Posts by David 132

Canada's .ca supremo in hot water after cyber-smut stash allegedly found on his work Mac ‒ and three IT bods fired

Re: That's quite an iMac

Shades of the old Python joke... "I object to all this sex on the television. I keep falling off."

My eyes thank you, Google: Android to get dark mode scheduling in future update

It does seem like Google (originally?) chose the most complicated way possible.

"Apps have to request location permissions"? No. The system knows where it is, and just needs to broadcast a "go to dark mode now" message to applications whenever the user has explicitly, or via sunset scheduling, requested it.

Why on Earth would Google do it in the way described in the article, which must be the most permissions-profligate, privacy-invasive way... oh. Never mind.

We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory

Re: Ho Hum

..and in the North, a lorryload of hair restorer has spilled on the M54. Police are combing the area.

Meanwhile in Derby, a pet shop was ransacked of all its stock overnight. Police say they have no leads.

Re: Ho Hum

"The Talons of Weng-Chiang".

Thanks for the reminder. Must watch that again.

Re: But I already harvest organs from hogs!

Seldom has anyone made a rasher comment.

Xbox Series X: Gee thanks, Microsoft! Just what we wanted for Xmas 2020 – a Gateway tower PC

My last Xbox was so unstable, it must have been made by Gateway - it kept fresian up.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Re: glow worms?

Yes, it does. I saw some once in the verge of a lane just outside Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire. Delightful, almost magical-looking creatures.

Re: Dynamo Dan, the Electric Man

Give him a break, it happened Ians ago, and probably left a Mark.

Re: Not just a wall socket

I sympathise, having just bought a house (here in the USA) and encountered such diverse horrors as

-external sockets not weatherproofed, with no GFCI [ground fault] protection, just a short arm's reach from a hot-tub,

-sockets in a built-in desk that were wired by the simple expedient of cutting a hole in the plasterboard, ripping out the wires from the existing wall socket and then stuffing them straight into the desk socket, unprotected,

-sockets in a barn that had live/neutral reversed, open grounds, and about 35A worth of load on a 15A breaker,

-30-year-old recessed light fittings so full of mouse droppings, wasps' nests, sawdust and fluff that it's a wonder they didn't spontaneously flame out.

*shudder*

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, unencrypted hard drives of staff data stolen

And what do biblical ships for fish have to do with it? This "carp ark" of which you speak fascinates me.

Well, the alternative for him was a Pot Noodle, as I recall. So he made the sane choice.

HPE to Mike Lynch: You told either El Reg or High Court the right version of why former Autonomy execs won't testify

I think the term is "a Hail Mary pass".

Next up, HPE's lawyers will bring up the subject of wookiees on Endor.

Oracle leaves its heart in San Francisco – or it would do if, you know, Oracle had a heart

Re: Good riddance

"hordes"

Re: Vegas Knows how to host a convention

Yes, mostly agreed, apart from the usual Vegas unpleasantness of having to cross an entire floor of nicotine-stinking, flashing/clamoring gambling machines and tables just to get to the hotel checkin, then from there to the elevators.

Gee, it's almost like they're trying to manipulate everyone into gambling... surely not.

Re: Vegas

So I'm not the only one who takes 19½ minutes to sign an S/4HANA contract then?

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: C'mon - there's a Register article from Oct 2019 that says the opposite

That would be the case - and outcome - that's referred to in the second paragraph of the fine article.

Re: Engineers

..and the qualification process is paneful.

Alleged Nigerian social engineer wins free flight to the US for business email fraud and love scams

Re: So it's a rare thumbs up for the wheels of justice

Just don't ask how much the transport, trials and incarcerations are costing vs. the funds stolen.

Fair point, but since when has justice (in the ideal world, pace the US prison system) been about making a profit?

Next on the demonization list...

”Using sophisticated anonymization techniques, including the use of spoofed email addresses and Virtual Private Networks”

Interesting that they call out VPNs in the same breath as “spoofed email addresses”. Is this the first volley in law enforcement’s next campaign to get VPNs tagged in public perception as “something only criminals use”, or am I being overly paranoid?

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Re: Paper White...

Unless you’re an alpha male, in which case it’s AAFFFFFF or AAFF0000.

And I heard a rumor about changing the planet's name to "U-rectum" (obligatory reference to Futurama)

To shreds, you say?

Samsung Galaxy S11 tipped to escalate the phone cam arms race with 108MP sensor

Re: None of the above

...plus, when you take it out to show people, you get to yell “Say hello to my little friend!” in your best Pacino voice, right?

Nokia 2.3: HMD flings out €109 budget 'droid with a 2-day battery

USB-C, I presume. The main advantage of which in this context is that it’s not orientation-sensitive, so much easier to plug in vs. Micro USB.

Whoooooa, this node is on fire! Forget Ceph, try the forgotten OpenStack storage release 'Crispy'

Re: proper application of thermite

Next you'll be trying to tell me there's a difference between thermite and Marmite.

Fancy a sandwich?

Scammy and spammy harassers are chasing veteran pros off crypto-collab platform Keybase

Re: Who in this era ...

Techno-utopians, of the "Wouldn't It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice" persuasion, apparently.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

I think he should read the Count of Zenda first

Or the sequel that starred Elvis Presley, “Return to Zenda”.

*joke (C) Russ Abbott circa 1984

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

"Buggy driver"?

BSD is preferred but "a single buggy driver can crash the system".

So just don't let the Amish use it then. Problem solved.

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

Re: What a time to be alive...

Ah, you're a waffle man?

Re: thank god.....

I’m well into my 50s and my gearing is fine

Good to see you've still got your cog-nitive faculties.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

Re: Too much Credit

turn the elephant upside down and watch the spectacular fail.

I'll take "sentences that would completely confuse our ancestors" for $100 please, Alex.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

Re: "Remediate"????

Jesus saves, but Hoddle scores on the rebound.

(Edit: this is the joke as I heard it in the '80s. For those of you wondering "who's 'Hoddle'?", feel free to substitute a more contemporary name.)

Re: Pity it's not a traditional drive...

It's solid state though so once you've hit the limit you can flip the sign bit by turning the drive over and carrying on as normal

Stop! Do not do this! This will lead to data loss!

FIRST, you have to use a hole-punch to mark the drive as double-sided.

AC, you should be ashamed of yourself, giving out incomplete advice like that.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Re: lifeboats and goblins

and how the same happening to the "goblins" utility would seem if it were being used in an office suffering an invasion of ... err .. goblins. :-)

Don’t know, but it sounds like an Elfin Safety violation to me.

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: Speed of light

Such an erudite and learned comment. I bet you have a degree.

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

Poor struggling Apple.

Can we start a GoFundMe to keep these noble altruists in business?

No wonder cops are so keen on Ring – they can slurp your doorbell footage with few limits, US senators complain

Re: Nextdoor

Overly paranoid there, I think. Nextdoor.com is super handy as a hyper-local forum for staying in touch with neighbors; on ours, the local sheriffs' dept posts regular updates and it's great for getting the word out about missing pets, etc (and as a less dodgy alternative to Craigslist for getting rid of unwanted stuff.)

I don't get anything in the way of junk (e)mail that I can attribute to Nextdoor, so my opinion of it is pretty positive.

You'd have received that postcard because one of your neighbors requested it be sent to you - the remorseless logic of the network effect is that the more people are on the neighborhood's forum, the more useful it is to everyone.

Wasn't me that downvoted you, btw.

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Or as my mum always put it: "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"

What a load of bollards! Object of bloke's street furniture romp run over

Re: The state of education in this country today!

“It wasn’t my fault, it was the asphalt”

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

"The triggerer triggerer"?

We're speaking German now because....?

(apologies to The Simpsons, who like most things, Did This Joke First.)

It's good that you knew your plaice.

Re: Huh,

Well, if you get hungry, you could always eat that massive chip on your shoulder.

Re: Eggs on a train?

Yeah, yeah... puns about French bread are a pain, and jokes about German sausages are just the wurst.

Je ne regrette rien!

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Selective deafness

"Our pro customers tell us they want their next MacBook Pro to have a larger display, blazing-fast performance, the biggest battery possible, the best notebook keyboard ever, awesome speakers and massive amounts of storage, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers all of that and more," claimed Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad product marketing, Tom Boger.

I think, Tom, that you must have a failing pair of disposable EarPods wedged in your shell-likes and impeding your hearing, because Pro customers have also been asking for:

-removable/replaceable battery

-upgradeable RAM

-ditto SSD

-useful number of ports

...since, oh, about the last six years or so.

(Rant follows. Feel free to ignore.)

I used to be a huge Apple fan. Between 2006 (first Intel-based devices) and 2011 (last decently upgradeable iMac) I bought, for me, my wife and extended family, just about everything they offered - Macbooks (& Pros), iMacs, AppleTVs, iPads, iPhones... but no more. While they have this fanatical obsession with THINNER THINNER THINNER and hypocritical "we're SO green, but you can't upgrade any of our products and have to treat them as disposable" I am boycotting them.

There. I feel better for that.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Re: Sopwith Camel user interface

A tad off-topic, but the opposite of this was true for the Sopwith Camel: three rights made a left.[...] Took the same amount of time

Interesting. Torque effects from the propellor rotation?

Re: George 2+

Wow.

I think you've definitely earned your Platinum 1K Lifetime Elite geek card there.

(either that, or just know how to use Wikipedia/Google, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt!)

Re: SCO Unix

I learn't to use disksuite after that.

And now work a's a greengroc'er?

Re: SCO Unix

Sounds like karmic opposite of the "Woman finds out she won the lottery, 10 minutes after learning she'd beaten cancer" story I read in the news yesterday.

Yin, yang..

Facebook iOS app silently turns on your phone camera. Ah, relax – it's just a bug, lol!?

Re: Which is it

I'd be more concerned about his intended meaning of the word "it".

"We're looking into...

...our users' homes"?

...our users' reactions to each advert we show them?"

...the abyss of impending failure as people increasingly realize how much we are data-mining every facet of their existence to use against them"? (unlikely, but I can dream.)

Don't miss this patch: Bad Intel drivers give hackers a backdoor to the Windows kernel

Re: Trust Me. I'm a Microsoftie

...and any political party with the words "Liberal" or "Democrat" in their name is neither liberal nor democratic?

(trollface icon - light touchpaper, stand well back, watch fireworks)

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: Tollgates?

...not to mention the wisdom of welshing on a debt.