Posts by Number6

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: They want employees with more skills

Richard Branson: "Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to".

AWS builds a DNS backstop to allow changes when its notoriously flaky US East region wobbles

I assume this means they've set the default TTL on DNS queries to 60 minutes. I've done that sort of thing (except down to 10 minutes) for scheduled changes to allow IP address changes to propagate faster when a change is made. 60 minutes is probably a reasonable compromise for unscheduled outages.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

I find one of the incentives to upgrade to a new release is the rest of the world. If you're stuck on a distribution that uses Python 3.4 (assuming it's new enough to have made it to V3) then a lot of stuff needs a newer rev. Similarly with other things, you're still getting upgrades that don't include features from newer releases, and occasionally you learn that the functionality you crave does exist in the latest revision.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: "colored pencil office"

Also in California, I was introduced to someone "from Canada", so I said "Ah, someone else who knows how to pronounce the last letter of the alphabet", to which I got the response "Zed". Then we made fun of various US things.

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

I have a laptop that works perfectly well with Win10 and Linux (dual-boot). It won't run Win11 and I don't see why I should ditch a perfectly good laptop because of some arbitrary MS requirement, so no Windows 11 there.

I did discover that my main desktop machine, which runs Linux but is also not good enough for Win11, will actually run it in a VirtualBox VM. No doubt MS will break that at some point, but I did take a snapshot of the Win10 image before upgrading it, and I did take a snapshot of the working Win11 image once it was done, so hopefully I'll be able to keep something running. It only exists because I have one Windows-only piece of software I have to run once or twice a year and it's insisting on Win11 now.

Amazon spills plan to nuke Washington...with X-Energy mini-reactors

Re: More Micro than Small

If there's a decent market for the fuel then someone will invest in making it.

To me, as well as the tech and reg hurdles, what about physical security? You don't want some nut job (or group thereof) breaking in and doing bad things with the fuel, given that the rest of us would much prefer it to be kept in a safe, controlled environment. And what happens when they need to refuel the things? Something has to happen to the spent fuel, and that costs money that should really be properly planned for up-front rather than a vague "by the time we need it we'll have it figured out", which hasn't really worked too well so far.

End of Windows 10 support is the perfect time for the Windows 11 installer to fail

Re: Just learned?

It was never really relevant to me until I had a need for Win11 but not new hardware. I only really used the Win10 machine twice a year.

Some US tax software is requiring W11 starting with the 2025 edition (which we can't really use until 2026) on the basis that W10 will no longer be considered secure at that point. Whether it will actually still work on W10 remains to be seen. If they were smart they'd let it work with a big warning about security.

Isn't the presence of MBEC part of the definition of compliant hardware? My main PC was built in 2013 so it's definitely not going to support the newer features, but so far Linux runs just fine.

For me, the Win10 predecessor of my VM would be fired up twice a year, first to do updates, then again a bit later to do my US taxes. So I can put up with a lower performance because it's still the easiest/cheapest way to do that for me.

I learned this week that VirtualBox will allow Win11 to run on an old system in a VM. It will emulate TPM2.0. If you do a fresh install it seems to go quite happily, if you try to upgrade a Win10 installation it will object to the CPU variant, but a Google search will provide a registry hack to get past that stage.

I assume at some point Microsoft will break this, but for those who run Linux but keep a Windows VM around for that one program that isn't available on Linux, it's a way to keep going. Just take a snapshot before installing updates so you can revert to the last one before the breakage.

Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry

I saw something go by late last night that needs more verification, that claims this fee is going to be retroactive and that anyone turning up at immigration with an H1B isn't going to be allowed in unless the fee payment is on their record, even if they've been living here for a while. The advice is that anyone on an H1B who's in the US stays in the US, and anyone with an H1B who's currently out of the country should get back before the rule kicks in. The advice also says that those on a derivative visa (H4?) should also do the same. It can certainly be read that way, and with the behaviour of the current US administration, assume the worst case.

Section 2(c):

(c) The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State shall coordinate to take all necessary and appropriate action to implement this proclamation and to deny entry to the United States to any H-1B nonimmigrant for whom the prospective employer has not made the payment described in section 1 of this proclamation.

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Re: +

No, their goal is to get it promoted to pilot, where it takes control of your life and you're just there to help.

Personally, any time I see anything to do with Copilot on my work PC (home machine is Linux), I search for how to disable it or otherwise make it go away.

Absolutely fabless: Trump derails TSMC's China chip-building effort

I wonder what happens if all chip manufacturers outside the US decline to play ball with Trump?

The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says

William Gibson had a few good examples of AI versions of dead people. It's been a while since I read his books but I think at least one of the AIs asked to be deleted.

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

Overall it's much safer to just hack them. The film "Gravity" demonstrates what can happen when you just blow stuff up in orbit without paying much attention to the debris field. See also: Kessler Effect.

US signals intention to rethink job H-1B lottery

Re: There's a simple fix

If they're steadily raising the minimum then I would guess they're trying to implement something sensible over several years so as not to disrupt too much in the short term. Can't quite see government being that joined-up and forward-thinking though. They just went for a cheap headline and then it'll get filed.

I interpret that as "get way more benefits to reflect their contribution to the company performance" or similar. All that paid time off, decent and affordable healthcare, employment contracts, etc...

The actual skill level of H1B workers varies enormously, from "yes, we must encourage this person to come because it will benefit the US greatly" to "barely qualified and probably only here as a warm body to fill a seat and enrich some staffing agency by being paid a pittance while being contracted out at a much higher rate. To be fair, some of the latter category who manage to hang in there long enough do eventually learn if they've got people willing to coach them, but that's not really what the H1B is for.

In theory it's a valuable and useful programme, in practice it's been corrupted for the financial benefit of a few, often to the detriment of the people that really should get a visa but can't because the quota has been used up.

DHS warns of sharp rise in Chinese-made signal jammers it calls 'tools of terrorism'

Re: Don't panic people

The cell protocol has provision for priority, so what would happen is that the emergency comms would still get through, and no one else would be able to make calls. Still vulnerable to a jammer that blocks the entire cell tower though.

Having said that, there are directional antennas on most towers that try to radiate out towards the horizon in most cases, not straight down, so a jammer near a tower might not take out all of it, and would have to radiate sufficient power to overcome the antenna beam pattern that gives signals on the main lobe a significant advantage, which would probably make it fairly easy to track down. The main application for the sort of jammers in the article is to take out the handsets at the scene of the crime, not the tower. They can afford to be a lot lower power and cover a limited range.

"as lawmakers introduced new rules against vehicle key and key fob jammers as part of the Crime and Policing Bill."

The irony here is that many years ago they introduced a new frequency band for key fobs at 433MHz, which just happens to be in the middle of a popular amateur radio band, shared with the MOD. Documented cases of people parking near a radio tower and locking their car when the repeater on the tower was quiet, then coming back and being unable to unlock their car because the repeater was transmitting and effectively swamping the remote receiver. Didn't even need to be on the same frequency because of the cheap design of the fob receivers.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

I was always good at breaking things too. It started at school with fellow students writing BASIC programs. "Enter a number from 1 to 5" was just inviting me to enter anything but, and they learned an awful lot about the importance of input validation from my actions.

The outstanding one was crashing the stuff written in Ada in my first proper job. It was trumpeted as being wonderful and rigorously tested etc. I was doing some testing on some aspect of the system and as part of it I had to navigate a page full of input parameters, which I filled in by alternating "0" and the enter key. I should note that this was on a VT220 terminal, to give some idea of the state of the UI. Having done this successfully numerous times, suddenly I got the thing to crash. The fully-validated input module took whatever input I'd given it and barfed. I mentally went through the muscle memory of what I'd just done and realised that I'd missed the 0 and hit the minus key next to it. This was an input it would accept because the number fields were for signed decimal numbers, but it turns out that having gotten past the initial input filter that took out all the characters that were not part of a number, what followed couldn't cope with a single minus sign as the entry because there was no numeric digit in the string. On a roll, I tried it with a + sign too, and got the same crash result. What a deeply satisfying day that was, breaking something that had passed all the required verification testing. And no, it's not one that had occurred to me before that day either, but you can be sure I've tried it on stuff ever since.

I got dragged from the West Country into London for a "feature" once. I was part of the dev team and it was escalated from the front-line support because they couldn't figure out the problem. So I turned up with one of the support guys who did the interface with the actual people and we went through a bunch of stuff and couldn't find anything wrong. We were literally on the way out the door having given up, when someone made a comment that provided the one piece of information that was missing. I remember we both knew exactly what was happening at that point and pivoted in unison to head for the control PC. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to, according to how it had been designed and configured, but they clearly needed a slightly different configuration.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

This is why I try to used wired Ethernet for as much as possible. You can even get USB<>Ethernet adapters that work with Android phones if it gets bad enough.

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Given my experience of the accuracy of AI to date, I don't expect this to go well.

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

Sometimes I'm glad I'm not a gamer or in need of that level of graphics performance. My current graphics card is ten years old and I'm only using it because I acquired a free second-hand machine (thanks, Windows 11) with one that was better than what I was using, albeit of similar vintage.

Windows 11 roadmap great for knowing what's coming next week. Not so good for next year

My roadmap for Windows 11 is to avoid it as much as possible. It's on my work PC but everything else runs Linux because none of my hardware is good enough for W11. So I get to avoid all the annoying features.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: hot plug

You'd be surprised. What is easy in the UK is way harder with the weedy US mains voltage. I have a high-velocity blower that allegedly[*] takes 10A (and is designed to be a bit inefficient as the airflow runs over the motor and so comes out slightly heated for fur-drying purposes). The plug and cord on that get a bit warm when I use it for long enough. It would be pulling half the current and a quarter of the heating effect if it was a 230V device.

[*] I think it takes more than that, based on the size of generator needed to power it reliably.

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

I use the most effective way of not letting Alexa send stuff to the cloud: not allowing them in the building.

Now, if only I could find a way of permanently disabling the Android phone voice features without having to ditch all the phones in the house.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Re: Goodbye Windows 11

The only thing I "need" Windows for is the tax returns software. While the vendor is willing to let it run on Windows 10 (they may lose a lot of their market if not) I can cope by running my Windows 10 VM, which only tends to get fired up to do taxes. If not, I'll find another way to file taxes, even if I have to resort to a paper filing.

This is partly why I've always built new machines from parts. I'm not aware that they get kickbacks at that level (and I hope not), and given that I've always installed Linux, it meant I could avoid the Windows tax. My laptop (too old for Win11) did come with Win10 and I have subsequently acquired a Pro licence which is used when I dual-boot, but the disk I/O is painfully slow compared to what I get from Linux, so between manufacturer and MS, they screwed that up too.

My newest desktop machine is now over 11 years old and is still going strong, albeit with a few upgrades. Running Mint22 with KDE on top and copes perfectly well.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Wow, fancy having to pay for a more annoying version of a paperclip.

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

I put up a post with distrowatch,com in it and it's still there six hours later.

Then again, I've had the bot take offence to something I posted a year earlier (and which I'd later set to viewable by only me) so it may just mean it's busy elsewhere.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

The Windows shop is going to keep hyping Windows 11 and trying to sell the public on its AI OS vision, whether customers like it or not.

A lot of customers don't have a choice. Some of the tools I need for work are only available on Windows, which is why my work PC is new enough to run Windows 11. However, it lives on my desk next to my Linux machine which does pretty much everything I need it to for my use.

Re: Kicking and screaming

Keep a careful eye on it though, it is not unheard of for disabled features to be "accidentally" re-enabled by updates.

After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

In a similar vein, one of the largest potential vulnerabilities for all users are ad brokers. You're clicking on a web page, which includes a load of JavaScript from a third party. Neither you nor the owner of the website you're viewing has any idea what's in that code, and there have been a few instances where someone has successfully attacked the ad broker, so that JavaScript contains malware. The only way you're going to improve that is to put all of that server side, so that static images are what gets delivered to the end user. That would also potentially defeat most ad blockers, because if done correctly, it would be near-impossible to distinguish between an ad and a wanted image.

There's a lot of other JavaScript that gets loaded from third-party sites too, which means that even if everything was fine when the web page was written, if someone compromises that site the day after you've released your web page on the masses, it's going to affect a lot of people. Sadly, the only way to reduce this risk is to take your own copy of the common code and source it from your own servers, so that even if the central library gets compromised afterwards, you still have a pristine copy (assuming you're not blindly auto-updating). If your server gets compromised then it doesn't affect all the others with their own copies.

Security and convenience have a fraught relationship, and you rarely get both together.

Google's 10-year Chromebook lifeline leaves old laptops headed for silicon cemetery

Re: 10 years !!!

I have a PC I put together in 2013. It has an i5 processor and 32GB RAM. I recently swapped out the graphics card because I was given an Nvidia P2000 which was better than what I had. It's running Linux perfectly happily. I have looked at replacing it a few times but I'm not convinced newer stuff at an affordable price is going to be significantly better. It's not capable of running Windows 11, but that's OK, I don't want to.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Interesting to read the line:

...designed it for machines that it had already sold. It did not want to let existing customers down.

While not quite the same situation, Microsoft, is effectively abandoning existing PC users who have machines that could probably run Windows 11 perfectly well, but are being prevented from doing so by MS design decisions. None of my machines is considered capable of running it, despite being decent spec machines, their only failings being that the CPUs are considered too old. Of course, they still have that big stick to beat people with, if they stop supporting Windows 10 and key applications are only available on Windows, industry has to give in and buy new machines, whereas home users will still hang on with their last version of Windows 10 while their PCs are still good enough, and security will start to fall apart because undoubtedly it still has some embarrassing vulnerabilities.

I do still run OS/2 in a VM on my Linux machine. It was a nice OS, shame it got screwed over.

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

Re: Freedom awaits you

I second the OpenWRT route too. TP-Link routers tend to be cheap and reliable, although I've never used their software for longer than it takes to reflash it. My router currently says it's been up for 236 days, which is probably about when we last had a power outage longer than the UPS could handle. It's handling VLANs to keep some devices partitioned off from the rest of the network on their own subnet, took a bit of effort but figured it out in the end.

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

I asked it for tonight's winning lottery numbers but sadly it didn't provide those, just the results of the last draw.

Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

Re: Backups...

Yes, because having all the children in school, regardless of whether they're actually learning anything, is considered to be a high priority regardless of any adverse effects it may have on those children.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

If MS want to provide me, at their expense, with new PCs that meet their hardware requirements then I might consider swapping out the W10 machines here. Most of what I have runs Linux, some of it is 10 years old (I finally replaced a Core 2 Duo machine last month, ironically with someone else's cast-off as they upgraded to W11 hardware) and runs the latest distros just fine. So no, not going to switch to W11 any time soon.

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

I assume a self-assembly trebuchet wouldn't meet the spec?

I've seen something like that in use at Bryce Canyon in Utah, hauling people up out of the canyon. Eight local volunteers, from the fire department and other locals, come down with it, strap the casualty to it and then wheel them back up the narrow path. It's at 9000ft, so I suspect they get plenty of practice with all the visiting sea-level dwellers.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

I looked at their process and figured a script was needed. It would check that QATOOLS was not empty before executing the rm commands. The script would probably also take over copying the tools across too.

The harder it is for finger trouble to cause mayhem, the better.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

Re: Wait...

I know they've got more lawyers, but I'd start with the line that it was their error, so I shouldn't have to pay more than my existing fees until the time I would have had to upgrade anyway (if I've got proof of typical upgrade cycles for my company then I'd use that to nominate a date).

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Re: Really?

I have so far failed to come up with any reason to have it connected to the internet at all.

Refunds

I see a need to change the law to provide a full and immediate refund if a smart device is returned because the buyer did not wish to provide the required permissions if they were not clearly disclosed in advance of the purchase. If you can't determine whether a device is acceptable before purchase and attempting to set it up then you don't know if it will be fit for purpose. Having a significant return rate might cause some of these companies to revise their policies a bit.

Last time I bought a large screen TV I managed to find a dumb one - I probably couldn't find one now. I attempt to confine various other IoT devices to my home network with a firewall entry in the router, and a few that do need external access are separated out onto their own VLAN so they can't see the rest of the network. I try not to buy stuff that requires giving away personal data.

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

I was approached by an Amazon recruiter this week. I said I wasn't interested because I was unimpressed by their RTO mandate. So I'm taking the advice of the AWS CEO and concentrating my job search elsewhere.

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

Re: I'm skeptical

There might be something in it. In the early days of stealth technology there were moves to create a stealth warship[*], but one of the limitations was that while you couldn't see a positive return from the ship, what you ended up with was a hole in the general noise caused by the returns from the sea. So if you were paying attention, you could deduce the rough location by where there wasn't such a noisy return. It's quite possible that the same trick could be applied to an F22 - if everything around it is providing a good return then it's sitting in the quiet hole in the middle. A lot harder to do, of course, because a warship tends to be a lot bigger than an F22.

[*] I know they have improved the warships to reduce the returns, if you compare a modern one with a WW2 destroyer and all those random reflecting surfaces, they're a lot harder to spot directly, and looking for the hole is going to be a lot harder.

Meta's mass layoff severance agreements illegal, says judge

Because if it turns out they missed one, or another one arrives between writing the press release and publishing it, they'll get roasted for being wrong. I almost never make a definite statement for the same reason, because people, especially the media, often forget the implied "to the best of my knowledge and belief". Saying "approximately" instead saves several seconds and avoids the need to type a few letters.