Posts by diodesign

Choc-a-block: AWS sues sales exec for legging it to Google Cloud. Yup, another bitter battle over non-compete clauses

"AWS should have to pay the employee"

I do believe AWS has refused to do this.

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Class-action sueball flung at Capital One and GitHub over theft of 106 million folks' details

Re: GitHub sued over data leak?

The alleged data thief posted details on how to enumerate and download CapitalOne's poorly secured S3 buckets on GitHub. That's about the closest connection.

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Cambridge Analytica didn't perform work for Leave.EU? Uh, not so fast, says whistleblower

Hi, Mitch

> "still he holds on to a decent approval rating"

> decent approval rating

> decent

When compared to Jimmy Carter, perhaps

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/voters/

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Oh sh*t's, 11: VxWorks stars in today's security thriller – hijack bugs discovered in countless gadgets' network code

Re: Inconsistent

I wouldn't worry about aircraft and spacecraft. Here's how Wind River characterized it:

"Connected devices leveraging standard VxWorks releases that include the IPnet stack are impacted by the discovered vulnerabilities. They primarily include enterprise devices located at the perimeter of organizational networks that are internet-facing such as modems, routers, firewalls, and printers, as well as some industrial and medical devices."

It's not great, it's not terrible. Not as terrible as some other publications have wailed.

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Alibaba sketches world's 'fastest' 'open-source' RISC-V processor yet: 16 cores, 64-bit, 2.5GHz, 12nm, out-of-order exec

"RISC-V is coming from a standing start"

Oh yes, we forgot to emphasis that - just assumed everyone was on the same wavelength. RISC-V, as an ISA and community, is still very new compared to incumbents, and today's available silicon is currently up to about Arm Cortex-A50-series performance.

So there's everything to play for. Don't forget: Arm's CEO late last year told a room of journos, including those from El Reg, RISC-V was keeping Arm's engineers and salespeople "on their toes."

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Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Um

> > women driven out

> No one leaves a good job just because

Key words: driven out. Leaving against their will.

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Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Re: Why is this a 'news' story?

Also we've written about aviation software faults for years (see Register passim) because readers love hearing about engineering problems - and we're OK with this. Bugs and weird shit fascinate us.

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South Africans shivering in the dark after file-scrambling nasty hits Johannesburg power biz

"the prepaid credit vending systems being down"

Ah, yes. We'll make that clearer in the opening sentences.

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Brussels changes its mind AGAIN on .EU domains: Euro citizens in post-Brexit Britain can keep them after all

"the Register is nothing without snark."

Bit like saying a steakhouse is nothing without steak.

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Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Re: 65 ton???

Yeah, it's a typo. We accidentally out a word or two. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong, please.

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Re: Christoph

Yeah we accidentally out a word or two. Should be 65k.

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

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Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

Re: Nice Picture

I'd hope by now that most of our article images are tongue in cheek, or deliberately trolly, to raise a laugh. Like using Babylon 5 pics to illustrate JEDI contract stories...

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This major internet routing blunder took A WEEK to fix. Why so long? It was IPv6 – and no one really noticed

"If anything, it is a demonstration of how robust IPv6 can be in the face of such mistakes."

Hm, I see where you're coming from. We'll keep it in mind in future.

(Edit: Tweaked the article to include your counterpoints. Completely accept that IPv6 is vast, that it didn't break despite this error which is a good thing, and that more specific routes would have been used. As watchers of IT blunders on a daily basis, who see failures developing a mile off, we were concerned that no alarm was raised, and no fix was applied, for several days, which makes us contemplate more problems in future.)

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'Why would anybody notice, particularly?'

Doesn't bode well that an advertisement like this is only picked up days later. Maybe we're worrying over nothing; maybe not.

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"they weren't in use so nobody was affected"

Yeah, as we said, doesn't speak well for IPv6 and future routing cockups.

(Yeah yeah we know IPv6 space is huge and this probably collided with nothing.)

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I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

'knocking Cloudflare over'

Aw shucks. Don't let the other websites know, they'll only get envious.

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Re: Is El Reg

Given that we've faced multi-gigabit DDoS waves in the past for annoying black hats, Cloudflare's CDN is particularly useful in staying online at the moment.

We are planning to expand our infrastructure tho to improve connectivity (and then IPv6 etc etc)

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A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

"Has whoever sold the domain actually got the money?"

According to the linked-to SEC filing, dated June 18, MicroStrategy received the money in cash on May 30 with GoDaddy facilitating.

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The European Space Agency is going to visit a new comet in 2028. Which one? We haven't discovered it yet

In what way was it offensive?

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FYI: Your Venmo transfers with those edgy emojis aren't private by default. And someone's put 7m of them into a public DB

Re: Can someone tell me why Venmo is a thing?

It's not that smooth in the US. Venmo is a thing because it's faster than anything else available. It also means someone can pick up the tab for a table of six and then request each person's share from them individually - the restaurant will not let you split it more than once.

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We asked readers what DXC should be known for... and of course you came up with the goods

Re: "Is that the case?"

No. Paul, who writes our DXC stories, has never worked for DXC.

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HP CFO Cathie Lesjak didn't even read KPMG's Autonomy due diligence before $11bn biz gobble

Re: Oh my

"Lesjak personally reading the due diligence report is neither here nor there"

I will only add that this was HP's biggest, or one of its biggest, acquisitions at the time. This wasn't some sub-$500m acquihire.

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These boffins' deepfake AI vids are next-gen. But don't take our word for it. Why not ask Zuck or Kim Kardashian...

Re: 59.6% is most people

Yeah, yeah, we know - late-night blunder that wasn't caught. We can't catch every error. Email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong, please, and we'll fix it.

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Re: Wellyboot

"59.6% does equal 'most' to me"

Yeah, late night brain burp. Wasn't caught in the edit, but now fixed. Please don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong. We can't catch every slip up.

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Hate your IT job? Sick of computers? Good news: An electronics-frying Sun superflare may hit 'in next 100 years'

Re: sm-erg

I dunno, erg is pretty funny sounding ;-)

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Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

"Mac mini's definitely can use external monitors and keyboards right from boot... as they have no other option."

This ain't a Mac Mini: pretty sure my old MacBook Pro didn't fill its external monitor with anything useful during boot + login (just kept it a dull grey)

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US border cops confirm: Maker of America's license-plate, driver recognition tech hacked, camera images swiped

Re: Subcontractor’s network compromised?

"What class of a computer did this subcontractor’s network run on?"

Looks like Windows with some Linux.

"What was the name of this subcontractor?"

Are you trolling? The name of the subcontractor is all over the article.

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Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook in crosshairs: Politicos stick monopoly probe into Silicon Valley

"Figures only matter in relation to other figures."

Yeah obviously it's not much in terms of product revenue and profit but that's not the point. If you click through the link, you see the headline

"Biggest Washington DC lobbyist is now a tech giant (yes, it's Google)"

There's your context.

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Uncle Sam wants to read your tweets, check out your Instagram, log your email addresses before you enter the Land of the Free on a visa

Re: terrorists

FWIW, the visa program includes things like fiance K visas and spousal derivative visas, so it's not all employment focused.

Also, I think it's the DS-160 form - if not, it'll be another one you fill in - that asks you if you've ever trafficked child soldiers, built or used explosives, been part of a terror group, etc. So yeah, you would be asked to declare that kinda occupation.

This is what happens if you tick the wrong box (in this case, on a visa waiver form) www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-45678517

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Re: Require Social Media?

For ESTA, it is optional FWIW. For the DS-160, not so much.

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Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

"Methane is odourless"

For the vast vast majority of people, it has an odor due to treatment.

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It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

Re: Oppo and Vivo? They're one company.

"Why are figures for Oppo and Vivo cited separately?"

Just the way Gartner breaks them out - see the linked-to announcement. Also, it's Vivo and not Viva - now corrected.

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That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Re: pun violation

It works either way.

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When two tribes go to war... Intel, AMD tease new chips at Computex: Your spin-free summary

"Unmentioned in the article"

Yeah, they weren't included in the keynote but are in the linked-to announcement. I'll throw them into the article, too.

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It's all in the RISC: Arm legs it to Computex with a head full of Cortex-A77 CPU, Mali-G77 GPUs

Re: Body puns

When Michael Foot was put in charge of a nuclear-disarmament committee, The Times (of London), according to one of its sub-editors, ran the headline:

Foot heads arms body

We're taught it in headline-writing school. I'm dying for headteachers to quit an Arm-sponsored STEM group so we can do the headline

Heads leg Arm's body

It should be no surprise that El Reg editors hoard headline ideas in a black book waiting for the moment to use them.

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Assange rape claims: Complainant welcomes Swedish investigation's reopening

It's 22 weeks, not 22 months.

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RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Re: What about AMD cpu's?

Not affected.

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Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

Re: Bandwidth & storage

"So we have all these Teslas sending data/video to where?"

Tesla's backend servers. Funnily enough, bandwidth wasn't discussed, AFAICR.

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We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

Re: Please just give it a break

Sadly, politics is everywhere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zruGBWLk9s8

Although we try to keep it to a minimum and just to tech.

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Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

Re: "incorrectly e-mailed out the Journo's details on the porn age thing"

FWIW we also got the same mass-CC'd email from the UK government, and I'm told it was sent by someone within White Hall with the initials K. Hunt.

Cue a lot of hacks reply-all'ing with "Thanks, K Hunt"

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Hey, remember that California privacy law? Big Tech is trying to ram a massive hole in it

"You can easily roll your own analytics"

We could and maybe we will when our tech team is bigger.

> what happens to your page rankings if you don't use Google Analytics

FWIW Google claims GA has no impact on search rank.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1012320567381422081

Not that we care too much about SEO, as you may have noticed from the headlines and writing.

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Re: ratfox

"What is exactly the information that El Reg obtains out of using Google Analytics?"

Less than we could get out of our direct server logs, which we don't look at. With 150,000,000+ pages served last year, we wouldn't have time. We don't see individual readers.

Our internal stats systems and GA therefore aggregate visitors into tallies: number of people reading in the past minute, hour, day, week, month, year, etc; number of people in the UK, US, etc; number of people who are repeat readers, etc. GA happens to present the numbers in an easy-to-read format (graphs, country maps, tables) whereas our internal tools produce text summaries.

All with a pinch of salt and some squinting as a single IP address doesn't represent a single person, people block Google cookies, and so on and so forth.

Specifically, it's documented on our cookie page https://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/cookies/ - and on Google. Here's what is collected: https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsTrackingOverview

Our privacy policy is here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/about/company/privacy/

> Do you know how many of your users have the "specific code for eating disorders (571) and black people (547)"?

No. Our internal tools count page impressions, ad impressions, and unique readers, producing separate tallies per country we're interested in. Google Analytics does this too, and goes one step further by estimating age ranges, gender, and interests, but we don't pay attention to that because... we think we have a better handle on reader's real interests than Google's tracking bots. There is nothing as creepy as racial and disability profiling.

As I said in another comment, we're not cemented to GA.

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Re: Ian Michael Gumby

> This is California Senate Judiciary Committee not the US Senate

Correct, which we did know, and we've made it crystal clear in the story now. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything that may be wrong.

> Why does theregister.co.uk still use Google Analytics?

It's free and useful. It produces easy-to-view summaries of daily, weekly, and monthly traffic, and allows us to compare these year on year, or month to month, and see which regions are growing, and which stories people are most interested in, by views. It also produces a real-time dashboard so we can see the live effect of publishing, tweeting, tweaking headlines, etc.

It's just one source of indications of what works well, and what doesn't, with readers. There are other things we keep an eye on, such as comments, emails, messages, and the effect pieces have on the industry. I'd rather an article forces a company to reverse a bad policy than do mega page views.

However, in an attempt to entice us into paying for Analytics, Google's free version of Analytics becomes somewhat inaccurate after the first 10m page impressions each month, and we regularly smash through that, so we're considering other options, including non-Google paid-for analytics or perhaps rolling our own.

Any stats we quote are from our own internal stats system, which processes logs and isn't set up for real-time analysis. We could make our own form of Google Analytics, but so far we've chosen instead to put our small team of web devs onto other things more directly useful.

> El Reg never has addressed

Well, we do, in a way, in our cookies page - https://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/cookies/ - in which you can opt out of GA and/or view its privacy policy.

Hope this helps,

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No Widevine DRM for you! Developer left with two years of work stymied by Google snub

We try to avoid asterisk notes, as it's annoying to scroll to the bottom and back up again. An asterisked note was supposed to be moved but got lost. It's now sorted.

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

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Don't know how to do the Kubernetes? MapR says it'll hold your hand

Re: Nerdmaster

Bod - n, Brit slang: A person, eg: a clever bod, infosec bod.

One thing we do around here is not try to be like all the other outlets, whether that's technical depth, style, sarcasm, exclusives, etc. That means language you won't find elsewhere.

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And here's Intel's Epyc response: Up-to 56-core, 4GHz 14nm second-gen Xeon SP chips, Agilex FPGAs, persistent mem

"The EPYC Rome processors go up to 64 cores"

Yeah - OTOH Rome isn't out yet. Will add it to the piece anyway.

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With the right training, algorithms can predict Li-ion battery lifetime – with 95% accuracy

"I don't see how this is valid for battery development"

Imagine you're designing a battery and you want to see how long it will last. You can either sit through 2,000+ recharge cycles, or 100 and use this regression model to predict its lifetime to know if you're onto a winner.

It mean you can mess around with prototypes and get an idea of lifetimes far faster. Imagine compiling an application and then running it through 1,000 hours of testing before you can iterate on it.

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Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

re: sanmigueelbeer

Hi - thanks, that's fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if we get anything wrong.

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HPE lawyers claim Autonomy chief Lynch knew all about 'revenue-pumping' carousel

Wait so HPE overpaid by almost 9 billion because of $20m?

No, HPE claims it's part of it - it's given examples of alleged inflation so far.

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Renegade Android apps can siphon off your web logins, browser history. So make sure Chrome or OS is patched, friends

Android System WebView

Thanks - will tweak the article.

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