Posts by MJB7

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Re: Be prepared!

Have you tried looking in Switzerland? There are an awful lot of them there. Some are even in uniform.

AWS builds a DNS backstop to allow changes when its notoriously flaky US East region wobbles

Testing?

I don't see how you can properly test this until us-east-1 throws a wobbly. It's a worthy effort, but I won't get really excited until it is seen to work.

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Comparing CVE rates

> sudo-rs has 5 low severity CVEs in it's entire 2.5 year history: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=sudo-rs

> During that time alone 3 high severity CVEs have been announced in the original sudo

That is the important metric. If sudo-rs has fewer bugs than sudo, then it's worthwhile. I had honestly not expected that result though; I had expected that old code like sudo would have had most of the bugs flushed out by now.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Switzerland _was_ quite expensive?

I live in Germany near the Swiss border. Roaming in Switzerland is still quite expensive (for calls). I pay €1.49 per minute for outgoing calls to Germany and €0,69 for incoming calls. Data is included on my contract though. Fortunately I mostly use Signal/WhatsApp when I talk to people.

Handily my mobile provider still thinks the UK is part of the EU, so I get free calls, and more data than I can use when I go back.

Chinese gang used ArcGIS as a backdoor for a year – and no one noticed

Re: Pots and kettles

It's called "freedom of speech". ElReg doesn't have the resources to investigate every account to see if they are a shill account or not, so they let them all stand. They _will_ remove accounts that expose them to legal risk, but this one doesn't.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: Are they are two separate cages?

Phones, watches, other electronic devices? I expect there will be a ban on bringing powered-on electronics to the site (unless suitably shielded). I'm not sure that EVs are going to be worse than spark-ignited engines (petrol), but compression-ignition (diesel) should be better. I think the main defence against lookie-loos is the "800km from Perth" - that 500 miles is not uninhabited, but there isn't a lot there either.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: My NTP-AD default...

> South-western Germany, (not Bavaria)

Waves from Baden-Württemburg (specifically Südbaden - plenty of people here still bitter about the merger)

Torvalds blasts tardy kernel dev: Your 'garbage' RISC-V patches are 'making the world worse'

Re: "at least he didn't drop the F-bomb"

He's a Finn, however his mother tongue is not Finish. It's Swedish.

And he can probably swear in three languages.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Broken Britain

The nationalized period includes about 26 years before the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. That Act may have lead to an awful lot of "Health and Safety gone mad" stories - but it also led to a dramatic drop in the number of deaths and injuries from accidents. I'd like to see a graph of "death rate vs time", and I would not be surprised to see an uptick after 31 January 1995. The trouble of course is that railway deaths tend to be very "lumpy", so it's hard to see a signal in amongst the random noise.

Cosmoe: New C++ toolkit for building native Wayland apps

112 lines?

That's not small, that's microscopic (unless each one is 1MB long - but each #included header file has to go on it's own line...)

Wolfspeed to file for Chapter 11 in deal cutting 70% of debt

Re: Utterly criminal

I don't see how ordinary people's lives will be ruined at all. It appears that the big lenders will convert their loans into equity, so will win big if WolfSpeed eventually becomes profitable, or will lose if it eventually folds (more likely). The big lenders should be big enough to make their own decisions about whether the risks of lending $1B are worth the rewards. Small creditors (the small firm that cleans the offices, the stationery supplier, etc) will continue to get paid. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some redundancies, but that's always a risk, particularly when you work for a hi-tech company.

As to "no company should be allowed to exist to the point of a billion in debt and unable to pay", that's pretty much already the law - if the directors believe the company will be unable to meet their obligations as they fall due, the company is insolvent and must be wound up. That is true if the company is $1B in debt, or $1 in debt. If you mean, no company should be allowed to go $1B in debt, remember that $1B is pretty much table-stakes if you want to build a semiconductor fab.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: When will we stop trying to get Windows?

"Surely the only people who switch to Linux are those that actually want to?"

Or are switched by their children. I am seriously considering switching my mother (94) over to a Linux distro. She needs Chrome, and access to Whatsapp - and that's probably all. It needs a very, very, Windows-like UI. Different system calls are entirely irrelevant.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Be consistent in your lying :)

I am pretty sure that because Congress certified the election results, Biden was president, even if the election results were false (spoiler: they weren't).

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: Customizations

No, no, no. en.gb-oxendict ftw!

(It's a horrible word, but when I need it, it's spelt "colourize".)

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: The only verified backup is one that you have restored from

Nonsense. If you want proper long-term archival material, the only choice is baked clay tablets ... and we can still read them 5000 years later. (Shame it's mostly tax records)

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

Re: Brilliant!

"Cut and paste" don't come from paper tape (though patching may do). They come from graphical layout where pictures and typed text were "cut" (with scissors) and "pasted" (with glue) into a layout before reproduction. ("copy" was a quite a _lot_ more difficult in those days).

Blue Origin postpones New Glenn's maiden flight to January 12

Upvoting the accurate information - not the delay :-(

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Any system...

EVERY system has a TEST environment. Some people are lucky enough to have the luxury of a separate production environment too.

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Re: WPEngine 'likely to prevail'...

My guess is that his lawyers _have_ been telling him this all along ... but he doesn't want to listen.

SBF's right-hand woman praised for testimony – and jailed for two years

Re: Sneaking suspicion...

I don't think that is fair. It was in reply to "hers [sic] being the prettiest she got off lightly" - now that you can apply your rule to.

Starlink's new satellites emit 30x more radio interference than before, drowning cosmic signals

Re: Look...

"Most people on the planet live in the wilds "

The UN says 55% of the population live in urban areas, and this is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. OTOH, it is true to say "Quite a lot of people live in the wilds".

(I'm actually surprised it's as low as that - I would have guessed 75% urban now.)

Boeing's Starliner set for extended stay at the ISS as engineers on Earth try to recreate thruster issues

Nominal return to earth

"Nominal return to earth" doesn't mean what you think it means. In this context, "nominal" means "according to the expected flight plan". It doesn't mean "roughly" or "approximately".

"Nominal" is a _good_ thing to hear in space flight.

How many Microsoft missteps were forks that were just a bit of fun?

Re: Don't mention Visual Source Safe

I never did get round to writing my "Project Manager's Guide to Using VSS as an Excuse For Why Your Project is Late". Step 1 was going to be "don't have sufficient disk space", and Step 2 was "don't have backups". (There were several more rules. I have forgotten them now.)

Unfortunately, our IT department had procedures in place to make both Steps 1 and 2 unnecessarily difficult.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Language

Any noun can be verbed (in Indo-European languages at least), and we have been doing it (and the reverse) for millennia.

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

Re: computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

Err, when DARPA write "incompressible CFD" that means the easy stuff - with fluids like water whose compressibility can be ignored.

The fluid in a nuclear fusion reactor is very, very, compressible which makes the fluid dynamics much harder. Not only that, it is a plasma, so the particles are all charged, and if you have moving charged particles you need to consider magnetism. There are people who try and model magneto-hydro-dynamics, but it's ... not easy.

Of course, that doesn't nullify your conclusion "quantum computers won't solve nuclear fusion" - if they can't do the easy stuff, what hope have they got with the really messy stuff?

Christie's stolen data sold to highest bidder rather than leaked, RansomHub claims

Re: Smelling Bullshit Here [Money-Laundering]

It adds another layer to get through, and while you may think it doesn't happen the law in the UK says that auction houses have to do due diligence on purchasers who spend more than €10,000 (and that currency symbol is not a typo). See (for example) https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/anti-money-laundering-legislation.

The EU has the same rules, and I am pretty sure so does America too.

Security pioneer Ross Anderson dies at 67

Re: Retiremant Age

UK academics are on a career-average pension now. That's not quite as generous as the previous final-salary pension, but it's still very comfortable.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Re: Plagiarism?

Point of order: Cummings is not "an honourable gentleman". Not even in the language of the Palace of Westminster. That is reserved for Members of Parliament, and Cummings has never done anything so beneath him as to ask the common populace to vote for him.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

No. Google has decided Google doesn't need Usenet anymore.

However, I used to follow a dozen groups or so, and I haven't looked at any of them in certainly the last five years. I doubt I am alone.

Canon claims its nanoimprint litho machines capable of 5nm chip production

Re: “ a mask imprinted with a circuit design”

The boring answer is almost certainly electron beams. Cutting very fine details with an electron beam has been possible for ages (I think that's how existing masks are made). The problem for chip lithography is that electron beam is _slow_ (you only cut one bit at a time). An optical mask can cover the whole chip in one go.

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Re: explicitely creating schematics for an explosive warhead

Somebody created schematics for an atom bomb for their PhD to prove that it could be done from publicly available information.

Intel spices up its FPGA game with open source and RISC-V freebies

Re: Giving Away Free Stuff?

My employer has recently moved from separate crypto accelerator to FPGA - and expect to go further.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Re: Lost in Translation?

> Also, I would posit it would be organiSed, but it appears Toyota speaks American rather than English :)

Or maybe they speak proper English, as recommended by the Oxford English Dictionary? en.en-gb-oxendict ftw!

Microsoft: China stole secret key that unlocked US govt email from crash debug dump

Re: Alternative explanation..

> I'd think even a half-competent government can probably build their own data centers and go fully open source for about the same price.

Do you mean "a government which is half-way along the list of governments sorted by competency"? Looking at the number of government-based IT disasters, I really doubt it.

Or do you mean "a government which is half-way to being fully competent" ? I'm not sure there are any of those.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: ECO DECT

> Plants expirate oxygen, not CO2.

Plants expire CO2 at night.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

Re: Newton on line #2

> Can someone explain to me how a hyper-velocity impact with a satellite fails, enough to break chunks off, does not result is a significant effect on the orbit?

Not sure what the actual numbers are here, but:

1 tonne (1 Mg) stage in orbit.

10g "thing" smacks into the stage at 10,000 m/s relative to the orbiting stage. That's quite a bang, and could easily crack something off, but it changes the momentum by 100,000 gm/s - which is a change in velocity of 10cm/second. Typical LEO orbital velocities are about 8,000 m/s (which is why I chose 10,000).

Net result: The orbit changed (of course), but not significantly. A 10kg bullet would make more of a difference - but it would still be pretty small.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Re: Big plastic wind deflectors

They may cost more than side-bars under the trailers - but wind deflectors save money in the medium term (by reducing fuel consumption - which is something truck owners care _deeply_ about).

Discord.io pulls the cord after crooks steal 760K users' info

Re: Good and bad here

> Passwords salted and hashed, miscreants aren't going to be able to do much with that

Depends _how_ it is hashed. If it PBKDF2 with 1000 iterations of SHA1, it'll take longer to download the data than to find if the password is one of the top 1000 passwords.

If they are following OWASP recommendations and using Argon2id with a minimum configuration of 19 MiB of memory, an iteration count of 2, and 1 degree of parallelism then I agree. However "following OWASP" probably isn't the way to bet in this case.

... but I do agree that they deserve plaudits for being upfront about the situation.

Virgin Media email customers enter third day of inbox infuriation

Re: People needing access to tickets...

I couldn't be bothered to set up Thunderbird account when I switched to a new laptop ~10 years ago. The Gmail web interface is "good enough". Yes, yes, I understand the benefits, but life is too short.

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

Different UI in America?

I wonder if I see a different UI (connecting to amazon.de). The last couple of times I have signed up for a free 3-months Prime trial, I have found it really quite straightforward to cancel my Prime membership.

I also like the fact that I can sign up, place the order, and then cancel it - but it still lasts until my three months is up.

Lenovo's Yoga 9 is flexible at home, but stretches the friendship at work

receiving MFA texts on their own phones

Err.

1. SMS is the _least_ secure MFA option (by a substantial margin). Use a TOTP generator instead.

2. There are certainly a substantial number of people in my office who won't install a a custom app to act as a MFA token on their own phones. I don't _know_ whether they would accept texts - but I wouldn't want to bet on it!

DC thermal management, power kit is getting easier to find and a lot more expensive

Is it just me?

I read "DC .... power kit" and thought this was talking about "Direct Current" rather than "Data Centre".

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Re: Marital Status: British

Minor nit: I _think_ even Alabama now insists on children being at least 14 before marrying.

A 13yo legally married to an adult in one of the United States is probably legally married in the UK. They just can't have sex in the UK (and the adult is at risk of being prosecuted for having sex in America).

Re: On the other hand...

The worst bug I ever came across was a memory corruption bug that only occurred if the username had an odd number of characters. The programmer who kept encountering the bug did. The programmer who was trying to debug it had an even number of characters in their user name. That was _days_ of fun!

(This was before valgrind.)

Supernova peekaboo could provide clues to our universe's age

Re: Physics check please

Photon's have no rest-mass. However they have energy, and hence have a (non-rest) mass. A dense cloud of photons can gravitationally distort space.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Re:Lights on the same circuit as power

Standard practise in Germany. Don't forget, everything is on a series of 16A radials, rather than ring circuits (and neither appliances, nor lights, have fuses).

The safety and cost trade-offs between the UK and European systems are complex - but neither is per-se dangerous.

Upstart encryption app walks back privacy claims, pulls from stores after probe

Re: RSA

It is perfectly possible to write secure systems with RSA. What's wrong with it, is that it is slower to sign/encrypt than a corresponding EC algorithm, and it is _much_ slower to generate a new key. That last point matters if each participant generates a new keypair for each message (as they should), and only uses the persistent key pair for authenticity.

There _is_ a theoretical point that because quantum computers break asymmetric cryptography in a completely different way to classical computers, a quantum computer that can break RSA-3076 will need about 12 times as many qbits as one that can break NIST-P256. If quantum computers develop at something like Moore's Law (a _big_ if), that gives RSA-3076 about a decade advantage over P256.

Re: Signal AND WhatsApp?

Sure, Signal has _much_ better security than WhatsApp - but while Signal is top of the Premier League and WhatsApp is low in Division 1, Converso is a bunch of mates who get together for a kick-about and a beer.

Astronomers say they've seen the largest explosion yet – and we just had to talk to them

Re: Would it even be possible for black holes to suck each other up?

Absolutely. And we have seen it happen multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_observations.

The usual term is "merger" rather than "suck each other up".