Posts by Will Godfrey

Spectre (Dark)

Goes straight to your core and soon has you blabbing your most intimate secrets. In spite of later treatment you find you keep having flashbacks and reveal even more embarrassing information.

So Long

and thanks for all the fish tales.

And the current tale?

Here's one I was told by my boss (I'll call him Fred) from when he was a humble service engineer in the 1970s.

He was forever going to the same place, because one of the operators kept messing about with machine settings. Eventually he caught the guy in action and sort of casually asked what he was doing. He was informed that the machine was 'unstable' and the guy was trying find the controls to correct it. Fred then wandered off and found the manager. Between them they cooked up a little ruse. Fred goes back to the machine and pokes about for a bit, then the manager turns up and asks Fred what model the machine is, and on being told swears and says they've been swindled and given the older model without a stability control. Operator is now looking pretty smug, and Fred is 'instructed' to fit one ASAP.

Later a new control is fitted while the same operator is on-shift, and wiring threaded through the machine to an obscure point, where a note is left telling others to call the office before touching it. The 'control' was apparently a broken potentiometer that would go round and round, with a click where the end stop used to be.

They never heard from that place again, but did occasionally get puzzled phone calls from other service engineers.

How do they do it?

Disaster after disaster, yet still they get huge contracts.

I've had to fight for work. What was I doing wrong?

Again?

Yet more buffer overruns, one of which is related to html - something not noted for tight in-built sanitation. I was going to ask "What were they thinking?" but clearly somebody wasn't.

Nasty

I knew startups were tough work, but never realised they were violently so.

P.S. Anyone who keeps personal data of any importance on a works machine is asking for trouble.

Hmmm.

Still no popcorn icon then

Training?

The 'clean room' guys don't know how well off they are.

In the dirty, greasy, ink-splattered world of industrial electronics you are still sent out on urgent repairs to kit you've never seen in your life before. This has frequently been much {cough} modified {cough} over the years, and in no way resembles any schematics (in the unlikely event they still exist). If the mechanics are modern (less than 30 years old) and European, you may have the luxury of all metric fittings, otherwise all bets are off. Electronics could be anything from pure relay control, through TTL/CMOS and PLCs of questionable capability... or any mixture of those.

A few years back I was sent to fix a variable speed drive on a printing press. I was staggered to find this was built in the 1950s and used a variable reluctance system - quite ingenious, horribly inefficient, and something neither I nor any of my colleagues had ever seen before or since.

Now get of my lawn :)

P.S.

Forgot to mention you've usually got an 'excitable' production manager hovering over you asking when it'll be fixed every few minutes.

Conflicted

This has reached the point where I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Strange spin

Our tame examiners only exposed a few people's details, so we are certain no crims did any better.

O really?

Ye Gods!

Every time I think this stuff can't get worse something like this comes along to prove me wrong.

Talk about a false sense of security. Kids aren't dumb - if they want to get up to no good, they'll simply take the thing off, or swap it with a friend. At the same time I've no doubt these have the usual absence of security, so the kid is now being advertised as not with his/her parents.

If it walks like a duck...

Smells like another power grab to me. ICANN are not exactly known for being self-sacrificing for the good of society.

I've done the exact oposite

Shut down the wrong machine then {cough} hot swapped {cough} a drive in a running machine. It didn't go well.

A breath of fresh air

Just a breath, mind you, but what a change from the suffocating, seemingly relentless steamroller.

News?

At this rate it will be news when we go an entire month without a breach being reported.

It's obvious

We weren't sufficiently frightened when 'they' sent the rubber duck.

Repeat

They would not listen,

They're not listening still.

Perhaps the never will.

Forget the politicians

What about us real people?

I visit friends in Europe quite frequently. Without exception their first question is whether I will still be able to get over to see them, and whether they will be able to visit me. I have to say in all honesty that I don't know.

These days I don't give a toss about the exchange rate, business investment and political control. I want to be able to enjoy time with my friends, wherever they may be.

Don't trust it.

What's the catch? I'd always be concerned about some obfuscated lock-in

We're in for a rough time

He's absolutely right of course, but the people who should know this were not there, wouldn't listen if they were, and won't do anything that makes the slightest dent in their obscene profits (or those of their friends).

Just what we all thought

I'll drink to that!

It's not all bad

I'm sure the spooks think it's great.

/s

So Good

I just got back from a grueling morning of wor, wo, doing stuff and saw this. I feel bright and happy again now.

Beers all round.

Don't tell the politicians

Or the next thing you'll hear is that Arduinos have been made illegal - That's sure to stop the bad guys.

/s

Seems clear to me

The snoops don't like it because it does work and borks their spyware.

Time for a song

never gonna give this up...

we need a popcorn icon

House of cards

Well, no actually. That has a broad base. This whole mess is an upside-down pyramid , getting rather wobbly on it's tiny contact with the ground.

Interesting

This also potentially has another effect - at least in Blighty. ISPs are much less likely to get involved in prioritising access, and/or running their own media services, as this would weaken their 'conduit' status.

No!

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

Fool people 99999 times, Fuckin hell!

I can't think of anything much worse

The small project I work on is a Linux only GPL 2+ one. It's status allows it to have free hosting both there and on Sourceforge. I can foresee real problems if Microsoft muscle in, one of the first being charges brought in. We have no funding at all so in that case (with great regret) we'd have to abandon GitHub and try to find some other second repository. I imagine there are very many projects in a similar position. Knowing their reputation, I guess Microsoft would consider that a good thing - only paying cust victims remaining.

Following a train of though

I wonder what results you would get if you re-fabbed the ARM2 instruction set with modern sizes. It should be pretty fast, and ideal for highly deterministic designs. You would always know exactly how long any code sequence would take, and it would be somewhat more secure that some others!

P.S. apologies for spamming the thread!

A thought

If they were just spamming facebook users, they presumably aren't interested in anybody else.

Oh of course, silly me. They're targeting the {cough} thickest {cough} group.

What a lovely day

First BOFH and now this. What more could I ask for?

Hmmm.

How about monster May having an accident with an orange ladder, and the private hospital she's taken to having a data breach, revealing it was in breach of GDPR

So True

All of it. The HSE wonks really are that crazy... but then you all knew that anyway.

Time for (another) beer.