* Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth

1536 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2012

Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinking about buying TikTok

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Facepalm

Why not?

He's not in China's pocket. Oh, wait...

FILMS FINANCED BY STEVEN MNUCHIN WERE TAILORED TO APPEAL TO CHINA

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/films-steve-mnuchin-china-hollywood-censorship/

From quantum AI to photonics, what OpenAI’s latest hire tells us about its future

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WTF?

Quantum + AI

Yea, that will fix it.

Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

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FAIL

Re: Shocked... shocked I tell you... well not that shocked

You need ballots with at least two candidates for any attack on a voting system to be worth doing. Russia is intrinsically immune.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

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FAIL

Re: Better option

It's also because they could not license that 31st seat at all. They'd have to license another 20. And be told it's a programming thing.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

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Re: This is where technology lets you down

The United States. The union was the International Union of Electrical Workers, who terrorize Raytheon these days, among others. (The company I worked for in the 70's was not Raytheon, it was a company that ate Raytheon for lunch.)

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Re: This is where technology lets you down

I worked at an aerospace firm in the 1970's, and those brown envelopes also existed in classified form. And where I worked, as an Engineer, you were not allowed to walk from lab to lab with tools or hardware, no matter how small. You were supposed to get an "expediter" to come and transport it. Expeditors were (all union, of course) High School dropouts who generally had a gallon of beer for breakfast, and another for lunch. (A couple of them dropped a mockup for a multi-billion dollar project the night before a bunch of Generals were showing up as they imbibed too much at dinner.) And after showing up late, union rules required they would charge your project a minimum of 4 hours labor even for 5 minutes of walking an object down the hall. If you, as an Engineer, were seen carrying anything, you could be stopped by a union rep, and if found to be carrying something an expediter should have been called to carry, all hell would break loose, you'd get written up, and they'd charge you project 4 hours labor anyway. The best use of the classified version of those intraoffice brown envelopes was to put the object in one of those, as if a union rep stopped you, you just hold it out and say "You open it." If he did, while you'd get written up for carrying the object, he'd get a more serious writing up for violating the unsealing of a classified envelope where he didn't have project "need to know", even if he held the proper clearance level. (If you could, you used an envelope above your own clearance level to really feign ignorance.) So then you'd have a cat & mouse game of walking around with the rep following you until he got tired or you found a classified lab to enter that he didn't have access to. (I was young, the reps were old. Did I forget to mention, they were all overweight?) Oh, the joys of overly bureaucratic defense conglomerates. I left that place in 1980. Probably hasn't changed.

Microsoft confirms Russian spies stole source code, accessed internal systems

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Unhappy

Re: Well that's business buggered then

Not even Microsoft, by the looks of it.

We're not Meta support: State AGs tell Zuck to fix rampant account takeover problem

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FAIL

Phone number recycling

Moving one's cell number when one changes providers is trivial in the US. Very few people change numbers to avoid a harasser. Most change numbers because they didn't pay their phone for some period of time, or are trying to avoid bill collectors, or some other dumb ass reason.

It would not be an undue burden on cell phone companies to require numbers be deactivated for some amount of time, measured in years, before being recycled. These days, in the US, area codes are meaningless so phone numbers really are 10 digits (not counting the 11th US country code digit which is optional inside the US), so roughly 10 billion possible numeric combinations most of which work as phone numbers. Mandatory retarding the recycling of phone numbers would benefit a lot more important things that Farcebook, like 2FA of bank accounts and such.

LinkedIn's turn to fall over: Outage hits thinkfluencer hub

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Happy

LinkedIn Signal to Noise ratio

Is maximum when it's offline.

US accuses Army vet cyber-Casanova of sharing Russia-Ukraine war secrets

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FAIL

Nebraska

The fact that he "seemed" to think there are no available real women in Nebraska (pop ~2M) is telling.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

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FAIL

Re: Don't we all have an ex-boss we never want to meet again?

Mine is the one who founded a small company. We supposedly had a patent that locked all competition out, but those of us with technical chops knew our product didn't use it despite said boss telling the world it did. We got to the whopping size around 2002 of 10 people with ~$6M/year revenue, and a big company we worked closely with offered $16M to buy us as they realized they could not trust the guy, but they needed our product. And they wanted to close the deal in 2 weeks. I owned vested options representing a 5% equity stake, the COO 10%, and the remaining employees maybe 10% combined. Said boss was such a small-minded crook* & idiot he stretched out the negotiations for four months over trivia like who would pay the final phone bill (I am not kidding). During that time, the big company's tech folks figured out our patent wasn't used in our products, so they withdrew the offer and extended an $8M offer. Said boss said, "No way". All of our customers hated said boss, but one day, about a month later, he overheard the COO talking with one of us about walking out and starting a rival company, as the customers would follow us. So said boss runs back to the big company and asks if the offer is still good. They smelled blood, so they said "yes" at $4M. He takes that offer, having "negotiated" the sale of the company down from $16M to $4M in less than six months. (Great businessman, eh?) But it gets better. He then tries to do what is called (according to my business lawyer) a "dirty departure" by not honoring the option agreements. As you can imagine, lawyers and such get involved (with "suggestions" of going to the State Attorney General), and we got our pound of flesh (reduced by 4x due to his price negotiation skills of that $16M offer going to $4M.).

What a gem of a guy. That saga ended over 20 years ago and I'm still hoping that if I ever hear of the guy again, it's because he's been convicted of something & going to jail.

*He had a lot of shady personal side businesses that he wasn't good at hiding . The Feds threatened to raid the company at one point as part of their dealings with him.

Microsoft's February Windows 11 security update unravels at 96% for some users

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FAIL

Re: Windows 11 might "face installation issues."

Microsoft takes the position that when you update a house of cards, you should expect a lot of collapses.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

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Unhappy

Great last line

And all I could think of is Musk announcing their transitioning & want to be called Karen.

That's an image I can't unsee, as hard as I try.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

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WTF?

OK, I'll bite.

Right now with PC's full of DRAM, worst case when the thing is in la la land, is to pull the plug, then plug it back in & boot it. How do you get a PC full of persistent RAM out of la la land?

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

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Joke

Re: What the hell?

In the US, we make our subs out of titanium. It plays extremely well with sea water and does not rust. Maybe the British Navy should give that a try? Costs more than steel, though.

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FAIL

So....

Do they plan to try again soon to prove Britain is actually at least as nuclear capable as North Korea?

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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WTF?

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

I'd be more worried about what's going on with the steel chassis. Dissimilar metals in contact with each other in water, especially water that contains ionic solutes, will result in galvanic action. And one metal will corrode at the expense of the other, usually the steel in the case of SS and non-SS steels in contact with each other. Given how Musk has a reality distorion field problem like Steve Job's, it would not a big surprise if the chassis rust out from under these cars.

https://www.appmfg.com/blog/how-to-prevent-galvanic-corrosion-between-carbon-and-stainless-steel

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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Go

And now for something really important

Meanwhile, apparently, Zefram Cochrane has started working on warp drive in Bellevue.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nuclear-missile-found-us-man-191224528.html

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

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Unhappy

Thanks for nothing

So, is there a list of vulnerable routers published anywhere? If not, why not?

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

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Boffin

Re: Oops!

#1 rule of programming of any kind: People are idiots. Write your program the first time assuming every stupid thing possible for it will be encountered eventually.

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

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Unhappy

He's sueing for too little

He should go for much more. While it's never a slam dunk in front of a jury, its hard to see how he won't prevail. So nail 'em from the get go so even if they settle, they feel some pain.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

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Facepalm

Re: No real surprise

Agreed. I only replace phones when they stop functioning, which they usually do after about 3+ years. Having said that, my Flip 4 is awful enough that I'll replace it as soon as I've paid it down in 6 more months.

Asia beat US, EU in chip building because the West didn't invest, Intel CEO claims

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FAIL

So in other words..

They let the MBA's run the show with short term revenue and gross margins as the only KPI that mattered.

Not exactly a shock now, is it?

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

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FAIL

The bigger issue is the patch fails even when not needed.

The patch also does not recognize when the machine has no Windows Recovery Partition and hence doesn't have Windows Recovery.

It's a fail all the way around. Even if there's "still" a reason to have the patch applied to a system that has no Recovery Partition, whoever wrote the patch should have done the full job, not a half-assed incomplete job.

New year, new updates for security holes in Windows, Adobe, Android and more

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FAIL

KB5034441: Windows Recovery Environment update for Windows 10 FAIL

KB5034441: Windows Recovery Environment update for Windows 10 which patches a flaw in could allow attackers to bypass BitLocker encryption by using Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).

This patch is an example of a bad patch rushed out. While it should ignore machines that have WinRE disabled & don't have a recover partition, instead it generates a Windows Recovery Environment servicing failed error in the form of "CBS_E_INSUFFICIENT_DISK_SPACE" or "0x80070643 - ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE".

It's done this on every machine I've seen that doesn't have a Windows Recovery partition & has WinRE disabled. There are boatloads of posts about this patch failure all over the Internet.

Avoiding AI-capable PCs will be impossible by 2027

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FAIL

Re: Training models on the PC?

"Also, where is the huge data-set coming from and where is it being stored and will its contents be available to each PC user?"

That's where the mandatory subscription fee just to boot Windows 12 comes in. You don't expect that cloud storage to be free, do you?

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FAIL

Re: To paraphrase Dilbert

If someone wants to make a bundle, they'll make motherboards with a connector that can go to a mechanical switch on the laptop or desktop case that disconnects the AI chip(s). Kind of the reverse of the "Turbo" switches of decades back.

Bigger problem will be "AI" rubbish embedded in the CPU/GPU.

Uncle Sam will pay for your big ideas to end AI voice-cloning fraud

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WTF?

Re: It's too late.

I know I am real. You, I'm not so confident about.

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Black Helicopters

Re: Distrss code

I prefer the response "But <name>, you're a billionaire!".

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FAIL

Re: Respond to fake recording calls

"...a widespread threat could involve spoofing CEOs' voices to impersonate them and instruct the finance department to wire money to an attacker's account..."

Any company that has such poor fiduciary controls that a CEO on their own has the authority to order this deserves to go out of business.

Driverless cars swerve traffic tickets in California even if they break the law

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Re: Just wondering . . .

It would just make up a lie.

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Mushroom

Re: If Corporations Are People

I propose that if a autonomous vehicle gets more than three tickets in a 12-month period, it be sent to the crusher. Preferably with the owner inside.

Sports Illustrated boss fired – but it's totally nothing to do with AI fake news

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Unhappy

Of course AI isn't a problem

Neither was the fact that many of the AI generated SI articles had basic facts wrong in their stories.

The solution, of course, isn't to fix the AI or use real humans and fact check everything. The solution will be to make the use of the words "wrong" and "fake" socially unacceptable.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

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FAIL

According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

So Tesla's position is that lying in advertising is protected speech even if it is fraud. Good to know.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

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Re: AA quad AC adapter's have been around for decades

I agree entirely.

I actually use one of these for 2 AAA batteries at home that, instead of using a USB output wall wart, uses a more standard wall wart. ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0873Y5MQ5/?th=1 ) Having said that, I would advise one to do their due diligence and make sure the power supply is quiet, stable and at the correct voltage.

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Boffin

AA quad AC adapter's have been around for decades

In a 'battery operated" stationary critical piece of equipment like a battery powered radio time clock, you use an ac adapter that interfaces to the equipment through dummy batteries.

I first used the 1970's version of this in, surprise, the 1970's. A modern version can be bought off Amazon for next to nothing.

https://www.amazon.com/Lenink-Power-Supply-Battery-Replace/dp/B09YTVTZ1V

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

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Thumb Up

Re: "we understand there are circumstances that could prevent you from ..."

I have some PC's, isolated from the network of course, running dedicated machinery that have NT 4.0 on them. When one PC died a couple of years ago, we went to these guys who build new "legacy" PC's so we could keep going. Spending a few $k to keep something going that would cost north of $500k to replace makes total sense. https://nixsys.com/#

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FAIL

"we understand there are circumstances that could prevent you from ..."

Yea, like the Windows 11 upgrade program doesn't work, and doesn't generate proper error logs.

<rant>I've upgraded a boatload of machines (& VM's) from Windows 10 to 11, and Microsoft has done an absolutely shit job handling the situations where it does not work perfectly.

One of my systems, a 2 year old Origin PC AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system (TPM 2 chip, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB graphics, 4TB Western Digital Black SN850X SSD) with fully updated Windows 10 Pro , modern up-to-date bios, etc) as of last week still goes through the entire Windows upgrade, gets through a couple of boots, and then reverts back to Windows 10 Pro. The various setupact.log files (& setuperr.log, miglog.xml, BlueBox.log...) show nothing about the revert or why. Yet I have a couple of Win 11 instances installed & working in Virtual Box VM's on the same machine.

And I know a bunch of other folks with similar upgrade failures on modern machines that Microsoft's "PC Health Check" is happy as a clam to pronounce "This PC meets Windows 11 Requirements". If Microsoft wants people to upgrade, they need to supply an upgrader that actually works & logs the fail trigger cause if the upgrade reverts. And if the issue is a driver incompatibility, should not require digging through the upgrader log files to ID it.

The lowest hanging fruit for improvement would be for PC Health Check itself to scan for Windows 11 incompatible drivers so they can be dealt with BEFORE the upgrade attempt. (And Microsoft, a friendly user interface hint: Scanning isn't enough - you should tell the user the specific problematic driver files, not just generate a typical Microsoft-like vague message of "You have incompatible drivers.") </rant>

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

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Unhappy

No problem

Most legislators don't read the Laws they vote for anyway.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

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Elon Musk will come to his senses

I predict that Elon Musk will come to his senses and both revert X's name back to "Twitter", as well as reinstall all of the content filtering & moderation it had before he took it over.

Stop shaming service providers for outages, argues APNIC chief scientist

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WTF?

Aviation Investigations

May not apportion blame, but lawyers use their accident investigation reports to apportion liability. I suspect the telecommunications industry would fear that.

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

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Happy

Re: Déjà vu all over again

"Hello! It looks like you are trying to destroy humanity. Do you need help with that?"

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FAIL

The first question...

The first question I'd ask the damn thing is why does the upgrade to Windows 11 on my modern laptop take hours and a couple of boots to eventually roll back to Windows 10 without even an error code in the log files?

Google Photos' AI Magic Editor won't change pictures of IDs, receipts, faces, or bodies

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FAIL

Re: Stupid Google, spoiling everyone's fun

Especially since you can do it manually in Paint.

Beijing reportedly asked Hikvision to identify fasting students in Muslim-majority province

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FAIL

Fat

Gonna be a lot more fat people if they are penalized for dieting.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

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Boffin

Re: BT announce

The horse analogy is excellent. Horses didn't have enough intelligence to have a clue about what the consequences would be either.

Adobe sells fake AI-generated Israel-Hamas war images – then the news ran them as real

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WTF?

Re: Metadata... yea, that'll solve the problem

What? You don't check the metadata of every image of every web page you visit?

Brits make Amazon, Meta stop using third-party data to undercut rivals

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WTF?

Re: Freudian typo?

You don't expect computer geeks to pay attention to details do you? You trying to put the entire computer security industry out of business?

IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer something else instead

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WTF?

Re: They still do 401(k) matching? How quaint.

What planet do you live on? The average 401k employer match in 2023 is 4.7%.

To prevent 'lost' nukes, scientists suggest storing them in a hall of mirrors

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FAIL

Re: Not sure it's the right tech. to monitor nukes

Well, first you need to believe the participating countries don't have secret stashes they never told you about. Good luck with that.