Posts by original_rwg

Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

Too Late

I predict that by the time there is any sort of agreed standard for bot behaviour that allows web sites the control to allow or disallow bots as appropriate, it'll be too late to protect anything.

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

And....

Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors,..... their spouses, their children, relatives, gardners, window cleaners, the person that sells them their newspaper in the morning and anyone else they know.

Did we miss anyone out?

ChatGPT users wake to find it's even more wrong, slower than usual

Worse

"Meanwhile, the company reported yesterday that it had surpassed $10 billion in annual recurring revenue"

I dunno what's worse, that they're getting paid for this snake oil or that some have been persuaded to part with money for it.

Still, you know what's said about a fool and their money....

Victoria's Secret website laid bare for three days after 'security incident'

Re: Disappointing Lack of Puns

Going all out for support....

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

So, in summary, what the above are saying is, A.I. is shit. I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you.

UK tax collector puts half a billion on table for call center services

Capita has entered the room.....

openSUSE deep sixes Deepin desktop over security stink

Change....

...is inevitable, unless from a vending machine. I'm a long time user of OpenSUSE and will miss the old Yet Another Setup Tool but as long as I can still run my sever without a GUI, I can live with it.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Oh Dear

Yet another example of your PC doing something for Micros~1 before it does what you want it to do....

Don't delete that mystery empty folder. Windows put it there as a security fix

Did something similar a while back. Having managed to eradicate SCCM from my desk machine (it was responsible for preventing Windows Updates being installed) I created three empty files with names that duplicate the folders an SCCM installation would like to create.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Static discharge

Many years ago, back in the 8086 days, I managed to fry a multi-io board in a machine simply by releasing the static charge by touching the mouse. The hard drive led went solid red and the machine became unresponsive. New multi-io board required.

Even more years ago, back in the physics class, it was our classroom show-offs turn to have sticky-up hair with his hand on the Van De Graff generator whilst stood on the insulating box. He thought it might be a laugh if he reached out with his finger to touch the teacher but as he leaned forward, his wedding tackle got too close to the gas tap on the bench....

The sound of Windows 95 about to disappoint you added to Library of Congress significant sound archive

Also missing

The theme from Red Dwarf....

Infosec pro Troy Hunt HasBeenPwned in Mailchimp phish

MailChimp

The following shit-show was a number of years ago now but for the avoidance of doubt, bulkmailprovider was Mailchimp

So, the back story here is that a member of staff where I work could not subscribe to a particular mailing list for an organisation whose activities were very relevant to her job.

The organisation uses a bulk email service for distribution of said emails. I couldn't subscribe either, in fact no one could and another staff member was now no longer in receipt of a regular e-bulletin which was also distributed by this bulk mail service. Confused, I got in touch with them and the correspondence is below. I have changed names to protect the innocent and the ridiculous alike because you couldn't make this up.

RWG said: (Via their web page)

Hi.

I'm at a bit of a loss to explain this error message (That e-mail address has been banned) when some of our people attempt to subscribe to a mailing list you operate on behalf of the 'Important Public Organisation'.

I've made sure that 'BulkMailProviders' server addresses have been added to our mail filter white list but our users can still not successfully subscribe and another, who was previously receiving an E-bulletin, also delivered by yourselves on behalf of 'Another Important Organisation', is now no longer receiving that.

We use a 'ReputableMake' firewall with built in mail filtering.

oooOOOooo

'BulkMailProvider' replied:

Hey RWG,

Thanks for getting in touch with us about this! I can definitely understand your concern here, and I'd be more than happy to help you get started in the right direction.

When an email address returns the banned error message, it is because somebody at that domain has requested to no longer receive emails from 'BulkMailProvider'.

We would recommend reaching out to our Compliance team for further information. They can be reached at [e-mail]

If there's anything else we can help you with, don't hesitate to get back in touch with us and we'll be happy to assist you.

Have a good one!

Thank you,

Igor

oooOOOooo

RWG responded:

Hello

I was given your mail address by Igor. I understand from him, that the reason some of our users are unable to subscribe to e-bulletins and newsletters, from organisations that use your service for delivery, is because someone at our mail domain has requested not to receive any further communications from an organisation that uses your service. Can you advise how we might resolve this?

Regards

RWG

oooOOOooo

'BulkMailProvider' replied:

Hi RWG and thank you for reaching out to us. In order to resubscribe the 'wherethisishappening' domain we just need the original person who requested to block to reach out to us. They can send an email to [e-mail] requesting the domain be resubscribed. While we are unable to provide the details of the individual who requested the block we can say it was submitted to us on November 19, 2013. Hopefully this will get you going in the right direction.

Feel free to contact us if you have any other specific questions or comments that we can assist you with.

Thank you,

Mel

oooOOOooo

RWG asked:

Hi Mel

Thanks for getting back to me. I'm afraid your explanation, while understandable, is less helpful than I had hoped for. Unfortunately, it is not practical to interrogate the mail system, or our employees in order to determine who may have selected to unsubscribe.

Even if it were possible discover whom it may have been, it could be of little use, as if any one individual wishes to opt out of communications for which 'BulkMailProvider' is the service provider, then the entire mail domain is subsequently excluded. That strikes me to be a strange policy although no doubt the reasoning is sound. Could you offer some explanation on that? I'm sure our users here would be most interested, as would I.

Regards

RWG

oooOOOooo

'BulkMailProvider' replied:

Hello RWG,

Thank you for writing back in. The domain @wherethisishappening has been removed from the blacklist. It will now be possible to add subscribers from this domain. Please note that it may take 24-48 hours for this to take effect.

If you have any additional questions, please let us know.

Thank you,

Tony

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Nil carborundum illegitimi

DeepSeek can be gently persuaded to spit out malware code

I'm reminded of the scene in Short Circuit 2 where Los Locos explain to Johnny 5 that they work for the Department of Car Stereo Repairs and have a large number of car stereos to 'collect' today....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ5MI8tsKWE

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

Worth it?

Some might say it would be worth it if he promised to bugger off and become a recluse in cave somewhere no-ones heard of and take President Cheese Puff with him.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

I kept reading Majorana as Marijuana....

I'm off for a lie down...

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Re: Google free

Ah - perhaps I should have mentioned that I use my phone for calls and text messages. It's not got various Apps for this that and the next thing (my choice). Also at the time of installing LineageOS, the Google part of the OS came as a separate install - I didn't.

Google free

With LineageOS.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Making changes

On a Friday - what could possibly go wrong?

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Paperclip

Struggling to see how the text description included the word 'paperclip'.

Microsoft talks up 'significant capital investments' in AI as sector reacts to DeepSeek

This

"....particularly considering the effort Microsoft has put into forcing AI and Copilot on any customer unable to get out of the way in time...."

Says it all.

Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets

£1000

I understand it's £1000 for the Fenix model. It seems if you want the time you have to have the money too....

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

$$$$

Could it be because these AI pushers have 'bet the farm' so-to-speak and now need to see some ROI?

1. Monetise from how people have been using this stuff.

2. Force it to be ubiquitous then start charging the users.

3. All the above.

<Icon because they have their hand in our pocket>

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

Re: Daily Trump

Some years ago, the late Janey Godley famously held up a sign at his Turnberry golf club that described him as a c*nt. I believe that description to be inaccurate as he has neither warmth nor depth.

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Rubbish

Blasted Generative AI. Worse than useless. We asked it to generate a picture of a pole-dancing Donald Trump having dollar bills slipped into his thong by MAGA-hat wearing men.

It refused. Guard rails or some safeguards or whatever. These tech companies have spent billions on this stuff and it refuses to co-operate. We want to mock!

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

Bollocks

This is not just bollocks - this is Apple Intelligence bollocks....

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Cracked Case

Back in the 90's, that cracked case issue cost Compaq millions. The laptops were sent back to local service centres for the countries of origin, dismantled and the faulty plastic with I/O board was shipped to one of two places for replacement. One was in Houston, Texas the other was in Stirling, Scotland. We replaced the poor Japanese plastic with US plastic, refitted the I/O board and repacked them, often with different keyboards depending on the destination country.

Swedish authorities probe Oracle Cerner health record rollout

The Fujitsu Horizon software was also flawless.... until it wasn't.

QNAP and Veritas dump 30-plus vulns over the weekend

Veritas? Is anyone still using that?

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Distraction

Microsoft stated: "In a future update we will completely remove the binaries."

Look! A squirrel!

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Router appliance

I've never used the ISP supplied router as they're always built to a cost. I've also moved away from using an appliance as my router as if it dies (and that has happened before) I'm stuffed. I've now retired the little Fortigate in favour of a small PC with pfSense. Neither of these are for non-technical people but like many people who comment here, I'm not non-technical.

The Fortigate was great but unfortunately, there is zero support for the second user market either in firmware or feature licences. I know many would say it's overkill for a domestic set up and they might be right but the more robust my security, the more attractive the low-hanging fruit is. Of course if you really want overkill, try out Mikrotik.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

That rings a bell. I think you got away with having win.exe (or was it .com) in C:\windows\

I do remember the 'joys' of reinstalling because someone had buggered up something. Networking was also a bit flakey but you could reinstall the local drivers and files to put things right.

Microsoft Exchange update fixes security flaws, breaks other stuff

Channels

Ah the old days when we only had three channels and you had to cross the room to change it....

Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment

Gouging the customer

A 25% increase suggests to me that they've been reading from the Broadcom/VMWare playbook.

>>Icon because they're poisonous...

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Comming soon....

Windows 12?

Windows 11's Recall feature is on by default on Copilot+ PCs

Re: "Microsoft's latest Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE)"

Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE)

Out-of-Brains Experience

FTFY

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

New Media

That'll be new tape media so the figure will not include the many thousands of tapes out there that are still within their life cycle of uses....

IBM Consulting bought into Microsoft's Copilot – now it'll help customers do the same

Copilot Runway Adoption Framework

Pity they didn't decide to call it Copilot Runway Adoption Process....

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

Not a good look

So it is installed in such a way that it is only discovered by checking a list of installed programs....

I'm struggling to suspend my disbelief at 'accidental'.

Microsoft gives Hyper-V ceilings a Herculean hike

Immune

And of course Hyper -V never has any vulnerabilities that would require a restart after patching....

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Didn't someone once say, "In God we trust, all others pay cash"

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

"Contract"

Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

B0ll0cks!

"The Google-run proxy can observe the user's IP address but not the websites being visited"

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

I suppose that would also rule out Romain Grosjean then....

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Hold Muzak

Many, many years ago if you were on hold with a company called D.E.M. who were a software reseller for Backup Exec, they played excerpts from Goon shows.

Beneath Microsoft's Surface event, AI spreads everywhere

Red Dwarf....

Would you like some toast?

Capita staffers told attackers stole data from its own pension fund

Black Basta - We have all this data on you because we stole it.

Experian - We have all this data on you because you gave it to us.

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

Re: Microsoft....

This thread is becoming laced with puns

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Re: Multi I/O Boards

Can't remember the board maker but think they had hdd and fdd direct attached by ribbon cables. Parallel and serial ribbons to a separate slot. They could support 2 x hdd and 2 x fdd and some even came with a game port - 15 pin D type. The machines were beige boxes branded Wren. Originally started out as 486DX-33 but we upgrade them to 486DX-66 (wow!) and fitted a cooler for the CPU. So sad that I can remember all that :(

Static

This story reminds me of an event many years ago. I was performing some routine maintenance on multiple 486 machines running Windows 3.1. Walking back and forth across the carpet a few times was enough to build sufficient a static charge in me that when I reached for the mouse of one machine, I felt the zap of the escaping 'angry pixies' and watched as the machines hdd led came on and stayed on. I had fried a vital component of the multi-io board (remember them?) and the box was now totally unresponsive and unable to boot.

While awaiting the delivery of a replacement multi-io board, I placed a note on the monitor which read "Under treatment". I kept tropical fish as a hobby at the time. One of the other staff members added "Nil by mouse" to it. Amused by this I agreed she could submit it to The Readers Digest. They published it in one of their end of article fillers and we shared the spoils.