Posts by lurker

UK gov rushes through emergency law on data retention

Re: First person on the dangerous persons' list

Yeah, he does seem to be that rarest of oxymorons, the honest politician. Probably means he won't last long in the business, sadly.

Oh SNAP! Old-school '80s Unix hack to smack OSX, iOS, Red Hat?

Re: True bug location.

Quite.

Apparently though, if you take a unix trick which has been known about, documented and worked around for thirty years and throw it into a document with the words 'exploit', 'vulnerability' and the names of popular current unix-derived operating systems, you have 'news'.

Re: directory write access?

Yes. Basically what they are suggesting is that

- if you have the ability to create files (e.g. some webserver that allows you to upload files and stupidly doesn't rename them using an internal, safe, naming scheme)

- and if the operating system happens to also have some scripted shell glue which runs wildcard commands on the contents of that target upload directory

- and if that shell glue didn't use the ./* convention named above which has been widely used since the 80s to avoid this kind of cockup

Then there might be a problem. But this is in no way a 'newly discovered exploit'.

Re: which is why...

Indeed, this was well known about when I was first exposed to unix in the early 90s.

So basically some 2014 script kiddies just learned about a 80's era issue which has been worked around since forever, and now it's news?

Facebook: Yes, we made you SAD on PURPOSE... for your own good

The possibilities are huge

That's a nice citizenship you have there, it would be a shame if someone were to turn up the 'angry' dial on our Regional Mood Control Panel for the UK for a few weeks before the election...

So, about this 'tax on global megacorps' law you were about to pass...?

REVEALED: Google's proposed indie music-killing contract terms

Re: Hmmm....

It seems of late that they have decided that it's not "Evil" if you're not actually shooting bunnies or similar, and that just being ruthless and dirty like every other big corporate entity is "fine".

Apple SOLDERS memory into new 'budget' iMac

Re: @JDX

Ah, you mean the £1500+ imacs? Those are even worse value for money. Who the hell spends £1500 on a computer with an i5 and 8GB of ram? The mind boggles at the sort of PC you could build for the price (and yes, that's INCLUDING a 27" monitor using the identical panel apple used).

Obviously, if you throw enough money at something you would expect a nice monitor. The point still stands though: Apple just buy their panels from LG or Samsung like everyone else, and if you build a PC instead you can always buy the same panel in a monitor with a different sticker on without paying the fruit tax. So claiming that apple is value for money because they have super duper screens is a peculiar argument - when you get down to it they have the same screens as everyone else, and until apple start building their own panels (not going to happen) that will remain the case.

Enjoy your ugly computer/girlfriend and rejoice - from your perspective saving money is all there is so congratulations, well done. You got what you paid for.

Well, with women as well as computers I find that in the long term it's wiser to look at what's under the surface.

So the same to you: enjoy your shallow, dedicated-follower-of-fashion existence, and the expensive trophy wife which from the sound of it you would consider ideal. For me, as for many engineering and science types, form comes second to function.

@JDX

It's a 1920 x 1080 21.5 inch IPS screen, made with an LG panel. You can get a very similar screen made using the same panel (but with an LG sticker on it) for a desktop PC for £120. While perfectly decent, it really is nothing all that special, and I'd factored that cost into my estimate.

The one defence you could reasonably make for the pricetag is to compare it to other all in one systems, such as those made by Lenovo, in which case it only looks moderately overpriced instead of stupidly overpriced.

It's a laptop part in a desktop chassis though, so unlikely to be thermally constrained that much, and will probably spend a good portion of it's time at the 2.7GHz turbo frequency.

It's not a desktop chassis, I believe - pretty sure these are all-in-one units with the hardware packed into the 'monitor' - so performance is going to be very much like a lappy I would imagine.

And I'm not saying it won't do the job of web browsing and basic office tasks very nicely. However you can easily build a PC for £400 - including a monitor and keyboard - with much better specs - admittedly in more boring and generic cases, but with the upside that you can tinker and upgrade it should you be so inclined.

And yes, probably they will sell. But let's face it, apple could slap a logo on an iTurd, charge £100, and it would probably still sell. That doesn't make it good value for money, however.

From the specs? It's just PC hardware, and a 1.4GHz dual core Intel Core i5 is a 1.4GHz dual core Intel Core i5 whether it comes in a box with a fruit themed sticker on, or not.

Supermodel Lily Cole: 'I got a little bit upset by that Register article'

Never underestimate the ability of politicians - of any flavour - to make it worse, whatever 'it' happens to be.

YouView loses YourView trademark fight, may have to pick new name

Seems stupid

I suppose this means that British Telecom and British Petroleum should go war - BP vs BT, clearly us poor dim punters are going to get confused and start trying to make calls using petrol pumps.

Alienware says it WILL ship a Steam Machine in 2014 – running Windows

Re: Breaking News

Yup, Alienware are overpriced anyway, so I guess adding the 'windows tax' into the equation won't make a huge difference.. they'll still be expensive, but people will buy them anyway because they don't really know any better and they have pretty adverts and the dell brand behind them.

Anonymous plans hacktivism against World Cup sponsors

You're making the classic mistake in assuming that 'Anonymous' is some big sinister organisation with a hierarchy and a leadership, or a strategy and a set of goals. Hint: anyone can be part of 'Anonymous' just by claiming to be. That's sort of the point.

GAME ON: Top 10 tellies for a World Cup kicking

Re: WTF is this "article"?

Pretty standard stuff from the reg really, like all the reviews of the "latest macbook" they churn out whenever there's a new model, which always conveniently overlook the pricetag while banging on about how great it is.

I think anyone sane knows that this is not a place to come for detailed product reviews, let's just let them have their fun - my guess is that this might give them some leverage to try to get hold of some cool toys for the office 'for review purposes, you know!'.

Londoners urged to cut landlines and take up wireless broadband

Quite, would want to know about the latency, also. Everyone blathers about 'Up To MB/sec' speeds but if you care about anything beyond common-or-garden web browsing then low ping times are important too.

Apple: We'll tailor Swift to be a fast new programming language

The main thing wrong with C is that life's simply too short. Operating systems written in C - great. Fart apps? Overkill really. Just not the right tool for the job.

How Bitcoin could become a super-sized Wayback Machine

Well the network would obviously use a high level or redundancy, effectively your storage contribution would be one part of a very large virtual raid array, if you like. So you would have no duty of care.

As for earning coins, I guess it would have to be based on both time availability and storage, in which case coins would not be lost when you 'switched off' (or blew up) your storage - basically you would be paid for the contribution you make to the 'virtual drive', and you should be able to enter or leave as you wish - nothing else would be practical.

I suspect that the protocol could check for that using checksums to verify that data was actually being stored fully and completely. In fact it would need to do this anyway really, so I doubt that it would be easy to adopt the 'cheap high capacity chinese pendrive from ebay' strategy you're suggesting.

Glassholes beware: This guy's got your number

Re: There's plenty of stories about “Glassholes”

Yeah that line stood out to me as well. So far as I can make out, most of those stories get the bulk of their bandwidth footprint from The Register anyway.

SPB's mountaintop HQ menaced by wolves

Re: Eh Hello?

LASER - Lupine Alert System - El Reg

Google's driverless car: It'll just block our roads. It's the worst

Re: FUD

Yup, for a technology related site El Reg does seem to spend a lot of time screaming "New Idea! Kill it! Kill it with fire!".

Obviously nobody at Google thinks these are going to be replacing human driven cars in the next few years, but that doesn't completely invalidate the point of the research. Even if it never results in actual computer driven cars running on normal roads I would imagine there's a hell of a lot which has been learned about things like robotics, image processing, software anticipation of complex environments, etc.

100% driverless Wonka-wagon toy cars? Oh Google, you're having a laugh

"Ho ho ho look at the silly computer"

Yes, I'm sure I would be concerned about software driving cars around.

On the other hand, consider the general public, and indeed an average member of that general public. I'm honestly not happy about that person driving a car around either.

One thing's for certain though: if all the cars were driven by computers, the number of fatalities would be lower. The thing which makes the roads most difficult to compute is the other drivers on the roads and their unpredictability.

Microsoft's 'CEO of no' on Xbox: NO SALE

Bing

Spinning off Bing would be a very short-sighted move. It's not going to dethrone google, but without the backing of Microsoft it would fail, and Microsoft need it to exist simply because handing the whole game to the chocolate factory would be suicidal. If they don't have an ecosystem of their own which can at least seem to challenge google, they are doomed, and search is a big part of that.

Where does the 30% search share figure for Bing come from by the way? That sounds more like a USA figure rather than a global / Western world number. I don't think I know anyone who uses Bing, to be honest. If I met someone who said they did they would probably get the same sort of reaction as if they had admitted to being Seventh Day Advent Hoppists - confusion and disbelief.

Watch: Kids slam Apple as 'BORING, the whole thing is BORING'

Re: The 70's?

Erm.. Thatcher was only elected half way through 1979. Although she can surely be blamed for many things, her misdeeds were perpetrated in the 80's, not the 70's.

EBAY... You keep using that word 'ENCRYPTION' – it does not mean what you think it means

Re: Ah, encryption and hashing

The fact that a software geek isn't also medically knowledgeable actually isn't as ironic as your misuse of the word 'irony'.

Weakened Apple slab grab sees Q1 growth slump to RECORD LOW

Re: Not News?

"so the headline is just flamebait for the Fruity Haters then?"

Welcome, you must be new around here :).

Although arguably being just 'first among equals' is a fall from grace from the days when they were 'the only game in town'.

Oh aye, a mobe grumble-flick player? No – it's a 'droid ransomware nasty

Re: 200+ Domains?

I think you're underestimating how easy it is to set up a free subdomain, or iterate through a list of subverted domains. My point is that they do get squashed, but that requires due process and legal action typically, whereas the black hats are smaller and much more nimble, with the net result that it's simple for them to add new domains faster than they can be squashed.

Epson takes on Google Glass with wired 'augmented reality' glasses

Re: Enterprise use of Augmented Reality.

I'm sure there must be irony and/or sarcasm in this post somewhere, I'm just not finding it.

Hey, Samsung: Why so shy about your 960GB flash drive's endurance?

Re: Beyond a joke.

@razorfishsl

I understood that you could still read data from SSDs once they hit their write endurance limit? That's why it's a WRITE endurance limit surely? You just can't change the data any more.

And regardless, enterprise usage of SSDs should be based upon the usual redundancy strategies so loss of a single drive != loss of data, same as for the usual chunks-of-spining-metal drives.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft – A jolly little war for lunchtime

Payment Methods

"On PC, payment is done via Paypal"

Card payments are also accepted through a card registered to the associated battle.net account. (Like all blizzard games, you need a battle.net account to play).

Feast your PUNY eyes on highest resolution phone display EVER

This will be a breakthrough

In lolcat delivery technology, the principal benefit resulting from all major technical developments such as this.

"Look at the detail on those whiskers!"

What price justice? 73 CENTS in book price-gouging case

Ironically, until very recently Amazon had the exact same policy with their 'price parity' rule on all products sold through the Amazon Merchant system - you could not list a product cheaper elsewhere (e.g. on your own store) if you were listing it on Amazon. But they were told (quite correctly) to stop that, in the EU at least.

Amazon fuses LoveFilm, subs service, calls it Prime Instant Video

Netflix is definitely supported on a far wider range of devices, especially when you take into consideration media streamers and the like.

I doubt that it is actually a case of Amazon wanting their product to have a more limited audience, the issue is likely that it's having to rewrite a lot of it having gone down a dead-end technology branch in the form of MS silvershite.

Mathematicians spark debate with 13 GB proof for Erdős problem

Re: wikipedia download too big?

Actually truly random binary data would not compress well at all.

The revival of survival – the gaming genre that refuses to die

Re: Dwarf Fortress

Relevent, a study of the pursuit of 'fun' in dwarf fortress, in comparison to 'normal' and merely 'hardcore' games:

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png

HARD ONES: Three new PC games that are BLOODY DIFFICULT

Re: The Saga of the Saga Sagas

As above, try Googling for the definition of the word 'saga'. It's being used absolutely correctly in the context of this game.

The Candy Crush people used it inappropriately, and then tried to sue the makers of the Banner Saga for using it in the title, despite the >1000 years of precedent in the form of the Scandinavian saga literature. Classy.

Altcoins will DESTROY the IT industry and spawn an infosec NIGHTMARE

Re: Valid Points

I know that in theory they should be fine, however the truth is that they are not really designed, as gaming GPUs, to run 24x7.

Given the choice between one which had seen normal use, and one which has had it's nuts clocked off and then been run with a custom water block at the absolute thermal limit for 2000 hours without a break, I'd choose the former, all else being equal. Perhaps that's just my suspicious nature.

Quite right about the warranties, but having to return stuff is hassle I prefer to avoid.

Valid Points

I think though that to say that they (graphics cards purchased for mining) 'will not have a resale value' is an exaggeration.

It's almost certainly true however that the resale value of cards will be affected by the glut of cards which are purchased for mining and then dumped onto the second hand market when they quickly become obsoleted by a newer card. So it's true that people buying such cards would be wise to expect to be selling them for considerably less than the current going rate.

Which is potentially good news for gamers looking for second hand cards in a few month, although the question arises: do you want to buy a card which has been nuked at maximum load 24/7 for the last six months?

Globe grabbin,’ sphere slammin’, orb-tossin’, pill poppin’... Speedball

RE: Daley Thompson & joysticks

Those QuickShot IIs just couldn't sustain that kind of abuse, I must have killed a few before I discovered the glorious (and basically indestructible) sure shot, and later the almost as rugged (and slightly more flexible) competition pro range.

UK.gov to Google: Kill impostor taxmen ADs hogging top spot in YOUR search results

Tax Return Gateway

Sneaky how the TaxReturnGateway people made a website with a colour scheme using exactly the same palate as the official HMRC site.

They made one big mistake though, their website actually looks professional and tidy. If you click the official HMRC link just below it you get a horrendous mess which looks like it was produced by a 15-year-old YTS trainee who had been handed a copy of FrontPage from 1998.

Bitcoin's so over. We're mining Primeco... Oh SNAP, my box is a ZOMBIE!

Re: Erm

Translation:

I haven't a clue what I'm talking about, so I will string together some phrases which I believe are pertinent to the issue and hope that it makes sense.

MANIC MINERS: Ten Bitcoin generating machines

Re: You have missed the boat!!!

That's certainly true for BTC, which is where the alternative Crypt based cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and more recently Doge have come from - because scrypt doesn't currently benefit from the ASIC hardware out there (although naturally there are people working on Scrypt ASICs).

Clink! Terrorist jailed for refusing to tell police his encryption password

If you read the article carefully, it doesn't say that it's the same password used elsewhere, just that it is based on the same phrase (from the Koran) on which other passwords were based.

Gone

Title

"Windows Phone app devs, this is for you"

What, both of them?

Thought sales were in the toilet before? Behold the agony: 2013 was a PC market BLOODBATH

Re: What's the point of upgrading

PC Gaming market is actually still very healthy, Steam and other online game retailers have really helped keep the PC going as a gaming platform - you get a lopsided impression from high street retailers with racks of console games and a tiny dusty PC games shelf in the darkest corner of the store, because very few PC games are purchased physically nowadays.

Source: I work for a company which sells gaming PCs online in the UK, sales this year are better than last year, and that was better than the year before, etc. Our view of the market is quite different from that reported by El Reg with monotonous regularity, although obviously these nuggets from 'analysts' are looking at the 'monolithic' companies rather than the smaller outfits like ours.

Obviously, the gaming PC market is a small corner of the overall PC market, which is undeniably shrinking for the reasons cited by other posters - simply no pressure to upgrade, since a PC which ran a web browser and office software three or four years ago will still happily run a web browser and office software.

Now THAT'S a sunroof: Solar-powered family car emerges from Ford labs

Look at it this way, if you typically used this car only for short journeys - e.g. the school run, it could effectively be free to run. Pretty sure you can see the point of a car which doesn't require petrol?

Obviously, it's not going to work for everyone.

You're spending WHAT on iPhone 6? Wells Fargo downgrades Apple stock

Apple doesn't innovate, that's just their marketing department at work. What Apple best does is refine, reduce and repackage existing innovations in a highly effective manner, while claiming to be innovating. What it needs to do is what it already did with mp3 players, smartphones and tablets; find another (existing) class of product which is 'out there' in the hands of a niche market and ready to be brought to mass market.

Security guru Bruce Schneier to leave employer BT

Re: writing for you

No offence to El Reg, but I doubt they could afford him.