Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

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.

Meta convinces Blue Owl to cut $30B check for its Hyperion AI super cluster

Re: For when the AI bubble bursts...

I look forward to advances in AI tech but I can't see most of these mega-projects being profitable. The costs are insane, the hardware depreciation is instant, and the revenue isn't even figured out. These billion dollar datacenters will obsolete money-pits before there's a product ready.

Some like it bot! ChatGPT promises AI-rotica is coming for verified adults

The 1980s called

Do we have to log in or will there be a good old pay-per-minute phone number? Will the advertising for these services help sponsor daytime TV programming?

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

Best backups

Extreme redundancy, globally distributed backups. Rest assured that your data can never be accidentally deleted.

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Re: Trapped

OK, so some apps don't work anymore. Big deal. Let the apps die. Why would you log in to a service with Google when account take-overs are so frequent?

My credit union allows rooted phones for their app, and they don't even require you to use their app.

Killing AOSP

This is to brutally kill off AOSP. Google always say they're crippling Android for security, but it's never about security.

Google restricts which APIs apps in Play Store may use. They keep the apps a bit crippled to force more usage of Google services and Google data collection. App stores like F-Droid also check what an app is doing, but only for security and privacy. They have no interest in crippling phones.

A mandatory Google developer license in every app from everywhere gives Google the power to silence any developer using APIs that Google doesn't like. You created an efficient peer-to-peer filesystem that makes Google Cloud look stupid? You might find that suddenly your license is dead and all your apps are dead. For security, of course. Google can make it so nobody even bothers contributing to AOSP anymore.

I'll never again buy another phone with a locked bootloader. Google and Android are dead to me.

Oracle saddles up with $18B debt amid AI infrastructure gamble

Re: Buy now, pay later

Execs never lose when they burn their company to the ground. They have preferred stock and severance packages. They can shuffle stock ownership to hide insider trading, and even sacrifice some shares to pretend like they were caught off guard. They can ask fools to fund a new project, and they get money again.

Scattered Spider gang feigns retirement, breaks into bank instead

Re: Maybe

You don't use a US bank if you want to keep your money safe. Low yields and service fees of at least $50/month are common.

AMD tries to catch CUDA with performance-boosting ROCm 7 software

Re: Patiently waiting....

Darktable uses OpenCL. It's pretty quick on 42Mpix camera.

For me, it's a matter of which driver installs on Linux successfully and without causing it to no longer boot. I'm done with NVIDIA. The kernel, the default Python, the GPU driver, and the CUDA client have to be perfectly matched or you're getting a trashed system. Have that USB stick ready. Maybe you finally get it working but discover that you can no longer turn off your computer due to a driver bug. Yay, you get to do it all over again.

Criminals broke into the system Google uses to share info with cops

I don't believe you

"No requests were made with this fraudulent account, and no data was accessed."

That's what hacked companies always say before the data goes up for sale.

Mega-and-MAGA deals position Oracle's Larry Ellison to overtake Elon

Musky can always use his goons to hack systems that Larry outsourced to the cheapest workers. Who wouldn't want to watch a long battle where they destroy each other?

Ubuntu users left waiting after Canonical's servers take weekend off

Trust us, everything is fine

I'd be really concerned if an hour of downtime caused a two day outage, but maybe that's just me.

Or is it an hour of outage that caused two days of downtime? I'm not sure which way the doublespeak goes.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

If they go bankrupt, I'm sure the execs will feel terrible the whole time they're unemployed and traveling the world with their luxurious wealth.

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Re: MAGA

It doesn't prohibit you from being at your employer either. You can visit, have lunch with your coworkers, participate in celebrations, and attend some general information meetings.

Re: No raids in hotels and golf courses?

Maybe some underage too.

Re: A whole shitshow from start to finish

The factory was probably symbolic to make Trump happy. It wouldn't surprise me if Hyundai and LG closed it and told 'Murica to import everything and enjoy those tariffs.

Salesforce sacrifices 4,000 support jobs on the altar of AI

Re: The Great LLM crash will be brutal

The actual impact is retirement investment accounts of ordinary people becoming worthless. 401K plans tend to be scams because there's no guarantee of any money being made or returned. They're essentially a huge amount of play money for investment firms to manipulate the stock market with.

Re: Keep filling the pool

Obviously you hire those 4000 people back at 60% of their original salary then fire the more expensive "old timers" that survived the previous round of terminations. Then repeat.

This is what all the big tech companies have been doing for years. The COVID unemployment blip was what they needed to get it started. A government that favors wealth inequality keeps it going. AI is the social excuse to justify it.

Tesla Model Ys recalled Down Under for overly enthusiastic electric windows

Re: You are doing it wrong

You need the option to sever fingers for Musk's zombie apocalypse scenario.

And by zombie apocalypse, we mean ordinary people demanding a living wage from the wealthy.

Frostbyte10 bugs put thousands of refrigerators at major grocery chains at risk

Re: If Russia had exploited this ...

Definitely. The nuclear winter attack is making freezers ice up. Even if you fix the hack, the food will spoil before defrost finishes.

AMD Ryzen CPUs fry twice in the face of heavy math load, GMP says

Re: Is There Any Automatic Thermal and Clock Management ?

My suspicion is that a lot of failures are caused by BIOS disabling everything except the 99C temperature limit. Under those conditions, the hottest point in the package might not be where the thermal sensor is.

ASUS definitely turns some throttles off. With the ASUS BIOS defaults, my 7950X can hit the 99C thermal throttle with a liquid cooler.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

Or Full Self Driving.

One little feature request

Please give these phones a specially reserved block of MAC addresses for cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth. To publicly show support, of course.

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Googley eyes are watching, Googley lips are whispering

Damn, that phone sounds like a privacy and manipulation nightmare.

Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power

Re: To everything its season

That privacy policy.

Patch now: Millions of Dell PCs with Broadcom chips vulnerable to attack

Something that has never, ever, happened before in a secretive chip that mysteriously improves security. /s

Perplexity vexed by Cloudflare's claims its bots are bad

They're all lazy

I've already firewalled a few networks for hosting bad bots. Netcup GmbH is dead to me. Amazon got several promotions from SMTP to full block too.

At the same time, I'm tired of every Cloudflare user asking me if I'm a bot every few minutes. Add some damn persistence. It's a static IP address.

ISS is still leaking air after latest repair efforts fail

Re: Might be missing something here

There's no smoke in a vacuum.

I put a tiny electric motor in a vacuum chamber to see how fast it could go with no wind resistance and a lot of extra electricity. I never saw any smoke in the chamber despite all the hot parts evaporating. The pump sure stank.

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

No puppy-sized hornets

Of course they would have abandoned the normal sized nest for something larger.

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

Re: All because

Larry says he's building free and open public transportation by bus. People help maintain the bus, people help plan routes, and people build bus stops. Larry says the bus is always free but it travels on some Oracle toll roads that cost $200/person. You'll need to be vary careful about where you get on and off of the bus, or you can pay a $100000 annual bus toll pass.

Elon outs $16.5B Samsung chip deal Tesla asked to keep secret

Commitments change

Is this one of those times where everone says big deals are happening but they aren't? What is the follow-through rate on multi-billion dollar PR announcements?

My bet is that Tesla doesn't have the money and Samsung doesn't have the building plans, but the announcement sounds good. Maybe it's for the senile orange guy to hear.

AI industry's size obsession is killing ROI, engineer argues

Re: Capitalism 101

There are few executives that don't end up comfortably wealthy after hyping a company that's clearly a failure. Elizabeth Holmes only made the mistake of faking verifiable data. You have to stick with the intangible hype.

I wonder how Magic Leap is doing...

$380M lawsuit claims intruder got Clorox's passwords from Cognizant simply by asking

Re: Password

That worked for e-trade some time back. They recommended a Symantec 2FA app that prohibited backups. It locked people out so often they they'd do a login reset without much of an identity challenge.