Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

The picture in my mind …

a teenage intern with copies of SQL for Dummiesand The Complete Idiot's to SQL open at the GRANT pages. ;)

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: For an industry that chokes on "standards"

"I am still getting passwords emailed to me in the clear"

Slightly better SMS/Text in clear.

Getting otherwise cluey people to generate a ssh key pair and send the public key is usually a bridge too far.

The classic fail for me was receiving the QR code for the TOTP seed in clear in the sender's foolishlessly mistaken belief it was encrypted.

"12345"…top choice among Zoomers…the far superior "123456" was preferred by Boomers

The far superior—who doesn't come here for the snark ?

I had to look up skibidis – not that I am much wiser—I'll probably stick with my first impression and stay with spinsterish old ducks on skis (ski + bidis/biddies.)

Curiously I understand that pre WW2 some strata of English society pronounced "ski" as "she" in the possibly mistaken belief that how it was pronounced in whatever nordic language from which it was half inched. They were pretty ignorant and clueless lot on the whole; probably still are.

So she-biddies works out rather serendipitously.

The problem with using long words like "serendipitously" for passwords is I forget how to spell them correctly, or otherwise, the same way. ;)

NetApp claims ex-CTO built a secret cloud platform then sold it to VAST Data

"rather than comply, he [Stefánsson] left the United States for Iceland,"

Presumably leaving NetApp and VAST Data to slog it out in the mire of US litigation.

I would imagine he managed to exfiltrated most of his contestably illgotten gains out of the reach of US courts.

If I were in his shoes I might explore a consultancy stint in the PRC until this inconvenience has largely blown over.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Anyone taking bets on what's going to fall over next?

Even money on all the DNS root servers having wee lie down together ?

Re: Ruined Lunchtime

"Had to go highbrow and read Ars Technica instead."

Umm Arse Technical…Highbrow ?

You are a courageous chap, I give you that.

Eating lunch and taking the risk of reading one of Beth Mole's "challenging" articles and retaining it—your lunch I mean.

Yes I guess Ruined Lunchtime would cover that… quite umm nicely… and your keyboard.

Re: SPOF

«CEO: “Should we reconsider relying on one vendor for DNS, CDN, WAF, analytics, TLS termination, routing, edge compute, zero-trust, VPN…?”»

If anyone from the C-Suite spouted that I would be checking myself in for urgent psychiatric assessment as clear my admittedly tenuous grip on reality had finally failed. As plot dialogue it's not credible. These chaps have trouble working a light switch.

«CEO: “But you said they were the gold standard.”»

Clue: the gold standard was obsolete and counterproductive over fifty years ago.

Pentagon and soldiers let too many secrets slip on social networks, watchdog says

Part of the problem is not really solvable

Proud parents posting that that their son has be promoted to lieutenant and posted to HMS Dreadnought is relatively innocent and in days past might have garnered a column in the local rag which would be innocuous but with social media etc such material is frequently universally visible which taken by itself is still relatively harmless.

But the aggregate of many such posts augmented with similar but indirectly related posts can be analysed with modern data science techniques to yield usable intelligence.

Ultimately other than turning off social media completely (yes please ;) or turning into a North Korean hermit kingdom there isn't a great deal practically that can be done to remove this hazard.

The same tools that Google, Facebook etc use to indiscriminantly trample on our privacy can be used by an adversary's intelligence gatherers.

Re: Commander in Chief

"What happens in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom stays in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom"

One would hope not everything. Given the chap on the throne is so full of shit one hopes the some of the crap is flushed.

Brits believe the bots even though study finds they're often talking nonsense

Believable British Bollocks Bots ?

If the AI summaries that some browsers foist on you are indicative I wouldn't trust it to speak my weight.

Most recently I submitted a search query about one of the smaller belligerents† in WW1 and the AI summary manage to muff the major belligerents.

_{† Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in October 1915.}

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: The problem is ...

"Anyone "In the IT industry" will be able to find a cheap machine to play with."

A local computer refurbisher was clearing its win10 casualties from the win11 invasion at AUD90.00 (<USD60.00) for i5 8Gb ram small form PC with 128Gb ssd — ideal for ffaffing around with unusual OS and distros.

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

"Tories and Labour - two cheeks of the same arse..."

Two arses of the same cheek.

Stereocoproaic arrogance.

Overconfidence is the new zero-day as teams stumble through cyber simulations

"slipping backward as teams fumble crisis drills"

I read that as "circus drills" which probably reflects the clowns I have encountered in IT security. All talk and no trousers.

Doesn't surprise me in the crucible of a crisis, even one contrived for training purposes, these chocolate teapots melt.

Alibaba releases chatbot that produces error when asked about Tiananmen Square

"Why is Tiannamen (sp?) still off limits,"

Why is Tiannamen (sp?) still off limits, we all know something happened and I bet all the Chinese know something. Whether any of us have the truth is another matter. You might expect some sort of lie rather than no answer. Maybe the CCP wants to scare people off even thinking about it?

My guess a superposition of shame and the inherent insanity of any autocracy. Also possibly not wanting their people to consider the path not taken.

The picture of the chap standing in front of the leading tank means that those events won't be forgotten outside the PRC for generations.

Could ask Qwen "Why would a man stand in front of a moving column of tanks?"

"countries with strong rule-of-law protections (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)."

Clearly hallucinating if is including Trumpisstan in those.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: flashlight vs torch

"early Biggles books ... the ones you can't get anymore"

Try The Faded Page. There is a fair collection of W E Johns' work including Biggles.

The texts in the site are the transcribed intact from original texts but might contain a warning that certain attitudes, prejudices and beliefs expressed in the text that are unacceptable today were common and acceptable at the time of writing.

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Re: What happens if you play AI country music backwards?

You picked a fine time to leave me, John, Deere.

With a crop in the field .,,

"Ghastly. It all is. Absolutely ghastly."

Re: Sundarts

Letterkenny. ✓

I know I shouldn't like it but kind'a do. ;)

"LLMs are nothing if not parody generators."

Unsurprising really as they are being pressed into service of some mythical, even mystical "AI" to be used for poorest parody of intelligence.

Model autophagy disease. Sounds like an affliction of the anorexic models that sashay down Parisian catwalks.

Personally I would be content if the whole boiling goes completely apoptic but I suspect its fate is necrotic.

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

"Have you made a mistake that made your cloud costs soar?"

No. I suffer from incurable congenital nephophobia.

For research purposes and for development purposes the loads are typically well defined (usually 100% of whatever is on offer if students are involved) owning or leasing the hardware will invariably be cheaper and provides a hard, physical "stop loss."

A few years ago I was an onlooker in the purchase of a very large memory (>1Tb), multisocket server costing ~$400,000 required for scientific computing which was questioned by the chief PHB as to why the workload wasn't being moved into the cloud.

So the prospective purchasers toddled off to the cloud providers for quotes—the lowest was ~$1.00 million per year.

These boxes could be realistically run for up to eight years in that environment with loss of vendor maintenance and support being the main reason for decommissioning.

Production environments with highly volatile loads, requiring ~100% availability and geographic diversity are a different kettle of fish. Cloud hosting probably is a decent fit for at least part of the solution.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

"Microsoft may have just blown its own toes off."

One can hope with their accumulating AI induced daftness that the next time Microsoft aims their litigatory blunderbuss at another of their extremities that they will fail to recognise that they are holding the weapon back·to·front.

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

Re: woke detector "what's a "holiday" season ?"

Otherwise known as the Silly Season when the news media and the politcians even dafter than usual; TV programming crappier than the usual crap etc etc a degenerate Saturnalia.

Really good time to take a "holiday" in some remote location cut off from this lunacy.

Re: PiDP maybe?

Look forward to the review.

I recall a Uni OS course assignment (1980s) where I used the console switches to load a bootstrap by hand (I think around 16 words) to load my hand assembled program.

Loved this observation from https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11

"So I looked around for 49 fellow-fools - but found 2000! "

One would, wouldn't one. That commodity has never been in short supply.

I thought I saw a piece not long ago where a chap built a PDP-11 from discrete logic (TTL.) I assumed he used the SMD versions as the DIL packaging would take up as much space as the original '11s.

Researchers find hole in AI guardrails by using strings like =coffee

"Add enough unsafe LLMs together and you get more of the same."

Collect a room full of idiots, adding another imbecile isn't going give you a chamber with an Einsteinian brain capacity.

If you have been taking notice it is pretty obvious that what you do get is the current idiocracy or retardnation of the current US Administration.

Memory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60%

Sliderule

I tried my slipstick recently and found it had jammed. It's over 50 years, old manfactured in Germany (FDR) but it appears the parts have shrunk or expanded disproportionately.

At least my HP35s still works — at least until they come for the CR2032 button cells.

I sourced non-ECC DDR4 a little while ago and found from the smaller vendors the prices were pretty unchanged or discounted. ECC DDR4 seems either unobtainable or unaffordable — I am guessing when manufacturers (samsung?, micron?) announced they were stopping production of DDR4 to concentrate on DDR5 etc production anyone expecting to keep a fleet of servers running for a few more years snaffled as much memory as they could get or afford.

Now you can share your AI delusions with Group ChatGPT

OpenAI suppository ?

Just when you thought virtual collaboration couldn’t get worse, OpenAI stuffs a group conversation[s] into your bot[tom].

Another way AI is putting the P firmly in the A of PITA.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

"Tales from the pit"

Says it all. The road whither is traditionally paved with good intentions (and human weakness.)

A decent technical library next to one's desk is often a far better resource than the whole internet combined. Actually getting up an taking a book from the shelf to lookup some detail of a data structure or algorithm etc allows the mind's focus to broaden and become receptive to peripheral information in the text which might lead to a much better solution.

Although in practice most software that doesn't need to scale to millions is often better forgoing complex data structures and involved algorithm for simplicity. Its usually easier to replace a simple implementation after benchmarking with a more efficient but more complex implementation than the other way round.

My observations in the last two decades would suggest proportionately far fewer graduates from the exact sciences (eg maths & physics) enter software careers than previously. The vast majority seem to be IT graduates followed by Comp. Sci. (not quite the same thing) graduates. The narrowness of the former IT courses, especially the typical total lack of any mathematics, does limit the creativity and insight required for problem solving tasks.

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

Re: What's next?

almost identically spelt word for people …

Celt ?

Compensation rated per cell ...

The human body has roughly 30 trillion cells (puzzlingly males slightly more, females slightly less) so USD1.0 trillion is a little more than 3 cents for each of Space Karen's cells. Obvious jokes about girlfriends, blood and other banks... not affording his services.

The brain has about 100 billion cells so for our trillionaire, USD 10.00 per brain cell increasing with Special-K (ab)usage.

Worth printing $1,000,000,000 in greenbacks, to take with him, as a reward for his personally reaching Mars in the next three years. (And staying there.)

Although in recent pictures he is looking decidely "later middle aged" and likely starting to discernl the reaper in background although in his case it might be the rat^† that does the honours. So he might not actually be around for the payout.

_{† who presumably squeaks in SMALL CAPS.}

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Made me think of the earliest origins of UNIX.

The reason or excuse to create first system on a spare PDP-7 was document prepararation.

I could see Gordon's downfall looming in the first few paragraphs. Once the institutional hacks "jumped at the chance to help" Gordon's fate was sealed.

The smart counter·move would be to "devolve" the preparation "definitive" documentation to the hacks and prepare on the qt, a short form guide for the suffering users.

Institutional writers are rarely the cream of their profession are generally an unmotivated lot. If there were an award for impenetrable and incomprehensible writing, salaried technical writers would be among the front runners.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'

"very small shell script"

AFAIK The smallest syntactically correct (Bourne) shell script is:

:

Older Unix system would invoke csh it the first character was a # which might replace a bad tempered manglement type.

Arguably even a single character is over-implementation.

"shared equally between the selection committee and the award winners"

Bribery. Old but golden even more so when the readies were more or less "(mis)appropriated" from the party being bribed.

Looking at the risk assessment of Simon's proposal:

Hazard: Award going to another group.

Severity: Catastrophic.

Risk: none.

a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'

through an open third storey window would be favourite.

_{† sense #6. the act of withdrawing or removing.}

ERP carnage continues as orgs jump in unprepared

An Expensive Exercise in Futility ?

Listing some early points:

• ¹ There's so much that can go wrong
• ² this is business transformation
• ³ There needs to be executive sponsorship
• ⁴ the organization is actually preparing itself for change

Translating these four points:

• 1. declares that there are a vast number of paths to failure and possibly at most one to success.
• 2. recognises that the very act of implementing the system to meet the client's will change those needs.
• 3. admits the apathy if not outright antipathy starts from the top down - like rotting fish heads.
• 4. is the forlorn hope that the organisation is capable of any concerted action whatsoever.

Not so much herding cats as on a par with attempting to convert Iran to Mormonism and even there the elders would have a slight edge.

To solve compatibility issues, Microsoft would quietly patch other people's code

Re: Of course not!

a VM on my laptop Debian Trixie. WfW next?

Shouldn't be to difficult. I had Win 3.1 running under RHEL virt-manager kvm. The only problem was finding a Win3 network driver diskette image for any of the network adaptors qemu/kvm/virt-manager supported. Same problem with early x86 Unix stuff eg Solaris 2.4. OS/2 has a few more hurdles. ;)

Re: I remember

"They actually created a special memory allocator mode just for SimCity :) -- no memory freed until the game exited."

Curiously I was reminded today of the very early Pascal allocator (before dispose() was implemented) - mark(); new();… release(); — Basically a stack which was fast and removed the double free problem and in this case use·after·free.

I assume MS created a custom dll with the dummy free() and substitute allocator routines and fiddled with the simcity .exe's imported symbols to use the custom .dll.

So more akin to library interception (LD_PRELOAD, RPATH etc) and patchelf, than blindly rummaging around the binary entrails of the .exe's .text segments.

Happy holidays: AI-enabled toys teach kids how to play with fire, sharp objects

Didn't Hollywood do this…

decades ago? And I am not thinking Gremlins.

Shove the kids' fluffy toys into the microwave for 20 minutes should sort out the electronics - bit like shoving a red hot poker through the back of the head of the insane marketing and product development types who dreamt up this dangerous nonsense albeit nowhere as satisfying.

On a par with a jack·in·the·box that pops out pulling the ring of a live grenade (Mills bomb in a box.) Nothing like starting Xmas day with a bang. That's how to do it Mr …Mills?

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Re: re-writing in today's fashionable dialect

Copying an existing utility purely for the purposes of re-writing in today's fashionable dialect is hardly innovation. Its ego driven indulgence.

An alternate view one might hold is that recreating an existing non·trivial application with a new programming tool is one very effective way of testing that tool on a real world problem with the added advantage you have a reference implementation with which to compare the new version against.

Here the tool is the innovation – not the recreated application.

Although "[an] ego driven indulgence " does rather make one think of Rust.

(Hush now, child. Play nicely. They only want the best for us. ;)

"Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut"

Using plenty of flux, one hopes.

I had some mistaken idea that debian shipped doas from OpenBSD instead of sudo. Sudo having a patchy security record although, to be fair, often in practice due to vendors shipping ancient versions and with dodgy modifications.

R$*$=X$* $@$>5$1$2$3 … "It's logical, Jim …

but not logic as we know it."

Battled sendmail.cf even before the m4 macro generated version. I reckon if the Lord meant us to mentally execute Turing machine tuples he would have given us infinite tapes (or patience.)

When postfix arrived I dropped sendmail faster than typical American billionaires drop their spouses.

I remember meeting Allman and McKusick in the 1990s, probably around the AUUG '97 conference, at a vendor sponsored event. I only remember their being rather laid·back even by AU standards. ✓ ;)

As for m4, I actually quite like it. Once you get your head around it, it's really useful when you need it. M4 is like Unix — it's not unfriendly; just fussy who it befriends.

Ransomed CTO falls on sword, refuses to pay extortion demand

Slightly misleading headline

"The CTO fell on his sword" would normally mean he had resigned as the phrase derives from a Roman military method of commiting suicide after defeat or after pissing off an Emperor.

I read the headline as both resigning and donating a sum to cybercrime research. Nothing beats sincerity except I suppose, sincerity with the shareholders' cash.

To be fair it's difficult to fall on your sword if the thing is stuck in ruddy great boulder.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

"SPRINTING to chase after the stupidest tech brained trends"

When you collect all the subjects that could be prepended to that phrase just for the current AI tulip madness and add up all the dollars being pissed on those tulip bulbs — trillions and trillions — there will eventually be an enormous number of people that will have wished they had "sat it out" especially those whose pensîon funds have gone full monty with exposure to AI and AI enabling sectors.

_{Oh dear ! I seem to have lost the '.' key and also to be channelling Carl Sagan. :)}

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

"with options how to ruin someone's day."

Generally known as mindless impersonal bureaucracy ?

"Let's find out what everyone is doing, And then stop everyone from doing it." A P Herbert (1930)

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Re: Choirboy gets new haircut, but

...caught fucking sheep.

That's what ewes say !

_{Don't bother I know the way…}

Broken wizard forces Microsoft to issue out-of-band Windows 10 patch

Wine

Because bugger all apps actually run successfully under wine! I Know I've tried several times and just given up!!!

Have you tried Codeweavers Crossover ? They seem to have done a lot of the legwork to configure Wine for a large number of applications. A few years ago I purchased a Black Friday discounted licence just to evaluate but you can also download a time limited trial. I was surprised by how many Windows application did "just work."

Worth trying. I didn't really deal with Windows other than through services like Samba so I really didn't need to run Windows binaries.

"Broken wizard forces Microsoft"

Sarumen forces Sauron...

Somehow I don't think so.

If Microsoft were wizard, Catweazle or Rincewind would be masters.

OpenAI GPT-5.1 adds more personalities, loses inhibitions

"unwelcome observations about sex, violence, and mental health"

…

ChatGPT5: "I can see you're depressed… Why don't you shove your head up your bum. The stimulation should cheer you up."

…

ChatGPT5: "No? Well you can go f@ck yourself !"

…

Enshittification and enfornication in one package all with easy payment terms—what's not to like ? /s

Google to allow Android users with high pain tolerance to sideload unverified apps

Re: Handwave handwave, distraction distraction.

Gave up on Android phones for other reasons and in spite of not being a great fan of Apple, tried an old $90 refurbished iPhone SE and was pleasantly surprised.

Will be pissed off once the Chocolatiers actually pull off this heist. Recently I wanted to install the Lithium e·reader on a new tablet and discovered it wasn't in Play anymore. I find Lithium is often useful for epubs that don't render properly with ReadEra.

Anyway I had to grab the apk from a Play Store alternative and jumping through a few hoops, sideload it. Once these restrictions are implemented this won't be possible.

I would have thought leaving things as they are at least for devices that are in "Developer Mode" would be a fair compromise. The majority of the polloi couldn't count to seven let alone locate the build number.

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Good question

"Routing, routing, traffic management… and routing" — would be my answer albeit not a network engineer. ;)

While it's always DNS, I cannot begin to list the mindless cockups with routing of one sort or other with which the network gods have seen fit to afflict me.

Network engineers appear to fall into two distinct camps: ¹the truly full bottle and ²the profoundly clueless. To add insult to injury the latter seem to have a propensity to rematerialise in IT security.

"Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools ? — Prof. Digory Kirke. (Not that Plato would be much help here.)

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

Re: creepy

"without the arms"

Reminded me of the Jackelian Kings in "The Court of the Air†" who after some "political problems" concerning a former king in their distant past, subsequent monarchs were prophylactically "dis·armed" on ascending to the throne — by amputation of…

Probably also a very sensible precaution in the case of a killer robot prototype although that didn't slow the Daleks down.

_{† Picked up a copy from a box of books left on the side of the road. Read anything. Vaguely reminded of a Strugatsky bros' work.}