Posts by diodesign

NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off

"This story sounds a bit odd"

FWIW we're reporting what the auditor said - so if something looks odd, you mean, the auditor's findings are odd.

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Re: Hang on...

"surely that data should have gone directly to a NASA data centre first anyway"

That's the rub. NASA didn't want to run its own data centers: it opted to upload all the stuff gradually to the cloud. According to the audit report, it didn't realize that people can't download this stuff "for free" from the cloud – someone has to pay for the bandwidth. NASA, in this case.

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UK government puts IR35 tax reforms on hold for a year in wake of coronavirus crisis

Re: Errata:

Thanks for the feedback - I've tweaked that sentence.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong. We can't read every comment, but we can read every email to that address. Case in point: if you had emailed us, we could have addressed this hours ago.

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Vimeo freezes accounts after malware hunts for logins, coronavirus map app infected with evil code, and more

Re: $Deity Crap !

Shared ;)

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Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer

FRAND

The patents are now linked from the article. They don't look standards related.

They look like the usual video-on-demand and video encoding fare. Check 'em out and let us know.

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America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

It'll come from the US Treasury, and it's not returned. It's a one-off check.

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Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

Re: Why the kick in the nuts...?

Microsoft is a multi-billion-dollar company: it can take the criticism. We're not here to kiss ass, no matter the vendor's good intentions: we're here to scrutinize.

What's the point of offering something for free if it just goes down?

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Coronavirus pandemic latest: Trump declares 'two very big words' – national emergency – and unexpectedly ropes in Google to help in some form

"And what's the point of that snarky comment?"

It's PR trolling by billionaires. It's 0.01% of his net worth. We're just playthings to them in their weird point-scoring battles.

"We join hands with Americans in these difficult times"

C'mon.

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Apple fans may think they can't get viruses but Cupertino disagrees: WWDC 2020 dev summit goes online-only

Ah thanks, yeah, we've watched back some of the previous WWDC content online in the past. We'll mention that in the article.

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Ex-director accuses iRobot of firing him for pointing out the home-cleaner droids broke safety, govt regulations

Re: Safety?

From the court document:

"At a subsequent meeting on March 15,2018, Pankowski reiterated the statement he made during the earlier meeting that his team could not approve the product because it did not meet safety requirements and doing so would place consumers of the product at a safety risk and expose iRobot to liability."

And:

"iRobot ... refused to provide required safety and labelling information with the products it sold"

Emphasis mine. Hope this helps.

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Thought you were done after Tuesday's 115-fix day? Not yet: Microsoft emits SMBv3 worm-cure crisis patch

They are not vulnerable, it appears:

https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2020-0796

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'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

What kind of ramifications does this have on DRM in general?

Any decryption done using keys secured by the CSME can be broken: so video streaming, anti-copying mechanisms, etc that rely on the EPID/TPM to store and use keys.

DVD and Blu-ray encryption is already cracked.

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Facebook, distributor of deceptive political ads, sues registrar Namecheap over deceptive domain names

Re: Only in England the source of the Skripal fantasy would this title fly

Wow. You hear about these sorts of comments on the internet. It's incredible to see one with your own eyes.

We've struck gold

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MPs to grill Post Office and Fujitsu execs on Horizon IT scandal after workers jailed over accounting errors

Re: JohnG

Thanks for the feedback - don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong so it can be fixed ASAP

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Uncle Sam's nuke-stockpile-simulating souped-super El Capitan set to hit TWO exa-FLOPS, take crown as world's fastest machine in 2023

Re: That article title

Commas are for wimps, and multimillionaires.

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Download this update from mybrowser.microsoft.com. Oh, sorry, that was malware on a hijacked sub-domain. Oops

Pedant

Yeah, dude, the rub is that the researchers thought the bounty included sub-domain security, Microsoft disagrees.

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Come kneel with us at UK's Cathedral, er, Oil Rig of the Canal: Engineering masterpiece Anderton Boat Lift

Re: Conversion error?

350ft = 106m, fixed.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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Amazon staffer based just a stone's throw away from Seattle HQ tests positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

"So there is a high number of undiagnosed cases in that region"

Sure, doesn't change the fact that at time of writing, there have been 27 confirmed reported cases in Washington state.

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New Jersey beats New York – and then the rest of America – on broadband access. How does your state fare?

Population density

Sure, I've added a note mentioning that.

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Wi-Fi kit spilling data with bad crypto – Huawei, eh? No, it's Cisco. US giant patches Krook spy-hole bug in network gear

Re: Gotta bash with feeling now

If you click through to the original article, it lists Huawei as vulnerable.

HTH

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You've put up with us banging on about IT for years. Now it's your turn. Grab a mic and join us on The Register's podcast

Re: I know...

Speaking in Tech was fabulous, though the decision to part ways with it was taken by El Reg's management some three years ago. A lot has changed since.

Also, this time around we want to focus on end users rather than vendors and suppliers.

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Wi-Fi of more than a billion PCs, phones, gadgets can be snooped on. But you're using HTTPS, SSH, VPNs... right?

"MitM attacks on unencrypted network traffic do happen"

This isn't about that at all, so you're more strawman builder than Satan's attorney.

This is about forcing a nearby device to encrypt data with a key you know (0x00000000), and you can snoop on this data over the air to decrypt it.

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Thanks, added to the story.

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Going Dutch: The Bakker Elkhuizen UltraBoard 950 Wireless... because looks aren't everything

Re: El Reg shitty photography

"Why is it that The Reg publish the tiniest grainy photos of products, when a full resolution copy exists?"

Because we sometimes forget to link to the full-res - and forget that you can't click on the main top image to expand it.

FWIW our articles - the content written by journalists - are input and edited as raw HTML in our publishing system, which then sticks stuff like the mast-head, headline, comments link, and so on, automatically when the article is published.

The top image of articles is automatically inserted: we can control the URL of the image, and whether one appears, but it's always non-clickable. If we want to make the main image clickable, we have to manually hide it from the top and embed it lower down in the piece.

In other words: if there's no link to a larger version of an image, someone forgot to put the anchor tag in. If the top image isn't clickable, and should be, someone forgot to move it down into the article.

Drop us an email to [e-mail] if you think we've screwed up so we can fix it immediately.

I've moved the top image down into the article and made it clickable.

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Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

They've fixed it, then, it seems. It was throwing certificate errors earlier.

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Judge Vulcan-nerve pinches JEDI deal after Amazon forks out $42m to pause Microsoft's military machinations

"Most tech rags would not remember what they published last week"

You need to be a black-belt in reoccurring inside jokes to work around here.

It's partly to annoy pedants, and partly a send-up of publications (including El Reg TBF) that accidentally mix up pictures of TV shows, airplanes, battleships, old computers, actors, etc, in headlines and images.

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It's official: In May, Microsoft will close the door, lock the vault, brick over the entrance of dreaded Windows 10 1809

LTS

That's not on the list of affected editions.

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Huawei to the danger zone: Now Uncle Sam slaps it with 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, theft of robot arm and source code

Re: Huawei to the danger zone

The Register's tweet for this story was more obscure...

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What do we want? A proper review of IR35! When do we want it? Last year! Bunch of IT contractors protest outside UK Parliament

Re: No conflict of interest

Not quite. Rishi Sunak, the new UK chancellor, is the son-in-law of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the father of Sunak's wife.

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Microsoft: Yeah, dual screens are pretty rad, but check out our purple calendar

Whinging

I read an amusing tweet by someone at IBM the other day. So, there's that.

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Internet's safe-keepers forced to postpone crucial DNSSEC root key signing ceremony – no, not a hacker attack, but because they can't open a safe

Re: "during what was apparently a check"

I think it was more checking they were operational.

FWIW, ICANN has the ability to override protections and literally drill its way into accessing the KSK HSM but it's rather obvious if that were to happen.

The point being that IANA/ICANN staff can check security systems but there are tamper-proof protections and other layers to prevent actual access outside of a ceremony, unless you brute force your way in, which is, shall we say, detectable.

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He’s a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges

Re: a digital Fort Knox: impenetrable to only a very few special people.

Yeah yeah, we meant "all but" not "only" - it's fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot something wrong like that, please, so we can fix it ASAP.

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Google, YouTube, Twitter tell face-rec upstart Clearview to stop harvesting people's content – that's their job

Re: Ok...

It's fairly trivial facial recognition - it's the scale and the source of the training data that's causing people to kick off.

Here's how I'd do it. You take 3 billion pairs of images scraped from online profiles and URLs to those profiles. You train a convolutional neural network – or a series of networks – to map images to their source profiles. To make life easier, assign each profile an ID number. Thus a particular face will map to ID 1000, another to ID 1001, and so on.

So when you show it a face, it predicts what the correct profile ID should be. Thus if you show it an image it hasn't seen before, it will try to map it to the closest matching face and its profile ID. You then turn that ID number into a profile. You now have a suggested identity for that input face.

The neural network can output profile ID numbers with a confidence value, so a face could return ID 1001 90% confidence, ID 3000 70% confidence, ID 2000 10% confidence, etc. Just take the highest two or three.

Depending on the training and input data preparation, the training process and the network architecture, it'll be accurate or not very accurate.

As for the scraping: buy a lot of cloud instances and parallelize your curl fetches, crawling webpages, building a graph network.

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PS: Cache a copy of the page per URL so that if profiles disappear online, you still have a copy. These pages will contain stuff like names, personal info, links to other profiles owned by the person, etc

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

Re: 13 Bits

You're over-thinking it. A random number is generated between 0 and 7,999 inclusive, which falls within 13 bits. It's as simple as that.

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Oh ****... Sudo has a 'make anyone root' bug that needs to be patched – if you're unlucky enough to enable pwfeedback

Better title

Yeah, if it was the default configuration and in the main distros.

If we focus on the bug type, people will complain we're overblowing it. If we focus on the scope people will complain we're downplaying it.

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Facebook coughs up $550m to make AI photo tagging lawsuit vanish. How ever will it survive on that $17.9bn left over?

Re: One weeks worth of quarterly income

Between 10 and 11 days of full-year profit, or a week of Q4 profit. Facebook banked $50.7m a day in full-year profit in 2019.

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You know the President is able to shut down all US comms, yeah? An FCC commish wants to stop him from doing that

"the Register can do much better than this"

You mean publish opinions you agree with. It's a comment piece, with some reporting. There are plenty of other stories to read if you don't like or agree with this one.

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Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Re: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia?

Yes, Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia. That's a bad oops.

It's been fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

"how unreasonably low a target uptime of 75%"

1. We like to think it's obvious to Reg readers that 75% (it's actually 77) is low. Didn't seem worth making too much hay about it.

2. Kieren wrote 3 great articles on Tuesday, and we at the back edited a load more. We're always pushed for time, there are always improvements and extra work that can be done, and we have to ship a product at some point. Sometimes you have to call it and run it, and move onto the next thing that needs covering.

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Re: WTF?

Actually, sorry, it's 77%. Not 75%. Small difference but important to get right.

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Cache flow problems continue for Intel: Yet more data-leaking processor design blunders discovered, patches due soon

Re: Clickbait!

Cache flow, ca... *taps mic* is this thing on?

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Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

"I just pity the jury"

There is no jury (unless I've missed a major development): it's a judge-only hearing

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Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

"Guys is now an all inclusive term"

It's kinda leaning towards being just blokes rather than inclusive these days.

I thought it was gender inclusive, too, but then someone pointed out: ask a straight male friend how many guys they've dated, and witness the inclusion in action.

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10nm woes, CPU supply shortages, competition from AMD... What? Sorry? Intel can't hear you over the cash register going bonkers

Spectre-Meltdown-L1FT-Zombieload-et-al

I've heard rumblings that a chunk of the data center sales are or were due to banks and cloud builders replacing processors with those with mitigations built in.

But it's mainly Intel auctioning off chips to hyperscalers ordering 1m parts a year, I reckon.

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In the red corner, Big Red, and in the blue corner... the rest of the tech industry

"I cannot find it easily"

The original complaint is way out of date - the legal battle has changed over the many years it's been running. Various claims have changed, or been thrown out.

I recommend reading the latest appeals court ruling: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/29/oracle_v_google_opinion.pdf

The original is here: https://regmedia.co.uk/2010/08/13/oracle_complaint_against_google.pdf

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Judge snubs IT outsourcers' plea to Alt-F4 tougher H-1B visa rules: Bosses told to fill out the extra paperwork

Re: ... at the current price

Yeah, I've tweaked that sentence.

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'I am done with open source': Developer of Rust Actix web framework quits, appoints new maintainer

"The Rust standard library isn't available on bare metal?"

For bare metal, you can use what's called the core library, and a few others, that provide primitives and basic structures. There's no IO nor heap allocator: you have to implement that yourself.

If you pull in a third-party library that expects to use std library primitives, you're out of luck in a core-only environment. It's not the end of the world: not all libraries require std. Ones labeled nostd will work with core.

std expects there to be an OS underneath providing stuff like heap allocation and IO. With bare metal, there is no OS. You are the OS. Core doesn't require an OS. Core expects you to provide things like the heap allocator.

So, with core, you're not totally on your own, you get some support, you just can't use dependencies that require std, and you have to provide stuff like memory management.

Compare std: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/

to core: https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/

Core gives you a lot, along with common data structures in the alloc library, but not all of std.

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Re: Whats the problem with unsafe code in Rust?

FWIW you still have to obey Rust's borrower rules in unsafe code. You also wrap unsafe { } around unsafe code so you can find and audit it easier - whereas with C/C++ any old pointer could be wild.

Unsafe IO port access on Rust looks like this:

unsafe { *(0x10000000 as *mut u8) = c };

..for writing a character to a serial port at 0x10000000, say.

I've done a fair amount of low-level Rust dev in my spare time and it's helped me write much better code, so much so, I am terrified about the thousands of lines of C I've previously written.

I'm not on the Kool Aid, though. It's frustrating that a lot of the ecosystem uses the standard (std) library, which is unavailable on bare metal. Thus, you may find a third-party library that will save you reinventing the wheel, only to find it's reliant on std and you can't use it.

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Unlocking news: We decrypt those cryptic headlines about Scottish cops bypassing smartphone encryption

Remote access

There is that, but this is in the context of physically seized devices.

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Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

Hair splitting

Yeah, all right, but you get the gist of what we meant. It's in the context of releasing, aka distributing, software. I've taken that sentence out so people can't misread it.

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