Posts by Nick Kew

Re: Who's gonna buy it?

In Sweden you can drive for an hour without seeing another motorist -

As I expect you can in Montana, or Wyoming, or the Dakotas, or Iowa, parts of Texas or California .....

But not of course in the populated parts of Sweden, where driving has become *a lot* tamer since my mother and her generation treated it as something of a free-for-all.

@Lee D

Your comments re: apache are wide of the mark. Yes apache starts as root if it wants to bind to ports 80 and/or 443 (http, https). But it's certainly not intended to be installed as setuid, and I should be surprised if anyone ships it as such. You - or more usually your systems init scripts - just start it as root.

Bottom line: if there's a commandline option that'll take advantage of root privileges to do something unintended, then you need root privileges to exploit it. So you might as well just do the unintended thing directly.

Re: Accuracy

"... made burned offerings ..." vs "... burned incense ..."

Indeed, that sticks out.

But perhaps more telling is what hasn't been changed. Namely, archaisms that might be obscure to the modern reader: "the ark of ...", or "the great stone". Instead of making those clearer, they make the material change you picked up on, to cleanse it of something abhorrent to the modern reader.

And there's substituting a proper name for "The Lord" ...

Latin has been evolving a long time. Church latin is quite distinct from classical latin: if you're a choral singer you get to perform the same texts with different pronunciations. Then you can add more disreputable strains from Goliard[1] to Schoolboy.

[1] A mediæval dissident movement.

Re: So let me get this straight...

Quick lesson in life: that's the primary purpose of the judicial system. More expensive than hiring a gang of thugs or an assassin, but does a more thorough job and leaves you in a stronger position if you feed it sufficient gold.

C.f. patents, for an application area likely to be more familiar around here.

Re: Where do the keys come from?

They look the same to me.

Not the same. DOH is a nice big extra overhead: help avoid any prospect of the world's IT infrastructure ever being ample to meet our needs.

Re: Does it even define what it means by "God"?

Yeah, but calling God by the wrong name is the worst crime of all.

Hence Elijah's slaughter of all the followers of Baal. Somehow the bible translators failed to translate the word Baal, so it looks like a proper name. And thus the genocide becomes a work of The Lord, who is somehow not merely a translation of The Lord.

Re: GDPR...

A proximity system has its own issues,

Indeed, that sounds likely. Not that I have personal experience.

In the context of a column like this and its anecdotes, one of those issues is that most of the stories come from an entirely different era. Computers have had screen lock for as long as they've had screens[1], and inactivity-based logout for as long as I can remember, but any more sophisticated measure of proximity is surely an altogether different story.

[1] OK, that wouldn't've looked like modern screen lock, but clearing the screen then refusing any input that isn't an accepted unlock serves the same purpose.

Re: Asylum

Evidence please!

Assange is evidence.

Before dismissing that, note a couple of things:

• I didn't claim (nor would I) anything about all asylum seekers. Or even any weaker quantification beyond a comparison with the general population.
• Evidence and proof are of course very different things.

So yes, a sample of 1 can be evidence - and is easier to quote here than any more detailed or authoritative report containing stronger evidence. Just apply Bayes' Theorem using the sample we're discussing.

Re: Trigger Happy

I once had an employer who insisted on keyboard click and disciplined me for turning the vile thing off. Something about standardisation of the office environment, and if I disable the click it must be a symptom of abusing or subverting the whole place.

And that was back in the era of VT100(ish) terminals, and big solid keyboards with *loud* synthetic beep for a click. YOUR WIFE IS A BIG HIPPO!!!

Re: Incompetence

Hmm, isn't that just a question of funding? That is to say, non-government incompetents run out of money before they achieve the scale of government?

Re: Sweet memories...

"Oh, I never read messages from IT, you're always just sending out warnings."

The boy who cried Wolf springs to mind.

Can't comment on your individual situation, but warnings are more effective if you pick your cases with some care to avoid overloading users with esoterica that'll only baffle them.

Re: I've always liked RSS

RSS is still the best way to consume day-by-day data on the 'net. For a site like El Reg, we get the executive summary, then click on selected stories we want to read. I don't think I'd hang around here if there were no feed. Ditto other news sites. And all the blogs I follow are through RSS or Atom feeds, either directly or aggregated as Planets (which I follow using a Planet's feed).

The web browser does nicely for sites one visits proactively but not daily, and for interactive contents. Mailinglists serve for full two-way communication, with a much higher bar to subscription than a feed. Usenet does (or did) interactive comms best of all. RSS serves a niche that is none of those.

Fortunately these media still integrate: the RSS button in a webpage, and the feed reader launching a full Reg story in a browser. No need for Firefox's builtin stuff, which was always less-than optimal.

@Russell Chapman

Thanks for that explanation. Sounds like one of those words whose meaning evolves. Like "frogs" (from the Parisian coat of arms), or various others that would likely get me banned if posted here.

Re: Just the Usual...

Hmmm. For a busy office, this kind of thing must be routine. Surely there should be a healthy market for scanners and printers incorporating a metal detector that'll complain *before* potentially self-harming if fed a stash containing staples and paperclips?

Likewise sticky things that might feature in a stash.

Re: Not Again!

Was that the battlefleet that got eaten by a small dog?

Re: Which ${subject-I-know-about} related reviews

Fixed your title for you. If your expertise lay elsewhere, you'd see similar issues with their reviews of something else.

Re: bleh...

Hehe.

I remember setting up a cron job before working on firewall rules. Cron job would run hourly and reset port $ssh to the state before I started a session. I don't recollect ever needing it, but it made the job less scary.