Posts by Cruachan

How Voyager engineers found two more years in a 50-year-old power budget

The gift that keeps on giving, the project still returns useful data and we get stories about the incredible ways the engineers are keeping Voyager going.

Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts

Re: WHEN

It's fine, all these datacentres (much like some of the coal power stations) will switch to bitcoin mining (other forms of snake oil are available)

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Stories like this always make me think of the SABRE and other projects that literally never got off the ground. Flights would have been 2 hours or less if it ever was developed, but as the company are now bust that seems unlikely. James Follet's novel Sabre based on the proposed space plane was also very good IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)

Part of the issue for me with air travel is the attempts by the airlines and lots of brands to still make it seem glamorous, as if overpriced alcohol, perfume and other such luxury goods that you can only buy at travel retail are a good thing. Clearly they are to some people though.

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Broadcom's billing department looking at this and thinking that it sounds like a great idea.

Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud

"Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted."

Uh huh. Anyone reading that and thinking it's true, you might be interested in this bridge I have for sale...

Hands off our VPNs, privacy groups tell UK ministers

Re: Capita?

They see it, but are very heavily lobbied to pretend that they don't.

RIPA is nonsense, the calls to put backdoors in encryption are a joke and the adherence to IR35 as a solution to tax dodging contractors was driven by consultancies lobbying for the work they wanted. Readers of PE, Computer Weekly (actually the first to break the story) El Reg knew about Horizon long before the TV drama that finally forced the Government to act, but successive governments have defended all of them or ignored calls for change or independent investigation until they are forced by public opinion.

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Would be interesting to see as percentages, I suspect there will be more W10 machines getting pwn3d but whether that's just down to hackers going for the system that there's more of is the question.

Microsoft to switch off OWA Light after nearly two decades

I was talking about OWA the other day to blank stares from the youngsters I work with. The amount of time I used to spend setting up things like OWA, OMA and RPC over HTTPS (Outlook Anywhere as they renamed it) in the days before everyone had smartphones.

Clingy Virgin Media fined £28M for refusing to take the hint

I lived in a flat where the previous occupants had VM (actually Telewest from the logos on the junction boxes, so several acquisitions old)

They sent junk mail through the post almost weekly addressed to "Householder" for almost the entire time I lived there. Between that, this story, and the hassle various family members have had getting through to them, no chance I'll ever sign up.

One of their tricks is to say that you'll lose your VM email address (or any legacy ones like blueyonder.co.uk) to put people off the hassle of changing everything, in each case I know of the address is still working years later.

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

Re: Physical media for music please

That also gives you lots of opportunities to say "This one time, at band camp..."

Yes, that reference instantly ages me. I'll get my coat.

Re: Physical media for music please

Yeah, if you buy a CD direct from Amazon then it's "Autorip" enabled and you don't have to rip the mp3s yourself, you can just download them. That's linked to the purchaser, even (IIRC) you mark the item as a gift.

Yet you can't gift a download to someone, either music or books from the Kindle store. I assume not Prime Video content either, but never tried that.

Re: Physical media for music please

One of the few nice things I can say about Amazon is that buying music from them means downloadable DRM free mp3s. I used to always buy CDs but they are often more expensive than mp3s these days.

If it's older stuff then Music Magpie and the like on eBay are my go to.

Lessons from the VMwars – nothing virtual about the Broadcom vs Tesco slugfest

There might also be the odd vendor offering an appliance or only supporting their product virtualised on VMware. Probably less of an issue these days but I definitely remember Cisco Call Manager being a VMware only product for example.

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

Re: I haven't followed this saga closely

"But does anyone understand what Broadcom's play is here?"

Check out this story and the comments as well:-

https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/06/17/tesco-is-sprinting-to-quit-vmware-and-broadcom-despite-rapid-migration-risks/5256133

Apparently Broadcom have decided to focus on the top 5-600 customers on the assumption that they are too big to migrate quickly/easily and so will take the financial pain, and they don't care about the rest. Tesco and T-Mobile are obviously big enough to unleash the lawyers on Broadcom where many won't.

Supreme Court rules cops need a warrant to vacuum up phone location data

Don't need their location data to know that they're in the pocket of some very rich GOP donors.

Datacenters dip a toe back into waterborne computing despite obvious challenges

Re: Ocean cooling ?

Yeah, the issue these days is more storage than generation, there's talk (again) of Loch Sloy (above Loch Lomond on its West Coast) being converted to pumped storage which has never happened in the past due to non-native invasive fish in Loch Lomond.

The battery farms sound really scary, I've cycled often in Whitelee Windfarm and the batteries there are incredibly noisy, a kind of ground hum sound.

Re: Ocean cooling ?

"Coastline that isn't storm lashed desolate cliffs is likely occupied by the sort of houses that can afford lawyers to tie you up in environmental impact studies for centuries"

I'm surprised actually that no one, like Microsoft for example, has explored using some of Scotland's former power stations. The majority were built on the coast and lack the cooling towers that "traditional" power stations have as they used seawater as a coolant and had long cooling channels for the water to cool in before returning to the sea. Plus they obviously are connected to the power grids.

The downside is the contamination of the site, Longannet (former coal station near Kincardine) is still being cleaned up and so is Hunterston A (nuclear station on the west coast). Have to assume US regulations are rather less strict on such things given that some former power stations are apparently now bitcoin farms.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2022/05/03/dont-blame-cryptomining-blame-the-power-giants-epa-told/1018957

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

I'd like to say it's just MS who don't listen to users and instead say "you want this, don't you?" but I've been setting up some Android devices at work this week that are used as scanners in a production facility's warehouse, and the latest Android update changes the functionality of the power button from opening the power menu to opening Gemini.

Hours wasted writing and testing MDM policies to change it back cos these devices need to be as dumb and as "set and forget" as possible. Much like writing GPOs to disable consumer features on an enterprise OS.

Re: Windows 7 was the last usable shell from MS

8 was actually decent IF you were using the right hardware. They got the timing wrong and assumed everyone would be on touchscreen/hybrid devices and it worked pretty well on Surfaces for example, but was a POS on a regular desktop for normal users which were and still are the main users of Windows.

ME was the least stable OS I ever used, even going back many years to a ZX81 with the RAM pack that would fall out and crash the whole thing if a butterfly flapped its wings 3 counties away.

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks

Re: is this the beginning of the end for VMWARE

I'd forgotten about that one as licensing dongles are pretty rare these days (IME anyway). Pretty sure there is/was a 3rd party tool to get around it though, or I have a dim recollection of a license file being placed on a virtual floppy disc in one case.

Re: is this the beginning of the end for VMWARE

Be interesting to hear what bit that is, or if they've fallen victim to marketing hype.

Only customer I've worked with over the last few years who said they couldn't migrate to Hyper-V for example (which IME a lot of public sector and charities use due to the discounts they get) was running ~300 servers and heavily used some of the cluster balancing features of VMware, but they were looking at the Dell alternatives when I was there. Don't think it was VxRail, IIRC Dell were launching their own HCI product but can't remember the name of it.

It's a weird choice from Broadcom. I'm sure in the short-term they'll be fine, as they've clearly calculated on enough customers being unwilling or unable (again in the short-term) to migrate.

They're going to get little to no new business though when it's well known in the industry that they think they can behave like Oracle, and their competitors will be aggressively marketing their own products in comparison.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Re: On the one hand....

It rather depends on the next US Administration and how they decide to regulate, if they can given the damage done under this one.

His rightward shift was at least in part fuelled by his daughter's rejection of him, but his quarter billion investment in to getting Trump re-elected got him a lot in return and ended a lot of investigations and projected regulation of his companies.

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: HTC phones

I had several even before that, O2 XDAs running Windows Mobile were mostly rebranded HTC phones. The Touch Pro was a great business phone with the slide out keyboard

Just remember when it does that it's the fault of Biden, Clinton or Obama. Possibly all three.

Graviton 5 impresses, but please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them 'AI chips'

Re: Nobody has ever found, detected or seen a graviton

Never used, but they only point (far) right.

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

Dealt with this sort of thing a lot in the days I did outsourced support, most people like this also insisted on their accounts having full admin access and refused to accept having a separate admin account as a security measure. Almost all of them had no need to have admin accounts at all, but insisted on it anyway. CFOs and similar posts were (IME) generally the worst for this, due to finance historically being where IT began in a lot of companies.

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Nudity is not a crime

"Or a Music student researching album covers is blocked from seeing The Scorpions - Virgin Killer."

That was the very example I was going to cite, there was a huge furore between the IWF and Wikipedia over that one a few years ago.

If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs

A friend told me about a friend of his who's relationship ended because he DIDN'T have an iPhone. Apparently the girl he was seeing felt it was too much hassle communicating when she couldn't use iMessage.

Logitech knows when to fold 'em

I had a Surface Arc Touch mouse many years ago, would have to hope that the tech has evolved since then as it didn't last very long. Mind you, it didn't have AI.....

Other than the fact that it had a dongle and wasn't bluetooth, yet to see a mouse better for portable use than the original Arc Mouse to be honest.

If you don't fall for these extortionists' calls, they'll show up with USB sticks

Re: It’s easy

About 15 years ago the company I worked for that did SMB support was asked to do a security audit of one of our clients, which included an element of staff testing. I turned up at an office I'd never been to before, said who I was and gave the name of the partner at head office who had requested the audit who could be contacted to verify I was who I said I was and should be allowed access. Apparently I had an "honest face" and the partner was never contacted, he was apoplectic when he read the report though as that was included.

Surprised they don't stick with the tried and tested post them a promotional leaflet from a random company along with half a dozen infected USB sticks, rather than show up in person.

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

How many of those "saved" 43 minutes were not having to deal with "Copilot can help you with that. Would you like to install it?" prompts?

All the passwords were stored in Active Directory description fields

Re: Why, for the love of all that is holy...

"I don't see a point to expiring passwords."

It's another of those things that has changed over the years, changing passwords once a month was seen as "good" security in the days when laptops weren't the default, not everyone had smartphones and services like OWA were much more commonly used and exposed to the internet. Most services exposed to the internet these days will have some sort of MFA.

Re: Why, for the love of all that is holy...

People assume that normal users can't see the information, and it does require either command line/PowerShell queries or local admin rights in order to install the AD tools to access the information.

I remember once being asked to get a list of AD users and when their passwords were last changed, and the guy who asked couldn't understand how I'd done it in 5 minutes without access to a DC. He had no idea how much info is accessible in AD to a standard user with no additional rights.

See also people who put passwords on post-it notes under their keyboard, insist on having non-expiring insecure passwords, or don't bother with any sort of basic security as "their data isn't worth stealing".

Hence why my post said "also" block CMD and PS and change the GPOs from ancient defaults. There are huge changes from what was considered secure in 2003 and what is now, things like password standards and encryption algorithms for example.

I'm now wondering if this a company I used to contract with (briefly), they asked me to do some auditing of AD and I discovered this same issue and they thought I was incredibly paranoid until I showed them just how much info you can query out of AD as a standard user.

I doubt they've changed anything in the 6 months since I left there, also gently suggested that they should be blocking access to the command prompt and PowerShell (amongst many other changes) in their GPOs, which appeared to have been barely changed since the Server 2003 defaults.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: Hiding behind morals

Same as all ex-Tories now in Reform "we're going to fix Broken Britain" desperately hoping that voters conveniently forget who was in power for 15 years.

Five Eyes: Watch out for odd LinkedIn connection requests, China's back on the hunt for state secrets

Given the slop on LinkedIn these days it's not like I need another reason to ignore connection requests.

Whilst I still get a lot of work from there it's messages from recruiters I know, very rarely see any actual work advertised on there but it might just be hidden by all the people desperate to be business influencers.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

References to floppy disks these days remind me of my time working for a hardware OEM in the early 2000s. We would occasionally get overflow calls from South Africa due to the shared language and overlapping time zones. We were warned in advance that in South Africa 3.5" floppies are referred to as the much funnier and also much more accurate "stiffies" so users calling with a problem with their stiffies were not in fact just taking the piss and should not be laughed at.

Re: every byte matters

Was it the Speccy that had the jerky music in Manic Miner because it only used every second CPU cycle? I have a recollection of reading that because music had previously been considered impossible due to lack or resources, can't find the source for that now though.

Re: Router on a floppy

The Beeb is terrible for that, and so are many other sites. Any even tangential story to the music industry means a picture of Taylor Swift

Dems slam Trump for making cybersecurity hold out the tin cup while splurging on ballroom and Jan. 6 'slush fund'

His mobile phone website is leaking customer data and he had his twitter account hacked at least twice, safe to say cybersecurity is not high on his list of priorities.

Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache

No doubt it's not an easy problem to solve, categorised block lists are hard to maintain and many sites will have multiple domains as well, plus proxy bypass websites will always be a thing.

I was oversimplifying with "on/off switch", what I meant though is that similar to TV boxes having a PIN to unlock adult channels there would need to be a way for people to bypass the filters, as you noted with the horse racing for example. Huge numbers of people in the UK who aren't gamblers like a flutter on the Grand National for example.

If it was going to be done via block lists then there would have to be a centralised block list maintained by someone, presumably ofcom, with the ISPs reading from it on their devices. We've had in the past the farcical decision to block torrent sites, which is only enforced on the "big" ISPs and not all ISPs as a prime example of poorly thought out legislation.

I've said all along that this should be done at the household level, the bill payer has to age verify anyway for the direct debit or however the bill is paid so give them the keys to the on/off switch and not some random "identity verification" provider, many of whom have already been found to be dodgy.

Parents don't want to be seen as the bad guys though, and they can point to the government and say "it was them" whilst the government can say "look, we thought of the children" as if everything is now peachy.

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

Re: Can it run Linux?

Now someone is going to start a challenge of can it run Doom under WSL under (insert OS or hardware device)?

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: "Car 54, Where are you ?"

Precisely the point anyone involved in the project even tangentially made many years ago. You can't (easily) overcome geography, much of the UK is rural hills and valleys and at the time this project was announced when 4G was current, there were large parts of Scotland and Wales that essentially had voice only capability. The huge backlash over putting masts everywhere gets a lot less public coverage than electricity pylons, but it's still expensive and people don't like it.

As usual though, the techies aren't listened to, it's the same with the backdoors in encryption argument. Any exploit is a total exploit, so not safe, but the politicians keep banging that drum.

Peace President's Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market

Re: "Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest."

"Don't flatter yourself, you egotistical kumquat."

Really? You think I'm taking credit for Trump? I also didn't say it was decided on the basis that Trump was in power, but there was a clear shift in the opinion polls when Trump started the 51st state and "Governor Trudeau" nonsense away from Poilievre. That pattern is carrying on across Europe at the moment, notably in Italy as well as Hungary and even AfD in Germany have publicly disagreed with MAGA recently

Re: "Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest."

It'll be interesting to see what happens in Hungary, they're obviously worried about Orban losing which would (according to Magyar's campaign statements) lead to more EU integration and stop the vetos on anything anti-Russia.

Anti-Trump sentiment already turned the Canadian elections on their head and many of the far right parties they have endorsed are publicly against this war.

Re: 25th Amendment Time

Almost certainly not, and with my cynics hat on, he's probably making moves behind the scenes about it already but desperate not to invoke it too early. He's arrogant enough to think he can one day be President himself, so won't want to kick Trump out too early as serving more than half of Trump's term would count as one for him according to the 22nd Amendment.