Posts by Doctor Syntax

North Korea's fake IT worker scam hauled in at least $88M over six years

"given a goal of earning $10,000 each every month."

IOW they were telling them that that sort of money was achievable on the outside. I wonder if any took that incentive to jump the wire.

Broadcom says VMware is a better money-making machine than it hoped

"growth for VMware would be achieved in a tighter time frame than the three years initially forecast – and that further improvements are achievable."

That sounds like a man planning his retirement in the next three years.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: The Dream

In the case of the Thames valley it's human excrement and it's in the river.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Re: Jersey?

New Jersey isn't an island. Jersey is, mate: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@49.2403943,-2.0619738,96906m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIwOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Re: Jersey?

Why not? It's a nice little island, low tax rates and the early spuds are second to none.

Lights in the sky

It's the Chinese. Those Chinese lanterns.

"some of the basement trolls here"

You write from direct personal knowledge?

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

Computing used to be measured in the number of computations per second, the storage available or the number of bits in and out of a data centre. In other words, its output. Now it seems to be measured in the power consumed, its inputs. Is this because the output is so pointless it's not worth measuring?

Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation admits to hole in security

I take it from this that it's mandatory to make a report to possible investors but not to customers whose data might have been taken. And yet the investors, as shareholders, are the company and as such owe a duty of care to the customers.

I miss those. We haven't seen one for years.

Lights out for 18 more DDoS booters in pre-Christmas Operation PowerOFF push

"An ad a day to keep cybercrime at bay" is what Europol said in its announcement, saying it too will be paying for Google Search and YouTube ads to deter young people from using these sites.

For that to work they're going to have to have a convincing story to tell. A handful of arrests of the operators of the sites isn't going to provide that.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Why stop there? Delete the entire Windows madness.

Re: Time to do the right thing and kick the habit.

"You know it is never going to improve. It's just going to get worse. Every month, every year, every update, every version."

That means that every month, every year, every update, every version the cost, real or imagined, to migrate away to something more stable gets greater. The longer term rewards also get greater, of course, simply in terms of avoiding the creeping enshittification, but short-termism masquerading as corporate strategy is going to ensure that that won't happen.

However much it's attractive as an idea, what would the grounds be for that? They made a free upgrade from W10 for those who'd bought it reasonably* recently. However much "no more Windows" versions was bandied around in the media it was just something said by "an employee" and not by the company despite the lack of major effort to deny it.

As to the rest of the changes I'm sure Microsoft's EULA agrees that they'll make "improvements" and what constitutes an improvement would be a matter for argument. I doubt you'd find anyone being prepared to gamble the money to try to establish that one in court.

* Reasonable would undoubtedly be the key factor here. I suspect the entire free upgrade was mad with this as a reply to such a challenge.

Re: They've not even updated their own documentation

Because nobody's going to discover it that way.

Re: United States v. Microsoft Corp.

Of course they remember it. It showed them they could get away with anything. They've lived by that result ever since.

Intel turmoil prompts S&P Global to downgrade chipmaker's credit rating

Does this indicate signs of sentience in financial markets? S&P taking a stance on longer term consequences of manglement's decisions.

Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Instagram stumble on and offline in global outage

Meanwhile productivity everywhere else increased.

Blocking Chinese spies from intercepting calls? There ought to be a law

What this episode has demonstrated is that backdoors are not accessible to only those for whom they were intended, they are accessible to anyone who made the effort - considerable effort, no doubt, but an achievable one - to investigate them. Currently the standard means of communication on the internet are no more secure than messages written on a postcard. You personally might have no dealings that risk exposure in that way. You may never, for instance, buy anything on the internet, transmitting banking details. OTOH your employers might well rely on communicating matters which they expect to be treated as commercial in confidence and leave themselves and their employees - that means you - at a disadvantage if those matters were intercepted by a competitor.

Re: REPEAL CALEA

My understanding of TFA is that he's compelling the FCC to do its job. Presumably CALEA enabled FCC to do it but made it voluntary.

Cruise robotaxis parked forever, as GM decides it can't compete and wants to cut costs

Re: Reality is at fault

Reality is a bitch.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

"I am hesitant to say that 'more tech' is what will solve the problem,"

Simply blocking the submitters might.

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Re: I wonder

It happens, you know. It also happens quite often that ballistics checks show it was the gun that fires the fatal rounds.

Re: I wonder

"quite a few cases have been broken by lucky breaks. But this takes the biscuit."

I can think of quite a few:

The getaway car that left one of the gang behind. For good measure their safe house was just round the corner and a witness pointed it out to the police.

The culprit who threw away his cap as he ran away. He'd written his name inside.

The culprit who threw away his jacket as he ran away. His library card with his name and address were in the pocket.

They're not all criminal masterminds.

"grainy pics the only tech involved"

Surely the telephone with which he called the police counts as tech?

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel

Re: Replicant Gelsinger

That was for the entire IT industry.

Re: Replicant Gelsinger

"nVidia's also in a weird personnel position in that so many of its staff were given company shares in years gone by that the place is full of millionaires now."

If they haven't cashed in those millions are hypothetical until they do so they need to keep the share price up.

Re: IBM, Boeing, Intel...

What's the factor in common to all those? They were built by engineers and taken over by beancounters.

Microsoft dangles $10K for hackers to hijack LLM email service

Re: Dear LLM

How about cat AIPressReleases > /dev/sda

Not random but nonsense all the same.

China's Salt Typhoon recorded top American officials' calls, says White House

Have you got it yet? Secure communication and back doors are incompatible.

We can't make this stuff up: Palantir, Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures

"US military is not retaining sensor data collected by vehicles and weapons that could be used to train AI."

Really? In this day and age there's actually something not already being used to train AI?

Mysterious outbreak with high fatality rate in the DRC could imperil tech supply chains

"To make matters worse, insecurity in the area means armed groups could disrupt the transport of medical experts and disease samples in and out of the region."

In that case, let's hope the disease spreads to them.

Kyndryl's consulting business may be less than it seems

Re: fake accounting

"people should go full class action if they've been ruined by fake accounting"

Why? As share holders they own a share of the business. The clue's in the name. The only source of money to pay out is the company which, if you want a fuller description, is the company of shareholders. So what happens in a class action by shareholders? They pay lawyers to sue themselves and pay lawyers to defend themselves against themselves and, whatever the outcome, get what's left after lawyers fees of what was left before the class action.

Are you, by any chance, a lawyer?

Would I be correct in thinking that by setting up Kyndryl IBM was trying to hive off the drain it was circling?

Windows 11 24H2 strikes again – Outlook might not start with Google Workspace Sync running

What's "basic home use"? Someone with a single address/account/mailbox they use for everything including part of their online credentials (where it's likely to be paired up with the same password on multiple sites)? Home use might extend to multiple email accounts, multiple addresses on the same mailbox, etc. There isn't necessarily a differentiator between the capabilities a home user might and a business user might want. The only difference is that the business user is paid to use it.

Currently I have an email client that has open:

one mailbox with a number of different mail addresses using it,

a second mailbox on the same (my own) domain with mail from a legacy address forwarded to it,

a mailbox on the domain of a committee I'm on and

a second mailbox on that doamin that's the end point of a contact link on our web page

a number of RSS feed

a number of Usenet groups *

It's also my calendar

* Unfortunately not much used since Google stopped supporting them and most members seem unable to make the transition to reading them as they were intended because, I suppose, they're using a mail client intended for basic home use. Thanks, whoever, for dumbed down mail clients.

Have to stop a competitor's product to use it? That's not a bug, it's a feature.

Blue Yonder ransomware termites claim credit

"Blue Yonder – which reportedly counts ... Morrisons ... among its disrupted customers"

That explains a lot. I'm not sure it explains why it's taken - could still be taking for all I know - naby days to fix a refrigeration unit, nor does it explain why nobody had the wit to either put up a notice to ask staff if you needed butter, nor to shuffle things around so that space could be found on another shelf for butter.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Quite. The opposite of "shutdown" is "openup", not "open". However, with command expansion...

I always thought that place lacked some serious thought in the design. In the main exhibit you start at the end and walk along it to the beginning.

In that context "safe" would be "safe" for all elements of the system.

Re: Informix

"it used raw disk allocation rather than block storage"

Why have an extra layer of S/W between the database engine and the hardware?

Re: "Ever had a moment when [..] reading the manual didn't help"

"(or records, for you RDBMS people)"

That'll be rows.

I remember Informix going from file/record/field (when it was called Marathon) to relation/tuple/attribute before getting to table/row/column.

"(Delete removes from RAM, not from database)."

Ouch!

Re: Context matters

"It’s the console cowboy’s responsibility to know what he’s typing."

I'd have thought that it's the original programmers' responsibility to not let his code expand an ambiguous command. In the examples you give "sho", "shu" and "shi" should be the minimum. nd not just the programmers, thye QA, the overall management chain.

China strikes back with Nvidia antitrust probe as US tightens tech chokehold

Who was it who said "Trade wars are good and easy to win"?

India launches two ESA sun-spotters that will fly in incredibly precise formation

Re: Neat

Depth of field of the lens? The closer the occulter is to the lens the fuzzier its edge.

China launches AI that writes politically correct docs for bureaucrats

I suppose providing a chatbot makes good sense. You wouldn't want people thingking for themselves, would you?

Facing sale or ban, TikTok tossed under national security bus by appeals court

to be replaced with official government approved news outlets and social media of truth unicorns Truth Social (and pixie dust, of course).

By your argument the US this legislation wouldn't apply to them anyway.

"Trump will allow them back"

What if Biden were to allow them a waiver? Would Trump then reverse that, just to be contrary and start off by pissing off all their users?

You're so bad at recycling, this biz built an AI to handle it for you

Re: "manual labor for sortation"

Garbage in, raw materials out in this case. Probably unique in the annals of AI/ML/LLM.