Posts by Evilgoat76

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

Re: Yesterday's tech

Moved to ESP/STM32 a while back thankfully and dropped the IDE not long after. Sadly it WAS useful for really quick and dirty stuff that I didnt really care much about and didnt feel like fighting Eclipse over.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Re: Tracking Disappears!!!

A SIMless device is still trackable Im sorry to tell you. Even without using WiFi. Your VOIP provider is also required to hold certain data about you for the emergency services as well.

Untangling the Jeff Bezos web: Who pays for the billionaire's space lust?

Re: Financial engineering

All our systems are on pay monthly, no contract. not sure if thats still the case but we frequently stop and star ours ove rthe season. Keeping 15 dishes running year round would be insane when they only get used 6 months a year.

T-Mobile's satellite service lifts off, and it's open season on rivals

Re: Hmm, satellite to cellphone

Nope, the Starlink network just failed globally

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

The Malamute, with his whole two brain cells (one for breathing and a spare) tends to go for the catch with a noticeable lag and much enthusiasm which has landed said cheese on the top of the fridge/cupboards/child on numerous occasions

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Re: Its a bit rich..

We saw, and still do, a lot of situations where a housing estate is done, then the business estate on the other side of the road isn't. 100-1000 subs vs 100 at absolute most. So the business estate just doesn't get done till Glide potter along and do it for them. There is a lot of cherry picking going on now that they know others will pick up the gaps. They have also used other people's work to cover their gaps. In Dorset they just go XX% coverage and include Wessex and other providers in that. They arent saying THEY did it, but they arent not taking credit either.

Its a bit rich..

Given how much they have been paid to deliver this...

Leaving asside the BT business units trying to rip SME's off left right and centre with unsuitable products based on IDSN/COPPER cut off with no products for the customer. "Oh you'll use copper until the FTTP arrives!

Its not a speed to be proud of either. Our (large) village has been on poor FTTC or Vermin for years with promised FTTC some time in the future. This was so long ago we have since sued for, and won compensation for them messing up a business move and as above, selling us products we couldnt have. That would have been around 2010 we were promised FTTP imminently,

In comparison, CityFiber showed up fisrst week of Jan and are almost done. The sheer speed and organisation demonstrated has been amazing. SItes prepped, barried, trenchedm ducts in, butired and restoration works and jointers / overhead teams right behind them. At the rate they are working it will be around 6 weeks to do the entire village (Except the new bit covered by the Charles Church Protection Racket)

Yes they arent perfect, but they are ACTUALLY visibly doing something BT has been promising for about 10 years.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

No compelling reason to do it

I have a customer, staff and management are all older types. Through 7 to 10 we have everything working just right, everything is dialled in. Their desktops have had ram and SSD upgrades, everything is good with the world. 11 offers them nothing.

Last week one of them died, and had to be replaced, unlike the last 11 machine I had to slot in, this one, with babysitting, just worked. The new recipient hates it, cant find anything and said it gets in her way, Sage hate it even more, but it works.

Yesterday a W10 machine "upgraded itself" and instantly created an utter disaster, drive maps stopped working, ot wants an email address or fecking hello, won't talk to AD properly and as fir the Agfa supplied nightmare...

Most are seeing the latter as their first exposure to 11 which leads to "dear god no, run away ”. I still dont want it, my customers dont want it, but managed it can be made a lot less painful rather than just foisting it on people....but that, the pointless hardware requirements, bling fir the sake of it. bully tactics, making it harder to do things, and no killer use case kean businesses dont care for it.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: What's in a name...

I've been out on those waters enough times, it's just The Channel, as in "the Channel Tunnel" And to confuse it, the Channel contains the Shipping Channels, like one really big, wet CAT5

Re: Americans have lost their pride and he wants to restore some

At 0 AC street?

Or Diode Junction?

Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems

We actually use these. An ISR keeps an eye on them at all times allowing the mcu to shut the circuit down and provide realtime poad stats/control load shedding. Good little bits of kit. Not expensive either.

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

Re: What are we measuring?

We seem to store memories and information via association so maybe BIT it the wrong work here. It makes everyone in information technology and hardware think of a logical bit.

Object or Symbol may be better terminology. A word may represent just a word, ie. "Bit" but with the attached memories it closer to an object with a root class and many properties. So Banana is one bit, but inferences many, many more things. Its a fruit, it's yellow, I like the taste, they are of class "plant" also "food". There are methods for it too such as "eat" and "how to stop spelling it"

So while yes, technically Banana is one "bit" it does not represent a singular thing in our minds.

Right, I need Calvados, way too deep for this time of night

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

First they came for Huawei

We do a LOT of large event networki

Years ago, before it all kicked off we purchased a number of Huawie SmartAX MA5612 DSLAMs, Vectoring CCUEs. VDSL2 line cards and POTs card. These were neither cheap or easy to find.

We chose them on the simple basis that they were the best technology available, they wernt horrifically expensive, the support was excellent as was availability of parts. Nothing US manufactured came close and the Versa's we evaluated against them were garbage. Defininateley a market keading product...

US and later Uk : "Cant use then because..."

We firewalled them off anyway but upped the security a little but no one ever provided actual proof. We still use them and there is still nothing better.

Rather than drink Ubiquiti cool-aid and get reamed by licencing we went TP-Link Omada and went as far as to bake the management into our own build network controllers. The whole thing *just* works bar a few false starts and its a good, solid, reliable and powerful system. I personally faver it over Ubiquiti for a number of reasons. Like the Huawei DSLAMs we can make the Omada kit sing and dance and we favoure the ISP routers we purchase from them for DSL customers (Which we DONT lock down from the customer). When up against expensive kit like Draytek that B2B providers favour, its lightyears ahead in capability and configuration.

US: "Can't use them because..." No doubt the UK will follow suit.

Once again some wishy, washy excuse that seems to boil down to "Its better than our stuff"

Its getting boring now and is starting to reek of protectionism when the home grown options are like swiss cheese and mostly running UI's from the netscape era or built IN CHINA by the lowest bidder.

TP-Link did try a brand shift a few years ago with Mercusys. Its mostly hugely cost reduced TP-Link hardware with an absolute garbage firmware intended to do battle with the Tenda crap.

* I don't doubt Ubiquiti stuff is probobly mostly good, but I'm not playing their licencing game for every single product. I buy stuff, its mine, I dont pay to use it after. I certainly dont pay over the top for old technology and then pay again.

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: Apple AI=Ain't Intelligent!

Had this the other day. Its been a year or so since I used word to do anything particularly intense, I have a habitof doing anything like that on the Laptop where I can go sit somewhere nice. But last week I had to use it for some technical docs.

My Laptop has a locally installed copy of word and its old. My desktop, O365

Cue cries of WTF? Why? Will you stop bloody helping! Shortcuts that used to work, no longer do. Stuff that was simple (Formatting a sodding table) is now like pulling teeth and unintuitive.

I gave up, grabbed the laptop and did it that way.

I really wonder why MS are hell bent on breaking stuff for the sake of breaking it :(

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Much the same here...

Emporia Vue, a few Tasmota Devices and Home Asssistant run the office, our resin room heters, curing box, general heating and if needed the bloody great deisel generator.

Ideally next year I want to to get a handle on it all and drop the grid connection to winter/backup duties.

Its not actually hard to do and at home (I live in a pub) it was used to shave £600 a month of the monthly bill. 17th century pubs cost a fortune to run.

Ingram Micro to 'stop doing business' with Broadcom, downgrade to 'limited engagement' on VMware

Re: Alternatives

Admittedly not a power user however we have a fair few stand alone ESXI boxen.

A number of these had a ProxMox box installed alongside when the news started that Broadcom were sniffing about. Migration was initially painful and we ran side by side with the VMs on both platforms and moved to Proxmox gradually over almost a year now.

Halfway through Proxmox gained the ability to mount VMware data stores and that was a game changer for us.

Not much left on VMWare now and it seems easier to manage once you get your head round it. And having a useable backup system off the get go is a huge advantage and takes the cost of Veeam away too.

YMMV but I see this as a good move for us that should have been done earlier.

Reliability wise. No change. Performance wise, I feel its possibly a bit quicker but its subjective.

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

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

Re: At least...

Then there's Marketplace search.....

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Just a few.

One line in the right place... Remeber

:(){ :|:& };:

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

Re: Kinda better

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I vote

Crew 9 gets renamed to Thunderbird 3

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Re: Nice to have.

The MGT Sam Coupe used it for networking

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

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

Why?

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

Broadcom CEO says hiking VMware prices is not his strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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