Posts by diodesign

Intel, AMD engineers rush to save Linux 6.13 after dodgy Microsoft code change

"He had all this time to review it. Why didn't he?"

Good question! Maybe we should look into and describe how the kernel development process works in an article this year.

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Nothing to do with clicks, either

Mentioning where a kernel developer works, submitting patches as part of their job, and causing an issue, isn't for clicks, it's reporting on reality IMO. You might not think it's a fairly big deal; we do.

I think this quote from an AMD person sums it up:

"I just love it how this went in without a single x86 maintainer ack, it broke a bunch of things and then it is still there instead of getting reverted. Let's not do this again please."

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Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Its main office is in...

...Blagnac, France. Which is why we call it France-based. So, nerrr.

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The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

Re: Little Red Book?

Check the link :)

Blue Origin postpones New Glenn's maiden flight to January 12

'Panamaga Canal'

I lol'd.

No, it's standard legal reasons

For legal reasons we're not going to have an open comment thread on a criminal case that's going to trial in England. There are contempt and libel laws in play.

If the accused are convicted, comments will be open. If people discuss the trial here, we'll have to moderate that away, too. And I don't like heavy handed moderation.

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Azure networking snafu enters day 2, some services still limping

Re: Snafu...

S'wot Microsoft done did wrote.

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What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Jurisdiction

A US federal court in San Francisco, California.

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Mitel 0-day, 5-year-old Oracle RCE bug under active exploit

We use a mix

We use a mix of AI and human-made images, mostly human-made. Sometimes AI if it feels relevant or is the better option if the theme is more abstract.

We pay thousands every year for library images, so we do pay people for their work.

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Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Customer and employee

It is believed a customer mentioned him to an employee, who decided to call it in.

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Elon Musk tops US political donor list with $270M+ for Team Trump

Making it more efficient

If Elon was an independent expert in optimizing US government organizations not to the unfair detriment of those relying on said organizations, then that would be awesome.

But he's not. The conflict of interest, as we've alluded to, is weapons grade in strength. Color us super skeptical that the guy who has openly bitched about being regulated by the FAA, FCC, NHTSA, FDA, SEC, etc, is going to be solely thinking in a selfless public-spirited manner about efficiency and democracy.

As you said, he's a bit of a twat, he's a pure capitalist, and foremost a salesman. That's fine on his own turf. It's a free country. But why on Earth would you put that kind of single-minded person in charge of deciding the future of the very checks and balances put in place to stop people like him running roughshod over all of us?

I'm not even being politically biased here. Just think about it logically.

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Just here for the comments

Sure, if you find value in the comments rather than the articles, then you're still enjoying the site and we're all winning. We can't please all the people all the time.

Our readership is up year on year again so I'm happy that we're net bringing more people to El Reg's tech journalism. Our biggest stories this year weren't even about Musk or election politics.

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Biden and Harrris were geniuses

Clearly not, they bombed. And for clear reasons some at the very least were of own their making. Again, as editor of this place, I can't and don't vote in the US so I'm the neutral observer; I calls it hows I sees it.

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No

"I think a few moved to San Fran and shared office space with the Twitter that was, which may have influenced them. Or it's just going Californian. Never go full Californian. The Cali bubble may not be representative of the real world, or reality in general."

We've never shared office space with Twitter. We did share a floor one time with Imgur, one of the smaller but still decently sized social media sites, so that's about as close as it gets.

Out of the US editorial team (ie, not sales and ops), 3 of us are in California and one recently moved to another state (and one earlier this year left the team to re-enter academia, good for them). I personally like California for lots of reasons - the climate; the mix of sun, sea, and snow; the smart people; the city and forest life - but its politics is not one of them. As an immigrant, I can't and don't even vote.

The rest of the US team lives across the country, and we have people all over the world. Our politics is a mix (eg, we don't all agree on nuclear power, we don't all agree on gun ownership) and that's fine but overall, for the publication, we're just anti-dumb. Sorry if we think your favorite person is bad for everyone.

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"blue haired, septum pierced children"

I know you have this image in your head of us, but if you were to say watch our Kettle episodes, you'll see we're the opposite of that. You don't know our personal politics; as we've always said, we're just anti-dumb. Sorry if we think your favorite person is a fool.

Also, only two of us in the editorial team are in SF. The rest of our US journalists (and US sales and ops) are spread out across the country.

But anyway, the point here is that Elon's very publicly benefiting and benefited from the US government, he's now topped the US donor list, our readers have an interest in him, he's in tech, he owns a big social network, he's giving advice on how the US government should be run in exchange for that support for Donald, so we think it merits coverage.

If it was Zuck or Benioff or Schmidt or Ellison or Bezos, or any other big name in tech, topping the donor list, we would report it. It happens to be Elon this time. I don't see the harm in letting people know. We can't list every political donor (we'll try to keep track of the list, I wanted to list more but time was a factor, we'll make more of other donors later).

In fact, Trump's government is pretty much going to be run by billionaires and folks on their way to that level of wealth. So we'll focus on that in future, too.

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British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Noted

We'll be sure to include more specific power output next time we write about batteries, novel or otherwise. We were focusing on the design, TBH.

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Re: Low power

Ah yeah, oops, we should have mentioned that, and now added - it's microwatt level. We did say it was devices that require very little power but we can be more specific than that.

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FreeBSD 14.2 wants to woo Docker fans, but still struggles with Wi-Fi

Re: linuxulator containers

Fair point - we've added that caveat.

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SOHO, the two-year mission that forgot to retire, finally faces sunset

The other meaning of redundant

Yeah, it's UK-ism. Being made redundant is being let go, laid off, no longer needed or working. We'll make that clearer.

And no, we don't use AI to write. This is all human, as you can see.

(And I hope this demonstrates why we try to use US spellings and terminology. Americans and other non-UK folks likely don't get Britishisms but British people can get Americanisms at least, I think due to the differential in level of cultural exposure. As we scale up to more and more readers around the world, using UK terms confuses more and more people.)

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NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to use pen and paper

Cancelled is canceled

Yeah, we use US spelling across the board these days. Labour Party, Ministry of Defense and whatnot still use their local spellings but general words, it's US.

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Russian spies may have moved in next door to target your network

Re: Microsoft has seized ?

Yeah, on the basis that a trademark was infringed by the fake sites. It's kinda tenuous as it seems to be a Linux Foundation mark that's affected, and MSFT helps bankroll the foundation. Thus Microsoft gets be involved.

But at least some bad sites got closed down. MS routinely does this, using trademark law to take over fraudulent sites with a court order.

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Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

Re: Chrome is based on Chromium, not vice versa.

Ah, you know what we mean. Chromium is the open-source heart of closed-source Chrome. I've tweaked that par for readers in light of your feedback; thanks.

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'Alarming' security bugs lay low in Linux's needrestart utility for 10 years

Cos Qualys

Hey - it's because Qualys focused on Ubuntu Server as it has the tool by default, and it's a widely used flavor. Yes, needrestart is present in other distros but not necessarily installed. It's not on my El Reg office Debian Linux workstation.

Still, we've tweaked the piece to appeal more to everyone who has the thing installed, by default or by choice.

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America's drinking water systems have a hard-to-swallow cybersecurity problem

Yeah, it's computer security

And I get the need to be allergic to vendor-based FUD ('OMG we're doomed... unless you buy our product') but bear in mind this is the EPA Assistant Inspector General telling us this. They're not selling anything, though do hope someone takes notice.

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Datacenters line up for 750MW of Oklo's nuclear-waste-powered small reactors

Thanks for the steer

FWIW the issue with the NRC is true, and happened in 2022, though the upstart is getting along at least a little better with the government lately.

That said, as much as we like nuclear power, we are maintaining a healthy skepticism of this SMR project, and in future coverage about Oklo, we'll include some more history of the startup. I've added the above links to the piece.

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AMD axes 4% of staff while staring hungrily at AI, servers

Fair point

Yeah, that's cool. I've added more context to the piece on that subject.

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The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: The issue with rust

Is this a good time to mention Zig? C like with correctness checks, tho without Rust's nannying and also without Rust's strict safety features...

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

carbon footprint

As if that matters anymore.

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GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

Errors

Hi -- just to say, yes, if you see something wrong with an article, please contact [e-mail] at least so that us editors are aware of the problem and we'll act on it ASAP.

Leaving a comment is like putting a bug report in a GitHub issues comment, when really, you should be opening a new issue (emailing us in this case). Cheers,

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Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

Who are they

They're pretty well known payment processor for people selling software online. We've added a paragraph explaining this. Thanks for the feedback.

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Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

Free hardware

Yeah, we said in the piece that Starlink has handed out some devices to places, particularly public offices, which is helpful. But that doesn't mean everyone got a free dish.

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it's a service waiver

Once you've paid SpaceX about $400.

30 days of free service

For which you have to buy a terminal.

You're making Mount Everest out of a pimple

You're allowed to have an opinion on the news. That's fine. That doesn't make it wrong.

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'SpaceX isn't just saying now ... you'll need to get a dish'

It literally now says, following this article, on the Starlink Helene page that you need a dish. It didn't before. That they had to add that caveat speaks volumes.

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Service

So why didn't Starlink say right from the start 'dish required'. It didn't because, or so people suspect, it was a way to bag some extra subs.

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Headaches

Because you're trying to find holes in the piece but it's pretty simple. Starlink boasted it was offering free service in the area. Everyone got excited. It was a PR coup. That was nice of SpaceX.

When people on the ground, struggling to recover from the storm, looked at the offer in hope of using it, though, they found they had to shell out $400 to get going with it.

And then they got mad, and then they told us, and then we told you.

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Re: Re: Misleading article

No, the tweets are about Starlink offering 'free' service - we're helping clarify what 'free' means. Simple as that.

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Clear for you maybe

We have staff in the affected area. We've been out to talk to people. We've heard a lot of disappointment from them when they found out they had to shell out $400 for the dish and then get enrolled in a $120/mo plan.

We wanted to help make that frustration public.

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Trials and tribulations

The residential trial section explains the differences.

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Re: Misleading article

Yes, and? Only now is Starlink sheepishly saying you need to already have a dish before you get this free service.

It's cool to offer 30 days free. Just be upfront that this applies primarily to those already with Starlink. Otherwise it's just seemingly a sly way to draw people into a subscription.

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Internet Archive user info stolen in cyberattack, succumbs to DDoS

JS lib

Not known yet - as soon as we know, we'll let you know.

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US lawmakers dig into FCC's $900M Starlink snub in wake of Hurricane Helene

Wat

It's "far left" to mention that the world's richest person is asking for subsidies? We're not even passing judgement on whether he should or shouldn't get them. Hell, we're reporting that Congress is looking into why the subsidies weren't granted.

I guess we're at the point now where printing information is "far left."

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Re: Subsidies for the world's richest billionair?

Fair point - we thought we might sound repetitive bringing it up again and again, but I've added that observation to the piece.

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Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: War declared on passive voice by project leadership

There were concerns the potential impact of the title may have been lessened for the very reasons elaborated by the open source figurehead, as well as possibly attracting unfair allegations we had failed to understand their arguably well-elucidated point.

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Geico tells El Reg, no, it's not canceling all Cybertruck insurance

Of course.

Not so much annoyance as not wanting to delete your comment but also not wanting to let it stand without a response.

I shouldn't get into tit-for-tat with people though, so my apologies for those reading this thread.

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More Reg bashing, yawn.

You consistently don't read articles; just jump to conclusions. How on Earth is an article saying Geico isn't going to drop coverage of Cybertruck bashing Elon?

This is like when you said a review of a Meta model in which we said it was brainless and inaccurate was an AI puff piece. I don't mind critiques of articles, I just ask that you actually read and understand the things.

Or more simply: Lurk moar.

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Netflix on Mars? Yeah maybe, thanks to NASA's laser comms demo

Re: Nice news

I've added a couple more links to the page, so if you follow the ones on there to NASA, you'll get some more info.

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Re: Timeouts?

If you think we're not the type to let some specifics like TCP timeouts get in the way of a headline gag, you'd be wrong.

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ULA nears second launch of Vulcan Centaur in pursuit of US Space Force approval

Strap-ons

Been there, done that ;-)

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