Posts by Leeroy

Get it while it's hot: NASA's Space Poo contest winners wipe up $30k

Nice solutions, I'm sure it won't take long to trickle down.....

Would love to see the winners sh!t eating grin.

TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next

It worked in trek so it must be fine. ...

Computer lower the light level 20% and play some some music. ... no not that, Vash is coming for dinner.... ahhh that's better.

Landmark EU ruling: Legality of UK's Investigatory Powers Act challenged

Ummmmm No

“Most of us can accept that our privacy may occasionally be compromised in the interests of keeping us safe".

Not me thanks I'm sure I will be fine and I doubt my browsing history, where I shop, what I buy, where I withdraw cash or my views on government policy has anything at all to do with the chance of me getting blown up by a bad person.

'Upset' Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

Curly bracket

The missing or extra curly bracket that takes an hour to find often gets a few choice words from me when I find it. Grrr bring on the swearing I say, especially when is been staring you in the face like a massive FU, you tw@t+!ng C@€£ ₩@Mb! €.

Ahhh that's better, it's working now :)

Sexbots could ‘over-exert’ their human lovers, academic warns

Internet Of Tits

Or Todgers, whatever takes your fancy.

I will have the dumb non connected model please, actually make that 2. The batteries always die at the wrong time and it would be nice to have a spare :)

Dyn Dyn Dyn – we have a buyer: Oracle gobbles Internet of Things DDoS victim

Blame the plants.

40-50 times the normal incoming traffic from tens of millions of web addresses around the plant.

So that's where all the ipv4 addresses have gone, flipping automated watering systems for your house greenery !

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

Boris likes cake.

Does he ? It must be true, I read it on the Internet.

I really should ask him next time I see him.

UK privacy watchdog sends poison pen letter to Zuckerberg et al

I'm behind Denham on this one !

I would gladly pay for what's app if had not been bought out by Facebook.

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Zombies

Would the excuse of .... I was just preparing for the inevitable Zombie apocalypse sir! Stand up in court ?

I don't think zombies drink much tea so maybe the booby-trapped kettle is out. Anyway we all know the safest place is the pub :)

Birmingham sperm bank pulls plug after just a handful of recruits

Cut out the middle man

You can have mine for free and it only takes a few minutes !

Sextortion on the internet: Our man refuses to lie down and take it

Re: Fourth

Nobody can safely up vote your post no matter how accurate it could be !

Court finds GCHQ and MI5 engaged in illegal bulk data collection

They have enough

They have enough to hang anyone they choose, looks like it's coming to the point of staying under the radar is the best option :/

Not that I do try to hide anything but I'm expecting the worst and hoping / planning for the best just like everyone else is in this sinking boat.

Re: Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Very true, we didn't vote her in etc.

How a chunk of the web disappeared this week: GlobalSign's global HTTPS snafu explained

Re: Let's Encrypt is not an alternative.

Let's encrypt is fine for Web servers but as noted above it will not work with RDS deployments. Tried for a few hours with no luck and ended up buying a £5 one, shame I still have to pay the racketeers :/

Drone exercise will transform future naval warfare, says Navy

Shouldn't laugh but

My 7 year old's drone piloting skills are out of this world, if you consider getting tangled in his sister, mother, grans hair hair a kill shot he could rack up more fatalities than Chuck Norris !

RBS debit card payments have gone utterly TITSUP

Grrrr

I'm guessing that's why my Eve online subscription didn't renew then :/

I'm off to run up a nice big bar tab and hope they don't fix the issue before I leave :)

So. What's North Korea really like?

Wow

Just wow, I read the entire linked article. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

The radios cemented into the walls though, maybe 1984 is actually being used as an instruction manual.

Not somewhere I would ever want to live or even visit !

Pound falling, Marmite off the shelves – what the UK needs right now is ... an AI ethics board

Re: Human-like superintelligent AI is a huge risk. Non-human-like may be even worse...

Ex Machina, it didn't turn out very well for us walking meatbags :/

Self preservation and all that. AVA !

One-way Martian ticket: Pick passengers for Musk's first Mars pioneer squad

Kanye

He can take his Mrs as well!

Revealed: The true horror of being a big CEO

No shit

Are most people unable to go a whole working day without giving a shit?

FTFY

Sage advice: Avoid the Windows 10 Anniversary Update – it knackers our accounting app

Not just Sage

The anniversary update has also broken. ..

Screenconnect, perpetual 10 tech legacy license

Sage 50, managed to fix this on 3x pc's but one still refuses to work.

Acrobat Pro 9, downgraded to 8 and it works on several pc's

Unfortunately I didn't have the authority to prevent the free upgrade/ downgrade to Win 10. I just have to mop up the mess.

Pluto's emitting X-rays, and NASA doesn't quite know how

Re: 1 word. Triboelectrification.

Triboelectric charge, someone put dodgy toner in the aliens copier again...

Latest F-35 bang seat* mods will stop them breaking pilots' necks, beams US

Re: Handling the G's

Explosives on the chopper blades worked in bond :p

Also autorotation landing if you are high enough and the pilot is alive, if you are that high I would prefer a parachute!

Re: minimum weight

Do you really want to delay the opening of the parachute if ejecting from ground level ? Take off and landing being the most dangerous phases of flight etc.

Maybe F1 style helmet brace would work.

Hackers hijack Tesla Model S from afar, while the cars are moving

It's fixed now

Until the next exploit Is found...

Just imagine every Tesla slamming on the brakes at the same time, not pretty :/

IDC: Those servers numbers just keep on tumbling

It's not the cloud

It's the fact that server admin guys are realising that they can have twice as many hypervisors if they shop around. I have one that has been working for 5 + years and it cost £1K. If it dies who cares ? The VM will fail over to another one and I will either fix or replace the broken unit.

I'm not going to pay DELL or HP £££££ when I can pick up a cheap box that lasts for years and doesn't have proprietary components that coat the earth and are a nightmare to configure.

Disclaimer, storage is slightly different... don't skimp on that !

BOFH: The case of the suspicious red icon

Real call

2016-09-15

12:08:00

Open

IT Problem, Scanning, Network

scanning issue asking for passwords

Justin

Paste from a real call today. Small company, one user had a new computer. I get several of these a week and they are always on the ground floor or have secure windows :\

It's OK for the FBI's fake hacks to hack suspects' PCs, says DoJ watchdog

Re: Old trick works

Close enough, they gave him a link to an image and he followed it.

Old trick works

People often ask me why images in email are not automatically displayed on our system. It's because you can create a tiny unique pic for each email that you send, monitor the Web server logs and match up the email address and public IP of the reader and if \ when they read it etc.

A lot of mass mailing software uses the tactic, that's why it is blocked even if I'd somehow manages to get past the spam filter.

If this guy was clever enough to use an out of country proxy and decent browser settings I an very surprised that he fell for this \facepalm.

Teenage noughties protocol BitTorrent reinvents itself again

Rsync

Moving several 100G plus backup files off site sounds like a bloody good task for bit torrent with a nice UI. It doesn't seem that processor intensive either.

We currently use Rsync through VPN but it's a pain to set up and monitor, always looking for a better option.

Google's AI finds its voice ... and it's surprisingly human

I agree that the spacing is the main issue. What really throws me though was the word ' film' it just didn't sound right for some reason.

Florida Man's prized jeep cremated by exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7

Half decent cars

Every car I have driven made in the last 10 years cuts power to the sockets if the car is locked or if the ignition key is removed. Quite sensible I think, I would rather have a flat phone battery than a flat car battery etc.

Besides leaving expensive electronic equipment on charge in the sun, especially a car anywhere remotely warm is asking for trouble. Do you know how hot it gets in there before the phone blows up !

Also the Samsung issue has been reported by the BBC quite a lot over here. The only tech news with more air time is the lack of 35mm (seriously they said that on air) headphone socket :/

You should install smart meters even if they're dumb, says flack

Re: It was damn cold

Same gripe here. They spent 10 minutes trying to relight my boiler and wearing out the igniter. When they finally let me do it... one push twist hold and click ta da done cue some sheepish faces hahahahahaha.

Don't even get me started on the cooker inspection ! That apparently involves trying to pull it off the wall and ruining the surround to check that it had a chain on the back :/

Missing Milky Way mass blown away by bingeing supermassive black hole

Re: Missing matter

That will be the 'dark money' as mentioned above :)

SpaceX Dragon capsule lands in Pacific carrying 12 moustronauts

Re: What's in it for the mice?

I wish they would send a kitten to the ISS, it could live up there and keep the humans company.

As a bonus training it to use the kitty litter would be interesting and you can guarantee some awesome space lol cat vids :)

Please don't chop it up when it gets back though !

Watch the world's biggest 'flying bum' go arse over tit in a crash

Re: Optional Headline:

Maybe 'Giant airbags soften blow' or 'Torpedo tits up'.

Seriously though, how much helium ? I thought it was a scarce resource.

New science: Pathetic humans can't bring themselves to fire lovable klutz-bots

Re: Flawed (pseudo-)science, fake emotions, whatever, humans do seem to have a tendency...

I really like my car and it has a butt ugly face that would look better if I rammed it into a brick wall. .. thing Is it has collision avoidance, it beeps lìke mad and slams on the brakes when I try to 'hurt' it. The only thing it's missing is a sad face on the dashboard, that tail pipe still doesn't look sexy though... airbags maybe ?

Addendum, do not kiss your car... birds poo on it !

BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'

Re: Or Ricoh

The pc running windows 7 is normally only used for 'pro' machines and is over £5k extra for the basic version, please tell me it's for printing high quality jobs with colour matching and that someone had training on calibration with the photospectrometer ?

Silently discarding jobs usually happens when usage tracking is turned on, BW has no restrictions and colour requires a pin that has to be entered into the print driver. If you don't put the correct code in the job will vanish but you can see it in the printer log. Yeah it's a bit crap. Another reason can be that the copier will only accept print jobs from the print server, configured by ip or host name. It's to help enforce the authentication on the print server and prevent people bypassing it.

The worst thing about Ricoh is the new tablet interface with no physical buttons and a 'new and improved experience' according to BLI. Yeah we turn that crap off and thank god you can set up the old interface that Ricoh have been using for a decade.

/Rant off. I'm back in work Monday/ Ricoh tech lol

Microsoft promises free terrible coffee every month you use Edge

Cut it out already

While you are at it sort out the issues when printing pdf's from within edge.

I'm getting really pissed off at customers complaining about long \ more than 5 minutes to print pdf's. It works fine from foxit and acrobat reader and for some reason its extra clicks to set the default app to anything other than edge. Most users can't figure out how to do it, now it's part of our call out procedure to check that they are NOT using edge ffs, like I haven't got enough to do.

The calm before the storm: AMD's Zen bears down on Intel CPUs

X2 5200

I'm still using a very old x2 AMD as my main work PC, it's been upgraded to 4GB ram, SSD, and an AMD 250 graphics card to run 2x 30 inch monitors. Works fine for me as I actually work and don't FB, LinkedIn etc all day.

Server side its several 8350 cpu's with 32 GB each ram runing VM's on a cost effective SAN. At half the price of intel kit they get upgraded more often and I have more redundancy.

Unfortunately when we need new desktops in a hurry it always ends up being intel based. AMD are either out of stock or the lead time is too long. Sort that out and they woud probably sell more machines :/

Oracle Java copyright war latest: Why Google's luck is about to run out

I can drive

'It was why Android hit the ground running – developers knew the interfaces, they knew the libraries, they could build apps for it straight away.'

A bit like driving a car then. It's an API they utilised, right or wrong. It seems like oracle are trying to make them put the brake pedal on the steering wheel.

US Patent Office sued after it declared a power outage a 'national holiday'

Time

To sort your s#!t out...

Adblock Plus chalk talk takes stock: Facebook's gonna block our block of their block of our block? Let's rock

Idea

Ad Block overlay on the top of each Facebook post with a button to say 'this is sponsored or advertising'. The first few hundred click it, report back to ad block then overlay on top a nice white rectangle 'Ad Blocked'.

I don't use FB and my coding skills are not amazjng it but it may work if some clever people get on it :)

Tim Cook's answer to crashing iPhone sales: More iPhones

Water

'Over time, I’m convinced every person in the world will have a smartphone. '

I assume that he meant every person that has clean water, enough to eat and surplus income. Narrows the market a bit when you put it like that.

Air gap breached by disk drive noise

Mission impossible

If only Ethan Hunt had known about these type of attacks. At the very least he could have avoided removing the man sized air vent cover with a standard socket and dangling into the room getting all sweaty etc.

League of lawsuits: Game developer sues cheat-toting website

Lol scripts

Please don't sue the cats !

Internet of Car...rikey what the hell just happened to my car?

Security

"Security is a relatively new concern for the automotive industry,”

Maybe you should have used "Computer Security" ?

I'm quite sure physically entering a vehicle and driving it away has been more difficult year on year since the 90's.... It's going backwards due to the addition of unnecessary gimmicks not because they are using crap locks.

Blighty's Coastguard goes into battle against waterborne Pokemon

Re: Don't mess with evolution!

The Pokestops (seriously) were all created / discovered by Ingress players that had to be at the site and take a picture. This process stopped around a year ago so no new pokestops or portals unless you have a deal with Niantic.

Altitude does not matter as all portals are assumed to be at ground level, as is the player. You can spin pokestops and capture portals etc in a helicopter at 1000 ft if you really want to, I have seen it done.

You also get an account ban if they even suspect you are faking the gps location. They are very good at catching people doing this.

UK 'emergency' bulk data slurp permissible in pursuit of 'serious crime'

Newsagent police poster.

I seen a poster on the shop door of a newsagents today it read 'Any crime committed against the owners of this company will be treated as a hate crime. 'Plus some more bollocks about protecting the community etc. Boils down to some person pinching a Mars bar can now be arrested for hate crime. Where do I buy my ticket off this planet ?

Gaming apps, mugging and bad case of bruised Pokéballs

Re: Journalism?

I 'discovered' a few of those portals / pokestops.

Ingress and Pokemon Go are getting people off their arse and doing stuff, got to be a good thing. Ingress players are usually in their mid twenties to thirties and educated (it's a lot more complicated than Pokemon and requires advance planning and teamwork). Also most ingress players have groups that know where they are and look out for eachother, have regular social events / piss ups etc. I have never met such a diverse selection of people, some of who I now call friends.