davb

To counter some of the (valid) privacy concerns around TPM unlocked FDE, one big benefit is when it comes to decommissioning physically secure machines. If you aren’t concerned about the evil maid scenario and have reason to avoid network based unlocking, TPM unlocked FDE keeps your machines remotely rebootable while still allowing you pull a disk and send it for secure shredding at server EOL. That is to say, if your scenario is “encrypted at rest on a physically secure and trusted server” (more concerned with the storage medium alone), it’s a good fit. It means you’re not reliant on the OEMs opaque secure erase functionality.

This works equally well on Debian 13, but I found that installing Dracut (which will be the default from Debian 14 onwards) made the whole process smoother.

I found a small bug in QoS handling in the OpenSSH client under specific conditions. It had a big impact on my workflow but wasn’t a complete showstopper and might not have had an obvious impact on the broader user base. I raised an issue on the tracker and within a day I had a test build, a confirmed fix and a note of which release would carry the fix. It was one of the most positive experiences I’ve had reporting a bug, especially for a non-security issue.

I know this comment doesn’t add much to the conversation about this release, but I’m very grateful to Damien (who handled the issue) and the team for the wonderful job they’re doing on such a core piece of software.

Coincidentally (?) we’ve seen a huge uptick in failed login attempts to our MFA-protected admin accounts on our self-hosted Gitlab CE instance today. They’re coming from thousands of IPs across hundreds of networks (VPS providers and, apparently, residential proxies).

This book looks like it’s targeted squarely at people like me!

I’ve been a software engineer for the last couple of decades and I’ve tinkered with microcontrollers as a hobby but always been limited by my lack of electronics knowledge - very much trial and error to get a project far enough to be able to focus on the firmware (which is more my domain). I want to bridge the knowledge gap there.

My only formal electronics education was first year introduction to analog and digital circuits module at university two decades ago, led by a lecturer who assumed students had a huge corpus of pre-existing knowledge (and who I now suspect would have preferred to be supervising his PhD students and conducting research but had to make up the teaching hours - which I do understand).

I will definitely pick up a copy. However, Amazon UK (to avoid the NoStarch UPS shipping cost of $24) won’t get it to me until November. I’m excited to receive it.

I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.

But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).

Yes!! The Dell WD19 was notorious for that. My wife’s company used those - we couldn’t leave her WFH dock connected to our home network because of the wild broadcast storms causing our core switch to stop processing frames from her home office desktop switch. My org used HP Dock G5 units which behaved much better (besides the occasional firmware update killing video output until a power cycle, and inconsistent MAC address pass through between hardware revisions).

Indeed. We look after a huge, very diverse set of users (university science faculty - many thousands in our faculty, but tens of thousands across all faculties and professional services teams). According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome has over 65% market share for desktops - not supporting Chrome would be overly restrictive.

Our users interact with a huge array of internal and external sites and web apps, virtually all of which will be tested on Chrome. Our LMS, collaboration tools, internal apps, SIEM tooling, HR systems, ERP, knowledge exchange partner portals - it's all been tested on, and works with, Chrome. And we're not in a position to force thousands of vendors to make sure their applications are standards compliant and work in less popular browsers (as much as we might like to). Not to mention the deluge of tickets we'd be dealing with when incompatibilities arise; banning Chrome would cripple us.

Google have backed us into a corner with this one by making a careless default choice that takes advantage of their market dominance and forces us to work around their decision.

An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again.

As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.

I actually found it really reassuring and a little enlightening that he had so little to say about those technologies. I find it very easy to get sucked into a technology vortex (especially on Hacker News), where the imposter syndrome creeps in and you feel like a failure for not knowing some trendy technology that “everyone knows, duh!”. The next time I feel like that, I’m going to remind myself that Brian Kernighan doesn’t know Nix, only used Rust once (and didn’t like it) and doesn’t even know what Linux distro he uses. And no one would ever accuse him of being an imposter or a failure!

Related, I found that even after designating an application (iTerm2) as a "Developer Tool" in System Settings -> Privacy & Security, there were circumstances where notarisation checks were still carried out. Particularly, launching tmux then detaching and reattaching would cause the processes to no longer be exempt. This applies to any executable (+x), including shell scripts. I put together a test script that proves it at https://gist.github.com/davebarkerxyz/4111276ae1fb4a7566b271... (the second run is much quicker than the first one after a tmux reattach, but within applications marked as Developer Tools the times should be nearly identical).

Fortunately as of Sequoia (15.4.1), I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue.

Fortunately it’s only £16.40 with VAT and shipping to the UK. Approx $21.85. Comparable to the £9 M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (ESP32-S3) I picked up from Pi Hut recently.

Anyone who has maintained code that written by engineers new to the industry, who didn’t understand the context of a system or the underlying principles of what they’re writing, may disagree.

I’ve seen other versions of this like https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1i4nm32/rip... - none of which mention Trump. I do wonder if this version (mentioning Trump) is real - the domain from the link is Foxnews…

Yeah, having the whole of the UK being one colour is pretty useless, given the huge disparity in wages and cost of living between central London and the rest of the UK.

I use a .xyz for my personal domain (I could get my real name as the domain, and it was cheap). I use FastMail for email. Deliverability has been fine, with one exception - Radisson Red hotels. I’ve had two occasions in the last year when I’ve needed to email different Radisson Red properties, and both silently dropped emails from .xyz domains.

Thanks for the clarification, that’s really helpful. I think a paragraph under a “License” header in the README just reiterating what you said in that reply would be pretty clear.

I’m sure some people would make the assumption that it’s under the same license as the upstream package but in some environments absolutely clarity around licenses is really appreciated.

That appears to be the VirtualBox OSE license, copied from the original Oracle package, not the license for this specific release. It’s unclear how this new derivative or work is licensed.

The blog post mentions an open source license but I can’t immediately see it in the post or the repo (perhaps I’m just missing it). Any idea what license this is released under?

I was looking for something just like this the other day. I’ll often import a CSV into SQLite to do some ad hoc data analysis and transformation, but realised how useful it would be to have a JS/WASM based tool I could host on a static site for my colleagues (academics who don’t necessarily feel comfortable working in the terminal). Being able to say “import your CSV here and run some of these example queries” would be so useful. No complex web app or reporting suite to host, and nothing to install.

Similar experience here - I was making changes to the internal phone directory program and seen an entry for the “Pig Launcher” on a platform. As someone new to oil and gas, I thought it was quick funny.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a terminal supporting background images (indeed, this is very well supported). It was that I couldn’t find anyone referencing using subtly textured (slightly noisy) images to avoid a very solid background.

Meta, but I love the simplistic design of the landing page. That textured background is so much less brutal than a solid colour. I thought about using a background like that in my terminal (to give it a very subtle paper like quality) but was surprised to find nothing online about other people doing the same (I had hoped for screenshots and texture packs).

Whatever the complaints about DDG, I still commend yegg for engaging here. I can’t imagine the head of Google Search or Bing doing the same.

Agreed. And chatbots also leave no room for discretionary exemptions. My headset microphone broke recently (after the warranty period) - emailing the company and asking if there was any way I could buy a new one netted me a free replacement and a nice note from a real person. I’m 100% convinced that a chatbot would have told me that based on the serial number my headset was out of warranty and ended the chat.

No, the people building the shite customer service chatbots that we all hate using should take a stand.

It looks like the top line is “Screw better technology” (with the r dropped off).

“RR - What were FY96 [Financial Year '96] SW sampling limitations”

“RPG’s most messy” (with a superfluous letter in there).

Their (Serif / Affinity) site license costs are exceedingly reasonable, too. Especially for education customers.

Except, LLMs don’t cite their sources accurately (if at all). A Google search may yield information with a source I can verify; my understanding is that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of doing so.