Posts by dmesg

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

I support Windows 10/11 for a client, and I support my wife's Linux Mint install. Far less work for the latter.

Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build

It's no wonder people want to stick with w10

The design process for Windows 11 seems to have included compiling lists of features users wanted, and features that they didn't. And then mixing up the lists when handing them to the dev team.

I can't see how anyone can get any real work done with that POS.

Re: Should be made illegal

My personal experience is that installing Windows is more of a pain than installing Linux, at least with major distros aimed at desktop use. No faffing about with license keys, or figuring out which of the multiple Windows editions (Home? Student? Pro?) to download, or wondering if you need to first download a "Media Creator" app. Or figuring out how to evade M$'s desperate attempts to get you to sign up for an account.

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Proxmox undone

Regarding the article's last question: in my last job I inherited a small office setup with a handful of Windows servers running on bare metal. Old versions, some out of support, and spottily patched. The industry-specific application software was antique, with developer-vicious misfeatures I'd never seen before. The GUI database software would sometimes crash the dev machine when you opened the SQL editor window. But that was all topped by the in-house code. It was mostly written by an admittedly smart guy who was completely self taught, which is to say, the code was full of every software engineering anti-pattern you could think of and a few you couldn't, all cleverly intertwined.

I also inherited two shiny new servers just unboxed - but unconfigured - that were to replace the old ones. I set up them up as a Proxmox cluster and installed several Windows and Linux VMs (all current!) and moved the data over. Worked great, and there was no anxiety about applying patches: take a snapshot first and roll back if problems occur.

Can't say too much about leaving that job -- had to sign an NDA in order to file a complaint with HR about the boss on the way out the door. But a few months later my personal email was accidentally cc'ed on a memo that strongly suggested they'd wiped the servers and put bare-metal Windows back on them. Can't imagine how much work that took, but I guess there's nothing like going with what you know. Even if it means losing the documentation wiki. But maybe not; they might have converted that back to a bunch of Word documents on a Windows share. And given everyone the same admin-level password to get in.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Rather different

My brother was an F-16 and B-1 engine mechanic back in the day. His shop had a large, perfectly smooth and level titanium table used for alignment and calibration. It also had a raised border guard all around it.

Flash back to the 60s and 70s, when as kids we had a game called Battling Top (https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/toys-games/battling-tops/). Great fun, we played it often.

Flash forward to my brother's shop. Yep. He introduced his fellow mechanics to the game, only this time played on a titanium surface by people with metal-shop equipment at their disposal. Lunch and break times saw fierce competition. All manner of designs evolved -- one top carried, via bearings, a non spinning frame with arms that would drop magnets when the top was jostled, hoping to destabilize competitors (nice idea but it didn't win).

IT angle: one day someone brought in a platter assembly from a disk pack. For the youngsters here, these were several metal platters about a foot in diameter, stacked several inches (or higher) on a heavy metal spindle. This particular assembly had a spindle that, at bottom, came down to a precisely machined cone with a sharp point. Quite literally, this thing was made to spin.

The guy spun it up with an air compressor.

Seconds later, everyone in the shop dove for cover as the other tops began making contact -- and ricocheting off equipment on the way to embedding themselves in the walls.

No one dared touch the assembly until it stopped spinning on its own. The point on the spindle was now nicely rounded.

They declared the fellow the Ultimate and Eternal Lord of Battling Tops and never played again.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

Old joke, still applicable.

Q: What's the best Windows remote administration tool?

A: A car.

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

I first read that as ...

... "publish and be exhumed".

Perhaps I'm deluded.

Re: I'll Be Picky Here

Is fiction a well-told lie, or a well-told truth?

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: Its all about *efficient* communication...

I love the management types that criticize techies for using email instead of making a phone call. The argument usually boils down to "it's so much more touchy-feely, and besides the other person doesn't have to spend time writing things down if they can just think out loud at you".

To which I'm about to begin replying: "Are you telling me that you hire college-educated people who can't write?"

Re: Wrapping at column 78

That's exactly where I learned this habit, though I must confess that nowadays I honor it more in the breach.

I find that adhering to line lengths is more important in writing code than in email (I prefer auto-wrap for that, for exactly the reason given by the first reply to the article). Seems like a lot of young'uns can't be arsed to look up the line-continuation character for their language, and then use it to keep their code to 72/78/80 columns. And double the long-line offense if the language doesn't require an explicit line-continuation character.

Simple reason for limiting line lengths: diff -y. On a decent dev desktop machine, you can readily fit 160 (+-) columns in a terminal window at a readable font size.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Re: Hate it

But at least MS sometimes does the admins a favor by making the platform completely unavailable to users.

Bands and Brands

I had a friend long ago (and kinda far away) who told me about a band he was in, way back in high school. They were so bad, they changed the band name after every gig because they could never get a second booking with the same name. Anywhere in town. Word traveled.

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

typing "enteric" at DuckDuckGo gets you this:

enteric

ĕn-tĕr′ĭk

adjective

1. Of, relating to, or being within the intestine.

2. Of or pertaining to the enteron, or alimentary canal; intestinal.

3. Typhoid fever.

Sounds about right. When the marketers realize what they've done they'll have to change it again. Might I suggest "Nova"?

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Re: On the other hand...

I'm presently working with a 10+ year old database product, as required by our organization. (I won't debase myself pro-fessionally by mentioning its name).

It offers the ability to code up routines that iterate through database rows to do things like total up columns, find minimum values, and so on. You can even write nested loops where the key field in the current row of one table is used to look up records with a matching key in another table!! Such power was liberally used by my predecessor to write gobs upon gobs of near-unreadable code.

But perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh. The database product segfaults -- every time -- when you run a query in the SQL window.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

Re: Circular?

There may be a Halting Problem in that idea, struggling to emerge.

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

Downright baffled, indeed.

"... downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice". Yep.

But then, I also feel that way about systemd.

OTOH, on my desktop I just want to get desktop-y things done. As long as it's reliable, quick & easy to install/update, and isn't a god-fosaken clusterf ... er, Windows, I'm happy. Can I have a mint, please?

Thank you.

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

Proving Liam right ...

Has anyone else noticed that many of the above discussions go quite firmly toward proving Liam's point? "I do X, but replace Y with Z because ${REASON}. It's not too hard with a distro that supports W, but if it doesn't you you can usually get it if you install V first and then adjust for U". Yes, it's nice to have this much choice, but it's the kind of thing that gives newbies weak knees.

Re: The rise of "It just works"

Another "just works" user here. I used to be heavy into the techie/experiment stuff, but it was long ago when that stopped paying the bills. Now I just install Mint (MATE, no GUI foo-foo tempting me to adjust it), pick a background I like, and get to work on what currently matters. At home and at work. Also put it on my wife's machine. Whatever issues are encountered (by either of us) are usually in the application/interface layers (or upstream of our internet connection) and would be just as bad on Windows. Probably much worse.

Still glad for all the tech experience, as I have to wrangle a bunch of Windows workstations and servers (insert gagging sounds) and some Linux servers (TG4 proxmox!) and install/config/maintain various server-side stuff, and that sometimes involves the command line or a config file.

Now, how about an opinion piece on server-side stuff that "just works" with minimal fuss, vs stuff with mazes of twisty little configuration files, all alike, but if you get a detail wrong you're either inaccessible or pwned once you open port 443 on the firewall?

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

How about a campus tour for the Boss?

If the boss ever visits the States, I'm sure I could arrange a tour of the old storage rooms on campus. Entire computer labs stashed away as new models came in, no time for overworked staff/faculty to do the paperwork to de-acquisition (state uni system). Bottom layers may go back to the mid-80s. Gotta buy 'em all though, guv, just to make sure you have enough spare parts.

The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

Re: Bonus points ...

BINGO !! Perfectly done.

Bonus points ...

... for those able to link the Toasters screensaver to Gen. Jimmy Doolittle.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

VAX, VMS, PL/I -- my first real programming job.

My first programming job was during the summer between my junior and senior college years, and it was writing PL/I on a VAX. VMS' design of saving old versions took some getting used to, but was handy once learned. Yes, I remember the wall of manuals that I used to teach myself PL/I and learn enough VMS to get by. I wrote a query-and-retrieval system for the college's student records database. My boss, in the reference letter he wrote for me, said it had capabilities exceeding some commercial offerings of the time (that might have been the ability to write queries with boolean expressions of arbitrary depth and complexity). That boss had an interesting way of encouraging work -- he'd stop by, smoking his cigarette, and tell me stories of the *really* early days of computing -- until he could see I was itching for him to wrap it up so I could get back to the task at hand. Except for the smoke, one of the best bosses I've had, and I've been lucky to have a lot of good bosses.

Our DEC installation was a showpiece for the college, demonstrating their embrace of the modern era (it was an early adopter within the State University of New York system). The VAX, with its tape and disk drives and CPU cabinets was in an airy two-story room, and there were large windows in the second floor where you could look down from a hallway, watching the dedicated tech going about his duties. There were even picture windows at ground level -- to another hallway and even the outdoors! -- so passers-by could admire the machine. A DEC service guy would show up several times a month for hardware repairs/maintenance/upgrades. Everybody in the department, including me, had their own office with a window and a door just a short ways away on that second-floor hallway. Those were the days.

Now, the computing center is a row of racks in a sub-basement behind several locked doors, and the IT staff (no, not me!) are in a windowless warren off a back hallway. They're sentenced to maintaining, among other things, a non-standard ActiveDirectory installation. Progress, I guess, on somebody's metric.

Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond

We've been here before ...

SPAD: Simple Plastic Airplane Design: https://spadtothebone.org/.

PCV downspout section for the body, corrugated plastic for the wings (why does Corvo use cardboard?) Put the engine and electronics on a narrow wood slat and slide it into the body. Secure components with rubber bands. At RC dogfight events, back in the air in 10 minutes after a prang. Airframe that's sturdy, long-lasting, and cheap, cheap, cheap. Or even free with a little dumpster diving around sign shops and residential construction.

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Re: What do you mean - its never been rebooted ?

A friend of mine used to serve on submarines in the US Navy, and part of his duties involved maintaining some on-board computer systems. Said systems were engineered in such a way that he could (and sometimes did) replace memory _while the system was running_.

Icon for the event I'm glad never happened.

Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes

"Mother Hittons Littul Kittons", by Cordwainer Smith.

Brought this to mind:

https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcordwainer-motherhittonslittulkittons/smithcordwainer-motherhittonslittulkittons-00-h.html

Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, East Asia expert, WWII (and after) intelligence officer, and pioneer in modern psychological warfare.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

A colleague told me of attending a conference in which a US Education Dept official announced, to a large number of in-the-trenches State officials, targets that States were to meet on some common educational metrics.

The finely-delineated target ranges were backed up with all kinds of rationales and studies and incentivizing policies. Release of Federal funds depended on hitting the targets.

One State official stood up and said what everyone was thinking. Something along the lines of "We've been doing this for years, and the best any of us in the room have ever done on our stats is plus-or-minus 5%. Why do you think we can measure to two decimal places? Are you in the real world?"

He said the deer-in-the-headlights look from the speaker, and the whole front-of-the-room table, was priceless.

Re: Lies, damn lies and metrics

+1 for "refuctored"

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'

Re: NTP to the rescue!

Thank you and your team! NTP is one of the most essential pieces of software in a data center, addressing a thorny problem with layers of complexity and nuance, and yet is a snap to set up and run -- and it does its job perfectly. Well done!

An interesting workplace, Dr. Falken ...

"If management have any sense, they will be persuadable that an approved outage during a predictable time window with the technical team standing by and watching like hawks is far better than an unexpected but entirely foreseeable outage when something breaks for real and the resilience turns out not to work."

Nope. Gotta have all systems up 24/7/365, you know. Can't look like laggards with scheduled downtime, now, can we?

Forget about routine downtime. We had to beg and plead for ad hoc scheduled maintenance windows. We tended to get them after a failure brought down the campus (and of course, we made good use of the failure downtime as well). But upper Administrators' memories were even shorter than our budget, and it would happen again a few months later.

Thank $DEITY for the NTP team knowing what they were doing. It was easy to bring independent local NTP servers on line ("Is it really this easy?? We must be doing something wrong"). We put in three or four, each synced independently to four or five NTP pool servers, but capable of keeping good time for a several days if the internet crapped out. The sane NTP setup resulted in a noticeable drop in gremlins across our servers, particularly the LDAP "cluster".

That LDAP setup was a treat: three machines configured for failover. Supposedly. One had never been configured properly and was an OS and LDAP version behind the others, but the other two wouldn't work unless the first was up. Failover didn't work. It was a cluster in multiple senses of the word, and everyone who set it up had departed for greener pastures. We didn't dare try to fix it; it was safer to not touch it and just reboot it when it failed. Actually, we wanted to fix it but it who has time for learning, planning, and executing a change amidst all the fire fighting?

<digressive rant>

Besides, fixing it wasn't really necessary, since the higher ups decided we were going to have a nice new nifty Active Directory service to replace it. Problem is, AD has a baked-in domain-naming convention ... and the name it wanted was already in use ... by the LDAP servers. We had to bring in a consulting service to design the changeover and help implement it. No problem, eh? Well, they were actually extremely competent and efficient but the mess that the previous IT staff had left was so snarled that the project was only three-quarters implemented when I left a year later. At least it had cloud-based redundancy, and failover seemed to work.

The reason for switching to AD? Officially, compatibility with authentication interfaces for external services (which, it turns out, could usually do straight LDAP too). Reading between the lines: it finally dawned on the previous team what a mess they'd made with LDAP and rather than redo it right they went after a new shiny. When they left there was an opportunity to kill the AD project, but a new reason arose, just before I came on board: the college president liked Outlook and the higher-ups decided that meant we had to use M$ back-end software.

</rant>

We also had dual independent AC units for the server room. Mis-specced. When one was operational it wasn't quite enough to cool the room. When the second kicked in it overcooled the room. If both ran too long it overcooled the AC equipment room as well, and both AC units iced up. Why would it cool the AC room? Why indeed. The machine room was in a sub-basement with no venting to the outside. The machine room vented into the AC equipment room, and that vented into the sub-basement hallway.

When the AC units froze up, que a call to Maintenance to find out where they'd taken our mobile AC unit this time. Then the fun of wheeling it across campus, down a freight elevator that occasionally blew its fuse between floors, into the machine room, then attaching the jury-rigged ducting. It could have been worse. We had our main backup server and tape drive in a telecomms room in another location, and that place didn't have redundant AC. It regularly failed, and for security's sake whoever was on-call got to spend the night by the open door with a couple big fans growling at the stars.

It was a matter of luck that one of our team had been an HVAC tech in a previous life and he was able to at least minimize the problems, and tell the Facilities staff what we really needed when the building was renovated.

Oh, do you want to hear about that whole-building floor-to-ceiling renovation? About the time a contractor used a disk grinder to cut through a pipe, including its asbestos cladding, shutting the whole building down for a month while it was cleaned up? With no (legal) access to the machine or AC room for much of that month? Another time, grasshopper.

<rant redux>

The college president commissioned an external review of the IT department to find out why we had so many outages, in preparation for firing the head of IT. The report came back dropping a 16-ton weight right on her for mismanagement. Politely worded but unmistakable. She tried to quash it but everyone knew it was on her desk. She then tried to get the most damning parts rewritten but the author wouldn't budge and eventually it all came out. Shortly afterward an all-IT-hands meeting was held where the President appeared (I was told she almost had to be dragged) and stated that we'd begin addressing the problems with band-aids, then move on to rubber bands. Band-aids. That was the exact word she used. I lasted another half year or so, but that was the clear beginning of the end.

The college is also my alma mater, and I have many fond memories of student days. But I don't respond to their donation pleas any more.

</rant>

A hotline to His Billness? Or a guard having a bit of a giggle?

It could have been Bill

I worked as a perma-temp contractor at MS in the late 90's. Seattle at the time was a fabulous city, but I didn't have many close friends. So, one Christmas or maybe New Years, having nothing to do and not wanting to get drunk yet again, I drove to the Redmond campus to work on a project -- this was a time when even contractors were issued 24/7 swipe cards for their building. The parking lots were completely deserted, save for one car. I parked my used, slightly beat-up green Plymouth next to Bill Gate's golden Jaguar (with one of that era's mobile phones resting on leather seats) and went inside. When I came out several hours later it was dark and my car was the only one there.

During that time I also chanced to see him up close, once in a cafeteria and once in a hallway. Both times he was surrounded by 5 - 10 people and engaged in intense conversation, looking like he hadn't slept for two days. (BTW, I was surprised by how short he is -- everyone around him was taller).

Consider, too, that if it were security that answered Allessandro's call they would have identified themselves as such.

It was also known throughout the company that anyone could email Bill directly about a problem or issue. But there were two conditions: it had to be worth his attention, and if it was a technical matter you HAD to be right. People who weren't right, even high-up managers, could be pilloried in a humiliating all-company email coming right from the top. I remember one. After naming the culprit and describing the offense, the email concluded with something very close to "... if we are to succeed as a company, we cannot afford to make these kinds of mistakes."

Icon for irony.

It's safe to leave your bunker: Blame that Chinese nuclear plant alarm on fuel rod faults

Re: Obviously, if its China....

Yeah ... it's not like they could land a rover on Mars on the first try or anything.

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

You start work tomorrow.

This works for national governments too. Back in my student days in the 70's I returned home to see a housemate packing up and moving out, mid-semester. Turns out a certain Mid-East Petro State wanted his communications system expertise. (I once saw him pick up a phone and whistle a number of tones into it. He handed it to me, then described accurately what I heard as the connection went through various exchanges, telling me where each exchange was located. "Now, when it rings, hang up." I did. "That was the AT&T office in Puerto Rico".)

The MEPS' intelligence service had contacted him and informed him that he now worked for them. Or else a former roommate and good friend, a MEPS citizen now living back home, would find life ... unpleasant. He explained to me that it was exactly the kind of job he was hoping for, even if they way it was offered him was less than optimal. He took it, but declined the offer of a wife. "I don't need a spy in my bed."

Re: 'Too much information'

Agreed. TMI just doesn't ring true. "The time limit on our warrants were about to expire" doesn't quite cut it either. Extend the warrants, going dark for a while if it takes time to get them renewed.

I'm more inclined to believe the targets were getting wise.

Re: One Time Pads.

They also suffer from resource exhaustion and human folly.

Bob: Once you've used up the OTP that Alice handed you before you left on the mission, you're out of key. No more sending secret messages to Alice. You may be tempted to re-use your OTP but if you do this you've just committed a crypto cardinal sin and Eve, your opponent, WILL get you.

There is a way to get around this, but you no longer have perfect secrecy. Alice can give you a seed value for a cryptographically strong pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). Using the seed, you can generate as many pseudo-random bits as you like. But "pseudo" is the key word here. The seed has to be large enough that Eve can't find it by brute force, the PRNG (design *and* implementation) has to be exceedingly good, and you still may be limited in the amount of information you encrypt. It's a *much* larger limit, but eventually you may generate enough traffic for Eve's cryptanalysts to crack.

Re: One Time Pads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust. It's about the best you can do, unless you want to posit a trusted central authority. Right, I thought so.

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

Re: Mate is great

I started using Mint w/ MATE for personal systems about 6 years ago. Does everything I need and want, new versions change gently and don't require re-building a mental model or muscle memory, it's stable, and snappy enough on my machines. The one thing I miss from the old DEs is the ability to have different wallpapers on different virtual screens, but I can live without that.

Congrats to the MATE team for delivering a solid and useful piece of software that consistently respects its end users.

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

Re: Ha ha ha.... but it's not funny

Also, there may be some people who are, for legitimate reasons, unable to safely take the vaccine. Not to mention that a 95% effectiveness rate means there's still one out of every twenty vaccinated persons still at risk. You want the numbers as much in your favor as you can get them.

Inflated figures and customers who were never there. Just another data migration then

Something similar at M$, long ago.

I was a contract employee at M$ back in the late '80s. They had a corporate email system known as "wizmail" (I kid you not), and I was duly assigned an email username beginning with "c-". Other people had a similar prefix, as I noticed in recipient lists, while some had "t-" prefixes and others just some simple hash of their name. It was explained to me that "c-" was used to designate contract workers, "t-" indicated temp workers, and permanent employees had no prefix.

It wasn't always that way, I was told. It used to be that anyone getting an email account could request any reasonable username they liked, subject to availability. No prefixes required or even suggested. That ended when someone realized (during an audit, perhaps as part of email system migration) that because contractor's email addresses were indistinguishable from those of permanent employees, contractors were often kept in the recipient lists of email discussions that would wind up in sensitive areas -- strategy or product planning for example. Even worse, this extended to contractors being included in group aliases. IIRC (and I might not RC on this point), the error was compounded by allowing email users to have email forwards to their outside mail accounts. Many of the contractors had finished their contracts and moved on, but were still valid email users. Oops.

On a tangentially related note, but a story that should be recorded for posterity, while there I met the product manager for DOS at the time, DOS 4 or 5 I think. In the course of the conversation she told me there were parts of DOS that they didn't dare modify: they had lost the source code for them.

OpenRefine (https://openrefine.org/) is your friend. Bit of a learning curve, and still takes a lot of manual effort, but it reduces it to the essential amount needed. If you have more than a thousand records or so, time learning it pays off. It's FOSS and based on an earlier Google project (I hear they have some experience with data). There are probably commercial apps/services in the same genre, but OpenRefine did what I needed on a couple data-cleaning projects. Much better than throwing a grep party, or $DEITY forbid, trying to clean dirty data with a spreadsheet.

Kaspersky Lab US staff grilled by Feds in nighttime swoop

Re: Odd timing

But might be working hours back at K HQ. Hoping to catch someone in some sort of questionable (but non-carnal) act?

Yahoo! retires! bleeding! ImageMagick! to! kill! 0-day! vulnerability!

Re: Exclaimation! marks! on! every! El! Reg! article! headline! has! been! annoying! for! years!

But then, Yahoo! has been annoying for even longer. Fair's fair.

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

My email:

I write to protest the proposed Section 40 change which makes media organizations liable for the legal costs of both sides, even if the media organization wins. This is an open invitation for the filing of frivolous and vexatious lawsuits against media. Even the threat of such lawsuits will have a chilling effect. The law may be aimed at the "bottom feeders" of the media industry, but it will equally affect top-tier organizations that publish valuable news.

In my case, I rely on The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) for impartial and insightful information on the Information Technology (IT) industry. I work in IT, and The Register is a unique resource for honest, straightforward information. It has proved valuable for making informed decisions on products, services, suppliers, and future strategy. There are numerous occasions where it has (responsibly) disclosed critical security flaws requiring immediate attention -- something that many vendors would prefer never be reported.

The organization I work for is a public university system in the USA, funded by taxpayers. The proposed changes would harm the taxpayers that fund my work, and similarly will reduce the ability of publicly-funded IT workers in the UK to serve the UK taxpayers.

I am aware of the clause that allows publishers to avoid the worst of the change by signing up to a state-approved press regulator. This is nothing less than prior restraint and self-imposed censorship. I am astounded that such would ever be proposed in the UK.

Smart TVs, satellites, and billboards all hacked in Ukrainian war

WMDs

"There is no question cyberwar exists, but whether it rises to being a weapon of mass distraction ... "

You mean, like Facebook?

Mine's the one with a smartphone in the pocket ... no, not that one ... or that ... or ... aw, stuff it. Just keep the damn thing and I'll nap on the ride home.