Posts by Yes Me

Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

Re: Amendment Zero

Which has (and always had) the unintended side-effect of encouraging corruption (often curiously described as "lobbying").

Re: "grave privacy risks for millions of Americans"

The people downvoting HuBo are either (a) totally misunderstanding him/her, due to lack of \s or (b) frothing MAGAts.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: New AC...

Seen a few of them; especially disturbing when they're running at 220 volts or so.

An amateur-installed socket with live wired to ground, neutral wired to live, and ground wired to nothing... (no RCD in that house).

Forgotten Turing treasure trove rescued from attic goes under the hammer

Re: Amazing

The Turing Archive would be the place. Whether Kings has enough spare money to bid, I don't know. It would have been nice if the Routledge family would have donated the material to the college, the Science Museum, or the British Library.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Trappist

"I had one of those a few years ago"

Or maybe you had a few of those one year ago?

In any case, "Trappist" rhymes with "pissed" for a good reason. Happy memories... but the icon is the wrong colo(u)r.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Make Aerospace Grotty Again

This is terrible. Not the proposed cut itself, but directing the remaining budget away from useful science and towards vanity projects (humans in space) that have no scientific or economic value in themselves.

OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules. Study suggests it isn’t waiting for permission

The first law of everything

Indeed. On average, everything is average, and that's where LLMs will head unless they are curated to only learn true stuff, much of which is copyright.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Re: It's quite clever, really

And it's always been so. Go back to a paper shop in the late 1980s and you will see a load of "PC" magazines full of tips on how to avoid BSoDs etc. There'll just be one magazine for Mac users, because they never crashed, even back then. But the muggles all thought that PCs must be much better than Macs, because there were so many magazines.

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Re: FTFY

And pumped storage, where wind power pumps the water uphill when it's too windy (or solar when it's too sunny). There really is no need to burn stuff on quiet nights.

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

Learning from inexperience

Of course we can save money by consolidating procurement. What could possibly go wrong?

IBM boss Arvind Krishna pockets 23% pay rise to $25M

I can't excuse the racial stereotyping in your second sentence, but with regard to:

> Is there such a thing as a non-corrupt CEO?

When Arvind was appointed, I thought there might be. I have been grievously disappointed. He used to be a good guy. But that doesn't make him corrupt.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Things are obvious once you know

> I remember moving from PROFS to Lotus notes

Sincere condolences

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

Re: ALGOL-68 is out

Are you by any chance confusing Burroughs Algol, which was very close to the original Algol 60 report, and ESPOL, which was Burroughs system programming language based on but extended from Algol, which they used instead of assembler to write the operating system?

I have in front of me the 1973 "Algol Primer for Burroughs B6700" by de Souza and Manley of Otago University, and the I/O doesn't strike me as strange. There's no memory access as such; that definitely existed in ESPOL but I don't have an ESPOL manual.

Ex-NSA grandee says Trump's staff cuts will 'devastate' America's national security

Re: Not an issue

There is the subtlety that the US dictator has only claimed to have stopped offensive activity, not defensive. So what that have allegedly stopped is something they were never allegedly doing in the first place. There's much smoke and mirrors in the NSA's world,

Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome

The actual problem here

The conversation seems to have moved away from the actual problem: a right-wing, somewhat Trumpian, political grouping (actually aligned with NZ's ACT party and its neolib leader David Seymour) is trying to suborn a national Internet registry. That can't be a good thing.

Insiders say IBM's broader return-to-office plan hits older, more expensive staff hard

Re: "[IBM] maintains that it does not systematically discriminate"

In any case, random discrimination also cuts the payroll. I wonder what the shares will be worth when all productive employees have been relocated to dole?

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Re: Computers in the 1960/70s

The Russians found it fairly easy to copy the Williams tube but it took them some years to copy core memory.

True story. Imagine the staff tea room in the Manchester CS department in late 1969...

Tom Kilburn: "How much does a colour TV cost, then?"

Somebody: "About £250, I think."

[As a reminder, £1000 per year was a good starting salary back then.]

Tom: "Not worth waiting until they're cheaper, then."

Everybody: dead silence

It was utterly impossible to know whether Tom was being serious or not. We certainly all wondered how much his salary was.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Strange...

What I'm wondering is why anyone would want to run Windows 11 on a machine perfectly capable of running Windows 10, especially with the good news that patches for Windows 10 will stop soon.

Not sure what my next machine will run, but I doubt that it will begin with "W".

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

Re: walked to the lab to disconnet the switch?

> Why wasn't the demo DHCP server set up as a NAT router?

Because that was planned for the following week's tutorial?

Because the tutor was only one page ahead of the students?

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Re: Ah, hardware replacement...

Ask them why a city needs a sewerage department.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

Icon not found

I think we can simply ask Vulture Central to provide a new icon; they never replaced Paris. For now we can make do with this ---->

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Long ago I was in charge of IT for part of a university

There are many possible explanations (for a textbook on the subject, read "Moo" by Jane Smiley) but the generic answer to anomalies like CS and Maths being in Social Sciences (which I experienced many years ago) is simply academic politics and which senior professors and Deans hate each other (or the opposite). But generally speaking, everybody hates the university IT department for reasons amply explained above, so they are bypassed whenever possible.

The Bunter books were truly awful, in retrospect. There was some very dodgy celebration of flagellation too. It all made me very glad that I went to state schools.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Any system...

You can comment out an if with if True: #day=="Tuesday":

I also find the statement 0/0 very useful for checking that the code works up to a certain point.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Re: Bork Bork Bork

Windows 10 ? More like 7 or 8 from what I see at the top of bus stop poles and the like.

FCC net neutrality rules dead again as appeals court sides with Big Telco

Re: Interseting argument

How about reviving the radon-infused water business while we're at it? That used to sell very well back in the day.

Or in solid form

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Here is where G****e is heading

ChatGPT's Astonishing Fabrications About Percy Ludgate

https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.2023.3272989

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Re: One of my favotire tools

The big false assumption is that it assumes everything is IPv4

Re: One of my favotire tools

I think the downvotes were for the American spelling; it should have been "favoutire".

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"On many routers I've played around with, the routing of private traffic on the WAN ports had to be explicitly enabled."

Absolutely true, but (see my other comment) that is exactly the same for IPv4 and IPv6. NAT is irrelevant to opening and closing external ports, except of course that a NAT box can only support one instance of port 80 whereas an IPv6 router can support one port 80 for each host on your LAN.

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"I expect ISP IPv6 routers will implement something akin to this rule"

What do you mean by "will"? Of course they do; I haven't looked at the code, but I can't see any reason why the same code path can't be used for both IPv4 and IPv6 firewall rules.

If I want an IPv6 app to be able to accept incoming traffic on port N for IPv6, I have to tell my home gateway. It's called "Port sharing" and it's configured on the same page for IPv4 or IPv6. There is simply no difference. The idea that network address translation adds any actual security is just bogus.

(It is true that NAT prevents an external attacker learning a little bit about the internal addressing of your network, and possibly guessing a few things about its topology if you have multiple LAN segments and routers. Some enterprise networks claim to care about that and want to hide their IPv6 topology.)

See for yourself

"IANA let's the rir play in 2000::/3"

More accurately: the IETF lets IANA let the RIRs play in 2000::/3

The large majority of IPv6 address space is still completely reserved. The authoritative information is at https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml

Re: Good for Huawei

They can only tunnel if the relevant gateways let them tunnel. And that's always been true and always will be true, so love your firewall and keep it warm and happy.

Re: Good for Huawei

Not so. Actually the top 48 bits aren't structured; they're allocated non-geographically just like IPv4 prefixes. And most ISPs don't allocate a /48 per subscriber anyway; /56 is more common unless you want to pay extra.

So we do have a ridiculous amount of address space for everybody. I can only assume that Huawei wants to pursue the idea of semantic addressing, i.e. using address bits for more than just network topology. Otherwise they could not conceivably need that much space. I think that's a REALLY BAD IDEA but some people don't agree, including some Huawei people.

Re: Good for Huawei

Emphasis on was available.

IPX? Please!

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Thusly

A useful word is "thusly"

It's dual syllablically

Therefore it scans handily

When writing silly poetry

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: smart decision

It has been said that if you make your software fool-proof, they will send a better fool.

I have rarely seen such blunt commentards on El Reg.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: 8.5 seconds...

WHAT'S CAPS-LOCK???

Top 10 billionaires make nearly $64B in post-Trump election stock surge

The only good news we'll get this week

"apparently Mark Zuckerberg failed to cash in"

Re: ...collective net worth increase by $346.3 billion

Don't worry, tRump will look after that little problem for them.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: Seems a bit specious

"long on opinions and quite short on facts"

Exactly. As a kid I always loved the longer evenings after each change to BST, plus the fact that sunrise woke me up at the right time instead of far too early. Agreed, it's hard on the dairy cows in Scotland, but they don't get a vote...

Moaning about having to adapt your body clock is sad. Your body clock adapts to the longer and shorter days anyway; the change to and from BST is a minor hassle by comparison.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: Since they brought up DNS

"... getting the big vendors to implement..."

What on earth are you talking about? Firstly the engineers who work on IPv6 standards mainly come from, and are paid by, big vendors. Secondly, product managers at big vendors don't do what the engineers tell them, they do what the accountants tell them. Those "useful, secure, and use friendly tools" would come from the big vendors or from startups trying to get bought out by a big vendor. Or they'd be open source (i.e. no paychecks at all).

I agree, more tools are needed, but it isn't IPv6 standards writers you need to convince, it's the accountants. Welcome to capitalism.

Re: phone numbers are easy

It's irrelevant. Phone numbers used to be for people, who used to have to dial them with their fingers in a dially thing. IP addresses are for computers.

Incidentally, your example above should be written fe80:cd00:0:cde:1257:0:211e:729c according to RFC5952, and looking at it anybody can tell that it's a link-local address. No human is expected to parse beyond fe80.

Re: Hence, IPv6

"...with an address scheme that no human being can personally translate."

Translate to what? Am I supposed to be able to translate "142.250.76.110" to "google.com" in my head?

What the designers recognised at a very early stage is that no human can readily memorise 128-bit addresses whatever format they're written in, so it was better to write them in hexadecimal to make them shorter to cut and paste.

"a far simpler, far more humanly-parsable address paradigm could have been (easily!) adoptable; the 'country code prefix' being just one easily-readable idea."

I'm not sure you understand how Internet routing works. It's non-geographical, so the notion of a country-code prefix is simply meaningless. In any case, human-parsability is not a requirement, so TBH your whole comment resolves to null.

Re: Opinions do differ

I don't know which world you live in. In the one I inhabit, half the traffic is IPv6 and all operating systems support IPv6. There's no realistic prospect of an IPv7 in the next few decades. QUIC may well paper over some of today's glitches, and if it does you won't even notice when IPv4 fades away.

Re: He should keep quiet and be thought a fool rather than open his mouth and prove it

"Does he even know what an A or AAAA record is?"

<sarcasm>I doubt it, he's only been involved in Internet technology for 30 years or so, how would he know anything about DNS? After all, he wrote his first RFC as recently as 1994, and the first one concerning the DNS only in 2008. Clearly, he's an ignoramus.</sarcasm>

That said, I don't really agree with his conclusions, and with the Google IPv6 usage peaking at 47% recently I think we can say that IPv6 has made it.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Important word

If you take the router apart you're going to invalidate your guarantee.

Internet Archive wobbles back online, with limited functionality

Re: My question is... Why?

I cannot upvote that more than once, but +1000. That is the whole point: an irrefutable archive makes people who lie for a living very, very nervous. There's very possibly big money behind this assault.

This isn't the first time: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/ddos_internet_archive/

Pure coincidence that the Archive is in a legal fight with the copyright industry, as the Vulture has previously reported: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/20/internet_archive_lawsuit_latest/