I salute him...
...for having the balls to do it in the first place!
Posts by DJV
2666 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
Page:
No yoke: 'Bored' Aussie test pilot passes time in the cockpit by drawing massive knobs in the air
Unearthed emails could be smoking gun in epic GDPR battle: Google, adtech giants 'know they break Euro privacy law'
Who will stand up for European democracy? Us! says US software giant Microsoft
Oldest white dwarf star catches amateur's eye – and its dusty ring leaves boffins baffled
'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin
Windows Subsystem for Linux adds pop to release, SAC-T sacked, crypto-jacking apps: It's Microsoft's week
Solder and Lego required: The Register builds glorious Project Alias gizmo to deafen Alexa
What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS
Dratted hipster UX designers stole my corporate app
Saturday 16th February 2019 14:40 GMT 
Re: It's not just designers
"*Some* People in IT rarely seem to be interested in spending time watching what users actually do"
Also, some people, even when told what users do believe them wholly, which becomes their undoing!
20 years ago I was a developer at a company with an educational website. Once, while I was on holiday, one of the junior developers was asked by someone else in the company to produce a specific piece of software to run on the site - the "spec" was verbal only.
When I came back from holiday she told me that what the develope (who apparently hadn't questioned a single thing in the verbal "spec") had produced for her was "exactly what I'd asked for" but "didn't do what I wanted". After that she always came to me with requests so that we could battle our way to a common understanding of what was required and how it would actually look and function.
Want to know what 2020 holds? Microsoft has a little something for you
Saturday 16th February 2019 14:05 GMT
"In many areas it even went backward"
I suspect there are many of us hoping that "backward" trend continues so that a future version of Windows 10 will have the look and feel of Windows 7, revert an update system that allows us to block individual patches from screwing things up and isn't packed with telemetry snatching crap that phones home every couple of minutes!
Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?
Roses are red, this is sublime: We fed OpenAI's latest chat bot a classic Reg headline
US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?
Earth's noggin took quite a clockin' back in the day: Now a second meteorite crater spotted under Greenland ice
How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables
Saturday 9th February 2019 21:18 GMT
@Stevie
OMG Stevie! I remember that exact column. It made me laugh so much I cut it out and kept it for years - not sure what happened to it in the end! Is it online anywhere?
A few years back I did a similar thing regarding the wardrobe in that, just before selling my previous house, I ran out of paint for the wall, so plonked the wardrobe in front of the unpainted bit. As I had no use for the wardrobe in the new house, I asked the new owner if he wanted it. He said yes - I always wondered how long it took him to discover the lack of paint behind it.
Friday 8th February 2019 15:14 GMT
Re: Bent coat-hanger and curtain wire
I once used one of my cats to help run a new replacement light fitting cable under the floor of the upstairs bedroom in my bungalow conversion. A piece of string was tied to the cat's collar who was then encouraged by my partner to the other end of the 15 feet or so of narrow underfloor passage, which he did quite happily. Once the string had reached the far end it was a simple job to untie the cat and use the string to pull the actual cable through.
Boffin suggests Trappist monk approach for Spectre-Meltdown-grade processor flaws, other security holes: Don't say anything public – zip it
Monday 4th February 2019 23:24 GMT
My first reaction is to smack my forehead, and think, "What an idiot!"
However, a lot of it depends on the company or organisation that owns/maintains the software/service/device upon which the flaw exists.
If the company is known to be responsible and can indicate privately to the whitehat discoverer that the flaw needs X amount of time to fix (where X might be relatively small for software and probably a lot larger where hardware may be involved) then the discoverer should allow the company that amount of time (+ a bit of leeway) if it sounds reasonable to develop and push out the update. For those companies that are known to ignore such things and only react when the faeces hit the rotating blade type air circulating device then public disclosure should not be held back as that is the only way to get the flaws fixed.
In the end the way a flaw should be reported, patched and eventually made public should depend on an agreed, responsibly thought out timeline for that particular flaw that prioritises public security (and doesn't just pay lip service to it).
With regard to Spectre/Meltdown then El Reg's disclosure was probably timely as Intel has, in the past, been known to downplay things until their hand is forced.
Bug-hunter faces jail for vulnerability reports, DuckDuckPwn (almost), family spied on via Nest gizmo, and more
Terribly Sorry Bank reports 165% drop in profits to a pre-tax loss of £105.4m
Musk shows off the latest power plant for Starship, replaces Tesla CFO with a millennial
Q. What do you call an IT admin for 20-plus young children? A. A teacher
Tuesday 29th January 2019 14:41 GMT
Re: "Young students, for example, cannot be expected to remember and enter a password. "
Well then, just empty out their accounts - they might actually start getting the idea then!
It's similar with data backups - people don't do them until they get bitten by losing something essential (though, it does take a couple bites before they really start doing it properly).
My chemical romance drowns tomorrow's money, warns TSMC: Chip maker's yields rocked by bad batch
Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice
Data flows in a no-deal Brexit are a 'significant' concern – MPs
Amazon's titchy robots hit the streets, Waymo starts a self-driving car factory...
Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know
Friday 25th January 2019 11:40 GMT
Re: Inquiring minds want to know...
I once had a client who thought their "completely original" idea of using "letmein" as a password was extremely neat. Not only had she told me it in the first place, she then took a bit of convincing as to why it wasn't quite as neat and original as she'd thought.
Users... sigh...
Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s
Friday 25th January 2019 10:54 GMT
Mouse balls
When I worked in IT Support back around 1998 we used to get numerous complaints about mice not working due to the build up of crap on the rollers and balls. I used to remove all the balls and take them to the nearest "gents" and give them a soak in a basin of warm soapy water. Other staff entering the loo would ask, "What are you doing?"
"Washing my balls," I'd reply.
Google faces another GDPR probe – this time in the land of meatballs and flat-pack furniture
Pentagon cloud contract sueball: Oh no, Oracle doesn't need those docs, AWS tells court
Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently
Struggling with GDPR compliance? Don't waste money on legal advice: Buy a shredder
Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again
DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one
Microsoft partner portal 'exposes 'every' support request filed worldwide' today
It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update
Three quarters of US Facebook users unaware their online behavior gets tracked
Microsoft sends a raft of Windows 10 patches out into the Windows Update ocean
China's really cotton'd on to this whole Moon exploration thing: First seed sprouts in lunar lander biosphere
Yes, you can remotely hack factory, building site cranes. Wait, what?
Army had 'naive' approach to Capita's £1.3bn recruiting IT contract, MPs told
Nissan EV app password reset prompts user panic
Monday 14th January 2019 14:29 GMT
I call bollocks!
I've moved whole web sites to different hosts where the website data contained encrypted passwords and that didn't require any such reset. Properly salted encrypted passwords contain all the information needed to determine the encryption used, even where several are in use on the same set of data. This means that there's no need to force a reset whatsoever.