Posts by John Geek

CIA: Russia hacked election. Trump: I don't believe it! FAKE NEWS!

to register to vote, you have to certify that you are in fact a citizen, and to do so incorrectly is felony perjury. nowhere is a drivers license accepted as proof of citizenship.

American supremacy, space, liability, funding, openness – AI gurus lay it all out to US senators

I've always assumed AI stood for Artificial Ignorance. Nothing I've seen or heard of to date has dissuaded me.

Stay out of my server room!

many many years ago (ok, was about 1975), I was working for a small computer company who had a customer that was a exotic steel alloy mill. the factory was full of these enormous arc furnaces being used to make fancy aerospace alloys. the computer was in a portable building on stands in the middle of this factory. we had to cover the whole porta building with copper sheeting, soldered together and grounded at multiiple points with 2" wide braid, heavy copper screens over the windows and door, to keep the EMF from crashing the system. we had to isolate the power with a motor+generator where the outside power grounds were NOT connected to the copper cage, only the generator was (and massive ground stakes). thankfully this was before networking was common, so there were no external connections to this room, not even modems. lets not even get into the problems we had caused by microfine metal dust getting through the ventilation filters and into the systems, those were mostly mitigated by stacking multiple air filters and changing them weekly, and keeping positive pressure in this room by way of enormous fans (outside the faraday cage, powered by the building power).

Hackers electrocute selves in quest to turn secure doors inside out

Re: They're still alive after electrocution?

you beat me to the same comment.

shocking.

Freeze on refrigerants heats up search for replacements

Re: Liquid CO2?

CO2 will liquify under sufficient pressure (a bit over 5 atmospheres)

one of the best refrigerants is.... Propane. you can drop it right into an existing R12 system and it works just fine, better than R12 to R134a conversions, even.

FreeBSD 11.0 lands, with security fixes to FreeBSD 11.0

Re: FreeNAS

freenas 9.10 is based on bsd 10.3. FreeNAS 10 will have a all new UI whihc is behind schedule, so they mashed the old UI onto 10.3 underpinnings, and it works quite nicely.

Don't panic, but a 'computer error' cut the brakes on a San Francisco bus this week

btw, in those old days, at least, those trolley busses didn't have any batteries on them, when the trolleys jumped the wire, the bus lost all power and lighting. hydraulic DRUM brakes didn't need any sort of servo assist, thats a feature of disk brakes, and I suspect those old busses would have had drums. I have no knowlege of what they run now, I've not ridden on the Muni since about 1970...

Noone in SF calls it the MTA or SFMTA, its been The Muni since I was a kidlet in the 1960s and took the 22 Filmore or 24 Divisadero to school. Fun fact, circa 1964, I lived about 1/2 block from the intersection of this accident.

I know my Muni card is in ONE of these pockets.....

Zilog reveals very, very distant heir to the Z80 empire

there's also the Rabbit processors, now owned by Digi International... The Rabbit's core instruction set is very close to Z80, although its not binary compatible, it is assembler source compatible, same registers etc, but with many extensions and enhancements, as well as a 32 bit mode.

OMG: HPE gobbles SGI for HPC. WTF?

Re: It was games wot done for it

exactly. hpe bought rackable. I deployed a couple dozen of their 3500 storage servers (the 36 drive 3.5" 4U servers), which were thinnly rebranded supermicro kit.

Re: Hewlett Packard

um, the arrow goes the wrong way on Compaq. the current HP is really Compaq more than it ever was Hewlett Packard.

this should be fun. modern SGI x86 systems are heavily supermicro based.

UK copyright troll weeps, starts 20-week stretch in the cooler for beating up Uber driver

priceless. "Get used to your life being different"

SOHOpeless Seagate NAS boxen become malware distributors

I'd hazard to say that many of them were blinking 12:00 12:00 not because the owners were too stupid to find out how to set, but were tired of resetting it every time the power glitched, as the two-tiny-button time set procedure was incredibly tedious.

Software-defined networking is dangerously sniffable

why does this not surprise me in the least ? all these reinventions of the wheel under the guise of software-defined-_____ seem to be designed by people without the first idea of security.

Microsoft: Why we had to tie Azure Stack to boxen we picked for you

let me edit this article a bit for you, its really too wordy.

"Microsoft can’t guarantee Azure will work properly."

there.

Video surveillance recorders riddled with zero-days

the vendor undoubtedly outsourced software development to the lowest bidder, and has no infrastructure or staff capable of ongoing development.

Larry Ellison's Oracle swallows Larry Ellison's part owned Netsuite for $9.3bn

k, read article, googled netsuite, read a bunch of PR, and I *still* don't know what they actually do other than sling around cloudy buzzwords.

Flame Canada, flame Canada ... Botched govt payroll computers spew smoke ahead of probe

yeah, parliamentary hearings outta fix their IT problems, real good.

If managing PCs is still hard, good luck patching 100,000 internet things

re: Neoc: No, no, nope.

if you're on a 2 week road trip, you won't want to occasionally check with your house and verify everything is good? maybe look at your security cameras, verify the temp/humidity is in range, etc?

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

this story must be OLD, that sounds like early 90s technology replacing mid 80s...

re: tools, in my pocket at all times is a Leatherman "Juice" (a smaller/slimmer leatherman) which has a phillips driver as well as pliers/cutters, AND a little AAA powered Fenix LED flashlight which is way more than bright enough AND tiny enough that I always carry.

in my pickup is always a pair of 'truck boxes', one with a reasonable set of 3/8" metric and imperial sockets (hey, I'm in da USA, land of the ... oh wtf do they call that stuff now?) and combo wrenches, and the 2nd with an assortment of electrical tools including my all time favs, a bent pair of needlenose from Knipex, which are way better steel than the current USA brand name made-in-China junk. Said bent needlenose are the 'perfect' pin straightening tool.

Networking not cutting it: Brocade needs wireless to pull revs up

news flash: overpriced company of older technology is losing volume as the market moves on.

VMware flushes Windows vSphere client and Adobe Flash

wait, the windows 'vSphere Client' was the free one, yes?

so does this mean there's no more free ESXI ?

Magnetic memory boffins unveil six-state storage design

Re: A bit off

actually, three.something cells. 6 states is about 2.5 bits (log2(6)), and 3 such cells have 6^3 states.

512 bytes is 4096 bits, which encodes a total of 131072 states, so 6 states at a time, you'd need 1585 cells instead of 4096 binary cells (or 2048 4-state TLC style cells)

Cops deploy StingRay anti-terror tech against $50 chicken-wing thief

there is no try, there is only do or do not...

wait, if they didn't catch the guy, then they didn't use it to 'track down the thief', they only used it to TRY to catch the perp.

Windows 10 handcuffs Cortana web search to Bing and Edge browser

click the search bar, click the 'gear' settings icon next to the box that pops up, turn cortana off. done.

Nearly the very first thing I did when I installed windows 10 was disable Cortana, and convert that search-box next to the start bar to be purely local file search. If I want to do an internet search, I use Chrome's search/locator bar.

Millions menaced as ransomware-smuggling ads pollute top websites

Re: @Destroy all monsters ... Firefox and NoScript

um, html5 *is* javascript.

and, without javascript, the whole AJAX world that enables stuff like Google Docs and Google Maps goes bye-bye.

uBlock Origin seems to keep all that stuff at bay. and when my local n00zpaper/fishwrapper installed some lame script that blocked the page view if I was running an adblocker, I blocked that script too.

Anti-cyber-attack biz Staminus is cyber-attacked, mocked by card-leaking tormentors

better, these guys primary business is 'DDoS resistant web hosting', *AND* they host IRC DDoS groups? oh yeah. more more!

Reprogrammble routers axed by TP-Link as FCC bans custom firmware

its not that simple. these cheap wireless chips they use are 75% software ('firmware'). the firmware has complete control over the radio as the radio doesn't even work without it.

Irate IT distributors chase Amazon over unpaid bills

I read this story, and thought it was talking about hardware amazon buys for their data centers.... is it that, or is it stuff Amazon is reselling?

color me confused, like blondie over there ==>

IRS: Er, those 100,000 tax records illegally accessed? Make that over 700,000

Re: Gold? Fort Knox?

... stored in new york in Trump's personal bathroom.

Virgin Atlantic co-pilot dazzled by laser

i've got a couple fairly high power chinese green laser pointers. comparing them with an older one that I know is just about 4mW, I'd estimate these powerful ones to be in the 50mW range.... their beam is NOT very well collimated. it might be 1mm wide at the exit, but its about 15mm wide at a distance of 12 meters. at 2500 meters (8000 feet), it would be 3 meters across, which hugely reduces the brigthness of the beam. To hit the cockpit of a plane flying at 2500 meters, you'd have to be shining them from even farther away (straight up would hit the underside of the jet, not the cockpit), so the beam would be even more diffused.

SCO's last arguments in 'Who owns Linux?' case vs. IBM knocked out

I remember Microport Unix for 286 and 386 from that era. This competed with Xenix, pre-SCO.

Re: "SCO code" in Linux?

re: AIX.... AIX was originally built from 4.2BSD with a mashup of AT&T System V stuff, and has no USL/Novell Unix in it whatsoever as far as I know.

The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads

ublock origin FTW

Thirty Meter Telescope needs to revisit earthly fine print

time to give up on hawaii and move it to Chile

That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done

I remember reading a few years ago, the chinese *BOUGHT* this technology from the UCSD fusion project, who'd run out of money to build this next step.

Google to deep six dodgy download buttons

for the past couple weeks, google 'freenas' and the first link to the freenas.org website is flagged as 'this site may be hacked'. I sure don't see anything bogus anywhere on their site.

sure,, as a site offering a popular opensource package, they have a download link on their home page, could that be it??

Layoffs! Lawsuits! Losses! ... Yahoo! is! in! an! L! of! a! mess!

So Ms. Mayer is taking a 15% cut of her salary and all other bennies, right?

hahaahah, I know, I just had to ask.

Eff You, Yahoo and everything you've done since you escaped from the Stanford Dorm you were created in.

Islamic fundamentalists force Yorkshire IT shop to chop off brand

In the 1970s, Intel had an OS for their MDS-800 development systems called ISIS :)

the first dozens of times I heard ISIS on hte news, that was the first thing to come to mind.

IBM still on a (downward) roll with 15th consecutive quarterly revenue drop

the main IBM Services folks were interested in were SERVICES surrounding IBM's once excellent HARDWARE PRODUCTS. Get rid of the hardware, and noone wants those services any more.

DUH!

Inside Intel's CPU-level multi-factor auth (and why we've got deja vu)

I wanna know if this will be any easier to use from non-windows systems than TPM was. We stupidly tried to use TPM to authenticate PC based test equipment at a API level, omg, what a horrendous headache THAT was.

icon for the headache induced by trying to use TPM as a security token substitute.

Oracle laying off its Java evangelists? Er, no comment, says Oracle

Um, US Labor Day is the first Monday in SEPTEMBER.

This last monday was Martin Luther King Day, which is a federal holiday but very few businesses, other than banks, pay much attention to.

Dialog box shut: Now Microchip is set to gobble up Atmel

AVR and PIC contend for the low end of embedded systems, ARM is higher up the CPU food chain.

AVR is whats in Arduino. PIC users mostly scoff at Arduinos and just roll their own from scratch since hooking up a PIC is near trivial.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

Re: The drive's a Seagate...

note ALL 15000 rpm disks use 2" platters, even the ones in 3.5" form factor. Most 10000 rpm disks are 2" internally too. the linear velocities are just too high at those RPMs for larger platters.

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

I remember a norwegian or danish or something import by the name of Green Rooster that was fairly bright green. It was a quite boring export lager other than the color.

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

my local cycling friends call strava users 'stravatards', as they are always racing GPS benchmarks and treating it like it actually means someting.