Posts by Brad Ackerman

Kyocera claims 5.2 Gbps underwater laser data blast in lab tests

Re: Wait!

It's much easier to keep the ill-tempered sea bass alive when there's a convenient naturally-provided water reservoir to sustain them.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

Re: the kernel

When RHEL6 was fairly new (but after .1), a US government agency I could (but won't) name wanted to deploy a new system running RHEL3. On Itanium hardware (which RHEL5 was the last available OS release for). Some people just want to watch the world burn.

Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely

Re: Did you work for Microsoft?

If a Microsoft employee creates enough PBIs in the right product areas, Teams bugs will eventually be fixed. But it took over a year the last time I tried (utterly hosed Bluetooth audio on Macs). Mostly they just get closed as "obsolete" having never been scheduled for a sprint.

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

Re: 1 trillion question

Kompromat is irrelevant. He's a documented sex pest and statutorily ineligible for a US security clearance based on actions he took on the 2019 Joe Rogan show. A government that wants to either screw with him or follow the law can do so and make his life (more) miserable. There's no information Putin could have that would make a difference.

Xi's got something better — direct control over his substantial China-derived business revenue. That's also something that should make Musk, along with half of Trump's current cabinet, ineligible for a security clearance per SEAD 4; but that's technically a judgment call by the government, whereas Congress removed any executive branch discretion from clearance decisions for people who use illegal drugs while in access. It's legal, if incredibly stupid, for an agency head to issue a SEAD 4 waiver and grant someone access despite extensive financial ties to adversarial governments. Or indeed for most things, including violent felonies that have nothing to do with drug possession. But smoke some weed? The law says no.

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

It shouldn't be possible for the backup system to send data to someone else's storage resources in the first place.

Re: web.config

There are likely gazillions of LoB applications that connect directly to a SQL Server instance. And of course it's not going to be administered competently enough to require privileged logins to come from a PAW — if the organisation even has those.

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Taiwan gets chippy about US request it shifts manufacturing

Re: WWPW

Putin may have applauded when Trump took office, but the only way this is going to end is with a dozen more countries having nuclear weapons programs. The US put a lot of effort into convincing Taiwan to end the program they're now certainly restarting.

Don't panic: H-1B visas will cost companies $100K only for new petitions

Re: More TACO

The whole point of Trump doing this via EO rather than regulation is that (assuming it holds up in court) there's explicit allowance for the him to waive the fee as he sees fit. For example, if a company paid him $50k per new petition.

Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

Re: Aside from the Q.A. fail...

I buy content legitimately, but I certainly don't leave it in a DRM-encumbered format for more than a few minutes. Jellyfin shows zero unstoppable, annoying ads.

Fiverr cuts 30% of staff in pivot to being 'an AI-first company'

If Fiverr is going to be AI-first, what value are they adding? I can have an LLM design a lame logo for free.

The US government has no idea how many cybersecurity pros it employs

Re: The US government has no idea

Which isn't a particularly new situation. Congress authorized some good cybersecurity salary authorities in the Biden administration, but they've been unevenly deployed because not-market-but-close-enough is 40% over GS-plus-locality in a lot of places. CISA doesn't even have authority over cybersecurity for the entire federal government, and of course the Trump administration has been kneecapping everything left and right.

Grow a new Arm: UK advisory body wants investment in local AI chips

How is it that the US has managed to be far ahead of the rest of the world in pay transparency laws? It was even legal for Australian companies to ban employees from discussing their own salaries until 2022.

Ethernet switch vendors like Cisco are riding high on AI network economics

Webscale?

That's just MongoDB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Uncle Sam floats tracking tech to keep AI chips out of China

I want a fire-breathing pony capable of invisibility and flight.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

Re: 7-row keyboard

Or buy an aftermarket motherboard.

Re: The nub?

There are some good ones on Etsy that last longer and are more comfortable.

Reddit is people! Which means its search might not be so damaged by AI slop

Whether AI will ever be able to distinguish between reality and /u/fucksmith's pizza topping suggestions remains to be seen.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: Issuing hollow offers to new hires

The super fancy amenity-stuffed campus is just a Silly Valley thing, and even there is a small number of companies. Massive salary increases are a more universal motivator.

Re: Issuing hollow offers to new hires

The only way a US employer would be required to pay severance is if the worker is covered by a CBA. Which I doubt any of Tata's consultants are.

I could name some, so yes — although the people I could name need a US security clearance for their job so it's not like TCS has a choice in the matter.

Why does the headline use "return-to-work" when even the company involved doesn't make the implicit claim that people aren't working outside of the office?

How to get rid of useless keys in Windows and turn them into something helpful

Keyboards with the full complement of function keys are still available brand new from Unicomp—but F13‒F24 emit a modifier and F1‒12 rather than the actual USB keycode, possibly because 5250 emulators don't support a 122-key keyboard. Perhaps you could get a custom board that does; you could definitely buy a keyboard and roll your own controller for maximum fidelity, rendering the icon choice even more apropos.

How to host a Linux-powered local dev site in Windows

wsl install AlmaLinux-10 will directly download and install that distribution.

UK to ban ransomware payments by public sector organizations

There’s no need to do it explicitly if the government would just use the statutory authorities it already has. Every ransomware operator can be designated under one or more instruments as soon as it’s known to exist. Paying a ransom is then conspiracy to provide material support to a proscribed organization.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Re: Logs

/var/log should always be a separate partition, at least if you're not using ZFS (in which case give it a capacity reservation); but whether the system continues or not when that partition is full is a different issue. Secret squirrel agencies want AU-5(4) ("shutdown on failure", which does exactly that) implemented. That choice makes other controls (system monitoring) more important, but you should be monitoring free disk space without needing an SSP to tell you that.

I shouldn't need to explain the icon; it obviously had to be Sectoids.

OpenDylan sheds some parentheses in 2025.1 update

Meanwhile, the big advantage of Clojure over Java is that it has fewer parentheses. LISPs are awesome that way.

Microsoft is about to retire default outbound access for VMs in Azure

Re: Doomed

Azure Virtual Network Manager is the solution for giving developers a subscription with owner permissions; it applies security rules at the management group level (one above subscription and they're nestable). Set that up and nothing they do will permit their RDP endpoint to accept traffic from the internet.

(I work for Team Blue, but they're not paying me nearly enough to comment for work.)

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

Re: Going beyond 10Gb/s requires fiber for now

If someone were to make a sufficiently high order commitment to the silicon vendors, they could get 25 or 40GBASE-T into production; by "sufficiently high" I mean Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Tencent/etc, and none of these are interested in building an AP1000 unit just to power a single data center's PHYs. Except for out of band management, none of the above are going to put anything slower than 40G in a cloud server and for current server SKUs I have my doubts about speeds slower than 100G being worth the trouble. So Cat8 will cost you a ridiculous amount of money to install because of the extra difficulty and you'll never be able to use it beyond 10G, so if you were thinking about it for 10GbE length reasons you'd just run OM4 instead.

The one known use case for better than 10G between rooms at home is not caring which your NAS is in.

Re: An eventuality..

There were plenty of 100B-SX line cards shipped when that was a thing. Intelligence agencies liked it because every transmission line is an antenna and it's easier to prove that nobody can pull bits off your fiber from the other side of SR 123, but their easy availability at my local recyclers seems to imply they had use beyond classified systems. STP cable has been easily available for decades and is more than adequate to mitigate that attack, so these days copper is usual, but fiber is still preferred in some applications at or below 1G.

Re: FTTR? Really?

Windows Update takes forever even when plugged into an Ethernet port in a Microsoft building.

Europe slams online tat bazaar AliExpress for dodging obligation to stop dodgy traders

I'd buy some of their lawn decorations if I had a lawn to put them on, but given that the enforcers of the Wassenaar Arrangement have had their sense of humor surgically extracted I'd want to have export-control solicitors on retainer before having clicked the buy button.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256808773726461.html

Re: Isn’t selling cheap tat the entire point here?

Google's selling a bill of goods to advertisers rather than cheap tat to consumers, but you could argue that both count as "utter crap".

Re: Great !

I wouldn't complain if the injectable bleach and keyboard-walk-themed purveyors of 16TB UHS-II microSDXC cards went away, but those of us in Festung Amerika need our sources for modern sunscreen formulations since the FDA is still sandbagging it despite Congress having very bipartisanly told them to knock it off multiple times. Melanoma is bad enough without the government preventing you from doing the thing that makes it less likely.

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

Re: The most important question

Time for some more consumer protection law updates. The EU did mandatory data export, so there's no reason they can't mandate MFA standards. (I'm assuming EU and other countries that implement their laws since as we all know consumer protection in leftpondia is even more limited than the bassackwards banking system.)

Brit space sector struggles to compete with £90K graduate banking salaries

Re: > banker salary in London

Why do you think council tax is banded? It's a handout to owners of £100M townhouses without needing to make that explicit.

Re: > banker salary in London

Wrong; in Germany and Austria housing is ordered from the factory all the time. Which is why it's substantially cheaper and of higher quality than any in English-speaking countries.

Re: > banker salary in London

The policy of the UK government ever since the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been to discourage the construction of housing (obviously only when it can't be banned entirely). Parliament and local councils don't want housing to be affordable; they want it to be limited, which is why planning permission for building housing is entirely discretionary rather than ministerial.

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

Re: Minority report

Psychological screening, theoretically. Although it's a pretty big mystery how Robert Hanssen was hired by the FBI despite obviously being a raging ass.

Re: "a wannabe-criminal or a complete fucking idiot"

Those actions should all be audited, and ideally will require explicit privilege elevation rather than being on someone's standard user ID all the time. Certainly if GCHQ is following NCSC guidance, they would be audited.

Re: "Signing" The Official Secrets Act

If the job description doesn't explicitly state that it requires a security clearance (which therefore requires citizenship), employers would rather not see that CV and may bin on sight, just as if you'd included a photo.

Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

Re: I would be happy...

I don't think I've ever seen such an asymmetrical service offered in the US. The choices are always fibre at 1000/1000 or 100/100, or cable at no more than 40 upstream.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Re: There are three urgent priorities here.

Any USG employees with Bics are bringing their own. The standard USG writing implement is provided by Skilcraft and represents the state of the art in anti-pilfering technology. Supply rooms aren't emptied overnight by amoral GS-15s—mostly because they're never stocked in the first place, but also because Skilcraft pens suck so hard that nobody in their right mind would consider taking one home with them.

Good luck to DoD if they try to operate without French and German smart cards, though.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Re: "What was the plan, showing her his big iron?"

Her rack may or may not be impressive, but his big iron is certainly a microcomputer if he needs to compensate that much.

Artist formerly known as Indian Business Machines pledges $150B for US ops, R&D

Re: You forgot the important bit

I can get you that $100M as soon as you wire $5M to this Cayman Islands bank account so I can pay transfer fees.

At least Taiwan is an ally and will be until Trump decides to go further than he's ever gone to bat for the PRC.

Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors

If they wanted cost savings, they'd focus on highly-paid people who are unlikely to be doing a better job than a potted ficus. So how much are they going to save by replacing the CEO with ChatGPT?

Booby-trapped Alpine Quest Android app geolocates Russian soldiers

LZH?

The 1990s called; they want their archive format back.

Guess what happens when ransomware fiends find 'insurance' 'policy' in your files

The existing statutory authorities for sanctions should suffice. In the UK, the Foreign Secretary can designate ransomware groups under e.g., the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 and Cyber (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020.