Posts by Michael Hoffmann

Misconfigured Azure Blob at Raven Hengelsport exposed records of 246,000 anglers – and took months to tackle, claim infosec researchers

Meh

Wouldn't hackers have bigger fish to fry? Yeah sure, they probably caught all those records, hook, line and sinker. But there's so many fish in the sea, you'd think they would be more interested in reeling those in.

I'll stop now.

In the Navy, we want to share data with some ease. In the Navy, can someone help us with this please?

Argh!

And not ONE comment about now not being able to get that bloody song out of your head?!

We want you. We want you. We want you, for a new contract.... or something.

Make it stop!

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: I suspect that Stardock

I confess I've been running Start8 and Start10 for years - making it look and especially behave like good old WinXP (thanks to Microsoft dragging along the old Quicklaunch bar in a hidden corner of the OS).

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Heavy winds here last night

... now I know that was the held breaths rom thousands of NASA engineers and scientists going around the world. All exhaling simultaneously.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Re: Commander Vimes style?

Wan't that one. Was definitely Vimes shirt-fronting some tavern keeper (Harga?).

Commander Vimes style?

And of course, I can't find the book with the quote about the real proper breakfast, by Samuel Vimes.

Something about runny yolks, charcoal crunchy bits something something. Something "tricky order" ending with "you managed it yesterday".

Somebody help me out - or this will be stuck in the back of my brain all day.

Kepler spots four rogue Earth-mass exoplanets floating in space, unbound to any star

Don't Forget!

"Dark Star" - they actually did something about it!

Don't give me any of that intelligent life crap! Just give me something to blow up!

IBM President and former Red Hat boss Jim Whitehurst quits

Ouch!

From the article "We assume that discussions regarding his departure were not conducted over IBM's iffy email system. Presumably messages were exchanged via intern or fax machine."

That burn was to vicious, I think some of the pixels on my screen melted.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: The great Okkoto rises again!

A Ghibli fan as well, I see!

US Supreme Court rules teens cussing out schools on social media is protected speech

Private schools, however?

As is always emphasised, the US 1st Amendment applies to government. Private entities have more leeway in controlling speech.

Does that mean that a private school would still be in its rights to kick a student out?

Would-be AWS bomber pleads guilty, faces 5 to 20 years behind bars for plot to take out government servers

Kill off 70 percent of the Internet...

He could have just become an engineer at Fastly!

Yes, yes, alright, that IS my coat, I'm going already!

Sold: €15k invisible sculpture that's a must-see for art lovers

That first sentence...

"Readers of El Reg are nothing if not cultured and frequent dabblers of the avant-garde. "

How long did it take you to write this, interrupted by paroxysms of laughter?

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

Re: Punishment?

So, when I hit the delete account button two or three years ago, that was self-inflicted punishment, then?

If that's the case... I must be into this punishment thing! Yes, YES, more! I've been a baaaad boy!

*cough* sorry...

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Examples...

That's with people you like I assume?

For those I don't like I throw in things like flash RAM for SSD (nowadays) and video RAM, just to hear their anguished sobs.

(who am I kidding? it's *my* anguished sobs when I have to explain these)

Stack Overflow acquired for $1.8bn by Prosus (no, me neither)

Re: Just StackOverflow?

Indeed. If the arrangement essentially breaks off SO from SE, then for that amount of money you can expect some MBA to try for Experts Exchange 2.0.

Just StackOverflow?

Or all of StackExchange?

The hot discussions on SE Meta seem a bit confused as to whether it's one or all.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

What does it take...

...to actually get the concept of privacy into people's heads? Anyone?

Or is it bad marketing that makes Mozilla fail to drive this home better?

I simply don't get it. I'd use Lynx and XMosaic before I use Chrome or Edge. Even my Firefox is loaded with addons to block everything the browser isn't now kindly blocking by itself.

</morning rant>

Now for some coffee...

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Just opened tabs for all the interesting sounding article. Excellent timing that Victoria just went back into lockdown. I'll need that time!

Arm freezes hiring until Nvidia takeover, cancels everyone's 'wellbeing' allowance

Re: Missing info

This should arguably go into the article. Maybe contact El Reg hacks as "according to an anonymous source not authorised to speak for the company..." ?

Nvidia nerfs RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti GPUs to shoo away Ethereum miners

Electricity prices

Maybe when they start charging miners power prices commensurate with the cost of coins and the cost to the environment?

(so: never?)

Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

Malcolm Turnbull

Considering how the LNP has been disowning Turnbull, I could see Herr Peter Dutton going "Aha! See? Case in point!"

Salesforce fell over so hard today, it took out its own server status page

Re: It was the engineer in the DC with the keyboard

Forgive me Paul Vixie for I too have sinned. Let s/he who hath never Quickly Changed An NS Record Before Nipping Off To The Pub throw the first kill -HUP!

Icon is putting my coat back on at the pub after getting called back to the office.

App Tracking: Apps plead for users to press allow, but 85% of Apple iOS consumers are not opting in

Re: May not be directly related...

I recently ended up watching Youtube on a browser without my general holy trinity of uBlock/Disconnect/Tampermonkey. It was appalling: more ads than a US sitcom. I didn't even *know* they injected them. Said trinity does such a good job that you simply watch on a clean ad-free stream, without pauses or anything.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

Indigo?

There wouldn't be an original Indigo among them? Every so often I look for one. Looking back, when we got some of those at work, an argument could be made that it set my whole career on a different path.

Yahoo! and! AOL! sold! for! $5bn! as! Verizon! abandons! media! empire! dreams!

Patents?

As I can't imagine what else would be worth 5billion, is there any indication there's a patent portfolio worth trolling with?

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

Insert meme here

While I share quite a bit of their cryptocoin distaste, was it just me who had this "Old Man Yells At Cloud" vibe throughout this entire article?

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Libel? Slander?

Can someone who is more versed in US law explain why Oracle continuing to harp on with their statements doesn't constitute libel or slander now?

I mean, to me it seems the highest US court has said "no, Google did NOT break the law and what they did was legal under fair use". If Oracle continues to gripe and make statements that in essence say "Google broke the law because WE say so"... isn't that illegal? They're not saying "in our opinion the SCOTUS got it wrong", if I read this right? Meaning that would be free speech.

If you can't log into Azure, Teams or Xbox Live right now: Microsoft cloud services in worldwide outage

It's *always* DNS.

Google's boss for the next billion users bails after beating that target handily

White Nerds Burden?

"The scheme aims to recruit new users, principally in developing nations. Google styles the quest as a mission to civilize"

Is that actually what they say? To.... *civilise* those users in developing nations?! If so, it's breathtaking. Like straight out of the handbook of colonialism.

And yes, I'm aware that with his name, Mr Sengupta is likely not "white" - but he probably didn't write that "mission statement" either.

This Netgear SOHO switch has 15 – count 'em! – vulns, which means you need to upgrade the firmware... now

Re: No, please don't fix anything, Netgear!

Yeah, I was wiresharking (none of it is https, natch), watching my username and password in the clear and dug in, and finding most of the info is *still* there even when not authenticated (username, for example, thought the password is masked).

No, please don't fix anything, Netgear!

I've been using an undocumented, unauthenticated endpoint for monitoring internals of some Netgear devices for years now. First time I found it, I facepalmed so hard I almost knocked out my own teeth, but then went "oh hey, this is convenient, just gotta keep it far, far away from the Internet".

(yes, I'm being facetious, but it's still true: it's treasure trove of info in there, so I thought I'd make use of it for my own devices)

Valheim: How the heck has more 'indie shovelware with PS2 graphics' sold 4 million copies in a matter of weeks?

Re: No mention of Ark Surviva Evolvedl?

Just did a quick search and Valheim *will* allow private servers. This just bumped the game on to my "awright, this I gotta play" list!

No mention of Ark Surviva Evolvedl?

Said game did it with dinosaurs, so what's not to like?

Well, what's not to like is that the makers were too busy just rolling out more and more subscription-based expansions, moving further and further away from the pre-historic setting into scifi. Oh, and ignoring game-breaking and gear-destroying bugs for years.

Let's hope Valheim does better. I still run my own private Ark server for fun (so I can rollback to a backup when yet another bug wipes out weeks of work). Wonder if Valheim allows that?

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.11, says it's so good your significant other wants you to test it on Valentine's Day

What Valentine's Dinner?

Our romantic seafood dinner at our favourite restaurant was cancelled due to re-lockdown in Victoria.

Might as well muck about with the kernel, I s'pose.

No joy for Julian Assange as Uncle Sam confirms it will keep pushing for WikiLeaker's extradition to America

IANAL...

... but I'm honestly curious:

If he'd gone to Sweden, faced up to the rape charges, even been convicted, what would he have gotten under Swedish jurisdiction? He wouldn't have been extradited to the USA, I'm quite sure, not by Sweden. (I could be wrong, any Swedes here?)

Would he effectively have had his life back a long time ago?

Of course, he could have then come back to Australia and our government, ever ready to please the US, would have nabbed him for said extradition.

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

If NFL...

... is a "violent egg-and-spoon race" what would he make of Rugby of Aussie Rules Footy?

No wussy protective armour, no 60 second commercials after every 15 second game play, fair play is if somebody helps you pick up your own teeth after a bit of a collision.

We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

Re: Undead teachers are nothing new.

"I swear that man made Yoda look like a suckling babe."

<nerdrage><sputter>They don't suckle! When babies, they eat... err... spider embryos, frogs, lizard eggs, octopus things with fangs</nerdrage>

Derailing a thread? What do you mean?

Scottish enviro bods shrug off ransomware gang's extortion attempt as 4,000 files dumped online, saying it's nothing big

Takes me back

Many, many moons ago, I worked for the US Antarctic Program. Somehow Romanian hackers had managed to break into a number of science systems at the South Pole and download gigs of data. No mean feat seeing as the station had limited capacity via satellite links that were only up around 8-11 hours per day.

The fun part was that they were trying to blackmail the NSF with releasing that data as well! This was before ransomware as we now know it. Also, this was around the time of the X-Files movie, if anybody remembers that. You know the one with the secret alien base on the South Pole? From the communication it was clear the Romanians thought that we either pay or they would dump the files and publish The Truth (That Is Out There).

What it actually was, was hundreds of gigabytes of atmospheric and astrophysical data (google ICECUBE and AMANDA projects), which, like all science data, was merely embargoed for 2 years so that the principal investigators and their teams could publish findings first, seeing as it was *their* work. Afterwards it becomes public anyway. So yeah, hacking scientific institutes and threatening to ransom their data is not really a lucrative income stream - it's going to be published anyway!

Oh, and through cooperation of the FBI and Interpol, AFAIR, they arrested the guys.

The best part: it got me a 6 week sojourn to McMurdo and South Pole, the closest I'll ever get to space travel (speaking in terms of hostile environments where only few people have ever gone). Those memories will stick with me for life, so, mulțumesc, baieti!

Fearing she had stumbled across a body, dogwalker reports pota-toe to police

Nervous breakdown

I can't take it! I can't take it! Make it stop!

First the article... so much punnage... the puns, the puns, they burn!

Then the commentards... more puns... even more puns... my head... my brain...

I'll never be able to look a potato in the eyes again!

Roma, we've had un problema: When every flight's final destination is a date with Windows Boot Manager

Re: "I started drinking"®

Indeed. And I can think of worse places to be stuck in than a place where I can work my way through the wine regions of Italy. The greatest hardship is deciding whether to start south and work your way north or the other way around.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Should it really be called Redhat anymore?

"IBM-Redhat"? "IBMHat"? "Big Red"? Ooops, that one's taken.

We got it! Japanese space agency confirms its probe has Ryugu asteroid samples

Re: 1st Capsule is now open

Some top-shelf Sake, surely? Takusan nonde!

Ever had a bogus call from someone claiming to be the IRS? A tax scam ringleader just got sent down for 20 years

Re: Jim...

Spent a fun couple of hours watching those guys in action. There's also a few that actually speak Hindi and throw some choice words at them once they manage to wipe their machines. Apparently a lot of those scammers have never heard of backups.

That said, one of those vids led to some interesting comments from Indians: apparently this scum has no hesitation to scam their own citizens, many who can afford it even less. The rewards are mind-boggling, where even the underlings live in luxury by local standards (and the bosses even by Western standards). But they bribe police and local politicians (of those aren't part of the scammer org in the first place) and are nearly untouchable.

Manchester United email servers remain offline amid what is being called a 'ransomware' attack

Has anyone asked...

... Jürgen Klopp where he was during the times the attack supposedly happened?

You deserve to be sidelined for that!

'Unmute' named one of Oxford Dictionary's words of the year

No phrases?

I suppose it's because entire phrases aren't allowed? "Unmute" is just the button, generally clicked as a result of "you're on mute". That one is most certainly the most common expression I've heard in the last year.

Six months after A100 super-GPU's debut, Nvidia doubles memory, ups bandwidth

But can it run Crysis?

Apologies for the over-used, tiresome meme, but I actually mean it in the sense that I'm curious: these are still labelled GPUs, but are they actually still usable as graphical processors or have they now become so specialised that despite their name there isn't much 'G' in there, it's all CUDA and AI/ML and TensorFlow and what-not?

IBM warns staff across the business of fresh 45-day redundancy consultations

Best place to work?

Only recently some article flew by listing IBM as still one of the Top 3 best places to work.

Says all about the value of those rankings, dunnit?

Police chopper chasing a crim near an airport? Ideal time to use my laser pointer, says Texas idiot now behind bars

Re: Retroreflectors?

How about laser-guided missiles? Just follow the source instead of the pointer.