Posts by TrevorH

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

Microsoft Teens...

I thought it was already decided that it would be renamed Microsoft Teens...

From a trickle to an Application Stream: Red Hat opens barriers for RHEL 8.3 beta

I've not used the 8.3 beta installer but it looks like they just moved the user creation bit into the stuff that has to be filled in before the install can start. If it's like it was before this change, when you got to fill it in at your leisure while the install was running, then setting the root password is mandatory but the user creation is optional. If you look at the text it does actually say "No user will be created".

Amazon staffer based just a stone's throw away from Seattle HQ tests positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Plus mortality rate at present is being estimated assuming that we have a functional health care system. If 20% of the population go down with this at once and 4% of those fall into the "critical" category then we're talking about more than 500,000 people in the UK needing ICU treatment at any one time. That still leaves the 15% with "severe" symptoms to fend for themselves at home. Better hope that you're one of the 81% with only "mild" (whatever those are!) symptoms.

Would-be .org gobbler Ethos Capital promises to keep prices down in last-ditch effort to keep $1.1bn deal alive

10% per year for 8 years means that they "only" double the price (plus a bit more).

Startup Mycroft AI declares it will fight 'patent troll' tooth and nail after its Linux voice-assistant attracts lawsuit

Pretty sure that Amazon & Google have a vested interest in this sort of thing.

Alexa, find me a patent troll

No Motorola Razr comeback orders in 2019: Costly foldy nostalgia mobe pulled back

"with just 6GB of RAM and 128GB"

That's 384 times as much RAM and 650 times as much storage as the first mainframe computer that I worked on and that ran the entire UK network for a very large insurance company.

Radio nerd who sipped NHS pager messages then streamed them via webcam may have committed a crime

> to make the content of the communication available to someone who is neither sender nor recipient"

Under that clause, is it not the responsibility of the NHS trust in question since it is them that are making the content of the communication system available by broadcasting it in plain text in the first place?

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

How can they have a patent dated 2018 about this. Surely there is prior art and history showing it's already been done.

Virgin Media promises speeds of 1Gpbs to 15 million homes – all without full fibre

Have they fixed their crappy "superhub v3" so that it actually works yet? The one with the dodgy Intel chipset.

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Re: International Law

Assange was never a refugee. A fugitive from justice, maybe. Refugee, no.

> Just yesterday his news leak org claimed that blackmailers had threatened to reveal "sexual" things alongside other details

> of Assange’s life inside the embassy; the group claimed that miscreants were trying to squeeze €3m out of it.

You mean he got one of those emails saying "I caught you in front of your computer and your password is 'password'"?

Well Holby damned! We've caught a virus: Brit medical soap operas team up for 'cyber' episode

Shouldn't it be that the outbreak is magically stopped by a malware author turned security researcher...

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

Yes, they really seized them

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46334810

TL;DR: "Rarely used parliamentary powers were used to demand that the boss of a US software firm hand over the details." and "In a highly unusual move the House of Commons serjeant-at-arms was sent to the businessman's hotel and he was given a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with the order."

Linux kernel 'give me root, now' security hole sighted, dubbed 'Mutagen Astronomy'

Fixed in kernel-3.10.0-862.14.4.el7

World's oldest URL – fragments 73,000 years old – discovered in cave

From the extrapolated drawing seen in "b", it's perfectly obvious that this is actually the stone that used to sit in the original estate agent's window and is advertising a teepee for sale. One careful owner, all mod cons including a central fireplace...

Fix for July's Spectre-like bug is breaking some supers

The bug is already identified and a fix has been provided (unofficially) for CentOS. The CentOS bug report for this is https://bugs.centos.org//view.php?id=15193 and the fixed version is on https://buildlogs.centos.org/c7.1804.u.x86_64/kernel/20180820114938/3.10.0-862.11.6.el7.bug15193.x86_64/ and the fix has also been incorporated into the latest CentOS plus kernel kernel-plus-3.10.0-862.11.6.el7.centos.plus.1.x86_64.rpm

Home Office seeks Brexit tech boss – but doesn't splash the cash

So.... interviews at the start of October, by the time they've interviewed the candidates and made their decision and had an offer accepted it'll be at least the end of October. Wait 3 months for them to resign and be released from their current job and they'd be starting around Feb 2019 and this all has to be up and running by March. So start in Feb, fired in March. Good job!

Why the fsck has this person not been in place since June 24th 2016?

Batten down the ports: Linux networking bug SegmentSmack could remotely crash systems

> Most enterprise-grade Linux distributions do not yet use kernel 4.9 or above so aren't immediately affected.

Unfortunately not true. Redhat have a page https://access.redhat.com/articles/3553061 that says that RHEL6 and 7 and even 5 (which is quite dead) are all affected by this bug.

Scam alert: No, hackers don't have webcam vids of you enjoying p0rno. Don't give them any $$s

I've had two of these mails in the last 3 days and both told me that my password was 'changeme' which, to the best my knowledge, is not one I've ever used anywhere for anything. I vaguely recall it used to be the default password for some java key store as delivered from Sun/Oracle but it's certainly not one I'd choose to use (much too complicated, mine are all 'password', honest). They can send me as many as they want but since I already know I've never been anywhere near an adult site and most likely never will, I'm not likely to be paying anyone anything.

Europe's scheme to build exascale capability on homegrown hardware is ludicrous fantasy

> So EU, find the cash, somehow, give it to Atos

Hahahahaha.

(An ex-ATOS employee)

Indiegogo lawyer asks ZX Spectrum reboot firm: Where's the cash?

Who'd keep half a million squid in a paypal account. I get worred if I have a fiver in mine!

If you're a Fedora fanboi, this latest release might break your heart a little

> Linux tip: Avoid Nvidia graphics cards if possible

Really? That may have been true about 10 years ago but these days they pretty much just work. Besides, the main alternative would be AMD and theirs are far far worse.

Monday: Intel defector touts Arm server chip. Wednesday: Intel shows off new server chips

Or perhaps the news release has to do with the leaks... https://www.anandtech.com/show/12387/skylaked-creeps-out-on-intels-price-list

EE Business Broadband digital transformation: Portal offline until July

Code review?

Someone did a code review and discovered it leaked like a sieve and was unfixable?

El Reg assesses crypto of UK banks: Who gets to wear the dunce cap?

What happened to Nationwide?

Why are we disappointed with the best streaming media box on the market?

3D?

Didn't that ship sail about 5 years ago with no-one on board?

Fore! PCI Express 4.0 finally lands on Earth

El Reg left hand, meet right hand...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/25/new_optane_disks_280gb_480gb/

Huge ransomware outbreak spreads in Ukraine and beyond

So let's get this straight, this exploits the same vulnerabilities as the last one that made headlines all over the world and crippled various organisations and yet, some people still didn't patch against it?

sympathy-o-meter firmly pegged on 0 here.

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

CentOS 6 is in production phase 3

So... yes, CentOS 6 is "supported" until 2020 but the upstream RHEL that it's based on and receives all its patches from went into what Redhat call "Production Phase 3" on May 10th 2017. That means that only security vulnerabilities that Redhat class as "critical" will now be fixed. Anything that's merely "important" or less gets patched if they feel like it and judging by the things that _didn't_ get fixed in RHEL5 once that reached PP3, that's going to mean that CentOS 6 gets less and less secure over the next 2.5 years until it goes EOL.

Canonical sharpens post-Unity axe for 80-plus Ubuntu spinners

All this stuff about not rebooting when there's a kernel update. Without the reboot you're still running the old, potentially exploitable kernel. But who needs security anyway, eh.

1.37bn records from somewhere to leak on Monday

It's a myisam database

Unlikely to be Microsoft then

Mysterious Gmail account lockouts prompt hack fears

There was some discussion about this possibly being related to Cloudbleed too but comment 24 in https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1139 says definitely not.

Intel's Atom C2000 chips are bricking products – and it's not just Cisco hit

I'm pretty sure that I've had one Supermicro A1SAi fail with these exact symptoms already. Was in normal use one day and then the load average went sky high with no warning and a shutdown/reboot killed it stone dead. One replacement motherboard and processor later...

Alleged ISIS member 'wore USB cufflink and trained terrorists in encryption'

USB stick disguised as a cufflink...

as sold by that bastion of terror: Marks and Spencers Plc perhaps?

NASA gets last Pluto data

The one kilobit figure is wrong

Having done a little reading around it seems that the spacecraft has 2 transmitters and both can be used simultaneously if they shutdown other equipment on board. That nearly doubles the data rate to 2Kb/s but that still doesn't explain the discrepancy. I also see that the image data can be compressed by a considerable factor so this is probably more likely to be the explanation - the 50GB figure is going to be the total data size before compression.

Belgian court fines Skype for failing to intercept criminals' calls in 2012

>> but explained that it was impossible in 2012 to provide access to users' conversations

In 2012. Doesn't say it's _still_ impossible.

Asterisk users need to patch DoS bug

1.8 is also affected but out of support so there is no upstream fix.

M.2 SSD drive format is under-rated. So why no enterprise arrays?

Re: Gbit/sec?

Yes, Gbit/sec is wrong. It's GBytes/s.

Bad news: MySQL can dish out root access to cunning miscreants

mariadb is affected too

Don't assume that mariadb is immune - it was a fork of mysql and at least some of the vulnerabilities discovered here are also present. Mariadb also helpfully reads $datadir/my.cnf so you can do something similar with it too.

Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'

> Effectively Red Hat and Oracle have both done that. They publish their own version of the kernel as a tarball

Haha. Not sure if that's meant to be a joke since the main reason that Redhat produce a monolithic patch of their modifications to the kernel is to stop Oracle from hijacking their work.

BT customers hit by broadband outage ... again

Re: Some sympathy -but not a lot

I don't believe this problem has anything to do with LINX. THN is a massive building and LINX have space there but the room currently affected by the power problems is not the LINX suite.

Linux command line mistake 'nukes web boss'S biz'

Re: I thought everybody knew

The original post said he was running CentOS 7 and if you run rm -rf / on CentOS 7 you get...

[root@localhost ~]# rm -rf /

rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on ‘/’

rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

No, HMG, bulk data surveillance is NOT inevitable

Why did I read "the draft Communications Data Bill" as "the daft Communications Data Bill" ...

Containers! Containers! Containers! And RHEL 7.2. Employ as you wish

CentOS 7.2 "any day soon"

CentOS 7.2 has been out for more than a month.

Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?

The guys behind Arco Noae are longtime collaborators with the people who previously produced Ecomstation and wrote much of the code that shipped with ecs. I doubt if they'll price themselves out of the market so it's likely to be affordable when it comes out.

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Clive unpacked his new HD projector from Ebay

Brimming with VM goodness: Qnap TS-453mini 4-bay NAS

Hmmmm

Magnetic lid and spinning rust... good combination.

Red Hat unleashes EL 7.2 beta on a waiting world

Re: Some nice additions

Oddly the release notes make no mention of two of the biggest changes: systemd is rebased from version 208 to 219 and gnome from 3.8 to 3.14.

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

Lenovo are not the only ones apparently

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/536181/30/0/threaded mentions HP and if two of the major vendors are at it then I'd not be that surprised to find more of them at it too.