Posts by Version 1.0 5416 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
"... Narayen's compensation was 281 times that of the median employee..."
But in fact he's just making most employees work 281 times harder than he does. If you're an Adobe user and have a problem will he help? You're told to search the Internet for answers, so you need to do the work yourself ... that will give him a little ($7m) more next year.
I've been there just as the plane was about to land in North Carolina, "sudden case of climb, turn, full power to the engines while us passengers cling onto the seats in front of us wondering WTF is going on!!" and then the pilot said, "Sorry about the sudden turn, I saw a tornado crossing the runway as we headed in" - I have a lot more trust in a pilot than an autopilot.
If you visit an Instagram account then they will have all your details ... I think most people are aware that this is how it works these days, but maybe they will be looking at global data collections and saying, "Oh look, this person never visits our social media accounts so they must be up to something to make sure we don't collect their data, we need to investigate..."
Then let's ban clothing everywhere too - and maybe force all cars, buses, and airplanes to use the Wonder Woman "invisible" plane mechanism. If everything should be accessible to the police then maybe even politicians would have to tell everyone all the companies they are working for and how many wives and kids they have ...
Keep adding up all these results and banning encryption will be banned.
A while back I posted on a NAS community support page that I was having a problem with a NAS. Since then I see an Ad at the bottom of all El Reg storied that says "Sponsored: Protect and recover your NAS and unstructured data" - No, I'm not upset about this because it might just be a coincidence and if it's not then this is just the way things go and hopefully El Reg is getting a little payment every time I visit.
I never had any problems when DEC sent out updates, you couldn't lose an RL02 under a rack-mount PDP-11/23 ... but the DEC updates were simply and easy, instead of sending out complete set of new program images they just sent out the diff files so the updates are fast and easy to install. But the weird thing was, I used RSX11M and installed it for all our customers for years and never saw a operating system bug cause any end-user problems - the icon refers to the OS, not me.
Upgrading to Windows 10 for free, or buying support for Windows 7? The problem is that Windows 7 extended support is limited, although that does means that your operating system "features" don't keep changing, so applications normally keep working.
"The big difference between software for money and software for free is that software for money usually costs a lot less." - Brendan Behan (updated for the modern world).
They don't run a lot of the modern privacy theft applications - I've got a few Vista laptops that I've been using for specific tasks and jobs for years now - they work great and don't get to hang up for 10-20 minutes while Windows 10 updates with new "user" features every month or two. Just turn them on and they work great. Sure, I wouldn't go browsing the Internet with them but for day to day use they are so much easier to use than Windows 10.
Sure, free software used to be written to help people do things - but these days "free" software serves the users advertisements, sells their data, and occasionally cracks their wallets if the "free" access is a result of someone hacking the registration. I've got a few free applications out there that people use but they were all written back in the old days to help people.
If I was trying to fund their replacements today then the corporate management would be telling me to harvest user data.
It’s not that Perl programmers are idiots, it’s that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done - Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp about 30 years ago.
This is normal, we've seen these arguments and comments for years, I can remember thinking that FORTRAN sucked ... because I was happier writing 8080 assembler but when I started to work with people writing FORTRAN instead of being taught it, I changed my view but wrote everything in Pascal and Modula-2 - but these days people say they are all old and retired ... yes let's rewrite everything in Java ... no that's too old, lets move to Rust this week. And in a few years we'll hear all these comments about all the languages we use today.
The "Best Language" is just the one you are good at.
I'm pretty confident that Google stores and shares my phones location data all the time. I suspect that the NHS would be able to do this if they told Apple and Google that they were just using it to send users a few COVID-19 advertisements every time they browsed the Internet or used other apps.
When Java first appeared it was promoted as a useful language that could work anywhere ... just like a cup of coffee, something that everyone could use. That's the way we did things back in the 90's, everyone put an effort into making things work!
These days we're busy suing people for doing that sort of thing.
Trump chose the people who would vote for him, Amazon did the same thing. These days "voting" has become how the bastards in control maintain their control. Look at the US now, the Republicans are busy "fixing" Trumps problems by making it harder for their opponents to vote against him next time.
These days "democracy" has become a fight that you either win or lose.
This is like the old days of trying to write code that reads the keyboard as the user types by sampling the serial input... easy to do until the user presses the arrow keys to move the cursor around the text and the characters come faster than the routine is sampling and start getting dropped - what's the solution?
The standard solution was to increase the serial character sampling rate ... but the better solution was to move to an interrupt service routine - that always worked 100% whereas boosting the sample rate meant the CPU spent too much time waiting to a character as the user typed and dropped them occasionally.
Charge a fee per email and you will start getting invoices claiming that you have sent a 1000 emails last week and that you need to pay the invoice in bitcoin quickly otherwise you will be disconnected from the internet.
Adding little fees isn't going to stop anything, the internet is designed to always work, security was not an issue for years after the internet first appeared - it needs a complete redesign.
The great "feature" of COBOL is that you virtually never need to provide independent documentation of the code functions - it's so totally readable. Sure, you can create issues if you have problems but then just reread the code and it's normally completely obvious.
Mathematics has not changed since COBOL first appeared so it's still functional because 1+1 still equals 2.
A bitcoin money transfer takes less then 30 seconds, a wire-transfer takes about 5-7 days ... but converting your bitcoin into bank cash can take a while. The banks are busy tell everyone to signup for an on-line account because that's "money" but the reality is that online banking and crypt-currency are just electrons running around on the Internet.
It would be interesting to find my details in the Facebook dump because I've never had a Facebook account. I tried to sign up back in the early days - using my real name and personal details - but Facebook refused to open an account because my real name sounded like a fake name to them. After several attempts to create an account they told me that they told me that they would sue me if I tried to setup an account again.
I am so grateful to Facebook!
Microsoft launched MS-DOS by copying the CP/M interface - I'm not going to complain because it help me write a bunch of MS-DOS programs early on and Gary Kildall seemed to have no concern that they were copying his work, but that was decades ago and in those days we were all running around getting things working - with very little thought about lawsuits.
When someone has broken though your security (I'm not going keep saying "hacked") then you have to assume that everything may have been accessed, not just the couple of items that you eventually noticed after a while.
What does "accessed" mean, just one thing or everything? The only people who are certain are the ones who broke in.
Sure - the QNAP boxes seem to be pretty good, I've got nothing against them - I just think that bugs like this are unfortunately quite common. If I have to run anything on the Internet then I run it behind a firewall and isolated from the internal network to reduce the risks if it's hacked - I always assume that hacking to possible, I hope that it's not but I'm not going to risk thinking that it's not.
I do believe that with some decent precautions, your own NAS data is safer than cloud storage.
Turn the power switch off.
We don't know all details and history of this latest vulnerability but the chances are that it's a result of a feature being updated. Companies that build devices that connect to the Internet, normally invest effort in making them secure, but then features are added and independently updated - resulting is this type of problem.
The solution? If Google was making these devices then the NAS operating system would be updated every six months, and the NAS web server, DLNA server and other NAS apps would be updated few days like my Android phone updates. - I think that this guarantees Internet security, the bugs aren't fixed - they are just moved every few days to prevent hacking make it difficult to reliably hack the device.
My car has auto-lights, I never need to even think about it, they turn on and off automatically ... until I take the car in for service and they turn the lights off when it goes into the service area. So I pick the car up and drive around in the daylight for a day or two until I end up in the dark one morning, driving around and wondering why it's so dark outside ... LOL, and then suddenly remember why.
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