Posts by MatthewSt

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: CC

That's a great solution if you're at a level where you only need to send an email to one person at a time, but it's going to make day to day collaboration difficult

Police National Legal Database confirms data theft after dark web leak

Re: Design out the problem.

Are they building their own fixed line and mobile networks too? Actually probably best not think too hard about the mobile network part of that question.

Cloudflare has mostly ditched third party security tools, suggests not trying that at home

Re: With or For ?

Charge: entrust (someone) with a task as a duty or responsibility

"Them" refers to the engineers. It's ambiguous, but not incorrect

Unexpected item in the bagging area as Windows Activation error pops up at check-in

Flight mode?

'Nuff said!

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

Re: We already have sovereignty...

If you let your shareholders have network access then you've got bigger problems than the CLOUD act to worry about.

Re: We already have sovereignty...

Yes, really. The CLOUD act applies to governance rather than ownership. The fact that it has US owners is irrelevant as long as the US owners don't have seats on the board (which, as far as I can tell, they don't).

Also, if we're unhappy with that, what's £3bn to the government in exchange for sovereignty?

We already have sovereignty...

... It just appears no one is aware of it!

https://crownhostingdc.co.uk/

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

Verification

If my only choice is guess, rely on AI, or say I don't know then I probably would lean towards the AI answer (obviously depending on the consequences of the answer). It doesn't look like the participants were allowed to verify the answer elsewhere though. This isn't really any different to people using Wikipedia as a source, just the tool is different.

Tech support scam caused massive data breach at Australian airline Qantas

Re: Quantas IT help

You mean he hasn't already texted them to you?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

Re: Why?

I've seen this in the UK. Hospitals are quite bad for mobile reception for various reasons, and the police aren't allowed to connect their equipment to unsecured WiFi networks. Their choice is to go outside or use a personal device. When you're there supervising someone going outside is not always a practical option.

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Re: WTF?

Not sure how heavy you think software is, but the article indicates that it's going to run on the equipment that's already on board.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Many a year ago ....

Perhaps you were too bull-ish for them

Bcachefs exits experimental status in new 'performance release'

Re: "his AI coding assistant PoC was conscious – and female."

Maybe a loose grip on reality makes one a better file system creator...!

Microsoft site throwing warnings after someone forgot to renew cert

Re: Monitoring failure on a large scale...

But then you need something to monitor your monitoring system, because how would you know if there are no alerts or if it's just not sending them...

Home Office ditches legacy asylum database, keeps the spreadsheets

Re: "some Home Office staff continue to maintain their own spreadsheets alongside official systems"

Ah yes, but then you move on to sheet 2 where you get another mibbion[0] rows!

[0] probably won't catch on, slightly more than a million

Company CEO flooded file share with smut, called for help after he deleted it

Pin code

> First, the iPad that wasn’t turned over clearly was not locked to the point where someone else couldn’t get into it

iPads tend not to support user accounts, so the usual process is a shared pin code but then requiring individual sign in to whatever apps you're making use of. If it's a shared account too then the pin code is probably considered secure enough.

UK nuclear investors get 'high' returns for lower risk than consumers, who also foot the bill

100%

It's almost like there's a benefit for national infrastructure to be wholly funded and owned by the country itself.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Re: Intelligent? tools

I can't tell if you're talking about AI or devs in general...

Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

Re: Live by the sword ...

> I wouldn't say BitTorrent is inefficient

Depends on your use case and the perspective you're looking at it from. For distributing large files that never change it has a good user experience. For optimising backbone network bandwidth you can't beat a CDN: your traffic stays within your network instead of crossing peerings and continents.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Re: Words that strike terror in the heart of anyone oncall

> Not a chance! If you want me to troubleshoot, I do it my way. Methodically, step by step, looking at everything from the ground up.

Trust, but verify

Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming

Grant access

> in its current state it triggers a UAC consent prompt

So the application gets given admin access by asking the user to grant admin access...?

Microsoft to stop taking reservations for 17 Azure VM flavours, kill 13 in 2028

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

> What Borkzilla should have done is simply alert all existing users that there is a new platform they can migrate to while keeping their existing environment and that they should do it because the existing platform is getting old and becoming obsolete.

You mean by giving you 4 years warning like they did a couple of years ago, and 2 years warning today?

And changing instance types is a scriptable operation (until you get to v6) so you can do it in a scheduled maintenance window.

What would be nice if they had an option (like container instances) for "I don't care which CPU I run on". Then they could take care of it for us.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

RSS

Full articles (minus formatting) in the RSS feeds now! Nearly made my feed reader explode when I opened it up!

IPv6 carried half of internet traffic – for one day, according to Google

El Reg

How much of The Reg's traffic is over ipv6?

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Can't monitor something without changing it

Applies to hardware, software, wetware, and the universe as a whole

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems

Yorkshire!

https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/26030519.microsoft-set-get-go-ahead-build-data-centre-west-yorkshire/

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

Appeal process...

You're absolutely right! The transcripts weren't analysed properly so this department can remain.

Security boffins scoured the web and found hundreds of valid API keys

You can't fake an IP address if whatever you're doing needs bidirectional communication

Using AI to code does not mean your code is more secure

Age of bug

Would be interesting to limit the numbers to those that were "implemented" within the last 12 months. The CVEs found in pre-AI era code will be skewing the numbers.

Lloyds app glitch turned transactions into shared experience for 447k users

Not the trade off they think it is

> What this incident brings into focus is the fact that there is a trade-off. By moving more interactions with our bank online, we place our faith in technology which can suffer unpredictable errors.

Unless their staff are using a disconnected paper system, this has very little to do with customers interacting with the bank in an online manner. A race condition could still happen on staff terminals.

AWS S3 turns 20 and reaches ‘hundreds of exabytes’

Yes, but are you telling me that for those 2 months of the year they said to AWS's customers "sorry, we're going to switch you off. We need the capacity back"?

I agree that the principle of it is what led them to launch it, but the practicality doesn't add up.

Pretty sure that's a myth, otherwise what would they do in the run up to next Christmas?

AMD challenges Intel with an 84-core Epyc processor aimed at telcos, edge

Re: I guess….

Or they could just be talking about a different part of Italy...

KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on

That depends...

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Sales argument

> LibreOffice developers use LibreOffice daily

I don't doubt that's the case at all, but that's where it falls down: Developers aren't your target audience. Different skillsets, different requirements.

Azure power hiccup gives Windows admins a rare break from updates

Re: Misleading title

> Only place I can see where Windows Update and the Store makes sense is if it's a small time operation

So, only in 99% of businesses then (as far as the UK is concerned anyway)

Microsoft actually does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows

Re: Another thing MS should have done earlier...

Because it's had even less testing than what they normally throw out. Use at your own risk!

Old Windows quirks help punch through new admin defenses

Re: DOS? There's still DOS in windows?

Thankfully it's finally being fixed - https://superuser.com/a/1929659

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Source code...?

> clone commercial products, a job it can achieve if provided with resources including source code, specs, and product documentation

Marvellous! Give it the source code and it can clone a product! What will they think of next?

Microsoft probes Windows 11 boot failures tied to January security updates

Limited Number...

Well I suppose we can count ourselves lucky that it's not an unlimited number of reports...!

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

Re: "all were re-assigned to work at other branches!"

It's like all the current accounts: no interest

Bond, debt bond: Investors shaken, not stirred by Oracle’s borrowing spree sue Big Red

Re: Realised losses?

I'm not saying prices shouldn't change, I'm saying the losses aren't "realised" until you sell the bond, which is reinforced by the SVB scenario: They didn't have enough funds to cover withdrawals which led to them having to sell at a loss. Even then, it wasn't selling them at a loss that was the problem (I imagine this happens all the time, otherwise bonds would never decrease in value), it was their shady accounting and the ensuing panic.

If you are planning on holding the bonds to maturity, the day to day value is irrelevant. It only becomes relevant if you want to sell.

> Interest rate/bond rating define their present day value

Not quite, it's the price of the last transaction. If I wanted to offload a significant tranche of bonds then I would be very unlikely to get that price for them, the price would decrease as the supply increased.

Realised losses?

Technically bond holders won't have suffered any losses. They'll still get interest payments, and there's no immediate threat of the bonds not being paid at term.

Bond sellers however... Made their own choices. Good luck to them!

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

API

I had developer support for an API platform tell me to clear out my cache and cookies the other day.

If they'd have bothered to look at the attached network request they'd have seen that no cookies were sent and it was their API choking on some data.

I felt like asking them to forward on the request to someone who could spell API...

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Re: Hi.

If it's anything like my last DBS they posted it to an address I moved out of 8 years ago...! One can't help but wonder if the same attention to detail is present in the enclosed record!

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

Or "this line quality is really poor, I'll call you back" if you got a dodgy circuit. Or crossed lines.

Every technology has its issues, we just forget them when we stop using it!

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

Re: Is this some kind of joke?

They're not charging per CPU cycle though, they're charging per run duration. So an efficient sleep mechanism would let them over-utilise resources.

Microsoft spins up Azure HorizonDB to take on distributed Postgres rivals

Re: How much is M$ contribusing to PostgreQL ?

They contribute code (with the source being open, that's the kind of thing you can check rather than assume that they don't) and run at least 2 developer conferences.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Funny The Register Could Not Stay Up

Either AWS or Azure have equivalent services available on a (nearly) PAYG basis. They can be configured as your backups, switch over to them (maybe even automatically) when Cloudflare has a wobble.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

Re: Who is the longest

> Though to me 15 years seems an awfully long time to stay on a release, support contracts or not.

In Microsoft years 15 years would get you Windows 7...!