Posts by Phil O'Sophical

London Mayor shows off GIANT BLUE COCK in busy square

Re: Johnson's Cock?

BoCo ?

It won't stay blue for long

Not after the other winged inhabitants of Trafalgar Square have perched on it for a while.

Back up all you like - but can you resuscitate your data after a flood?

Re: DR - never important until you need it

> We had tested the DR plan by restoring to a copy of the VM.

Well, you tested the backup plan. Doesn't sound like you had a full DR plan, one that identified services, risks, impact, allowed downtime numbers, etc. Put all that together and the missing bits tend to stand out.

I suspect you designed this from the bottom up, starting with the backups, and working out how to transfer them, how to restore them. That tends to focus your attention on what is in the backup, it's easy to miss what isn't in it.

Full tests are a pain, but are essential. I have a customer that swaps their production and DR centres once a month, back and forth. They take a short outage, in the small hours of a Sunday morning, at what they know to be off-peak hours, but they do know for certain that their DR site will be there for them when they need it. Given the size of their travel/hospitality business, they need that assurance.

UK pots 'n' pans outfit Lakeland scalded by hack attack

Re: No worries?

> they wouldn't store the 3-digit CC security code. Would they?

If they do they'll be in big trouble with the card suppliers. Storing that is an absolute no-no, and could leave Lakeland liable to the costs.

In fairness, the payment part of most websites is usually supplied by a bank, or related financial services company, it's just too risky and legally complex to knock-up a DIY version. I personally would trust Paypal a lot less than I'd trust a high-street business website.

The email I got from Lakeland said that the problem was due to a recently-discovered flaw in Java, which implies that they weren't up-to-date with patches. Anyone know what OS the site runs?

Mars, bringer of WAR: Quatermass and the Pit

"rather phallic Martian pod"

Yes, like a cross between a Dalek and a dildo.

There's an unnerving thought...

US remains global sluggard in broadband speed rankings

Re: US telco's will never get broadband faster or more reliable

Not a situation limited only to US telcos, sadly.

PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister

Re: Sense at last

> most people have no idea what DNS is, let alone how to change it.

the ones who want to find a way around it will learn quickly enough. Unless the government bans that information too.

> the kids certainly don't realise the wealth of gross stuff that's on the net

but telling them that it's been filtered is one way of making damn sure they'll go looking for it, and if you think your 11 year old won't be doing that in a few years time you're way too naive to be working with children.

> some pubic school educated dick

Hmm...

> Because the difference between both ends of a CAT5 is...

Both male, how shockingly pornographic

As for the idea that ISPs, and by extension the UK government, will get a list of those who like porn that makes no sense. One might equally be a fan of spoof religions, or Strawberry Vodka, or even pretty underwear, all of which are firmly labelled "adults only" in the metadata and thus could easily end up on the wrong side of any content filter

Which actually makes the opposite point. Anyone who just wants to order vodka or pretty underwear online is now going to have to tick the "show me evil PORN" button, both ending up on the ISP list, and having to explain to the family why "daddy turned the porn filter off".

Besides, most El Reg readers are not so much worried about the "why", as by the impossibility of the "how". This is being presented as a way to stop perverts accessing really nasty, illegal, porn. It won't make the slightest difference. Just like DRM on a music file, it will inconvenience ordinary folks, while doing absolutely nothing to control the real problem. It's just another half-baked idea from a government which seems incapable of thinking through anything before making rash statements. If it was a business it would already be in the bankruptcy court.

Symantec snaps up PasswordBank, touts SSO logins to biz

In practice, SSO offers a way to reduce the amount of passwords corporates are obliged to manage but doesn't achieve the one-password-to-rule-them-all goal the marketing hype around the technology promises.

Ain't that the truth.

100-metre asteroid 2013 NE19 zipped past Earth today

and, as usual, xkcd has an apropos commentary

http://www.xkcd.com/1239/

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Banning specific search terms

If the pædo networks don't already have their own version of Polari, they soon will have...

Re: Better get busy

Google still ignores punctuation, so the search queries

extra-marital sex

and

extra marital sex

give the same results...

PORNAGEDDON: Sexy bloggrs stung by Tumblr smut smackdown

Re: "Adult"..?

Do children enjoy childhood as much as adults enjoy adultery?

I think the main difference is that childhood is best enjoyed in retrospect but is not much fun at the time, adultery is likely to be the other way around.

How our shaken Reg Playmonaut survived a 113,000ft stratodangle

Re: Risky, risky!

So soon after our hero hit the drink you send another one up in a dangerous craft?

My parachuting friends used to call it a "bottle jump". If the main canopy failed, and you had to deploy the reserve, you needed to get back up straight away before you lost your nerve...

They guys must have steel balls etc

As long as they're not brass, it's nippy at 100K ft.

Water, sunshine or pig s***: How will YOU power your data centre?

Isn't the underlying problem that you're "dumping" the heat? All that electricty goes in, is used to spin the electronic wheels, and most of it comes out as lower-grade energy in the form of heat. Which is thrown away.

Never mind just using natural cooling to discard the heat cheaply, why not find a way to use it, instead of dumping it? Put the data centre beside a district heating plant? Beside a hospital?

PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'

Re: DNS look up @Irongut

> All they have to do is block TCP and UDP to port 53 o

and in no time at all a bunch of dodgy DNS servers will appear using a port other than 53, which will appear to solve the problem but in fact will direct the juicier porn site names to virus-laden scam sites.

This is just DRM all over again, it won't stop the people who know what they're doing, and will just make life unnecessarily difficult for ordinary users.

Cubesats to go interplanetary with tiny plasma drives

Re: Leaving orbit?

Drag? It;'s gravity that I'm thinking of. You need somewhere around 11km/s velocity to escape from the earth, and a satellite in low-earth orbit will only have about 80% of that. Can a weak plasma engine give it the addition 2/3 km/s it needs?

Leaving orbit?

Won't they have to start from a much higher orbit than cubesats usually get to, in order to get out of the Earth's gravity? I can't see a micro plasma engine being able to accelerate to escape velocity.

Sun sets on Oracle VDI products

Re: workstation price, entry-terminal functionality.. was redundant on day one.

A Sunray is essentially a remote framebuffer/keyboard/mouse, and sells for only a few hundred dollars (less than a PC). All the work is done on the server and then the desktop is transferred remotely to the graphics framebuffers in the Sunray using an efficient protocol (much better than plain X11). It gives you a full multi-head graphic workstation, just as you would have with a normal desktop. The big advantages I've found are that it is totally silent, no fan/disk noise in my office, and you have the full power of a SPARC or x86 server available, not just that of a desktop.

El Reg Playmonaut soars to 113,000ft

Re: Affinity for treetop landing?

> Trees are magnetic.

Yep, ask any beginning skiier!

Gadgets are NOT the perfect gift for REAL men

Re: I am not making this up

I did think about getting my wife a memory upgrade. Can't find anyone that makes a compatible one...

Are driverless cars the death knell of the motor biz?

Re: So what the author is suggesting is...

> IIRC the french "over the limit" is 2x the British "over the limit."

It's the other way around. British limit is 0.8g, French is 0.5g. Penalties get heavier if you're over 0.8g, but there's no automatic ban unless there are aggravating circumstances. That leads a lot of people to assume that they can get away with it once, and contributes to the French road death rate being 2x that of the UK, for the same number of cars,.

Re: all I'm hoping for...

Unfortunately, shafting insurance companies does nothing except put the premiums up for everyone.

Re: So what the author is suggesting is...

In France, people who never gained a driving licence in the first place (usually the old) may drive a specific model of low powered car, limited to around 30 Mph.

Ah yes, known in France as "coffins on wheels" ☺

Sometimes they are bought by people who have lost their licence due to drink-driving.

It's not quite so simple. A minor excess of alcohol for a first offense will be punished by a suspension of licence, and the driver can still drive a "voiturette". A driver who is further over the limit, or caught a second time, won't just lose his licence, he will be banned from driving, and that applies to all types of vehicle.

Of course, even voiturettes need to be insured, and someone with a drink-driving conviction will find that to be expensive for any vehicle.

Be still, my quivering atoms: Here's a new way to count a second

I have no idea about Planck time, but for The Plank time try:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyU6SonN6mc

a real classic.

BT earmarks super-speedy 300Mbit/s broadband for 50 exchanges

Broadband isn't a necessity, clean water and heating are.

Government dials 999. What service do you require? DIGITAL

"maximum of 999 participants"

So, they're still using BCD ?

Sky asks Ofcom to unlock BT cabinets

Require the other party to provide a precise list of what they will install on each occasion they want the cabinet opened (every item of electronics, wire, tools etc). Anything not on the list can be removed at any time.

Radar gremlins GROUND FLIGHTS across southern Blighty

Re: I did wonder...

It's not the 25,000ft that's the problem, it's the 500MPH!

Snowden's Australian 'revelations' are old news

Re: All old news

Can one have old news? Wouldn't they just be "olds" ?

OFFICIAL: Humans will only tolerate robots as helpful SLAVES

"people have warmer feelings towards robots when the machines are helping them in some way. Conversely, people tend to have negative feelings about a robot if they feel the machine needs to be looked after."

Isn't that true for all staff, robotic or not?

US public hate Snowden - but sexpot spy Anna Chapman LOVES him

> They were spying on citizens of their closest allies

So what's new? After WWII, one of the of the reasons Churchill wanted Bletchley Park kept secret was that he was giving Enigma machines to allied countries like France, as the bleeding edge in encrypted comms. He didn't want them to know that all their traffic could be read by their 'friends' in the UK & US.

Spies spy. On everyone.

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

> they would be talking to a friend on the phone and every so often an 'English' word or phrase would be used like VISA card or taxi or 'dirty weekend' which had me cracking up.

I remember sitting with some German customers, and at coffee-break they were chatting in German. Someone was demoing his new shiny toy, and in the middle of a long string of German I heard "Es ist way cool!". Cracked me up.

Re: @ Anonymous Coward 101 - "circeln"?

> neither is "handy" for mobile or cellphone

"handy" long predates mobile phones, it's an abbreviation for "handheld" and refers to the radios used by army/police, also called "walkie-talkies" (or, as the French would have it, "talkie-walkies" :) )

Mastercard and Visa block payments to Swedish VPN firms

Re: Cash is king

If someone wanted to be anonymous why would they pay by credit card in the first place?

At last: EU slashes mobile roaming fees

> VOIP XMPP replacement ASAP!

You must be joking. The PSTN is still far and away the most reliable, highly-available service around. Maybe you don't care if you phone doesn't work sometimes, or if having a few dropped calls is unimportant, but for many of us the guaranteed reliablity of POTS is essential.

Of course IP-based communications could be made as reliable as the PSTN, but then it would cost 10x as much. Each service has its own levelsof quality and cost, and each suits its respective market.

Re: Get a local Sim

I keep an old phone for the same reason. My main smartphone gives me decent net access via the various free wifi points, and my old phone + local SIM works just great for calls. It's a slight inconvenience to carry both, but not a major one`.

House bill: 'Hey NASA, that asteroid retrieval plan? Fuggedaboutit'

Re: Flip-flop

The Chinese will show you how it's done, and that makes me sad.

Sad to some extent, but outweighed by great happiness that at least someone will be doing it.

Personally I really don't care if the inventor of the warp drive is Chinese, as long as it gets invented!

Washout 2012 summer, melty Greenland 'nothing to do with Arctic ice or warm oceans'

Re: Overpopulation

> how will the politicians deal with that problem.

They won't. What politician is ever going to endorse a policy that produces fewer voters?

Mother Nature has it in hand, excessive population problems have a way of sorting themselves out, one way or another. Famine, war, plague, etc. I suppose we'll be able to blame the politicos for the 'war" bit.

Boffins find evidence Atlantic Ocean has started closing

Re: new series of Preppers...

> 'No-Nukes' lobby

So, experts. Science fiction novels have proposed getting rid of nuclear waste by vitrifying it and dropping it into subduction zones, on the basis that by the time the glass has dissolved/disintegrated in a few 10K years it will have been absorbed into the crust and be on its way, harmlessly, to the core.

Is this actually practical? Discuss...

Ad-slingers! Punting peeps' pics into promos? You must read THIS

Scope for fun here

Each time you upload a hi-res piccy to some social sharing site you should embed a low-res bit of extreme porn in a corner somewhere where it won't be noticed. Then when some big-name company lifts your photo and uses it in their latest ad campaign you post an anonymous tweet "hey, guess what you get if you zoom in to the bottom left of the new Tesco/Ford/Smirnoff/etc. ad".

We want to put a KILL SWITCH into your PHONE, say Feds

"we've just broken your case"

Yes, I've had that happen. They didn't break the unlocked case, though. The fuckwits just cut the metal zip toggle that the padlock was dangling from. The actual "lock" was a twist-tie, just to stop the zip coming adrift when the baggage monkeys were throwing it around, but noticing that was clearly way above the IQ of a TSA inoperative.

This makes little sense. What's to stop the crooks just buying an unlocked phone using a false name/address? It will never be reported stolen, and not associated with a criminal, so there would never be occassion or reason to kill it.

Unless, of course, they plan to ban the sale of any phone unless proof of identity is provided. Tantamount to requiring you to have a license for your cellphone. I can see them trying it, I can't see it working.

EU signs off on eCall emergency-phone-in-every-car plan

Re: Guaranteed not to track you

Yes. "could be exploited for additional services (e.g., ...stolen vehicles tracking ).... not subject to any constant tracking."

So, they'll just track us when they want to. How reassuring. Especially given:

"European Commission signed off draft legislation to enact the scheme. Assent from the European Parliament and Council of the European Union is now required, but little opposition is expected.'

Of course not, those elected MEPs will just do what their non-elected civil servant masters tell them to. As usual.

Desperate Venezuelans wiped clean of bog roll

Re: Who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?

Peanut butter? Worse than Marmite, that stuff.

Good sharp cheddar with strawberry jam, now that is a good combination.

#Facebook: Now all your hashtags ARE BELONG TO US, Twitter

Hash tag?

I always wondered who named them, since most folks in the US seem to call '#' a "pound sign".

Octothorpetags anyone?

You've seen the Large Hadron Collider. Now comes the HUGE Hadron Collider

Re: They should call it...

No, there'd be too much uncertainty about size and position.

Boffins fire up old dish to send interstellar SMS

Re: Except...

> the 18-20yo earth porn starlets are underage

But they'll be 50+ by the time the message gets out & the reply back. Not sure if that'll work as a legal defence, though "It wasn't underage when I replied, M'lud"