Posts by DJV

A cautionary tale of virtual floppies and all too real credentials

cA - ex PET user!

As soon as...

..I saw the line "my application first deleted all files and directories (recursively)" I knew we were in for some "fun"!

IKEA Croydon (FYI: that's a place in outer London, not a type of DIY cabinet) likes things in pairs, from chimneys to bork

IKEA products named after London boroughs

Balham - a ball of ham on elastic for your dog to play with (£35, ham extra).

Camden - a large storage box to store old cameras in. Costs £50 (£75, if painted). Made of cardboard.

Hackney - a sharp chopping device for lowering the height of tall persons (£125, sharpening extra).

Linus Torvalds hails 'historic' Linux 5.10 for ditching defunct addressing artefact

Re: bye bye 2038

Yep, that just leaves the Year 10,000 problem to sort out at some point.

Ubuntu 20.10 goes full Raspberry Pi, from desktop to micro clouds: Full fat desktop on a Pi is usable

what colour to paint it

From here it looks like a nice shade of mangled, which is probably made up from a mix of cluelessness and obstinacy.

FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home

Re: "NASA engineers whooped and cheered"

Looks like I should have put the joke icon up for those who couldn't spot it without a clue.

Re: "NASA engineers whooped and cheered"

I suspect the one hour "Whooping and Cheering 101" course is both part of the NASA induction and absolutely mandatory.

"I want to be the first one to start a new conspiracy therory"

Sounds more like you want to be the first one to start a new spelling of "theory"...

UK state of the Internet report: Virgin Media 'fast', BT's PlusNet last

Re: help our customers stay connected to what’s next

Well, definitely not IPv6 if you're on Vermin Media! I think they are waiting for the heat death of the universe before they roll it out...

Google screwed rivals to protect monopoly, says Uncle Sam in antitrust lawsuit: We go inside the Sherman parked on a Silicon Valley lawn

Re: "so a majority of people do change search engines"

Well, actually, I downvoted him for his total inability to use punctuation properly!

Re: FFS ..... Goose meets Gander and Both go on a Mindbender

Hmm, sometimes I find it hard to tell the difference...

Quick thinking and an explanation for everything – key CTO qualities

"We'd just delete them on-sight"

Shirley you mean: "We'd back them up onto CD or a Zip disk to take home and THEN delete them."

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

Even though I passed my Lego on many years ago, I do now have a small collection of random pieces. These I have gained through digging the garden of my house that was, 23 years ago, purchased from a family who'd had kids. I think their kids must have thought that planting various toys* in the garden might make them grow into a new crop.

* Not just Lego - also in my collection reside (the remains of) tanks, cars, plastic soldiers/infantry/native Americans (though they were probably called Red Indians at the time they were manufactured). Many of the latter are missing a limb or three, though they don't complain about it. I also have what I presume to be a single boot from an Action Man, a few battered glass marbles and several bits of old clay tobacco pipes. Oh, and a toy whistle. No actual treasures, unfortunately, though a dig in a previous garden when living with parents unearthed a rather thin and somewhat bent/battered 1575 sixpence.

It's 2020 and a rogue ICMPv6 network packet can pwn your Microsoft Windows machine

maliciously crafted IPv6

Does that mean I'm probably safe as I'm on a Vermin Media network? Those laggards are STILL only in the testing stage with IPv6!

Facebook doesn't know its onions: Seeds ad banned after machine-learning algo found vegetable pic 'overtly sexual'

Re: Please o' Please!

The text reads "...Facebook's automated software clearly disagreed. A screenshot posted by the company..." - what made you think it might not have been a link to Fartbook?

Re: Should have gone to SpecSavers

So that's why your eyes were watering so much...

So, what exactly are you planning to do with this new PC? Windows Insiders face new questions during OOBE

What do you plan to use the thing for?

How about: Just to get an early heads up on the future pain you are hoping to inflict on us poor suffering fools before the latest round of "improved icons" and fuck ups hit the PCs we are trying to use to do proper work.

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Re: I read a mention of BOFH in another thread

Yeah, that was me (unless there were more than one) - looks around for magic lantern that I might have accidentally polished...

Facebook's anti-trademark bot torpedoes .org website that just so happened to criticize Zuck's sucky ethics board

Re: Convention

If they'd registered realarsebookoversightboard.com/org instead, we'd have all known who they meant!

From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

Re: Welcome back

Yay! Dabbsy! Now someone just needs to hunt down the BOFH and the world will start looking just that teeny bit more normal again!

Amazon tells ISPs: I can be your Eero, baby. I can ease your Wi-Fi pain. I will block bad sites forever...

No thanks...

..or to put it more bluntly, ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Who knows what amount of data it will be filtering back to corporate headquarters!

Pack your bags! Astroboffins spot 24 'superhabitable' exoplanets better than Earth at supporting complex life

Crusade...?

Ah yes, Poul Anderson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Crusade

Re: 100 years as the light flies

Wait, what? Hold on, can you get amanfrommars to explain all that in simpler terms?

Plates?

Just waiter minute...

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

Go, El Reg!

I'd just like to say a big thank you to Kieren McCarthy and all the other El Reg staff who are not letting up on this. Keep screwing down on these Nominet idiots who are far too big for their boots and need a severe cutting down to size.

What is it about McDonald's, cultural black holes, and not being able to make tech work?

Re: They do have a clown as their mascot after all

Yep and, unfortunately, we in the UK have one as a Prime Minister.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Re: If Bill Gates has the technology to implant chips to control people's behavior

No. 1K built in, plus a wobbly 16K rampack sellotaped precariously on the back.

@ShadowDragon8685

Have you been drinking at the fountain of amanfrommars?

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

Re: Dave Allen

Here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLhXVswy9-8

With so many cloud services dependent on it, Azure Active Directory has become a single point of failure for Microsoft

test it?

Of course it will be tested!! Just not by Microsoft, though...

Microsoft? More like: My software goes off... Azure AD, Outlook, Office.com, Teams, Authenticator, etc block unlucky folks from logging in

Re: Mutliple users being unable to sign in

Mutliple users being unable to sign in, end up getting on with doing more productive work (provided they aren't using O3652, of course).

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

"But with all the commits MS have made to Linux, you are using MS code already."

Well, sort of. But, as the code MS is submitting to Linux is open, there is hope that non-MS people are checking it thoroughly before it's accepted. Conversely, that's something no one outside MS can do to the code that runs Windows.

Anglian Water fishes for on-trend laundry list – including low-code work – in £24m trawl

scrum management

Had to look that one up!

However, if you take the "r" out I've had plenty of experience of working under that over the years.

Behold the Bloo Screen of Death: Bathroom borkage stops spray play

Re: Video over IP?

See icon...

Amazon Lex can now speak British English... or simply 'English' if you're British

Re: Organize!

I reckon you should organise a petition to protest about it!

Re: Alexa can speak double Dutch for all I care

My centipedes persactly!

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

The Register has asked Apple to comment

Apple are obviously helping to save the environment by not wasting the generation of power it would take to email some comments back to El Reg.

Or some other BS like that!

Peek-a-boo! Windows Insiders play hide and seek with a Friday night update

"Dev Channel of the Windows Insider programme is very much a work in progress"

I think you'll find that applies to the entirety of Windows 10, not just the insider programme.

Vinyl sales top CDs for the first time in decades in America, streaming rules

Rewind

Back around 2000 when I bought my mother a mini hifi system to replace her aging separates she'd inherited from all over the place, I had to carefully explain to her that CDs didn't actually need rewinding after they'd been played.

What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore

Re: Bond movie

Or, in this case, it was BRAINIAC!

Bond movie

And don't forget that Simpsons episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2GfKUi9ghM

Pension scheme cold caller fined £130,000 by UK data watchdog

"This company clearly flouted the law when they should have known better"

This company clearly flouted the law while they thought they could get away with it.

FTFY

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

capable hands of Windows Server 2003

Yeah, I've seen those "capable hands" running at a small software house where I was temping back in 2005. I don't know who set up the server but they had to reboot it at least twice a week because it would just curl up and die for no logical reason. What was worse was that it had done so since it had first been installed. No one ever investigated any further - they'd just reboot it without question.

Near the end of that temping stint (about 5 weeks), they did offer me a full time job there. Having been there long enough to see first hand how the way the place was (mis)managed - and I don't just mean the IT side of it - I politely declined. They went bust a couple of years later. No surprise.

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

Project AMIGA

I hope the person in charge isn't called the Commodore...

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Re: the circle completes

Don't forget the use of "its" instead of "it's".

Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher

Well, if they did that to me I'd ignore them - because my name isn't Paul!

Southern Water customers could view others' personal data by tweaking URL parameters

And even more obviously:

Dear Southern Water (or something beginning with "wa" anyway)

"We take the protection of customer data very seriously" - um, no you don't.

"we rigorously test our systems" - your interpretation of "rgiorously" and mine are obviously poles apart.

"have strong measures in place to safeguard customer information" - I think this situation proves that is a complete lie.

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

I never saw a machine that would run Win9x faster than the contemporary version of NT

Unfortunately, I did - had to put it back to 98 in order to get it to do anything other than an impersonation of a lame snail. Can't remember the spec now as it was someone else's PC.

Re: Happy memories

...back when Microsoft thought they were cool...

FTFY

The Viking Snowden: Denmark spy chief 'relieved of duty' after whistleblower reveals illegal snooping on citizens

Re: When spellcheck goes wrong

Everyoen mkaes typos and mistooks! The way to handel it propaly is to click the "Tips and Corrections" link and tell El Reg directly - not to raven about it in teh comments!