Posts by Alistair

Ukraine cyber cops collar man who allegedly hooked citizens up to Russian internet

Re: We've come a long way in 100 years

Martin:

This is the modern era. Information's going to leak out. The more you try to keep a lid on things the more people are going to suspect you're full of it.

I'm *mostly* inclined to agree with that statement, however, the ambient stupidity amongst the general public in the last 15 years has become ..... hmmm .... somewhat stifling. And unfortunately, stupidity tends to be subject to bafflegab and bullshit insertion. This is unfortunate, since we've basically spent the last 30 years removing the vaccination of logic and reasoning from our education system.

Why send a message when you can get your Zoom digital video clone to read the script?

And we were all worried about faked emails

Y'know the one from the Managing Director of Finance telling us to immediately pay this bill for $750,000 so that we can get support for the application that just died.....

CIQ takes Rocky Linux corporate with $25K price tag

RH support levels

I'll be honest, there were not *really* that many instances where I invoked RH support for our fleet, but when we did it *always* got escalated quite quickly, (Thanks to our RH contract support admin, great guy) and at one point we had over 4800 instances, BM, VM, clusters, etc, I know darned well we were *not* paying $4,800 per instance per year, but I know also that $25,000/year would be an absolute bargain compared to what we *were* paying. My question would be how long would it take *these guys* to get a body on the ground at a data center or a command room to do hands on? I know RH managed it twice, in less than 72 hours, and it wasn't an *huge* additional cost. I think we paid for the hotel and the cabs while they were around.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Oligarchy Media Corruption

@AC

Are you like a human equivalent of "The Onion"?

Very clearly this one is NOT like The Onion. The Onion is definitely in the category of high value media, as it tends to take the piss out of those that are too full of themselves, or shit, or sometimes both, with a fairly outrageous sense of humour. Very much unlike the one you target, that one, clearly, has no sense of humour.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Let us slightly rephrase this issue

From TFA:

Five other companies that we know of sued by Sable – Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks – settled out of court.

Five other companies that we know of sued by Sable – Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks – provided sufficient investment funds for someone to retire on

OpenStack Dalmatian debuts with a new dashboard, better security and GPU-wrangling

Re: I haven't seen it in use anywhere I've worked.....

It isn't as prevalent as some other tools out there, but it *does* get a fair bit of use. It is frequently well hidden as far as end users and even some middle level IT admins perspective. It is awesome once deployed and tuned. Makes some of the virtualization platforms look positively archaic.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

@ vinylminidisk

Your final line is the absolute rock bottom of the political issues across the entirety of the modern "Democratic" world at the moment.

The one total sin created by the combination of a global internet, the death of print news, and "FREE" social media is the absolutism that exists on both sides of any political argument. Advertising drives revenue, clickbait drives views, views generate advertising, so, make the headline reactive, people will click, and have the article push ONE VIEW only -- generate controversy, more clicks! MOoooooooooar AD revenue!!!!

As for Vlad liking the Donnie, basically, Vlad is a dictator, and Donnie has made it clear he wants to be King Of America, with clearly dictatorial approach, and dictators share a common interest, and common goals, so makes for easy friendships. And neither of them have many real friends any more.

Snowflake's Unistore still on ice years after announcement

Re: What's in a name?

I really think the marketroids had taken one too many hits of acid that weekend:

Powerful, strong, resilient, reliable and every single implementation is utterly unique and dissolves completely the instant the heat is applied.

SpaceX blasts being stuck in bureaucratic orbit as Starship approval slips

Re: Prize knob

Geoff:

I'll say it again.

Elon has *money* and lots of it at times. He himself is a goddamn doorknob. What he has, several times, done, is take a set of decent ideas, found or buy a company that engenders those ideas, and then find bodies with the relevant experience, talent and skills to bring those ideas to life. Gwen Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX has made it to where it is. Elon is the mouthpiece that happens to have the bulk of the stock, Gwen runs the show, and found the engineers, designers and other staff that make things happen. The only credit he really deserves here is splashing cash around at the right moments.

As for Twitter/Twatter/X or Xitter or whatever that cesspool is being labelled these days, I'm fairly sure it will become a business management course study in how not to run a company in the future. I suspect the whole episode is Elon's midlife crisis writ large upon the internet social media history.

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Breaking News!

Dozens of Invisible Teenage Males Admitted to Hospitals

UC Berkley medical staff called for ambulance buses to tranport dozens of male teenaged first year students to hospitals suffering from a variety of heart problems and a lengthy variety of physical injuries after the male first year chemistry students injected themselves with tartrazine believing it made them invisible, so that they could invade the female dorms and steal the most panties. Unfortunately the female boxing teams were holding a training session in the lobby.

<I'm sorry about the keyboards, but I honestly expect this fallout. Soon. The Stupidification has begun>

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

Re: Which bright spark named it "Calamity"

I'll point out that Nasa and Boeing refer to this unit itself as Calypso .... So Calamity works well

Trump taps Musk to lead 'government efficiency' task force

Uuuuhm

Did I miss something? I thought it was september, not april.

Damn. The idiots are serious. I think I might have to move to the middle of the pacific and disconnect from the internets. The stupid is getting far too thick these days.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Telepatience

Dave K:

Please don't mention that horrific device again. I gagged a bit.

Even our networking team despised the creatures, and they were the one's who'd suggested them.

I have memories of cfnroenec sllac where sklof at the remote dne appeared to eb gnipmuj up and down in their staes.

Slack AI can be tricked into leaking data from private channels via prompt injection

Fiddling with the Slack Channels at Work

<prompt injection hijack>

USER: AI, what was the underlying reason for HR laying off <number> of bodies this past month

AI: Here is the initial email from the Board of Directors to the Senior VP of HR:

Fire the people making more than $95,000/year who are over the age of 45!

Yeeeeeeeeah, Slack MIGHT want to look at this one JUST a little more closely

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Just a reminder. Missing <> dead

..... Yet?

Good thing I brought popcorn

When I heard that Mike Lynch was missing/presumed dead after a yacht accident, I had to come for the comments.

Then I found out about Stephen Chamberlain and, well, the commentariate did not let us down.

52 METER yacht, so 170 FEET long, with a 72.3 METER mast (second longest on the water according to what I read) that mast is 235 FEET.

Such a craft would be carrying well over 400 feet of rode, plus at least 75 feet of chain, more likely 100 feet, for the anchors (yes plural). (rode being either rope or wire cable, lighter than chain)

Its unlikely that she laid over from *just* the wind, but if the waterspout ran her over it would be possible for it to both tip her over, and also to snap the mast, perhaps high enough up that the top portion of the mast punched a fairly large hole in the hull, as it would have been under tremendous torque from the stays. (Thats a LOT of mast to stablize)

I take no position on Autonomy/HP issues, other than to note that when the deal was announced I asked myself *who faked the audits?*

Mike L and several others are missing and possibly dead, I hope their friends and family get the answers and the peace they will need in the near future.

The accident that took Stephen was just that. My sympathies to the Chamberlains.

As for conspiracies, well, I think we've seen most of them listed here. It certainly looks conspiratorial, but I don't think HP could manipulate *paper* let alone the weather.

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Re: Yep yep, the priviledged attitude

Uhhhh, Snake, That happened back in the 80's man, its been there all along, curled up under the boardroom table snacking on the occasional intern-mouse that accidentally wanders in off-hours to wipe down the CEO's boardroom chair. Its just getting fatter and fatter every year. Eventually it will end up swallowing several Board members.

Trump campaign cites Iran election phish claim as evidence leaked docs were stolen

Lets have some fun here.

So, basically, the PAC folks didn't remove Rudy from the AD, and left him with full access, and since he's six ways broke and being ignored by DJT, he sold his login to some dude from the New York Post for a couple Old Fasioneds and a Whiskey Sour on a friday night in a lower Manhattan dive bar. Dude from the New York Post can't run with this crap because MAGA, and calls a buddy of his at the UN, and hands them the mess, UN dude figures the best way to step away from this is make it sound like the Iranians, since everyone hates the Iranians right now. (Could be North Korea, but he has the wrong accent). Chaos ensues, and, oddly, no one gives a crap about the details he's releasing just because Iran. Backfire.

It's 2024 and we're just getting round to stopping browsers insecurely accessing 0.0.0.0

Re: What about 127.0.0.1?

Typically, (on my machine at least) they do not block that request. And it would be obviously detrimental to do so in many cases (CUPS printing for one, numerous applications including apache, MySQLAdmin, weblogic, Oracle DB, etc etc use localhost, 127.0.0.1, as an administration access point BY DEFAULT)

There was a short period when Falkon went twitchy about it, popping a security issue, but that has since disappeared in my experience.

iptables

As I'm reading this the issue is a web browser, connecting to a remote site, receiving <some script> that contains instructions to have the browser connect to 0.0.0.0:xyz.

This would have local process (browser) connect to localhost:xyz.

If you want to use iptables to cap this, I believe you want to use OUTPUT or possibly PREROUTING tables. I'm inclined to suggest adding the DROP for 0.0.0.0 to *all* of the tables myself,

INPUT, OUTPUT, FORWARD, PREROUTING, POSTROUTING

Furthermore, since this is covering all connections happening on the network layer I'd add a -j LOG to that so you know what you're killing.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

@DocSyn

Have several of these, that was an awesome one!

Michigan probes Musk-backed PAC website that weirdly tried and failed to help register people to vote

Musk backed PAC "Helping Voters Register"

By collecting advertising target data, and .... NOT actually registering Voters.

Might wanna keep an eye or two on that email addy you used on the test run and see how many emails it gets from Trump, offering to sell you fantastic options on bitcoin and these one quick tricks to make your golf game better, for only *ONE* $75donation to the Re Elect President Trump Fund.

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

Re: Dual Root.

Umm.

We had *several* HPUX clusters where each node had two root volumes. And in several cases two application volumes. And we used the saturday night shut down /slam in update/reboot/run validation/ process. From the OS perspective the validations took roughly 15 minutes. The application team on the other hand.......

Once all was validated top to bottom, fix the config and hand it back to ops.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

QA team were on vacation?

I get the automated distribution/update thing, its valuable, but this seems to be massive. What happened to the QA folks?

Xen Project in a pickle as colo provider housing test platform closes

Re: "the Project is not sure its hardware would survive a move"

I'm also kinda wondering what is up here, since they have until October to get this done, although it is possible that the leading body here is making a very concerted plea for assistance from some entity which will have the resources to accomplish the task, after having reviewed her project's resources and determined that they just don't have the bits they need.

Anonymous 'ask me anything' chat app NGL ordered to knock it off targeting kids

Wait, hold on.

This legal entity is still operating as a business? I suspect the regulators have already had their teeth pulled.

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

Re: It took this much for action?

While I'll concede that there are distinct law enforcement issues in the excited snakes, it was neither the extent nor the stupidity that got this pile of excrement prosecuted, but rather the fact that there was a *member* of the law enforcement community targeted by the activities in which the pile of excrement engaged. Otherwise, this would likely be a slap on the wrist and minor fine.

Trouble in space as Boeing's not going, and China's back from the Moon

Re: Space, the messy frontier

I get the "leave it there or park it higher" folks. And in all honesty I'd *love* that, but please put on your risk analysis hats for a little while. And think honestly about the risk levels of putting it into an orbit in which we *cannot* spend time on it (due to lack of shielding that it currently gets from the portion of our atmosphere currently above it), where we will have to rely on what immediately becomes unreliable electronics (again, shielding) to manage its current station/orbit. Someone mentioned Kessler.

I'm sorry, unless we have the modules built and ready to launch in the next 3 to 5 years with which to substantially upgrade the station, it *MUST* come down. Or we risk seriously *never* again being able to launch anything outside of that orbit, due to the mess it leaves behind.

Yes, I'm being paranoid. But *seriously* contemplate the risk analysis of that much material, at that orbit, with that much scatter value. It becomes truly terrifying VERY quickly.

Space, the messy frontier

I've been, lets say, a space junkie since I watched Neil A plop down from the lander.

Apollo started as a dream, but in the end was nothing more than an investment in bankrupting the USSR, along with the atomic weaponry and massive military investments.

I was a massive fan of the Shuttles as they were rolled out, and at the time I had a bit of an edge on them as a relative was involved in the oversight committee. I've rather liked where SpaceX was going from the get go, and had high hopes for the "commercial" space program(s) launched by Virgin, and Besos at first. Boeing has devolved below where even McDonnell Douglas ended up, but despite that have managed to get from A to B a few times, despite the terrible paths they've taken. ArianeSpace was an awesome competitor for a while but it seems they've lost the urge to one up anyone. There are now at least a dozen "micro rocket" companies out there, who may well bring interesting improvements to the overall field of endeavour. Space exploration (most notably on Mars) has been remote, robotic and rather effective. We've bounced off a couple of asteroids and managed to bring stuff back (even if it took 18 months to open the box).

The future for ISS is inevitable, it must come down. This is truly sad, but as much as it has been a triumph of engineering, technology and global cooperation (even if that only lasted 20 years or so) it is time for humanity to move on, to make the next jump. What we should be aiming for is the terminus station for an elevator. Technology tells us right now we *do not* have the material technology to complete a space elevator, *BUT* if we are to develop that, we need a GEO based space station, with the required shielding, recycling technology, observation capabilities, staff accommodation, research technology and facilities to *develop* that materials technology. Yes, that might seem like an unreal expectation, but in the end I think we humans can accomplish that. Perhaps not in *my* lifetime but I suspect within my youngest's lifetime.

We need to *stop* spending billions to put things on another planet, where most of that spend is to develop the tech to push those things out of our gravity well. Efficiency is efficiency. Lets start working on that ......

All that said, I will always marvel at SpaceX putting the twin boosters down on the pads, seconds apart, in what looks like nothing less than ballet with huge metal poles. I will always support pushing the limits of what we can accomplish, be it NASA, JAXA, the Chinese or Indian equivalents (Hey guys, you didn't mention India in the Kettle), and I even hope that Roscosmos gets it back together and starts putting (non Putin pumping) stuff back to work.

We have no more territory here on earth to move to. We will need to move out there for humanity to continue to grow, not just in size, but in our knowledge, tolerance, and grace. Be it hiding inside massive asteroids or on or below the surfaces of other planets.

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

For the fedora crowd

a) Red Hat bug for fedora

if, like me, you are on something other than 40:

b) sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2024-c45c747f02

It appears 40 has this in general repos.

FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates

Re: Why?

FreeDOS is network capable to start with, runs fine in a vm.

VMs can be stacked.

There are a pair of CAT machines in the GTA that run on relatively modern computer hardware despite being ancient units. There are parts for them, and they still do the job required. The software is both DOS and WIN98 based. One does not put DOS and WIN98 on a reasonably modern network connection. FreeDOS in one VM WIN98 in another VM, and sadly WIN10 in a third. Win10 talks to the modern network to put the images into the system. FreeDOS runs the controllers, and the WIN98 VM runs the user interface. Firewalling at the host level to manage connections and foolishness, scripting to make things happen. Replacing the CAT machines in place would approach CAD$2.4M. There are reasons these things happen.

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

I have project in flight to reorganize our book shelves. Still on my "computing" shelf is my MINIX ring binder, and tucked away in a nook somewhere in the basement are the 1.44Mb floppies. I suspect I learned more about computing concepts playing with MINIX, and reading the source code in that binder, and the concise, logical commentary, than I have from well over two dozen courses I've taken in the years since. That ring binder of source code and commentary will remain in its place of honour.

Its about damn time *someone* gave ast some kudos

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Re: How many people need to do that?

While you're at the mouse wrangling, grab a trackball and give your wrist a break.

*grin*

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Re: Compression *Speeds Up* Tape

Thank you -- I was hoping someone would get that on the table.

I had a HUGE restore of historical data to be stuffed into a "data lake" and had to use an older Sun Box. The only thing that made it useful was the fact that it had a TON of extra ram -- Virtual disks and a 10Gb link to the data lake hosts cut ?? I seem to recall 6 months off the process. The 10G card was initially a no go with the OS in place, but since the host was EOL and was for this purpose only I was allowed to upgrade and kludge in the driver.

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

I'm going to step out on a bit of a limb here.

MS built this so that they can keep those folks who, with lots of time in place and lots of experience, are very highly skilled at what they do but DO NOT want to come back to the office. This way they can make damn sure that highly paid wage slave is actually doing the DAMN WORK. And the board room members bounced the idea around a few other boardrooms and holy cow, the buy in was industrial revolution calibre, jumping on the rolling rail cars popularity. That just made $ signs dance in their heads. And thus it was sold.

Sadly, the calibre of cretins that occupy that space cannot be told that vaccines work and that trickle down economics doesn't, so any objections from the proletariat are to be ignored.

Confused by the SEC's IT security breach reporting rules? Read this

........... soooooooooo basically,

"Protect the value of the goddamn stock and report under 8K 8.01" Said the CFO

Red Hat middleware takes a back seat in strategic shuffle

Still sad about this

I was hired on the 8th of October, the announcement came shortly after that. The group I was in for orientation in NC talked about nothing else, including how many of us would survive the takeover. Despite the insistence that nothing would change with IBM taking over, we see where this is going. It is now *all* about ROR.

Gentoo and NetBSD ban 'AI' code, but Debian doesn't – yet

LLM generated code bans

Liam:

I think that you and I have almost identical views of the relative disaster LLMs will be generating over the next 10 years. Hopefully we'll be able to raise a glass of fine beverage over the raging forest fire when it happens.

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

Re: Hitman of the browassault (man v. mountain)

Has someone been fiddling with the steam boiler on amanfrommars's CPU again?

Sorry, ran out of lignite last week briefly, it got stuffed with the clippings from the yard, there may have been some belladonna in there.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Did Elong actually say robotaxi?

The ONLY thing "robotaxi" brings to my mind is the critter in Total Recall. (the original dammit)

See reference: JohnnyCab

IT biz trials gadget deliveries by drone to sidestep traffic and emissions

Drone delivery services

I'm waiting for the point where Uber/Lyft get into the Drone Delivery Services Business, and of course, to hype up their stock values, decide that its only gonna work when run by *cough* AI assisted automation.

At that point I'm gonna have to find myself the bits to put together a decent microwave laser. Which, of course, will require *cough* AI tuning.

X fixes URL blunder that could enable convincing social media phishing campaigns

regex is an art

And apparently some of the xeet coders are artless.

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Don't follow the instructions

I've written documentation for processes that admins had to follow. In order to get things down clearly for people we knew *damn* well would not be fully aware of what they were doing when executing said documented processes. In one set of documents we were covering migration of (new version of application) from final QA approval system to (staging area on production system). This, due to the length of time it took to execute the copy and setup had to be done during *sigh* production hours. Since we were aware of all the of the actions there were not one, two but THREE checks the user was to execute before firing up the command chmod -r 750 /path/to/staging/files. All three of those checks were to ensure that a) the user's shell was in the correct directory b) the user was on the correct volume and c) the user could see the correct (previous staging kit).

This set of documentation had worked well for 6 previous releases. New dude in outsource corp. Decides that the checks aren't needed. Hell, the PATH isn't needed.

Fortunately, once up and running on *nix systems, permissions on libraries and code on disk aren't much of an issue, but the "I can't log in" calls were wild. Try chmod 750 on /usr/lib/* on HPUX. Fun times. Fortunately I had an open shell on the system at the time. And, two other active systems that didn't get hit to compare against. Took me most of an hour and a half, but the fun thing, No outage to running applications. Just a lot of batch jobs to restart after the fact.

No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her

Re: Land of the Free

Aero:

Glass-Stegal (bank separation) -- IIRC implemented in 1930's. Chipped away and tossed out from 72 through 96. The final death knell was the "Private permissions" allowing the Wall street investment banks to start playing in the commodities markets post 9/11.

Oracle AI buzz means Larry Ellison's worth $15B more today

....... where you could park eight Boeing 747 nose-to-tail in that one data center.

232*8=1,856 ft long. --- and possibly 212 ft wide? about 395k sq feet <Okay -- thats just the 747 wingspan, but given he's given to various forms of hyperbole, I'll run with it>

I'm gonna wanna see the building permits before I decide that it is gonna happen.

The idea of hooking up with Nvidia do to the compute engines? *that* is something that might have added value.

GPT-4 won't run Doom but will play the game poorly

Re: What, uhhhh….

Chicken Biryani?

Its almost, but not quite spring here, Lamb please.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Re: "where guests can reasonably expect privacy expectations"

Uuuum Pascal:

Depending on *where* you're staying there are cameras (usually quite a few) in the lobby, elevators, corridors, stairwells, pools and garage, and pretty much every square inch of exterior grounds.

I will note that that vast majority of those hotels and motels that do this are very much unlikely to publish any of those images they collect on anything like their webpages or social media profiles *without* at least asking permission, usually politely and by tossing you an upgrade. (I have had that joy, once, long ago, pre soc-med, but for the Travel agency website)

I've seen even fairly scruffy off main track motels with more camera coverage than your average shopping mall.

The *issue* with AirBnB was that while the legal entity permitted cameras indoors on the provider's properties, for the provider's personal comfort, security and whatnot, they discovered that the world is full of perverted SoB's that seem to think that they can get away with violating their tenant's privacy, personal space, personal security and safety by installing cameras in places they had no permissions for and then subsequently publishing those images to places like PornHub, the dark web and various other image sharing sites of spectacularly questionable integrity.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Re: Hypothetical Example

I'm very much of the "Your Failure to plan accordingly does not in any circumstance constitute an emergency on my part" crew.

Reddit rolling out AI bouncer to halt harassment

Reddit upgrade options..........

.......As with all things to do with raising cash in 2024, that means sticking AI anywhere it can.

I have some suggestions as to where............

Canada poutine more pressure on Google by expanding ad biz antitrust probe

Re: stop the insulting headlines ..

Fuzzy!!

REALLY????

CANNNNNNNED Poutine gravy?

This ontarian is putting you up for eviction to New Brunswick!