On Call There was a time in IT when "brute force" meant something other than guessing at passwords while wearing a favorite hoodie. Welcome to an edition of On Call that really pulls out some memories.
Today's tale comes from the era of coaxial cables and thinnet. "Ben" (most definitely not his name) was working on the campus of an educational institution. "We got a call that the network in a building out on the edge of campus was 'flaky'," he recalled.
"Some machines were working, some weren't, especially the department director's."
A big cheese bereft of connectivity would never do, and so Ben and a chum grabbed some cable testers and headed to the afflicted location.
"When we got to the building we started testing adjacent to the thinnet to the fiber converter that fed the building. Worked fine. The further we got from the headend, the more performance degraded, until we got to the director's office...
"...where the problem was discovered."
For those who never experienced the joy of thinnet (aka Thin Ethernet or Cheapernet), it consisted of thin coaxial cables replete with BNC-T connectors, usually plugged into network cards. Before Category 5 cables became all the rage, networks frequently (and, in some cases, still do) consisted of lengths of RG-58 cables.
The thin cable and BNC connectors are significant to our story.
"Seems the director wanted to rearrange his office," said Ben, "but didn't bother to call Physical Plant to do the heavy lifting."
"Evidently, when it came time to moving that big tower PC under his desk, he just hauled it out and set it over next to where the desk was moving to," remembered Ben. "Of course, he didn't bother to check to see if anything was plugged INTO that machine other than the power and video cables…"
Thus the connectors of both pieces of RG-58 cable plugged into the BNC-T connector were ripped off. The director only realized something was wrong when he moved his desk and saw the two sad bits of wire where his PC had been. What to do? Tie them in a neat bow and hide them behind a sideboard, of course.
Sorted! Right up until he realized that connectivity was now sadly absent and placed the call.
Ben and pal dutifully replaced the ripped-off connectors and reconnected the cable with a barrel connector. The computer was back on the network.
"All was once again right with the world. We headed back to the office wondering how People Like That™ managed to score tenured faculty slots. Ah well."
Ever been called out to deal with an incident that could only have been the result of brute force and ignorance? Or were you the person applying unnecessary force to an innocent bit of cable? Confess all with an email to On Call. ®
Interview "It's our data, it's our intellectual property. Being able to migrate it out those systems is near impossible... It was a real frustration for us."
These were the words of communication and collaboration platform Mattermost's founder and CTO, Corey Hulen, speaking to The Register about open source, sovereignty and audio bridges.
"Some of the history of Mattermost is exactly that problem," says Hulen of the issue of closed source software. "We were using proprietary tools – we were not a collaboration platform before, we were a games company before – [and] we were extremely frustrated because we couldn't get our intellectual property out of those systems..."
Government departments are guilty of high levels of non-compliance with the UK's off-payroll tax regime, according to a report by MPs.
Difficulties meeting the IR35 rules, which apply to many IT contractors, in central government reflect poor implementation by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and other government bodies, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said.
"Central government is spending hundreds of millions of pounds to cover tax owed for individuals wrongly assessed as self-employed. Government departments and agencies owed, or expected to owe, HMRC £263 million in 2020–21 due to incorrect administration of the rules," the report said.
Internet interruption-watcher NetBlocks has reported internet outages across Pakistan on Wednesday, perhaps timed to coincide with large public protests over the ousting of Prime Minister Imran Khan.
The watchdog organisation asserted that outages started after 5:00PM and lasted for about two hours. NetBlocks referred to them as “consistent with an intentional disruption to service.”
Interpol and cops in Africa have arrested a Nigerian man suspected of running a multi-continent cybercrime ring that specialized in phishing emails targeting businesses.
His alleged operation was responsible for so-called business email compromise (BEC), a mix of fraud and social engineering in which staff at targeted companies are hoodwinked into, for example, wiring funds to scammers or sending out sensitive information. This can be done by sending messages that impersonate executives or suppliers, with instructions on where to send payments or data, sometimes by breaking into an employee's work email account to do so.
The 37-year-old's detention is part of a year-long, counter-BEC initiative code-named Operation Delilah that involved international law enforcement, and started with intelligence from cybersecurity companies Group-IB, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and Trend Micro.
Comment Broadcom’s mooted acquisition of VMware looks odd at face value, but if considered as a means to make edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) more mature and manageable, and give organizations the tools to drive them, the deal makes rather more sense.
Edge and IoT are the two coming things in computing and will grow for years, meaning the proposed deal could be very good for VMware’s current customers.
An Ethernet switch that Broadcom launched this week shows why this is a plausible scenario.
Emails between leading pro-Brexit figures in the UK have seemingly been stolen and leaked online by what could be a Kremlin cyberespionage team.
The messages feature conversations between former spymaster Richard Dearlove, who led Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6 from 1999 to 2004; Baroness Gisela Stuart, a member of the House of Lords; and Robert Tombs, an expert of French history at the University of Cambridge, as well as other Brexit supporters. The emails were uploaded to a .co.uk website titled "Very English Coop d'Etat," Reuters first reported this week.
Dearlove confirmed his ProtonMail account was compromised. "I am well aware of a Russian operation against a Proton account which contained emails to and from me," he said. The Register has asked Baroness Stuart and Tombs as well as ProtonMail for comment. Tombs declined to comment.
The UK’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has commenced a full national security assessment of Newport Wafer Fab’s acquisition by China-controlled entity Nexperia.
The Fab is the UK’s largest chipmaking facility and produces up to 32,000 wafers a month. In August 2021 it was acquired by a Dutch outfit named Nexperia that is controlled by Chinese company Wingtech.
Issues including global semiconductor shortages demonstrating the importance of sovereign capacity, the many credible accusations that Chinese firms practice industrial espionage, China’s desire to become self-sufficient in semiconductors, and general China-related security concerns all made the sale a hot political issue. So hot that when news of the sale emerged, UK prime minister Boris Johnson promised a national security assessment, overriding business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng who had previously said the deal wasn’t worthy of a probe.
Indian budget airline SpiceJet on Wednesday attributed delayed flights to a ransomware attack.
SpiceJet said the attack was quickly contained and rectified with flights again operating normally.
The company later was forced to clarify that its definition of “normally” meant flights delayed by ransomware had a cascading effect on its schedule, so while it whacked the ransomware passengers could still expect disruptions.
Mitsubishi Electric has admitted to widespread cheating on its internal quality control efforts.
The Japanese giant makes datacenter-scale power supply products, uninterruptible power supplies, high-end optical networking kit, plus plenty of electronics and semiconductor products – so this scandal is of concern to Reg readers. Buyers of other Mitsubishi Electric products, covering building operations, railways, and space systems, also have reason for concern.
One more thing: the company's motto is "Changes for the better." We can't make this stuff up.
Current and former Activision Blizzard staff are stepping up their organizing and pressure campaigns on execs as the video-game giant tries to close its $68.7bn acquisition by Microsoft.
Firstly, QA workers at Raven Software – a studio based in Wisconsin that develops the popular first-person shooter series Call of Duty – successfully voted to officially unionize against parent biz Activision. Secondly, a former employee appealed Activision's proposed $18 million settlement with America's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding claims of "sex-based discrimination" and "harassment" of female staff at the corporation.
Finally, a group of current and ex-Activision employees have formed a Worker Committee Against Sex and Gender Discrimination to try and improve the company's internal sexual harassment policies. All three events occurred this week, and show how Activision is still grappling with internal revolt as it pushes ahead for Microsoft's takeover.
Nvidia exceeded market expectations and on Wednesday reported record first-quarter fiscal 2023 revenue of $8.29 billion, an increase of 46 percent from a year ago and eight percent from the previous quarter.
Nonetheless the GPU goliath's stock slipped by more than nine percent in after-hours trading amid remarks by CFO Colette Kress regarding the business's financial outlook, and plans to slow hiring and limit expenses. Nvidia stock subsequently recovered a little, and was trading down about seven percent at time of publication.
Kress said non-GAAP operating expenses in the three months to May 1 increased 35 percent from a year ago to $1.6 billion, and were "driven by employee growth, compensation-related costs and engineering development costs."
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