Posts by Richard Tobin

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Re: Technology question

The battery is certainly the obvious place. It's heavy so a little extra is less noticeable, or perhaps they just reduced the battery capacity. It could even be introduced without the complicity of the pager manufacturer - offer them a good deal on several thousand batteries and they might well take it.

I haven't seen anything indicating how they were triggered. If the software was compromised it could signal to the battery without the need for extra wiring, for example by a pattern of power use.

ESA's Juice probe dances with Earth and Moon before shooting off to Jupiter

Re: "On August 20, the spacecraft will do it all again, this time around Earth"

It took the Apollo missions three days, not three weeks.

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Re: Not as luxurious

"Many years ago while working for a small MSP" - Ruth Davidson?

It's 2024 and we're just getting round to stopping browsers insecurely accessing 0.0.0.0

Re: Why is it a loopback address?

It means all interfaces on this computer when bound as a server address. But this is about it being used as a destination, which should just be disallowed by the operating system.

Why is it a loopback address?

When binding a server address, 0.0.0.0 (INADDR_ANY) means listen on all interfaces. But what is the justification for it being recognised as the local host when used as an address to connect to? I don't recall ever seeing that documented, and what would be the point of 127.0.0.1 if 0.0.0.0 did the same?

Would you rather buy space broadband from a billionaire, or Communist China?

Re: Would you rather buy space broadband from a billionaire, or Communist China?

Well obviously it depends on *which* billionaire.

Faulty instructions in Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V CPUs blow away all security

"If I use this instruction correctly and without any malicious intent on any other RISC 5 processor, then in these machines my code is completely broken?" This makes it rather surprising that the bug was not noticed immediately - or indeed in testing before release. Are there just very few programs that use the affected instructions?

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Simple rule

Always take a photograph before you start.

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Re: Too much complexity

The transputer did indeed demonstrate what could be achieved by a very simple processor in a big array, and the answer was "not much". For several years people enthused over it, but failed to produce useful solutions with it. It became clear that the vast majority of tasks just weren't amenable to being solved that way: they have parts that are inherently sequential, and even when parallelized need access to shared memory.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

glibc??

".... anything running glibc is probably vulnerable. ... The notable exception here is OpenBSD"

Surely the BSDs don't use glibc anyway?

Updated: according to https://www.qualys.com/2024/07/01/cve-2024-6387/regresshion.txt they haven't tested any other libc implementations.

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

386

"many early internet hackers worked on the original MINIX, porting it from x86-16 [sic – this was an 8086 OS] to 68000 and SPARC"

The most significant work (at least in my opinion - I played a part in it) was getting a 32-bit x86 version running, and improving the system libraries to the point where gcc and emacs could run. That's what Linus built the first Linux with.

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

TDK... oxide based...

... they're made out of old SA90 cassettes, aren't they.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

User attitude readjustment tool

Usually abbreviated to "LART".

Starlink suffers 'degraded service' from solar storm but emerges intact

Not that unusual

The storm may have been the "[b]iggest in a long time" but it's not that unusual. It's the first extreme geomagnetic storm in 20 years, but that's because there weren't any extreme storms in the previous solar cycle, which was a rather weak one. The average frequency of extreme geomagnetic storms is 4 every cycle, so it's quite possible that we will have more in the next couple of years while solar maximum lasts.

See https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation for more information.

Meta lets Llama 3 LLM out to graze, claims it can give Google and Anthropic a kicking

Running it with ollama

Somewhat surprisingly I can run the 70b model on my 32GB Mac. As you'd expect, it's very slow: output takes about a minute per token.

The 8b model runs at a reasonable speed.

ASML ships another high NA EUV lithography machine to mystery client

Who wants to make their own chips?

Apple?

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

Photo

Presumably the large white splodge is the sun, vastly larger than it should be because its brightness is overwhelming the camera. The crescent to the left of it is the earth (which should really appear much larger than the sun). And the white blobs above and below the sun are camera artefacts.

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

Re: Too late?

Solar flares have both immediate and delayed effects on the earth. X-rays travel at the speed of light and can cause radio blackouts and also affect satellites in various ways. X-rays may remain at high levels for several hours - in this case the level was above M1 for about an hour and a half. Flares are often also accompanied by "coronal mass ejections" which can cause geomagnetic storms a couple of days later. There doesn't seem to have been a significant CME associated with this flare.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

Compensation?

Will they be compensating people who have been charged for overdrafts and missed payments because of this?

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Re: Oops!

There's no reason to follow symbolic links in a program like this. If the symbolic link is to outside the relevant filesystem (or subtree), it shouldn't be followed. And if it's inside the filesystem, there's no need to follow it because you will look at the destination directory anyway.

Re: Oops!

This problem was encountered pretty much as soon as symbolic links were introduced in 4.2BSD. Each utility that traversed the filesystem (du, find, etc) had to have a flag added to indicate whether symbolic links should be followed. I remember a version of SunOS in the mid-1980s whose cron job to remove old files in /tmp followed symbolic links, with predictable results.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: Security

I think it would only take a handful of design flaws. For example, the printer could trust a length field at the start of the serial number, so a malicious chip - even just an EPROM with more than 32 bytes - could provoke a buffer overflow in the printer firmware.

(I have no reason to suppose that they have such a bug - it's just an example.)

Security

"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network."

If this is true, then HP's printers are dangerously insecure by design.

Open source PostgreSQL named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

SQLite

I wonder what their ranking system does to keep SQLite off the top (it appears to be 11th)? It's run on more or less every phone and computer in the world.

SQLite isn't good for everything, but if it does what you need, it has the great advantage that you don't run a server - the database file is instead mapped into your program.

British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms

Re: "constructed digital models"

The "equipment" in question is a block of railway line about a kilometer long, which is rather difficult to enclose in a cast alloy box, especially if you want a train to travel along it.

Leader of pro-Russia DDoS crew Killnet 'unmasked' by Russian state media

Axis nations

What???

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Re: As George Carlin remarked...

"The curve is in no-way Gaussian" - this statement is meaningless unless you have a non-arbitrary scale of intelligence, which we don't.

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

PCs? That's nothing

There are people out there making adaptors to connect BBC Micros to HDMI monitors: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14430

China reportedly bans iPhones from more government offices

Perhaps it's the other way round

They don't want government employees using devices they can't crack.

X may train its AI models on your social media posts

microLenat

As the Jargon File notes, the standard unit of bogosity is the microLenat. The Lenat itself is far too big for practical use.

RIP Doug.

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Elements

I think they should return to names that are chemical elements with a letter missing, like Xeon and Itanium. There are plenty of possibilities: Ron, God, Odium, Geranium, ...

Amazon, Bing, Wikipedia make EU's list of 'Very Large' platforms

El Reg must have been relieved

to find it wasn't on the list.

Google reminds everyone it too can launch a ChatGPT-like chatbot … waiting list

Waiting list

I was on the list about two hours.

Sandia opens up ultra-fast X-ray cameras to speedy shutterbugs

How much?

I'd like to put one of these on my Raspberry Pi, but you don't mention the price.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

"New" spellings

(This post was rejected - I think that must have been a mistake)

"color, center, aluminum and other new versions of old words"

That's an oversimplification. According to the OED, although "centre" was the form in which it came from Norman French, by Shakespeare's time "center" was prevalent in Britain, and was only replaced by "centre" as a result of Johnson's dictionary. "Aluminium" and "aluminum" were both common in the USA for much of the 19th century; the decline of "aluminium" was assured by a report by the American Chemical Society which recommended "aluminum" around 1890. It also recommended "sulfur"; but was less successful with "iodin".

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Trust

"Maybe you trust your brother. Me? I'm not so trusting." As usual, the question is not whether you trust your brother, but whether you trust everyone he trusts. And everyone they trust...

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Core memory

I think I've mentioned this before - we had a PDP/11 with 32KW of core memory and the rest semiconductor. Some decorators pushed the big red button, and when we turned the power back on the system continued running, since the operating system was all in core, but the user processes died one by one as most of them were in semiconductor memory.

Block Fi seeks bankruptcy protection as 'shocking' FTX contagion spreads

Re: Let me test my understanding of all this

I think you're misinterpreting "protection". Bankruptcy is not primarily for the benefit of the owners of the company, but to ensure an orderly payout of its assets if it can't be saved.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Parody

"One laid-off staffer was in charge of managing the system which controls badge access to Twitter's buildings. He was called back in to help regain access to HQ by those who had locked themselves out."

That was a joke.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

And of course...

... the moron has fired him: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592186302379982849

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

I'm told that in the world of Air Traffic Control the phrases used are "loss of separation" and "metallic contact".

World Cup apps pose a data security and privacy nightmare

Re: Just buy the cheapest smart phone you can get

Presumably to install the app you need to have connected the phone to your Google or Apple account, so you'd better have disposable versions of them too.

If you think 5G is overhyped, wait till you meet 5.5G

I don't think the way it's been sold is the problem at all. Most people probably don't even know that it can be used for anything other than mobile phones.

I have a 5G mobile phone, and generally get a good signal. The only "problem" is that it makes no difference at all - nothing I do benefits from the extra speed.

Moon has been drifting away from Earth for 2.4 billion years, rocks reveal

Re: those further away than geostationary orbit tend to depart (eventually).

Without the moon, we would still have tides, caused by the sun. They would be smaller, and happen at the same time every day. You can see the tidal effect of the sun in the difference between spring tides (when the sun and moon are aligned) and neap tides (when they are at right angles). If I recall correctly solar tides would be about a quarter as big as lunar ones.

Yes, tidal forces transfer rotational kinetic energy from the earth to the moon. Drag in the oceans causes the high tide not to be perfectly aligned with the moon, resulting in the gravitational force between them not being exactly through the earth's centre.

Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs

Re: Smart devices for dummies

If you want to transmit information, why use someone else's lights?

trapped in the Upside Down

umop apisdn

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

Re: Old School

Copying down notes does indeed help you remember, but what goes along with that is that the lecturer should also be writing the material on a blackboard, to match the rate at which students can copy it.

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

You gave them your email address when you bought a burger?

What did you expect?