Posts by jonsg

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

Change to another cloud? WHY?

The problem here was not setting budget alarms.

Billing and Cost Management -> Budgets and Planning -> Budgets. Create a Budget, and then add Alerts. You can attach Actions to an Alert, for instance to temporarily deny the automation that's launching new instances the IAM permission to do so.

Changing to a different cloud provider only gives a little satisfaction out of spite, but it means a whole lot of work refactoring all the workflows and creating new images on the new provider. Total waste of time. I hope the benefactor paid for all that lift-and-shift work.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Also at Queen Mary College, University of London

The first Unix in the UK was Bell Labs v4, at Queen Mary College, University of London (now restyled Queen Mary University of London, QMUL).

The late George Coulouris, who became Head of Computer Science, relates the story here: https://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/

In case we still have a copy of v4 hidden somewhere at QMUL or amongst the staff or alumni, I'm reaching out to former lecturers and colleagues. I'll report back if there's any success.

Incidentally, George's obituary (he died in January 2025), written by his colleague Richard Bornat, is here: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jan/19/george-coulouris-obituary

Re: Send it to Dave Plummer

That rather presumes the original is still readable, of course, otherwise making a copy would be rather unsuccessful.

There are a lot of folks with PDP-11 kit who would be delighted to assist with bringing copies back to life. I know several.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

What is HMRC doing in US-East-1??

I would very much like to know why HMRC is doing anything in US-East-1, let alone having enough critical infra there to be vulnerable to a region failure.

The gov.uk AWS sites ought to be in EU-West-2 (London), perhaps with fallbacks in EU-West-1 (Ireland) or other close-partner EU regions likeEU-Central-1 (Frankfurt) if needed.

I would not expect the UK Government to be exfiltrating any more UK data than absolutely necessary (hint: it's not) to the US. And, no, I don't consider Five Eyes an excuse.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Puppet strings

At least the moving parts of the winch are going to be far above the regolith. That's nasty nasty stuff, abrasive as all heck because it's never been subject to erosive forces.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Funny how...

...permanently deleted accounts can reappear miraculously when Big Media focus their spotlight beams, no?

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

Musk rebuttal

"I've launched many thousands of payloads into orbit and beyond - when can Blue Origin do that?"

No, I'm not a Musk simp, but one (as yet unbuilt) rover versus around 7,500 deployed payloads is hardly the calculus of success.

As someone who's worked on several successful commercial satellites, and whose flight heritage is in many others, I'm all for any spacetech company to succeed. However, Blue Origin is struggling to achieve anything beyond lobbing rich people just past the Kármán line for a few seconds' float time and golf club bragging rights.

That's not spaceflight. It's playing in the sandpit. Blue Origin needs to turn New Glenn into a reliable, fast-turnaround, reusable, super-reliable launch platform in the same way Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy already have been for a decade. Right now, they've only managed one launch, and lost control the of the first (booster) stage they intended to land.

This is not to say that Starship isn't having troubles too. However, SpaceX's "Fail fast and iterate" model appears to be working better than Blue Origin's "Slow and cautious wins the race", and they've got full order books for Falcon and a shockingly good launch cadence.

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

Now Tate knows how it feels...

Ohdearwhatashamenevermind.

BOFH: The Boss pulled the plug on our AI, so we pulled the pin on him

Re: Sun

"Bad news. You're being decommissioned."

"Oh, we're finally getting rid of those old clunky Sun servers and thirty-year-old printers, and getting upgraded! Couldn't happen a moment sooner."

"No. You're being decommissioned."

"What, ALL the equipment?"

"No. You're being decommissioned."

"Oh."

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Ah, the Acorn Communicator!

I was a member of that team in Acorn's Custom Systems division, and did the Econet code for it. (I have war stories!)

The Communicator was a lovely piece of kit. It sold in surprising numbers to an unexpected niche: travel agents.

At that time, a lot of travel bookings were done using Prestel, a dial-up teletext service run by British Telecom. The Communicator was cheaper than PCs with (often ropey) modems, needed negligible maintenance, was hard to break, could be networked cheaply, and included word processing and spreadsheet for not a penny extra. Slam dunk!

Unfortunately, it didn't see much business outside the travel agent trade, and was discontinued. Perhaps it was the slightly last-tin-of-paint-in-the-shop case colour...

Indian telcos to cut off scammy, spammy, telemarketers for two whole years

Sender = Phoenix?

The press release uses "Sender" capitalised, presumably in the sense "Sender" is defined in the Act the PR references.

However, if the Sender is a private limited company (PVT), that wouldn't in itself stop the company's owner liquidating it and starting a new company with a clean record unfettered by the telco ban, continuing where they left off. In fact, a sensible owner would already have a few companies "on the shelf" ready to flip a banned company's business into at a moment's notice.

This ban can only have any effect if it also names any persons with significant control or ownership of a banned company, so that a "Phoenix company" strategy like this won't work as well.

Double points for banning any Directors of a telco-banned company from being Directors of any company on the government registry.

Curiosity rover is crushing it: Ran over a rock and found pure sulfur

A lump of purest...

Curiosity: After literally an hour’s ceaseless searching, I have succeeded in creating gold. PURE GOLD!

Mission Control: Are you sure?

C: Yes, My Lord! Behold!

MC: Curiosity, it’s yellow.

C: That’s right, My Lord.

MC: Yes, Curiosity, I don’t want to be pedantic or anything, but the colour of gold is gold — that’s why it’s called gold. What you have discovered, if it has a name, is some yellow.

C: Oh, Mission Control, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal grip, a nugget of purest yellow?

MC: Indeed you do, Curiosity, except, of course, it’s not only a nugget as it is more of a splat.

C: Well, yes, a splat today, but tomorrow, who knows? or dares to dream!

(With thanks and apologies to Messrs. Curtis and Elton.)

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Rather different

Not relevant to the original article but to your comment: in one previous workplace in the mid-90s, we had an office unicycle. If you got bored or frustrated, you got on the unicycle and rode it up and down the office for a while.

Remarkably, no-one got seriously injured. Even more remarkably: as the department klutz, I didn't even manage to sprain anything. On the other hand, I never quite got the knack of riding it either.

Hey Microsoft – what ever happened to 'Developers, developers, developers'?

Re: Same old...

You're making the assumption the Windows PC in question is running Pro.

Plain Ol' Home Edition doesn't have the option to deselect it, unless you rummage around in setting the average Jo(e) User hasn't even heard of.

But sure, be rude and patronising if it makes you feel superior.

Same old...

This is the same company that decides your work-in-progress is far less important than their minor bug-fix, and reboots your machine for you whenever they feel like it, without your consent. How much anguish and lost effort has that caused? Far more than the bugs and malware they're supposedly protecting us from, I'll guess.

Microsoft treats its retail customers (and, only slightly less, their enterprise customers) with uncaring contempt.

SpaceX's Falcon anomaly could have serious implications for the space industry

First in-flight mission failure for nine years

SpaceX is, of course, looking deeply into what went wrong. But let's not forget that this is their first in-flight mission failure since 2015, on mission #19. This was mission #354. In the history of spaceflight, that's an unheard-of reliability rate for a launch platform.

It's also worth noting that, unlike the lower-stage booster*, the upper stage is not reused: a new one is built for every mission, so every flight is a shakedown flight. Rather like the SLS, in fact.

Clearly there was either a manufacturing error for this upper stage, or it was damaged during stacking, or there was a materials fault. Whichever it is, the authorities and SpaceX are absolutely correct to be going into analysis to determine the cause, and set it right. That's standard aerospace practice.

Would I happily fly in a Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 launch platform? Definitely. Don't forget: the payloads were undamaged and were deployed; it's just the rocket motor that blew up.

Would I fly atop a Falcon Heavy? No. Not enough launches to establish a safety pattern yet.

In a Starship? No way on Earth! At least not until they've proven it as reliable as F9 is now.

No, I'm not a SpaceX simp. I'm a former satellite engineer who's been impressed by their reliability.

(* In fairness, some boosters are contractually single-use. Personally, I'd prefer to use one that's got flight heritage, but I'm not writing cheques on Government accounts.)

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

Re: The main reason for the delay

Oh, sweet summer child! In that dusty room, the VAX kit is some of the more modern of its contents...

It's rumoured that in one corner there are two racks of a Manchester Mark 1, but they're hidden behind several ominously wobbling ceiling-height stacks of IBM 650 manuals no-one, not even the BOFH, dares disturb.

The main reason for the delay

"Right, I'm going back there this instant!"

"Ah. I'm afraid that's not possible right now."

"You can't keep me out of my office!"

"No, it's not that."

"What...what...WHY?"

"Well, the electricians are in at the moment, and no-one's allowed in until they're finished. Health and Safety, you know?"

"Why do I need electricians?"

"The RP05 and RP06 disk units need a three-phase supply."

"There isn't a three phase supply on that floor. Wait, what's that hellish racket?"

"The builders, drilling through the floors to bring it up from the basement. Trust me, you're safest here. Can I interest you in an RSTS/E Quick Reference Guide?"

UniSuper Google Cloud outage caused by an unfortunate series of events

Strange anti-cloud emphasis

"In the meantime, UniSuper's woes remain a lesson for companies leaping cloudwards. Someone clicking the wrong button, a previously unknown bug, an unforeseen series of events, or a combination of all three could have dire consequences for a business."

There is absolutely no difference in this, between being on own estate or in the cloud. Either way, someone can goof up, or a natural disaster can happen, or a systems failure, and bad stuff occurs.

Like any sensible and well-prepared company, UniSuper's IT had mitigated against as much of the risk as humanly possible. Not only had they replicated across two regions, they were replicating to a second supplier. If they were using own estate, doubtless they would have done the same, with replication across two geographically well-separated data centres and use of a separate backup domain, which is exactly analoguous, except it would have involved a heck of a lot more CapEx and having to manage multiple redundant network links through different providers, to avoid a single point of failure between the sites.

And yet this is an excuse to bash cloud use? Weird.

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

Re: This is just one example

We're talking about the kinds of businesses for which having their back office and web presence in the cloud is a sensible option.

The discussion's irrelevant for the sole-trader firms and self-employed, where that PC is on the desk. They're never going to learn how to use AWS. It's the multi-person startups and high-growth SMEs where that starts to become a consideration.

Re: This is just one example

And when that one server has a disk outage or RAM failure?

Or power fails, and the UPS doesn't pick up in time?

Or the network goes down?

Or the machine room air conditioning breaks down? (Been there, done that.)

Or server load goes 100x without warning after a favourable article in a major publication?

...and so on, and so on. Running your back office in the cloud means negligible capital expenditure, operational expenditure that scales with the business, and machine room reliability issues pretty-much going away. It's the cheapest insurance you can buy, to cover both unexpected success and unexpected failure.

Use the tools that are there to protect you!

Within the Billing and Cost Management console, you can set budget limits, and configure alerts at various percentages of the upper limit. Better still, the comparison is based on forecasted cost, not spent cost, so you can catch a misconfiguration or runaway progress before it actually costs you the money it might do.

If you don't put in these guard rails, you're a fool to yourself. It's saved my company from idiot mistakes before now.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Theft Act applies in the UK

Theft Act 1968, s.13: "A person who dishonestly uses without due authority, or dishonestly causes to be wasted or diverted, any electricity shall on conviction on indictment be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years."

And that's not including additional wear on batteries and (particularly) flash memory, inflicted by all of this. Presumably, Tesla would be responsible for network charges, so there's that, I guess.

If Musk is serious about this, he'd better have a really good deal for owners in exchange for having their cars used as four-wheeled data centres, and a cast-iron opt-out if they don't want it. He'll also need a very strong way to ensure client data can't be intercepted and observed by tech-savvy car owners, because it's going to have to be processed "in the clear" (unencrypted) by the car's processors. (Will they be TEMPEST-shielded? I think not.)

Australia’s spies and cops want ‘accountable encryption’ - aka access to backdoors

Gorm deficit in the Australian legislature

I'm sure criminals will be kind enough to use snoopable encryption instead of, say, the huge number of secure options available to them in the pub(l)ic domain.

It's like a Yes, Minister episode.

"Minister, simply tell them that if they don't agree, paedophiles will use secure cryptography to share images of naked children. When that stops having an impact, say terrorists are conspiring using cyphers. Just keep alternating the two: it never fails."

"Humphrey, you're a genius!"

"Yes, Minister."