Posts by Colin Bull 1

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

no ..but

In the UK at least they can be charged with aiding and abetting.

They are assisting the illegal sellers and should be prosecuted for doing so.

Singapore may split liability for phishing losses between banks and victims

Re: Who is responsible for rampant payment and transfer scams?

This is patently absurd. There is no way you can verify the number at present - it is simplicity itself to spoof any number- here in the UK at least.

Robocall scammers sentenced in US after netting $1.2M via India-based call centers

broken system

My experience in the UK is that the TPS (Telephone Preference Service) and their contact with the ICO is completely broken. EVERY complaint to TPS has a boiler plate reply that the complainee has said it is not them, some other company is using their name, EVEN WHEN you have proof with a verified email from the spamming bastards.

SK hynix vice-chair denies selling to Huawei, calls for memory probe

15 years?

How can anyone envisage what the IT world will look like in 15 years is beyond me. The only logical reason for this is so the salesman can get his commission for the 15 year term now.

Capita class action: 2,000 folks affected by data theft sign up

Re: Er - not very good reporting

As a member of one of the pension schemes involved I would be interested in this. If it was not for the fact that Barings a lot of scamming bastards that ignore TPS and GDPR regulations and the Solicitors Regulation Authority do not give a fuck either.

Angry of Tunbridge Wells

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

I have said it before ...

I have said it before and will say it again ..

http://www.baarf.dk/BAARF/BAARF2.html

:-)

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

No excuse

But the Torpoint ferry runs 24/7 - no excuse

VMware sees no need to Arm itself for multi-architecture multi-cloud

Same old ?

Intel have a history of paying to eliminate the competition. Perhaps they are still managing to do that. Itanic failed even though Intel manged to nobble Tru64, HPUX and others by doing a deal with Carly. Who knows what they are up to now. I wonder if any under the counter deals are happening with TSMC to reduce AMD's capacity?

G20 digital ministers sign up for Digital Public Infrastructure push

India leading th way in trust ?

If this leads to a way of verifying spam calls that 99% come with an Indian accent I would welcome it tomorrow.

The TPS treats any complaints with the same boilerplate message "Despite our best efforts, TPS has not been able to ascertain valid contact and/or address details to raise this particular complaint"., Even if you have a voice recording. Even if you have an email from the company with DKIM and SPF headers verified by Google. Even if you give them full company details.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

A I understand it - Gates and Allen were 50/50 originally. Allen was doing something else on the side, so Gates "suggested" they reduce Allen's share to 60/40 or something because Gates would screw any one he could. When Bullmer came along he was from the same mould as Gates and they tried to concoct a deal that reduced Allen's shares even less. Allen overheard the discussion and said FU, I am off.

I believed Allen was the better programmer, but I do not know where I got that from.

How would Microsoft have turned out if Gates and Bullmer had not tried to shaft Allen?

Framework starts taking orders for 16-inch repairable, upgradeable laptop

On my radar

3 years ago when my laptop failed and I needed a replacement in a hurry, I had 2 requirements. Wanted a recent AMD processor so my bollocks were not burned and to reduce the jet engine noise when the cooler cut in of my then Intel processor - and the ability to run Linux.

I was forced to buy a Lenovo paying the Windows tax AND I had to suffer a soldered SSD. I thought long and hard about this but eventually bit the bullet. It is still going OK, but when the SSD fails I will have an expensive brick.

I will probably think about one of these as a Xmas present for myself.

Days before its earnings call, Infosys announces $2B in new business

Crystal ball gazing ?

Infosys's Q1 2024 results, which run through to June 30, are scheduled [PDF] to be released on July 20

I know we are living in cloud cuckoo land, but this would be amazing if they could predict accounts this far in advance :-)

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

The big issue is the elephant in the room.

This is a joke survey by an organisation that does not seem to have a clue. THE BIG ISSUE is as above, POTS disappearing in 2 years. There has been no consumer publicity for this. How can any company offer a 2 year contract when the hardware existing will not be usable in 2 years.

Ofcom is a complete waste of time. Has anybody mandated what is going to be offered at switchover time. Or is this date another load of cobblers that will be put back because BT is not ready. Or is it a ploy to stitch up all the non technical consumers and force them into another 2 year above inflation new contract otherwise they will lose service and their existing numbers.

Brit data watchdog fines sleazy sales ops £250K for 'bombarding' folk with calls

Another way forward ..

If the tossers at Ofgem had a clue, they would ban agents and sub agents from working on behalf of the energy companies. This all because in a short sighted pursuance of competition it was decided it would be a good idea to allow agents to peddle their wares. Why is a sub agent based abroad and ignoring all UK laws allowed to be in this arena?

There was enough problems when the energy companies marketed directly - it is easy to see how they have got round their obligations.

Google changes email authentication after spoof shows a bad delivery for UPS

Re: Lack of SPF

I had similar this week sending from my Zen domain. Required DKIM set up to send to a Gmail account. Zen's instructions worked eventually but it took me a while.

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Re: A large pull request of mechanical changes swapping out API calls.

Excuse my ignorance, but WTF are "application lifecycle services".

Just asking for a friend.

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...

Soldered SSD ?

I have a few issues with Lenovo -

Having a soldered SSD as the only internal storage is a very bad move. Not mentioned in this article if this device has or not

Not being able to get a recent AMD processor laptop WITHOUT Windows.

Another security calamity for Capita: An unsecured AWS bucket

Another couple of hundred thousand ...

Receive letter today from Unilever Pension fund that their scheme administered by Crapita may have been compromised. Data includes pension ID and banking details. 12 months free Experian monitoring for free . Guess that is worth sweet FA ( https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/12/experian-account-hijack-krebs/ )

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Optional

Why for f***s sake can we not buy a lenovo without windows. I bought a AMD yoga 2 years ago which is a dream but HAD to pay the windows tax.

Atomic energy body proposes fusion framework to manage British energy grids

Re: Nice

I am turning to be a socialist in my old age. What we want is an organisation to plan and develop storage solutions. We could call it the CEGB. We have power companies who have their own systems, we have water companies that have theirs. The CEGB could develop pumped storage systems using our reservoirs that are relatively local based to even out the load, using all that wind energy when not required by the grid and storing it locally for when everyone puts the kettle on after Eastenders or the cup final.

We have thousands of miles of canals with the potential to give a large storage solution with perhaps 150mm of 'storage'. With a central non profit body, this could all be planned with adequate capacity.

It is not in the interests of the generators to do this. It is not in the interest of the water companies to do this. It is not in the interests of the British Waterways to do this.

Where I live there were 5 oil storage tanks put up virtually overnight in WWII that had the capacity to store something like 25Mwh each. Plenty for the local community. If they could do it then, it would be easy now.

Microsoft tells people to prepare for AI search engine that goes Bing!

Re: Decisions Decisions

The jokes on you . In pirate country we would NEVER use butter - the jam goes on first to give something for the clotted cream to stick to. Simples

Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

awful

I had savings with NS&I but withdrew the lot because the web site was so dire. The feeling was they do less testing than MS and more time was spent clicking the fuck awful repetitive consent screens than anything useful.

A 15 year old work placement student could have done better.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Well down here in pirate country ( Cornwall ), this small part of the country has a nuclear alert test every Monday at 11.30. BUT it is the ALL CLEAR signal. This is a continuous tone. The alarm signal is a variable tone. Simples.

Tributes flow as Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo - the mind behind Sound Blaster - passes aged 68

Dr Sbaitso

My kids are in their 40s and they remember Dr Sbaitso text to speech app from SB. Brilliant for its time. I will have to dig my soundblaster T shirt out and wear it for the next week.

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Re: I'd quite like an X-term

"PCs + Hummingbird X-Windows software replaced them."

Is that the software that was about £600 a pop. We sent someone to the states to grey import 20 copies and made a handsome profit.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

You are Liz Truss

and I claim my £5 reward

Cops swoop after crooks use wireless keyfob hack to steal cars

coincidental

IN 2017 I bought a 2 year old Citroen C4 with only one key. Timpsons said they could duplicate the key with a authorisation code from Citroen. When this came the car was booked in, for most people this would be a short drive straight there. For me it meant a ferry trip and turning the ignition on. On Trying to restart the car I got a Key Fob error warning and the car would not start.

This is too much of a coincidence for me. I believe there is some telemetry in the car at allows this.

From Citroen website -"Citroën Connected Services includes practical programmes such as Real Time Traffic and Telemaintenance which are FREE to activate for new car customers"

I think word has got out how to do this.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Re: Joshua's suspicion that Toad was playing games

He was probably using Leisure Suit Larry's boss key

Re: point of order

Nobody used edlin for much of anything in 1987

If I remember correctly the in thing then, was the fabulous Borland Sidekick. Always kept it on a floppy for when on customer sites.

Cloudflare's invisible CAPTCHA works by probing browsers with JavaScript

Re: And what if you block JS?

(the internet is a big place).

Cornwall council tell me that I MUST verify voting information every year and they give a convenient link to do this. Stupidly not only do I need to enter password and keyphrase I must also do a captcha with US based themes. I have told them this is stupid as they are sending this request to a verified email address.

What are trying to guard against? A bot that registers 50 new voters.

Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months

Re: Any engineers here?

Well I am not an engineer but I think everybody wants to do things on a massive scale when small and plentiful can be more beneficial.

Just a few miles from where I live there are 4 x 25,000 m3 ( 50m diam x 7m high) WWII oil tanks buried in the hillside 100m above sea level ( which is only 200-400 metres away). These are in AONB and are not visible unless you look hard for them. When i did a fag packet calculation several years ago i worked out to be 25MWh of storage. These were put up in months 80 years ago. Would work for all the local renewables in a 25 mile radius with using partly existing infrastructure.

These could be replicated thousands of times if politicians could think small instead of big.

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

Re: Obsolete regulations are best regulations

You obviously missed the recent article 'AWK gets Unicode support'. CSV not naturally supported (yet) but hardly difficult

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

a programming language for analyzing text files

I think this is the understatement of the year. It is more an Extract Transform Load machine.

Thanks to A and W and K.

Interconnect innovation key to satiating soaring demand for fiber capacity

No need for more than 2Mbs

My memory might be failing , but I am sure when I was at Homechoice/Videonetworks in the year 2000, some big wig from BT said consumers would never need more than 2Mbs. Thet were charging £700 for a broadband connection at the time and even then Premier League football was blurry at times.

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Apples and oranges

On planes these things are installed for safety. In cars they are used to justify obligated visits to a garage to clear the faulty faults before the car will not start and you need a tow, all because there was a micro amount of static that the sensor read as a fault.

Sore, not me - I am happy to pay best part of a grand for a fault that comes and goes.

Discord details how it dodged latency with a super-disk made in the cloud

Why not RAID 10 on SSD

Back in the day when 4GB memory was about £4k, we would raid 10 our data on live services because a good controller would allow writing to one of the pair while reading the other and because reads do not need use any locks would be extremely fast. This was more expensive than RAID5 or 3 or 4 but much more resilient, allowed for different batches of disks in a mirror pair and was a magnitude faster at replacing a failed disk.

Lenovo updates ThinkPad mobile workstations with AMD variants

I would like to get one ....

just because they are offering them with Linux. Have to wait for price though.

Financial exchange's efforts to replace core systems with blockchain founder – again

doomed, doomed I say

For a system to be tied with the Itanic in 2017 seems to be absurd. It was never going anywhere,

Amazon sues 10,000 Facebook Group admins for offering fake reviews

On the other side of the coin ...

Trustpilot cannot be trusted because they remove reviews that are critical of their paid clients even if you prove the purchase and are invited to do the review with a personal email.

Microsoft's latest security patch troubles Windows 11 users

Only Win 11 ?

Had a support call from my granddaughter. After Win10 upgrade would not boot and BIOS did not see boot SSD drive. After 90 minutes of fumbling around it finally booted. I have not used Windows for at leat 15 years and was proud I never once said install Mint to fix.

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

Re: WHAT DO YOU WANT THE REGISTER TO DO FOR YOU?

"Where’s the “All of the above” option ???"

Sorry that was taken by Leisure Suit Larry.

Ex-Uber security chief accused of hushing database breach must face fraud charges

What about the UK too

I would like to see some jail time in the UK for the Uber execs who decided that online medicals for drivers would be a good thing.

Microsoft forgot to renew the certificate for its Windows Insider subdomain

BT has same problem ?

I had a support call yesterday from a friend who could not access his webmail because he was getting a message that his computer might be compromised. He sent me a screenshot of the error and it was a cert error for xx.btmail.bt.com. When I followed through with Firefox it stated cert expired at midnight Friday. OK today though. Downdetector did not show any particular problem.

Symantec: More malware operators moving in to exploit Follina

RTF - WTF

How can an RTF document carry a payload - I thought it was effectively a text document.

Telcos fear Big Tech will bleed them until they can’t afford network builds

I am crying in my beer

Not only does our monopoly suppler for most of the country BT use hyper inflationary mid contact price rises, they are advertising it as super fast fibre when it is not fibre at all - it is hybrid fibre/copper. And meanwhile Ofcom sit and watch without a murmur.

Luckily for me I have just had the pavement dug up by Wildanet so it is full fibre in a week or two :-)

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Progress

Fondly remembering the sound of games loading from magnetic tape... Was my first computer.

The Spectrum loading from tape had feedback with audio and visual clues.

The tossers at Fitbit could not do either 35 years later.

ESET uncovers vulnerabilities in Lenovo laptops

worried, moi

I was getting a bit concerned about this but when looking at the Lenovo link it appears only Win 10 is affected. No problem with Ubuntu.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: The joys of Linux

I had BT Openreach on the phone this morning for 45 minutes to repair my internet connection. I Did everything I was told. Downloaded Anydesk for Windows, tried to run it - nothing.

Looks like I will have to go back to Windows if I want to get a decent internet connection.

Rivals aren't convinced by Microsoft's one-click default browser change

Easyjet

Sadly I cannot be arsed to faff around the problem so I have installed Brave just for the easyet website otherwise It id Firefox. But yes, the stupidity of having to reboot browser whatever the number of tabs you have open is stupid. I thought Linux apps were better than this.