Posts by Wanting more

Cyber-crew claims it cracked American cableco, releases terrible music video to prove it

They were saying they could infect their customers. Poison their DNS perhaps? That could be very damaging.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: 8.5 seconds...

I've been caught like that.

I thought one of my old laptops was broken as the wifi was enabled but just couldn't get it to work. Took me ages to realise that there was a physical switch on the side that enabled / disabled it. Windows had no clue it was turned off though, it just couldn't find any signal.

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

... hand over the dough...

applause for that!

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: I was considering an electric car but...

Well my Honda Civic (2007 petrol) was claiming 500 miles range earlier and I'd already driven 100 miles. In reality I know it's more likely it's likely to last another 250 miles (tank lasts about 350 with normal driving, if motorway cruising it does better). It's always been inaccurate like that. So it's not just electric vehicles that get it wrong.

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

created a directory

I was diagnosing an authentication issue on a newly installed live server cluster and created a temporary directory and copied some log files into it for further analysis. What harm could that do? I also did the same on the other node of the cluster. Went off to lunch and apparently all hell broke out. Over lunchtime an automatic code replication process ran and tried to get rid of my unexpected directory but couldn't due to permissions and crashed leaving the server in a half upgraded state. The other node did the same. A colleague of mine who wasn't at lunch spotted the issue and silently deleted my directories and fixed the servers. We blamed the issue on the original problem under investigation and so no one ever found out what really happened! We also fixed the scheduling of the replication process so if one node failed the other node wouldn't try and do the same, so in fact it was a very good "test"...

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Obviously he was a hardened criminal?

After 13 years, Atlassian delivers custom domain names for Jira

We have to use Microsoft Service Centre. Also truly awful.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Re: "Or struggled to serve a classified client?"

Ohm my that was a good one. Hope you're not going to charge for that.

Another week, another leak for Boeing's Starliner crew capsule

Re: Reminds me of one of my favourite Larson cartoons.

You mean a "software pitch"

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

Re: "celebrated industry diplomat Linus Torvalds"

brought a smile to my face too!

Hyperfluorescent OLEDs promise more efficient displays that won't make you so blue

lasers?

Will this help build a more efficient laser rifle?

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Cross breed it with a honey badger, then see what fun ensues.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board

Just drop a transporter pad next to them and send someone through.

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

Re: Improvement?

Yep at my workplace I setup up DOSBox to run a ancient application that drives an OMR scanner. The application was custom written in the 80s in Turbo Pascal by an outside contractor (we don't have the source code). The DOSBox solution worked well even talking to the parallel port (finding those cards is getting harder!). I haven't tested it on Windows 11 yet, but it's working on Windows 10 64bit fine.

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

Re: Oops!

and where were the backups? I've had a 2Tb hard drive fail and lost a lot of data (nothing important fortunately, mostly my stash of very legal media downloads), so I'm a bit paranoid now and raid systems don't fix theft, or user error.

Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms

Single point of failure?

Should such an important project really be so reliant on just one person.

YouTuber who crashed plane for sponsorship dollars earns 6 months behind bars

sell the plane instead

If this was a scheme to make money, surely the plane was worth more than the sponsorships / commissions? It was able to fly, so the engine instruments were good at least. But maybe he sold them after he helicoptered out the wreckage.

OpenCart owner turns air blue after researcher discloses serious vuln

Would we be even reading about this if the owner had responded "thank you for the report, we've incorporated the fix."? I learnt long ago that being boring is often the best policy.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Re: New phone no thanks

My Android 11 phone at £120 does everything I need it to and more and it's 1/8th the cost. When I drop it and smash the screen, or it gets bent etc. (all things that have happened to my previous phones) I won't be so upset and will just buy another one. Same with my £150 android tablet vs iPod. Just can't understand why people are buying Apple stuff as the cost / benefit equation just seems so out of whack. But I suppose the same applies to the latest Samsung Galaxy or Android pixel phone too. But then I'm still driving a 2007 Honda Civic Type S, so draw your own conclusions.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

I think she should switch to writing about RISC V like much of the world will be. Obviously ARM are worried.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: The bubble has burst

Isn't quick sort recursive and that can cause problems in environments which have limited stack space / memory. Sometimes an exchange sort is the better choice.

Microsoft makes some certification exams open book

Yes I tried to take that and had been developing using Azure for years and thought this will be easy.

I was expecting questions about Subscriptions, Resource Groups, Storage accounts, how to deploy things etc.

But no it was all sort of weird questions about what support contract you opt for in different situations and that sort of thing.

Stuff that 1% of the organisation probably needs to know and would probably negotiate with a MS sales rep anyway.

piles of books

When I started as a programmer 30 years ago, I remember the piles of (sometimes expensive) books we had. 11 ring bound manuals for the database, A shelf of Cobol Manuals, reference guides, Java API guides, Windows API, books full of algorithms etc.

Then you'd go on a training course and come back with a binder or two.

You couldn't just google it and if the vendor did have a website it was just for sales and maybe you could email them.

Still using one of my Java books as a monitor stand!

Must admit times are better now.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

I've been to the office 3 times this year. We now share 18 hot desks between a department of 100, so we couldn't all come back at the same time if we wanted to. The organisation is considering closing it's current campus and rebuilding a smaller office elsewhere.

So looks like I'll likely be at home for the rest of my career,

That's quite a change in just 3 years.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

We had a similar incident

At my old work, when someone was getting a PC an admin person would set it up, then wheel it to your desk on a trolley (big CRT monitors were heavy!).

They'd use the lift if it was to another floor. The incident happened when the power cord fell off the trolley and inbetween the doors. The doors closed on it and the lift ascended for a bit without issue then the UK plug on the end of the cord pulled between the doors but wasn't able to get through and acted as an anchor so the lift couldn't move any more and hit a safety cut out.

So the poor admin lady was stuck in the lift which wouldn't now respond to any commands and had to be rescued 30 minutes later. In this case they just had to lower the lift and open the doors and reset the electronics.

But from then on she refused to deliver PCs and people had to collect the trolley themselves and maybe risk the lift.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Re: Don't let that guy work without supervision

I expect Han felt very exposed.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

still run for legacy stuff

Sadly I still run 32-bit XP in a Hyper-V VM quite often. It's because I have to build VB6 and VB.NET 1.0 code and asp / com websites against IIS. Tried installing very old versions of Visual studio in Windows 10 64-bit and you can get it to just about work after a lot of messing around. But once you start adding in other legacy components / controls it stops working.

The one good thing is that it's nice and quick though.

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

A dozen CD-ROMS doesn't sound right, at 650Mb per CD that's 7.8Gb . The latest Mint distribution only downloads as a 2Gb file in 2023.

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

10 years ago we had a project to migrate our databases to Oracle.

We now have a project to migrate our database off Oracle (to Postgres in the cloud). You can guess the reason why.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: At least you fixed the problem.

Hey, I live there! It's actually a good place to live on the whole. Lots of greenery and parks. Nice village pubs. As like anywhere there are some estates to avoid, but anything based around the old villages is usually pretty decent.

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

Re: Wonder....

If you keep this up we'll be on a collision course. Just don't let them trace it back to you if you go down that route.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: Lots of things are possible

It's going to be cold too. A quick google suggests between seawater at that depth is 0 and 3 deg C and will be sapping away the heat in the sub. That's well within hypothermia territory.

Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

Re: Puts me off sharing my Wi-Fi

It's also probably against terms of service of your provider to offer such a public service (even if you do so free of charge).

Mars helicopter went silent for six sols, imperilled Perseverance rover

Re: Wrong place for the solar panels?

Fingers crossed for a nice heavy rain storm to wash them off? Might be a long wait though.

EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency

ban cash too?

Will they ban that anonymous cash stuff, coins and notes etc. too? Obviously it's mostly criminals that use that.

The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep

Re: I'm no friend of MS

Yes, their standard black optical wired mouse works just fine for me too (p/n X800898). At 80g not to light, not too heavy and a pleasing sensible ambidextrous shape. Scroll wheel is light to move but has the clicky detents. I have a few spares. In later years they brought out a newer model with thinner cable and only 60g, but it feels cheap and isn't as good as the earlier model..

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

ported that away in 1998

We ported our Cobol and Fortran code off our VMS Vax to Sun Sparc in 1998 and that was the last time I used VMS. Literally some of that stuff had been written before I was born (in the early 70s) and had been ported from a Sperry mainframe before that.

Ironically now we have "offshore colleagues" porting that same stuff from Sparc to Intel Linux boxes. If it works there I expect it will run unmolested for another 30 years.

It might surprise people that we're not a bank. Education sector.

Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state

stay and work from the inside

Perhaps they would of been better off staying and peddling suitably backdoored kit at knockdown prices to all the entities in Russia they could. We accuse of Huawei of doing the same, so why not follow suit.

Or maybe all their kit is already backdoored so they felt they didn't need to.

Google halts purge of legacy ad blockers and other Chrome Extensions, again

Re: Manifest V3 will kill many extensions

Breaking uBlock origin will be the push to get me to migrate from Chrome to Firefox.

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

sitting idle means they are using less power

At least modern PCs / Servers when the CPU is idle they are using less power. Give them a heavy load then the power consumption goes up. So it's not actually "free" to give them something like seti@home to do. Also generates more heat therefore the cooling system has to work harder also drawing more power.

So in effect it's stealing to use the "idle" computers in this way.

We've had incidents where I work of people mining bitcoins using the organisation's electricity.

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

had a printer with the same fault

I had a old dot matrix printer that wouldn't print. The interlock switch (just a leaf spring pair of contacts) thought the lid was always open. Fix was to bend the contacts a little.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Re: True to form

Never check for an error you don't know how to fix!

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

what's the power draw?

An increasingly important factor is the power it's using. 50 to 60W?

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Canon too and in a 10 year old printer

My 10 year old Canon inkjet printer died last year. So I took it apart as you do, hoping to find stepper motors, precision ground bars etc. No stepper motors any more, just normal motors and end limit switches.

But was disgusted to find a big nappy in the bottom of the printer that was saturated with most of my expensive ink. Obviously the head cleaning that the printer seemed to do every time I turned it on was sucking ink into it.

Have now switched to a laser printer (Xerox B215) which can't do pretty photos, but so far I think this one toner cartridge should last me a few years as I'm a light user and probably only print <500 pages a year. I've had it a year now and toner still says 97% .

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

DECNet new fangled...

Last time I used a VMS VAX I was connected to it via a serial cable! Early 1990s

How a crypto bridge bug led to a $200m 'decentralized crowd looting'

Re: There're kidding, right?

Yes everyone knows it should of been 0xFF instead

Miscreants aim to cause Discord discord with malicious npm packages

nuget too

We had an incident here where one of our developers accidentallyinstalled a Nuget package from a dodgy publisher (not Microsoft but a very close spelling). The package seemed to be from Russia. It was several months until this was noticed and the code had been deployed to test servers.

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

Re: "At 1.97kg and 33.6mm x 340mm x 220mm it is heavy and bulky."

Same here. My Thinkpad T340 weighs in at 2.1Kg, but with a SSD upgrade in it it's still good enough for most tasks.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: College Tales...

Our T-connectors were double shrink wrapped to help deter tampering and accidental disconnections. Seemed to work quite well, doesn't stop anyone really intent on damage though, but then they could just cut the cable, you just can't prevent everything.

Creator of SSLPing, a free service to check SSL certs, downs tools

Re: Pingu

We still have a Windows 2000 server to run VB6 builds on. Heavily firewalled and running on a VM. But one day VMWare will update things and Windows2000 will no longer run any more, then we are screwed. We're currently on the 3rd project to replace the old VB6 system.

We also have some "irreplaceable" DOS software attached to a specialised scanner, but that runs on Windows 10 64bit in DosBox though, so fairly modern!