* Posts by Rainer

376 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2008

Page:

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

Rainer

Nobody complained for years

When the Iranian Ayatollah spewed his usual antisemitic nonsense and was not banned (in contrast to Donald Trump).

But as soon as Elon takes over, everybody falls over themselves to find stuff they can personally attribute to him.

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

Rainer

Re: Do you remember?

That was probably when they were hosted on an IMAP server with little quota.

Rainer

Do you remember?

When Joyent sold "lifetime" hosting accounts that ended up lasting six years (basically, until the servers they ran on started to give in)..

https://www.google.ch/search?q=joyent+lifetime+account

Rainer

Re: Wordpress or ???

The problem with Starlink is that it was always intended only for civilian use. It's in the AUP.

AFU just thought nobody would care.

FBI: Who was going around hijacking Barracuda email boxes? China, probably

Rainer
Holmes

likely true

I looked into this when our appliances were....visited (I am not responsible for them - I would have shut them off a long time ago, and a couple of weeks earlier, Barracuda had suffered some sort of breach for their hosted-service, which it kind-of swept under the rug....

Anyway - I took two of the IPs from the IOC-list and did some digging. At least one pointed to an ISP in Hongkong, boasting great connectivity to China - and prominently accepted various forms of crypto-payment.

I did a reverse-dns search and saw that the IP hosted a lot of domains that looked like they had been acquired from some sort of Chinese domain marketplace.

I mean, the line between "professional hackers for profit" and APT-style, government-sponsored groups is likely very thin anyway, but this one somehow had this "uncanny valley" feeling you get when something is top easy, too simple.

Microsoft DNS boo-boo breaks Hotmail for users around the globe

Rainer

If you manage DNS or mail, you regularly come across a lot of people who, while they have the power to change configs and DNS records, should normally not be let near either systems.

Because they have no f'ing clue about what they're clicking there.

Similarly for SSL certificates.

Why securing East-West network traffic is so important – and how it can be done

Rainer

Re: bad example

The problem was not the cooling units themselves - it was that the 3rd-party doing the remote maintenance on them got breached and while they were only supposed to access the cooling units at Target, they didn't have actual restrictions - likely because those who setup the VPN didn't want to bother with figuring out which 3rd party needed access to which part of the network.

Germany to cut Huawei from networks 'irrespective of costs'

Rainer

Re: Lapdogs

It‘s just another State in the Union now.

Maybe if they lick hard and good enough, they’ll get a star on the flag?

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

Rainer

Re: IPv6-mostly?

I guess most will just put it behind a CD/Proxy like Cloudflare.

Yup. Requirement fulfilled.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Rainer

Re: You will trigger vegans with a reference to cream!

For a pork roast, you have to soak the fat side in water for a couple of hours. Then the fat will get all crispy.

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

Rainer

Host your own

You'll learn a lot about email along the way ;-)

I have all my work-emails on the server back to 2007-ish. They are mostly in the root-folder.

Lately, they've been emailing users about having too many emails in a folder for the archiving solution to work properly.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Rainer

Ridiculous

Does everything has to be politicized these days?

Additionally, it's a slippery slope. What's next? Internment camps, because you don't trust 'em to not do any sabotage-acts?

Remember, folks: this war cannot go on forever. At some point, you will have to make peace again. Politicians make war, but only the people can make peace.

Indian tax authorities raid offices of Chinese smartphone maker Vivo

Rainer

2kg isn’t that much

I mean, it’s like 110k CHF here.

The report fails to mention if it was two kilo-bars or multiple smaller bars?

Also, as with everything from China: did they check that these are in fact solid gold bars or rather gold-plated tungsten bars?

Intel CEO Gelsinger spells out five-year renewal plan inspired by iconic leaders

Rainer

Re: "discrete graphics class performance with the efficiency of integrated graphics"

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Pro Max enter the chat....

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Rainer

Almost everybody in my organization hopes or hoped that they could retire before touching IPV6.

In larger enterprise-networks, NAT becomes a serious problem. And of course, people having barely a grasp of IPV4 after a decade in IT would now need to start over.

In any larger organization, you'll also need some soft of IPAM or even better an integrated DDI solution (most have skipped that because for V4, you can somehow muddle through).

Barclays snubs public cloud giants and hardware rivals for HPE GreenLake private cloud

Rainer

What is GreenLake anyway?

OpenStack? VCloud?

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Rainer

Don't currently own a TV

If I ever have to buy one, I'm seriously contemplating buying a hospitality TV.

Or just one of those huge 40"+ 4k gaming displays and hooking it up to AppleTV.

Biden warns 'real shooting war' will be sparked by severe cyber attack

Rainer

Re: The White House declares and outs itself ..... in a crazy directive

Trump could at least wrangle with reporters and hold his ground.

This guy...I cannot believe the media thought it was a good idea to have him elected.

Though, I suspect they thought that Kamala being sworn in mid-term wasn't too bad either.

I still have a bet with a co-worker that he won't make it to mid-term. Those drugs he gets to prop him up will stop working sooner or later or the side-effects will show.

Scam-baiting YouTube channel Tech Support Scams taken offline by tech support scam

Rainer

Re: YouTube tech support?!

To be fair, if you've got 3.6m subs, you might have some sort of go-to guy at google that manages your account (among others).

Ex Netflix IT ops boss pocketed $500k+ in bribes before awarding millions in tech contracts

Rainer
Mushroom

They could make a Netflix movie out of this.

On second thought, I doubt they will.

RHEL, RHEL, RHEL, fancy that: Rocky Linux would-be CentOS replacement hits RC1 milestone

Rainer
Linux

What's the point?

I mean, CentOS stream will be freely available (probably) and at least with stream, you don't need to wait for the security-updates.

I think a lot of people didn't realize just how far CentOS had been lagging behind RHEL recently. Especially in the early 8.0 days, with months without an update.

There's no such thing as a free lunch - people seem to forget that all too often.

While you can get almost all Linux Open Source software on Debian and Ubuntu, most of the enterprise-software that makes RHEL actually an Enterprise OS is either simply not available there or unsupported.

It all boils down to what you want to do with the installation. The typical Wordpress blog does not really need to run on a 1000 $ / license / year server.

But a service that a couple of hundred or thousand hosts rely on (like IPA or Satellite Server or 389 directory server) is something different.

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

Rainer

Re: Ask any actuary

Still a thing here in Switzerland.

An insurance agent once told me, I pay only a third or less of what a young man from Albania or Kosovo (or really any Balkan country + Turkey) would pay (for my car).

(German, mid-30s then).

Though a lot of insurances have just chosen to not insure a certain demographic anymore.

VMware reveals critical hypervisor bugs found at Chinese white hat hacking comp. One lets guests run code on hosts

Rainer
Facepalm

There's a quote from Theo de Raadt...

It's almost timeless, because he wrote it over 13 years ago:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582

Apple Arm Macs ship, don't expect all open-source apps to work without emulation – here's what you need to know

Rainer

Ran NetBSD arm32 on my RISC PC 600.

Was fun downloading 20-ish floppy disks at uni (and re-downloading a couple of them because the drives in the old Apollo workstations were flaky as hell).

Didn't really know what to do with it, though, at the time.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Rainer

Apple TV app only approved the day before

and then the thing shut down...

Woman dies after hospital is unable to treat her during crippling ransomware infection, cops launch probe

Rainer

Re: Citrix VPN

The vulnerability was apparently mass-exploited before patches were widely installed. Backdoors were installed and the networks were they are still accessible are now subsequently "milked".

Rainer

It's money, as usual

IT-department probably asked for anything that was recommended in the comments above (separation, IDP, whatever) but management told them "No budget, make it work".

A while ago I was at an event (yeah, it was a while ago, because it was still physical and there was food served afterwards) that was primarily some talks about DNS and DNSSEC and also hosted a panel with politicians and engineers where the audience could fling questions at the panel.

There was one guy from a rather large and well-known hospital, begging the politicians on the podium for stricter laws so he could get the manager at his hospital to give him more money to fight the incoming threats. If it wasn't so sad, it would have been comical.

Hospitals in Germany mostly belong to large chains that are profit driven. If they can shave a Euro from the budget by buying cheaper mice, they will.

But if a security-measure costs money to implement and isn't obviously required by law, they'll just skip it "because we've been good so far, right?".

DevOps pilgrim Progress forks out $220m for automation crew Chef

Rainer

Not really surprised

The problem with Chef was and is (AFAIK) that integration into 3rd-party things was always quite complicated.

This is maybe rooted in the idea that chef would be *the* source of truth of an enterprise and not some cog-in-the-wheel.

You can see this when you look how e.g. The Foreman tries to integrate chef in comparison to ansible.

I have done some chef in the past (now everything is ansible) and the learning-curve was comparatively steep.

So, chef's "mind-share" was certainly shrinking.

If you do some google-searches, you also get to postings on reddit where people claim that large chef-environments claim that they became unmanageable over time...

Chef's hosted chef-server (which we never used) was also often criticized for having less-than-stellar availability-figures.

Some aspects of chef I really liked, e.g. the fact that it ran continuously and thus there was little doubt about the state of the node.

AMD pushes 64-core 4.2GHz Ryzen Threadripper Pro workstation processors

Rainer

No idea what I would do with that

I don't game, I don't do ML, I don't do sims, I don't do 3d, I don't to video.

Just a couple of VMs, Youtube, reading El Reg and reddit...

Man responsible for least popular iteration of Windows UI uses iPad Pro as a desktop*

Rainer

You wouldn't either, if you were as loaded as him.

Tom Cruise to increase in stature thanks to ISS jaunt? Now that's a mission impossible

Rainer
Alert

Who‘s paying?

Your guess is as good as mine - but what are the odds that the taxpayer isn’t paying for this?

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

Rainer

And wasn't one of the main attraction points of CES...

that it was at the same time and location as Adult Entertainment Expo?

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Rainer

That's too obvious.

You need to make it more subtle like "Jean", or "Chantal".

The big secret is to let the mark's brain do all the work and fill in the stuff you couldn't (and didn't want to) write on the small label ;-)

You spoke, we didn't listen: Ubiquiti says UniFi routers will beam performance data back to mothership automatically

Rainer

APU2

I use it on an embedded AMD Geode APU2 from PCEngines. This CPU only has one core and thus none of the Intel bugs of the last years.

It's passively cooled and I get pfSense updates for a very long time.

My access point is from Apple. I guess it does phone home a bit, but at least they don't sell to advertisers or hand it through to Facebook et.al.

I hope it will be viable to run your own access point at some time (with open firmware).

BT adopts Ubuntu OpenStack as core brains for its 5G, fibre-to-the-premises rollout

Rainer

Re: No CloudStack then

> So clearly BT decided that their own „cloud”, based on CloudStack, is not

> good enough. I wonder what BT’s tenants will think about that?

It was mentioned here:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/bt_to_sunset_apache_cloudstack_cloud_customer_demand_went_awol/

'No BS' web host Gandi lives up to half of its motto... Some customer data wiped out in storage server meltdown

Rainer

Re: Interesting

Not sure if el reg allows links:

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-June/091254.html

Here you go.

Rainer

Interesting

A while (months at least) ago, somebody on the freebsd-fs mailinglist had an unrecoverable 36T pool after repeated crashes (due to power-failures, IIRC) and the subsequent (uncompleted) resilvers. There was also some sort of metadata corruption.

It was a huge thread that petered out with no solution - until the author came back a month or so later to claim she was able to access the pool again with the help of a commercial Windows-only tool made by a 3rd-party company.

Intel teases NUC-leheads with new desktop-class graphics systems and a fast i9 CPU

Rainer

Re: Displacement??

This is important for people who want to do a full-submersion oil-cooled NUC.

Cops storm Nginx's Moscow offices after a Russian biz claims it owns world's most widely used web server, not F5

Rainer

Meanwhile on reddit

A guy from Russia claims that Rambler.ru was acquired by Sberbank a while ago (largest state-owned bank) and this is the "usual" way to extract money and instill state-influence over a Russian or foreign business. It's "business as usual" for Russia, literally.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Rainer

No Pro Display XDR?

;-)

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

Rainer

Our university lab had somehow enabled xhost+ or the equivalent

Because we could send the output of xview to other screens in the lab.

It was 1996 or 1997 and people didn't have internet in the dorms, so they couldn't enjoy pictures of pretty ladies they downloaded from the internet from the comfort of their own room, mostly. So they did it in the lab.

That usually didn't go unnoticed, but most didn't care.

A friend hat the idea to make a banner, a collage of a stop-sign and other icons found on the internet with the words "Stop. Internet-Police. You've been caught watching porn" - or something like that (I cannot remember exactly).

When we spotted somebody enjoying a set of naughty pics, we sent him the banner via xview.

They'd usually straighten-up (having been thrown out of their porn-trance abruptly and without warning), close all browser windows, log out and leave the lab immediately.

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Rainer

Re: Not impressed with Bose

They came out with the QC35-II to fix it...

And now there's the even-more-expensive next version...

Rainer

I have QC25 NC over ear headphones

The are NOT wireless and there were never any software-updates.

They work very well.

Apple will soon eat their lunch in the earphone-department. Because unlike Bose, they do issue firmware-fixes and if in the rare case these brick a device, they'll issue a fix to unbrick it soon after (or actually give you new hardware).

The AirPod Pro's are already almost as good as the Sony ANCs.

Boffins show the 2017 Nork nuke can move, move, move any mountain (by a meter)

Rainer

Not a big problem, IMO - until

North Korea has better missiles that can actually carry such a thing and land it on target.

I would imagine the "gadget", was rather big. Think 1950s-style Castle-Bravo size.

Until then, I'm not too concerned.

I'm more concerned over India-Pakistan, TBH.

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Rainer

Re: it might he a hipster thing to do

And, if you buy a 2019 Yoga, do you think it's still as well maintainable?

I'd be shocked if it wasn't glued together, too.

Rainer

Re: Selective deafness

13" comes with 8GB, 16" comes with 16GB standard RAM.

If it had a replaceable battery, you'd still need to lug that around, wouldn't you?

While user-upgradable RAM and SSD would be nice, the reality is that most users never do that and rather enjoy sleek and portable devices.

It's a bit like insisting that every car come with feature X, because you need that feature.

Even though most people wouldn't care.

Why should everybody else pay for your special requirements?

Same as USB-C vs. the rest. Apple has decided that the future is USB-C and Bluetooth - and it seems that consumers are currently voting with their feet to support that decision (witness the rising number of non-apple BT headphones and in-ear headphones on the market).

Yes, you need batteries etc. but with the exception of the headphones, I'm with Apple on this one.

For a portable device, less is more.

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

Rainer

Re: Where have I seen this before?

They probably have no-one from the academic body who is willing and capable of administrating this stuff in his spare time.

Rainer

Those calculators are great, though.

At school, a simple one was enough back then.

But at university, I needed a programmable one.

And unless you insist on installing some games on them, there are also far fewer distractions than with a laptop or a tablet.

So, while it costs 100, it's really priceless in overall benefits.

Though, technically, in the exams I had it was mostly irrelevant if you had a result at the end.

You got most points for understanding the the questions, formulating a solution-approach and showing how you'd solve it. That was usually 85-90% of the points.

I actually once forgot mine and approximated most results in my head/on paper. Was still enough for a good exam.

As for the article - I do agree that learning something from a physical text-book is much, much better. You learn best by engaging as many senses as possible. Being able to physically grab pages of a book is invaluable.

At least, they use Apple hardware. It could be Chrome books, ensuring the kids get conditioned from early age to watch ads and buy the products. That would be much worse.

'That roar is terrific... look at that rocket go!' It's been 52 years since first Saturn V left the pad

Rainer

Re: Poor filing practice?

It's a good thing the main architects and developers were Germans coming from WW2. They knew a thing or two about making-it-up-as-you-go.

Baffled by bogus charges on your Amazon account? It may be the work of a crook's phantom gadget

Rainer

Probably not too hight on the list

A lot of people won't even notice the small charges, so Amazon might actually improve its bottom-line by this.

Page: