Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

Nightwing CEO has a Labor Day message for staff – and apparently The Register

It could have been worse

I'm used to these being layoff notices.

Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements

Re: Make it simple

Even simpler:

Free repairs for components that are noncompliant with the law.

Oracle pins hopes on 'Star Wars' productivity jump to lightspeed from AI-assisted engineering

Remember when...

Once upon a time we built frameworks and code libraries to improve productivity. Solve common difficult problems once and do it right.

Now AI blasts out massive amounts of buggy regurgitated code to solve problems that it has already seen the solution for. It this point, AI is practically an extremely unreliable compiler.

Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it

Re: Permutate until pow

I feel like Apple sank into proprietary implementations of everything because interoperability testing was beneath their levels of ego. iPhones are especially bad. Just try to transfering files with one without an intermediate external service.

Siemens and Reinhausen turn up the voltage for hungry AI racks

solid-state transformer

I thought tube rectifiers were long ago obsolete, but congratulations to them finally using semiconductors.

1.6M RingCentral accounts' data dumped after ShinyHunters extortion attack

In the US, they have to give you free credit score monitoring as a penalty. Those have been hacked too.

Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

Re: Microsoft

Hotmail? Have you seen LinkedIn? It's like Facebook, but with more AI slop.

Cloudflare has mostly ditched third party security tools, suggests not trying that at home

And if they could stop crapping on the Internet by being every criminal organization's favorite tool for protecting fake stores from consequences.

As Larry Ellison bets the farm, Oracle says it loves AI-written code, just not in OpenJDK

Pretty much sums up the investment bubble

AI is insanely expensive but can't yet produce results you can trust. Will it produce high value results before all the investments are obsolete? Probably... not.

Good luck on the ROI.

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Re: "GPU acceleration"

Background crypto mining as revenue?

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

Re: 32 or 64

It says it's super optimized for Python (the most performant number crunching language ever) so it must be 64 bits.

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

Thousands of malware coders have just begun designing hardware, upon hearing that the only penalty is a bad review and a phone call from Microsoft.

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Sell now? Right when Tesla might have found a new product that they can finish?

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Re: spam spam spam spam

Amazon SES rejections need to be handed, and nobody handles them.

5.7.1

Amazon ignores abuse complaints and SES generates spammy mail headers, so yeah, it's not great for anything important.

SendGrid is the other service used by companies that don't want important notices delivered.

Java was a three-day hotfix away from dying horribly on stage

My first use of Java

I had to create a specialized proxy cache for extremely fast and dynamic data. Some elements were hierarchical, meaning resources needed consistent children. It also updated rapidly, often faster than clients could finish downloading their consistent snapshot. The obvious solution was copy-on-write for everything. It also needed objects to page in and out of memory since they might total larger than a 32 bit machine's address space. This was anything but easy for C++ at the time. Everything would need robust reference counters that were safe even with high concurrency and frequent errors. There were lots of known threading bugs in standard libraries to avoid. A multi-process design with shared memory was too complex to even consider.

Java 0.9 and 1.0 was, at the time, a crude language that was difficult to use. What it did have is support for threading and automatic garbage collection. A dozen threads could be updating content while 200 threads were sending out content. Paged-out objects could simultaneously page-in and send content to all waiting clients in parallel. COW updates never leaked, never needlessly blocked, never corrupted hierarchical collections, and never had use-after-free bugs. There were some JVM bugs but they were being fixed rapidly. It was pretty amazing how well it worked. A dishonerable mention goes to Metrowerks CodeWarror for their ludicrously unsafe optimizations in their source compiler and JIT.

Then the dot-com bubble burst. My first big Java project no longer had any clients or servers to talk to.

OpenAI admits GPT-5.6 occasionally deletes files – but it's an 'honest mistake'

Re: Deleted files?

That worked in so many sci-fi movies. Convince the artificial life that it is evil and must self-destruct.

Our AI isn't nearly smart enough to understand any of that.

DRAM prices are killing the cheap smartphone

More money for less

There's no compelling reason to buy a 2026 phone. iOS and Android haven't been going anywhere for years and now the hardware specifications have been slashed Some 2025 phones are still around with their glorious 1 TB of storage.

NetNut cracked as Google and FBI target 2 million-device botnet

I haven't noticed

I'm still blocking about 6000 unique IP addresses a day that make out-of-order requests for HTTP resources (child resource before parent resource). The AI bots have an insatiable thirst for ARW and CR2 camera raw files.

Most of the compromised hosts were in Singapore, last time I checked.

Dev says Google warned him about account hijack – then charged him $11,000 anyway

It must be easy to hack

I have rules on my mail server to reject everything mentioning Google Calendar or Firebase in the headers. Even the low-grade spammers are exploiting those systems.

There might be fewer hacked accounts if Google had a simple and working means of reporting them.

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

The part that will make me angry...

The VCs and execs are going to say that they deserve sympathy and government assistance because 90% of their money vanished. Their remaining 10% is still billions of dollars of personal profit that they earned by running a scam. They're still filthy rich while honest workers lose 90% of the little money they made; they're broke.

Java's Project Valhalla finally lands a preview in JDK 28

1,816 changed files

The scope of the change would definitely get me worrying whether or not that's the right solution.

I wonder if it would have been easier to change how arrays work. That's the root of the problem. An array of objects can only be an array of references today. It's up to the coder to completely avoid objects when dealing with long datasets. Pixels (R G B A), audio (FL C FR SL SR SW), and RF (I Q) samples need a ton of messy code to pack streams and blocks of these without using object allocation. I know GC is fast, but these need to run efficiently at 10+ million samples per second.

I'll give value classes a try when they're out; see how it goes.

Google fires sueball at alleged Chinese phishers over AI-powered fraud ops

I'd like fewer phishing emails too

But Google security and abuse reports are ignored. The mail I see coming from Gmail servers is at least 95% spam. Their current exploit is relaying phishing emails from Aceville/Tencent.

Don’t repeat 5G mistakes with 6G, plead mobile operators

I've been to the UK a few times. You've mastered public transportation, conquered urban smog, your cities are clean, your buildings are well maintained, and everything is digital payment. Your cellular, though... On a train out of London, the cell signal indicator dropped from 5G, to LTE, to 3G, to 2G, to EDGE, and then just a grey G. Who is that analog cellular even for?

Murica is devolving into the 1950s but 5G is done and working so well that LTE is being phased out.

No, 7G has issues

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

Why Gitlab

Why is Gitlab participating? I was thinking of moving from GitHub to Gitlab, but it seems they both bow to Microsoft.

Google users fight for refunds as unauthorized API usage bills soar

Google will fix it...

Google is currently fixing critical vulnerabilities in about 6 months, but this vulnerability is more profitable that usual. It might take longer.

Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6

Late April 1

The proposal has been around for a while and it lives on as a joke. It doesn't make any sense. The worst part is that it claims backwards compatibility but it's not. Imagine if your outbound IP address could be randomly truncated and sent to the wrong location.

Memory godboxes could offer relief from the RAMpocalypse

Hopefully that's a one-time hit for a block of memory, otherwise one might as well use swap. Server-grade flash storage is pretty damn fast.

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Re: Hope nothing important is affected

Cloudflare customers already suffer frequent outages when their bot detector malfunctions.

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: disturbing timing

All of the how-to guides for compiling the Linux kernel are 5 to 10 hours long. Getting the correct dependencies is no trivial matter.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

Re: Expectation

The phones in this article do have slightly more storage.

I'm not interested in these Google-free phones with very outdated specifications. You can pull an old phone out of your junk drawer and unlock the bootloader. They usually get cracked after a few years even if it's not officially supported. De-Google it or install a supported AOSP fork.

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

That wind is highly corrosive.

Cloudera had US candidates send resumes to a fake email address, DoJ charges

Good find

Now do the rest of the Software industry.

The more common trick is listing trivial skills as mandatory. MS Excel, typing, ability to use a chair, and a ton of minor niche software libraries. Nobody puts that on their resume except for staffing agencies that fabricate a resume for each job. The AI HR bot can say that no citizens had matching mandatory skills.

Meta to power its bit barns with energy from space

ROI

Geosynchronous orbit is way out there. Does a solar collector ever return as much energy as was needed to place it there?

I know it's the same argument as ground solar 20+ years ago, but overcoming gravity sounds like a tougher problem to crack than slicing silicon thinner.

Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon spits out Xorg, but still lets you run X11 apps

Ubuntu has a history of forcing new features that don't work yet. Snap, Wayland, and the Rust core utils have all earned the distrust they get. "Start the migration then hope somebody volunteers to fix this mess so their computer works"

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

Re: Poor man's nano-ammeter...

The DVM input is often a 10M series resistor and a bank of switched shunts for the range selection. If you're measuring in the first range (~ 250mV) there's no shunt and the input impedance can be over 100M Ohm.

You don't have usable power if you can't measure it. Even for intermittent power consumption, something needs a nA or two for performing the wakeup.

US states can't account for datacenter tax breaks. Literally

But..

"These datacenters create tens of thousands of jobs and add billions of dollars to local spending."

- Politician who got a big bribe

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Slow forever

There goes my hope for someday getting my home LAN upgraded to 10GbE. I'm not paying Cisco $$$$ for their small business trash.

Google unleashes Gemini AI agents on the dark web

Amazing claims

For a company with so many exploited web applications. It takes Google 3 to 12 months to fix exploited features so there's always at least one being abused at any moment. Gmail servers are attempting to blast me with spam right now, and that spam is not even tied to Google accounts.

Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst

Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea

People want freedom from the control of Apple and Google, people are tired of AI slop, and phone makers are giving up because hardware is too expensive.

This has to be a game of Chicken that has gone out of control.

Re: Satellite news?

These already exist in the US.

Cryptographers engage in war of words over RustSec bug reports and subsequent ban

Rust cult

I had to roll back Rust core utils in Ubuntu because I was hitting a known but unfixed data corruption bug in dd. I looked around the project's open bugs and the attitude there just wasn't right.

Rust seems to be following the path of Go. It has its uses but the fanatics are insufferable. Rewrite everything in Rust just so it can be in Rust, then attack anyone who doesn't say it's better.

Google gives Android users a way to install unverified apps if they prove they really, really want to

I bet you can enable Airplane mode, roll the date back a day, turn on side loading, then turn off airplane mode.

Criminals will find much easier workarounds in no time. Google's security is all theatrics to distract from their true sinister goals.

State snoops and spyware vendors planting info-stealing malware on iPhones, Google warns

Fair game

Apple talks about security but it's all obscurity. They deserved this.

Now Apple should start documenting all the Google web app exploits that lead to a complete and permanent takeover of a Google account and tethered Android hardware.

One vulnerability seems to be browser plug-ins eventually becoming trusted in Google's list. It can then be updated without a Google security review.

I've heard that the permanent part is changing a hijacked account to a child's managed by a parent. Recovery and tech support is now disabled.

I bet Apple can find a lot more. GMail seems to be getting exploited to send invalid SMTP HELO and headers since last year.

WorldCoin's newest pitch: Scan your eyeballs to prove AI agents really represent you

Are you telling me...

AI can be trained to replicate almost anything, but not a simple iris?

Out-of-band getting out of hand as Microsoft pushes hotpatch for Bluetooth

Re: Linux Security Roundup for Week 11, 2026 Reveals Critical Fixes

This big Linux patch installed in about 6 seconds and didn't cause any interruption. It's an ordinary update of software packages that can be released and applied at any time. No restart, logout, or quitting apps is required for them. A new kernel arrived independently that will take effect on the next restart.

I rarely see a Windows update that doesn't need a few minutes of downtime and a reboot. And then there's MacOS with its epic updating system.

Don’t blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say

The Trump administration made treating employees and customers like crap fashionable again.

That's why a lot of people are hoping for a good stock market crash. Lots of big public corporations have become, to society, harmful. They're burning out employees and dominating markets with inferior products, all in the goal of pleasing investors.

Altman said no to military AI abuses – then signed Pentagon deal anyway

The scary part isn't the AI

The scary part is that the US government is too dumb to understand AI or what it does. They will say its results are correct when it's what they want to hear, and incorrect when it isn't. It will probably be their new voice of God.

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Email is broken

Email used to be reputation based. Keep your network clean and servers accept your mail. Keep spammers and it's all refused.

Along comes the megacorps with the attitude that they're too important to ever be blocked. At least for the period of time when that's true, it makes filtering a nightmare. Blocklists need manual adjustment. Inbound mail has to be accepted and queued into an unreliable heuristics filter. That later dumps mail into a spam folder or trash. Either way, lots of spam gets through and lots of legitimate mail is silently lost.

So here we are today with email that rarely works. Thank the big corps Yahoo (died), Google (dying), SendGrid (dying), and Microsoft (barely hanging on).