Posts by jfm

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: I remember the time...

I thought this was established years ago (by Simon Slavin, I believe):

Microsoft is a cross between The Borg and the Ferengi. Unfortunately they use Borg to do their marketing and Ferengi to do their programming.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

I'm sure it's been said many times before but in South Africa we make it harder for people to abuse sockets.

Our standard plug socket is three pins in a triangle, not unlike the British plugs but with round pins (very old British 15-amp standard).

Plugs for protected circuits have a red casing, and the top of the earth pin cut away to give a flat horizontal surface on top. Red sockets have the earth socket shaped to match, so white plugs simply don't fit.

Re: Doh..

I was in a workshop yesterday (having my car's aircon regassed). The woman in the next bay was attempting to have her aircon repaired, and the mechanic was having some trouble getting to the compressor, for which he had to remove the bumper.

This proved impossible, because after a recent accident, her insurers' approved mechanic had done, and billed the insurance for, a full repair. They'd increased their profit a bit by not replacing the clips and mountings that held the bumper on, instead gluing it to the wing.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

TWIAVBP. I have switched sockets everywhere in my house (compliant with national standards) and I'm 12,000km from the UK.

Hudson Rock yanks report fingering Snowflake employee creds snafu for mega-leak

It's a dreadful headline. This is ElReg, not Variety: too-clever headlines, too many nouns in a row, too many ambiguities. Who are these Hudson Rock yanks, and why are they fingering people and then reporting it?

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: I can commiserate with Matty.

I had a similar experience. I (then sysadmin) was travelling with my Windows support guy, Q, to our offices in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Halfway between was a very nice hotel whose executive chef was a friend of Q's. The hotel was empty (it was the off season) so we were comped our rooms for the night, and ate well with the chef and staff.

It made up for a previous trip where the office had booked my travel and accommodation. I caught the first flight out of Durban, picked up a hire car in Pretoria and drove straight to the office. After a hard day's work I found my hotel, checked in, and asked where to find the bar. "This is an Islamic hotel, sir".

Now picture the traditional hotel breakfast buffet but entirely untroubled by pig… My breakfast before a drive to Johannesburg was toast, an egg, fishfingers, and chicken curry.

Some scientists can't stop using AI to write research papers

Re: Creation or translation?

Which is why there are English-improving services (generally using suitably-qualified piecework editors). Some of these do an initial (pre-human eyes) edit to try and tidy up the English; some editors (I hear) find that their own first pass involves correcting it, including places where the pre-edit has entirely changed the meaning. (I'm being a little cagey because this part of the academic publishing process is often done on the quiet even though it's entirely respectable).

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Bogus

Bit late to this but ln(1) exists to create hard links (by default, or symlinks with the -s flag) on UNIX-like systems, so unless I'm misunderstanding you, "no OS" is a bit sweeping.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

No it isn't. Many people assume the autistic spectrum is from high-functioning to low-functioning, but that would be a continuum —shades of grey.

there are many areas in which people can diverge from neurotypical: think of each one as a colour of the rainbow, and of each person with autism as having their own colour palette. THAT'S the spectrum.

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

Re: Perhaps Ofcom will take inspiration from the Home Office

> one wonders how there's any time left for effective governance…

There clearly isn't any, based on the performance of this government.

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

> phrases involving piss-ups and breweries don't fully convey how useless this guy was.

Perhaps you want the rather cruder Army version: Couldn't organise a fuck-up in a brothel.

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Re: Got to love 5x9's uptime

I've always found that more useful in the form "pi megaseconds is a millicentury" (31.4 Ms in a year, which is within 5% of the actual value), and for quick estimations, 30 megaseconds—and knock off as many zeros as there are 9s in the reliability.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Aaaaargh!

I used to see that in recruiter spam on technical mailing lists when I first moved to South Africa (may still happen, I don't know):

"Hi. I'm looking for a resource with the following skills…"

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

I'm convinced Google's voice recognition (and indeed Assistant) are an elaborate but not especially funny practical joke. I'm a British migrant to South Africa, living in Cape Town. In recent weeks I've asked my phone to navigate to a place about ten minutes' drive away. Imagine my surprise when the response was "the fastest route is via the Trans-Saharan Highway. Your journey will take approximately 7 days and 14 hours" (it wanted to take me to somewhere in Britain).

A few days later, I said "Call Jeannie" (my ex-wife, in my Contacts so that I can discuss childcare arrangements). Without any attempt to check whether it had guessed right before dialling, or even give me a list of possible matches , it out me through to La Trini, a restaurant in Barcelona, Spain (I have never visited the restaurant, the city, or indeed the country). This would indeed have involved a six and a half day journey including a section of the Trans-Sahara Highway, but a two-week round trip drive for dinner seemed a bit excessive…

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Missed opportunity

This is why recipes in some of my older cookbooks have two sets of measurements, metric and imperial, and you're warned not to mix them, because the conversion involves both rounding and adjusting to make the recipe easier to use either way. For example the recommended dry-weight conversions in one book are 1 oz : 25 g; 2 oz : 50 g; 4 oz : 100 g; 8 oz : 225 g; 12 oz : 350 g; 1 lb : 450 g.

Red Cross seeks digital equivalent of its emblems to mark some tech as off-limits in war

Red Cross protection of tech assets

So, a mechanism similar to RFC 3514, but with the opposite intent? It could be called the do-no-evil bit.

Linus Torvalds admits to 'self-inflicted damage' with -Werror as Linux 5.15 rc1 debuts

Again: it's an unsigned integer. The test (i >= 0) is always true. In fact I'd expect the compiler to optimise it away; and I can see why it would also warn that it doesn't make sense.

Surely subtracting 1 from an unsigned integer with value zero results in a number well in excess of the upper bound—or am I missing something obvious?

FBI deletes web shells from hundreds of compromised Microsoft Exchange servers before alerting admins

Re: Fore!

The US Attorney for South Texas—the senior lawyer for the federal government in the South Texas federal court district. Acting in that role, granted, but hardly a random South Texas lawyer.

Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

Re: Reply all

I've always liked the response by the Cleveland Browns' lawyer to a silly complaint:

Dear Mr. Cox:

Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.

Very truly yours,

CLEVELAND STADIUM CORP.

James N. Bailey,

General Counsel

You know Facebook has an image problem when major nonprofits start turning down donations over political lies

Re: I must express my opposition to this

It may be reluctant, because he's probably saying "I do not want to lose the company's protected status with respect to liability"

Are you misunderstanding §230 of the CDA? It was passed specifically to protect information services from liability in general for external content, AND to allow them to edit or censor some content without creating such liability for all content. Short of the law being changed, nothing Facebook do or don't do can create liability or remove the protection. (Obviously there are exceptions, eg for illegal content.)

Now you've done it: Cyber attack targeted Australian brewery 'n' dairy biz Lion

Re: Also deals in milk as well as alcohol

Dunno, but it's not a feel-good story…

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Re: The past is another counttry.

SU bars were usually cheaper, yes—but not at Edinburgh in the '80s. The Students' Association (non-NUS-affiliated) had a policy of selling beer at pub prices and using the proceeds to subsidise cheap hot meals, so when you'd gone through your grant cheque ("What's green and takes 3 hours to drink?"), you could eat for next to nothing at the Student Centre.

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

Re: Switch provider, and refuse payment

Agreed re driving tests. I recently (for reasons of emigration and bureaucracy) had to sit a local driving test. I walked into the driving school, said "I've been driving for 30 years but I need to learn to pass the test", and did exactly what I was told until I did pass. (The instructor said I was a much easier student than the younger learner-drivers, who don't listen.)

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

"Some 49 per cent are checking whether you've tested for drug and alcohol abuse."

Saw this years ago on Usenet:

"First time I've gotten a programming job that required a drug test. I was worried they were going to say "you don't have enough LSD in your system to do Unix programming". -- Paul Tomblin in a.s.r

As pressure builds over .org sell-off, internet governance bodies fall back into familiar pattern: Silence

Re: Oh really?

I'm in South Africa and paying in ZAR for a .org I've owned for going on 15 years. I can assure you that any large increase will be extremely painful.

20% of UK businesses would rather axe their contractors than deal with IR35 – survey

Re: Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35

Yes, I remember as a university sysadmin we were talking to a security vendor and having to explain patiently that at a university with several thousand inquisitive students, most of the threats to our network were internal.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Re: Yay!

There's also The World's Shortest Political Quiz (arranged as a diamond rather than a square).

Linux Journal runs shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software

Just how many editors, desktops, filesystems, etc. do you really want/need?

One (of each) — but not necessarily the one you chose.

IBM torches Big Tech's get-out-of-jail-free card, says websites should be held responsible for netizen-posted content

Re: how about stick to the original intent of 230

As I replied to someone else who claimed this a few months ago:

This is nonsense. Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy, decided in May 1995, was the court case that found that editorial control by a service provider changed them from a distributor of information, without liability, into a publisher with liability. Within months (Feb '96) section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was passed to /prevent/ service providers from becoming liable if they screened or moderated content, and indeed encourage them to do so.

In other words, you've got section 230 exactly backwards.

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Re: Dolt

I'm assuming the Gold status is for quantity, not quality.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Re: Changing Wallpaper can have career enhancing effects

Inverting the sense of mouse movements isn't nearly as bad as rotating by 90° — mouse up moves cursor left &c.

Amazon agrees to stop selling toxic jewelry, school supplies to kids, coughs up some couch change ($700,000)

Re: "I've been a customer of theirs since 1999 when they only sold books"

However, Chinese companies have already been found guilty of putting lead into almost everything under sun, including milk formula.

I hadn't heard about lead but I do know about melamine being added to formula and petfood because it was detected as additional protein by protein-content testing. (I believe the tests now used can tell the difference).

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

In South Africa, many parking payment machines accept your parking ticket for cancellation, and your debit/credit card for payment. They have one card slot. After 17 years here I'm just about over the brief panic every time I use one (how does it remember which card to rewrite? Especially since it takes both, processes them and then returns them, all through the same single slot).

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: Ambivalence of complexity

Indeed. Hence the name of a group I ran for a while in Durban, The Programmer's Art, which combined meetings to discuss programming languages and paradigms with frequent pub visits. We never worked out whether we were Artists or Artisans but we had fun debating it over beers.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Or skilful application of an angle-grinder to the earth pin of a white plug (allegedly).

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

South Africa uses a plug with the same pin pattern as a UK plug but with cylindrical pins. A plug for a protected circuit is red and has the top of the earth pin ground flat. The socket fitting is also red and the earth hole has the same flat-topped part-circular shape so that a standard white plug won't go in. I've even seen installations with two protected circuits, red and blue, with the plane at different angles.

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Re: Is this the best that the USA can come up with ?

No. Google "doctrine of speciality" (or specialty for leftpondians). Extradition in international treaties prohibits adding any charges beyond those in the application for extradition.

Wondering why 'Devin Nunes herp-face' was trending online? Here's the 411: House rep sues Twitter for all the rude stuff tweeted about him

Re: But he actually has a case...

This is nonsense. Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy, decided in May 1995, was the court case that found that editorial control by a service provider changed them from a distributor of information, without liability, into a publisher with liability. Within months (Feb '96) section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was passed to prevent service providers from becoming liable if they screened or moderated content, and indeed encourage them to do so.

The safe harbour provision is 230(c)(1) which reads:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Error pop-up? Don't worry, let's just get this migration done... BTW it's my day off tomorrow

Re: took the day off

Written in Perl by any chance?

Spending watchdog points finger at Capita for 1,300 shortfall in British Army rookies

Re: TBF...

Billy Connolly (who was with 15 PARA for a while) summed this up well in this song, "Sergeant, Where's Mine".

OK Google, what is African ISP Main One, and how did it manage to route your traffic into China through Russia?

Re: Just a reminder

ObXKCD

Well slap my ass and call me Judy, Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 is just as hard to fix as the old one

Re: Green Credentials

Surely the justification for the glue is ease of recycling? Instead of lots of fiddly little screws, you just pop the thing in an oven so that the glue melts and it drops neatly into a pile of recyclable components. That's the story anyway.

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

Just to extend the quote and violently agree:

they can slot in these sorts of interesting elements as required on the day, and making it clear what's important to readers…

If you want to know what's important to me, ask me: don't try to tell me.

FWIW, what's important to me is all the stories, in chronological order.

Boffins bash Google Translate for sexism

Actor/Actress [was Re: Correct translation]

This sort of thing led, more years ago than I care to remember, to the following correction in the Guardian:

A rigid application of the Guardian style guide caused us to say of Carlo Ponti in his obituary, page 34, January 11, that in his early career he was "already a man with a good eye for pretty actors…". This was one of those occasions when the word "actresses" might have been used.

If you weren't rich enough to buy a Surface before, you may as well let that dream die

Re: You don't cancel a successful program

I think it was Simon Slavin, years ago, who said that Microsoft is a cross between the Borg and the Ferengi. Unfortunately they use the Borg to do their marketing and the Ferengi to do their programming.

HTC U12 Life: Notchless, reasonably priced and proper buttons? Oh joy

Re: Gets out key spec list needed for me to upgrade...

6) Security & OS updates?

Should be #1. When the Moto g5 was released I bought one to replace my original Moto g. It was supplied with Android 7.0 and has had no version updates and only occasional security updates in the 18 months since its launch.

I won't be buying Lenovo/Motorola again.

The Register's 2018 homepage redesign: What's going on now?

Looking at the new homepage on a Moto 5g in Chrome. It's hopeless: have you actually viewed it on a phone?

There is not a single headline visible: just an ad covering half the screen, and the top part of the image for the first story. The font on the first 5 or so stories is way too large and just wastes screen space. In the remaining stories with images, the image is too big, taking up half the width of the box with the text crammed into the other half almost as an afterthought. The boxes are ugly, and between them and the wide linespacing there's a general sense, again, of wasted screen space.

Clicking through to the archive is like a breath of fresh air: headlines and stories with no faffing about.

Please, try reading the page on a phone and then reconsider the design.

Don’t talk to the ATM, young man, it’s just a machine and there’s nobody inside

I've seen problem reports (especially networking issues like "The Internet is down!") referred to as Layer 8 problems.