Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: Have to wait in UK...

No, AFAIK it's banned since 2020 or so, except for heritage lines. They might still do it but in my experience they just keep the in-carriage toilets locked. No-one wants to do track maintenance if those trains are allowed.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Back around 1991 I remember a friend who discovered nmap and similarly left it running over the weekend to scan the company network. In those days it was a reasonable-sized company with 10k+ employees across international offices.

He had not realised that the way the network was configured allowed his exploration to leave the internal network and reach the wider internet (simpler times).

He came back on Monday morning to find a much larger database than he had expected, and a shocking number of 'interesting' systems discovered. He (just) resisted the temptation to send spoof jobs to the many printers discovered as well. As far as we know, IT never noticed.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Re: No. AI could encourage you in everything you do – just small comments to lift your self-esteem

The Creeper virus dates from 1971, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms

Re: building PA system.

Are we talking Public Address or Personal Assistant here?

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Re: ... Meta underestimated the effect those features can have on users...

Preying on the strong tends to have adverse effects...

Scot NHS Trust probes email stuffup involving maternity patients' data

And if it was a junior, their manager should be the one dismissed, for lack of training and supervision.

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

If a UPS could do it...

... why wouldn't a generator also have been a possibility?

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: Simple solution

Nice bit of whataboutery, but irrelevant.

Re: Simple solution

Shop theft is most certainly NOT a victimless crime. Every item stolen from a shop puts up its costs, both directly for the stolen item and indirectly for the additional security needed to stop the theft. Those costs are passed on to the honest customers. At over £2bn per year total in the UK, that's well over £100 added to the average annual shop for each of us. The victims of shop theft are every single customer of the shop.

If you're going to be that paranoid about it you might as well worry about all the CCTV around which doesn't have facial recognition attached, it's no longer an FR issue.

As long as they buy the stuff, won't that mean the technology has served its purpose of deterring theft?

Europe's new import rules are coming for your bargains

Re: Uk is Temu EU

I think the point being made is that despite Brexit, successive UK governments have tried to pretend it didn't happen and still slavishly adopt new EU regulations.

Secure Unix ancestor KSOS did type safety before Rust made it cool

Re: Nice find

Compared with Pascal, it loses its predefined I/O: which was enormously problematic since WriteLn() etc. needed to be defined in the compiler.

IIRC Wirth's original Pascal didn't have WriteLn(), only Write(), and that was implementation dependent since it relied on the OS file implementation(s). Most real implementations of Pascal added WriteLn() in a library, not least because the lack of variadic functions meant that you couldn't write WriteLn() in Pascal.

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: Vanity

the nature of the north channel makes extension to Scotland very expensive, but not impossible.

There's also the problem of Beaufort's Dyke, and all the munitions dumped in it over the past 100+ years, which makes tunnelling somewhat tricky.

Re: Vanity

The problem with UK rail, which HS2 was intended to solve, is that the bottleneck is the capacity of the existing network. In order to encourage more use, and offloading the roads, you need more stopping trains. Adding them to the existing schedule means fewer express and freight trains, which dumps their load back onto the roads. The solution is to move express trains onto dedicated track, like HS2. Absolute speed isn't a priority, as you say, just reasonable, reliable, speed

France does have the advantage of being twice the size of the UK with a lot more flat empty space to build lines. Just running TGV rolling stock wouldn't have made that much difference.

NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

Re: Vostok 1

IIRC Gagarin bailed out of the capsule at about 5 miles up and landed by personal parachute, because they weren't confident that the capsule would land safely.

Arm64 on the desktop? It’s spendy and it’s sluggish

Re: Nothing to do with the CPU

But is it the same kernel? It may be the same source code, but with different compilers, different options and different optimizations. Just because someone has written a kernel for optimal performance on one architecture is no guarantee of similar performance on a different one.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: Not with a disk, but

Sure they were MOSFETs? Junction transistors suffer from thermal runaway, but one of the nice things about MOSFETs is that they usually don't. You can parallel a bunch of them to get higher output power, and thy automagically spread the load without need for other components. If one takes more than the others it warms up, the resistance increases, and the excess load moves to the others, levelling across them all. Try that with, say a 2N3055 and POP!

Re: Dynamite

Ah yes, I remember TNT. VDUs delivered with smashed keyboard, and a pyramid-shaped hole in the side of the box that perfectly matched the corner of another box. They made Evri look competent.

Disks usually have a specified 'drop height ' that they'll survive

IIRC 1m isn't unusual, so 2m should be tolerable for some, especially onto something relatively soft like plywood.

Re: Similar story

Not to mention the little levers on each side of the DIMM slots that exist purely to pop them out?

Not with a disk, but

I remember a friend who put a new 128Mb EPROM (in the days when such things were rare and very expensive) into the PROM programmer backwards. It didn't survive.

He kept it stuck to the wall beside him in 'dead insect ' pose, to remind him not to do it again.

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Re: Worth the wait?

> In an exchange of say 10 query-responses,

"Have you tried switching her off and on again?"

I don't fancy my chances after the factory reset, either.

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

Re: If 11 is bad, imagine what 13 will be

> What will the release after 68 be called?

systemd?

Angry at the TPM?

I'm not angry at the need for TPM 2.0. I'm delighted that not having one means that I don't have to resort to registry hacks to stop Microsoft from forcibly downgrading my system like it did when I was running Windows 7.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

That's a little unfair. Bile is useful.

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

"us" covers a much wider scope than just the UK. You're also assuming that Putin is operating on logic, rather than simple greed and desire for empire-building power.

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

why pump hundreds of billions into a lost cause?

There's no certainty that it's lost, but in any case:

- you stand by allies against aggressors because it's the right thing to do.

- if we let a bully like Putin walk over Ukraine, there's a very good chance that we'd be next.

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

The other difference is that 30 years ago a change of government (and thus PM) meant a substantial change in policies, for good or bad. Recently it didn't seem to matter who was PM, or from what party, the policies rarely changed much.

Of course, if Burnham gets selected and does make substantial changes, especially ones outside the manifesto Labour was elected on, there will rightly be calls for a general election. It remains to be seen if he's arrogant enough to think he would win one.

In the meantime we have the leadership contest and Manchester mayoral replacement election to look forward to. Where did I put the popcorn?

Massive password-stealing attack hits 75k Fortinet firewalls

Re: Rotate your passwords

Whereas chickens are the ones usually batteried...

France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well

They never seem to learn

"we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data,"

Translation: We assumed somebody else would be taking backups.

Nobody ... should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside. Nobody should be accessing our services from the outside.

Then don't connect them to the outside. Oh wait, Cloud. oops.

UK Treasury hunts CTO on salary that may not compute for top tech talent

Re: Microsoft Treasury 365

Except that there is zero chance of them being held acountable when it goes titsup. Scapegoats don't usually get golden handshakes & pensions.

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

Re: One decent bit of common sense

My father worked damned hard to bring himself out of the back streets where he was born, to run his own business. Perhaps if others worked like him we'd all be in a better place.

Re: One decent bit of common sense

The fatigue and time poverty (and in many case just plain material poverty) of parents can explain any failing in child development

If they can't afford the time and money to raise children, they shouldn't have children. Popping them out and then assuming that someone else will do the hard work of raising them is a large part of the problem.

Re: Could this mean...

Quite a contrary point of view.

EU sovereignty push gives tech buyers a new alphabet soup to swallow

We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable, and our services secure. This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests, and making our own choices."

Fine words, but she forgets that the EU isn't a sovereign entity, it's more a federation of countries that agree to rub along together for a common good. If one country decides to do things its own way there is little the EU can, or will, do about it

Look at France and Germany and budget rules, or Hungary and the social ones, for example.

At the end of the day, even using technology from another EU member means depending on others. What's important is knowing how dependable they are, and having a Plan B if necessary. That need not be constrained by an arbitrary membership.

Plymouth council exposes hundreds in latest local government email gaffe

More context box in this article?

I somehow doubt I'll get "More Context" from the provided links:

60 years since humanity touched the surface of another planet

Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids

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

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

??

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: False economy?

> Sorry, but what is WEEE?

It's the sound made by a PFY as the PC descends from the 10th floor towards the boss's new car...

Yes, doesn't seem very PC to me.

Angry bug hunter with Microsoft beef drops new Windows 0-day

Re: Apportioning the Pox On Their Houses

I could have done without that image at breakfast time...

If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs

I'm surprised

No one's yet suggested that it's because iPhone users are a bunch of wankers?

Re: "people aren’t in physical proximity, and thus less likely to be having sex."

Ah, reminds me of the old "Carry On" joke:

Q (from man) "Do you smoke after sex?"

Reply (woman): "I don't know, I've never looked"

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Already implemented

Not just your toddler's bum...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/09/explicit-content-warning-photo-cat/

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

Never mind medical staff, they could save users more than "an average of 43 minutes a day on admin" by hiring some admin staff (secretaries for the non-PC) so that medical staff could concentrate on the part of their jobs which really matters.

Council in UK's City of York outs hundreds of disabled residents with a single email blunder

Re: My privacy...

True, as long as they have a blue badge on display. It's people parked in disabled spaces without such a badge on display that deserve the complaints.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: DOS era?

And doesn't Windows still have.cab (cabinet) files?

Citation, please! UK regulator slaps Google with new publishing rules for search

Re: Clown Market Authority strikes again

an increase in people just making shit up, bullshitting and lying, hoping others will simply believe them. And almost entirely from those on the right.

Or perhaps you don't notice the equal amounts of bullshit coming from the left because it agrees with your own biases?

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

Re: Living In Zero G

The gps on my dashcam showed no co-ordinates, the cars navigation, Apple Maps nor Google Maps couldn’t get an accurate location

GPS location services don't depend on cellular coverage, they get the information from satellites.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: The well-known name ranking

It's like those detergents to protect the colour of dark clothes. They remove the whitening agents, and then charge more for the "special" feature.