Posts by G Watty What?

Mega supermarket spots stock discrepancy of tens of millions amid ERP system migration

Re: TLDR version

£21m across their reported 145,000 employees works out at an extra £144.83 per person per year. Or £12.07 per month before tax.

Not quite retirement money but welcome I am sure.

UK Surface owners can now take misbehaving laptops to Currys

Re: Three times a looser

I feel like there is a joke going over my head here but I'll bite.

Did you really mean "looser" or is that just a terrible typo in the most sarcastic of posts?

I ask because from the article, getting these things loose and open seems to the root of the problem.

EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'

Re: What about more heavy lifting for the experts?

3 times? Amateurs!

I do it 13 times for extra security.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: ??

If memory serves then I think the files were on disk, at least for the local library. The ITunes "library" was in effect a big XML file that logged the location of the tracks and some metadata about the them, like your rating (it used to be out of 5 rather than like-dislike). It also logged the playlists and such.

Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger

Re: it just me or .....

Yes. Global Thermonuclear War please.

Technology does widen the education divide. But not always in the way you expect

Best preparation for work ever!

"They had been inside a lot. Some had been forced to work in cramped conditions, sometimes with multiple <<co-workers>> all doing <<something>> and <<managers>> struggling to supervise them. You could tell many had experienced real chaos. Some had struggled with limited devices, and inadequate broadband, using <<Visual Studio>> on tiny screens, for example."

You are ready for the office younglings.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

"2nd Wednesday after Pentecost, 2nd Wednesday after Pentecost!" A. J. Rimmer

An anti-drone system that sneezes targets to death? Would that be a DARPA project? You betcha

Re: I for one .....

I imagine the drones are praying for "the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief"

Tor users, beware: 'Scheme flooding' technique may be used to deanonymize you

Isn't that the point though?

The fact you (or the privacy conscious) don't have these apps but I do, is what would make our "fingerprints" different. Therefore this could still be used to differentiate your cohorts interactions from mine.

The fact the app is detected or not is the trigger. I think the article was trying to say that a bit of JS shouldn't be able to determine that fact, one way or another, however, not having the apps is no real defence.

Happy to be corrected.

A borked bit of code sent the Hubble Space Telescope into safe mode, revealing a bunch of other glitches

It depends...

Can Hubble run Minesweeper?

'We're finding bugs way faster than we can fix them': Google sponsors 2 full-time devs to improve Linux security

Re: They don't trust the binaries so they compile themselves

That was really interesting. Feels like it predicted the SolarWinds issue. I appreciate its not quite the same in that it wasn't a compiler but still a tojan horse in the source.

Thanks for sharing.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Re: Dear Canonical...

Dear Anonymous Coward,

We're really disappointed you feel this way and would love to speak to you to see if there's anyway to improve our service. If you could fire up an instance of Ubuntu on Azure, we'll be sure to reach out and I'm convinced we can this sorted!

Feel free to do it anytime you like, I'm always watching.

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: Once

Don't forget it's hard dependency SANSFIRE.BAT

Trump administration labels WeChat, TikTok ‘threats’ to national security, bans transactions with both

Re: The DeathStar analogy is apt...

They certainly make me want to gnaw off my own leg

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: Just do a text search

But he does look simian

Re: Just do a text search

I feel dumb. I wondered why they didn't just remove the naughty words but this is absolutely why, its a bit more nuanced than "do not swear".

I wish you weren't anonymous, this is a great comment and helped me out.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: Isn't it just a historical anachronism?

It is configurable. It just defaults to the side of Satan.

British Army adopts WhatsApp for formal orders as coronavirus isolation kicks in

Re: Is this Standard WhatsApp?

They did_____

0____i_____SQ0TAr0tVP1ki$1KiV14ys0EWr1F=00a2____L____1Y2S

1TR___0____15qy0FIM1jB___v____0oG10fjT11pR0BLR0pdb0bNM

0ETi08Y90______E______9Q1MQ50dX10LsH1avq1mYz0F1W0Nop

1lFR0Jzl0JUx0tFu0xl____Y____1H4=12yd1bYT1K1T11Zp

1en0____0____UsN0paN0rmn1B2t0fIW0$e____U____19T31JnI1hwY

14R61gOI1EkO0EGV0Kz4120F0ZXv04sk0XmQ15NY

0CZe1Fsq04jW0Oq60VTs0=cM

Kinda sweet really.

GCHQ, are you seeing this, I cracked this in like 5 minutes.

Not cool, man: Dixons spanked over discount on luxury 'smart' fridge with wildly fluctuating price

Yeah Dixons

You better have learned your lesson from the savage gumming you just received!

Are you aware of the gravity of the situation on Mars? Why yes, say boffins: We rejigged Curiosity to measure it

Re: Is Big G truly a universal CONSTANT?

Has ' A man from mars' got a new account? Honestly, I was hoping for more insight.

Disappointed.

Smart cities? Tell it like it is, they're surveillance cities

"so we can expect automatic penalties for dog fouling"

sign me up. Where I live would be a lot less shit if this happened. Can you get it to throw the poo at them too?

Move over, Bernie Ecclestone. Scientists unearth Earth's oldest fossil yet: 4bn years old

Sub heading

Brilliant just brilliant. Made me chuckle so whoever wrote that, bravo!

Hard numbers: The mathematical architectures of Artificial Intelligence

Re: AI is a relational by meanings database

I imagine even the simplest AI's learn that repeating the same action and getting a negative response means "don't do that again".

Could I suggest introducing some AI into your posting process? It might prevent you regurgitating the same thing over and over and over.

I will add more "overs" the more you post to maintain the accuracy of this comment both mathematically and statistically. I would hate for my data to be misused.

Edit: in the seconds I posted this, you got another one in! I have added another over.

Samsung, the Angel of Death: Exploding Note 7 phones will be bricked

Re: Is this even legal in the EU?

"5 downvotes - I expected more from commentards."

I can only downvote once :( I will try harder next time. Sorry.

Deliver-oops! Takeaway pusher's customers burger-ed by hijackers

Re: There's not much Deliveroo can do about it - but they're not even trying

I agree with your scenario but blimey what an edge case!

I use my uncompromised account to order food, once a month lets say (I try to stay healthy but not too healthy). So your fraud detector won't fire unless, I order some food, the cheeky-chappies hack my account, on the same night, and also order food.

Now imagine I order once a week not once a month. There's still a 6 in 7 chance that your fraud detector won't spot it.

As other have said, forced re-entering of card details for different delivery addresses seems a really sensible solution here.

TfL to track Tube users in stations by their MAC addresses

Re: GDPR to the rescue

"Recording the MAC address means it can be tied back to an individual"

Does it? If my home wifi router collects your MAC address as you walk by my house and I check the logs every day, how have I identified you and how do I hold any information about you?

You issue your GDPR request, what response should I give you? I have no information to do the lookup.

Now if I capture your MAC address and at the same time interview you and get your name, age, sexual preference and store it all in my SnoopingDB, then I'd agree with your point but in this case that doesn't appear to be what's happening.

Happy to be corrected.

Robot solves Rubik's Cubes in 637 milliseconds

Driverless Cars?

Driverless cars whats the connection? Oh Infineon make bits for driverless cars!

I think this might have implications for opening jam jars. Oh by the way did I mention I bought a company that makes jam jars?

El Reg can you quote me too?

Continuous Lifecycle London: Less than eight weeks to go

I think I have a better offer

Start your journey of continuously delivering agile processes and developing your operations in 8 weeks time. Via witchcraft and voodoo, I'll take your business and get everyone stood up from top to bottom. We'll sprint into a future where the Product Owner is king (or queen). Don't worry if you haven't got one, I'll force that role onto the first person recognises your product's name, I don't even care if they know what it does.

Now you might have heard that automation is where its at, you're right. I'll give you the tools to push out any change you want to any environment you want at the speed of light. I'll get your developers doing ops and ops doing development so neither need take ownership of anything, I call this collaboration. I'll have you swapping desks and wearing so many hats you'll never be bored (you won't really achieve anything but god it'll be a good ride).

I'll have your business in so many clouds you'll never worry about seeing the sun again, I'll spaff your data into any virtual system that'll take it and squidge it all together into something that was kind of what you had already. Think this might be hard to manage? Think again. I've got a tool that'll manage all these cloud providers so you'll never know where anything is.

I'll break down barriers, smash the walls of silos and push everything to the left. Failing fast is good and don't worry you'll be failing with the best of them, just much much faster. Good aye?

After I've done all that, I'll still not be finished, I'll give you a backlog so long you'll never finish grooming it. We'll prioritise things into sprints and JFDI like never before. Changed your mind? No problem, a sprint starts every 30 seconds so feel free to change the requirements as much as you like because honestly we ain't delivering and everything we deliver is half finished anyway.

So if this is what you want come and see me.

If you don't want this, come and see me anyway because I'll have a list of failing clients in a right pickle who'll need some solid engineers to help them out.

It's win-win. Well win-win-win because I don't give my expertise away for free!

See you in the future

You, yes YOU: DevOps' people problem

How many more of these articles must I read before I learn my lesson.

Don't get me wrong, Agile, DevOps, CD, CI, automate this, measure that. I get it. Useful stuff, it has a place, great stuff.

BUT, if I have to wade through one more article on The Register that is just some polished marketing techno-crapola that then ends in a shameless plug then I am going to need to find a new news provider.

Less of this sort of thing!

Not one to bring a problem without a solution. Get Dabbsy to write more, he wouldn't put up with this turd. In fact get him to write about DevOps, then we can all laugh together.

How to solve a Rubik's Cube in five seconds

"That's some more words, but it might not be any better."

You do yourself a disservice. That made a great deal of sense, thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated.

Bravo sir, this ones on me ------>

I can read the words, it's just the sentences that are causing me problems.

Would you be so kind as to try again, possibly with sock puppets, for those of us blessed with small brains but a keen interest?

Hole in (Number) Two: MYSTERY golf-course pooper strikes again

The Phantom Shitter Strikes Again

This just brought back one of my funniest memories from school. We'd all go into assembly, listen to the usual propaganda and on the way out, in the hall back to the classrooms, would be freshly cooked arse-burger, tastefully presented, for all to admire.

This happened a number of times over a number of months and the 'Phantom Shitter' became legend, never seen, never caught, always funny, a hero of his day!

Sir, I salute you, two decades have past and still you're sticking it to the man. Bravo.

I am not sure what you've got against these golfers but you always be a hero to me.

Shove off, ugly folk, says site for people who love themselves

Re: Tawnie Lynn (pictured)

You didn't realise the * was for the footnote?

Careful now, that horse is pretty high, climbing off maybe difficult! Muppet* **

* There is no regex in this message :)

** Apologies for the insult but as you'd said it already, I couldn't resist. I only mean it in jest, I am sure your a nice person really and not a [Mp]uppet***

*** There was some Regex there but the *** was not part of it.

Can't we all just agree regex is beautiful?

I don't get it....won't M[rs] match:

Mr

Ms

I maybe wrong, happy to be corrected. Was your beef with the 'Mr' match?

NO ONE is making money from YouTube, even Google – report

times have changed

"iTunes Plus is the new standard on iTunes. ...., and without digital rights management (DRM). iTunes Plus music can be burned to CD as many times as you need...."

http://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201616

So I buy from iTunes.

Burn everything to CD.

Give the CDs to the kids in my will.

Maybe you can save the rubber on the soles of your shoes and use the internet as nature intended :)

LIFELESS BEAGLE on MARS: A British TRIUMPH!

Re: Curiosity

Or pull its flaps open* then they could have two things driving around causing Martian mayhem.

*ooo-errr missus....get you mind out of the gutter!

Pity the poor Windows developer: The tools for desktop development are in disarray

Re: WPF = Pain!

Try XAML rather than XMAL. You might get more results.

LIFE, JIM? Comet probot lander found 'ORGANICS' on far-off iceball

Re: why not here?

who knows?

The little baby Jesus

Million Mask March: Anonymous' London Guy Fawkes protest a damp squib

Tourist Information - the real enemy

"Someone half-heartedly threw a coffee cup at two tourist information officers."

Finally someone standing up to these oppressive clowns; telling us where to go and what to see in places we're not familiar with! HOW DARE THEY!!!!!

Once I went into a Tourist Information Centre. Information Centre! Propaganda Centre more like. All they kept telling me was what I should do and how good the place was. Using their directions I got back on the Trans Pennine Trail but that's besides the point!!!

Thank you Anonymous for recognising and ending this tyranny.

Drupal megaflaw raises questions over CMS bods' crisis mgmt

"..hard pill for some sites to follow..."

To follow? I would imagine the only following this pill caused anyone was to follow through.

Current Status - Brown

POISON PI sniffs WiFi from your mail room, goes on rampage

You'll always be caught?

So I post this thing to someone, it gets there and I snaffle some tasty data treats, put in some back doors etc, etc.

But as soon as someone opens my package then they'll know something is up. Doesn't this severely limit the amount of time that you'll get to launch an attack and also make your mark completely aware that they've been targeted and probably compromised?

Given the complexity of all this, it appears it might be a better idea to deploy the old "I'll give you a Mars bar for your login details" scam. Even if that doesn't work, you've saved on the cost of building this thing AND you'll have a load of chocolate to munch on.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3639679.stm]

Rejoice, Blighty! UK is the TOP of the WHOLE WORLD ... for PHISHING

Re: but do we click on the links?

@JAK 1

Of course we do. Just go to my site where I collate stats like this and you can see for yourself. It does ask for some details but that's just to keep the spam robots and scammers out. Check it out: http://www.drainmybankaccount.com/moreMulesHereBe

Ninja Pirate Zombie Vampires versus Chuck Norris and the Space Marines

CRITTERS - THEY BITE

I humbly request that Critters be added to the list of aliens to enter the fray.

What with stinging quills, a nasty attitude and they look like Sonic The Hedgehog's psychotic relatives, they must surely have representation in the arena of death.

Over and out.

P.s. relive the glory days here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090887/

ISPs haul GCHQ into COURT over dragnet interwebs snooping

GreenNet? who are they?

So this is the only UK ISP kicking up a stink about this? Truly they are the Accrington Stanely of the ISP world.

Ironically, their entry level product is called 'Activist'. I am pretty sure that subscription is going to put you one someone's list.

Twitter: It's JUST LIKE Elder Scrolls (no it's not)

Golden Handshake

"You do something well, you get showered with goodies. You cock it up, you get a bucket of holes"

Mr Dabbs has obviously never held a senior management role where "Cock it up" == Loadsa cash + an extended holiday.

If life's a game surely this deal means you've won.

Douglas Adams was RIGHT! TINY ALIENS are invading Earth, say boffins

Re: Now...

I'd say the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.

Microsoft's swipe'n'swirl pic passwords LESS secure than PINs, warn researchers

Reposition Characters OnScreen

You know the pin keypad that get's displayed? Wouldn't re-arranging the position of the numbers for each unlock defeat the greasy finger attack?

OMG I can almost taste a patent!!! Samsung, Apple, Google you'll all soon be paying me mega-bucks for this little beauty bru-ha-ha-ha.

tiddle-dee-dee-googly-googly-doo --> http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6549194

DAMN YOU HP!!!!!!!!!

Space-walker nearly OPENED HELMET to avoid DROWNING

Re: SPOILERS

@Justin Stringfellow

You dozy plonker.

It would seem "he survived the ordeal so that he could blog about it" and the "I'll get my coat" icon aren't big enough clues for you to spot a joke.

Still the fact that you tried to educate Rich in subtle art of deduction and then went to the trouble of looking up an old news article to demonstrate vast knowledge of watery space walk stories, has given me copious laughs this morning. Bravo.

Jimbo Wales: ISP smut blocking systems simply 'ridiculous'

Re: Content Filters Help Me

You make an excellent case. However, I fail to see how any of what you have said invalidates my perceived benefit of the service?

Am I saying a network filter will stop child exploitation? No.

Am I saying that a network filter is another layer of protection for our household? Yes.

Am I saying we should all be opted-in/opted-out? I think I am saying - meh - the end result would be the same, some will opt-in and some will opt-out.

I guess being given the choice is the key part here or are you concerned that this "thinking adult" is incapable of making the decision to opt-out when the default is to opt-in? I, for example, opted out of the phone book but had I done nothing I would have been listed. This was an informed adult decision was it not? I am sure I am not alone in being able to make one of those. So I guess from my perspective (and I appreciate you hold a different view) the default of opting in or out is irrelevant to me. I make my own choice regardless.

Yours was an interesting post though and for that you have my thanks.