Posts by Alister

Congress puts the ISS on life support until 2032, orders Moon base plan

I wonder if Brian Johnson still has his blueprints.

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

I had a similar experience.

Working at a tech college, we had students who had a classrooms of machines on which they tested pushing out machine images to hosts from an AD domain.

The AD servers, DNS and switches, and a UPS were all in a mobile 12U rack which we used to move between classrooms as required.

We were tasked with closing down the rack and moving it to another classroom.

Just as my colleague unplugged the rack from the room's mains socket, the whole building went dark. His face, as he stood there with the plug in hand was a picture.

Again, it was just a coincidental grid outage, nothing to do with what we were doing.

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

"Technology secretary Liz Kendall said: "I know that parents across the country want us to act urgently to keep their children safe online."

Maybe the parents should get off their arses and do something about it themselves?

There are a plethora of options available to restrict or monitor your child's internet activity.

British Army splashes $86M on AI gear to speed up the battlefield kill chain

Re: Whoops

Yes, what a clever idea that was...

"I don't care who they are made by, they are still armed missiles and they are coming in our direction!!!"

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

CRT Monitors and floppies

Does anyone else remember that there was a rash of tech outlets (Radio Shack and Maplins come to mind) who for a time were selling what I can only describe as "saddlebags" which you could hang over your CRT monitor, which had pockets in them to hold all you most precious 3.5" floppies draped down the side of the monitor. The ideal environment for all your data.

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: Waste of time and money?

In my view, anything which promotes the use of correct spelling, punctuation and language should be encouraged, and long-form paper exams do that.

What we absolutely don't want in Britain is a descent into multiple choice "Tick" answers to every subject. This doesn't prove that the students know much about the subject, as at least a 50% pass mark is possible by sheer guesswork.

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

So, tell me again how that Robust, Reliable, Resilient cloud is working out for you...

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

I had a manager who occasionally went all OCD about cabling in the office Comms room. On one memorable occasion we were alerted to a number of system outages and went down to the basement to find him pulling power and ethernet cables out of the racks to "tidy them up". He had successfully unplugged a VPN concentrator, an AD DC, and a number of backbone switches by the time we found him and stopped him.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

"Whereas in the past even the most minor of system upgrades would need to be performed late at night or during the weekend, now the office preference is to action such things on a Friday afternoon"

NOOOO!

We never, Never, NEVER do changes on a Friday, that's just asking for weekend disturbances and pain.

Kubernetes kicks down Azure Front Door

It wasn't just accessing Portals or Entra, any website behind a FrontDoor was suffering outages as well.

I have a lot of unhappy clients today.

ChatGPT wants teens to agree to let their parents spy on them

If a teen is asking an AI for life advice, they are not likely to be wanting parental interference as they obviously don't feel able to raise the issue with the family. They certainly won't be asking the AI those questions if they know beforehand that it's going to snitch to mummy or daddy.

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

Re: why are we using dns?!!

Good old Noah Webster, always so consistent...

Why don't Americans talk about fenses, seeing as it's the same root as defence and offence.

Trump's budget bill bankrolls $85M Space Shuttle shuffle

"Otherwise, the orbiter could be cut up and transported in parts, but Space Shuttles were never intended to be dismantled and reassembled this way, and the risk of permanent damage would be high."

Well it's not lke they are going to want to fly it again...

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: HERESY!!!!

No, those are bent aubergines, and nothing good will ever come from them.

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

Re: Manager clearly doesn't know what his underlings actually do

"about as much as I need to think order about this sentence words to write."

I bet more cognitive effort went into that phrase than the whole of the rest of your post. :D

Trump guts digital ID rules, claims they help 'illegal aliens' commit fraud

Re: Just read the article

You seem to be a little out-of-date.

I doubt very much if the Orange One is taking any advice or anything else from the South African one.

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

Yes, let's get rid of all that old legacy stuff, then, the next time we have a power outage or a computer hack, we've got nothing left to fall back on.

Excellent idea.

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

One thing is clear: The Blue Danube Waltz will finally travel to its rightful home among the stars

I had thought that it had already been included on the Voyager Golden Record, but apparently not.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

I have a hammer drill

It goes bosch bosch bosch bosch bosch bosch bosch

Scammers are deepfaking voices of senior US government officials, warns FBI

So if Trump rings me and says he's forgotten his password, I now know to just ignore him...

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

I can't think of any way an electronic countermeasures system could combat a directed energy weopon once it's started hitting you. Forcefields are still science fiction.

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Re: usable payment or card details

>> All the other details may be stored

PCI DSS doesn't prohibit the storing of the full PAN, but it strongly recommends against it, and does mandate that if stored, it should be encrypted, and when displayed, should be masked.

In practice, in nearly all cases only the last four digits of the PAN are stored, and that is simply to identify the card to the user for subsequent transactions.

Actual transactions use a representative token generated by the payment provider, rather than passing the actual card details.

Dell sheds ten percent of staff for the second year in a row

Dell sheds ten percent of staff

So they have been truly decimated.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

Re: Who, me?

"The wheeled suitcase is a myth,"

But... But, I've SEEN one, honest.

I didn't get a photo though...

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: Redundancy has a cost

"The on-board systems of aircraft are an obvious, fairly topical example"

Except if you are Boeing, apparently.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

And it can be initialised as BAPS, what's not to like?

AI models hallucinate, and doctors are OK with that

It's hard enough for a human Doctor to sift through the obtuse and confusing information they get from a patient to arrive at a sensible diagnosis, what chance does an LLM have.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Popcorn

I'd just like to point out that both covid and Ukraine happened during Trump's last term, so is he the "former senile corrupt one" you are referring to?

First private moon lander to touch down safely starts sending selfies

I wonder which film studio they faked this landing in?

Or maybe we've moved on and it's just AI generated imagery now.

/s

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Teachin AI to lie

ChatGPT, what's this (holding up a banana)

"Its a Small off duty Czechslovakian traffic warden!"

Incoming deputy boss of Homeland Security says America's top cyber-agency needs to be reined in

Re: There are still some people in El Reg's homeland

Agreed.

For those who can't be arsed to google, it is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

"We are heading into being a communist country"

I don't think you really understand what a communist country is.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

no toast, no teacakes, no buns, baps, baguettes or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes and no hot-cross buns and DEFINITELY no smeggin' flapjacks!

Oh, so you're a waffle man?

IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door

Re: WTF do IBM know about emergency services radio?

As far as I know, IDEN is not compatible with 3G or 4G networks.

UK Emergency Services Network is supposed to be based on the existing 4G infrastructure provided by EE.

Re: Solar / EMP events

There isn't one. I wonder if carrier pigeons will get their navigation scrambled by EMP?

But more importantly, most commercial cellular mast sites do not have any power backup at all, at least the Airwave sites mostly have either battery backup or generators.

Re: WTF do IBM know about emergency services radio?

This.

But also, the government keep trotting out "PTT services" as though this was something normal and everyday on cellular services.

It Isn't.

There are no fully working reliable examples of PTT operation over a commercial cellular network anywhere.

Motorola did have a system, but they couldn't get it to work properly, which is part of the reason this contract has rumbled on so long.

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

Space Launch System project overspent, under-built, and is overdue

I wonder how much it cost to prepare that report and get to that conclusion.

I think if you asked most El Reg commentards they could have given that result instantly.

Happy Sysadmin Day, the Bitlocker keys are in a bowl on top of the fridge

I keep asking for the new improved cordless cattleprod, but still no sign of it.

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

This is why you have a separate disk for the O/S, and don't allow any application to put any data there.

We have successfully restored a number of Windows IIS and SQL servers today, by just rolling back the O/S disk to las night's snapshot. The data disks were not replaced, and so they are still current.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Nope, Server 2016, Server 2019, Server 2022 all affected here

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

AI Confused

My first name is Alastair, but throughout the company I'm known as Al.

Recently, there have been a number of emails from manglement encouraging staff to find innovative ways to use AI within the business...

Colleagues have taken great pleasure in pointing out that my workload looks to be on a skyward trajectory.

Al.

US 'considering' end to Assange prosecution bid

Re: Prodding the bear

>> None of these posters have any realistic knowledge of Julian Assange's actual character.

I would say we have a fair idea, given he got his mates to stand bail for him and then skipped and hid in the Equadorian embassy, leaving them to foot the bill.

Cyber-crooks slip into Vans, trample over operations

Funny that, North Face recently laid off a load of their IT support staff.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Not quite on topic, but we run backend systems for ticket purchases on a number of transport links, where customers can book a ticket and receive an email with a barcode or QR code which allows them to travel. Associated with the barcode is a randomly generated 12 character reference code used to store and refer to the transactions.

We do have some rules in place to sanitise the reference code, but on this occasion the system beat us.

We had a complaint, demanding that we refund the ticket price because of the rude word...

The ticket reference code was UrAWw4nK3rB8

I think the computer was right.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

Note that the default installation path for Microsoft SQL Server is

\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL{nn}.<InstanceID>\MSSQL\

and has been for many versions.

Locked up: UK's Labour Party data 'rendered inaccessible' on third-party systems after cyber attack

Re: Who is this 'third party'?

Probably Canary Wharf

First, stunning whistleblower leaks. Now a shareholder lawsuit lands on Zuckerberg's desk

The complaint, brought by shareholder Wee Ann Ngian

Is she a Nac Mac Feegle?

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

Good luck trying to sort out a single coherent stream of data from the bundles of cables shown in the rack in the header photo. If they had to artificially slow down UDP packets and transmit a single letter at a time on a single cable, I think it's going to be a while before we need worry about this in the real world.

Italian researchers' silver nano-spaghetti promises to help solve power-hungry neural net problems

Bistromathics!

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers, Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers am not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

Boris Johnson’s 'Galactic Britain'

We are going to launch BT Tower into space and travel from one solar system to another spreading promotional materials about investment opportunities in Peterborough and Slough.