Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

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).

Generic methods arrive in Golang, but they weren't the top dev demand

Re: Here we "go" again...

Go created its own problems by having so many insane fanatics. They must use Go even where it doesn't fit, so everyone around them wishes it was more like the languages that should have been used. The maintainers of Go insist that it's perfect and you're doing it wrong. It easily became my least favourite modern software language.

Qualcomm, Nvidia ready for 'AI-native' 6G, if only the world knew what it was

A sequel of the characters you don't like

I thought 5G has all of that AI edge support, but nobody wants it. The spectrum efficiency boost is great and some telcos are even phasing out LTE. The rest of the 5G features are silly.

I guess every patent troll on Earth wants a piece of 6G licensing. Over here in America, we doomed our broadcast TV upgrade by cramming it full of DRM, interactive ads, and patent trolling.

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

Re: Even though it’s Google, SerpApi deserve to lose

DMCA has been used in cases where bypassing security meant viewing the source of the web page or incrementing/decrementing a user ID in a query parameter. It's a free pass for companies to throw anyone in jail.

PayPal app code error leaked personal info and a 'few' unauthorized transactions

That was the sales pitch right from the start. It's just like an online bank, but with unchecked fraud.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Re: Running joke

At least we can all stop saying "blockchain."

Investors shove another $30B into the Anthropic money furnace

Re: Magical Thinking

Theranos literally contradicted information theory in their job descriptions, but it didn't matter. Big investors can get out early while conning the small ones to stay.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Been here for decades

Isn't this how the cheapest remote contractors work? It's an infinite loop of telling them to fix bugs, and they write more random code?

I've seen contractor projects balloon to millions of lines of very enterprisey code without it ever compiling. It's the sign that it's time to leave where you're working.

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

Re: History doesn't repeat itself

Don't forget the late 90s when companies were declaring that their customer base in 10 years would grow to be far greater than the projected population of Earth in 10 years. All the employees were scared, but investors totally didn't care.

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

I use compressed air

I bought an air compressor that doesn't use oil lubrication, I make sure there's no water in the tank, I use a soft-tipped air gun, I regulate the air pressure, and I tested it on lots of things that weren't expensive.

That checklist seems like common sense.

Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year

This is what you get when your codebase is several generations older than empliee tenure, and then you throw AI at it.

The way forward is to start moving the OS into a legacy environment like WINE. Start over fresh with a really good team of real Software Engineers, and don't lay them off just to fudge quarterly profits.

Yeah, I know it can't happen. AI the #&@% out of it with cheap prompt crafters.

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Even with proper due process, Cloudflare would still ignore the request to shut anything down, or stall it until it's irrelevant. They sell protection from online organized crime. They know who's really driving business.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Samsung and AI

"Open the fridge"

- "Are you hungry?"

"Duh"

- "UberEats is offering you a special discount tonight. What would you like?"

"!@$% Uber and open the door before I rip it open"

- "This is inappropriate and I don't feel safe. I'm uploading this audio to corporate. Your warranty is now void."

- "Error 0x03AFE2307131.003 please service immedi84//2//0"

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Or use something else that exists now

Object escape analysis can figure out the scope of many local objects while GC takes care of shared objects.

Wasn't there a project for a compact Java runtime? Imagine all the runtime optimizations that could be performed if you're not trying to benchmark well with gigabytes of bloated "enterprise" code (Spring Boot).

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

Re: Going fishing

Or launch silicon carbide sand into orbit and watch the LEO region turn to dust.

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Re: The real reason nobody wants to use it

The extra IPv6 addresses are disposable client addresses for privacy. It makes client tracking, fingerprinting, and hacking more difficult. It's an optional feature that can be switched off.

Accused data thief threw MacBook into a river to destroy evidence

Re: If paranoid is your starting point !!!!

Slate bars work well too. I use one to erase old electronics that won't power up anymore.

SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year

Spending spree

It's brave to assume that AGI will be solved by the time the billions of dollars of hardware investments are ready. I would instead bet on AGI being solved after that hardware is obsolete. Then what? Old supercomputers aren't worth much because their operating costs are too high.

Amazon blocked 1,800 suspected North Korean scammers seeking jobs

How many?

A lot of people are out of a job and can't get their resume seen but Amazon had to turn away 1800 North Koreans after background checks? Did they sort the applicant list by desired salary, lowest to highest?

Damn, another fake. Such a shame because they only wanted $4k a year.

Apple, Google forced to issue emergency 0-day patches

Re: Thanky for the reminder

I've never understood Apple software updates. Minor bugs fixed is 4+ GB, 45+ minutes of installation with a locked screen, and three reboots to install. The more Apple brags about their fast hardware, the sillier it is for minor updates to take so long.

These are about 15 seconds on Linux and you only need a reboot for a new kernel. Not even major updates take 45 minutes. You can even technically still use the computer during a major update (your apps will quit when they're replaced).

Disney turns to dark side, licenses IP to OpenAI for videos, images

Re: Err?

So, more circular investments?

700+ self-hosted Gits battered in 0-day attacks with no fix imminent

1980 called

They said stop mixing up files and symlinks for untrusted file paths.

I don't like Go enough to know it well, but isn't fixing this as easy as setting a bit-flag in a file API call? If you wanted to be really fancy, only follow symlinks if they are immutable and owned by an administrator. That's maybe 5 lines of code

Cloudflare blames Friday outage on borked fix for React2shell vuln

A fix so critical...

There's no time for testing. There's no time for rules.

Push it Friday and run for your life.

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

OK, Reg

The original article has some great information and I think I know why The Register doesn't link to it. Endpoint https:// api.extensionplay dot com /clean_master/t.json?t=Date.now() and other domains are still up and running long after everywhere else has purged it. Up an running on a service that The Register is often quick to defend.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

AI can does amazing things, but it's a long way from general intelligence. If anything, Microsoft's LinkedIn should be the textbook example of a corporation not understanding how to use AI. Even when doing simpler tasks like code assistance, AI mistakes negate many advantages. Especially the sneaky, subtle mistakes that slip by if you trust AI too much.

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

I have a product idea

Ordinary thumb drive bundled with a hammer. If you're a spy, you can even try erasing some enemies with the hammer before the drive.

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

Musk and long-term goals?

Musk will quit, say it was rigged, say everyone at Tesla is incompetent, and sue for his un-earned money.

AMD red-faced over random-number bug that kills cryptographic security

Sounds like a test feature that didn't get turned off. The best way to test a pseudo random number generator is by setting the seed and validating the pattern it produces.

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: I only use Windows for work

The underlying problem is that corporations will treat you as poorly as they can if you stubbornly keep returning as a customer.

Leaving them for better solutions is exactly the right thing to do.

Nvidia adds AI peanut butter to Nokia's 6G network chocolate, throws in $1 billion

Re-failing the lessons of 5G

• Higher bandwidth efficiency is good and this is the only reason anyone upgraded to 5G
• Nobody cars about ultra-fast high bands with unusable range
• 5G resulted in lots of neighborhood small cells, none of which have edge compute
• Radio physics still exists and uninterrupted mobile data still doesn't exist
• Most of the 5G specifications will never be used

And here's 6G to build upon everything that was a failure in 5G. Absolutely no telco is going to use edge compute yet. Possibly some day, but not in the lifespan of 5G or 6G.

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

"they have never had a global outage"

Some types of instances are effectively unavailable outside of us-east-1. It's a global outage unless you're wealthy enough to purchase dedicated hardware elsewhere.

AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M

Re: LinkedIn declined???

LinkedIn is where Microsoft throws dumb AI ideas to see what sticks. None, so far. It's a parody of itself.

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: Who actually uses Hibernation?

Hibernation is a good response to your UPS saying power reserves are getting low. Sleep can still consume 20+ watts and it won't survive a power outage.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

I guess AI was still up

The headline image gives me a headache.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/10/21/smart_home.jpg

Re: The answer?

Yes, but Home Assistant is written in Python so getting it stable and secure on an existing server can be quite a circus. It's possible but they'd prefer that you buy their box.

Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized

Re: if mobile Linux wants to succeed and prosper, it needs to...

The lack of flagships is the killer. You can run crippled Android on a phone with 24GB RAM and 1TB storage, or full power Linux on a phone with just 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. Old LTE or NSA 5G phones won't cut it either, since the LTE bandwidth in the US is already being shifted to 5G.

Android sucks more every release. Each time I hope that manufacturers are motivated to unlock their bootloader or fork the OS to free themselves from Google.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: Multi Region for a Reason

Multi-region is hard and it's expensive at AWS. Software has to deal with high latency, bandwidth fees, and multi-region consistency. Also, us-east-1 seems to host some AWS internal systems, so being in a different region doesn't mean everything keeps working.