Posts by cosmodrome

ICE enlists Palantir to develop all-seeing 'ImmigrationOS' eye to speed up deportations

Operating Sytems and the Gullible

Now I get the idea why the newly elected German chancellor was phantasizing about an "operating system" that would allow the police to basically stop crime once and forever, keep terrorists out of the country, pick cats from trees and guarantee sunny wheather every day after they closed an expensive deal with Palantir. I was quite amazed to hear the term "operating system" out of the mout of someone unable to tell the difference between an OS, open source and an operation amplifier in suspiciouis context. Guess I know who put that flea in his ear...

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Damage done

...and, of course, because it is the most illogical, stupid and harmful thing to do. As I said above: stupidity always wins.

Re: It is so refreshing and hopeful to see some people with integrity and a backbone.

I don't see much chance for him. As we all should know by now, stupidity always wins. I'm afraid we're on evolution's bad leg.

Ex-Meta exec tells Senate Zuck dangled US citizen data in bid to enter China

So?

So they'll buy the data from some other data broker. Supposed the don't have them already. It's not that there's a shortage of shady data traders, specifically in the US. You can't eat the data and have it.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Re: Why not make a reason for a call-out?

> Made a good doorstop...

...for a caterpillar shed.

Re: Fake tickets raised in malice?

In defense of the design, let's assume that changes in the construction plans, which usually come from a central office, had to be available on site ASAP. This is the only good reason to deploy a client-server solution over ~500km I could think of without knowing further details. So engineers are obvlously limited to on screen views which is highly unpleasant - but have you ever seen an industry grade A0 laser plotter, even by today's standards? These things are double wardrobe sized monsters and due to the paper size (A0) they're not going to shrink - and they're just as expensive as they're huge. I've spent enough time in the projects department of a very big firm selling devices that require their own buildings to know about these problems. OTOH I was more than once travelling with a cradle of construction plans in order to "for heaven's sake be on site with the *correct* version, before..."

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Filling hydroflouric acid in a lightbulb (or trying to do so) is quite an ugly way of killing yourself. Basically anything meddling with HF is. The good news is that you won't feel any pain because the HF will dissolve your nerve cells first when it washes the tissue from your bones. (bones take a few seconds longer to dissolve).

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Mercury isn't that dangerous and eyegoggles or breathing mask would make no sense if you're handling mercury one single time. Mercury is dangerous if it sinks for example into cracks in the floor of a room that is permanently inhabited because the very little bit of it that will vaporize will accumulate in the air and finally in the bodies of it's inhabitants over the years.

Pure mercury doesn't chemically react with anything in your metabolism so you could swallow a teaspoon (if you manage to get that heavy mass down) it would go out in the same condition as it got in. The toxic stuff are mecury phosphates or other organic compounds that will accumulate in maritime life in mercury-contaminated water. These metallo-organic compounds are dangerous as fuck but are a very different matter as pure elemenal Me-metal in the way that pure oxygen or hydrogen are different from water.

Re: staying awake

I did that using my pocket calculator as a "remote" for the chemistry teacher.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

If you don't have a unified fornat or set of formats for your graphics as well as a consistent layout to integrate text and graphics (usually in form of a set of page templates) you'll never end up with a consistent or even acceptable layout. This is one of the iron rules of layout. The other one is always to set readability as the first priotity.

Re: Just use Serif Publisher

If you're seriously intending to use a spreadsheet for layouting, MS Office is just the right tool for you. You had it coming for even thinking of it....

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

The swiss cheese approach indeed. Supposed you're intending to catch all the holes and let the cheese pass. Referrer and user agent filtering were well established practices on 1990s porn sites. Never failed to annoy -strictly scientific- visitors and doing little to stop content scrapers. But maybe it's working better nowadays - if in doubt, just throw "AI" at it.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

Squid has been doing that (and lots of other useful things) since forever. If you don't mind setting up and using Loonix and a proxy on a Raspberry Pie or similar hardware you can log, block, filter, trap and report any HTTP(S) request and response for, to and against anything you can think of.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Re: Pipewire!

You're aware that you don't need either? Just run jack on plain ALSA. Unless you're trying to watch Youtube vids and stream whatever at the same time. Which you just shouldn't - and if you really think you must then don't run it on the same audio device as your production apps. If you run all this shit through pipewire on the same interface you'll inevitably end up with internal software resampling, mashing x different sample rates from y different sources to an awful stream of mud. Maybe that's OK for you - it won' be for anyone else on a different setup. Before you call me an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about: I've produced title tracks for international cinema productions (one even got a golden palm in Cannes), jingles for ads and radio stations, played live radio shows and gigs - all besides releasing my own stuff.

In one thing, however, you make a point: the same kind of people aggressively supporting systemd are the loudest supporters of pipewire.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

I've seen the same with 3½" floppies. I didn't even realize why these "copies" were made and put into a ring binder at the time. (I was a young and naive apprentice back then, assuming every professional would be at least rudimentarily competent.) It came to me years later when I read one of the many anecdotes on the net about "copied disks".

Automated backups, verified, tested and...

...worst expectable desaster after an actual headcrash. How did I do it? Verified and tested my automated backups, tweaked comfiguration files until everything was perfect and then - relied on my perfect, tried, rock solid and daily performed backups. For too long. So I didn't realise that my backups had all been exactly 0 bytes long for six months until a head crash took down a complete volume group. I had changed compression algorithms to one I firmly believed to be supported. Which it wasn't. Unfortunately the error within the compression algo did not escalate to the main backup process and I got my daily "backup completed successfully" notice. No need to look into the details ("0 files and 0 directories backed up...") because everything was fine, wasn't it?

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Sometimes...

Thinking about their mechanical base and the shitload of trouble it causes to users I am surprised about the relative low rate of violence against printers. Really, I'd have all sorts of understanding if not sympathy to people throwing printers out of office windows, setting them on fire out just kicking their evil mechanical souls out of them. The only decent tool to repair a printer, IMHO, is a blunt, heavy one.

Re: When managers get involved in technical stuff - beware!

Why didn't you let a professional print shop do the printing of the letterheads? Maybe the same one that printed your business cards - you didn't print those on ink jets, did you? If you order a thousand of letterheaded sheets they'll not only be cheaper than self-made ones, they'll also still be the same color after three weeks when your ink jet color will be faded to something unrecogniseable. They'll also deal with Pantone or RAL colors by mixing up real colors for printing and cut a couple of raster screens so you don't have to worry about fonts or anything graphical.

Actually the designers should have given you a very technical piece of documentation, called a CI that you might have given directly to the printers and asked for a bidding for the number of letter heads, business cards, etc. you had in mind. But you decided to DYI the job, which worked out as DIY uses to do compared to professional work.

Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Re: Disk is cheap

Specifically other people's disk.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

Look for the guitar player among the staff and you've got your suspect. We can't help swapping cables in audio mixers. Not even in those that are perfectly in order or even in those we've set up ourselves. And then there's the curse of the gaffer tape. It gets limp and immediately loses it's stickiness as soon as it sees one of us...

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

Millions of gouvernment money and an enforced usership? That's about what Microsoft gets in almost every country. Doesn't seem to help much if MS has to bother their users with advertising nevertheless.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

On-site security

Someone saw someone else without the mandatory hi-viz jacket. Mandatory! Safety! Missing! Must! Report! Or else distaster! Because safety.

Same logic as wearing hard hats on top of the crane - at the highest point where nothing but the sky could fall down on you and wearing anti-fall guard on ground level. Not to forget anti-fall guard in actually dangerous height but without a rope and certainly without anyone holding it. Completely pointless but safety inspectors are fine with it...

DoD spins up supercomputer to accelerate biothreat defense

Re: ... both military and civilian defenses

"We had to defend ourselves!"

Secure Web Gateways are anything but as infosec hounds spot dozens of bypasses

Root of the problem

"Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) are an essential part of enterprise security,"

And that's where the problem starts. Trying to fix the problem down the line is just putting patches on the fissures of a structural system that is statically underdefined - which means it will just break somewhere else.

Google apologizes for breaking password manager for millions of Windows users with iffy Chrome update

No Master Password?

Does Chrome's password manager still not allow master passwords? I don't know why it didn't last time I checked but I decided not to trust Chrome then.

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

Re: DAT - a technology we're sure few remember fondly

Rule #1: If it is not automatized and mandatory it's not a backup.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Ceterum censeo erosionem linguam non tolerandam esset.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: Cor, blimey

> Yes, most people can tell the difference. The iodine imparts a narsty metallic taste.

Believe me, you'd not taste or feel anything at all wherever you're in contact with iodine. Your nerves will be gone before they could signal "PAIN" to your brain - together with your skin, muscles and bones. That's what makes iodine and it's iinfamous hydrate so dangerous. It will simply turn you into ooze before you knew it was even there. I also doubt that the iodine salts can do a lot against the intense saltiness of the NaCl at a concentration of 15-25 mg/kg, That's 0.025 parts to 1000 parts or 1/4 per 10,000.

Metals, by the way, have no taste. That metallic flavour is actually tiny amounts of butylic and other low-order-vat acids from your own sweat slightly oxydizing the metal's sutface. The metallo-organic compounds from that reactions are what our senses are very good in detecting.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

Kudos for preserving the locative in "de pulverem" but without the preposition it's "pulvis". Remember that if you're the kind of guy who might feel tempted to label all the bottles with unknown powdery content in the lab as "pulvis alba".

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

German has different words for welding (schweissen) and soldering (löten) too. The latter even comes with a funky umlaut.

TeamViewer says Russia broke into its corp IT network

So Teamviewer has been moving from security hole to security hole for years. But this time they're not to blame because "the Russians did it". Funny, how all the usual suspects all have turned from jerks who don't want to smaller their profits by selling well-tested and secure products when they'll can just leave their customers with the damage and walk away into concerned victims of "state-sponsored" supervillains, "nation backed" "APT" and other invincible attackers. Of course they're not to blame, it was the Rrrussians *gasp* after all. Now we need to pay extra tax money to help those poor tech bros covering their asses (while still selling unsafe software for lots of cash).

But even if it really were the Rrrussians *gasp* Teamviewer et. al. still are to blame beause the fucking let them in! Even double so. And do you know who else is to blame? You. Because you knew all that and you knew there are better -but less comfortable- alternatives and still used known to be unsafe software as someone admitted above.

Funniest thing is that the Russians (no, really) might destroy software safety even without doing anything at all as long as everyone gets away with blaming them. That's what I call a viscious enemy - annihilating by their sheer existence. We're doomed! Doomed!

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Did anyone of us actually ask for systemd?

The LSB decided that systemd would become part of it. Just before it quietly disappeared - now even the LSBs stearing comittee's site contains only a 404.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: Been there, done that

60" - just millimeters short of A0? I've seen weird and big plotters and printers eneough to know the magic question¹ but I don't think I've seen that. Don't say it doesn't exist I just wonder what strange purpose it had.

¹) where is the power switch? I spent a full hour unpaid overtime finding it when I was new at the job. Much worse if you don't know where to turn it ON and everyone is waiting for their plots..

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Re: Labelling production

Yes, what if not a database server woud be expected to drop information when updated?

Re: Labelling production

IIRC it was an ancient release of KDE, independent from distro.

Re: Calling all servers "server"

what the hex... :)

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Re: Tailor needed

Flanel for suit? That's not the Microsoft way, They'll take a couple of holes and stitch them together.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Re: "simply accepted the news silently and continued about his day"

It wasn't just a mental mode. Drawing tablets aka 'digitizers' were the common input device for CAD in the 90s and these (very large) tablets were absolute mode only.

Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE

No, it's the fact that you exist that makes you guilty. Noone is innocent. Shut up, we are asking the questions, here.

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Yes. ARC architecture, non-PC but x86. I had one of them, long ago.

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

Re: Lonely

...or desperatly trying to escape. Piece by piece, 8kB wise.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day

SUN and SGI boxes and even HPs had a PROM, not a shabby BIOS. Some real sublevel OS that you could enter by BRK-Stop and recover or reboot when the main OS got stuck and where you could boot or install from network, drive or SCSI-tape.

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

New version, same shit show

They want you to use W11, not W10 so they can better stuff you with advertising and monetize your data while having to support just one version, so WIndows 10 will start to crackle. I remember that behaviour from last time. A million tiny bugs like external monitors no longer recognized, updates failing and various network problems will accumulate until you give in and update.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Re: Always was crap

There's nobody wanting to use it. There, however, is the content industry wanting you to use it so they can enforce DRM on you.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Re: sort of on topic...

Probably the tank driver training unit in Stadtallendorf ("Stadtalingrad"), Hessen, Germany. They also had these funny Leopard tanks with a glass cabin instead of a turret where the trainers were sitting in.

How artists can poison their pics with deadly Nightshade to deter AI scrapers

Re: Nightshade - poetic

Sorry, never advanced further than "Der Dritte Mann". Didn't even know there was a sequel.

Infosec experts divided over 23andMe's 'victim-blaming' stance on data breach

Re: I just never understand

Obtaining, yes. But obtaining millions of samples, analyzing and putting them into a database on the web? Not so much. Selling them in the dark net even less.

"infosec" PR companies

Why would anyone with a brain even listen to "infosec PR experts"? It's not their job to prevent security breaches but to downplay the damage and white wash their customers' vests. They are *not* security experts, they're primarily PR droids.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Depends.

Both. And I got the feeling that "rigour" is not French. That should either be "rigeur" or "ragout".

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

A Witch!

TBF, a witch (or a shaman) seems to be the last chance to bring the GNOME project back to sanity. Of course the inmates might disagree...