Posts by train_wreck

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

You answered your own question. Texas is a MAGA stronghold. Moving there gets you brownie points with MAGA. Nothing more complicated than that.

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

Re: The BBC - hardly a paragon of virtue

Something something two wrongs…..

“Courage” (-ously libelous)

"A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary."

Strange language there, “unexpected”? Almost like they didn’t want write “inaccurate”.

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

Re: Along those lines ...

They’re honestly indistinguishable.

Right now I am currently in between jobs. Oh. My. God. I. HATE. Linkedin!!!!!!! Like, i am looking for work. I am not looking for effing influencers. That fact that half of them are AI sewage is the cherry on top of the urinal cake that is Linkedin.

Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

Re: Anyone still buying WD?

On Linux i’ve always used hd/sdparm to disable drive standby, and that has always seemed to work. I even want to say it’s a firmware level change, meaning it will survive being changed to a different system unless the new system runs an equivalent command that disables it. Though don’t quote me on that, it’s been ages since i’ve run such a program.

Thousands of Fortinet instances vulnerable to actively exploited flaw

FortiManager FortiFucking up and causing FortiProblems? shocked FortiPikachu

ICANN reserves .internal for private use at the DNS level

Hmmm, i’ve been using .LAN for all my personal servers/devices. Always thought it was a relatively safe choice.

Microsoft ad subsidiary Xandr accused of violating GDPR

Re: Yet another advert related story.

It’s not a lie if everyone believes it. <rollsafe.jpg>

At first I thought “noyb” was just bog standard Reg snark, but that’s actually what they’re called. 10/10. I sincerely hope an MS legal hound is forced to repeat “noyb” ad nauseum during the proceedings.

Devs claim Apple is banning VPNs in Russia 'more effectively' than Putin

Re: Doing Business

Probably the Roskomwhatever representative lol.

Phoenix UEFI flaw puts long list of Intel chips in hot seat

Can it be taken as read that disabling TPM would mitigate this?

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Pseudoscience is a hell of a drug. And the quote from the board member rambling about “40, 50 years the government blew it”.. like what the actual f are you saying bro??

Fancy climbing the peaks of Alpine Linux? 3.20 is out

I mostly like running Alpine on my router PC appliance, but the Alpine wiki could use quite a bit of improvement. More than one article led me astray with incorrect/missing information. I’m spoiled i suppose by the legendarily great Arch wiki.

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Tan can get Hocked. The ~60K seat healthcare conglomerate I’m at has been actively investigating alternatives since the announcement earlier this year. I will be very interested to see where my company (and from street talk many others) lands.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

I run Alpine on my router, and the whole install of base environment with no GUI and various network daemons like nftables/DNS/DHCP/IPSec comes up to 390MB. I will say that Alpine has been a joy to use, and helpfully can operate with read-only root similar to Cisco IOS . I’ve been an Arch user since 2007 but they are far from being a small distro. One of the best parts of Alpine has been (rejoice!) no systemd!!

AnyDesk revokes signing certs, portal passwords after crooks sneak into systems

Literally the only time i’ve ever seen AnyDesk in use is during tech support scams.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Re: Thanks for nothing

Thanks for the input. I had skimmed the warrants and missed the lo interface thing. And CISAs comments on the absolutely abysmal web interfaces on many SOHO devices are spot on IMO, with so many it’s just too easy to inject things via unsanitized input boxes or HTTP POSTS.

Re: Explain again to me

They do and i have had some success with them. A problem is that they are often too new to have drivers written for older operating systems. Some appear to be sort of “passive” and don’t require a driver of any kind. In my experience though, the greatest reliability has been had by trying to match older hardware with as close to the original specs as possible.

Re: Explain again to me

Curious why they recommend that…. i guess for updating? I can’t imagine there being much market for data brokering from such a niche device.

Re: Explain again to me

For whatever reason it seems that the aircraft test equipment field is chock full of ancient SW requirements. I did work for an airport a number of years back that still used an IBM A/S400 to store schematics and do billing. The box had a mfg. date older than me. They interfaced with it using a crazy VBA Excel plugin, required 32-bit IIRC.

You see old Windows in metalworking where they’re used as controllers for $100k CNC machines. Most of the time they’re airgapped….. most of the time. Getting to be a bigger and bigger PITA to get parts for computers that vintage. I remember hunting down an ISA serial card for one not too long ago. Went through a couple to find one that worked in NT4.

Re: Thanks for nothing

Been poking around for a list as well, the search warrants say that the FBI will release a list of affected models but so far i haven’t seen that released yet.

I have to think with Netgear it’s the Prosafe VPN firewalls, seeing as Netgear “exited” that market in 2017. For Cisco likely the RV series which again have been EoL for ages.

Apologies if it’s already been mentioned, but I’m kind of curious the exact mechanism the FBI has to be able to run these commands on each device. Are they gaining access using the same vector that the botnet used?

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Especially brazen considering that this research was in part conducted at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a site of major developments in nuclear technology.

Gen4 reactors all the way.

eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk

Eh over here the rich usually only get nailed if they steal from other rich people. Screwing the poors is just good business. This case was different only because the conduct was SO egregiously harassment. Like crazy stalker level harassment.

I was honestly shocked that the perps got jail time in the original case. Good to see eBay proper getting their just desserts.

Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned

Hmm, not a great look when the cloud provider’s own services have trouble running on the cloud provider’s own cloud. The dogfooding process ended up failing the digestion phase, one could say.

That call center tech scammer could be a human trafficking victim

I worked at an IT service/sales store for a while and we somehow managed to get on every scam call lead list out there, we had multiple calls every day for years. I watch some scam baiters on YouTube/Twitch that are hilarious (Kitboga & Rinoa Poison are great.) But I’ve absolutely wondered how many were being forced against their will. I read about one in Vietnam recently that was like a gated compound where they kept the “workers”. Awful stuff.

Apple slaps patch on WebKit holes in iPhones and Macs amid fears of active attacks

Re: iOS 17 photo export

I’ve had this happen once before. I had to go into Setting -> General -> Reset and Transfer, then tap Reset and there is an option to Reset Location and Privacy information. Then when you plug into the Linux machine it will ask to trust the computer and upu say yes.

I have had a different problem since installing iOS 17 on my 13 Pro. Safari regularly stops loading any and all websites and i have to force close it to get it working again. Happened maybe 7 or 8 times. While the problem is occurring the phone starts to get roasting hot.

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Re: Sam Bankman Fraud

Nah Trump would never pardon him, he donated to Democrats.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Re: Best free pubilcity in the world

It’s pretty unlikely that the trial will be televised IMO.

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

A minor burn

Petty officer second class Zhao's alleged data theft began in August 2021 and lasted until at least May 2023, according to his indictment

Some low key shade from the Reg right there.

China's openKylin 1.0 arrives. Our verdict? Not a bad-looking, er, Ubuntu remix

Can’t imagine the CCP being too thrilled about VPN being right there in taskbar by default. Not that it makes a huge difference. Life finds a way and all.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: I grew up with "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."

As someone who survived 2 suicide attempts as a teenager due to bullying, I concur. I’m glad it’s getting the attention and support it deserves. I dealt with it back in the mid 2000’s. You were on your own then.

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

I installed Pipewire on my Arch system a couple months ago and it immediately introduced a lag time of about 1 second if sound hadn’t been previously playing, almost like it needed to “wake up” if it wasn’t getting actively used. I never could figure out how to fix it so i uninstalled it and went back to PulseAudio. May try some time soon to get it working fully.

Firmware is on shaky ground – let's see what it's made of

Re: Et Tu Brother

It’s worse than that; it only takes being burned a few times for the someone to, understandably, be scared to install updates. When those updates address security vulnerabilities, the situation becomes more dire. Unfortunately I see a downward trend in software across the board, where the rush to ship is far outstripping concern over code quality.

Theranos founder Holmes ordered to jail after appeal snub

Re: Aren't the yanks nice?

There are plenty of people here who are taken to jail immediately after being arrested and remain there for months if not years before their trial even starts, because they can’t afford bail. Sometimes it’s for minor offenses that don’t call for prison time at all, or call for a fraction of the time the person has already served. Bank account value and skin color go a long way in determining the course of events there.

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

Late stage capitalism needs to get forked.

Windows November update trips up some Intel graphics drivers

Every. Freaking. Month.

Sorry seems to be tech execs' favorite word as DB player Aiven lays off 1 in 5

Kind of impressed at the “keep your work device”. I’m in the US and was laid off along with the rest of my team in November. My WFH had accidentally sent me 2 new flash drives at the start, and I forgot to send them back the extra one after layoffs. A few weeks ago I got a form letter from their legal department threatening legal action if it wasn’t returned. Rich, that.

Microsoft: Whoops, Patch Tuesday might screw your database connections

Literally every patch Tuesday has a showstopping bug now…..

Cisco unifies GUIs across security range

About 4 years ago I was on a TAC call with a rep who asserted that Cisco was on a slow and steady shift to GUI-first management schemes. My reason for the call was encountering a bug in the CLI of a 4321. I bristled when he said he could usually guess the age of a netadmin based on how well they knew the IOS commands (i was only 30 at the time!)

Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu

We’re currently having an Adderall shortage here in the US. The situation you describe is not terribly far off from reality for some of my IT colleagues. (Well, except for the frog part).

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Wow, 15%?? Obviously i knew the number would be low, but that’s a pretty stark signal that customers are sending…. I have to think the arbitrary hardware requirements are a not-insignificant factor.

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, because we won't patch their flawed VPN

Why do they recommend moving to the RV160? That device will receive its last software update in roughly a week from now…. (Cisco has let all the RV series devices languish for many years, IMO they would very much like to give up on them and please won’t you just buy a $1000+ firepower device/subscription)

Source for EOL: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/small-business-rv-series-routers/eos-eol-notice-c51-2655972.pdf

It's 2022 and there are still thousands of public systems using password-less VNC

RATty like it’s 1999

Cisco inferno: Networking giant reveals three 10/10 rated critical router bugs

Re: "fixed software is yet to arrive for some models"

Agree wholeheartedly on your description of the RV series being awful, at least the earlier ones were. Part of the reason they sucked so bad was because some models were holdovers from the Linksys acquisition, and yes it appeared Cisco had zero interest touching them. God what a fiasco those few years were...

The 340/345 are newer ~2015 hardware, and in my experience they weren't terrible, although for sure had bugs that never got fixed. I recall getting decent performance out of them, something like 500mbps IPsec and gigabit NAT. I think the hardware was Cavium based, but I'm not 100 percent on that. As a product line they seem on their way out....

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

$80,000?

$80,0000 was the cost of this upgrade? I seem to remember reading that it was just a firmware update of sorts, changing the control logic to disable MCAS if the AOA sensors disagree. The "warning light" is located on a primary LCD interface in the cockpit, so no additional hardware was needed there.

Could be wrong, as I'm no aviation expert.