Posts by vulture65537

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

I had a user trying and failing to log in with a new account while using CAPS LOCK. I pointed this out but she was sure (all) computers didn't care about this.

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

I remember SysAdmin about 1997 carrying Red Hat ads saying this is the OS for people who write their own device drivers faster than the vendor can send them.

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Maybe I should write that book

The one based on my experience where it's easy for management to do pretend security.

For example the time the lying head of Unix Engineering told my manager I had backdoors after I helped one of his staff get root by a method he didn't know.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Re: Ah, the old "rm -rf *" command

I knew people who let an unset variable prevent them from deleting user accounts for years. They had a script hooked into the user deletion work and without a counter it had an infinite loop.

Patch or perish: Vulnerability exploits now dominate intrusions

This reminds me of when my manager (Revolting Richard) insisted a certain bug did not exist despite the fact I had found it and reported to the vendor 9 years earlier.

Re: Phishing attack - how to help take down

Somewhere around 20 years ago there were 2 phish reporting sites (not gov) and I provided input to them.

I then rigged my MTA to send wrongly addressed mail (luser_relay feature) into a program that checked for links where the visible link and the real link were both https?: but they were not the same. Those got sent to the phish report sites. I then went out to work.

12 hours later I had 16000 recognised phishes and because I put no rate limit on my program the reporting sites blocked me.

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Re: So the future is built on clueless devs who trust fully AI?

Internal IT which doesn't produce obvious costs is in some large companies completely unsupervised. Get told to do thing: think sorta gets done badly and nobody asks any questions. Or if they do they are ignored.

Multi

If I had a decent amount of cloud infrastructure some backups would be in another cloud.

Bank of England: Financial sector failing to implement basic cybersecurity controls

Re: Incentives

I can think of managers I might be prepared to get jailed under those terms!

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: I can believe it

Richard Burton apparently had to tell Winston Churchill one Hamlet in a play is enough.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Go, Look, See

Anderson's rewriting of atomic physics makes positive and negative charges into forward and backward.

"Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding" is a famous essay explaining atomic theory using a deliberately simplified, Germanic-rooted English, avoiding Latin/Greek words like "atom," instead coining "uncleft" (un-cleft/undivided) and "uncleftish" (atomic), demonstrating linguistic purism and showing how science might have ..."

Re: Error message

I was caught at work saying I hate people who can't read. I corrected it to people who can't read shouldn't work in IT

Re: Nifty-Looking Desktop Computer Cases

There is a range of work lockers with a sloping top .

Re: Solicitors...

I used a mainframe where if you called a file List: THING.LST it got deleted overnight.

I had someone tell me the message on the screen as a series of LETTERS rather than words. As soon as a computer was involved he lost the ability to read.

I've also seen a screen with brightness all the way down.

And (this one puzzled me for a minute) the computer has 2 video outlets and meaningful results require plugging into the right one.

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: sewage sorting

I remember IBM's packaging saying accept the conditions on this CD before you unwrap it.

Re: RTFM. Has failing to do so led you into trouble?

I remember great shock the first time I found d that.

getopt command line treatment is often far from advertised too

Re: Beat me to it.

Mrs Farnworth raised children dippy enough to miss the real best line

Minority Report: Now with more spreadsheets and guesswork

Re: Start with cleaning up SW1A 0AA

)

Fixed paren syntax

Re: Unintended consequences

Imagine if the map didn't get updated for two weeks so Plod phones the IT company and it turns out an rsync job has got stuck so no new data got delivered. There was a lock preventing two attempts at the same time

The rsync job was wrapped in a timer of a few hours to enforce complete or quit.

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

Stefan Brands had a solution to that 25 years ago.

Extreme !

I'm pretty sure it's a bad idea to make UK the most extreme ANYTHING whether that is restricted Internet, first to net zero or anything else (including good things).

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

While working at Vodafone I answered somebody's question with an email ; about 2 sentences from me plus a link to a Wikipedia page that had a diagram.

I got a reply about being so good at explaining.

Security pros are drowning in threat-intel data and it's making everything more dangerous

There's some truth in that. There are also poor configurations and poor understanding of what people use.

And there's a whole lot of attitude around "there can't be any security problem with our work and if anybody says there is we will reject their ideas". Security staff are wasting their time in an organisation that won't fix anything .

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Together with testing every operation for success.

Upgrade package (failed with full disk) ; migrate data anyway .. asking for trouble.

Re: sysadmin ... become a developer

I had to deal with new staff disposed to believe any server would have ONE IP that they called THE IP and I showed them a bunch of real data proving that was uncommon.

Re: sysadmin ... become a developer

Aren't the most useful details of a printer where it is and what kind it is?

I've been asked to support a printer by someone who couldn't tell me anything about it at all. I resorted to sending test print jobs to the printers I could reach online asking whoever found them to phone me.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Cooper Pair

> Model M is the Steinway, the Stradivarius of the qwerty world

Tommy Cooper found in his attack a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt.

Unfortunately Stradivari couldn't paint and Rembrandt made terrible violins.

IBM scores perfect 10 ... vulnerability in mission-critical OS AIX

Re: So much for....

About 1998-9 Troy Bollinger did a great job of handling the batch of bug reports gave him on AIX 4.1. One of which was library code and he pointed me to other vendors.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Every other government from North Korea, Iran, and France will be able to obtain everything MPs put in the platform.

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

Re: Quite the opposite experience

What about an earlier vehicle of yours you know has been scrapped?

At uni in the 1980s we all got a floppy disk and were strictly told not to copy copyright material such as Apple Mac applications Almost immediately after was the lesson on copying files where it was suggested we copy MacWrite to floppy.

Backup software vendor Veeam deleted forum data after restoration SNAFU

Re: Didn't backup frequently enough?

Maybe they could have gaps in the ID range reserved for corrections.

Maybe they could have a journal of changes capable of replying parts.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Backup to /dev/null

I knew someone get the tape device name wrong. This created a large file under /dev/ and a puzzle why the tape was blank .

Abandoned AWS S3 buckets can be reused in supply-chain attacks that would make SolarWinds look 'insignificant'

Re: What!

S3 buckets can be used for web hosting. These days you need to fiddle with settings to allow that. So if someone is intentionally providing something to the public it's not normal that the public would need to authenticate to read it.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: AND / OR

In a cafe I once ordered coffee and strawberry ice cream which got me dual flavour ice cream and no coffee.

I worked at a major email system where the 'block email from that address' control was mixed in and hard to separate from such other powerful features that minor changes to the block list (could be several a day) all had to come to someone as senior as me

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: WYF!

6502 assembly could be programmed from the BASIC UI.

Re: WYF!

It was in the ladybird book.

US Army turns to 'Scylla' AI to protect depot

Will it be available to the secret service?

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Re: Pay grades

renumeration

And dodgy spelling/typing.

My pension record shows salary £42,750 in April 2005.

And nobody ever took any notice of my reports and advice - even managers with no first hand knowledge denying my own observations.

Revamped UK cybersecurity bill couldn't come soon enough, but details are patchy

>. idea is that if more organizations have to keep their security controls in line with government-set standards,...

When I worked in the private sector to government standards about 10 years ago they weren't all that sensible.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Saltzer & Schroeder gave principles in the 1970s including

Safe Defaults

Proving yet again that people will put more work into making a mess than into finding out what's good to do.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

I saw a commuter on the tube carrying a pack of paper in a transparent case. In the front of the pack was a letter reading Dear $name, ...

I spoke to her by name (great shock) and suggested the transparent case in public was a bad idea.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Canary Wharf workers near a pile driver have had to explain in their conference call with other sites what is going on.

Three-year-old Apache Flink flaw under active attack

Managers are divided between those who refuse to believe a bug exists even when it was discovered years earlier by a member of their own team - that the manager has spoken to but insists that he knows better than technical staff

Or the kind that believes bug reports such as red hat rpc still contains a flaw fixed in 1998 just because the version number shown over the network is still 1.2 .

Neither one is curious enough to ask about the truth or be any more satisfied with better conditions than you get by doing nothing. This ensures that nothing will be done except useless things because something must be done

These are real examples from work and people with names omitted.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: One thing you've missed

Disconnect from network then do your volume or filesystem snapshots. Reconnect to network to copy them to other storage.

Re: Performance isn't free...

Mark Bannister (of Jane Street) documented one on Linkedin a few years ago while I still had an account on it.

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Re: Would you believe...

Don't tell me this was at a greeting card company.