Posts by Sitaram Chamarty 215 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Aug 2008
I *just* recently moved one of my laptops to KDE, and it had started looking good enough for me to recommend to a particular non-geek friend as a daily driver.
I'd hate to have to switch him out *again* in 2 years so I guess I won't give him KDE, and stick with XFCE.
Here's hoping those guys don't make a unilateral jump before the problems are solved!
Both those methods are good, but they are scattershot -- you have to target each individual organisation with those two mitigations and ask/hope/pray they will do the right thing.
What I would like to see is more done to track cryptocurrency. May be more scalable to start aggressively going after CC exchanges.
But we live in a world where expressing opinions is more dangerous than actually stealing money :-(
It's not just "crusty old fart" (I am one too, by the way).
It's a general feeling that people accept bullshit more and more, don't have the time or inclination to think beyond what's in front, and thus, allow (slowly creeping) changes that in the end are not good for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog comes to mind. Using that analogy, it's the attitude of recognising that the water is heating up and we better get out, that the non-crusty young non-farts are missing.
> Which gets The Register wondering why the Minister wasn’t angry when Namma Yatri introduced this scheme last year.
It may simply not have gained enough attention. I have never even heard of this app (and from the name it sounds like it is specific to Bangalore/Karnataka, so no surprise). I just checked with a couple of my most "savvy" nephews/nieces and they have not heard of it either.
Uber is nationwide so more eyes on the app to notice things.
I had never heard of openlogic, but I laughed at that comment.
Would have been more credible if it was not coming from Roy Scheshtowitz's (sp?) site -- that guy makes all other conspiracy nuts look like the voice of reason
umm no, it's not just the sharp bits.
Or at least not without taking out the Li-ion battery first
(and good luck if that is not user-removable).
Speaking from experience: someone I know did this when I was visiting, and they had to hurriedly move the whole thing out into a more "open area" when it started smoking. The stink was horrible, and I'm willing to bet it was quite hazardous.
I can't recall if it burst into flame before or after the smoke though.
Well "systemd is an init system" has not been remotely accurate for ever now, so why would anyone think Pottering and his gang of Microsoft sleeper agents would care about systemd-tmpfiles not being a good enough name.
I'm surprised they even care about deletion of files, given their track record on response to user feedback.
Same in India, and maybe worse too, because the government makes just enough noises to make people think Aadhaar number is mandatory for various things (e.g., getting a SIM card), but in fact all they need is *some* form of govt ID.
I was asked for my Aadhaar number (aka Modi's version of "papers please" as far as I am concerned) to get a replacement SIM card. I refused and offered my drivers license. The semi-literate chap didn't know what to do and looked to his boss, who -- luckily (for me? for them?) -- seemed to know it was sufficient. But in the course of this episode I got to hear how "everyone gives it" and "he's never heard of anyone having problems with it" and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(international_relations)
A young colleague of mine (young compared to me anyway) was mentioning the other day that almost everything about China in re big tech violates this principle.
Opponents of tiktok don't have to argue the actual merits -- they just have to point out that China bans a lot of western apps. Why is this argument not seen anywhere? Neither of us were able to figure out why this is so.
In this specific instance, can any american company that is barred in China sue the MSS or eqvt?
Huh! I know English is not my first language but I didn't think I was that far off.
Jokes apart, looks like we measure these things differently. An A/B switch only affects a well-known aspect of the system in a specific, well-defined and largely beneficial way. Its definitely not a creeping cthulhu-wannabe that gradually pokes its tentacles into every subsystem that makes Linux tick, whether its needed or not.
yup; a bit of digging found it: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1dxmroj/zed_editor_automatically_downloads_binaries_and/
even if I were the kind of young upstart who thinks requiring a GPU for text editing is somehow a good thing, I would probably not touch this one. Way outside the off stump for me, and I honestly think in this day of supply chain risk everyone should seriously think about this.
anyone who's helped someone deal with ransomware will have developed a visceral hatred of the major enabler -- cryptocurrency.
So, I have less than zero sympathy for anyone who willingly deals with cryptocurrency in any manner -- you're part of the problem, so F you and hope you lose ALL your money.
... who at least indirectly blames him (well wikileaks anyway) for Hilary Clinton losing? Not that I like her very much but she would have been orders of magnitude better than the orange turd. At that time he was not in prison; he was still operating wikileaks from his hideout in that embassy. (Sure Comey takes the brunt of the blame for this but this guy had a role to play, no doubt supported by Mother Russia!)
Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins has an excellent rebuttal. One of these links should work, and ideally should be added to the main article itself, considering Prof Green's creds in this.
- https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1789687898863792453.html
- https://nitter.poast.org/matthew_d_green/status/1789687898863792453
- https://web.archive.org/web/20240513112355/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1789687898863792453.html
on the parts of SE/SO I used to frequent, there was one egregiously officious "person" (very hard to stay polite but I made it, yaay!) called Schroder (sp?) whose behaviour was so high-handed that -- after a few incidents, each of them minor and inconsequential by itself but not when taken as a pattern -- I deleted my account, deleted as many as I could of my posts and comments, and never looked back.
Hardly surprising.
Anyone who's followed the evolution of India's so-called digital privacy legislation will have realised that, from the first version in 2018 to what it looks like today, every revision (approx once/year) has progressively distanced the government itself from any of its provisions.
For people like me, who believe any government is always a bigger threat than any google/microsoft/whatever (if only because you can't choose to walk away from the former like you can the latter), this basically makes the whole thing moot.
I expect FOI to go the same way, adding more and more exceptions every once in a while till it too becomes as meaningless.
In India, the UPI infrastructure covers your points a, b, and c for domestic transactions. No one takes a cut, not even a small fixed amount, and it is instantaneous -- about the same speed as SMS or at worst a few seconds more.
(International transactions are not covered by this of course)
On point c, much as I hate the "your papers please" nature of India's Aadhaar, not to mention all the security issues it brings, it *has* helped poor people open bank accounts etc.
Also on point c, I do not think cryptocurrency enables the poor any better; most of them are illiterate, and you're talking about a system where **techno-literate** people regularly get scammed out of their savings, with no legal recourse because "immutable".
In short, I'd say "catering to poor people" is a particularly strong reason **not** to go for a cryptocurrency.
Point d is of course completely out, though most people don't care. I've found places where they discourage cash because it is convenient for the merchant to be paid digitally -- which would not be true if any of the banks in between were taking a cut.
because you didn't "approach" him right :-) (sarcasm there, just to be clear)
I had a boss like this for several years. A very learned man (though I won't list his qualifications). Very smart, mind like a steel trap, and when you meet him as a relative stranger he would be so amazingly friendly and empathetic and all that.
Sadly, none of that applied if you worked with him or for him. He was easily the worst boss I ever had.
El Reg continues to be the only place online whose users generally reflect my own well-considered antipathy to Poettering...
Most other forums have a somewhat different ratio of like/hate than here. It is also quite possible that El Reg readers also have a higher average age than the others (and I am sure my contribution to that average is also high!)
One thing you'll often hear is that shell scripts are baroque, hard to debug, and what not. That may well be true, but you can pick another one if you wish. Meanwhile, those same people fail to mention that this "declarative syntax" has hundreds of keywords. Many of them look very similar, with subtle differences that can trip you up. The values are not always intuitive, but even if they are, you had better RTFM to make sure you're using the right one.
How the hell this is supposed to be easier to learn I do not know -- 90% of the help messages I see on systemd get responses that say "use this [boilerplate]".
A shell script is much more immediately understandable without having to refer to manuals.
> So you use two browsers that could potentially have insecurities or flaws
"potentially" is better than *definitely*
Barely 3 weeks before this, we had CVE 2022-0609 (https://threatpost.com/google-chrome-zero-day-bugs-exploited-weeks-ahead-of-patch/179103/ -- you don't even need to click it; the URL says it all)
I have to admit... I've hated lots of public figures over the years (heck that's half the reason they *exist* right?). But no one, not Bill Gates, not even Steve Ballmer when he was calling Linux a cancer, nor Bezos in his rocket, nor .... [well you get the idea] has ever generated in me the kind of instinctive, visceral, hatred I feel when I see Zuckerburg's picture anywhere.
"A face only a mother could love" has been a standard phrase in literature and humour for decades, but I suspect in this case even that could be a stretch.
Maybe that's just me...
...for those who would like an immediate solution, I suggest installing NetGuard and setting it to block these apps from being able to send/receive data. I recommend setting it to "whitelist" mode, and allowing only the few apps that *you* know absolutely need network access.
NetGuard is open source; you can get it from f-droid also if, like me, you avoid the plague-store.
> How is that not "dictating anyone's policy but their own"?
because "suffer Huawei's fate" should actually be read "we won't do business with you", so it is still within it's bailiwick
you got fooled by a symlink :) (if you're a unix/linux guy you know what I mean, if you're not you have my apologies for a crappy joke!)
I'm one of those ultra cynics who consistently refused to let PHP on any internet facing server back when I was working on, and had a say in, such things.
Today I consider the node ecosystem to be just as bad in terms of the effort required (not just one time but on an ongoing basis) to keep it secure.
And I don't think I'm alone. I've often found comments on reddit and elsewhere, where, if someone posts a new tool in nodejs, will respond with "Uggh, node!" or "Node? No!" or similar. This is especially true for apps which don't really need to be written in JS (i.e. could have been written in any other language), although I cannot say if those comments are also driven by security concerns or just a general dislike of JS.
No idea about windows but at least on Linux, for a normal desktop/laptop using dm-crypt/LUKS, the FDE key is encrypted by a stretched version of a *user supplied* key.
There's nothing "stored [...] on the motherboard", and what is stored on disk needs to be brute forced in order to be of any use.
> not using systemd in the way he envisioned
Or using any *other* software in the way his latest patches expect.
There was an incident with kernel cmdline (debug flag? don't remember) where Linus had to come down hard on this jackass and his minions, if I recall, because the then-latest systemd prevented something that was working before, but these people tried to claim the other guys need to change.
Yeah that was rambling, but this was some years ago so I don't quite recall the details.
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