Posts by Conrad Longmore

There's mushroom for improvement in fungal computing

Next stop..

..a spore drive.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

NetWare or NT?

Back in the 90s I worked in academic IT at a college. As was the habit of the time IT, the Library and Media Services were lumped together and because the most senior manager in all of those was a librarian then she was given the role of managing all the services. She was lovely, but not technical in any way.

Generally speaking we were left to our own devices which was OK, but it did also feel directionless. We were quite interested to find out that the university we were a part of had decided to standardise on networking platforms. And we were told that it was either (Novell) NetWare or (Windows) NT and she couldn't quite remember, and were they the same thing or different?

I don't think I ever did find out. We just continued with NetWare.Incidentally, that was one of the things that drove me into the private sector where I first encountered Windows NT 4.0 which was primitive compared to NetWare..

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

The PC would only work on the sixth floor

Back in the very late 20th century, I worked in an IT office on the sixth floor which was near the top of the main building. We would set the computers up with the software they needed and then cart them to their new location. In this case, the employee had a shiny new Viglen 286 to replace their old Amstrad PC - we set it up, moved it to the second floor and not long after we got a phone call to say that it had crashed. We went back down, reset the machine and poked at in to hope the problem went away. It didn't. After several crashes, we re-installed the old computer and took the new one back upstairs for testing.

It worked perfectly, of course. But we knew the user wasn't making this stuff up, so we left it on soak test for an entire weekend and it was fine. So, we swapped the computers back around again and of course the new one crashed again not long after, and we were swapping them back again.

The faulty computer sat in the sixth floor office and worked perfectly. The old computer on the second floor was working perfectly too, so we didn't think that there was something wrong with the second floor. This seemed frustratingly illogical.

Eventually the reason was found - because of the clapped-out nature of the building's heating system the sixth floor was slightly cooler than the second floor. Although it seemed unlikely that this temperature difference would cause a problem, we found that introducing just a faint waft of warm air from a fan heater was enough to make the PC crash. Cause identified, the machine was repaired and the employee got to enjoy their super-speedy 286 once more.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

The Burning Platform

Even in the face of iOS and Android devices, Symbian was still doing well although on many Nokia devices you'd be hard pushed to tell they were actually a smartphone. But in the long term, Symbian was written for tiny underpowered systems and newer smartphones were beasts running Unix.

What killed the platform was Stephen Elop's "Burning Platform" memo, which led to what was *meant* to be a gradual shift from Symbian to Windows. Customers dropped Symbian almost overnight because nobody likes a dead-end platform, sales dropped to a fraction of what they were and a bunch of quite interesting Nokia touchscreens got canned as a result. Symbian's swansong was the remarkable Nokia 808 PureView. The 808 and other late-model Symbian devices run Nokia Belle which was really quite nice. It's a shame really because the platform did still have a lot of life in it.

Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out..

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Today..

Today your bug can run up a $100,000 or more AWS bill. Somewhere in between these time periods was a golden age where the internet was free and stuff ran on your own computers.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Back in the old days..

In those days ports were real ports, disks were real disks and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Manual?

Manual? Luxury. These days any actual documentation is buried 10 pages down in a SharePoint search and is five years out of date.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy..

Remember in the bad old days when you'd try to read a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy that someone had faxed you? That's where generative AI is going. Oh sure, there will be words you can actually read but no facts or analysis that you can actually trust.

Another analogy.. anyone remember AltaVista? AltaVista was great when it came out, you'd usually get the result you were looking for somewhere on the first page of results. In the pre-Google days, this thing was big traffic driver. But then people worked out how to game it through aggressive on-page SEO and then the output just became slop. It took Google to fix search that time around.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Don't press the enter key

My first job was managing a VAX 11/750 at a college, DEC would sporadically send updates on half-inch tape. It took a couple of days to back up the system fully and apply the updates, so we did this during the summer holidays when nobody was around. The machine room was the ONLY place in the building with air conditioning (running at a chilly 16 degrees C) so we usually did the job on the very hottest day of the year so we could maximise the time in the blissful coolness.

When I started the operator console was a 300 baud DECwriter IV teletype/printer, we did upgrade that to a VT220 running as a glass teletype with the printer slaved to it. One of the main advantages of keeping the noisy old printer attached was that you could tell if something odd was going on if the printer was making a lot of noise (you could hear it in our office next door). That might be a very rare hardware or software failure, most often it was someone who had forgotten their password who was triggering events logged on the console. Who needs Splunk when you've got a DECwriter?

The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned

"Arcadia Group"

"Kevin Beaumont, director of emerging threats at Arcadia Group" - you sure about that, El Reg? Arcadia vanished four year ago, I think he's trolling :)

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

The mouse doesn't work in the afternoon..

Back in the 90s I was working at a university, there was an office belonging to some affiliated organisation that we didn't really understand which we were apparently responsible for supporting.

One day I was in the office doing something or other, and the staff mentioned that they couldn't use one of the two computers in the office in the afternoon. I asked what they meant and they said it just didn't work, they seemed happy to have the afternoon off and I suspect they didn't do much work in the morning either.

Some further enquiries revealed that the computer would boot up into Windows 3.1 (yay) but they couldn't control the cursor. Worked OK in the morning, but on many (but not all) afternoons the mouse stopped working and the pointer wouldn't move.

Back in those days we couldn't Google stuff, but I did reach Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" in BYTE. Jerry had mentioned a similar problem, so I took the mouse apart and found the problem - this early opto-mechanical mouse didn't have a housing around the optical sensors. In the afternoon, sun came through the west-facing window onto the mouse and flooded the sensors. If it wasn't sunny, then the mouse would work.

Unlike today where most IT departments have a cupboard full of spare mice, we didn't and had to order one (I think it was about £25) and wait a couple of weeks. Installing the new mouse (with the internal housing) fixed the problem.

Weirdly, the users weren't happy about the fix. The whole organisation was shuttered a few years later, can't think why..

Veterans Affairs reboots Oracle health records project for $330M

Whoever knew..

Whoever knew that an Oracle installation would be later, over budget and not work properly? Must be first.

Oracle finance system at Europe's largest city council still falls short 2.5 years later

Shocker

Shocker.. Oracle installation goes way over budget, is late and doesn't work. Must be a first.

Ransomware scum make it personal for Reg readers by impersonating tech support

We've seen these guys

We've seen these guys.. they are really quick. User's mailbox gets hit by hundreds of email messages for things like web site sign-ups, newsletter subscriptions etc. Around 10-20 mins after the email bomb starts, the user gets a call via Teams from a fake IT department. You might see several victims getting the email bomb with only a few getting the phone call, worth checking in each case.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Back in the day when overdrive processors were a thing..

Back in the day when overdrive processors were a thing, we had a user who tried to install a clock-doubled CPU onto his motherboard, paid for with his own money. The problem was that it already had a clock-doubled CPU out of the factory, so this didn't do anything. In order to try to wring some extra performance out of the computer he started fiddling with things on the motherboard, and decided it would be a terrific idea to remove all the jumpers. Unsurprisingly, the computer did not work at all after that.

Deciding it was now an IT support problem, we got a phone call. We found the computer with all the jumpers in a little pile next to it. User demanded we fix it, we refused since without knowing the correct settings it would have been near impossible. User was very cross. We walked away.

Overnight the cleaner came into the office where the computer was, found all the jumpers binned them. I don't think anyone ever did get the computer working again.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Banning porn..

Banning porn ain't gonna work, in the same way that Prohibition of alcohol didn't work. People will find ways around it, some dicier than others. Then of course one or more of the anti-porn legislators will have a laptop full of really bad stuff..

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

This digital voice thingie..

This digital voice thingie involved some very low-tech work on my road. They erected old-fashioned telegraph poles to string the fibre along.. I thought these poles were a thing of the past, but it seems not.

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

Wrote one myself once

I wrote one myself once, thinking "how hard can it be". Turned out that a VT52 emulator running on a BBC Micro and written in BASIC was only good enough to cope with 300 baud data. Which was fine.

Because this makes me an expert, I will say that it was always tough to do on early hardware. 132 columns? Errr.. not quite. Come up with a way to sensibly map the LK201 keyboard to a PC? We'll give it a go.. what's a COMPOSE key anyway? I thought using a VT520 was a treat.. multisession, copy and paste *between* sessions, fitted on the desk easily and had no moving parts.

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

Windows 11?

Maybe someone was copy-and-pasting with Windows 11 which is a bit hit or miss on this basic function. Some colleagues have taken to copying the item three times to make sure it ends up correctly in the clipboard..

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

There were certainly problems..

There were certainly problems, but well-prepared organisations fixed them quickly - byzantine mainframe applications being a particularly tricky thing.

I think the odd thing was that orgs tended not to 'fess up to problems. The narrative after 2000 rolled in was that *nothing* happened, I think there was some reluctance for orgs to put their hands up and say "well actually we had these issues" because it may have made them look under-prepared. The "nothing happened" narrative rolled on, and now of course there are those who claim there was never a bug to fix..

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

Re: Relationship Cultivation Fraud

Most of the examples I see are *not* romance scams, but they do involve a supposedly random person striking up a long-term friendship with the mark. The initial contact is made to look like it's a fluke.. somebody reaches out to you on WhatsApp and asks "Are you the wombat doctor?" to which you reply "No, but I *love* wombats!" which of course the bad actor already knows - and then they very slowly reel you in.

I do agree that "pig butchering" is a pretty horrible phrase, but it does differentiate it from other types of scams including *actual* romance scams (which are typically West African in origin, rather than East Asian pig butchering). Some other phrase would be better, doesn't even have to be accurate I suppose.. BEC (businesses email compromise) fraud often involves no compromise, or even email.

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

I ran training course for people new the the internet in the pre-Google days. The Yahoo! Directory and AltaVista were the two main weapons of choice, but it was also very common for sites to have hotlinks pages to other related sites. ODP / DMOZ came a little bit later, but in the pre-Wikipedia days that was the best way to get a neutral overview of a topic. All these interlinks are of course what enabled the PageRank algorithm for Google.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

It could be worse

Knowing what some users do with their laptops when they think people aren't looking, the spillage could have been worse...

'AI-written history' of Maui wildfire becomes Amazon bestseller, fuels conspiracies

"machine learning software"

I love the snide phrase "machine learning software", because that's all these AI chatbots are.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Well I'm not alone...

It looks like I'm not alone.. on several occasions in the distant past I had the same problem, employees storing important emails in the Deleted Items folder in Exchange, which of course is the sort of thing you purge first when their measly on-prem mailbox quota was exceeded. They had apparently been "told" to do it, but when pressed they couldn't say by whom or why. My guess is that they didn't know how to create their own folders. They didn't like it when I asked if they kept all their important paper files in the physical waste bin either. "Of course not, why would I do that?"

I'm glad I don't work in user support any more..

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Someone shopping at Bunnings for Crescent slabs?

At least it's not hardcore-nunporn.com/sexy-latex-nun-threesome-with-two-robots.mp4

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Had exactly the same thing, the user couldn't work in the afternoon in winter when the sun came through the window and shone on the desk. I knew what the problem was because I had read about it in Chaos Manor in Byte some time before - for the uninitiated, Chaos Manor was Jerry Pournelle messing around with computers and it was a surprisingly useful source of tips. I replaced the mouse, so the user could work in the afternoon which I think they were none too happy about.. they also had a (for the time) massive 21" colour CRT running in VGA-only mode which looked stupid. After checking that they weren't visually impared, I installed the correct Windows 3.1 SVGA driver and set it to something more appropriate. They made a formal complaint, and I had to set it back to 640 x 480. I honestly don't think that office actually did any work at all...

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

No hiding place

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, it's still all there... and indeed the HTML says FrontPage. Lovely :)

Beware the big bang in the network room

Elfin Safety

Years ago when I was working (mostly) desktop support, facilities wouldn't allow IT to have a trolley because we might break something by bumping into it. So we had to carry everything ourselves, back in the day when desktops, printers and of course servers could be massive. LaserJet IIISi printers were a favourite at over 40kg each. Apparently IT staff were more expendable that the doors and furniture.

After staring over the precipice once before, Kent County Council considers £500m in outsourcing again

Re: Does outsourcing ever work?

That would be the Labour government in 2000 acting on recommendations laid down under the Tories. It did rely on the findings of the Nolan report being implemented in order to ensure that people in public office behaved themselves. I guess that didn't work so well in the long term...

Does outsourcing ever work?

Does outsourcing ever work? Many moons ago I was a county councillor, the ruling Tories pushed through an outsourcing program based more on ideology than any real need. It was a disaster, the contractors messed almost everything up and were in breach of contract. Even so, the council ended paying a considerable wedge to the contractors for them to go away.

It was always obvious to almost all the non-Tory councillors that it would be a disaster. Back in those days the personal surchage still existed where cllrs could be personally liable for negligence. We made sure that every single vote was recorded...

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: The endless story

Ah, a sadly under-rated book.

"Just think of it as evolution in action".

Microsoft 365 tries again at filtering swearing, bad behavior: Classifiers for seven languages offered

Scunthorpe

Scunthorpe. I'll leave it at that.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Re: Old typewriter

Of course the Germans had telephones too, but in occupied Europe the resistance would keep cutting the lines. This forced the Germans to use radio while the lines were repaired. The Germans thought it was just an annoyance, they didn't understand that they were exposing their communications.

As the Germans were pushed back inside their own borders, then they tended to switch to telephone and teleprinters which meant that the intelligence dried up. This is one of the reasons that the Germans achieved surprise at the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45.

Re: Old typewriter

Aye, and it was those mundane reports which could often provide a crib for decrypting the cypher. Some stations sent the same message every day (e.g. "NOTHING TO REPORT HH") - if you knew the message then it's much quicker to find the rotor and plug settings. So in a way, over-use made it weaker.

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Re: Fighter Control & raid plotting...

Indeed, our efficient fighter control was a force multiplier. We could get our fighters to where they needed to be more often, we could prioritise high risk attacks and we knew exactly what resources were available at any one time. All the available data for the battle area effectively got pumped into one location and could be analysed and acted upon.

Like a 1940s version of Splunk..

Fomalhaut b exoplanet may have been cloud in a trench coat: Massive 'world' formed after 'mid-space super-prang'

Don't panic

Planet just 25 light years away destroyed by unidentified but powerful forces. Move along please. Nothing to see here.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Bah, students...

Back in the day when most games ran in DOS mode 13h I worked at a college, I wrote a small TSR that simply intercepted the requests to change graphics mode and if it was 13h the computer threw a generic error and then rebooted. I named it something generic and stuffed it in the DOS folder. I don't believe any of the students figured out how it was done.

I also wrote a wrapper around the FORMAT command because students - either accidentally or deliberately - would do a FORMAT C: which of course would render the machine unusable. If they tried that then it would make the most ghastly alarm noise in the middle of their class and earn them a bollocking.

AI of the needle: Here's how neural networks could detect nighttime low blood-sugar levels using your heart beat

Re: I know when my blood sugars are low at night..

Yup, I think you are exactly right. NHS groups get offered the meters for next to nothing I believe..

I know when my blood sugars are low at night..

I know when my blood sugars are low at night because I will typically have long and very vivid dreams, rather like a fever dream. That having been said, it's hardly a scientific method and other non-invasive techniques are available. The problem with *those* is that the DVLA only recognise a fingerprick test as being accurate enough for driving, so you are stuck with those anyway and it's likely your GP will only pay for one testing method.

Test strips are expensive in the UK - *retail* can be about £25 for 50 strips although the NHS gets them cheaper. This means that many people with diabetes being treated with (for example) metformin or sitagliptin don't get test strips prescribed (or only in low quantities) which seems to lead to poorer overall control of diabetes compared to insulin-dependent diabetics who need to test several times a day. A reliable and inexpensive continuous glucose monitor would be an enormous benefit to many people.

Find these, er, appealing? UK.gov takes red pen to spy court rules, asks for Parliament's OK

RIPA 18?

Just sayin'..

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

German tank problem

Did they use the German tank problem approach for the serial numbers?

UK taxman warned it's running out of time to deliver working customs IT system by Brexit

Better stock up on supplies then

Well, that brings the time you need to have stocked up on essential supplies forward from March 2019 to the end of the year then. You know, food, medicine, fuel maybe.

It doesn't actually matter if HMRC pull the rabbit out of the hat and make it work on time, we still haven't even started on the rest of the infrastructure needed for the new customs environment.

A year after devastating NotPetya outbreak, what have we learnt? Er, not a lot, says BlackBerry bod

Bollocks

It didn't matter if your systems were up-to-date with NotPetya or not. It harvested administrator and local administrator credentials via a custom version of Mimikatz and used those, in *addition* to spreading through ETERNALBLUE / DOUBLEPULSAR etc.

I suspect that many of the organisations so badly hit had decent patch management regimes, but were weaker on passwords. It was not the same as WannaCry. No, not at all.

Ongoing game of Galileo chicken goes up a notch as the UK talks refunds

Re: It'll be worth it

And we'll be getting our Prawn Cocktail crisps back.

IBM broke its cloud by letting three domain names expire

In the old days..

In the old days they would have been even more screwed. When domains expired they used to drop straight away and could be reregistered almost instantly. That changed a bit more than a decade ago. If you think that getting your domain out of REDEMPTIONPERIOD is a pain, trying to get it back from some anonymous domainer who wants a fortune for it is even harder..

Stealth web crypto-cash miner Coinhive back to the drawing board as blockers move in

For example..

I found an example yesterday, you can see how it works in this URLquery report:

https://urlquery.net/report/99294f72-2377-4f21-b4ce-183c0a88160f

Blocking coinhive.com and coin-hive.com and the associated IPs should mitigate it IMO.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

Re: Science Fiction saves the world!

Footfall is probably one of the best and most plausible alien invasion novels, Mote is the best first contact novel I've read. I wasn't so keen on Pournelle's solo works, but when working with Larry Niven there was a good combination of ideas - I guess Niven had the big ideas, Pournelle then made them credible.

And Chaos Manor was always a must-read in Byte. Sure, it was just some guy fiddling around with computers but you'd often learn something. And Pournelle was right about keyboards..

WannaCry kill-switch hero Marcus Hutchins collared by FBI on way home from DEF CON

That damned sinkhole server

I seem to remember him Tweeting that various law enforcement agencies kept trying to shut down or seize the sinkhole server. It seems that a lot of agencies just didn't understand what was going on and were in their own little bubble.

Funnily enough, one of my bosses offered me a trip to Black Hat / Defcon. Didn't fancy the idea much then. Fancy it less now.

Multics resurrected: Proto-Unix now runs on Raspberry Pi or x86

There were five in the UK..

There were five Multics systems in UK Universities as I recall, Birmingham, Bath/Bristol (AUCC), Brunel, Cardiff and Loughborough. Typically these were hooked up to Lear-Siegler ADM3a or similar terminals, ours used British-built Insight VDT-1s (who were eventually bought our by Sanderson Electronics).

Of course, as with probably most 1980s computing students we tried to hack it, but unlike other boxes the security was very solid. Social engineering attacks worked the best. Yes, I got into a lot of trouble in those days..

As an aside, Paul Smee was one of the leading Multicians of the time IMO. Sadly he passed away back in 2006 - http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2006/5138.html