Posts by TeeCee

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

You do know that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness?

(The second sign is a saxophone solo in the middle 8)

Ever felt down after staring at your phone late in bed? It's not just you – mice do too

It was probably a bit bloody stupid to swap all the usual red power/standby LEDs for blue ones then.

You know, like world+dog has done over the last few years because "oooo, is new LED colourz ,yes, shiny shiny?" trumps common sense every day.

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

Australian-born...citizen of Antigua & Barbuda...lives in Surrey...

Dunno why he doesn't just insist on being paid in Bitcoin to dodge tax.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

It could be TURNED OFF???!!!???

There's somebody I once knew who, if I ever run into him again, is getting a kicking.

Nostalgia is available here.

SpaceX Crew Dragon docks at International Space Station

Even the aircon worked...

...and no inconveniently invisible articulated trucks to avoid en route, so the autopilot worked too,

Re: Why the delay?

From experience, the most likely explanation is that despite being expected and on schedule, everyone indoors was asleep and it took three hours to wake the bastards up to open the door.

They can't just drop a "sorry we missed you" card and bugger off like everyone else who finds that they're delivering to inconsiderate idiots.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

As one who used to tour the globe doing that sort of stuff...

...there really is nothing like proving beyond a shadow of doubt to a local boss that his staff are a bunch of lying little shits.

Bonus revenge points for Germany or France as they're culturally only too ready to cast aspersions elsewhere at the drop of a hat. -ve points for Italy as that'd be like kicking kittens for fun.

Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way

Two wrongs may not make a right, but three lefts do.

Re: "turning left by turning right through 270degrees."

The undoubted Dog's Bollocks of commercial flying.

None of the crews they put in a simulator afterwards, given the same situation, got anywhere near landing the thing so 184 survivors is up there with loaves/fishes and water walking as miracles go.

They actually got it on the floor intact, but couldn't keep it on the runway as they had no rudder control. All the damage was done when it veered off and rolled.

Personally I reckon gear up into the adjacent cornfield was a better bet, but....(!)

No, no, the other left.

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Hang on...

So there's an open source product.

Someone else takes open source product and modifies it to suit.

They then publish the full source of "their" version.

Isn't that the way it's supposed to work? None of the licenses seem to support the notion that you have to kiss the original author before you fuck them.

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Surely "shrink foil" is the correct product?

Make it into a hat, stick it on your head and it tells you why you'd be idiotic enough to want 5G protection because of your relationship with your mother.

Re: Paris... because...

...and the Devil's Handbag will not suffice because...?

I've got me a stalker! Obsessive downvoter alert!

Re: I've got me a stalker! Obsessive downvoter alert!

It happens. Piss off the wrong types and everything you've posted on an article that appears on the main pages will aquire a downvote.

Have a riffle back through your recent posts and find the one guaranteed to offend some True Believer In The Faith[1], no matter how accurate it was.

[1] Freetards, Openistas, Fanbois, Nazis/Marxists, etc...

Gone in 9 seconds: Virgin Orbit's maiden rocket flight went perfectly until it didn't

...planned its first operational mission in a matter of months.

God forbid that anyone would actually plan for time to fix stuff found in testing and retest, that would just be silly.

I sometimes wonder what Project Managers think testing is for, apart from being that inconvenient obstruction to hitting their deadlines of course.

Boeing brings back the 737 Max but also lays off thousands

Re: "more than a dozen initiatives focused on enhancing workplace safety and product quality"

You mean they can decline more than they already have?

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

The Anandtech review of that CPU is a scream. Opens with some blurb about how odd it is to see a premium priced processor from AMD, then puts it up against Intel's top end i9.

The summary starts with; "I don't like to use the word 'bloodbath', but...", then goes on to rub salt into the wounds by pointing out exactly why you'd be mad to consider the Intel product. Finally closes with a message to Intel that , if they were thinking of cobbling something together and rushing it out to compete, tough shit 'cos AMD have a 64 core one about to ship.

It probably sucks even more for Intel that their most puissant offering got its clock cleaned even when setup in the "please pwn me" mode of Hyperthreading on.....(!)

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Even a stopped clock is occasionally right. But then, immediately wrong again.

What made Rahman special is that he was continually mentioned in Private Eye over the years.

IIRC he even threatened to sue and got the Arkel v. Pressdram response, which is shorthand for "Feel free, hope you've got deep pockets as we can prove every bloody word.".

OI! KETTLE!

You're black.

Signed Pot.

Seriously. Bullshit on [email protected] is an issue? Why now? Makes more sense to just remember that absolutely everything on [email protected] is somebody's opinion, no more, no less and thus extraordinarily likely to be opinionated bollocks.

If someone could stop hackers pwning medical systems right now, that would be cool, say Red Cross and friends

Slight snag.

I'm pretty sure that those doing this are already breaking quite a few rules and adding more for them to break won't slow them down.

Record-breaking Aussie boffins send 44.2 terabits a second screaming down 75km of fiber from single chip

Missed a bit.

...dropping to 39.2 Tb/s and 39.0 Tb/s for the lab and field-trial transmission experiments...

...and about 20Mb/s when deployed by Virgin.

To test its security mid-pandemic, GitLab tried phishing its own work-from-home staff. 1 in 5 fell for it

Well, obviously.

...click rates vary from 7 per cent to 45 per cent, depending on the survey.

Ask people if they would click on an iffy link and presto, a whopping 93% of them say; "Oh no, not me, I'm way too smart to do that.".

Send them an iffy link and there's yer 45%.

Also:

Many moons gone around these parts there was a story on how Mozilla, having sent their user base a prompt to update their Flash plugins, were bemoaning the fact that only 35% of them had bothered to do so. A shade over six months later there was (inevitably, as I saw it) another story on how a coincidental 35% of FF users had been pwned by a fake upgrade.

The software bots are coming, the software bots are coming: Microsoft swallows UK automation minnow while dreaming of low-code apps

Re: Cough

As far as I am aware, Skype is still with us, still working, still bulletproof and also built into Office / Teams.

Unfortunately, it lacks the UI candy of the ludicrously insecure Zoom so, as Joe Bloggs doesn't give a flying fuck about security but loves shiny and wants its babies, that's where the sheep have gone en masse.

We really doing this again? Rumour has it that Apple is nearly finished developing augmented-reality glasses

Re: John Prosser?

But they're AR glasses, you have to build AR glasses.

Hey Siri, are you still recording people's conversations despite promising not to do so nine months ago?

Hmm.

Any time Siri heard something it couldn't understand...

If that is the only time it saves a recording for analysis then I have to say it's probably right to do it. I can't quite see how Apple (or anyone for that matter) can fix their voice recog failures without the sample that failed.

The key element here is how the user is informed. MS ask up front if they can capture errors/ problems to improve the service, so it's an opt in/out for the user, do Apple do this too?

International space station testing Wi-Fi links with incoming craft, with an eye on autonomous docking

Re: Is the robot called Roller?

Are there a lot of things on the ISS that need to be rolled?

Depends how the weed garden in that inflatable podule is doing.

(Because if "smoking weed in zero gee" isn't on your bucket list, it bloody well should be.)

Tech's Volkswagen moment? Trend Micro accused of cheating Microsoft driver QA by detecting test suite

Re: Responsible disclosure is a privilege reserved for the mistake not the misdeed

Besides, anyone would be obliged to publicly disclose that lot. It's just way too bloody funny to keep to yourself.

Rust marks five years since its 1.0 release: The long and winding road actually works

Re: Meh

Which, if most developers actually gave a rat's arse about compiler warnings, might help.

The problem is that "if it compiles, chuck it into testing" is the mantra these days.

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Re: 8.3

Gosh, yes.

If only there were some sort of global network where they could connect to all the world's information, with a search interface on it so they could look this sort of thing up.

We should definitely have that.

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

Internet taxis.

...not drivers...

Really? I guess it must just be incompetence then.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Mouse fixing.

First honest-to-god, gen-u-ine computer fix I ever did was to declag a mouse ball.

As it was an Apple machine, this converted it from the world's most expensive paperweight into a computer. The training company were quite grateful, pushed me upstairs onto a real course and...

Re: problems getting started

....it was me who paid for it, not someody across the room....

So which one of you might be in the market for one?

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

So Russia is parking its tanks on the USA's lawn?

Same shit, different year...

Singapore releases the robot hounds to enforce social distancing in parks

Picture discrepancies.

So it grows a snake's head if it needs to open a door?

What other fiendish devices are hidden inside it, to be deployed as required?

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Ah. The Boss.

One place I joined, the DPM would take each new starter (including myself) and give them The Talk. One part of The Talk was to log into the '38, show the PWRDWNSYS command, point out the the default action is *CNTRLD (IBM-spik for "dies on its arse in a hideously and agonisingly drawn-out manner" as it disables each terminal, subsystem, controller, etc as soon as they are unused), show that we always change this to *IMMED and close with; "But we really don't want to do that now" and CMD-3 to quit.

Years later, I was out on site setting up a '36 and ready to test linking it back home. I called a colleague:

"Ok, all ready here. Can we test it now?".

"Er, no."

"Why the fuck not? I want to finish today and get away."

"The comms subsystem is down."

"Well bring it back up!"

"I can't."

"Er....why?".

"Somebody's down a PWRDWNSYS *CNTRLD."

"WHAT!!??!! What sort of monumental fucking idiot would do that??"

"New starter and the DPM hit the wrong key..."

Microsoft claims AWS has used new JEDI mind trick with secret contract objection filing

...due to his animus towards Amazon founder....

First rule of contract negotiation: Never, ever piss off the bloke who gets to sign the cheque.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

Re: Calling Isaac Newton...

How do you make a Maltese Cross?

Tell him he's not allowed to have an 8GW orbiting laser.

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

Re: User education

I'd be more worried about the possibility of God's boss calling down in a lather with something like: "I need to tell everyone to stop replying to this bloody mail AND IT WON'T LET ME!".

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Redmond Glazing.

Quick Q: Er, why is the Moon emitting carbon? And does this mean it wasn't formed from Theia hitting Earth?

Odd. Anyone curd have got that one.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Re: Experienced tester.

Ours was called Gerald.

He went through terminals like they grew on trees too. Ruddy things would just give up and die once he'd been at them for a while. Decent analyst, great programmer and fucking excellent at breaking things.

Browse mode: We're not goofing off on the Sidebar of Shame and online shopping sites, says UK's Ministry of Defence

Re: Ah...Amazon...why didn't I think of that?.......

Not so. If you look really closely you'll see that the very small print, just under the big purchase button, says "not eligible for Prime delivery".

The gift wrap option is still there though. Yay!

Android trojan EventBot abuses accessibility services to clear out bank accounts – fortunately, it's 'in preview'

So it's "in preview" and yet not also widely deployed globally?

That's Google off the list of potential authors then.

Guess which cloud giant Zoom picked to handle millions more video calls? Bzzt, wrong answer: It's Oracle

...chose to make the recording in what looks and sounds like storage closet.

I guess that even multi-billionaires have to worry about arseholes doing bunny ears behind them.

I'm doing this to stop humans ripping off brilliant ideas by computers and aliens, says guy unsuccessfully filing patents 'invented' by his AI

"...only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application."

Aha! Well there's the problem.

He can't file the patents under his own name as he's a teapot.

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

Ay, cups. We 'ad to gather 'orse droppings from t'coalman's 'orse, mould it into cups wi' our bare hands and put by t'fire to harden.

Weren't no fire mind, but we 'ad t'do it anyway.

Aussie immunology legend consults Twitter for his local off-licence opening hours

You want something really difficult to get and hideously expensive?

Ask for hand-sanitiser cut with orange juice.

China strings up red tape barrier that shows businesses they're better off buying local tech

The CAC did not respond to The Register's request...

Aha! Proof that China is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple.

Escobar lines up COO... for lawsuit: Controversial bendy phone slinger sues exec over 'missing cash, YouTube hijack'

It's always messy when crooks fall out.