Posts by Michael B.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Hey, Clippy

This just sums up the The Register's commenters now. A reference to something that was dumped 25 years ago is the most liked comment.

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Re: Didn't Boris promise us a space agency?

Huh? The UK Space Agency was setup in 2010 nearly 15 years ago.

International Space Station's out-of-this-world selfie booth turns 15

Re: Great selfie

That's quite deliberate she was a big Voyager fan.

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

Nobody's now as NASA just sent up the previous SpaceX capsule half full so these two astronauts have just taken the place now of the two that didn't fly up.

British arms dealer BAE behind F-35 electronics first in line for US CHIPS funds

Not British

It's not the British company that is getting the money it's BAE Systems Inc which is run at an arms length from BAE Systems Ltd. with a separate board of directors and Inc even has a UK subsidiary.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Re: Firefox and YouTube shenanigans

Ah yes the standard YouTube scam template

$Name was working in $Industry and was disgusted by the practises and left to found their own company. $Name created a $(Faster|Cheaper|More Efficient) Product that is disrupting the profits made by $Industry. $Industry is mad and is trying to get this banned. Buy it now before $Industry gets their own way and get this marvel banned.

Chinese vendor apologizes for claiming Microsoft open source code was its own product

Re: Oh, Surprise.

It wasn't Microsoft that stole the code. It was done by the "San Francisco Canyon Company" who had earlier ported Quicktime from Mac to Windows and was hired to improve the performance of Video For Windows by Intel.

Clearview AI fined millions in the UK: No 'lawful reason' to collect Brits' images

Re: New York

That pretty much means they won't be able to do any business in the UK from now on. They could hide behind that barrier but it would mean that they would have to stay behind that barrier and I'm sure that their investors won't be too happy with a limited marketplace.

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Why would you want to do that? In the full install is:

C++ and libraries for 4 architectures for multiple builds.

Java

Python

R

Node.JS

.Net Framework versions going back to 3.5

4 different .Net Core version.

Android

Unreal

4xWindows 10 SDK

1x Windows 11 SDK

C++ build tools for Linux

Language Packs for 14 languages

Unless you are truly multi platformed then you are just hoarding stuff you don't need.

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

Re: Crazy Idea

No, because what is the definition of social media. Are El Reg comments counted as social media for the purposes of this law? Even if you dislike Facebook et al this could have very dangerous consequences.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Linux Subsystem - Android?

Hang on, I wonder if this whole Linux subsystem malarkey in Windows 10 was really just a prelude to having Android apps all along.

Microsoft: Try to break our first preview of 64-bit Visual Studio – go on, we dare you

GIT interface

First impressions are good, but one change I've noticed that they are forcing through is the new dog poop GIT interface and have removed the old Team Explorer interface.

Microsoft flips request to port Visual Studio Tools for Office to .NET Core from 'Sure, we'll take a look' to 'No'

What about a .Net Framework service?

If Microsoft hadn't been so lazy and not ported WCF and instead relied on that god damn awful gRPC they could have quickly wrapped the external interface in a .Net Framework service and had a .Net Core stub. The performance might have been a bit naff but you could always blame Word/Excel etc. and nobody would have been none the wiser.

It just seems that the MS .Net Core development teams just want to hang out with the cool kids and not do any actual hard work these days. Oooh look it's 0.001% faster shiny shiny.

Here's how we got persistent shell access on a Boeing 747 – Pen Test Partners

Are there any passenger 747s still flying?

At this point it's almost like finding a vulnerability in, say, a Ford Sierra's ecu, vaguely interesting but of no security value at all.

Microsoft kills broad entry-level IT certifications, replaces them with all-Microsoft curriculum

They used to be good.

It's a shame as on the old Microsoft Virtual Academy they used to have some excellent fundamentals courses. I did an excellent one on Machine Learning that had some contact with Azure but was all about the fundamentals first and using it on Azure came a long way in second.

British owners of .eu domains given an extra three months to find a European address

Like Leave.eu ?

Very little helps: Tesco serves up 3-for-1 borkage special to self-scanning Tesco shoppers

These ones aren't that old. They did have a previous generation of hand scanners with a smaller screen that also ran CE so they've probably ordered more so as to avoid a wholescale rewrite.

I was targeted by North Korean 0-day hackers using a Visual Studio project, vuln hunter tells El Reg

Re: Opening some Visual Studio projects can cause code to execute

I'd be interested in how it was done as I knew about build events, but I had no idea about executing code on launching the .sln. It's actually something I'd like to do as I'd love my project to check that depedencies are all up and running.

NHS COVID-19 app is trying to tell Android users something but buggy notification appears stuck on 'Loading...' screen

Re: Google Play Services

Out of interest where do you find that exposure check logged?

Hong Kong's Hutchison Group, which runs mobile carrier ‘3’, protests as USA puts it on new China ban list

Re: Dear World. I'm sorry.

I'm guessing this is why Biden has picked a lot of people who have worked in those departments before.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Re: Re:corruption and idiocy behind the UK government's handling of CV19 will ever come to light

That's probably the truth though. - They don't know how much they've spent.

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

Is it just minified?

I quick look at the home pages and the articles shows that the articles are very heavily minified whereas the "home pages" have very spacious easy to read HTML. The JavaScript doesn't seem to be the fault either as you can run the pages with JavaScript disabled and it looks broadly as it should do.

Remember the days when signs were signs and operating systems didn't need constant patching?

Re: Why Windows?

Microsoft used to do Windows Embedded and now do Windows IOT which definitely suit this better but these probably require some degree of effort to configure properly. it wouldn't surprise me if the computer guts of these are just off the shelf computers with Windows Home.

Boeing Starliner commander Christopher Ferguson bows out of first crewed mission due to family commitments

See John Selwyn Gummer at the height of BSE crisis feeding a beef burger to his daughter and lately we had the deputy head of the FAA flying the Max to prove its safe. Politicians and people in the public eye will take stupid risks to prove something is safe.

GitHub users speak their brains on Microsoft's open-source efforts: ASP.NET shines, but WPF is 'a disaster'

No Entity framework 6 I see in that report

the dev response on that repo there is either F - Off or ignore you completely.

Physical locks are less hackable than digital locks, right? Maybe not: Boffins break in with a microphone

LockPickingLawyer

The headline writer has obviously never seen the LockPickingLawyer destroy lock after promising lock to know that physical locks are absolutely hackable and digital locks are usually far worse.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

Re: So what happened?

It won't make a difference. Just look at what John Selwyn Gummer did during the BSE crisis in the UK in feeding his daughter a Beef Burger in front of the camera.

A tragic postscript is that the daughter of a friend of his did die of vCJD.

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Re: Why is the company still alive?

You'll be able to tell on the seat map as the NG and this Max variant have different numbers of seats.

Uncle Sam prepping order to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch from the UK

The FBI is a part of the DOJ and ICE is under the DHS. They certainly don't have the same bosses with William Barr for DOJ and Kevin McAleenan for the DHS.

Would you open an email from one Dr Brian Fisher? GP app staff did – and they got phished

Re: Do you use one of these popular passwords?

The NCSC actually publish the whole of their top 990k dodgy passwords which should probably be in every web app's banned password list.

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

Re: bigwigs had spent the last year working on ... "numbers totally unrelated to reality"

A quick scan of Wikipedia shows that at least French and Dutch spells it Heroine despite the Bayer name.

If bigger seats and nicer nosh in British Airways' First Class still aren't enough, would sir like to wear some VR goggles?

Re: USB charger

You can buy splitters that allow you to charge via USB-C and listen to headphones via 3.5mm.

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast

Re: Toaster

Nerd hat on. We don't know what ancient Egyptian actually sounded like as they didn't, except in certain circumstances, write down the vowel sounds. (I believe that Arabic is the same.) The closest we can get to it these days is coptic which is the direct descendant of ancient Egyptian, and we do know how to pronouce.

Class-action sueball flung at Capital One and GitHub over theft of 106 million folks' details

Re: GitHub sued over data leak?

How utterly bizzare. Why not sue Stackoverflow then for giving the demo code that they probably used to create the sample code?

GitHub builds wall round private repos, makes devs in US-sanctioned countries pay for it

Re: What do we do now?

That person was voted in with more than 50% of the vote. So he is in that very rare position in British politics that more people voted for him than cumulatively against him.

Virgin Media promises speeds of 1Gpbs to 15 million homes – all without full fibre

My anecdote is that my VM connection is sold as up to 350 and often I get 105% of that. My connection was, until recently, monitored by Sam knows so I know for certain that I got the speeds promised.

Observation: Slow-burn space HAL 'em up fires adventure game genre into the exosphere

Re: No Steam? No Thanks.

Even if the contracts don't allow discounts across multiple stores Epic could have side stepped this with a loyalty scheme, or some form of cashback.

Microsoft doles out PowerShell 7 preview. It works. People like it. We can't find a reason to be sarcastic about it

I too was horrified to see the line

Try the new cross-platform PowerShell https://aka.ms/pscore6

on the powershell console when I logged in. I felt violated and physically sick.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Nope just avoid the 737 Max. That's what I will be doing in future.

Gather round, friends. Listen close. It's time to list the five biggest lies about 5G

Re: China is not using 5G to spy on people

I got Adobe ads, I'll gladly trade you.

QEMU 4 arrives with toys for Arm admirers, RISC-V revolutionaries, POWER patriots... you get the idea

Me too, I just assumed that this had grown naturally out of QEMM.

We don't know whether 737 Max MCAS update is coming or Boeing: Anti-stall safety fix delayed

Re: I'd fly in one today.

The captain was extremely experienced and had 8000 hours, the copilot 200. This is close to what the US required until 2013 when they upped it to the current 1500

The curious case of a WordPress plugin, a rival site spammed with traffic, a war of words, and legal threats

Re: Smart. Not.

I wonder if this is due to the wondrous quote in the wordfence blog from their creative director, who has never heard of the computer misuse act.

“Last year we had some serious problems after someone obtained a huge list of license keys and downloaded all of our products. The keys and files were then distributed on their file sharing site, which has since been taken down (not by us, ironically!). The drop tables function was put in place to try to stop this at the time.”

This is so blatant and open I'd have a hard time believing it is not true. The suing is probably from the rest of the directors once they released what their colleague has done.

Re: Trojan Horse

This has nothing to do with the browser - it is entirely server side in PHP code. Look at the linked Wordfence blog post, its code examples are pretty daming.

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

Criminally negligent is feeding the MCAS system with just the data from the captain's side AoA sensor in order to make the decision! If system had at least read both sides then it could have detected a fault condition and dumped out control to the pilots.

Armor Games admits all its users' deets slurped in database mega-hack as site moves to repair chink

Re: 617 million? Really?

I did read it that way first of all but I think their password database was amongst the 617 million accounts amongst 16 different websites. So the article has no information on the size of the scale of the breach.

Outlook Mobile heads to the White House, passes infosec clearance for federal sector

Re: Thought Outlook Mobile was cloudy and uses Azure even for on-premises Exchange accounts

FEDRAMP is the approval process for cloudy applications that's why.

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Re: bbc quotes

Why would a foreign power waste time and effort inflicting chaos on the UK when we are barrelling headlong into our own self inflicted chaos.

Roll a diplomacy check to win the election: Vote tie resolved by a D20

The die had obviously been properly luck optimised for an upcoming game, and that 20? Well we all know that you make natural 20 rolls when it is most important, and the DM is not looking.

Accenture in doghouse after NHSmail mass outage cuts off 1m+ UK health staff

Re: £1.50 per month

Zero for us this month