Posts by An_Old_Dog

Wyden warns telcos still leave Senate in the dark after Trump DOJ snooping scandal

Re: Weasel words...again

You beat me to it.

Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt

Re: "to leverage AI tool"

When people write or speak about "tools" and "leverage" (as a verb) I think, "I wish I had a crowbar at hand so I could demonstrate that!"

Wanted: A handy metric for gauging if GPUs are being used optimally

The New Old Thing

Utilization evaluation features could be built-in to CPUs and GPUs, and the results made available to software reading a port.

Chip manufacturers see a negative benefit to that.

IBM's OS/360 had an API for user-supplied utilization-accounting software, but that API changed frequently and capriciously.

I can't imagine why. /sarcasm

DARPA zaps popcorn with laser power beamed 5.3 miles through air

Radio Station

"KGAL, The Rock of the Valley": similar distance from home, 920 Khz, 1KW daytime, 500W nighttime. It was enough to light a neon bulb hooked between my untuned longwire antenna and ground.

Techies propose the Agent Name Service: It's like DNS but for AI agents

Blockchain-based -- NO!

If they want to decentralise it, why not go blockchain-based?

Because we don't want to use that much of our electricity doing this. Blockchain computations are very energy-consumptive. Using blockchain computations for a thing that will be at least current-DNS-request frequency would be madness.

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

Favorable Circumstances

I once worked for a large org - mainframe, minis, 13K+ PCs, 2K+ printers - which had the favorable circumstances of low tech-job turnover. ALL the techies knew ALL the other techies - field service, networks, telecom, help desk, machine operators, DBAs, and computer security people - by name, face, and voice.

Yet when you called the help desk to have them reset your password(s), they always (cheerfully) asked for your verifying info.

Accessorising

While you're accessorising your hacker stereotype, remember the black, fingerless gloves, dark sunglasses worn in a dimly-lit lair, male gender, Caucasian features, "ttribal" tattoos, and chatting with his co-malefactors on IRC, typing in "1337 5p34|<" [(e)lite speak].

China launches an AI cloud into orbit. 12 sats for now, 2,800 in coming years

Payback

Guoxing Aerospace also hopes its satellites assist emergency services and help drone users down on earth.

Ah, so they'll have a service which will help military and TLA drone operators. I was wondering how they were going to pay for all that stuff.

Eeek! p0wned Alabama hit by unspecified 'cybersecurity event'

Compromised Product

SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer Metadata Uploader

With such a pompous product name as that, my best guess is is that it is an FTP client; perhaps it is a rebranded copy of "MOVEit".

Re: CISA

@ Falmari:

Will you please post the plaintext version of your encrypted comment?

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

Options 1 or 2, plus option 4: dissension within the ranks? A "disturbing lack of faith"?

Fired US govt workers, Uncle Xi wants you! – to apply for this fake consulting gig

While I Disapprove the PRC's Goals

... I gotta say: damn, that was clever.

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants AIs fighting AIs so those most fit to live with us survive

Why Would We Want (Fake), Amoral AIs with "Survival Skills"?

The winner of the (fake) AI wars will be a skillful killer and will be good at deceiving humans.

As an inferior fleshie lacking these skills/attributes, I seriously don't want to have to compete with these things.

Re: Robot Wars

The game is called, "Core War"; the computer language you program it in is called, "Redcode".

If you're running Linux, check your repo for "pmars" -- Portable Mars.

You can get pMARS downloads, source, etc. from: http://www.koth.org/pmars/

(Icon for, "FIGHT!")

Re: There's no reason

Keep it simple. Put a serial terminal on every desk, and hook 'em to a single timesharing computer (an RPi would do) running a TUI testing app.

(semi-joking ...)

Anthropic’s law firm throws Claude under the bus over citation errors in court filing

Re: Being lazy ...

Isn't this sort of "formatting" normally done by legal-office secretaries, who make extensive use of pre-formatted documents and templates?

DoorDash scam used fake drivers, phantom deliveries to bilk $2.59M

How in the World ...

... did these perps think that the DoorDash accounting department would not notice that just a few accounts had, between them, performed more than TWO MILLION DOLLARS' worth of deliveries in less than a year?!

John Deere boasts driverless fleet - who needs operators, anyway?

Runaway

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/

Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant

Re: Poor lighting?

Maybe next time they should bring a flashlight.

It seems as though they hadn't considered some of the should-be-obvious difficulties.

At least they're not selling rides, as did OceanGate.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Packet Analysis

My printed-out docs on Wireshark are in fibreboard binders which still are labelled, "Ethereal".

Re: Good, but don't do that again

@AC above:

You're lucky you weren't fired for making upper management "look bad".

Re: Good, but don't do that again

Boss: "The Internet is in that little blue 'e', and I need you to fix it."

Doing it the Stupidest Way (Custom Per-PC Ghost Images)

Go read about Microsoft "Sysprep".

Re: Panic

Under VMS, or under Unix?

Re: Panic

OK, so what? Offline the DECwriter, set it up with a new box of paper, turn it back online, and you can once again type system comnands to rhe computer.

I never had a DECwriter, but I had a surplus ("Just haul it away and you can have it.") Data General Dasher TP-1 dot-matrix printer+keyboard, and a Nova 4 minicomputer to hook it to.

Re: fax Feeding the Beast

My thermal-paper printouts from an HP 9830A have all turned blue and illegible. :-(

Re: Feeding the Beast

For a while I had a surplus Model 15 (I think) KSR. This was the version which used 5-bit character encodings, had three rows of keys (plus a spacebar), and [Letters Shift] and [Figures Shift] keys.

It had been left out in the rain for months, and some of the parts had obviously corroded.

After pulling out the plant detritus, I brought it inside and let it dry out, wired it for loopback operation, and turned it on. Unsurprisingly, it did not work properly.

I unplugged it, sprayed the hell out of it with WD-40, let it sit a day, then, each afternoon when I came home from school, I'd spend 5-10 minutes typing on it, then unplugged it, and lightly re-sprayed it with WD-40.

After a week or so, began working properly.

Metal maker meltdown: Nucor stops production after cyber-intrusion

"There's a little black spot on the sun today.

It's the same old thing as testerday."

US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

Re: Phrasing

Add "NIC card", and "ATM machine".

I despise 'em all, but have been sufficiently beaten into submission by common mis-usage that it doesn't get my adrenalin up.

Phrasing

@ nobody who matters:

They are called "fighter jets" because the phrase, "jet fighters" is misleading. These jet-powered, fixed-wing*, military aircraft do not fight only other jet-powered, fixed-wing* military aircraft.

* the phrase "fixed-wing aircraft" is not literal ("swing-wing" military aircraft have existed), but generally-descriptive, and used as contrast to "rotary-winged" aircraft (helicopters).

Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software

End Result of the Lawsuit

"Guilty!! Guilty as charged!! We find for the plaintiff."

(Lawyers get their cut ...)

"If you are a member of this class, please provide your full legal name, physical address, telephone number, email address, a photocopy of your driver's license (both sides), and the ORIGINAL sales receipt from a decade or more ago when you bought the covered MICROSOFT product(s), and you will be sent a cheque for €1.77.

Please allow 12 to 16 weeks for processing.

Yours truly,

Dewey, Cheatham and Howe, administrative designee for MICROSOFT CONSUMER COMPENSATORY FUND "

After more than half a century, the voyage of Kosmos 482 is over

Reuse, Repair, Recycle ...

... somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a ship docks at an island.

Shorehand: Cap'! What's with the funky-looking anchor?

Captain: Found it.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

I've gotten some good keyboards from thrift shops for < €10 each. One is a Das Keyboard (Hotblack Desiato model) with mechanical, non-clicky switches. The other is a no-info-available, clicky mechanical switches with annoying-RGB-LED backlighting which I finally figured out how to "freeze" into a non-moving pattern.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: No Comment!

Pete did the right thing.

Remove those traps for "impossible" conditions and a programmer error or program modification will make those "impossible" conditions, "possible".

Re: Hilarious!

No NAG source?

Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

A non-sweary variant I've seen:

"You should never see this message. If you do, call a system programmer."

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Physical Write-Protect Switches

1. ... should be required for every device with modifiable firmware or microcode: BIOSES, CPUs, hard drives, video interfaces, network interfaces, IMEs/PSPs, USB controllers, USB devices (notably thumb drives), and so forth.

2. Re: making the switches "obscure": No. Security through obscurity has been shown to be pointless. If you don't have physical security, you don't have security.

3. The tech bros don't want to lose profit by including these switches.

4. Home users don't want to be "bothered" by such things.

5. Big business users don't want to pay tech staff to physically visit machines to update them.

6. Manufacturers probably were leaned upon by spy agencies decades ago to design in these security holes.

7. Despite intensely-wishful thinking otherwise, modern PCs are not things which can informationally-safely be operated by ignorant, arrogant, lazy, or stupid people. They are not toasters. (And even toasters are potentially-deadly. There is a greater-than-zero number of deaths each year due to people trying to fish pieces of toast out of plugged-in toasters, using electrically-conductive items.)

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

Re: Shooting the Whistleblower

"It was an accident. He fell down an open elevator shaft -- on top of 23 bullets."

VC behemoth Insight Partners fears top-secret financial info swiped by cyber-miscreants

Look Past the Surface and You will See Why this Problem Never Ends

The problem is NOT that Gary Grunt or Pauleen Peone were fooled by cybercrims.

The root-cause problem is that the real Big Boss(es) can, and do, call up Gary and Pauleen, and demand that Gary/Pauleen take all sorts of security-compromising, company-policy-violating, GAAP-busting actions, such as, "Wire £10M from the employee retirement account to my personal checking account, and put it down as a loan," and, "Make my nephew, Freddy Fumblefingers administrator on host smytheco-gb-dc0."

Should Gary/Pauleen ask for identity verification, a second signature on the order, or point out the Big Boss(es) is/are demanding Gary/Pauleen to commit a security policy violation and/or a crime, the Big Boss(es) thunder, "Don't you know who I am?! Carry out my orders imnediately, or I will have you fired! You'll never work again in this industry! You'll never work again in this city!!"

Gary/Pauleen know the Big Boss(es) can, will, and have made this happen, and that Gary/Pauleen have effectively zero protection against this.

So Gary/Pauleen carry out these orders immediately without question or pause for verification.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: In six months...

In Mission Control ...

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M [Enter]

(time passes)

PFY: "Hey, Charlie ... why is the system so slow today?"

BOFH: (looks up from his onion bhajis and sees write activity lights flashing madly on the SAN controllers) "WHAT. DID. YOU. DO?!"

This sort of thing can happen at cloud providers as easily as it can on-prem.

I'm Bearish on "The Cloud" in General, But ...

If you don't know how big your data is going to get, or how long it will take to get big, then yes, cloud storage makes sense for startups.

Just ensure as best you can, that you have a reasonably-fast and inexpensive way of getting your data back off of the cloud when you do go on-prem.

A new Lazarus arises – for the fourth time – for Pascal programming fans

Re: This IS interesting, but people have opinions

Kernighan's paper reminded me of some of the workarounds -- some portable, most not -- I made in my own programming with Pascal 6000 on Control Data big iron.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Nothing Like a Challenge

There are many techies who see a really stupid idea and accept the intellectual challenge of making it work.

Sadly, many of them succeed.

I question how well an Apple Airtag-like device would work inside a grounded, metal computer chassis, which is filled with radio-frequency interference.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: Cats on computers

In olden days, cats liked to drape themselves across the tops of large CRT displays. So warm ...

Peripherals

Not a PET, but it had a "Cue:Cat" peripheral. These were free barcode scanners given out. They had a PS/2 keyboard connector intercept jack and plug.

The company hoped you'd install their driver on tour PC, which in turn "phoned home" to query a database, which would return the text info on what item you'd just scanned.

In turn, when the device phones home, it sent the serial number of your Cue:Cat, and logged the item to the profile the company built up on you, which it intended to sell.

The company went bankrupt.

The Cue:Cats themselves worked just fine without the driver, without phoning home, on any OS. You got the string of numbers represented by the bar code, "typed" into your PC via the keyboard port.

Stop Pakistani content at the border, India tells media, tech biz

Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

This level of paranoid reaction to anything vaguely Pakistani would be like the US government fearing revolutionary plots every time someone sang or played, (I Wish I Was in) Dixie's Land.

Lyrics link:

https://genius.com/Daniel-decatur-emmett-i-wish-i-was-in-dixies-land-lyrics

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

ATC Career

When I was young, I thought I would like to be an ATC as the work appeared interesting. I found this DOS-based, character-mode game which simulated being an ATC, and found I could not get past even the first level. I learned my brain is not wired to process that sort of information/do those sorts of calculations sufficiently-quickly.

I de-selected "air traffic controller" as a potential career, and have the highest respect for the people who can do that sort of work.

Upgrade!

“We are going to radically transform the way air traffic control looks”

So, they are going to replace all the incandescent control panel indicator lights which have red covers, with modern blue LEDs.

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

New Word

So would talking about the status quo be a "quoloquialism"?

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

Why "AI" Search Sucks for Me

Even if it were in tip-top shape, "AI" searching would continue to be useless to me.

This is because I search for uncommon items, and the tree-pruning / node-weighting processes inside the "AI" engines remove the things I'm looking for from the "AI"'s results.

I don't want a peanut butter cookie recipie.

I don't want instructions on how to assemble an IKEA Hëavybōttom chair from a kit which is missing three of its eight fasteners.

I want the name of the book which documents Gear's Assembly Language (and even better, the source code of the assembler itself), without being drowned in a sea of unrelated, so-called-related results about industrial this and machining-supply that.

I want a conventional search engine which respects double-quotes, capitalization, Boolean operators, parentheses, a near() function which takes as a parameter the maximum number of words between groups, regexes would be nice but not required, AND which does not show me anything I did not explicitly ask for.

I might as well ask for a unicorn, too, because the enshittification bros will never give me what I want.