* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Vision Direct 'fesses up to hack that exposed customer names, payment cards

Alister

Should have gone to SpecSavers

Well someone had to say it...

Finally a platform for train puns: IBM Halt station derailed

Alister

So it will no longer be IBM's Platform-as-a-Service...

Where to implant my employee microchip? I have the ideal location

Alister

Re: 'One day he'll give up and take a dump on my pillow instead'

Blimey! Are you Pterry re-incarnate?

I've never seen so many footnotes. (No, not even on AFP).

Court doc typo 'reveals' Julian Assange may have been charged in US

Alister

That's unfortunate, it gives the whinging twat the opportunity for lots of "I told you so" smugness.

I was hoping he would just whither away in obscurity.

Creepy or super creepy? That is the question Mozilla's throwing at IoT Christmas pressies

Alister

Re: Rotate the Pod Door, HAL

I'm sorry Dave, but the Pod door cannot rotate. I can open the Pod Bay door for you, or rotate the Pod for you, which would you prefer?

Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'

Alister

A prime example: Michael Gove.

He's been, successively, Sec State for Education, Sec State for Justice, Sec State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and now they want to make him Sec State for Brexit.

I doubt that he has any expertise in any of those diverse subjects.

Alister

Re: That's nothing

"There's desktop engineers still walking about that couldn't tell you what USB stands for."

Useful Sticky-in Bit

Openreach v Ofcom dark fibre legal bill bounced back to Competition Appeal Tribunal

Alister

such a pawltry amount

NIce! a cross between poultry and paltry. maybe?

That Old Time 2018 IT songbook: Verity, Verity - give us your lyrics, do! We're half crazy, all for the love of you

Alister
Thumb Up

Re: Yay! Stob!

@Geoffrey W

You're absolutely right, I missed the September one. Thanks!

Alister

Yay! Stob!

Far too long since the last one, but thank you, it was worth waiting for.

Now wandering round the office singing:

"Six foot, seven foot, eight foot BUNCH! Daylight come and me wan' go home"

RIP Dave Neal.

Oi, Elon: You Musk sort out your Autopilot! Tesla loyalists tell of code crashes, near-misses

Alister
Thumb Up

Re: No way ready!

Dammit Lee, stop writing things I agree with...

;)

Microsoft lobs Windows 10, Server Oct 2018 update at world (minus file-nuking 'feature') after actually doing some testing

Alister

PCI compliance

We got marked down the other day for some of our Server 2016 instances, as they hadn't got the latest patch applied - fuckwits.

You can't win, can you. You either roll-out patches immediately, and risk being an unwitting beta-tester, but be compliant, or you wait, and test, and wait for Microsoft to fix it, and then get called out for being cautious.

Gaaaaaah!

Rocket Labs mean business, Brits stick pin in Mars map, and Japan celebrates HTV-7’s dive into the atmosphere

Alister

Re: Ooh err missus--

Bloody stupid computer autocorrect that doesn't recognise the word ether.

AI - yeah, right...

Bloke jailed for trying to blow up UK crypto-cash biz after it failed to reset his account password

Alister

Re: Counter Terrorism Command?

@jake

Every major city that I am aware of (and quite a few minor ones!) has had a Bomb Squad a lot longer than the current fad of calling anybody who sneezes at the wrong time a "terrorist" has existed.

That may be the case in the US, but it's not in the UK.

Most bomb disposal teams are provided by the armed forces. Individual Police services are unlikely to have EOD abilities, with the exception maybe of the Met.

Alister

Re: Counter Terrorism Command?

I would suppose that the necessary skills for dealing with bomb attacks fall most easily under the counter terrorism umbrella, rather than any other branch of the law enforcement services.

Junior dev decides to clear space for brewing boss, doesn't know what 'LDF' is, sooo...

Alister

Shrink an LDF file?

Back when I was less old, and less bitter and twisted, I remember asking the boss how to shrink an LDF file on an older version of MS SQL.

His response was that I should stop the server instance and delete the LDF file, then restart the service, and it should create a new smaller one...

So I did...

Good thing I copied the LDF file to another location, 'cos when I tried restarting the service it wouldn't come back up, and it definitely didn't create a new fresh transaction log like he said it would!

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Alister

@Kubla Cant,

I agree, if it were me I'd have done it in the living room :)

There was a very nice little winch and a big RSJ in the roof over the loft hatch. He'd obviously planned it carefully...

But that said, he still would have had to lug the engine, and all the tools, up the stairs.

Alister

My wife's uncle died earlier this year, and the family gathered round to undertake the task of clearing his house (he lived alone). He was a motor mechanic, who at various times had worked for a number of race and rally teams.

The house was as you might expect from a long-term batchelor, with car magazines piled up in stacks in the living room, new forms of life growing in the kitchen, and take-away food containers and pizza boxes much in evidence.

Upstairs (in a three-bedroom house) one bedroom was in use, the other two were full of all sorts of junk, masses of broken car parts: old batteries, cylinder heads, carburettors, you name it, it was there, covered in oil or rust or worse.

Climb up into the loft, and it was a different world!

A clinically clean, white painted room, with work benches round the walls, racks and racks of tools all carefully placed in order of size, and various bench tools - small lathe, grinder, pillar drill etc, all immaculately clean, and in the center of the floor, on a stand, a Ford Cosworth V6 engine in the process of being rebuilt.

We were at a loss with what to do with it all - we certainly couldn't just let a house-clearance gang touch that lot!

HSBC now stands for Hapless Security, Became Compromised: Thousands of customer files snatched by crims

Alister

@mark jacobs

You seem to have a misunderstanding of the "breach".

Thieves used valid usernames and passwords leaked from other sites, not from the HSBC site, so whether HSBC salted their hashes or used HTTPS is irrelevant.

Alister

I don't know about the US HSBC Online Banking site, but for the UK one you have to use a unique numeric ID, a passphrase, and an electronic pin generator to access your account. It would therefore be unlikely in the extreme that you could use the same credentials anywhere else.

'DerpTroll' derps into plea deal, admits DDoS attacks on EA, Steam, Sony game servers

Alister

the charge of "Damage to a Protected Computer"

Really?

DDoS is "damage" now, is it?

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

Alister

Re: at Last

I would love to hear a comment on the state of the game from an actual AI researcher

Um: Andrew Fentem has worked in human-computer interaction research and hardware development for over 30 years

Not good enough for you?

Alister

Thank you!

Thank you for a reasoned, common sense article on the realities of AI.

And thank you particularly for reminding me about Thompson's designer, I too remember reading about it in the 90s, and being fascinated that the circuit evolved to use properties of hysteresis and electromagnetism within the FPGA.

It seems that this, and things like Aleksander's WISARD discrete neural nets are being ignored in favour of software based solutions, and yet they were, even in the 80s - 90s, achieving things that software based AI still struggles with.

Has science gone too far? Now boffins dream of shining gigantic laser pointer into space to get aliens' attention

Alister

Next door neighbours

Imagine how annoying it would be, if a next-door neighbour decided to set up a massive security floodlight in their backyard, pointing at your bedroom window, and let it switch on every time the wind blew the trees about.

You'd be tempted to chuck rocks at it, or something, wouldn't you?

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Alister

Re: Astrology??!!

He was also a noted alchemist, so quite possibly an astrologist as well

Roscosmos: An assembly error doomed our Soyuz, but we promise it won't happen again

Alister

@boltar

I modded you down, because of your clear assumption that the behaviour of a Russian, (or Ukranian, or wherever) assembly line worker would bear any resemblance to that of the work-shy British factory workers, who had the privileges and comforts of living in the West.

Now Europe wants a four-million-quid AI-powered lie detector at border checkpoints

Alister

you forgot one.

But that would be sexist...

;)

Alister

Re: British implementation

Boris, you were set up for that one...

Alister

@Grunty McPugh

It worries me that you might have both saliva and blood traces in your underpants - not to mention a kidney!

Perhaps a visit to your physician is in order?

:)

Alister

Re: AI...

so for the UK a tandoori chicken

No, no, no, it's chicken tikka masala, isn't it?

Alister

fingerprinting, palm vein scanning and face matching

...and the anal probe, fecal sample, urine sample, saliva sample, blood sample, and one of your kidneys...

'He must be stopped': Missouri candidate's children tell voters he's basically an asshat

Alister

Re: Godwin's Law

It's not often that Godwin's Law shows up so obviously and repeatedly amongst comentards... but dear goodness! Today must be "special".

Did you actually read the article?

Given that Mr West (the subject of the article) is alleged to have said that "Hitler was right" I think it's a bit difficult to avoid, don't you?

Alister

Re: Can't believe this

so kids hatch revenge plot with fake comments to rubbish off his election chances

You seem to have missed the fact that the Republican party have disowned him because of his views - or perhaps you think he tried grounding them as well?

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Alister

Re: Craven District Council

@John Brown

Whoooooosh!

Alister

Craven District Council

Wouldn't it be funny if the keyboards turned out to be from the Council Offices...

The Chinese are here: Xiaomi to bring phones to the UK next month

Alister

Re: If this was five years ago...

The best phone I have had. Smooth as butter in the mouth.

Why would you put your phone in your mouth?

Florida man won't be compelled to reveal iPhone passcode, yet

Alister
Alister

I don't think anyone can be forced to _reveal their password_.

Not in the US, maybe, but in the UK, you most certainly can.

British Airways: If you're feeling left out of our 380,000 passenger hack, then you may be one of another 185,000 victims

Alister

“British Airways can confirm that it has had no verified cases of fraud.”

This fucking annoys me, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who have reported fraudulent transactions on their cards after having used them on the BA site during the relevant period.

Alister

Re: Not third party code

This wasn't due to any third party code. The original breach involved somebody changing BA's own JS code to insert additional functions.

You are wrong. It was the Modernizr third-party script library that was infected. However, BA chose to host a local copy of it on their own domain.

Yer a solicitor, 'arry! Indian uni takes cues from 'Potterverse' to teach students law

Alister

Re: Ralph gets an 'F'

Yeah, bloody Llamas! What have they ever done for us?

Alister

Re: Not as crazy as it sounds...

Is the manufacturer of the wand liable, or the retailer in Diagon Alley?

I believe they are one and the same, Mr Ollivander makes his own stock.

Cathay Pacific hack: Personal data of up to 9.4 million airline passengers laid bare

Alister

Re: Why is all this data being retained?

Because it takes work, and money, to delete data.

Leaving stale data is the cheap preferred option.

Excuse me, but have you heard the teachings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Chr-AI-st?

Alister

This could be ultimately used, for example, to turn complicated information into an easy-to-understand explanation, automatically by a computer, of course.

This makes me think of Douglas Adams' "Reason" software created by WayForward Technologies, where you gave it a desired outcome and the software constructed a plausible line of arguments to lead to the required result.

Dunno why...

Worrying Windows 10 wrecking-ball weapon weirdly wanders wildly on worldwide web

Alister

Re: Security

No, that's what they meant to code, however, nobody picked up the typo:

if (secLevel < previousWindowsSecLevel) printf ("Hey look, it's more secure!");

Alister

Windows 10

The gift that keeps on giving...

jQuery? More like preyQuery: File upload tool can be exploited to hijack at-risk websites

Alister

Re: Larry Cashdollar

Do you have a British relative called Sterling?

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

Alister

Re: MS-DOS was terrific

Come on !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BSOD

WTF? MS-DOS never did BSOD, it was a Windows thing only.

Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?

Alister
Headmaster

Re: Pfffft.

I wouldn't want anybody to loose they're temper over one off my posts. That would be rediculous...

<twitch> <twitch> <twitch> <twitch>

:D

Alister

Re: Pfffft.

So instead, I should annoy people by saying I could care less.

Nnnnnnnng... must resist... HmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmaaaaaaarGH...

No, I will be strong, I won't fall for the bait...