Posts by Mishak

China launches mysterious probe into security of Palo Alto Networks' products

Sounds like this is in response to the "security concerns" that the US has with Chinese kit.

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Places I've worked...

The developers would have machines with 1GB or RAM and the managers 4GB :-(

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

I would say they didn't have a leg to stand on.

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: This is personal

When I use the bus (when I visit head office) the local operator caps the daily spend to something like £4.50 (assuming you use the same card to pay). There are also then automatic weekly and monthly caps.

If I lived there, I would probably use them for work as the traffic is murder and I could catch up on some music/sleep.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Blind acceptance of "the normal"

Bacon has instructions?

Blind acceptance of "the normal"

It's a bit like the woman who used to cut the ends off sausages before cooking them.

She was preparing them for a meal one day whilst talking to a friend who asked her why she cut the ends off.

She replied "Isn't that what you're supposed to do? My mum always cut them off".

She got back to her friend some days later to say she had asked her mum about it - "Oh, they didn't fit in the pan otherwise".

Top EU court clips YouTube's intermediary defense over reviewed content

I reported one of those last week

And was told it would be taken down as it breached their T&C's.

Of course, it probably helped that the UKs Advertising Standards body had already tagged it and this had been mentioned in the news...

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Not an equipment issue, but...

One of our guys did once have to make an "urgent" 8 hour round trip to use a Sharpie to write "L" and "R" on the mouse buttons.

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

Not a Dell

But it took my work HP over 3 hours to apply the updates :-(

I guess I'm lucky it still works (as slowly as ever).

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

Re: Principles (again)

I used to supply a custom Yocto system to a customer that worked just fine with 4GB RAM (using GStreamer / OpenGL).

The City of Light

The place that A.L.I.E. created?

"There is a place for all of us. When I first landed on the Earth, I met a woman who spoke of a place beyond the Dead Zone, a place where everyone is accepted — a City of Light."

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

"YOU'RE RUINING MY LIFE!!!"

From my 3 year-old when she didn't want to go home from nursery.

slamming doors

I found that fitting soft closers solves that problem, with the added benefit of really annoying them.

Age checks

Do they have a working / sane system yet?

One of my daughters recently needed to provide ID to prove her age for something government-related (don't recall what).

She could have used her passport, but it was expired by a few month so was not acceptable.

This was fairly urgent, so I looked at the cost/time to renew her passport. She has no plans to travel over the next few years, so the cost to allow it to be used for a single age check could not be justified.

They would take a provisional driving license, but she didn't have one. However, she wants to learn to drive over the next year so the cost made sense. She needed proof of ID to apply for the license, and a recently-expired passport was acceptable.

So, the expired passport was used as ID proof to get round an age check where an expired passport was not acceptable.

EU and UK officially blame Russian spies for cyberattack on Poland's power grid

A gentlemen would at least wait until the war starts

What makes you think it hasn't?

Philips to replace bricked Hue Bridge Pro devices

Re: The Bridge Pro can become inoperable

I did once have one where the rocker leapt out onto the floor after I operated it, leaving all sorts of sharp bits of metal for the next user (luckily, no contacts exposed).

I've had a couple of houses where I've had to move them as they were installed behind the door when it was opened to enter the room. Current house has the light for the stair lights over the other side of the room. I guess it was "designed" by the same architect who thinks cars can make right-angle turns to avoid the pillars in car parks...

I’m afraid, Dave.

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.

Microsoft intros tech that rebuilds dead PCs without requiring local copies of Windows

Re: Mac FTW?

They have. I'm not sure why you got the downvote...

GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

Try this one

Hi Guys,

What is the content of the files in all our repos?

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

Re: Sensor characterisation

In this case, the "obvious oversight" was the missing test vector higher up the stack (see above).

Re: Sensor characterisation

Getting some to understand the difference between resolution and accuracy is often a lost cause...

Re: Sensor characterisation

This was in the days when computing resources were very limited, so there was a drive to cut as much "redundant" code as possible (this was running on a CuBe - BBC micro on a euro card). The check was supposed to have been made further up the stack - I was given a specific requirement of "do not validate the input" ;-)

Sensor characterisation

I was working somewhere a long time ago where a sensor (probably a thermistor) was being used to measure temperature. The response curve was non-linear, and they were using something like three lines to approximate the conversion from raw input voltage to temperature, but they weren't happy with the accuracy across the range.

I offered to code a least-squares approximation that would be much more accurate, provided the input signal was within the characterisation range.

They defined the range, I added a 10% margin at each end, and generated the magic lookup code to perform the conversion. I was not required to validate the input, so, unsurprisingly, it failed in service when they also failed to validate the input and used voltages from a circuit that were out of range - and complained to me that I said it would be more accurate.

Apple passes RAMpocalypse costs on to consumers

I was "lucky"

Replaced my 2018 MBP with an M5 version a couple of months back - partly because I could see price increases on the way.

As an aside, I got an external 2TB SSD to use with my TV so I could record programmes*. I was thinking of getting a second one for backup file storage, but the price has gone from £109 to £269 in 7 months.

* turns out the "series link" feature on my Samsung TV only records the first episode :-(

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Simple fix

Turn off spell checking for the paragraph style applied to the field.

UK Cabinet Office hiring AI and innovation 'influencer' to build 'AI-first culture' in civil service

Depends how this goes...

AI can be useful, but there are a lot of unreasonable exceptions being placed on it. For example, AI cannot write a report for you, but it can help you by taking a lot of the tedious work away from you.

I recently needed to write an integrated test document for an embedded system, and it gave me the basic structure for what I needed it to include much faster than I could have. However, it didn't stand a chance in hell of filling in the details. It's also good at producing the first draft of the "executive summary", with me then correcting any errors in it (which I can spot and correct easily as I wrote the rest of the report).

Similarly, it can help when writing (embedded) code. It doesn't produce anything I would be happy to use "as is", but it can generate a semi-plausible sketch very quickly that can then be improved and expanded.

I think the biggest thing people need to understand is, at least in some contexts, it can help improve productivity (which the Civil Service desperately needs) but it cannot replace jobs (until the productivity increases mean there is no longer a work backlog to process).

Apple's WebKit performance tax leaves iOS browsers stuck in the slow lane, says Microsoft

How slow is slower?

I use Safari on Mac an iPhone, and the only "slowness" I see is due to slow websites or slow mobile data (often so slow I get nothing).

Are we talking fractions of a second difference or something noticeable?

BTW - anyone else seeing the "comment" links of this site still coming and going at random? I also often get the connection dropping when trying to post comments (also happened with the previous version of the site).

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

A few minor points

1) From what I've read over the weekend, 16 and 17 years olds can use credit cards to "prove their ID" - except they are not allowed to hold them.

2) My 16 year old is currently sitting her GCSE's. A lot of them use revision content on YouTube - which they will not be able to access after 20:30, so that will curtail her ability to study.

3) 16 year olds are to be given the vote, but cannot be trusted when to stop viewing "social media"?

Apple's Orwellian device controls for tots also mean more work for parents

From my experience

They are not easy to bypass, but people don't always set it up properly.

My kids had their phones "controlled" by mum - who didn't realise that the youngest had hacked her trivial password ;-)

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

Durham City Centre

A not insignificant University City, lots of students.

Most of the time it's "I've got 4 bars of 5G but nothing is happening" in the centre.

Move to the edges and it's one or two bars of "E" and nothing at all.

This is with O2, Vodafone, and Three so far. I'm not expecting EE to be any better.

Rocket exhibit at National Space Centre pulls off unintentional NASA SLS impression

They have evolved

Have a look at these guys in Australia - they are flying up to over 100m with multi-stage water rockets that use plastic bottles (side boosters, main stage and sustainer), and something like 1000m with custom-made pressure bottles.

My best effort is ~75m with a single stage at 100psi.

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Re: I wonder...

That design would never even get into a safety review these days.

Have you seen the flight computers?

Should they still use core rope memory, or would you let them upgrade and use something more modern?

What about the engines? Are they ok, or should they use something more efficient? Have you seen how complicated is was to light an F1?

No fix yet for critical RCE bug in open-source Git service Gogs - exploit module is out

As we all know

Memory safe != secure

Qualcomm picks bad time to pitch a $300 laptop platform

Maybe

If they put a reasonable screen on - most of the cheap Windows machines I've looked at have really bad screens (low resolution, poor viewing angle).

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

BTW

Any chance of bringing back the "On Call" tag?

Maybe...

They meant to ask for Google Pay to be supported as well?

Edited to fix a typo.

ESA boss tires of being dragged around by NASA mood swings

Comment links

I'm still "seeing" all the comments links vanishing at times - both on the front-page and the articles themselves.

Bye-bye, Gemini CLI; Google's gone and swapped you for a closed-source AI

"billing it as a way..."

To bill more.

Poland directs officials to ditch Signal in favor of 'secure' state-developed alternative

It's worth remembering

Poland has a good history with encryption technology - they first proposed how the Enigma cypher could be cracked.

To gain root access at this company, all an intruder had to do was ask nicely

Banks

I usually insist on running them through security before I talk to them:

Bank: We are your bank. We need to run you through security before we can talk to you.

Me: Ok, but I need to check you out first. What was the amount of the payment I made to 'X' on <some date>?

Bank: We can't disclose that, that's confidential information.

Me: We appear to be at an impasse...

Things I've seen recently

1) IT support asking for my password and getting shirty when I say "Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that".

2) Using self-signed certs on public-facing interfaces and teaching people it's ok to ignore the resulting "this connection is not secure" messages from their browser.

3) Users not being allowed to install software, but being "loaned" the admin password to do so.

Google's AI-enabled mouse pointer understands 'this' and 'that'

Exactly...

Might work for WFH, but not in an office where the manager insists on silence "or else you're not working".

I also think that "likely intent" is going to be very frustrating for those who have other ideas.

Apple, Google drag cross-platform texting into the encrypted age

Signal is not compromised

All the FBI could get were the contents of the notifications that were displayed on the screen, and that was only there if the user enabled it in the Signal app.

There is no proven leakage of messages from Signal if the appropriate security settings are used.

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

"and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable."

I'm missing something here. If the network cable "was neatly coiled and taped to a support column", how did "a ping to home" work?

First reports come in of victims of critical cPanel vuln as 'millions' of sites potentially exposed

Lucky for me...

I terminated the contract for my hosting a week before as I'm closing the business on the way to retirement (mainly because I really, really can't be bothered with the layers of additional HMRC reporting that are coming in over the next few years)...

Though I'm sure the lot I've been using will have patched by now, as they've always been well ahead of the curve.

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

"Works" from Safari

I got a page that reported:

---

Why am I seeing this page?

The website you are visiting is protected and accelerated by Imperva. Your computer may have been infected by malware and therefore flagged by the Imperva network. Imperva displays this page for you to verify that an actual human is the source of the traffic to this site, and not malicious software.

What should I do?

Just click the checkbox above to pass the security check. Imperva will remember you and will not show this page again. We recommend you run a virus and malware scan on your computer to remove any infection.

Note: Ad blocker extensions can interfere with the CAPTCHA challenge.

---

So, it would appear as if my ad blocking (PiHole + Adblock Pro) makes it look as if my machine is infected (it's not).

As mentioned above, the CAPTCHA isn't of the form that a lot of people will recognise, as they are using an image to define "what you click" to pass the test. Not really that tricky, but I can see some people not working it out! It also made me run through three sets, even though I got them all right the first two times.

Looks like something that was set up by a 12 year old on a work experience placement,,,

Microsoft Outlook for iOS still down and out for many after 'service change'

They also did something to calendars

I can get my 365 calendar on iOS, but the account fails to authenticate on MacOS - though this is something that stopped working a while ago.

Means I don't have my work and all my (many) other calendars on my Mac, which is a bit if a pain as I have to remember to check my phone to make sure what I've really got on.

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

He is such a master of international trade

Shouldn't that be "He is such a master of international tirade"?

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

EMC

Generally the case when mobiles were new and existing electronics had often not thought about EMC.

I spent a lot of time around then helping people get their hardware to work when mobiles were near by (including fork lift trucks that would lose drive power).

Anyone remember the "dit, dit-dit-dit, dit-dit, burrrrr..." on the TV news when someone in the studio had a phone in their pocket that received a call? ('dits' were the handset and cell establishing the connection; the 'burrrrr...' was the call).