Posts by ecarlseen

Memory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60%

Blame it on AI

Layoffs due to an economy strangled by politicians and bureaucrats? Blame AI

Price hikes due to whatever? Blame AI

Bad weather on a weekend? Blame AI

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

Re: Microsoft loves constant change for the sake of change...

I understand if the PTSD is preventing you from remembering Windows 8.

Microsoft loves constant change for the sake of change...

...and if this year's change subtracts value and makes things worse then, oh well, it's more change!

Recently, I was looking back on the first version of Apple OS X (now macOS) released about 20 years ago. Settings management has been completely remade (to make it consistent with IOS / iPadOS) and scrollbars are hidden by default (because every company has to do at least one outrageously stupid thing), but other than that most of the core UI functionality is more or less the same. The presentation is much fancier (especially with Tahoe and Liquid Glass) and the applications themselves have evolved a great deal, but on a UI level it would take almost no effort for a person to transition from the first release of OS X to macOS 26. Menus work the same way, applications are in the same place, etc. Well, as long as you un-hide the scrollbars.

There's nothing wrong with taking a solid interface design and just sticking with it.

Australian police building AI to translate emoji used by ‘crimefluencers’

ROFLMAO

Having seen things like this attempted before, one can predict that the results will be far more hilarious than useful.

Unless the use is mocking them. In which case they'll be very useful.

Twist in Tesco vs. VMware case as Computacenter files claim against Broadcom, Dell

Is Broadcom even suffering?

Everyone who has been paying attention knew what was coming if they purchased VMware, and a lot of organizations either decided to ignore history.

It looks like Broadcom is coming out ahead on this because not enough customers jumped ship when the ticket prices doubled (or more) mid-cruise. Sure, people can sue and maybe even win, but even if they win, it's not like they're going to have anything resembling a good vendor/customer relationship. Any support they get is going to suck ass.

The smarter move would have been to get off at the next port, cut your losses (the sunk cost jokes write themselves), and never go back. If enough customers had done this, Broadcom would lose money on the deal. But plenty of companies would rather pay lawyers and fight to stick with someone who doesn't like or respect them.

Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum

It doesn't have to be open to the Internet...

...if an attacker has virtually any sort of presence inside of their network. Typically there are fairly few restrictions with regards to what kinds of systems can talk to WSUS. Traveling laptops with VPN connections, anyone?

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Government-mandated remote device bricking vulnerability.

Can you imagine the headaches created with how easily-abused such a system would be?

Social-engineer a phone company or police department to kill somebody's phone, for fun and profit.

How difficult would it be to take two seconds, consider "Gee, how could miscreants abuse such a system?", and then weigh the potential cost/benefits? (this is a rhetorical question)

Also, even if you lock out a phone's IMEI it can probably still be used in mobile bot farms.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Re: You have to lawyer out their claims

And you can find out for sure if this is true for your specific case after several years and millions of dollars / pounds / Euros / whatever in legal fees.

You can even try to figure out if you and your precious little votes mean more to your government than donations from these companies do.

Re: Nobody needs to change this setting more than ...

640K changes ought to be enough for anyone.

You have to lawyer out their claims

All of these terms and conditions are written by lawyers and riddled with loopholes in the exact same way that threat actors worm in and leave APTs in software.

Realistically, there's no way to parse out who is really doing what with your data, assuming they don't flagrantly violate their terms and conditions as big tech is often wont to do. After all, even if they get caught, what are you going to do about it?

How do you even compute damages for loss of privacy?

How do you even determine the scope of what is shared / lent / given / copied / grouped / sold / leased / teasingly flashed or whatever between companies?

You either trust a company or you don't, based on what they've been caught doing in the past.

Personally, I don't trust Microsoft further than I can throw their oddly-bloated founder who somehow bears an uncanny resemblance to the pregnant man emoji.

Nobody should trust Alphabet or Meta, at all, ever.

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

Office 2010 / 2013 = Security Fail

The last Office 2010 patch was released over five years ago, and the last Office 2013 patch was released in 2023.

I'll let you figure out how many published, open / unpatched security vulnerabilities there are.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of unpublished ones because out-of-support software doesn't qualify for bug bounties, so they're more valuable on the black market.

Office 2013:

https://vulmon.com/searchpage?q=microsoft+office+2013&sortby=bydate

Office 2010:

https://vulmon.com/searchpage?q=microsoft+office+2010&sortby=bydate

Senator presses Cisco over firewall flaws that burned US agency

Cisco's quality has been tanking for many years.

I used to be a very loyal Cisco customer and, while their hardware is still above average (not as good as it used to be) and they have a wonderful product portfolio breadth, their software has become garbage: bug-ridden / broken features, unstable, and frequently insecure. It sucks for customers because they were once a great one-source vendor for all of your networking and some security needs, but now I aggressively get rid of them when I can. Stability and security issues more than outweigh any benefits.

Locked out of your Gmail account? Google says phone a friend

Make Phishing Great Again!

Now their users (I refuse to use Alphabet products, and you can too!) won't just have to worry about phishing attacks agains themselves, but against their friends as well!

Also, passkeys are in no way whatsoever tied to devices - they often sync via password managers and can be stolen just like passwords can. They're marginally better than a username/password combination in that they can't as easily be fooled by a similar domain name, but that's it.

Python releases version 3.14 – with cautious free-threaded support

Re: 3.14

They don't even refer to compression as constriction smdh.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: Unless I'm hallucinating...

Moving something that size is a more interesting question than most people seem to think.

I've worked with people who have moved obscenely large things (such as engines for very large ships, large and insanely heavy structural pieces that for whatever reason can't be fabricated on-site, etc.) across continents for obscenely large amounts of money. There is specialized trip planning software - it works very much like Google or Apple maps - that knows all about things like road widths, bridge heights, weight limits, axel count limits, etc., and will find a workable route if one exists - and they do exist more often than you might suspect. If you can't move it all the way in that manner, then you see if you can barge it to a relatively nearby port. There is a boutique industry that builds the necessary custom trailers, towing rigs, barge modifications, and so on. You need to arrange for cranes, hoists, jacks, or whatever to move your cargo from one mode of transport to another. You need to have a highly customized insurance policy written for the move. And the list goes on. But usually it can be done, and there are people who specialize in doing it.

If you want to see what a shuttle looks like on a trailer, there's a photo at this link:

https://www.edwards.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2000190261/

Politicos: 'There is a good strong case for government intervention' on JLR cyberattack

Simple solution

When the government bails out a large corporation due to its own negligence, the c-suite and board of directors go to prison until the bailout is repaid.

AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs

Sounds familiar

Meanwhile, another recent study from nonprofit research group Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) found that AI coding tools actually made software developers slower, despite expectations to the contrary, because they had to spend time checking for and correcting errors made by the AI.

Now do offshoring development to 50-packs of cheap developers.

Moody's raises Big Red flag over Oracle's AI datacenter buildout blueprint

They're all sucking up to Trump ...

... so they can get their inevitable "too big to fail" government bailouts.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Has anybody created a script or application...

... that looks at the complexity of an Excel workbook in terms of average formula complexity and gives it a toxicity rating on a scale of “nauseating” to “nuke every city containing a datacenter where this abombination has been stored in or replicated to?’

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

They literally have two jobs.

You’d think that a communications company owned by a CRM company wouldn’t screw this one up, but nah.

Researcher who found McDonald's free-food hack turns her attention to Chinese restaurant robots

"Pudu Robotics is a Chinese robot manufacturer with over 100,000 units in over 1,000 cities doing everything from serving meals with the cat-like BellaBot,"

ngl I read that way too fast and got the wrong idea at first.

Salesforce data missing? It might be due to Salesloft breach, Google says

Let's just smear our attack surface all over the Internet.

After all, it's perfectly secure in theory.

In practice, it's perfectly secure just as long as software doesn't have exploitable bugs.

AWS, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, and Google helped Feds investigate alleged Rapper Bot DDoS perp

Re: What does Rapper Bot run on ?

All of those IoT devices embedded in iPads!

“Prior to joining Scoop News Group, Brandi produced a long-form documentary and worked as a journalist at Nextgov, Snapchat and NBC Network.” - not sure which of these is the least impressive.

Microsoft may be safe from quantum attacks (big maybe), but

they'll still be vulnerable to an endless number of exploitable bugs, so even in theory the best case is it's like putting a better lock on a safe made out of paper mâché.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

OEM identified based on specs?

According to this post:

https://x.com/MaxWinebach/status/1934632952366764447

it appears to be a re-skinned Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G (made in Chyyyyna, of course). The specifications seem to be a pretty exact match.

Post-privacy AI glasses claim to listen to your every word

This is why we need to take the term "glassholes" and make it stick.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

There are downvotes from the haters, but after moving to Apple I've stopped worrying about just clicking "update." I won't say there have been zero issues, but they're maybe once every five years or so vs. a PTSD-inducing frequency for Windows. Thinking back, it's probably been at least seven years (back to the days of big cat version names).

Workday warns of CRM breach after social engineers make off with business contact details

Re: Sophisticated attack?

The schadefreude would be amazing. Somebody leak it, please.

Just say the name of the "third-party CRM platform"

At this point we all know it rhymes with Rails Horse.

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

The sad thing about this:

I'd !@$# every last one of you in your sleep if it would get me an intern or new hire as capable from learning from a first mistake as this one was. First mistakes are a cost of doing business. The endless repetition by some people is a bit much.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

The irony is that if the BTRFS developers were as good at writing code as they are at holding grudges, none of this discussion would be happening.

I'm not a LKML geek, but reading this thread suggests to me that there's a lot of ivory-tower mentality in FS-land ("it works well in theory and in my lab, if it doesn't work for the rest of the world then it's the rest of the world that's wrong") and that does not bode well for the future of the operating system.

Re: An unfortunate turn of events

ReiserFS?

"After all, a murder is only an extroverted suicide."

Re: Add me to the list of people who have lost data to BTRFS

Why do people like you even write these comments? What does it bring to the discussion?

I didn't say it happens to everyone. Nobody is claiming it. Clearly it works well for many people. If it works for you, that's great and I'm happy for you. If it works at Meta, who has (comparatively) infinity dollars for systems validation before putting hardware and software into production, that's great and I'm happy for them. However, it has also failed for many people - apparently mostly in multiple-disk configurations where significantly more data is at risk.

Add me to the list of people who have lost data to BTRFS

Allegedly it is some degree of better now (maybe? I'm not playing guinea pig again), but it was rushed into production use way too quickly which certainly brings into question the judgment of the people deciding which filesystems to include in the kernel.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Some people like their fiber raw.

We were sub-subcontracted to figure out how to network between two buildings operated by a Fortune 100 corporation that everyone in this forum has probably done business with at some time or other. Turns out that they had already run fiber (ancient multimode, but we didn't need much bandwidth so whatever) so we found the necessary SFP modules for the switches, plugged them in, and.... no data. A more in-depth examination of the connection showed that zero photons were passing through, and the reason turned out to be that the fiber had been run through the air between the two buildings. This was not outdoor-rated or armored fiber. Just basic, plastic-clad stuff intended for indoor use. It was out in the open just dangling and soaking up the cumulative effects of the coastal desert sun, wind, rain, etc.

As a proper cable run between the two buildings would cost a six-figure sum and disrupt operations by tearing up their driveways and parking, we wound up using good, old-fashioned wireless bridging.

'Suddenly deprecating old models' users depended on a 'mistake,' admits OpenAI's Altman

“Please use us as a business tool, even though we test and change in production.”

On one hand, the AI companies are trying to ram their products down people’s and, especially, businesses’ throats.

On the other hand, how tf are you supposed to use these as production tools if they go around deprecating functionality and breaking behavior with no notice or time to adapt and test?

It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to get these systems to work reliably in the first place.

This is clown-world vendor behavior.

Nvidia and AMD reportedly chipping in to Washington’s coffers with 15 percent fee for China sales

A straightforward shakedown

The ostensible (and stupid) reason for prohibiting the sales was national security, but I guess a 15% "fee" makes all that go away.

Patch now: Millions of Dell PCs with Broadcom chips vulnerable to attack

Look on the bright side!

The connector cable is very prominently halogen-free! So at least you don't have to worry about that.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

I miss them

I moved to MacBooks when Apple introduced retina displays - being able to type scripts and code with well over a hundred lines of legible text on the screen at once was a productivity game-changer, and ditching Windows didn't hurt either (back then Linux on laptops was still sketchy with weird laptop hardware driver issues, sleep / wake problems etc., even on Thinkpads). I've become accustomed to the reliable and still very friendly-to-UNIX-lovers MacOS, but Apple's keyboard and trackpad have never come close to the ThinkPad keyboards and trackpoints.

And, yes, back in the day, I pushed my boss to let me get a 701C - that was pretty cool.

Cybercrooks attached Raspberry Pi to bank network and drained ATM cash

Re: Not new

Hilarious.

A PoE Pi in an air freshener case that plugged into a LAN port so that it's flush with the wall would almost certainly not just be overlooked by office staff, but also by an uncomfortably high percentage of infosec consultants / auditors. You could even use the RJ45 clip to make it so it can't be pulled out without physically breaking the plastic, kicking in the normie fear of breaking something that isn't theirs. If it actually had smell coming out of it, that would increase the deception value by a factor or ten.

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

Lip-Bu Tan is “leading” a managed decline.

The only thing Intel has left right now is inertia. They have no meaningful performance leads anywhere, by any meaningful metric. They're behind AMD on high-end compute, behind ARM on low-power compute, nowhere on AI / GPU compute, and abandoning the other areas (fabrication, networking, FPGAs, etc.) where they at least has a possibility of differentiating in a positive way, even if it's Intel not having to bid for wafer starts at TSMC vs. all of its rivals.

At this point Intel's only hope is that AMD makes a major stumble as it grows, or somehow gets stuck with bad leadership after Lisa Su retires. These things happen to the very best of companies, eventually (see: Intel). But with many of their best engineers retiring or leaving the sinking ship, I think Intel is now, as Douglas Adams so eloquently put it, dead - it just hasn't stopped moving yet.

Ex-OpenAI engineer pulls the curtain back on a chaotic hot mess

Re: Actually looks like a great place to work at

Huh. Tell that to Valve.

Intereting question:

How much code at OpenAI is written by AI?

If only they had a working information system...

...that could read though all of these Slack channels, code repositories, etc., summarize activity, and help leadership steer the herd (and the herd coordinate better internally).

The key word here is: "working."

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

FRED?

Pretty much everyone in the rail industry will tell you that stands for "Fucking Rear End Device," and the jokes for (ab)using one to slam a train to a stop just write themselves.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

The MOS Technology 6507 CPU...

...used by the Atari 2600 had a whopping 3,510 transistors to work with. Pretty sure your average microwave oven has more than that these days.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Ah, Boris.

If he wasn't done in by legal and HR, it would have been by moose and squirrel.

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Wrong wider Issue

While I won't argue that Broadcom isn't 50 shades of awful for this move, no vendor is under any legal obligation to continue renewing contracts in perpetuity unless that is explicitly stated in their earlier contracts (which no sane vendor would ever do unless offered a truly massive pile of money). The potential costs are ruinous.

The reason that companies don't normally acquire other companies and then Broadcom them is reputation hits. Yes, people used to actually care about reputation (a few of us weirdos carry on the tradition), but now everyone wants the government to renegotiate their deals if they go sour.

It's not like Broadcom doesn't have a reputation here. They've done this before. And they'll do it again, because people keep letting them. As soon as there was even a whiff of an acquisition, anyone with any sense of sanity and / or fiduciary duty started planning a migration immediately.

The IT administrations / CIOs / politicians / whatever in charge of these organizations that didn't migrate breached their fiduciary duties. If they locked in so hard on a single vendor that they couldn't migrate in a year, then they breached their professional duties.

Not responding to the real and imminent threat of your vendor being Broadcommed is an inexcusable and unforgivable management failure.

Not being able to respond to the real and imminent threat of your vendor being Broadcommed is an inexcusable and unforgivable management failure.

VMware's customers promptly fleeing would impose costs on Broadcom an order of magnitude more than all of the potential government actions combined, but too many people are too fucking stupid / lazy / incompetent to act in their own best interests. They could have made Broadcom choke hard on that acquisition price instead of profiting from it, but nah.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Even TheAgentCompany benchmark is horribly biased...

...towards tasks (coding) that AI companies have been focusing very, very hard on polishing.

The tasks described are the best of best-case scenarios.