Posts by Marty McFly

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.

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

I pay the money for my own domain, and I pay for email hosting with a mainstream provider.

About half of the emails I send to colleagues who have Gmail addresses get tossed in their spam folder. Lame reason given.... My domain does not have a strong reputation and therefore must be a spammer. Nevermind that I have owned the domain for years, and no spam has ever been sent from it. Simply because it is used to lightly makes it suspicious of spam.

Yup, if you don't sent a lot of emails you must be a spammer. At least according to Google's logic.

I am sure it is just a coincidence because I am not a Gmail user. They would never block someone who took accountability for their own email...

Signal president Meredith Whittaker says they had no choice but to use AWS, and that's a problem

Signal is right to be worried

_{<<Set your politics aside for a moment & look at the facts, okay?>>}

Remember "Parler"? This was a social media network that was popular with conservatives.

Now rewind your clock back to January 2021. Google suspended Parler from their Play Store on January 8, citing posts that incited violence. Apple removed Parler on January 9th, after warning Parler to improve moderation. And AWS terminated their hosting on January 10th, effectively killing them. On January 11th, Salesforce blocked the RNC from sending emails. Shopify & Stripe also took politically motivated actions against some of their customers.

This DID happen, and regardless of our personal politics we cannot deny it happened. Did Big Tech take these action of their own accord, or was there collusion with government? Politics go back and forth, and we are mere pawns in their game. Neither the Red team or the Blue team will hesitate to use this control & leverage in the future if they find it serves their interests.

We should NEVER forget that it happened. Centralized Cloud services represent a real threat to free & secure communication - which is exactly what Signal provides. With this demonstrated past behavior from Big Tech, it is a small step to see Signal get a ransom note the next time there is a crisis.... "Give us a back door or go off-line".

We simply CANNOT trust Big Tech in the future because of what they have done in the past. Yeah, given what Signal represents for security & privacy, they are in a tough spot when the next social unrest arrives.

Alaska Airlines grounded by mystery IT meltdown

Re: Fallback

It is a cascading failure, and it is more about crews than aircraft.

Modern aircraft fly day after day with minimal daily maintenance. Sure, after a certain number of cycles they go in for programmed maintenance, but that is planned well in advance.

Crews, however, are a perishable commodity. They are strictly regulated with the number of hours on duty before a mandated rest period. If a crew experiences a significant delay, they will 'expire' before the flight can depart because there is not enough time left to ensure they reach their destination before their mandated rest period.

Other regulations, for example, require crews to have printed hard-copy weather reports on-board before departure. There are other in-house documents that flight crews need before their birds can fly. For example, the calculated weight of the aircraft would be needed performance (ie: fuel) calculations. Thus something like an outage of the reservation system could cause the flight crew to not know their number of passengers, thus their weight, and be unable to fly.

For the cascade...

Let's say a flight crew is halfway through they day. They flew SEA (Alaska Air hub) to AUS (Austin, Texas, not an Alaska Air hub) and are now returning. Same bird, same crew, a comfortable margin of two flight hours left in their day when they get back to SEA. The weather computer that prints the hard copy goes down. It takes three hours to fix. That crew has just expired and now needs to go to mandatory rest. No spare Alaska Air crews are in place to take over (not a hub airport). Flight canceled. Same bird, same flight crew will likely fly the next day.

No idea what caused Alaska Air's outage, but it easy to see how a data center problem & legal flight requirements can conspire to keep birds out of the sky.

In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out

Toe tags

A good boss always has a secret list of employees fitted with toe tags. That way when the senior boss comes knocking, the decision is already made by the immediate boss.

The problem comes when arbitrary cut decisions are made at the senior level with no regard to performance. That's how I was cut a year ago. My boss was given a list of names and a choice. RIF these people, or take the package yourself....then we will have someone else RIF these people. The names chosen were done with no input from my boss and made by a senior manager new to this business unit.

Stupid way to run a business that advertises hiring & retaining the best & the brightest.

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Lazy cops and dumb judges

About 15 years ago my nephew lived in a older urban area. The kind of place where they take a large house and split it up in to three rental units and rent to young couples. This was back before a lot of people put passwords on their WiFI.

Cops raided him at 6am when he was leaving for work. Gave him 30 seconds to alert his wife and they were coming in, warrant in hand. Searching for CSAM. Searched his computers, etc, and found nothing. It was then that they started looking at his network and realized the WiFi was wide open.

The cops pivoted immediately. The started saucing my nephew up as an aspiring young guy who should be working for them, etc. Really laid the compliments on thick. Then they asked if they could put a snooping device on his router, to which my nephew happily agreed. They also told him not to talk to anyone about what had happened, and both he and his wife agreed.

No court gag order. Just a plea to not tell anyone, to which my nephew willingly agreed. IMHO, he should have run straight to the local news and reported the raid. Nope, he kept quiet for 9 months. The cops eventually found the perp.

Follow me through... The cops were smart enough to use the Telco to trace the location of the network drop to a street address. The judge was smart enough to know what that meant when issuing a warrant. Why didn't the cops check to see if the WiFi was open?? There were dozens of residences within range - remember this was an urban area. Why didn't the judge ask the cops if they could access the network from their car at the street?

Pure laziness on the part of the cops & the judge. They had the tech skills to find the location, but didn't make any effort to check if the WiFi was open or not.

As to whether the ends justified the means... Violating an innocent citizen's 4th Amendment rights is NEVER justified by sloppy police work.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: I don't get it

>"How can something that's powered down "provide a vital network connection"?

In a career far away, selling a product long since discontinued, we had a product that performed in-line Intrusion Detection. This was before Let's Encrypt took over the world and the bulk of network traffic was not encrypted.

To minimize a single point of failure, the network card was a special pass-through type which would "fail closed" (ie: the circuit is closed and passing traffic) when the power was shut off.

Basically, if the power supply died or the box was rebooted, it would not also take down the network. Sure, no IDS was happening, but it didn't take the world off-line either.

The only way this would be a single point of failure is if someone unplugged the network cables from the box....which is the crux of this story. Had our hero made note of which wire was which, they could have simply bypassed the missing equipment by looping one wire back to the switch.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Dare I say it is no coincidence that Crowdstrike is an all-Mac house internally.

Microsoft warns of 'payroll pirate' crew looting US university salaries

Text message MFA

>"After securing access, the attackers add their own phone numbers as MFA devices"

How about not using text messages to a phone number as MFA? That is the fundamental problem here.

Text messages are not a true "something you have" MFA validation. Text messages are a "something you have ACCESS to" validation. The problem is that access can be easily cloned.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Decades ago, in a career far-far away....

Rolling back clocks to tweak payroll is an age-old trick.

I ran a restaurant with a (then) cutting edge DOS-based point-of-sale system running on x386 hardware, 10BASE2 networking, light pens on CRTs, etc. The computers had a habit of gaining about 5 minutes a week. No external connectivity for a handy NTP server to correct the time drift either.

Being a savvy manager I recognized that the time gain occurred while employees were on the clock. When multiplied by headcount I was paying several hours of extra wages weekly.

The labor percentage matrix we ran was VERY tight. So I would 'fix' the time drift on the busiest time of the week when the most employees were on the clock. Conveniently on a night when I was running the closing shift. Gave me a few extra hours of labor to work with that night and made my job a lot easier. A restaurant BOFH? Maybe. But again, the clocks had drifted forward while while the employees were on the clock, so it wasn't a completely unjustified.

That point-of-sale company became my lead in to the tech industry. I spent a few years traveling to job sites to upgrade those x386 systems to brand new x486 systems...with better internal clocks. That was three decades ago, cheers!

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: Tell me, Ted...

>"How many private-sector logistics firms have attempted to move a Space Shuttle before?"

The answer to that specific question is none. But that is not the correct question to ask.

"How many private-sector logistics firms have experience in moving retired aircraft to museum archives?"

True, many birds had their final flight to an airstrip adjacent the museum, but many more made their journey via surface transportation. A cottage industry for sure, but hardly something brand new.

Re: Barge?

If the Spruce Goose could be moved from California to Oregon via barge, moving a shuttle from Virginia to Texas is possible too.

Getting a retired space shuttle from point A to point B is an exercise in logistics. It is not Rocket Science anymore.

Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere

Don't trouble me with facts, I want to believe the fear!

"The sky is falling, run for your lives!"

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

Seen this before

Anyone here remember the original release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial? When Elliot flew over the cops, they were all pointing guns at him. The later releases of the movie changed the scene to pointing walkie-talkie radios instead.

Legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg now regrets that decision.

"I never should have done that because ‘E.T.’ was a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are,......All our movies are a kind of measuring – a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there.”

Sure, if Amazon wants to remove guns from all future Bond movies, that is their choice. Not sure how they would do at the Box Office, but they are welcome to target new movies to whatever demographic they choose. But do not edit older movies to remove the essence of what they are.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Sure it was an error? Maybe an Easter Egg

The big yellow security company I used to work for had to put a stop to that in the late 1990's. Previously there had been a hidden picture of all the Devs and a movie screen style credits list that would scroll on the screen. Some special key combination on the About page would trigger it.

Then the corporate and government worlds got stuffy and no such undocumented functions could be permitted. That language got slid in to one of the big contracts and that was the end of that.

The Wild West days of tech were a lot more fun when we could still laugh together.

Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?

Re: Interesting idea

Ah, but when does it stop being "oil" and start being a non-flammable heat transfer fluid?

Re: A hacker's dream

Meh.

There are a zillion workloads that do not require the high security common in modern data centers. With the exponentially increasing use of AI by the common folk, it does draw the question of whether those workloads need to processed in a high security data center.

Sure, I want my bank to use a secure data center. Even my email provider. Does the CPU which renders my AI request for a cute kitten meme need to be in the same high-security DC location? What about the servers hosting the latest on-line games or helping write my resume? The value of those data assets does not warrant the expenses currently being incurred to have them hosted in the same physical DC as high security assets.

Assuming there is job tasking which breaks out secure workloads for different DC's, I don't see this as being a hacker's opportunity at all. It actually looks like a brilliant opportunity to reduce data center costs for mundane low security workloads.

Re: Interesting idea

"Any odds on the oil being flammable ?"

100% odds

Electrical cooling is a very common use case for mineral oil. The power transform on the pole next to your house is full of it.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Reminds me of the SR-71

A cottage industry magically appeared to disassemble and reassemble the SR-71 Blackbirds as they were heading to museums. The wing spars would be drilled and mounted with a patch piece. Then the spars would be cut - permanently rendering them unflyable. Transportation, and then the patch piece would be re-attached to hold the wing in place.

The whole premise was the SR-71 was assumed to be built in such a way that it could not be disassembled.

Museum curators later found cutting the wing spars was not actually necessary. The birds could have been disassembled enough for transport and then reassembled. The myth was widely propagated in the air museum community, driving business to the one company professing the methods for titanium cutting and patching. They made a lot of money for awhile.

Discovery's current location isn't that far from navigational waterways....which can take a barge right over to Houston. Take a look at how the Hughes H-4 Hercules (commonly know as the Spruce Goose) made it to Oregon back in the early 1990's. If a plane larger than a 747 could be transported this way, a much smaller space craft carried by a 747 could be transported as well. This can be done without a slice & dice.

Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries

Re: Great for the old fogies

Does that explain why Tempe & Mesa Arizona are the test markets?

Downward spiral

>" I’m struggling to see the advantage here, except for the thermally lazy or incompetent!

This drives a downward spiral for some people.

No money to 'stock up' on consumables like diapers or toothpaste. They know they will need them, it won't be magic potty training perfection and then Oops, they ended up with an extra case of surplus diapers.

So with limited funds they don't have diapers or toothpaste in stock. Thus they end up buying them 'last minute' and paying a premium price for DoorDash delivery. They are not getting Costco volume sizes at membership warehouse prices this way!

Thus they spend more money than needed....leading back to the problem of not having money to stock up.

This is a service in search of a problem which it will help create and perpetuate.

Amazon will refund $1.5B to 35M customers allegedly duped into paying for Prime

Anyone remember...

...When "Amazon Prime" meant legit free two-day delivery on everything?

Nowadays "Amazon Prime" means free overnight (which only actually arrives 25% of the time), or get it sometime next week with no shipping costs.

Oh, and "Included with Prime" Amazon Music actually had music you had heard before. And "Included with Prime" Amazon Video did not include advertisements. I can get those with AM radio & over-the-air TV.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: Conspiracy Theory

I do miss the Shack.

And yes, you needed to know what you wanted. Never walk in the door asking questions. Easy to say today, but pre-WWW information sharing...not so much.

Cheers to the fond memories.

Microsoft digs up Vista-era animated wallpaper for Windows 11. Here's how to get it

Bloat

Microsoft continuing to prove their OS is bloated and filled with detritus from years of garbage features. When was the last time this code was checked for vulnerabilities?

Anyone want to bet this has been in Windows codebase all along and was simply never removed? Someone just added a 'hidden' switch to turn it back on.

SpaceX Dragon huffs, puffs... and fizzles out as NASA aborts ISS boost

Timeline

>"The Katalyst vehicle must therefore be ready to launch within months, rather than the years that such a mission would usually need."

All possible and has been done successfully before. Reference Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Even the Space Shuttle once it was operational.

The only question is whether the time and money will be invested to get it done in months rather than years.

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Google search cannot be trusted. Ever.

_{<Judge me however you want on this topic, it doesn't change what Google did. This information needs to be shared.>}

COVID vaccine cards. This was a simple template produced by the US CDC for standardized mass printing. It didn't matter what search parameters used, that template could NOT be found on the Internet anywhere with Google's search.

After looking at some alternate search engines, the template was eventually located on multiple individual state CDC websites. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maine, etc. Every one of these states had their version of the CDC's COVID guidelines. Buried in the document was the template for the vaccine card, ready to print.

NONE of these official documents, hosted on official state .gov websites, was available in Google search!

To be clear, each of the individual state documents included 100+ pages of VERY valuable information about dealing with COVID. However, because they also contained the COVID vaccine card template, Google actively and intentionally suppressed them from their search results.

That is a betrayal of trust from Google which can never be forgiven. They willingly suppressed official government information in a time of crisis when it was needed the most. NEVER trust their search results to be conclusive.

Seriously. Pick a different search engine now, and implement it in your favorite browser. That way when the SHTF you are already using a trustworthy information source.

Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

...."consumers are returning to DVDs"

So consumers are rejecting the subscription model for streaming entertainment?

We must stop that NOW! Otherwise they might figure out how suck-tastic our software subscription models are!

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Explains a lot....

...like why Windows is a multi-gigabyte install that used to fit on a CD (or even a stack of floppy discs).

...like why Windows is so vulnerable to attack - when was the last time this 2006 code was checked for security?

...like why Windows is a dog with fleas even on the latest hardware.

Yeah, pick the Penguin.

Small nuke reactors are really coming online by next year, US energy secretary insists

Is a generation enough time?

I regularly drive by the remains of the Trojan nuclear power plant. It was started in the late 1960's based off 1950's technology. It was a center point of protests for years, back when my parents were young.

In a different context, I have a 1950's vehicle which is now referred to as a "collector car". The engine powers the wheels, the steering wheel moves left & right, and the brake pedal makes it stop. Nevertheless, the technology in my "new" 2021 vehicle is several orders of magnitude beyond this vintage car. However basic functionality is the same - start/stop, left right, etc.

Both are powered by a liquid fuel which can be explosive when combined with oxygen & spark, and are subject to the same laws of physics when impacting an immoveable object. The safety in the new car is such that all but the most severe accidents are survivable whereas the old car has a non-collapsing steel shaft (steering column) pointed at my chest.

The new car has incredible emission controls and the old car is sniff-test noticeable when running.

Is it reasonable to assume nuclear technology has advanced by the amount over the intervening decades? Is it time to give it another look?

Or, are we still stuck with the old paradigms of our parent's generation about the evil's of nuclear power?

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

Logic...

Threat actors know O365 is where the bulk of the world is. Therefore they will ignore any Office 2016 & Office 2019 footprint as a target of limited opportunity.

Furthermore, those 'old' versions have had years to get any prominent defects worked out. Any remaining defects will be so fringe that they will never be uncovered by any organization still running the software. The risk of a business impacting security vulnerability or product defect is infinitesimal.

Dare I say the risk of O365 being O364 or O363 is actually a quantifiable business impact.

Thus, the safest place to be is on-prem Office running a perpetual license key.

Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

..."approximately 40,000 users reported problems"...

Reg missed a snarky opportunity:

"The outage was brief. According to Downdetector.com, approximately 40,000 users who have a secondary method of Internet access reported problems early this morning. The remaining 5,960,000 customers, whose only Internet connection is via Starlink, were unable to make a report to Downdector at all. Most of them were busy checking their kit to see if the problem was local to their network."

Seriously... Let's say a measly 5% of Starlink's estimated 6M customers did some troubleshooting, I did. That is 300k people. I spent about 20 minutes doing the usual network pings to make sure it wasn't one of my switches, rebooted stuff, etc. That math works out to 6M minutes, or 100k hours or wasted time. Most people work around 2k hours/year for around 50 years, to reach 100k hours of work over their entire lifetime.

What makes Starlink different from other Telco's and ISPs? It seems rare that all of AT&T or all of Centurylink will go down at once. However, when Starlink goes down, it seems to take the entire planet with it. It seems unlikely that all of Starlink's data flows through a single point of failure, or even a single data center for that matter. Therefore the only thing that comes to mind is their software.

If there was a defect in the software, then it seems unlikely the problem could be found, patched, tested, and uploaded within minutes. That leads me to think these occasional short global outages (fractions of an hour) may be intentional - deploy the patch and reboot everything. Simply take the outage hit rather than a progressive update with hours/days of degraded service. Starlink does work 'outside the box' of traditional thinking, this could be their standard operating procedure for updates.

Maybe I am over thinking the situation. It would be interesting to hear what other tech minds think could be a single point of failure in Starlink that could cause global outages.

Senator blasts Microsoft for 'dangerous, insecure software' that helped pwn US hospitals

Fear and money

Step 1: Ignore security by design.

Step 2: Release critical patches, keep everyone scared.

Step 3: Shorten the lifecycle. Release new versions and quickly drop general support for the old version.

Step 4: Charge money for extended security fix support because it takes customers too long to upgrade.

FCC plans to kill Wi-Fi on school buses, hotspots for library patrons

I had two options...

1) Be the first on the bus in the morning, and then ride an hour to school. Bring a book or talk to other kids. Just imagine learning how to interact with other kids without a device!

2) Walk a mile, be the last on the bus, and risk having the only open seat be next to the smelly kid. Get some exercise too.

Reverse the options after school. Walking that mile home always beat the ride on the bus. Gave me an alternative if the weather was really bad though. The late bus only ran the highway, so I always had to walk home during sports season.

Precisely zero kids today are pulling out their device of choice and saying 'Hey, I should do my homework online while riding the bus home'. Wifi on school busses is a waste of money. Very few kids have the hour long bus rides like I had back in the day. The few minutes they are disconnected will help them, it won't hurt them.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: Not fools

Earnings call. Broadcom stock price is up 17% in the last 5 days.

Don't expect a strategy change any time soon. Hate the game, not the players.

Not fools

Broadcom may be cut throat, but they are not fools. This lawsuit is just the public side of the issue. I guarantee there is an entire back channel that is working a deal between both companies. This lawsuit will eventually go away with an undisclosed settlement. That settlement will actually be a much broader deal with Broadcom selling a product 'portfolio' to Tesco at a compelling rate.

Public lawsuits are just part of the negotiation process between big companies these days.

Hate Broadcom all you want as consumers, but you cannot deny their stock is trading within 5% of its all time high. Wall Street loves what they do. As long as the stock price keeps climbing year over year, this market strategy will remain, regardless of what we think on this fine forum.

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Who to blame?

"your product is shit and you are shit"

Good Lord! Those customers are the worst. I work for a company just like they do. I want to take home a paycheck just like them. They will get so much further by using different language... "The product is garbage" instead of "YOUR product is garbage". "XYZ's tech support sucks" instead of "YOUR tech support sucks". Like I personally own the company.

Blame the product. Hate the company. I just work here, don't make it personal. I work for your vendor. I really do want to help you because the company's success keeps those paychecks coming.

Just because the customer wrote the purchase order, it does not entitle them to vent all their other frustrations on the person who took their phone call. Aggression will get the formal documented answers every time. A friendly and collaborative request will get the same answer, but often with a bit extra like "here is an unofficial way to make it work".

Re: Who to blame?

Vendor here for a counter point...

I cannot count the number of times I have experienced the reverse role. "Send out a tech for free, this is all your fault, we will never spend another dime with you, we will tell all our tech buddies you suck, yadda yadda".

So a Tech goes to site. Problem is as expected. Customer did not follow the documentation <here>. Which we referred them to multiple times in <these emails>. And talked to them about on <this date> and <this date>.

Just as funny as this story is on El Reg, it can also backfire on the customer. Customer's tech doesn't have the technical acumen to properly implement the product. So the vendor gets blamed internally and often with hostility. Then the big meeting happens with the big bosses. The vendor's tech lays out all the evidence in nice order for the big boss. Either the meeting is cut short, or the customer goes on mute for awhile.

No apologies are ever given, but when communication resumes it usually starts with <new person> is taking over this project and will be your contact going forward.

Online property ad reveals looted Nazi war art, triggers police raid

Are the authorities even that interested?

So the family has been under suspicion of possessing this ill-gotten art for a good 80 years or so. And it took Dutch journalists monitoring Argentina property listings to spot it and inform the local police.

Seriously? In those eight decades, no one every visited the property and questioned the artwork? Then, when the police are contacted from an International agency, the art magically vanishes just in time for a 'surprise' raid.

I wonder how much of those "substantial assets" were wisely invested and still buy influence today?

Australian university used Wi-Fi location data to identify student protestors

Re: Not exactly the brightest bulbs

Follow the link to the report. The university required an individual login to access the WiFi. This was not some open WiFi with the password posted on signs everywhere.

The crux of the matter is there was a period of time when the "Terms of Use" document was not available on the student's first login. Therefore they could not 'Accept' the terms which they were unable to read, although they had to hit the 'Accept' button for access. Because, of course, every one of us always reads the terms before hitting the accept button. Especially university students.

Oh, and the reason for stopping the protest...

Over occupancy of the facility & personal belongings blocking emergency exits. Had there been an emergency (fire), the safety of the protesters would be at risk. They didn't stop it because they wanted to squash democracy, they stopped it to protect the students.

Imagine the alternative - the place is packed, lots of emotional energy for the cause, some numb-nuts lights a pryotechnic, chaos ensues, exits blocked, students injured, and the university blamed. The university didn't have any good options, so they took the one with the safest outcome for all involved.

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Re: I would want to see some better evidence

"Investigative" and "reporting" parted ways a long time ago. Walter Cronkite wouldn't even consider our modern journalism worthy of tabloid news back in the day.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Did that, done that

Needed to share test lab networking between two adjoining rooms. IT was notoriously fussy about their switches and special rules for what traffic they would permit. Inordinate amounts of approvals would be required for them to open the two switch ports to each other (create a dedicated VLAN essentially).

A fluff & buff remodel was done to align with new corporate standards (get rid of offices, deploy cube farm, etc). As the re-networking was happening, and working with vendor after-hours, I managed to plug in a patch cable between the patch ports in the two rooms - eliminating the corporate switch gear. When a few hundred other cables were added with really good cable management, unless someone took all the bundle apart they could not tell the cable doubled back to a different patch port on the same panel. Once the paint was dry I could uplink between switches in each room.

Yeah, a technical violation of the rules. It was a clean solution. Alternative was pop ceiling tiles to run a cable over, or take apart back-to-back wall plates for some rogue in-wall cables. Or simply drill through the sheetrock and conceal behind a desk or something. Bust down the wall and make the adjoining rooms in to a single room....

So for the hero of El Reg's story....There may have been a reason the cabling was done that way, which was long forgotten by they time they arrived on scene.

Hanging up: AOL to pull the plug on its dial-up service after 36 years

I'm calling a downvote, sorry

Did I really get less content back which I had to screech-screech connect at 2400 baud?

Being honest with myself, I could receive and respond just as much as I am doing now on this forum. True, it was a text interface displayed in VT100 format and did not contain all the graphics and the user interface which is common these days. But it was lightweight and the same amount of content in the same amount of time as I get reading this fine forum today.

What 'broadband' has enabled is an overload of advertisement, tracking, unwanted browser scripts, and other garbage. There are many sites where I would prefer that dial-up VT100 interface if it also meant getting rid the trash and bringing me just the content I am looking for.

This comment is only 896 Bytes long, less than 1k. Dial-up is just fine for delivering this actual content, taking less than 3 seconds to transfer at 2400 baud.

'Suddenly deprecating old models' users depended on a 'mistake,' admits OpenAI's Altman

Refreshing!

Good to see a tech company listening to their customers and reverting an unwelcome decision.

For further discussion refer to the Windows 11 so-called "upgrade"....