Posts by eldakka

systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix

Why the fuck is the init process being used as a DNS resolver?

Fuck I hate systemd.

Sweden leaked every car owners' details last year, then tried to hush it up

marketers?

the transport agency e-mailed the entire database in clear text messages to marketers that subscribe to it

Why are marketers, private organisations, receiving a feed of the entire government vehicle database, irrespective of whether it's encrypted or not?

I understand that the government probably uses private marketing agencies to do it's own mass-mailouts, but in that case only the necessary information for that particular mass mailout should be being sent to the specific marketers.

I guess any PI's or re-possession agents or similar, or foreign intelligence gathering, need to cultivate contacts in marketing firms to get registration details. They don't need to bother with trying to subvert someone in the police or the Swedish DMV-equivalent.

Ew! HTC jams pop-up adverts into people's smartphone keyboards

Trivago?

I usually don't watch much (or any) live TV, for the past several years nearly all my video-entertainment has been bought/streamed/downloaded and watched ad-free.

However, in the last month or so I've been watching a fair bit of free-to-air TV, mostly to watch Tour de France and Wimbledon, and a few other football sports live.

The ad's have been driving me crazy, but even worse, there are a massive amount of ads for Trivago and an ambulance-chasing law firm for accident compensation.

And I can say that those 2 businesses, Trivago and the law firm must be absolute crap if they must bombard people with their advertising.

If a product is any good, you need the odd ad to let people know it exists. Then, it will sell itself. Word of mouth will say if it's any good. But if they gotta bombard it, it must be absolute crap and they gotta get as much money from first-timers as they can, sorta like the opening weekend of a crap movie, get as many people in before word-of-mouth gets out as to how crap it is.

Needless to say (but I will anyway), Trivago and the law firm are on my blacklist of places to never use.

Burglary in mind? Easy, just pwn the home alarm

I'm confused.

What server is the Cube, the controller unit, trying to connect to. Isn't the Cube the server in this case, the endpoint for the phone app to communicate with?

With the exception of updates, why would I want my security controller communicating with some other server?

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

Re: Not Ugly Enough

As you can with any phone for a lot less.

It's called a custom case.

Slower US F-35A purchases piles $27bn onto total fighter jet bill

Re: Sea Gripen

@JamesPond

But why would the RAF, with long runways, need the B, which is slower and carries less ordinance than the A?

Commonality.

Even tho they are based on the same airframe, it is still easier (cheaper) logistics-wise to have 138 F-35Bs than (say) 60 F-35Bs and 78 F-35As.

It also means the carriers and land forces have a pool of 138 F-35Bs to rotate through if necessary (losses, maintenance, etc) rather than a more limited purchase of their specific sub-type.

Also, if you buy 138 of one type of aircraft, the volume discount is greater than splitting that into 2 types of aircraft.

Basically, the requirements of the Fleet Air Arms carriers trumped any requirements of the Air Force.

Of course, this would have been much more sensible if either of 3 other alternatives were selected:

1) More aircraft total, so they CAN have more, more capable role-specific aircraft of each type (e.g. enough F-35Bs to make the Air Arm happy, and enough F-35As to make the Air Force happy);

2) Fitted the carriers with catapults so the common aircraft could be the F-35C.

3) Choose different aircraft than the F-35.

Or combinations of the above.

However, with the exception of 3, those options would have cost more money, lots more.

Edit: added a reference a quote of who I'm replying to.

Trump tramples US Constitution by blocking Twitter critics – lawsuit

Why would anyone wants to read Trump's twitts?

1) Entertainment;

2) Since it is a defacto official Presidential communications channel, anyone taking an active interest in the government and the running of the country would want to read them?

(PS I don't, but doesn't mean I can't understand why others would)

Re: SMH

@Emmeran

I know, this is worse than Bill Clinton banging the intern (really, really bad).

Unless there was coercion involved, which as I understand it has never been put forward, there is nothing wrong with Clinton banging the intern. Nothing illegal or immoral about it, they were both consenting adults.

What was bad was the attempted cover-up and lying about it.

GSM gateway ban U-turn casts doubt on 7.5-year prosecution in Blighty

Re: @ alien overlord

The law being broken is a fact that does not hinge on conviction.

Maybe you need to better understand how the law works.

A jury in a jury trial, or a judge/magistrate in a bench trial, is the finder of fact. They are the sole determiners as to what is fact vs what is conjecture.

Among other things, a trial will determine:

1) whether the accused did the actions alleged; and

if they find the accused did in fact commit the actions,

2) (if it's not a strict liability case) did the accused intend to commit the acts;

3) if those actions broke the law.

Unless all 3 (or 2 in strict liability cases) are decided against the accused, then in fact they have not broken the law.

nbn™ hits the half-way mark – but has more than half of the job left

less-than-enthusiastic takeup

Since when is an uptake of around 50% for anything, 'less-than-enthusiastic'? If I was selling a new product into a market that has active competition, I'd be delighted with a ~50% uptake.

Those that do sign up for an NBN connection mostly aren't buying faster connections.

Unless we know the before-and-after speeds, this statement has no basis in fact. Even not knowing specific customer speeds, it should be noted that the rollout started in places that had slower available speeds initially. Many of the areas first serviced had, at best, standard ADSL1, 8Mbps. And this is very dependent on distance. The vast majority of people 'on' 8Mbps ADSL1 were getting speeds far, far lower than 8Mbps. Therefore a guaranteed 12/1 would be at least 50%, if not much better, than they would have had before the NBN rolled in, therefore 12/1 is 'a faster speed' than many had beforehand.

The fastest speeds available to most of the rest of the country was ADSL2+, 24Mbps/1Mbps (up to 2Mbps up if using Annex M, but that reduces down speed), excluding those lucky few, a very tiny %, who could get cable or VDSL. And again, most people 'on' ADSL2+ won't get anywhere near 24Mbps. I'm on ADSL2+, the connection is very unreliable, mostly sitting at around 14Mbps, sometimes dropping as low as 3Mbps for periods of a few days (probably due to bad cables). And I won't get NBN in my area - a suburb of Canberra, the capital city, for another 2 years (at the earliest).

Therefore, a guaranteed 12/1 (the lowest plan in the graph, ~33%) would improve my service to a stable, guaranteed speed.

And the 25/5 plan, a guaranteed speed as I understand it, is better than any ADSL2+ theoretical capability, and significantly better than any 'realistic' delivered capability. I'd be delighted with 25/5, and for my parents, for example, I wouldn't recommend anything higher than 25/5, as that would be more than sufficient for their use-pattern, 12/1 would do them now, but 25/5 would be better for opening them up to more capability.

As people who were previously on ADSL1/2 get experience with the higher, stable, speeds of NBN, and as more services become available from the internet (Netflix only recently came to Australia for example), and as long as it remains affordable, more people will migrate to higher speeds.

Zero accidents, all of your data – what The Reg learnt at Bosch's autonomous car bash

@Dave 126

Such data doesn't need to be associated with a specific vehicle or user - so it doesn't inherently raise privacy concerns.

I'm not sure how you could prevent such data from being associated to a specific vehicle, and hence at the very least the owner of the vehicle.

Any communication would have to have some sort of authorisation associated with it to do the communication. For example, to establish a wireless connection, the vehicle would need to be identified as having authority to make such a connection, otherwise anyone could just broadcast random crap into the network - ice here, no ice, traffic jam, no traffic jam, etc. Therefore each vehicle would need some sort of key/identification/challenge-response system for the information to be accepted.

Now, they can claim they don't keep this information (this is exactly the sort of thing meant by anonymising data), but they have to get it first then strip it out. And since the data is there, it is open for abuse. There have been recent articles that in the US single warrants have been issued for the collection of millions of phone conversations over a period of time (30 days? I forget) where no arrests have even occurred, let alone charges been laid against the subjects. How hard would it be for the various spying/data collection legislation around the world (UK's snoopers charter, Australia's metadata collection) to order them to keep the data and associations?

While USA is distracted by its President's antics, China is busy breaking another fusion record

Re: Who still uses farenheight for things like this ?

@NBCanuck

I think the correct term should be GigaHiltons. Your unit overstates the true value of her diminishing hotness.

Maybe a "diminishing hotness factor" term needs to be added that adjusts the value in real terms, like when referring to money when they adjust for inflation.

5 megahiltons (I), where I indicates adjusting for Inflation.

Therefore when the factor is omitted, it refers to an "ideal" or "classical" Hilton state as opposed to the current "Inflated" Hilton state.

Working out the actual adjustment term would require intensive theoretical research and a lot of practical experimentation, involving lots of beer.

Re: Who still uses farenheight for things like this ?

@I3N

Hn not °H -

I concede Hn, however The Reg online standards converter lists it as ° Hilton, not just Hilton.

So one of the pages is an error, NFI which one...

Re: Who still uses farenheight for things like this ?

Can't we have a reg unit, maybe a "Tamale"

There already is a reg unit for temperature, the Hilton.

50M℃ ~= 5M°H

That's a lot of Hilton's!

EDIT

Dammit, Adam 1 got in first while I was working out how to insert ℃ and °H symbols!

McAfee settles McAfee lawsuit over McAfee name

Re: Moral of the story...

Don't name a company after yourself and sell it off. Require that as a condition of having the name, they must keep you on salary at $$$$ every year.

There's a right way and a wrong way to name a company after yourself.

• WRONG* - sell your name to the company for a 1 time fee
• RIGHT - lease your name to the company, with a "greater of x value or 0.01% of revenue", and with clauses for additional bonuses when the company is sold off.

(*) Unless it is a humongously large price - like $500mill**.

(**) Tho I guess in 1991, $9mill was a humongously large price for a security firm like McAfee.

'Vicious' neutron star caught collecting dustbunnies

Re: Three degrees

@Roj Blake

You beat me to it!

TMI.

Boffins with frickin' laser beams chase universe's mysterious trihydrogen

Re: The point is H3+ is really unstable in anything like a normal environment.

@Steve K

Don't shoot me down, but could this account for any of the missing matter discrepancy - i.e. we have assumed molecular H2 floating around but it is actually H3 so is ~50% more mass per Hydrogen molecule?

No, this doesn't change the amount of hydrogen, just the proportion of different forms.

For example (made up numbers):

they might estimate 1000 hydrogen atoms per m³, made up of

• 100 'free floating' (H) atoms and
• 450 paired H₂ molecules.

Changing that to

• 90 free floating H
• + 20H₃
• + 425H₂

still = 1000 hydrogen atoms (i.e. protons) m³.

Also note, that dark:baronic matter ratio is ~ 6:1, therefore even if H₃ was something unaccounted for (which it isn't since it is still baryonic matter, 3 protons) then more than just a little bit extra would be needed to account for that discrepancy.

RED ALERT! High-speed alien fugitives are invading our Milky Way

This is just FSM's version of skipping rocks on a lake.

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

or Gentoo.

Re: it's a not a critical security issue

Surly this allows me to chuck a sysadmin £20 and lets him do something that doesn't have his account details all over it to trace back to him

Actual hacking rather than the "kid in the hoodie in front of a green screen" image the daily mail has

That'd actually be bribery, or social engineering, rather than hacking ;)

Constant work makes the kilo walk the Planck

Confused

I thought the kilogram already had a very precise definition, it's in their in its name:

kilogram.

A kilogram is not the basic unit of mass/weight, the gram is, with a kilogram being equal to 1000 grams.

Therefore, shouldn't they be trying to determine precisely the mass of 1gram? Multiplying that by 1000 gives you a kilogram.

Medicare data leaks, but who was breached?

@Phil Kingston

a Medicare card is like a 40 year old credit card - no hologram, signature, chip or other anti-fraud measures

Well then, strangely enough, it counts for exactly the same number of points in an identity check as a credit card - 25.

When doing some activity that requires positive proof of identification - opening a bank account, getting a drivers license, and so on - a '100 point identity check' is required. Various types of documents are given a point-weighting, and the combined point value of the various documents must equal or exceed 100 points.

Some examples:

70 Points

Only one of the following may be claimed:

Birth certificate

Birth card issued by a Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages

Citizenship certificate

Current passport

40 Points (must contain a photograph and a name)

Driver licence issued by an Australian State or Territory

Licence or permit issued under a law of the Commonwealth, a State or Territory government - (e.g. a boat licence)

25 Points

Credit card

Foreign driver licence

Medicare card (signature not required on Medicare card)

Blunder down under: self-driving Aussie cars still being thwarted by kangaroos

Re: Roos

@Chris G

...I hit one in the forest near Colgate...

I bet all involved came away with clean teeth tho.

Virgin Media router security flap follows weak password expose

Re: Where are the instructions?

Don't worry, we've done it for you.

-Random Chinese Hacker Collective

And for 0.5bitcoin's we'll tell you what it is.

Ex-NASA bod on Gwyneth Paltrow site's 'healing' stickers: 'Wow. What a load of BS'

it claimed were "made with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut's vitals during wear".

Well, considering the internals of the space suit when in use is filled with a carbon-based life form that is reasonably conductive, and that is able to relay back to mission control information about it's vitals - "heart is beating a bit fast, sweating a lot, and I wish those aliens would stop distracting me from my work...", maybe they aren't too far wrong?

If you walk it for 10km it'll hatch into a shit pokemon

Are they in high demand from pokemon go players?

Tory-commissioned call centres 'might have bent data protection laws'

Re: Hmmm

@wolfetone

at which point I ask "Well tell me how I can be identified by you telling me who my insurer is and when this accident took place?"

They soon hang up, the scum.

I frequently get this sort of situation when a utility (telco, electricity supplier), bank, insurance company and others call me out of the blue with the intent of trying to upsell me in some manner.

After they've initiated the conversation, they'll then start asking for me to provide various identifying data - date of birth, address, and whatnot - in which case I refuse to provide the information. This throws them for a bit, and I explain why I'm refusing - I don't know who they are. They're calling me, I have no knowledge that they are who they say they are, maybe first they should give me their DoB, address, full name, before I start handing my data to them which can be used for identity theft.

Honestly, most of them do get it once I've explained it, but a few, usually obvious foreign call-centres who are probably being paid on commission, argue the point for a bit before one of us (me in amusement, them in anger) hangs up.

Walmart tells developers to stay away from AWS

Re: Can't wait until google gets into the supply chain...

(Jeez - can't we just have one spelling for ther?)

Since they are different words that have different meanings, why would we want them all spelled the same?

One way to help simplify it if you really must is to stop using the contraction "they're" and use the full 2 words it represents, "they are".

Lordy! Trump admits there are no tapes of his chats with Comey

Re: "He's not a professional politician. "

Too bad the US system seems to make any kind of thrid party virtually impossible.

That's the ground-state of any "first past the post" voting system. Having more than 2 parties, certainly more than 2 viable parties, is a temporary aberration in that election system, which will then make its way back to the ground-state over a few election seasons.

Elon Musk reveals Mars colony rocket capable of bringing pizza joints to the red planet

Re: Fuel on Mars

I reckon what he means to say is that it's all but a front: in reality, Musk is building the B Ark :)

What? I don't think he's BArking mad. A visionary maybe, eccentric absolutely.

Re: Venus is too nasty, Mercury too hot and the moons of Jupiter or Saturn too distant.

if there's a lady with 3 boobs on mars, I wanna go

But I've only got 2 hands, what would I do with the third one?

Backdoor backlash: European Parliament wants better privacy

Re: Interesting question

@Pascal Monett

Because creating a key and self-signing it is trivial?

Yet more reform efforts at the Euro Patent Office, and you'll never guess what...

Re: American CEO sleeper?

He actually sounds more like a merchant prince, a head of a Venetian trading house or similar.

Those guys could teach modern day CEO's a thing or two about iron-fisted control.

Of course, they usually also had to worry about assassins as a normal business risk, from their own families as well as the expected opponents.

Congressman drafts COVFEFE Act to preserve Trump's Twitter tantrums

Re: It's a good idea

@JLV

thinking they'd want his "pearls of wisdom" swept under the carpet pronto.

No, it was Bill Clinton's "pearls of wisdom" that were swept under the carpet....

Donald Trumped: Comey says Prez is a liar – and admits he's a leaker

Re: Impeachment?

@MonkeyCee

The president doesn't get to write get-out-of-jail free cards for the future. They can pardon someone once they have been convicted of a federal offence. Obama couldn't parson Hillary for something she has never been convicted of doing.

Absolutely incorrect.

In the ruling on Ex Parte Garland, the Supreme Court stated:

The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.

A pardon reaches the punishment prescribed for an offence and the guilt of the offender. If granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching; if granted after conviction, it removes the penalties and disabilities and restores him to all his civil rights. It gives him a new credit and capacity. There is only this limitation to its operation: it does not restore offices forfeited, or property of interests vested in others in consequence of the conviction and judgment.

HPE ignored SAN failure warnings at Australian Taxation Office, had no recovery plan

Re: RMA the controllers?

Because HPE was managing the array, it was their job to maintain the arrays, and THEY should have done that.

ATO IT staff weren't directly operating the arrays.

'Fat boy' flies: ISRO's heavy rocket fails to blow up

Re: It still isn't a heavy lifter

It's all relative...

Not really. Like in many industries, there are generally accepted definitions of various terms, with some agencies (NASA, ESA) having formal definitions of the terms.

In the industry, a 476Jub (2,000kg) to 4762Jubs (20,000kg) payload to LEO (e.g. Delta II, Long March 4, Zenit, Atlas V, Falcon 9) is classified as medium-lift, with heavy-lift being 4726Jubs (20,000kg) to 11.9kJubs (50,000kg) (e.g. Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, Falcon 9 FT non-reusable).

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Re: Thanks BA

They understood in a flash.

Hopefully with no accompanying bangs or blue smoke.

Social media vetting for US visas go live

The dates of birth of your spouses, ex's, domestic partners is most certainly NOT your personal data, it is THEIR personal data.

Toshiba asset-swap shock: Western Digital is not impressed

No.

It is Toshiba, not Sandisk (owned by WDC) who is allegedly breaching the terms of the JV contract.

The JV contract requires the approval of the other party before selling off or otherwise transferring assets belonging to the JV, and Toshiba has not sought that approval.

Toshiba unilaterally transferred it's ownership stake in the JV to a newly created company it formed for the purpose. This is against the terms of the JV.

There is nothing wrong with Sandisk enforcing the terms of the JV.

Microsoft founder Paul Allen reveals world's biggest-ever plane

Re: Not Maetric not interested

662 sharks now that's an impressive number :-)

If you think that's impressive, then just wait until that shipment of frickin lasers arrives!

Re: Not Maetric not interested

A wingspan of:

838.2 Linguine, or

12.7 Double-decker buses, or

5.3 Brontosaurus.

And a MTOW of:

140403931310.0767 MicroJubs,

140403931.3101 MilliJubs,

140403.9313 Jubs,

140.4039 KiloJubs.

67782.1431 Adult Badgers;

662.2827 Great White Sharks;

393.131 Skateboarding Rhinoceri;

13.1044 Austrailian Trams;

1.1043 LINQ Hotel Recycling.

German court says 'Nein' on Facebook profile access request

Re: a solution @big_d

Data protection law only applies to the living.

Like all the people who have communicated with, posted to the girl's account?

It's not the dead girls data and privacy being protected, it's everyone else who has interacted with her.

BA CEO blames messaging and networks for grounding

And then there are those who forgot to pick up a knife in the first place... ;)

My theory:

They are probably using IBM mainframes and IBM P-series servers and IBM Datapower appliances, all with IBM providing the support with a dedicated team of 20 professionals who have worked on the contract for years with tons of corporate knowledge.

Then IBM fired all their contractors, and were suddenly down to 5 permanents as the 15 contractors are let go, and those permanents are mostly management-types. So there were no skilled staff left to handle what would have otherwise been a routine failover and so botched it.

IBM asks contractors to take a pay cut

Re: Ever heard of contract breach?

Not sure about Aus, but in the UK there'll be a term in every contractor's contract giving right to terminate at any time.

That is pretty typical in Australia as well.

Orbital boffins cut four years off NASA mission to shiniest object in the Solar System

I'm just waiting for the mission design team who designed the new trajectory for Psyche to come back with: "Psych!"

Vegemite tries to hijack Qantas name-our-planes competition

Re: Doh!

A dingo ate his airplane identification guide.

Payroll-for-contractors company named at centre of AU$165m tax scam scheme

Re: Good reporting, el Reg

Agreed.

The other articles I read about this seem to imply that somehow they manged to get the money out of the ATO, i.e. transfer from ATO bank accounts etc, as opposed to it being tax money owed to the ATO that hasn't been paid to them as this article makes clear.

Re: Not surprised...

I still find it amazing that companies can still pull off such stunts.

Well, as the article stated:

raids in Sydney yesterday seized 25 motor vehicles, a dozen motorcycles, 18 residential properties, over 100 bank accounts holding over $15m, $1m of cash from a safe deposit box, firearms, jewellery, vintage wines and even a pair of aircraft.

and 9 or more people have been arrested, I would suggest that they haven't pulled it off.