They were saying they could infect their customers. Poison their DNS perhaps? That could be very damaging.
Posts by Wanting more
80 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2013
Cyber-crew claims it cracked American cableco, releases terrible music video to prove it
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
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
After 13 years, Atlassian delivers custom domain names for Jira
Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified
Another week, another leak for Boeing's Starliner crew capsule
GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture
Hyperfluorescent OLEDs promise more efficient displays that won't make you so blue
Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep
NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board
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
Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms
YouTuber who crashed plane for sponsorship dollars earns 6 months behind bars
OpenCart owner turns air blue after researcher discloses serious vuln
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
FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds
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
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
Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email
Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice
It's time to mark six decades of computer networking
Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine
Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue
Mars helicopter went silent for six sols, imperilled Perseverance rover
EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency
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
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
Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything
Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine
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
How a crypto bridge bug led to a $200m 'decentralized crowd looting'
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
Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout
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!