Posts by richdin

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Re: I blame the trainers

Nor Kamala Harris (or Biden for that matter)

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

ThinkPad users made the best lovers

My go-to nickname for the ThinkPad tracking device - was always followed by the above explanation...!

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

Print Queues

Corporate Mainframe would print the monthly salary run on sealed paper with the figures only viewable when the packet was peeled apart. But the print run was editable/viewable until purged from the queue.

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

Fallback plan

The US election cycle has kicked into high gear heading towards November. Having a renewed pandemic break out in time to justify having everyone mail in their ballots instead of voting in-person is a repeat of 2020. My parents were Republican voters their entire lives. Ever since they passed away, they have been voting Democrat.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Re: This is not the first time this has "accidently" happened

...and add PiHole to your network!

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

Re: DR Strategy

Exactly right. I deliberately make sure that my cellphone and my wife's are always on different networks just in case one fails, we should still have phone service. (I also pay for a landline JIC).

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

Re: Stabby stab

When seconds count... the police are but minutes away!

Re: Stabby stab

The states with the STRICTEST gun laws - have the highest statistics of gun crime.

Maine on the other hand passed a law allowing permit-less concealed carry... and for the last 4 years, no gun crime.

Australia forced the people to give up their weapons - and gun crime has SOARED.

Switzerland has an assault rifle (a real one, not a scary lookalike) in every home - yet no one is being gunned down on a daily basis.

Ask the REAL reason why they are trying to take civilian guns away...

FBI boss: Taking away our Section 702 spying powers could be 'devastating'

Re: Real stats

...and 97% of scientists claim that man-made climate change is real...*

* 97% of the 100 scientists in that room (IPCC) at that time.

Winklevoss twins back in hot water after NY AG sues over $1B cryptocurrency fraud

My grandfather always said that there were three kinds of markets

Bull Market, Bear Market and PIG Market

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

Costs in Israel

Living in Tel Aviv - I pay NIS 60 (US$ 15) for 2 x phones each with 50GB/month, NIS 109 (US $28) for 200/200 Mb/s fiber (copper) to the home. And most of the country there is free public WiFi available.

The FBI as advanced persistent threat – and what to do about it

Re: Assigning Traffic To A Real Person Can Be Made Difficult.....

The man [just needs to] filter all the known phones from their current list and then track the unknown phones to see if there is any of them doing something interesting... and then follow that one around.

Microsoft decides it will be the one to choose which secure login method you use

Annoying as my bank (if not more)

My bank (nameless, not blameless) has an annoying habit of "suddenly forgetting" my password every 60 days... forcing me to create a new one thru a torturous process of 2FA and thinking up something clever. They don't say it out loud, but no matter what you try, you can't get in unless you "decide" to request a new password.

Needless to mention that forcing users to change their passwords often only makes them come up with easier ones - but only allowing English letters and numbers without symbols makes the process worse. Better to stick with a more difficult password created once.

As they say - more security theatre.

Cops crack gang that used bots to book and resell immigration appointments

No passports in Israel

We have the same issue in Israel - a group of [Russian] hackers have hijacked the appointment process for getting passports - they grab all the open slots and charge 500 Euro to get a near date/location. The MoI had to open up 4 bureaus that you can walk in without an appointment (although some people have waited 12 hours in line w/o bathroom breaks etc.) just to clear the backlog. Seems to be working. No one arrested... yet.

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

Stamp Tax

This is one of the triggers for the American War of Independence from the UK... demanding a "stamp tax" on newsprint (the actual paper) - which would only be available for newspapers loyal to the Crown. A means to throttle what messages were being published.

Proliferation of AI weapons among non-state actors 'could be impossible to stop'

Re: Is this FUD?

...you mean "countries that we cooperate with".

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: It Works both Ways

How many Californians do you need to change a light bulb?

100 - 1 to change the bulb & 99 to share the experience.

Find pushes back birth of Europe's steel hardware to about 3,000 years ago

Re: People move around shocker !

The Jewish calendar is currently year 5783, while the Chinese calendar started only 4660 years ago. The 1123 years before Chinese food was invented is called the Dark Ages.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

I discovered by accident that I can program the microwave to run at x power for y time and THEN continue for a power at b time! without having to intervene... Awesome for reheating leftovers.

Move over, graphene. There's a new super-material in town: Graphullerene

Re: I wonder why …

Horsepucky

Orion snaps 'selfie' with the Moon as it prepares for distant retrograde orbit

Re: And Wallace wanted Shaun to bring some cheese back

...and some water bears

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Cop Out

Why bother? According to Greta, AOC and Al Gore and the rest of the Chicken Littles, the world is going to end in 12 years...

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

Re: It makes sense for CPUs

Used to be done with a set of DIP switches... DEC upgraded my VAX's memory from 4MB to 16MB (long time ago) with the flick of a switch. Had I only known...

Boffins build microphone safety kit to detect eavesdroppers

Re: There's a far better solution to that problem

ALL my devices are connected with managed switches (Mikrotik, 1 to a room). Easy to disconnect when a device is unneeded

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: She was a good one

Like versions of Microsoft Windows - one generation is great, the following, not so. 95 vs Me; 7 vs 8; 10 vs 11, etc....

Google Play to ban Android VPN apps from interfering with ads

Two words

Pi Hole

Twitter savaged by former security boss Mudge in whistleblower complaint

CNN comes up with this?

With all the talk around collaboration (if not collusion) between the MSM and the High-Tech world - it figures that CNN would be the outlet to "scoop" this.

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Re: Plus ca change - lentement

If aviation advanced at the rate that computers have - we would have landed on the moon in 1912 (9 years after Wilbur and Orville first flew at Kitty Hawk.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

There were two FATs - a copy to rebuild the original from JIC.

Ransomware grounds some flights at Indian budget airline SpiceJet

Better than Kenya Airways...

Once I flew from Mombasa to somewhere in Masai-Mara game park. The plane was a little 14 seater, open to the cockpit and dripping oil from multiple spots. Heart was pounding from takeoff to landing (buzzed the strip to scatter the zebras first). Only after we landed did I realize the fast heart rate and difficulty breathing was also because we flew at about 12K ft without pressurization. Needless to say - never again (although I do want to go on safari again)

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Seems ok

I had a 2 cylinder 4 valve dual carb Italian motorbike. One day I got it in my head to tune the engine, as it was sounding a bit rough. I managed to barely drive to my mechanic to unravel the mess. He gave me a resounding smack across the face and stated loudly - " I don't try fix my computer, YOU keep your hands f'in hands away from your bike!"

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

More fun making deposits rather than withdrawals...

Procurement guy at Apple allegedly ripped off iPhone giant in $10m+ scam

Re: Stealing cash from the Big Boys in America

Son to father: "Dad, I've decided to enter organized crime..."

Father: "Which, private sector, or working for the government?"

BOFH: All hail the job cuts consultant

Job hunting

From my experience - these so-called consultants are actually gunning for a job in the outfit they are consulting. Numerous times a consultant has come in with grandiose plans and lots of bells && whistles - which culminated in their receiving a senior (aka high paying) position in said company.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

I miss revision numbers (and VMS / RSTS-E in general). Showing my age.

Chip CFOs get a crash course in silicon geopolitics

Learned our lesson yet?

Need to re-establish onshore the capabilities for production - including returning to older technologies (reopen fabs from previous generations) - to get the capacity online and remove the dependence on foreign production with interruptible supply chains. Do we really need the latest and smallest for most of the products? Even if it cost slightly more - not having ready inventory of chips impacts everyone.

Why is the little guy getting rinsed for hardware? Because top OEMs had to spend 25% more on chips in 2021

Re: At least Sony didn't

The great difference between "build to order" aka Dell and "build to plan" aka IBM

Secure boot for UK electric car chargers isn't mandatory until 2023 – but why the delay?

Re: Solution to car charger issues...

Can't have that (cash) - 'cause it can't be monitored. THEY want to do away with cash.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

Re: @AC - @Zippy´s Sausage Factory - The plan is obvious

You mean like buying a VAX 750 with 4K of memory, and when you want to upgrade [after shelling out $$$], the fiend (field) engineer, opens the panel, and moves a single DIP switch - presto, 16K.

This has been standard practice for decades.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Humans

Tell a man that there are a billion stars in the galaxy and he'll believe you.

Tell a man that the paint on the bench is wet, and he has to touch it to make sure.

Kyndryl spins out of IBM, stock starts trading on NYSE – and shares tumble

Who chose the name?

A Lynyrd Skynyrd fan? Corporate anthem is Freebird?

After more than a decade of development, South Korea has a near miss with Nuri rocket test

You forgot one

Israel has been lobbing stuff into space since 1988

Ubuntu 21.10: Plan to do yourself an Indri? Here's what's inside... including a bit of GNOME schooling

Re: Smooth FM

I tried twice... got kernel panics on my ThinkPad. Reverted to 21.04.3.

Want to check out Windows 11 but don't want to buy a new PC? Here's how to bypass the hardware requirements

It will pass quickly...

As Microshaft never gets consecutive releases right (95 vs Me vs XP... Win7 vs Win8 vs Win10) - Win11's days are numbered. Wait for Win12.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

Re: Bodged rack mount server

I once had a situation with a PC server using 2 mirrored SCSI adapters running Netware on a token-ring network that brought down the entire corporation including the mainframe because of a magic app running a btrieve database...

Shows how old I am... and what an a** saver the NSE was (pre-internet!).

SCSI=SCARY

Apache OpenOffice can be hijacked by malicious documents, fix still in beta

Re: LibreOffice

MAGAOffice (as opposed to MEGAOffice?)

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Re: denying their actions amounted to a criminal offence

Ratatouille? Not so much.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Re: Go agile, go!

There are undocumented features, and there are documented unfeatures (vaporware)

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

Happened to me once...

A long time ago, before it was a thing - I was at a demo at Microsoft Israel (at the time it was a very small subsidiary and way before I worked for MS) - someone who will remain nameless to protect the guilty was demoing the email capabilities of a product and for an example send a missive to billg@microsoftdotcom. It was in Hebrew as this was supposedly a demo system. A few moments later, Bill replied with a note saying that if we would send him the mail again in English, he'd be happy to reply. Oops.

Amazon to bring a full region to Israel, land of large government contracts

According to international law - it's NOT illegally annexed

You better stick to tech - because your grasp of international law is completely flawed.