* Posts by Red Sceptic

65 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2011

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Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Red Sceptic

A great read - your bursar sounds like a top geezer!

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

Red Sceptic
Mushroom

Dinsdale

Luigi Vercotti. : So I decided to set up a high-class night club for the gentry at Biggleswade. With international cuisine and cooking and top line acts. And not a cheap clip-joint for picking up tarts, that was right out, I deny that completely. And one evening, Dinsdale walks in with a couple of big lads. One of whom was carrying a tactical nuclear missile. They said I'd bought one of their fruit machines and would I pay for it?

Second Interviewer : How much did they want?

Luigi Vercotti. : Three quarters of a million pounds. And they went out.

Second Interviewer : Why didn't you call for the police?

Luigi Vercotti. : Well I noticed that the fellow with the thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area. Anyway, a week later, they came back, said that the cheque had bounced and that I had to see... Doug.

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Red Sceptic

Resignation note

Lovely ending - an appropriate alternative to signing in blood.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Red Sceptic

The Regomiser …

… played a blinder there - “Edmund” indeed!

Did he find himself Tenzing up a bit as he talked to his remote colleagues?

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

Red Sceptic

Re: Thought Experiment

Dystopia

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

Red Sceptic

Police Slow

Is that an instruction or a statement?

When is a privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit

Red Sceptic
Big Brother

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Red Sceptic

“That’s easy to remember!”

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Red Sceptic

Immediately made me think of Atom Heart Mother - but that’s my age.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Red Sceptic
Unhappy

The Sun?

Came for Kelvin MacKenzie reference - was disappointed.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Red Sceptic

Stereotype at best

When I worked at a provincial RG university in the UK, the work of university staff was universally headlined in the local rag as “University boffins [create/discover/{other verb}] …”.

And at school, those who - whether by dint of natural aptitude, hard work or both - excelled at STEM subjects were universally dubbed as “boffs”.

Neither usage seemed to be particularly gendered.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Red Sceptic
Headmaster

Since this was good old Blighty and Kevin was dealing with a RAF chap, I’m quite sure that he dived, not dove.

Why does this particular past tense so irritate me? That and “fit”?

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Red Sceptic

No good deed goes unpunished.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Red Sceptic

Re: "just" static

You made a Leyden jar, a precursor of the capacitor. These can store a significant quantity of electrical charge at high voltages - corona discharge can be seen from these in some cases.

Consider yourself lucky that you were able to write and tell us about this.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Red Sceptic

Came here for the shag pile / Wang comments. Was disappointed.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Red Sceptic
Joke

Leg pull, surely?

I’ll see myself out …

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Red Sceptic

Re: Sarah? Is the Moderatrix back again?

We live in hope …

Heineken says there’s no free beer, warns of phishing scam

Red Sceptic
Pint

In Victor Borge voice

Reaches the parts other scams cannot reach.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Red Sceptic

Re: Feck!

So that would be an ecumenical matter!

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Red Sceptic

Re: Bee-sting ?

That’s the thing about names.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Red Sceptic

Re: how did that escape?

Thank you for the Monday morning @Pratchett reference! Duly upvoted.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Red Sceptic
Pint

Practise [sic] makes …

Usually see “practice” used as a verb (accepted use across the pond, of course).

Don’t ever recall seeing “practise” used as a noun. Another Register first?

Have one of these ->

Infosec chap: I found a way to hijack your web accounts, turn on your webcam from Safari – and Apple gave me $100k

Red Sceptic

Not holding my breath

“ If someone at Apple would like to comment, you know where to find us.”

Elvis may have left the building, but Windows remains very much on show

Red Sceptic

Windows is just sayin’ “Treat me Nice” / “Don’t be Cruel”.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Red Sceptic
Pint

Thank you …

for Douglas Adams reference - that cheered me up!

Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

Red Sceptic

You're folding it wrong.

UK chancellor: Getting back to the altar of corporate dreams (the office) will boost young folks' careers

Red Sceptic

Re: Son of a billionnaire talks up watercooler networking

Right-on here, @Pascal - not quite sure what the haters are hating, unless it’s Rishi’s friends not liking “speaking truth to power”.

Russia's ISS Multipurpose Laboratory Module launches after years sitting on a shelf, immediately runs into issues

Red Sceptic

Re: "Nauka" = "neukъ" ?

“So, i think we have the wrong translation for "Nauka" ... instead of "science" it should be "disoriented".”

Wrong. Nauka == наука == science. Unambiguously.

'Lots of failed startups came out of Campus': Google axes London hub because startup scene 'doesn't need' another 7 floors of workspace

Red Sceptic

Re: These "offices" are surprisingly expensive...

Excellent advice - but have to disagree about the quality of Starbucks coffee!

To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA? Gartner analyst says OK — but don’t be robotic about it

Red Sceptic

Stevie Martin

https://youtu.be/LButXcZ57pc

Boffins show sleight-of-hand tricks to Corvids, find they are smarter than people

Red Sceptic

Of course, they had to show us this through a tweet.

Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems

Red Sceptic

“Cavorted”?!

What is this, the D***y M**l?

Brit unis hit in Blackbaud hack inform students that their data was nicked, which has gone as well as you might expect

Red Sceptic

Re: Just received the email

Likewise, received email from a university where I have attended events in the past (public lectures) - not as an alumnus.

What was my data as an EU citizen (then - pre-Jan 2020) doing on servers in the US? Isn’t this proscribed under GDPR?

TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader

Red Sceptic

New one on me

“1BIP” - YABATR

(Yet Another Bloody Acronym To Remember)

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Red Sceptic

Is that you, BOFH?

Jeff Bezos tells shareholders to buckle up: Amazon to blow this quarter's profits and more on coronavirus costs

Red Sceptic

Any fule kno that Amazon don’t make profits for a reason, as Scott Galloway has pointed out in his inimitable way:

https://youtu.be/dgzizQBXcLU

'That's here. That's home. That's us': It's 30 years since Voyager 1 looked back and squinted at a 'Pale Blue Dot'

Red Sceptic

Thank you

True romance!

Supreme Court says secret UK spy court's judgments can be overruled after all

Red Sceptic

Thank you ...

... for “appealed against” rather than “appealed”.

That’s all.

The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild

Red Sceptic
Thumb Up

Kudos ...

for Lost in Space reference.

I’ve gone all nostalgic now.

123-Reg goes TITSUP – again

Red Sceptic

They're claiming a "huge scale" DDOS attack:

https://twitter.com/123reg/status/760426324427206656

Kremlin wants to shoot the Messenger, and WhatsApp to boot

Red Sceptic

So, just let me get this straight ...

Our Western governments impose sanctions and use all sorts of bad words about the government of this pariah state, yet when it comes to protecting the rights of their citizens they wish to enact exactly the same kind of laws which deny these citizens the right to privacy and secure communications for banking, commerce etc.

So just who are the bad guys here, eh?Western nations are now governed by a class which views the law as being a protection for them and their cronies against the people - not at all like the Kremlin, then.

Chinese loan sharks seek salacious selfies as collateral

Red Sceptic

Monty Python had this sorted 45 years ago ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khXJqedYRpw

Norman Conquest, King Edward, cyber pathogen and illegal gambling all emerge in Apple v FBI

Red Sceptic

No - it's binary

There are no shades of grey here. Either you have secure data or you don't. Once you create a backdoor into a system, unlock just *one* phone, make just *one* exception for law enforcement or whoever, THAT IS IT. There will be no going back:

a) once the vulnerability is made, do you really think it will stay in the hands of "the good guys", even if they were the ones (whomsoever they may be) for whom it was specifically created?

b) once the precedent is set so that "the good guys" (whomsoever they may be) can get the information that they want, do you think that others will not seek to use whatever means necessary to avail themselves of this, whether by rule of law or commercial pressure or some other means?

It's binary, people - being referred to as "West Coast law" in some articles I've been reading.

German mayor's browser tabs catch him with trousers down

Red Sceptic

" ... when I got to my room I wanted to get clued-up."

Nice turn of phrase - not heard it called that before.

Direct translation, maybe?

Hackers mirror 250GB of NASA files on the web

Red Sceptic
Black Helicopters

Oh the conspiracies ...

"One of the main purposes of the Operation was to bring awareness to the reality of Chemtrails/CloudSeeding/Geoengineering/Weather Modification, whatever you want to call it, they all represent the same thing."

So they also got access to the giant network controlled by the blood-drinking baby-eating lizards (David Icke, we know you're in there!) too, did they?

"NASA is looking at the effect of cloud seeding in the upper atmosphere, but sadly – for the hackers – there was no smoking gun suggesting the agency is engaged in an active conspiracy."

Oh what a surprise ... gee, I know the standards of education here in the UK are dire these days, but ffs, how do these people even manage to go to the bathroom (sic), let alone reproduce?

Did water rocket threaten Brum airport Airbus?

Red Sceptic

Very impressive

There's a write-up of the project, and some photos here:

http://www.uct.ac.za/dailynews/?id=9389

Pay up, Lincolnshire, or your data gets it. Systems still down after ransomware hits

Red Sceptic

And that's exactly how it's pronounced.

Apple and Google are KILLING KIDS with encryption, whine lawyers

Red Sceptic

Re: Tough titty, this is the price we have to pay

@cowherder ^ this^100

Pluto plastered in what looks like 1970s orange wallpaper – proof

Red Sceptic

We had a kitchen wall this colour, which my mum thought would be "nice and cheerful". Bad enough in the tin, but once on the wall it really did catch the eye, especially in a 3m x 3m kitchen with a low ceiling.

Thanks for bringing back this rather poignant memory, SwRI and El Reg.

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