Posts by Gene Cash

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

Re: I won't shop at a small site

I've had too many friends with funds either frozen for months or outright taken by Paypal to ever trust them.

You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

Re: We hear these stories all the time

> I'm pretty sure most of the people I know are racist, but they're pretty sure that they're not

I was raised by horribly racist relatives in a podunk shithole in the Deep South. They thought "Roots" was a comedy, and Kunta Kinte was too uppity and needed to be beaten again. That was the point I realized something was wrong and started trying to get out of there. I think I was 14. My grandfather used the "n-word" at least 3 times a day. My grandmother swore "well, I'll be John Brown!" and JB was a famous abolitionist.

I'm probably pretty racist but I try not to be.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

> My ex-wife had the exact opposite effect

She wasn't named Margaret Dresden, was she?

Christmas tinsel and cats

I don't know about the UK, but xmas tinsel is long thin metal strips here.

Anyway, I was once treated to the sight of a cat coming up to sniff the tinsel, and it swung over to her nose, emitted a sharp snap, and swung back. Cat evaporated.

Mondrian

It took me over 30 years to figure out what that art style was called... and it was because of a girl's dress in a web comic. One of the forum users called it the "Mondrian dress" and I had to Google that.

Apple: We're defending your privacy by nixing 16 browser APIs. Rivals: You mean defending your bottom line

Gotta agree with Apple for a change

By the size of Google's temper tantrum, you can absolutely bet they're using this for fingerprinting.

None of those APIs are necessary in a browser.

Come glide with me: Virgin Galactic gives Unity some fresh air, looks forward to rocket-powered flight

Behnken is not a NASA astronaut

He's employed by SpaceX, not NASA.

Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Comcast to handle DNS-over-HTTPS for Firefox-using subscribers

So how does Comcast handle NXDOMAINs?

Will they inject a fake response and ads like Spectrum/Brighthouse & Cox does?

Russia returns to space tourism and offers a first citizen spacewalk

"becoming the first private citizen in history to experience open space"

Um, Bob Behnken of SpaceX is supposed to do that very soon, as he's slated to do an EVA to replace batteries.

He's a private citizen.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Eating CS students

They should move to the US... one CS student here would last an entire fox family all winter.

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

C-3000Zoom owner here

And it still works. It's got excellent low-light performance, better than anything I have now, and a very intuitive user interface.

I haven't been able to find anything Olympus in the shops for at least 5-6 years.

Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

Fix for 50-mile jollies - raise airline prices

Stop charging $5 for the flight and $25 for each checked bag. Charge what it used to cost back in the early '80s, $800+ a flight minimum for that 50 mile jolly. Four digits for anything further.

Insist that people adhere to business attire... no more flipflops, shortshorts, and minimal bra top.

Flights will quickly drop to only what's really necessary.

Airlines will be able to serve decent food and provide comfortable accommodations and good service again.

Windows 10 Insider wondering where Notepad has gone? Fear not, Microsoft found it down the back of Dev Channel

Re: Better alternative, skip MS

I thought the command to exit vi without rebooting was "killall -9 vi" ?

Salesforce plans to write Slack integration out of the equation by rolling its own messaging and collaboration app

Yay, another messaging app to be ignored.

Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop duke it out: Only Electron left standing

Re: FeatureDrop

Nah, that'd be a better name for the Mozilla Foundation.

Can't get your Pi fix online? The Cambridge shop's back open for business, Brits

YASPDFV

Yet Another Shitty PDF Viewer (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/59275/U.S.-Gold-Another-Successful-Year-1986/)

Can we stop trying to reinvent the PDF viewer? Everyone has their own installed already, and it's a pain in the ass to spend 5 minutes trying to find the tiny download icon, if it's even there.

I'm sure the museum's time is much better served elsewhere.

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

Re: Security

That sounds like a problem that needs to be kicked upstairs before it's used as an excuse to ruin someone's career.

Management needs to make the choice one way or the other.

At Mozilla VPN stands for Vague Product News: Foundation reveals security product will launch eventually, with temporary pricing, in unspecified places

So does this mean there are Firefox Un-Protected Areas? (FUPAs)

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: New Normal?

Geographically dispersed teams suck balls. (edit: probably after it reaches about 2 dozen people - for really small groups it's fine)

You have to keep in mind which timezone someone is in, people miss important emails/slacks/IRCs/WTFs, and people end up forming cliques in each area, where the Switzerland group knows what's going on but doesn't realize the England/India/US groups haven't been fully informed.

Hayfever in Haymarket, or has Windows sneezed out a BSOD?

Re: I just don't understand why this is supposed to be hilarious

Possibly because Microsoft holds themselves to be the be-all and end-all of personal computing, and that they're reliable 24x7x365 with 99.999% uptime.

So basically this is "you're not" and "you're too full of yourself"

Adobe about to pull the plug on Creative Cloud freebie 'at-home' access for students

On the good side

This teaches kids why cloud "licenses" are a bad thing.

Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops

Re: I have to admit...

Or it wasn't actually a drone. I know there's been plastic grocery bags IDed as drones.

https://i.imgur.com/7lx3aJD.jpg

Bloke rolls up to KFC drive-thru riding horse-drawn cart only to be told: Neigh

Re: So what's with the ban on horse-drawn conveyance in the drive-through?

No idea. There was a McDonald's and a Del Taco in Orlando (Florida) that didn't serve motorcycles in the drive-thru. That's ok, we just got 50-odd bikers together and filled the parking lot for a couple hours, and miraculously they changed their policy. We sent one guy in at a time to get a sandwich so we weren't loitering, we were just waiting to get food.

I've also seen places refuse to serve people on bicycles.

However, in Pennsylvania the Amish will not drive cars, so their horse-drawn buggies are seen (and accepted) everywhere. It's part of their religion, so if you refused horses, you'd have a civil-rights discrimination lawyer on your doorstep in a heartbeat. They live for that stuff.

Intel outside: Chip king Keller quits x86 giant immediately 'for personal reasons'

Non-compete?

So will they be suing him for non-compete? Oh wait, California is smart enough to outlaw that shit. That's why they have Silicon Valley and no-one else does.

When open source isn't enough: Fancy a de-Googled Chromium? How about some Microsoft-free VS Code?

Evidence in the privacy case against Google?

So can the various people suing Google for privacy issues use this as evidence of their pervasive snooping?

Re: Things we turned off

"safe" browsing sends the URL of everything you even think of browsing, to the mothership (Mozilla/Microsoft/Google) so it has a bigger benefit to them than you.

I've gone through about:config and updated the Mozilla URLs in a similar fashion, by munging the end of the hostname.

Yet another beefy BSOD spotted lurking within the walls of US patty pusher

Re: Stuffed full of deliciousness

The easiest way to limit social interaction at Ron's Rooburgers is to use their self-ordering terminals.

They're the only US joint (before the 'rona) to offer such things in working order.

You walk up, tap in your order, pay for it, and sit down. In about 10 minutes, someone brings your food.

Almost no social interaction, thus making the less than stellar food worthwhile for someone that's tired of asking "extra onions please" 4 times and still getting it wrong at other establishments. I'm looking at you, Burger King and Wendy's.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

It's not called Internet Of Twats for nothing.

My refrigerator was 36 years old when I replaced it, and I did that only because all the door shelves were gone. In 1982 the PC had just been introduced. I think the only protocol that's survived that long is TCP/IP itself and the early stuff like FTP & Telnet. HTTP wasn't around for another 7 years.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

They shoot themselves in the foot

So they go on and on about how conventional CPUs should be improved to handle vector calculation... then run their code in an instant on a GPU, which is DESIGNED for massive parallel vector calculation.

This is like saying "you don't need a floating point unit, the CPU should do that" or "you don't need a GPU, the CPU should do that"

I think they should get out of their ivory tower.

Kinda goes without saying, but shore up your admin passwords or be borged by this brute-forcing botnet

My sympathies

to Larry Cashdollar

Google+ replacement ‘Currents’ to end beta and debut in G Suite on July 6th

Re: Another product for google to burn

Hm. What Google products have moved out of beta and not been killed off... there's search, and mail, and... hm... let's see...

Re: Oh, you can opt out. Trust me.

Google sucks... but Apple is worse, so I put up with Android.

I'm rather forced to use their DNS, as my ISP does ad injection.

I've had friends get fucked by "you're not using your real name, so we disabled your account" shit from Google, so with a name like "Gene Cash" I stopped using Gmail.

Google India says Play store policy, not geopolitics, behind removal of Chinese-app-deleting app

> prohibits “apps that merely provide the same experience as other apps already on Google Play"

Really? What about the thousands of generic speedometer apps, or OBD2 apps, or "shopping made easy" apps, or resistor color code apps, or fake caller-id apps, or... well you get the point.

Apps get bit animated: Android Studio 4.0 released with new Motion Editor

I didn't have a minute to launch, and I have a rather elderly i7-3770

It does have to download a lot of things to start, like gradle and other helper tools, so your internet connection has a big influence.

My big issue is the amount of shit that I have to download when I open a project I haven't worked on in a couple weeks. Google updates ALL of the tools/libraries like once a week, apparently, so it has to sit there with about a dozen "downloading..." one after another. So "update hell" is definitely a thing.

Amazon declined to sell a book so Elon Musk called for it to be broken up

Tell people what the goddamn guidelines are

Amazon does have the choice, but not putting the rules/guidelines out there of what's verboten and what's not, is wrong.

If you want people to play by the rules, you need to publish the rules.

And who elected Amazon to be my parent, to decide what I can and can't read?

Edit: stuff does get rejected by publishers all the time because it's crap, but at least you get a letter saying they don't think it's high enough quality to print, not just a generic "rejected" stamp. If Amazon can't put out that much effort, they deserve a beating. It's part of their job.

Have I Been Pwned breach report email pwned entire firm's helldesk ticket system

Re: Now, tell us, Troy

At least we know where little Bobby Tables got a job when he grew up...

Update Firefox: Mozilla just patched three hijack-me holes and a bunch of other flaws

Hahaha, Firefox 77?! I'm still on 43 because they dropped ALSA sound support, fine-grain cookie control, and a whole bunch of other useful shit.

I once met a Mozilla "developer" - I said "oh really? which features are you working on removing from Firefox now?"

For some reason, he stopped talking to me. Darn.

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

My problem with systemd

I just wanted to write a udev script that ran when my camera was plugged into USB, copy the images off it with progress in a window, and exit when the camera was unplugged.

That didn't seem possible with systemd. Trying to correlate the unplug event to the script running the progress window was something it actively fought.

Boffins step into the Li-ion's den with sodium-ion battery that's potentially as good as a lithium cousin

Sodium will react just as vigorously. Throw some sodium metal in water for some fun times.

Publishers sue to shut down books-for-all Internet Archive for 'willful digital piracy on an industrial scale'

Re: But what about...

> Books have been rare, specialist, or out-of-print since forever

Which is pure bullshit, especially in this age of electronic materials.

It trains me to steal.

If I can't get a book because it's out of print, then I'm certainly going to grab what I can get before it does go out of print.

This is why (for example) I have a PDF of John Clarke's "Ignition!". I notice they've FINALLY reprinted it after 30 years. Sorry, too late.

Same with Isaac Asimov's books. Dude wrote over 500 books. How many are still available to buy? Almost none... a handful of his most popular stuff, if you're lucky to find it.

Nice wallpaper you've got there. It would be a shame if it bricked your phone

It's not a problem with validating user input... it's trying to convert a file to a format that it doesn't convert to, and not handing the resulting error.

The original file is a perfectly good JPEG file, and it's not a user error to try to use it as a wallpaper.

They've only gone and bloody done it! NASA, SpaceX send two fellas off to the International Space Station

Re: Long Live Private interprise!

Was NCC-1701 a public Enterprise?

Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way

Re: Crossing the International Date Line/Equator

"How do you get a Starfighter? Buy an acre of land in Germany and wait!"

Did nobody tell them about the lockdown? Logitech releases new 'luggable' mechanical keyboard for LAN parties

Re: No numpad

Did you actually read the part about "fits in a backpack and is easy to carry around"?

Re: How Much?

That's because quality costs. I spent some bucks on some IBM Model Ms a couple decades ago, and I'm still typing on them.

Go buy some cheap chiclet shit if you want. Best Buy has tons of it.

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

Re: ...but does it really "matter" given the state of Humanity?

As a wise man once said:

"You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half of 'em are even dumber than THAT."

Boeing brings back the 737 Max but also lays off thousands

Re: They are to big to fail

> Boeing will start to lose those big contracts

Some say this is why Boeing didn't get any of the Moon lander contract, despite having an attractive technical solution.

Here's an article to back up that opinion a bit:

https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/

Turns out Elon can't control the weather – what a scrub: Rain, clouds delay historic manned SpaceX-NASA launch

Also, TS Bertha was in the way

Tropical Storm Bertha formed the day before, and was right in the way.

It was raining buckets here. I don't see how they got as high as 60% chance.

Rocket exhaust is conductive, so it's a good path to ground which induces lightning, as Apollo 12 found out.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

No, it's not good, and I've used GIMP for decades. GIMP is pretty clunky.