Posts by Joe Gurman

US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days

Er....

Isn't the US only reducing tariffs to 30% for the 90 days? Or until the Felon-in-Chief has another temper tantrum?

Fentanyl from China....

....has been dropping steadily for years, as has the number of overdose deaths due to it. This is political theater for the benefit of the Felon-in-Chief's base.

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

NASA

Maintains, or at least used to maintain, an extensive database of lessons learned — that is, descriptions of screwups, and how to avoid repeating them. If that still exits, I suspect it captures useful information from Mr. Hale.

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Will it work….

…. on high steel? Asking for a friend in New York City.

How to survive as a CISO aka 'chief scapegoat officer'

I kind of got the clue….

…. when the outfit I used to work for changed the name of Human Resources (the organization formerly known as Personnel) to “Human Capital Management.” In my experience, all the employees began pronouncing “Capital” as “Cattle.”

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

To be fair....

....those Wang calculators occupied ~ 1/4 the desktop space that their predecessors, the electromechanical, clackety-clack calculators from Friden and Monroe, did. And the Wangs were silent as well.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Ahem.

“[T]he House Un-American Activities Committee under Senator Joseph McCarthy persecuted thousands of people”

McCarthy, a member of the US Senate, had no effect on the US House of Representatives, or vice versa. Starting in 1953, Tailgunner Joe chaired the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, through which he carried out the worst of his depredations. HUAC was its own, entirely independent can of worms.

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

Re: DOGE incompetence

Based on personal experience, those hours look very similar, if not identical, to what I’ve gotten used to over the last several years. I felt a bit of discrimination based on the apparent assumption that all Social Security clients and their support personnel are frighteningly early risers who are all tucked up in bed (without their phones) by 11:00 PM. Oddly enough, the Thrift Savings Plan, the 401(k)-like retirement investment mechanism for federal employees, has a website that’s available much later into the wee hours, including on weekends.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: I feel liberated already...

Without a paddle. Hope they like herring.

Re: I feel liberated already...

As the late Mr. Jobs famously explained to President Obama c. 2009, manufacturing the phones in the US would add ~ $1 to the price of the phones (say, $1.50 today). What makes manufacturing at such scale and with such rapid prototyping possible is the abundance of process engineers in China (educated to what would be called an Associate's degree level in the US), as well as the parts manufacturing infrastructure there. That difference in the result of state investment in the educational system, as well as demand by foreign manufacturers.

Brit supermarket finds breaking up is hard to do as Walmart-Asda divorce stretches into fourth year

Re: Misnomer

Sounds exactly like the standard “hedge fund” model in the US: buy a distressed business at a low-ish price, financed by debt which gets reassigned to the distressed asset, then strip the business of all its fungible assets, spin off the now hollowed-out business, less the real estate the shops/offices stand on, charge debt-ridden business rent on the property that had been theirs, and sell off the real estate at a nice profit when the shell of a business finally goes bust. They’re even doing it with hospitals.

Rocket Lab says NASA lacks leadership on Mars Sample Return

Re: Architecture

The samples are already in containers on the Martian surface, where NASA rovers have dropped them.

Simple enough?

Too many moving parts.

Is NASA's science budget heading for a black hole?

Re: Flow Check

If you read any of the NASA-tracking sites here in the US, it's not at all clear that Mr, Isaacman will ever lead the agency. Evidently, he has committed the mortal sin of starting several companies that offer diversity training, as well as other sins against the fascist, er, Republican core beliefs.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

We are now told....

....that the managers of various federal agencies are being told to fill out spreadsheets listing the 10% of employees who are mission critical, the 40% who are, know, kinda OK, and the 50% who are for the immediate chop. This alone demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of what those agencies are about. The hopeless cases never make it past the one-year probationary period, and this who late decay into uselessness are remarkably few and far between in the agencies with which I've had to deal. I know right wingnut propaganda likes to portray all Executive branch employees as lazy do-nothings, but the truth is mostly the opposite.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Which is exactly....

.... what Apple punters voted for by buying kit and services that guaranteed their privacy.

This is just madness. How would folks in the UK react to Trump's minions' "secretly" declaring they had a right to examine the encrypted data of anyone in the UK?

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Re: Where Is That "Someone"? Guess!

Milou.

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

Please

Name two. Or better, “a lot.” Turning off unwanted A”I” “features” on iOS is a matter of three taps: Settings, Apple Intelligence & Siri, and toggling the Apple Intelligence setting to “off.” For what it’s worth, this Apple user didn’t have to worry about it because my phone is pre-iPhone 15. If there really are “a lot” of iPhone owners who want to be protected from A”I” intrusiveness, this old thing might command a good price.

Google takes action after coder reports 'most sophisticated attack I've ever seen'

One takeaway from this….

….is simply to have nothing to do with Google. I abjured that particular demon and all its minions some years back, and will not do business with any person or outfit that hides behind them.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

I suspect it’s desperation

In Apple’s case, at least, I suspect so few people turned on any AI features at all in iOS 18.1 and 18.2 that the corporate bosses are desperate the punters never will unless they’re forced to “experience” the new “functionality.”

Following through on another El Reg article today, I installed DeepSeek on my desktop and got totally reasonable answers to “What is air speed of an unencumbered swallow?” and “Latkes vs. Hamantaschen?” So what’s not to love? ;-)

For the record, those queries running locally emptied no reservoirs and caused no lights to flicker, nor even made the machine’s fans audible. No idea, of course, what they cost the mothership.

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

Here's your update, received 12:02 UT, 2025/01/19

"Resolved: system issue impacting deposits, payments and transfers

"Valued customer,

"We wanted to provide you with an important update regarding the service disruption impacting Capital One, which resulted in delays in the processing of some electronic payments and transfers (ACH).

"This was due to a technical issue at a third-party service provider that delayed timely processing of some banking transactions and impacted your ability to bank online with us. Rest assured, it was not related to fraud or the work of bad actors attempting to access our system. Your Capital One Bank accounts remain secure.

"This issue is now resolved and impacted systems are restored. We sincerely apologize for the disruption and any impact on your ability to access certain Capital One services. We also understand how frustrating this situation may have been, and we’re committed to making it right."

For what it's worth, this customer's account sent a scheduled ETF payment last Thursday, and received a scheduled direct deposit on Friday. Many other people, obviously, fared far worse.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Glad to hear....

....that Mr. Six's credit rating wasn't;t damaged in the long term.

Re: Bats..

That's "unfortunate countries where American [there's another kind?] baseball isn't played."

The fortunate ones include Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. Probably leaving off some I've forgotten. Oh, wait, there are 82 altogether: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-countries-play-baseball .

We’re paying for what we don’t get: East D.C. neighbors frustrated with Amazon’s Prime delivery exclusions

Back to western movies

They just need to have someone riding shotgun, or maybe assault rifle, in the delivery trucks alongside the driver.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Revenge is a dish….

….best served at 3:00 AM — local, that is.

SOHO, the two-year mission that forgot to retire, finally faces sunset

Re: British-isms

Well, of course. They wanted to sound like posh imperialists.

NOAA? Really?

Things may have changed in the last six years (when I retired after 31 years of working on SOHO, from instrument proposal, software development, and science operation design before launch through science operations and management), but we never got one cent from NOAA despite their using SOHO data for forecasting. There was a brief time, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when it actually looked like NOAA might share some very modest costs for a backup data processing facility for the SOHO data they use, but that evaporated once it hit a certain level of management at NOAA.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

Did he choose to retire....

....or was he pushed? I suppose it's irrelevant. Either way, it's refreshing to see a less than successful (*cough*) CEO get the boot just before Xmas instead of thousands of employees.

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Gee

Do you think Mr. Musk will get all his policy wishes once his pal is president and has replaced Ms. Rosenworcel?

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Re: Count me out

Don't know about other systems, but Apple's Face ID is implemented by scanning that can distinguish between a three-dimensional face and a photograph, and the vectors extracted from that scanning are embedded in a devices "secure enclave," which I believe has been demonstrated in proof-of-concept to be vulnerable by boffins if they have physical access to the device (and can somehow evade security procedures to log in), but for ordinary humans, including crooks, pretty secure.

"[E]xpensive high-end" Well, I guess you get what you pay for, in security as well as anything else.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Well, there's at least one upside

Imagine all those user-generated bots, er, AI constructs, replacing our actual faces with their perfect ones in every Teams meeting. While the people whose time would have been wasted "participating" in such a meeting can, you know, do productive work. Or hang out around the water cooler and discuss.... stuff.

And the fossil fuel extraction industry will love it: re-open more coal and hydrocarbon-fired electric generating plants do Micro$oft and others can open more GW-gobbling AI GPU-farms. Feed that loop. Kill that planet.

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Are they certain....

.... it's not 12 monkeys?

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

Naked backplanes….

….make life so much easier than the cramped, heavily shielded enclosures PDP’s had in their first lives. The thought of inserting and especially removing cards without donating copious amounts of blood is almost incomprehensible to this veteran.

Come across “one?” Try PDP-11/20 (operating an instrument at a mountaintop observatory), multiple -11/34s, commanding, receiving data from, and analyzing those data from instruments on a spacecraft, an -11/40 used by another project, that borrowed me for some grunt work, and a schizophrenic -11/70 that ran IAS during the day and Unix at night. Probably others this geezer can’t recall right now.

Using 1Password on Mac? Patch up if you don’t want your Vaults raided

Ugh.

I had resisted upgrading from 7 to 8 on macOS because of AgileBits' development environment and "all cloud storage" decisions. Now I'm forced to introduce a less secure password manager as a backup for iCloud password management. Blah.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

And someone at the customer sites installing the update on one (1) testbed system each before deploying to every mission-critical production system also used to be standard QA practice. Still is some places™.

You know what spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft

Farewell, Excel….

…. it was a good thirty years, but all good things must come to an end.

Don’t let the door &c.

65 years of NASA's meatball: Original logo lives on despite detractors

Past and future

"The worm is instantly recognizable and a single color but isn't associated with what many feel are the agency's glory days."

NASA is the one US federal agency that is firmly focused on the future, so a vaguely futuristic logo is probably more appropriate.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Re: This isn't that surprising

And Apple knows that.

There’s something odd about this report. Apple has known for years — since well before the introduction of the first Apple Silicon machines in late 2020 — that Mac users keep their machines well over three years. It’s one of the reasons they started offering AppleCare+ service plans not just for three years but indefinitely (defined as, “until we no longer stock parts except where required by law” [e.g. France]), on a monthly billing basis. Think that “service” income isn’t making up for at least some of the supposedly missed (and famously large) margin on hardware sales? Think again.

Resale

They command high resale prices, percentage-wise.

Perseverance pays off as Mars rover's SHERLOC brought back from the brink

Re: Keep IT Simple

Considering the environment, molybdenum disulfide (sold as Dry•Slide in the US) might be a better choice.

Re: Needs a bigger ...

....or at least a rubber mallet.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

In the US, Verizon has been doing this for at least 12 years

Starting no later than the recovery from Hurricane Sandy, when the ripped out miles of copper POTS cabling and replaced it with fiber.

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

If you read reviews....

The use case/primary audience appears to be people who prefer a good tablet to a laptop. In the case of the Pro version, the differentiator (compared with the Air) appears to be the ability to add Thunderbolt/USB-4 storage.

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

Re: Fuck off

Ever consider that Apple might be getting the money because its users have good reason to trust the Fruit Company on this?

Um....

"[I]mportant information which would otherwise have been very useful to them" — when was the last time you got that in any ad, anywhere?

Disclaimer: I am so adblockered-up on all my devices that the only time I ever see ads is when I briefly lift the protective force field to view specific _content_ (as opposed to ads) before swiftly turning the shields back on, that I haven't viewed many ads coming from the Intertubes. Please let me kn ow if I'm missing anything "important" or "very useful." Ta.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Ah, intuitive hardware and interfaces

As a wise person once pointed out, all intuition is based on experience.

Silicon Valley roundabout has drivers in a spin

People in the UK may sneer

....at the vast majority of US drivers who have never seen a roundabout, traffic circle, or rotary (as they're called in Massachusetts, where I grew up), but I dar any UK driver to try driving (keeping to the right, mind) a Boston-area rotary with unsweaty clothes and dry pants. While state law humorously insists that vehicles entering the rotary have the right of way [*], the actual practice is even simpler than the UK hierarchy outlined by FIA, above: simply assume the vehicle you are driving in a Range Rover with heavily tinted windows and once you muscle your way into the rotary, _you_ always have right of way. Put another way, whoever gets there first has the right of way. Miraculously (or maybe not so, since human beings tend to get used to almost anything), there are very few accidents in those rotaries.

During a sojourn in France some decades ago, I learned that the driver entering from the right (pretty much anywhere, including rond-points) always has the right of way.... unless the intersection is signed otherwise — which is why nearly every rond-point through which I had to navigate every day was festooned with "Vous n'avez pas la priorité" signs confronting anyone trying to enter the rond-point. Not that it made much difference in the drivers' behavior.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Doesn't this seem like....

....Schrödinger's marriage?

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

In general….

Satellites that require precise pointing usually have both gyros (mechanical or the ring laser variety) and rate wheels. The gyros provide information on rates of movement about a specific spacecraft axis, and the rate wheels can be used to null those out to maintain the pointing.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Really?

"pulled wool over buyers' eyes with forged veterinary certificates"

I see what you attempted to do there. As with the last line of the piece.

Fail, rather.