Posts by herman

Bloke hits armadillo AND mother-in-law with single 9mm round

Well, this is just the worst case of bad luck ever - she survived!

Google offers 'INFINITY MILLION DOLLARS' for bugs in Chrome

Re: Google admits there are INFINITY MILLION bugs in Chrome!

Try Hotel California next time. They always have room.

Crack security team finishes TrueCrypt audit – and the results are in

I'm almost sorry that they didn't find a backdoor.

However, absence of evidence is not proof of absence...

Nuclear waste spill: How a pro-organic push sparked $240m blunder

Glow in the dark cat poop

The real question is how many other drums are filled with the wrong dirt and who is going to open them all to take a look?

'Virtual nose' makes VR less dizzying, say boffins

I would guess that adding virtual hooters to a simulation will help a lot for half the population, since the male brain will totally ignore everything else that is in view. Although except for the two pointy objects it may make the whole simulation completely pointless.

Forget viruses: Evil USB drive 'fries laptops with a power surge'

Re: Like Unicorns and Fairies

It is like pins in halloween candy. Feasible, but so improbable, it never actually happened.

VMware sued, accused of ripping off Linux kernel source code

Re: Case..

Wrong. Very wrong. I used to work at a very large Defence company who ended up paying M$4 due to a GPL copyright case some years ago. There were several lawsuits based on Busybox as another example. A quick google will find those.

I, ROBOT ~ YOU, MORON. How else will automated news work?

What? Dabbs is a real person? That is unpossible.

Lenovo CTO: Hey, look around – we're not the only ones with a crapware infection

Decrapifier

I wonder if http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ handles this yet.

Amazon tries to patent 3D printers on trucks

I already patented 3-D printers on drones.

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

You should use ed. It is the standard.

Did NSA, GCHQ steal the secret key in YOUR phone SIM? It's LIKELY

GSM was always easy to crack

Now we know that it was even easier than that.

No big difference.

Lenovo shipped lappies with man-in-the-middle ad/mal/bloatware

Re: Microsoft hardware

leopard

You should return your geek card for that error.

Back seat drivers fear lead-footed autonomous cars, say boffins

Roller coasters

This is why roller coaster rides are scary - the loss of control.

Now imagine getting into an autonomous taxi with a Fitipaldi driver profile and the passengers screaming all the way to/from the airport...

RadioShack lists 1,800 stores facing the axe across America

Re: It's perhaps an image of the demise of technology in the US

Funny that building a tube amp is still just as much fun today as it was 50 years ago. The only difference is the Bluetooth module now needed at the front end http://www.aeronetworks.ca/2015/02/cool-amplifier.html

Sparkfun

The Shack was done in by stupid management and eventually made obsolete by Sparkfun Electronics.

$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience

If this cable advert succeeds in opening up one person's wallet, then it was all worth the effort...

IBM chasing ex-staffers for $20 payments

Well, the IBM CEO has to finance his new yacht somehow.

Forget Norks, Russian hackers are in Sony Pictures' servers – claim

Re: The FBI Director must have been cringing with embarrassment..

Exactly. The Norks could not possibly have downloaded all that data over their national AOL dial-up modem account.

Re: Je suis Sony!

Seven eyes data sharing - the usual five plus NK and Russia.

Enough is enough: It's time to flush Flash back to where it came from – Hell

Yah, having Adobe on your resume is a huge black mark for any programmer. Anyone that ever worked at Adobe, is unemployable.

Drinking to forget? OK. But first, eat a curry... QUICK!

So if you eat a lot of curry, you won't be scared of getting the trots. Figures...

Keylogger: Somebody STOP ME! Oh hang on, I just did

Basically everyone now needs a dedicated keyboard with encryption built in so that a simplistic key logger will only log gobbledygook. Then you can use a different keyboard for each application. One for Excel, another for Word...

Wall St wolves tear chunk off Microsoft: There goes $30bn!

Re: That does it!

Wall Street runs on Linux actually.

Landlines: The tech that just won't die

Dry DSL

You certainly can get dry DSL with no dial tone. You just have to call customer service and insist on it. Simply don't take no for an answer and it is cheaper than the package deal. There are lots of business DSL lines with no dial tone.

FIVE Things (NOT 10: these are REAL) from the WINDOWS 10 event

Siri/Cortana/Bob/Clippy

They are all about equally useful.

Presently I use a Mac as my main machine at home and I used the speech functions once, to see if it could be useful - and - well - no - it isn't really and I never tried it again and I don't know anybody that use it either.

Want a cheap Office-er-riffic tablet? Microsoft Windows takes on Android

Re: Commercial use forbidden?

Nope - doesn't do Domain log-on.

I'll build a Hyperloop railgun tube-way in Texas, Elon Musk vows

Intertubes

Finally the Intertubes of Senator Hatch may become a reality.

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

Re: What do UK and Iran have in common?

No, there are quite a few more countries like that, e.g. the Vatican and Saudi Arabia to name two of the best known.

Re: Ironic

The police were too busy trying to decode encrypted pron traffic, to notice the Kouachi brothers.

Therefore, the obvious solution is to outlaw encryption so that they will have more time on their uhm... hands....

Get your special 'sound-optimising' storage here, hipsters

I want some!

"As it turned out, it was possibly the best sounding source yet. It could sustain pace and drive, and gave body and richness to music where the Kingston SSD, for example, had been heard as limpid and lightweight. Maybe higher frequencies still weren't as insightful as direct CD playback at its best, but the sound had a relaxed quality that this listener has found quite enticing enough to plan a migration of all music onto it — pending a test of other NAS combinations!"

I don't know what they were smoking, but I think I want some...

Google's first stab at control-free ROBOT car rolls off the line

Re: As a cyclist

Bicycle, walk, skate board, horse and buggy - you will still have plenty of freedom,

Most big planes do auto landing. That is the only way to land in fog.

STAY AWAY: Popular Tor exit relays look raided

Tor RTFM

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en

ExcludeExitNodes node,node,…

A list of identity fingerprints, nicknames, country codes and address patterns of nodes to never use when picking an exit node---that is, a node that delivers traffic for you outside the Tor network. Note that any node listed in ExcludeNodes is automatically considered to be part of this list too. See also the caveats on the "ExitNodes" option below.

You have a 'simple question'? Well, the answer is NO

Coming out party

Dabbsy in an Apple store? Seriously? What has the world come to?

At least, I buy my Apple kit online, to keep a safe distance.

Norks: FBI's Sony Pictures' hacking allegations are 'groundless slander'

Clueless admins and management at Sony (Whitehouse and FBI)

Sony was hacked via a SMB exploit. This harks back to 1995: Clueless home users putting Windows PCs on cable modems and script kiddies having fun over ports 135 - 139.

Sony was clueless in 2005 when they released a root kit on millions of CDs and infected thousands of government departments with their crapware (and enabled many opportunists who came along for the ride on the new exploit) and now they want us to believe that a dumb SMB exploit was an attack by a foreign nation?

Occam's Razor tells me they left a bunch of unpatched Windows 2000 servers online with no firewall and a script kiddy gang went to town with it.

Sony Pictures hack is Hollywood's 'Snowden moment' say infosec bods

SMB

According to CNN, the hackers got in via SMB. I guess they had ports 137 to 139 open and WORKGROUP and p@ssw0rd set as well...

It sounds to me like a comedy of errors, not a sophisticated attack as some people are trying to make it.

Boffins: We have found a way to unlock the MYSTERIES OF SHEEP from old parchments

Anthropodermic bibliopegy

Anthropodermic bibliopegy was the practice of binding the trial notes of a murder with the skin off the back of the murderer. So once they are bored with sheep, there is another weird source for research.

Was Nokia's Elop history's worst CEO?

"That was Leningrad, sorry.

No, it was Stalingrad. Leningrad was supplied over a lake under German fire."

No, it was St Petersburg, you dum dum...

;)

Forget eyeballs and radar! Brits tackle GPS jammers with WWII technology

Sextant

So, I take it that sea captains don't learn how to use a sextant anymore? LORAN is good for ships, but not so great for aircraft, since it only provides 2D position.

Forget WHITE BOX, it's time for JUNK BOX NETWORKING

Stolen

Sounds more like 'stolen box networking'.

Ex-Soviet engines fingered after Antares ROCKET launch BLAST

Re: Re:The simple fact is

Rarely? How many of these engines reached orbit, vs the ones that blew up?

Re: Depressing

These engines have a proven track record and are well known to explode spectacularly. So if spectacular explosions is your prime objective, then they sure are a good choice.

Brazil greenlights $200m internet cable to Europe in bid to outfox NSA

Jimmy Carter

With a simple 185 million expense for a new cable, Brazil now forces the USA to spend a pile of money on a new cable tap. It amounts to a tweak of Uncle Sam's nose, but it also opens up bandwidth for new data centres based in Brazil/Spain/Portugal.

Ancient American Proverb, circa 1990:

"You can never the rich enough, thin enough, or have enough bandwidth in your network connection."

Microsoft's nightmare DEEPENS: Windows 8 market share falling fast

Linux market share

Well, on my web site, Linux visitors consistently ranks about 60%. Well, it is a Linux web site. That may skew things a tad I suppose...

Anyhow, there are likely waaaay more Android Linux cell phones out there than MS Windows clunkers, not to mention all the Linux embedded machines. Linux won. Winders just has to shrivel up and drop off still.

Happiness economics is bollocks. Oh, UK.gov just adopted it? Er ...

Adblock took swift care of the damn dancing beejeesus...

Want a more fuel efficient car? Then redesign it – here's how

Fuse wire

I apreciate that aluminium is lighter than copper, but the high positive temperature coefficient of copper is an important safety point. Aluminium doesn't take kindly to being overloaded and once burning, it cannot be extinguished easily, so this car is in danger of going up in smoke one day.

Scientists skeptical of Lockheed Martin's truck-sized fusion reactor breakthrough boast

Well, if anyone could make it work, it would be the likes of Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics and the first use will likely be in a military ship or a submarine, not an aircraft or any commercial system.

Forget passwords, let's use SELFIES, says Obama's cyber tsar

Re: Cut'n'paste

"more difficult" - You think so? Pretty simple to fake and every time I successfully faked it, you would have to go for plastic surgery to change your face. That would get tiring rather quickly I'd think.