Who, Me? A Register reader is tripped up by the curse of software updates decades before Patch Tuesday was a twinkle in Microsoft's eye. Some things never change. Welcome to Who, Me?
Our story this week comes from "Ivor" courtesy of his experience with punched cards and the IBM System/360 Model 40.
This particular bit of kit was aimed at businesses that had outgrown more simplistic hardware. There were rows of lights, magnetic tape, and dryer-sized magnetic disk units. CRTs had yet to make an appearance at Ivor's facility, but punch cards were still in use for programming purposes.
And output? Via a typewriter that chugged along at around 12-15 characters per second.
After spitting out whatever message it needed to, the computer would use the typewriter to punch out "READY FOR COMMUNICATIONS" – informative, yes. Performant? Not really. Not when one considers how many times per day the operators were presented with the message.
"Luckily," said Ivor, "at that time in their history, IBM provided the operating system as a box of punched cards (source code) that were assembled into executables and so for those interested, one could replace a few or many punched cards and modify the operating system.
"There were magazines that published code modifications for various improvements and as a junior assistant system administrator, a code update that would reduce the operator message to something shorter seemed like a great improvement."
So the next time the system was updated, Ivor made a change. The message text got updated and, in a different module, the length in the print command was set to two.
"Operations staff loved me," he recalled happily, "as now they were presented with 'GO' instead of the lengthy previous status message."
Months went by. Ivor moved on to other projects. He was therefore unprepared when the inevitable phone call came in.
It transpired that something odd had happened to his message. Software updates, you see, were issued every six months and somebody had helpfully fed them into the computer. One update was to the module responsible for printing the status message, effectively backing out of Ivor's two-character speed up.
The operators were a bit alarmed by the output.
"What the hell is that?" demanded the datacenter manager, pointing to the console typewriter.
Ivor peered at the page. Instead of just a cheery "GO", the entire message had been printed. And Ivor had been a very naughty boy indeed.
The "GO" was still there, but was followed by a strongly worded suggestion (in deference to more delicate eyes) that the operator might like to, er, go away.
The message had been repeated over and over again.
"It seems the latest update had replaced the print command with one with the original message length, but my replacement message which had never seen the light of day due to a truncated print command message length was now exposed to all."
Ah, the delight of receiving a call when a long-forgotten bit of code explodes in a user's face. Would you have hurriedly solved the problem, or adopted a funny voice and pretended the caller had dialed a wrong number? Confess all with an email to Who, Me? ®
Tomorrow Water, a subsidiary of Korean firm BKT, is aiming to make datacenters more environmentally friendly by colocating them with sewage treatment plants, an arrangement it claims can save both energy and water.
The idea behind the process is fairly simple: heated water from a datacenter can be used to boost waste water processing, cutting energy requirements for that, while some of the treated water then becomes cooling water for the datacenter.
In Korea, Tomorrow Water has now signed a memorandum of understanding with Samsung, Dohwa Engineering, and BNZ Partners to jointly develop integrated datacenter and sanitation infrastructure solutions based on this process, which the firm calls Co-Flow.
Video After some careful study, it turns out the brain of an insect is pretty good at separating signal from noise.
Researchers from the University of South Australia, Flinders University, and Australian defense company Midspar Systems found that to be the case when they teamed up to reverse-engineer the visual systems of hoverflies. Why? To improve acoustic drone detection software.
Specifically, they wanted to use a bug's visual pathways to detect acoustic signals. It's the first time this particular approach has been taken, though insect vision has been used to improve detection systems in the past.
A US federal district court decision in California favoring database biz Neoj4 is incorrect and imperils free open-source software, according to the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Neo4j Enterprise Edition (EE) was at first offered under both a paid-for commercial license and for free under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPLv3). In May 2018, version 3.4 of the software was put under AGLv3 plus additional terms from the Commons Clause license, which is not an open-source license and explicitly says as much in its documentation.
The viability of Neo4j's AGPLv3+Commons Clause license is what's at issue, because taken as a whole, the AGPLv3 includes language that says any added terms are removable. That view has been rejected in court – which accepts Neoj4's right to craft custom terms and to resolve contradictions in those terms – and the Software Freedom Conservancy believes the court erred.
Amazon warehouse workers in New York City voted in favor of joining a trade union on Friday, marking the first-ever successful union campaign against the tech giant in its history.
The election was held by staff at Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York: 2,654 votes were cast by the facility's workers in favor of joining the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) versus 2,131 votes against the move. About 8,300 in total were eligible to vote, and the results need to be signed off by US labor officials. The White House applauded the outcome:
GitLab on Thursday issued security updates for three versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that address, among other flaws, a critical hard-coded password bug.
The cloud-hosted software version control service released versions 14.9.2, 14.8.5, and 14.7.7 of its self-hosted CE and EE software, fixing one "critical" security vulnerability (CVE-2022-1162), as well as two rated "high," nine rated "medium," and four rated "low."
"A hard-coded password was set for accounts registered using an OmniAuth provider (e.g. OAuth, LDAP, SAML) in GitLab CE/EE versions 14.7 prior to 14.7.7, 14.8 prior to 14.8.5, and 14.9 prior to 14.9.2 allowing attackers to potentially take over accounts," the company said in its advisory.
A Swiss quantum computing company claiming a world-first discovery has just marked what it believes is one of the largest funding rounds in the history of the quantum tech space.
Terra Quantum announced on Thursday it extended its Series A funding to $75 million, which it said will go toward strengthening its offerings in cryptography and cybersecurity.
Alongside its funding announcement, Terra also mentioned a recent breakthrough it says it had in its ferroelectricity research, which it claimed will be key to further miniaturization of electronics.
Deepin version 20.5 is the latest "Community" version of one of the best-known Chinese Linux distros, and shows an interesting blend of technological influences.
The Debian-based distro is from the UnionTech Software Technology Co (Chinese language only) in the People's Republic of China, however, it supports multiple languages and can be installed and used entirely in English.
Microsoft's attempts to have a 2021 lawsuit's claims regarding anti-competitive practices struck out were this week contested in UK courts.
During the hearing on March 30-31, counsel for ValueLicensing requested Microsoft's applications be dismissed. While the software giant appeared to accept that there were issues around competition law to be tried against its US and Ireland operations, its lawyers reckoned there weren't reasonable grounds for a claim against its UK tentacle.
According to legal website Law360, Microsoft's lawyers said in court that its UK tentacle just marketed the licenses and "nothing else."
British police have charged two teenagers as part of an international investigation into the Lapsus$ cyber extortion gang.
The boys, aged 16 and 17, are set to appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court on Friday, according to the City of London Police, the force responsible for the capital's financial district.
Detective Inspector Michael O'Sullivan said the pair remained in custody.
IDC forecasts that spending on compute and storage systems for cloud infrastructure will grow 21.7 percent this year compared to 2021. Spending on public clouds is also expected to pass that of non-cloud infrastructure in 2022.
The research firm made the predictions as part of its latest Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment report, which follows the proportion of compute and storage hardware products that are being sold into cloud environments.
IDC found that in 4Q21, total spending on cloud infrastructure increased 13.5 percent to $21.1 billion compared with the same quarter in 2020. This was the second consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth, with IDC noting that the ongoing supply chain constraints have depleted vendor inventories over the past several quarters, which means that pent-up demand will likely lead to more growth in future, so long as the supply chain can keep up.
Feature Like so many stories in the history of computing, it involves Xerox. Scientific Data Systems was sold by Xerox to IBM as part of a hardware deal. When Big Blue canned a related software project, a group of five German engineers saw an opportunity.
Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther, all from Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, thought that businesses would be able to see functional company data as they are working, rather than waiting for hours for punchcards to be punched and read as was the fashion at the time. On April 1, 1972, SAP was born.
Celebrating its 50th birthday, the German company is now the largest European business technology firm and, until recently, the highest valued company on the German stock exchange.
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