Posts by IglooDude

Deplatforming hate forums doesn't work, British boffins warn

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

"You obviously know nothing about these states or the "US South." I know plenty of trans around these here parts and they do just fine. They call the cops when they need assistance and, gosh durnit, they get help. Try not collating your facts from hysterical internet forums and news outlets."

Perhaps if you knew those "plenty of trans" better, you'd know they consider 'trans' to be an adjective, not a noun.

No little irony seeing that showing up in a post implying someone else's lack of familiarity from a misused label, too, "US South" AC person.

(If your post was actually intended as sarcasm, then mea culpa.)

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

Worth noting, in some cases one's local police force (or a significant percentage of the individuals in it) are more sympathetic toward the trolls than their target. Obviously no police force enjoys being the tools of internet assholes, but the Ontario PD wasn't exactly eager to treat @keffals gently either.

To say nothing of the fact that being outed on the internet as <whatever minority status> is bad enough, but forcing one to go to one's local police force and *tell them* that one is gay, trans, whatever (and bonus potentially get hostile treatment/response by individual policeassholes) is yet another special sort of win for the internet assholes.

Russian snoops just love invading unpatched Cisco gear, America and UK warn

Security!

Ah, no worries here then, I always change the default 'public' community string to 'private' on my SNMP client configs so there's no exposure to the internet.

Amazon: Trump photon-torpedoed our $10bn JEDI dream because he hates CEO Jeff Bezos

Re: Trump, bent?

I beg to differ. The 2016 election featured two of the worst main-party candidates to have won their primaries in recent memory. At least two of the current top-tier Dem candidates (Biden and Buttigieg) are above that very low bar. Plus "the devil we know" is really worse than almost anyone expected, so while Republicans will hold their nose to vote for him, there are many more independents that will vote for "someone other than satan" this time around.

Spri-Mobile? T-Print? Time to think of a nickname: The Sprint/T-Mobile US merger is go

Re: STM?

Given the relative reputations in the US the two carriers have (as indicated by Sprint steadily losing customers and TMo gaining them faster than anyone else) they will likely (and should) drop the Sprint side.

"Sprobil" is shaping up as the merger name in my office (MVNE with connections to both), at least.

New Zealand border cops warn travelers that without handing over electronic passwords 'You shall not pass!'

Re: Have fun!

"Evidence that I have read an article on gun control which means the red-necked "patriot" on the desk is going to invent some reason to block me, or at least keep me waiting for 12 hours for further questioning."

Law enforcement folk (particularly the urban/metro variety) tend to favor a disarmed civilian population as well. So if it is any consolation, my phone's articles regarding things like 'best ammunition for various pistol calibers' is as likely to get me blocked/delayed as yours are, for fundamentally similar reasons.

DEF CON hackers' dossier on US voting machine security is just as grim as feared

Re: Controversy? What controversy?

When even Senators can see through a manufacturer's objection to the workshop, you know the manufacturer has been remarkably dumb.

Re: Land of the free!

"Even your dead grandmother can vote."

She couldn't change the "12:00" blinking on her VCR, but it sounds like these voting machines are still within her hacking abilities.

Techie's test lab lands him in hot water with top tech news site

Geographic redundancy, thirteen-fourteen years ago? I'm vaguely surprised they had servers in an actual colo at that point, and not sitting underneath the junior journalist's desk.

BOFH: Is everybody ready for the meeting? Grab a crayon – let's get technical

"You wouldn't expect to open a textbook on knot theory and understand the mathematical equations therein would you?"

Well played, sir...

Orbital ATK launches another Cygnus without anything blowing up

Re: Environmental impact of burning tons of space junk in earth's atmosphere?

Not specifically, but surely it's not moving the needle as lots of spacestuff burns up entering Earth's atmosphere daily anyway?

Did I say Chinese jobs? I meant American jobs says new Trump Tweet

Re: Art of the Deal

I only recently figured it out, that when Trump says "drain the swamp", he's referring to the existing well-known one in Washington DC, and he means to drain it INTO his own swamp which is conveniently located nearby and at a lower level than anything around it.

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

...for varying definitions of "person". I love my fellow man, but some of the people that answer the phones really put the "desk" in "helpdesk".

NASA lunar rover trundles to a meeting with Doctor Hacksaw and Mister Axe

Another market for Lyft, looks like. Or maybe time for a cooperative venture (a la ULA): SpaceUberLyftX?

Sprint, T-Mobile US sitting in a tree, M-E-R-G-I-N-G

This is a lot more palatable than AT&T swallowing T-Mobile. Given the 2G/3G technologies each carrier relied on, T-Mobile has primarily been fighting with AT&T (and has been gaining ground), whereas Sprint has been losing badly against Verizon. Sure all four carriers now get to a common technology with LTE, but there's no way Sprint can catch up, so giving T-Mobile a boost to compete against AT&T and Verizon (especially given the latters' ISP business advantages) makes more competitive sense. Though ATT/Verizon's ISP broadband businesses will probably get Pai to shoot this one down, objecting to Deutsche Telekom/Softbank somehow.

Medic! Orangeworm malware targets hospitals worldwide

They should stick some credit card info on the ROM of every medical scanning machine, to bring everything into scope for PCI auditing, I daresay those old Winboxen would get upgraded or airgapped much more expeditiously.

Boeing CEO takes aim at Musk’s Starman-in-a-Tesla stunt

Re: "We might pick up the one that's out there and bring it back"

Indeed. It invites a Musk response along the lines of "start with your own boosters".

Hold the phone: Mystery fake cell towers spotted slurping comms around Washington DC

Re: This has been a scandal for years

It's fairly ironic that 2G turndown is slowly proceeding, in the US. In a few years most 2G availability will probably be provided by IMSI catcher devices.

Fed up with Facebook data slurping? Firefox has a cunning plan

Hosts files that get updates, maybe? There's a lot of facebook.net that I've seen. And really, how trivial for a company like Facebook would it be to come up with additional inocuous-sounding (or at least anonymous) domain names?

I fired up VMware Player (the free version), spun up a Mint VM, and use it exclusively for Facebook, the account of which uses a FB-dedicated gmail address. Zuck can have the whole damned OS if he likes, he's not getting anything else from me.

Prof Stephen Hawking's ashes will be interred alongside Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin

I can't bury anyone in a place of honor (legally, anyway), but I can raise a pint to their memory.

RIP, Doctor Hawking.

Ex-Equifax exec charged with insider trading after bagging 1 MEEELLION dollars in stock sale

If one employee exploits the breach, it's insider trading. If the entire company exploits the breach (such as to get people to sign up for its own affiliated ID monitoring service free for the first year and then pay for it after that), it's good business.

IBM thinks Notes and Domino can rise again

"IBM and HCL think Notes can rise again"

And I think we should take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

America's broadband speed map is back! And it doesn't totally suck!

Yeah, when you can list three satellite providers, your "competitive environment" for broadband is going to look a lot more competitive than reality will bear out.

BOFH: Turn your server rack hotspot to a server rack notspot

Re: new keyboard alert !

Given the "stair oil", I'd think more "stairway to heaven"? Though either work, in the end.

Biker nerfed by robo Chevy in San Francisco now lobs sueball at GM

Re: I think the cyclist is at fault#2

Actually "objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear" is a pretty valid warning, it isn't so obvious

In my Mustang GT, the warning says "objects in the rear view mirror are irrelevant".

Also a big thumbs-up for the subtitle, best lyrical play I've seen here in a while.

Leaky credit report biz face massive fines if US senators get their way

This looks to me like a more specific version of GDPR, with significantly higher penalties. While GDPR itself doesn't become law until May, I'm aware of some companies (including mine) already making preparations. Why then the objection to this one that it is useless unless executives are directly exposed?

Once again, UK doesn't rule out buying F-35A fighter jets

Re: Why go totally F-35?

US carriers lately (since the 1960s) have four cats, two on the bow and two on the angled deck portside. The bow ones are usable more or less simultaneously (with a bit of careful timing) with landings, but the side ones are definitely not.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

Re: Well done NASA!

Technically, Voyager has been thrown* away. A very very very long way away.

* = by planets, via gravity, as they don't have arms.

Amazon Key door-entry flaw: No easy fix to stop rogue couriers burgling your place unseen

It could be worse

I'll give Amazon one bit of credit - this "deliver packages inside your front door" concept is less stupid than a recent Walmart trial-balloon of "deliver groceries to your kitchen refrigerator", with the same sort of delivery-unlocking feature. While everyone is noting the problem in the Amazon system due to underlying wifi weakness, at least when it works correctly it does not feature an unknown person actually walking through your house to get to the kitchen. The mind boggles.

You know what's coming next: FBI is upset it can't get into Texas church gunman's smartphone

Re: FBI can't unlock smartphone

"There is presumably a small logical difficulty in preventing violent killers in the military having guns"

Ordinarily I'd agree with you, but this is the Air Force we're talking about.

Sex harassment scandal scoops up Silicon Valley's Slimy Scoble

No does mean no, though not always for the same reason.

For the vast majority of women, it simply means no. If there are some few women out there for whom it means 'maybe' or some variation of 'yes', then yay for them, but since I really don't like socializing* with folk that won't communicate clearly or worse play games with that sort of thing, ultimately it all boils down to the same thing: no really does mean no.

*The fact that I'm very and happily married and not propositioning anyone anyway is presumably not relevant here, but noted anyway in case the missus happens to read this.

Have you heard the one about IoT network tech that uses SIM cards?

"Rather than using 3G or LTE data, however, Thingstream just uses the 2G USSD capability."

I feel like I'm missing something - aren't cellular carriers turning down 2G left and right?

Super Cali goes ballistic, small-cell law is bogus. School IT outsourcing is also... quite atrocious

Re: never mind the Super Cali headlines...

I dunno, this particular headline was worth some virtual upvotes, or a raised glass.

Hurricane Irma imperils first ever SpaceX shuttle launch: US military's secret squirrel X-37B

In such conditions the space center goes into lockdown. Non-essential staff are evacuated and a core team of volunteers stays on site until the storm is past, safe in the launch bunkers.

My first thought was yeah, if there's a superhurricane coming, even a sharknado, one place I wouldn't mind being is in a rocket launch site bunker. Then I thought... ummmm, it IS waterproof, right? Because it'll be a lot tougher to get out of than an attic onto the roof once the storm surge puts everything several meters underwater.

US border cops must get warrants to search phones, devices – EFF

Re: the sort of precautions you would take if you were being parachuted into [..] France in 1941

"Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."

Weekend yeah, but most of it didn't last past Sunday night. Though the ammo lasted all the way till Thursday.

Re: FedEx routing "errors" are common

"...unless the package happens to contain... a phone."

And (irony aside), it doesn't need a phone - there's several luggage-tracking devices/apps out there that'd do nicely, enabling you to keep your phone powered off and therefore keeping it in a completely encrypted status.

HMS Queen Liz will arrive in Portsmouth soon, says MoD

Re: wrongo

"To be fair, Gerald Ford went through several battles while serving on an aircraft carrier (the USS Monterey, maybe?) during WWII. I can offer no similar excuse for Ronald Reagan."

Just thinking, it's funny that in a place where the Navy isn't the Senior Service, we've had a high percentage of chief executives out of that service since WW2: JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George HW Bush, and one more came rather close (McCain). Truman and Eisenhower distinguished themselves (combat and SACEUR respectively) in the Army, and nothing notable since then.

Teen who texted boyfriend to kill himself gets 15 months jail

Re: whatever is not forbidden is compulsory ?

<<<WTF ? "... and that the state of Massachusetts lacks laws that prohibit encouraging suicide ..." reminds me of this ...>>>

Right now those teens are being prosecuted for the misdemeanor crime (apparently not previously used in Massachusett's history) of "failing to report a death".

Kill something, then hire cleaners to mop up the blood if you want to build a digital business

In this day and age, it is good to kill an app from time to time pour encourager les autres.

(Yeah, mine's the one with the copy of Candide in the pocket)

Cops harpoon two dark net whales in megabust: AlphaBay and Hansa

I read elsewhere (NY Times) that it is the latter - suicide.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

"Where's El Reg's Naval Correspondent when you need him?"

Can I fill in? I was a USN shipboard Communications officer for a few years back in the 90s.

Bridge officers (aka surface line officers) typically do not know Morse at all, or can fumble out an SOS. Even I was an oddity in being able to read signal flag hoists, to the chagrin of the senior enlisted signalmen. The only ones that know Morse fluently are the signalmen themselves and the occasional old-school radiomen.

On the whole, this sounds a bit like post-WW2 when radio traffic went from morse to voice and "high-speed" data - you still needed the enlisted folk as operators, even if they weren't tapping a telegraph key directly, and now the officers will be telling the signalmen what to type into the tablet and aim and click Send instead of copying down on paper them grabbing the signal lamp and start flipping. And those signalmen will continue to learn Morse as a backup for tablet failure until the service gets accustomed to the newfangled technology a few decades hence.

Happy 4th of July: Norks tests another missile

Re: "just gabbing on until..Norks have the ability to nuke the whole US and..free to invade SK.

"They've probably got much more artillery, and better defensive terrain (if they choose not to attack), but a much less modern airforce."

Much less modern airforce, indeed. In that particular respect, given SK, Japanese, and US airpower and air defenses in the region, it'd be like the Spanish Armada coming to invade an England defended by Jellicoe's Grand Fleet.

But on the whole, I sometimes wonder if the anti-Nork alliance is awaiting production-ready anti-artillery defenses before really pushing back on Kim, hoping to get it up and rolled out before the nuclear ICBM threat starts approaching credible levels?

Make sure your Skype is up to date because FYI there's a nasty hole in it

Is this for retail or business Skype, or did I lose track of business Skype becoming Lync, or was it the other way around?

SpaceX nails two launches and barge landings in one weekend

This is a great example of why SpaceX is kicking ULA's ass - they're doing great engineering trusting that it will solve political/contracting issues, and ULA is doing great political/contracting work trusting that it will solve engineering issues.

And pints all around for the two-fer, lads.

BOFH: Putting the commitment into committee

I'm borrowing "TIGASA list" for future use. It'll nicely supplement my labeling things as SEPs (Somebody Else's Problems, for those of you that don't recall upended Italian restaurants from Douglas Adams books).

Live blog: Fired FBI boss spills the beans to US Senate committee

And Comey's replacement will probably be someone who most recently defended a big-mouthed chief executive against allegations of politically motivated malice. That we could all hire folks as well-prepared for the job we want them to do...

Re: Honest question

The reason is really Comey's reputation. And, I'd say somewhat ironically, Trump's threat of having 'taped' the meetings actually helped - it'd take a special kind of idiot to falsify meeting notes if an audiotape of it turned out to be available, and now that he's taken a pitchfork to both Hillary and Donald there seems to be bipartisan agreement (except for Trump administration folks) that Comey is no idiot.

Cloudflare's incredible solution for IoT security: Use our services

Cloudflare isn't the first offering in this regard, anyway, though to be fair they're probably the first to do any serious content scanning/filtering. Some M2M/IoT MVNOs offer general "defense from the internet" by default - your cellular device gets a private (usually static) IP and various flavors of VPN options to enable you to initiate traffic to your devices, while the devices have unrestricted outbound internet access (same as PCs on your LAN) via many-to-one NAT at the MVNO outer edge.