Posts by chuBb.

Elon Musk hits the brakes on taking Bitcoin for Tesla purchases

Re: He declared a long position in BTC in February and then they went up

He's bored doing it for the lulz

Thats my guess, shorting although not in a traditional sense, declare long, make it too attractive to his billionaire club rivals not to invest, then tweet hand grenades to wobble the price, safe knowing its unregulated enough that he cant get into trouble and have a giggle with his cornflakes when they realise they just lost the gdp of a small country thanks to < 140 chars (yet still not moved a place on the rich list).

Any normal person who looses money well serves them right for investing what they couldn't afford to loose in crypto

How i wish they would do follow up series of nathan barley where he has accidently become musk, as he really is a self facilitating media node, and if phones still had buttons would punt a tesla phone with a massive number 5 button because its the best one....

Namecheap hosted 25%+ of fake UK govt phishing sites last year – NCSC report

Re: Filter by registrar

Only if your using that registrar's DNS servers, but most hide behind cloudflares dns infrastructure (or similar) so no not easily without having to maintain a massive ever growing pinhole list of allowed domains, and as others have already said they are the registrar so mainly its just running a billing system to charge for customers domains and not primarily hosting, i guess you could do a whois search per dns lookup and reject if the registrar is on your shit list, but frankly its easier to subscribe to some RBL's for this sort of thing to block at the edge, be restrictive with browser permissions, lock users down, proxy everything and actually pay someone to proactively monitor logs and spam filter reports

Re: Tangential rant - there - I feel better :-)

Its fiddly to get it just so, im lucky if i manage to get 9 months of deliverability from an SMTP im stuck supporting (bloody family boxen, cus my time is obv cheaper than chucking £10 in hat a year to cover costs and improve deliverability of urgent book and bridge club business...)

Compsci boffin publishes proof-of-concept code for 54-year-old zero-day in Universal Turing Machine

Re: The illusion of absolute security

The one powered off buried in 10foot of concrete is pretty secure, just somewhat lacking in utility

Could just read it forwards then backwards (similar idea to magstripe), should only encounter 2 user input ends, but you would have 3 from the quick scan of the exploit details, but i dont know the mechanism well enough to know if the tape reader had a reverse gear

Want to see this exploit demonstrated on one of the many lego UTM's on youtube...

House of pain: If YAML makes you swear, shout louder – the agony is there for a reason

Re: Ubuntu server networking

This is where my hatred of yaml and by extension netplan stems from

And this is the only reason yaml is crap and needlessly complicated, otherwise its just json without curly brackets and non quoted strings instead, which to my mind strikes me as some obsessive micro optimisation for a very niche task where it might have made a difference at google scale and broke out into the wild....

'Unhealthy' Azure Portal instances in UK West take a little lie-down over lunchtime

Re: Interesting oxymoron?

Nope, none of the azure services you can admin via the portal were effected just the admin interface website, powershell worked fine. So no there was no impact on the services you pay for, just the ability to alter service settings, now if you needed to burst scale during the outage i guess thats different (use powershell seriously it takes at most a week of using it instead of the portal and its second nature plus all the public settings are available to you, unlike the subset which the gui is wired up to, and spend enough time doing azure things you will eventually find you have to use powershell for something)

was down 10:30 for me, portal came back online about 12:30 for me, but has been VERY slow since +5min refreshes on app insights

Powershell was uneffected though, so for anyone moaning how can i manage (at best 50% of the available options via noddy ui) my resources, get some skills and learn powershell, you have had 15+ years

Lock up your Peloton smart treadmills, watchdog warns families following one death, numerous injuries

Re: I think it's more a design issue

Why surprised it would kill the company.

Everyone is sick of the blanket advertising already, all they have is selling to those who bought in already (frequency of ads makes me think on downward slope of the bell curve) , and a widespread tabloid headlines of "killer workout" etc would put any one who was on fence off, especially when amazon or Netflix (insert streamer of choice) start offering health add in subscriptions and then who would pay over odds for a middle of range tablet and middle of range treadmill with subs on top when a 15quid handlebar tablet mount would do same thing on any bike or treadmill. My point is I reckon peleton have 18months of existance left at best without a major product recall, with one, well I expect the c levels to scarper with as much cash as they can get away with and lots of people stuck paying hire purchase on a bricked service to who ever provides the finance for them.

End of the day there are only so many "should use more" subscriptions people can afford, and paying less for real gym fees (to not use but doesn't take up any space at home either other than the card in my wallet I use to de-ice windscreen with) at least snags use of sauna or hot tubs and pools too. Post lock down peletons prospects look grim, would not be surprised if renewels come with a real gym membership too anything to make it look like there is some value to be had from them.

Re: I think it's more a design issue

Yes i believe there is a direct correlation, same as the proven link between hestitation in feeding and being tripped down the stairs

To allow easier ebaying of unwanted clothes and to reorder smoothy pouches

Re: I think it's more a design issue

Damn you autocorrect!

The heading isn't the problem, it's getting the angle right so the claws retract and you don't end up ripping your face off by whipping the moggy down with claws embedded...

Re: I think it's more a design issue

Evertried heading cats or looked at how well prohibition worked in America?

If this was code this would be like accepting unvalidated data input, then blaming the user for sql injection, because its their fault I didn't paramaterise the dB query and provide some sanitisation of input and it was their fault they typed ';drop table customers because I put a label on the ui saying be careful..

Nope if a treadmill can kill through use (ignoring heart attacks, if your dumb enough to jog...) and not from toppling then it's got a major design flaw. Any other product would be recalled, but being iot vc funded I expect there is glaring omissions in current consumer protection legislation they can try and absolve responsibility behind.

Oh no, Internet of tatt peddler fears profit maybe hurt and people might go outside to trigger massive heart attacks and destroy their hip and knee joints.

Can't see this ending well for them IKEA got dragged over the coals for not very freestanding drawers toppling and splatting sprogs, inspite of safety warnings and user error being cause (not attaching included tether). This seems to be a basic failing of product design, and lack of realisation that most of the subscription overflow wardrobes don't live in minimalist exercise pods, but crammed into what ever space is available. Nevermind fact exercise equipment and tablets are irresistible fiddle magnets to kids, combine the two and you have no chance of keeping them away from it.

What next for Visual Studio? Microsoft's monster IDE can't please everyone and 64-bit will not solve legacy problems

I can honestly see .net 6 or 7 (VS2024 or 2026) being the version where windows dev options become a complete install or explicit opt in option when installing (much like windbg used to be part of a default install), cant remember the last time i did anything that exclusively targeted windows

Microsoft bows to the inevitable and takes Visual Studio 64-bit for 2022 version

Probably a good thing although vs flies along at a decent pace for me on new projects a couple of the large accreteted solutions regularly need chunks of projects disabling to avoid out of memory errors and lots of swapping. Although forget about vs if your somehow stuck on having spinng rust instead of an ssd as your os/app drive

To be fair to vs its performance has really improved with 2017 and 2019 versions its the third party add ons (reharper really not needed anymore thanks to built in refactoring tools, but it's unit test runner is so much better than the built in one) which kill performance.

Search visualstudio. Com for offline installer

New systemd 248 feature 'extension images' updates immutable file systems without really updating them

Re: why in hell?

Nah he needed to find new ways to ruin my day now I'm wise to *most* of the locations that can override what ever config I define.

It's a shame, if systemd just did init and not all the other shit it does it could be an adequate update to init scripts, i find it less effort to parse a. .service file than what ever ultra terse bash dick waving the dev put in the init file for example

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Re: Is this an April Fool?

And the fact the article links to the press release/letter hosted by nominet, so that would be quite the trick to pull off as i doubt el reg is any more popular with nominet's board as they are with apple....

You put Marmite where? Google unveils its latest AI wizardry: A cake made of Maltesers and the pungent black tar

Marmite cake is delicious

Had a friend whose South African girlfriend made us one claiming it was a family delicacy, she wasn't wrong was like a savoury jam rollie pollie excellent with custard

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

Re: Oh god its the BOFH

That's my pet theory on why phones got big again

Ruby off the Rails: Code library yanked over license blunder, sparks chaos for half a million projects

Re: RoR is saved!

And 10s of devs sighed in relief, and all the unmaintained but used RoR apps chugged along regardless

Guilty: Sister and brother who over-ordered hundreds of MacBooks for university and sold the kit for millions

Re: Actually no

Also not improbable to over order for spares and replacements, and just have them sat on a shelf waiting for a drinks spill, the look on peoples faces when they get the exact same model of laptop they thought they had engineered an upgrade too is priceless.

University i worked at i think the rule was +1 per 10 or 15 ordered for mobile kit, so depending on how many empty boxes were on the shelf with a 3 year refresh quite easy to get away with

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

Hopeful but sceptical

Im hopeful for some wholesale change at nominet, and cant applaud the actions of public benefit enough. That said im sceptical that it wont be met with chicanary and obstruction, too many vested interests in the status quo, hopefully 1and1 and GD will get told where to go, but money talks and wouldnt put it past them to piss about with pricing and start spreading FUD because they are not getting what they want.

To echo a previous comment they should be a public service, i see no difference between a domain name and a post code in terms of public benefit (obviously desirable isn't an adjective you can apply to a post code in terms of its composition, unlike a domain name, its not like there is a market for trading postcodes [ok there is but i dont think property sales are comparable to domainnames], my point is that the registry of post codes is a public service)

Been missing the lolz from the Autonomy bunfight, looks like this will get interesting....

Following Supreme Court ruling, Uber UK recognizes drivers as workers, offers min wage, holiday pay, pension

Re: Fuck uber

Was gonna say sounds like eurotaxis a2b in brum use the same app and have been excellent in my experience, even dropping me just before pay to exit bit outside departures Hall to avoid extra charges :D

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

#if debug

Bet they will be double checking the compiler directives (again, until they forget and release debug code again)

Customer comment and contributions no more as Microsoft pulls the plug on Office 365 UserVoice forum

Re: Reality check

Pure me twoism on ms's part

Wouldnt bother with the elctron app (desktop client) just use the web interface, its the first thing MS support tell you to do, on the long and stupid road to getting them to admit that their lastest typscript enhancements the product team has spaffed out might have bugs or needed further testing with telephony or voice users not just vid calls....

If you dont mind getting your hands dirty (your running *nix so i guess you dont mind config file fettling) try adjusting the useragent string that the desktop client sends to one the mac one uses, depending on your flavour of linux and audio sub systems you can often get a more up to date experience, as far as im aware the main sticking point is unified api's on linux to control mic/speaker/cam access where as on every other platform thats much less of a moving target, and why the web client works better as your browser vendor of choice has provided that api through the HTML5 WebRTC extensions they all support... (obv no proof that this is the case, but it makes sense and is bourn out by my experiences [you can do the user agent trick to also get the android apk to run in phone mode i.e. desktop teams phones are android tablets with a handset attached have root will fiddle ;)])

Re: Reality check

Only seemed to be a tool for adding weight behind project managers opinions

The lack of GPO or any enterprise management for teams is a joke, seriously you can't reliably force a client update or prevent its rollout like you could with sfb...

Same with lack of exchange address book integration with telephony, but then teams seems to be the result of poached social media staff who don't understand enterprise requirements just how to clone slack and zoom with added sharppoint.... Annoyingly it's almost excellent just let down by its lack of enterprise management eg sharppoint best ui update had been teams people actually use it as intended instead of an overcomplicated samba share with added excel macro

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Business as usual

But we had all predominantly wfh for last few years, but that's a benefit of working for a startup telco who main focus is wfh and cloud telephony, helps if we dogfood our services...

Footfallcam kerfuffle: Firm apologises, promises to fix product after viral Twitter thread, infoseccer backlash

Re: I like the Raspberry Pi

Why bother with designg anything bespoke unless you have a need to, just find an SBC that does what you want and add usb peripherals instant product

From the description the whole product is a simple bash script, footfall detection one of the millions of cctv motion detector daemons out there emitting a +1 and timestamp to a log file, a copy and paste of the street view WiFi snagging bash script logged to file, and curl on a cron job to push the log to (want to bet wide open) s3 account

Probably took 30mins to panic write after fucking about for 3 months playing games instead of working

Do love how overpriced digital signage is for what is often no more than a WiFi enabled digital photo frame, or a rpi in a vesa mount case on a tv

Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one

Re: Greed

Domain names peaked with nathan barley and trashbat.co.ck, after the cooke islands all other tlds are .co.ck

gTLDs are just a bog standard pump and dump scam run by icann, as soon as it became apparent that the infrastructure was being gobbled up with speculative registrations and brand protection, all that was left was the inevitable spam and malware domains. Never mind the whole more specific TLD just felt and acted like some walled garden shit your inlaws installed with a compuserve cd in the 90's, litterally 15 years late to the party

Troubling news for JSON tinkerers? Windows Terminal unveils The Settings

Mixed feelings

I for one must be hair shirted windows terminal has quickly displaced superputty as my primary terminal manager, but the json file doesn't bother me, guess I spend so much time at a terminal plain text config files are a norm for me so no bother at all

That said I'm increasingly concerned by uber tweak able settings files stored as plain text in predictable locations, especially in light the North Korean hacking via toxic visual studio project files, the worry for me with something like windows terminal is the fact it's so editable, such as where the path to shell exe's is set or overridden. For arguments sake some browser based exploit enables a script to be run on victims machine which detects Windows terminals presence, downloads a payload then parses the json config and changes the shell location to that of the payload, if ur lucky its just some malware, if ur unlucky part of the payload is a key logging rat shimed in front of the real shell that would be pretty nasty...

So would be in favour of the config at least being encrypted and requiring authentication to edit, at least that would be a speed bump, like viewing saved passwords in a browser.

How embarrassing: Xiaomi and Motorola show up to high school prom both wearing remote-charging tech

Horribly inefficient but could be useful

Useless idea for consumer tech, could have some very useful uses, medical devices for one, especially ones aimed at young children where the lead severely limits the effectiveness given inability to sit still, assistance buttons for the elderly that don't require remembering to plug in.

As for home use unless you live in a minimalist IKEA nightmare pretty sure speed of charge trumps lack of cable or charging coaster.

North Korea infected infosec bods with backdoors via dodgy blog pages, Visual Studio files – Google

Re: So much for the experts

Learn assembly and work up, no mystery, unless you go in for a games course or something more electronic based it's very unlikely u will do much in a formal educational establishment these days with assembly.

Once you know a cpus instruction set its 90% common between the lot just check your endianess...

Thing is the vast majority of devs and dev work is higher level language and api based, yet the literal bits of a computer remain a mystery.

My point is though that you need very limited compute access and a few dead tree books to get a fundamental understanding of computers, if that's your starting point before progressing to c and higher level languages then your going to have a massive headstart in understanding over a dev who can say DMA but doesn't understand or even knows it stands for direct memory access. I suspect NK hackers have impressively cobbled together systems similar to the dumpster diving hackers of the early 90s along with a better understanding of how the low level fits together compared to ur average dev who doesn't call them selves an engineer... That and I wouldn't be surprised if they have bought various sources (windows, cisco etc.) from Russia and China or in the case of Iran possibly even share info as those 3 do plenty of business with the hermit state especially Russia, would imagine it would help them to have a b apt team to try things with and burn if detected, tsk tsk naughty norks to world, cheers Kim here's some military kit and a good word for you at the UN in private.

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

Really handy for pos

Epson driver will also mean just about every thermal printer can be made to work, lots of fun to be had with one

Theranos destroyed crucial subpoenaed SQL blood test database, can't unlock backups, prosecutors say

Would lol to hard if next week el reg has headline of db found on unsecure s3 bucket....

React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components

Re: Something is fundamentally wrong

The problem is cultural I think, the Web team always seems to be the youngest, experience and longevity push you towards the back end and processes, certainly thats how my career trajectory is headed that and ux got v boring, having lived through css - > xhtml - > ajax - > fuckit-justput-<doctype>-at-the-top I just can't be arsed give me a good systems integration challenge instead...

Confessions at a Christmas do: 'That time I took down an entire neighbourhood'

Re: Or a specific "-all" switch

I still regularly dump strings looking for undocumented switches of smartarsery

Re: Or a specific "-all" switch

Bah the more critical the bit of kit the terser command...

Darwinism in the workplace where rtfm is an aptitude test, and aptitude dictates access to production

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

There is a lot to be said for only using text editors configured to display comments in a different colour especially multiline day ruiners committed by whitespace phobic devs...

Re: ~/.procmailrc

Reduced user login support calls by 90% and started a still ongoing turf war with marketing, by ignoring the style guide and editing with extreme prejudice the style sheet that choose a wanky modern font which displayed i L 1 and O 0 the same on all form fields and password emails for a clear monospaced one....

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

Once had to demolish a wall to fix a generator on a farm, the farmer was fed up of his gennies disapearing on the back of low loaders in the middle of the night, so built a 8foot block wall arround his new one, even included a door, neglected to consider servicing and maintenance access, and left a 6inch gap between the walls and the generator....

tool station and screwfix have a good range of patch and usb leads at reasonable prices too, ur rarely more than 30mins away from either of them, and both offer click and collect.

many security sockets available, problem with locking sockets (much like security usb) is that it stops casual removal, but the mechinisms are easily overcome with brute strength/stupidity or a biro lid, and its MUCH cheaper to just buy outside double sockets as they nearly all have a padlock loop on them, which is enough of a speedbump to stop supposititious people who think electrics are sorcery from disturbing them, especially if u use a hefty looking lock to secure it with (looks official/more than your jobs worth if you mess with it), but trivial to bypass in an emergency with a hammer or pair of snips (or possibly in extreme circumstances the key if it can be found ;))....

Although for permanent installation nothing wrong with cutting the plug off and just using a fused flex outlet instead of a 13A socket faceplate, can still be turned off by muppets though unless you get one with a key switch BUT it cant be unplugged/overloaded, so solves the majority fuckwittery that happens with plug sockets.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

There is an episode of the simpsons where bart declares "Everybody knows the first/last (cant remember which) day of school is a total wank"

Learning Mandarin

When I was learning mandarin, it pleased me no end that the Chinese surname "Wang" translated as "King" (according to the instructor, some of the vocab we were taught was very incorrect...), unsurprisingly as I am still incredibly puerile that became my favourite character flash card...

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

Fax modem and data nully were my favourite characters in reboot (the rebooted reboot is rubbish BTW) from the x files parody episode

Re: No good reason then

Other than being used to determine if oem or retail versions by the installer.

And IIRC some early CD roms (cd-r's were not ubiquitous then, many a Friday night I funded through upgrading family multi media centres to facilitate disk burning) had a fit if the CD wasn't full so probably needed just in case someone cobbled min specs together to get the windows eXPerience (bsods, reboot loops, telly tubby desktop, plug and pray, hours of fun fighting for your pci modem to be recognised only to fall over come cumulative update time, deafened and startled by the startup and shutdown noises, so user friendly skiddies could pwn the world with a few lines of vbscript... )

Plus I believe at the time full payloads were more economical to press as cds, which was why the iso vs installer images still differ in size...

No, the creator of cURL didn't morph into Elon Musk and give away Bitcoins. But his hijacked Twitter page tried to

Re: Pointless

You need to watch the prophecy hidden as satire called idiocracy