Posts by nagyeger

Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene

This is where the expression "Mad Scientist" comes from.

Are you referring to the missing cheese? Yes, that's really annoying

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Ooops

> Can't imagine what it must feel like to see this on high resolution radar with no idea what it is...

A. What's that?

B: doesn't /look/ like a data error. Some kind of tunnels?

C: Aha you'll never find my secret underground base.

A: You know... let's zoom in a bit

B: Uh oh.

C: This /is/ a joke isn't it?

B: So, urm, who do we tell that we've maybe just found an ultra-secret underground base? And do we get in trouble for asking?

C: That's not funny, guys, own up, who planted this data?

Google's plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome crumbles

Re: Huh?

The other reason that DoH is mostly snake oil is that for https to work at all on a shared server, the browser has to send the intended site name unencrypted at the start of the request. I.e. https encrypts content, but sites visited is almost as public as a DNS request. I say mostly and almost, because redirecting all DNS traffic to your local X-letter agency so they can send the agents to the right cafe / train station when you dare to look for theregister.co.uk instead of the approved .com variety is much less resource-hungry than installing a suitable packet filter to strip the relevant bytes off an https header on all potential ports.

But for your local common or garden mafia-front coffee shop, it's easiest to just assume that they know what you're doing unless you've got peril sensitive, screen-decrypting sunglasses and a VPN.

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Certain hardware?

Makes me think they got a Y2K-style integer roll-over / did a signed/unsigned comparison or or something embarrassing like that.

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Re: Thing I found surprising about Wayland

> each desktop having it's own implementation.

And this is why I'm staying ignorant and suspicious of "wayland". It might possibly classify as a protocol (though sounds more like it's not even a graphics library).

Whatever happened to "Do one thing and do it well?"

Hi, Pakistan? You do know anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? You don't have to ask

Re: >>convince other editors<<

While not in any way wanting to claim that might equates to right, they are a nuclear state, and they have some convincing tools -->

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: Do be evil

Ah! Another demonstration that sans-serif fonts are evil.

Intel's 13th-gen CPUs are hot, hungry, loaded with cores

Re: Countries need to start taxing TDP or some other metric

Problem is, processor TDP is an artificial number which doesn't have any standardised measure. It roughly correlates to thermal load on a cooler from a given manufacturer and whatever load they choose to put on the chip, but it's certainly neither 'how big does my power supply need to be to avoid the voltage dropping out' (that's a significantly bigger number) nor is it 'if my cooling solution can physically dump this many watts of thermal energy at a steady-state of X degrees difference between package temp and ambient, my chip never limit itself'.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Linux downloads

Not surprised that there aren't many Linux downloads. I expect most people just run apt-get / rpm / yum / whatever and use whatever their distro includes.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Milky bars are on that guy over there.

Yep. "ness-ells" certainly used to be good enough for the TV adds when I was a lad. "The milky-bar kid is strong and tough...[etc] ness-ell's Milky Bar!"

I don't know when they changed their style.

James Webb, Halley's Comet may be set for cosmic dust-up

Rule of thumb: 1 astronaut-year spacewalk = 1 dead astronaut

Just be glad the telescope's not in LEO. You get gravitation pulling more natural particles in towards you and space debris too.

IIRC, the impact hazard from space debris starts getting noticeably higher than natural particles at around 0.1mm size (estimated size you can protect an astronaut against), but common knowledge back when I was in the lab was that you'd get about 1 astronaut-killer impact per astronaut-year of space-walk, so with JWST being 25m2, I'm not surprised it's got a few noticeable craters. (as well as hundreds of less-noticeable ones).

As for protecting the mirror.... that's a tough one. If it were my mirror and you gave me the choice of 'protecting' it with 1mm of Aluminium/plastic/whatever or exposing it directly to 0.1-3 mm particles at 66km/s (Orionid meteor shower), then I'd almost certainly choose to not have the inadequate 'shield', and just hold the mirror edge-on to the stream, so as many of them miss as possible.

Each impact on any shield is going to make a shower of ejecta (inside and outside, if the shield isn't thick enough), as the particle blows itself and the target to plasma and makes a pretty crater. Impact ejecta like that can cause a massive amount of damage to surrounding surfaces, far more than the initial impactor would.

To properly protect it, you either need a few tens of km of atmosphere or multiple layers of stuff to break it up, spread it out, break up and slow down the high-speed ejecta, spread that out, etc. How big was that telescope again?

(Fun viewing: https://hvit.jsc.nasa.gov/impact-videos/, but remember children, this is lab simulation of some slow orbital collisions, certainly not head-on, and let alone the impact speed of any natural meteor streams.)

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Re: Still missing?

@julian.smith

You think he's going to pick your lifetime to show up in the shot, with a microscopic sign saying 'Yes I'm here'? Which of the 7000+ languages of the world should it be written in? I expect if he did people'd call it fakery.

I myself would think he'd do something a bit more dramatic, so that those who deny his existence have no excuse. You know, save some people and animals from a devastating flood*, parting some large body of water, the odd miracle? To paraphrase something from a story this guy born in Bethlehem once told a crowd somewhere, 'there's just no convincing some people, if they don't believe history, not even someone coming back from the grave will convince them.'

* Local or global depending on how you want to interpret a word that can mean 'earth/land/a particular small territory'.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: Measurement creep

Probably cheating:

$ bc -l

scale=1000

pi=a(1)*4

x = 355/113 - pi

1/x

3748629.0926628157868016244511646880974354889954070036234564032865454604793222886800140518816206836356898079757856583284769379701126839058362003772355496229770758776797063438635191977660363361658744058103117300160461407276837111486330913977530873701252813424084198400481405092339036142808124539709683599867051286776490510626222882018048540955721785108550715843278070987656589966381686938060800983246562587555490962488193999331001490603484545747242535590070139275682350221862811047078534288326502531238107419444664984567094661646407825083581568369435126109673237667122066542690481175490950780594741574076038648703833149716962300481919871324782090295149305449951761504107916830115926158948469898610910327249791290301794755871665455486720582729977835980177289213718137555499355392288048490060629138647289009508061564131833621484607268993002381032691514552359573669279876404364535066753777868985530913238716219930154570781566614631309790422382386201404931585554783220139580948786727209918542548521348819205030972

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

Re: Earth, May 2022

Don't worry, once the noose gets a bit tighter it'll stop kicking.

Oh. Maybe we should worry.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Re: I have concerns

In the Linux distros I have used, when I update the kernel I still have the old one in the boot menu, and it's my choice which to boot and which to remove. So all this jive about modern OSes are too complex and need new ways of managing just sounds like drivel.

Exactly. And it's not exactly rocket science to keep a spare copy of root around and have booting from it as an option to the boot loader.

Why does systemd need to add this? It has been a (very useful when things are broken) feature since linux first got a kernel command line, back before grub existed.

How to find NPM dependencies vulnerable to account hijacking

Re: Unvalidated Updates added to packages!

Exactly. But this 'rapid deployment' seems to be the whole point of the system.

NPM? Not on *my* machine, you don't.

Microsoft sounds the alarm on – wait for it – a Linux botnet

Re: knock, knock.

Sounds like what you need is a second fail2ban rule that perma-bans them after 2-3 'blocked 123.234.243.123 SSH' entries in your fail2ban log file. (and maybe an extra unblock magic port-knock sequence, just in case some cron-job on your home machine accidentally triggers it.)

Intel shareholders revolt against Pat Gelsinger's pay package

Link pay packets to...

Something other than current share price.

Anything other than current share price.

I'm revolutionary enough to think top-level management's bonuses ought to be linked to 'what did your reign do to improve the viability of the company, 10-20 years later'. Basic pay ought to be something like company median pay maybe with something to account for reinvested profits, sensible cash reserves, retention of staff (on the basis that people leaving is a bad sign, sacking people is nasty, and training up new staff is a drain on productivity) and customer satisfaction after several years ownership/use of product.

Anyway, reward the guys that made e.g. the electric drill that lasted me 20+ years, and don't give tuppence to the bean-counters that make me buy a new washing machine 10 minutes after the warrantee expires.

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

It is only pretty recently that we would have considered a 9 year old computer to be anything other than utterly obsolete.

Maybe you have that attitude. Maybe you're a gamer who needs those extra super dooper graphics cards, or maybe you're a micro$oft victim?

Or do you buy machines that barely have enough RAM when they're new?

I'd consider a 20 year old computer obsolete and a 9 year old one ' due for replacement in the next 6 years', if I'm talking desktops.

Case in point, this machine I'm on at the moment, has a Xeon E3-1275, released 2013, still going strong.

My old Turion64-based laptop (2005) is still very usable if plugged in, but I need to class it as pretty much obsolete, but only because of software bloat and it can't take more than 1GB of RAM.

A cool $28m for datacenter immersion company GRC

Survival?

I know there's a long tradition of oil-filled heatsinks, etc, but do the random collection of circuit boards, chips etc. in a PC all survive immersion in mineral oil? I thought I'd read something a while back about the oil killing some components after a while or making the boards swell/separate?

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

Re: Bizarre system

The dumbest bit of HMRC's system is that if you're foreign-resident you can't use the online system, but need to send in paper forms.

I guess they really want those fingerprints??

Internet backbone provider Lumen quits Russia

Re: Hire a few hundred thousand biplanes.

a fleet of hot-air balloons,

Let me guess, 99 of them?

Nena sang a song about that back in '83 (German)/ '84.(English)

Re: Hire a few hundred thousand biplanes.

They might do, but they probably relegated their short-wave radio to the dustbin a decade ago, when auntie and co decided it wasn't worth continuing to broadcast AM to anywhere in eastern Europe.

Co-inventor of Ethernet David Boggs dies aged 71

50 ohm coax

For my mind, the reason ethernet won the LAN wars was that (a) it supports different hardware layers (b) 10base2 used easily available, easy to make cables (50Ohm coax + BNC). (c) price (of course).

Solder/crimp a BNC on any bit of 50 ohm coax (or pick one off the shack wall if you're a radio ham), plug in a a pair of NE2000s and suddenly you can copy files around that don't fit on a floppy, network print like the big boys and play networked DOOM with your friends and family. You could even just about get away with unterminated 75ohm coax from the TV set, a pair of resistors and some matchsticks, if you didn't mind a few packet errors and no one moved the cable.

We tried it. It didn't work well, but it did work enough that we decided to invest in the proper cable.

For small offices / home users it just lowered the access bar so far.

'Hundreds of computers' in Ukraine hit with wiper malware as conflict continues

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

More to the point, they have no delivery system that can reach past Warsaw, and even that's only if they launch from Belarus and get lucky.

Given that they still put people on the ISS, and deliver them home again, I'd be very surprised if they don't retain the capability to downgrade/overload some orbital rockets to deliver some other packages anywhere on the planet. Not efficient but entirely capable. That was the entire point of the space-race, remember?

A (getting people back safely) is much harder than B (one way delivery of warhead to 1km above target).

B is has undesirable, radioactive consequences for grandma / grandkids.

Let's all prove we can do A.

The problem is I don't think Putin cares about grandma / grandkids any more

AI-created faces now look so real, humans can't spot the difference

Re: S or R?

Simulated? But what do the percentages mean? It probably says in the text, but it's monday AM here too.

UK National Crime Agency finds 225 million previously unexposed passwords

Re: Trust

It's fairly low risk. from your favourite shell:

From the API docs: (https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3#SearchingPwnedPasswordsByRange)

Searching by range

In order to protect the value of the source password being searched for, Pwned Passwords also implements a k-Anonymity model that allows a password to be searched for by partial hash. This allows the first 5 characters of a SHA-1 password hash (not case-sensitive) to be passed to the API:

GET https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/{first 5 hash chars}

It will also add a random 800-1000 hashes if you request padding (next item in docs)

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

Smart shutters?

I'm probably missing something here. As I understand it, the problems are on long-ish exposures. Orbital parameters ought to be known... Shouldn't it be possible to 'close the shutters' (or ignore the appropriate pixels if a multi-exposure integration is happening) as a satellite flies past? Yes, it's going to be a pain in the software, but surely it'll be better to not record the data in the first place rather than try to 'clean up' the contaminated plate?

FTC carpet bombs industry with letters warning that fake reviews will be punished

Re: The Register is an amazing website

I would happily pay 1000‰ of the current price for each issue! Absolute bargain!

When the stock market flotation finally goes ahead, please put me down for 4,000,000 (four MILLION) voting shares at a list price of up to 1000 microfarthings each. I can be reached at mailto://obfuscated@localhost/

Android OS vendor variants transmit data with no opt-out

Re: LineageOS misrepresented?

Yes. Hardly surprising that google apps send data back to google when you install them on something.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: You have gotta be SWATting me.

@EngineerAI

I'm Not a medic, but my understanding is that certain effects of puberty blockers are not reversible, as you can't wind back the clock and some things that are meant to grow won't grow later on.

Given the suceptability of the young to peer pressure and fashion, the common misconception that they are reversible can be harmful.

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

Re: A power station at each garage ?

I suspect they are out of my price range.

But I *want* one!

If I say please, could they park one in the back garden on a "rent the space for electricity" basis, maybe?

They can even have almost all of the electricity. I'm sure the neighbours would be interested in providing winter cooling via their radiators / green-houses.

Summer cooling for the reactor might be a bit of a problem, but I'm sure something can be worked out....

Tor users, beware: 'Scheme flooding' technique may be used to deanonymize you

Sort of worked for me...

+ Old copy of palemoon (v. rarely used) opened up 3 recognisable and correct 'what do I do with this' windows, but it detected the non-errors, and said I had those three protocols available.

+ Firefox didn't open up the windows but it did give me the same 3 protocols.

- Epiphany-browser thought I have all 24 apps

Their 'next job could be in cyber': UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn't own

governing body on training and standards

A comment on RevK's blog points us to: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-uk-cyber-security-council-to-be-official-governing-body-on-training-and-standards

This is in the online safety section, apparently.

Yes, you couldn't make it up, they're the official governing body on training [FAILURES] and [IGNORING] standards.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

date wrong?

Someone from El Reg please tell me the article date is wrong....

Linus Torvalds issues early Linux Kernel update to fix swapfile SNAFU

Re: Windows 10 20H2: CHKDSK /F damages file system on SSDs with KB4592438 installed (08.12.2020)

That quote ought to be in every help-desk worker's signature, any chance you could dig up the original reference?

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Or...

If too miserly to update the OS, then they could at least provide some kind of support-in-kind to the good folks at lineageOS* and give users and an easy 'Samsung are not supporting your phone any more, click here to upgrade to community-supported lineageOS'

*yes I know, other AOSP flavours exist.

Ah, right on time: Hacker-slammed SolarWinds sued by angry shareholders

Who pays?

> I'm not sure suing them out of existence is going to do the world any good.

Exposing my ignorance that comes from being only half-way knowledgable about how shares work...

Who is actually suing whom here? It sounds like the share holders (company owners) are suing the company ... that they own a share of, which sounds like employing a lawyer to empty your own wallet. Seems like a very dumb way of feeding lawyers.

Surely if it's shareholders saying the company shouldn't have money in its accounts when they've lost money, then can't they just call and EGM and award themselves a massive dividend?

If it is past shareholders effectively wiping value off present shareholders's holdings, then that sounds like:

"While I had some influence over this company it did something dumb. You bought my shares from me so it's now your fault, and you should pay me," and I'd hope the court would throw it out.

If it's shareholders holding the directors responsible for their (in)action, and clawing back the last 10 years of bonuses, stock options and other benefits their mismanagement has earned them, then urm, yes, that sounds very reasonable to me.

Microsoft adds 'Here's what we may have broken' screen to Windows 10 Insider PCs

1995, the year of linux on the desktop!

I think that's around the last time I was regularly booting windows for real work(TM), anyway.

Or as I probably said to win95 users: "You've got preemptive multitasking, finally? When are you expecting to get real symbolic links and filesystem permissions?"

Elite name on Brit scene sponsors retro video games preservation project at the Centre for Computing History

Screenshot

Doesn't *look* like the original. That had wireframe graphics, not solid colour. It must be a later version.

What was really amazing about Elite was the way it switched video modes half-way down the screen, giving high-res monchrome for the view out of the window and glorious multi(4) colour below, albeit at lower resolution.

Fiendishly clever stuff. Common opinion was that someone must have been counting CPU cycles per opcode /execution path to get that right.

SpaceX to return NASA 'nauts to Earth with a splash

Re: Argh!

In that case, they:

Fut: will be seated there.

Fut Perf: will have been seated there

etc.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

Privacy regulations compliant in other words.

I believe.

I am not a lawyer.

Don't base any decisions on comments here.

Please don't sue me.

Or sew me. Or sow me for that matter.

Where's my coat?

Three UK: We're sending you this SMS to warn you not to pay attention to unsolicited texts

Re: Great way to generate a list....

I want a plugin that does that to emails too. (active ones, I don't mind ones I have to read and manually

copy/paste).

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

Holiday season

It's just nipped off for a quick trip to the Costa-Brava, after getting a really good last-minute deal.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

sabre?

Doesn't £93M buy you quite a bit of a sabre test-programme? Or am I hopelessly optimistic and mis-remembering my numbers.

Huawei going to predict the future? Nope, say company leaders when asked about Joe Biden winning US election

Re: Are some commenters using a Trump dictionary?

It must be Monday. Some people allegedly can't get the hang of Mondays.

Russia lifts restrictions on Telegram messenger app after it expresses ‘readiness’ to stop some nasties

Jasper Carrot?

Was it just me?

When I looked at that photo, I asked myself, what's an old picture of Jasper Carrot doing on a piece about Russia?

Quick Q: Er, why is the Moon emitting carbon? And does this mean it wasn't formed from Theia hitting Earth?

Not micro-meteoriods

Macro-meteoroids? Late-stage bombardment comets (spot the craters)? Recently demised spacecraft?

10^4/cm2 /s isn't exactly masses... 44.5e6km2 per moon, so that's 44.5e20 / moon, or 0.0089g/s.

also known as 2800kg/year. OK, so maybe not the Apollo missions.

I vaguely remember we get C14 from nitrogen + cosmic rays... anyone know what solar wind / cosmic rays does to rock-stuff?

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

EmbraceExtinguish

Or maybe Extinguish$oft?

QUIC, dig in: Microsoft open-sources MsQuic, its implementation of Google-spawned TCP-killer QUIC

the good thing about standards

is there are so many to choose from,

- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

What does MS add to the standard other than 2 letters and maybe a (TM)?