Posts by Timo

Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers

Bring back the original term: glassholes

It is not clear what the makers thought would happen, as this is the second run at selling these things. Term "glasshole" seemed to be a perfect term for them at that time, why not reuse it?

I've gone from writing about SD-WAN to depending on it

Re: This is much simpler than he makes it out to be

This type of routing is also done incredibly well with opensource firewall software like PFSENSE or OPNsense. Using an old desktop you can slot in network cards as needed. Have had one running here in the data dungeon for a few years and its great.

Agreed, the article does not appear to have much in the way of SD-WAN in it. Just some failover or load balancing, and policy-based routing.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

You may have noticed that the legal profession is one of the last where they still have secretaries and other clerk types. It really seems to insulate the lawyers from the outside modern world that the rest of us inhabit. Its fun to watch them try to interact with the rest of us unwashed masses and not exactly get the same responses that they are used to getting when they are in the office.

Amazon Leo constellation nears 400 satellites as broadband launch looms

Re: Competition

OK this one is fairly easy:

Population of earth: 8.3 billion people

land area of earth: 148.9 million sq km, or total area is 510.072 million sq km (land and water etc)

for unit conversion: 1 square km = 1,000,000 sq meters

for land area only: each of the 8.3 billion people spread out would get roughly 18,000 square meters, which translates to a square of 134 x 134 meters

for total area: its 61,500 sq meters per person, or about 248 x 248 meters.

i thought it would be more!

Raspberry Pi OS gets a new kernel but apparently not a new version number

thanks for the info

I loaded raspberry PI OS, or what used to be called something like Raspberry PI Desktop (?) onto an old x86 computer with spinning rust hard drive as a test of where to go after Windows 10, and its been great. I tried it years ago and it was fine, but now the current (aging) version seems to do the basic stuff very well and gets out of the way! Oh, and I loaded it so that I could rip DVD's.

I really don't think I need more from an OS, especially for older machines that can still do the job. Do I? An update would be fantastic if it keeps the same clean functionality.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Ah the C-Suite

I think it's something with the Microsoft identity service, someone has figured out how to skim lists of people, or someone is selling lists of names that they've gotten there.

I joined a company and once I got access to my work computer some of the first emails I got were spam. I barely knew what my email address was. Only place the address would have been is with Microsoft!

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

Re: Ah, yes, another unfunded mandate.

probably not even unfunded - its that the funding was DOGE'd a year ago, and so there's even less of it.

First step will be to restart the funding to do the research to build such a magnificent device.

Oh wait, that funding went to starting a war.

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

Re: OTP

WiFi calling also supports sending/receiving SMS and RCS messages. So if you can get to your banking website you can use that same connection to get the 2FA messages.

6G: The next gen of wireless tech nobody's ready to pay for

practical challenges pilingup

At that high frequency the signals will be line of sight, or line of reflections off buildings and objects. Which then means that the coverage areas of each individual hotspot will be small, and the operators will have to deploy bazillions of them. That will drive the requirement for ultra low cost "base stations" or access points. Oh and backhaul - how are you going to get all those bits to the internet?

Maybe these high frequencies will be used for mesh or cross-haul inter-AP links.

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Re: No network card, no ISP, what's the diff

IIRC this was about the time that home ISP's, even dialup ones, would give you 20 MB of web space to play with. Those were fun times.

This would have been a big learning experience for them, that business accounts don't all work that way, and that you as the web hosting was reachable from the internet but their office wasn't since they had cancelled their service.

I had a short stint of trying to manage a web page for a parent/student organization where someone with much more web skills had bought a few layers of services. It still doesn't make a ton of sense to me, there seemed to be a content-management service that rides on top of web-hosting, and possibly DNS from a third place. And analytics.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: musical notation was probably one of the oldest programming languages .....

Also no rest on the quarters

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: implementation

Am I missing something - if I need a passkey to log into an internet site, then doesn't that mean that I use that same connectivity to access my passkey or however that exchange takes place?

I do know that there are problems with sending TOTP to a mobile device on an airplane since it isn't delivered over the cellular networks but can be delivered via WiFi calling and RCS. There's a chicken and egg situation - need to be connected to get the PIN but can't connect until you get the PIN...

And the other question: I'm losing track of the number of different ways that a website can ask me to log in.

Let me count the ways:

password

password + one-time PIN

password + passcode / authenticator code (what is this called when you open an authenticator app and get the rolling code?)

password + authenticator popup/approval

Passkey? what is that? And why does the site want to throw away all the other options if I elect to use a Passkey.

and how many other ways are there? I'm getting confused because I had passcodes and now passkeys but they sound like the same thing.

El Reg needs an icon for "get off my lawn".

Your datacenter's power architecture called. It's not happy

this will shift the power losses around

Increasing the supply voltage 10x will reduce the current by 10x and the (I^2 *R) loss by 100x, which is what you've shown.

But current computing equipment doesn't run on 800V, so somewhere in the chain there will need to be power converters or power supplies to get the voltage levels down to usable levels. These power converters will need to be extremely efficient to minimize that conversion loss that will also come out as heat. Go back and do some of those conversions: 15 kW at 90% efficiency means 1.5 kW is lost in the conversion process. 95% loses 750 W to heat.

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

In one child's first few weeks at college found that the power was off in their dorm room. She immediately connected the dots to the orders for "no extension cords for refrigerators", which they were using in order to have it in the correct place in the room. She and roommate went to hardware store, bought heavy cord or something to match the stated requirements, and went back and plugged it in with no luck. Called me in a panic that they thought they had burned the world down.

At that point a google search uncovered that the power was out in half of the campus. They had skipped over any sort of checks, like were any other rooms without power, or floors, or buildings, or blocks?

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: Logs

Standard behavior. All you would see in the logs is the machine coming up nice and fresh (and ready to be reset again.)

Not like a keyboard-initiated shutdown or reboot where there will be entries in the logfile.

Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

IR LED flare hat

This is great, the ability to detect that these are nearby is going to keep things interesting.

ISTR someone developed an IR LED jamming device for all cameras. Nearly invisible to the naked eye but it could flood the camera, like a denial of service attack.

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

Took a nap during my freshman engineering FORTRAN final. Put my head down on the desk and woke up a few minutes later with the full solution, just had to write it down.

KPMG partner in Oz turned to AI to pass an exam on... AI

"We've got a toothless system where con artists... get away with so much,"

Is she describing AI, or the whole ecosystem of consulting practices?

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Boss, in an uncharacteristic fit of energy, decided to replace the water bottle in the cooler

The Boss's insecurities force him to act busy while the team is doing things that he won't/can't understand.

It can be a useful thing to create a diversion for those kind of people. Like when a woman is ready to give birth they tell the men to "go tear up cloths." It gives them something to do.

When young children do that it is called "parallel play".

Happy Friday the 13th all.

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

two-legged

I believe milking stools had two legs, that allowed the milker to swing closer or farther away without having to shift the stool itself.

Windows fails to tip the scales in grocery store deployment

image missing

Did someone intend to include the image in the post? Or is there something wrong with my machine or my eyes.

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

Re: "it's a complete rip and replace of everything that you have today"

About a decade ago I worked in a company that got bought by another one that used SAP. When faced with integrating the company the story we got from execs was that it was easier to reconfigure the company's operations and "way of working" than it was to adjust the SAP software so that it fit the company. Somehow SAP had defined the optimal way of working and that was it. Full stop. I bet that hasn't changed, or maybe the consultants that can manage the customization have gotten cheaper.

what would you expect them to say

Consultants or analysts, after they've paved the world over with some variant of Salesforce, still have a need to be useful, so they're going to invent a new thing that you need (and that you'll maybe pay them to do.) Consolidate, then go with modular, then consolidate. Rinse, repeat.

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: What's new?

The origin story and the whole tired Northern California and silicon valley narrative is what is new. You know, where a couple of startup nerds try to tell you how to perceive things. And how they co-opt normal words to mean something completely specific to them, like a cringey inside joke that you're not enlightened enough to be in on.

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

but everything is top priority!!?!!!

I was expecting it to end a different way. The places that I have worked the PHB would have a bright idea that if one job ran faster as top priority then ALL the jobs should be loaded with high priority.

And it would be back to long job runtimes and handwringing.

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

sidetone came along for free with POTS

The sidetone that was mentioned came along for free - the full voice conversation is carried on two wires and is powered by the telco. There's a hybrid circuit in every phone that gets the microphone and earpiece working on that one loop.

You can now put your US passport into Apple Wallet for domestic travel

do you have to unlock your phone to show this ID?

Do you have to unlock your phone to show your digital ID?

Because in the US with privacy laws and illegal search and seizure you've basically handed all of your info over. Cops can't make you unlock your phone, against your will, in order for them to find things that might incriminate you. But if you have to unlock it to show your ID they'll take it from there.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a lot of info, here's one:

https://ssd.eff.org/module/how-to-get-to-know-iphone-privacy-and-security-settings

and an excerpt, not exactly in the same subject, but it hints at what could happen if you unlock your phone to show ID:

"In the United States, using a biometric—like your face scan or fingerprint—to unlock your phone may also compromise legal protections for the contents of your phone afforded to you under the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled incrimination. Under current law—which is still in flux—using a memorized passcode generally provides a stronger legal footing to push back against a court order of compelled device unlocking/decryption. "

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

"the cloud" is just someone else's computer that you can't control

Sometimes when trying to explain "the cloud" to my parents they spark to the idea that its just a faceless/unknown server somewhere unknown that someone else runs, and you put your data on it in hopes that you can trust them with it. They can "get" a mental picture of what a server room looks like.

Days like Monday are how you reinforce that idea.

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

its all part of the grift

The current regime is all about saving money, and redirecting it to their cronies. When you are in the defense industry or department of war there's no money to be made during peacetime.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: Excel

You would think (hope) that after having to do manual calculations a few times that he would have realized that Excel was capable of doing the math automatically.

I've worked with a few of those people, its amazing to watch them attempt to navigate a technical world.

Dashboard anxiety plagues IT pros' nights, weekends, vacations

Don't fix things, drop everything and write me a report about why you can't fix it.

Never mind that all that management "oversight" took perfectly good time away from letting you solve the real problem. There's an opportunity cost to all that. And they hate it when you explain that back to them.

Fisher price management

Oh managers love finding the red dots on the dashboard, it lets them feel like they're doing something. Like kids toys.

You don't need real time management interruptions.

Solution to all this is to create a separate management dashboard that is "filtered" or delayed so that you have time to fix things or investigate. It also gives you the chance to appear so proactive in that you've identified the problem before anyone was aware of it

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

Re: If an employer asks you do to this ...

I applied for a job at a company that had the questionnaire, but decided to subject its candidates to a video interview format where the question was presented and then you had to formulate and record a response, with a two hour time limit. Somewhat stressful, and completely impersonal. They had some semi-robotic claim that it would let the team review my answers when it was convenient for them, and so I wouldn't have to answer the same questions multiple times.

The cognitive dissonance with their HR marketing material that claimed "we value all our people" was pretty off-putting. We value people, but not enough to be considerate to the applicants.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: been there, done that ...

On the systems I've worked with it seemed that tripping the panic threshold would cause the ntpd to give up permanently, and the only way to get it right was the run ntpsync before starting ntpd. So this "change the time server and hope all the clients fall in line" would not have worked, would it?

I guess I never had the ability to change the time source as it was synced to an internet pools.

EchoStar sells off its spectrum for more than its total market cap

are these bands already supported?

OK been out of the cellular industry for a while now. Back in the day getting support for random blocks of spectrum was expensive and didn't always line up with the "economies of scale" for the network or mobile device manufacturers.

The fact that the selling price is so high seems to indicate that these bands are useful. Is that true? Or is there a bunch of work needed to make these bands interesting to vendors? Even having the new blocks be adjacent to existing bands doesn't automatically make them supported.

If Echostar is already trying to operate networks in these bands then they might be a) useful for an ATT-adjacent business (backhaul, point-to-point), or b) if they're already operating a cellular network in these bands then being able to share them between ATT and EchoStar is a big improvement in efficiency and utilization.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: This:

Why wouldn't you have all the access points with the same credentials so client devices could roam freely? And adjust footprint based on power? Its not mesh (wireless backhaul) as much as connected and centrally managed.

Microsoft puts the squeeze on onmicrosoft.com freeloaders

spam coming from inside

At the last 2-3 places I've been it seems that as soon as I start working and get an email address I'm getting hit with spam emails. I get spam before I have a chance to sign up for anything.

It must be that spammers are harvesting the list of users at microsoft365 or somewhere. How are they getting it, and is that a sanctioned thing (by Microsoft)?

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Re: Consumers vs Creators

This is really the key distinction. A phone or tablet with a touch interface seems to be for consumption devices. Maybe just because it is hard to "create" on them. OK there are the handful of photoshop type apps for iPads that cross over, but its nearly impossible to edit a spreadsheet or document or write code with a touchscreen.

Desktops and printers in coffee shops? Starbucks Korea tells customers to 그만 해

"third place" or "homeless shelter"?

Recently visited a friend in Oregon and she mentioned how she noticed how the people there made much more use of those "third spaces" that weren't home or work, and for the most part it was nice. The next day however we went to a brewpub and the best table was taken up by a grubby person and his dog. We could not decide if he was a customer that had stayed there a while or if he was homeless.

Every culture will have their own relationship with the unhoused, and so the use of third spaces will be highly interrelated with that.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Phone down

Could they have done a boot of a live Linux system to test those parts of the system? Would not be able to read the hard drive but the rest likely would work.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: VAX field service engineers

Jimmy Fallon (US comedian and late-night TV show host) did that to his ring finger.

https://www.nynjcmd.com/jimmy-fallon-suffers-ring-avulsion/

I grew up in a rural state, and we were shown the farm safety videos in high school. Lot of pictures of people that jumped off something and left their ring and finger behind. Also the effects of loose shirts caught in PTO shafts.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: At my last place....

satellite providers can usually predict when the outages will occur. it might be determined months or years in advance. when they get closer to the sun outage period they will send out alerts

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Re: Listening outside the box

That reminds me of a customer site a long time ago. Machine room with lots of server fans and general noise, and the manager's office that overlooked it with a glass window. Nice and quiet inside the office. Right outside said office was a fax machine. While having a conversation in front of the fax machine was pretty common, you had to speak loudly to do it. And that made it very clearly heard inside the office.

I don't remember if I got caught out for saying something disrespectful of the site, or if a friendly customer worker made a point to tell us. I think he did a demo and it was shockingly clear.

Fired US govt workers, Uncle Xi wants you! – to apply for this fake consulting gig

Re: "How to spot a fake"

Ahhh, known in Spain as the "Monfeo"!

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: So you forgot how your code worked... hold my beer

Good thing you took the time to post the solution online. Its like a letter to your future self!

Once you've solved the problem its too easy to not do the final wrapup and just jump into the next problem to solve.

Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it

blackhole them? poison the well?

Use AI against AI. Seems like there would be a way to put in a honeypot or blackhole or long list of bad/misleading fake AI pages that a robot would readily follow but a human would not see, or would realize that its obviously garbage. Dump a bunch of links off to a 3rd party location that can be continuously updated to keep the AI scrapers confused.

Feds sue Southwest for chronic delays, unrealistic schedules

Re: That's way to lenient!

You make a good point, but with the numbers of flights per day and month that Southwest operates one or two chronically late ones might amount to a rounding error.

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Re: LDAP?

thanks for the explanation, I ALMOST understand it. Just got done with a day or two of that fun when I had to change my password on my machine, from home.

There seems to be a way to get it to sync everything (desktop and apps etc) but our IT dept haven't been able to write it down. There are myriad ways to initiate a password change, from the desktop ctrl-alt-del menu, to going to myapps.microsoft, and with or without VPN engaged, and I SWEAR I got it to work one time so that the login to my computer was updated along with everything else, but I can't seem to reproduce it. It could also be some misconfiguration by our IT people, they seem to be in the low cost arena.

So I'll have a machine (win10) that I have to use the old password to log in, then everything else uses the new password. Until I go into the office and on powerup the machine will get its update and then everything is wobbly for a bit while the machine and everything microsoft and in the cloud somehow thinks that its out of sync (when it should be in sync.)

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Cobol...

My MechE first year university student has already had to program in C and Python in the first semester. Its all software these days. I'm waiting to hear when she will be allowed to touch real physical objects. She wants to take a welding course...

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

this happened at a live game

I have had this sort of thing happen at a live football game. During the pre-game action a brief excerpt of the tone was played with a lot of graphics on the jumbotron to indicate an offensive "storm coming".

It was startling even though it was a clear sunny Saturday in September.

That alert tone is very unique and only gets used when something important is going on.

Someone may have already brought up that the cellular alert system has had its share of problems with mapping alerts to coverage areas.