Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Why switchh? (Score 1) 33

Your sentence is gibberish. Assuming you mean to say "systemd does not preclude somebody adding security by other means", then no it does not.

But does any sysvinit based dist do it? Devuan, the white knight of the dump-systemd "movement" certainly doesn't. Service sandboxing? Nope. Cgroup process tracking? Nope. Credential handling? Nope. Log tamper proofing with FSS? Nope - rsyslog has some tamper evident features but the capabilities are way easier to set up in systemd. Disk encryption via TPM? Nope. Least privilege? Nope - its all LSB spaghetti code running as a user and no control beyond that.

Devuan admits how terrible it is by offering OpenRC during installation. OpenRC supports cgroups, capability dropping and supervision. But then it runs OpenRC over the same LSB scripts in compatibility mode, so none of that is used. And even if it was used it would still be limited compared to systemd. And it tacitly admit that sysvinit sucks when that was its whole schtick in the first place.

And I don't think people raging about systemd were ever motivated by security, or common sense for that matter. You demonstrated that with your Poettering remark. There are reasonable points of debate / concern about systemd, about overreach, modularity, packaging and suchlike but you're not interested in any of them. Just some kind of irrational fear of change even when it is progressive and beneficial. Almost as though you see a change to a subsystem in an operating system as a threat to your world view. It's very weird IMO.

Comment Re: Why switchh? (Score 2) 33

Systemd improves security in a number of tangible ways - small commands which do specific & least privilege operations, tamper resistant / journal logging, cgroup process limits, per service sandboxing, disk encryption, credential storage, security auditing tools and more. The sandboxing is probably as close as you would get to OpenBSD's pledge/unveil functionality in a Linux.

Where systemd may not be considered secure is it's certainly not minimalist. It has a lot of commands in that one package. But many of those commands exist to avoid dragging in even larger packages for the sake of using small bits of them (e.g. to set the time without ntpclient), but there have been flaws found over the years.

Comment Re:Why switchh? (Score 1) 33

Linux was NEVER like this. From the early days it was kitchensink mentality - dists would install stuff whether you needed it or not. Dists were especially bad for installing Telnet, FTP, SSH, NTP etc.

It was only when security was taken more seriously that dists started being more selective about what they installed. Most modern dists still have a couple of ports open, mostly locahost only but won't even run SSH unless somebody explicitly chose to install it. There are cut down Linux dists like Alpine which run with almost nothing additional at all and would be suitable for being firewalls, routers and net filters etc.

I think if I were ultraparanoid about security I might still consider OpenBSD, but it has its own limitations in terms of supported hardware & drivers, networking throughput, package support that may prevent it from being viable regardless of how secure it may be.

Comment Snake oil (Score 1) 61

All that really matters is the content you're trying to play, the DAC and the output impedance. Anything else is basically snakeoil. If Sony is trying to sell this thing based on "oxygen-free copper", or any other weasel marketing terms then it's snake oil. I'm sure that it does have a decent DAC and audio specs, but so do most mid/high tier phones. Anyone paying $2000+ for this is a fool.

Comment Re:Hmmm (Score 1) 120

Except it doesn't produce complex code if you tell it not to and review to ensure understanding. And no I'm not "special". I'm just capable of using the tool in a way that mitigates against its excesses and still makes it useful for some but not all tasks I would otherwise have to do by hand.

Comment Re:Hmmm (Score 1) 120

The problem with AI generated code, whether it is Claude or not, is a person vibe coding it. If they're ignorant of coding and just prompting AI until it does what they want then the code underneath is 100% guaranteed to be unreadable garbage and probably very brittle, unpredictable, insecure and unmaintainable outside of what it appears to do.

Conversely if it is driven by somebody technically proficient where code is generated, reviewed and adequately tested to specific requirements and standards, then the result is likely as good as handwritten code, better in some ways worse than others. As a developer myself, my assumption is that AI gets dumber the further away it gets from good training data. So if I ask an AI to generate unit tests, or generate code against some popular language or framework then it works fantastically well. It also works better with good context - existing code, rules & guidelines. But if I ask it to generate something for which there is scant information then it will definitely generate garbage and need a lot of hand holding.

Comment Grifter says a thing (Score 2) 165

Altman is hardly likely to come proclaim AI is a shell game with enormous potential to ruin lives. Because he's got his bank account and personal enrichment to worry about. The grift will perpetuated by his ilk until the bubble collapses or they and their company becomes criminally and financially liable for the consequences.

Comment Why does it have to be Flock or nothing (Score 2) 90

Assuming Flock were the reason for the drop in crime (it isn't), then the job could still be performed by an ANPR / ALPR system run and operated by the state with a specific, well defined and legal purpose with oversight. It would certainly be better than allowing a private company to harvest that information and use it for god knows what nefarious purpose.

Comment Re:What's new here? (Score 1) 57

Who said it was "hard"? But it isn't fast and it is a pain in the ass if you just want to run a container having to do it through some desktop shim image (Rancher and Podman use backends images just like Docker) or an Ubuntu image. If wslc makes it easy to invoke straight from a prompt it will save time, memory and effort. I expect a compose function will show up in due course too. I would also not be surprised if some of these Desktop applications support wslc directly instead of through shim images.

Comment Re:What's new here? (Score 1) 57

Docker on windows is usually done one of two ways - Docker for Desktop (a commercial product) which is basically using WSL2 as a backend and its own custom distro, or you install Ubuntu and install docker inside of it. Neither is particularly convenient if you just want to a container off the cuff for some reason and I assume Microsoft want to make it more easier, faster and more convenient for those use cases.

Comment Re:"could" (Score 1) 160

I don't have an objection to GMO per se, but I do to bullshit PR pieces that start off with an exaggerated benefit and then overlook the obvious issues that meaning that benefit will never happen. Aside from the GMO angle, if the contention is that food waste and emissions are a thing, then it would be far more effective to crack down on the way supermarkets sell stuff in quantities that people don't need, e.g. packaging & pricing certain kinds of fruit and veg including bananas in quantities that guarantee food waste.

Comment "could" (Score 3, Interesting) 160

I love press releases which are total bollocks. Such as announcing a genetically modified banana and hypothesizing the carbon savings if the entire world switched over to this banana when that is something that never happen. In fact I wonder how many plantations would be willing to switch over if they and consumers have to bear the cost of this presumably patented and controlled plant. And it's not like with some GMO products which can be produced for domestic consumption where approval is one regulatory hurdle - bananas are grown predominantly for export from tropical countries so there are multiple hurdles. And it's interesting they claim "British shoppers" will enjoy these bananas - since we all know how welcoming the UK and the EU are to genetically modified products.

Slashdot Top Deals

...this is an awesome sight. The entire rebel resistance buried under six million hardbound copies of "The Naked Lunch." - The Firesign Theater

Working...