Posts by SoaG

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Moose will mess you up

Males during rutting season or females with a calf can both be pretty aggressive.

However, most of the dangerous encounters stem from their poor eyesight and used to being (by far) the biggest creature in the forest where everything else gets the hell out of their way. They go wherever they want in a straight line.

Enough so that they're the leading cause of highway deaths in Newfoundland. Hit a deer and your front end is messed up. Moose are tall enough hitting them just takes out the legs and their 1,000 lb body lands on your roof & crushes everyone inside.

Cyclist passing in front when one wants to cross a bike path would barely count as a speed bump.

Global tat supply line clogged as Suez Canal authorities come to aid of wedged 18-brontosaurus container ship

II'm not buying that it was an accident.

Given the artistry was *immediately* before entering the canal and getting stuck, and the degree of control necessary to do such maneuvers with such a ship even without any wind. To me this looks like the biggest "FUCK YOU i QUIT!!!" in all of human history.

First impressions count when the world is taken by surprise by an exciting new (macro) virus

The number of times...

...all of the staff spot the extremely obvious email w/ attachment from someone they don't normally deal with.

Then someone in senior management clicks on it,

Leading to all the middle management to open the same attachment that they'd known not to click on 5 minutes earlier because they're too scared to ignore someone in the C-suite.

Followed by the brown-noser minority on the front line doing the same...

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Seashells

In sets of 3.

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

Simon started a band?

https://youtu.be/aNZNvYz_Mxc

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Fascism is a methodology, not an ideology

Neither inherently right nor left.

J'accuse! Amazon's Rekognition reckons 1 in 5 Californian lawmakers are crims in ACLU test

Re: 1 in 5 lawmakers ...

80% false negative does seem a bit high.

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

They just had to open up that can of worms, didn't they?

"A staffer of the same gender can be requested by guests to carry out the inspection"

I identify as an attack helicopter!

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

Re: ShitSecurity

Swipe card logs to promote basic decency? Yes please! Also mandatory white cloth shoes.

We've got a guy at our office always uses the urinals with his hands on his hips. Can't imagine why the floor of the bathroom near his desk is always a swamp and the other bathrooms aren't...

Re: Just asking ....

Next episode? What do you think this episode was about?

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

Trigglypuff

with a patchy neck beard.

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

2 options

"my neighbours continue to feed them with dog food."

A) poison the neighbours instead of the foxes?

B) more seriously, relocate all resulting shit to its source, their front porch, ledge of any open windows, windshield of their car, etc.

The dread sound of the squeaking caster in the humming data centre

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

If the goal is to keep it simple we should just call them all Bruce.

Egg on North Face: Wikipedia furious after glamp-wear giant swaps article pics for sneaky ad shots – and even brags about it in a video

Wikipedia exposed as joke.

Again.

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

Re: Cost centers

"Ohhh! You have an MBA..."

https://youtu.be/8Vx1BTBhg4c

There's 2 types of MBAs:

- Those that have done something productive for 5-10 years, earn a promotion so they upgrade their skills and filter what their profs say through the lense of experience.

- Mostly they're the other type. 18yr old secondary grad working PT as a team lead at McDonalds who decides they telling others what to do. Regurgitate everything they're taught, without a moments pause to consider which (if any) profs have ever done anything beyond theory.

BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts...

Wikipedia, El Reg? Really?

Since when does The Register link to Wikipedia, instead of mocking it?

Transcript leak: Inside Facebook's secret crisis meeting, where Zuck and Sheryl race to save social network's rep

Please make this an ongoing series.

You can keep it fresh by doing a different tech company each episode.

Six Flags fingerprinted my son without consent, says mom. Y'know, this biometric case has teeth, say state supremes...

Re: Thank you!

A 14 year old can't even give legal consent.

Tech giant to spend $500m dealing with housing crisis caused by tech giants

Caused by tech giants? No.

Caused by NIMBYs pushing local governments to refuse building permits.

Happy Thursday! 770 MEEELLLION email addresses and passwords found in yuge data breach

Re: Now is a good time to get a password manager app

It is El Reg, so hopefully sarcasm. PW managers are the biggest risk out there. At least one of the big ones has already been breached a couple years back and the others all have huge bullseyes on them.

Never understood the mindset that a single point of failure is a somehow a good idea.

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Security through hilarity

Any of my staff leaving their workstation unlocked promptly finds they've sent an email to the department declaring how much they love cheese.

'Plane Hacker' Roberts: I put a network sniffer on my truck to see what it was sharing. Holy crap!

Re: Insurance Black Boxes

Good on the 2 truck drivers for immediately blocking the road like that.

Thanks for the happy memories, Micron – now beat it, says China: Court bans chip sales

The world is upside down.

China upholding patent protection.

China? Really?

LOL

Creep travels half the world to harass online teen gamer… and gets shot by her mom – cops

Although that might sound vaguely romantic

14-year-old girl

Troy George Skinner, 25

Nope.

Nothing even vaguely romantic about pedophiles.

You should be ashamed of yourself for having written that and your editor is clearly incompetent for not having removed it.

Commonwealth Games brochure declares that England is now in Africa

'at least we aren't American'

Take off, eh!

Wanna work for El Reg? Developers needed for headline-writing AI bots

I couldn't believe the 10 things that happened next and DESTROYED <pro/anti political view> using these common household items and kitten gifs.

Lucky Canada. Google chooses Toronto as site of posthuman urban lab

Not a distillery, but you'll have cause to drink if you live there.

It's a decommissioned coal power plant. That smokestack is still one of the tallest structures in the country at over 700'.

Just out of frame to the left is a cement factory and another Toronto landmark:

The Ashbridge's Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Not to worry though. You'll hardly notice over the smell of the harbour. As part of Lake Ontario, you'll also note that even in the sketch nobody's swimming.

Sounds like it's going to be great place to raise a family!

Equifax couldn't find or patch vulnerable Struts implementations

Two different credit reports depending how you write your address?

That actually sounds like good feature!

WannaCrypt: Roots, reasons and why scramble patching won't save you now

It doesn't matter how up to date a machine is...

...if it's not connected to the internet.

Forget the cost of new hardware/anti-virus. What's the cost of employees wasting time?

I've got several consistently underperforming help desk staff on final written warnings for watching YouTube playing browser games for hours on end. Now they'd rather stare off into space than use remedial training materials to become competent.

2 of them have even gone to HR to complain about how unfair it is to expect them to do what they're paid for!

The cheapest solution is to run 2 networks and have most devices have no outside connection.

Man sues date for cinema texting fiasco, demands $17.31

One mistake with the lawsuit

He made it all about the interaction between the 2 of them and getting compensation for his expense.

Should have filed it as class-action to get everyone in the theater reimbursed.

You know how online shops love to keep tabs on you? Now it's coming to the offline world

Re: Always another choice of retailer.

Always is a strong word.

I've been to 3 major hardware chains here in the last week, not a single light bulb among hundreds that isn't made in China.

'Toyota dealer stole my wife's saucy snaps from phone, emailed them to a swingers website'

As an atheist not of the militant/evangelical variety (which is all too common on the internet) I approve this message.

'Strategic' submarine cable to connect islands where locals just emerged from stone age

Re: Start the countdown...

I remember the memes when Star Wars Galaxies (of all possible games to do so) briefly released a patch that overwrote the Windows, rather than the game, boot.ini file.

Good news: Teen hacker gets 1-million-air-miles bug bounty reward. Bad news: It's United Airlines

Re: €5 in airport tax

You flew out of Toronto? You know it's not a long drive to fly out of Buffalo right?

Not just lower surcharges, but the ticket itself is always at least $100.00 CDN cheaper and 1/2 the price for parking.

Probably less total travel time too given how much faster customs is at the border instead of the airport.

UK Home Office is creating mega database by stitching together ALL its gov records

Always amusing

When a Big Brother article has a Facebook button on the page.

Re; then the entire government services delivery will grind to a halt.

So...business as usual then?

'Acts of war in a combat zone are not covered by your laptop warranty'

Re: Death by power point

Certainly an efficient way to win a war, but seems like a violation of the Geneva convention.

Vendor rep 'Stinky Sam' told to wash and brush teeth or lose job

Vendors?

I always found our own sales and marketing types caused far more problems than vendors.

Yelp minimum wage row shines spotlight on … broke, fired employee

Re: Minimum wage actually means $0 in the US

The minimum wage everywhere is always $0.

If government regulation prevents an employer from hiring someone without paying them more than they're worth, they don't hire them at all.

This is why jurisdictions like Portland see a stampede of entry level employers for the exit when they drink the 'living wage' koolaid.

Yelp isn't a viable business in the long run, so Talia needed to leave anyway. A shame someone who thinks she's should be paid lots of money to do media for a reputation company, wasn't bright or savvy enough to realize trying to publicly shame an already reviled company could only impact her reputation, not theirs.

You've heard of Rollercoaster Tycoon – but we can't wait for Server Tycoon

So 3 guys...

...gaming since 1981 and somehow 20 years experience, not each, but combined?

Forget anonymity, we can remember you wholesale with machine intel, hackers warned

Re: Hungry for results?

You've got a 100-sided coin that lands the same way 64% of the time?

Re: code by known malware authors

Perhaps could be made to work the other way too. Within a secure network, regardless of credentials of the user/admin trying to run something, refuse to run any code other than by whitelisted authors.

Donald Trump wants Bill Gates to 'close the Internet', Jeff Bezos to pay tax

“Some people will say, 'Freedom of speech, Freedom of speech', These are foolish people."

Well, hopefully that's enough to finally pull the wool off his supporter's eyes and end his clownshow of a campaign.

'Dear Daddy...' Max Zuckerberg’s Letter back to her Father

I fail to see how anyone, other than public employees and self-serving politicians, benefit in any way from inserting the corruption and inefficiency of government into charity.

So why exactly are IT investors so utterly clueless?

RsWyp

I believe the only appropriate response to your proposal is "Shut up and take my money!"

How to build a city fit for 50℃ heatwaves

Re: don't expect humans to turn troglodyte.

Clearly you don't know very many humans.

Voting machine memory stick drama in Georgia sparks scandal, probe

Re: There's literally zero evidence so far of any tampering.

The ONLY reason to even have electronic voting instead of physical ballots is to make tampering with the numbers easy.

GCHQ's CESG team's crypto proposal isn't dumb, it's malicious... and I didn't notice

IMEI blocked?

Doesn't even need another network or country. Guess what your provider does when you call them to activate your replacement phone? They delete the old IMEI to add the new one thus removing the block. There is no master list of blocked devices. Only purpose of blocking is to keep them running up your usage bill until you get the new phone.

Snakes in the aircon, killer crocs in the river, virtualisation for apps

Re: I can relate to Scott's experience

Wireless internet is always a bad idea for a whole host of reasons, signal attenuation being one of the main ones. Even if you were to put up an antenna mast tall enough to clear the trees around the house, you should still expect it not to work for much of the rainy season and work poorly when it's just humid.

Wanna harvest a stranger's Facebook data? Get a mobile number and off you go

Re: Well duh!

"only put things on facebook that you would be happy published in the national newspaper"

Metadata, you might want to look it up. Facebook knows you better than you know yourself.

They even know how big an idiot you are.