Posts by Alistair

Google spews out Alphabet. Alphabet gobbles Google

Alpha Bet

As in the first bet?

with a google of cash?

Just watch out for someone (hmmmmmmm Zuck?) spinning up an Omegabet.

(dear lord the wordplay available with that ........)

So, what's happening with LOHAN? Sweet FAA, that's what

its time.

Lester, go visit Trevor. Hell, I'll drive out there and deal with the gubernatalia if need be. It really wont take 2 years to get this done.

Hash-tag CompSci: FBI grooms pre-weed teens

Simple proof that the FBI can't decypher *anything*

They can't figure out that they're too damned cheap.

which is why they want back doors.

which really indicates a problem, since if they can't figure *that* out......... what else are they missing?

WATERPROOF iPhone 6Ss? Old news. Check out the OTHER 7 SECRET FEATURES

These polls reveal something important.

That the vast majority of us commentards are sick, twisted individuals.

Have a beer to celebrate.

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

Re: Typical Lewis clickbait.

I'll give you the fact that Lewis gets folks jumping on the topic.

Is that necessarily a BAD thing? We are talking about climate change here.

Either AGW is a fact, exists and we (the A in that handy acronym) need to do things to change or there is CC and we're (adding to it/not adding to it) or perhaps we're just seeing weather.

No matter *which* of the above is correct, globally we are going to end up spending substantial portions of our GDPs on the issue, either to correct the warming, to try and correct the warming or to deal with the fallout of the warming. It might just help if more of us were aware of the issue(s) and the complexity so that we can deal with the whitewashing that financially driven interests will MOST DEFINITELY be engaging in - this is not going to be hundreds of thousands of (dollars/pounds/francs/euros/roubles/yen/etc). This will be trillions ..... lets make some wise decisions based on well critiqued scientific data please.

In this case even the trolls could be doing the overall subject lots of good, simply by getting people fired up enough to go out and find the data that disproves the trolls. Possibly, the trolls get folks to dig into this, get new minds to look at the science and contribute to improving the models and data. Who knows, but I for one enjoy seeing both sides of the debate, since more knowledge is more power to make wise decisions.

@Symon

The variance in the figures of output may be down to this issue:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/02/great_news_tree_huggers_your_woody_harem_is_much_bigger_than_thought/

Multiplying the underlying "how many trees are there" factor *just* might nudge your figures around

Has the UK Uber crackdown begun? TfL opens consultation on private car biz

Re: Insurance

Indeed it is easy to spot the astroturfer.

"valid insurance" and "Private Hire insurance" are not the same thing. The "check" engaged by Uber (certainly the check engaged on this side of the pond) is a photocopy/scan of a piece of paper.

Uber's famous "we carry $1 million of liability" statement needs to be read in context of the fine print at the end of the contract you signed when you downloaded the app. Over here, that $1 million of liability has vanished outright in at least 4 cases that I've read of, where in the Uber driver was *not* carrying private hire insurance. These cases are now in court as lawsuits.

I, having BEEN a cab driver at one time in my past, can state that private hire insurance is on the order of 7 to 12 times more expensive than standard everyday driver insurance.

Smuggle mischievous JavaScript into WinRAR archives? Sure, why not

Urrrrrrrrrrm.

Stupid passwords are a problem on all OSes, thats not a code vuln dude.

Here are the God-mode holes that gave TrueCrypt audit the slip

Truecrypt and veracrypt

Hopefully whomever picks the code up makes the same assurances about integrity - the reason the originators stayed out of the public eye was that anonymity supposedly kept the TLA's from hunting them down and forcing a compromise into the code.... *cough* (thus the paranoia when they left the project). If you can lever it around and get elevated privileges in winders with the TrueCrypt client then well.......... Perhaps there original team saw an exploit in the wild that used those holes, and didn't know where to go with it, panicked and ran?

LUKs has the advantage in my case of keeping several volumes, different passwords, different requirements - and additionally - I am able to hand off unique passwords to (boss/coworker/wife/lawyer) so that in the event of [BUS->] (me) they have some hope of recovering my work, but I can contain who gets to see which bits. As I get it bitlocker can do the (alternate password) bit but can't do "volume" level encryption, it must do the entire disk.

The ONE WEIRD TRICK which could END OBESITY

Re: It is not portion size which matters

@sooty

They did replace the fat.

With sugar, and salt.

VW: Just the tip of the pollution iceberg. Who's to blame? Hippies

Re: Misfuel?

I have a bag of sugar for you sir.

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Re: Alltogether Now

Okay --

I have a 2009 TDI.

I have *no idea* where anyone is coming up with the smell test issue on jetta tdi's. My wifes 2006 Grand Caravan smells like it emits 10 times the NOx.

SAUCY INCEST and brutal VIOLENCE boosts UK space sector

Re: GOT can feck off

Phil, I'll agree that Thomas Covenant series makes Game of Thrones seem like a bus full of circus clowns with popcorn and warm furry kittens.

(scarily I've read the series three times)

Oddly, however the Republican party makes Thomas look like a New York Hipster Socialite.

Gold bugs, concrete bog roll holders and frolic-friendly furniture: What IS it with designers?

capstan tables

THOSE are design. And even art (there are a couple video's where they've done contrasting woods/finishes)

Stuff in article, mostly dross.

We saw the future: Apart from the bath apps it looks like the past

Re: Reality sets in

In same boat.

I'm starting to aquire small bits here and there (sink, cabinet fittings, etc) that might work for me in the end (SO thinks I've lost my mind and am turning into a pack rat) - I've not finalized anything but I'm definitely making my own cabinets (no particle board going in this) and possibly might tackle the replacement kitchen table. Whilst I like some of the new HE appliances, I'm seriously wondering what level of stupid is taking over the planet when we've got (2/3/4 year) short lifespan software and electronics in an appliance that should last (based on the prices) 20 years. No thanks, I don't want your "didgital thermal management" (sic) in my goddamn fridge, nor do I want an electronic temperature control on my gas stove, just give me a dial.....

Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

Re: Elastic Cloud?

The elastic was *cough* stretched too thin.

Mysterious cosmic dustball fires up Milky Way's black hole

@lawndart

How misogynistic of you to suggest that our galaxy's central black hole is *male*.

If you absolutely must do a ‘private cloud’ thing, here's how

Cloudy with a chance of MLOS

I have a mess of issues with "public cloud" - mostly to do with security issues and mitigation processes. However the single biggest issue in getting from point a to point b is that automation *has* to come into the equation. Part and parcel with automation of application deployment is that "standard deployment" is typically specific to a vendor - so you have to build your deployment tools around a vendor stream - and when you have 40 or 50 software vendors in the feed line it can get *disgustingly* difficult to harmonize your installations to not trip over one another. I've built cfengine kit to deploy *dozens* of apps in a *reasonably* automated fashion (LDAP would have made my life soooo much easier) but regularly get "but our specialist application that needs that wants it installed HERE, not there" (and I've 100% satisfied that set of issues with path functionality on linux, hpux and aix) what gets me *most* about some vendors is how when putting software into a *nix environment they completely and utterly ignore posix standards, os vendor standards and general best practices by assuming that the application will a) run as root, b) own the entire host from top to bottom and c) get to choose its own ports UIDs and GUIDs.

Cloud, by the way, in my books, is nothing but a buzzword for "really damned good automation that works". But even then the automation can still suck.

(why, yes, I *am* arguing with a vendor about what they said in the sales pitch versus what their field engineers are trying to do in my datacentre right now, thanks)

UK.gov wants a cloud wizard at £1,000 a DAY. That's more than the prime minister's salary

I'm sorry the post is already filled

We outsourced it to china as they said they could do it cheaper,

Mobile phones are the greatest poverty-reducing tech EVER

Re: Disruption

While they didn't have *quite* as much copper dragged around ... they absolutely did drag copper all over. I've an acquaintance that could offer you some tales about just *how much* of it tended to vanish at times.

Cesspool 4chan sold … to former owner of Japanese cesspool 2ch

Re: sage

4chan going back to its (square)root(s)

*cough* so much irony

'Intrusion' at ceph.com makes for red faces at Red Hat

Re: What happened exactly?

All they can see *right now* is that the code was browsed -- what they *don't* know is *when* this occurred, and what has happened since then - they concede that it is possible compromised code could have been in place at *some* time in the past and since overwritten, removed or restored to non-compromised state.

I like the tone and the fact that they are out front on this.

It *is* easy to validate one's in place code to verify that it is in sync with the signed, known good code. << I typoed that on first pass. known good coed. I think I'll get in trouble with the SO for that >>

A friday that will be long for a few out there - but I've not got Ceph in *my* systems - I do know about 12 admins that are playing with it in other wings of the company - they'll be having a long weekend dotting Tees and crossing Is.

BOFH: Press 1. Press 2. Press whatever you damn well LIKE

Mainframe version

kept us busy while the scheduler loaded on sunday mornings. And at least we looked like we were working.

American Airlines: TITSUP computers ground US flights

Perfect pic for the article

Something chose the wrong day to quit.

Email reply-all cat-nado drenches Cisco inboxes with pics, memes

tivoli && exchange && DLs && OOO messages

Exchange hosts configured to use tivoli to send users notifications when the mail server instance was about to go down.

Exchange not configured to ignore DL's in the 'active user' list.

Queue MS patching at 3 am. 5 days before christmas when about 30% of the folks are already on holidays.

2:45 am. notification sent ....

Poor bugger who started that one had to defer the actual patching for three weeks since the server(s) in scope were too busy delivering the sh!tstorm to shut down, and the next day started a "seasonal change freeze"

Blood-crazy climate mosquitoes set to ground Santa's reindeer

Re: In other festive-season related recent climate news...

@ Alister

in as much as you mimic my name, at least your perspective on seasonal rotation agrees with mine.

Have one, just for that rant

Re: Have you EVER been in Northern Canada?

Yes. Yes I have.

Your camp counsellors didn't tell you to have salt handy for when you got out of the water? Lousy camp.

And this is why canadians like flamethrowers. And REALLY big campfires.

US librarians defy cops, Feds – and switch on their Tor exit node

I see the FBI executive(s) (has/have) been keeping up with the Reg......

wonder if this will make it into the TV show of the same name

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3663490/

Ahmed's clock wasn't a bomb, but it blew up the 'net and Zuckerberg, Obama want to meet him

Re: The name Mohamed has earned its Terrorist Rep

New id

5 posts

all on this topic.

I take it I pissed you off in suggesting that you be fired from your position and shamed officer.

From the original article:

******

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions.

*****

Nope no racially biased kneejerk "muslim terririst bomber" reaction on THAT police jerk.

The only way out of this mess is for the Irving Police Department to dismiss this cop. Clearly labelling his actions as racial profiling.

Cybercrim who fleeced students faces scramble to repay stolen cash

Re: Punctuation!

There really ought to be some punctuation in that headline. How does one "fleece students faces" without their knowledge? Is it done while they sleepsheep? Who buys this face-fleece?

FTFY

Android 5 lock-screens can be bypassed by typing in a reeeeally long password. In 2015

Re: Not on a Samsung S4

Samsung SIIx(t989) - CM 5.1.1 (Tesla kit) - not affected

a) no cut and paste on the password screen so my numbers are ..... rough - but at ~36k characters with camera running it did not crap out - that took 11 minutes with 'faked' bluetooth keyboard device to generate the string

b) interestingly - from the logs, CM *might* be throwing the characters after the 257th is typed, will try again later with more time on my hands and an improvement to the fake keyboard script.

Burn all the coal, oil – No danger of sea level rise this century from Antarctic ice melt

Re: "...he's not OK with gas power as an alternative to coal..."

"As an interim step, coal should be replaced with natural gas nuclear as fast as humanly possible.

FTFY

Confession: I was a teenage computer virus writer

Re: Fake DOS

Digital Research. and GEM dammit.

PRIME SPACE: Bezos in Cape Canaveral SPACE PODULE debut

Bezos

Will be spending a *whole* lot of money before *anything* launches from there - Major overhaul required for just about every system there.

AT&T fingers BT's brass neck, wishes it could throttle it

Okay -- lets see if I can find

The ATT rant about getting into Canadian ISP status - and the commentary they dropped on the way out the door ....

US braces for WW3 with Cyber Command 'Vision' of integrated cyberops

Re: An article of the Onion, with additional Amurrika Fcuk Year!!

Have an upvote DAM.

This is the organization that *lost* in .... far too many conflicts for me to list here. And still has a habit of paying $450 for a standard 8oz hammer.

If you think they thought of it before, I've a bridge to sell.

US cop goes war-driving to find stolen gear by MAC address

This is a decent *idea*

Sadly manglement and legal pitbulls will get hold of it and turn it into dataminable "historical data" for "reference" and "analysis"

a) mac addresses *can* be altered at the device. End of Line.

The above statement makes the software as proposed INVALID. What more can be said? as a legal tool this is now invalid. Now, don't get me wrong - it makes it possible to *locate a specific mac* if that mac is active - I get that -

i) find missing hardware that was (lost/stolen/dropped off a cliff)

ii) find (runaway teen/missing small that has phone/altzheimer patient carrying panic device etc, heck even stolen cars)

iii) give insurance companies (are you hearing yet?) SOMETHING to recoup losses on stolen devices ... (I suspect this will be the lever that will be applied to make my original proposition occur)

are all possible, but the consequent data:

i) which mac addresses were at what location at what times on which date

ii) which mac addresses were connected to known networks (are you hearing yet) at which location at what time on which day.

iii) what (dramatic event) ensued within x time of y event when the above devices were connected to THAT network.....

(i.e you are developing a data pool that will result in witch hunts hours after (dramatic event)s occur that will trash the civil liberties of a substantial number of innocents.)

I think that the data usage, tracking of said data, and resisting compilation of that data must be written into the baseline proposition before we let the authorities start running this anywhere.

And good luck on the patent front - I've no less that three utilities that do precisely this.

3l33t haxxors don't need no botnet, they just pinch passwords

Simple enough

If admin creds are getting stolen you have issues with your admins not keeping things tidy. If your admins have these issues, I don't wanna know what else is going down the toilet.

I've had a couple of days where security has called me because I've been WFH, gone out for lunch and had to pop on to sort a quick issue, usually from a hotspot - this pops a bell in the VPN logs. How hard is that? Is this not a starting point? I can imagine that an admin loosing control of a laptop/work desktop is one thing ...... I suspect it would get *me* at least *fired* if I got some sort of viral infection on my work laptop.

Ashley Madison made dumb security mistakes, researcher says

application development and security

I'm sorry DAM. I've been an SA - specifically tasked with *doing the new stuff* for 12 years - I've met in that time exactly 3 developers that gave one rats a$$ about security - Typically I'm the one jumping up and down and waving security policy documents around and screaming at idiots that try to 777 entire data stores. Given the latest flock of DEVOPS twats I'm meeting -- most of whom have less than 5 years in IT, I'm feeling like I'm drowning. I DO tend to blame it on "developers trying to do everything" - mind you I'll agree that its typically because the demands of management include "give us new $hiney $hiney for < last weeks coffee budget"

And I've found the that the only way to get 'maintenance' done is to let the 3P pen testers red flag all the "This version might be active in your environment and might be vulnerable" items - it at least gets us outage windows to do things to fix issues. Even if we're updated past "this version" and don't even have "this application" installed.

Its getting worse rather than better as we start rolling out "application in a box" appliances. Jesus murphy.

The S, Huawei’s new best Mate: Compact and premium – but not cheap

'taterza

Given that the rest of the pizza is constructed correctly - Potatoes work.

That one doesn't look like it has bacon. One *must* have bacon.

Fruity Firefox: Mozilla caves to Apple, unveils iOS-friendly browser

Re: I give it 10 minutes...

>Yeah too bad on mobile it is a dead man walking.

I find it hard to call that walking. More like oooozing. Like slime.

Pioneer slaps 80s LASERS on cars for driverless push

Dunno bout this one

From the diagram that lidar has a blind spot almost worse than the average meatsacks.

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

"I'll just keep this log safe while those devs are chasing their tails"

<even if I don't have a UK mailing addy handy>

BOFH: Power corrupts, uninterrupted power corrupts absolutely

Re: Bastard! T|N>K

I'm sure that the BOFH could make sure that new K120 was quite bloody for you.

Huge, absorbent iPad rumours recycled – and this time it's REAL. True

crapple announces

My only issue with crapple announcing *anything* is the three week change freeze at work around the announcement.

Au oh, there's gold in them thar server farms, so lead the way

interesting. We ended up with legislation

Electronics things have to be recycled. In fact, we now pay (on certain items) a pre loaded recycling fee for this. And... we have to *take* the recyclables on which we pay this pre loaded fee *to* the recycler.

Recycling around here is apparently *very* good business. (Yes it includes computers -- ODDLY - only when bought by an individual person - if you have a GST # you don't pay the fee, since you are thus a company)

*blink* *blink*

And I'll guarantee that those things we do this with STILL end up getting broken down by 10 year old kids in a garbage dump in china.

Brit school claims highest paper plane launch crown

Re: No more Paris articles

Hell, don't go south, come NORTH. We've MUCH more territory that you can chase your 'plane around on....