Posts by David 132

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

Re: More pictures !!!!

Ah, so it's not just me then.

I see only one picture - of the drooping nose-cone - and had assumed it was my script blocker/Pi-Hole being over-zealous.

CrowdStrike deja vu as 'performance issue' leaves systems sluggish

Re: cloud issue?

The article does rather make it sound as though CS Falcon is signature-matching files against white/blacklists in the cloud, meaning that slow cloud performance slows down local performance.

I'm sure - or at least, before July's outage exposed their incompetence, I would have been sure - there's some caching of those lists in play though.

Re: Hmmm…

From personal experience in times past, I refuse to believe that any endpoint protection software can have more of a performance impact than Symantec/Norton Antivirus.

*shudder*

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

Re: Banana Skin?

Indeed. The most obvious that comes to mind is posting pet pics (or worse) into a chat with your family/friends/wife/etc, only to realize that the Teams window is signed in to your work account and you've just shared something nauseatingly twee with colleagues.

Even old Teams for Business was terrible for that; the number of times I've been messaging someone, then a toast notification appears to tell me someone else has IM'd me, I click the popup, type a reply to the new person... and then remember, for the umpteenth time, that Teams doesn't (or didn't) switch away from the existing chat when doing that, to the utter confusion of the original person with whom I was conversing.

Ah well. If only Management had adopted my proposal to standardise on ICQ or Yahoo! Messenger.... :P

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Incisive reporting from the Reg as usual.

Cutting remarks - a shear joy to read.

Windows 11 Insider preview brings new Sandbox features and fatter FAT32

Re: Regedit bug?

Sure, Regedit is a solid & useful tool, but have you never thought how much better it’d be with a ribbon UI, integrated CoPilot, adverts for OneDrive built in, and mandatory Microsoft Account integration?

No?

Getting up close and personal with Concorde, Concordski, and Buran

Re: I'm convinced...

Yep. And also provided the aircraft for the final scene in Die Hard 2 - or at least, the exterior shots of the plane taxiing along as Bruce Willis is about to drop onto it from the TV news helicopter. They blanked out the EVERGREEN branding, but the green stripe livery is very distinctive.

Yippee-ki-yay, etc!

Re: Google Translate

even though many basic words are almost identical to English (Arm, Finger, Hand etc).

Also "gift". Be sure to offer a Gift to everyone you meet in Germany - they will appreciate the gesture.

(Note icon.)

Re: Wonderful!

Obligatory XKCD :)

Re: I'm convinced...

>The spiraling slides down from underneath the aircraft in Speyer are very popular with smaller (and bigger) children...

On that note, a shout-out to the Evergreen Air & Space Museum, not too far from me here in Oregon - admittedly, a little further than Germany for many Reg readers.

Among other delights (including the Spruce Goose! and an SR-71 Blackbird!), there is a waterpark right next door to it, with a 747 mounted on the roof of the building - and water-slides down from the fuselage back into the main pool. Possibly the only place on Earth, with the possible exception of the Hudson river (too soon?) where you can slide out of a plane straight into water.

I wonder if the Reg would like to do a feature on this museum, too?

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

About time.

The FTC could start with Sirius XM satellite radio, which is - and I admit, this is a crowded field - one of the worst offenders. Unsubscribing from their service is made as tricky as possible.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Time for a slide show

My own opinion is that Seasons 1-7 are the best, and it all went a bit downhill after that, but each to their own. Enjoy it!

Re: Simple rule

>2) No cameras in the datacentres.

"Boss, do we have any Burnt Umber, Carmine Red, or Titanium White gouache paint anywhere? I need to add the finishing touches to my latest masterpiece, 'Still Life With Apples And SGI Irix Rear Panel', and I just can't seem to capture the exciting play of light on the SCSI terminator block..."

Lights, camera, AI! Real-time deepfakes coming to DEF CON

"In an interview with The Register, Kovacs said..."

And how do you know you were talking to the real Kovacs? Hmm?

Fortune 50 biz coughed up record-breaking $75M ransom to halt leak of stolen data

Re: You are never going to stop this...

Ah, upvoted for linking to the always-excellent W3IGG. I enjoy reading that site, but only in small-ish doses - there's only so much schadenfreude I can take in one sitting.

Re: "they may feel it's cheaper in the long run to pay up"

Indeed. That was a painful lesson learned with the rash of plane hijackings in the 70s and 80s - the old "Take this plane to Cuba!" trope.

At first, the hijackers' demands were met; ransoms were paid, prisoners were freed, and so on.

And then slowly it dawned on the authorities that in the long run this was counterproductive - "once you have paid the Danegeld", et cetera.

Public policy became "we don't negotiate with terrorists"; demands for ransom were ignored.

And very quickly, plane hijackings ceased (until 9/11, of course; and there's evidence from the time that the reason the passengers on those doomed aircraft didn't rise up and overpower the terrorists was that they all assumed it was a run-of-the-mill land the plane, demand concessions, free the hostages type deal, and they'd therefore all be OK if they kept calm and didn't cause trouble. But I digress.)

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

It should perhaps attempt to soothe the user's nerves, with an uplifting haiku, or picture of kittens... or perhaps something spiritual, like a Guru Meditation...?

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

> Or am I missing something?

Yes. Several million dollars of VC funding and a spot in Gartner’s next breathless hype report.

Depends. Does it use blockchain? If so, shut up and take my money!!

'Error' in Microsoft's DDoS defenses amplified 8-hour Azure outage

Re: Microsoft logic

Either that or the home defence system deliberately collapses all the walls, so that there’s no home left for the burglars to raid - “ha, your move, burglars, showed you there didn’t we?”

Amazon, you will do a total recall of bad stuff sold through your site, watchdog barks

Re: About time

Perhaps this will slow their frenzied courting of no-name Chinese tat flingers?

Ah, who am I kidding. Amazon without the serried ranks of GUTKJBO, KYPRINQ, or RUJDREF and their ilk would these days be completely barren.

Asia's regional internet registry APNIC names new director general

Unrelated…

I have nothing cogent to say on the article’s topic, but i just came here to say that I must be old. I saw the image accompanying this story on the Reg front page - a globe set against horizontal lines - and immediately heard in my head, “And now, on BBC1… <insert late 1970s TV program of your choice>”

Automation needed to fight army of AI content harvesters stalking the web

Re: Whac-A-Mole

Or to alternative Google queries, depending on political leanings and/or how sensitive your stomach is:

"Diane Abbott Nude description"

"David Cameron Oiled & Buff Fanfic"

South Korea creates $445M bailout fund after payment glitch trips up e-commerce giant

A really small fund?

Yes, yes, I know Corrections should be sent using the above link, but I just tried that, and the infernal Captcha didn’t load, thereby losing my carefully-written email. So via a Comment it is, sorry.

Either it’s a REALLY small fund, or your headline has omitted the word “million”:

“South Korea creates $445 bailout fund”

Perhaps they had a whip-round and rummage down the back of the sofa cushions?

Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up

Re: a backup pop-up

>if MS manufactured cars you would have to have someone on call to do things like "clear the windscreen" ...

You'd be driving along at 60mph, making good time, feeling good about life, when suddenly the entire windscreen would be taken over by a giant advert for Microsoft OneGear, or Radio 365, or an exhortation to use your Microsoft account to unlock & start the car rather than that primitive car-key in your pocket.

I'll stop there because it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Re: The thing is…

> Probably a couple of hundred MB at least (a “hello world” program seems to take close that these days - ...)

Not so long ago, I tried my hand at coding using the WinUI3 framework, which - supposedly - is Microsoft's recommended framework for Windows 10 & 11 apps (you know - Acrylic Blur, pages, all that good stuff).

Well, apart from the fact that at the time, only 8 months or so ago, there was no sodding visual editor for WinUI3 in Visual Studio, and the recommendation from MS was to build-view-tweak-build-review-tweak-etc until satisfied (!), I do recall that a simple "Hello World" program in a dialog-type window compiled out to something ridiculous like 150MB, and the build process vomited a thousand discrete files into the output directory, all of which were apparently a) vital to the execution of the program, and b) not simply duplicates of existing Windows system library files.

So anyway, I went back to WPF & Winforms. Call me a dinosaur if you wish.

Ooh, let me guess…

…clicking the X in the corner of the popup (assuming there is one), or pressing Alt-F4, is interpreted as “yes, PLEASE sign me up for this and start slurping my data”?

Can’t let dogmatic adherence to decades-old UI conventions get in the way when there’s cross-brand marketing synergy to be actualized.

Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth a little typing that last sentence.

French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country

Re: F.T.A.

Ssh, don’t flaunt your industry knowledge! Didn’t you sign an NDA or whatever?

Re: F.T.A.

“…but we’re waiting for the council to resurface the road all nice and fresh and smooth before we dig our hole & crudely patch it to the industry-standard 0.5” below the rest of the surface.”

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

>Oracle is a well functioning economic (sub-)system.

So is the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. What's your point, exactly?

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

It's a dedicated late for cars equipped with a turbot.

Re: super thread drift.. but..

>That's a weird thing to teach. They don't teach that here in the US. It makes no sense, because without brake lights it is less apparent to other cars that you're stopped which seems to me to make it less safe.

As Red Sceptic has already alluded just above, the recommended procedure - at least, when I was taught to drive *coughcough* years ago in the UK - is to apply the hand/parking brake if you anticipate that you'll be stopped for more than a few seconds, but - if and only if there is no car behind you - either keep your foot on the pedal brake, or be prepared to pump the pedal repeatedly to flash the rear brake lights if you see someone approaching you in your rear view mirror.

That way you don't blind the person sat stationary behind you, but you also minimize the risk of being rear-ended.

Uncle Sam opens probe into CrowdStrike turbulence at Delta Air Lines

Re: 1150 cancellations and only 3000 complaints….

And possibly an IT department recently outsourced and/or treated as just a nuisance, a drag on profits?

Speculating, I admit. But I wouldn’t be surprised either.

Philadelphia tree trimmers fail to nip FTC noncompete ban in the bud

Re: if I'm not being paid...

It dozen’t work like that.

Windows Patch Tuesday update might send a user to the BitLocker recovery screen

Re: Jesus H

The horror version of Groundhog Day.

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

Re: Yeah, this was fun...

Eeeeek. That’s not a “drive home”, that’s a road trip (albeit an involuntary one).

I drove the 1100 miles from Palm Springs CA up to Portland OR once, stopping only for gas and bladder; not an experience I’m in a hurry to repeat.

FTC grabs controller as Microsoft jacks up Game Pass price by 81%

Re: I’m shocked.

Ooh! A downvoter! Who will now of course offer a thoughtful and reasoned explanation of why I am wrong, and megamergers are a good thing.

Or will possibly admit that they struggle with the concept of "sarcasm", and therefore probably shouldn't be reading El Reg anyway.

Over to you, downvoter!

I’m shocked.

Megamerger leads to reduced customer choice, job losses, and higher prices.

Honestly, who could have seen this coming? If only someone had said something or warned us.

UK cops arrest teen suspect in MGM Resorts cyberattack probe

Good.

But what's the betting that his defence will turn out to be some (claimed) variant on autism/Asperger's? Seems to be the universal fall-on-the-sympathy-of-the-jury defence for computer crime cases.

And before you all pile on me - autism and Aspergers are very real, and many people are afflicted by them, yes. But I'm getting a little tired of it being the first thing a criminal defence lawyer tries; mainly because it stigmatises all genuine sufferers ("oh, you're one of those criminal computer hacker types").

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Probably in a tiny room somewhere

Something with flow control, certainly.

Re: erosionem linguam

Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano in mea bideo.

And I think we all know what THAT means, Holly.

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Three Dog Night told us: "There's a bathroom on the right".

Are you sure you're not thinking of Creedence Clearwater Revival, with their well-known Mondegreen from Bad Moon Rising?

See also Jimi Hendrix and "'scuse me while I kiss this guy", and my personal favourite, Enya with the chorus of Orinoco Flow: "Save a whale, save a whale, save a whale..."

Trust me, once you've read those words, you'll never hear them singing anything else.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

IPMI in the datacenter, or Intel’s vPro/AMT for clients. The latter, once configured, gives what is essentially hardware-level VNC access with KVM control and network drive mounting / boot redirection. It’s saved my bacon more than once. Combined with a simple script it could be used to deploy this Crowdstrike workaround in seconds per PC.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Re: WTF?

The ones with AI (and Genuine People Personalities) saw this coming and are hiding in the basement.

Release the hounds! Securing datacenters may soon need sniffer dogs

Re: Demolition Man Revisited

Wouldn’t it be crowded up there what with the three sea-shells as well?

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

Or the bug where typing an email becomes incredibly slow; resolved, IIRC, by whitelisting one of Thunderbird’s data files in Windows Defender’s exclusion list. You could argue that this is a Defender issue not a Thunderbird one, but no other email client that I’m aware of is similarly affected.

A minor gripe, though. I am despite appearances a Thunderbird fan, and will be giving this new version a spin.

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Tried installing NT 4 in a virtual machine on modern hardware? The installer process takes about 30 seconds. It’s heartwarming.

Evidence for Moon caves emerges as humans hunt for hospitable hideaway under lunar surface

Re: Arrers

Moonington Crescent!

Car dealer software slinger CDK Global said to have paid $25M ransom after cyberattack

Re: BlackSuit “supports” Linux operating systems :o

On Gentoo, of course, it gets delivered to the victim as sourcefiles that they have to compile themselves.