Posts by Tascam Holiday

More UK councils caught by Capita's open AWS bucket blunder

Beyond a joke

"We are working with our third-party technical advisors to investigate this issue. The data is secure and no longer accessible."

Oh well that's alright then YOU FUCKING CLOWNS.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Not all broken

The nice unobtrusive desktop Twitter client I use is still working for now, no ads, chronological time-line, really slick and with very low overheads. Not going to mention its name as I don't want it becoming any more popular if the Reg's theory is correct that clients with fewer than 100000 users are still allowed to work...

I'm just a Twitter lurker who avoids the toxic crap and just sees tweets from the people and orgs I'm interested in. Never post anything, never had and don't want any followers. I'll miss it when it inevitably folds or becomes unrecognisable and everyone I like has fucked off.

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Re: Joplin

I did the same, though I haven't completed my migration to Joplin. I was a paying EN user since 2007 but stopped when V10 came out.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

Multirow Tabs Please

I much prefer multirow tabs over vertical ones, but they're getting harder and harder to implement in FF, requiring a new bunch of modifications to userChrome.css which break every few versions.

All this malarky fiddling around in files is a colossal PITA and I curse Mozilla for removing the ability for plugins to control the UI like this.

Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research

Reproducibility? What's that?

Grizzled old university sysadmin here, ex researcher. I spend a fair amount of time explaining to our researchers (and not all young 'uns) that basing their critical work on code grabbed via 'git clone <last night's commit of useful looking repo>' is not a good start. Most are honestly baffled at the impact this will have on reproducibility, and I seriously wonder if basic scientific methodology is not formally taught any more.

On the other hand freezing anything other than a very simple codebase and expecting it to continue to work for years afterwards is a very difficult problem to solve. The immense pressure to publish also relegates these issues to way down the list of priorities.

Bioinformatics is the main culprit in my experience as it's a new field and there's been an explosion in ad-hoc tools and pipelines cooked up in labs and released to the world and embraced with little concern for long-term maintenance and preservation. We're at the stage in bioinformatics software cycle where the initial burst of software activity of 10-15 years ago is leaving a lot of abandoned applications in its wake. Whole research programmes have come to rely on some of these and it's always painful explaining to them that they must find an alternative as their cherished application or tools no longer work due to our necessary OS upgrade.

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Re: UK Law

> Milk Marketing Board = the shadowy organization behind all conspiracy

Watch out watch out, there's a Humphrey (Appleby) about!

It's not easy being green: EV HTTPS cert seller Sectigo questions Chrome's logic in burying EV HTTPS cert info

EV certs: waste of money

EV certs are not particularly secure anyway. How do I verify that an organisation's address as indicated by the EV cert is the correct one?

See also https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-really-really-dead/ where it was demonstrated to be trivial to get an EV cert with the same name as an existing company.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Flipping heck

Our CentOS 7 to 8 migration work has just come to a screeching halt. On this occasion our corporate love of grinding policies has actually helped and we hadn't gone too far down that road yet. Separately our new HPC system would have been CentOS 8 with a couple of RHEL licences just in case we need support - that plan scrapped while we consider an alternative. It will probably be Debian or Ubuntu, and the same for the rest of the estate come 2024.

No wonder Brit universities report hacks so often: Half of staff have had zero infosec training, apparently

"Chop one hand off each time they click on the phishing test. If they manage a third time they're probably beyond help"

That person we would call 'clever dick'

You're drinking morning coffee in 2019. These eggheads are in 2119 landing drones on their arms like robo-falconers

At last!

How long have I waited for a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction? Now it's here.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Re: Is he off his rocker?

I think the idea is bonkers too, but the SSH key issue is already solved. We use LDAP to hold public keys at my org, as the home directory is created on initial login only, so doesn't initially exist. We get the user's key as part of registration. A combination of SSSD and SSHD config sorts this out.

...actually scrub that. You'd still need to use a password to decrypt the home dir container, so this wouldn't help much. Oh well!

Handcranked HTML and JPEG japes. What could possibly go wrong?

Silly oversight

One important step was omitted.

sudo chown ceo incriminating_image.jpg

Twice in one month: Microsoft updates new-style Terminal preview

Bless 'em

This is a nice little development, but MS seems inordinately proud of their achievements in this simple application, with features that ahem, other OSes have had for years and years. I had to laugh at the overblown promo video for this that came out a few months ago.

RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud

Ditched for Zonomi

I jumped ship to Zonomi a few months ago when I realised I was paying $60 a year to Oracle for very little with Dyn (although I've otherwise been a happy customer for many years). My home router doesn't know how to talk to Zonomi, but all I've had to do is cron a curl call every day to update Zonomi if my IP changes. And it's free.

Encryption? This time it'll be usable, Thunderbird promises

Better Exchange support would be more welcome

It's nice that TB is going to get some love after years of neglect, but I'd rather they put some work into native support of EAS or EWS. I know IMAP is available from Exhcange but my last two employers wouldn't enable it.

There are some add-ons which can help, but they're of variable quality and suffer from frequent abandonment.

Happy 10th birthday, Evernote: You have survived Google and Microsoft. For your next challenge...

Good product, questionable quality control

Long time EN user here. There's not much on the market quite as good, but the quality over the last 2-3 years has taken a serious nosedive. Long standing bugs and issues are ignored for years, while unasked-for features (emoji support for example) get shovelled in. Beta versions are released, the community feeds back to EN only to see all those new bugs appear in the general release anyway.

Someone needs to take their dev teams (or at least the managers) by the scruff of the neck and rub their noses in what they're currently pushing out. You get the distinct impression nobody at EN actually uses the product themselves.

You're the IT worker in charge of securing the cloud for your company. Welcome to Hell

Re: Now let's play this through for a UNIX(oid) shop

SSH doesn't just mean a text terminal. You can use it to tunnel through multiple hosts to get to your endpoint very easily, basically a simple VPN solution, especially when used as a SOCKS proxy.

Organisation totally locked down from the outside? SSH out to a friendly host and create a reverse tunnel for whatever service you need (within reason). Bang - you've got your entry point for working on the move!

Mozilla and Yahoo! trade sueballs over Firefox-Google search deal

Yahoo! has a reputation that can be harmed!?

Yahoo! “... has suffered and will continue to suffer competitive injury to its business and reputation...

What reputation?

Phone fatigue takes hold: SIM-onlys now top UK market

Same here, I've got a Note 3 which is pushing four years old. The Note 8 is the only valid replacement but it's stupidly expensive and the sealed battery means it's unlikely to last as long. I'll soldier on until my Note 3 breaks then consider my options.

Virgin Media biz service goes TITSUP* across London

Redundancy

Let me guess: VM's net admins made a fuss about a lack of redundancy, management took it on board and defenestrated 226 employees.

Britain's warhead-watcher to simulate Trident nukes with Atos supercomputer

Re: Hmm

@Jon37

Yeahbut we'd keep the lid on the saucepan to be really safe.

UK Parliament hack: Really, a brute-force attack? Really?

Misread the memo

Instead of putting in 2FS they put in SFA.

IBM makes meek apology for Oz #CensusFail, offers no fail detail

As the saying is likely to go...

Nobody ever got hired for buying IBM.

Apple backs down from barring widow her dead husband's passwords

Maybe a dead man's switch is a good idea. If you don't access your e-mail account for a month, e-mail the password to your next of kin.

Google has such a feature: you can nominate someone to be the recipient of your account details after three months of inactivity.

In some respects Apple's stance on customer privacy is quite admirable, in this case they've clearly lost the plot though. It's strange how these examples of dreadful customer relationships are always a 'misunderstanding' once the media gets involved.

Lights, power, action! Smartplugs with a twist

Totally Pointless

Really? Does anyone walk around their house with their phone all evening? Mine goes straight onto the charger when I get home, I don't want to lug the damn thing around for basic home functions to work.

A solution that worked off something a bit more passive like RFID-with-range could be worth the aggro, a device that costs pence that you could stick to the hem of your PJs or embed under the skin (for the brave) could be a goer.

Raspberry Pi grows the pie with new deal allowing custom recipes

Re: Raspberry Pi grows the pie with new deal allowing custom recipes

That'll be the Raspberry i - the imaginary Raspberry Pi

Angry Birds maker Rovio takes aim at staff, axes a third of them

Re: Greed to put it simply ....

They no longer make simple addictive games, just crash-prone ad-delivery apps.

BT broadband in broad-based brownout and TITSUP incidents

Re: Bt have finally admitted there is a problem

Mainly encrypted traffic affected eh? I guess one of GCHQ's decrypto taps has thrown a wobbly.

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

In a sysadmin role I invariably find that the odd day I need to wear a collared shirt and a decent pair of trousers is the day I end up having to crawl under the floor space following cables or heft kit in/out of the data centre. Sod that, jeans and t-shirt look much better when covered in dust than a shirt ever does.

Microsoft points PowerShell at Penguinistas

Re: End of Days

>> And your reason for supposing GNU/Linux requires only 2% the sysadmin resource that Windows does would be... what, exactly?

Well, they can generally tell the difference between 2 and 20 for a start...

End of Days

If you work in an organisation that the management think of as a 'Windows shop' (even though 90% of your estate is actually Linux but only requires 20% of the manpower to manage, so is effectively invisible) then await the day a manager insists that you investigate using MS tools across the estate because it's got to be better than that free rubbish you currently use.

Woman caught on CCTV performing drunken BJ blew right to privacy

Re: I feel sorry for her unborn kid

I expect he's called Otis...

Aged 18-24? Don't care about voting? Got a phone? Oh dear...

Re: Why bother?

Hmm. Someone should start a political party called None of the Above, they'd be bound to get in on a landslide.

Mattel urged to scrap Wi-Fi mic Barbie after Register investigation

In two minds about this...

The thought of my kids having one of these is very worrying, but if they're not silly money I'll definitely buy one for hacking purposes!

Seagate's spinning rust most likely to crash, claims backup biz

Seagate 3TB

I've gone through eight of those Seagates (they're the ST3000DM001) in two years (for a lightly-used RAID array). They've proved to be so unreliable I'm unlikely to ever buy a Seagate disc again.

PlayStation clambers back online days after DDoS attack PARALYSED network

Useless Sony

I wouldn't be surprised if half the problem is due to all those new PS3's and PS4's plus every single new game requiring a massive update when first started, that must put quite a load on their infrastructure on Xmas morning.

I was going to rent a film on PSN tonight but can't get into my account (it was fine yesterday and Xmas day though). Oh well, I expect bittorrent will deliver where the multinational corporation fails.

spɹɐʍʞɔɐB writing is spammers' new mail filter avoidance trick

Re: And of course...

The point is that the text is backwards within the source to evade spam detectors, but uses the Unicode RTL code &#202e; to force the mail program to reverse the text so that it displays in the correct order.

Celeb nudie iCloud pervs hatched photo-slurping Flappy Bird plot

Apologies in advance

Flappy birds to get birds' flaps?

Kate Bush: Don't make me HAVE CONTACT with your iPHONE

Re: she's right, of course.

I've got tickets to see KB and wouldn't even bother taking photos with my phone, let alone get in everyone's way and record a video on it.

But I wouldn't mind taking a few snaps with my decent camera. The ticket conditions (as pretty much standard) forbid photography and I don't want to risk getting it confiscated on entry so I won't bother.

But it pisses me off that photography is generally forbidden (even if largely unenforceable now that just about everyone carries a camera with them) but crowds of numpties gather at the front to hold their phones aloft without being challenged by venue staff.

HTC One M8: Reg man takes spin in Alfa Romeo of smartphone world

Apple == BMW - well built, recognisable, performant, quite stylish, mass-upmarket, but neither as

exclusive, nor as powerful, nor as good looking as their owners think.

And like BMWs, owned by wankers.

Ten classic electronic calculators from the 1970s and 1980s

Re: FX-7000G

My FX-7000G is still going strong, I think I got in 1986 or 1987. There was a depressing point a couple of years ago when a colleague pointed out that he was younger than my calculator though.

Facebook fans fuel faggots firestorm

Could've Been Worse

Just think of the hullabaloo if he'd said he eats faggots!

Adobe hit by 'sophisticated' mega hack ransack

Re: Good advice except that it's impossible

Set a random 20 char password, buy yourself a Yubikey and configure that to send the password for you, assuming you're not using a service that works with the OTP functionality. Works on any machine as it's basically a USB keyboard as far as the OS knows.

Yep, something like LastPass will work across all major browsers and devices. Use two-factor where possible with a Yubikey or Google Authenticator - LastPass, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Evernote accounts at least can all be made more secure this way.

I use LastPass and have it automatically generate 20 character random passwords for every site I need to log into. I don't even know the passwords myself in most cases so even hammer decryption won't work on me.

Nonetheless although we can do everything possible to be secure we'll always be at the mercy of the likes of Adobe clowns who are able to get my credit card details hacked. Changing my password for my Adobe account is no big deal, but changing my card is a PITA.

HALF of air passengers leave phones on ... yet STILL no DEATH PLUNGE

Never any danger

This apparent danger has always been cobblers. If it was a serious risk then the airlines are putting their passengers' lives at risk by not confiscating all such devices on boarding. They don't let us on with guns, pneumatic drills or welding gear for obvious reasons but for these deadly electronic devices they're happy to stick with the honour system.

1953: How Quatermass switched Britons from TV royalty to TV sci-fi

Re: Was it colder then?

> I think pill-boxes were/are a rural thing - I only started to notice them when I moved out of the city, and there are plenty left, particularly at spots where roads cross rivers or canals. They were, after all, built to last.

I was playing in pill boxes, gun emplacements and acoustic mirrors while living in Kent in the 1980's. I think many of them are still there around Hythe, Folkestone and Dover. And there were some awesome (though somewhat dangerously dilapidated) martello towers from the Napoleonic era to be explored around there too.

Ah-ha, at least one of the acoustic mirrors is still there: http://goo.gl/maps/XFyMA

Fear the Embarrassing Bodies webcam

Pink Pancakes

"and for an appalled moment I thought he was directing the patient to heave his bristling pink mansack onto his own flatbed scanner."

Now why did this make me think of Mick Hucknall...?

Drone quadracopters throw and catch inverted pendulum

Really cool demo but...

It's not clear from the article but I'm sure these drones aren't autonomous, there must be a motion capture system out-of-band which is doing all the processing and drone control, hence the white sheets to give good contrast for the system's cameras.

Being able to do the same thing with autonomous drones must be much harder just due to their viewpoints, even if the processing and drone comms could all be done on-board. I guess that'll all be do-able in the near future though.

Still very impressive nonetheless.

Playmobil punts bank-heist set to wide-eyed kiddies

Optional JCB

For added fun get the Playmobil digger for extracting that ATM:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Playmobil-4038-Heavy-Front-Loader/dp/B001RHAF46/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1360588727&sr=8-3

Windows 8: At least it's better than ‘not very good’

Re: Have they ...

Mouse-follows-focus for Win7:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ActiveWndTrkTimeout=dword:25 (value in ms)

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask=hex:9f,12,03,80,10,00,00,00

No idea if this works for Win 8 but I expect it would.