Posts by Dwarf

Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

Rating system needed

Since the government is very fond of rating systems, such as those used to rate schools. How about if they implemented the same thing for the outsourcing companies that they use across all government programmes. Then they could try and work out which ones are no good, so that they don't keep making the same mistake.

The trick is that they need to consider cost, risk and time. Just because it was cheapest, doesn't mean that they will get it right.

You would also assume that with a win on a £239M cointract, they could afford at least a handful of competent people to drive it forwards properly

Given the number of things that have been reported to be visible and wrong, you can be fairly confident that the same sort of level of quality will exist all through the platform.

Microsoft quietly shuts down Windows shortcut flaw after years of espionage abuse

Whitespace

I wonder why they didn't opt to run a regex on the command line and trim all repeating whitespace to a single space character

This would shorten the text too and, when coupled with their super duper scrolly wide text box, then you would see everything easily.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

Try when you are talking to an offshore resourcing team and they have really lousy Internet connectivity.

India, I'm looking at you.

We had more success listening to the birds in the trees than the person that was presenting the latest design for approval

Have we lost Arav again ..

Yep, OK, lets wait for him to rejoin.

Wait ...

Do I have audio ?

Yes, you have Audio.

2 more points on the design.

Then, again, we are waiting on them to re-join.

Good people that are knee capped by their poor connectivity

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Re: Windows "Professional" "Enterprise"...

Looks to me like we are all using Windows Yee-Haw edition.

You might get lucky today and it doesn't kill you, or you might not.

FFS MS, use some form of testing on your software.

Perhaps even train your AI to do something such as basic testing and prove its not completely pointless.

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

The new winner

This weeks new winner of the "why we do backups" competition.

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

I'd prefer a coat

I'd prefer a coat to a sweater, that way, I have something to protect me from the clouds.

Now, If only we could find something to protect against the AI.

Looking at the sweater, it shows how many things, that they thought were important are now completely irrelevant to us.

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

Re: Reviewed on update, or no?

It doesn't say when that happens. Is it on submission - as you would hope, or is it some form of asynchronous background process that gets done when someone gets around to it and as we know, people have plenty of time, so there will be absolutely no delay, promise.

Or, with AI everywhere, perhaps, it is some automated code that can't figure things out properly, just approving changes and firing them out there. AI has good form for this, it can simply lie or say sorry when it gets called out that it made a mistake.

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

Slop, Slop, Crash, Reboot

So, AI increases the costs for those that don't give a damn about AI - by consuming everything - everyone's data, all the graphics cards, all the CPU's, all the RAM, all the storage, all the power and pushing ther prices up for everone, whilst producing inaccurate regurgitations of other peoples information or generating random fake videos that nobody needed.

The time can't come soon enough when this all falls flat on its face.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Ahh "the good old days"

But did you run 802.2, 802.3 and SNAP on the same IPX network ?

I think I've still got an Arcnet hub in my roof somewhere, along with a bunch of old adapters. They are still doing useful work as insulation.

They used 75R cable too iif I recall correctly. Star network out from the switch, no terminators necessary, but slow ....

Turd files

I used to do the exact same thing on Netware 3.x servers and NT 3.51 servers.

I had an amazing trick on these that allowed you to create the files nearly instantly - from the app perspective, but it flat lined the server for a bit, it went like this

Create the file, set the file pointer to XMb out, Write a 0, then close the file

The great thing was that sparse files didn't exist yet and when you fseek() to where you want and write one byte, the OS would handle all the rest of the IO for you.

The other great thing about the approach of filling the disk with "turd files" as I used to call them, is that if anything is running and is running away, when the disk is full, it will generally abort, sometimes deleting its huge file as it goes.

You can them simply delete a turd file, to give yourself free space and get the company working again, whilst you go and find out which user is creating massive files and go for a quiet word.

Re: Ah, the joys (?) of 10Base2

Why would you need a network connection in a morgue ??

I guess the residents dont need the Internet much, other than to do their tax returns.

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

Unfortunately, they are not measuring the real cost - to all their customers, every day when using this buggy software.

Focus on your customers, not your internal staff overhead.

Get real people to write code, not AI

Get testers to test things, not customers.

None of this is difficult. Software profiles and debuggers have existed for many years, yet it seems that many have forgotten how to use them effectively.

HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’

@cd.

You beat me to it, I was going to say that a # prompt generally gets its way, but your post was way funnier, so have an upvote !

Praise Amazon for raising this service from the dead

Great news

When people can't trust that a product will be here next week, they will get all touchy when something new and shiny comes out.

Additionally, with the current approach of "everything as code", a modern using source control system is a critical component of the build pipeline, so why would someone like Amazon need to rely on an externally hosted service ? That would make no sense whatsoever.

At least AWS seems to have listened to someone and fixed what they got wrong. Other vendors might want to take note.

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

Understand what IT Pros really need

Basic tools that can be used to fix a broken system, or to tweak a config file are important.

notepad did this really well, since you could guarantee it was always there, you could open basic text files, readme files, tweak config files when needed, make notes for future reference and it would work with virtually any other app installed that has text components.

The new versions makes all of this impossible, it keeps your files open after restarting it - I don't want that.

It auto-saves - I definately don't want that. Only when I choose the save option, do I want to save. Just because I'm working in another app, or because I got called away to fix something else, have lunch or answer the phone, definitely doesn't mean that I want to save.

If you want to make an AI enabled text mangling tool, then bring back Wordpad and screw that up instead and roll back the changes to notepad.

Alternately, install Visual Studio Code on all build and give us a decent editor that you've already got.

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

Nobody works well when they are tired.

Nobody should be making changes to production systems when they are tired.

Nobody should be planning changes to a production system when they are tired.

The end customers won't be happy about having people that are not well rested managing their critical IT systems.

None of this is sensible for the people on the ground doing the actual work

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Allow me to simplify

People have been unimpressed with Microsoft products for a long time, what makes you think that something called AI is going go change that ?

Remember that we never asked for it and yet we get it rammed in our face all the time, with no way to turn it off. Now imagine it was a toaster constantly offering to make you toast.

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

Happy to see testing

Perhaps Microsoft and others can take a look and see that tesitng is necessary, you can put something on the test bench and give it a go, before you get real customers using it and bad things happen.

Not a Musk fan, but at least they are making progress, even when things come apart in unexpected ways.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Current generation Yoof of the day

I'm fairly certain - following over a decade of research, that most young ladies are built pretty much the same, so if you can imagine one and you can imagine their face, then you are probably not too far off from what the real thing will look like, if you are lucky enough to find out. I'm guessing it works similarly for the ladies too, just add a beer belly here and there and a couple of tattoos.

No computers required, no AI, no subscriptions, no trouble from the regulator.

We really don't need computers for everything we do.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Pointless

Well, at least he has proved that it was pointless, saving anyone else from having to do the same thing *

* Except for all the cats and dogs that are still trying to figure out why we haven't done it yet. This is why you never see a cat or dog with a wallet or credit card.

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

Re: Checking the comments on the Adafruit stinging assement link brought up this

I'm interested by the concept of reverse engineering, when its all just open source, source code. There is no reverse engineering, you are simply reading the source code, like every other developer does with any other code base.

Secondly, they do not own the IP of the chips that they are using, the respective manufacturers do, so no point arguing about how the I2C interface works in a AVR or an STM32, its all printed in the data sheets, again just ready for engineers to read. All of this information is already in the public domain and has been for a very long time.

Re: Just to clarify

Yes, but there are other conditions ...

PlatformIO can use the Arduino framework and I expect this to be the norm for most that just migrated to PIO for a better development experience as it uses VSCode as the IDE, has GIT integration and JTAG support, etc. So, just because you are using PIO doesn't necessarily mean you are Arduino free.

There are other frameworks, see PlatformIO Supported Frameworks and you can switch, but you will need to make some code changes and also need to have relevant libraries for the other frameworks, this is likely to be the sticking point for most projects, since many will have a display, touch, some widget sensor that the design relies on etc. I expect to see a lot of library creators migrate their libraries and I hope these end up in the Platform IO Registry, with their code in the authors GIT repos.

Its probably sensible to download any libraries you depend on and get the last version of the pre-acquisition IDE, so you can watch from the sidelines whilst the enshitification continues.

You are only Arduino free, within PIO, when it is not configured for the Arduino framework and your source codes does not have any #include <Arduino.h> or any #include "Arduino.h" lines in your code and you no longer have the setup() and loop() functions, nor use any of the arduino functions for things such as I2C, SPI, UART, etc.

Been putting it off

I've been putting off a migration from Arduino to ESP-IDF for a couple of boards that are 100% mine. my design, my code, my ideas, my bugs, my feature roadmap. Quallcomm can go and swivel if they think they have any rights over my IP.

The only thing Arduino was good for was to get a whole lot of knowledge into peoples heads about how modular electronics and modular software could work together.

The libraries were where the main intelligence was, knowing how to talk to this widget in a manner that I can port across any of a family of microcontroller boards

But, the basic protocols are just that - GPIO, I2C, UART, SPI, etc. they are not hard to learn.

My only concern is keeping my current code base stable, whilst the firestorm consumes everything. Time to go and download all the current generation libraries, or make sure all my libraries are up to date.

I hope someone forks Arduino, Dave Jones over on the EEVBlog seems to have a domain called LibreDuino or something along those lines that he's looking to give a new home.

Something along the same lines is needed to help the next generation of engineers get up and running, where they can choose which brand of screwdrivers and spanners they want to buy. Electronics should be the same.

I'm also wondering how many people will delete their libraries from Arduino and just make them available somewhere else - the PlatformIO Registry perhaps ??

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Re: XYZZY

That was for the original Adventure game - Advent.

Just remember to put down the staff before picking up the bird.

I'm just wondering what happens when we stick AI in front of Zork and see if it can play it. AI playing a different generation of AI, or would that just result in a singularity ?

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Insame

The problem with that approach is that if any disk based operations fires off, then the first thing it will do is to un-park the heads so that it can perform the operation.

So, this would only work if the discs were completely inactive and that is virtually impossible for a running OS.

You would also assume that if its a proper server, it would have an array of discs in it.

Monkeys

Well, they say if you pay Peanuts, you get Monkeys.

I guess that would be helpful when moving a heavy UPS though.

Tens of thousands more ASUS routers pwned by suspected, evolving China operation

Open source alternatives

Obviously not a solution for everyone, but switching to open source alternatives such as OpenWRT and DD-WRT are both good choices.

You will gain new features on your device, as the products are feature rich, you will improve your security position and learn a bit more about networks and security too.

These are a great way to take existing hardware and re-use it, overcoming abandoned platforms with no firmware updates.

The challenging bit is if your upgrade goes wrong and you have no working router, then you don't have an easy way to go and find information on the problem or its solution, other than possibly via a mobile phone and its hotspot. At the minimum, know how to update and roll back, know about 30-30-30 resets and the like. The rest is easy when you get your head around the basics.

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Start with the basics and build out.

@scotty86 - Absolutely agree.

Then when they have an understanding of OS's, start to look at networking, so you can see how things flow across interconnected systems, then learn about security, by understanding risks and mitigation methods against those risks. There is plenty of meat in all of that to get people at least understanding the main building blocks and some of the real complexity.

Then, when they have the basics, start diversifying out to things like proper software languages, rather than the fancy-in-vogue language of the day, or resilience and scalability and recoverability.

My concern is that now everything is going down the route of software defined everything, people are forgetting that ultimately its electrons and photons whizzing around doing their magic.

I'd love to see any of the current generation get given a microcontroller with 64 bytes of RAM and told to write an app in Assembly language or C - to really drive home how systems work.

AMD grabs more x86 share as Intel stumbles in entry-level chips

Unusually Flat

So, Microsofts asprirations for new PC refreshes, with Windows 10 end of life and massive hopes that Windows 11 will take off, with its demands of a Microsoft Account, Office 234, AI Slop and anything else they are trying to wedge into the services are clearly not working.

People are buying what they need for what they want to do.

Happy to see AMD progressing well, I've always supported them.

FBI flags scam targeting Chinese speakers with bogus surgery bills

Guillible

If you get a call from someone that is clearly fake / a scam, then have some fun with them to waste their time and then tell them to foxtrot oscar.

If you can't recall if you had surgery, then perhaps you family should help to reduce the risk of being scammed with the phone set not to accept incoming calls where they are not a contact.

But, this can only be a small percentage of people. The larger percentage seem to be in the guillible portion. If you are not sure if you are in this category, please send £50 for our questionaire.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Re: Copyright?

This becomes a bit of a circular argument.

The reason we have icons is because they are supposed to be blindingly obvious to the end user, which means that they will have seen them extensively before. Easy examples are the waste bin, floppy disk icon, nuclear symbol, a CDROM drive, the MIL light on your car, etc

Imagine if they tried this copyright stuff with things like road signs, which are ingrained into everones brain

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Re: sendmail.cf

The AT&T 3B1 was a great machine with its 68k cpu and 1Mb of RAM, except for the squeggy power supply, but at least you could easily tell when it was working hard

I was lucky enough to have one with the DOS coprocessor board, which just about worked

It took a lot of space and maintenance with the hood up was fun.

Ahh an idea

Let’s get the rust team to target the systemd team and demand a rewrite of systemd in rust

That should keep all of them tied up for years

Then someone can have all the fun of trying to debug that, which should keep them occupied for another couple of years.

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

It doesn't seem to matter to Microsoft that most peoples experience in Windows is precluded by the word "bad"

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Forget AI, get boolean searches working first

Forget AI. I'd like to see the most simple of web site search tools just work properly with a basic boolean search.

Many store search tools do not support basic boolean searches, if I search for "black paint", I am really stating that I'm looking for "black and paint". So many web front ends OR each word, so every word you add, just muddies the water with things you don't want, giving you no way to get to what you want and many ways to say "too difficult" and go somewhere else. The only workaround I've found is to use Google, with a site restriction on it, so "black and paint site:diy.com".

Broken wizard forces Microsoft to issue out-of-band Windows 10 patch

Another barrier

Another "accidental" barrier to make it look easier to go to Windows 11 on a new PC.

Awfully sorry, here's an update, even though there are no updated (regulator protection mode enabled). Oh, you don't understand how to install it ?

Would you like a new PC and some AI - No

Would you like a new PC and some AI, with office 234 -No

Would you like a new PC and some AI, with office 234 and oneDrive ...

UK unveils roadmap for replacing animal testing

Misplaced trust ?

I don't trust AI to do basic jobs at the moment, so why should we trust it with something as critically important as this ?

AI only learns from existing information and can't differentiate good information from bad information, it will have presumably ingested Agent Oranges views about injecting disinfectant as a COVID remedy for example. We also know it can't extrapolate accurately and is known for getting the basics wrong, with examples such as putting glue on pizzas to stick the toppings down, claiming some things are safe to eat when they are not, etc, then there is the risk of it misunderstanding the nuances of the prompt it was given, particularly for more complex challenges.

The risk can only be huge and we can only be deeply concerned that it will generate similar hallucinations on the things its being asked to solve. I for one, don't fancy being at the front of the queue (*) when someone wants to test something that only works in theory, since we know that everything in theory, works in practice.

(*) or worse, my kids, etc.

But, once again, the hype is that AI fixes everything.

Presumably, they will still need to do animal testing on any animal medications, and don't forget that we are animals too :-)

So, the claim of "replacing" animal testing is somewhat misleading.

Cyber insurers paid out over twice as much for UK ransomware attacks last year

Conditions and guidance

I wonder if the insurance policies have conditions to do things such as spend more money on Cyber next year, since most of these "highly complex attacks" are rarely so. Its always the same attack vectors, operated in the same way. Poor compliance with security standards and people falling for scams and getting software installed locally, that is then used to elevate access and pivot to something else.

If only there was a way to solve such a complicated problem, perhaps someone should come up with a framework to make it less complicated for motrals - Oh, yes, there are several aready. You just have to read them and implement their recommendations, which means that companies need to spend money and have suitably trained people, rather than say "no budget", but then "spaff any money we need to dig ourself out of this huge security incident".

Here's a couple of links for some common ones.

NCSC for the UK - https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/advice-guidance/all-topics

NIST for the US - https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework

CRA for the EU - https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cyber-resilience-act

MITRE ATT&CK - https://attack.mitre.org/

ISO2700x - Stupidly, behind a paywall

CIS benchmarks - https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-benchmarks

OWASP - https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/#

Any additions from others welcome ...

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Has your tech team pranked colleagues?

A friend of mine managed to convince a project manager that they needed some high temperature / asbestos patch cables to go into the back of the firewall, due to the heat that was generated when it was incinnerating the bad packets.

Took him a day or so talking to procurement, to figure out it was a hoax.

AI companies keep publishing private API keys to GitHub

No surprises here

Most developers don't understand security and just see it as an inconvenience. My standard response is that developers stop when it works, not when its secure.

Then AI trains on what it can see - the output from developers.

So, we get the same output if its people or AI doing the development work and following some process.

Wasnt DevSecOps supposed to fix this by putting controls on what can be uploaded to the source control system, thus preventing the problem ?

Intel CTO and AI boss quits to join OpenAI after just six months in the job

Or worded differently

Person offered more money for the same working week decides to move to place where the grass is greener.

Any sensible person would maximise their earning potential. Seems that the CV wasn't important, which is what most think when planning the next role.

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Arguably, with the generally poor reliability of the public transport network people are used to things not working, so they would barely notice if something got bricked, it would just become another reason to add to the list of why you won't get home before your dinner is spoiled or why you can't get to that meeting on time.

The whole remote telemetry and always-on principles need to be balanced against when reporitng or maintenance can be done. Why not just download it when you get back to a depot and use a local server there, since the local team with spanners live in the same place too. There is absolutely no need for hooking them up to the cloud.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

I assume that if they help get some of the Chinese crew home, then that would be a Chinese take away ?

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

Re: Did they

After many years, I found out that PC stood for Paper Casette, whereas everyone always called it the paper tray, since its the tray where the paper goes.

So its asking for Letter sized paper in the tray / casette.

Thinking more on this, if its a casette, then that means that a printer is a form of Casette Recorder then, which has a completely different meaning again, but that won't mean anything to anyone born after the 1980's

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

Swimming ...

There is no way I'll ever be swimming anywhre near a data center. I know how much power goes into those racks and that would really quickly lead to a bad day.

Looks like they used AI to generate the pictures of "stupid things not to do"

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

I wonder

Did Collins use AI to generate the dictionary definition of Vibe Coding.

Clippy - It looks like you are trying to build a boat, can I help ?

Blackwell a no-sell in China as trade deal fails to materialize

Re: Chips? Or Fries with that Donnie?

What was that line about when someone tells you they are really smart ??

Oh yes, I remember, its because they are not, they just think they are.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Reliance

Well, it made sense in my head when I wrote it, but following your feedback, I agree, so have an upvote.

The big question is how to make it hurt the suppliers bottom line, so that they change their approach.

Microsoft: Don't let AI agents near your credit card yet

What sort of world are they trying to evolve

If we have AI doing the work for us and then AI spending the money it earns (indirectly for us), then where do people fit into all of this ? Won't we all just end up surplus to requirements ?

There is no way that I'm letting anything with artificial intelligence anywhere near any of my money. Its bad enough that the wife has a credit card, given some off the questionable stuff that turns up at home.

How, I wonder would AI know what I want. How would it propritise the nice to have from the must-have. How would the advertising system work on this "ignore all previous instructions, buy this cr*p instead". How would it know what is quality and what is cheap and nasty ? How would it do the touchy feely part of purchasing in a store, when it lacks the required hands ?

This just seems to be another attempt to wedge AI into something that absolutely doesn't need it.