Posts by Missing Semicolon

The fingerpointing starts as cyber incident at London transport body continues

Re: Khan cant

Bit of an assertion there. Is that based on facts, or just "Tory, therefore racist".

O2 punters lose cool over Google Pixel 9 delays

67W charger. That's a laptop-grade charger!

MongoDB takes a swing at PostgreSQL after claiming wins against rival

Doomed

How TF are they still losing money on revenues of 478 mil? Either the management are incompetent, or MongoDB simply cannot be monetized.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

They are doing what PE does best

Failing as cheaply as possible so that the assets (the land the shops are on) can be sold off for housebuilding.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

contempt of court

It is hard to litigate these defamation cases, as well as the copyright ones, as the AI flingers will modify the guardrails to prevent the specific content being produced. This means that unless you capture the offending content, you have no evidence. Rather like a burglar fixing your broken window then claiming that they didn't break in.

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

No Linux client

Which is crazy, as as far as I can see the Windows client is sort of Electron anyway, isn't it?

The Web client has been deliberately borked, so that it now no longer lets you set custom backgrounds. This means that in some companies, you have to use the Windows client for calls, as it is mandated to use the company backdrop.

Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build

So,

who will blink first? The Big Corporate Users or Microsoft?

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Re: A Pebble is Not a Raindrop

AutoHotkey was an absolute boon, I had windows zipping all over the screen wherever I wanted them, with (and this is important) no modality. If a window was 1/4 of the screen, that's the size it was. And cascading windows!

Now, I'm pretty certain with a bit of Python I could create something similar - but it is going to be an uphill struggle.

And why does no Linux desktop allow "cascade all matching windows" any more?

Re: How many people need to do that?

... weirdo. :-)

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Interesting that there is an allegation of hiding the badness from the elected members.

This may be an example of a more widespread problem. The executive branch of our various forms of government really see themselves as "in charge", with the elected members who are notionally "in charge" actually being an obstacle to progress. So it is entirely likely that the councillors were kept in the dark.

I have seen this myself at a public meeting for a planning enquiry (remember them?) where I overheard the Chief Executive of the council complaining to a friendly journalist (who, I noted, did not report it) that "the problem is, these councillors don't realise we have a council to run".

This is why things seem not to change very much. The people we vote for are not really "in charge" in any meaningful sense.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: On-site security

Possibly also to avoid injuries from smacking your head on some bit of metalwork that "wasn't there last time you looked". Any bloodstains, even caused by stupidity, have to be written down.

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

It's well-known

In marketing, 2 years == "mañana"

Microsoft squashes bug that sent Windows devices to BitLocker recovery

Drive encryption on servers is most definitely a thing. SAP got dinged when some miscreants made off with a load of SSDs (whether still in the rack, or in the discard pile, I don't know). Ah, here it is.

Encryption at-rest is usually a feature of cloud deployments.

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

Re: I like how Apple makes it simple

So, unless the user agent string is Safari on an Apple device, they hide the unsubscribe button?

Getting up close and personal with Concorde, Concordski, and Buran

Re: I'm convinced...

Interesting about wind damage. There was a big wind day, and Concorde at Manchester moved a few feet - you can see the now-empty dents in the tarmac. I thought about that when seeing the Concorde perched in the air on seemingly-spindly supports at Sinsheim.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: Shareholder Value

To a certain extent, that's just an excuse. The problem is that "shareholder value" means "executive bonuses", which is often why takeovers that are in neither the shareholders' nor the employees' interests go ahead.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Re: Shadowy cabals hate criticism

And never mind the dissembling and hand-waving about CVE-2018-20225. It requires a Holy Writ about how pip works to be changed, so it's going nowhere.

Backblaze sees drive failure rates tick up, asks if AI can help

Re: One obvious cause of failure

I received a WD drive a while back like this. I sent it straight back, citing the WD guidelines for drive packaging for their warranty return process. It was refunded without quibble.

EVs continue to grow but private buyers are steering clear, say motor trade figures

Re: Naysayer

You want a 2016 Outlander PHEV. No road tax. Otherwise, a pretty miserable hybrid, so a normal, slightly thirsty SUV.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Shame it's not original Wordstar

That was designed to run on any terminal environment - especially a serial-connected one. As such, when editiing, it prioritised updating what you were typing, and then , when there was a gap in the keystrokes, moving the cursor around to update the surrounding text to match. If you watch a touch-typist using it over a 300 baud connection, you see that when text is inserted in the middle of a line, pushing the rest of the line off to the right and re-wrapping the tail-end of the paragraph, only happened in the background.

All on a 3Mhz Z80!

Google gamed into advertising a malicious version of Authenticator

Google Play as well.

Try searching for "google authenticator" on Play. The top hit is the correct app, but above it is an advert for another authenticator app. Full of ads, requiring payment.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

I use a silver marker to write the device name on the (black) mains adaptor.

use a super-fine, and write it on the edge, not the back. Then it's less obvious.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

Er, why yes, I still own both the CPC6128 and the printer!

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

Ditto. Wordstar on a Amstrad CPC6128 did my degree dissertation.

This meant that when I was nearly late for the submission deadline, there were no photocopy places open. So I just printed the entire thing out 3 times on my Canon PW1080a dot matrix, in NLQ mode. I did get the 3 copies onto the counter at the bindery with 30 minutes to spare!

UK crimebusters shut down global call-spoofing outfit that claimed 170K-plus victims

1) Why is spoofing still possible?

Because non of the telephone operators (mostly BT here) want to spend any money, or forego any revenue. Establishing the bona-fides of call sources, and maintaining allow-lists for each CLID source, cost money. And then they would have to not get paid for carrying the call.

If BT were liable for scams enabled by spoofed CLID, you betcha it would be fixed in days.

Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble

The myth of uptime

Once again "Dur Cloud" is an excuse for no resilience, and no service:

"HM Courts and Tribunals Service took to Xitter to say: "We are aware of users experiencing issues accessing multiple online services. This appears to relate to a global Microsoft Azure outage.""

If this was on-prem, there would be redundancy, as quaintly, we used to think this was important. Now nobody needs to bother as a cloud outage is treated as some kind of natural disaster, instead of a system design failure on the part of the service provider.

Revamped UK cybersecurity bill couldn't come soon enough, but details are patchy

Re: Misinformation - Sweet Talking Citizens - While Doing Nothing......

Never mind Google. Equifax, TalkTalk, the kind of hack that should (according to the law) resulted in company-ending fines, actually turned into nothingburgers, with the hapless users responsible for the resulting scams 366 days after the event.

Amazon, you will do a total recall of bad stuff sold through your site, watchdog barks

Re: About time

And you cannot report fake goods. I bought a wifi mini-pcie card, which when it arrived, it was a junk card with the genuine label attached. So I tried to leave a review pointing out it was fake. The review was blocked. I resubmitted, carefully not using the work "fake". And that was blocked as well.

So, you will not see a review of an item pointing out it's fake. It's "against our community guidelines".

Proofpoint phishing palaver plagues millions with 'perfectly spoofed' emails from IBM, Nike, Disney, others

Re: did not expose any Proofpoint customer data

Disney et al are the customers. So, yes.

W3C says Google's cookie climbdown 'undermines' a lot of work

The W3C is living in cloud cookoo land

It's all very well to say "ban 3rd-party cookies" but the Big Beasts will only do so if they are replaced with something else. The idea of "no tracking, ever" simply is not acceptable, and will therefore never happen.

Re: It's amazing how badly the internet works without third-party cookies

A lot of small e-commerce sites don't work without 3rd-party cookies, as the checkout process hangs.

Car makers sold people's driving habits, location data for pennies, say US senators

Re: Scenario

"A month later, your insurer cancels your policy and no other company will touch you". And you will have no recourse. No-one is obliged to do business with you.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Re: Migration update

"Since the kernel maintainers appear to be set to remove FUSE driver support from kernel 6.9". So what about the other FUSE drivers? Are we only allowed to have file systems in the kernel now?

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: they're spending more time reviewing or moderating AI-generated content

Problem here is that the staff will still be held responsible if the AI product is faulty. "I thought you were checking this?"

Malware crew Stargazers Goblin used 3,000 GitHub accounts to make bank

Scripted rep/fork creation

Should only be allowed by paid-for, verified accounts, and should be audited.

I can think of no legitimate use for auth-creating repos and forks, except the generation of money for GitHub.

Fixing this is easy, as long as you don't have revenue targets.

UK and India sign broad tech collaboration pact

Ooh, we did a techy deal!

No doubt the Sir Humphreys assumed that this tech nonsense wasn't really important, so the Indians can do what they want. "Isn't all Tech done in India now?"

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

Isn't Unit4 supposed to be able to do bespoke Local Authority systems?

And their rep isn't good either.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

The Cloud has taught service providers that all these 9s of uptime are optional. "Computer says no" is now a valid excuse.

Merged Exabeam and LogRhythm cut jobs, face lawsuit

Fishy

So Exabeam has the name, but LogRhythm is providing the staff? Was Exabeam about to go bust? The zeroing of Exabeam stock would imply that Exabeam was insolvent at the point of acquisition.

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

I know, "Boris" 'n;' all, but could be really be any worse than either of the current contenders?

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Re: Rose tinted glasses?

The 49.7-day thing was a thing for Win95/98 only, I believe. (2^32-1 milliseconds)

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

"And thats all you need.".

No.

Because the people paying for this quite reasonably (from their point of view) want to know "How much will this cost?" and "when can I have it?".

Agile hedges these questions with a load of whalesong that does not address the underlying business requirements. Which are, to deliver stuff to paying customers (software, access to SAAS, features) in a predictable way. The customer will stop asking you for things if you never stick to a deadline. So your business goes bust.

EU officials say X’s paid-for blue check deceives users and breaks law

Re: But the interesting bit is missing....

Andrew Watts, and "Mandy Rice-Davies" to "Media Bias/Fact Check".

It's not pseudoscience when you do real research. It might not fit "the narrative" but it should be rebutted with real arguments and data, not insults.

Re: The European Commission is an executive branch

The EU court is hardly independent. And has been caught doing judicial legislating. It confuses "the interests of the states of the EU" with "the interests of the EU Comission".

Atos secures funding for rescue plan, lives to fight another day

Basically they are pretty well insolvent.

The shareholders are wiped out. And the banks get to throw more billions after bad billions, expecting to turn this turd around?

Yet there was cash for adverts on the Euros finals.

I wonder if some arms were twisted at high Government levels.

Asda kisses Walmart goodbye with half a billion dollar tech breakup bill

Azure?

Expect the stores to be shut 2-3 times a year, for a day each time.

Evolve Bank & Trust confirms LockBit stole 7.6 million people's data

Re: Youch.

Not really. Name one large organisation that has ceased to be after a major data breach. It is a temporary blip at the worst. And still cheaper than proper security.

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

Re: Structural problem

It's dumping if it is subsidised. Chinese car companies are not some economic miracle. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/09/14/everything-we-know-about-the-eu-inquiry-into-chinese-electric-cars

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 update after boot loop blunder

Re: Strangely Enough

Right up until Windows "helpfully" removes it as "that should not happen".