Posts by eldakka

Re: No servers

> Now keep the copies in sync…

I don't need to keep my copies in 'sync' as such. I treat all copies of my password database that isn't the one on my at home desktop as 'read-only', so I only ever need to copy from my desktop to the phone for example, and not care about having to sync changed entries from the phone - as there shouldn't be any.

I rarely change important passwords from anything but my desktop at home. And important passwords, since by dint of using a password manager, are complex and change rarely. Therefore the 6-month old copy on my phone still has current important passwords. It's only missing some random website signups I've done in the last few months which aren't important and I am unlikely to need instant access to them on my phone while away from home. If I do need that access to some random shitty website (maybe an online specialist store I signed up to), then I also have access to email from my phone (since it's one of those complex rarely changed passwords that is current in the phones copy) so can just go through the password reset process since most places still do that via email, and it not being important doesn't matter if I have to reset it - either note I have changed it and update it when I do get home, or just reset it again at home (and this will probably prompt me to update the copy on my phone once I've updated it on my desktop).

Sure, if you are the type of person that randomly signs up to important things frequently and randomly across any of multiple devices at random times I could see it being an issue. But do you really sign up to or change existing credentials of that many things over the course of a few months that matter across random sets of your devices that a few month old copy of your password database on a secondary device isn't sufficient for use on that device?

That is usually the 'gotcha' situation with any 'self-managed' password manager.

There are ways around it though, depending on your masochism.

Copies kept with family or someone else you trust, e.g. (if you are posh) your lawyer, so you can call them with the details to unlock them to get, for example, your banking information so you can get money out.

Or, several backups on USB sticks/mSD cards/whatever in your luggage/on your person. So if you can get access to 'a' computer/phone somehow you've got the media with them on it - may not give you everything if, for example you've lost TOTP generators (physical like ubikey), but you've got a starting point to reclaim everything. If you are really worried you could probably swallow an mSD card and, every 24hours, clean it up and re-swallow it (are you a spy or something?)

Or, using Wireguard or similar to have a VPN server at your home you can VPN into (Internet cafe, do those still exist?) and, once the VPN is established, then you have access to the necessary files/programs remotely via the VPN.

You always need to memorise some amount of passwords, whether the unlock code of your password manager and/or the password for your VPN if you have that backup or the email account that recovery codes get sent to, etc., you need some 'code' that you memorise that can bootstrap the rest from.

You do know, don't you, that there are android/iOS local-only password managers, right?

I have KeePass on my phone and sync - when I can be arsed - my database from my desktop to it.

Now, if you are talking work-related stuff then that's a work problem to solve. Work needs to deal with that situation, as it's their problem if employees credentials get stolen from the work-supplied password manager. That's not my problem as an employee. I don't care how work manages what is, in effect, their credentials.

NOTE: do not use a personal password manager to store work-related secrets, doing that does make it your problem if they get stolen from your personal password manager!

Also, if work isn't using MFA (some sort of TOTP) to connect to work resources remotely (e.g. connecting via a phone app), again, that's their problem.

Re: Putting lipstick on a pig

Other alternatives, Sweden's CV90, Spains/Austria ASCOD, German Lynx, US Bradley M3?

This to me raises an obvious question - does the ASCOD have these same issues?

If they do, then how in hell was ASCOD ever downselected to become the basis of Ajax? That's a truly massive failure right there. Is this incompetence, maliciousness, or just outright bribery?

If ASCOD does not have these issue, then what in the living hells has General Dynamics and/or British Army requirements done to the ASCOD to introduce this behaviour?

I mean, I completely understand there can be modifications necessary to meet requirements (see my previous (long!) post replying to someone else earlier in this article), but surely "make it vibrate like a bastard and destroy the hearing of passengers and make them sick" wasn't one of the requested modifications?

I think heads need to roll, someone (or some people) have fucked up severly somewhere, either in the selection process, the modification requirements over base ASCOD, or the manufacturing.

But, everyone would stick their oar in and come up with $[reasons] why the UK needs something special and we need $[modifications], and before you know it, there are so many modifications from what's already available "off the shelf" that it effectively becomes a new design.

Coming from an Australian perspective, I'll use a current Australian procurement situation as an example.

Australia is procuring the New FFM (Upgraded Mogami) frigate from the Japanese. The first three are to be built in Japan with "no modifications to the Japanese version".

Now, to be clear, I support the New FFM decision. When the RFI was put out with the 4 different frigate classes in it, I, in my non-expert opinion, thought the Mogami (or the South Korean frigates) would be better options than the Spanish or German proposals as we'd be buying from somewhere relatively local, and would be operating a class in common with direct regional allies, which would make logistics, support, maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), easier, as there would be another country that operated the same type that could provide an additional regional location for maintenance and support (and we could offer the same for them).

But, the big questions as to 'no modifications'.

The Japanese use different missiles to the Australian inventory, Japanese locally produced anti-air and anti-ship missiles. Whereas Australia uses the Evolved-Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) for short range air defense, and the Naval Strike Missile (NSM - actually a backronymn as NSM originally meant Norwegian Strike Missile, but I digress) for anti-surface warfare. So, is the 'stock' Mogami compatible with those weapons? What about the software/integration, do the Japanese combat system software on board work with those missiles? Or would this meran Australia accepting into service a different anti-ar and anti-surface missile and logistics complications that involves?

Apparently the answer to that is yes for both software (Mogami uses a US-based AEGIS system, which is also what Australia uses, so compatible there) and hardware (Mogami uses Mark41 VLS, which is also what Australia uses and was the original designed launch system for ESSM). So, in effect, where the ESSM and NSM are concerned it's really just a change of ammunition rather than a complete change of systems and/or hardware.

But if that wasn't the case, then that would certainly require $[modifications] (to make thoise missiles work) and for $[reasons] (Australia currently uses ESSM and NSM, not the Japanese versions, and has started manufacturing in Australia the NSM and ESSM).

But there are other $[reasons]. Some hypothetical examples:

• What if in Japanese service the toilet-to-crew ratio is one head to 15 crew, but under RAN rules or legislation, crew are supposed to have a 10:1 crew:head ratio. Could they legally accept an unmodified Mogami with the Japanese standard 15:1 ratio? Or would they have to modify that? What about showers, wardroom space, etc. The requirements may be very different for Japanese SDF vs RAN (this may be legislation-based, not just internal policy).
• All the on-board signage, software, documentation, manuals, maintenance guides etc. are currently in Japanese. Therefore these all have to be provided in English, which means the ship built by the Japanese will have to modify things like signs, labels, etc. And if there isn't already English versions of the approrpaite documentation, what then? Who does the translation?. Does the current software used throughout the ship already have an English language mode so you just have to select the right setup option, or do the Japanese (or Australia?) have to do the translation and add the English language mode? Or just install Australian-spec English-language replacement software? Does that Australian-equivalent software support the hardware (CPUs, memory, ASICs, microcontrollers, radars, communications equipment) that is in the "unmodified" Mogami? Or will they have to port the software to the Japanese hardware? Or will they replace the Japanese hardware with hardware that the Australian software (remember, this is needed because of different languages between the manufacturerer, Japan, and the end-user, Australia, not because of random reasons) supports? Will the Australian hardware fit as drop-in replacemnts for the Japanese hardware, or will fittings/mountings/alcoves/cupboards/cable routing have to be modified to the different dimensions and weights of the Australian equipment?
• Do stock radars, communications, firecontrol, doorways (height, width), crew berths, emergency (liferafts, escape hatches, etc.), corridor dimensions, chairs, workstation heights, crawlspaces, electrical power production (AC, DC, voltage, frequency) correspond to Australian regulatory and naval standards (I mean, serving on board an Australian ship it seems reasonable that a crew member can just plug a domestic laptop/shaver/kettle into an electical outlet and expect it to work? right? do Japanese ships use the same AC/DC/Voltage/Frequency as Australian/RAN ships use?).

The list goes on and on. Most might seem trivial, but they are real. Whether regulatory or policy or training or commonality or logistacl or even social constructs, requirements can be different for the same things between nations, especially obvious when there are language differences.

Often it's just not practical to accept an item - in peace time, wartime emergencies like say the Russo-Ukraine war usually do away with these things, you "make do" - as-is because different countries just have different requirements and standards and use and have an inventory of different equipment.

Re: Not their decision

Most of the reporting I've seen around does note that, usually using phrasing along the lines of (my own words):

After receiving the report from WMP, the SAG had little option other than to ban the fans.

Re: Or resigned

> Quit != Retire

No, he did retire, he took early retirement and is getting a full pension (at least according to reporting).

Re: Idiocy

Edited: OOps, already mentioned by retiredFool's post.

It's become so common there's even a site that tracks it, AI Hallucination Cases which, at time of this post, stands at 811 instances.

Re: Dell UltraSharp 52 is Curved

Missing from the article is that the monitor is curved.

I have a subtly curved 35" ultrawide, and I do prefer that subtle curve to a completely flat (or steeper curve!) monitor of the same size.

But it is a personal taste thing, YMMV.

Re: Nah, I'll take the bezels

Oh, wait, maybe that’s some old-fashioned imperial measurement, that most of the world doesn’t understand well

As per the Reg's own standard units, it is actually 0.1903 Adult Badgers, or 0.0011 Skateboarding Rhinoceri.

Re: WAN speed anyone?

Selective and misleading quoting, the full quote says (emphasis mine):

Cordeiro says that Intel sees Wi-Fi 8 as the "connective technology for the AI era," one where in the not-too-distant future, everyone will have massive amounts of compute and storage available to them over the network, and this means that you can't allow the wireless connection to become the bottleneck to accessing all those resources.

The goal is to prevent WiFi from being the bottleneck in the coming years if/when Internet connectivity speeds improve.

1 Gbps allows good connectivity to that compute on the WAN/Internet. However, for some reason most people seem to equate LAN with WiFi because most people seem to use WiFi rather than cabled LAN. How often do you see instructions that say "to connect this thing to your network, go to your WiFi router ...." - the assumption being that you are using WiFi. The upshot is that it seems most people use WiFi as the standard connectivity between their devices and their LAN and out to the wider WAN/Internet. Therefore the WiFi bottleneck becomes a serious constraint when you consider it's seeming to becoming the standard LAN setup (not sure why, I use CAT5/6 for most of my computers, WiFi is a convenience for say phones or when I/m wandering around the house with a lapttop - couch to kitchen to porch to bed, but once I 'settle' in somewhere I'll plug in a network cable). Therefore improving reliability of WiFi is a reasonable goal to me (despite for me WiFi is a fallback, not the main connectivity method, but I understand that how I do things isn't the way others do things and I may now be in a fading minority who prefers cabled connections).

The other thing you are missing is that many corporates are starting to use WiFi much more. My work (~15000 people) recently went to hotdesking and assigning everyone laptops. And the default/expected connectivity is using the corporate WiFi. Sure, you can plug in the network patch the replaced desktops use(ed) - and I try to do this where relatively easy - but I've found many hotdesks haven't bothered to plug the dock into the LAN, they all seem happy using the corporate WiFi rather than cabled. And many corporates have better than your 1Gbps connectivity to the internet, and that's not even mentioning the multiple multi-gigabit connections to our datacentres and their mainframes and server farms.

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

Not properly, it doesn't re-stripe the existing data like mdadm or btrfs, it just evens out the disk usage.

A 3 disk raid5 expanded to 5 will inherit the same 50% parity overhead for existing data,

And that can be solved by a simple mv and copy back the file. e.g.

mv $i $i.tmp && cp -p $i.tmp $i && rm $i.tmp

Stick that (or your own preference, using rsync for example) in a simple script/find command to recurse it (with appropriate checks/tests etc.), and that'll make the 'old' data stripe 'properly' across the full RAID width.

Re: oddly

> It is a white dwarf but identifies as a red dwarf.

You mnean a very short ginger?

> Vivaldi technologies has about 60 employees to maintain and develop their entirely competent browser.

Sure, if you ignore the hundreds of developers who work on the upstream chromium engine they use.

Re: Vivaldi

I used Vivaldi for a while when it first came out, but lack of Tree-Style-Tabs (TST) reverted me back to Firefox.

I tried requesting that Vivaldi implement TST-style tab systems, but in threads about it a Vivaldi dev would always demand a detailed explanation of why we (TST users) use TST and prefer it over the tab-grouping features.

Vivaldi are free to implement or not implement any feature, but as TST is a personal preference, I can't give a clear explanation of why or why not I prefer it over other mechanisms. And that's exactly what a personal preference is, something usually logically unexplainable, and the frequent demands for such explanation from its users who have that preference - and the un-substantiated defences that tab-groups were superior and we should be using that instead - drove me away from Vivaldi.

Re: Logistics is the real killswitch

I doubt that was ever feasible. Europe's total fast jet count is around 1,700, but roughly half of that is recent aircraft (inc a few F35), but it would never be feasible that Europe would order more than say 600-800 F35. Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Canada aren't going to take more than a few dozen (ignoring any possible cancellations). Not seeing a big queue of remaining countries available to pay the asking price. So I'm seeing total international sales at around 1,000.

Lockheed-Martin aren't idiots, they'd never have planned on 3,000 international sales. Whether the Pentagon were stupid enough is a different question.

While 3,000 was optimistic, that projection would have been based on replacing all of the following aircraft in various friendly countries airforces on a 1:1 basis:

• Rafale
• Typhoon
• F-16
• F-15
• various MiG/Su models still in some ex-Soviet bloc NATO airforces
• Various other older models that where wheezing into the 21st century

They were dreaming if they thought they'd get 1:1 replacements for many of those models, what with the capital and operational cost increases of the F-35, not to mention that as a 'uberfighter', surely you need less of them ? But of course the purveyor of the aircraft, Lockheed-Martin, would put the best 'spin' on it to get the tender.

Also note your estimation of "Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Canada aren't going to take more than a few dozen" is way off.

• Japan: 147
• Canada: 88
• Australia: 72 (with options of increasing that to 100 - it's an ongoing debate)
• South Korea: 85
• Israel: 75
• Taiwan: 0

That's 467 F-35s right there in non-EU countries, not "a few dozen" - before any cancellations take effect that is. But, TBH, Canada is the only 'question-mark' on whether they'll take the F-35, as the other countries on that list have already received at least half their orders, so it's unlikely any of them would back out now. Canada is the only one that hasn't received any F-35s at all, so they are in a position to cancel and go with something else. They (Canada) were seriously considering Gripen at one point, but if the cancellation is to avoid US equipment, Gripen would be off the list as that uses a licensed-built US GE F404/F414G engine. Of the serious gen 4.5+ non-Russia/China combat aircraft, only Eurofighter and Rafale have non-US engines AFAIK (RR/Eurojet and Snecma/Safran respectively).