Posts by that one in the corner

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

> I had three Microsoft Mouses, they all were all bad.

OTOH I've had three MS mice and they were so good I got the last one 2nd hand after they stopped making 'em. BTW often had two PCs on at once, chuntering away before 24-cores became de rigeur and having separate peripherals suited me better than using the KVM switch. So just one spare mouse.

One Good Thing: nice simple design, could actually be used in the left hand! Today, using R'Pi mice for the same reason. And they come in different colours for the PC or the actual R'Pi!

What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

Re: It's the simple things

> I want the button I'm about to click to stay the button I think it is, not shift layout so the mouse is now over the previous button 100ms before I press it.

I used to think that, until it was pointed out[1] to me that this is all part of The Gamification[2] of, well, everything. We get to have the "fun" of awarding ourselves notional points for every web item we manage to click in time or suffer a real-world penalty.

Similarly, other times we are meant to treat websites like a point'n'click adventure, just trying to find out what is active on each page (e.g. pressing the back button at the top of the browser - will that work or will it cause the browser window to close because we have been on one ever-changing "single page web app" for the last ten minutes of constant browsing).

[1] as in "Get wid da game, grandad!"

[2] apparently, you are not supposed to pronounce that to rhyme with "ham', or the state of your leg

Elon Musk reins in Grok AI bot to stop election misinformation

Re: What is misinformation ..

> What is deemed “wrong information” and who decides what is “wrong information” ?

>> What is misinformation and who gets to decide what is misinformation :o

And around we go again.

(Or this later AC just a Cunning Commentard, here to remind us this is a computery site and wants to celebrate the Great Notion, Recursion?)

Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time

Re: We are doomed

It was a blatant clue!

> does that mean it can learn to simulate other software, too? Or perhaps learn to amalgamate features from different applications into one simulation

Following on from the logic of this example, you'll get a result that produces the visuals from the other software without any of the internals. For some cases (playing Doom) that may even be enough.

But I'd question the utility of a simulation of the display from Inkscape as it is used to create a new design: you won't actually get a usable SVG file out at the end, just a simulation of what you get when the SVG was rendered to a bitmap: time to break out the autotrace[1].

Could be fun explaining why the newly simulated Office App To End All Office Apps can't even copy text to the clipboard, as the Stable Diffusion-created output resolutely stays as a bitmap.

There *may* be some mileage in the concepts you describe, but the system described in this article doesn't come anywhere near their execution.

[1] now, training up a neural net to be a good autotrace, turning a bitmap into a *good*, minimalist, SVG, that is a decent goal. Tried a few websites which claim to have done that and they are junk!)

Or just run Doom in your VR headset and you not only don't need all those TPUs of "AI model" to generate low-res JPEG quality, replacing them by 120 plus FPS of stonking high quality visuals, but you also get to reach all of the game map.

Using Stable Diffusion, this approach is just recreating, badly, the visuals it has been trained on. It isn't creating new 3D maps of exciting new levels for you to explore, it isn't coming up with new in-game AIs for you to interact with, or new plot lines to follow. Those are the features that would make for an interesting holo-deck experience.

Plus all the physical interactions via improved haptics (pressor fields and tractor beams!), full surround sound with thousands of identifiable points of origin, a scent organ with more than a dozen whiffs at its disposal...

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

Re: Now just a cotton-picking minute, there

> Plank time (that being the ability of a politician to retain anything they don't want to know)

The Planck Time is how long politicians retain unfortunate truths.

The Plank Time is what we dream of applying to said politicians (one piece of wood, so many uses: dunking, nailing, swatting...)

First of ESA's Cluster satellites prepares for fiery finale over South Pacific

Re: bonfire

> Science doesn't agree with you.

Hmm, what does that article (not an actual scientific paper, btw, but a journalistic report) actually say:

>> The detected concentrations of these compounds were much higher than what could be caused by natural sources, such as the evaporation of cosmic dust and meteorites upon their encounter with the atmosphere.

SO they can detect it - above the background noise of the meteorites etc. At NO point does it say that the total of the background noise is less than that from the satellites. In fact, it makes no quantitative comparison between the two. BTW, NASA estimates 44,000 kilograms of natural infall PER DAY, so we are adding to that non-trivially. But we have only been at it for a very short time.

So, nope, that article does not disagree with me. Some paper *may*, but not anything they've read and are reporting on.

Yes, they do point out that the satellite debris *may* have an effect in the atmosphere - because even raising a bit beyond the natural noise, along with everything else we are doing, may have deleterious effects.

Which could be mitigated if we sue God and he lowers the background.

Re: bonfire

First, we pass the Environmental Protection Laws to protect ourselves from all this fiery infalling junk.

Then we sue the biggest offender, God, for all the meteorites that are continually vaporising in our atmosphere, every hour of every day.

Not to mention all the solid bits that make it to the ground absolutely everywhere, getting into the downpours from all our roofs.

Re: Magnetosphere protection

"Your underwear can glow with cleanliness, when you use New Improved Cherenkov Powder in your wash".

SolarWinds left critical hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product

Hot fix has to be manually installed

> users are encouraged to install the fix, which presumably removes the baked-in creds.

Guessing the start of these special manual hot fix instructions begins with "Step 1: do *not" take a backup copy".

> It affects Web Help Desk 12.8.3 HF1 and all previous versions

And the final step is "Now delete all your previous backups".

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Re: Aaaaand another parsing error

> In a lot of languages, it's actually really difficult to find out exactly where a syntax error is so you can emit an appropriate error message. Are there too many closing braces, or is it actually an opening brace was omitted?

True, some languages are very hard to parse. C++ can be a right bugger.

But why is there anything even vaguely complicated to parse in a search box for Settings or Notes? What could even need proper parsing? That is, anything more complicated than a bit of lexing or even, dare I say it, trying out a few select regexs on the input?

Someone suggested that the presence of colons in the trigger phrases could be related to looking for URLs - in which case, what kind of URL starts with quotes (or are those apostrophes, no matter, same response)?[1]

If you have a search box routinely worrying about such things as matching parentheses then something has gone very wrong somewhere!

[1] before you ask, yes, I have written a lexer that looks for URLs, as part of a Wiki parser - which never generates an error message, a "failed" parse just gives up and leaves that bit untouched, attaching no special significance to it - which is what I'd expect a search box to do when you gave it "malformed input": just search for that exact string without even attempting whatever cleverness it was hoping to do. Duff URLs don't get converted into hyperlinks, loony dates don't get added to the timeline, malformed smileys are not replaced by any appropriate image.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

undeniably less attractive than the modern Settings app

Even if that were true[1] - so bleepin' what?

Why would any sane[2] person use a computer program because it was attractive over one that was functional?

[1] what is attractive about wasting pixels on huge amounts of blank space - and hiding the scrollbar to remove the clue there *may* be something useful further down!

[2] Microsoft product managers need not attempt to answer, it will only upset hem

Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build

Re: Lesson learned?

Wave hands vertically whilst going Diddleee-didddllee-diddleee as we wind back to the past:

A machine bought with Win10 today may or may not meet the minimum spec for Win11 in however many years time, but it will almost certainly still be able to do the job that it is being bought for today after MS decide to pull support for Win10.

ICANN reserves .internal for private use at the DNS level

> ICANN decided nobody could get .corp (and .home) because too many fuckwits were already using these TLDs on their supposedly private networks.

Well, those were listed in the draft RFC 2606 so perhaps those "fuckwits" were just following what they believed was going to become Standard Practice.

And if their use of those tld's *has* really, truly, meant that ICANN will never release them, then - that is a Good Thing.

Unless, of course, you were hoping to buy .home and hold everyone to ransom, back in the long-distant past of up to last month when ICANN had refused to actually guarantee us a sensible and *well publicised*[1] tld to use

[1] before you leap in with .home.arpa or similar that were also unofficial all these years but unlikely to be sold.

Re: Would have prefered "*.int"

> You're lucky. It might have been .localdomain

The draft for RFC 2606 did listed .localdomain - it also recommended that .local, .domain, .lan, .home, .host and .corp where all given the same treatment, meaning we could have been using any of those safely since 1999 - if only those recommendations had lived on into the released RFC 2606.

But that would have lost ICANN a quarter century of laughing at us trying to set up LANs that weren't going to suddenly go ga-ga.

In celebration of Curiosity's successful landing on Mars

> if every nation worked together with NASA to start exploring and evaluating our solar system planets

You mean like the way that NASA works with ESA and with JAXA?[1]

Oh, and it isn't up to other the other nations - if NASA wants to work with another agency, it is up to NASA to ask (and vice versa).

> and then start looking at others in our Galaxy

You do know that we have been looking at other stars and planetary systems in our galaxy for a while now? Little things like the JWST - although, as far as the stars go, NASA is way behind the curve, people all over the world have been looking at those for, oooh, years - a good few thousand if them at least, going by recorded observations.

> NASA is far more likely to get it done if everyone in the world was working together.

NASA is not the be-all and end-all of "looking at other stars and planetary systems"; actually, they do very little of the looking, but do do more of the sending robots for some very specific little bits of in-situ work.

[1] and others, but you could try googling for those yourself

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: Missing the point?

> In practice, I guess the compiler(s) define the language.

Sadly, that *is* precisely the formal model that Rust currently goes by.

> Clearly not ideal.

That is a well-used formal model for a language and one that has been used often enough in the past. And it is a model that works well enough for a certain class of languages (e.g. any of those used for interactive training slash text-based adventure games: so long as your implementation matches "the master copy" all is good).

But it is *not* a model that should *ever* be applied to a language that will be used for low-level production work, most definitely not one that promises to do the memory management for you.

Without a formal language spec, and preferably one that includes the formal maths proof of its claims, Rust is still very much in the "here is our demonstration piece, if you like it we will take it to completion" phase of life.

But too many people, shamefully, are pushing Rust as something that is ready for major use by everyone TODAY.

I truly wish it were. But it ain't.

Re: Missing the point?

> The C and C++ memory models are very much impossible to make memory safe.

The assembly language and raw binary opcode memory models are very much impossible to make memory safe.

Therefore we should stop running anything.

OR we could put a layer on top to help.

Like, say, any of the extant C/C++ libraries that do provide memory safe versions of everything you need to do.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: Don’t people look after their devices?

> I’ve never had a key break on a laptop (how does that even happen?)

No matter how good the extractor, dust from the laser cutter it is plugged into. And bits dropping out as you carry the cut sheet away, forgetting that it is only the commercially used cutting patterns that leave the little stubs that hold everything into the sheet (and leave rough bits that need sanding).

Not breakage, as you can normally clip them back on, but after learning finger positions from using a Proper Keyboard (where there is proper space for your guitar pluckers), it turns out you can hook a fingernail under a naff laptop keycap and flick it right off!

Re: My most recent breakage?

> if there's a weird way to break something, a cat will discover it. It's a shame she can't/won't do software testing.

Software? Wetware!

All cats are fully occupied, stress-testing the human wetware.

They are doing it under contract to the mice, but after Magrathea shut down during the Galactic recession there are - issues - between the two, something about the cheque bouncing. Hence all the chasing, leaving the odd mouse head in bed etc after the cat mafia got stung.

Now I want a Maynard's Winegum.

> Irn Bru ... Makes you wonder what it does to your insides when you see what it does to a PCB

Your insides are fine *if* you remember to disconnect your battery before imbibing. If you are running on external power, take especial care not to let your neck bolts get splashed, as that stuff will just strip the copper before you can blink.

Irn Bru - always read the warnings and do not drink for an hour before playing the bagpipes; one burp and the debris from the bladder will have someone's eye out: a drone is more aerodynamic than it looks.

Re: Poor kid!

>> sailed gracefully through the air

> No toddler ever tripped gracefully

The run up is wobbly, the take off clumsy, but once in the air the double barrel-roll and knee-tuck is smooth as silk.

We gloss over the landings[1].

[1] Come to think of it, that might be the reason this keeps happening.

Re: Dropping the phone while gardening

Appropriate soundtrack: the gentle purr and deep throbbing of that classic Jaguar Lawn Cruiser, with the reflex grass clippings bin and twin overhead awnings, that you daydream about owning. As the headphones cancel out the erratic one-and-three-quarters stroke B&D Friday Special that the neighbours so love waking up to on a Sunday morning.

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

Re: Myopic UNIX View

> My opinion is that C should be taken down a notch or two.

As soon as there is something as easily portable to as many targets[1], and with as at least equal ability to produce efficient code, that is easier to use and standardised, then C will quietly lose its ground. You don't need to do anything to make that happen, other than give your all to help create that new tool: calling use of C myopic[2] - or any other rude comments - will not affect its usage one iota.

> Some commenters depicted it as a forever-standard.

Given we are talking about longevity of code, and the current existence of 50 years of C code, even if a viable replacement tool comes into full fruition next Sunday (and Rust isn't grown up enough, yet; soon, maybe) C compilers *MUST* stay in existence for decades to come, if only to allow all the extant code to remain compilable until it is *ALL* replaced by new code.

C has a standard (unlike some...) and compilers to that will exist for longer than you or me. Which is Good Thing. Just as Fortran compilers still live on and have their forever niche.

[1] BTW, note that "many targets" includes all of the microcontrollers; and although there are increasingly large MCUs available, which can run greedier code for hobbyists/small run production, mass production runs will always want to save pennies on BOM.

[2] again, a weird thing for you to have said, as TFA was explicitly about someone who HAS made great strides in moving some code away from C! And Unux (well, Linux) is THE place where Rust has more traction, trying to move away from C!

Re: Fifty years?

> gcc 10 can compile gcc 11, gcc 12, gcc 13.

Look at those version numbers and the maturity of the specific complier; now compare those to the maturity of Rust; now compare GCC (or other toolchains) when they were at the same level of maturity.

> It's quite normal to have a toolchain in use from several years ago that's still relevant and useful now

I never throw a toolchain away; my build system includes a copy of VC6 (the extant compiler when the build setup was started) and all of the compilers (mainly GCCs now) that have been used, right up to date. It really pisses me off when a compiler only comes as an installer that insists it is the only copy on the machine and even has to always be on PATH. Do not get me started on bleeping Arduino V2 that does not support a "portable" install. Anyway, back to your points.

> rust from a year ago can't compile Firefox... It's not sustainable to imagine finding a specific version of rust from a specific part of a specific year...

True. And for that, you need to point your anger at Firefox et al, who are knowingly using a toolchain that is still in the state of flux that every language starts with - and are doing so in production releases[[1], not as a parallel project preparing for the Rust developers to develop their toolchain.

The problem that exists today is people using for production releases a toolchain that is not yet ready for production use. Those same people would have been equally reckless around any other shiny, new and nowhere near standardised language. From that p.o.v. it is still not Rust's fault, qua Rust, yet another programming language; qua hype surrounding Rust and and the apparent urge to be visibly cutting edge, no matter the pitfalls, that is certainly at fault.[2]

But you started by talking about using Rust in 50 years time - a time frame that will either see Rust long settled into the maturity of GCC, with all the backwards compatibility flags, or will have seen Rust failed and excoriated decades earlier, as the issues you point out make even the Firefox team rebel against the Rust developers.[3]

I remind you of my opening line:

>> Much as I wish for a Rust that is less of a moving target,

That will come, or Rust will never make it to 50 years. Well, only as a relic that you can download from the Wayback Machine as a giggle.

[1] Worse, I have no doubt that they are proudly tracking point releases and compounding the problem.

[2] And jumping onto things and shoving them into production just because they are shiny is not restricted to Rust.

[3] Or everyone will have *finally* stopped pissing around with mediocre build systems and firing off builds with dozens of different compiler versions involved becomes no more difficult than typing "make" and leaving the machine to get on with it. Fat chance.[4]

[4] cue "but all the projects using Build System X already have that, to which the response will have to be "Yes, yes, but is everyone using X?". Anyway, that is a red herring (more of a bete noire, but I don't know to type accents on this device).

Re: Fifty years?

Much as I wish for a Rust that is less of a moving target, your point is misaimed.

The specific case you cite is absolutely normal when bootstrapping any language's compiler.

> Rust from two years ago can't compile rust (the toolchain itself) now.

For Language X, Compiler V1 is coded in - anything you like, even BASIC. V2 is coded in V1 and adds features F2. V3 is coded in V2, using features F2, adding F3. V4, coded in V3 using F3, adding F5. And so on and so forth.

Trivial observation: compiler V1 can not build compiler V3; V2 can not build V4; and so on and so forth.

> rust code written now will still be compilable 50 years from now?

BUT, unlike bootstrapping, where you are asking if older compiler can manage newer code, NOW you are asking if newer compiler can build older code.

To which the answer, as you already know from existing examples, is: YES!

In the Good Case, it is really easy, because the compiler, over the next 50 years, added backwards compatibility flags: take a look at GCC. Nice and easy.

In the Bad Case, you have to dig up an older copy of the compiler. Drat, all the hardship of getting the release from GitHub (or wherever) and looking up articles in the Way Back Machine.

but no FOSS package ever dies

Oh yes they do - and have.

Nowadays, the bulk of FOSS is shoved into GitHub and will be available - for as long as GirHub bothers to run its servers[1].

Back in the day, Tarballs and Arc files were downloaded direct from the author's site and then you were expected to mirror it if it was important to you.

Then the Web was "discovered" by more and more people and for some reason the mirroring stopped and changed to just dropping in a link to "the" download location - and of course, we then learnt that URLs have a half-life.

As public version control servers came online - and people started to trust them - we saw materials on something safer than a personal site, or the pages of a company that vanished overnight (sometimes the entire company vanished, sometimes just the project)[2].

If you are lucky, the Internet Archive grabbed a copy and you can try one of the dead URLs there; patience can be required[4].

If you are really lucky, somebody has put a copy into GitHub[5] - although you can open yourself up to flames because your copy "doesn't compile for me"[6]

And what about the FOSS that is practically single-sourced by being published in that JavaScript compost heap? Was LeftPad() also available from GitLab? Some of it is handled properly (p5.js oooh, squiggly and probably safe from vanishing).

Of course, any FOSS that does fall through the cracks "is not important" - after all, all the Linux distros keep their own copies of source packages, "so we are not actually reliant on GitHub at all, Corner you fool."

Not important. Well, you never know. Literally, you never know, it has gone now.[7]

[1] Then we'll have to go back and pull the older version from SourceForge.

[2] As a few others did I like the old "Elegant" library & util from Philips Labs - good luck finding that, on the Philips site - or doing a web search for it available elsewhere[3]

[3] stop giving your projects names that are normal words!

[4] not being able to find something is, in all practical terms, the same as the thing no longer existing at all. Take note when organising your backup copies...

[5] really must put my compiling copy of Elegant up on GitHub

[6] so maybe I won't put Elegant up, as I only have Makefiles for My Own Build System and am fed up telling people how to write build scripts for their favoured build tools. Seriously.

[7] "Important" is a relative term[8]. Maybe it is really important to *you* to generate an awful lot of Elegantly laid out syntax diagrams in the next day or you can't pay for Tiny Tim's new clutches, he is growing so fast nowadays, at least the one leg is.

[8] see so very many commentards "well, my PC is ok so this is a non-issue" and the response to same

[9] Footnotes FTW. Be more Pterry!

Things are going Z-shaped at Huawei: Chinese giant preps three-screen folding smartphone

Re: So, trifold now

> Whether the market for trifolds is even as big as the tiny market for bifolds remains to be seen

Trifolds, bifolds - really buying into the marketing speak (or, hopefully, Huawei just have a bad translator!)

As TFA pointed out, Huawei are describing a BIfold device, and so far you've only seen MONOfolds and nonfoldables.

Please don't just blindly follow the marketing speak: if all the marketing division walked

off a cliff, would you follow them?

Security biz KnowBe4 hired fake North Korean techie, who got straight to work ... on evil

Re: Where can I get more of that scam?

> If they're using stolen US identity documents, they may have to take steps to appear to be the person pictured in them.

Well, yes, like

>> a camera and a blank wall to stand against

Plus a copy of MS Paint - as capable as using an "AI" to modify the picture of the stolen credentials. More, as Paint doesn't have a habit of adding or removing fingers.

Where can I get more of that scam?

> The scam is that they are actually doing the work, getting paid well

If the "scammer" is actually doing the work, can we get some more of, please?

Maybe in one or two companies whose QA tes we have recently suspected are understaffed (and/or the staff are underperforming).

Ok, not this particular guy, with his penchant for malware.

Just a strange use of the word "scam". Fraudulent ID, yes.[1]

[1] Which raises another question: if they were going to have a video call, why use (pseudo)AI to modify a stock photo? Couldn't find a camera and a blank wall to stand against? Or some people have just fallen for the "AI" hype, even in. N. Korea.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

> So I would have expected that some developer set up some malware, checked that it successfully used these named pipes, implemented the change, and verified that the malware now failed to use these named pipes named pipe. And while testing this they would have noticed a crash during boot.

Go back over your scenario and compare it to Joe Bloggs's PC on Friday morning, as it BSOD.

What is different?

Joe:s machine does *not* have any pipe-using malware.

So, how about the dev "didn't* notice a crash during Boot, because it didn't crash, but spotted the malware and dealt with it. Maybe even called over the PHB to demonstrate the positive case. Job done, sign off, release update.

Whoops, tested the true positive, demonstrated the clever stuff worked. But forgot to test the negative condition. The one that most Users actually have.

If that happened, it would still be a QA failure, of course, but, be honest, who hasn't forgotten to test the negative condition, at least once.

And "once" is the number of times that poor sod of a (hypothetical) Dev would forget.

Re: Parse, don't validate

> Parse, don't validate

No.

Parse *then* validate.

> After (proper) parsing you know that the data is valid!

Successful parsing says the data is grammatically well-formed, *not* that it is valid.

my_age = 264

may well parse, but it ain't valid. Heck, depending upon the grammar,

my_age = purple

may parse quite happily (I am, of course, a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue, not purple in the least).

You can add semantic checks into the erstwhile "parser" code, but unless you have put those into the grammar (e.g. there is only a fixed set of colours my age could be) then you are just mashing up the terms used to describe what your code is doing.

In particular, validation of data can (often does) involve cross-checking with other data, which need not have gone anywhere near your parser.

Re: my surprise...

> I suppose the wrong hundred thousand machines could wreak havoc while ten million personal devices could be an inconvenience.

A key point here is that CrowdStrike is only installed (barring a few home users with more money than sense - or a "borrowed" work key) by companies, and generally larger ones at that.

So personal devices (barring ...) were never at risk from this cockup - instead it was going to be machines that stopped one part of a (big) company doing something, which stopped their colleagues doing something else which...

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Gizza job

This whole thing is just Kurtz's SOP for getting his name into the press before leaving for a new job, just like when he left McAfee.

We all curse the very soil he walks upon, but for the money men in smoke-filled rooms: "Kurtz? Kurtz? I've heard that name somewhere, haven't I? Well, guess that means he's famous. Go ahead, lob some money at him, let's see what he can do. Got any more brandy?"

Re: Canary releases?

> I just used to call them phased releases, back in the day.

But were you dealing with code that could totally knacker the machine?

The canary falling of its perch is a good analogy for a BSOD (shortly followed by an explosion - of expletives heard all around the open plan office).

But if your app failing just meant it had to be restarted whilst the rest of the User's tasks progressed as normal - well, "signal the alarm, the canary has a bit of an itchy wing" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Administrators have update lessons to learn from the CrowdStrike outage

Considering the root cause was a total lack of file content validation (or a staggeringly shitty one if a file of all nulls is "valid"!), not even one of the "genuine antimalware boo-boos" (like the classic "false positive quarantining a key system exe") perhaps this case should prompt the Sys Admins to ask - demand - for the right to test the system for themselves.

I.e. to know precisely what files are capable of being updated, their update method (humans running installers, auto-installers that still show up in "Programs and Features" or "just data we silently grab from our servers". Which then allows them to run a test system and actually, um, test the software before they install it. By feeding it gibberish files.

Yes, you *ought* to be able to trust your vendor has run fuzzing tests, zero byte files etc, but if you are knowingly going to install software - well, really any software you install fleet-wide, but especially stuff you *know* can fiddle at a low level - and you are prevented from doing your own (double) checks that at least the most basic, trivial, well known and bleeding obvious protections are present then perhaps you should be raising alarm bells.

ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet

That isn't Classic Space

It doesn't have the LEGO swoosh on it.

It arrived in June? So LEGO knew it was coming and they haven't included a model of it in their current Collectable Minifig range (which is all about space, from Classic Space to UFOs). What a missed opportunity.

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Re: Too much complexity

> The problem is that some things just don't scale well in parallel.

As we have seen machines moving to more and more cores in the CPU (with or without hyperthreading), it is only too obvious how few programs can even take advantage of using "more of what we are used to", let alone reworking to take advantage of GPUs. Bring up Task Manager - and fire up lots of separate apps just to make it look as though that CPU was a sensible buy.

(Then again, given what I've seen coders do with mutexes it is probably a good thing that we don't have everybody trying to parallelize...)

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Back in the early naughties...

> . It was an absolute godsend for creating software to match native microsoft applications.

Only if it came a good while after the book Undocumented Windows (or you had a copy of that as well) or you would not have known how to write text out and get the TABs interpreted correctly.

And good luck matching Microsoft Office's use of MDI if you decide to use the *documented* MDI WndProc...

Re: Wrong question

> I wonder if the Windows T&Cs don't have the same language. If they don't, they should.

What, you didn't read it? :-)

These days, MS just go with the standard "it isn't fit for any purpose" wording:

>> Microsoft and the device manufacturer and installer exclude all implied warranties and conditions, including those of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose

In days gone by, just about every bit of COTS software made you explicitly agree to such things as not running nuclear power plants or even using it to control an aircraft, heavy machinery or medical equipment[1].

Nowadays, those explicit warnings seem to have gone Tubby bye-byes.

However, the "we never promised it could anything at all" language has the same effect, it is just trying harder to hide in the safety of apparently innocuous words.

[1] wish I could give URLs for this as well, but searching for the no nukes policy took digging through so, so many irrelevant hits. Was trying to get, e.g. the T&C's for Windows 2.0, they may be old enough to have the more explicit language, but so far, no dice.

> you MUST have data fuzzing and mutation testing going. From everything I can see this far, it's totally clear that CrowdStrike has neither!

Good grief, CrowdStrike clearly didn't even have basic, trivial, content validation on their files, like magic numbers and a checksum.

Yes, they should fuzz etc, but for pity's sake, call them out on missing the truly basic stuff first!

Re: WHQL

> You should not be able to feed new code to something running in the kernel space from the user space and certainly not without huge amounts of checking.

Sod running in kernel space.

How about just sanity checking the contents of a file, any file in any process at any priority level, before blindly interpreting its content.

Like, in a binary (data) file, checking for magic bytes, the checksum at the end... And just refusing to touch it when it is clearly insane.

That is basic stuff for any program, surely?

If a file with a duff photo can be calmly rejected because it doesn't have the JFIF magic numbers, but ...

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

> back in 1963

> 62 years later...

We find out why I've been getting complaints about post-dating cheques by a year.

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

> downloaded as a Cy file, which contained only zeros instead of pcode or malware definitions

So, we learn that zero is not NOP in their pcode?

Then again, NOP is hardly ever opcode zero, which can be considered unfortunate, as getting a file full of zeroes is one of THE classic blunders[1] (just ahead of a file full of all ones or a serial connection full of curly braces).

And if they'd just read it as good old fashioned ASCII, a sequence of NULs would just get ignored; almost as if they knew what they were doing back in 1963.

62 years later...

[1] The most famous of which is, ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia'

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

The occurrence of kernel panics mere weeks

> before CrowdStrike broke many Windows implementations therefore hints at wider issues at the security vendor.

That they accidentally released the Linux borkage weeks ahead of schedule, before it was ready to really screw things up. After that, they continued as planned to really knacker a load of Windows boxes, but had to hold back the completed Linux version "because the sysops were already on their toes and wouldn't be so easily caught out".

The CrowdStrike C-suite were annoyed at the resulting partial success, but the CFO pointed out it gave them a bit more time to practice holding pinkies to mouths and getting the correct "eee" in "beeelions".

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Re: I still use them - bit.ly

Perhaps it is time to research how to run a little web redirector next to your forum server and slowly wean yourself off Bitly: get yourself free before they have the chance to Boojum your members.

Re: Link Rot

It is a cunning ploy on their part. I used to copy MS URLs into my notes and docs, expecting to find them again in a week's time. But they have now hidden Product 2009 and any attempt to search for it on their site only returns Product 2023 (or Product 365). Eventually, you give up as it is cheaper to just buy the new damn Product.

I am less gullible now, and make heavy use of the Print Edit WE add-on, or similar, to store a local copy and put a link to *that* in my docs.

Re: Decisions such as Google's

First problem is trusting yourself to a service without a contract and being surprised when it no longer works for free (or at all).

Pay for your basket, and get an SLA, if you actually give a damn about your eggs.