* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

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Flame

Kill it with fire?

I always wondered who invented that.

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Facepalm

Re: Thank goodness for the internet

You've never done business in France I take it? It never went away.

The description; "deliberately obstructive, hidebound, petty-minded, bolshie bastards" is pitifully inadequate.

Wi-Fi slinger Ubiquiti hints at source code leak after claim of ‘catastrophic’ cloud intrusion emerges

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Coat

How they were caught.

...bad actors were able to hide their presence within SolarWinds' infrastructure...

"Hang on a minute, that's not Phil, it's some other bloke in a crap wig and godawful makeup who sounds like he'd reading from cue cards."

Apple begins rejecting apps that use advertising SDKs for fingerprinting users

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Meh

Been a while...

...since St Steve announced exactly this banhammer on third party ad-tracking coming. ISTR that his version came with an Apple ad service that you could use instead. Any news on that?

'Imagine' if Virgin Galactic actually did sub-orbital tourism: Firm unveils new chrome job on SpaceShip III

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Nearly there.

All it needs now is a load of rivets down the outside and a new engine that produces smoke and sparks, rather than a plume of fire.

Oh and some of those ray guns that make a "whoop whoop" noise and produce rings of glowing light.

AI recommendations fail fans who like hard rock and hip hop – official science

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Meh

Re: Why would it recommend?

It's all right, apparently hip-hop is "music" too, so their definition of the word is obviously a lot broader than we're used to.

Arm pulls the sheets off its latest Armv9 architecture with added AI support, Realms software isolation

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Re: Will it be a leaky data teabag like all Intel chips are?

Er, yes. As soon as chip designers bake in sekuritty that's a given.

The reason? It's difficult, if not impossible, to update and fix the holes when, not if[1], it's compromised.

[1] Because you can cater for all the penetration techniques around now, but you cannot, without a reliable crystal ball, guard against those yet to be developed.

Rails waves goodbye to mimemagic, welcomes Marcel to fix GPL MIME drama

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Re: "in over half a million software repositories"

Yes. Reminds me of the Astrolabe / timezone database fracas not so long ago. Normally, you'd expect losing a single server, with no fault tolerance, run by one bloke as a hobby in his spare time to be no big deal.

However, you then add someone's free library wrapper on his service and world + dog taking same "as is" without even looking at how it worked. The end result being that the number of critical services that were dependant on the server was, frankly, terrifying.

This is something the free software / open source types really need to get a grip on. When you find something out there that does what you need, open it up, look at how it works, make sure you understand it and all its dependancies[1] and that the whole shebang is suitable for your use before thinking of using it.

[1] ...and yes, all too often it does turn out to be turtles all the way down.

‘Radiation upset’ confused computers, caused false alarm on International Space Station

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Coat

"~1-pound decrease in the wastewater tank quantity."

Sounds like somebody's taking the piss.

Crafty: Cricut caught out by user revolt, but will cloud stop play?

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Facepalm

So....

One off money goes in, serving those customers costs per month. As long as mug punters keep chucking money in faster than the liabilities chew through it, everything keeps going.

Can anyone say "Ponzi scheme"? No? Ah, well, that's all right then.

Space station dumps 2.9-ton battery pack to burn up in Earth's atmosphere after hardware upgrade

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Alert

Trouble with that approach is that, if they can be unbolted that easily, they'd have the new ones off the outside of the station as well.

Also, once you've attracted that attention, there's a bloke on Deimos gives a good price on solar panels and doesn't ask any difficult questions about where you got 'em.

Ex-asylum seeker with infosec degree loses discrimination claim against UK cyber range provider after storming out

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WTF?

Er, why?

Is that supposed to be sarcasm?

Boffins revisit the Antikythera Mechanism and assert it’s no longer Greek to them

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"...and the Olympiad cycle.”

I still reckon the most convincing theory I've heard is that it's a sporting almanac.

The ancients were not aliens and to this day, if you want to see really stupid amounts of money being chucked down the plughole by the wealthy, look no further than sports and the betting thereon.

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

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Meh

Re: Experience is the best teacher

Trouble is that "proper change control" invariably ends up implemented as "everything has to be signed off on by this bunch of rabid Nazis who find their phone a technical challenge".

Everything takes longer, deadlines get missed because the wrong font was used in the change submission, critical fixes cannot be deployed because CC won't provide an exemption for something they don't understand and never will.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

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Meh

"... less historically problematic."

You can tell this is all down to the septics.

It wasn't a problem until some bunch of twativists made it one over the last couple of years. Hardly "historical", unless you come from a country where all of "history" happened over a few hundred years and you'd like to ignore the first half 'cos the important bits involve slavery and genocide.

Huawei's first desktop PC to be sold outside China is a sleek business machine with optional 'smart' keyboard

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Meh

"like your favourite coffee table book."

Presumably because it gets on teh internets and thus has a huge supply of "art pictures".

Belgian cops crack down on encrypted phone network Sky ECC in 200 overnight raids as firm denies criminal ties

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Facepalm

Re: When will these people ever learn?

The same Telegram that was shown to have the world's crappiest encryption, home-brewed by s'kiddies?

I wouldn't trust anything sensitive to something that's already had a security FAIL of that magnitude.

Name True, iCloud access false: Exceptional problem locks online storage account, stumps Apple customer service

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Help via Soshal Meejah.

Many moons gone, I did the old skool version of that.

I used to hang around on a list server (think Tw@ter, only without the bullshit and arseholes) dedicated to IBM midrange stuff. After a while we started to see some very odd messages about attempting to traverse the wormhole and such (yes, DS9 was current then). Turned out that the IBM Rochester AS/400 development team had aquired an internet connection, had found our friendly list server and were attempting to get access through their firewalls. They succeeded.

A while later I ran into an odd comms problem on the AS/400. Hardly surprising, doing weird things with midrange comms was my thing at the time and this was a very early version of OS/400, but this was throwing errors that, in theory, didn't exist. I chucked the details at the list to see if anyone bit. I got a quick reply from one of the IBM lads saying that he'd written the microcode for the x86 processor on the comms controller card and I'd just found the bug in it. Anyhow, if I waited a couple of weeks and asked for PTF number nnnn, it would fix the problem. This led to the following exchange with IBM Software Services South in Basingstoke:

Me: "I need PTFnnnn."

IBM: "That's not the way it works. You describe the problem, I feed it into the system and it suggests possible fixes, if there are any."

Me: "OK" (detailed problem description with relevant SNA sense data).

IBM: "Ah. Right. Yes there is a fix for that......what was that number you said?"

Me: "nnnn".

IBM: "Yes, that's the one.....hang on.....you said you were TeeCee?"

Me: "Yes".

IBM: "The customer number you gave me is for XYZ company though."

Me: "Yes, that's us."

IBM: "Could you tell me why your name is down as the requestor for an internal development fix from IBM Rochester?".

Me: "Yes, but I'm not going to."

Linus Torvalds issues early Linux Kernel update to fix swapfile SNAFU

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Re: Windows 10 20H2: CHKDSK /F damages file system on SSDs with KB4592438 installed (08.12.2020)

What I found particularly unfunny at the time was (un)helpful souls chiming in that nobody should be running chkdsk on an SSD anyway.

Conveniently forgetting the fact that, if Windows thinks there may be a disk error, it does it automatically on next boot. Unless you were aware of the issue and stood over every boot to abort it, you were screwed.

I run an external backup disk with Acronis chucking incrementals and a full every five times for this sort of reason. It actually wasn't MS that made me instigate this policy. Step up Abit and take a bow for your fucked up BIOS update, which would irrevocably trash a Raid set faster than you could say; "WTF?".

Most recent visit from the Disk Corruption Fairies; An MSI board electing to have its on-board power go iffy in such a way as to drop the NVMe slot at inopportune moments, with detrimental effects to the filesystem thereon.

Anyone not running regular, verifiable backups of any machine they give a shit about is asking for it.

The world's first Apple Silicon iMac is actually a Mac Mini

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Re: Wow

I once had a gen-u-ine honest-to-god IBM AT case, containing a 486 DX4 100 mobo with a SCSI card and the rest of the case stuffed with surplus AS/400 SCSI disks.

I had them set to sequential spin up both 'cos it sounded cool and also it didn't blow the (bog AT) PSU.

Facebook uses one billion Instagram photos to build massive object-recognition AI that partly trained itself

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Alert

"one billion Instagram photos"

Ok, one question. Just what use do Zuckerbitch and his minions have for an insane AI that hates humanity with a vengeance?

What happens when cancel culture meets Adolf Hitler pareidolia? Amazon decides it needs a new app icon

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Re: Adolf

I don't think the post was even that well thought-out and it's just down to the, wholly apocryphal, tale of the BMW logo representing a running aircraft prop.

Incidently, the original Focke-Wulf 190 came with a BMW radial engine. That didn't get the Junckers-Jumo until the G variant (which is why you get an aircraft sporting both a radial cowl and a line of exhausts down the side).

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Coat

Re: 'you make it sound like...'

I heard he waxed the ends of it and used a forged Belgian passport.

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Re: Cancel Culture Feedback

But iz u get troll pointz for iz get celeb f1r3d or iz corp embarass, yes?

That's the driving force behind this shit, idiots trying to out-idiot each other.

Amazon are, very sensibly, going with the policy for this situation laid down by Samuel Langhorne Clemens; "Never get involved in an argument with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.".

Dutch government: Did we say 10 'high data protection risks' in Google Workspace block adoption? Make that 8

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WTF?

...block the use of consumer Google accounts in the Workspace environment...

Bloody Hell! That was not only possible, but you actually couldn't prevent it? And corps used this shit? Have none of them ever heard of GDPR? You know, that piece of legislation where enabling the leak of corporate data to public accounts is an automatic "go directly to jail, do not collect £200" thing?

Excel-lent: Microsoft debuts low-code Power Fx language... but it is not really new

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Alert

A coding language that will..

... appeal to spreadsheet-wielding businessfolk.

Something feels strange. Like an entire army of massive fuckups have been incarnated upon Earth and are all looking for somewhere to happen.

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

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Re: Incentives...

Which is, in turn, why it suddenly became possible to get cigarette cases that hold 20 king size in a variety of finishes.

I was delighted, as I'd always wanted one. I went through several until I gave up a couple of years ago[1], just to prove that I really could if I could be arsed and shut a few people up. I may take it up again one day, but I can't be bothered right now.

[1] From somewhere around 15 a day to none overnight. Can't see what the fuss is about myself.

Valheim: How the heck has more 'indie shovelware with PS2 graphics' sold 4 million copies in a matter of weeks?

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...gameplay and design reigns supreme.

A lesson most vividly illustrated when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out with all the HD wonderfullness, only to have the Nintendo Wii clean their clocks in the market.

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

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It actually doesn't say it won't work and work well.

What it says is:

1) May lead to reduced performance: If you install a third party product which has slower access times it will. "May" is the key word here.

2) May lead to unsupported configurations: Send it back under warranty afterwards and get told to sod off 'cos you fiddled with it.

What they're desperately trying to prevent is Joe Bloggs fucking up his device by cocking up the following of some instructions on teh internets and then expecting them to fix it. I doubt they have any issues at all with someone who knows what they're doing and who is prepared to look after it themselves having a go.

This has always been the Microsoft way. An official policy for the plebs and a tacit (and often actively helpful) attitude for the likes of us.

Clop ransomware gang leaks online what looks like stolen Bombardier blueprints of GlobalEye radar snoop jet

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Black Helicopters

The Clop ransomware gang..

..now high on the target list of the CIA, MI6, Mossad and all sorts of other agencies lacking aversion to "wet work".

Wouldn't want to be one of them right now.

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

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Or..

From a secret base beneath Olympus Mons: "Finders keepers, losers weepers!".

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

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Coat

Re: Bloody cowboys

Wow! I didn't see enough detail in there to deduce exactly which model of flying car they were talking about.

How did you get Escort Mexico from this lot?

The wastepaper basket is on the other side of the office – that must be why they put all these slots in the computer

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Meh

Guess the country?

"... task force was aimed at overhauling national policy for targeted crime prevention,"

You'd have to be a native English speaker to come up with meaningless flannel like that. Also, our Civil Service are the only ones far enough up their own arses to use it without worrying that everyone's laughing at them for being such a bunch of pretentious tossers. Thus Britain, obviously.

Healthy 32-year-old offered COVID-19 vaccine because doctors had him down as 6.2cm tall with BMI of 28,000

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Coat

And the reason they withdrew the vaccine offer?

They just didn't like his altitude.

Badum, tish. Eyethangyou. I'm here all week, matinees at weekends, try the fish.

Soviet 'Enigma' cipher machine sells for $22k at collapsed museum's exhibits auction

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Facepalm

Re: Smithsonian comments

I dunno. Maybe they didn't mention that because it had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the subject under discussion?

I know that there is a trend on shitter for everything said to be criticised for not mentioning something else entirely irrelevant that is ${arsehat}'s pet hobby horse, but let's try to remain above that here, eh?

@The upvoters: Altogether now; "Baaaaaaa".

Fujitsu scrapping fuel card benefit to cut costs, threatens dissenters with fire and rehire

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Re: Backfire (and not just the old company cars)

Yes, but.

I don't know if things have changed, but the way it used to work was that the tax was based on the car. If there was no car (just a card) then a "standard" fleet car was used as the yardstick.

Back in the day, this was a 1.8 litre Mondeo (IIRC). A mate bought a Land Rover Discovery 4.0 V8 to go with his fuel card. It's amazing how much petrol one of those will drink when it's driven by someone who isn't paying for it and thus has no aversion to heavy use of the "lead welly".

Iron in the kinks, say boffins: Wrinkly graphene could one day make computer chips 'smaller and faster'

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Meh

Graphene. Check.

Where's this week's article on the latest theoretical use case for carbon nanotubes, or is that one, like, over?

Hey, maybe we should all be cat-faced eco-warriors on our daily video chats

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WTF?

...use more cooling water in data centres than the city of Los Angeles.

Really? How?

Cooling systems come in two flavours. The usual way of doing things is to have an evaporator indoors and a condenser outdoors. Heat is carried between the two by water in pipes. That doesn't "use" water, the water's still there. Once in a blue moon a circuit may be drained for maintenance and its contents then become waste water and new water is used to refill. That doesn't happen very often.

The other way of doing it is if you happen to be somewhere with a large amount of cold water adjacent (e.g. a glacial river). In that case it makes sense to either replace the condenser with a submerged radiator or just pipe the cold stuff through the building as it passes. You're still not "using" it, just warming it up an imperceptible amount.

These statistics look a lot like damned lies to me.

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Meh

Re: Use the waste heat from a Datacentre

I know! We use the waste heat to power the cooling systems, which will generate more waste heat, which we use to power the cooling systems, which....

I'm off to the 18th Century to file a patent.

Huawei invokes 140-year-old law at England's High Court in latest bid to thwart CFO's US-Canada extradition

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Meh

Powerpoint.

The lengths people will go to to get a decent presentation to crib from.

48-hour strike action: Openreach repayment project engineers confirm it's on

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Counter-intuitive?

Only to those who buy into the union bollocks and actually believe that workers are underpaid.

In actual fact, the headline rates of pay mean nothing. With overtime, bonuses and such you quite often find skilled workers on hourly rates being paid rather more than their managers on salary. Both often work more than their contracted hours when the job demands, but managers don't get paid any more for doing it.

Back in the early eighties, driving a 3 ton delivery truck, I once took home more than double what the transport manager did, via the simple expedient of working every day in December for the Xmas rush.

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

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Facepalm

I'm pretty sure that it's now been established that actually she was and still is an agent.

It's called "cover".

Salesforce: Forget the ping-pong and snacks, the 9-to-5 working day is just so 2019, it's over and done with

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WTF?

"team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations"

I suppose with a name like "Salesforce" they were always going to be trying to sell something. I'm just surprised it's Powerpoint.

India lifts 550-day Kashmir internet ban, tries to impose new Twitter ban

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Re: The medal for the best State sponsored media specialist goes to "Twitter "

Absolutely.

The slight snag here is that if you wish to support free speech, you have to support all of it. That includes the likes of Trump, those waaay to the right of him and the mad marxists to boot.

Put it this way. If the J&K mob actually were a bunch of swivel-eyed religious loons intent on mass murder to bring about the downfall of the Indian state, would you still be standing up for them?

Global censorship according to the rules of what's "right" by the standards of a privileged, white, left-liberal westerner is just good, old-fashioned colonialism.

Google OS, phone home: Leaked Android 12 screenshots suggest new design, privacy features

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WTF?

Ohshit.

"...aims to elevate people and conversations in the system surfaces of the phone."

Well that's Android stuffed then. They've run out of useful shit to do and have brought in a Strategy Boutique to come up with a dialogue for their future direction.

Well, either that or they've just discovered Wankword Bingo.

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

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Facepalm

Re: Not that hard to search

Yeah, you left out "WHO" and "accuracy". That's where the flame wars come from...

What would be waaaay more useful than curated[1] search would be lessons on how to use a bleedin' search engine. It's easy to find what you want on the internet if you target your search correctly, leave unnecessary cruft out of your query and then hone your query from the initial results.

I have found that being able to use a search engine correctly is actually a highly valuable skill these days. I think it's simple, but it would seem that I am in a minority as many do not.

[1] 'Cos "curated" means cost and "free but crap" always beats "accurate but costs money" on the internet, so any service needing cash to run is always doomed to die though starvation if a free competitor exists.

Borkem ipsum: Supermarket gifts Thailand a tech fail that will echo down the millennia – and probably choke a turtle

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Coat

Re: Well...

Looks more like geek to me...

Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one

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Coat

Re: .hiv?

I guess it's being flogged off cheap 'cos it's not as catchy these days.

Chromium cleans up its act – and daily DNS root server queries drop by 60 billion

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Facepalm

Re: hang on

WHAT? You mean design the thing and look for possible inefficiencies and cockups before building it? It'll never catch on.

Simpler to just chuck together a prototype, lob that into beta, fix the serious user gripes and chuck hardware at any performance issues.

Costs so much less and makes the development process more......erm......agile. Yes. That's a good word, agile. Makes it sound like a method rather than just a massive fuckup looking for a place to happen.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

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Historical or utilitarian?

The answer's in the comments here. As long as there are people who hate trackpads, Lenovo might as well continue to fit a Computer Laptop Integrated Trackermouse and take the captive audience on offer.

I'll bet it costs pennies as it's designed into their keyboards too.