Posts by Slow Joe Crow

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

Re: Perfect way to trump the investigation

It's about time we had a new look Richard Nixon masks are so 1970s

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Battery powered angle grinders are game changers for both bicycle thieves and privacy advocates. I can also suggest glass etching products for camera windows since paintball dye can be cleaned off. Alternatively several common solvents will fog polycarbonate and there's the hero sitting in his lawn chair holding a piece of carboard on a stick in front of a camera

GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions

I miss Mac Like WM

Back in the days before OS X there was package in Suse that made your Linux look like classic Mac OS

I don't care if Linux looks like Windows, I've been using XFCE for years, although I'm currently using MATE because all my running machines are Mint

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Re: Can you stick a pencil in it, to wind it forwards or backwards?

In the US we mostly used Bic pens, the "crystal" ones are still on the market and just the right size

Missing the point?

The whole reason we had Dolby noise reduction, and the rarer but more effective DBX was to eliminate tape hiss. Granted a lot of car stereos were too cheap to pay Dolby and some labels were also too cheap but there it is. Besides if I want the nostalgia I have a rack of cassettes and a Pioneer dual deck in the stereo stack at home and my children have vehicles old enough to have working cassette decks. I think I also have a functioning Walkman somewhere and I know we have a mini boom box.

Also @Nifty the canonical rewinding tool was a clear plastic Bic pen and us fancy folk had an Allsop head cleaning cassette

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Re: Sounds familiar

Google's algorithm generally wants to take the earliest available turn. A few years back I was visiting Zumwalt Prairie, and Google took the first right turn which led through a herd of cows to a set of ruts where the road used to be. The second right was an actual gravel road leading to the official entrance.

I suppose 5 hours from Swansea to Norwich isn't too bad since that gets you to the other side of the country. Getting to Zumwalt Prairie was a 6 hour drive to Enterprise, OR and I didn't even leave the state

Flock cameras go up in flames as cops hunt suspected firebugs

Re: Good!

In the US paintball guns are unregulated or lightly regulated aside from New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York City.

If you wanted to be really nasty find a way to deliver glass etching cream

To quote the famouns line in Porky's II

"get the flock outta here!!" which is now a movement https://gettheflockoutofhere.com/ which I guess brings in an Alice's Restaurant reference

Regardless we the people need to point Flock at the real criminals, the politicians signing the contracts.

Re: Writer at The Drive website Flocked over Range Rover plate mixup.

The LA Sheriff's Department entered the plate as 34 DTM and Flock will eagerly search partial plates. There was a second incident with another journalist and a Range Rover with 34 xx DTM plates where the police were not quite as excessive

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

Re: Horseshit

UPS is unionized, at least in North America so drivers have mandated breaks, although I suspect that UPS' industrial engineers have calculated optimum location and duration. AFAIK FedEx is reasonable about this stuff and DHL unknown

That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry

Re: Sure was nice being able to read the screens in the sun.

Disaster Area stunt ship theme?

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

My Little Pony

I had a co-worker who would set the wallpaper to a My Little Pony image. That tended to only happen once.

I used to freak out passing users by running the BSOD screensaver in conjunction with a fake spilled coffee cup

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Re: Super

One can only purchase guns at the supermarket if the supermarket has a Federal Firearms License (FFL) to sell guns. Fred Meyer and Wal-Mart used to do that but still required a background check and any applicable state waiting periods. Both companies have stopped selling firearms. While getting a gun legally is not as onerous as in the UK there are laws and processes, even at gun shows. Most people get their guns at gun stores or sporting goods store, although I know of several hardware stores with FFLs and there used to be a combined gun and liquor store in Crescent Oregon. The hyperbolic claim guns are easier to buy than books is bovine excrement because Barnes & Noble doesn't require government ID, and a background check

This will fail hard

The thing that leapt out at me was a 3D printer "allow list" which is analogous to the California gun roster of which pistols you are permitted to buy. California says this is about safety features but seems more like a gun ban by stealth since since there is a rule about removing multiple guns when a new one is added and treating a different color as a separate model requiring a separate certification. Naturally there is an exception for the police. This provides a useful side hustle for police officers who buy off roster guns at a discount and resell them in California at a premium. Naturally this law and all of California's other highly restrictive laws do nothing to prevent the Crips and Bloods having full auto Glocks and the occasional submachine gun

Re: Huge risk to inventors

Pretti was morally right and tactically stupid. He was planning a confrontation with the police so he should have been carrying nothing more lethal than a burner phone. Best guess is he thought his gun was a talisman that would scare off the bad guys. I have even greater contempt for the ICE agents who made a total clown show of arresting him since the agent who disarmed him negligently discharged Pretti's gun which caused the other agent to mag dump into Pretti.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

There are fellow Americans who think New Mexico is a foreign country, and also don't believe $2 bills are legal tender. On the lighter side when my sister was 11 or 12 she asked if she need a passport to visit San Francisco.

The York Pennsylvania Harley-Davidson factory originally made bomb casings. I visited it in the early 90s and watched them stamping gas tanks and building Fat Boys. There is also a Yuasa battery factory nearby that supplies H-D among others

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Just found this from the car running on vape batteries. In a world where Doom runs on a pregnancy test this is almost mundane, but it seems like a lot of compute power for a battery and a heating element

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: The horror... the horror...

I just had a colleague who would install My Little Pony wallpaper,

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

standby boss?

There's an old BOFH where the head of IT has an accident and the interim boss is a technical manager who's done it so often he has a second set of business cards. Apparently this manager is smart enough to ride herd on Simon and the PFY for short periods while avoiding being given the job permanently.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: Waterproofing your car.

That sounds even worse than Oregon which Jeff Foxworthy described as "almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction".

I live East of the Cascades so it rains less and I mark seasons by events. Fall, the irrigation canals are drained, Winter the crunch of studded tires , Spring the irrigation canals are refilled, Summer, the first hotshot crews arrive. (forest fire season). At least we get enough snow in winter for good skiing

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Which winery in Newberg? I live in Oregon and have occasionally made the rounds of Willamette Valley wineries, plus the occasional visit to the Columbia Gorge

Back in the late 90s the site I worked at had a lot of Iiyama 21" CRT monitors. These were a 2 person lift because they weighed more than 40lbs. I just had a 20" Trinitron that my co-worker claimed gave him sunburn. I also had some units with VGA, some with BNC and some NEC monitors with a VGA and an Apple specific connector ne of which was my bench monitor to run the one Mac and whatever PC needed attention

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Get the flamer, the heavy flamer

I had noticed the never to be sufficiently damned Copilot icon in Windows 11 but hadn't looked into the full horror. My company loads Notepad ++ on everything which gives all the useful stuff like syntax highlighting in various languages, line numbering, and tracking your parentheses and none of the useless "AI" junk.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: My wife was a keyholder at a bank branch

From my experience in the US during the savings and loan crisis, the most effective to way to rob a bank is to own it. The people at the top of several failed banks walked away with lots of money and no criminal charges while the government was left holding the bag.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: Good episode, but take note:

"You can't eat your cake and have it, too" Ted Kaczynski

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

What a descent from Mindstorms which was a full on microcontroller that could do something more useful than make noise

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Re: 44 gallon drums

A bartender once described Malört as tasting like disappointment. Fortunately I live in Oregon where the signature drinks are more palatable, fresh hopped IPA and Pinot Noir

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Re: EIGHT HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE ACRES?!

Since my initial answer didn't post, empty stuff can be indoor MTB parks or mushroom farms. Where I live some big boxes reincarnate, the Shopko discount store is now a Winco supermarket and all the better for it. I do wonder what the empty stores down the street will become. FWIW I live in the middle of Oregon so cloud data centers have been around for years because low value agricultural land and hydro power are cheap and some of the data centers are largely air cooled.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: "colored pencil office"

Don't worry, most of the Pacific Northwest hates Californians too. Oregon and Washington have been overrun by Californians fleeing the consequences of bad political decisions and immediately replicating them while driving up home prices, and crowding cities.

As for spelling, several centuries of separation have simultaneously caused drift and preserved languages. Some Appalachian dialects are closer to Elizabethan English than any 20th Century UK speech and similarly Quebecois is is closer to 17th Century French than modern French. I'm still a bit surprised when Brits use American sports metaphors like "step up to the plate" or loanwords like boondocks or boonie which is Tagalog. Then again we use trek a lot, which is Boer, so I guess slang terms from colonial wars crossed the Atlantic.

Back on topic, defenestration seems like a great way to clear dead wood in both personnel and operating systems

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

I have free ESU on one PC and will probably do a couple more. Then it's Linux time since the budget doesn't support new hardware. I've already installed Linux Mint on the machine we use to stream on and it was seamless, right down to detecting my printer and installing drivers.

I have tested FlyOOBE to install on unsupported hardware but I'd rather not have Windows 11 in my house. At work I've been on 11 for almost a year and the clients are almost entirely migrated or on ESU.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

WTF?

Why would reporting be done done with write permissions. In any halfway sane system the reporting would done with read only accounts, or if you need to write using a separate DB.

Confessional time, I was working on an internal application that had never been finished so user management was done by SQL query. I accidentally forgot a WHERE and gave 30 odd people the same first name, resolved by swiftly restoring the table from backup before anyone noticed

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

dang, by 2000 the IT outsourcer I worked for had us submit timesheets online, albeit via a terminal emulator straight into a text based minicomputer application. I'm still not sure whether it was better or worse than emailing an excel file

SonicWall breach hits every cloud backup customer after 5% claim goes up in smoke

That's exactly what Sophos does with Sophos Central. When you deploy a firewall you set a master encryption key, and then a separate backup encryption password which Sophos requires you to store elsewhere. I work for an MSP so we have dozens of firewalls and we store the encryption keys in a documentation system. It seems to work fine and we can easily pull a saved configuration to apply to replacement firewalls

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

I was working a on a hardware lab fit out project one time, and a manager wanted to mount all the network panels in the ceiling instead of the back of the benches so the layout would be easier to change. He was promptly disabused of this notion, since it would make it very difficult to hook up systems on the benches, and we never changed layouts after the benches were installed

Microsoft puts last remnants of original Edge browser on life support

Cannot come soon enough

Edge wasn't that good and served only as tool to download Chrome or Firefox. The newer Webview pieces have required updating some of our client's applications but that is a small price to pay to get rid of the last vestiges of ActiveX.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

demading a technical solution to a management problem

This is the macro version of web filtering and blocking at work. We get asked to block, monitor and lock down, but users still do stuff, because management won't create and enforce policy. Legislating against kids viewing porn is useless. the only effective thing is parents educating their children. Of course keeping kids from viewing porn is a great excuse to replicate the Great Firewall of China, as a means of imposing broad censorship. This appears perfectly on brand for a UK government that expends more police time on mean tweets than rapists

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Multiple clocks might be an add on

I recall having multiple clocks on my Win 7 work PC because I dealt with people in multiple time zones. I'm pretty sure that was a separate utility, and harking to another lost feature, I had a double height taskbar so my 4 clocks were nicely arranged ans well as my may open windows.

I'd als like the one Windows 11 feature I liked reinstated. When I copied a phone number to the clipboard I used to get a popup offering to dial my soft phone which saved a few clicks.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

I'm a track point partisan too

I've always had laptops with a pointing stick, starting with a Toshiba Tecra and many ThinkPads. Even the company issue HP laptops had nubs, except for my current Probook, and I have a hard time using the touchpad

I also think black with the big chunky hinges is the right look, a ThinkPad says "serious tool" where a shiny silver MacBook says "fashion accessory" and a shiny silver Dell with one USB-C port says "fashion victim". My old T570 has a mechanical dock an RJ45 port and a full complement of USB to hook up anything. The only missing trick is the spring loaded RJ45 HP uses to allow a beveled edge.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Fortunately my screwups were minor

Not so much a typo as an oversight, in my first job doing real dba I left out the Where clause in a SQL Update command and gave everyone in the database the same first name. Fortunately I could restore the table from an hourly backup the users never noticed.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: Ah, Symbian

I didn't have a smartphone until 2011 but in the early oughts my iPaq had IR which I could use with a Canon portable inkjet printer, and my TV set. The circa 2002 iPaq had a consumer grade IR emitter and a universal remote application. These days I can control my Roku over WiFi so I have some of the same function.

Smartphones in the doldrums due to crap demand and tariff woes

I'm completely unsurprised, I only replace phones when they break or wear out and I buy older models because they are cheap. My carrier was selling Samsung Galaxy A14s for $50 US so why should I buy a newer one.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Re: Sword and Scandals

I'd lay money Larry Correia and John Ringo would be flagged up for badthink, since both of them offend the Leftists and some one once claimed the mere presence of Larry Correia at a con mad them feel unsafe. Both are actually pretty clean living, but both are right of center and to some degree religious

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

With billions in losses and minimal sales, you have to ask how much of the budget was spent on hookers and blow?

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

I treat USB sticks as tools, not data storage

I keep an assortment of USB sticks on my desk and in my computer bag but they are almost exclusively bootable images for installation or troubleshooting. I do use a few for holding photos, to share or have printed. I also have one novelty USB shaped like Hello Kitty with Ubuntu on it so I can "boot to the head".

I don't trust the long term stability of USB sticks so everything goes on external drives, optical disk or cloud

Re: Even worse ...

So far I have only had one SSD fail, and that was in the early days of SSD. My work computer's Intel SSD up and died after less than a year .fortunately I kept very little on the machine that wasn't also on a network drive so it mostly cost time while IT replaced the drive and reinstalled everything, Since then, knock particle board the closes I've been to SSD failure is a bad controller chip on a motherboard

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Re: I wonder

Ballistics doesn't work as well as it used to. The basic theory is that cut rifling leaves a unique set of tool marks in the gun barrel which in turn transfer to the bullet. This falls apart with modern industrial production with cold hammer forged barrels and polygonal rifling. At that point the best you could say is the bullet came from a Glock, and matches 5000 barrels forged on a specific mandrel. The police would be happy to charge based on that but the defense could tear it apart. Even with older rifling methods ballistic doesn't work as well as it does on TV. The State of Maryland used to require a fired bullet and case from every pistol registered to allow matching ballistics, but quit doing when they realized they had never actually used this warehouse full of evidence in a prosecution.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Let them fight

I used to care but I've been using XFCE for years.

A new city springs from the rainforest to become Indonesia's tech hub

Adam Something video in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Building a city in the middle of nowhere is a bit of a feat. Granted Myanmar just did it recently but this feels like one of those Arab Sheikh pipe dreams like Neom but in the jungle. I suppose it could become a Canberra or Brasilia. The tech promises make it sound more like Neom.

America's drinking water systems have a hard-to-swallow cybersecurity problem

SCADA systems are known to be vulnerable, partly due to lazy configuration, and partly due to insecure design. I guess the only comfort is that my water company is very small and supplies untreated well water so hacking the treatment plant is a non-starter