Posts by diodesign

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

"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

'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

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 [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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

Re: Geography lesson

Yeah, OK, these things happen and it's fixed -- can you please email [e-mail] 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

Snall tpyoes

It's fixed - for minor things like this, please use [e-mail] 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?

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 [e-mail] 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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

"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...

"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

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

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

Re: failing to break?

Yeah, OK, easy mistake -- it's fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything like this, ta.

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

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 [e-mail] 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

"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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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

"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

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

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

"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

"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

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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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

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

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

"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

Typo

Yeah, it's fixed -- thanks for reading all the way to the bottom, though please do let us know via [e-mail] 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

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

"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

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

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

"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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"an anti-social network peopled only by the far right."

Not "only." Just a lot. And a lot is too many. Paradox of tolerance and all that.

We've got to stop thinking in binary terms, of either total free speech or no speech. Life is shades of gray. Saying 'Jeff Bezos is a greedy scumbag' shouldn't get you kicked off AWS. That would be suboptimal. But we're not talking about that: we're talking about people using speech to plan the overthrowing of democratic rule. The glue of a civilization.

Speech has consequences.

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Another snowflake

"For people who supposedly deal in facts there's an abundance of rabid anti-conservatism based on emotion alone"

This story, and us here at the Reg, aren't anti-conservative. It's written with the normal level of emotion. Everything in the story is fact. You need to drop the victim complex. It's not healthy.

"You seem to be perfectly happy with censorship as long as it isn't a viewpoint you support"

Nah man, you need to check out the paradox of tolerance. If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. If you force the likes of Amazon to enable the spread of hateful, violent messaging, you're not going to see a bright, happy future.

If someone draws the line and says, no, I'm not going to allow people to plan an armed insurrection in my country on my servers, then that's their choice -- and that's you no longer welcome. Just like if you mouthed off in a pub at everyone, you'd be thrown out. Speech has consequences. Go make your own platform or find someone to host you. Amazon doesn't owe you a thing.

"Amazon was not supporting Parlor in the sense of Facebook ... Content was none of their business."

Funny, a conservative telling a private enterprise what to do. I thought you were all about small government? Now you want to tell Amazon how to run its cloud and who it should do business with. Weird.

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Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

Re: 404

Ta -- when Biden was sworn in, the 45th president's White House site was archived and replaced. I've fixed up the link to the archived WH site.

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Over long US weekend, GitHub HR boss quit after firing Jewish staffer who warned Nazis were at the Capitol

Skepticism

It was never our intention to tarnish anyone's reputation and I wanted to be very careful that we didn't. We felt that we were maybe only hearing half the story. And as it turned out that it really was a one-sided HR screw-up, we ran a second story and addressed our misplaced skepticism. At least we're being transparent.

There's very very rarely a perfect story in which there is a clearly defined good person and a bad person, and the good person has done nothing wrong, and the bad person has done everything wrong. Life is way more complex than that. Hence our concern.

But it turns out it really was that bad -- and we've followed it up and laid it out here.

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Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Oh, hi Mark

Dropbox basically decimates workforce, COO logs off: Cloud biz promises to be 'more efficient and nimble'

Decimation

Dude, it's close enough.

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Dems to ISPs: You're not gonna hike broadband prices, slap restrictions on folks in a pandemic, are you?

Ah, cool, we're at the outrage-over-an-imagined-scenario stage.

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If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

"Does this apply to the UK and the EU though?"

From WhatsApp's European Economic Area FAQ (which claims to include the UK still, updated Jan 4, 2021):

"WhatsApp also works, and shares information with the other Facebook Companies who act on our behalf to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customise, support, and market our Services.

"This includes the provision of infrastructure, technology, and systems, e.g. for providing you with fast and reliable messaging and calls around the world; improving infrastructure and delivery systems; understanding how our Services are used; helping us provide a way for you to connect with businesses; and securing systems.

"When we receive services from the Facebook Companies, the information we share with them is used on WhatsApp’s behalf and in accordance with our instructions. Any information WhatsApp shares on this basis cannot be used for the Facebook Companies’ own purposes"

So, Facebook Companies can't use the info for their own purposes but can use it as Facebook-owned WhatsApp directs.

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Women are 40% of Indian STEM grads and in just 14% of tech jobs. Not good enough, says VP Naidu

"women being in fewer numbers in IT than men is a social evil"

I wouldn't call it a social evil, but there are loads of reasons why it's a good idea to have a diverse workforce, and have more than just a vast majority of straight white guys in technology.

For example: realizing when features could be abused by stalker exes, when features only work with people of a certain color, etc.

I know a guy who wanted to build a glass-floor second-floor balcony for their house overlooking their nice view of the SF bay... which is cool except anyone standing underneath it, walking from the yard into the home, could look up and see up the skirts of any women standing up there. I like using this unintended consequence of his design as an example that you need more than just guys on your engineering team.

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Trump's overhaul of Section 230 stalls, Biden may just throw the web legal shield on the bonfire anyway

That TechDirt link

Apropos of almost nothing, that TD article is one of the most reader hostile things I've seen in years. It's not written to educate anyone; it's written so that people can show off to others that they know something better than someone else.

You don't teach people using the tone 'you're a f'king idiot'. Just my 2p.

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Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

California

"20 million infected California"

It's 2 million.

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Techies start growing an Alphabet-wide labor union: 200-plus sign up, only tens of thousands more to go

Alleged "bad info"

"So, $28835 / year divided by 2040 hours/year is $14.13/hr."

Which is more than the US federal min wage. These people won't be working in CA, I suspect.

"In 2015, I was hired as an SRE III/SWE IV. Salary, bonuses, and stock was >$200k. I have little doubt that our TPM was close to $300k."

Yeah, as the article says, the quoted numbers are base pay. Once you include bonuses and stock, it's going to be a lot more. And sure, $200k base is low when you get up to L6 and long-term L5.

The quoted base pay range is in the right sort of neighborhood, depending where you are, and experience. You get the gist: in engineering you get paid a lot, and outside engineering, not so much.

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