Posts by Munchausen's proxy

FBI deletes web shells from hundreds of compromised Microsoft Exchange servers before alerting admins

Re: So all you businesses running Redmond software ...

"and they didn't plant private backdoors on anything,"

Then put a pass-through system between your exchange server and the outside world, and audit its network traffic.

One careful driver: Make room in the garage... Bloodhound jet-powered car is up for sale

Re: Perhaps Elon Musk...

Can we just say that, as a general principle, a supersonic aircraft in ground effect would not be a safe vehicle in which to ride?

As if a supersonic wheeled vehicle on the ground is?

US nuke agency hacked by suspected Russian SolarWinds spies, Microsoft also installed backdoor

"this is just a who me column article misfiled"

I don't know how I should react to this intrusion until I find out if the BOFH is looking worried, or smug.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Jumbo quarks involved?

"African elephants can be broken down into Savannah elephants and forest elephants"

I'm envisioning something like neutron decay here - do we have a Playmobil data visualization of this process?

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

Re: Built into a keyboard?

"From all the posts I've read, what everyone seems to be wanting is nothing but a netbook with updated hardware."

Remember, this is the internet -- if it were raining beer, half the people would be bitching because there weren't any free peanuts.

Devs strung up about .NET 5.0 string changes that may break working code are told: It's not a bug, it's a feature

Re: "... that doesn't create new productivity improvements for our users"

I've got it! Let's use regexes!

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

Re: El Reg becoming political now ?

"Dunkin' is to donuts as Trump is to Presidential."

Just what I'd expect to hear from somebody who probably uses emacs.

Visual Studio Code 1.50 goes hard on extensions support, but tackling add-on bloat is becoming more onerous

Re: Don't blame the extensions...

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6.2K Apr 8 2020 /usr/bin/geany

Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

It's pretty ironic

"while reducing the amount of expertise needed to deal with situations like running out of disk space"

BTRFS uses large amounts of disk space without telling 'du' or 'df' about it. In my experience, exactly the opposite of this claim is true. When you get an unexplainable 'out of disk space' error, you can't see anyplace it's gotten to, and it turns out you quickly need to learn about a bunch of infrastructure you never knew was there, expertise is at a premium.

And that's why I'll never use btrfs again.

'There is no way we can keep coding local': GitPod's cloud development platform released into sunlight of open source

Really no need for code at all anymore

It's frameworks all the way down.

Pew, pew, pew! Our galaxy is shooting cold, gaseous 'bullets' of high-speed matter. Boffins are baffled

To be expected

Once John Conway moved to a higher plane.

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

Re: @Julz

Judging by results proudly displayed on social media, some of them seem to be agents of Zeta Reticuli.

Google employs people to invent colours – and they think their work improves your wellbeing

Re: The lack of u triggers me

Sourry.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: Hypocritical

I was always entertained when we did an upgrade and counted all the abends that no one noticed.

Reviewing and profiling your code is boring? Well, Amazon will now sell you an AI editor to do it for you

So,

They've solved the halting problem, then?

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Can I still say

"Oh, for fuck's sake!"

Or is that too hurtful to the lonely?

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

Re: Well

"But I bet they made more profit from those 5 tests than the Koreans made from 3500"

I expect we'll see testing numbers skyrocket here, as soon as Ivankacorp LLC gets the sole-source contract for the tests.

Honeywell, I blew up the qubits: Thermostat maker to offer cloud access to 'world's most powerful quantum computer' within months

And it lives again

Multics and a simulator to run it on are freely available.

http://multics-wiki.swenson.org/index.php/Main_Page

is a good operational starting point and

https://multicians.org/

has the history.

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Re: COBOL

"Maybe COBOL developers don't go to StackOverflow the minute they have a problem :D"

These days, it's more like "... the minute they want another problem."

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Instilling new timeframes of thought in a world beset by faster/shorter.

"Visiting the clock will require an effort, a long hike on which to contemplate whatever it is you feel contemplating,"

What time is it? Are we almost there?

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

Re: Why isn't any one offended men were required to wear a blazer and slacks or suit?

"Why are so many in the comments "indignant" about women being told what to wear, but nary a peep about men being told what to wear?"

Because men are such stupid sheep they think being told to dress in stupid clothes (and neck accessories) is actually a compliment on their abilities to select stupid clothes.

ERP disaster zone: The mostly costly failures of the past decade

Re: Can ERP actually be a perfect fit for any company ?

"Good for whoever is in charge of the programming, not so good for the company in the long run."

Citation needed. How many problems are avoided, how much spending is never even planned when you have a more-or-less fixed cost inhouse pool of expertise to draw on?

White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome

Google is probably not your business partner

Definitely not your friend.

'We've done it, we've wasted further time!' Judge raps HP over Mike Lynch court scrutiny

Re: Pissing the Judge off over a number of weeks

In the USA this tactic works, does it? Looks like it's failing spectacularly here.....

"If you can't convince them with facts, then baffle them with bullshit" has been a cornerstone of U.S. discourse for quite a while, now.

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Re: Eh?

It can be argued the owners of Android don't consider surreptitious data extraction to be a bug.

Malicious code ousted from PureScript's npm installer – but who put it there in the first place?

The question is not "how?", but "why?"

"designed to install PureScript, a programming language that compiles to JavaScript, on the user's system using the npm command line interface. It gets used about 2,000 times a week."

It's muppets all the way down.

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: Child-proof reset operation

This is the best goddamn thing I have read on the internet this year.

Maybe ever.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

Yes, I'd argue, not sure blockchain is quite as overhyped as "AI"

It's a trick question though. AI is the most overhyped technology over the past fifty years.

Sysadmin's three-line 'annoyance-buster' busts painstakingly crafted, crucial policy

Re: Great system...

"That's precisely the point.

See how we have different answers?"

Of course, in real life, the system will simply use the best config until the worst possible time, at which point it will switch seamlessly to using the worst one.

You like JavaScript! You really like it! Scripting lingo tops dev survey of programming languages

Re: Yeah...

" If you roll your own everything you spend half your time reinventing the wheel."

But at least then there's a chance your wheel will be round.

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

"So... we should have rats driving our cars?"

Have you ever taken a taxi in the U.S.?

Western Digital: And when I pull the covers off, behold as NAND becomes virtual DRAM

Re: So... how is this different to swap on an SSD?

" So... how is this different to swap on an SSD?"

It wasn't entirely clear to me, but it sounds like they've built in a good paging system so they can bypass Linux's house of cards, and make actual good use of the backing store.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

I can see it now:

systemd-iefbr14

Good luck.

Is this cuttlefish really all that cosmic? Ubuntu 18.10 arrives with extra spit, polish, 4.18 kernel

Re: "the system has a more modern and 'flatter' look"

"Modern KDE can indeed be far too resource-heavy, but at least you can configure it to be light."

Can you easily get rid of crap like akonadi being a prerequisite of every thing I'd like to install but don't want a goddamn desktop indexer for?

I used to like KDE a lot. Used to.

Chinese Super Micro 'spy chip' story gets even more strange as everyone doubles down

Re: Denials

"So far AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and TMobile have denied being the "major telecommunications company" in question. Who does that leave, Centurylink?"

Comcast. But it couldn't be them -- if it were they would have charged the customers for it.

A web where the user has complete control of their data? Sounds Solid, Tim Berners-Lee

Xanadu

So basically, the vision Ted Nelson had, but with more marketing and no more likely to be implemented.

What do a meth, coke, molly, heroin stash and Vegas allegedly have in common? Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicolas

Re: Because there has to be more to being loaded.

> "coke, meth, heroin"

> When you're that loaded you need to get loaded more?

" There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.” -- Hunter S. Thompson

Do Optane's prospects look DIMM? Chip chap has questions for Intel

Re: i've been waiting for this since the first experimental Dimm loaded scsi SSDs

"persistant ram is going to need a whole new programming model to be used effectively I feel."

Or a whole old one -- multics used that model. Almost 50 years ago.

Developer’s code worked, but not in the right century

Re: timestamp is a date format

"Maybe The Register can come up with its own special timestamp ? Milliseconds since el'Reg started ?"

VMS (and OpenVMS) uses tenths of microseconds starting November 17, 1858.

Git push origin undo-my-last-disaster

"So basically... Stick all your configuration in source control and you can check out old versions when you screw it up?"

It's actually more than that. The point (I think) is that you can automate that process almost completely, so you can commit a change, press a button, and the change works its way through your machine farm, paying attention to which machine does exactly what thing, and therefore needs exactly which change, and so on.

Of course, if you can automate it, you can give the button to someone who doesn't understand the inner workings, doesn't have a good model of those machines and their relationships, and is all too willing to push the button because, hey i'ts automated - the button knows all that stuff.

What can go wrong?

As I understand it, there's a reason U.S. Navy submarines have so many people on board. They think it's better to have humans who know stuff in the loop than to have a fully automated system with catastrophic failure modes.

Every major OS maker misread Intel's docs. Now their kernels can be hijacked or crashed

Re: PC 2.0

"IIRC the VAX architecture had instructions for BCD arithmetic."

The VAX had instructions for EVERYTHING. Including a single machine instruction for solving polynomials.

Re: So all of this is just a case of...

"If OS developers - highly intelligent people with excellent knowledge and understanding of their domain"

Try to work with memory overcommit in a shared HPC environment, then try to repeat that with a straight face.

A kernel house of cards designed for no other real purpose than to make bad code run (for a while).

ZX Spectrum reboot firm's shareholders demand current directors go

Re: A Wide Spectrum of opinions

"Hopefully the shareholders will be able to salvage something out of this mess."

Well, I don't know about the shareholders, but the 'backers' are all receiving a good lesson, for those who can understand it.

BOFH: We know where the bodies are buried

I like the new Boss

He seems to know his place, and could prove to be a real asset to the team.

BOFH: Give me a lever long enough and a fool, I mean a fulcrum and ....

Re: Isn't it time for LART to get updated?

"Any suggestions for a modern Agile, IAAS enabled version of it?"

Thought leader.

Teensy plastic shields are the big new thing in 2018's laptop crop

"f laptop makers were really serious about security, then hard swtiches for the camera and mic, just for starters."

Yes, it's not the camera that worries me nearly as much as the microphone. I'd really like a laptop without one, or failing that the confidence to open it up and cut the correct leads.

A tiny Ohio village turned itself into a $3m speed-cam trap. Now it has to pay back the fines

"Try not speeding. Total fine $0"

Speeding is so ubiquitous in the U.S. that 'scrupulously staying just under the limit' has been used occasionally by police as an indicator for suspected impaired driving, justifying a stop.

Trump backs push for bumpkin broadband with presidential orders

Re: Republicans voted against financing municipal broadband

And just wait until they start raising the chocolate ration.

UK.gov puts Suffolk 7-year-old's submarine design into production

Re: Art World

"He's cross because he didn't get credit for producing all that piss. The artist just took it."

That's the crux of the matter, I think. You've nailed it.