* Posts by diodesign

3495 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Moderation gone mad?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Interesting nix ...

"nixed about 26 hours after I posted it"

The time is irrelevant - live comments can be moderated as soon as they are reported or as soon as we spot something wrong ourselves.

"Why the nix? What was wrong with that post?"

Someone's been charged with a crime rather than found guilty; your comment set off alarm bells that it was presuming the accused was guilty. The comment has been restored in a safe state after it was pulled for review. See below for more by moderator Jude.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Passive moderation

New commentards, repeat offenders, people who have had comments rejected, and people commenting on stories that are not auto-moderated will sit in a queue awaiting moderation.

That may take time to clear, especially over a weekend. Trust me, we try to barrel through comments as quickly as possible. If a comment is lingering then it's probably been passed into a second queue for bosses to approve or most likely reject for being too bonkers, libelly or otherwise unsafe.

Myself and my colleague Jude have hand moderated nearly 230,000 messages in the past couple of years.

If you're noticing your comments take time to appear, you're in one of the above four categories.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I ain't Spartacus

"I'd be interested if you had an update on this article"

I'm not sure there's much more to add, honestly. As much as I love a media conspiracy theory, sadly there's no great collusion here. An article, one of the hundreds we publish a month, riled some readers. It happens.

"Item 2 was some sort of 'anti-radiation' cover for a mobile phone ... If you'd taken the piss out of it, you might have got away with it. "

Er, we did: we wrote 'Weird science? Snake oil modelling? Take your pick as it’s going to be hard for a user to determine...'

"The 'stocking-filler' bit was badly judged"

I'm assured it was tongue-in-cheek. I certainly read it that way after publication.

"Keep up the good work."

Thanks.

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BBC: What YOU spent on our lawyers in Secret Climate 28 debacle

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: In criticising the BBC and their alleged agenda

"some writer at The Register says a stupid thing"

Ok, forgive me for trying to take part in a discussion.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: In criticising the BBC and their alleged agenda

"You have crime coverage?"

I assume this is sarcasm.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: fooey

28 refers to the 28 AGW-leaning people at the BBC's 'secret' climate session.

PS: I'm quite sure Andrew is the complete opposite of a "frothing right-wing" person, as you'd quickly discover if you ever met him.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: In criticising the BBC and their alleged agenda

"puts El Reg in poor company"

Sooo, you're saying we should be nice to the BBC because the Daily Mail isn't? Seeing as The Mail isn't particularly warm to child killers, I now fear for the expectations of our crime coverage.

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So: 6,500 Win 8 laptops later, how are BT's field engineers coping?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: I hope this causes the BT staff lots of problems

"hey ho maybe something bad will happen to you"

Perhaps now would be a good time to take a break from the internet for a few hours.

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Dell buyout stalled by Microsoft, low takeover price?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Microsoft mentioned a lot?

"Licking the hand that feeds The Register"

Good grief. Search for Google. We've said plenty of rude things about them.

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Integrator 2e2 axes 319 UK staff, halts pay cheques - insiders

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"they're just tax shills surely!"

They're mainly acquisitions.

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Worst broadband notspots in the UK named and shamed

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Stats for the other cities please Register.

We've added a table of more cities - uSwitch's 20 cities ranked by the drop in on-peak to off-peak speeds, if that helps.

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RIM PlayBook trumps new iPad in UK channel sales - analyst

diodesign Silver badge

Re: Sales direct from Apple included?

No, it's not direct: it's what went through the distribution channel. Obv Apple is the direct sales master, but interesting to see the PB selling in non-trivial numbers.

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Filter Great Firewall of China's architects at US borders - petition

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Really?

"have always been completely ignored"

When was that? We found that a lot, if not most, of the submitted corrections were eaten by a spam/security filter. As of at least month ago it's a simple email address you can fire into rather than a CGI form.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "wish you weren't hear..."

God dammit. I'm in too much of a rush this morning - it's been fixed.

PS: Please use the correction button on articles - the messages go straight to my desk, phone, tablet, shoe, home - rather than relying on me to check every one of the thousands of comments posted a day.

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Patch often: Cyber-crim toolkits love stinky old gaping holes

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: trauma inducing headline!

Perhaps you're right. Maybe we'll just stick to gaping holes.

Another solution would be to stop leaving bugs in software for people to exploit, but everyone makes mistakes in all industries so I'm not holding my breath on that one.

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Lotus 1-2-3 turns 30: Mitch Kapor on the Google before Google

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Not "Mac II"

Whoops - the article was fixed asap.

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Twitter must unmask racist French twits or face $1,300-a-DAY fine

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: So the French courts are ordering Twitter to write code now?!??!

Yes, gah. My fault. Compiled, complied. I had word blindess :(

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Amazon: IVONA bevy of 'all natural' blabber babes to beat Siri

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: IVONA Pun!

'Ivona bevy of babes' not good enough?

Don't you dare ruin my Friday!

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Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Virgin also have over utilisation issues in many parts of the country with cable... Why not cover that?"

Please, email us with your problems: either the reporter or to news@thereg. If one person drops us a note, it may just be an end-user cock-up. If 50 hit us up, we know it's a problem.

And this Sky capacity issue was definitely a problem for some.

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Sympathetic Scots scoff-house offers hard-up Apple fanbois a discount

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: FFS

"Anna Leach's anti-Apple drivel"

Amusing given that Anna is the office's official Apple fan.

"I'll also be able to filter out John Leyden"

Oi, I'll not have that kind of talk: click on the corrections button on an article if you have a problem with the spelling and grammar.

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Greenland ice did not melt in baking +8°C era 120k years ago

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Is there a way I can filter out crap posts?

"I suggest Lewis look there for his kind if he needs new employers"

I doubt it; he's the esteemed editor of this fine organ. And he's made his views clear on the subject of climate here, scroll down (or search) for 'full disclosure'.

"But to wilfully and continuously disparage the scientific method"

Yes! Of course! You're so right! We should just swallow everything we hear! There's only harm to come from questioning everything, testing ideas and challenging data! Let's completely forget that high-level decisions - the consequences of which could be devastating - are being made on the basis of alarmist predictions! It is so obvious that The Reg is completely derailing the entire scientific process, destroying millions - nay, billions - of lives and setting back engineering progress by centuries simply by reporting something you don't want to hear.

"is there a way I can block these ridiculous articles from appearing in my logged in version of the Register?"

No.

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Just what is GOOGLE'S MYSTERIOUS NEW WIRELESS NETWORK?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"What a NONE STORY! Thanks for that WASTE OF TIME."

I guess the tech details of White Space flew over your head. It's OK. You don't really need to know about radio frequencies for MySQL admin, right?

Sorry I seemed to have dropped this.. ;-)

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EU-wide mega-Leveson 'needed' to silence Press, bloggers

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: I'm not one to post general abuse...

Sorry to be a pedant but opinions based on false facts have always been defamatory in the UK. And who defines hate-speech? What if slagging off a politician or a judge becomes a "hate crime"? :(

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Hungary votes to support proposal

"the UK has a body that can fine newspapers"

Just as a helpful point of order, the PCC doesn't (and can't anyway) fine newspapers because it reckons media barons would treat penalties for inaccuracies as business expenses; it would ruin smaller newspapers; the libel courts are there for making good substantial damage.

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Google v Microsoft mobile war: Who's REALLY to blame?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Yeah, SOP. Also...

Yes, we use capital letters.

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Mobes, web filth 'pornifying' our kids, warns top Labour MP

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Dr Stephen Jones

"No it hasn't. At least if the story at The Reg linked to is to be believed."

TalkTalk does active filtering; other ISPs have been pressured to bundle filtering with new connections.

"Eh?"

Largely resisted by ISPs and parents. I've had another stab at that par to spell everything out for you.

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How to build a BONKERS 7.5TB, 10GbE test lab for under £60,000

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

First-degree burns treatment

"Just how many readers do you think have 60 grand to throw at a 'test lab' that don't already know how to do the same thing cheaper and better?"

Just a couple of things. In case the headline didn't make it obvious enough, this is a bonkers setup: it's obviously an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink "dream rig", as the sub-headline states. Also, you don't have to buy the whole lot; the headline figure is tongue-in-cheek.

We write technical stuff and people complain that's it boring; we write fun stuff and people call it fluff. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

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Review: Infiniti M35h hybrid sports saloon

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Amazon?!

"Can I order one and have it delivered to my local McColls 'click and collect'?"

I need a new keyboard. Something for the web team to mull over; it's built into Reg Hardware reviews.

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Kim Dotcom's locker may be full, but the cupboard is bare

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Wow

"nice one El Reg"

What can I say? We're here to provoke debate.

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Foxit outfoxes fiendish flaw to fix foxed-up Firefox PDF plugin

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I had almost expected

Good point; forgot that Firefox was the browser the bug was tested against.

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Game over for Atari? One life left as biz files for bankruptcy protection

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Guys? I know they're french, but...

Some kind of horrific grammar/spelling autocorrect is at work here, perhaps. Thanks. It's been fixed.

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Not quite game over for Atari, yet

diodesign Silver badge

Not quite game over for Atari, yet

Atari has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection so it can work out how to deal with its debt.

Will it be missed? There's more to the company than the abomination that was E.T. for the Atari 2600, surely?

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Longest-standing bug?

diodesign Silver badge

Longest-standing bug?

A minor cookie-handling bug in the KDE libraries since 2002 has now been fixed. This surely can't be the longest-standing code flaw? Anyone know of any more, perhaps even bugs allowed to stand because it would be impossible or unwise to fix?

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Google's JavaScript assassin: Web languages are harder than VMs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "a prototype-based language"?

Oops, some wires crossed. It's been clarified.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Dart runs 130 per cent faster

Point taken. It could be that Dart is running 130% faster but the target is twice that. Or it could be 30% faster but the target is 100%. We'll go back to the source to check this one.

PS: On busy days thousands of comments are posted; we never get the chance to read them all so problems like this can go unnoticed. If you hit the corrections button on the article, we'll be able to fix problems immediately :-)

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BT's 'six-month free broadband' offer is a big fat FIB - ads watchdog

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Another day, another "Let's bash BT" article

We recently wrote about Virgin Media and the ASA here:

Virgin Media's 'bye-bye to buffering' ad nuked by watchdog - AGAIN

Virgin Media spanked for 'we've already cabled up your house' mailshot

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Lynch mob of bankers say they'll stump up cash to take Dell private

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Banks willing to stump up the cash?

It is the Canadian bank, not RBS.

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Titsup Windows Phone 8 orders user to cram 'boot disc' in mobe

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Lurking? Really? Is this news?

"Do you actually know what a kernel is"

Yeah, I wrote one.

"Demonstrate to me that this can commonly occur on joe bloggs phone"

That's not the point of the story as plainly pointed out.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Lurking? Really? Is this news?

"Be or remain hidden so as to wait in ambush for someone or something"

Yes, I guess an operating system kernel that is out of sight and only visibly strikes when something's gone wrong isn't lurking at all.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Lurking? Really? Is this news?

You are hilariously reading too much into one word.

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Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Sometimes simplification of tech news goes too far. The language was tidied up earlier today.

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Satnav blunder sends Belgian granny 1,450km to Croatia

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Er, what about the Apple Maps?

Dang, you're right. Kill 'Satnav', replace with 'iPhone 5'.

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Zuck on that! Instagram loses HALF its hipsters in a month

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Fact check?

The correct graph and figures have been added to the story.

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Next-gen H.265 video baked into Broadcom's monster TV brain

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Broadcom don't do processors

"Broadcom don't do processors"

Yes, give us some credit: the BCM part contains an ARM processor and does video decoding. As the article states :-)

The trollslayer turns out to be a troll. Who da thunk it? ;-)

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'Better than Adobe' Foxit PDF plugin hit by worse-than-Adobe 0-day

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Peter

"In this case, it cannot be the kernel stack."

This is entirely unrelated to the kernel. It's, as far as I can tell, completely in userspace. The plugin is a DLL but the context is ring-3.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Significance

"If it's another variable or saved register contents, then the previous contents will be lost, and/or some unpredictable behaviour might happen when the variable is used"

Yes, but: doesn't matter, got EIP. You've got control of execution and your own code in memory: spawn a new process to do evil things and watch the victim burn. In a nutshell. It's not quite that trivial. Ideally, you don't want the attacked process to crash (especially if targeting an OS kernel) but it's not the end of the world. For you, anyway.

But, anyone weaponising this particular flaw will need to jump through the usual hoops of buffer overflow exploitation. Your payload may well be in a non-executable memory area so the processor will fault if it and the OS support NX, for example. You'll probably blow away the stack cookie too, if it's there - it's not in this program, though.

And the browser or corporate web proxy may reject or otherwise screw up a stupidly long URL so you can't be too loose with your payload.

However, the goal isn't to pwn everyone using Foxit, just enough of those using the PDF plugin on susceptible systems to make it worthwhile.

See others who have pasted the smashing the stack paper; you guys beat me to it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Lee

It's a rather neat and tidy bug, if you look at the code in the disclosure.

mov al,[esi+ebp]

cmp al,'%'

jz handle_url_escape_code

mov ecx,[esp+1Ch]

mov [ebx+ecx],al

jmp continue_loop

So.. keep looping, writing whatever's in the URL string (pointed to by esi+ebp, copied into al) into the buffer at ebx+ecx one byte at a time. continue_loop increments esi and ebx.

I've only briefly glanced at the rest of the code, but it does appear to do some checking (multiple uses of repne scasb) to make sure it doesn't run past the end of the URL string - but not the buffer boundary.

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Forget 3D: 13,000 UK homes still watch TV in black and white

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: WTF?

Actually, it's about old TVs needing an RF analogue signal and modern digital boxes offering only Scart or better. If your cheapo Freeview has an RF out it's highly likely it's just a passthrough and thus the signal fed into your B&W telly will be useless.

I've fixed the par to make it clear what "special" means in this case.

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Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Disappointing...

"the answers supplied by the commenting community"

Well, that's half the point of enabling comments on Martin's storage blog. His Storagebod pieces are supposed to generate discussion on top of our usual storage coverage. The comments aren't just there to let off steam at work by throwing rotten tomatoes at writers :-)

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Japanese cops cuff cat carrying remote control virus

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: "popular Japanese Reddit clone 2channel"

"No, but seriously, El Reg, how about doing just a teensy bit of research?"

OK, OK, OK - sometimes humans just make mistakes. Software engineers leave in bugs, writers get their BBSes mixed up.

I've already fixed it.

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