Posts by Flat Phillip

Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

Re: Microsoft

Or if you like, Microsoft have completely Hotmailled it up.

Telstra outage: Failed emergency services calls, train chaos, payment systems down

Re: If it's not DNS it's NTP.

Possibly PTP not NTP though carriers use both. What is a mystery to me is why it took out everything. A single device shouldn't do that as both protocols have ways of having backup systems.

"The reset changed the time and synchronisation, which was then passed on to the rest of the Telstra network". So possibly they were sending out time not synchronised to GPS and by the time the synchronisation got fixed the "bad" time was out amongst the network and its a while for the slew to happen. Does look like someone got their config wrong, that's easy to do.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Amateurs

There are way better methods of doing this.

1. Make the commission only payable if you meet your performance criteria

2. Have a small, say 5% of the criteria be something that is hard to measure

3. Make that 5% mandatory (so if you don't "pass" you fail all of it)

4. Oh dear, you didn't meet the (largely unstated) bar for that 5%

That's what a real scumbag corp would do, bonus points for doing it at different times so you don't join the dots initially.

- Signed ex-presales of Scumbag Corp

Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI

The new sexy maintenance mode

Their stuff, for better or worse, is pretty much where it needs to be at. No real innovation or major changes; but saying "we're entering maintenance mode, just bug fixes now" doesn't get you upgrade sales or a sweet valuation on the stock market. What to do? You have a bunch of staff adding limited value by making for the most part useless additions to your software base.

Enter the AI fairy, now you can fire all those excess staff, look like you're still cool and hip and be a stock market darling.

Posting AI-generated caricatures on social media is risky, infosec killjoys warn

Bit late for that

If I use ChatGPT to make a caricature and it somehow "leaks" information that can be use in spear phising, hasn't the horse well and truly bolted? It's not the cartoon creation that is the issue, its the fact that this data is already in the system. Not making them somehow doesn't make the data disappear.

If the point being made is that these caricatures demonstrate just how much data is *already* in these systems about a person, that seems more of a concern really.

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

Re: This is confusing

Of course the T800 runs on Good assembler, none of that MOV nonsense

Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge

Re: When i worked supporting a number of retail outfits…

Been so long since I've worked where staff can get to the devices I had forgotten about the cable fairies! Thanks for the reminder.

So many "how could the possibly think that makes it better" moments.

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

Or...

They'll build more big, ugly grey boxes on the ground that have all the charm of a breeze block.

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

firewalls and voice are evil

One possibility is that 000 calls look a little different and are handled differently to normal calls. For example, there could be location information which isn't normally there. The way the calls are routed (e.g. speak to THAT endpoint for those calls) is also slightly different.

Firewalls can be finicky, but firewalls with voice traffic that is not your bog-standard arrangement (and inside a carrier classifies as not standard) are diabolical.

Could a firewall block certain calls and not others? You bet it could. They fail in new and exciting and definitely non predictable ways.

That being said, it could also have just been a typo'ed config line.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Literally the first word..

in the article is "Chris".

They're not exactly hiding the fact.

Google torpedoes 'no AI for weapons' rules

Re: don't be evil

It's just a minor change:

Don't! Be evil.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Who wouldn't, in that role

Head of the Widget X maker says that the US Army would be much better off if they bought a bazillion Widget Xs from the Widget X maker company.

I mean, if I was that guy I'd be saying the same thing. Might be getting confused if the US Army is better off, or I'm better off but someone will be.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

Re: BYD in the US

That plan probably has a lot to do with the tariffs the US are putting on Chinese made cars.

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

One other use-case

I'm generally happy with running GNOME on Wayland. The weird odd bugs are old history for me now.

The one reason why I run GNOME on Xorg is for Teams, specifically when there is a presentation on. I know this is more of a Teams problem rather than a Xorg/Wayland problem but that is, unfortunately, the collaboration tool of choice of my employer. I haven't tried Teams on Xwayland on Wayland; perhaps that will work.

Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse

270 mil

And not one shark let alone a shark with laser beams just some treehouse thing and tunnels.

Evil island hideouts have gotten too pedestrian.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

Bring back ELIZA!

I'm pretty sure she never suggested anyone should go do treason, but it was a while ago.

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't really hope this email finds you well?*

First poll missing an option

Where is the "creates a meeting for every single thing, including pre-meeting meetings"?

First to the wall when the revolution comes.

Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth

Wow, they weren't wrong describing him as a one-man environmental disaster.

Network died, hard, during company Christmas party, leaving lone techie to fix it

VTP

As soon as I read VTP I knew they were in for a bad night.

I'm not saying it always goes bad but touching VTP will generally burn you, especially across switch families or with older IOS.

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

I appreciated it at least

"more than just IP access"

Nice, reminds me of those fake names like I.P. Freely.

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Makes sense

If you can't C you might be able to hare better.

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

Re: Patenting pi, digit by digit

I agree with Kuhn, get rid of software patents.

They are a curse on the industry as they don't promote innovation and remove it because, for example, anyone looking at doing something new and seeing a patent thicket (nice term) is going to give up.

They are all about big large companies locking in their advantage.

'Set it and forget it' attitude to open-source software has become a major security problem, says Veracode

Distributions help here

A lot of the distributions frown upon having "embedded libraries". That is where you have your program in a package and it brings its own special version of libssl or something else along with it.

It's not 100% perfect but when there is a vulnerability for a particular library once it's updated it is done; no need to work out where else has this same library that will also need updating.

It doesn't work too well with modified libraries where the binary maintainer has their own special version with modifications they added to the library. Generally this is a bad idea as there are better ways of getting the same outcome.

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

Space Force predicted this

China needs the arm so you can cut the solar cells off the American satellites.

Also to steal the treasonous monkey.

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

How are you going to read those 10 Articles You Won't Believe (#3 is a shocker) without Facebook News?

AWS has been doing things that are 'just NOT OK since 2015,' says Elastic as firm yanks Apache 2.0 licence

Re: Not the first time

So what you are saying is they released software based on a license they didn't understand or they have basically reneged on something they previously released.

You can't blame Stallman and FSF for this; either it is open source (and people are free to make money off the software) or it's not. It's not exactly some strange side-effect or loophole. It is right there, item #6 of the Open Source Definition.

My take is Elasticsearch has seen the $$$ AWS makes and gone... we want some of that action.

On his way out, Trump emits exec order suggesting US cloud giants must verify ID of all foreign customers

Re: Was it Trump?

Doesn't even need a fake US ID, any counties will do.

"This looks like a legitimate Elbonian drivers license so you're all good to go on our cloud, Amanda Hugankiss"

The real worry is yes, another database to track people with. Also, depending on how small they go with the order, how good is the provider's security for that data?

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Re: First they came for the coffee

It's a reasonably reliable sign, especially during the dot-com days.

If they started to muck around with coffee or fruit or whatever, it was time to either burn down your leave or find another contract. It didn't mean things were going bad tomorrow, but you had fair warning.

US taxman wants AI to do the security checks it seemingly can't do itself

Needs more work

Here I was hoping it was some new AI killbot that rampaged after SharePoint administrators.

Inept bloke who tried to sell military sat secrets to Russia gets 5 years

Looking after dad

If this guy starts making enquiries about life insurance and muscle relaxant when he gets out if I was his dad I'd firmly decline his "help".

nbn™ hits the half-way mark – but has more than half of the job left

How ready is ready

I live in one of those locations where it is ready for service (passed the RFS date in March) but... well its not quite orderable yet.

So the website helpfully says

YOUR AVAILABILITY

SERVICE AVAILABLE

and then:

There’s still work to do before we connect your premises.

So, using their own statistics, which are more about stretching the truth then reporting what is actually happening, am I one of the 50% that is ready for service or the 50% that is not?

Good Guy Comcast: We're not going to sell your data, trust us

Aggregate and opt-in

There were two parts that to me seem to be Comcast using the weasel-words.

First, they won't hand over individual data, that doesn't mean it won't be sent in aggregate and who knows how small those "buckets" get. Also it has been shown many times you get enough aggregate data you can sometimes work out who someone is.

The opt-in can of course be covered by 5 scrolling pages of "EULA yada yada" style opt-in in the future, so its all good.

It's Comcast right? We all know how this will end.

Australia's online Census collapses, international hackers blamed

Unexpected DDOS

You would think given this is a highly public event with some data privacy contraversy floating around it that they would know someone would try something like this.

There are methods to help against DDOS usually using some sort of service provider.

I think the days of "we didn't think it would happen to us" or "we didn't expect it that big/that way" are long gone.

Liberal Party of Australia: why are you paying so much for ancient software?

DataFlex

DataFlex? Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time. A long time. I haven't heard software gone by the name DataFlex since, oh, since you were born.

Or maybe 1991; its a close call. And we were trying to remove the awful thing not install it!

Motion Picture Ass. of America to guard online henhouse

Someone should build that list. Not because I host anything dodgy but because I don't what my email and/or tiny website at the mercy of some idiot lawyer in Hollywood.

It also sends a very signal to those registrars. Let's face it, it's not like there aren't other choices out there.

Safeguards

It will be all ok because of those safeguards, you know the ones that:

* Try to take down sites using 127.0.0.1

* Remove Debian CDs because they were CDRs

* Tried to nail someone because they were using bittorrent to get valgrind

It seems the rush to find the pirates there may be a somewhat liberal interpretation of what a safeguard is. The hint is, its not "some crap we made up so you all ok about us which we will ignore".

Still it's nothing new; I'm sure there were such things happening in the high seas in Ye Olde Days where some ships that was unknown and/or suspect got taken out.

Australian Greens don't believe Silicon Valley can save the world

Not exactly sure

But something about the article makes me think the author is taking the piss at our new-fangled STEM will save the world, or at least Australia, idea our pollies currently have.

I am Craig Wright, inventor of Craig Wright

Re: chain of blocks

More likely a chain of bollocks, to use one of those quaint English sayings.

Pop goes the weasel! Large Hadron Collider blown up by critter chomping 66kV cable

Cyber Squirrels

Obviously this weasel is part of the Cyber Squirrel conspiracy. While they don't have a break-down of all their agent types and only list successful attacks by Squirrels, bird, raccoons etc, I'm sure it was them.

You can find out what other successes they have had at http://cybersquirrel1.com/

A penguin is a bird, right? (277 successful missions so far)

Miguel de Icaza on his journey from open source to Microsoft: 'It's a different company'

Re: open source people DON'T universally hate Miguel.

You do recall correctly. People may want to rewrite the history but Qt around the time Gnome and Gtk started was quite hostile to open source. It was that typical "we'll call it open source but you play by our rules" attitude.

The competition of Gtk definitely put some pressure (but would not be the only reason) to open up Qt; it's all ancient history now but doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Australia's Dick finally drops off

Re: dropped off a *long* time ago

Yeah, 25 years seems about right. I was an employee of Dick Smith back then. Half of us had electronic interests and you could see things changing. While there was a full complement of electronic components, there was this temptation to go into consumer electronics because that's where the cash was (Telephone Answer Machines and My kids first computer)

Move forward a few years and noone had any idea and electronics components were those under-stocked annoying things in the corner nobody cared about. I stopped going and went to plays like JB or online instead.

Strangely enough, Jaycar hasn't changed terribly much and is still going.

Admin fishes dirty office chat from mistyped-email bin and then ...?

Another era?

I suspect the admin had the best of intentions at the time. There was a time email was newish and he probably thought he was helping people out by fixing typoed email. I doubt he was thinking it would be a problem getting work related emails and sending them on their way.

Me? I'd nuke it and then consider if I want a catch-all anymore. Maybe just check the mail logs and add some alias for some common problems. It is easy to be the armchair general with hindsight though.

DNS root server attack was not aimed at root servers – infosec bods

Re: Was it a test?

Not really hard to send stuff from 895M addresses; you can build programs that send it from just over 4 billion addresses. Now; if they were sending it from more than 5 billion addresses and using IPv4 then I'd be impressed.

I'm surprised source IP filtering is still not in yet (and yes I'm quite aware of some of the pitfalls of it). Doesn't make sense for consumer type lines and for the vast majority of commercial ones too.

A Logic Named Joe: The 1946 sci-fi short that nailed modern tech

Re: *Remarkably* sharp prediction?

Brunner had a lot of predictions in that book (others too). Have an upvote.

FBI v Apple spat latest: Bill Gates is really upset that you all thought he was on the Feds' side

Re: We are the government

I suggest narrow means "not quite as much as NSA does"

Yahoo! is! up! for! sale! – so! how! much! will! you! bid!?

Yahoo should buy Yahoo

After all, it's where all the other failed Internet properties go to die.

D&D geeks were right – their old rule books ARE worth something now

Has to be a better way

If only there was a large company filled with nerds that had a really good way to scan books. I'm sure they're not cutting up the library books for the project.

Help! What does 'personal conduct unrelated to operations or financials' mean?

JM

My guess he has done something that John McAfee would approve of.

Perhaps they can get together and form some sort of strange start-up.

Samba man 'Tridge' accidentally helps to sink request for Oz voteware source code

Voting machines

You do realise that in Australia there are essentially voting machines now? All the bits of paper get counted and then the numbers are sent to a central site and put into a computer, which then does things like send it to the media, update the website and ultimately give the results.

Sure, for simple cases you could pick up fraud, e.g. Voting booth A at electorate B voted 75% Party C, but the scrutineers with their samping might see it only 25% so it looks sus. For more subtle changes its harder, but for the lower house its the edge-cases that get more checks.

For senate (and the story was about the senate voting), good luck with that! There is in theory a 1:1 relationship between the number of bits of paper seen and the numbers that go into the computer but after that it gets hard real quick, especially when you get to the later preferences when the usual suspects have their quotas.

That's not to say I think AEC is fiddling the books, quite the opposite. I'm just pointing out there have been computers involved for quite some time.

The bigger problem is disenfranchising public from the senate voting because it's almost impossible for normal humans to vote how they want in the senate. Not really an IT problem though voting machines might help with the "tablecloth" but a change how the senate is elected would certainly help.

Doctor Who: Even the TARDIS key can't unpick the chronolock in Face the Raven

Re: Bring back Clara!

I saw that too. I thought, oh she already has taken it and in the next scene it's back and NOW she's taken it.