Posts by david 12

That's gotta hurt: NASA suffers attack of the lame Orionids

Re: The Orionids are not a major shower

Not in the Southern hemisphere. Geminids are mostly below the horizon. Orionids is one of the few chances for a decent show -- but Alice Springs is more likely to be clear and dark, not Melbourne or Sydney

HP perfomance monitor can climb through Windows

Re: Again?

"SYSTEM" is not an account. It is a SID, a role, an account type. And that SID, by itself, doesn't work for most network tasks, so whatever account they are using must also include a SID that does have network privileges.

There probably is a good reason why it needs a privilege in Windows which doesn't exist in Linux. It could be anything, and it might not even be a privilege associated with the SYSTEM role: it might be a privilege associated with the other role.

Top VW exec blames car pollution cheatware scandal on 'a couple of software engineers'

You sound like a Repubican blaming 7 years of Congress failure on the President.

Mozilla to boot all plugins from Firefox … except Flash

Followers

It was inevitable once MS released 'edge' without ActiveX support.

FF needed a equivilant of ActiveX to compete with IE. Now that MS has given notice that ActiveX in the browser is depreciated, FF feels able to do the same.

I'm a desktop PC man myself, part of the original Digital Generation. So I feel the gradual loss of support and functionality. But it's balanced by.tablets and always-connected devices, using a much looser connection than COM. It's a new world.

Australian Prime Minister runs private email server

Re: Not a fan of Mal's

The "Vision" ??

Are you still banging on about the vision in 2015?

Their vision, however attractive, was complete BS, and any educated person should have recognised it immediately. Kim Beasley pitched the NBN as the centrepiece of their "infrastructure" policy. He justified spending public money on it to provide an economically beneficial infrastructure for education, industry, and tele-medicine.

That was all BS, and if you weren't sucked in by the Optus and Telstra adds you had the example of Radio, Cinema, Tape, Television and VCR's to tell you so, each of which was pitched to the public on the same basis.

Many people have now, belatedly, recognised that the actual use of the NBN is to replace Free-To-Air Television, and most critisizm of the NBN now is regarding if it will be suitable for Netflix.

Many, many, many Australians were sold internet so that their kids could find out about the Great Wall of China (not to keep rabbits out, Dad). They were primed by the self-interested propaganda of the ISP's to believe that there as a rational benefit from the NBN. That was the "vision". That was the BS.

If you got Netflix for Miss Marple, you're out of luck (and a bit odd)

(R)

Speaking of piracy/copyright, what is the Registered Trademark symbol doing at the end of every Register article?

Brown kid with Arab name arrested for bringing home-made clock to school

No actual experience with explosives? Or too much?

I can see a school treating all toys as bombs, if that's what they do, and I can see a school always calling the police, if that's what they do. and I can see the police treating all reports as equal, if that's what they do.

But at every level, they should have noticed that it was just the electronics, not the explosives.

Does this mean that teachers have never seen dynamite/gelignite/explosives, or does it mean that they think the school is full of bomb material that only needs a trigger?

Another website gone

Another website gone

I've got to remember to shift over to saving a copy of web pages, instead of bookmarking. But what brought me here was the death of Wotsit.org, an old legacy website (file format information) that had been kept hosted by GameDev.net. And GameDev.net just dissapeared, no warning, and Wotsit.org went with it. And all the resources are gone... lost in time like tears in rain

If you are hosting a legacy site, please consider zipping it up and making it available for download now, so that when you die your users still have the information..

Ex-Secret Service agent who siphoned Bitcoin from Silk Road takes plea deal

Mt Gox

Well, now we can guess what happend to the missing millions from Mt Gox (which was investigated by the same people)

Carders fleece $4.2 million from Victoria's MyKi transport agency

Re: The Law of Unintended Consequences

I have very little sympathy for people who are willing to buy milk at a shop, so that they have it for coffee next morning, or cheese at a shop, so that they have it for lunch next week, but are outraged at the idea of buying public transport at a shop.

But MyKi was a speculative investment in the idea that the state government could get out a pay-wave debit card before the credit card companies did, and we've been paying for their hubris ever since.

Using SQL techniques in NoSQL is OK, right? WRONG

Back to the future...

So, just like SQL in the early '90s ?

IBM tries to dodge $1bn sueball for deal won with 'ethical transgressions'

And this is why governments, bureaucrats, managers, and hospitals of all persuasions want to put medical staff (and shop assistants) onto simple flat-rate awards. The "efficiency" dividend has nothing to do with how much you get paid. Everything to do mangement wanting to not care how many hours you work, in what order, on what days, on what shift, continously, so that they don't have to think about it.

Body-worn cameras a 'Pandora's Box' says ex Vic Police chief Nixon

??intense period of state police corruption.??

What intense period of state police corruption? What kind of corruption?

NSW police inspector to VIC police inspector at joint operation: "We won't steal anything if you don't kill anybody"

Killing people is certainly a bad thing, but it's not what we normally mean by the word "corruption"

Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons

Windows 95 - fairly stable

What I remember was how hard it could be to install, sometimes taking hours of re-installation before it got it working. Win98 was a big improvement in that regard.

Re: The old ones are the good ones!

Build numbers just increase incrementally with the build. For a less Offical and Jokey answer, don't cut the version numbers off the front:

Windows Vista ---------6.0

Windows 7 --------------6.1

Windows 8---------------6.2

Windows 8.1 ------------6.3

I haven't looked at Windows 10. Either we are up to version 7 now, or (more likely) we are still on version 6.

Sydney adopts 'world's first' e-ink parking signs

Re: Fantastic!

OMG! Not at all secure like the present system, where some random dude just puts a bag over the parking signs and places a few traffic-management signs on the road.

Anti-privacy unkillable super-cookies spreading around the world – study

Re: "the Land of the Free"

No, that's free as in Butterflies, not free as free beer.

You're all up for sale / you've all been sold out.

Power Bar: EE was warned of safety risk BEFORE user was burned in explosion

"a risk that the"

Documents listing "risks" mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. It is a requirement of "risk assessment" that you write down long lists of absolutely anything you can think of -- "sun may go out", "change of orbit of earth"

Want to download free AV software? Don't have a Muslim name

Re: To be fair

One of my relatives with a WASP name was taken into a small room on the way into the U.S. because someone with the same name was on the FBI wanted list. Never mind that criminals on the FBI wanted list are local criminals: it took them an hour to decide that my relative is "not black".

Oh no ZigBee, as another front opens on home networking insecurity

Would be interested to read actual article about actual flaws

So I start reading, and I see "new flaws in ZigBee" and "insecure key transport".

But when I read further, I see "older versions" and "default link key"

That doesn't sound lik a "new flaw" or "insecure trasnport".

Which leaves me feeling just pissed off and unimpressed.

Epson: Cheap printers, expensive ink? Let's turn that upside down

Re: Yes, laser is the solution

Reading reviews for middle-price color laser: "Thin lines may not appear". And this gem: "Pictures are recognisable".

This is not photo quality.

My older Brother printer with the larger print tanks automatically cycled through (internal, paperless) print head cleaning cycles, to keep the thing operational when not in regular use.

My newer Lexmark, the printheads dry out, the print nozzles get blocked, you throw out the small cartridges if you can't get them clean when you want to use it.

Perhaps this new model is intended for regular heavy users.

Mac fans! Don't run any old guff from the web: Malware spotted exploiting OS X root bug

>and using an environment variable that can be set by an unprivileged user

That seems to be a standard design method in the cross-platform open-source world. I've been complaining about it for years, and each time the developers have taken the attitude "WTF?"

It's enough to get your back up: Eight dual-bay SOHO NAS boxes

btrfs

I had to laugh at the suggestion that btrfs is slower on writes. A file system with the same features as NTFS, and it's slower than EXTn? Who'd have thunk it?

But I think that someone must be stretching the truth if they're claiming that copy-on-write and shadow-copies provide protection against viruses and malware.

Happy 30th anniversary, Tengen! Your anti-DRM NES chip fought the law, and the law won

Re: @Mongo ..."the court ruled that reverse engineering was protected"

Last I looked, reverse engineering is not protected in Malaysia or Australia. Dunno about the rest of the world, but I suspect that Malysia and Australia are not unusual in this respect. In Aus and Malaysia, the ban on reverse engineering falls out of the copyright law. (Note: not "is the copyright law"). The effect is much wider than DRM: it also prevents reverse engineering of car parts and other objects..

Security tool bod's hell: People think I wrote code for Hacking Team!

I don't publish my actual name here...

...And for the last 15 years I haven't put my actual name on the credits of open source software either.

The French want to BAN .doc and .xls files from Le Gouvernement

The problems you get trying to integrate with Libre/OpenOffice users is that the Libre and OpenOffice implementation of ODF sucks.

Microsoft nixes A-V updates for XP, exposes 180 MEEELLION luddites

Re: People still use Vista?

Nope. The only unpatched machines I have connected directly to the internet are ADSL modem/routers and modem/firewall appliences. And they all run varients of Linux, so I'm completely safe.

Mozilla loses patience with Flash over Hacking Team, BLOCKS it

Active X kill bit

I don't have flash on work computers, so I don't give it much thought. But I was curious reading this: it's Tuesday, MS patches have just been released, have they set the kill bit on Flash? If not, why not?

Holy SSH-it! Microsoft promises secure logins for Windows PowerShell

Re: I don't

The SAMBA guys had to implement a registry because /that's what SAMBA 4 is/

You might perhaps be under the mistaken belief that SAMBA 4 is just an implementation of SMB, like SAMBA 1?

SAMBA 4 is an implemenation of Active Directory. Active Directory is a replicated database system. Wait for it ...

... the "SAMBA guys" had to implement a replicated database system to implement AD....

finally

>allowing people to log into Windows systems and use software

>remotely over an encrypted connection.

RDC, using RDP 5.2 with TLS (Windows server 2003)?

or

SecurePipes, the older method of logging into a Windows system and using software remotely?

SSH has long been a strange omission. Still, only a MS marketing drone would pretend that there were no earlier alternatives.

Re: troll troll troll

>Yes, but plug a USB stick in, where does it get mounted? On a drive letter,

That is the default, although you can, of course, turn that off, and set it to automount inside a folder

>and one for hotplugged devices

That is the default, although you can, of course, turn that off, and set it to automount inside a folder

Sometimes I think that some people think that knowing about Linux gives them some special insight into how Windows works.

Ireland loses entire airport amid new postcode chaos

Re: Stupidity

Eircode is not a postcode. It is a delivery point identifier. Australia and the USA have both postcodes and delivery point identifiers.

In Aus and the United states, cheap bulk mail is required to be labeled with a delivery point identifier. All the banks here use cheap bulk mail to post out bank statements. Same for social security, the tax office etc. For postal sorting of this mail, the address written on the envelope or visible in the window is not used at all: the mail is sorted using the delivery point identifier.

Each delivery point in Aus (and Ireland now) has a unique random number. The bank (or government office, or other bulk sender) is responsible for deciding which of the available delivery points the address you gave them corresponds to.

This is not the same as a postcode, and no, it does not do what a postcode does, and no, it does not do geolocation. It is only an ID. A primary key in a database. Having a primary key is not stupid: it is normal.

iiNet warns NBN circuits too expensive in the Netflix era

Re: Who knew media would be delivered digitally?

Certainly no one on forums.whirlpool.net.au: I was deleted for trolling when I suggested that the main use of the NBN was going to be for entertainment, not "education, medicine and business".

Oz Defence Dept 'not punitive' with crypto export controls

It's still a mess

Does Not, "Not apply to devices"

" Sending, receiving or storing information (except in support of entertainment, mass commercial broadcasts, digital rights management or medical records management); or"

So, does apply to IOT hardware adapters, which use SSL. Cen't be sold overseas without a permet. Because a TCP/IP HTTPS web interface for your sensor/power/light/water building managment system is a general purpose communications encryption device not covered by one of the exemptions :DRM, medical, entertainment, broadcast.

KILL FLASH WITH FIRE until a patch comes: Hacking Team exploit is in the wild

Re: Ok

The exact reason I passed on VMware. For me, there were some options, and I choose one that didn't require installation of Flash on my work machine.

How a Cali court ruling could force a complete rethink of search results

It's an abuse of trademark to supress competition..

The intention is that you can't search for watches unless you already know a brand name.

Owners of well-known brand-names want this. New market entrents don't want it.

Consumers benifit from competition, big watch companies benefit from monopoly.

And I don't give a damm about watches, but once they get this through the same applies to cars and dishwashers.

Canuck chump cuffed over helium balloon flying chair stunt

Re: Darwin award?

Technically, Catholic Priests promise to not get Married (the vow of celibacy). Having children without getting married indicates a failure of Chasitity, which would be a sin, which would require penance, same as if you have children without a church wedding.

MAC address privacy inches towards standardisation

Concerns are often ignorant, even if they sometimes are based on or related to genuine issues.

The concerns about MAC's and Processor ID's were ignorant, the "solution" of hiding the ID number was unworkable, and the false "solution" only had the effect of giving a false sense of security.

Like hiding your WiFi SSID

.

"Little thought was given to the risk that the MAC address"

Actually, enormous thought was wasted in the 90's on the risk to privacy and security due to MAC addresses. Like the silly decision to prevent Intel putting ID's into processor (since ignored by every European company selling into the utilities market), MAC's were the victim of a stupid smear campaign that ignored their utility, causing MS to hide them from programs in Win98, requiring you to use a stupid and inconvenient kludge to get the information.

It is still the case that certain tasks, (like sending out broadcast packets on specific adapters on multi-adapter machines) are needlessly complex, and the ignorant "privacy" concerns of the 1990's are one of the reasons.

Supreme Court ignores Google's whinging in Java copyright suit

Re: Andrew Orlowski article dissing freetards, praising copyrights on APIs soon

Java was, at the time, slow and archaic. As the line went: "All the readability of C, plus the sheer speed of interpreted BASIC". The reason MS's "Java" was a threat was that it was faster and had a better library. Which had an immediate salutary effect on Sun's "Java" development, before they managed to kill the competition, as they have since tried to do with both Google and with the open-source version.

That shot you heard? SSLv3 is now DEAD

Re: Snake Oil, FUD and the security problem known as Web Browser

>there are *NO* server vulnerabilities visible in the SSL Labs Scan.

When I go to that link, it tells me that --

"This server supports SSL 2, which is obsolete and insecure. Grade set to F. "

Along with a string of other grade B and grade C failures.

Fujitsu shrinks SMB file transfer metadata traffic jams

Re: Which version of SMB did they do this on ("and other SMB protocol use")?

Enterprise sites I worked on had remote file servers for all the working stiffs: only management and their PA's had the privilige of working with local file servers. And not at all surprised that some of them would be working with early versions of SAMBA.

Australia's Senate demands access to NBN business case that doesn't exist

Melton

Have you been to Melton? "The Plain is characterised by vast open areas of fertile plain covered with grasslands and grassy woodlands,"

Yes, costings based on Melton are non-representative. Because, (go and have a look), Melton is non-representative.

Melton was (and is) a good place to do base-line costs. New. open, uniform: you can see what the costs are, and were the money is going. Not like real life, which is full of exceptions.

Firefox preps processor revamp under Project Electrolysis

Or, as MS said about IE8 in 2009: "LCIE is a collection of internal architecture changes to Internet Explorer that improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of the browser. It also paves the way for future improvements in other areas, including security and usability."

IE6, of course, was designed on a different UI model. Each tab, displayed on the tab bar at the bottom of your screen, was a different process.

IE7, introduced in 2006, followed the more natural MS Windows model demonstrated by FF, and put the tabs at the top of the application window, where Bill Gates and Nature intended them to be. But they followed the FF example of putting all the tabs into one process. They fixed that in 2009, which was 6 years ago.

Why did Snowden swipe 900k+ US DoD files? (Or so Uncle Sam claims)

"Secret" == "Not very import, interesting, or secret at all"

Secret is the default value for almost everything other than press releases. Material that would, in industry, be called "confidential" or "None of your business" or "Why are you snooping on my desk?" is "secret" in the DoD.

Vic Govt security standards to launch next month

Bureaucrats can check out the standards on the Vic commissioner's website

Bureaucrats /will be able to/ check out the standards on the Vic commissioner's website /when they are released next month/

Perhaps theregister will check in again and tell us when that happens.

'I thought we were pals!' Belgium, Netherlands demand answers from Germany in spy bust-up

Re: typical

..Of course you spy on your friends. You already know what your enemies think of you...

Get off the phone!! Seven out of ten US drivers put theirs and your lives at risk

Re: Synchro-boxes, disk brakes and isolated interiors are to blame

Which reminds me that on the old car, you didn't take your hand off the wheel to text or eat, because without power steering, it took both arms to drive the thing.

Land Rover's return: Last orders and leather seats for Defender nerds

Series II

That's what it said on the compliance plate.