* Posts by richardcox13

646 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2012

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RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

richardcox13
Boffin

Re: BBC repetition

One advantage of creating your own tools (cloud based, so no need to sync what has been read[1]) is being able to add the logic to separate new from updated (and track updated timestamp separately from created).

[1] must get around to the UX refresh to work on mobile sized screens...

richardcox13

Setting an Example Poorly

> The Reg itself naturally offers its own list of feeds.

However the sibling publications from Situation Publishing don't currently (eg. DevClass did until its recent makeover).

An unsubtle hint upwards would be a good idea...

Accenture down to buy Downdetector as part of $1.2 billion deal

richardcox13
Mushroom

Enshitification incoming :-(.

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

richardcox13

Re: Isnt this a little weird`

Any one DC can fail for any number of reasons[1]. A Failure of a power grid connection should not be one, but there are lots of others.[2]

If your DC provider is claiming resiliency for anything other than minor failures, the marketing/sales BS has taken over.

[1] Eg. the chemical plant next door has a failure that leads to a general evacuation...

[2] Even having two geographically (~100km) separated DCs may not be enough, because they're aligned north-south in tornado ally: it would just take one larger storm system...

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

richardcox13

No, its the one with inbuilt ad & tracker blockers.

(Also lots more split view options, a proper amount of configurability, and a commitment to no AI.)

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

richardcox13

Re: Its why

Vivaldi defaults to no auto-play on videos: check the site settings to override when you want auto-play..

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

richardcox13

Re: Sigh..

Beat me to it.

European development, no mega-corp (USAian or otherwise) and you can run your own server!

Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment

richardcox13

Re: I'm enjoying Vivaldi

Ublock Origin doesn't work with Vivaldi. Period.

It works here. Vivalidi 7.8.3925.56, uBlock Origin 1.69.0 (both updated yesterday).

I've had it installed for years, maybe that makes a difference? (If I go to the Chrome web store page it still has the limited support warning.)

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

richardcox13

This is confusing

The Phoenix BIOS message on boot will be familiar to many, and the battery error suggests that whatever is keeping the BIOS settings alive is not long for this world.

But we know (as we see The T800's own view) that The Terminator runs on a 6502, and such BIOS's are not used by 6502 bases systems.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

richardcox13

Re: IMAP4 Was Originally Published in Dec 1994.

I've not had a problem forwarding emails to Gmail.

But then I don't think you mean that: you mean re-sending (SMTP level) to your Gmail account which is not the same thing as forward in an email client (or even Gmail itself).

That (SMTP) forwarding very much depends on the tolerance of the mailbox, and of the user: I do this for my domain emails, but not to Gmail (and I expect it would fail for other mass email hosts like outlook.com) simply because of their very low tolerance to "abuse"). Pick a different host to forward to, that is better suited to more niche requirements.

richardcox13

Re: IMAP4 Was Originally Published in Dec 1994.

Go read the latest IMAP4 RFC! Both downloading a message from the mailbox and then deleting from the mailbox are both supported,

As is listing all the messages. So iterate through, download and delete.

I'm not aware of any email client's that do this directly: because having a local copy (remove dependency on server copy) is usually regarded as sufficient (you have a copy even if removed from the server by something else).

richardcox13

Re: IMAP4 Was Originally Published in Dec 1994.

> Did you even RTFA?

Yes, and the linked article.

And noting how obsolete POP3 applies to both using POP3 to deliver to a mailbox, and to connect a client to that mailbox. Just that the former was never an intended use case

richardcox13

Re: Sorry, unless you ruin your own email server (somewhere)

While ruining your own server seems a poor choice, I'll assume that was a typo :-).

Running your own server could easily be replaced by "paying someone to run a server for you" (which in most cases, eg. if you have other things to do, will be a better option).

Taking a hard dependency on a "free" service comes with risks, and for businesses (in particular) that is a risk.

richardcox13

IMAP4 Was Originally Published in Dec 1994.

RFC 1730 (which has been replaced b RFC 2060 two years later, itself then superseded by RFC 3501 after another 6 years, and then 18 years later by RFC 9051).

POP3 has been obsolete for over two decades, IMAP4 has worked well for at least that long.

POP3 was never a good choice for email delivery to a user's mail box, no-one has a good justification for complaining other than "I had a hack that worked: nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix": El Reg scraping the barrel here finding someone complaining about this.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

richardcox13
Boffin

Re: Boulder, Colorado, Strata 0?

> Strata 0

Means you have your own reference time source, not that it is GPS (albeit GPS is a common option).

Or more explicitly correct: your time source is not another NTP server.

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

richardcox13

Re: Lupus

Not in this case. Cloudflare have RCA blog post up: https://blog.cloudflare.com/5-december-2025-outage

richardcox13

Re: Cloudy with a chance of errors

Exactly.

If you want high resilience in the cloud you can have it. Use at least two regions in at least two different vendor's clouds. And make the choices of regions checking for not too much locality[1]. Also remember if you need two services, each with 99.9% SLA, to both be working the overall SLA is rather less.

You have to handle load balancing/replication problems that will arise. This will not be cheap.

[1] Because weather, earthquakes, ... can be significantly non-local. Eg. two DCs ~100km apart north-south in tornado alley could easily be hit successively by one storm system.

richardcox13

Re: A more sanguine opinion

While there alternatives that are broadly equivalent (even if some porting needed), Cloudflare's alternatives are rather less functional.

Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people

richardcox13

Re: Reading between the lines ...

A contractor who did that should be told they're not working for the major company again.

For a junior employee, a formal disciplinary would be appropriate, for anyone at all senior there is no excuse.

This might seem harsh, but remember this would, amongst everything else, be a GDPR violation.

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

richardcox13

Re: $1-2K per month?

I don't see temporarily spun up installs [...] requiring a lot of backing up and updates.

Updates to tools happen a lot. Typically weekly. These need to be incorporated into the images you use to build temporary VMs.

Backups will depend on how much you end up on the pet vs. farm animal scale.

Your reference VM (apply updates, build new image, repeat for ever) you would likely want to keep around, and thus backup.

richardcox13

Re: $1-2K per month?

How much does it cost to:

- Somewhere to put them (rent etc.)

- Host (electricity, cooling, ...)

- Backup

- Admin (lots of updates in even quite a simple tech stack these days).

For those "one or two computers".

(This is open source using AWS, so reasonable to assume they don't have an office.)

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

richardcox13

Re: Someone else's computer, someone else's rules - YOUR data, YOUR business

or you're over-reliant on that system.

or you've built processes that are so lean that they are just fragile.

richardcox13

Re: Looks like they still didn't catch the cause

Distributed systems at sufficient scale need to handle Byzantine Generals.

Which is not easy. And while the design may be good, ensuring implementation over years (and decades) of maintenance still achieves its robustness is even less easy.

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

richardcox13

Re: Blue Origin?

Make that 18 days.

EscaPADE launch on New Glenn is currently scheduled for Sun 2025-11-09.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

richardcox13

Re: HMRC taken down

I strongly suspect this is the case. Some aspect of DynamoDB (directly) or indirectly (other AWS services that use DynamoDB) depends on something in US-East-1.

Much like the Azure Central-US-1 (IIRC) region having a wobble breaks Azure world wide (I should note MS have said they are working to reduce this dependency).

Eliminating all single points of failure in a complex system is hard.

Mad man builds chatbot in Minecraft with redstone, Python, and patience

richardcox13

There is only one conclusion

Some people have too much free time!

California cops confused after trying to give ticket to self-driving car

richardcox13

> Any passengers will just have to find a new ride.

And claim any consequential expenses from the operator directly (and there is explicitly no defence for the operator to challenge the costs other than being "clearly ridiculous to a reasonable person").

UK minister suggests government could ditch 'dangerous' Elon Musk's X

richardcox13

Re: A Govt Bluesky PDS?

No.

But it should for Mastodon (which is those things BlueSky has, vaguely claimed but not done like decentralisation.

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

richardcox13

Re: OneDrive is Sharepoint?

Personal OneDrive isn't; but business OneDrive is (and always has been).

This is why they are not consistent, especially in their browser based iteration.

Microsoft cuts off Azure phone surveillance support for Israeli military

richardcox13

Re: Moving 8,000 TB

Or these days, a box of micro-SD cards.

Much higher information density, even when allowing for multiple copies for redundancy.

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

richardcox13

Microsoft will give consumers in the European Economic Area no-strings extended support for the soon-to be-EOL Windows 10.

Another Brexit benefit!

Is GitHub a social network that endangers children? Australia wants to know

richardcox13

Re: Utter nonsense

Indeed.

But that fact that "f there's a truly offensive page/project there, it can be flagged and filtered out" it true, immediately means the question is not nonsense.

That are answer to the question is "no, almost 100% no", and that "almost" is doing quite a lot of work.

richardcox13

Re: Utter nonsense

Utter nonsense

That's what I thought on seeing this headline yesterday,

But then I looked at https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter (and particularly some of the—rejected—PRs) and I'm now sure that it is not utter nonsense. Anywhere politics creeps in, tempers rise and people say intemperate things and make threats; others find mechanisms to transfer dubious content..

So, while initially this does seem ridiculous, with a little thought questions like this, from non-IT people, shouldn't be rejected out of hand unless you are sure there are no deep park corners of nastiness lurking mostly out of sight. That this reflects badly on us* does not help.

––––

*Just because 99.99% of IT folks wouldn;t have anything to do with trying to push nasty content to children, doesn't mean the 0.01% (or whatever it is) are not very damaging.

Linux's love-to-hate projects drop fresh versions: systemd 258 and GNOME 49

richardcox13

This 100%.

When I started (around 35 years ago, so rather later than the quote) even an extended phone call was seen as an excessive cost; the idea of the kind of tools that are routinely used for remote collaboration today was only in SF.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

richardcox13

Re: Never trust a Microsoft timestamp.

Create a local repo and give it a try...

richardcox13
Boffin

Re: Never trust a Microsoft timestamp.

RTFM...

git commit --date=1977-09-03

Laravel inventor tells devs to quit writing 'cathedrals of complexity'

richardcox13
Devil

Re: "simple and disposable and easy to change."

When mentoring more junior colleagues I have a tendency to quote:

Code as if the next person to work on this code is a psychopath, who knows where you live.

And then remind them of the stress levels when dealing with a critical client incident.

richardcox13
Stop

Photo on feed

The photo for this feed on Bluesky was of Sagrada Família (well worth a visit).

However Sagrada Família is not a cathedral! Barcelona already had a cathedral (also well worth a visit), since medieval timers, and Sagrada Família is not replacing it.

Someone needs to check what photo they are associating to these articles to avoid looking ignorant.

Not in my browser! Vivaldi capo doubles down on generative AI ban

richardcox13

Re: Phew

This AI choice has provided yet another reason to prefer Vivaldi. As if there wasn't enough already[1].

[1] Configurable, tab management (other browsers have now copied some, but not all, of Vivaldi's capabilities), ...

Google fixing Gemini so it doesn't channel paranoid androids quite so often

richardcox13

Re: Eddie isn't any better.

At least Eddie is better that Eddie's emergency backup personality.

Sudden spike in demand causes issues in Azure East US region

richardcox13

Re: Cloudburst

More a case of: do not assume there is infinite capacity in the provider. You won't always be able to freely scale up instantly.

Or have some kind of resilience plan.

This 100%: if you are assume any one thing (one thing could be a WAN connection, a server, a server room, a cloud region) has 100% up time you are either deluded, or accepting of downtime.

(It is a reasonable business decision to say: the cost of going from 99.9% to 99.95% is is not justified.)

Skyrora wins green light to lob rockets from Scotland

richardcox13
Holmes

Software...

> "a software complication."

That pretty much sums up 80% of life today.

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

richardcox13
Boffin

Re: The PRC will have a well defined goal...

My local pharmacy has a sign up that says they refuse to accept notes from the Bank of Scotland. Is that legal?

Yes. But it is not why you think.

"Legal tender" as a concept exists in English & Welsh law, but only applies to payment of a debt (there are some restrictions like you have to offer the exact amount: you cannot demand change). And retail sales do not create a debt (but a bill at a restaurant, where you pay at the end of a mail, does). Assuming you have a debt to pay, then the creditor has to accept legal tender. However (1) for small change there are maximum limits (eg. the creditor only has to accept 20p in copper coinage), (2) Bank of England notes are legal tender, (3) All other bank notes issued in the UK (eg. Bank of Scotland) are not legal tender (they are not even legal tender in Scotland: only £1 and £2 coins are for an unlimited amount).

For retail it is up to the vendor... and providing they clearly state limitations on the payment types they accept.

Power cuts, cable damage, and government shutdowns behind Q2 internet outages

richardcox13

Re: 24th July UK Mobile Network

It was reported, and this is the follow up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go

(I was not impacted, the original version of that article was how I knew about it...)

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

richardcox13

Re: How long????

How can it take more than six months to go through what was said in court?

Because what was said in the inquiry sessions—the verbal evidence—is a small fraction of the evidence being considered. There are over 250,000 documents (over 2 million pages) as well. (See background and statistics about the Inquiry (PDF).)

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

richardcox13

I'm waiting for USB<>BNC to come out for my mobile. None of the modern fads for me!

Still too new. Where's the adapter for drop cable to vampire tap?

(Who needs more than unswitched 10Mb/s?)

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

richardcox13

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

Look for "ten key less" designs.

Have main, cursor, and page-up/page-down/... as PC-AT; just drop the numeric part.

Daddy of a mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes

richardcox13
Thumb Up

Power

which means plenty of your user populations now have an inkling about the power of sudo

This was well documented years ago: https://xkcd.com/149/

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

richardcox13

Re: Malware in Lisp?

https://xkcd.com/297/

"Lisp ... Elegant weapons for a more civilised age."

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

richardcox13

Re: Progress Bars

Use the full link because the hover text can be the best part... and in this case definitely applies.

https://xkcd.com/612/

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