Posts by Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

Re: Plain ASCII

> cue the downvotes

I won't downvote you but "Plain Unicode" would be more inclusive. :-)

Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push

Re: Why are they in the cloud at all?

> Surely Airbus can afford a data centre or two and host its data on-premises?

Given that they make planes it should be just as easy for them to put their data in the clouds.

Researcher poisons open-weight AI model for under $100

Stop wasting time and get bactrian to work

C'mon, just copy this text string and paste it into your macOS Terminal – it'll fix your computer, honest

The bit missing from the article

It would be nice to know how users are being convinced to run the shell command.

If it's just some random spam email: "Run this and your computer will double its RAM / run twice as fast / make you attractive to women" then standard cybersecurity hygiene needs to be strengthened.

If they've searched for some problem and, thanks to Google Adwords, the first result back is "run this command" then that's a bit more serious.

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Challenge intruders

Wait until AI security guard robots are roaming the hallways: you go to the loo and are challenged to show your ID and asked why you've had to leave your desk; you come back from the loo and are challenged to show your ID and asked why you've had to leave your desk. You go to the coffee machine and are challenged to show your ID and asked why you've had to leave your desk; you come back from the coffee machine and are challenged to show your ID and asked why you've had to leave your desk. You go to the printer in the room down the hall because the nearest one to you is out of toner and are challenged to show your ID and asked why you've had to leave your desk; you come back from the room down the hall with the working printer and are challenged to show your ID and asked why you've had to leave your desk.

Only when it tries to sniff your breath and ask if you've been smoking in the loos do you realise that the robot is supposed to be patrolling the nearby high school but the kids have hijacked it!

Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

Re: Burgess?

But might need to Maclean up his act.

Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

Re: Python is not a Microsoft product

> > The same kind of error I would expect in a High-school coding class (or made by CowPileIt).

> Or from an AI perhaps?

"CowPileIt" might be a bit too obtuse - how about just calling it Coprolite?

British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems

Re: Compensation seems a little light

Croydon - you can't get better than that. Applicants will be flooding in...

Texas lassoes massive Microsoft datacenter – and 20 years of gas turbine emissions

Re: Fascinating... how reality starts to converge towards those cyberpunk storylines ...

> ... where citizens are forced to organize self-defense against the seemingly overwhelming power of huge global corporations that operate without being restricted by law (or making their own law in some versions) , show up at a peaceful place and start using land and other natural resources in exchange for polluted water and air.

> From what I read, many of the rich AI bros are huge fans of this SF genre - did they ever notice how these stories usually end?

There's no need to read SF when they could just read history books instead. Huge global trading corporations used to exist, creating and controlling large armies that were used to fight wars against each other and other countries. However their ending wasn't caused by a revolution, uprising or "glitching the machine" but boring old government legislation.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company

The tech bros' empires will also be ended by legislation - probably anti-trust legislation - the same way that AT&T and IBM were broken up. It's just a matter of time.

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

> I remember way back when PostreSQL first came out in the research days when I was at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK, Canada, back around '84-'85 in third year when the "Business Programmer Students" started working with it on the student systems. You knew very well that if you saw someone log in to that particular 400-series class on our VAX-780's, you may as well log out and come back some other time, because two measly users of PostgreSQL were enough to completely saturate the capabilities of a VAX.

You've reminded me of the capacity sizing guidelines I (we) had for VMS back in the late '80s: 0.5KB per standard user; 1.5KB per Ingres application user.

Yes, those are kilobytes (but they were green screen users).

Tell that to kids of today etc etc

Re: In place upgrades...

I'm assuming from your posts that you have several (many?) different systems/applications using separate Postgres databases. And these are deployed in Docker containers for various reasons, not least that it is cheaper than VMware?

Choosing containers imposes some constraints resulting from the fact that they are meant to be immutable and replaced when needing change, not updated on the fly so they no longer match their containerfile definition.

I'm assuming / guessing at your scenario a bit, but suggest you:

a) Create a new version of your app container, using the new version of Postgres but don't deploy it.

b) Create an "upgrade instance" of Postgres - which could be containerised or not - just for you to run as admin with old and new Postgres present. Stop the old container in K8s and run the upgrade yourself against the database to be upgraded using this "upgrade instance".

c) Then, if the upgrade went with no errors, allow K8s to start up the new version container(s).

Repeat the above for each application in turn.

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

> In the last ten years, the UK has gone through six prime ministers; it took 34 years to get through the previous six.

The old joke was that Bolivia measured its history in RPM - revolutions per minute. We're now at the point where prime ministers need to be measured in PPM -- Prime ministers Per Month[1]

Icon: closest thing to a stopped pendulum. Also a sign of the "chaos" that No. 10 said would occur if Andy Burnham were allowed to step down from being mayor

[1] Month conveniently ensures that the lower bound set by Liz Truss[2] is close to one.

[2] A lettuce is a little too short-lived for general purposes use.

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

> How, precisely, do they intend to establish that a child is using the device?

That's easy: the Government will introduce a service whereby you send a picture of your genitalia and the service will decide whether you are adult or not based on the picture.

I've already lined-up a Government spokesperson to say "The safe and secure storage of your submitted photos is our top priority."

<\sarc>

Brit maritime agency heralds fresh global rules for crewless cargo ships

Re: Mandatory Search and Rescue

> It can help in a limited way

There's a good chance that a level 3 or 4 ship will have remote controlled drones that can launch from and return to the ship, intended for carrying out inspections following storms, etc. Weather permitting these could be used to assist search and rescue by locating a vessel or people in the water.

Even if it only confirms that the autonomous ship is not close to the stricken vessel then that in itself is useful information.

Zombie user account let hackers control the city’s water

Nice irony...

From the fine article

We have a few takeaways here. First, the people who ran IT security for the city should have both deleted Greg’s account when he left and done periodic audits to see who had access and whether they should still have it.

Greg was the auditor. If they'd replaced him this wouldn't have happened, maybe.

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Slightly ironic that...

Slightly ironic that the problems affected Victoria station on the 12th of May which is the Feast Day of St Pancras.

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

Can I be the first to point out...

The harebrained scheme is part of Elon Musk’s recently announced Terafab project, which seeks to boost global semiconductor production by 50x. After all, how else is he supposed to lob a terawatt of compute a year into orbit?

In a recent public filing, SpaceX described the project as a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility.”

That's an awful lot of "vertical" if it's going to reach into orbit from Texas.

$250M crypto-robbing gang’s dirty work guy sentenced to 6.5 years behind bars

Re: They never learn..

Or abuse animals.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9l74wvd7o

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Win back fans by making the Windows UI completely skin-able - every single feature. So if we want it to keep looking like Win10 then it can do. Make the skins sellable in the Windows store so that enterprising and creative designers can profit from producing a better UI and MS gets *real* UI feedback - if people are willing to pay for it then it must have some merit.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

> We do make it hard for kids. First, it's counting in decimal, we drum 1-to-10 into them, they have 10 fingers, off they go.

You forgot to add: and the dial is numbered 1 to 12 and sometimes 13 to 24 as well but it's also invisibly numbered 1 to 4 so that we can say quarter past, half past and quarter to but not three-quarters past as that is wrong, obviously!

Microsoft Outlook for iOS still down and out for many after 'service change'

Plus ca change etc

Surprise, surprise: Microsoft still issuing dodgy releases that mysteriously only disrupt its competitor's products.

It's given me the chance to nostalgically recall Netware and DR DOS :-)

Humanoid robots one tiny step closer to exterminating autoworkers' jobs

Re: Humanoid robots

> So, why does this need to look anything like a human?

Because the alternative is that it looks like a Dalek.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

We always used the "crashed into by an airplane" scenario in disaster planning.

What we never went as far to consider was the simultaneous loss of two datacentres, which is what has happened to AWS here. That was put into the "give up and go home category" so hats off to AWS for managing as well as they have done.

Complaining about the lack of billing / audit records is a bit churlish tbh. I'm sure auditors will be able to extrapolate from the previous month given the circumstances.

Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years

Re: He led Adobe’s swing to become a SaaS company

> Curse this man and his name. Narayen is the one responsible for turning Photoshop, Acrobat, and Dreamweaver into a subscription instead of a one-time payment for life. A pox of his house, a pox on his yard, a pox on everything he owns.

Would you like to purchase the one-off lifetime pox or the subscription version where he receives a new pox variant every year?

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.