Posts by Sam Liddicott

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Sumption is wrong

Farage wasn't parliament though, was he?

And parliament didn't take his advice so they voted through other voting rules.

After reportedly dragging its feet, BlackBerry admits, yes, QNX in cars, equipment suffers from BadAlloc bug

I bet they aren't using calloc

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Who to believe

Whether you take medical advice from a politician or a medic that the politician appointed, it amounts to the same thing. The politician decided which medics to appoint (or sack as the case often is).

But it's not simply a medical or scientific question, how the factors are balanced is a personal preference.

What's your attitude to risk?

Anyone whose attitude to risk is more timid than Boris thinks that everyone whose attitude to risk is less timid than Boris is a murderer who should be forcibly vaccinated and then executed.

Anyone whose attitude to risk is less timid than Boris thinks that everyone whose attitude to risk is more timid than Boris is a Nuremberg kidnapper doctor who should be coughed on and made to walk home without a mask.

What is more concerning than the above hyperbole is the extent that people appear to be willing to go to in order to enforce their political ideals on others.

One person is not a means to another persons end however noble; good intentions aren't the same as good results.

Re: I have some sympathy for Boris

> Boris' ideal role would be father Christmas: a fantasy man of smiles and freebies all round.

Same as Corbyn then

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Not a chance of salvation

"IBM has one chance of salvation"

I don't think they do. They sold off nearly every hardware product and software product, sacked all their experienced staff, they don't have anything left and this current failure proves it.

They can't even migrate their own emails from their old system that they sold off to a new one.

Why would anyone buy IBM now? (The products, the services, or the shares?)

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Re: BBC News 24 talking to a medical researcher last night

Too many think that other people can be used as a "means" to their "end" on the grounds that someone is suffering

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

Re: How is this possible?

Stop using C, peeps!

It's too hard to get right enough everywhere, as we are seeing.

Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron pegs damage from iPhone factory riot at $7m

Re: Should we care ?

"The best players get to make the rules, and they became the best players by having what you need to survive. This is reality. Uncomfortable, but not incorrect"

True, but from the article we see that you are describing politics, not capitalism, I quote:

"relaxed legislation and the liberal dangling of subsidies and incentives"

^^^ That's what it takes to make up for India not being "the best player", not even being good enough to otherwise be considered.

What we are seeing is a bad player, playing badly.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Re: Blockchain

That could describe what they did, but how about a replay attack?

Perhaps you meant challenge-response using a private key.

Ooops that could also be a known-plaintext attack to reveal the private key.

So while it could be done, even by depending on a private key, you also accidentally also specified a failing system

Re: Confessions of a bolt cutter

Possibly they were of the belief that he served their interests and not the other way around.

Microsoft to pull support for PHP: Version 8? Exterminate, more like...

Another server configuration that PHP runs on termed WIMP for good reason, and it DOES have windows in it.

FTP is crusty and mostly dead, right? AWS just started supporting it anyway

Good. FTP doesn't require that either the file source or destination be the control client.

Control client C can coordinate a transfer from server A to server B

In Rust we trust? Yes, but we want better tools and wider usage, say devs

The biggest problem with rust is 3rd party library authors (or authors of wrappers) lying about ownership transference for those cases where Rust can't work it out -- thus undermining all the guarantees of rust.

That critical VMware vuln allowed anyone on your network to create new admin users, no creds needed

Are these bugs deliberate?

It's clearly a programmer error - it's not valid to call that function without valid credentials!

At least that's the sort of response I get when I report bugs.

I reported today how bash's printf %q format can leave a dangling unused backslash which voids the whole safety benefit of %q

Apparently it's a programmer error to expect to use %q as advertised.

It's not safe to use a truncating size specifier with %q e.g. %.8q

It could be made safe, but why bother for "a programmer error"?

I don't think these sorts of bugs are deliberate but I know others do.

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

Re: Sad to see it go

I believe the spelling is:

wubble-wubble-wubble

I have it on good authority

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Re: JS lib house of cards - you ARE the weakest link!

I remember this being a problem for Microsoft just over 20 years ago with an exploitable libtiff having been statically linked into their apps.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

worse than an Acorn electron

Worse than an acorn electron - an 8 bit CPU on a 4 bit data bus -- which pretty much ruined it.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: Pascal has always been great

I wrote a device drivers in turbo pascal to work with a windows Delphi app.

Its job was to pre-register client handles with windows csmapper so that apps could regisster with card services (pcmcia) *after* windows had started (csmapper was intednded only for clients that loaded before windows started).

There was quite a bit of dpmi stuff going on to ensure that callbacks occured in the correct virtual machine (if there were dosbox clients running under windows).

Turbo pascal didn't lack anything C could do.

Blame of thrones: Those viral vids of PC monitors going blank when people stand up? Static electricity from chairs

Re: For extra fun ...

And how many men are you?

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: It's all in the 'title'

I was taught that a "professional" is one in whom gross misconduct or dishonesty could of itself bar them from effective participation in their profession.

That is, their integrity is gone, not merely that a registration board has de-listed them.

Who would hire a software engineer found guilty of inserting back doors without their employers knowledge? Or who would lie on a passport form? If you can't trust their word, you can't trust their work.

Hence, a professional being trusted to sign a passport form because of what they have to lose if they lie.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Re: writing a variable twice.

Until you learned (which I didn't until decades later) that you could treat page 0 as being an array of 256 registers.

Brexit bad boy Arron Banks' Twitter account hacked: Private messages put online

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

That sounds like an argument for partial revocation of human rights.

Madame guillotine also waits for you, citizen Robespierre, by your own argument.

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

These are they same people who think that the vote to leave the EU shouldn't apply to them; cousins of the "not my president" bunch.

Many self identify as liberal and democratic; and get angry with those who don't enable their pretense.

Re: "Twitter [...] have broken GDPR rules"

They know that voting against something doesn't make the result inapplicable to them.

Something that many remainers apparently don't understand,

Re: Re:because it's exactly how these people think.

no actual quotes follow...

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Beautiful

It was possible even in DOS well before Windows 95 with the "join" command.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Fixing the symptom…

Really?

How many OS do you know of that sort the results of readdir?

That would require the OS to either read all of the filenames before returning any of them, or that the FS maintain an order, and most FS do not.

Re: Fixing the symptom…

And what locale or collation rules? Is a before B?

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

Re: Brexit

To be fair, we should have had a vote on joining the EU in 1992.

if the voters who have lamentably aged 27 years in the intervening period could have voted then, we would have to be in this mess now.

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

Re: "Palmer believes Oracle is billing the wrong entity"

The anger is because the minimum licence quantity is 500

Single user license?

Try getting a single user licence and you will find that you can't.

The minimum quantities for 500 users when I last checked.

I think the business plan when is to go for small businesses who won't need a 500 user licence but will have some employees that will run the add-on anyway.

Combine that with the fact that the licence conditions may vary over time, I believe a legitimate use can become an illegitimate use and subject to the licence.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Re: At werdsmith.

I see what you did there.

Nice demonstration!

Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Re: The SFC can kiss my taint...

So that those who care about copyright and/or respect the law can also have nice things.

(A license is permission).

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

Re: 100% honesty 90% of the time

and modulate it

Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?

Re: Proppa language bruv

Where do you place ASCII with C?

Chinese Super Micro 'spy chip' story gets even more strange as everyone doubles down

Re: A Matter of Trust

True dat!

Too many people feel the need to come to a premature conclusion, and get very choppy with Occam's razor to help them do it.

They consider that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and then chop away, not thinking of the extraordinary value that they might be chopping away for want of a little patience.

Oracle? On my server? I must have been hacked! *Penny drops* Oh sh-

Hacker installed Oracle and then dobbed you in for the reward money

Surprised it hasn't happened yet... or has it?

Click your heels, um, mouse thrice and you've quickly got Ubuntu on Hyper-V in Win 10 Pro

As soon as "seamless mode" is supported I can ditch virtualbox

Vodafone cops ads rap over Martin Freeman's vanishing spaceship

Re: They're all the same speed

speed means data rate in this conversation.

The DSL data rate need not be related to the peering data rate, and on a badly managed ISP may be much less

In a similar way, a 5 lane driveway between the front door and road won't reduce your journey time to the Sainsbury's even though the 5 line driveway is in your control.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

My printers "google-print" module mysteriously wouldn't work until I disabled ipv6 on the printer.

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Re: What we need

> And only putting three registers on the 6502 was just dumbfuckery of the highest order.

> Shame on Peddle!

Once we decide something is not worth knowing about, we lose the opportunity to find out we are wrong.

I used to have that view, but years later found out that 6502 page zero access was treated specially and very fast, effectively giving another 256 registers.

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

Re: Never!

> NAT is *not* a security feature!

and yet it successfully prevents unwanted external access for so many users, while permitting desired external access through uPNP and NAT helpers.

Have you tried pushing an unexpected connection through a NAT router?

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

Re: Groupwise

Despite the Precedence: junk

header that Unix systems had been using for years.

Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep

At one point British Telecom called # "gate" much to the bafflement of every single one of their customers.

Declassified files reveal how pre-WW2 Brits smashed Russian crypto

Re: Paranoia and hot pockets

I hope you start writing for el Reg -- I mean not just in the comments section

Official: The shape of the smartphone is changing forever

Re: Wouldn't it be nice ..

the case -- that makes your phone really thick again but without increasing the battery life.

Why don't they attach a flip front cover to the battery case which is thicker because it has more battery?

Microsoft Edge bug odyssey shows why we can't have nice things

Malicious compliance

I'm waiting for the other side of the story to show up in Reddit's malicious /r/MaliciousCompliance

Google-free Android kit tipped to sell buckets

Re: What do people want in a smartwatch?

"tells the time" <-- wooden bobbins, I tells ya!

My list is:

* time-travels you to whatever time you want it to be -- never be late again!

* charges "Instantly" by time-travelling after charging back to the point at which it need charging

* split-time heirloom mode where on the death of the first heir it time-travels back to be inherited by the second heir (using the diagonal slash rule to cope with any number of heirs and sub-heirs).

* time travel shopping - buy a holographic anti-gravity translator combination from etsy-bay in future end-of-line close-out sales at bargain prices

Devuan ships second stable cut of its systemd-free Linux

Re: Storm in a teacup

Devuan is here, get over it.

Don’t talk to the ATM, young man, it’s just a machine and there’s nobody inside

Re: "Don't talk to the ATM..."

"Perform a U-turn where possible"

Not unless you say please