Posts by Alphebatical

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

Out of curiosity, do you have a reason as to why the Soviets wouldn't have called out the US if the landings were faked? That's one question I've never heard a satisfactory answer to.

Dear alt-right morons and other miscreants: Disrupt DEF CON, and the goons will 'ave you

Re: code of conduct

An uncivilized, anti-social code of conduct can't make assault and battery any less of a crime. What it can accomplish, however, is to make DEF CON legally liable for any attacks that happen during the event.

Uptight robots that suddenly beg to stay alive are less likely to be switched off by humans

I can't seem to find which group(s) they belonged to, but three people who left the robot on did so simply because they could. While I'd consider it likely one of them was the one who didn't shut off the unobjecting functional robot, without being able to read German(the presented datasheet doesn't translate the comments), I can't rule out the possibility they were clustered together(I'd like to think this would be pointed out if true, but you never know).

California lawmakers: We swear on our avocados we'll pass 'strongest net neutrality protections' in America

Re: Another View

> I'd read it if I could, but the paywall screams that I'm not welcome.

Here's your golden ticket:

http://archive.is/Xl146

His assessment of the bill is questionable, but my (limited) understanding of the Californian process is that he's not entirely wrong when it comes to rich people being able to misuse the initiative to threaten the legislature.

DNS ad-hocracy in peril as ICANN advisors mull root server shakeup

Somehow, I suspect a DNS system entirely ruled by ICANN would have trouble mapping to places that don't collect "proper" WHOIS information.

Microsoft shoves US govt IT contract where ICE throws kids: Out of sight in a chain-link cage

Re: Disreputable media

I believe there's a strict 20 day limit on the length of minor detentions(whether or not they're joined by their parents in the same facility), which means any case that takes longer than that will inherently result in family separation as the children now get put into the foster system. There also has to be some account made for human traffickers who use children to create a fake family in the hopes they'll be waved through in the end(and you can be sure these kids won't get the milk and honey treatment if the scheme isn't caught).

The pieces are there, but there are definitely other ways to put them together.

Calm your conspiracy theories, latest glimpse reveals Planet Nine may just be a pipe dream

Assuming I didn't screw my math up, that's about 9.26 kilosuns(or 292.6 Sagittarius A*s) away.

Dinosaurs permitted to mate: But what does AT&T Time merger mean for antitrust – and you?

Re: What does it mean to me?

> TW aren't active materially (if at all) in ISP and telco activity.

Time Warner Cable was spun off well before this deal was even thought of(I don't think AT&T was even in the TV market yet). I worked for them (indirectly) for a brief time and they were very clear during training that we were to always use the company's full name because of this.

Keep your hands on the f*cking wheel! New Tesla update like being taught to drive by your dad

Re: The autopilot is not an autopilot ?

> "The problem is, people confuse autonomous drive with autopilot."

Pedantry isn't a defense: Tesla needs to be held to the standard the average consumer expects when they hear the term. When you factor that in, it's patently false advertising - which would be bad enough on its own, but the fact that Tesla uses fewer, lower quality sensors than cars with no more than automatic braking on top is unjustifiably reckless at best.

US senators get digging to find out the truth about FCC DDoS attack

Re: "maintain paper trails to help track ballots and guard against tampering"

I don't know about other places, but my county uses electronic voting to let anybody vote anywhere, regardless of which precinct they live in. I don't see that being doable with paper ballets.

AT&T gets clearance to devour Time Warner for $85 BEEEELION

Re: Simple answer went right by the judge..

Time Warner doesn't compete in the telecom business(Time Warner Cable was spun off in 2009) and, last I checked, AT&T doesn't produce any content. The only way AT&T could reduce competition is if they found a way to use Time Warner as a bludgeon.

Nominet throws out US corp's attempt to seize Brit domain names

Re: Torn...

Nissan.com still points to his site. It seems he both won the lawsuit and got awarded damages.

Actual control of Windows 10 updates (with a catch)... and more from Microsoft

"Percent" is nothing more than a contraction; even older American works will have a space if you look(you can see the same effect in action with "deluxe").

Un-bee-lievable: Two million Swedish bugs stolen in huge sting

A bee's a bug. A spider's a bug. A roly-poly's a bug. The word "bug" is generic, the idiots who insist "true bug" makes any sense be damned.

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Re: The Real Question no one has the spunk to ask.

What rock have you been under? The entire scheme was abolished in the 2.6.x series and any semblance to the idea was removed with version 3.1.

Trump’s new ZTE tweet trumps old ZTE tweets that trumped his first ZTE tweet

Re: Toddler

> fucking moron.

This is pretty much his favorite form of "3D chess": shout like a loon and act like an idiot and nobody will look at the board.

New Facebook political ad rules: Now you must prove your ID before undermining democracy

Re: It's always the fault of another

The Trump campaign will have its place in history, but I can see the Clinton campaign as a part of the core curriculum for poli sci students for generations to come. She managed to screw up just about everything - including a few things most people wouldn't even think could be screwed up!

President Trump broke US Constitution with Twitter bans – judge

Re: Twitter a public forum

> "Twitter can ban your account if you break the T&Cs."

If Twitter is officially declared a public forum - and this ruling would seem to do so - then no, they can't. There are well-established rules regarding public fora and many of the reasons they ban people for run afoul of them; this is especially true in California, where Twitter is based(and where they're currently being sued over this exact issue).

One year late, US senators act on fake net neutrality comments that drowned the FCC

Pai was already under investigation for his sweetheart dealings with Sinclair. Without a flood of supportive comments, he'd probably be in the clink by now.

GDPR for everyone, cries Microsoft: We'll extend Europe's privacy rights worldwide

Re: "Microsoft has said it will...

They were fighting Uncle Sam due to legal reasons, not out of any concern for privacy. Had they been asked what they considered properly, they would've been tripping over themselves to hand over anything even remotely related.

Great Scott! Bitcoin to consume half a per cent of the world's electricity by end of year

Re: What a load of bollocks this bitcoin is!

> Can someone provide a viable use-case for bitcoins? Not just a fanciful one, but one that makes even a tiny bit of sense?

Not anymore, which is why Bitcoin Cash was created: to return to the original idea of a decentralized currency.

Software development slow because 'Most of our ideas suck'

Re: CI/CD = PB

> Perpetual Beta

If you let the software reach beta, you're doing it wrong. Each commit must go into production the second it hits! Think of all the experimentation you're not doing if you're waiting for "deployment procedures"!

Real fake scam offers crypto-coin to replace frequent flier points

I think Bitcoin demonstrates the biggest problem with cryptocurrency: anything that gets popular can clog its network with transactions, causing transaction fees to skyrocket to the point where it's no longer a viable currency and just a vehicle for speculation. Altcoins address this issue by processing more frequently and using bigger blocksizes, but time will tell how much any network can handle.

Tesla forums awash with spam as mods take an unscheduled holiday

Re: That sandwich is an abomination...

McDonald's unleashed a video once of how they film the burgers for their ads. One of the tricks was that you have to deliberately misstuff it in order to display all the yummy goodness inside. Given the look of the picture, the same technique seems to be at play.

Pointless US Congress net neutrality vote will take place tomorrow!

"But even though everyone knows it won't pass, the fact that it only requires one additional vote to pass the Senate has led to seemingly endless commentary pieces on how it actually might pass because it only needs one vote."

Are there any senators that haven't said anything or taken a side? If there are, I highly suspect at least one found out that there were already fifty votes and is keeping quiet in order to be the Big Damn Hero. After all, people might like heroes who never let the evil reach the city, but they love and remember the ones who stop it at the gates.

NASA boss insists US returning to the Moon after Peanuts to show for past four decades

Re: "may have failed"?

Well, he finally got to meet his favorite actor.

Legal tech startup tries to haul 123-Reg to court over 24-hour backup claims

You can always take a snapshot of the snapshot using other archive sites. I'd post links, but my work firewall blocks them.

Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year

Thanks, Obama!

ICANN was under the United States Department of Commerce until just a few years ago. It might not have formally been a government agency in and of itself, but it might as well have been. Since it was never hurting for money, there was never any real reason for it to change until this particular hammer fell and reminded them that governing the internet doesn't insulate you from the will of government bodies.

That said, I've gotten the impression that we wouldn't be having this conversation if ICANN were still owned by the USDOC, since they could make an argument that they were an official regulator. It certainly would've been more entertaining to watch, at least.

Android apps prove a goldmine for dodgy password practices

Re: XKCD has been totuting the complexity angle for years

"it takes next to no time at all to defeat the xkcd approach, even when the words are random; it was already defeated years ago - can't remember where I read about it and didn't make a note of it because I never used it anyway precisely because I said to myself "Real words? No way!", so I can't point you to it but, believe me, it wasn't simply phrases/lyrics that were of next to no use but any and all real words (in any and all languages), even with no spaces and/or punctuation."

I remember that article., The sole "evidence" he presented was to point out that dictionary attacks exist(with no further details). He then went on to pimp his self-named method for almost all of the article, giving me the impression he was mainly driven by ego. I immediately discarded it as worthless.

That said, I don't know of any comparison of the strength of the xkcd method to what people actually do, which is all that matters. Let's not make the perfect the enemy of any possible improvement.

It's April 2018, and we've had to sit on this Windows 10 Spring Creators Update headline for days

Re: Beefed up Cortana

> Is it coincidence that "Cortana" is an AI character in Microsoft's Halo game franchise?

It's a bit well known that's where the name came from(like Edge's working name of Spartan). They just didn't change it for launch(unlike Edge).

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

> nissan.com

If you'd bothered to actually visit your link, you'd realize that it does, in fact, belong to an American company.

Brit Lords start peer-to-peer wrangling over regulating the internet

Are you sure you're not thinking of the primaries? Because picking a candidate from party members is sort of the point.

Politicos whining about folks' data rights ought to start closer to home

Re: It's just data warehousing all over again

Mother Jones ran a rather lengthy article on this whole imbroglio. It turns out the leaked data wasn't very effective in affecting the campaign: Cambridge Analytica pretty much conned everyone who worked with them and produced little or no usable information for the campaigns.

Presumably that article was written by the Russians.

WannaCry kill-switch hero Marcus Hutchins collared by FBI on way home from DEF CON

Ermm... I'm pretty sure lying to open a bank account is an FBI matter the same way that property damage is a policy matter. I think you mean it's not worth prosecuting, though I imagine it'll appear on any indictment they eventually cook up for him.

Red Hat acquires Permabit to put the squeeze on RHEL

Re: Beer

Most configurations use an initramfs. You don't need any FS compiled into the kernel to boot.

Steve Bannon wants Facebook, Google 'regulated like utilities'

Re: pseudo-debate in desperate search for clicks

Fun fact: regulation of interstate commerce is handled by the federal government.

Tech support scammers mess with hacker's mother, so he retaliated with ransomware

Re: Don't get too happy

At my company, all customer-facing call center agents are on non-permanent VDIs like this and most programs used are actually webapps to begin with. They do have a mapped network drive to store some documents, but rebooting the VDI nixes the program(assuming a strange program is allowed to run) and their files can be recovered with Previous Versions. Even with Windows, you lose nothing.