Posts by david 12

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Re: User Error

BSP -- British Standard Pipe -- is a metric thread. The metric thread for pipes.

I can only imagine the negotiations and horse trading which led to that result (standards creation is notoriously corrupt), but out of all the thought that went into creating the metric standards, BSP was chosen without modification.

For nuts/bolts, a modern thread profile was wanted, which was why all the existing British bolt threads were abandoned, and Britain had the choice of going with Europe, or continuing with the new standard it had just developed in co-operation with the USA. Britain abandoned the new trans-Atlantic standard, and adopted the European standard instead. And Europe chose BSP for pipe threads. Was that the best choice for Europe? I have no idea what their pipe threads looked like before metric threads. But after metric threads, I know what their pipe thread standard is: BSP.

Privacy Shield binned after EU court rules transatlantic data protection arrangements 'inadequate'

How is this different to EU/UK practice?

As I understand it, "the processing of personal data by competent authorities for law enforcement purposes is outside the GDPR’s scope (e.g. the Police investigating a crime)", and National Security is exempt. In the UK and in Ireland and in the EU. How does FBI and NSA access differ from this?

51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home

Re: Alternative fakery

>We know they never went to the moon anyway<

As shown in the 2002 French documentary "Dark Side of the Moon" (William Karel)

It is very good if you are the kind of person who likes watching history documentaries or are interested in the space program.

And it demonstrates that you don't need Deep Fakes to do deep fakes. Watch the film before reading the Wikipedia article :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(2002_film)

If you can read this, your Windows 10 2004 PC really is connected to the internet no matter what the OS claims

Re: I see this BS because of minimal trust for Microsoft domains

>The correct way to detect no connections, should be continuous failure to connect to any internet address, during a set time period, a good one can be the time server, if set to an internet address. <

This is the way Win10 detects internet connection failure, and up until now has been the reason for this bug. You get a routing failure, and Windows labels that as an Internet connection failure, and that affects routing....

It's been a problem with Win10 for some time, -- IPV4 standards/RFCs never really caught up with multi-homed systems and multi-homed systems are subject to corner-case routing failures. It should be fixed by total system conversion to IPV6 protocols (but of course will probably be broken by the transition).

And no, "IPV6" doesn't just mean IPV4 with more bits.

No Wiggle room: Two weeks after angry bike shop customers report mystery orders on their accounts, firm confirms payment cards delinked

Re: There is no breach

The fee isn't outrageous for a credit account, (although they look to be making money on their business accounts) and Revolut has an Australian presence. I'll look further.

Re: There is no breach

I would use one time virtual cards if any were available in my market. Which bank / supplier is providing virtual cards?

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

Re: Efficacy of warning messages

Chkdsk /does/ do that. It recovers chains of clusters. If all your chains are only one cluster long, either all your files were one cluster long, or your FAT has been overwritten.

Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial

Not RABV (rabies.lyssavirus). Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV). Fruit bats, wombats ....

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: But you can recover deleted Items ON AN EXCHANGE...

If that mailbox was on an exchange you have the option to recover deleted items

If only that were true. On exchange you actually have several options for recovering deleted items, and even experienced exchange administrators are unlikely to know all of them. And when you go to the "the deleted items store" on exchange, to recover the deleted item, you do not find it there at all. Although you do eventually find it in one of the other undocumented places where exchange hides deleted items.

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

Re: Inconveniently placed keys

It was an IBM keyboard. And although Personal Computer World reviewed the IBM PC as --meh--, they were unequivocal about the keyboard: not just excellent, not just best: genre re-defining.

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

Re: re: Not a defence, it's not difficult to make things work cross browser.

Personally, when I use an unsupported browser, I don't care what the site looks like. If I render tables, side panels and transparencies wrong, I know the blame is on me. On the other hand, if they just refuse to provide a page at all, that's a problem, and it sucks.

jQuery started out offering transparent support for multiple browsers, then, as you no doubt know, later choose to interpret 'does not support' as 'will deliberately break support for'. So that when using an older browser you would get a blank screen on sites using current versions of jQuery.

jQuery pioneered "break site for unsupported browsers".

LibreOffice 6.4 nearly done as open-source office software project prepares for 10th anniversary

Re: I'm not so sure that options are the answer to why Office is so popular

Office is popular because Microsoft gave it away to schools

Not like Open Office? That schools would have had to pay for? Or perhaps you are think of 1990, when every school had a MSDOS computer lab that students could use? Obviously I'm missing something, because this doesn't seem to have any historical basis.

Re: I think you underestimate it...

Oof the effects Open Office has had on Microsoft is that it has helped diminish the importance of Small Business for MS. That is to say, MS development is now driven by Enterprise customers, and Small Business users have to just take what they are given by OO and MS.

Oh this 2019 timeline. Finish this sentence: Austrian politico accused of spending €3,000 a month on ...

What I was thinking, but I wouldn't have put it like that. Life and Career collapse, he self-medicates with addictive self-destructive behaviour: drugs, alcohol, gambling, or, in this case, computer gaming. For that at least I've got some empathy and he's got my sympathy.

ACLU sues America's border cops: Tell us everything about these secret search teams targeting travelers

Re: "he just exploited them better"

Soviet communism was a menace, but he tried to fight it like Beria and Stalin would have By killing people? By sending them to concentration camps in Siberia?. Please moderate your hysteria.

It's cool for Brit snoops to break the law, says secretive spy court. Just hold on while we pull off some legal jujitsu to let MI5 off the hook...

Which team to support?

Court brought it back within the pale with a ruling that its decisions are subject to appeal, despite laws establishing the IPT having been explicitly written to ensure they couldn't be

It's hard to know which teem to barrack against: the government for trying to put themselves above the courts, or the courts for trying to put themselves above the government.

I don't want to go on the cart! Windows 10 Mobile hauls itself from the grave one last time

MS has never been able to get their dates right.

I've been a MS customer for 30+ years, and, apart from a few well known media events like Win98, their ability to correctly identify release or unplugging dates has never been any better than it is now.

Google tightens the screw on 'less secure apps', will block most access from June 2020

Re: How will this work with a printer?

This change -- designed to force legacy customers off of competition software and on to a system that ties all their activities to a single account, for advertising and identification -- only really affects downloads. Sending mail, as your printer does when it scans to email, is not affected.

FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

Re: I understand where the dev is coming from but ....

Companies leeching off his code have already forked their own commercial versions. That was the impetus for the licence change.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Trademarks

They've got a trademark, and he's trying to steal it. Putting aside the question of drawing a line in the sand for public safety, he's still trying to cash in on someone else's trademark and goodwill.

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Re: About the same time that ...

The story was made up by a French author, Eugenie Foa. It is quoted in an American book by an American author. In the book where it is quoted, it is quoted as a separate story by a different author. ( Back in the day, American ideas about attribution and copyright were different)

I'd suggest that people stick to posting where they have some idea what they are talking about, but hey, this the talk pages of The Register. Nobody here knows what they are talking about.

Re: About the same time that ...

"The Little Hero of Haarlem" is a story within a story, but like "Eric, or Little by Little" in "Stalky and Co", the original story, of the little boy and the dike, existed prior to and outside of "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates".

FTC kicks feet through ash pile that once was Cambridge Analytica with belated verdict

Yet another demonstration of the importance of Active Defense.

In the absence of a defence from the company, it was found guilty.

Excuse me, but I find that less than convincing.

Elon Musk gets thumbs up from jury for use of 'pedo guy' in cave diver defamation lawsuit

I wonder how many posters here are shorting Tesla shares?

I wonder if all the people here suggesting that the jury was bribed are really that stupid?

Or just pretending to be that stupid because they like denigrating other people.

Tricky VPN-busting bug lurks in iOS, Android, Linux distros, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, say university eggheads

Re: BSD Stacks?

But it's not a 'network stack' problem. It's a routing problem.

Escobar Fold 1 snort all it's cracked up to be: Readers finger similarity to slated Chinese mobe

Buy in China with drug money. Sell in the Americas for clean money.

Sound business model.

And the phone may be a flop at $1400, but at $400 it looks like reasonably good value.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics that don't lie.

According to the most recent figures, half of the IPV4 address values are not in use. Not attached to anything. Not responding to ping or in DNS because they aren't associated with anything.

Some of these IPV4 values could be 'easily' recovered. That is, for values of 'easily' which are much more difficult that implementing IPV6. As demonstrated by the fact that people who actually have to put money into it are adopting IPV6.

Re: "We have now run out of IPv4 addresses"

IPV6 is, apparently, being used internally by growing ISPs, even when you don't see it at your end point.

IPV6 requires rebuilding their internal routing infrastructure, but we've already come to the point where that is cheaper than buying IPV4 on the open market.

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Competing with C and C++ for speed isn't a high bar. C and C++ get reasonable speed only on the back of decades of compiler optimisation: C wasn't intrinsically designed to be a fast language (quite the reverse).

Remember that when CS students used to tell you that C was 'fast' and 'close to the machine' they were comparing it to Lisp.

Re: I'm tempted...

Dunno. The file-open stuff I use is not entirely generic either on my Linux system or my OSx system or my Windows system, but it's still file-open. On all platforms, it's the configuration of the Serial-Port vs USB vs Socket that is different, the file-open code differs just in the name of the different 'files'.

Irish eyes aren't smiling after govt blows €1m on mega-printer too big for parliament's doors

Re: Not only the Irish

It was only on the organised walk around

At the new hospital here it was only on the organised walk around for the medical staff that it was discovered that the oxygen and anaesthetic gas lines were mixed up.

It's not a small mistake. That stuff is inside the walls.

After 10 years, Google Cloud Print will finally be out of beta... straight into ad giant's graveyard

Re: Oh no

[ As a complete noob on this kind of thing. Can a little server/laptop/solution be setup for email to print? Then just email the account, and it prints the document?

Yes, absolutely. A server can be set up to handle printing.

Most of the world is moving away from having on-site email servers.

And many if not most email-enabled printers can't handle the authentication now required for 'secure' email using gmail, so that's also not going to work for a lot of the users.

NASA boffins tackle Nazi alien in space – with the help of Native American tribal elders

PiC

Gone from using a name which signified the strength and endurance of the indigenous Germanic peoples, to one which signified the strength and endurance of the indigenous Algonquian peoples. Because culture and race based superiority is what we really want to celebrate.

Don't miss this patch: Bad Intel drivers give hackers a backdoor to the Windows kernel

Re: One way

To quote from one report "Too many trusted Windows 10 peripheral drivers, ... are riddled with exploitable security vulnerabilities"

Peripheral drivers. Intel network cards, wireless, Bluetooth etc. Not just the motherboard, and perhaps not the processor chipset at all.

Still pwned dude.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Re: Legality

Doesn't matter if it legal or not: eating in front of people without sharing is just rude.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

An impact printer of some sort. A drum printer, band-printer or chain printer --- daisy wheels were late innovations for low-volume printers, and dot-matrix printers came even later. Early dot-matrix printers were very loud ---- by earlier chain printers were much louder!

Re: That was a pretty impressive setup

Supposedly, from name of Gene Flack, a movie agent.

According to that infallible source, the internet.

"£PJ12345--12349"

I don't know if it was deliberate or not, but on one or my browsers, on one of my machines, that line was actually hyphenated at the hyphen:

~ ~ ~"£PJ12345-

-12349" ~ ~ ~

...which made it even more difficult to understand.

You make this sound like a name change made on a whim for marketing purposes. A college has to offer a sufficient range and quality of courses, postgraduate and research as well as undergraduate, to qualify and it also has to earn degree-awarding powers. It's a rigorous process of qualification and assessment which usually takes five years or more to attain, even once the minimum academic provision is in place. A successful result culminates in the grant of a Royal Charter and the right to call itself a university

That is to say, it's an expensive and difficult change made for marketing purposes.

Bloodhound rocket car target of 550mph put on ice after engine overheat

Re: Dear AC

I do wonder why they chose to use English measures

Imperial measures.

Or actually, since the Imperial measures were re-negotiated during and after WWII, International Measures.

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

Re: "no requirement of 'registration' for deactivated firearms"

don't see what practical purpose this serves?

None. It's an EU requirement linked to an entirely different regulatory environment.

It has been suggested that one solution to this kind of meaningless requirement is for Britain to leave the EU. I put that suggestion to you for consideration.

Communication, communication – and politics: Iowa saga of cuffed infosec pros reveals pentest pitfalls

can't find the iowa code

I haven't read the Iowa law. It's normally a defence against this offense that the persons had or reasonably believed that they had permission.

So... the prosecution knows they can't win this -- on appeal it will go to the state court that sent the men in. They aren't trying for a conviction. They are just trying to be assholes.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

Re: Surely

But it's the absolute angle measurement between the two eyes that's used for Binocular Triangulation?

Not the angular resolution of a single eye?

I've heard both claims from different sources. Are there any one-eyed vultures here to report personal experience?

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

Re: "Science" ?

The probability of multiple persons experiencing the same pschosomatic symptons at the same time in the same place are essentially none.

Unfortunately, you are wrong. Humans are social/tribal/pack creatures, and the phenomena of mass psychosomatic symptoms is well known and frequently documented.

Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

Hyperthreading

Cripes. The whole article is a mass of confusion, which seems to originate in the direct quotes, between threading, hyperthreading, shared cache and multi-core processors. Was English not the first language of some of these guys?

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

Re: 737 MAX

My Medical friend tells me that any medical selection panel hiring from India should include at least one person trained in India. To identify the applicants with shoddy qualifications or qualifications from shoddy institutions. India is a huge country, and there are some top-notch medical, engineering and CS graduates from top-notch schools. Also, the opposite.

Mark Hurd is dead

NCR

National Cash Register was the company that IBM learned business from. And the IBM aim was to be "not as criminal as NCR", which gives you some idea of the NCR sales culture that Hurd came from.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Re: Bah!

If PayPal has anything in common with any other financial transaction company, they are required to send notifications to the last known address, even when they know that the last known address is invalid.

Microsoft says .NET Framework porting project is finished: If your API's not on the list, it's not getting in

Re: It was the EU who compelled Ms to make Ms.Net an open standard....

>Try working at a large company with apps fighting over bugs due to differing VB runtimes.<

That problem was the VB3 and VB4 runtimes, which is to say Win9x/Win 3.x The later problem which people are more like to remember was the problem with conflicting C runtimes around the time of Win2K, which caused problems with objects written in C for use in other programs (including for use in VB programs).

It was the problem with conflicting C runtimes (as exposed by VB and other programs), along with the decreasing cost of memory and disk space, which caused MS to rethink their shared DLL approach.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Fixing the symptom…

Yes. FP maths on all modern CPUs has to conform to the IEEE.754 standards.

Yes, and there are unavoidable 'implementation dependant' details in in the IEEE.754 standard.