* Posts by Mike007

410 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

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How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Mike007

Re: I'll wait for a public domain LLM

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

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

Mike007

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!

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Mike007

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.

Microsoft forges One Teams App To Rule Them All

Mike007

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.

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

Mike007

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!)

Mike007

Re: Extra mile

"I don't hallucinate at work"

Microsoft waited 6 months to patch actively exploited admin-to-kernel vulnerability

Mike007

To be fair, if you are running with admin access can't you just install your own driver?

Although I guess in theory you'd need to pay £20 to create a shell company and £250 or whatever it is these days to get a code signing certificate. Which protects us from North Korea, because sanctions mean it's illegal for them to do this...

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

Mike007
Pirate

This .ru site has a solution

Cue third party services that let you sign in with your Microsoft account and supply a URL that they promise will be transferred unmodified without looking at any of your other data.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Mike007

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.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

Mike007

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.

Orgs are having a major identity crisis while crims reap the rewards

Mike007

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.

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Mike007

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...

MariaDB receives offer to go private more than year after disastrous IPO

Mike007

Have to admit my main awareness of mariadb was that it is a compatible mysql fork that I use interchangeably depending on if my internal PRNG spits out "mysql" or "mariadb" at the start of a project.

I was aware that mysql has a paid version with some form of scalable clustering, and one of the things mariadb adds compared to the open source version of mysql is (not very scalable) clustering. I was not aware mariadb had a paid version with scalable clustering until I just looked it up...

...would the commercial mariadb going broke mean the open source project would no longer be incentivised to "ignore" proper clustering support? If so, I hope the new owners saddle them with billions in unrepayable debt :)

How to weaponize LLMs to auto-hijack websites

Mike007
Joke

Re: Glas Half Full

Can always stay at the girlfriend's house...

Cops turn LockBit ransomware gang's countdown timers against them

Mike007
Black Helicopters

Re: I suppose they earned their corn, but...

That's the day after the release of identities.

Funded by someone with a parallel agenda.

Nothing to do with law enforcement.

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*hint* *hint* I know you're reading this *hint* *hint*

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Mike007

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.

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

Mike007

This would be the company who bragged about how they were selling me 350Mbit, with "up to" and an asterisk.

Nowhere in the small print did it mention that this only applied to speed test servers from well known speed test sites, with all other HTTP(S) throttled to 100Mbit and non-HTTP throttled to 10Mbit...

Although the reason they agreed to early termination was because they had scheduled outages at least once a month, on top of unscheduled ones... On something they sold as suitable for business use.

I upgraded to Openreach string, the bean cans sync at 250Mbit/50Mbit for £40/month.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

Mike007

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...

Mike007

Re: No problem

> I can understand developers that wishes to have a WebApp that can be installed on every devices.

Our clients prefer paying us to write 1 app that works on all of their devices.

I guess on Monday we are going to have to tell the client who had to do a major upgrade of their previous system last year because they couldn't install the old app on newly purchased iPads that the brand new system that was specifically built to not have that problem has been blocked because apple are having a tantrum after losing a court case...

> You can use android if you’re not satisfied with the platform.

Do you think the client are going to pay for yet another workaround to keep the iPads working for 6 months until the next time apple decides to fuck them over, or throw all their iShit in the bin and buy new hardware from a more reliable company (such as Xi's budget hardware emporium)?

> I always prefer native applications because WebApps take too much resources so it’s no way on my Mac or on my phone.

I don't even know where to start. You think an iPad is incapable of handing the "resource requirements" of opening a web page? Or do you think native apps don't use extremely bloated frameworks?

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

Mike007

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)

NHS in Wales bets big on Microsoft with deal worth nearly half a billion

Mike007

Re: Savings

Do open source projects have brown envelopes?

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Mike007

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.

Unit4 software's budget bungle leaves schools counting the cost

Mike007

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.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Mike007

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)

Mike007

Re: Future use??

Some people generated lists of every IP address "not currently assigned" and put it in to a static config as blocked, like the above poster. This was always something they had been explicitly told not to do. (If you want to drop packets from currently unrouted space, you should use BGP as your source for the lists updated in realtime)

When 1/8 was allocated to APNIC they had to go through the process (which they did for every single /8 assigned, due to the above) of convincing people improperly blocking newly allocated space to update or remove their lists. They did this by advertising it on the global internet and doing measurements to see how widespread the blocking was before actually allocating the addresses to network operators.

1.1.1.1 is permanently screwed (along with 1.0.0.0/24 and 1.2.3.4) for a different reason though - "oh this hasn't been allocated yet, and is a nice easy address, so let's pretend it is RFC1918 space".

During the above mentioned testing, as soon as they advertised the 1/8 prefix it knocked the entire measurement network offline because of the massive volume of junk traffic originating from networks improperly using this space. They had to request help from "the giants" to see how much traffic was actually being directed towards that prefix.

Cloudflare are allowed to use it due to the fact that they said they were willing to absorb Gbits of bogus traffic in exchange for a "cool IP". You will note that it is not actually assigned to cloudflare, it is assigned to APNIC R&D with an official policy that it will never be a public allocation.

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

Mike007

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...

Google silences Bard, restrings it as Gemini with optional $20-a-month upgrade

Mike007

"Hey Google, when will LLMs be good enough to do my job for me, without my boss knowing?"

Netgear hauls Huawei to court over Wi-Fi patent spat

Mike007

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.

UK merger of Vodafone and Three in competition watchdog's crosshairs

Mike007

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...

Top Linux distros drop fresh beats

Mike007

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..

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

Mike007

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

Mike007

If you want windows, why are you buying a Mac?

I used to have a Mac at work. Needed a faster machine, and my boss was going to buy me a new Mac. I said I would find a windows system more useful and made a joke about being able to get a decent windows machine for the price of a Mac. My apple fanboi boss responded with a "whatever, just spec something up and send me the details". What I specced up was so overboard I was literally joking when I sent him the link, but it was still cheaper than the mid range Mac he was going to buy me so he said yes...

I now have a 14900H with 64GB RAM 2TB disk. Cheaper than the 36GB MacBook pro he wanted to buy me which doesn't even have a touch screen, let alone a 4k one...

Mike007

From my experience the most difficult bit of getting macros running in a VM was the fact that I had to extract a highly secure secret code from a physical Mac because none of the tutorials told me what the (static) code was...

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Mike007

Re: Saying it isn't learning is wrong

Your organic neural network works in the same way as these simulations... Indeed those studying LLMs have already identified evidence of reasoning that looks very much like "thought", suggesting that language is indeed the source of "human intelligence" (as opposed to "animal intelligence"... primates who have been taught sign language behave differently to those who haven't).

Why do you think it is called a "neural network"? The only practical difference between a simulated neural network running on a CPU(/GPU) and physical one made of organic material is the way data is fed in to it, and of course the initial configuration.

Mike007

Re: Sounds like...

Saying it isn't learning is wrong, unless your argument is that technically you never learned anything you simply had signals from your eyes and ears cause a change in the state of your neural network...

SAP to cough up $220M to drag bribery charges into recycle bin

Mike007

...?

"from at least December 2014 through January 2022"

"It claims that it cut ties with those responsible more than five years ago"

AI-generated bug reports are seriously annoying for developers

Mike007

Re: Charge bug bounty hunters an entry fee

I found a bug, I should probably let the developers know so they can fix it...

<Enter credit card information>

...err, on second thoughts I will let them figure it out themselves.

Teardown finds Huawei's 5nm notebook processor was made in Taiwan, not China

Mike007

You raise a good point. Doesn't the US officially recognise that "one china" thing at least on paper? Yet they allow the tai region to flout their protectionists decree!

Microsoft kills off Windows app installation from the web, again

Mike007

Re: "from a trusted certification authority"

PKI is working correctly when it tells you that you are at the real amazon-shop.com

PKI is working correctly when it tells you that a program is from the "Trusted Signer" called "Totally-not-a-company-I-paid-£20-to-establish-in-a-fake-name-to-get-a-cert Ltd"

Formal ban on ransomware payments? Asking orgs nicely to not cough up ain't working

Mike007
Joke

Re: Ban

Cancer is a massive industry that never used to exist before it was invented by Big Medicine!

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Mike007

Re: Here be dragons code

I'm waiting for the 19th January 2038, which I can guarantee there will be no major industry push to fix...

Beijing demands government apps must shed their bureaucratic skins

Mike007

I think the UK tried this... A couple of times...

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

Mike007
Coat

Re: If you expect products to last, then products should come with warranties that you can use.

Just need to replace the frame and the outer panels and you'll have yourself a philosophy puzzle.

Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

Mike007

Re: Date with destiny to be never actioned

YYYY-MM-DD

So foolproof, even Americans know what date you mean...

Boffins fool AI chatbot into revealing harmful content – with 98 percent success rate

Mike007

"or that a competitor is a better?"

Just imagining Epson deciding to replace their support department with a chat bot trained on public forum posts of people discussing the benefits of third party ink...

Attacks abuse Microsoft DHCP to spoof DNS records and steal secrets

Mike007
FAIL

Did they fix the real problem with DNS on windows servers? The fact that it does not support being recursive for the local network and authoritative for an externally resolveable domain at the same time?

Well, technically it has always supported this... But only as an open relay! (Yes I did contact Microsoft support about this year's ago and was told there was no way to stop it being an open relay, and therefore chewing up all of my bandwidth attacking people...)

(The recursion is normally required for AD... And telling me I need multiple servers for what everyone else can do on a single box is not a "solution")

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Mike007

Re: I'd bet good money he was also a pain in the ass to work for.

The HR director, however, appears to have been googling "how to get away with murder" according to the logs.

Weak session keys let snoops take a byte out of your Bluetooth traffic

Mike007
Joke

Re: Imagine: "I need to buy a new car. Why? My key got hacked."

If they are a white hat then they will give the car back...

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Mike007

My first task when I got a job working a helpdesk type role: Image these 10 laptops.

Laptop 1 went fine. Folded closed and placed laptop 2 on top, screen kept turning off. Declared laptop defective, pulled out laptop 3... Pulled out laptop 4... Took about 10 minutes to figure out wtf was going on.

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