Posts by Gene Cash

Torvalds shoots down call to yank 'backdoored' Intel RdRand in Linux crypto

Android

Does anyone know what the Android code does? I know it's weak enough to have compromised BitCoin, but I haven't looked at it myself.

TV's goggle gaggle: EVERYBODY'S first with something at consumer tech feast

XQD

Yay! Another proprietary Sony memory spec! Been a while since the last one.

Five SECRET products Apple won't show today

Camdodian?

Is that a city on Kerbal?

Want the latest Android version? Good luck with that

Re: Does it matter?

No, it shows the disrespect the CARRIERS have for their customers. When I had my Verizon Xoom, I got no updates, despite it being a "Google experience" device. Ditto for my Droid phone.

Since I've bought my Nexus 4 from Google Play, I've had no fewer than 4 OS updates.

That earth-shattering NSA crypto-cracking: Have spooks smashed RC4?

Weakend random number generators are already here

The Android one for example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/12/android_bug_batters_bitcoin_wallets/

That's not a bug, it's a feature, according to the NSA...

Hands on, er, heads on: We take a gander at Sony's gaming goggles

"forehead pad puts a lot of weight on your bonce"

The NASA goggles they use for virtual EVA training have huge counterweights on the strap in the back of the head. I've always wondered why they don't kill two birds with one stone and use batteries back there. You'd have power for a week!

New! Yahoo! logo! shows! Marissa! Meyer's! personal! touch!

Headline

I thought I was going to have to wait for this story until tomorrow, so the exclamation-mark machines could run all night. Good job!

Your nicked iPad now likelier than ever to show up in Mongolia

Re: remote brick option ?

Bullshit. A simple police report saying "it's been stolen" should be more than sufficient.

NAO: UK border bods not up to scratch, despite billion-pound facial recog tech

Not just the UK

Friend came back to the US from a trip to Aus/NZ and said "it doesn't feel like I'm coming home, it feels like I'm just returning to custody"

LOHAN slowly strips lens caps off hi-def imaging arsenal

640x480? In 2013? Really?

And it's the only product to include "Hi-Resolution" in the name... I'd say it's not worth the waste of space to bring it up.

Researcher bags $12,500 after showing how to hack Zuck's pics

Re: DIY

Most bug report "screenshots" I get are images pasted into a version of MS Word I can't open. They usually get the "unable to reproduce" flag.

Give us a break: Next Android version to be called 'KitKat'

Re: I would have been very surprised if either company had objected.

Pretty much ALL American chocolate is rubbery nasty crap, but yes, Hershey's is the worst offender. Pretty much tastes & feels like a doormat soaked in motor oil.

Thank god we have a "British Shoppe" on 17-92 that has the imported good stuff.

Myst: 20 years of point-and-click adventuring

Squee!

I still have the little metal toy that came with Riven. It's the creature that goes "squee" when you deflated the balloon plants on a hillside.

I always thought of Myst as a text adventure with graphics, if that makes sense. Instead of "go north" you clicked a particular direction and got rewarded with a particular image. I enjoyed actually having time to solve puzzles at my usual slow & stupid rate.

Nokia drives cars into the clouds: Hear HERE, you're here, hear?

Re: Smart phone tyre pressure monitoring.

Or the shop monkey destroys the unit in the rim when he fits a new tire. A couple friends have had that happen, and getting the shop to pay for a new one is... problematic.

Behind the candelabra: Power cut sends Britain’s boxes back to the '70s

Re: Not so much

The UPS daemon on my Debian box does a monthly battery test for 5 seconds. I had enough power to get to the power company's website and report the outage. It was an amazingly simple one-click affair, as they used my service address to figure out where it was.

Finance watchdog: Big fingers + tiny mobe screen + banking = doesn't end well

Re: Not just mobiles...

Eh, it's no different than typing "rm -rf *" you give it the hairy eyeball and an extra second to double check it.

I'm pretty much a retard, so I know I will make stupid mistakes right off the bat, so I guess I pay extra attention.

Oracle revs up Sparc M6 chip for seriously big iron

Singin' dat song...

I got 96 sockets but an Intel ain't one?

3D printed guns are for wimps. Meet NASA's 3D printed ROCKET ENGINE

Showerhead test

Hot-firing is impressive, but the important test is the "showerhead" test, where they pump fluid through the fuel and/or oxidizer channels and give it the really hairy eyeball with lots of high speed cameras to make sure the jets impinge on each other properly, and nothing is squirting off somewhere it's not supposed to. That's where you usually go "aw crap, this one is junk" or not.

That's actual NASA R&D

I thought that was dead!

Seriously though, the injector is the "hard part" of a rocket engine, and even after you've come up with a good design, machining it is a bitch. You've got to put literally hundreds of tiny holes next to each other in some seriously hard metal, plus you've got to somehow put in the channels internally that feed them all without any chance that the fuel channels can connect to the oxidizer channels. If the 3D printer can make an accurate injector in less than a month, they're pretty much printing money right there.

The turbopumps are difficult too, but the design is the rough part, they're not nearly as hard to actually make. Notice you'll not see any pictures of recent rocket turbopump impellers, they're secret, just like nuke sub props.

Obama prepares to crawl up NSA's ass with microscope

"in a way that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy"

We'll keep doing business as usual.

"while respecting our commitment to privacy and civil liberties"

i.e. none whatsoever.

"recognising our need to maintain the public trust"

Don't piss off the voters, all 10 of those old fogeys. We need to market this better.

"and reducing the risk of unauthorised disclosure"

We'll get legislation/policies in place so we can Guantanamo any more Snowdens or Mannings.

Seriously though, it doesn't matter. Of all the people I've talked to here in the US, none of them give a shit about the NSA stuff, and the only one that has an actual opinion thinks Snowden should be swinging from a rope. Really. They have no problem with the NSA stuff.

Do not adjust your eyes: This Kobo ten-incher has a 2560 x 1600 resolution

Any idea if it handles footnotes?

I tried a bunch of e-readers about 2 years ago, and none of them handled footnotes decently, the worst being the Google reader. Obviously, this is a big drawback when reading Sir Pratchett's work. I haven't ever tried a Kindle though.

The 'third era' of app development will be fast, simple, and compact

Babble & doublespeak

"pass a pointer to another processor, and execute on that data"

Sounds like a hardware guy that doesn't know how code really works. Or a sales mouth.

"we move the compute rather than the data"

Yup, you just confirmed that. You have no idea what you're talking about

Ten top new games for phones ’n’ slabs

Or if you hit the convenient "print preview" button instead of the "next" button.

But being an I.T. professional you already knew that, of course.

Holiday HELL: Pourquoi, monsieur, why is there no merdique Wi-Fi here?

Re: re. switching off the cable modem

And some of us are smart enough to set up a script that emails us when the router IP changes, however infrequently that happens.

Google cursed its own phones with wacked Wi-Fi, say Nexus users

For once

I'm apparently left out of all the "fun" - I've not had problems with bluetooth or wi-fi, and I'm on the latest 4.3 OTA update. I can use the Apple BT keyboard, or a couple ones branded "for Android" that I have, as well as one of the old laser type-on-the-desk ones so ancient I used it with my Palm.

But yeah, I agree with the sentiment to chill out on the camera UI.

An afternoon with Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer

Re: Nice

There's little "personal application" in modern teaching. Phil talks about making kids look through a telescope or go out to look at meteor showers. You talk about using the compasses. There's the chemistry demos that always go bang. Yeah, this gets folks interested. The problem is that's the ultra-rare exception to sitting in a chair for 8 hours listening to someone talk.

For example, I'm a space buff from WAY back, saw Armstrong walk on the Moon on my fourth birthday. So I've amassed this huge library of space books and rocket models and I "know" space stuff, like "oh I know what a Hohmann minimum-fuel trajectory is!" and I visit KSC visitor's center once every couple months.

Well this month, I got Kerbal Space Program, and I sure as hell DID NOT know how to design a Hohmann trajectory or figure out a launch window! However after watching the computer do it, I dug out all my old books and had a renewed interested as I finally saw the real-life application of it and it was no longer just a dry academic interest. I even found Buzz Aldrin's old MIT Ph.D thesis on rendezvous and started going "oh yeah! that's why that happens!" and I started actually learning the stuff I'd been parroting for years.

This is why computers are so popular... you can sit down and pound away for a while and get an inkling of how they work.

I don't know how to fix it. Most teachers barely have the budget to just stand there and talk. They're lucky to have the room and the blackboard, at least in the US.

Online trainer launches free student login promo

"Australian companies have difficulty finding programers" (sic)

Actually they probably have difficulty PAYING programmers just like everywhere else.

“We want to give students a head start in carving out a career in the technology sector, with absolutely zero barrier to entry” means we want to spin out lots of people that'll take a coding job cheap.

And by the way, it's not spelled "programers"

Google Glass is high fashion in September Vogue magazine

Re: Distracted driving

That doesn't matter. Most of the US has laws banning cellphones & driving, and it hasn't done shit.

And I took a taxi about 8 years ago, and the driver READ A PAPERBACK pretty much the entire time she was driving. No tip for her.

Do you think spinning rust eats flash's dust? Join the hard drive daddies club

Not in my experience

When I've had a drive go bad, it's always been gone with no warning and I never see my data again. Like the thing doesn't spin up, or if it does, it refuses to read, or it's not seen on the bus. Once a drive started making horrible noises and was never visible to the computer again.

Once I was reading from one of those WD MyPassport external USB drives, and my glasses slid off the keyboard onto the drive (a drop of about an inch) and the drive immediately started clicking and giving USB errors. I didn't get any data off that one either.

Yes, I do once-a-week backups, why do you ask?

I've only had 2 SSDs (one's in this computer as I type) and one failed once with SATA errors about 6am before I got up for work. Linux immediately blacklisted it as a device. I powered off and back on, and have not had trouble in the 3 months since.

And yes, flash is getting reasonable in cost considering it's a new technology. The first hard drive I worked with was a Fujitsu Pragmatic PD-40M which was 40 MEGAbytes for about $5K at the time, so I may have a weird idea of reasonable cost.

Philips' smart lights left in the dark by dumb security

My 3M wi-fi thermostat doesn't do ANY authentication at all.

You send a http request and it does it. It sits firmly behind my firewall, but I still worry about someone getting through the wi-fi security itself. Fortunately my neighbors are not so technical.

Heck, it doesn't even seem to enforce minimum time-outs for switching between heating and cooling. You can flip back and forth until the compressor dies.

NYT crackers get busy again, claims vendor

Gives 'em something to do...

The NYT certainly isn't doing much journalism.

(Icon for what they have up their butt)

Does Gmail's tarted-up tab makeover bust anti-spam laws?

Optional... for now

From Google's past history, I'm sure it won't be optional in about 6 months.

Ask Android users running Jellybean about Google's "fuck you, you *will* have a search box in Google Maps and all your home screens"

I'm able to install another homescreen app, but Google Maps still has the goddamned search bar permanently taking up a good chunk of my screen.

Norway BANS Apple from Oslo's skies: No aerial Maps app snaps allowed

The US just does the censorship afterwards

Last I looked on Google & Bing maps, the roof of the White House and other important buildings was a uniform shade of white with no details.

DARPA calls Big Data boffins: Help us lock up everyone's privates

How about a robots.txt file?

Sorted! Where's my huge DARPA contract payout??

No distro diva drama here: Penguinista favourite Debian turns 20

Gaming on Debian

You know Steam runs on Debian now, right? And so does Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program, which are the only games worth playing aside from original HALO.

Obama proposes four-point plan to investigate US data spooks

Snowden ... should have gone through lawful channels

Yeah. So he could have been told to STFU and mind his own business. Right-o.

Tor fingers Firefox flaw for FAIL but FBI's also in the frame

Re: Firefox 23

It's interesting to see Firefox 23 no longer has the "disable javascript" option in preferences any more...

Happy first anniversary, Curiosity!

"Happy Birthday" played on the SAM motor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxVVgBAosqg

And isn't that song copyrighted? Is this the first interplanetary copyright violation? Of course I'm sure the Recording Industry Association of *AMERICA* will step up and claim jurisdiction....

Barbie paints Red Planet pink with NASA-approved Mars Explorer doll

Does Elon Musk have one?

And does Jebadiah Kerbal try to hit on her all the time?

Geneticists resolve human dilemma of Adam's boy-toy status

Re: @ 0_Flybert_0

It'd probably be pretty instructive to come over here and see all the religious retards first-hand, especially in the Southeast. They're not so bad in Orlando itself, but go to one of the rinky-dink towns like Sparr, Ocala or Oviedo, and it'll be a culture shock.

I could tell dozens of stories, but you'd owe me a lot of beer.

Paris, because even she's not that stupid.

Buy a household 3D printer, it'll pay for itself in months!

What is this, Slashdot?

Didn't we have this story yesterday?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/02/study_finds_opensource_home_3d_printer_could_save_2000_a_year/

Study finds open-source home 3D printer could save $2,000 a year

IP rights

Savings from printed faucet handle: $20

Lawsuit from Kohler for reproducing their design w/o permission: $120,000

T-Mobile US: Go ahead, PAY NOTHING up front for any device

Stupid clueless US customers

In the US, even after you pay off your device subsidy, you still pay an ass-rape rate. It doesn't drop, you just get the opportunity to say "yes master may I have another" and get another "free" phone.

People here don't understand it's not a free phone, and they really honestly think the latest iPhone only costs Apple $30 to make. Seriously.

Boffins flip optics to make booster-free superfast fibre

I have no content

I just wanted to say "all-photonic optical phase conjugation unit"

Mars, bringer of WAR: Quatermass and the Pit

Thanks El Reg

As an American, I would have never heard of Quartermass, and it's absolutely fascinating.

Planetary paparazzi snap candid pics of Earth, Moon from space

Amazing.

Mariner-Mars returning pictures was the top headline in the local paper on the day I was born http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=hXZnTIgIr50C&dat=19650715&printsec=frontpage&hl=en

They say it took "as many as 21 photos" and each photo took 8 hours to send.

Today I simulated going to the moon in Kerbal Space Program on my PC.

Progress is amazing.

Aereo streaming TV now bargaining chip in Time Warner Cable, CBS tiff

"take advantage of a perceived loophole"

Either STFU and enforce the law AS IT IS WRITTEN or get Congress to fix it!

I don't see you sneering at Microsoft, Google, et al because they "take advantage of a perceived loophole" in the tax laws.

Dickhead activist judges.

How the clammy claws of Novell NetWare were torn from today's networks

Re: Don't forget X

Shoot, you could have used one of the many security holes to gain superuser. For example, to be able to access files to print them, the print server had an "assume privs of client" call for any file it was printing.

Thus you could wait for a superuser to queue up a print job, declare yourself a print server, service the print job, call "assume privs of client" thus becoming superuser, assign yourself the superuser priv, then say you couldn't service the print job after all so it would be released back to the queue and a real print server would deal with it.

Another fun one was the fact that server processes running on workstations (such as print servers) would automatically be added to the bindery when they broadcast their ability to serve jobs of type $FOO. This was all fine'n'dandy until you wrote a server of type "user" at which point you were inserted into the bindery of all the servers and showed up in the admin app as a user. You didn't have a password property so you couldn't log in, but the admins would wet their pants at seeing a new unauthorized "user"

Gadgets are NOT the perfect gift for REAL men

Man, I wish I could +1000 this. One of my ex-friends is precisely for this reason. He'd get really offended and pissy when I shied away from the birthday thing no matter how many times I tried to explain it. One year I just finally told him to fuck off and die.

Since I can't think of gifts for other folks, I feel *really* bad when someone gives me something, especially since it's never anything close to something I want, and since I'm not good at faking my expressions, you can tell right away from my face. Plus I hate a big fuss over things.

A simple "happy birthday" is sufficient and maybe an amusing card if you really want to go overboard.

I'll have to steal that "Feb 30th" trick.