brexit-dodging SCISYS Brits find Galileo joy in Dublin

Libertarian Voice

No Access to Galileo is a win

Galileo is all about road user charging and spying on people, particularly in their cars. If we have no access to it whatsoever than I really cannot see how that would be a bad thing; It may not stop the inevitable greedy government from coming up with new and innovative ways to shaft drivers, but it may hold them back a bit.

If one little company moves out of the UK then I can live with it while thinking of all the money I am saving by not paying for every mile I drive for a little longer.

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Libertarian Voice

Next ones 's a Dell

Yeah, I had already decided this a while ago, I am still using my iMac at the moment, but when it decides it has had enough of this world I won't be buying a new one. Don't get me wrong, it has been a good box, and I like osX, but I don't like the direction apple is taking.

UKIP doubled price of condoms for sale at party conference

Libertarian Voice

Re: Eh?

Just imagine how stupid the average voter is and realise that 48 percent of them are stupider than that.

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

Libertarian Voice

Re: Fuck it

I voted Brexit and I wholly agree with you; in fact I am looking forward to it immensely.

Libertarian Voice

There will be a period of adjustment and that is all as there is a price to freedom, but it is always preferable to living in somebody else' shadow. It is just like when the little snowflakes move out of mummy and daddies house and get their own place; they have to start taking responsibility for themselves and have to start paying the bills, but that does not mean that they would be better off tied to mummy and daddies apron strings.

What's all the C Plus Fuss? Bjarne Stroustrup warns of dangerous future plans for his C++

Libertarian Voice

It's not the features, it is how you use them that counts!

I write a lot of code in C++ that has to interface with C libraries and do not have the time nor inclination to create wrappers for every library as I would never get any work done. This is what happens in the real world; most companies are not prepared to pay you to write wrappers and would much rather employ programmers that have a reasonable understanding of C and can use it withing C++ programs and find workarounds where necessary.

The problem with c++ is not the code itself (you either use STL features or you don't, it is up to you); it is the evangelists who insist that you should write everything using strict OOP and every single available feature to write a hello world program.

The good thing about the STL is that it can save an awful lot of documentation if used properly, and OOP too has its place. Where I start to get a little annoyed with cpp is its determination to hide or mess around with what are basically pointers just for the hell of doing so, it makes no sense and over complicates things unnecessarily.

I like the language, I like the features and I like the fact that I can still use C code quite comfortably within, should the need arise or should it make the code more readable (which in many cases it does).

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