Posts by Mike007

Re: Isn't this a job for AI ?

LLMs cost a fortune to operate and can't add up properly. So a like-for-like replacement...

Does Ubuntu still have that damn single tasking GUI that is utterly useless for someone who wants to switch between multiple windows?

I consider mint to be the fixed version of Ubuntu.

Inter-system data transfer, government style.

Does this mean they will have to make things like online forms feed the data directly in to the relevant system, instead of sending it to the printer in the data entry department?

The unions won't be happy about this...

Re: AI bubble or bump in the road?

The established smart speaker players are taking a conservative approach to LLMs. When Alexa/Google/etc get upgraded to make use of modern LLMs they will be very different devices to interact with...

However I suspect the reason Google didn't rush to deploy whatever the fuck their AI is called this week to every Google speaker is probably less to do with the reliability of the system and more to do with the fact that running every single Google assistant request through an LLM would be bloody expensive for something that doesn't directly generate revenue.

This week I was given the task of evaluating PrivateGPT as a potential product offering. I tried feeding in the product specification documents for a manufacturers entire product range. I gave it a scenario and asked for a product recommendation.

At least it was able to tell me which page of which document contained the specifications for the 20mm bolt it was recommending for a 16mm hole...

Re: SytemD?

I suspect systemd is used to reconfigure the ssh service in some way. If you simply edit the config file someone might notice...

Getting something like this in to every server that installs an OS update without anyone noticing is the sort of thing that earns you a sophisticated attacker badge.

Re: Coders vs Developers

Query("SELECT * FROM Somewhere WHERE Username ='$UserSuppliedVariable';")

Vs

Query("SELECT * FROM Somewhere WHERE Username = ?;", $UserSuppliedVariable)

Both allow the user supplied string to contain a ' but only one rewards said user with admin access.

Just to add, switch to mobile data then go to a "what is my IP" website. Then go to another one. Then another one. Quite likely you will get at least 2 IP addresses shown to you. If you try again in 15 minutes you will probably get different ones again...

Re: Reminds me of the dreded Service Desk loop!

Company A buys a service from Company B. Uses their main email address for the account, which goes to their ticket system.

Company B sends an announcement/notification to Company A from their public email address, replies go to their ticket system.

This *should* result in 1 ticket at each end, but only if they recognise the "We have opened a new ticket" email as being related to the previous ticket...

We have experienced "incompatible ticket systems" before, we had to turn off confirmation emails on our ticket system while we changed that account to a different email address..

Although even when this doesn't result in a loop, I do wonder about the provider where our ticket system opens a support ticket their end every time they send us a notification that a server has rebooted... The only reason I can think of for why nobody has contacted us about this is because tickets they can resolve without doing anything help their stats?

Re: We have a fucktonne of standards for physical security

I once contacted the vendor of a system handling financial data for millions of customers that was using plain HTTP, and got a response that I should fuck off because they are ISO27001 certified.

A couple of years later I got access to ISO27001. It does not require that you comply with basic common sense practices to call yourself compliant. That stuff is all split out in to a separate "related" standards that technically have a different number...

There are standards that require proper use of cryptography... But the sort of people who send compliance checklists to potential suppliers have never heard of them.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

Fine, until you start sharing files with clients who open them in Microsoft office and think "what incompetent idiot put this together? The boxes don't even line up properly..."

If there is a risk of that happening once in every 100 documents, that is unacceptable for most companies.

Re: I'll wait for a public domain LLM

Methinks the problem is that language hath changed over the years.

Re: AOL

I always laugh at the fact that it cost them hundreds of £ to write "I am not professional enough to invest in an £8/year domain name for my company" on the side of their van...

One man band with sales@company.co.uk and a memorable phone number with repeating digits on their van? Approved!

The issue here is putting the primary and backup copies on an external drive which is more likely to get damaged or stolen, and the same drive meaning no backup.

When it comes to consumer Vs enterprise drives if you are talking less than a dozen drives you probably won't notice any difference. Statistically over thousands of drives you may have fewer failures with enterprise drives and therefore less maintenance etc. but for a small deployment drive replacement is an irregular task.

You should always assume a drive will fail, and if using RAID that another drive will fail during the restore process. If buying consumer drives means you can buy an extra parity drive, I would say that is a good idea... Like off-site backups.

I am assuming this also means 2 work accounts with different organisations both signed in and online at the same time?

"You can now launch personal and work accounts simultaneously with separate icons on the taskbar,"

This is how it currently works... new teams has worked better for the scenario I mention than "teams classic" in that account switching is better, but I don't see anything in the article that isn't already supported?

My current gripe with Teams is external users - Why do they have to "switch account" to access a team on my tenant instead of it being seamlessly integrated as an extra tab? And don't get me started on how bloody useless chat is if you have a guest account on a clients tenant... They will NEVER message the "external" account that you are actually signed in to.

Re: So I can run a local chatbot

"Chatbot" doesn't mean something you discuss your day with, it refers to the fact that you can have a back and forth conversation with it about something - in this example some document you want it to review.

The example being if someone gives you a contract to sign, you might have a "chat" with your lawyer about its contents. (Although if you using a chatbot for legal questions, ensure the initial prompt tells it to remind you "this is not legal advice, I do not have liability insurance" with every answer!)

Re: In the absence of files...

IIRC windows NTFS had support for symlinks, but the OS didn't expose it and they were effectively useless because explorer would do things like a recursive delete... So they introduced a deliberately broken version of symlinks at the OS layer with junctions. Rather than fix explorer.

Concur

If I genuinely have the budget for £100,000/month worth of resources and am willing to pay extra rather than have downtime then I am not going to make it to production without being aware that I need to change the default £100 limit... Whereas if I DONT have that kind of budget I would probably rather the system went down.

Re: Working from ... North Korea?

Probably few if they are doing it correctly.

However working from home on a personal device instead of a dedicated company device... Or using a company device for personal use, which is more likely if it is on your desk at home.

Re: These guys are amateurs and need to go on a course.

Takes one suitably senior person to insist mail merge in word is easier than using the supplied bulk mailing tools, and as if by magic an export button appears... Either put there by you, or your competitor.

We have had a receptionist make such a demand, and get supplied with an export of the entire user database...

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

The problem I had with my .UK domain is that people kept emailing .CO.UK - thankfully I owned both.

I stopped giving people the .UK address when they asked for me email, and use .co.uk as my "public" address and .uk for account registrations etc.

Re: No problem

An option on an app by app basis. We transitioned to using web apps for everything because of the ease of deployment compared to native apps... Both automated and manual deployments were easier along with the hardware flexibility.

The skeleton app with a full screen browser is probably what we will do where we do need iPad/iPhone support, but my point about that client is that they have been screwed over by apple multiple times and they are not going to be happy when we tell them it happened again...

I remember when I first started using Linux. I was annoyed at needing multiple floppies so found one that was usable for my needs (NAT router/web server) and only required one floppy! (no chance of remembering the name)

Re: Savings

Do open source projects have brown envelopes?

Re: Sliding doors...

Using an open source hypervisor vs rolling your own isn't something the customer gives a crap about - assuming you put in the huge amount of effort required to get something that has the same performance and functionally.

A frontend that gives you access to all of the functionality you need in an easy to use interface with someone you can ask for help if you can't figure it out yourself... THAT is the reason people pay for proprietary solutions.

Re: Over the Horizon

There was a bug in the code that was meant to handle teachers who had left - it was not meant to actually pay them, merely claim it had so they could prosecute for not repaying the stolen funds.

Re: Future use??

It would actually be interesting if anyone has a reference to a more recent report on the situation with this IP space. The fact that it is technically R&D space means they will likely be sharing information with APNIC about the traffic they are observing.

If they had merely reserved it as per the original plan then I suspect it would still be unusable, but cloudflare putting a massively popular service on there will have forced a lot of networks to fix things they otherwise would have ignored. I believe this is considered a "win win situation" with regards to the goal of rehabilitating previously unusable IP space :)

(for the record, when I first heard about this cloudflare thing I was not supportive of it and thought it unethical to give "special treatment" to a big company - I have since changed my position on this)

PWAs are the way to go in my opinion.

I am working on a system that has recently gone in to production. One of the components is a mobile app to run on iPads being used on the production floor.

At deployment time the client went "this group of machines is different, can we have a desktop app that runs on a PC?". Answer was "yes". No extra development required.

The previous system was based on some software which used a native app. After a couple of years they replaced some iPads, and the app store only had the newer version of the app. We had to upgrade the entire infrastructure to the latest version to get it to work... If the supplier had gone out of business (their software is shit, so surprised it hasn't happened already) we would have been totally screwed.

Not to mention, next round of tablet upgrades they are not locked in to apple and can buy cheap android tablets if they so desire...

I believe the "essential" comes from its inclusion in the standard meaning you have to implement it to be compatible with other devices.

The aspect of if they could implement the standard without it is down to wanting a good standard. Let's say I have invented a new technique that allows you to double the throughout of a radio channel - is that essential? If I refuse to license it then you can do without, but if I say everyone is allowed to do it for a token payment of 1p/device then you will be very tempted to include it in the specs, and I get a payoff for my R&D investment.

Re: Forbid

Three have always been the network for higher data limits. Go to a price comparison site and for any given package size all of the cheap options will be a carrier that uses the Three network. For quite a while they were the only network offering unmetered data...

And near the bottom of the price comparison list will be Vodafone with one of the most expensive packages offering 1/4 of the data. I wonder what the result of this merger would be...

Re: Preparing for October 2025

I ran Linux on my main machines for years. Then I got a surface where the experience is shit on Linux distros compared to windows... Then I put windows on my desktop...

I do not miss clicking play on a video only to discover my audio service updated and the configuration I came up with to fix it last time this happened has broken again..

My boss has apple everything... That's why I wanted to pick my own replacement machine :)