Posts by Anonymous Coward

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

Re: Huh?

My current car has such a bracket, but my previous car had such a discreet arrangement that I didn't notice for about 2 years - the fuel cap had a couple of notches in the side, allowing it to perch atop the flap. It was also tethered so couldn't be removed entirely. A brilliant bit of design, masked by the fact that nobody knew about it - I told several other owners of similar cars who all responded with "wow, never knew that!"

Prior to that car though, there was no such arrangement. The cap either got placed on the pump, or on the car roof. I never had a problem with that either.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: Yes the users are bad

I often get "and then some numbers"

Yes, those numbers are the error code and will point me at the exact error. That's the only really useful bit of the message, not something to be skipped over.

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

GunsTeslas don't kill people, people kill people.

International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

Firing lasers at the ISS?? I sure hope they've set them to 'stun' otherwise they might blow it up.

Vodafone issues a stay of execution for Demon domain hold-outs

Re: Blast from the past

Threaten them with GDPR to get them to remove all traces of your old number. It's amazing what they can discover when faced with such legislation!

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

Re: Sure...

He is such a major flight risk that he cannot be released on furlough or similar.

But if he's that worried about contracting covid-19, there's another way to keep him safe... solitary confinement. If he has zero contact with any other living creature, the risk of contracting it are significantly reduced to the point of elimination.

SpaceX's Elon Musk high on success after counting '420' Starlinks in orbit and Frosty the Starship survives cryo test

Re: This may be a really obvious question.

"monthly bills on this link are going to be pretty high"

The word you're looking for is "astronomical"

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Re: "Hopefully he also added a bit of text along the lines"

And this is why I have $? as part of my shell prompt. Knowing the return code (roughly similar to errorlevel for you DOS-junkies) is incredibly useful.

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position

Re: Satelite designers missed a trick

Boosting that fuel has a cost, and the risk of it leaking is high.

It would also be difficult to haul enough fuel for multiple satellites.

If you're sending up a purely refuelling rig, you may as well send up a complete new bird to benefit from other technological advances.

591

Perfectly readable, very strong, but I don't like your tone :-p

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Re: Cables with labels on

"Hand me a 0.5m turquoise patch cable"

"We haven't got any. You can have either a 10m turquoise or a 0.5m blue"

"Fuck it, give me the blue one. We'll order more turquoise later."

And was thus forever more.

Re: Cables with labels on

Or has been intentionally moved to an adjacent port "temporarily" and that has become permanent, but because it was only temporary initially, the label remained.

In case you need more proof the world's gone mad: Behold, Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels

Re: Re Cycle Wheels

Lycra. Indeed, it's prohibited on a mountain bike. That's rule #18

Velominati - the rules

Apple: We respect your privacy so much we've revealed a little about what we can track when you use Maps

Re: Week days

Indeed, I once drove all the way across the country to a rented cottage that we hadn't seen before, purely on intuition. My parents made the same journey at the same time but using sat-nav (we were coming back at different times hence needing both cars).

I arrived almost 2 hours before them.

Sat-nav has its uses, but is not always the right solution.

Anyway, back to the topic... from what I've witnessed, public transport is pretty much empty at the moment. A friend commutes by train (to a hospital) - normally it's standing room only and getting friendly, but the last 2 weeks she has had three whole carriages to herself.

Week days

It looks to me like there used to be peaks associated with weekends, but now there are troughs at the weekend. That implies that it is now being used for work related travel more than leisure, which is a good thing.

Well, kind of. I mean how many people are going to get lost on their way to work, or end up on an airport runway?

Consumer reviewer Which? finds CAN bus ports on Ford and VW, starts yelling 'Security! We have a problem...'

Re: Who needs access to CAN to change tyre status

My car (of German origin) has a tyre pressure monitoring system that relies on the ABS sensors and looks at comparative differences on wheel rotation - a soft/flat tyre has a smaller circumference and thus will spin quicker.

That struck me as a very clever implementation, but it does mean that you need to drive some distance to get reliable data, because going around corners has a similar effect on rotational speeds.

My experience has shown that it alerts me to a soft tyre at around the same time as I notice it, maybe before. A proper flat however I noticed a long time before it alerted me (I kept going, slowly, another mile because there was nowhere safe to stop on that bit of road)

Microsoft prevents Domain of Danger from falling into miscreants' paws by forking out cash for corp.com

I've done the whole AD-within-registered-domain a lot. And some of those businesses have then decided to change their company (or 'trading as') name and thus register a new domain, redirecting the website etc. It plays havoc with the AD setup. Having a unique domain for the AD saves a lot of hassle in those situations.

I don't believe there is any one 'best' arrangement to cover all situations.

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

The UK FM band is the same as pretty much everywhere in the world; 88-108MHz

DAB is around 220MHz, so nowhere near GHz. It even still counts as VHF.

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: Wear face protection?

While we're on the subject, the US recommendation is 6ft separation whereas in the UK it's 2m. That extra 17cm might make all the difference, so perhaps we should err on the side of caution and go with the 2m one?

For reference, 6ft is about 13 linguine; 2m is a smidge over 14

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: Windows Server 2000

I'm more concerned about the bootloader and RAID controller than the power supply. I have spare power supplies but it's a bit trickier to have a spare bootloader to plug in (especially on a headless server)

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

Re: I'm a fan of meatball and spaghetti

Exactly. It's not a worm, it's a noodle. in homage to His almighty noodliness

Cloudflare is over the moon because its pro-privacy 1.1.1.1 DNS service got a clean bill of health from everyone's favorite auditor – KPMG

Re: 8.8.4.4

I was only remarking that 8.8.8.8 is mentioned in the article but not its counterpart.

Poor old 8.8.4.4, overlooked again.

P.S. dig dns.google TXT +short

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Re: Aduntgeddit

Indeed, the AI won't be on your machine. It'll be in the cloud somewhere.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

4. What about people who think that a question should end with a question-mark?

My example: A university professor who had a report that needed submitting "this week". 4PM on the Friday the computer wouldn't switch on. Cue panicked phone call; he was too stressed to even attempt talking through and insisted that I drive over there (15 minutes). I proceeded to flick the switch on the mains socket and turn the computer on.

Bless him, he acknowledged that it was just the stress/panic and he didn't hesitate to pay our call-out fee.

Brit housing association blabs 3,500 folks' sexual orientation, ethnicity in email blunder

Re: You have to wonder...

It's amazing to think that there are instances where people know things which aren't recorded in an excel spreadsheet. Even council workers can occasionally achieve such a feat.

Re: You have to wonder...

You have two flats available. And two families needing them.

One family has a homosexual child and is of an ethnic minority.

One flat is next to a known violent homophobic racist, the other is next to civil people.

Which family would you put in which flat?

Captain Caveman rides to the rescue, solves a prickly PowerPoint problem with a magical solution

Re: Key workers

The problem is that most IT people can work from home perfectly well already. So they're key but don't need to get to the office etc.

There's also a larger than average proportion who are well practised at self isolation/social distancing, and probably also a larger than average proportion who are single/have no distracting kids. Yes, I include myself in that assessment.

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

Re: "Or heard the sphincter-loosening words: 'What's a backup?' "

Do a full disk backup rather than just copying their profile. Restore the profile to the re-imaged device but retain the backup for a couple of weeks. Make it clear that if they have anything missing it needs to be reported within a week (yes, the differing times are deliberate)

Corporate VPN huffing and puffing while everyone works from home over COVID-19? You're not alone, admins

Re: 100% cloud

foreign??

It's not like companies and individuals have never been spied on by their own government.

Download this update from mybrowser.microsoft.com. Oh, sorry, that was malware on a hijacked sub-domain. Oops

Re: generic names - on Google/AWS/Azure

This is not about website redirection. It's just using DNS CNAMEs which are susceptible to re-registration. Same would happen if it were an IP address in a pool that could be re-used.

Fancy that: Hacking airliner systems doesn't make them magically fall out of the sky

Re: Fees and charges

"Remember that the number of take-offs should always equal the number of landings."

Always? For most of the time I spend on-board an aircraft I would like the number of take-offs to be one higher than the number of landings.

Broadband providers can now flog Openreach's new IP voice network in bid to ditch UK's copper phone lines by 2025

The POTS socket on the (G)PON NTE is for Fibre Voice Access. That's another service which has been canned in this announcement (just not written about by El Reg)

a) It's already in the spec - they have profiles for different bin availability.

b) The hardware already supports it.

Boeing didn't run end-to-end test on Calamity Capsule, DSCOVR up and running, and NASA buys a Falcon Heavy

Re: "A few more minutes of testing"

That's a little bit unfair. I think it's reasonable to conclude that Microsoft do test their telemetry. Can't miss an opportunity to capture just which swear words are uttered at the computer each time if FUBARs.

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

Wrong lesson

Surely they could've set up their own ring for when playing games - switch it in/out of the the main company network as required?

Obviously not enough blue sky thinking in those days.

Admins beware! Microsoft gives heads-up for 'disruptive' changes to authentication in Office 365 email service

Isn't cloud lovely

Now you get the opportunity to have all of your users pissed at you and there is literally nothing you can do about it other than say "yeah, microsoft made us do it".

Techs might understand, but the masses will just blame us for not giving them a way around it.

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Re: Take a lesson from railways

A simple approach: make the in-car entertainment system play some Justin Bieber and time how long it takes for the driver to smash the 'off' button. Any more than half a second and their obviously either dead, a sadist or too thick to be driving.

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

It has more control and adaptability than a typical aircraft autopilot system.

It can also automatically pilot you straight into a parked fire engine; that doesn't make it any less of a pilot, it just doesn't correlate with what people wish it would do.

Instagram influencer fools followers into thinking Ikea photoshoot was Bali holiday

Re: Clearly a cover up

You forgot to include the vaccine myth.

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

250 terabits per second

That's a lot of very high definition porn. I don't think we really need that amount of detail.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

Re: And if accompanied by Bitcoin wallet apps

Just pray they don't have a webcam as well.

Bloke forks out £12m, hands over keys to tropical island to shoo away claims that his web marketing biz was a scam

Re: Sorry, somebody had to say it.

Are you two particularly short? Because the sarcasm evidently went straight over your heads...

Re: But Angela has a working brain...

"diagnose a Windows Server issue"

There's your problem, right there. Windows Server is basically an oxymoron. Nuke it and start again.

.

.

Sorry, somebody had to say it.

Netgear's routerlogin.com HTTPS cert snafu now has a live proof of concept

Re: I don't believe it!

ISPs don't access the config dashboard on the router; they use TR-069 provisioning.

TR-069

Re: Is this really a big deal?

"probably would still work if I visited http://192.168.0.1/"

Which is why serviceworkers can only be registered on https sites

Re: Is this really a big deal?

The article glosses over it (or seems to miss it entirely), but the issue isn't about connecting to your router's admin panel while connected to another network.

When you connect to that other network, they (presumably MITM'ing an HTTP connection) register a serviceworker for routerlogin.com; when you then connect back to your own network and log into your router admin panel, the service worker kicks in and can do stuff at that stage.

From the linked blog post:

Thus, if the user’s browser loads routerlogin.com while connected to a malicious Wi-Fi network or VPN, someone could install a Service Worker for the domain. This could be achieved by injecting a hidden iframe for routerlogin.com into a Wi-Fi captive portal or a random HTTP webpage that the victim was browsing. When the user connects to their home Wi-Fi network again and visits routerlogin.com, the Service Worker could inject malicious JavaScript into the router management pages

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: SCSI

Correct, as long as it was on the fifth Thursday of the month.

Social media notifications of the future: Ranger tagged you in a photo with Tessadora, Wrenlow, Faelina and Graylen

Re: Robert'); DROP TABLE students;--

If you're going to insist on a link, at least make it an actual link.

https://www.xkcd.com/327/