Posts by Cheshire Cat

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: I'm not planning to visit the United Hell Holes any time soon

So the Americans are just even more sexist than they are racist? And - on average - they are *very* racist.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!

There also appears to be a resource allocation problem on some continents; the limits have been removed and theres 1% of the processes that have unnecessarily been allocated almost 90% of the resources...

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Telex? It'll never replace proper telegrams!

(I remember receiving a telegram expressing birthday greetings from my parents while at scout camp, dropped off by a boy on a bicycle and everything. If only I had kept it...)

London cops unplug iPhone crime ring said to nick 40% of city's mobiles

Phone bricking (using the IMEI) only works in countries that subscribe to the blacklist. China doesn't, so your phone will magically work again if connected to a China serviuce provider...

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

The epoch bug is my retirement fund

The Epoch bug is going to be huge - much worse than Y2K. This is because -

* It will affect anything using 32bit time - which is a LOT of legacy systems, including many embedded systems, popular libraries, etc, that people may not even be aware of

* It is much more than just a display/parsing issue; while Y2K did have storage isues on older systems, a lot of it was just converting the year for human reading/writing

* Since we worked so hard to prevent problems with Y2K, nontech people (managers) will expect this to be a nothing as well

* 2038 is not a nice round number and so nontech people (managers) will not expect anything to go wrong

I will be retiring around 2038, and so before I do, I will make stonking amounts fixing Epoch bugs everywhere on egregious consultancy fees...

Back in 2000, we worked hard and despite the paranoia of management, only one thing failed after Jan 1st -- the fancy Windows Y2K countdown screensaver that was commissioned by management from outside contractors and mandated to be force-installed on everyones desktop. Apparently, nobody had tested what it would do after Jan 1st. It crashed.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

You mean on 7A

AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

Re: Hey kids

and of course you dont need years of experience to install a server, either.

Only to do it *properly*.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Firefox is still just ahead of chrome

... largely because Firefox has a better UI, and it can be highly customised using CSS.

Chrome on the other hand does not even allow you to have proper fixed side-bar menus for bookmarks or to fully customise your icon bar, resulting in those horrible letterbox-shaped screens and load of useless icons along the top. We have widescreen now, lets use side-bar menus.

Plus Firefox is better at handling plugins and adblockers (unsurprisingly since Chrome == Google == the biggest ad-slinger in the world).

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Nuke from orbit

My very first paid gig was Fortran66! (Summer internship)

In my lunchtime breaks, I also wrote a boulderdash game in Fortran66, which was a challenge because it did not support recursive functions.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: Holy fucking stupid idiot

I would agree to hang Colin out to dry -- except that, in that situation, by far the most important things are to secure the data and restore it. Had Dean gone to the law, COlin would have wiped/destroyed the dink to cover his tracks. At least this way, the data restore is done, it is confirmed that the data have not leaked, and Colin hopefully learns a Very Valuable Lesson.

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

It always surprises me that the USA, which claims to hate absolute monarchs, has a system in which the President can apparently rule by dictate. This could not happen in the UK for example as the PM would have to get approval from parliament -- and the King does not have the power to make unilateral orders like this.

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

> If I didn't have over twenty-five (maybe thirty?) years' worth of email, calendar & contacts history in my Outlook .PST files, I'd switch to LibreOffice, but Outlook (Classic) owns me.

You can import PST files into Evolution, and from there store them into other mail services or open formats such as maildir. Not sure if they also import contacts and calendar items though.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

"Microsoft had mistakenly labeled the Windows Server 2025 upgrade "

Yeah... "mistakenly".

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Not to mention the difficulties of doing automated rotation for public certs, when your service is not HTTP-based, and runs over a cluster of hosts (do they have one cert each? One for the cluster? How to do challenge/response when the cluster is load-balanced and you don't want to give DNS admin rights to the whole network ...)

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Re: Making the decision for me --

FFS don't give them the idea! I could easily believe they would do this!

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Reminds me of a claim by a sysadmin

Zero *unscheduled* downtime. Still a pretty impressive feat when running windows.

Re: 'Exit interview'

If done correctly, an Exit Interview is the chance for the ex-employee to give candid reasons why they are leaving, which the management should listen to as it can expose problems that may be hidden by people who are still employed and feel their jobs may be at risk if they speak truthfully.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

You too?

I too am on some list, somewhere, that puts me at the front of the queue for "random selection". Though I have avoided travelling to the USA for the last 10+ years because of this, and seem to be immune when travelling with my family. The last time I visited the USA, some rude TSA agent insisted I boot up my laptop and log in (to show it is 'real') at which point they whipped it away for an hour, presumably to copy off data and browse through anything confidential they could find, without any explanation or by-your-leave. As if I would put anything incriminating on an unencrypted laptop hard disk.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Re: Staggered releases?

The problem is that AV pattern updates are very very time-dependent, which is why they have 15min or lower update cycles.

This issue was a pre-existing bug in the code which was tickled by a subsequent pattern update. While the code updates can be staggered, the pattern updates have to be quick, so cannot be delayed by a month, or even a day.

This is why extensive pre-release automated testing should have been performed, and clearly was not (at least, not sufficiently)

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

48V

* Don't hold the probes on with your bare hands as a call is coming in .....

Or try to strip the wires in the macho way with your teeth as a call is coming in (BTDTGTT)

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

"In truth, though, I don't think they need worry too much. There will always be demand for live music, together with the associated merchandising opportunities - nobody is going to buy t-shirts featuring an AI, or go dance in a data centre."

A large number of Hatsune Miku fans would disagree with you

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Who's next

We're talking Tesla owners here. He would have needed a part long enough to reach.

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Re: Esperanto? That's for rookies

Voku la halan pordiston, estas rano en mia bideto!

US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels

Re: Three ways to make this idea even better

3. The example image: 1200 down, 200 up for only $109.99? As long as it's not one of the major coax cable companies, sign me up! I'll even move for that deal!

Here in New Zealand, thousands of km from the centre of the internet, we get that, plus unlimited usage and free phone service, for the same price in *NZ* dollars, which is about 60 USD. You yanks are being ripped off.

Chinese schools testing 10,000 locally made RISC-V-ish PCs

Microsoft will not lose much...

... because most of the Windows in China is pirated anyway.

I'm more interested in whether or not this new architecture will become available outside China, and if it will join x86 et al as a standard linux build. A bit more competition for Intel might get things to improve in general

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

Did anyone else parse that as "Cuddly Law Firm" and wonder if their lawyers had teddy bears and ponies?

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

There's a break in the road here 13°58'59.7"S 143°11'06.6"E

This means google will never route anyone along it

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

This is why its doing it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/13%C2%B058'59.7%22S+143%C2%B011'06.6%22E/@-13.9832575,143.1829237,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m47!1m42!4m41!1m26!1m2!1s0x697862555ba22413:0x400eef17f207860!2sCairns+QLD,+Australia!2m2!1d145.7709529!2d-16.9203476!3m4!1m2!1d143.2541971!2d-14.1483235!3s0x6999af9ce9644b71:0x4a50f2a26b96eacf!3m4!1m2!1d143.2528997!2d-14.1407584!3s0x6999afa267b1bbcd:0xb4c3d13967f1c431!3m4!1m2!1d143.2831829!2d-14.1036521!3s0x6999aea119b44c41:0x94d58f7045aabcdf!3m4!1m2!1d143.1900959!2d-13.9599422!3s0x69984d0be4c3961f:0xefc441f59ebc6a77!1m6!1m2!1s0x69baa201d6daf179:0x400eef17f20d810!2sBamaga+QLD,+Australia!2m2!1d142.3871554!2d-10.892344!1m3!2m2!1d143.1854248!2d-13.9862892!2m1!3b1!3e0!3m3!8m2!3d-13.983262!4d143.185157?hl=en&entry=ttu

Theres an incorrect break in the map data at 13°58'59.7"S 143°11'06.6"E and Mr Google doesnt think its a through road.

Broken map data

This sort of thing happens when the map data has a break in a road - zero length, but the calculations think it isnt joined. So, it sends you via the next-best route as it sees things - and this is then compounded by it not knowing the differences between a standard minor road and an outback dirt track that is 4wd-only. This is why people should always sanity-check their planned routes rather than blindly following...

There was one of these up north of here near Kerikeri, that sends you a great long aroundabout route rather than the simple trip by a ferry. I found the break and reported it to Google years ago, and it seems to be fixed now.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Re: Good luck

Paying for an ad-free experience is like handing over your lunch money for a bully-free school day

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: All the more reason

That's the pronounciation rules for Chinese PInyin.

In pinying, Xitter would be indeed be pronounced She - ter (same as "Xi Junping" is pronounced "She june ping")

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Kill the unauthorised servers!

I can understand the director of IT on this one.

Unauthorised servers on an internal (and privileged) network are a security nightmare. They are rarely kept in line with security standards, probably never backed up, or regularly patched, and cause unanticipated load on network infrastructure.

Plus, at some point, they go wrong or are crypotolockered, and then IT are called in to help fix the shitshow caused by the office cowboys.

In a university, which likely does not have much (if any) internal firewalling on the staff network segments, a vulnerable machine can cause chaos if it is compromised, and you can't recover what was not backed up.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Smokers in the 90s

As a young, green techie I was sent on-site to some offices of BAT (British American Tobacco) to help sort out some desktop computers.

In those days, their employees were given free cigarettes and, of course, could smoke in the office as much as they liked. You can imagine how unpleasant it was in the building.

After opening up the nonfunctional computer, I found a thick and heavy layer of ash and tar deposited all over, which may have been the reason for overheating and failure. Still cleaning things off and unblocking vents somehow did the trick, though my clothes had to be fumigated after returning home and my hands were stained yellow.

Added a smoking icon because ...

'Millions' of spammy emails with no opt-out? That'll cost you $650K, Experian

Just make it so that the C-suite at the time of the incident are PERSONALLY liable. Then it would NEVER happen.

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: They are blocked in France

When I went to Warwick uni in the early 90s, one of our Maths profs wrote his own book for the course -- "Derek the differentiable dinosaur". It was available for about 5 quid which covered photocopyiong charges, or we were free to photocopy someone else's copy if we wanted to, since it was all public domain.

This guy was very, very popular.

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

So all business move to Teams

Kill off Zoom -- and all businesses then move to Teams, which is likely just as bad - if not worse - but you'll never find out.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

ChatGPT confidently tells me that the story in question is "The afterlife of Bailey" by Harry Bates, though it notes a whole range of other stories with a similar premise.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Re: Marital Status: British

There is a specific document, a "Certificate of no impediment", that the British embassy can produce - it is sometimes required for overseas marriages in countries that suspect every foreigner of being a bigamist.

Re: Marital Status: British

When I married in Taiwan 20y ago, I had to prove that I had never been married previously. This is much harder than you would imagine, and required several contacts with the British embassy, and taking out an advertisement in the local newspaper to meet certain criteria. After almost 3 months of to-and-fro, the resulting "Certificate of no impediment" document was very impressive, with seals and ribbons and the like.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

This is all Management jargon

This is, of course, all Management jargon.

The big difference between Technical jargon and Management jargon, is that with Technical, everyone knows and agrees exactly what it means, but disagrees on how or if it should be implemented; whereas with Management jargon, they all agree it is Necessary and Important but cannot clearly define what it actually means...

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC vs managers - You Forgot

Oh yes, SWMBO just hates my boxes of spares, even though they have proven useful several times in the past.

Re: PSUs

Have an upvote for this, and a vBeer, because you remembered to post the solution to the forum

Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'

Re: Does rate limiting mean anything to anyone ?

Nonono... more than x failed connection attempts, using different passwords, in y minutes from the same IP, and you deny the *login* for 24h, not the connection. But tarpit by 4s. Don't deny the *connection* - then they won't realise they've been blacklisted, and will continue to waste more time in the tarpit, and will think everything in their database is a bad password.

Google accused of stomping on rivals as it stamps out annoying Calendar spam

Re: The FOSS aversion to Outlook leads here.

Evolution (add evolution-ews for O365/Exchange access) or Thunderbird (add OWL for O365/Exchange access) seem to work well for me. Thunderbird was a bit ropey a few years back but has improved in the later versions. They are also both much better than Outlook at handling multiple external calendars.

Sounds like a good idea to me

I don't want thing to appear in my calendar just because someone emailed me an invitation; I want to explicitly accept them first.

Google's change here sounds good to me, and is in fact how my current Evolution mail client works as well.

No wonder the spammers are complaining when they no longer have a way to push things into my calendar without my approval.

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Re: FBI banging down doors is a real thing

If the local police *asked* me to help them catch a pedo who was stealing my wifi to try and cover his activities, by adding a snoop to the network for a week and keeping quiet about it, I'd have no problems helping them out. The key word here is "asked".

Though I'd not be such a jerk as to have no auth on my wifi in the first place of course.

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Re: old password

I was one year too late to have used the university's PHysics Undergraduate Computer Resource, named by its acronym. Someone caused it to be renamed for some reason.

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

Re: I have consulted in many places over the years

"I am trying to convert many of them to python scripts "

Yes, convert a simple, working shell script to something that is understood by fewer people, and now has a dependency on the whole of Python being installed, plus a few extra libraries...

If you don't need to have Python (or Perl, Ruby, Php, GCC, etc) installed on your server it's inherently more secure, less to keep patched, less disk space required, and so on. At least shellscript is a universal that everyone knows, and unless you need something really esoteric or high performance I'd go with the KISS principal

Re: This is why we need code review

A project manager, programmer, and QA tech go into a bar...

The PM orders a beer.

The programmer orders a beer.

The QA orders -1 beers. Then orders a fish.

What if someone mixed The Sims with ChatGPT bots? It would look like this

Re: Overriding limitation

I remember that as far back as 91, at University, a couple of us wrote a simple Eliza-type program that took generic input, and then programmed it up to write scripts for Neighbours (old Aussie soap opera starring Kylie for those of you who are still whippersnappers). Later datasets produced a university-based soap, rap songs, and a new soap imaginatively based on students in a computer lab.