Posts by Marty McFly

FCC says it's making it easier for US telcos to ditch legacy lines

Government regulations is the fault

"For too long, outdated rules and regulations have forced providers to maintain aging copper infrastructure and to keep consumers on broken, antiquated networks,"

Here is the problem... The state requires 'like for like' replacement. So it was easy a couple decades ago to string fiber along the telephone poles and in to my area.

However, from the CO box a couple miles away to my home, the copper is all underground. Therefore any fiber replacement also needs to be in the ground.

'Back in the day' they came through with a trencher, tossed the copper in, and pushed the dirt back to cover. In our modern times that requires all sorts of permitting for 'earth disturbance' permits and environmental studies. The only alternative is the expensive directional boring machines.

That investment will simply not be made in rural America. There just isn't enough density of customers to warrant the expense Same thing for cellular - have to drive miles to get the first bar of coverage.

Or, our wonderful government could back off the permitting and regulations....let us dig a ditch and toss some direct bury fiber in it.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Dim future for ServiceNow

Closing big deals like those are a multi-year effort. Public Sector is a b*tch to deal with. I'll bet it took the better part of his 13-year stint to build up those relationships.

The company will lose in the long run. No top-tier sales reps will go near ServiceNow with their resume. ServiceNow will only get bottom sales reps that have trouble meeting quotas at other tech companies.

Tech companies compete for sales reps the same way they compete for customers. And good sales reps have no company loyalty. They perform and they expect to be compensated per their contract. Commissions pay for loyalty. Word will get around.

Screwing sales reps on commissions guarantees the top performers will go to the competition...and have no compunction about stealing ServiceNow's lunch tomorrow. Their professional contacts in the industry is not a list the company gets to keep.

Non-compete? When it comes to sales that isn't worth the paper it is written on. Non-compete is only really useful when dealing with intellectual property - code, patents, etc. They cannot block a tech sales person from working in their chosen career field. (Which explains why tech sales people rarely know much about their products - the company will not share deep tech details with them.)

Don't bother putting a 'Bluebird' clause in their contract either to limit pay out for big deals. That is the quick way to end a revenue stream.

Commission sales is coin operated, and they are not idiots. Hate it all you want, but that is how the game works.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

FP?

"Oh, yes, they appear quite often,"

After 25 years in the cyber security business this just screams false positives. Possibilities...

• They have zero edge protection and this is accurate because every endpoint is exposed to the public internet.
• They truly are infected, in which case their daily operations would have been impacted, ransom notes, etc.
• Or, the security guys have the settings turned up too high and the endpoint security is alerting on every little thing.

My bet is the latter...lots of security trouble tickets help to justify FTE positions to the C-suite.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

College roommate hacking

Back in the 33.6k dial up days, DOS & Windows 3.1... I helped a buddy deal with an annoying roommate.

Roommate liked to get on-line and troll the Internet. This was pre-web days when many sites were wide open to Telnet & FTP with u:anonymous p:<your email address>. Roommate would stay up all hours of the night, so we installed a 'line noise generator' which would kill the phone connection - essentially crossed the ring & tip wires, and the modem shrugged and gave up.

For a while we spoofed the roommate by pointing a blue LED keyring light at his monitor and claimed it generated line noise. He believed it.

Not to be deterred by random disconnections, the roommate took up VGA graphics first player shooter games. Again staying up all night. Roommate had work-study all day on the weekend and was absent for a predicted period of time. Remember how POTS has four wires, just in case you want to add a second phone line? The yellow & black wires coming in to the internal modem on the desktop PC "somehow" got wired in to the reset switch. Elsewhere in the dorm room a momentary contact switch was connected to the yellow & black.wires. And presto, a remote reboot switch!

He never did figure out why his machine would randomly crap out after midnight.

Cheers to innocent days with under challenged creative minds!

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

The Devil you know...

“industries that house the most sensitive data are ironically the furthest behind in basic OS patching”

This does not surprise me at all. An older OS, properly locked down and in a secure network environment, beats a new & unknown OS every day of the week. The old OS may not be perfect. Knowing its flaws, and mitigating them, is better than a new OS full of unknown issues.

CoPilot is a great example. Is it secure enough to be trusted in a security sensitive business? What data leaks might it have to the AI mothership? M$ft is forcing it, and we are supposed to be able to disable it, but is it really fully disabled? These are all valid questions, and the answer is often "Just stay with what we have because we know where the problems are".

In short, I am not the least bit surprised that organizations with sensitive data are the furthest behind in basic OS patching. After all, the first adopters are just the last beta testers.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Stupid customer

It is their security requirements. They should have provided a proper meeting space, isolated from their infrastructure with only basic Internet access. Get the local ISP to put a separate consumer grade network router in. No wired or wireless access to their internal secure network. Soundproof the room as they see fit. Then who gives a crap what the vendor brings in?

It is nonsensical some of this extreme security that is put on display. It is like they want to impress vendors with how elaborate they can be. Especially when 9 times out of 10, the content of the presentation has no need to be made within the customer's security perimeter.

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Re: A rehortical question:

Computer salesmen only exist so that used car salesmen can have a career path!

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Hanging chad

>"There's no substitute for a mark on a bit of paper."

Greetings from George W. Bush in November 2000!

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Stories old code could tell

The DOS-based point-of-sale company I worked for 30 years ago (long since defunct) had an undocumented feature - "Remove & Renumber Tickets". Login is as full admin (credentials were conveniently stored in clear text), tag the tickets, then ALT-F10 five times in a row. Poof, tickets gone. Never documented, only shared verbally with the senior installers.

Dare I remind anyone this is back in the day before debit cards were commonplace and cash was the standard currency. Yes, this was a customer requested 'feature' and was more widely used than suspected. The mom & pop business owners wanted to keep employees honest with POS, but still wanted to fiddle some numbers themselves. Corporate chain customers were none the wiser.

Those were different times, with cavalier coding and little oversight. Reverse engineering old code with AI may tell many stories which will be interesting to learn. In 2026, such a 'feature' would likely make the news, and not in a good way. Cheers!

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Re: Good memories of simpler times

>"I also remember copying a program by hand out of a computer mag"

Danger! ALWAYS wait until the NEXT month's issue. There was often a publication error that left out some part of the code! Rule learned the hard way, wait one month and check the 'Corrections' column before spending hours typing in code.

Kids these days don't know how easy they have it...download, click install, a few OK buttons, and the program is running. Doubtful today's kids could muster the motivation to manually key in code just to play a game.

Cheers to memories.

Re: 3.5" is the wrong way round

Yeah, that is correct. An open hole meant write-protect.

Here is the logic... An OEM software install disk had the open hole, and it also did NOT have the shutter to slide over it. An early form of software assurance that the contents on the disk could not be tampered with.

Good memories of simpler times

>"It required a hole punch, a sacrificial disk, and, in this writer's experience, a fair amount of teenage optimism."

Did that, done that. I remember going in 50/50 with a buddy to buy a box of bulk generic floppies. Had a nice little hole punch tool that made the proper notch at the right location - even square cut it too. Lunch break & "Computers class" were nothing but a big pirate fest, copying whatever each of us could leach from other kids we knew. Copy ][+ was the preferred tool, but Locksmith was the go-to for the hard to copy disks. Then go home and try to figure out what I had copied and how it worked.

Although I don't remember ever calling them a "flippy" disk. "Double Sided" was more the preferred term.

I've still got those disks around somewhere. I wonder if any of them would still work....? The icon seems fitting.

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Re: Nice story, most of you missed a bit though.

Everything works out just fine though. "Vulnerabilities in Microsoft's supply chain" match up perfectly with "vulnerabilities in the code base." They effectively cancel each other out, so it is all good.

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

Well, shucks....

I read the article looking for a release date. I have been enamored with the Mac Mini for years, with a small fleet of them around the homestead. Most serve as video players for flat screen TVs - enabling me to avoid all the crappy remote-based controls. They have a wireless keyboard, and I have full control of whatever ad-blocking and tracker blocking I desire...but I digress. Oldest is an i7 mid-2011 Server. The last Intel version, and all three M versions abound. So yeah, I am that guy always waiting for the next release.

I have read the comments here - most are all about politics, and blaming the most prolific politician they can find. Whatever.

I will be very curious on the next Mac Mini release. The Mini is a budget targeted Mac. We can debate tariffs elsewhere, but we cannot deny they are a tax on imported goods by definition. Will building the Mini domestically result in an even more budget friendly Mac - given it will not have tariff?

I also read a comment about US-built quality. This will be a tough one to gauge. Apple's kit has a reputation for lasting a long time. I still have my Apple //c in the attic! Will I buy a Made In USA Mac Mini in the near future? Of course I will! Will it last as long as older Apple hardware?? That will determine whether this is a win or a lost.

Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty

Re: Why even bother?

>"...quality of a potato"

YMMV!

I have been running Ubiquiti cameras for years now. Only one I have ever lost is a G3 Micro. That was due to my attempt to enclose a non-weather proof camera in a weatherproof case...which eventually failed me.

Completely agree, their cameras are expensive. But I cannot complain about not getting what I paid for.

I upgraded a few of the more important cameras from G3's to G5's. When I installed Starlink, I had to build an antenna tower to get above the trees. I figured what the heck...I am already doing this tower, and already running cable, I'll just toss a spare G3 Bullet up on the tower. That G3 bullet still keeps working faithfully, despite being fully weather exposed year round.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Focus on the PC, not on what is happening!

Years ago. Early days of Point-of-sale systems. Installing in a Greek restaurant that is known for its live entertainment. I am upstairs, in the office, inputting some final menu programming touches on the main PC.

Did you know belly dancers have no inhibitions?

Turns out the office doubled as the dressing room. It took all my professional effort to focus on the job in front of me, while she got prepared for another day in her professional career.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Integrated Kill Switch

There is ample precedent for that thinking. Look up the history of the F-14 Tomcat, and who our allies once were. The US ended up physically shredding retired F-14's rather than risk some of their parts going on the international black market to support airframes in what has become an unfriendly country.

"Kill Switch" is an accurate technical description. But "Stay Friendly" may be a better name.

Icon because it has an aircraft!

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Blurry lines

A password is the 'something you know' authentication method. It is supposed to reside between your ears and be inaccessible to everyone else.

Putting that password in a password manager changes it over to a 'something you have' authentication method. Access to a database now becomes the controlling security factor. Compromise the password manager and now it can be shared & duplicated just like a physical key.

The bottom line... Never put anything in an online password manager that doesn't also have a multi-factor companion.

Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators

Re: Not a fan

I was a huge skeptic. I kept paying my land based DSL for over two years until I felt I could trust Starlink. The only Starlink outages I have experienced have been system-wide - which means it gets fixed immediately. Meanwhile the legacy DSL would go out and not come back on for a couple days until some tech finally drove out to the country and replaced some piece of kit in the big phone box.

My Starlink is in bridge mode (I NEVER let my ISP own the connection AND my network). Unifi Cloud Gateway Max owns the edge and the Starlink IP address.

The only thing I miss is having a routable IPv4 address. Yeah, I know it is a business product offering, but it is priced beyond viability for a geeky home user. Static IP DSL was only an extra $10/mo.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Wiggle the mouse

Back in the Win 9x days where the world was fraught with frequent reboots that were always slow...

My IT counterpart told one 'frequent flyer' user that wiggling the mouse would help keep the system awake and it would boot faster. Of course, what that did was give this individual something to do which made them think they were doing everything possible to speed up the process.

A week later it was observed that most users were actively wiggling their mice during reboots too. He realized the power of suggestion when it comes from someone who understands the mystical workings inside a computer.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

>a male TA left to become a funeral director

That is a business which takes a special type of person. But is is recession proof. People keep dying at the same rate and business is predictable. Having been through a few tech industry cycles, I can see the value in paycheck stability.

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

Does the ISS have research more to give?

If the ISS was placed in a location where it could be realistically re-visited in 50-years, would there still be more we could learn from the station as it ages long-term?

Imagine visiting the station and taking bits & pieces off for forensic examination. How well did a particular material or construction design hold up? Does stuff actually last forever in the vacuum of space? How does that aging compare to the same materials when left on earth?

Enter the realm of Sci-Fi. Will humankind ever journey to the cosmos? Maybe someday we will discover 'warp speed'. But if not, it would be useful to know what type of spacecraft construction will hold up for the long term. We have only been doing this spaceflight thing for less than 70 years. There is no long term data.

I do believe there is a case to retain ISS as a long term unoccupied research project. Researchers hundreds of years from now would be thanking us for creating a lab experiment that we would never live to see the value from.

There is precedent for changing & extending the mission of spacecraft. Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 are still delivering research long after their primary missions have been completed.

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Re: Maybe...

That's been tried before, ya know.

American Revolution. Gun powder was a far more dangerous & unpredictable thing. At the edge of town as a powder house were each family stored their gun powder. Thus if the powder house blew up, it did not destroy the houses in town. The British took to destroying powder houses since they could not disarm the populace.

That act of attempted disarmament led to the creation of the 2nd Amendment.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Back to plan B

Let's build more terrestrial data centers. We can power them with fossil fuels and use local water resources to cool them.

It is utter non-sense to have orbiting data centers, functioning off-grid using solar power and radiating heat in to the vacuum of space.

Besides, aliens will probably take over the DC's anyway >> icon excuse.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

What could possibly go wrong??

It is the age of massive AI computing. Add autonomous robot dogs. Put them in a radioactive environment.

This already reads like a bad Hollywood movie script!

To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide

Re: Yeah, I've had a few spams about that too

I agree, it is tough to separate the sheep from the goats.

However, there are some good use cases for anonymous & distributed connectivity. Big Tech / Big Data does not need to know everything that comes out of my ISP connection and track it back to me for profiling, targeted advertising, and targeted pricing.

I have been using & supporting Presearch for a number of years. A couple small Ubuntu VMs running Docker. They have brokered around 55k searches in the past 5 years. So around 1-2 searches per hour. That is more than enough to skew and obfuscate any searches that may be my own.

(Of course, I monitor the VMs - they are not spiking CPU resources, nor are they generating any unexpected traffic. Yes, they have an 'earn crypto' angle - I don't care about that, I care about privacy.)

The thing is, this all takes someone with a tech skill set, like the fine people who read El Reg. Most of the great unwashed masses don't understand how their privacy is being violated and subsequently used to monetize them.

Re: IPIDEA?

So this article is about Google doing a good thing by dismantling a malicious proxy network made of Google's own Android devices.

Nudify app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google

Old school response

Anyone else remember the old days of online comments??

"Pictures or it didn't happen!!"

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Culture shift & context

January 28, 1986. Less than 13 years after the last Saturn V flight. Less than 5 years from the first Space Shuttle flight. Less than 24 years after Alan Shepard said "Light this candle" to launch Freedom 7.

More time has passed since Y2K & 9/11 until today, than did from the start of manned space flight until the Challenger disaster.

I submit that early NASA culture was heavy with risk taking. Data was analyzed, unknowns were calculated, and at the end of the day they took their best guess and rolled the dice. Everyone knew the risks and they took the chance. It worked. The US won the space race and to-date has been the only country to put men on the moon.

That luck ran out in 1986, and was further affirmed on February 1, 2003.

As a society we have become far more risk adverse. Safety was always on the list, but in those early days it was not at the top. We, as a society, no longer have the tolerance for taking risks that those early space pioneers did. We can debate whether that is better or worse, but I think we can agree that in 2026 the world is simply different.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

Dumb move

This is a good way to identify which employees have too much free time on their hands. Get back to work. They should organize a protest on their own time.

The tech company employees are paid to do the things that Meta, Apple, Google, etc want them to do. They are not paid to go cube-to-cube and gather signatures. In the tech world there is always a RIF coming. If I was a direct supervisor I would make note and keep those names handy the next time I am told to cut headcount.

Someone will probably say that is unfair. Managers have to determine some way to stack rank their staff. Don't be the person using company time to engage in political activity, and then they won't be on the short list.

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Duh!

A good IT Tech always grabs a discrete copy of the good stuff before dropping the hammer.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

School district master key

Many decades ago my father was the principal of a primary school and carried a large wad of keys. After some budget cuts & peers retired, and he ended up with a second primary school under his purview, so the district gave him a single master key to replace what would have been a 2nd large wad of keys.

A couple years later, a mental breakdown occurred, and my father left education. The district never reclaimed the master key. It hung on a nail over the workbench out in the garage.

A few more years passed and a certain high school senior got curious. Sure enough, the key still worked! This was before the days of cameras everywhere and motion sensing alarms, and when a harmless 'Senior Prank' could be laughed at. There might have been a midnight mission or two, so I'll just end the story there.

I now have that same workbench. And for posterity, the key is still with it. Cheers to innocent days!

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: "a large US-based aircraft company"

>"your pilots will need none of that expensive additional training.

Because that is what the airlines wanted! Boeing cannot say that out loud because it is blaming the customer. Only option it to take the hit themselves.

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

>"It’s become acceptable in software that there will always be bugs.?

When was the last time you saw an actual beta test release?

Nope, alpha test in-house, then release. The early adopters are now the beta testers.

It used to be when beta was complete, then the code was declared production ready. Nope, rush, rush, rush to ride the feature train. Products will be released to match a marketing schedule determined by the colored pencil department.

Ship now, fix later. It is a win-win for everyone involved!

Sales & marketing get their bonus today. The developers get overtime to create emergency fixes. Support stays fully staffed to handle all the calls. Even the customer's tech staff gets extra headcount approved to roll out the frequent patches & updates. In reality, everyone is making money, and jobs are secure.

Sure, it sucks having to deal with defects....but that is what everyone gets paid to do! If the tech worked properly, many of us would not be needed long term.

It is all a giant self-licking ice cream cone. I would like to take another lick product release, please!

Historic NASA test towers face their final countdown

A National Historic Landmark (NHL) can have its designation withdrawn (“dedesignated”) under the rules in 36 CFR § 65.9. It can happen only (1) at the owner’s request or (2) on the Secretary of the Interior’s initiative.

So the government's NHL protection only applies as long as the owner wants it. In this case the government holds both ends of the rope.

Frankly, as much as I would like to preserve these structures in a museum state, I don't want to spend tax dollars to do it. If a 3rd party entity was willing to put forth the funding, I would feel differently. From the looks of the picture in the article, a tetanus shot should be required before viewing. That is a lot of $$$ to fix.

Venezuela loses president, but gains empty Starlink internet offer

Ground stations or no ground stations?

I thought Starlink used lasers for inter-satellite communication to help cover areas without ground stations. Seems to me that would allow Venezuela to get some connectivity. May not be blazing fast or low latency, but it would beat the heck out of no connectivity.

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

"Most Macs will never run anything but their original copy of macOS."

I am curious where the source of this data point comes from.

MacOS is incredibly easy to update, as long as the current version supports the underlying hardware. Apple runs about a five-year deficit on supported hardware before cutting it off. And Mac OS is usually update annually.

Where is the author's data showing that a five year old Mac was never once updated to a new OS version?

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Bastards

I had to work on New Year's day 2000, just in case the world ended. This was after two years of making sure customer x286 systems from a decade earlier were properly upgraded. I got promised an 'exchange' holiday for working. Okay, I am a team player and all, so I reported as ordered. Got RIF'd a few months later... "Your job is going to Atlanta, you are not going with it."

And do you think they remembered the extra holiday I had earned in my severance package? FSCK'ers.

Yup, totally trivial and has no bearing on where my life is today. Yet it still taints my memory of Y2K, enough that I post it here for the world to see.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

Re: Happiness boost

Advertising has been a part of our culture since Red Lanterns indicated the 'services' available nearby. Billboards are just a modern update.

Does grassroots 'adfreecities.org' really think they are going to change modern society?

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

"Have you used tech to prank colleagues, and gotten away with it?"

Back in the late 1990's, I used PCAnywhere for remote access on the office curmudgeon's computer. Two finger typist on a good day. A smart guy, a good friend, but still struggled with the user interfaces of the era.

The mouse cursor would never quite land on the <Okay> box. And random characters would be inserted in to the message requiring a re-type - one finger at a time.

Of course the rest of us in the shared office were on to the gag. We played it out for a few weeks before fessing up. Earned me the reputation of the office Hacker - this was the height of the "Free Kevin" campaign. But it simply was commercial off-the-shelf software, installed over lunch when the PC was not locked.

Tech was simpler then. And mischievous pranks did not end with summary dismissal. Cheers to fond memories!

Activist groups urge Congress to pause US datacenter buildouts

No AI was used in writing this post!

Just doing my part to reduce the horrible environmental impact of data centers.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

Meh, cut the other garbage out

For years I worked remote with a 6mb/s down / 768kb/s up DSL line. Delivered product demos out of my home-based lab via WebEx. And since it was DSL, the audio was a good ol' fashioned POTS line with a wire to my head. I rarely had problems with lag, jitter, or other issues.

However, I did not simultaneously have two TVs streaming 4k video, three kids playing on-line games, etc etc. Nor did I have any 'smart' devices constantly banging on the mother ship to report my watching habits. Nor any IoT devices constantly streaming my doorbell to cloud storage. And the list goes on.

Anyone trying to work remotely who is having issues, needs to shut the other crap off if they want to look good. Put in a Pi-Hole to block the mothership coms, throttle bandwidth to invasive devices, etc. And since they are a El Reg reader, they should know how to do so - otherwise they are unqualified for the job they are trying to do remotely.

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

A piece of analog hardware manufactured in the 1970s....

I have two rotary dial phones in service at my residence. Yes, since I have to drive 8 miles before my first bar of cell service, I maintain a physical wired land line. Model 500 series, one wall phone and one desk phone. Yes, both are "Red phones".

These phones ring with a real bell. And the audio is significantly more clear than the audio on the various digital, wireless, and headset telephony devices I also have. It is actually surprising how much audio quality we have sacrificed over the years.

Cheers to devices built to last!

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Hollywood needs this

Because transporting the most secret data, unencrypted, on portable media, is the best way to do things. Seriously, what super spy wouldn't enjoy wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, ride around in armored limousines with glamorous body guards, fly private jets into secret military bases, etc. The only thing they need is a self-destructive USB key, handcuffed to their wrist.

Enter the Hollywood movie plot where Ethan Hunt is trying to destroy the USB key and is desperately searching for PC to plug in to, meanwhile Chinese hackers stay one step ahead of him with a super virus that disables USB ports on nearby computers. The plot thickens when our spy finally escapes the villains with a MacBook, only to find it is equipped with USB-C ports and is not backward compatible with USB-A. The movie ends when the voluptuous double agent is seduced by the hero and admits the device EULA in unenforceable....

_{Seriously Hollywood, see the icon. This is really a dumb movie idea and I am mocking you.}

It is a nothing product, prove me wrong

Its apparent primary function is to self destruct when told to do so. To validate its primary function will break the warranty. Therefore it can never be tested.

If the magic button is pressed purposefully to destroy the device and nothing happens, no problem, they will just warranty it and send a new one. Nevermind that the spy hunters now have physical possession of the secret code list, along with the spy who carried it. Anyone want to bet there is a hold harmless clause in the EULA?

The only way to actually validate performance is to buy a large quantity of them. At regular intervals pick a few and destroy them. If any failures happen then the rest of the devices can be assumed to be faulty and therefore should be replaced.

In that regard this is actually a genius product to sell lots of them....assuming the primary function is something legitimately needed.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Life forming

Zork & Infocom made an impression on the career I took in life. Think it through...

These games taught basic troubleshooting. They taught how to define an objective with limited clues to what the objective may be. They taught how to observe and connect pieces together. They taught how to solve ambiguous problems with more than one path to a solution. They taught how to use my imagination to visualize a scene without computer graphics, and if that didn't work they taught how to hand-draw maps for notes. Even at the more basic level they taught me rudimentary typing skills (errr, "keyboarding").

Reflecting back on everything I have done in tech since then, these fundamental skills have been regularly used for success in my career. I have not adopted any of the modern gaming culture, so I wonder if today's kids get the same skills through modern computing recreation.

This earns a huge cheers!

Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer

My rural area has telco copper which has been buried in the ground for 50 years or so - works great for 6mb/s DSL. The state requires like-for-like. Thus the telco cannot just run new fiber along the existing power poles and call it good. They have to dig in the ground and lay new fiber.

Fifty years ago that was easy - show up with the trencher, dig the ditch, toss in the cable, and close the hole. Now there are permits, analysis, studies, and research before the government will grant permission to disturb the earth and dig a hole.

It is simply too expensive to bring fiber to rural areas - the bulk of the cost is in permission to dig, not the digging itself, and even cheaper if they string fiber from exiting power poles. (Hint: The government doesn't need to spend money to fund rural Broadband, they just need to trashcan the bureaucracy.)

For a good 20 years Centurytel (now Centurylink) charged me an 'infrastructure improvement fee' every month. The kept the money, never did a thing to improve bandwidth on DSL. Starlink is a game changer that has picked up the opportunity to disrupt the markets in areas with a single Telco provider.

I still have a landline because 'Two is one, and one is none', and being a techie I need the comms. But the majority of my neighborhood has dumped Centurytel for Starlink & WiFi calling on their cell phones (no cell service in the area either).

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

I read it wrong

"It has built-in immunity to AI overload"

On first pass I saw "...immunity to AI Overlord" and immediately wanted to know more.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

The story is not too far out of line. I think we forget how far we have come in the last 35 years.

A typical 1.44mb floppy took around 1hr 45m to download on a 2400 baud modem. That was a pretty big chunk too. Countless times it would get to 99% and then get a CRC error and restart. It was much safer to grab smaller chunks to increase the probability of getting a clean file and minimize the loss of a restart. I remember only getting a clean download 10-20% of the time with anything that took over an hour to download. Restarts were very common.

Now mix in a little bit of corporate paranoia and unsigned files. It is easy to see a corporate policy that all patches shall only come from the vendor's servers on the vendor's phone number. No concept of signed code until the late 1990's, so only a chain-of-custody could be relied upon for code authenticity.

Back in those days, "Long Distance" calling charged by the minute. To see really high rates, make a call overseas. Even if the vendor provided in-country connectivity, it was pretty well known that the new stuff came from the main office and often took a while to trickle down.

And the vendor-provided the modem pool wasn't regularly updated to the latest & greatest. 2400 baud was top speed in the late 1980's. 9600 & 14.4 came out in the early 1990's, so stumbling across a rack of 'legacy' 2400 baud modems in those years was not uncommon.

Let's play with those numbers a bit.... 1hr 45m for a floppy to download at 2400 baud, 40 floppies for OS/2 = 4200 minutes. Let's say a 20% success rate, that means 21,000 minutes. Call it $2 per minute international calling rates, there is the $40k bill.

Sure, there are a lot of ways this could be done better (like pay to ship the patch in the mail). But the story is very plausible given the tech of the era.

Got an HR talking to...

Back in the late 1990's, I worked for one company which got bought by another company across the country. Instead of a split tunnel, they backhauled all the traffic to the new corporate office. They had variable speed links that would bring more bandwidth on when required, but was otherwise notoriously slow.

I figured out that "PING -l 65500" to the gateway IP address would send 65k hits to corporate office. Being the curious sort, I launched multiple CMD windows with multiple PING commands just to see where things choked at. Surprisingly speeds didn't choke, they got faster. So I ran CMD windows on a few more PCs and everything went wonderful. Co-workers even remarked how the systems at corporate were more responsive and they were more productive.

Thus it became my daily routine to launch some CMD windows in the morning and shut them down in the evening, making it look like daily work-hours traffic. Until one day I got lazy and left them running overnight.

The next morning I was promptly hauled in front of HR to explain myself and what I was doing to 'hack the system'. I explained what I did and told the HR lady, "If PING is so dangerous, why is the command available on all the computers in the office?" That earned me a 'Don't do it again' warning.

The network team got the message though. They begrudgingly paid for more bandwidth.

In hindsight, I figured out how the system worked and took advantage of it. I guess that is a fundamental component of 'hacking', so maybe the HR lady was right after all? Cheers to edgy problem solving that almost got me fired. Corporate culture is a lot less forgiving these days.