Posts by 0laf

I studied hard, I trained for years. Yay, now I'm an astronaut in space. Argggh, leukemia!

I wonder what the actual cause of the change is?

Low G, radiation, light cycles, lack of exposure to other environmental factors?

Apple: You can't sue us for slowing down your iPhones because you, er, invited us into, uh, your home... we can explain

Self inflicted trauma here.

If they'd been open and upfront they wouldn't have an issue.

i.e.

(Assuming phone is out of warranty)

Your phone is older, the battery is not good enough any more. you can either -

a- pay us to change the battery

b- allow the performace throttling patch to be applied to stop your phone crashing

c- not apply the patch and accept your phone will crash

d- buy a new phone pretty please

But insted they went for b, without asking then denied it and are now excusing themselves using some stupid argument.

Raspberry Pi Foundation says its final farewells to 40nm with release of Compute Module 3+

Like warm apple pi?

I got my first Pi just the other week with the intention of turning it into a filtering proxy server for my son's kit.

I've not had much luck with the project as such but it's still a remarkable little device.

NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail

Re: Rescue

Sadly after a while we'll stop listening. So even if a freak gust of thin wind moves the dust and just by chance the batteries and electronics have survived the deep freeze and it sends a signal.... no one will be there to hear it.

I can hear the light! Boffins beam audio into ears with freakin' lasers

Nooo

the govenment is beaming words into my head!

The outfit where the NHS England Digital boss is headed? Turns out their code is 'not technically suitable' for the £6.4m NHS App

Re: Sounds like they've already choosen LIVI

That sounds par for the the course for most of these procurements.

It'll go in anyway, won't work, no one will use it, money will get written off and world will keep turning.

Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won't see 2020

Yep. I hated the desktop Win8 UI but really liked it on the phone.

If MS had really invested and worked on it they could have made a real killer secure usable business phone to replace BB which was going down the tubes at the time.

But they were clearly obsessed with chasing the iPhone shiny. Despite it being pretty obvious to everyone that MS will never be shiny. It's like trying to make a washing machine sexy.

They should have seen it. Make MS Phones tools but the best damn tools out there. But they didn't.

Re: Clickbait

Ditto,

I dumped my Winpho 920 when other services I began to use were unavailable on it. But it was a solid, usable phone and still my favourite phone UI.

Still have the 920 in use as a backup and car satnav.

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

It's a Hugh-Weeee in my house. I've a P20 Pro spying device.

I figured that since Google, Facebook, the USA and GCHQ would slurp everything anyway I might as well give it to the Chinese too, only fair.

I get a decent phone / camera device for a reasonable price out of it too.

RIP 2019-2019: The first plant to grow on the Moon? Yeah, it's dead already, Chinese admit

Harsh

Bit harsh to say the experiment failed. It germinated and it grew. It might not have met all the desired outcomes of the experiment but it doesn't seem like a failure.

I'd love to be privvy to some of the discussion in the US about Chinese space developments. Oh right they're won't be any because the government has shut down over a planning issue.

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

New name needed

Cool.

I wonder if the LHC could become an accelerator ring for the FBC (Fucking big collider) like the SPS is to the LHC?

You can blame laziness as much as greed for Apple's New Year shock

For most it's about the price

I went from Windows to Apple not liking Android at that time. The iPhone was the cheapest model but still expensive however I enjoyed it's reletive easy of connectivity and my partner has the same phone so transfering photos and messages to her was very easy and all within the same ecosystem. I don't like the UI however.

Fast forward 2yr and I'm getting annoyed with the small screen on my SE. New Apple phones have come out and for me the prices on the larger devices are just too much in comparison with the competition. I'm not tied to the ecosystem since most of my cloud services are carried over from Windows and my other machines are mostly MS based. Looking around I give up and get an Android. I still dislike Android as an OS but I never really liked iOS either. The phone specification I got was 50% the price of the cheapest new Apple but exceeds the performance of everything including ther flagship.

It doesn't conenct as well with my car and sharing files with my partner is harder but thats about the only drawbacks.

My partner is very tied into Apple with Macbooks and phones. She's considering moving to the same supplier as me because she is so impressed with the camera on my new phone and the prices of the new iPhones are so high. I think she'll stay with Apple but is likely to get an iPhone 8 rather than a new one to avoid the prices. If Apple cut prices it might change but that seems unlikely.

I think realistically Apple have just pushed things too far with pricing and people are considering switching now when they wouldn't have before. Just having that thought is a problem for Apple since now people will start to compare specs etc and not just look for the next shiny apple.

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Re: Possible detection

"Detection systems do exist although they are probably quite expensive"

In comparison to the costs of disrupting an airport the size of Gatwick for a day they are likely quite reasonable.

I suspect the problem is being able to do this in a way that doesn't involve large quantities of high speed shrapnel or 5Kg of drone landing in a built up area.

I'm a layman but a quicker answer may be to have a qualified drone pilot/s that can fly a large drone to knock the other one out the sky over a safe area. Have some of these guys on call.

A technological answer is likely a while away. Drone V Drone you could do tomorrow and a human could chose to leave the drone or hit it depending on the location.

Prisons seem to have an effective antidrone tech in place to stop drug drops. I appreciate that the area to be covered for an airport is vastly more but have the airport authorities been loking into the tech that is available.

It's all well and good talking about legislation but if you have some headbanger that wants to casue disruption they're probably going to do it no matter how big the writing in the statute book is.

Re: Wow, blundering around like freshly castrated cattle.

Crossed my mind as well but likely they are too high to be hit with shotgun pellets in an effective way. And having been sprayed with shot that has come a long distance I can state that although not life threatening it still bloody hurts and you really wouldn't want to be hit in the eye with it.

Droning

I would suspect prank. And I would take reports of them being 'large, professional' type devices with a pinch of salt for now.

But.....As an act of state sponsored disruption it's pretty low risk for the effect. Send in some low rent heavies with off the shelf drones to repeatedly buzz large airports causing millions of pounds worth of disruption. If your guys get caught they'll probably just get a summons by which time they are safely back in the motherland. If they do end up in the clink for a short while I'm sure the offer of some adequate compensation will make their time go past fast enough.

On a long term basis this is cheap, effective and and as said low risk to state and operative. Much like Facebook or Twitter trolling.

If it's not the Russians or Norks this time I'm sure they are taking notes on the respons to a couple of drones.

Introducing 'Happy Quit', where Chinese smokers are text-spammed into nicotine abstinence

No but you can get a Palm Palm suppository. £350 a go though so only for the highly addicted.

Phones are good mmmkay

Being phone addicted keeps oyu nice and trackable by the one party state. A win-win for the Chinese government.

Pork pulled: Plug jerked out of beacon of bacon delight

If only...

If only this could be repurposed so that it would dispense perfectly cooked quality dry cured back bacon, delicately placed upon a floury bap, spread with real butter and with the customers choice of (proper) red or brown sauce.

Future machines could include the option to add a fried egg done how you like and/or a meltingly delicious slice of Stornoway black pudding.

This would be the lord of machines and I would worship at it's little plastic feet.

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

Punkt 2

Remember this one -

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/09/punkt_mp02/

Cost $350 does even less but the batter does better. I'm sure it faired really well in the comments....

Price

£350.

Lol.

I'll just buy one of those small chinese phones. Or maybe 5 of them and pocket the change.

Dunno where I'll put it. Dman change pocket filled with phones

Should have been £75 with an ePaper screen and 4 weeks battery.

If most punters are unlikely to pay more for 5G, why all the rush?

Depends on the use case. Right now people with 4G in crowded areas aren't getting 4G speeds due to contention. They might be persuaded to move to 5G although they'll probably be disappointed again when high contention 5G gives them slower than expected service as well.

For people getting reasonable 4G service there isnt likely much of a push at least for now. I don't see many people really watching TV on phones right now so it doesn't seem likely they'll start doing that with 5G. Especially if 5G comes with punative data limits. What's the point of the speed if you only get 2Gb.

I agree with the other commentards though that it could be of substantial benefit for bsuiness users with 5G providing links to networks in otherwise inaccessible areas.

The fastest, most secure browser? Microsoft Edge apparently

Windows Phone was also very secure. It wasn't worth malcontents bothering with.

Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space for the first time, lugging NASA cargo in place of tourists

Space, not quite as above and beyond as before

Space = 100km

Rocket can't reach it.

Options:

1> Make rocket go higher and cross 100km line

2>Change definition of 'space' to one we can reach

Which did they go for?

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

Here we go again...

Been involved with government IT for many years. This idea of "just get over it" tends to come in with any minister who sets up a new division and then staffs it with the hip, cool, trendy, inexperienced, overconfident and under 25. The solution for every problem involves "cloud", "Google AI", and "iPads".

Basically anyone who points out a flaw in the design is shouted down as inhibiting transformation (or other such buzzword shite) and moved aside. Invariably the issued pointed out come to fruition the project collapses in a frenzy of finger pointing. Then everyone moves onto the next project to fuck that up too.

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Take your browser and fuck off

If you try to forecfully get me to use something I don't want to you can go fuck yourself sideways with a pointy stick and I really don't care how good/fast/shiny it is. You've pissed me off therefore I will not use your goods no matter what.

I didn't even mind Edge that much functionally but the constant popups of "why not try edge" when I clearly DO NOT WANT TO USE EDGE get on my tits.

This goes for all manufacturers. So fuck Chrome as well.

No, you haven't gone deaf – the Large Hadron Collider has been wound down for more upgrades

Moarrrr Powwah!

I for one will welcome our interdimensional overlords when they arrive shortly after this upgrade.

Pints for boffins meanwhile.

It's nearly 2019, and your network can get pwned through an oscilloscope

So the attacker already has physical access to your network. You're in a bad place anyway.

Hacking the oscilloscope probably isn't next on their agenda with that access.

So a nice unsual vulnerability but probably not very important. If you're running a high assurance network I would hope you'd be examining every bit of network aware kit coming in and making appropriate descisions regarding their use.

NHS supplier that holds 40 million UK patient records: AWS is our new cloud-based platform

Re: You're stuff is going in the cloud regardless of this.

But doctors can use their own equipment (BYOD) in many trusts and they like dropbox and Whatsapp so you can have some certainty a lot of PII is in those cloudy shitboxes as well.

CubeSat buddies, like those sent to track Mars InSight landing, can be used in future missions

Re: Lifetimes?

Indeed these little critters were just a proof of concept. Indeed they exceeded their remit since they weren't really needed to relay the data, that was an added bonus.Surviving the journey was the main objective for them.

It will be more likely now that future missions will include micro sats to perform relaying duties for larger probes. And some of them will be orbiters I'm sure.

Re: Lifetimes?

They'e done already. They weren't orbiters they are just doing a Mars flyby to test that the tech can survive the journey and to aid relaying telemetry when the lander was on it's journey down.

https://www.space.com/42538-mars-insight-marco-cubesats-between-planets.html

Again pints and shot for those steely-eyed rocket men (and women) at NASA for landing yet another critter on Mars.

Great Scott! Is nothing sacred? US movie-goers vote Back To The Future as most-wanted reboot

Just clean up the old one and rerlease it to the cinema.

Cheaper for the studio and I might actually pay to see it.

If you must you can do a He-Man reboot, the film was crap so you've got a good base to work from

Office 365 Exchange enjoys a less than manic Monday. Users? Not so much

I got O365 for home recently.

It works other than Outlook. It won't connect to an existing Outlook account.

MS advice to tweak a setting. Only problem is that the setting they sugget tweaking doesn't exist anymore. Thanks.

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

Ipads @ work

Ipads are for shallow people to be seen to be doing work, generally by other shallow people probably with job titles including the words "influencer"or "evangelist".

Laptops are for people who need to work on the move.

PCs are for proper work. I've been at work with PCs since 95 and have used pretty much every class of machine and every form factor. I'm yet to be convinced that anything beats a reasonably powerful desktop with multi screens for doing proper work.

even with MS's attempts to royally fuck this up every chance it gets

Black Friday? Yes, tech vendors might be feeling a bit glum looking at numbers for the UK

I have bought a few things as a result of the sales.

I changed my mobile phone contract but it was a deal to existing customers which was better than the Black Friday offerings. I only looked becaue of the sale notice.

But I did get a new shower tidy for £20 less. Struggling on the IT angle with that.

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Re: Infosec staff quality

It's not hard to blag the certs. It just costs money.

Re: Infosec staff quality

Infosec bod here.

Yes I too know of this dogmatic mentality. However that can stem from corporate culture. If it is the culture of that airline to use the infosec team as blamehounds whenever a project goes wrong then it's not really a surprise. But it can also stem from a lack of confidence.

I get quizzed every day all day with 'is this ok?'. This will be on every IT subject from server setup (Windows, Unix, Linux and propriatory), cloud architecture, software development, web development, databases, legal and compliance ramification GDPR, PCI, SOX etc etc. I'm expected to be an expert in them all at the moment the question is asked and my answer makes me responsible for the outcome.

So I have become good at asking questions and mostly all I do is guide the subject matter experts who are asking the questions to the reasonable answer they probably knew in the first place. And I learn a little bit more in the conversation.

I might identify risks and take them to the right person to sign off but it is not in my authority to say no or yes to anything. Getting is across that the risk is never mine can be quite hard. Speaking to an infosec bod is not outsourcing the risk.

3 is the magic number (of bits): Flip 'em at once and your ECC protection can be Rowhammer'd

Interesting but not for the majority to worry about

Although these types of vulneabilities are interesting I suspect the majorty of us will soon go back to the day job of worrying about users clicking on links in badly spelled emails with invoices for products they've never ordered.

Big Falcon Namechange for Musk's rocket: BFR becomes Starship

Re: out of topic question

There is a commentard out there that gives every post a downvote. Keeps all our feet on the ground and stops us getting big headed.

It's his/her task, duty, mission from God.

Thou shalt not have 0 downvotes! For that way lies hubris, vanity and a directorship in Capita.

Starship

Shit name. Yawnfest.

With the subversive names of his landing barges I'd have thought he could come up with something less dull than that. BFR is still far better.

Joe Public wants NHS to spend its cash on cancer, mental health, not digital services

Digital. It's just the current shorthand for "shiny thing make it all better".

Might as well just hand £20B to Fujitsu etc and tell them to go enjoy themselves. I think we all know this will make nothing good, late and for double the initial price.

Britain may not be able to fend off a determined cyber-attack, MPs warn

I find it hard to take anyone seriously when they bang on about cyber security being so important then in the next sentence sign off yet more cuts to the IT department that does the majority of the work.

If you want resilience and response you can't get it by paying overyone off.

My own organisation's IT guys are now starting to cut corners becasue they have so little resource to deliver when they are being told to do. Point out the risks and all you get is an exasperated shrug and senior managers who paste on a smile and swear everything is wonderful.

Wombats literally sh!t bricks – and now boffins reckon they know how

Once again "everyone needs a hobby" seems to fit there.

Brexit: UK will be disconnected from EU databases after 2020

I think the most honest statement I saw from an elderly Brexit supporter was (I paraphrase), "I don't care if it fucks up the country I want the UK to leave Europe".

The only think I predict now is utter fucking chaos as the SNP now wades in. The only reason the SNP lost the indy vote was based on the prospect of an indy scotland being thrown out the EU and having to rejoin. What we got by staying was a ticket out of the EU vote through mostly by the nearly dead.

If the SNP run another indy vote they'll win on the ticket of Scotland being able to rejoin the EU.

Politicians, a plague on all your houses.

Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'

At least he admitted it

If it had been one of our politicians they'd have ducked the question made out they knew lots about cyber security then went on to make dozens do insanely stupid decisions based on what they'd read on their mate's Facebook page or what the vendor offering them a directorship told them to say.

If it had been Trump he'd have said his knowledge of the internet was "powerful, very powerful and he was probably "the best person for the job" since he invented the internet". Something which would clearly upset Al Gore.

iPhone XS: Just another £300 for a better cam- Wait, come back!

Re: Not me

Nope. I wanted to replace my SE with something bigger. Would have stayed with Apple had the prices been reasonable or even plain old expensive. But not these prices.

I've picked up a flagship form someone else for half the price of an XS. There is a limit when even Google's snooping becomes an acceptable risk.

Hands up who isn't p!*$ed off about Amazon's new HQ in New York and Virginia?

I don't blame Amazon, it is a corporate entity evolved to hoover up cash and spit out profits. It played those idiot politicians like a fiddle.

It speaks a breat deal about the vanity and stupidity of our elected officials and I mean that globally not just for the region in the story. The UK parliament and Brexit is another example of the patients taking over the asylum or The Dilbert Principle in action.

'Frontline workers' of the world, unite! And grab yourselves a Surface Go White Van Man edition

These days with MS I just wonder two things.

1) Is it shit?

2)Will it still be supported in 2yr?

Palliative care for Windows 10 Mobile like a Crimean field hospital, but with even less effort

Re: Surprised?

Windows Phones were always pretty secure. Partly becasue it was actually quite a well designed and robust OS under the cover and partly because no one ever bothered to try to hack it.