Posts by Wexford

Microsoft isn't fixing 8-year-old shortcut exploit abused for spying

Hopefully corporate IT learned its lesson and implemented user disk quotas. No single user should be able to take down a system like that.

CISA fires, now rehires and immediately benches security crew on full pay

Re: "your ethical obligations"

I read that as a hint to not say anything particularly bad on SM that might jeapordise their return to employment.

US minerals company says crooks broke into email and helped themselves to $500K

That's a handy $500k to add to its deductibles.

Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China

Re: Great plan

6. Blame Biden

A Kansas pig butchering: CEO who defrauded bank, church, friends gets 24 years

"recovered around $8 million, which is being returned to local investors ahead of any government claims to the money."

Business as usual, then...privatise the profits, socialise the losses. In this case, let's help out the private investors who made a decision to part with their money, before we help the public who had no say in the matter.

Judge decides not to block Musk's $1M election giveaway

Re: The petition was about what?

I've just been changing the labels on mine. It started with 0-10 but now it's 2-13. Looks like I'll have to make it 3-14 or get a whole new one.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: Hmmmm...

> My mate who had a 2yo EV with a burned out motor

What repair bill? That's warranty.

Re: Dumb interviewers

> On average an EV vs dino burner is around $10k more

Not the case for our latest EV.

> Battery replacement after 3 years, might as well get a new car

Not the case for our 13 year old Leaf.

> resale value poor, used cars not wanted (see above)

Please share your evidence of this. I can't find anything that substantiates your claim.

> limited range, charge times too long

Our EV gets us everywhere we need to, and we charge at home or work.

Charging time is irrelevant - you're stuck in the old mindset where you need to make a trip to a refuelling station and stand around waiting for your vehicle to refuel. EV owners don't have to do this.

> Power grid cannot handle it if EVERYONE had an EV

Yes it could.

> enriches CCP [where most battery materials come from]

So what?

Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage

Re: Hmmmm....

I wonder if this might be the innards after a fairing/shell was removed?

TSMC blows whistle on potential sanctions-busting shenanigans from Huawei

I'm sure you're right about the vertical integration. The Chinese system pretty much allows for the vertical integration of *everything* at a nation-state level.

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

Re: Cost!

You're likely aware of this Dagg, but for the benefit of others the Coalition's nuclear policy is nothing more than to throw uncertainty into the energy market. This in turn allows their fossil fuel sponsors to keep earning from that tasty tasty coal.

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: My collection

Same here. I'd just like to know where they keep the nuclear wessels.

AMD downplays risk of growing blast radius, licensing fees from manycore chips

Re: Bigger is better

I might be misunderstanding your post, but your first paragraph seems to be contradicted by your final one?

Moscow-adjacent GoldenJackal gang strikes air-gapped systems with custom malware

Re: Hey beast666

Downvoted - how dare you include "low value" and "the Reg" in the same sentence!

Earth's new mini-moon swings by, then ghosts us by late November

Re: "only a 0.00151 percent chance"

So you're saying...there's a chance?

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Wow, that's also me. All the Pascal coding chops, with the inline assembly for the bits that needed to run particularly optimally.

Now there went several years of intense learning...

I don't think anyone knowledgeable thinks there's any intelligence in AI (yet).

But ChatGPT is definitely a very useful tool in some office and programming contexts. We're using it frequently for first drafts of large volumes of code that would otherwise take hours to write...or somewhat less onerously copy/paste from Stack Overflow :-)

Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier

Explain how announcing the results from the latest test flight is bs?

NASA pushes back missions to the ISS to buy time for Starliner analysis

What a time to be alive.

Inner child me is fascinated that we have a huge space station with a mix of Progress and Dragon and Starliners coming and going, with a rescue being planned and working around a side trip to Jupiter that's occupying one of the pads.

I want to tell 40 years younger me "you think that Apollo picture book is cool? Just wait til 2024"

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

I recall a backpacking trip in 1999 with three friends, all of us Nokia owners. With heavy use (mostly playing Snake while on long rail or bus journeys between cities) we would get four solid days' use from them before needing to find a power point at a hostel, which was part of the fun challenge of travel at the time.

10 years later most backpackers seemed to have a phone, a digital camera and a netbook. The snakes of charging cables were a thing to behold in hostel dorm rooms at the time. I imagine now they'd be back to one single device.

A million Australian pubgoers wake up to find personal info listed on leak site

You don't get the choice, if you want to enter the venue. Either you let them scan your driver's license or they don't let you in.

Hardware-level Apple Silicon vulnerability can leak cryptographic keys

Re: I'm not sure it matters.

"They" might or might not want to spy on us, but every miscreant out there who wants to install malware on our devices to earn a quid is most certainly interested.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

I was the problem luser

One day my hand held Brother scanner, that lived on the window shelf behind my desk, stopped being detected when I plugged its USB cable in. Quick call with Brother who asked me to RMA it.

It arrived back a couple of weeks later, in working order, with a note that there was sign of liquid damage but they'd repaired it under warranty at no cost (kudos, Brother!). "Water damage??" I thought, "it's above and behind my PC, nothing fluid ever goes there!".

Some months later and we get a torrential downpour, from an unusual wind direction, while I was home. There's water coming in via a previously unnoticed leak above the window and begins pooling on the shelf...

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

Re: math doesn't bend

This math is not for bending?

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Lost the plot

Please grow up.

RAM-ramming Rowhammer is back – to uniquely fingerprint devices

Re: Why?

Per the article - stopping bots. I can see the use for this in a DDOS or even a queue-for-service scenario, if there were such a thing as a reputable global register of devices with compromised/uncompromised flags. Not that I'd line up in any particular hurry to let them rowhammer my device and add me to the registry as "ok".

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Takes me back to a 90s backpacking trip, and first encountering "straßer". My mates and I were saying "strarber" to each other while navigating, until we were politely corrected by a helpful local.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: Bouncing checks

We had "Cash is better than a Czech" in our Perth rag. They were all onto a winner that day!

Re: Checks?

And in Perth it is (was?) the UBD.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: Change window - cue the drums

I wonder if it was a false memory suggested by the owner and your Dad and his mates :-)

"It was all Chivo's fault, we had no choice but to drink it!"

Re: Change window - cue the drums

First time I've read that, so I'm grateful for the repost - it's a good 'un!

Ads for lucrative jobs in Asia fail to mention chance of slavery as crypto-scammer

Re: The modern slave trade

That's because you want to stop immigration for cruel and racist reasons. If you really cared you'd be protesting the kids locked up in cages.

Stop trying to put lipstick on a pig.

I live in Western Australia and this is familiar practice, if not the exact thing we've dealt with only recently. If I recall, it was indentured Vietnamese workers on a farm in the northern suburbs (Wanneroo).

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

Re: FTFY

The search engines are fine, and that looks like a browser hijack to me, so I'd be running a malware scan.

Intel bumps up core counts for 13th-gen vPro chips

Similar here - my 4th gen 4-core i5 still doing just fine for most things, to my ongoing surprise as a tech worker who used to upgrade every other year. Switching to SSD and upgrading to 16Gb RAM has extended its life significantly.

Running VMs exposes its limitations - I can manage one Win10 VM (work from home environment) but the performance hit is noticeable on both guest and host. For that reason I'm considering an upgrade to a Ryzen 9 with lots of cores.

Cops swoop after crooks use wireless keyfob hack to steal cars

Re: An alternative

I unlocked and got into the wrong Holden Camira (Cavalier in the UK, I believe), sat down, started the motor, and music from someone else's cassette came on. My brother in the passenger seat: "Were we listening to U2 on the way here?"

My car was two spots away, it turns out.

That Camira key could also unlock and start the ignition on most Holden Geminis at the time (early 80s models).

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: Good for another 110 years

I'll set a calendar reminder so my brain-in-a-jar can come back to this page in 2132 and check in on your brain-in-a-jar's progress.

Java SE 6 and 7 devs weigh their options as support ends

Re: Version numbering still confusing.

They probably inherited the versioning from Sun just like Sun's Solaris versioning...2.4 was SunOS 5.4 then when it became SunOS 5.7 they went from Solaris 2 to Solaris 7 then...I lost track

Microsoft says Azure fended off what might just be the world's biggest-ever DDoS attack

Windows computers? Got some sauce on that?

'Welcome to Perth' mirth being milked for all it's worth

Re: Sydney thinks it is Oz

> Driving is impossible unless you mean the OTHER Perth.

Perth, Tasmania is much closer but you still have to fly to get there from Syndey. Or put the car on the ferry.

Do you come from a land Down Under? Where diesel's low and techies blunder

Re: looking at the DNS log

Takes me back to when I'd set up a basic keyword log filter at work, and was suprised at the domain names used by Pen Island (calligraphy consumables) and Experts Exchange (tech forum) at the time.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: (Only) A Bit like Porsche

I'd love to see Windows Millennial Edition.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

The former time seems just as perfectly good a reason to emergency halt as the latter. If I saw my DC filling with mist or condensation from the AC I'd be pretty keen to protect whatever I could while I could!

Protip: If Joe Public reports that your kit is broken, maybe check that it is actually broken

Re: My tight-fisted manager ordered us all brand new shiny laptops

That one's almost excusable. Your manager was trying to spend efficiently given the present environment...was a wifi rollout being considered at that time, though?

An actress, an internet billionaire, and Tom Cruise walk into a space station ... not necessarily at the same time

Re: Nothing there...

7am comes around every ~93 minutes on the ISS. That's a lot of croissants.

NASA pops old-school worm logo onto Orion spacecraft

That 80s-era Battlestar Galactica is the source of its appeal for many, myself included :-)

James Webb Space Telescope runs one last dress rehearsal for its massive golden mirrors before heading to launchpad

Re: So may ways to screw up!

If. !! IF !!

Don't jinx it!

Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably

My first exposure to multi user systems at uni was a delightful learning and discovery experience, including that one could cat to /dev/ttyXX.

One fun bit was to construct a text file "Talk request from xxx" or whatever the format was, then cat an appropriately modified copy of this to two users' ttys such that each thought the other was sending them a talk request. There was a strong chance that at least one of them would "respond", leading to exhanges of "what, huh, why did you send that talk request, no YOU sent it..."

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter cleared for further, farther, flying after landing on 117-second fourth flight

Re: Nighttime Landings

Well at the risk of lots of downvotes I guess you could argue that Challenger made many daytime splashdowns.