Posts by John 104

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

Beat me to it. How this doesn't get picked up is beyond me. It is monopolistic and actually harmful to the consumer, unlinke the IE/Netscape joke.

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

Re: Signature versus signature block

And I thought we had whacko judges here in the states....

I can't see this ever being a determination in a US court. If the law on the books there say that it has to be signed and on paper, how is it that this judge chucked that under the rug?

NASA Administrator upends the scorn bucket on Elon Musk's Starship spurtings

Re: Airstream in Space,....

Don't be fooled by the shiny exterior of Airstreams. Yes, it is pretty, but for the price tag, there should be yacht level of accouterments on the interior. Instead it is the same cheap crap that every other trailer (or caravan as the Brits call them) are made of.

Re: Something has been nagging me about the look of Starship

I almost want to give you a thumbs up, but that show was based on underwater adventures. Love it though! OK, have a thumbs up.

Confused why Trump fingered CrowdStrike in that Ukraine call? You're not the only one...

So....

He intimated about a previous investigation but not really and the FBI already has this evidence? Not sure what they are going for here, other than to make themselves look like a bunch of sore losers - still.

Serverless neither magically faster nor cheaper, dev laments

Duh

There is no such thing as serverless. You are just using someone else's hardware. God I hate that term.

And duh, of course it costs. A few grand is enough to buy a very nice 1U server that will last you YEARS.

This is right up there with people suddenly realizing that Amazon isn't their best friend and are actually a company trying to make money.

So we're going back to the Moon: NASA triggers countdown by firing up spacecraft production

Re: What do you mean "we", British Subject?

Well, to be fair, it was the 60s and only America mattered back then. (you know, the rest of North and South America really didn't count).

What do you mean "we", British Subject?

AMERICA is going back to the moon. You can't even get out of the EU.

-Brutal

MPs call for 'immediate' stop to facial recog in UK as report underlines bias risks in 'pre-crime' algos used by coppers

Re: If only...

As a yank, I was always mystified about the TV license thing. I thought we had tax hungry politicians...

Re: Bobbies on the Beat

Much more stupider.

FTFY

Scotiabank slammed for 'muppet-grade security' after internal source code and credentials spill onto open internet

Morons

Why would you put credentials for anything anywhere online in the first place? Private or public, its a bad idea.

First they came for 'face' and I did not speak out because I... have no face? Then they came for 'book'

Re: Facebook cretins.

@muscleguy

Dude, lighten up.

Google age discrimination case: Supervisor called me 'grandpa', engineer claims

Re: Ahh...

Are you implying that the BOFH memoirs are falsified? I always thought they were just ruminations of a retired engineer. World Crushed.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Re: Surely...

I used to run a hydraulic paper cutter when I worked in a print shop. 4 foot blade and it would cut through several inches of paper at once. To operate it, you had to grab two lock outs at near full arms width apart, and then depress a foot pedal to activate. It was pretty locked out but still scared the shit out of me. I got so quick with it that I was moving my hands towards the blade as it finished its cut. It was at that point that I realized how close I was coming to loosing an arm. I slowed down after that. Can't imagine someone defeating the safety mechanism, but people do...

Wall Street analyst slashes HP Inc's share rating amid mounting worries over printer supplies declines

Re: You think?

I'm sorry, but anyone who is dumb enough to own an ink jet printer these days....

Color laser printers are readily available and very inexpensive. I've been using the same HP color laser for about 10 years and it still hums along and prints when I need it to. When I don't need it to, the toner doesn't 'dry up', rendering the printer useless. I think I paid around $250 for it. Yes, it is more than an ink jet up front, but cheaper in the long run. And if B&W is enough, my son just bought one for $109.

Check out this article. its $AU, but you get the idea. ink jet is over 3 times as expensive to operate vs toner. It's a no brainier.

People are too short sighted when they buy printers. "Look, this one is only $60!" of course it is cheap. the whole model is based on basically giving away the printer and upcharging on consumables.

As for HP not making it due to printer supplies. Well, if you didn't charge so much for the product and have so little in the cartridges, maybe you'd do better. Same with toner. I never buy HP branded stuff because it costs 3x as much as the compatible cartridges available from the myriad of suppliers. If they prices were close, say within $5-$10, I'd go with the name brand. But corporations are greedy and stupid when it comes to these things. In this day and age, brand loyalty is gone. If it works and is cheap, that's what people go for. Doesn't take an MBA in business to figure this out...

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Re: Dubious

@ctcodger

Yeah, Comcast is a multi-billion dollar company because they are dumb. Nailed it.

The NetCAT is out of the bag: Intel chipset exploited to sniff SSH passwords as they're typed over the network

NetCAT?

Name is already taken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat

Re: Innocent accidental?

And it isn't FBIntel. It's Investigation. Unless that was an intended pun?

Re: Wireshark is my shell...

They aren't monitoring sound....

They are deducing the timing between key strokes to figure out a character. The human finger takes x amount of time to travel between keys. Using this information is how the make the assumption on key stroke.

The application for this vulnerability is interesting to me. The system is already compromised at this point, so data theft or corruption is not the name of the game. With this method, it isn't obvious that the system was hacked and a user being proxied. No, the deed is done with valid credentials, making the forensic portion of this difficult for the defendant. A haxxor could use this to steal credentials, do nefarious deeds, and have it pinned on the jacked user. Want to get an executive at a rival company fired for watching kiddie porn? These sort of events affect a companies standing on the stock market (I still don't know why). You could buy low or promote your own rival company as better, etc.

Exim marks the spot… of remote code execution: Patch due out today for 'give me root' flaw in mail server

Windows Haters

And where, exactly, are all the Windows haters?

Just goes to show you, vulnerabilities exist on any platform.

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

Who Complained

Other than people wringing their hands over the perceived insensitivity of the acronym, have there been any people who actually have a physical malady complaining? Is it like the Washington Redskins, or Kansas City Chiefs arguments by like minded hand wringers who determined that these names were offensive only to realize that Native Americans have no issue with them whatsoever?

Can Amazon's AI really detect fear? Plus: Fresh deepfake video freaks everyone out again

I thought it was pretty obvious. Hader is a good structure match for Cruse, so morphing is pretty easy. You can see it in the mouth and eyes throughout the video. If you need help, pull up a pic of a younger Cruse (if you dare) and pay close attention. This is the best one of these I have seen to date. Totally cool and totally creepy. Glad I'm a nobody!

Bit barn raising Arizona: Thirsty Microsoft mounts blazing saddle, plants 3 solar-powered server farms

Re: Solar power may use no water to generate electricity

You could use water, but why would you when better medium's like Glycol are available? It's what we us in ours. Closed system, no water needed. Not sure what all the fuss is about?

And as for radiative cooling, some of the larger data centers in our area use ambient air when it is cool to keep things, er, cool. Reduces wear and tear on systems and doesn't cost anything. in AZ, it gets relatively cold at night, so I don't see this as being any different than here in the PNW.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Re: I'm confused.

Shit, our medical monitors (barco) are so expensive that we became a vendor and they still run $12K a pop.

It's so hot, UK needs to start naming heatwaves like we do when it's a bit windy – climate boffins

Re: 32°?

Ah, so true.

How is it so difficult to close up your home, drink extra fluids, and take it easy when it is hot? Oh, and 30 isn't hot; its warm. You people....

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Re: Wyden for POTUS?

Are you serious? He so casually ignored all the illegal surveillance under the Obama administration by the NSA and others while blasting Trump? Just another politician cherry picking facts.

When you play the game of Big Spendy Thrones, nobody wins – your crap chair just goes missing

Waxed Mustache

Don't confuse the 80s with waxed mustaches. The only people who waxed their stash back in the day were weird dudes stuck in the 70s. It was generally laughed at by us teens (if not to be creeped out by if you were a girl i'm sure). Today's hipster 'stache wearers are closer to the mark. it doesn't make any less idiotic, though.

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

So.... we'll have self driving cars for a year before the world comes to an end due to climate change. Got it.

More households invite creepy smart speakers indoors: Arch-slurper Google top dog for Q1

No kidding. Order up some goods for him. If it happens enough times maybe he'l bin the thing.

We are shocked to learn oppressive authoritarian surveillance state China injects spyware into foreigners' smartphones

Sure, go ahead and install the app for me. Thanks.

Walks away, resets phone.

Problem solved.

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Re: "bad software deploy"

It's called testing. It requires a test lab. And not the dev's laptop. I've worked in IT for around 20 years and I've worked at 1 company that actually had a copy their production environment to test on. We never had a deployment failure. Not once. Everyone else just mangles together something in a half baked effort and then management screams bloody murder when a deployment goes sideways. This is, of course, after being told that spending on a proper lab would be ideal...

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

I had the fortune of seeing the concord fly at an airshow in California back in the day. For $50 they would fly you half way to Hawaii and back. Being a poor teen, I didn't get that pleasure. I did get to see it taxiing on the runway at Brown Field. What a noisy racket. Not the wonderful growl/whine of a combat aircraft (of which I saw plenty living 10 miles from Top Gun school at Miramar). It was more like the hellacious assault of a Harrier. But still, jet noise.

Years later, after grounding, I was able to do a walk through. Glad I didn't get to fly in it as it had about as much room as a Cessna 172!

Delicious irony: Hacked medical debt collector AMCA files for bankruptcy protection from debt collectors

um

Sounds like they just weren't paying their bills. What does this have to do with data breach?

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Re: That's why when importing data...

Not really. At least in Windows land. Every log in ends up in the security log. So unless you are wiping the entirety of the logs, you will get caught eventually.

And see above regarding lying vs being responsible. :)

DIY with Akamai: What to do when no one sells the servers you need? You build your own

lol. like 15 different types of hardware is such a burden. That is NOTHING for most businesses that host their own kit.

Still Akamai do a great job and the network is VERY easy to work with/configure.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Re: And you assume the geniuses do all that, right?

Yes, they are geniuses in the same sense that their track pads are magic.

Re: BS

The failure is Apple for programming this in the first place. At the very least, normal or half brightness should be working on boot so you can see post messages, etc. There is zero logical reason for this. What a bunch of morons.

Box shifting on the Moon? Lunar payloads on Amazon Prime

Kupier?

They should call it Kessler. THAT would be honest.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Re: Not an explosion, just my own daftness...

It's larger on the inside.

Still sniggering at that $999 monitor stand? Apple just got serious about the enterprise

Re: Yuk

What you are describing is an engineering workstation. Not a personal computer. Or, what single U servers might look like.

Thunderbolt ports are super if you are using a Mac. Useless for anything else, so I don't see that as a compelling sales point. If you are moving large amounts of data over one of these ports you are doing it wrong. Otherwise, USB 3 is fine.

1.5 TB of RAM. Yeah, sure. I have hypervisors that are running 512 GB of RAM and they have a ton of headroom. They could take the 1.5 (its the processor architecture, not Apple) but it is cheaper just to buy another server and have the extra CPU headroom.

Just more idiot tax.

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

To get the PHD you have to have your BS. So, he has a BS and works at 7/11?

3.14. FTFY.

Two weeks after Microsoft warned of Windows RDP worms, a million internet-facing boxes still vulnerable

Re: Why do they make it complicated

What you are asking for is how they used to do it.

It made identifying patches to apply or not apply very granular. Great for admins who care. But, this method required a lot of extra work on the MS side, so now they bundle them all up into one bucket and make you take the lot unless you are using WSUS or SCCM.

It is very frustrating to try and find details on a single patch though. Very obfuscated for some reason.

Re: So why Windows?

Maybe not with 365. Most people don't realize that you get thick client versions of all the 365 software (depending on your licensing model) with each subscription. Don't like the web client? Download the thick client and run it locally.

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

I love how all the verbiage assumes that hyperthreading is just this thing that some desktop users might have enabled, so you probably want to turn it off. Not much mention of the server market, which relies on multi-core SMT processors do heavy lifting.

Disabling hyper threading in a data center environment would be catastrophic. In our environment, as an example, we have just a few hosts that aren't utilizing virtualization. Most of our workload and infra are virtualized.

Cocaine, psychedelics, DMT? They sure knew how to party 1,000 years ago: Archaeologists make startling discovery

Science?

"Our findings support the idea"

This, folks, is how science is supposed to work. Notice that she didn't say, "Our findings prove the idea," as some in today's media would hysterically declare...

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

How about:

Always ALWAYS at least look at the code you have pasted into your query before blindly executing it.

Seems pretty basic a thing to miss...

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

"We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to people who use Firefox"

So a pretty small list then? I kid I kid!

But seriously, how do you not catch an intermediate cert expiration date?

Hey, those warrantless smartphone searches at the US border? Unconstitutional, yeah? Civil-rights warriors ask court to settle this

Re: they need "reasonable suspicion"

@Aodbhan

Thank you.

If no one calls out moronic statements like how being a CBP agent is for losers, then more morons believe it as truth and we are surrounded by a collective of uninformed or ignorant people who have no idea what they are talking about but shout from the top of their lungs how dumb you are for not agreeing with them.

As for search and seizure at the border. It needs addressing to be sure (US Citizen). In the mean time, don't use a fingerprint or face recognition to unlock any of your devices. Passwords/patterns are intellectual property as upheld by US courts, so use that to protect your data.

Apple, Samsung feel the pain as smartphone market slumps to lowest shipments in 5 YEARS

Waterproofing. That's pretty much it. I commute via motorcycle and am hard on phones, so I have to go up to the 'flagship' models to get this feature. I'd much rather have a $250 phone that is waterproof...