Posts by diodesign

Red Hat slams into reverse on CPU fix for Spectre design blunder

Re: Re: Why would techies be scratching their heads ?

Thanks! Article updated.

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Quality journalism

Re: Re: Quality journalism

"Gareth Corfield does then deletes comments to make it look as though he doesn't."

Not taking criticism from a moron who can't string a sentence together.

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Re: Quality journalism

Let me get this straight. You "just" want "lame clickbait churnalism once in a while?"

No, we don't do lame clickbait churnalism. So you'll "just" have to fsck off somewhere else for that. Ta.

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Kent woman to season festive dinner with her mother's ashes : what happened?

Re: nick_rampart

No.

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Re: moderation

Hi Nick,

I'll keep it short and sweet: thanks for the feedback.

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Oracle says SPARCv9 has Spectre CPU bug, patches coming soon

Re: It is a serious, fundamental design flaw

Yes, as we've repeatedly reported since January 2, and were the first to report. Read El Reg ;-)

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Re: Confused, SPARC vulnerable or not?

"Oracle believes that certain versions of Oracle Solaris on SPARCv9 are affected by the Spectre vulnerabilities"

and

"Oracle is working on producing the patches for all affected versions that are under Premier Support or Extended Support."

Pretty clear to us. SPARC v9, running Solaris, is vulnerable to Spectre.

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Google's 'QUIC' TCP alternative slow to excite anyone outside Google

Re: rjed

"QUIC is not been deployed yet because it is still not a standard !! IETF is working on it and has recently pushed back the dates (to end of 2018)"

Yeah, so as we said, only Google seems excited by it. Everyone else seems to be taking their sweet time - of course, they're allowed to do whatever they want. But the point is, only Google seems excited by it, mostly.

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Germans make an even bigger mess of naval procurement than Brits?

Re: Germans make an even bigger mess of naval procurement than Brits?

I think it's probably fair to say it's enough work for us to cover UK and US military goofs, let alone Germany's cock-ups, too... But thanks for the link.

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Celebgate latest: Fourth dirtbag 'fesses up to pillaging iCloud for stars' X-rated selfies

Re: Hate to think El Reg was going PC......

Eh, I dunno. We called it The Fappening in the past, and it just seemed the name had morphed to Celebgate.

And I'm all about a writing style that's like your mate at the local boozer. Just not so sure about playing into the hands of a bunch of 4chan degenerates jerking off over people's stolen private images, so to speak.

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Re: Known as Celebgate?

Call it what you want. Free country.

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UK's Just Eat faces probe after woman tweets chat-up texts from 'delivery guy'

Re: RLY!?!

Mate, none of what you said above is cool. If you're delivering stuff to someone, serving them food, any kind of day-to-day thing, taking their phone number and texting them weird flirty stuff is awful. The number was provided for business purposes, not to set up a date.

It's one thing to ask a person for their number in a social setting. It's another to delve into a customer record and pull out a contact detail and pester them.

Now imagine this happening every week - it could be on twitter, uber, just eat, work email. It gets old really quick and it's just creepy and sad. If you want to ask someone out, do it properly.

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Brace yourselves for the 'terabyte (sic) of death', warns US army IT boss

Re: slang v gospel

"you breeze by his 600 gig"

We were charitably hoping he meant 600 gigabit per second.

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1 in 5 STEM bros whinge they can't catch a break in tech world they run

Re: An interesting statistic on your box of morning cornflakes

"The racial makeup of Cupertino"

Cupertino is a small city in California that happens to have Apple HQ next to it. People who work at Apple, by and large, don't live in Cupertino. They live all over the Bay Area and the world.

No idea what point you're trying to make, anonymous coward.

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Nebula spotted with more super-sized bodies than a gym on Jan 2nd

Re: Terje

Thanks - I'll tweak the article. Sorry, we were mostly working on chip stuff this week and brains were tired. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong. We don't have time to read every comment.

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We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

Re: "Isn't making it go mainstream before this date kind of a bad thing?"

We asked Intel what was going on, twice, and had no response - not even a no comment, or an off-the-record explanation. We were certain with what we had - given the LKML discussions and information from other sources - so, why not warn the world that big changes are coming?

We offered no exploit code. Just a heads up that important alterations were being made to crucial bits of software. It's not our job to do companies' PR. We can't read minds.

And these changes were being done in the open, so any bad people paying attention could have known what we knew or more, and started exploiting it.

A lot of vendors hold us at arm's length, hoping we'll go away. We regularly get the silent treatment from various - but not all - companies. We're not going to sit on stories just because we get a no comment/no reply. Turned out this one was quite a big one. We had no idea it would be this big.

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Re: Late to the party

We made it go mainstream. Our Tuesday report was the basis of Bloomberg, Reuters, NYT, CNBC and BBC coverage - we were even cited and linked.

I dunno how many people saw your speculation pre-Tuesday but our articles this week are seven-figures in terms of page views.

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Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Re: Shouldn't we be upset with The Register for broadcasting this?

>apparently against the wishes and advice of everyone involved

No one we contacted for comment told us to stop.

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Re: This is being very over exaggerated

Gaming is pretty much unaffected - it doesn't involve the kernel, you're talking direct to the GPU. Most desktop apps are not IO intensive so you won't see a big hit. It's not great news for stuff that slams the disk and network, or works in real time - however, as we said, if you have PCID supported, the hit is minimized.

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Re: A pretty good writeup I think

I think we're both right - but i disagree that the CPU is in charge. The CPU isn't in charge of anything, it's just obeying code. Who is in charge - the horse or the person riding the horse? ;)

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Re: Hmmm...

The KPTI Linux patches are applied to all Intel x86 CPUs. AMD submitted a patch to stop it being automatically enabled on its chips. It is possible to turn off KPTI during boot up.

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To Puerto Ricans: A Register apology

Re: Big John

"The author tried this same shiza a couple weeks ago"

Stop being such a snowflake, dear.

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Re: anonymous coward

"The Register used to be about Technology"

It still is - Christ, look how much tech stuff is all over the site.

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Cloud-building alien space rays altered Earth's climate – boffins

Re: twofeathers

The temperature assessment is from the university.

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Autsch! Germany slaps Facebook in its abusive little face for 'limitlessly amassing data'

Re: Adam 52

"This article seems to be mixing two things; Facebook's abuse of it's monopoly and it's blatant disregard of EU data protection law by hoovering up data without consent."

Because the German watchdog is talking about both? That's why both issues are present in the story.

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Checkmate: DeepMind's AlphaZero AI clobbered rival chess app on non-level playing, er, board

Re: AI = Marketing = Lying

"But if even the Reg simply won't be bothered to call out this brazen misuse of the term"

Holy balls, we just published hundreds of words calling out DM's approach - and we're still the bad guys. We use "AI" as shorthand for various related technologies just as "the cloud" covers IaaS, PasS, SaaS, etc. The exact tech is defined, AI is used to avoid repeating the same phrase over and over. We're not a dry technical manual.

You may have noticed we bounce between terms – IBM, Big Blue, Intel, Chipzilla, Microsoft, Redmond, crypto-currency, digi-dosh, etc – because it's more interesting to read, easier on the eye and mind, and still conveys overall the same message.

Trust me, trust us, after decades of writing and publishing, combined as a team, an article with the same terms repeated over and over and over and over stops being engaging – and becomes bland documentation.

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Past, present and future: A year in hyperconvergence

Re: Supported by == Spam ad by

it was written by one of our guys. Here's how it works: HPE buys ads, it wants its ads to appear around an article that isn't laying into HPE - and we lay into HPE a lot - so here's an article about HPE-related stuff with HPE ads around it.

It all supports the journalism we do every day.

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Tech giants at war: Google pulls plug on YouTube in Amazon kit

Re: Love the Hendrix reference

Headline was:

"Google has but one burning desire: Let them ban access to Fire... Oh move over rover, and let Mountain View take over"

but... some killjoy (cough, me) changed it. Mainly because it's Google pulling access, rather than Amazon banning, and I didn't want the headache of explaining the lyric to either side's PR people.

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Facebook, Twitter, Google cleared in Dallas shooting lawsuit

Re: 2016 incident surely

Oops - fixed. Thanks. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot any problems.

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Get ready for laptop-tab-smartphone threesomes from Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Qualcomm

They'll have the usual ARM TrustZone gubbins...

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Photon taster: Flirting with VMware's CoreOS gambit

Re: jtilghman

You can specify whatever name you like. The convention is author/project:tag. if you want to publish your dockerfiles, the author field should be unique AIUI.

Eg, on my personal machine, I have the following Docker images:

diodesign/debian-x11:latest

rust:1.20.0

diodesign/debian-verilog:latest

diodesign/debian-gcc:testing

debian:testing

which are respectively:

My custom Debian-based X11 desktop

Standard Rust 1.20 build environment

My custom Debian-based Verilog dev environment

My custom Debian-based C/C++ dev environment

Standard Debian Testing install

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AI taught to beat Sudoku puzzles. Now how about a time machine to 2005?

Re: rasmusbergpalm

"We don't care about solving Sudokus in and of itself. I tried to make this clear in the paper, but it wasn't really picked up in this story."

Thanks for commenting! But ahem, ahem ;-) It's all over the story that this is more than cracking Sudoku. We wrote:

> it’s an interesting problem for deep-learning software to tackle, as it's an exercise for neural networks to practice complex reasoning.

[...]

> Although the recurrent RN is pretty good at cracking Sudoku puzzles, it’s designed to be a general purpose module that can be added to different types neural network models so that it can perform many-step relational reasoning.

>

> It’s still early stages and the applications have yet to be explored. It’s an important area for machines since logical reasoning is key to making them smarter in the future.

Congrats on the cool research. We made it clear this is more than breaking Sudoku. If you're put off by the sarcastic title, well, them's the breaks around here.

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Night before Xmas and all through American Airlines, not a pilot was flying, thanks to this bug

Re: the pic

Wait, are you saying... no way. Oh no. Oh god. It's not a real photo?

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Give 1,000 monkeys typewriters, they'll write Shakespeare. Give them robot arms, and wait – they actually did that?

Re: Hemispheres?

Yup, we accidentally got it wrong - it's been corrected. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot any mistakes.

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Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

Re: Not for me?

It only works on public High Sierra macOS (10.13) and only if you don't already have a root password set.

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Cops jam a warrant into Apple to make it cough up Texas mass killer's iPhone, iCloud files

Re: grizewald

I've tweaked that sentence slightly but... it seems crystal clear to me. Govt wants backdoors, privacy people are opposed to that.

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Re: "One riot, one Ranger"

Uh, well, we wanted to explain state troopers / rangers to a wider audience. Maybe FBI was the wrong analogy. I've tweaked the article.

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Some 'security people are f*cking morons' says Linus Torvalds

Re: Re: Exercise stack to avoid everything living in registers

IN RUST WE TRUST

sorry, I mean...

match lang

{

Rust => Some(Trust),

_ => None

}

Dick move: Navy flyboy flings firmament phallus for flabbergasted folk

Re: mad_dr

"No, but we SHOULD admonish El Reg for seemingly failing to point out that the pilot drew a cock with his growler..."

Mate, got to keep it classy ;-)

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(And only Brits will get the joke...)

Re: Malcolm Weir

The navy spokesperson told us it was an F/A-18, but it appears they meant the EA-18G.

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Apple whispers how its face-fingering AI works

Re: Works for me

FYI - the article is about iOS's face detection, and not Face ID. See the correction. We regret the error.

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Increased level of rejections

Re: Altor

You've had 2 comments rejected this month, and before that way back in 2013. The rejected comments accused someone of fraud and another suggested someone committed homicide. So just take it easy and hold back on the wild accusations - cheers!

Also, we try to write for a big range of people; not every story is going to be your cup of tea. Readership is up ~20% year to date on the same period 2016, so we're obviously doing something right. And what we can't do is please all the people all the time.

But ta for reading. Hope you stick around.

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Re: Increased level of rejections

Hiya,

Well, from our end, we haven't stepped up rejections. It's biz as usual. So don't worry about some kind of puritanical crackdown.

You posted on an article where the comments went a bit nah so a mod stepped in to clean it up a bit. We all like cracking jokes, but maybe not about shooting your load in someone's mouth and making light of sexual assault reports. It's the sort of wisecrack that you say a party and it kills the group conversation dead. We've all been there, I think.

So anyway, don't take it personally. You can still comment. Please do comment! And thanks for posting. Just that one, out of your 290-odd other comments, was not great timing.

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ARM emulator in a VM? Yup, done. Ready to roll, no config required

Re: Just how big are they?

Software has bugs, stories have typos. We try to catch them all but it isn't always possible. Some days we're pretty good at catching them pre-publication, some days we're not.

Just drop [e-mail] a line if you spot anything wrong. Takes just as long as a comment post.

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Re: Nothing really that special

"This has been around for a long time."

Well as noted in the story, it's for newbs to get into reverse-engineering and exploit dev on non-x86 architectures. If you know how to set it all up already, this isn't for you.

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Alexa, please cause the cops to raid my home

Re: 45RPM

Mate, we're ahead quite a lot of other titles on news. In some cases - such as IBM canceling remote working - we were months ahead of other titles. It took the WSJ about half a year to notice and follow up our coverage.

We thought this amusing thing about Alexa would tickle Reg readers, and be something fun to talk about. And unlike other bootnote-worthy stuff this week - like the woman who allegedly unlocked her husband's phone on a plane while he was asleep next to her and discovered evidence of an affair - this one is actually provably true.

Lester, god rest his soul, would have been all over this, and even he would bootnote his own bootnotes with:

It happened a few days ago. What of it?

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US government seizes Texas gun mass murder to demand backdoors

Re: 48 Hours

AFAIA fingerprints don't need a warrant. PINs and passwords do, fingerprints, no. Well, not right now: it's being disputed in the courts.

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Amazon's answer to all those leaky AWS S3 buckets: A dashboard warning light

Re: “accidentally left open” is incorrect...

Apologies for being too generous. We wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt - Occam's razor and all that. If "accidentally" triggers you, just image the word "stupidly" in its place, instead.

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Imagine the candles on its birthday cake: Astro-eggheads detect galaxy born in universe's first billion years

Re: Mike Moyle

Point taken - it's fixed.

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Re: Big, yeah but not the biggest ...

LMT is the biggest steerable single-dish *millimetre-wavelength* telescope. I've made that clearer.

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

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