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Comment Re:Nobody admits it: supply chain attacks are EASY (Score 1) 30

Of course, I've always said that if you have untrusted users you are fucked. LPEs are a dime a dozen and can break anything, even VMware tenant separation.

The problem is, you're going to be opening connections outward, and you might be compromised that way. Say, through your browser. As long as LPE remains possible then that opens the door to owning your whole system, to say nothing of the damage they can do to your data even without one.

Comment Re:Nobody admits it: supply chain attacks are EASY (Score 1) 30

There's another way to mitigate this, and it's ideologically difficult for a lot of Open Source people to accept...

The big problem is not ideological.

but you'll have to diverge from the tried and true path. AI makes this much easier: instead of using $popular_thing_everyone_uses, you use something else - either COTS or roll-your-own. Yes, it might be bugs, and yes, they might be security bugs, but unless they're painfully obvious issues where you didn't do your due diligence, it's going to be a more obscure target which will require more targeted attacks.

Humans are vulnerable to making the same kinds of errors, and security is hard, so you're going to either be highly likely to make predictable errors that are going to be easy to find or you're going to need to pull in some libraries to handle security.

No, this doesn't solve anything and it's 100% "security through obscurity".

IOW it's not a useful suggestion, especially now that there are exciting new tools for finding vulnerabilities rapidly.

Comment Re:Another point for Firefox and against Google (Score 1) 47

I gave up on NoScript a long time ago. Too difficult to use. Too many broken sites.

I have to use Chromium to access a few sites which are important, like for paying certain bills. Those sites don't work in Firefox with or without noscript; even when I enable all scripts, they still don't work. Anything not critically important which doesn't work when I enable all the scripts I'm willing to enable, I just don't go to, and I'm better off.

Comment Re:Right (Score 2) 47

Yet Microsoft Word requires a maximum of tens of megabytes of RAM per document. And arguably Word is more powerful.

Word can't even draw text while scrolling at speeds above a crawl because its rendering engine is such pathetic trash, so very much no. It also can't keep its UI drawing reliably if left running for a few days, even after windows are forced to refresh some elements won't draw until every window is closed (since they all run under one executable like it's the fucking 1980s because Microsoft doesn't trust their inter-process clipboard functionality to work correctly) and so on. Every part of office is hot garbage, and Word is absolutely not an exception.

Comment Re:No longer just SpaceX (Score 2) 64

If they think it's worth it, on the balance, yeah. I'm not telling people where to put their money; or how to weigh the risk of Musk skimming the till on the actually-profitable rocketry in order to cover losses building mechahitler or trying to make orbital datacenters work.

I was mostly responding to the "I ask because I'd imagine the first thing the collective shareholders will ask for is that the crappy bits of Musk Inc. get divested as quickly as possible." part of the above poster's post. This is 100% an IPO where, to the degree legally possible and potentially beyond, and more so than even typical tech IPO voting structures, anyone who thinks that they are getting even a whisper of oversight, even at institutional investor scale, is kidding themselves.

It's up to you whether or not you think that a security representing whatever basket of endeavors Musk feels like conducting will be worth it; or if the risk that he'll bleed the winners to prop up his more dubious bets is too high; my note is purely that this IPO is genuinely rather novel in the degree to which it's designed to put the current CEO in effectively total control. Even compared to something like the mostly-unremovable Zuckerberg voting/nonvoting shares arrangement this has additional curbs on shareholder resolutions and litigation options.

Comment Re:No longer just SpaceX (Score 5, Informative) 64

Anyone who is hoping to avoid Musk's dumber ideas should probably just stay the hell away. Even by the standards of the classic "oh, there's actual-votes stock and peon stock; guess which kind we sold during the IPO" stuff; spacex is pushing things. The boy-king of mars holds 85% of the voting power; shareholders are required to waive the right to jury trial or class action and submit to arbitration only, only class B shareholders(mostly Musk) can remove the chairman of the board, CEO, or CTO; and similar enthusiastic use of Texas' provisions for 'controlled companies' that really don't want to take any pesky outside input.

Putting your money on that is pretty much entirely just making a bet on whether you think the dictator for life will make line go up or not; not even pretending to be analogous to an ownership stake.

Comment Re:Artificial wombs are coming (Score 1) 35

If it weren't a technical issue; would it actually be a moral issue?

I suspect that there are lots of ways, including some surprises, of getting the problem wrong to some degree and introducing nasty developmental issues; so I could see an IRB having very plausible objections to the "eh, we'll keep pumping out flipper babies until we trial and error our way to what an embryo requires to develop a brain stem properly!" R but, if for sake of argument, you had a system that actually worked wouldn't that basically just be surrogacy without the seedy undercurrent of economic conscription?

Comment Re:No longer just SpaceX (Score 5, Interesting) 64

Unfortunately, Musk and friends took that into account. They demanded, and received rule changes to get rammed into indexes as fast as possible. They'll certainly be happy to take direct purchases from any of the weirdos paying for blue checks on twitter; but the strategy is clearly intended to not require the bagholders to bite directly; instead hitting anyone with index exposure as rapidly and automatically as possible.

Comment Re:Strange crossovers (Score 1) 115

Removing server features from workstations was a step ahead of the pack.

Into a hole.

It's an upgrade

It isn't.

Apple has all the money, they can afford to do both things and it's weird they haven't. Having a meaningful management system is a huge part of selling computers, to corporate and educational users. Back before all computers were on an IP network, when they didn't have security beyond antivirus, you could get away with not offering management.

Those who have demands closer to the old day workstation solutions are better served by other OS'es, but we're a blip on the consumer axis, not a norm.

Apple has a solid alternative to Windows for business use, if only they offered a full suite. They could be digging into that market. That's what NeXTStep really was supposed to be, a Macintosh-ish system for business use. Their prices were even more hallucinatory than Apple's at the time, which prevented any real adoption more than any lack of software, especially since they had very good compatibility with other environments (including, for example, a Netware client.) It's quite confusing what made them think they could get those kinds of dollars for a 68k when the PC was just getting fast. We can't ask Jobs now, though.

Comment Re:Where's the surprise? (Score 0) 115

I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.

To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.

Comment Re: Poettering (Score 0) 115

I just want a way to write a scheduled task with one line instead of an entire config file.

cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.

Another thing I would like is to be able to just put startup scripts in one directory and have them run instead of doing all kinds of configuration

That's /etc/boot.d

Comment Re:Surprise? Everybody's been saying it. (Score 1) 115

Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.

Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.

But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.

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