Posts by Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Logs

Lots of focus on the exposed reset button and the double-jointed junior but not so much on the logs...

None of the team had made any changes that could have made the box unstable, so Carter checked its log files.

"They showed nothing out of the ordinary," Carter told The Register. "No temperature spikes, no failing drives, no network or device errors."

and no indication that the reset button had been pressed either, apparently. Was that a BIOS setup omission or standard Windows behaviour at the time?

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

Well, someone's got to foot the bill.

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Offbeat

The article is filed under OFFBEAT. I see what you did there.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

The thing that stood out for me...

The thing that stood out for me (aside from removing 6000 lines of superfluous script - someone was being paid by the line!) was:

"We had carried out multiple dry runs, deployed and rolled back in pre-production a number of times. And we had a four-hour window from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM to when the business would allow the site to be down for this process."

Tom sat next to the employee who was allowed to make the change.

"I had supplied all the steps in detail, and all he really needed to do was cut and paste a few commands," he wrote.

If you're not allowed to make the change yourself then the person who is must do the rehearsals. Otherwise the rehearsal is not a rehearsal. If the boss complains just ask him to imagine rehearsing a play without the real actors being present.

<icon: Hamlet>

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Facewatch admit their software is useless?

> Because only YOU can ask for information about YOU. I shouldn't be able to simply send a picture of you and learn whether or not you are in Facewatch's database.

He's not a criminal - by definition - so FaceWatch should accept a letter from him at face value, given the circumstances.

It's a measure of how paranoid they are if they think that every such request is simply someone trying to game their system.

Facewatch admit their software is useless?

> "Our data protection team followed the usual lawfully required process to confirm his identity and verified that he was not on our database and had not been subject to any alerts generated by Facewatch."

Why do Facewatch need a passport and other information to confirm the bloke's identity? If their system worked then all they would need is a picture which would then be confirmed as not present in their database. If it can't do that then it can't be working as they claim.

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

General gun control

You're all missing the point: the purpose of this legislation is to stop people making their own guns once the soon to be proposed repeal of the 2nd amendment goes through.

<sarc/>

Free strapline for the gun control lobby: It wouldn't kill you to try gun control.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Don't ask MS why he left...

> It is unclear why Poettering decided to leave Microsoft. We asked the company to comment but have not received a response.

I'm not really that interested in why he left Microsoft but I would be interested in what Microsoft thinks was his main contribution while he was there.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

An analogy is swimming

Swimming can be dangerous, which is why we teach children to swim safely.

Once they can swim they may go to dangerous places, such as rivers with strong currents or quarries with deep water. We put up warning signs - i.e. ban them - but also educate as to why the ban is there.

They may also try and swim in rivers polluted with sewage - we don't ban them from this, instead we prosecute those responsible for the pollution.

Social media is very much the latter: it's currently polluted with electronic sewage and legislation should be aimed at forcing the providers to clean it up.

Banning children from using social media seems a bit close to victim blaming.

Cop cops it after Copilot cops out: West Midlands Police chief quits over AI hallucination

Re: Retired eh ?

> Imagine if you or I had pulled this stunt ?

> He should have been sacked with extreme prejudice.

I found it ironic, but unsurprising, that Labour MPs demanded he be sacked for lying to parliament but don't seem to be so keen on an enquiry into former Labour leader Tony Blair's lying to parliament and fabricated "weapons of mass destruction" reports which he used to justify going to war in Iraq.

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

So that explains it

So that explains why when I came to start up my work laptop the other day it was already running. Fortunately it didn't overheat in the laptop bag and burn the house down - otherwise HP would have gotten the blame. ;-)

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: My wife was a keyholder at a bank branch

> I say, steady on, this is Blighty! A gun? One simply insists the ne'er-do-wells "Stop!" - they know their place, and woe betide them should they ever disobey one of their betters!

Stop! Or I'll shout stop again.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

The ones that don't stick are escapeas.

> Apparently the title of one of the tracks I ripped from a Nina Simone album is: It might as well be string.

The Goodies - It Might As Well Be String

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: confusion?

> name ANY function that doesn't lead to confusion when a user invokes it unknowingly.

NOP ?

Pot ... kettle

> The feature is also not discoverable at all

Has he not used Gnome? Oh, I forgot - he's a dev so has "discovered" all of its features by reading the source.

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Re: I locked myself out of Bitwarden

> Also some stupid "you are using the same password" warning on Windows 11 for a system to authorise system use that requires the same password!

This! Started seeing this a couple of weeks back on the client's laptop trying to log in to their Confluence (when the "remember me" had run out) but it's all SSO via AD so there's no possibility of using a different password even if I wanted to.

It stopped as of yesterday which I take as a sign that the IT people managed to undo whatever dumb-ass change MS had made.

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

PromptQuest

PromptQuest - lol. Absolutely nailed it 100%.

"After publishing the article a pint of beer appears..."

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: Boulder, Colorado, Strata 0?

> I thought Boulder, Colorado got it time from its own atomic clock

It does. The problem, as far as I understand it, is that the NTP server has lost contact with the master clock - the hydrogen maser mentioned in the linked release. The NTP server(s) have their own "local" atomic clock - but this is "just" a commercial atomic clock so not as accurate. Normally it corrects itself by regularly contacting the master but, being out of contact, it has drifted ever so slightly - 4 microseconds or so.

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: until some fwit removes comments to "save spacce"

> In particular, the value of the "top comment block"

I take that concept even further. In the comments at the top of a function or method I write out in bullet points what the function aims to do e.g.

This method allows an object to behave like a 'foo' even though it's a 'bar'.

1) Make sure we have been initialised as a bar

2) Check the prerequisites for being a 'foo'

3) etc

And then in the code just have short comments /* Step 1*/, ... /* Step 2 */ etc. marking the start of each bit. That way the commentary is in one place and reads as meaningful prose from top to bottom; but the comments in the code are easily moved around and retained. And if a change comes along you can easily amend step 2 to 2a, 2b etc without having to renumber. (And also, the person doing the change has to read the top comment in order to know where in the code to put the change, so at least you know they've tried to understand the function and the change they are making!)

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Why a TV licence?

> Which is a form of taxation.

Correct. I didn't think it was necessary to point that bit out.

Re: Why a TV licence?

> So, basically, there's still a licence fee because no one has yet had a better idea.

Not in any way suggesting this is a better idea but, for comparison, in Slovakia any household connected to mains electricity is automatically charged a TV licence fee.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: Vibration & banging ?

> I want a picture of where the tower PC was installed --- back seat somewhere? Surely not in the trunk!

In the front passenger seat with a woofer on top and a hat and coat wrapped around it, I hope, so she could ride the carpool lane!

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: In this instance i cant blame the user for this!

> But I would be quite happy to blame the user for saying that the screen was blank when it wasn't!

I blame L1 100% for this.

If the user says the screen is blank then L1 should go through the usual monitor unplugged / brightness turned down tests. At some point someone should have asked the user if the status line was visible since we're told there was always a status line.

If the user still swore blind that the screen was blank then a hardware technician should have been sent out to swap the screen, not pass the call to "Charles".

Re: Penny ante

That's a stiff power lead, not a loose one - by definition since the secretary didn't have the strength to push it back in fully.

NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

> But when MAVEN’s orbit brought it back into view, ground stations on Earth could not detect any signal from the probe.

It came back into view and saw a large orange blob on earth that made it confuse Earth for Mars.

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

TITSUP

Temporary Inability To Skydive Using Parachute

Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

Re: It shouldn't happen, but...

> I was thinking "crapita AI? Will anyone notice a difference from their normal performance?"

Crapita have AI baked into their name - for as long as they take the 'p'.

Brit telco Brsk confirms breach as bidding begins for 230K+ customer records

Re: Surely it's a data

Life's a btch

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

> Logical ring, but ultimately physical star.

You've reminded me of a former client, a power company servicing an industrial estate with 15-20 odd substations. The control and monitoring network was designed as a loop so that if there was a break in the cable (i.e. a man in digger doing what he does best) then packets would still flow the other way around the loop.

Until we found that the loop actually ran around the wall of a single room on the substation more or less in the middle of the estate, with a star pattern "out and back" pair in a single duct to each substation. D'oh.

Tiny tweak for Pi OS, big makeover for the Imager

> The plasma TV used a lot of power, but created intense images. I still remember mine with nothing but good memories.

Sounds like those memories are etched into your retinas brain.

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Paying a premium for fuel

> This may involve paying a premium for the fuel to power backup generators, yet pales into insignificance compared to the potential cost of halting a production line.

And the response from the bean-counters: "Challenge accepted!"

You just know that the priority supplies at a premium price aren't going to survive a couple of year's worth of "budget analysis". "Why do we need so much fuel?" "Why do we have to run the generators for so long during the weekly tests". "Why do we have to test them weekly?"

Icon: my local bean-counter

Manchester hits snooze again on joining Palantir-run NHS data platform

> So if I go somewhere other than the Manchester area, how do I opt out of having my data shared with a malign foreign organisation (Palantir) ?

https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/about-the-nhs/opt-out-of-sharing-your-health-records/

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

Latency

> "They wanted to know what changed because our cloud charges for the last two months were $40,000."

AWS storage latency: 2 milliseconds for the data; 2 milli-centuries for the bill

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Re: What?

@Dan55 : Thanks for that explanation, I see what you mean now.

Re: What?

> They block outdated phones because they can't roam when making a call to 000 in Australia, to force the customer to update to a newer phone which can

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "roaming". The victim is described in the article as a Sydney resident so no (international) roaming involved.

Re: What?

> Since when does a phone's handset software prevent a call to emergency services?

I'm with you here. That phone was able to dial regular numbers to make calls when it was new - and presumably still can do since the owner was still using it - so why dialling 000 is treated any differently to any other number is a mystery.

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Burst bubble clause

I hope these discounts will include a burst bubble clause - ie they will end as soon as the bubble bursts and that we won't end up subsidising energy costs for a few lucky DC owners for decades?

Elephant in room alert: if the Government were truly interested in improving the economic prospects of deprived regions then they should introduce a corporation tax discount based on the number of employees living and working in a deprived area and earning above minimum wage. (Or even just a discount based on distance away from London and the South East!)

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

> According to the Amazon link not being released until June 2026.

That's part of the true retro experience: pay now and wait ages! The only difference now is that a better machine won't be announced by a competitor in the meantime.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

That story doesn't add up. It claims Thatcher wanted more competition so blocked the roll out to give competitors with older technology a chance.

However, at that time BT was already privatised so could have told her to bog off and gone ahead anyway.

Presumably - the unstated bit of the story - is that they wanted a large Government subsidy to do the roll out and that was the bit she declined to provide.

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

> Made from sheep, for sheep!

Wool? These should be made from recycled Rayon kipper ties so that the static electricity produced can be harnessed to power the phone as well.

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

The wheels on the bus...

> Imagine the chaos if a major portion of public transport buses got bricked (or stopped from working normally) in a couple of countries.... and private transport too...

If buses and coaches in the UK suddenly stopped working then the railways would really be in trouble. Where would they get replacement buses from?

UK tax collector falls short on digital efficiency, watchdog says

I think that means HMRC estimated they needed 1.6 + 0.8 = 2.4 in total but were told they can't have that much. Instead they were given 1.6 and told to fund the rest through savings.

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

Re: Damn AI!!!

AIDS - AI Distrust Syndrome

I think we all have that. :-)

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Not a work prank...

Not a work prank but this made me snort my coffee.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2ler3xnv8o

Thanks to Trump, UK-based right-wingers are creeping out of the woodwork. The latest incarnation of this is the practice of flying the St George's Cross on street lights etc in an area in order to show how patriotic you are, or some such.[1]

In response, someone had the inspired idea to deliver fake letters from the Council informing households that: patriotic households displaying the country's flag will temporarily house refugees because "we know you would be proud to assist your country"

That's hilarious.

[1] For the benefit of non-UKians, flag-flying to express political sentiment has never been a "thing" in the UK except for Northern Ireland during the troubles and, because of the NI link, has always been looked down upon. The modern affliction is nothing to with patriotism but simply a racist dog-whistle for whipping-up anti-immigration sentiment.

Russian spies pack custom malware into hidden VMs on Windows machines

Re: WTF is EDR?

Last line of the 3rd paragraph

Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

Crow pie?

> Palantir CEO Alex Karp used his quarterly shareholder letter to take aim at critics after the company beat Q3 2025 earnings estimates.

Much as I hate to interrupt an enemy while he is making a mistake, crowing too much over beating analysts estimates is a double-edged sword: the analysts might feel that the only reason their estimates were low was because they were misled in the first place during earlier briefings and so will be less inclined to trust the company next time.

Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life

Transition plan...

Has he got a younger brother?

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Breakfast

> "When thing X happens, do thing Y" is how computers basically work, and it's about as much "AI" as it is a breakfast cereal.

I eat grains for breakfast. Often resulting in movements. A bit like real AI.