Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Jeep drivers can be HACKED to DEATH: All you need is the car's IP address

Re: No smoking gun?

safety-critical system that has so many potential flaws and has single points of failure (in both code and the hardware) and that is a "smoking gun" to me.

I'd say the most common example of such a system is "the driver".

Never mind air-gapped internally, why are any incoming connections accepted at all?

Re: A start, but...

Past experience shows that bankrupting the car manufacturers won't help, since the taxpayer will be on the hook to bail them out. Jail time for the executives is the only deterrent that will work.

An EPIC picture of Earth, sunny side up, from one million miles out

Re: What a beautiful place to live

capable of doing miracles like sending up this craft and yet we can't stop killing each other

The one is, I suspect, tightly linked to the other. Without the drive and passion that leads some humans to kill one another, we'd probably never work up the collective enthusiasm to build the space craft. Oh well...

Re: Ultimate Holiday Destination

The airline reserves the right to charge for oxygen

And the actual landing zone is on the moon, with a shuttle bus once a year to your hotel...

Reg top tip: Don't have the same name as someone else if you use Facebook's Instagram

Re: Good parting advice

customer service seems to be an afterthought.

I doubt if it is even that high a priority. For one thing it would require them to recognise that users are Customers and not Products.

What makes our planet's clouds? Tiny INVISIBLE CREATURES. True story

Re: Global warming help?

So we are all doomed then.

'fraid so. I reckon I've got another 40 years or so left.

Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true

Re: RNLI

What also fascinates me is the international aspect to it, since (despite having "Royal National" in its name) the RNLI also operates sea rescue for the Republic of Ireland. It's truly a organistion dedicated to a common goal, saving lives at sea, and with both UK and RoI being island, seafaring nations, it seems to transcend any petty differences.

Contrast it to groups like the RSPCA, which seems to have become an activist lobbying group and has long forgotten its real goal. I can't see the RNLI going that way, and you (poster above) have every right to be proud of your part in it. I have friends and family who sail, and although they've never needed you (yet) it is very reassuring to know you are there.

Re: Semi "voluntary" cooperation

various taboos and customs are put in place to manage the stock.

That sounds like the "Priesthood" approach, which is surely just a variant on the Government-controlled one? People with power (either physical or spiritual) lay down the rules, and define the punishments that will happen if they are broken.

2015 Fiat 500 fashionista, complete with facelift

the 1.2L 900cc engine, does it still crap itself when it sees a hill and goes of drying back to Turin

If the rental I has a while ago is anything to go by, yes. 2 normal adults, and it wouldn't climb a hill in anything above 2nd gear. Horrible tinny pile of crap. Not even worth buying as a fashion statement, if I were given one I'd sell it.

Your security is just dandy, Apple Pay, but here comes Android

Re: Convenience?

1 - Wallet out of pocket

2 - 5.00 note out of wallet.

3 - Hand over note to pay.

4 - (optional) put change in pocket.

Bitcoin fixes a Greek problem – but not the Greek debt problem

Moving bitcoins out

One snag to this plan is what to do with the bitcoins when you do get them to some other country. The EU anti-money-laundering rules have made it damn near impossible to open a bank account in another EU country if you don't provably have an address there. There's no legal bar, but the banks just don't want the hassle so they won't do it. Maybe you could move them to the US, if US banks still allow non-residents to open accounts, but many (most?) charge a substantial annual fee for the privilege.

Hands off, Apple! Irish dev studio sues over alleged iWatch infringement

Re: "Two companies, both alike in dignity, in fair Milan"

What light through yonder Windows 10 breaks?

Did speeding American manhole cover beat Sputnik into space? Top boffin speaks to El Reg

The links to the details are worth following, any scientific test where the report includes the phrase "the hypersonic expanding column of vaporized concrete" must have been spectacular, whatever happened!

IBM to offer breast milk delivery-as-a-service for staff

IBM

International Breast Milk ?

International Business Mammaries ?

The Great Barrier Relief – Inside London's heavy metal and concrete defence act

Re: How does the barrier defend against heavy rains?

it would have to be upstream from London to hold back the rainwater that's coming down the river.

It doesn't hold it back, it stores it. By closing the barrier at low tide the sea rises on the downstream side, but the basin 'behind' the barrier (upstream) remains low, so all the rainwater flooding into the Thames can be stored, instead of adding to the inflow from the sea. Then at low tide the barrier is dropped again to let the water out. It prevents the sea surge + rainfall adding together.

Re: The only computers were a VAX running PDP 11

True, but VMS VAXen can also run 16-bit RSX-11 applications in a compatibility mode, and so were often used to replace aging PDP11s. This may be what the authro was trying to convey.

My top three IT SNAFUs - and how I fixed them

cables != cables

I had a VMS cluster once (a while ago) which would, from time to time, run like a dog for 10 minutes. There seemed to be no correlation with anything else, and the diagnostic tools we had at the time were fairly basic. The fault never lasted long enough to debug.

Eventually I noticed a huge spike in network collisions when the problem occurred, and on lifting the floor tiles found that one piece of what looked like ordinary 50ohm 10base2 co-ax was actually 93ohm PC network cable (ARCnet, I think). The mismatch was creating collisions and retries, which mostly went unnoticed until network traffic reached a certain threshold.

On a similar note, I had great difficulty convincing our sysadmin why it wasn't a clever idea to use RJ45 doublers to plug two PCs into a network socket, since it seemed to work just fine...

but they report what they think the problem is to the Service Desk,

Ah yes, these are the same users that are totally incapable of reading out an error message word for word from a screen. No matter how many times you ask, you always get their interpretation of what it says.

Sixty-five THOUSAND Range Rovers recalled over DOOR software glitch

Re: "...doors can remain unlatched even when in the 'closed' position..."

On the first car I had with central locking, pressing the 'lock' button resulted in whirring and clunks as various motors did their stuff. My wife's new Peugeot just makes a tiny 'click'. I still end up trying the handles, I just can't accept that something as supposedly secure as locking both doors can be done without something solid and mechanical moving.

Blurred lines: How cloud computing is reshaping the IT workforce

Or to put it another way

We're moving from the "modern" era of individual computers where developers were their own sysadmins, back to the 1960's timesharing model of huge mainframes somewhere else, managed by expert acolytes, and users who sit in front of a terminal somewhere and see the computer as a service, whose location is unknown and largely irrelevant.

OK, so the "dumb" terminals are smarter than they used to be, and dynamically allocating storage and compute resources on-demand means a bit more than waiting for the operator to load a magtape and a card deck, but it all looks very familiar.

The cloud has been pushed more by marketing types than technical ones from day one, and at least half the companies offering cloud solutions are only doing so because they don't want to be seen not to. It has a momentum all it's own, at least until the next trend comes along.

Security is viewed by both developers and operations as being constantly "in the way".

I have rarely seen this from operations, they tend to see developers as being in the way of security, and with reason. Developers are now, finally, beginning to realize that customers don't care much about performance these days, they can get all they want for next to nothing. Security is foremost in customers' minds now, and the professional developers who get that will be the successful ones.

And as for In a cloudy world you can't just jab a finger at operations and fob an angry suit off on the room of weird socially inept people down the hall.

Of course you can. It just won't be your hall. "it's the cloud" will replace "it's the computer" as the universal scapegoat.

Google yanks fake Android battery monitor

Re: "its intentions were revealed by the permissions it seeks (basically, everything)"

It is a pity that Android doesn't seem to have a way to selectively accept the permissions an app requests. There are times I've seen an interesting app, but when I see the permissions it wants I won't install it.

These aren't necessary malicious "give me TOTAL POWER" apps, but otherwise innocuous ones that want, perhaps, location or camera access. Maybe I would find the non-location or non-photo features sufficiently interesting to keep it, if I could say "OK, I accept all these permissions except 'x' and 'y', but I can't. All-or-nothing usually means it gets nothing.

Planet killer: Ex-army officer's Welsh space-rock mission

Why would anyone name a surface-to-air missile at all, let alone call it "Jonathan Tate" ?

Les Américains order a MEEELLION doughnuts ... from French baker

Re: My head exploded.

Same principle for dougnuts, serve them by the half-dozen but it will be OK because they're only "little" French ones.

'The server broke and so did my back on the flight to fix it'

Re: Hubswitch..

The previous generation always blamed problems on "the picture valve" :)

Reg hack survives world's longest commercial flight

Re: Auckland to Heathrow

(excluding the Old T1 and now T3 which are shite).

You'll be glad to know that T1 has just closed, prior to demolition and reincarnation as a T2 extension. Why BA moved their T1 flights to T3, and not T5, though, is beyond me. T5 isn't bad, and if your connection all happens within T5 it can be pretty fast, but once you add the T3/T5 standing-room-only bus journey it goes downhill rapidly.

Still, at least it's better than CDG, with the added benefit of not having to flying Air Chance.

Biologists gasp at lemur's improbably colossal bollocks

Re: AKA the Madagascarin space-hopper

If I were holding something with eyes that were bugged out like that I'd be shit scared to let go unless I was in Kevlar...

Ford recalls 433,000 cars: Software bug breaks engine off-switch

Re: And again ..

Man its fun watching that happen, although i'd imagine shit scary if it happened to you.

It's scary enough watching from nearby, I don't think I'd like to open the bonnet and look for the air intake while the engine was attempting to self-destruct. CO₂ fire extinguisher emptied through the grille, perhaps?

Re: And again ..

get back in the car and stall it.

You're assuming a clutch, I think. Most US cars are automatics, much harder to stall.

Mastercard facial recog-ware will unlock your money using SELFIES

Re: Heartbeat recognition??

Very exciting!

Do they have special processing algorithms for purchases made at Alton Towers, or in "massage" parlours?

Chair legs it from UK govt smart meter installation programme

Re: "I thank Baroness McDonagh for"

someone dumb enough to stand on the footplate....

What's Martha Lane-Fox doing these days?

‘Clandestines' prompt British border blockade in France

Just goes to show, we should never have given Calais back to the French.

Uber execs charged, will stand trial in France

Re: refreshing

to see some execs who broke the law actually get arrested for once.

allegedly broke the law. The trial hasn't been held yet, it's a bit soon to pass sentence.

VPNs are so insecure you might as well wear a KICK ME sign

Re: Hide My Ass

If you did have an internet-connected donkey you'd probably want to have it hidden, to keep the RSPCA off your back.

Do the users of these services care?

I get the impression that for many of the services listed the big draw is that they can be used, cheaply, to bypass geolocation, so folks in the UK can watch US Netflix, or those in the US can get to BBC iPlayer. The "Virtual Network" bit is the important one, not the "Private". Surely most people who need really solid privacy from a VPN tunnel, for work, etc., will be using a commercial product supplied by their company, such as Cisco AnyConnect, and connecting back to secured company servers?

Do people really trust companies with names like "Hide My Ass" to, well, securely hide their ass?

Hide the HUD, say boffins, they're bad for driver safety

Re: "a pilot is also taught when it's safe to ignore the view outside"

And I have to wonder, why do you "dearly like the idea of night driving with IR-enhanced HUD display showing me the road as if it were broad daylight" ?

Presumably so that one can see obstacles like drunks and unlit cyclists as easily as one can in daylight?

Re: Wrong question

Road safety went IMHO off a cliff after speeding fines were automated via cameras instead of putting people on the road.

It's no coincidence that road casualty numbers have recently been increasing in the UK, and are now trending the same way in France just after the French government started installing revenue cameras everywhere.

Maybe some of these university boffins could run a study into that correlation? Methinks the grant money might be hard to find, though.

GM's cheaper-than-Tesla 'leccy car tested at batt-powered data centre

Re: Don't believe it

One charger in the dead center of every 50x50 square would be a charger within 50 mile of you everywhere.

It's technically true, but meaningless. 50 miles as the crow flies doesn't help if it's 100 miles by road to get there, nor does it help if there are 500 vehicles all wanting a charge within that 50-mile-a-side square.

It's like the mobile phone networks that cover "98% of the population". Great if you're in the home counties, useless if you're in deepest Scotland.

It's just a propaganda figure.

Re: Don't believe it

5) You would only need about 1,500 fast chargers to cover the entire US or EU every 50 miles.

That's a spurious figure. The USA has just under 4m square miles of area, so that's 1 fast charger per 2500 sq miles. That equates to one charger per 50x50 mile square, which is not at all the same as one charger every 50 miles. Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

Re: What a horrible paint job

shout loudly "I'm coming! I'm coming"

Immediately followed by "You bastard, you were supposed to pull out" ?

That man told me to stuff a ROLE up my USER ENTRY!

My name is not Pat.

There is the old story about the actress Diana Dors, whose real name, the one her home village knew her by, was Diana Fluck. She was due back in the village to open the village fete, and the local dignitary charged with introducing her was terrified about getting it wrong and embarassing himself. He concentrated really hard on getting that 'l' right...so much so that he introduced her as Diana Clunt.

Humongous headsets and virtual insanity

Re: Proprioception

you have no idea if someone else is standing there in the room watching you.

Or if they, via the hacked cameras in your smartphone, are enjoying their own remote VR experience of you enjoying your VR experience of......

Shadow of the Beast: Amiga classic returns from the darkness

Re: the demise of Guru Meditations

Guru Meditations are also still to be found in Virtualbox, I saw one only last week.

Samsung caught disabling Windows Update to run its own bloatware

Re: There is a problem though!

On Linux, I do "ldd /path/to/some.so", see what is missing and can easily install required libs with apt,

Really? I think you forgot the bit where you have to download a new Perl module from CPAN, which takes most of the evening finding and installing the 27 other modules that are interdependent, plus the new (or maybe old) version of GCC you have to install so that you can recompile something you don't need but is part of the library dependencies, and the trendy new scripting interpreter that you've never heard of before and which the developer has used for the startup, instead of using bash like everyone else.

10 things you need to avoid SNAFUs in your data centre

Ah, the days when disk drives needed 3-phase motors :) Probably held all of 100MB?

Wake up, sheeple! If you ask Siri about 9/11 it will rat you out to the police!

Actually, the leading 9 was chosen so that payphones could easily be modified to connect the calls free of charge.

Not in the UK, it would have been as easy to use 111, since other level 1 calls (operator, directory enquiries, etc.) were already free (DQ isn't free now, of course).

The problem was that in the early days many phone cables were bare overhead wires, and just blowing around in the wind could cause them to dial a series of 1s. They still wanted a number that would be easy to dial on a rotary dial phone in the dark, so picked a number at the other end of the dial where it could easily be found by touch. Then by keeping a finger in the hole, you just rotated the dial 3 times, for 999.

WikiLeaks spaffs files showing NSA spied on French presidents

Re: I'd be more suprised if they DIDN'T spy on us

I'd be more suprised if they DIDN'T spy on us

Me too. The Americans spy on the French, and the Germans, Britons, etc. They all spy on the Americans, and each other, it's how the game is played.

No doubt there will be some face-saving diplomatic communiqués issued, but I'd imagine that the real reason for the crisis meeting at the Élysée is not because the Americans spied on French presidents, but that they successfully spied on French presidents. Someone in the French counter-intelligence services is in for a bollocking, and a head or two may roll behind closed doors.

Then again, we are talking about a president who popped out of the palace on his scooter for visits to his mistress, and didn't expect anyone to notice...

Triple glitch grounds ALL aircraft in New Zealand

Re: yeah real funny with those sheep

yeah real funny with those sheep

It's the double-ewe, double-ewe, double-ewe problem.

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

Re: Beat the clock

I wonder what's keeping him from increasing the clock speed.

Propagation delays across those square metres of panels, I'd guess.

Kamikaze Rosetta probe to ram comet it's chased for billions of miles

Re: "and later we will have to try and determine where on the surface we can have a touchdown"

And then in the distant future, in a solar system far, far way, maybe another NASA will send another probe to a passing comet, and find Philae and what's left of Rosetta. I'd love to see the reaction to those pictures.