Posts by JT_3K

Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

Re: Glowing tubes

That really is a fabulous book. +1 for anyone that's not read it.

Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements

"EU regulations come into force in February that will mean new mobile devices must have user-replaceable batteries, with some exceptions for products like wearables."

Prediction: the new iPhone to be announced on Wednesday has one of those lanyard-holes and has an optional convoluted watch-strap fitting, thus is declared a wearable. iPhone costs go up by $99ea to cover the cost of the "starter" wearable band included within the box. Apple shareholders are thrilled that Apple has managed to repeat what was legislated away when they stopped putting power bricks in their boxes and Apple stock sees a noticeable bump. iPhones continue to have non-user-replaceable batteries due to their wearable status. A wall of each iStore (and every motorway service phone case shop) now sells nothing but these wearable bands, and they ultimately fail to gain traction, before being the centrepiece of every car boot sale trader and Amazon-overstock blind-box from mid 2028 to 2030.

Time lords prepare to kick leap seconds into the next millennium

Re: An alternative approach

Now I'm sat considering the impact of ~300 years* of various levels mining activities in moving mass from underground** to overground and away from the centre of rotation, and whether that's had a meaningful impact. Anyone that's done that bit on a roundabout where you all lean in at the same time knows what I mean.

* yes, mining has happened for much longer, but it's got deeper and more aggressive in that timescale

** I'm aware its infinitesimally small amounts of mass in the grand scheme, as well as infinitesimally tiny distance it's being raised

VMware swings its focus back to low-end server virt, promises vSphere Standard upgrade

Re: How about some Cake?

"...he's going for Proxmox

he's going with *speed*

he got fucked over

in his time of need

cos he's migrating, and building, and plotting a course

he's changing, converting, and getting rid, of course..."

User who handled life-or-death situations struggled with the SHIFT key

Re: At least they knew about the Shift key

I see this regularly (UK based) but primarily its peck-typists in the 45yo+ category that usually tell me proudly they're "not very good with computers" at some point in the interaction. Thankfully it's a rare day I have to do support now so I see much less of it. I always sigh inwardly when I see it as I assume it means I'll see a lot more of that person during their tenure.

Windows 11 update sends some desktops into an unwanted goth phase

Re: Why wait?

This is explicitly why I disagree with the Cyber Essentials 14d blanket "every update installed" demand. 7d past release date I'll take the critical stuff, ~14d is when I'll consider anything non-super-hyper-critical. It's not that the patches aren't important, but on balance if I patched my entire estate on launch-day, or at least started it, I'd end up with this clownshow to deal with monthly.

Sometimes I wonder if security boffins would rather my PCs/servers were suspended each in a 3m2 steel box which was subsequently filled with concrete, then lobbed in the Mariana Trench under surveillance. It'd certainly be more secure then.

UK goes shopping for homegrown AI with £100M procurement scheme

"For the NHS challenge, companies will develop systems to automate workflows, coordinate care, and support decision-making across health services."

We don't need AI being bludgeoned in to the NHS as a process automation tool so administrators can feel young and trendy. What we need is for the processes to be contiguous across all NHS trusts, and then for one basic system to be able to be created to allow us to benefit from the cost savings. I've said it many times before, but until we can stop

...having to print a second copy of this form *on a blue page* because Janet carries it across to the other building because that's what she's done since 1986 and she's so close to retirement now it's just easier to let it carry on rather than tackle the process change head on and anyway the [INSERT NHS STAFF MEMBER HERE] is so busy, as are [OTHER NHS STAFF GROUP], we couldn't possibly get that change to happen, and that would mean we'd have to change the admittance process in $Department and where would $OtherDepartment find the patient's NHS number because they're too busy to look on the COW and they're not very good with the computer either...

we're on a hiding to nothing. Yes, the mega-outsourcers with governmental friends are problematic, but half of their profits come from finding out this stuff at the last second, or trying to placate a difficult member of staff with some seemingly innocuous tweak that adds time and expense. Meanwhile the internal members of staff managing have two choices: face up to the internal problem and be bullied/pushed out; or accept it, """play the game""", seem to be someone who gets stuff done and be promoted long before the costs/failures come to bear.

I'm not saying the NHS doesn't have thousands of highly caring members of staff who are run ragged at bargain basement prices (oft thanks to war-criminal Tony Blair's excessive use of PFI meaning there's no money left to spend now amongst other local/global financial drivers), but at some point if the NHS is to continue, there's got to be a concerted push to recognise that treating someone with breast cancer in Torquay is the same as if they were in Blackburn and the flow has to be dragged in to line.

UK cyber bill targets AI users, not the vendors building it

Oh no, that's terrible. Where would one find such an article from OFCOM? I mean, to corroborate your story for themselves?

UK digital ID may be dead, but its legacy IT problem lives on

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

Check out the width of that Debian display

You missed the Titanic

Nuisance-call blocker fined £190k for being a nuisance caller

Re: Telephone Preference Service

You sit, wait for the backbone operators of the UK telephony networks to face financial impact of their idiocy/inaction noting it won't be because their political mates with the financial interests in the businesses hold them to account via Ofcom, so probably around the time pigs fly. At this point, they'll stop allowing people to report their own unauthenticated sending number via SIP trunk from South Africa or similar. Another miracle and they then decide to actively take on nuisance calls which, at this point are probably a major financial contributor to their bottom line.

Until then, enjoy!

Re: Telephone Preference Service

Maybe we can connect them to the Indeed Human Resources department?

Cybercrooks jet off with Manchester Airports Group customer data

Re: GDPR

What, that sweet, sweet valuable data?

Spare a thought for poor MAG. Whether it's landing fees, headers on services rendered to operators such as baggage handling, government subsidies, retail space where you're charged £4 for a bottle of water, operator fees and/or per passenger overheads. They're evidently not making enough money and need *another* avenue to do so by selling your email address. It just so happens here that the process has happened exactly as it would without the hack, but that MAG didn't receive any funds for it and can't provide a thinly-veiled vetting excuse to someone like the ICO as to the legitimacy of the purchaser.

To their plus, it does not mean that there's plausible deniability that anywhere to which they've sold your data and the recipients of the "hacked" data are so mixed, that it's impossible for those that have purchased the data and used it for nefarious purposes to create a blame issue for MAG. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that this is a net positive for them: the ICO are going to chocolate-fireguard any possible outcome; passengers aren't going to choose to drive to "London-Bournemouth-Southend" (or whatever they're calling it this week) instead; the general public is still going to need WiFi in departures so they're not going to lose the data stream; the public will have forgotten by Tuesday; and it's now mostly impossible to tell between any sale/use of data or that resulting from the hack.

I'm sure they're very, *very* """sorry""", for whatever that means.

Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Throwback Friday to when I started my career in education in ~2006. Whilst I've a lot of time for teachers and think they get a bad deal, like any profession a small number have a warped sense of their own infallibility borne from the constant power/knowledge imbalance between them and the kids they spend all day teaching.

-------

One particular moment that stood out was a senior leader who deigned to gift the children with his teaching* once a week. We'd been hard at work, with YouTube in its infancy, building an internal media server. Every classroom had an interactive whiteboard but they still carried around a VCR or used DVDs in class. With great success, we'd thrown together a dusty server donated from another school with a load of salvaged drives in a very paranoid RAID and offered a digitising service where we'd cut the bits of VHS tapes or DVDs used to DIVX AVI that they could instantly load. Cleaned, tracking (for those who know, it's time for your medication) perfected and cut to the useful bit. All we asked was that resources were thrown to our techies a week or so before use and they'd be permanently available.

This senior leader came to us with zero notice nine minutes before the start of his lesson for the VHS, (wanting a 20 minute segment by the start of his lesson) and was indignant that we were unwilling to digitise his footage. We dropped what we were doing to help with the VCR, plugging it in to the RCA on the wall and changing the input on the projector for him. He called us back 10 mins in to the lesson however as it wasn't working. Whilst he stood at the front making barely veiled sarcastic comments to a group of ~30x 12yo about how poor the IT was in this school and nothing ever worked, I took a look at the problem without rising to it. It took me around 30 seconds to realise he'd not put the VHS in the VCR. I advised him of this professionally, quietly at the front of the room, but unfortunately even the biggest classroom is just not far enough away for the kids in the front row to go unaware.

They started squawking and shrieking it at full volume and the lesson descended in to chaos. As he'd pulled rank and made sure it was the closest classroom to his office during timetabling (ejecting another teacher to the opposite end of the not inconsiderable site for this single period) he was also closest to the other senior leaders. Moreover, they were covering the roving extreme-behaviour function and had to come help him after a while because he couldn't get the kids to calm down after they decided just how inept he was. The best part? He was the senior leader *in charge of behaviour* in the school, and the Headteacher got a great view of his abilities in-role.

* It was common around the staff for them to pity the kids who endured this. Those who've done education (if there are any among us) will recognise immediately: somewhere 3/4 to the end of their career; done well but lost interest in staying current whilst expecting others to do so; was never a great teacher anyway, but increasingly insular; now senior and believes his workload in one lesson per week made him "one of us" but didn't understand that other staff couldn't put that level of time in to their classload; and "performative" to the max in terms of "...I've managed to fill in the data sheets..." or whatever halfwitted short-form target was being pushed.

----

Bonus story

There was another similar tech incident. I was at my desk with a polite queue of students waiting their turn to be seen and helping one get their coursework back. Someone slammed open the outer door to the IT area, just out of sight and I was just about to call the behaviour team to come help when I was surprised to see a teacher hammer through the door and storm to the desk. Before I had a chance to process what was happening, and despite that I was mid flow with a student, the teacher *threw* a 3.5'' floppy (again, it's time for you to stretch your knees) such that it bounced clear off my desk and hit me in the sternum. This was followed with her bellowing "I PUT THE INTERNET ON THIS DISK AN WHEN I GOT HOME IT DIDN'T WORK". I couldn't conceptualise this quickly enough before the tirade continued "I COULDN'T DO MY PLANNING AND IT RUINED MY EVENING. I WASN'T READY WHEN I GOT IN THIS MORNING." I was just about to open my mouth to respond when she turned tail and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. I apologised to the students who had been queuing politely and cleared the issues, checked the disk, then went to find her.

She was incandescent in the staff room. It took some time to explain to her how a shortcut icon worked, and why it would have worked here, but didn't negate her need at home to get an internet connection of her own. Moreover, to set some professionalism boundaries and talk about the example set for the students. I didn't get an apology, but I didn't have to deal with that again.

Iran-linked cyberattack shut down a UK power plant

Re: A suspected Iran-linked

It's a tough balancing act. On one hand, we need to hide the information that says which plant, how we know it's Iran (and at it's most "Bond-esque" point, where the information might have come from and in what manner) and the technical details of the attack. On the other hand, having to take that leap of trust allows whomever's in power to write the story that suits their narrative, direct less substantiated claims to allow them free reign (see Blair-Iraq) or the media to sensationalise/throw-rocks and slowly bend the attitude of the populace to the agenda of their puppetmasters.

It'd be nice to explicitly have a national cyber body that we trust and for them to build that over time, being willing to overtly state "we believe X happened" in the manner of a Reuters-level news release that has as little conjecture/spin as possible. I do note that would likely be subject to some level of ministerial influence however and likely be watered down by idiotic short-termist decisions (see national emergency phone alerts about not having a BBQ)

Self-hosted email is in steep decline, Microsoft and Google are taking over

Re: Come in to my parlour....

Everything Exchange was a hellscape. Whilst I was happy doing just about every task as a generalist IT lead, Exchange (bigger jobs) was the one thing I always brought in specialists to do it. Whether it was the time a new instance of 2007 refused to start until a combo of three disconnected Event Log items were found to link to a buried Technet demanding a specific negative 9 digit number (I remember it starting with -213) in a registry key; or the time a glowing-brain-type used ADSIEdit to tidy my AD from six previous Exchange installs or attempts before finally rolling out 2016 as part of a no-excuses technical-debt pay-down.

My sole main memory of Exchange was that if you were doing something structural, there was no "undo", no "uninstall", no restoring a backup because it'd failed on a setting in AD and you couldn't roll your estate back. If an update failed, if a Service Pack didn't take, if the function turning something major on or off somehow missed a Registry or AD operation, you were screwed. Fat chance that the logs or Events would show the actual problem in an actionable way. Sure, if you lived and breathed nothing but, you ultimately got used to it and knew which rocks to turn over when this happened.

I remember a fabulous Microsoft event called "Exchange Unplugged", towards the back end of the period in which Microsoft cared about supporting the pros. They brought out the real techhies, not the marketing goons. They stumbled a bit and were a little uncomfortable, but when they realised it was a supportive and engaged technical audience, they came to life. One of them explained in great length that the reason SQL 2012 clustering had gone through a generational leap in such a short period, is that they'd taken the clustering codebase to use for Exchange, fixed it through heavy rewrite, then returned working code to the SQL team.

It was never accessible to the generalist though

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Re: False floors too

From memory TIA-942 specifies 30cm minimum, with 90cm for higher levels of the standard (IIRC).

Re: The Security Was Possibly Via a Screwdriver

A real connoisseur chooses JIS

Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

Re: Simple is nice :)

Ye olde days of pulling your data with a pair of crocodile clips at some point between the two.

My knees hurt, it's time I left - I'll get my coat. Mine's the one with a lightbulb hooked to a RJ11 in one pocket and a battery hooked to an RJ11 in the other.

Casio decides it's about time the simple digital watch got a little smarter

Reminder that 10,000 steps is an arbitrary figure plucked out of thin air by the Japanese to promote the Olympics in '64 with an aim to get the populous more active. It has absolutely zero real-world basis being a target or measure of anything. "Yes", someone walking that much in a day will probably be healthier than someone who doesn't by the same metric that someone who uses the gym every day (and/or bothers to consider the metric) will likely be healthier than someone who doesn't.

Capita handed vital role in next pandemic despite civil service pension failures

Re: Somebody at Capita must have ordered a new packet of brown envelopess

A small gripe, but a gripe nonetheless.

NHS111 vs NHS24. Can we not just have "one approach"? It's this kind of chicanery that means we have two sets of forms, a system that supports two different workflows and names and it starts here. I don't care if it's England or Scotland that keeps "theirs", barring that it's obvious it should be whichever has more people/sites/overhead.

Indra rides off with £1.96B Transport for London ticketing deal as Oyster heads for back-office overhaul

"...revealing the deal could be worth nearly twice what was initially announced."

I'm tired boss.

Cops arrest man suspected of being Dream Market kingpin

Re: Huge amounts?

Funny, I had exactly the same thought.

On the subject of great stories, the obvious Whittington Brothers and Road Atlanta is one of my favourites. It's followed closely by a thread on one of the private aircraft forums (shown when I worked for an industry organisation years ago) that my pilot-colleagues gleefully creased up reading over breakfast, asking in drawn out terms which of the current crop of business jets could be safely flown at full-flap zero-height with their rear door open and without airflow running from that door through an engine...

Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming

Re: revenge tour

There's something to be said for these zero-day being released so publicly. One can infer that there must be some internal knowledge of these in Microsoft, and as they exist, potentially purchased by nation-state level actors.

Small solace, but on the positive side, the seven-figure investment that would have been spent to obtain any of these by any actors who have them is now approaching nullified as they'll have to be patched, and hopefully quickly.

Yes, the wider risk has grown (at least short term) but mid term in such a scenario, even the one man bands (who often are better than credited at basic slapping in of patches on balance) will be safer taking it automatically than in a scenario with an unpublished vulnerability for which they don't have the big team's security nous and dedicated resource to already have "deployed Bitlocker with a pin".

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Re: Schrödinger's trains II

[MUFFLED MECHANICAL ANNOUNCER VOICE]

"...the train now arriving at platforms 3, 4, 5 and 6...is the derailed 18:43 service to Northampton..."

UK age-gating plans risk breaking the internet, privacy groups warn

Re: Age gating is a solved problem

Which in turn raises it's own challenges: a sheltered child without comprehension or exposure to popular media and opportunities to discuss the shortfalls and targeting/bias is unable to become an adult capable of critical thinking. It's easy to go full "southern US church parent group" on their media consumption and try to pull anything even slightly different from their lives but when they get old enough, they become insular and unable to support themselves. You *have* to give them news and some level of access to things that may be upsetting to learn about (at the appropriate time), such as the holocaust. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.

Oracle plans to power its New Mexico mega datacenter with a 2.45GW fuel cell farm

Re: What about solar?

I concur that NM would be a good candidate for "covering with solar", but as to the concern of it having impact on the breadbasket, I'd suggest it might - albeit in a slightly different way to that as expected.

I cite the outstanding recent Technology Connections video where he cited (with accompanying back of a cigarette packet math) that the quantity of corn grown in that part of the US for bio-ethanol for gasoline is an order of magnitude less efficient than an equivalent area in an equivalent location covered with solar panels to run an equivalent fleet of EVs. Such was the argument that even with obscene allowances for the figures in favour of the corn, it's still a compelling argument. "Covering NM with solar" and an EV push would significantly reduce corn-for-fuel reliance and thus the saleability of the corn, or force a plan for secondary markets.

Back to the point for Oracle, I understand the shenanigans that make "fuel cell" the preferred approach and scare from sufficient battery storage, but that doesn't negate my disappointment that they're not choosing (or forced) to install sufficient solar to operate independently during peak daylight, or to cover the site in-full if sufficient space doesn't exist, and lower the requirement on actual non-renewables.

IT manager approved downtime over lunch, but made a meal of it

Re: Work expands

Reminds me of the time around 2014 when I started at a place and pulled out three BNC repeaters, numbered 1, 2 & 4. That I never found #3 drove me insane for my time there

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: HVAC settings

Finishing reading this thread and intending to add my own, yours seems entertainingly to have crossovers.

Gaining one of my first ever fiefdoms in ~2007 I was lucky to arrive to find a ~4m x 4m dedicated computer room, which was a 3m high breeze-block single room in the corner of a UK business-park type warehouse with ceiling tiles on it. Less fortunate was I to find the motley crew of "servers" that were pushed together under a desk and that the door was permanently open to allow a combo of the warehouse staff to use one of them as a personal computer, and for """cooling""".

Over time I put in a fairly early and rudimentary VMware stack on a few pieces of HP tin. Real bang for the buck at the time. To protect the new investment I asked if we could put aircon in, but the cost was deemed too much so I got a household thermostat connected to a bathroom extractor fan, with the fan being the type with rotating flaps that opened when it turned on. I was polite but made it clear that I didn't find it suitable.

Late one Friday evening, my on-prem Exchange stopped routing and my VPN stopped taking connections. As the company was an 8-6 M-F affair with a roving sales team that it wouldn't impact and 1hr from home, I assumed a power cut with little impact, and decided to stop by as I happened to be passing the next day. On arrival I found a 4m high "scorch mark" from a large hole on the outside of the building where the back of the fan had once been. Transpired that the rotating flaps had *not* opened when the fan had started, the fan had superheated and caught fire, and then turned itself in to plastic flakes and soot. The servers had gleefully sucked this in and diligently, as they'd become more packed with plasti-flakes, ramped up the fans in a desperate attempt to cool further, then having packed themselves (beautifully) had thermal shutdown at ~85c. All this before the fan had gone "enough" for the power to drop out of the plastic housing and short itself to blow the power to the room.

I cleaned the room for two days, all the servers too. Removed the fire blackened roof and swapped cables. Lo and behold, the HP kit booted without any losses - somehow, and the business was online as normal on Sunday night.

Suddenly and inexplicably, there was budget for a pair of humidity controlling aircon, a raised floor and the room to be re-fit with a solid roof with insulation. There was a great moment where, as a younger and more gung-ho (idiotic) guy, I agreed to crane/forklift/sling the live server rack from the concrete floor on to the new raised floor. In my (limited) defense, the forklift operator was one of those guys that could pick up a coin, and understood the assignment, and we had no issues.

====

The bit that aligns with your story however is shortly after. My new CLIMate monitoring device, hooked to my shiny new PRTG monitor emailed overnight just after the aircon was installed, just after I went to sleep. It told me my beautiful new TIA-942 compliant server room was running at 14c and 90% humidity. Seems the HVAC firm on the business park had limited experience with humidity or server-room aircon units and had misconfigured. Some oscillations we'd had for a week or so and been complaining to them about had got out of hand.

By the time I got to site (at quite the clip) early morning, it was colder and more moist. I've never experienced anything like it in my life. Was like walking in to a tropical rainforest just after a downpour, but without the heat.

I shut down all the kit and opened the door, then left it for ~24hrs whilst the air-con was finally set up properly and the kit re-acclimatised, and it somehow dried out and came back on with no complaints. And that, is the story of why I now have a very strong affliction for HP enterprise server hardware...

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

Re-record, not fade away. Re-record, not fade away.

- I'll get my coat

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

I fought this at a previous employer through use of USB-heated fingerless gloves. I looked ridiculous, particularly in a senior position, but it worked.

UK.gov's top tech jobs pay more than prime minister earns

Marvellous. A new quango developing a new centralised efficient single login platform. Roll on the age of efficiency and the technological process. If the money is needed to make it happen, I'm sure it'll be being used in a productive way.

Just keep looking at the cup they're telling you has the ball under it, and not at the second incarnation of "Government Gateway ID" that was finished ?2yrs? ago, it's first incarnation from ?2017? and the prior attempts. No pissing-money-in-to-the-wind going on here whatsoever.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

Having been on the receiving end of this I can't say I'm surprised. I managed IT in a school for a few years and unfortunately we had a contract with RM, and the hideously mangled Active Directory "overlay" that broke a load of basic domain functionality. This was historic and had been part of the school since inception. The school had graciously designed in an IT office when redesigned, which we had to share with both our servers and the internet distribution for every school in South Yorkshire.

When the RM "All In One" came out, a design that to the un-initiated can be envisaged by imagining an AT case stood vertically with an angle-adjustable TFT hot glued to the front, we ordered a few hundred. The vent holes sat between the TFT and the main body, which was fine, except they were sold as such so kids could be told to put the keyboard in this gap to remove the temptation to touch the PC whilst the teacher was talking. This in itself would also be fine, because the powered fan would push *some* hot air around the blocking keyboard and the machine would usually be idle/cool(ish) whilst blocked.

...until the "Eco" version came out. The Eco version was so named because it used less power, achieved seemingly solely by unplugging the CPU fan, and nothing else. Cue a load of our estate overheating and needing mobo replacements. One blew up so spectacularly that it shot exciting blue sparks out the lower PSU air inlet and blew the breaker to the whole room. These Eco machines broke so frequently, they eventually sent a tech to swap boards onsite as it was cheaper and less effort than shipping them all. This was in-part because I was simultaneously orchestrating the IT element of Building Schools for the Future for South Yorkshire and made it clear that the shocking turnaround times for the several-machines-per-day they had go pop with us was a strong argument to remove their quotes wholesale for the whole county.

The RM tech arrived (late), and I re-explained the issue with the blue-spark machine, then asked if he wanted a cup of tea. I turned round to get my mug and as I turned back, we had blue sparks fly in the corner of the room and the power to the room went out. He'd plugged in the faulty machine having just been told the issues, and killed not only our school, but the internet to every school in South Yorkshire.

Needless to say: (1) he was escorted offsite and never came back; (2) we suddenly *did* have the budget for the UPS I'd wanted; and (3) not long after, that summer with our computer suites so devoid of working equipment they were unusable by the students, this incident and the broken AD tools, I finally got agreement that we could go vanilla AD.

Microsoft 365 pauses Copilot creep after admins cry foul

Re: Microsoft is so proud of Copilot they promote it by saying it can be turned off

As I recount often, I was at the UK launch of Windows 8 (not 8.1) with that disastrous no-Start-button, hot-area interface. They had a really strong pushback from the audience who made it clear that the application of a tablet OS without visible buttons to user desktops was ridiculous and would be a nightmare. Further, the crowd pushed that application of this UI to the server OS would be insane as selecting a hot-area on an RDS would drive us all mad.

Eventually, the on-stage representative got angry and went off on a rant reminiscent of when BMW's M-chief ranted at press that the E30/E46 were not the "last great M3" and people needed to move forward. Their response was "it's not going to change, and users are going to use it at home and come in to push you in to it anyway, so you'll have to get used to it, because W7 is going to be retired eventually". The mood for the rest of the day was poor, a far cry from the triumphant W7 launch event where all of us clamoured for our free W7 Ultimate handout at the end.

Obviously it went well for them, and moreover, they learned their lessons from it. /s

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward

Re: This is what drug dealers do

I remember being invited to group market research that quickly became evident to be Google in a trenchcoat wanting to feel out a push for Chromebooks (based in GCloud) to professional environments against lower-level laptop use. I stayed remarkably reserved until the facilitator probed a lack of trust I had in GCloud when I mentioned Google Graveyard. When poked again, I spilled a previous (12,000 user, 650 site) UK based experience where shared files disappeared on a regular basis because the (admittedly badly setup) environment had users sharing files left and right from their own Drive which then disappeared when they left and Google's lack of interest in helping us fix it. Surprisingly, the other participants (similar high-level IT leaders) hadn't heard of the Google Graveyard website but were not impressed at the trend demonstrated and viewed the offerings in a much dimmer light after that point.

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

[VIETNAM FLASHBACKS INTENSIFY]

Not again. Please.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: Who would wear AI glasses during "extremely private moments" ...

Ah yes. Before I use any bathroom I always make sure I remove my glasses before I remove my trousers. If that's something I forget to do, that's ok because I always consider whether there's a mirror in view of the toilet itself and if so, simply stop needing the toilet and leave.

In a similar vein I've never changed clothes whilst wearing glasses, I just shut my eyes really tight and when I open them, I've got a ~90 second window where my visual impairment disappears so I can complete tasks like that without them.

If I did have to take them off, I'd make sure to leave them face down though, so the cameras were pointing at the table. My optician recommends that, states it's good for the lenses to get toughened on any surface - teaches them a lesson. Besides, I'm usually carrying my handy 4 foot by 4 foot glasses-vault so I can put them away nicely alongside my multiple pairs of prescription glasses I make sure are on my person at all times. It's hermetically sealed, lined like a faraday cage and has to be so big to both hold all my glasses *and* for the inches of soundproofing built in to it...

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

That's ok. There's a comment above talking about how hard councils have it, how tightly controlled budgets are and the woes of being held from growing Council Tax. It suggests woe is the life of a councillor and nobody could achieve given circumstances and lack of funds.

Evidently they didn't have to listen to Barry Sheerman talking about the cable car he wanted to put in at Castle Hill, watch the 20yrs it took for someone to muster the backhander significant enough to build the Kingsgate, endure the dual farces of the old Huddersfield Leisure Centre and the Technical College site, the inability to push brownfield development over the hilarity of the loss of wildlife about to befell Kirkheaton (again, I'm guessing due to brown envelopes), watch as Kirklees went from one of the most progressive and successful at recycling to 20yrs of "unable to recycle Tetrapak" under a short-sighted contract or the time a councillor, on public record, referred to constituents as "dickheads" for complaining about woeful gritting. But no, no, it's not their fault they're continually making poor decisions.

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

Re: PC world and hard discs

Being that it's now incredibly hard to get real USB HDDs and memory sticks from Amazon* without being scammed, and eBuyer has gone, I expect I'd be headed here for a memory stick if I needed one. That said, I hate going in there, hate being "upsold" repeatedly by someone who just won't take the hint that I'm not falling for their lies and despise giving DSG any money.

* Having been burned with dodgy firmware "upsized" ones and not-from-that-manufacturer clones, I finally stopped trusting Amazon for "official" products when the seemingly official "Oral B shop" sent me counterfeit toothbrush heads that were noisy as hell and shredded bristles.

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

...and when you get there, you can f*ck off again. And you can keep f*cking off until you get right back here. And then, you can f*ck off again.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

We had similar at the end of November. $Department demanded an MFP because they thrashed their on-desk laser with labels as it got too hot, and they knew labels went through the upstairs MFP. A good-used low-throughput one spent three weeks being re-commissioned at the supplier before being delivered. Supplier is great and believes hard that their at-cost parts are cheaper for a full replacement than the engineer time/effort onsite and lost goodwill. Supplier carefully delivered, then took great pains to explain to $Department that labels had to be fed strictly from the side tray as that was a shorter path that didn't expose to heat for long enough melt the glue on the labels before spitting them out.

One proud-semi-technophobe decided as he'd put a sheet through from the drawer before being corrected and it'd worked, he'd just carry on because he thought it was easier than having to understand how to print from a tray. His first tray sheet however had been in a cold printer. His fifth sheet was not. The entire sheet peeled off in turn stuck around the fuser, the transfer belt, every transfer roller/wheel and all the toners. It did a few more before he figured something was wrong.

The printer was with us three days before it needed a full reconditioning.

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

And now I'm intrigued as to where socially-acceptable converges with profit-margins and what would happen in such a scenario. Would the tool be deemed a write off and specialist disposed, or would it have a new chain fitted, be cleaned and re-hired with the team secretly referring to it as the "death chainsaw".

Did you have a serious injury workflow pertaining to the future of the tools? Say a gravel compactor that took a few toes from an idiot without steel toecaps, or a plasterboard lift that may have been used improperly and concussed someone?

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

I love Henry and the culture of support it's gained. You're right though, that lack of a *powered* rotating brush does it in. Anyone who's ever vacuumed a mid-pile+ carpeted property with a Henry or similar, then picked up a mid-range upright (corded) vacuum with a rotating brush and gone over it again knows. We changed a well maintained and supposedly "good" one to a Vax Air Max Pet 3 once and it pulled 3-4 full buckets the first time.

They're brilliant vacuums in an office, carpet-tiled student-digs or workshop though.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

That's...yeah. I know this is a thread of people "reminiscing when you could have a joke in the office" but we've got a stores guy with permanent knee damage from kneeling in a freezer ~15yrs ago for too long and the cold damaging his knees irrevocably. The reasons some of these things have faded are written in blood.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: My never ending (and barely started ) project

My favourite was the BMW E-series cars. When from ~'95 to '05 they had the head units with the screens that used to speak via CANBUS to the "navigation" unit in the rear. You could read the CANBUS and inject an additional item in to the main menu on their screen. Then you could sniff for the user selecting it and present on screen options. In turn you could sniff the buttons used (forward/reverse track, etc) and get it to drive your media output.

It was however, ultimately a stratospheric amount of effort at a time when iPod radio transmitters were a thing and usually fairly viable. Those with cassette decks would use the cassette adaptor to the same end. If you were bothered enough to spend car-PC money, you'd probably be bothered enough to pay for the Denison ICE link. Those looking to throw more money would spec the "base non-amplifier" variant of the car and install a full setup from scratch with a touch multi-screen or USB input.

Still cool, but very quickly bypassed as the iPhone era and screen mirroring became viable.

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Dare I ask where you are? I have a suitable machine and can help, but am unsure on the state of the 5.25'' drive. It'd be nice to see some of the collection come to external use?

Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw

Re: WhatAbout WhatsApp ForBusiness?

Are you sure you're not getting confused with Michaelsoft Binbows?

TP-Link accuses rival Netgear of 'smear campaign' over alleged China ties

Re: A similar thing happened with Supermicro in 2018

I see your downvotes, and am not sure those doing it remember the raft of unfounded reports going around at the time. The allegation was a tiny chip on Supermicro boards (the size of a broken off pencil lead) which provided full remote control, logging and visibility of the server, and had supposedly appeared as a post-design addition by the manufacturing plant in China. The allegations were *very* noisily made and very quietly, almost silently, retracted in the global press, barring el-Reg. Bloomberg (the original source IIRC) then proceeded to pivot in some modern post-truth to ignore their original chip claim and start pushing a line on custom BIOS variants.

I don't disagree there's a large push (from all sides) for backdoors and compromise, but the Supermicro stories stood out as particularly egregious when it was seemingly unfounded.

There was a great comment at the time on a Reg article about the potential reasons the story might exist. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/02/12/supermicro_bloomberg_spying/#c_4204731 Feasibly, yours is only part of the potential viewpoints.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Insame

I was all set to spark off about how much spinning disks love to be jolted, especially with the kind of forces for rack mounting or the weird angles whilst being carried. Then I remembered that it's Linux and right at the back of my head something glowed - HDPARM allows you to park the heads of a disk. *Arguably* you could keep the uptime counter running with the OS in memory by parking the disks and pausing/stopping a load of services. Still not sure I'd do it mind.

Boffins build 'AI Kill Switch' to thwart unwanted agents

I love the idea, but thinking of it in action for one of the stated purposes, I'm struggling to get my head around it.

It talks about preventing the use of LLM based responses to sow discord in forums. I imagine this referring to the sort of general populace coercion such as the """"alleged"""" Russian propaganda that swung Brexit on sites like Reddit or Facebook. The scientists propose a DIV that's marked as not visible, such that it'd be parsed but not visible to human visitors. Surely any offensive coder will very, very quickly tell their scraper element to ignore invisible DIVs (or that which matches the background colour, or in such small lettering, or hidden behind an image, etc) and be wholly unaffected?