Posts by Christoph

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

Internet -connected coffee machine

Hard-code it to return Error 418 to all enquiries.

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

"using state-of-the-art cesium clocks; so accurate that it would take 160 million years for them to drift by just one second."

That's not the time keeping state-of-the-art! The current state of the art is around one second in 30 billion years - longer than the current age of the Universe. And they're working on a way to make them ten times more accurate.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

From Orwell's '2027'

They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.

‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice.

‘It was behind the picture,’ breathed Julia.

'No you bloody fool, you're wearing it!' said the iron voice.

The fix inches closer: Iowa moves farm right-to-repair bill forward

"That would break our business model so we demand it be made illegal."

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Hazing = abuse

Compressed air can get into the blood stream and cause an embolism.

Re: Hazing = abuse

I don't think that's a sacking offence. It's a criminal offence.

Crims hit a $20M jackpot via malware-stuffed ATMs

"Program storage has been removed or amended. Contact central bank for the authorisation code to re-enable this machine."

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Way back in the 60s the keyholder for a particular device lived well out of town and had no car and no telephone.

The device was the siren to give four minutes warning of a nuclear attack.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

The boss insisted we reused old print-outs in the laser printer by printing on the back. This was a false economy anyway as it often didn't work and you had to print again - the extra toner cost more than the paper you saved.

I'm not sure what eventually happened but I suspect someone re-used a sheet of paper that had a staple in it. The replacement drum cost far more than any saving.

Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware

The trial was unfair! They used Evidence against me!

Sorry mate, you have to be a politician or extremely rich to get away with that one.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

Re: Roadside billboards

A few years back the £$%^&* Post Office decided to monetise the constant long queues by blaring adverts at them.

They did disappear again, presumably due to the volume of infuriated complaints.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

But can they make one that can land on the Hudson river?

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

"the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects."

"hundreds" of debris objects associated with the incident were being tracked

So according to Musk, "hundreds" is "a small number".

And how many untrackable objects?

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

Python - because the space between peace and war is significant.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

what they love doing, which is interacting with customers

Yes, their staff absolutely adore being shouted at in fury by someone demanding they magically make a spare aircraft appear, or wave a wand to move a hurricane away from the destination airport.

Re: Worst case scenario

And don't forget to pre-pay to use the steps!

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

Only /tmp [and /var/tmp] require[s] 1777 (== 777 with the T-bit set).

Do applications ever store confidential information in temporary files? I wonder if anyone's ever written something to scan such files?

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: How can this work?

It is presumably solar powered, giving effectively unlimited lifetime.

However there is an obvious problem.

The more power you need, the bigger the solar panels have to be.

The bigger the panels are, the more aerodynamic drag there is.

The more aerodynamic drag, the more power you need.

This will require careful balancing!

FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess

How dare you expect me to lock the bank's vault door every time I leave the vault? I don't have time for this nonsense!

First stellar Coronal Mass Ejection detected beyond our Sun

Get Lone Star to flip the switch to put the atmosphere back.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

No, comms across the disc go by clacks.

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: I'm not planning to visit the United Hell Holes any time soon

You are perfectly safe, they would never put you in a crocodile infested facility.

Alligators however . . .

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Seen elsenet: AI is three autocompletes in a trenchcoat

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: Let's rebrand Starmer...

he claimed customers were "really excited about it,"

Citizen #666 hasn't quite gone full Trump yet then. They weren't calling him 'sir' with tears in their eyes.

Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise

Computers administering justice? What could possibly go wrong?

Computers Don't Argue By Gordon R Dickson. 1965!

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Fusion power has been on wheels for decades! Always 30 years away.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Absolutely. My first reaction was imagining what might happen if the slightest thing went wrong. If something derailed it that train could demolish acres of buildings down to the foundations.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Fax? It'll never replace Telex!

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

Day 1: Introduce objects that move under your hand when you reach for them.

Day 2: System is hacked so that the objects scuttle out of the way every time you try to grab them.

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

If the only maintainer of a critical open source program dies, who is going to risk taking over maintaining it and being legally liable for sorting out any existing bugs?

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

I can move it for them far cheaper than that!

I have this trebuchet.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

Re: How to parse this?

To lose one drone, Mr. Bezos, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

US gov shutdown leaves IT projects hanging, security defenders a skeleton crew

speed the entry of AI into the federal workforce

Our AI powered Department of War has just declared war on San Serriffe.

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

That's the cables that get randomly shot. What about the people who get randomly shot?

NASA's deep-space laser comms demo has left the chat

The primary downlink station is a 200-inch (5.1-meter) telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County.

I can remember when the Palomar 200 inch was the biggest telescope in existence. Now it's useful as a comms receiver, and El Reg has to explain what it is for readers who haven't heard of it.

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

How does a new developer start out?

A lot of apps are written by a single person with a good idea. But now they won't be able to distribute them unless they are a registered developer.

So they have to jump through whatever hoops are put in their way to get this status - invest their time, (and money?) and navigate the bureaucracy to get registered.

Before they know if there is any interest whatever in their new app.

They can't even give it to their friends to try out an early test version to see if it's worth them continuing, and to ask for ideas.

Looks like the only new apps will be from existing big companies.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

The resultant database of everyone's details will of course be absolutely secure with strict access controls.

So no rogue plod could possibly misuse it to stalk someone.

And it will be completely impossible for hackers to break in and grab and/or corrupt the lot.

And no future government would ever under any circumstances extend and misuse it for political purposes or for authoritarian control.

Also, have you ever considered all the advantages of owning a really nice bridge?

Japanese city passes two-hours-a-day smartphone usage ordinance

Round here there is already an extremely severe sanction on using smartphones while walking.

Someone on an e-bike will snatch it out of your hand.

RubyGems maintainer quits after Ruby Central takes control of project

Time to fork.

AI can now design functional viruses – not the computer kind, either

Re: What could possibly go wrong ?

Even a thoroughly well known pathogen can escape - it's still not known how the last case of smallpox happened.

Google unveils master plan for letting AI shop on your behalf

Re: "for example...."

The ticket sellers would hopefully do their best to block multiple purchases.

But that's not the main problem.

Even for genuine purchases by genuine fans this is really bad.

The automated purchases will grab all the tickets before human purchasers can click all the buttons to make a purchase.

So the effect is that ONLY people using their automated systems will be able to buy tickets.

Everyone will be forced to use those systems, and the race between people to get tickets will turn into a race between robots.

(Quite possibly overloading and crashing the selling system until they spend lots to improve it.)

Australia to let Big Tech choose its own adventure to enact kids social media ban

We demand that you use reasonable methods.

We leave it up to you to work out what is reasonable and how to implement it.

We will punish you if we decide that you get it wrong - despite acknowledging that it's impossible to get it exactly right.

It's time mobile devs started to think seriously about foldable smartphones

Re: A niche product looking for a mass market

I have a Razr because it is easily pocketable - it can just drop into a trouser pocket. Plus its screen is completely protected.

I don't have to put it in a shirt pocket where it could drop out or be snatched, and gets in the way - I can ignore it until needed.

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Re: Boo Hoo, America

Quite - how come it took so long to notice the attack, didn't their own spying inside Chinese networks spot anything about it?

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

I used to pass a building on the way to work that had zero identification, obviously fortified construction, and irregularly timed visits from security vans through the very strong gates.

I realised what it was when I noticed that it backed onto Hatton Garden.

(London street full of jewellery shops.)

Re: Lower ranking officers

"An extremely courageous decision" -- Sir Humphrey Appleby

Re: Higher ranking officers

Major Major Major Major was the Catch

Viking 1 at 50: NASA's first raid on the red planet

Re: Bicentennial

Tell the Normans that 1,000 years is quite enough, and abolish the monarchy?

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Re: Very lucky escape

And off-by-one errors.

The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says

Today's utter trivia is tomorrow's historian's valuable resource.

"Why is my private correspondence being spread all over the internet?" -- Ea-Nasir.