Posts by david 12

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Ah yes, the classical logical fallacy: "The reason I know Latin is because I went to grammar school"

UK still doodling digital pound while Brussels frets over payment sovereignty

Re: One option - ban them

I mentioned block chain as an iconic example of a finance technology heavily investigated by the finance industry and central banks, particularly as a settlement technology, that seems to be more closely related to a European Settlement System than Bitcoin. IE, not very close at all.

For people not familiar with settlement systems, perhaps I should have written What is the connection between a European settlement system, and a European bitcoin? I'm not saying there is none, just that it's not immediately obvious to me that a European bitcoin is any more necessary than a banana..

Re: One option - ban them

What is the connection between a European settlement system, and a European bitcoin?

I'm not saying there is none, just that it's not immediately obvious to me that a European bitcoin is any more necessary than a block-chain settlement system.

Document Foundation urges EU to ditch Excel lock-in for cybersecurity law consultation

Re: OOXML is also an open and ISO standard

Unless the pro-forma spreadsheet has embedded macros, the unspecified parts of the specification are irrelevant.

Until last month, attackers could've stolen info from Perplexity Comet users just by sending a calendar invite

Google Calendar Event

Another Google Calendar virus.

People, you need to lock down your Google Calendar. The default setting is 'open for the public'. It's like running email without a spam filter, or running an internet connection with an open firewall.

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Win7 Starter

I was surprised that The Register published a picture of a COA label. Somebody could copy the product key.

Then I looked and saw Win7 Starter.

I'm a Windows / MS customer, but when my users asked, I had to tell them that even if I got 'Starter' free, I still wouldn't want it.

Sounds like a deal to me

Well, if you like the idea of goal / jail, you know how to get there. I've heard that people are fighting to get in.

Accenture down to buy Downdetector as part of $1.2 billion deal

Buried the lede?

I would have led with Ookla Speedtest, and mentioned Downdetector later.

I take this to mean that, in some markets, to some people, Downdetector is a more important part of the deal than speedtest?

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

Re: I'm not sure I understand the point, Firefox has supported multiple windows forever

"multiple tabs" was the killer feature of Firefox, when MS was trying to promote an active desktop, with browser windows and tiling managed by the OS, and tabs (by default) along the bottom of your screen. Clearly, many people like to have in-app window tiling and management, like that provided by the wildly successful applications Word, Excel and Outlook.

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

'"Thin" client?

Not a serial terminal. Not even a RPC terminal. It's running MS Edge on Win11 to display a web page.

OK, it's a trimmed-down light-weight distribution, running Windows more-or-less in 'safe' mode, but interesting how the meaning of 'thin' has developed over the years.

Cloud CPC OS

Not sure where The Register 'quoted' that term from. It makes me wonder, can I log into my Cloud Cloud Personal Computer using a Personal PIN Number?

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

The mystery explained in the article is the previously unexplained characterization of the squeak, including why it is a "squeak".

Brit dual nationals grounded by border digitization drive

Re: unsure whether she would be able to return to the UK

bolloxes up the airline's APIS stuff

It's been a known problem forever, in the sense that official US government advice was that you had to exit foreign countries on your American passport, so that the travel documentation forwarded to the US government matched the arrival information.

It's just that apparently, they never did pay any attention to the travel advice they were receiving. Security theatre.

Re: unsure whether she would be able to return to the UK

I thought my 'Britishness' had been superseded when I was naturalised in Aus (because no-one told me otherwise). And I've been back to the UK on my Australian passport without issue (though the last time was years ago).

Then you probably have nothing to worry about. The implicit threat is that once you establish your status in the system as "non citizen", you will find it difficult to switch status to "citizen".

If you don't mind abandoning your UK citizenship, then having the UK think you are a non-citizen isn't a problem.

Go library maintainer brands GitHub's Dependabot a 'noise machine'

This code might not be used *today*, but tomorrow it might be

Hence the recommendation that dependencies be updated in sync with your package update cycle: when your code changes, you should update dependencies.

Crims create fake remote management vendor that actually sells a RAT

Re: But?

Obviously, it's a Trojan Horse disguised as a Trojan Horse

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Mark Williams Company's Coherent did not have virtual memory It was limited to the amount of memory you (could afford to) put in your PC.

As such, it was a toy unix for people who needed or wanted a pc unix to complement the unix they used at work or at university, but it didn't offer a compelling alternative to DOS or Apple.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: Kinda obvious...

It gets better: since the AI is producing "probable" passwords, it predicts the kind of passwords found in large password sets. It's a generic password-pattern prediction tool.

You should now be rotating passwords with patterns similar to those used to train AI, not just those provided by AI.

Flush with potential? Activist investor insists Japanese toilet giant is an AI sleeper

Re: Don't knock it till you've tried it

Having tried it, I can say that there is a difference between the Japanese product, and what you can buy for $50 online

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Harry Potter

This is what I wondered about https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/09/boffins_probe_commercial_ai_models/

"We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet," the authors said, citing a recall rate of 95.8 percent."

Was that 4.2% change semantic ablation? It seems likely

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

"Centronics Port"

Interesting term, not used here or in the magazines I read or the later IEEE specifications.

"Centronics" became the name of the plug/socket/cable Centronics used at the printer end. At the Computer end, it was called a "printer port" or a "parallel port"

As I recall, the Osborne 1 had a scrollable display. Sideways as well as vertical, so you could fit a longer line length.

It worked quite well. I was always disappointed with DOS / Windows / unix display drivers that only implement switchable windows instead of a large virtual desktop.

Re: "very few computers have Centronics ports any more"

Yeah, but is it compatible at the PCXT-hammer-the-8255-registers level?

??

Windows isn't compatible at the hammer-the-registers level.

To write to or read from the 8255 registers, you write to or read from the bus. The bus was connected to the CPU memory / IO ports. The 8255 registers were exposed as I/O ports.

Win98 virtualized the output ports (only one process could own a virtualized port), but Win2K did not. You use the Win API driver API to read/write I/O ports. No direct-access program is compatible.

On Win2K, I could rewrite my code and use a freeware driver for I/O ports. Today, you need a signed driver, which costs, and a generic port driver is generally considered a security risk.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

-O3 being dangerous strikes me as somewhat absurd.

It's always been that way, ever since c compilers were advanced enough to have an "optimizing" state and a "mostly correct" state. And not just for GCC. Corner cases and weird constructs aren't noticed in testing, and high optimization is at the forward edge of compiler development.

then it's not acting as a C compiler.

That's another part of the problem he's identified: that people think that there is a standard c, and that it is enough to build a compiler that implements standard c.

DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered as botnet blitzes break records

Which TVs?

The Register often publishes model names for affected routers, which is good. I've got a couple of android TVs, and my family have more.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Why did he have to do that if their system hadn't flagged him the first place?

The headshot and ID established that he is NOT in the system -- the fault was human error at the shop ('they all look alike to me')

Re: "Papiere, Bitte!"

And what if he didn't have one, or any other photo ID?

If there was no photo database, there would be no come back at all against being thrown out of the shop because management thought they recognised him.

In this case, if he wants to use a shop where the management has thrown him out, he could get a photograph taken, and submit it with a false ID -- the ID doesn't have to be correct to prove his photograph is not in the database.

Re: Ban it

Society functioned for thousands of years with small groups where everybody knew everybody. Cameras just try to bring back the kind of individual recognition people are built for.

Oh, it wouldn't be any cheaper than just hiring security people to walk around the store? THAT'S THE IDEA.

So that store security could evict people they thought they recognized, because they look like every brown person?

'Lethal' and 'magical' Palantir tech is in demand by Pentagon, China, Middle East, CEO says

Re: ShipitOS

Odd historical fact for Americans. American railways never had 4th class passengers. Hobos could never pay a penny, and travel in boxcars: they walked or jumped trains.

Unlike Germany, which had a recent railway history of 4th class rail passengers. Hobos paid pfennigs, and traveled in freight wagons.

Microsoft finally sends TLS 1.0 and 1.1 to the cloud retirement home

required manual tweaks to enable TLS 1.2.

That is to say, one component of Windows 7 (schannel), required manual or scripted or policy or installation tweeking.

I'm not aware of any version of Windows that supports 'thought control' (What You Want is What You Get), so in that sense any change you make to Windows default settings is "manual"

Polish cops bail 20-year-old bedroom botnet operator

Not sure why it's an unfortunate use?

Probably just a misreading, but delay, halt, rob: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailed_Up

Russia-linked APT28 attackers already abusing new Microsoft Office zero-day

Mitigation

The mitigation offered blocked the specific malware -- it blocked use of the legacy IE engine used by the script.

It ~appears~ to me that the bug is that you can avoid a authorization step by moving between 64bit Application and 32bit com object, but I may have misunderstood that.

Re: Carry-on regardless

LO has ~very little~ protection against typical .doc malware, such as document-event driven macros.

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

"reported symptoms consistent with noise and vibration effects"

That's a very poorly defined complaint, which seems to be part of the problem.

Here is the Australian Government advice: "Measuring WBV can be difficult and complex. If workers feel WBV is uncomfortable, it is likely their exposure to vibration is reaching levels which could affect their health. I" https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/system/files/documents/1703/wholebodyvibrationinformationsheet.pdf

So,(presumably) lacking meaningful measurement, all they can say is that the troops report that they are uncomfortable in the new truck. Now, these are professionals, but "troops report that they are uncomfortable" is not a measure susceptible to any kind of technical solution. Even if the problem is real, the solution is a Morale solution. The only question is if it will be cheaper to restore morale with care and compassion, or with a new truck.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

Re: So nice to see

Duct tape is actually not very good at sealing ducts -- typical duct tape doesn't have high-temperature long-life adhesive. You need specialist tape for joining heating/cooling ducts in your ceiling/attic space.

Duck tape? That's a phonetic change, and a brand name.

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

Re: De-intellectualisation?

That does not appear to be what is predicted here.

Dow appears to be predicting that by reducing plant maintenance, they will be able to reduce their maintenance workforce - skilled trades, not knowledge workers.

Plant maintenance is traditionally a very naively scheduled activity: just stuff like "at 1000 hours", and also disrupted by production changes. It's easy to see significant benefits from better pattern matching.

And also, FWIW, easy to see significant failures from LLM hallucinations. What kind of AI is "C3 AI"? C3 is/was mostly a "big data" analytics company, and it's not clear how much "AI" is in their AI offering.

To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide

Re: IPIDEA?

It is a company name. It looks like it may be a made up name (IP Idea), but I can't access their web site:

I think that Google took court action to block the IPIDEA domain, in order to block their proxy assignment and control, but I'm just seeing the press release, not legal or technical information.

Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning

Yes, like you would USE a lever for leveraging. Like criminal gangs are using this lever to enable the other exploits they are using.

Old Windows quirks help punch through new admin defenses

Re: DOS? There's still DOS in windows?

Also PIPE, MAILSLOT, and UNC.

That's Universal Naming Convention, the thing that (in the WinNT family) replaced drive letters. "\\server\public\readme.txt" instead of "c:\public\readme.txt"

I don't know how important this is (I don't know system internals), but "DOSDEVICE" is deeply embedded in the operating system.

London boroughs limping back online months after cyberattack

Re: birth certificates

It isn't just for historical reasons. It's proof of ID.

Historically, it's for proof of parentage. Your "ID" doesn't need proving: you are who you are. Your inheritance needs proving. Also, sometimes your eligibility for parish relief.

Pwn2Own Automotive 2026 uncovers 76 zero-days, pays out more than $1M

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is to malware what email was 25 years ago. The default settings leave it wide open, and then your spam and attachments come from a known and authorized source -- gmail.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

" It's not built-in in any mainstream language"

Language design took a strange u-turn after 4GL languages

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

Re: "Surrender as a service"

For those interested, "Cheddar" is a region in Somerset, known for a crumbly type of hard cheese. The cheese is popular, and varieties of "cheddar" are made world-wide.

The cheese on a Big Mac is a cheese with the regional appellation "american", "american cheese" is mild, creamy, and melts easily. The cheese appellation "american" is not generally protected, so, like "cheddar", "american" cheese may actually be made anywhere.

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

the Unix smart-ass culture I was embracing at the time.

Yes, that is the best description of Power Shell that I've seen for a long time.

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

Who still uses environment variables?

The whole unix/linux development community. leading to another root-access bug a couple of times a year.

Environment variables should be notorious, like bad pointers or string overflows, but somehow people never seem to notice that this creaking old system of unsecured configuration is unfit for purpose.

Power scarcity drives datacenters to Texas, where the juice is

Re: Lies!!

Texas has gas and oil.

You may run your PC on electricity, but the bit barns are going into Texas with their own generation capacity because they can run generators there.

Given how well the Texas grid performed in 2021,

Grid stability is not relevant when you're independent of the grid

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: The Key to Everything

You don't see them much any more, but 50-100 years ago a "key case" used to be common. Easy to take keys out of, protects your pocket, and sits flat in your pocket.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ashford-Ridge-Leather-Holder-Colours/dp/B00EV2Y7L6

Re: Fired

Interesting on the prison.

Well, it was a tech job. I don't think they had any intention of giving out any keys that mattered, and certainly not a master key. I would have been inside the walls, but not in the cell blocks. A lost key would have been a couple of doors including cupboards. Expensive enough to make management angry, but not enough to blow their budget.

Prisons and "boys homes" go through cycles of security problems and incompetence, as the wardens and prisoners react to each other. This was at a time and place where the wardens weren't psychotic gang bangers, and neither were the prisoners.

Re: School district master key

The district never reclaimed the master key. It hung on a nail over the workbench out in the garage.

Friend at school had lived in a small "electricity generation and mine" town. When they moved in, found a set of key on top of the refrigerator. Not high security, but let them into every gate around the power plant and around the mine.