Posts by Stoic Skeptic

Stanford prof is beating the drum for a new protocol to replace TCP

SCTP

SCTP works well for the telecom industry at layer 4

MariaDB again faces questions over Galera's open source future

Re: The Sound of Music

Replace it with Postgres

UK guts planning red tape so datacenters can bypass the neighbors faster

Power

With electricity costs being what they are in the UK, I am guessing that the neighborhood is not the biggest obsticle.

Oracle plans to power its New Mexico mega datacenter with a 2.45GW fuel cell farm

Great Scott!!

You could run two flux capacitors with that much power.

Future jobs in AI will come with a hardhat and boots, tech bigshots argue

Gold rush

You know, the people that got rich during the gold rush were not the prospectors. It was the guys selling picks and shovels.

We will be cruising at 35,000 feet and failing to update our Apache HTTP Server

Medical Equipment

This is very frequently the case in medical equipment. There are lots of MRI machines out there running windows NT under the hood.

Even doing a security patch on medical equipment will require recertification of the entire device.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

No savings, but a treasure trove of data about every UK subject. Tell me that won't come back and be used for nefarious purposes.

India demands smartphone makers install a government app on every handset

What could possibly go wrong?

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Hallucinations

It is bad enough when dealing with interactive chatbots that can be ignored by intelligent people, but I do not want my operating system hallucinating on me when managing system resources.

HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’

Browsers are the most dangerous applications

Browsers are the most dangerous applications on any computer. Think about an application that is usually running on a privileged account (all PC users want to be admin) that is completely controlled by an external server, be that a website or a C2 system.

Twist in Tesco vs. VMware case as Computacenter files claim against Broadcom, Dell

Open playing field

First, no one who knows Broadcom's history should ever trust it to be a long-term partner, full stop.

Second, it does open up the playing field for someone to be come the next industry standard hypervisor.

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

Though shalt have no Gods before me!

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Maybe an African Swallow?

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Re: Help! help! I'm being repressed by the language police

You will still be thrown in jail for posting a mean tweet in the UK.

Microsoft used staff in China to help babysit US govt cloud services, report says

Jail Time

As with any corporation, when there is no consequence to bad behavior, it will continue. Want these things to stop? Put Nadella in jail.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

To quote Joshua: "The only way to win is not to play."

Qantas begins telling some customers that mystery attackers have their home address

Nothing is private

Is there anyone that believes that any aspect of their lives isn't already for sale on the dark web?

VMware and Siemens spar over where to stage software licence showdown

Miscalculation

I am thinking that the MBAs at Broadcom must have missed their Economics lecture the day that they discussed the concept of "Substitution".

The other hypervisors on the market may not have as many bells and whistles as VMWare today, but Broadcom has given them the reason to step up their game and close to parity.

Without bringing politics into this AB Inbev found out not to F-around with an existing customer base when adequate substitutes are available.

Ex-CISA chief decries cuts as Trump demands loyalty above all else

Was big fan of CISA

I was one of the biggest fans of CISA at one time.

Thought that they were one of the only agencies that was worth its cost.

Then the beans were spilled on the censorship efforts that the government pushed on were driven by CISA.

So, yes Cybersecurity is National Security, however censorship is not.

Let the downvotes begin!!

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Not a very bright boy...

More an issue with build management than code review.

Cybercrims now licking stamps and sending extortion demands in snail mail

" Despite the creative effort that went into these demands, GuidePoint’s North and fellow threat analysts Stephen Brzozowski and Hermes Bojaxhi have “a high level of confidence that the extortion demands contained within are illegitimate and do not originate from the BianLian ransomware group.”

Some will fall for it and it doesn't take a high hit rate to make money.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Reality Check

Everyone jump to the down arrow, but a reality check.

The budget for the project is £750 million. Which means it will really cost £1.5 billion before all is said and done.

Don't for a minute believe that it won't be the rate-payers that pick that up somewhere.

The UK already has some of the highest electric costs on the planet and the impoverishment of the country will do absolutely nothing for CO2 levels.

Those levels will be determined by China and India.

Electricity prices

UK (From 1 Apr) - 27.03 p/kWh

China - 6.00 p/kWh

China - 6.00 p/kWh

US - 12.20 p/kWh

Iceland - 14.47

Japan - 15.75 p/kWh

Australia - 19.50 p/kWh

Datacenters and factories run on electricity. Wouldn't expect many of those coming to the UK anytime soon.

Let the downvoting begin, but as an old colleague of mine used to tell me: "Reality causes stress".

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

I guess it is a good time to be in the VPN business.

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

Re: I hope it sticks

Stop trying to make "Fetch" happen!

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Pack 'em up

Send them to NJ.

Probably get enough money to pay for the development.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Jersey?

If you were an alien that just drove 18 trillion miles to get here, would you really want to hang out in Jersey?

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

... the cost of management sometimes exceeds its value ...

A sign of poor management.

The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block

I have heard stories about spouses not knowing they both worked there until they both received reunion invitations.

Starlink finally files proper paperwork to operate in India

It will certainly make it more difficult for government to control the conversation.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

Forget the Lithium this morning?

AT&T claims VMware by Broadcom offered it a 1,050 percent price rise

Re: Openstack

There was a big push in the wireless world at timeframe for a concept called NFV (Network Function Virtualization) where in all the discrete hardware based network functions were to be virtualized and auto-scaled. Openstack was one of the contenders to be the standard orchestrator in that eco-system. Don't know where things have gone since then as I left that space 8 years ago.

Didn't M$ wind up in court over practices like that? Not that it will deter Broadcom.

India extends IT hardware import license scheme that enraged Big Tech

Re: "import license scheme that enraged Big Tech"

Perhaps the same treatment for software written in India?

Re: "import license scheme that enraged Big Tech"

I smell some rishwat.

CrowdStrike hopes legal threats will fade as time passes since it broke the world

License terms

What I will find interesting is what this whole debacle will do to licensing terms. Software companies have generally given themselves a get out of jail free card in their EULA.

After this event, I wonder if customer boards will allow this practice to continue.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

ROI

The WSJ published an article a few months back stating that the ROI on AI/ML projects in the real world was averaging 4%.

While there are some niches that suit the current flavor of AI/ML very well and have a much higher ROI than that, many do not.

The great experiment in enterprise AI/ML will be coming to an end soon.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

The root of the problem (as I see it) is that software development is no longer the domain of software developers and now controlled by corporate managers with no background in software development. They grasp for metrics that they can relate to and software greatness is not one of those things they can measure to put on a weekly/monthly report to upper management; you get what you measure.

The analogy of this is the result of Boeing making an accountant the CEO rather than an engineer.

Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

Elon is gong to have to go up and get them.

Is AI going to pay its way? Wall Street wants tech world to show it the money

Follow the hype curve

AI as it is defined today will have niches where it performs very well, but according to Deloitte: experienced organizations that are leaders in AI implementation typically see an average ROI of 4.3%, while those just starting out may only see a 0.2% ROI.

Those kinds of numbers aren't going to support the kinds of multiples and money currently on the board

Uncle Sam accuses telco IT pro of decade-long spying campaign for China

The only "major US telecommunications company and an international information technology company" is Syniverse. They are only the group that sits in the middle of all inter-operator sms exchanges and a great deal of the roaming signaling.

FBI gains access to Trump rally shooter's phone

Re: Ramblin Man

Not "Any" bill, but the one that came out of the Senate that had provisions to allow 5M illegals entering the country without background checks every year.

The bill is online for all to see.

Americans abroad cut off as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US suffer roaming outages

Syniverse was f*ed up way before Carlyle got there.

FCC wants telcos to carrier unlock cellphones 60 days after activation

No more subsidized handsets.

Julian Assange pleads guilty, leaves courtroom a free man

Nope, had that adjusted a couple of weeks ago.

Just noticing that https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/ (which worked a few weeks ago) now generates an internal server error when the rest the site seems to be fine.

Certainly, just a coincidence.

I find it interesting that Assange gets freed on the same day that the DNC email cache disappears from WikiLeaks.

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

Didn't Howard Wolowitz invent this?

https://youtu.be/az44pMHvUYk?si=twlHYJprZpnJ-Owy

CISA in a flap as Chirp smart door locks can be trivially unlocked remotely

With 50,000 potential clients each with a product liability claim, one would think that the lawyers would be dripping off this.

Malicious xz backdoor reveals fragility of open source

Re: “… reveals fragility of open source”

Hear hear!

My thoughts go back to the Solar Winds and Kaseya incidents. Something this complex would have never been found in the closed environments there.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

Training Data

Will this put EU organizations at a disadvantage when it comes with the amount of data used to train AI models?

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Typical Government Program

There were many billions more lost here in the states. It is just another example of the inefficiency and incompetence of government. Whenever programs are run by political appointees instead of actually competent people, there will always be failures such as this. More money = more failure.

Anything that can be done by private enterprise should be done by private enterprise.