Posts by redpola

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

Your comment is ridiculous. If my purchase choice is guided by the vendor telling me something is a “lifetime” service then why shouldn’t I believe that? Why put scepticism above hard facts and a contract?

As it happens I bought one of these “lifetime” VPN deals for $40 a decade ago and have had a great deal of use out of it. I bought it because it was advertised as a “lifetime” deal and I’d estimate it’s saved me around $1400 over a subscription VPN service over that time. And it’s still going. I must be dreaming.

Fujitsu promised to sit out UK deals ... then Northern Ireland called with £125M

Fujitsu obviously has good tech they can usefully provide to the UK government and it is crazy to exclude them from the pool of potential suppliers. That said, they are still getting away with shocking systematic failures which led to significant human suffering and even suicide.

The question is, what is an adequate remedy for such a large but useful organisation? A big fine is irrelevant. More openness for their process to be inspected? Expensive to police. Throw them out of all UK govt business to act as a deterrent to other similar companies? Less competition and less tech available.

It’s a difficult one. My gut says that all complicit in Horizon should do jail time, minimally.

Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months

OneDrive is already fundamentally broken on Mac as it relies on the underlying filesystem the server runs on to deal with file names. It’s possible to have a perfectly valid file name on Mac that will not sync to the cloud because Windows doesn’t like the file name. In 2025 we can’t name our files just about anything we like and have the computers deal with the underlying filesystems. It’s madness.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

Re: What is this article about again ?

Segway /ˈsɛɡweɪ /

▸ noun trademark a motorized personal vehicle consisting of two wheels mounted side by side beneath a platform that the rider stands on while holding on to handlebars, controlled by the way the rider distributes their weight.

– ORIGIN early 21st century: an invented word based on segue.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: Rust is bad

“ It is trivial to make C the perfect operating system language. And there is no way to make it better”

And you left a deliberate error in that to see if we’d spot it? Or to prove how fallible humans are?

Re: "it would suck"

If there were a strong enough case for it to be compelling he might.

The question is, how strong can we make a case? I’ve read a lot of philosophical debate on this subject recently and literally nobody has asked what problem is solved by switching to Rust. Until that’s quantified the real question of whether it’s worth it can’t be posed.

I get that “perfect” code is “better” but a bug or exploit that is never found may as well not exist.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: an alleged Nazi salute

You understand that “may of been” is just gibberish?

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

You’re adding a new product to be delivered for free on top of the existing functional product that’s paid for.

In experienced and mature companies this might (and could and should) just pop out for free but most companies are neither. So now you’re are either adding another potentially expensive step to release cycles (or maintaining two source trees?!) or you are demanding the entire company culture changes.

If the company started as a hacky startup there may be legacy ugly code nobody understands and more. You want customers to see that they’re paying for this? They might not like that and use it as leverage to pay less.

As a functionally benign example, consider removing the embarrassing, rude or profane comments in 500k lines of legacy source code so you won’t upset the customer. How can you achieve that without risk? How do you further enforce standards on future source code comments? Now look at non-benign stuff and you’re starting to sense the scale and cost of it.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Invent the new GB-C standard and rebuild the UK on the back of converter cables, wall warts etc…

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: Sloppy

The side of your head got warm because you were holding a big hot slab of phone to it, and absolutely not through excitation by radio waves of negligible energy.

Microwave ovens are faraday cages, which are very well understood, and do not leak radio waves unless faulty. Do not use faulty microwave ovens.

Your decision to base your lifestyle decisions based on your own invented science sadly does put you firmly in the “those "5G towers are secretly reprogramming our childrens' DNA" crazies” camp whether you concur or not. I get being sceptical and even support it, but when science/physics utterly disproves your standpoint, then that’s the time to back down and admit you were wrong.

Re: From the article:

That article doesn’t contain any of the terms “5g”, “mobile”, “cell”, “WiFi”, “radio”.

I’ve conducted my own study and have ascertained that 100% of people who die of cancer have drunk water all their lives. Avoid water!

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

Re: Freedom Internet Technology

Don’t be snippy with Richard Stallman here or he’ll eat a piece of his own foot in protest.

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Re: Fuzz testing

A test engineer enters a bar, runs a brute force fuzzer against the code, and observes a thousand crashes.

Which should they raise as defect reports, knowing that raising all 1000 defect reports will crash the engineering team for a six months?

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

Oh my god, the ship is going down! Let’s get inside and close the door behind us!

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Re: Not really understanding the plan

Dammit, Elon! You posted the business plan we wrote that weekend at the beach on the Reg! It looks kinda funny now- were we high?

The problem with his “civil war” stuff is that he’s said it a LOT over the years about a whole range of subjects. It’s his twitter equivalent of “Full Self Driving by the end of this year”, i.e. if you believe it, you’re the mug.

Re: For those for whom Musk is still their idol..

A Musk-debunking playlist that doesn’t have any thunderf00t videos? You have achieved the unachievable!

For added (entertaining and numbers-based) childish whining, thunderf00t’s content features multiple examinations of Musk’s record on telling the truth and behaving rationally.

Are you talking about the guy that’s taking us to Mars?

OpenBSD enthusiast cooks up guide for the technically timid

Re: Thank you Carnat

I can confirm that the now-obsolete manual upgrade process was neither slow nor painful. I once upgraded an old server to the newest version, which I think was through five minor versions. Including downloading all the versions it was less than an hour. Of course now sysupgrade makes it absolutely trivial.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

I wonder what proportion of comments on this site are in the “Waa! Apple locks everything down and has too many private APIs in their walled garden!” camp versus those now complaining that third parties have TOO MUCH freedom.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

TIL that crypto keys are mathematically derived from whether I play squash on a Thursday or not.

Re: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Your joking.

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

I imagine RIAA is just squashing these companies to gain control of them. There is definitely a possibility that the AI could be trained with modern (copyright) material- although the only good AI music I’ve heard has been 1940s throwbacks- but how can someone prove ownership of elements used in the creation of the derived work?

Imagine the analogous example in the vast amount of AI generated images trained on, no doubt, the enormous corpus of copyright images on Facebook, insta, Pinterest etc. Proving an individual AI image was created by a model trained on stuff including pages from my sketchbook that I uploaded to instagram is nigh on impossible.

Maybe RIAA want legislation that dictates training materials are logged and catalogued etc.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: User attitude readjustment tool

LART is a TLA I haven’t seen for decades! Bravo.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

His idea of raising advertising revenue is to rant about being blackmailed by advertisers and subsequently telling them to F off.

Wait until you hear what his idea of “delivering what I said I’d deliver” is!

Tesla misses the mark on all fronts in quarter of chaos

Easy to raise Tesla price

All Musk needs to do is stand in an aircraft hangar with a thousand people, announce “At this point, it’s literally crazy to NOT be buying Tesla stock!”* and then have the audience whoop and holler in agreement.

Instant +10% for Tesla.

* or “We will have men on the moon by Q3” or “FSD is in testing and will ship next week” or …

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Dear Register;

When you are using computers to transcribe audio, you must read the generated text just once to check the results. Then you don’t ship glaring errors like “duplicated mass routines” or bizarre repeated stuttering sentences that humans often utter.

Just read it once. Just once. It’s the cheapest QA you can effect.

SEC Twitter hijacked to push fake news of hotly anticipated Bitcoin ETF approval

Re: Remind me who hates the SEC...

Musk knows he can get away with making something Tesla up, announcing it will arrive imminently, then selling off Tesla stock when it pumps. He’s done it over and over, an order of magnitude more than several others are serving lengthy terms in prison for. He doesn’t need to pump crypto.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: Overheard at Tesla

“At this point, I know more about cross-traffic than any human alive on the planet.”

(Aside, to engineer) “What’s cross-traffic?”

UK-US data deal could hinge on fate of legal challenges to EU arrangement

Re: Sovereignty

I think you mean are jerbs.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Re: On the other hand...

You can’t call yourself a seasoned software engineer until you’ve built a release build with debug info in it (because the debug build doesn’t exhibit the defect you’re trying to fix).

Thousands of subreddits go dark in mega-protest over Reddit's app-killing API prices

Reddit is so weird. A few years ago I was (basically voluntarily) paying them yearly to use their site. Then they changed their pricing model which hugely increased the price.

The price increase was so shocking that I cancelled before realising they were honouring the existing price for current subscribers.

I immediately contacted them, asking for my subscription to be reinstated at the old price and they blankly refused.

So for the past few years I have continued using the site for free, despite being perfectly happy to have continued paying at my old rate.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Someone in government must have a donor in the burner phone business.

I think the UK has the stupidest government it’s ever had in all of history.

It’s like they believe their own anti-experts mantra and that governing is simply making up unenforceable laws and then expecting someone else to enforce them.

Shambolic.

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

Re: ...what the EU wants in a completely separate area

“ Doing so would have just given the remain mob a second chance to screw things up even worse that they have achieved”

Somehow, with a majority brexiter government and a brexiter cabinet, a deal negotiated by brexiters and a situation that brexiters were wholly in control of was screwed up by Remainers? You realise how daft that sounds, right? Are you saying the rabid brexiters we had in absolute control weren’t rabid enough?

Re: Science vs Politicians

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/0/05/Beaker.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20101015151246 Would be an improvement.

Re: Science vs Morons

Something something exact same benefits.

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

4K character posts? It’s like Musk is taking everything that made Twitter successful and removing it piece by piece. We could all post 4K content on tumblr (or Wordpress… or… ) back when… Twitter beat it.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

The three Twitter clients I regularly used have all literally given up. They were shut off, they couldn’t find out any information, and now they are gone. Musk’s strategy to force businesses closed and then expect them to pay him seems a little optimistic.

Musk roundly booed on-stage at Dave Chappelle gig

Re: One of the rare times he escaped his own reality bubble recently

I think you’re right that he’s in a bubble. The problem is now everyone is too scared to criticise his terrible technical decisions. Take the blue tick on Twitter, which added veracity in a web of trust- a very old concept in cyber security circles. Not only was it sound but created a self-policed walled garden for celebrities to switch off the noise. Hit the “ticks only” tab and those verified only saw content from other ticks. That encourages influencers and celebrities to use the platform.

Musk is making bad technical decisions that have real impact on the usability of the platform for its most important users, and those decisions are getting implemented…

Musk is suspending users on Twitter that post the videos. Bloody rightist fragile snowflake!

https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/zjutsq/elon_musk_got_booed_off_the_stage_at_the_dave/

I’m not a fan of whining takedowns but thunderf00t on YouTube is worth a watch on this subject. He regularly picks apart Musk’s “achievements” with scientific analysis (sadly padded out with sarcasm). Spoiler: there aren’t as many as you’d imagine.

Finally, this article mentions that Musk destroyed the Twitter share price but also doesn’t mention the much more significant impact he’s had on Tesla stock. Who knew that saying over and over that his money was “first into Tesla and will be the last out”, and then taking a bunch out would piss off investors and destroy confidence!

US brings first-of-its-kind criminal charges of Bitcoin-based sanctions-busting

As is common in this type of story, the language used betrays ignorance. Nobody with an understanding of Bitcoin claims it is untraceable- indeed a massive global public database called the blockchain exists, listing literally every Bitcoin transaction ever conducted, and is the fundament of that cryptocurrency. What is true, however, is that accountability is difficult to prove- unless exchanges are brought into the equation, who may be pressed to list as assets to government entities the Bitcoin addresses they use. Through that process of accountability it may be proven that Bitcoin “moved from one country to another” which is the charge here. Simply put, if the accused hadn’t used exchanges, which is perfectly possible, there would be no case since a Bitcoin address has no geographical location. I also suspect that it didn’t help that the accused was practically bragging about evading the law.

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

What a time to be a smuggler! We took back control of the borders we always had control over and then lost control of them.

Re: @Spaceman9

“ Well - yes we started faster”

Actually, Hungary, an EU member state, began vaccinating one day before the UK did.

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

“The internet’s down.”

“Never mind. Let’s have a nice cup of tea while we wait for it to come back up. Fill the kettle up won’t you?”

“…”

Apple's Mac Studio exposed: A spare storage slot and built-in RAM

Re: The other storage slot ...

Careful! Your rational and objective analysis means you’re now going to be accused of being an apple fanboi by the apple haterzzz.

Seriously though, aren’t we past this crap? Twenty years ago I was working at M$ and bought my first Apple, because I wanted a BSD/Mach based laptop. Back then Apple were the cool guys and everyone loved to hate Microsoft. Now everyone is hating on apple. It’s a cycle of fashion and little to do with engineering.

Microsoft tempts G Suite customers with 60% discount

Re: Google's Foot Gun

We’ve always been second-class citizens. It’s still, after years and years, not possible to leave reviews for google play store apps using a G domains account. Every time an app pops up “Would you like to leave a review?” we are reminded how much Google hates us.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

Die, filthy vimmers.

https://github.com/progfolio/wordel

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: Not Happening

El Salvadoreans. Bitcoin is legal tender and must be accepted as cash.

Apple emergency patches fix zero-click iMessage bug used to inject NSO spyware

Re: Autocratic governments, that's a broad brush nowadays.

“ there are going to autocratic governments much closer to home”

… What?