Posts by diodesign

Win 95 code gaffe nearly made Stuxnet Suxnet, say infosec blokes

Re: Luck, or Unicode?

Thanks, fellas. We took a closer look at the code – and something's not right. We've added a bootnote.

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Windows 10 Device Guard: Microsoft's effort to keep malware off PCs

Re: Kernel has control

"Of course, the kernel can stop the Device Guard VM and replace it with another."

No, that's not possible according to Microsoft's design. Read the article again, please, I think you missed an important point.

There's an always-on hypervisor, which runs under the kernel and Device Guard. Device Guard is allocated its 'secured' corner, the kernel gets the rest. The kernel controls the vast majority of the machine as a result, but the barrier between the kernel and Device Guard isn't controlled by the kernel. That separation is enforced by the hypervisor.

I didn't want to bog down the story with an OS development 101 class, so I kept it simple. But I think it's all clear if you read it through.

This is all in theory: as linked to in the article, previous secure execution environments on other platforms have been popped by bugs in the interface between the two sandboxes.

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FBI alert: Get these motherf'king hackers off this motherf'king plane

Re: Either

This is also the same FBI that thinks North Korea hacked Sony Pictures.

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One small shot for Man, one espresso maker IN SPAAACE: Dragon snatched by ISS

Re: No cappucino of course

That's a hell of a first post, artificial bitterness. Welcome aboard!

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Google drives a tenth of news traffic? That's bull-doodie, to use the technical term

Re: Whatever you wish to measure, you will

Sorry for any confusion: when we say search traffic, we mean people searching for things like "hp notebooks", and Google pushing news articles about HP netbooks to the top of the results. People click on those, and that's your traffic.

For example, if you Google search right now for "Nvidia's GTX 900" the top hit is The Register's article on the open-source Nvidia Linux driver faff. If you search for "Miliband Cameron poll" you may get a Guardian article about the UK election campaign. That's search traffic. A stupid number of people use Google so getting even a tiny slice of that each month is valuable to publishers.

Ultimately, it's about ads. You could shift 50 million page views a month but if you can't extract any ad impression cash from that then you're just another VC-funded blog burning through money.

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Someone PLEASE stop patent trolls' stroking their favorite tool, cries Google and friends

Re: ratfox

Microsoft isn't on the list – sorry.

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Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

Re: JustNiz

"I actually am a professional Linux dev"

Brilliant – post the URL to your software's bug tracker so I can file some bugs that don't exist. It's only fair – you lied about our headline, I get to make stuff up about your project.

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Re: JustNiz

Sigh, the article + headline are fine. If you don't care about software freedom, fine. But some people do.

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Re: Terminology issue?

My understanding is that the firmware must be uploaded each time to the card when the driver starts. If this firmware isn't present or signed, it breaks.

Grep this page for firmware: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/InstallDRM/

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Videogame publishers to fans: Oi, stop resurrecting our dead titles online

Re: very fair and balanced

BryceP gets it. We're rude about everyone. And Google has given the foundation a million dollars here or there. Small beans for Google, but a big chunk for the EFF.

And I'm speaking as someone who thinks the EFF mostly does good. But giving people a shoeing is why we're here.

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Why is nobody here?

Re: Why is nobody here?

Everyone's in the article comments, and perhaps not aware separate forums exist. Or everyone's too shy to talk ;)

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Urine for a treat this Monday, ISS 'nauts: SpaceX to launch pee-powered coffee pot

Re: Friday... beer o'clock.

Yeah, well, pee-powered coffee pot was too good to pass up.

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comments moderation or censorship?

Re: Re: Censored too

Email corrections @ theregister.co.uk if you spot any issues with stories, ta.

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Re: comments moderation or censorship?

"This is a pure censorship. Shame on ElReg!"

PS: You don't understand what censorship means. Read this.

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Re: comments moderation or censorship?

"It's unacceptable, ElReg!!! Comments now are being censored?"

It's absolutely acceptable. Our house, our rules. We see nothing wrong with curating comments that appear under our articles.

You're always welcome to email our writers if you feel your opinion isn't being heard.

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Who is the fastest-selling phone maker of ALL TIME? Samsung? Apple? No, it's Xiaomi

Re: Register spin..

No spin – just pointing out that the mobile world isn't just Apple, Samsung, Blackberry and Nokia. I've made it super clear in the story that we're talking about online sales.

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Intel, Cray bag $200m to build 180PFLOPS super for US nuke boffins

Re: Coincidence

Yeah, we're on it...

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Marvell: We don't want to pay this $1.5bn patent bill because, cripes, it's way too much

Re: Blasphemy

Changed the headline to make it slightly shorter (for design reasons, layout nerds; it now fits in just two decks in the article view). I'm pretty sure your omnipotent deity can cope with an enterprise tech newspaper using his son's name flippantly.

(Original headline.)

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Bone-tastic boffins' breakthrough BRINGS BACK BRONTOSAURUS

Re: Biological accuracy

Uh-oh, here comes the fun police.

It's a couple of grown dinos skinny dipping on a warm summer's day, officer.

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Mobile 4G spectrum investors actually spent $12.4m on walkie-talkie frequencies – US SEC

Re: Peter2

Your wish is my command. I was too busy chuckling at the thought of some poor sods spending $12.4m on two-way radio frequencies.

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Popular crypto app uses single-byte XOR and nowt else, hacker says

Re: Unclear

"Not sure where the AES128 comes in."

I believe the app makers are saying AES128 is used for messages, contacts, call logs and other things are encrypted using AES with a 128-bit key. But in the hacker's test, a simple PNG file was 'encrypted' using a single byte 'key' and plain XOR. And only the first 128 bytes of the PNG. Bizarre. So maybe images aren't encrypted in any meaningful way?

I've tweaked the story here and there to make it a bit more clearer.

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Don't be stiffed by spies, stand up to Uncle Sam with your proud d**k pics – says Snowden

Re: YouTube Error

Works for us in northern California – sorry.

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Bloke faces 25 years in the cooler for upsetting Thai king on Facebook

Re: Warning to The Register

"your whole domain will get blocked completely in Thailand"

Our global readership is increasing year on year, but I suspect it is not being propped up by Thailand.

Sorry, sorry – I mean – excellent April Fool comment :-)

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The internet IS a series of tubes. Kinda: A Reg 101 guide to cabling

Re: Re: Errrr

Thanks for the corrections. I've been through these with the writer and a second source, and made tweaks. Not every change you've suggested has been made, mainly because they're outside the scope of this intro to cabling, but I hope all the factual problems have been fixed up. Let me know if not.

It's worth pointing out the problems caused by a misplaced 'the' changing the meaning of a sentence:

"Unlike the other Ethernet standards, 10GbE provides the only full-duplex, point-to-point links for connecting network switches"

v

"Unlike the other Ethernet standards, 10GbE provides only full-duplex, point-to-point links for connecting network switches"

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Europe could be drowned in 'worthless pop culture' thanks to EU copyright plans

Re: So... The Reg editorial line is in favour of geo-blocking? Didn't see that one coming.

Chill out, mate. It's Friday.

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(PS: We don't do 'editorial lines'. And the above article is a comment piece.)

Bye bye, booth babes. IT security catwalk RSA nixes sexy outfits

Re: Levente Szileszky

Keep digging.

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Google-gate: 'Toothless' watchdog FTC nibbles furiously on journalists

Re: Mark 85

We do it to annoy you.

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Snowden dump details Canadian spies running false flag ops online

Re: Wow!

Meant blobs, blocks of data, not literal bits :P

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New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

Re: BBC has just stolen el-Reg's website design!

Where do we send the consultancy invoice?

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Winning a brand new BOFH T-Shirt is as simple as...

Re: Clean Desk Policy!

Proof that our London office is very shiny (and posh).

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Kaspersky Lab hits back at Bloomberg's Russian spy link hit piece

Re: Bloomberg

Kaspersky (the bloke) has written a long response to Bloomberg.

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Hackers prove security still a myth on Windows PCs, bag $320,000

Re: Destroy All Monsters

The Windows kernel does font parsing in ring-0 on x86. Register passim

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AMD, ARM, Imagination, Samsung alliance publish official shared GPU-CPU blueprints

Re: Pete H

Very smooth. I mean external buses, or separate interconnects between on-die components. There will always be some kind of bus between the RAM and whatever is reading from or writing to the RAM, but the HSA people want to do this with one cache-coherent bus and one portable programming model.

One thing springs to mind is bandwidth: jamming everything on the same interconnect may be a problem, so I'll look into that. The specification allows you to break up the physical memory into pools if you really want to, as long as you stick to the standardized programming model.

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Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

Re: Clevew twap?

No, I just left my proffreedng skills in the glovebox this morning. It's been fixed :(

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Australians! Let us all rise up against data retention

Re: Two-way Street. NOT!!!!

"Even though the title says Austrailians... this applies the world over."

This article was written for our Australian/APAC audience in mind, but I felt it was worth extending to our wider readership so I opened it up to everyone to see.

For context, Australia's leaders are considering retaining people's communications metadata.

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iTunes snafu: DNS fail borked Apple's app & iTunes stores for 10 HOURS

Re: Won't cost them much...

But think of the lost impulse buys! :)

I've certainly woken up after an in-depth summit at the local bar and discovered unexpected albums and software purchased on my iThing. I mean, who would buy 3 hours of TV theme music when sober?

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Intel gives Facebook the D – Xeons thrust web pages at the masses

Re: When is a SoC not a SoC? When it's a Xeon D-1500

Fair points. But, and playing devil's advocate here, what's the difference, really? Whether it's discrete, SiP or SoC, it still looks the same to software, even low-level code.

I meant to put in the article (and TPM on our sister site The Platform mentions it) that it's not truly a SoC (like a bunch of ARM cores with an LCD controller and USB and power management glued alongside in a single package) but I forgot, probably because it's not that important.

I just don't think it really matters, personally, but I'll add a tweak to this story anyway. I just worry this affair has a whiff of holy war about it.

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Re: Errr - cooling?

Yeah, that's up to 400W a sled.

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Everything moderated now?

Re: Everything moderated now?

Yes, you're in a sin bin.

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'Rowhammer' attack flips bits in memory to root Linux

Re: Desktops don't have ECC

"laptops use low power DRAM"

I've tossed that into the story. FWIW Intel does do desktop mobos with ECC support.

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Re: “On the software from” ?

It's been fixed. Click on some ads and we'll hire more proofreaders :-P

There's always corrections@thereg if you want to point out typos. We don't have time to read every comment, so those emails are appreciated.

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Chewier than a slice of Pi: MIPS Creator CI20 development board

Re: No love for hardkernel's ODROID range?

Yeah, I guess supply is an issue. It's also what to do with one of these ODROID SBCs in a way that can stretch to 2,000+ words, personally speaking.

I bought a Pandaboard and got burned when TI dumped OMAP, so I'm hesitant to trust another manufacturer (outside the usual) unless I've got an interesting project or two for it.

No, not a media center (I don't own a TV). No, not a NAS. I don't have a home network to speak of.

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Grab your pitchforks: Ubuntu to switch to systemd on Monday

Re: More research needed

Tweaked story to make this clear systemd is in Debian Testing. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister if you spot anything wrong - you'll experience massively lower post-publication correction latency.

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Litecoin-mining code found in BitTorrent app, freeloaders hit the roof

Re: "buying that Blu-Ray in the first place"

lol u mad???

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FREAKing hell: ALL Windows versions vulnerable to SSL snoop

Re: A different Freak?

Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 Preview and Windows 8.1 was/is flagged up as vulnerable on freakattack.com. It is the same problem. Microsoft warns:

"Our investigation has verified that the vulnerability could allow an attacker to force the downgrading of the cipher suites used in an SSL/TLS connection on a Windows client system. The vulnerability facilitates exploitation of the publicly disclosed FREAK technique, which is an industry-wide issue that is not specific to Windows operating systems."

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VMware sued, accused of ripping off Linux kernel source code

Re: A few nitpicks

Just to be clear: this isn't about Busybox, and the article doesn't mention Busybox. It's about Linux kernel source code (drivers, specifically).

As for violating copyright law versus violating the GPL, I don't think the article's wording is confusing.

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Re: interesting

Very good question. One way is to guess or work out the version of the Linux kernel allegedly used by Vmware in its vmkernel, compile that Linux kernel for x86 and compare common blocks of code between the two binaries – looking for shared function signatures.

It's happened in the past with Linux: people who spend hours looking at compiler output can spot similarities in other code. Obviously, there will be some small blocks that are the same (start and end of similar functions, for example), but chunks of copied code are easy to spot.

That's just one way. But essentially, you don't always need the source code. Binary analysis is possible.

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Canadian bloke refuses to hand over phone password, gets cuffed

Re: CAN$25,000 (US$19,900)

Guys, I did add a £ conversion. We still love you.

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Intel touts tardy Broadwell Core CPUs for laptops, PCs

Re: Socket Type & Chipset??

"I (and others) would certainly appreciate some indication of the socket type the new CPU requires and what new chipset provides all the features that the CPU provides."

Sure - as soon as we know, we'll let you know. You're commenting on an old story BTW.

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The Platform?

Re: The Platform?

The Platform is our new sister site, launched by former Reg writer Timothy Prickett Morgan and co-editor Nicole Hemsoth, both expert journalists in the field of HPC.

The site focuses on supercomputing and other really big iron. Don't take my word for it – it's all explained here :-)

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