* Posts by GruntyMcPugh

1604 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2016

Twice in one month: Microsoft updates new-style Terminal preview

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

It's,... almost useful,....

... and would be moreso if there was a Powershell ISE option, the ability to 'Run As', and also change colour preferences by accessing settings by right clicking on the tab. Ubuntu terminal is fun for shit's 'n giggles, not sure what I'd use it for as I already run a Ubuntu VM,.. but hey, I can ponder that.

Maltese browser game biz flings €1m sueball at Google over Adsense kerfuffle

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

If anyone gets paid,....

... surely it should be the content creators, not the cheeky upstarts passing off other people's work?

Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Baby.Bathwater > /dev/null

Equality is important, but it's rather sad it's more important than actually hosting the conference. Hell, if they'd gone ahead, they could have canvassed the attendees (who hopefully weren't all male) got a feel for the landscape, and ascertained how many female devs there were out there, and worked out how to better appeal to them next time.

My god, it's full of tsars: A gun-toting Russian humanoid robot is on its way to the International Space Station

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Real robot

@AC: "So it's actually a robot this time, then?"

Back in 1970, there was an urban myth that the Lunokhod 1 Lunar rover was driven by a dwarf on a suicide mission.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: The "Cowards" comment

@joeW: "I'm not sure why you think other people should risk their necks"

Because he expects other people to not be cowards. You seem to think that someone who won't stop a robber would stop an assailant, and that is quite frankly absurd, if you haven't got the cojones to block some dude's exit, I doubt you're gonna get brave and take a punch for someone.

Don't let your dreams be dreams! Itty-bitty space shuttle to ride into orbit on a Vulcan Centaur

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Reminds me of a fictional craft,...

.. from Disney's 1979 film 'The Spaceman and King Arthur'

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTljMmM3NmUtZmY3YS00YmQyLTgyMTYtNTI0MmYyYzU5ZWZkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyOTc5MDI5NjE@._V1_.jpg

Plot twist: Google's not spying on King's Cross with facial recognition tech, but its landlord is

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Where's the face data from?

@Aging Hippie: "what do they compare the faces against"

If only there were a large, publicly available source of names,... like a large book,.... of faces,.....

If only there were a near instant way of finding photos of people,.... if only you could get an image, and snap! find a match,..... if only there was a way to link one image in to another,.....

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "... we have sophisticated systems in place to protect the privacy of the general public."

@AC: "vague and insubstantial assurances should just be treated as if they were lies."

Complete oxymoron isn't it? A 3rd partyiinvolving themselves in securing our privacy, when we didn't allow them in, in the first place.

FBI, NSA to hackers: Let us be blunt. Weed need your help. We'll hire you even if you've smoked a little pot in the past

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: They don't rely on drug tests for past use

@DougS

I was previously cleared for Full SC / UK Eyes only, and there was no drugs test. One of my referees held far higher clearance and they didn't even call him. And the information I got access to, was beyond mundane,.. it was blander than a pale shade of bland.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Depends on your clearance level

@AC: "FTR what's a "dangerous hippie"?"

I have long hair, am a member of shooting club, and have studied several martial arts. I don't identify as a hippie, but I occasionally get called, one : -)

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: They Live....

@ridley: "turning the display 90 degrees."

From memory (and I can't check this right now, as I'm work, and it's pouring with rain, so I didn't bring sunglasses with me) the LCD panels in most kit are offset at 45º, but that blocks enough light to vertically oriented polarising lenses to make them look pretty dark. Still doesn't answer why it's 45º and not vertical though. Perhaps viewing angle,.....

1Gbps, 4K streaming, buffering a thing of the past – but do Brits really even want full fibre?

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Yes please

@AMBxx: "only 1Mb up. That's a real pain seeing as I work from home"

Depends what you do I guess. I used to WFH doing security stuff on Windows based servers, and 1Mb was fine for RDP to our terminal server, and running mail and instant messaging etc. Used a landline for confcalls, as the VOIP solution we had made people sound like Metal Mickey even when we were on the office LAN.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Customer's don't want it?

@werdsmith

I don't need it either, I cancelled Virgin Media because they kept upping my broadband speed and prices, and I just didn't need the speed. There's just me and my wife at home, no kids, and we watch the same Netflix stream, so the ~20Mb we now get from Plusnet is more than enough, VM wouldn't sell me less than 70.

I'm looking at changing to Vodafone 4G Broadband next.

Neuroscientist used brainhack. It's super effective! Oh, and disturbingly easy

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Facebook with brain hacking capability ? Run for the hills.

@Blackbird74: "Facebook? I think you need to look to the future, when they re-brand as Mindbook!"

Yeah, they'll cut your Face off just before they stick your brain in a jar.

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Last chance saloon

@Jemma the advert states 'Vauxhall a British brand since 1903'. It doesn't claim it's a British company, and the provenance of a 'brand' is iffy at best.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@AC, But they now have 50,000 employees with half a billion dollars worth of expertise in selling you,... er,... stuff you'd probably rather get elsewhere.

Now IBM have bowed out of the laptop, PC and server market, and only do cloud, mainframe, and that Watson thingy, I can't see us ever spending money with them. We aren't a small organisation, 6000+ seats, but for cloud we have Azure/O365 and S3, we have Hyperconverged servers, and no need for AI.

Being ex-IBM I'd always hoped I'd get to wear the boot on the other foot and grill a salesguy,.... but it won't happen.

Hull be damned: KCOM shuts shop as UK High Court waves through £627m Macquarie deal

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@AC "We're all off to Hull and Back."

I've already bought my one way ticket to Hull and Back.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Liberty Global = Virgin Media?

I was going to ask the same question, but I see it's been answered. I wonder then if Vodafone have their sights on the rest of the LG assets, and will gobble Virgin Media eventually?

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Priti Patels Brain

@AC 'Pretty Vacant' is sexist or racist is it?

I thought her full name was 'Disgraced Priti Patel' as that was in the headlines some years back. You are aware who she is, right? Supporter of the death penalty, and the one who lied about her wherabouts to her seniors, whilst having secret meetings with the Israeli Government? She's pro-Zionist, and and voted against same sex marriage. Now she's on the wrong side of the fence wrt encyrption.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Insanity

@Potemkine!

Indeed, no idea why they couldn't have just kept an eye on her, wait for her to leave the house and go shopping, then tap her on the shoulder, quietly, like.

'Cockwomble' is off the menu: Uncle Bulgaria issues edict against using name in vain

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@baud: "don't really disagree on her opinion regarding tattoos"

You don't see hypocrisy with the old Harpy using controversy to get attention? She's denigrating people with tattoos, claiming they do it for attention, while being a vapid attention seeker herslf? Pot, Kettle, Black?

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "Under VCAP, ... collect IP addresses of prolific prates."

@Tom 38:

Ah, so they join in on the pirate party? If this was physical media, I'm pretty sure anyone taking part in the distribution would be liable for handling stolen goods, so not quite sure of the ethics of enabling 3rd parties to channel warez through your own peer. The only blameless way to do it would be ISP logs, and it seems they aren't blameless then.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: All about the content

@AC It certainly is all about the content,... so, I'm a bit of a nerd, and I was excited to learn that DC had made a SwampThing series,.... but then I was a bit miffed to learn it's only going to be shown on DC Universe, and that DC Universe isn't going to offer it's services to the UK, and that they then cancelled the series right after the first episode aired (although the series had finished production so they will air all the episodes filmed.)

So unless they release a Region 2 box set,......

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

"Under VCAP, ... collect IP addresses of prolific prates."

Er, just how were BPI and MPA getting hold of IP addresses in the first place? Were they allowed to tap into ISP communications?

Just add water: Efficient Energy’s HFC-free chillers arrive in the UK

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@Luke Maslany

We have a Datacentre modelling application, that allows us to place hardware from a catalogue into racks, and work out hot spots and air flow etc. Most kit is in the catalogue, but sometimes I have to go look for a spec sheet, and then the heat output can either be BTU or KW. The App defaults to BTU, because we're British, and awkward.

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

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Seems reasonable

@NetBlackOps: "you can kiss user content on smaller sites goodbye"

That is my fear here, in making the large social media sites responsible for content, they actually make them the _only_ places user content can be posted, and thus give them even more power.

Apollo at 50? How about 40 years since Skylab smacked into Australia

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Exciting time

@OssianScotlan 'Civic Improvements',.....

.... you mean Coventry, don't you.

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@AC So, C: ,... /, ....

SYS$SYSTEM is where it's at ; -)

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

"a not-for-profit organisation which has received £9m in donations from Saudi Arabia"

Sounds to me like he's still bending over for cash.

Parliament IT bods' fail sees server's naked OS exposed to world+dog

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: it's probably

@Alister: re: QDOS

A few years ago, I signed on after taking voluntary redundancy, and because I worked in IT, I got referred to a training outfit and they called themselves QDOS. I mentioned when I saw them, that QDOS used to stand for 'Quick and Dirt Operating System', so older IT veterans like myself would associate 'Quick and Dirty'with their business, not 'kudos'. I asked them why they hadn't Googled and checked the history. They seemed a little embarrassed.

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: It's *not* going to be a £4 million project

@John Robinson: "can't do anything IT related"

Ha, what a prophetic response, given the news today in El Reg that that the pr0n age verification requirement has been delayed yet again, and the govt aren't even implementing that one themselves!

Meanwhile, are the BBFC going to go back to their old name of 'the British Board of Film Censors' given they'll be collating the big list of banned sites?

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: It's *not* going to be a £4 million project

The Govt just can't do large scale IT projects,... take the Child Support Agency database,.... the first one cost about as much as it recovered from errant parents, was then scrapped, and they paid for another one. Or ID cards, or the multi-vendor National Identity scheme, of which one vendor bowed out, leaving formerly iidentified people high and dry.

This will probably fail, then get revisted. Hey, maybe they can combine it with the pr0n license database, why tick just one box, when you could have access to pr0n and a drone license!

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: In the UK...

@big_D

Amstrad CPC 464? Mate had one of those, quite nice BASIC implentation, I recall a rather cool real time command 'EVERY' that would run a subroutine at the specified interval.

Never knew anyone with the Tatung Einstein, but we did get our hands on the equally rare 'Jupiter Ace' which used Forth instead of BASIC.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: BBC Basic Bug

@J.G.Hartson

Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!

: -)

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: In the UK...

@big_D "the Oric 1"

Oh boy, I tried to get one back in the day, ended up on some waiting list, they had issues delivering the first units and every week I'd call, and see if there was an updated eta,... there never was, so I cancelled my order. I ended up with an Acorn Electron, so got a better machine in the end.

It was a great era, various mates had different machines, I had the Electron, another had a ZX81 and then a Spectrum, another a Dragon 32, and one lucky blighter had a Ti994a, which was 16 bit, and had an eyewatering £1000 price tag at first release. Then there was my mate Pete who ended up with a Sharp MZ80k, the poor sod. It was so niche we had to type games from said magazines in, as pre-loaded game cassettes were as rare as the proverial rocking horse poo. We spent many hours playing 'Wizard's Castle' searching for the 'Orb of Zot'. Plus I ended up working at Woollies as a Saturday lad, flogging TV, HiFi, computers, and consoles.

Smash GandCrab: Free tools released to decrypt files scrambled by notorious ransomware

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Why is this still a thing?

@STOP_FORTH: "Anyone in a corporate environment should not have a problem."

Pray tell why? Various places did get slapped by Crypto attacks, Lincs County Council was one, and I'm sure they'll have had AV and security policies in place.

And not using Windows is not an option, not unless you are personally offering to support the user base when they transition. I've done that sketch at the behest of an anti-Microsoft Dean of Faculty, and his Personal Assistant was crying and threatening to quit within hours of having her Linux machine delivered.

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

That's only really an issue if you already use Opera, but if folks don't, and only use it to access the pr0n, don't login to social media etc, all Opera get are the pr0n logs.

Gonna be so cool when we finally get into space, float among the stars, work out every day, inject testosterone...

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@phuzz: "n that case how can I get an erection when I'm upside-down?"

Indeed, I had a girlfriend once who was determined to tick off all the positions listed in the 400 question version of 'The Purity Test', and upside down was one of them. Mind you I was a teenager, and I got a boner if the wind changed direction.

Yubico YubiKey lets you be me: Security blunder sparks recall of govt-friendly auth tokens

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

"particularly when the USB-based token is first powered up"

My mate discovered a similar bug in the Dragon 32 OS back in the early 80s,.... he'd written a program to generate RuneQuest characters, and it rolled the die for you cand came up with the stats,... except it generated the same supposedly 'RND' stats every time from a fresh boot. He had to use time instead, so you pressed a key twice, that gave a time difference, added that the RND value and did a Modulus / 6 to get the dice value. Or summat like that, it's been a while.

Right, I'm off to Wikipedia to wallow in some Dragon 32 nostalgia.

Nope, we're stuffed, shrieks Apple channel as iPhone shipments enter a double-digit spiral

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: @ Dedobot re: Xiaomii IR blaster

@DiViDeD

I have 'TV Kill' app on my Note 4, and it's great. I was in the supermarket last year, and they had a telly on for the World Cup, and it was really loud, as it was competing with the muzak,....so, a quick 'TV Kill' and then, blessed relief. I've also got 'AnyMote' for controlling my devices at home,... and occasionally the volume of TVs elsewhere : -)

IBM raising axe for 'significant workforce balancing in Europe', says staffer rep council

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: The Unbalanced Desire 'Balance'

@Steve Davies 3: "here IS NO FUTURE IN IT IN THE UK"

I agree, and wonder why our Govt are so keen to promote programming courses at school.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Given the recent rounds of redundancy,....

... were paid out at Statutory Minimum, what's the incentive to take VR?

Captec saps tech from Aleutia to put its tiny PCs back to work

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

(pronounced al-oo-sha)

I don't know why, but it irks me when companies pick an obscure ish name, then tell you how to pronounce it. I don't know if Aleutia did this, or it's ElReg lending a helping hand, so I'll give Ale You Tee Ah the benefit of doubt this time.

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@AC I'm struggling with that part myself, my recent web searches have been for CD storage units,.... and not once while searching for such have I had a result that's been banned because it contains dodgy images, they'll all been furniture shops. (I'm going with the one from Argos, if anyone is interested)

I think they are trying to say that if they can't intercept DNS lookups, people might happen across dodgy sites,.... which sounds like they are looking down the wrong end of the problem here,..... if the dodgy sites still run regular DNS, they are still discoverable and can be banned, they don't need to see what the clients are looking at, and I'd have thought the authorities would have some pretty good web crawler technology, so they can find all this stuff by themselves? Also, the DNS part only gets you the server, not the URL, so unless the site has an obvious name like dodgy-images.com how are they discerning content from DNS lookups? I don't think they are, it sounds like instead of finding and dealing with the offending sites, they actually want them to persist, and then check and see who is looking. Which then makes you wonder,... are law enforcement running some of these sites as traps?

Facebook removes about as many fake accounts as it has actual monthly users (yes, billions) in effort to clean up online

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Verify users

@Chris the bean counter: "The poster could still remain anonymous to the public."

Hey, there's this thing at your fingertips,.... it's an Internet connected device, it allows you access to the largest source of information ever known to humankind, and if you looked in the right places, you'd see stories like this:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/21/facebook_passwords/

Where Facebook stored passwords in plain text. Oh, you don't have to go far for that one,.. it's here! Plus you might see other stories about zero day exploits in server OSs,.... hardwired creds in Cisco gear, Web site vulnerabilities, thanks to compromised #include functions. You'd know that sharing personal data to the Internet has an inherent risk. Which is why if you want to be able to talk openly and honestly, anonymity is the thing that enables that.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

@Oddlegs: "It would be political suicide"

It has been suicide. Cameron fell on his sword pretty quick. The 2017 election saw the Govt lose it's majority and forced a coalition. MPs have resigned their posts in droves. May is now falling on her sword. Brexit is political poison.

Bug-hunter reveals another 'make me admin' Windows 10 zero-day – and vows: 'There's more where that came from'

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@Timmy B: "How about simply being a decent human being?"

Well, she's gone public, and the exploit will get patched, so there's that. Someone who was utterly nefarious would have either tried to sell the exploit on the QT, or used it themselves to hold people's data hostage, and she's not done that. What it makes me wonder is if she's the first person to discover these vulnerabilities, because better funded state institutions have entire divisions of people looking for them. State actors don't share, they don't get stuff patched, they hoard exploits (or try to, sometimes their hoards get discovered) and they use those exploits against their own citizens. So she's achieved one goal, the middle finger has definitely been given to the West's intelligence community.

Tesla's autonomous lane changing software is worse at driving than humans, and more

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "performed worse than human drivers when trying to change lanes automatically"

At the weekend I got overtaken by a Tesla, on the inside, and he then ran out of road, and had to use the bus lane to gain enough distance so he could pull into the correct lane.

Reading this article I guess I could be charitable and blame the autopilot.

Tim Peake's Soyuz lands in London after jaunt around the UK

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

The Skylark Raven sounding rocket that's on display at the National Space Centre, Leicester, was in crates, down in the basement of the Uni Physics Dept when I worked there. It was a remnant from a bygone era, when a PhD at Leicester could see you design and build an instrument, and launch it a couple of times atop one of said rockets, from Woomera. One chap who got his PhD at Leicester went back to the states and became an astronaut, crewing several shuttle missions. He used to visit from time to time, and show us his personal video cam footage taken in orbit. He then took us to the pub, and destroyed us playing pub skittles.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

@AC Not really, no.

The National Space Centre was a project run, in part, by Prof Alan Wells from the University of Leicester Physics Dept (which at the time had X-Ray Astronomy, Astronomy, and Earth Observation Depts) and the National Lottery. It still has ties with the University of Leicester's Space Research Centre, and provides science workshops for schoolkids to encourage STEM.

A new, totally non tourist Space Park is being built in a nearby plot, which also has ties with the University of Leicester's Space Research Centre. Plus of course there's the actual University of Leicester's Space Research Centre, on the campus at Leicester University.

So the tourist part is for tourists, but, understandably, tourists aren't allowed in the clean rooms, where satellite parts are assembled, nor to shoulder surf the PhDs and Post Docs while they process satellite data.

I quite like the 'tourist attraction' part myself, it's got some space junk, and who doesn't like that.

That reminds, me,.... I should arrange to go for beers with the folks I used to work with at the Space Research Centre.