Posts by logicalextreme

Uncle Sam probes H-1B abuse surge: What do our vultures make of it?

Re: Its a joke

And I'm presuming I'd be buggered due to lack of the thoroughly unnecessary postgraduate degree…

Chrome's HTTPS padlock heads to Google Graveyard

Re: Gorhels htts push was nothing to do with making the web secure

I'm not doubting you but do you have a link? My G-fu is weak and I am le tired.

Aye — alert by exception, keep the signal:noise ratio cromulent. As long as people are warned on insecure pages (especially where they're actively entering information) I'm good with less cruft.

Still be a cold day in hell before you catch me using actual Chrome on a desktop, though.

Streaming apps – and maybe even Cloud PCs – coming to electric cars

Re: While charging?

Speaking as a pedestrian, cyclist and sometime passenger — not just driver safety!

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: I think you'll find...

2005! I was a decade out. Knew it'd been the Inland Revenue for a longer portion of my life

Re: I think you'll find...

They always used HM, inherited from HM Customs and Excise at the time of the 1995 merger that created HMRC. There was no way even back then that the authorities would be stupid enough to expand that abbreviation knowing that it was liable to become defunct at any second, Liz II was already pushing 80.

I actually said something similar about kvinna/kona etc. at the time it happened, as I was fairly into the Icelandic sagas back then and always into etymology. But I like your revolutionary idea better. :)

Ubuntu Advantage is being wired deeper into the distro

Good point — I did initially have it on Debian but shifted to Ubuntu as stuff was ending up just a little stale for my tastes, and I like relatively up-to-date packages with minimal maintenance (fixing some broken scripts once in a while is fine, it's more likely a change in a web API is going to break things for me than a new package being installed).

Never had a direct problem with systemd though I'm inclined to trust the Reg readership and wider community on it being problematic…one thing I've disliked about Ubuntu so far is that when I do try a new major release, there's often a completely new way of doing something fundamental which may or may not be available alongside the old way of doing things, and there may or may not be some attempt at back-compatibility to go with it. Which reminds me a lot of Windows!

I imagine I'll stick with Ubuntu for ease, but upgrade time is always my chance to poke my head out there and see what else might be available. Of course I could probably suffice with a Raspberry Pi if streaming services/distributors et al. could get their shit together, but I'm one of those cantankerous types that would like to be able to actually view the next episode of something they were in the middle of watching…or view any episode of certain things.

It's basically functioning as that aye, just without any of the redundancy you'd hopefully expect from a NAS. And it's plugged directly into the telly for video stuff.

I do also have a NAS that's been running about a year longer but I think it's probably due for retirement given that the firmware's dried up, it's about five times louder than that PC and I have low faith in the RAID 5 array successfully recovering from a drive failure after 12 or so years of continuous operation. And since the total available storage over 4 disks is 6TiB, when the last single HDD I bought back in early 2020 was 14TiB, I wouldn't be shocked if I were to discover that it's the least electrically efficient appliance in my house!

Re: Users is the correct word!

I get enough of that shit trying to just buy groceries online and Tescos 5 clicks to get out of the upsale and actually to checkout is as annoying as f*** as well

I've mostly not been too annoyed by self-service checkouts of late; I only use the ones at the Co-op and local mini Tesco really as I don't drive and stay close to home. They seem to have removed the volume control/mute buttons though which means the Co-op ones SCREAM LIKE AN ANGRY DICTATOR and the Tesco one mumbles confirmation of scanning the Clubcard barcode so quietly that I never know whether it's actually done so or not.

My least favourite interface however is a cash machine at the petrol station where the user journey goes:

(Card inserted)

Enter PIN> (I do so)

Would you like to view your balance before you proceed?> (No)

[List of options, including "withdraw cash" and "view balance"]> (withdraw cash)

Would you like to view your balance before you proceed?> (No)

[List of amounts to withdraw]> (Amount I want to withdraw)

Would you like to view your balance before you proceed?> (No)

[Card returned, cash dispensed]

As someone who hides from the awful truth of knowing their bank balance wherever possible it takes some commitment to successfully evade it during this sequence of interactions.

Ah, just saw your comment — Manjaro seems to work okay for some people as a server OS. I've used Arch as a desktop before but also like minimal fuss/learning these days, I'm not as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I once was. Might give it a whirl on a VM sometimes though; sounds like your laptop isn't too far removed from my PC which has been running since 2011; just a mobo + i3 + RAM bundle from Dabs with about 16 HDDs of various sizes thrown in because I CBA figuring out ZFS or any kind of storage pool manager for JBODs.

(Of course I expect your laptop perhaps has fewer than 16 HDDs unless your thighs are particularly beefy)

I've liked Mint as a desktop OS before, but it's been a while since I used a Linux with a desktop. I currently run Ubuntu Server 18.04 as a file/media server and it's been stable (outside of occasional weird complete freezes that I've never been able to diagnose, but am fairly confident are something to do with the now quite old mobo or maybe the GPU on the i3). I'm using it essentially headless (X kicks in to run Kodi when I want to watch something, but that's it, and I shut it down again afterwards as the majority of the freezes only happen when Kodi and/or X are running).

I haven't been too put out by this Advantage stuff but did see a message about it for the first time a couple of weeks back. I'll need to do a fresh install at some point in the future to get myself on a more recent OS version, which I was anticipating would be whatever the most recent Ubuntu LTS is when I do so (didn't get round to 22.04 or even 20.04 because I am le tired). I anticipate it would be easiest for me to stick with Ubuntu as I have setup notes and commands for the current instance that would hopefully not need too much adaptation, but what alternatives to Ubuntu are there for a home headless/server setup that I might want to consider?

Cloudflare engineer broke rules – and a customer's website – with traffic throttle

Re: They've at least done the right thing...

Aye — and the crucial thing is to make sure that when the unexpected (or even the mildly-expected-but-not-deemed-likely-enough-to-be-worth-coding-for) happens (or happens often enough), that you have processes, architecture, people and a codebase that can be adapted to deal with it using a reasonable amount of time and effort.

I've seen it happen all too often that a line is drawn (perfectly reasonably) under the number of cases that have been programmatically anticipated in order to avoid endless searching for edge cases without ever doing an actual release, but then adding in a new case (edge or otherwise) is so difficult due to rigid processes etc. that it never gets done.

Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit rule

Re: mobile browsers

For plugins, best that I've found is Fennec via F-Droid. I use it for bypassing half-arsed paywalls and such.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

Re: Microsoft proves that the 365 branding was a terrible choice

Ah yes, I remember SleazyJet and Cryanair. I seem to recall that our internal names for Ryanair and Virgin however were <the surname of a DBA named Ryan that we'd all worked with once> and Vogon (occasionally Vorgon), respectively.

Re: In other news

Or maybe you're a vampire now.

Re: As a world spanning corporation...

:D unfortunately not — you could see the usual backlash on the nascent Twitter et al. but all we could do was sit and watch and pray. To be fair it was overnight but a good six-to-eight hour outage affecting every service.

Of course it turned out to be DNS. All service status pages were down too, but they barely logged any problems retrospectively once they were back up.

I think things are probably a hell of a lot better now, but even ten-minute cloud outages in the US were making headlines back then (probably about 2013 or 2014).

Re: As a world spanning corporation...

Saw it happen with AWS many moons ago too — entirety of Europe went down for many hours (and I mean everything, including all of Amazon's own websites) with complete radio silence from Amazon for the duration. Didn't appear on a single news website that I could see.

People are overall a lot cloudier these days, but it was telling as an outage like that in a US region would've been widely reported.

The wheels on the cloud go bork bork bork

Bork bork bork

Bork bork bork

The wheels on the cloud go bork bork bork

3

6

5

Re: Microsoft proves that the 365 branding was a terrible choice

In a similar vein, back when I worked in (a consultancy doing work for) travel, the industry's alternative name for recently-deceased airline Flybe (including by direct employees) was Flymaybe.

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Has your advice been ignored, leading to utterly predictable problems?

I was gonna say, this question is basically asking "do you work in IT?", or one of several other disciplines.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Fascinating stuff. We don't have anything like it ("the tone") in the UK to my knowledge — I've listened to it and it's unpleasant but doesn't stir any feeling in me other than mild annoyance. I guess you have it conditioned into you when you've grown up with it and have to deal with the sort of weather you get over there.

That said, I could be wrong; I haven't listened to or watched a broadcast medium in years except for the odd radio in a taxi or TV on at someone's house. I'm sure we've got local systems for the same sort of stuff, and if e.g. you live in an area prone to flooding you'd be conditioned to whatever signals they use.

Smoke and fire alarms are the only things I think I'm conditioned to in terms of "STOP: SERIOUS THINGS AFOOT". Very occasionally hear emergency services sirens, but other than that nowt.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

Re: Wait, what?

If you find the wallpaper that stops Excel from opening, please send it to me.

Go to security school, GoTo – theft of encryption keys shows you need it

Re: "GoTo Considered Harmful" then?

Go Directly To Considered Harmful

Do Not Pass Go

Do Not Collect £200

Re: LastPass

Not a fan of LastPass, found it horrible to use, and I'm not suggesting for a second that they're any good (especially given the fact they didn't come clean about this stuff for a while) but at least there are no empty platitudes about "taking security seriously" in the article for once.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Poor Kelvin, that sounds uncomfortable

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

I've found that drum equipment is surprisingly standardised, although you can still be bitten by the odd thing. One thing I went through hell with was trying to find a replacement tuning lug once — lengths and diameters and thread gauges are specified in all sorts of weird mixes, and you're lucky if you can find a manufacturer that specifies all of them at the same time, which doesn't help when you've apparently acquired a shell which requires something slightly nonstandard.

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

Aye, I've got a box with both. It's fine, but I can imagine it'd be annoying if I had a job involving them and needed to take them places.

Oh wow. I thought we were bad in the UK. This is next-level wat.

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

The more conspiratorially-minded might suggest that they're doing it on purpose to sell us more Allen keys — I say this in jest, but if you have the time and money I'd recommend reading Iain Banks's book on whisky, Raw Spirit, wherein he happily unfolds the tale of standardisation of casks and barrels, the union influences that go into their production, and the resultant batshittery that we think nothing of these days.

Re: Bowls

I think one of the oft-overlooked factors in the why-can't-we-all-just-get-along* argument is the fact that the word "centimetre" has four syllables, which can be a ballache to utter at times when working at scales of centimetres and inches. People want to use centimetres, but inches win because they're either 50% or 100% efficient when voiced. Add to that the fact that writing the word "inch" on a piece of paper at a reasonable size will result in a word that's just under an inch long, but for "centimetre" the word is about 3–4cm long, and ⟨er⟩/⟨re⟩ spelling differences, and you can see why it's hard to get people to use centimetres.

* any discussion on weights and measures is rife with puns, it seems

Re: "forced to glide the aircraft, containing 69 souls"

They/Them, Shirley?

Different formats in the same file is fine. It's stupid, as stupid as not using a format from ISO 8601 (which has its own bits of stupid); but it's fine.

Different formats in the same column/field, on the other hand…there will be blood.

A Scottish pint, for example, was almost double the size of an English equivalent until 1824, which speaks volumes about the drinking culture north of the border.

I'd have added ”at the time" — Scotland's still got a problem, but they acknowledge it, are getting better, and are addressing it in ways that the rest of the UK should be but aren't.

That said, I'd like to applaud the pun.

A more down-to-earth example came in 1983 with the Air Canada "Gimli Glider" incident, where pilots of a Boeing 767 underestimated the amount of fuel they needed […] the aircraft took on less than half the fuel is needed and the engines failed at 41,000 feet (12,500m).

And this one.

Live Nation CFO on Taylor Swift ticket chaos: Don't blame me, bots made me crazy

Re: Oh yes, Congress is serious!

Yep — having avoided Ticketmaster for about fifteen years I used to think that See weren't quite as corporate-wanker but haven't used them unless forced to since they double-charged me for tickets a few years ago and refused to budge on refunding me until I gave up on the basis that at least it represented another ticket sale for a smaller artist.

I'm still pissed off that I didn't get tickets for Pulp this year as I've wanted to see them for over a decade. The only place they said you could get tickets in their announcement* was Ticketmaster, and having set several reminders and gotten myself up at whatever ungodly hour they started selling tickets** I proceeded to watch the site crap out until they were all gone. Later found out they were available through Ticketline and others. Seething. Last thing I'd expect from someone like Pulp.

Last time I did use Ticketmaster "successfully" was for NIN, where they were the only choice available. That stung too (including financially), as again it's not what I've necessarily come to expect from Reznor (hell, he likes making money and selling merch and I'm all up for that, but he's consistently banged the drum for music and experiences being available to all). Was charged something like £80 and some ridiculous fee for a "souvenir ticket" which arrived after the gig.

If I'm wanting to buy tickets for anything non-independent, I tend to go down the hierarchy of Dice > venue > Ticketline (this one usually takes priority if I want a physical ticket) > $others. Things seem to have gotten so much worse over time that I barely actually go and see anyone big anymore.

* Pulp haven't had a mailing list for aeons and seem to operate almost exclusively out of an Instagram account (which I can't see) these days. Only reason I found out about the tour in the first place was a Graun article, though I'd been googling every few months to see if they were doing anything. After the article I religiously googled every day for months until tour and sale dates had been announced; I went off the links in their Tweet which I was able to just about see

** probably 0900 or 1000, definitely not a time when my brain is functional

Rentokil uses AI rat recognition to plot extermination in real time

RATS

hairy Japanese bastards

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Re: API?

Jobs.

developers developers developers

oh wait…

Twitter 2.0 signal boosts Taliban 2.0 through Blue subscriptions

Re: What?

I like them, on the whole. As a TV license refusenik I've always found it a little baffling that they hoard their archives and won't let me just buy a copy of something I might want to watch and would happily pay for, making piracy either the only or superior option available; but I still like them.

Re: What?

token northerner has upvoted you

(not a beeb worker though I've known plenty)

Punch-drunk Apple Watch called 15 cops to a boxing workout when it heard 'shots'

False positive = thing is working maybe a bit too well

Re: Brave New World

I dunno, even a PM can own goal themselves. You reap what you sow, etc.

Re: Hey, Siri

AFAIK these devices always have to be listening (or the wake command wouldn't work), and store the last x seconds on a buffer which may be useful for the forthcoming command — imagine a 30-second piece of music is playing on a TV show and after 20 seconds you wake the device up and ask what the music is. If it only started doing its music detection on the sound that occurs after you've issued the command, you might only capture a couple of seconds of music and not get a match. If it's got a 40-second buffer, it can utilise that to get you a match.

The inevitable happens, of course — it's an internet-connected device that's listening constantly, and that buffer ends up being relayed to places it shouldn't, whether by design or by error.

I'm not averse to the general idea of the things and they must be an absolute godsend for people with various disabilities, but the only way I'd ever have one is if it was on a device that I owned the keys to, running open-source software locked down to only the features I required.

PayPal says crooks poked around 35,000 accounts in credential stuffing attack

It doesn't have to be a "serious" device — just something that's secure enough to mean that authentication can do its job, namely authenticating that it's you who's logging in. The idea behind an authenticator app is that it'll generate a password from a context that should only be possible at that moment, with you present and your device unlocked and in your hand. That should be inherently more secure than SMS or email.

Re: 2FA

You'd hope, wouldn't you.

I still remember this about PayPal. I try not to use them for commercial payments without a good reason (buyer protection or credit options, basically) but I can say that the flow of the payment process with them is exactly what I expect — I'm always asked to log in with my creds and then asked for my TOTP.

However I only have that flow because I've chosen the appropriate options — 2FA isn't mandatory with PayPal. Furthermore, unless anything's changed since I set it up on my account, they not only offer but actively encourage 2FA via SMS and phone call when you start to set it up. I reckon if PayPal had the balls to require true 2FA, with an authenticator app or hardware key, on all accounts they could change the way the masses think about security overnight.

Microsoft to offer ChatGPT-as-a-service from Azure real soon now

Re: :-)

amanfromMars1 vs ChatGPT

whoever wins, we lose

(said with greatest reverence to amanfromMars1, nice to see you)

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Re: NIce one!

Perhaps not as noble but I do remember the odd shout from the CTO along the lines of "guys, please limit your torrents for the next few hours, we've got a client in and we need them to see the release go through" in the early days of my career when office bandwidth tended to outstrip home bandwidth.

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

Re: Uh-huh, right

I found an Android app called RedReader which makes it just about possible to read Reddit threads without having to deal with that absolute asscrack of a website, no account needed. I can't deny there's some useful stuff on there.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Re: “Vitamania”

Something fishy about this story…

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Re: Concrete dust = Kryptonite

Well at least I of course have backups of everything and definitely haven't been "going to get around to that" while just slinging in another single disk every time I run out of space…

Re: Concrete dust = Kryptonite

I'd assume when it's fine enough and there's enough of it that it can enter the airhole…I don't remember whether drives have those anymore and don't fancy busting my PC or NAS open though I'd assume so. Controller boards used to be just bolted to the underside of drives too…though admittedly I'm pretty much talking about consumer-grade stuff here and it's been many many years since I did anything with server hardware.

Re: Water and IT

Neither of you are insane, you've just joined a different timeline. I assume in your base reality Mandela died in prison?