Posts by David 132

AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

[citation needed]

From the article: And as humans need oxygen

See, that’s just shoddy journalism. Wild assertions, not backed up by any references or explanation. Pure speculation.

Poor show. I shall be canceling my subscription forthwith, etc etc.

Ransomware-skewered meat producer JBS confesses to paying $11m for its freedom

Re: "Resolve" is an interesting word

“…the equivalent of $11million. In Danegeld.”

Generous Alibaba to scatter 0.9% of annual revenue over Southeast Asia to develop tech talent and infrastructure

Re: Erm…

Just a heads up... the El Reg team do prefer you to use the Corrections link ([e-mail]) at the bottom of the article to report stuff like that. They've been known to get quite tetchy about people who choose to make fun of their errors in the comment threads.

Ingratiating themselves with the CCP by putting funding towards the new "make China appear friendly and cuddly" initiative?

I wonder if Indonesia and the Philippines know that expression about supping with the devil and using a long spoon?

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Or google'd Google?

US House Rep on cyber committees tweets Gmail password, PIN in Capitol riot lawsuit outrage

Re: Jeebus Cribes, that tweet

While your not especially wrong

In a comment criticizing other people's standards of literacy. Oh, the irony.

Muphry's Law strikes once more.

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Re: I've had some interesting errors, but.

I seem to recall there was an incident a few years ago where a mix-up over daylight savings time caused a (Palestinian? Hamas?) suicide bomber to blow up an hour prematurely, whilst still en route to his target.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: Access denied

"How do you avoid making mistakes? Experience.

How do you get experience? By making mistakes."

Re: Push me

And yes, i already used it as a decoy, two times effectively preventing the real e-stop button ( around 3 meters down the corridor) to be pressed.

All fun and games until someone walks up to the joke button on the wall, laughingly says "listen to what happens when I press this, it's hilarious!"... and realizes they are 3 metres further up the corridor than they thought...

Definite shades of Chief Inspector Dreyfus and his joke gun-shaped cigarette lighter... "Don't just stand there, call a doctor, and then help me find my nose..."

Sold: €15k invisible sculpture that's a must-see for art lovers

Re: Art

You have to be reverential and quiet when discussing it.

It's Sh!Art.

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Re: Collecting rarities

AKA “Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten”, as Sir Pterry put it…

Deadline draws near to avoid auto-joining Amazon's mesh network Sidewalk

Re: I wonder if...

Finally! An excuse to wear my Pac-a-Mac in public without looking like a complete dweeb!

And the tartan Thermos flask is for, uh... blockchain! And the black rubber nerd-strap around my glasses is... hmmm.... it blocks 5G, yeah, that's it...

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: Carbon neutral

Many roads in older parts of towns were sized for horses and handsome cabs

Which was, frankly, discriminatory against the plug-ugly or even just homely cabs.

ITYM "hansom" cabs?

Surviving eclipse season and resurrecting 25-year-old software with Windows for Workgroups 3.11: One year with Mars Express

Re: some are working remotely.

Would it be hyperbolic to suggest that “thanks” to comcast, AT&T, Verizon and their ilk, the Mars Express team probably have a better & more reliable link across 211 million miles to their orbiter than many remote workers here in the US do across the few dozen miles to their offices?

Who gave dusty Soviet-era spacecraft that unwanted lick of paint? It was an idiot, with a spraycan, in Baikonur

Re: How low the mighty have fallen

Not mentioned is that the Buran which actually made it into Earth orbit was destroyed when its poorly maintained Cosmodrome collapsed.

I don't know if the article was updated after you posted your comment, but there's definitely mention of that in it:

"The only orbiter to fly, 1K, was reduced to scrap when the roof of the building housing it collapsed on 12 May 2002."

Apple's iPad Pro on a stick, um, we mean M1 iMac scores 2 out of 10 for repairability

Re: You can never be too rich or too thin

Bookmarks? Give it another 2 or 3 generations and you'll be able to use the ipad pro to gap spark-plugs.

Nature is healing: Shhh. It's a lesser spotted Pi Bork nesting behind the bushes at IKEA

Re: Börkäge

So what you’re saying is that I should refrain from posting the news of the Møøse that bit mi sister…

Oh, you’re no fun any more.

Lessons have not been learned: Microsoft's Modern Comments leave users reaching for the rollback button

Re: Old laws new again

I'm making a note here:

HUGE SUCCESS.

Déjà bork: BSOD fairy pays key-cutting kiosk another visit

Resetting it

Certainly, a remote recovery from a BSOD can present a challenge unless one has an extra long finger with which to jab the reset button

Yes. Such a shame the Fing-Longer hasn't been invented yet.

Ah well. A man can dream. A man can dream.

Linux laptop biz System76 makes its first foray into the mechanical keyboard world with dinky, hackable Launch

Re: Way too many keys

and it has caps lock and shift and punctuation keys i mean who uses those

signed ee cummings

Re: Why?

First keyboard firmware virus for this thing incoming in 3, 2, 1...

Re: The price is high....

But I Want That, Man.

I'll get it One Way Or Another, though it might take a Long Time.

Activist millionaires protest outside Jeff Bezos' homes to support tax rises for the rich

Re: Tax avoidance costs

And if they feel so strongly that they're not being taxed enough, there's nothing to stop them writing a large check to the IRS each year over and above their tax liabilities. "Here! Have more of my money!"

Waymo self-driving robotaxi goes rogue with passenger inside, escapes support staff

Too right. This is 2021. It should be using blockchain!

NASA pops old-school worm logo onto Orion spacecraft

Flight of the Navigator was an excellent film, although to my mind Explorers was better. Very Young Me certainly thought so.

India’s vaccination-booking API criticised for excluding millions, containing bugs, and overflowing with elitism

Re: The complaints have a point.

Looks like they've managed to make a vaccination registration system that (inadvertently) excludes the rural, generally illiterate, poor. Who are also the subset of the population least likely to have access to good diet/nutrition and healthcare, and hence most vulnerable to Covid and the associated mucormycosis. And are also the ones who live day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, and are in real trouble if they lose even a day of health.

I think it would have been more prudent - assuming they don't have enough vaccines yet to go around the entire population - to divide up their stock, go out to every village and corner of the land, and just start vaccinating people. Maybe the old/sick/infirm first. Keep a log. Maybe "permanent" ink hand-stamps to denote those who have been vaccinated. Repeat as necessary as new vaccine stock arrives. K.I.S.S.

Rude awakening for O2 customers after network runs surprise test of emergency mobile alert system

Re: Interesting accent choice

Obviously, it should be Pam Ayres' voice!

(Icon chosen as an example of someone who probably wishes he'd looked after his teeth.)

Maybe the nuclear apocalypse only happened in some parts of the country, and your area was spared?

I mean, there are parts of the UK - and I am deliberately not going to name them, so feel free to think of your own according to individual prejudice - where the inhabitants are already living in a ruined lawless dystopia, and the Russians wouldn't want to waste their very expensive missiles...

Nice idea, usually ruined by overuse

Here in Oregon, I used to have the government & AMBER alerts enabled on my phone. But after the second time of getting woken at 3AM by an ear-splitting siren and an alert along the lines of “MISSING CHILD POSSIBLY ABDUCTED, IN VICINITY OF BOISE IDAHO” (clue: Boise is about 500 miles away, so obviously it’s vital to wake everyone in a 1000-mile radius and give them a coronary) I switched them off. If the clueless chucklefucks who operate the system had only learned from “the boy who cried wolf”…

App Tracking: Apps plead for users to press allow, but 85% of Apple iOS consumers are not opting in

Re: Ark 2

Be patient. Facebook and the others will be despatched on the B Ark, just as soon as the moist lemon-scented towelettes are delivered.

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

Re: Lessons learnt? I doubt it.

He went on to write a widely-deployed Linux init system.

Stale and past its best. Are you talking about Windows or the pizza you're waiting for?

Re: Pizza toppings

Please note that in spite of the name this has nothing to do with Hawaiian cuisine.

It would be more Hawaiian if you substituted Spam for the ham. Not wanting to give the fine pizzerias of Germany any ideas, of course…

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

The customer service person was very helpful but very surprised that my DoB in the system was "wrong"

Shoulda just told them, with a straight face, that your DoB had changed because you were a born-again Christian.

I have kind of the opposite problem. I have two Amazon accounts - one personal tied to my gmail address, and one for work, tied to my corporate email. The latter is linked to my cellphone (which is a personal phone, but company funded) for 2FA.

On my personal Amazon account, I'm forever being nagged to set up 2FA. So I enter my cellphone number - and get told "nope, this number is already linked to an Amazon account" (duh, yes, my second account).

It's apparently beyond Amazon's ken that anyone might conceivably have two accounts. Despite them being the ones who aggressively pushed my company into forcing us all to switch to corporate Amazon accounts in the first place (where the pricing is higher, but hey, someone somewhere is getting a kick-back I'm sure).

China sprayed space with 3,000 pieces of junk. US military officials want rules to stop that sort of thing

Re: Let's not forget

"Oh, bother!" said Xi, "I've got my head stuck in this jar of Hunny..."

Re: @LogicGate - Two faced?

Only if you've been lubricating the elephant first.

At which point, we all have to ask, just what the hell are you playing at? It can cause terrible pachydermatitis.

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

Re: If it doesn't make sense,

Do you mean obfuscsplaining?

There may have been problems with the JEDI deal but you still wouldn't have won, Oracle told by US govt

Re: 'Smine!

Ah, the Violet Bott legal strategy - "I'll thcream and thcream and thcream 'till I'm thick!"

Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably

Re: Novel interference

I find a lot of rubbish that I can't possibly have written.

I remember reading an interview with Neil Gaiman - or it might have been Sir Terry - about the writing process for Good Omens.

Because NG was in the USA at the time, and ST was in the UK, they would take turns to each fax the other the bit they’d written while the other was asleep.

Which worked fine until they found marvellous bits of prose in the growing document that both would swear they hadn’t written.

Mayday! Mayday! Microsoft has settled on a build and Windows 10 21H1 is inbound

Re: Settings......

Not to mention every single Windows 10 update puts a shortcut for Edge back on the desktop.

I don't want your shitty browser. Stop trying to make it happen. It's not going to happen.

Google to ban emoji, deceptive marketing, and ALL CAPS from Play Store metadata later this year

Sure there are, like the.. oh no wait, that one does, how about... ah no, caught myself in time, that one does too. Hmm.

Try the Ham, Eggs, Spam and Spam. That doesn't have much Spam in it.

Re: 30 character limit is limited

And they've torpedoed, if you'll pardon the expression, my plan to offer an information app for German-speaking officers in the Danube steamboat company (Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän)

Curse you Google and your arbitrary restrictions! Thanks to your shortsightedness, Apple are going to own the market for Danube steamboat captain-related apps!

Stealthy Linux backdoor malware spotted after three years of minding your business

Disguising it as Systemd is cunning

How many admins, upon seeing a process (apparently) related to systemd sending data out on a well-known port, would assume it was malware?

I suspect that in many cases, the response would instead be a shrug and a resigned muttering of "so systemd has now extended its tentacles over TLS too? *sigh*"

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: If you want a prime example of how not to drive...

The consensus on t'Reddit seems to be that it was just dirt being washed off the top of the truck, which is literally the most boring explanation possible.

What amused me was the way the driver reversed, the truck hit the overhead roof beam, and his passenger got out and looked everywhere except up.. "nope, there's no curb behind you, we must have imagined that loud crash and the truck almost coming off its frame, try again... repeatedly..."

Clearly, you've never driven in Boston.

Or been a pedestrian in Venice (not a lot of drivers around those streets.)

No street-signs of any sort; if you're lucky, you'll happen upon a location where some helpful soul has chalked "PIAZZA SAN MARCO --->" on the corner of a building. Cos all navigation directions are referenced from St Mark's - so if you can get back there...

Dark, narrow, medieval streets, very little street-lighting, canals everywhere waiting for the unwary to stumble into them... it's a lovely city but trying to find my way back one evening after dark was some serious Don't Look Now shit.

Icon - that's my coat. No, not that red cloak.

Re: Best roundabout in the world...

You've reminded me of the XKCD rotary supercollider...

First Coinbase, now Basecamp: Should workplaces ban political talk on internal corporate platforms?

Re: Pub rules

What makes a bestselling novel? The best themes are: sex, the aristocracy, religion, and crime/mystery.

On that basis, the best possible opening sentence for a novel is said to be,

“‘Hell!’ said the Duchess, ‘I’m pregnant. Whodunnit?’”

Here's what Russia's SVR spy agency does when it breaks into your network, says US CISA infosec agency

Re: the unpronounceable Yttrium

I believe it was Jo Brand who told the joke years ago about Watson walking into 221b Baker St, to find Holmes on his hands and knees attempting to push a small yellow citrus fruit up his posterior.

"My God, Holmes! What are you doing?"

"Lemon entry, my dear Watson."

JavaScript developers left in the dark after DroidScript software shut down by Google over ad fraud allegations

Re: Nobody works at Google anymore

The abuse and webmaster mail accounts have a "prerecorded" message, stating that the email has been automatically been deleted and emails to these accounts are never read.

That, right there, tells you what disdain Google have for the niceties of being a good Internet citizen.

No, I’m sure the relevant RFC doesn’t mandate that the abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses are staffed 24x7 with a 15-minute SLA, but even so - “we have these addresses for the look of the thing but you might as well be dropping meringues into a black hole for all the good emailing them will do” just shows a complete lack of courtesy.

China claims it has stolen a march on 6G with colossal patent portfolio

Re: What's the point of 6G?

Jake, I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment, but think about your analogy for a moment. Creating documents and spreadsheets is a baseline capability these days. How would your DOS-based 486DX33 fare, say, playing a 1080p video stream, or transcoding that stream to h265? Go ahead, try it, I'll wait :)

Or to put it another way... "I don't see the point in these new cars. I can trundle the mile-and-a-half once a week to the village store at 15mph just as well in my Model T Ford as in any new car..."