Posts by teebie

Ex-CEO of fintech biz Wirecard arrested over missing money: Vanished €1.9bn may not have existed in the first place

Re: Wow. €26bn lost in two years

exactly what investors will pay for it is the price of a company, not the value.

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Entirely legal

Whirlpool's kitchen heaters are surprisingly effective. I don't understand why they market them as washing machines.

Nine in ten biz applications harbor out-of-date, unsupported, insecure open-source code, study shows

"Ninety-one percent of the audited applications had components that are either four years out of date or have exhibited no active development for two years."

So if a component already works and nobody is mucking about with it then that is a bad thing?

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: I know you are lying* I just don't know how much

"Ping" could well be ignorance, not dishonesty. He probably heard the term - possibly from one of the maker of his privacy-and-security-disaster app - and has been using it incorrectly ever since. In this case to mean 'contacts a server, which contacts other phones.

In Hancock's defence he often displays astonishing ignorance, so this isn't too farfetched.

I am not a defence lawyer.

Aussie immunology legend consults Twitter for his local off-licence opening hours

What started as a great insightful comment was ultimately ruined by the addition of a question mark

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Hello, yes please, I would like to take medical advice from the man who doesn't know the word for 'brain'.

Vivaldi browser to perform a symphony of ad and tracker blocking with version 3.0

Re: El Reg ads

I don't think this will work.

The thing about loo roll is, over a long scale the overall demand is steady, so there is no incentive for the manufacturers to change how much they are making.

Food goes off, so the amount used in a year increases if it is panic bought. Hand sanitiser and masks get used more in a panic, but people don't fundamentally alter their bum output based on a respiratory disease.

GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats sued by hangry, overcharged coronavirus customers

Re: "We are going to be very strong on food supply."

I'm not sure about pissing themselves, but it may well involve somebody pissing someone.

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

Re: Needs a big rethink

"a trend whose time came and went."

I'm not sure DAB's time ever came

Microsoft spares TLS 1.0 in Azure DevOps Services after customer backlash, Cosmos DB makes good on blurtage

Citing "early feedback from some customers," Redmond has said the deprecation is off for the time being.

The feedback being "we are devops, we don't do security, stop trying to make us improve ourselves"

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

Re: "Capita software"

They aren't very good with computers.

Ring of fired: Amazon axes multiple workers who secretly snooped on netizens' surveillance camera footage

So 4 times they have received a 'complaint or inquiry' from someone who had reason to suspect that someone is watching their Ring.

And 0 times has their internal auditing flagged up people accessing a user's Ring without permission.

I'm willing to bet that most unauthourised accesses couldn't possibly be detected by the end user (which is when the innuendo falls down), so their auditing processes must be terrible. (As most non-existent auditing processes are)

The soap opera continues. HP again tells Xerox: Show us more money!

So Xerox are doing due diligence to make sure that HP are worth as much as HP think HP are worth.

And HP think that doing due diligence on a company; worth before taking them over is cheating? Because companies should value themselves autonomously?

I imagine everybody sees what I did there.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

That press release sure uses a lot of words when "we are incompetent" would have done.

Unless Nick and Nick are helping to mitigate the blow against nominative determinism?

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

And that is when data like 'There is one jedi who goes to the village GP, and he is the one with psoriasis' comes in handy.

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

City Link said they delivered my furniture to my neighbour at number 4.

They were unable to tell me which street number 4 was on.

Enjoy a tipple or five? You might need this AI system to tell you when it's time for a new liver

Ignoring that there are non-alcohol related sources of cirrhosis...

If you have 2 heavy drinkers with similar education levels, then you are comparing like with like. If one shows more impairment than the other there is a higher chance they need medical intervention.

Of course, if this does work out then we with be incentivising people to write long, ranty, meandering emails to their doctors.

Three UK does it again: Random folk on network website are still seeing others' account data

Re: "fewer than 10 customers"

Fewer than 10 people who have remained on as customers?

Never mind monitoring dead crims, Ministry of Justice has just palmed Serco another £800m

"We are delighted to have been awarded this major contract to provide prisoner escort and custody services for living prisoners, dead prisoners, prisoners who are staying in prison, prisoners who are already at their destination, and prisoners who are nowhere near the country we are operating in"

Oh good. They're looking for an NHSX CTO. Hopefully they'll see off 'snake oil' pushers, says GP

"on the verge of wasting money on untested technology such as AI because it does not necessarily understand what it is buying."

Whatever the solution to that problem it, it does not contain Matt Hancock.

Former TalkTalk cybersecurity overseer rattles the tin to cover costs of equal pay dispute against UK ISP

"m'lud, it's Talktalk, they can't do anything - anything at all - with any degree of success. Clearly the lack the capacity to accurately ascertain or track the gender of their employees"

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Re: Boris' browser history

No, he's safe "get off my laptop" means "stop using your fat arse to destroy all records of your browsing history"

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

Terrible idea

"we will need a long period – at least a generation – where women are favoured over men for funding and promotion"

Straightforward positive discrimination a terrible idea. The best way to deal with people of one gender thinking people in another only got the job because they were in another gender person isn't to make the prejudiced people correct. And of course by rejecting talented members of the one gender for less talented members of another you are ensuring your company doesn't get the best talent and performs worse.

(I'm using "gender" in the middle english sense of "kind", "type", or "sort" here, because the same applies whatever group you are discriminating in favour of.)

There are ways to deal with inequality that don't have this drawback, or the problem of illegal discrimination

- employ the best people - if you do this the talent pool available to your company is bigger than the talent pool available to a hidebound competitor that still thinks that "those people aren't right for this type of work". Outcompete them, prove them wrong, and rejoice.

- remove identifying information from CVs/whatever before passing them to the potentially prejudiced person in charge of hiring. This has been shown to work in blind auditions for orchestras

- if you must mandate something, mandate interviews not outcomes - since the NFL mandated that at least one non-white candidate must be considered for a head coach job the diversity of head coaches has increased, but nobody got the job because of their race.

Hacker House shoved under UK Parliament's spotlight following Boris Johnson funding allegs

"a former tech editor of the Daily Telegraph"

A job that consists entirely of complaining about "Kids nowadays, with their boom boxes and hula hoops"

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Re: Damning...

"Parliament is sovereign. Why is this so hard for people to understand? Government is not sovereign."

I think a lot of people don't get the distinction between government and parliament. If things were going better here they probably wouldn't need to.

Class-action sueball over refurbed iThings will ask Apple what 'as good as new' means

Re: Control, control, control.

No, the problem is that the fact that an unauthorised person opened the device flies back in time, thus negating the warranty at the time the user first sent the device in for repair.

Or a lawyer thought they should throw all available shit at the wall hoping some would stick, I dunno.

Freebie tier coming to issue-tracking Jira, but you'll have to cough up to unlock the good stuff

I came here to say exactly that.

JIRA's main work flow is wait for page to load>click in area to leave a comment>start typing comment>javascript finally loads>whatever you were typing now becomes a series of commands>try to undo whatever just happened.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Google translate offers two definitions in english for the noun "gimp"

*How* did my eyes skip the letters 'on'? They were in the middle of a word.

I blame the reference to urban dictionary above.

TalkTalk's voice-over is writing speeds that its text can't match: Ad pulled from broadcast

"Our marketing strategy is hoping people don't pay attention to our adverts, and that the *definitely* don't pay any attention to the new, or reviews, or notices we send out telling them we sprayed their personal details over everything..."

If you could forget the $125 from Equifax and just take the free credit monitoring, that would be great – FTC

"A large number of claims for cash instead of credit monitoring means only one thing:"

Is that thing that you didn't fine them enough?

IT outages in the financial sector: Legacy banks playing tech catch-up risk more outages, UK MPs told

"Members of the public would probably be alarmed to learn that some of their financial institutions are running on systems that are possibly 50 years old.. and often are not well understood by the people working with them. "

Only one of these 2 things is alarming. I rarely find myself thinking "Oh no, this thing has been working without causing problems for decades"

Google's reCAPTCHA favors – you guessed it – Google: Duh, only a bot would refuse to sign into the Chocolate Factory

I listened to a Planet Money podcast about repatcha 3, where they interviewed someone from google about it

(paraphrased)

"Given that recaptcha will use data on if the user is behaving normally for a user of a given site, do you really need to know whether the user has a google account to verify that they are human"

"[Extremely long pause]"

Does recaptcha also hamper you signing up for additional google accounts? Asking for 7 friends who are actually me using various different websites.

Mike Lynch in court: I was not aware of every single thing Autonomy did around the world (so don't blame me)

Re: I know people who know Lynch/Autonomy

Send your CV to HP's due dilligence department. They do not appear to have anyone with your abilities on staff.

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

Re: Leap Out And Let It Burn

Yes, the fire extinguishers are purely an aid for you (whether you be a person or a fire) to get out of the building.

Hacking these medical pumps is as easy as copying a booby-trapped file over the network

Re: I already fear upgrading my motherboard firmware

"you can still successfully boot"

You the person? Or you the device? And thus the person.

Google: We're not killing ad blockers. Translation: We made them too powerful, we'll cram this genie back in its bottle

Re: The art of misleading with numbers

They have replaced Joan, who was tiny, with Overtall Pete and Severely Obese Geoffrey, leading to an increase of 327% (measured by biomass).

TSB appoints new tech transformation chief cuz last tech transformation went really, really well

I think the plan is to transition their back end systems from Excel to some sort of database.

Auditors slam FBI for shoddy testing of facial-recog tech. But no big deal. It only has 641m images on its systems

Re: Not Ready For Prime Time

We... don't know that facial recognition works at better than 2% accuracy, based on the Met's trials.

MI5 slapped on the wrist for 'serious' surveillance data breach

I wondered why my dog looked so ill.

And every time he says 'sausages' it is in such a mournful tone.

UK is 'not a surveillance state' insists minister defending police face recog tech

Re: "UK is 'not a surveillance state'"

No, just photographed and maybe nicked later as a result.

Apple hits back at devs of axed kiddie screen-time apps

"MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history."

So why do you give apps access to it? And how is disabling apps after they have been using it for months an acceptable fix?

"I've got a great idea for a stable door - it closes itself 2 hours after your horse chuffs off having stolen your car."

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

So more competition is driving prices up? That's not how it is supposed to work.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

"just over half of Brits surveyed knew nothing about the plans. On the other hand, some 60 per cent thought it was a great idea."

So somewhere from 10 to 50% of those surveyed said "I have no idea what this is, but think it is a great idea"

This is why we end up with shit politicians.

"The introduction of mandatory age-verification is a world-first"

There is a reason for this, Margot. It's a terrible idea.

As long as there's fibre somewhere along the line, High Court judge reckons it's fine to flog it as 'fibre' broadband

Re: Utterly Shameful decision.

"This case was brought by companies with their own vested interests,"

Any case is brought by parties with their own vested interests. It doesn't mean the other party isn't wrong.

Blundering London council emails unredacted version of notorious Gangs Matrix to 44 people. Data ends up on Snapchat

Re: Does it count as a database?

'I'm betting that this "Database" is an excel spreadsheet or maybe Access at best.'

Preposterous. You show me where in the dictionary it says a database can't be a bunch of etch-a-sketches on a shelf.

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Re: The same problem every time

"Perhaps a distinctive shape would be a better distinguishing feature"

A normal hemispherical button, with nails glued to it pointy-side-out would solve a couple of related problems.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

"A small increase in biosecurity risk"

Does anyone know where I can find the bus with this written on the side?

How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

"it wasn’t usability, because we changed the instructions to make those easier"

Alternative explanation: the new instructions still aren't good.

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Re: TPBP

Tea polluters, bad people