* Posts by Anonymous South African Coward

3212 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010

Cisco opens its network automation system to the unwashed masses

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Ne'er-do-wells will most probably have a go with it hammer and tongs and try to exploit any vulnerabilities on world+dog...

Aussie bloke wins right to sue Google over 'underworld' images

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Ick - googled myself and had a shufty at the images - only two pictures was of myself - and the rest... some was pictures which I've posted yonkers ago and is now on some other servers (which made me go WTF) and the rest is of people I don't even know.

HTF did google got a screenshot of my OS/2 Warp 3 desktop? o_O (did not display when safesearch was ON, but with safesearch OFF...)

Scary.

Dixons Carphone 'fesses to mega-breach: Probes 'attempt to compromise' 5.9m payment cards

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Facepalm

How did the ne'er-do-wells manage to gain entry in order to milk the data?

My reasoning - if the system is properly secured at the perimeter, then only three ways -

1. Email with malware attachment

2. Disgruntled employee

3. Bad field technician

The chances of anything really new coming from storage are a million to one, but still they come

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Thumb Up

Thumbs up for the Pterry reference.

Trump's ZTE deal challenged by Senate

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Realpolitik

UK! watchdog! slaps! Yahoo! with! £250k! fine! for! 2014! data! breach!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

No doubt some beancountery type will be going Yahoo! at this news....

Apple: No currency mining for you in our App Store thank you

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

It wears them out, why would you want to add charge/discharge cycles unnecessarily?

Ne'er-do-wells won't care, it is not their hardware that's getting abused.

US tech companies sucked into Russian sanctions row

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This is but the start of things to come.

Who knows what Trumpmenistan will try to block or sanction next, and could it affect YOUR company (who've been quietly minding their own business in No1 Bagshot Row for ages)?

Which? calls for compensation for users hit by Windows 10 woes

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Had the dreaded update on my Lenovo X260 Stinkpad - and nothing seems to be amiss...

....yet.

I've resurrected an old HP 7600 desktop PC, added some extra RAM and loaded Linux Mint on it, for the kids @ home. Not going to stick with M$ anymore, next thing you know is that they hosed all existing Win7/8/8.1 installs with a funny windowsupdate thing.

Mistakes will continue to be made and Windows users can expect a lot of data loss not to mention productivity loss to be the inevitable result.

Every bloody gadget in the house is ringing. Thanks, EE

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Thanks, but NO thanks.

I reserve the right to receive calls on ONLY one cellphone. And most certainly won't like it if every single gadget decide to give me a tinkle in order to let me know that person X want to talk to me.

Chances are it'll be either a cold caller, telemarketer or spammer.

One device is easy to manage - just put it on silent and ignore its frantic buzzing. A whole host of beeping and whirring devices? Not so simple...

Xiaomi the money? OK, here's a one beeeeellion dollar loss ahead of IPO

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Using a Redmi 4A device - and is impressed with it.

Usually a phone will slow down after 6 months' heavy use and need a factory reset, but this phone just chugs on and on.

Very impressed.

Looks like Huawei and Xiaomi's going to cause big grief to Sagsmug in the long run.

IBM to GTS: We want you to 'rotate' clients every two years

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What are the chances that the engineers will have to fund their own training?

Oddly enough, when a Tesla accelerates at a barrier, someone dies: Autopilot report lands

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And this is why I will still prefer old school cars without autopilot or any such fancy gimmickry. I want to remain in control of the car at all times.

At last: Magic Leap reveals its revolutionary techno-goggles – but wait, there's a catch

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Coat

Words fail me... not another one.

It's chaila o' clock anyway.

Monday: Intel touts 28-core desktop CPU. Tuesday: AMD turns Threadripper up to 32

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: But ... I don't want more cores.

Heh, reminds me of something back in the OS/2 days - somebody soundproofed their PC - then put a resistor over the terminals of the CPU fan to keep it slow as OS/2 doesn't cook your CPU.

Was a really quiet PC.

Nowadays it is like McDonald's farm, a fan-fan here, a fan-fan there all fan-fan-fanning.

You get fans with LED's and allsorts of blinkenlights. Why?

And some components (esp RAID cards) with passive heatsinks really get hot, I prefer to have these cooled with active cooling. More noise. Plus dust is the bane of fans.

In the end it may be better to just get a bar fridge, stick everything inside with a couple of fans and have a really quiet PC (until the fridge compressor kicks in). And have a filter inside which'll filter the air continuously.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Microsoft will come to the party sooner or later - they'll have a "basic" version of their product restricted to 10 cores.

Want access to an extra 10 cores? Buy an extra licence. etc etc etc...

GNOMEs beat Microsoft: Git Virtual File System to get a new name

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

ATFS

African Time File System

because it gets delivered... whenever!

1,300 customers of Brit bank TSB defrauded due to botched IT migration

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With this and the Visa shambles last week, is a cashless society really the best idea?

I have to agree - it is tempting to go 100% cashless, but then you'd stuck up the proverbial creek sans paddle should Mr Murphy decide to poke his grubby fingers in where they don't belong.

Cash still is king. Plus it feel nice to fan some large notes and pretend you're the richest in the world :)

Stern Vint Cerf blasts techies for lackluster worldwide IPv6 adoption

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

We routinely use IPv4 on our sites.

I expect we will continue to do so - and just have a firewall NAT'ing between IPv4 and IPv6 should all the ISP's go over to IPv6 anyway.

Will have to wait and see what happens. Until then I'm not going to break anything yet.

VPNFilter router malware is a lot worse than everyone thought

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Lovely.

Running Smoothwall behind our router, so the ne'er-do-wells will not have any luck with that.

Hear that? Of course it's Indiegogo's deadline for a Vega+ whooshing by

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Definitely vapourware then.

What a pity.

Watchdog slams TSB boss for underplaying extent of IT meltdown

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Too Shy to Bank properly....

You have suffered without red-headed emoji for too long. That changes Tuesday

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: 1F984

Do the unicorn fart rainbows?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Any new poo emojis getting pushed out?

Four hydrogen + eight caesium clocks = one almost-proven Einstein theory

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

There was no word on why time seems to slow interminably when a lift is full of sweaty people during a summer lunchtime rush.

Pterry now working for El Reg?

Nadella tells worried GitHub devs: Judge us by our actions

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Got rid of Skype recently, and it feels SO GOOD!

Pity about the rest (desktops, laptops and servers) though.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Guys, before you delete your source repos on Github, add a few deliberate coding errors which'll let the code compile and run, but crash after a while...

Schadenfreude for UK mobile networks over the tumult at Carphone

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Once the Competition Commission have allowed all the networks to be combined...

Now that will be a *really* daft move.

The market benefits from competition as it keeps everybody on their toes and prices will be kept low.

Once that happens (network combining), prices will go up, service levels will drop and the market will go to pot.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

For me an unlocked phone is better than one that's network-locked.

The carriers, however, may disagree.

I will vote with my wallet. End of the story.

DIYers rejoice: Hitting stuff to make it work even works in space

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One unavoidable trade-off in getting the drill working again is that some science had to be abandoned: “Curiosity's drill is now permanently extended,” the post said, a configuration that means it can no longer use its sieve device, the CHIMERA (Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis).

No doubt the boffins will figure out a way to resolve this problem as well.

Dual-screen laptops debut at Asus' Computex chat

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Why? Why a touchpad/screen thing? What good will it be? Watching pr0nz surreptitiously?

Russian battery ambitions see a 10x increase in power from smaller, denser nukes

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: And the weather is not very nice either

The lunatics are running the asylum nearly everywhere.

Come Inside

(Bert Hansel?)

I was outside a lunatic asylum one day, busy picking up stones

When along came a lunatic and said to me, "Good morning Mr. Jones,

Oh, how much a week do you get for doing that", "Thirty bob I cried"

"What, thirty bob a week, with a wife and kids to keep?

Come inside you silly bugger come inside"

"Come inside you silly bugger come inside, you ought to have a bit more sense.

Working for your living, take my tip, act a little screwy and become a lunatic.

Oh you get your meals most regular and a brand new suit besides.

What's thirty bob a week with a wife and kids to keep.

Come inside you silly bugger come inside."

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Empty...

Excellent hack.

Pity the stiffy drive's all but forgotten now... would've loved to try this trick on my PFY :)

Not to digress - colleague of mine dumped all sorts of viruses and trojans to a stiffy disk, and labelled it clearly "DO NOT USE - VIRUSES" and left it on his desk.

Of course somebody phoned in to complain that their PC's all acting up now - just because said person "borrowed" that "special" stiffy to copy some documents over...

@all windows weenies - can't take a joke, eh? (I refer to the second post which got 10 downvotes)...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

What about Windows?

Help, I'm being held prisoner in a security camera testing factory. So please read this...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Pint

I love the reviews done by El Reg, no sugar coating and you get told the truth, nothing more, nothing less.

Keep it up, and have one!

AWS outage killed some cloudy servers, recovery time is uncertain

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

But the company says some instances haven't come back yet because they were "hosted on hardware which was adversely affected by the loss of power."

What? No graceful handover to UPS power, then to generator power?

HostingUK drops offline after losing Farmer vs Fibre competition

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: I'm on the wrong side of this break

One of our ISP's are experiencing merry dingdong today - ADSL accounts are connecting but absolutely zero throughput.

No communication from them whatsoever, only a deafening silence.

Bah. Beer o'Clock can't come soon enough.

US judge won't budge over Facebook's last-minute bid to 'derail' facial biometrics trial

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Who gots popcorn? Ah, CMOT Dibbler?

Mmmm, fresh and hot.

Thank you, there you go, have a nice day, kthanxbai.

Headless man found in lava’s embrace

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McDonalds drivethrough in Pompeii after delivering a super-super-super-supersized Big Mac

Sysadmin's PC-scrub script gave machines a virus, not a wash

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Your PC is now Stoned.

Softbank's 'Pepper' robot is a security joke

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Simon's getting his Boss to order a couple dozen of Pepper bots post haste.

Game over: Atari cofounder Ted Dabney dies aged 81

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Any multiplayer Android Pong apps?

Two player only, connected via Bluetooth or wifi.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Seems all the icons of yesteryear is finally shuffling off to /dev/null

Sad.

RIP

IBM's Watson Health wing left looking poorly after 'massive' layoffs

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Watson's going on at IBM?

(insert WAT granny here)

Buggy software could lock a Jeep's cruise control

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

1969's Diesel Landy. :)

Agreed with the sentiment that old-fuddy-duddy technology sometimes are the best, especially if you're deep in the boondocks. Then you most certainly don't need some 5c resistor deciding that now would be a good time to carp and prevent your car from starting/unlocking/getting filled with fuel.

Old-fuddy-fuddy tech is easy to repair in the field, whilst advanced tech is not that easy to repair, most of the time you'll have XP technicians swapping out parts until the fault goes away, and that you most certainly cannot do in a rural area (or especially when you're stuck in a desolate place).

There is a time and place for both. Most of us most certainly don't need fancy things like aircon or electric windows or a heated chair which'll massage your butt at the same time.

Let the city slickers have it with their technologically advanced cars, and let us old-fuddy-duddy guys have our old-fuddy-duddy tech cars, and everybody will be happy.

FBI to World+Dog: Please, try turning it off and turning it back on

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

*cough*

how about no? Or have the FBI counterinfected world+dog, and now want a reboot to make it permanent?

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

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Pint

Excellent BOFH.

Pub o' clock it is then!

Is your smart device a bit thick? It's about to get a lot worse

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

They are more likely to decide that in 5-10 years flipping burgers will be more secure and pay better.

And nobody screaming at you regarding a borked RAID array... until the robots come and start doing the burger flipping for you...

TalkTalk plans to sell family B2B jewel to Daisy Group for £175m

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And use the money for what exactly?

Advanced VPNFilter malware menacing routers worldwide

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Smoothwall/ipCop/pfSense FTW