* Posts by yetanotheraoc

1872 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jan 2021

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

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Re: Auto-Account Deletion

Ha, your combination of subject line and text brings back memories. I wanted to demonstrate a bug in the formatter of an application, so I posted a description of the issue along with a demonstration file containing enough lorem ipsum to trigger the bug. The admin thought I was spamming the system and deleted my account.

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

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Unlimited growth

The visionaries will not be deterred by your discussion of maths. There are winners and there are losers, if scientists were winners they would be(*) rich like the visionaries. They are not, ergo don't listen to them.

No sarcasm tag; need an icon for banging my head against the wall.

(*) Some of them are, though. Slightly suspicious when that happens.

Microsoft investigating 365 Office activation gremlin

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April 2025 is not necessarily wrong

Well, the problem for journalists is there is no one true date for the end of classic outlook.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/outlook/get-started/guide-product-availability

Note that Mr. Speed wrote both articles so he probably knows what is referred to where. I think April 2026 is the end of the "opt out" period so Mr. Speed link is correct, and April 2025 is the beginning so Mr. Speed current article is also correct. (But I don't use outlook at all for over two years so I don't really want to investigate further what are the exact dates.)

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

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Coat

Re: Apple II

Problem sorted, then.

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Re: Small changes matter

Perhaps should be "all changes matter".

Watchdog deep-sixes job ad that was actually pay-to-play training course

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Re: All over cv-library

"is absolutely disguising"

That too,

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

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Sometimes the incompetents are also malicious.

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Re: Defects appearing like magic

Doesn't SWMBO have it backwards? More like - Wherever there's a schemer there will be a scheme!

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

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The best list ...

... is the one of customers who spent about £639 on this and will still be happy to spend similar on the next thing like this.

American cops are using AI to draft police reports, and the ACLU isn't happy

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Colour me not surprised

"Draft One includes a feature that can intentionally insert silly sentences into AI-produced drafts as a test to ensure officers are thoroughly reviewing and revising the drafts. However, Axon's CEO mentioned in a video about Draft One that most agencies are choosing not to enable this feature."

Yeah, because they are _not_ thoroughly reviewing and revising the drafts. So _of course_ the answer is to turn off the test, because silly sentences in evidence is not a good look. Oh wait, somehow silly sentences are still creeping in, what shall we do now?

Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

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Re: Ouch!

Worse, he was forced to play outside.

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Wish I could upvote you twice, once for POP3 and again for fixed.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

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Where would you like to go today?

Windows Maps definitely needs Copilot. What could go wrong?

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

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Re: Leg day at the office

"Not wanting to be overheard, I wandered into the service stairs for some privacy. ... I had my phone with me but, unluckily, no service in there."

Extra privacy when you can be neither overheard nor heard.

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Re: Testing is essential....

"blame was aimed at us"

At least they are good at something.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

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Re: KDE FTW

I get the impression he has one shirt with 14 sleeves, but the other 12 sleeves don't get in his way.

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El Reg existentialism

"Both these projects have laudable goals, and there is nothing to criticize here."

But we won't let that stop us.

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

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Dumbing down or smartening up?

"I'm just vaguely wondering why a TUI or GUI at all?"

It's the installer equivalent of a shell script. The first time you perform a complex set of steps, you research the commands, finding the options that fit your use case, and documenting them. The second time, you work from your document, fine tuning the commands as you go. The third time, you edit your document, adding # and ${} and $() where needed, with #! /bin/sh at the top. Now you at least won't miss a step.

The TUI or GUI donates the benefits of scripting to people who know _next to nothing_ about installing your distro, or indeed any distro. Of course _you_ don't need the hand-holding, but you are not the audience.

"The only tricky bit is if you want to edit the disklabel ..."

Another tricky bit is lack of a Back or Previous function.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

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Re: I read through

"PS as a side note, someone earlier suggested sacrificing a bean counter to keep the machine god placated and happy. this does not work."

Did you try again?

We can clone you wholesale: Boffins build ML agents that respond like specific people

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"All of these things are coming (especially the sex robots)"

I see what you did there.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

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Re: leaving Windows for a *nix

"I want Sky Sports / Virgin Media."

Sky Now TV box is what you are looking for, I believe. Then it won't matter what OS is on your home computer.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

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Pluses and minuses

They didn't need to find your documentation, they just needed to try the default passwords. And of course without the documentation, they could blame you for the passwords not having been changed.

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Happy

Re: Passwords

"35+ years on the clock"

That's some serious uptime!

iOS 18 added secret and smart security feature that reboots iThings after three days

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Mouse-move

You need the equivalent of a cron job on the device that undertakes some activity once every 24 hours and resets the timer. Is there an App for that?

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

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Re: What Kind of Illogical Idiot ...

Probably the panic referred to was due to being unable to complete their homework on time.

AI: I don't understand the questions.

Grad student: Please just tell me the answers. I really need them.

AI: Feck off.

Grad student: No, no, nooooooo! (sobs)

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Re: Are we being fair to the AI ?

"Who gets to decide"

The AI has already decided.

Microsoft Exchange update fixes security flaws, breaks other stuff

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Re: Duh

"enlighten me on what I missing"

If you don't want another stroke, best avoid Microsoft entirely.

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Re: Is this stuff even newsworthy any more?

In some places, the weather is the news.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

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Re: A Piece of String

It's from the Psychologic Manual of Design -- If the original machine had arrived new with a piece of string hanging from out of the front, the operator would have refused to use it. But because her own engineers had devised it, she thought it was brilliant.

Microsoft Power Pages misconfigurations exposing sensitive data

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Security is hard, almost as hard as Microsoft docs

The Reg article's link to security roles "Security roles and privileges", https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/security-roles-privileges , doesn't have any information on the Power Pages roles discussed, "anonymous users" and "authenticated users". That link is for Power Platform, and Power Platform is apparently not the same as Power Pages.

From The Reg article: `The problem is that many companies treat the "authenticated user" role as belonging to someone inside the organization and grant permissions accordingly – even for outsiders who register for their websites.`

I wonder where they got that idea? I found a link for Dynamics 365 "Secure your Power Pages", which does discuss those two roles, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/guidance/implementation-guide/security-strategy-product-portals , wherein we can read the next gem of a first paragraph. It doesn't explicitly state that authenticated users are internal, but mightily implies it.

From Microsoft: `Power Pages let internal and external users access Dataverse data through external-facing websites. You can expose your data to anyone—that is, to anonymous users—or only to authenticated users. For example, you can create a landing page or a home page that anyone can see, or a page that's only for users in your organization. To secure your Power Pages sites, you need to use authentication and authorization.`

Maybe that's not the link most low code users would find? I found a link for Power Pages "Power Pages security",

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/security/power-pages-security ,

From Microsoft: `Authenticated users **can be** (emphasis added) assigned web roles that provide specific access to information on the site. ... Web roles allow users to perform special actions or access protected content and data on the site. Web roles link to users, table permissions, and page permissions. Because users can be assigned multiple web roles, they can get cumulative access to site resources.`

In the unix www, "anonymous users" and "authenticated users" means roughly the same as how Microsoft intends it. "Authenticated users" doesn't mean all records, it means access is controlled by work **already done**, by a different admin, when the account was previously created. That's a missing step in Microsoft's implementation, and expecting low code users and managers to understand the implications of umask 000 is a bit much (pun intended), when their primary goal is simply to "make it work".

Anyhow, I didn't see any mention of Web roles in The Reg article? A quick scan of "Power Pages security" with the "what will my users think of this" cap on and I conclude: They will run away screaming! From bitter experience with SharePoint, business users and access controls don't mix. This is where I set up a meeting with my boss and they "decide" to let me set perms on the default Web role, assign the employees to a new team Web role, and create a process for my boss to switch people between the roles. Or would do, but wiser heads have prevailed and there are specially trained (thus oxymoronic) low code teams who implement all the details on behalf of the business teams.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

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The moral of the story

Never miss an opportunity to call QA TOOLS.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

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Joke

tldr;

Go, too, considered harmful.

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

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Re: Embrace, extend, empower!

Some years back I was making a choice of new scripting language. The candidates were python, php, and ruby. I chose the one that no longer appears in the top 10. :(

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Neologism

All the fuss about Rust := fust. :)

Sorry, couldn't resist the joke. But seriously, what makes Rust good is what makes it hard. and this will always limit its growth on popularity surveys. The corollary is Rust developers as a rule are pretty sharp. Not a fan of the language though. (a) I'm no longer sharp enough to put in the effort. (b) Anyway the problems Rust solves are not my problems.

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids

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plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

"it's only the gobshitery between tracks that changes"

The gobshitery is freely recycled. I heard the exact same story twice on the car radio, separated by four years listening time and 900 miles of driving distance, supposedly about a spider "yesterday" in some "local" DJ's garden. An LLM trained on all DJ patter could not do worse than that.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

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Re: BBC News today: Smartphones: "I feel guilty for not buying my daughter one for school"

Somebody threw away the globe that used to be in the corner. The stand was obviously broken because the globe would spin around if you touched it.

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Mushroom

Re: Not Trusting Apps

"F*** off" territory

Personally I can't wait for Web 4.0 interactivity, where we users get a row of buttons at the bottom, like: [Bugger Site Admin] , [Pwn Zuckerberg's PI] , and the final option [Nuke It From Orbit].

// Turn off daydream mode.

Fake reviewers face the wrath of Khan

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Joke

Beware the Khan!

"and also some planes that actually do work"

You're not allowed to knock the aircraft unless you've actually purchased one.

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

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Re: It's not just about scale, it's also...

"somebody else handling the operational complexity"

That's the dream, isn't it? No complexity anywhere, or as Hans says in _Die Hard_: "We'll be sitting on the beach, earning 20%." And as everybody knows, there are no mosquitos in paradise. Whereas in the real world, managing suppliers is just as much work as managing employees. The complexity moves around, but it doesn't go away. This must be true, because if it were possible to outsource all the complexity, then anybody could be in the same business as you. Er, wait, that's what MBAs think already. Never mind, puts hand down.

The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg

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And here it is being modelled.

Equally suitable for catwalk and spacewalk. Could use some feathers, IMHO.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

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AI is the answer to all questions

"how will they get a job ?"

Remote interview for a work-from-home role, obviously.

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Re: School rules

"... two students trying to kill each other? Recommend they all sit down in a circle ..."

More AI nonsense, two students make a line not a circle.

Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

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The other side of the coin

"I'd be very loath to use a law firm that didn't actually realise that a contract is between two parities and isn't valid if both sides haven't agreed to it."

You would be loath, some would be happy.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

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Neptune is jealous

Meanwhile, enquiring minds want to know why the BBC reports wind speeds in mph rather than kph.

Version 7.6 – the 'OpenBSD of Theseus' – released

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Re: Firefox isn't allowed to browse the local filesystem

"none of the links worked"

Try creating a Download folder on your microSD card and putting your reference documents there.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/220400/local-files-revisited-opening-local-html-files-file-path-to-file-in-chrome

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

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Re: Nick Read - Mediocre man

"He gives no impression of being the Leader a broken and illegal organisation needs to force change upon it."

Perhaps that's why they wanted him.

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Re: Pathetic from Read

The way I read the article, Read _did_ know ahead of time. His complaint was that it wasn't mentioned in the job requirements nor in the hiring interview.

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Re: Unrequested comma surplus

"One person makes a YouTube about something and now it's the rule of the world; ..."

The obvious solution here is a YouTube about placing punctuation outside the quotation marks.