Posts by Alan J. Wylie

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

FIELD / SERVICE

There are plenty of previous comments about the default passwords on VMS.

It's strange that "UETP" doesn't show up on The Register's search.

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

Greg KH's reply on OSS-SEC

https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q3/210

UK.gov's tech department gets the chop after two years

Re: Lord Vallance resigns as Science Minister

Google's search result for "Lord Vallance" in the past 24 hours, for me, returns a hit on the BBC website in "Pidgin"!

Lord Vallance resigns as Science Minister

Lord Vallance's resignation has gone pretty well unnoticed by the mainstream media

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

No Such Agency

Some questions:

Have the NSA so far failed to build a quantum computer?

Have they done so, but not told Trump, because they can't trust him not to be a blabbermouth?

Does Trump know, but has managed to keep his mouth shut?

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Dry broom

A long time ago I worked for an engineering company that had an ancient poster on the wall: "What to do in case of electrocution". If your colleague has been electrocuted, take a dry broom, wrap your flat cap around it and pull him away from the supply.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Re: Links don't change colour after being visited

Yay! Somebody has taken notice of my (and others') complaints about this: it's now been fixed.

Links don't change colour after being visited

I've used /Week for ages, it's far more cluttered now (and to begin with didn't work for a while). Even if I don't visit an article, I use a Firefox add-on to mark it as visited, so I know where I have to catch up to. Now the link stays the same colour after being clicked, rather than going grey.

Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root

A quote from Greg-KH

Subject: Re: Coordinated Disclosure in the LLM Age

We (on the kernel) are seeing duplicate reports of the same issue from

different groups within the time period it takes to get a fix merged

(i.e. just within a few days).

SystemRescue 13 lands with Linux 6.18 and bcachefs support

Tom's root and boot floppy

The small edition of Grml is a half-gigabyte download and if you have a large UEFI System Partition, you can keep the Grml squashfs directly in your ESP and boot it from there, without any removable media, root partition, or anything else.

Memories of Tom's root and boot, except 500 times the size.

1) tomsrtbt is "The most Linux on one floppy disk" for: rescue recovery panic & emergencies tools to keep in your shirt pockets whenever you can't use a hard drive

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: RE: "I want to live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon," the 54-year-old said.

It's been a while since I read /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/, but isn't there a quote in it where the AI says something like "shall I stop hurling steel encased rocks at Cheyenne Mountain, because it isn't there anymore?"

Re: "Built a Fab"?

I can sort of imagine using lasers in some way "dropping" atoms onto a substrate in a way that is already done when doping

Molecular-beam epitaxy perhaps?

A friend of mine used to do this at Heriot-Watt before he retired. Have a look at some of the images on-line for stainless steel flange porn.

Re: Peak Musk...

Like Star Trek, Iain Banks, Asimov, or Heinlein

More likely, Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

P.S., is the phrase "a rack packed full of high-end AI fear" an apposite typo?

RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

tt-rss

I run tt-rss on my home server. Only 287 feeds in my opml file, though.

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

"sophisticated"

“targeted by a systematic and sophisticated attack"

It's always "sophisticated".

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Re: Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals

There's another xkcd sudo related cartoon.

doas

I switched to the Linux port of OpenBSD's doas when I bought a couple of Yubi keys.

systemd already has

NAME

run0 - Elevate privileges

SYNOPSIS

run0 [OPTIONS...] [COMMAND...]

DESCRIPTION

run0 may be used to temporarily and interactively acquire elevated or different privileges.

It serves a similar purpose as sudo(8), but operates differently in a couple of key areas:

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Lucky to still have his finger

I posted this here last year in a thread titled Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

I can still remember, in the early 80's DEC VAX field service engineers removing their wedding ring before working anywhere near the computer's backplane. Apparently the current available from the power supply could heat the ring to red heat in only a short contact.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Useless use of cat

cat PROMPT.md | claude-code

A contender for the Useless use of cat award.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

The answer

For added giggles, they could have asked it for the square root of 1764.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Good timing for purchasing my new computer

31 July, I bought 64GB of ECC RAM.

2 x 32GB Kingston KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA DDR5 5600MT/s ECC Unbuffered Memory DIMM

(KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) £295.33 (+ £59.07 VAT)

Today, it's £489.29 for 1x32GB

https://www.kingstonmemoryshop.co.uk/kingston-ksm56e46bd8km-32ha-32gb-ddr5-5600mt-s-ecc-unbuffered-memory-ram-dimm

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

PERQ / Accent / Mach

Back around 1980, I briefly evaluated an ICL PERQ workstation, running PNX (yes, really!). It could run several other operating systems, including Accent, which was a predecessor of Mach.

Wikipedia articles: PERQ, Accent

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: K&R C

Example:

$ grep -A3 sig_catch sig_catch.c

void sig_catch(sig,f)

int sig;

void (*f)();

{

$ grep sig_catch *.h

sig.h:extern void sig_catch();

$

K&R C

A decade ago I worked for a cyber security company that used qmail. I tried to drag the code kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and failed.

It reminds me of the code I wrote in the 80's, (though I did a lot of linting). No function prototypes or type checking.

Re: Interesting

There used to be licensing issue, too.

Debian Mail Questions

qmail is distributed under a licence which prohibits the distribution of modified binaries. Debian's policy requries that mail transfer agents conform to certain standards in order to be included in Debian as packages. qmail doesn't meet all of these standards in its standard upstream form, so it's impossible for Debian to distribute a qmail binary package which satisfies both policy and upstream

Though 18 years ago, DJB changed it to "Public Domain".

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Alan B'stard in 1991

> Here's an idea... Why don't we plant a tiny explosive charge in every mobile device,

Alan B'stard had an exploding wallet back in 1991.

New Statesman episode: Labour of Love

Capita fined £14M after 58-hour delay exposed 6.6M records

Re: Is that a joke ?

> You want to make an example ? 10% of 2.4 billion is 240 million.

Fine them 10 times the total remuneration, during the year of the breach and the previous and subsequent years, of the members of the board of directors, including all bonuses and resignation pay-offs.

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

"a 400 error page"

I hope that was 451 (Ray Bradbury reference).

Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russia-based Yandex dev

Obligatory xkcd

Dependency, s/Nebraska/Moscow/

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

"Should this data be held indefinitely?"

Birthlink, who keep (kept?) records of adoptions in Scotland, so that children could, if they so desired, trace their birth parents, found out the hard way (BBC) that some records should not be deleted. ICO monetary penalty notice

The UK’s cartographer maps mission to help people and business

Re: 45 years ago

P.S. Here's a photo of Prof Frisch at the 1948 Solvay Conference. Lots of famous names, though it doesn't quite match the one in 1927.

45 years ago

I worked for Laser-Scan Labs in Cambridge and spent a lot of time in Southampton installing a Fastrak for the Ordnance Survey at the time that they started doing digital mapping. I lost track of the number of times I demonstrated it scanning the 1:1250 map of Prebend's Bend (NZ 2741 NW) in Durham.

For a history, see Paul Hardy's web site and in particular his photos. We had lots of eminent visitors: Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and Margaret Thatcher.

LSL was founded by Otto Frisch, I've spotted his name in the news recently: he and Rudolf Peierls did the maths for the feasibility of an air dropped nuclear fission bomb (Prof Frisch, together with his aunt Lise Meitner, coined the phrase "Atomic Fission") and their paper was instrumental in starting its development.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Kernel 6.16 and ancient AMD processors

It was all to do with the new kernel configuration option "X86_NATIVE_CPU"

Optimize for the current CPU used to compile the kernel.

Use this option if you intend to build the kernel for your

local machine.

which uses those gcc options to optimise your build

Kernel 6.16 and ancient AMD processors

Linus also had something to say about my aging AMD FX-8350 processor (from 2012) after I reported that objtool didn't support its instruction set which caused the 6.16 build to crash with multiple errors and warnings:

And yeah, I think it's bulldozer-specific, which explains why nobody sees it (because bulldozer was one of the not-very-great AMD uarchs before they got it right with Zen).

Australia’s attempt to join the space race lasts just 14 seconds

Re: It's not brain science

As recently deceased Tom Lehrer said

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun"

Wikipedia article

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Lenna

I do like that the image that goes with this article on the Latest News page subtly references the "Lenna" image that started it all.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: Ring, ring ...

They are stardust, but they are not golden.

Re: VAX field service engineers

It's not just electricity - just getting a ring caught on something and it's quite painful

My mother was in the WAAF during the war, some of the time she was servicing airplanes. Lots of stories to tell - the technicians were "encouraged" to go up in the plane on the first flight after servicing. Winding up the undercarriage on an Avro Anson. Pilots showing off with aerobatics and trying to impress the attractive young woman sitting next to them. But what sticks in the mind most is the scar from a ring that got caught on the fuselage as she got out.

VAX field service engineers

I can still remember, in the early 80's DEC VAX field service engineers removing their wedding ring before working anywhere near the computer's backplane. Apparently the current available from the power supply could heat the ring to red heat in only a short contact.

And I can still remember FIELD / SERVICE and SYSTEST / UETP too. The good old days of insecurity.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

I once had an email blocked by one university because it referenced The University of Sussex (or was it Essex?)

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

Re: "Commitment" is not enough

Better than the old BS5750.

Some of us are old enough to remember Def Stan 05-21

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Smoking hairy golfballs

They're left with racks of molten silicon

As Jim Gray said: "smoking hairy golfballs"

paper

Interview

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Arthur? Who's Arthur?

Thanks for that. The interview would have been early 2001. I hadn't done any work on ARM for more than ten years at that time. P.S. I got the job.

Please note the "I'll get my coat" icon before giving me a thumbs down.

32-bit registers, 26-bit memory addresses. The upper six bits of the program counter held the CPU flags

I remember an interview where answering one of the questions required realising that since all instructions were word aligned, the lower two bits could be (ab)used for storing state.

"from hand-crafted Arm assembly language to high-level language (eg, portable ANSI C)."

Why not be up-to-date and use Rust?

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Feynman

Plus several hundred for the Feynman title reference.