Posts by David 132

Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics

Re: use for troubleshooting and put it away when done

"Is that a time machine in your pocket, or will you have been yesterday going to have been pleased to see me tomorrow?"

My head hurts.

Re: Respect has been lost

These days a security issue isn't taken seriously unless it has a cool, dramatic-sounding name and an associated logo.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: slap a keyboard ...

On later PCs with PS/2 ports, the ports were protected by soft (self-healing) fuses; they'd still almost invariably "trip" if a keyboard or mouse was plugged in live, and the PC would still need to be power-cycled to recognize the device, but no permanent damage would be done.

Also, the article states: "The color-coded sockets – purple for keyboards and green for mice – featured on IBM Personal System/2 computers and swiftly spread throughout the PC world..."

which isn't quite correct. The original PS/2 ports were non-coloured; it wasn't until a Microsoft/Intel initiative in the late 90s - PC Design Guide, or "PC'97", and subsequent revisions - after the IBM PS/2 PC era, that the colour codes were introduced (or at least, standardized; some manufacturers had begun using their own colours before then) to make PS/2 ports more user-friendly. I have direct knowledge of this because a close colleague was on the PC'97 working group at the time!

Microsoft patches patch that broke USB printing in Windows 11

Re: Printing!

>And when they finally pull the old device models out of the print system (as the CUPS developers want to do), driving old non IPP/IPPS printers will become a lot more difficult!

I'm sure that when that happens, some enterprising company will step up and introduce a range of reasonably inexpensive adapter dongles that interpose between the PC and the printer and translate IPP/CUPS to the printer's native language. A different dongle, of course, for every brand & model of printer; each with an embedded microcontroller and firmware that can be updated remotely over its own wi-fi, which also allows for online registration and activation of the dongle whilst tying it for perfectly reasonable security and convenience reasons to that specific PC.

And in that way we'll finally move away from the nightmare of having software drivers for printers.

(Please note icon. It was that or the "I'll get my coat" one.)

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

Re: I'm happy as long as everyone keeps using different models, I'm happy.

The forecast for this evening/tonight where I am is full of dire warnings of thunderstorms, gusting winds, and hailstones the size of golfballs.

So I spent a long-overdue hour cleaning my wife’s #%^@! out of the garage to allow me to put my car away (hers has been squeezed into one of the barns) juuuuuust in case.

Can’t decide if in the event of no hail I will be annoyed or relieved, after going to all that effort!

But glass half full, I now have that rarest and most precious of things - a garage with a car in it rather than just junk.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Re: This is the way the world ends...

Well, I can't speak for myself, obviously, but I'm fairly certain that you are.

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

I'm not one for victim-blaming, and the blame & odium belong squarely on the miscreant, but I will say... this couldn't happen to a nicer and more deserving company than Oracle. Nyuk, nyuk.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

Indeed. I'll be surprised if the senior Heathrow leadership don't get elevated to the Lords after this mess.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

>London Charles De Gaulle?

Ah, I see you work for Ryanair's marketing department.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

Given the general state of infrastructure investment in the UK - the Reacher Gilt attitude of "run it at 110% non-stop, preventative maintenance is too expensive, and surplus capacity would just be leaving money on the table" - I am quite happy to believe that this was the cause. Occam's Razor and all that; while I'm sure Mad Vlad is pleased at the outcome, I see little credible evidence to suggest his sticky fingers in this mess.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

Or reverse the current direction on the moving walkways and turn them into dynamo treadmills instead. By the time the passengers realize they've been walking for an hour and still haven't moved past the first advertising poster, you'll have generated plenty of power.

Capital One cracker could be sent back to prison after judges rule she got off too lightly

Re: Book, Paige

So, you don't think the justice system should leaf her alone and let her close this chapter of her life? That she's folio-ware of what she did?

(OK, that last one was a stretch. I haven't had enough coffee to be creative, nor enough alcohol to have an inflated view of how funny I am.)

AdTech CEO whose products detected fraud jailed for financial fraud

The elusive “Send Corrections” link is at the top of this page. I’ve just used it to point out a couple in the “In May 2024…” paragraph.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: GTK3!? Oh no!

I just installed it on my Linux Mint 21.1 testbox using the unofficial .deb build here (Flatpak and Snap are an abomination unto Nuggan in this luddite's crusty opinion, but each to their own...)

I'm happy to inform you that there is a traditional separate menu bar, distinct from the window title bar. There is, for those who prefer it the other way, an option in the Welcome dialog box (which can be called up at any time post-installation) to merge the menu and title bars.

SystemRescue 12 lands with added bcachefs support

Hollow laughter here. Thanks for your tip; via Fastly I am getting 1.7MB/s, which is close to the the practical limit of my microwave-relay broadnarrowband connection. 850MB/s? Get out of here before I say something I'll regret later :)

Microsoft isn't fixing 8-year-old shortcut exploit abused for spying

Early 2000s, a company that like so many large organizations combined technical brilliance with occasional pants-on-head instances of daftness; and its campus was badly damaged by an oil storage depot explosion shortly thereafter. And from that, it probably won't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out which company I am talking about.

I have a friend who, in the very early 2000s, came into the office one morning to find the corporate IT department waiting for him with glowering looks and metaphorical (or possibly actual) baseball bats.

He was responsible for coding hardware drivers, and had written a script that would run the build overnight and e-mail him the resulting log file. However his script contained an error; when the build failed and was logged, it tried again, and again, and again... until it couldn't write any more logfile due to having filled up /home, at which point it continued as written and e-mailed the log file. Which was now 4GB in size.

Apparently it took down the company's e-mail servers across Europe and the US, and my friend was a little embarrassed, to say the least.

Watching out for any .lnk files that are, to quote the article, "megabytes" in size rather than the usual 2-4KB, would also be common-sense.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

"PC littera inserere"? Quid infernum est "PC littera inserere???"

(Courtesy of google translate and a little lateral thinking, so any classicists reading this, please don't flay me alive.)

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

Re: Oh Lord...

Indeed. “Pro Max”? What a depressing fallback to cliché.

Coming up next, the “Pro Max Ultimate” or perhaps the “Pro Max Ultimate Classic”.

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

Re: Gosh!

>...it always make me smile when I see the "more work needs to be done" part of a paper ;) Implied: "of course, and we would like to be the ones to do it"

I interpret that line as "we've done the low-hanging fruit and can't be bothered to do the hard work, but publishing this paper will allow us to claim some of the glory when someone cleverer than us actually makes it work".

Perhaps I'm too cynical for this kind, gentle, inherently fair world?

Re: rather than anything that might be described as intelligence

OTOH... in the case of the question, "What's that gouge on your motorbike's kickstand?"

... "Markov chain!" would be a perfectly acceptable response.

Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

Re: Of course it's Stephen Thaler again.

With the amount of coverage he's accruing for himself with his tilting at windmills, he's definitely the Kevin Warwick/Captain Cyborg de nos jours. And my apologies to anyone who's just been triggered by my mention of that name.

So reports that AI will destroy all jobs for humans are proven to be utter hyperbole!

Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update

Re: You get a dead horse, and you get a dead horse, and you get a dead horse…

Nagware?

M4 MacBook Air keeps ports modular, locks tight – still a headache to repair

I have a lovely Macbook Air - 2nd or 3rd gen, so getting on a bit now, albeit in theory still perfectly useable... except that around 4 years ago our rather large & clueless labrador managed to sit down heavily on it, cracking the screen and rendering it nonfunctional. The quoted repair cost from Apple was ~80% of the cost of a new machine; the screen is bonded into the lid and waaaaaay beyond my repair skills (and I've disassembled my 2011 27" iMac many, many times, because it has a habit of killing SSDs).

So I say "bah!" to Apple machines now. Beautiful like a butterfly, but also as resistant to dismantling and upgrading as, well, a butterfly.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Re: Better backing track?

Or the audio of that famous Ballmer video… “here’s my issue video, as requested, and to motivate and inspire your debug team I have given it a soundtrack of ‘Developers Developers DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!’ repeating over and over again…”

…the technician will ALWAYS ask for a remote session, will ALWAYS ask for a phone call even though I specified I prefer email, and will ALWAYS be nigh fucking unintelligible when they do get on the phone…

I get almost exactly the same experience from Microsoft Support! But with the advantages that 1) they call me out of the blue even if I don’t have a Windows PC, which is really smart of them, and 2) they’re much more diligent about finding problems, even looking at the Windows Event Log and helpfully pointing out the evidence of VIRUS INFECTION from all the Info log entries. Then they courteously and efficiently ask for my credit card and give me the all-clear.

Who’s the dumb sucker NOW, eh? Eh???

That darn Trogen Hawes, eh?

“Since KB10089589 was installed in the March Patch Tuesday, my Windows 11 desktop keeps crashing to a black screen with a flashing red box saying ‘Guru Meditation’…”

I’m honestly only surprised they didn’t ask him to reboot and run sfc /scannow - that seems to be the unthinking copy-paste response to every single ticket raised on the Microsoft “support” forums.

Edit: oh, curse the way comments are threaded on the Reg. I finally, 5 minutes after posting this, read down the page to reach the point where it had appeared… only to see that the similarly-named David Austin, who is clearly smarter, faster, nicer-smelling and more attractive to prospective partners than I, beat me to it by a piffling 5 hours. Give him your upvote. I deserve nothing.

GitHub supply chain attack spills secrets from 23,000 projects

"Oh, I see there is now since yesterday a tk-actions/changed-files-clean-safe-honest repo, that must be a new updated version, I will switch to using that one instead, because what could possibly go wrong with blindly and unthinkingly pulling in unseen code from a complete stranger?"

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Re: Reminds me of another litigious nuisance

> Maybe, there is something about owning newspapers and publishing houses which brings out the basest instincts.

Or it’s just cognisance of the old aphorism, “never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel”.

Re: Congrats

Has anyone ever seen Keef Richards and Rupe Murdoch together at the same time?

Obligatory xkcd Penny Arcade.

Intel's new CEO: Chip world veteran Lip-Bu Tan

Re: Hmmm ...

Did he make Intel wait 15 minutes before accepting their offer?

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: 17½"? Rather you than me!

Pfft, 12” is perfectly adequate for anyone, as long as it’s as thick around as your thigh.

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Cut Microsoft some slack, people.

Putting ink onto paper is new, cutting-edge technology at the forefront of the IT envelope - Microsoft's bound to make a few wrong moves as they pioneer this exciting new capability for us all.

(Please note icon.)

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

Re: From 100 days to a lifetime?

This is one tech area where CI/CD or "move fast and break things" probably aren't the appropriate approach.

Microsoft adds another Copilot hotkey – this time for AI voice chat

Re: Rage-Inducing Key-Combo Hijacking

Wait, is Unreal Tournament still a thing?

I know that about a year ago I hopped onto the UT (1999? Game of the Year edition) internet server browser, and found a surprising number of games still active. Even played a co-op map with some rando, who was probably as surprised as me to find a real living person sharing the map with him...

Re: We are back to morse code?

Yet another instance of an Onion joke anticipating reality?

https://theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no-keybo-1819594761/

Allstate Insurance sued for delivering personal info on a platter, in plaintext, to anyone who went looking for it

Ah, "free credit monitoring"...

...the online commerce equivalent of "To convey our apologies please accept this voucher good for 0.005 pence off Brussel Sprouts, terms and conditions apply, minimum purchase one hundred kilos, voucher expires 12 hours from now, can only be redeemed at our Burrafirth, Shetland store."

It's not even a "cost of doing business" at this point, it's a rounding error for companies that screw up.

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Pfft. Real men just do a port-scan for Internet-facing hosts that are exposing port 631, pick a random one from the results, and then send the print job there with a cover-sheet saying "Please post these pages to me at <my street address>".

FTC's $25.5M scam refund treats victims to $34 each

Re: WOOT!

I do amuse myself (*and almost certainly no-one else) when I put them away each night by yelling “You’re all FOWL! Absolutely FOWL!”.

That, and urging the geese out of their stall in the mornings with the words “Geese out, y’all!”.

Little things please little minds, etc.

Re: WOOT!

Maybe a half dozen eggs.

As the proud, accidental, and slightly bemused owner of more than 60 runner ducks & geese, I laugh at this so-called "egg shortage". I have the opposite problem - am practically knee-deep in them (an ova-supply problem, you might say).

"The FTC announced on Monday that it will issue 736,375 PayPal payments..."

...so if you get an email notification that "THIS IS THE FTC THERE IS COMP3NSATION REFUND FOR U ON PAYPAL" you should totally trust it and click it, right?

Seriously, though. I'm sure scammers will be leaping on this one just as they attach themselves leech-like to every other news story.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Well “hostages” is already the accepted term for Oracle’s market base, and Oracle would probably sue if anyone else used that term, so another word would seem to be called for!

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Re: Traffic lights

Even better in this always-on era of social media - replace the traffic lights' display with an OLED that alternately displays the Twitterx, Bluesky, and Metaverse handles for that light.

If you want to know if the light you're waiting at rapidly approaching is showing GO or STOP... simply Follow @TrafficLightsNorthboundA437PastTheAldiButBeforeTheVapeStore (hoping that you copied the handle down correctly before it disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the Bluesky handle, which is of course completely different) and see what the council's Social Media Manager has posted to that account as the latest Status Update.

I are a genius and should be employed by the government.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Re: The two achilles of current encryption

Speaking of Firefox - indeed, this might have been what you were alluding to, I'm not sure - I have seen very little mention here on El Reg or elsewhere of the impending timebomb that will render older versions of FF (pre-128 or 115ESR) borderline unusable after the 14th of this month. DRM playback will stop working (big whoop, all my media is de-DRM'ed) but more painfully, add-ons will suddenly stop working.

More details here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/root-certificate-expiration?as=u&utm_source=inproduct

I am particularly irritated by this, because I've settled on v114 and disabled all updates (yeah, downvote me if you feel holier-than-thou.) I just got sick and tired of being constantly nagged to update - wait - reboot - wait - update - wait - reboot, and stepped off that treadmill. Remember when software was for the use of people, not the other way around?

If this comes across as grumpy and Luddite, well, so be it. But I am still cross at Mozilla for forcing me to update a perfectly serviceable version of FF and waste time turning off the inevitable new cruft ("we've added an AI assistant!" DON'T CARE. "we've partnered with..." DON'T CARE. "Let us show you sponsored..." yep, DON'T CARE.)

Google teases AI Mode for search, giving Gemini total control over your results

Re: This is something Google has heard that "power users" actually want

Hey, at least Holly had The Junior Colour Encyclopedia Of Space as factual reference.

Icon --> Queeg.