Notices by Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club), page 31
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Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2018 01:27:27 EST 
Hattie Cat
https://shitposter.club/attachment/1520732 Savaged by systemd -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:41:38 EST
Hattie Cat
@h That gives me hope. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:40:43 EST
Hattie Cat
@h It's especially repugnant to me because I remember the days when I built computers from discrete logic and chips in DIP packages and when the Internet was just starting to catch on. A far cry from now. But later generations don't realize how much freedom has been lost because they never experienced what was before. (And because it was so limited compared to nowadays, would not want to go back to it.) -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:37:58 EST
Hattie Cat
@h Yeh, when your "operating system" has an "advertising ID" you're sunk. Modern computers have just become consumer appliances, and increasingly controlled by other entities, not in your interests either. I've heard of "the war on general-purpose computing" - may be this is what it's alluding to? -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:36:47 EST
Hattie Cat
@h @bob I also remember X.25 PADs on terminals talking to a mainframe. The dumb serial terminals were later replaced by microcomputers. The orange VMS documentation set I also remember. In those days, the microcode for the processor actually came from DEC on tape, and you could upgrade it.
Nowadays my little Raspberry Pi would blow the VAX out of the water, both on performance and memory capacity. An FPGA-based system would deliver a lot less horsepower than a Pi. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:30:57 EST
Hattie Cat
@h @bob I agree - every time CPU power has increased, software engineers have always found a way to reduce the machine to a crawl, but this is partly because the increasing power of machines has made software far easier to create, even if vastly inefficient. Look at the number of people writing stuff in Javascript, whereas back in the day I was cycle counting in assembler - it was a real effort to get acceptable performance or memory usage (usually not both simultaneously - I remember doing multiple passes over files because there wasn't enough memory to process the whole thing at once). -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:26:15 EST
Hattie Cat
@h @bob Things like this keep me encouraged (RISC-V on an FPGA). https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/risc-v-on-an-fpga-pt-1/
Unfortunately one doesn't just need a CPU but peripherals to communicate with the world. I believe @bob has pointed out the increasing problems of open driver support for wireless LAN. USB is fundamentally untrustworthy. Disk controllers can be backdoored. Graphics is complex but back in the day we managed without - I still have fond memories for my VT220 tied to a VAX - but would if resurrected I suspect we'd find it cripplingly restricting. And what about printers?
I've even mused about paper tape if all other mass storage is suspect. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:20:53 EST
Hattie Cat
@h @bob This is something I've mused over about an FPGA implementation of something like RISC-V. (You can build your own systems based on an off-the-shelf RISC-V core if that's too extreme https://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/mi-v-embedded-ecosystem/risc-v-cpu#overview )Β Unfortunately, the performance would be low - FPGAs are hardly fast - at least not at reasonable cost, and adding complexity like caches and MMUs pushes up the transistor count. (Would we have to go be resigned to the capabilities of the early microcomputer days?) -
h (h@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 18:34:34 EST 
h
The Free Software Foundation moves to address the Intel Management Engine threat.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/intel-management-engine-2013-take-action
"The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a grave threat to the freedom, privacy, and security of computer users. [...]
If there is an event at your university or in your community addressing the Intel chip bugs, we urge you to distribute printed copies of our report by Denis GNUtoo Carikli"PDF Document Download:
https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/blogs/Intel_ME_Carikli_article_PRINT_2.pdf#fsf #freesoftware @intel #ime #spectre
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Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:11:37 EST
Hattie Cat
@bob @h Unfortunately CPUs are extremely complex these days. Perhaps an extreme view, but the Ken Thompson compiler hack (Reflections on Trusting Trust) means it could be turtles all the way down. A backdoor built into a Verilog compiler means even if you verify the hardware description it could compiles into something with a backdoor. Backdoored programmable logic means even FPGAs could be suspect. The days when ARM1 was designed by Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson are long gone. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 18:45:36 EST 
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@h Intel ME, AMD TrustZone and also the recent Meltdown/Spectre bugs which were really chip design flaws highlight that what's really needed are open chip designs which can be independently checked. Even if the known problems are fixed if CPUs continue to be black boxes then we can expect more similar design flaws in future. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 19:02:05 EST
Hattie Cat
@delores K&R and do the exercises? 'Old skool' C was simple enough that I never bothered with tutorials. (Aah, the days when an entire language could be covered by a single slim volume.) -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 17:24:42 EST
Hattie Cat
@bob @schlink @abreakinglass Still some question marks but I use it with a friend who I weened off Skype. Unfortunately there don't seem to be many other alternatives if you require a multiplatform video and voice chat system that works on mobile as well as desktop, and is friendly for non-technical people to set up and use. Open to other suggestions. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 04:15:49 EST
Hattie Cat
@extebert @thatbrickster I already use a squid proxy server and block various domains including mozilla location services (seems to have traffic even though I disable geo.location - no ill-effects noticed so far). -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 04:13:38 EST
Hattie Cat
@extebert @thatbrickster As @bob has pointed out, all this web2 shit means that browsers have to be stupendously complex - so well beyond the capacity of a single person or even a small group to write or maintain. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 04:11:29 EST
Hattie Cat
@extebert @thatbrickster I disable the telemetry and dive into the about:config to turn off geolocation, disable pocket etc. but it's a faff - creeping Googlization of Firefux. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 04:04:22 EST
Hattie Cat
@thatbrickster So, no choice then? Unfortunately konqueror doesn't run on MacOS. There's always lynx but that's getting crazy...
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