* Posts by Mike007

343 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

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So what if China has 7nm chips now, there's no Huawei it can make them 'at scale'

Mike007

I am curious what the most advanced semiconductor that can be made with "US technology" actually is... considering as far as I am aware they haven't developed any new technology in this area in decades... there is a reason everyone making modern chips uses Dutch technology, not even US companies use US technology...

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Mike007

Re: No one would ever willingly let a complete stranger read all of your mail

There were some interesting things like the OS reporting as either Windows 7 or windows 10 test edition which raised an eyebrow, because I'd just make my malware only run on Windows home or pro and it would never get detected by their scanners... but not enough interesting material for a whole talk.

Mike007

Re: No one would ever willingly let a complete stranger read all of your mail

We use a program called ScreenConnect (not using its new name!) to access client devices. One of the features is the ability to install the client by sending a link to an exe file which auto installs everything.

We had a client working in a clandestine project and we set up a separate silo for the computers on the project. Then I noticed we had a "ghost" computer showing up on the system under that companies details. Windows 7 with the iffiest looking desktop ever. It came online and registered itself then disappeared.

We had a 3 hour long all-hands meeting trying to figure out how we had been compromised. Then someone tried re-sending the install link to the client, and a second ghost computer showed up. It seems the o364 email filtering has an antivirus scan that involves spinning up a VM and executing the file...

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

Mike007

Most Brits find broadband outages to be almost as annoying as someone jumping a queue? If it is that annoying how come so few people are willing to spend an extra £5/month on a decent ISP?

I hope people working from home on the cheapest ISP they can find get their wages docked for hours not working...

(Of course some people might have an issue with their line they can't get Openreach to fix, but most of the outages people complain about are either a crap ISP because it is 50p/year cheaper than a decent one or WiFi issues caused by a crap WiFi router at the opposite end of the house because they don't want to buy a whole home WiFi system)

Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API

Mike007

Re: Meeting price ticker

"Anyone have anything more to add? Anyone? I don't want to end the meeting just yet, we have another 2 minutes before we reach $4.20" - Elon.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Mike007

A pattern...

They did the same thing with the postal service. Started selling stamps you could apply yourself at home then drop the letter in the letterbox. This encouraged young women to engage in immoral communications without needing their fathers approval.

Mike007

Re: Computer MOT

And this "MOT" will be conducted by someone who declares your computer too insecure to connect to the internet, because your Linux system failed the "windows security centre has no warnings" check.

So you install windows, and it still fails because there is an exclamation mark saying you don't have OneDrive backup enabled...

ISP's ads 'misleadingly implied' existence of 6G, says watchdog

Mike007

Re: 6G?

My 6e wireless only has 5e backhaul

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Mike007

Re: Task failed successfully.

Disability discrimination. Not everyone would get the same number of logins.

There's a good chance your VPN is vulnerable to privacy-menacing TunnelCrack attack

Mike007

Re: Looks like I'm safe!

If you want to use open WiFi then all you care about is if it has internet access... What difference does it make what (easily faked) splash screen comes up when you initially connect?

Mike007

Re: Looks like I'm safe!

Open WiFi would be more attractive if you didn't have to manually click the "Whatever, I agree, now let me have some internet" button every time your device auto connects...

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

Mike007

One of my colleagues used to say "ping me if you need me". He stopped doing that when one day he got back from lunch and I copy/pasted from the terminal in to the chat and asked why he didn't respond...

S/4HANA was once the future for SAP – but now it's in the clouds

Mike007

Re: Opportunity

Yes, and weed dealers should start giving all of their customers free seeds and lights...

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Mike007

News headline from 2043

Revolutionary new operating system works without network connectivity.

Global Slack messaging outage cuts world off from colleagues

Mike007

Re: Cough... maybe we'll use letters and stamps next time.

As someone who covers first line support on a helpdesk as part of my job, I can confirm that email is not 99.99% reliable.

For example there was that time office364 decided that the provider we used to host the images for email signatures was bad and our clients started contacting us saying their internal emails were going to the spam folder... Followed by asking why we weren't replying, because Microsoft was totally blocking our replies for the same reason without even sending them to spam.

We have had many people email us, we reply, then 2 weeks later they email in asking if we got their email because they haven't had a reply. We tell users to phone us if they haven't had a reply from a human confirming we got their message within 45 minutes during office hours.

The company has received 2 formal complaints from users against the helpdesk staff in the 2 years I have been working there. One was against me for not replying to someone. The ticket system recorded my replies, the logs showed they had gone to spam...

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Mike007

The problem with the post office is that are in the wrong industry. When they fuck up and and destroy people's lives they have to pay compensation...

Fujitsu on the other hand are in the IT industry. They wont have to pay a penny, after all there is no warranty that the software will work and liability is capped at the cost of a license. Industry standard practice!

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Mike007

This is such a problem that Microsoft has added a secondary bin. When you delete from deleted items you can still go in to this secondary bin to recover it.

The problem is that when you go to the main deleted items folder on the web it puts a notification banner at the top to click on to access the secondary one. Instead of hiding it from the user and forcing them to go via the IT department if they want to fuck with that folder...

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

Mike007

Tip for voice menus where they prompt with a vague "please tell me your problem" then hope you say one of the magic keywords so it can respond to that word with an irrelevant suggestion... Try saying "I want to speak to someone" (if that fails then "customer support" is more universal, but I always try the first one first because it is more satisfying when it works)

Mike007

Client Helpdesk: I have detected an error on startup. Please assist.

Helpdesk Helpdesk: Please reboot.

*Client disconnected*

Client Helpdesk: I have detected an error on startup. Please assist.

Helpdesk Helpdesk: Please reboot. This resolved the issue last time.

*Client disconnected*

Client Helpdesk: I have detected an error on startup. Please assist.

Helpdesk Helpdesk: Please reboot. This has resolved the issue multiple times in the past.

*Client disconnected*

Mike007

Re: What ?

If the Indian call centres I have dealt with are representative then they have always had difficulty hiring competent staff...

(Not saying Indians are all incompetent, but the competent ones probably want a higher salary than <Insert least favourite company> call centres offer)

Microsoft's GitHub under fire for DDoSing crucial open source project website

Mike007

Re: Whatever happened to local caching?

There are benefits to every build starting out from a known clean system. Before I migrated all of my projects to docker build environments I would frequently come back to a project from 6 months ago and find it no longer builds because of some change I made to my dev machine to accommodate another project...

Microsoft signs 1.5 million seat contract for Office 365 and more

Mike007

Re: Value for money

Presumably for the NHS email platform they only actually need basics? Or do the NHS buy full desktop office licenses for users at private companies* just because they have an NHS email address...?

*which is what all of the hospitals and surgeries and pharmacies using NHS email addresses are...

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Mike007

Re: Unique keys

I am called Michael Jones. At my university one year there were 10 of us enrolled (it varied each year as people came and left).

It didn't help that login username, email address, and name in the system all had to have numbers added to the end and were treated independently. I was MJones on the domain, Michael.Jones-1 for my email, and my name was on the system as Michael Jones (2). Mine was the most rational, others had for example a username of MJJones (adding a middle initial), an email of Michael.Jones-5 and a name of "Michael Jones (7)" or whatever.

Where are we now, Microsoft 362.5? Europe reports outages

Mike007

I do wonder how it really compares to self hosted.

10% of the world down for a few hours at the same time is more newsworthy than 50% of companies having 1 day outages at different times for different reasons spread across the year.

When an outage hits a smaller company they rarely have the ability to get back online in a couple of hours.

Google searchers from years past can get paid for pilfered privacy

Mike007

Re: Location?

sending Google your personal information? surely you are merely confirming it?

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Mike007

Re: A large pull request of mechanical changes swapping out API calls.

I think they mean a boring task of going through replacing DeleteDatabase() with DelDB() or whatever.

And someone accidentally replaced Database.Delete() with Instance.Delete() or some equivalent.

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

Mike007

Re: Racist?

"In this case the problem was almost certainly a training set deficient in pictures of Black people. Training sets tend to mostly have people"

Unfortunately not. Although that is also an issue.

Training sets did historically have fewer black people, which any competent company should be aware of and rectify these days... however even if you have an equal number of black and white people you will still get worse results for black people due to the lower contrast. My understanding is that you need to bias it the other way and have more black people than white in order to get similar accuracy.

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

Mike007

So you need a windows 11 PC to use this... Meaning you already have a full windows desktop. With an RDP client...

China hasn't told Micron why it failed security review, or what its ban means

Mike007

Re: the found backdoors

or perhaps they couldn't find their mandatory "security module" in it? you know, the one that allows remote diagnostics so the government can check that the device is properly secure or something

Logitech, iFixit to offer parts to stop folks binning their computer mouse

Mike007

Re: 3D printable parts

The sort of person who will consider repairing a mouse is more likely than average to have a 3D printer...

Let white-hat hackers stick a probe in those voting machines, say senators

Mike007

Re: If you want secure elections

If you don't register then how do they know you are voting in the right constituency?

Apple pushes first-ever 'rapid' patch – and rapidly screws up

Mike007

If they want people to apply updates, how about an "update and shut down" option users can use at the end of the day (without requiring an admin password) instead of asking on startup when one presumably is planning on using the device?

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

Mike007

Re: VOIP Numbers

There are dedicated VoIP blocks in the 05 range, but nobody uses one of them when you can select a geographic number with pretty much every provider. An 05 number just "looks weird".

Like having a .uk domain instead of .co.uk (although this isn't as bad as it used to be)

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

Mike007

Re: Grown-Ups

The company I currently work for does some robotics stuff and as such has had several PCBs manufactured over the years. Previously my boss used UK suppliers because he wanted fast turnaround times, cost about £100 per board for a delivery time of 3-4 weeks.

When I started working here I mentioned that I had gotten a PCB made in China as part of a hobby project and I paid £20 for 5 boards with a delivery time of just over a week... the company now gets all of its PCBs made in China. We only do small volume one-off projects so we prefer to assemble them ourselves, but if we wanted them to the Chinese supplier will pick and place all of the components and it'll still be here faster and cheaper than a bare PCB from a local supplier.

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

Mike007

Re: Clarksons Farm

According to Google Danish police are armed, whilst nurses are not.

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Mike007

Re: Far too close to home

> I personally accept beer as a deposit.

Do you return the beer in the same condition it was deposited with you, or does it undergo biological processing before being returned to the user?

Of course if it's fosters then it doesn't matter, they won't taste the difference.

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Mike007

I just have unbound running on my router providing a local recursive resolver, no filtering.

Mike007

Umm... My home resolver has been doing this for years.

In case you are wondering, I haven't noticed any breakage.

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

Mike007

What does this mean?

"Software downloaded with privileged access is not tracked for license compliance and life-cycle management, and NASA does not have a consistent, Agency-wide process for limiting privileged access or using "least privilege" permissions, which gives users only the software permissions necessary for their job."

what is "privileged access" in the context of downloading software? Regular users have Administrator access on their workstations...?

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

Mike007

Re: Intelligence

we have artificial intelligence, it's real intelligence we struggle with

Microsoft chases Google with ChatGPT-powered Bing

Mike007

The real question: will an ad blocker also block the extremely confident but probably wrong answers from the AI, or will we need an extra extension for that?

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

Mike007

It took me an embarrassingly long time to spot the cut/copy/paste icons on the new context menu...

After roasting Nvidia for overheating issues AMD now has its own

Mike007

Re: Well to be fair...

A cable not being plugged in properly can be blamed on the customer, but it can also be rectified by said customer. Not so for a defective cooling design...

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Mike007

Re: Someone Else's Password

Salts are used in hashes to prevent the same password hashing to the same value for 2 users. LastPass does not hash the passwords.

LastPass encrypts the passwords with a unique key, so they can be decrypted again (which hashes prevent). The unique keys are what prevent rainbow tables working.

Twenty years on, command-line virus scanner ClamAV puts out version 1

Mike007

Re: Charming

Who can queue for the longest?

WASP malware stings Python developers

Mike007

Re: Double check your spelling

Presumably that is the correct package name...

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

Mike007

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

Had a user who when asked their password so we could log in to their account gave Password3. Next time I needed to log in they had changed it, told me it was Password4. A while later we needed to log in to a random user to test something and I suggested trying Password5. It worked.

Jump forward a few months. A users account has been compromised and used to send phishing emails to clients. Guess which user.

In my defence, I did flag it up and in fact gave that user as an example when arguing against forced password changes.

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Mike007

Re: Pass me the incense and put the whale song up to 11.

Better? Or just more optimistic?

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