Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

30 strong fingers but still no happy ending for robotic back rub

Perhaps 6 hands -> Shiva -> female ...

Patch alert! Easy-to-exploit flaw in Linux kernel rated 'high risk'

Re: Yeah but

And for the "reboot" part as well, since patching systemd would also require a reboot. systemd, bringing Linux to the WindowsME security level !

Fsck Cloudflair

Possibly related recurrent TLS F**k-ups

These days I'm seeing a LOT of TLS errors when connecting to El Reg (comments, articles, frontpage, the whole lot). That's from at least 3 independant connections from my side (unrelated IPs) and 4 different machines, 3 different browsers. It often causes lost comments (back to blank form, please retype...). In fact I have now resorted to typing my comments in a text editor (Vim, since you ask, because that's the best text editor ever, obviously ;-) ).

This started as intermittent but is now >50% of my attempted connections to El Reg. Sometimes agremented by a CloudFlare exhortation to activate JavaScript, or else (some sort of redirection then kicks in, and I am served the desired page regardless of JS activation. Sometimes.)

My F5 key kindly asks you to sort your shit, pretty please.

Comment copy / pasted from Vim because I may get yet another TLS error on the first few tries

IT plonker stuffed 'destructive' logic bomb into US Army servers in contract revenge attack

Re: "total labor cost to the US Army of approximately $2.6 million"

I am not one of the downvoters, and I had a long yet witty response typed when either ElReg or CloudFlare decided crapping themselves would be a good thing to do.

Long story short, 700 000 bucks claimed against McKinnon, a slightly lost kid on the other side of the ocean trying a default remote desktop password and not disturbing anything, vs 2.6 mil claimed against an IT professionnal with physical access to "critical" systems and causing actual damage... the 2.6 mil claim doesn't seem the most overstated of the 2, to me.

"crime in cyberspace" ????

Appart from the obvious fact that no-one cool has used the term "cyberspace" in the past 3 decades, how is sabotaging a server "cyber"?

Nice computers don’t need to go to the toilet, says Barclays

Re: Self service checkouts

"You don't get the checkout operator looking over your purchases, giving you funny looks or making "witty" comments because you happen to purchasing certain items together."

I don't know about that, when I was a youngling I was amused by one tilltender wishing me a pleasant evening as I exited the shop with a bottle of champagne and a box of condoms.

I usually don't dislike exchanging a word or 10 with fellow humans. I see enough automatons at work as it is.

Equifax fooled again! Blundering credit biz directs hack attack victims to parody site

Both domains went dark ?

securityequifax2017.com refuses connections, and securityequifax.com now redirects to a parking page.

What do you call an all-in-one PC that isn't? 'Upgradeable', says HP

Or buy a Raspberry

One of my 2 office computers is just a Raspberry Pi 2 (not even 3 !) hanging behind the monitor. Works well enough for office work and command-line data analysis. A bit on the slow side for video editing though...

Sexploitation gang thrown in clink for 171 years after 'hunting' kids online and luring them in front of webcams

'z that incitation / apology of violence and / or abuse? Sentence the scum, OK. No need to call for more.

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

Re: rubber prop knives

I don't buy that for half a second. Rubber prop knives and real ones don't feel the same at all, they don't even wheight the same at all. It's a bit like saying kids get routinely injured by baseball bats in swimming pool because of confusion with foam noodles. Perhaps we should add a clear textured coating to foam noodles, so that they can be differentiated from baseball bats by touch?

123-Reg customers outraged at automatic .UK domain registration

"same difference" ????

seeing on these very pages the abitrary expansion of the techie "same / diff" saying into the gormless (and meaningless) "same difference" hurts my eyes. I think I need hops-and-barley-based recovery medicine at lunchtime.

According to the whois database, they did not register danielmcintyre.uk for you, though.

Giant frikkin' British laser turret to start zapping stuff next year

Not only the fuse

You'd presumably need a 5x higher resistor in the amplification circuit too, so make that £20M

LDEW?

Surely Laser Powered Energy Weapon would be better. El Pew for short.

Boffins' satcomms rig uses earthly LEDs to talk to orbiting PV panels

Re: Heatsink

That, and electronics-produced heat is rarely an issue in orbit.

Bluetooth bugs bedevil billions of devices

Not terribly new

Bluetooth lack of security was never really a mistery even for the non-tech world. About 10 tears ago in a Simpsons episode Lisa mocked Bart for playing super-secret agent with a bluetooth hand-free kit, the most vulnerable tech ever (or something to that effect).

Your boss asks you to run the 'cloud project': Ever-changing wish lists, packs of 'ideas'... and 1 deadline

Re: Project creep vs Design creep

It's not just cloud. In fact it's not just IT. It goes the same in every situation where you have to set up something new and "exciting".

Everyone loves programming in Python! You disagree? But it's the fastest growing, says Stack Overflow

In the science / datascience field

Python is finally beginning to recover from the 2.x / 3.x schism, as more and more libraries get ported to 3.x which makes it trivial to port end-user applications. Yes, you got it right, a whole lot of core scientific library are just beginning to hit the 3.x repos. That sure made things difficult for science Python users, especially on Windows (ptouach') which lacks any kind of centralized package management (from the end user point of view at least) and meant either a lot of fiddling or the use of CygWin. Not terribly difficult, but an added barrier to adoption and growth nonetheless.

Pack up, go home to your family: Google Drive is flipping out

My FTP repo, OTOH,

is still working flawlessly.

A lot of people use GDrive here despite it being forbidden (it's -usually- more reliable than our in-house solution TBH, but it is a confidentiality / infosec hazard)

Paris Hilton inflates cryptocurrency bubble some more, backs Initial Coin Offering

So much growth...

... that it will soon go public !

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

Re: Screw 16:10

Not many people want 4:3 so I can gather them for my work tower. Unfortunately it also means that it's increasingly difficult to find 4:3 lappies. For my last one I had to settle for 16:10.

Kiwi prankster 'oinks' down cops' radio and sings Old MacDonald

direction-finding...

... will most likely point to the ute's location, which is by essence variable, no ?

Vital fair use copyright defense lands – thanks to warring YouTubers

Re: litterally unwatchable

Your "g" and "l" keys seem to stick a bit ; given how I was not able to bear it for even one full minute, I did mean litterally, but thank you for your help.

litterally unwatchable

I tried to look at the video linked in the article, I tried hard but could not go past the 50 s mark. all the other vids I tried from the guy, I stopped after max 10 s. This is horrendously tedious. It looks like it has been refused by prawn channels because of poor dialog and story.

Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed

Re: So essentially...

> English-speaking democracies

that would be... South Africa perhaps? Can't see any other country that would fit the bill...

Live and leftie

I lean quite radically port-side myself (#no_innuendo) and I am often very surprised by the range of ideas covered by the word "leftie" (or its equivalents in various languages).

In the present case for example, OP seemed to infer that a "leftie" should automatically approve of the twittergasm and thus condemn the voluntary baring of skin. From where I stand, this would seem extremely prude and very right-wing (not an attack).

Some responses suggest that "leftie" means "whoever doesn't agree with Trump" - which is awfully region-specific - because for some very badly mislead people, left = stalinism ( historically speaking, Staline is closer to autocratic fascism -far right- than to communism. In fact, Staline had all the "real" communists killed or deported).

One thing about Staline: he stained his hair black, unlike modern-time like-minded politicians. Orange may well be the new black, after all...

.

Re: Outrageous Sexism

The Femen, who visit churches -including Notre Dame, very close to Wanderlust- for the sole purpose of baring their chests in there, are presumably the archetype of machism and misoginy, then, one would suppose ? Or is it a Bad Thing (TM) only in night clubs ?

Not unusual

In one of my favorite bars there was a row of lady breast and chap buttocks snaps behind the counter. I don't remember if the barkeep offered a shot for these, but being featured there was considered a badge of honour by all parties. Although presumably not for life. Quite luckily, instant snaps have quite a limited lifetime when kept exposed to light, after a few years the snaps would have faded and be replaced.

Airbus issues patch to prevent A350 airliner fuel tanks exploding

Re: Brilliant!

Fuel is very efficient in a cooling system, as the PFY could tell you.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/11/bofh_and_the_vax_cluster/

Re: Lovely plane

It is a pretty cool bird indeed. The looks alone...

Accused! Yahoo! hacker! pleads! not! guilty! in! US! court!

eBaum's world

They dunnit

US Navy suffers third ship collision this year

Re: What do they all do? @SkippyBang

OK, This is mostly nonsense as in the high sea you'd do almost anything to avoid collision regardless of rules, especially if you were on a rowing boat, but let me elaborate.

Colreg 72 is specifically aimed at high-sea vessels, I think we can agree on that, it's explicitely stated.

For the purpose of ColReg, with as little interpretation as possible, a vessel is either "sail" or "power". No interpretation can possibly put "oar" in the "sail" category. As I, erm , "sea" it, the distinction is meant to be "vessels in full control of their thrust" vs "sail". In that case, mechanichal devices like oars, caterpilars or propellers are all alike, in that they are mechanical contraptions aimed at pushing the water backward in order to make the vessel go forward. The energy source is not stated in ColReg, so I would think that any vessel powered by mechanichal devices pushing the water backwards would qualify as "power", regardless of the energy source. ColReg does state "machinery". I'll let oaring enthusiasts fight over that precise word.

For the rest of the world, most rowing boats would fall in the "not under command" category, and these have automatic right of way, like it or not. (you may yell insults at them through the loudspeaker though)

Re: What do they all do? @SkippyBang

There are only 2 types of (steerable) vessels : power and sail. That is very explicit everywhere, and puts rowing in the power category very explicitly.

Mid-flight jumbo font smartphone text shock sparks kid abuse arrests

Re: Just equip all the kids with body cameras?

There's nothing CRISPR can do that we could not already do before. It's just more convenient in some cases.

Oz government wants its own definition of what 'backdoor' means

Re: Politicians don't understand what they're dealing with...

"while the real criminality online is probably going on very well hidden and away from mainstream services."

The trick is, they don't even need to. Law enforcement is notoriously bad at discriminating between a clear-text harmless joke and a clear-text terrorist plan (often chasing the former instead of the latter; see the Robin Hood case, or the wild-goose chase after the Paris shooting that saw law enforcement going all-out for several days after a couple of innocent tourists who were in the tube at the time, with their cellphones reporting to cell towers approximately following the events ; or that time when an innocent passenger was arrested and kept in custody for 48 hrs because a mate sent him a riddle mentioning the word "bomb" while he was at a train station. Plenty of examples really.).

This blanket surveillance puts us all at serious risk, while letting the crims do their dirty business largely in the open.

Re: Quote: "...because encryption is such a complex thing to explain"

It *could* totally be an encrypted message. For all you know it could consist in a single symbol for example, which Alice and AC agreed would mean "meet me behind Carol's for some dogging, but don't let Dan or Eve know because they have bad breath". Or "don't forget to buy bread on your way back home", for that matter.

In fact, Alice and AC could have decided that it would mean the first "dogging" thing the first time it is used, then the "bread" thing any subsequent time.

AI vans are real – but they'll make us suck at driving, warn boffins

That's only too true

Just put a random driver used to automatic in a stick car, and watch the horror unfurl. And that's only a rather minor difference...

Apple building data centre in China to comply with tough cybersecurity laws

They don't have to be run by Chinese companies (Apple didn't relocate its headquarters), personal or sensitive data just has to be stored within the country.

"we in the west" is a very diverse crowd, but the answer is "mostly yes, and more and more so". Especially after the US made very clear that anything stored in the US has to follow US laws and US laws only, which is understandable but also understandably worrying for foreigners.

Judge used personal email to send out details of sensitive case

Re: "judgement is a matter of public record"

"It used to be before all the secret courts were introduced here in the UK and the guilty but "under age" murderers, rapists, serial offenders, etc... were given anonymity by law"

What actually happened is pretty much the exact opposite.

Re: "Internet e-mail is not a secure medium..."

I think it's both a mixup and a shortcut.

- free webmail services are inherently insecure

- pretty much anyone with a reasonably big pipe and minimal tech gorm can harvest email content and / or draw a "connection map" (which is where the intel value lies).

But email content can be almost unbreakably secure (GPG / PGP for example). That's one of my pet peeves: "serious" institution adding disclaimers to every outgoing mail stating that there is no way to guarantee email integrity, so they won't take any responsibility if they send you misleading info -or even malware- by email. Yes, there are ways, you lying bastards, you're just too cheap to implement them (or worst, that's a preemptive get-out clause if they do send you nasties).

As for network masquerading, well, I won't rant on that again, but if you're serious about it there are easy and readily-available solutions. Which doesn't matter much: history proves that unencrypted channels are good enough for terrorists because the limiting factor here is not technological: the plods are so busy trawling the humongous databases for evidence that their girlfriend is cheating on them that they wont notice a terr'ist if he sticks a fist-sized piece of C4 in their ass. Blanket surveillance, as everything else, follows the rule: "too much data is worst than no data". TB/s is NOT a substitute for proper intel.

Re: At least it seems it's an exception

"target market i.e. 18-24 year old males living in this area with these interests"

I think you'll find that advertisers have that one figured out already...

Former GCHQ boss backs end-to-end encryption

Re: Don't suggest that!

' "The challenge for governments is how do you stop the abuse of that encryption by the tiny amount of people who want to do bad things, like terrorists and criminals," Hannigan said.'

Stongly-worded EULA?

Semiconductor-laced bunny eyedrops appear to nuke infections

Re: Double-edged sword?

"It is good that the researchers noted that, but I think we should be more worried about what happens to the nanoparticles that get out into the environment. At least they'd be in such small quantities it would be impossible for them to have any large scale effect, but still something we should look at.

Is there anything like them in nature?"

Yes, in fact I am very much involved in that kind of research. Nanoparticles are found in many everyday products (from gaz additives to enhance combustion in engines, to beauty products), and their beneficial/nocive properties depend on their composition and on their size. It's still an open field, but we're working on it. Right now I work on two "opposite" projects, one aimed at curing genetic diseases with nanoparticle-mediated gene delivery, the other aimed at deciphering the pathogenicity of metal or carbon nanoparticles (such as those found in cigarette smoke or exhaust fumes) in lung pathologies, including the risk of mother exposure for the fetus. We're working on it!

Double-edged sword?

Nanoparticles do have a slew of adverse effects, including severe inflammation and carcinogenesis. The "non-toxic" part of the claim needs to be examined carefuly in long-term experiments. Curing the bacterial infection is good except if the rabbits turned blind as a consequence!

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

Re: "it doesn't work"

"I have some kind of messed up drivers on my laptop from an upgrade from Win8.1 to Win10, rather than a clean install. So when my laptop is plugged in to my monitor (or some tvs/projectors) it will fail to play any video file in any application. Otherwise, when unplugged, it runs just fine.

So I couldn't play videos, but if I took it to IT, it would work just fine, I'd look dumb, and go back to my desk. Rinse, repeat. I never noticed the monitor variable for a month or so, just thinking it was "randomly" broken."

Not even close. First, users don't send their failing kit to me, I go to their machines, no peripheral glitch can be implicated. Then, coding is not my primary role, so I find myself in a very comfy situation where I'm not under too much pressure to release code, so when I do release a tool, it's properly tested, comes with extensive documentation, and is reasonnably bug-free (yes, I know I'm lucky, don't be too jealous). Plus, I generally get to demonstrate (and sometimes install it myself). In fact, I've NEVER seen my code fail on ANY kind of setup to date (when used according to the bundled instructions). Which means that my tools generally perform as expected, except right before banking holidays for some reason. Right now is a bad period for me, for example. You could blame high temperatures for random glitches, but it also happens mid-December and to a lesser extent right before any kind of holiday.

Re: "it doesn't work"

"Well - to be fair Windows is about as far as you can get from a deterministic system so it might be true..."

It's my code, it's simple, elegant and it comes with its own map and compass specifically featuring the users' ass and elbow just to be sure. It works. OK, it only happens with my Java code, perhaps if I complained less about Java being an unclean language the users might not assume that it must be broken somehow, but heh.

"it doesn't work"

Some pieces of my code appently stops working from time to time, but strangely enough, only when I'm not around. When I come around to check, everything is fine. but of course " Well it's working now, but I did the same a minute ago, and it wasn't working". Yeah sure, that's likely. PEBCAK, much?

Dead serious: How to haunt people after you've gone... using your smartphone

Re: You surely must have forgotten

The wonks who call you to sell you a better tech solution than you already have, but don't know either what you have or what they are selling.

Make sure your Skype is up to date because FYI there's a nasty hole in it

No notice for the Linux versions

I (almost) can't gather why...

Nadela did "open up" Microsoft to some extent, but he kinda veered it towards an Oracle-like mentality, it would seem. Gates must be spinning in his... bed. Yes, bed. Bed is what I meant. Yes.

Microsoft: We'll beef up security in Windows 10 Creators Edition Fall Update

This might be the year MS became relevant

This comment's title may be far-streched, especially after reading the comments above, but these tools (which in some incarnation have been available in most of the more serious OSes for decades) are really going to be useful for those of us unfortunate enough to have to manage a large number of MS-locked boxen. A welcome addition. If it works.