Posts by Mr Humbug

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

This can be solved by proper parenting. My 20-year-old son can quote Aliens, Blade Runner, Terminator etc just as well as anybody else can.

This is the Send, encrypted end-to-end, this is the Send, my Mozillan friend

I see what you mean, but if you've got maliciaous insiders who can set this up on their own VPS then you've already got malicious insiders who can set up a VPS that accepts file uploads over https. ANd if that's a significant threat for you then you should already be locking down the end points and whitelisting permitted upload sites

I am confused

> It is however a DLP nightmare....

I suppose it depends a bit on how your users need to use information to do their jobs, but I don't see how this is any worse (for DLP) than the other file sharing services already available. You still have to control where people can upload stuff to and it doesn't really matter (when you look at the insider threat risk) whether the file is locally encrypted before it's uploaded if users have mobile devices that can connect from outside your perimeter. And if you can monitor and block access to sites such as files.fm then you can do the same with this.

Lenovo kicks down door of MWC, dumps a stack of sexy new ThinkPads

Re: Gained?

I see the T490s has lost the full size ethernet port in favour of a silly dongle, and it looks like it's a different silly dongle from the one on the X1 Carbon. That's a shame.

Re: Gained?

Yes, as do the T480s and the T580

Crowdfunded lawyer suing Uber told he can't swerve taxi app giant's £1m legal bill

Sounds like it's trying to put itself in the same position as eBay and Amazon Marketplace - an order processor and payment intermediary, not the provider of goods and services. Presumably the fee it charges to drivers includes some element of VAT.

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

Re: What's worse than the biased algorithm

Actually I was agreeing with your point about the reliability of drawing conclusions from random internet search results :)

Re: What's worse than the biased algorithm

I tried that search in DuckDuckGo and I discovered that most doctors wear a lab coat, have a stethoscope hung round their neck and stand with their arms folded.

The main exceptions seem to be Matt Smith, David Tenant, Peter Davidson, Peter Capaldi, ...

Edited to add: obviously this is gender bias because you have to scroll down quite a lot to find Jodie Whittaker

AI or ML

Call it what you like. It's just a way of automatically repeating our past mistakes, but really quickly

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

Our domain name incliudes 'lli' in the middle. Scammer registered a domain with 'lll' in it.

The most convincing one I've seen so far was an email that looked like a normal Exchange online synchronisation failure report that when youclicked through took you to a copy of the Office365 login process

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

Burden of proof

The government said the law still provides for the existing "reasonable excuse defence", which includes circumstances where a person "did not know, and had no reason to believe" the material acccessed contained terrorist propaganda.

"Once a defendant has raised this defence, the burden of proof (to the criminal standard) to disprove this defence will rest with the prosecution," the Home Office's impact assessment said.

I'm not sure how the Home Office arrived at that conclusion. The fact that you possess a chemistry textbook or have watched a video of a chemistry lesson that discusses nitration of toluene makes you guilty under 58(1). Then 58(3) says:

It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that he had a reasonable excuse for his action or possession.

Which looks like it places the burden of proof on the accused to show that the excuse is reasonable.

PS. I am not a lawyer

It's now 2019, and your Windows DHCP server can be pwned by a packet, IE and Edge by a webpage, and so on

Re: How oh how

And even worse, Edge doesn't render some PDF forms properly and has difficulty printing some PDF files. It did last time I tried to use it anyway

Cops looking for mum marauding uni campus asking students if they fancy dating her son

When my older daughter started looking at university a few years ago I was astounded that she *wanted* me to go with her to open days. When we got there I was equally surprised to find that nearly everybody else had at least one parent with them.

On the other hand, a few years later, when my (autistic) son started looking I was quite glad that having a parent with him didn't make him stand out so much at open days.

(PS. If anyone is looking for a University that is sensitive to students with additional needs, UCLan seemed very good, although he ended up going somewhere else)

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

Well if Apple won't pay ...

He could take it to Zerodium. It pays up to $50,000 for a MacOS local privilege escalation or sandbox escape apparently. (whihc seems rather low - the equivalent for Windows is up to $80,000)

Post-Brexit plan for .EU tweaked: No dot-EU web domains for Europeans in UK, no appeals, etc

> I can buy any domain anywhere, yet apparently, only the EU is so super sensitive to the location of domain owners.

The French worry about this too. To register a .fr you have to be a French legal entity or own a European trademark registration and you have to register it to an address in France (although I don't think anyone has actually checked the address we used for ours).

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

The ones that don't comply will get added to the same block list that the Piratebay and similar sites are on.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

There was the 2011 Dredd story 'Choose your own Christmas' (Prog 2012 Christmas issue). I spent a good 20 minutes jumping between panels and pages before I worked out that it's best read from Dredd's point of view, not the victim's.

Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary

XKCD, of course, pointed this out years ago

https://www.xkcd.com/1279/

I have <firstnamelastname>@gmail.com and only this evening I had an event organiser asking me to confirm my shirt size for a uniform. I told them it came to the wrong address, they apologised and then an hour later they sent it again!

On the up side, there is a very nice chap in Australia who has given me a couple of Amazon vouchers for dealing with stuff meant for him. I've told him he doesn't need to send the vouchers because just passing the message on is much easier than trying to convince the sender they made a mistake

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

Re: Waiting for the unbranded knockoff priced right

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unihertz-Smallest-Smartphone-Android-Unlocked/dp/B0752BYRHM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1545156932&sr=8-1&keywords=unihertz

But it was done first

Roll a diplomacy check to win the election: Vote tie resolved by a D20

The odds of scoring 20 on 1D20 are 19:1. The probability is 0.05. the odds an probability of any other number are the same.

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

James Prescott Joule. The pound needs more energy.

And he was from Salford, so the BBC should approve.

Xiaomi waggles Mi MIX 3, the first smartphone packing 10GB RAM

Umbrella

> But do they sell an umbrella under the Mi umbrella brand?

Yes, they do

https://www.banggood.com/Original-Xiaomi-90-Fun-Portable-Umbrella-Anti-UV-Umbrella-Waterproof-Three-Folding-Umbrella-p-1332976.html?rmmds=search&ID=224&cur_warehouse=CN

Silent running: Computer sounds are so '90s

Isn't an alarm cock a male chicken that crows at dawn?

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

Unihertz

Apart from the paired SIM (which is within the gift of your mobile network) didn't Unihertz already do this at a much more reasonable price last year?

https://www.unihertz.com/spec.html

2.45" screen, so even smaller and £99 on Amazon

Leaked memo: No internet until you clean your bathroom, Ecuador told Julian Assange

"Adding insult to injury, the embassy threatened to remove Assange's cat to a shelter should they decide he is not cleaning up after the animal properly."

I don't understand why people think this is unreasonable. If it was my embassy he wouldn't have been allowed to bring a cat in the first place.

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

> chresmomancy

What a wonderful word, it didn't even know it was a thing. And it's not in any of my dictionaries

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

It went live on WSUS then was expired pretty quickly. I only saw the expiry appear on my server

'Men only' job ad posts land Facebook in boiling hot water with ACLU

Re: I think some people might have missed something...

'Most of these employees are men, so I shall advertise to men' is the wrong way of solving the problem. If I want to recruit a welder and I advertise to men then I'm going to waste most of my budget because, even though most welders seem to be men, most men are not welders. I should be trying to advertise to groups that include welders and not restricting my potential applicants based on criteria that are not essential for the job.

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

Would everyone please stop using trigger as a verb.

Signed,

An offended pedant

Post-silly season blues leave me bereft of autonomous robot limbs

Telepathically controlled drone arms you say?

Sounds a bit risky. You could lose a universe

http://lexx.wikia.com/wiki/Mantrid_Drones

On the positive side you could add Xev Bellringer to the thing with Rachel Weisz and Shirley Manson

I'm going to be very careful about which carrots I buy

http://lexx.wikia.com/wiki/Carrot_Probe

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

Except this doesn't seem to be about the Google search engine. The post is on blogspot, which is owned by Google, so Google is quite capable of removing the post or the whole blog if it wants to.

Whether it should remove the post is another question entirely

Don't you just love Windows 10 refreshes, yells Lenovo

Seriously

Thinkpads have a three-year onsite warranty that you can extend to five. Call them with a hardware problem and someone arrives the next day with a replacement part and fits it for you.

I used to buy Toshiba. Those have a one-year warranty that you pay to extend to three. Call with a problem and a courier comes to collect the machine that you have to pack up yourself. The machine goes to Germany and comes back in a week to ten days.

That's my experience anyway

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Re: what the fuck does PC LOAD LETTER mean?

I had them all saying OUT OF BEER. When I had a call about it I told the user to go and buy beer so I could 'fit it' for them.

Didn't work.

Brit comms providers told: You must tell people when their cheap contract's about to end

Jake and Elwood

In the bar where they have *both* kinds of music: Country *and* Western

UK comms firm Gradwell quits cloud land after 'strategic review'

I used to have DNS with Gradwell until they transferred that to Portfast a couple of years ago. I left my domains there because the old hosting system had got into such a broken state (and they weren't going to fix it because I would be moving to Gradwell Cloud any day now ... for two years) that I didn't dare touch anything.

Yesterday and this morning I moved all my domains to Portfast. Seems to be like Gradwell in the early years: one chap who does a small amount of stuff well and cares about his customers.

Now I just have to make sure that Gradwell and Pickaweb don't try and charge me by mistake.

UK's first transatlantic F-35 delivery flight delayed by weather

> My understanding is that they generally plan on no aircraft going below ~50%

> fuel to give a decent diversion range and a bit spare for a contingency.

On the Black Buck raids, when we last needed to fly military aircraft a long way across the Atlantic, the Vulcans refueled seven times on the way there but only once on the way back.

I guess the F35s would want their tanks topping off four or five times on the way over so they have enough fuel to divert to somewhere dry in the event of a problem.

Article Removed

Well done. You entirely missed the point.

Before I sign up to your thingumycryptopaywotsit I would have to find out how it works and whether I could trust it. That means I have to spend, probably, several hours researching it. How many times am I likely to use it after buying this book? As far as I can tell, none.

Now if everybody accepted your iron money I'd be more willing to invest the time and effort needed to join your game, but even bitcoin hasn't achieved that ubiquity yet.

I'll buy this

But I want to buy it in epub format, or something that Calibre can convert to epub, as I do not have any iDevices. I would also like to pay for it in a way that doesn't involve me spending considerable time to ffind out what I'm letting myself in for by signing up to some cryptomoneywebwalletcoin thing that I've not heard of until now.

A fiver sounds about right (since you have already monetised the articles) for a non-DRM version. I'll give you three quid if I have to strip the DRM off it.

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

Re: Thanks

I had to look it up. Collins gives 'deasil' as the more usual spelling.

For low values of usual, I expect

Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds

> doesn't this add up to 110%?

Maybe some respondents named more than one resource

The uSwitch press release is here:

https://www.uswitch.com/media-centre/2018/03/digital-poverty-line-poor-broadband-services-see-1-2-million-children-falling-behind/

"Switch.com surveyed a sample of 1,000 UK parents of children aged 5-18 from the 5th to the 8th of March. Results have been weighted to nationally representative criteria. 952 respondents identified themselves as parents of children who do homework."

So the 3.9 hours is the avereage of children aged 5 who bring home one reading book each week to children aged 18 who are expected to do homework and revise for three or possibly four A-levels. I think the conclusion is whatever you would like it to be.

Sysadmin wiped two servers, left the country to escape the shame

Re: I've had a backup restore

I cheated, which I could do because it's a small network.

I've had a backup restore

When I moved a number of user accounts from one Active Directory OU to another then deleted the (now empty) OU. Then I discovered that in an act of malice the servers decided that deleting the OU (and all that it contains) should synchronise throughout the domain before the account moves should synchronise. At least that's the only explanation I could come up with for all teh user accounts vanishing.

But, as I said, the backup worked.

OK, deep breath, relax... Let's have a sober look at these 'ere annoying AMD chip security flaws

Seems more likely that it's a bunch of 20-somethings who started a company last year, stumbled across something clever and have spent the last three weeks (since 22nd February) putting together a self-promotion campaign to get the most press coverage possible without considering things such as responsible disclosure.

The TPM issue (if as described) does seem concerning. I'm sure I can't be alone in using the combination of TPM plus Bitlocker to keeps the data on PCs secure with minimum inconvenience to the user. I guess AMD-based machines are going to need a BIOS boot password now.

Rant launches Eric Raymond's next project: Open-source the UPS

This is something I recall reading on Usenet

or perhaps on a BBS. Being old, my recollection is hazy.

Anyway, as the new Battlestar Galactica says "These things have happened before, and will happen again"

http://www.danielsen.com/jokes/objecttoaster.txt

FBI chief asks tech industry to build crypto-busting not-a-backdoor

> Every time he opens his mouth on the subject he reinforces his lack of understanding.

Every time he opens his mouth he reinforces the idea, which so many governments and law enforcers are also esposing, that the technology industry is just being awkward and not trying hard enough. If they can get that message to permeate the mainstream media they hope the overwhelming weight of Daily Mail opinion will force back doors or key escrow into their hands.

If you have a chance, listen to this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09rwgcg Entirely different subject, but in part looks back at how the media was manipulated

4G found on Moon

Gene Hunt drives an Audi Mars Quattro

Samsung left off Google's new official Androids-for-biz list

That's where the Android for Work bit comes in. The MDM system that you use to deploy settings partitions work data from the consumer side and the Google Slurp can't see it.

Japan finds long, deep tunnel on the Moon

So they found the way in

http://www.baen.com/empire-from-the-ashes.html

Brit broke anti-terror law by refusing to cough up passwords to cops

I am confused

Try this one:

The government wants Huxley's Brave New World, is actually building Orwell's 1984, but will end up creating 2000AD's Mega City One