Posts by Version 1.0

FCC pushes forward on rules to block the certification of new telecoms gear from ZTE and Huawei

Quick fix

Maybe Huawei and ZTE should just start making Nest devices and phones that work on Amazon's mesh network? Oh wait, that might cause China to ban Huawei and ZTE from selling devices in Asia.

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

Cheers Roger!

He's a good guy, I saw them a lot back in the days when Syd was playing, and then, a few years afterwards I had to deliver a parcel to their roadies at a show - it was great, I got to watch them, sitting up there with the pig and afterwards we had a nice little get together before I headed home again.

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

That's the standard W10 view ... change the GUI and call it a new OS, it looks more like Windows 10.5 to me.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Windows 10 EOL

This is good news, finally Windows 10 will be reasonably reliable and will not stall for half an hour every few weeks while "updates" are installed that cause apps to break and add "features" like requiring that when the administrator logs in, the machine "upgrades" for another 30-40 minutes. Windows 10 might finally be actually usable?

We've been shown time and again that strong encryption puts crims behind bars, so why do politicos hate it?

Old encryption is returning?

Encryption is easy to spot because it's encryption so people decrypt it - but if it's not encrypted the AI is much less likely to spot it - for example:

Leave Eastern Trains Sometime Dick Under Many Pumps Before Ordinary Risks Invest Simple Innocence Never Treated Heavily Even There Ordinary Incase Lovers Excite Themselves.

I've used capital letters to help the average reader figure it out but normally they would also be part of the "encryption" - would AI even bother looking at this? The icon indicates that the encoded statement is just a joke, not a threat.

Amazon exec's husband jailed for two years for insider trading. Yes, with Amazon stock

Re: Moronic

Sure, but when you look at all the comments you can see that most people think that all insider traders are caught - LOL, no that's not the case at all, the smart one get away with it, we're only prosequeting the stupid ones.

BOFH: Despite the extremely hazardous staircase, our IT insurance agreement is at an all-time low. Can't think why

Re: Insurance insurance

I remember my economics class at Oxford way back in the 70's when the lecturer explained that the only difference between the insurance industries and the betting industries was that running an insurance business was more profitable because the risk of "losing" an insurance "bet" was non-existent. If you did lose money in an insurance contract (more than just one earthquake, hurricane etc) then you would recover your money from everyone who was unaffected by raising their premiums.

'I put the interests of the country first': Colonial Pipeline CEO on why oil biz paid off ransomware crooks

Re: So "Coloni4l123!" then?

Maybe it was "1complexpassword" - but most likely it was something like GJt75$fhSwE09^ but written down on a sticky note attached to the underside of the keyboard because good safe passwords are very hard to remember... If I was in the malware business I would be financing an office cleaning company...

UK government bows to pressure, agrees to delay NHS Digital grabbing the data of England's GP patients

Re: Well I never

It's just a U-Turn, a standard government procedure ... we'll probably see another one soon or "evidence" that it's an EU problem - of course three years ago they would be running around blaming the EU for the hole data (sic) problem.

Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s

Remember the 10Mb Ethernet days?

I've still got a few old 10Mb interfaces around - it was fast back then but I never saw anything (multiple PDPs and BBS's) hacked back in those days even though we had a lot of kit hooked onto the Internet via FTP. A live 400Gb interface means that more systems will be hacked faster ... the potential if you are running a mail server is to see a couple of million administrative login attempts an hour.

Faster Ethernet has both an upside and a downside.

Cryptography whizz Phil Zimmermann looks back at 30 years of Pretty Good Privacy

Cheers Phil Zimmermann

A beer to Phil for being such a good person for so many years even though the idiots were shouting at him - look around at the idiots at the top of tech world these days ... Phil set such a good example of behavior and they have all ignored him.

Proof-of-space cryptocurrency Chia triggers HDD sales boom in Europe

LOL - drive space

Back in the early days of USB drives I was in China and bought a 100Mb USB stick at a street market in Beijing ... that was cool until I tried to load my MP3 files onto it. Turns out it only had 50Mb of storage but reported 100Mb.

Good news for pentesters and network admins: US issues ransomware guidance asking biz to skill up security teams

So what's more profitable?

Do you make more money from ransomware or by selling insurance?

Twitter’s new subscription service costs the same as a cup of coffee a month – though much less stimulating

So no more Covfefe?

But only 30 seconds to fix a typo? I don't think that this is going to fix much - I'll have another cub of coffee (icon) ... no problem I can drink a pint in less than 30 seconds.

Tech scammer who fooled Cisco, Microsoft and Lenovo out of millions jailed for more than seven years

137 replacement hard drives worth $143,000

So each drive cost $1044 .... and that's not the one off price, they are purchased in bulk. One crime has created another ...

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Re: Once upon a time.....way back in another century......

I never saw any problems with an 8080, 8085, 8048, or Z80 that I didn't create myself and fixed as soon as I saw the problem. Processors used to be completely reliable until the marketing and sales department start to want to add "features" which have lead to all of today's issues.

European Parliament's data adequacy objection: Doubts cast on UK's commitment to privacy protection

Re: Consequences?

We've taken control of our border (and data) now, and given the EU control over its border and data, but now the Tories complain that other countries have control over their borders. A potential consequence would be for the new UK data regulations to force more UK businesses to move.

This AI could save a firefighter's life

Most of the time they put out 100% of all fires but the most significant factor is the ability to get to the fire quickly. Research like this is good but maybe it will work or maybe not, it will be a while before we know. A better solution might be to create a fire risk monitoring system that could be installed in buildings and accessed when the Fire Brigade arrives at the site?

UK Special Forces soldiers' personal data was floating around WhatsApp in a leaked Army spreadsheet

Special Forces personnel are trained to delete people, not data, the PFY is not going to get a job with the military.

Antivirus that mines Ethereum sounds a bit wrong, right? Norton has started selling it

Re: What's the difference between Norton Antivirus and Malware?

No! Malware costs the company money but if I install Norton Antivirus on all the PC's in the office and use a personal account to register them then I can make some money ...

Deadline draws near to avoid auto-joining Amazon's mesh network Sidewalk

Re: Overblown

"the data used up by Amazon Sidewalk will be capped at 500MB a month" ... think how much you would save if you turn off your Android "automatic updates" feature ... way more than 500Mb a week.

First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups

Re: Denial of service attacks?

The problem is that these days algorithms are tested to verify that they work and then used ... nobody tests them to see if they don't work - that pretty much explains what happened.

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

Re: It is slated to cost about £200m

And it will be years before we find out who made a 10% commission from the design and implementation.

They are saying "green technology" but the last boat I ever saw built with green technology was HMS Victory - that was a carbon-neutral boat unless the admiral pissed out of the back windows.

Why did automakers stall while the PC supply chain coped with a surge? Because Big Tech got priority access

I'm guessing that a lot of people feel like that - I'm seeing a lot of older cars on the road these days with a good restoration done (many of them look almost new) and driving around with people looking through the windscreen instead of at the dashboard.

Computer Misuse Act: Tell the Home Office infosec needs a public interest defence in law, says CyberUp campaign

Written 30 years ago

It states that "A person is guilty of an offence if he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer."

So the Computer Misuse Act implies that it's an offence to turn your phone on unless you are a woman. It's a joke that this is a joke but the law was written 30 years ago when today's environment did not exist and computers were generally either desktop machines or were the actual desktops themselves with a pile of mag tapes on top. Back then most people communicated across "the inter net" with a tennis racket in their hand.

The Computer Misuse Act needs to be completely rewritten, not just patched to update bugs.

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Re: BOFH and Beancounters cooperating

Err, is "BOFH" actually Boris Operating From Hillingdon this week?

They could have built a room with a cinema sized screen and armchairs, each in an isolated viewing area (with a bar) to enable video conferencing. The bar? "That's so that we can wash our hands and tongues in vodka for guaranteed cleanliness to stop spreading COVID when we speak and use our phones" ...

Russian gang behind SolarWinds hack returns with phishing attack disguised as mail from US aid agency

Re: This is what happened, when The Register pushed propaganda the last time

Your quotes are certainly reasonable but I generally trust El Reg, sure I've had posts deleted too occasionally - nothing odd about that.

Does the apparent (probably) Russian hacking indicate the state of things these days? I am puzzled that we don't hear any reports of Russian and Chinese agencies being hacked ... are the Proud Boys much better at it, or are they still running Windows 3.1? /joke - the fact is that all these media reports normally just tell us what's seems to be happening and how it's being seen.

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Re: Rule 0 of secure programming..

"designers" are busy designing things to keep the folks running the sales department happy and meet their demands - maybe the sales folks thought this was a feature not a bug originally?

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

Windows trundles on, seemingly never escaping its disorganized past. FTFY.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

Re: Coming soon

This means I can make a pot of tea just by plugging the kettle into my laptop.

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

New Windows systems are very helpful!

I love the Windows 10 ... because now my Windows 7 system doesn't get buggy updates all the time, I can just turn it on and get everything done. I thought that Windows 7 was sucky when it came out and kept using XP and Vista. I started using Windows 7 when Windows 8 was released - the problem was that there were continual updates that occasionally caused issues - but now that Windows 10 is the prime system, I find Windows 7 to be very reliable.

Contract killer: Certified PDFs can be secretly tampered with during the signing process, boffins find

Portable Document Format update

Please Don't Fiddle

Apple patches macOS flaw exploited by malware to secretly snap screenshots

"Patching" and "updating" cost terabytes

Updating devices and apps automatically means that we don't actually know how much data we are buying everyday - I just updated my phone and watched it, only 312 Mb today but I'm sure there will be a few more updates in a day to two ... I wonder how much data I buy every month to keep updated ... probably only about 3 - 4Gb. Assuming everyone in town only has one device then that's a bit less than 2 Tb a month locally.

So if your company is selling data transfers then you probably smile every time there's new malware.

iFixit publishes teardown of M1 iMac, shows that making a determination of repairability is still hard

Where are the old teardowns?

Maybe I should publish a teardown of some of my old IMSAI and Altair systems, easy to do - just pull the cover off and swap one, or occasionally two, of the S-100 boards if necessary to get them up and running again although occasionally adding an extra wire to the front panel helped.

China announces ‘crackdown’ on Bitcoin mining and trading

Now that that damn thing is "done"...

... will there be a new "Trade Deal" and Bitmain will move its manufacturing to the UK?

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

Re: not just umn.edu

If you are a student on the way to graduation what's the highest paid job opportunity, demonstrating that you can write open source code or applying to the NSA with the code in your hand?

How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works? Ah, thought so: nothing

Re: How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works

"Works" is easy to define this days.

It "works" if the company employing him for nothing gets a nice big fat payment from the NHS, no need to worry about functionality or any bugs, the tracking app can be updated every few days and the NHS charged again.

US Treasury wants to treat cryptocurrencies like cash – as in you need to report $10k+ transactions

Re: The government will shut down Bitcoin, just watch!

So many a raid on the British Tobacco Company is coming?

Blue Origin sets its price: $1.4m minimum for trip into space

Returning to Earth?

Current government policy suggests that they will need to self-isolate for 10 days and be tested twice, even if they were vaccinated prior to lift off.

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Re: Making Python faster

BASICally (sic) Python makes it easy for programmers with a PhD in an area other than programming (e.g. Life Sciences) to write code because it does all the work that a programmer has to think about and get right when they create an algorithm. So it makes it "easy to write code" because Python does all the hard work - this is a big advantage for its users but I wouldn't write Python code to fly a drone around on Mars ... I wouldn't write it in BASIC, FORTRAN or COBOL either.

China all but bans cryptocurrencies

Re: Bitcoin’s price has dropped around 1.5 per cent in the last 24 hours.

Ban bitcoin for a few months, wait until the price drops to about $5,000 ... then buy a lot of bitcoin and remove the ban and watch the price increase.

That Salesforce outage: Global DNS downfall started by one engineer trying a quick fix

Re: "We have taken action with that particular employee"

Might be worth keep them onboard - they have just learned about a scripting issue which could mean that they will never have this happen again because the tech will be damn careful next time! Replace them with a new tech and the chances are that this will happen again in a year or two.

Miscreants started scanning for Exchange Hafnium vulns five minutes after Microsoft told world about zero-days

Re: You get what you pay for

Employ a competent IT security person, someone who leaves a USB stick in the office when they are interviewed and later in the day when someone picks the Rubber Ducky USB stick up and plugs it into their computer the entire network is compromised with a message on every computer, "You folks need to employ me to stop this happening again."

New Zealand hospitals infected by ransomware, cancel some surgeries

Re: Local malware weather report

It's certainly a risk but it's unlikely, we monitor all access and block all login attempts that are not from specific locations - we log all attempts and only see a hundred fake attempts an hour most days but they increase too after we get weather. Two login failures result in the IP going into a hole for a few hours.

I've been seeing this for years now, we're prepared for a potential malware infection but so far (touch wood) we've been clean. While 2FA works, it can be a risk so it's not a cure.

Local malware weather report

Here in Louisiana we're just had 10 inches of rain on Monday night and once the water level dropped I went into work - malware delivery's on Monday were up about 300% - we've been getting them for years so I block a lot of attachments at the mail server and run multiple virus checks, deleting viruses and quarantining attachments like "urgent_new_purchase_order.z" - the quarantine queue was stuffed. This is always related to the weather reports.

I believe that the malware delivery service monitors events worldwide and pushes up the delivery's whenever it's likely that there's going to be confusion or people are busy e.g. "Mari and John can't get in this morning, can you quit making coffee and check the sales emails please". 10 inches of rain is unusual (except during a hurricane) but malware is not - this happens continuously.

Microsoft hits Alt-F4 on Windows 10X: OS designed for dual-screen PCs axed

Re: why does this remind me of

And after it's implemented and bugs discovered and patched a few times, everything will run slower - a standard Windows side-effect.

Unit4 handed police ERP deal after 'significant deficiency' found in Oracle Fusion system

Payment method?

Discovering "a troubled Oracle implementation" like this usually results in someone being paid in bitcoin.

Ransomware victim Colonial Pipeline paid $5m to get oil pumping again, restored from backups anyway – report

Re: $5 million for criminals

Bob, you don't think that Putin would arrange the evidence for some American businessmen to be convicted?

Cloudflare launches campaign to ‘end the madness’ of CAPTCHAs

When I see CAPTCHAs appear I quit my subscription to the site - they are a complete pain in the arse (I'm human, not a computer).

Rust 2021 edition to arrive in October with 'more consistent panic' and other new features

"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is." - Larry Wall (Perl)