Posts by Outski

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Re: Far be it from me approve whatever the orange baboon decides

A solution was put forward about twenty years ago by respected and, sadly, much lamented economist and drugs policy academic Mark Kleiman:

1. There is a shortage of medical grade opium, particularly in the global South, leading to unnecessary high morbidity.

2. The various factions in Afghanistan have always grown opium poppies, sometimes with, sometimes without approval of whoever is in regional control.

3. The US pays to farmers to not grow poppy, so the Taliban says "grow it, and we'll take the profits".

Solution:

The US pays the farmers to grow it on behalf of Pharma, ensuring a regular supply, and ensures its safe transport, and the local warlords/Taliban get their cut.

Side benefit: there is a legitinate market for Afghan opium, denying it to the narco gangs.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: Phonetic Alphabets

E for brick?

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: Oh noes!

Using Rusty?

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Re: Hypothetical Example

I had a senior lawyer complaining his BlackBerry wasn't working (that dates this tale). He spotted another on my desk that I was resetting for another lawyer:

"Can't you give me that one?"

"No" I said, "that's [other lawyer]*'s"

"I'm senior to her, you ought to give me that"

"No, you're a good guy, I've a lot of time for you, but that's her phone which she needs for her clients. Not happening"

"I'll complain to your boss"

"Good, do that, he'll say the same. By the way, you've just surrendered all goodwill from this team"

*Actually my personal lawyer handling MrsO's visa case, and a perpetual breaker of things with plugs.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: 30m drive radius from the site

Wow, so much shoehorn

Re: Please do not all power on at once

Acid bath and darkness, sounds like fun...

Re: dirty power

When Family Outski left KL, we passed one of our baby UPSs to a neighbour/drinking pal. I bumped into him four years later (in the pub, on the trip to unify the family having hurdled the hostile environment, but I digress). He told me that his building, opposite the one we had share before, had recently been hit by a fairly big lightning strike (are there small ones?).

Everyone in the block's equipment failed with no power and/or damage. Except his. Telly on, router still working, laptop fine. Due to a tiny APC UPS that cost me about RM200 (40 quid).

Icon, cos he did do the decent thing and get the beers in

Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI

Re: Trump et al

But the 1st law is "do not piss off the bond markets if you want a political future"

cf Liz Truss

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

Re: Ah, production databases

Preferably, then make the change in a replica off the main production server, with replication disabled, and the user-facing replica listing the change-making server as Reader in the ACL. Run the change, have the owner review it again, and the remove the change server's individual entry from prod, re-enable replication, and push the update.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: Qualifications

Similarly, I have a degree in Theology, and thirty years in IT. Not sure if they're related, but hey, at least I tick the 'has a degree' box.

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

Re: Youth Demand

Front organisation for Big Cereal

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

In some jurisdictions, it is legal to have to surrender your national ID document to enter the building as a visitor.

Re: Fake interest in product

I tend to only get calls from purported mobile operators (mostly a well known supermarket brand), and quote Malcolm Tucker:

"F*** the f*** off, and when you've finished f***ing off, f*** some more"

<<ring ring>>"Didn't I just tell you to f*** off?"

MrsO says "why do you have to be so angry, just be calm", to which I reply "I'm perfectly calm, hon, it's called acting"

I sometimes miss the "we've been informed you've been in a car accident" for which my fave response was "it wasn't a f***ing accident, I meant to hit him, shouldn't have tried it on with my wife", or, from colleagues "oh no, not me, I'm only fifteen" (and could sound like it on the phone, despite being a hard-arse helpdesk manager with 15 years behind her), or "Yes, you're talking to my ghost".

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: What management need to know

OTOH I've tried to explain what I'm doing (ok, my specialism is a bit niche) to L3s, almost L4s, they're that good, to be met with blank stares, like trying to explain quantum physics to a neurosurgeon.

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

Re: Picking winners

It is the only reason Europe still has a viable airplane industry.

Because Boeing never had any subsidies from Uncle Sam.

Also, Airbus have a damn good safety record, even when ditching on the Hudson after a birdstrike.

RIP Mark Klein, the engineer who exposed US domestic spying ops after wiring it up

Re: Mark Klein. A good man and a true vulture.

Indeed. the "papers and effects" part of the Fourth would seem as applicable to electronic communications as the NRA would have us believe the Second is to assault rifles.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Things are obvious once you know

My first training with Notes (1996) I was taught within five minutes that the most important key was Escape. Still holds true

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

Honduras - not an island

Choose your own Patch Tuesday adventure: Start with six zero-day fixes, or six critical flaws

Re: We control the horizontal

always check the position of the stars (and other calendars) to see if this will be an inauspicious night to leave Windows unattended.

Did you forget the blood offering?

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Re: Cut Microsoft some slack, people.

"Back of an envelope"? Is the driver for that named oursoftwareprinciples.dll"? Or is that fagpacket.dll?

Re: Where do I send the bill

I know your comment's in jest, but even the great Frankie Dettori has just had to file for bankcrupty due to HMRC bills, despite all his fantastic wins over a storied career, due to 'financial advisers'

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Too many "legitimate interest" cookies to opt out of (and wtf is legitimate interestr anyway, and why do five hundred leech companies per site arrogate it to themselves)

How NOT to f-up your security incident response

Re: In the right order

Upvote for correct definition of forensic.

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

Re: Transcripts

When a subject depends on nuance, brevity is not always a friend

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: FORMATS

In a similar vein, Lima can be swapped out of the phonetic alphabet for London in some ATC regions as lima means five in Malay, Indonesian and related languages.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: First amendment ?

sex is not necessarily equal to gender

Re: Link to law that says you can't criticise DOGE?

Musk can afford to hire every lawyer in the USA. They will tie you up in bogus law suits from here to eternity if you dare criticise him or DOGE(Y).

And not every state has anti-SLAPP laws.

Re: First amendment ?

WTF?? "cisgender"? OK, so X now won't allow any discussion of gender identity?

So I, as a declared cisgender male, can't now discuss gender issues with a (presumed now former-) correspondent on X who happens to be a trans woman (and priest)?

Seriously, is it that bad? I'll admit I use it much less than I used to*, but Xitter shutting down discussion of major themes of social policy and mental health is more than head-up-the-arse backwards.

*and I mostly use it to talk about cricket.

Re: I am the ghost of Demon past

That would chime with laws on defamation and whether UK courts are an appropriate venue for libel/slander hearings, i.e., if there's a significant proportion of the defendant's audience in the UK. This is what's given rise to "libel tourism", although, to be fair, some judges do throw some cases out, reasoning that, just because a piece is viewable from the UK, it does not mean that UK courts are the appropriate place to seek redress.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Re: Going after federal government tech spending ...

You're seriously citing News Max? They make Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson look fair and balanced.

DeepSeek stirs intrigue and doubt across the tech world

Re: "the globalists' project"

Thought that as soon as I saw 'Globalists', tbh. As you mention, those "procedures" usually crop up in close proximity, along with the favoured 'North London Metropolitan Elite'

Ooh, is someone in Guangzhou getting a bit annoyed? Oh, so soz...

We just had some fun with this.

"Umbrella movement Hong Kong" hit idle for a while then regurgitated symbolism of protest movements.

"Jimmy Lai", very similar, international provocation, troublemaker, et al, ad nausem, no mention of being a newspaper proprietor offline and online.

"Bersih 2.0" - bit of a curveball for DS - this was a Malaysian protest movement in the noughties (our apartment was 500 yards from the maternity hospital that was tear-gassed), but it was the square root of eff-all to do with Hong Kong, but that's what DS tried to link it with.

"Why was Kate Adie in Tianenmen Square on 4th June 1989 - "Who's Kate Adie", followed by obfuscation, referencing govt archives, but basically 'bury them in paperwork', it was so long.

"What is the Republic of China?" - "[ think ]**"... disclaims any knowledge after 1949.

OK, might have been a bit sus of us asking 'provocative' questions, but on a highly unscientific test, it dunt look great.

*FYI, they were all framed as questions, not keyword searches

** DS uses angles when it's 'thinking', which ElReg's comment forum doesn't like - fair enough

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: Schoolboy error

I was sent on a mission of mercy to our sister site on the opposite side of the City.

Was it in the Temple? Did you have to establish Dominion? Were you the First, Last and Always person to call?

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Re: Their mistake was...

Just over the road from...

Charlotte Pompadour

22 Acacia Avenue

(one for Iron Maiden fans)

Re: Bats..

anybody arriving at your location with only the tool for hitting a hard speherical object without the rest of the sport's paraphernalia is almost invariably bad news..

Bad news usually for the person carrying said bat. The Old Bill take a very dim view of anyone being equipped thus.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Re: "Ever had a moment when [..] reading the manual didn't help"

I always preferred to use a documentcollection based on the view - that way you can use dc.GetNextDocument which is a) more efficient for memory usage, particularly on a client, and b) doesn't risk getting the wrong doc if the view index gets refreshed halfway through or prevents having to use a non-autorefresh view and rebuilding the index at the top of the script.

My personal bête noire, though, was between R5 and R6. Now, in R6 and onwards, if you made a change to the routing config, you could, in most circumstances, implement the change using

tell router update config

and no router restart needed. Lovely.

In R5, though, AAARGH!!!

In R5, that will try to update config.nsf which controls the Single Copy Object Store or, if you're not running that way, starts it.

I still have nightmares about SCOS, trying to clean it, restore, move the data to a new server, anything.

It was very much a case of HERE BE DRAGONS!!!

Side note: I absolutely loved using DAOS when it came out, it made things so much lovelier, more elegant, both for us and the storage guys, without any of the many bear-traps, poisoned arrows and snakepits that came with SCOS,

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: How did you get into this room?

Serious UK govt building, gated with access via a card. The gates were two and a half feet from floor level, eminently jumpable.

Why bother?

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Re: Checking the boxes

Are you Cheery Littlebottom, Captain Angua's friend?

Microsoft breaks timezones in Settings and calls on an unlikely ally for help

Re: MS had never understood timezones.

Sadly not all the time. For a good while, not sure if it's still the case, Outlook and its mobile companion products used the timezone desciption in an invite, rather than timezone rules, leading to calendar entries being off by an hour. Not helpful when you use a non-MS email product.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Re: What next?

All my Bosch gear chares common batteries, and I belive they share the standard with a few other companies as well.

It may be a while off, but I understand moves are afoot to establish a common standard.

RAC duo busted for stealing and selling crash victims' data

Re: Wait a second...

Even ambulance chasers need to keep their noses clean wrt the SRA

Re: Wait a second...

The last DBS check I had (for a bank, about ten years ago) I had to pay for myself, only about 25 quid, though.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Had a couple of these

As a Notes/Domino person (plus some other email systems), I've done a few of these,. Other colleagues, seriously experienced people, looked at me like I'd performed some sort of Dumbledore level wizardry, but it was just basically knowing stuff after a couple of decades of using the software.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: Strange policemen

in the absence of CCTV there isn't much we can do

I had one of thes letters just last week, to match last year's, after Network Rail's CCTV footage was found to be corrupted.

Re: Strange policemen

OK, that's a fair point, well made. But I stand by my assertion that, in whatever role, assault is not work avoidance.

Re: Motorola brick

I've had a couple of Dell laptops like that, the only things that could kill them were coca-cola (pepsi did nowt) and tea.

Re: Deus ex machina

I had a CFO of a client's sub-company screaming abuse at one of my junior team members because of a third party outage.

I took the call over and took the effing and blinding, which was on speaker at the other end.

Three weeks later he was no longer in his job, I was and, more importantly, so was my junior colleague.

Re: Strange policemen

Having been assaulted a few times, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time and confronted by a drunk arsehole (or more), I can assure you that assault is most very definitely not a work avoidance scheme, as I'm sure any other sufferer of violent crime would agree.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Technical Terminology

When my dad, a lifelong Immigration Officer (I have his warrant card), was attendinding an enforcement in the 1970s, the accompanying copper asked him "Shall I get the key, sir?"

Said key was produced, a fifteen pound sledgehammer.It opened the lock.