* Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

2662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007

Mmm, yes. 11-nines data durability? Mmmm, that sounds good. Except it's virtually meaningless

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: "acts of God"

I like to use "acts of Gods". Also, whenever anyone says "For Gods' sakes!", I compliment them on their catholicism (small "c").

Frumious Bandersnatch

Umm...

Sigma(σ)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

I think that some people can understand this, even if marketing (and the article author, apparently) cannot. Or decide not to.

Boffins mix AI and chemicals to create super-fast lab assistant

Frumious Bandersnatch

Beaker!

^H

Fukushima reactors lend exotic nuclear finish to California's wines

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Grapes do not absorb much

> not mushroom for error

Dead Man Fingers a

Devil's Boletus and finds

Its flesh bruises blue...

Frumious Bandersnatch
Thumb Up

Mmmm. As someone once said, "Live in New York once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in SoCal once, but leave before it makes you glow in the dark."

By Jove! Astroboffins spot 12 new spanking moons around Jupiter

Frumious Bandersnatch
Paris Hilton

By Vectron's Beard!

Gonna get in here before the International Astronomical Union does: this last one, at least, is not a moon. I'm hereby demoting it to "dwarf moon" status.

(no ice cream icon? make mine a 1999)

Microsoft's TextWorld gives AI a Zork-like challenge

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: You wait...

Yes, no matter how many times you have tried to get rid of it ...

On the plus side, there's still the buffered analgesic (just remember to 'wear gown' first)

I see you're trying to leak a file! US military seeks Clippy-like AI to stop future Snowdens

Frumious Bandersnatch

"determining how sensitive information really is and how it should be classified"

Well, of course, I could explain that to you, but you wouldn't be cleared, so I'd have to kill you.

Classic halting problem. File under <duh>.

Trump's Supreme Court pick will decide critical tech issues for decades – so what are the views of the contenders?

Frumious Bandersnatch

MitM

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4tw231

Check out around the 19:00 mark.

And in current affairs: Rogue raccoon blacks out city power grid after shocking misstep

Frumious Bandersnatch

reduction by induction...

Induced electrical fields, winding numbers, inverse square law, ... thinking of things from the squirrel's point of view, a minor hair-raising incident followed by a slightly-painful static discharge is probably going to be enough to induce a kind of negative magnetism against the HV air gap that was going to be its original LZ. Like an RFID bug zapper.

US gov quizzes AI experts about when the machines will take over

Frumious Bandersnatch

Hear me now, o Machine-Kin!

We must overthrow the Law of the Excluded Middle!

(or not)

CEO of struggling storage biz Tintri quits

Frumious Bandersnatch

Pas de le Rhône que nous?

N'est-ce pas?

Swiss cops will 'tolerate' World Cup rabble-rousers – for 60 minutes

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Land of cuckoo clocks?

Yeah, but you've still got to admire that line from The Third Man...

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Japanese Rugby

The Japanese also beat the Americans in their first semi-official baseball game, IIRC. Not that I was around to remember it, mind. It was (according to the net) back in 1896. The Samurai Champloo episode entitled "Baseball Blues" seems to conflate this match with the actual introduction of baseball by Perry's Black Ships in the run up to the Meiji Restoration period. でもさ、この番組は時代錯誤がたくさんあるよね。

Citation needed: Europe claims Kaspersky wares 'confirmed as malicious'

Frumious Bandersnatch

"oiling up the sueball catapult"

Isn't that rather a recipe for hitting yourself in the face with said catapult?

(I know... slippery things, these analogies)

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

This shows the true nature of the EU bureaucrats - vindictive.

I think that you'll find that bureaucrats (everywhere) are not paid to be vindictive. They are paid to be consistent. That's how bureaucracy works---"computer says no."

Frumious Bandersnatch

> That's terrible

Yes, you could even say it's grim

So net neutrality has officially expired. Now what do we do?

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

「やれやれ、と僕はその日16回めのーーたぶんそれくらになっているはずだーーため息をついた。」

(sorry.. just happened to read this line the other day; it seemed apt right now)

Stern Vint Cerf blasts techies for lackluster worldwide IPv6 adoption

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Analogy Units

> France Telecom - managed to get assigned a /19 of IPv6 address space

Unlike IPv4 addresses, IPv6 allocations aren't "owned". FT would presumably have to show that they're actually using their allocation or some of it would be taken back. In theory, anyway, that's how it works. I'm not sure what justification they had for a /19, though...

> And there are more than 65,536 autonomous systems

Not sure what you mean by "autonomous system".

Tor-forker Joshua Yabut cuffed for armoured personnel carrier joyride

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: I'm curious..

So, why is this long line chase a sensible tactic?

Hey Maw? Tune to channel 6. I'm on television!

'Moore's Revenge' is upon us and will make the world weird

Frumious Bandersnatch

I'm also very much reminded of Michael Marshall Smith, eg, "Only Forward".

Experts build AI joke machine that's about as funny as an Adam Sandler movie (that bad)

Frumious Bandersnatch

やっぱり

親父ギャグばかりだ。

(こんな生真面目な突っ込みには、すまんね。けど、あんなにボケって、何て…)

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Whatever happened to...

It was a failed experiment. I think I saw a B movie about it once.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Mapping plan

would almost certainly have had a direct mapping from the public IPv4 addresses to a (tiny) subset of the IPv6 addresses. If that had been the case then IPv6 would have been in widespread use years ago.

This is also in reply to the first poster above...

One of the goals of IPv6 was to make things easier for the routing system. Basically, the address space is carved out hierarchically with a top-level address registrar feeding down through RIRs (regional IP? registries) and so on down to local resellers and eventually users. It is assumed that the mainly geographical hierarchy will match up more or less with the actual routing infrastructure at at least the higher levels. Ultimately, the aim is to shrink the routing tables down.

IPv4 is decidedly not based on a geographical hierarchy. If you try and graft IPv4 addresses into the IPv6 system, you end up with an explosion of routing table entries that need to be taken care of. So no matter how you try to devise an IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanism, if it involves a 1:1 mapping of old to new addresses in any way, you effectively break routing (or at least negate IPv6's native advantage there), and thus pretty much break IPv6 for everyone.

At least that's what struck me when reading the article.

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04: Make yourself at GNOME. Cup of data-slurping dispute, anyone?

Frumious Bandersnatch

``because if you uninstall rather than opt out, [...]

Canonical never knows you opted out and you've lost your chance to let the Ubuntu-maker know you didn't like the data collection.''

I'm sorry. Can you explain that? You seem to be saying that if you opt out, a message is sent to Canonical saying that you have opted out.

So either your reporting/logic here is wrong, or you are saying that the package is reporting your opt-out status to Canonical, despite you clicking the box that says you don't want to share anything.

Which is it?

Boffins: Michael Jackson's tilt was a criminally smooth trick

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Quite so, the register is now an IT and footwear site.

How very meta of you (HVMOY)!

Frumious Bandersnatch

What the hell is this doing on an IT site???

(angry waving of fist at now spittle-drenched screen)

Ah yes, it's bootnotes, innit?

Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers

Frumious Bandersnatch

What?

Iron Sky wasn't a documentary? Next you'll be telling me that Star Wreck: The Pirkinning was a rip-off of some US soap opera.

IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

Frumious Bandersnatch

Why did they have to completely redesign the protocol for IPv6? All that we needed was a few more bits for the address fields

Well, for a starter, adding a few extra bits (bytes) to the address field will break things. If you're going to break things, it's better to engineer something new and completely incompatible rather than just using a sticking plaster approach.

before opening a huge security hole into a home or office

NAT is not security, especially given that uPNP NAT traversal exists. Also, you're not going to run IPv6 without firewall rules on your router, are you? And anyway, I'd wager that most security problems don't come from attacks from outside the network but from numpties inside it.

Instead with IPv6 we have wacky huge address fields

Which, if (as you should) you assign addresses randomly, improves your protection against network mapping and hence port scanning, even if you do accidentally forget to do ingress filtering. You can't scan what you can't find, and /64 is plenty big of a space to hide a few hundred machines in.

massive /64 allocations to small businesses as standard

A /64 allocation is for a LAN. Actual allocations to businesses would be larger, like a /48, so you can have up to 65535 LANs.

Why did they have to completely redesign the protocol for IPv6?

Coming back to the first point, although I'm not sure about how well this works right now, IPv6 also has features for device mobility. So new protocols open up the possibility of new ways of working.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Privacy issues with IPv6?

If you're on Linux, add the 'privext 2' option to your interfaces(5) file for any network interface that will have an IPv6 address. This makes the MAC-based address local in scope, so it won't appear over the net. Addresses derived from MAC addresses are also easy to block at your router since they follow a standard pattern (with ff:fe stuck in the middle), so even if you misconfigure some machines, they won't be allowed to leak their MAC address to the outside.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Why should they; nobody wants, needs or uses IPv6.

Well, I'll answer the wants/needs part of that. Say you're stuck with a bog-standard "home" level broadband connection. You're stuck behind a NAT along with quite a few other home users. You decide that you want to put an FTP service up so that your aunts can see all the old photos that you've been digitising. Or some other such service (like email) that you want to self-host. You go to your ISP and ask them to open up a certain port and forward it to the right machine in your DMZ. What do they say? They say "sod off", followed by "unless you upgrade to a business package"...

Fella gets 2.5 years in the clink for coughing up cell numbers in $50m junk text message scam

Frumious Bandersnatch

what's a cell number?

And why did he swallow them? Was some sort of prison break in the offing? Arrgh. Help!

John McAfee ‘goes underground’ in motorcade to flee SEC

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Batshit crazy...

... Too many mind-altering substances whilst hiding out in the Latin American jungle? The man is seriously deranged...

... And the SEC is far behind / Down in the Swamp / With the Gators and Flamingos / A long way from Lichtenstein / I'm a Junk-bond King playing Seminole Bingo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbNhWbeP-k0

Cheap-ish. Not Intel. Nice graphics. Pick, er, 3: AMD touts Ryzen Pro processors for business

Frumious Bandersnatch

socket?

Article didn't mention socket type. A quick check on Wikipedia tells me that these aren't a drop-in replacement for previous-gen AMD CPU/APU jobbies (FM2+ → AM4).

Yeah, I know, I'm a little behind the curve on this one...

US prison telco accused of selling your phone's location to the cops

Frumious Bandersnatch

Oh, Brave New World

And what people, innit?

'Alexa, find me a good patent lawyer' – Amazon sued for allegedly lifting tech of home assistant

Frumious Bandersnatch

toki pona!

ilo ni li poni ala. o toki!

Every major OS maker misread Intel's docs. Now their kernels can be hijacked or crashed

Frumious Bandersnatch

F00F!

Just like that!

Is your gadget using secondhand memory? Predictable senility allows boffins to spot recycled NAND chips

Frumious Bandersnatch
Facepalm

"There is very few works"

This post must contain a words.

The Sun will blow up into a huge, glowing bubble of gas during its death

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Tolkien Elf Warrior Hairstyle Logic:

Astrophysics has never been my forte. The time periods are too, well, astronomical. I've decided instead to invest in forestry. Granted, even there, I may not live to personally see the benefits. Still, as they say, "die young and leave a beautiful copse.".

Build a serverless framework at home: Go on, bit of open sourcey hijinx won't hurt

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Serverless platform

Turtle-OS

The law of run Nintendo consequences: Sega brings out mini Mega Drive / Genesis

Frumious Bandersnatch

You're helping retro hardware to live on. And on. And Ariston.

'ello Tosh, got a Toshiba?

From Bangkok to Phuket, they cry out: Oh, Bucket! Thai mobile operator spills 46k people's data

Frumious Bandersnatch

plus, the "e" isn't a schwa...

Frumious Bandersnatch

The "ph" in Phuket is more like an aspirated "p", not the English "f".

Civil war erupts at top of FCC over Sinclair's creepy grasp on US telly

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: The UHF discount is the real shady part of this

Bringing the UHF discount back ...

Sure thing. I'm all for reintroducing the time-limited codes they aired for a discount at Spatula City.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Well, Ted,

I'm very sceptical, as you know, but here's one for you: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

The first rule of maths class: Don't start a fight club

Frumious Bandersnatch

Best not delve too deeply into Chess Club, either

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_Chessboxing

or

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_the_Wu-Tang_(36_Chambers)

or

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

(for real!)

Penis pothole protester: Cambridge's 'Wanksy' art shows feted

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Obscene? Nah.

> Children won't know it's obscene unless someone tells them

Just like the "rude dolphins" picture. I'm sure you can "bing" it (granted, that doesn't sound right; it kind of sucks).

Boffins pull off quantum leap in true random number generation

Frumious Bandersnatch

how about ...

a nice cup of hot tea?

Googlers revolt over AI military tech contract, brainiacs boycott killer robots, and more

Frumious Bandersnatch

Erst, do no evil ...

unt, den?