Posts by druck

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

Agreed. If someone is hired to produce 20 widgets a day, which takes most people 8 hours, but this person can do in 4 with no loss in quality... I say give them the extra 4 hours off paid as a reward for being efficient. They fulfilled their end of the contract and it's not their fault they can do things twice as fast as everyone else.

In reality they would be told to produce 40 widgets in an 8 hour a day, and someone else who only produced 20 would be sacked.

EU companies claim Google still abusing its Shopping power

Here is the original list of complainants from this very site, Microsoft amongst them.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/27/eu_google_antitrust_complainants/

If by little guys you mean Microsoft backing a bunch of feckless link spammers.

China launches solar observation satellite

Falling bebris

The video shows a substantial amount of material being shed from the nose cone, revealing a red surface underneath, which doesn't look normal.

One also hopes that the Long March 2D doesn't leave any soon to be de-orbiting debris behind, as the 5B does.

Crypto exchange Bittrex coughs up $53m to end claims of US sanctions busting

Not a suspicious activity report but - instead of all of them

"Bittrex's failures created exposure to high-risk counterparties including sanctioned jurisdictions, darknet markets, and ransomware attackers."

If that isn't the entire point of a crypto exchange, what is?

Google Cloud to accept cryptocurrencies as payment

Re: This will be fascinating

I suspect a few select customers that use cloud computing to earn large amounts crypto from various nefarious practices, will only be too happy to pay in crypto without having to launder it in to real money first.

UK govt launches multibillion procurement for tax agency application services

Distressed

I was distressed by seeing the cost overflowing a 32 bit integer before the project even started.

Mastercard moves to protect 'risky and frisky' crypto transactions

Re: Crypto does compete with credit cards, it replaces them

Transacting in crypto currency is more like doing business in cash in a dark alley with a know criminal than it is like using credit cards.

FTFY

When are we gonna stop calling it ransomware? It's just data kidnapping now

Not a good reputation

creating technical support headaches and bad reputations

I'm sure they have sleepless nights worrying about not providing top notch technical support to their victims, and not getting glowing testimonials on ransomware-advisor.com

This rumor needs to Die Hard: Bruce Willis denies selling face to deepfake biz

I'm afraid the Russians have annexed...

...Bruce's face.

BlackCat malware lashes out at US defense IT contractor

Re: Secrets Managers

Question: who pwns google, microsoft, apple and amazon?

If the spelling data is being transmitted in plain text, anyone providing a public WiFi hotspot could pwn them.

How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix

Re: Impressive

I've worked with Jonathan, and he certainly says it as he sees it.

Japan 5G network tests Arm chips, claims power draw down by 72%

% less power

This is great news, but what is 72 percent less power? Is it using 72% of the power that the x86 uses, or actually 72% less which is 100-72 = 28% of the power of the x86? If its the latter, why not just say 28%, or is this yet another Americanism?

NASA, SpaceX weigh invoking Dragon to take Hubble higher

Re: Insufficicent

It doesn't need the Starship, only a rocket capable of getting a manned capsule to Hubble's orbit, has a docking adaptor to attach to the capture ring, and is capable of allowing space walks. I'm pretty sure that a Falcon Heavy plus Dragon capsule could be made suitable with a few modifications.

Re: Insufficicent

Plus a space telescope is above all the LEO satellites ruining the sky to ground observatories, particularly the ones owned by a certain Mr Musk.

Uncle Sam to unmask anonymous writers using AI

Re: WRITE IN ALL CAPS

It might be interesting running the El Reg comments through HIATUS to find the AC posts and sock puppet accounts of the obvious trolls we are infested with.

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Yes, he mentioned Java and PHP, but take a deep breath and get over it.

Check out this Android spyware, says Microsoft, the home of a gazillion Windows flaws

What do you expect?

As we've said before, it's nice that Microsoft is pointing out cybersecurity issues in other people's code – raising awareness is good for users – but it's strange to see Redmond making a song and dance about this sort of thing when it routinely downplays the scores of vulnerabilities it fixes in its own products every month.

If you can't fix your own shit, throw some at your competitors.

Morgan Stanley fined $35m after hard drives sold with customer info still on them

Jail time

I don't normally agree with the calls for jail time for the C-suites, but with a history of repeated violations and a clear disregard for the law and their customers privacy, it would be entirely appropriate in this case.

Internet Society recommends development of Solar-System-scale routing framework

SBGP

The overall goal is to populate forwarding tables or routing tables (where appropriate) without human intervention and depart from the Earth-centric management scheme

Space Border Gateway Protocol - what could go wrong?

iPhone 14 iFixit teardown shows Apple's learning on repairs

If you you need transparent aluminium for the case - you are looking at it wrong!

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: More stuff to track people.

The metal isn't the reason the pillars are thick these days, its the airbags hidden in them.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Carpets are nothing compared to tobacco smoke.

We keep telling you to give up those nasty gitanes.

Uber reels from 'security incident' in which cloud systems seemingly hijacked

Re: Nothing to see..

We can only hope they dump the entire lot on the web for shits and giggles, exposing the vast catalogue of illegal activity in every jurisdiction Uber operates.

Merge shifts Ethereum to full proof-of-stake, price slumps

Re: $45,000

So after the equivalent of hundreds of billions of new notes being printed in 14 years of Quantitative Easing, is your currency worthless? Does it fluctuate by tens of percent on a daily basis? Are there massive fees for purchasing goods or conversions to other currencies?

If you think that crypto and fiat currencies are equivalent, I've got a bridge I can sell you (once people have stopped queuing on it).

SWIFT to trial blockchain – but not for its core payment service

Re: Hello bandwagon

Swift has always been a pretty sensible organisation, so why now this madness?

There is nothing you can do with blockchain can't be sone better with other technologies, and the only thing you ever hear about smart contacts is appallingly insecure code causing millions in losses. Alarm bells should be ringing.

Linux kernel's eBPF feature put to unexpected new uses

Re: Why is this thing named after the BPF?

I'd never let him near a C compiler ever again.

Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test

Re: Bumby rides ahead

Plus it can't do corners, as it fly straight off at the first bend, unless you bank all the corners. It the aim is for speeds of 143mph, that's going to be almost vertical banking like old racing tracks, such as Brooklands or Monza.

Retbleed slugs VM performance by up to 70 percent in kernel 5.19

Just how crippled?

Just how much are x86 systems now crippled by the sum of all the mitigations since Spectre and now Ratbleed?

Feds freeze $30m in cryptocurrency stolen from Axie Infinity

Crypto mixers

most usage of these platforms is completely legitimate

My arse!

In the world of real currencies these platforms would be called Money Launderers Inc

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: A very sad day

So I'm not going to say anything, as it's pointless.

But you did, and we are all the poorer for it.

As Cybersecurity Week begins, Beijing claims US attacked Uni doing military research

If this was a real intrusion, and not a bit of PR spin as mentioned in the article, perhaps one Chinese university is experiencing a little of what every western educational institute and defence company is experiencing day in and day out, emanating from behind the great firewall.

NASA's Artemis rocket makers explain that it's a marathon and a sprint

Re: Covered in ... ?

So the boosters become expendable. Or go out in a blaze of glory. "It's just great to see them used in this manner," said Hurley

"We've got 16 total engines from the Shuttle program," he explained, "so we can get to Artemis IV."

I'd go a bit stronger than eating your own seed corn, to destroy these reusable parts which have been used on multiple Shuttle missions for one flight of a big dumb booster is verging on criminal. It's progress with its foot flat to the floor - in reverse gear.

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: RAM removal

One place I worked for at the turn of the millennium was so paranoid about the PCs or RAM being stolen, they used to get a lockable 20ft shipping container delivered to the workshop, to put all the PC's in over the Christmas and New Year shutdown.

I always thought that if thieves found out about this, they could break through the shutter doors and put the container on a lorry, far quicker than the half a day it took us to unplug everything and bring it all downstairs from the offices.

And of course it cost us nearly a whole day to put it all back again on the 2nd of January.

One man's battle to get patent rights for AI inventors in America may be over

@heyrick you don't need to believe anything, he states that directly.

"Machines can outpace humans in generating intellectual property, thus producing unprecedented global prosperity. That could lead the way to an economy in which people strive to improve themselves rather than brutally competing against others for wealth and resources. I believe that would amount to a better, but still not perfect world," he said.

i.e swamp the global patent system with auto generated patents, and gain unprecedented prosperity - for himself. Mere humans wont be able compete any more, and will have to hand over all the wealth and resources to who controls the AI. An almost perfect world for him, with probably only the issue of some people with envy and guns getting in the way.

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

Re: WTF

heat is heat , the planet's a closed system.

I think you'll find it isn't, heat coming from the sun and being lost in to space, tends to affect things somewhat.

AI detects 20,000 hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10m

Or install a bit of camo netting.

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: Missing

We'd need to add the cost of partially dismantling the front of the house to get it into the first floor living room. A 75" only just made it up the stairs around the corners.

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

Re: Fireworks

The solid boosters are just big fireworks, the core stage powered by rocket engines is very complicated mechanics. That's why the Saturn V still is a far more impressive achievement - fully dependant on rocket motors, rather getting most of it thrust from solid boosters as the the SLS does.

AMD smartNICs to meld ASICs, FPGAs, Arm cores

NICtop

Specifically, the smartNIC features 16 A78-AE cores for high-performance workloads and four R52 cores for low-power and lights-out operations.

Memory is supplied via up to four 32GB LPDDR5 or DDR5 memory DIMMs to the card itself.

Finally, networking and host communication will be provided by a pair of 200Gbps interfaces and 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 or CXL 2.0 connectivity.

Forget that as a SmartNIC, I'd be happy with that as a desktop! Certainly a step up from a Raspberry Pi 4.

Micro Focus bought by Canada's OpenText for $6b

Re: I have fond memories

Even with the limited choice of languages on a 80s PC, calling Cobol a proper language is a step too far!

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

America without V8's just isn't America

This^

UK's largest water company investigates datacenters' use as drought hits

Re: Witchhunt

Most of the share holders are firms investing your pension funds.

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

Beening born in the year of Apollo 8 and growing up during the moon landings, Skylab and the introduction of the reusable Shuttle, I had great dreams of future space manned missions, which have come to nothing. It is really disappointing that after 54 years we only now staging a mission equivalent mission to Apollo 8, but not even manned.

The tens of billions spent on the SLS does not even given us a core rocket as powerful as the Saturn V, as most of the SLS's thrust is achieved by the use of Space Shuttle era solid boosters with extra segments. When the Shuttle came along we thought that was the end to giant throw away rockets, with just tiny capsules splashing down in the sea at the end of a mission.

Luckily Space X is working on something different and better.

Binance exec says scammers made a 'deep fake hologram' of him to fool victims

"Legitimate crypto businesses"

Say what?

Smartphone gyroscopes threaten air-gapped systems, researcher finds

Re: Let me see....

Many attachers infiltrate a system and remain undetected for months, during which significant amount of data can be exfiltrated by slow methods.

No, that will be the microphone, its far easier.

Review your app permissions!

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Cloud access?

So it downloads a profile from the internet, instead of storing a few KB of data in NVRAM? Name and shame so we can avoid this vehicular monstrosity.

Solaris is in maintenance mode – but Oracle added a significant feature anyway

Before the bits run out

Oracle has extended support for Solaris until the year 2034

I note that's still a good 4 years before signed 32 bit time values overflow.

The truth about that draft law banning Uncle Sam buying insecure software

Re: Another reality

That's why the article mentioned running bug bounty programs on other companies software. They might not raise CVE's themselves to be able to compete for USG contracts, but their competitors sure as hell will.