Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

UK.gov bans TikTok from its devices as a 'precaution' over spying fears

Re: WhatsApp

The ability to use vowels in messages will hopefully be available in version 2.0

Ah - so its UI is in ancient Hebrew then?

(Other non-vowel ancient languages are available)

Re: 冰山一角

not that difficult to lock-down corporate Android devices so that only allowed applications can be installed

Likewise with iOS.

But it requires a couple of things:

Techies with a Clue (and managers with a backbone) and, crucially, the desire and ability to fund a team to curate and whitelist the apps. Any of those three missing and the whole things fails into an incoherent mess.

Google taps Fastly to make cookie-free adtech FLEDGE fly

I will not run a Chrome based browser on my machines

I use Brave - it uses the Chromium engine and does ad-blocking by default (and switchable script blocking on a per-site basis).

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

Re: But physical keys can be hacked

using too few standard key blanks on the production line

Or, like my old Cortina, having locks so badly made that they could be opened with a screwdriver..

(Or like the old guy that does the Morris Minor servicing - he turn up in a 1930's Austin - it doesn't have door locks at all because they didn't think they were needed.)

Re: You laugh

They still have a manual you can download

My 5-year old Toyota came with a physical manual..

I read it once (mostly to see how the auto-parking worked - I've never used it because I don't trust it) and it currently lives in the sideboard cupboard with all the other manuals I never read.

Re: You laugh

This is why you have your own domain so you can hand out individual email addresses

Or, like in my case, have your email address as the catchall address for the domain. Each email address I give out is in the form of [person]-[website/company]@... That way, if I start getting spam to that address, I know who has leaked my details (or is improperly using them) and can do a GDPR complaint against them.

And block that email variant address in the SMTP proxy on my firewall.

There's only a few in the block list at the moment - the most prominant of which is my linkedin variant - got *lots* of spam going to that.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

Wouldn't it be nice to havee cars that Just Work

We've got one - it's a Morris Minor. Give it a service once in a while, replace any panels that have holes in them and it'll start every time. [1]

It's also cold in winter, hot in summer, really, really uncomfortable to drive and has absolutely no concessions to comfort at all. And a top speed to about 50mph - you wouldn't want it to go any faster anyway because of the sheer amount of noise it makes.

[1] Post-lockdown 1, the Toyota hybrid was utterly dead - both the lead/acid and hybrid batteries were dead. It took a day of charging to get to be able to start it - at which point I got *lots* of error messages - including 'hybrid system disabled'. I managed to get it to the Toyota dealer who did a controller reset (aka - turned it off and back on again) and all the errors disappeared. Physically a really nice car but the controller and firmware seem a little fragile.

Re: As far as indicators go they are all but useless.

Especially on BMW's

Yeah - there they just mean that the dealer wants a few more trailing zeros in their bank account..

It could mean "Stop now! The engine is about to fall out"

We (briefly) had a Citroen XM - lovely car *except* for two things - all the hydraulics feed off a common system (including the hydropneumatic suspension) and said suspension had a tendancy to blow the ride-height adjusters - at which point all your hydraulic fluid is dispensed generously all over the road.

And your steering goes very, very heavy, your brake servoes don't servo any more and your fancy suspension goes to its lowest setting.

And the error messages on the console go from "there's a problem" to "we suggest you stop" and finally "stop now!". As if the complete loss of power steering, suspension management and power assist on the brakes hadn't given away that something was wrong.

On the plus side - we got a tyre blowout at 80mph on the motorway and the car remained level and in control - the suspension (when working) really was that good!

We traded it in for a Rover Sterling with a (I think) 2.6L V6 Honda engine. Which was nice but the car chassis really wasn't suitable for an engine of that capability and would shudder alarmingly if you put your foot down hard.

I've had some 'interesting' cars.

Sodding Vauxhalls

OldestBrother once bought one of the bigger Vauxhalls (he tows a caravan sometimes [1]) and both the documentation and dealer assured him that the towable weight waas well above the weight of the caravan.

First time he used it with the caravan, one of the drive shafts popped out of the diff. Dealer repairs it but doesn't know why it failed.

So he tries it again, same thing happens (but with a different drive shaft). So he checks the Internet and found that it's a known fault with that model - some people mark them down as utterly unsuitable for towing since there's a design defect.

Took it back to the dealer and got his money back - and has never bought another Vauxhall. His current car is a LR Disco (he does about 10K miles a month and wants to be able to do it in relative comfort with a car that's reliable). Second hand naturally.

the needle on the speedo has trouble keeping up with the variations

Ah - you've seen the speedo needle on a Morris Minor then.. (accurate up to about 15mph - thereafter, you have to work your speed out from an average reading of the speedo needle wobbles..)

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

SMB on IP was complex, verbose, high-latency and flaky

I remember that, long, long ago, used Microsoft's first iteration of a mail server (Microsoft Mail?). Each mailserver had mailboxes and were supposed to connect via (probably SMB). We had a WAN connection to our partners in the US and they (and we) had a transfer mail server that talked over a very slow, packet switched WAN connection.

It failed more often than it worked. It would start, time out and fail. Again and again.

Eventually, we dumped it and I put in a Checkpoint-1 firewall, a 64K leased line (from Pipex) and started using SMTP to route the emails (via a Mail to SMTP gateway with the reverse at the far end). Worked flawlessly except for the times the gateway fell over.

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

telnet user@ip_address

That was the days before anyone thought of encrypting anything on this new internet thingy - the main problem was spam and Usenet UCE and there were parts of Usenet that were actually still usable (UKRM was one of my haunts).

Nowadays, using telnet is an easy way of saying that you don't care that any passing pidgeon can read what you are typing.

(I do have it installed on one of my VMs though so I do SMTP manual testing..)

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Re: "What do you mean when you say “There are no backups”?"

do you use new tapes everyday?

We still use some tapes at work but we're getting rid of them (to everyones delight - we've had lots of instances where a job has apparently finished but test restores are failing and that's even after replacing the tape drives and getting new tapes).

At home, my VMs are all backed up to a local NAS which then backs itself up to a Backblaze bucket - the bucket is set to only retain data for 14 days so that the costs don't balloon.

Switch the system off in such a way that it can be reactivated immediately if need be, then see if anyone complains

We've got test servers (VMs) that are only used at year-end. The rest of the time they sit there unused (and shut down). At one point they were also used a dev servers so were up a lot more.

Fortunately, we are getting rid of that application (it uses a very old version of Oracle and fails the cyber-essentials rules) and, at that point, any last remnants of it will be gone!

Re: Turning off an waiting...

One place we found an old Novell server (literally in a cupboard - still powered up and connected to the network) and we have zero idea what it was for.. there didn't seem to be any data stored on it and very definately no documentation so we eventually turned it off but left it in place.

Come next billing cycle, everything fell apart. The billing application sat there waiting for data that never turned up so all the bills went out with £0.00 printed on them..

Turns out the server was purely a transit server - it took data from one system and then bunged it on another - which the billing application (which I seem to remember was on some sort of mainframe) then copied it from. I suspect that the mainframe couldn't do Novell so this server pushed the data to something that the mainframe could talk to - either that or the mainframe was on a different network to the source data.

So the server got turned back on, the billing cycle was run again and this time, we sent out non-zero bills. Eventually, they re-worked and simplified things so that the server could be turned off - but that was well after I left.

Singapore software maker says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

We were largely forced to go to Azure because our capital budget got reduced to 10% of what it was previously. Cloud costs come from revenue budget, not capital..

(We do maintain some local servers - DCs, print servers and a few hyper-v clusters, but the majority of our servers now live in Azure)

I looked at..

.. migrating my home VM servers to either Azure or AWS. I did some quick and dirty sums (server A has a 500W power supply - assume full draw continuously [1] and the price of a unit of electricity, how much did it cost a month.. now do the same for the other servers..)

End result was about £70 per month.

Then I looked at the cost of implementing just the essential VMs in a secure fashion in AWS (Azure was a non-starter - they didn't allow FreeBSD VMs - don't know whether they do now) was well over £1000.

Not really much of a decision! Even factoring in the hardware cost amortised over the life of the server (one is 7 years old, one is 4 years) and other gubbins like the external disk array, self-hosting costs a pittance compared to cloud. Especially as I have a largely static environment.

And it's even cheaper at the moment because the older server is powered down because the RAID card fried itself and corrupted all the VMs hosted on it. Thank goodness for regular backups.. Next annual leave I'm planning to replace the RAID card and get it going again, even if it's only as a cold-standby spare.

[1] Obviously, it's not but that assumption made the arithmetic easier!! Looking at the server load, it barely breaking a sweat most of the time. The only reason I have two servers is for resilience as they used to be clustered together (before the older one ate its RAID card) in a Proxmox cluster.

Welcome to Muskville: Where the workers never leave

Re: The Quakers knew how to build decent company towns

The railway companies in the 19th Century Britain also built housing

As did the GWR works (aka Brunel Engine Works) in Swindon. Which is why there are rows and rows of fairly identical houses in the town centre..

(And in one of the early bits, the houses are arranged into squares with the corner houses being much bigger - either for use as a pub or a shop or a house for a senior-grade manager.)

Re: I have some sympathy for the idea..

Rarely since have green open spaces been such a part of urban planning

In that once-proud bastion of industrial housing (Swindon - where the majority of the working age men worked in the Brunel Engine Works and much of the housing stock in the centre dates from that era) you can see this effect clearly - the newer areas of the town where houses have been built on formerly-council land (like mine) are in estates with wide verges and plenty of green open spaces (there's at least 3 parks in dog-walking distance). Presumably, the conditions of sale of the land to developers was quite specific about such things. Because we are a corner plot, our garden is a reasonable size (albeit was used as a carpark ond general dumping ground by the builders so, if we are planting something, we have to dig down to make sure that we are not planting it on top of a large lump of concrete or tarmac..)

Estates build on private land are very much the opposite - the developers have crammed in as many houses as possible with tiny exterior spaces using a series of twisty, turny roads, all alike.. Visiting friends who live in those estates is really quite claustrophobic.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

Re: I'm affected - no pay today

I also think I'm lucky enough to have grown up when interest rates were 8%+

I remember when mortgage interest rates were 15%.. (we had an endowment mortgage and saw the value of our house go down from the £68K we'd paid for it to £55k). Fortunately, we were both (reasonably well paid) prgrammers in a fairly cut-throat environment where constant staff poaching was rife and so were paid a fairly decent retention bonus (50% of which was paid out at the end of 3 years) so we managed to survive.

We still took a fairly big hit when we went to sell the house in 1997 to move to our current house. Needless to say, the current house has grown fairly massively in price since then.

And, equally fortunately, we ended up on a tracker mortgage where we could overpay so, when our very-underperforming endowments vested, we actually had enough to pay off the mortgage.

Moral of the story? The Finance world is inherently unstable and anyone that tells you that they can predict out to 5 years is either a fool or lying.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

In my experience, if you don’t change anything, nothing breaks by itself

Until you let the users use it..

Re: North American Charging Standard

It's also why there's a bag full of adapters and converters sitting in any decent tech's kit

Ah - you've seen the bubblewrap bag that lives in my work bag then. Straddling (as I am) the Mac and PC worlds, I need all sorts of cables/converters/adaptors because, inevitably, at a critical point someone will have 'forgotten their adaptor'.

I do make sure that I either get it back or that work buys another one for me.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

Re: A Little Bit of History

Motorola, IMHO easing them out of involvement with the ESN is yet another mistake; what other company has the experience to be able to put together a functioning system?

Motorola?

The ones I worked for back in the mid 1990's that could barely find their own backside with a map and their hands tied behind their back? The ones who never, ever sacked a manager, no matter how bad they were - instead they just promoted them and moved them to another site?

That Motorola? The utterly disfunctional one that had one good product (mobile base site) then did bog-all development or research to improve it and then got their lunch stolen by Nokia?

(Yes - I'm a little bitter about my time there - I learnt many things there - mostly how *not* to do IT and mangement. Like not promising your staff something you quite clearly can't deliver then making up an utterly specious reason why they can have what you promised them..)

Re: voted Labour and Remain

removed at most opportunities by the ERG

One Brexit had become the orthodox cant of the Tories, anyone of a different opinion either shut up or left. I respect those who left a lot more than those who carried on parrotting a line that they obviously disagreed with.

That lure of potential ministerial seats must be *very* powerful!

Microsoft makes Outlook Mac native email app a freebie

Re: Can't wait...

Outlook for Windows and a Microsoft 365 subscription as soon as April

We migrated our non-O365 Macs over to O365. One of the unintended consequences (apart from a few where the migration of the mailbox hadn't been done or had failed) was that shared mailboxes no longer worked in classic view..

You *had* to enable the 'New Outlook' flag in order to access shared mailboxes on Exchange Online - presumably, the 'New Outlook' flag is more than just cosmetic and changes the server comms protocol.

Took me about a day of head-scratching to work out why a small number of installs were not receiving email properly. It was because they didn't like the new outlook look and feel and so turned it off.

Re: Client not worth paying for

Outlook for Mac has been crippled for years because not all the protocols have been enabled. This makes it more or less impossible to share calendars

This is utterly untrue.. (typing this on a Mac with O365 installed and I can quite happily share calenders..)

Tech demo takes brain scan, creates a picture of what you're looking at

Re: From the article

You have been in one of those machines more than once? Sir, I am in awe of your bravery.

Twice - once to see if my migraines were the result of a brain tumour (they weren't - just genetics) and the second time to check my heart.

Not the most fun experience - you can't even read a book or listen to music. Just as well the scanner aparture isn't small enough to trigger claustrophobia.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Cheap

And sealed. You don't really want physical push button in an active kitchen since the steam and grease smoke will get in behind the buttons and gum everything up.

Unless you seal them properly - which costs more.

So yes, cheap. So the starving shareholders can have a few more kopecs in dividend..

Re: Change window - cue the drums

Given sufficient levels of arthritis in the hands the only way to open a child-proof medicine container is to outsource the job to a child

Or buy a gripping hand^W device - I have a screw-top opener that has several sizes of grippers to use. I'm now looking around for a new manual can opener (don't want electric - expensive and prone to breaking) can opener as my fingers are now finding it difficult to turn the cutter handle.

Found one that has a long crank connected to the cutter so I might try that.

(Co-incidentally - just as I was typing about age and arthritis my playlist changed to "When Age has done it's Duty" by Cosmograph - based on Matthew Arnold's poem "Growing Old" - well worth reading. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52311/growing-old)

Re: Off datasheet appliance usage

cooking rice in the kettle

I now cook my Basmati [1] rice in an Instant Pot on pressure cooker setting (6 minutes then 10 minutes of natural pressure reduction). Makes amazing rice. My wife likes saffron (she's of Cornish descent!) so I add a pinch of that sometimes..

Equal volume of rinsed rice and water. Small knob of butter and a bit of salt (plus any additions like saffron. Good to either eat as-is or to use later in fried rice!

[1] Two reasons - I like the taste and the starches absorb more slowly in the gut so the blood glucose peak is longer and lower than long-grain rice. Much better Glycaemic Load.

Each time it went off, the police would get a call

Previous orkplace we had an interesting combo of low-level radioactive sources and large quantites of very flammable solvents.

If our fire alarm went off, the Fire Service would generally turn up within a couple of minutes. We used to warn the head of station if we were doing a drill so that they didn't have to turn up but apparently, they would use it to do an emergency drill as well.

Re: Why would one ...

I have one because I DO drink tea

Most times in the US where I've been offered tea, they have heated up the water in the microwave..

Re: Why would one ...

the only year I spent in student accommodation

ah yes.. I shared a Polytechnic Halls with some one with (apparently) no sense of smell or taste. He was from the Welsh valleys and seemed to have a diet that consisted of fish fingers, beer and chips, cooked in lard (not the beer though - that would be weird). Now, stuff cooked in lard can be really, really nice - but not if the lard is very much on the far side of rancid..

I suspect the only reason he didn't die of food poisoning is the fact that he used the same pan every night and the head killed the bugs. Either that or the superbugs that lived in the lard killed any invading bugs.

We eventually got tired of the stench and him not reacting to us asking him to change the lard and threw out the pan, congealed lard and all. And threatened to do the same to any replacement pan.

Re: Why would one ...

so I made some Marmite on toast

Aha. You're one of Those People!

(I am too but my wife issued a 3-line whip that that and related substances are forever banned from the house.. I sometimes was able to smuggle in some Twiglets [1] but that's about as far as I could go..)

[1] Is it just me or do the modern version not actually taste of Marmite?

Re: Why would one ...

to reheat his mouse mariniere

I really hope that was a spelling corrector getting overeager.

One of our previous cats would bring his dead mice in a dunk them in the sucer of milk we generally had by their food bowls.. (this was pre-dog!)

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

Re: Bloating the bloat

Setting up new computers is kinda depressing.

Can I point out that Macs come with no bloatware?

<Smug mode on>

Who needs sailors? US Navy's latest robo-ship can run itself for 30 days

Re: Religion bashing?

"more than 100 disaffected English religious extremists"

This statement sure looks like general religion bashing,

Nope - it's a reasonably accurate statement. Even in their time they were considered extremists..

was because they advocated for a separation of church and state

Nope. They were advocating that anyone Catholic be either killed or exiled. The law wouldn't allow this so they left to find a place where their extremeism wouldn't be checked.

And your final point - they *were* violent fanatics. And groups of non-conformists (much like the one I belong to) were able to worship in their own way - because they didn't shout about it from the rooftops. Maybe you might want to learn some English religious history before you make wild statements.

FTX is back in Japan, where users can withdraw fiat and crypto

Re: Withdraw fiat?

Much like any FIAT car after several years..

The original Fiat Cinquecento [1] (ie the 1970s version) was pretty much bulletproof - we had an Italian lodger for a while who drove his from Milan to London. It took him a while though..

My dad has a series of Fiats as company cars (he worked for an Italian pharma company) - one of which (Fiat 127 or 128 rings a bell) was so poorly built that the clutch pusher plates kept breaking. It was eventually fixed by using a squashed baked bean can as reinforcement.. They eventually switched to giving out Peugeots as company cars.

[1] We nicknamed it "The travelling overcoat"

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

Re: Cost

Canada Goose. DO NOT consider arming the demon fowl.

The male swan on our local lake takes a very dim view of Canada geese turning up on his lake. Especially at this time of year when the breeding season starts..

Re: @Yet Another Anonymous coward - NIBBB

It's still Whisky if you've imported it from Scotland (or Wales...)

Or England..

(English Distillery Company produces some very fine whisky. As do the Cotswold Distilleries. As do quite a few other English distilleries..)

Re: Republicans have a lot to answer for

Nobody has ever claimed that "trickle down economics" work.

You obviously don't remember Liz Truss. She didn't specifically say 'TDE' but her policies were pretty much defined by the TDE policies..

The second dust bowl cometh for America, supercomputer warns

Re: All I can see

we once met a prospective customer in Swindon

I'm astonished that anyone would think that *anything* about Swindon was planned..

(The town centre mostly dates from Brunels' days - the Great Western locomotive works were the towns major employer for quite a long time - Brunel first requested land in Wooten Bassett (which, at the time, was bigger than Swindon) to build his factories. They said no (we don't want your smelly factory here!) so he went to Swindon who basically allowed him as much land as he wanted..)

There are nice bits of Swindon - we live pretty much next door to Lydiard Park.. The town centre, not so much.

The estates that were built on council-owned land have wide streets and plenty of green spaces. Those built on privately-owned land, not so much. There the houses are crammed in - presumably by a space-planning algorithm that enables the developers to put as many houses as possible regardless of the impact on prospective owners.

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

it says "collected", not "stored"

No point collecting it unless you are going to compare it with a stored print or hash..

I'd assumed that a hash of the fingerprint is stored for later recognition of that print

I used to work for a company that made fingerprint readers. We didn't store the actual fingerprint - we stored a one-way hash of the fingerprint and the readers calculated the hash on the fly and sent the hash to the controller for it to authenticate. We also had stuff like 'is it a live finger' detection [1]. Initially we used rs232 to talk to the controllers but, while I was there, upgraded to ethernet.. (there was talk of wifi but it was decided that it was too unreliable and prone to connectivity errors - especially as the readers were fully weather-proof and tended to be in fairly hostile environments..

Any reader that stores and forwards your actual fingerprint is a security nightmare!

[1 When the weather was really cold I'd often fail that test - my fingers go quite white and numb when I get cold..

Re: Only the first one counts?

What is wrong with the USA?

Unrestrained capitalism and a generally chaotic-neutral alignment.. (with some obvious chaotic-evil outliers)

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

white with no sugar

So not British Army-standard tea then?

After all, being the only army in the world that fits hot water boilers to their AFV's you'd expect them to make full use. Bung in a handful of tea bags (shudder) at the start of the day and start drinking it about lunchtime..

Oracle NetSuite datacenter plunges offline for a day, customers warned of data loss

'creeped'

Guys,

If you can't use British English, can you at least learn how to conjugate verbs properly?

The past tense of 'To creep' is 'crept'. Not 'creeped'

Take the blue pill: Keanu Reeves has had enough of AI baloney

As long as there is one Human in the chain, the plug can be pulled

"I have no mouth yet I must scream"..

Lufthansa flights grounded by major IT snafu, 'construction work' blamed

Probably multiple "redundant" fibres in the same cable/duct

We have redundant lines - one exits the back of the building and one out of the side in a completely separate duct.

But, as we discovered later (when the weight of a JCB collapsed a duct that was too close to the surface), both those 'separate' ducts went into the same conduit under the next-door car park. And, when said JCD ended up nose-down in the duct we discovered that both our lines were in that duct and, both got severed at the same time.

Opps.

Our landlord had some explaining to do (it was their ducting) and we had specified that out outgoing circuits *had to* travel in serapate ducts. They tried to blame BT but the GIS systems clearly identified that they had built the ducts and that they were on their land. Cue a rebate on the rent..

The lines now (genuinely) do take diverse routes. As does the 3rd line..