Posts by Victor Ludorum

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Re: around ten meters worth

American ones I expect.

Singapore to phase out checks for businesses by 2025

Re: Just realised I DO care about the US spelling, after-all

the meaning of the comment is made ambiguous

That's kind of my point.

I was giving an example of opposite meaning between English and Americanese phrases.

Re: Just realised I DO care about the US spelling, after-all

As a right-pondian I worry about the US-ification of almost everything. Having been a regular visitor to ElReg since 199x, I am disappointed. My tutting shall become slightly louder, lest I disturb anyone from their Times crossword...

'I realised that this also means El Reg is now likely to visit the horrors of "thru" and "pants" on me, and even worse - may well start using Americanisms that are either unknown to me, or which have referents unknown to me, or which have the opposite meaning to that which I'd expect.'

I expect there are some who could care less...

The one with the Kentish hops, please -->

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Re: Crashed most of the time.

Was that your flying or the game?

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Re: But I DO want to know!

I think that was Happy Eater.

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

Re: Hang on..

There is a possibility it's not the DIMM, but a component on the motherboard that has failed. Soak testing the new memory will help to eliminate that possibility.

Cisco: Yes, Yanluowang leaked our data. No, it's not serious

Re: Once again, a professional company is hacked

There has to be a trade off between ease of use, convenience and security.

Air-gapped data is secure, but convenient? No.

Time-based 2FA (e.g. Google Authenticator) is probably one of the best compromises, but can be MITM-ed.

SMS-based 2FA can also be MITM-ed.

A hardware (U2F/FIDO) key is probably the most secure, but less convenient to use. And it can be lost...

I think the best option is continuously educating the user, but that is often seen more as a cost than a benefit to the company.

OVH opens less flammable datacenter at site of 2021 fire

Neat cabling

It might not be the neatest cabling in Octave's pic, but I think pretty much everyone here has seen a LOT worse!

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

You, sir, are a genius!

That will use up all those pesky carbon atoms so they don't combine with two (or occasionally just one) oxygen atoms and venting into the atmosphere.

Just one teeny tiny problem. What do we then do with this CH₄ to release the stored energy?

(spoilt for choice on the icon with this one -->)

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Re: Depressing

Don't leave us guessing, what was the reaction?

Bye bye BoJo: Liz Truss named new UK prime minister

Re: Trussed Up

There's Cheddar, and then there's West Country Farnhouse Cheddar (PDO).

Cloudflare: Someone tried to pull the Twilio phishing tactic on us too

Re: Am I missing something ?

I'm not sure a Google Authenticator style 2FA would have stopped them. According to the article the login credentials are sent instantly from the fake login page via Telegram. Assuming the fake login page also then asks for the 2FA code, the man in the middle has a (max 30 second) window of opportunity to capture and use that 2FA code to login.

Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis

Wonderful

So that's where ARTHUR got his name from.

I also remember the '!Lander' demo-type game that showed the Archimedes' graphics capability, which was pretty cool for the time, if somewhat limited in actual gameplay.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Having read this story

I DON'T NEED A FIRST NAME.

Re: Legal issues

Away.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

Love it.

I'm an electronics hobbyist and like to do those small projects for learning purposes or just for pure fun.

If that's a small project, what's a big one...?

Definitely deserves one of these -->

Chinese 'Aoqin Dragon' gang runs undetected ten-year espionage spree

Re: Once again

There are all sorts of ways the scammers could have got useful information. My guess is that the travelling friend used compromised wifi. It's not too difficult to intercept emails.

Google keeps legacy G Suite alive and free for personal use

But many orgs (including GMail and Outlook) sinkhole OVH IP addresses for outgoing mail. How do you get round that?

Re: Gmail's spam filtering is really good

I've noticed they are very fussy with SPF records. I've had various issued, including someone complain that I don't reply to their emails (because their SPF record is slightly wrong). I never even get the emails (not even in the Spam folder). They (and I) use Google Workspace...

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: RISC OS

I loved the file save method in RISC OS - you just dragged the save file icon to the folder (directory) you wanted it in. Even now, there are many Windows apps where the file save dialog doesn't seem to remember what folder you were using last, and you have to click through multiple levels to get to the folder you want.

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Re: sudo shred

Can't find it in my distro

$ sudo apt install thermite

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

E: Unable to locate package thermite

Any ideas?

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

Re: "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square…"

I think someone needs their morning caffeine shot...

Nvidia releases $1,999, 8K-capable GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU

Don't all rush at once...

At the time of writing, Scan have got the ASUS one in stock for only £1,943.99.

Doom comes to the Pi Pico

Top work that man

Have a virtual one ->

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

Re: old kit and wp software

Reminds me of a friend's story:

A colleague of his had just taken delivery of a new digital camera and 'photo' inkjet printer in the early days of said technology. This colleague was showing off the photos he had printed, several of which featured his not unattractive 18 year old daughter's birthday party. One colleague ignores the content of the pics and pipes up 'What photo paper did you use?' Cue much mirth and merriment...

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

RIP Cliff

Demon were my first ISP back in 94/95 (memory is now hazy), and I stayed with them pretty much until ADSL and ntl: came along.

I had a 19200 baud modem as that was the fastest the serial port on my Archimedes would run! Then moved to a PC with Trumpet Winsock and a 33k modem, which I eventually upgraded to a 56k that would reliably connect at about 43k. Those were the days!

I don't miss the phone bills though!

Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges

Re: Still Avoiding Them

I try and use hive.co.uk for book orders, you can choose a local independent book store to support.

AWS to build 32 more small clouds around the world

Re: Wot no London?

There's been a London region since 2016:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-london-region/

He ain't heavy, he's my brother: Bloke gives away SpaceX ticket because he was over weight limit

I know BMI is controversial in some circles

but his BMI works out at about 47. That's quite high.

Even shifting 50kg would still class him as 'morbidly obese'.

Less of these might help --->

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Re: Dave?!

I get the feeling he was called Bruce, but the Regomiser changed it to Dave.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Isnt' it wonderful

I'm so happy that there are so many people in Government who understand the necessary hashtags.

Buy 'em by the punnet: Raspberry Pi offers RP2040 chips in bulk

Re: missed a trick

Err, I think you mean 258...

(Cue pedantry about approximations of pi...)

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

What a bunch of dopes

See title

Final PCIe 6.0 specs unleashed: 64 GTps link speed incoming... with products to follow in 2023

I think Micros~1 will work their magic to ensure that even PCIe 8.0 equipped devices will still take at least a minute to boot up...

Worst of CES Awards: The least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable

Re: It is an all out war on ownership by the bilionaires

Enforcing generic warranty periods of 5-10 years on electronics reduces E-Waste and would solve many of the hard to repair issues,

And how many lobbyists do you think the tech companies would throw at the governments who tried that?

Hmm

Unless your house is extremely well insulated, surely you're wasting energy by maintaining a room at a comfortable temperature when it's unoccupied?

As an example, we have a Loxone system controlling the lighting and zoned heating, and the spare bedroom is normally effectively unheated. A long press on the light switch turns the radiator on for 30 minutes. I fail to see how maintaining that room at 18C is more efficient.

AWS adds another Arm CPU to its cloud: Apple's M1

Re: Typo?

Given the context of that sentence in reference to the previous sentences in the same paragraph I think the author is allowed to omit the word 'processors'.

AWS claims 'monumental step forward' with optional IPv6-only networks

Re: Made the switch

I haven't used them , but vultr.com's cheapest VPS product is IPv6-only, and $1 a month cheaper than the equivalent IPv4 product.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Looking back

Yes it does look rather simple now, but the game was squeezed into less than 22K of the BBC's RAM. Try that nowadays...

Angling (re)Direct: Criminals net website of Brit fishing tackle retailer, send users straight to smut site

Interesting

Their MX records now point to Protonmail. They were pointing to Outlook/O365...

Sir Clive Sinclair inspired me and 'whole load of others' at Arm, says CEO Simon Segars

Maplin wasn't the only one

I remember going into my local Tandy for electronics odds and ends until the late 80s / early 90s...

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

Re: Out of band management?

Quote from Santosh's writeup:

'Our primary and out-of-band network access was down, so we sent engineers onsite to the data centers to have them debug the issue and restart the systems.'

Email billing blunder meant MVNO iD Mobile told 24,000 customers to pay up or have their service suspended

Re: But...

just jump to Three or an mvno of three or EE.

iD Mobile is an mvno of Three, run by CarphoneWarehouseDixonsPCWorld...

Navigating without GPS is one thing – so let's jam it and see what happens to our warship

Outside the cocked hat

As an occasional sailor with a Day Skipper qualification, I get how the cocked hat reckoning etc works. Other reasons for errors can include not correcting for True/Magnetic North, inaccuracies in the compass itself (fixed onboard compasses should be recalibrated occasionally), and large ferrous bodies (oo-er) interfering with the compass.

Loving the series, more please!

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

They were the religious porpoises.

Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04

Who said it had to be your personal data?

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

What an odd problem

Er, I mean even.

Reminds me of the 'fact' about 19th November 1999 - the last date for over 1000 years to contain no even digits.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

Have I missed something?

If you watch the animated code entry 'film' on Sotheby's, it's been HTML-ified, all of the > characters have been replaced with >

There are others in there as well.

I'm not sure it would compile very well like that...

Does the NFT contain that code or has someone cocked up?

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

So if it needs TPM 2.0

What's going to happen to all those motherboards that self builders and small shops use? There's going to be one almighty stampede for TPM2 modules.

Dell have got a 'sale' on at the moment and I can't find much mention of Win11 or TPM. Some people are going to be upset in 6 months time when they can't upgrade their 'new' computer...

Also, will we be able to run it in a VM? I'm sure some people would like to run various setups in VMs for testing etc...

Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU

Re: Something doesn't add up...

I thought it was a typo - 0.36p per MB. Unfortunately not.

Looking at EE Ts & Cs it's 36p per MB, so potentially £360 per GB.

It's also a bit vague on what your allowance would be if your package allowance is less than 50GB.