Posts by lglethal

The results are in: Science says the Solar System's magnetic heliosphere looks like a deflated croissant

A Depressed Pastry?

It just needs a sympathetic ear to listen to it. i mean we sent the Voyagers, but they just didnt have time to stop...

Canon not firing on all cylinders: Fledgling cloud loses people's pics'n'vids, then 'Maze ransomware' hits

Re: "...offers 10GB of long-term storage space for people's personal photos and videos"

A house fire or break in and theft and your home storage is gone. Thats why people back up to the cloud. It's supposed to be a safe option.

So long as you dont keep all your pics in either one or the other location, you are pretty well protected from losing everything.

Ever wonder how a pentest turns into felony charges? Coalfire duo explain Iowa courthouse arrest debacle

Re: Perfect shit storm

Sell it like that and Hollywood will eat your hand off!

(I'd watch it!)

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

Re: Right

Ahhh. So we can expect El Reg to be next on the Ban list then.

Bummer...

Re: Hmmm

Exactly. I believe the expression is "The Pot calling the Kettle Black".

Self-driving car supremo Anthony Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in the clink for stealing trade secrets from Google's Waymo

You also missed the part where he is suing Uber for $4.1 billion, to do with his truck startup, Otto.

What a great chap. Well if he wins that case, then I'm sure he wont mind paying google back its $700m...

Chinese debt collectors jailed for cyberbullying under ‘soft violence’ laws

Ok serious problem but...

...and trying to spook people by playing funereal music.

Thats a weirdly specific thing to ban. Is that really something that happens a lot in China?

European Commission: Full-scale probe launched into data-slurping potential of Google's $2.1bn Fitbit buy

Promise... Yeah, right?

Google then wrote to EU regulators, pledging the buy of Fitbit was “about devices, not data,”

And if you believe that, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying!

Dont forget this is the same Google that promised not to combine Doubleclick's user profile data with its own user profile data. Which of course lasted about 6 months before that promise was broken. So yeah, I'd trust any "promise" from Google about as much as I would trust a promise from a hungry cannibal not to eat me whilst I sleep...

Trump bans Feds from contracting H-1B workers and makes telehealth the new normal

As some other commentard has previously said

The easy way to fix the H1-B visa is to not hand them out as a lottery, but on the basis of the expected salary of the worker. Either set a limit (like the UK does), that the worker has to be above to be eligible for the visa or a highest salary gets the visa first system (depending on how/if you want to limit the number of visas).

By setting a limit that cuts out the whole bringing in cheap foreign labour to replace the locals, you remove that problem, whilst still allowing for the high end, skilled professionals to be brought in as needed.

It seems such an obvious solution. Obviously too obvious for the US...

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

Re: Short and sweet.

Do we really need the wheel? I mean I can walk wherever i need to go, and heck if i need to carry something heavy i can just stick it on the Ox over there. Wheels? bah! Do we REALLY need them...

OK, to be less facetious, WE may not need this specific aircraft, but if they crack Supersonic flight without being massively loud, and whilst being comparably energy efficient to a standard flight, then eventually that tech will appear in our regular civilian jets. I mean we didnt jump from the Wright Brothers to the 747. You need these in between steps, and if rich buggers want to spend their money funding that tech development, then I'm all for it... And even if it doesnt work out, at least some of that rich people cash has made its way into various designers pockets, so I'm failing to see a downside here...

Struggling company pleads with landlords to slash rents as COVID-19 batters UK high street. The firm's name? Apple

I am not an economics professor but...

... it always seemed to me like the number one thing that should have been done once the Pandemic and the shutdowns hit, was that a) Mortgage repayments should have been put on hold (for all properties), and b) rents should have been put on hold (again for all properties).

Those hit by joblessness, furloughs or reduced hours would be safe in their homes for a bit, and the owners of such properties would only take a small hit (once their mortgage costs no longer had to be paid), and the only people hurting would be banks. And lets face it we'll end up bailing them out anyway, so we may as well get some benefit out of it.

The only people who would lose out are those who rent out properties but dont have mortgages on them, but thats very much not a majority of people...

Architect of tech contractor tax fraud scheme jailed for at least five years

You have to wonder

You really have to wonder what was going through their heads? I mean did they really think $100m was not going to be missed?

Stupidity and greed, such a painful combination...

Congratulations Peebles. Felicitations Queenzieburn. Openreach is bringing you FTTP (yes, they're real places)

I read that as Queeniesbum, and thought someone was taking a biiigggg risk when they named their Village that!

Two large flightless birds walk into a bar... The pub's owner was not emused *ba-dum tsh*

They should just be grateful they dont have a dropbear infestation. They wouldnt have any customers left if that was the case!

No wonder Brit universities report hacks so often: Half of staff have had zero infosec training, apparently

I hope you ran your phishing test better than our firm. IT did up an interesting case, it looked like it could be legitimate, but with that slight whiff that made my alarm bells go in to warning mode... So i actually checked and whilst the email came from offsite (our IT providers own site, so not exactly an unknown or faked address), the phishing link was to a website within our firewall. So i clicked on it, as did a lot of others (admittedly most of the others probably didnt do the checks i did) and IT got all high and mighty that we had all fallen for their phishing scam, but the fact was they'd linked to one of our own websites and used their own email address kind of represented a massive fail on their part. If the scammers can set up a phishing pool on our own websites and use one of their email accounts to send out phishing emails, then we've got bigger problems, dont you think?

Google allowed to remember search results to news articles it was asked to forget. Good

Re: Suing the wrong party

You're assuming you can track down the owners/operators of the website in question and that the servers are located in the EU.

If this is some dodgy site, hosted in some Russian bit barn good luck getting them to even acknowledge the contact. In that case, getting Google and co to stop linking to it is the best you can achieve.

Google search trends used to calculate floating prophylactic prices

Re: Rabble

Hard Question Time:

What would you prefer? An evening listening to Marketing? Or a lifetime with an STD?

Well I've heard of getting a leg over in the market, but well...

We're not all about rockets, says NASA: Balloon tech is good enough for economical star scanning

Re: Cool

"I used to charge my phone from my stove."

Wow. Thats an... inefficient... way to charge your phone. I sincerely hope you weren't turning on your stove JUST to charge your phone. If you were cooking something else and just using the excess to charge you're phone fine, but turning heat into electricity anywhere outside of an actual power plant is hugely inefficient and wasteful...

Re: Stability?

This isnt a particularly new technique for space work (well maybe for NASA), but DLR (the German Space Agency) and the Swedish Space Agency have been running BEXUS (Balloon Experiments for University Students) since 2007.

OK BEXUS isnt so long lasting (its a day trip to ~30km), but it is aimed at Uni Students (and with the budget to match). There's quite a history of balloon based space research, it is signifcantly cheaper than rockets, and for a lot of things works just as well, as being all the way up.

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

Re: Did he not

Frankly, I really dont get this guy. If you're worried about being caught with documents and your willing to go to the effort of trying to find out how to delete them properly, why not just ditch the laptop completely and buy a new one?

Copy the family photos to a new USB stick, drop the laptop in the bin, and head to the local computer store and grab a new one. reload the programs you need want and if any cops come calling, you're in the clear.

Any other course of action is you being a dumba$$...

'First ever' snap emerges of something vaguely resembling our solar system 300 ly away. We'll take 10 tickets

Re: Are those numbers right???

If those numbers are right, then just wow. I mean the Sun does manage to "hold" on to (for a given definition of hold) the Oort cloud which supposedly stretches beyond 100000 AU, but thats just small comets.

Gas Giants at 160 and 320AU must have only a relatively tentative grasp of their Suns gravity. I imagine it wouldnt take too much in the way of collisions or close encounters with other planetary bodies to send them hurtling away from their parent system.

The Universe never ceases to be amazing, does it?

Are those numbers right???

The inner planet is 160AU and the outer 320AU???

For comparison, Jupiter is only 5AU from the Sun, Neptune is 30AU, Pluto at its furthest is only 49AU, heck the Heliopause kicks in at 123AU.

And this young Sun has two gas giants in its system massively beyond its Heliopause? There's not perhaps been an extra 0 mistakenly added on the end of those numbers, perhaps?

Frozen: Bank accounts of suspected Chinese Cisco counterfeiters who exploited pandemic shortages

Wait....

"Defendants' sales of counterfeit Cisco transceivers mislead customers, and they threaten irreparable harm to Cisco's goodwill that cannot be adequately addressed by awarding damages after-the-fact."

Wait, Cisco has goodwill to lose????

Suspected armed robber’s privacy was not infringed by cops’ specific cellphone tower data slurp, US judge rules

What i do not understand...

Why would the police take the risk of gathering this data and then having it thrown out by a judge later, when they could extremely easily just ask for a warrant from a judge in the first place. No judge is going to refuse a request along the lines of "We would like the tower dump for this day and this time, so that we can try and identify the possible robbers". So long as its for a specific time and place, it would be a reasonable search and every judge would allow it.

It just kind of beggars belief that they would take that risk...

Mexican cave relics suggest humans were populating the Americas up to 17,000 years earlier than thought

Re: YDP

Not necessarily, and frankly the fact that there were older human populations there also doesnt kill the human based megafauna extinction option. Just consider different groups had different hunting/gathering methods.

As a good example, the very first Australian Aborigines lived alongside Australian megafauna (think massive Wombats and kangaroos!), but at some point the Aborigines discovered the hunting technique of setting an area on fire and using that to drive the animals to their hunting areas. The fires affected what grew in Australia, leaving only fire hardened trees and plants, and thus removing the vital ecosystem that supported the Megafauna.

It's not necessary to physically kill off every last creature, affecting the environment to such an extent will have the same effect. Who knows, maybe those pre-Clovis civilisations had a minimal effect on their local environment and so lived alongside the American megafauna, whereas the Clovis changed things and brought about the end of the Megafauna.

As always, more great science like the research in this article will help us understand our history... :)

Ex-boss of ICANN shifts from 'advisor' to co-CEO of private equity biz that tried to buy .org for $1bn+

Re: @lglethal

Thats how it works for corporations sure. But my understanding was that the Internet Society was more like a club, with members, that vote and pay their dues and whatnot. Or am i totally wrong?

I'm just curious, how does one get on the Board of the Internet Society or PIR for that matter?

I have a desire to "serve" the community. For an appropriate fee of course...

More seriously, if these are actual society's with members and a voting structure to get people on to the board, then the voting community needs to take a good long look at themselves, and maybe actually pay attention at the next board election. Or if everyone is suitably outraged, then a recall ballot to sack the entire board and start over from scratch sounds like it should definitely be on the cards...

Twitter Qracks down on QAnon and its Qooky Qonspiracies

Re: Juvenal called?

It's cheaper this way. And easier on the lions...

Wait what?

"... the Republican party he leads has endorsed candidates that openly espouse QAnon theories."

So the Party that has held the majority in both houses of Congress for the vast majority of the last 26 years (20 out of the last 26 years in the the house of representatives, and 18 out of the last 26 years in the senate) and controlled the Presidency for half of that time. Additionally, during that 26 years, the republicans had control of all 3 of the presidency, house of representatives and congress for 8 years (Democrats had that full control for only 2 years in that 26 year period), and yet they believe that there is a deep state that controls the world? And they believe that they're not the ones in charge???

If they truly believe that, then what the hell have they been doing throughout all those years they were in power????

Motorola Moto G 5G Plus: It won't blow your mind, but at £300 we're struggling to find much to grumble about

I guess I'm going to be holding on to my phone for a long time to come. Seriously 6,5" is the normal for a phone these days? My Sony X Compact is 4,6". I cannot imagine having a larger phone then that. I dont need to carry a brick with me, everywhere I'm going.

Amazing how we used to laugh at the very first generation of mobile phones, "Oh how large and brick like they are! Hahaha"! Well it seems we've progressed from Brick to Tile phones, Jokes on us!

Anyone able to recommend a sensibly sized phone (say under 5")? Or do they just not exist anymore?

Germany bans Tesla from claiming its Autopilot software is potentially autonomous

Yet again Germany comes out with the sensible ruling...

Cisco restores evidence of its funniest FAIL – ethernet cable presses switch's reset button

Re: Either way

"You're holding the cables wrong, obviously."

Come now, this isn't Apple were talking about here...

Hey there, want to break into computers like an Iranian hacker crew? IBM finds 40GB of videos that include how-tos

To claim your $1m bounty, you just need to send us a $10k transfer to facilitate the exchange....

Twitter says hack of key staff led to celebrity, politician, biz account hijack mega-spree

"Sounds like a well executed plan, and scary if the numbers are accurate as to how many people fell for it."

It is relatively common practice for scammers to seed the account with money before and during the scam. The more money people see in the pot, the more likely they are to think thatif so many other people are putting money in, it cant possibly be a scam.

Same sort of deal with Beggars seeding a few coins into the begging tray to make it look like other people are giving them money and thus encouraging others to also give.

So the $100k is definitely overstating it, but by how much is anybody's guess.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Back when I first moved to the UK fresh out of uni (2005 I think it was). I looked into seeing what jobs the F1 teams had available (being a mechanical engineer I thought I'd made sense). Jordan were advertising for a Junior CFD Analyst. Must have 10 years experience with CFD.

Sorry, but if I've got 10 years experience in something I'm certainly not going to consider myself a junior in that topic!

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

Re: This

Not defending it completely, but it can have a benefit, by reducing the amount of dividends (i.e. profits) you have to pay out to shareholders each year. Therefore, increasing your future ability to invest in research R&D etc.

However, most of the time thats not the reason companies are doing it, I know...

Re: So what happened?

Well done on spouting complete bollocks and not knowing what you're talking about. But dont let that get in the way of making up conspiracy theories.

When working for NASA or on NASA funded Human Spaceflight projects you need to be an American. Fullstop. I can point to procurement documents that say that. Try and outsource around that and get caught and you would lose your preferential status, costing Boeing potentially billions. Not too mention the media and political fallout that would accompany it, and frankly not even Boeing management are that stupid.

As for comparing this with the 737, civilian aircraft have zero nationality requirements. You can outsource you're design and construction work wherever you want and indeed aircraft companies do, because it encourages those nations where the work is being carried out to buy Boeing aircraft and support their own local industry. Airbus does the same thing.

Even with military aircraft there are usually no nationality requirements. It's entirely based on getting a certain level of security clearance. Of course at the higher levels, you wont get the security clearance without being of the right nationalities, but that only applies to a small percentage of positions in the aircraft design.

As for your statement that "an engine is engine; the sub-contractor is none the wiser". All i can say is thank god you're not in charge of anything security related. Security through obscurity is what you're advocating and when your opponents (other nations in this case) are actively trying to find out more about your aircraft designs (and military aircraft specs are very high on the list of every intelligence services wishlist!), you really think that outsourcing like that is going to remain a secret? Intelligence agencies would have a field day with such an approach.

Whilst Boeing are definitely infected with Beancounter disease at the moment - cutting corners, failing to test critical items, and dropping the ball on quality - their are some rules you cant get away with cutting if you want to keep your cash cows. But by all means if you've got evidence that Boeing have been outsourcing their space program by all means - post it here. It would absolutely be newsworthy and El Reg would love to report it. But frankly you're talking bollocks.

Re: So what happened?

"And maybe bring software development back to the USA."

I think you can stop trying to lay the blame on "dirty foreigners", there tiger. Unless things have changed significantly in recent years, only Americans can work on Starliner (and most NASA funded programs but especially anything to do with Human Spaceflight).

So this is completely down to American programmers. Or more likely their bosses, refusing to allow additional resources to be wasted on little things like reviews, testing, and hardware/software testing.

Leave the Xenophobia out of it...

When Facebook says you're not a good 'culture fit', it means you're not White or Asian enough – complaint

That you seem to believe that Asians excluding India have a single culture seems to say a lot about your understanding of the Asian continent.

That belief is very insulting to pretty much everyone in Asia...

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

Re: Good article, because it outlines the two types of goofs

The moron, right? That way you've got someone to blame when the sh&t hits the speedily rotating device, and everyone will just assume its their fault...

What do you mean I've been reading too much of the BOFH ?

It’s happened again: AT&T sued for allegedly transferring victim's number to thieves in $1.9m cryptocoin heist

Re: I have questions...

TFA describes him as a technology consultant. You'd think he'd know better.

Oh I dont know. Have you ever had a "Technology Consultant" come into your business before? They spout a bunch of bollocks and buzzwords to the PHB's, convince them that X is the new thing that they absolutely need to be doing. Provide a whole bunch of expensive, yet useless solutions that fix nothing and leave the entire thing a worse mess than it was previously, and then they bugger off with their excessive fee, and leave the IT team to clean up the mess afterwards...

In other words, they're just snake oil salesman with no actual Tech knowledge beyond buzzwords. So No i wouldnt think he'd know better.... Because Blockchain!

You've accused Apple of patent infringement. You want to probe the iOS source in a closed-room environment. What to do in a pandemic?

Re: A quick scan and they look like BS to me

Has the US Patent System had a fine moment in the last 50 years? Has it had a good moment? Actually i'll accept an OK moment. Has it had one of those?

hmmmm...

Stinker, emailer, trawler, spy: How an engineer stole top US chip designs, smuggled them to China to set up a rival fab

Well they've certainly ensured one thing - Chinese nationals or pretty much anyone who even has a Chinese sounding name wont be working in any high tech industry in the west in the future. I already know there is a ban on a number of nationalities working for my firm (China is on the list along with the likes of North Korea, and Iran), and thankfully this is backed up by our local government as we are a "sensitive" industry.

I'm a little surprised they got the jobs in the first place, as these sorts of bans have been in place for donkeys years, and i hate to say it but they've been backed up by such cases of IP theft on a regular basis. Still it's sad, that will severely dent regular Chinese people's ability to find work outside of China.

There are DDoS attacks, then there's this 809 million packet-per-second tsunami Akamai says it just caught

Re: And the next step...

I wouldnt believe a call, no. but if i received a letter from my ISP on company letterhead. Stating that "We've detected traffic from your IP address being involved in an DDOS attack. this may mean your machine or a device on your network has been compromised. Please consider running a Virus scan across your entire network or take your computer to a specialist repair shop for diagnosis."

The number one rule with these types of communications is not to offer your own solutions, do not link to any online fixes and dont be accusatory. And frankly, dont do it over email.

If you send something with a "You can test your computer by using our free diagnostics tool here" then of course people are going to think your a scammer.

Not that difficult.

And the next step...

Can Akamai pass the IP addresses from which they got the attack to the various ISP's, so that the ISP's can contact the associated end user and suggest they give their machines a thorough cleaning?

Otherwise, I dont really see a difference to the police stopping a bank robbery in progress, identifying the perps, and then saying "Ah well, its too hard to go and grab these crooks at their home address. We stopped them from stealing anything, so we'll just forget this ever happened..."

That's not going to stop the next attack, now is it...

Grav wave boffins are unsure if they just spotted the smallest black hole or the biggest neutron star seen yet

So too small for a black hole and too big for a neutron star

I propose a new class of objects falling between 2 and 5 solar masses that shall be called Neutron Holes! Wait... No, lets name them Black Stars, much cooler sounding.

And look we just spotted one! My proposal is validated! Where do i collect my Nobel prize?

Ex-CEO of fintech biz Wirecard arrested over missing money: Vanished €1.9bn may not have existed in the first place

Re: Wow. €26bn lost in two years

Whats that old expression - knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing...?

Re: Wow. €26bn lost in two years

Dont be confused by the share value compared to the ACTUAL value of the company's assets. The Share Value was as high as €26bn, but thats just what the investors think its worth. It only ever had assets worth €6.8bn. Maybe, it sounds like ti never actually had assets worth more than €4.9bn.

Just remember, according to share value, Tesla is a bigger company then General Motors despite the fact that General Motors produces 1000 of times as many cars as Tesla, has huge numbers of factories, workers, IP, and all the jazz.

Just because investors are delusional, doesnt change a firms ACTUAL value...

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

Re: Damage the hard drive?

Agreed. Its not at like Apple going out of its way to brick jailbroken iPhones.