Posts by mikus

Cisco make-me-root email bug exploited as a 0-day by unknown crims

Cisco makes FreeBSD insecure

Only Cisco can take a fairly secure OS like FreeBSD that underpins their "AsyncOS" on these a gloryhole year over year since acquiring the product.

VMware has quietly walked back its SmartNIC ambitions

Fear the deprecation

I'm sure they fear everyone, including nvidia of trying to obsolete vmware, so of course. Hide your head in the sand, they won't get you.

Nvidia shows off Vera Rubin platform for tokenmaxxing

Replacable memory because they are known to fail

I've watched a fair amount of gpu repairs, and seems a known fact the gddr7 chips tend to die, I guess this is nvidia's answer to that - surface mount pluggable memory banks. Guess the can't get better quality, so at least they're making them easier to repair (unless when they don't like the consumer chips, but f those guys).

IBM's AI coding 'partner' Bob hits general availability

The Bobs would approve of Bobcoin.

IBM Bobcoin. Yeah, it's great...

Jaguar Land Rover's cyber bailout sets worrying precedent, watchdog warns

Indian Tata owns them, so...

Tata as an Indian company is one of the worlds largest outsourcing groups for IT services, including Cybersecurity, failed to protect its own infrastructure from attack, and the UK government has to bail them out now?

Both Jaguar and Land Rover are the worst vehicles to retain value and maintain due to them falling apart for pretty much their entire history, it would seem hardly a loss to let die. Seems neither has been a truly British company for a long time (I call them a Tata when I see them), not sure why it is the UK people's problem other than some sorely misplaced sense of national pride in something they don't even *own* anymore.

Malware-laced OpenClaw installers get Bing AI search boost

Bing - "We're still relevant, really"

Bing is just happy someone still wants to actually pay them to advertise with them purposefully, even if it is just malware.

Cisco hikes prices to cover memory cost rises, says you don’t much care

Too big to fail

If you're buying Cisco, you're paying too much already and won't care.

Asda's 'self-inflicted' SAP mess after Walmart divorce stalls financial revival

When does any ERP actually go as planned and on-budget?

Apparently they don't read enough Reg articles to know how *any* ERP project will end.

Spoiler - They don't end! They just continue to sieve money. Oracle, SAP, and anyone else that competes would have it no other way.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

It's not a bug, it's a feature...

Windows doesn't always suck because it's buggy and needs patching like XP certainly did, it sucks because it is nothing more than a spyware and adverting delivery platform for microsoft now, people just also happen to still try to use it as a desktop OS unknowingly. The bloat is simply astounding when using an unmolested home version of the OS packed with ads and games down to the desktop, taskbar, and menus. Even notepad shows you a persistent ad for Copilot now, because what the hell else would you do with AI in a notepad?

I've been using claude code lately, and it's honestly a changing experience for me, so I get why agents could be useful built into the desktop, but it's not useful when you can't trust the tool, and you simply cannot trust Microsoft for anything privacy related anymore.

At this point they've mostly enslaved an entire generation or two of the world population, knowing only Windows for a PC experience, trained on it in schools from early on through college, and having watched it for 25 years as a linux/unix user it genuinely disgusts me. It's like letting the drug dealer set up shop in your schools with your children, first hit is always free you know.

Now you'll take this AI slop we give you and damn well like paying for it too.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Launch admin MMC's, you get blinded by the white

I've been tinkering with server 2025 for a customer, and refreshingly most is dark mode ala other windoze, until you hit the circa 1998 admin MMC's that still dominate any real Active Directory or windoze service administration use at all.

Almost microsoft, almost. Fix the admin tools, please!

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

The great Godaddy outage of 2012

Everyone forgets when Godaddy went down in 2012, much of the internet stopped working. Certainly not because they hosted most of it, but because most used them as a DNS registrar. That day a config glitch sent them spiraling down to take down their entire DNS anycast network globally, causing glue records for some 70M domains to stop working at all. It took a good 12 hours to fix I think with network vendors involved.

Much the same, too many eggs in one basket, and AWS has very large baskets.

Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk

Re: Marc Benioff

The Indian Guru gave him away. Now you know how outsourcing began!

Feds put finger on H-1B lottery scale to favor higher earners

AI == A lot of Indians

Oracle gets to store US users' TikTok data, says Trump

Yeah, let's put Larry Ellison in charge of children viewing habits

He's a nice, stable fellow, what could go wrong? Why go with a lesser evil when Larry is willing and available?

It'll be nice and secure like Oracle products with their 500 security patches at a time they regularly release.

I guess we ought to be glad it wasn't merged into Truth Social.

Microsoft reportedly cuts China's early access to bug disclosures, PoC exploit code

It's 2025 and you just now just realize that's probably not the best of ideas?

I guess we know where the past 20 years of exchange exploits against government have come from.

Trump does a 180 on Intel chief following White House meeting

Another million(s) dollar donation to Mar-a-lago

I'm certain Tan's charitable donation to "Help Donald Trump Grift" fund I'm sure assuaged any concerns the US government had.

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

Who still makes modems?

I assume they eventually realized they can't find parts on ebay for ancient dialup dsx hardware anymore, and it was simply time to cut losses.

I've not looked, but curious if any vendors still make modern wholesale dial bank hardware, and if not, what AOL was actually still using...

Edge case: Opera claims Microsoft still playing dirty with defaults

> This writer recently had to configure a new Surface device and was struck by the sheer volume of nagging and pleading within the operating system to stick with Edge rather than opt for an alternative.

As a full-time Linux user for 20 years, I just went through the same thing, a friend having given me an old Surface to play with fresh win11, and like everyone else, the only thing I use Edge for is downloading librewolf, finding that it literally fought me! First, trying to click a link through bing would refuse to take me there, and just hang mysteriously in the redirection process like some technical glitch. Second, it would refuse to download as "suspicious", and I had to click through a bunch of windows telling it to bypass and indeed download, then keep the file. Third, trying to set it then as a default browser they hide it in system settings now and force you to click every option manually to change to use another browser.

Any normal user would get scared and stop, just giving up and use Edge, which is exactly what they want. Absolutely disgusting tactics, Microsoft is just so sleazy about it now, they should get taken down a few notches. It's a shame our governments are run by luddites or worse.

Microsoft SharePoint victim count hits 400+ orgs in ongoing attacks

Worst run organizations list

If you still run ancient sharepoint servers for any particular reason in 2025, you make the list of the worst run organizations on the planet.

Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack

It's insanity running an actual public microsoft service at all any more, it just should NOT be done. Sharepoint is up there with Exchange on the "just don't do it anymore" list, and if you really must, get 365 services and at least you can't be blamed for not patching it.

Broadcom has won. 70 percent of large VMware customers bought its biggest bundle

Vmware's user base was always the simpleton Windows admins too scared to play with Linux by itself, so no surprised they'd let themselves be strong-armed into another abusive relationship already after Dell/EMC.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Anyone on Gnome team actually use Nvidia?

I have to assume those quick to move toward abandoning X11 for Wayland do NOT use Nvidia, as Nvidia drivers have been mostly rubbish for any Linux Wayland desktops until quite recently, and then still iffy at that. With the dominance of Nvidia in the GPU market share, x11 won't die until Nvidia finally makes drivers work right for it. Because Nvidia has already said there is no major priority for them to support all the graphics features needed for Wayland, it will remain a second-class citizen, thus any distro and desktop that moves away from X11 is directly tying their success to Nvidia to fix their drivers long-term.

As a KDE user, it's made Wayland mostly unusable until the latest beta 570 drivers for me, to the point I'm look at my next system being AMD. Trying one of the latest KDE Plasma desktops, kernels, and drivers with Wayland got me at least 6 crashes in 24 hours, but otherwise rock solid on x11. Have fun Gnome team.

OpenAI to charge $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro

It's $200 to talk to the smart one, or you get the dummy.

I'd mostly given up on using gpt4 for doing complex development as it's forgetful and annoyingly so. Using o1 was refreshingly intelligent and usable, until it's not. I don't want to talk to the simpleton version that forgets every few sentences, I'd rather have the smart one.

Oh, that's $200 dollars, a month... I'll get back to you on that.

No, Broadcom did not just end VMware's flagship VCDX certification program

Yet another cert offically useless

This can be up there with your Netware certifications, and MSDE! Like the IT tramp stamps.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

When has ANYONE EVER seen a successful or *good* Oracle deployment?

What happens when you take the most technologically disinclined part of your business and clash directly with complex software, technology, and clueless consulting/outsourcing? Miserable failure, always.

Now add Oracle being an unmitigated disaster to work with as a company and a solution.

Six IT contractors accused of swindling Uncle Sam out of millions

"There is no place for fraudsters and crooks scheming to manipulate the government bidding process for personal gain."

Too bad everyone in government does exactly that eventually, usually equally for good or bad. IT procurement systems are so dysfunctional either way they end up having to game the system to get anything done, it's just down to the nature of the managers whether they use them for good or bad.

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

First hit is always free.

Same as it's always been.

Workday beats Oracle and Microsoft in UK 'Matrix' ERP deal

Anything but Oracle

After decades of hating Oracle, I can imagine any and every consumer of the product with a need for ERP would rather have the devil they don't know vs. the one they do.

The only people like anything Oracle are the ones that make money from selling it, certainly not using it.

About a quarter million Comcast subscribers had their data stolen from debt collector

Re: Two things...

It was probably the history of ANYONE ever across time that has ever been delinquent with comcast that they sold the bill to those guys to collect on.

What do bill collectors know about IT security? The owner's kid runs the bill payment website from his house. They're akin to used car salesmen and 20x worse for the nature of doing bill collections.

Musk's Starlink rockets to 4 million subscribers

Helps when military adoption takes off for drones

Since finding these in use in Russian and only who knows what other types of intercontinental weaponry used globally, business is good for Musk.

Samsung fined just $8K for exposing chip fab workers to X-ray radiation

At this point the Samsung leadership could go straight Jeffrey Epstein, raping and pillaging on live TV and the Korean government would be ok with it, or a small fine like this. It's just how the Chaebol's roll.

Apple's latest macOS release is breaking security software, network connections

If microsoft did this, they'd be up for regulatory action against them, but since *only* apple, it is glossed over. This is exactly what Microsoft had their little private security conference to discuss how to better windoze security, but not fsck over all the vendor - apple simply didn't care to fsck them over.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

Having worked for dozens of companies consulting over the years, I can say from experience orgs with Teams, it's always an unhappy place that people only use when necessary, and act like big brother is always watching. Slack orgs actually like to communicate and do so freely, spawning non-work interest chat for mutual hobbies, and in general is a much friendlier experience.

Not to mention if you use Teams on anything NOT windows, the experience is downright miserable as anything Microsoft on non-Microsoft devices.

I actually quit a job once because they moved to Teams, or at the time OCS, as it simply didn't work with Linux which I use, so it hobbled my ability to work effectively there.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Oh yeah, Larry Ellison has always been the caring and philanthropic type, sure he will.

Over his cold, dead hands I'm sure.

Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

Microsoft is in a rock and hard place here, either they boot out of the kernel 3rd parties and anger every AV vendor, again, not to mention regulators that force them to allow compatibility, or they are forced to create a new way to allow visibility for these products to work, and anger every AV vendor to re-engineer their software and probably reduce effectiveness.

The one product that won't be impacted is Microsoft's own product Defender for sure, and who will be able to compete with native solutions afterwards?

Either way this is going to probably up-end the "make microsoft secure again" party and cause riots of everyone vs Microsoft, so of course they didn't want publicity for the sh*t show.

House to grill CrowdStrike exec on epic IT meltdown... no, not the CEO

Blame Microsoft, not Crowdstrike

The reasons all AV software is so fragile is that to protect Windows as a perpetually insecure operating system with new exploits found weekly, and they can only protect so closely to the OS kernel that runs the entire thing before they end up destabilizing it accidentally as we saw. Even when they orgs use endpoint security on Windows, it's still not a guarantee to protect the OS and users. Almost every security software has had their Windows enterprise-breaking moment they've done the same prior, only now with the market dominance of Crowdstrike among enterprises, it was far more pronounced.

At this point enough windows source code has leaked over the years or employees leaving after having been exposed to it, and with Microsoft being hamstrung by billions of lines of legacy code across 3 decades no one even remembers now, it is no wonder how easily found new zero-day exploits are still today.

If you want secure computing, you should start with pretty much anything BUT Windows. You can only blame yourself otherwise.

Samsung boosts bug bounty to a cool million for cracks of the Knox Vault subsystem

Maybe they should hire/acquire Cellbrite?

Considering it took Israeli Cellbrite, the worlds favorite mobile malware vendor for government agencies, 40 minutes to unlock the Trump assassin's Samsung phone for the Secret Service, Samsung is obviously not paying the right people enough where other more nefarious suitors are more than willing.

Skype goes ad-free, which is unusual for Microsoft

International Markets

Seems only people still using skype are largely international, and it's probably more hassle than worth to try to keep up with locally relevant advertisements, particularly with EU cracking down on that whole exploitation of human rights thing. Besides, if you're using skype, you're using windows, so they'll just feed you the ad to your desktop anyways!

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

Keep it classy Microsoft!

If Harris doesn't take the bribe, I'm sure they'll find another suitably purchasable politician or 100's that will. You know the Supreme Court is always for sale at least.

You know the FTC is actually doing the right job when...

Tesla sales, market share dip in EU while other EV makers grow

Now everyone knows Musk is a twit

Give the man a soap box to hang himself. Some $44B later, done!

Apple reverses course to approve Epic Games Store on iOS in EU

Epic has themselves become a thing to hate these days, but I love seeing them make Apple squirm.

Imagine that, a government with power over corporations. If only such a thing were possible in the US now.

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

It's funny a company like Broadcom can be so single-handedly polarizing. They're behemoths that drive probably 70% or higher of the Ethernet switching world, but they're just so terrible with anything software, much like Cisco was/is. They bough bad software companies and made them worse with CA and Symantec, the dregs of the enterprise industry at that point in their lives, but buying VMware everyone knew it would be bad - and is!

VMware is used by enterprise shops with more money and bad admins than management brainpower, usually windows shops that are too scared of linux to use it natively, and Broadcom is betting that those customers are so bad they'll take a good reaming to not complain too much, only they are now. What are windows monkeys to do, actually have to use HyperV finally?!

If Hock Tan throws a dog a bone, he doesn't want to know if it tastes good or not.

Microsoft blamed for million-plus patient record theft at US hospital giant

Two words, Internet Explorer

For 25 years, Microsoft pushed the most commonly abused malware engine as Internet Explorer, at its core ActiveX as part of their own dotnet programming languages, ever to be unleashed on the populace, and only then begrudgingly admit to defeat in killing it off having found better adware and tracking in Google's Chrome engine now. Exchange servers are still a constant liability people misuse and abuse, and Active Directory every time remains the common denominator at the heart of most infections due to it's ubiquitous presence in 99% of enterprises today.

If people haven't learned by now to mistrust Microsoft products, they impose their own blissful ignorance.

Apple Intelligence won't be available in Europe because Tim's terrified of watchdogs

Good thing the US and most of the world have no privacy protections, or Apple would run out of new ideas to exploit the populations quickly.

Uncle Sam sanctions Kaspersky's top bosses – but not Mr K himself

I wonder what happens when a nation admits Israel hits war crime status and they have to extricate Israeli technology from government and businesses. They make all the best government malware too, drat.

Intel interrupts work on $25B Israel fab, citing need for 'responsible capital management'

Since they leveled Gaza, maybe Intel is going to make a lowball bid on all that cheap land instead now for their "luxury research park".

Salesforce expects lowest quarterly growth in two decades

Same stench as Oracle or SAP

Salesforce is like the lesser evil of that world that they with Oracle and SAP all divvy up. Even Slack's acquisition can't make them great again as a cool kid, as most of the user base that would use SF just uses Microsoft Teams by default, and people are already over the hype of AI replacing humans to improve their bottom line.

Nvidia faces local competition for its 'China special' GPUs

About those ships circling Taiwan like sharks...

Nvidia will be *the* Chinese GPU if/when they finally invade and take over Taiwan. Let's see how those tariffs and technology bans work when reversed on the western world.

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

When I met my SO 10 years ago, she used an old iphone, and said it was telling her it was full, even though she had deleted everything. I told her it probably was making shadow copies of everything, and it was. After some googling, I found that the only way to delete them was funny enough to use linux to connect over usb (windows drivers disallowed something needed), and use a special tool built to access and delete files for that exact reason. This fixed her problem, but she asked what the heck, and I told her it's so the government and hackers could make sure to get a copy of her naked pics in perpetuity. She changed to Android shortly after that.

Apple is a cult, you're either in, or you're not.

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

When advertisers whine, you know someone is doing something right for consumers.

There is no good reason NOT to block ads, you are literally opening yourself to exploit if you don't. Using the internet without an ad blocker is downright disgusting, I don't know how or why people ever would.