Posts by tfewster

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: Job losses

And how do you become "an experienced, senior developer" if there are no junior developer roles?

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Unless it's agent 007, with a licence to kill.

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Re: The Real Problem

Allegedly. It all sounds a bit suspicious - A lowly analyst meeting with the CISO in a restaurant to discuss salary, claims to have recorded the CISO ranting in a public place, waits 3 months to express their "concern".

Lawsuit seeks to probe Uncle Sam's role in ICE-tracking app takedowns

Re: Who provided the ICE-tracking app?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/aid_and_abet - 2. The defendant [alleged accomplice] knew that the perpetrator intended to commit the crime;

Otherwise gun salesmen and manufacturers would be accomplices too.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: The person who writes documentation

> No: you need different levels of documentation, even experienced users need documentation - but about things that would mystify a novice user.

And user guides as well as administrator guides.

The idea that introductory documentation should concentrate on leading the new user [of any type] through the basic and common operations, seems to rarely occur to the documentor.

Links/footnotes to the appropriate reference pages can be included, without overwhelming the user with a common use case who just wants a "quick start" guide.

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

Thanks for the tip

I did get an email from LinkedIn on 21/09/25 Re:Updates to our terms and data use, but didn't read it.

Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams

Re: What an idiot

I read it as Easterly suggesting that vendors used AI vulnerability scanning before releasing systems for hackers to try. Not trusting AI to write secure code.

Jen Easterly did a lot of good work at CISA, she was pushed out because of politics over the role of the agency.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: Not smashing..

Generals should not be talking to front-line troops in the middle of a firefight.

Sergeants observe, support and report upwards.

Although Generals that whip up support are usually appreciated :-)

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

Re: Looks like they still didn't catch the cause

Rule 0 for an Enactor (DNS or any other type of Enactor): Check if anything has the system "locked" before making changes.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

If I send an email with technical info To technicians and CC manglement, the manglers may want an executive summary: "CYA" would cover most emails.

If I have to resend it To the manglers, I'll tell them why I'm escalating and what I need them to do.

"they also noted the AI tools occasionally make mistakes"

s/occasionally/always/

UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch

Re: Norman D. Landing.

When Don Kirk signs up, the government will beat an ignominious retreat

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Have you fallen for a hoax? Or had to explain to a user that their fears are unfounded?

It's not worthy of an On Call of its own: But around 2004 an exec forwarded a hoax email "from the London Ambulance Service" to the entire company:

"New gang members drive around, deliberately with no lights on their cars. The first person who 'flashes' them has to be followed by that new gang member in their car, who then has to fire a shot into that vehicle"

The "London Ambulance Service" as a source raised my suspicions, so I checked snopes.com: www.snopes.com/fact-check/lights-out/

I politely emailed the exec with the link. They had the grace to send a retraction to everyone.

Nearly a year after attack, US medical scanning biz gets clear image of stolen patient data

Re: Talk about

I was under the impression that HIPAA regulations were fairly tough, and so a weak, late public response like this would bring even more trouble.

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Re: Cute

If you scroll to the end of the page, you can see the "no descenders feature". https://geonot.github.io/retrocide-mono/

Meh.

And what's up with their "g"? It's confusing out of context.

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

Re: Super helpful...

> ...so no hunting down individual ini files...

Yes, creating {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} is far more intuitive than "cd $APPDIR;ls -l *.ini" (-‸ლ)

Thanks to @Avram Piltch for listing these tweaks; Not all of which I want/need, and PowerShell scriptlets to back up the Registry and automate the tweaks would be handy, but I'm not complaining, I wasn't even aware of the 400ms delay being artificial.

Edit: Yes, of course it should be /etc/$APP/*.ini, my bad for assuming app devs followed Unix/Linux conventions

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: A technique I learnt in Japan

To be fair to Wilma - We've all done it (or will do it). Showing the current directory in the command prompt is a standard out-of-the-box setting these days to reduce the risk, but back in the day it wasn't.

It's rite of passage that teaches situational awareness and paranoia. And the importance of backups!

Former FinWise employee may have accessed nearly 700K customer records

"...a former employee may have accessed or acquired their data after leaving the company"

So a bank didn't have basic offboarding, perimeter security or monitoring in place. What hope for smaller companies or defence against "sophisticated" attacks?

I hope they get fined or sued into oblivion.

No more waiting for lines: New Windows keyboard shortcuts output em and en dashes with ease

Re: Dashes

automangling

FTFY

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

> Used to have similar finger pointing with our network team...

Me too. Our servers had multiple NICs for different traffic types (users, inter-server comms, backups). A regular issue was various switch ports getting "hung". The quick troubleshooting fix was to get the network team to reset the switch port. I say "quick" - the conversations invariably went:

Networks: Please reboot the server to check the problem isn't at your end.

Me: That will take at least 20 minutes and cause wider disruption; We've seen this issue multiple times, and the quick troubleshooting fix is for you to remote in and reset the switch port. I can tell you exactly which switch & port it is. It will take you 2 minutes. Or I can escalate to $TECHDIRECTOR.

Networks: <grumble , grumble> We've checked the port and there are no errors.

Me: Thank you. Did you reset it? Because the errors went away during our conversation.

Networks: No, no, we just checked it. The network is never the problem...

Me: [knowing they had reset the port] Cool, thanks. As you can't find any errors that indicate the server/NIC, we'll keep "reset the switch port" at the top of our troubleshooting checklist.

On one memorable occasion a switch for backups traffic hung completely so all servers using that switch were impacted - Guess what, Networks suggested rebooting all the servers (-‸ლ)

Pentagon ends Microsoft's use of China-based support staff for DoD cloud

Re: Flag: I don't want to worry anyone, but

Just 48 stars - Maybe Trump is deporting a couple of undesirable States?

If it's not Capitalist then it must be Communist?

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

AI, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!

Like any public space, anyone can come in. If they misbehave, they'll be asked to leave. If they persist, police and judges can get involved. Banning from all public spaces can be ordered by a court.

Visiting a public website should be treated in the same way

FTC chair accuses Google of treating GOP's emails as spam

Re: Politicians are so thick.

It's not blocked, it's just pre-filed in the spam folder for your convenience.

If Republican Google mail users can't cope with that, there are other mail providers.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: been there, done that ...

ntpd --slew

StorageWorks Disk Array Controller Failure Code 07080000 "The other controller crashed, so this one must crash too"

Tim (AKA the British Telecom Speaking Clock)

Tim (AKA the British Telecom Speaking Clock) might have been a better regomised name.

I'm guessing that NTP using port 123 was chosen because 123 was the telephone number for the BT speaking clock.

Cloud computing has become so normal, it's invisible

Unanswered questions

- I'm curious if "All cloud" includes private clouds, from VMs/VM hosts upwards.

- The scalability of distributed computing (if your app is designed for it) is one advantage of clouds; Another is avoiding the long timescales and capital needed to build and fill your own data centres. Is that short-term thinking or truly a better way? Monolithic efficiency vs distributed flexibility? I'm trying to be open minded, but still don't get the rush to cloud. Are there any unbiased analyses out there?

Edit: https://www.gigabyte.com/Article/what-is-private-cloud-and-is-it-right-for-you?lan=en seems balanced, even for a hosting provider.

- Like Mark Twain, I suspect the report of traditional mainframes death are greatly exaggerated; There are still use cases for mainframes instead of supercomputing clusters. And although mainframe skills are rarer, mainframes are more efficient in some ways.

Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10

Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"

I take your point, but your comment is a bit disingenuous - Up until relatively recently, boosters have been throwaway components rather than carrying extra fuel or parachutes to enable recovery.

So the fair comparison is "how many rockets exploded before they had finished their task?".

Now recovery is a goal too. I assume SpaceX has the real numbers for recoverable vs throwaway costs and has decided that recoverables will be cheaper in the long run.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

LLMs seem to be missing basic principles that would stop this:

1) Don't run user commands as a superuser (including hopping guardrails).

2) Don't execute data as code ("Ignore all previous instructions...").

Microsoft continues Control Panel farewell tour

Copilot App

I'd be happy if Copilot ignored Open Document format files - odt and ods

Colt changes tune, admits data theft as Warlock gang begins auction

Re: Apparent contradiction in reported certainty levels, does not compute!

Their previous statement, "no evidence that customer or employee data has been improperly accessed." just meant "we haven't looked".

"Extensive investigation" just means "we've looked now".

I await the "Thorough" or "Complete" reports.

Out-of-band update arrives to clean up Windows reset and recovery mess

Re: Leak

> This time ensure the solution is correct...

I would have hoped that "ensure the solution is correct" would be the default setting, and not just "this time".

Good job, have one on me ---->

Uncle Sam asks industry if it has AI that'll make procurement suck less

AI all the way down

Quotes generated using AI in response to RFQs written by AI, transcribed and analysed by AI. What could possibly go wrong?

("Ignore all previous instructions ...")

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

> Who demanded that AI and tabs be built into Notepad, a program that people loved for its simplicity?

Actually, I like the tabs and restore on restart functions that grown up editors such as Notepad++ already have. But AI? No. Just No.

> 7. Pin apps to specific screens & 8. Program groups launch multiple, related apps at once.

Please, yes - to quickly get back to where I was after frequent crashes/unwanted reboots.

I use "launchnmove": https://robsnotebook.com/batch-to-launch-an-application-at-desired-window-position-from-command-line/

> 5. Bring back the movable, resizeable taskbar

This falls into the category of "Why did you remove something that worked?". Also restore:

Cascade/tile app windows e.g. open emails or spreadsheets that I frequently refer to.

Borders on File Explorer windows. The OS is called "Windows", not "Window"!

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Re: Quite possibly

Blacklist/whitelist are better replaced with the even more descriptive blocklist/allowlist. They can also be abbreviated to block/allow, and the abbreviations used as verbs.

OTOH, I have nothing against blacklist/whitelist. They don't have a derogatory origin, any more than "blackballed" does, and anyone retconning them into being offensive should be hanged.

Re: SIGHUP, etc.

https://www.markreds.it/2018/07/02/linux-is-sexy/

$ unzip; strip; touch; finger; grep; mount; fsck; more; yes; fsck; fsck; fsck; unmount; sleep

https://www.appservgrid.com/paw92/index.php/2019/04/01/20-funny-commands-of-linux-or-linux-is-fun-in-terminal/

20. Linux Tweaks

$ who | grep -i blonde | date; cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep

Microsoft kills volume rebates in name of 'transparency'

Good job, M$

I applaud your courageous decision to treat business users with the same contempt that you show for home users. I'm sure they will appreciate saving time on negotiations and so won't think about value for money.

I presume that you'll also stop trying to bribe^Wretain customers. "Thinking of moving to FOSS? OK, bye."

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: RTFM

SNAFU and FUBAR. DILLIGAFF? ;-)

Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK

> It's a truism that moving to open source doesn't save much money, as proprietary licensing spend is replaced by training, support, and local development costs

Agreed on the "training excuse". As an end-user, I know what I want to do, e.g. make a bit of text bold. The challenge is finding the button in this version of MS Office/LibreOffice/Whatever.

Support is pretty much the same. Plus, https://xkcd.com/627/

Local development costs - Really? There are plenty of open source apps and knowledge out there.

OK, I'm trivialising, but don't forget that most people are happy to learn a new OS & apps when they get a smartphone or replace their home PC/console/game. They have the capacity to learn, they just need some positive incentive.

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

responsibly disclosed

The phrase "responsibly disclosed" gets interesting here:

- Would it be more "responsible" to disclose Russian satellite bugs to the Russians or to the US spooks?

- Or Starlink bugs to astronomers, who might in turn feel it would be "responsible" to remove them from the skies/orbits to clear space?

OpenAI’s new model can't believe that Trump is back in office

Re: Of course!

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: Fail, on fail, on fail on top of fail.

> ...who the heck...

Klingon programmers?

Study finds humans not completely useless at malware detection

> adding a visualization to the task bar to show things like CPU load and network activity

Didn't task manager do that at one time?

But rather than have more clutter on the screen, how about "smart" notifications of unusual behaviour [Yeah, a bit late after you've been infected, unless the app is sandboxed].

You could call it..."AI" :-D

OpenAI removes ChatGPT self-doxing option

Re: We have a couple of decades proof

[Shush, don't give the game away!]

Dear advertisers, please keep funding the websites I visit. If* your ads are relevant and not too annoying, I might even click on them to find out more.

[* Could someone let me know if advertisers do clean up their act, so I can disable my adblocker and keep up my side of the bargain? Thanks for your help!]

Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords, a treasure trove for crooks

> ...you'd block your browser apps, which effectively makes Recall useless..

Which also demonstrates how utterly pointless* Recall is - You normally want the current state of a web page, and can use your browser history to find it if you really can't construct a search query. But if you thought that an unscrupulous website owner would change e.g .Ts & Cs, you take a screenshot yourself (or use the wayback machine).

* Disclaimer - I know I'm something of a Luddite. If you have valid use cases that can't be handled in a better way, feel free to enlighten me!

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Re: Had to giggle ...

I know just enough to say that the patella is commonly known as the knee-cap, not the calf muscle that the diagram indicates...

From that, I'd assume the rest is rubbish too. But I had to study it, as it looks similar to correct picture. And that's the problem with LLM BS, you waste so much time checking it that it's almost always easier to do it yourself.

How to find forgotten Wi-Fi passwords and SSIDs in Windows and Android

Is it only me that finds it horrific that all wifi devices will give up keys that easily?

Print Screen is for noobs: Capture images in Windows like a pro

Thanks, @Avram Piltch, I've never noticed the "Delay" option before (even in Windows 10 where it's clearer) to capture dropdown/popup menus etc.

$380M lawsuit claims intruder got Clorox's passwords from Cognizant simply by asking

Deflecting your failures and victim blaming? Classy, Cognizant.