Posts by Alistair

Mailchimp 'fesses up to second digital burglary in five months

WooCommerce.

Essentially oiled Himilayan Salt mail, or a Gwyn Paltrow subsidiary?

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Re: Yeah

Hey!

That was *my* line!!!!

(still have some awesome screen bg's from the fractal program in my catalog)

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Re: The meltdown continues

Khaptain:

Musk has certainly brought together an awesome group of folks to accomplish something a few times in the past. One thing in there is that he has always started the process, then handed off the overall accomplishment of the task to the awesome group that he put together.

Until he gets his hands off the steering wheel, this vehicle is gonna be bouncing off a *lot* of things in its path.

And in this particular case, he has absolutely set himself up for failure on a spectacular scale. The *very* few people with the vision and perspective required to coordinate and quarterback an entity like twitter into a 'brilliant model of the town square' are very, very, likely to be vehemently against almost *every* action he's taken so far with the company.

Furthermore, Musk isn't about removing the extremes from the fold. He's absolutely about "Free speech for all". And the extremes of all sorts are going to jump on that bus constantly, littering the application with a far larger number of them. Besides, with that attitude, you're going to get a 4chan mentality in a hurry. Humans devolve to the lowest common function in large numbers in all cases.

WRtA, while twatter appears to have killed their API for 3rd parties, keep in mind that FB did something pretty damn similar about 2 weeks ago AFAIK.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Re: The future

Considering some of the folks mentalities out there and the "think of the children" component of things, I seriously doubt you'll have a choice as to which body part you're putting that chip in. I know what a few males on social media would want to do.

Re: Thin edge of the wedge, indeed

sticky tape?

They seem to fall to paintballs more often about here.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Re: I'm OK with Chrome no longer being supported

Martin:

in fedora, not all of the scanner backends are installed by default. The photodupe backend on mine was in a separate package, and was actually in the sane-backends-drivers-cameras package. Not sure *why* but its possible you are just missing the backend driver for that Epson.

AI conference and NYC's educators ban papers done by ChatGPT

Re: Something OtherWorldy for SMARTR HumanIT to Mimic and Master for Remote Virtual Leadership???

I dunno, commentary on where AI/ML generated output can be applied legitimately coming from a poster who has put so much effort into appearing to be a slightly demented AI/ML entity might not carry much weight amongst the commentariate here.

Good luck there AMfM.

I suspect SG7 will be along shortly to jump on the bus.

The CES tat bazaar: Bike desks, AI-powered bird feeders, and the smelloverse

Re: Half an hour doing dishes is enough to make the small of my back burn

Dishwashers are absolutely REQUIRED in any residence I'll be living in. If only I could figure out how to get one in the boat.

Re: Half an hour doing dishes is enough to make the small of my back burn

My male parent *built* our house, and he was about 6' 3". He departed this mortal coil some 30+ years ago after an attempt to dodge being arrested by consuming sodium cyanide failed initially, and the long term affect nuked his liver. My female parent was 5' 4", and complained bitterly about the counter/cabinet arrangements (to this day, still chugging along). I learned to cook in that kitchen, and find *any* counter anywhere too low as I was acclimated to working above what is considered the optimal level for my height (5' 10"). My spouse on the other hand insists the current counters are too high, I find them too low, and both of the currently resident offspring can't find the counters. (Dishes *everywhere* else)

Its all relative to your experience. One case where "standard" sucks.

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Re: Water and IT

Not when you have $44B in loans to pay it isn't.

Twitter whistleblower Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko lands new gig at Rapid7

Re: January 6 Insurrection

You've watched too many B rated horror flicks..........

And, yeah, Jan 6 was one.

Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at Twitter extended to not paying rent, claims landlord

Re: Send in the Bailifs

If they do seize his jet, at least he'll be able to find it......

Oh, right!

Since humans can't manage fusion, the US puts millions into AI-powered creation

Re: Nothing new.

Hey, careful there, you might be letting loose an NDA'ed feature of those fusion fuel pellets!

_{Finally a use for the turd's turds}

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

Re: Everybody hates lawyers...

(I'm not a fictional lazy gluttonous orange tabby cat named Garfield)

You do realise that for quite a few folks, this is an aspiration?

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Re: A service provider that doesn't bill because their attempted fixes failed?

IBM s/36, MAPICs II. It was the second install of MAPICs in Canada. IBM had bought the underlying core code AFAIR, from someone in Europe. It did not deal well at all with the Import tax/Federal manufacturing tax/fuels tax issues, took about 6 weeks to get that sorted, and I can't recall how many attempts at a patch. It introduced me to RPGII, and some weird compiler issues on that machine.

It also predated GST by a few years.

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Exit door release button (blue) right below power kill button (red). 6" of separation. No cover.

Yes, at least 4 times in one year. Solution, move power kill to inside of command centre.

Hit at least twice in one year by non-techies needing access to the floor.

End of an era as the last 747 rolls off the production line

Re: My first flight

In 1973, Lisbon to T.O., I got 35 minutes in the cockpit on Air Iberia 747. (was not yet a teen) Interesting point, I still have (somewhere) the wings and the little portfolio they handed out to the kids they brought into the cockpit.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Re: Just one question

Monitoring warrants get served to the provisioner of said monitoring.

Old world, cops would go to Ma Bell and get a tap installed on your line, that would allow it to be recorded in a police controlled environment. Usually a room at the switch site.

Now, they typically go to the NP, (even with MVNO target) and get the same process engaged, but with subtly different hardware.

Video wise, where they have a municipally provided system, they go to the operator and get recordings made.

The *target* of the surveillance does NOT need to be informed of said surveillance. This is the point.

The ACLU's single biggest point here is that the camera(s) was/were deployed without the legal over site of a jurist, for *long term* surveillance. The cops can do that "I heard screams" thing for one off, immediate intervention, this is the pivot of the Good Samaritan clauses in a lot of american law, but cannot use that principle for long term surveillance. The cops rebuttal will be that they were deploying it themselves, and did not need a provider. I'm gonna bet that the *owner* of the pole is a local utility provider, either or both electric and telecoms. If the pole owner is a telelcom provider, the cops are loosing this one in a hurry. If it is a power provider, there may be a corner brief about not having in place a well known process for passing the warrant, but that is a razor thin ledge the cops are standing on.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

In other news

Mastodon subscriptions are continuing to rise.

Popcorn sales are through the roof!

NASA sets November date for next SLS Moon rocket delay, er, launch

Re: If it wasn't hard

Advanced hypergolic plumbing is not in any way easy.

As has been eminently demonstrated on SLS testing, staging, launch prep. Someone's not learning quickly is all.

Python team wraps version 3.11.0

3.11!

Woot, Python for workgroups anyone?

Does it have a GUI?

/sarc

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: DX2

So I went DRDos and GEM. I think I've been stuck on the antims bus ever since.

And Yes, Slackware!

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

Sooo,

Does this mean that Nvidia 4090 cards are hot sh?t?

Looking at that cable and connector set (both in the images linked in TFA and in diagrams for the spec) I'm not too certain that someone hasn't dropped a decimal point in a calculation somewhere. But I've not done that level of engineering math in quite some time. Perhaps the materials in use aren't what they used to be?

TikTok accused of covert plot to track specific US citizens' every move

I've already done on thing.

I've taught the entire family that the *ONLY* time GPS functionality needs to be on is if you are using a guidance app for step by step assistance on a path. Yeah, the whole "wifi names map" thing comes up and of course the cell tower tracking, but when you tell an android app that it can use location data, it only gets the GPS data. And if you *must* for some bizarre reason keep GPS on, use coarse settings.

Certainly I'm not someone that Beijing would want to track for any reason, but dear GOD the number of non map related apps that want your location data is staggering. TikTok is in all likelihood the LEAST of yer goddamn worries on that front if you have GPS turned on.

Considering some of the crap that comes up on the *generic* (i.e. not yet signed up for an account) FYP on TikTok, I'd be guessing they have a far better ability to predict the next election results in any G20 country than most of the polling companies, *and* have a far better idea of the perversions enjoyed by that populace.

a) yes it was installed

b) I've since removed it

c) rooted Moto G and non-vendor install.

IBM Consulting orders staff back to the office for at least three days a week

@Potemikine!

Get it right, DinoBabies.

P.S. HR wants you to sign these documents before you close your laptop today.

/sarc

:}

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

Ummm, correction ?

Milton continues to deny guilt and appears to plan to file an appeal, with his defense attorney Marc Mukasey telling reporters outside the court last week: "I've suckered him into paying me more of that money."

SpaceX's in-flight Wi-Fi, Starlink Aviation, takes to the skies

..... Was gonna say ....

Starlink Aviation has a desk at the local small airport here, I was kinda wondering there......

(And if you're thinking money counts, as small an operation as they are, they've got plenty of cash, so lawyers could come out)

The kit is kinda pricey, but one would have to compare it to what the alternatives charge, both for the hardware and subscription and bandwidth. Would be an interesting comparison.

Manufacturers could be forced to include repair instructions

Floating around somewhere there is a manual for a 69 Corvair that my parents owned. It had instructions on how to replace the exhaust system and indeed how to tune the spark plugs and distributor amongst several dozen other things that would need doing periodically in the life of the vehicle.

In the manual for my neighbour's Chevy there is a warning (SERIOUSLY) *not* to drink the brake fluid, but literally *nothing* on maintaining the engine other than changing the oil every 5,000km. Lots about how the radio bits work, and where to put the windshield washer fluid etc. But nothing, absolutely nothing about FIXing it. In fact, it advises taking the car to the dealership in order to REPLACE THE %@$#%@ taillights.

So, yeah, maintenance and fixing things in manuals, I'm all for that stuff. Perhaps start with executing the executives of that tractor company to start with.

Westinghouse sale signals arrival of a new nuclear age

Nuclear will be back in a fairly large way.

It will be the underpinnings we need.

And its kinda interesting, if Westinghouse wants to, there's this design that actually works, has for years, they just need to get licensing from the folks up here. No need for Molten Salt Reactors. Deuterium isn't *really* that hard to come by.

Airline 'in talks' with Kyndryl after failed network card grounds flights

Re: Some thoughts...

We had *all* of our EOR switches from cisco with that @#$% misconfiguration.

Oddly its easy to test for in linux during card initialization, and have the right config in the nic setup. (was a default on all my deployments until cisco finally fixed the negotiation protocol). I've *no* idea how the 'Doze team managed things on their end, but we never had the issue after we documented it in house. (and bitched at all the vendors involved). HPUX 11.0 didn't deal well with it in superdomes as it would halt the boot process at nic init, we moved the devices to a separate, HP switch to mitigate initially. Eventually 11.2 solved it.

All that said, that is *OLD* shit. If they're still hitting that *now* I'm gonna suggest that they need a MASSIVE overhaul of infra.

Oracle VirtualBox 7.0 is here – just watch out for the proprietary Extension Pack

Re: my beef

dnf install virt-manager.noarch virt-manager-common.noarch

Setup, deploy, boot, run, destroy. Storage, Network, Memory, CPUs, hardware pass-through. The whole works in one interface, plus have the console to hand.

It will ask for authority as needed.

Personally, find it easier and typically more accurate than *cough* that commercial entity that wants to put it all in *their own* cloud.

He's only gone and done it. Ex-Register vulture elected to board of .uk registry

Kudos to Kieran.

Considering the global situation w/r/t the various organisations that either regulate or implement or manage components of the internet, and the unmitigated disaster that was Nominet's destination prior to the EGM, I'm thinking that there are a few other entities that could use with the invasion of a few of the commentariat here in order to correct the drift.

Go get em Kieran, and umm, don't drink the stuff over yer head in that video. I know where there might be a we dram of Caol Ila or three to be indulged.

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

Nuclear fusion is impossible because electron removal is unthinkable. We are dealing with a scam.

I'm going to suggest that you look up *just what it is* that happens in batteries. You'd be electrified.

UN's ITU election may spell the end of our open internet

Re: Who voted for whom?

172 member states were present and voting, Bogdan-Martin received 139, Ismailov received 25.

Apparently 8 abstentions?

ITU PP22 election results

I can't find a list of who voted for Ismailov. I'm sure it would be interesting reading.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

US Politics summed up in a single quote

Robin Williams once said:

Canada is like a nice apartment over a meth lab.

And the two parties are the two chemists running the production.

The immediate conclusion we can see from what is presented in TFA and amongst the commentary is that somehow, someone who likes to meddle with what other peoples children are exposed to in an educational environment, decided that an author, who encourages folks to support other people making choices for themselves in a mailing list, not the books, was offensive enough to demand that the books written by the author be removed from schools even though those books didn't violate her rules about what can be in books found in schools.

Now, to be honest, there are books that are banned all over the US, and in some schools up here above the meth lab too, that I'm inclined to agree should not be in grade school libraries. But trust me on this, you can find 'em in the public libraries here. There's a *very* subtle difference.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Wangs for the Memories

Medical transcription offices in the GTA, late 70's early 80's had herds of those things. My mom's office ran 12 of them. If you know University Avenue in T.O. you know which hospitals I'm talking about.

I recall that, since there was carpet tile in the office, and they printed in the office, that once a month or perhaps every other month they'd have someone come in to vacuum out the systems, and remove the carpet bits, dust, and paper fibres. They cleaned the PC cases, *and* the video monitor cases out. Mom worked nights at the time, and would get a night of switching machines while the (usually 3 bodies) were cleaning the systems.

I don't think the cleaning crew worked for Wang, but well, there are jokes in this one too.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Re: been there

Oddly, I have a contrasting experience.

Industrial laser printer for printing cheques.

Unit was about 25 feet long and could chew through 5000 pages of (even for the time) fairly heavy weight paper in about 32 minutes. Job queue on an Amdhal system, and a small unix head unit. We had to stop and pull every 700th imaged cheque to validate alignment and print quality and readability.

Every 3 months one of the units (we had two) was supposed to receive a full vendor servicing. However said vendor was, well, no longer in business shall we say. Fortune smiles, because said vendor servicing team had, on their final visit (Okay his, and the reason the visits and maintenance took so long was because he was about 115 years old, deaf as a post and about as happy to be in our city as a kangaroo would be to be in Moscow in January) left basically his entire kit sitting in one of our equipment lockers, along with detailed instructions on how to execute said maintenance.

One of the steps was to take the compact, high velocity vacuum cleaner to the entirety of the lower belt path. By using the exhaust hose to blow things loose *while* using the intake hose to suck stuff up. Oddly, the trick worked. He just had TWO hoses for the thing, with a slightly constrained nozzle on the exhaust hose.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Reactions being what they have been so far.

I've grown up in Canada, and QEII has been our head of state my entire life. I'm fully aware of the historical relevance of the Royal Family's predecessors and the relevant "evil" done in the name of the British Empire. I do somewhat understand that there are those that will regard the death of a member of that family with some glee. What astonishes me is that there is little recognition of the effort put into changing the state of affairs that she inherited when she took the throne. Certainly she did not change these things with her sole effort, but with her grace, style and dignity she absolutely helped things along.

There are few leaders, or figureheads, about these days who carry themselves with similar grace and elegance. As much as there are millions of folks who demand massive change in the world, there will be millions of folks who demand that the status quo remain. A leader or figurehead who can see that the change needs to happen, and can also bless the process of convincing the others that change is good with such charm, dignity and elegance, is priceless. And to do so while also being willing to portray their humanity openly, is awesome.

I'm certainly *not* a monarchist in the traditional sense, however the need for a stabilizing, constant calm, dignified and elegant figurehead in leadership is utterly apparent in recent times. I for one am completely done with the raging conspiracy theorist populist clickbait media puppets that believe "entertainment" is more important than "informing the public". Looking around the planet, it is becoming abundantly clear that irrational, illogical vituperative commentary about *anything* by the everyday politician garners far more attention than the ever rarer, calm, rational process politician. In times like these, a figurehead who can provide the contrast necessary to make the difference abundantly clear is needed more than ever. There were several times in our recent history where Her voice was that contrast.

Much like I was not a huge Obama fan, I am not a huge Royal Family fan, but Elizabeth and Barrack both had the same affect. In times of chaos and clickbait, they carried a certain dignity and grace to the roles they were engaged in. That, I at least, appreciated. Sadly I doubt that Charles III will have an iota of what his mother brought to the role.

I am an atheist myself, but:

God bless and Godspeed Elizabeth, may your have the blessing of crossing the rainbow bridge to be surrounded by your many adored corgis and horses.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: I need some THC

We had a spreadsheet.

It was searchable, and could be updated by the team.

Something close to 1100 rows when I last updated it.

Buried in there were some *very* NSFW acronyms. Nobody knew.

Twitter whistleblower summoned to Senate Judiciary Committee

Corrections in line

"false narrative about Twitter, and our privacy and data security practices that isare riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context," and told The Register Zatko was fired from his role at Twitter in January 2022 for "ineffective leadership and poor performance."

Perhaps the last is simply that his poor performance was an inability to toe the corporate line, and the ineffective leadership was an inability to keep his underlings on the same line.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

For my neck of the woods

https://www.ieso.ca/power-data

I'll keep the nukes running and I'll be adding to them.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

VOT

Google "Kentucky coal mine fire"

Burning for years, several abandoned towns. No "exclusion" zone by decree, but yeah, you might NOT want to move to any of the towns that are now emptied.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

Rather than try and fail to refute what I wrote, you immediately go into the "how do we keep the lights on?" argument.

Ahh yes. I made an argument, you must refute, otherwise you are making no point!

I love folks that stick with this. My younger sibling suffers from this. The point is that your "argument" has been rebutted *hundreds* of times as moot and immaterial as it is based in hyperbole, and outright inaccuracy, yet you jump up and down like a spoiled child denied his cookie at lunchtime. And as such you are regarded as a spoiled toddler having a tantrum.

Good luck.

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

"Fossil Fuels" come from the fossilization of biological material (plants, animals etc).

Uranium is a mineral. Been in the earth since the ball of dust formed.

Plutonium (as used in nuclear energy) is man made.

I see you could use a clue-by-four, just like the other idiot posting.

single family dwelling vs apartment/condo counts anyone

Give us an idea of how many batteries you'll need in a 32 story condo please.

Raspberry Pi 4 takes a trip to Vulkan, sharpens 3D vision

Re: Invisible

On linux it's strictly a developer thing at the moment. It will take a while.

I've been using Vulkan on linux with *wine* to play video games since Vulkan on linux was at 0.85. Packages for Fedora and Ubuntu have been around since 1.01. It is in active use for some of us crazy folks for a while.

It *definitely* improved wine rendering of windows DX11 games on wine over direct openGL translation. DX12 games absolutely require it. (Along with DXVK layer)

IBM board probes claims of fudged sales figures that led to big bonuses for execs

Did Jim figure this out?

Is that why he bailed in a hurry after Ginny crowned him?

Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols closes hailing frequencies

Nichell Nichols

Lt Uhura as a character was a breakthrough role on public television at the time. I was never a huge television junkie, primarily because we didn't have a TV when I was a kid, I became a book addict very young. Star Trek was an awesome show in my books because it took a concept of how humanity should work and put it on screen. Captain Kirk was purely there as an example of what was, being surrounded by what should be.

Later, as a teenager, I bagged the opportunity to go to a ST con here in T.O. In all honesty I can't recall how old I was at the time, but I was with several other folks who had paid to have a small room session with "Kirk" and "Bones" and "Scotty". All three of them dodged the meet and greet for some unknown to me now reason. We were discussing how utterly disappointed we were with the situation when she wandered by. She sat down on a bench and chatted with us for near enough 2 hours, about an enormous range of things from the show to her own life and the world as she saw it. The woman was a serious class act, and an amazing role model for young women in general.

/Salute

Fedora sours on Creative Commons 'No Rights Reserved' license

For the record:

rpmquery -a --queryformat %-30{NAME}:%{LICENSE}"\n"

Will produce a list of packages, with the licenses they use. I see 41 packages that have or include CC0 in my list, on a Fedora 35 install. Mind you I also include rpmfusion and a couple of other non fedora repos, so that may throw that number off.

Canadian ISP Rogers falls over for hours, takes out broadband, cable, cellphones

interesting perspectives

1) Thank (deity/curseword/appropriate idom) I'm no longer there.

2) Interac was working in specific cases, although the bulk of the backbone does go through Rogers it was not utterly wiped out

3) Bank machines were fine, except for (PC/SuperStore/Shoppers/Rogers) I did hear from one person that their banks machines were not working but I believe they're a (virtual bank) type critter. (Yes, Loblaws has a bank, and Rogers has a bank, and Shoppers Drug mart too, and they are all the same thing)

Certainly at least TD and CIBC were just fine.

At this point, my neighbour has never lost the Rogers cable service, but their interwebs is down, as is the "home phone" service. Cell service for Rogers is off and on in this neck of the woods, and from checking a phone that was flipping on/off signal it seems to be an IP addressing issue as it went through about 5 different segments and subnets in about 15 minutes, some working some not.

For what its worth, I'm not on Rogers, and my interwebs has been just fine all day.

I love how some folks are talking Armageddon, but in reality 90% of things were happening just fine. Including the police raid around the corner. All 8 cruisers were just fine. Not sure about the crew they busted, but the cruisers were fine.