Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Brit broke anti-terror law by refusing to cough up passwords to cops

Re: It's not the judge's fault

So what happens if every judge stands up and says - "I refuse to try a case with such an obviously bad law"?

Do they all go to the camps, or are we saving that for after we get rid of the ECHR?

Hotter than the Sun: JET – Earth’s biggest fusion reactor, in Culham

Ultimately the hydrogen could be fused all the way upto Carbon, just like in stars.

Then we could burn the Carbon bringing back coal jobs to wherever it was that Trump was promising

Re: Do not press

What’s special about Euratom compared with other EU regulatory agencies?

Although the negotiations about joining a committee dedicated to peaceful use of nuclear technology is a lot easier when you have nuclear weapons and they don't

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

Re: (Unimportant) Things that Daesh have ruined

Can't imagine it's much fun visiting the USA if you are a nuclear physicist working for the ISIS neutron beam thingy near Oxford

Not quite. Enigma had a flaw that it couldn't encrypt a letter to itself so a known plaintext gave you a start.

But the operating procedure involved chosing a random daily pair of 3 letter groups, encrypt them in the code of the day and send them (encrypted) to the other party ( I forget the details)

A perfect enterprise solution

Once they realise how bad they are, they will outsource the job to Crapita / IBM / HPE and after a few years and umpteen $$Bn they will still not have a working system.

There will however be a group of heavily armed fantasists further crazed by dealing with Crapita / IBM / HPE and hell bent on revenge ....

Re: People who want to kill other people for stupid sky fairy reasons are not clever

The head of your church of sky fairy just asked the sky fairy to bless an aircraft carrier to go and blow up the people of that sky fairy. Ironically they are the same sky fairy

I hope this doesn't offend the FSM or he will send his pirates to deal with the HMS QE

Re: Mock while you can.

Presumably the ones who did scrub the data did survive.

Supposedly in WWII there was an Afrika Korps radio operator who chose "HIT" "LER" for the random enigma initialization setting every day. He was captured and the army had to stage an escape to try and get him back to his unit

Australia commits to establish space agency with no budget, plan, name, deadline …

Re: Shirley

At least there aren't any Spiders on Mars

Re: didgeri-dont risk it.

So boomerangs are SpaceX's secret technology ? It all makes sense now

Space port

Didn't Australia used to have a "space port" (ie, bit of empty desert to shoot rockets from) called something that sounds like onomatopoeic chundering ?

Kebab and pizza shop owner jailed for hiding £179k from the taxman

re: A kebab shop only making £9k a year,

Well he has to buy his kebab meat from Switzerland for £100/lb, and he has to pay a fee to Kebab Shop Licensing inc (Bermuda) for each kebab he sells, and the sale didn't happen in the UK anyway because all kebab sales are booked through Luxembourg.

So really he makes a loss and has to claim a £9k a year subsidy

If only they could go to an Apple store and ask how the till is in Ireland when the store is on Oxford st

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

Re: Understandable but Problematic

Remember the laws to freeze bank accounts of terrorists ?

Remember how it got used against Icelandair?

Remember the laws allowing surveillance without a warrant - to stop terrorism?

Remember them being used for school catchment areas?

Remember the laws allowing websites to be shut down if they supported terorrism ?

Remember them being used to block -------------

Re: "or many people in Northern Ireland pubs."

Even the bombs were better before the internet

Re: Why not fuck off and sort out Brexit instead

jihadi material which is photographs of Arabic, given the low value of foreign languages in the UK.

That's how you know it's bad - it's in foreign

CCleaner targeted top tech companies in attempt to lift IP

Re: Is it just me....

I would assume only small companies and individuals were customers/users?

Once you are inside the corporate network security is generally much weaker.

So only only need one developer / CxO / salesperson with either root access on their work machine or permission to connect a personal machine to the network and ....

Re: "Peoples Republic's timezone"

Whois says the registrant is in Seattle.

Blame Amazon

CCleaner targetted?

I think the virus which infected CCleaner attacked them.

You don't claim "Intel targeted" for every single virus running on x86

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

they would be a gold mine if hackers could get access to them.

Cheaper than just paying a copper to copy the data for you ?

Behold, says robo-mall-cop maker: Our crime-busting dune buggy packed with spy gear

Re: Maybe

If you legalise it then productivity would drop to national average.

The nice thing about illegal activity is that it's amazingly productive.

The amount we spend on marketing compared to drug dealers is ridiculous

Re: Maybe

trillion dollar negative impact

It's only negative for one half of the deal, to the party it's a one trillion $ opportunity of equipment and services to supply

Then you need those weapon detecting robots everywhere, not just airports.

Presumably to detect anyone who doesn't have a gun and dispense one.

Congress battles Silicon Valley over upcoming US sex trafficking law

Re: "Two wrongs don't make a right."

So, what's your solution to keep young women from being bought, abused and murdered ?

What did we do before Facebook - Policing ?

Re: The most effective way to stop online crime is to shut down the Internet

That's just silly - it's like saying that the best way to reduce school shootings is to ban children from taking guns to school.

Stack Overflow + Salary Calculator = your worth

Re: DBA

DBA you don't do it for the money - it's about the lifestyle !

as evidenced by the adverts immediately below the calculator, all of which fall below the lowest percentile.

So the subset of employers who have unfilled vacancies that they are so desperate to fill that they have to run web ads fall below the likely range of salaries for that specialty?

Is there an economist in the house ?

Re: No server side development, no Unix

Stack Overflow is would be biased towards Web development, seeing as they are a web-based entity.

I can see how S.O. would be biased toward silicon designers since they use silicon based semiconductors in all their machines

Microsoft's AI is so good it steered Renault into bottom of the F1 league

Re: Red Bull have design genius Newey

So what a competitor needs is some sort of Artificial Inteligence that could - "perform calculations and analysis that would otherwise take up the time of a team of engineers."

VMworld schwag heist CCTV didn't work and casino wouldn't share it

Re: Obvious

"failed to protect his health and safety"

Rather like the USAF "failing to obtain a construction permit" for Hiroshima ?

Brit ministers jet off on a trade mission to tout our digital exports...

Re: Brexit

Brexit is, as usual, irrelevant here.

Unless you need any people to implement any of this stuff.

Or any of the other countries have any rules about privacy

Or there are any sort of licensing or professional qualifications to work with the data

Senators call for '9/11-style' commission on computer voting security

Re: '9/11 style' commission on computer voting security

No they will conclude that Russian backed hackers did it and so America will invade Iraq in retaliation

SpaceX releases Pythonesque video of rocket failures

Re: Fix Earth's Climate Using Terraforming Instead of Seeking Escape!

Doesn't do you much good if you are hit by an asteroid

Re: More transparency from IT companies?

Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Intel - were as open with their failures

They launch their failures with huge marketing campaigns and make people buy them - you can't get much more open than that !

Things I won't work with blog

Fixed link above:

sand won't save you now

Just how are HMRC’s IT systems going to cope with Brexit?

Re: How difficult can it be?

But all those votes will be subject to adding extra clauses to protect eg the Oatmeal biscuit makers of upper-lower Walloonia - so the deal won't be nailed until the day before Brexit

How difficult can it be?

You have two years (well 18months now) to imagine all possible scenarios for trade with Europe from total free market access to a Cuba style blockade of Britain.

Then you implement all of them and the day before Brexit when we are told what the deal is - you just turn on that strategy for the morning.

Farewell Cassini! NASA's Saturnian spacecraft waves goodbye for its Grand Finale

WEEE directive

Are we allowed to dispose of obsolete 90s equipement by crashing it into a planet?

I have some dead HP printers that I would be happy to donate.

The planet in question may have to be a little closer to home

UK attorney general plans crackdown on 'trial by social media'

"That is why a jury composed of members of the public is a bad idea"

However, every alternative ever tried has proved worse.

Originally a jury was ONLY of people that knew the defendant and the likely the victim - it was people from the same village

It is only more recently the idea that they should be 12 random strangers with no clue

Yet more British military drones crash, this time into the Irish Sea

Re: Accident reasons

IIRC the original anti-crash function refused to go anywhere near the ground if it didn't have good height data on approach. It used a laser altimeter which didn't work in the rain. This made landing in Wales tricky.

The result was that the drone sat there sulking 300ft up until it ran out of fuel and crashed - so the avoid the ground feature was regularly turned off.

Re: droning on

So you are watching an empty bit of desert for 14hours and occasionally drop a $1M bonb on a camel.

Meanwhile 100,000 phosphorus/thermite/shaped charge bearing drones descend on your camp/HQ/tank army

Re: droning on

Depends on the target - is it easier to defend against 1 single £15M drone vs 100,000 x £150 drones coming at you at knee height with 1lb of unpleasantness underneath

There is Stonehenge I believe

Homeland Security drops the hammer on Kaspersky Lab with preemptive ban

Re: Quite the planning process, this

And the contract with HPE didn't include uninstalling software so they need to negotiate a deal, which will strangely cost more than the original windows install.

In house staff couldn't do the uninstall because that would violate the warranty and anyway they were all downsized when support was outsourced to HPE

Re: RE: And I thought El Reg commentards hated Microsoft!

Stallman would have just whistled his comments to the server directly from a payphone

Re: I wonder who the real oppressor is here...

Although a segment of American politics believe that removing tax breaks on slave ownership is an example of Communism

Former UK.gov IT man and Python king's guide to neural networks

Re: Well...

It didn't say they listened

Giant frikkin' British laser turret to start zapping stuff next year

Re: Albatrosses not sharks

But then you wouldn't need carriers

The new BAe shark carriers will be ideal for laser equipped sharks and it is hoped that with further investment and a moderately expensive refit it will be possible to research ways to launch them into the air