Posts by Grunchy

John Deere accused of being full of manure with its right-to-repair promises

I haven’t shopped John Deere for decades now

I took my commerce elsewhere.

(Also, the “computer” they locked with proprietary algorithms is nothing but a PLC running glorified ladder logic. Guys are successfully rewiring their cars by disposing of those cost-cut “black box” brains and snapping in a home-built “speeduino”. I’d guess a small consortium or syndicate of farmers scrape up a little bit of bounty cash and set loose some hackers to sort out the John Deere mess, open-source the DIY alternative, and otherwise stop being a customer. Mazda has made heated seat resistors a subscription service, are you kidding me?! As if I don’t have a 12V cigarette lighter socket directly adjacent to the heater circuit. Also: just avoid Mazda, folks. Don’t be a loser!)

Cruise fined $1.5M for failing to report right away its robo-car dragged a pedestrian

Mars Robo Cars

They’ve got autonomous robot vehicles ripping around Mars at speeds up to, like, 1 mph! Because it would be a real disaster if they were to crash into no person nor any valuable property (kidding: more like 1/2 mile per WEEK).

I wonder how these robotaxi companies can just “let loose” their barely-in-control models at highway speeds with the barest comprehension of what’s around them let alone identifying people, property, hazards, etc. They have absolutely zero ethics. They’ve been menacing and killing people for years now, I’m glad somebody in law enforcement finally noticed the crimes being committed.

US Army orders next-gen robot mule to haul a literal ton of gear

Range Anxiety

If the device ran on diesel, it would probably be ok.

What if they made, like, a “general purpose” kind of vehicle, that could go almost anywhere while hauling some gear.

Even better if it had machine guns that popped out the taillights, and could emit a cloud of smoke, or puddle of oil, on command.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Re: "The firings/floggings/beatings will continue until morale improves”

“they no longer see the employees as a source of their continued profitability…”

You know what I find interesting is how these companies one the one hand seek to divest themselves of the good old employees who already know how to do everything, yet on the other hand ask for the exact same experience education and credentials from the new hire.

They want to hire the exact same person as the guy they just fired, so long as it’s somebody else.

(Well I guess it’s obvious: they want the exact same person except the replacement works for a starter wage.)

10 nasty software bugs put thousands of fuel storage tanks at risk of cyberattacks

Ladder Logic

My relay network is completely and utterly unhackable. Well, for starters, it has no IP address…

US proposes ban on Chinese, Russian connected car tech over security fears

Re: Great first step...

I want a ban on ALL connected tech. I want, at bare minimum, any and all “connected” tech to include a mandatory option to be completely and utterly free from ALL connections.

That includes your friggin Apple, your friggin Microsoft, your friggin Sony, your friggin Google, your friggin WHOEVER!!

If your friggin tech can’t work unless it’s connected to your friggin company, then that tech device should be friggin BANNED.

End of line.

Ivanti patches exploited admin command execution flaw

What’s an “Avanti”

It’s some kind of Studebaker, or something?

I have no “clew” who uses it or for what. I have no basis for judging how relevant any of this is. The necessary evidence has not been “shewn.”

(I traverse the path in my butt-nosed Avanti like it’s sailing “threw” the cloud, coming in for a high-angle interception with a gigantic immovable rock! Or some-such.)

Kelsey Hightower: If governments rely on FOSS, they should fund it

Uh oh I smell a scam debacle brewing. Some swine is about to make a dirty deal with corrupt government officials to deliver some garbage public IT project that is going to be minimum 10x over budget and extend 3x beyond the project time span, accomplishing at best 25% of the agreed scope before being cancelled as a massive boondoggle and delivering absolutely nothing at all, and we learn in the forensic investigation that everything was hopelessly outdated and incompetently managed for every single second. And everybody responsible evades culpability by retiring to the Canary Islands.

Intel frees its Foundry biz – and that's just one of many major shake-ups today

Re: sales

The troubles extended back to itanium: a premium product developed to cash in on wealthy industrial customers (who were unexpectedly presented with a much cheaper yet equally as powerful 64-bit concept). Oh, the humiliation of Intel forced to adopt AMD64!

Intel was like the Evil Witch of West shrinking to a $90 billion emaciated shadow while AMD has swelled to a shaky $244 billion valuation. Intel isn’t exactly conquered, but battered and belittled.

Meanwhile nVidia is a $2,800 billion dollar target…

Much like 2009

Any factory is expensive to run and its output must be sold at sufficient profit or else it will go bankrupt.

Now suppose you had the misfortune to have bet your future on enormous gigafactories, but your product is suddenly 10 years old in the market…

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Jollyscript

I can get behind it, why can’t you?

(Not the Rancher; more the Roger).

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Re: Conspiracy

“Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.“

I don’t see how this is far-fetched. The pagers beeped for several seconds prior to exploding, so there was a software hack that caused the pager to attract attention before blowing up in someone’s hands. Also a hardware hack to incorporate both the explosive and the trigger.

People scoff at the potential but the fact is many nations have forbidden Huawei from providing 5G network equipment. So why was that, if not because of some malicious activity?

Read it for yourself:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/huawei-5g-explainer-1.6461391

Bin Laden avoided cellular for years and years because he knew that’s how he would be identified and targeted. Modern EVs are the same, hell any GM has an On Star radio that can be used to surveil and target the vehicle just as it sits! This very publication has reported numerous times on the ability of hackers to attack and disrupt these very cars: this is fact, not fiction!

If bad actors can hack and booby trap a tiny little pager radio (or thousands of them), they can definitely do the same to an EV.

Re: Technology question

Someone remarked that "Hezbollah doesn't have the technical skills to figure this out".

Isn’t this that part of the world where they loaded hundreds of tons of volatile fertilizer into a storage silo in the middle of the city and left it there until it blew up?

China’s quantum* crypto tech may be unhackable, but it's hardly a secret

Re: old school

My favorite simple cipher is the “book cipher,” because nobody can possibly figure it out unless you know precisely which book is being referenced. Although I suppose you could just look for the most worn-out book on the shelf… (or, to foil that, pick anything from project Gutenberg).

My “fill the band” scheme goes like this: the ‘key’ is a seed value for some RNG that generates values up to 100. That number is the bit-count of noise bits per single data bit. So the message becomes up to 99% waste. Anyway, what you do is take the sparse data stream (data bits surrounded by random stretches of zeroes) and just pick random phrases, words, and letters that happen to have the same data bit set while filling in the emptiness with plausible information. Even better, every once in awhile you include within the message a special instruction to reset the RNG seed, etc.

(Of course this is a specialty cipher for particular people that want something more than commodity crypto. The algorithm can be as nuts as you want, and the plausible data could be audio, video, noise, repeating patterns, anything your imagination dreams up!)

Starlink U-turns, will block X in Brazil after all

You know what happens when you disrespect the court is you generally wind up paying a very hefty penalty. Even a ridiculously rich guy like Leon, his BBS company is suddenly banned from an entire country.

What is fascinating is when a COURT INSIDER like Giuliani goes, "Oh, Yeah??????" and doubles down, and doubles down, and doubles down.

And is punished so severely he finally shuts his fool mouth up!

Muskrat vs Mushrat

(Same little weasely guy.)

Begun, the open source AI wars have

Hack

Nobody will ever know if AI had been secretly manipulated to preferentially do something by some malicious actor sabotaging the learning data.

Because the data is too big to retain and to audit!

AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords

Same old voice menu

These are nothing but canned “expert systems” that know about 10 common problems and only give you enough symptoms to choose from that are designed to fence you into the 10 ineffective canned solutions (that are never what the actual problem is).

The way I see it, the company has committed suicide by abandoning its core function: to provide service to the paying customer. I avoid these “zombie” businesses. When something really goes wrong, there will be nobody able to fix it. Why struggle with dead businesses? Take your trade somewhere better, I say!

So you paid a ransom demand … and now the decryptor doesn't work

Ha

The company I worked for paid a $50k ransom and TONS of geometry models didn’t work anymore after recovery. I only found out about a month after I had started. I sorta had developed a feeling they were a bunch of amateurs, which was rapidly becoming a strong conviction. Interestingly, there had previously been an entire engineering and design department of whom there was one drafter left. I remember part of the job description was “solve differential equations,” I asked what they had in mind, because even Newton’s reaction equation F=m.A is a differential equation. They never asked me to solve any such equations (too bad!) but they did ask me to recreate a design from a bankrupt competitor’s blueprints… which they said they bought at the bankruptcy auction. Well, for the wrongful dismissal lawsuit I found out, no, it was the other guys had bought the intellectual property assets, and not only that, had paid almost $2 million for the works. Yeah, they elected to settle out of court.

(Personally, I found a discarded Netgear NAS for $20, 3D printed some caddy shells, loaded up with HDDs, and keep it as an offline backup. Yeah, I just shut off the power between backups. I’d like to see the hacker who can hijack my unplugged NAS backup!)

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

Re: Control bullets

“Cartridges use a propellant not an explosive.”

Semantics? Our colleagues at Gun Zone mistakenly think ammunition can somehow “explode” if it catches on fire. Where did they get this bonkers notion when ammo have no explosive whatsoever?!

https://thegunzone.com/what-happens-to-ammo-in-a-house-fire/

Re: Okay, sure

“The real problem” is that regular folks have no way of disqualifying the kooks in politics! All you can do is vote for the other kook. Well, the two major political parties have dominated the political landscape and you have to be this much [=====] corrupt to be invited to participate.

There is just one kind of democracy that allows opposition and that’s the Plebiscite. What we need to do is bring the opposition power of the Plebiscite to the ballot box, and EVERYTHING is solved.

Ever wonder why famous celebrities can challenge elections despite bringing nothing but recognition? Because nobody is allowed to oppose any candidate, is why!

Hey here’s my manifesto.

https://youtu.be/1WiPbLgMHSQ

Control bullets

The 2nd amendment is all about arms but there’s nothing about bullets. So, control bullets.

(Bullets are explosive devices. All other explosive devices are tightly controlled.)

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

What’s the point?

Apparently there is some worthwhile thing you can do in freefall microgravity, I wonder what that thing is?

Because I genuinely don’t see the point of the space station!

Of course the Internet Archive’s digital lending broke the law, appeals court says

Boilerplate

Oh, books have been printed with boilerplate disclaimers (“nobody is allowed to scan this work and store it within a digital distribution system without the publisher’s permission,” yada yada) for decades now.

Sadly, I am a book-hoarder. Have been for decades now. I *love* the Gutenberg library for two reasons, one it’s all there and it’s all free, and two it’s all freely available! I don’t need to load up my hard drive, I can access anything in there whenever I want.

I enjoyed the archive collection while it was available but they were breaking the terms of the book. Sigh.

Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

Re: How can I?

“Perhaps your motherboard manufacturers included a TPM header on the board, in which case you can buy the TPM modules. Should you really want Windows 11...”

Hey did you guys hear there’s a nearly complete ISA bus in that TPM header? Some guys have been busy hackin’ away and managed to get old Sound Blaster audio cards working on a modern PC! Some think it might even be possible to get a floppy drive controller card working, too!

Re: How can I?

Microsoft has abandoned Windows, didn’t you hear? Yeah you can activate any version for nothing now.

Massgrave.dev is the website.

Scottie explains how it works here:

https://youtu.be/rDH0f59klWc

Ghost Spectre versions

Well I switched over to Ubuntu but I still run “classic” windows 7 and 10 by installing the ghost spectre versions in Virt-Manager. They run with full video acceleration because my motherboard has a second full length PCI-e slot for a dedicated Video card, which is passed through to the virtual machine.

It’s a legacy setup but the nice part is that I can easily take snapshots, make full system backups, clone the system as many times I feel like. I isolate the VMs from the internet so they can’t be hacked or meddled with by Microsoft. Zero need for any anti-virus. I keep all working data in a special folder on the Linux host as a Samba share. I run legacy programs on Microsoft so it’s ok if nothing ever gets “updated” (meddled with). Those programs already work good enough.

It actually harkens back to “good old” days before Agile forced people to run shitty buggy defeatured beta copies and endure years of constant updates while trying to get something done. I have zero intention of buying anything from Microsoft Apple Google Sony ever again. If Microsoft buys Ubuntu, I’ll switch to another Debian implementation I reckon.

Feds bust minor league Radar/Dispossessor ransomware gang

Honeypot As A Service

Maybe there’s a business opportunity here…

Check your IP cameras: There's a new Mirai botnet on the rise

Re: We are bored now, so chuck your camera in the bin

“Well past your end of life…”

Hey, aren’t you supposed to be dead by now? You know, we’d have a lot less problems if you didn’t persist in remaining alive ! !

Microsoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats

I got issued a company phone

It’s an iPhone 12 and locked down pretty hard. Ostensibly it’s an email appliance, but really it’s a surveillance device (must be, because they terminated my contract but left me the surveillance device). My working theory: they think I might be dumb enough to carry it around and possibly bring it to a competitor’s facility? It’s still 100% activated. Maybe they are surveilling my kitchen cabinet. Mystery!

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

No worries about spontaneous combustion?

I find that interesting that the only concerns are range and battery charging infrastructure (and cost). Really? Nobody cares about electric vehicles spontaneously catching on fire and burning down the car park or garage or killing somebody?

Huh!

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

My DX4000 still struggles beneath the sopping wet blanket of windows server 2008. Shrug, I got it basically for free..

And then, some wizard figures out how to “Linuxify” it with Debian!

..and just like that, its value instantly triples. To $15.

https://github.com/alexhorner/WD-DX4000

Crypto boss finds fraud trial a serious pain in the neck

The cryptoscammer had no idea whose money he was stealing, which is why he never even recognized his victim sneakin up behind him.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: I owned a SX64 back in the day and loved it

I lusted after the SX64 but it wouldn’t have fit my circumstance. I was working as a nighttime clerk at a self-serve gas station, which had a staff TV (and infrequent customers). I’d wait until after the Taxi re-run then I’d hookup my bread bin c64, 1541, and modem (just enough room for this stuff), and surf BBSs. Or play Dr. Creep, or Bungeling Bay, or Karateka, or Raid Over Moscow, or dozens of others…

The last 8-bit I owned was a C128 I miserably regretted: I couldn’t afford the 80-col monitor which meant I never left C64 mode. Plus the oversize case, the unused Z80, stuck at 1 MHz, the inferior 8581 audio, even the keypad wasn’t recognized in C64 mode!

My friends all moved to DOS and Amiga, all frightfully expensive, while I knuckled under to Engineering in University. Graduated May 1995, rode my Honda down to Key West Florida for holiday, then back home where I got what I always wanted: combination Sony CD player and PlayStation 1 game console for cheap! That tiny little box resoundingly kicked the ASS of every single thing that came before it.

(The very best DOOM version, ever — on PlayStation 1.)

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Forget Microsoft.

Forget Apple too, for that matter.

I switched to Ubuntu a couple years ago and it was much easier than I expected. I might fire up Windows once a month now (maybe). There is a bit of a hiccough running Windows inside virt-manager with a dedicated GPU for full video acceleration, but once you sort it out it works just fine!

https://github.com/Andrew-Willms/GPU-Passthrough-On-Ubuntu-22.04.2-for-Beginners

For Windows I personally choose the “ghost spectre” defeatured versions (Win 7 and beyond).

For activation with Microsoft, it’s all taken care of, courtesy of massgrave.dev.

https://youtu.be/rDH0f59klWc

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Gotta be a joke

“4,242 x 1,977”

Yeah, because some people call “,” a decimal point whereas most everyone else recognizes “,” to be a space between digit triplets.

In my mind this is a straightforward input that a computer ought to handle. But since string parsing and interpretation are so particular there is hardly any language written that could interpret this request, most notably ForTran itself, which is guaranteed to barf if it doesn’t get * instead of x, and all “,” omitted.

(Gates’ BASIC always pissed me off too: every INPUT command always receives a text string from the operator, and if you pass some arbitrary text sequence through VAL() it will reliably interpret it to be 0. This is the dubious sequence, “INPUT A$:A=VAL(A$).” Whereas if you foolishly tried “INPUT A”, as a number directly, and the operator were to type in the same arbitrary text, stupid Gates’ BASIC will crash with “INPUT ERROR”!! This same baloney behaviour persists in almost every language to this day, and to make any of them work you have to do the same chicanery as Gates’ BASIC, or some other “error trap” scheme, which proves nothing ever improved much even after all these years!)

The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead

You said “command line”

Maybe you meant, “Power Shell?”

(I actually don’t care what they’re doing to the Windows, I run “legacy” versions anyway. Once you run Virt-Manager, all other operating systems become just more programs you can run within Linux. Kind of like redefining all Imperial measurement systems in terms of S.I. — in one fell swoop the whole world is metric, whether they knew it or not!)

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

Got all excited for a minute there

I was cruising through some Ukraine coverage on the YouTube when all of the sudden was an “announcement” of the new 2025 Chevelle being rolled out by GM, so naturally I clicked and it was nothing but a rendered 3D model and some very generic-sounding voice over, so then I did a search, and now here’s a dozen-plus similar videos, and I’m like “What the hell? Which one is it?” and I’m looking over all these video thumbnails, and then I see one of them has an overhead banner saying “CHBBEL,” and I’m like, ohhhh now I get it. It’s a goddam friggin A.I. prank or something.

So then I watched how some guy filled up his engine with 5L of cooking oil because he forgot to pickup a jug of 5W-30 at the Walmart.

https://youtu.be/8p62TQ1WXSA

China's top Office clone copies Microsoft again – with an inconvenient outage

I prefer Notepad

Some people like Notepad++, I respect that. For me Notepad is “good enough.”

I also like NoteTab, an alternative not many people heard of.

MS Office is a big old sack of nails, useful for smacking across someone’s face (more likely, other people smacking it across MY face!)

If I need something a little more sophisticated than Notepad I’ll probably fire up MathCad.

Deadbeat dad faked his own death by hacking government databases

Yeahbut

If you hack the school mainframe and give yourself all A’s, are you really still a dummy?

(Maybe the actual smarties seek the $20 million hack instead.)

Windows 11 Insider preview brings new Sandbox features and fatter FAT32

I (occasionally) run Windows in a real sandbox: within a qcow2 environment inside Virt-Manager running in Linux.

I gave it exclusive control of a second video card, too, so it has full hardware video acceleration.

The best part about using a real sandbox is that I can spin up duplicates in seconds and try out stuff on Windows, and if it goes wrong, can revert to snapshots or delete the copies. I’ve got all the options, all the control, and Microsoft has been completely neutered.

As a matter of fact I have zero intention of trying the new Mac OS or Windows ever again.

As far as I am concerned… they are irrelevant.

Russian man who sold logins to nearly 3,000 accounts gets 40 months in jail

We want the Kim Dotcom story!

Since his extradition order has now been signed etc.

Arrest & prison transport should be next step, no?

NASA's VIPER rover might still reach the lunar surface after all

Is there $84 million worth of science on the moon?

I’m skeptical.

For example: suppose the chairman of the board of directors said, “alright how do we monetize this deadly toxic lunar wasteland?”

I doubt the c-suite has any legitimate ideas!

Microsoft patches scary wormable hijack-my-box-via-IPv6 security bug and others

I finally signed up for “Ubuntu Pro”

I didn’t know what’s it do, it’s a premium update scheme for upper crustys (or so I thought), and then all of the sudden it’s free for personal use. But only for up to 5 computers, and only for LTS=long term support versions. Plus, you have to give em an email address, which has to work, and they make you identify all the fire hydrants out of a photo lineup.

Now I am Pro! And the very first thing it did was crash and send two complete system reports to Ubuntu Pro HQ presumably for chuckles!

SpaceX tries to wash away Texas pollution allegations

Re: tit for tat riot/revolution comment

Space exploration, for living creatures, is a futile exercise.

Yeah it's because "space" is completely barren and hostile environment where nothing that didn't evolutionarily adapt can survive!

There are some interesting experiments, like "suppose I sent a seed out into space and it floated around in space for awhile and then was gravitationally attracted to another planet and landed on that planet and then found some soil or something and then germinated or whatever, could that even happen?" yes, an interesting fantasy.

Or, "what if a bunch of really tough and hardy bacteria were blasted into space and floated through the galaxy and then landed on some other rocky watery planet that wasn't a gas giant or a star or a black hole or comet, could they colonize and become an extra-terrestrial algae bloom on the side of a rock?"

Or, "what if some rich a-holes in flying gas tank land empty on a barren dusty rock without water air gravity food sunlight magnetosphere and they got blasted by a coronal mass ejection, how miserably do they die?" Galileo called this "thought experimentation," because it's cheaper and less lethal than going to find out first-hand.

Pollution comes from EARTH, goes back to EARTH

ALL the pollution comes from the Earth, and it all stays on the Earth. It's the consequence of manufacturing "purified" objects, the source material comes from the Earth, becomes "purified" into a finished good, and then all the non-desirable constituents get isolated and then somehow have to be put somewhere. "Where" do you put a substance that came from the Earth, I guess you could put it back where you got it from? Only now instead of a trace contaminant, your toxic waste has become highly concentrated...

As with Fukushima, just dump that radioactive coolant out at sea so it can disperse across the world's oceans where it might not even be detectable (after awhile).

... it's also difficult to find some place to even bury it since some substances are liable to poison the groundwater.

Hey this sounds like a complicated issue!

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Guy argues that maybe C isn’t so obsolete compared to Rust.

https://dev.to/sucuturdean/is-modern-c-better-then-rust-3odf

Fundamentally I don’t care much about which programming language: every “command” in every language is just another program. I think Lisp really took this to the extreme, plus Logo I’m pretty sure.

Even machine language op-codes are essentially hard-coded routines in silicon circuitry, go grab a byte, shift bits left or right, etc. For example, there are “kext” modules you can add in to your Hackintosh implementation to substitute slower subroutines in place of missing processor extensions.

In summary: any program is nothing but a sequenced assemblage of other programs, from a “language” that comprises a particular selection of programs to choose from. DOS and Unix scripts are clearly this.

So, what difference between C and Rust? Apparently Rust is more abstracted, and C you have to explicitly destroy all the objects and variables, even integers, when the program terminates.

But anyway: handing some complex translation task over to A.I. seems like it’s definitely going to inject bugs. Sure you can test the code, but I can bet this creates new classes of bugs that defy testing.

(Had a gnarly one yesterday: apparently a bug crops up between the ATA and the modem due to UDP timeout, believe me I have barely any idea what this refers to, that PERSISTS after reboots/resets of both Modem and ATA, which isn’t even a SIP AGL collision, anyway upshot is you need to pick a new random SIP port number, say 30000-60000 and not 5060, to “break” the confusion. The symptom is nobody can get through by dialing your VOIP ATA, it never “rings” and every call goes straight to voicemail. Or rather, you might temporarily “solve” it by resetting, but shortly the confusion comes back and symptoms resume. You can’t say the programmers are stupid but you can say they don’t care about fixing the problem.)

Link: https://forum.fongo.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19934

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: Shareholder Value

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm#thieves