Posts by Mike Pellatt

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Re: Anyone else remember the days...

Well, no, you didn't actually own the software you thought you'd bought.

What you owned was the media it was supplied on, and a license to use it.

Just like recorded music.

Use it in contravention of those license terms, and it's quite possible that you'll have your collar felt by some industry shakedown organisation or other.

Just any small business who wants to play music on the radio in the workplace or retail outlet.

So, just as contraventions of music licenses are easy to spot by walking down the road and going into shops, software licenses are now easy to enforce thanks to universal connectivity.

Dear Oracle, we need to talk about the future of MySQL

Re: Where does MariaDB figure in this?

As soon as Oracle got their paws and MariaDB was launched, I have never, ever voluntarily used MySQL. The have diverged though, and in my last full-time gig, we had an external dev who'd used some new MySQL-only features, so I held my nose and installed it in prod ☹️

It does feel weird to read a whole article about MySQL with no mention of MariaDB in it.

MPs brand NS&I's £3B IT overhaul a 'full-spectrum disaster'

Re: Business as usual

The job of Parliamentary Select Committees is to scrutinise what's being done.

It's hard to scrutinise something that hasn't started.

Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators

Re: "nearly always drops packets during that process"

Given that the UDP services I use, which ofc do any necessary retransmission at the app layer, run without missing a beat these days, I'm pretty sure that assertion isn't still the case. POTS VoIP - perfect. WhatsApp - perfect. Zoom - perfect.

2+ years ago was a different story, but Starlink have clearly put massive effort into seamless handover. As well as terninal-base propagation times, reflected in RTT, and max speed.

There were multiple terminal firmware updates in a week in 2024. It's dropped to less than one a week now .

Cisco finally fixes max-severity bug under active attack for weeks

I've always considered bundling functionality into black-box "appliances" a Bad Idea.

This is the perfect demonstration of why.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

Re: SSSL?

It was Exmouth Junction box that was closed as there were no trains down the Exmouth line either.

Nothing to to with Basingstoke.

Re: SSSL?

Signals if you're lucky.

The line between Exeter and Salisbury had no trains for the best part of this morning.

Because the signaller hadn't pitched up.

Unbelievable.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

This "nobody" does think it's wrong, because given that the large supermarkets tend to be accessible only by road, it discriminates against non-drivers, who will already tend to be financially challenged.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Yeah, my favourite was my neighbour who insisted that the terrestrial TV had gone to fuck because our predecessor had installed $ky. Which had an entirely separate cable run. My repeated explanations that this was impossible since the frequencies and reception methodologies were different fell on deaf ears, so I'm afraid I had to resort to pointing out that I had nearly 60 years of electronics and RF experience, including an electrical engineering degree from one of the world's top 10 universities.

Still didn't believe me.

X shuts down European Commission ad account after €120M fine announcement

Re: X? Why X???

"drives conversations"?? Don't make me laugh.

I've never heard a pub conversation anywhere near as bad as the shouty uninformed crap that passes for debate on Xitter.

I do have to say that Wootton posting a video of himself pretending br respectful to HMQ Elizabeth's memory was a laugh, though.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Vendors...

And of course they now all need their own DB admin.

Or every DB is running sub-optimally.

Still, once it's all in the Datalake, who cares about the access controls?

Re: Lost for words

Yeah, me too of course.

I find accounts package developers are the worst, going back to the early 1980s (in-house devs on an Olivetti S6000)

The most recent one was, of course, a Windows one who told me it absolutely had to run with Admin privs. Asked 'em why - "because it has to write to the registry".

Turned out to be just one key, so created an account for the app, changed the privs for the one key to that account, job done.

Unbelievable yet unsurprising. The usual cavalier attitude to security.

Proxmox delivers its software-defined datacenter contender and VMware escape hatch

I'd imagine if running an MSP you'd actually be paying Proxmox, so the answers to your question will be "yes". Proxmox are one of the good boys when it comes to the free(beer)/paid-for equation.

IMHO, obvs.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: Have we been here before?

I came here to mention DECUS, but you beat me to it.

And after copyright, along came software patents. Patenting algorithms. Madness.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Single point of failure

If he's spending 9% of his time installing TLS certificates, he's taking the p**s.

That should all be automated. And it'll soon need to be, or he'll be spending 100% of his time doing it.

Re: How do you create a single point of failure for a chunk of the net?

One of which should be MSF or its equivalent in your geography.

Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer

Didn't happen in the last one.

I was watching my stats very carefully as the latest huge CME hit, and Starlink didn't miss a hit, unlike last time.

2 years' use of it says that pretty much every aspect of the service has improved over that time, and I'm quite sure they're continuously tuning how they handle space weather. Experience of operating will help them hit the sweet satellite reliability/service resilience spot.

Quite handy the latest solar max seems to be coming hard and early!

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: "Tales from the pit"

'eee ba gum lad, when I were young that were all we had. I go back even before the technical Usenet groups. Yards and yards and yards of shelves of manuals. Thank heavens people knew how to index properly.

Re: "Tales from the pit"

Maths is, basically, formalised abstraction.

And abstraction is crucial to good systems design (which leads, one would hope, to good code)

Me, I never really got my head around mathematical notation systems which are key to understanding and handling its abstractions. So I've always been frightened of it. That, and learning how to integrate, which in my day was about pattern recognition so you could spot the right technique to use. Numerical methods have rendered that skill from the 1960s totally redundant.

Now, where's my slide rule and log tables?

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Re: A little background.

Before coming to the comments, on reading the article every neuron was screaming "what abour security??" So it was great to find this little group of comments

Your analysis of how we got here is fantastic. I'm also reminded that in the early days of the development of IPv6, a whole IPSec-based encryption system was designed at the packet level. Cue much debate,with the final unsurprising but depressing decision that security was out of scope of this particular protocol spec or at the very least wouldn't be mandated, which ofc for internetworking has the same effect.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

Haha

Hahahaha

You miss a crucial point in this. The desire will be to outsource management of the system, because reasons.

But the outsource suppliers will say "can't have that open source stuff, because there's no-one to sue if it all goes wrong". Because they don't actually want to take the risk that outsourcing is meant to transfer to them, but shift it somewhere else - and they don't understand that key part of the GPL - "if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces" - with the implied "so you can put it back together yourself"

Since I don't give a sierra-hotel-one-tango any more as I've retired and am now a stroppy parish council chair I can tell you all that I actually heard this from Cable & Wireless in the mid-noughties when a secure email system for local authorities was being looked at, and one of the district councils in Somerset, IIRC, had already developed one. C&W wouldn't consider taking it on and managing it for the sector for that very reason.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Ouch

You were doing so well with that explanation until you used that awful phrase "reaches out"

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

VoIP phones generally provide dialtone from the ATA. Regardless of whether a SIP registration is active. Certainly the case for my Gigaset.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: I'm curious...

Oh God. You've reminded me of the Olivetti S6000. It was a rebadged version of some American kit. Microdata?

But then, as they did, Ivrea set some NCGs onto it. They produced a hard disk interface that ran over HP-IB/IEEE488. It sort of ran fine-ish. Until paged virtual memory was implemented in the O/S. That did for it.

Olivetti had a habit of setting poorly supervised NCGs on projects. This also produced an OS written in Pascal. That didn't end well either (it was binned in the UK, and the previous gen of OS run on the new hardware. Thus was the Abbey National contract, and quite a few others, gained)

Level-10 vuln lurking in Redis source code for 13 years could allow remote code execution

Garbage collection. Again.

Oh look. Another vuln from a language/system that uses garbage collection.

I've got a novel idea. Keep track of the memory you're allocating, free it when you don't need it any more. Relying on some underlying runtime monitoring isn't the way to do that.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Re: Added value

In which case it wasn't F/OSS in the first place.

Re: Added value

Yeah, I've seen that attitude. I bet they don't ensure a bulletproof escrow agreement for the code they're licensing, in which case the value of the support contract/SLA and indemnity they think they're getting is precisely zero.

DDoS is the neglected cybercrime that's getting bigger. Let's kill it off

Re: Effective defense against DDoS ..

> You can't sell a device without an electrical safety cert or a RF compliance cert.

OK. You carry on believing that those regulations are adequately enforced.

Microsoft puts the squeeze on onmicrosoft.com freeloaders

Re: Thank you

I first came across onmicrosoft.com when taking over the admin of an existing 365 account.

My first thought was "why?" It feels like a left-over artefact from the early development phase of 365.

That's probably exactly what it is.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Come back when there are personal electronic devices available that are usable by people with any disability or cognitive impairment that exists.

Until then, take your your ableism and ageism and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine.

Oh, not forgetting the homeless who'll have a little bit of difficulty finding a power source.

A bit of kindness towards people who struggle wouldn't go amiss.

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

Re: This one of the few use cases for blockchain

I'm completely out of touch with the latest iterations of blockchain technology, but isn't there some issue with exponential increase in computation as you add to the chain? If so, tends to make its use for log/audit immutability proof a tad tricky.

Microsoft blames 'latent code issue' after Windows 11 upgrades sneak past admin blockades

That's the inevitable consequence of bell-curve driven hire-and-fire.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: rare occasion

What Openreach call a CBT - Connectorised Block Terminal. I think they're the same thing, just given different names by different manufacturers/operators/geographies.

Re: rare occasion

Oh yes, I'm 100% sure.

I used to work for for said altnet.

Re: Hole reuse

"If Carlsberg did roadworks...", perhaps?

Whereas today with the private sector doing it all, I've been waiting, let me see, 7 years for fibre. And still no sign.

The private sector keeps refusing to do it unless they gets shedloads of taxpayer money, and even then can't be arsed to actually deliver.

And even then, once they've done it, they have to pay back some of it because it turns out more people sign up than they thought (see BDUK phase 1 gainshare - yes I know that was FTTC)

Re: rare occasion

Just got to look up on the poles here. Not just abandoned fibre, but MSTs too, all around the place too.

Yep, it's an altnet that ran away.

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Re: But why tho?

This. However much you try and bend one system to look and behave like another, there will always be stiff bits that won't bend.

Embrace it, run with what you have, changing how you work when swapping systems helps keep the brain active.

And what is this "text editor" for MacOS of which the author speaks? What's wrong with vi in the command window?. Works for me.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Enslave humanity?

You've made the classic mistake of misunderstanding Democracy there.

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people"

If the outcome of a particular version of government claiming to be a democracy isn't the net benefit of the people (and that doesn't mean "a majority of the people") then it's demonstrably not a democracy.

Not by that definition, anyways. Of course, even the Greeks had ways of redefining democracy, by excluding some people from their definition of "the people"

Re: In any unstable system with a feedback loop.....wild output swings

But, as the parent comment says, the work involved in verification is effectively unbounded, thereby rendering AI useless.

With you on the GIGO bit though - I've been saying for some considerable time now that AI will be a demonstration of GIGO on a global scale. And, boy, does the internet have a s**tload of garbage available for AI training.

What we see here is a demonstration that garbage in can create garbage out elsewhere in the system where non-garbage has been inputted.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Re: All Live Operational Virtual Environment Systems are Go.

Have you seen Micah HG on Facebook?

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Wrong - digital businesses will be digital

"What is overlooked in all of this is that when working from home the employee needs to have an appropriate environment to work in.

Offices pretty much guaranteed that"

Oh, don't make me laugh. Every office I've worked in over the last 15 years had air handling that provided hot spots and cold spots. In modern builds and refurbs. So half the people on the floor wanted the temperature up and half wanted it down.

If that fundamental isn't right, you can forget all the rest that you list.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

It all started that fateful day in 2016. I was on the riverboat on the way to Canary Wharf the morning after. It felt exactly as you describe.

Whilst Crossrail was ridiculously late, and ridiculously over-budget, thanks to being run as a load of projects, rather than a programme, it's exceeded all expectations in terms of usage. Even with the crap infrastructure west of Padders. So that's success on 1 out of 3 of your criteria :-)

Re: Britons: is the detection of potholes the problem, or the fixing of them?

People say the same about driving into Devon from Dorset.

But then Devon CC are quite open that they're only doing safety-critical road repairs. Which means only potholes that have been reported by the public and meet their "safety-critical" criteria - >40mm deep, and "the size of a dinner plate" across.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Re: This is certainly on brand for Matt

Indeed. I can't remember when it was that the hosted wordpress.com came to life, but I seem to remember thinking at the time that it all seemed a bit shitty. It seemed like an attempt to get do a bait and switch to get people off the free (as in speech) WordPress and into something that was being proprietised. Can't remember what it was about it that made me think that, though.

UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push

Re: wouldn't call him an expert more a blog writer / press release regurgitator

Unlike all those "trade journals" which do exactly what you say, Mark regularly pulls apart press releases, drills down into the detail to find out what's really going on, and calls out, sorry, "seeks clarification" on the bullshit. You do him a disservice.

Yeah, there are a lot of BT shills in the comments. Such is life. He's recently started moderating comments, so I guess the more extreme are getting mod'ed out now. Or maybe just the spam and abuse.