Posts by Missing Semicolon

Criminals spent 10 days in US dental insurer's systems extracting data of 9 million

Once again

The criminals (the data holding companies that regard the pitiful fines and compensation a cost of doing business) get away with totally failing to compensate the victims in any meaningful way.

Fed up with Python setup and packaging? Try a shot of Rye

Re: No mention of pip and venv?

"And, because there is no lock file, what you get might still be different from what I get". You don't pin your dependencies? Tut.

Re: Sorry if this sounds negative, but...

Pycharm does a nice job of isolating the environment changes to a project - basically by defaulting to creating a venv for it. That and a couple of deadsnakes installs, and you're golden.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC vs managers

I had a boss who decided to tidy the software cupboard. In the era when licence keys were printed on the box.....

Re: My Mantra*

98% of what I have is crap. But, which is the 2%?

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

Cheaper devices structure the power system as charger-to-battery-to-device, with no charger-to-device path. This is bad, as the battery is now being float-charged all the time the device is on, and connected to the charger. Float charging == death for LiPo cells.

Re: D'oh. Botched my own edit.

@liam, do you go to computer shops, try to pay with an utterly invalid card, then whip out your Reg staffer's card and say "wanna writeup?"

Google, Facebook, Chaos Computer Club join forces to oppose German state spyware

Re: No problem

"We recently updated our privacy policy to provide more clarity on the information we may collect," a TikTok spokesperson said.

Meaning, we have been doing this for a while, so we thought we'd better update the Ts&Cs before somebody noticed.

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...

Re: Back to the past

Got several Thinkpads, and you'll prise my X230 from my cold dead hands. But..

I'm experimenting with a Framework. Treating myself to an AMD one, so still waiting.

The lower-specced Intel devices are quite reasonably priced.

Yet to find out how terrible the keyboard is, but the display looks like it's going to be sweet.

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

What value!

£100m to save £10m a year.

The solution will not be running in 10 years' time, I bet you. So an overall loss.

For £100m you could not just hire some techies, you could start a software company to build the solution. At least then you'd have a solution, and a software company.

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

Dystopian

The parents thought (and why should they not, they are not experts) that the ipad was locked. Smart kid unlocks it. Short of hovering over them all the time they are playing, what's the solution?

More UK councils caught by Capita's open AWS bucket blunder

The bad news train keeps rolling for Capita

Not really. Bad news for the poor ordinary folks who will now have to watch their finances for pretty well "for ever' (I bet the data thieves know to wait until the free enhanced monitoring expires), but basically no effect on lucrative future contracts.

"We are working with our third-party technical advisors to investigate this issue"

Is that the new name for sitting in a conference room, holding your head in your hands, repeating "f**k, f**k, f**k"? Because there is little else to do.

MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations

Cloud. That's what kills the consulting/support market. Everybody's stuff is on the cloud now, so, given the requirement for a robust, backed-up database service, do you pay a bunch of consultants to set you up a HA mariadb cluster, with a backup scheme, or just pay AWS/Azure for their offering. The cloud providers famously grab all the open-source they can and re-sell it as a service, with no payback to the authors.

Hey Apple, what good is a status page if you only update it after the outage?

VM modem reboot.

Which, to be fair, can fix things. Just had some "maintenance" on the network that made the packet loss rate appalling. Was about to call, so I rebooted. Issue fixed.

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Re: Upside down images

Even more moons ago. We have VT220 terminals on our desks. Whilst colleague (who had it coming, believe me) was away we pulled the case of his off, and reversed the polarity of all of the scan coils to the CRT. Result - upside down display. We then placed the monitor upside down on his desk. He comes back, sees the monitor,puts it right way up, goes "ha-ha", and switches on. To be greeted by the login prompt in the bottom right corner. Delicious.

Britain's largest private pension scheme reveals scale of Capita break-in

£20m?

Tens of pounds per person. That does not cover very much does it?

They should actually pay for fraud insurance for each victim. Which would I suspect cost rather more.

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

Re: Ubuntu Cinnamon is better looking than Kubuntu

.... and breathe...

Two Microsoft Windows bugs under attack, one in Secure Boot with a manual fix

Re: Yikes!

One day, booting Linux will simply no longer be possible. Not today, but someday.

At the moment, we can turn off secure boot....

... but maybe you won't be allowed to access some services.

No responsibility.

So, how long has Secure Boot been a thing? And yet, even now, it can be subverted? Why is there not some kind of hammer we can hurt these guys with?

Activists gatecrash Capita's AGM to protest GPS tracking contract

Sorry to be dim

But don't we have a bit of a job chucking out people who don't have the right to be here? I mean, unless you think that we shouldn't be doing that at all.

Capita looking at a bill of £20M over breach clean-up costs

They have everybody

So pretty well 100% of UK households.

Google Cloud's watery Parisian outage enters third week, with no end in sight

"Google Cloud products in europe-west9-c may not be available to customers."

An announcement that was not followed by "so we have redeployed all of the workloads to europe-west9-q (a bunch of containers in a car-park} so that service is maintained". Odd that. Almost as if they don't have to give a s**t.

Cloudflare opposes Europe's plan to make Big Tech help pay for networks

Re: This old chestnut

ISPs do charge for internet access. I have a bill here. The problem is that the ISPs business model is based on there being nothing to do with said bandwidth. Well, now there is, and the amount of data has exploded. If the ISP cares to renegotiate their peering charges, that's up to them, but the fact that there are now businesses selling content over the internet is simply the new reality, not some kind of crime.

FYI: Intel BootGuard OEM private keys leak from MSI cyber heist

Security based on broacast hardcoded secrets...

... that rely on corporate security is inherently insecure. Who woulda thunkit?

NASA tweaks Voyager 2's power supply to avoid another sensor shutdown

Re: And I thought my Model M keyboard was long lived...

No spilled coffee in space....

Hubble spots stellar midwife unit pumping out baby planets

Hubble still winning.

Joy!

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Wrong number of P's

It's 7!

India's major IT outsourcers slow hiring and fret about deal pipelines

So the code will get even worse. And I bet that there will be chunks of code that will get generated then checked-in, without human intervention or proper testing. If that isn't the plan, why pay for AI?

Major decision on GDPR compensation rights expected soon

Re: Mon-material

Yes, it would be good if as well as reputational damage, it could be expanded to "stress caused by knowing that at any point, you could be scammed out of your life savings". If that was worth, say, a few grand per person, cases where millions of people are affected would indeed bring down the company responsible (TalkTalk, for example). Once that is a possibility, shareholders will start asking hard questions - which was the point of GDPR in the first place.

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

Python Typing

Python now does have typing! Mypy will do code inspection based on type decorations in your code. Done properly, it makes it much easier to catch misuse of dynamic typing.

It forces you to say "ok,l this parameter can be anything, what kind of everything do I mean" so that all of the callers are checked. And also, if you have handling a variety of types, to pull you up on "but *this* type doesn't implement 'foo'!".

Having said that, "doing it right" can be a right mare. I both hate its baroqueness and "don't-you-have-a-CS-degree"-ness (the definitions required for generics and polymorphism can get mind-bending), but love the way that code ends up with far fewer hard-to-find bugs, particularly when refactoring.

Go ahead, forget that password. Use a passkey instead, says Google

Re: Oh boy here we go

Plus now all of the authenticating objects are stealable, physical things. A key is stealable. Your fingerprint is stealable.

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

Odd how the copyright problem gets swerved.

OpenAI have slurped *everything*. With no regard as to copyright, with the old "if it's on the web, it's public" nostrum. Books, code, news articles, everything. It has been copied and "stored in an electronic retrieval system", to quote the notice in the front pages of many books. And then published, if you can get ChatGPT to regurgitate great chunks of it.

So why haven't they been sued into a smoking hole in the ground?

Apple gives up legal war on iPhone CPU wizard who co-founded Nuvia

Scenix SX-28

A bunch of engineers at Microchip got fed up with the lack of impetus to improve the venerable and inefficient 4-clock-per-instruction PIC architecture, and went off to found Scenix. The SX-series where pipelined 1-clock per instruction devices that went (for the time) blazingly fast (up to 75MHz), that, whilst sharing no hardware elements, nonetheless used the same instruction set. I seem to remember that Microchip got very sniffy about it, and the line didn't last long. I still have a few, with the sx-key, in a box.

ESA's Jupiter-bound Juice spacecraft has a sticky problem with its radar

Nah. Needs an R2 unit.

Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows code in memory-safe Rust

"all of these expensive checks are in the debug build"

Not a secure solution. Ok, with 100% testing, and fuzzing, and wotnot, the debug build will trigger an error on a vulnerability. But with always-on checking (for free with Rust) means that even an imperfectly-tested app will quit at runtime, instead of allowing data leakage or arbitrary code execution. Denial-of-service, but not compromise.

C has had valgrind and friends for ages, to perform these checks. Heck, I wrote a horror that overrode malloc() and new() in the late 90's that used the Windows allocator (originally PharLap286/386 on DOS) to detect array overruns and use-after-free.

AMD probes reports of deep fried Ryzen 7000 chips

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

Nice board.... but... RGB! Aaagh!

Singapore tells its people: Go forth and block those ads

Re: Vinegar.....

Youtube ads are particularly terrible as the targeting is just so, so, poor. Showing the same ad or series of ads repeatedly does not make anyone want to rush out and buy the product.

El Reg needs to police better.

"Especially reputable internet publishers who have an in-house team that polices the ads shown, cough, splutter."

I don't run an ad-blocker. I run Privacy Badger. Which blocks sites that implement tracking, despite being sent a "do-not-track" header. Which mysteriously nukes 99% of ads on this site. There was a time a bit ago, where the occasional advert appeared - presumably because it was not trying to track me.

You need to police your advertisers to stop them attempting to steal information from the site users - plainly they are trying to find out (without asking you) where else the typical Commentard goes on the internet. Not cool.

Still no subscription option?

Where are we now – Microsoft 363? Cloud suite suffers another outage

Re: Single points

"And this, boys and girls, is why open source exists.", and why, inch by inch, "open Source" will get edged out of the business arena by legal risk, copyright, patents, interoperability, censorship, liability, anything that the Big Corps can lobby for, until once again, they get to charge what they like for what they like, with no pesky competition.

It's a matter of when, not if, customers move to the cloud, SAP tells investors

Sick company

If the profits are compromised "owing partly to the increase in share-based compensation" i.e, paying the execs more.

What does an ex-Pharma Bro do next? If it's Shkreli, it's an AI Dr bot

Scammers are attracted to lots of money. The US healthcare market is awash with the stuff.

International cops urge Meta not to implement secure encryption for all

Re: This whole excercise is not what it looks like

Especially if the snooping is subcontracted to Crapita, who then lose the lot.

Huawei replaces ERP with homebrew effort, claims it’s perfect and shows company will thrive despite sanctions

ERP as moneypit

It just proves that it is really possible to implement ERP yourself. There is no magic sauce in SAP, Dynamics, Oracle ERP or whatever. They are supremely expensive dinosaurs, so hard to integrate with your business processes it is no faster than designing and building in-house.

Capita has 'evidence' customer data was stolen in digital burglary

"there is proof that some customer data was scooped up by cyber baddies"

== They've taken the lot. Army recruitment, BBC license fee, the lot. The crims probably now have the data for most people in the United Kingdom now.

So, having lost personal information for millions of people, guess how much jail time there will be? And guess how many Government contracts will now be moved elsewhere? A Round Number!

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

No awareness

If she'd just tailed the "pity city" rant with "... and I'm getting no bonus either until you get a bonus" she would have been in a much better place. So easy. yest, so hard for the greedy, entitled, and, yes, lazy exec class.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Re: Those are rookie numbers

yes, but you land, spend a few minutes pumping kerosene in to the tanks, then take off again. The point about liquid fuel is that it is consumed, and is then easily replaced. A battery is still heavy when it contains no energy, then must be recharged. Which takes longer.

If you recharge faster, you bring forward the time when the battery must be discarded and replaced. Replacement normally is not economically viable.

My ICE engine can just have a few hundred quid's worth of spannering, and it 's good to go.

Even at 30% efficiency, that's still 3.6kWh as against 0.5kWh.

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

"lorry lane"

And you never, never drive in Lane 1 of a "smart" motorway. As that is where the broken-down vehicles that can't reach a refuge that is up to a mile away are stuck, possibly with no lights.

So here am I, trundling along in Lane 2, and I don't care how many numpties undertake me in Lane 1, instead of using Lanes 3 and 4. Sorry, I don't want to risk death every time I use a motorway.

I notice that whilst no more new ones will be created, the existing ones will continue to be run in 4-lane mode, instead of permanently switching on the "no way" sign in lane 1. Even with (allegedly) more refuges, they are still death-traps and car-ruiners. Ever had to drive to the next refuge on a flat tyre that might have been repairable, instead of having to drive a mile on it and need to replace both the tyre and the wheel?

European datacenters worried they can't get cheap, reliable juice

Whodathunkit?

Modern life requires reliable consistent energy supplies.

If you legislate against those supplies, you get power cuts.

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

Re: This is why we need code review

Now it's "latest Google Chrome or nothing".

And it must be the latest too! "Web site does not work" -> "Have you upgraded Chrome?"