Posts by Shugyosha

It's May 2. Know what that means? Yep, it's the PR orgy that is World Password Day... again

Re: How about we ask companies to stop letting the hackers have all the passwords instead.

"It was incredible how many people blurted out their passwords on national television.."

Yes, I'm always skeptical about exercises like this though.

In the unlikely event that I'm accosted by a surveyor and actually stop, the conversation would be something like:

"Hi, we're doing a survey on password security. Can you tell us what password you use?"

"No"

"There's a gift voucher in it for you!"

"Sure, my password is BullshitFakePassword123."

READ OUR SHOCKING ARTICLE ABOUT PEOPLE'S LAX ATTITUDES TO PASSWORD SECURITY!

Brekkie TV host Lorraine Kelly wins IR35 ruling against HMRC, adds fuel to freelance techies' ire over tax reforms

I would imagine that the growler reference came from Avid Merrion's representation of Lorraine Kelly on Bo' Selecta! Which is unfortunately what I also unconsciously first think of when I hear the name Lorraine Kelly. And yes, it refers to exactly that offensive meaning.

It is probably problematic these days. It was a different time, way, way back in the the '00s.

Carphone Warehouse fined £29m for mis-selling mobile insurance to punters who didn't need it

I wonder how this aligns with the values of the Carphone Warehouse?

US man and Brit teen convict indicted over school bomb threat spree

Re: He met his Waterloo

I expect a spell inside will scare the living daylights out of him.

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

Re: id10t

OSI layer 8 fault

Manchester man fined £1,440 after neighbours couldn't open windows for stench of dog toffee

Re: Presumably

I think you've missed the fact that all the song title puns are from Manchester bands, giving a link, however tenuous, to the story.

Facial recognition tech to be used on Olympians and staff at Tokyo 2020

Re: The state of the tech

Is it much different, if at all, from the tech that allows me to pass through UK immigration by having me stand in front of a camera and then matching me to my passport photo, with no human interaction?

If it's complete snake oil, it seems unlikely it would be used for international border control? (I realise I'm leaving an open goal here for someone to slot in an easy one about the state of the aforementioned).

OpenAI bots thrash team of Dota 2 semi-pros, set eyes on mega-tourney

Vigilo Confido

XCOM

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Re: My wishlist

Knew this comment would be here before I even read the article - it's on every phone article.

The mythical Regitard's phone is this place's version of Homer's car.

Boss helped sysadmin take down horrible client with swift kick to the nether regions

Ah, that explains it

I did wonder why there has been zero Register coverage of probably the biggest Australian IT story of 2018 - I.E. Optus's disastrous failure to deliver World Cup streaming. But all is now explained as Simon was clearly preoccupied with other things.

Good luck with the new role, it's been great having your local coverage as well as these weekly On Call columns.

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

More red button shenanigans

Mid 90s and very early in my career I was a lowly operator, on call for first line support. One morning in the early hours, my pager woke me, indicating a Pyramid minicomputer had gone down. Shortly after, another message about another Pyramid, then another, then another. Knowing that these machines were all next to each other, I assumed a power issue. I reluctantly got out of bed and made my way into the office.

Sure enough, once I arrived, the affected machines had no power. On the wall at the end of each row of machines was a switch that controlled that phase? (My terminology may not be correct, electrickery has never been my forte. But everyone used to call it a phase). The switch had a green on button, a red off button, and a light indicating its status. The light on this switch was out.

Standard procedure at this point would be for me to page the on call electrician. But given it was about 2 am, I would have to wait around for at least 30 mins for the electrician to get on site, who may just cycle the power then scowl at me wondering why I'd woke him for such a simple thing. I was also tired, young, over confident and a little laissez faire; so I decided to first just try cycling the power myself.

I pressed the green button first - nothing happened. So then, figuring it was off anyway, it maybe needed the red button to be pressed first to 'reset' things before it could be turned on. So that's what I did. At that point, things got a little quieter as another five or so minicomputers in that row which unbeknownst to me had been fine until that point, suddenly powered off gracelessly.

At this point I called the sparky. And the Pyramid team on call person. Fortunately things were up and running fairly soon and with no big issues. Whatever the power issue was it was something that needed the sparky. The reason the phase switch seemed to be off was... there was no bulb in the indicator light...

I got away pretty much unscathed because it was the early hours of the morning so little impact on business; I was on pretty good terms with everyone involved; and I think the sparkies recognised it was pretty stupid/dangerous to have no bulb in the indicator light on the power switch.

Developer’s code worked, but not in the right century

If Denis Norden didn't need to censor 'cockups', I don't think The Reg has to.

Experts build AI joke machine that's about as funny as an Adam Sandler movie (that bad)

Start it off with an easier challenge

I reckon it'd have done better if it was compared against captions generated by Register commentators. It can't do much worse than 4 decade old Monty Python routines repeated ad infinitum, or a Cancy McCancerFace joke that the rest of the world realised was mildly amusing on first discovery, then halved in mirth value after every repetition.

Unclip your pager and bag from your belt: We need to make room for a battery-powered 1TB HD

Portable spinning disk

Oh, like an iPod you mean? Yeah you're right - those things were a disastrous failure.

Citrix snuffs Xen and NetScaler brands

Re: Blame the software not the user...

Not sure why you think Citrix is a dinosaur.

I've been a Citrix (XenApp and later XenDesktop) specialist for 20 years. I've never been out of work and I continue to get hit up on at least a weekly basis by recruiters looking for Citrix skills. EDIT: I've literally just received a LinkedIn Recruiter connection request while writing this post. It will of course be trash, but it shows how misinformed the idea that Citrix skills aren't relevant is.

I currently work for a Forbes Global 2000 company (and within that 2000, we're in double figures) with around 150,000 staff globally, and we're well underway moving EVERYONE to XenDesktop.

So tell me again how the skills are irrelevant - <willywonka.jpg>

The issues I see around 'Citrix' (usually people mean XA/XD when they say 'Citrix) are:

1: There's a misconception that XA/XD reduces TCO. This is probably because Citrix used it as a selling point for MetaFrame in the early 2000s. Every time I see an article on here about Citrix, there'll always be a comment along the lines of "B.b.b.but we put in Citrix and it didn't reduce our costs!" It RARELY REDUCES COSTS. NOBODY PUTS IN CITRIX TO REDUCE COSTS.

2. There is a perception that it simplifies the environment. Hmm... it depends. It CAN do, but as earlier posters have highlighted, you need a very well designed environment with good Citrix people. If you don't have these, you will not have a good experience. Any muppet can mount a XenDesktop ISO and click Next > Next > Next - and pretty soon 'Yay! We have a Citrix environment!'. This is both bad and good. It's bad because it adds to the poor perception of Citrix. It's good because it keeps me in a job when I'm brought in to fix these clusterfucks.

3. Anything involved in the whole chain from client device to server is perceived as a Citrix problem. User's client is on a personal device riddled with malware? Citrix problem. User's network connection is a wet piece of string? Citrix problem. Citrix admins are asked to present an app that is a decade old, out of maintenance, was never written with virtualisation in mind, but it's business critical and no one will approve a business case to upgrade, even though it's highly unstable? Citrix problem.

Why Citrix is still, if not more than ever, relevant; and why for example one of the world's largest companies like mine are continuing to adopt it:

1. Security - everything is in the datacentre

2. Flexibility - work wherever you want, connect from any device you like

3. Business continuity - office has burned down? No worries, everyone can work from home and connect to their XenDesktop. Data centre has burned down? No worries, the XenDesktops are pooled across multiple sites and the data is replicated.

Citrix of course has it's problems - having worked with it for so long there are plenty of things I've bitched about over the years; and it's certainly not the only way of achieving the benefits I've listed. But the idea that it's a legacy product is idiotic.

(Fanboi icon because I'm bound to have some bias for something that's put food on my table for so long)

Car-crash television: 'Excuse me ma'am, do you speak English?' 'Yes I do,' replies AMD's CEO

RE: "hillbilly OZ V8s"

Ahem, it's the 'Bogan' OZ V8s, thank you very much.

Irish priests told to stop bashing bishops

"One rather funny rejection of one of my comments (and I cannot remember by who) was when I called Stephen Fry a fairy*."

You can't even call Stephen Fry a fairy?!? Next you'll be telling me you can't even smear racial slurs on someone's car in excrement without someone taking offense! It's political correctness gone mad!

Fucking hell mate, get yourself into the 21st Century. If that's the kind of bigoted shite that's being moderated, then El Reg is doing a good job as far as I'm concerned.

Carphone Warehouse given a stern talking to for 'misleading' radio ad

I wonder how this aligns with the values of the Carphone Warehouse?

Argentina eyes up laser death cannon testbed warship

When did Clarkson start writing for the Reg?

Police deny Notting Hill Carnival face recog tech led to wrongful arrest

Re: They didn't particularly try to hide it

Not much new. It's about 15 years since I was last at carnival but even back then I recall uniformed Police very visible filming the crowd. There may be additional technology involved now but I'm sure the decision to be a highly visible presence is very deliberate.

Headless body found near topless beach: Missing private sub journalist identified

Re: Awful, simply awful

Agree it's awful and the submarine bit makes no difference, but if it hadn't been for all the submarine weirdness, no one outside Denmark would even know about this story.

Facebook pulls plug on language-inventing chatbots? THE TRUTH

To me to you to me to you

They've hardly invented a new language, they have merely adopted one already developed by the Chuckle Brothers.

Dear racist Airbnb host, we've enrolled you in an Asian American studies course

Re: It's called fascism, I mean "progressivism".

@Justin Case

I see that argument, but she's not being 're-educated' for the opinion; she's being re-educated for acting on that opinion, in contravention to the law.

I don't really see it as much different to a drunk driver being forced to undergo an alcohol awareness course.

She could hold as many racist opinions as she wanted, no matter how abhorrent, and she wouldn't have been forced into 're-education' - until she broke the law. It wasn't a thought crime, it was an actual crime that tipped the boat.

Re: It's called fascism, I mean "progressivism".

She's allowed to have that opinion. She can complete the course and still have that opinion. What she can't do is act on it to discriminate against someone.

I realise you're going for a clumsy 1984 analogy, but from the various Orwell works I've read, I don't think he was rallying for the protection of racists.

'Bio-hacker' embeds public transport ticket under his skin

Ah, bless

From the ABC article:

"He is able to use the Opal just like other users, including topping the card up on his smartphone."

Well, yeah, because the smartphone app just updates his account on the Opal servers via his 4G connection - it's not making an NFC connection with the chip.

I can understand his reasoning. No doubt he tired of losing his card due to the daily kickings he's no doubt on the receiving end of.

I fear for the day he is rudely awakened from his Neal Stephenson-esque cyberpunk existence, when he gets on a rickety STA bus, has to stand because the only free seats are wet due to a leaking roof/windows, and can't tap on because the Opal system is down, indicated by a hi-tech plastic Coles bag placed over the reader.

Ex-MI5 boss: People ask, why didn't you follow all these people ... on your radar?

Terry Christian's let himself go.

Samsung Galaxy S8+: Seriously. What were they thinking?

Re: Pure hipster wankery

"I could hardly believe my eyes when I read "force users to revert back to old habits (eg the touch interface)"."

I raged too when I read that, but for me it was the tautology 'revert back'. Makes me want to go full Bill Bixby.

Can you ethically suggest a woman pursue a career in tech?

Re: math is hard

All your staff have domain admin rights?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc700835.aspx#XSLTsection127121120120

Maybe the reason you've not encountered many good female IT professionals is the good ones probably don't want to work for an amateur cowboy.

Re: Another female

If El Reg wants more women in tech, don't you think it's time to drop the Finbarr Saunders headlines and articles? I've been visiting for around 15 years and while I admit I used to find it funny, these days it seems like a relic from another era. While I like Alastair Dabbs articles for example, I cringe every time I see one of his 'Ivor Biggun' type jokes - which is on average every three sentences - and he's far from the only culprit.

In these more enlightened times, it's just more sad and pitiful than funny. Like seeing Jim Davidson on TV.

Is your child a hacker? Liverpudlian parents get warning signs checklist

Overcomplicating it

There's a far simpler method that I have observed through fastidious research and this very article supports my hypothesis.

All hackers wear hoods indoors while using their PC. Does your child wear a hood indoors? You may well be harbouring a hacker. The more l33t haxxo0rz will also sit in front of a backdrop of either binary, or random code fragments.

These are the real warning signs we should be watching for.

Batman v Superman leads Razzie nominations

Re: Obvious omission...

He was busy with his Netflix movies, like The Ridiculous 6, which I haven't dared face but the 1 star rating it has tells me he's maintaining his standards. I guess that doesn't qualify as it didn't get a cinematic release.

New British flying robot killer death machines renamed 'Protector'

@Kurt Meyer

This is a site where one in every two threads will eventually break into a four decades old Monty Python routine. Here, the older and more hackneyed the joke, the more appreciated it is.

Melbourne man arrested for broadcasting fake messages to pilots

American, I assume?

That may well be your perception, but Melbourne is in Australia.

In-flight movies via BYOD? Just what I always wan... argh no we’re all going to die!

Works fine

Used this a couple of years ago on a budget Virgin flight, Sydney to Narita I think. Didn't know it existed on the outbound flight so I didn't have the app ready. For the return flight I downloaded the app in advance and it worked perfectly. No issues connecting, no issues streaming, no issues full stop.

For a tech site I'm frequently surprised by the amount of luddite naysayers here.

Citrix bakes up Raspberry Pi client boxes

But what's the management like??

How much these things cost, what they look like, what they do, etc. makes next to no difference to me. There are a myriad of thin clients that all do the same thing, whatever the OS, components, etc. - I couldn't care less which one I use as long as the components are up to the job - and for simple Office task workers that job does not require a lot of power.

What sells a particular thin client to me is how good the management suite is, yet these articles never mention it. Cheap does not appeal to me if wrangling the client fleet is like herding cats.

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

Re: Nonsense

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia. - Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.

Tech support becomes Australia's number one scam

Re: Phone policy 101

I never answer my landline - it's only there for my internet. I don't even know what the number is and so nobody who knows me has it. So I've never encountered one of these calls. They don't call mobiles, I presume.

Lizard Squad back to blast Blizzard’s gaming hub

Re: Cheers LS!

Nerfed your class, did they?

God forbid that a company should be money driven.

Waleed Aly's NBN intervention is profoundly unhelpful

Re: Slow news day

Is it cynical of me to think that this article only exists as an excuse to leech site hits off Waleed Aly's name as he's probably trending in Google searches due to all the Golden Logie furore?

Thin client market gets even thinner, down seven per cent in a year

ChromeOS eating into the market?

XenApp \ Desktop has been my been my bread and butter for 18ish years now and so I've spent a fair bit of time with thin clients over the years. These days however I would deploy a ChromeBox or ChromeBook before one of the traditional toasters and I know of a number of big rollouts that have done the same. I expect that might have something to do with the decline.

Citrix buys System Center control freak, sells CloudPlatform

Included with Platinum

The management packs will be included in a XD Platinum license, according to the E-mail I received from Comtrade yesterday, just after we spent AU$80K with Comtrade...

Wanna call Barnaby Joyce a w**ker / gerbil on radio? FINE, says ACMA

SHOCK JOCK IN 'SAYS SHOCKING THINGS' SHOCKER!

Nothing more to add.

Sony Xperia Z4 4G Android tablet – gift of sound and vision

I've got an Xperia SP - great phone and it had plenty of updates, but mine's close to two years old. They stopped updates after Jellybean, so if your wife bought her phone more recently then that may explain her lack of updates, but it's not really fair or accurate to say there were no updates.

Ashley Madison hack: Site for people who can't be trusted can't be trusted

Re: OPM

"we could be in for an interesting ride"

Isn't that what users signed up for?

Mozilla loses patience with Flash over Hacking Team, BLOCKS it

Re: The best bit is....

I would suspect downvotes because the fact that the BBC is reporting it, despite it being a technology they use themselves, is surely good isn't it? Or would you prefer a news service that hushed up stories they had a personal stake in?

Daybreak Game Company GOES TITSUP after painful Sony DIVORCE

Re: Smedly can burn in hell

And for what he did to my EQOA. I'll never touch another SOE / Daybreak game again. Although by the way things seem to be going, they won't be around much longer for that to be a concern.

HDS embiggens its object array by feeding it more spinning rust

Re: "Embiggens"

I agree, it is a wonderfully cromulent word.

Star Wars: Episode VII trailer lands. You call that a lightsaber? THIS is a lightsaber

Re: Even Fantasy Has to'Work'

Pedant alert - when blocking with a samurai sword you would also use the flat of the blade rather than the back. Well, speaking as a Nidan in Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu. Perhaps other styles block with the back edge, but I find it unlikely as you'd have to change grip to block then change grip again to counter, or contort your body into a position that would leave you unstable and open.

Apple Fanboi? Stand by to get Beats Music LIKE IT OR NOT

Re: You'll NEVER FORGET about Dr Dre NOW

@big_D That's quite understandable, but since this deal with Apple started to gain notice, it's been all over the mainstream media. Fair enough to say 'I don't listen to hip hop', but I guess these people claiming ignorance (not aimed at you) don't read any business news, don't follow the BBC \ CNN \ ABC \ replace with your local media broadcaster; don't read LinkedIn, etc. etc. It's all so unlikely that it seems like an affectation, to claim ignorance of a major pop culture figure as though there's some kind of neckbeard cachet in having a complete ignorance of the outside world. If it's a 'Britain's Got X Pop Idols' runner up from a few years ago then fair enough, but when people claim ignorance of these major figures, like Academy Award winning Actors, multiple Grammy Award winning musicians, etc. who have usually gained crossover appeal beyond their initial core audience, it's just so fucking tedious.

Protip - it's possible to be an IT gun and also know what's going on in the world. You might actually find your career benefits from it.

Re: You'll NEVER FORGET about Dr Dre NOW

He's a very successful and highly rated music producer, a successful but not highly rated rapper; and a successful entrepreneur. I suppose you can be forgiven for not being aware of him - he's only been massively successful and well known for around the last 25 years or so.