Posts by Peter 39

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

it all started years ago

For those too young to remember, there was NT. It was a cheap-and-cheerful implementation and not built with modular architecture. For efficiency (i.e. to avoid lots of expensive context switches), lots of stuff was built to run in the kernel.

Fast forward a couple of years and hardware is a *lot* faster. Context switches are still costly but the hardware is so much faster that it doesn't matter so much.

Unix-style systems had modularity from the start. Admittedly, sometimes those modules were placed in kernel-space for speed. But as hardware became faster they were moved out to userland - because they were architecturally separate. Sure - this needed some API tweaks etc but the original design supported it.

Unfortunately the legacies of NT mean that can't be done with Windows, absent an entire redesign of the OS and everything that goes with it. That would break essentially every piece of Windows software so Microsoft has decided to not do it.

"Cheap and cheerful". You get what you pay for.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

This will go down about as well as MCAS has done for Boeing

TSMC’s CEO is not pleased with the growing US-China rift

"reliance on global supply chains"

"... such an action would render the factories inoperable due to their reliance on global supply chains"

If China invades Taiwan, the global supply chain will be the least of the things rendering the plants inoperable.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Who expects Microsoft to test their stuff against Safari ??

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

Quite aside from the present legal arguments, Assange is in his present situation because he *probably* (based on information available) took advantage of at least one of the women with whom he associated during his time in Sweden.

Had he behaved differently he'd probably be a citizen of Sweden already.

As the old saying goes, "This is the screwing you get for the screwing you got"

When it comes to renting tech kit, things can get personal, very quickly

Being a Mac developer in a primarily Windows zone, I chose to provide my own hardware. Sure - it cost a little but there was never any possibility of dispute about who owned what.

They cautioned me that I had to keep backups, which I did. And a darn sight better than the corporate IT folks. IIRC there were three 100%-loss events on PC's during my time. Disk failure plus unusable backup ! Good one, guys. I took care of my own and never lost anything.

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Charger, or port ??

If EU mandates USB-C chargers - no issue.

But there's no good reason why EU should mandate that all DEVICES should be USB-C. That's what cables are for.

Re: Apple don't like it?

I'm not hard on my cables but I've never had an original Apple one fail.

Plenty of third-party, but the genuine Apple ones (from the Apple Store) have been solid.

Just one opinion.

Facebook rejects Australia's pay-for-news plan, proposes its own idea: How about no more articles at all, sunshine?

Trumpbook

No issue if "Facebook" decides to not publish. That's their call.

Given the lousy thumb-on-scale scheme to decide "what you want to see", seeing nothing would be an improvement.

For Apple's latest trick, the iCockroach – allowing it to survive while the smartphone sector faces a nuclear winter

codswallop

"Republicans, known for their fiscal conservatism..."

That was the case decades ago. Now it's alternate conservatism and profligacy depending upon the recipient(s). So a $1.7 trillion tax cut for companies and high-rollers is fine - no offset needed. But funding for laid-off workers got the axe Friday night.

Even the Trumpites are cr***ing themselves about this because they can see the disaster unfolding during the convention in a couple of weeks. What it means, of course, is that the GOP Senators have given up on T. If they thought he had a reasonable chance then money would be showering down like the balloons at the convention - but they won't be having that this year either.

The Great Trumpet has not yet sounded its last but it is most certainly off-key.

Worldpay stops turning in the UK, leaving trail of thoroughly miffed retailers and customers

Surprised they're still in business. I used them for a while from the US and they hassled mightily about "verification".

And then a bit over a year ago they just shut down here. No advance notice. Just on the bike and away.

S'house way to run a company.

Wall Street analyst worries iPhone is facing '2nd recession' after 2019 annus horribilis

It's amazing that it's 2020 and we still have the same-old same-old whinging about iPhones.

These folks have been proven wrong for over a decade and still they blather. I guess they just can't read the financial reports. Lots of people have voted with their wallets. Many have bought some variety of Android phone, fewer but still a goodly number bought iPhones. And Apple has cornered almost all the profit in that business (about 80% last time I looked).

With the current massive unemployment in the US, all the companies will have an annus horribilis. The wonderful-Wall-Street-analyst isn't telling us anything that was not already bleedin' obvious. Anything to get clicks, I guess. Put "Apple" in the headline and get more - that's all it is. Just blather.

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

"Standard" and changeability

It's really funny when Brits talk about the ability to change and update standards, such as moving from the "old" microUSB to USB-C connector.

"No problem," we're told.

Then we point out the standards evolution of the BS 1363 Type G plug - and fall about laughing.

Seriously, it's well past time for UK to move to a transition. I might suggest that new dual outlets have one type G and Euro C and F sockets, with a fuse in the outlets to handle the ring-main characteristics of UK wiring.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Tom Lehrer

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

Apple sues iPhone CPU design ace after he quits to run data-center chip upstart Nuvia

No-compete restrictions are very limited in California but do operate at high levels in companies. No idea whether he was at that level or not. But Apple knows this law well and will have pegged it appropriately.

The more serious question is whether he took anything, *anything*, other than what was in his head. To do so is fatal in this environment. As is trying to recruit staff. No notebooks, no papers and certainly no electronic files of your designs. Your head is yours, and that's all.

You can do this "involuntary spinoff" thing in California but you have to be very, very careful.

Front-end dev cops to billing NSA $220,000 for hours he didn't work

A dull knife in the drawer. In private industry there is elasticity, as one poster rightly noted. But these scenarios are usually for salaried staff, not people billed by the hour. If that's your gig then bill only those hours you actually work.

Of course, he's doubly-screwed because his clearance now is worthless. Dumb move, dude.

Former General Electric boss explains how he got the internet wrong

Immelt was only the most recent in a long line of GE managers who got it wrong.

GE was running trans-Atlantic time-sharing in the late 1960's. It was worldwide in the early 70's (meaning US, western Europe, Australia, Japan and probably a couple of others I've forgotten). The "Information Services Business Division" used email for its daily business from the early 70's - long before it was legally permitted to offer it as a service to others.

Some observant folks might have noticed that GE's class A (in old-speak) IP block is 3.xxx.xxx.xxx. That's right - the first one allocated (0, 1 and 2 were reserved). By contrast, Apple's is "17" and Microsoft is "92".

We GE folks were there in the early days and helped build it all. Then crass, stupid management pissed it all away. Immelt was not the worst, just the most recent.

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Re: Phone Calls

I guess your carrier is shite. My iPhone X (in US) is solid on calls and has been so through all the s/w releases (was new in November 2017).

two camps

The question of "which is the best smartphone this season" is really "which is the best Android smartphone this season".

Apple does its stuff with iOS and, if you're into that, that's the way to go. No questions asked.

If you're into Android then the questions abound.

You're burning £1.2bn for what? UK spending watchdog gives digital court plans a kicking

Re: Trial (conviction) by Computer

Being not from UK and driving while on holiday I was nailed for one of these. I admit that it's an awkward place but I suspect that it has been left as-is to be a speed trap. A long downhill that suddenly becomes 20 mph. Doing 27 will get you busted.

So you're out £40 for the rental car company to inform plod who you are, then you get a £100 splat from plod. Which you can avoid if you attend one of the classes offered but, of course, you have to be in the UK for that. No concept of on-line class - in-person only.

Whap. Whap. Great way to encourage me to visit again.

p.s. most people like me spend more brain cycles remembering to stay on the left side of the road. By pissing us off with overly-stupid speed traps you're forcing us to spend our attention elsewhere. Be careful of the mayhem you invoke.

Re: True and Tried Software

Don't know about Oz but the US system PACER has mixed reviews. It does work but there are lots of issues.

A new system could and should do a lot better.

Four US govt agencies poke probe in Facebook following more 'oops, we spilled your data' shocks

Open ? Shmopen

"Facebook is now – finally – being open about ..."

Pure BS. They might be more "open" than before but anyone who thinks that this is 100% transparency needs to get a brain transplant.

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

Re: '90s Called...

The 90's ... really ???

No. This is a 1960's scheme, with giant platters and one head for each surface.

Donald Trumped: Comey says Prez is a liar – and admits he's a leaker

"Leaker"? No !

"Comey admitted he became a leaker – giving his notes to a friend to pass to journalists"

This is NOT a leak. Comey was a party to the conversation and is entitled to report it however he wants (excluding obvious exception such as classified info, or legal advice, etc that don't apply here).

If it had been someone else's conversation that he'd heard then that would be a leak. But if it's his own then he owns it (jointly with Trump, I guess) and he's free to report it.

LTE-Broadcast has broad deployment models. What it doesn't have is the iPhone

SSDD - users pay, carriers save

I'm sure the carriers want to push broadcast. That'll save them shedloads in infrastructure at high-demand areas (such as sporting events).

But punters will still be charged full whack for each byte.

Soz fanbois, Apple DIDN'T invent the smartphone after all

Re: Of course they didnt invent it, but made is so much better

Absolutely KEY comment. Thank you.

What Apple did is instantly obsolete all the "special web page" stuff that had been previously required. "Pinch to zoom" with the multi-touch capacitive screen was the game-changer. And Apple had to have that so you could connect to the various WiFi networks that were starting to become available.

Re: It's the usual story.

ABSOLUTELY !!

A neighbour has a PC with a forced update to Win10. Networking was dead. Stone dead, so she called me - the "Mac guy" for help. It was trivial to plug in MacBook Pro and verify that the network was indeed alive and well. A bit of work with Mr Google released that many others were in the same sorry state because of the borked fix a month or so ago. No help from Redmond, of course.

But some suggested that reacquiring a DHCP lease might be a help but - of course - there's no way I could find to do that within any of the Control Panels. I did try for a while - total zero. Then I remembered that the command-line might help (last time I used that on Windows is longer than I care to remember) and BINGO - networking was networking again. Fortunately Redmond figured out its fiasco and applied Band-Aid#2 so I haven't been called back on this.

Then she mentioned that none of her printers had been working since the unwanted, forced update. It turns out that all the Win7 print drivers are c**p for Win10 so you have to funky-fiddle the de-install of the old ones and then manually install new ones from the vendor.

Funny, but my Apple MBP had no problem finding the printer and printing to it - although it had never seen that variety before.

So, the "usual story" is that Apple mostly gets its stuff to work, straightforward, right out of the box. If you others want to buy other stuff and then complain that *that* doesn't work - that's your problem. I choose not to spend my life doing that.

SOZ, El Reg. Fanbois didn't claim that

No-one said that Apple invented the "smartphone". Maybe the "smarterphone" but we quibble.

But Apple most certainly DID invent the "smartphone industry" and promptly took all the money.

SOZ, Samsung, HTC. Nokia, Microsoft. Oh, and Blackberry. I almost forgot :)

Emulating x86: Microsoft builds granny flat into Windows 10

Re: Cart before the horse

And for even more reference - Apple previously migrated the entire base from 680x0 to PowerPC.

That was an even more massive challenge, and amazingly successful.

Re: Apple's migrations were different

Apple won't do it for the high-performance machines but you should expect to see MacBooks with A-xx CPUs in the not-too-distant future.

I expect that by now Apple is capable of building a Rosetta-like tool but even if not - who do you think owns the Rosetta IP these days ?? IBM, that's who. And has anyone failed to notice the cozy relationship between IBM and Apple? Not if you're this side of dead.

x86 on ARM will happen. The fat lady has sung.

Pilot posts detailed MS Flight Sim video of how to land Boeing 737

the way it was ...

Back in the day (late 70's) BA had a cool fully auto-land system. It was on BAC-111 and maybe some others, although not heavies. This was a 100% hands-off landing, all the way.

Worked great through testing and acceptance and then one day the full-thick fog reduced visibility to not much more than your nose. But BA could land, and then ... LHR had to send out a blinky "follow-me" to lead him to the gate. Poor pilot could not even see the ground in order to taxi.

Landmark computer hacking archive deposited at TNMOC

"The Internet"

There were certainly networks available before "the Internet" and it's often difficult to differentiate the two.

Most here think of "the Internet", lately retitled "the internet" as the descendant of the ARPA/DARPAnet which was certainly available in the 80's but only for non-commercial access. CompuServe wasn't part of that in those days, but used other networks AFAIK (as did many other services, including AOL).

Verizon: We're sick of waiting for the FCC, so here's our 'net neutrality'

bollocks

Verizon conveniently fails to note that it is an ISP and not a transit service (although it may do some of that).

So the Netflix traffic it receives is destined for its own end users, who have paid for the delivery all the way through Verizon's network. The fluff about asymmetry is just that - fluff.

Apple finally publishes El Capitan Darwin source

source code actually quite useful

In one gig, access to the networking source was absolutely crucial to be able to build in-kernel network plugins. To say nothing of how different the packet handling was from the STREAMS code in classic Mac OS.

In another, we were building custom kernels with added security. Some of which Apple has incorporated (our changes went back to Apple under the open-source rules).

The disinterest might be widespread but it's far from total.

How cyber insurance actually works

Glad to see this

I am very pleased to see that this is becoming more common in companies. When dealing with security issues and expenditures, the bean-counters frequently reduced or eliminated security aspects of IT budget proposals. They saw it as a dead expense, completely ignoring the fact that what they were doing was self-insuring the company.

Once cyber insurance becomes commonplace, IT managers will have a way to push back against those cuts by arguing that spending on security will recede the price of insurance. Just as installing better fire protection will cut those premiums significantly.

Cyber insurance should be mandatory for businesses dealing with customer data (which is most of them) just as liability cover is required for your car. You aren't required to have full cover but you should at least have cover for customers. Why don't we have that yet ??

On its way: A Google-free, NSA-free IT infrastructure for Europe

Re: patriot act

I don't think that would be sufficient. After all, isn't that exactly the situation with Microsoft? There's a separate EU company (HQ in Ireland, I would guess) and it's wholly owned by Microsoft. Yet the U.S. is trying to force disclosure of the data in the EU datacentre.

I think that the EU company would have to be fully independent for the separation to work.

Microsoft to spoofed Skype users: Change your account passwords NOW

Yawn

Having had my account info swiped a couple of years ago while I was on a short visit to Europe, I have never been amazed at the level of pwnage going on at Skype.

If MS thinks that this is a good way to deal with mobile and social media then it will confirm all that they've done with killing the PC business.

Any company that handles web pages in the kernel deserves all this problem, and more.

Even Apple doesn’t mess with Taylor Swift

Apple gets cluestick

I expect that Apple is actually rather appreciative of Swift's letter.

It was clear right from the start that this was a bad decision on *someone's* part but Apple could reverse it without losing face. But after Swift's letter, they can claim that they were caused to seriously reconsider the [inexplicably poor] decision. And everyone will be happy.

Had this kept going - without Swift's involvement - then it would have become a PR disaster for Apple. They don't do this often but this is a doozy.

Google, Microsoft and Apple explain their tax tricks in Australia

record companies

“I just bought an album on iTunes: how much of that money goes to tax havens and how much is taxed in Australia?”

For the answer to this - they'll have to haul in the record companies. Apple takes a 30% cut but pays all the sales cost, delivery, billing etc. The 70% for the record companies stays mostly with them - the artists don't see much.

Apple Pay is a tidy payday for Apple with 0.15% cut, sources say

Re: This is nothing unusual

Actually this can't happen. Apple never gets any transaction detail. It down't know what you bought, or where.

Sysadmins, patch now: HTTP 'pings of death' are spewing across web to kill Windows servers

stupidity calcified

(1)Microsoft has been doing this make-it-faster-by-putting-it-in-the-kernel thing for twenty years.

Nothing has changed, nor will it change. The only way for MS to stop it is to isolate Windows into a VM on top of some non-Windows OS.

For if it is Windows, see (1)

LEAKED: Samsung's iPhone 6 killer... the Samsung Galaxy S6

So the new Samsung S6 is smoking' Apple.

Unfortunately for BGR, that's "smoking' " in a less-than-good way. I guess that BGR didn't take time to read the reports that the Snapdragon was way-too-hot and that Sam had settled on a less-capable-but-cooler substitute.

Ahh, facts. Such pesky things.

Blind justice: Google lawsuit silences elected state prosecutor

Amazon is not "Silicon Valley"

"The current US administration has been remarkably generous to Silicon Valley. Obama's administration treats Big Tech as generously as Bush's treated Big Oil. Google staffers can be found at all levels of this administration, and Google is a significant campaign funding contributor.

It's not just Google. The Department of Justice handed Amazon a very favourable settlement in its "price fixing" case against publishers. The order handed Amazon something very valuable: a retail monopoly (technically, a "monopsony")."

Uh, no. It gave Silicon Valley, Apple to be specific, a raw deal. And this was to the benefit, as you say, of Amazon which hails from Washington state. Your premise might be correct but your example contradicts it.

18 million iPHONE USERS HAVE NEVER BONKED to ApplePay

It apparently works in the UK if you have a US credit card.

slow rollout

I've used Apple Pay at a few places but most don't have NFC yet. That will change by next October because terminals have to be upgraded/replaced to support chip cards, and most will include NFC.

In some ways, a not-so-fast rollout is an advantage as it allows firms to get bugs fixed while they don't have a large impact. For example, one large hardware chain has AP working for Visa, but for MasterCard the transaction shows on the phone as "done" (i.e. "Done" with a green check-mark) and then "Declined". The account is good however and using the actual plastic works just fine.

And said chain does have chip-readers in the terminals. Just not active. Having been hacked one might think that they would have flipped that switch. But - no. Go figure.

Chinese coder's got 99 problems and getting hitched is one: Huge iPhone woo plot FAILS

With the gender-selection in China (and some other countries) there are lots more men than women.

She knows that she will be able to find a husband with more common sense.

Home Depot: Someone's WEAK-ASS password SECURITY led to breach

cobblers

Having your everyday network traffic on the same network as the POS systems makes as much sense as giving a spare key to the safe with the contract cleaning crew. In every store.

The late 2014 Apple Mac Mini: The best (and worst) of both worlds

SIMMs

I've read that a contributing factor leading to soldered-on memory is that there aren't any SIMMs available for the memory that Apple is using here.

Apple, Google take on Main Street in BONKING-FOR-CASH struggle

CurrentC from MCX has several "issues".

1. you have to provide direct access to your bank account, via either direct debit (via ACH transactions) or debit card info

2. you have to give them your SSN (social security number) and driver license info

All this goes into the database-in-the-cloud and makes an extremely juicy target for identity theft. Everything you want all in one spot !

With a credit card there are at least some consumer protections. With CurrentC/MCX there are none. It's a disaster in slow motion.

Re: Plenty of retailer incentives for MCX

And you'll have to upgrade your POS terminal by next October anyhow - for EMV compliance (i.e. accept chip cards). So the incremental cost for NFC will be fairly low.