Posts by Nameless Dread

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

New definition

"The poor guy's got a problem." POOR ?

Scattered Spider snared financial orgs before targeting shops in Britain, America

"Hello, I

am your courteous AI BOT.

I have entered this conversation between you and our Helpdesk because I have detected your request to our helper that he/she transfer funds to an unrecgnised account.

Our person has now been disconnected from this conversation and I have also temporarily removed his/her permissions to transfer funds, since such transfers are against our policy.

This conversation has now ended. <click> "

OK?

"Hello, I am your courteous AI BOT.

I have entered this conversation between you and our Helpdesk because I have detected your request to our helper that he/she transfer funds to an unrecgnised account.

Our person has now been disconnected from this conversation and I have also temporarily removed his/her permissions to transfer funds, since such transfers are against our policy.

This conversation has now ended. <click> "

OK?

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

We've been here before

"Having a standardized system for identifying vulnerabilities is extremely important, and helps keep everyone — companies, vulnerability researchers, developers, governments — on the same page. "

It's already done by biologists so what's the problem?

Having a standardized system for identifying SPECIES is extremely important, and helps keep biologists —and everyone— on the same page.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

On the topic of HP ..

Why does HP's name sometimes appear in the red header-band on el Reg's pages?

I ignore it and it eventually goes away.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

The future was so yesterday

A short while ago, I jokingly mused about the onset of the smart lavatory.

And just a few days ago THERE ONE WAS!

Count me out (of course).

Debian 12.9 arrives, quickly followed by MX Linux 23.5

Re: Another MX vote here

Another MX fan here: Dropped MS so went Mint, then MX because systemd. Flirted with GhostBSD (liked it a lot) but couldn't easily load driver for my printer, so MX it is and happy with it.

(BTW, server is Rpi 3B+ - runs Apache web server and mySQL like a dream.)

Meta's plan for nuclear datacenter reportedly undone by bees

Have a pun time!

If you can't join them, bee(t) them. I'll bee off now.

OpenAI says Chinese gang tried to phish its staff

Smart, you say ?

Smart meters, smart cars, smart TVs ... Watch out for the next BIG thing: Smart lavatories.

Your every movement monitored.

Smart TVs are spying on everyone

Smart, you say ?

Smart meters, smart cars, smart TVs ... Watch out for the next BIG thing: Smart lavatories.

Your every movement monitored.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Coming shortly

Writing this in GhostBSD (FreeDSB-based). Sussing it out before switching from MX Linux (and from Miint and fromr Windows before that).

Just got to get to grips with Fish and then it's migration time.

Thanks to Liam for the articles.

Happy birthday, Putin – you've been pwned

Law is as law does

"Kremlin officials vowed to bring those responsible ... to justice."

"Justice" ?

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

'... there is a number of US readers ... '.

10 out of 10 for grammar! (Singular number.) --->

'Gay furry hackers' say they've disbanded after raiding Project 2025's Heritage Foundation

IT aspect ?

Where's the IT angle in all of this ? (speaking/writing as an Anglo)

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Old computer, you say?

A PDP-8 was the first computer I got my hands on (Saturday mornings only), courtesy of the IT guy.

I had to enter the tape loader initialiser program manually on the toggle switches on the front panel, depress the 'Run' switch and the tapes would start to spin

- and maybe jump off the spiders, unreeling as they flew across the room.

Happy days; Good while they lasted !

Then we moved to a PDP-11 and that was the end of my little gallop.

Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems

Re: How does this malware gain a foothold on ones Linux computer?

Please excuse the ignorance - Does a router, e.g. a domestic / BT router, offer any protection against such intrusions ?

Email phishing, Network vulnerability probing, Zero day leveraging were mentioned above.

Microsoft revives Windows 10 Beta Channel even though OS doesn't have long left

Another solution ?

Here it is ..

Dual boot Linux Mint / Ghost BSD.

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

Remedies?

Has anyone anything to say about DuckDuckGo, uBlock, Privacy Badger, Tampermonkey, etc ? (other brands are available).

(Satisfied smirk - so far. But then, I don't do audio books.)

.

OpenAI insists it's not launching a search engine nor GPT-5 on Monday

Re: Re: LLM progress is now asymptotic

".. So full of so many truly unexpected surprises..."

When did you last have an EXPECTED surprise ?

ND

European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale

Geoid, anybody ? -Correction

Missed the edit window ...

I should have written ' ... 50 - 60 metres altitude..' (difference between smartphone and real GPS receiver which corrects for Geode shape).

Geoid, anybody ?

Any mention of the Geoid?

My so-called smartphone disagrees with my hand-held GPS receiver to the tune of 50 - 60 cm altitude.

The latter agrees more closely with the Ordnance Survey maps (sea-level based, and I'm in Central Scotland.)

Perhaps this hyper-accurate system reports the distance to the earth's Centre of Gravity ...

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Not for me, thanks

Mint user here ...

Ran the core version of Zorin live yesterday but didn't like the 'Fisher-Price' icons. Also, to my disappointment, it didn't install a proper version of Wine, so it wouldn't run Lotus 1-2-3 ( unlike Mint).

Didn't try Virtual Box. I can do that already on Mint. (+ Win XP, Lotus). So no go.

MX Linux is OK;

Tx for OS suggestions, Liam

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

DOBs on multiple occasions

" ... and merged the records of the individuals that share the same name and date of birth on multiple occasions during 2000, 2021 and 2022."

Remind me to change my DOB on multiple occasions, just in case I share it with Zuck or someone. Once would be enough, shirley.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Oh, Brother ...

... Not the universal answer, sadly.

I have an HL-L2350DW which ghostBSD has never heard of. (Many thanks for mentioning this OS, Liam.)

Nor has Brother' s site a driver for FreeBSD or GhostBSD

Even Ghost's recommended alternative driver (HP something or other) doesn't function.

And yet Linux Mint copes, no bother.

Perhaps Ghost HQ will wake up some day ...

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

FreeBSD to HOST VirtualBox?

Installed it and liked the fast boot-up to Desktop. - much faster than Linux Mint.

(Perhaps the verbose start-up messages makes it more interesting than Mint's bla[c/n]k screen.)

Now, how to install Virtual Box ON the thing ?

Internet search seems exclusively to yield install GhostBSD INTO Virtual Box on another OS.

Any pointers ? Somebody ?

Twitter says it may harvest biometric, employment data from its addicts

Xit away

Ever seen one of those pesky pop-up windows with an 'X' top RH corner to send it away?

Well the other day, I got one but it was the wrong sort of 'X' and when I hit it as a reflex, our Elon got another hit he didn't deserve.

Eternal vigilance, folks!

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Old hat here

I still yearn for Lotus 1-2-3.

Graphs ('charts') were neat; not klunky like in OL Calc.

Larry

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

The good old days

XP in Virtual Box on Mint on a private network (disabled) - runs Lotus 1-2-3 and Notepad - Magic! (So much faster and more eye-appealing than Libre Office !)

FTC sues VoIP provider over 'billions of illegal robocalls'

For non US readers re robocalls ...

I had a well-spoken 'lady from Amazon' call my land-line the other day to say 'suspicious activity' had been noted on my Amazon account and it had been blocked.

'Dial 1 to speak to a customer representative.'

I hung up and logged in on my desktop to my Amazon account and, to no surprise, there had been no suspicious activity reported.

Then I recalled I had NEVER given my land-line number to Amazon at all:

Draw your own conclusions ...

Zoox blurs line between workers and crash test dummies in robo-taxi trial

"Amenities"

... a steering wheel, gear shift, accelerator, or brake pedal... amenities ...

Ironic, or what?

Linux Mint 21.2 includes a bit of feature creep from the GNOME world

Bring back the good ol' days

Just gone from LM19.3 to LM20.3, prompted (driven?) by warnings of LM19's imminent EOL.

IMO, general appearance of LM20 is 'Teletubbies' compared with LM19 crispness, and overall performance has slowed.

Any chance of reverting the appearance ?

Also had to upgrade Virtual Box and now B -Win XP can't see my second hard drive. AND can't update Firefox manually!

Not a happy bunny.

Starlink decoded for use as GPS alternative – without Elon Musk's help

Larry Grew

"... traditional GPS..." !

Survey shows XP lingers on while Windows 11 makes a 0.21% ripple in the enterprise

... from beyond the gravy ...

Count another XP user here.

It's in a VM on Mint so I can use Lotus 1-2-3, just like the good old days.

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

Some things never change

... The solution is to open Task Manager, then kill and restart the Explorer process, which is not too painful though hardly intuitive.

Sounds like the bastard son of 'Stop it then Restart it' (of beloved memory).

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

Ads ? Paid features ?

On the topic of 'ads', what's the difference between one of them and a 'paid feature' like we've started seeing on el Reg pages ?

Detroit Police make second wrongful facial-recog arrest when another man is misidentified by software

Fish ? Scale ?

No more installing Microsoft's Chromium-centered Edge by hand: Windows 10 will do it for you automatically

Life on the edge

OK, the blocking tool works, it tells me.

But I had to use an ELEVATED Powershell (admin permissions) so as to dodge the "access denied" refusal.

Strange that the "help" page from MicroSoft doesn't seem to mention this. (At first sight, anyway.)

(Just spotted a commenter above mentions use by admin.)

Any ideas how to Uninstall Edge if it's already in place ?

It's absent from the "Uninstall or change a program" screen; likewise from the "Windows features" box.

Reminds me of trying to remove Internet Explorer in the good old days. Only more so.

Old-school cruel: Dodgy PDF email attachments enjoying a renaissance

PDFs nogo in FF - Vivaldi OK

Just in case anyone's interested - PDFs don't open any more for me in Firefox ( with with add blocker, on Windows 7) so I have switched default PDF application to Vivaldi - works fine. Useful for tax and other docs from secure sites.

Tim Apple. Larry Oracle. Ginni Layoffs: It works so why the heck not?

Thumbs up for the classical reference. elReg authors are not all unliterate, as it were.

Fat chance: Cholesterol leads boffins to discover world's oldest animal fossil – 558m years old

@ David 132: I’m sure there’s a limerick in there somewhere....

The fuss Dickinsonia provokes,

those plentiful sexual jokes,

augment their transmission

by prompting coition

as Charles Darwin's notion evokes.

...

NEXT!!!

Q: How many guns to arm nine coachloads of terrorists?

Some other perp!

"Suffolk Police said had the weapons fallen into the wrong hands, there would have been enough to arm nine coach-loads of terrorists."

Let's hear it for Suffolk Police!

'Traditional' forms of thuggery decline in UK, cybercrime on the rise

Re: Ye Olde street Thugs

"Like Hallowe'en on steroids?"

No, thanks, I don't.

Europe's Asteroid prang probe plan calls for cubesats

... 10cm^3 modules ...

10cc ? Rubber Bullets ?

Perhaps you mean 10 x 10 x 10 cm = 100 cm^3

Google snaps Dutch woman completely taking the piss

Re: "A Village Fair with a Church Behind"

The original, painted from a different viewpoint, was titled: "A Village Church with a Fair Behind".

Windows 10 growth stalls during October

Re: XP

... old legacy software ...

For instance: Lotus Approach (a Win 7 fail-to-run) goes just fine in Win2k SP4 in a VM.

Not to mention my QBasic executables, vintage DOS 3.

Next up will be VirtualBox for Mint so I don't have to keep dodging the WinX bullet.

The only GOOD DRONE is a DEAD DRONE. Y'hear me, scumbags?!

Nice one, Dabbsy

... GCHQ prying through my children’s web history? Bloody paedos, the lot of them.

Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

" ...an imaginary individual in a context where their sex is irrelevant." (Dave 126)

Three cheers for avoiding the mealy-mouthed term "gender" when what's under discussion is the difference between male and female (namely sex). In my book, "gender" is a grammatical concept, not an anatomical one. As in German: das Madchen (gender = neuter) refers to a little girl (sex = female).

<rant ends>

Yet another Android app security bug: This time 'everything is affected'

A lift-shaft of flaws ?

title

Techies told to GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY by Microsoft, Netflix

Words and their meanings

Seem to remember Woody Allen commenting that, when accosted by some undesirables, "I told them to go forth and multiply, but not in those exact words ... "

Now car hackers can bust in through your motor's DAB RADIO

... a visit to the men in white coats. ...

@ John Styles

Nah - THEY come to YOU.