Posts by Dwarf

Six on capacitor charges

Apparently they didn't put up much resistance when arrested, which means that the prosecutors have a lot less time to charge them - its rumoured to be somewhere around 5RC

Hell Desk's 800 number was perfect for horrible heavy-breathing harassment calls

Needs help justifying work

Back in my helpdesk days, working for one of the big IT outsource companies, we were on day-1 of service having just displaced one of our competitors. There was the inevitable queue of calls and a large backlog of existing tickets to be resolved. The PFB's had agreed to two teams - one to focus on each.

I remember the colleague who picked up the ticket from late the previous week stating "Urgent : User needs help justifying work", since we provided help on Office products and many of the users were on-the-road marketing types, the mobile number didn't raise any eyebrows.

Unfortunately it turned out that the phone number had been sourced from a local phone box and the poor chap got a bit more than he bargained for when he called to help the lady.

Microsoft puts Windows Updates on a diet with 'differential downloads'

Ummm

I'm sure that we were told previously that Windows 10 devices share updates on a P2P basis to reduce the load on downloading from the mothership (read to reduce MS's costs).

So.. How will that work with differential updates then ?

I can only see two outcomes here

1. Not at all - Complete revamp and its now all back to MS and they are cloning another Linux approach (about time too)

2. They have implemented a full P2P type service and the deltas are coming from the peers

I wonder which one it is ?

Agree with other comments about privacy. Wonder what gets sent out the door or what a 3rd party can find out about your PC's update needs..

DRAMA ON MARS: Curiosity bot fires laser at alien metal object

Re: Alien metallic object

Relax, its just a remnant from the Golgafrincham B-Ark.

Barracuda: Outage caused by 'large number of inbound connections'

Alternately, their sales people have been soooo busy, its just a capacity management issue with all those new paying customers falling over each other to use the service and perhaps it caught them unaware.

Windows 10 market share stalls after free upgrade offer ends

Re: One VM

its easier than that. I just say that I wont support Windows 10 as I know nothing about it, which is a slight fib, since I looked several times and decided I'm not playing Microsoft's game any more, since it spent all its time telling me I couldn't do what I wanted or trying to force me into new accounts and rubbish like that.

This is also having the effect of stopping the friends of a friend who knows you work in IT from asking me to fix their now not working properly "free upgraded" Windows 10 box. Odd how the conversation goes along the lines of "Wow, you're brave with all the data slurping of your personal data and cloud stuff"

Windows 7 was where I got off the merry go round. For me, its Windows 7 and Linux.

Much more free time, much less faffing around doing free support for people.

From the graphs, it looks very much like the majority of ex-MS customers are doing similar things. Less than a third of machine running the freebie, even after all the pushing and shoving.

Then they kill off the old Win 7 licences in the market - brave or stupid - will be interesting to see the market in 2 years time.

Ford slams brakes on sales spreadsheets after fire menaces data center

Re: Are they still running core memory?

@smarrtypants. The article says

The automotive giant said that the Monday fire, which broke out at a power sub-station beneath the building, caused a full evacuation of its headquarters in Dearborn, MI. The fire also resulted in power being cut to its on-site data center that was scheduled to receive sales information from Ford dealerships across America.

So, a mains power failure occurs and the UPS maintains power whilst they work out the problem and decide what they are going to do (wait for power, generators kick in, initiate DR) - exactly like the system would have been designed to do. Success story #1

A Ford spokesperson told The Register that the data center itself is intact, with battery backups on-site preserving all stored data and remote facilities able to shoulder the load while power to the Dearborn datacenter is restored. The company said that no other facilities or services have been disrupted.

This implies that they have invoked DR and the "remote facilities" will be the replica DR location doing its job as designed. Success story #2

This is text book stuff, IT working exactly as its designed to do and the primary reason for spending big piles of cash on a situation that will probably never happen. Its just insurance in a different form.

I'd like to hear more about "the worst IT setup" surviving this with the lack of power, UPS or a secondary DR location. Please explain how you expect this to work. After all, there is a well known truism of "it works better when its switched on" which seems very apt for this article.

DR done right

Nice to see an example of DR done right.

Having said that, there seems to be a trend across data centres of power capacity management not being managed properly. I recall a couple in Telehouse earlier in the year where the magic smoke was released.

Perhaps its time for the enterprise management platforms to have a view of power consumption and power limits. Also sounds like more could be done for regular capacity management on the critical power sources to the data centres.

WebAssembly: Finally something everyone agrees on – websites running C/C++ code

Re: Just complete the circle

@Gall

Whichever ones are needed. Its called a makefile and cross-compilation.

This is how we used to do things before someone tried to make a one-size fits all platform called a browser - then tried to make it the solution to everything and spent the next decade or so making it work properly - which is why we've had Active-X, Java, Flash, SVG, Desktop views, mobile views, lousy application security (or no security), HTML5, etc.

Performance issues still remain, so they are bringing in the big guns again.

Looking at it from the other perspective. with a proper client side application, you can compile for the specifics of each platform, optimise as necessary to get best performance, utilise hardware offload, comply with local UI requirements, so it feels right for the user, etc. Its all been done before *

This is nothing new - your map app on the phone is probably a local app, as is your mail app, even your browser is local.

* We can reliably state it will all be done again when they go round the loop next time in about 20 years time.

Just complete the circle

Take out the slow browser and use a native C/C++ application.

I seem to recall that C can use network sockets right out of the box

Apple urges court to hurry up with hearing Galway data centre objection

Re: I'm puzzled

@Mage,

Keep up. None of the rest of them have rounded corners.

Google man drags Emacs into the 1990s

Aren't we always told that there is a setting for that.

I'm sure its in the manual somewhere ;-)

+1 for vi / vim

Lenovo downward dogs with Yoga BIOS update supporting Linux installs

Well, +10 points for Lenovo for actually sorting out the problem.

But ... -100 points for trying to pull the stunt in the first place.

Microsoft goes back to the drawing board – literally, with 28" tablet and hockey puck knob

The big questions

Will they turn off all the slurping in the update ?

Will they sort out the start menu ?

I know its dumb questions, but you gotta ask just to make sure to find out if anyone is actually listening in Cloud MS Land...

Uber's robo-truck makes first delivery of ... Budweiser in Colorado

Should I be worried ...

By the large yellow emergency stop button on the dashboard and the lack of anyone within close proximity to press it ??

Is there any irony in that an anagram of otto is toot, which is a little lame for the sound of the horn on 40 tonne's of steel steaming down the highway.

Surely the thing should be called HONK, which sounds a lot more manly. Oddly enough the similar re-arrangement of those letters in a similar manner yields Knoh, which is very similar to Know.

I really hope that the engineers behind all of these automated vehicles really KNOW what they are doing and aren't being led by marketing types as is happening in the rest of the gadget space. Having a watch crash or getting hacked is a completely different ball game to a fast moving chunk of steel with the ability to mow down bunch of wrongly placed people or animals, *

* - I might be tempted to make an exception for marketing people involved in recent product specifications..

'Every step your anti-theft tracker takes – I'll be watching you'

Well they say you are not famous unless you have a stalker, so I guess that means that we'll all going to be famous sometime soon.

Seriously though, less than one week from the last disaster from low grade devices and we see the same problem panning out with another class of devices.

VENDORS - FFS wake up and smell the coffee.. Do it right or not at all.

And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage

Monitoring and testing

Its all well and good to having all these resilience technologies, but you still need to monitor the damn thing for the situation when a component fails and actually do something about it.

I'm wondering when the last test if their resilience and DR processes was as well, since that should have been the belt-and-braces proof that the design actually works.

On the bright side though, given that its educational, at least this will be a "learning experience" for them when they do the next set of purchasing and they can get it right that time around.

Chinese electronics biz recalls webcams at heart of botnet DDoS woes

Re: UPnP is a red herring in this thread

@Fidodogbreath (great handle BTW). I kind of agree with you. but probably for not the reasons you expect. The @AC asked how the compromise worked, hence the thread.

UPnP is part of the problem because its there and because of what it does, It exposes insecure things to to the outside world in an automatic manner, This just builds on the previous solution of "home security" as touted by many ISP's with their ADSL routers with stateful firewalls and NAT which was sold as two layers of security in years gone by. So, we just went full circle back to no effective security, but dangerously with the perception that its still there.

If we step forwards a bit, imagine if every device was accessible and each device had to secure its self in a recognised way using some industry standard, UPnP and NAT would cease to be necessary and then we are in a far better place. IPv6 is the obvious way forwards here, since it can do end-to-end encryption out of the box. Additionally, the need for Dynamic DNS goes away, since you have enough of your own space and you can take your IP addresses out to other parts of the Internet and still be reachable using the Mobile IPv6 capabilities.

So, IPv6 will help to raise security as it will force vendors to better secure their devices and remove the false perception of security in most homes. Another byproduct is that the IPv6 protocol is heavier than the IPv4 protocol due to its expanded functionality, so there is a good chance that it will drive the home devices (including any IoT junk) to use more powerful processors, which in turn opens up more security options such as hardware assisted encryption, this is already present in some ARM processors (Arm v8's as an example), but not in things like Arduino's.

I know that many here don't believe IPv6 is going to help, personally, I think that its going to help a lot as the home infrastructure and the connectivity between devices is going to change radically. The groundwork has already been done to fix much of these problems. The gap I see is the lack of some trusted home focused authentication realm so that we can get away from passwords as that's where many of these issues originate from.

Is this cultural change that much different from when we went from dial-up to always-on Internet ? Security was only there in that case as the connection was down unless you were using it, so layer-1 security was used and nobody had even considered the other layers at that point.

All that happening is that the security needs to go further up the stack, so that its end-to-end.

Re: How are these devices accessed from the internet though?

@Charles 9

That's the million dollar question. Answers on a post card please.

The problem as I see it is :

1. Bad marketing ideas - Web enabled printing; The IoT fridge (or IoT anything for that matter, they are just decides); the remotely controllable CCTV devices.

2. Marketing companies keeping up with the other vendors who "already have a product" so their engineers can do it, why can't we ?

3. Users are completely clueless when it comes to anything with technology, other than showing off with "look what I just got" type statements.

4. The lack of any standards or accountability for any of the cruft that people chuck into the market. Who suffered the most following last weeks issue - Dyn customers / unrelated companies, or the vendors who made the vulnerable junk ??

5. We can't even get electrically safe chargers that don't electrocute people or batteries that don't catch fire when being charged, so what hope is there of more complex things like entire computers with changing hardware components and stacks of protocols that make up their inner workings.

6. Corporate greed. Companies want our cash and dangle shiny stuff in front of us for unbelievably low prices

7. User stupidity - people look at the previous point and reason along the lines of "Well, they are selling it, so it MUST be OK since SOMEONE must be making sure they stick to the standards right ?"

8. The race to make the next big thing. (company : 1. Make Device, 2 ..... 3. Profit !!)

9. Doing it properly costs in terms of time and makes the products more expensive, hence they do not compete with the tat vendors in the same market place, hence they cut corners until its the absolutely cheapest they can get it to.

To fix the problems, I think that we need :

1. Mandatory standards, a bit like we have for cars - Scratch that, Dieselgate, didn't work), er, Electronic safety like CE approval (Conformite Europeene) - Scratch that, China Export made a mockery of that), We still need standards, but they need teeth and those who bend the rules or ignore them need to be held accountable.

2. Vendors need to be accountable for their products for a long period, e.g. 5-10 years, so it costs them in terms of recalls, replacements and penalties. It needs to be cheaper for them to do it right, not do it cheap and nasty. The car market is a good example of this, but it needs to apply to other devices too.

3. Customers need to be selective on what they buy - buy good things, not random junk

4. Customers need to be able to easily see whats going out of their house and can turn off things that they don't want. WiFi on my fridge - nope. CCTV remote access - Nope. Win 10 slurp, etc.

5. Anyone, without impunity have a crack at any device, since it should be secure. If they find a vulnerability, the need a way of registering these to a world-wide entity with teeth. The manufacturer has to pay the person who found the vulnerability an amount based on the severity and number of units sold. The manufacturer has to resolve the issue and make it available to customers for free. This makes a market from securing devices and makes manufacturers accountable for compliance with security and standards. Obviously things like the DMCA that makes it illegal to reverse engineer something would need a clean up, but that's small detail, since bad guys ignore it already. This also makes it more likely that the gifted people who can find their way into devices make money legally from it.

Re: How are these devices accessed from the internet though?

Check out what uPNP does for your home network.

Its a standard that got dropped into home grade router firmware and turned on by default, so that internal devices can ask the firewall to open up various ports without the user having to worry about the complexity of setting up port forwarding. This is why when you add in a games console "it just works"

Now add in a dose of "We've got an iphone|android application" that the marketing people thought would be a good idea, Sprinkle a little Dynamic DNS so you can always find your home network's public IP address and connect to the application from your phone (obviously using the hard coded / internal password or one you also use for facebook)

Now add a spash of "your device registers to our cloud" - marketing ware, which establishes some more outbound connections and probably some uPNP inbound so it can talk back to you, rather than use keep-alive connections, which the cloud provider would have to maintain as open too.

Add a sprinkle of IoT to the mix which will then try and use all the above, again lowering your security but at least your fridge can tell you when the eggs are reaching their sell by date.

As you can see, now you have swiss cheese on your Firewall with NAT. Don't forget that NAT isn't a security standard and in all of these cases, the firewall will just handle the traffic like any other stateful outbound traffic in your state table (ie like browsing this web site)

Since the devices sit on your LAN, once one of them is compromised, you need to treat your whole home LAN as compromised.

As you can see, each of the "handy marketing" ideas looks good on paper, but the security behind each of them is fairly non-existent. Security standards need a reboot on home grade devices as today's solutions is about as secure as hanging a key on a peg outside your door with a large flashing neon sign saying "key".

Smoking hole found on Mars where Schiaparelli lander, er, 'landed'

Metric and imperial

I wonder if someone got their metres per second confused with their kilometres per hour again.

Direct from NASA's Some Famous Unit Conversion Errors doc

Skyscape rebrands to UKCloud following legal challenge by Sky

Now what?

So. what are we supposed to say when we look out of our Windows (tm) and stare up to the lovely blue Sky (tm)

In both cases, there is plenty of prior art of standard dictionary words before the legal cancer get hold of the idea its exclusively theirs.

Sounds to me like the patents and trademarks world needs a complete reboot with a good dose of common sense applied.

It's finally happened: Hackers are coming for home routers en masse

Re: Time to research alternatives

@Caps

You mean like the ones already provided by say Asus or Netgear - picking two names from the hat. Some (smarter) vendors have realised that there is market share out there for professional consumer grade routers, however the prices can be a lot higher - up to £400 for top end ones with high spec components multiple AC grade wireless module, good spec multi-core CPU's, plenty of FLASH and RAM etc, but plenty of middle-of-the-road routers with reasonable prices are also available say around the £150-£200 mark. Some vendors such as Buffalo even provide pre-installed dd-wrt routers

The install process is only difficult on some models as the vendors have deliberately made it hard to install anything except their own firmware. Part of this is to stop 3rd party firmware and part of it is to prevent users uploading non-firmware images and bricking their devices (ie a .zip rather than a .bin)

Hardware support is limited in some products as the vendors will not release or cannot release due to licencing terms the full details of their devices / components within them.

All the open source alternatives include images to break out of the OEM firmware, but you might have to do two re-flashes, one to break out and one to install the full feature set firmware, it all depends on the amount of resources in the router you are upgrading since many home grade devices are skinned down to absolute minimum FLASH, RAM and CPU spec.

De-bricking, at least on broadcom based platforms is easy since the CFE is protected and this can be used to de-brick, either using a vendor supplied tool, or if you know to look for the ttl=100 in the pings to the routers default IP address during boo that shows the CFE is active, you can then initiate a tftp with the correct firmware to get the device back up. Debrick processes are often detailed for each model, some are more involved than others, again it depends on what the OEM did to save a few $ during manufacture, some even remove the JTAG resistors, but even that can be overcome.

None of this is difficult, but it does require a basic set of background research and knowledge on what you are doing, but I assume that's not an issue for the majority of the readers here !

Time to research alternatives

Time to go and find out if your router is supported by one of the open source alternatives - DD-WRT, Open-WRT, Tomato, etc. You'll get better functionality and new features such as iPv6 support, better firewall functionality, multiple VLAN support, etc.

Obviously Joe Public isn't going to bother until they can't do something they want to as someone is stealing all their bandwidth / data allowance.

NHS patients must be taught to share their data, says EU lobby group

Trust is earned

Its a simple statement and very true.

The big corporate seem to forget what the word "personal" means and why we don't want random companies knowing about all our medical history and issues, nor do we want to find out that they were accidentally leaked or shared with "partners".

In any case, any such rules on personal data must be "opt in" with no impossible to bypass conditions such as "use of this site grants us ..." type legal BS when trying to book an appointment with the local GP or attend hospital.

You have to assume that most outcomes would be negative for the individual - leaked personal data or misuse, for example insurance companies would probably buy it and use that data as a reason to not take a policy or pay out when the worst does happen to some unfortunate person, since 3 generations back someone had something broadly similar.

When data is leaked, big corporates may be able to get away with just paying a fine and walking away from any issues, but its not possible for the rest of us to undo their mistakes as easily, we have to live with their consequences. Personally, I'm not taking that risk. Personal data will remain personal.

What I want to know is where is the data protection act and why isn't this being enforced to reduce the misuse of our personal data.

Microsoft boffins: Who needs Intel CPUs when you've got FPGAs?

Re: Hmmm

FPGA emulations of many CPU's has already been done - even relatively low end FPGA's are doing this, take the Papillio.cc as a very low cost example. Jack Gassett is behind this project and its an easy starter for people who want to dabble in FPGA's with minimal outlay.

There are a list of freely available cores Here. Open the Processors tab and marvel at the list. 8080, Z80, 6502, 8051, ARM, 68000, GPU, MSP430, PDP 11/70

People have even done complete computers such as the VIC20

Nintendo NES Nintendo NES

Many of the higher end FPGA platforms come with standard CPU "Soft Cores", google for "soft core FPGA" for more info. Cores such as LEON3, MicroBlaze, Nios II, OpenRISC are available.

FPGA has a place as does a CPU. Its a bit irrelevant where it actually lives - ie CPU within FPGA, CPU with FPGA capabilities etc.

On the positive side

At least Microsoft have a product that is NOT running Windows 10

Sweet, vulnerable IoT devices compromised 6 min after going online

Given that there are millions of Pi's in circulation, I bet that one of the credentials on the list was :

User : pi, Password : raspberry

I expect this was quickly followed by a quick "sudo bash" or similar

Perhaps a suggestion to the Pi foundation is that users must change their password at first login - given that this is good practice everywhere else in the world.

After all, I expect that they wouldn't want another top score to go with their number of units sold metric - that of the "most compromised device" category.

The Pi is a great device, but it can be a bit dangerous in untrained hands, a bit like a Smith and Weston. Lets at least show the users where the safety catch is.

Apple's car is driving nowhere

There's a reason that Ford don't make mobile phones, toothbrushes or Jeans.

Its called specialism and its based on the principle that you can't know everything about the world from one organisation (not even Acme !). There is just too much knowledge, technology, experience and expertise to be any good at any particular topic and therefore trusted by consumers.

Perhaps Google would be good to stick at what they do best, which come to think about it was a search engine and I'm struggling to think of other examples ...

In return, I'll not go to Ford to search the Internet.

Intel: New x86 AI instructions

Re: A.I. is still hard.

@charles 9

And of course, ad blockers can use the same to become more intelligent.

It will just be another cycle on the endless treadmill

Dell to reveal 'micro data centres' for outdoor use

Just put one of those metal hanging basket brackets on each side and she'll be really impressed

Obviously you'll have to watch out for the random wasps nest that may turn up in the top of it, what with it being nice and warm and easily accessible, but at least you'll know when that happens as the temperature alert will appear on the flat-screen in the hall that serves as you house-wide monitoring platform

With handy fork lift access

That will be handy when someone wants to make a break with the box that looks Ike it's been dumped outside and they think they can make a few quid recycling the steel

BT will HATE us for this one weird 5G trick

Re: Surely ...

@wonk

Don't try and take it out of context. What I said was :

The other obvious way to solve this is to just do away with the commute, remote working is easy, the technologies are there, so it would reduce the amount of traffic in all forms, thus reducing the problem.

As you can see, it say reduce, reducing, not eliminate. Its a relative rather than an absolute term, much in the same way we say "reduce your speed", "reduce your calorie count", "reduce your alcohol units".

Practice a bit, you'll soon get the hang of it.

Re: Surely ...

@wonk

You seem to have confused the word "reduce" with "eliminate". You also seem to be confused that who you work for didn't change. There are no new "cottage industries"

Office drones (like me) who used to spend 3+ hours a day (63 h/month -> 3 DAYS A MONTH) getting to and from the office to sit at a desk with lower levels of technology than I have in my home office, who then spend hours in virtual meetings, office automation apps or just a $ | # | C:> | PS1> prompt benefit from this approach.

Remote working is becoming more of a norm. Companies don't need to have big flash offices, with high operating costs, so they benefit too.

As to your point about hospitals. By reducing the need for travel, you reduce the likelihood of them getting run over on their way to work in the first place. I can't recall seeing a bus or cyclist on my stairs or in my hall, however if I were to suffer an injury, my local hospital would probably have shorter queues than the ones in central London.

This is where the word reduce comes in handy again - those who physically do have to be somewhere can get around more easily. In time, I fully expect that the same technology that is used to remotely fly a military drone to some bad guy and allow a remote surgeon to operate on a person via robotic machinery will just become more main stream in other area.

As to the interface being a keyboard, that will change in time too, VR will become more, er. realistic.

Surely ...

The point about a big heavy thing and a smaller thing not being in the same space applies equally to busses / lorries and bikes in the same way it does with a bike and a person.

This is the reason that bikes were taken off the pavement in the first place, since having a piece of steel / plastic/ aluminium / carbon fibre inserted into you at 30mph can put a real downer on your day.

There' are a couple of small problems with your plan

• The footpaths are raised to prevent vehicles coming into that space
• many places have large bollards to stop lorries parking on the pavement
• There is always some hoarding for the current re-development that narrows it to half a person width
• Dropped kerbs that make it difficult to walk along the pavement
• The moron coming the other way with their head in their phone.
• The kamikaze cyclist who slows for nothing

I'd suggest that we connect EVERYONE up to some high voltage source where the ability to activate is controlled by near-field communications, that way the bike can zap the lorry / bus driver who is too close, the walker can do the same to the idiot on the bike that is screaming towards them or the person with their head up their mobile phone that is just about to walk into you.

The other obvious way to solve this is to just do away with the commute, remote working is easy, the technologies are there, so it would reduce the amount of traffic in all forms, thus reducing the problem.

First look at Windows Server 2016: 'Cloud for the masses'? We'll be the judge of that

Used to be fun to watch

It used to be fun to download the eval's on TechNet and have a play and see whats changed, but now its just "meh".

Servers based on Windows 10 UI, <marvin>That sounds awful</marvin>

The rest seems to be very Microsoft - copy, copy, copy.

• You can limit the admin's ability to run tools - copy sudo from Linux
• VXLAN - copying the networking concept from VMWare and Cisco
• Nested virtualisation - yep, VMWare and Xen does that too
• ASCII art on .Net Core .. Really in 2016 ?
• Headless admin - copy from Linux. Wonder if its useful this time though ??
• Docker - copy from Linux.
• Screwing more out for the same tin with the new core based licencing - Yep, MS.
• Raising the limits to just above the competition. Expect VMWare to do the same again in a couple of months

I don't get the benefit of local cloud. We used to call that "our data centre". If "real cloud" is a lot more resilient, then it should be more than a half rack of server tin, or its not a real comparison, even if you dress it up with glitter and lipstick. Where's the resilience in all the layers ?? I'd expect around 6 racks - 2 compute, 2 network, 2 storage as a minimum.

If its using the same reference design, it makes you wonder what the cloudy hosted ones look like, or is it more smoke and mirrors ?

Hey, you know what Samsung is also burning after the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco? $2.3bn

Couriers

Given that most couriers aren't the most careful with devices, I wonder why the special box isn't the one closest to the phone, rather than furthest from it. That way the courier damages is most likely on the ordinary boxes.

Also puzzled by the need for the anti-static packaging. I can't see that they would want to re-sell the phones once returned, this implies that they may be protecting the phone from static. I wonder if this is related to the battery failure condition ?

MS Paint re-born in 3D

Hardware bump

Looks like we're going to need new hardware again.

The rumoured minimum spec is Windows 10, 32 core CPU running at 24THz, 1Tb RAM, Direct-X 46.9.005 compatible video card, an Office 345 subscription and a blunt crayon.

Samsung to Galaxy Note 7 users: Turn it off. Now

It is only one type of battery that has the problem. It's the ones with Lithium in them.

Social media flame wars to be illegal, says top Crown prosecutor

Re: John Smith

Surely you mean

"That John Smith's pale and bitter"

John Smith

Setting up a fake social media account in someone else's name is also said to be a potential crime.

I wonder how many John Smith's there are in the UK ?

What happens if one John Smith says something now declared nasty against another John Smith, given that both are using their proper name.

Could they just plead confusion or irony in that they were taking the Mick of themselves or perhaps just using their ability for free speech, given that we don't live in China.

Obviously Mick might get upset about the former, but that's another matter all together.

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

Re: The grew the business...

@TRT

Even though they are both numbers and accountants are supposed to be good at numbers aren't they ?.

I wonder how many accountants can count in binary, octal, hexadecimal, let along do any maths in it.

I bet that the only other number base they, like everyone else uses and doesn't realise it is sexagesimal - Base 60 (which is used in clocks for obvious reasons).

This is ironic, given that they spend all their time worrying about "the end of time" - or at least the next the week, month, quarter, year, tax year, accounting period, etc.

Adventures in (re) naming your business: Fire up the 4-syllable random name generator

Re: agreed

Its a bit like the file sharing thing called 'wuala', which always makes me cringe, given that the french word being copied is 'voila'.

For some reason when people start saying nonsense words, the turbo encabulator always springs to mind.

Turkey blocks Drive, Github, OneDrive in bid to kill RedHack leaks

Cloud fail

+1 to the list of reasons not to move to the cloud, since you can be off the cloud when something like this happens

Windows updates? Just trust us, says Microsoft executive

Re: Trust us

Perhaps Microsoft should try Windows 10 Sag Aloo edition ?

No

No, we will not trust you with patches. You lost trust with the Windows 10 and other forced updates debacle. Repeat again until you get it. Its not your computer, its mine.

If you want me to change my computer, then be truthful about what the patches do and I might decide to install it. If not... then the answer is no.

The other issue you have is that I now have a $ prompt, not a C:\ prompt.

This was because you tried it on before and we changed to something else that doesn't do this to us.

Actually, yes, Samsung, you do have to pay Apple $120m

Slide to unlock

Does it matter that Apple no longer use slide to unlock in IOS 10 ?

Don't panic, but a 'computer error' cut the brakes on a San Francisco bus this week

Crashed

Must be running windows 10 then ?

Internet of Things will turn up the compute heat for data centres

Hot air

Summary : Marketing droid spouts hot air re cooling.