Posts by A Non e-mouse

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Re: Idiot

Certainly Curt's prank backfired on him and he seems to have learned from his mistake. I'm not sure we have enough information to determine whether he should be fired or not.

Ransomware gang using stolen Microsoft Entra ID creds to bust into the cloud

FYI

1 - Microsoft's recommendation is that any domain accounts with any privileges beyond a bog-standard user account are not synced to Entra via Entra Connect. Conversely, accounts with privileges in Entra are not synced from on-premise Active Directroy.

2 - A little wrinkle with the Entra Connect user ID is that it needs Domain/Global admin permissions when Entra Connect is being setup, but these can be revoked to much lower levels once the service is running. How many people remember to do that final step, I wonder...?

Public Wi-Fi operator investigating cyberattack at UK's busiest train stations

Public Wi-Fi, often unencrypted and easily accessible, provides an ideal entry point for attackers.

To what? It's just to the internet, it's not to a corporate's private internal systems.

Unlike the security of home Wi-Fi, which is password-protected and encrypted, public Wi-Fi leaves users' data exposed to anyone on the network

And that's why IT people have been banging on about using TLS for aeons as you can never trust a network. See: China, Russia, etc.

Yet more scaremongering form someone who should know better.

WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk

According to Wikipedia, the Wordpress software is released under the GPL. Does this mean Automatic blocking WPEngine's access to the software is putting Automatic in breach of their own GPL license?

WP Engine hits back after Automattic CEO calls it 'cancer'

"I've given away my life's work for free and now I'm angry that people are using my work for free."

UK pensions department's project to unite government ERP systems comes to £1.9B

I predict a huge fat fee paid to consultants and a late, over budget and barely functioning system with oodles of bugs.

AWS claims customers are packing bags and heading back on-prem

Re: “ customers are finding that moving their IT back on-premises is so attractive…”

Exchange is a right pig to administer. Paying Microsoft for Office 365 is genuinely a cheaper & less stressful way to consume Exchange.

And before any smart arse says "Well don't use Exchange" let me introduce you to enterprise integrations that only work with Exchange. I live & work in the real work and that means having to have Exchange.

Re: No fixed (reliable) idea of cost

The cost isn't known (or fixed) in any meaningful way

And if you do find an option that is fixed cost (e.g. reserved capacity) shock horror, you find it's more expensive than running your own tin.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Re: Well...

Problem 3: Practically no consumer ISPs (in the UK at least) support IPv6 properly (i.e. give you a /48 global prefix)

Sky are the second largest UK ISP and provide IPv6. (Plus all the boutique ISPs such as Zen, A&A, etc)

UK Lords push bill to tame rogue algorithms in public sector

What has the Horizon scandal got to do with AI? Horizon was a mixture of bad software engineering, bad project management and senior managers refusing to acknowledge reality to prop up their bonuses.

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

Re: "Generative AI is"

Can we stop calling this current orgasmic hype-ware AI? It's not AI. It's just a large language statistical model.

AI would imply the software has some form of understanding of what it's dealing with. It doesn't - as it clearly evident by some of the utter rubbish it produces.

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

Re: Helium?

It's to keep pressure in the fuel system. Gas pressure is less complex than pumps.

Providing, of course, your seals are working correctly.

Double Debian update: 11.11 and 12.7 arrive at once

I read that LKML thread. I think Linus' frustrations were fair. How can you supply a 1,000+ line diff late in the release cycle?

Do look up! NASA unfurls massive shiny solar sail in orbit

Maybe we could get the military to read "Superiority"?

Rocket Factory Augsburg breaks down the SaxaVord blowout

Re: "Enjoy the footage"

Exploding rockets tend to be harder to cover up compared to dodgy accountancy.

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

Businesses which have shown to have poor self-regulation and are saying they should regulate even less are complaining that they don't want legal regulation and should self-regulate instead?

I'm not sure a violin small enough exists.

Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier

Re: rose tinted glasses

Concorde didn't need afterburner to sustain supersonic flight

The key was supercruise. It was a mechanism which adjusted the air flow into the engines based on air speed and density. It required a leap of faith to use modern (for its time) electronics.

Whilst we've certainly learned a lot since Concord(e)'s time, it was nontheless, an amazing piece of technology & engineering.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Re: Ask the Chinese?

I'm pretty sure that the Chinese have the capability to reach an orbiting space station

The key word there is "an". They can reach a space station but possiby not the ISS due to the different orbital inclinations between where the ISS is and what China can reach.

And that's before we get to the tiny little issue of American law preventing NASA working with the Chinese.

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Re: Vision

During the lockdown supply constraints, the Pi Foundation had a difficult choice: Prioritise consumer or business customers? They took the decision to prioritise business customers. It wasn't an easy decision.

We're now out of the lockdown supply constraints and everyone has equal access to devices.

Complaints

Reading some of the comments here complaining about feature X missing/wrong on the RPi 5, I think people need to take a step back and look at the origins of the RPI. It was designed as a very low cost computer for people/children to tinker with - a bit like the 8-bit home micros of the 80s.

Right from the off, people started using it for things it wasn't designed for and asked for more features & performance.

It's now on its fifth iteration, people are still complaining about features & performance, but now they're complaining about price too because its gone up as they've added features & performance that people asked for.

New Zealand minister OKs Kim Dotcom extradition to US

Consequences

Dotcom and associates have maintained that just because they built the platform, that doesn't make them responsible for users' actions

As some people in the UK have recently found out (and more will find out): Actions have consequences.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

I wish public bodies would shift off twitter and onto other platforms. They provide useful information but I resent having to be affiliated to the Musk hate-pen to see information.

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

Why DC for these high capacity lines? I thought the whole point of AC was there are fewer losses?

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

Re: Tesla's are anything but S3XY

Project 2025 will make it very hard for Tesla to continue in business in the USA.

I watched a LegalEagle video where they looked at the Project 2025 manifesto. Oh. My. God. The poeple who wrote Project 2025 eriously have learned nothing from 20th century history.

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

Admitting to the mistake in in such a public forum is the first step. The real task is for CrowdStrike to re-write their software.

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Re: Good luck

How much would code be improved if it was just re-written without changing the language?

Raptor Lake microcode limits Intel chips to a mere 1.55 volts to prevent CPU destruction

A typical silicon based PN junction requires 0.7v to switch. So 1.5v is quite low to run a transistor at.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: Engineers and MBAs

I'm a manager and I know I'm an idiot. When I get new hires, I always tell them to tell me if they think I'm wrong or they have a better idea.

I also seem to have gained a reputation as someone who can solve problems and get things done. (NOTE: *I* don't get things done, my teams get things done)

I wonder if the two things are related?

Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff

[NASA] is unwilling to charge Boeing if the contractor fails to meet quality standards.

Can I just clarify something here: Boeing is on a cost plus contract to build this thing. You're telling me that if Boeing don't make what's required, you'll just pay them more to make it right second time and not consider telling Boeing to pay for the mistake themselves? What f**king incentive is there for Boeing to do anything right?

Obligatory Dilbert.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: WordStar

...responsiveness became regarded as a "solved problem".

We have computers with multi-core CPUs running at GHz, oodles of memory, fancy graphics acceleration and blazing fast permanent storage, and yet, somehow, we manage to write software that can bring it to its knees.

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

It's a shame the only people that stand a chance of suing ClownStrike are the investors and not the affected customers.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 called out for 'worker surveillance'

How is this new? This has been going on for years (decades?) in the world of workforce management.

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Didn't Space Karen fire them all?

And then have to re-hire some of them.

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Re: Called out by a commentard

Only a commentard's view here:

- A couple of his recent articles have been pertinent around the ClownStrike debacle.

- I would argue that this one is correcting a previous article which, journalistically, is important.

Post-CrowdStrike, Microsoft to discourage use of kernel drivers by security tools

Re: "Windows Security best practices for integrating and managing security tools"

the whole design of Windows is fundamentally flawed with far too many hacks, kludges and compromises that have been left unaddressed, or fudged to 'fix' over the years, and which now are almost impossible to fix without a complete rewrite

To Microsoft, backwards compatibility is almost sacrosanct: This includes supporting software that did very dodgy things (e.g. abusing bugs)

To be fair, this isn't too far different to the policy for the Linux Kernel of "Don't break the user space".

The driver loaded fine at boot. The issue was when the driver came to load a data file from disk once the system had booted.

Whilst I'm sure there are things MS could do to minimize the impact of a repeat ClownStrike performance, let's not forget that ClownStrike made two fundamental errors here: No testing of the files before release and no client-side sanity checking of the data before being used in the kernel. If ClownStrike has done ONE of those, we wouldn't be in this mess. (And let's not forget the "Don't deploy on a Friday" either)

NASA swings budget axe, kills $400M+ VIPER lunar trundlebot

Re: Custom components?

Reading some of the analysis by Scott Manley on twitter, he says NASA have already paid for the rocket launch and they're going to put a lump of concrete mass simulator in the rocket. Why not just throw the lander in there untested? If it works, great! If it doesn't, what have you lost? I bet a lot of the cost of the lander isn't the components but the paperwork.

Cold comfort to teachers who got paid late, but ERP software rollout had 'unrealistic' timeline

Re: Ownership

People often conflate "ownership" of a service/system with the "running" of it. Because of this, the wrong people are running the projects on upgrades/replacements.

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

My thought is that it's due to a security issue with the connectors.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

It doesn't. But your speedometer clearly needs fixing.

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

Dogfood

this situation suggests the Project has not eaten its own dogfood.

Hypervisors are not normal pieces of software as they are designed to run on physical hardware. Testing a hypervisor inside another hypervisor is not an accurate test.

Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout

The problem was the definition of "completion" kept on changing, hence why the council had to keep handing over bundles of cash to Oracle.

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

The blame isn't 100% Microsoft's. WordPerfect were slow to embrace Windows.

I remember our typists preferred to stick to WP for DOS rather than use the early versions of WordPerfect for Windows.

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

Re: Thrusters

Sunk cost fallacy.

Re: Absolute incompetency

Now it is in space, with almost zero repair options beyond hand tools to access parts inside the pressure vessel.

How many of the components, such as the problematic thrusters, are only accessible from the outside of the craft?

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

There's an element of truth in what Microsoft say: It's not for them to say whether person A logging into Office 365 with valid credentials is allowed to see the data: That's your job as the tenancy. administrator.

The problem with that line is in this case, the ne'er-do-wells bypassed the normal authentication methods to gain access to Office 365 so MS are most definitely on the hook here.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

It always comes down to using the right tool for the job.

Sometimes Agile is the right development methodology for software. Sometimes it's the worst thing you can do to a software project.

Spam blocklist SORBS closed by its owner, Proofpoint

Re: So, another one bites the dust

Why don't you ask them for a refund or compensation on your previous subscription payments...?