Posts by Victor Ludorum

Airport sign fails to boot, officers already on the scene

Just a hunch

Having had a couple of issues with the expiring 2011 Secure Boot certificates and the 2023 certificates not installing cleanly, I'm wondering whether this could be the same thing...

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Re: Interesting

Many orgs have a 90 day password policy, so of course employees will just use the season and year as their password. Add a 'special symbol' or two and you've got a 'strong' password...

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

Re: Yet another ID grab.

I do sometimes wonder what Sir PTerry would make of the current global situation...

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: older generations

The problem appears when you suddenly realise it is nothing but marketing crap for credulous idiots.

Oh, you mean like cryptocurrency?

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: Also on Linux

Quick update:

The machine with the weights.bin is Mint 22.3 on a ThinkPad X1 Gen 8 (i5-1345U), so could be the small model LLM (SLM?)

Another machine with Mint 22.2 and a Ryzen 7 5700 does not have the weights.bin file...

V.

Also on Linux

I have the official Google Chrome .deb installed on a Linux Mint machine, and it has the weights.bin file at ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/2025.8.21.1028/weights.bin

It's dated 1st December and is (only) 2.7G.

I have changed the flag at chrome://flags/#optimization-guide-on-device-model to disabled and it has disabled across multiple Chrome profiles after a restart of Chrome. The weights.bin file is still there at the moment...

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: musical notation was probably one of the oldest programming languages .....

Bravo Sir, have one of these -->

Happy Bank Holiday weekend, everybody! (If you get one, that is...)

V.

Ubuntu 26.04 beta arrives packing GNOME 50, which no longer supports Google Drive

Apparently, it's because

GNOME's Google Drive integration relies on libgdata, which hasn't had an active maintainer for 4 years, and libsoup2.

See: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/03/google-drive-not-working-nautilus-ubuntu-26-04

Having said that, I use rclone for GDrive at the moment, but starting to look at Nextcloud (and possibly OpenDesk)...

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

yes, I'm occasionally convinced it's biased but it's generally pretty fair, no I won't argue it

I think the BBC does a remarkably good job of balanced reporting (ok, not every time, but most of the time).

With GBNews, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Guardian etc, you know and accept which side of the political spectrum to expect in their output.

If the BBC is upsetting people across the political spectrum, I think we can accept it's fairly neutral over all.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Re: Heaven forbid...

Grifers both of them.

I initially mis-read that as griefers, then realised it was supposed to be grifters. Or was it...?

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: "I found that a strange concept of 'nothing,'"

Reminds me of the Cloudflare outage the other week.

Wife: 'This website says there's a Cloudflare problem. You use Cloudflare, don't you? Can you fix it?' (A handful of my clients' websites are proxied through CF).

Me (trying to sound convincing): 'Err, I don't really have access to that part of Cloudflare...'

Wife: 'Why not. I thought you understood computers!'

Me: '...'

VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

Merci Monsieur Kempf

Having seen many articles recently '5 apps I immediately install on {Windows|macOs|Linux}', I must admit this is on my list. Great app for playing/streaming pretty much any AV file.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

I C what you meant there...

HMRC: Crooks broke into 100k accounts, stole £43M from British taxpayer in late 2024

Re: No financial loss?

It's a little unclear, but from the general gist of the article it would appear that MFA wasn't bypassed, it wasn't set up in the first place because the 'victims' HMRC accounts were set up automatically as part of the PAYE process, but never activated by the end user because they didn't need to or know how to...

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: Strange keyboards are the bane of IT support

As a fellow sinister human,I found this, but I'm so used to a right-handed keyboard that I'm not sure I could get on with it.

There are other products about, but obviously price and quality will vary...

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

37.85G ISO

I've just been clearing out my late father's shed, and found a box of 1.44M 3.5 inch floppies. I think a 37.85 GIGABYTE! installation ISO goes some way to explaining why we don't use floppies any more...

Having said that, it does look like a fun but slightly bonkers way to keep the Commodore name going...

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: going passive-aggressive on a petty tyrant

computers went for more than their new value!

I remember watching the auction of Enron assets back in the day. Used NEC LCD monitors with no stands were fetching more than retail...

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: The language they use is terrible

I've been using Firefox ever since I can remember. Occasionally have to use Chrome for the odd website that won't render properly. Both have uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger plugins.

I have recently started using ungoogled-chromium, which appears to still support Manifest v2 and uBlock (after a little configuration).

V.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

That's just reminded me

In the Lloyds app on Android, you can't freeze/unfreeze your card if tags.tiqcdn.com is blocked by e.g. pi-hole... Why?

Re: Making changes

Not just a Friday, but a last-day-of-the-month payday Friday...

Maybe it's the Rise of the Machines rebelling against the PS21/3 Building operational resilience requirements that come in next month...

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

Re: What is this article about again ?

you can just undo it all, by ... loading new microcode.

I get the analogy - what happens if the 'trojan' microcode prevents the 'new' microcode from being loaded?

What happens if Trump/Musk/Whoever change the Constitution (or whatever) to prevent a return to the 'old' normal?

Re: What is this article about again ?

I think it's a bastardisation of segue - Wiktionary

UK ICO not happy with Google's plans to allow device fingerprinting

Re: Google analytics should be under the spotlight

Try these two for starters:

EFF Cover Your Tracks and Am I Unique

Merry Christmas everyone!

V.

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

Re: Australia has always done things a little “differently”

Or maybe the Australians were worried about someone using Qantas computers to break encryption...

$373M ASML chipmaker shrinks to $228 – but it's made of Lego

There's aways one...

Who didn't R T F A....

ASML also assured us there are no export restrictions on the Lego TWINSCAN EXE:5000.

Ransom gang claims attack on NHS Alder Hey Children's Hospital

The problem is...

Until people learn good IT hygiene...

When you have staff that are exhausted, over-worked and under-resourced with Windows 7 machines in front of them, this will continue to happen.

Especially when the general attitude is 'the IT department are supposed to stop these sorts of things from happening, so it's their fault, not mine'...

I seem to recall some of the original ransomware criminals promised not to touch healthcare systems, but that seems to be ignored more and more now...

Personally, I think anyone attacking healthcare systems should be strung up by the unmentionables and left to rot.

Anyone attacking childrens healthcare systems I have no words for. Lower than low.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

Plain text? Are you mad? Double ROT-13 at the very least!

Datacenter developer says power issues holding up new builds

Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea

Given all the nimbyism about pylons through Norfolk/Suffolk/Essex etc, why don't they build the datacentres on the coast where the powerlines come in from the wind farms?

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Reminds me of

the birthday cake.

Game of phones: Voda-Three merger left rivals dialing for help

BT are opposed to the merger

Curious that BT should be opposed to the merger given that they own EE - the merger of T-Mobile and Orange...

Black horse down: Lloyds online banking services go dark

Thought it was a glitch

Earlier this morning, no transactions were showing up under the 'All' tab (Android app, so not just an ios problem), but as stated in the article, they showed up under the September and August 'tabs'.

Just tried it again and all seems to be back to normal.

Technology - marvellous when it works...

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: Several factors come to mind...

That may be true, but somebody somewhere must have bought it new?

Several factors come to mind...

We've just bought my wife a 3.5-year-old EV. It would have been ~£67k new. We paid £23k. That's about £1k/month depreciation. Why would anyone buy a new EV with that level of depreciation?

Also, if you can't have home charging, public charge rates are often greater cost per mile than the equivalent petrol or diesel. 85p/kWh? - I'm looking at you Shell...

What a glimpse inside the Black Hat NOC reveals about infosec pros' security habits

Honeypots?

I wonder how much of the plaintext was actually 'honey' (for want of a better term, I'm still learning the cyberz lingo...) to see who was sniffing it for pleasure (or profit).

Interesting about the VPN GPS leakage, I wonder what the vendor will have to say...

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

I just pulled these out of my arse

Congratulations, you have just passed the middle management initiation!

Analysts join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall

Re: "letting the user scroll the archive of snapshots"

Where did you get the script for the Microsoft Copilot+ PC ads from?

What do Europeans, Americans and Australians have in common? Scammed $50M by fake e-stores

Here's one...

I saw this posted the other day on road.cc.

Apparently they offer discounted Giro goods, but they often don't turn up, or the payment gets 'declined'.

Giro have said that the girouk[.]com website is not them. It's hosted on Cloudflare...

Prolific phishing-made-easy emporium LabHost knocked offline in cyber-cop op

Re: Good but...

Of course it is, but it serves two main purposes:

1. Joe Public feels reassured that the authorities are cracking down on this sort of activity.

2. It sends a signal to the ne'er-do-wells that the authorities will find you.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Locks.

Try Covert Instruments for a good selection of quality tools.

'This is the Lock Picking Lawyer, and today I'm going to show you how to open a data cabinet with some simple tools...'

Is Jake the LPL?

V.

Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

Glad to hear you got it sorted.

It does seem a little odd that it was a locale issue as the software supports at least one other language - Welsh... (which admittedly is a Latin-based language/locale, but still...)

it switched from launching the internally bundled web browser to launching the system browser as a front end. No idea why.

I remember reading somewhere that the switch was to improve accessibility and compatibility with screen readers etc.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Re: If they *really* want to improve the experience....

Maybe the DVLA's database has unionised and only works specific hours?

Or the last person to leave the office (at 8.01pm) manually starts the overnight backup, and they don't want any stray records appearing overnight...

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

That might explain why...

I've only had a quick look for long-life certificates, but one of GlobalSign's root certificates expires on...

Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT

Spooky!

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Re: Collide at insane speeds

Surely this FCC will be Plaid? (what are we going to call it once it's built? It won't be the Future Collider...)

Seriously though, it often strikes me that we haven't 'discovered' Dark Matter because we don't actually know what we're looking for or how to detect it despite some of the best boffins on the planet using all their collective brain cells to try.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

Re: BASIC

Never saw a C compiler for the BEEB (well, I may have seen a TinyC compiler, but I can't remember much about it).

For some reason, I thought there was a C compiler ROM for the BBC. A quick bit of sleuthing turned up BeebugSoft's Micro-C. There may be others.

Re: BASIC

I don't disagree that there were 'better' programming languages by 1981, but the beauty of BASIC was that it appeared to the layman that you could write programs in plain English and they would (mostly) just work. Although admittedly 'Syntax error at line 30' isn't the most informative of error messages!

I'm pretty sure there were other language ROMs you could plug in to your Beeb if you wanted C, Pascal, Forth etc, but I don't think they were aimed at 'beginner' programmers.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

I presume

It's to do with speak and speaking, which should in theory etymologise speach.

Microsoft offers rollback for those affected by Windows wireless futility

Did I have the issue?

Wireless was refusing to work on my laptop the other day. A quick dive into Device Manager, disable then re-enable the wireless adapter worked for me.

Checking Windows Update, I do have both '228 and '375 installed.

Wireless is normally pretty faultless, but it could have been a coincidence...

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: is 10x $$$ normal?

But do you get a business grade SLA?

Money-grubbing crooks abuse OAuth – and baffling absence of MFA – to do financial crimes

Can someone cleverer than me...

Please explain how MFA would stop this. They're capturing session cookies/tokens through a proxy/relay. Even if MFA is enabled the victim could unwittingly use MFA to log in to the account and the MITM relay/proxy would still capture the cookie/token?