Posts by diodesign

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

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

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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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

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

Dabbs will return in 2016.

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Forum link

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

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

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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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

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

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

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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Re: anonymous

Just post here.

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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

Re: BITLOCKER ISSUE

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

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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

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

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

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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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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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'

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?!

Re: Lols again.

Whose side are you on, friend?

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Flickering screens turn Microsoft Surface Books into Microsoft Surface paperweights

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...

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

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?

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

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

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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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

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

Re: Biased much?

Thanks Rik! <3

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

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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Ridiculous highlights

Re: as2003

Phew - OK. A procedural error rather than a devop issue. Thanks.

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Edit: Hm. Are you in Australia? For various boring reasons, the teasers for that region weren't updated (accidentally). I've refreshed them.

If you're outside of Oz and still seeing old stuff then I'm at a loss. It may be aggressive caching between you and us? Maybe a corporate or home proxy?

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Apple fixes iOS 9.0.2 passcode loophole, kills 101 OS X security bugs

Re: Brian in Seattle

What El Capitan? No. Not any more.

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Roku 4 specs leak: Yes, it's got 4K streaming and a games controller

Re: OH FFS!

It's to stop other publications stealing it. The details are in the story.

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Apple slings bug-fixed iOS 9.0.1 at fanbois, PIN bypass hole still open

Re: Aimee

Er, we rip the piss out of everyone. We are impartial in that we're an equal opportunities snark. Stick around, you'll see.

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Re: Amazing....

A good number of us use Apple products. But that doesn't stop us taking the piss out of them.

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11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

Re: Sorry but how is this at all funny or appropriate?

Changed it, but only because it's a cliche. And! if! there's! one! thing! we! boffins! hate! at! The! Reg! more! than! meeellllions! of! fanbois!, it's beating a dead horse.

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India to cripple its tech sector with proposed encryption crackdown

Re: Stevie

Headline:

India to cripple its tech sector with proposed encryption crackdown

You didn't make it past the 7th word in that sentence? Crikey.

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Crash Google Chrome with one tiny URL: We cram a probe in this bug

Re: Infernoz

Opera, really? Fk me. Edit: My poor brain didn't click that Opera 32.0 is powered by Chrome 45. You got me!

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Internet Doomsday scenario: How the web could suddenly fall apart

Re: Domesday scenario?

You people are no fun. Domesday is the archaic spelling of doomsday (the last day of the world's existence). I'm only changing it because I can't be bothered dealing with all the armchair critics.

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Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

Re: Spousal issues?

"Maybe that's why he's so salty."

Linus is a multimillionaire - he was given shares worth $20m when Red Hat and VA Linux went public and gets paid a lot by the Linux Foundation.

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'To read this page, please turn off your ad blocker...'

Re: John Sturdy

"Sometimes I've found ads on El Reg so visually intrusive that I've copied and pasted the whole article text into an editor and read it there"

Psssst: insert Print between the .co.uk/ and the /2015 to get a cleaner view, eg:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2015/09/15/to_read_this_page_please_turn_off_your_ad_blocker/

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