Posts by Terafirma-NZ

Tesla's big reveal: Steering-wheel-free Robotaxi will charge wirelessly

Maybe the design isn't wireless as we know it but uses a dyno and the regen of the motors to charge.

Either way it's all stupid, converting energy from one form to another only to get it back to the original form is excessively inefficient especially at the power levels of an EV. Not that the losses are the worst thing in themself but most countries are starved for electricity right now so throwing Mw of power away in conversion losses isn't attractive. The biggest challenge is dealing with all that heat becomes a real problem when it's measured in the 10's of Kw.

Nokia walks the walk about its RAN to play on Uncle Sam’s China fears

You can't because I want to

The removal of Huawei and ZTE is really because they don't include backdoors for the US government and so they must be gone. What they tell the public to have this accepted is of course the opposite then the media runs with that.

I can assure you that wherever you are and whatever gear you use you always have government eyes in your network as a service provider, the question is normally how many you have to cater to not if its happening.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

He works for Microsoft so really he should have known and expected that the big tech company providing services to him would do its absolute best to shaft him as soon as it could.

Well-experienced engineers in IT tend to think of these scenarios and don't make assumptions expressly when it comes to availability and 3rd parties.

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

Asked it to read me the book and it said:

Certainly here is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

and started spewing it all out. I don't have the book so no idea if a direct copy.

Also found doing this causes it to crash when queries get too large but if you break it down it can do it.

Stratus ships latest batch of fault-tolerant Xeon servers

Re: Close (but no cigar)

That is exactly what it is. Two servers fully independent and able to run in a chassis. They are then connected via an interposer that makes sure all CPU input is sent to both systems and any output matches on both systems. Every part is redundant.

Funny thing about this is if you need newer hardware you can get their OS and run it on two standard servers. It runs KVM and keeps the VM's on both in sync or can do normal failover like std VMware HA. Have deployed lots of this in the past and it worked well for what it was.

Oh, really? Microsoft worries multicloud complicates security and identity

easier option

So no mention of a tool that shows permissions used by a user over 30/60/90/180 days compared to what they have and provide the means to change them out for you.

Even the ability to flag the account icons for accounts with global admin rights or other high-level permissions. The Azure AD user management and permissions are way too convoluted to manage effectively and require lots of clicking around.

I guess none of that is a new product to sell or a reason why you should drop their competitors. Not long ago MS was shilling multi-cloud due to AWS being so much bigger.

Investment bank forecasts LLMs could put 300 million jobs at risk

Do bankers know how money works

So it's going to put 300m people out of work meaning they spend less and then create 7 trillion $ of cash out of thin air.

Do banks realise that growth in global GDP comes solely from governments printing more bank notes, you can't have growth without creating more $ money otherwise where is it coming from? A country can increase its GDP by simply taking GDP from another country but that's not global growth and just makes people in other places poorer.

I've heard these statements every time some new tech comes around on how it's going to put people out of work, proves to be false every time.

One thing is always true the bankers have no clue.

Outage rates fall, but major ones will cost more. Oh and don't bank on SLAs

Re: SLAs - the promise that might deliver

We also now work in a world where SLA's went from large hammers designed to keep you doing the right thing to them being some sort of sales tool promoting how good the service can be but ensuring when not met nothing happens.

Case in point: DC we are talking to promotes 100% uptime. But SLA ends at 99.995% and the financial impact is you get 25% of your power bill as a credit towards the next month. So yes a 1s power cut every day of the working week sees them in the clear but would be a total nightmare for you. If you include the weekends then you can have a few hundred $ back on power.

My past is from SLAs designed to shift the power balance making the conversation about how you act and less about some paper guarantee. Be stupid or cost cut too much and be prepared for chapter 11. An SLA like this was normal:

$200,000 per hour per plane delayed from departure. 15 min MTR and 20 min notify the CEO. At times they were broken but the point was the power was then in the hands of the customer to decide if you did all you could and therefore let off or if you were negligent and deserve the bill.

Is Neuralink ready for human brain implants? Allegedly so

Move fast and break things

I fully get the mantra when engineering things but as for my brain, that's not a philosophy I am willing to follow.

As for his followers that praise him for anything maybe this will separate the truly dedicated.

Turing Award goes to Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet

Looking back

With all its problems and the many add-ons it's amazing how far we have taken it and to be here today and say the only thing I would have asked for was a TTL on the frame.

Wouldn't be an issue if the vendors actually adopted TRILL.

Bogus ChatGPT extension steals Facebook cookies

Google - we need to change the browser API to stop attackers but it will break adblockers. This proves the point.

Or you could just have rules that deny extensions that have the same name as another extension + some opaque character e.g. a space. Then clean up the ads you allow on your platforms! TBH I don't think I've seen a legitimate ad on any platform of Google's for months now.

Microsoft pushes out PowerShell scripts to fix BitLocker bypass

If Else

Two scripts why not one with an:

If build > 2003 then (...)

else (...)

why is this part left to the user presumably if you get it wrong it bricks the TPM and you need to order new computers and incur a new OS license fee?

US government says Silicon Valley Bank depositors can get their cash on Monday

Fire sale to other banks?

Pretty sure Elon will have Twitter go after this so they can get a banking license. Or did I just give someone an idea - sorry...

No idea if these sorts of sales have restrictions (can anyone just buy it and write them self a loan).

'Brittle' Twitter suffers bad case of the Mondays: Links, pics, vids fail

Simple fix

Sounds like they enabled the paid API feature so all Elon needs to do is whip out that credit card and add it to Twitters developer account on Twitter's developer portal and then all their apps will work again. A bonus feature is Twitter gets some more income.

Maybe if they make it pay-per-call it might even balance the books.

Microsoft wants to export 'grid-interactive' Dublin datacenter setup

Re: Functional collision?

My guess is that they use the grid information to decide how much battery to consume to prop up the DC and reduce their grid load at times of short supply thus helping keep prices low (in theory) for homes and reducing their costs.

Long term they will likely look to grid feed but I wonder how much of that is to do with generating revenue vs. an avenue to running the country's grid network and control.

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

Can we now spy on others

I wonder if the information it learns will be fed back into the training data then meeting information will be able to be searched via Bing out in the public. So all those Govt meetings and sensitive corp meetings become searchable.

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Re: Self-trepanning?

If the accuracy of Tesla car panels and trim installation is anything to go by I'll skip one of his bots-wielding tools near my brain.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

Re: This is going to destroy's Tesla's stock price

So it's next week here and the Saga didn't stop over the weekend.

Tesla (Musk via Twitter) announced that it wants to get Musk his shares back so is going to launch a round of share buybacks to increase its price. No doubt these will be awarded to the CEO for performance reasons.

The last item left now is to announce that Tesla needs Twitter infra for its global management of robots and cars and so will be buying it for $50B of Tesla stock.

Multi-factor auth fatigue is real – and it's why you may be in the headlines next

This is why MFA needs to move to symbol to accept, no way for the user to be worn down and far harder to create a site that spoofs a login.

Elon Musk claims SpaceX was in talks with Apple on iPhone 14 satellite services

Re: What frequencies?

It doesn't matter how free they keep it the FCC does not allow transmitting any of these bands from space nor do any other radio management agencies around the world. So any hope they have of this working is a decade or more away.

Then there is the whole problem of distance. Anyone here notice when they are more than ~20km from a tower their phone says no service yea that satellite is over 1000km away. Yes they will come in closer but at 500km that thing is moving too fast to keep a signal to a phone.

Yes mobiles can go more than 20km but they tend to not allow it due to the whole problem of TDM, most 5G transmissions are going to be cut far shorter than that. At the distance, they are I wouldn't be surprised if when someone was on a call it knocked cell service out for everyone within 3000 km.

TLDR radio management is hard very hard. Anyone who works in radio knows Apple went the way they did for assurance of a service existing 5 years from now and tech that actually works.

As for Starlink it has many battles to remain as is never mind deliver new things.

Software-defined silicon is coming for telecom kit later this year

some pay for ad-ons going a bit far

So I can pay for an ad-on for low latency? so how does it work if I don't pay for that you keep pushing updates to slow it down until I pay for the low latency module? I thought the point was that it goes as fast as it can but I pay for throughput latency seems a little on the nose to charge for.

So many vendors trying to get into the private 5G that I just don't see being taken up and as for carriers deploying large 5G none will be looking for a "cloud" based EPC or even an EPC internet exposed.

Google says open source software should be more secure

Re: It's all a bit wrong

Exactly.

Govt need to get out and stop meddling, use the free market to do what it does. All they need to do is outline rules that if you are supplying software to the govt you must prove that you sponsor any and all open source projects you use.

Then these big players e.g. Amazon would have to contribute to all the projects they take from either via code or $. These big companies will then push this on who they work with and it will flow down to most companies and become the norm. No license changes are required so no arguments over that just simply if you want our $ you will support the source of where you get your code.

We all know by now that changes tend to flow form the big govt contracts down whatever the tech involved.

Toshiba to become Threeshiba – company split to spur growth as strife persists

At the risk of downvotes.

Mergers are cost synergies and spinouts are cost focus. End of the day it s just bad management and bad leadership.

I can only imagine (having lived through it myself) just the shear amount of middle management and paperwork to do anything never mind the very risk averse culture from Japan and their ranks of org chart structure.

Ever wondered where the 'cloud' was in Adobe Creative Cloud? Here it is in beta form

Re: That browser

Ok yes more functionality - I guess you took my post as a negative and that's possibly due to how I worded it.

I'm actually a fan of the new capabilities modern standards have bought. I do however also believe that some sites take the use of those too far and things like SPA that can be great can also be a real pain when one bit of JS won't work correctly. Over use of animations can make navigation difficult of even impossible for accessibility users. The point was more about the browser and it becoming a mini OS, ChromeOS points to this but isn't exactly a future I would want either.

As for your clear cache comment, no I'm not trying to find problems. Clearing cache can to be a challenge these days in itself at times depending on how a site is built and what local features it uses along with how much of your browser life you want to reset. Your comment however doesn't need to be utterly dismissive that tends to be the real problem with the web these days.

I'm sure people did fret about change back then my point was more about how far we push platforms that never had any of this in mind at conception and if it might be time to re-evaluate that. Like we did for IPv6 and are now doing for TLS and HTTP and so on.

The other half of me however also recognises that the web is ubiquitous as it is not tied to companies anyone could setup a webpage or a server and serve content. I hope we don't re-work standards/protocols so far that the only options to publish content is to have a skilled team or use a giant platform like Squarespace etc.

That browser

I'm left wondering if the Canvas API was the greatest things or worst thing to happen to browsers. Yes we now get some new tools that are cross platform and new ways of interacting with the web, (Figma has become the standard in web UI design so just the new Adobe). But I now wonder how bloated the browser is becomming and how much JS is being made to do.

Can't imagine the pain one would go through if you had a problem with your browser caching bad JS and you just want to get on with work.

Next stop Premier in a web app rendering a 2 hour long clip made from hundreds of hours of footage interpreted throguh JS bet that thing would be a new level of slow. Then will come the new Electron version of all Adobe desktop apps to unify their code base......

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: And the bug was?

Exactly my thoughts, Cloudflare are very good at giving deep details of what went wrong e.g. last time they had a a big one they went as far as publishing their BGP filters to show how it happened.

At times they have even shown the bad code.

Yes a customer and not advocating for them above others but the level of openness is defiantly much better over there.

GitLab tries to address crypto-mining abuse by requiring card details for free stuff

Dropbox

While you still have to pay I'm surprised that Dropbox still has their unlimited storage with Chia mining about now can't be long before someone signs up for the 3 user unlimited plan and throws in 1Pb of plots. No not a free tier but I'm pretty sure the $65 per month isn't going to cover that storage cost.

Then again I'm sure it's already losing $$ given the number of people I know who use it as a backup service for 100's of Tb.

Or did I just break ]some unspoken rule of making someone aware of this (I'm sure not how many "Unlimited" cloud storage products have come and gone over the years).

House of pain: If YAML makes you swear, shout louder – the agony is there for a reason

was ok until I got deep

Until recently I had only done light work with it but recently I have been doing lots with docker etc. and it really is. code that looks 100% identical fails on one file and works form another.

Worst of all is the new fav IDE for YAML is VSCode and that thing sucks with YAML just search vscode not copying white space and see the history of code doing weird things with not saving white space or not copying it etc. Ok accept for the whole YAML is built on white space.

Then yes once you start getting deep and have to deal with strings quoted and not but then also that whole "I'm cool and can do my array on a single line" vs the next guy who types it all out making it slower to read as you mentally switch between styles.

No that note whats everyones fav editor for YAML and anyone write in another format and convert?

Facebook rolls out full-page ads, website complaining Apple is forcing it to get consent before tracking you

If they do actually care

If they care about small business then why don't they make organic content trending work again rather than limiting it forcing people to pay. Heck it may even have the side effect of cleaning up the absolute d\trash dump that Facebook has become.

Or maybe I do just need to put $250 into Netflix shares and earn an income so I can work less....... Heck lets go all out and put in $500 so I can have that same supercar in the add.

Are You Experienced? Microsoft packs up features developed independent of OS to flash at Windows Insiders

Store

a pack - why can't they just be apps on the store. Is their store so bad even they don't use it or is it simply they just can't handle the idea that something could be optional.

I see random store apps and games still show up after a new enterprise build. Cleaned thanks only to community cleanup scripts.

Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

Some Positives

Hey at least its Ubuntu, where I come from people tend to think software is Microsoft and Microsoft is software.

No more installing Microsoft's Chromium-centered Edge by hand: Windows 10 will do it for you automatically

Re: Everyone has it as default

that's not the issue the issue is:

The automated browser replacement routine will migrate Start menu pins, tiles, and shortcuts, as well as taskbar pins and shortcuts. It will pin the new Edge to the taskbar and add a shortcut to the desktop, removing the old Edge if present. Data like passwords, favorites, and open tabs will be preserved through migration to the new browser.

Its the we need to make this update but as we assume everyone wants to move over we will make it default and add shortcuts everywhere even though you removed them last time. Then like always it will have some deep tie into Windows that makes it hard to repair (even though this was superposed to be the single biggest change from IE to Edge).

We have Huawei to make the internet more secure: Dump TCP/IP to make folks safer says Chinese mobe slinger

IPv6

maybe they should finish one first...

GitHub upgrades two-factor authentication with WebAuthn support

More or less secure

What I don't get is they intend to shift from a password that may be easy or hard to guess but should at-least be in your head to a device that falls out of your pocket multiple times a day and is left on the table countless times.

Yes that device will allow the use of codes far too hard to computationally guess but this makes the old stealing a physical key a thing again and one far easier that stealing car keys. But this time it happens to hold the keys to that persons life and now also they company they work for.

You'll always need VMs says, surprise, VMware: Run on any cloud you like and get portability

VMware: Were a really innovative company, our future is built on the fact people have legacy systems and they take a long time to move.

Sounds to me like a stubborn idiot.

No stormy weather on Microsoft's horizon – as quarterly commercial cloud cash balloons 41%

Customer demand

We all know no customer demands any Microsoft product, try

"We worded things to ensure all customers have to buy more and use more"

together with

"We continue to market by shouting loud about cloud or die to no one in particular"

The last line there begin the big one. How many times have you had an Exec come in and say I saw this cool thing we have to have it. Or "Microsoft told me everyone's doing it.

Ouch, Apple! Plenty of iPhones stuck in tech channel. How many? That's a 'wild card'

Environmental policy

Anyone else find it so amusing that along with all the other corporate talk they shout about how they are pushing to be a green company and protect the environment then complain in financial results that people are not filling landfills with enough iPhones and buying new ones. Maybe start selling iPhone/Mac parts as a new business.

Yes I know they can be mostly recycled but honestly who believes that is actually happening.

How many years do we have left of natural resources to remain on this path?

Bitbucket wobbles but it won't fall. Oh, snap...

Just a nap

Gee, I wish when one of my internal hosted systems had an issue I would use nice words from marketing like "just taking a nap" or "have a quick coffee break".

You know things that humans can relate with so as not to stoke frustration. Somehow as it's cloud it is allowed a break and that's ok but my hard working gear is not.

Usual outsourcing story huh, be it people or systems.

Microsoft's next Windows 10 release creeps closer with a cluster of builds

Kernel or apps

Um.. was that just a long list of apps getting updates and rather than using the app store to do so or offer them we have to do a full new OS upgrade?

Wasn't edge meant to break the dependency between the OS and the browser but has only made is bigger?

Feels more like they are now creating updates to fulfill the as a service pitch than actually improving anything.

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

Re: Never!

@DougS

Wow and if you dig a hole in your driveway that should stop thieves getting to your house, or least by your description.

NAT provides no security whatsoever, the printer mentioned above only needs to initiate a single outgoing packet to the router that will then open a port public side and any (that is ANY!) internet traffic that hits that port public side will be sent to the printer. About time people stopped confusing the basic "established" firewalls rules used in home router devices for NAT providing security!

As for how can someone route to your 192.168.1.0/24 IP space at home behind your NAT device. Quite easily remember the box is just a router passing traffic from any connected subnet to another. This assumption just says I expect my ISP to not forward traffic using private addressing on the source or destination and most don't do this. There are varying methods to get traffic destined to your private range at home to pass over the net.

NAT simply states if traffic passing the router meets this rule then change the source/destination IP and/or port to something else, if it does not meet this rule then pass it unmodified. <- here see no security at all!

Your firewall is what says if this traffic is from the WAN and is not for an established connection in the connection tracking table then drop it usually via the implicit deny any any rule at the bottom.

Sure plenty of you will go on thinking NAT provides security until your IPv6 printer starts spitting out pages of unwanted messages - of course it won't as your ISP will have enabled the firewall by default.

This doesn't even account for the open wireless access point installed on most home printers these days (a quick scan of my neighborhood shows plenty)

Waymo van prang, self-driving cars still suck, AI research jobs, and more

Re: Dumb drivers

Accept people keep saying that and not doing the math.

Waymo 5 million miles 30 crashes humans are just over 4 per million so about 21 crashes for the same 5 million miles.

Don't get me wrong I am for it in places it makes sense, but lets not tout it as successful before it is out of R&D or praise its promise before it is delivered.

VMware and Microsoft make up and get NSX-y together

Brochures can do anything. What matters is what the marketing department decides to make the $$ number.

Knowing VMware something like "make this PO out to the value of annual turnover - $1.00"

Me, I'm over in the group of customers told our E+ licenses would give us access to everything released in the future.

Australia joins the 'decrypt it or we'll legislate' club

Solved

So how long until they realize this already exists.

It's called TLS 1.0 and we all just spent the last 12 months getting rid of it. Or there is the NSA's version of RSA with predictable curve results.

So how much will you pay some contractor to copy TLS 1.0 and AES 128 call it TLS 5.0 and sing his praises?

They still can't say how on earth they are going to force the bad guys to use the encryption with known back doors never mind the large online providers. Never mind the effort to erase the existence of the more modern encryption standards.

Roses are red, Ajit Pai is tickled. Broadband from SpaceX gets him out of a pickle

um... who gave the Comcast rep from America control over the whole of space.

Surely they have had to get approval from other countries or it orbit one of those first in based "international waters" type systems.

Mines the rocket with de-orbiting missiles attached to clear the way for my own new satellite network.

Windows Defender will strap pushy scareware to its ass-kicker machine

almost there

Take it another step further and add any application that by default installs other PUA then for once we can kick Oracle for their continued inclusion of other rubbish with Java.

STOP! It's dangerous to upgrade to VMware 6.5 alone. Read this

don't forget the firmware

Also before the ESXi step make sure you have run whatever hardware updater your vendor has as 6.5 moves to newer drivers that requires a newer minimum firmware version.

Even more fun if you have Broadcom NIC's and what to pick between the Broadcom and Qlogic drivers.

Cost-hurling IBM seeks more volunteers for employment bonfire

Even worse scams

So does this now mean that the same people attempting to scam us via phone/email etc. will now have access to just send me an official tax bill with a different account number.

Or worse that fake IRS phone call now really being the IRS IT guy with a bribe me and get out free.

Internet-wide security update put on hold over fears 60 million people would be kicked offline

The problem?

I say just do it.

Then all the companies running DNS servers and not maintaining them will get an in-flood of angry customers some will leave and the company will learn it's lesson to not leave stale infrastructure out there.

Heck doing it is likely to also halt a number of DDoS attack vectors due to loads of DNS servers suddenly being updated.

FBI probing Uber over use of 'Hell' spyware to track rival biz Lyft

As much as I have a distaste for Uber I wish the rest of the IT world would stop using them as the an example of the times and why I need to buy said vendors product.

I get it you all make loads of $$ from pay as you go but using the most toxic company is current existence it not going to win me over.

One recent event even went as far as using Uber as a positive example of woman in tech... Guess they never went online before writing their speech.

Deputy AG Rosenstein calls for law to require encryption backdoors

Two things

1st. Can they even enforce this when the devices ship from China and I am sure it would not be hard to move the systems that compile the code off shore thus the product is never exported.

2nd. I'll use this the second the USA confirms that all government agencies including the military use the same encryption for all their communications!