Posts by dmesg

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Back in the day, living in Seattle, there were apocryphal tales of a cross town competitor named Macrohard.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: What is a true random number?

"Randomness" is a quality of an algorithm or device which outputs values, not of a number itself.

The quality of a random number generator, roughly speaking, is the difficulty an adversary faces when trying to predict the next value, given knowledge of the generator's previous outputs and complete knowledge of its design.

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

I once attended a summer workshop at CMU in the CS department, some 20 or so years ago. They of course had a tour of campus. On a pleasant sunny summer day, there were any number of students out walking their robots. "That one over there will be going to Mars in a few months" the guide told us (or maybe he said the Moon, my memory fails me).

The tour began with the group taking an elevator down to the 3rd floor to visit the ICM.

Trump guts digital ID rules, claims they help 'illegal aliens' commit fraud

"The only beneficiaries of this step backward are hackers ... , fraudsters ... , and legacy vendors who want to maintain lucrative contracts without implementing modern security protections".

I pick door number three.

Your ransomware nightmare just came true – now what?

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

Security audits and recovery exercises are often just security theater. The recovery exercises I was involved in were "tabletop". Sure, they're better than nothing and sometimes lead to a noticable improvement -- as long as it doesn't cost too much. And from what I've seen, even noticable improvement can still be suboptimal.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

I remember when operating systems helped customers use their software. Now they seem to help software companies abuse their customers.

Consternation at Microsoft? Good.

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

Re: Can we start IT revolution 100% devoid of USA in 10 years?

Desperate enough to have hired a new CEO that broke their privacy promise, as reported a few weeks back on El Reg. I won't shed too many tears over their predicament, though I do appreciate that a number of privacy-respecting browsers derive from Mozilla code, with the naughty bits removed.

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

To be fair, I asked a LLM how I might catch students using LLMs to do their homework. The suggestions were actually reasonable, but missed an idea I'd had. I mentioned the idea to the LLM. It agreed it would probably work. Turns out, it was right.

Re: "HR tries to think appy thoughts"

... and, as I learned from the intertubes, "boss" is related to "botch". It can also mean "an ornamental stud".

One of my old schools has one of those consultant-designed-and-built sites that cost an eye-watering amount (that *could* have paid for some storage that was badly needed at the time -- I know because I was lead sysadmin back then). Even after ten years, the only reasonable way to get to the directory is by typing '${school_URL}/directory" in the URL bar, and I happened on that by guessing.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Good, but don't do that again

I once started up a sort of combined student club/computer lab at my uni. The department Chair and school's Dean gave me a (very nice!) room and a small budget, most of which went for a wall of whiteboards and proper electrical service.

Which left the small matter of stocking said room with computers. I knew the IT staff, and they were kind enough to donate several dozen machines that had fallen off the bottom of the upgrade cascade. Slow CPUs and antique Windows versions, but they could run Linux when the drives and motherboards weren't flaking out. Which was fine, since Linux and FOSS were the whole point of the thing. The students got plenty of practice repairing hardware and cannibalizing parts, but they kept the lab going and the organization growing.

A few years later they got a decent equipment budget, and a few years after that got some nice server room hardware donations from alums who'd gone off to work in research labs for several big name firms, so it all worked out. It's still going, 20+ years on.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

Re: I'm guessing they are shifting liability by using AI.

"I guess nobody in a corporate environment really gives a toss about the company they work for."

Maybe because it works the other way, too, with rare exception.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: Conflicts of interest

From what I've seen of business, an AI that lies is definitely what the C-suite ordered.

The more things change, the more they stay the same -- only faster.

-- iirc, Robert Heinlein via the character Lazarus Long

Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

Excel as a crypto object

I once implemented DES in a spreadsheet. Not too hard, actually. But making Excel into a MITM attack on Linux -- that's something special!

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: Haven't we moved on from this shit?

"Windows, like all OS's, is merely a tool. I'm no more passionate of Linux or Windows as I am my hammer or screwdriver."

One see this kind of comment often, but I think it's the wrong way of looking at it. It's more an instrument, as in a musical instrument. And there's a heckuva difference between a beginner's guitar and a Martin. Windows is constantly drifting out of tune, poorly tempered, with bad fret buzz and muddy bass response, and just when you manage to adjust everything to an approximation of workable, it updates itself back to the original annoyances -- or worse.

If you want to stock with the tool analogy, even a hammer isn't just a hammer. Carpenters have favorite hammers where the balance and feel is far less tiring than others they have. And they'll spend good money for good tape/laser measures or chop saws. Because the quality of your tools makes a difference.

Booby-trapped Alpine Quest Android app geolocates Russian soldiers

Re: Very Boring Russian Campaign

"praying for Trump" ... not as in "praying for Trump's health", but rather "praying for someone like Trump to come along".

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

"[Windows 10] was gently pushing users toward its paid services."

So "gently" now means "aggressively and annoyingly"? Or is it "gratuitously slurping up user time and screen real estate"?

The guy gets it right in the end. Windows is now an adversarial hindrance to getting things done, and that's not even counting the user experience glitches, bugs, and cloud outages.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

I did that once as a sysadmin at a local college where they had a lot of legacy in-house Perl utilities. Since I was using one of the utilities' "-a" flag to update a minor field in all records, I read the documentation at the top of the code, then checked and double and triple checked the command- line invocation. Hit Enter.

It deleted everything. A bug that no one else ever hit because "we never had to use that flag before".

We restored from backup in a half hour or so.

'Twas then I set out on the project of de-inscrutabilizing and fixing all the in-house Perl that that particular former admin had written. Dear God, it was awful. For several weeks I would go home and crawl on broken glass to relax.

Re: XMLT

Hey, awk (and sed) have come in handy for me many times. Handy tools to know for the times your task falls within their design envelope. Perl, on the other hand ... the modern answer to APL.

Microsoft hits Ctrl-Z after Teams trips over file sharing

"Reviewing our change management"

> Microsoft said: "We're reviewing our change management processes ..."

Might I suggest reviewing your management?

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

Re: And that's why...

... or were using an office suite that didn't send "telemetry" (cough, cough) to the mothership or ask it for permission to run.

Microsoft resets 'days since last Windows 11 problem' counter to 0

Re: M$

Well, there's all that history of M$ using undocumented calls to optimize Excel performance, forcing major players of the time to use unsupported hacks just to compete on a level field. And what was that little ditty back in the day? Something like "Windows ain't done 'til Dr. DOS won't run". Another message to anyone in the ecosystem, that playing by the rules is for suckers. Those examples were from long ago, but the stink lingers.

Samsung trumps USA's tariffs by making displays in Mexico, and elsewhere if needed

Re: Make the tea?

People already scavenge for meals in tips and dumpsters.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Re: So, we have finally come full circle

I crashed Michigan State's CDC 750 (or maybe it was the 6500) from a card reader. As in, full stop, no sound but the building AC. Twice. Or maybe even three times, it was long ago.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Ribbon.

Screen space is a valuable asset, and so is muscle memory. Let's blow them both up at once!

Re: never being a good operating system of theirs

When I was a sysadmin at a local college, the decision was made (just before I got there) to implement AD. I'm a bit foggy on the details, since this is all blessedly decades past, but there was a domain name convention that AD insisted on ... but which was already in use and couldn't be changed. I remember looking up how to handle this situation with LDAP, since that's what AD is built on. It basically came down to modifying a line in a config file. Would AD allow this? Nope, no way, and it would end life as we know it if you tried. So the school spent a measurable fraction of a million US dollars, over several years, on consultants figuring out and implementing a workaround. At least they were frighteningly competent. I hate to think of the mess if they had been standard caliber.

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

I would propose s/he try living without any medical advances that received any government funding to develop or deliver.

Re: Not hurting the right people?

Thanks. I needed a good laugh this afternoon.

Re: Tax cuts!

... and the programs those people depend on are being cut, and the minimum wage continues to stagnate. They're losing ground.

Umm, recent figures show this here Social-Security-dependent retiree paying about $1500 annually in additional taxes, and other programs for health, nutrition, and energy upgrades/assistance drying up. While the morbidly wealthy get huge breaks, less IRS enforcement, and fox-in-the-henhouse regulation.

One of the things Jefferson did for the young US was to establish research gardens, gathering plants from around the world with agricultural or economic potential. They're still going strong. You can visit them at Monticello.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: When was it ever otherwise?

Back around '86 or '87 I talked to a prof at UW who'd done some consulting over in Redmond. "What's it like there?" I asked. "A lot of smart people wandering around the halls reinventing the wheel" he replied.

But not smart enough, if history be the judge.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Re: The BREXIT Bonus

s/Reagan/Nixon/

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Memories having a secretary

The secretaries knew how everything really ran (and also where all the bodies were buried), and the janitors had all the keys.

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

Re: DOGE may be working?

No, they don't spend that kind of money on common items. It's one of the ways to hide funding for classified projects.

1. That 10 days of pay could make a huge difference to a disabled vet.

2. Do you think Musk/DOGE will claim a savings of a) the total contract allocation over its life, b) the total annual allocation, c) the amount actually spent on a year, or d) 10/365 of the annual expenditure? Given all the (documented) lying they've been doing, it's probably (a), though they might inflate even that by three orders of magnitude the way they've done with some other claims. The article is pointing out yet another specious claim by DOGE.

Re: When they realise that DOGE cut out the meat

What I hear is that other countries are recruiting fired gov employees with certain areas, such as science and intelligence.

I fear that's part of the plan.

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: The economics of not serving ads

"Hobby magazines were bought not solely for the projects, but for the advertisers who supplied the materials."

Yep. Those magazines even had an advertiser index somewhere near the back so you could easily find the ads from whatever company you were interested in.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Majora~1

How NOT to f-up your security incident response

Re: "having a current incident response plan that is [...] regularly rehearsed

"Finally, no IR plan review panel I have encountered has included any technical staff -- it's always been the executive and senior non-technical management."

Yep. I've been the technical person in some such meetings. When you start pointing out flaws in plans and current practices/configurations, you become unpopular. Management tends to see these meetings as box-ticking exercises.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

Re: I could only wish my work lasted that long

Have you tried turning off the AI assist?

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Extremely disappointing, Firefox. But then, what did you expect, hiring people from greed-head, privacy-invading corporations? Back-pedaling, but only part of the way, really doesn't look good on you.

I'll be looking for alternatives for myself, friends, family, and the odd client or two (thanks for the pointers, El Reg).

It was good while it lasted.

DARPA seeks ideas for 'large bio-mechanical space structures'

... And Firefly. Shut down waaay too soon.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: Yeah but...

No talent in government? No, there are plenty of talented and conscientious public servants. They just don't have PR firms telling citizens how wonderful they are, they way so many private firms do. How many minutes out of every television hour are spent on ads?

But I agree with the rest.

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

As a working hypothesis, I'd say by embracing PostgreSQL, MS is trying to take the oxygen out of the room for any competitors to the existing SQL Server base.

Oh, you want an alternative to SQL Server? Well, there's no one here but PostgreSQL + our extension, and by the way it runs best on Azure.

Embrace, extend, ... what was that next part again?

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

How about we make software vendors legally liable for product defects, as in just about every other critical infrastructure industry? Maybe even have professional certification required.

Yeah, it'd slow things down a lot, but would that be such a bad thing? It would keep Windows 12 at bay, for starters.

Re: Microsoft?!

Way back in the day I had a chance to talk briefly with the product manager for MSDOS 4.0 not long after it's release. In the course of discussing other things she mentioned that there were parts of it that they didn't dare touch -- they'd lost the source code. So yeah, it happens.

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

Re: across two meters of optical fiber

This is one thing that Babylon 5 got right. There's even a scene where Sheridan and Garibaldi are standing at the urinals, in order to meet and communicate as conspirators in a way that won't draw attention to their having met.