Posts by RM Myers

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Re: Balls

Great balls of fire - sounds painful!

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=UMKhjrWIQQw

Blue Origin blames New Glenn fireball on engine oxygen valve

Conflicted

I'm enough of a space flight fan (too much sci fi in my youth) to wish for successful launches, no matter by whom. At the same time, who doesn't like a spectacular rapid unplanned disassembly, at least when no one is hurt. And lets face it, New Glenn gave us one of the most spectacular of all rapid unplanned disassemblies!

Next step for LINK spacecraft – a software update that won't make things worse. Are you listening, Microsoft?

This was always considered a long shot mission, even when it was initially proposed. Basically, it was cheap enough that NASA considered it worth the risk, given the value of the Swift Observatory.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/a-bold-satellite-rescue-mission-came-together-in-record-time-but-will-it-work/

This one time, at Hacker Summer Camp …

Re: the triple-digit August heat

Are you sure it isn't over 100 Kelvin? This is Las Vegas, a city renowned for its academic culture, particularly the advanced research in probabilistic and anatomical theory. These people wouldn't use any temperature scale accept Lord Kelvin's finest.

Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

Re: risks incoherency

Yes, that does seem to imply that the UK government currently has coherency. If that is true, those of us on the other side of the pond would like to borrow some for our government.

Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems

"They did so by exploiting default passwords"

We're doomed! It's bad enough when consumer systems connect to the internet with default passwords, but critical infrastructure like water systems? Make it stop!!!

NASA Swift rescue mission spins into trouble during commissioning

From everything I've read, this seems like a long shot mission. Definitely worth the effort given the costs, but the odds of success are not good.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

I had the opposite experience between cassettes and floppies. My second PC was an Osborne 1 with 2 floppy drives, and I felt like I had died and gone to tech heaven. By today's standards those floppies absolutely sucked, but compared to using a cassette they were great. Having 2 drives was the real icing on the cake - heaven at last!

This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

I'm fairly sure that a large percentage of people my age (aka old) developed much of their vocabulary (particularly swear words) from dealing with the vagarity of cassettes. The impact on music quality was bad, but trying to use an interface between a primitive PC (I my case a KIM-1) and a cassette player to store programs laboriously entered on a hexadecimal keypad was soul crushing. The odds of success for either writing or reading was probably 1 in 4 at best. Ugh! I'll take a pass on cassette nostalgia.

Microsoft fiber foul-up cut off Azure California for almost five hours

Whodunit - AI or not AI - that is the question

Will this be a future "Who me?", or just another example of how AI has empowered computers to advance from really f-ing things up to really, really f-ing things up? Inquiring minds, et al.

Cyberattack threatens utterly critical infrastructure in Japan: KFC

Japanese Life Expectancy

According to Wikipedia, that fountain of all knowledge, Japan has the second highest life expectancy of all countries with at least 50k population. Could this push them up to number 1? Inquiring minds want to know!

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

Yes! Or, since it is Paris, oui oui, which is appropriate since that is what I usually do after a decent coffee. Damn prostate!

Progress orders emergency ShareFile server shutdown over mystery security threat

Progress?

Is this what passes for progress in 2026?

An unnamed US county – perhaps in Ohio – paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals

Re: Lovely...

Did you read the article? The evidence for Union County seems fairly compelling. Besides, $3 million would be less than 1/2 % of Franklin County's annual budget, so I doubt they could successfully claim poverty. And the budget is public information readily available on the internet.

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Re: Man page?

True, but at least when you are heavy-handed most people will probably realize it is satire. If you play it straight up and subtle, not so much.

Man page?

Surely you meant to say the "persxn" page: "https://lunduke.substack.com/p/discrimination-in-tech-solved-man-pages-renamed-persxn-pages".

AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

Re: Nearly a third of corporate leaders report difficulty understanding

If you believe only a third "actually"" have difficulty understanding, then you are more optimist than me. If that is the percentage admitting it, then a fair portion of the other 2 thirds are lying.

Australia investigating five social media giants for not enforcing ban on kids

...filth you can read in books...

I agree completely. Here is a "prime" example I found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sewage-Management-Sustainable-Development-Taseli/dp/1837685355. Pure filth, plain and simple!

Large Hadron Collider goes offline to make room for its enhanced successor

Re: So no risk that ...

With luck, maybe it will accidentally flip us into a none nightmare alternative universe!

Salyut 5 at 50: The Soviet space station that sickened one crew and nearly drowned another

Thanks for reminding me that I never expressed my appreciation to the commentards who pointed out that "https://www.theregister.com/archive" still had the old format. Job well done mates!

Texas lassoes massive Microsoft datacenter – and 20 years of gas turbine emissions

Re: Droughts are not going to be fun for anyone

Okay, I'm no expert on Texas, but I (involuntarily) spent a winter 5 decades ago in south Texas, and the local joke was that anyone drilling a water well who accidentally hit oil would be greatly disappointed - water was scarce, and thus more valuable than oil. This was an exaggeration, but only slightly. There are areas of Texas where you can drive a hundred miles or more without seeing much, if any, green vegetation. There are just random oil wells, a few head of cattle, and scraggly vegetation that was hardy enough to deal with the heat and lack of water.Drought is the norm in large parts of the state, and has been for hundreds of years.

Britain's privacy watchdog quits after 'poor judgment' admission

"...including inappropriate attempts at humor"

I feel sorry for anyone who tries to build a career as a comedian in these days. As far as I can tell, almost any humor is going to be deemed inappropriate by some group, and then social media will erupt with all the anger and vitriol social media seems to specialize in. What a sad state.

Everything's bigger and better in Texas – even data breaches

Re: Unnecessary data collection

You obviously have never been to San Antonio. Even 60 years ago those Mexicanians were the majority population. BTW, San Antonio has a beautiful downtown - well worth a visit. The Alamo is a bit of a whoopsie do, though, but the San Antonio river walk more than makes up for it. Great food also, as long as you don't mind the heat (food and weather).

Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let's play Truth Or Consequences

It amazes me when people complain that AI has turned Google search into shit. Google search was shit long before LLM's became a thing - ads disguised as search results, totally crap sources/scams floating to the top of the results, consistently returning the negative of your question, etc. And this was before considering the lack of privacy protection.

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

Danish or Duch?

I'm hungry, so a Danish sounds good to me right now. But what is the Duch of which the author speaks? Is this a sweet treat without the tea?

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

"This government does a lot of that."

Most governments do a lot of that!

UK.gov warned that digital transformation hype is no substitute for delivery

"... "allows updates to be made without triggering GOV.UK alerts..."

This reminds me of one of my favorite trigger phrases: "The project is on schedule according to the current plan." I was a secondary customer on one project where the project team was updating their plan every two weeks, just before the regularly scheduled status meeting to discuss progress, so they could make that statement. Having a background in IT, I wanted to scream at the project lead, but the project sponsor, who was much higher up in the organization, just nodded and accepted the platitudes and attitudes. Ugh!

Chrome's zero-day Whac-A-Mole continues with fifth exploited bug of the year

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I have two websites I have to use, including a doctor's office, which refuse to work without a chromium based browser. One even conveniently includes a link to download Chrome on the homepage! Is this 2026 or 2006?

Our systems editor flew all the way to Taiwan and still couldn't get away from AI

Yes, sometimes people mention the country (Taiwan), and sometimes the specific municipality (Taipei) where Computex is located. That seems fairly normal to me. Am I missing something?

Home Office ditches legacy asylum database, keeps the spreadsheets

... whether taxpayers are getting value for money.

Is this even a question which needs to be asked in 2026? Do pigs fly?

Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers

Bit Barn Palooza

A large part of the "basic maths" issue is the sheer number of bit barns. In central Ohio, there are an estimated 114 operating bit barns with an estimated 80 more planned. Most are not the huge hyperscalers, but there are at least 6 of those (probably more - I've stopped following the news on new ones, they became so common) . It has gotten to the point where, if I see a large, nondescript building in the middle of nowhere without any signage, I just assume it is another AWS, Azure, or Googly cloud data center.

On the positive (?) side, the one AWS bit barn I drive by frequently has almost no vehicle traffic. Their buildings are huge, but there are almost no people working there after construction is completed.

AMD says its $4K Ryzen AI Halo workstation practically pays for itself

They broke the rest of the website, why not the subheadings?

They broke the rest of the website, why not the subheadings?

Inference is giving AI chip startups a second chance to make their mark

Re: Big words the author doesn't seem to understand.

I'm afraid mister Webster disagrees with you. The first definition in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is: "a moment when significant change occurs or may occur : turning point". The second definition listed does agree with your definition. Like many other words, the definition that applies to a specific topic, in this case Math, isn't the more commonly used definition in everyday speech. Whether that is good or bad, I'll leave to other to argue.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: Chilli Enema

That reminds me of my first year at university. One of the seniors in my rooming house recommended a hot Italian sausage sub sandwich from a local pizza restaurant, but warned me and my roommate that the next morning we would likely suffer a fire polished a-hole. Boy was he ever right! Those were some of the best sub sandwiches I have ever had, but it took until about the fifth time I ate one before my bum finally adjusted and there was no next morning torture.

FAA grounds Blue Origin's New Glenn as it probes missed satellite delivery 'mishap'

Yeah, I noticed that also. You don't suppose someone else watched Scott's video, do you?

CISA tells feds to patch 13-year-old Apache ActiveMQ bug under active attack

WTF!

"..many deployments still rely on default credentials – the ever-reliable "admin:admin"..." -

Just when you think it can't get any worse, you read a statement like that. Really - "admin admin" in 2026? We're doomed.

AI agents are 'gullible' and easy to turn into your minions

In other words...

To err is human, to really f*ck it up takes computers, and to really, really f*ck it up takes AI!

Progress at last! What a time to be alive.

Out-of-band getting out of hand as Microsoft pushes hotpatch for Bluetooth

Re: Linux Security Roundup for Week 11, 2026 Reveals Critical Fixes

Have an upvote for at least giving me a good laugh.

Re: Linux Security Roundup for Week 11, 2026 Reveals Critical Fixes

Fanbois vs fanbois vs fanbois. I go back to the days of IBM versus the 7 dwarfs, and who can forget the 8086 vs Z80 vs 6502 vs 68000 vs ... Then there was the Fortran vs Algol vs PL1 vs (the list goes on forever). The names change, the technologies change, but the arguing never ends. Can't we all just agree to disagree, and get on with life.

Sigh!

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

GOTO

You do realize this was written in 6502 machine code, right? Every program that has any logical flow statements (if, while, loop, etc), when actually executed as machine code, is going to have "GOTO" commands (JMP, for example, in 6502).

Until last month, attackers could've stolen info from Perplexity Comet users just by sending a calendar invite

"Security always comes last.' Assuming it comes at all.

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Crazy?

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

Re: Carol Beer

Actually, yes there is. I have had several good experiences in the last month - real people answering the phone quickly and politely, getting the problems solved almost immediately, and following up to make sure everything was okay. Admittedly these were not directly IT related issues, and the companies were small, local businesses, but it still brought a much needed smile to my face. And yes, I would frequent these business again, even if their prices were higher.

Why our tech overlords can't do the same, I'll leave for others to debate.

Google fixes super-secret 8th Chrome 0-day

Re: What about Chromium and derivatives?

MS Edge got an update today also. Using multiple browsers certainly expands the threat landscape, but I have to use several websites that refuse to work with Firefox, and I don't want to use chromium based browsers more than absolutely necessary.

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Re: What the Fark did you expect?

Don't be too harsh on our poor commentard. After all, victim blaming is a fine and honored pastime on the interwebs, as in real life.

Brits believe the bots even though study finds they're often talking nonsense

Re: Proof of the obvious

I assume you mean the "other half". The other half is always the stupid half.

Google Chrome bug exploited as a 0-day – patch now or risk full system compromise

Re: Do I need to panic?

According to Hacker News, both CVE's affect other chromium based browsers, although they didn't elaborate other than mentioning specific example browsers (Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi).

How to bluff your way to AI credibility with the right buzzwords

Re: I'm suspicious

Gartner created a bullshit generator long before there were websites, and they have been perfecting it ever since.

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Re: Ernst & Young

I worked with KPMG auditors all the way up to partners, and they were very competent, although several had toxic personalities. But we also had a major accounting systems rewrite contracted to KPMG, and the joke in my area was that we were paying KPMG to train their employees for them. The KPMG staff who developed their proposal knew our business as well as employees with 30 years of experience in the industry, and really snowed the CFO and Controller. Once the contract was signed, the actual KPMG staff who were doing the work didn't even understand basic concepts and terminology. I was spending a large part of my day answering their basic questions about accounting rules and terms. Not fun!

Claude code will send your data to crims ... if they ask it nicely

Fixing vulnerabilities costs money, whereas blaming the user is basically free. It's good to see that the art of victim blaming is alive and well. At least AI hasn't screwed that up.