Posts by TangoDelta72

Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

Patience is a virtue

Are you referring to NMAP's paranoid mode?

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

I'll answer the question

"Who's the supposedly smartest person who has asked a dumb support question?"

Me.

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

PWEI strikes again - 36 years later

Echoes of the past, I'm afraid. If only they'd gotten as big as.... oh, who am I kidding.

I bolded some text below to keep on topic. Sing along if you know the tune.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

City Zen citizens walking past

Head down, heading for nowhere fast

Keeping ahead, keep business busy

Making bizarre schemes to make us dizzy

Now I don't know what's right or wrong

I'm too rapped up in philosophical song

But we can offer our guidance, proffer our suss

Stepping stone to a collective consciousness

No ID cards, no poll tax

When you score own goals, you need new backs

We've no time for brackets or boxes or cages

You're listening to the rock of ages

Caught you on the dancefloor, trousers down

Dancing to the ugliest sound around

From City Zen to the powers that be

You got T-R-O-U-B-L-E

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

Jive Coding, or Jive Talkin'?

I never read all the lyrics until now, but they seem to be incredibly apt to the AI conversation. I feel like I could annotate each stanza. For fun, I've substituted "coding" in for "talkin'" here.

Jive Talkin', by the Bee Gees

It's just you jive coding

You're telling me lies, yeah

Jive coding

You wear a disguise

Jive coding

So misunderstood, yeah

Jive coding

You're really no good

Oh, my child, you'll never know

Just what you mean to me

Oh, my child, you got so much

You're gonna take away my energy with all your

Jive coding

You're telling me lies, yeah

Good lovin'

Still gets in my eyes

Nobody believes what you say

It's just your jive coding that gets in the way

Oh, my love, you are so good

Treating me so cruel

There you go with your fancy lies

Leavin' me looking like a love struck fool

With all your jive coding

You're telling me lies, yeah

Jive coding

You wear a disguise

Jive coding so misunderstood, yeah

Jive coding

You just ain't no good

Love coding is all very fine, yeah

Jive coding just isn't a crime

And if there's somebody you'll love 'til you die

Then all that jive coding

Just gets in your eyes (woo)

Jive coding

You're telling me lies, yeah

Good lovin'

Still gets in my eyes

Nobody believes what you say

It's just your jive coding that gets in the way

Love coding is all very fine, yeah

Jive coding just isn't a crime

And if there's somebody you'll love 'til you die

Then all that jive coding

Just gets in your eyes

Jive coding

Jive coding

Texas lassoes massive Microsoft datacenter – and 20 years of gas turbine emissions

Re: Fascinating... how reality starts to converge towards those cyberpunk storylines ...

2030 = Blipverts

FTFY. :-)

Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

To be, or Not to be

"There is no way to see the current value without scanning the bus," he said. "But scanning the bus kills the unit."

Ah. The Heisenberg Uncertainty SAM. Yet strangely similar to Schrödinger's stuff, too.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: Fostering friendship

"[Organized religion] has no place within these walls, just like facts don't have a place within an organized religion."

Paraphrased from Superintendent G. Chalmers.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Software engineering isn't really engineering

Damn right. I'm an "engineer" because the employment environment has a title to fill a slot. Some of my best friends are real engineers: Industrial, civil, electrical, computer, mechanical. They earned their title through hard work and certification. They carry real risk. My title is bestowed on my business card due to contract awardednessness. I respect the people who've gotten the title on merit and effort.

All that said, a Software Engineer is a real title, earned and respected as a real engineer should be.

Re: Obviously too old

You beat me to the punch.

Hell, I still have an 8" Wang. It's amount of memory is close to what I have in my head. :-)

On topic: Yes, today's code is soooooo bloated. Has anyone played code golf lately? I know it's an esoteric exercise and the language can get... strange. But the point is to keep on topic, keep it simple, and keep it smart. I'm not suggesting that everyone go back to Assembly, but it seems that the languages and dev spaces have become too heavy for their own good. Am I just too old? See the Wang reference above, I suppose.

The article talks about "unnecessary complication and plain old marketing" which is undoubtedly a driving force in why we are where we are: new, shiny, misunderstood - if not outright deceptive. If it's different, it's gotta be better, right?

FWIW, I shoot a proud 120 on the green grass of 18 holes these days. IRL.

Cloud-managed earbuds sound strange - as a concept, and on a plane

EWW

Enterprise Ear Wax.

Your employer would own them? Share them after you've gone?

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Hitting the fan: The sound that's made is MRRRREEEENNN!

So yes, if you're a Marine.

On topic: I've been an MCP and MS user for over 25 years. My next build will be a *nix of some sort.

Icon:--> because that's how I, and the software, feel.

Bug of the year (so far): Nasty cPanel vulnerability probably exploited as a 0-day

MBM

Meat Beat Manifesto

You've eliminated any interruptions or distractions

You've eliminated any interruptions or distractions

You've eliminated any interruptions or distractions

You've eliminated any interruptions or distractions

We have come to visit you in peace, and with good will!

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Re: Windows 95?

In our pre-NT, pre-XP environment using Win95 for workstations, the enterprise solution was a screensaver lock with a password. It was better than nothing at the time.

Would you like fries with that terminal?

Muchies abound, no matter where you're from

It could be Döners in Deutschland or Taco Bell in Tulsa. Jack in the Box is the west coast version of White Castle in the east. Locals rule, of course. Hell, I'd help crowdfund a California remake of Harold & Kumar, as long as it had some Point Break references. Like the food offered in both places, "they're so bad they're good," especially at 0300, right?

To talk to TFA, I'm glad to see a *nix BORK in the Reg, even if it's statistically a lot less than the our usual exposure. Everything fails at some point as we all know, so it's good to keep honest. Nobody's perfect, but some are just assholes.

Obsolete Google nag drowns out vital bar information at Swedish concert hall

Re: UKOGB well worth seeing

Very much so! We saw them about 10 years ago and it was great fun. For me though, the best part was when the audience members who'd brought their ukes were encouraged to play along with the band.

Britain's atomic brain trust gives itself till 2030 to unpick fusion challenges

In a galaxy far, far, away...

Will Yoda be training the JFDI Knights? I know he's done teaching the JEDI Knights.

Showing the Windows 10 desktop was the yeast they could do

Re: baguette stuffed down their trousers

Stuffing their trousers with extras are what Reiley and Jonesy do. Now, who wants to crush some sandos?

Artemis II blasts off on first crewed lunar mission since Apollo

Orange is the new... something

It's clearly an homage to Luke Skywalker's orange jumpsuit.

Trump remembers to appoint science panel, fills it mostly with tech bros

Yankovitch, Yankovitch

[Off-topic:]

"weird AI-generated images"

Capitalize the first letter here, please! I once went to one of his shows and the Weird Al [band's] generated images on the stage screen were pretty cool. It was a really good show, especially his non-popular, non-satire stuff that he did.

Shameless plug to the man: http://weirdal.com/

Out-of-band getting out of hand as Microsoft pushes hotpatch for Bluetooth

Thanks for reporting this, El Reg!

I am on Win 11 Pro and was affected by this about a week ago, too. At the time, it was a new enough problem where not much was out there yet to research a fix. My MS-branded BT mouse wheel became effectively unusable (e.g. - scrolling up would result in a down scroll; sometimes a doc would just jump around because it sensed some wheel input). While a reboot would likely have helped me out, restarting the BT service is what fixed me [for the time being].

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

From the files of Professor Frink

Why? Why was i programmed to feel pain?

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

"Copilot: Our new elevator control allows us to go sideways."

Please don't conflate Copilot with my beloved Wonkavator. I think I left my coat in there...

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

Tempt fate, or court disaster?

We all know a broken mirror means seven years' bad luck.

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

"This is something that will exaggerate either your abilities, or possibly, if you're not so good at it, it might exaggerate that," he says.

So it's like alcohol, eh? For the D&D folks, fun with stats:

Alcohol/Beer character modifications:

CHA +4

DEX -2

WIS -2

See? It all balances out.

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

Re: I suspect the real purpose

If you know, you Know:

Spooooooon!

Kudos to Edlund; Apologies to Chairface for grouping him in with Musk (but we know it was really Charles who defaced the moon).

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: Fortune and Mason... and expensive red wines

Was that you, 42656e4d203239?

Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams

It's not the SW development time that's the problem...

...it's the remediation time. Discovery of a SW vulnerability is actually pretty quick, and there are lots of methods of detection: white hats, bounty teams, AV/malware subscriptions, RCAs, to name but a few. When there's a discovery, it takes time and money to remediate, and not everyone has an infinite budget or man-hours to throw at the problem.

"AI offers a way to address this, she claimed, as it is far better at tracking and identifying flaws in code. And it would be possible to tackle the mountain of technical debt left by a "rickety mess of overly patched, flawed infrastructure."

AI is *not* going to re-code or magically fix decades of old code. System Owners (i.e. - humans) still need to accept and approve the changes. As I just mentioned, discovery is quick, remediation it slow. AI (or whatever you want to call it these days) may develop or improve *new* code. That's yet to be seen as well, given many other nice articles published in El Reg. All I read here is a pipe dream that's about as close to nuclear fusion is to 2030.

And "no security teams"? That's nuts. So many things wrong with that blanket statement, but that's already been shared in the comments.

CISA used to have teeth, at least for government systems. Flaws can and do get bubbled up to congressional oversight if the risk and the affected system is important enough. To wit: "if you don't fix this, we pull your funding." I say "used to...".

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

Sometimes god makes mistakes, but...

... maybe it has learned from beta testing? https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/23/ai_jesus_peterskapelle/

Icon --> Because if it was proved infallible, then the Clerks were right after all.

Yeah, I know, a little bait and switch above, but here's the other link: Clerks

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Preferred Interactive Bot

I would not mind Mr. DNA. In the LEGO video game world, he's actually quite a potent and useful character!

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

Whoppers Junior

William Safire at Burger King.

Microsoft 'illegally' tracked students via 365 Education, says data watchdog

Ebenezer Goode

@TVU - Thanks for the memories!

________________________________________________________

There's a guy in the place who's got a bittersweet face

And he goes by the name of Ebeneezer Goode

His friends call him 'Ezer and E is the main geezer

And E vibes up the place like no other man could

E's refined, E's sublime, E makes you feel fine

Though very much maligned and misunderstood

But if you know 'Ezer E's a real crowd pleaser

E's ever so good - he's Ebeneezer Goode

You can see that E's mischievous, mysterious and devious

________________________________________________________

For the rest of the lyrics, here.

Icon --> Shamen Fanboi.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: He had delusions of ... Couture?

Slightly off topic here, but:

I'm a fan of Randy Couture. An impressive and accomplished athlete, and he seems like a genuinely nice guy. However, my favorite thing he's done was when he donned a tardigrade suit on Bill Nye Saves the World (S01E05) and states, "Nothing can kill a Tardigrade! ... ... Except a broken heart!"

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: Water Boilers - and hard water

We have hard water where we live, too. Lots of scale and lime builds up if you let it. We have an espresso machine and a Zojirushi kettle for hot water needs, but I also have a large saltwater reef tank that needs its water changed every once in a while. In order to keep the water parameters within tolerances, it's recommended that you make your own saltwater from premix and good water. And by "good water," I mean Reverse Osmosis/De-Ionized water, a.k.a. - RO/DI. Rather than buying gallons of RODI from the local fish store, I bought my own RODI kit and can make my own virtually pure H2O with nothing in it but hydrogen and oxygen.

I use my RODI water in my kettle and espresso machine and haven't had to de-scale in over 15 years. I.e. - no calcium in the RODI water means no scale in the appliances. My neighbor discovered my secret and now comes of every two weeks or so to fill up dedicated jugs for his own espresso machine. It makes for a nice cup of tea and lets the espresso crema really come out smoothly.

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Preserve your local apps

Download your own copies while you can. If nothing else, just run your own local copy of Notepad.

https://win7games.com/#notepad

This worked for me on Win11 to get the classic Photo Viewer back in action:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14312-restore-windows-photo-viewer-windows-10-a.html

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: A technique I learnt in Japan

That's where the elastic, bright orange bungy sprung taut between the chain or disc brake and the left handlebar comes into play.

Wise adage

From my Tae Kwon Do grandmaster:

"Strength is not equal to knowledge, and knowledge is not equal to training. But combine knowledge and training, and one will acquire strength."

I suppose you could substitute "Wisdom" for "Strength" here. However, I also appreciate the distinction D&D and Rolemaster provide for stats, when comparing Wisdom and Knowledge.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

Re: If you still use Github then...

Vote Doctor Doom!

(yes, that is an incredibly obscure reference. you had me at "you know it makes sense".)

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

Re: There's that word again

Agentic: I think it's a pharmaceutical I've been recommended to take because it's got major air time and a cool name.

Icon--> Mine's the one with the pockets also philled [sic] with Ozempic, Zyrtec, Xeljanz, and Kwyjibo.

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Re: Loud thump becomes "Oh &!@*!"

Your tale reminded me of an old TechTV episode where a rare phonograph cylinder broke during an interview.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Account switching via keystrokes. Keep them consistent!

Paraphrased FTA: "Every time you use a keystroke, and angel gets its wings"

I have multiple local accounts for different purposes. Different customers, different profiles, different activities in the day, etc. I'd come to learn the keyboard keystrokes to switch accounts quickly, but after the 23H2 update (maybe even earlier), the account listing would not even have the last account - or even currently logged in account(s) - in order. In fact, the local accounts seem to rotate randomly in the list you can select from. Not only that, and here's the really frustrating part, is that the memory muscle keystrokes had mutated in a way that actually logged me out of one account WITHOUT PROMPT. Not even a "do you want to log out? you have apps running..." prompt.

FWIW - here's my muscle memory keystroke, but now I've been trained, no, conditioned, by MS to focus on which account I want to switch to before I hit that last Enter to commit:

Win | Up Arrow | Enter | Tab | Tab | Space | [Select Account]

The [Select Account] option used to be predictable, almost defined, as in the last user switched to or logged in with.

P.S. - yeah, I know this keystroke sequence may seem a little laborious to some, but I've been laborious my whole life. :-)

P.P.S. - There are other peeves I have with the Win11 UI changing, but this one is currently #1 on my list.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Oh, Linus is running a recent graphics card!

I used to *ride* a GT750. It was water cooled and ran hot at times. It was pretty fast for what is was and when it came out. It also smoked quite a lot.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Re: Not just Moas

Roc on, brother!

Re: Not just Moas

Fossil evidence of moa skeletons indicates that a large raptor was their primary (if not sole) predator. Talon indentations on femurs, for example. Not unlike the Harpy eagle which predates on monkeys today, and their skeletons exhibit similar damage.

New Zealand's relative isolation evolved some very interesting creatures indeed!

Re: Not just Moas

Gwaihir or Thorondor?

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Gwaihir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagles_in_Middle-earth

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Thank you, Jake!

Thanks! That was the program all right. I appreciate your memory. It's probably for the best that I don't remember most of what I did when I was 11. ;-)

Here's the WIKI, folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

A similar youthfully exuberant and expensive lesson

When I was 11 years old, my dad brought home an all-in-one device for his work. This was in 1983, so you can imagine the level of technology involved: 900-baud built-in modem, a monochrome green screen (no idea of the resolution), and built-in keyboard. There was no hard drive: this was a remote terminal device to connect to a mainframe. It even had it's own 800 number* to connect from anywhere in the CONUS. I thought it was the coolest thing.

He saw my enthusiasm, no doubt based on his description of some neat games online and my obsession with the Atari 2600 at the time, and decided to show me how to connect via phone line. He showed me a few basic navigational commands and how to find a help file, but basically left me to play around. In hindsight, that was probably not a good idea, since it was a *BIG* company's mainframe that I was connected to.

After playing Rogue a bunch of times (I loved quaffing potions and killing hobgoblins that were the letter "h" roving around the map), I decided to see what other applications were available. Most were boring to an 11 year old: simple text editors, some financial apps (!!), but there was a weird one called "rebound" or "therapy" or something. It was a quasi-interactive text app that started off with a question like, "how are you today?". You'd respond and it would follow with "how do you feel?" or something to keep the conversation going. I guess someone had coded it up inspired by Joshua from WarGames. Or maybe the fictional Joshua was inspired by this kind of computing at the time?

But being an 11 year old, I put in silly and sometimes profane answers to the prompts. I don't remember what the responses were, but I do remember thinking it was a fun time.

Two weeks later, my dad pulled me aside to show me a bill. It was a lot of money. The thing was, it wasn't for telecom costs. It was the mainframe cost for running that interactive chat app. He told me never to launch that app again, but I could play Rogue as much as I wanted. (I wonder if he had access to the responses I keyed in. If so, he kept it to himself.) Dad had a lot of interesting work!

* - I still remember the 800 number to this day. I've searched against the number but it's no longer pointing to the endpoint of yore.

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: 'Write only'?

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US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

A new form of SCRM

With NIST recently (last few years or so) pushing hard to have government systems include Supply Chain Risk Management as part of its accreditation and authorization process, the event on board the USS Gerald Ford should bring SCRM to the fore in military environments. While SCRM is typically focused on where you source your hardware and software, it should also set its sight on Right To Repair as part of O&M activities. That's part of your Supply Chain, and you undergo a Risk if you can't Manage it.

China accuses Taiwan of running five feeble APT gangs, with US help

It's all just a little bit of history repeating

With apologies to Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads...

China is simply taking a page from the Goebbels handbook of redirection and fake news.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO - "with" vs. "using"

I completely agree. I'm "good with computers" and my wife is "good at using computers". I can build, code, network, and troubleshoot all day, but I usually ask my wife to find something or do research (tbf, she was a lawyer, so trained in that respect). We have disparately different backgrounds and we try to exploit our individual training for the best results.