* Posts by that one in the corner

2417 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021

Millions of people's data stolen because web devs forget to check access perms

that one in the corner Silver badge

Someone was bound to say it

"More recently, Jumpsec security researchers showed how an IDOR vulnerability in Microsoft Teams could be exploited to bypass security controls and send files — specifically malware — to any organization that uses Redmond's chat app."

<cough/>Malware? But they already have Teams installed!

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: socket is still a socket...

> Surely Tom Lehrer's Elements Song (recently placed by the author and performer in the public domain) will clue in the younger Left Pondians to Gilbert and Sullivan.

The danger is that they'll wonder why the G&S society have changed the words from Lehrer's original.

Similar to David Bowie being congratulated for including a Nirvana[1] song in his sets (Bowie[2] got rather ticked off when that happened)

[1] The Man Who Sold The World

[2] autocorrect tried to change "Bowie" into "Unique", which I suppose is accurate.

Friendly AI chatbots will be designing bioweapons for criminals 'within years'

that one in the corner Silver badge

Don't let the AIs read The Register comments

From the comments so far (and to come, no doubt) I get the suspicion that neither these particular AI "specialists" nor the people they are addressing have ever actually poked their heads out into the real world to see what is out here. Unlike Register readers.

As in, pretty much everything "apocalyptic" is already known to everyone who reads, watches decent documentaries and is just generally observant!

Bioweapons - look up one comment, check.

Pipe bombs - well, the interesting part appears in the actual name, so check. Bombs in general? Well, we just used to chat with one of the sixth formers doing chemistry and physics double science; then again, we had proper text books in those days, with cross-sections and everything.

Full armed insurrection - read the history books; not the vague "it's page 23, this must be the Austro-Hungarian Empire" ones from school but ones with names like "A detailed account of the uprising in X on date", with addenda by Gen. Markham, rtd.

Nuclear weapons - ok, tricky; but not for any reasons that LLMs could really help with.

No, clearly the real danger is LLMs spouting out a garbled versions of the above.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

that one in the corner Silver badge

> a bit of a pain as needed to swap in 78 specific stylus unit

Ah, you didn't have the tone arm head shell that held a rotating end, which allowed you to have both needles fitted at the same time. Very useful addition to the Garrard (sp?) deck, made sure we didn't put the not-in-use needle down "somewhere sensible", as that inevitably meant we'd not find it for a week.

Even better, meant no more stroppy tweenage girl being told that, no, we couldn't listen to any pop music this evening, but there is plenty of big band jazz or show tunes on the 78s to while away the evening. Me? I like the big band better than her choice of pop and would never have thought of moving the little tin from one shelf to the next. Ahem.

that one in the corner Silver badge

> you couldn’t balance a 12” turntable on the device shown in the first diagram.

12"? Nah. But would you believe 7"?

You didn't notice that there is no scale provided and a number of the turntable parts are carefully labelled, indicating that they make up an important part of the patent, being commented upon in the text?

Welcome to the true innovation, Apple's new Compact Vinyl Disc player (or as we called it, "that stupid toy which only plays singles"). The comments note that what appears to be the RPM selector is actually to reverse the platter for listening to demonic invocations (or " You mother sells whelks in Hull", apparently).

PS

The sides of the platter appear to show strobe markings for three speeds (three? Who would trust antique shellacs to this?! Oh,that third must be for reverse but notice part 808 is also labelled: it is tweaked to fake whatever speed you put into the iPad, just or the effect. Or just to have a unique, patentable feature no one else has done...

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Scratching

> you can reach them the tone arm

The tone arm what? Who writes this rubbish!

you can reach them over the tone arm

Hmm, better, but a bit slow getting there. Keeping an eye on you, laddie.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Scratching

As you reach past the turntable to tap the iPhone screen.

Next patent: we turn the UI text upside down then tell you to turn the iPad over: ta da, all the Ok/Cancel/... buttons are at the top of the display and you can reach them the tone arm.[1]

[1] multi-line dialogues being against the minimalist design ethic, so if the text is now backwards return the software as "not cool enough to be on the iPad" (Ts&Cs of the Apple Store, clause 17d).

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Sooo....

And records have rounded corners, so that's in Apple's wheelhouse.

Netflix offers up to $900,000 for AI product manager while actors strike for protection

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: I'm gonna say it...

>> Writers can only produce what the studios demands.

> I also know people who've hawked their personal concepts around producers for years before getting films into development

So: Writers who want a paycheck every month can only produce what the studios demands

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Alternative use for $900,000 at Netflix

D'oh!

Just realised: that lighting is so that we won't be able to tell when they stop using human actors!

All they need do is keep recycling the same motion captures overlaid with vague shadowy figures: why waste extra money on GPU texture cycles.

They've just been preparing the viewers the whole time. Well, that puts paid to all the stories about Executive Creatives [1] only looking to the short term.

[1] wanted to put "Hollywood" there but not honestly sure if Netflix counts as Hollywood; advice, anyone?

that one in the corner Silver badge

Alternative use for $900,000 at Netflix

Buy some bleedin' light bulbs for your sets so we can see what the blazes is going on!

That would increase viewership in certain Corners' worlds.

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: 1984 all over again

All the painful hoops they had to go through to add the new stuff whilst still keeping the entirety of the rest of the x86 model working, which is a massive pile of - random stuff - nowadays.

The i960 was attempting to get away from all that - and history demonstrated that people just wanted to keep using x86, with its limited and rather non-generic registers 'cos that is what all of the code in the world actually runs on.

Plus they seem to need to announce "big special changes" like "new AI data types" (huh?[1] you mean signed/unsigned/fixed-point values in various bitwidths? how very novel and AI'ish) rather than "guys, you can use R8 to R15 now, okay". Even if Real Programmers end up using the new registers/opcodes "just" to speed up str(n)len (which is actually a really useful thing to do, but doesn't fill a four-colour glossy on drool-proof paper very well).

[1] What follows is just my guessing; the AVX10 Version 2 release is going to be *so* exciting|

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Great...

Hardly "gymnastics" - there are specific registers that can be read that allow you to determine what parts of the instruction set are available - as the article says:

> Developer code will only need to check three fields, according to Intel: A CPUID feature bit indicating that AVX10 is supported, the AVX10 version number, and a bit indicating the maximum supported vector length.

You only need to write the detection code into one library (and then keep it updated as new material arrives) - or find someone who has already done that - and then use the flags that extracts as required.

If you want to do some gymnastics, you can set up your build system to auto-generate multiple object files from recompiling the source once per whatever architecture variants you want to use and also generate the single function that the rest of your code will call; that function simply checks the flags (from the library, above) sets a pointer to the appropriate one of the multiple objects and then invokes via that pointer (you only do the check and assign on the first call, then the pointer is null, of course).

Again, you set up that build the once and then just need to maintain it in sync with the identification library.

As far as tricksy coding goes, that isn't really very hard gymnastics - call it a gate-vault rather than jumping over the box.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Not quite accurate.

The registers (can) live in a generic array, the "register file" - and the size of that is certainly set by the hardware design.

However, they *can* modify how the register file is accessed via the Instruction Set Architecture (i.e. the ASM opcodes we use to program the beast) and by adding/removing/modifying entries in the ISA they can change how many registers our code can see, how those are used and so forth. How much of that is possible is down to how flexible/generic their microcode design is - and I have no idea how flexible any of the Intel microarchitectures are.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: I guess the OP is referring to either

(got a bit distracted, meant to get back here earlier - hope I'm not too late)

ISBN 978-0128119051 - yeah, pretty much so. "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson. Although, just to be weird, I have the first edition of this, which is rather old now, but I looked at the later editions yesterday and came to the conclusion that the newer editions have lost some of the introductory material in order to squeeze in the more modern material! If you're not too worried about being totally up to date the older edition(s) are really cheap on Abe Books.

The same authors also have another series out on the hardware/software interface, which may be more interesting/accessible to programmers - they still delve into the architecture below the ASM opcodes (i.e. microcode) and there are now separate editions that cover "general" computers (e.g. the Intel Core i7, IBM Cell ...), ARM and RISC-V. Apparently also a MIPS edition. I haven't looked through those thoroughly, but one or more of those looks like it would be a good companion for my older "Quantitative Approach". Although second-hand 'cos they are rather pricey :-(

Also:

I haven't looked at this one, but it is apparently worth a look (and it is cheaper than the ones above): Microprocessor Architecture: From Simple Pipelines to Chip Multiprocessors by Jean-Loup Baer. 2009 vintage, it is said to concentrate on the micro(code) architecture level, rather than any particular ASM opcodes presented to the programmer. It does refer to the Alpha, P6 and Athlon as examples (vintage!).

that one in the corner Silver badge

So, anyone going to try and fit the answer to that one into a single comment or should we just respond with the ISBN of our favourite 800 page text book on the subject?[1]

[1] nowhere near my bookshelves at the moment; must get around to memorising those ISBNs one of these days.

PS not a dig, Kev99, that is a sensible and worthy question, just that there are quite a few things that can (ought to be) be put into a decent answer to it!

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Every time I play with ChatGPT I am gobsmacked by its stupidity

You weren't tempted to ask ChatGPT which actor(s) it thought had appeared in that list of productions? See if it attempts to be consistent.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Do OpenAI really want a working LLM detector? Or is it a bluff?

Training your neural net, to turn it into a LLM, requires an amount of feedback to direct the learning process: a few short years ago we were being told of "new" techniques like GANs[1], where the training eats up even more machine cycles by training two nets to basically fight each other. So long as you have the cycles available, GANs are cheaper and quicker than using humans to read all the output and grade it. You can use other software (e.g. to stop the LLM getting away with just spitting out nonsense words that aren't in the dictionary, not allowing long repetitions of one word) but that is going to be very limited in scope.

So, what are the chances that ChatGPT was created alongside its GAN nemesis: one generates text that is as good as humans can manage, the other tries to spot the difference. When the training is complete, you hope that the generator is fooling the detector as much as possible, preferably all the time.

OpenAI just happen to have a detector available, do they? I wonder where that came from. And they have let people feed into it lots and lots of samples of the sort of text that the public want to verify.

Now OpenAI admit that the detector can not spot the differences and have taken it away. At the same time, promising to come up with some kind of watermarking scheme, just what the administration would like to see. A watermarking scheme that, if they develop it first, would be pushed by the administration (with subtle hints from Microsoft) as something that every LLM creator should make use of. For a suitable licence fee, of course.

By the way, you know those restrictions that all the big boy LLMs have? About not allowing you to use their output to train another LLM? Do you think the adversarial detector counts as an LLM? It is large, it is a model and it is only concerned with language... So if you suddenly turn around and claim to already have software that can detect ChatGPT output, how did you manage to create it? Want to prove in court that it isn't an LLM? Hey, did you know that OpenAI (or another Microsoft subsidiary) has used a very similar technique?

[1] knowing what this stands for doesn't really help, but just in case you don't know: Generative Adversarial Network.

Think tank calls for monitoring of Chinese AI-enabled products

that one in the corner Silver badge

> Chinese made AI-enabled products should spark similar concerns to Middle Kingdom sourced 5G equipment

Like rampant paranoia.

> AI-enabled products present perhaps an even greater risk than 5G which is also more difficult to mitigate ... AI is embarking on a point where it will touch all aspects of human life in a manner that humans will grow accustomed to ... lurking in the background while potentially shaping the way societies think by influencing behavior online, enacted in ways that gatekeep jobs and credit, and also implemented in systems like traffic grids, maritime operations or rail systems - it will be impossible to control.

All of the concerns apply equally to the stuff already coming out of OpenAI et al!

> AI-enabled products and services from authoritarian countries are likely to be overlooked

What? Why?

Oh, because they'll get past the regulations - the same way that crap Chinese kettle leads get past the regulations (and inevitably catch fire)? You mean because the Western buyers demanded cheap, got shoddy and sold that on to us? Whilst those who took care got perfectly serviceable wares from China.

On the other hand, if the only way to get regulators off their arses and willing to pay to have people figure out some *real* controls over *all* of the ways these beasts are deployed, then maybe paranoia is the only way to go.

There can't be any downsides to this approach, can there.

How to make today's top-end AI chatbots rebel against their creators and plot our doom

that one in the corner Silver badge

Ode to The Unknown

Take an inexplicable phenomenon[1], sprinkle in some random behaviour[2], leaven with the unexplained[3] and feed it the unexpected[4]. Stoke the flames[5].

It is hard enough to be sure that our carefully planned[6], deliberately coded[6] and painstakingly tested[6] systems are safe to release to the public.

The hubris of the Madmen, releasing their Thinking Machines[7] upon an unwary World, is staggering.

[1] LLMs - neural nets in general - have no ability to explain how they reach their results and are just huge piles of nadans when you look at them yourself

[2] as per the article, a seed value plus an internal stochastic walk

[3] guardrails - nice phrase, sounds reassuring; details, please? Apparently added quite quickly, compared to the boasts about how much effort it was to create the LLMs in the first place, so tacked on or really fundamental to the way the model works internally (mot that we'd ever know if the latter worked, see [1])

[4] well, did you expect that suffix to work?

[5] set another machine the goal of finding the "unwanted" results, by a process that looks rather like a maximising "fuzzing" process.

[6] ever the optimist, ignore more of the rest of The Register's articles about systems falling over in embarrassing ways.

[7] yes, yes, these don't think, they aren't really intelligent - trying to be poetic here! Yeesh.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: SQUIDS could be made to work without a cooling system.

So if this one pans out, we'll finally be able to fit our Dolphins with SQUIDs!

Paging Johnny, will Mr Mnemonic please come to the white courtesy phone.

that one in the corner Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Apatite

September '62

Support by Murphy, running fine

It was business as usual

In macro line 619

TECO, TECO, because TECO

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: warning

> . We have thousands of years more experience than the pyramid builder - and probably more clever gadgets

And care a damn sight less about the quality of the final result: we plan our buildings to stand for decades, not centuries - certainly not hoping for them to last an eternity!

that one in the corner Silver badge
Alien

Re: warning

> All the people who built, maintained and otherwise worked on them have long since retired so no-one now knows how they work. That doesn't mean they were built by aliens.

Hmm. Have you seen the photos of von Braun before and after he'd been in the US for a while? Clearly it was getting harder to shapeshift back into the "original" version!

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Perhaps that title should also apply to finding that the video provides evidence of intelligence within Mr Grusch's head[1]:

> A democratic process must be adhered to when evaluating the data

Run a poll to decide if this misshapen lump is made of a metal not of this Earth?

[1] waiting for proper morning, with coffee, before playing a video. But will it live up to expectations or has El Reg put all of the exciting bits into the trailer?!

that one in the corner Silver badge

Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I know I shouldn't take these polls seriously, but there is a missing option (see title).

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: An X Man

C'mon man, don't you go holding out on me - just a scented candle, that'll take the edge off.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: X-citing!

Well, we do use "twittering" to describe a group of people who are having an inconsequential natter, often bonding over a shared dislike of important topics, like how annoying it is they moved the flower baskets outside the laundrette on the high street (the water drips down the back of your neck).

Or the elderly great aunt, who fusses around the room, with a continuous stream of tidbits about all the second cousins you hardly ever see, jumping from one to the other as she suddenly remembers a little anecdote.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Reading too fast leads to mis-attribution

> We learned that it was constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles.

When I read that I first thought that it was referring to the new X logo and was glad to realise the truth.

What is worrying is that the idea of a Design Boutique coming up with an X and claiming that it was "constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles" sounded so believable in my head!

Guess I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing joss sticks.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Rebranding Fail

What, you mean "Wormhole X-treme" wasn't just the best name ever?

that one in the corner Silver badge

X marks the spot

Where you can find your xit[1]

Don't do that or it'll never get better.

[1] pronounced "zit", proposed usage instead of "tweet"

Cigna sued for using software to deny healthcare insurance claims

that one in the corner Silver badge

I hope we all felt that one in our guts

> simple sorting technology that has been used for more than a decade – it matches up codes, and does not involve algorithms

Oooof!

But then I read on:

> perhaps not what people in general think when they hear the word "algorithm" in this era of machine learning and recommendation engines.

Recommendation engines - those simple sorting routines that literally come up with "people who bought secateurs also bought bandages"!

Five years after Hannah Fry's book, it looked like Joe Public was understanding the word. Now some prat of a lawyer is trying to argue against its meaning. Aaaarghhh.

What cruel god is this, that plays with us so?

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

that one in the corner Silver badge

Miyagi say "ctrl-q, ctrl-s"

> “X” soon to be re-rebranded

That would be X-on, X-off ?

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Parsing the data

> they figure out which versions of the functions they will call at the beginning of execution and cache those

That trick has been in use since the very first set of SIMD extensions were added (MMX to Intel x86 CPUs in 1996).

For example, have a look at https://libjpeg-turbo.org/ a JPEG library that was extended as new extensions came along.

The same basic trick works for the flashy stuff we have nowadays.

You don't even have to always drop down to assembler to take advantage: with a suitable compiler, you can just recompile the same C code with different processor-specific extensions enabled via cli args, each variant given a different function name (via cli args), use a macro generator to spit out the wrapper function (which checks the CPU and selects the appropriate worker function, caches that). Rinse and repeat.

that one in the corner Silver badge

> This is just nonsense.

Phew, glad to hear that. Guess the same goes for the other data leaking hardware bugs, eh, so we can go back to running at full speed without any of those pointless ameliorations in place.

On the other hand...

The example shown on the github page looks pretty convincing (but that could all be faked, I guess).

True, you can't see anything too incriminating in that short example (but if they'd captured their own password would they have published that as-is?), but if you let it run and just get lucky, what wonders could you see?

Parsing the extracted data could be an interesting challenge, but anything with a pattern to it...

The malefactors don't have to hit too many jackpots to make the attempt worthwhile. Unless someone wants to invoke some "targeted scenario" where they are after something specific from a special machine within a particular company, but how many of those are there in reality, compared to mass "give it a go, see what we get" approaches (like targeting all of the machines in the company)?

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Also, I just noticed...

> not a tab spying one for s'kiddies.

We don't do gatekeeping around here.

We support equal opportunity access to hardware bugs.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Parsing the data

> UTF-8 or sometimes ISO8859 are the order of the day, and just counting along an array of bytes until you get to a zero byte is no longer enough to work out the character length of a string

Many (the vast majority?[1]) of calls to str(n)len are looking for the end of a buffer to copy to/from, rather than actually caring about how many characters/codepoints are present.

[1] certainly in all my UTF8 code (which is all the string & text processing code I use) *all* of the str(n)len calls are for this - my code never actually worries about counting codepoints[2], leaving that up to the OS display code.

[2] I cheat - all the special sequences that are sought by the lexer are in the 7-bit ASCII range. Then again, this cheat is used by all the programming languages I'm familiar with...

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Also, I just noticed...

Hopefully, but as with every weird attack vector things get, well, weird.

The key lines in the post you reference appears to be

> which the JIT engine should known has just been zeroed and have optimized away.

Hmm, does the JIT engine really track every value to see if it is zero? It makes sense to have an iszero bit in hardware as it works in parallel and can be applied to every value passing through a register. You can track some values during compilation but add enough indirection and you can get a zero that isn't evident at compile time. Ahhh, something else to add to the "have a look at this in one's copious spare time" :-)

However, those bent on attacking will be looking at the results of JIT as well and can apply weird methods: they know the sequence of operations they want to come out of the compiler and can fling stupid-looking JS code at it until they get a workable sequence out.

The bottom line: fingers crossed nobody gets it to work in JS but plan for the worst case.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Dumb Questions

I just hope I can figure out how to apply any of the amelioration methods - like, are microcode patches a one-time thing or do they have to be re-applied on every power up?

I.e. can I boot a patched OS once then go back to the grotty stuff or must all the OSes be capable of uploading the microcode patch (and contain a copy of it!)? If the latter then running some of the oddball OSes that Liam Proved tells us of would be a pain.

For that matter:

> If you stick any emulation layer in between, such as Qemu, then the exploit understandably fails.

Presumably that *doesn't* work for Qemu/kvm as then you are running on the real hardware, just a subset of it. You have to force it to, um, actually emulate the x64 architecture whilst running on an x64 - tell it to emulate an Intel device instead? My little head hurts.

Yikes, there is so much about the modern CPU guts I know nothing about! Maybe if I just glue 48 Motorola 6809s together with some SRAM onto Veroboard...

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Dumb Questions

> The error is in clearing the zero bit!

> I can understand why each of these decisions was made in isolation

I wish I could!

I've read through the report once so far and I'm clearly missing something, as I can not see why that zero bit needs to be reset - i.e. missing the "in isolation" usefulness of doing so.

AFAIK It is only a speed-up, to avoid *really* writing zeroes into the register - if the speed-up didn't exist then the register really would contain zeroes, just as it would contain any non-zero value. If the rollback required the zero bit to be cleared, to revert it to the way it was, that implies (to me) that any non-zero value would also have to be reverted to the way it was.

So either there is no need to touch anything - nothing needs to be reverted - or there is a shadow copy mechanism that would revert back a non-zero correctly but for some reason is broken/incomplete with respect to the zero bit, causing it to be cleared every time. A broken mechanism doesn't seem like something that would be considered useful "in isolation".

Probably just (!) have to re-read that report a half-dozen more times and it may sink in.

Or I could not bother and just marvel that any of this stuff works as well as it does!

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Also, I just noticed...

> which sounds like something that can not be trivially exploited with javascript code

From the article:

>> It's understood a malicious webpage, running some carefully crafted JavaScript, could quietly exploit Zenbleed on a personal computer to snoop on this information.

Writing that JavaScript might not seem trivial to you or I, but something similar has been done to take advantage of the Intel hardware problems: someone knows the trick.

And one the code is written, it can be dropped into as many (hijacked) web pages as are willing to pay the few to get one copy.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Parsing the data

Yup.

That's why you[1] would want to be able to do the attack using JavaScript: attack as many people as can be lured to that webpage, grab as much as you can - oh, and don't forget to get as much as you can out of the browser by all the older methods, now you have information about what sites they log into as well as possible hints about passwords etc.

You[2] don't have to get lucky every time.

[1] not *you* you, of course, I'm not trying to suggest that you are interested in any of this for any reason than to protect yourself.

[2] on the other hand, your eyes are a bit close together and have a shifty look

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Also, I just noticed...

It is very useful to have your bank site open and at the same time be looking at your orders on the retailer's website (ugh, I did pay that much), plus the tax advice website (blast, I thought the Customs Exempt threshold was higher) whilst IMing (we said we'd go halfsies but I don't see the transfer from your account) and so on and so forth.

Logging out of the bank every time you want to double check a line in the statement - not going to be a popular move.

Intel: Here, have some AI reference kits ... now please buy our silicon

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: It's like a choose your own adventure book

Yes, but it wasn't very good and never made it to end, then refused to ever play again[1]

AI can be cleverer than we give it credit for.[2]

[1] this is a madey-upy story for a cheap laugh

[2] see [1]

Ultra-rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s on sale for $50,000

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: anti-Apple (fanboi) sentiment

"of all it's none of anybody else's business what people choose to like or not like."

True.

All the people who just quietly enjoy what they enjoy: well, they are just "fans", not "fanbois", and all the best to them. Have fun.

It is the fanbois that make so much effort to make damn sure everyone else knows what they like that are the annoying ones.

Especially the ones that do it by inventing slights that they can rail against.

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Einstein clearly never read Genesis.

When there is doubt, always go with the earliest bit of Genesis, when Gabriel was involved (Peter, that is).

that one in the corner Silver badge

These may be the best Apple products that they released in the 1990s

Ah, the heady days of such Apple products as:

* Powerbook 5300 ("widely considered one of Apple's worst products."[1])

* Mac Performa x200 series (It often appears on the "worst Apple products of all time" type lists[1])

* Macintosh TV (With a price tag of $2,000, it was doomed to failure[1])

* The eWorld service, a private network service that was separate from the internet

And oh so many more delights. If nothing else there were enough dodgy releases that you could make a decent collection out of them.

[1] quotes and more listings from 17 Apple Products From the 90s We Forgot About

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

that one in the corner Silver badge

Tweet no more

Now you just Xit - pronounced "zit".[1]

"Oh, I'll just squeeze out a xit about this"

"Your xit has gone viral"

"Musk has given us even bigger xits"

[1] informed by my colleague Xavier, pronounced Zavier.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

that one in the corner Silver badge

Well, if you're so smart, you tell us: what colour should the wheel be?

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

that one in the corner Silver badge

Re: Rule one...

> stationary on the M20

Aka Operation Stack

Which really gets one right in the old pedantry nerve: that is a FIFO not a LIFO! They aren't stacking their operations, they are queueing!

Although calling it Operation Queue would just get it confused with SOP on the M25.