Re: Cynical but accurate
Except that you get a different answer each time. You'd be quicker just calling rand() directly.
8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
But there may be a thousand times as many ground stations as satellites. How many drones were you planning on using? How many targets, one at a time, are you planning to throw expensive precision-guided munitions at?
No. I think the chinese analysts have got this one right. Starlink-like systems make existing anti-satellite weapons obsolete.
"and is never going to be updated"
This is the point made at the end of the article. If you tell programmers for 40 years that .0 is reserved (and can be used to identify a network) then they will build that into their code. Likewise with 0/8 and 127/8. I've certainly written code that classifies addresses as multicast or node-scope based on the numbering. In fact, I'm not aware of any other way to perform such a classification, so I'm not even sorry.
"who's idea of fun is [...] to test a keyboard and mouse-less OS controlled by throwing M&Ms against a charged metal plate..."
But that *was* fun, right up until some bastard upstream recompiled libmetalplate.so to use a conflicting version of libplate.so and I had to mount the root filesystem in a different system in order to pin the package versions.
"Mr Average needs an OS which just works, doesn't get in the way, and is easy (for a normal person) to find support for."
This. Specifically the third requirement, despite the fact that Windows increasingly doesn't actually deliver on that front. No-one is going to make the jump unless they have a promise from an experienced friend that they will hand-hold and fix problems. With a decent distro, that support will not be a burden long-term, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can learn Linux from the interwebs painlessly.
Possibly a fourth requirement is to have a second computer (permanently on hand) that you can use to fix the first one. Most geeks take that for granted and most normal people don't have it.
Sounds a lot like you need to run that "game" (that you downloaded from a dodgy web site) as an admin. If so, I hardly think it counts as a hole. I could "inject" malware into crontab on a Linux system if I had the privileges. It's what the damn thing is designed for!
It is fun to see different examples of the mischief that people can get up to once they've taken over your system and it gives us more examples to use to convince our friends that they really shouldn't be running anything as admin if they can possibly avoid it, and certainly not if they've got it from a "helpful" site that meant they didn't have to pay for it. But it is hardly news.
drill rt.com @8.8.8.8 yields 91.215.41.4
drill rt.com @217.169.20.20 yields 0.0.0.0
The former is Google's service. The latter is Andrews & Arnold, an ISP in the UK that has traditionally taken a dim view of censorship (see https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/ and skip down to "An unfiltered Internet connection"). A&A's boss had a few things to say on the subject in this article -> https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/04/russia-sanctions-add-shock-internet-censorship-twist-for-uk-isps.html. That article concludes:
"UPDATE 6th May 2022
Ofcom and the UK Sanctions List appear to have confirmed that the first block list domains are for rt.com, sputniknews.com and rossiyasegodnya.com. Most ISPs will be implementing this via a basic DNS level block, which is usually the simplest approach."
So yes, we're being censored.
Assuming that they gave their assistance for free, that doesn't constitute "doing business" in the UK. Then again, even if the statement is true this judgement is still a problem if they ever want to start (*) doing business in the UK.
(* Or restart. I note the phrase "at this time" and wonder if ClearView have done business in the UK in the past.)
I dunno. How many words do you need? As the article states, the interpretation of that First Amendment has been pretty consistent over the years and the experts seem frankly rather surprised that Texas is trying it on.
Oh, and the 231 years is irrelevant. "Thou shalt not commit murder." is rather older and has simply been translated into almost (?) every human language because we haven't actually changed our minds about this in the last 5,000 years.
" When I kindly informed him that a new laptop would be with him in just a few hours, he was furious!"
I suspect that if you had delayed the phone call for the few hours and said "It will be with you in a few minutes." then you'd have been more popular. You and I both know that this would have been poorer customer service, but he is a jerk and so probably doesn't see the world the way we do.
Aside from the question of whether it is a good idea or not, is it actually possible?
If there is a way of blocking voices from particular geographical regions then I'm sure many people would be interested . For example, they could restrict the unwanted communications to their own country (where they can sue them if they cross the line separating "noise" from "abuse"). While that might be counter-productive for companies that trade internationally, or individuals with foreign friends and relatives, there are an awful lot of businesses and people whose communications are entirely intra-national. With a little bit of allow-listing, nearly everyone would fit into this category.
In practice, however, I suspect that the people we don't want to hear from are *exactly* the ones who would find it fairly easy to circumvent any attempted ban.
It would seem to me, then, that targetting the (relatively small number of) bullet-proof hosts and making them legally liable for their content would be more effective than trying to target the (relatively large number of) law-abiding internet users who just happen to have a valid reason to encrypt their personal finances and private communications.
Funnily enough, this is almost the same as the solution to the problem of "anti-social media". You make the internet companies legally liable for what they publish on their site. If they want to be exempt, they need to say who the original author is and produce credible evidence that they can stop that person from using the service in future under either the same or a different identity.
Right now, so much of the internet is just making cash out of facilitating ... "something, don't know what, don't care, as long as it keeps generating cash for me".
It's also worth noting that, historically, it has always been beyond the capacity of governments to snoop on the conversations of private citizens, even if it was legal. Despite that, they've been trying for centuries and the result is an accumulation of legal (and in some cases constitutional) protection of such conversations.
Proposals like this are NOT an attempt to "fix a problem that has arison recently, with technology". They are an attempt to create a more over-bearing government than has ever existed in human history. We have no prior experience to inform us of how badly this might turn out. The East German experience is one clue. Modern China is another. I find neither encouraging.
Yes. Both UK and US politicians are regularly criticised by their own civil servants and security experts for hiding policy discussions in secure channels where historians won't be able to read them, in contravention of existing laws. They are already breaking the law and now they want to pass more draconian ones for the rest of us.
(No idea if any other country has problems with this. I expect they do.)
I wouldn't worry too much about a deputy. He (and I assume it is a he) is the deputy because he isn't Putin and has no aptitude for the task of becoming Putin. If Putin goes, the field is clear for just about anyone who is ambitious and ruthless. They don't have to be insane and, if they want the army's support, being sane enough to do a reverse ferret on the Ukrainian debacle might just be the necessary qualification for power.
The current asking price is roughly 15-years-worth of profits. Unless he can make Twitter *more* profitable, not less, this is purely a vanity play for him. However, once Elon's "anything goes" policy takes effect, he'll be paying out loads in legal fees and fines just to keep the show on the road, and advertisers will think twice about associating themselves with a toxic brand. If I were a shareholder, I'd be looking to cash out at the top of the market and invest somewhere else.
Imagine a Linux system where /etc was a mount of a filesystem type optimised for lots of small files. In essence, that's the registry.
Would that be so awful? Clearly not. Would people blame every configuration error on the underlying filesystem, rather than the end-user who wrote the wrong values into a file? Clearly.
"Re. Wine... inevitably some stuff will be flaky. Windows in a VM might work out better, if feasible, but I guess that may be a bigger learning curve."
I'd say that Windows in a VM is such a shallow learning curve that you might end up with users doing all of their work in that Windows VM, negating most of the benefits of switcing to Linux.
And if your Exchange admin has switched off the IMAP support (*) then you can still use middleware like owl. (https://www.beonex.com/owl/)
(* Do MS say this is a security risk? Is it somehow "best practice" at Redmond to ignore the open standard in favour of a lock-in protocol? Who knows...)
"When MS has more patches than all the other patch sources listed in TFA *combined*, what does that say about their ability to write code that *doesn't* suck sweaty monkey nuts?"
Nothing at all, since the article is about Patch Tuesday, which is a Microsoft-specific thing, even if a handful of other vendors have elected to try to hide their own mistakes under its cover.