Posts by Marty McFly

Stupid customer

It is their security requirements. They should have provided a proper meeting space, isolated from their infrastructure with only basic Internet access. Get the local ISP to put a separate consumer grade network router in. No wired or wireless access to their internal secure network. Soundproof the room as they see fit. Then who gives a crap what the vendor brings in?

It is nonsensical some of this extreme security that is put on display. It is like they want to impress vendors with how elaborate they can be. Especially when 9 times out of 10, the content of the presentation has no need to be made within the customer's security perimeter.

Stories old code could tell

The DOS-based point-of-sale company I worked for 30 years ago (long since defunct) had an undocumented feature - "Remove & Renumber Tickets". Login is as full admin (credentials were conveniently stored in clear text), tag the tickets, then ALT-F10 five times in a row. Poof, tickets gone. Never documented, only shared verbally with the senior installers.

Dare I remind anyone this is back in the day before debit cards were commonplace and cash was the standard currency. Yes, this was a customer requested 'feature' and was more widely used than suspected. The mom & pop business owners wanted to keep employees honest with POS, but still wanted to fiddle some numbers themselves. Corporate chain customers were none the wiser.

Those were different times, with cavalier coding and little oversight. Reverse engineering old code with AI may tell many stories which will be interesting to learn. In 2026, such a 'feature' would likely make the news, and not in a good way. Cheers!

Focus on the PC, not on what is happening!

Years ago. Early days of Point-of-sale systems. Installing in a Greek restaurant that is known for its live entertainment. I am upstairs, in the office, inputting some final menu programming touches on the main PC.

Did you know belly dancers have no inhibitions?

Turns out the office doubled as the dressing room. It took all my professional effort to focus on the job in front of me, while she got prepared for another day in her professional career.

Integrated Kill Switch

There is ample precedent for that thinking. Look up the history of the F-14 Tomcat, and who our allies once were. The US ended up physically shredding retired F-14's rather than risk some of their parts going on the international black market to support airframes in what has become an unfriendly country.

"Kill Switch" is an accurate technical description. But "Stay Friendly" may be a better name.

Icon because it has an aircraft!

Blurry lines

A password is the 'something you know' authentication method. It is supposed to reside between your ears and be inaccessible to everyone else.

Putting that password in a password manager changes it over to a 'something you have' authentication method. Access to a database now becomes the controlling security factor. Compromise the password manager and now it can be shared & duplicated just like a physical key.

The bottom line... Never put anything in an online password manager that doesn't also have a multi-factor companion.

Wiggle the mouse

Back in the Win 9x days where the world was fraught with frequent reboots that were always slow...

My IT counterpart told one 'frequent flyer' user that wiggling the mouse would help keep the system awake and it would boot faster. Of course, what that did was give this individual something to do which made them think they were doing everything possible to speed up the process.

A week later it was observed that most users were actively wiggling their mice during reboots too. He realized the power of suggestion when it comes from someone who understands the mystical workings inside a computer.

Does the ISS have research more to give?

If the ISS was placed in a location where it could be realistically re-visited in 50-years, would there still be more we could learn from the station as it ages long-term?

Imagine visiting the station and taking bits & pieces off for forensic examination. How well did a particular material or construction design hold up? Does stuff actually last forever in the vacuum of space? How does that aging compare to the same materials when left on earth?

Enter the realm of Sci-Fi. Will humankind ever journey to the cosmos? Maybe someday we will discover 'warp speed'. But if not, it would be useful to know what type of spacecraft construction will hold up for the long term. We have only been doing this spaceflight thing for less than 70 years. There is no long term data.

I do believe there is a case to retain ISS as a long term unoccupied research project. Researchers hundreds of years from now would be thanking us for creating a lab experiment that we would never live to see the value from.

There is precedent for changing & extending the mission of spacecraft. Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 are still delivering research long after their primary missions have been completed.

Back to plan B

Let's build more terrestrial data centers. We can power them with fossil fuels and use local water resources to cool them.

It is utter non-sense to have orbiting data centers, functioning off-grid using solar power and radiating heat in to the vacuum of space.

Besides, aliens will probably take over the DC's anyway >> icon excuse.

What could possibly go wrong??

It is the age of massive AI computing. Add autonomous robot dogs. Put them in a radioactive environment.

This already reads like a bad Hollywood movie script!

Old school response

Anyone else remember the old days of online comments??

"Pictures or it didn't happen!!"

Dumb move

This is a good way to identify which employees have too much free time on their hands. Get back to work. They should organize a protest on their own time.

The tech company employees are paid to do the things that Meta, Apple, Google, etc want them to do. They are not paid to go cube-to-cube and gather signatures. In the tech world there is always a RIF coming. If I was a direct supervisor I would make note and keep those names handy the next time I am told to cut headcount.

Someone will probably say that is unfair. Managers have to determine some way to stack rank their staff. Don't be the person using company time to engage in political activity, and then they won't be on the short list.

School district master key

Many decades ago my father was the principal of a primary school and carried a large wad of keys. After some budget cuts & peers retired, and he ended up with a second primary school under his purview, so the district gave him a single master key to replace what would have been a 2nd large wad of keys.

A couple years later, a mental breakdown occurred, and my father left education. The district never reclaimed the master key. It hung on a nail over the workbench out in the garage.

A few more years passed and a certain high school senior got curious. Sure enough, the key still worked! This was before the days of cameras everywhere and motion sensing alarms, and when a harmless 'Senior Prank' could be laughed at. There might have been a midnight mission or two, so I'll just end the story there.

I now have that same workbench. And for posterity, the key is still with it. Cheers to innocent days!

Ground stations or no ground stations?

I thought Starlink used lasers for inter-satellite communication to help cover areas without ground stations. Seems to me that would allow Venezuela to get some connectivity. May not be blazing fast or low latency, but it would beat the heck out of no connectivity.

"Most Macs will never run anything but their original copy of macOS."

I am curious where the source of this data point comes from.

MacOS is incredibly easy to update, as long as the current version supports the underlying hardware. Apple runs about a five-year deficit on supported hardware before cutting it off. And Mac OS is usually update annually.

Where is the author's data showing that a five year old Mac was never once updated to a new OS version?

Bastards

I had to work on New Year's day 2000, just in case the world ended. This was after two years of making sure customer x286 systems from a decade earlier were properly upgraded. I got promised an 'exchange' holiday for working. Okay, I am a team player and all, so I reported as ordered. Got RIF'd a few months later... "Your job is going to Atlanta, you are not going with it."

And do you think they remembered the extra holiday I had earned in my severance package? FSCK'ers.

Yup, totally trivial and has no bearing on where my life is today. Yet it still taints my memory of Y2K, enough that I post it here for the world to see.

"Have you used tech to prank colleagues, and gotten away with it?"

Back in the late 1990's, I used PCAnywhere for remote access on the office curmudgeon's computer. Two finger typist on a good day. A smart guy, a good friend, but still struggled with the user interfaces of the era.

The mouse cursor would never quite land on the <Okay> box. And random characters would be inserted in to the message requiring a re-type - one finger at a time.

Of course the rest of us in the shared office were on to the gag. We played it out for a few weeks before fessing up. Earned me the reputation of the office Hacker - this was the height of the "Free Kevin" campaign. But it simply was commercial off-the-shelf software, installed over lunch when the PC was not locked.

Tech was simpler then. And mischievous pranks did not end with summary dismissal. Cheers to fond memories!

No AI was used in writing this post!

Just doing my part to reduce the horrible environmental impact of data centers.

Meh, cut the other garbage out

For years I worked remote with a 6mb/s down / 768kb/s up DSL line. Delivered product demos out of my home-based lab via WebEx. And since it was DSL, the audio was a good ol' fashioned POTS line with a wire to my head. I rarely had problems with lag, jitter, or other issues.

However, I did not simultaneously have two TVs streaming 4k video, three kids playing on-line games, etc etc. Nor did I have any 'smart' devices constantly banging on the mother ship to report my watching habits. Nor any IoT devices constantly streaming my doorbell to cloud storage. And the list goes on.

Anyone trying to work remotely who is having issues, needs to shut the other crap off if they want to look good. Put in a Pi-Hole to block the mothership coms, throttle bandwidth to invasive devices, etc. And since they are a El Reg reader, they should know how to do so - otherwise they are unqualified for the job they are trying to do remotely.

A piece of analog hardware manufactured in the 1970s....

I have two rotary dial phones in service at my residence. Yes, since I have to drive 8 miles before my first bar of cell service, I maintain a physical wired land line. Model 500 series, one wall phone and one desk phone. Yes, both are "Red phones".

These phones ring with a real bell. And the audio is significantly more clear than the audio on the various digital, wireless, and headset telephony devices I also have. It is actually surprising how much audio quality we have sacrificed over the years.

Cheers to devices built to last!

Hollywood needs this

Because transporting the most secret data, unencrypted, on portable media, is the best way to do things. Seriously, what super spy wouldn't enjoy wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, ride around in armored limousines with glamorous body guards, fly private jets into secret military bases, etc. The only thing they need is a self-destructive USB key, handcuffed to their wrist.

Enter the Hollywood movie plot where Ethan Hunt is trying to destroy the USB key and is desperately searching for PC to plug in to, meanwhile Chinese hackers stay one step ahead of him with a super virus that disables USB ports on nearby computers. The plot thickens when our spy finally escapes the villains with a MacBook, only to find it is equipped with USB-C ports and is not backward compatible with USB-A. The movie ends when the voluptuous double agent is seduced by the hero and admits the device EULA in unenforceable....

_{Seriously Hollywood, see the icon. This is really a dumb movie idea and I am mocking you.}

Life forming

Zork & Infocom made an impression on the career I took in life. Think it through...

These games taught basic troubleshooting. They taught how to define an objective with limited clues to what the objective may be. They taught how to observe and connect pieces together. They taught how to solve ambiguous problems with more than one path to a solution. They taught how to use my imagination to visualize a scene without computer graphics, and if that didn't work they taught how to hand-draw maps for notes. Even at the more basic level they taught me rudimentary typing skills (errr, "keyboarding").

Reflecting back on everything I have done in tech since then, these fundamental skills have been regularly used for success in my career. I have not adopted any of the modern gaming culture, so I wonder if today's kids get the same skills through modern computing recreation.

This earns a huge cheers!

I read it wrong

"It has built-in immunity to AI overload"

On first pass I saw "...immunity to AI Overlord" and immediately wanted to know more.

Signal is right to be worried

_{<<Set your politics aside for a moment & look at the facts, okay?>>}

Remember "Parler"? This was a social media network that was popular with conservatives.

Now rewind your clock back to January 2021. Google suspended Parler from their Play Store on January 8, citing posts that incited violence. Apple removed Parler on January 9th, after warning Parler to improve moderation. And AWS terminated their hosting on January 10th, effectively killing them. On January 11th, Salesforce blocked the RNC from sending emails. Shopify & Stripe also took politically motivated actions against some of their customers.

This DID happen, and regardless of our personal politics we cannot deny it happened. Did Big Tech take these action of their own accord, or was there collusion with government? Politics go back and forth, and we are mere pawns in their game. Neither the Red team or the Blue team will hesitate to use this control & leverage in the future if they find it serves their interests.

We should NEVER forget that it happened. Centralized Cloud services represent a real threat to free & secure communication - which is exactly what Signal provides. With this demonstrated past behavior from Big Tech, it is a small step to see Signal get a ransom note the next time there is a crisis.... "Give us a back door or go off-line".

We simply CANNOT trust Big Tech in the future because of what they have done in the past. Yeah, given what Signal represents for security & privacy, they are in a tough spot when the next social unrest arrives.

Toe tags

A good boss always has a secret list of employees fitted with toe tags. That way when the senior boss comes knocking, the decision is already made by the immediate boss.

The problem comes when arbitrary cut decisions are made at the senior level with no regard to performance. That's how I was cut a year ago. My boss was given a list of names and a choice. RIF these people, or take the package yourself....then we will have someone else RIF these people. The names chosen were done with no input from my boss and made by a senior manager new to this business unit.

Stupid way to run a business that advertises hiring & retaining the best & the brightest.

Lazy cops and dumb judges

About 15 years ago my nephew lived in a older urban area. The kind of place where they take a large house and split it up in to three rental units and rent to young couples. This was back before a lot of people put passwords on their WiFI.

Cops raided him at 6am when he was leaving for work. Gave him 30 seconds to alert his wife and they were coming in, warrant in hand. Searching for CSAM. Searched his computers, etc, and found nothing. It was then that they started looking at his network and realized the WiFi was wide open.

The cops pivoted immediately. The started saucing my nephew up as an aspiring young guy who should be working for them, etc. Really laid the compliments on thick. Then they asked if they could put a snooping device on his router, to which my nephew happily agreed. They also told him not to talk to anyone about what had happened, and both he and his wife agreed.

No court gag order. Just a plea to not tell anyone, to which my nephew willingly agreed. IMHO, he should have run straight to the local news and reported the raid. Nope, he kept quiet for 9 months. The cops eventually found the perp.

Follow me through... The cops were smart enough to use the Telco to trace the location of the network drop to a street address. The judge was smart enough to know what that meant when issuing a warrant. Why didn't the cops check to see if the WiFi was open?? There were dozens of residences within range - remember this was an urban area. Why didn't the judge ask the cops if they could access the network from their car at the street?

Pure laziness on the part of the cops & the judge. They had the tech skills to find the location, but didn't make any effort to check if the WiFi was open or not.

As to whether the ends justified the means... Violating an innocent citizen's 4th Amendment rights is NEVER justified by sloppy police work.