Posts by PB90210

On Call: Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Re: Just the fax, ma'am.

Never put sellotape on thermal paper!

Re: they even make us write it on the back of the credit card

I once stood behind someone signed a cheque and they just ran the pen backwards and forwards, leaving a thick black line

(imagine a Trump sharpie special but without any vertical movement... basically a dead Trump,)

ATF responds to 'major' cybersecurity incident after ransomware gang's claims

Re: You keep using that word. . .

I read that as 'honeypot,'

Nuisance-call blocker fined £190k for being a nuisance caller

Re: Another scum company

Companies House has changed a lot in the past few years.

It used to be that they had to accept, by law, the information given to them *without* question. This meant that suckers now saddled with mail, and worse, for dodgy firms now registered at their address and had to fight to get their addresses removed (sometimes they get named as directors, making things much worse).

They now have an online portal and have simplified removal

There is an episode of the BBC's Scam Secrets podcast about this - Fake Companies In My House

Check out the width of that Debian display

The problem with the London double-decker is that it's now larger than the 'stsndard' London double-decker!

Nigel Farage wants to scrap 'suffocating' UK GDPR

Re: Abolishing the OSA would save everyone money.

There were a few other regulations like that, that were basically the same as our pre-EU regulations and our post-Brexit regulations... just in a different font

Re: Sigh

"Reform UK did not respond to our request for information about its pledges."

How could they be able to remember all of them given that they immediately get hidden under the carpet, never to be mentioned again, as people point out the glaring holes

Claude and Cowork now share what they know about you

You hate your boss. You *really* hate your boss!

Good luck with those sensitive reports it's generating for them about that project they dumped you on against your will that you can see is rapidly going tits up

Australia’s record industry won’t chart tunes recorded in the key of AI

Re: The AI shit isn't even worth pirating...

Pang's Garden: fish & chips, and kebabs

(was previously Greek owned... don't remember if they got round to offering any Chinese)

Users mash LinkedIn's AI slop button 1M+ times in 3 weeks

CPO... "Pertwee!... What's all this slop?"

"I've got 27 witnesses who will vouch that I was nowhere near wherever it was, wherever it was, when the lead was nicked from the Admiral's roof"

Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

Default login for super supervisor (God's supervisor) was: 'super.super' with password 'great'

Cisco routers had the habit of accepting trailing spaces if the (plaintext) password was the last thing on the CLI command line!

Real bugger if that command has just locked you out and you need to log back in

Re: Sorry, wrong number

The Russian one-time pads were undone because the printers got lazy and printed off hundreds of identical pads

(which were further compromised by operators reusing pads because of shortages)

Re: Beware of unproven assumptions

Back in the day, I used to keep a few old job sheets on my desk... the job refs were a handy mix of 8 letters and numbers

And bitlocker PINs could be turned into phone numbers

Re: RE: don't change passwords often

How about having a different list of 'special characters' for password creation and password entry!

"What's the password?"

"Yes"

"No, what is the password?"

"It is"

Hand leans in(sic) and types W A T T

Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

Re: "attorney fees are huge and dwarf what you could have settled for"

Or in this case

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarndyce_and_Jarndyce

Casio decides it's about time the simple digital watch got a little smarter

His wa*king count?

Re: "low-end Casios can only display dates in US MM/DD format"

I used to buy the Casios with analogue face and metal strap. The first was around £20. A decade or so later, its replacement was still around £20... as was the 3rd...

(still in the Argos catalogue!... £29/£36)

OpenAI glitch locks out vetted cyber researchers – and some can't get back in

"look for an email titled "Action required: Reverify your Daybreak Blue access,""

But you're a cyber professional... that's just what you'd expect a scammer would do!

Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Re: Expired crypto material has long been a target

They had already cracked Enigma, but they did always need to crack the daily settings...

Apparently the guy was at a remote outpost in N Africa, who would set up his Enigma, enter the daily settings, encode his message ('nothing to report') and fire it off to HQ.

Bletchley loved him because they knew the contents of the message and that meant it cut the time to crack the settings dramatically... for the N Africa zone

(for other zones they would have to rely on things like routine and guessing that a message at 7am would start 'here is the weather for...')

Copilot tricked into telling reseachers how to hack itself

The more I hear about this AI thingy the less impressed with it I am...

UK puts Google AI on the flight path to fewer contrails

I think it was Florida that introduced a ban on weather modification a while back, despite having had a registry for decades that only had a single entry

Capita handed vital role in next pandemic despite civil service pension failures

Re: In later news

STOP PRESS: crapita have had their contract to run the Environment Agency's pension fund extended, so they do(?) know how to run a pension fund... unfortunately 'lessons have been learned' doesn't ring true

Part didn't fit so techie got out his screwdriver. Then something flew off the motherboard

Just built and configured a campus router and was packing it away and it rattled. Take the top off looking for a loose screw, but a capacitor dropped out. Do I go to the stores and see if they have a replacement? No, I've still got my dusty but trusty soldering iron somewhere in the bottom of my desk

Unfortunately I hadn't had to use it for years and in the meantime they had switched to lead-free solder paste and the iron didn't have enough heat to simply melt the paste to reattach the component (I don't remember just how I managed it, but in the end it worked)

Trump wants to grant private cyber firms a license to hack back

"Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom"

Names of the fire fighters in the Scandi translation of (the kids TV programme) Trumpton?

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: I'm old

"why am I leaving this room?"

ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor

Re: There's no way a Sam Altman company

He's just found a new use for CrapGPT...

Scan your kids calendars, add their likes/dislikes and have CrapGPT create a podcast for the drive to school so you don't have to speak to them

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: well um

"...in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying”...

'Welcome to Mar-a-lago'

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Blind acceptance of "the normal"

Re: cutting the ends off sausages

If you were poor, it helps when money is short as you can make ends meat

Re: Last time I used a pager

Had a mate who was on call who mislaid his pager. He kept sending paging requests while his wife searched the house listening for the beeps.

He then received a call from the garage that had been servicing his car... "We've ripped out half the dash looking for the source of an intermittent beeping"

Firefox 153 contains itself while Thunderbird 153 fixes almost everything

For there last week, X posts seem to be escaping the Facebook container.

I've tried 'open in containerr' > FB but they revert to opening in the default container

Talking smack about a doctor got him access to private medical files

Re: "your mother tounge is obviously not English"

Vintage Norf LDN here... neva 'erd ov it...

Rhyming slang possibly... talking smack > loaf of old kack?

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Re: a 2-week release schedule

I think they've gone to twice-weekly... it seems only a couple of days since the last one...

The AI that spawned MechaHitler and deepfake porn puts on a suit to become legal advisor and Excel jockey

Re: Reinforcement Learning

On the other hand, "the beatings will continue until moral improves", would explain the 'cheerfulness' of the prompts

"Thank you for pointing out my mistakes, oh master... please don't attach those electrodes..."

GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

Re: I idly wonder how far into organisations

Biden's last tax disclosure as Pres... 11 pages

Trump's recent tax disclosure... 927 pages

Moody Bible Institute breach leaves 2.3M accounts needing salvation, says cyber expert

"Thou shall not commit <sin>"... becomes "Don't get caught"

Have it printed in China, edged in faux gold, with a Sharpie squiggle on the first page

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

Re: web blocking is a big hammer

Horniman Museum!

Re: Why?

'Universal' SIM cards are available

(in the UK at least... provided some 5G comms kit for emergency services and they came with 'all networks' SIMs)

Re: The Secret Service “concurred” with all five recommendations

They have probably also done away with the constant need for cybersecurity retraining... once should be enough

Re: Apple, Tree...

"He's far from the only person I know who dislikes written communication"

Look, it was one birthday card...

Re: Porn. The answer is always porn.

Only gambling on the stock market is allowed/encouraged

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: Life after Trump

And he has all those tests to back it up... he's actually certified!

He has finally stopped calling them IQ tests, but still doesn't seem to to know why he's taking them

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

We used to delight in going down the back stairs because it had one of those 'break glass' tubes on the fire door. They couldn't really complain because it could be the real thing

Microsoft extends extended updates for Windows 10 in the most muted way imaginable

https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/extended-security-updates

"Windows 10 support has ended. You can enroll in ESU any time until the programme ends on 12 October, 2027. If you’re already enrolled, your coverage will automatically continue through that date—no action needed."

(so another year for the UK at least)

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

Re: I'm all for it.

<htm>3 little pigs<doclang>war and peace

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Re: vibe citing

I went for the granny translating the jive talk in 'Airplane'

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Agreed.

As HoS he would know to park his car in a spot not covered by (working) cameras

Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

Re: The "King" is in the altogether

I was in a store the other day that had a sign saying "have you tried our manned checkouts downstairs"... the sign was in in the place where the checkouts used to be!

Manned checkouts... strange idea, don't think they will catch on