* Posts by Henry Wertz 1

3137 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Security pro's time-travelling Twitter bot suspended after posting download link for Adobe Acrobat for MS-DOS

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: The auto takedowns...

"What I take serious issue with is the complete lack of redress, nuance or balance. Where is the ability to argue a point back that doesn't require you to be a social media celebrity bringing negative press against a company posting a strike? Why isn't there a method where if sufficient challenges against a company issuing strikes gets them put on the naughty bench unable to issue more until the can prove legitimately that the strikes are valid?"

There *IS* a penalty clause in the DMCA for false takedown notices, it includes being able to collect damages and penalties against them. As much as they might want to squirm out of it, I'm QUITE sure that there'd be no arguing against dead silence being a false takedown notice. And indeed, there have been cases in the past where the DMCA-trolls tried to argue "Well, it's automated, it makes mistakes", the judge correctly pointed out "Your bot is auto-signing attesting UNDER PERJURY that the info is true, that's your problem for not having a human double-check the bot results." The groups that use the DMCA as a kudgel have just made very sure they push ISPs, google, twitter, etc., into accepting automated DMCA claims, while making sure very few if any of them make people aware of their full rights.

SQL now a dirty word for Oracle, at least in cloudy data warehouses

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

More database capacity needed!

This:

"whilst crazy "non query" queries drag everything into the gutter."

and

"As these become more complex they'll take up more and more CPU cycles and take longer and longer to run ..."

Honestly, I may be cynical (OK, yes I am), but I'm assuming this is part of the end goal of discouraging direct use of SQL -- unoptimized and downright ineffcient queries drag down database performance; more database capacity needed! So then they'll either buy more cloud capacity (if it's the cloudy style) or if it's on-premises, they'll either be installing a few extra DB servers (additional copies of Oracle), or Oracle has been installing per-core fees for years so replacing a DB server with a beefier one will also mean additional fees to Oracle.

Obtaining US 5G supremacy is easy as Pai, says FCC commish Brendan Carr. It's all in the spectrum

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Simply refarming retired 2G/3G spectrum to mixed 5G/LTE usage (the standard allows for the same swathes to be used for both) would satisfy most of that demand."

It doesn't, Verizon is down to 2.5mhz (1 channel of 2G CDMA 1x, 1 channel of 3G EVDO), and running dynamic spectrum sharing (so the 4G and 5G spectrum are already shared on several 4G bands; not band 13 for regulatory reasons). AT&T sunsetted 2G quite a while ago (and probably running the minimum 5mhz 3G), T-Mo sunsetted their 2G last year and probably running the minimum 5mhz; they do plan to sunset their 3G systems in the ~2022 timeframe but it won't gain much at all.

That said, I don't know how much spectrum they need; I mean, T-Mo (from buying Sprint) has the most average low and mid-band, something like 250mhz average (Sprint had like 150mhz at 2.5ghz...) while AT&T has around 120mhz and VZW averages like 80-100mhz or so. This 100s of mhz of new spectrum in CBRS and C-Band alone is more than most of these companies had to begin with (let alone all this other spectrum the FCC wants to free up...), so I do think there'll be a point soon where they really have no use for more and more spectrum.

CBRS is kind of interesting, there's a section where it's kind of "free for all", essentially unlicensed as long as the equipment follows some kind of access rules that splits it up between all users fairly; and a "priority access license" section where it's licensed, but if the cell co or whoever licensed it but isn't using it it's free for anyone else to use. So, VZW for instance was expected to bid throughout the country, instead they bid high in some areas and not at all in quite a few others, hedging thier bet that under these PAL rules there'll be loads of open CBRS to use free of cost.

*Band 13 is not an approved band for 5G, the ETSI committee that formally approves new 5GNR bands did not meet last year due to travel restrictions, and I have no idea why they didn't just do it online.

FCC moves forward with plan to ban three Chinese telcos from American market

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

How much business did they do here anyway?

(I'm laying aside the political aspects of this, and just looking at the practical aspects.)

I wonder how much ComNet, Pacific Networks, or China Unicom hardware there is here in the states anyway? I've heard of ZTE and Huawei, but ZTE did very few phone or tablet sales here, and none of the big cell cos users Huawei equipment. I haven't heard of ComNet or Pacific Networks at all; and I've heard of China Unicom, but in terms of if I went to China, my phone could roam on China Unicom, not in terms of selling any equipment here.

There was some ZTE and Huawei equipment running here mostly among some wireless internet providers; these WISPs use a variety of technologies, in general the site equipment and CPE (customer premises equipment) are same-brand. In the distant past Motorola Canopy at 900mhz was common (not sure what technology this used, it was apparently good for up to like 2 or 3mpbs per user), more recently there's a variety of bands, and 4G LTE, or 5Gnr, or straight-up cable-modem style DOCSIS on 6mhz channels but going over the air on their licensed band instead of over a coax cable.

This was a bit of a mess apparently, the order to remove the ZTE and Huawei equipment gave until some date, and (due to COVID-related increases in internet traffic) a fund for WISPs to upgrade their equipment started like a month or two AFTER that deadline. Several WISPs pointed out they were going to have all their equipment replaced, severely depleting their funds, then be inelligible for this fund because all their equipment's just been replaced and is brand new. This was apparently unintentional so I don't know if they worked out some kind of reimbursements from the fund or not.

Google seeks to placate AI researchers complaining of Big Brother-like working conditions

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yeah that's silly

Yeah that's silly.. I thought it was going to be Googlers not being happy with some security measures to avoid corporate espionage. Not exepcting Google legal to be interfering with research papers -- very surprised!

After spending $45bn on 5G licences, Verizon tells customers to turn off 5G to save battery life

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

What a big phone you have

"Now the phone companies need to start convincing punters that the fashionable thing is no longer to boast about how thin your phone is, but how thick it is, as the bigger the battery is, the more it can do."

Can do! Really, I've seen pepole here in the states using those like 10" tablets as phones! It looks kind of ridiculous to have the top of the tablet by their ear and the bottom of the tablet at mid-torso level or so, one person I saw making a call on one kept moving it up and down so the mic would be near their mouth when they spoke (and speaker near their ear when listening). (I don't know if they had to, I'm guessing the mic would have picked up anyway... but they were, and it looked spectacularly silly.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not new

Not good PR for Verizon, but this is not a new thing at all.

When 3G came out, the early 3G chips burned tons of power, you would turn off 3G to save power. In addition, if a market had ANY 3G (even 1% coverage area), the phone would keep looking for 3G service throughout the entire market. (In Verizon's case, this is 2G 1x and 3G EVDO -- no GSM here!). When 4G LTE came out, the early LTE chipsets were power hogs; and the other bit applied too, early on in the 4G deployment when it had small area coverage, you would have the phone looking for 4G service througout the market even if you were nowhere near any actual 4G coverage. The 5G is a little different, newer cell site hardware is using software defined radio, which can run 5G through software update, so a lot more 5G popped up all at once than with the 3G or 4G rollouts (after I'm sure running a few test markets, the new enough hardware got software updated nationwide.) But it still applies, the early 5G chipsets are power hogs, and the phone will be wasting power looking for 5G service in areas that are still 4G-only.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Uhh, yeah.

Uhh, yeah. They should have someone besides a sensitivity manager or whatever review these suggestions. I think they're being oversensitive (does anyone seriously really object to abnormal?), I don't really have any objection to replacing terms with more sensitive terms or whatever, if they are actually equivalent. But....

Replacing "hit" with "tap" or replacing "hangs" with "stops responding" are fine; not sure that "dummy data" and "placeholder data" are exactly the same but probably close enough. "Special character" and "illegal character" are not equivalent terms (a special character is usually one accepted by the application, but treated differently than other characters, pretty much the opposite of an illegal character!), "peer" is not a replacement for "master"/"slave" (for IDE, the jumpers are actually labeleed "master" and "slave", so just let the term age out since people don't usually use IDE any more; for distributed systems, replacing the terms master and slave is fine, but a peer-to-peer system and one where a master is elected are two totally different things, replacing the terms "master" and "slave" with "peer" would turn the description into nonsense and gibberish.) Seriously, like 2/3rds of these suggestions would unintentionally change the meaning of the documentation, or make the documentation completely unintelligible, if they used them.

Nvidia cripples Ethereum mining on GeForce RTX 3060 to deter crypto bods from nabbing all the kit at launch

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Would you buy a second hand graphics card that had been run at 110% 24x7 for years, the MTBF has been eaten away."

Yeah, if the price is right. I've had a $20 SSD wear out (in less than 6 months; I was running extremely heavy write load on it though) and a few cheap SD Cards. But, GPUs, CPUs? If they're run under the temperature limit, I've never had one fail. (Most likely, for me, the price would be too high for me, they'll want too much for them. But I'm just saying, MTBF would not be the reason for me not getting one.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Older drivers?

Wouldn't you just run older drivers if you wanted to mine?

Healthy 32-year-old offered COVID-19 vaccine because doctors had him down as 6.2cm tall with BMI of 28,000

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

At least they handled it well

At least they handled it well.

Here in the US, Nutjob trump had ZERO vaccine distribution plan, so it's been left to the states. (Biden is supposed to be working on it; but, he expected a disorganized national distribution plan to fix, not "no plan whatsoever".) Some states have reasonable plans; some none at all. Florida was using vaccines to increase tourism(!), they said anybody over 65 could get vaccines, and the Florida travel board encouraged people to travel to Florida to get them.

As a result, here if this had happened, if you'd get the notice saying you're getting a vaccine... that's it. People here are (in most states) not doing any common-sense verification of info like this, if they did catch an error, just as likely or not it'd be like "Well, the appointment is already made"; if you decided you didn't want it so someone more deserving gets it, some states actually prohibit giving the shot to someone else and it'd be thrown out(!), others it's like at the end of the day the extra vaccines are injected into randos that are standing around waiting for "spare" vaccines. (If you get a call cancelling an appointment here, it'll probably be because you're in one of the less-organized states, and they handed out appointments in excess of their actual supply of vaccine, they're cancelling because they don't actually have any vaccine for you, not because you're 30 and healthy. That said, most is going to elderly, health care workers, etc. like it should -- just not anywhere near fast enough.)

Citibank accidentally wired $500m back to lenders in user-interface super-gaffe – and judge says it can't be undone

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Interesting legal argument there....

It's not that dangerous a precedent -- I think the judge is just making the point that it's not like they got $100 trillion or something in their account where it's obviously a mistake, at which point it would really not be reasonable to try to keep it. It's a large enough amount that it's reasonable to assume the bank would verify it (which apparently they did, the verification simply failed), but is the amount of their loan so also perfectly reasonable to assume it was an intentional payment based on the amount.

I recall Bank of America got sued a few years ago (well, their awful so they've been sued for many things but here's one...), they were cashing checks straight away, then sitting on the money (so they could get free interest) until 1 day before the legal limit. Their computers were down over a weekend, so they deposited some checks in like 9 days when the limit is 7. They got sued, they were like "Well, we can't help computers going down", the judge rightfully pointed out "Well, that's why you don't wait until the legal maximum to hold these checks", and the bank reluctantly paid $1000s in damages to the account holder for violating the law.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Isn't it the banks themselves....

Yup, and if this was just a deposit, they could probably do this to. The sticky wicket here is that it's a loan repayment, and load repayments have rent rules (including, in New York where Citibank is based, one specifically saying loan repayments cannot be reversed.)

How do you fix a problem like open-source security? Google has an idea, though constraints may not go down well

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Google can do this

Google can suggest what they want. As people commented, I do not expect the libjpeg-turbo, libpng, ffmpeg, etc., developers to follow any of this -- especiallly ffmpeg due to the large amount of ongoing code changes ffmpeg always seems to have. To be honest, if google wants repos where 2 people must vet every change, and the repo owner has a verified identity, they can continue to run their own repos with a verified owner and have 2 people eyeball each patch. I in no way expect upstream to do this for them.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I wonder how many they *really* sold?

First a comment on Intel making a huge mistake -- sales on this thing were a disaster, and this aspect was a real disaster for Intel. However (I don't know if Intel was this smart intentionally or it's just how it worked out), this eliminated (SGI) MIPS, (HP) PA-RISC and (originally Digital, but HP by then) Alpha, and temporarily Sun SPARC (it ultimately came back, but Sun mulled going to Itanium and stopped SPARC development for a while). This left only IBM Power (IBM made it clear at the time they intended to keep making their own CPU line.) PA-RISC, Alpha, and SPARC all cleaned Intel's clock performance-wise, but after they stopped development for several years to try Itanium, the several-year-old designs would not keep up with some Xeons, so these vendors then ended up using Xeons.

Second.. I wonder how many they *really* sold. I'm not claiming the (already quite low) sales figures were fabricated, I'm sure they were sold at some price. But, for example, I remember at the U of Iowa here, a department got a HP (Superdome I think) with Itaniums.. they commeneted that at the time, due to the compiler not handling the VLIW very well, their several year old PA-RISC HP system handily outran it. But they were happy to take the Itanium system -- in HP's zeal to show sales, the supposedly $250,000+ Itanium system ended up costing the department something like $1,000. I wonder how many of these were sold at anything like a regular price versus sold at an extreme discount like this?

Torvald's comment may be right -- it seems extraordinary to drop support for a CPU that is still in production, but HP has gone to extraordinary lengths throughout the life of this CPU to keep support going, to show sales at any cost, and so on, well after the point it was clear it was not going to pay off. The sales on this CPU were so low even back in the 2000's when it had it's highest sales, that it could well be the case that present-day sales of it are actually 0.

In the old days, coups started by seizing TV and radio stations. Now they crimp the internet at 3am

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Well in US

Well, in US, I've been surprised to see people who have a TV, but nothing running into the coax; they don't have cable *or* a TV antenna, they just stream everything. If you cut internet here, you'd have all these people who couldn't just not get online but couldn't get their TV either; they'd be very cranky, and if there was trouble in the capitol, they wouldn't know, they'd just know their internet's down.

Chrome 89 beta: Google presses on with 'advanced hardware interactions' that Mozilla, Apple see as harmful

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

USB?

Yeah, that's the last thing I need is to have some Javascript start interacting directly with my external hard drives, USB hub, and so on. I don't expect to be able to run ADB to my phone over the web either. I mean, it's fine to have these things exist I suppose, but I do hope they're off by default (I don't know, I run firefox.)

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Agreed

I've found the situation a little silly with the "100% libre" Linux distros too -- I can run Ubuntu with 100% free and open source kernel, 100% free and open source drivers, and 100% free and open source software running on top of it. But it's not "100% libre" or "100% free" because of a whole pile of firmware blobs that are loaded onto various devices as needed (which is why my wifi and bluetooth actually work out of the box with it).

Older hardware would have a ROM with some firmware in it, somewhat newer would have a flash ROM so you could update this firmware; so, after that, device makers chose to put RAM on the device instead and the driver loads firmware into RAM at run time. But to the "100% libre" point of view, having firmware in a ROM is fine, but it's forbidden to have the exact same firmware in a file and load it onto the device RAM when the driver sets up the device. To me this is very silly, and I would agree with those that advocate the "firmware blobs included" Debian should be the default, with the "100% libre" or "pure" or whatever version being an option for those who want it.

I'm all for keeping closed source drivers out of a stock install (I do use the nvidia driver on my desktop, but secure in the knowledge that the fully free nouveau driver also supports my hardware, so I'm not at the mercy of Nvidia to keep updating the drivers). Using fully free drivers avoids relying on the vendor to update them, lets one inspect the source, and also allows full portability (i.e. x86, arm, powerpc, whatever CPU you feel like, you can recompile an open source driver, but not a binary blob). But Ubuntu does that, it defaults to nouveau and mentions you can install nvidia driver if you want to.

Firmware blobs? Well, firmware blobs do not let you see the source, but neither would a device where the firmware is already on a ROM (you do get to the driver source though, so you can see what the driver itself is doing in terms of interfacing with the firmware); the blob does leave it up to the vendor to update it until they've worked out any bugs, but devices with ROMs have the same issue; and (unlike a closed source driver) a closed-source firmware blob in no way prevents building or porting the driver to other CPU types, loading the blob is just part of the initialization process for the hardware really.

Barbs exchanged over Linux for M1 Silicon ... lest Apple's lawyers lie in wait

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: What am I missing here?

This is Apple being Apple. They have always (since the 1980s) been bad about having restrictive systems and sue-happy lawyers. They maintain profit by maintaining the tightest possible control over their products and maintaining high prices and high profit margins. Don't like it, do what I do and don't buy any Apple products.

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Me too!

Me too!

Now I've got a friend of a friend -- who turns out to be a total asshole anyway, I wouldn't loan him 5 cents, but this was before I realized that -- who insisted since I know about computers, I must install Windows 7 on his computer for him. I pointed out a) You don't have a copy of Windows 7, go ahead and buy one (since there's free alternatives I'm not going to help him pirate anything). b) It's out of support, no more updates to keep it secure, so you shouldn't be running 7 anyway, if you insist on Windows you'll need 10 on there. c) I'd put Ubuntu on there for him*. (His response that he can't use Linux, without even trying to use it -- but he now constantly borrows my friends computer, with Ubuntu on it, since his is totally non-functional and of course has no problems using it.)

I read a comment years ago that rang true about this to me -- if you knew a neighbor that's a plumber, you would probably not be like "Hey you, you're good with pipes! Fix my toilet!", but with computers that's exactly the expectation people seem to have.

*He saw it running on my friends computer and had no problems using it -- when I do an install, I put gnome flashback on there so it's not running Unity.

Over long US weekend, GitHub HR boss quit after firing Jewish staffer who warned Nazis were at the Capitol

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: I'm confused

German makes this easier, having male, female, and neuter/neutral forms throughout the language. der (pronounced "dare") male, die (prononunced Dee) female and das (pronounced like DOS) neuter/neutral prefixes, and the pronouns to go with them. None of this "they" and "their" business.

As for *why*, some people view themselves (when transitioning) as neither male or female, they are literally transitioning and in between; some people go for being androgynous and so really are not planning to be either one; and I assume some are going to stay "gender fluid" and probably view themselves as both, at the very least (unless they're wearing clothes that make it obvious) it'd be easier to use neutral terms than to decide which gender they are at the moment if they're switching back and forth on a daily basis.

Debian 'Bullseye' enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

2 32-bit systems

Yep, I still have 2 32-bit systems. But, as others have said, I am not in some mad rush to have them have to run the newest software on them. These distros over the years have dropped 386, then 486, then pentium support (most went straight from 486 to 686 back then), most now need PAE too, they have slowly dropped support for older CPUs over time.

One is running Ubuntu 18.04 (20.04 has a few 32-bit packages to support wine etc., but not enough for a working system), and it's just serving up files and junk anyway, no newer packages needed.

The other is Ubuntu 11.04 with mythtv, running a much newer Ubuntu kernel to support newer TV tuner stick; had to turn off apparmor, since the Ubuntu 11-era apparmor setup has like 1/4 the settings an Ubuntu 18-era kernel needs, but other than that no drama at all, it booted right up to a graphical desktop, all tuners detected, etc. Obviously no newer packages needed here.

What's in the latest and greatest that would improve my 32-bit systems? Server-side, virtualization and cloud-related stuff, which is not really gonna happen on a 32-bit system; on desktop, better video drivers and mesa support, especially for newer cards (not needed, a 32-bit system is not getting a new video card dropped in); and x265 (... I don't think any 32-bit system is fast enough to do any x265 encoding or decoding in a reasonable length of time.)

They are talking about support in terms of maintaining security patches and such; this is true, but the other big issue is build time. I was very surprised when I went recently to build a kernel on my quad-core I5, and it took quite a long time; I mean, it took longer to build a kernel now than it did back when I was running a 486! You'd think modern fast systems would mean fast builds, it doesn't, the compiler does a lot more optimizing now than it did 10 or 20 years ago, which more than cancels out the speedup from having a much faster CPU; building like 20,000-30,000 packages (really, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. have a huuuuge number of available packages) surely takes a looong time and dropping i386 will save a huge amount of time on whatever build servers they have.

If it's just security, if they get any maintainers they could move i386 to an unofficial port, if there's demand for that. But it could be a matter of build time too.

Epic Games files competition lawsuit against Google in the UK over Fortnite's ejection from Play Store

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"On top of that, Epic also wants "an order requiring Google to remove or amend the technical restrictions to ensure that consumers can directly download apps/app stores without obstruction, including ensuring that those apps/app stores are able to operate in the same way as the Google Play Store with respect to app installation, app updates, and access to operating system features," something likely to ring alarm bells among Android security watchers."

Actually, I agree. I think phones with the option "allow installation from unknown services" missing, or force-disabled, are an abomination. AT&T did this a few years back, until they started having customers get worked up enough about it that they began losing customers and phone sales as they either went to another carrier, or stayed with AT&T service but bought an unlocked phone instead of buying one AT&T had crapped up.

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Uh-huh

"It's now going to use the extra time to address people's concerns and "help everyone understand our principles and the facts.""

Uh-huh, good look trying to explain to people why they should not care about privacy and should give Facebook all their private info.

I'm pleased to see there are enough that do care about Facebooks info-slurp and having some privacy to have 30 million flee in days.

Wine pops cork on version 6.0 of the Windows compatibility layer for *nix systems

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"A way to run decent software on a Mac!"

To some extent, but there's a big hair in the ointment. There's an ABI incompatibility. It's in Wine's online FAQ (but not any more detail than I give here -- I assume a bug report might have a little more info but I didn't look.)

MacOS does not store a 64-bit register that Windows does, so 32-bit apps will work (since they don't use the 64-bit registers); a 64-bit app "could" work if it happens to not use that register, but since it's an available register in Windows most 64-bit apps probably do use it.

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Idiots

"It’s not easy to switch to others. When someone the size of Amazon dumps you, everyone else will deny you due to reputational damage.”

Seriously (and this is ignoring their ugly politics), what a bunch of idiots.

First off, the regular cloud providers don't care about "reputation" or "reputational damage". They care about two things: 1) Will you pay 2) Will you follow their terms of service. If the TOS include not having hate speech on the site, obviously you are not going to follow the TOS; this isn't a matter of reputational damage. I mean, you probably could lie and claim you're going to run a site with none of the type of content you're currently running and they may be required then to let you sign up... but you'd be wasting your own time and theirs (well mostly yours, since on their end it's just some scripts firing up VMs or whatever for you). It'd be a waste of time, you'd then just be booted for TOS violations within days or weeks anyway.

Secondly, how can they be 100% unaware of "bulletproof hosting", to be honest most of the content off these hosts is probably piracy sites, spammers, and illegal pornography; but there's two types of these hosts, both of which will work for these guys. One type makes it clear they do not care what they are hosting, they aren't legally required to look at what's running, what traffic is coming in or out, so they don't; some also keep as few records as possible (i.e. they might not even keep payment info on file, so if they were subpoena'd they'd have no info to give to "the man"). The other type emphasizes freedom of speech, specifically to appeal to sites that are legal but kicked off other hosts for content; often times these also keep minimal records .

Linux developers get ready to wield the secateurs against elderly microprocessors

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I run old hardware and am OK with it

"As one would expect, there was a chorus of "I'm not dead yet!" responses as well as some in the community pointing out that a lack of updates was not necessarily an indicator of a platform's demise."

Probably both true -- a "mature" platform would eventually not need any updates at all, other than the (usually automatically applied) patches so, like, some kernel structure changes it's name or adds a field, the patch updates that structure's use within the platform-specific code. But this also points towards these users probably getting limited benefits from updating their kernel just because newer ones exist.

And I'm sure a few are using it. Probably not many though!

"Am I to understand that there are still 486s that are in working order ?"

Possibly a few.

That said, 1) Are you running a newer distro on your old system anyway? An old distro is going to ship with an older kernel anyway. 2) Is there any reason for a new kernel? Regarding #1, the 486 for instance, I don't think even a top-of-the-line 486 board held more than 128MB of RAM, and (support for your actual CPU aside), you are not going to be running Ubuntu 20.04 or something in that; the Itanic does of course hold plenty of RAM. Bringing me to #2: These CPUs are not receiving updates anyway, so security updates for the platform are probably moot (if there were security flaws in a 486... well, lets go with the Itanic, it's far more complicated and so likely to have flaws compared to a 486... these platforms probably do not have developers looking for or fixing flaws anyway given the lack of activity on them.) Also, I like to have an up-to-date kernel for hardware support, but a 486 or Itanium is not going to be having someone drop like a NVidia RTX1080 or something in it.

I just recently kludged up the Ubuntu HWE 5.8.0-36 kernel so I could build it for Ubuntu 18.04 -- both 64-bit and 32-bit version --- I have one 32-bit system still running Ubuntu 11.04 with MythTV, and have been regularly updating it's kernel (I actually needed a newer one for a newer TV tuner card so I started booting it off the Ubuntu 18.04 kernel several years ago.) No drama, I turned of the "propolice" security system (since ubuntu 11.04 had about 1/8th the propolice security settings it needs with a newer kernel a lot of stuff broke until I turned it off... luckily not sudo and the text editor 8-) ) but THAT IS IT -- X and the entire rest of the Ubuntu 11.04 system boots 100% fine on an Ubuntu 20.04 HWE kernel! (I also updated the kernel to 5.8.0-xx on my other 32-bit system, just serving files with Ubuntu 18.04, "just because.") But, that said, I can guarantee you nobody is shoving a brand-new PCI-E video card or some new TV tuner into a 486 or an Itanium!

There's something to be said about treating the kernel like a BSP "Board Support Product" (the term often used for embedded systems), once you have a kernel that supports every bit of hardware on the system and is feature complete for your use, it's nice from an aesthetic standpoint to know you can potentially install newer kernels, but kind of irrelevant from a practical standpoint; even if there's newer distro available (everything available for your CPU but the kernel)... which AFAIK there is not for 486 or Itanium, other that building something like "Linux From Scratch" and I'm not even sure if that's supported.... you generally CAN run a newer distro with older kernel!

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: An elephant in the room

"The generation(s) before you withstood viruses, wars and natural disasters with courage."

And masks. Flu of 1918-1919, people wore masks. Masks work, and the only people disputing the science of it are idiots. Yes, I'm calling you an idiot.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: An elephant in the room

"

The hospitals are very busy, but not using car parks for patients. You folks are being fed a line of propaganda BS from the very socialist BBC."

Don't know what news this guy's watching, but effectively parking lots ARE being used for patients here in the USA; not nationwide by any means but yes it's absolutely happening. There aren't like patient beds sitting out there, but the ambulances are having patients stuck in them for hours because there is not room to remove them and put them into the hospitals (which if anything is worse, since then the ambulance can't go help someone else if they need it.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: An elephant in the room

Under law, BBC is independent from the gov't. If you've seen "Yes, Minister" (you probably haven't), there's an episode or two there that humorously let you know there's still some influence; but the gov't does not run BBC in any meaningful way.

People are not worried about the president unilaterally using the nuclear football etc. based on anything from the BBC; this stuff with the nuclear football is widely presented to the public as the president pushing a button, the nukes launch (of course this is silly, even if it was having a machine launch the nukes with no verification, a button is not enough to tell how many to launch and what to launch them at); and since the description of even what it really looks like, what it does, and how it works in any sort of detail, are secret, there's no actual information to say "Well, no, here's how it really works." (I would assume like you do that it involves launch codes and humans in the loop, but there's not a document to point to to tell people "here, read this.")

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: An elephan"t in the room

"The President is the Commander-in-Chief, and no one has the power to legally disobey or not carry out any orders that he gives. "

In the wake of the Axios interview with nutjob Trump about 6 months ago -- where he said if he lost the election it was fraudulent, and when Jonathan Swan asked if he would cede power he made he clear he did not intend to (people claim surprise at the recent actions, but in this Axios interview he made it clear he'd use both legal methods and his MAGA supporters to try to hold onto power, and implied he'd use the military as well). In the wake of that, people did ask the military commanders if they would go along with Trump trying to use the military to hold power, and they said no. The replacement military heads are more Trump supporters to some extent, but they were also asked about this and made it clear they would not participate in a military coup.

What happens when a Chrome extension with 2m+ users changes hands, raises red flags, doesn't document updates? Let's find out

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Who still uses extensions in Chrome anyway?

Gotta admit I'm not too chuffed about all this -- I've been used to the limit on what I can run under Linux being simply resource contraints (i.e. due to slow CPU meaning some video encode would take a week, or low RAM meaning something would grind to a halt due to swapping), not due to "we're not building for your CPU any more."

But, I did read (with Ubuntu) that with 18.04, 10% were running 32-bit, and 10% of that 10% (i.e. 1%) actually needed 32-bit.. (the other 9% were running 32-bit Ubuntu on 64-bit systems, since the page then said something like "if you're not sure, get this version"... and possibly thinking the 32-bit version was more app-compatible, since the earlier 64-bit Windows versions did have a few compatibility problems with old apps. I think 16-bit and DOS apps.. I don't think later Windows versions fixed the compatibility, it's just people didn't use apps that old any more.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: They go after the older weaker members of the herd

Not to turn this into a Linux plug, but I have not had that problem with my Linux distros, besides there being free and open source versions of almost everything... the commercial softwares that accumulate extra junk in the Windows version installer, the Linux version has zero additional software. Strictly speaking, there's no technical reason for this, they seem to have just de-facto decided that Windows users will put up with it while Linux users will not.

Even the infamous RealPlayer from years past, which I heard got quite bad in the Windows version (i.e. lots of extra software, and intentionally confusing stuff like you go and uncheck all the boxes, but a few unchecking means you *do* install the extra software), the Linux version was RealPlayer and only RealPlayer up to the end.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Hmm

Yes, this is the very awkward part here, CNN for example is showing the direct comparison between the large amounts of troops around federal monuments during peaceful BLM (Black Lives Matter) protests earlier this year, the entire DC National Guard was called out ahead of time then; the amounts of tear gas used, the arrests; don't forget about the violence against peaceful protestors who were out 100% legally, because nutjob Trump could not wait 10 minutes for curfew to be photographed in front a church (at which point the tactics used would still not have been justified but at least they could say they were technically violating curfew, rather than 100% legal protestors being roughed up and gassed.) Contrast to having violent insurrections breaking into federal buildings -- and not monuments, in-use buildings; some armed, with the intent on destruction and disrupting the election process; no action taken after curfew, very little tear gas used at all, they just kind of eventually pretty much escorted people out, astonishingly few arrests. At least the FBI is going to try to track these people down and arrest them (I assume the ones that were in the building; the ones that stayed out on the lawn, I don't agree with but I'd view as legitimate protestors.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

What's amazing to me

What's amazing to me is, nutjob Trump SAID, 6 months ago in an interview on Axios, that he'd agree with the election results unless they went against him, but if they went against him they must be fraudulent, and he would have his supporters (meaning both political supporters and the MAGA ones) prevent transfer of power. I mean, both running for office and in office, again and again he'd say something that sounds unbelievable, like the ramblings of a lunatic (not the lies and conspiracy theories, the "if this happens, then I'm going to do this" type statements); people would not take what he said seriously because of how off-the-wall it sounded; he'd do exactly what he said he'd do... next time he'd say something unbelievable, people would be back to not believing it.

A note on Trump's constant repetitions of lies... his book "The Art of the Deal", dealt more with how to be deceptive and basically trick people into getting the deal you want more than anything. One of the tricks was that if someone repeats a lie long enough, that they'll get whoever they are doing business with to believe it, and it will then become the truth (so you can screw over your business partners). When this was brought up early in his campaign, I assumed it was figurative (screw over your business partner by claiming a building is worth 100 grand more than it is until they believe it and it's then "truth"..), took until later in his campaign before I realized he's totally mentally ill and really does think by repeating a lie he wants to be true he thinks he can make it true.

What I think is amazing about this is this block of supporters that believe every single verifiably false and fraudulent statement nutjob Trump tells them to.. they think he tells the truth about everything, and literally every news source on the planet lies whenever it disagrees with nutjob Trump's false claims; US news because (according to these people) every US news agency that disagrees with nutjob Trump's false statements are "liberal" (I know it makes zero sense, but these are not sensible people), and foreign news... well, they don't watch it anyway, but they're usually also extreme xenophobes so ... oh I don't even know what the excuse is on this one, there's no logic behind this shit anyway. Even the stuff where Trump's on tape saying something rude, he'll claim he didn't say it, these supporters can be shown the clip of him saying whatever, the clip of nutjob Trump saying "I did not say that", and they will seriously believe he did not say that, like the ultimate 1984 doublethink. (1 round of this happening, with the supporters claiming the clip was fabricated... it was from the Apprentice, so then they claimed it had been edited... then people found 10 year old DVR and tape recordings of the original airing, at which point the supporters STILL somehow claimed that... I don't know, that his opponents had like time travelled I guess?.. I don't even know what they thought then, but it was still not enough to convince them he said what he said.)

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yep

Well, given that Facebook bought them in 2014, and by 2016 had already been fined by UK and Germany (possibly among others) for slurping people's data*, not surprised at all. They really are just clarifying what they were already doing without properly disclosing it.

*Per the articles from 2016, they had a very well hidden, time-limited, one-time-use-only, opt-out, fined because of how hard it was to find and because in countries that care about privacy, slurping data from people that signed up for a service that didn't do it to begin with requires an opt-in not an opt-out.

3G ain’t totally dead yet: Verizon pushes back cut-off plans to some unspecified future date

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not really

"Actually, I'm sure the *real* truth, this being Verizon and all, is this: Verizon doesn't / didn't want / actually spend the money to upgrade their complete nationwide system. There are coverage gaps in the 4G, and therefore most certainly the 5G, network. Telling the world you're killing off 3G essentially cuts off the customers in those areas."

Nope, they finished their 4G rollout (coverage-wise) over 5 years ago, in present day their LTE coverage actually exceeds the coverage of their 3G network. The only spots you'd see 3G/1x now -- fringe coverage, where it might show 1x but it's not strong enough to use (I've seen this), off hiking in some hills... you move to a hair better signal and it flips back to 4G LTE. And if someone still has a 3G network extender (this connects to house wifi or ethernet and broadcasts a 3G signal).. so households with this would need a 4G extender but those have been out for years and are under $200 (perhaps Verizon "should" at least give a discount on the extender but they probably won't.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not really urgent

Not really that urgent -- CDMA 1x (for voice, text, slow speed data -- 2G) uses a 1.25mhz channel, and EVDO (3G -- but does not support voice, thus still having 2G *and* 3G) uses a 1.25mhz channel, so you're only losing 2.5mhz of spectrum keeping it up and running. Equipment availability would be the main thing... but I'm not sure if they're actually still running 2G/3G equipment, or just using their fancy software defined radios (used for 4G & 5G) to also run 2G and 3G... they don't really talk about it, but these software defined radios do support CDMA, EVDO, GSM, UMTS/HSPA, etc, since it's all software.

Verizon had already been claiming they were shutting down 2G/3G effective January 1, 2021 FOR REGULAR USERS, but keep it up until December 31 2022 for some long-term non-4G alarm system contracts. So I'm not that surprised, it'd be silly to have to keep it running anyway but artificially block users from it.

The other good reason to delay, it appears (despite being given notice 3 years ago, 2 years ago, a year ago, 9 months ago, 6 months ago, and 3 months ago that their phones would become a paper weight), people were rushing to try to buy replacement phones within the last 2 weeks, so some had nothing to buy. My dad has a VoLTE-capable flip phone (which I think is silly but whatever), it was like $120 or so a year or two ago.... last week they were going for $250 USED!!!

Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Too bad!

Too bad! Qt has always had free and commercial releases, but I know I'm not interested in contributing patches to a project that is going to wait until the code is in pretty good shape (due to contributed patches), then close that branch off, expecting people to help fix up the next unstable branch (which will then be closed off once it's in good shape.)

That said... Qt has a big market in in-car entertainment systems, embedded systems, and so on, so I'm sure they'll do fine on their own.

Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 8: No boundaries were pushed in the making of this laptop – and that's OK

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Pricey!

Looked great until I got to the price. I can't see plunking down like $2000 on a computer. Oh well.

$900bn coronavirus stimulus bill includes $600 for most Americans, $50 in monthly internet subsidies, $1.9bn to help rid the US of Huawei kit

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Our state made good use of that!

Our fine state of Iowa made fine use of the Covid relief funds they received! They spend it on non-Covid-related IT spending. Not even good spending, they blew it on some vague cloud services contract for possible future use. Not even under the table, the governor basically bragged about how clever they were to figure out a way to divert the funds.

edit: Oof, didn't realize this article was almost a week old! Oh well.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

$1.9 billion

The $1.9 billion of course doesn't have anything to do with Coronavirus... but, the funding was "needed" (well, needed if you insist on rip and replacing Huawei and ZTE hardware.)

This whole thing is really a Nutjob Trump-style clusterfuck... the FCC began pushing on the wireless internet providers (these are not cell phone companies selling hotspot plans, these are the ones that in days of yore would have been running a Motorola Canopy system or the like.. a few maybe still do) to upgrade their speeds since so many people were at home and needed better connectivity; the wireless internet providers by then were largely using newer site equipment and CPE (customer premises equipment) from... you guessed it... Huawei and ZTE. These are software defined radio systems, just like the newer cell phone tower hardware, so they planned to get software updates from Huawei and ZTE to roughly double the speed & capacity of these systems using 5G-like technologies; but, when it was made clear their gear was not welcome in the US, Huawei and ZTE cut off all support and software updates. In the vague Trump-like manner, the administration vaguely implied if these wireless ISPs took out loans or whatever to rip and replace right away, that they would be at least partially reimbursed out of that $1 billion later... well, that's not how it was set up, it was set up to apply for money THEN rip and replace... so the wireless ISPs that ripped and replaced when they were supposed to were completely screwed over. I suppose this $1.9 billion is (maybe.. but again, Trumps still in office so who knows) to give them what they were promised.

I won't place blame on the FCC for this one... in the US, you've got the "big 3" cellular companies (AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, who just bought Sprint) and in many areas an additional local carrier; none of the big 3 (formerly 4) used ANY Huawei/ZTE hardware, a few of the local carriers did. And Wireless ISPS would be the ONLY other thing using them, and apparently many used them heavily... so somehow, the administration was incompetent enough to focus 100% on local cell companies and totally ignore the situation with the wireless ISPs, and not coordinate anything whatsoever with the FCC.

Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Certification renewals to be free ... but annual

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Sounds OK to me

Sounds OK to me. Unlike Linux, where (other than systemd steadily borging things that have been the same for decades), it kind of builds on that UNIX tradition, and the newer tools build on that, and so on; a UNIX admin really could probably warp to present day from like 1990 and not have too much trouble finding their way around (and even administrating) a modern-day Linux box; don't get me wrong, the modern user can point out "Hey, there's an easier way to do this now" (the 1990-era user will be using command line tools, where there's now also GUI tools that under the hood are using the same command line tools to actually get the job done).

Windows? They love to move things around, change how things work (both internally and in terms of setting them up), deprecate features, sometimes without a full replacement in place, and so on (OK, I'll phrase it positively.. they love to "innovate"), so I do think a 1-year recert makes sense, and free instruction to keep people up to date is nice.

Stony-faced Google drags Android Things behind the cowshed. Two shots ring out

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"I've wondered does Google pay TV makers and eink reader makers and auto systems money to use Android, or is it just some manager in a company thinks it's a better idea than vanilla Linux?"

I don't know, but I think it's usually some manager. I think in fantasy-land, they see all those apps that are on the phone, and think Hey! Look at all those free apps, wouldn't it be nice to have some of those on the eink reader or (god forbid) auto system. (Of course, the answer to that question is "no, it wouldn't be nice", and secondly that a lot of those free apps are not going to be free when they are being commercially embedded into your product, as opposed to an individual downloading them through Play Store.)

As for this Android IoT thing... in addition to Linux, and (I guess if you're twisted) that Win10 IoT thing or whatever, I would guess (given the product getting the axe is apparently slimmed down Android) you could probably get some variant of LineageOS (formerly CyanogenMod) on there. (In general, they specialize in porting newer android versions to phones that the phone developer has dropped support for... so, lazycorp only shipped Android 7 for your phone? Here, put on LineageOS equivalent to Android 9, enjoy! So I assume, if there was any demand whatsoever, they could probably ship the Android iot-style version too.)

HP bows to pressure, reinstates free monthly ink plan... for existing customers

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Greasy. Double greasy.

Kind of greasy to offer a free service for the life of the printer, then rescind it. But, I do see companies offer a free service, realize it's going to cost them, then rescind it all the time; and in this case, it is costing real money when they have to send out ink (as opposed to some free services where the cost is the 0 incremental cost of running some services on a server that's already there.)

But auto-enrolling in a pay plan? GREEEAASY. I think at least in the state I live in, this is also illegal.

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Duh...

Beat me to it... I was going to say "apparently Windows doesn't have /dev/random" 8-)

End-to-end encryption? In Android's default messaging app? Don't worry, nobody else noticed either

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Targeted how?

So, do tell, if my RCS communications are end-to-end encrypted, what are they going to use to target targeted ads? Second, at least in US, virtually all sms advertising is illegal, and I doubt the courts will accept some "well, yes, it appeared in the text app but technically it's RCS not SMS carrying the text." The disadvantage (for them) from getting this baked in as a text replacement rather than yet another messaging app.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver ran 32-bit Windows Intel binary on macOS on Arm CPU emulating x86 – and nobody died

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yes and no, and ARM chromebook

Yes and no -- yes you do have this kind of DRM on the Mac, the fanbois saying they don't... I don't know why they're saying this. I have a MacOS VM, and it sure does have some DRM involved (signed binaries). That said... it's not like on some stock iphone or something where it's fully blocked. You can download an unsigned app, double click on it, it will not run, it says it's not signed and does not let you run it from that dialog box. But right click on the app and pick "open", then it gives a mild warning about it being unsigned and you can go ahead and install and run. (My guess is that this is stuck into the macos GUI and does not apply at all to UNIX-style running homebrew etc. to add UNIX apps to the system.)

Regarding CrossOver wine, the reason it's not 64-bit windows intel binaries running is (per Wine FAQ) due to an ABI incompatibility; windows guarantees some particular 64-bit register is not overwritten, macos does not make this guarantee so any app that assumes this register will not be clobbered will not work.

Interestingly, on this Chromebook I used (Acer Chromebook 13, a Nvidia Tegra K1 -- 2.1ghz quad-core ARM + 1 low-power core, and video about equal to a GTX 650, including working CUDA.) I threw Ubuntu onto that off an SDCard (16.04, but I got it upgraded to 18.04 with working nvidia drivers and CUDA still by holding back kernel and about a dozen interlocking xorg packages). Under qemu, you could actually run 32-bit and 64-bit Windows apps -- I installed qemu-static-x86-64, added i386 and x86-64 architectures for ubuntu packages, installed wine and it pulled in all the i386 (for 32-bit windows apps) and amd64 libs and stuff, installed it, and I could run some Windows apps -- both 32-bit and 64-bit, but the problem being only single-threaded apps -- due to ARM having weaker memory consistency than x86-64 and qemu not dealing with it at least then, multi-threaded apps did not work at all. Also ran a (binary-only .deb) driver for this canon printer that worked a treat through it (spent about 2-3 seconds CPU time per page, but that's way faster than the printer anyway), and had android devleopment toolkit running (mostly java, but the x86-64 helper apps it runs during builds and stuff worked fine, these miscellaneous apps only added about 5-10 seconds to a 10 minute build process for a rather chunky app.)

America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Why it occurred?

I'm no fan of nutjob Trump, but unfortunately this is not unusual and probably can't be blamed on him, see my other post.

Effectively, at least for the radio astronomy sites, NSF sites get lavish initial fundings, it's state of the art and there's plenty of spare parts. But after that, in business terms they effectively get funding for opex (operating expenditures) that cover operations and they did good inspection and maintenance; but near-zero capex (capital expenditures) so if anything out-of-the-ordinary needed repair, no money to do it; no money for spares, so (even with them doing board-level repair to repair lightning-blasted components, blown caps, etc. to preserve spares) they were down to 1-2 spares for some boards and such (not per-site, total among about a dozen sites). The NRAO site I've been to, it was installed in 1985, and it's state-of-the-art 1985-era equipment, so it's simply wearing out.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Other dishes

I have been to one of the NRAO radio observatory sites; it was installed in the mid-1980s. The dish has a single railroad rail style thing at the base on a several foot tall concrete "wall", with several wheels running on it, these wheels are then powered to rotate the dish. Last I was there, they'd been reporting for several years that the cement under some sections of the rail had crumbled away, the railroad rail was sagging 1/2" to 1" from the weight when the wheel was over these sections, at which point of course the electric motor was drawing extra current, extra wear on the motor bearings, and so on. No budget even for just slapping some concrete under this thing.

They were running the original 1985-era hardware (due to lack of funds for upgrades), in some cases down to having 1 or 2 spares left for some of the equipment that gets damaged by lightning strikes and such (1-2 total among about a dozen sites, not 1-2 per site...) To maintain the spares inventory, my friend (who is now retired) was regularly giving his voltmeter a real workout and replacing components with his soldering iron. They were still running some VMEbus hardware (with the problem being that Motorola sold their spares supply some years back, and the purchasers marked up the remaining equipment by about 10-fold, so now far out of budget for them to buy any remaining bits of this they needed), there was still a PC/XT up there running as a replacement for a dead VT-100. Last I know, they were still running everything to reel-to-reel tape and mailing it to the central office; to their misfortune, they replaced the tape-based functionality with a stack of IBM Deskstars, it turned out it was when all those faulty Deskstars came out; no budget to buy a second set of drives, so they went back to reel-to-reel tape.

Last time I was there (a few years back) I was like "Hey, you got some new hardware!"... nope, it was not for the dish, it was a USGS-run environmental sensor that got their in-building computer upgraded.

It's unfortunate, because these NRAO-sites truly are state-of-the-art (in so far as the newer equipment would not have improved RF performance over what they had) but NSF has the most shoestring of budgets for these places, in normal business terms they have just enough to cover opex (operating expenses) but zero for capex (capital expenses, i.e. maintenance and replacing hardware that's worn out.)