* Posts by W.S.Gosset

2344 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2016

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

W.S.Gosset

Re: Ah ha

Trivial example which doesn't require HUGE amounts of context:

While jackrabbited unexpectedly into turning around a debacle: my (inherited) senior exec in charge of Client Services had been singing me to the high heavens for a year+ for turning things round, but all the time raging that she/her dept wasn't allowed to simply visit customers LIKE THEY *NEEDED* TO DO!!! (Which was true.) Per her: I was A GENIUS (? just common sense) but she/they were CRIPPLED by evil senior mgt.

(Looking back on it now, of course, I recognise the age-old standard tactics of two-faced wannabe-elite/down-treaders: Drama! Unjustly confined! Someone higher status holding us back, holding us down! Good&Evil! Black&White! Us&Them! I'm fighting The Good Fight to help the plebs! THIS ONE SINGLE THING! If only SPECIAL PEOPLE LIKE US were in charge, everything would be fixed! etc)

I finally cracked the pushback at top-level: walked up in the open office, announced with everyone hearing that FINALLY she/dept were allowed to visit clients, unrestricted budget.

She went white.

Froze.

Box of spiders in her face.

Then what the psychs call a "microexpression" of sudden twist into what could only be called pure hatred.

I had Become EVIL.

I had pulled her out of The Narrative into Reality. And into real-world Consequences: personal responsibility.

Nothing to hide behind. She'd actually have to do what she said.

Not just The Story anymore.

(I really wish I had a video of that few seconds. The REVEAL was incredible. Enlightening. A mask torn off unexpectedly. Hard to communicate to people without taking forever or sounding in summary-attempt like a nutter.

Thing is, I saw a LOT of that. This is just the quickest no-context-needed trivial example.)

Suffice to say: from that point on, she never visited any client despite having banged the table many many times a week for the year+, nor allowed any staff to. She was in looneytoons caricature mode of hatred vs me (quite surreal to go from Hero! to TDS-alike in an instant of solving someone's problem), worked hard to screw over the whole group, resigned later to take a more senior position elsewhere, and has gone from strength to strength ever since.

W.S.Gosset

Ah ha

.. finally, a clear, genuine reason for the OS/2 debacle/implosion. None of the tech reasons stand up for a moment ("why didn't they just do that, then?"), but BOY have we seen endless corporate suicides via this:

>It had promised those customers OS/2.[...] and can attest that most of those customers neither knew nor cared

Until you've worked at exec level in the big boys you CANNOT BELIEVE the sheer anti-reality obsessiveness of the insularity. Inspiring stories trumpeted at each other is the ONLY reality, and the level of pushback you get from even considering the generalities of current market reality is beyond insane.

But if you try going a step further and actually suggest TALKING to clients' front-line, the actual determiners of what succeeds, (incl. potential clients), you suddenly flip into them losing what control they have, the mask dropping, and as sershal meeja has it: "REEEEEEE!!!!"

Mad white-out panic rejection.

"Rejection", there, doesn't begin to address the DEGREE of the emotion. Or the reaction. Or the cold campaigning thereafter to snuff it, snuff even the possibility.

Imagine an English person if a cloud of wasps swarmed the table, or if they walked into a massive web and a dozen spiders dropped on their face.

It's like that. Screaming, flailing, panicking, attacking, fleeing.

Absolutely surreal to watch. Every time. The resulting rationalisation gymnastics, likewise.

So, yeah: ignoring the pointy-end, or even the customers, or even just the general market, in favour of ticking a random Virtue box on an internal list in senior mgt --even if the necessary consequence is the evaporation of that product-- makes absolute sense, matches endless empirical reality, and finally provides a concrete, valid reason for the OS/2 debacle.

Thank you, Liam.

Reminder: Infostealer malware is coming for your ChatGPT credentials

W.S.Gosset

Re: Coming for your ChatGPT credentials

>LLM application: never interesting

They can be useful for surfacing deliberately obfuscated information sources, original documents, etc.

The narrative obsessives in AI are new so don't have the experience/surrounding subculture reminders, to realise that they have to block primary sources too, not just spin/enforce a story.

So you can use AI to get around experienced fact blockers. Or at least, pull a multi-week/-month hunt down to 10 minutes.

W.S.Gosset

Other way round is where the danger is

Personally, I'm just waiting for the enterprising malware boys to link up AI to auto-attack/drive the various probings, injections, etc. and to auto-create appropriate phish/social hacks' content.

That will create a stepchange in risk/vulnerability.

Particularly for specifically targeted targets/industries. Such as State actors' strategic or tactical priorities.

Bank's struggle to replace Atos threw system back to dark ages

W.S.Gosset

Re: Planning (what's that?)

>parts and systems made by different contractors didn't even fit physically -- notably, high pressure piping had to be hammered into alignment before it would connect up.

This is actually standard in the financial markets. The hammer is called Microsoft Excel.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

W.S.Gosset
FAIL

Re: It is not left wing extremists

>usual claptrap about fascist Nazis in Germany being socialists

Hitler & co were far-left.

If you'd tried declaring otherwise pre-50s, you'd have been regarded as having profound mental problems.

When the left realised that "the world" was outraged by their behaviour when exposed in large, a major revisionism campaign kicked off, starting mid-WWII in USA, led initially by the Frankfurt School.*

The revisionism worked.

* who, amusingly & tellingly, fled Germany for asylum in the US, then immediately they were safe, turned around & started railing at the US for being totalitarian.

GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks

W.S.Gosset

Re: Forks have always annoyed me

Peer Repute.

Memorably first identified & laid out by Eric Raymond ~2000. For those who don't know him, Eric coined the term "Open Source", wrote most of your Emacs modes, maintained the Jargon File, and your phone's GPS probably runs his code (he ran across an irritation and fixed it by completely rewriting everything).

"Homesteading the Noosphere"

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/index.html#id2764205

> In this paper, I examine in detail the property and ownership customs of the open-source culture. Yes, it does have property customs — and rather elaborate ones too, which reveal an underlying gift culture in which hackers compete amicably for peer repute. This analysis has large implications for anyone interested in organizing large-scale intellectual collaborations.

Definitely worth a read if you haven't already. A lot of what is now "accepted wisdom" re open source came from this collection of papers under the initial "Cathedral and the Bazaar" (qv).

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

W.S.Gosset

Re: Think big!

Ditto oil, but captured in chemical battery form so readily transportable & delayable.

India to make its digital currency programmable

W.S.Gosset

Re: Programmable vs Offline-exchangeable

That's... actually... a VERY good point.

And not one I've ever seen raised explicitly before...

W.S.Gosset

Put it this way:

If the objective of CDBCs was Currency, they'd use a Coin.

They've used Contracts.

So the objective is not Currency.

W.S.Gosset

The EU one is built on Ethereum so you know straight away that that "regulation" is a lie. It's programmable from the outset.

The draft regs are clearly intended to mislead people.

Also note that every presentation I've seen (same for each of the EU, UK, & US teams, incidentally) has said almost nothing about currency aspects; instead going on at great length and excitement about its programmability. This is explained via detailed examples showing the level of control/permissions over money, transactions, savings, & hence people you get as a result.

W.S.Gosset

Re: A tyrant's dream

Also mentioned as a capability+objective/intended-outcome in presentations by the EU, UK, & US teams.

Microsoft's Notepad goes from simple text editor to Copilot conspirator

W.S.Gosset

Re: No No No

And it's not just Microsoft, either. There's a progressive building-up of explicitly anti-user changes in UI/functionality across most of the software development culture. "Make a change! Impress my peers!" rather than "solve a problem/improve a task/consider the use-case/consider the human".

W.S.Gosset

Re: No No No

^programmers^people

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

W.S.Gosset

>Please tell us who you work for.

It's not an Australian company/govdept, or he would have written "and I sneer at security and privacy".

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

W.S.Gosset
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Re: Read the stories

Andy Herzfeld, IIRC.

Somewhere in there is the story of Burrell Smith swapping graphics cards on a _running_ machine, timing it so perfectly based on his knowledge of the code+hardware that the machine didn't crash, just kept on running: oblivious. The man was a god. Very unfairly treated.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

W.S.Gosset

Duckduckgo uses the Bing search corpus, if you'd like a different frontend to the same rankings. I can confirm it's not popping up Chat panels as of this afternoon (at least, not on Firefox).

Caveat: he threw his business model in the bin last year, and is now Censoring results.

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

W.S.Gosset

Re: Some light relief

Wrong country, wrong politics, wrong motivation. Now go take your frogpills.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Some light relief

> no evidence

Suggest you read this, above: #c_4798054

I did look at one group of those at the time. 3-simultaneous and the 1 final. Trump's actual cases.

The first 3: judge announced "New rule: all declared witnesses must have submitted affidavits -- no affidavits, therefore no evidence, therefore no case -- The End." So for the next&final 1, they submitted affidavits, judge announced "New rule: if you submit affidavits the witnesses can't testify -- no witnesses, therefore no evidence, therefore no case -- The End." Surreal but that's the way US "law" can be gamed in practice/practise.

.

> Why do you keep saying tech.report?

Because tech.report. Hence I used the term "tech.report".

Remember, I was pointing out to people some of the actual context, for why emotions are validly running pretty hot over there. The tech.report is NOT a he-said/she-said (unlike the tangential replies here), and has some IT-specific info professionally meaningful to commentards.

Thus: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.240678/gov.uscourts.gand.240678.1681.0.pdf

His informal run thru it, when unsealed 2yrs later: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/06/14/security-analysis-of-the-dominion-imagecast-x/

Sorry, I thought I'd posted that initially.

Solid credentials: Prof. J.Alex Halderman, who is responsible for some major security work on which you rely daily eg https, plus related stuff like the free LetsEncrypt certificate service. Here's his wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Alex_Halderman; and here he is a few times right here on ElReg: https://search.theregister.com/?q=halderman. Non-trivial competence and authoritativeness. Re Bias: he's anti-Trump, as you'll see from the ElReg articles etc.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Some background

Alert readers would have noticed that I didn't change the topic, but rather Easterly did.

Likewise, alert readers would remember I was merely providing relevant context re the level of emotions over there.

W.S.Gosset

>geolocation data

Worth noting that this can be less useful/accurate than you might expect.

For example, as I discovered tracing & discovering an Australian govt standard medical data breach, at least some of Salesforce's main email servers (*.mta.salesforce.com):

* identify themselves as being in San Francisco CA ("/C=US/ST=California/L=San Francisco/O=salesforce.com"),

* are set to San Francisco CA time,

* but geolocate as being in Francisco, Indiana

W.S.Gosset
Happy

Re: Some light relief

Side note: you accidentally helped me with a head-scratcher. While checking Dates, I tripped over an explanation for why that tech.report is so professionally damning about the security/hijackability, then suddenly flips and starts making bizarrely disingenuous political claims that there's no evidence it's actually been done. Doubly bizarre because the lead author has done previous court-submitted analyses of election machines with far more restricted attack surfaces, wherein he's demonstrated it was easy to eliminate all evidence of major election manipulation -- tidying up logs, etc. So he knows damn well he's talking foolishness, and he's got one hell of a CV, so what on earth?

Turns out he's a major Clinton etc. supporter. He kicked off this tranche of work as an anti-Trump effort.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Some light relief

"odd"... Mate, you haven't seen "odd" until you've paid close attention to a US case's actual day-to-day Process. "Surreal" and "insane" and "lunaticly decoupled from anything remotely connected to law let alone justice" are more the mot juste. Example I saw just yesterday, a climate scientist suing someone for defamation for referencing "flaws" in his work, has successfully prevented defence witness testimony for years now, on the basis that the witnesses know something about the topic. Ex post, that will just look like he was in the right, since no evidence tendered in defence.

In this case, the tech.report was sealed by a Court 2 years before. Everyone knew what was in it, but it could not be used in evidence. It was only unsealed by a superior Court some months after the Dominion-vs-Fox case was successfully won due to no evidence tendered in defence.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Some background

Alert readers may note some discrepancies between the tech.report and Easterly's declarations.

W.S.Gosset
Thumb Up

Some light relief

For a quick laugh, check out this short inclusion in the tech.report:

Election Headquarters & Server Room -- Site Inspection

Best not have coffee in your mouth. It's only 3 paragraphs but it's like Quentin Tarantino wrote the Christmas Panto version of an On-Call story.

W.S.Gosset

Some background

Swatting is toxic but ElReg readers may be unaware of just why emotions are running high over there.

Note what she very oddly chose to bring up then emphasise:

>work tirelessly to ensure their security and integrity. We at CISA, along with our partners, will continue to support these election heroes as they work every day to safeguard our most sacred democratic process.

A/ General Note: This wildly overflown black&white us&"them" heroes-vs-evil melodramatic language is characteristic of activist deceit/manipulation.

B/ Tech.Note: It is over 6mths since the public release of the tech.investigation of the Dominion election machines. First & only one with hands-on access. Readers of this site might understand the implications of some of the larger findings re Easterley's oddly-referenced topic: Election Security:

* You get full Root access + tools if you plug in an external keyboard.

* If you have a staff card, for your convenience you get this by just triggering the onscreen keyboard.

* All election setup data (eg candidate names) is centrally prepared then distributed & manually loaded by Zip files. Which are mini file systems. Dominion wrote their own Zip file extractor. It has full Zip Slip compatibility. It will place any file any where in the file system with whatever self-assigned permissions it comes with. This includes the core election app binaries. So any BadActor at any point in the distribution process can invisibly hijack every machine downstream of that point. This will only be detectable on site if people can read the QR codes on their printed ballot.

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

W.S.Gosset

Job Description

His uni site has an excellent job description, which he recommended for use in hiring engineers.

Jaguar Priest

Florida man slams 'tyranny' of central bank digital currencies in re-election bid

W.S.Gosset

Re: Hilarious

TDS999

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

W.S.Gosset

Re: One of the last waves of the pandemic

>"common cold" is rhinoviruses

Actually it's a whole fleet of viruses: it's a catch-all term for symptoms, not cause. IIRC typically rhinoviruses are about 40% of colds, coronaviruses about 20%.

W.S.Gosset

Re: sooo,,,

Minor correction:

>simian DNA in a lot of them

A/ bacterial DNA, not simian. E.coli, IIRC. Vaccines are farmed, not manufactured, and the shots via un-regulated Process 2 (ie, all non-trial ones) contained chopped up bits of the growth DNA, 30%+ by volume (for Pfizer; Moderna is lower). Equivalent to eating a serving of mashed potato but it's one-third soil+manure, all mixed thru homogeneously. Confirmed widely, including by Canada's regulator. 100 billion+ fragments of plasmid DNA per dose, 7% of which will be integrated into cells' own DNA as a viable replicating mutant, per empirical testing. (~20% integrate but most aren't viable.) Every mRNA recipient is now a chimera.

If you're British you don't need to worry about it, though. The Brit regulator has stated that it hasn't tested for it, that it will never test the Covid vaccines for it, and that in fact they've never tested ANY vaccine EVER for any non-payload constituents. So you can relax.

...

B/ All of them, not some.

People power made payroll support in putrid places prodigiously perilous

W.S.Gosset

Re: Somebody needs to cut the sh*t out

A/ I read that as the (unpaid) strikers, not the would-be payees.

B/ Having seen a couple of these up close, it's not the genuine workers who are doing the jostling/violence, it's the pretend-worker heavies who are employed/paid directly by the union.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Explosion proofing

Motorbike armour inserts!

Just occurred to me. That'd be ideal for this sort of shock.

The soft, thin, top-rated ones are materials-science marvels of shock-dispersion. A startling demo of their effectiveness is to drop a ball of it, and it just lands pat -- not even the slightest suggestion of bounce.

I can vouch for its intended effectiveness, too. I was sold by the demo, hit the deck about 12mths later on fresh oil at Donnington doing over 80mph, and didn't really notice: not even any soreness, let alone bruises.

Either buy a slab or save money by contacting the mfr asking for rubbish offcuts.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Explosion proofing

An easier trick might be to take a leaf out of the hi-fi boys' book:

Cut squash balls in half, mount the table legs on top of them.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

W.S.Gosset

Re: Orwell would have been proud of the use of language

Canada did precisely that during Covid.

Nuked all bank accounts, investments, and access to cash for everyone on the Trucker Convoy AND everyone who donated, eg via their GoFundMe.

(Thanks for that link. Never heard of it, but it sounds spot on. 1984 + 6)

W.S.Gosset

LOC- Letter of Credit

Data point re Importance:

Approx. two thirds of all global metals & minerals commodities' production and supply absolutely depends on, runs on, lives & dies on LOCs.

A good friend of mine was able to establish and build out what is now post-takeover Glencore's global Nickel operation, just by (finally) convincing the bean counters to extend the expiry date on their standard LOC. 1yr->5yrs... global dominance.

In case anyone's doubting the importance of purpose-bound payments' "minor" technicalities' impact on the greater scale of things...

W.S.Gosset
Stop

Deceit is a Black Flag

>His answer was that binding CBDCs to specific purposes is not the intention of such digital currencies.

Bullshit.

It's been front&centre on every. single. industry. CDBC. presentation I've seen.

Usually with detailed examples of preventing undesirable purchases or restricting undesirables full-stop. "Guiding behaviour" is a euphemism some of them like. A lot.

And --just in the presentations alone-- from the time spent on it and the emphasis and the language and the excitement and the bodylanguage fervour, it is clearly the actual primary goal.

Another observation leading to precisely the same necessary implication: if they genuinely wanted a currency rather than microcontrol over people's choices/social sculpting, they'd have simply used a digicoin and the project would have been over on day 1. Digicoins satisfy every _financial_ objective of a currency. They did not, so they do not.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

W.S.Gosset

Re: Last sighting of Yoshi

Sounds like a standard Project Review.

W.S.Gosset
Thumb Up

Re: Lots of wannabe timelords out there

>Think cron.

OK, I just did.

...

CRON!! CRO-OONNN!! Dour god of the famed Comam the Barbariam!. CRO-OOOONNNNN!!!!

W.S.Gosset

Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage

An even better tip:

Before running a new DELETE or UPDATE, just replace the first word with SELECT and inspect the result.

Even just checking a few hundred rows usually flags any errors.

As does the Temp space barfing on what was was supposed to be a precision strike :) (Monster predicates: 2 step: take just a # of rows AND precede with the same statement with COUNT(..) wrapping the col.list.)

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

W.S.Gosset

Re: Notepad++ Linux alternative

> I have seen many people say 5 is the most useful version. (eg, runs games & apps which later versions can't)

> Perhaps try upgrading wine by reducing version #?

W.S.Gosset
Headmaster

Also has an English (British?) colloquial meaning:

https://www.wordnik.com/words/scoff :

>from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

intransitive verb To eat (food) quickly and greedily.

intransitive verb To eat greedily.

intransitive verb To show or express derision or scorn.

intransitive verb To say in a derisive manner.

from The Century Dictionary.

noun Food; “grub.”

Cf. Billy Bunter.

(Icon courtesy of Greyfriars School)

W.S.Gosset

Copypaste a (tiny) Win version and run it via Wine.

See my tech.notes above, incl.a twiddle for using the XP version: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/12/06/veteran_editors_notepad_and_geany/#c_4771973

W.S.Gosset

Re: I like Notepad++

On the slight chance you're not already aware:

CygWin is brilliant too for bringing all your shell tools across. ("WHICH boxes are being hit?" fgrep "MalwareControlIP" *.log | cut -f1 | sort | uniq -- bingo)

(Newer versions are going backwards like most software: you now have to _manually_ select for inclusion many of the core tools, like diff, cmp, etc)

W.S.Gosset

Re: Notepad++ Linux alternative

>Platform

Oh, and I'm using the 32bit version, just copied over from my XP box. Which might make a difference.

So on First-Run, prefix "wine blah" with, IIRC, "WineArch=32bit WineReference=~/.wine-32bit wine blah" ; then all subsequent runs, drop the WineArch. This creates a 32bit copy of the core Win libraries in a directory "next to" the default 64bit ones in ~/.wine, and WineReference tells wine which to use. ~500mb extra diskspace.

If you add this as an entry in MintMenu rather than sticking a symlink on your desktop, you'll discover to your delight that making ANY changes to MintMenu's default config leads to it locking your machine every 5-10mins as it crashes, then seizes focus for a dialog asking if you want to restart it, which you can inadvertently cancel every time it does so mid-typing and just feeds the buffered text stream into the dialog. See "not ready for desktop", above.

W.S.Gosset

Re: Notepad++ Linux alternative

I found notepadqq far too subfunctional. It's a Potemkin notepad++: same pictures/graphics, but missing core (basic) functionality.

Notepad++ in Wine is ~identical to native Win, though.

Diffs: irritating extra corona of fuzz-shading surrounding the Find box, closing Find doesn't auto-restore focus to main window, sometimes re-open only restores Unsaved tabs, sometimes Recent Files list doesn't record newly opened files. These are minor irritations for me, though, relative to core functionality; YMMV.

Platform: Linux Mint 21.2 (which is NOT "ready for the desktop!"!), Wine...6 IIRC. Wine is yet another tool going backwards as coders disappear up their own fundament -- I have seen many people say 5 is the most useful version. Perhaps try upgrading wine by reducing version #?

W.S.Gosset

Re: EMACS or death

+1

Also, vi is the dog's nuts for editing existing files fast & fafflessly. Need to change the next 3 list items? c3t, , <type>, ESC, "Next!", /...

W.S.Gosset

Re: Notepad++ FTW

>mapping

If you only have a few, you could DIY.

Eg,I used the macro+keybinding to put in a bizarrely missing functionality: swapping 2 characters. Ctrl-T on Emacs, IIRC. Not perfect: it uses/wipes the clipboard (can anyone identify a less-destructive method?), but it does the job.

Scores of US credit unions offline after ransomware infects backend cloud outfit

W.S.Gosset
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Re: Physical is more resilient than digital.

>digital should be treated as an unreliable luxury layer on top of a core physical service

Well put.

Very well put.

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

W.S.Gosset

Re: NerdRageQuit

>one thing all criminals have in common

All criminals that we becomeaware of...

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

W.S.Gosset

Australia too

Australia's my.gov.au site went Live for ~36hrs with no https access.

~100% of ~25m people's compulsorily added medical, financial, tax, pension (superannuation), etc data.