* Posts by J. Cook

2105 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007

Health insurer's infosec incident diagnosis goes from 'take a chill pill' to emergency ward

J. Cook Silver badge

And if any of data was US citizens, that's a HIPAA breach on top of that- US firms get into MASSIVE amounts of trouble (with matching fines!) for not protecting PHI...

Apple remembers it makes iPads, updates fondleslabs

J. Cook Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Particularly idiotic

"Oh, but you can get a charging dongle to go from USB to charge the pencil."

Or I can go and buy a lightning to lightning coupler and a lightning cable and charge it that way without the fool thing flopping around in the breeze.

There's probably a reason for it, but it's either not a good reason, or it's tied to large-ish contracts for companies that use the base ipad as a foundation for their products. (like point of service terminals and such.)

Manufacturers could be forced to include repair instructions

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Re: Dell

Lenovo also publishes their service manuals online, which include all the FRUs for the entire product line.

Dell requires you to be part of a service organization in order to get access to the service manuals for their products, but that also comes with the ability to order parts when the product is under warrenty as well. (there's a fee the organization has to pay for this privilege as well. )

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

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Pirate

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

The teaching landscape in the US is all about getting the students to pass the standardized tests- no more, no less.

I have a rant around here somewhere, or at least my (retired) mother does- she used to teach kindergarten until the shenanigans with the school administration forced her out on disability.

Broadcom to spin VMware takeover as creating 'more competition' in cloud

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Re: Broadcom has earned its reputation, for better or for worse.

Indeed; Due to several very frustrating events and issues, I can't recommend anything by Citrix.

'Fully undetectable' Windows backdoor gets detected

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Go

And the wheel of reincarnation strikes again...

And mainly because using the OLE Automation hooks are hard and require additional time and effort to build to.

And as we can all see, no one at Adobe looked at Microsoft's problem with it and said "hey, let's embed a scripting engine into our PDF viewer which will let miscreats do the same exact thing!!!"

Scanning phones to detect child abuse evidence is harmful, 'magical' thinking

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Black Helicopters

Re: Illegal speech???

That, and how the hell does one determine what is 'illegal'?

From the article:

Levy and Robinson propose "have language models running entirely locally on the client to detect language associated with grooming."

On a certain level, I know what grooming is, but no one has really stated in these proposals an actual legal definition of it, preferring to lean entirely on the emotional response it invokes, which leads to bad laws that can be interpreted in any number of ways, depending on what the person's trying to achieve with it.

And plus, if the kids are told that they are under surveillance, they'll figure ways around it, especially if it's a case of parents abusing their children by putting them under surveillance. (which happens frequently enough)

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

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Joke

Re: 365

Yep; there's a very good reason I call it Office 279, or Office 307, depending on how many outages they've had in a given 12 month period...

J. Cook Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Pass me the incense and put the whale song up to 11.

Charlie Clark wrote:

Okay, this is what it is, but it's not very aspirational, is it? What is it people can expect to get from their subscription?

Let's see... automatic, forced updates with no control over when they are installed (it's decoupled from windows/Microsoft update); background usage of your internet connection to download said updates with no real control over bandwidth usage*; a STRONG attempt to push you to storing your documents in OneDrive (to the point where autosaves anywhere else are forbidden!), and the usual spate of showstopper bugs, security holes, and the usual drivel that Office has been famous for. And the occasional bought of it being unable to be used (web app mode) or to contact the license server to get it's "mother may I" pass when the servers fall over (locally installed mode).

I think that covered the bulk of it?

* It might use the OS settings for bandwidth throttling if it's running on windows 10; I wouldn't rightly know, I'm using it on an enterprise managed system...

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Survey missing option

I dunno; having to do full uninstalls and reinstalls of 2003 to fix OLE errors instead of just doing a repair install was a time sink and highly aggravating for both the end user and the tech who got saddled with it.

while I hate the ribbon interface as much as everyone else, office 2010 was probably the most stable of the lot in my arrogant opinion.

(and don't get me started about the Charlie Foxtrot and five dimensional gymnastics that are required to install things like Office 365 when another 'office' program like Visio is present.)

J. Cook Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Survey missing option

What, this one isn't good enough? /silly

People still seem to think their fancy cars are fully self-driving

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Re: Maybe it will never actually happen

Uh, my comment was aimed at Dave314159ggggdffsdds, not you. The whole "repetition is not how ML works" thing, which Jake countered with a short and simple "Actually, yes it does", which you had replied to separately.

(Please also note the sarcasm flag in my comment.)

What little information I have about ML is leads me to the opinion that the current systems that are being sold using it are producing garbage results because they are being fed garbage data with no human oversight to correct or re-train it when it makes a mistake; instead it's being treated as a magical black box that's always right, and I've been around in the IT Industry long enough to know that is a bad idea.

What little information I know about AI in general is mahoosivly outdated by at least 30 years (the early CYC days from the late 80's and 90's, and only from an even more ignorant teenager point of view), so I'm absolutely not qualified to get into a detailed discussion except as someone interested in why companies keep wanting to use these systems and treating it's output as gospel truth without having a solid foundation of how it arrived at the output it generated. (I.E., I'm one of the people who have no idea where the field is not making "ignorant hogwash" comments, mostly about the mis-use of this technology that's causing groups in authority (like law enforcement) to make poor decisions on how to police their communities.)

J. Cook Silver badge
Trollface

The VW probably had better factory build quality and QA as well.

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Facepalm

Re: Maybe it will never actually happen

ok, then. Tell us how Machine Learning works. We are all adults, here, use big words.

/sarcasm

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: "Just"

And consider that Honda had a (much nicer looking) bipedal robot back in the 90's, the current Optimus that was demo'd was... very underwhelming, especially compared to some of the demos that Boston Dynamics has put out.

Also, Hasbro might have some legal words regarding naming the robot "Optimus"...

J. Cook Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Last time I checked ...

Elon levels of foresight.

Um.. I'd to retain my intelligence and non-egotistic personality, thankyouverymuch.

Musk is just a loud mouth who happens to have money and a knack for buying tech companies that he can overhype and make wild promises from. A lot of his ideas have hurt Tesla (and it's self-driving) pretty badly. (like insisting on only using vision for distance and object detection, instead of purpose built sensors that work FAR more reliably.)

I'd like to retain MY levels of foresight instead of his, because I'm doing badly enough without that.

Rivian recalls nearly every vehicle it has sold

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Pint

Re: Ford (Found On Roadside Dead)

My parting comment after I returned that rental was "It needs to Focus on being a car."

My mother had an 1998 Aspire at the time; My running joke on it was "It aspires to be a car some day. It was a pink jellybean of a car with no A/C and manual gearbox, and had the best mileage I've ever seen because of it. It just was not a good car to drive in Arizona summers...

(She traded it for a 2004 Saturn ION, which lasted her until after she was unable to drive due to health problems; I ended up donating it to a place for the tax write off after finding that it needed over six thousand US rubles for it's many mechanical issues, and that wasn't counting a bunch of issues with the worn out interior...)

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Ford (Found On Roadside Dead)

I had the misfortune of having a rental Ford Focus many years back when the model had been first introduced as a result of a car wreck; the Focus had an underpowered engine, anemic slushbox of a transmission, and was in almost every way something I would never have driven on a permanent basis. I got better performance (and mileage!) manually running the slushbox in the three-four gears available to me.

While I've largely sworn off of Ford as a brand, I am interested in how well the EV iteration of their F150 works out; Ford seems to be doing something practical in offering a 'work truck' iteration of it that's priced for mere mortals. (The GM offering relies FAR too much on a brand label that used to mean military grade quality, but now is just an overpriced, overfluffed thing.)

California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles

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Re: I don't get it

Also, proper fleet companies (at least in arizona) have a special sticker that's applied when the plate is first issued, which gets around the whole 'need to put a yearly sticker on it' problem...

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Next stop: EBay

There are use cases for E-Ink screens that large; things like a weekly/monthly calendar display that changes once a week/month.

I have a cute little E-ink display I bought from Adafruit, and it can be programmed for a variety of things, like a clean/dirty indicator for the dishwasher (via a position sensor built into the board the display's mounted on), or a weather conditions display that updates once a day.

J. Cook Silver badge
Go

Re: Why?

The only time I have to visit a motor vehicle office in Arizona is if they require an emissions test on the vehicle, which IIRC is every other year. Otherwise, pay online, receive new sitckers in a week or two.

J. Cook Silver badge

Arizona used to have that rule- the plate was tied to the vehicle. But we got to the point where there were so many vehicles in the database that it was running out of entries, so they changed it so that it's tied to the entity that's registering the vehicle.

J. Cook Silver badge

And by the time it works it's way through the justice system...

All I can hope for is that it'll be a moot point by then, but still... let's utterly ruin people's lives for no other reason than cruelty.

This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car

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Re: Showing my age too

Also consider the Loudness wars as well; Turns out when you run music with a good dynamic range through a compressor to make it sound louder, you also remove a lot of the data and subtleties in the music.

J. Cook Silver badge
Joke

Re: How about...

1.21, if I recall correctly...

How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

J. Cook Silver badge

Sounds more like they masqueraded someone else's MAC address to get their foot in the door. But an inside job isn't outside the realm of possibility.

Musky scent? Billionaire launches fragrance: Burnt Hair

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Thumb Down

No thank you- if I want to smell sh$t, I'll go and huff the contents of the litterboxes after the cats use them...

iPhone 14 car crash detection triggered by roller coasters

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Re: Six Flags Great America in Chicago

Well, Gurnee is sort of a suburb of Chicago. Sort of. I have family that lives in that area.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

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Re: bell wire

While my house was built in 1961; it's using a mix of cloth sheathing copper, aluminum, and copper covered aluminum from the various remodels and other work done to it over the decades.

The prior owners who did some of the work on this place did what I refer to as "not even half-ass" work- things like not using wire conductors on connections, only twisting the ends together and wrapping them up in electrical tape. (along with other annoyances that I'm having to either partially or totally rebuild.)

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

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Re: Lint Magnet

Not to shill for them, but I use OtterBox Defender cases pretty much exclusively on my phones, and they've kept the devices in near pristine condition over their life. They may be bulky, but they'll survive a fall onto hard concrete with no damage to the device. (I've broken latches on the cases from impacts, though- such is the price to pay.)

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Lint Magnet

I got around the lint problem by putting my phones in cases with port covers on them, TBH. Seeing as I'm clumsy and tend to drop things, it solves multiple problems at the same time. :)

Atlassian, Microsoft bugs on CISA’s must-patch list after exploitation spree

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Boffin

Technically, you can, but it involves putting a content-aware proxy in-between the exchange server(s) and the firewall. while such things do exist (there's an iApp for the F5 load balancers) it also requires adding custom code to said load balancer which is not for the faint of heart. Oh, and it still wouldn't protect you against this exploit, and it'll break rather a lot of stuff that things like mobile clients use

Exchange should only ever swap email externally though an edge server and/or an smtp gateway appliance (i.e. spam filter)- while you could hook up a node directly for SMTP exchange, it's a really bad idea. (I was against putting Edge nodes into ours until I discovered that the cloud based email security appliances we migrated to a couple years back required it; this has resulted in at least one problem where user A blocks a sender as junk, and the edge boxes dutifully start doing so and then user B complains they aren't getting emails from that sender anymore...)

One of my projects this year is migrating to Exchange Online, which I'm pretty sure will cause the bald spot forming on my head to grow. :(

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

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Go

IIRC, for FreeBSD and linux, you have to actively work at it to exclude developer tools out of a distro, and even then the first time you need to install something that's not a flat-pack or something that requires a dependency tends to trigger the "Install the Dev Tools" circus. :D

J. Cook Silver badge
Joke

Re: switch to an OS OS

One of the apps I use (Scrivener) runs (reluctantly) under WINE, but only the current version, and only after some very specific steps are done to get the stars to align; Previous versions apparently require me to sacrifice a virgin, a chicken, and a virgin chicken (I forget which, or possibly all three) when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter is aligned with uranus or some shit, because I never got it working right.

And even then, I still need to find a specific cloud storage client that'll run under linux before I really start fettling around with it on my main system.

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: switch to an OS OS

I need to review what all Proton let's run on a linux machine, but I imagine some of the games I have (Skyrim, Borderlands, Saint's Row 3, etc.) might present a challenge. Maybe. I've not had the time to really poke that specific bear yet.

Tesla has a lot of work to do on its Optimus robot

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Coffee/keyboard

Oh, the places I could go with this; unfortunately, none of them are work safe. :D

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Exchange Server zero-days actively exploited

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Re: cynical?

Indeed; This is... annoying, to say the very least.

How CIA betrayed informants with shoddy front websites built for covert comms

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Re: So which is worse

Also, our E14 agency did a bang up job everywhere they went. No, you probably haven't heard about them. They were somewhat of a secret while they operated...

Since no one heard of them, I can only assume that they did a really good job?

(kind of like the old gag of Not Being Seen, I think...)

IBM updates desktop mainframe emulator

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Unhappy

I know that's one reason why we are moving away from our iSeries. (aka AS/400); there's no test or dev environment outside of a test instance that runs side by side on the production box, and getting a third set of hardware for training is just ludacrisly expensive.

Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Getting what you pay for

In some situations people can raise their game for a limited period of time. However, study after study have shown that working longer than normal quickly has a lasting effect on quality and subsquently on morale. Also, it's not just about money but "Pay People Peanuts and You Will Get Monkeys".

THIS. ALL OF THIS.

One of the biggest complaints that I heard at [RedactedCo] was the lack of a cost of living adjustment (COLA), which had the effect of people jumping ship at the drop of a hat if something that paid better presented itself AND being unable to hire replacements, because no one wanted to work for the wages they were paying.

And that was LONG before COVID reared it's ugly head. They've finally fixed it (in fact, they are now doing either annual or semi-annual 'market rate' adjustments to make sure pay is in line with the rest of the industry), but the damage to morale and knowledge drain had already been done.

(I have a seperate rant about their employee review system, but that's outside scope.)

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

J. Cook Silver badge

The team at the ISP I used to work for had two machines; a corporate one on the corportate network with all the usual group policy lockdown hassles, and another machine that was on a seperate space they'd carved out of the out of band administrative network for the various switch and routing gear.

You very quickly learned to lock your workstations, lest you find your non-corporate machine's home page set to some adult site, and I'm not talking about 'tame' sites like playboy, but the really raunchy hardcore sites. (this was done with the blessing of the infosec people, who were even worse than we were...)

Then there was 'That Guy' at LAN parties who had their computer that routinely had not-kid friendly wallpapers, screen savers, etc. on it. He also didn't lock his workstation, and also had a habit of running a torrent client 24/7 on it, regardless of the network it was one. THis was back when world of warcraft was a thing in our group, and one day we discovered he had fallen asleep whilst logged in. We didn't do anything bad to his account, but there was a spare keyboard that got plugged in and messages were sent to the guild chat about how large their pants were, and proclaimed their love for murlocs (one of the 'cute' monsters in the game), which he hated.

As revenge for running a torrent client when we told him to stop, we did change his desktop wallpaper, icon set, and sounds to murlocs. That was also the last time he was invited to a LAN party as well.

Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023

J. Cook Silver badge

Some back story: I'm actively looking for a fitness tracker, with some specific requirements.

While fitbit checked most of the boxes, what took them off my 'will consider' list was the inconsistent build quality and QA across their range, and the most irritating of all, the fact that most of the features I want under the "must have" list all required signing up for the premium service.

Bias: I had a gen 1 fitbit Flex way back when, and stopped using it when it decided one fine day to not interact with it's charging cradle, no matter how much I futzed with it.

Amazon's Roomba acquisition gets caught on FTC's rug

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Go

Re: Presumably, new Amazon features will include:

Well, amazon does like integrating Alexa with everything...

Morgan Stanley fined $35m after hard drives sold with customer info still on them

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Re: Data destruction is fun!

Naw, the recycling center was probably wanting to resell the machines, and having to buy new hard drives for old machines cuts into (or neutralizes entirely) their profit margin.

Depending on what's on the drive, If I need to sanitize it, I'll run DBAN on it with a couple passes from the randomizer with a final blanking pass. If it's something super sensitive, then I'll go the physical destruction route.

Letter to FCC: Why are US carriers locking handsets to networks?

J. Cook Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Waiting period...

And half the time you have to absolutely prove to them that Yes, the line really is bad- they will swear up and down that it's fine when in reality the neighborhood access box is on fire due to the car that landed on top of it upside down from the accident in the road next to it. Or that the local drug addicts decided that the stuff inside the fiber distribution box was all high grade copper, removed it with a fire axe, then realized that it's just plastic and glass, smashed it into bits and left it behind (along with said fire axe and the remains of the 8 ball they took beforehand)...

The cable companies are not much better, but at least their damned support call tree has hooks into the head end to run automated diagnostics and resets.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

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Boffin

Re: I'm surprised

The Amiga/Commodore, Atari, and Apple (including older 68K/powerPC macs) communities have been creating floppy drive emulators for some time that connect to the computer's drive interface and present a disk image as a disk. I'd have to go and dig up the relevant bookmarks, but they do exist.

J. Cook Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

I can provide an example of tape's longevity. Back in 2017, [RedactedCo] was going through the (rather large) amount of media we had stored off-site looking for media that was past data retention, and after recalling a number of of items, decided to see if I could read an old LTO1 tape we had from 2003-ish.

I had to get a server built, dredge up and LTO3 drive, and install BackupExec on the server, but the tape was not only readable, but if I wanted to, I could have restored the data from it.

There's a reason why I have old hardware sitting in the archive cabinets, and that's one of them. (the other reason is regulatory- we are required to keep certain types of data for a specific minimum time frame, and in the event they ever want to audit us, I'd like to be able to read the media that has that data in-house without having to scramble and find a refurbished tape drive or have to call in a service that does that sort of thing.)

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

J. Cook Silver badge

Yes, please; I had to junk an old eMac (one that used a CRT for the display) and that was part of the service instructions.

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: NLQ

The 5si's successor, the 8000, was pretty decent too, seeing as it was the same base engine.

Meta's next-gen Oculus headset kit left in a hotel room

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Go

Re: Kit was "left" in a hotel room

"There are too many results- please refine your question."