Posts by JimmyPage

Cybercriminals threaten to leak all 5 million records from stolen database of high-risk individuals

Are lists of dodgy criminals secret ?

In the UK they're in the public domain. It's called "The Cabinet"

Software glitch saw Aussie casino give away millions in cash

So, they are leaking cash

and still in business ?

Tells you a lot about margins.

NASA tries to jog Voyager 1's memory from 15 billion miles away

Tis is REAL science and engineering

Total and utter respect (we're not worthy) for the team working on this.

And not a hint of "AI" in sight anywhere,

Makes you think.

on me-->

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

News ?

My employer (a UK insurance company) was doing this 15 years ago. With additional help from Google Earth and Streetview

Just because the US has discovered something, isn't automatically news.

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

There is a joke here, somewhere

About living under a flight path and getting a Boeing in instalments

But - much like Boeings quality control team, I can't be arsed..

Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card

This is where standards come in.

You will excuse the hollow laugh.

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

Surprised it's only just come to the fore.

Am I alone in being slightly taken aback this hasn't been settled before ?

Alibaba signs to explore one-hour rocket deliveries

Maybe Chinese calendars

are a couple of days out ?

Happy 20th birthday Gmail, you're mostly grown up – now fix the spam

How many of those accounts

were created as the only way to access the play store ?

I "have" a gMail account. I never use it. Despite Android trying to force it on me everywhere. It's used for the play store and has a catchall redirect to my real email just in case.

Ex-White House CIO tells The Reg: TikTok ban may be diplomatic disaster

Re: With no express right to privacy in the U. S. Constitution,

The fourth amendment is pretty blunt.

Exposed: Chinese smartphone farms that run thousands of barebones mobes to do crime

Only if it wasn't making money for Google.

Don't be like these 900+ websites and expose millions of passwords via Firebase

We have a fucktonne of standards for physical security

ISO this, BS that,

How come - in an industry that fetishises standards - there isn't an ISO/RFC standard for authentication that mandates password hashing, etc etc. Possibly with a account recovery procedure appendix.

30+ years in IT, and we are still having to fix the roll your own brigades fuck ups. Because yes, your little postcode validation routine must be better than something tried and tested for decades.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

And ? (again)

and AirBnB is not a hotel. As you will discover very quickly if you expect any customer service.

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

Distillation ?

#justasking

German defense chat overheard by Russian eavesdroppers on Cisco's WebEx

So amateur you can't help but wonder

if it wasn't deliberate.

A good strategy in war (and that's what is going on here) is to feed your opponents view of you.

Which does, of course, work both ways ....

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

The point about Ai was probably close to the mark

I bet Google Maps "learns" roads by following peoples movements.

It certainly "knows" some unofficial shortcuts near me (like the back way to the motorway from the services).

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

Maybe isopropyl alcohol ?

Immersion then evaporation ?

Or just shut the thing in a box with a small peltier dehumidifier ?

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Any DBA of a database can access all the data using a suitable command shell/query language.

Not true.

Homomorphic encryption

The fact it's not more widely used suggests the powers that be aren't so keen on teh idea of data they can't slurp.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

One word ...

Collosus

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

POPCNT

missing a "U" in there, surely ?

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Vaguely reminiscent of the opening of a film ?

Terminator ?

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

One of the best memes ...

Family fortunes with Michelle Mone.

Les Dennis: Name one thing you should get in a pandemic ?

MM: Rich.

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

And so0 ...

I can already see the UK becoming a dumping ground for obsolete tech

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

January 2020, management : It's "impossible" to WFH

March 2020, management: You can *only* WFH or the company dies.

This is a classic case of the powers that be being caught in a lie, and using "can't" as a synonym for "won't".

I'm mildly surprised we haven't seen hysterical headlines about "WFH helps terrorists", or "only paedos would WFH"

Brit watchdog thinks Google's tweaked Privacy Sandbox still isn't cricket

Is there a way to return "FUCK YOU" back to Google

for any and all of my interests ?

Snow day in corporate world thanks to another frustrating Microsoft Teams outage

The Peter Principle

Everything gets promoted above it's level of competence. Ay which point you have to rely on the unpromoted parts.

I give you ... the cloud.

We also need to bear in mind John Glenns famous observation about sitting atop a bomb build by a collective of lowest bidders.

You think your PHB were tight ? Imagine how much these "cloud corporations" are trying to get away with not spending.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Re: Made some decent bank

It's how AI talks ...

Windows 12 fan fiction shows how Microsoft might ladle AI into the OS

We are seeing tectonic plates shift here

or maybe they did ages ago, and we are only just realising.

"Olden days" - the OS was needed to manage the machines resources most effectively, efficiently and properly.

The future: the OS is merely a shim between the user and the AI cloud.

Looking at cars might help. Gone are the days the driver had to adjust the advance/retard themselves as well as tweaking the fuel/air mixture in flight. Now they just drive.

That being said, you can fuck off if you think I want any sort of AI in my OS. Especially MS AI.

Vodafone signs a 10-year, $1.5B deal with Microsoft that sheds European DCs

oh do FOAD

deliver frictionless, real-time, proactive and hyperpersonalized experiences across all Vodafone customer touchpoints

How about a phone network that works and is cheap ?

Mandiant's brute-forced X account exposes perils of skimping on 2FA

Re: Brute forced?

Why wasn't the account locked after the 3rd failure ?

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

There's an Ignobel prize here ....

For researching the dynamics of falling phones. It's starting to look like they have a tendency to land in a way to do least damage ....

Teardown finds Huawei's 5nm notebook processor was made in Taiwan, not China

Room temperature semiconductors ?

Someone had to say it

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

Ah, the old forgotten bit ...

I'm sure all of us have had a moment when an alert pops up and no one has any idea (a) where it's coming from and (b) what it does.

Little tip: if you ensure you do a grown-up test of your UPSs by actually shutting things down (because as long as the mains is connected the battery remaining is a guesstimate you really don't want to rely on) you can winkle out some dinosaur processes.

Also restarting your comms to flush out DHCP reservation issues.

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Re: US jet engine patent that was granted this century,

Hero of Alexander created a jet engine in Roman times.

A lot of Roman engineering and science was never developed because with slaves, they had no need. Which is a warning sign for future generations.

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

Still, the great thing about keyboards ...

is they are probably the most replaceable part of a system. And I already have a cache of perfectly functional Dell and HP keyboards accrued from *years* of hoarding.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

This service would be financed by the CUSTOMERS rather than the taxpayer.

FTFY.

How the tech toy century has troubled Santa's sack

the lightweight rechargeable battery.

so close, but missed at the last with the multitude of various chargers.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

there's nothing particularly wrong with Windows 11

Tell me you don't use windows without saying you don't use windows.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: Whilst it has a lot of drawbacks...

Job creation scheme, innit ?

Doesn't this invert democracy

where we tell our elected leaders what THEY can spend OUR money on ?

Microsoft puts the 'why?' in Wi-Fi with latest Windows patch

Oh the (painful) irony.

Stable WiFi was the one thing MS had over Linux (and having spent 2 days trying to get a box that worked for 8 years under windows working in Linux, I am in no mood for a gentle debate on the issue).

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

A waste of time looking forwards.

Much easier to look back, and ask why every single empire in history has collapsed spectacularly,

(And I am just thinking of the ones we know about)

Because, to paraphrase the Hyneman: "That's your answer right there."

To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

Oh FFS !

How fucking difficult is it for programmers to wrap a tiny sanity check around the "To/CC/BCC" fields in their shitty email "apps" to pause for a second if there are more than (say) 10 people in the field ?

"Your email appears to be going to more than 10 people, and may include more people on the BCC list. Do you wish to check before sending ?"

for example. With an additional flag to enforce it for more paranoid organisations.

Or or we waiting for Apple to fucking patent it ?

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

And yet email use is decreasing

to be replaced by telephones.

Go figure.

North Korea makes finding a gig even harder by attacking candidates and employers

How come we never hear stories

Of non-gullible hackers using this trick to backload some malware up to our Norky chums ?

What do you mean "what do I think we've been doing for years ?" ?

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

Hmmm ... the airgap browser

(this is total kite flying)

While a little bit Heath Robinsonish, how about a UHD camera that points at a browser screen, with a hi-fi microphone rig connected to the speakers, and an AI program that simply cuts out areas of the screen based on it's own AI.

If I never post again it will be because this is exactly how GCHQ avoid the Chrome tracking and cruft without alerting Google.

For OSI fans, this is moving the war above the application layer.

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

Maybe reverse the process ?

Offer to work in a fully open space with the Chinese. Then you know exactly what they are up too.

Cruise parks entire US fleet over safety fears

Re: If you can fix train ridership, you can fix bus ridership

If they actually

1) went to useful places

2) at useful times

3) on a regular basis

4) were reasonably priced

then you've fixed it. However every single one of those objectives breaks the "business model" of someone who has bought your government.

The only way to make autonomous cars safe

is to ensure they have a very regular predictable environment.

Basically a version of a railway.

UK signals legal changes to self-driving vehicle liabilities

It's so fucking simple

it's embarrassing.

If a car wants to drive by itself (or it's manufacturers) then it sits a bog standard UK driving test.

If it passes then - like us mean puppets - it has demonstrated a level of competence assumed to be "safe enough"

All of this hand wringing would make sense if human drivers never made mistakes or killed people.