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Comment Choose protocol before choosing implementation (Score 2) 30

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

Comment Re:Sorry I just woke up⦠(Score 3, Interesting) 9

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

Comment Re:Why is global warming so expensive ? (Score 1) 65

That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.

Comment Re:Fuck off-The only thing that matters is story (Score 1) 175

Comics aren't even sacred to themselves. Probably the most parodied aspect of superhero comics is just how frequently "canon" is thrown into a blender, thrown out, and how new writers will just ignore established canon. Every decade or two, the publishers will make a big deal of reuniting timelines, and act as if it was part of some grand plan. The complexity of the textual history of Green Lantern, as an example, rivals the New Testament.

Comment Re: Marvel (Score 3, Informative) 175

Claude Rains and Peter Lorrie both played obviously homosexual men (Raines playing Renault in Casablanca and Lorrie playing Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon), telegraphed in such a way that it would make it past the Hayes Code. Heck, look at Johnny Guitar, with Joan Crawford playing as butch a character as you will find in the films.

But yeah, Some Like It Hot has so much straight and queer visual and dialogue innuendo running around it that it's absolutely nuts. When Tony Curtis's character blurts out in frustration "You’re a guy, and, why would a guy wanna marry a guy?”, Jack Lemmon's response is one of the great bits of movie dialogue "For the security!" Even the closing line, where Lemmon finally confesses he's a man, the response is "Nobody's perfect", which some regard as one of the great closing lines in cinema history.

Hollywood had to handle things carefully back in the day, and Wilder just as much as Hitchcock was a director who had a bag of tricks to foil the Hayes Code, so sometimes I actually wonder how Some Like It Hot ever got made. But this is the guy that directed The Apartment, so Wilder had a talent for getting blatantly sexual content past the censors.

Comment Re: same same. (Score 3, Insightful) 215

Keeping the home directories in another tree has been a thing for a very long time. I was working with Xenix in the early 1990s with a second hard drive, and kept all the home directories on the external hard drive. When I needed to do an OS reinstall, it just a matter of mounting the external file system on the path. Same would apply if you're using NFS or any other network file system.

Comment Re:True, but there are bypasses and workarounds (Score 2) 215

What distort? We're running Ubuntu LTS on workstations, and we keep the updates rolling, and have no significant issues. Generally when we want to do feature updates, we don't do in-place upgrades at all, we just build a new image and roll it out. We want complete control over new feature rollouts, including any major new upgrades of key software like LibreOffice.

And honestly, that's pretty much how we were managing Windows prior to beginning the migration. Updates in general are always a risky business, and I've seen upgrades in every OS I've worked with since Windows 3.1 go horribly awry. I've baked Windows systems, Linux systems, BSD systems, and even had to finally give up and reinstall my M1 Mac because the major release upgrade worked about 90%, but there was enough peculiar behavior that it just wasn't worth trying to track down.

In all cases in an enterprise environment, regardless of OS, you don't want feature updates, significant changes to functionality, or installs of major version of updates to software. When it comes to that, you're working in a lab environment, rolling out to a few users to test stability and interoperability, and then pushing them out to all the workstations. This isn't a Linux thing, this is just how an IT department stays sane and doesn't screw up the whole organization's workflow.

Comment Re:same same. (Score 1) 215

There are only a few circumstances I can imagine where LTS support over three or four years would even be desirable, and most of those are pretty niche use cases dealing with specialized equipment or legacy systems. In general, whether it's Linux, BSD, Windows or even MacOS, it's always better to do a full reinstall with the new OS. Heck, by the time Windows Server 2003 went mainstream, only madmen were doing in-place upgrades on domain controllers. The better solution was always to build a new DC and then decommission the old one.

All my worst upgrade disasters in any OS came from in-place upgrades just fucking everything up. At best, it left a lot of old cruft hanging around, at worst it rendered a system almost unusable, and it was usually a bit of both.

The way I'm rolling out Debian and Ubuntu at work these days is just working images. Sometimes there's some funky hardware that requires after I clone an image that needs some intervention, but generally it just works. New images are generated every six months, or when a new release has been tested, rinse and repeat. In the business world you don't give a crap about anything but quick up time, and I have a stack of spares in a closet that get refreshed regularly, and when something blows up, you grab one off the shelf and move on. New OS upgrade, new image.

Comment Re:is this new? (Score 3, Insightful) 100

It's almost like elections have consequences, and America has elected that it and its businesses are going to be treated like the plague. Well, even more than that, even visiting the US is dropping, and now with US Marines on city streets in a major US city, well, fuck that banana republic. I will never enter the US again.

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