Posts by diodesign

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.

C.

Re: More information please?

Firefox on Android is fine - it uses its own engine. Anything that uses Webview and/or Chrome is affected. Just a heads up, TBH.

C.

Super Cali optimistic right-to-repair's negotious, even though Apple thought it was something quite atrocious

"my fave IT red-top news website content"

Thanks for the thumbs up, and for reading!

C.

"PLEASE can these headlines actually scan?"

It does scan - if you say right-to-repair in three syllables, Mock Cockney style. Rigthto-repair. Say it with a D*** van D*** accent.

C.

Brekkie TV host Lorraine Kelly wins IR35 ruling against HMRC, adds fuel to freelance techies' ire over tax reforms

Growler

Ah yeeeeah. A wave of the magic wand and oh look, it's gone.

C.

My Lambda Custom Runtimes bring all the .NET Core to the yard, and they're like... where is this headline going?

"Would be, were it correctly spelt"

Bollocks. Fuck. God dammit. I hate it when this happens. My fault. Now fixed. Should be Lambda.

C.

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

"How many people when they drive past a road accident can't resist rubber necking"

It's true that people like watching bad stuff happen to other people. Getting a good look at something awful. Russian car crash dash cams are all the rage on YouTube. I dunno if that's possible to stop, or even a good thing to tackle.

OTOH while sites like LiveLeak have existed for ages and had loads of visitors, they're not on the scale of Facebook and YouTube, and also if you go to LL, you know you're getting gore and snuff. I suspect if LL had the reach of Facebook or YT, it would have been singled out early on.

I guess it boils down to this: censorship and moderation is harmful. Massive unedited and unpoliced platforms are harmful. There must be an in-between solution that keeps smaller platforms independent, and checks and balances kicking in when audiences start getting huge.

C.

"censoring unpleasant information"

FWIW government-level censorship is a terrible thing, and stripping unpleasant stuff from the internet is not great - OTOH it would be nice if FB took some responsibility for the content they are disseminating.

I highly suspect a lot of Register headlines would be deemed unpleasant by a large number of people and I'd hate for us to be thrown off the internet as a result. OTOH if The Reg had the same reach as Facebook, I don't think our headlines would be quite the same.

C.

"to put blame on the technology"

No one's putting the blame on technology. As the article says, 'this murderous racist knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled the trigger'.

The problem is, how to contain viral murderous exploitative propaganda without stamping out other forms of expression. I'm all for individual outlets catering for all sorts of cultures and interests and people, all making their own free decisions on what to publish. What I'm, personally, not happy with, is a huge Mad Max platform that doesn't care a jot what is shared as long as it makes billions of dollars.

There are no easy answers. Tiered moderation, based on audience reach, might be one way forward.

C.

"cut the stream straight to an ISIS video"

That is a problem that is difficult to solve without fundamentally changing Facebook - though funnily enough not a problem major, professional broadcasters have. Wonder why that is.

Facebook needs to grow up and realize what its platform is being used for. And it's not just livestream murders. It's anti-vaxx, flat earth, conspiracy theory nonsense that is suddenly given an immense platform.

I don't like any form of government censorship, heavy handed moderation, and similar - which is part of the reason why we try to push boundaries with headlines and writing.

On the other hand, it's not a black and white issue of freedom or no freedom. It's one thing to share stuff with friends or small groups privately that others may or may not like. It's quite another to have access to a huge potential audience.

Do I have the answers? No, no one has. Though, thinking about it, maybe one approach would be tiered moderation. After the first 10,000 views, it's flagged up for increasing levels of moderation as the views increase in stages (10k, 50k, 100k).

C.

"regulation on the Internet isn't going to stop nutters like this"

It never will, but we can at least curb the encouragement of it. There are knock-on effects.

C.

"the video would have been shared differently"

Without the same reach as a vid streamed on Facebook, though.

Look, you can't stop small / niche / dark web platforms hosting this stuff, and I dunno if full-blown suppression of anything deemed nasty is the answer. I'm uncomfortable with heavy handed moderation. I don't want all bad stuff stamped out because it's v hard and there's the potential for certain views to be swept away.

OTOH I can think of a few things FB could spend some of that $22bn profit it made in 2018 on. The FB platform is too big and unmoderated. Would you live in a city with no police?

C.

Re: Your "nutter on a rampage" is China's "Tiananmen Square"

I am dead against the government dictating what we can and can't see. If Fox News, NBC, BBC, etc decide it's too graphic to show real people being gunned down live, though, why is it beyond Facebook? Because of scale? Which is code for 'because we love making $$$$$$$$s from adverts with no consequences'.

If you make a TV show or documentary, and people refuse to broadcast it, or write a paper and a journal refuses to publish it, is it censorship or the application of standards? Don't get me wrong: this can be abused, and stuff can get suppressed for being uncool, unfashionable, or counter-cultural. That's why smaller platforms sprout up.

But if you have the reach of Facebook or YouTube, can't someone apply some kind of standards before a snuff livestream is disseminated? It's not black and white, freedom or zero freedom, it's not letting a platform with 1bn+ people just descend into Mad Max territory.

If there are riots in London, for instance, I expect and hope to see videos appear on the web. We don't need to see someone stave another person's head in with a mallet in real-time, though.

C.

Re: "the item the author of the article fails to address"

Thanks for the post. What I'd like to add is that the thrust of the piece is that this stuff shouldn't be out there for sharing, for the exact scenario you described.

C.

Re: Errr, censorship?

"the nutter would have used a different service"

One with far fewer viewers and virtually no impact, hopefully, yes. There's no denying there are other platforms - in fact, why not create you're own. It's still a free country in that respect.

The trouble, IMHO and what Kieren was getting at, is that if you're going to have as vast a reach as Facebook, YouTube, etc, cripes, take some actual effective steps to prevent your systems being wielded as a deadly propaganda weapon.

Apologies for the cliche, but: with great power, comes great responsibility. And Silicon Valley has shrugged off all but the bare minimum of responsibility.

Again, IMHO.

C.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

FWIW WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger do voice and video calls. The only people who phone me via the traditional phone system are PR people, restaurants confirming bookings, and robo-callers. Everyone else uses WhatsApp (or Signal) voice and messages.

Edit: I don't mind downvotes, people are free to vote how they want, but I get the feeling it was something I said. Anyone want to help me out and explain? Cheers.

C.

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

Numberwang

Ah, no - Numberwang is a reoccurring British comedy skit created by Mitchell and Webb

https://thatmitchellandwebb.fandom.com/wiki/Numberwang

It mocks math-based TV game-shows.

C.

Open-source 64-ish-bit serial number gen snafu sparks TLS security cert revoke runaround

"Unfortunately your comment is still not quite right"

Well, I'm trying to keep it simple here in the comments. Thanks for the extra info.

C.

Re: Why is this a big deal?

As we said a few times in the article, it's not a big deal for normal folk. There is still 63 bits of certificate serial number space.

It's just a bit - get it? - embarrassing for the usually by-the-book world of cryptography. And an interesting or amusing bug that we thought Reg readers would appreciate.

C.

Re: Re: Confusion due to lax use of terminology in RFC?

'1' is a perfectly valid cert serial number, yes. There is no problem with it. The problem is that no serial number would be generated with the top bit set, halving the number of available serial numbers and increasing the chance of collision.

C.

Re: Confusion due to lax use of terminology in RFC?

To be clear, the problem is all about certificate serial numbers, and nothing to do with keys. I've cleared out any mention of keys to avoid any confusion.

The issue is that serial number length must be at least 64-bits and a positive integer. To ensure this, the generation software was keeping the top bit clear, effectively reducing the default 64-bit integer to 63 bits.

C.

Windows XP point-of-sale machine gets nasty sniffle. Luckily there's a pharmacy nearby

Re: Re: Yawn?

Ignore the anonymous haters - everyone else does, here and in real life.

C.

Hey, DevOps fans. We've got another TLA for you to write down: CDF

Re: I expect better of The Reg

Yeah yeah yeah - it's fixed. Sorry, sometimes, either due to interest or time, we focus on technology rather than pedantry.

C.

It sounds like a new train line, but no: Compute Express Link is PCIe 5.0 server CPU-accelerator glue from Intel and pals

Re: I was told ...

Well, GPUs run software, and today's FPGAs are programmed like software. It's code all the way down.

C.

Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

"I will be forced to vote for Trump again"

You couldn't vote for Bernie so you voted the polar opposite of Bernie.

C.

While this CEO may be stiff, his customers are rather stuffed: Quadriga wallets finally cracked open – nothing inside

"Why is there no mention of what date in December the sixth wallet was emptied?"

Just an oversight on our part, it's in the linked-to report - it was December 3. Added that in now.

C.

God DRAM, that's a big price drop: Memory down 30 per cent, claim industry watchers

Re: The article's reasoning doesn't make sense

It makes perfect sense: fewer desktop Intel CPUs, fewer desktop PCs, fewer orders for RAM, more RAM building up in warehouses, prices drop as supply outstrips demand.

We're talking about the price of RAM, not the supply of RAM. Supply is outstripping demand. No shit you found RAM in your computers - it's cheap as, er, chips at the moment ;)

Hope this helps

C.

How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

Re: VIDEO Link

I'm not aware of the video being public - Iain, who wrote the piece, got the article's info from going to the researcher's presentation at RSA in SF this afternoon.

C.

Re: Not even El Reg.

FWIW our publishing system uses multi-factor authentication. It is mandatory: you cannot login to write, edit, publish, and manage articles without it.

So there's hope yet it'll be rolled out to comments.

C.

PS: We get our little red Reg badge when we post or reply to comments via the publishing backend.

When the bits hit the FAN: US military accused of knackering Russian trolls, news org's IT gear amid midterm elections

Re: Not sure if I get this...

FAN is being vague about the means - but it sounds as though the updates were intercepted or meddled with to allow the news org to be infected.

Here's verbatim from the news article - take with a pinch of salt.

"After connecting the Apple iPhone 7 Plus mobile device to the personal computer, not only the automatic launch of iTunes and the synchronization of user data were performed, but also Internet access was obtained from the Windows operating system and some system update files were downloaded that were installed automatically.

After that, the computer was actually managed remotely and all the necessary procedures were carried out to fully invade the local area network. It is worth noting that the intrusion into the local network was carried out from IP addresses controlled by American companies, including Amazon servers, which are usually used by hackers to sweep their tracks and hide the real source of attack."

C.

Pay row latest: We aren't biased against Big Tech, says Uncle Sam as it rolls eyes at Oracle

Google

It went nowhere. The officials' demands for internal information was deemed overly broad by the judge.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/17/google_told_to_provide_details_of_8000_employees_in_gender_discrimination_case/

C.

Hey mate, are you dense? Why, yes. Yes, I am, says the NAND in Micron's new client SATA SSD

Typo

No, mate, megawatts. Comes with a free* nuclear reactor though!

C.

(* Uranium sold separately.)

Wanna improve your software ops? Need to cut through container hype? Like saving cash?

They're all important, tho devops covers pretty much them all - there's no particular day dedicated to either topic as they're spread out over the three days. Check out the session list!

https://continuouslifecycle.london/agenda-and-speakers/conference-sessions/

C.

Intel: Let's talk about SGX, baby. Let's talk about 2U and me. Let's talk about all the good things, and the bad...

Purposes of SGX

On client machines, DRM and cryptography. For servers, allowing you to upload code to run in an enclave in the cloud using remote attestation to prove the software hasn't been meddled with in transit or prior to execution.

That % SGX working as expected and intended.

C.

(See the 'read more' article in the piece on how SGX can be abused.)

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

Re: How does it compare

Um, they are in the linked-to report:

https://brave.com/images/battery_8-1.png

Brave beats Firefox with uBlock Origin (as the opening pars state).

HTH,

C.

Oooooklahoma, where the AI comes predictin' down the plain: Neural net spins up wind turbine power estimates

Re: Duff baseline

Ah yeah, we were skeptical of the announcement, though that cynicism didn't trickle into the final article as necessary.

I've updated it to reflect the fact the claimed 20 per cent is unrealistic, unless wind plant operators truly are doing no prediction at all...

C.

Thunder, thunder, thunder... Thunderclap: Feel the magic, hear the roar, macOS, Windows pwnage tools are loose

Re: Is this really an x86 or maybe Intel flaw?

See the paper, it discusses non-Intel technology.

"We focus on the Intel and AMD IOMMUs in our study. In the mobile space, ARM’s System MMU (SMMU) applies broadly the same concepts, and a natural extension of our work would consider use of the SMMU."

Intel may just be the start - it was the focus of the study.

C.

Jeez, what a Huawei to go: Now US senators want Chinese kit ripped out of national leccy grid

Re: what?

The 'smart' net-connected ones made by Huawei, yes. They're more than the usual dozen or so electronic components doing DC->AC.

C.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

"his post seemed quite civil"

Fair point: happy to tweak that.

C.

Now you've read about the bonkers world of Elizabeth Holmes, own some Theranos history: Upstart's IT gear for sale

Feminists and liberals like Rupert Murdoch and the Waltons?

And that famously strident left-winger, Betsy DeVos.

C.

What's the frequency, KeNNeth? Neural nets trained to tune in on radar signals to boost future mobe broadband

Accuracies

Oops - editing in the US evening in time for the UK morning, and this happens as brains were tired. That should be 0.97 (and ideal is 1.00). Too many zeroes. It's fixed.

C.

Where's Zero Cool when you need him? Loose chips sink ships: How hackers could wreck container vessels

"why did you reference that infernal movie."

s/infernal/superb/

C.

What's in a name? Quite a bit when it's the most hated abbreviation of 2018 (GDPR, of course)

Acronym v abbreviation

Yeah, we know the difference. Key thing is, abbreviation didn't fit nice in the headline space, which is the most important thing ever for us headline writers. The story is correct.

Now it's worked its way down the front page, where space isn't so limited, happy to switch it to the correct word.

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot a problem.

C.

Ministry of Defence's new payroll contract is, surprise, surprise, MIA: Missing In Action

Re: Photo

Because we know pedants absolutely love it.

C.

Visited the Grand Canyon since 2000? You'll have great photos – and maybe a teensy bit of unwanted radiation

Boom-boom!

Re: Mountains.

Wait until you see how other publications reported it...

C.

How's this for sci-fi: Orbiting probes face fiery death dive from planet's radiation belts. And that planet is Earth

Re: Oxygen

In case anyone thinks we're misreporting this, here's the quote from NASA (in the linked-to webpage):

"During their last year or so of life, the Van Allen Probes will continue to gather data on Earth's dynamic radiation belts. And their new, lower passes through Earth's atmosphere will also provide new insight into how oxygen in Earth's upper atmosphere can degrade satellite instruments — information that could help engineers design more resilient satellite instruments in the future."

C.

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Re: Pi is a mini computer?

Mini as in miniature computer - we're well clear of the mini computer era now.

C.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

Re: balls

Bezos isn't putting up with Pecker's bollocks. Bezos refuses to swallow Pecker's line. Bezos refuses to play ball with Pecker. Bezos exposes Pecker. So so many combinations.

C.

It's 2019, and a PNG file can pwn your Android smartphone or tablet: Patch me if you can

Re: Errrrr.

Oops, should have mentioned: Android 6 and below are no longer supported with security updates, sorry. V6 was cut off after August last year.

C.