Posts by SVD_NL

Hotels are retro telephony treasure troves

Hotels tend to have very dated telephony requirements for a bunch of reasons. This is a combination of analog phone cables that are very difficult (and expensive) to replace, large analog PBX's being expensive, and local legislation often mandating that guests should always have a phone available to dial the emergency number.

While modern telephony platforms won't have as much trouble with 100's of phones, the expense of replacing all of those cables in an old building and all of those new phones is often too much to bear. So much so that we once came across an old comms room with hundreds of ATAs to convert SIP to analog phone signals.

Another classic background prank

The classic i remembered (i grew up with Windows XP+):

Screenshot, rotate image 180 degrees, set as background. Remove all icons, hide taskbar. ctrl+alt+down (this rotates the screen 180 degrees). Bonus points if you flip the screensaver too!

Classmates appreciated the pranks for the most part. Teachers didn't like me, i wonder why!

"A little effort showed the issue was actually with a mainframe"

I imagine someone getting that job without knowing what they're doing, spending hours on troubleshooting a basic issue, all while the rest of the team waits for him to show up to the cooter corridor.

Excellent waste of money!

I'm so glad they spend so much time and effort into developing a custom AI translator for weather alerts. Similar products surely aren't available off-the-shelf, because they have such novel requirements. The use of AI is also absolutely required, weather alerts are going to be extremely dynamic and complicated to translate!

I'm genuinely wondering why they can't just create template warnings with <severity> <weather event> <timing info> <call to action> and have those available in a bunch of languages (basically string templates that are used for localization everywhere).

"Get world-class business email at a fraction of the cost of other platforms."

"25 GB mailboxes, 30 GB file storage"

Maybe true for the previous pricing, but at 10$ that's a plain old lie! Even MS365 Business Basic only costs $6, which has 50GB (soon 100GB) mailboxes, and 1TB of OneDrive storage, and web versions of Office apps. You have to do some serious mental gymnastics to make your own offer sound like a better deal.

Don't even get me started on a price increase of that magnitude at such short notice...

I feel like a broken record...

...I've said this very recently on an article discussing the n8n RCE vulns, but i'll repeat the gist of it here:

Why would you ever deploy an AI service that accept user input with highly privileged access to a bunch of important internal systems? And even worse, expose it to the internet?

Clickbaited!

Did the Chinese really just try to clickbait US Govt. officials? What's next? "Hot singles in the Washington D.C. area"?

Good lord

It takes an idiot to use a random welding shop air hose to clean out computers (maybe i'd even pass it off as an honest mistake), but it takes a special kind of idiot to keep going after visibly destroying the first PC!

Not even a quick check to see if it still worked...

Idiots

The implementation of LLMs has always bothered me, especially the software architecture.

If you don't know by now that you shouldn't trust external input in any way, you shouldn't be near software development in any capacity. Why is it not possible to escape or sandbox external inputs? "Technical limitations"? I think that just means "I made a shitty insecure product".

What also bothers me is the lack of any kind of optimisation. I recall seeing a quote from Sam Cuntman that people were wasting X amount of money by saying goodbye/please/thank you to chatgpt, and asked people to stop doing it. WELL MAKE A GODDAMN FUNCTION THAT HANDLES GOODBYE MESSAGES WITHOUT SENDING IT TO THE LLM THEN YOU PLANET-DESTROYING CLANKERFUCKER!!

Same goes for prompts that don't need LLMs in any way. Why not parse calculations and send them to a calculator for example? Man, LLMs suck.

Widescreen laptop?

It's a shame they went for the gamer branding on that one. I rarely feel like i need some additional vertical real estate on my 13"laptop (it's a 3:2, but a lot of new models are 16:10 already), but i can definitely imagine situations where having some additional room for side-by-side windows comes in handy.

Also, execs would absolutely eat that concept up. Imagine their boner when they show off this thing expanding to show that big spreadsheet they don't understand in it's entirety!

"Oh no, my LLM can't use this treasure trove of stolen data!"

So, this method basically adds a bunch of junk data to real data and makes the LLM more likely to choose junk data when it queries without an encryption key?

I don't see how this actually protects against IP theft, unless the only IP you're trying to protect is the knowledge graph itself, not the underlying data as you should be able to extract that using other means. I'm sure there's cases where this has some real-world applicability, but i feel like most companies wouldn't be happy about the plaintext data being stolen, even if it is slightly obfusciated.

One of my mates had a Roomba...

...after the dog had diarrhea once, he no longer had a Roomba.

Related issues

Not really a wrong diagnosis, but for some reason we always get the blame for absolutely everything if we visited a site in the past week or so.

"Hello, one of your employees was here yesterday for our phone, and now our internet doesn't work" (a DECT handset was replaced).

My colleague had an encounter that took the cake: He was at a site to install an IP door intercom. The hole to the outside was already there, but inside the building he drilled a small hole through a piece of drywall to get the cable to the network cabinet. He was finishing up when the building's janitor approached him:

"Hi, were you drilling just now?"

"Yes i was installing the door intercom"

"Well the toilets are clogged now"

"....okay?"

Proprietary OS?

Threat actors realize that the host operating system is often proprietary or restricted

Just a friendly reminder Proxmox runs on plain ol' Debian. Not necessarily more secure out of the box, but at least you're in control!

Integral to the OS

What's worse is insisting that a user-level application or feature is so intrinsic to the OS that it cannot be removed.

What's even worse, like the IE situation mentioned in the article, is intentionally making an application intrinsic to the OS so you can later argue that it cannot be removed when people start asking questions about your abuse of market dominance.

Internet Explorer, Windows Defender (W10 onwards), Teams (at least early W11 versions), and now copilot. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

They also tried with the MS Store, which is nearly impossible to get rid of without breaking the OS (the latest 25H2 finally has a policy, but Enterprise only)

I notice my MS365 homepage having a bigger and bigger copilot textbox, and it's taking more and more clicks to get to the place i need.

My prediction? They'll make Copilot an integral part of the UI, argue they cannot remove it, and probably get away with it too.

Whenever something silly happens with computers, i try to take the skeuomorphisms¹ literally.

In this case it means watching some madman running across aisles, sweeping everything into a shopping cart, preventing anyone else from buying books.

^{1 Whenever computer terms and elements reflect their real-world counterpart, e.g. your desktop and recycle bin, or floppy disks for saving files.}

"technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair."

This list suspiciously doesn't include the words "secure" or "private".

Work-life balance

Balance the amount of work just so your employees barely stay alive!

Oh cool, my mum crotcheted one of those the other day. She should start selling them!

Hey, i know that book!

My university uses the Systems Approach book to teach networking! The specific study i was doing only did essentially a "networking 101" class, which wasn't much trouble for me as i'd been working as a network engineer for a few years at that point, but i really enjoyed being able to dig down into topics while bored during lectures.

For me personally, the high-level overview helps me more than anything else. Not just in networking, for any complex topic. This allows me to apply logic to new situations, slot it in to the mental model in my head, and work from there. This also helps slowly building up knowledge over time, it's all part of the model, it all makes sense, and it's all deductible. When misremembering something, it'll also set off alarms as it doesn't make sense in the mental model.

As humans our storage is limited and bit rot is a problem, we can't possibly expect to remember everything and also keep up with changes. We have to play to our strengths: Logic, reasoning, deduction.