Posts by Version 1.0 5411 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
We had a technician installing a data collection system in Brazil back in the 90's based on a DEC PDP-11, they had some problems and worked on the PDP to try and fix them but nothing worked so they came back to the US, I flew down with a a box of boards - I swapped all the boards which solved the problem and then switched the boards one at a time to find the problem. I found the problem board and I looked at the chips and noticed that an EPROM was inserted backwards, I pulled it out, turned it round and saw a bent pin, I straightened it, plugged the EPROM back in - everything worked!
The lesson that I passed on to the technician when I returned was that debugging problems can cause problems, and problems can be educational.
Yes, it was first seen in insider trading profiteers but these days it's just the standard commercial operation methods supported by virtually all politicians and governments.
When cryptocurrency first appeared it looked like a possible alternative to credit cards and bank transfers, you might think that the criminals pretty much took it over, but look at the current bitcoin price which shot sky-high after Bitcoin became a legal investment in the USA because it offers investors the ability to move vast amounts of money around while keeping everything secret.
Remember back about 20 years ago when we saw the news "Phones are turning into moving computers, with sensors, and AI systems will be guiding phone calls" - so will this idea up upgraded to add the most powerful new processor, advanced high resolution dashboard cameras, and we'll be told that it has faster apps and pages, an all-day battery, and proactive help. We'll be told that the Google Pixie Car 8 Pro delivers all you need when you need it with adverts appearing in the windshield as you drive past stores.
Phones will be upgraded to allow users to be driven around while they make phone calls, wheels are going to be added to the new phones.
I think that the Internet would be a lot nicer if we banned all cookies and payments for advertising - this would have the potential to significantly boost social media but would make visiting a social media site reasonably harmless. "Advertising" for your products would be completely fine on your own website and while social media could talk about things, it need to be illegal to steal and sell their users.
Imagine a world where people can make a little money by just being "good" people?
1.1 million Bitcoins was a lot of money when they were first created, once they were up and running, whoever was first creating them could have probably brought a nice used car if we had believed that they would become more valuable - but initially nobody thought they were worth anything and so selling them was doing nothing serious initially.
LOL, I know someone who bought 100 bitcoins back then and I thought she was an idiot - that was my stupid mistake these days.
The story has nice technical El Reg parts - I just see it as an excellent explanation of why it's always best to trust a doctor (icon)). I always trust doctors, I work with them a lot of times and so I know they can not be 100% correct all the time but they work so much harder at it then everyone else and much better than I can do.
As a kid I went to the Electronics Club in Rugby and I was in the club one evening when a capacitor blow up, it was just like Christmas with little bits of silver floating all over the place ... luckily the EL34 valves were not damaged so the user got the audio amp up and running again quite quickly. The guys running the club were teaching us Morse code, they were excellent at it because they worked at typing Morse letter by letter (not word by word) to submarines.
Expert investors generally have zero technical experience in clinical research, they are very good at persuading people to invest in the company and very good at making a lot of money from their investors. As far as people who have just won a PhD go, they have just become a Pumpkin head Doctor so you can't expect too much accurate research immediately - certainly they work hard at it but research takes a lot of work, getting investors to sign checks is much easier than getting research to produce the results you want most of the time.
A good story El Reg - I've seen this happen too. Messing around with AC power is something that people do not worry about in the USA, 120V is a little itch, not a shock so this story sounds like it might have happened in the US, not the UK. I see people do live wiring all the time over here, putting wires into terminals and tightening screws with a little spark most of the time.
I remember my first 240V shock in the UK, I was a kid and wet myself when I picked up the box I was working on and my finger went over the back of the power switch. Ouch!!! OK, I need to change my trousers!
I agree with you msobkow, but I was working in the field - most of the time my job was fixing programmers and hardware designers problems by testing devices - my attitude was always to try and show that the devices failed or screwed up so I was always very happy when I failed because that indicated that the devices were probably quite reliable. I've spent my whole life documenting and then fixing both hardware and programming problems everywhere.
The majority of problems are are simply a result of someone in the field not understanding every possible working and failing options in both the software and the hardware - as a result everything is sold as "working" ... the same situation we see with our phones and BORKed devices all the time these days.
"The world has actually improved since then..." - yes we are seeing much better bugs. You are correct about the lack of "features" back then but a simpler environment meant that both features and bugs were less frequent ... nowadays so many bugs are "fixed" by adding more code with more features and this story simply documents what happens in this environment these days.
"the .NOT Framework" (FTFY) ... this is probably just a result of a bug somewhere, in the code or as a result of a .NET upgrade or some other upgrade. I never saw these issues back in the days before Windows when a device like this would have been running code written for an 8048 by one programmer who tested and verified everything with the hardware designer ... just two people working together.
These days you write the code and use things like .NET which are written and supported by crowds of programmers and managers. You are coding to work with hardware that was bought from another manufacturer ... it's a bit like BASE jumping with a parachute you bought on the web ... oh wait, they delivered a Barbie parachute only 6 inches wide.
I see the same thing too - we sell medical equipment all over the world and many years ago I got a call from South Korea on Christmas day morning that things weren't working well. Luckily my father-in-law was listening to me, I didn't know it but he had been in North Korea back in the M*A*S*H days (he never told us exactly what he was doing there) and he told me that it was probably well below freezing there so I told them to heat up the lab and it all started working - a happy Christmas day for everyone!
It's the winter and we're having some cloudy weather ... down here on the Gulf coast this sort of bad luck doesn't seem too bad ... it just illustrates the need for backups and alternative servers when you are just hoping the clouds will not have a problem ... like the wind speed getting up to 150mph ... that can cause a cloudy fuse to blow.
But the Supreme Court is populated by politics and the police do not "enforce" the law, they claim that they "are the law" which is why they kill anyone who they think might be abut to scare them or they think has committed a crime, e.g. a kid with a toy, or someone who they have been told bought a packet of cigarettes with a fake $20 bill.
The USA has some very good principals and attitudes, but they are administered in a terrible way.
This was just an explanation ... I have driven in both countries for 40 years now - when you are used to driving in America and then move to England which drives on the other side of the road then you have an "issue" whenever you are on a junction, turning onto another road at night and there is no traffic that "tells you" which side of the road you must turn onto. It's essential that you think about this EVERY TIME you reach a T-junction but it's frighteningly easy to turn into the wrong lane at night, that's what Anne did and needs to admit, it resulted in a horrible accident.
I lived close to the base when I was a kid - we saw accidents every year caused by Yanks making driving mistakes as a result of the local roads being very different from the ones they learned to drive in back at their homes.
It sounds like India’s competition regulator is a lot smarter than the Western competition regulators working with Amazon. This issue sounds like a typical western corporate manipulation, which is not seen as bad in the west. Indian culture tends to take a more universal view of things than we do so they are not saying, "What are they doing?" like we do - they are thinking about the effects of what's being done.
We keep being told that two-factor authentication is a required "upgrade" but while it makes life slightly harder for malicious attackers it does make the parties we work with far too confident that an attacker is the real person when they complete the authentication. Effectively two-factor authentication is a feature that has a few advantages but does not guarantee anything. So it often makes the attacks far more expensive for the two-factor authentication users.
"The update appeared legitimate, but it contained malicious code that worked much like a digital wiretap, reprogramming the infected equipment to record all the communications passing through it before sending the data to China, [the sources] said,"
That could be spyware although I've seen code like that in the past where systems send user information back to enable debugging and performance verification. Had they included a typical "user licensing" text that stated that Huawei was working the same way as Google email or Google Drive then this would have been a complete non-issue.
Am I infected? No, I'm using Google (LOL).
Actually these sorts of Mind Control weapons are easy to disable in a conflict, just send a drone over the troops attacking you that drops marijuana, rolling papers, and boxes of matches.
We declare marijuana to be a "dangerous drug" so lets start using it as a weapon in warfare - give all of our troops a big pack to use to defend themselves...
And when you answer all the questions ... "Thank you, but we are looking at using Open Source software so if you would like to publish it for us we'll mention your name occasionally."
Universities were created to educate people so that is a part of Research. A top-class software engineer in the education fields is educating students to do create the research coding, so the pressure on them is a lot less than spending your life writing code as a "profession" although it's not less work. A top-class engineer probably started writing in FORTRAN and then moved to Pascal before teaching everyone C and C++ and these days is using Python and Rust before they retire.
We are always running around these days saying that we KNOW what happened - but all the time we're finding out that we were wrong when new evidence shows up that we had total missed or never even looked for previously. We live in a world where we say, "There's no evidence that this happened" ... but that usually means that there's no evidence that it didn't happen either - someone's imagination is not evidence.
Science doesn't make these mistakes, science means people look at the evidence and then think about what might have happened but consider all the possibilities as only potentials. Politics and Social Media are just people running around and worried about their popularity - I can remember feeling like that when I was 3 years old, I think now that we all need to grow up.
I saw these issues when I came to the US on an H-1B visa in the early 80s, the explanation I was given was, "You got an H-1B visa because we could not find any American citizens who knew how to build and repair these British made medical devices so the rule does not apply to you."
If you are connected to the Internet then you are vulnerable ...
... and even more vulnerable if you think that you are safe and don't have to worry about a cyber-attack because you have done everything that would have stopped yesterdays attacks. Malware deliveries are updated far more often than system patches.
I see infected attachments arriving all the time but we quarantine all potential risky attachments, that means that all emails with them needs to be evaluated by the admin before releasing them - but at last 90% of the quarantines are just deleted. We see occasional attachments that are not flagged by VirusTotal as infected, maybe once a month and every now and then an attachment is quarantined (so the mail-server AV software didn't think it was infected) and then flagged as infected a few hours later when the AV software is updated.
But getting emails with links to infectious sites or downloads is also a risk - I think that the malware senders are using AI to create the emails because many of the malware emails target specific people with emails that appear to have an idea what they do for us ... accounting get "invoices and payments" and the sales folk get requests for "quotes" all the time.
A lot of the issues that we see with cryptocurrency theft and secretive transfers existed years ago when our pirates sailed across the ocean and applied cannon balls to other nations ships that were busy transporting stolen artifacts from other countries to Europe. Back then we had to work at sea for months, now we can do everything working from home to deliver malware and receive bitcoins.
We see all of this as new problems today but we're been acting like idiots for centuries to get rich.
"I had always looked upon my beauty as a curse because I was regarded as a whore rather than as an actress. Now at least I understand that my beauty was a blessing. It was my lack of understanding the way to merchandise it that was the curse" - Louise Brooks
These days it's the Microsoft world defined.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
