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Comment I installed ubuntu 14.04 on my BBBs (Score 1) 581

I don't see why your BeagleBone black example is systemd's fault. It has a convoluted way of managing network interfaces because it uses connman, a network-management daemon from Intel that is not part of systemd.

I installed ubuntu 14.04 on my BBBs. (Had to upgrade the kernel a little later because the 3.13.0 kernel wasn't ported to arm-on-bone in time to go out with the original 14.04 distribution and the 2.whatever they shipped didn't handle a class of USB device I needed, but it's fine now at 3.13.6-bone8.)

Changing to a specified, fixed, IP address was just a matter of editing /etc/network/interfaces, which was commented well enough (in combination with the man page on my ubuntu laptop) to make it easy.

(Main problem was that DeviceTree overlays weren't supported by 3.13.0-6, so I had to hack the boot-time base device tree to reconfigure for the onboard device functionality I wanted, rather than just overlaying the deltas during or just after the boot procerss.)

Comment Re:quick question (Score 1) 212

What you are describing is what I already described via method #2. If and only if they are able to add their root public key to the user's computer will their fraudulently issued certificates successfully validate.

Actually I wasn't, because you specifically said in #2 "Somehow maliciously insert their own public key onto your computer". Key there is "maliciously". No need to do that as most governments have legitimately issued root CA certs in most browsers already. Including China...

No need to maliciously insert anything, they are already there waiting to be used.

Comment Re:Could be solved be VISA, etc. immediately (Score 2) 307

Cheques are notoriously bad for guaranteed payment - businesses would only accept a cheque if your bank also issued you with a cheque guarantee card (usually just a different design on your debit card), which means the bank would guarantee to cash the cheque up to a certain amount, taking the matter up with the writer of the cheque if it bounced. If you tried to cash a cheque without a guarantee (or a cheque over the guarantee amount) and it bounces, you are SOL and have to take it up with the writer yourself.

And cheque guarantees usually only went up to a few hundred quid.

Car dealers would typically want a bankers draft, which is a bit of paper issued by your bank for a specific amount and is treated as cash - the value is held on the paper, its not an instruction to transfer money, its an actual promissory note just like paper note cash is. Lose the bankers draft, and the money is gone, you can't get it back.

Bankers drafts cost you money to buy, and you have to go to a bank to have one issued.

Comment Re:Could be solved be VISA, etc. immediately (Score 3, Informative) 307

Pretty much no larger business accepts cheques these days in the UK, and hasn't for several years - cheques have essentially been relegated to inter-personal transactions or smaller business (single person style businesses) because of the cost of handling them as a business.

Comment Re:Responsibilitiy (Score 1) 137

So, if Google's search results are considered free speech, do they also have the same responsibilities as other forms of free speech.
What if you search for a person and the results incorrectly suggests that the person is a pedophile? Does that qualify as libel, or is that suddenly not Google's problem?

It's not-so-suddenly non Google's problem -- specifically it's not Google's problem ever since the passage of the Communications Decency Act and the section 230(c) immunity in back in 1996.

If you search for a person and the results incorrectly suggest that the person is a pedophile, you need to go after the person who wrote and posted the material, not the search service that automatically indexed the material because, truth or falsehood aside, that material is relevant to the search.

You simply wish to shoot the messenger, or the big bad corporation, rather than deal with the actual author of the libel. It's been decided that that is a poor strategy, and that the benefits of automated indexing and searching outweigh your reflexive need to strike against the most convenient target at hand.

Comment Re:Better go kick WSUS into a sync... (Score 0) 178

If we can do this in a 250 employee company (and have done it since we had more than a handful of users), anyone can do it. And what, precisely, do you need in way of resources - select a subset of computers, roll out the patch, if nothing bad has happened after a working day, roll the patch out to the next batch and so on.

If you are "rolling the dice" then you are a fucking pathetic sysadmin and should be banned from being responsible for patching anything.

Comment Re:Better go kick WSUS into a sync... (Score 4, Insightful) 178

If you roll out your patches the moment they come in, you are a retard - what ever happened to testing them in a subset of your organisation before releasing them to the general population, or do you enjoy running around like a headless chicken when theres a compatibility conflict?

Comment Re:Summary is misleading, you can work around (Score 5, Insightful) 327

If you read the rest of the article, you find that you can simply disable the driver loading security to have it working again.

The article paints this as a huge security issue, but why?

Because you cannot simply add your own key, but you have to disable all driver signing in order to use one non-approved driver?

Cn anyone reasonably argue that having a system highly secure for non-technical users with easy workarounds for actually technical users is a bad compromise?

Yes. See every argument ever about UEFI secure boot on PCs intended to run Windows 8.

Comment Meet the new Microsoft (Score 0) 327

I look forward to posts from all those who decried the "Microsoft-sponsred" secure boot UEFI feature.

After all, at least with the former you could turn it off or add your own key to boot what you like.

The latter is merely a giant F U from Tim Cook to anyone who does not purchase Apple OEM or Apple-approved hardware.

Comment Re:how does JavaScript work without computers? (Score 1) 112

So you need to solve the issue of electricity, internet access, education to read and write, education to read and write English, and the inapplicability of most modern hints and tips to subsistence farming that goes on in most of sub Saharan Africa, and also local crops.

In most cases, the local farmers know how to get the most out of their land, that isn't the problem - its that getting the most out of their land does fuck all for them, it won't raise them out of poverty, just like it didn't raise their parents out of poverty.

And in most of Africa, it isn't the local officials which stand in the way of these sort of things, its the locals themselves - I have extensive experience of Uganda, Namibia, Botswana and other countries, and in pretty much all cases its the locals which reject real means of raising themselves out of poverty because they haven't changed their mind set about what is important. One of our friends is a qualified nurse, and all of his siblings have been through similar education, while his father cannot read or write, cannot speak English, and still lives in a mountain village with no running water, no electricity, and a several hour drive to a tarmac road. So how did he do it? He sold his land. Was it easy? No, the rest of the villagers derided him for selling his ancestral land and no one would buy the land off him for three years. But now he has seven educated children, and a comfortable retirement ahead of him, while he has already outlasted Ugandas average life expectancy...

In another case, my wife treated a man who had been put through university - be came to the hospital with a growth. Except he came far too late - he had had the local village "doctor" treat it for years, only coming when it started bleeding. Cancer, spread to the bone - he died later that night. Wasted money.

Its not technology, education, medicine, or farming hints and tips that is needed, its a fucking huge epiphany by the locals.

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