Posts by TeeCee

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

...as Google asked him to provide information that was only accessible if he logged in...

All too common these days. When MFA is involved, trying to get back in when locked out ranges from "shitshow" to "fucking impossible".

My all time favourite example was attempting to use Google's own service to find where I'd mislaid my phone when away from home.

1) Find another computer - check

2) Get the owner to allow me to use it - check

3) Log into Google while thanking Fuck, Shit and all their little pixies that I had stuck with a password than I can actually remember rather than allowing some POS that I now cannot use to generate one.

4) Great. now I just need to enter a 2FA authentication code.... Ah.... Right... That'll be on the phone that I'm trying to find... feeling less smug about the password...

5) 2hr Drive home.

6) Find device using another machine that I own and which is thus already set up and previously thumped in the "don't give me that 2FA shit" button.

7) Find device.

8) 2hr drive back to get it.

This does not seem like a practical way of doing things to me..

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

the company claims is "nutritious, vegan, and caters to every diet"

TL;DR - tastes like chicken

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

"End User" always makes me feel warm and happy.

It's just a crying shame that nobody would ever let me actually do it.

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Isn't that Ed Milliband's job description?

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Re: Post-code GPS coords

Actually, the post office database is highly granular and updated by posties. The snag here is it's aimed at giving you the best access while on foot, which sometimes differs considerably to the closest you can get a van.

My favourite cockup though came from a company who decided to address the problem by moving to What Three Words and capturing the location themselves. It turned out that customers were not in the habit of booking a delivery while standing in the best place to park a van...

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

It's very, very simple.

If you want to hire cheap, off-the-peg eejits to run your shit, then it must be simple, utterly standard and well-documented.

If, on the other hand, you want to lead the market with bleedin' edge rocket science shit, then you need to pay bleedin' edge rocket scientists whatever the fuck they want to look after it.

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

.. working on multiple parallel paths to speed recovery.

Aka: Running around like headless chickens.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Careful. You'll have the management demanding that developers optimise their code rather than throwing CPU/memory/disk at the problem.

Then there'll be bouffant hair and shoulder pads making a comeback and nobody wants that.

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

The pope is worried about his job going to AI, isn't he?

Let's face it, religious leader is probably one of the easiest human tasks to replace with AI. One thing they do really well is, er, pontificate.

( The long dress with the gold trim and weird sigils on it please.)

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Today we've seen it in action, holding platforms to account...

They really are utterly deluded, aren't they?

As 4chan's lawyers have already pointed out in a legal response (TL;DR - "Fuck Off"), 4chan has no assets in the UK and the chances of anyone getting a confiscation order by stomping all over their First Amendment rights in the US is about 0% of the square root of bugger-all.

So all this is actually meaningless.

Microsoft 364 trips over its own network settings in North America

Re: Microsoft 364?

As I have observed before, it seems likely that their key stakeholders are invested in a paradigm pivot to a 360 solution.

And that's my wankword bingo card filled out, how about yours?

Microsoft warns of 'payroll pirate' crew looting US university salaries

Re: While in Soviet Russia…

Yes but, in Russia, adversary in middle attack you!

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

..a vampire?

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters offering $10 in Bitcoin to 'endlessly harass' execs

Yes, you're right. They could just be perfectly ordinary soshal meejah retards.

Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy

Re: Ancestry

I think that one has to go down as; "harsh, but fair".

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Expensive Lessons

They were lucky. A nuclear reactor is one of the very few things in the world that you can drop 400 tonnes on and not do any real damage to it.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Oh no it won't...

"the EU says" = Lies. As bloody usual.

They switched on the system in CZ recently. The words "complete and utter bloody chaos" don't even begin to describe the monumental omnishambles it's caused.

Stop runaway AI before it's too late, experts beg the UN

There are Nobel prizewinning idiots?

Of course it's entirely possible to stuff the genie back into the bottle and the UN are just the people who can do it.

Yeah.. right.. good luck with that..

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

Wrong picture?

Bin fires are a Really Good Thing in Birmingham right now. They contribute to solving the other big problem the council muppets are presiding over.

Japanese city passes two-hours-a-day smartphone usage ordinance

Re: recreational use of smartphones

You mean you haven't got a timesheet task like "Education and Training"?

Mine's the one with the "Most accurate and complete timesheets" award in the pocket.

Re: Phone Zombies

Nope. Warning another road user of your presence is correct use of the horn.

I realise that nobody uses it for that, but...

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: inquiring mind wants to know

Probably only used by minions waiting to see them. They'll have a fridge stuffed with Perrier.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

One of my personal favourites, from an ex-colleague.

At a place he used to work they were old skool, having just the one server for both test and live, with separate environments.

One day, they were running very short of space and since a release had recently gone live so the test environment was no longer in use, it was decided to remove the test environment's data until more disk was aquired. This resulted in the following exchange:

"Er, ${regomised_name}? Is there anything you'd like to tell me about the test Customer table?".

"Oh, right. We were short of space and we were only reading from it, so I hardlinked it to the live one. Why, is there a problem with it...?"

Microsoft puts last remnants of original Edge browser on life support

Seconded. Also worth noting that the Chromium version is considerably slower and more resource hungry, especially in its Android incarnation.

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

I fail to see the problem.

Surely if it takes over an entire core while your compile runs, the compile takes longer and you get more time to play Pinball?

That's a good thing...right?

(The one with "Pinball Wizard" picked out in sequins on the back please)

Cybercrooks ripped the wheels off at Jaguar Land Rover. Here's how not to get taken for a ride

'...a group calling itself "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters"'...

s'kiddies then?

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: My God, You're the Inebriati!

As an ex-colleague of mine used to put it: "Never fuck with computers while you're sober. It's easy to work out what you fucked up while drunk when you are sober. It's much harder to work out what you fucked up while sober when you are drunk."

Matrix.org homeserver grinds to a halt after RAID meltdown

There is no charge for using Matrix.org...

Well, you got what you paid for.

Reg readers have spoken: 93% back move away from Microsoft in UK public sector

... £1.9 billion will be spent every year...

...and the cost of migration, retraining, software recertification, etc ad nauseum?

Add on the annual running support costs of the allegedly "free" stuff, and I'd be gobsmacked if there were any savings at all in a timescale shy of 20 years, with the slight problem that the majority of the cost would need to be spent up front to do it at all.

Yes, I have had cause to look at this on a large scale before. We renewed the MS contract...

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

More "human" every day.

Now it turns out you can get them to give you access to stuff you shouldn't be able to get at by showering them with bullshit.

If you're in Customer Services for a "cloud" service or telco, that's your job off to AI.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

Re: Very interesting.

Yes, I've always wondered at the logic in play there.

If you do acquire someone's current password, does it really matter whether it's five minutes or five years old when it comes to what you can do with it? No, it does not.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.

Hey! Sometimes having kit under a leak is a good thing.

I once worked in an antiquated building that had faux wood boxing under the windows, containing the airco units. Only the original, antique units would fit, they were prone to failure and leaks, and there was a queue for reconditioned ones.

One day I was greeted by a soggy carpet at my desk and the local environment being rather too warm. I trotted off to facilities and was told they'd "put it on the list". Ho hum.

Struck by inspiration, I went down a floor and looked through an internal window into an area that was off limits. I then went back to facilities.

"Look, we told you to fuck offwe'd put it on the list.".

"Just thought you'd like to know what's underneath my desk on the floor below.".

"What's that?".

"The main comms rack for the building. You can clearly see the water dripping onto it through the ceiling.".

The facilities manager left the room at about Warp 7 and my faied airco unit was swapped out in record time.

Microsoft lets devs tell Copilot to STFU in Visual Studio

You can now turn off Clippy? Again?

I wonder if they'll learn from the mistake this time.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

A shade unfair there.

"...application programmers not taking into account two digits."

In many cases that would be because all the date functions in the language they were working with were six digit only. If the system calls didn't have any way of returning the four digit year and all the manipulation / conversion / comparison functions were six digit only, you didn't have much choice.

Much of the affected stuff was written in languages developed in the '60s and 70s, when memory and storage were hideously expensive and in short supply, so nobody used four digits where two would do the job.

In the place I was at the time, we chose "60" as the window for Y2K work. The company didn't exist before that, so anything "before" 60 was 20something. I heard of one place that chose 30 for some reason. I now wonder how their humungous "replace it all" project went/is going and if they're getting nervous?

Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two

Re: DDoS attacks are not always what they seem...

Or a fine toothed comb even.

That's a comb with very small teeth, suitable for combing out the smallest of contaminants, rather than something decent that you comb your teeth[1] with.

(Was that one of "pet hate" buttons that you pushed?)

[1] WTF?

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

The admin responsible..

...coming soon to a plasticised body parts exhibition near you.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Tried it and...

My ISP happily supports IPV6, as does al the kit I have that needs to talk to the world.

So I tried it.

It all works but, oddly, the "big name" services die like dogs when I use IPV6. That's all the major streaming services effectively unusable and a load of other stuff as well. Weird and the only thing I can think of is that they all use some sort of load balancing of the "Big IP" type and the V6 options in this area must suck harder than an overvolted Dyson.

Anyone?

Most other stuff works just fine, if it works at all. The problem here is that while most things will gracefully fall back to IPV4 if there's no V6 service, if there is a shit V6 option it'll be used exclusively, even if a better V4 option exists.

IPV6 remains off for now as we still seem to be in "5/10 please try harder" territory.

Ransomware crews don't care about your endpoint security – they've already killed it

Re: The criminals?

So. Do you reckon Mad Vlad or Winnie the Pooh?

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

History extract.

2026 - Death of COBOL announced.

(Someone had to trot that out).

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

Extra, extra:

Bloke who runs IVR systems company turns out to be massive c*nt!

(There ought to be a paper called the Daily Bleedin' Obvious, to report this sort of thing)

Meta training AI on social media posts? Only 7% in Europe think it's OK

That's another "AI" stuffed.

Crowdsourced data:

Plus side - it's free.

Minus side - you get exactly what you paid for.

Patch now: Millions of Dell PCs with Broadcom chips vulnerable to attack

The biometric elephant in the room.

...including fingerprint information...

Right. So just how do you change your fingerprints once their data is compromised?

Biometrics may well be flavour of the month for security, but that needs a practical answer. I can't see it being long before someone works out exactly how to reverse engineer a fingerprint analogue from the biometrics associated with it.

Once that happens, biometric security just boils down to an arms race between the scanner manufacturers and the hackers. This will differ from previous security arms races in that both embedded scanners and fingers are not upgradeable, so the good guys are on a hiding to nothing.

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

Wasps.

...ten times over safe radiation limit...

They must have been buzzing.

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Re: About time too

Well give it back because I need it!

A billion dollars' worth of Nvidia chips fell off a truck and found their way to China, report says

Re: Could have been worse

That would make RTX5090 availability in China rather better than it is elsewhere.

BOFH: If you can't beat the AI, let it live inside you

Hmm.

This is all just a convoluted excuse to buy a new cattle prod on expenses billed as a "fast charger", isn't it?

Building the Apollo Soyuz Test Project out of LEGO® bricks

In space, no one can hear you step on a plastic brick

Well, of course not. In space you'd be weightless, so the evil, nasty, pointed lego brick wouldn't be driven to embed itself in your foot causing the screaming and swearing that usually accompanies this and alerts everyone in a wide area to the fact that you've done it.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Bright eyed, freshly trained, no experience.

I recall a Storage Admin like that. Asked to add some disk to a server he found there were no spares in that loop. Fortunately for him, one of the servers in the same loop had a load of disk allocated that wasn't in use. He knew it wasn't in use, the course he'd just taken from the array provider themselves had drilled into the students to check for filesystems on disk to prove it was spare before doing anything to it and there were none.

He learned the hard way that a) some DBMS's prefer their disk served raw and b) all DBMS's go down harder and faster than a Portsmouth tart on Navy payday when their storage is rudely removed without warning.

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un essay question.

Better still:

Summarise the Korean war in 25 bullet points.

If there isn't at least one bare-faced lie in there, I'd be surprised.

Also, if you are hiring people without a face-to-face interview, you deserve to get shafted. It may be cheaper, but you are likely to get what you paid for.

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

Here's how this works.

1) Aircraft gets towed taxi rather than doing so under power.

2) While queueing for runway, aircraft performs engine startup.

3) The APU trips and there's a total power loss.

4) Entire airport sits and twiddles its thumbs while a trolley-ack runs out to provide power to start the now-immobilised aircraft stalling the queue.

What? You mean you haven't been on one that's had 3 happen at the gate? You need to fly more often. This is usually accompanied by increasing murmurings of panic from the more nervous passengers sitting in the darkness while the staff whistle up a trolley-ack, despite this only taking the odd couple of minutes at the gate. It'll be fun to see what happens when they have to wait for one to traipse out to the runway queue.