Posts by Dog11

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: speaking of usb

Ah, but if the user tried hard enough, they could get it to go in the wrong way. Then you'd have to come with a little screwdriver or similar instrument and bend the pins back straight again.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: I remember well...

We had one secretary who complained about radiation from her computer. Thing was, she'd break out in a rash on the underside of her forearms. My theory was that it had something to do with the static charge that collected on the CRT faceplate, or perhaps the dust attracted by it. We got one of the filters that was conductive glass with a ground wire, and it seemed to help (at least she stopped complaining).

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

Re: Sue You, Jimmy!

Exactly. It's not like web designers are forced to put this privacy-invading javascript on their websites. They do it on purpose, so they are the ones responsible for the data sharing. I've had it with the attitude that "just because you're on my website doesn't mean I'm responsible for the contents, that's somebody else whose identity and privacy policy I will not tell you about".

Back in the day, it would often turn out that people who had viruses/malware regularly used yahoo. It wasn't yahoo themselves doing the dirty work, it was being done via syndicated advertising that they didn't bother to monitor.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

I also have a Win7 era netbook. It's on its third HD, and running Linux as an online file server 24/7. It wouldn't do as a general purpose computer, and the occasional web browse is sort of slow, but otherwise it doesn't require much attention, it just works. I suppose a RPi would use less power, but power consumption compares favorably to all the other computers I've got running.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

Depends on what you mean by "resist better". Bit rot is a thing, and can affect CDs and DVDs, even pressed ones, as well as scratches and delamination. It can be caused by contamination (environment or manufacturing) in the reflective layer, and maybe other things. Pressed CDs are more resistant to (immediate) handling damage, but the Internet Archive is reading (and transferring) shellac and vinyl that's a century old. Think any CD maker can tout that kind of lifetime? I'd actually think that, stored properly, "vinyl" may well have a longer shelf life. Deterioration over time is a fact for almost all types of digital recording (not even considering its fast obsolescence).

The truth about those claims of Qualcomm chips secretly snooping on you

Re: What did you expect?

> there's been a requirement in the US for decades that phones incorporate GPS or similar to know where they are.

Sure. But what legit requirement is there to share that info outside the phone when not making an emergency call?

I've got "location" turned off, and some apps won't work that way. Is my phone still sending location data to anyone (outside of emergency calls)? Obviously the local cell towers roughly know where you are based on signal strength, but they really only need that to determine which tower has the best signal. (It's also obvious that telcos unnecessarily retain that data to make it possible to snoop later, but that's a different issue than the chipset spying.)

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Cat (carnivore, same as penguin) food is much higher protein than dog (omnivore) food, which has a lot more vegetable matter in it. And because of that, more expensive.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Re: Don't rely on a single password

If people want to use open source, there's always Password Safe (https://www.pwsafe.org/), the program by Bruce Schneier. It's Win only, but there are a flock of compatibles for other platforms (see their "Other Platforms" page). I've been using it for 2 decades. It doesn't natively do cloud or sync, though you could have it do backups to the cloud, or I suppose put the datafile there.

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

"It is reasonable that it is not sold on for illegal purposes."

How about "given" or "handed over" rather than "sold"? Is it the monetary transaction that's important? Does the word "illegal" mean "against law in either my country or your country"? (Hope you lave multinational lawyers on staff.) Would it mean acceptance of liability if the data is used for illegal purposes (whether or not you had the ability, foresight, or power to guard against that)?

I'm guessing you mean, "if it's ok in my country, it should be ok for you regardless of whatever your local laws may say."

"Using the data to personalise a service (e.g. adverts) sounds reasonable. "

It might, IF I have explicitly agreed to that. (Personally, I don't want unsolicited adverts, in e-mail we call those "spam". And I want personalised adverts even less.)

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

"Bag Balm" is a brand name. Great stuff. One herd-size can will last you a lifetime! After 30 years, I've only used 1/3.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

RS232 upside down? That takes work. In the old days, saw a computer with 2 25-pin D-type RS232. One was for DTE and the other for DCE. Serial printer got plugged into the wrong port. Wisps of smoke and a burning smell ensued. Didn't hurt the computer, but the printer was now toast.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: I've seen worse

Re portrait rather than landscape. That's the way you normally hold the phone, and it's kind of awkward to hold it sideways (with my phone, I have to be careful not to curl a finger over the cam lens). If a building is blowing past your window, you're probably too distracted to stop and think about the best video format.

Shout-out to whoever went to Black Hat and had North Korean malware on their PC

Re: Malware at Black Hat?

Back in the days when pickpocketing was a hanging offense, and hangings attracted crowds looking for entertainment, I understand pickpockets did work those crowds.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Hot stuff

Redundant so deleted.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Modern copiers

Maybe they can track it down if you buy new printers. All of my printers came from thrift or used-computer stores.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Re: The title is optional

Trade mags are often paid for by the advertisers, so their income depends on an extensive mailing list. There's one I've not only sent back for close to a decade, but taken at least one phone call from ("to update our records"). I still receive it monthly, and convey it directly to the waste bin. (I'm not dead, only my business is.)

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Re: Nasty goings on

A check on several search engines (with nanny filter turned off), and several different browsers, gave me a (first) page of hits almost all relating to that show (which I'd never heard of). One or two dictionary sites. Even tried with a misspelling ("I before E except after C, anything else would be weird"). Purely in the service of scientific researc, you understand.

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

Re: "lean" innovation

Well, to be honest, the Sturmgewehr pretty much invented the entire category of "assault rifle" (intermediate cartridge, capable of full auto), so pretty much all countries based new weapons on it. Kalashnikov was merely the first to do so.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Re: Quality vs Quantity

Europe/America/Japan (Japan is in the same boat) have relatively high standards of living and accessible birth control. The time required for education and career cut into childbearing years, not so much16-and-pregnant any more. It may be that many women are finding other things they'd rather be doing than breed.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Don’t know about you

Used by the Viet Cong, too. Just because we've got new ways to kill people doesn't mean the old ways don't still work.

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

Re: "stolen"

> perhaps he should go buy "Truth Central" or "Trump Truthful" or whatever that shit is called.

The name is translated from the original "Pravda".

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Re: It's a curious distinction to make

> short of rolling your own hardware (CPU and motherboard included) you can't avoid propriety closed-source firmware.

Yup. They've got you by the short hairs, so smile and bend over.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: Density

Could be. But a DD disk could be formatted and used at 4D, if you had an appropriate disk drive and software. Granted, that's still short of HD capacity.

Re: I've never seen (or heard of) hard-sectored floppy disks before

By the time of the IBM PC, disks were mostly soft sector. But before (and overlapping) that, there were a zillion disk formats. I had software (UniForm) that could do many of them, and there were a lot of hard-sector formats listed. Before that, I used IBM 8 inch, and those were soft-sectored. Never did run into hard sectors, think by the early 1990s they were not common. There's a list at stackexchange but I remember there being more.

Zlib crash-an-app bug finally squashed, 17 years later

Re: FOSS community

You always have the option to choose closed-source software, where the publisher can arbitrarily declare no more support, goes out of business, or is eaten by the borg. For example, if it runs a multi-million dollar machine whose manufacturer went out of business two decades ago.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Re: USA change its date format ...

> USAians are genetically predisposed to mis-understand times, dates, timezones, and anything else about localisation, which is odd because they have enough of their own timezones.

Timezones are a little confusing, but we can figure them out. It's the concept that there are other countries (Canada doesn't really count) that throws us for a loop.

Re: USA change its date format ...

MM/DD/YYYY? When I was programming, I used big-endian YYYYMMDD (internally at least), since then a numeric sort put it all in order.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Mac usability is only better if you already are part of Mac culture and, I think, use only officially approved software that was originally written for Macs. As a Win (and some Linux) guy, I always had immense difficulty getting Macs to do what I wanted (where are those network parameter settings again?). And then, there's that "if you can afford it".

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

Exactly. Kaspersky worked as advertised. Is Kaspersky susceptible to direction from the Russian government? Certainly. Are other AVs susceptible to pressure from related governments? Also certainly (this applies to OS software as well). I use Kaspersky because I am confident there is nothing about my computer (or my life) that the Russians would be interested in. I am not sure I can say that about other AV producers and their respective governments.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

It's not the Woke that's the problem, it's the Asleep, the ones in the Nightmare World.

But if you've read the History of WW2, you will also see that appeasing a mad Dictator, also doesnt end well.

Sure. But the question is, is maintaining the .ru domain (etc.) the equivalent of appeasement? What would the 1930s equivalent have been? Blocking mail service to/from Germany?

Even during WWII, mail service continued via neutral countries (I knew soomeone n the US who received mail from a German relative... yes, the letter was presumably read, and the envelope endorsed by both German and US censors).

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Not very common in most areas for residential or small commercial structures. Standard in places like Chicago, where building codes required it (due to Great Chicago Fire of 1871), and in areas (e.g. New Mexico) without many trees for lumber. In most of the US, wood is the predominant building material.

Worst of CES Awards: The least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable

Re: It is an all out war on ownership by the bilionaires

Lawmakers' only job should be to make laws, and the potential targets of those laws must not be allowed any influence.

The problem is, that might be you, objectiing to a proposed law that would require demolishing your house. It's very difficult to construct the right dividing line. Should your council be allowed to advocate to lawmakers that all houses in your area be painted green? How about object to plans to replace them with a toxic waste dump?

Related to #5, you've got to trust that the server will not do an update (perhaps a "security update") that in any way changes the algorithm it uses to generate results.

Re: "the marginal cost of sharing and making copies of things is pretty close to zero"

30% is the traditional retailer mark-up. For goods that the retailer must first purchase with their own money, without being certain the goods will sell. For retailers who maintain a bricks & mortar store and perhaps a warehouse to hold their stock, hire sales clerks, buy insurance, deal with recalls, and collect and submit taxes (in LeftPondia there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of differing and sometimes overlapping tax jurisdictions, yes of course that's inefficient and confusing).

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

> According to my Iranian friend Iran’s not as stable a country as everyone would like it to be either.

Since 6 January 2021, we've seen that the USA isn't as stable as everyone would like, as well.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Colour me impressed...

Depends on what you're comparing NTSC to. For OTA antenna video and marginal signal strength, it just degraded, where digital would have been completely unusable. (I grew up with B&W TV down in a valley, with 2 TV stations visible through heavy snow. It was still good enough to watch Emma Peel.)

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: Despising the company/customer loyalty

Ah, Virgin has adopted the American way. Our big vendors of consumer services (in this arena, ATT, Verizon, Comcast, CenturyLink or whatever name they're going by this week, etc.) are pretty much all like that. Your only hope is to find a small company that has not yet achieved monopoly or arrogance.

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Re: Hands On

Translates for Left--Pondians as "Vice-Grips".

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Re: For the record...

Non Tesla owner question. If you have the keycard, what's the benefit of a paired phone?

Re: 'In gear' vs 'handbrake on'

Leaving it in gear (or "park") mostly works. But if you park on an incline, and your front (assuming FWD) wheels are sitting on ice, and the day warms up to above freezing, it'll slide downhill if the handbrake isn't also on. Ask me how I know. Well, I guess if the rear wheels are also on ice, it'll slide anyhow. But I wouldn't think a little rust on the disks would prevent releasing the pads, though it does make for noisy brakes until you've worn the rust off the disks.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Re: Positive signals

Much the same for the US F102 interceptors in the late 1950s. Their task was to fly west on afterburner (very fast, fuel hog) to meet the Russian bombers, shoot them down until they ran out of missles. At that point they wouldn't have enough fuel to return home, so they were to end their mission by ramming a final bomber.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Way Back...

Not necessarily redundant (unless you were going to spring for hardware and training for the typing pool). Otherwise letters would go to the typing pool as illegible scrawls. Though a good typist who knew the terminology and the authors could often fake it, improving grammar in the process.

Pulling down a partition or knocking through a door does not necessarily make for a properly connected workspace

Re: I remember Grandma's houses wiring

Eh, my knob & tube was replaced. By single strand bitumen & cloth insulated wires (the multiconductor cable that left-pond calls "Romex" had apparently not yet been invented). House retrofitted with electric in maybe the 1920s (original lighting was gas). Since construction c. 1900 it has seen much inventive work by mechanics and such. More recent addons by electricians and pretenders of various vintages. (One private inspector said "that brand of panel (maybe what Brits call consumer unit? holds all the circuit breakers) is only used by DIY, not electricians). I am normally competent (have done new-house wiring elsewhere unofficially) but don't dare touch any of this stuff. If you disturb it, the insulation starts falling off. But I've lived here 30 years, give it another 20 and I'll be beyond caring what happens.

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Re: The choice of available browsers is lame

Vivaldi hurts my eyes, and I'm not willing to spend the time to customize it so it doesn't. Pale Moon is a good fork from what Firefox used to be, And the UI doesn't keep changing lika a kalidoscope. Works for me.

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

Anonymous Coward

"Free speech...has never, however, been unbounded. Everyone agrees that you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre, or post classes of obscene images, or advocate terrorism. "

No, "everyone" does not agree. You can't falsely shout fire. Some of us don't give a crap about what classes of obscene image you post, so long as they're not in the El Reg comments. And the problem with advocating terrorism is, that's always defined by the government in a way that excludes their own acts (e.g. drone rocket attack on automobile containing family with many small kids doesn't count, assassinations don't count if they're done by government employees, etc.).

In any case, in the US "free speech" is (in theory) free from government interference, but that doesn't mean that any private party is obliged to aid your saying it.

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

I believe some cities in Japan did likewise, issued consecutive numbers as buildings were built. I expect that when there were only a handful of buildings, it seemed perfectly logical. And now that there's a lot of buildings, it's too late to change.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Re: This is confusing

"I fail to understand why so many people in America have to describe themselves as though they are still a national of whichever country they or their parents migrated from"

As an American, I have no idea. Perhaps it's because most of us descend from immigrants (the real history of America was with the original inhabitants, but they are marginalized and don't count). As a country, we don't have much history. Perhaps it's because few other tribal groups are options, clans etc. didn't transplant en masse. So we have ersatz clans, much like football fans do. Perhaps it's an attempt to have pedigrees. We mostly don't know much about our ancestors who are more than a few generations removed, those ties were broken when they immigrated.

Don't you (wherever "you" are) create real or imagined ties to the past? Do they go back before, say, 1800?

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

What? You have to look at the keyboard when you type? That was the first thing the teacher beat out of us, when I learned.