Posts by druck

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

I blew chunks when I read that!

Internet daddy Vint Cerf blasts FCC's plan to ban Wi-Fi router code mods

Re: VHS vs Wifi

Not even with the most advanced software defined radio will you be able to interfere with VHF air band frequencies from hardware designed for 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wifi.

Devs ask Microsoft for real .NET universal apps: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

Re: "The C# language has been a big success for Microsoft"

What is this C-Pound nonsense? # is a hash, pound is £. If anything call it C-Hash.

I think it is quite a nice toy language for small projects, just a shame its still mainly Microsoft only. There is mono, but it comes with a fair share of problems.

Ring Chime: Needy wireless doorbell or $30 bling t'ing?

Re: Signs can be beneficial...

Yodel have thrown a set of glass kitchen pans over a 6ft locked gate, put a parcel inside the recycling bin on collection day, and left a book in a cardboard packaging outside the back door during thunderstorm. All items were destroyed, so if a company uses Yodel, I don't use them.

Xen 4.6 lands, complete with contributions from the NSA

Any code submitted by the NSA these days is going to be put under more scrutiny than any other contributor, so any flaws, never mind backdoors, will be found.

At least we are talking about open source, it's their contribution to closed source such as Microsoft OS, you should be worried about.

Crypto cadre cloud-cracks SHA-1 with just $75k of compute cost

Re: US$75K to rent 60 GPUs for two weeks?

Back during the RC5 challenge it was P75s and P90s, which ran just as hot doing nothing as when flat out.

Re: US$75K to rent 60 GPUs for two weeks?

Doctor_Wibble wrote:

On the other hand if you can be smart about how you split the CPU workload, you can do it in a whole mass of short computational fragments in everybody's web browser - just pretend you are an ad network with a bunch of crappily-written ad rotator scripts that just happen to look like complicated calculations, display an occasional punch-the-monkey picture and most people won't notice until it's far too late.

I liked the RC5 challenge, all completely above board. Or rather it was the challenge of running it on as many work machines as you could get your hands on!

Fingerprints, facial scans, EU border data slurp too tasty for French to resist

Maggie

To quote dear departed Barness Thatcher; NO, NO, NO.

Top VW exec blames car pollution cheatware scandal on 'a couple of software engineers'

Nurse, more pills please.

Now even EUROPE is slapping down ICANN in internet power struggle

Re: ICANN in a death spiral then?

Anyone at Shoreham would disagree.

Phone-fondling docs, nurses sling patient info around willy-nilly

Re: Mobile Phone use in a hospital

That was more to do with protecting the extortionate monopoly of the hospital payphone. They had a fig leaf to hold on to by saying it could interfere with medical equipment, but since pagers were phased out every doctor/nurse/paramedic uses their mobile on the ward, so they can't really stop you.

GCHQ's exploding doughnut threatens to ooze into innocent field

Re: Underground lair

I'm extremely glad it isn't underground as the enormous donut is unmissable in any weather day or night, and makes landing on runway 27 at Staverton (Gloucestershire) Airport easy as can be. I learnt to fly there and have done hundreds of circuits directly over it, getting a view just like in the photo.

NASA offers free access to its patents for startup entrepreneurs

Who has the patent for a pointing thing that goes to space? NASA, CCCP/Russia or Germany?

DDoS defences spiked by CloudPiercer tool - paper

IP address spoofing works for IPv6 too.

Talk revealing p0wnable surveillance cams pulled after legal threat

Re: Or just put it behind a firewall?

If you do put it behind a firewall, be very careful to set it up correctly. If you have nPnP enabled the cameras will use that to open up multiple ports through the firewall. They need to be placed on a network segment that is completely locked down to an extent most cheap home routers (and all ISP provided ones), are incapable of.

Post-Stuxnet hack group builds formidable LinkedIn phish network

Well that explains a few linked in invitations which I've ignored.

Israeli lander FOUND ON MOON (in 2017)

Boing!

I suspect the mechanism by which the lander moves 500m is pretty similar to Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout - come in with quite a bit of vertical and horizontal velocity and use a sprung landing gear to do a massive boing back up and then land for a second time, and may be more - if it was good enough for Philae, why not? But given the far higher gravity on the moon, would this count as a soft landing? I say if it still functions afterwards, then yes.

What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes

Re: Hmph!

Billy, don't worry the ambulance is coming.

Asus ZenPad 10 Z300C: Cheap tab, dock combo you can turn up to 11

Full height cursor keys

Well done ASUS.

Hillary spillery finds half-hearted phishery

Re: re: druck (the person, not the thing)

I'm pretty sure she didn't make it any further down the Start Menu than Outlook.

P.S. Thanks for the person/thing distinction.

Her servers must have been hard as nails or maybe someones not telling the truth?

If she'd opened the attachment, it isn't the email server that would have been compromised, but the client machine she was using to read the email.

Elon Musk unmasks Tesla's Model X – the $132k anti-bioweapon SUV for the 1%

Re: Two words for those doors...

If they don't open as high, they are going to open wider. Multi-story car-parks have both low roofs, narrow spaces, and bloody pillars everywhere. There is bugger all chance of opening those doors on anywhere but the roof.

Two words for those doors...

...multi-story car-parks.

HP's Mad King Léo ignored Autonomy iceberg, emails claim

Not as bad as it could have been

HP conned themselves in to paying over the odds for Autonomy, even Microsoft walked away from a bid of half as much, and no one knows about destroying value in acquisitions than Microsoft (total write offs with Aquantive and Nokia within a year or so). HP should be grateful write down was only $8bn from $11bn paid, as Microsoft would have lost every last cent.

You want a 6% Google Tax? Get lost, German copyright bods told

Sorry; his name is Corbyn. The 'y' was too far to the left of the 'i' for my liking.

GrumpenKraut wrote:

Politician's logic: After trying X and failing, trying more X and failing again, what to do? Try even more X because it HAS TO work!

Exactly, hence: Jeremy Corbin, socialism, the 1970s, and welcome to Venezuela.

The pachyderm punch: El Reg takes just-over-a-ton Elephone P8000 to tusk

I really don't see how Samsung is going to be able to carry on charging the premium prices it does, with phones like this and many other now about. It's got all the features that I actually use on my S5 for a fraction of the price, in 9 months when my contract is up I doubt I'll go for the S7. No wonder their profits are tanking.

'We can handle politicos, OUR ISSUE IS JUDGES', shout GCHQ docs

Re: GCHQ

It's all very easy to throw words around, especially if you don't really know what they mean.

Astroboffins snap BREATHTAKING, WISPY Veil Nebula supernova debris

Big

I tend to think of astronomical features being tiny dots in the sky, too small to see with the naked eye, but it's fascinating to know this nebula is over 6 moons wide - if only our eyes were sensitive enough to see it.

Will IT support please come to the ward immediately. Weeeee have a tricky problem

Upgrade on the NHS

The other day I visiting a hospital and saw a PC running Windows 7, never seen anything later than XP before, so the NHS are finally getting an upgrade.

Official: North America COMPLETELY OUT of new IPv4 addresses

Re: IP8?

Should have just gone with IPv5, increasing the address space from 32 to 64 bits, minimal software changes and none of the IPv6 guff. We all be using it now, and IPv4 address exhaustion would be ancient history.

ISPs; thumbs out of arses please

x7 wrote:

so when are the ISPs going to force all their clients to use IPv6 capable routers and NICs?

You mean when are clients going to force their ISPs to move IPv6. Mine has no plans in the foreseeable future, after all they have only been resisting introducing secure email for the last 7 or 8 years.

The BBC's Space: A short history of 21st Century indoor relief

Re: The issue with the Beeb..

And ¡Bong! is 100% factual reporting, gawd help us.

EE is UK's biggest loser on customer broadband gripes – AGAIN

A marriage made in hell

Looking at EE's and BT's similarly atrocious complaint figures, the merger is a marriage made in hell for their customers.

Things you should know about the hard work of home working

WFH but not Home

Once you have the ability to work from home with all the secure access rights, it can be tempting to work away from home too, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

When my wife had to severe hyperemesis, I WFH'd but the H was the Hospital rather than Home. That way I was able to spend time with her, and get some work done too. It would have cost a fortune connecting the laptop through 4G, but luckily the hospital had free Wifi, unfortunately it was web access only and wouldn't even allow email through. So using 4G I connected to by home router and redirected the HTTPS port to SSH on my Raspberry Pi, I was then able to connect back to the WiFi and create a SSH tunnel through to home, and back out to work. The speed wasn't fantastic, but was fast enough for a few RDP sessions.

Apple rains refunds on Peace'd off axed ad-blocker netizens

Re: Something smells.....

He's been nobbled. I would not be surprised if he wasn't offered double or triple the amount its cost him in refunds.

Microsoft starts to fix Start Menu in new Windows 10 preview

Re: Waitaminute...

With such restrictions, I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 10 wasn't still full of 16 bit ints and 64KB segments.

Ubuntu Wily gaggle builds 15.10 beta beachhead

Re: Failed to upgrade from 14.10

No amount of deleting stuff in .config .cache .kde* or .local helped.

A do-release-upgrade -d took me to 15.10, and plasma works in that version.

Microsoft to splurge $75m on computer training for kids

Re: $75 M? Not so much a donation...

Micro$oft isn't funny now, wasn't funny then - buts still just as true.

They are still taking $billions out of the economy for products which haven't improved, or have even gone backwards, since the turn of the millennium. Hence the people still on XP and an old version of office.

Storage silo unification from file sharer ownCloud

Um Wow?

Is this the same ownCloud I set up on my Raspberry Pi? Nice, although fiddly to set-up, but haven't really found a compelling reason to make much use of it. Not really a wow, not yet.

Hey, remember Zune? Zune's dead, baby. Zune's dead

I'm fully aware of the flack I will catch for this, but Zune is actually proof that Microsoft listen to their customers if they don't open their wallets.

FTFY

How did jihadists hack into top UK ministerial emails if no security breach took place?

Re: Easy question.

Exactly, no need to hack anything now a Privy Council member will be passing everything on to his many friends in the Middle East, Irish Republican's, Argentina, etc, etc.

As we all know, snark always comes before a fall. Mea culpa

"As a subset of that, we can work out the statistical value of a life: look at how people are willing to pay to avoid – or need to be paid to accept – risks to life and limb on a statistical basis."

I interpret that as; how much extra am I willing to pay Waitrose to avoid the people who shop at Lidl and Aldi.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo good to go!

Re: 2 steps forward and 3 steps back

They've got them in to a theoretically usable but still incorrect orbit, and they aren't currently operational, only in test configuration. They may prove not be suitable to join the main consolation, but could still be used for search and rescue work.

2 steps forward and 3 steps back

They've launched another 2, but they are 3 down, with one having a transmitter failure and two in incorrect orbits which will probably make them impossible to use. It's going to be tough getting to 30 satellites in orbit by 2020 without spunking billions more of EU tax payers money.

HP signs ex-Microsoft IE crew for global migration fun and games

Acts of terror

All those responsible for hideous old non standards compliant versions of IE, all in one small company - where is a drone strike when you need one?

Anti-peeping-tom drone law nixed in California

Yet more laws

Nameless Faceless Computer User wrote:

Liberals tend to introduce a new laws to give the impression that they are doing good. What they are really doing is making a tangled mess of the legal system which makes most things a crime and turns us all into criminals.

Just as Labour did in the UK, between 1997 and 2010 they passed thousands of new laws, must of which duplicating existing ones. Knife crime was already illegal, but they made it doubly illegal and then triply illegal, when any high profile case hit the media.

The collation which followed tried to repeal a good number of these useless laws, but it would have taken an entire parliamentary session just to undo the past 13 years.

Let's NUKE MARS to make it more like home says Elon Musk

Re: Ridiculous

Major N wrote:

Settling underwater is less likely than you'd think, mainly due to decompression.. would you want to live somewhere where you have to spend a day in a hypobaric chamber just to go to the surface?

As opposed to a 9 month trip home from Mars by rocket?

Ich nicht bin Charlie: Facebook must crack down on racists, says Germany's Merkel

big_D wrote:

As an expat Brit living in Germany, I find it a great country to live in. But there again, I took time to learn the language. A lot of immigrants can't speak German and they find it hard to integrate or be accepted.

I did find it a bit strange when the media were interviewing migrants travelling through Europe and asking where they wanted to go, they all shouted "Germany, Germany" - why wasn't it "Deutschland, Deutschland"?

'Major' outage at Plusnet borks Brits' browsing, irate folk finger DNS

No problem with PlusNet fibre here this morning (Friday) as I'm working from home.

I didn't notice anything last night either, but I wouldn't have given that effectiveness of my wife's bedtime story on both my two year old son and me, I didn't wake up until 5am wondering what happened to the rest of the evening!