* Posts by diodesign

3495 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

No escape: Microsoft injects 'Get Windows 10' nagware into biz PCs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: New Group Policy option to disable upgrades

The link to the instructions is already in the story.

Did anyone read the article?

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Geoffrey W

"The article is not entirely accurate"

This article is extremely accurate: the instructions you mention are linked to in the article, and we've reported on them before.

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Somethings Wrong at El Reg

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: GNU

Given this site, its servers, its tech staff, and quite a few of its journalists rely daily if not hourly on GNU software, the suggestion we're anti-GNU is way off the mark.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Somethings Wrong at El Reg

Cool story, bro.

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Amazon drafts blueprints for its own home router, IoT gateway ARM chips

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ARM-compatible... missleading

You're reading into it too much. I use the term ARM-compatible deliberately because ARM did not design this chip - just the core. The SoC is ARM-compatible, but not ARM-designed.

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Confirmed: How to stop Windows 10 forcing itself onto PCs – your essential guide

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ahh! Registry hacking! Of course.

"it's for geeks only, you have to use the CLI for everything"

Not around here. We don't need a mouse to delete our files.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Score one for my pet theory...

"El Reg might think that adding registry keys is neither "impossible nor particularly scary" but it's not exactly, um, something that the average user would care to do, is it?"

We're not writing for average users. ZDNet and Gizmodo are that way ------>

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Hacking The Register

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Hacking The Register

"Will I get sued if I publish this info on-line?"

This is my personal 2p. This is not a Register corporate final say. If you're making legit HTTP requests like any other browser, and rendering the HTML/CSS in your own way, you're no different to any other browser.

Attempts to circumvent security or other protection mechanisms in the website wouldn't be very nice; we'd take a dim view of that. But if you're fetching and submitting stuff via vanilla HTTP, and rendering it in your own way, then how are you any different to the huge range of bots and user agents that hit us every day? Even if 1,000, or 5,000, or 10,000 people used your tool a day, it wouldn't be noticeable.

Having said that: your tool sounds like it's ditching adverts. Don't forget that we are entirely independent and advertising funded. We're not backed by a magazine giant, nor a VC consortium, pulling the puppet strings on our output. Some ads piss people off; we try our best to not let that happen. Our ad ops guys are superb at responding to complaints about ads.

My rent, the food I eat, the vacations I take with my wife, are paid through advertising. Same goes for everyone contributing. Give that at least a little thought as you browse the site through a text terminal. It's not about the numbers - some people use ad-blockers and that's just the way it goes - it's the principle I'm talking about.

Thanks for reading.

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OH KNOWES! I'VE BEEN ACNE SPLATTERED!!!!1!11!one!!!1

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: OH KNOWES! I'VE BEEN ACNE SPLATTERED!!!!1!11!one!!!1

Jake, which comment are you talking about? 500 thumbs down would be a new record.

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Your boss yells 'build a secure IoT gadget' and you don't know where to start. Take a look at this

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Designing secure Internet-of-Things

"How about running the core OS on read-only memory"

Then you're completely screwed when you need to patch a security bug in your OS. The whole point of this root-of-trust thing is to be able to install trusted updates. And there will be bugs.

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Oops. Silent Circle let apps meddle with Blackphone's modem

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Errrr....

One other thing to mention: ARM and Thumb are fixed width instruction sets – instructions are either 2 or 4 bytes wide. X86 is all over the place: instructions can be various widths.

This is why xor eax, eax is so attractive to tight assembly code, because it's just two bytes (0x31C0), rather than than mov eax, 0 which is five bytes (0xB800000000). You save 3 bytes with the exclusive-OR. And you avoid using NULL bytes, which is handy if you're trying to inject code into another program's buffer...

On ARM, it doesn't really matter: the instructions are the same length anyway.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"But doesn't arm have a zero register"

Only 64-bit ARMv8 does (just like MIPS). MOV.W is an ARM Thumb-2 instruction, and Thumb-2 does not have a zero register. You can do the same as xor %eax, %eax in ARM:

EOR r8, r8

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The Register's entirely serious New Year's resolutions for 2016

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: we plan to be a big part of the prosperity

"It's as if you were going to sell out."

I don't wake up in the morning to write and edit boring articles. There is scandal, death, cockups, lies, and firings every step of the way in technology - that's what we want to uncover. The Reg started out as the Private Eye of IT and that's what we're gonna be.

It means more stuff like this, this and this, among loads of other original writing, and less stuff like this and this.

Of course, we're still going to have fun with headlines, and of course, we're still going to stand up to corporate goliaths and governments.

PS: no, we're not doing video reports (TTBOMK) because most of us have faces for radio, as they say.

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Password-less database 'open-sources' 191m US voter records on the web

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Has anyone besides the guy himself seen the proof?

Databreaches.net has seen the database too, it seems. We'll chase up the guy.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What's the concern?

I can see why some people would be annoyed by this database configuration (it may override your state's privacy hurdles). I can see why some people wouldn't be. It's something to debate.

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Merry Christmas everyone at EL Reg

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Merry Christmas everyone at EL Reg

Thanks - and merry Christmas to you, too, and everyone else reading :-)

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Have we lost Dabbsy this week

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Dabbs will return in 2016.

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Forum link

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Forum link

It's definitely there, mate. Here's the discussion.

Merry Christmas.

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SpaceX starts nine-day countdown to first flight of the new Falcon

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

It's been fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@thereg if you spot any errors. We don't have time to read every comment, so any problems raised here may not be seen, and thus the error will go uncorrected. Which no one wants.

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Free HTTPS certs for all – Let's Encrypt opens doors to world+dog

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: So...

Yes, it would be nice if {accounts|forum}.theregister.co.uk were TLS'd. Thing is, the cookie is carried over to the www site too, it appears. Our techies are working are hard as they can.

As for the ad networks – we use a mix of them. Not all of them do HTTPS.

Believe me, we do want to get encrypted.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: So...

Adverts. Our media server is HTTPS'd. When our ad networks become HTTPS-friendly, so will the rest of the site. Otherwise our pages will have mixed content and that's no good.

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BlackBerry axes BBM Meetings a year after launching it

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Best subhead ever

Should be no surprise that the UK office is having its Xmas party today ;-)

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(BTW the subhead was "Subhead".)

VW's Audi suspends two engineers in air pollution cheatware probe

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: anonymous coward

I've added a note to say the German watchdog doesn't have a problem with the German-designed V6 engine. Simple.

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Meet ARM1, grandfather of today's mobe, tablet CPUs – watch it crunch code live in a browser

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Layout Vs Schematic

~~ My chip articles bring the pedants to the yard. And they're like, our knowledge is better than yours. We can teach you but we have to charge. ~~

It's fixed, ta. Once upon a time I used VLSI design software to layout gates and doping regions and cells and metallization layers and, arrgh, I thought I'd erased all that from my mind.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: anonymous

Just post here.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: PleebSmasher

Don't let me stop you -- off you go, then.

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Why Microsoft yanked its latest Windows 10 update download: It hijacked privacy settings

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: BITLOCKER ISSUE

Nope - chasing MSFT about that, but it's Thanksgiving this week so few people around.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: people's unique advertising ID numbers

It's an ID number unique to you, the user, out of all Windows 10 users. It allows apps to track, identify and analyze you based on your behavior online and on your desktop.

Do. Not. Want.

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Ex-IT staff claim Disney fired them then gave their jobs H-1B peeps

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Anonymous coward

No, perhaps you're thinking of other complaints from non-IT staff earlier this year?

The IT bods were let go in January, complaints are being filed to the commission, the deadline is almost up, and then we wait to see what happens.

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Superfish 2.0 worsens: Dell's dodgy security certificate is an unkillable zombie

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: re-installed from one of the other Dell services that starts up?

See the update to the story – it's reinstalled by a telemetry .dll from Dell. Delete that .DLL and the root CA cert should stay away when you next remove it.

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Superfish 2.0: Dell ships laptops, PCs with huge internet security hole

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: anonymous

We outright deleted it from the office Inspiron 15 laptop, and it didn't come back... oh wait, it has. Fuck. Me.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: anonymous

Does it come back on the next reboot – something installing it during boot a la Lenovo?

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Where's Worstall/Weekend Edition?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Very quiet

The Weekend Edition had a good fun run, it must be said. Nothing like a little downtime at the end of the week to cover non-IT stuff.

Having said that, we've rejigged our output to better focus on the weekdays, essentially pouring as much of our energy into what we do during the week when most people are looking at the site.

Dabbs, On-Call etc that used to appear on Saturdays and Sundays now appear on Friday before everyone fscks off to the pub/family/suburbia/mountain-top-HQ. Doctor Who review appears after its airing on Saturday evening BBC TV.

Of course, if anything big happens over the weekend - devastating earthquake in Silicon Valley, Facebook hacked, etc - we'll be here to cover it.

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Who's moderating Andrew Orlowski's latest

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Who's moderating Andrew Orlowski's latest

We woz busy. We try to clear the queue at the very least once every half hour - sometimes there's just loads of other things to do.

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Where's Dabbsy gone this weekend?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Where's Dabbsy gone this weekend?

Dabbsy is published on Fridays now. Latest one here. It's in the top stories on the front page :-)

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Obscure Chinese web servers at the end of your connections? It's legit, and growing

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: anonymous coward

"What would a web server be doing in my logs?"

Think outbound firewall logs.

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Intel Xeon chip ban? Pfeh. China triples top 500 supercomputer tally

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: That last paragraph kind of sinks the rest of the article

Ah - ok, I see what you're saying. I'll add some more context. By 2018, the US will have all the top spots. That's what's meant by China catching a break during the upgrade cycle – there's a lull as America builds its next-gen machines, and before they come up, China's picking away at the weaklings lower down the table.

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Here are the graphics processors cloud giants will use to crunch your voices, videos and data

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Who the hell uses PCI anymore?

PCIe.

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CSC, NetCracker IT staff worked on US military telecoms 'without govt security clearance'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: So which is is?

We fucked up: It's been fixed.

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The only GOOD DRONE is a DEAD DRONE. Y'hear me, scumbags?!

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Lols again.

Whose side are you on, friend?

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Flickering screens turn Microsoft Surface Books into Microsoft Surface paperweights

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: komodo dragon

"Why in the seven hells is Hyper V installed on a surface?"

Microsoft uses it everywhere now - Device Guard, etc.

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Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 4 bits one in 16

That's basically it. Try at least 16 times, you're bound to work once. Or bit flip the most significant bits in a pointer to change its color. Just make sure you don't set off any alarms if you repeatedly crash the app.

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Zuk it and see: China’s stealth seduction of Western phone buyers

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 1980s_coder

From the Z1 specs page:

"Both SIM1 and SIM2 support 4G networks, you can choose the data service mode in the setting; one SIM will be 4G while the other SIM can only use GSM networks."

HTH.

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Job alert: Is this the toughest sysadmin role on Earth? And are you badass enough to do it?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Hope you're getting a commission from this...

Bah, we found it funny and worthy for something to finish on a Friday afternoon.

Git another martini in ya, anonymous ;-)

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Down and out? Rimini's Oracle slap spells trouble – for Oracle

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: It's hard to take El Reg seriously

"Oracle-bashing is getting a bit tired"

We bash everything, mate. We don't have quotas on companies. "Oh man, we've said five non-nice things about Oracle, better make the next one nice." No, that's not how life works.

There's plenty of nice things about Oracle on oracle.com.

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Apple may face $900m bill after A7 CPU in iPhones, iPads ripped off university's patent

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Why not ARM?

Because Apple designed the A7 from scratch using its own implementation, which stepped on the uni's toes. The chip is ARMv8 compatible (and Apple licensed the 64-bit instruction set) but that doesn't mean ARM designed the thing.

And thus, it's not ARM's problem.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ARM?

Oops - meant to include a note about ARM: Apple looked at ARM's 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set and designed a chip from scratch compatible with it, then later licensed the instruction set.

None of this is ARM's problem: it was Apple's custom system-on-chip design that infringed the uni's patent.

I've slung a sentence or two about this on the end of the article.

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I have one thing to say to MacBook users at EMC: Whoops

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: FFS FaceBook?

No, it doesn't go to Facebook.

Calm down, man.

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TRANSISTOR-GATE-GATE: Apple admits some iPhone 6Ses crappier than others

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Biased much?

Thanks Rik! <3

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Microsoft's HoloLens: Here by 2016, mere three THOUSAND dollar price

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Trust The Register to

Oddly, this wasn't at first pitched as "an end-user retail thing" for normal people. It was aimed at architects at work, CAD users, surgeons, and so on. Serious uses with serious budgets and serious prices.

The dev kit costs $3k (as the article says) but we were kinda expecting the final thing to cost in the area of $1k anyway.

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