Posts by collinsl

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

I wouldn't necessarily ascribe the attribution for these events entirely to Russia, more I'd argue that Russia gave them a helping hand to one degree or another once they'd started.

Re: Uncle Krasnov

The people around Trump in the security space may well have this view, but Trump himself is too mercurial and petty to be able to hold a long-term and sophisticated goal in his head if someone annoys him sufficiently for him to want to hurt them economically - hence the tariffs randomly imposed whenever someone does something he doesn't like or says something mean, only to be removed when the adults in the room give him a suitable compromise to withdraw down.

Re: EU politicians finally getting it

And if PC hardware is about to increase in price by 40%+ then there's further incentives to not want to upgrade it just for W11's requirements.

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Musk X platform is the *only* large scale platform allowing free speech

Unless you hurt Elon's feelings or say something nasty about Trump or try and talk about ICE or try and track celebrity's jets or...

X is just like the other social platforms, it's moderated based on the whims of the owning company. Yes they claim to have rules and obey laws, but ultimately they decide what appears or doesn't appear on their platform. They use convenient excuses like "free speech" or "hate crime" or "stalking" to justify their decisions about removal of content.

Yes, some content should not be allowed on platforms at all, but 100% that is being used as an excuse to remove other non-illegal content which the company owners or their backers/friends object to. Especially Elon, who seems to have a very thin skin.

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Re: $[special] ?

Sadly for us their recent escapades have revealed to them a lot of their planning & logistics issues, which they've been working hard to solve. The good and bad side for us is that they've now used up a lot of their stocks of mothballed vehicles - the good side being their stocks are low, the bad side being they're replacing them with brand new more advanced ones.

But the issues with corruption around the defence procurement sector are rapidly being solved. When the full scale invasion began there were large problems with various items of procurement, from trucks with all-terrain solid tyres turning out to have cheap Chinese road tyres which couldn't stand up to the use they were put to, to tanks going into combat with cardboard spacers instead of reactive explosive armour blocks, to frequency hopping encrypted radios turning out to contain cheap Chinese Walkie-Talkies which had no encryption and no range. All because the procurement officers skimmed off the top (and their superiors wanted paying too) - these problems are now mostly solved which means they've learned the lesson for any future conflict.

Re: Hi-history re-re-repea-repeating it-its-its-its-its...

Not in the MoD, the spring powering the winding mechanism would be broken within a month of deployment

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: Not a Trump thing.

^{The Greater Good}

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

Re: General Dynamics is American

Can't we just stick a new engine in the CVR(T)s? Why do we need new hulls and tracks? This problem has already been solved.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

"Stores are for storing, otherwise they'd be called issues" - ancient British Army joke

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Re: Been there!

In that situation you'd expect HR to be very clued up on not moving cameras etc, and hopefully whoever is senior enough to instruct you to move it should be too...

Examples:

https://www.theregister.com/2004/08/12/winxp_sp2_stop_moaning/

https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/02/winxpsp2_security_review/

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

Re: Muck inside

I think that may well be more down to maintenance than anything else - if you're just in steady state peacetime ops with either no hope of stopping the Russians if they do come through the Fulda Gap or at home then costs can be cut on maintenance, but if you KNOW you're deploying to a hot environment with likely use of chemical weapons and missiles then you make absolutely sure that your tank is in tip top condition with all the bits working and all the rubber seals in place and not perished etc.

Re: dust explosion

WW2 did have plenty of such "madcap" tools for SOE and the various Resistances etc. Other examples include explosive disguised to look like coal to be dropped in locomotive tenders so it would be shovelled into the fire and explode, rat corpses packed with explosive so if they were disposed of in a furnace they would explode, also ones with explosive and a vibration detonator so if someone kicked the corpse it would explode etc. Not anything which would wreck a site or prevent production across an entire factory, but enough to cause annoyance, a few casualties, and more importantly, a sense of fear and mistrust in enemy command and troops, proving that resistance members were everywhere, and that nowhere and no objects were "safe".

Seville: Famed for blue skies and now Blue Screens of Death

Referring to windows 7 as an "early" version of Windows can't be true, it's only been 5 minutes since it was released!

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: "in December 199 he worked in the IT department"

Medieval Helpdesk

Taikonauts inspect cracked Shenzhou-20 window during Tiangong spacewalk

Re: Duct tape

They should have duck taped over it during the spacewalk.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: To borrow a phrase ... SAD!

Including:

Franklin D Roosevelt

Harry S Truman

Dwight D Eisenhower

John F Kennedy

Lyndon B Johnson

Richard M Nixon

Gerald R Ford

?

The House Un-American Activities Committee sat for all or part of all of those Presidential terms.

We're not "strangers" in the US, we're aliens!

Re: Hey Trump

They even require you to submit applications for visas or visa-waiver travel to fly through US airspace now, in case your plane is forced to land for some reason.

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Heck, London Underground have several backup/emergency power generators based on English Electric Lightning RR Avon engines!

Trump says Nvidia can sell H200s to China – if Washington gets a 25 percent cut

China's already either figured out how to get around the restrictions by buying through third parties in "neutral" countries, or have made their own chips which are good enough for their needs.

ICE-tracking app developer sues Trump admin after Apple spikes the software

Re: Land of the Not So Free!

Immigration is not encouraged under Trump, thanks to the "indefinite pauses" on migration he has put in place from various nations, plus his clear attempts in his previous administration to ban any immigration from any Muslim country.

Re: Not a good situation

Check the border figures for Oct/Nov/Dec 2024 and prepare to be amazed - it's almost like Biden solved the problem before Trump was elected, and Trump is riding his coat tails...

Except now that the system is not letting people progress, due to "indefinite pauses" on certain applications at any stage of progress (including some people having their citizenship ceremonies cancelled on the day of the ceremony).

So when the system says "there's no legal way for you to be here even though there was yesterday" then what can you do? After 5, 10, 15, 20 years living in a country, with your family there, your life there, your job there, just to get kicked out and treated like a criminal.

The system no longer works for people, so why should people work with the system?

Anyone in this situation essentially either needs to hand themselves in now and be deported (since they can't deport themselves voluntarily as they'll be "arrested" at the airport), or go into basically permanent hiding and hope that ICE don't find them.

Windows Insiders get a glimpse of Microsoft’s agentic future

Re: Wrong

1. Some of the sheep

With apologies to Sir pTerry

UK moves to strengthen undersea cable defenses as Russian snooping ramps up

Re: Whose word must we take?

...in this (the 21st) century.

Server prices set to jump 15% as memory costs spike

Re: Yay!

Thing is with eBay selling you need:

1. Supplies to properly package whatever you're selling

b) Some shipment method - either pay more for a courier to collect from home (which means you have to be in during normal working hours) or go to a post office/parcel point

֍ the willingness to accept eBay taking a slice of your profits as seller fees

iv.) the willingness to deal with the general crapness of people. Admittedly this isn't as bad on eBay as other places like Farcebook Marketplace but you still get people trying to message you to relist for much less than it's worth (if selling at a fixed price) or giving you ridiculous offers (if using "make an offer" on a "buy it now" price) or cancel the auction and they'll pay you less than it was going to sell for if you let the auction complete etc, or scammers claiming they didn't receive the item or that it's broken or that you've mis-sold something.

Personally I don't often see it as worth the hassle but I suppose it depends on how much you're likely to make on a part and how much faff/risk you want to take.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Re: WTF?

They do, it's called Windows Enterprise or Windows LTSC and you can basically turn off anything you like in it.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Re: There's no slowing down this fecal train

VMWare Workstation PLAYER always used to be free, the actual workstation product was not. Otherwise why would these people I know who I don't know the names of and who are definitely not me have to torrent the latest version in order to get it for years?

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: Landlords!

Some places have delivery fees on digital goods like license keys - it's ridiculous but they'd justify it by saying it pays for their digital infrastructure to serve the requests.

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Hi, I'm Vinny Slick of Bent and Oily Law Associates!

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: Guess What, Genius

Don't you mean change the design? A requirements document should say "we want the system to be able to do x" not "this is how the system will do x". The design should say how.

Re: Left unexplained, for now, is exactly how intense solar radiation corrupts data.

Except it's not the job of the BBC to explain something based on their supposition of the situation when facts are involved, it's their job to report what the facts are that they're presented with.

And if Airbus and EASA aren't saying, then the BBC can't report the explanation that they've given. That's why they said "Left UNEXPLAINED" - I.E. no one has explained it to the BBC, not that the BBC doesn't know how it COULD have happened. Facts are important in journalism, especially these days.

Tiny tweak for Pi OS, big makeover for the Imager

we're a mole-person who ought to use sonar in the comments

US Navy scuttles Constellation frigate program for being too slow for tomorrow's threats

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

True, but in WW2 those ships would have also had extensive armour and 6 to 8 inch guns numbering from 6 to 12 (roughly from memory), plus very large and cumbersome fire direction equipment including early RADAR sets which took up a lot of internal volume with their computing equipment (such as it was at the time). The crew was also usually a lot larger as you needed more extensive teams to man the guns (both primary, secondary, and anti-aircraft) and run more cumbersome and finnicky engineering equipment.

These days a lot of internal volume is taken up by "optional" spaces - spaces where you can fit containerised silos for missiles, spaces for mission-specific equipment, spaces to fit marines/soldiers/police if required (police for anti-drug-smuggling operations etc), and spaces for future systems which haven't been designed yet but which may be fitted in the future (this lesson was well learned from WW2 and subsequent years when ships were too small to retrofit technological advances), and spaces for aircraft.

Automation has done away with a lot of the previous crew requirements - the Queen Elizabeth class carriers of the UK for example use automation extensively in the magazines meaning they're mostly unmanned now, saving dozens to hundreds of crew over older US designs where these stores are handled manually. And of course on smaller ships missiles are stored in their firing position so don't require handling at all at sea, and the primary gun mounts are usually automatic.

So whilst the ships may be the same size, they're packing a much bigger punch now than their predecessors but the crew is a similar size to an old destroyer.

Plus things have always been classified oddly, ever since people started changing the definition of what a "ship of the line" was in the 1700s.

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Re: Paying a premium for fuel

"What we should be doing is renting our snowploughs when we need them!"

Turns out that every council then would rent from a contractor who rents them from another contractor down a massive chain until you arrive at a guy called Dave who drives a tractor with a shovel on the front who will "get to you when he can" as he's "busy clearing the M4"

CISA warns spyware crews are breaking into Signal and WhatsApp accounts

Re: Somebody tell the FCC

Without wishing in any way to defend the current administration, I feel I must point out that you'd be hard pressed to get any similar response out of any US administration, or a UK one come to that.

Worth noting that the FCC has been gutted and redirected for years by subsequent administrations, and on this side of the pond the UK parliament has demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of anything technical on a number of occasions, and has thus not been able to legislate effectively about it.

Russian spy ship theories sink after Orkney blackout traced to wind farm fault

Re: Chain of dependencies

Make sure you raise that phone issue with the provider and your local MP - they're supposed to have backup batteries and/or generators etc to keep phone masts running so if they're not and you don't have any means of summoning help then that's a clear service failing on their part.

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

Re: I have some old phones

I guess because in the UK at least they're designed to operate on 90V DC and engineers back then envisioned lines being struck by lightning so everything inside is much more protected than a little 12V/5V router with basically no shielding except on the ethernet side when it steps up to 48V.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: you need an incinerator

That's not the point. The point is that you must comply with the rule in the way the rule is written, otherwise if something does go wrong you're the one up in front of a tribunal/court/court martial arguing why you thought your system was better than the one proscribed.

Arse covering is strong in government circles.

Re: In my experience...

They rely on two principles to secure their data:

1. The data is encrypted on the chips with AES-256 or higher

2. The chip holding the encryption keys is glued to the case such that if you attempt to get the circuit board out the chip with the keys is destroyed, rendering the data unrecoverable.

3. That if given physical access to a device any adversary can overcome any protection you put in place, so you store and account for the drive such that if it's ever stored data of a high enough sensitivity then it never leaves the secured facility ever again unless it's shredded into tiny pieces or melted into slag.

Three. Three principles. And nice red uniforms oh damn...

Re: Or...

Proper encrypted drives to my knowledge just accomplish physical destruction by glueing the encryption chip to the surrounding case - if you prise the case away you also destroy the keys by destroying the chip they're stored in, which should be sufficient to protect the data on the storage.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Those were the innocent days...

I’m all green (hot patch)

Called a Penguin and Chameleon

I’m all green (hot patch)

Call Torvalds and Kroah-Hartman

It’s too hot (hot patch)

Yo, say my name you know who I am

It’s too hot (hot patch)

I ain’t no simple code monkey

Nuthin’s down

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: Pennies

Anyone remember what happened to MySpace, AltaVista etm?

Something "better" came along in the form of FaceBook or blogger etc. What's the "better" thing with OSes right now?

As much as it pains me to say it it's unlikely to be Linux or the BSDs because they're too fragmented and difficult for entry-level people to get into. Apple has it's own system already and it's own market so it's not going to be that or it would have happened by now.

What does that leave us with?

Re: They should rebrand it

Windows 12 will probably be called Microsoft 365 EntraOS or something stupid.

Re: RE: Walmart, Target or Amazon

Welcome to my life, the modern world, where you need to go to 5 different shops to get what you want or need :sigh:

And people in the 1880s or 1920s or 1960s didn't need to go to different stores, like the hardware store for tools and fixtures/fittings or the lumberyard for wood, or the grocers for fresh fruit & veg, or the butchers for meat, or the bakers for bread etc?

It's only modern convenience of the last 20 years that put all of those things under one big roof, and then only really in the USA (at least on the scale of Wal*Wart). Before that, you did have to visit different shops, who served you individually. Supermarkets started wrapping together all the food/grocery items in the 1970s/80s into one store, and then expanded into other non-food-related goods later on.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

Re: Confused Old Person Here....Again!

Think PCs running ATMs or attached to medical scanners (lots of which still run XP!) or industrial machinery or air conditioning systems or access control systems etc.

Or servers running on warships or airbases or missile silos etc...

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

Re: I ask the other way around...

I think I'll put this thing right here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp8hvyjZWHs

FTFY

Re: WHAT?!?

Sadly AWS are never going to introduce a hard cap when it's not in their interests to do so - unintended overspend like this is how they make profit and they're not going to turn that off unless they absolutely have to. Note that they forgave 40% of the cost, meaning they still had 60% of the unintended revenue paid to them for basically doing no work. Yes some persistent disk space was consumed but I'm sure with their advanced systems they were quick to archive this off somewhere to cheap storage so most of that 60% was pure profit.