Posts by Steve Aubrey

Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m

Re: Portage...

"portage" is also the package manager for Gentoo Linux, providing a very tenuous IT angle.

Want a piece of GitLab? It's going to cost you: IPO price per share settles at $77

Selling the sizzle

It's been selling today between 93 and 96. Current market cap is a shade under $13.5B. They can't keep this up forever (same as I said about BitCoin).

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

And somehow, somewhere, your name was associated with that demolition in a negative way. You just know it.

Ukrainian cops cuff two over $150m ransomware gang allegations, seize $1.3m in cryptocurrency

The times, they aren't a-changing

"ransomware criminals complaining that REvil's rentable malware was ripping them off through a secret backdoor"

Reminds me of the quote about an honest politician being one who stays bought.

No "joke" icon. It's all sad, but true.

Big Blue's quantum rainmaker jumps to room-temp diamond quantum accelerator company

Timing

Always five years away . . .

Unsure whether to add joke icon or not. I'll stop back in five years' time and check if I was right.

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

We had a power outage once, and I grabbed a movie DVD and a laptop, so we could watch "television" by candle-light.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Re: Progress?

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address - in PowerPoint

https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

(joke icon because there isn't one for crying)

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

Kudos to Gareth

Subtle, but present, humor. Sly, even.

Apple won't talk to El Reg, "so asking it to comment on this is a fruitless exercise"

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Shakespeare

Methinks he doth protest too much . . .

No insight into the person nor the situation. But a 10k word "missive"?

Digital delinquent deletes developer's database during disastrous Docker deployment, defaults damned

Re: my compliments

And noted by an author whose initial is "D". Of course he would notice!

Nominet is back to 'the same old sh*t' says Public Benefit campaign chief as EGM actions grind to halt

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Monitoring is simple enough – green means everything's fine. But getting to that point can be a whole other ball game

Re: Its a partial description of your IT farm.

"Miss one system and your monitoring infrastructure is immediately invalid."

Agree with Unlocked - that isn't invalid, though it may be imperfect.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Re: Best text editor so far

Thumbs up for Beyond Compare. Started using it multi-years ago as an internal software distribution tool.

Just one in 5 Googlers plan to swerve the office permanently after COVID-19

Re: Turn the headline around.

And some nerds don't like to commute

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

Re: Why not bring back REXX too!

There's something fond in my heart about Rexx (and XEdit) - simple and easy to program. Not for heavy lifting, no, but wonderful for one-off things. I may have to revisit Rexx . . .

Ex Netflix IT ops boss pocketed $500k+ in bribes before awarding millions in tech contracts

Not a politician

Or at least not an honest one.

"An honest politician is one who stays bought"

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: Printers are the Devil's work

. . . reminding me of the love sent across the ocean https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

(icon for the originators)

What is it with Facebook and screwing democracies? Now calls for Prime Minister Modi to resign censored in India

The rest of the story

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake" - and then we got caught.

Microsoft received almost 25,000 requests for consumer data from law enforcement over the past six months

My guess - IANAL - is that you'd get much less, if anything. You lack the force of the law.

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Re: "over localised regions of the bridge below"

Oooooh, that's low.

US govt can talk about the end of lockdown, but Silicon Valley says 'as long as it takes' – and Twitter says 'WFH forever'

Re: What is it with the VCs?

Some people are trying to recreate the old way of doing things in the "new normal". There are times where vision is important. There re many times, though, where the information is the important part, and that generally doesn't need a webcam.

I keep thinking about the world's best buggy-whip manufacturer. Yes, there's a need for the product. No, Zoom doesn't fall into that verging-on-obsolete category. But I think we're seeing a lot of hype and people playing with new toys. The novelty will wear off and it will be a tool, just not as high-profile as now.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Re: Never saw a car crash into a computer

Aaaaah, so that's what a Fenwick is. I thought maybe it was something like a henweigh.

Asleep at the wheel: Why did it take 5 HOURS for Microsoft to acknowledge an Azure DevOps TITSUP*?

Re: Follow the sun support

That's what happened - sun went down, so single-person support closed its doors (and eyelids).

After 16 years of hype, graphene finally delivers on its promise – with a cosmetic face mask

Re: Manufacturing?

And then there was the homeopath who drank distilled water and died of an overdose . . .

Roses are red, IBM is Big Blue. It's out of RSA Conference after coronavirus review: IBMers will not attend infosec event over 'health concerns'

Re: Overblown?

That third hand is called the "gripping hand" - cf. "The Mote in God's Eye". Thank you, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven.

It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises

Re: "The move was buried in documentation"

Optimist.

Cache flow problems continue for Intel: Yet more data-leaking processor design blunders discovered, patches due soon

Based on the branding icon . . .

I wouldn't worry about fixing this one soon. It's not too scary, so it must not be too serious.

It scares me to think that some people evaluate these things that way. OTOH, that's probably how some folks choose to read comments here.

Leaks point to Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra with mammoth 108MP camera and ... what? 16GB of RAM

Re: I thought

Don't forget your gold interconnect cables, that make digital signals sound so much smoother. Tight this way, just three thousand a meter - and well worth it (to somebody).

ICANN finally reveals who’s behind purchase of .org: It’s ███████ and ██████ – you don't need to know any more

Bothered

Let's have some brakes applied.

Let's have some light applied.

Let's follow the money trail.

Full disclosure - I have a .org domain, and so does my church. Individually, my additional out-of-pocket won't be that much more. But I don't want to be that snowflake that goes along for the avalanche ride. Something seems very wrong here.

Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it

Buzzword bingo

"Flutter is the Chocolate Factory's open-source, post-platform, interface development framework for creating applications that run on the web, mobile devices, desktop computers, and other chip-bearing kit with graphic interfaces like so-called smart televisions. And it's this last segment, the appliance and IoT market, that's a new addition to the Flutter conquest plan, at least in terms of public messaging."

I win! Or do I?

Americans should have strong privacy-protecting encryption ...that the Feds and cops can break, say senators

Really?

"no American should want a device that becomes a safe haven for criminality."

I am an American. My house has walls that protect against outside eyes. My car has a gas pedal, which (on occasion) has led to speeding.

Do I want both of those? Yes, I do. Do I consider myself a criminal? No I don't. Does the government think I'm a criminal? I'll let you know.

In my mind, the tool - whether a gas pedal or encryption - is not criminal in and of itself. Its use is what determines that.

VCs find exciting new way to blow $1m: Wire it directly to hackers after getting spoofed

It's a fine line

Disapproving of the crime while admiring the resourcefulness and attention to detail.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

"A signed integer" because - of course - you never know when your SSD might be used in a time machine.

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

20/20

“It is very clear that much more study of the photos is needed”

At least one thing is clear, then . . .

Astroboffins capture video of Mercury passing across the Sun's surface

Re: @abubasim

Affect/effect. Pedant.

Sticks and stones may break your bones but robot taunts will hurt you – in games at least

Esme, don't worry about the positive experience - they will fix that soon.

Mission Extension Vehicle-1 launches to save space from zombie satellites

Space work is becoming normal

This is good. And it's a great time to be alive. This stuff was science fiction not too long ago.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

Re: It's the new world order...

"We have the best government money can buy."

They say an honest politician is one who stays bought.

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

Re: SIPping

Rule 3(A) from http://mri.beckman.illinois.edu/resources/writing_tips.pdf

ASBMAETP: Acronyms Should Be Memorable And Easy To Pronounce

(3B is "SATAN: Select Acronyms That Are Non-offensive")

Seriously, this sh!t again? 24m medical records, 700m+ scan pics casually left online

Ratios

Three comments about the story. Five comments about grammar.

Commentards FTW!!

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

"It will only look like a shadow until someone mistakes it for a shadow and shunts it into next week."

Not if it's VantaBlack all the way down . . .

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019

Re: 10 trillion (Zimbabwean) dollars

They did. Probably several times since then.

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

Re: Microsoft OneDrive iOS does it too...

Because determining when you have stopped taking pictures based on something like recency is so - well, unprofitable.

Blindly accepting network update texts could have pwned your mobe, say researchers

Calling Carl Sagan

"Check Point claimed the vulns affected billions of devices."

Shouldn't that have been "beeellions"? Or even "beeellions and beeellions"?

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

Physician, heal thyself!

El Reg's sub-hed says "Redmond suggests nuking 'profanity, geopolitical, diversity' terms from browser source"

Isn't the concept of "nuking" prejudiced against second- and third-world countries that don't have nuclear weapons?

And I am obligated to quote: "Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm".

For Foxit's sake: PDF editor biz breached, users' passwords among stolen data

'if Foxit's password cache was indeed neither salted nor hashed, this could be severely problematic for its customers.'

And, presumably, for the firm itself. That's lawsuit territory these days.

So your Google Play Publisher account has been terminated – of course you would want to know why exactly

Re: The Register has asked Google for comment on Godeau's case.

And the El Reg journos, after getting Google's response, will anticipate hearing from the original complainant.

That's right, they will be waiting for Godeau.

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

Re: Truth in advertising

Mom! TeeCee's been looking in my room again!!

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

And New Yawk? Fuggedaboutit.

Investor fires shot at 'sinking ship' Google in battle over privacy-menacing Google+ bug

Re: the world’s fifth largest social media network?

Largest =/= most-used. Just sayin' . . .