Posts by KarlTh

Windows users ambushed by attack on fresh IE flaw

Easy way to mitigate this one...

...as always.

"An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user,"

So don't run with unnecessary rights, just like you wouldn't on any other OS.

Conficker left Manchester unable to issue traffic tickets

@Tom 13

Blame the cretin who agreed to buy shite software that requires Admin privs to run. Hammer the provider until the provide a fix. That's what I do. Final sanction is "tough. Our policy says you can't run as admin. End of."

Having said that, it's usually a case of sorting out the permissions on a few registry keys and system files.

@Tom 13 again

If all else fails, give 'em a second account which has administrator rights but does not have the right to log on interactively. Give 'em a shortcut to "runas /user:domain\adminac ShitSofware.exe" and you're good to go.

Never ANY excuse for people to log in interactively as admin, any more than you'd log into a Linux box as root.

As bloody usual...

...conficker can only infect via USB if the user has admin privs. The message is quite clear. Why the hell were users on a corporate network given admin access?

University emails 'blocked from Hotmail'

Second rule of forums (after Godwin's Law)...

...if you criticise anyone's education, grammar or spelling, you will make a howler yourself:

"Say's it all really..."

Complete FAIL - apostrophe abuse.

Asda clamps down on killer teaspoons

@AC

No, the actions of the private company in this case are indicative of a moron being wrongly in a position of responsibility.

What in the name of all that is holy...

..has the moronic policy of a private company got to do with a "Nanny State"?

Or is "Nanny State" going to join "Political Correctness Gone Mad" and "'Elf and Safety" under the paranoid "country's going to the dogs everything is bad" Daily Mailesque mythology?

US credit card payment house breached by sniffing malware

@KH

Rather juvenile - as soon as anyone posts anything vaguely non-anti-microsoft, the shill accusations start.

This OS wars shite is no more meangingful or sensible than arguing over the relative merits of Star Wars and Star Trek, and I'd be willing to bet a considerable sum that there's a considerable overlap between the overgrown little boys who fight the one war and the overgrown little boys who fight the other one.

Google sponsored links caught punting malware

@Bob

You'd be amazed. Most people don't know how to configure their system and indeed run as administrator. Even in corporate environments where one of two things happen:

1) Lazy admin find it easier that way

2) Pompous management insists they have admin rights, and the culture of demanding it flows down to everyone on a higher grade than the underpaid and underavalued administrators who have to kowtow.

The real joke is all the people who thought they were so clever in turning UAC off on Vista and then running as Admin because UAC was "a pain". A number of chickens are coming home to roost now on that one. This latest IE flaw is a case in point.

Study spanks Adobe Flash for abuses of power

Me too

Really noticed this lately. I have the CPU/Memory gauges on the Sidebar for information, and it's amazing how once you hit a flash animation the CPU runs up to around 30% (dual core 2.4GHz or so) and after a couple of seconds the aircraft take-off noises start. How is that Media Centre can show me full screen telly using less CPU (far, far less, only around 4-5%) than a small animation making a stupid smiley jump up and down? At least when Thing 1 is playing Flash games on the BBC website it's achieving something. Keeping him out of my hair.

Vista SP2 to land in April 2009-ish?

Come on...

UAC asks you once, and once only. It is so much like the way Ubuntu works that I was taken aback when I stuck said distro on a laptop, and yet no-one whines about how "intrusive" being required to re-enter your password to use sudo to do any admin is.

Backward compatibility is tricky. Lots of things don't work on Vista because they used the insecurity of previous versions of Windows - assuming the user had write access to parts of the registry and file system that they shouldn't that there is a balancing act between backward compatibility and improving security.

Rootkit unearthed in network security software

I thought...

...they probably were - once you've got your own code running in the kernel you can make the OS hide anything. But "hidden directory" has a specific meaning within a Windowsbox, so it's a tad misleading. Just wanted to clarify.

What if you slave the drive off another system? Will the unrootkitted OS see it? I'm trying to get an angle on what's being done here.

Hidden folder?

Wouldn't "dir /a:h" handle that?

'Meh' makes Collins English Dictionary

@skelband

So there's a word you've not heard. Meh.

Microsoft retires Windows 3.11 on 18th birthday

@Chris Crosgrove

WfW 3.11 _stable_?

If only!

The intervening years must have faded the memories of the regular GPFs. The most stable OSes I currently find are Vista (yes, really), XP and W2K3. I find various Linux distros slightly less so. Interestingly enough, the Linux guru down the way finds Linux more stable than any of the Windows offerings. Rather than come to any bizarre conclusions I put this down to him being damned good at administering LInux and me being damned good at administering Windows.

And sod the juvenile OS wars once and for all.

But I digress.

Police collar kid for Wi-Fi pinching

@Mark

The bylaw thing is irrelevant. Bicycles on pavements are illegal under English Law. Bicycles are, in law, carriages (as a consequence of the Taylor v Goodwin judgment in 1879) and should be on the highway not footpaths.

@Steve

Ignorance as to the law - that using someone else's Wifi is illegal - is indeed no defence. Ignorance as to *fact* - i.e. thinking the icon one is clicking is for one's own network, is. Moreover, as well as _actus rea_ a criminal offense requires _mens rea_ - the conscious intent to commit an offence.

Immature tech likely to get lucky in credit crunch

Is this

just a complicated way of saying "people without much money are more likely to buy cheap tat"?

In which case I suppose it's "bears shit in woods, pope catholic, more news at 11"

Speed cams ditched in Wiltshire

@Ken Smith

If the things were hidden and unannounced that driver would probably be alive today, because either he'd have been flashed so many times he'd have been banned, or he'd have sobered up and started driving legally.

It's not the cameras that are the problem, but the requirement to make them bright yellow.

This is why

They need to be hidden and unannounced to work. If you knew (as I understand is the case in Germany) that you could be caught speeding [i]anywhere[/i], then people would be more inclined to observe the limits. Or at those who didn't learn would pretty soon get a ban.

But the Clarksons and Suns of this world forced them to be bright yellow so that they became useless. This was the plan all along; make them useless (in the same way that store detectives would of little use if they had to wear Ronald MacDonald outfits and shout "I'm a store detective" every five minutes to be allowed to catch shoplifters), and then get rid of them, fired by the mistaken belief that they are somehow entitled to speed as much as they like.

McAfee update classifies Vista component as a Trojan

@most of the above

Jokes are a lot funnier when they've not been done to death and aren't as predictable as a very predictable thing happening on National Predictable Day exactly how it always does.

MS roll out exploit prediction with Patch Tuesday

Except that

No-one's knickers are in a knot, nor am I a "windoze fanboi". It's just getting a little predictable - any story about Windows, someone posts a totally unrealistic "just migrate to Linux your problems will be over" or similar bit of geeky mental masturbation.

@AC - don't forget Flame 4x: "That May Have Been True In The Past But Recent Linux Distributions Aren't Like That", which frankly I now rank along with the frequent Creationist claims that evolutionary theory is about to be disproven any day now.

Oh dear. Compare Linux fanbois to creationists. Now the flames really will come in. Tee hee.

@Iam Me

Project much?

Look...

If we who use Windows in part or exclusively, just for the sake of argument, agree that Linux is best, we're complete fuckwits for using anything else, and we would instantly migrate except that we're too stupid to know how, would that be enough for you lot to shut the fuck up?

Brits happy to hand over password details for £5 gift voucher

@AC

"you can on a variety of server systems reset a user's password to enable the techie to login with their credentials. However, it's a lot easier if the techie simply asks for the user's password then logs in without changing it."

But any IT manager tolerating or encouraging their techies to work this way should be shot. It undermines the message to users: "You Do Not Give Your Password To Anyone, Not IT, Not Your Line Manager, And Not Julie In Accounts Who's Forgotten Hers Again And Doesn't Want To Wait For IT To Reset It".

VMware renders multitasking OSes redundant

@Mark Honman

"So, in this modern day and age, is it still not possible to configure a Windows server to reliably fulfil more than one task? I ask this because we are happily running a linux box as a combined file/email/intranet server and we all know that proprietary software is supposed to be better."

Perfectly possible; I've got several. It's only vitualisation which leads one to consider one app per machine.

Griffin pitches out-loud music without wires - or speakers

"akin to a pair of desktop speakers."

i.e. the cheap passive ones costing around a fiver and sounding bleedin' awful. Fair enough for the job in question, I suppose, but another nail in the coffin of audio quality delivered curtesy of the portable digital music player.

Royal Society says goodbye to creationism row vicar

You know...

When this story first hit the Reg, I commented that Reiss was not in fact saying anything controversial, and simply was being misquoted by the "teach creationism" headlines - what he was actually saying was "teach why creationism is a load of dingos' kidneys".

And I recall the regular Reg commentors baying for his blood.

And I said "nothing to see here". And there wasn't. Royal Society professor says "teach why creationism is bullshit". Bears shit in woods. Pope still Catholic. More news at 11.

Except that because of the misreporting, and the reaction of many like the Reg commentors, the poor bloke's position in the Royal Society is history.

Too many people acting like Daily Wail readers and reading the headlines instead of the actual story. Too many people thinking with their spleen instead of their brain.

Royal Society: Schools should show creationism 'respect'

@AC

"The Royal Society told the Times that Reiss’ position reflected that of the society, on the basis that “teachers need to be in a position to be able to discuss science theories and explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism isn’t”."

Or, to put it your way, teachers should teach that: "Creationism is a pile of mince. This is *why* it's a pile of mince".

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Ballerinas and fish-gutters beat techies in UK immigration race

@JonB

How does one move to London when the price of one's house anywhere else would buy a cardboard box in Peckham?

Ubuntu documentation in shreds

Hmmm....

Dictionary definition of Linux documentation in general:

Recursion: See "Recursion".

Clever, clever Adaptec

@Mark Lockwood

Verbing evolves language whether it's surly or cheerful.

@Christopher P. Martin

Verbing weirds language. (Bill Waterson)

Vodafone presents punter with £500k phone bill

But wouldn't it be easy enough

To have the following code:

[PseudoCode]

if CurrentBill > 10 * LargestPreviousBill then call MarkForManualCheck(CurrentCustomer,CurrentBill,LargestPreviousBill)

[/PseudoCode]

In the computers? Surely this would get rid of all these million pound gas bills and half million pount mobile phone bills in one stroke. Sure, you'd have to tweak the multiplier which triggers the check, but how hard would it be?

SanDisk touts read-only SD cards for sensitive data

@AC

I think the theoretical difference is that unlike CD-R, you've got more than a whelk's chance in a supernova of reading it after five years.

King Arthur was English 'propaganda', French claim

@bobbles31

1. It wasn't a joke, it was a dig, and a fairly standard dig.

2. Who said I was moderating anything? I merely commented on an observation I'd made.

3. If this were the place, I could point to significant differences between King Arthur and Jesus, but it's not.

@Neil

I don't describe atheists as militant, except for militant ones. One definition of militant could be "uses a discussion of King Arthur to have an irrelevant pop at religion"

@Neil et al.

Has anyone noticed a parallel to Godwin's Law here? Just as Godwin's Law states that the probability of one side comparing the other to the Nazis approaches 1 as a discussion progresses, it is an unfailing Register Law that the probability that one of the resident militant atheists will take a totally irrelevant, and generally completely unoriginal, swipe at religion also approaches 1 as the comments progress.

It's also rather boring.

Warning sounded over black hole in UK physics teaching

@Rob Luscombe

Not an avid reader of the sits vac section of New Scientist, are you? But then since science is not important anyway, you wouldn't be.

Here's the problem

From the title of the article:

"Warning sounded over black hole in UK physics teaching"

then:

"Boffin targets to be missed"

Until the media drops the horrible word "boffin" with all the "white coat socially inept scientist" baggage it carries, few children will want to study science seriously. There will consequently also continue to be a shortage of teachers in the sciences. No-one wants to be a "boffin"; the very word conjures up "people not like you whom you wouldn't want to emulate".

Royal Bank of Scotland takes three weeks to squash nasty Worldpay bug

Worldpay?

I wonder if this is why their server was timing out last night when She Who Must Be Obeyed (yes, some Reg readers can manage relationships with the opposite sex) was trying to buy some fabric.

PC World, Currys staff to be dumped in DSGi rescue plan?

Customer Service stinks

Yup. I had a CD player go wrong from Currys. The manager insisted I had to accept a credit note. Eventually had to threaten their head office with trading standards before I got a cash refund, after an incredibly stupid conversation by Email with their Customer Stiffing Centre.

Even with the famous PC World Premium

I guess the problem is you have to sell a lot of overpriced £15 LAN cables (£5 from Maplin, around a quid by mail order in any bulk) to make up for making next to nowt on flogging cheap Packard Bell computers. Especially since most buyers are savvy enough to tell them where to stuff the "PC Assurance" package.

Ian McKellen to reprise Gandalf

@Alistair

A true Tolkien geek should be able to spell the names right.

I think the Silmarillion would make an excellent TV series. I'm concerned about the possibility of appalling 21st century dialogue in the "original story" one.

Men could have kids with chimpanzees - gov must act

@AC

For God's sake, don't discredit Christianity by linking it with that insane Creationism. The world is 4.6 billion years old, and biodiversity arose by evolution by natural selection. Link your faith with creationist nonsense and you are looking to make a shipwreck of it, because sooner or later you'll realise that the Creationists are taking you for a ride.

Turning to the other side - amazing. In the name of speaking out against religious bigotry, it's been stated that:

(a) religious believers are by definition stupid

(b) religious believers are by definition insane, and:

(c) they shouldn't be allowed to hold office

which is, frankly, an amazing show of bigotry.

I don't know who's worse. The fundamentalist religious mob or the fundamentalist atheist mob. Two sides of the same coin if you ask me: "Agree with me or you're a worthless shit".

US lag sues over prison crash diet

Thank God

Most of the posters here aren't on the jury. Do you routinely assume SUSPECTS are guilty?

Which is irrelevant to the story, which is about how anyone can try to sue anyone. Whether they win is another matter.

VXers slap copyright notices on malware

Surreal

Just surreal. It's like a bizarre comedy universe. You couldn't make it up.

Hellboy helmsman to direct The Hobbit

Why the invented material

When the entire Silmarillion is crying out to be made into a series of films for years to come?

'We could wake up smarter' - Ballmer hints at Win XP reprieve

Something is odd

On the one hand, people are complaining about poor performance on 2GB RAM machines, and yet I'm having no performance issues on 1GB RAM. Discounting all the "I've never used it but I know it's crap" sheeple, and the "it must be crap because it's not Linux" bunch, that leaves a core of people who've found it runs slow on more powerful hardware than mine, which was budget a year ago.

MS need to actually find out what the issue is. My suspicion is drivers.

Ballmer bitch slaps Vista

What am I doing wrong?

I must be doing [i]something[/i] wrong. My Vista box runs fine in 1GB of RAM, yet I keep being told it needs 2GB "just to run".

Still waiting for the Linux lot to tell me what the Linux equivalents of AD GPOs and SMS are so that I can begin to see how I could manage an enterprise full of Linux desktops, without simply buying SLED and replacing one paid for solution for another.

Yeah, MS stinks but it does things I need doing.