Posts by Vincent Ballard

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

My local airport used to have a sign informing costumers about their rights if their flight was cancelled.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Another brexit benefit

You were both part-right. Monty was right that Schengen and freedom of movement are different things, but Schengen is relevant to EU citizens too: it's not just a unified visa. In particular, I'm thinking of Benelux where one road near a border (can't remember offhand which) is jam-packed with petrol stations because the tax is cheaper in one country and lots of people border-hop to buy petrol. That would be a lot less practical without Schengen.

Re: They were already doing this, at least for photos

Photos and information on your passport is probably already in a database belonging to gov.uk.

Re: I have been unable to find out how it applies to folk like me

Carte de séjour, FYI. Mine is issued by Spain but still has the French words on it.

Re: Another brexit benefit

Schengen is about border controls, not freedom of movement. Any EU citizen can move to any EU country and stay (technically, provided they find work within 3 months or are studying or retired). That is what "freedom of movement" refers to. What Schengen does is allow travel between countries without having to stop and show your passport.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: Many moons ago, when I was gone for a week ...

British passports did until some point in the 1980s. (Wikipedia says 1982, but the document it links as a reference says 1984).

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Re: Don't see the problem

You appear not to have read more than the title, and not to have understood that. This is not about the malware and slop in the store: it's about the malware and slop which isn't in the store.

Re: Good news! Great! Thanks Google ...

I need apps because I want to do things with files which are stored on the SD card. Putting all my photos, music etc. in the cloud without a local copy would be idiocy; keeping it all in a browser's LocalStorage cache would prevent me copying to/from my desktop computer or switching browser.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: It's not such a big problem out of museums, I suppose.

And to back up your point, not in avionics, but today I've run into a problem because I updated our TLS certificates last week and one client has an Android tablet which is older than the CA's root cert and does not appear to easily support adding trusted roots.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

Re: My irony meter went SPROING!

When I moved overseas from the UK, I tried to get copies of my medical records, because obviously my host country's systems aren't integrated with the NHS. My GP was able to give me a copy of a file with letters from/to my previous GPs, but they didn't have the detailed results of the day I spent in hospital having various tests after a previous GP had detected a worrying symptom. So I wrote to the hospital which carried out the tests, and they informed me that when I moved out of their Trust area they deleted all my records. I now know (following a different GP referring me to a specialist in a different hospital about a different symptom about a decade later) what was behind the original worrying symptom, but it would be nice to have the early record for longitudinal analysis.

PS I now try to get printouts of all test results and file them myself.

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Re: Can't say died

I've seen "AITM" (Adversary...) recently.

Re: My inclusive reply

Given Microsoft's goal in % of code written by LLMs, I think they've gone for no-sanity checks.

Kremlin goons caught abusing ISPs to spy on Moscow-based diplomats, Microsoft says

Re: WAT?

Not true: some countries separate spying on in-country diplomats and spying in other countries into two separate agencies. E.g. in the UK it's the job of the Security Service (formerly MI5) to do domestic espionage and counter-espionage, and they would be very upset if the Secret Intelligence Service (formerly MI6) were to try spying at home.

Re: How is an embassy not using a VPN?

Are you sure? There is research effort currently towards post-quantum systems which are efficient enough to actually use, but I think you may be mistakenly thinking that elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman is post-quantum. That's not the case: it's still vulnerable to Shor's hidden subgroup attack. Certainly if I run `openssl ciphers -v` it doesn't list anything other than Diffie-Hellman variants and pre-shared keys.

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Room temperature?

But I will. My infrared thermometer currently reads 30.9 in my living room.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Paramedics?

Given the police response, it probably should be.

American coders are most likely to use AI

Re: Unsurprising stat

And 30% of Microsoft code being written by AI might explain why things which used to work well in Visual Studio are now hit-and-miss.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

If I want to visit my bank in person I have to log into their website to book an appointment...

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: "hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers"

Wrong scientific memoir. It's "The Scientific Method" by Fieser that discusses the invention of napalm.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Re: Fooled me.

I have long held that Starbucks doesn't sell coffee: it sells milk and ice.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Unless you're using something like quail's eggs, I'm curious about the keyboard layout which allows you to mistype either 60 or 70 as 20. (According to the box of eggs I have in the kitchen, "large" eggs are 63 to 73g, and that particular box averages 66.5g).

Re: Before boiling

I keep my eggs in the fridge in summer, but not in winter. Same with butter. Where I live, summer temperatures are mid-30s and winter temperatures are low teens.

Cyberattack on NHS causes hospitals to miss cancer care targets

Re: Pick Your Poison.............

The US' disruptor is an individual acting for his own private benefit without any thought of the general public, so if you have any coherent point at all it's hard to work out what it is.

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

Re: Christmas party

Easy mistake to make given that the previous "board" was miswritten.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Bluffing

> Have you ever found a fix despite not being an expert in the troubled tech you were asked to tend?

I've maintained code in languages I don't know, and in one case I didn't even know what the language was, but generally it's possible to reverse engineer the syntax by looking at the rest of the program. It only becomes a major problem when you need to know the type system.

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

Re: I agree.

That's pig slaughtering. Turning a dead pig into manageable chunks is a lot more work.

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

Re: Not bad...

I'm at the opposite extreme. Back when I was a cub scout, we had a trip to the library in the nearest town and the librarians wanted to demonstrate their computer system, so they asked whether any of us had a library card. I did, so they tried to find my account by searching on my first and last name. Then they asked whether I had a middle name. They managed to find me on the fourth page of results of people living in the same county who shared my first, middle and surname. I can hide by being a tree in a very large forest.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

You comment about Kim is on point, but Putin didn't self-build. He was a mid-flier in the Leningrad KGB (whose career was helped by the purge following the exfiltration of a defector, Oleg Gordievsky, by the SIS) whose superiors gave him permission to change tracks to politics. He's managed to consolidate power quite effectively, but previous generations set up his empire for him and helped him on his way.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

I hadn't noticed that, and you're right that it seems weird, but there are scenarios where it's not as weird as it seems. Maybe she's a mature student doing a second undergrad degree because she's the rare marketer who actually wants to understand the product they're selling. Actually, correct the end of my first sentence to "weird in a different way".

(On the question of undergrad theses in general: at my university it was called a dissertation and it didn't have to be novel research, but the end-of-course project was a substantial paper, on the order of 10000 words.)

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

$QATOOLS/bin, $QATOOLS/etc, $QATOOLS/incl, $QATOOLS/var

Everything beyond this point was superfluous, because we could all tell exactly what was going to happen.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

Doesn't the UK celebrate Thanksgiving Day on the 4th July? With double reason nowadays...

Fired Disney staffer accused of hacking menu to add profanity, wingdings, removes allergen info

Re: Disney villain act.

It probably can't qualify as attempted murder without a specific target victim, but there will be some equivalent to reckless endangerment.

He did.

That song's really twisted. You hear the title and the upbeat tune and you think it's about growing as a person by not holding onto resentment, but when you look at the full lyrics it's really about growing as a villain by not suppressing your destructive desires.

Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

I don't think that's quite right, because the patient won't necessarily know what side effects the real stuff has (and anyway, side effects vary from person to person). But I am reminded of something I read decades ago about making placebos taste really unpleasant because the patient will think that something that nasty must be effective.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: 'larger than life' characters with a low center of gravity, ginger beard, and spectacles.

Some quick Googling brings up pages which suggest that ginger hair has the lowest density of strands per unit area and that darker hair has thicker strands, so ginger beards probably weigh less than other colours after correction for beard length.

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Re: "at least one screen on our network that looks like this for a few seconds"

In-bus displays seem to be particularly prone to problems. My latest photo in this collection is a blue screen of "your computer needs recovery" from Schippol taken 10 days ago, although since it was taken with the camera of a cheap phone it's not worth sending in.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

My biology teacher claimed that the shape of the rubber plant leaves was due to damage from thrown board rubbers.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Coincidence or what !!!

Probably not water nymphs, but Palermo's not too far from where Charybdis used to hang out, as related in the Odyssey.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: The scissor graphic...

I don't think they're scissors at all. That's a single blade with no hinge. It's a very impractical dagger with a knuckleduster-style grip.

Re: The ghost of 9/11 casts a long shadow

A friend had a job as a security trainer for our regional airline in about 2010. His comment on the theatre of the knife ban was that there was a fire axe in the cabin crew equipment.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Re: "This behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue"

I interpreted her intent as "social media is a great industry", and thought that she'd misplaced the "stain".

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Sometimes I have to ask a non-technical client to run a debug command on the command line and redirect the output to a file. I fully understand that they might not grok that greater-than output.log writes to output.log. I was, however, surprised yesterday when I had to explain this to our first-line support guy.

More than 83K certs from nearly 7K DigiCert customers must be swapped out now

Re: "We will not be able to delay revocation beyond that date and time."

They're afraid that if they delay more than 24 hours, the browsers will implement official policy and remove their root certificates from the browsers' trusted list, causing all of their certificates (and not merely the 0.4% at issue) to become worthless for interactions involving anything other than wget/curl/equivalent.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: Strange policemen

In English law they had just assaulted the shop worker by threatening to batter them. Assault doesn't require contact: just the "apprehension of immediate unlawful violence".

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Peter Kay has a routine on mondegreens. My favourite is Duffy's "Begging you for birdseed".

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

I have an A/S in electronics and a degree in computer science, but I never build my own machines because I'm not confident in my ability to correctly install the CPU's heat-sink. I spec them out (IMO pre-designed ones always skimp on RAM) and get a local shop to build them.

BOFH: It's not generative AI at all, it's degenerate AI

Three?

Who's the third human? And how long before she quits because she finds the BofH and PFY too creepy?

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

"Welding" and "soldering" is the same word in Spanish, and I wouldn't be surprised if English is the only language that distingushes them, due to its tendency to take a Germanic word and its equivalent French word and give them subtly different meanings.

US Space Force wanted $77M to reinforce GPS – and Congress shot it down

Re: Sees a great idea

The point that the committee is making seems to be that they're only asking for $77M now for the next proof of concept, but the whole thing would be $1000M. If they're not willing to splurge the billion, there's no point paying for the PoC.

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

For sacrifices when installing Windows updates on the domain controller?