Posts by Gezza

May Day! PM sacks UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson for Huawei 5G green-light 'leak'

Perhaps he needed to go as he was too sharp and a potential problem with May having signed the UK into the Euro Army, squirrelled away in the WA if she fails to have Brexit actually stopped.

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

Re: I am always disappointed in modern computing

Isn’t that from Armageddon? The bloke who goes whacko on the asteroid and rides the drill head like Kong in Dr Strangelove then shoots everything up with the remote gun.

First A380 flown in anger to be broken up for parts

Re: This underlines one more thing

What amuses me most is that the expression I want to use here to point out that you’ve completely missed the joke is ‘that flew right over your head’. Ah, the things that make you chuckle.

Zookeepers charged after Kodiak bear rides shotgun to Dairy Queen

Re: F1 Opportunity?

grid girls -> grid kids = alliteration -> assonance

just saying, for no particular or practical reason other thn its friday and I'm done with this week.

Re: Bear material

i'm going to guess Hamleys.

It's Galileo Groundhog Day! You can keep asking the same question, but it won't change the answer

Re: The UK go it alone?

Blue Streak mean anything to you?

I have no flag to fly either side of the referendum result but it really is getting rather tiresome being confronted with endless stream of sado-masochistic 'we're all fcuked 'coz we're crap and EU was a great club and aren't all you brexiteers such a bunch of ignorant numpties and we're so clever' type comments whilst I try finding some sort of reasoned arguement or 'funny' in the comments section. 'We're all doomed' - OK, so sit back and get run over or do something a bit more positive than just slagging everything off. But shut the fcuk up about what has happened - it's happened. Stop the wallowing and wailing. And back to this topic, we are actually quite good at space stuff as well as plenty of other stuff and so far I cant see the clusterfcuk that was promised so can we stop the self flagellation for a bit and give those with ideas a bit of air and support. We're not 5th biggest economy in world for nothing.

How a QR code can fool iOS 11's Camera app into opening evil.com rather than nice.co.uk

re:SQRL

goodness me - GRC is still going. Can't think how many times I used his Shields Up service over the years. Might give it a spin now just for kicks.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

RE: I still think that the promoters of Brexit should be tried for treason.

... said the sheep third row from the back

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

Re: Arm A53

the transputer's time has come. Step forward Tony Fuge and the Inmos posse. (its always the Brits who turn out to have been right in the end)

Shazam! Apple chucks £300m at Brit what's-that-song app – report

Re: Did Apple mix up Shazam and Spotify?

Nope - Given Apple Music is trying to muscle in on Spotify's turf I would think this is them cutting off part of Spotify's blood supply.

Public cloud backup kid throws a Spanning out of the Dell EMC works

How much space have you got back there?

Let's hope man with unpronouncable name's company has a lock out preventing his customers from backing up their entire google team data storage, otherwise he could come a cropper if any of them are saddled with this minor issue - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/07/googles_team_drive_unwanted_drive/

Inside Internet Archive: 10PB+ of storage in a church... oh, and a little fight to preserve truth

Re: Essential service

@Stuart Castle - thank-you. Brilliant. I needed cheering up and that hit the button. What a classic.

Combinations? Permutations? Those words don't mean what you think they mean

re: pseudo-maths

It's a Shriek (the exclamation mark in that equation). At least, that is what our maths master called it at school although we're talking '70's here so I may be the only one now.

Shhh! There's a new BlackBerry and... no, we've said too much

Yep - I remember it well, as the extrapolation of the Gulf States banning them was that rest of western world did have access to the traffic (all BIS and BES email routed via RIM servers in Canada so Uncle Sam must have had a direct feed). Snowden then happened and, well, the world realised that US, UK et al Govnts were snooping wholesale on its own population.

I would guess this product is Gulf only as it is specifically chipped to enable said Gulf States enfettered access to comms.

'Open and accessible' spambot server leaks 711 million records

Re: Apparently I have been PWND

@ Camilla Smythe

Do you comprehend the size of the job it would be to parse that quantity of unique records esp' when they are stored in a haphazard messy data dump? Did you bother to read his write up on his page about it, including this very point? Did you not also clock that Hunt hasn't charged you a bean for providing you with this service? You must be horrifically high maintenance. Jeez - some people want marmite on everything!

Radiohead hides ZX Spectrum proggie in OK Computer re-release

Re: Only a British would use a ZX spectrum for music...

@ TonyJ - isn't a Murkan a wig for a burger bap or other cheesy comestibles?

Tech can do a lot, Prime Minister, but it can't save the NHS

Re: Real world underfunding

We haven't left yet.

Netgear 'fixes' router by adding phone-home features that record your IP and MAC address

Anyone here actually own one of these?

Reason being I have one with the latest firmware and there is no such Analytics section on the page advised in the Netgear Kb article you link to (Advanced > Administration > Router Update). Would like to switch it off but it ain't there!

While Microsoft griped about NSA exploit stockpiles, it stockpiled patches: Friday's WinXP fix was built in February

I disagree: the principle operation of the product was to provide an O/S, which it did (rather well at the time as it happens), much as the principle operation of a car is to enable you to travel around under engine power. The bug in SMB v1 was hardly the principle operation of the software; indeed SMB V1 actually worked as it was meant to. However, it could be tricked into failing if it were deliberately fed the wrong data, much as a petrol car fails if you deliberately (or mistakenly) feed it diesel - does that make it a defective product? If a knife is used to kill a person, is that a defective product? Or a plane flown into a building?

The deliberate misuse of a product or parts of it, to cause damage, is the issue here. Pretty much everything in the world today can be considered defective if one takes your approach.

PC sales are up across Europe. You read that right. PC sales are up

Re: "but Brexit-blown Blighty misses out"

@ Rich 11

TL;DR

Jeremy Hunt: Telcos must block teens from sexting each other

actually, to extrapolate your glib answer, ie he would emulate Canute, is (unintentionally) quite interesting in that he would be demonstrating (as indeed Canute was) that he does not have God's power to command the elements and that actually the common man should take control of his own destiny, not sit around on their fat arse.

agreed - although if this forum is a reflection on availability of such technical advisors, I would imagine they would reach the same conclusion as you do.

Re: Think for a minute

Firstly it took several weeks for my mate and his wife to realise it was going on. The poor girl, being only 14 at the time, was embarrassed/humilitated and didnt say a word. It was only after she changed dramatically over the course of a month, not laughing, hiding in her room, not eating, etc, that her parents decided it was more than just teenager angst and investigated. By then the damage was done and she had deleted the texts out of desperation (she didnt know who was sending them). It was reported to the school and then the police, both of whom told the kids they identified to stop it - that's it. They had to move her to another school in the end and only now, 3 years later, is she starting to be herself again.

Think for a minute

Given the comments to date, I can only assume none of you have seen the damage done by such 'sexting' activities. The daughter of a friend of mine was driven to the point of despair, depression and severe eating illness, courtesy of lads 'havin' a laff' by sending dic pics and other obscene material to her via smartphone. The damage was devastating.

Hunt maybe lacking a technical grasp of the issue but his flagging this as a serious concern is laudable. This isnt the same as anything in previous generations - it is bullying by remote with no escape through distance.

Rather than being so arrogantly superior, perhaps one should think of the average non-tech literate user of all your technical wizardry and instead think of ways to achieve a solution rather than taking the piss. It's sort of the job description of being in tech anyway, isnt it, rather than being some twat in the server room hell-bent on seeing everthing burn 'coz we know so much more than you bastards'.

I've been in IT for 30+ years, chief cook and bottle washer, and sure would send most of the comments' authors out the door in 2 seconds flat with attitude like that. Cart and horse - getting it wrong is why this country got rogered by the banking world.

UK National Lottery data breach: Fingers crossed – it might not be you

Isn't it ironic, don't you think?

the chances of having your nat lot account hacked versus the chances of winning anything.

Facebook pays, er, nope, gets £11m credit from UK taxman HMRC...

Re: The system is broken

>@Gio Ciampa

>"Works on a personal level... why not the corporate?"

>It doesn't though does it? As a quick example - do you pay into a company pension?*

>You are no longer being taxed on your "turnover"

Actually I think that is the only example, or to re-classify, the one exception. Any others? ISAs I suppose, though that's just a delaying tactic really.

Re: The system is broken

correct - didn't put much thought into it other than to see if anyone had thought it through further than the response you gave, cogent as it would seem to be.

Taxing profit turns up the intractable problem of how to stop multi-nationals exporting their profit through clever little schemes, as previously advertised. Have yet to hear any way to block that hole easily.

So why not kick the alternative on a bit further - doesn't hurt to think the stupid to see if there is something the other side.

In your example, Omnicorp has now coughed up £1.8billion more than before. Mirror that across the enterprise world and HMRC should be raking in huge extra dosh. Reducing the actual tax percentage (in your example you work off 20%) to counter-act that, plus maybe a bit of sliding scale action (like personal tax bands) and you should able to shuffle the payables by Omnicorp to a more manageable/acceptable level and bring Mr Smith's liabilty down to, who knows, even zero (it was only £2K under the old system - Omnicorp's extra dollop is many thousands of Mr Smiths).

not so stupid, maybe.

Re: That ship...

"So what now, Jack Sparrow? Are we to be two immortals locked in an epic battle until Judgment Day and trumpets sound?"

"Or you could surrender."

Re: The system is broken

or just tax turnover, not profit.

Re: The grew the business...

The entire dot com parts 1 & 2 were built on this - think amazon or any one of the now stratospherically ginormous software/app biz of the past decade or so. Not one made any mention of how to make money - all were ideas of how to use the new technology for technology's sake (from a purist's angle hats off to them I suppose), and the money men kept on throwing moolah at the lucky few that had caught their eye, deperate to not miss the boat. Monetising the resultant audience was not even an agenda item. That is why people who had some sort of business logic couldn't crack the dot com land rush; they couldn't demonstrate to themselves (let alone any potential investor) how to make it pay (yep, i am one of those; bitter at seeing the coming revolution but unable to make a bean). Only those who hadn't a clue about business and so didnt even try (just look at the shiny) got through, which is why we now have so many muppet squillionaires throwing their money about like drunk teenagers.

Re: Blame Game

I spent far too long thinking of an extension to this line of thinking, which I entirely agree with I should add. I was trying to work out how to expound how we are witness to the car-crash of capitalism, the free market and democracy, all of which have gone rather wrong in the past 10 years and have now careered into each other, such that Big Biz and inordinately wealthy individuals seem to be able to own/rig the system, laws of competition don't seem to balance the market any more and democracy is meaningless, esp' when you have such grotesque options (I'm looking at you USA, but the UK's Labour party or the upper echelons of the EU are equally valid for differing reasons). A lucid and reasoned paragraph is in here somewhere but damned if I can find it - I keep on sounding like a crazed illuminati/NWO loon, so will just leave this here as a sort of signpost as to what I am thinking whilst I go drink more coffee and try and shake the w/e off.

Short answer - I agree and upvote.

Inside the Box thinking: People want software for the public cloud

seems apt:

http://thenubbyadmin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/SAY_CLOUD_AGAIN1.png

Fasthosts was down

Something's been up for a while

last week their email in and outbound was mashed up for a couple of days, now this. Either they've got muppets in the datacentre or actually more likely, someone somewhere is being a very naughty boy. Mind you, the huge volume of spam being squirted through their servers over the past few months appears to have been suddenly quelled. Maybe they tightened things up their end and it tipped other things over.

On a side note, anyone know an effective way to de-spam/malware-scan encrypted email connections. Despite being in the game for decades, was slightly shocked to discover a few weeks ago that Norton (yes, yes, I know,) doesn't do anything. Quick search turned up that most competitors, if not all, don't either. Seems to make their products rather superfluous especially all the gumpf in the settings about email protection. There are website nasties I suppose, and downloads, and USB memory sticks, and ... (what have the Romans ever done for us). But still - no email scanning?

Boy, 12, gets €100k bill from Google after confusing Adwords with Adsense

Re: Twelve =/= teen

you're joking, right? Teen, as in thirTEEN, fourTEEN, fifTEEN, etc. Please tell me you were joking.

Skype shuts down London office, hangs up on hundreds of devs

Re: So I Did Not Make A Mistake

either that or 'too' :-)

Lester Haines: RIP

All waypoints to my life are being retired

this is getting to seriously piss me off. Another bulb blown. Lester - thankyou for making a decade of back-office tech admin less onerous, nay, giving me that smug 'If only you knew' sense of superiority over the cubicled sales drones and navel-gazing chinless wonders that weebled their way in and out of meeting rooms.

<12 gun salute, flag lowered, lone firework shell arcing across the sky. Then the long trudge home, head down, collar up, hands deep in pockets, cursing the Gods at their stupidity.>

Brexit? Cutting the old-school ties would do more for Brit tech world

Re: Where's the referendum on TTIP?

OK - so flip the respective positions in your post. You may end up with the same final line but which ones can we do something about. It certainly isn't any of that lot in Brussels/Strasbourg* (*delete as appropriate depending on which day of the month it is when the whole kit and caboodle gets crated up and re-housed - classic EU fiscal probity).

This whole EU thing is about self-determination. Everything else is a subset.

Windows 10 build 14342: No more friendly Wi-Fi sharing

You never stop learning

I do love the Comments section. Where else could you read an article about a top level function (by which I mean something any old Joe Shmo would grasp) in Win10 being switched off and within seconds be immersed in a scrum of serious conversations about symlinks, junctions and all manner of minutae - important undoubtably but most definately 'under the hood'.

Apple loses iPhone™

W.O. v Design

Perhaps the finer points of trademark law are missed by the author here but they lost the 'Word Only' trademark - that is the word iphone. I should imagine the stylised design/graphic of how the letters and typeface is set is probably still there for the taking and should the leather goods co. start embossing iPhone on their products, rather than IPHONE or iphone, I think they would have a case to answer. Still it is China, so anything's possible.

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

given the way the tectonic plates are shifting around at the moment (in geological timeframe it is all in a split second), I wouldn't want to be hanging around any known crunch points - Istanbul and the San Andreas being the other places I think are on the short-list.

Re: Seriously America...

America is a continent of which the United states is but one country. Sorry to be a pedant here but they don't own the whole frikkin' continent - let's not play to their ego please by giving them the whole place - I like Canada.

Aside from that, totally thumbs up to you at the incredulity of the situation - jaw-dropping.

National Pupil Database engorged to 20 million individual kids' records

tick, tick, tick ...

personal data presumably includes all those lovely fingerprints used to gain access to library books and lunch. Biometric content on the next generation just waiting to be abused or hacked from no doubt impeccably secured school IT systems.

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Re: I give up

This happens all over the internet, not just the Reg. Long ago I realised that, after writing a complex and detailed missive to educate the masses, it was sensible to do a simple select all and copy before hitting the Post button. When it fell over, as with you, one could just control-V the content back in the freshly presented blank comment box.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Re: "I've been struggling to articulate just what it is about Windows 10 that bothers me"

not really - the bigger picture is IT is now an FMCG, like foodstuffs. The view from the megacorps is they have no need for the army of IT admin/tech people (like us lot here) so they are cutting us out of the loop. Userbase is considered tech savvy enough to get the thing working; everything else they'll do over the internet so off the shelf and straight into use with no intermediary administration. We are being retired.

Re: No wonder Win7 systems around me are having an 'off' day...

yep - here too. My win7 laptop has been behaving really badly in the past week, even moreso in the past 24 hours, and despite having a top notch fibre broadband service the internet speed/response time is rubbish. A locked down install has no effect either - something very odd going on - smells like the spirit of MS teens' emanations.

Re: Something Missing

"Google is your friend" - I get what you are saying but sort of ironic really given their business model is what MS is switching to. It is the most notorious of the data slurpers and considered the mother of all evils on many a Comments page on this esteemed site.

Bloody TECH GIANTS... all they do is WASTE investors' MONEY

have a butchers at the blackberry classic. Picked one up for the wife recently and it's pretty good piece of kit, even for a seasoned tech cynic like me. wife loves it.

Boybanders ONE DIRECTION launch DoS attack on open-source bods

Re: You know who i feel sorry for

... tickets to see Wales v Ireland. ...

FTFY

/pedant