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Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 1) 68

Win9x and Win2k (and the other NT descendants) are fundamentally different operating systems. In general, NT had a much more robust kernel, so system panics were and remain mainly hardware issues, or, particularly in the old days, dodgy drivers (which is just another form of hardware issue). I've seen plenty of panics on *nix systems and Windows systems, and I'd say probably 90-95% were all hardware failures, mainly RAM, but on a few occasions something wrong with the CPU itself or with other critical hardware like storage device hardware. There were quite a few very iffy IDE cards back in the day.

The other category of failure, various kinds of memory overruns, have all but disappeared now as memory management, both on the silicon and in kernels, have radically improved. So I'd say these are pretty much extinct, except maybe in some very edge cases, where I'd argue someone is disabling protections or breaking rules to eke out some imagined extra benefit.

Comment Re:I assume you are joking, but ... (Score 1) 153

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Comment There's no consensus definition of E2E encryption (Score 1) 89

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

Comment long time coming (Score 1, Funny) 71

As I said https://slashdot.org/comments....
AFAIC ruzzia can and needs to go to hell. I hire people, I won't hire a ruzzian, the world needs to get its act together and start using space without them.

They are a scourge, always were, always will be. The American scientists, that passed information to the USSR about nuclear weapon design and manufacturing were not just traitors, they made a gigantic mistake, they truly made the world a much worse place to live. Preferably the soviets and by extension the Chinese and then the Iraqies, Iranians, North Koreans and who knows who else should not have nukes, at least not immediately after the Americans designed and built them.

Americans are exceptionally good at delivering innovation, but they are also exceptionally naive about the rest of the world. All Americans, their scientists incorrectly believe in basic good human nature, their politicians incorrectly believe that others are just like them and want to do business. Ha! Business is the last thing on the minds of foreign despots. The first thing is to make sure their population are controllable so that nothing can dethrone them, this means the status quo must be maintained, business does not help to maintain status quo, on the contrary, it may provide extra resources to the population. Once the population has more resources than the absolute minimum and once the population does not depend on the State to provide this bare minimum, once the population can provide for itself it starts demanding change and this is unaaceptable. The change is a political demand, population must be dependent and ready to die for a few scraps off the table of the rulers, business interferes with this. Americans think putin or whatever other dictator wants to do business, what a stupid notion.

American people believe they can just keep to themselves, nothing concerns them about the rest of the world, they do not need to try and control the outcomes. They are the naive wealthy mark, walking carelessly through a foreign open market, there are enough eyes on their pockets and there is a guy with a knife in a dark alley waiting for them specifically. This is a metaphore. Americans need to build alliances with the Europeans, not break them, they need to understand that ruzzians are not friends or business partners. They also need to understand that global caliphate is a real thing, it is the goal and if Americans care about their way of life even a little, Israel and Ukraine are their lines of defence right now and must be supported as if the war was already in the USA, bevause it is.

Comment Re:Much as I enjoy mocking Russia... (Score 1) 77

I know, it is true, the front lines have 50+ year olds, no doubt. Ukraine hasn't dipped into the pool yonger than 25 yet, this is the conscription age while orcs have sent 18 year olds to die for their tsar already. Ukraine also allowed 18 to 22 year old males to exit the country, over 45 thousand left to Poland. None of this changes what I said.

Comment Re:Wow... (Score 1) 69

There is zero value in some big scary climate risk number also being disclosed, because A that risk accounted for if you are studying the details anyway and does not help you make a rational decision, because it literally does not affect you beyond the places where it is already baked into the numbers.

If you don't care why the insurance is so expensive or unavailable (e.g. high risk of flooding) then maybe you also don't care about why the house's price is so high (e.g. nice location, good construction, etc). No need to even look at the house. Just treat the whole damn thing as an abstract exercise in numbers.

OTOH, some people might actually care about details. Maybe because they're considering living there?

Comment comments (Score 1) 21

Read through the comments in that telegram post, the amount of denial is staggering, the amount of cheerful propaganda is even greater, but there were some worried notes gleaming through all that cheerleading, where someone hoped they would still have a job later on. Someone thinks that the things may not turn out so well, they think that out of all of the options they may end up with the option I listed as number one here https://slashdot.org/comments....

what I can tell you from the very tone of this cheerful post, they do not have all of the necessary components and it will not be simple at all. Obviously they will try to launch Proton in December as scheduled by trying to do it without the service cabin, there is maybe a way, a bunch of wooden planks and ropes, who knows. The number of ways this may end up disasterous for the launch are too many to be listed here.

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