Posts by Kiwi

Re: Usernames

I recall reading of one where it was first 6 letters of the surname followed by first 2 of the first name.

A person named Megan Cummings (or similar) apparently had issues with that.

Paris, coz..

Re: Program Error Notification and Information System

Did it have a penetration testing component to it?

Re: Automatic User Name Creation

Now why would they want a politically correct password since passwords aren't to be shared and are "secret"?

'twas for a generator, not user-defined passwords (in my reading of the OP).

Not many people would like b1GAs5 for a 'random' password. (assuming, of course, the OP also included caps and letter/number swaps)

But both countries seem really concerned about online child abuse (when it comes to encryption) at this very moment in time, strange that.

Not really so strange. Tackling the at-home poverty - requires real work, with real and readily visible results or failures. Within a few weeks change would be noticeable, and within a year or two career-ending failures would easily be seen.

With the encryption stuff, no real work is necessary while the nasty evil tech companies are being mean and making things really really hard when you're being super serial about protecting the children (read in the voice of South Park version of Al Gore). For decades you can stretch it out as you target one individual after another. Real-world policing and changing political landscapes - and what material you push the press to publish and what you 'encourage' them to not publish (there are only so many minutes of news time, so many column inches etc) will mean people will start to think the terrorist threat is over since no more media publishing 'terrorist' stories every few minutes. For decades you have a mass of funding and easy ways to appear successful/hide the actual total failure. And if any one ever questions you then just trot out how they're supporting kiddy fiddlers/terrywrists etc etc.

Just look at the effectiveness of the whole 'carbon' nonsense (and a real-world example of the attacks on those who dare question will soon be immediately following my post no doubt :) )

Re: Forget the kiddies

I look forward to all the well-informed, courteous and adult and response to this post...

Please tell me where and when you're performing! I'd dearly love to see your comedy show, even if I have to sell all I have and all a few other people have for travel expenses!

Re: Sure.... why not?

for the sake of political fairness, dont forget the Mail Servers in Jarred and Ivanka's House

They don't count. They're good people and could only ever be doing stuff for good reasons, even if they're breaking the law and being utter hypocrites in the process. Hillary, on the other hand, is a milt-convicted criminal who is only free because of her political power which by her deviousness is stronger than President Trump's ability to keep his oft-repeated promises to "LOCK HER UP!".

(And if they ever were caught doing anything illegal, well there's that whole "presidential pardon" thing so while chump's in power it's probably not worth doing much about it)

Re: Sure.... why not?

If you're attempting to hack the US government you're going away if they catch you. And that might not be prison,,,

I dunno.. A "Here's a list of the emails sent from your wife's account, they will be published if I die or disappear within the next 20 years" could guarantee you a good life. Or a visit with a "therapist" who takes "acupuncture" to new extremes.

Of course... If you send that list from your ex-wife's email account, you'll never miss an alimony payment again...

Re: "Outside the digital world, none of us would accept the proposition that"

My kids watch SpongeBob...are you suggesting they're up to something?

I never would've made the link but.. At the time of writing (ie before my post corrupts the flow), immediately below your post was a post by "Bombastic Bob".

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Re: Data fetishists

...And at what age people are suddenly off their love-list?

Oh that's easy. Never.

The issue is which list is of value to them. They have lists based on age, race, gender, sexuality, income, class/ancestry and all sorts of things. Good and bad lists of each as well. Whether they like or hate you; whether you need compassion and support or a long sentence of hard labour - all depends on what sound-bite they want recorded today.

That's why the label manufacturing industry is so busy inventing new ones and not just retiring old ones but making out that those who use them after they're retired are bad people (eg how calling someone "differently abled" is now a big offence whereas just a few years back it was considered the proper PC term) - the more you know which lists you're on the better you can live, but the more confused you are....

Re: Forget the kiddies

I was told he joined the Met. Police, where I suspect he continued to be an arsehole.

Funny that.. A few of mine also went that way. Seems pretty common actually....

Re: Forget the kiddies

this is why parents need to teach their kids HOW TO FIGHT THE BULLIES and stand up to them and kick their sorry asses into silence and/or submission.

Not exactly easy when you're 6 or 7 and the youngest of them is 10 or 11 - and note the "them"

This reminds me of that "bully video" of the kid being harassed in an Australian school. Finally he was sick of it and he picked up the harassing kid (who was much smaller than him) and head-slammed him into the ground. All of the usual whiny socialists complained. I thought it was *PERFECT* and a *SOLID* example of how you deal with bullying.

Yeah rah rah rah beat them into a puddle rah rah rah use the same stuff on them as they did to you rah rah rah...

Beating one or two of them can help, true. But it doesn't always and sometimes is the worst thing long-term. Teach a kid that they can get their way with their fists and. well, I'm sure you're smart enough to work the rest out.

--> About the closest we have to a puddle...

Mint 17/18/19 with MATE, which keeps the Gnome2 look/feel I grew used to over the last 10 years or so

Devuan uses Mate. Not as "polished" as with Mint, but while I noticed it at first (going from Mint 17 to the Devuan before Ascii) I don't notice it now. A couple of panels (top and bottom) that autohide when I'm not doing stuff, and if the window borders/icons etc are something I'm noticing then there's a problem with the content of the page I'm looking at :)

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

Replaced a failed disk, updated fstab and ran mount. No errors, but the things not mounted.

While I slept, deep in the recesses of what passes for a brain, things moved and sparked and gradually a though was formed.

This morning I phoned a former customer - a nice old guy who retired from IT some time back but still plays with newer hardware. Of late he's been having an issue with removable drives and network stores showing up as present but when he tries to access them they're not there, he has to pull them out and plug them back in again.

We'd talked of this a while back but nothing in my knowledge of Linux would help.

I twigged overnight that the issue you refer to might be related, and asked him if he has sillyd on his system. He does.

Thanks Sir, we may now have a way to resolve the issue! (though I still suggested he may find Devuan or Slackware more to his tastes :) )

[I won't exactly repeat what he said when he was told it could be StupiD silently unmounting the hardware, and don't bother with your imagination as I don't think you'll match it either. Suffice to say he has experienced a lot of problems and some actual physical pain (has bad arthritis, largely bed-ridden, this fault has meant he's had to get up at times when he's been too sore to do so), and wasted a lot of time faffing around with something not only broken in a StupiD way, but so idiotically designed that it doesn't even report an error in a sensible place/manner!]

Re: Fine for a stand-alone machine, but...

Although, now I've written that, maybe he is on to something?

FTFY

"Oh FFS seriously, the risk of snarfing decrypt key from memory from a suspended laptop, really?"

If it's a risk just shut down instead of suspending. Not even possible to insult it as a first world problem.

You may've just hit the nail on the head.

From text either here or in a thread linked through posts here, I understand that systemd-encrufted machines/VMs have trouble shutting down, especially when network shares are involved?

Perhaps pottything is scared to shut his machine down lest he be reminded just how foul his offerings are?

#sogladImovedtoDevuan

Who the hell runs Linux on a laptop?

Me.

Not only that, my nextcloud server is also running Linux and, strangely, also on a laptop.

Generally customers love high uptimes, they never like to see their services or servers go down, even if it's just to apply monthly or security patches on servers running in higher availability.

Mine never did. Well, once when a bad storm knocked out most of the valley for several hours overnight and well past the UPS time. But then, the same storm also knocked out connectivity for a few days so... But their servers were up and running as soon as I a) knew about the extent of the problem and b) could drive to somewhere with enough connectivity that I could swap the DNS entries for the running-redundant server and the blacked-out main server (which, strangely, became the running-redundant server for the next few months till the formerly-redundant-now-main required a reboot to load a new kernel or something).

Unlike your claims, I don't work at a global level, yet was still able to provide services for customers with redundant web and email servers located in other towns. I didn't use automatic failover but was (when phone lines were available) alerted PDQ to any issues and able to silently fix them. IIRC, in several years of service, total downtime was less than 24 hours, and most of that on one day due to one storm.

I do reboot my laptops, but I still don't care about bootup time. I've long wondered why this metric is a big deal for people.

Same. Usually shut mine down at night.

In the morning, get out of bed, press power button, go for the 3 S's (cept I don't shave and only shower if I'm meeting other people/it's been a couple of days), type in password, go and make coffee. Machine is ready for me.

Did it take 1 minute to boot? 20 seconds? 10 minutes? Don't know and don't care.

The servers I still run - reboot only rarely. If I was doing stuff for others I'd make sure the backup is up, reboot the main, and if it takes a minute or a day who cares, redundancy rules bitches!

(Yes, I know my practices are probably "best practice" in the same sense that "shallow grave at the beach" is "appropriate form of dispute resolution", but it works for me :) )

Longer boots is increased downtime for any reboot, like kernel updates for example. It's also not great when you have a customer on the phone shooting for their site to be brought back up right now

Surely, if you're working at the "global scale" you claimed in this very thread, you're using redundant servers and automatic failovers, load balancers and the like - and making sure server B is functioning before rebooting server A?

Bloody hell, when I was running a couple of mate's websites off of a spare laptop in the linen cupboard under the stairs, I had a backup clone running at another mate's house where I could redirect DNS before shutting down/doing work on the main machine!

acy in the same way as the wheel is legacy.

Dammit! Beat me to it by half a day!

still of questionable quality, but tolerated by and abusing millions.

FTFY

the problem is that nobody else made an alternative that gained any kind of wide-scale adoption to replace the very much legacy sysvinit.

It's like 2 wheels on a bike or 4 on a car... Extremely legacy, not perfect for every situation, but seems to work perfectly well most of the time.

The reason the alternatives are less used is simple, they're less-appropriate.

One wonders if LP is actually a stealth MS employee or plant, attempting to destroy Linux from within.

I gave up wondering that a long time ago.

While I am not at all convinced he is a plant from MS, I am quite concerned that he does not have Linux and it's users best-interests at heart.

Whoever pottything works for, it's not for the good of the Linux community, nor for the good of humanity.

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

Parsing text files for config is a slow legacy solution without full auditing (bar a full config management solution) that is incapable of per field ACLs.

Wait, you're defending this stuff in a thread where it cannot even properly handle mounting disks?

One commenter in the site Mr Tasker linked talks of wasting over 22 hours on this issue - and you want to try and make out it's faster?

Others report issues of systemd silently unmounting devices (ie with no warning) and then writing data to the underlying file system where it is not intended to be.

And you think this is defensible? How about instead of sitting here defending systemd, go and learn how to code and fix the issue that's been a problem for some 4 years now!

Re: cheapo wired phone

I'm not selling my power back to the grid until the ££££ that I get is close to what I pay the leccy company for it. At the moment the difference in prices is a sheer WTF! you have to be joking moment.

1) You do realise that by 'punishing' them by withholding your pitiful amount of power, you're actually only punishing yourself? They'd not really notice anything you add y'know.

2) Basic economics. The RetailCo charges you a certain amount per KwH, let's say 25cents/unit. Do you actually believe that they buy that power for 24c/unit and out of the remaining 1c/unit cover their fees to LinesCo, overheads and profit? Or is it more likely they buy the power from GeneratorCo at a price closer to the pittance they offer you, and you're really actually being treated much the same as BigGenCo?

(Obvs based on NZ's funky system - dunno what the rest of the world does but I assume RetailCo, TransmissionCo and GenCo are usually the sameCo)

Re: Disaster mitigation?

None !!!

You do not think that vulnerable people come anywhere on the list of priorities for the people drawing up these plans do you ?

You're probably right but....

I wonder if they've considered some of those "very important people" they want to reach might also be amongst the "can't get through because congested/dead cell towers"?

(I obviously mean the likes of electrical engineers, roading contractors, coms techs, medical staff and so on - if politicians and councillors cannot be reached, so much the better! (and if some of them wind up listed amongst the dead, well, the losses will be lessened...(we really need that 'cynical bastard' icon!))