On Call Modes of operation always present a challenge for users. Especially when they invent their own. Welcome to a mysterious On Call with an all-too-obvious solution.

Today's contribution comes from a reader Regomized as "Ivor" and concerns a particularly puzzling support call from a customer struggling with Ivor's software.

It was regarding a PC setting he'd never heard of. We should explain that Ivor worked as a developer and development manager for his employer for well over a quarter of century and would be forgiven for thinking he'd heard it all. But there's always that one ever so special case.

"Your software doesn't work," was the complaint. Simple enough, right?

Maybe not. Ivor explained that the customer "reported our software would only work if the computer was in 'I' mode."

"It wouldn't work in 'O' mode."

Ivor was baffled. "This was the '90s," he said, "and no one could think of such a config option in our software."

There were different modes in the platforms of the era. Who can forget Windows 3.1's "constant crashing mode" (aka "standard mode") versus the "crashes a bit less mode" (aka "enhanced mode") or the MS-DOS MODE command, responsible for setting the mode of operation for printers or the serial interface?

But "I" mode and "O" mode were new to Ivor and the team and they gently probed the increasingly frustrated customer to work out what the problem was.

The customer explained again: "Your. Software. Does. Not. Work. In. O. Mode."

Perhaps this was a reference to the MODE command of the BBC Micro Model B. MODE 0 would put Acorn's finest into 80 column mode while MODE 1 was a bit more graphical. The BBC Micro (along with its successor, the Archimedes) was, after all, only discontinued in the 1990s. So not too far-fetched… if it wasn't for the fact that this software was designed to run on a PC.

The questioning went on and when "we managed to ascertain it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it," the penny dropped.

The customer was referring to a rocker switch on the PC. "To be precise," said Ivor, "the on/off rocker switch."

There's no record of how the conversation with the customer went as Ivor explained that "O" meant the PC was off and just about nothing would be running, not even his software. We imagine that the sentence "'O' is for Off and 'I' is for Idiot" wasn't too far from his mind.

Still, at least it gave Ivor a fresh twist on an old IT truism: "We still don't talk about 'turning it off and on'," he said, "but rather 'putting [it] into 'O' mode and then 'I' mode'."

Ever had a user who such a high opinion of your software that their expectation was that it would run even in the absence of power? How did you reset their hopes and dreams? Share your tale of support shenanigans with an email to On Call. ®

Even as NASA publishes images demonstrating progress in the commission of the James Webb Space Telescope, preparations are being made to ground the Boeing 747-based Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) for good.

The end of operations was announced on April 28, confirming that there would be no more mission extensions for the modified Boeing 747 SP and its telescope. Operations will cease "no later than Sept 30, 2022" once the current mission extension comes to an end.

SOFIA, a joint project between NASA and partners at the German Space Agency at the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), was on borrowed time. Development began in 1996, first light was seen in 2010 and the platform was declared fully operational in 2014.

Atlassian has reported robust figures for its Q3 2022 ended March 31 in which revenues were up, net income was in the red and questions over the recent outage continue to linger.

As a reminder, Atlassian's very own Who, Me? moment occurred April 4 when a script used to deactivate instances of a standalone application instead managed to delete the sites of approximately 400 customers, according to a lengthy explanation by CTO Sri Viswanath.

It took until the end of April 18 for the company to recover everything.

Microsoft appears to be planning a VPN-like solution for its Edge browser judging by a support page for the upcoming feature.

The change is described as a "preview feature." It has yet to show up on our Canary and Dev versions of Microsoft's browser, however.

The theory is that by using the Microsoft Edge Secure Networking functionality, one will be kept safe from miscreants when joining networks that "may not be adequately secure."

Facebook parent company Meta has a new project that's grounded in the physical realm: using artificial intelligence to discover new formulas for green concrete.

Concrete is foundational to modern construction, but the manufacturing process is a huge source of carbon emissions. Manufacturing cement, one of the primary ingredients in concrete, is responsible for around 8 percent of global carbon emissions, which reportedly makes it the largest single industrial emitter. And that's just the cement – lots of other stuff with its own trail of carbon emissions goes into concrete.

Meta, which is currently working on eight datacenter projects, pours a lot of concrete.

Ransomware groups in recent years have ramped up the threats against victims to incentivize them to pay the ransom in return for their stolen and encrypted data. But a new crew is essentially destroying files larger than 2MB, so data in those files is lost even if the ransom is paid.

The group behind the Onyx operation is overwriting the data in those files with trash data rather than encrypting it, so the data cannot be recovered via a decryption key. Given that, victims of Onyx ransomware attacks are being urged not to pay the ransom.

"There's a big problem: as the ransomware they are using is a trash skidware, it's destroying a part of the victims' files," analysts at the Malware Hunter Team wrote in a tweet. "Would say, no company should pay to these idiots as smaller files decryptable, big they can't decrypt, but they are stealing files too."

Sales of cloud infrastructure services are still expanding by roughly a third every quarter – despite the maturing market – and in Q1 they leaped 34 percent to hit $55.9 billion.

According to tech research firm Canalys, cloud spending was around $2 billion more than in the previous quarter and $14 billion more than in Q1 2021. The top three cloud service providers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – added 42 percent in sales collectively over the last year as their share of the market hit 62 percent.

Although it is more than 16 years since AWS launched as a commercial cloud service, base market growth seems unabated.

Apple is warning that lockdowns of factories in Shanghai due to COVID-19 and industry-wide silicon shortages will hurt its sales by between $4 billion to $8 billion in the next quarter.

On an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the "constraints are primarily centered around the Shanghai corridor" but "on a positive front, almost all of the affected final assembly factories have now restarted."

Cook added: "So the the $4 billion to $8 billion range reflects various ramps of getting back up and running. We're also encouraged that the COVID case count that's been reported in Shanghai has decreased over the last few days."

There are doubts about the future of the new read-write NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, because its author is not maintaining the code, or even answering his email, leaving the code orphaned, says a would-be helper.

It took a long time and a lot of work to get Paragon Software's NTFS3 driver merged into the Linux kernel. It finally happened in kernel release 5.15 on the 31st October 2021. It has received no maintenance since.

AWS shone in an otherwise subdued set of financials from megacorp Amazon last night.

While Amazon.com registered a loss [PDF] in operating income for both its North American and International arms ($1.6 billion and $1.3 billion respectively) and a drop in International net sales, AWS continued to notch up impressive gains, with revenue rising to $18.4 billion for the three months ended March 31 from $13.5 billion in the same period last year.

The performance of AWS will have increased calls for the division to be spun out into its own entity despite protestations from boss Adam Selipsky last month.

As cybercriminals become more sophisticated and their attacks more destructive and costly, private security firms and law enforcement need to work together, according to Interpol's Doug Witschi.

It's tough to argue with either of these two statements. But considering the constant barrage of ransomware-attack headlines, as well as politicians' calls for more public-private threat intelligence sharing, they both begin to sound a bit hollow.

Witschi, the assistant director for cybercrime threat response and operations at Interpol, told The Register about recent successes that the agency's Gateway cyber-threat intel sharing project has had, and the increasingly well-funded, targeted attacks that law enforcement agencies are trying to prevent. 

Google's Deepmind has published a paper proposing a family of machine learning models with the aim of doing more work with far less costly and time-consuming training.

The upside of that is, the tech giant claims, massive cost savings as training is quickly becoming prohibitively expensive. The downside is that it's no small task to combine visual learning with a language model.

The model family, called Flamingo, is a few-shot visual language model (VLM) set of distinct software systems (versus a more monolithic model like GPT-3, for instance). Google's Deepmind team says it outperforms all previous few-shot learning approaches, even those fine-tuned with orders of magnitude more data. 

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