* Posts by diodesign

3495 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Mysterious case of Arizona state senators skipping a vote on tackling Apple and Google's app commissions

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Relax, buddy

What we meant was: the committee hasn't been forthcoming on what its intentions are and the reasons for stalling the bill. I've reworded that sentence to reflect this.

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NASA sets the date for first helicopter flight on another planet – and the craft will carry a piece of history

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Pedantry

Ah come on, you know what we meant. The Wright Flyer was a recorded first whereas we're having to take Eole's word for it. That's why we said the Flyer was recognized as the first.

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: eerrr...not quite "by the side"

Yes, yes, the article's been updated in light of the fact that it's not actually unstuck as previously reported.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Shocking! Most disappointed

Ah no, we're not talking about 151 kph -- it's 151 km. As in, 151 km along the canal.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I am most disappointed...

Thanks, though when it comes to knob gags on the pages of El Reg, I feel we've been there, done that, sold the t-shirts, etc.

It's noted that in the article update.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ship has not been refloated

Thanks -- this information came to light after the article was written. We've updated the piece to reflect this.

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Proof that Surface devices are not a niche product obsessed over by Microsoft fans: A patent lawsuit from Caltech

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Why is that not automatic ?

You have to ask the courts what you would like, and it's decided upon. Judges typically don't preempt or assume a plaintiff or defendant's wishes.

In short: don't ask, don't get.

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OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

20kV

OVH says it has a 20kV power supply to its Strasbourg data center operation. It is substantial, yes.

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Following Supreme Court ruling, Uber UK recognizes drivers as workers, offers min wage, holiday pay, pension

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Waiting for a job is excluded"

Yeah, the union (quoted in our piece) pointed that out, too.

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Google emits data-leaking proof-of-concept Spectre exploit for Intel CPUs to really get everyone's attention

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Huh?

IMHO this is what happened: we reported upcoming OS patches to work around design flaws in today's processors -- Intel's Meltdown being the worst as it was easy to exploit.

Everyone went wild. Markets, media, analysts, vendors. Things were patched before they were exploited. It reminded me of Y2K. In the end, very little went wrong because of all the work beforehand, leading some to say it was a load of hype. I see the same for Meltdown+Spectre.

The obvious Meltdown and Spectre flaws were addressed early on. But as we wrote in early 2018, Spectre will continue to haunt the computer industry for a decade or more as the family of bug is quite large. Google's pointed out that there's still work to be done on the web front-end side, and so released this PoC exploit to make web devs wise up.

There are exploits for Spectre out there but they tend to be in expensive toolkits (Immunity Inc's Canvas IIRC). Now here's one for free.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"But everyone runs NoScript don't they"

Absolutely not. The vast, vast majority of people have JS on. Depending on country, we're talking fractions of percent to 2% tops have JS disabled through one way or another.

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Twitter sues Texas AG to halt 'retaliatory' demand for internal content-moderation rulebook in wake of Trump ban

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

First comment is obviously a sealion, figures

It's a far-right haven. It's fair comment to call it a far-right-friendly place. It may have non-far-right people on it, but it's known, well known, for being home to far-right internet outcasts.

Are there far-right people on Facebook and Twitter? Sure, but with billions of users total, that's not what they are famous for. Parler is famous for being a haven for the far-right.

Far-right isn't defamatory, anyway.

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Like a challenge in a high profile 'face-of-IT' role? Welcome to the Home Office

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"a poor innocent foreign girl"

Priti Patel was born in London, England.

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What happens when cancel culture meets Adolf Hitler pareidolia? Amazon decides it needs a new app icon

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'you make it sound like...'

I dreaded someone would be this tedious. Everyone, bar weapons-grade numbskulls, knows the history. He killed millions of people. Then he killed himself.

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Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Wording

Yes, we did proofread it and sometimes things slip through just like bugs slip through into production.

The bit at the end was boilerplate from a previous debate, and it's now fixed.

As is clear from the opening and the debate page, the second piece is going live on Friday, and the results on Tuesday. We space them out to give people a chance to read and vote -- most people read us a few times a week, not multiple times a day.

Also, please don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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Telecoms shack in the middle of Scotland put up for auction at £7,500

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Geography lesson

Yeah, OK, these things happen and it's fixed -- can you please email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong in future, ta.

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Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Snall tpyoes

It's fixed - for minor things like this, please use corrections@theregister.com to let us know, ta.

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1Password has none, KeePass has none... So why are there seven embedded trackers in the LastPass Android app?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: KeyPass as an alternative? Are you sure you didn't mean KeePass?

Yes, yes, see the note at the end of the article: we meant KeePass. Though KeyPass does exist and also has no trackers, I'm told.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything that looks wrong, please, so we can fix it immediately.

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With computer brains in short supply, President Biden orders 100-day probe into semiconductor drought

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Vague because... it's a news article not a judicial review

It's going to be mostly (d) all of the above. Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Xilinx, Intel etc are going to be fighting over TSMC's leading edge and not-quite-so-leading-edge, and similar fabs.

Yes, microcontrollers aren't going to be on 7 or 5nm, they will be on something more chunky, though to me it appears these are either constrained too, to a degree, due to demand - or the things they are going into (cars, etc) are being held up because the control units need the aforementioned Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia, etc chips that are in short supply.

Plus also the stuff mentioned in the article about rare earths and batteries.

In other words, supply chains and manufacturing are complex, with inter-dependencies and knock-on effects.

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So, bye-bye mighty nerd haven Fry’s, took Silicon to the Valley... and now you must die

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not entirely mutually exclusive

Why not both? Lack of inventory and the rise of Amazon, Aliexpress, etc.

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Microsoft sides with media groups, together they urge Europe to follow Australia's lead, make Google, Facebook pay for news article links

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Sorry, thought it was obvious

Apologies, we thought it was obvious that when talking about links to news articles that it includes the titles and summaries that Google, Facebook, Twitter etc automatically generate when presenting the link.

The link text has to have some part of the publisher's content in it - the headline or the opening sentence - to be simply visible on the page.

The article also did note that "both Google and Facebook feared Oz's bargaining code would embolden publishers in other nations to demand royalties for using headlines, snippets of text, and article links in search results." So, yes, it's more than just links.

BTW Microsoft etc left it open ended on what exactly should be paid for. I've now made it as clear as I can that we're talking about more than just simply a link, though.

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NASA sends nuclear tank 293 million miles to Mars, misses landing spot by just five metres. Now watch its video

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Hi, likely VxWorks worker

Thing is, VxWorks is a staple of NASA missions. It's a given that it's running on the thing.

As journalists, we're here to highlight what's new -- it's called news, right -- and what's new here is the use of customized Linux and FFMPEG. As someone above pointed out, NASA name-checked FFMPEG in their briefings, so that and the Linux side is newsworthy. We've written about VxWorks in the past on space missions.

FWIW we're working on a separate piece describing the chips and OSes on the rover in more details, and I'll add a reference to VxWorks to this article.

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Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What the AAIB had to say

FWIW the article does link to the report...

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Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Redundant

Sorry to hear that, mate. Just created a poll answer for folks in your situation. best of luck finding somewhere else to work.

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Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Real Story from Texas

Even though ERCOT has some connections to other grids, it doesn't typically use them to draw power, as it fiercely guards its independence. Instead, it exports power.

On a normal day, Texas would proudly argue its grid is independent - an electrical island, no less - and that it don't need no federally regulated network, thank you kindly. But then this storm hits, and at the suggestion it was perhaps wrong to have an entirely independent and isolated grid, suddenly here come the apologists arguing that it's not actually truly independent and could tap into other networks any time it wanted (but couldn't or didn't). Sheesh.

Ultimately, the Texas grid wasn't built to withstand the storm that hit, its power generation failed, and it couldn't or didn't use whatever links it had with the Eastern Interconnect, and people went without power.

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Edit: From CNBC: “Texas has chosen to operate its power grid as an island,” noted Rice University’s Cohan, which means the state can’t import power from other states when it’s most needed. He added that the impacts are also felt in the summer, when Texas has an abundance of power that it can’t export.

Uncle Sam accuses three suspected North Korean govt hackers of stealing $1.3bn+ from banks, crypto orgs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: They men also, it is claimed, siphoned $6.1m (£4.4m) from ATMs in Pakistan

From the indictment:

"On October 27, 2018, having gained unauthorized access to the computer network of [Pakistan's] BankIslami, the hackers caused fraudulent ATM withdrawal requests to be approved, which caused requesting ATMs to dispense approximately $6.1 million to money-launderer co-conspirators, including co-conspirators acting at the direction of unindicted co-conspirator Ghaleb Alaumary."

Uncle Sam says they had money launderers in Pakistan waiting to pick up the cash.

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Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Why this astonishing silence on that situation"

There's only one Kieren at The Reg and many, many organizations for him to investigate. We felt that Battistelli's departure was a good moment to turn attention elsewhere for a while. Future coverage of the EPO isn't ruled out.

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Barcode scan app amassed millions of downloads before weird update starting popping open webpages...

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"people just submitted complaints about the wrong one by mistake?"

Yes, apparently so. The bad one got taken off the Play Store but not people's phones. So people went to the Play Store to complain about the pop ups in the software still on their device, and trash the wrong app.

Bit of a mess.

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Bitcoin surges, exchanges flooded after Tesla says it bought $1.5bn in BTC, hopes to accept it as payment soon

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ego

Oops, we swapped out that tweet with one that has more context. The above comment is referring to this tweet, which was originally embedded in the article.

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Smells like Teams spirit: New platform Viva builds in all the tools Microsoft thinks staff need to succeed

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Plain English

I've added some extra context and a link to more info on it all by Microsoft if that helps. It's tools to manage (and monitor) work and non-work time, pool together internal documentation and training, and inject references to that corporate material into your chat conversations in some attempt to be more helpful.

Personally, this looks like Microsoft trying to add tools to make up for the fact that we can't bump into colleagues in the corridor anymore (due to the pandemic) or catch someone after a meeting or at lunch or while getting a coffee and ask a question and get an immediate answer or feedback. Asking on instant chat or email feels like you're bugging someone rather than taking advantage of a spontaneous encounter.

So instead, you, I dunno, bump into Teams and get it to answer your Qs without bothering anyone or waiting for them to reply. If possible. Also, you might see notices and posters up in the office about stuff you need to know, which you can't do if you're stuck at home all the time, so these tools fill in that gap online.

Something like that. This isn't an endorsement of it.

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Amazon deploys AI cameras inside delivery vans, misspells 'surveillance' as 'safety' in reason why

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: failing to break?

Yeah, OK, easy mistake -- it's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything like this, ta.

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LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Ribbon UI

Ah yes, we got the 7 right. It's easy to think the 1990s were last decade sometimes. It's fixed.

Don't forget, please, to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong. We fixed this within a minute of someone emailing this slip-up to us just now, whereas it takes hours to get round to reading all the comments on stories after editing and writing articles etc.

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Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"You're not putting any old drives in your NetApp SAN"

No, but we're not aware of a NetApp NAS that requires NetApp-only drives above a certain capacity. 'Cos that's the situation with Synology.

Yes, certifying drives is a thing in enterprise. But this article is about a very specific move by Synology.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Professional kit vs non-professional kit

I really hope you are reading the full article. The thrust is that, according to storage world people we've spoken to, it is unusual for a NAS box vendor to insist on its own branded drives above a certain capacity even in an enterprise environment.

And as the article says: If Synology really can deliver the performance improvements it claims its drive firmware enables, being locked into Synology drives may be a sound decision.

It's a nuanced issue.

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Musk see: Watch SpaceX's latest Starship rocket explode while trying to touch down

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"so they stuck to the extant rules for the launch"

That's not the way the FAA tells it. In an email to the media, the agency stated:

"Prior to the Starship SN8 test launch in December 2020, SpaceX sought a waiver to exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations. After the FAA denied the request, SpaceX proceeded with the flight.

"As a result of this non-compliance, the FAA required SpaceX to conduct an investigation of the incident.

"All testing that could affect public safety at the Boca Chica, Texas, launch site was suspended until the investigation was completed and the FAA approved the company’s corrective actions to protect public safety. The corrective actions arising from the SN8 incident are incorporated into the SN9 launch license."

This non-compliance is the reason why a January 28 test of the rocket was delayed, and why Musk went off on one on Twitter about it.

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GitLab removes its 'starter' tier: Users must either pay 5x more or lose features

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Rejected

It's because your comment was HTML-gore. Our publishing system escaped all the code so it looked like a horrendous mess. If you want to link to something, just paste the URL as is, ta.

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Missing GOV.UK web link potentially cost taxpayers £50m as civil servants are forced to shuffle paper forms

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: The link is NOT missing though?

The issue is that the link to change address for those with a BRP goes to a printed form and not the online form. Similarly, if you want to report an extraordinary change in circumstances - such as separating from your partner - you're directed to the printed form.

Whereas if you have applied for a BRP and haven't had a decision letter yet, you are directed to... an online form.

This bureaucratic maze is what this article sought to highlight.

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Biden administration pauses ban on Chinese tech companies suspected of military entanglements

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"any post that questions their world viewpoint gets banned,"

I love reading these in public, not banned posts. It's like someone going on Fox News to say they're being censored by the media.

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Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the majority of those insurgents are in the process of losing their shirts"

Well, yeah, though that doesn't contradict what we wrote. See yesterday's piece on the risk at least some people are unwittingly taking.

Some people are doing this to give Wall St a middle finger. Some are doing it to pay off medical debt or make life-changing sums of money. Some people won't get very far at all. It all amounts to a rebellion against the status quo, though, in our opinion.

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What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: You forgot to explain a crucial point about options

We took out the stuff about the options and futures -- and instead highlighted the short squeeze aspect. GME was heavily shorted, to somewhere around 140%, leaving the hedges particularly vulnerable.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: wow, this is weird.

Yeah, thanks. We took out the stuff about options and futures and highlighted the short squeeze aspect.

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Ads in comments

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ads in comments

We're experimenting with ads in comments though we've taken them offline for a short while while refining their design.

I think user-submitted images in comments are a long way off. Too much of a security and UX nightmare for now.

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AMD, Nvidia, HPE tapped to triple the speed of US weather super with $35m upgrade

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Bandwidth

Er, yeah, that 200Gb/s figure is in no way the entire internal bandwidth of the system. It's basically the base speed per port.

As the linked-to article and this paper [PDF] and HPE's own bumf says, that's the link speed of the interconnect. You can have, eg, a 64-port switch with each port doing 200Gb/s per direction (four lanes of 50Gb/s).

NCAR also said the "HPE Slingshot bandwidth is 200 Gb/sec per port per direction."

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Google, Apple sued for failing to give Telegram chat app the Parler put-down treatment

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"She knows that it started under her husband"

As I've commented before, that's disingenuous. The Trump administration massively ramped up family separations.

Under Obama, separations were rare and usually for the child's safety -- ie: they were being trafficked.

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Apple emits emergency iOS security updates while warning holes may have been exploited in wild by hackers

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Typo

Yeah, it's fixed -- thanks for reading all the way to the bottom, though please do let us know via corrections@theregister.com so we can fix it right away rather than a day later when we get a chance to read the comments.

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US cyber intelligence officer jailed for kidnapping her kid, trying to hawk top secrets to Russia in Mexico

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Budget Snowden

Yeah, yeah, whistleblowing, we get it. It was an attempt to point out she was rather crap at whatever she was hoping to achieve. Bargain Bin Klaus Fuchs might be more apt.

We already changed it to something else.

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East London council breaks off 20-year Oracle relationship to shack up with cloud ERP nobodies by year's end

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Oracle is somehow good because it's big"

Nnnnnnnnn-o.

I would say El Reg's sentiment is: moving away from Oracle isn't a bad thing, but you better have a robust plan in place for something as important as a local authority.

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I was targeted by North Korean 0-day hackers using a Visual Studio project, vuln hunter tells El Reg

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

White space on pages

If you see the whitespace on the site, it's probably because you're blocking an ad. If you're not running an ad blocker, then it's a bug and so drop a note to webmaster @ therg with the URL, screenshot, and description of the browser and system you're using.

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In a trial run, Google Chrome to corral netizens into groups for tailored web ads rather than target individuals

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Opt-in advertising?

The FloC group-by-interests ads trial is opt-in; if you don't opt in, you get your regular ads'n'web experience.

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Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"what's happening to the El Reg, it has never been so impartial"

I'm assuming you think you mean 'biased' not 'impartial'.

If there's one thing about The Reg, it's that we've never, ever knowingly shied away calling something we think is dumb "dumb".

And running a platform like Parler, in which anyone can say anything, no matter how extreme, and think there will be no consequences? That's really fkin dumb.

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