Posts by Mark M.

Oi, clickbait cop bot, jam this in your neural net: Hot new AI threatens to DESTROY web journos

Clickbait headlines vs. intrusive ads

Never mind the click-baitness of a headline. The AI needs to also gauge the number of unwanted and intrusive ads that hide behind such headlines.

Strip Capita of defence IT contract unless things improve – Brit MPs

Re: Why stop at defence?

While the buck always stops with them, it's not entirely the ministers' fault. They are usually treated like mushrooms by the devious Humphreys in the civil service and are usually oblivious to anything and everything that's going wrong until the shit hits the fan while they're right in front of it.

Ministers come and go, but the civil servants remain the same. if you ever wonder why the same mistakes keep getting made despite having different ministers "in charge", look for what never changes in the organization. That is usually the cause of the shit.

If anyone needs to be shuffled out of the MoD, it's all the devious, power-hungry senior civil servants who know very little about the domains in which they work and only exist to brown-nose with other senior civil servants in order to prepare for the moment when they need to jump ship and into another cushty public service job that they can screw up.

Sueball smacks AMD over processor chip security flaw silence

There are probably 2 kinds of people flinging sueballs at AMD at the moment.

1) Greedy munts who only want to see their shares going in an upwards direction and give them quick short-term profits and will fling sueballs if share prices went downwards by as much as $0.001. These greedy munts deserve to lose every cent for investing money that they don't want to lose.

2) Idiot IT bosses who paid millions into putting all their computing hardware into AMD and away from Intel and started believing the sensationalist media over-hype that a fix for AMD devices will slow their new computers down by 50%.

Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets

As long as the unlimited fines doesn't go lower than the high 100's of thousands of pounds and the touts don't end up in front of a wet wimp of a judge (or even a dumbass jury) who doesn't understand the crime or the magnitude of it.

A "fine" of a few 10's of thousand pounds would be loose change to some of these greedy touts who will then make it up with the next ticket scalping.

Hot chips crashed servers, but were still delicious

Re: Power Cables...

Or though plugging in a power strip into another power strip that in itself was plugged into the latter power strip.

The mains cables themselves was a huge spaghetti mess under the desk so unless the entire lot was pulled out, untangled and tidied up, the user had no way of knowing what was plugged into what.

Erase 2017 from your brain. Face ID never happened. The Notch is an illusion

Take it you mean in the centre of the screen, so that when you skype or facetime someone, you're looking straight at them and not to the bottom, top, left, right, wherever the camera pinhole is.

Just like in the movies.

Facebook announces ad revenue reroute: When Irish eyes are crying

I'll bet the definition of "advertising revenue" gets revised by the FB beancounters so that less tax gets paid when distributed to other countries than is currently paid in a single lump to Ireland.

YouTuber cements head inside microwave oven

Re: Confused

Nah, The firepersons should have just grabbed the biggest disc cutters that they had in the back of the fire engine, fired it up and used it on the defunct microwave.

5 minutes, job done and a testament to the delicate skill of the firepersons that they didn't take his head off or cut it open. the brown-stained trousers of the blockhead afterwards isn't their problem.

Awards?

Darwin award? No

Blockhead of the year award... yes. In more than one sense.

New Capita system has left British Army recruits unable to register online

£1.3B project expenditure and no viable end product in sight

This just means most of the budget so far has been wasted on tickboxing exercises from project manglement and other IT non-job manglement all trying to "make their mark" in the project. The term "Agile" is something that goes over the heads of these entrenched civil servant career-manglers at supersonic speed.

The poor solution architect & lead developer have to deal with all these fingers in the pie which inevitably understeers or oversteers the end product requirements way off course with the end result that they are the ones that cop all the blame.

Data-slurping keyboard app makes Mongo mistake with user data

Predictive test app == keylogger?

Surely, if using a "predictive text" keyboard, there would be a history of the words you are typing on your phone in this database? A miscreant could easily sort through through the words and pick out sensitive PII from them.

Pokémon GO caused hundreds of deaths, increased crashes

Blaming the wrong tool

Most Pokemon gyms & stops are at places where youths would normally congregate at anyway, so a fair number of them could have been killed while obsessing over something other than Pokemon Go. Like social media apps or sexting on their mobiles while arranging to meet their family, friends, boyfriend, girlfriend at the aforementioned places.

There's no real evidence other than just a random co-incidence unless the researcher has hard and fast evidence that the last app open on the unfortunate's mobile was indeed Pokemon Go. Which I very seriously doubt.

Activist investor rages at Mellanox for dismissing Marvell's advances

This just reads; "Greedy American shareholder wants quick profit... now."

This Field chap managed to wrest control of Marvell from its original board of directors just over a year ago with just a 6% investment stake in Marvell... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/28/marvell_lists_to_starboard/

Looks like he now wants to try the same contemptible trick with Mellanox. Probably bordering on being immoral and unethical.

Mythical broadband speeds to plummet in crackdown on ISP ads

Advertising: "On average you will get..."

The problem now, is that those who still get below the "average" BB speeds will still complain loudly, even if it's not the ISP's fault that their customer's line is so crappy and it's all the fault of the infrastructure maintainer.

Maybe the ISPs ought to advertise "speeds of upwards of 1bps!!!!".

Amazon launches Secret Region – so secret it's endorsed by the CIA

CIA + Secrets = red flag to Wikileaks & the conspiracy nuts

So, how long will it be before some disgruntled AWS employee secretly backdoors this secret region to Wikileaks?

UK.gov: IT contracts should be no more than 7 years. (Not 18, Fujitsu)

Re: Surely the "no more than 7 years" applies to cloud providers?

They'd just be the systems hosts. Proverbial datacentre lock ins for decades. The government departments still needs to source and pay some 3rd party company to actually, you know, like *develop* the applications and infrastructure that would be put in the Cloud-based datacenters?

That's where 80% of the Government IT problems lay. Knowing precisely what you want in the virtual datacentre and getting someone who can actually do it rather than faff around spinning out the contract for little or no actual work being delivered. Another 15% is continuing to use the Waterfall development process instead of an Agile development process in Government IT moneypits.

Facebook vows to double staff with new cadre of Net Police

Re: So...

More like 20,000 unpaid interns tasked to review the dodgy postings.

Boffins' bonkers fibre demo: 53 Tbps down ONE piece of glass

All nice but...

The smutserver you're streaming your pron from is serviced by a PoS ISP with a single 10Mbps connection shared with about a gazillion other smutsurfers.

Having a 10's of terabytes/sec download link is only worthwhile if the rest of the network is capable of the same kinds of speeds, otherwise you are throttled to the speed of the slowest link in the connection (usually at the other end of the chain or when your connection gets routed though the local intelligence gathering service).

Ex-Harrods IT man cleared of stealing company issued laptop

Erasing content company laptops

If you have personal data you want deleted from a company laptop and the laptop is a cheap-ass PoS with spinning rust for storage, just leave a big-ass electromagnet on it for a few hours before tossing it back.

Any company doing IT support correctly would just re-image the laptop from the latest core build and removing any "customisation" the previous owner may have had which could include elevated privileges to internal systems stored in non-core application installs or support documentation.

WannaCry-slayer Marcus Hutchins 'built Kronos banking trojan' – FBI

Arrested on way home?

I'm willing to bet here that he upset someone with senior fed connections at some point during the DEFCON and they told a pile of wild porkies to the FBI in order to ruin Hutchins' day and reputation. Why else would he be charged before he left the USA and not when he set foot on US soil.

Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain...

Too little, too late

It won't stop the script kiddies and virus/trojan peddlers from sending out "Your Flash install is out of date, please update to the latest [trojan riddled] version here." popups in dodgy adverts.

As part of it's death, Flash ought to self-destruct on any computer receiving the last update and leave behind a small piece of plug-in code that pops up "Flash is dead, this is a virus-ridden site don't go there" before automatically re-diverting to Adobe's page about Flash's retirement whenever a website with any flash content gets loaded.

Virgin Trains dodges smack from ICO: CCTV pics of Corbyn were OK

investigating Corbyn

For what? *every* politician makes bogus claims at some point in order to further their ambitions. In some cases, they're too stupid to properly fact-check what they were told by someone.

100k+ petition: MPs must consider debating Snoopers' Charter again

The only "debate" MPs do on these petitions is in which round filing tray to put these timewasters in. These petitions are already discredited by political activists hijacking them though using false details to boost the number of signatures. All you need is a few dozen like-minded activists, each with a collection of a few hundred fake email addresses and the detailed knowledge of housenumber/postcodes and you can "add" as many people to a petition as you like. There's no proper sanity checking on these petitions as to whether the signee is a real person.

Time to make all official petitions be signed ONLY by UK citizens with a valid GOV.UK ID.

Belgian court fines Skype for failing to intercept criminals' calls in 2012

@Neoc, At the time of the original court order, Skype was still independent - All it was was a peer2peer software. Skype central servers were nothing more than directory listings enabling users to locate other Skype users and what their current IP address is when they logged in online and maybe some feedback metadata for software operation performance. Even back then, you needed to register with a valid email account and was something quick for MS to force MS accounts only onto new users after they bought it. The Skype client back then could still only physically connect the call to another PC running a Skype client that was logged into. There was nothing for Skype to intercept, unless it baked in spyware that sent a digital recording of the call to a central server somewhere.

After 2012, when MS bought it up, they ripped the guts out of it then centralised all the comms routing so they could mismanage it. Now, Skype/MS could comply with the order and intercept a call, but they don't have a time-machine to send the new post-2012 Skype infrastructure back to the time of the conversation in question and then capture/decode it for the Belgians.

New MacBook Pro beckons fanbois to become strip pokers

Re: Strip or screen...

"Couldn't help but think 'just put your hands on the bloody screen man'."

Oh, screw that for a lark. I'm forever using screen wipes to get rid of fingermarks where people jab at *my* non touchscreen display to point out something. Don't know what they've put on it but Macbook displays are *extremely* susceptible to greasy fingerprints.

Stickers emerge as EU's weapon against dud IoT security

Internet connectivity

No-one, other than a complete idiot, is likely to connect their sensitive little IoT gadget *directly* to the internet where it can be abused and sodomized by the skiddies if they ever discover it. If an idiot does do that, then they deserve to get sodomized.

An EU sticker with a "Passed security compliance as of <enter date here>" would be worth as much as a piece of soiled toilet paper in about 3 months to a year's time after that date, especially if the IoT manufacturer is a lazy piece of p*** who ships boxes, takes the money, then washes their hands of any after-sales support by way of updates or customer advice.

Most people who have a need for, and understand, IoT devices will connect it to a router which ought to have reasonable ingress security to protect it. Those who can afford to have expensive IoT gadgets would probably already have a very beefed up firewall/proxy on their router to ensure that whatever is inside their firewall behaves when it goes outside to play and that *nothing* from the outside can get in unless it has the appropriate authentication. They can then worry about firmware updates at their leisure.

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

MS Linux?

As other commenters have said, MS have been using bits of Linux for years, and using Linux internally for years as well. Guess they know bare-bones Linux servers perform better than Windows servers at high demand sevices.

This is the first time they've offered a bare-bones Linux distro for servers without all the crud-ware that they pack in Windows. Probably MS will add a Win10-like desktop package to it and flog it as a Linux replacement for Windows 10 for those who hate Real-Win10. Slowly add in crud-ware packages that install themselves by default. Then they'll get Office365 working in Linux so it kills off LibreOffice. Real-Win10 & Win7/8/8.1 gets quietly morphed into Linux-Win10 on existing PCs.

*Then* MS will start pissing in the Linux pool by messing with standards and wresting control of the kernel from Linus so that all other flavors of Linux have to become clones of whatever MS produces so in a decade's time users have a choice of MS-Linux, MS-Linux or OS-X with bits of MS-Linux in it.

Windows 10 market share jumps two per cent

Re: Low marketshare

Given that soon, you won't be able to buy/download/install Win7 anywhere for new desktops/laptops/tablets unless you know someone who has a DVD with a valid, unused Win7 product key with it, you have Hobsons choice of using Win10 or Linux. Places like eBay will probably flood with pirates offering Win7 OEM DVDs with a product key that may (or most likely) may not work when you install it.

The small group of Win7 fanbois who are pissed off at MS will drift to Linux, or just stop receiving MS updates in fear of MS forcing them to upgrade to Win10, Most users will shrug and accept that Win10 is the future of the PC.

It wouldn't surprise me if MS haven't already installed a timebomb in Win7 in that if it doesn't install any updates from them in xx months, Part or all of Win7 will just stop working though being considered a "vulnerable threat" if connected to the internet.

Norton bans kernel.org

Re: It is a threat

Kernel.org is only visited by those who roll their own Linux distros. So if they have a need to download stuff from that site, the odds are they are already on a Linux environment and wouldn't give a flying f**k about what Norton think.

Now, if Norton blocked Ubuntu, Fedora or similar sites that have complete distros for downloading and replacing Windows with on the basis that the Linux distros were virus and trojan-riddled software packages, then that may be newsworthy of a moderate reader outrage among those who want to avoid Windows 10.

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on July 29th

Re: @jaywin - Fairly good outcome my ass

Nope, right at the beginning, when Microsoft launched Win10 last July, they announced that the free upgrade would only be for 1 year, after which, it would cost people to upgrade. They are still sticking to that plan.

Swede builds steam-powered Raspberry Pi. Nowhere to plug in micro-USB, then?

Steam engines and "steampunked" computers.

If he was going to build a steam engine to power a computer, he should have built a Babbage engine to go with it.

Osbo slaps down Amazon and eBay – who'll be liable for traders evading VAT

Sales tax

All companies like Amazon will do is collect/record the tax owed to HMRC though UK sales, then back-charge the seller for the privilege. If that causes double taxation to the overseas seller, then probably tough titties.

Though once TTIP gets in, such companies can sue HM Government into removing the tax as it dents their profits.

Who wants a quad-core 4.2GHz, 64GB, 5TB SSD RAID 10 … laptop?

Great spec for a laptop, and what to people go and do? Bung Windows on it.

Fat cat fanbois' obscene dream bling

It's one way to shift obsolete stock

That pimped iPhone looked like an earlier model. Even if it is diamond encrusted, the OS and functionality will be obsolete now that the 4G version will be here "soon". it'll probably be awkward enough to upgrade/repair even if they could find a mobe shop trustworthy enough not to "lose" a $2mil phone.

I suspect that those who buy these blinged gadgets will be investors who will then lock them away in a vault to appreciate in value and only bring them on show for special events....

or high-maintenance posarellas / "me-me-me" gangsta rappers who use them to make themselve look even more vain while their million dollar purchase rapidly depreciates in value due to wear and tear.

ICANN delays decision on pornography domain

A sneaky way for governments to control the intarwebs?

If the .XXX TLD becomes reality, how long before some dim-witted prude of a politician or judge tries to impose a ruling that all ISPs in <insert State or Country of choice here> filter out all .XXX TLDs on the basis that one or two sites on that domain that they purposefully examined "in great detail" offended their prudish morals?

How many days between the .XXX TLD going live and the first court order from any country globally to try and block it gets issued? less than a month? less than a week?

The smart on-line porn publishers will just ignore the new .XXX domain and try to stick with the .COM or whatever they currently have that seems to bypass any domain driven filters to reach their dependant addicts.