Posts by theOtherJT

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

You are of course right that people don't care. That's not terribly surprising, because to most of them none of what we commentards would warn them about sounds like words in any language they speak. I've found it painfully obviously when talking to various members of my family about IoT things that they simply do not understand any of the things I'm telling them, and don't believe the things they do understand because "They wouldn't be allowed to sell this if that was true!"

I've had more than one family member tell me exactly that, and it really gets to me because that's exactly how this should work, but doesn't. There needs to be a law that says you - product vendor - are legally responsible for meeting these minimum security standards and if you don't you pay huge damages. People who are used to simple electronics that have a kite mark of some kind on them to prove that they're "safe" just assume that there's some equivalent for IoT devices, when in fact, there isn't. It's the only way that people who don't understand, and don't care to understand, the actual problem can be kept safe.

There's a reason that you find a little label saying "This device must not cause harmful interference" stuck on pretty much all electrical equipment these days. Someone had to legislate for that because until they did we had a bunch of cobbled together electronic crap out there that fucked up everyone's TV and radio signals as soon as it was turned on - but of course the people who bought it had no idea why and probably weren't even aware that it did. Legislation is the only answer here.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: Look At Cutting-Edge Enterprises ...

Most of the ones I know use Macs.

Re: Repeat after me:

Trust no one. No one can be trusted. It only takes one moment of carelessness or a single malicious employee to do catastrophic damage.

I have a user who has, because he has local root on a shared GPU cluster, managed to force us to send his entire team home multiple times because he's totally hosed the cluster by playing with things he doesn't understand to the point where we've had to actually go into the server room and rebuild the thing from the local console.

He's not a bad person, but he's absolutely not qualified to be administering a Linux system. He's a software developer. Presumably he's a good software developer, because despite the number of times he's done things like this and we've not let him go, but he can't be trusted with local root.

It only takes one fuckup to seriously ruin everyone's day.

Re: Repeat after me:

I totally take your point. We had full time 5 (it was meant to be 7, but for all the time I worked there, we never managed to have the complete set due to staff churn caused by the shockingly low pay given the complexity of the work) members of IT staff to support a company with about 1000 employees.

Personally, I think that's pretty impressive. That means that each one of us was handling all the support requirements of 200 people, and this was definitely only possible because 90% of those people were using Linux systems that were basically impossible for them to break - and if they did break, due to hardware failure or something, they were all effectively identical and we could just swap in one from spares and have them going again in a matter of minutes. Compare and contrast where I work now where we have effectively 14 proper IT staff and another 4 help-desk technicians to support about 400 people and still provide what I see as a much worse user experience, but can't do anything about it because our management absolutely insist that all users must get local root.

I think what @cyberdemon was getting at in their "Lazy IT" comment was that it's a matter of training the IT staff to be able to run a thing like this, and not just relying on people who are just about good enough at their jobs to click through the list of GPOs and it'll probably work, most of the time, for most people, maybe.

I'm not sure it's fair to call those people "Lazy" perhaps so much as "low skilled" and you do get what you pay for. It seems like the barrier to entry for managing Linux at scale is much higher than it is for Windows, but that itself has upsides as well as down. Basically any idiot (including myself, back when I was responsible for the Windows desktops) can click through the GUI and find a bunch of GPOs that sound about right and apply them to the fleet and get a "sort of good enough on a clear day" level of management, but it takes a much more skilled Windows specialist than I ever was to be on the ball about which of those were deprecated in the last release, which don't work for the "Education" edition but require "Enterprise", which just plain don't work any more... I got caught out by AD an awful lot of times. That's before we get into the problems caused by someone clicking though a UI rather than using something like Desired State Configuration (is that still a thing?) because a lot of the Windows admins I've met over the years don't even know that's something Windows can do.

But then again I'm not a Windows admin, and if that were my job full time I'd expect to be expected to know that sort of thing and design things accordingly. As a Unix admin I was required to know a very different set of things, and I don't actually think there's a massive difference in the number of good Unix and Windows admins out there, there's just a fuck ton of bad Windows admins available because of the ubiquity of Windows devices.

When it comes to managing Linux at scale the answer seems to be "You can do it properly or you can't do it at all." where as Windows is totally possible to do badly.

Re: It is the UI

I'd give you the full list, but I'm afraid I can't find it. It's a bit like the rules for the badges. I've definitely seen it, but I have trouble finding it any time someone asks about it. The things I know work are i b strike code a sub sup q ul li blockquote but there might be others.

Re: It is the UI

I was informed (in a way that I think was intended as an insult, but never mind) that for those of us with enough comment history to prove we're not bots that El Reg supports a small set of HTML tags. In this instance the one you want is code.

And yes, there's plenty of weird arcane shit in Windows, but Linux has a reputation for this stuff. Probably not really deserved at this point, but it's definitely there - especially amongst people who perhaps flirted with the thing a bit back in the early 2000s and were traumatized by being expected to occasionally do things in bash and swore "never again".

I personally love it, but bash is very much a product of a different era and to the average person it looks like fucking voodoo.

Re: Repeat after me:

| And what if you have 200 laptops scattered here, there and everywhere and need to make a configuration change?

I had a puppet agent running as root (which the users were not allowed to have) on the laptops with a public endpoint that it would poll for changes every 15 minutes. If I needed to change a machine I'd update the manifest and the next time the thing checked in it would update the machine config accordingly. This had the double benefit of the fact that if someone changed something I didn't want them to change but it wasn't practical to completely lock (Common ones like the VPN config where the username was something people might realistically need to update, but the host address absolutely was not) it would simply change it back.

It was, in fact, the same system we used to update the desktops and servers - even the switches by way of a switch management bastion. Everything was IaC. Everything was version controlled. All endpoints could be swapped from the "Prod" to "Test" branches as required. It even managed major version upgrades entirely remotely. We offered a "Things done fucked up" boot option that would connect to a sftp site, validate the machine certificate for your host, and download you the correct and pre-configured installed should something go terribly wrong. It was - in short - a metric fuck ton more reliable and convenient than AD was, where Microsoft had a nasty tendency to change what settings did between one version and the next, and occasionally just plain take them away from me.

Now, this was not cheap - at least in terms of man-hours spent getting the thing to that state. Basically the entire infra was totally custom and there were effectively two full-time members of staff to support it, but then I don't recall AD being particularly cheap in that respect either - although I imagine it would be easier to hire people for.

Re: It is the UI

Indeed. I'm typing this from a Dell XPS15 running Ubuntu 22.04. It's without a doubt the best machine I've ever had, but it was issued by the company I work for and it arrived in the office with Windows 10 on it, and we had to re-build it. Dell actually do offer Linux on the XPS13, but go to this page and look at the "operating systems" list on the left, it's not there. You have to select the machine with Windows and then customise it to chose Linux. What's more they only let you do that on one specific machine! Despite the fact that Ubuntu works perfectly on the XPS15, they won't sell it to you.

Re: Linux Mint

Sure, any distro can but steamOS is a product. It's a thing people can just buy and use without thinking about it. It changes the perception, and the perception of Linux has been more important than the reality for a long time. Linux has been "good enough" for a long time, but the perception doesn't match that. I personally like mint. It was my daily for a couple of years before I decided that stock Ubuntu was now good enough that I was happy to go back to that - but people really like a thing they can buy and don't have to think about. The major benefit is that it comes on the device and once it's gotten it's foot in the door that way...

Re: It is the UI

UIs are important, but TBH I think that Gnome has been a "good enough" desktop for quite a while now. Certainly for the last 4 years. Even my eighty-something year old parents are just fine with it. In fact they like it better than Windows because it has fewer buttons. They just pin the four or five apps they ever use to the Ubuntu taskbar and get on with their lives and it isn't constantly asking them to sign into things or do updates. Those I set to happen automatically in the background and they never thought about them again.

Here's why I think they wouldn't have bought machines with Ubuntu on if I'd not bought them for them:

They had no idea that such a thing existed.

And that is probably the biggest blocker to people taking up Linux as a desktop these days. Most people have either no clue there is such a thing, or if they do know about it, they think that's some nerd thing for nerdy nerds that they can't imagine themselves wanting because they're normal people who don't cast magic spells that look like this ${array[${#array[@]}-1]^^}.

Even for me - who is very aware that Linux exists and would very much like to be able to buy computers with it pre-installed - it's remarkably hard to do so. Most vendors will sell you Windows or Windows, and if you try and convince them to sell you a machine with no OS at all, because you don't want Windows, they just plain won't.

Re: Linux Mint

I'm going to have to disagree.

I reckon it'll be steamOS or whatever it is that Valves supports. Why do I think that? I think that gaming is a hook. Kids will own Steamdecks to play games, and then they'll get used to the idea that they can sort of use this thing as a PC too. Then as they get older they'll need an actual PC for work, but now - and here's the kicker - they're already comfortable with the idea of steamOS, and of course they still want to play games too, so why not stick with what they know?

It's the same way that the 8 bit micros completely dominated the 80s. Gaming drove adoption. Yeah, they got killed off in business by the IBM PC, but they didn't die in the home until the PC was also capable of playing games so it could supplant them and do both. Games is a really powerful driving force.

Re: Repeat after me:

Curious what it was that was missing in 2005, and what's still missing now?

The biggest blocker everywhere I've worked was always MS office. Specifically Outlook and Excel. My feelings about those two particular abominations and the way that so many office workers are suffering what I would best describe as Stockholm syndrome regards to them are well documented at this point, but those have been the big blockers for me.

I have worked somewhere where we very successfully managed nearly 1000 Linux desktops and that was the case as far back as 2012 - but even there, which I still remember extremely fondly because of how incredibly easy managing Linux desktops at that scale actually was - we had another 100 or so Windows desktops explicitly to provide MS office to specific members of staff who refused to couldn't work without it.

Anthropic unlocks Claude 3, claims it's better than ChatGPT and Gemini

Re: After spending the day with an LLM yesterday...

Well, quite. Hence the "scare quotes".

After spending the day with an LLM yesterday...

...I was genuinely impressed that it "understood" the question that I asked. That bit I am really blown away by. There's definitely room here for these things to be effectively a "better search" function for people who know what they want, but aren't sure of the exact terms they need to search for to get it. I particularly liked the fact that it linked to the sources it had used to generate the answers. When it comes to the content of the answers tho, things started to go a bit wrong.

Yes, they were obviously an attempt at answering the deliberately broad question I asked it, but they were not a correct answer. Multiple rounds of "No, that's wrong. You've made a mistake here." and it going "Oh, yes, you're right, that should read..." started out looking promising as it was fixing each mistake I pointed out, but each time it fixed something it introduced a new problem. After a dozen iterations it had re-introduced the error that I called it out on the first time, and when I pointed that out it didn't have any memory of the fact that it had screwed up in the first place.

So, yes. A useful tool in a lot of ways. It pulled out a ton of information related to my initial request, and gave me much better links to the things I needed to read to answer the question than a google search would have done, but for now at least - as in so many areas of life - it's still vital to check the original sources.

Cruise's valuation halved after its driverless car hit and dragged a woman

Almost nothing would be allowed...

...if we invented it today. That's one of the big problems with today. We've gotten so fucking comfortable with how well everything (looks like it) is going that we conveniently forget that a fuck ton of people had to struggle, and in a lot of cases die, for it. It's really easy to judge the mistakes of the past from up here, and IMO we're on a path already that leads to dangerous back-sliding.

It's a relatively short step from "We should not have done this thing in the past, it was dangerous." to "We should not do this thing it is dangerous." when we didn't live through how fucking awful the past was before we did the dangerous thing. Yeah, cars are pretty bad for us in a ton of ways, but you and I never had to shovel horse shit off the streets, or deal with the fact that the food we're going to eat today is a bit on the rotten side because it took a week to get it from where it was grown to where we bought it.

Re: "We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

You and I might be fortunate enough to see it that way, but ask any of the hundreds of people who get pulled over in the US* for "Driving while black" and I suspect they'll feel differently - and that's just the ones who got pulled over and then sent on their way.

Much like you skin colour doesn't really play a big part in my life so I don't tend to think about it much, but it is a big part of a lot of people's lives. We can debate endlessly that it shouldn't be, but if we're going to be honest we need to acknowledge that for a lot of people it is.

In that context history matters and correct historical representation matters. It's not OK to say "Everything is all fine and well with the world we live in now, no one thinks about things like that any more, isn't this a lovely civilized society we live in!" While ignoring the fact that for a lot of people, no it isn't, and for the vast majority of our history, no it wasn't. No problem ever got fixed by pretending it doesn't exist, and no problem that ever was fixed stayed that way if people started pretending it had never existed in the first place.

*and I imagine in a lot of other places, but literally every black person I know who has been to the US has gotten pulled over for as far as they could tell no reason at least once, and this is not true of all the white people I know.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

Re: Sure thing. All that's needed now...

Code. It's called code.

'How do I reset my router' isn't in LLM corpuses. An alliance of telcos wants to change that

I don't see this working...

...based on my - admittedly limited - understanding of LLMs and how they work.

So, as far as I understand it:

- To train an LLM it has to be able to make statistical inferences with a high degree of accuracy.

- To improve the accuracy of the statistical inference, you have to have a large dataset.

- The larger the dataset the more links the LLM can make between words and phrases and the higher the likelihood that some outcome is "correct" based on the fact that this outcome appears very often in the training model and other outcomes do not.

- Small datasets lead to weird behaviours from the LLM because there's not enough signal for them to start selecting for meaning instead of noise.

Given these facts (and feel free to correct me if we have any data-scientists in who know better) it's unsurprizing that if you ask big LLMs questions that are highly technical that have very few examples to draw from in the dataset they're likely to come up with silly answers. A fairly generic question like "how do I reset an *thing that needs resetting*" will probably have hundreds or thousands of examples of "You reset a *thing that needs resetting* by..." but if the thing is sufficiently rare it might have none at all for the specific thing you're asking for.

It doesn't seem to be in the nature of LLM's to go "Fuck if I know." but instead they tend to come out with something plausible sounding based on the data that is in their training set, but which actually bears no relation to reality.

So, ok, to try and fix that problem, we train the model on some very specific data that does contain all the information about your specialist field.

...but that's a small dataset. Which leads to weird behavior from the LLM because there's not enough in it for it to build useful statistical inferences.

Sounds to me like what they actually need is the operators manuals for the equipment they buy. Which I have to assume they have already, because they'll need it to train the model.

Perhaps they should try having their employees read them.

Google to reboot Gemini image gen in a few weeks after that anti-White race row

Developers must make a conscious effort to create models that produce diverse and fair results

Must they? Because this feels like another is/ought problem to me. What is the purpose of this model? Is it to reflect reality the way it actually is, or is it to depict reality as the people who designed it think it ought to be? When did we decide that the results of the model needed to be "diverse" or for that matter "fair" given that life itself is regularly neither?

I find the idea that we should "tune" a supposedly representative model to gloss over facts about life that we don't like really concerning. If there's a problem with the facts, focus on changing those facts. Don't pretend things aren't the way they are because they make you uncomfortable. I don't see any way that doing that doesn't make things worse rather than better.

Embedding the prejudices of the people who made the model into the model surely limit it's utility - and supposedly "positive" prejudice is still prejudice. The one thing these "AI" do is shine a lens on their training set. They show the things that are in there that we might not particularly like. It's about the only valuable thing I can see them doing at the moment, so deliberately stopping them from doing that strikes me as lopping off the one somewhat useful feature they have.

The machine is genuinely colour blind. It can't be sexist, or racist, or any other kind of ist because it's not aware of any such concepts. It's showing you the truth of what you showed it, warts and all. Once we start saying "You should tell us the truth all the time - but not that truth." we're taking the first well-intentioned step to a potentially pretty dark place because now I can't trust anything the AI says. What if you "tuned" it not to tell me other things you didn't find convenient?

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

Re: Pot, this is kettle

Because quite regularly some business who I'm invested in in one way or another - normally in as much as I use their product, or have to support people who use their product rather than a "I own shares in it" sense - announces something via bloody twitter, and then all the news outlets report it by linking to the bloody twitter, and I have no idea what the fuck they actually said because I don't have bloody twitter!

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

He went on to state that...

...in reality, the systems have never been stable, and lack safety guarantees.

Never mind AI, that's the state of our entire fucking industry in one sentence right there.

Google debuts first Android 15 developer preview without a single mention of AI

Re: Word Definitions

In this case it's not you, it really is the children Google who are wrong.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Children aren't idiots....

...well, ok, some children are idiots, but so are some adults. They're not idiots just because they're children.

Children are ignorant which is an entirely different thing, and ignorance is totally normal. Everyone is ignorant. There's too much to know not to be. Everything you know today, you were ignorant about until you learned about it. Telling kids they can't do something - as many people in this thread have already pointed out - is actually an amazing way to drive them to reduce their ignorance.

Sure, the dark web is a pretty sketchy place - but let's be fucking honest here, the regular web isn't exactly a well lit, soft-play area under constant supervision is it? The idea that we can achieve anything by trying to keep them ignorant is exactly the same kind of idiocy that the "If we don't tell them about sex, they won't have any" crowd perpetrates. It doesn't work. It's been proven over and over not to work.

For better or worse the internet exists. The dark web exists. You're not going to get anywhere by trying to keep kids from finding out about it or preventing them from using it. Like all potentially harmful things the best thing to do is explain to them what it is, what it's not, what can happen, and how best to protect yourself. Then you sit back and hope like fuck you have a good enough relationship with your child that they listen to you.

If you don't, there's no amount of law passing that's going to fix that one.

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

I've played Magika...

...I expect this to make about as much sense, but be significantly less fun.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Re: Ain't Gonna Happen ...

Always my answer on the perpetual "What one thing could we ban to instantly make the world a better place?" question.

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Re: I support him

Eh.... maybe.

There's always the wonderful 3rd option that we are both non-deterministic and non-free because the illusion of free will arises from the action of some effectively random process along the lines of atomic decay.

That being said I've always harboured a suspicion that atomic decay is not at all random - seeing as that it is at least statistically completely predictable, but we just lack the theoretical grounding to explain what causes it. If that's the case then it could just as well be the case with mental phenomena. Maybe they do actually "exist" in some physicalist sense, we just aren't looking in the right place.

I would immediately concede that this is pure speculation mind you, and anything I suggested to explain it without a theoretical basis that could be in some way tested might as well be defined as "Supernatural".

Re: I support him

"Do not" seems fair. I don't see any evidence of it.

"Cannot" however is a stretch. To quote(ish) Captain Jean Luc Picard:

"We took are machines, only of a different construction"

I don't see any reason we couldn't make a machine that thinks in theory.

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Shiny button software...

...As a service.

Missed a trick there. All shiny button software is a service these days. By paying a low monthly fee of $7 per user you can generate metrics that will allow you to waste at least 30 people's time at a rate of $50 an hour, for an hour per month while the compulsory meeting to discuss the metrics that no one has read takes place. The outcome of which will be a reduction in over-all spend by the equivalent of at most $1 per month per month, per user, by making everything slightly more annoying.

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Officials working in counter-fraud told us...

"...the processes in place for sharing data, both between and within departmental groups, are often slow and burdensome, often resulting in incomplete or time-lagged data being shared"

And that, I can only assume, is entirely by design. The people responsible for setting these policies and processes would really rather that there wasn't a clear trail that would expose all the other incompetent decisions they made.

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

I've had the good fortune to see this thing in person...

...and it's absolutely amazing. Here's to you, you magnificent sciencey bastard. This one's for all those who worked on it. ->

Microsoft embraces its inner penguin as sudo sneaks into Windows 11

Good... I guess...

...but I have to wonder why now? What are they up to that this extremely obvious addition has finally made the cut after, what, three decades?

Says a lot about how I've come to view Microsoft that I view even what appears to be on the face of it good news with abject suspicion.

DEF CON is canceled! No, really this time – but the show will go on

Re: "That's because we studied math at school."

I guess it's because a lot of us don't understand where the fun is. Scratching some metallic foil off a piece of card doesn't on the face of it appear to be any fun.

I'm not anti-gambling in broad terms. I can get behind the idea of placing a bet on a football match - you were going to watch the match, now you get to watch the match and also maybe win some money. I play poker quite regularly.

I do not get lotteries which can be equated to "Pay a dollar and press this button. You have no control over the result. There might be money but there probably won't be." I don't understand slot machines for the same reason.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Re: What about LUKS

You can do LUKS a lot of ways - including hardware tokens like yubikeys or similar. If you're going with good'ol "Type this password in at boot" then I have to assume it's as good (or bad) as any other purely password based approach. If you an automate feeding the password you can break it in an amount of time determined by the complexity of the password.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

it might be a pretty piece of kit...

...but it's still just a headset

You think? Because everyone I've seen wearing one looks like they're getting ready to go snorkeling to me.

You could have heard a pin drop: Virgin Galactic reports itself to the FAA

Re: The pin fell off?

It's alright. They towed it out of the environment.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

No, it isn't.

If I was a maths student and needed to demonstrate that I understood the material I was supposed to learn, then damn right I'd get failed for using a calculator.

This is why they don't allow them into a selection of pure maths exams. You're supposed to demonstrate that you are capable of not only solving the problem posed, but - and far more importantly - that you know why the answer is what it is. As every school teacher ever will have said at some point "Did not show working. 0/10"

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Re: Remind me again

Well, the OS is responsible for managing that data. It opens and closes file handles if nothing else.

Now, if what you mean is "Why is it parsing that data?" there might be legit reasons for that. Search indexes for one. The problem here is that we just don't trust Microsoft to take proper care of the data that it has visibility of. The OS is a bit like a sysadmin. You would not believe the power a sysadmin has in most places if you've never been one. Your OS can go poking through your data, it can arbitrarily move things. It can erase the logs that it ever did anything wrong.

It's a huge amount of power and requires a great deal of trust. Once that trust is broken, you have to fire your sysadmin.

...or get a new OS.

"Hostile Environment"

Do application and system designers now assume Windows is a hostile environment, like the open internet, where data security has to be the responsibility of each product and service?

Yes. Yes they do. And they have for a while.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

Re: root cause

It's possible, but I'm not sure it's "Modern". Trying to hire for complicated jobs while offering utterly insufficient amounts of money has been producing shitty candidates since basically forever.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Re: where the NFS mount had failed

Ah, see, this is where pam_mount came in, because that's running as root and it will create the directories for remote users when they log in so it has somewhere to do the mount, and then delete them again when they log out. Unfortunately I missed a trick further down the stack where they should have been automatically logged out again and given a "There's something wrong with this host, please report it to the IT team" message if the mount failed. Instead pam_mount created them a nice empty directory owned by them; opposed to what it should have done which is returned a failure to the next step in the chain.

Re: Genuinely curious...

Good idea if possible, but given posix permissions you can only have owner, group, other. If "owner" of the junk files was whoever ran the script, and "group" was, for example, the working group that user was a member of, there's no room left for a separate group for the operator account that runs the script. Either it has to be a member of all the potential working groups (which won't help you, if those groups own files on other servers, which they almost certainly do in a large shared environment where all the groups are coming from LDAP or similar) or it has to be run as root, or some root equivalent power.

Depending on how long ago this was and what filesystem they were using, extended ACLs may not have been an option.

I'm thinking this is where the "do not cross filesystem boundaries" option to find is going to be your friend.

I may have done this...

...while cleaning up home directories.

See no one on the compute nodes should have a home directory except the operators account. That one belongs to a service account that runs ansible jobs across the fleet. Everyone else's home directory should be a NFS mount to a storage box.

Unfortunately there had been an incident where the NFS mount had failed and a few people had managed to log in anyway due to some oversights in pam_mount and then left a bunch of work on the local /home partition.

Didn't take long to sort out, fortunately their workload was such that all we had to do was remount the shares elsewhere and rsync some working directories around to get everything back where it was. Then we clean up the redundant ones in /home, reboot the box, and everything will be back to normal. Right?

Well... No. See, what I didn't do was disable all other user logins while I was cleaning up the mess, and someone didn't get the message in the group chat about "please don't log in here for half an hour while I clean this up.

It was on this day that I learned of the wonderful -xdev argument to find and found out why I should have been using it as I completely nuked the unsuspecting user's remote home directory and had to restore it from last nights backup.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Re: Improvement?

Depends rather what else is on this network that the thing needs to talk to I suppose. Win3.11 networking was, as the article points out, kinda... weird. It's possible that there's some other component has just been updated that now, when faced with a Win3.11 client just goes "The **** is this?" and refuses to talk to it.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

Re: Persky relies on discoveries of mass quantities of floppy disks by individuals and businesses

I wonder if I still have that degaussing cabinet in the garage...

Fairberry project brings a hardware keyboard to the Fairphone

The Blackberry Passport...

...oh man, that brings back memories. A mate had one and for the half hour or so I got to mess with it in the pub it was the best smartphone I have ever used bar none. I promised myself I'd buy one once I could afford one, but by the time that day rolled around they'd discontinued the thing.

I still really, really miss my little Motorola Milestone too. Touchscreens will just never be as good to type on as a physical keyboard, even when you're only using two thumbs.

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

Re: A fine idea but...

Humans are not good at estimating risk - and we're really bad at the idea of composite vs absolute risk.

There's something very immediate about "If this blows up it will kill everyone in a half-mile radius"* it's something people can understand. Something has exploded or it hasn't. People have died or they haven't. True or false. It's absolute.

Trying to get people to wrap their head around the idea that "Statistically, running this thing for 40 years will lead to everyone in a 20 mile radius having a 4% higher risk of cancer and a 6% increased incidence of respiratory diseases, which on average will amount to an additional 100 deaths per year over that time frame"... that's just too abstract. People don't really engage with that in the same way.

*...and yes, I know Nuclear power plants don't do that as a rule, but for the sake of this example it's a thing that people are afraid that they will.

A fine idea but...

...people fear nuclear. They fear it to the point of irrational panic.

It's become one of those things about which it's basically impossible to have a reasoned discourse because so very few people actually properly understand it. I was at least taught physics at highschool by a qualified nuclear physicist who had worked on nuclear power plants in the 80s, so I like to think I have some grasp on the complexities of the issue. The reality is tho, that I think nuclear power is good because someone I have reason to believe understands the subject told me it was. I don't really understand it myself.

A lot of people got told it's really, really bad, and at this point that's going to be a really hard notion to dislodge because they don't understand it any better than I do.

Nuclear power is regulated to the moon and back - which is probably for the best, given the potential for it to do harm if we cock it up - but given how many people are just plain scared of it I rather suspect that getting regulations relaxed enough to allow any kind of small modular power plant to actually be built is going to require a great deal more than a bunch of large companies agreeing that they'd like one and setting out a standard for what it should look like.

I have no idea how we get enough of those people on board that the issue isn't so politically toxic that no one with the power to do anything wants to touch it.

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

I dunno man...

...sounds like it has a pretty clear understanding of what DPD is like to me. Maybe these chatbots are smarter than we thought?

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Re: I realise the UK still has a strict class system

"The real question is how people can remain so ignorant of, or turn a blind eye to, things they really should be aware of, should have an interest in, have an informed opinion upon."

Because they're exhausted.

Just getting through the day gets harder and harder for a lot of people, and worrying about things that haven't impacted on them personally is just too much to deal with on top of all the things that are impacting on them personally. Can I afford my heating bill? What happens if my sick parent dies before they get through the massive NHS waiting list? Are my kids safe at school, or is it one of those ones that might fall down? What if the mortgage rates go up even more and I lose my home?

There comes a point where all the troubles pile up and pile up until the only way of coping is by just turning your back on anything and everything that you don't absolutely have to deal with.

On my more cynical days, I look at our government and do sometimes wonder if this is by design.

Re: Generous

This is one of the major problems we have. The government doesn't have any administrators who could take over operations, at least not without making a colossal mess. They've spent the last 25 years outsourcing everything they can get their hands on, and all the skilled technical staff are gone now - or more likely, given how long ago the rot started to set in, no one competent to understand IT at scale was never hired in the first place.

There has been a massive institutional brain drain, where all the in-house expertise that we used to have in the civil service for running complex projects is gone - which is of course a large part of how scandals like this are allowed to take place. There's no one in the government side who's qualified to take a look at the evidence and say "Hey, that looks wrong to me based on my years of experience with this sort of project. Someone get me more details." Everyone involved is pretty much forced to take the lies at face value because they don't know any better.

If we're going to cancel all the contracts of these big tech firms - and I actually think we should - it will first require the re-hiring of entire departments of specialist staff who are capable of understanding what it is that they currently do.