Posts by bish

Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor

Re: assuming..

Could be that I’m reading it wrong, but the article seemed to me to suggest that, yes, /etc/pam.d/ had a compromised module installed on affected systems. They also mention (somewhere, perhaps not in the article: I read a few different links) that they don’t actually know how the payload is supposed to be pushed to target systems. I’m willing to bet the answer is via piggybacking on some other legitimately root-requiring installer script. I’m just curious about who built it, tested it and then apparently didn’t get around to using it.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Sweet summer child…

“What are the actual of cost of ongoing support compared with buying new H/W to replace kit which is functioning quite satisfactorily? I'm sure MS would prefer to keep what in effect becomes a subscription going as opposed to the one-off price of a W11 "perpetual" licence and will price it accordingly.”

Consumer price is $30 for the first year. Businesses pay $61. Educational customers $1. But it doubles each year, and so far MS are insisting that the ESU will only run for three years, so that means $210/$427/$7* per PC over the three years PLUS the cost of then buying new hardware (with a nice new MS license bundled in - hear those Redmond cash registers sing!) if they decide to stay aboard the Microsoft train.

A comparison with switching to new hardware right away obviously depends a lot on what’s being dumped and what’s bought, along with complicated formulae for amortisation and other financial things I don’t fully understand, but the bottom line is that whatever you’d like to imagine about Microsoft’s benevolent customer-first approach simply ain’t true: depending on how sympathetic you are to their need to extract cash to fund extended patch support this is at best them speaking softly and carrying a very, very large gun, and at worst, a shameless shake down of people who very likely have not upgraded their hardware because they cannot afford to.

*don’t laugh at that last one - many schools will have a few hundred PCs and extremely limited budgets.

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Outlook/Exchange ?

Wouldn’t necessarily need a VM - Wine is actually pretty good for most things now, in my experience.

*runs for cover*

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Pop for now

Work requires me to hop between various web apps, a couple of terminals, one or two rdp sessions, a chat app, a password manager (or two, we’re migrating), zoom and (in home office) a soft phone. I’ve tried a bunch of distros and customisations (I need to stay in deb land for work reasons) but Pop’s tiling approach makes this fairly straightforward… at least, when and while it works.

I find it usually takes anywhere between one and four hours, but at some point in the day it seems to lose track of how wide or tall my screens are (whether using two standard HD screens in the office or a single 4K at home), and will not be persuaded to let windows cover the full screen - the bottom half or one eighth edge of one screen will just show me desktop. The only solution seems to be logging out and back in, which gets old quickly.

I’ve seen similar behaviour with a bunch of Gnome tiling extensions, on a bunch of distros, so it’s either hardware (it isn’t) or Gnome itself is throwing up problems that just can’t easily be solved by extensions. So I’m really looking forward to Cosmic, even if it’s probably still a long way off.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: Reactionary but...

I'm actually left handed, and I touch type. GUIs are made for the majority demographic - it would be nice if more and better accommodation was made for lefties, but it isn't and, as I said, I can get on with my day just fine. And sure, back in the day I did everything on the keyboard, but when you've 30+ tabs open and are copying from one near the left and pasting to one near the right, the mouse is bloody useful.

Everyone thinks they have all the answers and if only they were in charge we'd have a Utopia - UX isn't easy, and for the most part, the people doing it for the big OSes do a decent job of making it self-explaining. Except Windows 11, obviously.

Reactionary but...

El Reg writers do like a reactionary rant, don't they? The thing is, I think the constant evolution of the desktop is kinda fine. I support a wild variety of people doing weird and wonderful stuff, so switch between Windows, macOS and a good handful of different Linux distros with different desktops throughout my workday, and merrily get on my way getting work done without much cause for cursing or confusion: the important thing is that despite differences between one system and another, within themselves they have a mostly coherent, consistent approach to structuring and organising stuff, and so I find it pretty painless to get around.

Of course, when I say Windows, I mean Win10 Pro. I'm beginning to have more encounters with 11 and as far as I can tell, Microsoft has just accepted that alternate releases are traditionally garbage, and so set out to build the shonkiest, stupidest experience this side of Millennium Edition. It's just so broken, so riddled with stuff that would feel weird and worrying in a beta, and they're actually pushing it out as a daily driver. It's actually preinstalled on devices for sale in shops! I honestly find this hard to believe - every Win11 box I encounter, I have to check Windows Update, just because it seems so improbable that this isn't an early test build, but no, they're really shipping this utter mess and having the bare-faced cheek to call it an operating system. To be clear, I can still do everything I need to, it's just that the OS is *constantly* getting in my way and slowing me down, *adding extra steps* to processes that were often already a little bit convoluted (but bearable) in 10.

So yeah, the Evolution of the Desktop is a disaster, for Microsoft. Everything else is just fine by me.

Mac OS X at 20: A rocky start, but it got the fundamentals right for a macOS future

Re: It was all downhill after Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard was properly rock solid and bomb proof, too (for my uses: ymmv). It seemed like they'd finally cracked it, and the spinning beach ball of death had been vanquished once and for all. But no, it was a total one off. I've put it on a handful of older machines in the last couple of years, and while it's a bit visually rusty and misses a few features I've come to rely on, it remains the snappiest and most stable (excluding earlier-age, featureless stuff) consumer OS I've ever used.

Amazon's auditing of Alexa Skills is so good, these boffins got all 200+ rule-breaking apps past the reviewers

Re: You lied

You didn't ask me, but I'll answer: I own a few of Amazon's Echo Dots. Our primary use for them is as a cheap multiroom Spotify/Plex music system (they're all hooked up to semi-decent speakers, before any audiophiles get cross), and occasionally I'll use them to listen to UK radio (I'm in Vienna, so it's a convenient way to keep up with events in Blighty) or find out whether it's expected to rain before I head out. I also use them for making calls to some family members who struggle with phones. In my case they're almost entirely unnecessary, I could easily bin them without any real problems (pretty sure I could make the calls from the Alexa phone app, though I haven't tried), but I have two elderly relatives with mobility issues for whom they're genuinely life-improving devices, for reasons which ought to be obvious.

I partly agree with martinusher - it does seem that the researchers deliberately made useless 'skills' just to game the system and get a headline, but I'd argue that only makes things worse: if the skills in question had little relevance or usefulness to customers, that ought to have made the vetting team more suspicious, and will have meant the obfuscation ought to have been easier to spot. If you hide something malicious in a much more complex, fully functional skill, it will in all likelihood be much harder to spot than if the malicious code makes up the bulk of the skill. I dare say most malevolent parties will go to more effort to conceal their scams than these researchers did, which raises serious questions on what other Alexa skills might currently be available.

It's a fact well-known that vetting processes (of all kinds, from app stores, to content online, to personal background checks for employers) are seldom perfect, and it should come as no surprise that it's possible to make dodgy skills available to the public - users of course need to be aware of the risks and cautious about what they install on their devices - but the fact that precisely none of these researchers' rule-breaking apps were rejected is a legitimate cause for concern. If Amazon's best argument is that their post-approval auditing process would've done a better job of removing the rule-breaking skills, that only begs the question of why this process happens after, rather than before, approval.

A fine host for a Raspberry Pi: The Register rakes a talon over the NexDock 2

Re: Why some people keep on reinventing the ill-fated Palm Foleo?

The main selling point would appear to be that, because all the processing is external, it can easily be upgraded and therefore - in theory - last longer. I suppose in that respect it *might* be possible to bill it as a less-wasteful solution than a traditional laptop, although I have my doubts about how long the keyboard and screen will last. I'd be interested to know how easy it is to replace the battery, too, because if it's anything other than a simple external, screw-less latching system, the whole premise of longevity falls down immediately. And of course, I'd have to believe that they'll continue to make suitable replacement batteries...

Nah, I'm really not sold on it, either. The fact they claim it's a great solution for carting a PS4 around suggests to me that they really haven't figured out the point of it themselves.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: Firmware?

Seems like a decent theory. I definitely don't buy into the suggestion it's purely hardware - I don't remember any complaints about WiFi connectivity at launch.

Bah

Since launch day, I'd been using mine as a headless development server, but recently replaced it with a full blown PC so have been trying to repurpose it. Have been tearing my hair out over weird WiFi issues for days now (at 1080p, it won't connect to a 5G SSID - 2.4GHz is fine, but seems to dropout periodically). It's undoubtedly an incredible feat of engineering to squeeze so much capability onto such a small board, but it is beginning to feel like all that squishing came at a cost. That said, my suspicion is that this is actually a software problem: I'm getting some weird errors in logs, and find it extremely odd that these issues weren't raised at launch when everyone was wanging on about CPU temps. So I suspect the 'hardware interference' theory is a red herring.

Want an ethical smartphone? Fairphone 3 is on the way – but tiny market share suggests few care

Hm. My wife bought a FF1 at launch. It's still running (painfully slowly, which is ok as she only uses it for phonecalls on a couple of international SIMs) but I had to Sugru in a differently-shaped battery when the original died, as they'd stopped stocking the official, custom-spec battery. I understand that the phone market is both very competitive and utterly dominated by a handful of big players, and a small Dutch independent isn't ever going to become a market leader, but my impression is still that the FF series have been proof of concept devices first and foremost, rather than a serious consumer offering. Maybe that's changing with the FF3 - they certainly seem to have generated a lot more press this time, and if the comments here are anything to go by, people seem fairly positive about the device - but I'll probably stick with my unethical phone until either the FF4 launches, or FF3's success prompts the big boys to use their financial clout to encourage their own supply chains to smarten up.

Too hot to handle? Raspberry Pi 4 fans left wondering if kit should come with a heatsink

Re: Fan of fans

Yep. Wish I'd ordered mine right away, rather than bumping up against the throttling threshold for a week.

Re: Corrupt SD cards

Also depends on use. I have several Sandisk SD cards in various Pis that have been going strong for over 4 years, with me regularly pulling the plug without safely shutting down, and one that corrupted after only one power failure while running openhabian (which seems to constantly read and write to the card - I replaced it with my own homebrew scripting and have had no such problems). But yeah, as long as you're not intensively reading/writing, I've found the SD corruption thing to not really be as big of an issue as some make out.

Re: "heat-spreading technology"

I got the 4GB one on launch, and after a week ordered the FanShim from Pimoroni to stop it throttling itself, because it was almost constantly bumping up at the limit (just running some containers, headlessly, albeit in a warm cupboard). But no: because it uses the whole board to (very inefficiently) dissipate heat, the whole board only seems to get slightly warm (YMMV). Even the processor itself didn't seem to get hot enough to cause a burn, unless one were to find the most sensitive patch of a baby's very sensitive skin and hold it in place for a while. I'm not sure there's much mileage in going to court with that sort of use-case.

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Re: Error Messages

I could be wrong, but in my opinion, all of following statements can be true:

1) Father Ted was a very funny show.

2a) Graham Linehan's conduct on social media isn't always exemplary, and is often rather unpleasant.

2b) This can make it hard (for some) to appreciate his work.

3) As a (global) society, we're still a long way from adequately defining gender in any meaningful way.

4) Transgender people should not be oppressed.

5) Issues around transgender people and trans rights are incredibly complex, and the likelihood of such a tricky and sensitive set of arguments being resolved in a massively off topic BTL thread on El Reg is so vanishingly close to zero, any further discussion of the subject here is essentially pointless.

6) You (whoever is reading this) have every right to disagree with any and all of these statements.

7) My comment isn't an attempt to shutdown or censor debate, merely an attempt to point out that there are many other places on the Internet where one can shout at people with different opinions. This is not really one of those places: this is the comments section of a lighthearted article about an anonymous IT worker's confession to a couple of stupid mistakes.

You know whose kit for 5G is Huawei better? Go on, have a guess, says UK mobile player Three

Can't parse headline

Confusing me too much it is.

Biz tells ransomware victims it can decrypt their files... by secretly paying off the crooks and banking a fat margin

Absolutely right (and the people below you too) - as I said, being transparent about operating this way doesn't mean you'll lose all of your customers, some people are happy to pay to make the bad things go away. But not being transparent about it is also the difference between a legitimate IT service and a possible case of fraud.

A downvote? Conor Lairg, is that you?

Re: Trust

Hm. The bit where they requested that the client install TeamViewer suggests they had no intention of running the decrypt on their own systems. Of course, you can use TeamViewer to send and receive files, but you'd be daft to use it for a large transfer. Then again, perhaps they wanted to remote into the machine to upload the files to some cloud instance - I suppose, if this entailed a full clone of the host disk(s), the absurd $3k premium might begin to look less scandalous - but my money is on them simply running the decrypt on the client's machine, with all the risks that entails.

Curious to see people defending this (senior management offering their comments belatedly, maybe?). The key takeaways for me appear to be:

1) They quoted $3950, of which $3050 was pure profit, just to send a few emails, install a decrypt tool and run it (regardless of overheads, that's a seriously steep markup)

2) They quoted for a decrypt and gave an ETA before first establishing that the key worked and the tool was legit. (what would happen if it the stuff provided by 'Team Gotcha!' didn't work?)

3) They didn't give the victim any indication that they'd simply be paying the ransom: 'data recovery service' and 'Priority Recovery Service' seem deliberately misleading.

The thing is, I'd have no issue at all with their methods if they were transparent about them. Hype up your threat detection on the decrypt tools, your negotiating skills and your extensive library of common encrypt/decrypt tools, upsell consultation on prevention strategies and give loyalty points to the numpties who don't heed the advice, but for heaven's sake, tell the buyer what they're ultimately paying for with an itemised quote. I dare say most small businesses would want to negotiate the 300% markup, but a lot of places wouldn't mind paying *some* sort of extra wedge to cover overheads and such, if only to avoid getting their own hands dirty.

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

I'm not saying you're wrong but...

You're almost certainly wrong. The speakers are driven by the same source, and the speakers reportely sound great on both this phone and the Samsung Tab S5e. As this review says:

"It was good coming out the speakers at the base...but the headphones? It felt like we were at the back of the hall and kept increasing the volume in the hope the sound would get stronger and clearer."

This sounds to me like one of the channels is out of phase with the other - or, more outlandishly (but fitting better with the description) crosstalk between, or even summing of, the two channels, AND one of them being out of phase, causing phase cancellation that leaves only the sounds that are unique to either channel (if you've ever used one of those dreadful karaoke/vocal removal DSP plugins, you'll recognise the description of sounding like you're 'at the back of the hall'), - which is hopefully just a cock up on an early release review unit. If that's what's going wrong, the cause could be either software or hardware related, and as long as the hardware isn't too desperately badly wired (ie the two channels are reasonably discreet and not wired together) the fix could be either, too.

Either way, though, if Google are going to bother including a headphone jack, they really ought to make the effort to ensure it works properly, regardless of whether many - or even most - customers will never use it.

Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet

I suspect...

The former manager really didn't like Wayne very much, and relished the opportunity for vengeance.

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

Re: Entertainment system pen testing

I rather suspect that the next generation of in flight entertainment systems on Ryanair flights will involve large screens, endlessly looping adverts and the Ludovico technique. Customers can simply pay a £50 upgrade fee to retain control over their eyelids.

Pour $25m in its coffers and the local NAS box gets it. That's backers' hope for public cloud type Nasuni

Planning

"It's a very financially driven model and required a lot more money than we expected."

Whoever signed off on the $25m must be reading that quote and weeping. It's the 'a lot' part that tips it over the edge from 'slightly concerning' to 'amateur hour'.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

Re: ZpulNg

Yep, it's entirely deliberate, and actually just good social engineering: on the one hand, you don't waste time on anyone tech-savvy, and those who you do catch are often too embarrassed to ask their technical friends and family for help, and on the other, you allow the techie types to think you, the criminal, are far too stupid to concoct a convincing phishing scam, which makes them far more vulnerable (through misplaced confidence) to spear phishing. I wish no ill of Dabbs, but I'd be very surprised if he could correctly identify a well-executed spear phishing attack: the good ones can be incredibly hard to detect, and aren't even necessarily about getting you to hand over a password. Sometimes they simply want your correct email and signature, so they can convincingly spoof a message as you to someone else.

Re: MiniDisk? Bah!

It's all been downhill since the reproducing piano went out of fashion. I'm not really joking, either - the early 20th Century tech let you listen to note-perfect performances by world-renowned musicians on your own instrument, in your own home, at much higher fidelity (ie - actual live acoustic sound) than most of the music that's 'consumed' nowadays. Sure, no one bothered with the effort and hassle of dragging one around on public transport - it really wasn't a portable option - but if they had, even out of tune and crashing madly on every pothole, it would've still sounded a lot better than the distorted hiss of an overdriven iPhone speaker at the back of a bus.

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

"likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"

That would logically include the locations of key targets, and procurement of the means of transport needed to reach them: tourists visiting the UK are advised to eschew all guidebooks, and just wander round the airport until the return flight. Mind you, being in the country at all seems pretty 'useful', so perhaps just stay away altogether.

Seagate punts external PS4 drive at the millions who uninstalled their game libraries to fit Red Dead Redemption 2

Re: Replace it

It doesn't require a spare external drive at all, you can simply format a blank drive and start installing games again. It'll take a while, because PSN download speeds are painful, but it's possible.

What a cheep shot: Bird sorry after legal eagles fire DMCA takedown at scooter unlock blog

Re: Even if you couldn't replace the board

It's the board that costs $30. The scooters themselves are being auctioned off, so prices inevitably vary - but you're absolutely right that many appear to be going for a lot less than the combined cost of the components. I have no use for an electric scooter, but it could be a great way to pick up some cheap batteries and motors with which to build something else, assuming you aren't outbid by someone who actually values them as scooters.

Re: Legal question

I took "more illegal" to mean that the vandalism approach is illegal, but theft is, uh, more illegal. I believe the law bears this out, with (broadly) harsher punishments for theft than vandalism (ymmv).

Before dipping a toe in the new ThinkPad high-end, make sure your desk is compatible

"far-field microphones... in the expectation that voice interaction is an increasingly used feature."

If my voice gets far enough from my lap to validate the inclusion of those mics, I won't need a smart assistant, I'll need a surgeon.

Germany pushes router security rules, OpenWRT and CCC push back

Sell an upgrade

"Support for open firmware is, arguably, a niche consideration at the moment, but you could argue that one of the reasons to block it on end-of-life devices would be to protect the vendor's chance to sell an upgrade."

You could also argue that releasing new hardware that improves or adds features, reliability and speed would be a good way for the vendors to protect their chance to sell an upgrade.

Re: Routers are not firewalls

Yeah, I've got one of those too. I forget who it's made by but it gets rebadged and included as a free* 'perk' in fibre packages all over the EU - mine's from UPC in Slovakia, but while investigating how hopeless it is, I found it's also used in many other West and Central European countries - presumably because it's cheap as shit.

At least the Virgin one (which I had before I moved) makes it easy to enable 'modem mode' and then just connect some functional hardware between the Internet and your own kit - my Slovak variant defaults to IPv6 which hilariously breaks 'modem mode' so, each time they push an update that restores it to v6 (3 times so far this calendar year), I have to call the ISP and ask them to switch us back to IPv4, which inevitably involves lots of patiently explaining that actually their Super Hub is not remotely super and I don't mind whether I'm on v4 or v6, I'd just much rather be able to use use my own router and AP - with which I can actually secure my network - thank you very much, so either switch me to v4, supply a gateway that actually works, or cancel my contract, please. Unsurprisingly, they've always opted for the easiest and cheapest way - click, click, done - of shutting me up.

*actually, now I think about it, the most galling thing about this is that it isn't actually free at all, but rather leased from the ISP. As I recall, you simply had to return the device at end of contract with Virgin, but with my current suppliers I pay some nominal fee like a Euro a month for the privilege of having the piece of crap in my home.

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

300 baud!? You were lucky...

... There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road, cueing up once a week for a chance to use the village carrier pigeon.

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

It’s turtles all the way down.

Gone but not forgotten.

Amazon Alexa outage: Voice-activated devices are down in UK and beyond

Re: Mine are dead

Just for the record: andy-whatever-number is fully entitled to his opinion, as are you, Anonymous Coward, (and the AC before you). I wasn't remotely offended by Andy's opinion, but it did strike me that he had mistaken his comment for a brilliantly satirical skewering of foolish hipsters, rather than a fairly base bit of snobbery, and I felt it only right that someone disabused him of that particular notion. I didn't and don't wish to censor him, you, or anyone else... but that cuts both ways, and I believe we're all entitled to call out dumb opinions when we see them.

Mine are dead

We've got three Dots(*) here in Slovakia (all UK-bought and registered) and none of them have been able to connect to the backend at all today (although, to be fair, it's not like we've been testing at routine intervals - hearing the error message once is enough). To be honest, I'm quite relieved that for once it's not my fault for tinkering with the setup.

(*) For the benefit of andy 103, and any folk like him who agree that, 'If you're the sort of person who needs or relies on devices like this, you have far bigger problems than whether they can be used at any given time.' I'd suggest that - just perhaps - the sort of person who needs or relies on devices like this might not be a dumb, early-adopting, gadget-loving consumer, but rather someone who simply wants or needs to make life easier for themselves or their loved ones - especially if they or their loved ones are especially young, elderly or in some way disabled.

With that in mind, maybe right now, when the devices they rely on aren't working, isn't the best possible time to explain to them which of their problems are more important than their Echo devices going down. But, y'know, thanks for your input, andy 103.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

Re: but that's the same as everyone elses review!

True enough, but the point is that if there's no added value in buying the 'consumer' unit compared with just throwing together some off the shelf parts and spending a few hours soldering, printing and flashing an SD card - and if the latter approach is *cheaper* - then the consumer unit is pretty pointless.

If it was possible to build something *as good as* an iPhone, for *cheaper* than an iPhone, and the only added cost was a maximum of a day's work, there would be a lot more people building their own phones. They don't because the parts wouldn't be cheaper, iPhones are engineered to a standard much better than the average hobbyist could ever hope to achieve, and iOS isn't horrendously buggy while a roll-your-own phone OS can be pretty intimidating. (Installing an emulator shouldn't really intimidate anyone who wants to play Spectrum games!) This Speccy knock off doesn't tick any of those boxes, so I've no idea why anyone would spend more money for something less good - a Pi wouldn't be nearly as limited in playable games, and it could be repurposed if you got bored of it, unlike this thing, which will inevitably end up in landfill.

Re: but that's the same as everyone elses review!

Someone else has pointed out that you forgot about the screen and the button controller. The former is obviously essential, but as it sounds like the buttons aren't even debounced, you could get the same functionality by just connecting some mini switches up to GPIO.

Oh, and you really don't need a Pi3 for FUSE: A Pi Zero would work just fine, and save you some money for that screen (I'm a bit vague on the Speccy's screen, but Pimoroni's HyperPixel would probably work fine).

There's no question that someone, young or old, could easily throw together something as basic as this for about the same outlay, if they were determined to cut corners and not at all bothered whether it was actually any good. I'm just not sure why anyone would.

'Unhackable' Bitfi crypto-currency wallet maker will be shocked to find fingernails exist

Lay off the kool aid

First of all, you're calling out the Register's article as 'BS', but using a quote from a completely different source: the article, in that section, is quoting what Andrew Tierney wrote elsewhere. You can call bullshit on Tierney's opinions (and you'd be wrong) but you can't call bullshit on El Reg, since they're just accurately reporting someone else's (relevant and informed) opinion on the story.

Secondly, and finally, you seem to think 'hacking' is exclusively about using code to manipulate factory standard kit. Social engineering, bugs/key loggers, rubber duckies, etc etc are presumably not 'hacks' in your world, since they don't fit your absurdly narrow requirements that hacks use only stock hard/soft ware. You'd presumably also argue that even software exploits aren't technically vulnerabilities, because people aren't supposed to use software that way. God help anyone who relies on you for tech/security advice.

Tired sysadmin plugged cable into wrong port, unleashed a 'virus'

Re: A common occurrence

Those 'pass through' ports are, in my experience, often 10 Mbit/s. So when you've specifically allowed for two gigabit ports per desk, to ensure the thin clients' remote desktop connections glide along smoothly without being snarled up by the ancient phones, it's rather frustrating when, every couple of weeks, the office staff do a tidy up and some smartarse decides to start daisy chaining devices, and you immediately get support tickets for 'help! URGENT!! computers are slow again'. And no one will admit to even realising the cables were there, much less having dared to touch them.

I'm so glad I don't work there anymore.

Oddly enough, when a Tesla accelerates at a barrier, someone dies: Autopilot report lands

Fire Department

I realise that everyone is far more interested in attacking or defending Tesla's flakey autopilot, but can I ask: what were the fire department doing, pouring water on a burning battery? Electric and hybrid cars are pretty common now (more so in the Valley, I'd guess), so either no one has bothered to tool up the fire fighters with suitable extinguishing materials, or they haven't yet realised that pouring water on a chemical battery is probably the second worst thing you can do, behind setting fire to it in the first place.

Zero arrests, 2 correct matches, no criminals: London cops' facial recog tech slammed

Modern Policing

I'm just waking up so I might be misreading, but:

"If an incorrect match has been made, officers will explain to the individual what has happened and invite them to see the equipment along with providing them with a Fair Processing Notice.”

If fifteen arrests at the football represented 0.005% of matches, that means police were giving an explanation, a Fair Processing Notice, and the (oh so tempting) offer of a guided tour around the equipment ("There's the camera that recorded you doing nothing wrong, and this is the laptop that passed your photo to a central server, where our highly advanced software matched your face with that of a completely different person. No sir, I'm afraid you can't see who that is for legal reasons, but I will say she's a looker.") to two thousand, nine hundred and eighty five pissed-up football fans.

Can someone arrest the system (and/or its devs, and/or the numpties who commissioned it) for wasting police time?

Three storage hardware devices, a cash raise and Oracle gets blocked

Re: "Really? In the cameras themselves? That’s kind of hard to believe. "

I found the disbelieving tone quite hard to believe. As you've said, it's really not so novel an idea.

El Reg needs you – to help build an automated beer-transporting robot

Re: Eh.. Get an office Jnr its easier....maybe

GPS? It's just got to follow the PFY. And while you might use a duino to drive the motors, you'll want the Pi for the brains (whatever following system is used, and obstacle avoidance).

But the really difficult part here is 'without spilling a drop'. If we're talking about pints, in proper, broad-rimmed pint glasses, filled to the brim, putting them on any kind of motor vehicle without spillage is damn tricky. The platform will have to be suspended nicely so that it remains flat, and even then, the robot will need to avoid sudden jerky movements.

I'd probably just give the PFYs a talk on why the business is transitioning to performance-related pay, and clearly explain their new KPIs.

As Zuck apologizes again... Facebook admits 'most' of its 2bn+ users may have had public profiles slurped by bots

If the last couple of weeks have shown anything, it's that Zuck is the absolute king of the straw man. Whether it's his 'maybe I shouldn't be the one in charge of Internet censorship' or this 'I can't fix everything', he's a master at trotting out arguments that make clear he's just this guy, you know, and can't be responsible for everything Facebook does.

Which is perfectly reasonable. Except that he's their CEO, and responsible for everything they do.

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

Re: Sadly a lot of bollocks being talked here

Wish I could upvote you more.

I'm also going to generalise and suggest that people who don't actually teach in schools perhaps aren't the best people to be critiquing the school curriculum.

For the record, I tend to agree that C is a good starting point for learning about code, but since this thread began with the notion that tech in schools is practically useless except as a means to learn to code: I'm just going to gently suggest that computers of all stripes can (when sensibly and thoughtfully applied) be excellent tools to boost student engagement, as well as providing a range of ways for those kids who don't necessarily excel at writing to synthesise their learning in interesting forms. After all (as long as the students can all read and write to a reasonable level) shouldn't producing a slideshow, video or comic that demonstrates the same high-level learning be regarded as just as valid as scribbling a tedious three-page essay?

Oh, and since we're veering way off topic here, I'm going to loop back and add that, while the iPad may seem like the perfect device for what I've just suggested, the OP is spot on in that the management tools are (or have been, in my experience, YMMV, yada yada) terrible and broken.

Oh my...

Thank you, Giles, for writing this. I've been trawling round the mass of thinly veiled press releases published on supposedly informative tech sites, doing my best to articulate why 'buyer beware' is essential advice for any educationalists tempted by Apple's sales pitch. Now I can just link to this article, which (far more eloquently than my own red mist rants) itemises every one of my frustrations from my experience of trying to use iPads in a college.

I, for one, will continue to steer the people with the cash towards Chromebooks until I hear from (a lot of) peers telling me that Apple has finally bothered to create the tools to make iPads work (properly, seamlessly) in a classroom.