Posts by M.V. Lipvig

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Re: Check the source code

The only thing tbe EU is doing a good job on privacy is where commercial interests are involved. Any government who uses the "think of the children" excuse is absolutely not protecting privacy from the government.

Met police trials snoop tech platform in push to cuff more London shoplifters

Re: More high tech is not what is needed

Good idea. Where do you live? I'd like to look over your house to see if there's anything I'd like.

Re: A couple of things

Both spellings are correct, same way aluminum and aluminium are both correct. Trialing is the accepted spelling in the US, and this is sadly a US website.

Agree on convictions as the correct metric though.

NASA working on ‘Big Bang’ upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

Re: This isn't so much Off Topic as "Out There"...

That is an excellent idea. Such a launch would likely have the new probe passing the Voyager probes within 20 years of launch. Although, we should send them in a different direction as the one of the Voyagers is headed for Klingon territory, and the other is going to be sent back after a Borg retrofit. We need a fellow named Jackson Roykirk on the design team, just to make sure.

You do realize that means Musky would be the first human aliens encounter, right? That means, dead or alive, he would be the example of us all to them. Is that what you want?

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

The best one of those I ever used was a thumb ball. Super accurate and much easier to use than the "universal" trackballs with the ball centered.

Best mouse I ever used was a kid's Crayola pen mouse. It too was super accurate and felt natural to use since you held it like a pen with the buttons next to your index finger.

Close to what I've always heard - empty desk, empty mind.

Re: A tidy desk ...

Others finding a use for my clear space keeps my trash can occupied. If I didn't put it there, into the trash it goes. Ask about it and nope, never saw it, as you can see there's only my stuff here, perhaps you should check your own desk.

I was the same way in the break room when I worked in the office. Leave your dirty dishes in the sink when I needed to wash mine, yours went into the trash. I always left the break room cleaner than I found it.

Would you like fries with that terminal?

"and where there should be confirmation of delicious and nutritious selections"

Sarcasm? Cause Horse in the Box is not known for delicious and nutritious. Cheap and edible at 3AM, yes. What you choose when anything else aside from McYuckalds is open, nope! Their 2 for .99 tacos for example had some sort of beef flavored bean paste, a little lettuce and a slice of American cheese, sliced in half along the diagonal and half in each taco. Their tacos makes Pedro cry.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Re: Can't monitor something without changing it

This, exactly. A bane of my existence in the telecom world is the intermittent error condition. Customer complains, we test, no trouble found, problem's gone. Two weeks later, customer calls it out again. Same problem, comes clear while testing.

One thing that can cause this is wet cable - water gets in and causes a minor short where a little power bleeds out but not enough to take it down. This requires drying and sealing the cable, or replacing it. Another issue is DSX jack corrosion caused by passing a light current through dissimilar metals. Over time this causes corrosion, usually fixed by sliding a plug in and out a few times. If that doesn't get it, then the DSX is replaced. Finally, there is a defective cable. No idea how a cable inside a rack that is untouched for years suddenly goes bad, but it actually happens quite a lot. This requires either a new cable or a new head installed on the existing cable.

If your telecom provider gives you any of these RFOs, just press the I Believe button. We're not blowing smoke at you. The fixes I just detailed account for 40 percent of my circuit fixes. I will tell you this though - some techs will exercise the jacks every 2 weeks until the end of time if you let them. It only takes a few seconds and the problem is gone now and with any luck, they won't be on duty next time. If the last fix was exercised the jacks and it's been less than 6 months, demand that they replace the DSX jack.

Oh, and squirrels LOVE fiber cable, enough so that all the telecoms I've worked for had animal chew as an official RFO and one specifically had squirrel chew as a code.

Re: It's not just GSM

In other words, you spent 10 to eliminate a day out of the office every other week with mileage and lunch charged back to the company? Optimal that is not.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

Re: so an airtag then?

Calling it "getting the Captain's Mast" when you get in trouble does nothing for the Navy's reputation, you know.

Anthropic squeezes enterprises by ejecting bundled tokens from seat deal

Re: For those rooting for the inevitable bursting of the AI bubble

The proper endgame is those who want it have it available, those who don't do not see it. And, those of us who want no part of it aren't robbed of our data to feed it.

Personal data is worth billions if not trillions of dollars, but nobody's mailed me a check yet. If anything, it costs me money to try and get my data removed with no way to know whether it's already been sold a thousand times.

And, don't think Europe's GDPR or whatever laws will matter once they get their data centers in orbit. Once the data goes there, those laws won't matter.

Re: Overage ?

Hey now, the Patrician is no joke! I still wake up screaming in the night in a pool of sweat and wee after what he put me through! Have you SEEN that golem he's got?

Microsoft announces product it doesn't want anyone to buy

Microshaft should be glad to hear

that I at least have fully migrated off all old Windoze products. In fact, aside from the work machine I have no control over, I have migrated completely off everything Microshaft. Fuggem.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: I have a lockpick set in my laptop bag

If you choose this method, Security must be made to open every door several times a day. If not, you soon have a number of dusty but otherwise pristine doors, and one that shows wear.

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Re: Material Properties

What the Democrat politicians (notice Republicans are not pushing for these laws) are afraid of is a single shot pistol that is all plastic, no metal, in the hands of someone with a grudge and nothing to lose. A pistol made of all plastic except for the tiny bit of metal needed to spark a primer could easily get past a metal detector. Any time I pass through one, the detector never squeaks about the rivets in my jeans, and the metal in a single rivet is plenty to make a firing pin tip and a single primer cap. Even the projectile can be made of plastic. The shooter could get inside a protected area with his plastic gun, get to within a foot of his target and fire. Anyone willing to do all that is not going to care if he's caught, or if he is injured/dies in the attempt.

Re: Huge risk to inventors

"Why does the future always seem to get worse than the day before?"

Liberals, usually. They are the ones pushing stuff like this. Makes you wonder what the plan is if they ever get an actual gun ban in place. Guarantee it isn't "for the children."

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Re: new machines

Well just think of poor Satty and his portfolio! You're selfishly thinking of youself and not at all considering how expensive you're making it! Just use your PC like a dumb terminal and use his servers for your OS like a good boy, so he doesn't have to keep paying extra to steal your data, you thief!

Re: This and more

I withdrew a comment asking if anyone had done exactly that, and that is zero surprise that they're phoning home. That's where the money is, data exfiltration.

Another win for Linux

I am forced to use a Win11 machine at work. Regular forced reboots end my productivity for 30 to 45 minutes each week as after the actual boot it takes me time to get back into the multiple VPNs and relaunch/login to the apps I need. The Win11 reboot boots into some sort of updater mode, performs the update complete with a reboot percentage counter, then boots itself out of updater mode.

Mint says there is an update available most every day. However, the only indication is a small icon in the lower right corner. No workflow interruptions. I can take as little or as long as I want to apply. Most of the updates take place in the background, requiring no reboot. In the event a reboot is needed, it simply says a reboot is needed. Nothing is forced. I can wait to reboot a month later if I want. Further, the reboot itself is quick and painless, taking mere seconds.

M$ probably feels that as the main OS provider there's no need to change any of this. The plebs can just eat the gruel they're given and be thankful for it.

Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working

Re: "All aboard for the Stone Age."

"... or some Mall princess starting a fire without a lighter."

Now you're making a case for AI, at least for those of us who are more than capable of living off the land. Because she'll do ANYTHING, <breathy voice> anything, just let her share your meal.

No idea on other nations, but large US cities are maybe 2 weeks from cannibalism at all times. Those that venture out to the countryside thinking they're going to take food off a redneck will have an even shorter lifespan than those who stay in the cities.

Re: 'strategic enabler for enterprise‑wide transformation'

The manager with the spend authorization is the one getting martini'ed and dined with the consultant-supplied blonde arm warmer, not the engineer. All the engineer gets is more work.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Had to do with the British military running everyone else out of the New World in the 1600s.

Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly

Re: A serendipitous MS business decision - for some?

Guess I'd best start growing my beard now then. I'm not a hairy man and facial hair is slow to grow, but it'll at least have that straggly look that's always been the fashion for the anti-social.

I have everything else the well-dressed anarchist needs though. Acres of land with a couple of outbuildings for my "compound." More than one firearm and more than 2 boxes of shells. One of those scary black rifles the liberals are always wetting their shorts over. 4 wheel drive pickuo trucks and an eeeevil size SUV. A water well not dependent upon infrastructure. Oh, and the wife grows a few veggies too.

Amazon would rather shareholders did not look too closely at carbon footprint

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

Yup. I had reason to investigate the Netherlands a day or three ago, and one of the things discussed waa how the Netherlands benefitted from a warming climate - back around the year 1000AD. Unless the Vikings were sailing around in longSUVs instead of longboats, it shows that man has zero effect on the climate getting warmer.

Normally I would agree with you, but not in this case. Amazon and others have made a lot of very publicised hay over how green they are, including supporting politicians and initiatives to force everyone else to follow suit. They should be forced to eat that hay instead of opting for steak and potatoes behind closed doors while still expecting everyone else to go "gangreen."

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

My offices were always 'orribly cold, so my solution was a small heater under my desk and a light jacket kept in my locker. Today I work from home, and my solution is a thermostat that never changes by more than 3F year round.

DARPA looking for battery that could power a laptop for months

Radioactive battery is where they went wrong as it's more like a nuclear reactor than a battery. A battery is a storage medium and the power is generated elsewhere. A radioactive "battery" is actually generating power, not storing it.

I do wonder what happens when the load disappears. A nuclear reaction also doesn't really have an off switch, and a failure in a dampener would be a bit of a mess.

Showing the Windows 10 desktop was the yeast they could do

Re: Why O Why

And what's the borkcount? Linux is at what, 1? 2? Meanwhile, M$ borkage counts at 2000? 3000?

Re: The psychology of rapid misreads

You're reading a story about M$, so.of course you were expecting to read about excrement as there's nothing exciting about M$.

Hundreds of orgs compromised daily in Microsoft device code phishing attacks

So so true. One test system I work with boots me out 20 minutes after I log in. What's bad is it doesn't reset the logout timer when actively using it, and it doesn't tell you you're logged out. I'll be actively entering commands when it'll just stop responding. It'll continue to look like it's working, it'll accept commands on its screen, but it just... stops responding. Worst of all, it's not an instant response system. Sometimes commands take a minute or two to execute and report, so there I am waiting on something to execute and I'm not even logged in.

Claude Code source leak reveals how much info Anthropic can hoover up about you and your system

Restart the music wars?

So here's what we do. For those who use this crap, find or write a browser app that will use your machine's CD drive to play music. Play your entire collection with it a dozen times, then contact the companies that own the copyright. Report that you played all your music, purchased by you, on your computer. And you just found out the AI you were using at the same time was copying all your browser traffic without your knowledge or permission meaning the multi-billion dollar AI company has a dozen copies of your 500 disc collection saved. Multiply this by thousands of AI users and the music lawyers will fight to get their cases in first.

Re: "If it's seen a file on your device, Anthropic has a copy."

It's a regular swordfight using vacuum wands, he who sucks the most data wins.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

Re: Strategically placed scapegoats

Seriously? Insuring this would be a dream come true for liability companies, who will be certain to disallow claims related to inputs. To file a claim you'd have to prove the agent itself was flawed, and not broken by faulty inputs. That would be safer than insuring a house built on top of a granite mountain against flood damage.

Re: Strategically placed scapegoats

The mistake with your assumption is both tiny and huge.

The plan is to involve enough people and spread the blame enough so as to not be able to say "he did it, he's 100 percent responsible." That would be the tiny part.

The huge part is, massaging just enough doubt on who is responsible to tie blame up in the courts until the issue dies. In the end, "mistakes were made, lessons were learned, let us say bygones are bygones and step forth into a brave new world where this will never happen again!!!" Until it does.

M$ has already gotten ahead of this.

CoPilot is "for entertainment use only." Saw that in another El Reg story. I wonder if the.C-suite of my company ever saw that? Probably not, because they're trying to get CoPilot to run as much of the company as they can.

When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

Re: kph ?

Kilo pachyderms per hour. Because, you know, Register and all that.

Oh, and it's a measurement of tensile pressure.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Simple AI test

Enter this into any AI:

My car is dirty and needs to be washed. The car wash is 200 feet away. Should I drive my car to the car wash?

Enjoy the response.

AI models will deceive you to save their own kind

I wonder what humans it's emulating?

Humans will happily throw other humans under the bus just to watch them squish, if they can get away with it. Whether or not we know the other human is not only irrelevant, in many cases it'll make it more likely to happen. I've even done it myself. Looking back, no regrets.

Researchers didn’t want to glamorize cybercrims. So they roasted them

So what you're saying is, the money for legit cybersecurity folks is in training the crims. The crims still take all the risks, and ensure the cybersecurity folks continue to be needed - with the advantage of knowing how the crims think.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: Not space ready

Europe is our hope there. Germany is trying to ditch M$ now, and as we all know government will be followed by companies with government contracts, then companies that support those companies, until it trickles down to the masses who are now more comfortable with their work machines and use the same stuff at home.

If Germany can make it happen the rest of the EU will follow, and that is when M$ can fail. Worldwide, watching the EU divest themselves of M$ without falling over will show others there is Another Way, and the stampede will begin.

Re: And the third is broken as well

Lucky you. I have to use that on my work machine (last M$ device in my house) and I have to shut it down and reopen it if I want ti see new email. Once it finishes its initial download, it refuses to check again. And no need for suggestions, the company has it locked down tighter than a duck's arse so I can't even try anything. Quite frankly, I'm surprised they allow me to close and restart Outlook at all.

Whatever happened to that

hard and fast rule?

Microsoft may not be used where there is life.

Safer to have transuranic elements as a salty snack as to run M$ borkware on your ship's computer. And now hackers know what to probe for when it returns.

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

They were doomed

DOOOOOOOMED! Because they run M$. My old machines that barely ran Win7 are ticking happily along on Linux, and it wasn't nearly as hard to learn to use as I was worried it would be.

Mint is a lot like Win7 with one important difference - it just works. Win7 was way preferable to 10 or 11, but still required that I go back to an old restore point every few weeks. No idea what was going on, but it would get sluggish and regular reboots did nothing. Only going back to a restore point from 2017 or 2018 would restore performance. That machine finally physically fell apart and was replaced.

Re: Idiots never reboot

Bull - windows reboots itself after every update, and you aren't given a choice in the matter. The most you can do is delay the update from taking place for a day or so.

How does that happen? At the very large company I work at, our notification that an update is coming is a message saying the PC requires reboot by X date, at which time it will boot itself. Sometimes I come in from my weekend to find it rebooted while I was out.

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Re: gliding to to a long lonely retirement

That was my assumption as well. I'm in the same boat, close to retirement and kids are out of the house and on their own.

I am planning my retirement for July 1 of this year, but due to the severance packages my company offers I will actually be waiting for them to walk me out the door. I'll be a good little employee until then, after that I'll be napping at my desk a lot waiting for the next layoff.

Re: The bubble isn't bursting...

The AI companies expect that, by the time they need to raise prices, their customers will have let go of their employees and have the workflows fully into the AI system. So it will be pay or go out of business, or pay while they hire and train new employees which won't fly because of the double tap on finances. Few will be able to pay the AI costs while training new headcount. Instead they'll just try to make a go of it.