Posts by jake

When it comes to hacking societies, Russia remains the master at sowing discord and disinformation online

Re: Pot Kettle Blackhat .... and a Foretaste of A.N.Other Shade of Foreshadow* to Favour ....

Things have changed a trifle in 30 years. You can try on this one. It's online, if you know where to look. Enjoy :-)

Re: We are not us

Well, seeing as "English" (for various values thereof) is the lingua franca of TehIntraWebTubes, that "only" is a rather large value these days.

A rose, by any other meme ...

...as The Bard himself might have put it. Allegedly.

Re: Pot Kettle Blackhat .... and a Foretaste of A.N.Other Shade of Foreshadow* to Favour ....

You were clearly talking about the Foreshadow vulnerability in the paragraph I was replying to, amfM. Last time I checked, DEC kit doesn't have that particular problem. Nor does anything else non-Intel.

Re: Pot Kettle Blackhat .... and a Foretaste of A.N.Other Shade of Foreshadow* to Favour ....

"Zero systems are invulnerable"

Zero?

::posted from my PDP-11 running BSD::

Re: We are not us

Basically, yes and yes.

The Western World has been cutting education for decades, in order to keep the public as ignorant and manipulable as possible. Russia has noticed that it works well, eh comrade?

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

It did. And apropos of the original topic, Time itself came from Greenwich ... that's why Dr.Who's adversaries are always trying to take over the British Isles. innit.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Re: User Error

Note that I didn't say I liked Excel. I don't. In fact, I never use it. Not for over ten years.

However, the reality is that for the vast majority of users it is behaving exactly the way they need/want it to behave. And for the few who don't like the default behavio(u)r, it can be changed to whatever they want it to do (in this particular case, anyway).

But no. Instead the gene researchers are going to change the nomenclature that the entire planet has been using for decades. Who, exactly, is going to re-write (and then pay to publish & distribute) all of the textbooks and other documentation to reflect this change? Or are they going to turn it into a giant clusterfuck because they can't be arsed to learn how to use the proper tool for the job?

If the job is important to you, LEARN TO PROPERLY USE THE PROPER FUCKING TOOLS TO DO THAT JOB OR BE PREPARED TO FAIL MISERABLY! How fucking hard is this to understand?

Re: Provides a useful tool

"t can make it much more obvious where changes / outliers are. you look down the column of red and see a blue indicates a different gene snip that can possibly indicate the faulty \ different gene sequence."

That is trivial to do in vim or XEMACS. Has been since the 16-bit days. On 4 megs of RAM. (Well, at least 8 meg for EMACS + 4 more for the GUI, of course ... and back then vim was Stevie & ran on an Atari ST.)

Re: I have to use Excel at work

"You can now Alt Ctrl Del with one hand!"

If you honestly can't do that already, you can either buy a new keyboard or re-map your existing one.

Re: Where is the outrage?

Cats? What cats? ElReg must have automatically killfiled the cats because The Beaky Ones have decided that that's the way most users want to see the thread.

_{Try to think about what I just typed in the context of this conversation before taking it literally. Perhaps have a beer while you cogitate. I'll get this round in.}

Re: User Error

It's not the tool. It's the choice of tool. The tool is doing EXACTLY what it was designed to do. It is hardly the tool's fault that it doesn't do what somebody expects it to do.

It amazes me that some readers of this august forum seemingly expect the tool to read the mind of the user, and then do that thing instead of what it was programmed to do.

So let me get this straight ... if you order the fish at a steakhouse, and you actually received fish (as ordered) instead of steak you bitch to the waiter about it "because everybody knows that you eat steak at a steakhouse"? That's hardly sensible, now is it?

Be very careful what you wish for ... DWIM functionality causes far more headaches than it fixes. See modern autocorrection if you're not old enough to remember Damn Warren's Infernal Machine.

Re: User Error

"However, in the real world, people use what’s at hand or what they’re familiar with."

Of course. But it's still not the tool's fault when somebody tightens the wheel-bearing nuts on a Dana 60 with a Stillson wrench (for the uninitiated, that's the proper name for your common or garden pipe wrench).

Re: User Error

"where the car came down the belt with metric on one side and English on the other. True? Who knows"

Not unless the Union negotiated an extra 15% for all lug-nut installers in order to reflect their updated training. 20% for lefties on the right side and vice-versa, of course.

Re: User Error

No, it's not the tool. Its the user choosing the wrong tool, in this case a spreadsheet to do the work of a database. You don't use Metric tools on your old Ford[0], do you?

[0] Chevy, Mopar, pick your poison ...

How?

Veeeerrrrrryyyy carefully, at least in today's atmosphere of word censorship at the drop of your knickers a hat.

More to the point, when are they going to get rid of such symbols as BRCA (Breast Cancer)? It is clearly micro aggression, indicating Gene researchers want all women to wear burkas.

_{For the humo(u)r impaired, that's .... ah, forget it.}

Re: I must be missing something...

Wouldn't formatting cells be micro-surgery?

They are creating a database ...

... so why are they using a spreadsheet?

Horses for courses & all that.

China slams 'dirty' America's 'clean network' plan, reminds world of PRISM snoop-fest exposed by Ed Snowden

"Americans will wake up when their iphone costs $10,000, and their clothes cost $500 for a shirt."

I'm pretty certain that you can already pay upwards of $10,000 for a fancy phone, and last time I checked it was pretty easy to spend twice that $500 on a shirt ... and pre-washed, "distressed", falling apart at the seams jeans can be even more expensive. Worse, it would seem that hoi polloi actually lust after these 'orribly expensive useless bits of haberdashery.

And they wonder why we can't have nice things ...

Exposed by Snowden?

I guess Perry Fellwock was a figment of our imaginations, then.

Microsoft forked out $13.7m in bug bounties. The reward program's architect thinks the money could be better spent

I think you'll find that ...

... Katie is a she, not a he.

How long, exactly, have the cognizant been saying exactly this?

"Internal investments in hiring more skilled security people in-house, using better tools, and mandating a secure development lifecycle has a much higher return-on-investment than letting the public do the bug detection work for you after."

One word: DUH!

And that doesn't even begin to cover the bad PR that Redmond has generated for itself over the last couple decades, releasing crappy code as a matter of course to keep sales and marketing happy.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Re: Outsourcing

"so why aren't people doing it?"

Because making it and keeping it secure makes it hard for the ignorant, untrained masses to use.

Re: Outsourcing

How can adding more potential attack vectors to corporate security be considered "more secure"? This is a problem over and above the abilities (or lack thereof) of the staff.

Re: And the corporate world ...

Shall we address one problem at a time, please? I was discussing increasing the size of the attack surface, not the abilities (or lack thereof) of the staff.

And the corporate world ...

... STILL doesn't understand that increasing the size of the attack surface is always detrimental to security. The mind absolutely boggles that people use clouds for anything remotely important.

China requires gamers to reveal real names and map them to frag-tastic IDs

So I suppose ...

.... they want nothing but nice, innocent games like pinning the tail on Eeyore, and feeding Pooh-bear hunny?

Apple's big trouble in not-so-little China – culls 30,000 apps from its Middle Kingdom App Store in legal crackdown

Am I the only one whose old eyes ...

... on first glance parsed that icon as being a panda hijacking the Blue Peter logo?

Linux Foundation rolls bunch of overlapping groups into one to tackle growing number of open-source security vulns

Re: So....

Just come together and bitch, delaying projects that benefit the end-user for as long as possible, while rubber-stamping projects that benefit marketing would be my guess.

Re: And who, pray tell, does have a great record in security?

Code which comes from companies which are run by marketing have a distinctly worse security track record than code that comes from pretty much everywhere else. All of the outfits listed are run by marketing.

Wait ... are you actually suggesting that current code derived from old code has holes, but it's OK, because security was less stringent when the old code was written?

Re: But ...

Only in your tiny little mind, AC.

But ...

... Shirley they do all have a great track record in security!

For negative values of great. I for one wouldn't trust any of 'em to secure my granddaughter's piggy bank.

If you're on invite-only tech-testing scheme, take care with Amazon's Alexa-powered answer to Google's Glass

Re: Much less capable than Google Glass

The difference is that in theory your phone isn't constantly recording ... and if it is, chances are it's in your pocket or purse, and the sound is muffled and/or drowned out by whatever is rubbing up against the microphone. These glasses have a constantly on microphone, and they constantly feed that sound to Amazon.

Re: The big problem

And the last thing I want is somebody else's Amazon device picking up my voice and recording it somewhere in Amazon Space for them to triangulate digitally later. I'm not paranoid (but I'm getting there) ... I'm more pragmatic, I know what computers are capable of, and getting better at week to week.

Re: Go right ahead. "...take care..." is an understatement.

The only reason anyone said anything like that about mobile phones was the costs involved ... both the initial purchase price, and the ongoing service charges made them cost prohibitive for normal people.

When I first got issued my portable (mid '80s), the general consensus was "That's cool! I wish I could afford one!"[0]. Nobody, and I mean nobody, worried about personal security/liberty issues[1].

[0] To which I replied "I wish I could afford it, too ... this is a company phone."

[1] We did, however, worry about always being on the corporate leash ... and demanded (and received) compensation for that, just like we had for pagers before. Can any of all y'all say the same about your company demanding you be on-call 24/7?

Re: Go right ahead. "...take care..." is an understatement.

Actually, most open and concealed carry type folks are pro-privacy and anti- all and sundry recording damn near everything for their corporate lords and masters. The Stasi would have loved something like this bolted to the heads of their informers. I'm sure the NSA is drooling.

How often does Amazon delete interactions with Alexa Echo devices? The default answer is never, they save all of it forever. One has to jump through hoops to get Amazon to get rid of it. Which, of course, virtually no consumer will bother doing.

Re: Go right ahead. "...take care..." is an understatement.

Correct. It doesn't have a camera ... yet. It will. Marketing will demand it.

Grey Skype icon in the system tray - where is the startup process?

Re: Grey Skype icon in the system tray - where is the startup process?

Have you tried poking the question "How do I get rid of the Skype icon in System Tray?" into DDG? The third option down is this page.

I suspect the remote background colo(u)r issue can be resolved in a similar way, but I can't be arsed to look.

An irritating itch down the back of your neck? Searing midsummer heat? Of course, it can only be SysAdmin Day

Re: using placeholders

Are you suggesting I need terma helper? How very dare you!

Re: Searing midsummer heat?

You must live in the other gawd/ess-foresaken hemisphere.

Since when was ...

... an operator qualified to anoint a systems administrator? Operators don't even rate root access, for gawd/ess' sake!

Re: Colonies of sysadmins have a single queen

9ish years is a VERY long time?

Maybe in Internet years, I guess ... ::sighs::

Re: Colonies of sysadmins have a single queen

Why do people think that using placeholders to mask letters somehow magically changes the word into something non-profane? We (TINW) know you meant fuck, so fucking type fuck. If some fucker can't handle it, they can fucking leave.

Or we can let the fuckheads who pretend to be easily shocked take over.

Irony isn't dead... Facebook sues EU on data privacy grounds for requesting too much personal data

Re: Interesting

Re-read your quote. It quite clearly says "nation courts", meaning the courts of individual nations, not the EU as a whole.

Firefox 79: A thin release for regular users, but plenty for developers to devour

Just checked the Wife's computer.

Just updated the computer in the barn (to Firefox 78.1.0esr running on kernel 5,4,54). Firefox 78.0.2esr had been running non-stop on kernel 5.4.51 since July 10th. It had been rather heavily used in those three weeks of uptime. There was no sign of memory being gobbled up &etc.

The dev box here in the office that I use to keep an eye on things like this has similarly seen none of the issues that you describe. Bleeding edge kernel & Firefox, updated sometimes daily.

I suspect there is something else wrong with your computer.

Humble-bragging ServiceNow CEO tells anyone who listens: 'Our destiny is to become the defining enterprise software biz of 21st century'

Re: Must proof-read my own posts.

You can always withdraw the original and then make a "new", edited, post. I've done that a couple times when one of the cats helpfully posted an incomplete thought, making it appear that my intent was the complete opposite of what I meant.

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

Re: The complaint seems confused

"Someone write a news site where I can literally filter this stuff out."

We had that capability in Larry Wall's rn news reader. Back in 1985ish.

There are perl modules that allow it and could, in theory, be grafted into the ElReg interface fairly easily, but for some reason ElReg has decided that killfiles aren't necessary for most of us. Rumo(u)r has it that ElReg staffers have the capability (hi, Mr. Pott), and it seems to me that it was extended to gold badge members (beta only?) several years ago.

Me, I use wetware to filter out bozos. Seems cleaner somehow.

Re: Artificial Idiocy

How dare you keep a rock as a pet! Rock ownership is tantamount to slavery, and rocks are meant to be free! If it's a very old or infirm rock, and has trouble getting around and otherwise fending for itself, I could condone one becoming the guardian of the rock, but ownership is despicable. You should be ashamed of yourself!

_{No actual rocks were hurt, physically or emotionally, during the production of this satire. All complaints should be directed to the Circular File Department, Bit Bucket Division.}

We're suing Google for harvesting our personal info even though we opted out of Chrome sync – netizens

Re: Google records everything and deletes nothing.

"After that time, it will be permanently deleted from your account and can't be recovered."

Key words there are "your account". Note that go ogle does not say "will be permanently deleted from goo-space."