Posts by pɹɐʍoɔ snoɯʎuouɐ

Total WIPOut: IT chief finds his own job advertised

Re: "staff are meant to be protected against retaliation for cooperating"

The line was a quote from Richard Dawkins and was his description of the God of the The old testament in his book the god delusion. You should read it. And if you Happen to be a Christian who does not recognise his god then maybe go back and read your bible again. There are pages and pages of text that show god to be exactly how Dawkins described him.... Oh, and in a later interview when asked about the god of the new testament, he said that the god of the new testament was far worse and I happen to agree.

What put a bug up my arse, is that you decided that a theist would do the right thing, but an atheist would not, choosing the easy road instead.... its an old argument between the theist and atheist that claim that without god you have no moral values and its a despicable argument... I choose what I do because I think its right, not because I fear the wrath of a suspiciously absent space mage...

yes, the right thing to do maybe blow the whistle, but you have to think of how it affects the people around you first, and thinking that some imaginary friend will intervene on your behalf is the most ridiculous idea... but then maybe its your gods great plan that you blow the whistle and then ruin your entire families life....

maybe you got lucky that in your case you were out of the blast radius, but most get caught up in it... and if management don't crucify you then your workmates will. (that reminds me of another story I heard once)

Re: "staff are meant to be protected against retaliation for cooperating"

" If you believe in some higher power and the immortal soul etc. then that makes the decision a bit easier. For a devout atheist I expect the decision will be much harder and pragmatism would most likely prevail."

Oh my.... I expect this sort of drivel in a youtube comment on a pro flat earth video,,, but on EL reg!!!

so... lets put this another way....

if you believe in a deity who is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. then you will be just fine if you blow the whistle on some wrong doing....

you cant be "devout" and atheist, but anyway, just because you will not accept without evidence the existence of a god then you can easy make the decision to protect yourself and your family first, because you know the actual real people that have your life and future prospects in your hands will screw you over in a second if you get in their way and the people that are actually supposed to protect you will only protect you for little longer than a few weeks after the dust settles... but you expect the suspiciously absent space mage to protect you.....

wake up and smell the coffee....

Re: "staff are meant to be protected against retaliation for cooperating"

"I suppose it depends on how principled a person you truly are whether you go ahead and blow that whistle."

having principles are fine when you have a roof over your head and working central heating... but worthless when you have to sleep under a cardboard box on top of spikes put in the floor to keep the homeless away from the posh (but sheltered) windows of big corp outlet....

so when you wake up to another cold morning with frost on your woolly hat, and decide its time to make that 200 mile walk south for the warmer weather for the winter you will think about your decision to blow that whistle on your boss who broke the rules to get his friend a lucrative contract.....

whistle blowers tend to never get another job in their chosen profession because no matter if its right or wrong your boss needs to know he can trust you....

My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

"I know one person who trained themselves to use a mouse with their left hand (it took them a week, they tell me) so they could swap every hour."

Back in the days I did desktop support for AEAT, Going from desk to desk fixing peoples problems I soon learned it was easier to learn to use a mouse both left and right handed.

You would turn up to fix someone PEBKAC issues and the desk would be covered in paper work that you dare not touch (official secrets and all that nonsense) to be able to move the mouse over to the left side (i am a lefty), It was just quicker to learn keyboard shortcuts and use the mouse right handed...

Re: A solution

"Dedicated computer woo agents are in your area now! "

Anything that takes the piss out of these people that need the mental faculties re-aligning with reality is welcome in my book...

But a donation from proceeds to organisations that help people with actual mental health issues would be in order... in the same way that the collection plate in churches should be compelled to give a % to the people who "de-program" victims of cults....

Don't want to alarm you, but defence bods think North Korea could nuke UK 'within a few years'

was this written by.....

was the report written by the same people that told us about Iraq and its WMD's......

Mines the one with the pocket full of co-proxamol....

Hubble sharpens measurement of distance to ancient cluster

Re: 7800 Light Years?!

its even better if you ising it toy yourself in Eric Idles voice...

As Zuck apologizes again... Facebook admits 'most' of its 2bn+ users may have had public profiles slurped by bots

But, but, but.....

The thing is, to a point, I have to agree with zucks....

The only info that could have been gained from searches of phone numbers and email addresses is your public profile info that YOU posted.

the fact that they now have closed off the search based on emails and phone numbers has made life a little more difficult for some. I found my long lost brother who I had not seen for 40 years based on an email address that I found. A quick search of facebook and we were in contact a day later !!!

Also, paedophile hunters use the phone number search to identify targets when they have been sending filth to children over whatsap....

The point is that its the people with bad intentions spoil it for those with good intentions who (at the moment) are the majority.

Also, While advertisers are the prime income for facebook, making it free for users, adverts are going to appear... I would sooner the adverts be relevant to me than random shite.

maybe facebooks should come up with a figure on how much per user they make from targeted adverts per year and offer a premium service at that price where you don't get adverts and your data remains private.....

mines the bullet proof one, because I know I will get shot to death with down votes....

UK regulator bans slasher-flick parody ad for OnePlus 5 mobe

Re: Have you ever seen Thomas the Tank Engine?

i believe these double entendres' were intentionally placed in young children's programs to make them entertaining for the adults who should be watching over the children and not using the TV as a baby sitter..

have you seen the episode of rainbow where they were playing with each others balls blowing pipes and playing twangers,,, never mind the number of skins while pealing a banana

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

in an ideal world.....

Lets be fair, adverts pay for most of the "free" stuff on the internet so if you use a service that is funded by adds, then let it be..

And If all these data slurps did was target relevant adverts there really would not be a problem. A few times when I have been researching a new purchase I get relevant adverts appearing on websites and on occasion it has given me a link to a product a the best price I had settles on, or given me A better option. Great. Job well done...

But we know that's not the case...

there are companies that a gathering all the info about is they can, no doubt they have a file on everyone including everything you have ever searched for, every phone number and email address you have had. I would guess that most of this information they have no clue what to do with it, they just know its valuable to someone...

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

Business oppertunity.

Set up an office in Europe to be a europiean address for people outside of the EU who need a .eu tdl

Transition what?

This sort of reporting really yanks my chain..... The eu saying they are going to pull the plug on .eu registrants in the uk in march 2019.. But where in the report does it say that this is entirely against the terms of the transition period.

Next year, we officially leave the EU. but there is a transition period afterwards where everything stays the same to give everyone time to adjust and to switch to the new rules, because right now we don't actually know what the new rules are going to be...

so saying the EU are going to pull the plug on .eu TLDs is just scaremongering. its pathetic and i thought el reg was above that... (oh wait).. and the EU actually threatening it is total bulshit and its this sort of bullying that prompted me to vote leave. I do some trade in Europe with my business, and yes, its going to affect that when we leave, how its going to be affected I don't know, but I will wait and see.

Re: Where are the Brexit fans?

The brexit fans are all here, but just dont want to engage in the remoaners petty bickering...

facts are, the EU is a broken, corrupt organisation, which has a very questionable future, who has plans for the EU to become a United states of Europe taking control of everything. A lot of the plans they have were kept very quiet before the referendum for fear it would push the leave vote up.

Only a stupid person would think its all going to be roses and unicorns when we leave, its going to take time, but the uk, with strong leadership, will recover. Its going to take everyone getting on board with it and stop fighting aginst it. Its happening and that cant be stopped. The only problem with all the moaning is that its giving the EU a stronger hand at the table.

I'll get my coat before the remoaners start.....

UK.gov: Here's £8.8m to plough into hydrogen-powered car tech

8.8 meeeelion....

8.8 million is a drop in the ocean for what's needed.

Hydrogen power cells are the way of the future. They have cars that already run on hydrogen very well, and they produce enough power that they can power the house when its parked in the garage.

The investment needs to go into a realistic hydrogen generation system without producing tonnes of greenhouse gasses and distribution system with safe storage of it to make it into a consumer level appliance.

When they start pouring money into that, then I will believe the government is serious about green energy...

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Re: Lot of Lies from Microsoft Here

"I could never understand why people saved stuff to the cloud and expected it to stay private"

when ever i read anything that say "the cloud" my dyslexia kicks in and I read it as "someone else's computer"

I run my own personal someone else's computer with nextcloud on a little raspberry pi for all my someone else's computer needs....

Bollocks to that,,,,

Its legislation creep,,,,

it will start off where they dont "monitor" your private conversations or emails... but sooner or later they will drop in a little change to the t&c's to allow them to take a look just for quality of service maintenance or some other shit.... then off to room 101

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

one paying customer.....

Back in the days, I had a thriving business building and selling computers to the general public.

I had one customer, (A cousin of a well known footballer, known to the fans of his club as GOD**) time and time again his computer kept coming back with issues with windows failing to load and screwed up to such a point that the only fix was a format and a reinstall files were scattered all over the place... deleted and renamed....

after the 5th time it came back I said to him that this was getting ridiculous... I was spending a ridiculous amount of time getting his computer to work and stay working. Identical machines worked flawlessly. so the only thing could be somthing he was doing... so I asked,," what are you doing before it goes TITSUP?" the replay was a "Nothing, it worked, then I would switch it off and then start it again, and nothing would work".... "OK,,, what were you doing prior to switching it off" again,,," NOTHING"... so I got annoyed... and said "OK, I have gotta get to the bottom of this, the only option is to do a deep forensic search of the computer to find traces of what is going on... then if its something you are doing, I am going to bill you for it,,, and it wont be cheap....

It was at this point, he said he had just been tidying up files... putting all the DLL's in one folder EXE's in another....

I fixed it one last time.....an told him never to call me again...

**no bonus points for anyone who knows the player

Ah. The BSD old dsys....

I too remember the bad old days of computing. ISA slots, SCSI cards for a CD writer that ran at single speed and if as much as a little bit of defragmentation of data was read, it would scrap your £20 blank CD...

BUT....

Back in those times, the people actually using computers at least had a clue. When the interwebs was let loose on us, we all knew how to behave online...

Back in those days, you didn't have clueless masses able to go online in a few pokes at a fondlephone and post idiotic crap that other clueless morons repeat over and over. Clueless idiots who would think it would be a good idea to do a online survey on some webshite to find out what their pornstar name was without realising it was a exercise in data gathering....

Back in the day when people understood that if you put it online the world and his wife and his dog and cat can get to see it. It was understood that privacy settings were that you dont put it online....

windows 95 was the beginning of the end when plug 'n' prey worked half of the time, but enough that the masses could start tinkering where they should not be allowed...

There should be two levels of interwebs.... one a sanitised sandbox for the masses.... and a second that is for those who at least have a clue !!!

US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene

"The village constable, in my day, knew what you were doing day in day out, because he walked the streets, and he talked to the people that he met. Poeple knew him, and he was approachable. Stuff got sorted out that way."

yes, but times have changed. These days, anyone who gets noticed talking to the local village bobby will be flagged as a snitch....

Back in the day, kids fucking about would get the toe end of PC Plods boot up their arse and would feel the back of his hand.... and they would sooner that than the beating they would get from farther if PC Plod had to pay the house a visit.... But these days thats not allowed... :(

"They don't about YOU they know about a person that google will refer to you as a GUID.

Subtle but very significant difference."

Ahhh bless you and your naivety. so GUID: 54645435346474232343 is located at gps coordinates 51.3417 -2.5800 between the hours of 11pm to 7am every night is probably lives there..... and when the email address on that same handset is registers to Facebook account Mr F Giles and has lots of pictures of tractors, you can guess he is a farmer... so, you have a name, address, phone number, date of birth, occupation, likes, dislikes, possible political views.....

its easy to link a name to a GUID...

There is a lot of info around on how its impossible to completely anonymise data

"But do not use that footage to go after people that don't pick up dog poo."**

A criminal act is a criminal act.

If you can find and prosecute someone for leaving a health hazard in the street then do it, catching criminals is correct use of the surveillance equipment.

Data gathering to put the citizens in a profile group is another,,,

** maybe if one of your neighbours was letting the dog shit outside your door every day and not cleaning it up you would feel different when the local council refuse to do anything because your word is not good enough for enforcement.,.

Re: Protect Yourself

"Protect yourself by not engaging in criminal acts is even a better advice."

That is indeed the start... but this is not so much about the solving of crime. If it was just a matter of slurping up the data, searching for gps data that puts a person in the same location at the same time as a victim of crime, then going for a little chat with that person is one thing. Great, perfect use of the slurp of data,

But that's not how its going to be used...

sooner or later, the government is going to (if they have not already) going to have a file on everyone and every bit of your day to day life will be recorded, from what time you had breakfast to what time you took your last piss of the day and match you up to pre-defined profiles to see if you are the type of person that would object to the governments next move... and then make sure you dont....

Re: Protect Yourself

Yes, thats all well and good when you limit your access to the "grid" and doing what you can to limit your exposure to unwanted eyes...

BUT...

When you do things like that, then you paint a target on yourself for a little sit down in room 101 to explain why you are protecting your privacy...

It was cold last week with the beast from the east, but would you dare walk into the local bank to withdraw some cash with a balaclava keeping your face warm........

now let me check my pockets before someone else does....

I couldn't give a Greek clock about your IoT fertility tracker

Re: Antikythera Mechanism

"Nobody needs an excuse to go off on a tangent about the Antikythera Mechanism."

to go off at a sort of tangent, there is a nice bloke over in Australia, he has a YouTube channel called "clickspring". He usually does clock type stuff, but for the last year or so he has been doing a series remaking the Antikythera mechanism, using a mix of tools that would have been available back in the day to show how it would have been made, but using modern machinery for the grunt work once demonstrated with the ancient tools, even demonstrating how files and other cutting equipment are made.

Its worth a look, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA/featured

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

gotta love the Pi...

I Still have my very first Pi that was on the original first production run.... it still works, it has a USB hard drive connected to it and I use for my bitcoin and litecoin wallets....

I also have a row of them hooked up to ASIC cards mining away at litecoins... with another pi running security over it all....

I also have another running a radius server to keep the wifi secure (disabled on the rpi's running the cryptocurrency stuff)

I use a pi3 for my kodi box...

I never bothered connecting a hard drive, I use a old desktop PC as a NAS and use that to hold all my media. I never have any problems streaming to the the pi even at 1080p across a wired network. and use the onboard wifi as a wireless access point, so the 5ghz is welcome...

Good news: Apple designs a notebook keyboard that doesn't suck

no way.... not now not ever..

Apple have a massive market where they sell new computers to people that have screwed up the computer with the lightest of water ingress... I have seen macbooks damaged because if condensation.....

£750 to repair a £700 computer.... they sell you a £1200 computer for £1080....

there's not a chance in hell they will bring this to market,,,, but they will make sure it costs others too much to make a 3rd party keyboard replacement....

Will the defendant please rise? Utah State Bar hunts for sender of topless email

ahhhh sweet justice

I remember it well...

just read thriugh the blog posts again for lols...

Got some broken tech? Super Cali's trinket fix-it law brought into focus

when hell freezes over....

just imagine, A group of companies that make a massive profit from selling over priced products, that maintain sales by building in obsolescence and making repairs uneconomical by limiting accessibility to spare parts. The profits of these companies have available funds larger than the US government.

Do you think that this group of companies will allow a government to pass a law that will fundamentally change the way they operate? Not a cats chance in hell...

Apple for instance, actively make sure that its impossible or impractical for 3rd party repairs. Once chip in particular in the macbooks appears to be placed in the perfect position so that the slightest bit of water damage will find its way to. The chip is a off the shelf programmable device, but any attempt to read the code on it destroys the device. Third party repair shops only way to get replacement parts is by buying damaged boards from sellers in china who appear to get access to boards that don't pass quality control and do not work. This puts the price of a replacement chip from less than $5 to around $50.

apple charge $750 for a repair on a computer that a 3rd party repair shop will do for $300, Apples excuse for the charge is that they just replace the entire logic board as its impossible to repair which is not true) most of the time this means that the macbook will go in the bin and they will buy a new one.

If this bill was to pass, then apple would be obliged to make replacement parts available. does this mean they will supply the shops the means to program an off the shelf part? does it mean they will supply the chips pre-programmed? It would be a big fat NO for both. They would make all new computers impossible to dismantle or make it so that removing a chip would destroy the main board in some way. They would make it impossible to do repairs instead of just saying its impossible.

But lets face it, Apple and pals would get this tied up in the courts for eternity. It would never make it into law.

Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

George Carlin....

facebook and idiots....

The thing I find with facebook is that people just share stuff believing it to be true.

Its the same shite that gets recycled over and over and people swallow it up...

Most of the time you can see that the story is bulshit, but even when you post a link to snopes or similar showing its full of shit, people afterwards don't read it and still share it...

but just for shits'n'giggles I like to post about the dangers of DHMO and watch the gullible share !!

Europe slaps €997m antitrust fine on Qualcomm

WTF?

I hate apple as much as the next man, I can see the principle of what the EU are doing but surely offering a company a discount for being the exclusive supplier and in the numbers of chips involved should not be against the law?

If another company comes along and demands equal treatment, then give it to them, so long as they are buying chips in a similar quantity? I am sure if another company approached them demanding discounts, offering to buy 500,000,000 chips a year a nice big discount would be in order...

This is about the EU fat cats taking a slice of everyone's pie, How does it benefit anyone other than the EU governing body issuing these fines? They bleat on its about fair competition, but its not. is their an EU chip supplier that can supply the chips in the numbers needed and to the same quality?

The EU is the most corrupt organisation I know of, for example they make it so that the taxation on importing tomatoes from outside of the EU too expensive just to protect the Italian tomato growing industry. There are plenty of products that can be imported from outside the EU that are a superior quality to what's available from within, but they make the rules to keep the competition out of Europe... But they will fine an American company, supplying chips to another American company for a product being made in another continent.... so WTF is it to do with the EU? Is there a EU company that can supply the required chips but are being excluded because of these payments?

Twas the week before Xmas ... not a creature was stirring – except Microsoft admitting its Windows 10 upgrade pop-up went 'too far'

Re: Microsoft has been getting it wrong with user interfaces

I dont get the downvotes...

I dont particularly have any issues with windows 10.. It works and all the software I use all works.

I have had less issues running windows 10 than any othe OS since windows7

yes, IT does have some annoyances, but not so many as would make me abandon ship and go with a linux desktop.

Re: It's called OS X

Some businesses have already tried apple in the past and where it falls down is with backwards compatibility.

A while back when a new version of the OS was released it broke some software that was very popular. (cant remember what it was or what version of mac os it was) apples official response was "upgrade the software to something else that works"

so for a business, that means more capital investment in the software, more expense in training users to use the new software and half the company using incompatible files with each other...

This is why windows will always dominate any serious office environment. its all down to the TCO and good support. And lets face it, any business who has the updates enabled need to sack the IT staff. Updates are only installed when said update has been tested with the companies core software.

'Pirate block' proposal back on Oz agenda

and blocking works how?

They blocked TPB, but its still very accessable through proxies and a "Pirate Browser" that TPB has distributed themselves.

Blocking at ISP level is just an epic fail.

Mystery object falls from sky, area sealed off by military: 'Weather balloon', say officials

let me

Let me be the first to to welcome our new balloon dropping overlords.

Smartphone running 'Facebook OS' said to debut this week

and que the eletists that know it all....

the thing with this, is that if somebody plans on making a facebook phone then they believe there is a market for it.... and there probably is.....

there are a lot of people that buy expensive phones and all they do is go on facebook anyway, so why not produce a phone that just has all the functions of facebook and sell it cheap, if not give it away with a 18 month data tariff?

Its not something I would buy, but there are quite a few people that use facebook that I know would use this...

Facebook: Give us your credit card and pals' addresses as GIFTS

Re: Could actually be quite handy

i do see your point that it could be a handy way to buy people gifts, but to be honest, If I dont know someone well enough to know their address, then I doubt I will be sending them any gifts.

Then there is the massive issue of stolen credit/debit cards buying gifts for people and delivered to addresses other than the card holders address....

then the other point is that i would not trust facebook to safely hold on to a bag of salted peanuts, never mind my credit/debit card details !! How long would it be until facebook suggested a product they think I would like and pay for it on my card....

Walmart workers filmed playing iPad frisbee

according to apple....

according to apple they are flying off the shelves anyway !!!

Apple is granted a patent on the rectangle. No, really

glad really....

I am glad really that I dont live or work in the US of A where this patent means jack shit....

apple will push so hard with these stupid US patents that the amount of paper will become so densely packed in the US patent office that it will implode into its own gravity field creating a small black hole, just about big enough that its event horizon rests on the US boarders. in effect removing itself from the planet... sort of like a country wide "Darwin Award"

Let the rest of the world carry on with business as usual.....

EXTREMELY RARE never-seen-alive WHALES found (briefly) alive

in other news....

reports of a strange craft that has the ability to disappear and re-appear have been denied,

Also physicists have detected a new phenomenon they have named tachyon pulses that they believe will eventually lead to time travel...

Naughty-step Apple buries court-ordered apology with JavaScript

Re: Contempt yet?

...or just write to the court !!

now which pocket did I put that envelope in !!