Posts by Electron Shepherd

Brussels cunning plan to save the EU: No more Cookie Popups

Re: What good will this "relaxation" do?

would imagine that 10E-(a large number) of websites don't use cookies at all

I suspect it's just the opposite. I can't speak for LAMP-based sites, but if you're using ASP in any flavour, you get cookies as part of the architecture.

Any e-commerce site will be using them, because without some kind of state management, any form of basket management is impossible. There are alternatives to that which the EU defines as a cookie, such as modifying the URL, storing state in the DOM, or using "Flash cookies", but they are all "worse" than standard HTTP cookies for compatibility and user-acceptance.

A lot of cookies are benign, anyway, and aren't used for user tracking. Our product is priced in GBP, USD and EUR, and a visitor can select their preferred currency. We pre-select based on a geo-lookup on their first visit, but that's not perfect, and just because, for example, a visitor is in Europe doesn't mean that they always want pricing in Euros. We keep their selected preference in a cookie. No user tracking, just a small convenience for them.

IBM has an on-prem cloud it thinks can go big in Asia

Re: Whaaa...

I get the impression it's not on your own hardware, but rather IBM brings in the hardware, which you then effectively rent.

Microsoft announces 16 years of support for Windows, SQL Servers

If you need to ask, then you need to read the article, where it tells you, and even gives a link to a PDF with all the details.

VMware releases 'not cool, but very useful' integrated containers

What - there's more to life than "mobile apps"?

"Plenty of pundits have suggested that containers stand a good chance of killing virtual machines, citing the former as lighter, faster and better-suited to building the kind of apps that work well at scale on the web and with mobile devices."

Perhaps "replacing virtual machines for one specific use-case" might be a better way to put it, unless said pundits really think that the only use for virtual machines is to build web sites and mobile application back ends.

Privacy is theft! Dave Eggers' big-screen takedown of Google and Facebook emerges

Re: "an amalgamation of Google and Facebook"

So... Apple, then?

What shape is Apple's new HW building?

Coincidence? I think not!

Lenovo: If you value your server, block Microsoft's November security update

Re: Go ahead

Unless you are on Windows when it is at the will of Microsoft.

Only if you're daft enough to configure the server to reboot automatically if required. If you're a bit sensible, it will just sit there saying "Patches installed, please reboot", and if you're really sensible, it will sit there saying "Patches downloaded - ready to install".

The idea that Windows forces reboots is totally incorrect.

Inside Android's source code... // TODO – Finish file encryption later

It's actually worse

If you look at the source code in full, the function returns 'true' by default, meaning that someone calling the function, but not aware of the "to do", will be under the impression that the user key is locked, when in fact the function has done precisely nothing.

I would have thought that at least returning 'false' in the e4crypt_is_native() branch would have been sensible.

Ransomware scams cost Brits £4.5m per year

The other, and even more important piece of advice which is almost always neglected is to use a backup solution that is physically disconnected from the computer except when backing up. Backing up to a permanently connected external hard drive is great protection against a hardware failure of the primary disk, but useless against a ransomware infection, which will just encrypt the backup drive too.

Lies, dammed lies and ... etc

nearly 40 per cent of businesses had experienced a ransomware attack in the previous year. Of these victims, more than a third had lost revenue and 20 per cent had to stop business completely.

So, either 8 percent of all businesses that were trading in the last year went out of business due to ransomware, or Malwarebytes have very carefully cherry-picked their sample.

Since Malwarebytes is a "security software firm", I wonder which it is?

Shhhhh! If you're quiet, Linus Torvalds might release a new Linux

Re: Odd use of terminology

But if you think that the software that you have now will need more changes before final release (which is what Linus is saying), then by definition, the current software can't be a release candidate, since you don't intend to release it (as the final product).

Odd use of terminology

If Linus thinks that he'll end up pushing out another release, then to my way of thinking, this one isn't a release candidate. It's a beta, or possibly a preview. A release candidate is one where the developers think it's of sufficient functionality and quality to be released.

Blu Vivo 6: Top value trendsetter marred by Chino-English mangle

Re: Come back, Nokia 3310, all is forgiven...

Li-ion batteries degrade with each charge cycle. This is a brand new phone. If the battery only lasts for a day now, do you really think it will still last a whole day in two year's time, when it's been recharged 730 times?

Come back, Nokia 3310, all is forgiven...

And the battery quietly impressed too: you’ll get a day

There's something seriously wrong with the smartphone market when a portable device that only lasts a day before needing a recharge is "impressive".

You want SaaS? Don't bother, darling, your kind can't afford it

Ah, the lure of "the cloud"...

"I run my complete accounts and invoicing system in the cloud and it costs me barely £15 a month. The reason it's relatively cheap is because the SaaS developer is freed from the ball and chain of a single annual update schedule, huge physical distribution costs and the worrisome drop-off of the sales curve after each new release.

I think you mean:

"I run my complete accounts and invoicing system in the cloud and it costs me barely £15 a month. The reason it's relatively cheap is because the SaaS developer is freed from having to develop any new features, since now I'm locked in, and can't get my data out again in any sort of usable format. Each month, paying the £15 is cheaper than dealing with the cost and hassle of migrating to a one-off cost accounting package that would be much cheaper in the long run."

Emulating x86: Microsoft builds granny flat into Windows 10

Re: Baby... Bathwater?

But you need something CPU-specific to load the CPU-agnostic code. Or, to put it another way, some sort of CPU-specific system that can be used by someone operating the computer.

You could possibly call it an operating system...

We'd already be years into developing CPU agnostic applications that could run effortlessly regardless of the underlying CPU

You mean something that we could "write once, and run anywhere"? We've had Java for the last 20 years. But even then, you still need a CPU and operating-system specific runtime. Oracle currently lists seven JREs for Linux (x86 and x64), Mac OS X (x64), Solaris (SPARC and x64) and Windows (x86 and x64).

Why I just bought a MacBook Air instead of the new Pro

Re: Not much has changed in Windows-land

But computers exist for the sole purpose of running software, and, like it or not, the range of software available for the Windows "ecosystem", if there is such a thing, is much broader than that for OS X.

For example, why did you buy a Windows "gaming" laptop, if "the Mac is still the device to beat"? Why not just run the games on the Mac?

Re: A fair response.

"Why the apparent reliance on a third "device", cloud storage to keep them in sync? "

Because peer-to-peer syncing doesn't result in a monthly fee going to Apple.

Mozilla launches 'privacy edition' Firefox... that phones home

Re: Firefox, Mozilla Foundation

"Yes, the Firefox code is, technically, open source."

More importantly, who's checking that the executable everyone downloads is actually built from the published source? Does Mozilla tell you what their exact build environment is, so that it can be verified?

Who's to say that the pre-built browser doesn't contain some extra features included "for the convenience of the user"?

Portable drive, 5TB capacity. Hmm, there's something fishy here

Landfill Disks?

The Hitachi Life Studio drive is in my waste bin now.

I think a better alternative would have been to FreeCycle it. There's a lot of people for whom 500GB is a lot of storage. It's certainly more than the personal digital data for the vast majority of the population. Why throw it away when you can give it away?

Six years on it still works but 500GB is smaller than a decent USB stick's capacity now and the drive is useless.

As for switching to flash, a quick scan of a well-known IT retailer lists a 512GB USB pen drive at £190, and a 500GB portable disk at £37. It must be nice to be in a situation where the price difference between the two isn't important.

What a bee-lief! UK's asian hornet outbreak is over ... for now

Re: So?

Honey bees have enough problems without hornets adding to them.

Apart from the problems with CCD, neonicotinoids, varroa and EFB, there's a lot of evidence that the NOx from car exhausts is reacting with the complex scent chemicals produced by flowering plants, hindering the bees' ability to find the nectar they need.

HPE OneView's automated on-ramp is easy on the admin

Rehashed Press Release?

This reads like a press release that's been re-worded a bit, rather than an independent write-up.

Very much like another article from four days ago.

Alleged 2010 flash crash trader loses latest appeal against extradition to US

Re: I never bought the offence in the first place

Maybe a co-located server in an American DC with fast links to the NYSE was actually running the "trading" software.

Nest turns off oven, vacuum

All very well, but it needs the domestic robot for the full solution...

My dishwasher already has a "start in x minutes" feature. So does the washing machine.

What does Nest add? The idea of controlling either of those remotely seems pointless, since for both of them, you have to be there to load them with plates or clothes as appropriate. You can't get to the office and think "damn, I forgot to put the laundry on", fire up the Nest app, and have it go and fetch the clothes from the laundry basket.

Sweet, vulnerable IoT devices compromised 6 min after going online

Re: Making IoT makers co-responsible

There's a lot of hardware out there with MAC addresses copied from another manufacturer, duplicated within a production run or just plain invalid (sometimes all three at once).

There's no legitimate way to determine a manufacturer if all you have is a MAC address, and if you ask the legitimate manufacturers to pay for the assignation of addresses, they'll just pass the cost on to the end-users.

'Everyone' is buying Twitter

Always follow the money

according to rumors flying around Silicon Valley today

share price up 21 per cent

It would be very interesting to know who started the rumours. I'm quite sure that there's no way it could be some of the folks with large holdings still carrying a loss from the IPO. After all, pump-and-dump schemes are illegal...

'I'm sorry, your lift has had a problem and had to shut down'

Correct Priorities?

Given the state of the NHS finances, I can only hope that they let the licence lapse deliberately and spent the money on helping someone get better.

Linux turns 25, with corporate contributors now key to its future

Re: El Reg on Linux

"HP ... were shipping Red Hat Servers by the thousands."

How many Windows servers were they shipping, compared to the RHEL (or other Linux distros)? It's relative quantities that are important, not absolutes for just one half of a comparison.

"A very large international I worked for actually had quite a few Linux desktops"

A "very large" international probably had tens of thousands of Windows desktops, so "quite a few" Linux desktops is, relatively speaking, not significant.

Re: El Reg on Linux

"Thank you, Microsoft; that really helped the decision making process"

Why is it Microsoft's fault if a printer manufacturer doesn't provide a driver for a (probably, but you don't give a date, new) operating system? Surely you don't think they write all the drivers themselves?

"The Register runs on Linux"

It would be interesting to hear from the El Reg staff what proportion of their

a) web servers

b) internal "business" servers

c) desktops

use Windows, Linux and OS/X respectively.

For most businesses, it's

a) mostly Linux

b) some Windows, some Linux

c) almost all Windows

Redmond reveals Hyper-V 2016 beats vSphere's RAM and CPU count

Re: wonder how they tested more than 12TB

Probably just bought one of these

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B-TR4FT.cfm

Tesla touts battery that turns a Model S into 'third fastest ever' car

Re: Damn - No crystal ball

Where's the advance in battery technology going to come from?

If I knew that, I think I'd be quite rich by now....

I think that patience is the key. As mentioned, a lot of people are working on this.

The thing is, if you look back a few years, most technologies were reported as hitting their "limit", and now we regularly go beyond those limits.

From the IT sphere, I can remember articles in the early 90's in BYTE magazine, which said, quite authoritatively, that a CD-ROM faster that 8-speed was impossible, and that there was simply no way to get more than 33kbps per second of data down the cheap and nasty copper wire phone lines that went to domestic premises.

Of course, there's no reason to suppose that the answer is a battery as we think of them now. You still need a portable energy store, but the one we all end up using in 50 years time may bear no relationship to the chemical-based ones we have now.

Units, not numbers

I suspect that there's no transposition - just an omission. The second stat should probably read:

0-100kph in 2.7 seconds

Chocolate Factory exudes Nougat as Android 7 begins rollout

Dunno...

It's all Greek to me!

Brit cops cuff Sage employee at Heathrow airport

Sounds like they care...

I'm sure at some point they came out with the classic:

"Your privacy is very important to us"

Now they're saying:

"The dedicated helpline number is 0845 145 3345 – please leave a message with your details and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

A company the size of Sage can't even find someone to answer the telephone?

Social service council bungle

Re: Punish the taxpayer, not the person responsible

what proportion of the Council budget did that fine represent?

A minscule part of a tiny fraction of small bit of their overall £2bn budget (see http://www3.hants.gov.uk/budget/counciltax2016-17.htm

It's not a punishment in any way - it's a rounding error in the accounts. Makes you wonder why they bother.

'Daddy, what's a Blu-ray disc?'

Re: quality..

I mean who would ... how? why?

The who part is easy. If you think that a £700 0.5m USB cable (http://www.russandrews.com/ks2416-ag-usb-cable/ will make a difference, you'll certainly think that some sticky felt circles will be the finishing touch to your "audio experience".

As for the why part... ... nope - no idea.

Flipping heck! Virtual machines hijacked via bit-meddling Feng Shui

Re: (Not so) Easy to disable

The thing is, if your environment is one where you control the physical host, you probably also control all the VMs running on it, so there's no problem.

If you are in a shared cloudy environment*, you almost certainly don't control the physical host and probably don't control all the VMs running on it.

In other words, yes, you can disable the feature in software, but if you're in a position to do that, you aren't vulnerable anyway.

*A cloudy environment is one where you can't see everything that's going on.

Stealthy malware infects digitally-signed files without altering hashes

Re: why am I _NOT_ surprised

Digital signatures have never proved that code doesn't contain malware. We digitally sign all of our executables and installations - but the installation could still completely pwn a system if we wrote it that way, since installations usually run with effectively local Administrator privileges.

What they do is tell you who wrote the code (or at least who signed it), so you know who to blame if things go wrong. The problem now is not that digitally signed executables contain malware, but that the attribution of the malware can no longer be assumed from the certificate.

By the way, the Windows 10 requirement of requiring a Microsoft cross-signed digital signature is only for 64-bit kernel-mode drivers, and it can be disabled with one command, followed by a reboot.

Three times as bad as malware: Google shines light on pay-per-install

Re: Thank goodness Linux tells you which packages are being installed

why ... would you not want MIBs after installing snmp?

Because if you're managing the machine over the network (as in that thing the second letting in SNMP stands for), you don't need the MIBs on the machine you're monitoring, but rather you need them on the one you're monitoring from. They don't serve any purpose on the machine you just installed the SNMP daemon on unless you're doing everything locally (which you might be, but it's not the usual scenario).

Loss-making data-viz biz to investors: You know what our problem is? We did too well

Re: Am I being thick?

To add to Charles' comments, if they are selling a subscription, rather than a licence, then losses might be expected. The cost of the sale is the same, but you don't get the whole sale value up front to offset against this cost. Instead, you get a drip feed of money over time, but in accounting terms, you can't include future revenue, so you get a loss.

Brave browser lands $4.5m

Laudable aims, but..

... how will they split the revenue while respecting my privacy? If they truly respect my privacy, that means that no-one other than me knows what URLs my browser visits and appears on my screen, and that means they can't split the revenue based on what I downloaded and saw.

Of course, those links on the brave.com homepage to analytics.brave.com, looking suspiciously like they use the piwik analytics platform are just typos. They wouldn't possibly be tracking me themselves, would they? They wouldn't possibly be loading unnecessary JavaScript, since that slows things down, right?

As they say on their home page:

"It's amazing how fast a page loads when you strip away everything but the real content."

"At Brave, our goal is to block everything on the web that can cramp your style and compromise your privacy."

It's nice to see they are holding up those ideals themselves.

It's 2016 and your passwords can still be sniffed from wireless keyboards

Re: Yet another driver towards 2FA

password managers protect from this weakness

Not really. There's a lot of commercially confidential information that isn't passwords, and all of that would be readable from 100m away too. Either information that is useful in and of itself (think about all the emails sent internally by a hedge fund manager, and how useful they would be to other trading firms), or indirectly to bolster a later spear-phishing attack.

BBC will ‘retain your viewing history’

It's for marketing...

As Fearnley says, the BBC is not trying to sell you anything

Well, either he's lying through his teeth, or http://store.bbc.com/ is about to be closed down.

I wonder which it is?

Seagate in 10TB drive brand brainstorm

Re: 180TBytes/year workload for a NAS drive

180TBytes/year workload is only 6Mbytes/second sustained.

I don't think I want to work at your company! Are you assuming 24x7 operations? Most offices are 8x5, so effectively only operate for 23% of the time.

Assuming a fully saturated 1Gbit connection to a NAS containing these drives, the most you can get out in a year's worth of 40 hour weeks is 850TB, so 180TB per year doesn't sound unreasonable.

Looking at it another way, even assuming a 24x7 operation, 180TB per year is 500GB per day. If we staff our mythical office with 500 people (which is a fairly big office), how many typical office workers reference 1G of Word / Excel etc. files per day?

Samsung spills beans on mystery username, password emails to devs

More commands needed

Yes, SQL definitely needs a 'PUT BACK' command for when you delete the wrong data.

I have found myself wishing for a 'PICKUP TABLE' command, shortly after I dropped the wrong one...

An accident? Who really pressed the button?

If only there was some way that those at Samsung responsible for marketing the new developer program could get the technical press to report on it, and maybe even include a link to the new site in the article they write.

It's a real shame they couldn't think of anything...

Pollster who called the EU referendum right: No late Leave swing after all

Re: The result is what happened on June 23rd

"Parliament can certainly conclude that 37% of registered voters aren't enough to trigger Article 50"

I think they'd be on shaky ground if they did. A lot of MPs received less than 37% of the votes from registered voters in their constituencies.

Verbing Wierds Language

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Luck, not skill?

Given the worldwide interest in the referendum, and the number of polling organisations that were involved, I think it would be more surprising if there wasn't at least one organisation that "predicted" the correct result.

Botnet-powered ballot stuffing suspected in 2nd referendum petition

Re: Probably don't care

"That (And other) statements will have persuaded many to vote leave. How many BREXIT supporters believed that (and other) lies.

If we do leave then I'm off."

No doubt you'll go to that country where politicians always tell the truth, and always follow through with manifesto pledges.

That would be where, exactly?

Deploying software every day is... actually... OK – what devs tell their real-life friends

Practive What You Preach?

So, the report, produced by Puppet, says that low performers are those achieving a deployment between once a month and once every six months.

This is from a company that has released two versions of Puppet Enterprise since the start of the year.

If releasing every day is such a good idea for production software, why don't they do it?