Re: Airgap Russia?
https://www.topnewslive.net/the-war-in-ukraine-russian-authorities-ban-media-from-using-invasion/
Posts by Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013
Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?
Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)
I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer
The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes
Friday 3rd January 2020 17:00 GMT
Re: A mistake is one thing...
Been there, seen that. Quietly recovered floppies with PC Tools unformat and carried on.
Actually there was more to it. This person wasn't a misanthrope, but an engineer who had recently read about new class of "CMOS viruses" and was clearly afraid of them.
Others tried to explain him that common RTC chips had only about 70 bytes of CMOS memory. Furthermore, as the BIOS never tried to execute code from it, there was simply no way to use RTC as an attack vector. Yes, there were some viruses around which wiped the RTC CMOS memory, but that wasn't quite the same thing as propagating from there.
He, as a supreme engineer, obviously knew better and proceeded to format all floppies in sight. Which we quickly recovered once he had left the area.
Later he went on to become a fully blown PHB.
And 25 years later, with the advent of UEFI, flash-based viruses became possible.
Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost
A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse
A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears
OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers
RIP 2019-2019: The first plant to grow on the Moon? Yeah, it's dead already, Chinese admit
HCL picks up Notes, spanks total of $1.8bn at Honest John's IBM software sale
Pasta-covered cat leads to kid night operator taking apart the mainframe
What now, Larry? AWS boss insists Amazon will have dumped Oracle database by end of 2019
We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE
Friday 2nd November 2018 16:05 GMT
Re: @Solmyr - Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?
"If I'm not mistaking RedHat abandoned desktop 10 years ago in favor of server"
RH is not promoting desktop products loudly, but they're very much available.
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-desktop-or-red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation
US government charges two Chinese spies over jet engine blueprint theft
Worldwide Web wizard Tim Berners-Lee sticks wellington boot into Worldwide Web's giants: Time to break 'em up?
Euro bureaucrats tie up .eu in red tape to stop Brexit Brits snatching back their web domains
Monday 17th September 2018 22:58 GMT
Re: Tit for tat ...
"Imagine the fun we'd have if Nominet did this for .uk. Only British Citizens - all ye EU folk can lose your domains."
Officially that's exactly how they operate. Not sure how strictly they're enforcing their rules, but rules themselves are pretty clear.
https://www.nominet.uk/domains/about-domain-names/
Bah. Those pesky little facts tend to ruin a perfectly good wail. Again.
"Sigh. This behaviour is a big contributor to why I voted leave."
If that is your main motivator, then you probably have to vote to leave the UK too.
I've seen the future of consumer AI, and it doesn't have one
Saturday 8th September 2018 19:55 GMT
Re: Smash the spinning Jenny!
"You do all know that your parents said exactly the same things about electric appliances and computers when they came out, hell your grandparents said it about the telephone and about vaccines etc."
Except they didn't. Those inventions you listed were accepted quite easily. There was of course a matter of affordability - people just couldn't buy two dozens of electrical appliances for a monthly wage.
NASA 'sextortionist' allegedly tricked women into revealing their password reset answers, stole their nude selfies
ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator
Fake prudes: Catholic uni AI bot taught to daub bikinis on naked chicks
Sunday 22nd July 2018 22:27 GMT
@Voyna i Mor
Three women walk on a road. They see a drunk man without his pants sleeping on the roadside, face hidden in the grass, but tender parts well visible.
"That's not my husband." sighs one of the ladies with relief.
"Yes, that's not your husband." concurs the other.
"He's not from this town at all!" exclaims the third lady.
Sunday 22nd July 2018 21:56 GMT
Re: "that's why we've got future pedos."
"The biblical proscription of homosexuality is "man with man". There is a long tradition*** of defining a "man" as a male who can grow a strong beard. This allows the sophistry that a "boy" by that definition is not a "man" - and therefore not included in the proscription."
Another gem of sophistry: if the commandment says "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife", then it does not forbid lusting after the neighbour himself.
Big(ish) Blue: IBM sales creep up four per cent, share price follows suit
Tech team trapped in data centre as hypoxic gas flooded in. Again
No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project
I see a satellite of a man ... Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, that's now 4 sats fit to go
SoftBank sells off more than half of Arm China for a bargain $775.2m
Thursday 7th June 2018 17:28 GMT
an old joke
A Chinese man and his Jewish friend were walking along one day when the Jewish man whirled and slugged the Chinese man and knocked him down.
"What was that for?" the Chinese man asked.
"That was for Pearl Harbor!" the Jewish man said.
"Pearl Harbor? That was the Japanese. I'm Chinese."
"Chinese, Japanese, you are all the same!"
"Oh!"
They continued walking and after a while the Chinese man whirled and knocked the Jewish man to the ground.
"What was that for?" the Jewish man asked.
"That was for the Titanic!"
"The Titanic? That was an iceberg."
"Eisberg, Goldberg, you are all the same."
Double trouble at tape survivor Quantum as CEO and CFO quit firm
Sunday 3rd June 2018 08:48 GMT
"I can also state with some authority that Dell's Powervault TL line are re-badged IBM TS units"
Sort of. It's a German company called BDT that supplies both Dell and IBM (TS3100/TS3200 models) with lower end tape libraries. Same design was also sold as Oracle SL24/SL48 until Oracle replaced them with indigeneous SL150. HP MSL2024/48 are also OEM'd from BDT.
To briefly touch the article, Quantum/ADIC designs are actually quite popular in the midrange market. IBM TS3310 was definitely one of those. Not sure about TS4300, haven't seen it in the wild yet.
High end libraries are usually not OEM'd. IBM TS3500/TS4500, Oracle SL3000/SL4000/SL8500, HP ESL are all original designs. And fascinating beasts they are too.
Your F-35s need spare bits? Computer says we'll have you sorted in... a couple of years
HostingUK drops offline after losing Farmer vs Fibre competition
As Tesla hits speed bump after speed bump, Elon Musk loses his mind in anti-media rant
Sunday 27th May 2018 21:48 GMT
Re: All the best, Elon.
"But it's a shame people don't recognise the absolute need for a PR advisor/ handler"
Tesla has lost lots of PR people over time. Not sure if there are any left who could handle him if needed.
In one case Elon tried the PR job for two weeks and decided he's just as good at it:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/05/book_review_elon_musk_how_the_billionaire_ceo_of_spacex_and_tesla_is_shaping_our_future_by_ashlee_vance/?page=2
Blood spilled from another US high school shooting has yet to dry – and video games are already being blamed
Did you even sweat, tho? Plaintiffs told to amend claims in Apple headphones suit
Tech support made the news after bomb squad and police showed up to 'defuse' leaky UPS
Friday 18th May 2018 21:28 GMT
"Especially UPS batteries - the APC one I have had a large battery tray that one man can barely lift and - taking it apart to look at the individual battery modules (which is just a bunch of RPC6's wired together to give 48V and more capacity), there is no fuse on the battery itself."
Most APC battery packs do have fuses inside them. 96V RBC44 packs certainly have them. 24V packs like RBC55. 48V pack RBC43 does too.
You're toxic, I'm slippin' under: SCL, Cambridge Analytica file for US bankruptcy
Oh, great, now there's a SECOND remote Rowhammer exploit
Friday 18th May 2018 20:42 GMT
Re: Is it actually viable outside the lab?
"one of my favourites being the CDROM manufacturer that used a command commonly used for other functions to equal 'brick the firmware'"
Yup, that one was a neat job. CD-RW write cache flush command wasn't necessary for the CD-ROM drive. Fair enough. But instead of simply ignoring it, they interpreted it as firmware download command. Which erased the current drive firmware (without further checks) and started to wait for a new firmware image. Pretty botched-up thinking.
Reg writer Richard went to the cupboard, seeking a Windows Phone...
There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick
Saturday 21st April 2018 22:35 GMT
"[...] but the alliteration and repetition made it extremely annoying to read."
"Presumably they were essential characteristics in the original Finnish oral history. Human memory seems to be aided by such devices."
Yes, mnemonical qualities were important. For many centuries there was no way to write texts down, they were passed on via oral tradition. But there's something else too - old chants have a hint of magic about them. Or, for a modern reader, an aspiration of magic. See 'shamanism'.
This nice overview has a bit about Kalevala too:
https://spiritboat.blogspot.com/p/overview-finnish-shamanism.html
British government to ink deal for yet another immigration database
'Our way or the highway' warranty scams shot down by US watchdog: It's OK to use unofficial parts to repair your gear
Wednesday 11th April 2018 19:27 GMT
Re: Will no one think of the printers?
"So yes I can buy a standard replacement LCD panel from a wide range of third-party vendors, but for it to work, I need the variant that has the IBM/Lenovo product id"
Most certainly isn't the case with IBM Thinkpads. Nor earlier Lenovo machines like T400 to T430. I have done plenty of screen/HDD/SSD/memory replacements for those. Anything with a compatible interface can work.
Exceptions:
- IBM and Lenovo have always used BIOS whitelists for internal Wifi/Bluetooth/3G cards. Smells more like a FCC certification issue. This whitelist is actually easy to bypass. Search for BIOS error 1802 and off you go.
- T43 had a whitelist for suitable ATA harddisks. That was due to shoddy SATA/ATA bridge design. Again possible to bypass.
- There is a slim possibility that Lenovo has sneaked something into their very latest models. I haven't dissected them much. But in this case we have no reason to talk about IBM device ID's, because IBM hasn't been involved in design decisions since 2006.
Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?
Monday 9th April 2018 18:36 GMT
Re: disappearing scrollbars
"b) Make it impossible to navigate using the mouse in any sensible fashion. It is literally impossible to move up or down one page at time without moving your hand off of the mouse to the keyboard."
Tee-hee. There was a page (without scrollbars as the custom is) where clever designers re-used PgUp & PgDn keys for...drumroll...language selection!
Hitting PgDn changed the page from English to Chinese. Took a bit of wondering about what the hell just happened. After some troubleshooting - several reloads, clearing of cookies, etc - I traced my last actions and managed to hit PgUp key to get back to English. Page help obviously neglected to mention such a valuable feature. And no, providing usual dropdown box for changing the language was obviously too passè.
Aren't we living in wonderful times. So much progress around us.
Sysadmin shut down the wrong server, and with it all European operations
2018's Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop is a lovely lappie
Monday 9th April 2018 16:04 GMT
"It's still a laptop, with the same standard screens and standard processors and standard RAM modules as the one I showed you."
Nope. Thinner screens, lower voltage processors in the BGA package, RAM soldered on the planar.
"They've just put it in a smaller box"
And that happens to be the hard part. Also the most expensive part. That 'just' is in no way justified.
Granted, I am also wary of that price tag and unnecessary (for me that is) slimming. Not their target customer really. But it's at least conceivable that there are people who appreciate such design and are willing to pay that price.
Russian regulator asks courts to disconnect Telegram
Don't want to alarm you, but defence bods think North Korea could nuke UK 'within a few years'
Saturday 7th April 2018 17:56 GMT
Re: Russians
"Having a treatment/antidote does not mean having the ability to make the poison in the first place."
Especially if the antidote isn't very specific (having been designed as an antidote for one specific poison).
Atropine has been available for many decades if not more. Well, definitely longer, because it's an extract of the deadly nightshade. Strong poison by itself. But it's useful against a good number of conditions, like pesticide poisonings and some heart problems.
I don't know whether ambulance crews in the UK carry it, but it's still part of the standard ambulance kit in my neck of woods.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
