Posts by mikus

After 47 years, Microsoft issues first sexual harassment and gender report

Obviously they got rid of enough of the old guard. It started with Ballmer, finally enough cashed out to join the old money club and try harder.

AMD’s latest, greatest Radeon graphics card $600 cheaper than Nvidia’s top RTX 4090

When did $1000 video cards become normal?

Not really sure, with the advent of Steam Proton support for Linux gaming, I suddenly care to game again 20 years later, but pretty absurd being re-introduced to this when people were scalping gpu's for 3x the cost, ie several thousands of dollars, as apparently they generated gold or something. Suddenly they don't, and I just want some pretty graphics maan, but really - starting at 1000 dollars? I remember buying my first voodoo2 that broke me at $200 bucks, so perhaps I'm jaded.

Mormon Church IT ransacked, data stolen by 'state-sponsored' cyber-thieves

No, magic underwear does not come with malware protection.

Fortinet says it’s all about the security ASICs

Re: Interesting

Remember? You missed the memo Radware bought the rotting carcass in the Nortel collapse, and used it to make their "next-gen" load-balancers now. Yes my friend, it's aliiiiiive! <cackles to himself>

I always wondered what jackasses actually buy radware (that aren't Israeli), and last year I ran into one still running ancient radware LB's (still required flash!) and went in on the "next-gen" kit now. I tried to talk some sanity into them F5 or Citrix might be a more rational option, you know, people actually use and support them, but they couldn't be bothered to look at switching vendors.

I just laugh inwardly that someone actually bought the last-gen-before rejects as everyone already forgot the stench from the first and second round of life.

Microsoft patches the patch that broke VPNs, Hyper-V, and left servers in boot loops

Re: Quite a blast radius!

I've used only linux for almost 20 years now, and in IT consulting have to exchange files regularly with clients that of course only use MS Office. OpenOffice worked well enough mostly, and now with current LIbreOffice have almost no issues with import/export of native docx/xlsx files. Of course MS Office supports native odt and ods files for Word/Excel native import, which works well too, and so does even 365 online word/excel.

Give it a try, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised these days. The great equalizer is export to pdf if nothing else, which I tend to do for formal docs anyways.

Games Workshop has chucked another £500k at entrenched ERP project with no end to epic battle in sight

Yet another failed, er, delayed ERP project that's overbudget and undelivered. Death by a thousand cuts, or change orders.

Maybe at this point The Reg do so some public service and tally all their failed ERP projects year over year like the 12 days of bork, and name the incompetent (both implementer and customers that bought into them). Might pay it forward to the next generation of poor bastards that have to implement something new. ERP systems are always such nasty, nasty projects, no one gets out alive at the end of the day. They're almost as bad as medical HMS software.

LAPD cops who preferred playing Pokémon Go to tackling robbery can be fired, appeals court rules

One of my childhood friends used to tell me how he "gamed" the system as a DPS freeway officer to make an actual decent salary, as cops don't typically get paid the most. He would work a LOT of overtime with odd jobs at odd hours, thus improving his income, but usually just hanging out at DOT construction jobs playing his Gameboy or watching TV.

You know, those guys that sit in a cop car at off-ramps you're NOT supposed to get off at, with his lights on, doing nothing 99% of the time. Before that I always thought they just parked an empty car there with the lights on to scare people off, but no, your tax dollars pay for someone to be in there, doing nothing but playing games or watching TV in one flavor or another, usually at time and a half hourly rates.

This was even more egregious, like actually opting NOT to show up to a robbery because pokemon go was more important, but still, it always irked me a bit when he'd call me bored during those overtime sitting festivals with nothing better to do but soak up my tax dollars. I guess that's why we aren't close friends anymore...

When ERP projects go awry: Surrey County Council incurs £3.2m additional costs in delayed Unit4 project

When have you ever seen an ERP project go right? ERP is a four letter word.

Every time I have been involved in one, it's quickly learned that the folks doing the work are usually under-qualified, and then they start asking for change orders for everything, stating the project wasn't scoped correctly. If it does get done, it's usually a hack job that has problems just to say they finished anything, then just continue to request more change orders to fix them, and never really "finish" what so ever.

I pity the folks that have to work with ERP companies and software.

HCL accused of wage theft, underpaying H-1B workers by at least $95m a year

Nothing like modern day slavery, or at least indentured servitude. They want to come over, will work for nothing just to get there, and their own people are happy to sell them at an extreme profit. Then once here, the H1B is held over their heads indefinitely by the importer as a goal they can't achieve while paying them as little as possible.

Sounds like how America was founded alright.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

Why would you use this?

So instead of sending everything you do to in a browser to google, you send it to microsoft. yay.

Plus you get the "downgrade me to IE" for instant infection capabilities from their finest legacy code, what is not to love for enterprises.

Now they're down to grubbing for cash by giving you a layaway plan. You know how you can always tell a bad neighborhood? Count the check cashing stores on the corners, and this is the newest variety.

As a full-time linux user, I laugh when they announce Edge builds for linux, like any self-respecting user would ever other than as a random benchmark.

Cisco warns 'unintentional debugging credential' left in some network switches can be abused to hijack equipment

Oh yeah, so this one China order...

They said just cut and paste this here for big order.

Netflix sued by South Korean ISP after Squid Game fans swell traffic to '1.2Tbps'

If anyone at SK Broadband had any reasonable clue, they would have done what most other ISP's have done (long ago) and peer directly with Netflix, or with a 2nd tier provider that does for direct bandwidth offload peering at least cheaper than what they're paying for general bandwidth use with their current peering relationships. They've obviously been too lazy, too cheap, or too self-absorbed to care until it's now hitting them in the pocket book, but this isn't the customer or netflix's problem - it's theirs for being a bad ISP. This just makes them look desperate, ignorant, petulant, and absurd as an organization that can't manage their own ISP.

Netflix should just block SKB's ip ranges then and see how their customers and executives like that, but problem solved.

Activision Blizzard to pay out three days of annual profit to settle sex discrimination case

I suppose there will be a grand reopening of the "Cosby Room" now that this nasty bit is done with. Bring on the strippers and hoes!

Biggest takeaway from pandemic lockdowns for Microsoft? Teams stopped talking to each other

Teams vs. Slack

I do consulting at multiple organizations at a time, and thus tend to participate in multiple Slack and M$ Teams channels at a give time. The biggest difference I see is people actually like using Slack, communicate openly and socially vs. what seems like mere ghost channels on Teams like they're afraid of corporate logging something inappropriate.

Slack seems to invite communication dumping everyone into "General" first, usually with hails of "welcome!", and folks are typically encouraged to find other channels as appropriate to join. There are typically few private only channels, rather it's built more on social inclusion vs. exclusion. People actually enjoy using it both for being social within the companies and for getting work done in some combination of both.

Among even my own team Teams channels, it's almost frowned upon to post non-work items, get rare responses, and all teams lock their own channels to only themselves vs. inviting cross-team collaboration (no networking bofh's in the systems channel, please). There is no "General" channel for everyone to socialize in, no "Pets" channels, no specialized "outside work" interests, nothing. It's all entirely sterile and/or depressing. People only use it for direct messages to each other, and most hate it as a conferencing platform, still using their webex/zoom/google conferencing instead.

This is consistent across every Teams org I've joined.

As much as M$ gives it away, it just as usual misses the mark to clone Slack as much as they would like it to be.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

Candy Crush in my fscking menu?!

All people really wanted was not to be spammed with pseudo-ads in their frigging start menu with garbage ads like Candy Crush, Xbox games, and upsells for Office (um, libreoffice is free?). Really, getting rid of that would have been enough to satiate most.

Now it's just some bastard re-envisioning of how to ape mac's taskbar (look, centralized icons!), and simple lack of feature parity due to some laziness or ineptitude in the dev cycle. Yes, this is the latest winME/Vista it seems.

The only thing I use windoze for in the past 15 years is a hypervisor guest to run visio/project on. If wine could handle running visio/project in abstraction better, I wouldn't need windoze at all. Using Linux full-time for 15 years, it's otherwise not necessary.

Kaseya says it's seen no sign of supply chain attack, sets SaaS restoration target of Tuesday afternoon, on-prem fix to follow

So no sophisticated attack to sign malicious dll's and such via microsoft ala solarwinds, they just gang raped their platform and all downstream customers with blatant insecurity. Some 60 direct customers, and 1500 downstream customers. Nothing to see here, now move along, remember to pay your renewals, particularly the cyber insurance parts to pay off the gross incompetence all around by customer and choice in vendor.

Apple warns kit may interfere with implanted medical devices at close proximity

Old News

This has been discussed since the last generation of iphones were released. Has someone died yet? Who's the first sacrificial lamb for science and news to take a heart attack for the team?

Indian government reverts to manual tax filings as new e-tax portal remains badly borked a week after launch

You would think Indians would know better than to outsource anything locally after watching the mess they've made for the past 25 years in the US when playing that angle.

Women techs fume, offer crowdsourced fixes as Michelle Obama's online keynote crashes

Or they could have just zoom, webex, or any other responsible platform. How much did random unheard of conferencing company pay to show up at the table?

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

Maybe his production company for his book should have explained the concept of a pen name? If you work for apple, what the hell were you thinking - you wanted to be fired disgracefully for someone googling your name? Maybe just troll under other pseudonyms, call it a life. Andy Rubin is still around I think doing just that.

US govt indicted me because I make privacy tools, says crypto-chat app CEO accused of helping drug smugglers

So tomorrow Signal, Telegram?

Of course encryption helps criminals, only the definition of criminal is fluid whether that pertains to Donald Trump or Pablo Escobar. If they're not harassing the non-commercial encrypted chats already, does that mean they already have backdoors in them?

If I sell a rebranded chinese phone tomorrow with Signal on it, does that make me a criminal?

Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff

So ultimately CentOS* is deaed

All my customers using CentOS are still crapping themselves, but they're ditching IBM/RH as quick as they can.

Axe-happy Microsoft halves support for Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel

Good thing you can still buy up to an enterprise license for 9 bucks.

You can buy from sites like gkeys24.com for any microsoft product with legit licenses less than your lunch. Pay $180 bucks for shoddy windoze support, nah, but maybe $9 bucks for a win10 pro/enterprise license. Funny how microsoft whores themselves out to nations that can't support paying $180usd, but can $9 and takes it, while charging us fools full price in the US. Anyone can buy in through less than savory channels at a fraction of cost, but is it any less legit? I can buy a legit, ie certified by microsoft license of win10 pro, visio, and project for less than 50 dollars normally, likely from China. Glad China gets the hookup, and I can subsequently.

Paying any more for windoze or other m$ products is absurd unless a fool. Why even pay for office when LibreOffice is a superior standard. I use visio/project, but office is a waste to invest in with better free solutions for basic office alone.

In wake of Apple privacy controls, Facebook mulls just begging its iOS app users to let it track them over the web

Hey, it would be great if you just let us backdoor your app!

Usually some telemetry channel like that is either endorsed by the owner, usually an enterprise, or a backdoor rootkit of some kind. Fakebook looking to legitimize a separate command and control telemetry feed to keep marketing drones satisfied is pretty ballsy. Of course, Microsoft legitimized it first, so why not.

Five years after US promised crackdown on ticket-snaffling bots, the first prosecutions are in... and are a slap on the wrist

After all but legitimizing scalping after Ebay bought Stubhub, why bother even fighting it?

How does one fight scalping? I stopped going to concerts or caring about the artists 20+ years ago.

Malwarebytes says its Office 365, Azure tenancies invaded by SolarWinds hackers, insists its tools are still safe to use

Always good to know when your AV vendor aka Malwarebytes uses another vendor security solution such as Crowdstrike to secure their own systems.

So what would you say it is you do here?

IBM still spending its way to cloud relevance with Taos purchase

It'll be the typical consulting acquisition story. Big slovenly corp buys little agile corp, sudden dread for anyone at little corp, but look at those shares! Just have to stay a few years to vest, and then run in the opposite direction as fast as possible. After 2 years, anyone staying hates their lives, everyone else ran away to good jobs, and it's another bunch of clueless outsourced middle management running the operation as status quo fail for big corp.

Already IBM is crapping on Redhat, running off customers using CentOS to anyone but IBM. Anyone that Taos had as a customer will move away too when costs start going up, the IBM sales suits show up for revenue generating events, and you smell nothing but bullshit.

You just can't have anything good today.

Congrats, HCL, on your £1.5m contract to upgrade a county council's ERP system to SAP S4/HANA within a year

Typical excuses and delays will ensue

Like most any Indian outsource firms, they will never say no for a deal, and just find excuses to delay and keep the billing deluge going. I'll be fun reading the reg follow in a year on this.

Thailand calls on telcos and ISPs to censor information about pro-democracy protests

From the country that will lock you up from bad-mouthing their king, or even for leaving a bad hotel review, go figure. https://loyaltylobby.com/2020/09/27/american-hotel-guest-in-thailand-arrested-jailed-for-defamation-after-posting-bad-online-reviews/

SAP S/4HANA rollout at Queensland Health went so well that hospitals bent over backwards to avoid using it

So tell me if you heard this one: an ERP deployment goes horribly over budget...

Then over-promises, under-delivers, and users revolt... So what terrible Indian outsource shop/slave market did they use?

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

My Girlfriend worked for them for ~6mo doing remote (at home) customer support, and it was the most heinous experience I could imagine anyone going through before I told her to quit for her own good. I stopped using all Amazon products for years, until I realized I couldn't fight the machine to actually get things.

I have friends that work in aws, I have been invited to work there being a network guy, and have summarily rejected ever working for them in any capacity. AWS might be nice with blinders, but the other retail side is as evil as any retail chain still.

I feel crappy every time I buy something there, and try to limit that.

QUIC, dig in: Microsoft open-sources MsQuic, its implementation of Google-spawned TCP-killer QUIC

Re: the good thing about standards

Exactly what I thought, good old MS EEE strategy.

I'm already scared they put a "ms" in front of it, which means they adapted it, screwed it up, will push to every desktop on the market, and break every core browser not using IE/Edge/Whatever they are pushing to users by default.

Patently dogged: Apple unleashes lawyers to slash $454m patent rip-off bill – even after Supreme Court snub

Last will and testament to Steve Jobs.

Fsck VirnetX, see the lawyers beg and go hungry over my cold body.

I don't typically like apple much, but in this I laugh at every payout delay to the guppies.

We could have pwned Microsoft Teams with a GIF, claims Israeli infosec outfit

Reminds me of the 90's and days of aol when you could crash someone's computer remotely just by sending malformed html, otherwise known as punting. That was fun for years and never got old. Now I can crash a coworkers! Or pwn them, hmm...

Why so shy, Samsung? Weird Find my Phone push notification did not only affect Galaxy mobes

Got that on my old S8.

I woke up and had this as well, wondering if their service had been hacked, or just me. US here.

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

Who needs security.

They will be the next on the credential leaks, but good thing they have insurance against that!

Ding-dong: Cisco delivers your Patch Tuesday warm-up with WebEx, IOS fixes for a few irritating security holes

Another Casualty.

Enjoy getting the chinese out of your systems week after week.

Eighty-year-old US 'web scam man' on the run after pocketing $250,000 in Dem 'donations'

Better use of dollars?

Likely better use of any dollars contributed than what politicians will do with it here.

Huawei website ████ ██████ security flaws ██████ customer info and biz operations at risk: ███████ patched

Any worse than Cisco?

Enough said - watch the rashes of psirt releases every wednesday from Cisco? Seems authentication bypasses across products and remote exploits are a normal thing, whether US or Chinese. Not surprising when India runs and China makes everything for Cisco.

Mayday, mayday. Cray, you cray cray: Investor attempts to halt HPE's $1.3bn biz gobble

Another Casualty.

As with most other HP acquisitions, they don't want to be another casualty. Can you blame them?

HP has the rep to ruin/run everything they touch into the ground, so probably some pride in them not just capitulating and staging themselves for burial up front.

Maybe HP will try to bring back the Cray Itanium Division in fabulous collaboration with Intel for planned obsolescence and go figure, upgrade to something less craptastic!

Better late than never: Cisco's software-defined networking platform ACI finally lands on AWS

Re: If you need ACI in AWS or Azure, you're just doing it wrong

Agreed, I've been working with or around ACI from it's launch, and it's been a perpetual disaster in almost every case. Their micro-segmentation strategy fell apart quickly when adding almost any sort of filtering between segments quickly exhausted the tcam on their switches, and blew up at least one large Biotech company I had to clean up after. I recommended the same, "upgrade" to normal nx-os, and use them that way, as it was a giant L2 network mostly anyways. They ended up turning it off and putting it in a corner instead, simply leaving their cat6k's and old nx5k's to bleed for a few more years until maybe something better comes along.

More recently I've been pinged about helping with an ACI to Arista migration from one of the big three credit card companies that was becoming painful with outages even trying to migrate away from it. Same thing, no one wanted to deal with the complexity once it was in, and quickly lost any value.

In every case I've seen it put in, network engineers retch at the fact they have to click through 90 places to try and setup a basic vlan and layer 2 connectivity. Why not do it programatically? Because old network engineers don't program, and never will. They're just hoping to retire before someone makes them have to learn.

Good news is with disasters like ACI, there will always be a need for traditional network engineers.

Fukushima reactors lend exotic nuclear finish to California's wines

Good thing Californians are there to absorb the radiation for the rest of us more eastward. Here's to hoping they don't fall into the ocean too soon to soak up all that radiation.

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

firefox/adblock plus

enough said - when the rest of the windoze users wake up and finally stop using internet explorer (pronounced: internet exploiter), they will realize about 80% of their problems go away with Internet drive-by viruses or trojans. When they have their coffee and add noscript with adblock plus, they will realize the rest of their problems go away. The idiots that still insist on opening email attachments with .vbs extensions are the same ones that will use IE until they die, and happily pay geek squad to format their box every 6 months. May those customers' pr0n collections copied without their knowledge bring the asshole end of the tech support food chain some comfort in knowingly pimping them repeatedly thanks to microsoft inadequacies. They could just tell them to stop using IE and to use firefox/noscript, but where would the profit be in that?

How Phorm plans to tap your internet connection

Be more concerned about the "passive taps"

Those passive taps documented there are basically optical taps that divert a percentage of the optical signal off gigabit ethernet (or other optical) medium for the purpose of monitoring traffic. Companies like NetOptics make nice units that sit in-line of a optical data path, and can split the signal up to 5 ways, meaning it can produce up to 5 full copies of every frame sent on their network to every state, government, and various other litigious sources you'd really rather not have your traffic. This is typically how most carriers monitor their network, but also for large ISP's like ATT to silently divert all your traffic to Carnivore-type sniffer boxes so GWB and buddies can sell you out to whoever funds their campaigns.

HTC to include high-res video support in handsets

it's windoze!

I've been using a windoze mobile phone for years, and this is just the characteristic of a crappy os. Nothing changed in wm6, still the same microsoft bloat. I'm afraid I doubt (as htc apparently does) that adding accelerated video rendering will help it at all, as the os just simply isn't built to be high-performance - it's a phone for christ's sake, and it's microsoft. They're more worried about DRM and their failing vista product these days.

I'm still waiting for hacked linux drivers for cdma modems in my xv6700 and other HTC products, maybe then we'll see what these phones can really do. Until then, quit bitching and live with a mediocre os as you have since windows 3.1.