Posts by Gene Cash

Spoiler alert: Google's would-be iPhone killer Pixel 3 – so many leaks

> Google killed off the audio port last year

I just bought a not-top-of-the-range Moto G6 because the "higher" models didn't have a jack.

And I'm also surprised to see almost all of Motorola's range have SD cards, and some even have removable batteries.

However, my G6 is SLOW AF. Holy cow, it crawls, compared to my Nexus 6P.

'This is insane!' FCC commissioner tears into colleagues over failure to stop robocalls

Re: The FCC isn't going to do anything that isn't easy

> I use Tasker to do this

I click the thing in my Phone app that says "Filter spam calls" and Google does that all for me.

It's in my Moto G6 running Oreo, and it was in my Nexus 6P running Marshmallow.

I haven't gotten a spam call in about 4 months.

Canadian security boss ain't afraid of no Huawei, sees no reason for ban

Re: I know why they're so confident...

> Before you downvote, consider this: the system actually works pretty well in my experience

That's because (at least in the US) the manufacturer gets his pants sued off, if they're UL-listed and they start a fire. So there's an incentive there to not slack off.

America cooks up its flavor of GDPR – and Google's over the moon

What a shitshow

Completely embarrassed to be an American. As usual.

Some credential-stuffing botnets don't care about being noticed any more

Re: Maybe sites need two factor authentication

I downvoted you because of the ultra-shitty way most sites do two factor authentication.

For example, I got a new credit card from Capital One. Their website needs a code to log in, since it's a new unrecognized computer. Fine.

I have an option to text my phone. However it says it's not my phone... the address/name/phase of the moon doesn't match and refuses to use the number.

I have an option to have it call a number and say the code. However, when it calls, it says "no input was received. good bye" and hangs up.

I have an option to call support, and have them give me the number.

So I call, and it's one of those fucktarded systems that insists on you saying the number, instead of hitting the phone button.

Except it doesn't understand me, and tells me it will hang up on me if I don't choose something.

So you can bet I pounded some numbers, got a human on the phone, and canceled my brand new card.

And that's just the latest in a series of encounters with 2FA.

Re: Fail2Ban works well for this

Fail2Ban has been getting a lot better on Debian. I don't know if that's changes to the core, or patches Debian has added.

A spot of Python in your Azure automation? Step right this way, sir

Re: Python 2 support

I grudgingly moved to Python 3 at the beginning of the year, and it really is a major improvement. print as a function still kicks my ass though.

Biz! Formerly! Known! As! Yahoo! Settles! Data! Breach! Cases! To! The! Tune! Of! $47m!

Re: Didja think we'd get rid of the exclaims just 'cos you're Altaba now?

Not just exclaims, but slightly tilted exclaims

Revealed: The billionaire baron who’ll ride Elon’s thrusting erection to the Moon and back

Re: I watched the broadcast

> It was utterly bizarre

I figured it would be, which is why I avoided it. Musk is awkward at *best* and he's almost as bad of a public speaker as I am (I failed 7th grade because I absolutely totally categorically emphatically refused to do the required speeches to the class)

I may have a couple pints and watch it this weekend.

> Please click on this story

Actually I specifically came to El Reg because I knew you'd have a concise no-hype cut-the-bullshit article with the facts of the situation.

Probably for the best: Apple makes sure eSIMs won't nuke the operators

Re: I can see some of the US networks

> That US network is called Sprint

They're assholes. Which is why they're still the smallest network... out-dicking Verizon is quite the accomplishment.

New MeX-Files: The curious case of an evacuated US solar lab, the FBI – and bananas conspiracy theories

Simple explanation

> The National Solar Observatory's site enjoys a wide and largely unobstructed view of both the U.S. Air Force's Holloman Air Force Base and the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range, both of which regularly host a very wide array of U.S. military research and development programs.

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23582/mysterious-evacuation-of-solar-observatory-overlooking-white-sands-smells-like-espionage

Holloman & WSMR do a LOT of extremely sensitive stuff.

You'll never guess what you can do once you steal a laptop, reflash the BIOS, and reboot it

Linux is far more secure

Linux has built-in defenses against this.

When I put my laptop in sleep or hibernate, it just crashes.

Russia: The hole in the ISS Soyuz lifeboat – was it the crew wot dunnit?

Russian tech workers are NOT paid very much

This sort of thing is par for the course.

There was a Proton that crashed because an accelerometer was installed upside down. You say "why don't they make the bracket so you can't install it upside down?"

Well, they did, and the worker just used a bigger hammer. Literally.

Also, there was a recent grounding of Russian rockets because the engine supplier had used a cheaper metal that wouldn't withstand launch, so they had to go through and inspect and replace all the engines.

I could post 10 or 15 more, and those are the ones I know of, way over here in America, so I'm sure there's dozens more I don't know about.

I'm 100% certain some tech did an oops and said "just JB weld that fucker" because actually admitting the error and getting it done proper would probably mean he'd lose his job.

Re: Zero G

> no loose chips would indicate the ground as a location for the drilling.

Actually, if you watch the vid I linked above, you'll see the standard procedure is to set up a vacuum hose first, to collect the removed debris.

> What's the chance that there is actually a powerdrill on the ISS

Here's a cosmonaut repairing stripped screw on a spacesuit with a drill. It's not even a special PGT, it's an Earth-style battery powered drill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZtxph4Ntqs

Microsoft accidentally let encrypted Windows 10 out into the world

Re: What is the point of the login screen image at all then?

> I hate looking at blurred stuff like that. It makes my eyes hurt, trying to re-focus.

Oh hell yeah, even on the image in the article. I can't imagine it full-screen.

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

Daemons

Some of the Southern Baptists at my university were offended by the UNIX "daemon" terminology.

Seriously.

Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton talks to The Reg about Pi PoE woes

Re: Oh dear, a fan

> the prompt criticality fiasco when I deployed my home-made set-top box

I just don't get my demon cores from Intel...

SpaceX dodges lightning while storms keep Japan earthbound

HTV-7

The real problem is that

1. the spacewalking astronauts are scheduled to come back down on Soyuz on Oct 4, so there's kind of a hard deadline there and time's getting tight.

2. The ground needs to use the robot arm to pre-position the batteries for the spacewalk, which takes 3 or 4 days. That's bumping up against the time left too. If the flight docks by the 16th, which is the earliest possible now... then they've got 4 days. Tight.

Pluto is more alive than Mars, huff physicists who are still not over dwarf planet's demotion

Not University of Florida

Philip Metzger is with University of Central Florida - much smarter boffins!

Tesla's chief accounting officer drives off after just a month on the job

Re: All this, with real competition finally on the horizon

> Mercedes Benz just announced their intention to spend $12 billion

Which makes Musk ecstatically happy, as that's one of his prime goals. To get EVERYONE making EVs, not just Tesla, and hopefully cut down on ICE production. As far as he's concerned, the more, the merrier.

Post-silly season blues leave me bereft of autonomous robot limbs

ONE extra arm?

You need two, to be symmetrical! Plus it helps with the heavy lifting...

It's been 5 years already, let's gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's bloodbath

I still have my N810, and the apps I wrote live on in my Nexus 6P.

Maemo/Meego/Meego was half-assed. It was stole a lot from Debian, but without the benefits of things like apt. To upgrade to the latest, you wiped the device and installed new firmware. The API was kind of a confused nightmare inherited from a bunch of sources.

Starting to develop in Android Eclair was such a breath of fresh air and it was obvious Android was "it"

NASA 'sextortionist' allegedly tricked women into revealing their password reset answers, stole their nude selfies

Re: And service providers...

And stop treating my home town like it’s some kind of secret ESPECIALLY if you're not accepting anything under 8 characters!

Retards.

Voyager 1 left the planet 41 years ago – and SpaceX hopes to land on Earth this Saturday

My oldest application still running and in use

Do my apps for my Palm, written in 2002 and ported to my Android phone, count? This means I have continuous electronic banking records since 1998.

ITAR

SpaceX is an "infamously tight-lipped company" because the US Gov't will give them an ass whipping over ITAR if they release any actual information.

Indeed, there are European space companies making a living with products that are specifically not American-sourced and thus don't have to deal with ITAR.

It's sad because I have fascinating space books from the '50s-'80s that have far more detail than anyone would show today.

And we wonder why no one is excited about space today, when all you can talk about is boring stuff.

Canny Brits are nuking the phone bundle

Would love to see the US version

I am PAYG since that's the only deal that offers only 100 voice minutes a month, but a ton of data, since I don't make calls, and is just $30/mo, which is less that 1/6th of my Verizon bill. Yes, I was paying $190/mo WITH a corporate discount!

A couple months ago my T-Mobile SIM was so old, I needed to get a new one. The guy's eyes popped out of his head when he saw how long I'd been PAYG with them. He even said "thanks for the loyalty"

Huawei Mate 20 Lite: A business mobe aimed at millennials? Er, OK then

Re: castrated

> I can count the number of times I've recorded video on my current phone on zero fingers

I can count the number of times I've made a phone call on my current phone on zero fingers.

> Which is why sales of GoPros have fallen off a cliff?

That's probably more to do with the fact that the current GoPros, and especially the associated app you need to use them, are shite. Expensive shite.

Thousands of misconfigured 3D printers on interwebz run risk of sabotage

Set 'em on fire

Some of these cheap Chinese printers have the firmware's thermal protection disabled (Anet A8 for instance) so they have a distressing tendency to set themselves on fire.

The next revision of the firmware makes it almost impossible to disable the thermal protection.

Microsoft gives Windows 10 a name, throws folks a bone

LibreOffice - printing?

Being able to print LibreOffice documents in Linux would be nice, instead of having to fire up Windows in VirtualBox.

I have a Postscript printer, and still it chokes.

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

Re: Right to be forgotten

> Google continually filters Search

Yup. And right there is where they end up on the short end of the stick. Whole hog or none.

Trainer regrets giving straight answer to staffer's odd question

Re: Laptops cheap, good, qualified, trained and competent workers not.

I'll come work for you, mate! And I'll take 20% off what I'm being paid now!

Or at least I'll buy you a cold one if you're ever on this side of the pond.

Re: you call that Loud :)

Ha. Mainframe line printers have a self-test where you press the button, it thinks for a bit, the fires ALL the hammers.

"Hey, Lyle, this printer's got a fault... take a look here..."

Lyle sticks his head in the printer... KABANG!!

Now snickering tech gets the everloving daylights punched out of him. You could lose hearing that way.

Fruit flies use the power of the sun to help them fly in straight lines

Re: Flying Round in Circles

Why would they fly in a straight line? If they don't, it's some kind of arc, which will probably lead to a circle.

Flying in a straight line is rather difficult.

And it's not going to be a circle either, the flight path will probably end up resembling a bowl-of-spagetti sort of path.

New Horizons eyeballs Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, its next flyby goal

Re: "Artist's impression of New Horizons flying towards Ultima Thule"

No kidding. It looks like the artist was not much older than 8 years old with his first copy of Photoshop...

HTC U12 Life: Notchless, reasonably priced and proper buttons? Oh joy

* Larger screen

* Larger battery

* 3.5mm jack

* SD card

* No notch

* No edge squeeze crap

* Buttons are real mechanical switches

Damn. Sounds like they went right down my shopping list. They might get my business away from Motorola if my Nexus 6P finally dies.

So how invasive is the "HTC Sense skin"? Is it just the launcher? I install Apex Launcher anyway...

Judge bars distribution of 3D gun files... er, five years after they were slapped onto the web

Re: Autoresponder?

You mean something like Ye Olde BBS or FIDONET system?

Uni credential-swiping hack campaign linked to Iranian government

Cobalt Dickens?

Really? That just makes me wonder if these people are serious, or just taking the piss. It lowers their credibility and makes them seem like goofy military fanbois.

Just how rigged is America's broadband world? A deep dive into one US city reveals all

Finally!

I hope they do more of these to get people's attention.

Intel rips up microcode security fix license that banned benchmarking

Open source works

Debian kicked up a fuss, and Intel fixed the license. That's good news for a change.

> "You can't expect every lawyer to understand CPUs,"

No, but I'd sure as hell expect one working for Intel to understand CPUs, no different than I'd expect a lawyer working for Oracle to understand databases. It's a pretty basic requirement to understand your particular business.

Edit: they don't have to be an expert, but "duur, whut's a see pee yew?" isn't acceptable at the hourly rate these guys probably pull.

IBM slaps patent on coffee-delivering drones that can read your MIND

Re: So, Wally works for IBM?

> http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-03-25

Can we submit that as "prior art"?

Facebook pulls 'snoopy' Onavo VPN from Apple's App Store after falling foul of rules

You wouldn't believe how pissy people get when they send me a FB link and I ask "what's the non-fb link?"

There's a lot of businesses too lazy to set up a real website instead of a FB page, which at least shows they're too amateur to get my money. That's a useful indicator, at least.

Don't mean to alarm you – but NASA is about to pummel the planet with huge frikkin' space laser

ESA’s Aeolus gets there first

You mention NASA, but you leave out ESA’s Aeolus with it's own big wind-measuring IR laser?

It's the same bus design as Mars Express, too.

It's designed to measure winds, but the launch was delayed by a day because of uncertain winds. Nice.

Ex-UK comms minister's constituents plagued by wonky broadband over ... wireless radio link?

> "We're sorry to hear about the issues with broadband in Fernham, and we'd like to reassure residents that we’re doing all we can to resolve the matter."

"But how can you say that, when it's obvious you're not...?"

It may be poor man's Photoshop, but GIMP casts a Long Shadow with latest update

Re: Forget the geeky stuff, sort out the user experience.

> yes, space bar is there, but who reads the (...) manual

I think spacebar is pause on just about every video playing software I've seen, including YouTube.

Re: Forget the geeky stuff, sort out the user experience.

> I second the comment about the name

Then there's the idiots running Dia, which is a knockoff of Microsoft Visio. Just try googling for information on that...

Brit Railcard buyers face lengthy, unexplained delays. Sound familiar?

Americans have to envy you...

We don't even HAVE passenger rail, except for a tiny part around Washington DC.

Fix for July's Spectre-like bug is breaking some supers

RDMA?

EXPN?

How's that encryption coming, buddy? DNS requests routinely spied on, boffins claim

Re: whatismydnsresolver.com

> Because someone is stealing most of the packets you sent...Duh

traceroute to whatismydnsresolver.com (139.59.216.17), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets

1 firewall.lan (192.168.1.1) 0.500 ms 0.408 ms 0.397 ms

2 10.106.80.1 (10.106.80.1) 8.364 ms 13.526 ms 14.292 ms

3 ten-0-5-1-6.orld14-ser1.bhn.net (72.31.216.182) 14.278 ms 14.848 ms 14.835 ms

4 ten0-11-0-4.orld71-car1.bhn.net (97.69.193.188) 17.721 ms 17.911 ms 17.893 ms

5 72-31-220-226.res.bhn.net (72.31.220.226) 15.676 ms 16.401 ms 16.388 ms

6 bu-ether44.tustca4200w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.128) 16.581 ms 16.010 ms 20.713 ms

7 0.ae1.pr0.mia00.tbone.rr.com (66.109.1.87) 24.625 ms 20.405 ms 19.757 ms

8 ix-ae-23-0.tcore1.mln-miami.as6453.net (63.243.152.105) 25.569 ms 25.283 ms 24.998 ms

9 if-ae-1-2.tcore2.mln-miami.as6453.net (63.243.152.62) 250.751 ms 251.369 ms 249.845 ms

10 if-ae-3-2.tcore2.dt8-dallas.as6453.net (66.110.72.6) 251.330 ms 250.886 ms 251.073 ms

11 if-ae-34-2.tcore1.lvw-los-angeles.as6453.net (66.110.57.21) 249.765 ms 249.741 ms 250.536 ms

12 if-ae-2-2.tcore2.lvw-los-angeles.as6453.net (66.110.59.2) 252.348 ms 251.887 ms 250.691 ms

13 if-ae-7-2.tcore2.svw-singapore.as6453.net (180.87.15.25) 246.532 ms if-ae-7-2.tcore2.svw-singapore.as6453.net (64.86.252.39) 247.869 ms if-ae-7-2.tcore2.svw-singapore.as6453.net (64.86.252.37) 247.178 ms

14 if-ae-2-2.tcore1.svw-singapore.as6453.net (180.87.12.1) 245.922 ms 247.742 ms 246.338 ms

15 if-ae-11-2.thar1.svq-singapore.as6453.net (180.87.98.37) 247.035 ms 247.249 ms 246.797 ms

16 120.29.214.50 (120.29.214.50) 247.502 ms 249.688 ms 250.440 ms

17 * * *

Nice.

Facebook flat-out 'lies' about how many people can see its ads – lawsuit

Re: This is another easy win for Facebook

Chicago's used to that sort of thing... there used to be more election votes cast than there was people in Chicago.