* Posts by Mako

223 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2009

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Google gets gentle Street View slurp slap from UK data cops

Mako

I wonder how Google are going to go about proving that the data has actually been deleted?

I'm not for a minute suggesting that they might squirrel it away on a server in the US or whatever - but what form of evidence are they supposed to offer the ICO that proves the deletion? This is data after all, easy to duplicate by its very nature.

Anons: We milked Norks dry of missile secrets, now we'll spaff it online

Mako

I reckon the confidentail documents will reveal that Kim Jong Un has a huge collection of Button Moon VHS tapes.

France gives Google three month DATA PRIVACY DEADLINE

Mako
Unhappy

Re: A Question...

"Does this impact cross-border activity?"

You're going to need an enormous opener for that gigantic can of worms you've got there.

IANAL, but to me it seems that in your examples, the provider would be inadvertently committing a violation, but could not be pursued for it since they're outside French jurisdiction, (and I imagine the end user would be safe as they're not the ones alleged to be doing wrong).

So I suppose the French could either go after Google France for Google UK's behaviour, or they could simly block Google UK from being accessible within their borders. I don't think I'd like to see either of those things happen.

Spear phish your boss to win more security cash

Mako

Nothing new about this - covert penetration testing as an object lesson has been going on for years. Even IBM have been had over. The companies that do it used to be known as "tiger teams". Maybe they still are.

But I've always thought - Can you imagine this sort of thing as a sales pitch from a company that provides personal security? Maybe kidnap some executive's wife and send her finger to him in a box?

"Now if this had been a real kidnapping, it's at about this point that you would have received a ransom note for millions of pounds. So you see, you really can't afford to be without us..."

Number of cops abusing Police National Computer access on the rise

Mako

Re: Telegram from the Queen?

I think he's referring to this;

"the cops appealed and won the right to keep millions of minor records until a person reaches the ripe old age of 100, when they are finally set free from the database"

At reaching 100 years old, the queen used to send you a congratulatory telegram, (she still does, but these days you have to ask for it).

I told you I'd be back: Arnie set for another career revival

Mako

Brent Spiner is probably sitting at home facepalming right about now.

Badger bloodbath brouhaha brings 'bodge' bumpkin bank burgle bluster

Mako
Thumb Up

Re: As ocassionally happens.....

Came to the comments for the Bodger and Badger reference...

...was not disappointed.

Jailed LulzSec hacker Cleary coughs to child porn images, will be freed soon

Mako

"...and he is banned from using the internet to talk to anyone under 16."

Hmm. I'm not coming out in his defence here, but that seems a difficult condition to comply with if it's exactly as written. Any open forum could have members that are under 16.

China’s state-run rags brand Mars One mission a scam

Mako

Not to be overly nit-picky here, but surely for it to be labelled a scam there has to be intent to deceive on part of the "organisers"?

So if we assume that it's never going to take off (and TBH I can't see it myself) it's either a genuine but overly-ambitious project with no real hope of success, or it's the most brazen crowd-sourced money-grabbing scam in history and the Mars One boys have the ultimate poker faces.

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

Mako

This reminds me of the whole "SCSI" pronounciation debacle.

The inventors wanted it to be pronounced "sexy". Inevitably, anyone who came across the acronym in print pronounced it "scuzzy", (unless they were management, in which case they called it "Ess Cee Ess Eye").

I admire the effort, but there are some fights you just can't win, Mr. Wilhite.

San Francisco caves over mobile radiation warnings

Mako

Re: Stupid

"But city officials in any city in the world tend to be stupid."

I'd like to take the liberty of adding a few adjectives; greedy, self-serving, corrupt, detached from reality, smug, arrogant...

New 'BLOCKBUSTER' APPLE iTHING imminent - billionaire Einhorn

Mako

"Sticky" customer base?

Are they covered in jam? Or maybe Applesauce?

Fraudster gets ten years after selling fake 'ionic charge' bomb detectors

Mako

Re: Good.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

Weary quid-a-day nosh hack fears colonal mass ejection

Mako

Excellent - you can add a scientific experiment to the end of this social experiment - stress-testing rural Iberian plumbing.

New NASA rover lands in frigid alien hell tomorrow

Mako

Re: Is it just me or...

Ah wait - it's 6 feet tall including its solar panels, which are not installed in that picture. And that is a laptop.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/grover.html

Mako

Re: Is it just me or...

It's not just you. If GROVER is 6 feet tall, and if that is a laptop, then that laptop must be gargantuan.

Reddit: So very sorry for naming innocent man as Boston bomber

Mako
Alien

To paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones...

...from Men in Black:

"A person is smart. People are stupid, panicky idiots and you know it."

The Man Who Fell to Earth: Plane plummet plod probe phone

Mako

Re: Could he have survived the flight?

"The wheels [...] are still spinning on retraction."

It's a minor point given all the other factors, but on most aircraft that isn't necessarily true. For example it's SOP on the 757 and 767 to lightly dab the brakes once you're in positive rate of climb, to avoid cabin vibration and gyroscopic effects while the gear is retracted.

'North Korea Has Launched a Missile' tweet sent by mistake

Mako

Re: Modern Media Management

"I gather Stephen Fry is on stand-by."

I look forward to the lead-up media slots where he tells us how a fusion bomb works.

"So you see, there's all these little particles called electrons whizzing around, jostling all the big fat Uranium atoms. And after a while the Uranium atoms get annoyed with all this shoving and they start eating these terribly rude electrons. But then the Uranium gets fat and explodes like that chap Mr. Creosote from The Meaning of Life..."

Apple buys indoor mapper WiFiSLAM

Mako
Coat

Re: WIFISLAM

There should a separate app for that. They could call it Wife-Eye.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Mako

Re: Why?

I think ketlan is under the mistaken impression that she was walking around with porwigle in her mouth, (like some sort of brooding cichlid), and that the bottle contained just water.

It might be that this phrase...

"the airline's strict no-flying-with-baby-frogs-in-your-mouth policy",

...is the cause of his confusion.

Reg readers reveal MIGHTY DOMESTIC DATA CENTRES

Mako

Re: Nerds

"I larfed."

...and then sat there waiting for training that would never come. And then wondered why your self-taught colleagues who have home labs were getting all the primo overtime. And then posted a stupid snark on a tech site.

Well done.

Mako

For what it's worth, I have signed letters from a director authorising the removal from the building of the donated kit I have.

The letters - which I wrote for him - include the model and serial numbers. There's also a clause that says if they ever want them back, (very unlikely) they're welcome to them.

Mako

Re: Fleabay

I've got 1U servers which are useful, being easy to carry around, but again they aren't quiet.

As I understand it, it's because of the fan sizes. Lots of little ones are far noiser than a few large ones shifting the same volume of air.

A DL360 is way louder than a DL580, even if both are idling.

Japanese password protector floods screen with hoax cursors

Mako

Re: Easy to defeat.

I don't know whether he knows what he's talking about or not in general, but for what it's worth this bit of his post makes perfect sense to me;

" a little training should enable someone to distinguish the random motion of the fake cursors from the more-directed motion of the real one."

I haven't seen the system in action to be fair, but even if they've programmed it to hesitate, move at varying speeds and make occasional "mistakes", I think it's likely that an observant watcher could figure out which was the human-controlled cursor. But only because it's so difficult to convincingly simulate randomness.

It begins: Six-strikes copyright smackdown starts in US

Mako

Re: The land of the free...

<insert word or object desired here/>

Whopper, obviously.

Clarkson: 'I WILL find and KILL the spammers who hacked me'

Mako

Re: Time for copypasta

"gorilla warfare"

I was trained in that to a silverback level by Diane Fossey. I still have the banana scars.

Or did you (or whoever you quoted that from) mean guerrilla?

Crucial question after asteroid near-miss: How big was rock in Olympic pools?

Mako

Re: I can hear the strains of the theme from...

I could be wrong, but I thought that was a Red Dwarf reference?

Clash of the Titans: Which of you has the greatest home lab

Mako

Mine's all Enterprise-class boxes (DL580s and such) but pretty dated.

All I care about is I can sim stuff that would require change requests to do at work - even in test and dev, believe it or not.

So I agree that at least some sort of lab is pretty much necessary if you want to keep up, but it's also vital [i]just to do your job[/i] in some circumstances.

Huge rock-hard marble erection shocks Japanese kiddies

Mako

Sounds like the good people of Okuizumo could do with watching the Simpsons episode, "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge"

Boffins propose satnav tracking for 'KILLER KOALAS'

Mako
Thumb Up

Re: They're as real as you want them to be.

This has absolutely made my morning. Thank you!

What’s a computer? Eat yourself fitter!

Mako

Re: Holy crap - The body is like a warehosue

I once saw a .JPG that suggested that this is not always necessarily true.

Hang on - I'll see if I can dig it out for you. I think the filename started with an 'H'...

Baby got .BAT: Old-school malware terrifies Iran with del *.*

Mako

@ David W.

Thank you, that was epic! Had to stifle a mid-office LOL

[Upclick]

Prepare to greet the data centre of 2023

Mako

"To some, the idea of enterprise data centres still being around in ten years’ time is anathema. By then, they assert, all enterprise IT will be running in public clouds."

It appears from the tone of the first paragraph that you think such people are as silly as the box-huggers that they themselves are deriding. If so, I agree.

There is absolutely no way that the enterprise data centre as we know it is going to vanish entirely; far too many industries have either regulatory or self-imposed rules in place that mean cloud storage or applications simply would not be appropriate.

North Korea's satellite a dud, say US astroboffins

Mako
Thumb Up

Re: "easier to just grow enough food "

Good to hear from someone who has been there and experienced it themselves.

Polish man mistakes hot iron for mobe

Mako

Lucky he was ironing and not cleaning a handgun.

Win7 hotspot hackers kick-funded - now they're network bondage pros

Mako

Re: Connectificationtivity

"smoke the internet!!!"

I'm thinking we're going to need much bigger Rizlas...

Voyager 1 arrives on ‘magnetic highway for charged particles’

Mako

Re: Voyage, voyage...

Oh no! What have you done?!

It's in my head! It's in my HEAD!!!

Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel

Mako

Seems the Playmonaut's history is following the Stig's. A change of uniform colour, being launched into the sea...

Chinese student fails job interview because of iPhone

Mako

"Working at our company [...] calls for someone who can take the pain and suffering."

Yeah, you're really selling it to me. Where do I sign?

Curiosity finds organics on Mars, but possibly not of Mars

Mako

Re: Organic != Produced only by organisms

...not something to sneeze at.

Though if you did, whatever bacteria you're carrying around might find they have something to eat. Unchallenged by any other organism, they would multiply explosively.

Next thing you know, you've got an entire gelatinous civilization pulsating away, all born from your nosegold.

RETURN of the PLAYMONAUT: El Reg's space hero suits up again

Mako

Re: says:

Most aircraft run a cabin altitude (i.e., the equivalent air pressure) of between 6000 and 8000ft. The boiling temperature of water at those altitudes are 93.6 and 91.6 deg C respectively.

Doesn't sound like much, but since tea on aircraft always tastes awful, you could have a point.

America planned to NUKE THE MOON

Mako

This is the sort of lunacy that was probably thought up by some jingoistic psychopath as he sat on his mother's severed and mummified head, masturbating with a fistful of his own faeces and giggling at a lampshade.

You would hope that at some point down the line, someone looked up from their slide rule and notebooks and went, "Wait - what? Why are we even...? This is completely insane. Im going out for a beer."

Astronomers find biggest black hole, 17 BILLION times the size of Sun

Mako
Thumb Up

Ah, thank you!

I was racking my brain trying to think who he looked like.

Belgian finds missus was born a MAN after 19 YEARS of marriage

Mako

Re: It was a big old mess

He's referring to the song by Tone Loc, which in turn references a mythical drink with aphrodisiac effects. In the song, indescriminate use of the drink leads to hijinks which at one point involve a dog.

What I believe the poster above you was referring to in particular, is the verse that includes the line;

"But when she got undressed it was a big old mess; Sheena was a man."

It's not clear from the context whether Sheena was a transvestite or a pre-op transexual, but either way Mr Loc made his excuses and left. And I quote; "This is the 80s and I'm down wit da ladies!"

He later goes on to explain that the episode taught him a valuable lesson about not dosing his dates with what amounts to a sophisticated date-rape drug, while nevertheless remaining a blissfully unreconstructed 1980s stereotype.

I hope this helps.

Latest scam spam ploy: Bogus pay-by-phone London parking receipts

Mako

(From the linked site) "You can access a full list of your parking transactions in the attached file."

"[...]so the scam messages are more plausible than is normal for malware ruses, especially in cases where recipients of the dodgy messages happen to live in London or have driven there lately."

Someone who had parked in London recently may or may not bother, depending on whether they're the sort to keep meticulous records.

The bigger target is people who have never parked in London, since the fact they allegedly had a history of parking there would be something of a surprise and maybe worth investigating.

Peter Moore: IT consultant and Iraq hostage – Part One

Mako

I have to say I strongly admire the man's apparent coolness and mental fortitude. If I had endured the events he described, I'm really not sure I could discuss them in such a rational way.

I also imagine that the thought of revenge would occupy my every waking thought until it consumed and destroyed me...and yet...he goes on a motorcycle roadtrip around the US.

Good on him.

‘Anonymous’ takes down Texan RFID-tracking school

Mako

Re: Up the homeland security ...

It's nothing new, you know. It's just that tech makes it cheaper and easier.

When I was in elementary school in Ft. Lauderdale, the police came in one day to give one of their "community talks" or whatever they were called back in the 70s. As a special treat, we were allowed to be fingerprinted! On official cards, with our names on them! What fun we had!

When we were done, the cards were put in a police officer's bag. I'm sure that he was taking them back to the station to be securely destroyed of course. No way were they kept on record.

Ten Linux apps you must install

Mako
Joke

"Unless you are operating in the enterprise class..." "To help with such endeavours, here are ten Linux applications..."

I work in an Enterprise environment, but was certainly Endeavouring to find a Linux Challenger to my brother's existing software stack . He's just started a degree at Columbia university and, as a student, doesn't want to have to pay for software licenses since to him they may as well be as expensive as the lost treasures of Atlantis. The Discovery of this article was therefore especially timely.

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