Posts by Bloakey1

Legendary Brit physicist Stephen Hawking gets full Intel comms refresh

Re: Intel inside?

Is it driven by Windows 8 or 8.1? It certainly will not be Apple as Isaac Newton collared that particular nomenclature.

Feds dig up law from 1789 to demand Apple, Google decrypt smartphones, slabs

Re: All Writs Act

"Ah, the lesser spotted Communist Nazi!"

Ahhh, that would be Sigue Sigue Sputnik <sic> would it not?

E-cigarettes fingered as source of NASTY VIRUS

Re: Expected

It was not the actual charger that was the issue on this one, it was the software that ran it. I have one here in my box of "what the fsk was all that about" devices. Currently most of the stuff is lying under a raft of crappy failed Seagate drives along with some new ones that I will not use.

Personally I do not believe that a ciggy charger can do any such thing particularily when he has anti virus protection.

Perhaps a nice foil hat would be the best apparel for the guy stating this has happened..

Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users

Re: How Widespread?

<snip>

"1. It appears to be impossible to clear the file cache - clearing the cache manually rarely works entirely and the options to stop caching while the dev tools are open is flaky too. Incognito also caches files. This is bloody annoying if you are debugging js includes and Chrome is keeping hold of stale files."

<snip>

I have noticed that and it has lots of knock on effects, e.g. I can't logon to my Easyjet account butcause of a load of old outdated crap being stored. The dreaded Inertnet Exploder works fine as do the others but Chrome will not let go of old crap run when it last successfully logged in.

As a frequent traveler this sub optimal as one might say.

"try enabling 'hardware acceleration' in Chrome, then restart the browser. some tasks will be offloaded to the GPU, instead of the CPU, which may help."

It is on by default. Disabling it does wonders but it is still shite.

Re: How Widespread?

"I think it's very hit and miss."

<snip>

Try this;

Settings, Advanced, turn off hardware acceleration, then restart.

It helps but chrome is crap at the minute. I get far faster connections on Linux and on a Mac not running Chrome.

Evil US web giants shield terrorists? Evil spies in net freedom crush plot?

Re: After all, we're only human

Do not forget that terrorists use the phone, they use mobiles to detonate bombs, they wear clothes, eat in restaurants, buy food from shops etc. We should ban the lot, giving support to terrorists in the form of food, transportation,communications, allowing them to integrate wearing western clothes etc.

Modern life supports terrorism, let us ban the damn lot.

What happened to "common carrier status"? I remember Demon fighting under this banner in court way back when along with quite a few others.

<snip>

"So, who provided them with the message from Facebook? Sounds to me like GCHQ/NSA had access to this message all along....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30206359"

They did have the data well in advance but it was buried in amongst a load of old crap. It took a few weeks to search for it and recover it, then a further 6 to 10 days to clear it for release.

The problem with harvesting everything is that you are not targeting or searching in a discriminate manner. Once you have this monolithic chunk of data you then have to mine it and in this case it was not done in a timely efficient manner (too much to do real time and hey, we want everything anyway). All in all I feel that there approach to collecting everything means that they are less likely to get any positive hits.

Ask any of those people that download any and every program / film /MP3 they can from 'warez sites' . It is not long before you can't see the woods for the trees.

Cryptocurrency cruncher cranks prime number constellation

Re: Riemann Hypothesis

True. It would allow for much more accurate pattern analysis style attacks.

Chromecast video on UK, Euro TVs hertz so badly it makes us judder – but Google 'won't fix'

Re: Amazon Fire TV

I had an LG TV like that. Apparently the power supply was made in Beijing on a Friday afternoon.

I was watching in 3D and thought the flames were part of the film.

Judder Removal Technique.

When viewing porn if one were to get the correct masturbation rythm then one might cancel out the deletorious effect of frame rate difference.

I suggest that this is the method Google employees used when testing product.

Stop selling spyware to despotic regimes, beg MEPs

Re: How is this related to Regin?

Well it now appears that strings found in Regin appeared in the malware that GCHQ injected into Belgacom (does that ring bell from Symantec report) and other malware on EU Parliament machines during operation Socialist. The attack used spear phishing and social engineering on Belgacom engineers.

So it looks like GCHQ is part of it.

Syrian Electronic Army in news site 'hack' POP-UP MAYHEM

Gigiya the Culprit

Yup. US National hockey league, The Standard, OK Magazine, Parts of the Telegraph,Ferrari, Forbes PC World, Dell, Microsoft, etc. etc.

It appears that they launched an attack through Gigya using DNS redirects, so independent.co.uk redirected to http://i.imgur.com/qD53RZY.png which is a FSA page that displays their logo.

Pulling up other pages on the site such as cricket, sport etc. did not show the same behaviour and things were as normal. So all in all no brilliant skilled attack using zero day exploits or spear phishing just the normal basic redirection to their site.

Apparently they are supporters of a charming chap called Bastard al Assad, a medical chap and not the kind of man to inflict unspeakable carnage and horror on his people. A pink and fluffy chap and the kind of man you would like to have a few pints with down the local boozer.

Yahoo! CIO sued for alleged kickback scam during his stint as Netflix veep

I am sure that if I saw "Netenrich" and "Unix Mercenary" pop up in my accounts i would take a long hard look at what was going on. They should have done it under and off shore company, something called Shaft Netfix or another entity of that ilk.

Home Office: Fancy flogging us some SECRET SPY GEAR?

Re: Mine detectors

"Just give them a coin to flip, same chances of finding mines / bombs / terrorists"

Nahh too hi tech. How about fingers in ears, extend right leg, tap ground in front with big toe and describe a small arc. Rest right leg, advance one pace, extend left leg etc.

Back in the day we did mine detection with a copper coated bayonet probing at an angle of 45 degrees. my how we laughed.

I can see us all being asked to visit the vet to have our chips fitted for this system.

Why did it take antivirus giants YEARS to drill into super-scary Regin? Symantec responds...

Re: ........ – and in the Windows Registry

More likely would be to look in the MI5/6 or GCHQ registry.

Re: "Alternatively they could revamp the malware to the point where it's undetectable."

I am sure they already have revamped it and are now many iterations ahead. From the look of things they were after timely intelligence at that given point in time and presumeably they got it. Any further info from those sources would be mere background noise now and they would move on for legal, financial, operational or other issues.

I am sure that more sophisticated versions are out there and by leaving obsolete kit around for people to find they are muddying the waters and obfuscating other nasties that they have unleashed,

Yes, UK. REST OF EUROPE has better mobe services than you

Re: I have good coverage in France, can get 3G in the middle of nowhere...

Yep, France and Corsica good. I get very good reception in Spain and in my Portuguese house.

Do not get good signal in Portugal using Vodaphone and UK handset.

Hi-torque tank engines: EXTREME car hacking with The Register

Engine Classic.

I love the engine it is a classic British Army refurb / possibly new.

Did it come from Withams?

Megaupload overlord Kim Dotcom: The US has radicalised me!

Re: Relevant?

Interesting name Kim, closely related to the word quim, which as we all know is a sixteenth century word that means cunt. Says it all really.

Re: Hollywood has a thing about German villains

Yep.They seem to like the well educated Brit accent, it frightens the hell out of them.

I am more shocked by him talking a bit of sense. The way the US (nice one Charlie Wilson) funded Osama Bin Laden and the Mujahadeen could not possibly go wrong could it? They encouraged people to fight Jihad, encouraged Saudi Arabia et. al to fund Jihad and travel for people to fight the Russians. They supplied and trained rebels both in the UK and US as well as on the ground and when the fighting was over, well the Great Satan had its fat arse bitten in no uncertain manner. There are other examples indeed a plethora of examples of operational and tactical thinking ignoring strategic thinking in no uncertain manner:

For example the US funded ho Chi Minh back in the forties and that went brilliantly and there were no comebacks. They trained ISIS to some extent and they also trained smaller units that defected to ISIS. They supplied large amounts of fairly sophisticated modern weapons to lots of people that are now in the hands of ISIS. Luckily all of that is not a problems as they are in the hands of modern rational thinking people who wish us no harm. Phewwww, thank Gawd for that.

They seem to have a history of training rum coves who then end up fighting against them. Who would have thought it.

Come back duplicitous and perfidious Albion, you are forgiven and your skills are sorely needed.

We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

Re: ''Best' Desktop, (derisive laughter)

Shit!!! I am well used to OS religious wars but are we now seeing religious factional fighting amongst various OS'?

Sooooo, are you saying that Cinnamon users are a bunch of splitters and that Mint users are filthy apostate scum?

Re: It's an oldie but...

It is still a good one. My favourite one came from late fifties and is called:

Impure Mathematics.

Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.

Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a vulgar function behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once, by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, that he was bent on no good.

"Eureka" she gasped.

"Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little Polynomial you are. I can see you're bubbling over with secs".

"O Sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on."

"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary "

"i, i," she thought, "perhaps he's homogenous then?".

"What order are you," the brute demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet?" he asked.

"Of course not", Polly cried indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent."

"Come, come," said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never," gasped Polly.

"Exchlf," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began to smooth her points of inflexion. Poor Polly. All was up. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.

The moral of this sad story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.

Re: Are major version upgrades still a pain in the face?

I am having no problems with it at the moment, it is updating easily enough and has had no reason to moan. In the event that you hear a scream that will be me.

Re: Security

Yes, it was authored by a well known irish man called Ronald Regin .

Re: Upgrades

<snip>

"One of these days I must reformat the disks and start again. We always did that with MS-DOS & Win9x every year. Speeded things up no end. It was XP activation process that discouraged me from continuing ;-)"

Sadly it is still the case that a re-install invigorates the machine and gets rid of unsightly blemishes and wrinkles.

Having said that NT4 on a DEC Alpha was one of the sweetest Windows systems I ever used, 2000 OK, Win 7 OK, Win 8 ? nuff said geezer.

"Did you offer to sell them an installation DVD for £20?"

No, she was a well educated statistician. I did however show her how I could back her up on to my floppy and she said I was 95% certain that you would do that. She was very impressed by the lack of space that my kernel took up but annoyed that a stack overflow could happen so quickly.

Naive user was a popular term when I was at uni back in the 90s.

I must say that Mint is a lovely piece of software. I took a 'naive' user plonked them down in front of a fresh setup and before I new it they were on wireless looking at Facebook and researching what popular beat combos were in the top decem this week.

I am sure by now they will have discovered the Inertnet <sic> and the joys of Usenet, Ascii art, base 64 encoding / decoding, the joys of uk.misc and demon.local and finally that wonderful new search engine called Gopher.

Said the man whose first laptop was a PP 640 DD.

Suffering satellites! Goonhilly's ARTHUR REBORN for SPAAAACE

Re: History

<snip>

Agreed, nice to see loads of stuff that make your fingers tingle and want to get tactile.

"Also, nice rack. Beige boxes can only hold proper hardware."

Nice rack and beige box? They should rename the dish Kylie.

Regin: The super-spyware the security industry has been silent about

<snip>

"One news story quoted a "Gartner analyst Avivah Litan" as directly saying it was Russia, China, or North Korea, or even all three of them working together in a vast alliance. He didn't quite say "axis of evil", but the thought was there"

<snip>

There is a man I would like to see pass the bacon sandwich test.

Wanders off singing medley of Hava nagilla and home on the range.

Re: Why was Ireland 3rd most heavily targeted?

Big Finance center, lots of tax avoidance schemes, big time I.T. / comms center, masters of peat extraction, first country to have a Guinness tanker which neatly leads us to Saudi.

El Reg reanimates Cash'n'Carrion merchandising tentacle

Re: /steel

"And I know that red is a house colour an all, but red bottles are for fuel, blue for water."

Correct, the one behind me contains alcohol for my Trangia. But, but... Why not place menthylated spirits in the bottle? This is both a fuel for the fire and for the soul.

'Regin': The 'New Stuxnet' spook-grade SOFTWARE WEAPON described

"GCHQ almost certainly - the US don't need to spy on dissident republicans in Eire.

(just putting it out there) some might argue we do...."

It is a well known fact that IRA men lie under deep cover in the research, hospitality, airline, energy and telecoms sectors.

I can se it all now:

Sean, would you be after planting the bomb on the hated Saxon oppressor's British Airways flight tonight?

Ach jaysus Paddy I would like to but my thesis is running behind and I promised Mary I would dig up some sacks of peat before I erect the marquee for tonights celidh for the tourists. Could you not be after passing it over to Liam as his thesis is done and he will be finishing work at Telecom Eireann early tonight.

Bejaysus Sean I will so. How is Sinead's dissertation on the Munroe effect and explosively formed projectiles going? I saw her at mass the other day and she was after looking banjaxed so she was.

Those targets look economic! Could be the French though although I would put it down to the US and it's 52 state.

Re: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Ireland @ James

<snip>

""a degree of technical competence rarely seen""

By God sir you are right, it is straight from an Indian call center.

Re: Who dunnit?

"lets see, which country might have Russia as a historical enemy and suffers terrorist attacks from Saudi AND Ireland.."

Ahhhh, but it seems more economic than anything which would explain why you have a higher amount of individuals infected.

My bet is the US and Israel those two great guardians of fair play and democracy.

Re: Strange PDF ...

Ooh err, you might be on to something there. Years ago when I studied Erse or shall we call it Gaielge, the alphabet was as follows: abcdefghilnoprstu , with bh for V mh for W etc.

Could it be an evil Irish construction created by the Tims / Prods to achieve word domination and access to cheaper alcohol?

Get a job in Germany – where most activities are precursors to drinking

Re: Stuff is, is, it, issons, issez, issent and just speak the <snip title too long>

Start by learning I, me, want etc.There is no shame in asking "me want go toilet" or "want two beers I". The real tipping point is when you have enough vocabulary to say "how do you say this or what do you call that in <insert language>?".

I spent years at school trying to learn French and knew the grammar intimately. It took a few smack in the mouth from a Legion sergent <sic> to make me learn French and really want to learn it in a proper manner.

Once you have the first language the others generally come easier as they tend to be similar, so for Example French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese sit well together. Believe it or not English and Portuguese sit well together with a few thousand common words but will slightly different endings e.g. Attention - Atencao etc.. Once you learn how to speak the language then the ability to write, spell and do grammatical exegesis comes along with it.

Re: Go West(phalia) young man!

<snip>

""They are always on their phones checking their Facebook and Twitter instead of doing their work."."

I saw a job advertised over here for a barman, it said "must be able to work without phone and Internet" .

That made me laugh, as did the amount of people in Rome that text and drive, even the army and police are at it.

"Agree, and especially avoid expats who only hang around other expats."

<snip>

I totally and utterly agree with you both. I speak quite a few languages and I am horrified by the British attitude of "they have to speak English to me". I love my languages and I am proud that I am a bit of a polyglot. Most Brits do not even believe that I speak languages fluently, they also have problems identifying the language when I am speaking it.

I am currently in Portugal and speak the language, hang out with Portuguese and in Portuguese watering holes and love it (pint of Magners 2 quid, pint of lager 80p). The amount of times I have been told by Brits that Portuguese is too hard to learn is beyond belief.

Sooo, get out there, hang out with locals, enjoy the culture, learn the language and if you find it difficult, alcohol helps as it represses grammatical inhibitions brought on by a UK education. Stuff is, is, it, issons, issez, issent up teachers arse and just speak the language 'like wot it ought to be spoken' <sic>.

BIG FAT Lies: Porky Pies about obesity

Re: Brook your ire Sir!

<Snip>

"Anyone care to do a few back of the envelope calculations on heat balance for living in a centrally heated home vis-à-vis the "frozen window pane bedrooms" of the 40s and 50s?"

For me that would be 60s. 70's and into the 80s. Even to this day I keep my window open, love the cold and the joy of getting between cold cotton sheets borders on the monastic mentality.

'How a censorious and moralistic blogger ruined my evening'

Re: Damning Facts

"FWIW John is Editorial Director and cofounder of The Reg.

C."

"C."! Are you saying he is also the head of MI6? Well I will not be telling him anything at all, bejasus, so I won't.

Re: Only one comment to that

No such person old chap.

Quebec's latest bid to break away from Canada HALTED by a single dot

Re: Send 'em all back to France

Oyyy, send the buggers back to Ireland as well you wee gobshite <insert smiley thing>.

I love France and all things French. Vive la France, Vive la Guerre et Vive le Sacre Mercenaire.

Wanders off into the distance marching at 88 paces per minute and singing Eugenie les l'armes aux yeux.

Re: Stop signs at junctions.

"Which all explain why, when French-Canadian programmes are shown on French TV, they are subtitled in French like all foreign-language shows."

I see a lot of that with Scottish and English shows having been sub titled in English for the US market. Canadian french is certainly different and uses lots of archaic constructs and words.

My favourite translation ever was on Portuguese TV. They translated fair dinkum the Aussie term for the truth or straight up and they had it as faire dinkum in French which as we all know is to do dinkum.

Now I have been around a bit and no a few things but I have never done dinkum and I am not sure I would wish to, consensual partner or otherwise.

"Québec is also the home of the chien chaud."

I once went out with a chienne chaud from Quebec, ahhh I see what you mean.

Re: Petty cash

Zut alors!!

I love the way they speak French, lovely and archaic.

Surely they could just use the domain and forward it to jesuisanglophone.ca ?

Patch NOW! Microsoft slings emergency bug fix at Windows admins

Re: A better question would be...

<Snip>

Good summary of things as they stand.

"Have I missed something?"

Yep, buggy software written by the malware coves, inability to understand exploit, inherent complexity of any system i.e. if it is infected with abc perhaps it does not work properly due to component efg, OS component hij or another piece of malware klm.

Complex systems require complex malware. A piece of malware infecting 10000 machines may only work as expected on a small percentage of them. Why? because you cannot mitigate for the unique signature (think finger print) of any machine.

Further to all that, you have bank security at login point / portal etc.

Soooo, I would put it to you that it is easy to buy a round for 2 people who drink the same drink, it is easy to buy for a 1000 who drink the same drink, add a bit of inherent complexity, half measures, doubles, diet drink etc. it gets terribly complex.

Re: Have belief, you'll feel better.

<snip>

"Do your best and remember you are more likely to be hit by some idiot in the company with a bad USB stick (for example) than someone clever enough to get past the firewall. Happy days"

But my mate in I.T. says it is the system that is crap and not the USB stick.

<rant/>

I have just spent a lot of time and effort proving that a particular file from a particular source was crashing a users machine. The user was told that the memory error was down to lack of memory on their machine (32 bit 3.4 gig useable) by the company in question. Funnily enough it worked on a few other machines of a similar spec. I then changed OS to 64 bit, still no luck, jumped up and down and screamed at company whose software was exibiting problem. Told them what the problem was - a disclaimer badly placed in a non Autocad created dwg.

Finally they agreed, logged it, passed it to developers and accepted ownership.

I am still hearing from user "I do not understand why it works on other machines"

<rant/>

Re: Slack

"Microsoft invented the culture of buggy software. "Oh we'll fix that next patch time"."

<snip>

Cobblers old chap. Buggy software and programming has been around since the Difference Engine and even further back to the abacus.

With the complexity inherent in most modern OS' ,systems and programs in general the likelihood of problems increase exponentially.

Re: MS, please help me understand

<snip>

"Thereby, instead of keeping on whining about MS, just ensure your systems - whatever they run - are properly kept up to date."

I say sir. How dare you post a reasonable argument eschewing the OS dogma seen hereabouts. Have a pint and a thumbs up.