Posts by RIBrsiq 364 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2009
"[T]he rules were changed to stop researchers wasting their time on minor bugs".
This is not, in and of itself, unreasonable.
But the right thing to do would be pay for all the bugs already submitted that fall under the old rules. Minor amounts of cash, as the bugs are, but pay *something* to maintain good well.
>> on a company owned work computer there's very little right to privacy
>> Because it's their /job/ to work out if the data that was significant enough to back up but has since been deleted from the system
You are, of course, both right.
Most of what I wrote is intended for the general case of "you'll never guess what I found on this [laptop/PC/mobile] once brought in to be fixed!". Those guys/gals I absolutely abhor: if someone trusts you with their secrets -- even if inadvertently -- try to act just a little trustworthy.
But that really makes my posts somewhat off-topic, doesn't it...?
>> Recently a colleague of mine passed away from a serious bicycle accident, and a close friend of his asked if I could look and see if he might've had some photos they could use at his funeral on his laptop.
Sorry for your loss, first.
Second, surely it's obvious that it's not the same when one has explicit permission, no? Or if, say, it's a found laptop which's owner one is trying to determine, etc. But even then I personally would expect the person with the unfortunate task of going through the files to have the tact to not blab (or complain) about anything they see...
>> 1) Natural human curiosity sometimes. You know, the sort of enquiring attitude that enables problem solving and development of tech skills.
Poking in other people's files is not curiosity. Look it up, sometime. I believe you'll find the actual word you were looking for is "nosiness".
While you have your dictionary handy, there is this other concept you should probably also lookup: privacy, respect thereof.
>> 2) Because if you're going to free up space or wipe drives, it is sensible to do a dip check on what is about to be nuked.
And why would anyone but whoever owns the files make any decisions regarding what to keep or not? Either get authorization to delete everything, or demand enough disk space to backup it up. It's the only way to avoid "yes, but you know I use [XYZ] and should have kept its files for me!" and similar situations. Not to mention that it's the only way to get stuff done in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.
"...don't look at them".
Thank you for pointing out the obvious.
I always wonder about this. You see, on all machines I ever used, images, videos and other files never spontaneously open themselves! So why do so many tech support people seem to have this issue?
Needless to say, all types of autoplay, thumbnails or anything similar should be disabled. Especially on a machine one's using to poke files that almost certainly contain bio-hazards of various types.
"what seems almost a Wil-E-Coyote assemblage".
In fact, the main CAD package they use is a copy of The Incredible Machine...
More seriously: yes, I am right there with you.
Whenever I take a step back and look at how incredible "everyday" stuff is, I almost get vertigo. Then I remember that at some point in time, a flint edge probably was just as -- hah! -- cutting-edge and that at some point in the future, our toys will probably seem just as primitive and cry myself to sleep.
"Canonical is naïve to think they can commit this violation and get away with it. Oracle's lawyers will tear them into pieces".
This.
I don't think it would matter even if they win in the end because Oracle have the resources to bleed them dry in the process.
While it's been a while since I used Ubuntu directly, I do use distros derived from theirs. And, anyway, diversity is a good thing to maintain regardless. So I would very much not like to see them buried under a huge pile of legalese.
"I'm ashamed to say this took a good week and two engineers to work out,"
Eh...? Actual programmers were they? Or civil engineers or what have you?
Anyway, thanks for making me feel good about spotting the issue as soon as I read the relevant code even almost... 15 years, I think it's been...? God $deity! But time flies!!... since I last actually wrote any code.
"Seriously, this is a pretty specific nuclear option, in which the user has jumped through 3 separate hoops to make it unsafe".
...and if the user didn't fully intend to nuke the whole file system, you'd be perfectly right.
But they probably *did* intend to nuke the file system, and *only* the file system. Not the firmware.
"Which Windows also does".
In what way is that relevant to how Linux does things...?
Besides, AFAIK, Windows does not mount the firmware under the FS. If it does, I would really appreciate knowing where to, so as to avoid mishaps.
"The entire /cat directory for one, and the entire /sys for another. Deleting these is... bad".
Not if one's wiping the system anyway.
I am all for allowing root and root-like users to brick the system they're running on, if the user so chooses. "With great power..." and so on, you know. But... if the user so chooses.
Mounting bits of the firmware in obscure places in the filesystem tree cannot be the best way to handle things, surely...?
I mean when you see "rm -rf /", what do you think that will do, if someone ran up to you in the street and asked you? "Wipe all disks" would be what comes to my mind and, I am willing to bet, the minds of most people who should know this stuff.
Only retroactively would I think that maybe the FS tree might have held bits of the system that aren't actually on disks.
And why take this risk...? So some script can pipe stuff into firmware variables directly? Who thought this is a good idea, anyway? Madness!
@James 51:
Yes, we should. We *always* should.
One of the things we "should", for example, is find out exactly why and how sickle cell helps against malaria and how we can have the same effect *without* the whole "anaemia" bit, which is a bummer.
We should also completely eliminate malaria, of course.
On a larger scale: of course we don't understand all the ramifications of what gene editing will do! But that's rather the whole point, really: we never will if we do not allow smart people to fiddle with things and find out what they do and how they do the things that they do.
Maybe later we will decide that some things should not be done. But first we need to find out exactly what can be done and what effects it will have. Preferably in a regulated and controlled environment out in the open where everyone can see it, understand it and then discuss it somewhat intelligently.
As it is, the genome seems filled with random useless junk left over from all that evolution. I am sure some of it will turn out not to be so useless after all. But I am also sure that other bits will turn out to be worse than useless and we'll decide to eradicate *those* bits. But first we need to understand.
I speak for no one else, but my job doesn't give meaning to my existence. It's the thing I do to get paid and pay the bills.
Now, what I would like to do is connected to the job I do, so I am lucky that way. I know that others are luckier in that what they like to do is precisely the job they do. But I also know that for most the overlap is less than in my case.
What am I getting at...? Well: I, for one, would not mind switching to an economy of plenty where money is no more and everyone does what they want to do because all the basic stuff is all done by machines.
Being unemployed is not the problem, you see. Being unpaid is. At least if one has bills to pay.
@JimC
That's possible, yes.
But what is probable, given our understanding of the universe, is that if you keep waiting for FTL then you'll never leave.
Besides, if a ship with colonists from any part of the world 300 years ago were to sail into any port on the planet, wouldn't both humanity and the lost colonists be better off for it...?
"Hence, its likely that any such endeavour would not get any results in the lifetime of those that sent it. That would make it a fairly hard sell to get funding".
Not necessarily.
Consider the situation faced by Majikthise and Vroomfondel when Deep Thought tells them how long it would take to calculate the Answer.
Admittedly, it would take a politician more talented than the common variety to properly spin things.
More practically, while the results of the expedition -- if any -- will only be learned by future generations -- if any -- the engineering developed to pull something like this off would be available for use immediately.
"Hypervisors aren't inherently safe, even if they aim to be".
All code is inherently buggy, yes.
Hell, even HW is buggy:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/intel-skylake-bug-causes-pcs-to-freeze-during-complex-workloads/
So I guess there's a case to be made for "defence in depth" for Important Stuff™. But probably not applicable for most workloads, I think.
I find that I need a "proceed with caution" icon, as this is a bit outside my area of expertise and thus what I am about to write might be less sage wisdom and more senseless drivel.
Well, more so than usual, anyway:
It seems to me that if a VM is running only a single application anyway, then a DOS-like approach might not be so senseless, if it gives a performance boost and/or makes life easier for the application and/or the OS and their developers. After all, it's now the hypervisor that's separating the different VMs and their applications, protecting the system (IE, the virtualization host and all the different running VMs) from those that misbehave.
@Stuart 22:
Thank you, kind Sir.
Your valiant efforts protecting the vulnerable from being ruthlessly fleeced are duly noted and appreciated. I will try to keep your idea in mind, should a similar opportunity arise... Might pretend I still have a DESQView installation and see how that goes.
And KDE is indeed rather nice.
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