Posts by John Brown (no body)

No more free love: Netflix expands account sharing restrictions

True. Whether that's actually a legally enforceable contract term or even enforceable in any practical way is a whole separate hovercraft full of eels.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the readership here are in IT in some form or other. Sharing credentials? Really? How sure are people that "family members" are not then sharing them on with friends, boy/girlfriends & their families?

"Don’t know about US sit-coms, but some of the UK stuff the same era is definitely cringeworthy and in-PC."

Interestingly, I've just recently watched Man About The House. Most of it is still very funny, some great one liners and, of course, muchly non-PC by todays standards but still very entertaining. It might also be because I lived through that era so I know what was funny then, what is non-PC today and so can accept it for what it is without fake outrage because I know it was a different time from experience, not reading about it :-)

Depends. If you're young, single and like to travel, it's not bad, at least for a while. I pretty much did that for a year many years ago although I was home at the weekends. I had a mortgage, but if you're renting, dumping the home base for a year or three sounds doable and likely more economic.

Re: roaming

I don't use my "home WiFi" to connect to Netflix. It's wired. It seems I no longer satisfy the Netflix Ts&Cs and may be cut off. I wonder why they assume everyone has "home WiFi"?

Curiosity finds clearest evidence yet for water on Mars

Reached out? Not shared?

That's not US style guide. That's MBA jargon. Stop trying so hard do be down with the kool kids. It's sounding more and more like a Brit trying to sound like what they thing Americans should sound like, ie stereotyping.

Ring system discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar leaves astronomers puzzled

Re: shepherds?

Not to mention that the article states that debris outside the Roche limit will coalesce into a moon and we are seeing that debris as a recently formed ring that is in the very early stages of coalescing

Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution

Re: "the confidential correspondence doesn't provide many details about the Throckmorton Plot"

"what I can't understand is why the Bamfords are picking up his accommodation costs. Apparently, £74,000 since leaving office, in which time he's banked millions. If they want to do charity work, then, donate that money to the homeless - it will do more good."

Would Boris become homeless if they didn't pay for his digs? Have you seen rents in London?

Intel wants another €3.2b from German gov for Magdeburg mega fab

Re: ?

Something about money is not eggs? :-)

Re: Free money ...

Government grants and subsidies ought to have strings attached, If the promises aren't kept, the money must be paid back. The debt being "owned" by the parent company, not the now bankrupt development company set up just for the purpose of making sure if it goes pear shaped the shareholders don't lose out. Remember, investing in shares is a risk, the value may go down to nothing as well as up. :-)

Glasgow staff form UK's first Apple union after historic vote

Re: Ooooops!!!

From what I understand, there are some quite rigid and tight timelines once the process is started such that a union with enough support should be recognised with about a month or so, the only real potential delay being if it's a large company and the ballot may take longer to organise. The employer, if they don't want a union, have no choice if enough of workers want one. For that matter, the staff are free to join a union at any time, whether recognised or not and if/when enough staff are members of the same union, apply for recognition, eg USDAW, no need to try to create a new Union and then affiliate with an existing one

"(Past tense 'cos now living Oop North where banana fritters don't seem to fit into the Grim lifestyle and you have the Parmo for the calorie overload)"

Depends where you are. Pineapple fritters have been on the chippy menu since I were a lad 50-60 years ago and still available :-)

Cloudflare engineer broke rules – and a customer's website – with traffic throttle

Re: They've at least done the right thing...

"but there's always the unexpected."

True. But then there's the need to differentiate between known unknowns and unknown unknowns which will need different mitigations :-)

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

It's worth noting that 4k characters is a fairly densely filled A4 page. Most of the Twitterati won't have the attention span to get through an entire posting :-)

This gives the "influencers" and other with an agenda the chance to do what a lot of "the press" do. Start with a clickbait headline, lead with a paragraph or two telling you lies and finally explaining the actual facts near the end where many people never reach.

Re: Here is data everyone, including Musk, has been looking for

I thought he was just a fan of the show :-)

(either or both versions)

Re: The solution to this problem is exceedingly simple, and is being overlooked by everyone...

"Speaking as an engineer with four decades in practice,"

Are you ready to do it real after all that practice? Driving trains? Writing code? Building skyscrapers?

(Sorry, I couldn't resist :-))

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: Who loves cryptocurrency?

Worse, I parked at a university last year and they ONLY have pay by phone and pay by app. BOTH have a surcharge so it's actually impossible to pay the advertised parking charge without paying one or other (different!) surcharges. I'm sure they must be breaking some law or other with that.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Is there an app that puts a rotatory dial on your smartphone screen for that retro experience? Then again, how many people actually memorise numbers so can "dial" them anyway?

I saw what you did there!

Icon so I can give 2 thumbs up! ---------------->

Well, to be fair, even if the image is in 3D space rather than 2D space, it's still a Picture Element, ie a single point or "pixel" :-)

I was working with a guy just the other day. He's showing me a procedure on his laptop, He's bashing away at the touchpad for clicks and complaining about how poor it is. So after a demo, he lets me have a go. Moving the mouse and a quick tap on the touch pad for click worked perfectly for me every time. Also, as is common on many modern touchpads, it's actually what some call a clickpad in that the bottom left/right corners sit on switches. I still have no clue how he managed to make such a simple device fail to work reliably. I suspect he's frequently logging fault calls when the clickpad buttons fail. Some people are just ham-fisted by nature I guess.

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Re: launch window between March and September

Ah, thanks for the clarification :-)

launch window between March and September

That sounds like a very long launch window for a hoped for March launch. I don't seen anything obvious in the linked application that might cover multiple launch tests. I'm guessing the engineers are less confident in the timeline than the marketing and publicity people.

Re: Starship?

Boing STARliner[*]? Virgin Galactic[**]? They're all it, driving by marketing departments and the coloured pencil brigade.

* It's a souped up Apollo capsule, no more, no less, barely passed the stage of the Wright Flyer, not an air or ocean liner by any stretch of the imagination.

** Give me a break! They don't even go to orbit!! (VG is the space tourism bit, not to be confused with Virgin Orbit which can actually, you know, get to orbit. Sometimes)

Re: Space, the misunderstood frontier.

I would imagine, with the lifting capacity of most larger rockets, especially Starship, and the location of the payload, it should be relatively simply to launch nuclear fuel in a way that the properly designed container is extremely unlikely to be compromised in a launch vehicle explosion or the impact on crashing into the sea.

Re: Orbit

If your 65 mile daily commute was straight up instead along the ground, the press might take more note of it. Let us know when that happens :-)

Your later comment in the same post make you sound like a flat-earther.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

As a world spanning corporation...

...it's notable that MS change management happens when it's least likely to affect the home market so rest of the world gets 12 hours or so of beta testing. Or am I I ascribing maliciousness where only ignorance is in play? Maybe the people making the decision on when to apply changes don't understand that time zones around the world cover more than the 4 or so hours most "lower 48ers" have a vague understanding of?

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

Fake bot accounts?

Is a fake bot a human?

Re: An account that posts images and videos each time a cat returns home. Is that "good content"?

At least the decisions might have a firmer consistency.

Field trip! European Space Agency sends astronauts abroad to learn about rocks

Forced backronym?

"Planetary ANalogue Geological and Astrobiological Exercise for Astronauts (Pangaea)"

Not only is that one of the more forced backronyms I've heard in a while, ANalogue? Really? Yeah, I know it also means "a model" or "simulation", but most of the public will associate that with "old fashioned" technology. It's all digital maaaaan!

(And yes, I'm fully aware that analogue technology is alive and kicking and has uses where digital just can't compete. (Volume controls being the most obvious example :-) I don't care if it only goes up to 10 or if it reaches 11. I also has to have infinite variability between, not fixed steps which usually don't have a "just right" setting, being either just too low or just too loud)

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Re: Investigating RDA ?

Not just the US either. Most countries will shoot the messenger if they bring bad news!

Wikimedia Foundation confirms, and bemoans, Pakistan ban

Re: Strangely torn

An excellent point. Now, any affected Gods just have to show up in court and sue for damages :-)

Have we learned anything from SolarWinds supply chain attacks?

Re: where to start?

"So far as I know, Microsoft wrote all the code for Windows itself."

A lot of the stuff included with Windows is from companies they bought, depends on how you define where the OS ends and the included apps start. Not sure about nowadays, but for many years they used the FreeBSD networking stack and credited the Regents of the University of Berkley as per the (very open) licence terms.

Re: Meanwhile...

"some outfits think they can have a QA or coder or administrative staff person "do IT" in their spare time. I've even had to help clean up a situation where the hands-on IT person was more of a facilities caretaker than anything else -- not even the proverbial "electronic janitor"."

Aaaaand we come full circle. That pretty much describes many of the SMEs I used to visit back when MSDOS was still king of the desktop and Novel was the King of servers. Si9nce it was often the accounts dept/office which got the first PCs, the Finance Director, Accountant or finance office manager was often also the "IT manager".

Re: OSS

Yes, because "secure the open-source software" is actually the easiest part. It's much harder to secure the commercial code that you can't inspect, relying only on the supplier to do it for you, or inspecting the inputs and output of the "black box". If securing any FOSS you use is your responsibility, then securing the commercial software you use is the suppliers responsibility. Making the commercial supplier legally responsible if it's not secure might be a good start, starting with MS. At the very least, legally invalidating the common licence clause which basically absolves the company making the software to take no responsibility for it even working at all, let alone working properly.

Australian government doxxed citizens who criticized illegal 'Robodebt' scheme

The "weather" balloon

"one AIM-9X Sidewinder missile"

Why? If it's really a spy balloon, it's already done its job. If it's not a spy balloon, it was a waste of time shooting it down. Either way, the missile and flying time of a fighter jet was probably orders of magnitude more than the value of the balloon. This feels more like face saving because they didn't detect it arriving in the first place.

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

Yes, I did think of that as a possibility, then tried to put myself into the mindset of a "certain demographic" reading that same information and extrapolated from there :-)

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

https://magazine.ieee-pes.org/september-october-2011/operation-outward/

Thanks, that was a fascinating read about something I'd not heard of before.

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

Yeah, if Trump was in charge, he'd create a new anti ANTI-JINESE DEFENCE FARCE of Lawn Chair Larrys to go up there and shoot them down. (and with snazzy new uniforms with lots of gold braid too!)

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

Frankly, I'm amazed the yanks are showing restraint. "It's coming right for us...!"

Agreed :-)

"If you're not on your lawn getting noisy shots of every speck in the sky, you're missing out."

And with comments like that, there's probably a certain demographic taking potshots at any little speck in the sky in the belief they can see a fairly small "Chinese balloon" flying higher than most aircraft can go and their little pop guns have the range to hit it :-)

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Racks in hallways

"Only issue was repeatedly answering the same questions from all the techies curious about high-end kit."

And the techies were probably quite impressed at the forethought of the organisers to put all the blinkenlights out on show instead of hiding them away. It was all part of the learning experience :-)

Re: One time

"The number of times I've seen such a light when walking by"

Yeah, I once got called out to a Compaq server with a 3 disk RAID array that had failed. I got there and there were two red lights showing two failed drives. I asked the on-site person (non-techy type), in conversation, when the two lights had come on. "Oh the second one came on yesterday, the other one has been on since I started here". Oops! Clearly their head office were not monitoring or checking to make sure someone on site was aware of how to at least keep a basic eye on things. No blame for the on-site non-techy person though. She had little knowledge about MS-DOS and none at all about Novel servers, that wasn't her job. She knew how to drive the PC to do her job.

On a similar note, an "emergency" HDD replacement on a similar vintage server, out of hours, so no one on site to query other than security, Only one failed drive in this case so I go to pull the hot-plug drive and note that there is a lit "failed" LED and the "faulty" drive has been removed already. Called over the security guy to confirm what I was looking at (Always have a witness, just in case). Phoned their IT guy and asked about the state of the drives when he left for the day. He says he pulled the faulty drive ready for me arriving. I could almost hear the "gulp" when I told him he'd pulled one of the two remaining good drives and the array was now toast.

Re: shaggy dog story (was -- Huh?)

"Although, stranger things have happened, so what do I know?"

It has just the right level of convolution and detail to be true 'cos no one could make that up :-)

Microsoft swears it's not coming for your data with scan for old Office versions

Yes, because who better than MS themselves ought to be able to target only the specific registry keys related to not only their own apps but this very tiny sub-set of apps. Possibly just semantics, but there;s no need to "scan the system" for these 3 or 4 apps. If they don't trust their installer to have removed old and no longer used registry keys from previous versions that are no longer there, then again, who better than MS to be able to check for those very specific and unique files that should be in a certain place if the app is still installed.

Re: Strange way to respect user privacy

"pissing about with randomly broken dependencies whenever I try and roll out out any updates,"

FWIW, that's actually more rare than Windows breaking systems with their fixes these days. Other than that minor niggle, you're pretty spot on with the rest of your comment :-)

(FreeBSD user here. I can't remember the last time I had a dependency issue either from package updates, system updates or minor/major version upgrades)

Re: Strange way to respect user privacy

"my business and none of theirs."

But, but, but, how else is poor struggling MS going to work out who to target with upsell adverts on the Windows 11 start menu?

Another RAC staffer nabbed for storing, sharing car crash data

Re: Why the doxxing??

As someone who has spent a lot of time driving around North Yorks and had not heard of this village before, I was curious as to where it might be. According to Google Maps, there is only one village in the entire UK called Higher Whitley and it's in Cheshire, not North Yorks. That's quite a significant geographical error on the part of El Reg. Cut'n'paste of information without fact checking?

Latest Windows 11 build shares desktop real estate with, er, Spotify

Re: Windows 11...

Nah, they'll just make such a part of Windows that no one can do without it then change their Ts&Cs so ban apps that offer equivalent services to those provided by the OS while sneaking in the "Zune App" which will kill Spotify as they have been lured in to relying on Windows for their income stream :-)

Meta, which pays for web scraping, sues to stop web scraping

Confused?

a message from Bright Data citing the business relationship between the two firms: "Meta has long been a valued client of our proxy and scraping services for at least the last six years."

So, in a legal filing, with the publicly accessible bit redacted in their own claim, made visible in the Facebook claims, Bright Data don't seem to be able to check the status of their client. Facebook, and definitively state when the contract started, give or take about a year? Don't they keep proper records of contracts and payments?

That doesn't bode well for Bright Datas side of the case. Although I'd be happy for this one to run on and on for years through higher and higher courts, even if it does mean the lawyers get rich since it'll be two "scum sucking bottom feeders" duking it out at their own expense.

Fossil brain undoes 350 million years of scientific understanding

...and eventually reached the pinnacle of evolution when they invented digital watches :-)