Posts by TheVogon

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

No but it is discrimination. Bring back the best qualified for the job.

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Re: An "easy" fix

Not true. Solar PV panels are already totally economically viable in say Alaska and Arctic Finland. Repayment periods of 1-2 years typically out of a working life of ~25 years.

Big Cloud deploys thousands of GPUs for AI – yet most appear under-utilized

Are you allowing for that they probably use thousands of these things to train their own stuff? And provide "free" services?

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Re: Slow down

A constitutional requirement to be a president doesn't require a trial. If you don't meet it, you don't qualify. Just like not being 35. There is no need to be "convicted" of an offence related to the requirement. So election officials or indeed the Supreme Court can judge this without a trial.

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

Shitty company. Ordered boxes, paid an agreed price with a total and they tried to charge me extra after! Apparently some options were extra - but I paid a stated total after choosing them!

Being an online subscription I already used a Revolut one time card number so that I didn't have to make any effort to cancel anything so they didn't get their money. but I got my food.

Exploit for under-siege SharePoint vuln reportedly in hands of ransomware crew

"Manual, SharePoint-specific patches are required to ensure the fixes are applied properly as patches won't be installed by Windows Update." - well add them to Windows Updafe ffs.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Canon Ink Tank printer here. I can chose to buy overpriced (but very good) Canon ink by the reasonably sized bottle or buy 3rd party.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

"It is estimated that around 60,000 could be repurposed to add much-needed charge points."

Seems rather hopeful that 2/3 are useable. But even if it's 10,000 slow chargers in the end, its still useful to have extra charge points. Even if slow ones.

Broadcom to divest VMware's end-user computing and Carbon Black units

Re: KVM on linux works nicely...

Vmotion equivalent is completely free on Hyper-V Server 2019 and supported for a while yet.

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

Re: Should be a worldwide regulation

NO. a) Yes they do. See GDPR guidance from your legal dept or your DCO who will know what they are talking about - otherwise how would you possibly know who GDPR applied to? b) Where the data is processed is not relevant. This applies globally to the data of EU (and UK) citizens and residents. Where the entity is doesn't matter.

Re: Should be a worldwide regulation

GDPR legal guidance states citizens and residents. As per your holiday example it would be ridiculous to expect companies to identify if a US citizen took a day trip to the EU and suddenly have to wipe all non compliant data.

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Have you seen what government jobs pay? ~ half the going rate. Of course they are going to end up with the most useless of people.

Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

Re: Standards are slippin now El Reg focuses on readers outside Europe

My dentist gives you pink stuff in a cup to wash your mouth out with that tastes exactly like McDonalds Root Beer. Fortunately you are meant to spit it out.

Surface Duo crashes the party as Doctor Who celebrates 60th birthday

I expect we will get a labelled gender neutral toilet and wheelchair ramps on the Tardis soon. Davros will be pleased.

Broadcom asserts VMware's strategy isn't working and it basically needs rescuing

Re: VMware is Legacy Tech

support for the 2019 version will continue until 2029.

Uber reels from 'security incident' in which cloud systems seemingly hijacked

Re: Uber

Powershell scripts can be digitally signed too so it wont run if changed. And also not unless you had access to the service account that ran a secured script. Just finding the script won't give you access to the passwords even if you ran it from another account.

Samsung accused of cheating on hardware benchmarks ... again

That not true of the high end QLED models. Take a look at say the QN95A. Beats OLED hands down unless you watch in darkness.

Microsoft targets multicloud with Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI

All the licensing advantages of Azure extend to Azure stack too such as free extended support for certain products. Can be way cheaper than paying MS for support.

Munich mk2? Germany's Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Re: MS has everything to lose

So rather cheaper than say a supported Redhat full feature license then.

Libre Oriface is utter cack compared to Office 365, You get what you pay for. Good luck with their accounts dept, ERP systems, etc. etc. working with it.

Fancy joining the SAS's secret hacker squad in Hereford as an electronics engineer for £33k?

Domestic electricians expect circa £50K+. No wonder anything from the civil service or government organisations is generally pathetic.

ASUS baffles customer by telling them thermal pad thickness is proprietary

Re: This sounds like ...

(2mm is for the GDDR memory chips. Others may vary).

Re: This sounds like ...

Well I can tell you that the crappy marshmallows that Asus uses as thermal pads on its RTX GPUs should ideally be replaced with 2mm of Gelid Ultimate pads.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

Wont be buying anymore of those then. I only use WD Gold drives for SATA NAS.

Cayman Islands investment fund left entire filestore viewable by world+dog in unsecured Azure blob

Azure blobs are secure by default so to make one publically accessible takes a special kind of stupid.

EU slaps extra sanctions on Russian spy chief and APT28 malware dev over 2015 Bundestag hack

Financial sanctions from the EU would be rather pointless without the involvement of London as the world's leading financial market.

One alleged Dridex money-launderer set for US extradition, beams UK's National Crime Agency

Re: Escape from New York

Probably because they asked first.

Who's still using Webex? Not even Cisco: Judge orders IT giant to use rival Zoom for virtual patent trial

Teams has the way better Silk / Satin CODECs.

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

Re: Not just smart plugs!

Pick a well known brand name from a mainstream supply such as Amazon itself - not resellers.

The European equivalent "CE" mark is pretty much worthless as on items displaying that logo it frequently means "China Export". Seriously!

Re: Not just smart plugs!

They have inbuilt thermal fuses and as such don't pose a fire hazard.

Re: Not just smart plugs!

"Don't replace wall sockets with models that have built in USB chargers."

Just to note that any socket made to BS1363 is safe with USB ports built in. This primarily a problem for cheaper 2 pin type sockets not permitted in the UK.

On Her Majesty's Servers: UK's Coronavirus Future Fund sinks 'seven-figure sum' into Arm data-centre kit

Sinks likely being rather appropriate. Very little demand.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

You get about one advert every 6 months. Mildly annoying but manageable vs getting proper HDR1000 pictures unlike on my OLED.

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

"He added that the number of Windows 10 devices active each month continues to "grow by double digits year on year."'"

By percentage.

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

"If Linux is such a POS then why is MS embracing it like there is no tomorrow?"

They are just making it easier to run Linux stuff under Windows and to migrate your legacy midrange systems to Windows / Azure. If it continues this way you wont need Linux at all but can run everything under Windows. Microsoft are already adding GUI support to the Linux subsystem for Windows.

From per-processor licensing to... per-follower? Oracle said to be in talks to buy TikTok’s US operations

Re: Please Oracle buy this [redacted]

Trump will be gone by then.

Java? On no wait a minute. Everyone that doesnt want to be virus infected by every web page they visit already removed that.

He can ban / block the app as a "national security risk" effectively putting them out of business in the US.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: The future is behind you ....

"Satellite radio killed DAB"

Pretty much no one uses satellites for digital radio due to the vast costs involved. DAB and DAB+ are the only really widely deployed option in the digital audio radio space.

Re: The future is behind you ....

DAB+ is pretty good though. And it exists more because of the demand for digital audio than reuse of relatively low bandwidth spectrum that there are plenty of better options for already after analogue TV was turned off.

Peer-to-peer takes on a whole new meaning when used to spy on 3.7 million or more cameras, other IoT gear

Re: Under 10%

You can see who it is from the other end of your garden / in bed without visiting the front door. And you can answer the doorbell when out which is a major security benefit as you can say you cant come to the door right now if its "lucky heather sellers". Also can leave instructions for couriers / deliveries, etc that might otherwise have to be rescheduled. And you can set it to record video from movement and act as a CCTV system.

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

Re: Data not at risk?

It's already covered under the DPA and then by GDPR.

Purism's quest against Intel's Management Engine black box CPU now comes in 14 inches

Re: manufactured in the USA and Sweden, presumably for a reason like this

"Hahaha! Sweden!? Highest bidder wins, or not, they'll take anyone's money, and from both sides without conscience."

Still safer than the US who are known to intercept and compromise hardware no bidder required.

Canary-build Microsoft browser blocks Microsoft extension from inflicting Microsoft search engine

Duck Duck Go primarily uses Bing.

Netgear was told in January its routers can be hacked and hijacked. This week, first patches released – after exploits, details made public

Re: As a Faithful Agnostic...

And a non fictional character bless Open-WRT!

Nothing fills you with confidence in an IT contractor more than hearing its staff personal records were stolen by ransomware hackers. Right, Cognizant?

Re: Details?

Large GDPR fine incoming?

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

Or just read at home without bothering to print them.

Re: For the last 45ish years ...

So the planet will loose only 7.9 billion trees this year instead of 8 billion?

Customers of Brit ISP Virgin Media have downloaded an extra 325GB since March, though we can't think why

Plus Fortnite.

Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021

Re: We dont need .eu !!! :)

By hiding you mean killing presumably.