* Posts by diodesign

3496 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

RDP loves company: Kaspersky finds 37 security holes in VNC remote desktop software

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: TightVNC development is active AFAIK

Ah, the 1.x version is no longer supported and that's what Kaspersky studied. There is a version 2.x. I'll make this clearer in the piece.

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We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Wow I'm in shock that you called apple out on the crap they pull"

Stick around, friend: you're in for a treat

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Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "The £2,399 portable"

Er, I think you're wrong. This story is purely about the 16" Pro. There's no 13" involved here. The 16" starts at 2,399.

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Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Popular ?

From the first sentence in the article:

Python has overtaken Java as the second-most popular language after JavaScript, *based on the primary language of repository contributors*

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FYI, we're now in the timeline where Facebook decides who is and isn't a politician on its 2bn-plus-person network

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"You consider all conservative thought to be illegitimate"

No - it's that Breitbart really sucks. And the rest of your comment is bollocks.

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Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Surely

If you look at the logs, you'll see the AI thought Elaine was, at times, a static object - it didn't expect her to move into its path of travel. She did, though, because she was a person crossing the street. Something the AI didn't take into account at all until the final second or so. Or so it seems.

And don't call me Shirely.

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Phew! All that competition in the US mobile industry was exhausting. Thank God for the FCC, am I right?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Doom and gloom and somewhat slanted

Sure, I get what you're saying. Though, you are describing just one scenario (Sprint dies, leaving just T-Mob, Verizon and ATT). There are/were other options, such as, someone else more competent takes over Sprint and turns it around or merges it with someone outside the big 3.

Softbank's mismanagement of yet another business shouldn't let them off the hook. We shouldn't sleepwalk into super-consolidation.

PS: Doom and gloom is our jam. We're an antidote to much of the tech press which is usually hopped up on happy hype pills.

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In a world of infosec rockstars, shutting down sexual harassment is hard work for victims

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"I'm sorry but you don't get to gripe about it later."

Er, yes, you absolutely do get to gripe about it - how you were coerced into doing something you really didn't want to do simply just to work in the career of your choice. Some of us just fill out an application form and go through interviews. Some people have to, well, you get the idea.

This is exactly the sort of thing you should complain about. Loudly. Repeatedly. Until the abuse stops.

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Boffins don bad 1980s fashion to avoid being detected by object-recognizing AI cameras

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Boffins

It's a term of endearment. It's a note of approval.

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Is everything moderated now?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Permanent?

It's not - it's something that'll stay until one of us gets tired of hand-moderating your posts. Just do us a favor, and if you see something wrong in a story, email corrections@

Cheers

Astroboffins rethink black hole theory after spotting tiny example with its own star buddy

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 4 Msol limit?

From the paper:

"the lowest well-measured black hole masses [5 to 6 M☉ (4, 5)]. Whereas some models of black hole formation indicate a lower mass limit of ∼4 M☉"

The Chandrasekhar limit is about white dwarf stars, which can eventually collapse into black holes, though it needs to take on mass to do this. The limit of 1.4 is the maximum limit for a stable white dwarf. If you want a black hole out of one, it needs more matter, it seems.

See: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4887.pdf

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Watch tiny swimming magnetic robots suck up uranium in a droplet of radioactive wastewater

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Clever stuff, but practical?"

It's a lab experiment right now - where all* good ideas begin.

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* YMMV

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Uranium is harmless unless swallowed"

Yes, yes, and it's a good thing this article isn't about uranium in water, that hard to swallow, easy to contain, non-spilling water.

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We can go our own Huawei! Arm says it can flog chip blueprints to Chinese giant despite US trade embargo

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Apple was involved in the design/spec of ARMv8

AIUI the first Arm knew about Apple doing a 64-bit Arm-compatible CPU was when everyone else found out about it. There wasn't exactly a lot of this 'input' as you say at the time.

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Bezos DDoS'd: Amazon Web Services' DNS systems knackered by hours-long cyber-attack

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

DNS caching

Yeah, there are various ways to solve it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the answer is in the article"

There was a reference to DNS caching in the article, though I took it out as it was potentially confusing: a reader privately pointed out to me that the TTL of .amazonaws.com domains is in the order of a few seconds, much shorter than I assumed. Next time I'll check the TTL...

So if you are caching the queries somewhere, great, but ensure they are cached for a while and not dumped within a minute.

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Edit: I've added some brief advice to the update in case it's needed by anyone in future.

Luke, I am your father... which is why I must eject from JEDI decision, says US Defense Sec

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Fact check

Jesus, there's always one, isn't there.

Houston, we have a problem.

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The sound of silence is actually the sound of a malicious smart speaker app listening in on you

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Gellar

FWIW we let through his posts if they are not about him inventing the internet and databases and AI. General commentary is all right; riling up readers with patent claims is not all right.

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Not a good look, Google: Pixel 4 mobes can be face-unlocked even if you're asleep... or dead?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Erm

If you try to use fingerprint scanning on a sleeping person, you may wake them up. This is a missed opportunity to thwart unauthorized access.

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This fall, Ubuntu 19.10 stars as Eoan Ermine in... Dawn of the Stoats

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Someone hit the publish button a bit early?

It's there now.

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Think your VMware snapshots are all good? Guess again if you're on Windows Server 2019

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Bad link?

Thanks - it's now fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it right away - we may not have time to read comments until hours after a piece is published.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Backups

Yeah yeah yeah. Backups was mentioned just twice and just to avoid every sentence featuring the word snapshot. We like to vary the language a little to make it interesting and less monotonous.

But since we're being pedanted to death on this, we'll just kill off 'backup'.

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Former BAE Systems contractor charged with 'damaging disclosure' of UK defence secrets

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Why

I think they got it wrong - it should be Merseyside, not Manchester, though they've corrected their wording.

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Talk about a calculated RISC: If you think you can do a better job than Arm at designing CPUs, now's your chance

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"I did not know that ARM actually prohibited adding instructions"

It's pretty strict against screwing around with the ISA: your final SoC must pass validation checks to avoid breaking the license, as I understand it.

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Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: On the same day you post your article

It's the same Atari. They precisely timed their PR blitz knowing our story was coming out shortly.

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Hacker House shoved under UK Parliament's spotlight following Boris Johnson funding allegs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"it might just have been the co-founders wearing both the owner and employee hats"

I will say this: Matt at HH knows his stuff, he's even been quoted in El Reg a few times, and we know of people who have gone through HH's training. So it's a thing.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"an accommodation address"

Er, well yeah, it's called Hacker *House* ;) Lots of small biz is run out of people's home offices. That's basically what it was, a small infosec training outfit run out of a home office.

I completely get why people see this as being a bit weird - not a terribly fixed address, etc. We're doing a piece today or for Monday on WTF's really going on.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Daily Telegraph

Funny that the 'graph's Silicon Valley office is right next to El Reg's US base in San Francisco. Can even report we've been out drinking with them.

They can't be much older than 35-ish, aren't a bunch of stereotypical Tele grumps, and yet suitably skeptical of American tech. No complaints here.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: "an offshore company"

Supposedly, it's in London.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"an offshore company"

FWIW Hacker House is based in southern California, where Arcuri lives with her partner, Matthew Hickey, who co-founded HH. It also has a UK presence and has UK staff.

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Astroboffins baffled after spotting solar system with great gas giant that shouldn't exist

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Do you mean half as far away?"

Yeah, that could have been worded better. It means the maximum distance between both bodies is about half the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

It's been tweaked.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Error

Yes, it's 1/270. This blunder has been fixed.

Please don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything wrong so they can be fixed immediately.

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Are you a Nim-by? C-ish language, gentler than Go, friendlier than Rust, reaches version 1.0

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

C-like

By C-like, we mean, it compiles like C, it kinda looks like C, and it's supposed to be a systems language. On reflection, it does look like Python, too.

The lines are blurred and fuzzy.

C.

PS: The indentation doesn't bother me because it's Python-ish, and also it gets rid of the whole argument over where to put any scope-containing braces - on a newline or same line.

Chef melts under heat, will 86 future deals with family-separating US immigration agencies

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"don't enter the country illegally"

Dude, it's completely legal to claim asylum at the US border.

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Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

If you yank a package from the Ruby Gems repository, it can't be automatically and easily installed by the Ruby toolchain, used to build software that integrates with, in this case, Chef. You have to get the source by hand - except you can't, because the Github repo was also removed.

No different to pulling software from the Debian package repository, and yanking it from wherever the code is hosted, eg: Github.

Why do dependencies in this manner, so automatically? Well, that's the modern way. Python, Rust, Ruby, Go, whatever you're using, the libraries you pull into a project have their own dependencies, which have their own dependencies, and you don't want to be merging updates by hand into each of them.

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Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

diodesign Silver badge

"The story really doesn't add up"

Look, we talked it over in the office. There are parts that are baffling - why can't the cops or Feds just question the guy, or check phone records, the usual stuff.

But then in this day and age, nothing surprises us anymore: incompetence and misfortune and difficulties strike at every level.

The article is presented as is: reporting what she has claimed, and what she wants implemented, which to us seem pretty basic measures.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Doesn't add up."

I wouldn't be so quick to judge the mental state of someone who went through the ordeal they described.

Also, talking to the police involves formal interviews, lawyers, identifying the suspect, collecting of DNA evidence, perhaps even court appearances - not particularly nice experiences versus lodging a complaint to an app maker.

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Revealed: The 25 most dangerous software bug types – mem corruption, so hot right now

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"with a whole bunch of problems moved to compile time"

s/moved to/solved at/ ;)

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Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: He should have stuck to what he knows

FYI Marvin Minksy was in his 70s at the time of the assault, according to court documents.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Epstein

Ah yeah, we meant to include his sex offender conviction. It's added.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Jeffrey Epstein allegedly killed himself

Yes, we expect our readers to be smart enough to read between the lines.

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Not to over-hype this storage chip tech, but if I could get away with calling my first-born '3D NAND', I totally would

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Low Fluorine Tungsten?

You're in luck - it's patented! And on Wikipdia

Using fluorine with metals is not new at all. Uranium hexafluoride is used to separate U235 and U238 isotopes in centrifuges for nuclear fuel and weapons, for example.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the article didn't put that on the table too."

Well, that's what the article comments are for. We can't cover every angle and get stuff out on time in a regularish pattern - journalism is the first draft of history, and all that.

Feel free to pitch in extra thoughts on these forums - ta!

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MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Vantablack v MIT

MIT got the number wrong, and issued a clarification. This new material absorbs 99.995 per cent of light, more than Vantablack (at 99.96%). We've tweaked our article to reflect that (no pun intended)

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

According to MIT, its material "reflected 10 times less light than all other superblack materials, including Vantablack"

MIT should have said 99.995% not 99.96% - we've updated our article after the uni issued a clarification.

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The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"On what basis could they challenge the law in court?"

Uber claims it is not covered by the law. In its SEC paperwork, it describes drivers as customers: people using its app marketplace to sell rides to others.

This is partly how it plans to challenge the law: insist its operation doesn't fall under the law, then fight to ensure it does not fall under the law.

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Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Small correction re. Android

Lucky you - quite a lot of Android users are still waiting for v10...

Also: don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you think we've got something wrong. We can't read every comment, so we may miss this sort of thing. I've made it clear Android 10 is just out.

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Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Is there a system which transfers DNS queries over an unprotected HTTP connection?

No, it's a brain burp on our end. We meant unprotected DNS queries, not HTTP. HTTP on the mind. It's fixed.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you see anything wrong, and we'll fix it up right away. It's hard to spot requests for clarifications buried in the comments hours after publication: there's so much for us to go through while we're trying to get articles out the door.

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Finally! A solution to 42 – the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Y^2?

Just a typo. It's fixed.

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Loss-making $15bn hipster chat biz Slack suddenly less appetising to investors as it predicts deeper losses

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I just don't get these massive losses

For one thing, Slack said earlier this year it will spend $250m on AWS cloud hosting between 2018 and 2023....

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