Posts by FeRDNYC

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: idiots

It's a perfectly dictionariable terminologum.

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

Re: The US Constitution is bullshit

the "blessed are the poor, meek, peaceful, etc." guy doesn't seem well-represented anymore

If their religion is under attack at all, it's under attack from that guy. Or at least his complicated legacy, since the flock are constantly being compared — unfavorably — to the example set by that figure they worship so unquestioningly, uncritically, unreflectively, and disingenuously.

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition ... and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

– Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA; "The Colbert Report"

Re: 250 years only ? Maybe add a couple of 0s.

Your lord, maybe. Not mine.

Re: Hitler did the same...

Few, if any, TV stations have a "start" and "end" to their programming day anymore.

They USED to. When I was a wee FeRDlet, I remember local TV stations "signing off" for the night (usually around 3am / 4am), often while playing the national anthem over a loop of an American flag waving in the breeze. Then they'd "sign on" again 2, or 5, or a whole 30 minutes later, accompanied by more jingoist rigamarole, and start the whole process over again. But seems to me even that lip-service marking of a "programming day" has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

And Carr really thinks it's worth bringing back just for this? What a maroon.

Re: Task Force 250 invites citizens to have a renewed love of American history

"A 1"? Like the steak sauce?

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

Because Operation Jumping Bean would've been racist.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Riddle me this

Anyway, the problem with that situation shouldn't be that we're jealous of the freedom private companies have to be indiscriminately awful, and want to grant that same power to government!

Private companies shouldn't be able to pull this shit either. Not without at least some standards of evidence / due process.

Java developers want container security, just not the job that comes with it

they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions.

I mean, they're right about that. If the past three decades have shown us anything, it's that a developer who handles their own app security is like a defendant who represents themselves in court. Security should be the responsibility of security experts.

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

Or, back in the 1970s, Fla-Vor-Aid. #ForSomeReason!

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: Could be worse

There have, including someone once flashing images of the TSA's master luggage keys. OOPS.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: Hipsters indeed

My problem, and I hasten to point out this may be just my problem (that "manual dexterity" thing), is that I often roll the wheel while pressing for middle click, which can send the cursor scampering off to parts unknown.

I doubt that's your problem, but rather your mouse's.

My previous Logitech M515 (acquired from Best Buy for $5 thanks to a discount I had to use-or-lose) had an incredibly sensitive scroll wheel, and it was nearly impossible to click it without also accidentally scrolling the wheel. Now that I've finally ditched that one for a no-name ("Citlla") Chinese mouse I bought on Amazon, i no longer have any issues clicking the wheel without scrolling.

The Logitech was weird in other ways, too — like, it had a tilt wheel, but instead of scrolling horizontally the tilt functions were Back and Forward. My new mouse has a tilt wheel that offers four-way scrolling, and side buttons under my thumb for Back and Forward. Much more sensible.

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Cubicles roasting by an open fire,

Beancounters auditing your life.

And in his domain, the BOFH

Will be LARTing you, too.

BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner

Re: USA Option

Beat me to it, and I should've realized someone would've already made that point.

Oooh! If you were in the US and it were the ground floor of an entire house instead of just an apartment, the Realtor would burble about the property being a "split-level ranch" and gushingly describe it as the Cadillac of small, single-story homes.

(And if the split-level layout was caused by, say, half of the floorplan sitting slightly elevated over a sunken, basement-level garage... they might even be telling the truth.)

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

I'm disappointed that in none of these plots does the beautiful and intelligent hacker/developer exchange obligatory nookie with 007, only to then do a heel turn and reveal herself to be the evil mastermind behind the whole scheme. End the myth of Bond's 007" having impeccable good-guy-dar!

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

I've heard of Mickey Mouse operations...

But never a vendor that sends an actual mouse to act as a project consultant!

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Re: please America .....

The rule-of-thumb I try to give people for testing their uses of "literally" is to consider the same statement, but with "literally" replaced by either "figuratively" or "metaphorically" (dealer's choice).

If the statement that results from that change isn't blatantly and undeniably FALSE, then you didn't mean "literally", which is really only supposed to exist for those rare occasions where you wish to explicitly disclaim any possibility that you're speaking figuratively.

Re: please America .....

It's "literally" killing me, the accelerating pace at which misunderstood / misheard cliches are coming to mean exactly the opposite of what they used to mean.

"Cannot be overstated" is the latest I've noticed. Not appreciating how the phrase subtly creates a superlative by denying the possibility of excessive praise, #KIDSTODAY are more and more bastardizing it into "cannot be understated". Which, again, is exactly the opposite.

So they think they're saying something akin to "should not be understated" or "must not be understated", when in fact they're insulting whatever it is they're trying to compliment, by claiming that any praise at all Is undeservedly excessive.

(And don't get me started on the verbing. Verbing weirds language.)

Our intrepid documentarian has accidentally hit upon the Most Cunning Plan for Jim & co. to have extricated themselves from this predicament.

If Cellino & Barnes & No-Bull WAS actually a law firm, as well as a bookstore, then they could've sued themselves over the phantom shopping-cart activity!

How could they possibly lose? (Or, for that matter, win?)

Ex-CISA officials, CISOs dispel 'hacklore,' spread cybersecurity truths

Re: Is this really the priority?

Is this really the priority?

Well, it's the priority of that site, because it was built for the sole purpose of combating vulnerability misinformation. Which is to say, it's not occupying space used for any other purposes, or pushing out any other type of information -- so it doesn't really seem to be a question of prioritization. There's nothing more important for the hacklore site/team to focus on instead of this.

And in terms of overall priority within our collective lives and attention, I guess it comes down to, "people can think about more than one thing". Is it the highest-priority issue facing the world right now? Obviously not. But is there so much else going on that we can spare no time for this? I would argue, also no.

None of the things they're talking about are entirely wrong, and most is entirely correct. However, I have to question whether dispelling some "myths", some of which I would rather characterize as "exaggerations", is really going to help much. For example, I think they're right that there's no history of actual attackers using public USB ports in their attacks; it's too unreliable. Is there really much effort going into telling people that this does happen, and is correcting that misconception something we need to spend time on?

Well, there I think it is about priorities, because people can only do so much to keep themselves safe, and any time they waste on meaningless, folklore protections against imaginary threats is time that could've been better spent preparing for actual threats. Not to mention, when it comes to physical vulnerabilities like USB connections, there are entire cottage industries springing up devoted to selling woo "defenses" against this kind of stuff. Helping people not waste their money on bullshit security products is a noble undertaking, IMHO.

Also, I don't think end users are the sole audience for the site or its messaging, possibly not even the main audience. One of its purposes is surely to educate the journalists who perpetuate exactly the sort of hacklore that prompted the site's creation. If they can stop the endless flood of misinformation, end users won't need to be disabused of those wrong-headed notions as much.

Re: Of course

My middle mouse button has grown insolent, and may need to be liquidated.

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

Re: Trump and his supporters

I've known and worked for other people like that, yeah.

A mutual acquaintance of one of them asked me if the person in question and I were friends. I told him, "We've worked together, and we're friendly enough, but we're not really friends. Which is probably for the best. I've seen how ____ treats his friends. I can't take that kind of abuse!"

Re: “ Pretty sure Presidential Executive Order is the law”, nope

True, but Congress has passed many laws granting the Executive powers it can exercise with the force of law, because the law says so. These funding bills they're always passing (remember the One Bloated Butterface Bill?) or not passing (see the current shutdown) are in no small part made up of money stuffed down the Executive's blouse for this or that purpose, thus making the execution (aha! see?) of those tasks by order of the President a matter of law.

Of course, over the centuries we've increasingly granted the President more and more latitude in interpreting those legally-obligated tasks and in deciding how exactly to go about them.

Or NOT go about them, because the argument has been made, and.came up again during Obama's first term, that if any part of the office's obligations under the law are likely to be deemed Unconstitutional by the Supremes, then the President has an obligation NOT to carry out that task.

Because when a law is struck down as Unconstitutional, it doesn't become invalid only at that point. A law struck down by the highest court was NEVER valid to begin with, and any actions that the Federal government took in implementing that law were unlawful acts

(Not that anyone involved would be likely face criminal charges. The government's actions are unlawful, not the actions of any civil servants obeying the law as it was understood at the time. You need some seriously exceptional circumstances, like the Nuremberg trials, for civil servants to go down because they followed the law and did the job as defined to them.)

...Getting back on track, tho: Problem is, we all know THIS Supreme Court isn't going to be slapping any of Trump's executive powers out of his hand -- real OR imaginary.

Rich people are literally bringing him lumps of gold to curry favour.

Joke's on them, too, because no amount of bribery or kow-towing will inspire any loyalty in President Cheeto. The moment they make a single decision that doesn't benefit him (even if it has nothing to do with him), he'll turn on them faster than guacamole sitting out in the sun on a summer day.

To solve compatibility issues, Microsoft would quietly patch other people's code

That is about the most Compaq thing I've ever heard.

Re: What is a filename?

Well, you'll notice the lack of "Program Files" in the path there, because in the pre-Win2000 era there was no centralized install location and programs could and would be installed anywhere, often right on the root of some hard drive. And the user was much more likely to specify their own directory name, when selecting the install location.

So, EVERY mail program wouldn't have installed to C:\MAIL\MAIL.EXE, but there was a reasonable chance that more than one totally unrelated program could end up with the same full path on different machines, yes.

(Or, more likely, a user installs a bunch of applications to C:\WORK\, and there's nothing to indicate exactly which programs those are based on the filename OR the full path.)

There were also a nontrivial number of applications that all launched from a generic filename like START.EXE or WINAPP.EXE.

Uncle Sam lets Google take Wiz for $32B

Nobody beats 'em!

Wonder if this means Google will start having Christmas in July?

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Re: Which side of the pond are you?

...You can freeze eggs?

AlmaLinux gives Btrfs a home after Red Hat kicked it out

Although Red Hat might not be keen on Btrfs

That seems like a bit of an exaggeration, as it's the default filesystem format in the Fedora installer.

They just don't consider it enterprise-level stable yet, which seems understandable given the other issues mentioned.

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

Re: Interesting, I guess

Now, that's just false. The reason ext4 was never embraced on Windows is the same reason every other non-Windows filesystem was never embraced on Windows: It was a bad fit for Windows files.

Adding ext4 (or HFS+ or ZFS or...) drivers under Windows would've left you with a case-sensitive filesystem without support for legacy DOS 8.3 short names, two things bound to confuse Windows users if those volumes were mixed in with NTFS drives.

(Linux can use a case-insensitive filesystem like NTFS case-sensitively without any real issues. You just say that a file named "Document.txt" doesn't also match "DOCUMENT.TXT", even though it would on Windows. But it doesn't work so well in reverse. You can't easily bring a case-sensitive filesystem into a case-insensitive environment, because that filesystem might contain BOTH "Document.txt" AND "DOCUMENT.TXT" and the case-insensitive system can't easily differentiate between those two completely separate files.)

So Microsoft or any native partner was never going to add ext4 support to Windows. And the open-source Linux developers, for the most part, had neither motivation nor inclination to do it themselves, because why?

Re: Interesting, I guess

Won't help of your ext4 filesystems are inside LVM2 volume groups, which of course they always should to be because LVM2 is the bee's knees.

Re: During the meanwhile ...

Well, NONE of these NTFS drivers are intended as any sort of alternative to ext4. They all lack features expected on Linux-native filesystems, and always will because NTFS itself lacks those features. You'd never want to put any of your standard Linux partitions on NTFS.

(I tried with the /boot partition, years ago when I had a dual-boot machine and wanted access to the Grub configuration from both sides — but an NTFS /boot reliably broke Fedora's distro upgrade process twice a year, so I abandoned that experiment.)

The only reason to use NTFS under Linux is because you have an existing volume that needs to remain accessible to both Windows and Linux. But, that does describe a LOT of existing storage out there.

Curl project, swamped with AI slop, finds not all AI is bad

Re: No one would complain about AI bug reports

some of them will be bugs they already know about but aren't important enough to bother fixing (like "application crashes inside the function shutdown_on_error()")

I wish that was a joke, but the Lua team regularly gets fuzzer- or AI-originated bug reports along the lines of, "It's possible to crash Lua by doing ______ using the debug library."

To which their response is always (but in far more polite terms than I think are warranted), "DUH!!! It's the debug library, OF COURSE it can crash the interpreter. The whole point is that it gives you access to unsafe things!!"

But still the reports come, because people with fuzzers are the skript kiddies of this decade. Their good intentions don't count for as much as they might think, absent any sort of critical evaluation of the bugs they're blindly submitting.

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

Printer memory was particularly obscene, especially back when it required proprietary daughtercards instead of standardized modules.

I remember always wanting to get a 512K upgrade board for some HP laser printer, which would've brought the memory up to a whopping 1MB but, crucially, would've been enough to do full-page bitmap prints at full resolution. I could never justify it, though, as the expansion board cost SEVERAL hundred dollars.

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

I don't understand the suggestion that this could be used as a code font, since it's clearly terrible for that. The lowercase 'A' is easily confused with the lowercase 'O', and I'd bet money there's insufficient distinction between the lowercase 'I', 'J', and semicolon, or between the capital 'I', lowercase 'L', '1'. It's clearly a very stylized display font for use when aesthetic trumps legibility. It'd be insane to use it in a situation where the main concern is being able to clearly and unambiguously interpret the text.

If you want a really amazing code font, Fira Code is a revelation. It has near-perfect separation between all of the characters I mentioned, and any other problem groupings that often trip up even other supposed coding fonts. Zeroes are slashed by default so they're distinct from capital 'O', the '1' has a baseline bar and a diagonal top member, the lowercase 'L' has a curved baseline extension with a horizontal top half-bar that looks nothing like a '1', the lowercase 'I' and 'J' both have horizontal half-bars below the dot, the '4' has an open top-right corner so it doesn't turn into a capital "A' at any size...

And all of that's before you get into the ligatures, which combine common code operators like '==', '===', '!=', '!==', '<=' , '>=', '->', '=>', and a whole bunch more into symbols without throwing off the alignment.

(For example, '==' combines into a long equals sign, while '>=' becomes '≥' and '->' becomes '→', but spaced on either side to maintain a 2-character width. Ditto '!=' becoming '≠'. '===' becomes a long three-bar equal sign (in the space of three characters), and '!==' becomes a slashed three-bar equals.)

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: My code doesn't compile

Yes and no, Literate Programming fanatics talk about embedding code In documentation, and formatting that documentation richly, but they still took a coder's view of how that was done. The documentation was written in source form (typically using TeX), which is kind of the exact opposite of writing code in Word.

Any documentation system can allow rich markup in doc comments (Python supports ReStructuredText markup in docstrings, and Doxygen can interpret MarkDown), but you're still writing the source for that rich text, which may eventually be rendered more elegantly.

I don't think anyone has yet come up with the WYSIWYG code editor that would allow you to edit that markup without delving into its source. And, of course, unless you're using something like LaTeX your markup is a lot less flexible than Word. (No margins, no font control or sizing, no text alignment, etc.)

Re: Typical case of...

I don't think that analogy works, Val wasn't any sort of messenger in this scenario.

What happened to him was more along the lines of mafia rules: No witnesses.

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

Excel in particular is black magic, the gulf between people who are good with Excel and all the rest of us is vast and intimidating

If you're possessed of basic computer literacy, you can muddle your way through Word, or PowerPoint, or Outlook. The UI will do plenty to help you help yourself, and it's possible to discover the features you need and become fairly proficient in just a few hours using nothing more than an inspection-trial-error loop.

With Excel, though? No amount of flailing around in its interface will turn someone into a self-taught expert... not quickly, anyway. Maybe if you kept at it for weeks or months. Maybe.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: Today..

the early 'freeness' (as in 'without obvious renumeration' rather than 'as in beer')

Wait, no, those are the same thing. "Free as in beer" refers to obtaining something without obvious remuneration.

The other type of free is "free as in freedom". Which is a whole separate conversation when it comes to the internet, especially.

True, the terminology with ISDN hardware was "Terminal Adapter" or TA. An ISDN TA took the place of your dial-up modem, when you upgraded to #TheFUTURE of blazing-fast 128 kbps connectivity.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

with models on show from an early Amiga 1000 through to the more-powerful 4000 (although the latter is not currently running).

If it's a really early model, then it's not an Amiga 1000 at all — the very first units released were just "The Commodore Amiga", because it was the only one.

Once plans were developed to expand the line by adding the A500 and A2000, the first model was rebranded as the A1000 and made part of a product family..

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: ... or some cosmetically waxed neanderthals

I hate to think what the total cost was.

If it helps any, for that expensive a leased line the service public wasn't metered. If they just paid a flat monthly rate, then the more data sent over the line the LOWER the cost per byte. So really, you were just helping them get more value out of their investment.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Spiriting patient data off into a murder basement? Whatever for?

Andy never told anyone about the fix. And the government never figured out how their system for clandestinely making "backups" of all patient test results stopped getting updates from this one hospital CT machine.

(Kidding. I hope!)

Atlassian's Trello redesign may be 'worst in tech history' say frustrated users

Re: I love when they change software interface for the sake of changing it

Automakers also continue to enable "spirited debate" among drivers and/or their national governments regarding which side of the car the driver's seat should be on.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

I had a similar experience a couple of years ago in a slightly lower-stakes (but still frustrating) context.

I keep Messages on my phone paired to Google's Messages for Web client, because it means I can receive and send texts using my keyboard and mouse in a web browser, an infinitely more comfortable experience than thumbing messages in on my phone's soft keyboard. (And don't even get me started on the annoyance of finding photos or other media to attach, when it's anything other than the most recent shot taken with the phone camera.) Messages for Web is, honestly, the bee's knees.

But because it's a web client gaining access to the inner workings of your Android device's privileged SMS client, a potential vector for anything from identity theft to exfiltration of all your most embarrassing secrets to out-and-out fraud and financial ruin, they keep the connection rather locked down. The pairing method is fairly robust (scan a QR code displayed by the web client using the phone you want to pair to), and web clients need to be re-paired fairly often, especially when they haven't been used in a while.

At the time this came up, I was dealing with the fact that the rear camera on my phone had just bit the dust, a casualty of a swelling battery that popped it right off the back of the device and rendered it non-functional. Naturally, within 2-3 days of that happening, Messages for Web demanded that I re-pair my browser with the phone.

Which involved scanning a QR code.

Which is hard to do without a rear camera. (It wouldn't use the front camera, and it wouldn't accept an already-stored photo from device storage.)

The punchline was, at the time (they've since fixed this), that method of pairing was the ONLY method of pairing available. Meaning, without a working camera on the device, I was locked out of Messages for Web completely, with my only recourse being to either get the phone's camera fixed, or buy a new phone with a working camera.

I eventually did the latter, and Google eventually realized their system was being a pain in the ass by keeping itself a little too secure, so I guess ultimately the story has a happy ending? "Yay."

IRL Com recruits teens for real-life stabbings, shootings, FBI warns

It's far more likely that any given member's identity is known only to their immediate "handler" within the organization (the one who recruits them), who's also responsible for assigning them tasks and motivating them to comply by any means necessary (including swatting and other threats). That person has the same relationship with their handler/supervisor, and so on.

All types of information, from members to targets to "clients", tends be highly compartmentalized in these sort of groups. Nothing is ever centralized. That's what makes them so hard to wipe out fully. If they arrest 7 members, odds are good that's one or two low-level organizers, plus the 5-6 people they'd brought in — and except for the ringleader(s), none of them have ever been in contact with anyone in the larger organization.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

I'm concerned about the implication that there are contexts where lies should be tolerated.

In what contexts, actually, should we accept being lied to without complaint?

The obvious answer, or at least one obvious answer, is: "When being told a story" -- in other words, in any creative-fiction context.

But that's just a bad definition of 'lie'. A fictional story isn't a lie, it's fiction. And even fiction has to be internally consistent, so a better definition of "lying" in the context of creative output is to violate the internal framework of the fiction. If a work of fiction contradicts itself, that's lying, and it collapses the fictional reality.

And guess what? LLMs do that ALL THE TIME. Even when using them to generate pure fiction, their output has to be carefully checked-over for plot discontinuities, loss of narrative threads, and internal logical inconsistencies. So, even the contexts where it's "ok" to make stuff up, AIs still can't do that in a reliable fashion.

The survey takers also sometimes used text-to-text models for captions and descriptive assistance

..."image-to-text", perhaps? Or was it really referring to respondents who use LLMs to punch up bland description texts?

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Huh ?

Your servers had optical drives? I suppose most did, decades ago, but it always seemed like a waste to me. A drive that's used once to install the OS, and then never again. (Software installs and even OS upgrades were already network-delivered, at least on our systems, by the mid-1990s.)

So ours were CD-less. Granted, they were mostly 3Com telephony rack systems that couldn't have fit an optical drive anyway. (The control unit had a PCMCIA card slot, its sole concession to removable media.)

What they DID have, tho, was a console command dedicated to manipulating the entire chassis' extensive complement of blinkenlights. (Not only could we flash the lights on whatever blade we needed a tech to pull, but we could even script a chase pattern pointing directly at its release lever. All they had to do was follow the bouncing LEDs.)

BOFH: If you can't beat the AI, let it live inside you

"What's a jack see?"

"I don't know, usually a car's undercarriage?"