Posts by petef

Neutron star crash in a galaxy far, far... far away spews 'faster than light' radio signal jets at Earth

Re: Just a side note

Not quite. Antimatter has antiprotons and antineutrons at its core with positrons (antielectrons) orbiting (in the Bohr view).

Disk will eat itself: Flash price crash just around the over-supplied block

Of course HDD is a cyclical industry.

Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord

Larry Wall for BDFL

Let Parrot flourish

Chrome, Firefox pull very unstylish Stylish invasive browser plugin

Re: Stylus

Thanks for pointing out Stylus, I shall migrate.

One of my prime reasons for using Stylish is to read El Reg without the gratuitous headline images.

ICANN pays to push Whois case to European Court of Justice

ICANN seem to be taking their non-profit status quite seriously.

Russian battery ambitions see a 10x increase in power from smaller, denser nukes

Re: Specific Energy

A fair point but the mass of an engine can be amortised against a large fuel tank if we are talking about many years of operation.

BTW I upvoted you and would have given an extra if I could for the obligatory XKCD reference.

Specific Energy

3300 mWh/g is about 12 MJ/kg, the units chosen on Wikipedia. That is ~20x better than an alkaline cell though a quarter of that of petrol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

I got 257 problems, and they're all open source: Report shines light on Wild West of software

Re: At least the command line is OK

As long as you have patched for Shellshock.

Oracle demands dev tear down iOS app that has 'JavaScript' in its name

You use the word JavaScript 12 times in your article. Expect a letter from Sue, Grabbitt and Runne.

Must go now, there's someone pounding on my door.

Elon Musk's mighty erection fires sperm at orbiting space station

Vonnegut

The less gentle readers are directed to Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “The Big Space F***” published in Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972. The asterisks are mine.

IBM thinks Notes and Domino can rise again

I use Notes at work and it is truly appalling. I have been objective and built a list of its faults which currently has 120 entries.What is the worst? Maybe that I cannot read webmail on my smartphone because most on my email is filtered into folders and Notes actively prevents you from reading them.

Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

Obligatory XKCD reference

Exploits of a Mom

From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites

When email introduced security measures such as SPF and DKIM the Bad Guys were in the forefront of adopters in my observations. I expect malicious web sites to be ahead of the game in supporting HTTPS. A green padlock can be used to sell snake oil.

Crypto-jackers slip Coinhive mining code into YouTube site ads

The Opera browser added a blocker for mining a few weeks ago. That is in addition to the built-in ad blocking.

Facebook invents new unit of time to measure modern attention spans: 1/705,600,000 of a sec

Re: That's not news

Indeed, here is a quote from the BBC story:

A flick, derived from "frame-tick", is 1/705,600,000 of a second - the next unit of time after a nanosecond.

Take notebooks: About those new Thinkpads...

In Windows I turn on what they call Toggle Keys in Ease Of Access. That makes the computer beep whenever the caps lock (and num and scroll) key is pressed.

As Apple fixes macOS root password hole, here's what went wrong

Your Mac. [Privileges] Elevated.

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

https://twitter.com/petef4/status/935893902397190144

IBM offloads Notes and Domino to India's HCL Technologies

I like to be objective rather than just saying that Notes sucks. (Others may find different labels for my attention to detail.) I have my own list of annoyances through major defects that runs to over 100 items. Many of those are actions which are unintuitive, the list started as a crib sheet. That compares with Outlook at 21 and Gmail with 4.

Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 arrive, 364 days later than first planned

REPL in Java has been available for years using Jython.

Massive iPhone X leak trashes Apple's 10th anniversary circus

Re: 18.5:9 ?

Actually the simplest integral ratio is 812:375

Two million customer records pillaged in IT souk CeX hack attack

Onliner Spambot

Pah, only 2 million? Onliner Spambot has (some) details of over 700 million accounts.

https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-massive-711-million-record-onliner-spambot-dump

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

I use Opera which not only has a builtin ad-blocker, there is a nifty button you can click to compare the speed of loading a page with and without ads. The result for this page is 9s with and 3s without ads. So how tempted am I to whitelist this site?

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

What self-respecting nerd is going to get worked up about a decimal pattern?

G20 calls for 'lawful and non-arbitrary access to available information' to fight terror

Why stop there?

By the same token sales of kitchen knives should be banned because terrorists use them to kill people.

Bloke takes over every .io domain by snapping up crucial name servers

Re: Never fucking heard of it

Rather less than the ocean, IO is British Indian Ocean Territory, population ~2,500.

Australia to float 'not backdoors' that behave just like backdoors to Five-Eyes meeting

Will it work against uoıʇdʎɹɔuǝ uɐıʃɐɹʇsn∀?

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

Nah, we’re in the 21st century now: correct horse battery staple

Google to give 6 months' warning for 2018 Chrome adblockalypse – report

Same as now, their parents’ credit cards. ;-)

Avast blocks the entire internet – again

Re: Avast has form for this sort of thing

Avast completed their acquisition of AVG last October.

As of today, iThings are even harder for police to probe

macOS Sierra 10.12.4

El Reg makes no mention of the update to macOS / OS X released at the same time, There are a shedload of security fixes. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207615

eBay dumps users into insecure authentication mechanism

Re: Maybe not about 2FA?

SMS is generally 1½FA. If your smartphone is compromised then its new pwner will get access to your eBay app and SMS. That applies to email too.

Git sprints carefully towards SHA-1 deprecation

Re: Using a second hash function is no different than using a single hash [twice]

Hah, my scheme applies a second ROT13 to the first 32 bytes which makes it twice as secure.

AMD does an Italian job on Intel, unveils 32-core, 64-thread 'Naples' CPU

Re: But What About Purley?

In that video the unreleased Naples was tested against Broadwell-EP which has been out for about a year. It will be fairer to compare against Skylake-EP when it is released. That will have AVX-512 and presumably the other performance lifts we expect with a new generation.

There is no need to go that far. I use a snippet in the Stylish extension to disable El Reg’s headline pics.

@-moz-document domain("www.theregister.co.uk") {

div.article_head img.article_img { display: none; }

}

GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail

DVCS

Nobody seems to have mentioned that this is git. All checked out repos have all history so it is intrinsically backed up.

I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the API key

On the Internet nobody knows you’re a tractor.

Terry Pratchett's self-written documentary to be broadcast in 2017

Clacks

Thanks, El Reg, for your X-Clacks-Overhead.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/18/sir_terry_pratchett_http_header/

Kaspersky fixing serious certificate slip

Browsers vs Antivirus

Avast had a security problem with their SafeZone browser last year too. Comodo’s Chromodo also had a security issue. I personally trust the dedicated makers of browsers over the products supplied by AV vendors. I use Avast on the PCs I look after but use a custom install to exclude SafeZone.

MacBook Pro owners complain of short batt life – so Apple kills batt life clock in macOS

Re: Apple only Hard disks

If you buy a hard disk from Apple then part of the price premium is for their guarantee that it will install okay and continue to work.

I did my own upgrade to a non-Apple SSD and turned on TRIM. Both those actions are unsupported by Apple and if things had gone wrong it would have been my fault. But all is well and my old MacBook Pro is usable again at a fraction of the cost of a new laptop or parts blessed by Apple.

There's an app for that

I use the free app Battery Health 2 from FIPLAB to display more info than the stock Apple control.

Hull surfers cut off by router attack

Backdoor

“ZyXel has developed a software update for the affected routers that will address the vulnerability. In most cases this will be applied remotely and customers will not need [to] do anything”

So ZyXel have a backdoor into the routers they have sold? What happens when (not if) the bad guys get a hold of that?

Google's Chromecast Audio busted BT home routers – now it has a fix

Re: "simple" solution...

Unfortunately BT/PN routers lock down the DNS settings, you are stuck with their servers.

Debian putting everything on the /usr

mandatory Engrish joke

All your base are belong to usr

Password1? You're so random. By which we mean not random at all - UK.gov

Re: 'Social media' as the same level of importance as banking??

Many sites allow you to log in using credentials from Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.

Living with the Pixel XL – Google's attempt at a high-end phone

Video preview

“someone calls you on Duo you get to see video of them before deciding whether to pick up the call”

Have they thought this through? There is plenty of scope for nuisance calls at the next level.

USB-C is now wired for sound, just like Sir Cliff Richard

Re: I wonder how does electrocution through your ears feel like

The full OED entry has connection and connexion as joint headwords. They both come from Latin. The former comes from co(n)nectĕre whereas the latter is directly from connexiōn-em (in classical Latin cōnexiōn- ).

Let's Encrypt won its Comodo trademark battle – but now fan tools must rename

AFAIK Comodo is the only company other than Microsoft offering an antivirus product that is free for commercial use. (ClamAV does not do on-access.)