* Posts by DCFusor

868 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2013

FBI boss: Never mind Russia and social media, China ransacks US biz for blueprints, secrets at 'surprisingly' huge scale

DCFusor

Re: 3.1415926535897932384626433..

Agree - except for your partisan political statements, which indicate that either you are very young and naive, or have fallen prey to that which you complain about.

Which isn't unlikely. It's so common that even psychologists (who aren't really one of the hard sciences by the Heinlein definition) have coined the word "projection" to identify the issue.

Pay attention, the long slide downhill due to letting people who want power, have it, began quite some time ago. Making people work to get into power just selects for the worst.

Don't rage against the machine – wage against the master, says McAfee amid AI havoc fear hype

DCFusor

Debate?

I don't recall any debate among cryptographers, actually. I do remember almost total unity of all the experts saying that attempting to restrict it was futile and just plain dumb. Speaking out and being ignored isn't debate. Sure a few people in the "agencies" whose rice bowl needed constant filling spoke to a few people they had dirt on. Quietly.

Australia on the other hand has laws. Now all they have to do is pass a law against fission and fusion and they can't be nuked, right?

War on drugs eliminated them, right? As far as I can tell, it simply made the worst people on earth (money laundering banks and politician and cops taking bribes) rich and profited the cartels too.

I could go on, but it's pointless, and no one can decode it anyway. Sorry for the failed communication.

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

DCFusor

Politics, my friend

The Falcon heavy is not the cost+ (guaranteed profit) jobs program in as many congressional districts and has no where near the other investments in lobbying as the SLS people.

UK banking was struck by one IT fail every day for most of 2018

DCFusor

Ah, recursive acronym. What's old is GNU again?

Did you hear the one about Cisco routers using strcpy insecurely for login authentication? Makes you go AAAAA-AAAAAAArrg *segfault*

DCFusor
Unhappy

A simple text search

of the source would have revealed an unsafe use of the function, known to be bad news for decades now.

Total Irresponsibility To Show Usual Prudence. I've used your approach myself along with a couple of other trivial tricks to totally prevent stack corruption - since long before the big issue was someone malicious trying to do it.

I mean, that should have been proactively searched for and fixed quite a long time ago....that's plain irresponsible, it wouldn't take a whole dev-day to do all their source that way....unless their system is really an example of utter borkage.

Either way, it's a sign you should vote with your wallet. No, of course.

Tech industry titans suddenly love internet privacy rules. Wanna know why? We'll tell you

DCFusor

Re: Holding back the tide...

Hope you're right, but fear you're wrong. Far more money and power at stake here.

DCFusor

Re: Good luck with that

I put on my dyslexia glasses and read it "$Substance_Name has been known to the state of Cancer to cause California".

Probably not popular with those wrong-coast tech types, but from my POV, not sure which would be worse.

Now you've read about the bonkers world of Elizabeth Holmes, own some Theranos history: Upstart's IT gear for sale

DCFusor
Holmes

Look who was on the board of directors!

Names famous in politics and military, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, Adm Gary Roughead, and James Mattis, for example.

It's actually, quite a long and very interesting list - see the wikipedia entry, which is too long to type here.

I knew as that list caused some interesting comments in the financial analyst world.

Why in any world were those particular people on that list of directors?

And why that super deep voice and always a turtleneck. I don't care, but that's weird. Why would you assume Elizabeth is a "chick" - at least biologically speaking? I don't care, actually - identify as you like, but be honest about it; boy, all those add up to hyper weird.

Money people don't usually like weird. Why'd they all go for this, what's still hidden from us?

Was it a way to get a ton of dna samples for someone? The possibilities for nutty conspiracy theories abound to say the very least. Lots of twists here.

Was there an adam's apple in there? Those crazy eyes...shared by some other pretty nutty public figures. Lots of very interesting issues here, yet almost no reporting on what raises anyone's eyebrows who takes the slightest effort in looking. What's going on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

'We don't want a camera in everyone's living room' says bloke selling cameras in living rooms. Zuckerberg, you moron

DCFusor
Joke

Re: Does Zuckerberg even understand the concept of 'lying'?

At least useful as a space elevator, then?

DCFusor
Mushroom

Re: Pay YOU?

Yes they are, there is no way to opt out. I've never had a FB account, but according to friends who do, all my info is all over that place. Try opting out of several things and you'll find out, nope, can't do.

Equifax, Experian...no opt out even if you don't use credit - ever.

In fact, I just found out I can't even open a MySocialSecurity account if I haven't used credit in the last 7 years - the government uses those entities to prove I even exist. It's much worse than you think.

OPM - my security clearance forms/records which were insanely invasive even compared to the above.

I could go on to other things you can't opt out of from license plate readers to phone metadata, but I think you get my point. Tried voting? While it's surely possible to do without ID or a driver's license here, it's a lot harder in places well away from the borders.

Even if you trust all those people, what about them being hacked, as they all have been?

Note I'm mentioning things that have been in the news as they've been hacked and already lost your info to ??? - never to be gotten back or erased. Opt out of that.

Please tell me how, short of death of myself and all of my family, how to opt out of any of that. Surely you aren't this ignorant of how things really work! Nice theory, but it has nothing to do with practice in this case and hasn't for quite a long time.

Google: Hmm, this government regulation stuff looks important. Let's stick some more lobbyists on that

DCFusor

Wow

So I can take this to mean that "the best government money can buy" isn't a strictly US phenomenon?

(Hope I don't need a /sarc tag)

Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has got the horn for space rock Ryugu – a sampling horn, that is

DCFusor
Happy

Congrats!

I'm genuinely glad - and impressed - that more countries and outfits are getting good at all this. All success to Jaxa today, and the rest, too.

Science aside - and I'm all for science - humans also need to dream, and without things like this, the state of our planet and societies on it isn't very good dream material.

Thanks, people.

No RESTful the wicked: If your website runs Drupal, you need to check for security updates – unless you enjoy being hacked

DCFusor

a fractal...

Personal Home Page is a language designed from the start for utter beginners, and then "just grew". It hasn't been maintained with discipline, which would have caused some (well deserved IMO) loss of backward compatibility.

Utter beginners write crappy code even in good languages - the designer can't think of everything - nothing is fool proof. There is no "one weird trick" that prevents all classes of bugs.

And php in particular is still a fractal of bad design.

epic rant, oldie but goodie

Password managers may leave your online crown jewels 'exposed in RAM' to malware – but hey, they're still better than the alternative

DCFusor

Genuinely hard to get right

Several people seem not to understand that some ram (and disk!) is not controlled or controllable by your password app. And certainly not cache.

The GUI tools that all apps use these days keep the text in ram - even a terminal emulator does, and some even save that in history. The browser keeps the text in ram at least long enough to send your password *in plaintext* down the wire, and maybe doesn't get it erased due to sloppy coding - or using the GUI tools from the opsys, as we all more or less do (and on all opsys). Gonna write your own windowing and textbox code, really? And then hope that the opsys doesn't somehow keep a bit of that around in a screen buffer (in the extreme case).

Most people these days have *no clue whatever* how the magic really works inside. Swap files? I could go on for longer than this edit box will take, and no one read it. Hope you get the point.

Even if this was all public/private signed stuff where the password was sent encoded with a key only you and the site know (already) - there would be replay attacks possible - even in these days dumber-easier stuff like sql injection still works on many sites. This would be subject to a similar batch of code-at-screen noobs errors who are usually the ones hired cheap to develop web pages.

This is a genuinely hard problem...

And as pointed out in the article, if you're already owned locally, this is just a quicker pivot technique to own you on all the sites you visit *too*.

Visited the Grand Canyon since 2000? You'll have great photos – and maybe a teensy bit of unwanted radiation

DCFusor

Amazingly reasonable reporting here

I work around things radioactive. I own some U ore, some pretty hot as ore goes...but I don't keep it in my bedroom. Neither did they.

Alphas, the main decay path of the original U have a range in the small inches and don't even penetrate from the inside of an ore rock.

Betas, which are primarily from the things U decays into...a few more inches (a sheet of Al stops them easily).

Gammas...well, there are a fair number and high enough energy that distance is your friend (inverse square law).

But as reported, even a drum of this stuff isn't going to fry you unless you sleep on it.

The worst that would happen is somehow ingesting some of the dust. It is toxic, but that's not really the issue in the amount you'd mange to get into yourself.

The problem there is that now the frequent alpha and beta radiation is coming from inside you - there's not the normal layer of dead skin which stops alphas easily. And your body is dumb enough to sequester this sort of heavy metal in nice places like your bones, where new blood cells are finished off....

Uranium's long half life means it takes more weight of it to make the same amount of radiation per second than for other hotter stuff like cesium 136 ( a fission reactor byproduct we all use to calibrate our geiger counters and gamma spectrometers), where a tiny amount will do you in, and which lasts just long enough to do that to you. We get those samples encased in epoxy for that very reason - you're not going to inhale this thing.

But in a drum, even with a loose lid, and in rock form...nope, U ore (even refined) is not really an issue. People panic over the dumbest things, evaluate risk poorly. Yes, there is stuff so hot (reactor waste products for example) that's more or less lethal and right away, but this isn't it or even close. Just don't breath the dust or eat the stuff and you're fine (And gee, don't sleep with it either...).

New claim dogs Oracle: After $11m of sales, I was unfairly axed before next big deal – because I am a 64yo woman

DCFusor
Devil

No legacy

It's almost as though management has decided it doesn't matter if it lasts as long as they live, which as an old guy, starts to look like "not forever", so in the utter absence of morals, milk it for all it's worth - both customers and employees, and the consequences won't come home to roost while they are living. Looks to me like they're pushing it pretty hard, but then, it's not like as a person, where you can get killed - or at least severely beaten and/or jailed, if you anger enough people - evidently corps have significantly more rights than people, they don't hang them in Texas after all. But they sure do steal horses.

Revealed: Numbers show extent of security fears about security biz Kaspersky Lab

DCFusor

Re: Pattern?

Here's your pattern. Kaspersky caught the 5 eyes tools, while *all the rest didn't*. Hmmm.

Let's play shoot the messenger, 5-eyes. Why didn't anyone else detect your invasions?

Pretty obvious why they don't want Kaspersky around now.

I think this shoot the messenger stuff is hilarious, but saddened it works. We seem to care more about "who dun it" when there's a hack or a leak, but even when the leak is about something horrible - we don't seem to care about that, and the actors that did the horrible stuff don't even deny it, just vilify the leaker.

Lots of examples, but then someone would find a way to call it partisan, which it isn't unless the parties are "all of us" and "the powers that be".

Germany tells America to verpissen off over Huawei 5G cyber-Sicherheitsbedenken

DCFusor

Re: How about Apple's apparent deflation? The surgence of "cloud"?

It does indeed some more like some sort of competition avoidance. And a lot easier to pull off than say, banning BMW or Audi autos (since autos aren't as fungible as net gear and people like those brands).

Don't be confused I used German names - who'd buy any Chinese auto or even know a brand?

My point was more protectionism and the idea of the politics being easier for some things than it would be for others.

Now whether it's market "dirty" trading or just fighting over a slice of a decreasing pie rather than innovate to attempt to increase the size of the whole pie - which tactic has become popular as no one really has a new killer thing, and if no one else has noticed - we are in what amounts to worldwide recession despite governments cooking the books (lying)...I can't say.

The litany of "if you can't innovate, litigate" is getting kind of old to me....funny, when the pie was getting bigger, there was a lot less of that.

What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

DCFusor

Re: Not dead yet

@roland - I was there myself, and everyone here seems to be forgetting that bandwidth was increasing almost as quickly as you could get to the store to buy a new shiny modem. And that ability to host your own site became a lot cheaper with the earliest version of "the cloud", compared to the poor BBS operator who needed all those phone lines - and modems, and on prem hardware.

Less problems for the big boys (AOL and pals here in the US). *That* version of cloud worked due to the prevailing economic, bandwidth, and hardware conditions.

These days, with hardware dirt cheap and your "modem" coming with your phone service anyway....not as sure the cloud is as great an idea (Office 3xx anyone?) as when it made TCP/IP worth doing - remember it "wastes" lots of bits compared to just sending them with little to no reliable error detection/correction/resending.

Hence the development of some up and download programs/protocols (kermit and friends) that accomplished those things themselves, or at least made the attempt. TCP/IP won because it was mostly better, and universal.

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

DCFusor

Re: why even NYC?

WHile in the main you are correct, I made my own fortune by living in the boonies and consulting for places like companies in Silly Valley and DC where the cost of living is at least 5x higher. They didn't blink at paying rates that made me rich where I live.

Just last night I was in a video chat with some job seekers in Silly Valley and environs. What it takes to rent an apartment there would buy you a farmhouse here with nearly 100 acres of land...food is cheap in farm country, and our schools are top rate, our crime basically zero.

It's the myth that urban areas are more culturally rich and better in some other sense that keeps that stuff the way it is. In fact, look at CA in the US - poop, needles and homeless camps....none of that here in "deplorable flyover country" - and I didn't have any trouble recruiting smart people for my company either - because they could see this too and were, well, smart. Smart and talented people are everywhere, as are pretty good tech colleges (often state ones that are less expensive). Rather than seeing the graduates move away, you just grab them before they do...it's not hard, but that might be a little complex for a company that depends on a moronic HR dept to get hires by using job sites and demanding 10 years experience in something that has only existed half that long. Which is a good way to get liars I suppose.

DCFusor
Holmes

Re: Because Trump lied when he called it "tax reform"

As has every other pol when using the word reform*.

We had patent reform in the US. Now we have "first to file" vs "first to invent" which obviously advantages the big boys who can file on everything remotely imagined.

We had the "Sonny Bono" copyright reform. And it's still going to be awhile before I can copy Gershwin without breaking the rules.

Health care reform caused insurance to be mandatory, since people couldn't afford insurance that covers reality, it became bronze, silver etc plans that are so full of holes it actually cost most of my income to buy one, and then resulted in higher prices at the doctors - because they can - and the higher prices are the CO-PAY! I cheated and dropped that, paid the fine, and get off much cheaper as the docs aren't bad people and only charge me double what the tests cost since they know it's coming out of my hide. Which is more than a 75% discount! Ditto prescription drugs. Reform my ass.

We have bank reform - which lead to CDS's and banks being able to sell loans before the ink was dry to some investment bank. So the bank selling the loan had no reason to care about it being paid back.

Combine that with Blythe Masters' financialization that lets, in effect, someone buy fire insurance on *your* house without your knowledge, and a can of petrol and a pack of matches...and we had 2007's great time. And that was, on the surface "good intentions" to let people in the ghetto buy their home and get a stake in the community, so they'd help clean things up.

You'll note that this really isn't a partisan thing - it's a money/power vs the regular guy thing.

Every single "reform" in history has benefited the big guys. It's actually quite difficult for it to be otherwise, a lot of the simplistic schemes I hear are easily ripped apart - "all governments act in concert" was a real belly laugh given history long past and recent (-exit) in the EU alone. "Get rid of money". Every single one of these schemes (including many not mentioned here) has a ridiculous assumption at its base.

As someone smarter than me said - it's just as illegal for a rich guy to steal bread, or sleep under a bridge as it is for me - the law is in some sense "fair". Thing is, I don't need to steal bread and I have a nice house (and no debt). The poor guy doesn't - nor does he have my lawyers. True reform is HARD - assuming they even really wanted that. As it is, lobbyists...vote on laws to find out what's in them...stuff like that. Anyone paying attention knows.

To top it off, you don't even have to know law or have any experience with unexpected consequences to get to power - we have Trump and Cortez (and lots of others) proving that one. They don't even have to take a test, like for...any other professional job.

*Not only reform, but "fair" and "just" and "spending cut" and "tax cut" and ... almost all the other words they use to tell us how great they are, and how they're going to pick that other guy's pocket to give you cool stuff. We never seem to wise up to the fact that to the vast majority of the world, that "other guy" is me.

OK, Google? Probably not! EU settles on wording for copyright reform legislation

DCFusor

Re: "This tactic doesn't play well in the EU"

No, but Ajit Pai led the way on things like that, and it seemed to work for him.

DCFusor
Facepalm

Re: Who says they'll be giving up profit...

Yup, if the regulation means they'd have lost the money anyway....no point wasting time providing the service they'd be fined over. Doh.

Banking in 2019: Sure, we'd recommend TSB's online, mobe banking say cowed customers

DCFusor

Push poll

Surprised no one has mentioned this. It's quite possible - and widely done for political reasons at least in the US, to construct a poll in which not only the wording of the questions, but also their order, are designed not to gather information, but to convince whoever is taking the poll of a particular viewpoint. This can be obvious if poorly done (most of the phone polls I get around elections) or so slick you have to look carefully, but that sort of manipulation is almost always there, the only thing that really varies is how skillful it is in assumptions (unstated, but meant to be accepted) and conclusions (likewise).

We have a description for it here, see title. It's one of two reasons I always hang up on these guys and gals.

The other is the ridiculous attempt to shoehorn complex topics into drop down lists (forget which computer co patented that one, may they see time in hell).

Live isn't like that, as evidenced by one of the ridiculous examples given above. And nope, they don't want to hear detailed discussion or any nuance, though sometimes the volunteer will listen, and than task "so, should I put down you prefer disembowelment while live, or being slowly burned to death after watching your family mutilated" only to later come out with "people want their guts cut out".

You could even make people say they like windows update with tricks like that. (I'm a penguin myself, but I hear the horror stories).

The algorithms! They're manipulating all of us! reckon human rights bods Council of Europe

DCFusor

Re: Ha

Yeah, that patent guy Benoit Battistelli, worked out real well trying to fire him, didn't it.

Sure generated plenty of ink here.

DCFusor

Re: The private sector ? Act with fairness ? Have you heard of Facebook ?

Yes, moving the problem from private exploitation to government exploitation really doesn't solve much, does it.

All tools are double edged. And if they're powerful, and this one is potentially the most powerful ever, they'll be used. The user will be at least attempting to benefit themself, though it could be a case of elaborate suicide. Kinda doubt it in this case where after all, prediction IS the thing. But then again, users always do get sloppy. Too bad about all that collateral damage, eh?

Ivan to be left alone: Russia preps to turn its internet into an intranet if West opens cyber-fire

DCFusor
Joke

How much of the rest of the world will crash

Because badware is hung in a loop trying to find some Russian C&C server?

Opportunity's mission is over, but InSight almost ready for a driller thriller below Martian surface

DCFusor

Re: Haven't they done this the wrong way round?

Use the seismometer to monitor the bonking? Learn from any failure mode?

Not a clue, really. Could just as easily be "do the more important and likely to work thing first" for both science and PR purposes.

Intel SGX 'safe' room easily trashed by white-hat hacking marauders: Enclave malware demo'd

DCFusor
Joke

Re: Hidden processing on a CPU?

Reminds one from Scotty in "The search for Spock".

Scotty: The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

http://quotegeek.com/quotes-from-movies/star-trek-iii-the-search-for/6800/

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

DCFusor

It's amazing how many don't get how purely ridiculous the idea of a population dying off from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone is. When, you know, there haven't been public phones for quite awhile, there have been doctors and medical research, and despite some setbacks, most pandemic or deadly diseases have been either eliminated (smallpox) or contained (ebola).

Yet the kind of people who went on the B ark are still almost the biggest problem on this planet, with no solution in sight. You think Adams was making a slightly different point than the one you got, perhaps?

DCFusor

Re: "reality TV "stars" dying from crash landing, habitat failure, or slow suffocation. "

Shame we've made it ever harder to earn the Darwin award. It's a downward spiral from there...

US lawmakers furious (again) as mobile networks caught (again) selling your emergency location data to bounty hunters (again)

DCFusor

Re: Can anyone explain why the FCC was shut down

Yes, 100%. Perhaps also important is to note what wasn't shut down.

IRS collections. Military adventures far from home. Various snooping on us. Long list.

What do these two lists - the ones that run and the ones that don't - differ in.

The ones that get shut down are the ones that deliver service to the average citizen. It's *meant* to hurt - and hurt us.

The ones that are kept up keep the powerful in power.

I bet the only reason entitlements are kept up is to avoid revolt, and the timing here might indicate that - food stamp money was about to run out. Not sure under what aegis social security kept paying (it did, I got mine).

DCFusor

Re: Lock him up

Watch the smears on Tulsi Gabbard. I don't agree with much of her program, other than the anti war part.

But the MIC(C), as Eisenhower warned us, is driving this bus....the biggests of the big business with a lot of interlocking ownership (including media). Look at the smears against her already! Frankly, I'm not even on that side of the aisle, but anyone who wants to end war these days is now called treasonous or worse...and winds up abandoning that project - 'for some reason'.

Talk to DPRK - treason to get us out of a war that's been going on since the '50s, really?

Pull out of Syria or some other MENA war? Treason!

And it'll be treason if someone "blue" tries it too...so called. Treason against things like the congressional districts profiting from f35's, or pouring TNT into shells and so on.

DCFusor
Facepalm

Re: Lock him up

And no one wants to notice a couple facts. And no, I'm not defending anyone here - I'm giving info on how things work.

Executive compensation is usually in equities or options. That helps the board hide these insane pay scales for the guys at the top. They have to be all about the next quarter and !legally! about profit, or they don't make any money.

The driver in the end is the stock market, and specifically, grandma's pension fund. Fail to make a good quarter and that fund - nominally dedicated to seeing grannie gets a better grade of cat food - sells your stock, and the execs, who are legally obligated to put profit over people who aren't shareholders, know this.

Depending on how deep you want to go, "independent" central banking and fiat money along with interest rate setting drive quite a lot of this as well - those central banks are as federal as fedex - they are owned by banks. True in the US at least since JP Morgan bailed out the crash.

Always easy to assume there's some "one weird trick" you can get behind that solves the problem.

When you know how things work, it's messy and we need to think of real solutions, not slogans.

Human nature ain't that pure - people do as incentivised. That's what needs fixing, and that's far from the "one weird trick" mentality most evidence.

Sorry to bear bad news....I didn't create reality, I merely observe.

DCFusor

Re: Lock him up

All of the alligators claim they're going to drain the swamp to get elected. Taking the country back doesn't involve elections, since all are bought with the pocket change of the big outfits - it's called crony capitalism - laws whose enforcement is the responsibility of the guilty - good luck with that. Doesn't matter if they're wearing a red or blue tie. The swamp is primarily the unelected as it is, the ones that are really hard to get rid of anyway. Doesn't matter who's elected, they're all in need of vast sums - hmmm, where does that come from - and all retire wealthy.

Partisan politics is a show to distract us from power - just like the Hitchhiker's guide mentioned about Zaphod.

Too bad there's no good obvious solution to this that doesn't involve high information citizens (good luck) or non violence (good luck).

Better learn to live with it, realistically. "Humans will do as incentivised" and when they get to set the incentives, the results are as we see.

RIP, RDP... nearly: Security house Check Point punches holes in remote desktop tools

DCFusor

Re: VNC is your friend

I use TightVNC on perhaps 7 raspberry pi's, 3 odroid HC2's, half a dozen NUCs, and find it to be well, not even close to anyone's definition of slow. I use Remmina on the PC's (all this is linux, various).

Sadly the clipboard support is a little dodgy, but otherwise....nope, not slow, seems often as fast as just "being there" would be.

Maybe your experience is with (far) older versions of something, or some terrible setup options.

I generally choose medium quality and the native pixel bits for whatever the server side is.

Which is usually higher than the default, yet it's fast - maybe not selecting things that avoid transcoding is your issue?

HMRC: We 'rigorously tested' IR35 tax-check tool... but have almost nothing to show for it

DCFusor

Re: It seems government is as bad as corporations

"As bad? Don't forget governments have years more experience at this than mere corporations."

And enforcers, and jails and....

When ${BIG_CORP} employees show up at my door demanding I pay tribute, I can "stand my ground" and use hot lead if required. Not so much the guys with badges. Who can also simply garnish your bank account.

After Amazon's Bezos exposes Pecker, National Enquirer pushes back, promises to probe itself

DCFusor

I've respected Bezos for risk-taking

But didn't really like him or think him smart - brave maybe - there've been some insane risks taken to build that outfit unless there's a lot we don't know.

This move seems to demonstrate both risk tolerance AND brains.

Good of him to refuse to negotiate with the terrorists. Good that it's being reported in places people with IQ's greater than room temperature in centigrade will see it too.

A shame many men (and I'm one) do tend to think with the smaller of their two heads, getting the spinal column priority upside down, but it is what it is, and certainly not unique to this particular guy or a political view.

It's like Oracle vs Satan - who to root for? Amazon has certainly changed my own life for the better, while destroying many others - and creating insane dependency on themselves from retail to AWS....I figured the main function of the Enquirer was to keep low competence people occupied and out of our hair, if I thought about it at all. And you know Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post because he thought print media was going to be a profitable come-back.

Snakes vs alligators indeed.

Lovely website you got there. Would be a shame if we, er, someone were to sink it: Google warns EU link tax will magnify media monetary misery

DCFusor

Re: Wow

Expecting a journalist to "learn to code" - even something as simple as a text file like robots.txt, is now hate speech among the snowflakes in the US....

Heck, expecting them to know there is such a thing is problematic, their site was probably not written by a pro in the first place, just some beginner with a big framework that wastes resources hosted in some cloud somewhere.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

DCFusor
Joke

Re: The National Enquirer

Don't encourage that - most of us believe that was SCOs true motive in the "sue IBM+dog because we own linux" scandal.

Next people will sue because someone copied an open source API required for interoperability. Oh, wait.

DCFusor

Re: I have some questions

FWIW, I don't know any "Trumpists" rabid enough to like them, and I live in a very, very "red" place.

Smart people think crap "journalism" is crap whether matter it agrees with them or not.

Oracle accuses US of underhand tactics because discrimination case 'doomed to fail'

DCFusor
Holmes

Yeah, apparently they haven't figured out that the plan "if you can't compete, litigate" has its limits. Once people decide you're the bad guy in the room the rest doesn't matter as much. Eventually the law serves justice, despite itself.

Remember when innovation to increase the size of the pie mattered more than fighting over an ever-smaller pie?

Heck, I've had to go to court a time or few over things - and always won - because I was in the right...and my (good, I think) lawyers never had to pull histrionics or the usual Oracle "try to move the goalposts" crap. In fact, I can think of at least one case we won (more easily at least) because the other side did that stuff and the judge didn't like it.

I actually liked my lawyers...

Of course, many people like their personal representative politician too - I understand the issue.

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

DCFusor

Re: He's obliged to provide the details

I used to want to visit the EU and Germany specifically. But it looks to have gone all totalitarian again, so I'm probably better off in one of the ignored parts of the US now.

DCFusor

Re: Well if Apple won't pay ...

YeahBut. In orgs that have both, they keep all the mission-critical artsy-fartsy stuff they use to pitch for bucks on the apple stuff...Because the people they underpay to make up that faff can't run anything more difficult in order to make pie and hockey stick charts. Or kids leaping through the air while apparently having some sort of climax experience. We all know that's where the real money is.

Do I need a sarc tag?

What a re-leaf: IBM's AI smarts to tell 'leccy companies when their bushes need trimming

DCFusor

Oh no, I've said "it" again!

Che tiara! Revolutionary cloud commune fitted for Red Hat developers

DCFusor

I've hated long and hard on systemd, and for good reasons we all seem to know....some of which are ongoing.

But I finally learned how to make at least my own weird stuff work with (despite) it.

Funny thing for me to say, but other stuff has risen out of the noise even more of late...

It's all one in a way. While systemd claims to be more adaptable, it's not - what it's good for is just what red hat wants to sell - spinning up a zillion of the exact same thing, or a small number of different things. Even a big outfit may not have more things/platforms/whatever than my lan has!

Don't worry, AWS will eat the world anyway....Red Hat + IBM == "let's tie these two rocks together and I bet they'll float NOW" at least in my mind. Glad to be out of a world where I have to care about either one.

Apple solemnly agrees to pay France $570m in back taxes, turns to camera, gives us a wink

DCFusor

Re: Transactional Tax

Companies, now and for all time, put their prices based on their costs and margins, and always have and always will pase 100% of those costs along to consumers in one form or another. Thinking you can ever "tax those other guys" is naive in the extreme and displays ignorance of how money works.

Less margin if they "eat it" simply means less for grandma's pension fund - or some other outflow of the profits created by whatever margin. There are no exceptions other than slightly shifting where the burden is places, but it is NEVER on the companies involved.

There is the exception to that given the rampant cronyism out there, where big outfits buy laws that make them even more dominant over the little guys, as if network effects didn't accomplish most of that already.

DCFusor

Yep. The real issue with fairness is that these dodges aren't equally usable by all....

You can legally avoid billions of taxes for a thousandth of that - by creating the proper office, with employees, in the low tax district and doing this foolery. Works great if you have the dosh in the first place - the big outfits all do, and all do this. But any small biz can't afford to play that game.

We thus generate anti-progressive taxation via "any country who wants to write laws that allows that", and there's always one who figures some is better than the none they'd probably get otherwise.

//

But just to make it more interesting, since we are pretty much all direct or definitely indirect customers of these outfits, taxing them means what? Who pays? We do, of course. Always and forever, not exceptions have ever occured in all history - the corps either charge more, or go out of business, either way it's we who pay. Perhaps the more well-off pay more Apple tax, but most of us pay some of all of it. Do you think other manufacturers or advertisers don't get a boost in what they can charge by being just a little less, or a trivial example of one entity making the entire market more expensive?

//

Governments get more taxes, and use it to wastefully redistribute income - not that that is working out well, or standards of living have actually gone up since the 1980's at least. But it'll work this time, it's never been done just right (definition of insanity).

//

To inject even a little more fun into the analysis, think of it this way - while people usually are, and should be, equal under the law, we're not the same. Plenty of lower IQ people (as George Carlin mentioned so eloquently), plenty of low motivation folks and so forth. I think of the governments and their various departments as jobs programs for those sorts of people, who gravitate to sinecure jobs that require no thought, just choosing from drop down lists (which never really fit the complexities of reality), and showing up enough to last till a pension; depending on what country, it might even pay more than actually productive work - it certainly does if you count the pension most of us are never offered, or like most pension plans, is going to fail - arithmetic always wins in the end.

//

So, think of it this way. Paying some .gov jerk to stamp "no" on whatever they force you to ask permission for (especially including most of it not really being any of their business anyway) is actually costing us less than dealing with the life of (other) crime they'd probably adopt otherwise. As it is, most criminals are stupid - and keep an nearly as stupid police and prison system employed, all easy pickings and mostly leaving we smarter people out of it - which is not the worst possible outcome.

Eg the middle intelligence people would cost us more as criminals than they do as...government occupied criminals.

//

You can see why I'd never go anywhere in politics...the truth never sells well....especially if it's obvious in hindsight.

Kwik-Fit hit by MOT fail, that's Malware On Target

DCFusor

Re: re: Too bad they couldn't continue operating as normal with paper records,

Obviously you're out of touch. Now they just ask for the voice interface trigger phrase for the pencil.

Jammy dodgers: Boffin warns of auto autos congesting cities to avoid parking fees

DCFusor

Shoe on other foot

Lots of people sneered down their noses at me when I moved to "nowhere" and built an off grid homestead...they had their reasons I guess, though most were wrong.

I have freedom, lower taxes by far, great roads with little traffic, nature in full beauty, not many people (eg not many arseholes).

Yeah, it's a 13 mile drive to the beer store. Where I see maybe 4-5 cars the entire trip. Yeah, I have to work a little harder to bring in the firewood and so on.

Harder than what? I learned to write code before many here were born and that pays nicely no matter where the bits come from.

What this is describing is a dystopia worse than almost any fiction I've heard of, which will be getting worse. Leave while you can, and don't say you can't - zillions of "migrants" prove you dead wrong about that.