Posts by gosand

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Re: missing … the onions in our belts

This is very important that you know this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yujF8AumiQo

China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic

Re: Google

Google is not hurting for money, but they are much more than Ads. They aren't immune to the costs of running AI either... https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-first-negative-cash-flow-quarter-ever-due-to-massive-ai-spending/

AI researchers let models off the leash – then watched as they tried to add malware to a FOSS project

In that scenario, the real question would be how good are THEIR guardrails to ensure only their targets are affected?

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

Antidote indeed. My nostalgia is for what I was doing during the time of cassettes, not of the cassettes themselves.

Instead of records or 8-tracks, of which I had both, I could take my music with me. When I got a car, I mounted an under-dash cassette player and a booster/equalizer. Was there hiss? You can't tell if it's loud enough (which explains the constant hiss I now hear). It was better than anything else at the time.

I also learned to program on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III. It was great! A dozen years later I was bit by nostalgia and bought one. It never saw any use, and I sold it after staring at it for 5 years.

I used to collect arcade game cabinets - a very fun hobby. Until you move and have to take 5 or 6 cabinets with you. The games were fun, but it was more about the time when they were fun.

This filter is about as useful as the IBM Model M keyboard sound generator called 'bucklespring' that outputs those sounds as you type. Neat, for about 5 minutes, then back to normal.

(and yes, I still have a Model M from 1991, it sits in my closet as I type this away on a GMK67 mechanical keyboard)

Valve's Steam Frame pushes Arch Linux toward official Arm64 support

I've been using Debian-based systems since around 2005, and RedHat before that. My main system is Devuan.

I put CachyOS on a spare laptop a month or so ago, and I have to say it's quite impressive. The best installer I've seen, and it runs quite well. I really only tinker with it on weekends, at which point there are usually 100+ updates to install (gotta get used to that rolling-distro thing). But I see what all the hype about it is. I chose the default environment based on KDE, but they offer pretty much everything. List is here: https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/desktop_environments/

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

In my first job out of uni in '93, I started out as a Configuration and Release Manager for a major telecom company. Basically, I wrote and maintained ksh scripts for our build process - developed on Unix, read all the PRs/CRs (problem reports / change requests) out of our homegrown system, parse out the version info, check out all the code from SCCS, ftp it to the Tandem platform, build it, burn it to 9-track tape, and install on the test machine. about 12 hours start to finish.

We were on Unix servers, and the homegrown pr/cr system was ok but it used a gui front-end. Luckily, all the files were simply stored it text files named with the prcr#. I ended up writing a script for myself that would get the data from a terminal. It was faster, and you do do it from the lab where there wasn't a gui. After about a year of that, I moved into the testing team because I really liked testing. We still used the prcr script because we needed to look things up often. I made a few updates to it along the way, and I had learned to put comments in and a version history at the top.

1999 rolled around and I was lured away to the promise of the internet startup bubble, and we all know how that ended. Several companies and 15 years later, I was tracked down via email by someone who still worked at my first company. He asked me if I remembered writing the prcr script. Someone there was wanting to make some changes to it, and wanted to know if I was ok with that since I was the author.

While that was amusing, it was also frightening that 20+ years later a) they were still using that pr/cr system and b) my script hadn't been updated since then. It wasn't even stored in source control.

I of course gave them the go-ahead to change whatever they wanted.

Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

Re: Can anyone tell me why X11 needs to be abandoned?

You point out good places where X11 falls short.

That doesn't answer the question about why it needs to be abandoned.

Fine, implement Wayland. Let people use it. Work out the bugs, make it better. That doesn't mean that X11 needs to be abandoned.

Same goes for systemd. Linux admins love it? Great, let them use it. Other people like it for X reason? Superb! That doesn't mean all other init systems need to die.

Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

I have no need for any of these variants. But I love that people are doing them, and that the Reg is reporting on them. Just knowing they exist - even if they are vibe coded - is good to hear about.

I am not a fan of LLMs and really don't use them. I have heard from programmers who love them for aiding in certain parts of the development process. I also know for cybersecurity you can't sleep on these things and need to know how they are used to keep up with what is undeniably going on in the industry. I hope their use as a valuable tool outweighs their use as a dangerous nuisance. Time will tell.

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

Re: Sensor characterisation

And throw an error if you got 7 or 53, becuase those aren't between 7 and 53.

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

I hope the Pi wasn't bare and was in a nice non-descript black case. A printed label stuck on it saying "DO NOT REMOVE - Test in progress" might have bought them another week or two.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Back in the early 90s I worked at a major telecom company. I was building software, writing it to 9-track tapes, and installing it on the Tandem machines. They had these large 2GB disk drives that slid into the front of the cabinet. I needed to move one of them from one machine to another for some reason, and I shut down the one machine, removed the disk, and went to put it into the other... zap and a spark. I forgot to shut the new machine down. So I did, and reinserted the drive, and started it up. The machine was good but the drive didn't work. I reported it as a failed drive, and it was replaced.

Not sure how much that cost, but I am 100% sure they were not cheap.

Chinese cybersecurity company claims it’s built a better-than-Mythos bug finder

Re: They never learn

You mean like manufacturing?

BOFH: Amnesty means never having to say you're sorry

Re: Priceless

Luckily, they have been kind enough to have Who Me? and BOFH categories at the top, so I can quickly find those without trying figure out where they are in the sea of everything else on the page.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

bean counters

I once worked for a global bank, and our work was project-driven. This meant we had to provide estimates to the project, and as we worked on them track our actual hours worked. I had one person on my team who was working on 14 different projects at one point. A lot of time was spent doing this. The safe bet was to report the worked hours exactly as you estimated them. Note that this was all internal hours, so not working with external entities and no real money was changing hands.

They had people whose job it was to track the hours for their particular project.

One day one of those people gave me a call. "We need to talk about your hour variance. I'll set up a meeting".

I had worked with this woman for a few years, and we were on good terms, but the tone of her voice wasn't happy.

A couple of days later we had the meeting. She set the tone and started explaining to me the importance of meeting our estimates, proper tracking, how going over or under could really cause problems, etc. etc. I sat quietly nodding. She explained that sometimes people are off by a little bit, but big variances needed to be address immediately. My variance for the previous 2 weeks was 100%, which was unacceptable.

I calmly said "Ok Amy, I completely understand and I will really try to do better in the future." She thanked me. I then asked. "So Amy, how many hours are we talking about here?"

There was a pause, and then laughter.

It was 1 hour. I had estimated 1 hour for a meeting that never happened. I told her she just cost the company more money than me tracking that one hour.

I still think about this when I see people touting a percentage on anything, because without the numbers it could be quite misleading.

Flatpak-NG sounds like bad news for systemd refuseniks

Just for clarification, is this part of Extend or Extinguish?

Arch Linux locks down AUR signups amid wave of malicious commits

They will also tout the AUR as one of the things that makes Arch better than all the rest.

And you learn so much about how to install your system because you will invariably screw it up and have to reinstall it. Probably more than once. (paraphrased)

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

In what way, exactly?

*crickets*

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: At a previous orkplace..

How times have changed. Now the company I work for snags your laptop if you leave it in the office overnight. You are expected to take it with you every night.

I only forgot mine once, during my first week many years ago. I had to do the walk-of-shame to the security desk and ask for my laptop back.

Why don't I lock it up in my desk? Because *I* don't have a desk anymore. *We* have minimal standing desks in open-seating areas with nowhere to store anything.

It's fine I guess, I don't love it, but I've gotten used to it.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

So... are pipes supported? I did some looking, but don't see it mentioned or in examples given.

Grep is great, but its use would be limited if you can't use pipes, as would a lot of these tools.

I can't just download this on my work computer (the only place I use Windows) because it's not approved software.

I currently use cygwin when I need to do things like this, but it can be quite slow at times.

Another bug hunter leaks Microsoft exploits in defiance of company’s handling of vulnerability disclosures

Re: Even Microsoft knows it stuffed up

a little light reading for you: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/bounty

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

Capitalism was the case that they gave me

"Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity – coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world."

So.... GitHub included, since they enabled and hosted the exploit code?

SpaceX pitches itself as integrated interplanetary proto-monopolist in IPO filing

SpaceX is the only thing Musk founded that has been impressive and shown real promise. He has hired great engineers who have done amazing things.

Now it's being ruined by all of his other stupid purchases that he has run into the ground.

I am sure the fanbois will prop up this stock, just like they have with Tesla. People with money worship people with more money. I just don't get it.

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

Re: Yuck

I switched to DDG search a year or two ago and it's been fine. I sometimes have to go past the first page, but it's well worth it. The only time I use Google Search is for Maps, because Apple Maps are the default in DDG and it is trash.

But question for you... if you want the irs forms, did you try going to irs.gov first? Just wondering why you needed to do a google search for it.

I get it, we are conditioned to search for things first - sometimes I just add wikipedia to my search terms when that is what i am looking for, instead of just GOING TO WIKIPEDIA and searching there. I am trying to break myself of that habit.

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

I found the intro to be odd stating that 'Who, me?' is the title of the reader-contributed column, when it's not showing up in the title of the article at all. My question is "Why not?"

It sure would make it easy to spot on Mondays.

Linux gains more critical Windows apps: 3D Movie Maker and Space Cadet Pinball

I've had Space Cadet Pinball on my machine for at least a couple of years. I found an AppImage of it somewhere, and it runs great.

It may be a reverse-engineered one found here: https://www.appimagehub.com/p/1855605 but I only fire it up on occasion.

Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

Re: Another reason why Chrome/Chromium market share is a threat to the open web

And don't set Google as your default search engine. I know who DDG is in bed with, but at least it's not google.

I only use google for maps, because apple maps sucks. (they are the default for ddg)

Re: Oh well . . .

I remember... that was many years ago. Although, mine is PMTSD - Pale Moon. That is what I switched to and ran it for a few years with minimal issues.

When I finally did run into issues, and was called a fucking moron for bringing it up to the developers, I happily switched back to firefox-esr and was happy to find it's back to being awesome.

AWS plants more tombstones in the application graveyard

Best of luck replacing Epic. I used to work on a healthcare cost accounting system, and epic data was just one source we ingesting into our platform. MASSIVE amounts of data, everything that happens in a hospital is tracked and coded. In the US, hospitals are notorious for (among other things) being extremely slow to upgrade systems for day-to-day operations.

Once my wife was in for a routing procedure, and as the nurse was entering info into the computer by her bed, she paused, then raised her hand. Someone came over with clipboard and then called someone else on a radio. In a couple of minutes a 'runner' came over, and showed her how to do what she needed to do in the system.

"But I always do that over in this other screen"

"Well, it's not there anymore. Did you do the training?"

I asked the nurse what was going on, and she said they had upgraded their Epic system several days ago, and "everything changed".

The problem was that they use it day in and day out, so any kinds of changes massively alters their workflow. To the point that to keep operating, they had to have many runners with radios for about a week (to cover all shifts) to help people get used to the changes after a release upgrade.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

FOR THE HANDS, he swears!

Anthropic's super-scary bug hunting model Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger

Re: "one of misinformation and hype."

You can't spell AMPLIFY without AI.

Trump-branded datacenter project fails to make itself great, again

Re: Wait a minute

Such an wild story, I didn't know what was coming in the next paragraph!

In addition to the above...

- Neugebauer founded an anti-woke lending app

- they want to build 4 nuclear reactors for AI infra

- the location of the data center is next to natural gas fields and plutonium storage

- a new co-president with the last name "Bofa" (look up the slang meaning)

- an executive search by a firm with "Struggles" in the name

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Possibly my favourite thing to read in a long time.

My daily driver is on an OS that I installed in 2018. Granted, it's been more than patched since then (dist-upgraded) but it's relatively modern AND not broken. So it's possible.

I don't think I've ever been on the OS treadmill, I've been off of Windows since 1998 and only change my distro when necessary.

Intel gets trapped in Elon’s reality distortion field as it joins in megafab delusions

Re: says the guy who.....

He doesn't understand long-term consequences because he has never faced them.

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

Shots fired – literally – over proposal to build datacenter in Indianapolis

I looked up this area on Wikipedia: "Several public and private facilities can be found within Martindale-Brightwood. These include: the Brightwood Community Center, Martin University, the Juvenile Detention Center, the Edna Martin Christian Center, three public elementary schools, one fire station, five public parks, Genesis Plaza, and close to 100 churches."

To me that's a lot of churches for less than 13,000 people, but I wonder why they would be targeting this area for a datacenter....

"The residents are predominantly African American..."

There you have it, that's the Indiana I know.

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

I joined a small company that had been acquired by a bigger one. We were on the 6th floor of an office building, and had our server room on our floor. Just before Christmas I was one of only a couple of people in the office, and we heard the server alarms going off. Turned out the AC unit had died and temps were rising. Nobody in the office that day had access to the server room, but we were able to contact someone at corporate and convinced them to unlock it remotely.

We were able to open up some of the drop ceiling tiles to let the hot air out, and ran some fans to pull in cool air from the office (through the propped-open door). The AC was fixed the next day, and no servers died - which was good, because we didn't have access to those either.

Trump wants to take a battle axe to CISA again and slash $707M from budget

Every accusation is an admission

His description of CISA is a description of himself...

"more focused on censorship than on protecting the Nation's critical systems, and put them at risk due to poor management and inefficiency, as well as a focus on self-promotion."

When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

I fondly (ok, maybe not) remember LILO, but GRUB is pretty familiar - and largely out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

I recently saw this story posted about Ubuntu stripping out functionality https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1s3fhmz/ubuntu_proposes_bizarre_nonsensical_changes_to/

After reading through this, I came to find out that some people use other things like rEFInd, limine, systemd-boot.

GRUB works just fine for me, I don't see a need to change it, but in the Linux world there is always change and/or progress depending on your perspective.

I also recently found and implemented Clover in order to boot from PCIe. I wanted to set up a home NAS, and am using an old i3 system with no NVMe slot. It boots to a 128GB NVMe drive nestled in an adapter card plugged into the PCIe slot. Booting Clover from a USB drive makes this possible.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: Downward spiral

Except this: Why should we pay for something else when we already have copilot? Just make it work.

Microsoft has always had the stranglehold on the business side of things, all they have to do is keep expanding their ecosystem. If you're locked in, then you're locked in.

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

"Within a year, Microsoft was industriously paddling the web boat."

I read this as padding the web bloat.

I stand by that.

Systemd-free antiX Linux 26: Debian 13, in bonsai form

I know that it was a collaboration, but I think people are getting tripped up on the word parent.

I'm going off of what I consider to be a parent distrobution, which means where do the packages come from and what distro is it based on - not where it started.

I went and looked because I could be wrong, but everything I have seen says that MX Linux is based on Debian. Which to me means that Debian is the parent. If others want to use a different definition, so be it I guess.

https://mxrepo.com/

"AntiX Linux is one of the parent distros of MX Linux"

Nope. AntiX, as well as MX Linux, are based on Debian.

"MX Linux is a cooperative venture between the antiX and MX Linux communities. It is a family of operating systems built by users from Debian Stable repositories that are designed to combine elegant and efficient desktops with high stability and solid performance."

And AntiX came from Mepis, which was based on Debian. This is all confirmed in the fantastic 'Timeline of the development of main Linux distributions' image in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

I was looking at AntiX and MX Linux back in 2018 when I moved away from Mint, but chose Devuan w/XFCE and have been very happy on it since.

I am glad it is still under development though, while people complain about 'too many distros' I think it continues to lend to the excitement and variations that exist in the Linux ecosystem.

I'm old and mostly stodgy, I don't distro-hop because I like my current setup. My son on the other hand switched from Windows to Arch last year, and he'd been on Hyprland. He told me recently he's switching to Niri (which I've never heard of). But he's 18 and is just tinkering around with it... so how can I complain!?

sudo rm -rf ~/mylawn/*

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: systemd-free distros

Also known as Lovejoy's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children)

And not sure if the shade was intentional at the end of the article for not mentioning Devuan. It's been around a long time, and I've been using it as my daily driver since 2018, whereas I've never even heard of Adélie.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

better skin and hair is definitely not a trait of the Mango of Mar a Lago.

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

Re: verified at OS level

Or their car. Or their refrigerator, or thermostat, or phone, or....

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Re: Anyone else remember the days...

"Pretty sure M$ used to make more than one or two of those..."

MAYBE one or two... they purchased all the rest. I can't think of one that has gotten better over the years.

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

What I don't understand is how they will enforce this in particular states.

If I fly into CA, will my phone require me to authenticate my age before I can use it?

The computer OS would not only need to check your age, but the US State from which you are using it (if you are even in the US).

What about these new fancy cars that have an OS in them? Can you drive across state lines, or does it shut down at the border until you scan your ID?

Re: To protect the children!

Punctuation matters: Misogyny, Trumps, everything.

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Re: how many Windows installation disks were repurposed

Yes! In a plastic case with transparent lid, and a worthless lock to keep them safe. Of course, when transporting them you put them in a vertically stacked wallet of sorts.

UK still doodling digital pound while Brussels frets over payment sovereignty

The card payment industry is largely misunderstood. Processing fees, as you pointed out, are NOT charged to consumers. Visa/MC/et al set the transaction fees for the merchants, issuers, and acquirers. Those fees (and others) are usually passed on to consumers by the Merchants. There is a lot of complexity that happens in those transactions to authenticate, authorize, secure, and process it - often all in seconds. That's what those charges are for. Building out that infrastructure is no small feat, especially if you want to perform transactions anywhere in the world.

It's also a (common?) misconception that the card company sets the interest rates. My dad used to say "get a Mastercard, they have cheaper interest rates" which is nonsense. That's done by the issuing bank. I've worked in this industry, and it's fairly complex but not hard to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card

There is a cost to going cashless, but you also get a lot from it. As do the merchants, who don't have to deal with a lot of the hassles and time with cash. I personally don't miss the days of having to do currency exchanges when traveling internationally. It certainly would be easier if you only stayed within your country, but what fun would that be?

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: Nom nom nom

Back in the day, we were on Unix server (10 people per) and once when a coworker left hers unlocked, I sshed to a different server, and set up a cron job at various times to email herself a message ("Hi, how are you?"). At times she was sitting at her desk and got that email from herself.

It kind of drove her insane because she couldn't figure it out. When she threatened to go to security and tell them someone hacked her account, I fessed up what I had done.