Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Bad title (Score 1) 75

The title is very misleading.

The maintainers were not "kicked off GitHub" - GitHub had no part in this, and the maintainers still have access to GitHub.

The maintainers were removed from a private organisation and its repos by the organisation owner.

No, that's not true - at least, according to those involved (I have no way of verifying): the GitHub repos did not belong to the organisation - the organisation decided that it wanted to own them, so it persuaded someone who had sufficient access to give them the access and remove it from the people who did legitimately own them.

Comment Re:Stealth (Score 1) 57

This ain't the early Cold War anymore. While there are certainly some super-secret weapons platforms out there, a lot of military capability is deliberately communicated and even put on display because it deters conflict.

When the Soviet Union fell the Pentagon's priorities shifted from "World War 3 against the USSR" to "wars against countries with marginally effective air forces." So when the B-2 came online, it served the Pentagon's mission better to show it off. "Look at our invisible bomber. You really think crossing us is a good idea? Be a shame of bombs just fell out of an empty sky on you without any warning whatsoever."

China wants the US to know that it can launch stealth aircraft off of its carriers because that allows it to use its carriers to assert control of the Eastern Pacific. China doesn't regard war with the United States as inevitable. Consequently, it's interested in convincing the United States that a war in the Pacific isn't worth fighting. That means eroding American confidence in American strategic and technological dominance so Americans know that a conflict with China will be costly.

This is targeted directly at American isolationists: "do you really want your kid to die for Taiwan?"

Comment Re:For now (Score 2) 119

As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

Comment Re:I'm not sure this is really about hardware (Score 1) 157

Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Comment I'm not sure this is really about hardware (Score 1) 157

TPM should be optional. M$ is just colluding with the hardware vendors to increase sales.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

Comment Re: Adapter (Score 1) 243

It seems you donâ(TM)t have a clue. If you have a USB-C port you can plug in anything from 40 or 80 gigabit USB-4 (display port), 20 Gbit USB 3.2, 10 Gbit USB 3.1, or 480Mbit USB-2, and it will all work. Thatâ(TM)s what you want. The USB-C ports are identical. You cannot confuse them. You get the speed of the plugged-in device.

If only that were true! Unfortunately there's nothing to stop a manufacturer putting a USB-C port on a laptop, and having it only support (say) USB-3.1 downwards. And so some of them do this - because it's cheaper. Maybe there's one USB C port that also supports TB/DisplayPort, with a tiny little logo next to it to let you know which one it is. If you're lucky...

Comment Re:This is as old as computers and modem (Score 1) 56

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

Comment Re:Alternatives? (Score 5, Informative) 77

Yes, the one you run yourself.

That doesn't work, even if nominally email still works across providers and is all standard and everything you have nearly no chance to escape being blacklisted, no matter if you're coming from your ISP, or some hosted server basically anywhere.

Plus, given that nearly nobody does it it's a chicken and egg problem, even if there is free software for everything it's absolutely daunting to have a complete working system. One would think these days you'd have a simple package running on a Raspberry Pi, heck even your router and give you all services with some minimal configuration like the DNS and similar. Nope, just the opposite, it's tricky and a big headache even for people that did it from scratch more than 25 years ago. Never mind for some journalist that doesn't even understand how email works beside being able to use some webmail from a provider.

Slashdot Top Deals

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." --Arthur C. Clarke

Working...