* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3538 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

Thousands of Teslas recalled over brake fluid bug

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The tank could run low in just a few pedal presses due to the extreme pressure. There aren't many places where failure will only cause a slow leak.

iPhone 15 Pro Max users report seeing ghostly OLED apparitions

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Maybe fixable

I've read that OLED has two kinds of burn-in. One is similar to LCD and Plasma display momentary burn-in where charges have settled into insulators to offset the analog levels. All that's needed is a periodic calibration or discharge cycle. Maybe the new fruit isn't creating conditions where that may be performed.

My old Apple Cinema Display had nothing to fix LCD burn-in. It looked like ass sometimes and the only fix was waiting a few days for it to fade back to normal.

LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Stability inversion

I've noticed recently that startups appear to be looking more stable when job hunting. They have 2 to 4 years of funding and a long-term vision. Public companies are scratching around for quick share price profits like drug addicts. For all the intricate moving parts in a business, all the top of command has for a plan is a profit target.

Private is even better, but they have stable employees so they're rarely posting job openings.

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Trollface

Cloud Atlassian is good for productivity

The Cloudy version periodically gives your employees unannounced "distraction-free, heads down, working" days. No JIRA tickets or Confluence RFCs popping into your queue. Or take a break in the beautiful outdoors if you need documentation or specifications to get started.

Ubuntu unleashes Mantic Minotaur with 23.10 build

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: SNAP is an infection that shows no sign of dying off

Snap could be useful but it missing a whole ecosystem of user configuration apps. It should have been a dead idea the moment the plan was wiring it up to the perpetually broken Ubuntu/Canonical/Snap Store app. The command line 'snap' tool might actually be worse.

Canon claims its nanoimprint litho machines capable of 5nm chip production

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Low Ink

Changing the ink cartridges every 12 wafers must cut into production rates.

EPA flushes water supply cybersecurity rule after losing legal fight with industry, states

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: This will end well

We just need some fake news that the water supply machinery has been hacked to manufacture the COVID vaccine.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Excel is overwhelmed

Time to place an ad for a "big data Engineer."

(I wish I was kidding but I see those job openings frequently)

Qualcomm to shed over 1,000 staff in California, plus some Brits, starting in December

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I bet Apple would like to hire several hundred Qualcomm engineers.

Beijing-backed server chip startup formed by ex-Arm China execs

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I see Softbank mentioned and know that a good disaster story follows.

Google's third-party cookie culling to begin in Q1 2024 ... for 1% of Chrome users

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

One step ahead

I've blocked 3rd party cookies since browsers offered that option ~20 years ago. Now it's deleting all Chromium fork browsers that migh eventually have Topics and Privacy Sandbox permanently on.

AI processing could consume 'as much electricity as Ireland'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

New Reg unit?

1 Ireland = "29.3 TWh per year", 3.34 GWa, or 105PJ per year.

HTTP/2 'Rapid Reset' zero-day exploited in biggest DDoS deluge seen yet

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

A cancel request?

This sounds like a feature created by an overly eager intern. A more seasoned coder would demand that clients consume what they request.

HTTP 1.1 actually got this right. You can send requests as fast as you'd like and the server will send responses as fast as it would like, in matching order. People only think that they need HTTP 2 for this because most HTTP 1.1 libraries are too crufty to handle pipelining elegantly.

DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

Hold on now...

That was a real e-mail? Does this mean that I may have reported spam for an actual Nigerian prince offering trillions of dollars?

I'd like the link to Earth's bug reporting form, please.

Qualtrics culls 780 jobs amid 'complex' growth spurt

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

"We call it empathy at scale" "Software to improve employee engagement and retention"

Cringing too much to make it through their home page.

Google says that YouTube vid can wait if it saves on energy

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Mushroom

Spy power

How many gigawatts are used for ad tracking, ad serving, and syncing telemetry with the GApps suite on Android phones? Video requires a moment of expensive preprocessing, and maybe some light remuxing for variable bandwidth playback, but it's nothing compared to realtime big-data processing.

Just think about the tiny end of things: the cellphone. The GApps suite seems to use consume 2 to 5 Wh a day if its background data and background power are not restricted. Bump that up to 5 to 10 Wh a day if there's no ad blocker. If there are about 3 billion active Android phones, that's ballpark 20 GWh a day globally consumed recharging phones for power used by Google. Imagine what the servers use.

Everyone should do their part to live a more green lifestyle. Upgrade or re-purpose old servers that consume excessive power. Write more efficient code. Block all of Google's ads and personal data harvesting.

Lorenz ransomware crew bungles blackmail blueprint by leaking two years of contacts

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Ethical?

It's not so clear if the victims paid ransoms to keep the gang funded.

Google introduces phone-shaped housing for its AI tech

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

That was my first thought too. Appliances with the longest warranties come from brands that are preparing to vanish.

It may be many years before Google stops being a hostile custodian of Android but they could snuff out their Pixel product on a whim.

Nukes, schmukes – fuel cells could power future datacenters

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

sounds complicated

Since this is a solar powered datacenter, it seems like you'd want to put a dc-dc inverter and LFP battery pack under each solar panel. You'd have simple servicing, good use of space, good system efficiency, and excellent redundancy from mass-produced parts.

AWS stirs the MadPot – busting bot baddies and eastern espionage

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Odd stats

What is "malicious?"

This is a question that plagues many realtime blocklists. Hostile networks will rapidly rotate IP addresses between legitimate and illegal uses to frustrate blocklist users. Spamhaus will stop delistings on chronically dirty networks, making the service notoriously controversial for its false positives. On the flip side, AbuseIPDB will whitelist networks that are often transiently abused. This encourages even more abuse and makes the blocklist entirely useless against transient attacks.

There are, of course, lots of networks that are 100% hostile and it would be nice if everyone stopped routing their traffic. I'd also be super happy if Amazon could work on their vast network of illegal "affiliate" and "lead generation" customers.

Now MOVEit maker Progress patches holes in WS_FTP

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

FTP doesn't even need MITM attacks. Simply guessing the next port to be used for a file transfer can be good enough. You can give it points for not pretending to be secure enough for anything but an air-gapped network. The bad news doesn't seem to stop for Progress.

China suggests America 'carefully consider' those chip investment bans

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Not really. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Trump's cult are all viciously power hungry and unstable. Would you trust any of them? It's a good time for all to examine their foreign dependencies.

The trade war isn't causing a recession. It's the hostile political environment. It's not going to fix itself anytime soon because people sane enough to lead aren't going to jump into the current dumpster fire.

Microsoft Bing Chat pushes malware via bad ads

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Build to fail

Online advertising has always been identify, track, and redirect. Simple as that. Nobody cares where that redirection goes or even how deep it goes. It's unsafe and everyone should run ad blockers.

The funny part was the 2000 dot-com collapse. Many ad slingers had such long delegation paths that they never ended at a paying business. Multi-million dollar deals spontaneously evaporated and only the exec staff and advertising staff didn't see it coming. Sometimes there were even delegation loops.

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Syncing must be using Apple installer technology where a minor security update keeps the CPU full-throttle for an hour.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

JerryRigEverything performs a teardown and you can see that there doesn't appear to be much for motherboard cooling, if anything. The motherboard is going to run hot, and running hot makes high density chips run hotter.

Chip firm accused of IP theft bites back, claims Apple's contracts are rotten

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Knowledge transfer

I'm a good employee who will sync up my git repos and push all my unfinished work and documentation into branches before leaving. It can mean moving gigabytes of data sometimes.

No joke: Cloudflare takes aim at Google Fonts with ROFL

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

And Cloudflare won't be evil?

Cloudflare hinting that they might be less evil is laughable. They've been continuously expanding their access to what they can observe about Internet users. They are also willingly bulletproofing what seems like every fake store and SMS scammer on Earth.

Dear Reg mods fearing Cloudflare's retaliation because of slander: I e-mailed you many examples. I can send you more. There are always more. I'd be really happy if there weren't always more. Just check your SMS spam bucket - Those links start at Namecheap, head through click-trackers at Amazon, then land on a fake store behind Cloudflare. Also https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/cloudflare.com

AWS spins up more cloudy Mac Minis, now with M2 Pro silicon

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: EBS Mac?

Understanding EBS performance and cost for your workloads is 2+ hour read just to get started. Then you figure out that snapshots have an immutable EBS type that's not suitable for some uses. OK, so now you have an EBS AMI that's just for booting and it's too small for gp2 so you make it gp3 then buy more IOPS when it's mounted. Now you can add on gp2, gp3, or io2 storage on demand...if the instance supports it. Small gp2 is too slow, big gp3 is slow or expensive, and mind the block size and instance type for io2... Just put that all in a internal documentation on how to fire up a new instance. So it theoretically should be fast now but new instances are all iowait for half the day. Haha, your AMI's snapshot is arriving by dialup modem after the little burst allocation ran out because you didn't buy "Fast Snapshot Restore" for each sub region.

And as always, don't leave anything accidentally running. Turn off "Fast Snapshot Restore" from previous AMIs. Write down the snapshot ID before deleting old AMIs so you can delete the leaked snapshot manually. Oh, delete the CloudWatch logs too because log lines expire, not log streams. Actually, better have somebody manually garbage collect all the stuff that leaks. Just a few more internal documentation pages. Surely everyone reads it.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

EBS Mac?

EBS is like the ink cartridge money maker. You can rent an EC2 instance for pretty cheap but upgrading EBS until it performs well enough will cost you. It might even cost more than an SSD instance.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Can I haz a 46GbE switch?

Buying just one ordinary 10GbE switch with 4+1 ports is painful. All that does is link a desktop and server. Faster LAN hasn't reached the 2.5GbE WiFi access points because those are each behind more 1GbE switches that would need upgrading. Putting that speed to use would mean adding a 10GbE NIC to the backup NAS too.

Fly, money, fly away!

IBM's Weather Company leaked my personal info to analytics, thunders netizen

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Change the TLD

weather.gov - Ugly but not trying to profit off visitors.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

And one more thing...

Nope, sorry. Nothing is unexpected or exciting on the phones unless you think USB-C counts. Upgrade when old phone is falling behind on telco compatibility or physically wears out.

It's sad because it seems like there's a lot of potential still in what a phone could do. Makers divide up their products by cost rather than trying to target different options. I was seriously tempted to buy one of those crazy outdoor phones with armor, massive battery, thermal camera, headphone jack, expandable storage, a real flashlight, big speakers, and replaceable battery. It doesn't guarantee that SA 5G works so that means maybe no long-range NR71 while roaming the mountains.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Pineapple

It's the sweet+sour+meat combo. Some love it, some gag on it. Don't order on a big shared pizza.

I don't like anchovies, olives, mushrooms, or jalapenos either - not in any way or topped on anything. I wonder what they taste like to people who like them. I'll skip the combo pizza.

World's most powerful free-electron laser upgraded to fire a million X-rays per second

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The Fahrenheit scale is great for weather, with 0 to 100 being a nice match of what's safe to be in. Even in 'Murica, I'd like my science in C or K.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I do hope it's shielded

My cars have always been prone to glitching when driving Hwy 280 over the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Uncle Sam names three Amazon execs as Prime suspects in subscription ripoff case

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Dark patterns on-hold

I've filed credit card disputes because because a merchant wouldn't answer the phone or allow a message to be left in 1 hour after multiple tries. The credit card rep calls the merchant and also doesn't want to wait over an hour. The charge gets reversed.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

Weed brain

This is brilliant. Humans will see an X paywall and leave. Only the bots will pay, and they'll use stolen credit cards.

I don't recall what fraud rates get you locked out of payment processors, but I bet Musky hits it instantly.

GitHub Copilot, Amazon Code Whisperer sometimes emit other people's API keys

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Trollface

Re: We're too smart for the (ML/AI) internet

6) Demand that everybody redact the private key you accidentally exposed because your architecture doesn't support changing keys. I mean, who does that?

Intel thinks glass substrates are a clear winner in multi-die packaging

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

plastic?

I thought chiplets were on fiberglass. The rigidity should be adjustable.

A glass substrate sounds difficult when it comes to routing a thousand little wires. I'd need a manufacturing-for-dummies video to visualize this.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: It doesn't always smoke though

You can also quickly pick them up by their cable. They don't like being a gyroscope.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: snooty

I honestly don't know how anyone buys a new BMW. I tried twice but the sales people were too offensive.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Software prices without software value

BMW's move was blatantly stupid and provided zero value. I'm surprised that car makers haven't figured out upgrade purchases yet.

Most cars have a high degree of modularity. Just a tiny bit more would make them upgradeable with newer model parts. Engine updates, EV battery updates, infotainment upgrades, better headlights, better seats, new body panels, etc. No need for radical changes to convince a few people to buy a whole new car. R&D investments would pay immediately with progressive upgrade sales.

Serial number tracking would be a little more complicated but hardly difficult. It would be certainly less effort than some places waste on personal data harvesting.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "because if you unplug your car, your house goes dark"

The surprising answer is that home batteries are more expensive than an EV. The car also has the advantage that you can drive it somewhere to charge then take the power home home.

I have a home battery to avoid "peak" afternoon rates and getting through nuisance power outages. As much as I dislike the power company, scaling it and solar up to go off grid isn't at all viable today. There would be no ROI, ever, in my urban setting. That could change if old car battery packs get recycled for home use.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Don't get it

The price is dynamic in some places. Charge to 85% when it's cheap, discharge to 65% when it's expensive. For a 100kWh pack, that's $1.80 a day in California. Texas has extremely dynamic pricing so you could probably make a fortune every time there's extreme weather.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Voila!

Or it's a start in freeing ourselves from energy delivery monopolies. The more home-to-home sharing, the less need for the big power company to balance varying local production and consumption.

Batteries age by use and calendar time. For occasional drivers, this could be a little revenue from a car battery pack that would otherwise be depreciating unused.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Dysfunctionally conservative

It's much too heavy and has too little storage to be a suitcase, so why is it a suitcase? Colorless renderings of it being a perfect fit for an Accord trunk makes it look even more boring and pointless. You're going to drive almost somewhere, rip the trunk gaskets off your tall-assed Accord dragging this beast out, and finish the trip on this?

Not sold in Japan because they've figured out transportation already.

Google outlines Outline SDK: Censorship, geo-block-beating tool to drop into apps

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

More garbage for Play Store

App developers easily use this to put hostile advertising and personal data collection in their junk apps in a way that's difficult to detect or block. Google sells ads, Google steals privacy, Google sells evil developers cloud proxies, and Google makes more $$$$$$$$$$$.

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

W/kg

Ghost of Steve Jobs: You're not eating enough.

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Skeptical me

It's not Star Trek time yet. Training and maintaining AI datasets is incredibly expensive. Even when technology improves to make that easier, the same funding levels will be maintained to improve the quality. In other words, there are lots of bills to pay. AI products will be tainted to serve the large corporations that built them.

It could be another 15 years before we have AI that serves only the user and can be trusted with personal data. Even so, we're doomed if AI data ingestion is tricked as easily as real humans.