* Posts by el_oscuro

389 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2014

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Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

el_oscuro

Re: "consent fatigue"

You know you can download a host file which blocks a lot more, correct?

https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

It's too bad I don't have a way of editing /etc/hosts on my phone.

You can also of course use a Pi-Hole and set that to your DNS server. Works for phones too, but only when they are connected to your wi-fi.

el_oscuro
Devil

Re: Annnnnnnd...

So you have confessed - you are the real BOFH.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

el_oscuro

Re: Harmony by disharmony

The one time I heard that for real was about 10 years ago. My wife called me from her work, which was about 20 miles west of me. They had got hit with a massive thunderstorm all the power was out. I looked out the window and saw it was a bit breezy. Then the baseball game I had on went to the alert. About 2 minutes later we got slammed with the "derecho" - 70MPH winds, lightning and flash flooding. The whole thing was over in 10 minutes. But we (and most of the rest of the US east coast) were without power for days.

el_oscuro
Mushroom

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Growing up on the other side of the pond, we get those tones about once a month: "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. If this was an actual emergency..."

Also on Friday mornings at 10am, there was a local siren with a similar tone. But everyone knew that if it was for real, we could kill our ass goodby.

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

el_oscuro

Re: This is "normal" everywhere.

Duck Duck Go doesn't have all of this spyware crap, and they seem make money with their ads. When you use their search engine, they have your IP (which provides your city location) and your search term. That is all they need to serve relevant ads.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

el_oscuro

Re: Content

I have a newer one - it was built in Aug-1995. And my first computer was a Heathkit H89 that I helped my dad build.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

el_oscuro
Devil

Re: Replace with ClassicShell

I tried to upvote and downvote once - and it doen't work for some reason.

Twitter stiffed us on $2m bill, claim consultants in lawsuit

el_oscuro
Devil

Twitter Dead Pool

Will Twitter die because:

1. Something crashes and they discover they don't have backups because they fired the people who managed them?

2. They don't pay the data center rent, and the data center powers down their servers and locks the cages?

3. If they do manage to pay the data center, they realized they have no idea how to restart everything because they fired the people who know how?

4. They keep disabling 3rd party clients that are mostly used by their most important users, and those leave?

5. The entire database gets dumped to pastebin because they fired the people who understood network security?

6. It becomes the next 8chan and everyone leaves?

7. All of the above?

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

el_oscuro

Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...

I have a Brother MFC7840W that I bought about 15 years ago. I originally chose it because it had native Linux support, but it has worked perfectly since with every computer we have used. Almost never jams. And other than cleaning the scanner a few years ago, the only think I have had to do is replace the toner cartridges every few years.

BOFH: We're an industry leader … in employing idiot managers

el_oscuro

You mean like this?

https://youtu.be/_GhODn4FRoE

China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains

el_oscuro

China might want to rethink that shock and ore strategy. When Putin played games with the natural gas, Europe bought it elsewhere and probably won't buy it from them again. And if tries it, there is an article on El-Reg's brother across the pond, ARS which explains why it might be a very bad idea.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/toxic-cleanup-technique-can-get-more-rare-earth-metals-out-of-ores/

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

el_oscuro
Coffee/keyboard

Please see icon.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

el_oscuro

Re: I need some THC

As someone who has occasionally attempted to use a page like that, I can guarantee that whatever page you need is 404. That is just the way things work.

el_oscuro
Devil

Here on the other side of the pond, I tried to name a new admin program "Application Security System", but got shot down by manglement. A few years later, me and a co-worker tried to form a new company called "BAMF Consulting", but that was shot down too.

Windows 11 update blocking some users from logging in

el_oscuro
Linux

Re: Windows 7 was clearly the last Windows OS you didn't have to actively fight against

I just picked up a refurbished laptop with Windows 10 pro on it. At $300, most of the cost was probably for Windows. My job has a government issued smart card that is required to login, and the only supported options are Windows 10 and Mac. But setting up that laptop was a complete nightmare. In the amount of time I spent responding to: "No I do not want to create an online account" and "No I don't want Microsoft to track me", I could have done a complete installation of Linux from scratch. And this is Windows 10 pro, which I specifically because I didn't want to deal with all of this crap.

Other than the smart card business, I would be running Linux. But it barely works on Windows and it took several hours of troubleshooting to get it set up.

I actually have that smartcard working on Linux too, but not the complete set of applications. Given what I learned from the Windows installation, I might be able to get everything working in Linux too, freeing me up from the whims of MSFT forever.

el_oscuro

Re: Relevant

I bought an el-cheapo Dell laptop in 2007 - with Ubuntu preinstalled. Kept it for 10 years, upgrading in place to 16.04 without a hiccup at all. Eventually I had to replace it as it didn't have enough RAM for the virtual machines I need to run on it. So I replaced it with a Thinkpad - also with Ubuntu.

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

el_oscuro

I was 3 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and don't remember it. But I do remember later looking up at the moon, marveling that we had people up there! I hoped that when I grew up, I might be able to go to the moon too. That was in 1972 and it was Apollo 17.

Mozilla finds 18 of 25 popular reproductive health apps share your data

el_oscuro

My advise to women

1. Delete all pregnancy/period track apps. In fact, delete all of those crappy apps your doctor wants you to install for appointments. Half the time they don't work, and you can do everything you need to on their website or over the phone.

2. Delete any other apps you don't really need or use much. You won't miss them.

3. Remove location services from every app except your GPS and/or map app if you use them. And lock those down too, only allowing location services when you are using the app.

4. Your weather app does not need location services, and if it has it, it is is probably selling your real time location (within a few meters) to anyone who wants it, plus all of the other creepy tracking. The National Weather Service is the source of all of this weather data and they have their own app with no location services, nor ads. Or you can just set a bookmark in your browser to weather.gov. I'm pretty sure the Met Office has one too.

5. Should you need reproductive services, do any searching with Duck-duck-go from a public terminal like in a library. For added protection (against both COVID and snooping cameras), wear a mask. Leave your phone at home.

6. When traveling out of state, leave your phone at home. If you need a phone, get a cheap burner one and pay for it with cash.

el_oscuro
Devil

Actually, try searching:

Mothers

Against

Gregg

Abbott

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

el_oscuro
Devil

Re: Now if only Teams had something similar...

When I first started work for my current company, they warned me to always make sure I locked my workstation, as there were roving bandits that do funny things to it if you ever left it unlocked. Of course they didn't know I was one of them.

el_oscuro
Devil

Re: Another great victory for Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive

I once wrote a Windows service that I would install on my victims unlocked workstations. All it did sleep for a random interval, then pick a random number and pop up the Windows error dialog for that message. There is nothing like getting a random pop up like "The control file blocks have been destroyed.".

Make sure your sysadmin and security people are in on it.

Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing

el_oscuro

Re: Airlines have been doing this for years...

Here on the other side of the pond, *Everything* I have ever seen that was made in Taiwan was labeled exactly that way: "Made in Taiwan". I have never seen anything labeled "Made in Taiwan, China", or any of that other rot.

I avoid buying Made in China junk whenever possible.

Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'

el_oscuro
Linux

Mint updates have been a disaster for me

I tried Mint twice, both times one an extra PC I had, not a VM. The first one was Mint 13 32 bit and the second time, it was Mint 16, 64 bit.

Both installed just fine and worked flawlessly - until I tried an update. I'm not talking about any major version upgrades - just an apt-get upgrade to apply patches and such. I run these updates on Ubuntu and other distros about once a week and they work. Except for Mint.

In both cases, the update broke the desktop in the same weird way. All of the navigation menus became scrambled, which made the desktop unusable.

And it also changed the Firefox search engines, completely removing Google and making DDG the default. Now I actually like DDG, but still want to have Google as an option. I know you can go into about:preferences and change it back, but that didn't work either. I got some sort of error, and neither search engine had any solutions for either problem.

Speaking of updates, that is where Ubuntu 0wns practically every other distro. Their LTS editions have 5 years support, and you can upgrade from one to another without reinstalling. I think the original version on this computer was 14.04 or 16.04. I have never reinstalled and am running 20.04, and will be running 22.04 in a few months. Debian makes you reinstall, as does the Redhat based distros. MX Linux which is based on Debian also expects a reinstall. As far as I know, only Ubuntu supports the upgrade in place.

Mars helicopter to take a breather, recharge batteries

el_oscuro
Mushroom

Re: Thanks NASA!

It hasn't actually launched yet, but I did try it on KSP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xalBVIBlrw

Linux Mint 21 hits beta, and it's looking fresh

el_oscuro

Re: Snog marry avoid?

I tried Linux Mint twice - I think Linux Mint 13 32bit and a few years later, 16 64 bit. Both times, I had the exact same weird problems. It installed perfectly and everything ran. But when I applied the first update, it broke all of the menu navigation and scrambled the Firefox search settings.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

el_oscuro

Re: Microsoft phone support (baggy-pants edition)

I remember when my ISP would ask me to change some registry settings and reboot my machine (I was of course running Linux), when the issue was that my router had no connectivity to the central switch.

el_oscuro
Devil

Re: It's still going on

Ah, yes, shitty error messages. I once wrote a little program that ran on as an NT service and would select a random error number and display the message as a popup dialog at random intervals. There are a *lot* of weird Windows error messages.

There is nothing like a dialog popping up with the message: "The control file blocks have been destroyed.", along with an abort, retry, fail.

We would install it on unsuspecting co-workers that left their workstations unlocked. Make sure your sysadmin and security are in on the gag.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

el_oscuro

Re: Control Your Own Upgrades

I do Linux the Windows way - by buying most of my PCs with Linux pre-installed. I run Ubuntu LTS, which comes with 5 years support, and upgrades come out every 2 years. I'm about due to upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04 which is simply running "apt dist-upgrade" or select yes in the GUI when the option becomes available.

Right now on my old computers, I have support until 2025. After the upgrade, I'll have support until 2027.

el_oscuro

I mostly run Linux at home and Windows at work, but when the pandemic started I put an old Mac into service. It mostly worked fine, but a killer issue I had was keyboard shortcuts, specifically copy and paste. Every other O/S uses control/c while Mac uses alt(cmd)/c. This is a royal pain in the ass because if you use multiple O/S like I do, you are always hitting the wrong key. I was Googling how to remap the Mac keys so that my Linux/Windows shortcuts worked when my old Mac died. I replaced it with a Laptop running MX Linux and haven't looked back.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

el_oscuro

This is why you practice restores all the time. Use them to create standby databases, or simple restore them to /tmp or somewhere to make sure you can. If you haven't practiced restores recently, you don't have backups.

el_oscuro

That is just shitty error handling - I fail shit like that in code review all the time. Why not?

errorhandler: if err=cantsave print $actual _error_message

Swallowing error message is probably the biggest source of bugs these days.

el_oscuro
Mushroom

As a 30 year Oracle DBA

The very first time I logged into a production Oracle database - was to restore it for a client I had never worked for. It seemed that Oracle support had sent their recovery consultant and he said they would lose 2 years of data and there was nothing that they could do. So the client called me and asked for help. I asked different questions and got a full restore and recovery.

A year later, I joined Oracle and was at an awards ceremony where that consultant was awarded "fireman of the year".

Since then, I have restored many other DBA mistakes when they didn't have proper backups. But with Oracle, as long as you have archive logs, you can probably restore. I have never failed to restore a production database.

That is because I practice restores all the time as part of routine operations. Because, if you haven't practiced restores recently, you don't have backups.

el_oscuro
WTF?

Re: I'm not a DBA...

Oracle has you covered:

RMAN> drop database including backups;

I have no idea why Oracle would even consider that command to be something that could be issued.

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

el_oscuro

Re: Barbecue with stereo iSummers

That is awesome :) Most Spongebob covers just use 2 or 3 clips from the show repeated over and over, which is pretty boring.

But these of Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" and "Thriller" are good too.

https://youtu.be/DoWrCMGXE4Q

https://youtu.be/WrfeNtY5m5E

el_oscuro
Devil

Repatriation preceeds me

Before the pandemic, I always used a Model-M keyboard, so in conference calls, people were always asking me to mute. These days, I no longer use the Model-M, but still have a quieter mechanical keyboard.

But on zoom calls, when someone is typing, they always blame me, even though they can clearly see my mic is muted.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

el_oscuro

Re: You were lucky

At my high school computer class, they had a teletype that connected to the PDP-1170 downtown. You could play Zork all day on that and the teacher was cool with it. But if you spilled the papertape holes, you automatically failed the class.

el_oscuro

Re: You were lucky

The first computer I ever used was a Heathkit H-89 - with 5 1/4 hard sectored disks.

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

el_oscuro
Alien

A few years ago, they were constructing a new office building near mine. When they were getting ready to lay the cement pond - er - foundation, they ran into a major issue: Buried deep under the ground was an object they couldn't identify. It was square, about 2 meters high, 8 meters wide, and 18 meters long. It was too heavy for the cranes to move. So they simply laid the foundation and parking garage around it.

To this day, the parking garage has a large section on the bottom floor which which is walled off.

US Navy in mad dash to salvage F-35C that fell off a carrier into South China Sea

el_oscuro

Re: Where Britain leads, America follows

This Iron Maiden video seems to capture that concept. And Maiden screwed up by using a 737-Max for their flight 666 tour plane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBnW7bZHEE&list=RDMMWjKKD6yXlVc&index=3

NASA's Mars InSight trips into safe mode and ESA's Sentinel-1B gives scientists the silent treatment

el_oscuro
Devil

Opportunity

Opportunity dropped off the grid a few years ago, pretending to have been disabled by a dust storm. Now we know what it has been up to:

https://xkcd.com/1504/

Linux Mint 20.3 appears – now with more Mozilla flavor: Why this distro switched Firefox defaults back to Google

el_oscuro
Linux

Re: I shall be investigating

I have MX Linux has my daily WFH driver and it is quite nice. I have traditionally used Ubuntu at home before a co-worker suggested (right before the pandemic) that I try MX Linux.

I have tried Mint twice - one Linux Mint 13 32bit and Linux Mint 64 bit and they both broke exactly in the same weird way: Installed perfectly, but the first apt-get upgrade clobbered the menu navigation and broke the Firefox search engine choices.

The browser search should have been fixable by going to preferences but that didn't work, and I never found anything at all about the clobbered desktop menus.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

el_oscuro
WTF?

Can't say I have ever heard of an OTA network going offline like that. But back in the late 1990's I watched mostly the Fox network (not Fox news). The Simpsons, Married.. With Children, The X-files and Futurama were all appointment TV. They also had the best New Years coverage of the local networks. And New Years Eve in 1999 as we were getting ready to watch the ball drop:

10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1 (screen goes blank)

No Y2K failures - it seems that our cable network (COX - insert your own jokes here) had a contract dispute with the Fox network and abruptly cut them off at 12 AM 1/1/2000.

I canceled my Cox cable a few days later and got DirecTV, which had great service until they got bought out by AT&T and became shitty.

el_oscuro
FAIL

Re: Humble

By a strange coincidence, 1988 happens to be the first year that I fucked something up. I had been working at a data center in West Germany for the US Army, and we ran massive cycles on the mainframe for supplies and requisitions, as well as financial.

These cycles had dozens of jobs that had to be started when a previous job had passed a certain job step otherwise things would quickly go TITSUP. By automating the job release processes, we were able to automate a lot of this, which reduced mistakes and sped up the processing of the cycles. I also made lots of changes to automate generation dataset processing and free up lots of space. There was nothing special about this - it was basic MVS JCL.

n 1988, we had just finished setting up the last cycle for automation - the monthly financial cycle which took more than a day to run.

All of these cycles had one thing in common - a job at the end of the cycle to print the spool files and produce the output for the customer. Since this was pretty simple and never really had any issues, it was an afterthought. No one, including me, had really looked at.

So when this cycle that I had modified was scheduled to run, I was out of town. And of course that was the first time we had ever had in issue with the print job. I don't remember the details, but it failed to print, issuing a return code, but not abending. And the file disposition for that JCL step was set to delete the spool files.

So the job didn't print, the spool files were gone - and weren't on any backups because they had just been created. And the person who just made changes to the cycle - me - was out of town when it ran. And had I been available, I could have easily avoided the problem.

The client wanted his printouts - and my head on a platter. We had to restore from backups and re run most of the cycle. I owed lots of people beer after we got those printouts. And to this day, I am always around when any production system I made changes to runs for the first time to ensure it runs smoothly.

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

el_oscuro
Devil

Oracle had an easter egg too

In about 97 or so, as part of a service request, I received a patch for an Oracle middle ware product on a CD-ROM. In addition to the patch, the CD had a directory called "sparky". So I check what was in that directory - and it had a complete enterprise edition of MS Office 95 - no license key required. Served my office needs for years.

Not the kind of note you want to see fluttering from an ATM

el_oscuro
Devil

I love notepad

Anytime I see a notepad window like this, I know the machine is mine. That notepad window is probably running with SYSTEM level privileges, so using the file/open menu is like running explorer in admin mode.

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

el_oscuro

Re: The Arnie dream was different...

You realize that Musk is from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from South Africa as he claims. He just founded SpaceX to get some replacement parts delivered to Mars so he can fix his ship and get out of here.

Meanwhile, the Illuminati will fail as Mars has already been spoken for.

https://xkcd.com/1504/

The rocky road to better Linux software installation: Containers, containers, containers

el_oscuro

Hold my beer. I had the fun of troubleshooting a Oracle6 installation on WFW 3.1, running in real mode. Apparently a requirement of Oracle 6 on DOS. Both Windows and Oracle were flaky and I spent hours troubleshooting. Finally, I tried to resize the virtual memory file and it BSOD, nuking the entire filesystem with it.

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

el_oscuro
Flame

Re: Flames came out of the right end

Actually, it really should point to the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts point up towards space, you are having a bad problem and will not go to space today.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

el_oscuro
Devil

The somebody’s else’s problem

Ah, yes, the Somebody’s else’s problem. I get one of those and it’s like I am hanging up, logging out and removing the SIM card from my phone as fast as I can.

Yes, of course there's now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux

el_oscuro

Re: So, let's summarise this..

You don't even need Linux to do it. You can bypass all sorts of security restrictions enforced by the GUI by just using an CMD shell.

And while the CMD shell is old and most people don't use it anymore, you can do even more with power shell. In fact, it has a well documented option to bypass execution policies:

https://www.netspi.com/blog/technical/network-penetration-testing/15-ways-to-bypass-the-powershell-execution-policy/

And none of this stuff requires administrator access.

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