Posts by Lon24

CoreWeave revenue doubles as debt pile reaches $35.6B

Re: Circular economy?

Balls!

Smooth-talking fraudsters clone contactless cards, authorize payments in just 13 minutes

Lucky you. It's been years since I had the joy of the "Microsoft Support Desk" call alerting me to an infection which required me to install the solution. I always followed their instructions precisely (on my Linux desktop) which somehow didn't quite follow their script and didn't quite work out as they expected much to their confusion.

These days all I get is spams on how to improve the SEO on a now non-existent website and offers to redesign the website of a website design company. It appears even a little reconnaissance is too much for many. Indeed no one anymore is bothering to claim to have hacked my email and webcam to share my naughty bits with my contact list.

Am I getting too old and my bits ain't worth the ransom?

Feds warn Gunra ransomware is exploiting known bugs to hit critical infrastructure

Re: Friends

But, but, but - "Fortinet are global leaders of cybersecurity solutions" so their website continues to proclaim. "Introducing new FortiEndpoint enhancements to govern AI use, protect sensitive data, and reduce risk".

Customers were clearly using the wrong product wrongly and need to instantly upgrade to their spanking new premium product. So who is scamming who?

Intel upsizes stock sale to $20B with spending plans still fuzzy

Re: General Corporate Purposes

Hmm - if it's really for its traditional line and foundry business I'm interested.

If it's for catchup with Nvidia & AMD's AI GPU business - I'm not. Traditional computing will go on steadily and with competitor's interest diverted to AI - it could be a chance for Intel recapture it's own market. The N100 was a brilliant if not groundbreaking product. In the years ahead decent computing for almost no power cost may have a niche. Why leave it to ARM?

Play to your strengths. Not other people's.

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

Re: New Kind (Sort Of) Of Scam

Crew switched off Delta's own WiFi. Understandable but in retrospect the right decision?

If the hack was just a local fake DELTA hotspot then it may not have impacted other than those local to the perp. Turning off just extends the range for the perp. The obvious crew action should be to broadcast 'turn off your wifi NOW!" Fake justification that someone's wifi connection putting the plane's controls in danger could encourage everybody to do just that immediately without question. Of course the crew would have to 'tap-up' everyone wearing headphones ;-)

It isn't if the crew didn't have a planeload of IT security expertise. However, probably one couldn't be trusted.

OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs

Fascinated by our setup. Are you using Wireguard, OpenVPN or ... Is your dedicated server the VPN server or client? How do distinguish outging trafic from the server to the home system or the open internet?

Sorry for the hijack but this would a great solution for me in giving up a /29 for a single IP from my ISP.

PS You may be running the same VPS but is it running on the same hardware?

Hosters will be rotating new hardware for old to gain power efficiences and reliability of intensively used kit. The hosters will be trying to delay as much as possible but us oldies will be exposed to some of the new levels of traditional hardware pricing.

I use AI but as sparingly as possible unlike many people I meet who use it for every whim. That, sadly, is becoming the norm these days so consumers as a whole have to share the blame with the AI protagonists.

But to the new host you will be a new customer probably using new hardware and hence being charged the new device/storage prices.

The obvious alternative to OVH is Hetzner. They have already hiked their prices across the board by a 'modest' 30% as existing Hetzner users share the pain.

So its either share or restrict increases to new users. If the latter than 100+% increases are likely. Which makes it uneconomic to move.

Looks like it's in your interest to share the pain if your hoster is to stay in the game.

We need a new adjective for AI. Anglo-saxon expletives are becoming increasingly insufficient.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

A rule proven by the exception - Rumpole.

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

Re: zeroth law

I presume the Zeroth Law is to justify the concept of shooting Hitler in 1938 is both justified and the duty of a sacrificial robot or human hero. It assumes that what followed as a consequence could not be worse than what did, and was foreseeable, at the time. But can one 'know' that? Tyrants tend to get replaced by even bigger tyrants. If a non-descript corporal could become a tyrant how is anyone, let alone a robot, know there wasn't a non-descript private in the wings awaiting the vacancy?

Bu**er, I just invoked Godwin's Law!

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

Re: Meh

"Just having a sovereign LLM running on hardware and software that the USA can turn off on a whim means nothing"

Yep - I agree. Some inconvenience whereas just turning off Office 365 will paralyse industry, government and academia. No need to go deeper. Can even be disguised as a local technical outage followed by a backup glitch. Or even a new copilot 'feature' that forgot Briish English exists (like El Reg).

Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

I think you have the wrong target. Income from big corp customers may be eclipsed by visionaried IPO funders. Possibly/probably followed by the bail-out merchants (using our money).

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

Re: that's not a fix

Alternatively if formatting is your thing then using LibreOffice Writer for reading docx files may be a mitigation. Won't stop the code but will stop the action. Not (Word)perfect but neither is Microsoft.

Curiosity rover spots field of giant honeycomb on Mars – but no giant space bees

None spotted around Horsell Common though. Was H.G.Wells or the cylinders misguided?

https://www.villagematters.co.uk/sunbury-matters/sunbury-matters-articles/2019/12/the-war-of-the-worlds

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

Re: Not a problem

Dunno, but you can certainly install them on modern hypervisors on modern hardware. Got Windows VMs running back to from XP to Win95. Haven't tried WfW yet and I'm not sure I'd inflict ME on any device.

SpaceX to try its luck again with Starship Flight 13 after engines and weather say no

Local Time && UTC

Please. I'm not familiar with Connecticut Time.

UK.gov's tech department gets the chop after two years

Re: Lord Vallance resigns as Science Minister

Exceot the BBC.

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Re: The article is about me.

Your comment about AWS's one method of recovery is well made. I try and avoid MFA unless the provider has multiple routes.

I found out the hard way. I had an emergency which always chooses the most inconvenient moment - out of office, out of hours with only one laptop whilst travelling. I had to get into a registrar account with MFA quickly to sort. My authenticator appeared to fail. Never seen this. Tried time and time again - same result. This does induce panic which inhibits clear thinking. Must be their fault!

I recovered access to the account by their third alternate method. Issue sorted. Later I discovered my authenticator was perfectly OK - it was for reasons I now forget the ntp connection had failed so the timing was off but not enough to be noticeable. It was my fault.

How many folks have 're-sync the timing' in their recovery process if the authenticator fails? I do now! All part of the learning process. Belief that professionals are by definition perfect is a dangerous one.

Chinese memory ban would cut off RAMpocalypse relief

Subsidised?

DDR4/5 margins are so dazzling high that even a less efficient manufacturer can undercut the cartel and still turn a good profit without subsidy for existing fabs. Maybe the huge investment in new fabs to own the market the cartel are vacating as they switch to even higher margin HBM will require government financing support.

If the AI memory demand vanishes or, more likely, gets seriously delayed the cartel may find they can't switch back to DDR 'cos the Chinese now own that market.

Pointless for the US administration to block Chinese chips. Lenovo et al will simply use them in non-US markets and then charge US customers a hefty premium for using non Chinese chips there.

Own goal.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Which 16.9%?

The report doesn't split the Win10 persistence issue between business and consumer. I suspect business is lower and consumer is higher. Important where the juicy attacks are on the former with potential seven figure ransoms. Corporate migration to Win11 is heavily driven by insurance policy conditions. A risk even the most reluctant C-Suiters recognise.

In the consumer market a segment only upgrades when the current device eventually fails to function. They would still be on XP if it would still work for them. I guess some still do ;-)

Tech support scam caused massive data breach at Australian airline Qantas

Re: Quantas IT help

Next month's plan? The Commander-in-Chief's strategic planning horizon is now sub-24 hours: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crele3r8j19o

You really just need a Truth Social feed on a low latency connection....

Dark patterns in Windows are steering users to Edge: Mozilla-commissioned report

Re: Damning the already damned

One could argue Microsoft are past caring about their PC business. They will be made or broken by their Cloudy AI business. Windows will, at best, be a minor adjustment to their bottom line. Hence it receives less and less management attention.

Microsoft is not Broadcom. VMWare is a quick hit and run. Windows is more important as a gateway to their Cloudy AI so they ain't going to kill it and the people who can flee, like us, have mostly already fled. Which is not a lot.

Beancounters will balance rising ad revenues with reducing costs by sloppy AI maintenance. Windows will probably be there until the end of the PC market as it evolves into something else despite all our moans and groans. Microsoft have learnt to discount them and plough their own furrow regardless. You can't lose a lost reputation.

Microsoft cancels Patch Tuesday for some Dell users over surprise shutdowns, overheating devices

Re: Yup

Have you tried putting the ice cubes on top of the keyboard? It will shorten updates - and much else beside.

Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

I upticked you because I see how my kids have to bring up my grand-kids. It's a lot harder now then when we doing it in the 1980/90s. We were both working but school took care of them for most of the day. No email or social media - the only real contact was the end of term report. Our parents looked after them in the hols. Frankly I'm not sure we could cope in my kids place.

My parents probably had an even easier time in the 1950s. Manual workers could afford a house and the labour saving kit (fridges/hoovers/washing machines) for the first time to compensate for longer hours (ie 40 hours plus Saturday mornings). There was only one TV, 2 channels so you watched what they watched and was grateful for it. Their parents had a much harder time mainly because in the 1920s large families were the norm, working conditions worse. Most parenting was done by the elder siblings.

I conclude the two post war generations had it best. Ever increasing prosperity, full employment and you made your own distractions - not the slaves of the tech bros and the state's need to control more of our lives if only to try and regulate out a lot of the threats to all of us. I'm immensely saddened to see this generation of parents having a worse time in so many way than us with little prospect of improvement. Indeed facing the creeping enslavement of the tech bros taking us back to the worst of the Victorian industrialists.

Backup and running? Not this digital sign

Humble Pie

Or RaspberryPi? One would have thought would have been an easier, cheaper billboard driver. Unless the display maybe runs off an Excel macro-driven database.

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

Re: Two options for Crapita

If only it affected the 0.1% of civil servants who gave out the contracts I might agree. They can probably afford a little delay. It's the other (lower paid) 99.9% of whom some had to deal with Crapita's other balls-ups who deserve better.

Even those who gave out the contracts will have likely done it on the non-negotiable instruction of the combination of their political & Treasury overlords.

DRAM it! Cheap PCs being priced out of existence as memory cost bites

But it isn't happening in the way we hoped. Last year you could buy a N100 8/256GB or 16/512GB box for less than £70/110. Now they are charging £160+ for the barebone box instead of £50 the implied cost last year. Much worse than the storage price hikes. Figure that one out!

AliExpress prices.

Former Indonesian minister and startup hero jailed for Chromebook buys

Normally I'm no friend of Windows but ....

Would no internet (and updates, possibly fewer ads and a strangulated Copilot) make them far more productive and reliable?

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Tuned in for the last time

Which will have labelled this as the Light Programme on 1500 metres way before the nouveaux Radio 4. The original home of The Archers (weekdays at 6.45pm). Probably because Droitwich was the nearest transmitter to Ambridge.

More mature readers will recall Walter Gabriel and his idiosyncratic 'rustic' accent which was actually Lye (near Stourbridge) rather more urban and almost Black not Green Country.

And I remember an open day there as a kid seeing the transmitting valve. A huge glowing bulb atop a cabinet - not unlike a monstrous water dispenser in reverse.

They've read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

Yep, next week from OpenAI:

"Get our latest Codex. You can now read your book without actually opening it. (Oh, and our auto-top up has just billed you for a billion tokens. Have a nice day)".

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

Bloated Websites

As a hoster the problem is only half bots. The other half is what they are targeting.

Today's CMS powered websites with wall to wall images can bring a server down under even a mild DDoS or badly managed AI scraping bot. A database lookup and then loads of bloat puts so much pressure on the server compared to the old static small heavily compressed image if only absolutely necessary websites.with server-side perl scripts for stuff that moves Instructive to take a tour around archive.org of turn of the millennium websites. Today the only defence is moving stuff behind cloudflare and their ilk.

I have a server devoted to our old websites. It can sustain several magnitudes more hits with less umph. Maybe one day Retro minimal websites using Hugo or similar will become the fashion again. Until then we are at the mercy of the bot and the anti-bot industries. A score draw is no solution.

Sigh

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks

Unfortunately Broadcom are not stupid. Or they wouldn't be where they are today.

They knew they were killing the product. They also realised (more than the old VMware management?) the enormous lock-in power of the product in the short term. Hence the outrageous immediate hikes to extract as much as possible before most customers/prisoners could escape. II you care not for the product's future then the next three years ROI may sadly, be eyewatering sustaining the share price and the perpetrator's bonus. Hated but do they care?

When VMware is dead and buried Broadcom will simply replace it with other victim(s). The moral of the story is don't get locked in. Start disengaging now while you have time. If Redmond did the same with their products what would you do?

A bonus might be gaining some sovereignty in the process.

Re: is this the beginning of the end for VMWARE

It's already dead. Just not buried.

I would assume no sane SysAdmin is going to choose VMware now. And they have all, by now, developed an exit plan for their existing estate. The only problem is getting sign off. Any long term gain is offset by short term cost. More importantly - short term risk which could be a corporate existential and personal career ending. If I was unsure of my support team then getting beancounters to defer and swallow Broadcom's price hikes in the short term which may be preferable to being in the firing line if all does not go to plan.

If I'm going to contract an outside house to do the migration - I'd rather wait and see them use somebody else as their 'guinea pig/learning experience'.

The Screwers and the Screwed

I dislike and don't use Tescos because of its robust and confrontational ways it treats its suppliers. But not this time.

AMD's Mext buy shows how AI could solve the RAM shortage it created

Re: So...

Let me try and get my head around this. If this works HBM DRAM demand and price might decrease but slower flash (DDR/SSD?) will increase as will price. AI hyperscalers cash in and the poor consumer gets ... poorer?

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Sadly, betting against Elon doesn't have a terribly good track record. He is the undisputed master of pan-galactic hype which finds a ready market across the pond. The only question is this time has he gone past the end of the universe triggering a total collapse into a worm hole that will suck every dollar from sucker's pocket into the ultimate black hole - and indeed lots of unsuspecting folks who have indexed investments?

The US Government can't afford to let him go bust - until they literally can't afford it.

Windows bowls a BSOD at sports fans

Unsafe at any speed

Silly mid on facing a full toss.

Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

All is probably not lost

LibreOffice. No just a viewer of MS Office documents but you can actually (gosh) edit and save them as long as you are a fully paid up downloader. Fully paid = enabled to spend it (MS licence renewals) on something more enjoyable.

LibreOffice compatibility isn't perfect but neither is Microsoft's ;-)

Election interlopers register 5K+ domains, hope to catch some voting phish

Nationalise El Reg!

'US Election' please. It's really annoying to be click-baited by a headline into reading an article which has little relevance for many UK readers. And vice-versa for UK election news.

Punish the Editors!

Nvidia's Grace Blackwell superchips are officially coming to the PC with RTX Spark notebooks

Re: Not at those prices.

"But some people are interested in AI, and have uses for AI, so they will be paying for AI"

If only....

Steam Deck prices go through the roof as Valve blames component shortages

Re: Anyone for salt with their chips?

The cartel companies are concentrating their investment and production in the premium AI field. That's cutting edge ie hard to scale quickly and China is in catch-up mode so just getting a share would be a success for them. But with some of the cartels abandoning their retail brands (like Crucial) the retail market is an open target. Easier to scale quickly. Grab almost a monopoly with less extortionate pricing in the short term and with low cost production they can permanently lock out the cartels from ever coming back.

If AI prospers the cartels won't worry. If it goes pear shaped the Chinese will be pleased to snap up the ruins as bargain brands and fabs - like they are doing in the car trade.

FCC warns US broadcasters their licenses are a privilege, not a right

Re: Never thought I'd agree with Trump's administration

One of these ---->

To the civil servant who got that freudian to slip through the Trump PR machine....

Microsoft Excel champ proves he still has the formula

And here's me thinking that giving them CalcStar on CP/M-86 would be a more interesting challenge..

Ribbon free...

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Re: What actually IS an AI?

Not quite. There was an hilarious article in the Telegrope about a Spitfire fighter jet. Given that half of its readership are still fighting WW2 it didn't go down well. The obvious conclusion was the article had been AI slopped. Spitfire is a fighter plane and almost all fighter planes are jets leads to the high correlation in the LLM training data and the mistake made.

LLM's ability to deal with unexpected low or negatively correlated concepts maybe is one of its Achilles heels.

Google'll grab your gigs if you don’t cough up your number

Re: Google's goal is to identify everyone

None should be without a burner phone for this very reason.

Meta & Google monitoring whether my man-drawer is open or shut must be of great value to those who supply them with ad-money*

* Which, of course, comes from their luckless customers.

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Re: Interoperability is key

What is this thing you call a ribbon?

We were a Microsoft Partner and hence totally a MS house. But we left as a result of the Vista fiasco. Hence Office2000 was the last version we used. Made a transition to LO's predecessor straightforward. I've just watched a video to discover what the ribbon is. And yes, I agree with you, reverting back to MS Office would be as challenging to MS users moving to LO.

Not impossible but we all have businesses or households to run. Finding the time to convince, convert and pick up the bits is challenging. A victory for the incumbent.

Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6

Re: It would be so funny if it were widely implemented

Yes, it was so obviously a solution from the start I assumed there was a technical reason why it wouldn't work. And if IPv6 was a better solution for networking purists it could develop alongside.

I dabble with IPv6 in order to bypass my restricted IPv4 allocation but it's a pain when the networking philosophy is different from the incumbent structure. Depends on whether evolution or revolution suits you best.

The network password was a key plot point in one of the most famous movies of all time

Re: At least...

And a lot of apps and websites the default administrator username is 'admin'. Changing that to some other random string makes guessing the password moot

Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly

Re: they forgot to mention other costs

Well not if you could put Linux on it but it will probably be locked down. It is a rental so, I guess, the hardware returns to Microsoft at the end. Would Microsoft recycle it back to the s/h market as many retired business machines are today or landfilled?

Not hard to guess Microsoft's best interest. That isn't supplying the Linux market with cheap ex-business grade devices.

Not good news for the environment or anyone bar MS shareholders.

SoftBank to build massive AI datacenter on former US nuclear weapons site

Re: Returns on investment

The sudden rise in energy prices must be sending a lot of AI business plans even further south. Praying that the Middle East 'excursion' is merely a blip will be mighty brave. Cease fire now does nothing for the long term antipathy between Israel & Iran which appears unresolvable.