Posts by bish

SUSE bakes a Raspberry Pi-powered GNU/Linux Enterprise Server

Why not remove them?

If you're confident enough with a soldering iron that you reckon you could attach them when needed, surely you can just as easily remove them? You won't be the first, either: check YouTube for examples.

I haven't bothered, personally, because whenever I've needed small/thin, the power tradeoff of using a 0w has been acceptable, and I've never had a problem with the USB/Ether location (having the HDMI perpendicular to them, on the other hand, is a little annoying - but a blob of blutack stops the pi from spinning around too much). If it's just a question of rerouting, there's nothing really stopping you.

Ethics? Yeah, that's great, but do they scale?

Re: Ancient?!

In what way is anyone here guilty of plagiarism? As you yourself noted, few (if any) readers here will not recognise the lyrics, so I can't see how anyone above can be accused of passing them off as their own.

It sounds as though you're having a bad day. Cheer up, the weekend approacheth.

Super Cali's futuristic robo-cars in focus. Even though a watchdog says tech is quite atrocious

Give the headline writer a raise

Superb.

James Damore's labor complaint went over about as well as his trash diversity manifesto

Re: @Voland

"the stress of having to identify blips and blops on a screen"

Blips and blops and thermonuclear weapons. You're an idiot.

Re: controversial bro-grammer ?

You're absolutely right, a handful of right wing arseholes stepping away from El Reg is sure to make a significant enough dent in the site's ad revenue to warrant a news story. Bye.

Sky customer dinged for livestreaming pay-per-view boxing to Facebook

Joking?

It's possible that I'm not getting a very good bit of satire, but, um, maybe they just looked at the name of the person at the top of the Facebook feed, and got their lawyers on the case. It's really not as complicated as you're suggesting.

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

Re: More Magic Technology

"this is the first time that anyone, myself included"

If you didn't know about it, how were you able to determine whether anyone else did?

'Hey, Buddy! Do you know about that thing I haven't heard about and which might not even exist? What do you mean 'which one'? Well, ok, I'll just mark you down as a 'No'.'

Russian hackers got Trump elected? Yeah, let's take a close look at that, says Obama

Where's the satire?

These comments raised a few chuckles, until I realised they weren't jokes. My opinion of El Reg readers is damaged, possibly beyond repair, by reading so many partisan knuckle-draggers furiously point their fingers at each other. Whether Russia, or anyone else, hacked the US election or not, the people who voted in it seem distinctly incapable of taking a step back and behaving like people with any right to democracy. Thank heavens I live in the UK, where... well, yeah, nothing - never mind. Why has the English speaking world become so stupid? Are the Russians hacking our water supply or something?

Who killed Pebble? Easy: The vulture capitalists

Suicide.

Not convinced you can lay all the blame at the VC, and slightly surprised that such a shrill and overly simplistic article has made the top spot in el reg's email roundup. For one thing, the assertion that the sale means pebbles will simply stop working seems daft - aside from the fact that they'll continue to do all non-cloud stuff - barring an OS update that Borja the app - there's this on the dev blog:

"we’ll be working to phase out cloud services, providing the ability for the community to take over, where possible"

Those last two words are a major caveat, but given what the community has shown itself capable of, I won't be retiring my Pebble Time just yet. I'll be wearing it advisedly, half holding my breath in case things go kaput at any moment, which will be annoying, but I'll just have to look for something else when that time comes.

But yeah, while the VC money may have led Pebble in a direction they didn't have to go, I think it's unfair to lay the blame solely at the feet of the guy signing the cheques. Management made some crazy, well documented decisions, not least attempting to launch three new products before Christmas, funding them on Kickstarter but then still having to go to retail before delivering to backers, because cash flow was clearly so poor. They spread themselves too thin, and quite clearly underestimated the volume of sales a profit margins they needed to stay in the black.

What's utterly baffling at this point is that the Pebble Core, which was either a lie or a unique and well-species product with huge market potential, is now dead. If your company is going under, and you have one Hail Mary play to make, do you pick:

1) update your original watch with smaller bezels and a heart rate monitor

2) update your second watch with smaller bezels and a heart rate monitor

3) launch something entirely new, that will appeal to lots of people - not just smartwatch aficionados - and piggyback on Amazon's success with Echo/Alexa

Somehow, Eric thought the answer was 4) All of the above. It doesn't make sense - you're out of money, but you've developed something new and interesting: that's what you put on Kickstarter, perhaps even as a new company. And you reboot the watches later, once you can afford to pay your staff and ride out the slow sales.

What also doesn't make sense is the idea FitBit has killed the Core. If that's the case, the world's a crazy place. If I were them, that'd be the one piece of newly-purchased IP that I'd be slapping my own company logo on and bringing to market as soon as possible, before something else plugs the gap.

Analysts apply Occam's razor to Tesco Bank breach

Re: Not sure how the trojan theory would work out...

Yep. No idea how they reached the conclusion that cloning was even remotely likely, unless they already know of an employee in the Tesco Bank mailing room who recently brought a card cloner to work.

Shhh! Shazam is always listening – even when it's been switched 'off'

Meh

Honestly, if you have serious privacy concerns and you're using a service like Shazam, you're a fool. However much they process (a handful of FFTs, I assume, with some proprietary nonsense seasoning) and encrypt the audio, you're still taking your personal audio and sending it over the Internet. The idea that such a service could be made 'safe' just creates a false sense of security. If you're worried about someone listening in, don't install software designed to listen in. Shazam probably ought to have been more upfront about how its software works, but come on - surely if you're really concerned about privacy, that takes precedence over your desire to find out what's playing on the radio?

Re: Pedantically...

Ha! Correct, but they'll first have to wire your speakers to an input, and it'll sound pretty awful. For all that effort, they might as well just bug your entire house, which of course they have.

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

Re: 4s don't really understand

At my place, this used to happen quite frequently. Fortunately, 'all' was only about a thousand addresses (assuming internal only - there were a couple that went out, they were a separate matter). Thing is, the COO (now departed) was a 4 on the above scale, so every couple of weeks you'd get an email from a dunce who hadn't used Bcc, swiftly followed by our most senior tech, also not using Bcc to publicly upbraid the dunce. To be fair, once nearly every one of the grunts had been humiliated, they didn't repeat their mistake, and the culture of cheerfully Ccing enormous distribution lists evaporated. But I do still have nearly 100 emails from said former COO, each with two sets of fancy schmancy signatures with graphics and social media links, clogging up my Outlook inbox (of course I could delete or archive, but I have principles). Given how few of our staff ever delete anything (we have folders last accessed over ten years ago), that's around 100,000 emails from a COO, Ccing everyone to tell them not to Cc everyone.

FBI overpaid $999,900 to crack San Bernardino iPhone 5c password

24hrs? Doubtful

The hacking behind building a safety net for brute forcing the encryption is very impressive, but we're still talking about brute forcing a four digit PIN where every six attempts takes (on the video) ninety-one seconds, from the previous chip powering down, unplugging it, hooking up a clone, starting the phone up (yawn) punching in your first four combos (and you'd want a tick list if you were really going all the way from 0000 to 9999 - which would slow you down a tiny bit more each time - or you'd definitely lose your mind) waiting on the fifth and sixth, (potentially cursing yourself for mistyping a number) then powering down again. By that measure, it would take more like forty-two hours - unless of course the passcode started with 1-8, which admittedly is a fair shot but not guaranteed), without any breaks - if that were my gig, and it included the four months part time (two months full time) R&D, I'd invoice for AT LEAST $1m, simply because it's the most boring task ever.

Ireland looks like it's outpacing Britain in the superfast broadband rollout stakes

Re: Why FTTP?

I understand that you're being facetious, but not all rural areas are Trumpton. Oop North, I lived in an area North of Manchester, where a handful of small towns are connected by tiny clusters of houses and farms, scattered all about the hills, some (like the one I lived in) isolated by a good mile or so on all sides by dank, wet, miserable fields full of sheep. Given that BT still hasn't managed to install a landline that didn't sound like Bell himself might be on the other end (distant, crackly, muffled and with regular drop outs), one could understand their reluctance to invest any time or money in laying any cable where weather, fauna and farmers may damage it at a moment's notice.

According to a friend who's still local (I'd say 'neighbour' but they were fully two miles away) one of the nearest clusters of houses now has a FTTC cab installed, but the hopes of bouncing any kind of wireless signal UP the hills to the farms above seems unlikely, even if they had a maypole (or church spire, or any of the other accoutrements of your picturesque fantasy rural hamlet). Oh, and there's (to the beat of my knowledge - not been back in half a year) neither 4 nor 3 G mobile signals up there. Which is a shame, because it (and many, many similar premises) could easily be converted into a rather splendid office, or at least be used to work from home. I moved in the end because 'working from the coffee shop in town 5 miles away' just isn't the same. They didn't take kindly to me sitting down in my underwear.

Tech support scammers mess with hacker's mother, so he retaliated with ransomware

I have one Windows machine in the house, which I take good care of, and a bunch of Macs, Linux boxes, a FreeNAS system and a couple of Hackintosh NUCs on the TVs. Last time they called me, the Windows box wasn't even switched on, and I was sat in front of the TV in the lounge. I played along, but when they asked me to press the shortcut for Run, I didn't best impersonation of a panicked non-tech person, moaning that it wasn't doing anything and they were right but maybe too late to help me. They told me to open IE, oh noes! It's not there! They asked me what keys were on the bottom left of my keyboard (to filter out Mac users - nice touch, albeit somewhat late in the script) and I told them exactly what I saw on my Logitech wireless board. Utter confusion followed - they seemed to have chanced on a PC that was so utterly borked they couldn't do anything to demonstrate how borked it really wasn't. They escalated my call to a manager, who finally asked what was at the top left of my screen ("Well, there's a little apple and...") after a long pause, the first guy came back on, said "Hello, Sir? Go to hell, sir." And he hung up.

I was left with mixed feelings - of course these guys are scammers and bottom feeders, but the anger in his voice revealed how hurt he was to have wasted his time (which is money). Yep, got my own back, and maybe made him think, but ultimately these scammers aren't doing it for giggles, they're doing it because it's a way to make money, and presumably their English isn't good enough to work in a more legitimate call centre. I can afford to mess these guys around for the better part of an hour, but if he's on performance related pay, coming up to the end of a shift and wastes his time on me when he could be wringing a couple of sales out of people like my parents, I've just cost him big. On the one hand, I'm delighted to be doing my bit to slow down the success of the scam, but on the other, I'm depressed to live in such a shitty world that an (at least) bi-lingual dude of around my age is sat in a call centre somewhere in India, extorting his way to paying the bills and putting food on the table.

I dunno what the solution is, and maybe it's ridiculously post-colonial of me to assume the guy's poorer than me. Maybe his shitty scam job earns him £50k and he drives a Merc, but ultimately I think this kind of vigilante approach solves nothing for anyone. We probably all ought to pressure people in power to do more to address the issue.

Re: Bobby?

https://xkcd.com/327/

Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest password was 'dadada'

Re: As for username and password,

Oh feck yes, this. "Security Questions" seemed utterly dumb to me back in the 90s, so I'd just mash keys for a minute and move on. Lost a few sweet usernames on decent sites when they then started requiring answers after suspicious login attempts.

Re: Password strength lesson

How do salts and stored hashes protect against reused passes? I get LinkedIn's db, and find that they've only stores Zuck's hash and salt. Given he's not just any ordinary target but (a) an internationally recognisable figure with rather a lot of influence, and (b) someone who's (as of now) been known to reuse passwords, I decide he's a good target. I plug the salt into my script and bruteforce until I get a hash that matches. Huh, it's "dadada". Now I head over to a bunch of other sites and try dadada out. The salting and hashing has only protected the majority of users, because it's a PITA (and slow) to bruteforce all those salty hashes, but it hasn't actually added any (meaningful) extra protection to any individual login, and does nothing to mitigate idiot users keeping the same password for everything. Like the OP said, password reuse IS worse than weak passwords. If you find out my password for this site is 1234*, it doesn't matter too much for me since you can't use that pass to gain access to anything else of mine, and I only need to change one password to fix the breach.

NB: I accept I may be wrong or missing something here, so do let me know if that's the case. I also appreciate that I've made quite light of bruteforcing a salted hash, but a six lowercase letter password, containing only two characters, really isn't going to pose that much of a problem. My point is, if someone set out to target Zuck and the LinkedIn db had been salted and hashed, it wouldn't have made that much difference.

*[changes password]

Admin fishes dirty office chat from mistyped-email bin and then ...?

No brainer

If you set yourself up as the kind of admin who redirects mail, you have to redirect it. There's nothing illegal going on, and flagging it up as a violation of company policy on computer use is obviously messy and unnecessarily complicated. The right answer is obviously to stop nannying your users and let their emails vanish into the void. Teach them how to look up email addresses and check their sent items and then just leave it the hell alone.

The implied moral quandary over being complicit in an affair between two adults is so absurdly puritanical, I can't help but wonder if the admin worked in some kind of hyper-zealous bible sales business.

Amazon WorkSpaces two years on: Are we ready for cloud-hosted Windows desktops?

How much!!?

Really? Until it's (at most) half the current price, it really doesn't look like a viable product for anything other than uber-corporations with cash to burn and enormous tech teams to maintain it. The problems of managing the setup would appear to be at least as difficult as managing full fat machines, and much more complex than an in-house solution.

Just why?

Let’s re-invent small phones! Small screens! And rubber buttons!

Re: Small != Small

Bravo. Better than the main article, in fact.

How exactly do you rein in a wildly powerful AI before it enslaves us all?

Re: Isaac Asimov

Finally, someone mentions Asimov. Can I chuck in Banks' Minds in the Culture novels and suggest that a truly super-intelligent AI would likely be benevolent and certainly no worse a supreme overlord than our current governments? I, for one, welcome our new hive mind leaders.

Google Search head: I'm off. Yes, I told you yesterday. On Google+

"our mission..and the impact it has had..cannot be overstated"

Ahem: Google's mission has cured cancer, ended world hunger, conclusively resolved all religious and nationalistic discord and finally proven that we are not alone among the stars.

As my mum always said, there's no such thing as 'cannot'.

Apple tablet will 'redefine print,' says rumor mill

*snore*

"IT'S COMING AND IT'S GOING TO BE AMAZING!!!"

Except it's not coming, because it never does, and it won't be amazing, because even if it does finally appear, we'll all know everything there is to know about it LOOONG in advance and there won't be much to get excited about.

Jobs wants to make a game-changer portable computer. This has been his aim for as long as I can remember. The problem is, technology hasn't caught up to his vision, and his mortality is catching up with him. This leaves two possible outcomes:

1) This constant cycle of rumour, speculation and "this time next year" commentary will continue to add up to nothing, as Jobs keeps pulling back on going into production, because the best Apple can do still doesn't measure up to what he wants.

2) Jobs - worried he'll never see the day that cool kids with good hair iChat on their iTabs (or whatever) in Starbucks - goes ahead and launches the damn thing, but it's massively underwhelming to everyone and way too expensive, and while a few people shell out and sit in public places cooing at their overpriced gadget, most people just make do with a crappy netbook or phone, and get on with their lives.

It can't be thin enough or battery-efficient enough until someone invents fast-refresh flexible eInk, preferably with multi-touch capabilities. There have been prototypes of most of those ideas individually, but no one (that I know of) has put them all together, and certainly not affordably. It isn't likely to happen in Jobs' lifetime, and I for one wish he'd just shelve it, with detailed instructions on what he wants the Apple geeks to build when the tech is finally available. Why rush out a half-realised product? It's becoming a bit of a vanity project (like most Apple stock, I suppose).

Apple admits third of iPhone calls in New York are dropped

Hmm..

This is why, here in the UK, I've put off getting an iPhone. Sure, they're not super-magical solve-all-your-problems phones, but there's quite a few apps that would be really very useful to me, but I'm not trading that usefulness for lack of connectivity on 02 (which is rubbish in my area - a couple of friends have them and the amount of time they spend wandering round peering at their handsets, looking for a decent connection just doesn't seem worth it).

I thought about buying an iPod Touch, but that'd mean carrying around two things to break/lose/have stolen, and I've gotten used to my phone being an all-in-one. The news that the iPhone's coming to Orange is good for me, since their coverage is excellent, and my current contract runs out at the start of November.

iPhone app grabs your mobile number

Clarification?

Wait, they harvest the numbers via SMS? So are all these complaints from people who seem to have somehow forgotten sending a message to the company that makes the app? Or is the company lying? OR does the iPhone also allow apps to send SMS without the owner's approval? Because the latter would be a MUCH bigger security hole - not that the number-retrieving app isn't a big enough hole as it is... Whichever it is, I'd hope Apple addresses this soon, if they want to keep their customers.

Ageing Google supersizes its search box

Ugh.

Welcome to Fisher Price™'s My First Search Engine©!

It looks so retarded, I may even start using bing. Glad I wasn't the only one fiddling with zoom.

Tasered Oz man bursts into flames

@Kev K

"trust me it is a deeply unpleasant experience to me confronted by some violent, wild eyed, mouth frothing, smelly tosser high on that stuff"

Forgive me, but isn't it a police officer's JOB to confront people like that?

"being high on petrol/glue...gives the sniffer extra strength"

Patently absurd. Unbelievable silliness. Solvents may well make users FEEL stronger, but they act on the brain and certainly don't enhance muscles.

The issues here are - why did the situation so rapidly descend into one where the policemen felt they needed to break out the weaponry? Sure, he was behaving threateningly, so perhaps their actions were justified, but how they initially approached the suspect is unreported, and may have made all the difference (or not - not pointing fingers). Secondly, what reasoning led to employing a taser on a man with petrol? Did they have guns and did they consider using them? A well aimed disarming shot would've been a lot safer, since the likelihood of bullets igniting fuel is incredibly slim, despite what Hollywood and Mr O'Callaghan's suggest. And was it really out of the question to attempt to wrestle him to the ground? I'm assuming he had the petrol for sniffing, not burning himself to a crisp, so was it really reasonable to assume he'd use the lighter?

The fact that drug-crazed-crazies can be a bit intimidating is neither here nor there - if you panic as soon as someone threatens you, get a job in an office, not one of the forces.

Cyber security minister ridiculed over s'kiddie hire plan

As if further incentive were needed...

s'kiddies, and other nefarious 'cyber-criminals' (good god, when was the last time anyone outside the government used the word 'cyber' with a straight face? 96?) do their dodgy deeds for a variety of reasons - a sense of achievement, to boost their rep, and most commonly to earn a bit of dirty money.

None of those reasons is going to just go away, so why give baby geeks yet another incentive to turn to the dark side? Why not just run a recruitment ad - "Bored? Talented? Become a network bandit, get caught, and get a job working for the Ministry!" - I dare say they might get some of the less useless ones that way, too.

US city ends FaceSpaceGooHoo log-in grab

Madness

I've heard of checking out prospective employees on social sites, but demanding their login info when they accept a job? Hello, human rights?

Obviously local government in Bozeman just goes ahead and does stuff without actually stopping and working out whether their schemes are legal, responsible or useful.

What were they going to do with all those details (apart from probably not keep them secure)? Spam social networks with Bozeman tourism ads? Or just invade their employees privacy whenever they choose?

I hope they get a good slapping for even thinking of doing this, never mind putting it into practice. They'll probably just get nice jobs at MiniTrue.

Stilt-walking Cirque du Soleil founder turns space tourist

Clear as muddy water...

"And the purpose is clear: to raise awareness on water issues to humankind on planet earth."

Which water issues do you suppose he means? As far as I'm aware, it ain't running out any time soon...

Aren't there more pressing environmental matters? And aren't they rather compounded by the frivolous burning of rocket fuel?

Apple confirms $1bn data center

Perdue's kidding himself...

...If he thinks a DATA CENTRE is going to create 250 jobs for locals. I thought 50 sounded a bit optimistic. And he seriously thinks Apple will employ the locals for REPAIR!???

Talk about a sucker...

Hackintosher to open US storefront

But...

Regarding the OS-less system + OS X disk model Allan Rutland and others have suggested - to run OS X on a Dell, or any other non-Apple computer, I thought you had to first modify the actual kernel? Unless I'm mistaken, I don't see how he could sell copies of OS X modified to run on his computers without seriously violating both the EULA and copyright law.

Microsoft breaks Windows 7 three-apps netbook handicap

Wait...

...so, you pay less, and in return you get a slimmed-down version of Win7, without all the bloatware but otherwise fully functional?

Somehow, I'd expect to pay more...