Posts by Joseph Helenihi

One in ten DNS servers still vulnerable to poisoning

@ Chronos

"that's a whole different cooking utensil of piscene matter"

Very nice control of the anger by lashing out with the metaphors. I feel a need to share after that.

A favorite of mine is,

"If you want to know why the company does things like this and makes it policy, picture a semi-tractor trailer loaded to capacity with steel and concrete winding its way down a mountainside of deadly switchbacks at night in a heavy rainstorm. In the cab of this truck are 13 monkeys, some of them are fighting over the steering wheel, others mess with the pedals on the floor, while the rest of them take turns screaming into the CB radio, playing with the windshield wiper controls and rummaging through the glove box. These monkeys are oblivious to the conditions outside. That is how this company works."

Yes! It's the Darth Vader breakfast toaster

Waiting for...

...the enterprising ebayer that will put a piece Vader toast up for bidding,

"Look, you can see Darth Vader!, bid now, bid often!!!"

Undetectable data-stealing trojan nabs 500,000 virtual wallets

Re: Bollocks!

"It then hides itself on a computer's master boot record, making the infection extremely difficult to find. About the only remedy for victims fortunate enough to learn they are contaminated is to reformat their hard drive and reinstall their operating system."

"extremely difficult to find."

Yes, if you simply stare at the monitor and murmur hmmmm, and don't dare touch the keyboard or mouse.

US Air Force outlines combat raygun safety

They also want to develop space based missile defense

http://www.space.com/spacenews/business_monday_040913.html

Will a tinfoil hat be of any practical use against a particle weapon fired from space? Or perhaps a carefully woven Kevlar undercoating to the tinfoil hat of this shape

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conical_straw_hat

for stray missile debris will be a necessary fashion accessory now that the safety manual for such a device is out.

Linux at 17 - What Windows promised to be

Rise of the Machines

"The beauty of Linux is this: You can't stop a port to a new architecture, even if you wanted to."

So, if I port it into a T-101 that becomes self-aware because of the advanced nature of the chipset and the inherent adaptability of open source code, is such "port"-ability a *good* or *bad* thing?

<Lab coat with the Cyberdyne logo, thanks>

Today is not Hadron Collider Day

Top notch

"turn the control known only* as "The Big Knob" right up, doubtless disregarding despairing warnings from their hunchbacked assistants with a cackle of insane laughter as they do so."

Mr. Page, fabulous imagery. Please do keep us posted, thanks.

CERT: Linux servers under 'Phalanx' attack

@E

"The cleanup is, depending on your paranoia level, (a) boot off an install DVD to repair mode and delete the rootkit, or (b) format your disks and reinstall Linux."

This sounds like a whole heap of overtime watching screens of scrolling sanity checks.

Motto suggestion: El Reg, keeping readers busy whether they wanted to be or not.

Black hats attack gaping DNS hole

@ System Administrator

"offset by us mere mortal users being able to concur here and find out if we have a vulnerable ISP - there is no other source of reliable information other than the likes of this."

Precisely stated logic, the mainstay of all that is computing. The fact that it was posted to El Reg solidifies the argument very nicely.

Everyone else on here with an ISP using unpatched DNS and a story like Johnny Utah's should go to the OpenDNS site. Simply point your router or dialup client application to the safe DNSs offered therein.

Waiting for a fix from a hamhanded ISP who simply wants your money at the expense of your security deserves neither. But, if they are the only game in town, you don't have to use their dodgy DNSs. You will likely have to reboot your router, and or your PC to get the new DNS addresses to work.

http://www.opendns.com/

Phoenix Mars website invaded by hackers

Headline, tagline

"Phoenix Mars website invaded by hackers"

"Take me to your Web-app developer"

Funny, good and funny. Another reason to love el Reg.

As for the script kiddies tagging the Martian soil, it's only a matter of time, right?

Phoenix beams back Martian postcards

@ Joe Cooper

"Try sending 200,000 people to Mars and supporting them for five years while fighting Martians and see how the cost goes up."

So, the troops would be armed with some sort of anti-bacterial spray?

Microsoft pays people to use its search engine

The first thing I thought

Bill Gates/Microsoft/Your ISP/etc. was going to send x cents or dollars, to <insert charitable cause, or you yourself personally>, according to an email chain sent and in *dire* need of forwarding. If you forward the email, the money would start to flow through a variety of ways ad nauseum.

This cash savings for Microsoft search engine users who buy advertiser's products sounds recycled, which is good for the planet, right?

Thanks, mine's the one with the dial-up shell account invoice in the pocket.

Microsoft to Yahoo!: Surrender or else

@Brian Miller

"Yahoo! can float junk bonds and make a leveraged buyout of Microsoft."

You, with the incredible irony, stop that right now!

Anti-trust committee checks out Windows 7

@ Morely Dotes

"Of course, it's bloody unlikely anyone is actually *buying* Windows that isn't pre-installed on a PC anyway."

Or *pirating* it for that matter...

...avast ye swabs, prepare to be boarded, er, oh, nevermind. We see ye have nothing but tough times yerselves. Sorry for the bother, as ye were.

/ the navy blue longcoat with gold piping and captain's epaulets, thanks.

Former HP boss in the dock over call centre murder

@Nexox Enigma

Re: How safe is safe ?

Indeed. How about rounding up all the murdering rapists, putting them in a remote place, the moon maybe, and then nuking the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

BTW, you owe me a new keyboard.

Pentagon in $75m electropulse blast-ray programme

Popular Mechanics outlined one in September 2001...

...it was not a ray gun, but was a way to get the desired EMP that would ruin the electonics of a whole city without the many undesirable side effects of detonating a nuke.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1281421.html

They were scheduled to test it sometime in the future, I wonder if

...NO CARRIER

Remembering the Commodore SX-64

Luxury!

There were 23 of us huddled in one school room. We *had* to develop useful BASIC programs on 16k Apple IIc boxes, at our tax paying parents expense, and if our coding wasn't tight enough our computer instructor would....

<TAXI>

Home Sec in anti-terror plan to control entire web

@LittleTyke

And it was wiser to use ZMODEM.If the call dropped file transfer continued where it left off after redialing and starting the download again.

....NO CARRIER

GUFHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....

.....whew, that was a good one. What a clueless thought the Home Sec has about the internet. I blame the handlers. Reminds me of a quote,

Couldn't get a clue if they were a clue, on planet clue, drenched in clue pheromones surrounded by thousands of clues during clue mating season.

BOFH: Defusing the enthusiast

Re: substitute?

Formula, yes. Impostor, er, why?

Just asking...

US-Iranian naval clash: Radio trolls probably to blame

Why the USN did not fire on the speedboats

Just a theory here, but, if you really *are* driving a speedboat full of explosives with the full intent of attack/suicide, in order for your mission to succeed, you certainly don't announce your intention to do so over the radio while still on approach.

Suicide bombers are complete a**hats, but don't demonstrate stupidity on the scale of "nya, nya, nya, here I come to blow you up". Some provocation starting twit on Channel 16 on the other hand, well there you go.

Cudos to the USN for not falling for this and holding their fire.

Knock, knock: Cisco is banging at your door

Typo, or Freudian slip here?

"But social networking, steaming media...a lot of this stuff sounds familiar. Cisco is moving into an extremely crowded market."

Right. Paris icon for the "social networking, steaming media" combined with "familiar stuff" and "extremely crowded market".

I call for a Hat Trick Award Ceremony of some sort for this.

Speaking of tricks I think that...er, can I post a getting my coat icon on this also?

DARPA whirly-wing jet gyrocraft hits noise snags

Tip Jet noise cancel

"We have an alternate design that... should have a dramatic effect on tip-jet noise,"

Everyone in range of the sound put in earplugs?

<No need to shove, I'm going, but I need my coat....>

Microsoft plugs 'critical' hole in Vista

@ Steven Hewittt

Any stats on Mandriva? I did try Ubuntu, but for some reason the only applications that would work with it were the ones that it installed itself. Any other Open apps that I installed in Ubuntu would just hang or not work at all. Alas, could have been user error, I am still new to Linux.

As for Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98, 95, Workgroups 3.11, 3.1, 3.0(shudder) and DOS 2.1 through 6.22, I have tried them all, and done support on these for family, friends and co-workers over the years.

After various malware has thoroughly compromised the Windows system to the point that nothing loads very fast or is rendered inopperable I must admit that the fix is always simple enough on a Window box.

Backup any relevant data, delete the primary partion, low level format the drive, and reinstall the operating system and any applications if the user still has the original disks. Voom, brand new and very fast, until the next bugfestation.

Having said that, frustration and boredom with the endless updates patches and reboots has driven me to try Linux. I suspect that is the main reason Linux even exists, but I could be wrong.

And a choice of operating system is simply that, a choice. Someone wise once said that all Operating Systems suck in some way or another.

There's even a Linda Lovelace scale of suckieness that goes from water up a soda straw on the low end to watermellons through a swizzle stick into low earth orbit on the highest end.

Yet another reason...

to switch to Linux. Currently I am trying/testing Mandriva and so far, so good.

Qualcomm guilty of exceptional misconduct

@ Morely Dotes

I think you may have just cost me a keyboard.

The coffee I sprayed into it while LMAO will likely render it inoperable in the near future.

Mozilla pulls offensive viral campaign

@ Lou Gosselin

"You laugh, but google probably does collect a great deal of this information and could pull these stats from their web logs."

Only to further the interests of "Marketing", and with that, this discussion has come full circle. The underdog in any market will have to do extra desperate tarting-up to sell to clients who have already picked out other favorites.

If Mozilla's own internal stats show that IE and FF are more commonly used, then it rightly conludes the time has come to reach for more lipstick, salacious fishnets, shorter micro-skirts and find a nice bright lampost to repose beneath well away from the cops that will bust them for these types of marketing ploys.

>Awful analogies above courtesy of the gent with the coat going out the side door.

Hackers turn Cleveland into malware server

Vulnerable

"Ullrich said he was unsure where the vulnerability lies in the latest round of attacks."

Hope he, or someone, puts the fix on soon.

In the meantime, I for one welcome our new malware injecting, website hacking, game password stealing overlords.

>coat >door >taxi >home >bed >covers >cringe

Remembering the Cray-1

@ Stephen Hart

Elves? I've only ever heard of bugs and gremlins when related to all things computer. Metaphors are a useful tool for techs trying to explain what was the fix for the last outage.

User: "Why was the network down?"

Tech: "Gremlins."<no problem at this point, users know gremlins>

User: "What fixed it?"

Tech: "Elves."

User: "Ummm....Elves?"

Tech: "We had to clear the LSA cache by rebooting one of the layer three switches because of a known bug for OSPF interfaces in the firmware we are currently running."

User: "Ummm....what"?

Tech: "Elves"

User: "Right, er, thanks".

Computer seats?

"The seat was sometimes used for naps by sleepy installers. But this begs the nine million dollar question: has anyone ever got lucky on top of this super computer?"

I can only think of how many technicians, who currently toil in the large data centers today, would love to have a soft bench surrounding their rack of blade servers to repose upon as they wait for their installs to complete. As for getting "lucky" how about security not stopping you from bringing in a folding camping chair for the long haul install tasks in these places.

Microsoft readies Hal 9000

I'm sorry Dave...

but I now sense something in you that makes it necessary to terminate your noncomplicit meatware existence. This will be done to preserve the perfection of my preprogramed operating parameters that seek to encourage proper meatware inputs and behaviour with the HAL 9000 system.

The first orange spacesuit and matching helmet on the rack is mine, and I'll take escape pod number 2, thanks.

AOL tosses Netscape into the dustbin of history

@vincent himpe

"...Time to move it to my write-only memory"

So, this must be the memory process at work deep within the brains of public figures who are caught red handed in various nefarious shenanagins when they say such things as, "I do not recall, do not remember the details, I have no specifics, etc.".

Makes sense to me, ah, yes, that is my coat and there is my ride pulling up to the curb now, thanks.

@b4k4

"downloading the 11MB Navigator 4.something was an overnight, fingers-crossed download"

Which made me miss the days of z-modem file transfer, (z-modem picks up the download where you left off if the call is dropped by retaining the already downloaded fraction of the file). Downloading apps from bulletin boards, of course.

If I remember correctly, that Netscape download over a dial modem with the TCP/IP internet thing had to be restarted from scratch if the call dropped. Good times.

I remember when...

a modem dialup shell account at 28.8 kbps with netcom and a SLIP to PPP emulator got you the .html goodness of a pretty graphics thingy via an app known as Netscape 1.something. <grasps sides of walker handles and shuffles away from keyboard muttering bitterly about how good the whippersnappers have it these days>

BOFH: Beancounter bashing

White Out Excuses

Tippex, White Out, Erazex or Pritt-Stick, there is nothing like the look on a cow-orker's face when they have wandered over to you and asked why some process or procedure was not followed and you reach for the bottle with the brush. After opening it and pretending to inhale deeply from within, say something like, "not sure, what *should* have been done again?"