Posts by Doctor Syntax

Musk agrees with fan that worries over orbital Starlink traffic a 'silly narrative'

Re: We all really hate Musk, right?

But because of the low IQ they won't realise that.

QNAP NAS users locked out after firmware update snafu

"The firm said that only a limited number of NAS models were affected "

Same old same old. Do they not realise that for someone who has one of them it's not a limited number? iI's 100% of what they've got.

Anyone who trots out this ancient piece of PR verbiage should stop and think about what they're saying to their customers who were affected. They should also stop and think about what they're saying to potential customers with more wit than the PR mouthpieces (not a high bar).

Contact tech support who aren't responding. Maybe they're locked out of the device with their scripts on it.

China has utterly pwned 'thousands and thousands' of devices at US telcos

may require the replacement of "literally thousands and thousands and thousands" of switches and routers.

Given that Huawei kit was supposed to have been replaced I wonder what makes these were.

Ah - I've just checked the Washington Post article: Cisco.

Mysteries in polar orbit – space's oldest working hardware still keeps its secrets

Re: Photon Propeller

It's the Crookes' radiometer.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/705/

Smile! UK cops spend tens of millions on live facial recognition tech

Non-crime stuff can't go to court so it's possible to show great productivity without doing the tricky bits such as trying to persuade a lot of people about the facts of a case.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

File under "Neat trick, bad idea".

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Re: Firewall configuration

The Nokia Communicator. Great piece of kit. On one gig, working on-site, I'd log in in the morning and pick up the local email - it's easy these days to forget that Unix boxes had email between users entirely locally - to review the logs from the overnight jobs.

I took a day off to attend a meeting to set up a UK user group. A couple of the US group had come over to help sort things out. After the days events we went for an icon. As I hadn't had been in the office to check the emails I did so now. I happened to be setting next to one of the US guys who was greatly interested and shouted to his mate the immortal line "Hey, come and look, he's DBAing his box on his phone!" It's nice to be on the leading edge now and then.

We can clone you wholesale: Boffins build ML agents that respond like specific people

Re: After they sack you.

Why the joke alert?

Re: I thought this AI insanity was already scraping the bottom of the barrel and then...

And, in that regard, I suspect the uncharacteristic tendency of their "loved one" to remind them of the bargains on offer today at various sponsoring merchants will keep them on the right side of reality.

I can very easily envisage a deceased wife continuing to order shoes.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

I had a call about supporting UAT for an organisation scaling up to a bigger server. I'd worked in that field briefly about 11 years earlier but didn't recognise the name of the product. Standing in reception I could see some terminals in the distance, too far away to read but approved the style of the general screen layout - it looked like the way I liked to do things. Yup, it turned out to be the same package having been through a series of different vendors and names. One screen even had the place-holder text left by my code-generator, exactly as I'd left it when I quit 11 years earlier.

"Only as I turned the final page did I find my own name as the course leader and author."

This sort of thing gets increasingly scary as you get older.

"which I used to implement the braking algorithm I had proposed."

I definitely wouldn't have done that for two reasons one of which being that they didn't desrve it.

Re: Passwords

how I "would ever possibly know" what the head had ordered or not.

"Very easily. I'll ring him to get confirmation."

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Re: Checking the boxes

Pony tail? No way. It's thinning too much without risking the extra drag.

Once upon a time I dodged an employment contract bullet. I was near the end of a research assistantship and the job advertised was a college lecturer teaching MIBiol* which is supposed to be a degree equivalent. I envisaged an arrangement which would be partly teaching, partly opportunity for research. I was offered the job on the spot after the interview and taken aback. This is normally unheard of but said I'd like to think about it. The biggest impediment in my mind was that research assistantships don't pay much, neither did my wife's research student grant - we were flat broke and suddenly realised that we really couldn't afford to move for the job. They were equally taken aback that I hadn't instantly accepted but gave me a copy of the contract to sign when I was ready.

Big mistake on their part. On reading the contract the MIBiol was a sweetener taking up about a third of the time. The rest of the time, in other words, the real job, was just straight A-Level biology teaching.

* Membership of the Institute of Biology.

1,000s of Palo Alto Networks firewalls hijacked as miscreants exploit critical hole

I repeat "If so, AND THERE ARE NO DOWNSIDES TO THE PATCH"

Could you expand on your logic a little.

Remember that however quickly a vendor releases a patch* many admins (assuming there are any) will all too often be too slow of the mark; that was the point of TFA. OTOH the patch simply transitions the S/W to the state it was supposed to have been in at launch, i.e. secure. Let the devices be pwned or fix them quickly enough before that happens - which is the more responsible approach?

* In itself an alert to the bad guys.

Just a thought - if the vulnerability is such that the device can be so thoroughly hijacked can it be used to patch remotely? If so, and there are no downsides to the patch, why not use it to do just that?

A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat

"If AT&T has decided to stick with VMware, that's a brilliant first anniversary present for Broadcom."

That would depend on the terms. BTW Dec 13th is a Friday....

"Gartner's Warrilow predicts those discussions will intensify in coming months – partly because rivals have developed better alternatives to VMware."

Aided by experience staff suddenly coming onto the employment market no doubt.

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

Re: Who?

I think he's mostly a right-pondian problem. I suppose you have enough problems of your own without worrying about ours.

Pronoun problem

this site

Tate's or elReg?

Odd that all three posts so far have received a downvote and yet nobody has replied with, or separately posted, a message with a contrary sentiment. Could it be that they don't want to be identified?

Now’s your chance to try Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall ... maybe

Because it's there I can envisage the private owner with more enthusiasm than knowledge discovering it, turning it on without blocking anything. Why not go a step further, remove it and leave the user to add it on? That done it would be more likely that it would only be installed and active for those use cases, whatever they might be, that actually require it.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

"Currently, EVs are definitely not suitable for everyone, but a lot of the arguments people put up against them are nothing more than ignorant/malicious social-media trash talk"

People know what their personal requirements are. They can decide for themselves whether those criteria are met or not. If the industry can't meet them for enough people then it's up to the industry to sort that out. In order to do that they need to realise that there are two competitions going on: one is EV vs ICE. The other is the EV charging infrastructure vs the petrol/diesel distribution infrastructure. Simply sticking their head in the sand, in the clouds or elsewhere and pretending potential customers' concerns are trash talk won't help at all.

"Although there is a small chance that the list-price threshold may be raised just for EVs"

That doesn't seem likely given other moves recently.

There are also a good few in the old industrial villages of the West Riding. As the mills have disappeared - largely replaced by more housing as a doubly whammy - so the local jobs are gone they've become a big commuter belt. Combine that with crappy public transport and the demise of the ICE car would make those houses it fit only for the retired and the unemployable unless, of course, WFH saves the day. Either that or the public charging infrastructure gets to match todays fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Re: Plug in hybrids

Whenever I see one of these modern things with an octagon on the frontI can't help thinking "That's not an MG."

Grieving for the BGT whose back seat the kids outgrew years ago.

"That's just bad engineering."

Only from the customer's PoV. And who cares about customers these days?

That question, of course, is at the heart of this discussion and others, e.g. AI PCs. Nobody cares about customers so customers have given up caring about vendors.

How hard do you expect people to accelerate on their drive?

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info

Re: The Only Way to Keep Your Personal Data Safe

In order to open a physical filing cabinet the employee has to actually go to it and risk being seen there.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

"there are no compelling business cases,"

No killer apps. But if there were, what would they be killing?

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

For a great many applications it would be more productive to use a dumb terminal and server-based applications than to use the PC. I don't suppose Intel will do any studies on that topic.

Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

"Transcribing Meetings? Who on Earth does this?"

Whoever it is they have an amazing amount of control. It's so important a job that, as Sir Humphrey would tell you, sometimes the minutes are written up before hand, just to ensure that they show the correct decisions being taken.

Seriously: I'm on the committee of a charity. A few weeks ago the sec sent round minutes of the last meeting and I had to point out that there was an omission. I needed them to include a point which we had agreed but the minutes missed. It was one that enabled me to give the agreed reply to an enquiry via the web site. Hasty apology and circulation of the revised minutes. The written record matters.

Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

It's called box ticking. Box exists for bought in code. Box does not exist for AI-generated code.

'Alarming' security bugs lay low in Linux's needrestart utility for 10 years

Re: Cos Qualys

It seems to have been derived from another project checkrestartneeded. Both are in the repositories for Devuan and Debian but neither is installed on my desklaptop either. It's easy to see why. They're to make sure any updated libraries are broad into action by ensuring everything that runs them gets restarted. Desktop and laptops get rebooted fairly often (unless they're left running for the janitor to come round at night and fix everyone's problems for them) so it's really a server need where there are long-ruiing daemons. But Debian is pretty good at restarting daemons anyway. I wonder if its something that's used for setting up the .deb files before distribution.

Prepare for an AI policy upending under Trump, say experts

"the AI hype train is rapidly becoming an unstoppable force."

Unstoppable force, meet the buffers, immovable object. Of course it's going to happen.

In the meantime, what will Trump do? What's the daftest thing he could do?

Five Scattered Spider suspects indicted for phishing spree and crypto heists

Excellent, issuing indictments against those actually in custody as opposed to warning someone out of jurisdiction that they need to stay that way.

Given that one of their victims was a casino the trial might be the least of their worries now they've been publicly identified.

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

Re: Win11 easy when it is, and impossible other times

"We're not quite to the point of mass life cycle upgrades"

I think the official (Microsoft) view is that you are and should act accordingly. They want you to buy new licences.

"after official support ends"

How would one differentiate this from normal function?

Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft lack the talent to make something worse?

Re: Win10 will be the last OS from Microsoft I will ever use...

Don't blame the idea for being implemented by Microsoft.

Now Online Safety Act is law, UK has 'priorities' – but still won't explain 'spy clause'

Re: But the most important thing ....

"their lawyers can interpret the law"

Their lawyers can argue how they want the law interpreted. It will be the courts and no-one else who actually decide how it should be interpreted and they'll listen to arguments and expert witness from both sides, maybe also from amicus curiae briefs.

It's high time the RFCs for email were updated to make end-to-end encryption the default rather than an add-on, together with adding the required public key infrastructure into the mechanism (add the information as to location of the key store to the domain data and extend the mail sending protocol to request the key). Key store* would mostly become a part of the MSPs' offering.

PGP (I'm assuming this would be the mechanism) would become part of the mail client. Plebmail would scarcely see any difference as Microsoft and Google would provide all that anyway and the user will continue see plain text via MAPI but everyone else will get secure mail. It would get over the problem that virtually nobody uses encrypted email because they don't know anyone who uses it because virtually nobody uses it..

Correction - it's not high time for that now. It was high time for it years ago. It should have been the norm for years so the governments trying to pull this now would have to explain to the world why they're trying to unilaterally wanting to reduce confidential business communication to the equivalent of being written on the back of a post-card.

*Yes, I know. There's also have to be a mechanism for getting the key into the store.

Re: But...HOW?

"Clearly, none of them were listening."

I'm sure some of them were. Unfortunately the various agencies who just want their jobs made easier - and preferably done for them by somebody else - have a lot more influence on the relative ministers than backbench MPs. Home Secs are notoriously well house trained very quickly, apart from the few who start that way.

Re: But...HOW?

New - and old - laws have to deal with situations, including technologies, that have not even been thought of when they're drawn up. Fitting them to current reality is the job of the courts. Normally this works and has done from the time of Henry II or earlier. The trick is to draw them up without inherent nonsense. In this particular instance the courts are going to have a bit of a problem.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

Re: It's all just Bullshit

"it's basically a pretty-good bullshit generator. But as soon as you ask questions about accuracy, truthfulness, and judgement you find AI is actually not very much use to anyone."

But you repeat yourself.

That seems like somebody's being clever. Two birds with one stone: get Teams and AI banned together.