Posts by Mobster

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

Re: "Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"

What about replication in a geographically distant location like they are doing in the cloud?

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Serves Google right

Google still has to treat the account as if it is live.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Has Amazon? Only for the free tier.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

I know this is an old'ish article but I am sure there is more here than meets the eye. Jamal Khashoggi was working for the Washington Post when brutally murdered in Turkey by Saudis.

UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

Re: hyperbolic nonsense

I can give you an example, it is right there in your last bullet point. A school has more than one child, and usually there are many parents involved in a given school. Now imagine one, just one parent, going off and "taking legal action" because they, and they alone, feel that the bill was violated. Not likely to happen? Look at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/10/vicky-hartzler-nephew-same-sex-marriage-republican-tearful. At least in my quoted case the one lonely "but think of the children" moron was badly outvoted.

NOTHING trumps extra pizza on IT projects. Not even more people

My previous job was at a large financial institution. The execs got high on "digital transformation", took junkets to the US West Coast to "learn to be agile". Productivity ground to a halt around the tremendous increase in "agile" related ritual, and budgets going towards master of ceremonies of said rituals (no number of scrum masters or agile coaches can help you if you do not have enough people working ON the product). I left said company and joined one of the FAANGS. The company I joined was one of the ones the pointy haired bosses from the first company had traveled to to "learn how to be agile". Now my teams are much more consistently performant, and I have yet to poison my ears hearing the words "Agile", "Scrum", "scrum master".

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Bit klunky, but...

Well, he never told Musk it was too complicated, he explained the number Musk was looking for (RPC call count), and then provided Musk the reasons why the app was slow. CEOs thinking it is red flag when told by engineers at their company that things are too complicated for said CEO to understand should consider it a red flag, a red flag that the CEO is at the wrong place in the company.

UK forces Chinese-owned company to offload Newport Wafer Fab

Re: Amtrak

Why would _any_ government agency be making money? The job of a government is to provide services which private capital markets are not suitable for, precisely because private capital markets are in the business of making money. You have plans to require emergency services turn a profit?

Toyota dev left key to customer info on public GitHub page for five years

Re: Public cloud service

Does not sound like it was someone within Toyota, it was a software contractor.

PayPal decides fining people $2,500 for 'misinformation' wasn't a great idea

Banks can do this all day long. Banks can freeze your accounts for any of a number of different types of suspicions they may have.

The web's cruising at 13 million new and nefarious domain names a month

Do any of these NOD list generators make their lists available openly?

Here's how 5 mobile banking apps put 300,000 users' digital fingerprints at risk

Re: Assuming they were properly hashed

Why would they be hashed? If they were indeed hashed, then what is the point of having them in the first place? Hashed keys provide no benefit to the holder...

Cloudflare tries to explain why it protects far-right forums that stalk and harass victims

Re: What's the desired outcome?

A bit of an inexact analogy. I see CloudFlare more like a security company in this case and people are putting up hateful signs on their own property. Should the security service allow itself to be hired by said people to protect their property?

UK blocks sale of chip design software company to China

Re: The footrest

I cannot say whether this is being done at the behest of the US, either wholly or in part. However, after the Tony Blair / Iraq saga complete with dossiers and whatnot, it is widely accepted that the UK is the USA's footrest. Perhaps stooge would suit better if you find footrest too strong a word.

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

Re: emoji

First amendment does indeed apply to interactions of the state with individuals. The key point here is that the state cannot compel an individual's code to be cause for sanction, as said code is considered a form of expression and the state is prohibited from retaliating against protected expression. As such, it calls into question whether the state even asked for said individuals to be sanctioned to begin with or if that was just GitHub trying to be "proactive" in some form or fashion. Laundering money is illegal, writing code to do so is not. Eventually GitHub will realize it.

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

Re: cooling failure?

Actually DNS is not hosted in a single zone or even a single region by Amazon.

Leaked Uber docs reveal frequent use of 'kill switch' to deactivate tech, thwart investigators

That something like the business Uber is in a good thing, and inevitable really, is more or less a given. The efficiencies gained (price reduction, driver freedom regarding hours etc.) were bound to happen.

That such a momentous occasion had to have criminals that ran Uber at the helm is what makes me sad. There was an opportunity here to create a revolution and become heroes, but Uber, like many others, became too greedy. The politicians, of course, acted like they always do, no surprise or sadness there.

Nokia Bell Labs identifies six key technologies for 6G

Canadians would have been happy even with 3G considering the recent Rogers outage.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

Re: JS & trust?

I am not sure why it has to be JS. The specification calls for use of JSON, which is an object specification scheme, not JS, which is a programming language.

McKinsey thinks quantum computing could create $80b in revenue ... eventually

You had me at "Thinks"

Governments opt for XaaS, dump datacenters in droves

Of course Gartner is also telling governments on how they will so much better off putting their services in someone else's hands.

Huawei claims it’s halved the time needed to build a 1,000-rack datacenter

Re: The US has done its job well..

The difference is that blasting US manufacturers or intelligence agencies while in the US will not get you arrested or sent for re-education. Now try that in China.

Microsoft warns partners to revoke unused authorizations that drive your software

GDAP

Resellers should giddyup on to the gdap.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Re: Amateurs

Your job involved shooting ping pong balls every day? Now I am almost jealous ...

Another ex-eBay exec admits cyberstalking web souk critics

Re: How?

With a $57 million buyout, the former CEO would be needing a job ever again, not even as a shift manager at McDonalds. It is the former CEO, immediate executive staff, and the board that need looking into,

US Navy told to do a 'supplemental' integrity investigation of $2.5b Dell deal

Well, companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Dell etc. hire plenty of people coming out of the military. That lets the current military personnel see the candy that awaits them if they play nice.

AWS CEO: We're not spinning out, likely to seek acquisitions

AWS should buy VMware :)

That will give it multi-cloud management products and an already established on-prem/hybrid presence.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

A huge problem for Linux desktop usage, especially in the corporate World, is that most decent desktop distros are unfortunately free - and MBA style thinking is of the type that free = bad. Now engineers on the other hand .... :)

VMware patches critical guest-to-host vulnerabilities

i wonder if VMware is looking at Rust to help alleviate such coding introduced security issues.

Pentagon again delays JWCC cloud mega-deal

Re: Strategic Stupidity

What makes you think these assets are publicly accessible? See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-second-aws-top-secret-region-extending-support-us-government-classified-missions/

Three Twilio developers charged with insider trading

If only they were US senators or House Members, only those 2 classes are allowed insider trading!

Cambodia cans critics of its snoopy Internet Gateway, says every nation has one

At least no one in Cambodia is braying "it is to protect the children!"

FBI says more cyber attacks come from China than everywhere else combined

I often suspect that abuse our systems endure from hosts on DigitalOcean might actually surpass what China can output.

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Whenever you see the word law and freedom or moral mentioned in the same sentence, be afraid, very afraid.

US grounds investors in Chinese drone maker DJI over 'Xinjiang human rights abuses'

Re: Those that live in glass houses

The point is not we or anyone else did it in the past. Look far enough, and everyone has blood on their hands. The point is that it is recognized as wrong today, and were it to happen anywhere, including in the US, people of the US would (again, not every single one in the US, just to be sure you do not come up with an example of "but so so American said nothing") speak out against it while living in the US . There is no great firewall that would remove references to balloons of a certain orange haired biped floating around, like there is a great firewall in China that removes references to too many things to count.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

The poor slob at the bottom of the food chain potentially gets jailed. The slob at the top walks away with multi-millions. Business as usual.

Microsoft wins court approval to take over sites run by Chinese crime gang

We had the same experience with Google as well.

YouTube expands vaccine misinfo crackdown, nukes anti-vax channels for good

Now Texas will sue YouTube under their new silly law demanding social media companies allow all content. This from the same republican legislators who always bark about free market, no regulation of business yada yada yada.

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Actually that option expired years ago. I do agree that Mexico probably has more wisdom than to accept Texas - that might end up lowering the average IQ of Mexicans.

Microsoft adds hybrid meeting features to Teams, including interruption-detecting AI

This is all fine and dandy, but do they now allow one to view the participant list *and* chat window at the same time?

Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft

Microsoft could have easily alleviated this by providing an easy admin role tool, some equivalent of sudo or su. runas did not exist back then.

I do not think Microsoft is off the hook when it comes to needing admin privileges for many everyday things in Windows. Just look at printing, especially after the latest printnightmare patch.

Cop drone crashes into flight instructor's airplane

In Texas, the pilot and passenger would be shot, then drugs would be planted and the cops would get credit for downing a drug running Cessna.

Pakistan bans TikTok, for the fourth time

They should probably automate the process. Ban Tik-Tok for a week and announce on twitter, a week later ban twitter for a week and announce on Youtube, a week later ban Youtube and announce Tik-Tok, etc. etc.

UK govt draws a blank over vaccine certification app – no really, the report is half-empty

I am an engineer - the report is twice as long as it ought to be.

Google to end free unlimited online photo, vid storage, will eventually delete files if accounts go over their cap

Re: Another one bites the dust

Well, they will not be safe in the future - left untouched for two years will result in them getting deleted, or not paying for your storage subscription.

FreeBSD 13.0 to ship without WireGuard support as dev steps in to fix 'grave issues' with initial implementation

Re: I was about to

Maybe Rust can eventually grow up and take the place of C ...

Re: Time to change professions...

Bugs in critical code written in _any_ language will be critical bugs. As it happens, the World uses C heavily for critical system level items of code, so C ends up with the blame for many critical problems. Haskell, Julia, language du jour, would get the same reputation if one could write system code in it.

Brave browser first to nix CNAME deception, the sneaky DNS trick used by marketers to duck privacy controls

The CNAME would have to be created within the original first site domain, so this means that domain administrators from the first site would have to be complicit. As such, we should treat the first site as a malicious actor and not worry about putting the burden on web browsers to "uncloak" CNAMES, I would think ....

WSL2 is so last year: Linux compatibility layer backported to older Windows 10 versions

WSL 2 reqires Hyper V, so I am not sure why docker is excited about this...