Always broadcast my wifi hotspot SSID as 'FBI Monitoring AP3'. Never seem to get any unexpected guests. Funny that ...
Posts by trevorde
1419 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015
DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi
Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers
AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon
Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power
‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec
Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees
Cop who used police system to snoop for info on crook pals sentenced for Computer Misuse Act offenses
NASA boss balks at billion-dollar estimate for recycled Moon rover
NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck
Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11
Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered
Friday 31st July 2026 13:08 GMT 
The Luxury of Money
My brother worked in a government department and had a major role in their digital transformation. He did all the specification, most of the testing and signoff. After 36 years, he retired in relative financial comfort. After about 6 months, his old department contacted him to see if he wanted to work on an extension to the digitisation. He thought of a very high hourly rate and then doubled it. There was an audible gasp, some awkward silence and a "We'll get back to you on that one" response. After a week they called him and said "Can you start on Monday?". My brother thought about how much he was enjoying retirement and didn't really need the extra money anyway, before responding "Thanks but no thanks".
Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine
Thursday 30th July 2026 15:10 GMT
Post-It Note level security
Many years ago, I was responsible for maintaining some in-house, password protected software. The password was only valid for a month and the boss was very paranoid, so only gave out 3 months passwords in advance. The users immediately wrote them down on a Post-It Note and stuck it to their monitors.
Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel
America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks
Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours
Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo
Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'
Monday 20th July 2026 07:50 GMT
Had the great misfortune of having to document some legacy C++ code as part of a compliance procedure. The background was that a 'domain expert' ie not dev, in the company had managed to get hold of Borland C++ Builder and managed to spin his code into a £14M+ business line. The code itself was not difficult, just *long* eg one function 2000+ lines long. The best part was some hard coded, PII (Personally Identifiable Information); the sort of stuff beloved my identity thieves. It included: name, address, dates at said address, and salary details. I pointed out that you couldn't simply delete this info as it was permanently in the git history. Not sure if they ever passed their compliance audit.
Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates
Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all
Thursday 16th July 2026 15:37 GMT
Early security
Worked on a project which used Oracle as its data store. Oracle has very fine grained and sophisticated table level security. During development, everyone had admin access. When they started to enforce security, *everything* broke, such that everyone was restored to admins. The lesson was to enforce security from the start, which I promptly took to my next job.
Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push
IBM's mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value
Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud
Excel competition goes extreme, makes spreadsheet geeks compete from the street
User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap
Monday 13th July 2026 10:44 GMT
Trashed PC learning AutoCAD Animator
In the dim, dark ages of DOS, I was starting to learn AutoCAD Animator. I setup an animation and set it to render whereupon the hard disk went crazy! After about 15 mins of nervous waiting, I pulled the plug on my PC. Not sure what the program was doing but the PC refused to boot. IT support sent it to a data recovery firm who recovered it and diagnosed a 'virus'. I kept schtum and nodded in agreement. I never managed to learn AutoCAD Animator.
Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI
Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet
Tuesday 30th June 2026 19:46 GMT
Saving too much money
Worked at a company where the purchasing manager was notorious for screwing suppliers, even after engineers had agreed the price. He saved the company thousands. The suppliers quickly got wise to this and factored this into their quotes. We then started losing millions of dollars of jobs on price. The problem was quickly traced back to the purchasing manager who was then put under strict instruction NOT to renegotiate the price. His nose was a bit out of joint but we started winning jobs again.
Microsoft builds a bouncer to keep bots out of Teams meetings
NS&I dangles £220K salary for CEO willing to straighten out £3B IT mess
UK boffin bait lands 18 international researchers
England's exam watchdog frets over smart specs turning GCSEs into Google searches
Sunday 7th June 2026 20:55 GMT
Exam cheating software
Went through uni when the first programmable calculators (HP-41 et al) were still new. One of my fellow students borrowed his brother's calculator and programmed it to do weld stress analysis, a fairly complex and fiddly problem. He was very smug that he was going to ace the calculations in the upcoming exam. Unfortunately, he hadn't counted on the exam supervisor, who had never seen such a sophisticated machine in her life. She asked the rest of us if he should erase the machine's memory. Of course, we replied with a resounding 'YES!'. He still passed, though didn't do quite as well on the weld stress analysis as he'd hoped.
Sunday 7th June 2026 20:43 GMT
Smart lecturer, smarter exam
In one unit I did at uni, the lecturer allowed us to take the prescribed text book into the exam. He also allowed our 'annotations' in said text book. All the students promptly transferred all the lecture notes into their text books. He was several steps ahead of us. The 3 hour exam was 180 questions, instead of the expected 5-6! There was just no time to look in the text book, let alone our 'annotations'. I managed to answer 120 questions (best in the class); next best was 90 questions; most people only managed 50-60. He set us up for one type of exam and then gave us a completely different one.
Russian spy agency says foreign spies turned officials' smartphones into surveillance devices
Intel and pals cram 36,864 CPU cores into a 100kW rack while chasing the agentic AI dragon
Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm
Agentic AI arrives for Delphi and C++ Builder
Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident
Kyndryl takes employees' pulse while cutting off circulation for some
Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim
Microsoft wants safer C# without turning it into Rust
MySQL faithful launch OurSQL Foundation to keep Oracle honest
SpaceX scrubs Starship launch with seconds to go
Techie claims Trump Mobile website was leaking thousands of people's data
Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice
SpaceX pitches itself as integrated interplanetary proto-monopolist in IPO filing
PostgreSQL backup tool gets some backup of its own after sole maintainer sounds alarm
'Workforce rebalancing' comes for Kyndryl, and delivery teams are in the firing line
GameStop CEO's eBay account reinstated following takeover PR stunt
Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back
Thursday 7th May 2026 13:48 GMT
The Cloud is just someone else's (different) computer
Went on an Azure/AWS training course many years ago where the instructor was hyping cloud computing as 'generic as electricity'. It was about as generic as a wall socket but with a huge amount of transformers, rectifiers and power conditioners lurking behind. Sure you can change cloud/electricity providers but you'd then have to configure a whole new set of transformers, rectifiers and power conditioners.