Posts by theblackhand

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Re: ...we do approve of exploring and learning and having fun...

A lot but not everyone.

Certainly not Steve "you can play with very high voltage at least once"...

In his defence, he was correct

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

As far as I am aware, Windows has supported multiple NTP servers from the command line since Windows 2000:

net stop w32time

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:"0.pool.ntp.org,0x1 1.pool.ntp.org,0x1 time.google.com,0x1" /syncfromflags:manual /update

net start w32time

Alter your NTP servers as appropriate - try and use in-country pools for personal use.

IBM's mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value

Hey Watson...

Why didn't you foresee the downfall of IBM would be AI?

I appreciate that the downfall is still someway off at present, but I love the irony.

I guess there's always quantum computing...

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

Re: Ah, Sony

You wouldn't buy a video of a film.

And then a DVD of the same film because the video got damaged.

And then another DVD of the same film after a friend borrowed it.

And then another DVD because a child scratched it and you thought you might want to watch it again.

And then another on bluray after your daughter's boyfriend took it as part of a breakup.

And then another copy. And another. And another.

I think I've identified who the real victim is.

SAP snaps wallet shut for travel and hiring so it can keep shoveling cash into AI

Re: Well...

What? And risk having a CEO capable of rational decisions? Where's the business advantage in that?

Geopolitical jitters push Europe's internet registry away from cloud-first strategy

Re: Opex

So they benefit from learning new terms AND learning how to learn even more new terms?

Sounds like a gift that will serve them well.

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Won't someone think of the poor AI?

When people say how great the AI future is, they never mention the poor AI bots summoned by Crapita and forced to do unholy things.

Or maybe I'm being pessimistic and we will get an updated, AI version, of the four Yorkshiremen?

And during the warmer months of the year, the breeze can be quite refreshing if you don't have AC...

There's no such thing as an agentic CPU

A single AI dog turd won't get you VC money.

But if you can scale it up enough, they will not only be beating a path to your door, they'll be wiping dog poo off their expensive shoes.

And if that isn't a form of an intelligence, I guess you won't want to buy a bridge....

AI is making Patch Tuesday (kinda) fun again

Re: How many patches were generated using AI …

"With Microslop — complete borkage is inevitable."

The number of patches is increasing significantly (Windows CVEs were around 200/year from 1999-2012, increased by 100/year until a spike in 2020 before settling around the 900-1000/year mark in 2024) and we seem to be on track for 2000+ in 2026.

We have to acknowledge Windows flaws and that they need patched - we cannot rule out AI continuing to increase its patch output, maybe even giving a target boom or bust date where Windows is patched or fully booked...

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Re: Who me? 1988

They may not learn, but sometimes setting an example for the other students has a greater outcome...

Tencent admits GPUs only pay for themselves when powering personalized ads

Re: Improved personalized advertising - WOW! Can't wait /sarc. The enshittification continues.

Maybe you need to spend a little more GPU time on your ad for Ublock Origin?

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Re: Status pages are crap.

Imagine you're a poor, neglected status sensor.

All around you is burning, but you soldier on through the heat and smoke to keep letting the world know that you're still working and letting people know the status...

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: So it's true, then

Does a manager count as "a job"?

I thought it was just a welfare program ensuring they created the minimal number of issues possible and failing that.... The inevitable

Microsoft fixes broken Windows update days after vowing fewer broken updates

Re: Prompt engineering

"after reviewing the code I have created a patch that will delete the contents of %WINDIR% and any system backups. While this may initially appear to be the wrong solution, on reflection you will understand."

CERN eggheads burn AI into silicon to stem data deluge

Re: Problem Solving, the CERN way!

"Where are all the apostrophe pedants..."

Lining up behind the "you're replying to yourself to farm upvotes" pedants and the exclamation mark pedants? And don't even begin to get the "slackers? It's the weekend" pedants started.

ChatGPT advised exec on how to fire Subnautica founders to avoid payout, court ruling says

Re: Penny pinching all round then

"Not really an LLM problem, more of a cost-benefit/ethics issue"

Definitely not an LLM issue - it's a breach of contract issue because of the actions taken rather than the source of the "advice".

Not being willing to pay for lawyers that are willing to engage in morally dubious activities and instead using ChatGPT which ultimately results in chat logs being presented in court just provides a little more humour on the path from f***ing around to finding out.

Bank built its own threat hunting agent because vendors can’t keep pace with new threats

Re: AI and the threat signal count :o

Or a marketing department that realised that encouraging their clients that clicking on links in email communication was a normal and easy way to access their account might have consequences...

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Re: What a Mess

People have been objecting to writing COBOL for decades...

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Re: so .. er ?

IPX would have required either a proxy (I.e. Novell Bordermanger - not sure if there were any others that supported IPX) or dual stack IP/IPX.

My guess is that they were using a Burdermanager proxy as that would explain the lack of default route. The Bordermanger could potentially still get Internet access via proxy ARP but it would have been flakey as proxy ARP suffers under load. If so, the tech likely did fix things by adding a default route in the right place and testing on a native IP client would show things looked healthy but clients using Bordermanger still had to deal with it's reliability.

I've only ever dealt with one customer who used Novell Bordermanger with IPX clients - it always seemed like a problem looking for a small problem in order to make a much, much larger problem.

Cisco turns to titanium spoons and sand dunes to build a better … box?

Re: Next: Cisco -> Fiasco

How can you be so pessimistic?

Without these significant advances, an El Reg writer wouldn't have been able to make that joke...

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

Rather than looking at the number of bosses, you should add up the month's between bosses.

That's where you will see the savings...

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

The link says "1.5 GW Caterpillar G3520K generation (firm order, delivery March 2026)"

The Cat G3520K is a 97.6 litre, 20 cylinder engine designed to run on low pressure natural gas and generate 2552–2567 ekW (at 50/60 Hz).

Running ~600 gen sets seems rather optimistic and about 25% less efficient than three large 500MW CCGT's although they probably require regulatory permission and I believe the smaller units may not be.

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Re: Send it to Ukraine

Or we could just acknowledge that the design is fundamentally flawed and avoid wasting the Ukrainian's time.

And if manufacturers/UK defence decision makers need more evidence, have Ukrainian's "donate" some to Russians desperate for vehicles and let them demonstrate the flaws rather than harming allies....

Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers

Re: AI Herpes

While that maybe the case, it has to be compared to the existing service.

Being told to go f*#k ones self by AI in a timely manner is still better than the same from humans after multiple transfers between departments and a cumulative hold time measured in half days...

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Cloud direction

Previous articles have identified regulatory issues (i.e. the EU) and that the big two cloud providers (AWS and then Azure) pulling away from their competitors driving consolidation within the industry.

With only Google looking like they could be a viable competitor outside of regional niches based on investment (unless you believe Oracle/OpenAI can deliver on their contract), the pressure to provide multi-cloud is more about covering off future consolidation than customer flexibility.

Multicloud is less of a threat to further growth of the duopoly now that it is entrenched and smaller players can be priced out of future data centre contracts (if not on current contracts, then during the next 5 year round of contracts and infrastructure refresh) - it almost becomes a requirement for futher consolidation.

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Re: Tech debt

I thought Nestle grew by buying up water rights in areas they operated and charged everyone excessive pricing because "the idea that water is a human right "extreme." (Quote from Nestle CEO Brabeck-Letmathe in 2019).

Having said that, it is a useful comparison because the big 7 seems to want a monopoly on AI and by extension, water, electricity, data centres and leading edge semiconductors and the rest of the world doesn't matter.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: Ah, the great Y2K scare

Out of interest, how did you check Notes was working?

Because in my experience of Notes over multiple companies including resellers using Notes/Domino to replicate IBM parts and price lists, bring broken was almost the default state.

NS&I tech overhaul blows past Treasury spending limits

Re: The same story

I think you're overly focused on the cost to taxpayers and are completely ignoring the benefits that outsourcing responsibility and accountability to a third party bring to senior management.

Anyway, enough if this unChristmasy behavior, I have to find an Atos salesperson to take me out for ""an in-depth review" at the local...

ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US

There were almost 1600 incidents since 2021 of ATM jackpotting (https://www.justice.gov/d9/styles/banner/public/2025-12/picture2_0.jpg?itok=n4AAriXN) and while I don't believe they are attributable to one criminal organization the reported losses ($40m) now exceed the cost of the -5000 annual bank robberies in the US (~$35m).

The UK and Europe experienced issues with ATM jackpotting around 10-12 years and ATMs were either upgraded to address the issues or removed from some locations. Rather than declaring ~54 people "terrorists", I would have imagined banks upgrading their ATMs and police/FBI working together to apprehend criminals (which they appear to have done...) would have avoided the need to use the terrorist bogeyman...

Amazon is forging a walled garden for enterprise AI

Re: Own dog food?

While I have similar experiences aearching even when giving pretty good hints, maybe we aren't the target for Amazons sales AI?

Put another way, maybe Amazon have optimiser for sales revenue versus what we are interested in buying and improving search for...informed?...customers risks losing sales elsewhere.

MongoDB talks up its AI chops by talking down PostgreSQL

Re: Scaling problems?

"And scaling is fine, but don't you also want to keep the integrity of the data?"

Data corruption allows AI to be extra innovative....

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

"Well I for one would urge someone to give Poettering a ginormous IPv6 allocation in the hope we never hear from him or systemd ever again."

Or....systemd is able to allocate a truly unique loopback to every local application to avoid the dreaded "address already in use"error without having to worry about exhausting 127/8

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

It's not the DNS lifetime that caused the issue - it's the inability to create new DNS entries that stalls/stops provisioning resulting in a feedback loop that further overloads provisioning as failures generate even more provisioning requests.

I believe it means that if AWS experiences a major Issue with it's provisioning service, within 60 minutes (an SLA rather than how quickly they can potentially enable this feature), they will allow an alternative method of provisioning resources.

My guess is that AWS have preallocated a limited emergency range of DNS/IP mappings that can be safely allocated in an emergency and don't require DB access. That relieves pressure on the DynamoDB solution to allow key organisations to recover faster and probably allow AWS to recover faster as well.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: "Tales from the pit"

"*I caught her once, standing in a corner, holding a torch and she said she was a lampstand."

Maybe it was a test to see if you were a moth?

Sole trader dispatched almost 1M spam texts to hard-up Brits, says watchdog

Re: What I would be more interested in .....

Limited liability doesn't protect a company director if said director is breaking the law...

He's accused of sending text messages - why would you give him an unbreakable texting machine?

Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum

Re: Soooo...

My guess is that they tried to allow RDP access to their server, but couldn't get it working with a single port so allowed full access to all port/protocols...

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Recovery wasn't rate limited?

I would suggest you are looking at the problem from the wrong direction. The issue isn't existing DNS mappings. They work.

It's new mappings. You have to be able to create/delete records to flex services up

/down/between data centres (US-EAST-1 is a collection of around 100 large data centres) and each new instance that is required to cope with increased load or the migration of load between your capacity groupings (i.e. a data centre hall is likely the smallest grouping)

Once your DNS move/add/delete process is delayed, demand will create a situation where key services reach capacity and then you enter the downward spiral of no capacity to cope with current load and no ability to increase capacity.

This ignores any systems used to avoid this situation (DNS planner and DNS Enactor) - my assumption is that something triggered the DNS issue such as maintenance/power outages causing a loss of data centre capacity causing some of the initial demand issues, because historically, that has been the cause of a large number of previous US-EAST-1's outages.

It's worth noting that a number of AWS people have said that US-EAST-1 is too big to be stable BUT customers want it and it provides valuable data for how to run other AWS regions reliably as they have been built to avoid the extreme scale issues US-EAST-1 has. Ref: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/aws_dave_brown_ec2_futures/ and

IBM is just not into the 'spend megabucks on cloudy GPUs' thing, rents them instead

Re: BS

You're ignoring spreadsheet errors...

"Went from a first mover advantage, to loser last in 2 decades."

IBM may have had a capacity advantage in the pre-cloud environment, but cloud required bigger, more efficient data centres and IBM wasn't willing to invest to compete with it's rivals.

It didn't take IBM two decades to lose their advantage - it took 3-5 years and arguably less as many of it's data centres lacked the geographic advantages of being close to power suppliers or locations where data centre density allowed IBM to exploit their existing locations.

Rather than an advantage, IBM had a significant disadvantage of significant opex, a lack of capex and management that was unwilling to change course.

British govt agents demand action after UK mega-cyberattacks surge 50%

And if there's a real risk to the board, they will outsource the risk to a third party.

Maybe Rishi could help companies avoid the dangers of TCS and encourage them to use Infosys instead?

Oh dear, my sarcasm jar seems to have emptied unexpectedly.

UK Home Office opens wallet for £60M automated number plate project

Re: £60 million?

"Which part of the world would you like to visit? We can setup "an existing trial" there tomorrow and arrange a visit during the tender process to show a 'working system'..."

As you can see from the attached photo, the alleged crack is less than two feet deep - please find the £200 fine for abuse of His Majesty's footpaths. If you do not challenge the fine and pay within 2 weeks, the fine will be reduced to £100.

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

Re: Meanwhile

Using a wrist watch to distract your mouse still allows you to clock watch unless you choose to binge watch your favourite series...

College student went on a destructive rampage, then confessed to ChatGPT, cops say

How long?

How long must we endure these puff pieces for AI companies demonstrating AI is smarter than humans?

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: Good times!

So we look back with nostalgia at Clippy making an underpowered laptop take 5 minutes to start as we mumble "f*&£ off Clippy"?

Oracle will have to borrow at least $25B a year to fund AI fantasy, says analyst

It's an interesting comparison between Google and Oracle. Both were unable to keep pace with the huge infrastructure spend or AWS and Azure.

Google specialised to try and make their spend sustainable. While they have challenges, they also have some very sizeable revenue streams even as search falters.

Oracle fell behind for years, depending on renting space rather than building like the others.

Then OpenAI comes along and signs a deal that promises expansion at rates that AWS or Azure would be laughed at for suggesting. The lead times required for power and planning new builds make it time consuming and competition for existing space drives up pricing. Sure, you can get lucky a few times, but Oracle has to get lucky for years and years...

UK and US security agencies order urgent fixes as Cisco firewall bugs exploited in wild

Re: Unbelievable!

The advisory is for organisations to:

- patch equipment

- remove any end of life equipment ASAP as at best, it has another month of vendor support.

Insert whatever vendor you wish into those statements and it remains true.

While it would be nice if Cisco or any other vendor could write perfect code that anticipated any possibility, we have to accept reality isn't that perfect.

Apple 0-day likely used in spy attacks affected devices as old as iPhone 8

I'm wondering how you got from "a surveillanceware company" and "targeting individuals" to the UK government being involved? It looks like German and US companies were responsible for the software rather than known UK surveillanceware companies.

Amnesty International report "Shadows if Control" suggested this was being used in Pakistan and more widely against journalists.