Posts by Bebu

Russia takes gold for disinformation as Olympics approach

Re: At least Russia is finally putting their efforts into something good for once

_{They're incredibly profitable for the IOC - and a nightmare for everybody else, particularly the residents of whatever city is bamboozled into hosting the mess. Billions are spent on stadiums that immediately turn into blight until they're finally torn down. The host city and country lose huge amounts of money, cities are frequently bankrupted. Local businesses are shut down because they're not the giant multinational sponsors.}

Something for Brisbane to look forward to. :)

The rustic yokel banana benders outside that city were opposed from the start which only goes to show...

I thought Taco Bell was purely a US thing but DDG tells me there are 14 in Queensland alone.

Unfortunately the name reminds me of the nasty PNG clostridial disease pigbel.

Twitch ditches Safety Advisory Council, relaunches with vetted 'ambassadors'

Twitch... more like shudder

"Twitch" wasn't on my radar until this article - I would have assumed it was a birdwatching (twitcher) site not a tiktok clone.

With every passing day I have more and more sympathy for Victor Meldrew "I don't believe it!!"

verso la fine del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per nella terra oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

"[Reid] denied AI Overviews actually recommended smoking while pregnant, leaving dogs in cars, or jumping off bridges to cure depression,"

Apart from MRDA these suggestions have a logical, if raving bonkers, basis. Smoking does reduce fetal weight (I believe), so a smaller watermelon at term. Leaving dogs in a car make more logical sense than leaving them unrestrained (outside the car.) Jumping off a bridge I am confident you would perk up before hitting the ground or water (not that anyone could say differently.)

Stark raving bonkers.

The common element missing here is a human or moral element not to mention a skerrick of common sense. They are missing from enough humans I am surprised that anyone expects these to be present in a mere artefact.

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

think of ouroboros

Snake eating tail. Her more under than over - head inserted into caudal oriface.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Screwdrivers can be used for anything

《= Screwdriver stuck in the base of the tree.

I did manage to get it out with considerable effort and yes it was bent beyond repair.》

So not the rightful king then?

I would have left it there as an object lesson or in case aforementioned regal chap turns up.

At least you didn't compound the felony by driving an axehead behind the screwdriver to try to unwedge it.

I assume the recipocating saw only reached 60% into the centre. The uncut 40% in the well seasoned centre always going to be a hard nut to crack.

Sufferin Succotash

As soon regonomial* (Sylvester) was revealed I could see this ending cat lives -= 1

This episode was almost reenacted when an "engineer" (ostensibly electrical but likely computing/software) pulled out a similar tool to open the battery compartment (showing an error condition) of a seriously big 3 phase UPS. I suggested that mucking about with high voltage DC is not likely to end well and that if he intended to proceed, to give me a fair chance to vacate the area. He decided discretion was the better part of (my lack of) valour.

I don't know at what DC voltages the battery chains in these UPS operate but I imagine at least around 100V otherwise the DC currents would be extremely high. I am pretty sure that shorting 100V with 12mm steel rod (aka large flat screw driver with 450mm square shaft) would launch molten steel all over the shop and would be a good day if the batteries didn't commit harakiri flinging their superheated guts behind the shrapnel.

* _{or regonominal although the OED has nomial from 1700s}

DARPA awards in-orbit manufacturing contract to Momentus

Circus

Momentus will work with other NOM4D performers to design and refine experiments for inclusion on a future Vigoride launch.

Not short on acronyms. Vigoride sounds like an energy drink augmented with a class 1 psychoactive.

Seems like bit of a circus and said performers could be clowns. :)

Unless the microgravity environment has benefits that cannot be reproduced on Earth I would have imagined the cost of launching the raw materials for these factories is uncompetitive. If you were recycling, repairing or repurposing existing orbital materials it might make sense.

Neuralink wants 3 more quadriplegic patients for its brain control interface trial

Could equally describe...

"PRIME: An Early Feasibility Study of a Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface for the Control of External Devices."

Could equally describe John Lumic's Cybus Industries' "Ultimate Upgrade™." ;)

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

Sarah Palin's X tea party?

I don't know if these superspreaders would change anyones opinion but does propagate assertions whose veracity could be easity falsified but never are, so you are awash in a sea of lies. I strongly suspect both ends of the political spectrum are equally culpable.

The fabric of US society is unravelling before your eyes and I would seriously consider Ken Burns' is warning about this fairly imminent threat.

JFK once suggested Americans ask: "what can I do for my country."*

The US is now light years from that sentiment.

* Inaugural Address 1961 which began with "We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom--symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change."

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

Re: Perfect for elderly relatives

And now I are an elderly relative. :)

Seriously though the better half only uses Firefox to browse and read/send her email and libreoffice to prepare documents for which wordpad would be overkill and all on Win7 (I finessed the extended updates on to it but those are finished too.)

This distro might be just the thing to replace win7.

The web interface of gmail keeps changing which confuses her which subsequently irritates me. A simple mail client that can do google oauth2 would be nice. Simpler than evolution or thunderbird. ;) The browsing is mostly FF on an aging tablet.

Re: Wayland?

You were lucky to have a tiny 'amster wheel.

We had to wire wrap the 486 cpu out of TTL nand gates and power the system with old telecom hand cranks magnetos* from phones once used with manual exchanges.

* _{Don't laugh we had this phone, including the two Eveready N°6 cells, in the antipodean back blocks until 1968.}

OpenAI is very smug after thwarting five ineffective AI covert influence ops

Re: Errmmm...excuse me, but all of this is nothing new

How far down the slippery slope have we slipped that Donald R. (arguably a blood thirsty, geriatric, avaricious, retarded ex-spook) appears the model of rationality and sanity when compared with the late US President Donald T.

Rumsfeld was basically avoiding answering a serious question by muddying the waters with this nonsense.

He might as well have said "you have a colouring book with pages that you have coloured in, some partially, others not at all, but also contains other pages that are completely blank."

He could have more succinctly stated "at any time there are always things [threats] to which we are completely oblivious. Historically these have been the most challenging to both the US and the West generally."

Desperately seeking ICQ? It may shut down, but Nina could resurrect it

ицq?

I was wondering how icq rendered into cyrillic ицq? Unlikely that the english I seek you would be preserved.

Also wondered why a russian company would pay anything for a moribund IM service? They aren't all geniuses like Musk.

As it turns out according to Wired before the paywall pops up, icq was (is) extremely popular in cyrillic speaking writing* populations where is its referred to as Aska (or little Asya.)

* _{the former might be more correct. :)}

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

Structured cabling ;)

《industrial-sized spaghetti farm under the floor. .》

Archeology woud suggests you just raised the floor. ;)

Re: There could be some 'quick wins'

《Years ago I heard of one which closed their building over a weekend and removed 14 tonnes of old unused copper cabling from one site.》

Some years ago a 5 storey building on campus had its network spine replaced by fiber. The cablers left in place the generations of rs232 cable, thicknet (10base5), thinnet (10base2) and twisted pair (10baseT) as well as the cctv/5mbit broadband coax, but the network engineer estimated there was about 20 tonnes of copper just in the spine.

I imagine its a similar case in the just under 100 building on campus. In one building in the vertical voids the various generations of abandoned data cabling were just freely hanging like fruit for the harvest. :)

Finally :)

《Given the current price of copper (around 4 GBP/kg) and the average weight of typical copper wire (around 0.02kg/metre) then you will need around 200m of wire 》

Kilograms, metres and unambiguous currency denomination.

A relief from the ambiguous dollars which half the globe uses (USD, CAD, AUD, SGD, HKD?), and the feet and pounds (or yds and cwt) which none of the saner parts of the globe uses.

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Explanations

《It's relatively easy to write and understand a declaration like x1 = (-b + sqrt(b^2-4*a*c)) / 2*a, but if you try to express that as an English sentence you are going to be in pain, and anybody trying to read the result is going to be in a lot of pain.》

It would easier to explain as completing the square.

The two closed form solutions of the quadratic are declarative whereas the completing the square is largely procedural but the polloi are basic process thinkers if the gray cells engage at all.

I suspect that even the more mathematical actually think of a proof or derivation as intrinsically a process which, at lesst from my point of view, it is not.

Tesla slams advisors for not loving Musk's $44.9B payout

We hired you for one job...

Tesla board: We hired you for one job...

Glass Lewis: Yes. We don't want it to be our last job either.

Trust, integrity, honesty, ethics, etc fled the corporate boardroom decades ago and are concepts now so unfamilar they may as well be rendered in Latin.

AI future: Nvidia boffin hopes 'everything that moves will eventually be autonomous'

I am sorry...

but can these chaps really do everything, 24×7, with one hand?

FCC boss wants tighter rules to prevent devastating satellite explosions in orbit

acceptable risk

《Setting an "acceptable risk of exploding" number seems so strange. How about none? Is zero accidental explosions a good number to reach for? And if yours does explode, you get investigated to make sure you made every reasonable effort?》

make sure you made every reasonable effort

I think the idea of the < 1/1000 risk requirement is that if, on post accident investigation, you can demonstrate that the design, construction and other measures reduced the likelihood of explosion to below this criterion then you can claim every reasonable effort otherwise your actions might be held to be reckless or negligent.

Perhaps adding the word hazard clarifies: acceptable risk of [the hazard of] exploding

Noting that risk is the odds (probability, frequency) of the hazard occurring. Obviously if a something is not impossible then the probability of it occurring (while perhaps miniscule) is not zero.

Actually I would be more worried that the paradigms of sanity that run KP(PRK) who are currently sending meteorological balloons over the DMZ to dump excreta on KR(KOR) could malevolently launch fragmentation munitions into low earth orbit to devastate most of the LEO space real estate. Would really rain on Starlink's parade.

Windows 11 24H2 might call time on that old NAS under the stairs

Get an update :)

Two decades ago I was presented with a fairly new consumer lacie nas device whose vital forces had departed this earthly realm. The owner was not too concerned as it was only a secondary backup but unknown to her an academic whose computing skills were legendary (ie nil) had managed to use it as his primary and only storage (not backed up) on his PC.

I extracted the (pata?) drive which was ok and attached it to a Linux box to discover while in the land of the living it ran an ancient Linux kernel* and software on some odd risc SOC - even then I thought this device was never intended to get an update.

The data files were on a Linux file system (ext4 or xfs) so complete recovery was possible.

Personally I wouldn't let gormless users loose with anything more capable than an X Terminal.

* _{the SOC just booted linux from a disk partition ie not from firmware.}

Re: Stop sigh.

Given the UK's last decade I would think Douglas Adams' DON'T PANIC! (in large friendly letters) might be more appropriate.

IT worker sued over ‘vengeful’ cyber harassment of policeman who issued a jaywalking ticket

Unlawfully accessing patient's medical records?

In most jurisdiction this is a serious offence which in an aggravated case such as this would invariably involve a custodial sentence.

The scale of the harm the officer, who was just doing his job, and his family subsequently suffered at the hands of this lunatic cannot be pushed aside with "the poor bastard was a wee bit off in the head but is ok now."

Clearly the employer was negligent in not enforcing its medical records access controls or negligent in not having any.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

"he joked"

Fatal* mistake. These types have absolutely zero sense of humour. Dealing with them a) avoid, b) run away, c) three wise monkey^¤ time.

Given this must have been ca 1965-70 I suspect the state of art of civilian (satellite) infrared imaging was no where near the capability of detecting the small temperature differential from the heat from a Soviet^☆ nuclear submarine up to 30 feet (~9m) below the surface that Tristran surmised was the case. Probably highly classified.

Another thing about these nutjobs is that they are incapable understanding how a reasonably intelligent, rational human being could take the evidence of their eyes, apply a little logic and smidgen of imagination and arrive at largely the correct conclusion.

So long ago I suspect that the usual hardware guy's ploy of shifting responsibility to the (client's) software developer wasn't routine.

The "Cone of Silence" and 86's shoe phone are fond memories from Get Smart (99 was cute too. ;)

* _{potentially literally} ¤ _{graphic's chosen for the 4th monkey} ☆ _{AFAIK never actually enemies of the US}

Amazon Prime Air delivery drones allowed off line-of-sight leash

Re: Oh good, no line of sight

《Given that this takes place in a country with serious gun problems (and I believe that specific region is one of them) I have a suspicion that many a drone will be used for target practice.》

Once you have a sufficient number of these legitimately flitting about the sky no one will notice any interlopers.

I can see narcotic and other contraband delivery camouflaged by the general traffic.

How many of the gun crazies that call america home have watched the Ukrainians using commodity drone ti drop explosives on their enemies.

It is not a matter of "if" but rather "when" before some homicidal lunatic drops a pipe bomb or worse from a drone into a crowd.

Promising results for osteoarthritis treatments tested in space

Must be getting slow...

I couldn't see from this article any obvious reason why these experiments required a microgravity environment.

I believe tissues and cells like osteoblasts/osteoclasts/chondrocytes etc behave differently in these conditions but not clear whether that is a plus or minus here.

I finally saw the link to the original article (blind and slow :)

They [Grodzinsky's team] thought it might simulate osteoarthritis characteristics quicker, with past research demonstrating accelerated bone loss in microgravity.

Not entirely sure I follow the reasoning in that article either. :(

Ex-OpenAI board member accuses Sam Altman of 'outright lying'

"Sam Altman [of] 'outright lying'"

No.

Someine just corrupted his training set and twisted his LLM weights to produce hallucinations.

I am surprised that anyone expects the utterances of these movers and shakers from any part the technology sector to be in accord with any part of reality (drug distorted or otherwise.)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux 8.10 released as end of the RHEL 8 line looms

'version 8.10 will be in "maintenance support" until the end of May 2029'

《version 8.10 will be in "maintenance support" until the end of May 2029 》

Five years of peace and quiet. ;)

Last night I synched my AL8.9 repos to bring them up to 8.10 and found a surprisingly small number of updates.

If your hardware is pretty static and/or is mostly server hardware from the likes of DELL (so isn't bleeding edge :) which is often the case in research/academic environments its five years of fairly uneventful OS maintenance.

I would be seriously testing *EL9 or *EL10 in three years time so there is a two year migration window.

Of course the whole world can change in five years - still you don't need a quantum computer or a 1000 NPU enables AI monstosity to run the payroll (you really don't want!)

The Reg builds official Lego Artemis and Milky Way sets

Re: Not interested

《Meccano etc. was (to the best of my knowledge) supposed to be toys that inspire originality and creativity.》

A vivid memory from childhood was the meccano set from my father's (pre-war) childhood augmented with newer additions (all were red or green.) Learnt a lot about basic geometry, statics and mechanics. The clockwork motor had a centrifugal governor which was fascinating in itself. Pulleys, belt drives, gears, worm screws all still found in modern machinery.

The labour of fastening literally hundreds of tiny nuts and bolts taught perserverance and was character building. :)

I don't remember any construction manual for models apart from some simple examples on the inside of the box lid - you had to use your imagination and then work out how to realize your concept.

Elon Musk's xAI scores $6B in its series B funding round

Re: Grok benefits from real-time access to the contents of the X.com platform

《Oh great, here comes Artificial Incel-igence .》

Nasty!

A few days ago I finally looked up the word "incel" as I had assumed it meant some form of self imposed abstinance (the world is awash with mostly daft labels so I hadn't bothered with this one.)

When I read the definition I was actually shocked by the ideas involved (and not at the confusion between celibacy and chastity;), but their inherent psychopathy and sociopathy.

In the early 2023 I think some of these models were already producing some very ghastly output along these lines. ChatGPT definitely lacked prefrontal lobes then or had been lobotomised.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

Re: The Out-of-Ideas Party grasping desperately at the most obvious cliché...

We can expect a return to the gold standard with the reelected Sunak government then?

The other way...

Looking around on the bus I see the under 16s either larking about with their mates or surprisingly more common that you would think, reading an actual dead tree book.

Its the over 16s that are buried in the device - even obvious couples each buried in their own device!?

Ban smart phones for the over 16s - anything with a camera, wifi, bluetooth, nfc ... - just voice calls and text.

Unfortunately even my generation are just as afflicted.

Re: National Service for the youth

《It's as if the Tories are not even going for the pretext of trying to win...

Free llamas for every school! Compulsory beards for chicken farmers!》

Bring back traditional english values!

Universal compulsory Morris dancing, Mumming and Folk Music festival attendence.

Should do the trick.

mangelwurzel harvesting in Basingstoke.

Luxury!

Sound positively riveting compared to our test pattern and saccharine classical music and when broadcasts started from our single station at 5pm it was the likes of "Bill and (bloody) Ben" (who gave a rat's which one of those 'ers it was?) or "Magic Roundabout" with a hippy dog sucking LSD laced sugar cube and some sort demented hybrid between an escaped jack-in-a-box and a grub bouncing all over the shop - the children even then seemed like the "special" class on an outing.

I noticed as an adult, children's tv did improve for a while to the point that much of the content was superior to the adult fare. Now both are pretty dire. :(

Indonesia's president orders government to stop developing new applications

A good point

《That's still fewer than 2 apps per island. How many software developers do they have on each island?》

I would wonder how much of this sprawl to provide "local" employment (to the governor's nephew) and less cynically to address purely local problems or a local solution to common problems not being addressed more widely.

Knocking up a quick and dirty app using a high level framework to implement a local government program that will only last a year or so may well be much more cost efficient than waiting for the central government IT to get round to implementing the function in their one "ring-of-power" app which will typically be delivered long after it is no longer needed and millions overbudget.

Shadow IT on steroids ;) - With the coming advent of AI/LLM and low/no code user generated applications, shadow IT seems to have faded as a clear and present danger from security theatre's repertoire.

While the President's is probably an ambit claim, the development of a central capability to deliver government service would be wise to prioritize those that have the greatest benefit, shortest delivery time, largest user base and least cost.

A relatively simple national electronic identity and licensing system might be progressively rolled out with immediate benefit to users with later services leveraged off the identity management foundations.

I would assume any apps would be initially for a android mobile/cellphones as these are far less expensive than apple's devices and likely more common by many factors.

I don't know how quickly phones turn over in these nations but if signicantly slower than in EU/US etc addressing the range of android versions might be a challenge. The Covid-19 check-in app in Q/AU didn't work on my (older)Samsung phone because it was one point version (x.1 v x.2) too low and no upgrades (The app just opened a url, posting the date/time, user's location number, numerical identity - not rocket science.)

I wouldn't mind being pleasantly surprise by a public sector software success from this nation. India seems to have made significant progress in some of these areas which given India's much larger scale and unique challenges I would been rather sceptical of any success.

Busybox?

I imagine you might incorporated all 27,000 apps into a single multi-call executable like a (very) busybox ;)

《CII: country inefficiency index = software module count / island count

France CII: 10

Indonesia CII: 1,58》

How many islands compose the UK? Leaving aside the Channel Islands, Isle of Man and other Crown Dependencies and overseas territories. (Rockall 0.5 ;)

From what I have read in these columns of the misadventures in this arena of the various levels of government and associated institutions, I suspect the UK would be a serious contender in the CII stakes.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Recycled Buzz prefixes...

How long ago was it Hypercard? Well before the proverbial twinkle that preceded the advent of this Ashley I suspect. :)

I will seriously endeavour to be around in 2030 to see this wonder of the age.

My guess that if the market for gratuitous novelty in software were to approach zero asymptotically as the actual need for safe, secure and correct software increased it could lead to development with well defined requirements with a trend to the minimalistic, simplified designs, engineering quality reusable software components and a focus on fixing the broken rather that creating a whole new crop of bugs.

These putative AI hyperassistants might well automate much of this.

I often wonder what if we just froze software and hardware at a particular time - say 2012 - and only fixed security flaws, bugs and removed unused/unusable features how much worse off would we be today (12 years later.)

St Exupery was writing about aircraft (which Boeing could assimilate today) but often quoted in software engineering contexts but customarily more observed in the breach:

Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.*

_{*Terre des Hommes (Gallimard, 1939), p. 60}

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Lesson learned

"Also; No! My razor sharp woodworking chisel does not double as a screwdriver."

Or for opening paint tins. The damage to the poor chisel only balanced by the injuries caused to the misusing tool.

The catalogue of indignities to which the unfortunate wood chisel has been subjected would make anyone cry.

I have seen large bladed screwdrivers and claw hammers used together as a mallet and chisel often enough to admit tool misuse isn't limited to the untrained.

">>"I was asked to help migrate this same customer's machine to a new environment.

With this epilogue, I hoped Mel was able to put his hands on the resurrected card... it was worthy of being mounted on the wall as a trophy!"

I was thinking between skewering the board and resurrecting it Mel must have traded his soul in some Mephistophelian bargain. The epilogue would suggest Mel's creditor is sending a payment due soon reminder. :)

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

Hold up there, Poettering.

systemd-talkd Yes, need that. Remember when things are really bad they can always become worse. ;)

Wall (Unix) will mystify some.

I was truly surprised by the news that ICQ was shutting down. I was under the impression it was history twenty years ago. :)

I used ICQ for a year or so around the late 1990s after a contact overseas moved to Windows and ICQ from a Unix timesharing system and ytalk. I think I had to get an ICQ client that ran under my workstation Unix (hpux) or Linux - I would guess it would have been Java based.

UNIX talk, ntalk, ytalk started off, I imagine, as a LAN version of wall. From memory talk used udp transport and I think it was nigh impossible to get it through a NAT box so I suspect protocol layers were also a bit scrambled.

The one thing I clearly remember from ytalk is that both parties had to (tacitly) agree to some sort of 'clear to send' indicator otherwise with a little lag/latency the cursor was all over the shop. I think we used '/' \n to indicate 'over'/'go ahead'.

Customary Four Yorkshiremen reference. "Try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you"

Bored students can now enjoy Sonic 2 on TI-84 Plus CE calculators, thanks to port

Heroic

Truly impressive. This programmer decided that he had the game's disassembly from a z80 based game console and a TI calculator based on the z280 processor - what could be easier? :)

The greatest surprise is that he largely suceeded. These retro-coders are an intrepid, fearless breed (the nac mac feegles of the programming world. :)

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

"take even longer when there's compression or decompression to be done."

Does it?

I would have thought the rate limiting step would be getting the bits (compressed or not) on or off the magnetic media? Unless the cpu and memory inside the tape drives are seriously underpowered or slow, I would think a modern cpu could more than keep up.

Even then, if the drive can operate with hardware compression turned off, host based compression (and encryption) is an option. If you were going to use host based encryption you need to compress first anyway. (Would you really trust encryption in tape hardware?)

If you were to use asymmetric encryption (public key) to encrypt your archives and kept each decrypting key in a "tamper proof" device then destroying the device effectively deletes the archives so encrypted. The encrypting key doesn't need to be secret.

In practise I imagine you would use ephemeral symmetric encryption with those keys protected by the asymmetric cryptography.

Its ironic that in more than 50 years that archive storage is still magnetic tape based. "Breakthroughs" in optical/photographic/holographic technologies haven't got much past headlines. I vaguely recall decades ago a proposal to store such data on silicon(?) wafers using the same photolithographic(?) technology used in IC fabrication yet in 2024 we still trust our data to rust on great lengths of plastic. :)

GNU Compiler Collection 15 ushers Xeon Phi and Solaris 11.3 to silicon heaven

"Our apologies if we mangled it."

I am guessing if the original was grammatical you have got it right. Both mundi and solis are gen.sg. of mundus and sol (2nd, 3rd decl. resp.)

Apparently to learn latin grammar properly you need to have the exceptions thrashed into you from age 6 at an english public school. :) Of course this results in both likes of sir Humphrey and prats like Boris Johnson who could doubtlessly decline anything except temptation.

Sad to have seen the passing of Sun Microsystems. The first Unix workstation I encountered was a, then new, Sun-3 running SunOS 3.x (Motorola 680x0 CPU.) I would not underestimate how much of subsequent open source and other tech history was a result of Sun workstations being ubiquitous in academic and research environments of the later 1980s and during 1990s.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Re: The bells! The bells!

Didn't seem too difficult even with google's dubious assistance and knowing nothing about computer games.

If I have the right location they weren't too keen on witches and might have been the inspiration for Agnes Nutter.

Swivel eyed loons add to life's rich tapestry although the merchant banker seems to have cornered this village's idiot market and was fortunate not to be composting in the Warden's muck heap.

Re: Pure Fiction

A building I once worked in during the early 1990s had localtalk running over legacy rs232 serial cabling to Webster gateways then to a 10base5 (thicknet) TCP/IP backbone which in turn connected to the campus network via a 5 megabit broadband ethernet running over reused closed circuit coax (75ohm?)

Never really had to deal with the details as the appletalk and macs mostly just worked. The very few IBM PCs had localtalk isa cards. The departing admin said you don't have worry about appletalk - it will run over wet string. At the time I thought that is only network technology (wet string) that would improve its performance by being pissed on.

_{Appletalk appears to be the protocol and LocalTalk and EtherTalk the particular datalink but as I wrote I never had any grief from it so never took too much interest.}

"To this day he remains the only person I've ever known that bought condoms for research purposes."

You need to get out more and broaden your acquaintenances. ;)

Man behind deepfake Biden robocall indicted on felony charges, faces $6M fine

"Magic Man"

"the magic man was given $150"

Not a US relative of the Crowman who bring the straw brained likes of Worzel Gummidge and wooden headed likes of Aunt Sally to life?

The elected members of the US congress would suggest he has been busy little magician.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Re: Pride

Remember to register to vote folks!

I was shocked that voter suppression as suggested by the shoulder surfing isn't a dirty little secret but overt (caretaker) government policy. This prat was complaining about his veteran mates being suppressed not the principle itself.

So in addition to registering to vote also ensure you have the required identity documents to cast a vote.

Here in AU the toryoid* (LNP) government (at the time) unsuccessfully attempted this piece of contemptible skulduggery.

Having compulsory voting and registration makes voter id largely unnecessary.

High time the UK adopted both preferential voting and mandatory voting and ditch the lords for an elected regional representative assembly.

_{* like haemorhhoids but involving the genitourinary tract.}

70% of CISOs worry their org is at risk of a material cyber attack

And the 30% who don't?

I cannot imagine any organisation that actually requires a CISO is anything like immune from these cyber hazards.

Either in Lala land or work remotely from Brazil.

The best of organisations still have pretty piss poor security possibly excluding intelligence and the military and even then I would not bet on those either.