* Posts by Gene Cash

5687 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

I find the lawn service's lawnmowers are a great fix for that.

It's not on my premises until it hits the demarc. That's why it's called the "demarc" because the demarcation point determines if the customer or the telecommunications provider is responsible for maintenance, and that's not at the street corner, that's the box there on my wall with the FCC stamps on it.

It's fun to see the sudden realization on the tech's face when he realizes you know what you're talking about and he can't half-ass it.

It's going to keep getting run over by a lawnmower until you bury it, buckwheat.

Gene Cash Silver badge

Not an engineering problem

The reason things go from just complaining to active destruction is that people get the feeling that complaining accomplishes nothing, so they have to do something more.

So you have a 3 hour queue for customer support, and you always get hung up on 2.5 hours in.

Or you have some captcha stupidity that doesn't let you submit your complaint form.

Or you have some stupid scripted "chat assistant" that won't let you go any further, or worse, a scripted human doing the same.

Or you've done 4 engineer callouts, and the guy either never shows up, or just looks at it, shrugs his shoulders and leaves.

Or you get an email response to your complaint that "Service is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers"

These are the things that make a bloke lift a manhole cover and pour gasoline in.

In the rush to build AI apps, please, please don't leave security behind

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: To Quote Futurama

Yep. Nobody gave a shit about deepfakes until it was TAYLOR SWIFT! OMG!

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/nudes_taylor_swift_action/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/05/deepfakes_taylor_swift_4chan_competition/

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Gene Cash Silver badge

Old school

I typed in Eliza from 80 Micro. Used up almost all my 16K!

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Blending

When I saw posters being banned for being on-topic (e.g. posting interesting historical pictures to the interesting historical pictures subreddit as an actual example) is when I left.

Gene Cash Silver badge

I assume it'll be another lifeless shell like Slashdot, where a "Most Discussed" post is now 80 comments, instead of 2,000+

It's usually 10 comments now discussing how the post is a duplicate of one 2 days ago.

When they're not duplicates, most of the posts are links to Ars Technica and El Reg, complete with the "summary" being the first paragraph or two of what they're linking to.

I don't see how it's making any money.

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: No way-land

There are unofficial Devuan images. That's what I'm running. I switched to that when I couldn't get USB webcams working with RPi OS.

Edit: there was a review here a while back that said it was a good non-systemd distro for RPis, but damned if I can't find it.

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: I'll wait for it

> You forget the distances involved with living in America

That is absolutely no excuse. There are things known as repeaters. And technical knowledge, which it seems your ISP is sadly lacking.

I'm switching to Starlink because neither of my local ISPs (AT&T/Spectrum) can keep a link up. And boy, did they sh*t their pants when I called to cancel.

They offered free TV, a cheaper rate, a hike in speed, and it always came back to "what good is it if it doesn't go 2 weeks without breaking?"

The salesperson was apparently peeved that I was insisting on actual working service.

FTC goes undercover to probe suspected antivirus scam, scores $26M settlement

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Another evil doer escapes with paltry fine and "admits no wrongdoing".

> but I can definitely understand our FTC deciding it wasn't worth the even longer-term effort of fighting for extradition, trial, etc

I can't. I'm paying taxes for them to enforce the laws. And they really aren't. No one's in jail for this and no one has been deterred from breaking the law in the future.

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

Yep, if there was no intention to reuse it, it would be able to put 1,000 metric tons into orbit.

That's as much as ISS weighs. The second stage was bigger than even Skylab.

The video of the reentry plasma around the fin was one of the most amazing things I've seen.

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: maximising

Public (and your own) safety would be maximized by not getting out of bed in the morning.

I choose not to live that way.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

Gene Cash Silver badge

Had to kill my smart thermostat

It was useful for things like when I went away, I could remotely turn the A/C or heat back on an hour or two before I was going to be home.

The schedule was nice too. I could have the A/C and heat on minimum the day I was in the office. And a different schedule on the weekend

Plus if I was going to get up early, I could click on the heat 20 minutes beforehand.

However the app was crap. It kept going "WELCOME TO YOUR NEW THERMOSTAT. LET'S SET THINGS UP" and deleting all my programming and preferences.

It had half a dozen "don't show this again" that it completely ignored.

So it was a great idea ruined by a shit implementation.

And I assume they took the same level of "care" in the security.

Now it's all pissy that it's disconnected and is constantly flashing demands to be hooked back up to the mothership, and of course the front panel UI is deliberately crippled. (it has to be deliberate, nobody can do a thermostat UI that bad by accident)

This was a Honeywell, so I guess advancing past a simple round dial is beyond them.

I've bought an Ecobee, but it's going to be in the box a while before I get around to it.

Chrome users – get an alert when extensions are in danger of falling into wrong hands

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Lynx, woohoo!

Lynx has too much of an attack surface for me... I use telnet to port 80.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Device names

> ls -l /dev/disk/by-label

Holy cow. I do everything by partition label but I had never seen that snippet. THANKS.

Also, GRUB does not "do" partition labels. I edited /etc/grub.d/10_linux and where it sets LINUX_ROOT_DEVICE, I added

LINUX_ROOT_DEVICE=LABEL="`e2label ${GRUB_DEVICE_BOOT}`"

(YMMV for non-Debian-derived distros)

Beijing plans at least three new rockets – maybe reusables too

Gene Cash Silver badge

Good to see China "innovating"

... once they have something to copy...

Russia plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon – with China's help

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: A sample of what now?

The Apollo nuclear fuel was in a re-entry capsule on the outside of the Lunar Module. It was designed to withstand an escape-velocity re-entry without a problem.

It was also supposed to withstand the Saturn V having an Earth-shattering kaboom.

One consideration when Apollo 13 came back was pointing the LM to land in the deepest water possible.

To use it, the astronaut hinged it down, unscrewed the top and used a special tool to extract the fuel from the re-entry capsule and place it in the thermoelectric generator.

Stuck paying for your apartment's crummy internet? FCC boss Rosenworcel wants to help

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Maybe not as easy as it seems

> rule having opt-outs

Fuck that... otherwise it'll be "too expensive" everywhere. The thing American telcos & ISPs do best is exploit loopholes.

Amazon goes nuclear, acquires Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters for $650M

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: terminator lives

I think I saw that movie? I think it was called Active Terminator: Revenge of the SCSI Bus?

Cruise's valuation halved after its driverless car hit and dragged a woman

Gene Cash Silver badge

You missed the part where people are going 60mph+ in opposite directions, separated by only a thin painted line.

(edit: that's the part that gobsmacked my great-grandmother)

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: "We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

They probably filed a complaint with Garmin about their GPS maps

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Gene Cash Silver badge

Well, we did already have the stupidity test with people believing they could vote via Twitter.

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Daemon and Network

Though a dead salmon would be better than the last half dozen American presidents...

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Less code, fewer bugs?

Or at least a hell of a lot smaller attack surface.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board

Gene Cash Silver badge

50% of the missions don't make it TO Mars...

50% of the missions don't make it TO Mars... and they want to go and come back, which has never been done before

This is HARD and it's going to take a lot of work, so it is not going to be cheap.

That applies for anything, not just collecting samples from Mars. And think about it, we're COLLECTING SAMPLES FROM MARS. This isn't just going down the block to the chemists.

The federal bureau of trolling hits LockBit, but the joke's on us

Gene Cash Silver badge

"using it to squirrel money about"

Why? What are they doing that can't be done by regular means? So they're concealing the movement of money from regulators? It may be legal but it sure doesn't sound like it.

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Well USA, you learned an important lesson didn't you?

Hm. Let's see.

Who managed to finally reuse boosters? An American company.

Who manged to land boosters on a ship at sea? An American company.

Who's launched more orbital rockets (98) in 2023 than China (67) & Russia (19) & India (7) combined? An American company.

Who upended the status quo by launching at half the price of everyone else? An American company.

Now, I'm not a big fan of Space Karen, and I think SpaceX has succeeded in spite of him, but they've undoubtedly succeeded.

Edit: and it's good to see China trying to copy SpaceX's reusability, like they copy everything else.

GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Attack Vector/Scope of the attack

There's also "attacks add hundreds of whitespace characters (521 of them) to push the exec function offscreen"

What? Your editor/IDE doesn't do line wrapping? You deserve what you get, then... pick better tools or configure what you have properly.

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: a forever unchanging UI

Me too. So highly customized, no one else can use my machine... which is not something I consider a problem!

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Gene Cash Silver badge

BBC article

The BBC had an article about "leaplings" and many of them complained about not being able to enter their correct birth date into many forms

"When taking out a new phone contract, she failed the credit check because 29 February didn't appear as a date on the system. "

"the dropdown boxes on online forms will only list 28 days for February"

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68404617

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: So maybe...

It's still "bullshit numbers from the manufacturer" whether it's power or emissions. That's cheating in my book.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

Gene Cash Silver badge

"enterprise customers voted to sweat their assets"

I wonder if that should be "enterprise customers voted to run the hell away from anything HP"?

Google sued by more than 30 European media orgs over adtech

Gene Cash Silver badge

Yeah, I searched for a question on US Southern restaurant chains yesterday, and it was 17 (I counted) pages past ads, "Results For [location]", "Places", "More Places", "People Also Ask", "Nearby Events And Deals", "People Also Search For", "Order Food", a SECOND "People Also Search For", "Best Fried Chicken", "Soul Food Restaurants", "Best Southern Food", "Best Chicken Chains In The South", "South Carolina Fast Food Chains", Canadian (WHAT?) Chicken Restaurants", "Things In the South That Aren't In The North", "Burger Place West Coast"...

OK, I give up typing, there was tons more shit that wasn't results.

I never found a relevant result and never got my question answered.

Fuck Google.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Priceless ..

We already know the answer to that is "NO"

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

Gene Cash Silver badge

Oompa-Loompa

Man. I was not prepared for that tweet of the poor Oompa-Loompa girl. Holy hell. I don't think I've ever had as bad a day as it looks like she's having.

40k servers, 400k CPUs and 40 PB of storage later... welcome to Google Cloud

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Just

Yup, and this company has handled pretty much all of US airline ticketing since the '60s, so I'm waiting for the next time the American air travel system has taken a complete crap and nobody can fly anywhere. I'll know why...

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Gene Cash Silver badge

Well if they wanted to guarantee I WON'T buy a Dell

Then they hit the jackpot...

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Philosophical question:

There's never enough holy water to drown them all...

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Gene Cash Silver badge

Hm.

So "Annie Lennox first band" on Google says "the Tourists" unequivocally.

However "Annie Lennox first band" on Bing says: "Annie Lennox's first band was The Catch, which later evolved into The Tourists. She met Dave Stewart in 1975 and they first played together in 1976 in The Catch. After releasing one single as The Catch in 1977, the band evolved into The Tourists, where Lennox was the lead singer from 1977 to 1980."

Is this correct? It's apparently from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I'd trust. If so, I'd rate Bing a bit closer to the mark. but that's today's results, not the results from "back when" and I think Bing still sucks as a search engine.

So the trial is because Google "flouted competition laws to build its dominance of the US search market"

I think that's bullshit. I have no argument that Google is top dog in the US search market, and they did it simply by building a better search engine than Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, and everybody else.

My beef with Google is that they've let that technical achievement rot in favor of manipulating the results as they see fit, and as they're paid. They've removed features such as boolean search, search operators, and they even had a feature for a while of "don't return results from this site" which is also gone. They have indeed abused their position as top search engine.

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

Gene Cash Silver badge
Pint

Damn. That needs to go on a plaque.

Gene Cash Silver badge

It's not fear, it's disgust.

The Average Joe in the street has no technical skill and does not know that ChatPGT, Eliza, Perplexity, Bard, Jasper, Chatsonic, etc are all simply statistical models stringing words together and that THERE IS NO artificial intelligence behind "AI"

They see "Artificial Intelligence" and just like "Self Driving Cars" expect it to be what it says on the tin.

We're a lot more technically skilled and can see behind the curtains to understand it's all a pile of shit.

So this is the disgust for the snake oil salesmen that are selling this crap using technobabble and jargon to mislead and confuse people.

We can also see there's going to be a lot of pain and damage before people understand this and AI falls by the wayside as the fad it is.

Edit: As much as I hate Wikipedia, the steaming output from these LLMs are not even in the same category. At least Wikipedia usually starts with facts and doesn't just string words together.

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: And....

"American movies can't get any shittier"

Tyler Perry: "Hold my beer..."

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

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

> roads that have been there for decades

My former neighborhood east of Orlando (about 12 sq miles, more than about 4k people) has been there 42 years and is STILL not on any Garmin maps.

Gene Cash Silver badge

What did we learn today, boys and girls?

> We decided, 'OK, let's follow Google Maps because Google Maps knows maybe more than we know'

Whelp. As Adam Savage would say, THERE'S yer prablem!

I was meeting with a friend in Daytona for the races, and he sent me the Google Maps URL for his location. I get there and the URL location is immediately to my left, which is a stretch of empty land instead of a mall parking lot. He was actually nearly 3/4 mile away.

I've also had it give me bullshit directions depending on if I was in the left or right lane of a 4 lane road. The worst so far has been "merge into the interstate, go 26 miles, make a u-turn, come back and exit at the same intersection you merged into, and continue as you are"

Cyberattack downs pharmacies across America

Gene Cash Silver badge

forced some folks to pay for their medication at full price in cash

No, that would be "forced some folks to go without medication" as they probably can't afford the full price and they certainly aren't carrying that much cash.

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Doesn't sound right

Not really. I have a ton of capacity in the UPS on my PC here that just about never gets used, but when I need it, then I usually need most of it.

Also, it does a battery good to discharge it occasionally and not be continuously charging it. That's what kills most folk's laptop batteries.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

Gene Cash Silver badge

"One respondent logged on to say that the complainant was an idiot ...Others may see this as unhelpful"

They sound like Reddit Experts. Common sense isn't part of the equation.

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Misunderstanding

Are you having a stroke? Do you need medical assistance?

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Towers

"Towers ... as long as they're standing"

200-foot radio station tower stolen without a trace in Alabama

https://apnews.com/article/radio-station-tower-stolen-am-fm-alabama-d16a57daeaf10f473df39d628e1fe388

Gene Cash Silver badge

"removing the SIM"

Do you know how much of a pain in the ass that is, at least on any of the Google phones I've dealt with in the past 5 years?

It would take me 45 minutes just to find something to open the SIM bay.

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: 0_0

You mean like the banking and trading regulations meant to stop a recurrence of the Great Depression?

Don't worry, they're working on that.