Posts by TrevorH

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

I imagine an EV charger also requires significant quantities of power that a green comms cabinet probably didn't need so the "they're already connected to power" point is probably moot.

Infoseccer: Private security biz let guard down, exposed 120K+ files

Their response appears to be the usual "kill the reporter, ignore the cause". Inspires confidence.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

We're competing for a prize that no-one wants or has a use for?

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Call me when they ship a model with 3 x 2.5GbE ports.

RHEL 9.5 debuts alongside AlmaLinux, Rocky, and Oracle updates

> We confess to a moment's amusement at reading this section of the docs:

Even more amusing when you know that Lennart works for Microsoft these days.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

AI is to PC what 3D is to TV

The troublesome economics of CPU-only AI

> As we understand it, hyperthreading was disabled for these tests, so only 88 of the VM's threads were actually active.

What? Are you sure that's a valid assumption to make? 176 vcpus on a VM would be 176 vcpus whether you have HT enabled or not.

FortiManager critical vulnerability under active attack

Surely the issue is that they *silently* patched the vulnerability and released a new version without telling anyone that the bug existed or that it was fixed.

CIQ takes Rocky Linux corporate with $25K price tag

Re: RH support levels

You did see the bit in the main article that says "Support is available separately." ?

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

> Imagine you were the system engineer of a multi-million corporation. If the system went horribly wrong

If I were, I'd be paying Red Hat not the monkey.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Or you could just press and hold the key combination when the WPS starts up which stops it from restarting the running things.

"You can prevent the WPS from starting applications during startup by pressing Ctrl-LeftShift-F1 when the desktop first appears."

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

The issue linked is to one that is public because it appears to be less severe. It mentions other fixes to libcupsfilters and libppd which are not public so are presumably more severe. I am dubious whether these will end up being as severe as the hype makes out.

AMD reverses course: Ryzen 3000 CPUs will get SinkClose patch after all

> Does Windows fair any better in getting microcode updates for the non Epyc chips?

No. It's a desktop processor thing not an operating system thing.

AMD won’t patch Sinkclose security bug on older Zen CPUs

Desktop Ryzen 3000 series now showing a fix version of:

ComboAM4PI

1.0.0ba

(2024-08-16)

The link to the AMD CVE details page has changed since I looked at it when this article was first published. It now says under "Ryzen 3000 Series Desktop" "(Target 2024-08-20)" so that looks to me like it is being fixed for the 3x00X series after all.

MDM vendor Mobile Guardian attacked, leading to remote wiping of 13,000 devices

MDM is that Man in Da Middle?

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

Dotcom boom n bust all over again

Dotcom boom n bust all over again. Does anyone actually believe in this miracle cure?

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

Update 07/23/2024: We understand and appreciate the feedback that customers have shared with us regarding the timeline provided for the migration from Office 365 connectors. We have extended the retirement timeline through December 2025 to provide ample time to migrate to another solution such as blah blah blah

Is Teams connector retirement a tweak to fit EU laws, or a sign of price rises to come?

They blinked:

Update 07/23/2024: We understand and appreciate the feedback that customers have shared with us regarding the timeline provided for the migration from Office 365 connectors. We have extended the retirement timeline through December 2025 to provide ample time to migrate to another solution such as...

Interesting, the SPAM that was being appended to each webhook post saying "Action required, we're screwing you over" has now gone away. As of about 05:00 BST this morning, that SPAM stopped.

The current connectors use a domain per customer like $company.webhook.office.com and then go on to add another 3 UUID's to the hook url plus another random string that looks suspiciously like another uuid with the '-' characters removed. Total length minus the identifiable company + webhook.office.com is around 170 bytes so it's not what I'd call easily guessable. So first step for anyone wanting to exploit a security vulnerability in a webhook is to guess the 170 character random string so they can post to it. Sure, that's security by obscurity but you need to know the correct url to be able to get to it.

Microsoft to intro checkpoint cumulative updates for Win 11

It's not the bloody size, it's the TIME it takes. I can update 100 linux systems while the progress bar on Windows Update is still spinning. How can it possibly take longer to patch an installed windows system than it does to install it in the first place?

CentOS 7 holdouts thrown a support lifeline by SUSE

Better than the quote I got from CIQ which worked out at $500 per server per year.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Does indeed seem to be true, other news sites are reporting it in more detail like https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cneel8ed2vvo

What can be done to protect open source devs from next xz backdoor drama?

Nice selective quoting there... the original says "ordinarily used by ..." meaning xz the package, not restricting it just to the compromised version.

Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former coworker

This guy was on freenode and then libera.chat IRC in the #centos channels for years and came across as a thoroughly nasty person.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

This is not the first time that hobbes has announced it's going away. Last time it was rescued after a lot of complaints and a number of students or faculty came forward to continue to maintain it.

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

*This* is what counts as innovation at Microsoft?

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

It should also be noted that the vast majority of homes in cities in the UK cannot use individual heat pumps due to lack of space and/or noise from the fan units. If you live in a terraced street with no garden, where do you put your heat pipes? There are hand-wavy vague and untested plans for utility companies to install street-wide pipe networks under roads and pavements but so far nothing concrete (no pun intended) about how this would function nor how much it would cost. To meet the 2050 deadline they would need to be converting 20,000 properties a *week* to heatpumps. I suspect the current conversion rate is more likely closer to 20 a week than 20,000!

Red Hat greases migration to RHEL for CentOS 7 holdouts

Nor do they mention "Where can I find £25,000 a _year_ stuffed down the back of the sofa to allow me to migrate my CentOS 7 systems to RHEL"

Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines

It's been obvious they think it ought to be Windows for some time.

Researcher bags two-for-one deal on Linux bugs while probing GNOME component

why would you have anything installed with "tracker" in its name!

Some of us took one look at the package list and found something called "tracker" and immediately ran `yum remove \*tracker\*`

Sysadmin and spouse admit to part in 'massive' pirated Avaya licenses scam

The infamous Tuttle!

Previously known only for making the headlines for https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/27/tuttle_email/

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

Re: Compilers?

The entire gcc toolchain is available for OS/2 but there are also compilers from IBM and Borland though finding copies might be tricky.

64GB is correct

As a long time OS/2 user I can confirm that HPFS has a hard limit of 64GB per filesystem. JFS allows for larger volumes and quicker chkdsk times but I've also lost data to it so large is not always good!

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

Last time I looked Office 2019 was the last version you could install on your own computer.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

$0.005/h is US$44 a year so not going to break the bank for most people who need one. People that use hundreds of them, not so much.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

So you pay $44B for a brand name and then dump the name, logo and even the verb "tweet" associated with the name you bought.

What a cupid stunt.

What it takes to keep an enterprise 'Frankenkernel' alive

> No API changes, and no internal ABI changes either

This is a bit disingenuous. The so called "Stable KABI" almost *always* breaks at a RHEL point release. And since this is Stream and the kernel will be continually updated with new changes during the lifetime of one RHEL point release so I would expect multiple KABI changes to happen during Stream's lifetime between one RHEL point release and the next. If you run RHEL then you just get used to the "stable" KABI not being stable over a point release. If you run Stream then it could break at any time.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Re: A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gone amiss

Yes. I've seen what happens in CentOS Stream. The other day for example, they pushed out an update to gnupg2 which removed its ability to verify signatures using SHA1. Good move to remove insecure stuff... except that the key used to GPG sign all the packages in the distro uses SHA1 so immediately after applying that fix, you could no longer use dnf or rpm to upgrade or downgrade any packages because they all have invalid signatures. That is the level of testing that CentOS Stream packages get before they are inflicted on its users.

Run, run away.

Re: If RH can't do this...

RHEL 8 did and does have the same lifespan as RHEL 6 and 7. 10 years for all of them. CentOS Stream 8 and 9 are 5 years.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Never heard of "when you're in a hole ..."

...then stop digging. Or, double down on what you just said and go on a "you're all picking on us" rant: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

Well, who knows how that is now. At one point when OEL started up, it was found that there were typos in their SRPMs that had come directly from the CentOS version of the SRPM so it was obvious where they came from.

Also "if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code".

Re: GPL violation

Hello Debian!

Western Digital: Customer info stolen in that IT attack

I got the email from them telling me of this breach and, usefully, it contains only a JPEG of the grovelling apology from some WD bigwig. That JPEG has no explanatory text to go with it and like many I have images deliberately turned off in my email client so all I got on two email clients (gmail on Android 13 and Thunderbird on a desktop) was a blank email from them containing, apparently, nothing at all. Very useful. It was only because I wondered why WD would be sending me a blank email that I bothered to dig through the headers and work out that it was actually from them. I then had to hack through the HTML email source code to extract the JPEG URL so I could read it....

Not a great way to communicate

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

> Regomize

Nit pick time.

I'm pretty sure this should be 'regonomize' as in a smash of register and anonymize.

Regomize sounds more like a word smash of register and sodomize. Similar and maybe very registerish...

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

Eurpean format numbers?

> 21.921MB

Did you use Euro formatted numbers here with a . instead of a comma? Is that twenty one point nine two one MB or is it 21 thousand, 9 hundred and twenty one MB? The first seems unbelievably small and the second seems more realistic but quite bloated.

Red Hat at 30: Biggest Linux company of them all still pushing to become cloud power

> the RHEL clone CentOS changed its focus

I'm not sure why you continue to spout the RH company line on this.

What they did was kill CentOS. Only fools (and horses?) still use CentOS.

IBM shrinks z16 and LinuxONE systems into standard rack configs

> a single Rockhopper 4 would let customers replace at least 36 x86 servers, reducing energy consumption by 75 percent and space by 67 percent

So if it can replace 36 x 1U servers and use 67% of the space, does that mean this beast is a 24U rack mounted server? Does it come with a free forklift to get it into the rack?