Posts by alain williams

Sky customers moan: Our broadband hubs are bricking it

Sky been taking lessons from Microsoft ...

push out updates without adequate testing ?

Slack files for IPO, warns of bumpy valuation as it swerves big bank underwriters

No underwriters - no fat fees for bankers

I don't see a problem with that.

Ok Google, please ignore this free tax filing code so we can keep on screwing America

Re: Still using Google?

Google is doing the right thing here; the bandits are the likes of Intuit. They have an agreement with the USA tax people and then try to run around that agreement. They should be hit with a corporation changing fine - but this won't happen as they have paid too many politicians from their slush fund.

Wannacry-slayer Marcus Hutchins pleads guilty to two counts of banking malware creation

Re: So now he has admitted to creating nasty malware.

And telling lies

This is not a crime, if it were then 99% of our elected politicians would be eating porridge.

(Cue: discussion on if telling lies should be an offence. +1 from me.)

Old-school cruel: Dodgy PDF email attachments enjoying a renaissance

Very lacking in specifics ...

What operating systems, version; what PDF readers, etc ? Some details as to where holes have been found in the last year or few.

Eg: is MS Windows 10 any better than 8 ? What versions of MacOS ? What Linux distros ? Or do they assume that everyone runs MS Windows 10 ?

OK: can't predict the future, but knowing what has been vulnerable in the past can suggest what to avoid.

Facebook: Yeah, we hoovered up 1.5 million email address books without permission. But it was an accident!

''deleting the illegally collected details''

They might even do so, in an unusual fit of honesty; but what they will not do is to delete the social graph/connections that they have learned as a result - this is what I would like to see deleted.

Maybe punishment should be that Zuckerberg's address book should be made public, see how he likes that. Although that would be unfair on those who are exposed as talking to him.

Google hits brand slam stamping AMP with more crypto glam

How to make web pages load faster

Don't burden it with a morass of javascript - eg Google Analytics.

Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

If Morrisons is liable for what an employee did ...

then is the USA Commander in Chief (currently one D Trump) liable for what was released by Chelsea Manning ?

Europe's home PC buyers reach for their collective smartphone, sigh: We don't need a new desktop. This is a computer, right?

Hardware just chuggs along ...

My main desktop is a 7 y/old AMD Bulldozer, 32 GB RAM. I have had to replace some fans, the PSU & a disk but that is about it; oh - I upgraded the screen a while back. I run Linux so upgrade problems are not an issue. It is still plenty fast enough. I expect to continue to run this for a few more years.

Laptop: a small HP Stream. Not a heavy CPU which means the battery lasts. Cheap: so that when I drop it under a bus I won't cry (much).

US: We'll pull security co-operation if you lot buy from Huawei

Fuck off USA

That is the only possible reply to a bully; then the rest of us refuse to share security data with the USA.

This seems to be as much about economic competition that security/spying.

It seems that the quality of Huawei code is poor, but that is a different/unrelated topic and seems no worse than the code in their competitors' kit.

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Is this the best that the USA can come up with ?

We all know that the USA wants to lock Assange up for as long as possible to frighten anyone else who is thinking if lifting the lid on unsavory actions done by (or on behalf of) the USA. This is all about punishing the messenger, not the guilty.

If they do get their hands on him: he will not get a fair trial - so the UK should refuse to extradite him.

It will be interesting to see how supine our politicians are ... yes, yes, I know that the judges will supposedly make the decisions, but it is likely that they will be heavily leaned on. I wonder what the deal will be ? Give them Assange and we won't need to take chlorinated chicken in a post Brexit trade deal ?

BTW: have any of those troops shown shooting up innocent people yet been put on trial ?

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Does he yet have a ticket to the USA ?

This is what he was afraid of: the USA, somehow or another, finding a way of getting him over the pond. Once there he would likely spend a very long time in chokey, on some pretext of another. The real reason is that he embarrassed the USA by exposing things and some there want revenge.

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

I know places still installing them ...

It is quite fortunate that none of them are places where you need to worry about security; eg: ATMs.

Who had 'one week in' for a Making Tax Digital c0ckup? Well done, you win... absolutely nothing

HMRC taken advice from Microsoft ?

Just implement stuff and get the users to test it for them.

Google Pay tells Euro users it has ditched UK for Ireland ahead of Brexit

So this has nothing to do with ...

a more favourable tax regime in Eire ?

UK tech's gender pay gap: HP Inc closest to parity with 1.8% sliver – Civica, Huawei, Siemens straddle 40% chasm

Did these companies also report like-for-like comparison ?

All that the median number tells us is how many men/women go for the higher paid jobs or work longer hours - which, to an extent, is up to the individual. There might be some prejudice in the hiring and promotion of people, that will be harder to flush out as it will need careful analysis of the decisions made that result in a job offer or promotion.

A like for like comparison (ie job rôle, experience, hours worked) will tell us if there is real wage discrimination - this difference should be zero.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

A nice Anglo-Saxon name ...

Try getting in if you have a name like Muhammad, or (a few years ago) I recall a 6 y/old having huge problems because his name was Saddam Hussein.

Re: Don't travel to the US.

I read it, closed the page and Cookie Autodelete zapped those ad cookies.

Fortune favours the Brave: Privacy browser chap takes gripes over adtech body's website to Irish data watchdog

The next target ...

should be those web sites that ask you to opt OUT of receiving spam, etc. My understanding is that these should be opt IN.

Many do this, but start with Ryan Air.

Go on, feast your eyes on... HMRC's backend: 4,000 IT staff, its hookup with AWS and more

Why have HMRC given my tax records to the USA government ?

If all that data is held by Amazon, a USA company subject to USA laws, then how long before the NSA/CIA/... issues them with a National security letter demanding a slurp of all UK tax data.

How can they be so stupid ? Or don't they care ?

All this brouhaha about Huawei and we just give it to the USA!!!

Packet's 'big boy' servers given a shot in the Arm with 32-core, 3.3GHz Ampere CPUs

Please can we have a real speed metric

CPU clock does not tell you a lot. Different chips have different numbers of processors. Different processors do different numbers of IPCC (Instructions Per Clock Cycle). Different Instruction sets do different amounts of work per instruction (think: RISC/CISC, or x68_64 vs ARM vs MIPS vs mainframe ...). See here.

Work done is the only real metric. Something like SPEC is a good starting point. OK: different types of work load use the CPU in different ways so SPEC is not always that good, but it is a much better metric that clock speed.

This will make it harder for the journalists as vendors like to quote GHz as it is easy and many people don't know better. But most el-reg readers do know better ... so, please, can we have something more meaningful.

Huawei's half-arsed router patching left kit open to botnets: Chinese giant was warned years ago – then bungled it

Just crap software

Another example of crap software talked about y/day. I doubt that Huawei is worse than many vendors who ship other closed source on their kit. Huawei sells hardware, the software that makes it work is just an inconvenience and so will put as little effort (== cost) into it as it can get away with.

BTW: some will claim that this is an example of Chinese government back hole in Huawei kit; possible but I doubt it.

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Who bears the cost ?

You say it'll be more expensive

The real question is ''who bears the cost?'' The answer is ''not the development organisation'', eg not the vendor but its customers. So the benefit to who has to pay the extra cost for the reliability gains little, a bit less work for its call center maybe, but that is about it. Its customers however: waste huge amounts of time on work arounds or become frustrated - but does the vendor care ?

The other cost of producing reliable programs is time. The extra time taken means that the competition might get their product to market first and so get the customers and maybe even the market. One company that has used this ''get something that vaguely works and let the customers suffer'' method is Microsoft; it did this in its early days, got better for a while and is now getting worse again.

Another part of the problem is that customers getting redress is rare. We are pushed to accept major bugs. It is hard for the customer to go elsewhere, they have already made an investment, changing is costly - and anyway: will the competition be much better ? Probably not: commercial factors dictate not.

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

When the data breach happens ...

which, and how many, government minister's wife/husband will have been found ogling skin ?

Or fleece for the Welsh Assembly.

6 days to go, no sweat, just more than a million UK firms still to sign up to Making Tax Digital

MTD is still a complete fluster-cuck

Having to buy in (*) something to fill in 7 numbers on a web-form seems pointless

HMRC is pursuing the unicorn that by making everyone use an accounts package that tax fraud will be magically eliminated. They don't care a toss that it will cost all of us huge sums that bring us little benefit.

This is especially onerous for small businesses who do not need costly accounts s/ware, eg private landlords. It is also a pain for those who have written their own accounting programs.

From what I hear the amount of detail that will be required will increase over time, which means more time wasted entering, into accounts programs, information that is useless to the business, such as one purchases: supplier invoice numbers and VAT numbers.

Aussie engineer accuses 'serial farter' supervisor of bullying, seeks $1.8m redress

What a stink over a bully!

I hope that the court case clears the air.

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

It also seems that the astronauts ...

have the right to repair their kit. Hopefully this will be one of the spin off benefits from the ISS.

Facebook's at it again: Internal emails show it knew about Cambridge Analytica abuse 'months' before news broke

Thumbs up to the Reg hack

that dug up that Pinocchio in a suit image!

Debate around Huawei espionage fears in UK about as clear as those darn Brexit negotiations

Buy Huawei kit - install the open-source Network Operating System

They have the hardware that we need; just replace the firmware with something that we can trust.

(Assuming that the spyware was ever much more than smoke rings puffed from Trump's commerce department that Supports USA companies.)

Children of Wales to be prepped for the vibrant world of work with free Office 365 ProPlus

How much is the Welsh gov't being paid ...

to take on some of the function of the MS marketing department ? Pushing this stuff to school kids thus ensuring that it is what they will expect to use when they enter employment ... and complain if given anything else.

Oh, you mean Wales is paying MS, not the other way round !!!

Education should be about teaching kids how to use computers and a variety of software products.

Training is teaching kids to use one product.

How low our education has slumped.

Carphone Warehouse thwacked by UK Advertising watchdog for a Cyber Monday wobble

Premium rate calls

If you need to call that because of their screw up: you should add the cost of the premium call to any refund that you get. If they argue: add the cost of your time that they have wasted.

You can always find an alternative number at saynoto0870.com

Super Cali optimistic right-to-repair's negotious, even though Apple thought it was something quite atrocious

Where else will this apply ?

John Deere tractors & motor cars to start with.

What about broken firmware on 'phones, IoT devices, etc - many of which do not receive updates for very long - if at all.

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

I seem to recall PuTTY has had a mixed history when it comes to security (e.g IIRC there was a period where they had a trojanised copy hosted on the official website for quite some time before it got noticed).

PuTTY on MS Windows has a much greater problem than a, now fixed, trojan copy of PuTTY.

The whole operating system is a trojan, it has an in built key logger. You are supposed to be able to turn key logging off, but you can't completely switch off telemetry, what gets sent is encrypted (from the machine owner) -- so how do you verify that key stroke stealing is really disabled ?

I will not use PuTTY on a Windows machine - I would just not feel safe.

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

Kudos to the Head of Faculty ...

for helping to fix the problem *first* ... then think about bollocking the student.

I know too many managers who will rant, rave & place blame (not them) as the first thing that they do.

It's alive! Big Switch stitches together an open-source Network Operating System

Will Huawei start shipping boxes with this ?

It would make it harder for the USA to claim that Huawei networking kit is riddled with Chinese Gov't spyware. Especially if Huawei makes it easy for the local network admin to install his own compiled copy of NOS.

Granted the claim could be made that the hardware is spooked, but that is harder.

Next question: will CISCO also support NOS - so we can be free of NSA 'additions' ?

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Re: The worst thing about this outage...

I wonder how many more productive hours were done at work, school, ... as a result.

Maybe this should happen more often!

Amazon may finally get its hands on .amazon after world's DNS overseer loses patience

These new TLDs were always a stupid idea

It is an ICANN money making scheme, completely unnecessary.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

Effects of food import tax

good news for farmers, not so good for shoppers

But:

* UK farmers will become richer and thus pay more taxes, so the rest of us will need to pay less tax to 'balance the books'.

* Import tax also means less tax needed.

So at first glance it is good for tax payers, but the benefit will be felt most by the richer who will gain most by any tax cuts (assuming that this happens). Alternatively UK government could spend the extra tax receipts on helping the less well off - cushion them from price hikes.

But: it is all too complicated, and exposed to political whimsy, for anyone to predict with any accuracy.

You beat me to it ...

people keep on asking me if I think that Brexit will be a good idea. I always say ''I don't know as I don't know what the UK relationship with the EU will be after Brexit.''

Remember: all the brouhaha is about the *exit deal*, getting on to three years post referendum and they have hardly talked about what the post Brexit relationship will be. So how can anybody pass opinion on something that, for now, is a vague wish list ?

Refusing to talk about the new relationship until after exit strikes me as stupidity in the extreme; or perhaps political game playing.

Small Brit firms beg for 'light touch' as only half are ready for digital tax reforms due next month

Error control in Making Tax Difficult ???

I took a look at the HMRC Mythbusters PDF.

The 5th section is titled ''MTD won’t reduce errors'' ... and the 6th section is exactly the same. This doesn't really give me much confidence that the rest of this is anything other than bollocks.

What sort of Muppet do they employ ?

IR35 contractor tax reforms crawl closer to UK private sector with second consultation

Companies will take the easy & safe choices

Safe to them that is. Independent contractors will be deemed employed to avoid a tiny risk that they might get a fine. This is what happened 25 years ago when someone was not properly schedule D registered (ie self employed), the company who they had worked for had to stump up a tax bill. So companies/agencies/... then insisted that everyone work through a Ltd company. Something similar will happen now.

Doing a proper assessment takes time, so they will not bother as the time spent does not really benefit them.

I have a friend who does locum work for the NHS. She has classified by her current hospital as falling under IR35 & so employed (other hospitals classify the exact same position as outside of IR35); but does not get the benefits of employment such as holiday pay, sick benefit. She can now no longer claim hotel or travel expenses. The hospital pays the same, she has a large wage cut.

Yes: some were taking the piss, but many are not. We do need temporary workers for jobs that last a few months, often at a non-commutable distance from where the contractor has a home.

If the government wants more tax: go after the likes of Google, Facebook & Vodafone.

UK banking was struck by one IT fail every day for most of 2018

Can't spend too much getting IT right ...

as there won't be enough dosh left for the top brass bonus pot.

UK tech has a month left to bare gender pay gaps, but less than a fifth of firms have ponied up

Like for like figures please

The all-employee median pay gap has little meaning since it takes no account of different life choices made by different people: job harder/easier, travel lots/stay-at-home, education degree/A-level, number of years experience, ...

Compare like for like and the pay gap almost disappears. However politicians do not like meaningful numbers since they tend to destroy their emotion based words.

The government comparison web site does not permit such meaningful comparison.

Boffins put the FUN into fungus by rigging yeast to squirt out the active ingredients in cannabis

Re: What else do we use yeasts for ? ...

It occurs to me that such bread, when left to rise, would get really high.

What else do we use yeasts for ? ...

making beer. Pubs selling ales made with that yeast would be on to a winner.

Also for making bread - now that shows that the scientists were using their loaf!

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

Tom Lehrer says it best

In his song Smut:

For filth (I'm glad to say) is in

The mind of the beholder

When correctly viewed

Everything is lewd

In a galaxy far, far away, aliens may have eight-letter DNA – like the kind NASA-backed boffins just crafted

8 letters not needed - here anyway

The 3 base pairs can code 64 different combinations. However only 20 different amino acids are used, plus a STOP code, there is plenty of space for more. Most amino acids seem to be specified by the first 2 base pairs of the triplets; but not quite as simple as that.

The trouble is that once established it is very hard to change the assignment of amino acids to combinations - nature will not be able to change to free up a combination to use for something else.

So this is what was meant by

All your base are belong to us

It all hinges on this: Huawei goes after Samsung with its own foldable hybrid Mate X

How long before it breaks ?

Unless you have a big wrap around cover - one of these is going to spend a lot of time in the repair shop.

If it survives being carried around, how many times can you open/close it before the screen at the hinge wears out ?

This will sell well to the idiots with more money than sense and want to show their latest bling to impressionable friends.

'We don't want a camera in everyone's living room' says bloke selling cameras in living rooms. Zuckerberg, you moron

Re: "Remove the few rich guys and Farcebook will lose most of its income"

You have missed the point: Facebook will be able to tell the seller ''we know that the user is rich, you can show them the more expensive tat.''