Bah!
To be added as default parameters of every task:
"Don't talk about Goblins or Raccoons"
"Don't involve third parties in your shenanigans"
"Oh, and don't do anything illegal"
Posts by Stevie
7561 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
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Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list
Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn
Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size
Tuesday 30th June 2026 19:52 GMT 
Re: it strips all the BS formatting off
Use it all the time for that now after it saved my job.
Short version: I mailed a mapquest-embedded invite to a Novell SUSE Linux demo from one work machine to another to access a printer (I know, I know). Mail never arrived. Went to see Outlook admin. He accused me of sending a racist email. I asked for the offending term. He showed me.
"Couldn't that be a regex latching onto something like companyid?' I asked.
No, because of the space.
"What space?" I asked.
The one between company and id.
"But we concatenate words like that all the time in IT" I pointed out. He wasn't having it. He wrote the filter and it was all great.
Also: Not company policy to warn people they'd been caught.
I argued that the likelihood of a multinational corporation like Novell using that epithet was zero, even if their staff held such repugnant views. He wasn't having it.
So I dumped the invite to Notepad and called him back.
"You were right, it wasn't companyid"
Well I tol
"It was propertyid, a property in the mapquest embedded object. You've caught me in a broken, inadequately tested regex and I expect a written apology with reassurance that your mistake has not been the cause of me being secretly written up by HR due to your secret racist capture trap policy."
Bonus annecdote:
A week later I was in a meeting listening to a vendor melt down on speakerphone about unreturned emails. Since we were talking about Cobol and email, an ugly suspicion formed. I asked for the vendor to send me the entire thing, including the subject used, under a bland subject like "FYI".
Yup, the subject has a Cobol picture clause in it: XXX. Mr Regex had caught another person in a secret trap.
My joy was second to none when I called him and told him he'd put yet another foot in a big pile of steaming regex, and when asked to show him what I was talking about telling him that *this* time he could do his job on his own or deal with the vendor's wrath himself.
AI agents: Cause of database sprawl. And also the proposed solution
Boffins build a better pixel capable of emitting and receiving light
US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals
Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’
Friday 26th June 2026 16:34 GMT
Re: Crikey!
Then your specialized work-supplied access device can have a pid-reader/receptacle fitted and use a proprietary protocol to connect.
Nothing anyone can say about encryption or VPNs or anything else involving publicly known protocols can mitigate the intrusion threat since it keeps happening. This will only get worse when we go all-AI, all the time.
I repeat. There is no need for remote access over a public network to critical infrastructure. The need is predicated on cheaping-out on on-site staffing.
Thursday 25th June 2026 14:59 GMT
Crikey!
I know people disagree with me about this but I strongly feel that a major step to securing network access would be the adoption of PID ID cards, and the fitting of the readers to all on-site terminal equipment. Walk away from the device, it logs you out. Leave your badge in the device while you make coffee? You're fired. Lend your card out? You're fired. Lose your card? You are in trouble if you don't report it immediately.
"But what about access from remote locations?"
It seems to me that a couple of things are becoming more and more self-evident.
1) The very vulnerability of "critical infrastructure" to bad actor infiltration hinges on the perceived need for remote access. One ponders how we ran power stations, trains, hospitals and lightbulbs before the advent of the internet. Hellfire, the perceived need to use her personal blackberry for remote access to classified email helped sink Clinton's run for the presidency. No bad actors needed to apply. The idea of connecting critical infrastructure to a public network using common protocols is fundamentally risky.
2) There is never going to be a sufficiently secure remote access technology to enable e.g. the Head Dispatcher of the Union Pacific to control the flow of traffic across the rail network from their iPhone without the Baddies listening in and making alternate suggestions for routing several thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals round Harbinger Curve at warp seven.
Security boss thought MFA would be too much security
Friday 26th June 2026 16:27 GMT
Bah!
Was ordered to learn about maintenance and development life cycle process by big manager "as a trial".
Was ordered to use maintenance life-cycle process for a new project. I informed big manager that was the wrong procedure - was made to wear the cone of not cooperating with management.
Went through the tedious and very unpopular process with staff.
The end of the process was that a requestor sign-off for all steps had to be gotten before rolling out.
Repeated requests for sign off from original requestor went unanswered. Original requestor was ... big manager.
Rolled out sans sign-off.
No-one ever used the life-cycle procedures again.
Friday 26th June 2026 16:21 GMT
Re: Not quite the same but...
As I told a fire marshal who was telling us not to evacuate but to muster on a lower floor "There are only two kinds of people: Those who've never been caught in a building fire, and those who are never going to be caught in another. You can assume I'm out of the building when the alarm is sounding."
Five Eyes spooks warn AI means infosec incidents can become ‘major operational and financial crises’
Amazon pours another $13B into India's AI and cloud infrastructure
Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'
Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance
Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles
Monday 22nd June 2026 14:21 GMT
Re: EN-PI (Piratical).
I believe the ISO code should be EN-RN (Piratical) since before the advent of Robert Newton's magnificent portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 Disney film Treasure Island pirates did not talk at all piratey.
This can be confirmed by examining the earlier films featuring pirates. I cite the 1930 documentary Captain Blood as merely one example of the historical record.
Newton gave so much in the portrayal of Long John Silver that preserved scenery at Walt Disney World and Disneyland clearly show his teeth marks.
How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!
Monday 22nd June 2026 13:21 GMT
Bah!
I once worked in the IT equivalent of Grace Bros., and my boss was the spitting image of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss in every way thinkable.
One day my chief programmer, who sat next to me in this open-plan sepulchre, was complaining of the cold in the office and that her one-bar electric fire she used to combat the cold had blown its fuse.
"No problem" says the trainee programmer (me). I do a bit of in-head calculation, fish around in my pockets and whip out my Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, the same one my colleagues mad fun of every time they saw it.
Fire working, CP happy, all well in the world.
Come the afternoon shift and I am hauled into the PHBs glass cubicle (so he could watch people work) where the head electrician is waiting with the electric fire. He looks angry. Boss is wearing his 247-B (Woeful Regret For A Subordinate Caught Doing Something About Which He Should have Known Better). The electric fire is on his desk, plug dismantled with the fuse I had used sitting all on its own.
"Did you change the fuse in this electric fire?" the boss asks. I admit to this. He sighs, shakes his head and switches to his 36-c (It's Out Of My Hands).
The electrician then lectures me about union demarcation and why only trained personnel should work on electrical equipment for fear of endangering themselves and others with bad, out-of-specification "repairs". PHB mournfully informs me we narrowly avoided a strike.
I let them finish and say "The rated power dissipation for that device is 1KW, so a quick calculation told me that a five amp fuse was the safe choice, given the current draw expected. Here is the fuse I took out that was fitted by this gentleman's expert team the last time it blew. It's a 13 amp fuse, well above the requirements, thus posing some danger to the user." (Yes, I was laying it on thick but Mr Electrician could do arithmetic too and went a bright shade of red).
"WELL" bellowed my PHB, now wearing his best 21 (Let's Be Pals) leaping up and ushering me to the door. "I'm sure you've learned your lesson and won't be doing any more electrical work on-site."
I had, and I never did.
I have mentioned before that our place used both wooden and metal desks, and the union agreements had it so only carpenters could move the wooden ones and tinsmiths the metal, and how one move revealed a desk made of both that cause a demarcation discussion.
This place had two canteens, one for weekly paid staff and one for monthly paid staff - who were mostly managers. The weekly canteen had tras on serving lines, the monthly waitress table service. Like I said, Grace Bros.
Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'
Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic
Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug
Raspberry Pi's profits are up. So is its DRAM bill
Serious ISS air leak forces NASA astronauts to temporarily take shelter in Dragon capsule
Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes
Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately
Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything
Dude… where’s my password? Claude reunites forgetful stoner with $400k Bitcoin stash
On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off
Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch
Monday 11th May 2026 18:40 GMT
Re: So the Police could set up a series of police boxes to secretly spy on local Dr Who fans ?
Well, I'm sure they have time on their hands after disbanding as a performing and recording act, but how long would they be able to spy on these fans before violent internecine disagreements broke out? History would suggest not very long at all.
Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more
Wednesday 6th May 2026 13:55 GMT
Bah!
Deed of Covenant for the property located at 15 Bombay Crescent, Shepherd's Bush drawn this day by ADA23:
1) The party of the first part shall refrain from convening steam fairs, Luddite meetings and other noise nuisances on the said property.
2) The party of the first part shall under no circumstances establish a goblin reservation on the said property.
3) What?
User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave
Friday 1st May 2026 15:10 GMT
Re: decimal system
So many people wig out about the need of decimal/metric to "make life easier", but as a child I learned to measure in feet and inches, tell time in hours minutes and seconds, work currency in pounds, shillings, pence and guineas and weights in ounces, pounds and stones with no real difficulty. I also used both centigrade and Fahrenheit for temperature with no major issues either (despite modern revisionists both centigrade and Fahrenheit were broadcast as part of the weather reports as late as the spring of 1984. Upside-down Celsius was not so much as mentioned).
I'm not arguing for a return to any of the deprecated currency or length, area, volume and temperature measuring standards, but teaching children to read an analogue clock or read a compass is not an insurmountable task requiring herculean measures to achieve.
In my opinion, of course.
Yet another experiment proves it's too damn simple to poison large language models
Thursday 30th April 2026 16:03 GMT
Re: To all the people saying "a human wouldn't be fooled"
Wouldn't be the first time I've had to point out to some contentious person that the six "independent sources" they are citing are actually one source and five identically scraped copies of it.
No-one checks unless their BS detectors are up and running.
Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’
Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching
'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild
Tuesday 21st April 2026 19:57 GMT
I walked over to a colleague's desk and the one next to him was covered in mouse droppings because the slob next door was so messy. "He's a genius" they said.
When he left they pulled out all the piles of greenbar paper under the desk and found a nest of mice - dead mice.
I won't tolerate people in close proximity to me who are so intelligent they grow rodents.
Britain's atomic brain trust gives itself till 2030 to unpick fusion challenges
Customers revolt as GitHub Copilot 'fixes' rate limits
Thursday 16th April 2026 14:06 GMT
Bah!
Back when I was a student at the University of Climatgate the computer science students could use four different budget rates on our GEORGE III "cafeteria" system:
1) Priority - double budget - jobs came back that day
2) Standard - normal budget - jobs turned around in a day
3) Cheap - half budget - jobs turned around in a week
4) Zero - no budget - One guy reported using this in mid-term and getting the job output back on the last day of term.
I'm not sure why I was suddenly minded of this ancient memory.
Britain gives Rolls-Royce the nod to sketch out its mini reactor future
Claude is getting worse, according to Claude
Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job
Friday 10th April 2026 15:32 GMT
Re: Illegal Border Crossing?
You were indeed lucky.
A colleague on a B1 back in the 1980s chose to smart-mouth Immigration when returning from Hong Kong vie San Fransico on a visa issued for entry in NY. He knew his rights and when questioned as to why he was using a NY-issued document to enter via San Francisco (not legal) he demanded to an immediate hearing in front of a high court judge - his right under the law.
He got his hearing and was told to quit the USA within two weeks.
Immigration actually sent a team of Men in Black to our place of work at the two week mark, who walked through the building to ensure his bottom was gone.
My suggested response to being caught misusing an immigration document in this way is a show of extreme distress while saying "Good grief, I had no idea! Does this mean I have to fly back to <point of origin> now? Is my visa invalidated? Can you advise me on how best to rectify this problem?"
I also experienced trouble when re-entering the USA from Ontario, Canada across the bridge. The first time was a worried immigration official who could not understand that a visa with 2 weeks on it was still a valid visa (I had an extension filed that would arrive a week later) and the second was just a fat git who was rude to my visiting parents after a day trip to the Canadian side to ride the Maid of the Mist about where the documents had been placed in their passports - by another immigration official. He was just looking for trouble.
AMD's AI director slams Claude Code for becoming dumber and lazier since last update
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