Ironic that for the last week or so, The Register has also posted "25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then".
Posts by jlturriff
64 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2022
LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs
SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system
After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus
Speaking of the days of green screens...
(This is not a description of an on-call fix, but it did fix a few people.)
Back when mainframe terminals were an improvement from Hollerith cards and keypunches, they were very thin on the ground. (The first place I worked, the data processing department installed two (!) terminals for use by the senior programmers.) Things gradually improved by creation of a "bull-pen" of shared terminals for the rest of the staff. Inevitably, there was competition for access to this scarce resource, and occasionally someone would step away from a terminal or go to lunch without logging off. This, of course, was also a security issue, and a few of us, if sufficiently provoked, would do something like using a little-known command to change the terminal's line length to 1 character, or install a little TUI routine that looked just like the logon screen, but just looped until a particular function key was pressed.
(To my knowledge, nobody ever misused such a routine to steal credentials, which would have been a quick way to become unemployed.)
Amazon accused of cheating low-income Prime users out of two-day deliveries
Re: Exactly what the AG is doing
Even more simple (and ethical) would be for Amazon to inform their customers in those areas that "Due to circumstances beyond our control we are unable to provide the two-day free delivery provided by Prime to your area, so we we will no longer charge you for Prime services."
Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price
Letting chatbots run robots ends as badly as you'd expect
The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg
Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code
CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains
Software liability disclaimers are still a thing, right?
I'm no longer in a position where I buy commercial software, but I still see licensing "agreements" that state that the software is provided as "use at your own risk". How widespread (if at all) are such clauses in commercial sofware licenses? If they still exist, shouldn't they be phased out as part of the shift from insecure to secure software?
Google begs court for relief from Epic Games' Play Store demands
' "Google has a history of malicious compliance and has attempted to circumvent legislation and regulation meant to reign in their anti-competitive control over Android devices," '
I think you mean "rein in" (an analogy with controlling a horse by pulling on its reins) rather than "reign in" (a misguided analogy to government's supposed majestic power over Big Tech). :-)
American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years
Another reason for not wanting to modernise
Here in the US, people are also becoming more and more skeptical of overbearing automotive industry and their participation in mass data collection and remote control of vehicles that "feature" continuous network connections. These connections allow the companies to spy on their customers' (victims'?) use of their vehicles, track their locations, make features "rent-only," prevent maintenance by independent mechanics, and even brick them for late payments. There is a growing number of potential owners who are reluctant to buy these vehicles.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
(Okay, Cory Doctorow comes off sounding rather manic, but he's not wrong.)
Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US
US government's lax response to IT security "implementation"
It's really frustrating to see how the US government is "responding" to software security issues. (I put it that way because they mostly seem to be giving the IT industry a pass to ignore security.) Applying this blanket sanction to Kapersky only surprises me by the amount of time it took for them to take action at all; meanwhile the rest of the industry goes blithely on its way, ignoring security and lying blatently about their commitment to its implementation, and the government does nothing except squabble. IMO there should be hard requirements for IT to show the state of their security implementations, and criminal penalties for heel-dragging and backsliding, and I believe that a lot of high-level executives should be behind bars for leaving their companies open to theft of customers' data and ransomware attacks
Privacy features lose their way in latest Firefox update
Re: Uh-huh...
Or try running an external adblocker, like privoxy, like I do. I really don't trust plugins, or even the built-in password manager; the need for plugins I can't get around, since Mozilla has made UI customization effectively impossible without them, but I prefer to use things that are available externally to a browser whenever possible, both for security and performance reasons. Also, look through about:config and see how many external URLs Firefox wants to connect to; their privacy boasts are very suspect, IMO.
From network security to nyet work in perpetuity: What's up with the Kaspersky US ban?
What's up with Mozilla buying ad firm Anonym? It's all about 'privacy-centric advertising'
None of this is at all reassuring. I've long been skeptical of Mozilla's claims of privacy respect and user-friendliness. Just look into Firefox's about:config database (why does it make me think of MacroShaft's registry?) and count the number of URLs Firefox talks to; and just try to use it to customize the user interface: obscurant variable names and values, no user-accessible documentation.
To paraphrase a famous politician, "Firefox is the worst of the web browsers except for all the rest."
If, perhaps, Icecat could keep up to date with Firefox that might be a solution, but with no dedicated support for it, that's not likely.
Satellite phone service could soon become the norm
Re: "a pragmatic means of network extension"
Yes, "if the network gives you HD." Here in the US, even those who live in the big cities aren't guaranteed HD, and it just get worse in smaller communities and rural areas. The telcos here are always crowing about 5D, but outside the cities it's either unavailable or no better than 4D; and when it comes to internet, I'm hoping I'll live long enough to see fibre where I live; my satellite connection is expensive, slow, and subject to bad weather.
systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home
Google to push ahead with Chrome's ad-blocker extension overhaul in earnest
Do you really need that GPU or NPU for your AI apps?
TR-069, a protocol that made broadband manageable, turns 20. What's coming next?
Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?
Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe
Re: The English language is so much fun...
Hmmm... couldn't make the EDIT button work.
I first noticed this phenomenon when I was exposed to IBM's virtual storage and virtual machine technology in college. "Virtual" has pretty much fallen by the wayside in advertising now, but before then there were lots of advertisements that used the word, whose meaning was quite fuzzy to people, e.g. dishwashing soap commercials that said their product made glassware "virtually spotless." :-)
The English language is so much fun...
'Apple – which advertises Safari as "incredibly private" ' is, when one thinks of it, quite accurate: "incredible" says it all. We see this sort of misuse of words all the time; "incredible," commonly thought of as a good thing, really means "not credible;" "terrific" means "inducing terror" and so on. It's fascinating to see how such terms have been twisted so that their meaning has become positive instead of negative.
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you
GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session
Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh
Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks
Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech
NASA wants to believe ... that you can help it crack UFO mysteries
Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro
Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font
OpenAI is still banging on about defeating rogue superhuman intelligence
HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0
Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem
"Just run the test scripts." ―easy to say, but
On a large system like Azure, it's almost impossible to cover all of the possible combinations of interactions and customer practices. Does a customer run multiple servers that talk to one another? How many different ways are there to back up your databases? Do the servers interact with non-Azure servers? etc.
One would think that MS' test suite would include a realistic working set of databases (perhaps a clone of a production set, including some archival backups) that can be loaded from a known state, but it sounds like they don't.
Criminals spent 10 days in US dental insurer's systems extracting data of 9 million
Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'
Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux
Not only legacy hardware, but software also.
You mention old hardware that won't run more modern Windows than XP, but there are also instances of software that won't run on more modern Windows. The ones I've heard of are industrial control applications that are effectively 'abandonware,' but still necessary to operate industrial equipment (boilers, plywood manufacturing, etc.).
Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world
Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug
IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco
Throughput claims
One of the things that really gripes me about telecom (from POTS to Broadband) is the propensity of providers to tout their service speeds as "up to [insert rate here]," as if this means anything. Sure, ISDN was rated at "up to 128K/sec," but just think: 20 bits/sec qualifies as conforming to that boast, too. For example, my satellite link is rated at "up to" 50MB/sec, but right now my throughput is 15.03up/1.46down MB/sec, far lower than my ISP's suggestion.
We need to change the rules so that providers also have to state a LOWER limit.