Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

Re: Heathrow not blameless

Page 95? How about page 1?

Re: LHR suing National Grid

They have multiple feeds but only used one. If they were sharing power from all three and had a plan to use them to pick up the slack failry quickly backup power would only need to cover 1/3rd of the demand for a relatively short period.

"in short there's plenty of blame to go around"

Another way of looking at it is that there's always someone ont which to whuffle one's own blame. So nobody takes responsibility.

US imposes sanctions on second Russian bulletproof hosting vehicle this year

imposes

That's better.

NASA tests shrinking metals to help it find more exoplanets

Re: A new way to solve an old problem?

"aunching in a finely carved teak longcase, with mahogany and walnut details."

No problem with those being launched. Just leave antique oak, walnut or mahogany clocks alone.

Coming to PostgreSQL: On-disk database encryption

Re: why?

Two alternative answers.

1. Without seeing the exact details I suspect this encryption includes everything between the client and the storage medium. If that's the case it provided protection over and above what the network may already provide (on-prem that might well be nothing) so that it can't be observed by an eavesdropper or queried by anyone without an encryption key.

2. The cynical answer: it ticks another box on the ISO9000 inspired checklist.

Trump's budget bill bankrolls $85M Space Shuttle shuffle

Is the within 18 months clause to ensure it doesn't happen, to make it happen before the half-term elections or something as elastic as the time limit to sell TikTok?

Impact of Microsoft taking over Enterprise Account renewals starts to 'bite'

Re: Haven't read the full article,

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The middlemen will have done whatever work was needed to set up the deal. Once that's in place Microsoft doesn't need them. It's hard to differentiate between the two who's the parasite and who's being parasitised.

Of course we know who's really being parasitised - the users.

Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only

Re: Subscription only

"If a subscription means the code is rolled back to a previous versions, and no updates are available, you start to be in trouble."

Or does it mean no service in which case you're in more trouble.

Re: Subscription only

"You cannot exist without email these days."

I suppose it depends on what the subscription rates are. Outside of the freebie* gmail/$WhateverMicrosoftCurrentlyCallsIt/ISP service it's reasonable to pay for a email - it costs the MSP to provide it - and the ISP provided service isn't really free anyway.

A bare service using POP3, delete on download isn't going to cost that much per seat but it means individual clients will be storing the emails otherwise you can always run Roundcube etc locally.

* As in -->

You're really paying in kind.

Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs

Re: AI PCs…

That is the industry standard - slug it out and the last man standing wins.

Re: Upgrade? Why?

"if there was a window manager that was a perfect clone of Windows 10's UI, including the file manager for saving stuff and the printer dialog for printing stuff."

There seems to be a cottage industry in W10-type styling for KDE: https://store.kde.org but I'm not sure anyone would want to emulate the Windows file manager that closely. For some reason it seems to display two similar - but not quite - lists of places for reasons I've never quite understood. However if she could accept something simpler KDE Dolphin might do. AFAICS print dialogs are not consistent between applications.

Re: This isn't like Windows XP

"the larger screen can be solved without using Windows"

Of course it can. 17" laptop and Devuan works just fine.

However, you've just set me wondering. Your iPhone Mini idea works well in an hotel room where there's a TV. I'm thinking of a super-portable to take into archives where there wouldn't be that luxury but I need something to drive the USB document camera. I don't think my 15" laptop is much lighter than the 17" although that's what I used last week. But a lightweight monitor and a Pi might be a good combo... Where as that Aldi where somebody snagged a cheap monitor recently?

Interesting. AIUI ATMs have used Windows in the past and various PoS terminals also do. So what's the future software platform for those? Android? Linux? BSD?

"Microsoft appear to have gone terminally insane."

That's a bit rich, considering your handle.

Re: 2%?

They probably intended to sell most of them to business users but I suppose they also have no money now.

Re: Upgrade? Why?

"probably more years than she has left given that she's 87"

I wish people would stop saying things like that.

Re: This isn't like Windows XP

"The 'home PC' is rapidly becoming an historic artifact"

If you mean users are going over to phones or tablets that might be so for those with younger eyes. Eventually a bigger screen becomes essential.

It's all going terribly well.

Re: This isn't like Windows XP

"for everyone else I'm willing to make a bet Win10 will be around for a while longer"

Undoubtedly. People like my sister-in-law are still on W7.

Cl0p cybercrime gang's data exfiltration tool found vulnerable to RCE attacks

"It added that 44 percent of the 682 unique IPs executing scans within the past 90 days (as of June 25) came from Tencent Cloud, with the others coming from Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google."

I suppose the sort of people we're dealing with here will pay with cryptocurrency assuming the cloud providers will accept it. It might be a smart regulatory move to make the providers require verified banking details which would enable seizure of at least some assets and a starting point for attempts to trace the perpetrators.

Linus Torvalds hints Bcachefs may get dropped from the Linux kernel

Apple or raspberry pi?

Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour

Re: Except he doesn't have an MBA

He probably doesn't need it for his CV.

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers

Let's hope archive.org doesn't become collateral damage.

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Re: Greasy

The thing is, you're obviously professional and therefore less likely to be suspended.

Re: And this is why...

"Had a guy get fired while he was carrying the keys to the LAN room."

Very much the same situation as here. The keys should have been taken and the guy escorted off the premises.

Re: An estimated £200,000 in lost business and reputational harm

Given that the business doesn't seem to have been named in reporting the reputational harm has been restricted.

It's 2025 and almost half of you are still paying ransomware operators

"took advantage of a security gap they were not aware of."

In this case "we" will be some higher level manglement within the company. It's quite likely that somebody down the food-chain may have noticed it. Run a bounty system. It will not only get responses from whoever might have already spotted a gap, it will get people looking and, as an added bonus, increase general security awareness. But ensure the bounty pays worthwhile money.

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Re: Unwritten rules

Make that unwritten rule #0

"the Golden Rule in system stability"

Like I keep saying, the primary requirement for a DBA, or any other admin role really, is paranoia. Maybe Logan learned that.

"So I kept my mouth shut about the report"

I might have been tempted, about a week after being fired and preferably after you've found another job, to go a couple of levels above her head point out that just before you were fired you were about to tell her the company was missing whatever amount of business it was but didn't get the chance. And emphasise that as you don't work there any more the only way they can find out how they were missing it will be to work it out for themselves - which they obviously won't have the skills to do.

Re: sysadmin ... become a developer

So they're called windows of opportunity now? I like it.

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

Re: History repeats itself

Couldn't agree more. The one ability you can guarantee in anyone who's climbed to the top of a hierarchy is the ability to climb hierarchies. Anything extra that's useful if just good fortune.

To a large extent TFA looks at things from a European viewpoint. The European - or any non-US - viewpoint has to look at geo-political risks of being dependent on US corporations. If you're top management here you should be asking your senior IT management what they'll do if the services of those US corporations become unavailable. If you're in that senior IT management do you have an answer ready? Do you think something along the lines of what you (and others) have posted will be good enough? Will management be looking for somebody more on the ball to replace you?

Re: But why they won't quit M$

And I've posted more or less this here several times:

If the whimsical POTUS has a whim that your customer, your company, your country or your continent are to be sanctioned than those big US corps will quit you.

I've also posted here a few times:

If you're in IT management and you're not analysing your risks and making contingency plans you're not earning your salary.

Re: It's all built on sand...

1: My mail addresses are in my own domain. The registrar of the domain can be changed if required. Not only can be, but has been in the past.

2: Communication between client and server is an open standard.

3: That means the operator of the mail server can be changed if required. Not only can be but has been in the past.

In the unlikely event of MS taking over MB I can be gone PDQ.

Separating domain and MSP from ISP makes it easy to move ISP when I need to. It's called planning ahead, the sort of thing that business managements are paid to do.

MB make no secret of what they run - Debian/Exim.

Re: It's not just Microsoft

Yes I did. The problem is that the businesses didn't read the article or any like it. They need to remove their heads from their arses, look around and ask "could that be us next?"

Re: History repeats itself

Senior management should mean being able to consult* the experts you employ and getting considered, independent advice from them. All too often it means either the ability to get rid of the experts because they're expensive or else disregarding them because they're paid a comparative pittance so that's what their advice is worth.

* It should also mean being alert to what's going on in the wider world so as to know when you need to consult them.

Re: An awful lot of people have their heads in the sand

"Watch carefully what Trump does to Canada ... he is going to use them as an object lesson for the rest of the World !!!"

Given the US gets a fair chunk of electricity and oil from Canada the question is whose balls and whose vice.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

One of the features of dial-up was that a call-waiting beep would reset the whole connection. There is, I hope, a special place in hell for the salesmen of one particular double-glazing firm. I'm sure there was a collective sigh from the whole of the Huddersfield area when that - rightly - went bust.

Re: Makes for a good example

"Then I remind people that if corporations had their way, we'd be locked in to their services and would need to pay them for those services in perpetuity."

For those not in the know that's the way things are.

Obligatory Dilbert

"So had the "joys" of Token Ring and 10base2.

Ah the fond memories of crawling under desks trying to which dodgy card was taking half the site off line...."

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/05/ca/6905cac14093c248d268d074184e5e61.gif

One of the very best.

Re: "perhaps a little simpler"

"the break-out box"

I've still got one in a tool box somewhere.

Re: Phone bill must have been astronomical

"We connected to the Open University's computers using dial-up modems where the telephone handset was put in a cradle."

The same arrangement was used for a computer assisted training exercise in the chemistry section of the S100 course. As Tutor/Counsellor it was my privilege to oversee this by AFAICR hauling the not insubstantial cradle and, I think, an allegedly portable TTY out to the further flung bits of N Ireland. That last bit doesn't seem to have been a likely thing, now I've written it and memory is vague - half a century and perhaps PTSD of the whole effort have dimmed the memory. It was the kit of that era that made the later Osborne and its clones portable.

What I do recall clearly was that one of the students was a middle-aged* nurse tutor who was so terrified of the whole computer thing that she'd brought her teenage son along as reinforcements and went away completely enthused about the whole thing. It was that sort of happening that made the job worth-while**.

* Or, from my present perspective, young. It was one of the features of the OU back then that the tutors were considerably younger than most of the students.

** Given our finances at the time even the limited pay available was also very useful.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

"Find all the emails I've received that make exaggerated claims about AI and see whether the senders have ties to cryptocurrency firms,"

What's an exaggerated claim and would AI and human, one AI and another or even the same AI on two occasions agree on whether a claim is exaggerated? What are ties. how are they to be discovered? Are firms tied by sharing an address? A building? A city? A country? A planet?

Give a crap prompt, get crap answers.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: And then...

I can't help thinking that the Cavendish Lab should be involved in all this.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: It's the final countdown.

The leaders in making a gov.-wide switch here are Denmark. Trump wants to take Greenland from them because he fancies it. A bit like Putin wanting to take Ukraine because he fancies it. One of Trump's weapons would be turning off their Microsoft services.

What we have here isn't a government looking at the choice of MS services or FOSS. They're looking at a choice of paper, typewriters and postage stamps or FOSS.

Re: Maybe this is finally he time

No point in deploying brown envelopes to customer managements if you've been told by your own government that you can't have them as customers any more. Perhaps look in other directions...

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Never drawn a gun

OP (Jou) isn't a native English speaker.