Posts by TReko

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

Re: And the hits

This exploit is a rehash of an older exploit (RoguePlanet) that Microsoft did not fix properly.

Perhaps MS firing all their experienced engineers and replacing them with AI wasn't such a great idea?

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

Aussie police beat Atlanta police

Not a new scam. Someone tried it a year ago and were caught:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2024/07/01/police-allege-evil-twin-in-flight-wi-fi-used-to-steal-info/423843

Proxmox ports itself to Arm with help from Nvidia and Supermicro

No Pi support

A pity about the lack of hobbyist support for the Pi Arm chips.

This is where the innovation often happens with hobbyists and open source developers on small machines.

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: Only?

The solution is to give top execs and programmers machines with only 8GB.

Then they will have to fix up their slop code.

A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

Re: 3D XPoint was a missed opportunity...

Very true - this is what many greedy companies fail to understand - it is often the tinkerer on a low-end system that ends up building something really useful with your technology, which will move to the bigger end of town.

Pricing them out hobbyists is stupid.

Software was a problem

A big part of Optane's failure was the way all modern operating systems and the applications that run on them are designed.

They have grown up in over 60 years where there was fast, temporary storage (RAM), and slower permanent storage (disks).

Optane changed this - permanent fast memory - you could, for example simply, u power down your server, then power back on again later and it just resumed where you left off? Why do you need to boot the OS, why do you need to save a file. There's just one sort of memory fast and permanent. Our computer architecture wasn't built for this.

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

It's only a matter of time until real malware authors hijack this mechanism to install real malware.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

Re: 1980s joke...

The Boeing 737MAX FCAS software that caused the crashes was outsourced to developers paid $9 an hour in Bangalore.

https://medium.com/@suttojusrikanthchary66/the-high-cost-of-cheap-labor-how-9-hour-engineers-cost-boeing-billions-b20f42e48dd4

Actually, it was a three letter agency. In 2014 it emerged that they stole Airbus IP on behalf of Boeing.

AMD attacks the rack with Helios systems that rival Nvidia's

Nice hardware, how's the software now?

AMD's weakness compared to Nvidia has been their software stack.

From buggy link firmware and Numa drivers to their unreliable debugging tools, the cost saving of using AMD can be painful.

And then they don't have CUDA support.

Firefox 153 contains itself while Thunderbird 153 fixes almost everything

Thunderbird is looking good

I have to use Microsoft Outlook at work, and MS keeps making it worse, slower and less reliable. Microsoft seem to test nothing these days.

Thunderbird, just keeps getting better.

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

Price is the killer feature

Kimi K3 costs 1/12 of what Fable 5 does, for the same performance.

The Chinese models will kill the US ones on price.

We will benefit from competition here.

Google Cloud outage shows it’s still hard to understand hyperscalers’ real resilience regimes

Because they cost money, and those buying the services are CIO's and CFO's not technical people.

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Bubble code?

If there's one thing that makes me think AI is a bubble, it's the lousy quality of the code in the leaked Claude Code source and now this leak.

If their customer-facing software is so hacked-together and amateurish, then how bad is it in the billion dollar back-end? Do these high-value AI companies actually know what they're doing?

No more Java refills for Intel Macs after JDK 27, says Oracle

Re: On not owning what you pay for

Apple is a hardware company, they make money when you buy new hardware, so they are incentivised to make that happen.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Early days

What I find odd about the whole LLM craze is that the technology is immature. The attention mechanism it is based on, was discovered to be useful by researchers working on translation. LLMs came about almost by accident.

Who knows if there isn't another algorithm lurking that requires a fraction of the processing power? It's like everyone is going all-in on ISDN lines while fibre might be discovered next year.

The historical analogy is the canal building phase of the industrial revolution in the early 1800's. Soon these canal builders went under because of railways.

Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

Re: The frameworks are deeper. The machines are faster, but the dependency graphs are absurd.

Developers are also a lot lazier or ignorant. People will import an entire js library to strip the trailing space off a string.

A prime example is MS Teams, it uses a 1000MB of RAM to do what MS Messenger could do in 8MB. Strip the voice, video and screen sharing and IRC did that in less than 1MB.

No developer cares about resource usage anymore, perhaps the increasing price of RAM will change this, but I doubt it.

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

Re: Worring times

Real summarised letter to patient:

AI: "You're absolutely right -- my mistake -- I prescribed 10x the dosage of Morphine. Please take 1mg instead, if you are still alive.

Is there anything else I can help with today?"

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

Not bugs, but backdoors

Some of these vulnerabilities are bugs. But YellowKey is likely a deliberate backdoor inserted by Microsoft only in Windows 11 to bypass Bitlocker.

One other is a reversion of a 2020 bug Google found and MS fixed. Any automated QA/Test system should run builds against known previous bugs.

This is just sloppy version control, or perhaps all the AI coding is not going as well as planned?

HP investigating BIOS updates that leave premium laptop users in boot loop limbo

Ignorance = Surprise

Windows update is the default mechanism for BIOS updates these days. It probably accounts for 99% of BIOS updates, and CPU microcode patches on all machines.

AMD says its $4K Ryzen AI Halo workstation practically pays for itself

IT paying for itself

Many years ago we had a Xerox salesman joke to us that the then newfangled colour photocopiers would pay for themselves if suitable currency was put on the copying tray.

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Learning lessons

The only "lesson" we have learned after years of battling with Google Cloud is to move to our own in-house solution.

Google Drive kept deleting or reverting files to older versions. Paid Google support was useless.

I'm sure in a year or two we'll get a new CEO who decides that moving to the cloud will look good on his CV, and we'll go through it all again.

AI sackings reach New Zealand, which will use it to eject 14 percent of government staff

Re: More ministries than you think

You definition of a "public servant" is nonsense, they are all answerable to a state or federal government minister.

Approximately 17.7% of the Australian workforce is employed in the public sector. This translates to about 2,597,300 public sector employees, one for every 10 citizens.

The public sector is the only part of the economy that is growing, both in terms of numbers employed and in terms of wages.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Windows 10 fell off the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down

Windows 7 still looks really good.

The one subtle thing I really dislike about Windows 8/10/11 is how ugly it looks. Everything is flat, which is fashionable, but looks bad. It is also harder to use. As someone who helps old folks with computers in the old days, you could see what is a button, what is a scrollbar.

The clickable parts of the interface looked like controls - they have since X11. Now everything is flat, making it flat and more confusing.

Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming

An intentional backdoor for law enforcement?

The hacker's writeup on YellowKey is worth reading.

He thinks it is a deliberate bypass that was added, given it is not present in Windows 10 and the ease of the exploit.

Memory godboxes could offer relief from the RAMpocalypse

Re: Slower

Yeah, I agree. RAM is not meant to be on a peripheral bus. RAM should always be faster.

The problem is that PCIe has got faster more quickly than DDR RAM has. PCIe4 is now 16GT/s per channel. x16 lanes is 32GBytes/s which is the around same speed as a single channel of DDR4 at 4times the data bus width (x64, 64 bits).

The latency of PCIe will be the problem, in my amateur opinion. But once it is setup it should burst around DDR speeds.

Slower

It all depends what they are measuring. Your 25x is the CL latency, typically 10ns

For a cache miss with a closed DDR4 page, the end-to-end latency is usually on the order of 70–100 ns.

PCIe will be slower, but how much slower depends on topology and architecture, typically it gets 90% of the throughput of DDR5 . It is typically used for data, not code.

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

If their access is revoked, then they'll have to buy it off AliExpress now ;-)

Thunderbird in hand worth 2 Outlooks as fresh FOSS fave and Firefox arrive

Very good software

Both Mozilla and Thunderbird are very good apps. I use 'em at home, while having to use Edge and Outlook at work.

The difference in quality makes me wonder WTF Microsoft engineers do all day?

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Re: But

or even deeper, the hardware RTL that controls the low level MAC can easily detect some sort of magic packet header and misbehave.

Even more evil is not to knock out the equipment totally - this is easy to detect. Just make it start being unreliable.

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

As someone who worked on writing an NTFS driver a quarter of a century ago, this was actually the problem. Microsoft would keep making undocumented changes to NTFS which caused headaches and eventual abandonment.

A much better coder than me, called Mark Russinovich, actually gave up on his own driver and developed a hack to load the actual NT NTFS.SYS driver under DOS.

Claude is getting worse, according to Claude

Re: Greed

Making the current model dumber just before they release the next model makes the next model look better in comparison.

They might also be allocating compute to the new model by sacrificing the old model.

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Superb article

A great article, Liam.

There are good physical reasons for centralising everything on one chip.

It is a pity that, metaphorically, the centralisation is also of manufacturer's power over the consumer. I don't think there is a version of Linux than runs well on anything above an Apple M2.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

This has nothing to do with the kids

The reason they want "age verification" is to know your identity. Who you are.

Protecting the kids is just a convenient excuse.

Jack Dorsey’s fintech outfit Block announces 40% layoffs, blames AI, gets 23% stock bump

Buy now pay later

Maybe paying $27 billion for the dodgy buy now pay later company "Afterpay" wasn't a great idea for Jack and Block?

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Software efficiency bump incoming?

Maybe it's time for software developers to focus on writing native compiled apps, instead of these modern huge inefficient apps.

I'm looking at Teams, written in Javascript/Elektron and requires Edge Webview just to run. It does the same as old chat/talk apps that used worked in 8MB of RAM, not 1000 MB.

Mobile apps aren't much better. WTF is the GMail app for Android 300MB?

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: POP3S

POP3S also doesn't need passwords, it can work with OAuth.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Follow the ego?

What's a bet they got in a new CIO or CEO who wanted to enhance his LinkedIn profile by puting his "stamp" on the organisation by implementing a "modern" solution, replacing "legacy systems" and perhaps even getting a nice little kickback from Workday?

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Sadly point 2, Office in Wine is not possible. There are some very old versions that sort of work.

You have a much better chance of getting a complicated Windows game working in Linux than Excel.

I suspect MS uses many undocumented Windows APIs in their Office products.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Fire sales soon?

I await the AI crash, so I can buy some discount hardware.

I just hope that the AI crash doesn't crash the economy at the same time.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

It's all about money not the user

The purpose of putting AI into the OS is so that Microsoft can claim to be innovating. Their share price will go up because of the AI hype and managers who made the decision will get bigger bonuses.

The users of the OS, or any engineering concerns are not at all involved in these short-term calculations.

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

They already preload MS Office at boot

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/microsoft_will_preload_office_apps/

Instead of optimising code, AI says preload for the easy win.

Reminds me of a very old joke:

"c - the speed of light, constant, independent of the speed of the observer.

w - the speed of Windows, constant, independent of the speed of the hardware."

'Keep Android Open' movement fights back against Google sideloading restrictions

Monopoly power

I find the timing interesting.

This announcement from Google came just after they were sentenced to a slap with a wet lettuce for abusing their monopoly power in search.

I guess effective winning the case made them feel that they are free to do whatever they want now.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: "55% will regret those job cuts"

AI's often just an excuse to replace expensive workers with cheaper ones.

At the same time Microsoft announced their big US and EU layoffs, they also announced a $3 Billion investment in Bangalore.

Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

Raspberry Pi is no longer a Foundation - they are a profit making company that IPO'd last year.

A lot of their value is freeloading off the backs of open source developers who worked on Pi software.

You can get Pi clones and even Intel N100/N150 boxes for less with more performance.

The Pi shines in terms of software support and GPIO.

Atlassian drops $1B on company that helps measure dev productivity

The Con in confluence

Here’s another clue for Atlassian specifically: fix all the bugs in your own products.

Jira and Confluence are a hot sticky mess of bugs

Australia to let Big Tech choose its own adventure to enact kids social media ban

Smokescreen

The whole "protect the kids" thing is a smokescreen.

The Aussie government wants to know the real identities of all Internet users, so they can track down and silence those whose opinions they do not like.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly decides to do hardly anything to break it up

Re: As the Money Flows.....

Minor news story from 2026: Judge Amit Mehta resigns the bench and goes to work as a "consultant" for Google.

Microsoft rewarded for security failures with another US government contract

Re: Bribery and coercion

Yes, the text fails to mention how much money MS spent bribing/lobbying politicians.

EFF/Open source has no chance unless they start a GoFundMe to lobby a politician.

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

Backdoors bite back

Salt Typhoon exploited backdoors the US government had forced companies to put in their systems.

This is the key reason that crypto backdoors are unsafe for everyone. If your own government can spy on you, hackers will hack your government to get that information.

It will be the EU, UK and Australian citizens' turn next.