Posts by FlavioStanchina

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Considering the trend, we should probably define a shortcut for "the end of end-to-end encryption (E2EE)" which would be EoE2EE?

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Friday brings the prospect of spending time with loved ones?

I thought it brought the prospect of spending time with bottled fermentation byproducts. How times have changed...

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

A screwdriver into a UPS? I was expecting a far more damaging type of ZZZZZZINGGGGGG -- with sparks flying.

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

One of my colleagues did the opposite -- he managed to plug a RJ45 Ethernet connector into a RJ11 phone line. No, we never understood just how he could cram the larger connector in the smaller socket, but his mantra was something like "when all else fails, use the pickaxe". We had to repair quite a few large and/or deep holes he made with his pickaxe approach. In this particular instance, he fried one extension board of the office switchboard, about €1000 in damages.

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

"may cause debug error code 53"

Was expecting debug error code 451.

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

He'll Shatner the record for oldest man in space.

Cryptic US Strategic Command tweet reveals dangers of working from home with kids in the way

Maybe it's Trump's Twitter passw... oh, wait.

Name True, iCloud access false: Exceptional problem locks online storage account, stumps Apple customer service

What about her sons?

Also, she should consider calling her firstborn "Not" and trigger all sort of paradoxes:

"Who are you?"

"I'm Not True"

(universe implodes)

Atlantic City auctions off chance to hit Big Red Button and make grotesque Trump Plaza casino go boom

is Biden bidding?

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

this is pretty good On Call material!

Quick, find the engineers involved and have them write a story for On Call!

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

A coworker once wrote a "cleanup" script for a C# project. It was meant to run from inside Visual Studio, so it was something like:

DEL /S $(OutDir)\*.foo

DEL /S $(OutDir)\*.bar

DEL /S $(OutDir)\*.xml

After said coworker left, another coworker took responsibility for that project. Don't remember the details, but at some point he ran the script by double clicking it.

He spent the afternoon picking files from other computers to try and make his system stable. Then, when he thought all was fine, he tried to reboot. Of course it wouldn't come up again.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Test passed

I wonder -- the Navy should have been very happy, they got a kill on the first try.

Was the fisherman of German descent, by the way?

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Whoa, that was a nasty gremlin

Whoa, I did my fair share of stuff on the Amiga at the time, although I didn't own an A4000 -- the A3000 was far better, as we all know -- but never saw or heard anything like this. OK, the flawed Buster, SCSI termination, no memory protection (I'm pretty sure Paula wasn't running the Enforcer)... but taming disk errors by opening the clock?? And only in a certain position?!?

My best guess is that she, being the graphics designer, also had an add-on graphics card -- Picasso comes to mind, but memory isn't serving me well, I don't even remember the name of the one I had. Both the hardware and the drivers for those beasts were of mixed quality. Interactions between the graphics, the SCSI controller and/or system timings would not surprise me, although I'd still be at a loss to explain why the clock fixed the enough to work.