* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to Windows Server

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: Really...it's early and I've not had my coffee yet.

>they're translating Linux kernel calls into Windows kernel calls,

What could possibly go wrong?

Brits look at Google and Facebook every 210 seconds, says survey

P. Lee

Re: not all of us do it...

>Reason beats bollocks any day.

Maths beats them all. "On average look at FB & Google..."

For some value of "average."

Also, does "looking at google" include reading your email? Do they include google ads served on other websites?

Are they really complaining that people are reading email and FB updates rather than watching *American* "journalism"?

Pots and Kettles, though I must admit ditching the journalists is an easier habit to break.

Salesforce sacks two top security engineers for their DEF CON talk

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

Re: Think of this as the ultimate in guerilla marketing

>Is it just me or does the malware seem to be better structured and more tightly coded than the software it's attacking?

Is it just me who's wondering why Salesforce has developed an *offensive* metasploit-type ability?

Uber bros kill car leasing program after losing nine grand per vehicle

P. Lee

Re: No word on

>As soon as Uber gets beaten into following laws where they operate, and stops charging less than it costs to run the service then their prices go up to that of the competition, and they get obliteriated by that competition.

Here's the problem with Cloud services. The name is everything and its winner-take-all. How does a new taxi service get noticed in the huge morass of app-store applications presented on a small screen. Once the competition is gone, you squash all future competition by the threat of price reduction, using past profits to fund the loss. We need competitive markets, not free-at-all-cost markets. With an application-based services, not even geographically local competition has much of a chance of succeeding.

In the red corner: Malware-breeding AI. And in the blue corner: The AI trying to stop it

P. Lee
Terminator

The only winning move is not to play.

Seriously, stop relying on A/V.

We need more sophisticated and accessible rights-dropping. We need applications to drop rights to disk access outside designated subdirectories.

Give me ultra-light jails where I've dropped rights to all sorts of things like disk areas, opening of listening ports etc.

Reduce the impact of a compromise and the incentive to compromise rapidly diminishes.

Thought your divorce was ugly? Bloke sues wife for wiretapping – 'cos she read his email

P. Lee

If it was pre-finalised divorce, isn't it all assumed to be shared property?

RentBoy.com boss faces six months of hard time

P. Lee

Re: I am not sure about the sentence

>He didn't just donate a bunch of money, he actually spent time in the community doing the good work himself.

But was he helping the community or stoking demand for his product? Ok that's a low blow. I'd be curious as to how far this logic extends. If I give to the poor but put a hit out on my wife who is stealing from a charity, do I get a free pass?

I know I'm old fashioned but when you run classes on how to avoid getting AIDS and run a company which promotes and profits from massive amounts of risky sexual activity with multiple partners my hypocrisy alarm goes off. This is Uber-thinking. Don't have a local pimp, have a pimp in The Cloud! It's so different! Your local pimp probably makes very little, we make $10m so we are more successful and must be better! "We pimp you out without baseball bats" is not a mitigation of money laundering crimes.

>His company, Easy Rent Systems, Inc, pled guilty to charges of conspiring to launder money and has given up its assets. Counts of racketeering and money laundering against Hurant were dismissed at prosecutors' request.

Or perhaps the light sentence is for quickly giving up his assets to the government? Is the government using sentencing threats for financial gain? If I commit a crime but do it badly and don't have $10m to give the government, would I get the same treatment?

This smells of an unholy union of plea deals and trendy ideology. Dismissing anti-prostitution measures as "going against consensual trade" is not really following the spirit of the law. If you don't want the measures, get them repealed, then we'll see where that actually leads.

Microsoft Surface laptop: Is this your MacBook Air replacement?

P. Lee

Re: But Why?

>would anyone in their right mind be shackled like this with Windows 10S?

No-one would do that - certainly not someone spending that amount of money.

You're using wrongthink. It is for the vendor's benefit, not the users.

It is to get people used to the idea of locked hardware, knowing full well that for this hardware, no-one will be using the locked-down system so no-one will complain.

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

P. Lee

Re: "but they don't care and want the power anyway."

>"Give me six lines from an honest man and I'll find something with which to hang him."

They haven't forgotten Snowden. He and his ilk is the targets, "we must never again let such a thing happen!"

Real terrorists just grab a vehicle and ram it into something.

Allegedly.

You don't need whatsapp for that. I'd be surprised if whatsapp has ever been the locus of terrorist organisation. The logic of banning e2e encryption is the same as for bugging private homes. All of them.

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

P. Lee

I'd be a lot happier if FF syncing (bookmarks et al) went through my own internet server. Give me the FF sync server software or just use SCP/SSH/rsync.

I'd be happy to add sync and share but again, I'd like it under my control, thanks.

If FF want to introduce new features, how about a point-of-presence server which scales well? You send an email and it does a handshake then returns all the presence info for you - telephone (SIP) number, skype contact name, jabber, preferred email (for updating to a new provider)... whatever.

What we need is services to provide independence, not yet-another-tied-to-cloud service.

The Telegraph has killed Prince Philip

P. Lee

>This is SOP for all news agencies.

Well yes, but why was it so badly prepared?

<insert title here>

<insert story here>

If you love your email standards, SMTP your feet: 35 years later

P. Lee

Re: user-whitelisting

>And if you get spam to one of them, you know which one leaked.

Wouldn't the spammers just see the "+" and delete it and everything up to the @ sign?

P. Lee

Re: user-whitelisting

How about an extension to add (and collect) certificates to each email on a per recipient basis.

Basically PKI but you give the recipient a certificate to use to communicate with you. Everone runs their own CA. If it gets compromised, you send them another one. It isn't perfect, but that's ok because it allows for graceful failure.

It all boils down to clever address-books, which is why the idea will fail. Webmail halts the development of email in the same way that tablets and phones with hardware-based video decoding mean that developing new video standards is pretty much futile. The "winner-takes-all" cloud means you can't grow adoption of something.

The internet was designed to be decentralised. That design is being increasingly over-ridden and its dangerous.

/rant

Dear racist Airbnb host, we've enrolled you in an Asian American studies course

P. Lee

Re: I call that a result

Was the cancellation behaviour-based, or based on some inherent physical attribute of the guest?

The late stage of the cancellation seems to indicate the former. Airbnb is meant to be cheap and simple. That lowers the bar for, "this isn't worth it."

I wonder what the defendant's view of Asians is now? Not just fussy but litigious too? Will she welcome them with open arms after her reeducation?

Meh, speculation without information is fun, but only useful at a theoretical level.

NAO: Customs union IT system may not be ready before Brexit

P. Lee

Do we have to require extra declarations by brexit?

We could just enforce the existing rules until we have a capable IT system. The whole point of it is that we don't have anyone telling us what rules have to be enforced.

Even if the eu imposes duties, we don't have to do the same. Are their systems up to the task of handling the extra load?

Windows Insiders with SD cards turn into OneDrive outsiders

P. Lee

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

>Ok what one of those gives you 5 installations of Office and 5TB of storage for less than a tenner a month?

$10/month = $360 over three years which gives you 8TB of NAS-quality disk from any pc corner shop. You also get around 900Mb/s transfer rate rather than the soggy string a cloud provider gives you.

So faster and an extra 3TB of storage and from there the comparison only gets less favourable. You can also have as many installations of LibreOffice as you want. I have seven laptops, three servers and three desktops in the house. To cover those, I'll need to buy Windows 10 and pay $20/month (for end user devices only). The "servers" are old devices because my needs are small and I don't trust virtualisation in terms of putting them all on one physical device (they are internet-facing). Now I need to license Windows server for 8 cores on core-2 duo hosts. I'm running SMTP and webmail on-prem, so that's an exchange license too. You do back up your Outlook-Online email to an on-prem device don't you? MS doesn't do backups.

So my ROI is down to one and a half years on the disk purchase alone. Plus, a lot of the devices are old and I'll need to buy new windows 10 licenses *for each device* if I want to do the ecological thing and re-use old kit.

Windows licensing doesn't scale. Yes, MS Office is *much* better than LibreOffice - but not *that* much better. Let's face it, we keep all the windows infrastructure around to support Excel, Outlook calendaring and Visio.

Cloud sales shift as enormo Microsoft reorg continues – sources

P. Lee

>Although the discounts for an EA would be higher than for a month-to-month pricing scheme based on consumption, going with a consumption-based model might work out better for customers with workloads that are more dynamic than static, according to one source.

Ah, the mythical dynamic work-load.

Weasel-words.

Who are these people and what percentage of MS customer-base are they?

I've never worked in an organisation which spins down *production* Windows systems because it doesn't need them at the moment. Maybe there are some, I've just never met them.

Test (as in "pilot") systems, fair enough - its easier to kill and rebuild than to modify them, but that generally isn't a major cost and where it is a cost, it is an MS-dumb-license-model cost.

Typical marketing: make a problem, then sell the solution.

Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query

P. Lee

Re: At some point in the article

I've been using linux since v2 and love it. It was the system which allowed me to get stuff done.

It is still the *nix-like OS which also gives me Steam, but now I'm playing with freebsd for servers and I really love that.

It is a joy to use and it has a simplicity which I think linux has lost.

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: Hang on, all y'all ...

Obvious Troll is ... obvious.

Heaps of Windows 10 internal builds, private source code leak online

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: I'm done with Windows.

The funny thing is that all the IP laws around software are designed to stop people grabbing other people's work.

Then I tried to think of anyone who might have the slightest interest in stealing MS' code so they didn't have to code things themselves... and I came up blank. Who would ever want to steal MS' code?

All those IP laws and they only thing they could be used for is to stop people finding out about MS' bad coding.

It's fluffy bottom line time at Adobe. That's a good thing, if you were wondering

P. Lee

Re: Adobe is actually the only one I would subscribe to

And as revenue goes up, so do the incentives to compete.

Microsoft admits to disabling third-party antivirus code if Win 10 doesn't like it

P. Lee

MS's "business" is making money by creating (and maintaining) a monopoly.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

They don't need complete lock-out, just enough FUD to sustain them.

Brit uni blabs students' confidential information to 298 undergrads

P. Lee

>"Could you please delete this without opening/reading. Thank-you very much."

Should have read, "A spreadsheet possibly infected with the Wannacry ransomware has accidentally been attached. We recommend immediate deletion."

P. Lee
Mushroom

Re: Another reason to ban Outlook.

>'A' priority, not 'THE' priority.

Which would correctly tell you absolutely nothing. It is a priority, just slightly lower in ranking than cleaning my toenails.

Forget banning Outlook, ban "Excel as a database".

Ok, that's harsh. We just need Excel with a data store which isn't a file. Then at least you can keep hold of the access control even after the mail is sent.

I was tempted to use the "c" word, but we probably don't need that kind of language around here!

Mushroom c....

A bit of DLP would be nice too. If you ditched the proprietary formats it would be even easier and cheaper to implement....

Migrating to Microsoft's cloud: What they won't tell you, what you need to know

P. Lee
Happy

Re: Re: One way trip

I see what you did!

P. Lee
Facepalm

What you need to know

It's hard to do well and even if you did do it well, it is intrinsically worse than on-prem.

Or did I misunderstand the article?

Uber sued after digging up medical records of woman raped by driver

P. Lee

Re: But But But but ....

While I agree Uber is a nasty company, I'd be surprised if any other largish company wouldn't hire investigators to track down *anything* they could use to compromise a case against them. They just wouldn't be so dumb as to do it themselves.

This has everything to do with normal corporate culture and nothing to do with the taxi business.

Teen girl who texted boyfriend to kill himself guilty of manslaughter

P. Lee

Re: Do you have kids?

>She LISTENED TO HIM DIE AND DID NOTHING ABOUT IT.

I'm curious about what that sounds like. Not from a morbid POV but I'd be curious to know whether I'd actually recognise it for what it was, over a phone, from someone who had repeatedly threatened to kill themselves. Would I think they really were dying or would I think they were attention-seeking and only realise afterwards what it was?

It does appear she's not a nice person and certainly has moral culpability. I do somewhat worry about whether this should carry over into legal culpability. If you accidentally text, "drop dead" to the wrong number and they do kill themselves, are you liable? At what point does liability become a thing? If she was a minor, what responsibility do her parents have? What responsibility did his parents have?

And what of the sentence? Will it be punitive? If she got 20 years, would that actually help anyone? Would a shorter sentence be "protective"? Do we decide she'll always be a danger because she's a sociopath and lock her up forever? How far into "pre-crime" do we go?

I guess my concern is that hard cases make bad law. Whatever happens, I hope this case doesn't create more bad law.

EPYC leak! No, it's better than celeb noodz: AMD's forthcoming server CPU

P. Lee

Re: disappointed

>forcing people to buy dual socket servers just to meet their I/O requirements.

How much SSD storage and how many 10/40G ports do you get in a box before the CPU just can't pull data in and push it out fast enough? What happens when you use put FreeNAS on the new chip? Software defined networking? Media servers?

In these scenarios (unlike gaming or transcoding), you don't need massive FLOPS, you need I/O throughput.

I'm not sure it makes sense to compare AMD and Intel and say one is "better." We probably need to ask which is more appropriate for a given application. Intel generally wins in CPU-bound operations, it looks like AMD will win on I/O.

FOIA documents show the Kafkaesque state of US mass surveillance

P. Lee
Big Brother

Re: Super secret court

Missed it by --><-- that much!

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Microsoft's 'Ms Pac-Man beating AI' is more Automatic Idiot

P. Lee

Re: I don't see problem with hard-coded knowldge

>When someone plays (Ms) Pac Man for the first time*, they have to learn that ghosts are deadly unless you eat the pills and then they give you points. They also have to learn how (Ms) Pac Man moves and so on.

Well, you learn facts. But is that Intelligence? How much intelligence (vs memory) do humans use when playing?

Intelligence generally involves guesswork. Even without seeing the effect, do you guess that ghosts are bad? Do you guess that the aim of the game is to eat all the dots and that the flashing ones mean something special?

Uncle Sam █████████ cloud so much, AWS █████████ it another kinda-secret data center

P. Lee
Big Brother

cp -r AWS SAM

done

# _

Ever wonder why those Apple iPhone updates take so damn long?

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

Re: no no no no no no no, Apple

>No risk? this update bricked my girlfriends iPhone quite spectacularly, took forever to get the thing to boot again after re-flashing through iTunes.

So... not bricked, but requiring a restore from backup. It was an OS update...It was done with permission and suggesting that it was the fs test which borked it seems like a bit of a leap of logic.

Does anyone here work in IT?

P. Lee

Re: no no no no no no no, Apple

>who would be liable for data loss.

Well you would, obviously.

Wait, you didn't back up your data before doing an OS upgrade? No silver el-reg badge for you!

During an OS upgrade, when you might conceivably get a file system upgrade anyway would be the perfect time to do some testing. Would you prefer it to be rolled out without a roll-back plan?

If I were rolling something out, I'd want to do some real-world unit testing too.

I rather despise most of Apple's business practices but this isn't one of them.

Two leading ladies of Europe warn that internet regulation is coming

P. Lee

Re: How to evolve a smarter criminal in easy steps

>Driving the issue off the internet, for terrorism, means physical monitoring approaches, and this is vastly more expensive that internet monitoring.

Terrorism was never on the internet.

It is simple and its low-tech, because that is reliable. Given that nearly all terrorism is Islamic, they tend not to worry about surviving. People willing to die a almost impossible to stop. Smarter terrorists are not required for effective terrorism.

Terrorists are like celebrities. The only thing worst than being hurt is being ignored.

Microsoft Azure adds OpenBSD support. Repeat. Azure adds OpenBSD support.

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: Microsoft has extended BSD support in Azure.

Upvoted... who knows why you got downvoted?

The problem isn't just with MS though. AWS a larger problem purely because it has been far more successful.

I've heard AWS people say that when they have a problem, a third of all web-sites are affected.

That is stupidly concentrated IT. We are pretty much at the stage of "if one company fails, we are all in trouble."

The internet was designed to be a dumb network with smart end-points (the opposite to the telephone network) but the vendors are rushing back to the IBM mainframe model because that is far more lucrative. We may as well bring back SNA.

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: But, why?

>Who is the customer for this?

Potential cloud end-users with onsite appliances.

"Look! We can host all your IT - we have VM versions of all your appliances, you can just boot everything up to our cloud."

"Then we'll offer you a free Windows firewall."

"Then we'll make you pay for a Windows firewall." Ooops, did I say that out loud?

Microsoft officially hangs up on old Skype phones, users fuming

P. Lee

Re: How long before Duo is killed too?

>Good thing mobile phone numbers and email addresses stay put as the technology changes around them. (GSM, 3G, 4G, 5G, POP, HTTP, IMAP, etc.)

Which is why standard interfaces are important, no matter what the tech behind them and why I loath the cloud regardless of which OS it is built on.

Cloud replaces things like SATA with onedrive or S3. You then have a proprietary disk drive. That is one of the stupidest ideas I can imagine - vendor-specific data where the hardware is controlled by not-you but by a really reliable long-term organisation like ... a cloud company. I mean it isn't like MS have form for removing support for other vendors' stuff, like, say, HPFS under Windows... leaving Office to rot under OSX... removing third-party support to kill Novell logins...

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: Never count on MS

>Fair comment, but which tech supplier would you suggest counting on?

IETF

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

P. Lee
Linux

Re: We had a laser link between two nearby buildings

>a vulture was landing on the LNB arm and pushing it out of the dish focus

Ah, microwaving its lunch.

Smart birds, them Vultures!

Infosec guru Schneier: Govts will intervene to regulate Internet of Sh!t

P. Lee

Good, fast, cheap. Pick two

Good, cheap.

We are past the point where "fast" is a problem for consumers, especially for IoT. Fast is usually relevant only to over-consolidated vendors.

Australia to float 'not backdoors' that behave just like backdoors to Five-Eyes meeting

P. Lee

>What happens if terrorists simply flood the internet with tons of false leads, using botnets?

What happens when terrorists talk to their buddies at the local mosque or at picnic in the park?

Just because middle-class millenials are obsessed with internet services doesn't mean everyone is. How many of the recent attacks required any internet usage?

Go buy a gun or a knife and stab/shoot someone. Rent an Avis van and drive into a crowd. No WhatsApp required. No email trail. No iTunes purchase of "The Dummies Guide to Terrorism" epub.

Microsoft totters from time machine clutching Windows 10 Workstation

P. Lee

Re: great ideas at the top

>Desktop configurations - no tiles as an option?

Haha! Have you seen what happens to tiles when your proxy requires authentication *before* it allows access to the internet?

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

P. Lee
Coffee/keyboard

re: Dear The People

Agreed.

And all the terrorists know you shouldn't trust your IT. Surveillance is about stopping people like Snowden who embarrass governments, not terrorists. Once you know you shouldn't trust your IT you leave it out of your planning.

Terrorism is not high-tech and doesn't need high-tech. There is no high-tech solution to it.

We have to engage the values and historical context which nurture it. Sadly, no-one wants to discuss morality, in case an uncomfortable conclusion is reached or logical inconsistency is noted. So we make vague statements about "extremism" without saying what it is that is extreme. If "extremism" is bad, should we not be extremely committed to safety? Is May extremely committed to Brexit? Is Juncker extremely committed to "ever closer union"? Was Mohammed an extremist or moderate?

Vodafone to block its ads from appearing next to 'fake news'

P. Lee

>outlets that are "fundamentally at odds with their values and beliefs as a company"

This does appear to be the working definition of "fake news" for most organisations. It isn't about truth, it is about values.

Bixby bailout: Samsungers bailing on lame-duck assistant

P. Lee

>Digital assistants - don't really care about them, just as long as I can disable them.

Samsung need a new strategy. Following Google (lots of free stuff, lots of snooping) won't work because Google does it better. Following Apple doesn't work because you can't charge a premium for what is essentially Google stuff.

Why not team up with Canonical? Someone with enough software expertise to do a phone which doesn't track you. Minimal effort for Canonical; Geek cred and kudos for Samsung, poke in the eye for Google & Apple.

Microsoft's cunning plan to make Bing the leading search engine: Bribery

P. Lee
FAIL

> Over 7% I didn't think it was that high.

Its the number of people who are looking for FF & Chrome stub installers.

Seriously, IE11 doesn't appear to accept urls any more, it just dumps you on a bing page.

WannaCrypt: Pwnage is a fact of life but cleanup could and should be way easier

P. Lee

Re: @LittleTyke

While I love oss, the article is correct about malware being inevitable for all os types. Where nix gains is its diversity. That forces loose coupling between components, which means fewer breakages during updates.

Now, who thinks AWS APIs are going to be stable for 13 years? With cloud you don't get to run that custom application on a dedicated pic in the corner. Once the vendor isn't interested, your application dies with the next API change.

Especially if you are a small business, build that application rewrite cost into your plan. Elastic compute and storage may sound cool, but most businesses don't have rapidly changing requirements. Glacier may be cheap, but I'll bet they aren't using commvault so are you sure you need to?

Keep it simple and put some common sense into whether you consolidate or preprovision.

WebAssembly fandom kills Google's Portable Native Client

P. Lee

I'm curious

Is this really about generic web or is it about heavy-weight application distribution?

Should we actually be working on web distribution of "portable-apps" rather than trying to shoe-horn applications into JS?

If JS isn't fast enough on a PC, it certainly won't be fast enough for a tablet, so you've lost your cross-platform-ness.

Google can't spare 113 seconds of revenue to compile data on its gender pay gap

P. Lee

Re: Bullshit

Diversity reporting is a no-win scenario.

There are plenty of good reasons why the resulting figure calculated as an average seems to imply something it doesn't.

e.g.

a) many women like flexible jobs with lower hours because they actually care about their families

b) In general, flexible jobs are in lower-paying job categories

c) women often take a career break to have families, which means they don't climb the corporate ladder to the higher-paying posts

Even if you do the break-down and show you aren't discriminating, someone will summarise it to make you look bad and create a story out of nothing.