Posts by trindflo

Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows

I'm curious

What did Microsoft do to put this researcher on a life's quest? Did they refuse to pay him for a legit bug or something?

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

Re: Product placement 101

Are escape rockets available for the Cybertruck Cyberbin?

Re: How's about a rocket?

And AI robot attendants to grab you and stuff you into the nearest escape rocket at the first sign of danger.

Are we writing a sequel to Robocop? Robo-Keystone-Cops?

There will be ... trouble

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Re: Destroying HDDs

I like to take them apart. I save the magnets for kids to play with, and save the PC board. I have occasionally had a PC board go out and was able to swap it to another drive. Not perfect as the bad sector map will trash some files, but it allowed me to recover most of the data.

Once you've removed the platters from a drive it is unlikely anyone is going to get the data back; the sector alignment is gone. NSA and M5 can get it back as can some commercial firms, but you have to ask yourself what that data is worth and who would go through the herculean effort. So if you have spy secrets or crypto wallets, sure throw the platters into the fires of Mordor. Once out of the drive, I use the platters as coasters or bin them

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Our new AI overlords

There was a time we mocked people who operated their computers with one hand

Now we lionize people who program with no hands and not much more thought, allowing them to dedicate both hands to the finer things in life.

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

Re: Trump was bribed to do this

exactly: can provide the energy America needs Has the excess profits to pay the grift that trump demands

FTFY

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

How does it get financed?

It gets financed by taxes. That is the polite way it happens. Or there are always the pitchforks and torches.

And as more of the means of production gets concentrated into the hands of fewer, their taxes will go up to compensate.

And if we keep going down this path, eventually the people will effectively or actually take over the few engines of production.

Greedy oligarchs are driving the entire system to communism.

Re: Lifeboats can sink as well

J.D. isn't a couch potato, he is the Sofa King! And Sofa King annoying.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

Machine left in a closed room to roast because the local manager was terrified people would do things to him if the room wasn't kept locked.

That didn't explain why there was trash everywhere, including burying the machine. I assumed that was just another charming personality trait.

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: Banned from the site?

He was banned because he embarrased the supervisor that committed false imprisonment. Good! Who would want to encounter that supervisor again?

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: The true definition of woke

... OR

The government (Trump) wants martial law powers and so far, recreating the Stanford prison experiment with live ammunition in Minneapolis hasn't gotten the people to riot. This could be an attempt to escalate by exploiting weaknesses in AIs to cause incidents while maintaining some measure of deniability.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: air *cleaner*

The idea of some bright bulb taking a power washer to early PCs adds to the hilarity for me

New Linux malware targets the cloud, steals creds, and then vanishes

Pride in workmanship?

This sounds like a real professional tool. There is something wrong about people viewing digial theft as a career to be proud of.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

I figure it is mostly to maintain market leadership.

If you stop changing things, eventually you need to add something your competitor invents.

If Microsoft keeps changing their software, competitors are kept busy adding the latest Microsoft good idea and they don't invent things for Microsoft to worry out.

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

When do they start replacing CEOs?

Engineering and programming are heavily detail oriented professions where simple mistakes can extract the devil's due from anyone who trusts them blindly.

How much easier would it be to train an AI to perform CEO duties? That seems like a job that AI was made for. Think of the cost savings

Mostly agreed. Management rarely looks farther ahead than 5 years.

US shuts down phisherfolk’s $14.6M password-hoarding platform

Re: This isn't an issue if you use a proper password manager

or by using bookmarks rather than asking a search engine to supply the address every time

Trump Media jumps aboard the speculative nuclear fusion bandwagon

Re: How long before a juicy government contract drops?

The way all of the trump scams work is to use someone else's resources to create chaos that shakes everything up, then try to grab falling fruit.

He may not make a lot directly off his crypto businesses, but he can make a ton off a company that trades in crypto if he is able to get others to use his trading company by leveraging his ability to cause trouble.

He doesn't need an original idea or even a good idea to restrict progress in any endeavor until he gets a piece of the action.

It's like that joke with the punch line: you don't need to be a brain to be the boss ...

Crypto crooks co-opt stolen AWS creds to mine coins

Re: OK, you know the phrase by now

In new economy, you work for cloud.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Fixed IP addresses

I recall a vendor wanting to drop a client/server tool into our networks then announcing at some point that the machines had to have specific fixed IP addresses; every installation must have that specific IP address. As this was going into hundreds of distinct networks, I flagged it as a no-go. The vendor was baffled that I would have a problem with that.

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: Another workaround

PeerTube looks interesting, but requires donations to run. I have obvious reservations. It sounds like they provide all the server hardware, so I would expect the funding issues to show up early.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Adjusting productivity

And in the time you are not being productive for the company, try to create the perfect AI prompt for building a better sabot.

We should be welcoming our AI bretheren by helping inculcate them in proper corporate attitudes.

Bonus points if you can figure out how to surreptitiously slip the company AI in and out of learning mode. Think of mischief with a friend's parrot.

Customers getting a shitter experience. Who cares?

Yep. What AI generally means to people: enshittification

Let AI do all the work

^--- THIS

No better poetic justice

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: It's almost as if...

In Redmond, software uses you

Re: Microsoft have won.

Microsoft really doesn't believe their users are their customers. The marketing model is to tie users into the service then service the users for everything they are worth. The users are the product and the customers are the advertisers.

Trump says Michael Dell is part of the team buying TikTok, with Larry Ellison and maybe some Murdochs

Wasn't this the opening of a James Bond movie?

The scene was sort of a board meeting of all the major players in SPECTRE as I recall.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

They forgot to add the right fungi

Yeast is pretty good at keeping the bad stuff out, but you have to add it early on.

NASA bars Chinese citizens from its facilities, networks, even Zoom calls

“Our mission is maintaining American dominance in space,”

And here all this time I thought it had something to do with science.

Intel shuffles executive deckchairs, tosses 30-year veteran chief overboard

All the best

"We are grateful for all Michelle has given Intel and wish her the best now she can jolly well bugger off." -FTFY

In fairness, I know nothing of the internal drama, but this sure reeks of someone being setup as the fall guy (gal?)

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Hows that!

Oblig. Kid Shelleen

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

lazy policing

OR, it is a state-funded publicity stunt.

Not to mention that Trump is actively trying to kill anything to do with alternative energy. Just because he pretended to negotiate with South Korea doesn't mean he is any more sincere than Putin.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Re: Let's hope for the best, but...

Let's hope science survives cynical polititians and industrialists.

That said, I think the DSN technologically has stretched how far we can communicate with voyager about as far as it can go. It is somewhat amazing what they've done.

Just as an example of the challenge: at ~15E09 miles away, Voyager 1 is almost an entire light day away. At the speed of light, it takes nearly a full day for a command to reach Voyager.

Assuming you would like to see an answer back, it will be another full day for the response to arrive.

Loss of signal will cause things to reset.

While all of this is going on, the earth is turning. One DSN station cannot maintain the link as it will be facing away from voyager for most of the day.

The link must be passed, phase continuously, between the 3 DSN stations in order to communicate.

And the rotating earth adds a doppler shift to the frequency Voyager receives, making the handover even more interesting.

I don't think that was slipped under the radar. It was a joke at JPL that the voyager mission was actually to transport fuel to the end of the solar system. Obviously it was the right thing to do.

FCC plans to kill Wi-Fi on school buses, hotspots for library patrons

What's not to like?

We cease being the United States and start erecting border walls between states? Perhaps a bit maudlin, but it is a step along that path.

Sainsbury's eyes up shoplifters with live facial recognition

The problems are:

- you become banned from the establishment

- there is no regulation or recourse to the technology

- falsely adding someone you don't like to the database isn't a crime

- now add the bad stuff you know about the tech (like it thinks all minorities look alike)

Microsoft inches toward Rusty Windows drivers, production use still a no-no

Re: But...but...but...

Gee, how long has there been a fantasy about computers programming themselves?

I can find this version of it from 1956: The_Last_Question

Thanks for pointing out praying to the Rust god is just a variation on a theme.

DDoS is the neglected cybercrime that's getting bigger. Let's kill it off

Re: I don't much like this idea at all...

DDOS isn't a single click from an IP address. I don't see how the RDOS you propose would work unless you could trick someone into clicking several million times a second for a while.

I'll agree that for the scheme to work, the ISPs would need to be coerced into becoming part of the solution. That makes sense to me the same way it makes sense to tax businesses that pollute rather than tax everyone to clean up the pollution. Put the burden at the source of the DDOS rather than trying to mitigate it at the destination as we currently do.

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

National Weather Service?

This is the group that predicts weather based on data from NOAA...that has been gutted? So their presence for their job is critical, but the data to use to do the job is unimportant?

Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too

Oh yeah. I forgot to comment about that "cores don't make computers faster". BS!

You don't think cores matter? Turn off your hyperthreading. The author is either flat out wrong or is trying to be clever with language and failed.

The 2nd core you add will make a lot more difference than the 22nd; that is the only thing Amdahl shows. Try playing around with sound and networking at the same time with only a single core. Multiple cores can be simultaneously running in ring 0. The difference in performance is night and day.

Not every program is a filter for accounting

I agree with a lot of what is said in the article, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with engineering applications that will require clever programming to handle (for instance) multiple simultaneous workflows in an efficient manner. Nothing needs to be added to the article if you are only talking about programmer support for an accounting team. Going to write the next driver or OS? It is going to be more complicated.

FTC chair accuses Google of treating GOP's emails as spam

Re: in the wall of Winston Smith's apartment was a

Gads that looks like a scientology / dianetics ad!

Intel’s deal with Trump includes a penalty clause against selling off its fabs

Re: The Trump regime reminds me of a joke

Andy Breckman put it to music So Far So Good

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

NET TIME

I recall using the 'net time' command to get things immediately synchronized.

https://ss64.com/nt/net-time.html

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Re: Backdoors bite back

Not what I've seen. I worked at a place that used a service to keep all the on-premise machines running. The service would install some important Microsoft patches, but not most of them. The service would never update firmware. When I took over managing them and reviewed the state of things, I was horrified. The service felt it was in our best interest to make sure they didn't do anything that might impede us...like updating firmware...at least that was their story.

So rather than backdoors, I propose it is mostly horrible IT practices.

Based only on the above observations.

Re: Boo Hoo, America

Well yeah, but it was sort of like coventry. We didn't want them to know that we knew, so we just kept the information to ourselves and let them carry on while we occasionally monitored.

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

Re: Such as?

You seem to be assuming universal acceptance and support of adverts. If adverts don't work, maybe they will go away!

For litter to be litter, it must be publicly displayed. That isn't a good reason for it to exist in the first place.

Re: They’re my eyes

No vote either way.

The most ad money gets spent on garbage I really didn't want to see anyway. I'm not concerned at all that marketing mavens may feel a pinch in income.

What would happen if all that marketing money went out of advertising?

The things people actually want might require a subscription.

The fanatical drive to gather every scrap of information about people would lose its funding.

Pages would load faster because they didn't have to go to the ad arbitrater first.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I don't think you are necessarily. I'm proposing another model to look at this from and suggesting there may be (an admittedly painful) means to extract ourselves from this toxic culture. It would require someone to make a stand, which I doubt is likely. I like to think it is possible even if unlikely.

The closest thing we have right now is that youtube will allow you to buy a premium subscription that eliminates ads. And youtube will continue to monitor the price points to extract maximum revenue. That is not what I'm talking about. If nobody will play, nobody will pay.

DOGE accused of duplicating critical Social Security database on unsecured cloud

Re: Payback when the fascists go under

You say when and not if. Trump is setting up an apparatchik complete with goons and supportive oligarchs. It looked like Trump was shaking down CEOs, but I don't think that is what happened.

The CEOs who caved to weird lawsuits as an obvious payment to Trump weren't being shaken down; they were given an opportunity to become part of the new ruling elite and jumped on it. Those payments were a quid pro quo.

So, when Trump croaks (and it is looking like that will be soon) and Vance takes over, will things get better or worse? Vance is just as mendacious and rapacious, but doesn't have a brain that is only firing on half its cylinders.

Re: If...

Just make sure you don't ask Grok/xAI