* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3537 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

We sat through Apple's product launch disguised as a dev event so you don't have to

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Revolutionizing the way we tell you what to do with our products

Lots of people would love an easy-to-use and well maintained personal computing device the size of a phone. It's so close - there are common open source operating systems under the hood of Apple and Android devices. The chipsets support tons of powerful features. Instead we get faster, dumber, less storage, more cameras. I was literally more excited about a new coffee grinder than any recent phone.

Sony launches a space laser subsidiary (for comms, not conflict)

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Black Helicopters

It's not a weapon

It is a very robust communications laser. Objects, moons, or planets in it's path would only cause brief interruptions. Messages will be delivered.

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Even if ...

You're assuming that slackers didn't exist before WFH.

I see something completely different in the economy. Wealthy business owners are treating employees like crap, employees treat customers like crap, and the wealthy business owner keeps raising prices and blaming poor service on a "labor shortage."

They're are some good articles on the travelpocalypse going on right now. Airports and airlines are raising prices and cancelling flights in the name of staffing shortages. Check their open position listings and they have the worst pay for the most grueling work.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: 40 hours a week, minumum?

I imagine the Cybertruck team comes into the factory every Monday, puts a slab of bulletproof cold rolled stainless steel into the sheet metal bender, watches the machine destroy itself, and then says "I guess we work from home until this is fixed."

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Somebody's talking bollocks

I've found IPv6 really easy to use. It's the IPv6 instructions that are absolute crap. Inconsistent terminology, sample configurations where you don't know if the address is supposed to be LAN or WAN, and junk that just plain doesn't work.

Take Docker, for example. For years, the IPv6 instructions said {"ipv6": true} and you're done.

After billions of downvotes, it became:

{

"ipv6": true,

"fixed-cidr-v6": "2001:db8:1::/64"

}

It needs another billion downvotes because it's actually all of this:

{

"ip6tables": true,

"ipv6": true,

"fixed-cidr-v6": WAN or LAN of exactly /80,

"experimental" : true

}

It's good to know if you're hitting the eternal IPv4 SNAT bug.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Paris Hilton

If you can't upgrade...

If you have old crud that can't upgrade to IPv6, how are you going to upgrade the IPv4 allocations? Think of all the hardcoded subnets in firewall rules, routing rules, and configuration wizards. It's in your old network hardware, your old OS, and your old apps.

It makes NAT or IPv6 look easy by comparison.

We've never even built datacenters using robots here on Earth

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Terminator

At least we're safe on Earth for a while

The robots will have a hard time getting back. The Moon's gravity might not be much but Earth's will be nothing but trouble. Plus, nobody should tell the robots about large portions of Earth being covered in conductive liquid.

Zero-day vuln in Microsoft Office: 'Follina' will work even when macros are disabled

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Coat

Re: Clay Tablets

Don't mind the dust on this very heavy tablet. Just take it indoors and give it a good brushing. I'll wait outside your yurt while you read it.

I got a Russian phishing e-mail today and, as far as I can tell, somebody forgot to put the payload in it. It was disappointing to have read this article and then find nothing but a messenger contact in all the Word docs. (No, I didn't use Word to check it. Just unzip and cat.)

Big Tech loves talking up privacy – while trying to kill privacy legislation

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Devil

Re: better then in china

But we could have stopped the shooters if only we had been monitoring everybody more closely! ...<Struggling to come up with catchy sound byte about freedom for guns but not data.>

GitHub saved plaintext passwords of npm users in log files, post mortem reveals

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Meh

Logging auth tokens passed code review? Nobody read the logs -or- people read the logs but didn't do anything about auth tokens in it?

Should you worry about too much apathy in the company or is that somebody else's problem?

Twitter founder Dorsey beats hasty retweet from the board

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

Why stay?

Musk has promised everyone a massive spectacle of a train wreck and people are waiting to see it. Why stick around feeling betrayed when you can go spend some quality time with your money?

Foxconn factory fiasco could leave Wisconsinites on the hook for $300m

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Other options besides LCD?

Maybe build luxury SUVs with 6.5L V8 gasoline engines that redline at 3000 RPM, standard cassette deck stereo system, and a VHS entertainment system that displays on in-seat CRTs. No, wait. EVs are the future. Swap that V8 for NiCd battery packs and go full Laserdisc.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Software Junk

Google doesn't believe in dynamic linking. It makes software management trivial if you don't mind each app being 20 to 500 MB. It's fine for Google but that's a lot to serve up to the world when your open source project has a revenue of zero.

Snap, Docker, etc. claims to fix dependency management, but that's never how it goes in real use. The layers are customized so close to the root that every project ends up being 100 to 2500 MB. That size creates dependencies on well-funded hosting services.

So, here we are with complex dependency management to keep free software free and scalable.

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: I’ve been expecting you

Don't pay the wrong evil mastermind. I replaced your servers with rockets. HAHAHAH! Pay me 3,200,000,000,000,000 dollars or I de-orbit the moon.

Yeah, I know. This cost a lot more than I anticipated. It was outsourced and... Look, the loan sharks (with lasers) are going to grab me the moment I put this doomsday remote control down if I don't pay them back.

Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Mineral oil?

The system will get really buggy every time the lard cools down. Ants, cockroaches, rats, ...

Your snoozing iOS 15 iPhone may actually be sleeping with one antenna open

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

If there was a remote attack

I imagine everyone is attempting touchless hacks on the radio chips now. Image the selling price of an attack that can spread across iPhones whether they're on or not.

Apple might want to patch iOS to periodically verify the chip firmware.

Arm CPU ran on electricity generated by algae for over six months

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Lemons

That's getting power from the destruction of the electrical plates. It's like an ordinary disposable battery except that it consumes lemons too.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Or..?

Solar + ultra capacitor or lithium-titanium-oxide battery. Not everything needs to be Lithium Ion polymer.

Banks talk big cloud game but few have migrated over 30% of apps

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Eventually (manually) consistent?

Cloud hosting is generally a bad idea for "exactly once" operations. Frequent minor outages have you tracing down obscure fault recovery bugs forever, and each incident must be resolved quickly and perfectly when you're a bank. Self-hosted can easily go a year or more without a single unplanned outage.

Google opens the pod doors on Bay View campus

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Amenities

It looks amazing, but does it have what Googlers really want: Couches, showers, toilets, and food?

DigitalOcean tries to take sting out of price hike with $4 VM

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Mushroom

Also cut

DigitalOcean's abuse desk has been reduced to an unhelpful bot. That's not exactly helping their image of being a cheap place to launch network attacks.

Expect connectivity to evaporate soon. People are already creating lists of their IP addresses pre-formatted for different types of firewalls and gateways.

Bosses using AI to hire candidates risk discriminating against disabled applicants

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Run

It's best to never agree to those interviews. The interview is a preview of the job. Being treated like a low value and replaceable resource won't end after the AI screening.

Developer adoption is our priority, profits second, Cloudflare tells bankers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: 'deleting my post'

Sent you a couple. m.4mshop.org is a long-term Cloudflare customer at the heart of multiple fake storefronts that are also using Cloudflare.

Cloudflare goes beyond ignoring what might be right or wrong. They sell anonymity to crime gangs just as much as they sell protection against DDoS from crime gangs.

Google shows off immersive maps, AR-flavored search, Pixel 7, and more

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Pint

I applaud The Register for staying awake, paying attention, and completing the conference without being ejected for laughing too loudly when Google talks about security improvements.

Twitter buyout: Larry Ellison bursts into Elon's office, slaps $1b down on the desk

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Customer support

And that's exactly why raging lunatics get kicked off Twitter. No business is going to pay money to share a platform for the most offensive people on Earth.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Larry Ellison, the Saudis…and the Qataris all in bed with Elon?

Whatever happens, it's probably going to be entertaining.

Virginians sue to block rural Amazon datacenter

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

While you're at it

Might as well use the megawatts of waste heat to build a giant tropical water amusement park next door. (I think you can guess the name) At this point I think we can say that zoning continuity isn't impeding any plans.

False-flag cyberattacks a red line for nation-states, says Mandiant boss

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

How false are they?

OK countries, raise your hand if you have enforced computer security regulations. Anyone? Anyone? No, not really?

If country X uses servers in country Y to hack country Z, don't you think a bit of the blame also belongs to country Y used for the attack. If you manage a server you know that there are enormous numbers of networks having been havens for hackers, botnets, and stolen data trading for 10+ years. They still have network registries, solid peering, and all the usual business bits. They need to seriously piss off their own government to get noticed.

Google Cloud hopes to woo factories with its usual fare: Analytics and AI

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Auto-complete

Does this come with a suggestion engine based on similar uses in other factories?

Samsung unveils hardened SD card that can last 16 years if you treat it right

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Crap gadgets

Everyone today knows that a feature doesn't exist if it isn't covered under warranty.

Oh, it will be fixed with a future update? Does 'update' mean the next model for sale?. Or maybe the one after that... It's a top priority, I'm sure.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I recall Safari thinking it's so smart that it can ignore the HTTP Content-Type and Content-Disposition headers in favor of it's own analysis. Instead of rejecting invalid responses, it poops out files with clever new names.

Putin threatens supply chains with counter-sanction order

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

How much do we need?

I know that Europe is in quite an energy crunch but the other materials might not be as scarce as Putin hopes. COVID started this thing where businesses charged high prices as a result of labor shortages and then realized that it's super profitable to keep charging high prices and not paying for employees. New competition will eventually come along to fix some of that, but those new competitors are likely to also find ways to avoid or reduce dependencies on materials with limited supplies.

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever

Heating your home with miners isn't a great excuse. In many climates a heat pump is 3 to 4 times as efficient.

EU Apple suit alleges anticompetitive Apple Pay practices

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The sensible thing for a good operating system to do would be asking you if the app should be permitted to process payments by NFC.

iOS, and recently Android, no longer ask if your answer might hurt corporate revenue even the slightest.

Meta materials: Facebook using AI to design green concrete

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Dot.com time scales

I recall reading that concrete's formula is critical for long term stability. The AI knows Meta well and considers self-demolition to be a huge carbon emissions saver.

Google releases beta version of Android 13 'Tiramisu'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: What the article needed

It noted that there are permissions for only audio, video, and still images rather than general file access. I read that as Google driving the last nail into Android's coffin because all but the boring apps will stop working. Android 11+ is really broken.

China turns cyber-espionage eyes to Russia as Ukraine invasion grinds on

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Stealing thunder

China was supposed to be the new scary super power but Russia suddenly begins exterminating a country and threatening nuclear war. China really wants to know where they stand in this new game.

North Korea is demanding attention too but nobody is still listening.

Could a leaky capacitor be at fault on ESA's Sentinel-1B?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Leaky ceramic?

I figured that when I said shorted. That's why you can maybe get it to pop off the board. Once the solder melts, various organic vapors will either pop it off or blow the solder away.

MLCC caps cap pop off by burning their adhesive dot. Tantalum caps need no help.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Leaky ceramic?

Ceramic capacitors have nothing to leak since they're metal and ceramic. Maybe they mean shorted? Hopefully there's more than one cap on the power supply. If they can get the shorted cap hot quickly it might pop itself off the board.

I'd bet it's a damaged switching transistor. The symptoms are similar but with no chance of fixing it. Hopefully there's another power supply too.

Samsung, others test drive Esperanto's 1,000-core RISC-V AI chip

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Maybe a media codec chip

This might make for a great software defined media codec chip. All of the pattern searching to efficiently compress natural media takes so much computational power that it needs limitations to be practical. A chip like could improve the quality per bitrate in live 4K video recording. It could probably improve playback quite a bit too.

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Infinitely scalable (hosting costs)

If you can't host 100 million home automation devices on few ordinary servers, you're seriously doing it wrong. Remember that X number of clients also means X free computational nodes. The servers should only coordinate communications and hold configuration backups.

I imagine all these makers that cut hosting the moment budgets get tight have been putting too much faith in cloud vendor blogs.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Greenwashing?

They only need enough time to shift loads and boost replication of data. If they had 10 hours of battery power, they could ignore common short outages and only take action for extraordinary outages.

Anyone who uses cloud hosting knows that uptime quotes only apply to multiregional systems.

Yandex speaks out from front line of Western sanctions against Russia

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Not a Russian Google

Yandex stands out as a rare large network that doesn't seem to tolerate misuse. Hackers and spammers are kicked out in less than a day, and it's often followed by an apology for the incident. Their only faut is Putin's control.

Google doesn't care what's done with their services as long as the victims aren't on Google. I'm pretty sure Google is controlling politicians, not the other way around.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "Google [..] maintains that AMP is here to help make the web better"

Google has forced it to be a better deal for ad-driven web sites and visitors, at least in the short term. It's what monopolies do.

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Kids

The newer trick is to tell the Internet who you want to be.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Just for bots

https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/

LinkedIn could probably run it locally.

Google 'Switch to Android' app surfaces in iOS App Store

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Meh

Google has used their control over Android APIs to whittle away the advantages of Android without adding any value. It's becoming a buggy clone of iOS. MicroSd use is broken. Swapping the OS keeps getting harder. Custom UI is limited to changing the launcher, and Google has been eroding support for that too by withholding API access.

Google's plan to win the cloud war hinges on its security aspirations

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Security?

Google's whole product line revolves around backing everyone into a corner where no privacy exists and being deaf to all complaints. They host hackers and bots on GCP, Trojan horses in Google Drive and Play Store, spammers in Gmail, and content pirates on YouTube. It's all thanks to completely automated algorithmic management.

Rest assured that you'll be notified of your compromised hosting after it's in at least 3 public block lists, 15000 abuse reports, and a web crawler finds your data on a piracy site.

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "Dynamically typed"

Sometimes. It ruins some optimizations but a JIT can be a big advantage with localized optimizations. Remember that even C++ like languages can have performance problems with virtual methods. A JIT doesn't have those limitations because it can add, remove, and recompile optimizations as needed for different implementations. It's how Java beats C++ in certain kinds of benchmarks.