Posts by David Newall

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

back pains called

"Leaning over desk"

"Reaching back of cab"

"Fitting AP to ceiling"

Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

Beware the licensee terms

They'll probably have the most intricate and comprehensive suite of ai products, a cornucopia of do all and be all for everybody, priced from a pittance for entry-level to a king's ransom for it all.

Most people will pay for entry-level, never knowing that Oracle delivered everything. They'll naively ask the ai the wrong questions using the wrong phrasing, thus trespassing into advanced product territory, and then licence enforcement will pounce, audit usage, discover the usage that was not paid for, and demand the licensee pay for the top level product for every possible seat to avoid prosecution.

Every possible seat will include all employees, from janitorial to the board and all in between. It will include a seat for every customer of the licensee. And for every visitor. That will be how they make the real money.

Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls

Re: When Chaps like that, …

Some see a few wasted minutes here, a few there, as small stuff. I see it accumulating to a huge value across hundreds to thousand of workers.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: 0xDD

what is mc6800?

i win

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

portmanteau

Oracle, Michael Dell, named as investors in JV that will run TikTok's US operations

Shouldn't have caved

Should have made their system run on pure web - and surely 95% already is. Then register a new, predictable domain every day, change IP addresses every day. Finally, change the algorithm to boost the clips of Trump acting like a criminal and suppress everything that puts him and his GOP co-conspirators in even a slightly positive light, and finally, change their logo in Usanian market to the bird. Not a bird, but the bird; you know what this is. He'd squawk like the shiny little whit he is, especially when his erstwhile 'friends' realise that impeachment, conviction for treason, and penalty served in Texas (a capital punishment state) is what they need to do.

Oh, and close all their offices in Usania except one, and sack every employee who is not an avowed Republican, giving them senior titles but only pointless work, so that there's somebody in jurisdiction to punish.

Because only a tech giant can stand up to the orange bully.

Icon of a bird, not indicating Linux.

UK trade department put civil servants' feelings first during Windows 11 migration

wrong!

There's a very good reason why everyone uses Windows and Microsoft 365. It's always been that way and we all have expert skills. We don't want to change to something that doesn't come from Redmond. We'd be lost, unable to use it because nothing works the way it should (which is the way we know.)

Pardon? It did? It isn't? When did that happen? Oh no!

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Cease this nonsense

Yes, one should run one's own mail-server (I do) and, it's not so hard. But, the idea you'd pivot to a different supplier because your current one is down is ridiculous. It takes hours at the least, days more likely, and possibly, depending on existing reputation of the new IP, weeks or months.

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

buggy design

GNU telnetd interpolates values into a command line (a string) that starts /usr/bin/login. This is brittle as login might be changed to introduce new arguments to exploit.

The correct approach is to build an argv array. I'd classify it as a Security 101 blunder.

OpenAI is still figuring out how to make money, but wants you to believe in it

Do LLMs experience time?

I argue not because they "learn" up to a point, after which they merely regurgitate with no mechanism to learn more. I am stunned by what they can do today, but not one whit by their total and complete absence of actual intelligence. Let the learning continue in production and who knows what will emerge.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: I used the copilot!

And yet, chat gpt 5.2 had nothing to offer when i asked it where i should gyre.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

"with FOOF being a rather extreme example"

a Pentium bug?

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

unlikely. without the gpl underpinnings, they might have no (working) software.

perhaps they could negotiate commercial licences from all the authors of the essential applications and libraries, but as the number of such authors increases, so such licences become harder to negotiate. For VIZIO, i suspect it can never happen.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Where do you want to go today?

this was the tag line of their Windows 95 advertising campaign. They asked, but obviously had no intention of taking you there. Nothing has changed.

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

Re: Caveat emptor?

I really don't like it either, for philosophical reasons.

From a technical standpoint, it is more powerful and flexible than SysV init scripts, and whenever there are problems I manage to find why and fix them.

I have considered switching from Ubuntu to Devuan, but haven't yet because of inertia.

I might feel more sanguine if agent P didn't work for the masters of EEE.

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

need to put a different spin on it

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

creepy

without the arms

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

"The only other formally verified kernel we're aware of is the seL4 microkernel"

Formally verified, as in TCSEC (a.k.a. DoD Orange book) A division system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria:

Examples of A1-class systems are Honeywell's SCOMP, Aesec's GEMSOS, and Boeing's SNS Server. Two that were unevaluated were the production LOCK platform and the cancelled DEC VAX Security Kernel.

Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate

Byzantine pricing

For me the red flag is how complicated AWS pricing is. I can't even tell if they are price competitive because they are beyond comparison.

Cybercrooks team up with organized crime to steal pricey cargo

that seems like a lot of work for not really so much money.

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

A different LLM says it's one per 3e12 atoms. Still totally bonkers.

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Falsifiable

I asked that of ChatGPT 5 and it's top picks were Ford Ranger (2025), Toyota HiLux (2025), and Make Me Iconic Australian Wooden Ute. It then explained that the third one "is not a real road-vehicle but a fun 'toy' placeholder just to show you the idea of 'ute as culture'."

Its little joke was a surprise. It saw that I am in Victoria, Australia, so included it "for a bit of flavour and to reflect that 'ute' means utility + lifestyle in Australia", which seems clever and witty. No wonder people struggle to understand that GenAI is not intelligent.

As a follow-up, I clarified it was for my manor in England and then it suggested Land Rover Range Rover, Land Rover Discovery Sport, and Volvo XC60, so apparently

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

send it by post

Grind it up and send it by post in 40 million DL envelopes. That would be so on-message for Usania.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: What was so embarrassing about six?

no, sex was what we were having for dinner that night, according to one of my Kiwi housemates. True story.

Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?

who pays

for the electricity?

Judge dismisses Arm's last legal claim against Qualcomm in licensing spat

Goose, golden, egg

It's not too late for the world to pivot from Arm to RISC-V

Tile trackers are a stalker's dream, say Georgia Tech researchers

Sounds good

If I don't want the people who steal my stuff being alerted to a hidden tracker, are these what I should use?

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Angle Park

In the mid-70s a select group of secondary students descended on Angle Park Computing Centre where we could run batch jobs with ab turn around measured in minutes instead of days, and where there were two or three interactive terminals, which we shared in something like 30 minute turns. Such joy.

The machine, an IBM 370, mostly ran APL, and as I recall would crash fairly frequently. Oh, APL, you language of )commands.

One time, it was my turn on a terminal when the system was brought back up after a crash. I would have been 15, and showing off, I called friends to gather around while I typed )crash. Hah hah, so funny, except it didn't respond with invalid system command, it sat there thinking for a minute.

Yes, about a minute, that being how long it took the system operator to find out which terminal, race out of the machine room to my terminal, and look at my screen.

I guess the systems programmer wanted to test a crash recovery process so made )crash cause one. Who knew?

⍎A←'⍎A'

Bcachefs goes DKMS after Torvalds' kernel banishment

btrfs after filling disk

As I recall, you fix it by adding more space. Only then can you remove some files, and then remove the space you added. A full Btrfs induces panic (in the sysop, not the kernel.) Mind you, I didn't reboot. Does that truly make it worse?

As I recall, that's why I swapped Btrfs with ZFS, which just works. It also has online dedup, which really rocks.

If write_cache_pages is necessary for ZFS to work, or give good performance, as implied in the article, then removing it be a wonderful result for BSD.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

TKL

I'd like it with an integrated numeric keypad.

Citrix products sold under old licenses will get glitchy unless users upgrade

Oh, yes, this is very familiar

s/Citrix/Broadcom/

Reg hack attends job interview hosted by AI avatar, struggles to exit uncanny valley

RTFA

This is not an article about HR replacing human interviewers with AI. It's an article about HR prequalifying interviewees with AI.

Possibly still not fair, but most commentards have missed this distinction.

I guess if an applicant misses this then they are the wrong person for the job.

When I recruit, I set a technical exam. Everybody is invited to sit the exam and nobody gets an interview until after. This eliminates people who interview well but lack requisite skills.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Re: No mention of NAT, then?

Not all IPv6 are routable. Unique Local Addresses must be translated to a global address outside of your network border.

But IPv6 has such a huge number of addresses that scanning attacks are not feasible, there being 2¹²⁸ of them compared to v4's measly 2³². If it takes you a full day to scan all v4 addresses space (hah!) it will take over 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to scan all v6 addresses. If you don't know a devices address, you aren't even going to find it.

'Suddenly deprecating old models' users depended on a 'mistake,' admits OpenAI's Altman

AI sceptic/conservative

I've been a professional computer programmer for 50 years, and I know it's easy to see LLMs spout nonsense. I usually ask them about APL or PostScript because the corpora are relatively small and I'm sufficiently fluent in both to spot when the answers are wrong. You have to check everything they write before you rely on it's accuracy. If you don't you'll end up embarrassed, like those lawyers who were sanctioned for misleading courts.

And yet, if you don't know the topic you're asking an LLM about, it will be very convincing. They are uncanny in how well they appear to understand, and mind you, they lack the capacity to understand anything. They can write coherent, cogent and consistent copy that's sometimes also correct, but they cannot understand.

When they are correct they can save an incredible amount of time. If you aren't cautiously using them in your workflow, you're falling behind. No-one can read and digest the sum total of all human knowledge, but LLMs more or less already have. Avail yourself of this new tool or you'll become like the 19th century knocker-ups.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

Re: TOTP auth

Why would that be?

Re: Very interesting.

Such complicated rules are no longer recommended by NSA as they inevitably lead to passwords on post-it notes, and thus lack any semblance of security the. The recommendation now is to use words. Just three English words gives 1.06E16 possibilities, assuming case is not important, and people find such passwords quite easy to remember.

Canonical dusts off TPM encryption for Ubuntu 25.10

Cannot dual boot Ubuntu 24.04

Ridiculous but true, if you already use LVM for storage, you can't install Ubuntu 24.04 without wiping the entire disk. They describe that as "wish list", seemingly not planning to fix it.

The best you can do is install it on a new disk and then copy the volume/partition after, and fix grubby issues.

Publishers cry foul over W3C crusade to rid web of third-party cookies

unimportant

Third party cookies are only possible when you load the third party content that's included on the website you visit. When you visit example.org, their page includes something from evilcorp.com. It might be a banner ad, a single pixel, or a script, such as from gargle-analytics. That's the only way third party cookies can get onto your computer.

However, the cookie is not everything for these third parties. They already know, because you loaded the banner ad, your IP address, the date and time, the site you visited, and any extra information that that site chose to give up.

Suppose you watch Priest porn and your preferred porn purveyor includes a browser fingerprinting script from evilcorp, the URL could be evilcorp.com/track.js?cat=priest. Now evilcorp knows that, too. All without needing a single cookie.

So when publishers cry, boohoo, they're crocodile tears. The advertisers will still pay to have their content included by the sites they wish to advertise on, and for evil corporations starting with the letters G, and F, they want their content on every website. Without them getting their content everywhere, their tracking cookies have no value.

So they don't need cookies. The cookies just take ambiguity off the table. It lets them differentiate between mommy's browsing and little Petunia's.

The only way to avoid being tracked is to not load that third party content in the first place. Browse add-ons like NoScript help here. That's what really worries the big G's and F's. That's why Google invented manifest v3: to destroy NoScript and equivalent.

Hey: I'd like you to run this program for me. I'm not going to tell you what it does, and I'm not even going to ask for your permission, I'm just going to send it to you so that you can run it on your phone. That's exactly what almost everybody permits when they run third party scripts. Stupid everybody. That's what NoScript prevents.

Run NoScript unless you're happy running my unknown program without even being asked. Which means ditching Chrome and anything else that's switched to manifest v3. Firefox is the one you should be using.

50 years ago, Gates and Allen made the deal that launched Microsoft

Re: 5100 Screen Size

) by itself is invalid. ) ⍞ is no better.

⍎A←'⍎A'

Wayback 0.1 debuts as early Wayland server for X11 diehards

maintenance mode

x.org might be in maintenances mode but this is foss which many times has pivoted on a dime. We'll do so again and if that isn't Xlibre it will be some other ongoing port of x11. Wayback will not be the answer.

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Re: sysadmin ... become a developer

v4?

Quantum code breaking? You'd get further with an 8-bit computer, an abacus, and a dog

Re: Bullshit

I'm reading your words on my rather inexpensive, Chinese made smartphone, which runs for days on a single, two-hour charge, producing glorious images that were unimaginable outside of a glossy magazine when Quake was new.

Re: Bullshit

I think you know that "netboot" was meant as "network power switch, cd drive, keyboard, video, mouse". No amount of watchdog timer is going to let you turn the power on remotely, insert a CD, go into BIOS setup and change some settings, boot the CD, run the text or graphical setup program using keyboard and mouse, configuring even the network interface.

Slow down on building power plants for all those new AI datacenters, report warns

we need a two-tier power system

The enormous growth in demand for power by data centres will inevitably drive the cost up, which is not fair to the moms and dads eking out a living on minimal wages.

Bit barons care little what power costs, so long as their competitors pay the same. It's just a cost of business which they include in the price of their products.

Society needs to protect real people, in this case by capping what they pay for power, and when demand exceeds supply, by blacking out large consuming businesses first.

Yes, I'm saying people should pay less than businesses. Yes, I'm saying businesses should have their power cut off before people.

IBM moves scientists out of Almaden Research Center

Seems unlikely

"Founded in 1986 ... the scientists based there pioneered innovations like the world's first hard disk drive and relational database, the company once boasted."

That's two things which were widely used earlier than the 1986 founding date.

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Re: Власть

I want that to be true but an compelled to ask: references?

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Love Wayland

Why not? X11 has always worked with individual refresh rates per monitor.

Australian airline Qantas reveals data theft impacting six million customers

Interview asked why they keep it?

There are various reasons, such as future marketing.

Safeguarding customer data might be their highest priority, but not as high as making an extra buck by spamming existing customers.

I guess the safety of their staff & customers, which is also their highest priority, is lower still.

Highest ain't what it used to be.

Coming to PostgreSQL: On-disk database encryption

why?

HDD & SDD already encrypt. Linux already has encrypted filesystems. How does this improve anything?