Posts by lglethal

Sophos Windows users face black screens after false positive snafu

Re: ''All vendors suffer them from time to time''

The author quite obviously means AV vendors. I don't think RedHat, Mint or Linux are AV Software are they?

Next Mars landing scheduled for Monday, November 26th, 2018

Re: Clearing solar panels

Simply put the problem is weight. If you add something to vibrate the panels, that means you have to add the weight of the vibrators, that weight needs to be supported by the structure, which adds more weight, the vibrators also probably need motors of some sort, there's more weight, and they'll need power, which means you need bigger batteries, which means even more weight.

Every kilo you want to add, means you have to add significantly more weight to the rocket, and hence the whole thing has a huge effect on the cost. In the end, it's usually just easier and a site load cheaper, to design it for the base number of years and hope for good conditions to take it beyond that...

Brave idea: Ex Mozilla man punts Bitcoin adblocking browser

Re: So what's the difference...

You get better service from a protection racket?

Paint your wagon (with electric circuits) but leave my crotch alone

Re: holding phone in hand all the time

I cant decide which is worse - looking like a lost tourist or looking like someone who would play Pokemon Go.

Hey, uh ICANN. US govt here. You know we said we'd give you the keys to the 'net? Yeaahhh...

Re: If the choice is between the incompetent (Uncle Sam) and the corrupt (ICANN)

Here you go - hows this?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/03/extraordinary_verdict_against_icann/

Cooky crumbles: Apple mulls yanking profits out of Europe and into US

Re: People annoyed fancy that

I find it hilarious that the "annoyed" people you describe would turn to Trump over this. If there isn't a better example of someone who has engorged themselves on the very things that have annoyed the people, then I don't know what is...

Surge pricing? How about surge fines: Pennsylvania orders Uber to cough up $11.4m

Bootnote

So when people say the United States of America - should it be the United States and Commenwealths of American instead? USCA? USACA?

Hehehe. I think I will keep this fact in mind, for next time I need to trip someone up at a quiz night. How many states in America. 50? Wrong! 46 plus 4 Commenwealths! :P

That Public Health study? No, it didn't say 'don't do chemo'

All i can say...

... is that it worked for my Dad. It was definitely hard on him, but if he hadn't had the Chemo then he wouldn't be here today.

Stuff like this I would expect from the Daily Fail and its ilk, but when mainstream media outlets do this, they are just being dangerous. It would be good if the Medical Association sued them to force them to print in the exact same size and headline space "WE LIED!" and "WE DIDNT HAVE A CLUE WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT!". Unfortunately it wont happen though.

Tim Cook: EU lied about Apple taxes. Watch out Ireland, this is a coup!

Re: Just dumb

Nonsense. Ireland will say its appealing, may even go through the motions, but in the end they will lose and turn around and say "aww im sorry, we tried so hard. Better luck next time. Can we please have the equivalent of 2 years worth of our government budget that the EU says you have to give us? Sorry we really don't want it, but you know what can you do. The EU aren't they bastards, eh? "

It's always the EU's fault. Even when its not.

Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses

Re: 2 Years is Impressive

When the design is already done and only needs a few mods, you can start building pretty quickly. When you design from scratch, it takes time...

Just saying...

Lawyers! win! millions! in! bonkers! Yahoo! email! snooping! case!

If I knew anyone who actually used Yahoo...

... maybe I would have a talk to the EU Privacy Commission about this.

But then again, the only time I get Emails from Yahoo addresses is when I'm receiving spam, so they get ignored anyway.

Yahoo reading spammers Emails so they can deliver targeted spam to the spammers...

Height of stupidity: Heathrow airliner buzzed by drone at 7,000ft

Re: Cue loads of people saying...

Lets just say the word Li-Ion Battery. Not the most stable of things, tend to go boom even when in poor buggers pockets! Put that through an engine and see if the resulting debris strike produces the same sort of forces you would expect from a regular bird ingestion.

But the fact of the matter is that whether a plane can survive flying on one engine or not is irrelevant. We are talking about the landing or taking off of an airliner carrying 200+ people. At that moment, suddenly you lose one engine - if you really dont think that is going to make the pilots day rather shit, then how about we shoot out one of your tires going down the autobahn at 120kmh? Its basically the same thing. Your car can still drive with a blown out tire. It wont handle the same and the forces on the car will act completely different, but you can handle it right? It's not going to completely throw out your handling and risk you running off the road, is it? Well guess what? It will have a much larger effect on an aircraft as suddenly you lose half your thrust, gain a f%&kload of drag (acting in totally unexpected and unforeseeable ways), forces will act in 3D not just 2D as on the road, and your still expected to hit the runway and keep 200+ people safe.

Anyone who thinks the risk is understated, has never seen the raw data of a bird strike test. Believe me Engine's are designed to take a bird strike, NOT more then that, and a Drone is a hell of a lot more then a Bird in terms of damage!

Our pacemakers are totally secure, says short-sold St Jude

Two points

1) How on Earth do you pick up a second hand Pacemaker on ebay?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!

2) I hope the SEC Take MedSec and Muddy Waters to the absolute cleaners. this is absolutely disgraceful behavior. Ethics, I'm sure they've heard of them. ("That's that place near Wethics, right?")

Uber lost $7m a DAY in the first half of this year

Is there a way i can register as a tech business?

It seems there doesn't need to be any correlation between revenue/profit for investors to spunk billions on a tech business, so how can I declare myself a tech business, and get everyone to start investing in me??

I promise to grow every year (I can provide toenail and hair clippings as proof!), I can produce crap everyday, and I promise that I will burn through no more then €100,000 a day! I'm social (whatever that means), hip, and if you really insist I will move to Shoreditch. Come on VC Investors go the next "cool" step and invest in me!!!

New booze guidelines: We'd rather you didn't enjoy yourselves

If there serious about this

Then I say they should bring in full prohibition!

Starting in the House of Lords and the House of Commons of course. Lock all the politicians and lords in Parliament with nothing to drink but cranberry juice. I give it about 5 minutes until the riot breaks out and the people wanting the prohibition get lynched...

French submarine builder DCNS springs leak: India investigates

A big mistakes in this article...

DCNS beat out the Germans and the Japanese for the new Australian Submarine contract (although its a different class of submarine) not on the Indian contract.

But most importantly you some how missed out on making a headline along the lines of French Submarine Develops Leaks! For shame el Reg, for shame!!!

North Korea unveils its home-grown Netflix rival – Manbang

Re: Only 50 odd years behind the curve

My apologies! Of course you're right! Mitsubishi not Toyota... Still a wanker of a car though... ;)

Re: Only 50 odd years behind the curve

Apparently (according to our Chilean cleaner in College) the Toyota "Pajero" means "Wanker" in Spanish.

I always thought it seemed quite appropriate. A Chelsea Tractor indeed...

Privacy advocates rail against US Homeland Security's Twitter, Facebook snooping

When i hear things like this...

It kinda makes me hope that trump does win over there, but instead of just building a wall to Mexico, he can build it all the way around the country (hell I'd chuck some money into the pot for that). But not to keep us dirty foreigners out, but to keep all the Americans in!

We could turn it into a sort of large scale Battle Royale show! Hell they've already got the weapons!

Google broke its own cloud by doing two updates at once

Re: Change management 101

Google?

German minister seeks facial recognition at airports, train stations

Re: Ban my backpack? You don't want my money then.

Sorry, but you haven't been to Oktoberfest have you?

Lets have a look at your arguments:

a) Families - You don't bring babies and children to Oktoberfest. It is not the sort of event you just happen to bring the family along to. So frankly the comments about diaper bags are ridiculous.

b) students/hikers - if your hiking and coming to Oktoberfest, then you're probably going to hole up in a hostel. Hey guess where you can leave your bag? In the hostel! Wow who would have thought it? And if you don't have a hotel or hostel, then why don't you go and get one? München is not a place where you just go sleep on the streets because you're too cheap to pay for a hostel. And if your willing to do that, well your hardly going to be able to afford to go to Oktoberfest in the first place are you?

c) No-one in their right mind takes an attaché case to a beer festival!!! Really you arrive in München, dressed in a suit and tie for a business meeting (without having a hotel booked apparently), and just decide to go to Oktoberfest? Nope. Cant see it sorry.

d) Medical supplies - You can pretty much guarantee that there would be medical exemptions for your bag of diabetic medication but your going to need a note from your doctor most likely. Just like going through airport security. Not so difficult that, is it?

So to summarise, you've given 4 examples that were plain stupid for a beer festival. But don't worry, I guarantee that the Oktoberfest organisers don't mind that you wont be giving them "your business". Feel free to start your own beer festival somewhere else with your own level of security. Those of us in Germany will keep going with what we have here, and we'll take the heightened security. Cheers... bye

Microsoft promises free terrible coffee every month you use Edge

outlook.com is fine

I've been using outlook.com for years, well technically Hotmail, but that got switched over about a year ago (though thankfully it didn't change my email address) and it works great. I've also never seen a single ad in all that time, but maybe that's because I use NoScript and ADP?

New UK trade deals would not compensate for loss of single market membership

Re: The big picture

Did you miss the figures in the article? EU Exports are worth 44% of exports. China and India (the two expected big growth markets) are worth 4.6%.

Even if you double trade to China and India (unlikely). All it takes is a 10% reduction in EU trade (which is very likely) and you have reduced net exports.

And you really wanted to say the outlook looks good? OK then...

Shark bosses sink teeth into booming ransomware market

Re: 20 per cent cut

I'm hoping its the latter, as that would mean there would be control and command servers for the white hats and security bods to track down and take the whole damn package off the net...

Idiot flies drone alongside Flybe jet landing at Newquay Airport

Re: Risk?

lets do a little comparison shall we:

birds = bone, meat and feathers

drones = steel, plastic and potentially explosive lithium ion batteries.

Which do you think you want being ingested into your engine during take-off or landing - the two points in a flight where you do not want a sudden loss of power!

muppet...

IBM used dud DoS shield for failed online census says Oz PM

Re: Yeah but

@AC: Australia is nowhere near as backwards and right wing as the US. What your saying is just hyperbole.

Australia takes far more refugees on a per capita basis then the US. That it sends boat people to PNG and Nauru is to try and discourage people from dying by taking the boat route. Those that come in by plane tend to be accepted.

Also the whole black face thing, it's hardly encouraged and it is beginning to be viewed as unacceptable but it is worth remembering that Australia does not have the history where using black face was a way of humiliating black people. That was never part of our history or culture, so we have no hang ups about it. A few years ago, KFC got hugely bad press in the US because it showed an advert in Australia to do with the cricket which showed a West Indian family (so Carribeans in other words) and an Aussie family sharing some KFC chicken. It was funny and there was no problems in Australia, but Americans got all up in arms because showing the West Indians loving to eat KFC was apparently racist stereotyping. Since we don't have that racist stereotype in Australia, it wasn't racist here. As another example, in Australia the Pakistan cricket team are known as the Pakis. Just the shortened form of the name Pakistan. However, you would NEVER call someone a Paki in the UK as there is a historical context there which is highly racist.

Different cultures have different considerations for what is racist or discriminatory. You would do well to remember that....

$200,000 for a serious iOS bug? Pfft, we'll give you $500,000, says exploit broker Exodus

Out of curiousity

Who exactly are Exodus intelligence's customers?

"...only discloses after it has extracted the "maximum value for our customers." " is a rather worrying statement...

On the topic of bounties, if the process go up and it starts costing MS, Apple and co. significant cash then maybe they will start investing more cash into designing secure systems in the first place, i.e. letting the creators spend a bit more time plugging the holes instead of rushing out shipping to man+dog... It's only when it starts hitting the bottom line that companies take security seriously...

Julian Assange^TM to meet investigators in London

Actually lets be clear here...

The reason Sweden never interrogated him before was that they were not legally (under Swedish law) ALLOWED to! Apparently that law has been changed so now they can.

Not that it makes any difference, he still wont be able to come out of the Ecuador embassy anytime soon, he's still wanted for jumping bail in the UK...

UK tops European charts ... for carder fraud

Re: Wait what?

Maybe its because I'm in Europe, but yes I would (and have) backed out of transactions if a site wants me to complete a purchase without a CVC.

I expect any site that wants my custom to implement at least THAT minimum level of security. I will pay extra for it if I have to (by going to another site).

Your mileage may vary, but I've still never been defrauded online, and maybe that's been responsible or maybe I've just been lucky. But I don't think I'll be changing my habits anytime soon. If your happy to shop without at least CVC being used as security, all well and good I guess, but I hope were not with the same bank...

Wait what?

There are still sites that do transactions without CVC? And people use them??!?!?!?!

The stupidity of the "average" person never fails to shock me...

Google password fill effort could kill Android malware's best tricks

A bit light on details

This article is a bit light on details - how does only ever signing in once improve security?

Ok, I get that if you don't have to sign in multiple times, things like keyloggers cant grab your password. However, if your phone is stolen then the thief immediately has access to everything in your phone because your automatically logged into all of your apps. And I cant imagine it would be that hard to come up with a new type of malware that gets into your accounts because once it is installed on your phone, all the other apps are already logged in.

So I'm really not getting the benefits here except maybe, maybe against keyloggers. Anyone able to provide more details?

Windows 10 Anniversary Update crashing under Avast antivirus update

Blue Screen of Death

I know that's the term we all use, but I still find it funny to see it in official press releases.

Like hearing a news report on swim costumes and hearing the announcer call a pair of speedos "budgie smugglers".

Windows 10 Anniversary Update is borking boxen everywhere

Oh come now its all in the name...

This is the anniversary edition. Did you happen to forget it was the anniversary? Did you buy it a present? Did you take it out for dinner? What's that? You forgot?

Then is it any wonder your machine was borked. Be happy that's all it was! Geez you would think people had never been in a relationship before...

:P

Private moonshot gets the green light from US authorities

Rare Earths really?

Rare Earths are not actually that rare. There's been plenty of articles on this very topic here on El Reg. Sure China produces most of them for now, but if they try to raise the costs people will just set up their own facilities. It's not even that expensive to do.

Seem a strange thing to target...

15 million tech-fried Brits have tried giving themselves a 'digital detox'

"Of those, 25 per cent spent up to a day internet-free..."

It wasn't really their choice, they're just BT customers...

Mobile banking for the poor has flopped in India

Well quite obviously innovation and competition weren't working, as they had to create there own version. If innovation and competition had worked, they wouldn't have needed to.

And I can understand the logic in limiting the number of steps , IF your going to allow the phone companies to charge an arm and a leg for each step. But basically, they got the logic backwards, make each step CHEAP and no one gives a flying f%&k how many steps it takes...

If they liked M-Pesa, why do they need to reinvent the wheel. just take M-Pesa translate it to Hindi, Telegu, and equivalent languages, and put the same cost restrictions in place. boom. You just saved a ton of cash. Nope, have to redo it their own way, at more cost, worse design, etc.

To be cynical, I guess its harder to scrape cash off the top if you just buy an already working system, then if you "develop" a brand new one...

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

Re: #FeelTheJohnson

I always find it funny to hear Americans speak about the "left" and the "right" in American politics. You do realize that your "left" would be counted as so far "right" in Europe, it would probably count as a "far right" party? The fact that you then have something to the right of this, and its a major party is friggin' terrifying!

F-35 targeting system laser will be 'almost impossible' to use in UK

Re: Wait until you see the next generation fighter...

The next gen fighter jet wont have a meat sack inside, so it will be significantly cheaper, faster, and better.

Until Skynet takes over of course and then we're all screwed but at least we'll have saved some money...

Russia reports RAT scurrying through govt systems, chewing data

Re: After reading the description of the malware...

Yeah because a dedicated phishing operation compromising thousands of machines was organized in under a week to get revenge for hacking an American political parties servers.

Well done AC, well done...

Death of 747 now 'reasonably possible' says Boeing

Re: Last Chance To See

Funny how all of us who have bad mouthed Air France have been downvoted.

Would the Air France employs lurking on the El Reg comments section please stand up? ;)

Re: Last Chance To See

"The A380 is definitely the best of the best in terms of cabin experience. I've flown three different carriers and all four classes on the A380 and it's never been less than superb."

Avoid Air France if you want to keep that feeling!!! Even they can make the A380 experience terrible. I've flown the A380 with other carriers and it was as superb as you say, but my one experience with it on Air France was truly, truly awful...

Bought a GTX 970? Congrats, Nvidia owes you thirty bucks

And for us non-Americans?

So what do us non-americans get?

Microsoft axes 2,850 more Windows Phone, sales staff – a week after Justin Timberlake sang on stage for them

It always surprises me (though i know it shouldnt)...

... when companies hold big expensive events and hire big expensive superstars, and then sack other people for not making a profit.

The money spent on hiring Justin Timberlake to sing a few songs was probably the equivalent of a dozen people's yearly wage. I can never understand how that's justified... :/

Russian spy aircraft are flying over Britain – and the MoD's cool with it

Re: Drone on

Pretty simple reason for using the oldest aircraft available with the lowest tech you can get away with - there's very little benefit from the other side trying to steal the tech.

If you had your brand spanking new recon beauty with all the bells and whistles, you'd have to protect it 24/7 with armed guards to stop some spy trying to sneak aboard, not to mention the long distance lenses, IR cameras, and whatever else that would be deployed at range to try and steal your secrets.

Much cheaper and easier to rely on 1950's tech which the other side stole long ago or no longer wants...

Nope, we can't find dark matter either, says LUX team

Re: "Scientists named it dark matter as it did not seem to emit any light"

I'm going to throw an idea out, feel free to shoot it down if someone has data! :)

Could the missing mass in our view of the universe simply be that we are undervaluing the amount of mass found a) in star systems (i.e. planets, meteor debris fields, star system dust, etc all add up and we are just underestimating that for the star systems we see out there?); and b) that we are massively underestimating the number of brown dwarfs and other "star" systems that never actually became light emitting "star" systems? What I mean by that is that I can imagine MANY star systems existing that feature at their centre a Jupiter-like "star", i.e. an almost star, not large enough to actually ignite. This would still have a fair bit of mass, but would not emit detectable light.

Since we can track down so many star systems, and so many brown dwarfs, surely there would be an even larger number of "star" systems which never made it to light emitting status, because there just wasn't quite enough dust around. They would also be relatively small from a viewing perspective (a Jupiter sized exoplanet is only really visible when it crosses in front of its parent star, and we measure the change in light. This is only confirmed when it actually does an orbit in front of the star. A Jupiter sized star system is not in orbit and so would be super hard to detect by current methods.

Anyone see anything obvious with this idea which shoots it down entirely?

Tesla's Model S autonomous mode may have saved a life

Well...

Well if we can take it a step further and have it determine the difference between a person and a politician, I think we can all agree that not stopping for one of them would be perfectly acceptable?

BT customers hit by broadband outage ... again

I guess they can take reliability of their list now as well....

Good hacker uses vid vulns to spy on Quebec Liberal Party meetings

Re: Off topic

I have no problems with ads on the sides and top of the website. I said that in my previous post. But autoplay video ads are an abomination that piss EVERYONE off and a tech site like the Reg should know better!

I wont be logging back onto the register today until I'm at home where I have an adblocker installed and that means they will get ZERO revenue from me. I probably wont bother looking at El Reg from work anymore since it's such an annoyance, which then translates to no more revenue coming from me. Sorry El Reg, but you should bloody well know better then to drive your customers away (that's us by the way not the marketing twats) by showing such annoying ads.

Off topic

PLEASE get rid of these god awful Microsoft ads from the middle of the page El Reg!!!! Autoplay Videos in the middle of the article that run whenever your mouse crosses over the bloody ad space are NOT acceptable. Get rid of them!

is it any bloody wonder people are turning on ad blockers left right and centre. I don't mind the ads to top and to the right, but the ones in the middle of article AND Autoplaying video are absolutely disgraceful coming from The Register! Get rid of them ASAP!