* Posts by Number6

2319 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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

Number6

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

Number6

Re: Really?

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

Number6

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

Number6

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

Number6

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

Number6

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.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Number6

Re: Changing Country - what then?

As far as I know the cameras just assume any speed sign that is facing you applies to you.

I foresee much fun with this one. If you live in a village and your house number is appropriately low, make yourself a sign with that number in a red circle and display it in your front garden to get all the cars to slow down.

Number6

If it's using GPS then there are several situations where it can get confused about the speed limit. I drive in the US using Google Maps for general navigation, and it shows me the speed I'm doing, and what it thinks is the current speed limit. Sometimes it doesn't show a limit when it has decided it doesn't know, which is fair enough. Sometimes I can see the limit change as I pass the relevant sign, but it does have a noticeable failure rate, especially when there's a freeway running parallel to a slower road, often separated only by a small distance. The other place it can get briefly confused is when two roads with different limits cross, because then it depends on how well it copes with any disturbance in the GPS signals due to reflections from overpasses. The other place it often gets it wrong is roadworks, where it will continue to display the normal speed limit, rather than the reduced roadwork limit.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Number6

Re: possible fix

That would have been E1 (up to 30x64k channels), 2Mbit links in the UK,as oposed to the T1 1.5Mbit. If they were PSTN lines then either DASS2 or Q.931 if they were a bit newer.

Windows: Insecure by design

Number6

So we'll be able to disable the Recall feature. I wonder how sure we can be that this will stick, and that it won't quietly and "accidentally" be re-enabled by a future update? Or by a convenient and exploitable security hole, where malware could enable it, let it run for a while and haul in the net to see if you've done anything interesting in the intervening period. I would much prefer it to e an installable feature that I could purge from the disk.

Not that it's directly my problem at the moment - another Linux user at home, and my PCs are all too old to run Windows 11 anyway, despite working perfectly well with the latest Linux. The work machine, I'm only concerned if something bad happened and it abused my home network while it was connected, I don't keep any of my personal data on there.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Number6

Safest place for the tower is on top of the school. Your average cell tower antenna is designed to radiate very little energy downwards, so the children would be in the zone of least field strength, unlike putting the tower down the road a bit. Also, good signal strength received by the tower (easily achieved by optimal receive antenna placement - doesn't have to be the same as the TX antenna) causes mobile phones to adjust their transmit power downwards, further reducing exposure by children using phones.

But as said elsewhere, you can't fight wilful ignorance with facts.

AI Octopus predicts results of Euro 2024: It isn't looking good for England

Number6

Re: Of course England will lose at footy

I remember being in a bar when the England-Germany semi-final was on. the Germans scored, the on-screen commentator exclaimed "Kuntz!" and we all agreed with him.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Kuntz for reference)

Spam blocklist SORBS closed by its owner, Proofpoint

Number6

Re: re: Proofpoint mass emailing campaigns

I don't know about the persuasion side (I thought it was a company initiative, not imposed from outside), but we get that too. I can't be arsed to flag them with the button installed on Outlook, I just add them to my blocked senders list locally in case they re-use a dodgy address. I get way more fake spam than I do real spam.

Number6

Re: DHCP addresses (maybe)

I think the way it works now is that the DHCP server will remember you for some period of time, which may be from zero to "we need an address for something not in our system, let's take this one" after your last lease elapses. I know that the few times I've had an ISP outage, short ones mean I get the same IP address, longer ones mean I have to go reconfigure a bunch of stuff that relies on knowing the address. I did set up a cron script on one of my machines that queries the IP4 and IP6 addresses regularly and will let me know if either changes.

The other change is that in the early days we were on dial-up modems, so leases probably had deliberately short timeouts, whereas now I suspect that you get at least 24hrs for a typical DSL or cable connection (mine currently has almost four days left), simply because they do tend to be up most of the time.

Number6

Re: Not true.

I had to jump through a few hoops to get Google to accept my home server, but it seems to be working smoothly now. Ironically the only problem I have at present is with Proofpoint. For some reason they decided to add my mail server IP to the Cloudmark CSI-Global list a couple of weeks ago, and they're either ignoring my request to sort it (I wish they'd explain why something landed on a blocklist, too - is it because someone else in the netblock is running a dodgy server?) or are merely taking forever to look at it. In the meantime, it won't even let my server connect to any of their stuff, which makes it harder to forward stuff from home to work, as well as talk to a few other people who use email providers who use their services.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Number6

Re: Long term storage to tape, takes more than just a bunch of tapes!

I think I still have a DAT drive somewhere, and one of my older machine still has an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller in it, even though there's nothing currently connected to it.

I would like to be able to justify an LTO drive of adequate capacity for home use - said DAT drive, in the days when capacity was larger than a hard disk, used to do weekly full backups, spit the tape out and prompt for a new one, then do incremental backups for the rest of the week, then spit the tape out and prompt for a new one, ready for the following full backup. All done with scripts, too. I even did a successful restore once, when the disk abruptly died on me. Every few months I'd take a tape to work and store it there, bringing home an older one.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Number6

Re: SSDs [Dot-Matrix Printers]

I still have an OKI Microline dot matrix printer somewhere, wide version, too. However, I think it's only a parallel interface, so I'll need to get an expansion board if I ever resurrect it.

However, for proper thundering, I once had an ASR33 teletype in my bedroom. Everyone in the house knew when I was printing on that. None of this two pages a minute, it was probably closer to two lines per minute.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

Number6

I did the RAM-less Rugby MSF clock on a Z80 once - saw someone had done it and so figured out my own version. Still have that around here somewhere, minus the 60kHz radio.

Number6

Re: there should always be a need for simple chips that do simple things

MSP430 series was nice, had a chance to play with it once. A nice compact 16-bit architecture, made it better than the 8-bit stuff because we needed 16-bit math and the 8-bit chips weren't quite fast enough.

Number6

Re: 8051 in PCs It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it

The original keyboard controller was an 8042, I think.

Number6

Re: Designed by a software engineer

I think some of the unsupported CB codes, SLI (Shift left and increment, basically shoving a 1 in instead of a 0) affected the flags differently to the related instructions, which is presumably why it wasn't on the official opcode map.

Number6

Re: All is not lost.. yet.

IIRC, the way the BBC Micro did it was to use the graphics hardware to effectively provide refresh, so it didn't really need anything extra. The problem with the Z80 refresh was that it was only 7-bit, and some of the 64K DRAM needed 8-bit refresh.

Number6

Re: The Z80, however, was compatible with a rival, Intel 8080.

I think officially, to be a CP/M program, you were supposed to stick to the 8080 instruction set.

I used to know the Z80 assembly stuff off by heart - I could write the assembly language and then go down and write all the op codes, effectively hand assembling it. Forgotten most of it by now though, although somewhere I do still have my home-made Z80 computer with 7-segment LEDs and a hex keypad. I think it may even still work if the EPROMs haven't given up.

US Chamber of Commerce to sue FTC for banning noncompetes in most jobs

Number6

The UK considers it restraint of trade and the Unfair Contracts Act has put reasonable limits on it, with notice periods and compensation usually incorporated into employment contracts. The US largely doesn't have such contracts, many employers expect you to give two weeks' notice (although you're free to just walk out) but wouldn't dream of giving you two weeks' pay if they fire you on the spot.

Gardening leave is a reasonable compromise, you get paid a fair wage, your (soon to be former) employer gets a 3- or 6-month head start on anything you might subsequently do, and you get a nice holiday. Although I've heard tales of people required to turn up for their notice period, to be seated in a bare room with the minimum of furniture.

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Number6

Re: The trap

This is why I tend not to buy new PCs, I buy new motherboards, CPUs, RAM, etc, and put them together to make my own PC, then run Linux on it. I have paid for Windows stuff i the past, but I don't see the need to keep doing it when it's not necessary.

Number6

My current machine is over ten years old. i5-4440 CPU and 32GB RAM and it runs the latest Linux Mint quite happily. It won't run Win11 though, and while it's working I see no need to upgrade it.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Number6

Re: Do they work?

There are two sides to it - do you see the ads, and are you being tracked even if you're not?

One way to get around ad blockers is to collect the image but then render a blank space or otherwise not bother to display it, which hides the ad but doesn't stop them collecting their tracking data.

Number6

I use an ad blocker because I find the ads annoying and intrusive, and given that they're usually arriving courtesy of Javascript from an unknown third party broker, I don't want that script, which is potentially a malware vector, running on my system. I also run a script blocker, which is an eye-opener to see the huge variety of third-party scripts that some sites run. Again, a potential malware vector, so I try to only run the minimum necessary to load the page. If it's too difficult I give up and go elsewhere.

Anyone who can implement a decent server-side ad-dispenser will probably do well with it, because then the ads get served as part of the page load rather than a separate script and would be way harder to block. It also avoids the malware problem because static images are way less likely to be a source of something dodgy. However, all those third party data-collection companies would find their business models dented.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

Number6

My first thought was that the browser had lost its cookies. Then the login attempt failed and I wondered which of my recent posts had earned me a ban.

My cat was highly offended that I couldn't upload all the latest photos of him.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Number6

Re: Unique IDs

That's because they're not all assigned by a single master authority. If you're the only one issuing the numbers then you can guarantee that they're unique. Except human error will invariably transpose a couple of digits somewhere.

Texas judge turns out the lights on federal survey of cryptominers' energy consumption

Number6

Texas has a power grid isolated from the rest of the country. Perhaps the EIA could draft a new regulation covering 49 states and excluding Texas. After all, if they overload their own grid and jack up energy prices for the locals then that's their own problem, and if the locals don't like it, they can vote in state officials who will address it.

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

Number6

My work phone sits on my desk and goes on Do Not Disturb at 5pm. Sometimes I don't notice I've missed a call for several days, I look at it that often.

However, sending work emails after hours is fine. I do it, because if I want to go do something else in the middle of the day I might be catching up on stuff in the evening to compensate. However, I don't expect a response until the following day, and that's where the line should be drawn. If I notice an email during the evening and it's a two-minute fix then I'll respond, otherwise it can wait until morning.

Obviously I have a more enlightened employer than some.

How did China get so good at chips and AI? Congressional investigation blames American venture capitalists

Number6

Choose a Chinese manufacturing plant and within six months, your cheap competitor will appear on the market.

Actual practical example of this observed, tore down one of their products because one of its features was basically the same as ours. Superficially the design was similar in the same way that a couple of cars might look similar due to form and function requirements,, but I don't see why they bothered to etch one of our part numbers on the copper on the PCB like we did if it wasn't a direct copy.

Number6

Re: Money can't buy intelligence

But the Scots have a reputation for engineering, even as it extends to starships. Clearly something stuck, even if their politicians screwed it up in general.

Save the Mars Sample Return mission, plead Congresscritters

Number6

Re: Beserk

The thinking was that as technology develops, certain tasks become easier. Some of it is also potentially solving other problems too. The current Mars rovers are all very limited in their navigation capabilities, they rely heavily on commands from Earth to do anything, which is partly why it takes them so long to get anywhere. One of the challenges in the competition was that of navigation; how reliably can you navigate when you don't have a compass (no decent magnetic field on Mars) or GPS, and on uncertain terrain so wheel odometry can't give a reliable indicator of distance?

The starting premise was that the "lander" containing the recovery robot would be in a known position, accurate to a few metres, based on being observed by passing satellites. The locations of the sample containers is known to a similar accuracy. Thus, the task is to navigate autonomously from the base to an approximate area and search, allowing for the fact that there may not be a sample in the area to find, if it's been buried. This is where it gets more interesting, because some teams used an approach that moved from sample location to sample location, collecting them all, before returning to base and disgorging the lot. Other teams worked on the principle that if a sample was found, return it to base immediately, which also gave opportunity to reset the navigation to a known starting point. The first approach clearly reduces total travel time, but is literally carrying all the eggs in one basket if the rover failed, whereas the latter would mean that if it failed after one or more successful recoveries, there would still be something worth sending back.

Also in there was object recognition, which was a lot less mature ten years ago - it was necessary to recognise the sample container in order to pick it up.

As for recovery, the plan was that the base station would be a rocket capable of reaching orbit, where it would rendezvous with an orbiter that was designed to reach Earth orbit, after which they could drop the sample package for retrieval in a manner that has since been demonstrated.

Given that they've got mobile rovers, adding an extra gadget to obtain and package samples is a relatively low incremental cost and risk, which is what's happening now. They may yet decide to leave them there if other technologies overtake it, but remember that this was long-range planning from many years back, trying to predict what advances would be made over the next 30 years or so.

From memory, over the five years they ran the competition, I think only three teams managed to get samples back to the platform under field conditions, and an impressive demonstration of the eggs-in-basket scenario when one of the otherwise more-successful robots decided to head off through the boundary fence instead of returning to base, due to a programming error. Some teams were university teams, some were one or two people doing it for fun, others were slightly larger groups.

Number6

Re: Beserk

They had to do it this way because of the funding. To propose the whole thing in one go would have been highly risky and expensive given the technology of the day, and would never have been given the green light. Each mission did a bit more and advanced the technology - rovers have been proven, now they've got one that is packaging up samples and leaving them to be recovered. A few years back they did a public competition to evaluate navigation and searching for samples and delivering them back to a base (see links), which was eventually achieved after five years, which means they could decide how best to do the recovery phase. OSIRIS-REX demonstrated recovery of samples from space to ground, and so in theory they can do it now if they've got the money.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/with/28859200974/

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/stmd-prizes-challenges-crowdsourcing-program/nasa-awards-750k-in-sample-return-robot-challenge-for-autonomous-technology/

<disclaimer - I was on one of the teams participating in the challenge>

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Number6

Re: Crimbo

If done properly, pretty much zero after the initial scream.

China requires any new domestic Wi-Fi kit to support IPv6 and run it by default

Number6

Re: The Cultural Evolution - little leap forward :)

My ISP gives me a /64 to play with. Everything just works, anything on my home network that supports IPv6 picks up an address and can be used. My router tells me that last month 49.49% of traffic was IPv6. If I want to run a server accessible from the outside, I do have to add a rule to the router, so at least it comes up in a relatively safe condition by default - if you scan the address range from outside then you will only see those few holes in it, regardless of what's happening on my side of the router.

Looking at my webserver logs (external hosted server), I see a decent amount of IPv6 traffic too, so there are plenty of others who are probably using IPv6 without knowing it, too. A lot of mobile devices will have IPv6 allocated, so if you're browsing using your phone, chances are you're using IPv6 by default. Unless you're reading El Reg, of course, which appears to still only be IPv4.

Twitter says it may harvest biometric, employment data from its addicts

Number6

Nearly time to leave

I still have my Twitter account, mainly because to delete it requires effort on my part, so it sits there, occupying some of his hard disk space. As soon as he requires some of my cash or some of my data to keep using it, I'll finally cross the threshold and dump the account, assuming he doesn't dump it first.

Number6

You're assuming there is a bottom? Turtles all the way down...

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Number6

For a while I had a commute that could be as bad as 1.5 hours each way due to my employer moving location. After the first week I started looking for a new job. Now I have a fully remote job with a commute down the stairs each morning, and even before that I had rough limits on how far I was prepared to commute based on known typical traffic conditions.

Cross-country driving with almost zero traffic is fun. Going through busy areas is a lot less so.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Number6

Google probably has more interest in getting people back to the office than a lot of companies, given how large an office footprint they have in the Bay Area. There's still that large area by Diridon Station in San Jose that they bought up for redevelopment into another huge campus (albeit right next to a major public transport hub), will be interesting to see how that fares.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Number6

Re: Not a lift but…..

I "helped" one once - broadside across the river, blocking my path, so I just shouted for everyone to keep hands inside the punts, and to brace for impact, and ran the front of my punt into his, which turned him parallel with the bank and got him out of my way. Then I retrieved his quant and brought it back to him (lack of if was partly why he was stuck). I miss punting.

Number6

Re: Not a lift but…..

I learned early on, fortunately by observation, that when faced with the choice, it is better to let go of the pole than the punt. I think I only lost the pole once, and it was on a deserted stretch of the Cam so only the other occupant of the punt was witness. I'd gotten the thing to move quite fast and the pole hit a patch of sticky silt on the bottom and resisted just long enough that I had to make the call.

As for the chaos on the Backs, I remember following one of the "professionals" (as in they got paid to do it and generally knew what they were doing) as she approached a mass of punts all over the place and managed to keep about 10ft behind as she threaded a path through the mess and we both emerged unscathed out the other side with our passengers.

Number6

I had a 5Si once. Bought it for £250 used. Had to refurbish some of the rollers, but it had the duplex unit and the 2000 sheet feeder. Built to last, it was. Unfortunately I had to part company with it when I moved from somewhere with proper electricity at 50Hz to somewhere else because as far as I could tell, I'd have to swap out some parts to work at 60Hz. I vaguely remember being able to lift the printer off the sheet feeder, although because it was high up, it was easier to pick up than if it started on the floor. I was younger and fitter back then, too, although I can still lift 100lb if I'm careful.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Number6

Re: For readers outsie the US

I've not seen anything faster than 70 MPH in California, but like in the UK, you're unlucky to get pulled for less than 80 unless you're doing something else daft. I-80 through Utah is 80MPH but they'll pull you for even a hair over that. A lot of the big western states typically have 70 or 75 limits on interstates. Montana was "Reasonable and prudent", don't know if it still is.

Number6

Re: Florida driving license

Generally, emergency vehicles don't just blow through intersections, in the dark or otherwise, except in movies. They usually slow right down and check for idiots before proceeding, especially if they don't have a green light. Otherwise you can be sure that Murphy will make sure they do meet one of those idiots.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Number6

Re: Hmmm

Having done a clean install of Mint 21.2 this past weekend, I note that /bin is a link to /usr/bin, /sbin to /usr/sbin, and a bunch of /libxx are now links to /usr/libxx. I guess that's a half-way house, lets things run from one place for stuff that wants to, but provides a catch-all for legacy software looking elsewhere. I notice a lot of scripts still have #! /bin/sh at the top.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Number6

Re: Another

I compromised, I have /usr mounted on a 64GB SSD (it's a few years old now) and everything else on a big spinny disk. The other thing I discovered is that a lot of modern HDDs use SMR encoding and last time I changed disk and ended up with one of those, things got noticeably slower. This weekend I dumped that disk for a CMR type and things are suddenly a lot faster again. CMR costs more but not that much.

for those who've not met the acronyms yet: Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives write data on a hard disk in tracks that do not overlap. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) allows tracks to overlap, which results in higher data densities, but slower read and write times compared to CMR drives.

You don't want SMR drives in your NAS box or on servers.

Number6

I like Mint, been using it for quite a few years now. A bit of a hiccup when they dropped KDE support, but now I just install the XFCE version and then add KDE on top for desktop machines (laptops I tend to leave with XFCE). Takes a bit longer, but still pretty painless. I just did a clean install onto a new hard disk this weekend on one machine, and managed to copy most of the settings from the old disk.

I think the only quibble I have with the installer is that it won't let me easily do custom LVM partitions - I can have a clean install with two, but the custom partition option didn't seem to have a way of building up LVM so I had to do it manually in a terminal window and then run the installer.