Send him a box set of Oz
He'd get on quite nicely with Vern Schillinger
Posts by Colin Millar
1241 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Are you able to read this headline? Then you're not Julian Assange. His broadband is unplugged
Why is it that geeks' favourite enemies are... other geeks?
UK Parliament hack: Really, a brute-force attack? Really?
Microsoft's cunning plan to make Bing the leading search engine: Bribery
Friday 2nd June 2017 04:04 GMT
You're just "starting to think" that - you can't have been coming here for very long. Some of these people are so dedicated that they could get their windows/apple bait from an article about charcoal burning in the middle ages.
Oh noes - I mentioned the "a" word - that will have tripped the fanboi baiters radar and they will be along in a minute to tell us why Steve Jobs was the spawn of satan.
Uber fires robo car exec for insubordination
While Microsoft griped about NSA exploit stockpiles, it stockpiled patches: Friday's WinXP fix was built in February
Tuesday 16th May 2017 04:40 GMT
Re: Plenty of blame to go around
Exactly right - Hunt is not fit to be left in charge of the department of silly walks never mind the NHS
Seems like he had 3 choices
1) Pay for and force through the upgrades to supported systems
2) Pay for custom support
3) Take the gamble - with the one government department that really could do without any extra shit
I wonder if president May will finally sack this muppet who's life mission seems to be to wreck the NHS.
Big Brother - he's going to fix the deficit by betting everything on a 3-legged dog
While Facebook reinvents Sadville, we still dream of flying cars
Please don't call them Facebook chatbots, says Facebook's bot boss
Deeming Facebook a 'publisher' of users' posts won't tackle paedo or terrorist content
Saturday 15th April 2017 04:44 GMT 
Old chestnuts are the best
Facebook et al are nothing to do with freedom of speech
Lazy web hacks constantly peddle the censorship/oppression buzz words every time someone suggests that "social media" should take some responsibility for what they enable, while conveniently forgetting that these same companies are, far from the great defenders of free speech they want us to see them as, the worst offenders in terms of imposing conformity, binary thinking and selective speech.
Yes you can have freedom of speech until facebook decides that you can't. Then try voting them out of office and see how far you get.
Point-and-pwn tool for posers dumbs down ransomware spreading
UK gov draws driverless car test zone around M40 corridor
Saturday 1st April 2017 03:48 GMT
Not to mention the mini-roundabouts - and definitely don't mention the double mini-roundabouts.
At the top of my lane there's one of those y junctions onto a b-road - technically you are supposed to enter and exit on the left. Practically - you use right side to go right or you can't see the oncoming traffic and need to do a three point turn onto the national speed limit b-road. We have got plenty of roads with blind turnouts where you need to sight the traffic disappearing into a dip to calculate the turnout. We've also got loads of single tracks with very few (and variable quality) passing places where if you get it wrong you need to go and find a friendly farmer.
They are, however, welcome to the M40. Used to be a regular on that road and it always seemed to me that most of the vehicles would have been better off without whatever maniac was driving them.
Amazing new WikiLeaks CIA bombshell: Agents can install software on Apple Macs, iPhones right in front of them
Friday 24th March 2017 01:33 GMT 
Let me get this straight
Wikileaks and some cheap hacks that can't be arsed to do real journalism so just settle for copy and paste with a bit of random capitalised bold are wetting their panties because the CIA does spy stuff?
Oh boy - wait until they hear that the IRS is demanding money from people.
IRS DEMANDS that US citizens give them money or face CRIMINAL sanctions.
That 'Trump lawyers threaten teen over kitten website' yarn is Fakey Fakey McFake Fakeface
Thursday 23rd March 2017 03:01 GMT
Re: Are lawyers allowed to lie?
Allowed? It's compulsory.
Who the fuck would employ a lawyer that couldn't lie?
Now - getting caught in a lie without plausible reason (i.e. "I was reliably informed by .....presented the facts as they were known to me at the time etc") - that's a bit of a no-no.
Trump, Brexit, and Cambridge Analytica – not quite the dystopia you're looking for
Tuesday 7th March 2017 22:15 GMT 
Don't panic
Politicians do psychological profiling? Er - do they mean they try to make their message attractive to voters based on their perceptions of what the voters want to hear? - Wow, that trick goes all the way back to - well any sort of society really - certainly ancient Rome had it down to a fine art.
58,000 volunteer arsebookers? At least two major selection biases in three words.
Someone appears to be trying to justify their fees.
No IT to be seen here - just some more marketing fluff.
That big scary 1.4bn leak was 100s of millions of email, postal addresses
Don't worry, slowpoke Microsoft, we patched Windows bug for you, brags security biz
You're Donald Trump's sysadmin. You've got data leaks coming out the *ss. What to do
Tuesday 28th February 2017 01:48 GMT
The Donald has a plan
He will simply order all government departments to change all their datas to alternative datas. Then when it is leaked he can shout "fake news" and feel all truthy inside.
Meanwhile, all the real datas will be transferred to an sd card on his phone and he will send them by SMS only to people that he trusts.
Gov wants to make the UK the 'safest place in the world to go online'
Different judge, different verdict? Diageo's £54m SAP legal slap could have gone another way
Trump cybersecurity order morphs into 2,200-plus-word extravaganza
Grumpy Trump trumped, now he's got the hump: Muslim ban beaten back by appeals court
Explained: Apple iCloud kept 'deleted' browser histories for over a year
UK uni KCL spunks IT budget on 'reputation management' after IT disaster headlines
Trump's cybersecurity strategy kinda makes sense, so why delay?
Tuesday 7th February 2017 21:26 GMT 
Playing the game
Anyone who has been in admin at a serious level knows how to stay a few steps ahead of the accountability.
Give them this memo and they will say - sure - I'll accept accountability - here is my assessment of what is needed to make this shit secure (long list of stuff with budgets follows). Its called CYA and these people know that in their jobs it is their number one priority cos their bosses are all politicians who will hang their granny out to dry before taking a hit.
Radical changes in direction in large organisations take time and money and (because it is all new) no-one quite knows how much of each. You can, to a degree, reduce the cost by increasing the time but you cannot reduce the time by much no matter how much money you throw at it because the specialist resources required to fulfill complex tasks are limited.
Pentagon anti-missile-on-missile test actually WORKS, for once
A non-Standards Soviet approved measure of weight? Sod off, BBC!
This bot shorts stocks when Trump tweets (don't fret, the profit is used for good)
With net neutrality pretty much dead in the US, your privacy is next
Trump's cartoon comedy approach to running a country: 'One in, two out' rule for regulations
Facebook ad biz comes under scrutiny in MPs ‘Fake News’ probe
Tuesday 31st January 2017 00:30 GMT
Why tell the truth when a lie will do
All the way back to Jefferson and Adams US presidential elections have been stuffed full of everything from out of context quotes to outright lies. They learnt if from the Brits who have it in the list of "Things the romans did for us".
I think that the focus on fake news influencing individual political outcomes is a bit shortsighted. The erosion of confidence in sources of information is much more corrosive for the western democracies. The Russians (amongst others) policy isn't to simply undermine individual politicians but to destroy impartiality and due process leaving us with wildly unstable political environments where strong men politicians will clash furiously with a population grown used to liberal values. They intend to drag us down to their level and beat us with experience.
Don't worry, America: Elon Musk says he'll have a word with Trump
Irish townsfolk besieged by confused smut channel callers
We've found a ‘vaccine’ for fake news. Wait! No, we really are Cambridge researchers
Tuesday 24th January 2017 04:42 GMT
Re: Good grief ...
Beat me to it.
Yeah - confusing mental processes with physiological responses pretty much wrote "snake-oil salesman" all over this guff.
Most people who "believe" fake news do so because they want to because it would be much more convenient for them if it was real.
Remember David Irving - the court case pretty much proved that he denied the holocaust despite knowing for sure that it happened.
Yet another committee gives UK.gov a lashing for digital strategy delay
Saturday 21st January 2017 04:10 GMT
Coinciding with the Industrial Strategy
That's pretty much guaranteed - they haven't got a clue what to put in that either.
The plan from this point on is going to be something like:
Write a content free vision statement
Have another consultation with key stakeholders to see if they can think of something
Discover they pissed 450m up the wall on lunch and glossy vision statement printing
Have a "refresh" of the strategy
GOTO 10
350,000 Twitter bot sleeper cell betrayed by love of Star Wars and Windows Phone
Doctor AI: Good news, I'm better at predicting when you'll die of a heart attack. Bad news is...
UK.gov departments are each clinging on to 100 terabytes of legacy data
Wednesday 18th January 2017 19:48 GMT
Much better solution
Flush the lot.
No-one knows what is there and it will cost loadsamoney to piss around "structuring" the data which no-one will ever refer to.
I liked this bit
"Access to searchable digital legacy information can also prevent civil servants recreating previous policy ideas that do not work or inventing new solutions that are not actually new, known as reinventing the wheel, it said."
Nothing in this universe will stop civil servants ministers (FTFY) "recreating policy ideas that do not work" coz they are all convinced it would have worked last time if only everyone had just listened to them. As for re-inventing the wheel - that is the very core of the civil service (motto: "never do anything for the first time")
BT installs phone 'spam filter', says it'll strain out mass cold-callers
Google gives up YOUR private data to US govt – but won't hand over its OWN staff personal info
TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next
IBM staff petition for right not to work on Trump's pet projects
Tuesday 20th December 2016 06:35 GMT
And the cycle of stupid continues
This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to believe that organisms with actual brain cells thought of it.
They actually mention the constitution in the petition before proposing that they get to be the arbiters of the constitution thus rendering the whole thing fairly dead, they propose that IBM should take on the role of enforcing anti-corruption laws and then make up a completely new law ("perceived" influence peddling - I suppose it's just too much bother to actually prove anything).
Its morons like these with their massive sense of entitlement and conviction that (despite all the evidence of the past couple of decades) they know whats best that have given rise to Brexit and Trump. And now they are going to have tantrums and scream until they get their toys back. I thought that Brexit and Trump were a bad omen for the future of liberal democracy but these guys are just proving Trump's claims that it was never about liberal or democratic values - just a power elite complacent in their own smugness.
I think I need to go and lie down in a dark room for a while.
Beauty is in the AI of the beholder: Young blokes teach computer to judge women by their looks
'I told him to cut it out' – Obama is convinced Putin's hackers swung the election for Trump
Saturday 17th December 2016 03:07 GMT
DNC - Remove the mote from your own eye
Maybe if people are so horrified at the contents of DNC emails that they voted for an orange monkey to be president then the DNC might want to consider that maybe the views they hold are anathema to a lot of voters.
It's a strange complaint to make - "the us voters didn't vote for us because they found out what we really think"
The attitude of some people to email security might also be on their list of things to think really hard about in future.
Trump's 140 characters on F-35 wipes $2bn off Lockheed Martin
Tuesday 13th December 2016 04:54 GMT
Re: "when The Orange One made his pronouncement"
The Bhagwan seems to have done that EFL thing of not quite getting that the phrase is actually a joke and getting a key word wrong
Said of a blunt talker
"He calls a spade a fucking shovel"
My favourite was always
"You think I know damn nothing - well you're wrong - I know damn all"
$17k win for man falsely accused of a terrible crime: Downloading an Adam Sandler movie
Thursday 8th December 2016 07:53 GMT
Re: 55 hours of legal time?
Nah - Thats just the lawyers mantra
"Someone is going to get fucked at both ends and we don't care if it's our client or the opposition"
Plaintiffs lawyers create a mountain of BS = loadsachargeablehours
Defendants lawyers read the mountain of BS = loadsachargeablehours
Everybody who is a lawyer wins wins wins$$$$
If your smart home gear hasn't updated recently, throw it in the trash
IoT camera crew Titathink tells Reg it'll patch GET bug in a week
Monday 5th December 2016 15:25 GMT
Grumpy old men 1 - Web experience managers 0
In the last couple of weeks we have had directory traversal, open management ports without defined address ranges and multiple credential guessing attacks. What's next - a resurgence of SQL injection? Come on people - this is basic stuff.
Dear web experience manager - Next time that employee with a liking for doughnuts and coffee, no fashion sense and a claim to 10 languages none of which he can use to communicate with human beings says "are you sure? Can you just confirm that in en email" remember - that glint in his eye is his anticipation of watching you wet your pants in panic as your latest bit of shiny web experience crashes and burns due to the sheer weight of uninformed decision making.
Amazon tries again with AppStream because customers didn't like it
Microsoft, IBM, Intel refuse to hand over family jewels to China
Sunday 4th December 2016 19:40 GMT
Re: WTF LOL
Yeah - I think the original version was
"Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead"
Post Warhol that had to be slightly amended
"Two people can keep a secret if both of them are dead"
And then amended again with the advent of cradle to grave social networking
"Two people can keep a secret if neither of them knows the secret"
Of course the problem with that last one is that the two people - in common with everyone else on twitbook - just keep brainfarting until they actually reveal the secret (think monkeys and shakespeare).
I think the current revision is - "two people can keep a secret if the secret doesn't exist" - but it is currently being tested to see how it holds up against "A lie is just a truth that hasn't yet come true"
I think we are going to get eventually to "Two people can keep a secret if the secret is that neither of the two people exist"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
