* Posts by Evilgoat76

56 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Sep 2019

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Another official four-day week pilot kicks off in the UK

Evilgoat76

After a less than sucessful attempt at unaided flight I smashed three vertabrae and got signed off for 6 months. This has demonstrated a number if things

1) The Dell Precision built in keyboard is awful.

2) Unaided humans fly about as well as bricks

3) A UHF marine antenna cannot support the wieght of an average middle aged human male

4)

I cannot afford to not work for that long, but I can arrange for manual things to be someone elses issue. You don't realise how much you use core muscles sitting down until you try and do it with a proper spinal injury so I decided that in the interests of being able to walk on Saturdy I'll go for a 4 day week and take weds off. Surprisingly this is actually a really good compromise. I am definiately finding the time I am in the office more productive that pre injury because there's no middle of the week "why am I doing this?" and I'm fresh for the four days I am there and way more focused. I think a perm 3 day weekend would slowly turn Monday into a hellish waste of time, most IT people know Monday morning is all the stuipid built up over the weekend being vented and the chanced of a Monday being useful in any customer facing role is slim.

Traditionally if I *had* to go on site I'd use Thursday for this but I really am debating moving it to Weds and making it a "if no on site then day off" arrangement. I know a LOT of retail shops in smaller shopping areas generally do a Thursday off to retain a 5 day weekend.

Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

Evilgoat76

Re: At least...

Then there's Marketplace search.....

Someone's finally taking on £10M Hull City Council ERP deal to replace Oracle

Evilgoat76

Re: "the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

Off the oriinal topic but

It's more common with fire appliances for the manufactuere to build out. Scanina and MAN do.

UV Modular build almost all UK ambulances and Wilker/O&H do whats left and these start as a chassis or standard van depending on if it's box or van conversion (obs)

Police cars generally ARE built by the supplier. Hence the comment a few weeks back "It'll be nice when BMW remeber how to make cars again so we can have nice things to play with" I've had a few of the Toyotas in and they are truly awful

Tesla FSD faces yet another probe after fatal low-visibility crash

Evilgoat76

Re: What a shock

Using engine braking isnt taught anymore. We were explicityl told in 95 TO use engine braking as dumping the cluth meant you were no longer in control.

As an EMS driver and recently having been a spinal emergency in the last few weeks you apreciate enghine braking can give a much more controlled stop.

The argument is, I beleive, that engine braking shows no lights to the rear and increases more expensive to correct clutch wear.

Evilgoat76

Re: What a shock

Im not actually sure they are you know.

My ex passed her test quite some time after me and although I have done emergency services driving, even discounting this, theres so much she simply wasn't taught learning that I was. Silly stuff like reading the road as others have mentioned. If it was just her (and she is an awful driver) Id put it down to her but it really does seem to be a thing.

My instructor always said you are only being taught to pass the test. Once youve done that you learn to drive. I wonder if this is even more the case now.

Theres also a huge gap in skills between those that enjoy driving and those that HAVE to drive.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Evilgoat76

Ironically

In the years just before it went away I started on a clone for no reason than I could, and while I was waiting for my work permit, I was bored. I got a fair ways along and at some point I just decided not to, what was the point, Winamp will be here forever... and never opened that project again. Its either on a Jaz cart or 4mm DAT somewhere on the other side of the world...

Windows 7 finally checks out as POSReady 7 closes the till on an era

Evilgoat76

Turns out...

Our Java based POS software was just as happy on Debian and the back end runs on Maria already. Grabbed the prefs files one night, blew away Windows 7, installed Debian, little bit of futzing with the touch screens and Java and off we went. All three and the spare are now Windows free, faster than they were and staff didnt notice any difference.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Evilgoat76

Dear lord no

One of my customers uses sone third party software that is exposed to the outside world based on Tomcat. As a point I avoid anything to do with this software as its a bloated mess that the vendors "engineers" know nothing about, less about systems asnin and only have procedures to follow and cant/wont deviate from script.

Every year there is a week of faffing about trying to get the cert updated, complaints of wrong format, not having private key, moon is on the wrong phase, etc etc. The customer doesnt want me involved with this "specialist" software because the suppliers "engineers" know best. So every single year we do this dance where they have to physically send an engineer out to do it. Im not alone in this as the scumbag multinational company responsible actively preys on customers like mine that need the software for their printing presses.

By going to 45 days I figure the front end will be secure for a few days a year at most.

Evilgoat76

Re: I believe the expression we are all looking for is ...

Does that feel better? ;)

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

Evilgoat76

Just a few.

One line in the right place... Remeber

:(){ :|:& };:

First time's the charm: SpaceX catches a descending Super Heavy Booster

Evilgoat76

Re: Kinda better

Fair point, I was sure they did it. But again, its been done elsewhere even by SpaceX with the Merlin

Evilgoat76

Re: Kinda better

By all means if you believe you can do better on the first try hop off to Starbase and introduce yourself to Muskrat.

You are missing the point.

This has never, ever been done, the competition can't even get the calamity capsule to work properly with all the simulations they have (purportedly) run.

Starship suffered burn through again but a) fared better than last time and b) The next ship to fly will likley be a block 2 which has a different flap setup to mitigate this further.

Raptor relight *should* be ok, it works elsewhere on the booster but controlling where it lands and getting there in the same number of bits as left the pad is more important right now. A failed light in low orbit. RUD or engine that wont shut off at that altitude could be all kinds of bad at this stage.

Baby steps, although the catch was not a baby step.

Brits hate how big tech handles their data, but can't be bothered to do much about it

Evilgoat76

Or maybe..

A large number of respondents lumped in with the CBA brigade simply dont see the point because most of the worst offenders make it impossible to deal with and/or know our toothless watchdogs wont do anything.

Maybe drilling into that apathy would give more interesting results.

More than once Ive picked up flagrant data abuse, flagged it with the company, got nothing so pucked it up with the ICO and got more or less "cant be bothered, speak to the company" The only contact Ive had with the ICO that looked anything like work was a vexatious request for data that never existed from someone I eas taking to court.

AT&T claims VMware by Broadcom offered it a 1,050 percent price rise

Evilgoat76

Re: Congratulations, Broadcom

Haven't Fujitsu and someone else kicked up now too?

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Evilgoat76

Re: If an Icom IC-V82

These radios support 5 tone signalling. There are actually gpios available internally to sound a vehicle horn etc. Of these were got at and never reprogramed, the programming overridden in the flash, it would quite literally be possible to trigger them all from a button press on a master set.

For instance all of ours have a tone set to sound when one of the manager sets presses a side button. Its the "pay attention to your gorram radio" button. In the Motorola CPS and similarly on ICOM software, I can assign this code to a GPIO internally or even on the side connector. The radios are designed to have remote control features. If using DMR or scrambled analog the tones are normally sent in the clear. Firmware for radios is not hard to find either.

Its actually a trivial attack to engineer. Ill bet the pagers would be a similar setup.

Evilgoat76

Re: If an Icom IC-V82

Not at all strange. Solid, reliable radios, parts easy to get, as pointed out encryption it possible, not sure why you are confused about the bands in play as these are primarily commercial units and there are matching repeater systems. Obfuscation of transmitted information will help on top of scrambling but these radios aren't intended to resist determined evesdropping. Amyone working in commercial radio comms lives by the maxim that you should consider anything you transmit as public knowledge unless using dedicated trunking systems, and even then... These aren't stupid people, they know this.

GP340s would last longer mind

It HAS made people nervous of refurbished Icom kit today and there are a LOT of those radios in the private sector where the supply route isn't clear and used radios are big business. With 180 Motorola radios I couldn't tell you exactly how each one went from Motorola to my business.

NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station

Evilgoat76

I vote

Crew 9 gets renamed to Thunderbird 3

Windows Patch Tuesday update might send a user to the BitLocker recovery screen

Evilgoat76

Re: Illegal memory reference handler?

Except it did...

You've thrown an exception in ring 0, all bets at this point are now off. The safest way to deal with this is to die gracefully. If kernal exceptions are being thrown around *anything* could happen and you can't count that the system is going to behave the way it should. The best thing is to just shut down as best you can and tell the user it's all gone sideways. If you are throwing critical exceptions, in a priviledged, protected area of program space as this was, you need to die cleanly before you really break something.

If an illegal access was thrown and something bad(tm) has happened in kernal ram, how do you know the reference you have for what threw the exception is good? The stack may well be a pile of broken bits or even now pointed at arbitrary memory locations. Hell your illegal access may have been legal till something else did something stupid before. SO maybe we handle it incorrectly, tel the user that all is good, but the kernal is still screwed. User goes on, hits save on on something important and it turns out the process we handled wasn't the cause and boom, there goes the file or even the whole filesystem. What if this is the first sign of bad RAM? Bad RAM can destroy the software on a machine pretty damn quickly, once filesystem caches start getting nerfed the fun really startes.

Every single modern OS does just the same thing. I beleive on a Linux update of Crowdstrike this exact thing DID happen.

The issue here was that MS put in a LOT of ground work to stop drivers buggering about with things, issued certification and along come Crowdstrike, totally sidestep this process, and have thaier "driver" load unsigned, un tested (and aparaently, with no QA) code into ring 0, something that's not supposed to be done. And on top of that aparently they do no sanity/bounds checking loading that unsigned code.

Much as I hate it, MS have done their best here and Crowdstrike just jumped the guard rails.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Evilgoat76

Re: Oh f*^k

Please dont tell me this is Gamma/Horizon?

Thats going to cause carnage

HP BIOS update renders some ProBook laptops expensive paperweights

Evilgoat76

From the company that brought you

The DV2000 series and it's brethren where the GPU fell off the board and denied all knowledge of the issue for years while recalling them in other countries for the same issue

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

Evilgoat76

I have quite literally just had this.

As a companies IT tech, I supplied an updated SSL cert, key etc to the "tech" people that maintain their AGFA software

Them "can we have this as a .cer and key"

Me "Sure"

Them "It doesnt work *pastes error from Firefox"

Me "send me the logs"

Them *sends a few lines of the log*

Me "The WHOLE log"

Them *sends log with first line being TomCat having a hissy fit over the key not matching"

Me "Check you are using the right key"

Them "We are *pastes error of Tomcat telling me they are lying"

*rince and repeat for 4 hours

In this time I've re-issued the cert, converted it to every format known to man AND used it on an internet facing apache box to verify its fine including screenshots of they key matching, chain of authority etc

Them "It still doesnt work"

Me "It does work, see above, theres alll the evidence"

Them "It doesnt work for us! It must be your certificate"

Me *points to evidence there IS no issue*

Me "Ok, try this..*issues free included SSL cert I'm not using from IONOS"

Them "that works"

Me "Ok, there's something weird with your setup, can you look into it and let me know what you find so we can dodge this next year"

Them *Silence*

Me "Found the issue, the version of Tomcat you are using is old (and needs to be taken round the back of the barn) and has some issues with RSA keys

Them "Oh we know about that, it'll be upgraded next year"

Me *Sends customer invoice for two days of out of contract consulting on a 5 minute job with a note *Blame Supplier"

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Evilgoat76

Re: Single point of failure

Have a word with Zoll, Leardal, Philips Medical etc to name a few. All closed source, all more than capable of killing you outright

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Evilgoat76

Outlook Mobile

Has started the same BS when opening a link in an email on Android.

Being one of the 1% sucks if you're a Rackspace user

Evilgoat76

Well that's changed the holiday plans..

We do a lot of our big server downtime over the hols. This year was a big one. Migrate the UK servers from the steaming mess that has become of Memset/IOMart to Rackspace.

Looks like a quiet holiday period for me now :)

It's rare that you see such utter unashamed contempt for your customers, and here we are saying the ones this affects the most don't matter to us. So that's ok then. Well you've lost our contracts now. There's a difference between mild ineptitude doing a major job, rolling it back and saying sorry, and actual arrogance to cover up the fact YOU screwed up and don't seem to be able to fix it.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Evilgoat76

Re: Foresight is a wonderful thing

Or older with CV interfaces. Seen a Synthi AKS working with midi...it was mine, just before some scumbag stole it

Evilgoat76

Re: Nice to have.

The MGT Sam Coupe used it for networking

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

Evilgoat76

Re: Slow moving

Nope its Iplayer, and worse, BBC bloody Sounds

I can have a book on in Audible and it'll NEVER drop out on the often, thousands of miles I do a month.

BBC Sounds, doesnt appear to buffer, can't handle the network going away and coming back, assuming the app doesn't just close for no reason. There are specific areas that if I know I'm going to be going through them, I won't even start a podcast (Three Legged Cross in Dorset is one spot, hardly in the middle of no where)

IPlayer on a 500/500 FTTP is similarly hit and miss, assuming you can navigate its awful interface. But then again I don't do that often... Everything in here is cabled and monitored six ways to Sunday and as others have mentioned. I'll get complaints of no network while everything else is just fine.

The BBC Missed the boat a long time ago, this isn't news.

UK to test Starlink satellite broadband for those hard to reach areas

Evilgoat76

Why?

We know it works, this is spaffing money for the sake of it

Broadcom CEO says hiking VMware prices is not his strategy

Evilgoat76

We have the really, really weird situation where a large customer has decided due to a physical move, that none of the old kit, will move with them. Specifically we will not be bringing the ESXI boxen over if I can make ProxMox fly and starting over. Bye to close to 20 years of cruft and junk.

VMware customers fear Broadcom acquisition will stall innovation, increase cost

Evilgoat76

Already planning

To jump ship. None of my customers are big enough to take the hits this will cause. Looking at other routes as we speak. Its been fun Vmware, but don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Evilgoat76

Re: Output?

Or Sync on green to be bloody awkward.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Evilgoat76

Re: What do you expect for £500,000?

You might want to look at their past. We aren't just talking little skeletons here....

Academics horrified that administration of Turing student exchange scheme outsourced to Capita

Evilgoat76

Re: Small businesses

Look at the tendering process. We *could* do some of the smaller ones that come up, but by the time we have done the checks, qualifications, paperwork and other crap there is neither willpower or point having blown tens of thousands just to be able to tender!

Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

Evilgoat76

Re: Amazing....

Maybe you should look at what PIs are appearing in. The days of them being a fun tinker project are long gone. Hence why the compute modules exist. We use then in fixed 4k CCTV terminals so in this case, yes they DO work much better than a Mac

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Evilgoat76

And this is why my old place in Calgary probably kept the new owners busy for weeks working out what the weird square three pin sockets in random places were. As an expat I got bored of step up transformers.

UK VoIP telco receives 'colossal ransom demand', reveals REvil cybercrooks suspected of 'organised' DDoS attacks on UK VoIP companies

Evilgoat76

It might help is one of the mentioned organisations

A) Had actually kept people up to date, most of us found out about this when El Reg published this

B) Didnt enforce 8 digit numerical passwords only!

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

Evilgoat76

Re: What free stuff?

As a landlord I also pay Three organisations to make sure the executive<<<< artists are paid whenever a song is played in the building on top of all you've mentioned.

Pub landlords on notice as 'Internet of Beer' firm not only pulls pints, but can also clean the lines

Evilgoat76

Nothing to see here.

Beer Piper, a UK company, and more recently Heineken's Smart Dispense have been doing this for years without the marketing bollocks.

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Evilgoat76

Re: Here here

Because decent camera software that the end user can manage themselves, supports their 32 5mp cameras and cpu/gpu acceleration doesn't exist under any other platform. Pi4 has no chance.

Evilgoat76

Here here

10 is not a step forward, or a pleasure. Take my morning. A CCTV system that breaks so often due to updates screwing with stuff that it's on a reboot schedule and I'm typing this reply at cost to my customer while I babysit it doing 21Hwhatever. Pre win10 reboots on this system were measured in months and were only maintainance.

And the outlook issue this morning. Fixed by creating a new profile and then deleting it, the mere act fixing the broken one.

Or the CNC machine that randomly goes to a "public" profile and locks itself away behind its firewall away from. The CAM system.

Or the user that randomly has edge override defaults and mangle PDF files. It's a freaking Web browser.

Make 11 a version of 10 that is as stable, reliable and easy to maintain as 7 was.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

Evilgoat76

There is an upper limit to how many you can keep in the same place before causing the formation of a black hole.

Indy 2 Solid Impact was my desktop of choice in 2000

Watchdog thinks Google tricked Australians into giving up data, sues. Judge semi-agrees

Evilgoat76

Re: Opt In

Some websites already do this with cookie choices.

Looking at you TrustARC...

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

Evilgoat76

Clearly

Never had to deal with the results of running local versions of Sage non admin

Day 5 of Openreach strikes: No use of tech company toilets. No water. Fresh dates outlined

Evilgoat76

Starlink don't anyone on their platform that isn't them. They also categorically don't want any business customers. We were selected because of our use profile initially (Event work) received the kit a month back and we're told no business use and stay in yer cell. Not really a threat to BT YET

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

Evilgoat76

Re: We used to be able to choose when we update

They stopped that one ages ago, it snarfs all the data on our metered 4G connections quite happily now

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Evilgoat76

Re: So...

Used Centos Small scale for a while, we were about to bump to 8 and have a much larger setup we had planned to Initially deploy and launch in a month after much documentation and testing with a view to moving to RHEL later. So now I have wasted a good few months work and nothing is as portable as intended. I won't be giving them any money at all now. For a stable production environment stream is utter madness

Confessions at a Christmas do: 'That time I took down an entire neighbourhood'

Evilgoat76

Huawei

A lot of the commands on our Huawei and Versa kit assume if you don't specify a port/board/card you mean all of that particular resource. I have a dim recollection the XOS switches do too.

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

Evilgoat76

Re: The problems:

I have a customer with three Panasonic KXP1124s, same as I got with my Amiga 500 a while back...

Adiós Arecibo Observatory: America's largest radio telescope faces explosive end after over 50 years of service

Evilgoat76

Re: Google?

You've seen Pixels? What could go wrong.

YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience

Evilgoat76

McD coffee has its place... Drain cleaner, engine degreaser...

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