Posts by Woza

Microsoft dangles $10K for hackers to hijack LLM email service

how about

Fixing Outlook email search instead, so it can "retrieve relevant emails"?

Re: Dear LLM

<pedant mode>

/dev/urandom will not block, but in theory has less entropy

/dev/random depletes the entropy pool as it runs so can stall (esp on a VM) but in theory has higher entropy. You may only get a few hundred bytes out of /dev/random and then pause for tens of seconds.

I have read that the distinction vanishes in newer kernels, but haven't gone into details

</pedant mode>

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

brilliantly affective

Nice use of language, made me smile, have one of these.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

And there is a pause between the music and the automated speech *just long enough* that you think someone has answered the phone and get your hopes up, before being dashed.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Not ISDN...

*raises hand*

About five years ago, I spun up an AWS "free" instance to host some short-lived thing for my cricket club - damned if I can remember what now. Anyway, forgot the thing was running and ended up with a nasty shock at the end of the month when the bill arrived.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Re: Proper paper orientation

I do both - main monitor is landscape, with a second monitor next to it in portrait orientation. The latter is good for reading documents or long chunks of code.

Re: Round corners!?!

You're one fake Guardian obit away from imitating ChatGPT

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

I glanced at the picture before reading the headline and honestly thought I was looking at two artistic urinals. Only at a second glance after reading the headline did I realise they were shoes!

SBOMs should be a security staple in the software supply chain

Re: "The idea of the SBOM is relatively new."

Exactly. We were maintaining an SBOM for our product since it began development circa 2010 (</whippersnapper>) and this was a required artefact when we delivered evaluation units to $US_DEFENCE_PRIME a few years later. In that case the focus was mostly on understanding licencing of the various components, but still - knowing what you're using is not a new concept.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

Quiet, don't give them any ideas!

University of Texas latest US school to ban TikTok

Re: "School"

While I normally enjoy a bandwagon about US English, saying "school is for children" isn't valid.

Evidence from the UK:

-London School of Economics

-London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

- Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

etc

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Re: Solution....

Depends how you jam it - if you use raspberry jam, FCC wouldn't care.

Just need to get in touch with Lone Star.

Team Interpol: Metaverse Police

Secure by Design?

This from the crowd who keep shouting for encryption backdoors?

The Metaverse is the internet no one wants

Re: Call me old fashioned

http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/

Discworld-themed text-based adventure. I used to write code for them 20-odd years ago, still seems to be chugging along.

Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners

So, partners need to check that they don't check the checkbox next to cheque?

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

George Carlin nailed it years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mS8w-_9s0 (NSFW)

Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup

What's faster than the speed of light?

Monarchy.

Perhaps we need to start breeding really small monarchs...

GNU Terry Pratchett

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Several months ago, I had to blow away and reinstall my laptop, and decided to give Slackware a go, based largely on your posts here. (As context, I consider myself reasonably au fait with Linux, having run Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux From Scratch and OpenSUSE in one form or another since before 2006, and fully agree with your characterisation of systemd.)

I felt at home in Slackware, it was great! But I couldn't find how to update packages. Key internet-facing packages and libraries relied on OpenSSL versions (1.0.2) that were EOL at the time, and it seemed like the way to know if something was patched was via email list. I dug myself into a waist-deep morass of dependencies trying to update and recompile packages manually to get the latest security fixes, and in the end retreated to Kubuntu where I can just run apt-get and get the updates I need.

As an experienced Slackware user, what did I miss? How do you keep things patched?

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

In my experience, just about every witty or meaningful quote ever is automatically attributed to either Winston Churchill or Mark Twain. - Winston Churchill

Atlassian Jira, Confluence outage persists two days on

Waiting for

The "who, me?" article

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Re: Been there, done that, tipped the swear jar

Best one I saw in our code base was:

#define GO_HOME_WINDOWS_YOU_ARE_DRUNK

in code that was working around quirks of MSVC.

A different part of our code base has a function that cleans up child processes, called grim_squeaker - long ago tribute to PTerry and Death of Rats, from my younger self.

Switzerland's SWIFT data centre under guard after Russian banks excluded

One also assumes they're filtering based on RFC 3514, aka the evil bit.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Dumb question from a lazy bastard: why does an exercise bike need brakes?

US Navy in mad dash to salvage F-35C that fell off a carrier into South China Sea

Re: Sunk costs

Maybe it can be a stand-in until we get the new submarines...

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Hilly from Red Dwarf

Saying: "Awooga, Awooga"

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Re: I say it's plausible

Stop cracking yolks!

A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'

Re: Stuck a finger...

Why assume there was only one problem?

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Re: Totally American

My standard testing names (small volume):

Major Bloodnok

Ned Seagoon

Mad Dan Eccles

Bluebottle

Henry Crun

Minnie Bannister

etc

(Auto-correct hates me now)

Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS

Re: We asked Boeing to comment.

Missed a couplen on the bingo card:

3. We have made changes and this can never happen again

4. Safety is our highest priority

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

"Age, experience, and cunning always trumps youthful experience.

Age, experience, cunning, and treachery always trumps youthful experience. FTFY"

Age, experience, cunning, and treachery always trumps youthful *exuberance*. FTFY.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: Push me

A friend I used to work with pushed the Big Red Button by accident twice within a couple of months. We bought him one of these as a leaving gift.

(His leaving was unconnected to these incidents)

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

Re: Thus neatly explaining ...

systemd syndrome - a new entry for the DSM?

The stench of progress: Sweat may power your personal tech in the not-so-distant future

I used to play cricket with a guy whose kit had red marks from shining the ball for the whole season. At the end of the season, one of the player's wives gave this guy a box of washing powder. It wasn't until later that we wondered what could happen if he was pulled over by the cops with an unmarked plastic box of white powder...

Scottish enviro bods shrug off ransomware gang's extortion attempt as 4,000 files dumped online, saying it's nothing big

Re: How long, I wonder

Disclaimer: I work for a company active in this area.

Filesystem encryption is common these days - bitlocker on Windows, or Veracrypt, or the Linux alternatives, etc. But that's not going to help if scumbags are logged into your system because they then see the same view of the files as you do, they're inside the file system.

There are also ways to do application level encryption, which is what you're suggesting. There are tools that will plug into Word, for example, and encrypt/decrypt stuff between Word and the disk. The problem is that this needs to be implemented on a per application basis - if your favourite CAD software doesn't have a plug-in for your chosen encryption software, you're short on luck. You also need to be careful with configuration - for example, ensuring temporary backup files created by the application are also encrypted.

Depending on your paranoia level, you also need to worry about swap files, which can contain unencrypted snapshots of files resident in your application's memory.

Finally, there's a kind of middle ground where you manually encrypt / decrypt files as needed - either on a per-file basis or in a container like Veracrypt. But that is less convenient for day-to-day workflow.

Like a good defragging? The latest Dev Channel Windows 10 might be for you

Re: Windows 10 and Parliament

But the house of commons is in an ancient legacy building with leaking pipes and dodgy wiring just waiting to go up in flames, whereas Windows...

Ohhhh, I see, carry on!

Notpetya, Olympics hacking, Novichok probe meddling... America throws the book at six alleged Kremlin hackers

Re: I don't get this

They used a buffer downhillover run

Microsoft open-sources fuzzing tool it uses in-house to keep Windows so very secure

That explains it

So Microsoft products are written using fuzzy logic?

Up from the depths, 864 servers inside, covered in slime, it's Natick!

Blue Hades

Are wondering where their game of solitaire went!

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Re: Trumpet

If we're talking Windows, does trumpet winsock count?

What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore

Do you expect me to talk?

No Mr Bond, I expect you to buy.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

Re: Thinking outside the box

The Goon show called it 65 years ago:

Seagoon:

Tell me, how do we raise the pier?

Moriarty:

Oh, don't raise the pier!

Seagoon:

What then?

Moriarty:

Lower the river!

Seagoon:

Gad! Genius! Absolute genius! But, but can you do it?

Moriarty:

Sapristi yacka-backakas of course I can. My partner, the Honourable Grytpype-Thynne is the greatest water remover in the world! Follow me!

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

A wasp lands on a scorpion

Somebody's going to get stung and I don't care who!

Snortical warfare: Wild boar launches amphibious assault against German beachgoers

where's obelix

When you need him?

Icon: closest I could find to a menhir.

UK.gov to propose new rules for online political campaigns after last election marred by an avalanche of fake news

Re: "create more transparent rules for political campaigning online"

They should sew sponsors logos on their suits, like athletes. Or take a leaf out of stadium naming - like you have Etihad Stadium or the Kia Oval, could we see The Rio Tinto Prime Minister or The Boeing Defence Secretary?

Idea courtesy Robin Williams.

Google employs people to invent colours – and they think their work improves your wellbeing

Google's corporate colour name

"Eternal Beta"?

Korean boffins build COVID-bot to shove a swab right up your hooter

Hmmmm

"Boss? I have Oracle, Microsoft and many other software licencing teams on the line - they want to know how soon we can start taking orders."

Facebook's $500k deepfake-detector AI contest drama: Winning team disqualified on buried consent technicality

> Facebook must have parts that are super-anal about privacy

I have detected a fake Facebook! Where's my $500k?

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

I know what you mean, but I think it's awkward wording - it's not measured in terms of Hz, it's measured in terms of a count.

Find yourself a caesium 133 atom. Start counting transitions: 1,2,3,... When you hit 9 192 631 770, a second has passed.