Posts by Naselus

Engineer named Jason told to re-write the calendar

Re: July and August must Go!

"Not to mention the agony experienced by nomenclature pedants from 1st September until the end of the year."

July and August weren't additional months added in for Julius and Augustus, they were existing ones renamed for them. They were originally called Quintilis and Sextilis, which will just mean the nomenclature pedant hell will just be expanded by an additional two months. Unless we move them to the end, but then you end up with Hendecember and Dodecember, which is too many Decembers for my liking.

The Roman New Year was originally at the end of February, so March should be Month 1. If you do that, everything falls back into place and we avoid silly names. It's also why February has a variable length - originally much more variable. February had 28 days most years, and 23 days in others, when a 13th month of 23 days would be added immediately afterwards to account for the 368 day calendar length. When they corrected the calendar, February was the natural choice to soak up extra time again.

Honey, I shrank the company: Tintri's dire third quarter presages a worse final one

Re: Ouch

It's been a complete strategic fail. In engineering terms, Tintri products are top-notch, but their entire market strategy has been an abortion from start to finish - their entirely targeted at massive blue-chips who are never going to be confident buying from a startup in it's runway phase.

What network neutrality madness has happened today? Take a big breath

Re: Lingua franca

"My advice to you is to keep silent when intelligent mature people might read what you write."

So... much... irony...

New battery boffinry could 'triple range' of electric vehicles

Re: Sigh...

"As for batteries on planes, the rules are clear. Batteries inside devices are allowed unless it is a Galaxy Note 7."

You say that, but you didn't see the fuss they made at the airport when I tried to board wearing my battery-operated explosive vest last summer.

FBI tells Jo(e) Sixpack to become an expert in IoT security

In fairness to the FBI

Many modern routers - even default ones from ISPs - are now dual-band and default to creating two wifi networks, so it's not quite as unthinkable that Auntie Maud might be able to run her wifi light switch on 2.4ghz and her actual internet connection on 5ghz.

Also, the majority of outright technophobes appear completely disinterested in IoT stuff, so the average IoT punter is probably considerably more technical than the average population. Probably not technical enough to understand things like 'put it all in a DMZ' but bright enough to find the admin interface and change a password on it if instructed to do so.

Re: 'Don't use a router provided by an ISP'

"But some ISP's including the only one in my region, lock down the router 100%, no passwords will be given out ever etc"

In most cases, Wireshark will allow you to pull the ISP account username and password from a router, since the handshake negotiations are usually done in plain text. In fact, this is the only way you can acquire your password info if you have a Sky Broadband subscription.

The North remembers: York scraps Uber's licence over data breach

Re: Oi!! (II)

"If in doubt if the beer is warm you are in the south, if it's cold you are in the north."

Statement also applies to any part of the anatomy.

Re: Oi!

"And there is also the small matter of the River Humber betwixt the two hamlets."

We may not be as sophisticated as the southern folk, but we northerners have developed the concept of bridges.

Re: Oi!

Your Britishness is showing. We regard 50 miles away as being practically another country. Meanwhile, in Houston, they regard it as a suburb.

Re: Pricing?

"Is it still true that Uber are losing money on every ride?"

Yes, it very much is. Uber's overhead is actually higher than other taxi firms, since the business model can't take advantage of even the very limited economies of scale other taxi companies do (like, for example, bulk-buying cars and employing their own maintenance teams), while also running a huge and very expensive international lobbying arm and legal department to try and get round local laws.

So unless they're charging some 15% higher than other taxi companies, they're losing money. In their 'mature' markets, they've taken about as much of this from the drivers' share as they can get away with, but these markets still return losses.

There's really no amount of scale that can possibly make Uber profitable - it can only ever compete with traditional private hire firms at a loss. The only way that the business model remotely works is it it can become a monopoly in a given market and jack up prices, and even that is questionable - about 50% of the cab market is very price-sensitive and will simply stop using private hire vehicles if the price rises.

No one saw it coming: Rubin's Essential phone considered anything but

Re: Suggests that phones aren't as commoditised as we tend to believe? Or more commoditised?

"To me this looks like a decent-enough entry at its original price if I were looking at that end of the market, and a really good candidate after the price cuts."

Really? You can pick up a Xaoimi or a OnePlus with those kind of specs at half the price. Which is probably why it didn't sell - anyone willing to abandon their usual brand for stats had much cheaper options with similar performance, and it was never really a match for the higher-end flagship models.

Up to 'ONE BEEELLION' vid-stream gawpers toil in crypto-coin mines

Re: Sponsored by power companies?

I'd say making $332k a month using someone else's electricity to do the mining is still fairly profitable.

Facebook announces ad revenue reroute: When Irish eyes are crying

Re: It's over guys.

It's in deep shit. Facebook is going to get regulated, and it knows it; the US isn't going to protect Zuck anymore (since the whole 'I let the Russians pay me in rubles to try and fix my own country's election' admission), the EU isn't going to let them dodgy taxes, and increasingly senior figures from within Facebook are coming forward to say they won't use it and don't let their children near it.

Google should be worried too.

Archive of 1.4 billion credentials in clear text found in dark web archive

Do you not think there's a slight flaw in the idea of listing all sites and passwords whenever you type in a known username?

As in, what if you typed in someone else's email address, for example?

" I see that even passwords of 10 characters have made it into the top 20."

So Password123 remains safe, then?

Re: Oh not biometrics again

"When I had my eyetest recently the optician took a photo of my retina, without asking me, and stored it on their who-knows-if-secure system. "

It's worse that that - I leave copies of my fingerprints all over the place all the time, stored on tabletops, doors, and the devices I use to log into the web services he's suggesting I should unlock with my fingerprint...

Re: Has an analysis of the types of accounts been done?

"Df_Rg!Th$Y&[e-mail]

is higher still but pretty well impossible for a human to remember"

Speak for yourself. I named my daughter Df_Rg!Th$Y&[e-mail] and so, in my case, I feel it would be a rather obvious username to go with.

Google's Project Zero reveals Apple jailbreak exploit

It's not much of a bug tbh, more a means to jailbreak the device.

It's not trivial to execute, requires some fairly specialized knowledge and tools, can't be executed remotely and the end result is not a final aim for hackers (they might want to jailbreak the device in order to deploy a more useful attack, but won't simply be looking to jailbreak it as their endgame).

This is kinda useful for security researchers (who like having jailbroken devices for testing purposes) but I wouldn't panic over this.

US authorities issue strongly worded warnings about crypto-investments

Re: Bitcoin fees

"Plus how would Bitcoin then cope with the vicious spike of deflation that would cause."

They're infinitely divisible, so you just keep adding more decimal places as the economy expands. The effect is pretty much the same as inflation for normal currencies.

As for the miners... yeah, when the coins run out they're not in a great place. Not only have they spent a great deal of money on power to make coins with a fairly small profit margin, but they've also invested an extraordinary amount of money into the physical equipment, much of which is now so specialized that it can't be repurposed.

Basically, the entire value of Bitcoin is based on wasted resources that could've been used for something practical.

Re: The problems will start

"Looks like a ramping up Ponzi scheme at the moment."

No, it doesn't. The people holding Bitcoin aren't receiving dividend payouts from the new entrants into the market; they're selling assets. It's a bubble - a very, very obvious one which is probably going to collapse in the next couple of days - but it's not a fraud.

Re: Hidden meaning

No, he was doing quite well - at least a ransom is a financial object. Normally he'd have told us mortgages were a type of government-sponsored spy lizard or something.

UK lacks engineering and tech skills to make government's industrial strategy work – report

Re: All the jobs were sent offshore to get it for cheap....

"Seems to me that Parliament is dominated by the fruits of our "rounded and rewarding society"."

Just the opposite; Parliament is dominated by PPE grads and doesn't have much in the way of other humanities. The result being a badly skewed view of the world.

A similar thing happened in the Soviet Union about 50 years ago. Stalin more or less abandoned education outside of STEM; social science was essentially deemed 'finished' (because Marx was right, so why bother doing research in it anymore). The result was a huge wave of engineers being trained in the late 20s and early 30s, and no-one with any soft skills - so they thought you could run society like a machine. When these guys came to rule the country in the 1970s and 1980s, the whole thing fell apart.

Basically, you want a good mix of people running things - STEM guys to understand technical stuff, humanities grads to understand people. Banning one set or the other basically ends in disaster.

Typical

Employers: There's not enough trained workers in job X!

Employees: Can I get some training budget to improve my skills in X?

Employers: Never! You'll just ask for a pay rise or go and get a higher-paying job with someone else!

We have this conversation literally every year. At some point, if employers have to realize that if they want skill X in their workforce, they are going to have to actually pay someone to learn it, and then raise their salary to the point where they can retain them.

Shingled out: 14TB helium-filled Toshiba drive floats to market

Re: anecdotal evidence

There is. Statistically, WD drives are extremely unreliable compared to the competition, and it's not even close.

Backblaze, a storage company in the US who custom-build JBODs with dozens of drives, have a fairly comprehensive production study, and their WD drives fail at nearly twice the rate of other vendors.

Oregon will let engineer refer to himself as an 'engineer'

Re: iamanidiot let me guess

"You can have a BSc and be a Chartered Engineer, I certainly am as the BSc(Hons) in Software Engineering I did was BCS accredited and the BCS still do Chartered Engineer status - http://www.bcs.org/category/16268"

The BCS will give you Chartered Engineer status if you've worked on a helpdesk for 5 years, let alone if you have a degree. I've got chartered engineer status from them and my degree was a BA in Anthropology.

So you're 'agile', huh? I do not think it means what you think it means

Just the inverse; it's mostly about how quickly they can introduce new bugs and cockups. Agile allows a whole plethora of new problems to be brought in weekly.

It's a decade since DevOps became a 'thing' – and people still don't know what it means

Re: Nope.

"How can so few people know what DevOps is? We’ve used it in banks since the late 60s and it’s been pretty stable since the 80s."

Given you're literally the only person in the world who thinks DevOps has existed since the late 1960s, and the definitions you've offered for it thus far are completely at odds with those offered by any of the actual practitioners, I suspect you might just have no idea what DevOps is either.

Apple iOS 11 security 'downgrade' decried as 'horror show'

Re: Apple's security model is utterly broken

" I've never had to supply a credit card number to reset a password on an apple account. "

I've been asked to supply a CC number for resetting an Apple account before, even when we've already supplied a bunch of correct identification data. But yes, I fail to see how this qualifies as 'utterly broken security'. Possibly 'absurd identification process'.

Re: I don't get this article at all.

It's pretty simple really.

You can take a new backup of an iOS11 iPhone and set a new password for the backup, as long as you have physical access to the phone and the passcode. This isn't the problem.

The problem is that the backup contains a lot of data which you can't extract from the unlocked phone, but CAN extract from the backup file, as long as you know the password. Things like your iCloud password, for example, can't be gotten at from the device itself, but can be extracted from the backup - provided you can unencrypt it. So, being able to set up a new password on it as long as you know the passcode means you can create a data-rich backup file that you can then rip lots of information off.

It's not great, and shows Apple's slightly cavalier attitude to security when it conflicts with ease of use (i.e., security always loses if it makes life even slightly harder for the user), but at the same time this 'problem' requires you to have physical access and the passcode, so by that point it's pretty much game over for the phone anyway. It'd be preferable if the backup either didn't go around storing login data for other services, or if it does store them, doing so in an encrypted file based on the phone's device id (so you could only unlock the file by copying it back onto the same phone it came from in the first place). But really, it's a big of a reach calling it a 'horror story'.

There's a significant element of infosec hysteria to this one - like some of those 'security flaws' that crop up every six months where a server is vulnerable provided you already have the domain admin password, physical access to the box, and the time to crack 2048-bit encryption. You have to be in pretty deep shit already before this vulnerability becomes possible.

The sun rose, you woke up, and Qualcomm sued Apple three times

Re: "Card metaphor for activities in a computing device"

So you mean it was originally stolen from Xerox?

We go live to the Uber-Waymo court battle... You are not going to believe this. The judge certainly doesn't

Re: Uber...

"how is this going to become a sustainable business model?"

It's literally reliant on destroying all competition through blatantly anti-competitive behaviour and then leveraging the resulting complete monopoly power to turn a profit afterwards. That's their entire business plan.

Research has shown that Uber is actually a less efficient way of delivering taxi services - in cost terms, Uber is more expensive to run than a traditional radio taxi operator and adds no additional value. On a level playing field, they would be out-competed by the 1960s business model in the space of a few months. Which is why you have constant shenanigans and this constant churn of enormous losses; the only possible way for Uber to make money is if all others offering a competing service are forced out of business first so they can jack up the price to match the actual costs.

Re: Uber really throws money at everything and everybody.

On the other hand, you really need to leave with a few million, since putting 'Uber' on your CV is pretty soon going to be as toxic as listing the Islamic State as your previous employer.

Re: Uber...

"Are there any other businesses that do what Uber do, except legally,"

Lyft.

"and is there anything to stop anyone else from starting a non-corrupt version of such a business?"

Uber, and the fact that not following the rules makes it much easier for them to out-compete you.

As Apple fixes macOS root password hole, here's what went wrong

Re: OFFS - it isn't creating a new user, OK?

"ad part is it's like the gratuitous "hacker" scene in action movies where somebody taps a few keys and magically pwns the system - you know, the ones we all groan at. "

Apple kit - so user friendly even hacking it just takers a couple of key presses.

Re: Not

"The problem exists on the architecture/specification level."

Honestly, the problem exists on a cultural level at Apple. They keep everything secret even internally, so they have the complete opposite of the Open Source 'many eyes' approach. There's a presumption of security by obscurity minimizing problems, which is a really, really bad approach - and leads to having to rush out patches for bugs like this one when they get press attention.

On top of that, there's a general insistence that they don't need to learn from or follow non-Apple ideas about security, leading to stupid things like the lack of 2FA on iCloud prior to the Fappening (until someone who has learned about these things takes advantage of it, resulting in a sudden acceptance of what everyone else knew was a good idea 20 years previously). These are just plain embarrassing for a major vendor and the kind of thing most of their rivals addressed in the early 2000s, but are sidelined at Apple because they 'damage the user experience'. Presumably, no-one considered how having all her nude photos leaked online would impact Jennifer Lawrence's experience until after the event.

Re: Enterprise?

"Apple don't care about backward compatibility, which is essential for enterprises"

And aren't much interested in compatibility with other vendors, either, which doesn't help much. Honestly have no idea why Cook is trying to push the Enterprise angle, since it's completely at odds with Apple's existing (and undeniably successful) model.

Re: That was quick!

Now that's hardly fair. EVERY vendor will try and keep quiet about a problem like this until it's fixed, because revealing it when no fix exists is a fantastically irresponsible thing to do.

Of course, this had already been public domain for weeks and Apple weren't making any effort to do anything about it, which is the worst of all worlds. It was being bandied around by people on their own customer forum as a 'fix' for a locked account, and Apple still did not notice. Which isn't a great look.

Re: Mistakes happen, part two

"seems (from Apple themselves) that fixing the root password bug introduces a file-sharing fail bug"

Wonder how many other core functions in High Sierra are relying on a blank root password to function properly.

A day will come when Azure Active Directory 'classic' portal is killed. But it is not this day

Is it because...

The new portal sucks, and doesn't even allow you to do many of the things that you could under the classic portal? Even some of MS's own guides on fairly core tasks (setting up third-party SSO through AAD, for example) instruct you to log onto the classic portal because the options needed do not exist in the new interface.

Uber says 2.7 MEEELLION(ish) UK users affected by hack

Re: 2.7 million

Given a UK population of about 60 million, it's about 5% of the total population. Which isn't that small a percentage to begin with, even before factoring in that the majority of the population probably don't have an Uber account.

Scotland, now is your time… to launch Brexit Britain into SPAAAACE!

Re: Prestwick??

You're looking at it wrong. Yes, physics says that the best place for a space port is nearest to the equator, but politics says that the best place is the most marginal constituency. And the SNP majority in Ayreshire is only 1200.

Watchkeeper drones cost taxpayers £1bn

Re: Sounds like we need to start another war

"By the looks of it there's no useful role for the Watchkeeper, which begs the question, what's the bloody point of them?"

35,000 jobs in marginal constituencies.

Judge stalls Uber trade-secret theft trial after learning upstart 'ran a trade-secret stealing op'

Re: Will UBER IPO

"By these idiot's logic, Uber is in the same league as Vodafone, Airbus, UBS, BMW and the like."

And given that Uber's only actual contribution to the private hire process is an app that could be replaced by an Open Source alternative in about 45 minute's worth of coding, that $70 billion valuation is almost entirely based on the sheer scale of the criminality it appears willing to try and get away with.

Re: When do the magic words...

"An enterprise, for the purposes of RICO is something like the Mafia, or ISIS; not a legally constituted company like Über."

No, the enterprise can be a legally constituted company. The issue is that the defendant in the case must be a member of the enterprise, rather than the enterprise being the defendant itself. So you could sue, say, the CEO of Uber under RICO and list Uber as the criminal enterprise in question (since it's becoming hard to deny that it is, in fact, a criminal enterprise), but you can't sue the legal entity known as Uber for being a member of Uber, because it isn't a member of itself.

Of course, you generally wouldn't use RICO to go after a legally constituted company, because there's much better tools for doing that - RICO was originally put together because mafias and crime families tended not to go and file convenient lists of all their employees and directors, whereas a properly constituted company does that by definition. But in Uber's case, they appear to have been going to some lengths to try and produce 'shadow' groups who were operating as part of the company but legally weren't included.

Which means that, in actual fact, it might be RICO.

The six simple questions Facebook refused to answer about its creepy suicide-detection AI

Re: Ridiculous trying to automate this

To be honest, my first thought on seeing this was 'I wonder how they're going to try and derive advertising revenue from the suicidally depressed'.

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

Simple workaround

Don't buy a Mac.

In fairness, there don't seem ot be too many apologists for once. Presumably, this is so stupid that even Apple fans cannot think up a way to minimize it.

Apple embraces El Reg! iOS 11 is now biting the hand that types IT

Just waiting for the excuses to start

'You're spelling it wrong'.

Net neutrality nonsense: Can we, please, just not all lose our minds?

Re: Actually, Google and Facebook win either way

" Consider WHO benefits from "more regulation". It's not the consumer, because WE END UP PAYING FOR IT through higher costs passed on DIRECTLY TO US by the same people that are TARGETED by the regulation. Their costs go up, and then OUR costs go up."

No, it's the taxpayer who benefits, since he's not required to spend enormous sums bailing out industries that have collapsed from corruption. Think how much money the Taxpayer might not have had to stump up if we'd had some effective regulation in 2008.

As a result, by arguing against regulation, you're actually arguing that the taxpayer should subsidize the consumer here. I do believe that's known as socialism, Bob. You're getting the hard-working tax payer to underwrite risk so you can get a discount.

Munich council finds €49.3m for Windows 10 embrace

Re: "They'll be back."

@John Crisp;

Yeah, see, that's the answer Open Source people always give. And it's not good enough.

See, 'average users probably only use a few percent of the capability' is probably true, but we're not talking about average users. By definition, if we're talking about application usage in a professional environment, we're talking about high-end professionals. Your mum may not be able to tell the difference between Inkscape and Illustrator, but an architect being paid £45 an hour can. That's why we pay him £45 an hour, because he knows how all those extra functions work and he's been using the commercial version for the last 15 years.

And this is ALWAYS the answer OS types come out with 'it's almost as good, and it's free!'. Doesn't matter. There were plenty of commercial competitors who were 'almost as good' over the last thirty years. They're all gone now too. What's good enough for amateurs is not good enough for professionals, who will expect the best quality tools capable of doing the highest-end stuff.

So no, it's not 'just' a data portability matter (which is another convenient excuse for the OS community to use, since it means it's not their fault for making second-rate software, but the competitor's fault for using proprietary file formats). It's a program quality matter, and OS is simply not able to compete for the most part, even before we look at things like support.