Posts by Evil Auditor

Who cracked El Chapo's encrypted chats and brought down the Mexican drug kingpin? Er, his IT manager

Evidence for working for organised crime - sounds like they had something on him, at least enough to convince him to co-operate.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Re: Backups

Stuff you want to use again is kept in the recycle bin, that's why it's called "recycle"

You just made me draw rather inappropriate attention in an otherwise serious, calm airport lounge.

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

Indeed not the greatest leadership. Just wonder, purely hypothetical, if anyone else could have done better dealing with these barmy lots of brexiteers of different degrees and others.

I know, dbtx. It is the best spelling in history and very smart. It is amazing and the spelling of winning. It is tremendous spelling.

Michael Habel, I should downvote your post simply for using a hashtag here. Still pondering, however, what compitant could mean. My best guess is that it's the U.S. American spelling.

Now, regarding UK's PM. I do not like her. I had despised her long before she became PM. And something inside of me breaks when I feel compelled to defend her (that would justify another downvote).

She may not be the best PM that this country has seen. But she assumed government responsibility in a hopeless time where there's hardly anything to win (for her), facing almost certain failure. If you want to point fingers at incompetence, do so at the quarrelling Tories and at the opposition with their leading prick. As of now, those bastards are absolutely unwilling or unable to act in the interest of the country.

2018 ain't done yet... Amazon sent Alexa recordings of man and girlfriend to stranger

Re: More questions than answers...

Just imagine you command your Alexa to order a new car. And all you get is a freakin' gnome.

Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal

...once the matter is resolved...

That is, once his matenure in office is over?

Fraudster convicted of online banking thefts using… whatever the hell this thing is

Pin sentries are not specific to any bank so I found out when I used a Barclays one with Nat-west and vice versa, certainly a security error on the banks part.

Tony, how did gain access to internet?!

Here's 2018 in a nutshell for you... Russian super robot turns out to be man in robot suit

You call it fake. I call it the rise of the biomechanoids.

True, I'd also rather imagine something like HR Giger designed. But it has to start somewhere, doesn't it?

...and this is why nerds, auditors and stuff are not invited to parties.

Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

Re: Graphics

Whereas Wolf3D would give me splitting headaches, 10 minutes play at most.

We all had this. Key was, once you get beyond 13 minutes your head forgot about the ache and it was just pure fun!

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

Re: Actually, that is a good idea....

All too often, as a generation we aimed at the foothills rather than the stars.

I fully agree. Then again, Bloodhound SSC iswas doing exactly that, too - literally. Even a small bump might inflict serious harm, let alone foothills.

Re: No passenger seat

@Brian Miller

If you did the maths (i.e. risk calculations) correctly, you'd compare the ratios of pedestrians/pedestrians killed with speed run pilots/speed run pilots killed. I don't have the figures but my best guess is that being a pedestrian is less life risky.

Regading your accident records: did you ever consider to watch out for other traffic? (SCNR)

Re: Someone

...as being un-green

How can it be un-green with this pilot?

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Re: Sun?

So far I was only aware of Sun in a pizza-box. Still got one of those in my attic. That box is rather an energy sink than a storage though.

Tumblr resorts to AI in attempt to scrub itself clean from filth

“Using a binary classifier to identify masculine and feminine nipples for the purposes of cutting out porn is ludicrous.”

Ludicrous is only the application of said classifier. Using such to identify feminine nipples for the purpose of showing, well, feminine nipples... I'll leave that to you but there's something I like about that idea.

Re: Child porn

Ban images, text?

What kind of beginner are you, MiguelC?

Ban children! I say. It's the only way to be sure. And in a not so distant future there won't be and kiddy fiddlers. Or anyone else for that matter. Problem solved.

1,700 lucky Brit kids to visit Apple Stores for 'Year of Engineering'

Re: Huh?

creatives, as in barista.

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

I know where I will be on 14 March. I'm not mad about emmentaler but this rocks!

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

Who should an autonomous vehicle kill in an avoidable crash?

Don't know what kind of poll that was. But clearly the answer would be: anyone it can hit!

Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

Re: Chasing ghosts

Simple: it is an error. An expected error.

Re: toner powder

She would go to the men room...

Had you ever been to a ladies' toilet, you would understand why she didn't take you there (assuming you are male).

Do. Not. Go. There. Ever.

Woman who hooked up with over 15 spectres has found her forever phantom after whirlwind romance and plane sex

Re: Dear God,

@onefang, it was the toxic combination of two evil that turned the way to hell into a slippery slope downhill.

@Sgt_Oddball, I like your humour. Even though certainly not pure evil, rest assured she was definitely not heroically good either.

Re: Dear God,

...or Purgatory (if that's still a thing)

Yes it is a thing, and very real for that matter. I used to live there. It is otherwise known as Belgium*.

_{* Of course, Belgium isn't that bad at all. In fact, it can be a rather nice and pleasant place. That it turned out to be my personal purgatory has mainly to do with the fact that it is the origin of ex-Ms Evil Auditor.}

FFS. When you're suffering some flatulence, just fart like the rest of us! No need to turn to the media and public. It's nothing fucking special, your stinky "ghost".

We asked 100 people to name a backdoored router. You said 'EE's 4GEE HH70'. Our survey says... Top answer!

And if you must have something like this...

No. Just no.

Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

Re: This is all blasphemy

DropBear, exactly! Then again, if it's between that and your girlfriend being hit by a car... And not a robo-car, that is.

Re: This is all blasphemy

What if an aeroplane engine falls off midflight and crushes you in bed - God's will, eh?

Simple rule set

Rule 1: do not injure anyone.

Rule 2: if injuring someone is inevitable, adhere to the Highway Code (or whichever rulebook rules).

Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?

You Know

Whenever I read you know, heck!, even when I hear it, my brain makes me hear and see Christopher Walken saying you. know. And the world is back in perfect order for me.

Forget the CSI effect: Put some real AI brains behind video surveillance

Re: Or perhaps...

Wait, what?! Are you saying... we wouldn't actually all drop dead at once if we didn't have all this surveillance?

I'd like to stretch some game theory. Most of that surveillance might bring fuck all (I'm not at Google, obviously - just as an example of a different kind of monitoring) but the crucial issue is that many believe that maybe it might bring something and many do not want to forego this "opportunity", as dim as it may be.

Hubble 'scope gyro drama: Hey, NASA, have you tried turning it off and on again? Oh, you did. And it worked? Cool

Re: Hammers in Space?

Hammer. Or a healthy blast of pressurised air to get rid of all that star dust. Just imagine how it must look in Hubble's bowels...

Lester's ventblockers

Raspberry Pi fans up in arms as Mathematica disappears from Raspbian downloads

Re: Cake?

@HolySchmoley

I just had to follow the link. It's compulsive. Anyway, what struck me was the Greek equivalent of this idiom...

Scanning an Exchange server for a virus that spreads via email? What could go wrong?

@ASAC

Indeed. My earliest recollection of a remote desktop solution dates back to the mid 90s. And it wasn't exactly avant-garde back then either. It might have been with NT 4.0.

Sweet memories...

I remember well when ILOVEYOU broke out on our university campus. It was that morning when I found an e-mail in my inbox with this love confession from a girl in administration. As sweet as she was, I had some mixed feelings about this - can't remember her name since we cruelly only called her The Nose. For obvious reason. Needless to say, our love relationship wasn't meant to last. Not longer than a few seconds anyway.

I was safe with my Linux environment. And the next thing was to start up the Windows sandbox - no virtual machine at that time - and investigate what this charming virus actually did.

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

Re: Mickey The Cat

Micki (sic!) Mouse, Donald, most likely Scrooge too - not unheard of client names in private banking...

...instead, I am forced to hide my serious writing behind aliases

Wait, what?! Something for the Weekend, Sir? is not serious writing?

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

Re: Just the Usual...

@GlenP

...kill a deskphone by squirting so much...

How do I get this picture out of my head! It must be Friday.

In the early 2000s a then acquaintance ran a consumer electronics repair shop. One day a lady brought her disfunctional mobile phone in - "it stopped working" she said. He took it apart and found some moist, difficult to define stuff in its innards. I can't recall if he managed to get it running again. But when the lady came to pick it up, he asked her to elaborate what happened before it stopped working. "Oh, it fell in the toilet".

Uncle Sam gives itself the right to shoot down any drone, anywhere, any time, any how

Re: Inevitable

Is your flying car a drone if autopilot engaged?

What is a drone? Did they specify it as a flying object? Or do, for example, meatbags on foot navigatingstumbling with a fondleslab in front of their face qualify as drone?

The fur is not gonna fly: Uncle Sam charges seven Russians with Fancy Bear hack sprees

Re: Correction here

I believe everything I read on Facebook :|

Then again, can you read? Or can you look at pictures only?

Either way, you totally convinced me that everything on Farcebook is real. And I may not even have an account there.

How do some of the best AI algorithms perform on real robots? Not well, it turns out

I didn't go into the details of the study. But considering how much of our mental performance is interlinked with (and limited by) our body with its actors and sensors, it seems unlikely to ever get anything robotic AI that is not, to at least a certain extent, "aware" of its body.

Flying to Mars will be so rad, dude: Year-long trip may dump 60% lifetime dose of radiation on you

Misread as: Flying to Mars will be so sad

Volkswagen faces fresh Dieselgate lawsuit in Germany – report

Re: So...

No. The investors complain that VW hasn't informed the market once it knew about the emissions problem but rather kept it secret until U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made it public in 2015.

When's a backdoor not a backdoor? When the Oz government says it isn't

Re: Awesome

You can't spin bullshit if your audience is 100x more knowledgeable than you.

This, unfortunately, is only true for the small minority of people who are aware of the technical or social implications. Such as you find among El Reg readers and commentards. The majority of voters though, at least in my perception, are deceived/convinced by the criminally moronic phrase "if you've got nothing to hide..." or simply don't care at all.

_{Where's the We Are Fscked icon?}

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

Re: Plot twist? What plot twist?

strangely nothing went wrong

What should go wrong there? Even in my home installation I run the peripherals (screens and stuff) on one phase and workstations/servers distributed over all three phases. Strangely, I haven't been electrocuted yet ;-)

Prank 'Give me a raise!' email nearly lands sysadmin with dismissal

In a former life, working for a large financial institution, we found some unsecured SMTP servers on the intranet. Their purpose was to send notifications of some sort.

When discovering such an issue there are different possible ways to get it rectified. Being an auditor, an obivious way would be to raise it in a report. If found outside of a regular audit, a memo would work, too. Or even a phone call. But we, very cleverly, decided that best would be to send and e-mail from the CEO to the person responsible for maintaining those servers. Luckily, no typos. And only now I'm getting aware of the risk involved... it was not exactly the type of CEO to fsck with.

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Re: Timing is everything

Symon, excellent teamwork! That reminds me of a job interview I once had. The line manager gave me a "problem" to solve: you have two sandglasses, one with five and the other with three minutes - how do you measure four minutes? (It was a wee bit more complicated than this, something with three hourglasses.)

I thought for a few seconds and gave my answer.

The manager was not amused. He proudly mentioned that this is a test they use at Google and it is to see how an applicant communicates in problem solving.

Needless to say, I wasn't interested in getting this job and, presumably, neither was he very eager to hire me. Anyway, if someone wants to see my problem solving communication skills they better give me a problem that I cannot easily and infallibly solve on my own.

_{As a side note: my answer wasn't what was in his paper and grudgingly (I'd like to believe) he had to admit that it was also correct.}