Posts by ITS Retired

We want weaponised urban drones flying through your house, says UK defence ministry as it waves a fistful of banknotes

Why does new technology always seems to be developed for death and destruction?

Have we run out of peaceful uses for it already?

Northrop Grumman wins $13.3bn contract with US Air Force to kick off Minuteman III ICBM replacement

Why do we need enemies to function?

Why can't we get along with the rest of the world without trying dominate them?

Other than for a few making obscene amounts of money, that is.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

In a better world, the various countries would be working together to find something to eradicate this virus. After all, it IS affecting the whole planet.

But money drives way to much "progress". If you can't make a 300% to 1000% profit, it too often doesn't happen.

Soft press keys for locked-down devs: Three new models of old school 60-key Happy Hacking 'board out next month

Re: Alternatives?

I have a Model M, IBM keyboard. That is the best keyboard I have ever had or used.

I've worn the legends off two other keyboards and spilled water in another. Most of the keyboards I have used, just haven't felt right. Squishy keys, can't tell when then make contact, too soft, wrong key spacing, whatever.

Noise? Who cares, I'm half deaf anyway and like to know when I press a key. IBM made good keyboards.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Maybe what we really need is a plan to ban prudes. Then a lot of these problem would just go away.

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

How long will it take for the new Political Correct term itself to become offensive to someone?

Usually what happens is that descriptive terms eventually become divorced from the description of the action being describe.

Where does it end?

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

Everybody rush to the cloud.

So you can work from any and everywhere.

Never mind the cloud is someone else's computer, located somewhere else. A computer that you have no control over. Especially if the company falls over.

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

"They say no credit card or passport details were lost."

That means the information was copied and not cut and pasted.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

borg shaft. Best or worst of both worlds.

World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

Re: Costco's doing it right

Arrived at Costco early today. I was 7th in line. Costco Had one (1) pallet of toilet paper. 30 roll packs of Charmin. It was all gone by 10 minutes after they opened. Costco only allowed on those 60 years old and older in between 8:00 and 9:00 AM.

Not a cough or sneeze to be heard in all the time I was in there.

The IT angle? Costco also sells computers and stuff.

The Reg produces exhibit A1: A UK court IT system running Windows XP

Re: XP Updates

"One. Win 10."

That is not necessarily an update.

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Beware survival bias

As long as the replacement part overlaps the replacement of the other part, all is good.

Whoa, France. Take it easy. Wow. You're out of control. Fining Apple 55 minutes of revenue for secretly slowing down iPhones? Maniaques!

Re: On the other hand

What? Nobody wants replaceable batteries, except the people using the phones. Besides replaceable batteries would make the phone a bit thicker and easier to hold. Comfort? I'm sure iApple might have heard of that.

Apple tipped to go full wireless by 2021, and you're all still grumbling about a headphone jack

Removing the Lightning cable from the iPhone and with no audio jack, Apple then can make their phones paper thin, just like they are telling us we want.

Never mind what we are trying to tell them.

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

Re: Ah the good old days

DIP = Duel Inline Pins

Two astronauts conduct a successful spacewalk, world+dog lose minds

Because women still have a ways to go for full equality in the asinine gender wars.

At least women are not considered property anymore, in most places in the world today, so there is that.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

It would be mounted vertically. So only 13 or 14 inches wide.

To watch TV, or a movie on it, you'd have to lay down on the counter.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Too soon to check. Catalina just came out. It takes a while for everyone to catch up on broken stuff.

Scanner problem

With Catalina, I can only scan with the document feeder. Before I could scan using the glass. I need to be able to use the glass, as some things I need to scan will not go through the document feeder. I tried looking for a setting to change this, but could not find any.

Other than that, Catalina seems to be working OK for me.

It's Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas this week. And yup, you know what that means. Hotel room searches for guns

Re: Firearm Justification!

"So tell me, how does this show that firearms save lives?"

You will be waiting a long, long time for any kind of logical answer that makes any kind of sense.

Firearms are designed to kill, therefor saving lives is not what they are designed for. People think they need guns for protection. Then why are so many family members killed by this "protection"?

Fix LibreOffice now to thwart silent macro viruses – and here's how to pwn those who haven't

It was ticked by default in my Macbook. Show all extensions.

Legacy app whitelist can be abused to bypass latest macOS security defenses, expert warns

Unlike Windows breaking legacy programs, including the current operating system, but not increasing any security.

Microsoft Windows 10 'Burger King' build 1903: Have it your way... and it may still leave a nasty taste in your mouth

Has Been --

Anymore, it is as if Microsoft does not understand its own operating system, let alone its users. It should not take much more for MS to become a good reason for corporate to start going to Linux, or MAC OS.

Microsoft emits free remote-desktop security patches for WinXP to Server 2008 to avoid another WannaCry

Why would anyone trust Microsoft to properly patch XP? Their record of proper, working patches the last few years is atrocious. Then there is their Windows 10 forced "upgrade".

I still have one XP machine and never had a reason to have Remote Desktop active.

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Re: Some people would argue....

"Govts need to wake up and take proper punitive measures that actually work"

With the revolving doors between government and corporations, when will might that be?

White House issues Executive Order on cybersecurity, including hacker Hunger Games

Re: Securing cyberspace for future generations

There's nothing wrong with cyberspace security that needs fixing, the fault lies with the defective computers people connected at either end.

Hey, those warrantless smartphone searches at the US border? Unconstitutional, yeah? Civil-rights warriors ask court to settle this

And even though it is not legal or official, the Border Patrol also say they have authority withing 100 miles of every international airport. No they don't.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

Re: Motive?

"Why would Russia be so keen to see Trump in the White House. It's looking like he's a Manchurian Vladivostok Candidate for sure. But why?"

Because Russia did not want to to engage in a senseless war with the United States. Hillary Clinton, among others, is on record as thinking war with Russia is a good idea. If Russia did indeed meddle in the US elections, we may have dodged a bullet, so to speak.

Luckily not everybody thinks like us Americans, where arms and ammunition are at the top of the list for solving problems.

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

If our governments were not so corrupt and the leaks so embarrassing in proof of this corruption, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning would never have had any problems being free to do whatever.

It's raining patches, Hallelujah! Microsoft and Adobe put out their latest major fixes

Re: Yeah, I know... (now)

Be happy. You could still log on.

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

Re: No? Break.

The very first thing you need learn about big, noisy engines of all kinds, is how to stop them. How to start them is a few more steps doing the list.

The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

Re: If machines have personalities

Microsoft is going way out of their way to make sure Windows 10 changes that percentage so that Apple and Linux both have a much greater percentage of the market than now.

Cops told: No, you can't have a warrant to force a big bunch of people to unlock their phones by fingerprint, face scans

Re: Does it apply to US ports?

Why have a Constitution then? Just have everyone give up all their constitutionally guaranteed Rights and be done with it.

US midterms barely over when Russians came knocking on our servers (again), Democrats claim

Our so-called two party system is so corrupt, neither can figure which way is up, even if they had a helium filled balloon, on a string, ready to release.

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Re: Running backwards ?

It is sensible to use the power line as a sync source. The 50/60 Hz power line frequency is held to very tight tolerances, traceable to atomic clocks..

The internal crystal controlled oscillators, not so much. How often do you have to reset your digital watch, or kitchen clock because the time is too far off?

An upset tummy and a sphincter-loosening blackout: Lunar spaceflight is all glamour

Re: As time goes on the space program gets more amazing to me @jake

If you are an American, your heritage is either Native American, slave, refugee or immigrant. That's it.

Which are you?

US told to appoint a damn Privacy Shield ombudsperson already or EU will take action

However the reverse sure isn't true. The US government thinks they are in charge.

On the first day of Christmas, Microsoft gave to me... an emergency out-of-band security patch for IE

You'd think IE would be iron clad bullet proof by now.

One might think, but you'd still be wrong.

Boeing 737 pilots battled confused safety system that plunged aircraft to their deaths – black box

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

Set it up so who every made the red button make its contacts connect first, has control. If they can do similar on game shows, they can do this in multi-million $$$ passengers planes, too.

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Re: Legality

"Next you'll say something really ridiculous, like that foreigners are actually people."

People with Rights, not subject to United States laws. What a concept, huh?

People like Julian Assange, even.

Yikes. UK military looking into building 'fully autonomous' killer drone tech – report

This will all come to a head someday.

Then we can start all over by using rocks, up close and personal, just as we used to do it.

'He must be stopped': Missouri candidate's children tell voters he's basically an asshat

There are some people that the

(R) behind the name, is enough for them to support anybody, no matter how vile the candidate is. That (D) stands for "evil socialism" and most of us know how destructive "evil socialism" is, because... Taxes! Never mind that those type of (R) people have no clue of how those taxes benefit them... Til they don't., then hear them scream.

Finally, a use for AI and good old-fashioned simulations: Hunting down E.T. in outer space

We don't even understand everything that's needed for life here.

Or to maintain it for that matter. It has been only recently we really understood the roll our magnetic field played in keeping our atmosphere in place and otherwise protected us. Or the moon's roll in keeping that magnetic field going. Too many planets are like Mars, or Venus, without a large enough moon to keep the plate tectonics moving. No plate tectonics, no magnetic field, no life.

We can barely make out any planets out there, let alone if they have any moons large enough to matter.

While I'm sure there is life out there, even reasonably intelligent life (I'm not sure we count), we will never know for sure. The distances are just too great and the speed of light is too slow.

AI lifeline to help devs craft smartmobe apps that suck a whole lot less... battery capacity

Re: I know what will help battery life!

And/or thicker smart phones to allow for bigger batteries. Paper thin phones are not being driven by the consumers. It is being driven by the manufactures, so they can say, "Hey lookie, something new and different.

Self-driving cars may not have steering wheels in future, dev preview for PyTorch 1.0 is here, etc

Re: Turn left here please

Must be using Apple iMaps.

Microsoft gets ready to kill Skype Classic once again: 'This time we mean it'

Re: Microsoft like to change user interfaces in order to piss off users.

"This seems to be their main hobby.

If it works, break it.

If it's useful, hide it.

If they like it, change it."

That's the only way they know to make something "New & Improved".

Eventually MS will piss off the wrong people, or enough people, and go the way of a bunch of other used to be, world wide corporations.

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

Re: Multi-GB Unplugging the keyboard = kernel panic ?

Computer side USB drivers can be full of bloat too. Remember Microsoft recognizes USB stuff and even sets them up to work; most of the time.

Developer goes rogue, shoots four colleagues at ERP code maker

Re: A gun is involved in every single mass shooting.

Militias are mention in the first part of the 2nd Amendment. You know the forgotten part that many think was written in invisible ink.

Re: A gun is involved in every single mass shooting.

Read the Title. It says mass shooting, not mass murder.

A gun is involved in every single mass shooting.

Isn't it time to make it harder to acquire firearms? Have real background checks from a common federal government data base. Have at least a week long waiting period. Tax up the wazoo semi automatic fire arms, such as the AR-15. They are not needed and almost useless for hunted anyway. Psychiatric evaluations for anyone trying to buy a firearm for self protection. These are the people that end up shooting other people, Or getting shot with their own firearm by their 2 year old.

Only 35% or so of the U.S. population own firearms. Yet their are many hundreds of thousands more firearms floating around than the total population of this country.

Do something to stop the slaughter. NOW is the time to talk about what to do about stopping the violent gun deaths. Think you need a firearm? Join a militia first and show up every month for their meetings. Or lose your firearm.