Posts by Scaffa

Western Digital deploys heatsink on remodelled M.2 to tempt gamers

I swear some of these gaming-PC mentalists would water cool their kettle if they could,

What a meth: Woman held for 3 months after cops mistake candy floss for hard drugs

They might have done some time, but I never did get my candy floss.

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

Good old recruiters

I had a recruiter encourage me to overstate my experience with Cisco switching / routing gear, when really at that stage in my career I hadn't done much more than check if a port was showing as up or not.

I didn't want to put myself in a position where they test me on that subject and I flail, so I suggested we left it as is - the job was a junior role anyways.

Fast forward to the interview, they say almost immediately "We saw you're a Cisco EXPERT on your C.V, can you talk us through some networks / projects you did?"

Rogue IT admin goes off the rails, shuts down Canadian train switches

"On December 17, Grupe choo-choo-chose.."

Iain, never change.

Adult FriendFinder users get their privates exposed... again – reports

"El Reg contacted FriendFinder Networks via its web form inviting comment on the breach. We'll update this story once they confirm if Dabbsy needs to change his password."

And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage

From what I understand, the ideal (and seldom practiced) method of procurement is source disks from different batches.

The mean time to fail on identically manufactured disks, given that in a RAID they're typically all going to be spinning for the same hours, will be very similar across a batch.

SUSE: Question. What do you call second-place in ARM enterprise server linux? Answer: Red Hat

I'm one and I don't care

How a chunk of the web disappeared this week: GlobalSign's global HTTPS snafu explained

Let's Encrypt is Free?

So really there's no excuse for el-reg to not have HTTPS.

Who should deliver our next Reg lecture? You tell us

I don't want to toot my own horn, but BEEP BEEP my laptops got an SSD and I'm more than willing to talk about it for three hours.

BT internet outage was our fault, says Equinix

"Hello,

Due to a power incident at Telehouse North (London) IP Exchange Direct Access has been severely impacted since 07.45 this morning. Engineers are currently onsite attempting to resolve the issue.

IP Exchange COE, BT Wholesale"

Cryptocat dev reckons WhatsApp is blocking calls to Saudi numbers

VoIP is not ratified in most Middle East regions (Saudi Arabia, Qatar et al).

It could either be revenue protection for traditional carriers, or *tinfoil hat on* they haven't got a way of intercepting / monitoring calls placed through VoIP services.

Forget YouTube – meet ChewTube: Strangers watching millennials eat

Saucy.

Misco: We're moving to the cloud after yesterday's bit barn meltdown

They keep saying "data centre" rather than "data centres" - which I guess explains why their cock up was so unavoidable.

Boffins bust biometrics with inkjet printer

Fun fact from the pub: You can register skin from most appendages as a "fingerprint" on iOS.

Makes it a little awkward unlocking your phone when it's cold or on the train, but we've got to take security seriously people.

Oh, sugar! Sysadmin accidently deletes production database while fixing a fault

I must admit I've done something shameful on a production environment before.

After the initial "you fucking idiot!" calls were out the way and the issue was fixed, I actually got thanked for owning up.

I got the trust back in the end, but I think people appreciate knowing that they can trust you to own up to a mistake - instead of hiding and praying it isn't discovered.

Oracle plays virtual catch-up with new VM release

Still, pretty good progress for bunch of lawyers. Imagine if they were a software company!

Apache Foundation rushes out Arrow as 'Top-Level Project'

I've always had this running joke about management consultants where I just make up tech-sounding words and call it a revolution.

I didn't think it would ever make it into an article, but thanks El Reg!

Teen tricks leaky Valve into publishing hot new Steam game: Watching Paint Dry

Congratulations to young master Ruby Nealon!

I imagine this won't be the last time we hear the name.

Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!

Re: We had a Mac network in college in the late 80s.

"Immense fun to be had going round the machines and using ResEdit to assign an orgasmic sigh sample on floppy insertion"

Mine said "Christ knock it off! I'm up at seven tomorrow!" on insertion.

State should run power firm spam database, says... competition watchdog

Maybe these people would rather be left the fuck alone!

Bug bounty hunters score big dollars and the boom's only just begun

That guys shirt was so loud my AdBlocker crashed.

Under-fire Apple backs down, crafts new iOS to kill security safeguard

This was buzzfeed level clickbait.

UC Berkeley profs blast secret IT monitoring kit on campus

I find it kind of strange she was appointed anyways.

It's like if Greenpeace hired Ted Nugent as their spokesperson.

TalkTalk confesses: Scammers have data about our engineers' visits to your home

I imagine she'll be announced as a "Cyber Security Czar" or some such nonsense, with her vast experience in "dealing with" malicious attacks cited as a unique-qualificiation.

Brit censors endure 10-hour Paint Drying movie epic

I find the all-white cast to be yet another example of the film industries endemic racial bias.

VMware axes Fusion and Workstation US devs

I must admit I've found VirtualBox to be fine and haven't purchased a Workstation license in a while - though I never delved deep into anything I believe would require the VMWare super secret sauce.

Note: This is the one time in history I'll be complimentary of an Oracle product.

Telecity shuffles off London stockmarket

Whereas I have experience to the opposite, including recently their remote hands managing to drop power to our entire rack then saying "There's no camera in that isle" - followed by them using a camera in the same isle to prove no-one touched a cable when we had a layer 2 failure!

Nimble CEO: When it comes to all-flash stars, there can be only... six

"All Flash Array vendor announces All Flash Arrays will dominate market."

Wonderful. I certainly never would've expected such a position.

Microsoft wants to be your phone company, at least for voice

One day of dealing with BT / Gamma number porting and I was ready for Nando's application form.

Taxi for NASA! SpaceX to fly astronauts to space station

Re: Boo, hiss

Alternative point of view:

"I have so much profound respect for astronauts, that I am confused why they would trust their lives to a company whose record implies they build billion dollar fireworks and not spacecraft."

Navy engineer gets 11 years for attempted espionage

"He then secreted an external hard drive and two passport photos inside the container."

Please tell me they were in his backpack beforehand..

After Burner: Sega’s jet-fighting, puke-inducing arcade marvel

After Burner on the 360 cab was like £1 a go from what I remember.

Plus remember it was a glorious piece of theater, sure it wouldn't make its money back on its own but people would show up to see it - then blow their cash on Outrun or Street Fighter 2 (an SF2 board was about £2300 from Videotronics at the time).

'Walter Mitty' IT manager admits to buying gun on dark web

One of the key parts is he went to collect it.

If something illegal arrives through your letterbox that in itself isn't proof you ordered it - otherwise all those firms getting letterbombs should've been arrested for "clearly purchasing explosives online".

When he arranged to go and collect it from a middleman though, that defense went out the window.

DNS chief and wannabe master-of-the-internet ICANN pwned… again

Coat's already on

..more like ICANN'T ho ho!

Tara.

OnePlus phone fanbois flock for a shiny phondle

I imagine a fair few of those devices will be straight onto eBay - the invitations to purchase themselves are north of £100.

Some people may queue for fancy cheap phone; more people will queue for an easy wedge.

Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue

Seems Fair

If I don't add the HTML tags and just type it plain text like http://www.toronto2015.org/ - am I still technically linking to the site?

Chrome browser has been DRAINING PC batteries for YEARS

The article may say it is fixed on OS X, but merely opening Chrome seems to halve the battery life on a Macbook Air.

Listen: WORST EVER customer service call – Comcast is 'very embarrassed'

The most reliable tactic I've seen involves just staying silent after you've done the data protection malarkey, and stated you'd like to cancel the account.

Nothing is more jarring than just hearing someone breathe over the phone.

Hey doc, what's the PC's prognosis? A. Long-term growth below zero

For me, as soon as SSD's became "proper" affordable, my bi-yearly PC-updating exercise has been on indefinite hiatus.

Hot racks and cool customers: Colocating in the capital

Well, the SIP signalling can be TCP but yeah the RTP is UDP all the way.

FCC honcho: Shifting our crusty phone network to IP packets starts now

Re: Send a what?

Unfortunately fax is still used, especially among Japanese HQ'd companies. Also the messages to dump gas into the national grid are sent by fax as well.

I absolutely wish that technology would just die out, but there's always some task in a company which has always been done by fax - and as soon as you propose ripping it out they start going WHOA.

British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing receives Royal pardon

I'm not sure a pardon feels adequate for Turing.

A pardon seems to me, that we "accept" you did something wrong but we forgive you for it. Maybe it's the cynic in me, but it also seems to be of more benefit to the people issuing the pardon than he who receives it (posthumously, even more so).

I don't believe Turing was doing anything wrong by being homosexual.

'A measly 3 Instagrams? NO!' Sexy selfie Snapchat spurns Facebook's $3bn

It's laudible if his goal is to become the next google or facebook, rather than the next startup they bought out.

However, I would've qualified success as being bought out for $3billion too.

Help-desk hell

We had a phone call in from one of our re-sellers not too long ago. We manage a hosted-VoIP setup and have tiers of re-sellers below us. Usually they would have to log issues using a CRM site, but unfortunately one particular client curries alot of favor so they can get away with phoning engineers directly.

On a quiet day, we see an "Urgent" issue raised and instantly everyones phone rings. I answer, hearing a panic'd client saying "Someone just told me our phones are down!".

It took a few seconds of calm breathing before we could let him know that;

a, His company uses our system.

b, We use our system.

c, We were currently on the phone to each other.

To make matters worse we ended up being asked for a root cause analysis about a service outage that never happened.

Curiosity rover hijacked by will.i.am to debut science song

"It's not clear if the song is already on Curiosity. Given the rover only has about 2GB of flash memory, will.i.am's song could be an even bigger waste of space than usual"

I think this is the funniest thing i've read on the internet all year. Thanks!