Posts by Anonymous Coward

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

And please tell me how the blind drivers are expected to type on this keyboard?

Re: good grief

In the UK case, the first 2 letters of the modern format specify the location of issue. The next 2 digits specify the half-year. The final 2 letters are the unique identifier.

It's not that complicated.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: FFS

How is the ISO format backwards? Or do you think of time in terms of ss:mm:hh ???

Coarse -> Fine is the only sensible way.

Re: 11Oct16

Is that referring to 2016-10-11, 1916-10-11, 2011-10-16, or 1911-10-16 ???

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Sparky

HP (IIRC) laptop power supplies had an issue a few (probably 8-10) years ago... the clover-leaf plug that came with them had a manufacturing defect which left an air bubble between live and ground. eventually the plastic deteriorated and it sparked across. Left quite a good flash burn in the socket, along with a very surprised customer!

Thankfully replacing the lead was all that was required, but it made quite an interesting root-cause investigation. Affected a sizeable batch too, but took a while to emerge.

Fasthosts finally promises to stop pushing unwanted .uk domains onto irritated customers

Re: From the 7th of September we won’t email you ever again about making it yours

Talkie Toaster: How about a muffin?

I can 'proceed without you', judge tells Julian Assange after courtroom outburst

The judge

Can the judge simply say "fuck it, I've had enough of your shit. Off to America you go, you can piss off someone else over there. I'm done." ?

Re: No fair trial in the US

It will be impossible for Asswhinge to get what he would class as a fair trial anywhere. Because he's guilty as sin, so when he's found guilty he'll whinge that "it's not fair"

I won't be ignored: Google to banish caller roulette with Verified Calls

GDPR

So a business is intending to give data to Google about me (that they're calling me, what it's about)... isn't that against GDPR unless I've explicitly given them permission to do so?

The ICO should have a field day with this.

Re: I'm trying to think how many unsolicited calls I've actually wanted

Hospital waiting lists...

They won't identify anyway. Hospitals withhold their number for privacy. Can you imagine the conversation triggered by your phone ringing with the text "Hospital... about your abortion" and the sex-starved husband seeing it?

Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn't get through to users on Microsoft email accounts

If everyone else blocked outlook.com (and the myriad other Microsoft email names) then the whole email ecosystem would be a hell of a lot cleaner.

Unfortunately punters sign up with microsoft and we have to be able to communicate with out punters :-(

Hey, want to make a few bucks? Let Google sell your store's Wi-Fi network capacity

Critics

All you people moaning about google snooping... this is essentially a backhaul service, so do you know who provides all of the backhaul for each cell site that your mobile operator uses? Do you even care?

Hell, a lot of them go over microwave links which are inherently snoopable! (at least as much as this proposal facilitates anyway)

They're looking to automate connecting to WiFi to provide 'WiFi calling' functionality, which is essentially 4G-over-VPN. The "random store owner" doesn't see your traffic, just that a device has connected to a M(V)NO

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

Re: Silly question

Some of us have enough of both that that's all people see anyway.

Where? China? Yeah, good luck with that.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: My first major upgrade

X-stream.

I don't think it was profitable, hence you haven't heard of them since.

Re: contactable at all times

Pagers were (are, amazingly) a broadcast fire-and-forget system. There's no feedback to the network or sender as to whether a page was received. You could just have taken the battery out rather than risk exposing it when reaching for a biscuit.

Perhaps

If the minimum interval possible to configure had been in the order of 5-10 minutes, perhaps people wouldn't have come to expect email to be instant?

I still honour the hierarchy of priorities: telephone call for "urgent, must respond now" stuff; SMS for "ASAP but not necessarily immediate"; email for "FYI" or "sometime in the next 2 days" stuff. Yes, I also introduce unnecessary delays to get the point across.

Apple: Yeah, about those ground-breaking privacy features in iOS 14 – don't expect them until next year

Re: Disappointing they are delaying this change

Do you really think that facebook don't have a Apple-IDFA <> Facebook-ID mapping somewhere? Sure it may take a few impressions for them to confirm the link, but they'll just associate the new ID to your existing records.

This is not rocket science; it's far more lucrative.

Google declares Maps COVID-19-ready after retraining it on pandemic traffic – or the lack of it in some areas

The other point is that those costs vary, with some predictability and some unpredictability.

It's worth avoiding a school at pickup time even if it adds minutes to the average journey time, but it's fine to pass it at other times.

If there's an accident on the quickest road, it's better to take a different route early to avoid the whole area.

With local knowledge, these decisions are trivial. When working it out for the whole globe, I can see why they'd outsource the learning to machines.

Intel screams Tiger Lake is 'world's best processor' (then quietly into its sleeve: for thin Windows, ChromeOS laptops)

Re: I'm not impressed

The AMD-Intel balance has ebbed and flowed for as long as I can remember. There are times when AMD are on top and other (generally more frequent) times when it's Intel.

Re: What's wrong with "times"?

Perhaps it's really been developed for xxx-rated videos?

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

We've had dozens so far, and they've only got as far as the 'e's

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You

My 3210 took a LOT of abuse. To the point that the battery clip broke and wouldn't hold the battery in place properly. I wedged a bit of card in between the battery and the cover, which worked fine for another few years.

I still think that if Nokia had embraced android, they could've avoided the whole Microsoft fiasco and would still be the dominant player in the phone industry.

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

Re: My contribution ...

"I don't know of a single long-term un*x admin who won't ... admit to have done the same thing"

I have never done that - too many cautious tales from others (it's good to learn from other people's mistakes)

I have however done a dd in the wrong direction.

Two arrested in Congo after Google Loon mobe balloon meets terra firma more than 1,000km from operating area

"You can choose to have the Chinese, Russians, or the 5Eyes"

"Choose ... or" ???

Oh to be so naive!

You may choose which one has first dibs, but if the others want in on it then they will.

Samsung says it makes the world’s best holes. Yes, holes. Holes so good they even get a brand

Re: "... a selfie-shooting camera ..."

Personally, a selfie needs to be low quality and out of focus otherwise it will capture too much detail of my face and nobody wants to see that.

Re: Just the starting point

All true, but consider that they could have simply used wax crayons instead.

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Re: Stats

Where I live there's an Indian takeaway open occasionally, or a 45 minute drive to somewhere with 'fast' food.

But then fast food isn't for when you're at home, so it's largely irrelevant. If I'm out in a town I may well succumb though.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: "People nowadays have no idea how sensitive electronics used to be."

But everything now is surface mounted, double-sided boards or all of the transistors in a single packaged IC. Therefore the tracks (aka antennae) are much shorter and generally routed with some consideration to where the ground plane is, which all reduces the amount of pickup.

(De-)couple that with better understanding and availability of decoupling, twisted pairs, isolating transformers and you have much better immunity.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

Re: It happens

The Apple solution is to purchase another iPad for each child.

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

Re: DNS Over HTTP

And if the DoH server hasn't got that domain in its cache, what do you think it does?

It checks its upstream server, which at that level will almost certainly be/require a query to the root.

The problem is not the browser querying root directly, it's that everything it's looking up requires that the DNS provider queries root (because NXDOMAINs aren't cached, as well as being randomly generated).

If they checked it with <randomword>.google.com instead, that'd be absolutely fine regardless of protocol - the google.com NS & glue will be cached at all ISPs already.

Bunch of mugs keep risking life and limb to 'crockery bomb' sad little roundabout

Re: Oh come on...

They're referring to the time of placement, not the fact that the crockery is there.

Drivers wouldn't normally expect to encounter pedestrians on a roundabout.

I still think they're over-reacting, but at least I can understand what they're concerned about.

Obviously the only safe option is to deposit said china by quadcopter.

Aw, Snap! But you should see the other guy – they're in dire need of a good file system consistency check

Re: It can be done

Just about the right time to submit the funding request for 1 pack of government-approved balloons from a government-approved supplier. $2,000,000 should just about do it, unless you want some helium too.

Worldwide Google services – from GCP to G Suite – hit with the outage stick

Re: Oh my, Google Cloud and Slack at the same time

It's Storm Ellen making it rain!

50%+ of our office seats are going remote, say majority of surveyed Register readers. Hi security, bye on-prem

NHS

My other half works in a clerical role for the NHS. Most of her team are now back in the office, just those few who are shielding remain at home.

During the lockdown, everyone was working remotely at one stage, then they found they needed 1 person in the office, so that person worked alone in the office.

But the manager can't cope with not seeing the staff, so has insisted on getting everyone back. Thankfully the office is not crowded, but it seems daft to have everyone commuting when they've proven that working from home is at least equally efficient. (Difficult to quantify as the hospital has been quieter due to cancelling as many procedures as they could, so case load went down)

Me, I'm working from home about 80% of the time at the moment - just some hardware jobs need to be hands-on.

Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It's also really small

Re: School run

Well of course they had to take the SUV. The roadster is on its way to Mars, but seems to have taken a wrong turn (blame the sat nav)

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

Aluminium is safe, but just remember that the government embed tiny (invisible) trackers in rolls of aluminium foil which are activated on contact with head hair.

Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to turn customized iPod into 'Geiger counter'

You could indeed tell stories, but that's all they would be. Same as I could.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog

Capita: We were juuust about to generate revenue growth and sustainable cash flow – then pandemic stuffed it up

Re: Another poor day for Capita

But why would they worry about the turnaround? They still get flung wads of cash from government projects and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Yes, I've just purchased a few more shares at this low price!

Intel NDA blueprints – 20GB of source code, schematics, specs, docs – spill onto web from partners-only vault

From TFA:

"Binaries for Camera drivers Intel made for SpaceX"

Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

Back in the day (late 90s IIRC), certain processors could be overclocked by soldering a bridge between pads on their upper-surface. The different speeds being sold were the same chips but simply had different solder bridges from the factory.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Re: Outsourcing

Amazon employ people whose role is explicitly to make their infrastructure secure (and pay them handsomely for it). Run-of-the-mill companies don't do such things.

OK, they also give their customers the tools to defeat that security if they so choose, but that is not the default setting.

So, AWS comes secure by default. (some) corporate IT drones would hook a windows server up to the internet with all ports open.

A competent in-house tech however can still beat any cloud based setup.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

"It is always such fun when users take it upon themselves to diagnose issues, and usually ascribe them to a mystery virus or some other example of miscreancy"

The best I've had: I think it got a virus, so I ran a defrag on it but it made no difference.

The real problem (other than the user) was that the son had spilled coke over the keyboard.

Twitter says spear-phishing attack hooked its staff and led to celebrity account hijack

Re: Give us the method details!

brrring brrring

brrring brrring

"Hi, this is Barry from the Twitter IT department ( / development team / whatever). We're testing a new system and I'd like to get you to try it out."

"Umm. OK then"

"Yeah, just go to http://phishing.site and log in as normal. If you can test it out for a few days and then send us any feedback, that'd be great"

"Will do. Thanks"

If you own one of these 45 Netgear devices, replace it: Kit maker won't patch vulnerable gear despite live proof-of-concept code

Re: EU directive 1999/44/EC

Most home consumers would expect to use a router until they switch ISP and the new one sends them a new router. So that'll be just after the initial 18 month offer expires, probably.

They don't tend to purchase their own kit.

Named arguments squeak into PHP 8.0, 7 years after first RFC

Or pass the argument list as an associative array (aka map)

add_to_basket(array( 'customerID' => $custid, 'productID' => $prodid, 'quantity' => $qty ));

Simple & already works, just need to write the function definitions correctly and provide suitable defaults.

Data-stealing, password-harvesting, backdoor-opening QNAP NAS malware cruises along at 62,000 infections

Re: IPv6 Security Question

The firewall in your router will behave in the same was as it does for NATed IPv4 connections.

It will reject any unsolicited connection requests from outside (by default; unless you've tinkered with it!)

The way IPv4 NAT works means that an IPv4 address (32bits) + port number (16bits) gets routed to the local device which initiated the connection, so IPv6 is no less secure anyway (32+16=48bits vs 128bits)

See you after the commercial breakdown: Cert expiry error message more entertaining than the usual advert tripe

Re: At least here you have the option to proceed anyway

Just tried that on one of the ad-servers which is locally redirected to my own server - it didn't work.

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Re: but this can't be true

Ummm...

= ≠ ≡

Re: "the test is designed to make almost anyone fail"

Of course there's something wrong in the code. There's no such thing as a perfect program.

But I assume you're looking for debugging technique more than programming language skills... so start with "where's the input validation?", progressing to "what if someone has set this parameter to zero?", then hitting the language issues "surely this print command should be a printf?" and "still allocating memory manually?"