Posts by Flightmode

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: Muppets

It was clearly bork bork borken.

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

Re: 5% useful, 15% pleb fascinator... the remaining 80% expensive hot air?

Wait, how about - just hear me out here - deepfake porn NFTs??

(Icon for representation on mind being blown.)

Cisco slashes thousands of staff, 7% of entire workforce, pivots into AI

Oh great.

> Cisco is hoping to diversify and reposition itself for subscription revenue.

Just what we need in the infrastructure world - more subscription fees. /s

US standards body proposes atomic clocks in lunar orbit to keep Moon time

Made me think of this video

"I'm not gonna try and do accents... I just should not do accents."

If you know you know.

AI chatbots amplify creation of false memories, boffins reckon – or do they?

Re: Not facing the real question

Interestingly, one of the authors of the paper referenced in the article - Elizabeth F. Loftus - was the one that came up with the experiment you're referring to. "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction : An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory" was funded by the US Department of Transport and published by Loftus and John C. Palmer in 1974. It's actually pretty interesting - not only did those that were asked using the word "smashed" estimate a higher mean speed of impact, but they were also more than twice as likely as those asked using the word "hit" to give an affirmative answer the question "Did you see any broken glass?".

The five-page clip from the 1974 publishing is at https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/LoftusPalmer74.pdf for those that are interested.

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

False alarms also count as alarms

Many jobs ago, our NOC monitoring systems were sitting in a /25 subnet routed by a pair of Catalyst 5500 switches running IOS in a bolted on RSM module (I said it was many jobs ago). This subnet was protected by an ACL, a few hundred lines long, that required semi-frequent changes. These changes sometimes went wrong, so at any given point we had two ACLs on the boxes - 150 and 151, one applied and the previous one for backup. Our procedure was to copy the currently active ACL into a text editor, renumber it from 150 to 151[0] (or the other way around), delete the currently unused backup one, paste the new one to the routers and then change the interface configuration to use the newly updated one. Simple, right?

Well, there were always people (I'll admit it: including myself, once or twice) that messed up and accidentally deleted the currently active ACL[1] by mistake - which, in Cisco terms means "as long as the applied ACL is empty, all traffic is allowed". This in itself is not a huge issue since you'll be pasting in a new ACL version a few seconds later. But that's where the fun begins. Remember the "as long as the applied ACL is empty" part? When you put in the first line of that ACL, IOS does a complete 180 and says "if there's even a single line in the applied ACL, anything not explicitly matching that line is dropped" (which, when you think about it makes sense for an ACL). But this means that while you're in the process of pasting the updated ACL, your system is running in an incomplete state and is dropping traffic that would actually be legitimate as per the COMPLETE list.

And of course, pasting several hundred lines of configuration into a heavily-loaded router will take some time, each line would take about a second or so for the router to process going back in. Of course, the system running on the main screens in the NOC had an IP address ending in 240-something, and of course the ACL was organised numerically by destination IP. Which meant that when network devices around the world were up for their next poll cycle, the SNMP requests would time out. This would slowly start an avalanche of alarms in the NOC, entire maps turning from green to red, even audible alarms going off stating that this and that country had gone offline... And without fail, every time this happened there was a tour through the NOC by customers or higher-ups... It would clear itself up in about ten minutes as the list pasting finished, but it was always amusing seeing the NOC staff sinking into panic and managers turning the same shade of red as the screens.

[0] When doing a search-and-replace you had to be VERY careful to not just replace "150" with "151"; you needed to do "-list 150 " with "-list 151 "; otherwise you'd have a bunch of angry Scandinavians on the phone within minutes as they hade IP addresses containing 150 in one octet.

[1] This is in itself a risky mistake. I never had it happen to me, but there were stories circulating that if you deleted an ACL line that a packet was being evaluated against in that very moment, it was prone to crash the box entirely.

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

How about we borrow and adapt a phrase?

The “T” in “neural” stands for “truthful”.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

The Shrinking Site

A number of years ago we moved our first equipment into a new site while the surrounding facilities were still being built. At the time, it had nice spacious hallways we could run our racks and equipment through, so the initial installation was definitely not a problem. A couple of months down the road, however, we needed to replace a faulty Cisco GSR 12012 chassis[0] - something about the (passive) backplane deforming due to not enough support from the metal frame(?).

In any case, for some reason, the builders had placed a three-step stair about a meter inside a doorway[1] with no ramp. Also, they'd raised the floor so much AND installed a false ceiling to boot, meaning that we had to tip the chassis on its back on the trolley with one person pulling and two people bracing against the top for it to fit through the now quite claustrophobic space as there was no longer space to move it upright. There was JUST enough space to get it through the door and into our suite[2], where we could finally stand it up the right way again.

And I've mentioned my favourite not-quite-a-tool from the same era earlier here; it was a slightly deformed metal teaspoon that we kept on top of one of the racks at another site (the one we were aiming to replace by this new site, in fact). It perfectly fit the screw heads on the GSR line cards and came in handy many a time.

[0] Hefty boxes, somewhere just north of 30 RU if my memory serves me.

[1] The kind of door you can't leave open for more than 22 seconds before you have alarms blaring and guards coming to see what you're doing.

[2] We may or may not have accidentally invented a new area of physics along the way - we certainly invented some new colourful vocabulary, that's for sure

Voyager 1 makes stellar comeback to science operations

Re: Must see

I cannot recommend watching this movie highly enough. Such a calm and quiet celebration of this incredible project and the people, nay, HUMANS, behind it. Heroes, every single one.

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

...any form of Copilot is pretty much worthless when there's no actual pilot.

Ah, le mot juste.

Re: purple is the color of AI working

ChatGPT is probably already using this article when responding to questions on how to build an AI PC.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Lily pads, eh? Is this how knee pads and elbow pads got their names, from this incident?

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: Oh dearie me...

It's funny; with most controversial / polarizing ideas, you always get a faction of people saying "now, hang on; if you look at it from the angle of the ( doctors / unemployed / politicians / shareholders / capitalist elite ), I can see that this proposal make sense, because...". With Recall, however, this is the first such post I've seen in several weeks (excluding comments from Microsoft, of course) - and this story is completely built on a guess. Seems almost poetic, doesn't it.

What is it they say - "If the nicest thing you can say about an idea is that it's not illegal, it's probably not a good idea."? And I'm not even sure you can say THAT about Recall.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: "I didn't touch a thing"

We had a colleague who would open all her helpdesk support requests with "Ever since you guys installed Windows 97 on my PC, my life has been hard."

Let me tell you lady, your life was hard before we gave you Office 97 - we just gave you something new to blame.

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

Re: Trillian

I used Trillian for a while in an open-plan office landscape where it was more or less encouraged to have your speakers turned on and up so that everyone could hear every sound that all computers made. One of my colleagues liked the new-message warble that Trillian did so much that he'd just send me repeated messages that read "bududududu" just to play the notification sound... Not at all annoying.

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

I had something similar happen with an old home PC. I fixed it by breaking an ice cream stick in two and wedging the pieces between the bottom of the case and the motherboard; worked nicely for several years after that.

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

"It's just round this corner," I reply, listening to him wheezing his way behind me. "And then down a short passageway."

In horror-movie-land, this is just the sort of poorly lit alcove where all the eviscerations would occur, and I can tell the Boss isn't overly happy being here.

I was half expecting a room with goats.

Re: We're all agreed, right...

Now that you mention it, the Boss sounds an awful lot like my wife.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Next to a company where I was working (late last century) was an empty plot of land that some council drone decided to slap a big blue COMMERCIAL zone on in their real-life Sim City. There was somet problems with the ground there that meant they had to anchor any new buildings quite far down, which meant long poles. Thankfully, they didn't use pile drivers[0] to do this, but rather some form of vibrating technique that propagated throughout the whole area as they were doing it for hours on end. That and some mention of coming controlled explosions triggered our management to demand that we put huge domed rubber bumpers on all loose computer equipment in our building. It took us the better part of three months to complete, and I still have nightmares about both the smell and the stickiness of the industrial strength double-sided tape we used to stick those bumpers on.

[0] Seriously, the sound of a pile driver echoing off a wall for hours on end is probably the worst sound in the world. DU-DUM DU-DUM DU-DUM DU-DUM...

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: Features like that

Yeah. this was a step too far for me too. This weekend will probably be the one when I start figuring out if running my home workstation on Ubuntu (starting with Live) rather than Windows is a feasible option; and to see what applications I might need to find alternatives to.

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

I wouldn't think so. Hostnames and IP addresses are usually enough to locate the box you need. As long as you control them yourself, that is.

Re: Serial numbers

...which is great if you have access to the shell on the boxes. In this particular case, they were owned by a third party and we were just racking, cabling, powering and assigning an IP address through their limited bootloader. The serial number could probably be read in there too, somewhere, but it was just easier to remove and rebuild. I think the the net result was that not a single server was in its right spot, so they all had to be reshuffled anyway.

Re: Decree

Include a pull-out card (with a huge red tab so that it can't be missed) in the front panel with the serial number printed in a minimum 48 point monospace font with the different character classes (upper/lower/numbers/dashes, etc) marked in different colours so that there is no ambiguity, and a push-button on the back panel that makes all the LEDs visible blink out the number parts of the serial number and you have my vote.

A couple of, shall we say, more junior colleagues installed two racks worth of blade servers (each 1RU chassis contained two server nodes) on my behalf only to find out at the end of the day that there were actually two different types of servers (one with SSDs and one with spinning disks) that were meant to go in two separate racks and that there was a reason for the install request listing the server order (rack, position) and serial number for each box. Since the specific model and serial number was printed on a label ON THE TOP OF THE SERVER and there was no other means to distinguish them from the outside, another one of my colleagues had to go on site the next day and remove all of them and put them back in the correct order. He had some choice words for the other two guys...

Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys

TFA> For those wondering about multifactor authentication, it's kinda baked in...

"kinda" being the operative word here, and this is what gets me. The original idea for MFA (or 2FA as we called it back then...) was that you can only gain access to a resource with "something you know", i.e. a password or PIN, and "something you have", i.e. a one-time-password fob, a Yubikey or a mobile phone you could receive a text message on. When biometric data became more prevalent, the paradigm shifted more toward "something you know" and "something you are" - ie. use your fingerprint, iris or face scan to authenticate you. This, can be argued, made things more secure in some way; if someone has my password and steals my phone - they can't easily get into the phone to open my authenticator apps (or, god forbid, read my texts - for those services that still use SMS). Right now for MFA I need both my resource username and password (know), my phone (have) and my face to unlock it (are) and then either my face again (are) or a PIN (know) to unlock the relevant authenticator app. That's quite a few factors.

I fear that what we're seeing now is a shift to one or more "something you ares" combined with a single "something you have". This means that it if I get "physically compromised" - by muggers, kidnappers or even law enforcement - they will likely also have access to my phone as I always have it on me. With this shift, they no longer need the "something you know" portion; they can unlock the phone with my biometric data (by forcing my finger, holding my head or lifting open my eyelids; whatever method I use to unlock the phone/app).

Yes, this will help protect against the successful credential stuffing attacks that follow user data leaks. I'm sure that WE all use password managers with unique 20+ character randomly generated passwords for all our various services, but there are a lot of people who don't want to go through the hassle. For them, this might be a significant improvement in security. For myself, I'm not sure it's worth it?

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

Re: Picking the data to delete

I've never stored things in Windows Recycle Bin or Outlook's Deleted Items (Gmail's Bin is another thing...), but for some reason I thought /tmp on Ubuntu was a good place to store files I needed for every run cycle of my inventory tool. Took me one whole server reboot before realizing THAT was a dumb idea.

Re: Ouch!

Apparently, it was the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility. Thank you Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PLScMCb-io

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Re: "simply accepted the news silently and continued about his day"

I don’t recall there being music in my version of the game in the first place? This would have been 1988-1989 or so, before sound cards were generally available (or at least affordable). Just had a look at some gameplay videos[0] now (my old floppies disappeared many moves ago) so I don’t think it’s just dementia on my part… I clearly remembered the CLICK when completing a line, but as I recall it, it was only accompanied by the sound of buckling springs being hammered by teenagers…?

[0] Turns out watching people play Tetris on YouTube is just as frustrating as watching people play Tetris in real life. They’re clearly all idiots.

Re: Mouse balls

Still loving my Wave, partially for the very reason you mention. Though I nearly took one of my fingers off some ten years ago when a colleague handed me his Wave for opening a package or something, and he had it in stuffed in the pouch with the *serrated* blade facing out. Everybody knows that you have the flat blade facing the flap, so that you CAN do the one-handed flip...

Tangentially related, when I started carrying my Leatherman on my belt for work, I discovered there's no limit to how many loose screws you can find as you're going about your day. One morning I found six screws that needed tightening on the bus to work alone.

Re: "simply accepted the news silently and continued about his day"

Ah, the Logitech bus mouse!

We had a three-button version for our home IBM PC-XT in the late 80s. It had a companion software where you could assign keyboard macros to the buttons, so I set mine up to do left - rotate - right for the Spectrum Holobyte version of Tetris.

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Re: Hilarious!

My guess was that the other three candidates were genuine, but that Simon had made them pull out by clever mail server admin tricks. Faking two incoming withdrawal emails and two outgoing "the position has been filled" emails and passing the wrong interview address to the third or something.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

I've mentioned this before, but I got to do the European tour once - From Amsterdam to London, next day to Paris, the day after that to Frankfurt and then back to Amsterdam. All in business class, and I had a job that took about 30 minutes to do (that had to be done in the night-time maintenance window) in each city. Afternoon flight, taxi to hotel, dinner, catnap, taxi to site, work, taxi back, few hours of sleep, late breakfast, taxi to airport. The assistant who booked the tour for me had booked the main national airline leaving each country (KLM->BA->Air France->Lufthansa) so I had access to the biggest lounge at each airport. The hotels were decent but nowhere near the standard in the article, but the flights were comfortable.

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

Re: terminology

I thought “made up bollocks” was the term used to describe ANY output from an LLM? You’d still need a qualifier to be able to differentiate between “made up bollocks that happens to be right” and “made up bollocks which is associated with falsehoods”…

Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack

Re: Trivial?

Some protocols are more susceptible to this than you might think. This is especially true for protocols running over UDP that rely on having their own sequencing and error handling mechanisms built in to the protocol itself (as they can't rely on TCP to handle that for them). Many a protocol - TFTP and some flavours of SIP being the most common b*stards as any seasoned firewall admins will be aware - include the source and destination IPs in the packet payload, which means they can be different from the addresses used in the IP header. This will let your spoofed packets pass through the intermediate routers without being dropped. (And break any attempts at NAT without a clever enough stateful ALG in your firewall.)

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Sorry to hear that you're going through this. Regardless of what the reason is for you mother's cognitive decline, it's not fun seeing someone you care about deeply deteriorate over time.

I would urge you (and anyone else reading this) to arrange for powers of attorney for your parents and other loved ones BEFORE you end up in a situation when they are no longer competent to fend for themselves or look out for their own interests. I don't know if this document has a particular name in English, but in my language there's a specific form of PoA that you can issue that allows named relatives, family members or other appointed guardians to step in and help a person make decisions if they are no longer able to take care of themselves. This will allow you to step in and help your mother when she can no longer make the appropriate decisions for herself.

To be brought up, discussed and executed with the tenderest care and understanding for your mother's wishes, of course.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Re: Network?

Im sure there's a related aethernet joke in there somewhere too; I just can't find it.

Re: And there's me thinking...

"You accept payment in crypto-currencies, right? What if I told you I could get you the gear to mine your OWN crypto-currency?"

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Re: That's why collecting and selling location information needs to be very illegal

And don't forget the risk of guilt by association.

My wife told me about an ex-colleague of hers, a local newspaper journalist who a number of years ago now found out he was being investigated by the police for his connections to a neo-Nazi organization. The colleague himself leaned quite far left on the political spectrum, so he was quite shocked about being brought in for questioning. The reason, it turned out, was that when he was on call or working weekends, he would park his private car in the newspaper's reserved spot in a public car park. That parking spot was apparently right next to a building that was used by the organization in question, and they'd just assumed that since he regularly parked there in evenings and weekends, he must be some kind of leader for the group.

And this was BEFORE Internet tracking.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

There's a pair of podcast episodes about it too:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve

https://radiolab.org/podcast/breaking-newsve-about-zoozve

(Disclaimer: I've not yet had a chance to listen to them myself, but Radiolab usually has really enjoyable contents. And of course, Latif Nasser who is the originator of the X thread linked above, is the co-host of the show, so this is straight from the horse's mouth.)

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Re: Ouch

I cant help but to think that this is the kind of situation that LOTO (lock out, tag out) was invented for. The carriage shouldn't be physically able to move when someone is doing something to it; whether he's in the path of movement or doing something else that could be affected by the movement (such as holding a tethered-but-not-attached head-mounted display unit). LOTO would have prevented this. (But then again, aren't we all lazy and make assumptions?)

Singapore finally deletes its COVID-era contact tracing data

Re: Exploitable Data

Quoting a news article I’m sure will be coming in about six to eight months:

“We have reached out to the (country) authorities and will update this story with their response. Meanwhile, the press representative at (hyped LLM provider) provided this statement: ‘After careful investigations it is our conclusion that portions of this data was included, in anonymized format, in a set of training data used to train our model BEFORE the data was set to be deleted. Current training sets do not include sensitive or personally identifiable information in any way, shape or form’. When closing the call, they added, off the record, ‘No doubt we’ll speak again in a couple of weeks.’.”

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Re: Wrong defaults

When we were preparing to roll out IPv6 a number of years ago we had a consultant in to assist. She'd been doing some work at home over the weekend, and when she came into the office on Monday she continued checking how gracefully our equipment would handle NDP cache exhaustion in larger subnets but couldn't quite get anything to trigger the way she wanted to. After a couple of hours her husband called from home and complained about the Internet connection dropping out constantly. It was then it dawned on her that she hadn't changed the target IP subnet back from her home router on returning to the office, so she'd been DDoSing her husband for a few hours.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Now that megastar Taylor Swift has been pulled into this quagmire...

Giggity.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

My wife and I looked at buying a house a couple of years ago - it wasn't built yet, so it'd be brand new, and one of the things they touted as a huge benefit was an "app-controlled smart meter to keep track of and control your heating spend" which was marked as "(Free)*" in the prospect. Turns out, that little asterisk meant "for 12 months, thereafter the equivalent of EUR 25 per month; mandatory". One of the many reasons we didn't buy a property there.

This hits so close to home. Everything is a subscription these days, even if you still buy the hardware you'll need an annual license. Preferably pre-paid for five years and auto-renewing.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Two sides of a coin (aka Someone wanted a new printer)

A friend of mine many years ago told me a story of when he was called to replace a toner cartridge on an older-generation printer at a manager's office. The manager, who was generally well liked and somehow had never made any enemies in the helpdesk, asked if he couldn't get a new printer, as the one he currently had was very slow and noisy. My friend said that sorry, but he could only replace a printer that was actually broken. The manager asked if he couldn't make an exception, and my friend again said sorry, he could only replace broken printers. The manager now more or less pleaded, but my friend looked him sternly the eye and said sorry, he could only replace printers. that. were. actually. broken. As he said it, he nudged the printer about a foot to the left so that two of the rubber bumpers sat outside the desk surface. The manager brightened up and said that absolutely, good on you for not wasting company money.

When he came back from lunch about 45 minutes later, one of his helpdesk buddies was just discarding the packing materials from a new printer, as one upstairs had mysteriously crashed to the floor about ten minutes ago. The caller made a special note to say that they should keep the toner cartridge from the old one as it had recently been replaced.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: The RJ family...

Don't forget to include a constantly flickering blue LED with an intensity approaching the Trinity test. Preferrably on the back so that your whole room fills with strobe light bouncing of the wall.

Your password hygiene remains atrocious, says NordPass

Maybe I jumped to conclusions here, and for that I apologize. Wordings such as "NordPass customers in the US seem more likley[sic!] to use generic passwords..." from the article led me to believe that the data in the list (which apparently is an annual thing, coming from a company referred to in the same article as a "password manager vendor") came from their own customers. If the data is indeed collected from other sources then NordPass obviously have no blame here. I based my comment solely on the info in this article, I did not go the the source.

And my point was exactly what you're bringing up - if a password manager can even READ my password in clear text - either through non-encrypted backend storage or through a hidden master key, then they should definitely NOT be trusted. I have no experience with NordPass or any of the other Nord products, nor with any other online password managers. I rely on an offline password manager whose database I can maintain on my devices using a self-hosted sync service. That way, if something does go wrong, I can't blame anyone but myself.

So let's see, a password manager company that makes it their business to list their customers' most commonly used passwords every year? Broken down per service type, country and all? Definitely doesn't sound like a password manager I'd like to use, that's for sure.