Posts by itsborken

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Now do electrical meters, etc etc etc.

The internet of things is a disaster waiting to happen.

Red Hat offers RHEL support 'forever' for those who need to lock into legacy tech

Hardware support is the weakest link

What good is a RedHat OS guarantee when you can't find the memory/CPU to repair a system. I've watched ex-companies kick the can down the road for old DEC/Digital systems, continuing to use old out of support software as memory cards/DIMMs failed instead of phasing them out completely. Then you hit the seven year data retention years for the government to claw back data, the machine gave off the final puff of smoke, and its SOL time.

Canada wants to make its own AI, break free from US bots

Compare the 1 billion to the Trillions spent

Not even in the ballpark, eh?

Microsoft puts stability in the driver's seat with new initiative

Not quite the problem MS thinks it is

Can't even remember when a dodgy driver crashed windows. One finger pointing at hardware manufacturers, and the rest point right back to Microslop.

FCC walks back router update ban before it bricked America's network security

Wrong thing to worry about

The issue isn't that routers less than three years old aren't getting patches, it is that the tens of millions of routers three years and older have ceased to get any form of router updates from their manufactures and are most certainly exploitable in their decrepitude.

'Dirty Frag' Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit

Re: General Purpose Linux Distros

Exactly, hardening boxes and having audit scripts eliminate so many problems.

Re: The workaround

If your boxen are configured such that unpriv users can load kernel modules (which security rules would never permit), you have much larger problems.

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: Great!

You cannot derive a private key from the public key. Just like in email encryption, you can give a public key to anyone, but only the holder of the private key can do the actual work of decryption.

Re: Great!

The police get your phone, use your fingerprint or face to open it, and gain access to all your passkeys because your device is now unlocked. Brilliant.

With a phone's password I don't have to divulge, it gets much harder. With a master password and hardware token to an encrypted database, their job hacking a site just got a lot harder.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Not a problem with my paper books

It is not about you calling in for software support, this is the elimination of the AZW3 DRM format. I imagine some book publishers are demanding this as part of newer contracts for their bottom lines.

OpenAI gets $122B to 'just build things' as the world blows them up

"Upside Economics"

When's that supposedly starting?

SAP's grand cloud escape plan €2B short of the runway

Deja Vu

There's a whiff of Itanium in the air.

Notepad++ hijacking blamed on Chinese Lotus Blossom crew behind Chrysalis backdoor

Re: It's OK to charge for the service pre-compiled distributed version of otherwise free software.

It's OK to type viaTerminal.

AI blew open software security, now OpenAI wants to fix it with an agent called Aardvark

Brilliant

Train OpenAI on your proprietary software--what could go wrong? I'd check those T&C very closely.

Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10

You could answer your 'why burnthrough' questions if you listened to the broadcast

Many times they mentioned they were stress-testing the frame to detect failure points, to find borderlines and places for improvement. They also removed heat tiles in key locations to simulate failures. There's your burn-through explanation.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Past: We'd never even consider moving those AI snapshots off your computer.

Today: Yeah, we're going to need to collect them in our systems after all.

Future: All Windows 11 systems (AI or not) have been sending us snapshots, as the sparse AI uptake didn't get us the amount of data we promised the agencies we could harvest. And, we are retaining them much longer than we initially promised. You'll belatedly understand it has been done for your benefit.

Broadcom's answer to VMware pricing outrage: You're using it wrong

When in doubt

Use the same excuses why cloud costs so much...

HPE working on Plan B if DoJ nixes the Juniper deal it rates as shareholders' rocket to riches

Deja Vu

I remember when the 3Com acquisition was once going to be the boost that HPQ needed to capture the datacenter.

TikTok fined €530M after EU user data ends up on servers in China

I am floored

Who could have foreseen this? Good thing TikTok has no ties to the CCP and their security teams/hackers. That might be concerning, but, nothing to worry about here.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

This won't last long

Are they going to authorize a user to return their broken, under-warranty printer from the web? I'm thinking I'm going to be real passed off because I have to wait 15 minutes more to get a return authorization to ship it back.

Let's not forget their latest printers go into sleep mode and can't wake themselves up. The solution is to unplug the unit, wait, and plug it back in. Does anyone remember how this used to jack up inkjets way back when? Am I shortening the lifetime of the unit by using this hack?

I swear, HP is committed to corporate suicide, and they think everything is fine.

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

Three card monty is back in vogue

Of course, the three will take side bets.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Industrial strength dreaming

If wishes were fishes...

New York Times lawyers claim OpenAI accidentally deleted evidence in copyright case

Woof

My dog ate my homework.

ULA nears second launch of Vulcan Centaur in pursuit of US Space Force approval

It's more of a scandal that they didn't push the destruct when the motor's nozzle ring blew off. Does NASA now fly on the hope that it holds together enough to make it to the next stage? Boosters cannot burn into the booster stage?

Microsoft resurrects Windows Recall for upcoming preview

How many Windows default behaviors have you turned off to only get reactivated by an update? When the DOJ/FBI uses their backdoor to activate the latent code because you are under investigation, your rights disappeared via a hocus-pocus trick.

Show me the man and I'll show you the crime. Microsoft

FBI, CISA remind US voters that DDoS attacks can't touch election systems

Maricopa County AZ was hit with cloudstrike issue for primary voting. Absolute Rubbish.

Maricopa County Elections Department wrote on social media platform X that it was experiencing an “outage at some voting locations” due to the global tech outage on Friday. The department continued to open more voting locations throughout the day after starting with “a few” open.

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Windows 365 desktops in the cloud

Microsoft will disable this feature so data isn't stored in the cloid? I think not. Moreover, this concept cuts against OneDrive, where all you data is accessible on all platforms you use. Recall will be hosted in the cloud eventually and our wonderful governments will have access to it with the smallest request.

What they did to the Canadian truckers will seem trivial by comparison to what this will do to free speech and freedom of association. FU MS.

AI PC hype bubble swells, but software support lags marketing

NPU

The NPU will have the fastest and most used nop loop ever.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: Security

Somebody should remind HP that a printer is an output device.

Oracle disappoints market with revenue miss as Ellison hints at Azure database move

Low code application development platform

Should anyone be surprised when the performance turns out to be garbage? Shades of the Itanic optimizing compiler that was to save the day.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Win 11 isn't great

Installed and used it for over a year. I wanted to help test the next version. However, their adjustments to start, taskbar and context were a coat of paint. The snap to was annoying.

What broke me was MS wasting my testing to install emojis. Their focus is on games and consumers; the android emulation is useless too with few non-game apps. They make way too big a deal od light/dark mode too.

Reverted back to Win10 to get a better-optimized stable version without the annoyingly useless feature updates. Good riddance and waiting for Win12.

Biden administration earmarks $13b to modernize electric grid

Great opportunity

Hopefully they can make the network more resilient to geomagnetic storms/EMP. If not, we are throwing good money after bad. Let's do it right.

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Re: Vote A.O.!!!

This is an announcement from Genetic Control:

"It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on Humanoid Height."

...

"It's said now that people will be shorter in height. They can fit twice as many in the same building site (they said it's alright)...

Peter Gabriel/Genesis was ahead of it's time.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Re: As a Win11 user myself, don't bother if you don't have to!

Use a tablet and take the Win7 PC off the net for PC related needs.

Re: As a Win11 user myself, don't bother if you don't have to!

I upgraded to W11 last year, was irritated by feature rollback and the fresh coat of paint approach, and rebuilt my PC back to W10 after being too annoyed at it. I'll be happy to stay there until MS fixes the start and context menus and provides a better reason than light and dark modes.

Basecamp decamps from cloud: 'Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal'

It never ceased to surprise me

MBA management buying into the cloud, thinking that On Prem, then COLO is too expensive, but renting a COLO and their Hardware was going to somehow save more money in the long run. The mythical "other companies" were going to cover all that HR/bonus/profit of the host company because "our team" is such wonderful negotiators. Nope--they are complaining about the high costs of cloud and why they spent so much money for hypothetical expandability their established customer base never needed. They massively overpaid for what they got, in ways they were too blind to foresee.

USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec

EU will love this

New round of cable purchases sends the old stuff to the landfills. New hubs/docks obsoleting gear...

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

Brilliant

Tsunamis in the ring of fire coupled with them residing in shallow water where the wave velocity accelerates. What could possibly go wrong. Then again, the mangled containers will be easier to examine when moved a mile or two inland.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

Tapes were of the IBM Mainframe Open Reel variety, probably not even available at the time. There were 8" floppies; mainly useful to import or export a dataset for another system. These systems started out as cost effective data entry environment vs. expensive mainframe terminals. Eventually they grew with the 10meg disks and later 60meg multiplatter storage options, enough to run complex apps in their own right.

Re: It is a very simple idea

Physical reasons. The drive units were combined fixed and removable controlled by a processor. For performance reasons it was better to add a new set rather than daisy-chain another storage unit to the controller and have it struggle managing 2x storage. Processor memory was sparse back then. You couldn't back up across two controllers for network speed reasons, but disk to disk on one controĺler worked reasonably fast.

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

The drive units consisted of a fixed drive and a removable drive pack. On Datapoint, we put the indexs on removable and data on fixed. At backup time, shutdown app, remove index pack, install backup pack. Copy fixed data to backup pack. remove backup pack, reinsert index pack and restart app.

If fixed fails, copy from backup pack to new fixed. install index pack, run a reindex script to regen all index files on the removable pack. Start app.

On large systems, there were multiple drive units that were backed up in parallel. Backup/restore times were consistent. Run out of storage, add another drive unit and storage processor. Redistribute data and indexs across all drives as required.

Easy money.

The DG issue is they had data everywhere making backups a lot more complex and time consuming.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: Speaking facetiously

Have to love WinCE for the self-goal.

Re: Garbage Take

Almost as bad as the folks at Windows Central--gamer fan bois they are.

Re: Microsoft ***es Linux

W11 thanks for nothing MS. Paint job on stilts.

Just curious

Did they ever embrace NFS for what it is or is it still bastardization on top of AD or kludges?

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

seems like a waste of talent

How does he fit into a corporate mindset that has produced eyecandy Windows 11? It seems that he is joining a bunch of graphic designers--who is he going to have a technical discussion with?

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

Re: Never directly criticise the person paying your wages in public or work time ...

Fair or not, owners get to do this.

Re: Careful what you ask for

Sloppy analysis.

How many crashes total are there in 10 months. Not a couple hundred, thousands, or tens of thousands. Millions and we are splitting hairs on a fraction of accidents?

If a human was driving would it have still crashed? How many accidents did the autopilot prevent over those 10 months?

How is the crash attributed if a non-tesla crashes into a tesla. I bet it's a crash. People can't read minds but the autopilot is blamed when it doesn't?

Aren't people driving the cars specifically warned they need to pay attention and react if the tesla autopilot misjudges the circumstances? It is the autopilot code's fault the operator is negligent?

Who thinks that tesla self-driving mode is perfected at this point. Even if it was, doesn't human error still occurs?

It is OK to be critical of Musk and his company's products but calling out flaws when no companies are trying to achieve that level of achievement is just trolling.