Posts by Carpet Deal 'em

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

Re: Odd

And miss the chance to make them speak to sales again? After all, the license key needing to be reentered is the perfect time to consider if you want to spend more money upgrade to a higher service plan!

It's OK, everyone – Congress's smart-cookie Republicans have the answer to America's net neutrality quandary

Re: I've always wondered...

The question is how you stop ISPs from immediately abusing the privilege to do any sort of prioritizing. Sure, it benefits everybody if media streams are treated as high priority while simple page loads are last in line, but greasing the right palms could see your page loads above a less cooperative source's streams. Even if you just allow prioritization based on category, there'll be plenty of gaming the terminology to make things as "advantageous" for the ISPs as possible.

Who are the last people you'd expect to spill thousands of student records? A computer science dept? What a fantastic guess

Re: Confidential?

It's true Social Security numbers were never meant to be private, but having one now means you can access pretty much anything about the owner's life and the ability to attach their name to nearly anything you please. With absolutely no authorization mechanism in place, the only thing to do is to keep the SSN secret.

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Re: Nothing like having your work day extended a few more hours

Read the fine print on the deal: you'll have to shell out the big bucks for a full license if you leave/get disemployed.

Chrome devs attempt to slip muzzle on resource-guzzling browser beast with 'Never-Slow Mode'

Re: I like Chromium, but not Chrome

Google's been caught having Chromium installations install closed-source modules without telling anyone. As long as the browser is maintained by them, you can all but guarantee they'll use it against you.

Windows Defender update: So secure, it wouldn't let Secure-Boot Windows PCs, er, boot

Re: Again...

There's probably something in the ToS that say you can't sue them - and even if there wasn't, lawsuits are a huge hassle that most people wouldn't want to bother if they didn't have to(hiring a lawyer, taking days off to appear in court, etc). It's possible for a class-action lawsuit to happen, but we all know how that would turn out.

As netizens, devs scream bloody murder over Chrome ad-block block, Googlers insist: It's not set in stone (yet)

Re: Google doing this might actually HELP Chrome dominate

The problem with the analogy is that Google used a number of avenues to promote Chrome that alternatives just don't have - avenues such as getting companies offering free downloads to bundle it with their software, advertising it on one of the most trafficked web pages in the world, etc. It also got a massive, lightning-in-a-bottle boost when other large sites pushed it hard due to the newly-appointed Mozilla CEO having donated to a PAC in favor of traditional marriage years before he took the helm.

As it stands, almost all the competitors have nothing but word-of-mouth to spread by - and most of those are still Chromium skins. The few exceptions are Firefox forks, but their userbase tends to be disgruntled Firefox users; converting Chrome users isn't typical. We might see this monoculture broken, but HTML5 has allowed it to embed itself much deeper than IE6 did.

Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral

Re: "GPL is cancer"

Every library worth mentioning is under either the LGPL or GPL with explicit linking exception. The only licensing issue is in your FUD.

Crypto exchange in court: It owes $190m to netizens after founder 'dies without telling anyone vault passwords'

Re: Bullshit

This assumes anybody knew the address(es) holding the coins. If that was properly hidden, he'd look like just another whale on the blockchain(especially if he was clever enough not to move it all at once).

El Reg eyes up Article 13 draft leak: Will new Euro law give Silicon Valley more power? Some lawyers think so

I'd say the copyright period could be a bit longer(40 years sounds about right), but it definitely needs to be fixed. None of this "life of the author" nonsense - as it is, somebody who published young and lived long enough could have his copyrights last multiple centuries.

Frankly, we just need to tear copyright down and rebuild it from first principles.

LibreOffice patches malicious code-execution bug, Apache OpenOffice – wait for it, wait for it – doesn't

Re: Tried Libre about 3 weeks ago....

One word: Outlook. The rest of the Office suite is and always was easily replaced, but I don't know of any other email clients that offer anything approaching Outlook's feature set.

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch

Re: Cloudpets

Amazon's had more scandals than Facebook at this point. I'm not sure it's even possible for them to screw up badly enough to impact their revenues.

Fake fuse: Bloke admits selling counterfeit chips for use in B-1 bomber, other US military gear

Re: IC marking

Sometimes that's literally the only way: Uncle Sam was caught buying replacement parts for the VAX machines controlling the nuclear arsenal on eBay because they'd run out of spares and the production line had been closed for some time(they've since replaced the physical minicomputers with emulators).

Oh dear! Amazon's facial recognition is racist and sexist – and there's a JLaw deep fake that will make you want to tear out your eyes

Maybe not "polar bears in the snow", but setting up a camera that can give you a good look at all skintones at once can be kind of difficult.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Re: Annoying pedantry

We can always try.

Another Apple engineer cuffed over alleged self-driving car data theft: FBI swoop on bod as he boards plane to China

Re: security is not chinesity

> I also see very bad security level at Apple secret facility - guy was able to copy from network (!) to his personal storage (!). Why do they permit storing secret files on personal computers? Apple network does not work?

Very much this: why are people permitted to keep any data on personal devices if it's supposed to be this top secret? If they need people to be able to work on it outside the office, it's trivial to setup a connection that doesn't let the data leave the server.

iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

Re: £832.50, not £999

This is wrong. Many (most?) states allow cities and counties to stack on some amount of tax, making the actual tax rate far more variable(for example, total tax in California varies between 7.25% and 10.25%). That said, I'm pretty sure there's more to the difference between US sales tax and European VAT than being a separate line item vs. being incorporated into the list price.

Ad-tech industry: GDPR complaint is like holding road builders to account for traffic violations

Re: How we view this in the USA

> "Indigenous people" is a better term for them as a whole, but I much prefer to call them by the name they give themselves.

"Indigenous people" is far broader, anyway: it simply refers to the first people to inhabit any given area. It can be easy to ignore, though, since most of the world has either had the indigenous people of the area completely eradicated or still dominant.

"(American) Indian", on the other hand, is pretty specific in that it refers to the indigenous peoples of the current contiguous United States.

The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild

Re: The upside of open source

They haven't just refused to commit to a stable API - they actively change it just to screw over any attempt to create a compatibility layer. If this were a company, they'd be under the magnifying glass for anticompetitive behavior; unfortunately, even Red Hat's control over the Linux landscape is unlikely to draw the attention of even the most ornery of regulators.

Post-Brexit plan for .EU tweaked: No dot-EU web domains for Europeans in UK, no appeals, etc

Re: STUPID STUPID STUPID

> "Although I am an American, and am not affected by this change, I do not agree with your assessment; I fully agree with the EU's policy on this."

All he's saying is that existing domains should be grandfathered in, which is standard with just about everything. That Brussels has demanded all domains be confiscated is very much contrary to the norm - and a petty departure at that.

Re: In case anyone wonders where the EU got its reputation for thoughtless bureaucracy....

I think he meant "no purpose" as in "Trump didn't get what he wanted but buckled anyway". Pretty much all he's accomplished with that escapade is to guarantee his based won't reelect him.

NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail

Re: Oh no, I'm stuck

Number 695.

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

But just look at all those Linux distributions that release bianually! If it works for assortments of packages developed independently, it can work for Windows!

Slack to fend off the collaboration competition with... a new logo

I can understand some of their arguments against the old logo, but this one's just garbage. Whereas the octothorpe was merely overly colorful, this one's just far too busy. It might work if it were just the lines without the dots, though.

McKinsey’s blockchain warning irks crypto hipsters

The reason for Bitcoin's high transaction isn't the cost of mining, but that only so many transactions can be processed on the same block; with enough people wanting on the blockchain, miners can tell anyone not willing to stump up huge fees to get bent(if they couldn't, the energy spent mining would fall to match demand). This could be resolved by using a larger block size or more frequent block processing, but the latter would completely break the protocol and the Bitcoin developers absolutely refuse to do the former.

Spektr-R goes quiet, Dragon splashes down and SpaceX lays off

Re: Stainless Steel?

Fins aren't the most useful thing, either(even the Saturn V Mk II that got mooted at the time lacked them). I highly doubt practical concerns are being given a single iota of attention they don't absolutely need.

Dozens of .gov HTTPS certs expire, webpages offline, FBI on ice, IT security slows... Yup, it's day 20 of Trump's govt shutdown

Re: Operational Incompetence

Of course not! If they took advantage of savings they didn't need to, they'd just get their budget cut for next year - and there's nothing more a government bureaucrat hates more than a reduced budget.

What's the fate of our Solar System? Boffins peer into giant crystal ball – ah, no, wait, that's our Sun in 10bn years

Re: Glad they helped me understand

Actually, just "ten million degrees" would do just fine. At that point we're on the "doesn't matter" scale, so specifying Celsius is simply going against good style for no reason.

Hubble 'scope camera breaks down amid US govt shutdown, forcing boffins to fix it for free

Re: Can't fix stupid

> From what I can see it is *far* too likely that he'll be re-elected in 2020.

Assuming he doesn't buckle on the wall. With that GoFundMe having nearly reached $20 million, it's almost certain that letting the Democrats get their way would alienate his supporters to the point of no return.

Hands off that Facebook block button, public officials told by judges in First Amendment row

Re: One step closer

You're doing the redefinition. What you're thinking of is packing the court - FDR's scheme would've brought the number of justices up to 15.

Microsoft vows to destroy Office, er, offices: Campus to be demolished and rebuilt

Old != bad

The vast majority of Windows 10 problems are Windows 10-specific; given how Windows 7 has almost none of these problems, it's clearly the fault of shiny new code, not the veteran code written while QA was still a thing at Redmond.

Amazon exec tells UK peers: No, we don't want to be dominant. Also, we don't fancy being taxed on revenues

Re: IP valuation

The realistic value of a company licensing its IP to its subsidiary is zero. It might be one thing if it were a joint venture, but there's no reason to charge a wholly-owned subsidiary for inherent use of its parents' trade dress.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Re: dot UK doomed?

The "United Kingdom" moniker came with the union of Ireland. Scotland running off wouldn't change the initials.

Germany hacked: Angela Merkel's colleagues among mass data dump victims

Re: Usual scapegoating article

Assuming it's not just the age of the data, the lack of AfD information in the dump suggests to me a frame job, which would make it more likely someone with anti-Russian sentiments; a professional, state op would be better conducted than to leave such a glaring omission(unless this is a Russian frame job made to look like a frame job against them - but at that point of speculation we're just tumbling down rabbit holes).

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

Re: Width

There are those who consider what we ought

And plea to reconsider this quest for juggernaut

Apple blew my mind – literally, says woman: MagSafe plug sparked face-torching blaze, lawsuit claims

Re: Her Lawyer quite obviously studied chemistry in the US education system

She probably had her face close to the adapter.while plugging it in or pulling it out(both are common enough behaviors).

An upset tummy and a sphincter-loosening blackout: Lunar spaceflight is all glamour

Re: "almost ridiculous"

They're both very much correct: we do need to expand off the planet, but Mars is still stupid. It has no magnetic shield and an unbreathably thin atmosphere; it'd face all the problems of a moon colony, but be months or even years away from resupply and in a deeper gravity well. There's no reason to settle there except overeager romanticism.

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

Re: A bridge too many

Sony is a large holding corporation with many divisions; unless I'm mistaken, no two of those were done by the same unit.

50 years ago: NASA blasts off the first humans to experience a lunar close encounter

Re: Remeber those heady days of the Apollo missions well

In the sixties, there was a psychopolitical need to beat the Soviet, magnified by Kennedy's assassination. There's no such push today; NASA might get some funding if they can ever manage to fling an Orion around the moon(potentially capturing the public imagination), but at the rate SLS is going, that's a big if.

Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

Re: Will MS drop IE too?

Internet Explorer is in Windows for legacy compatibility(many corporate web apps depend on the peculiarities of one version or another). Edge was created because there was pretty much no room to implement modern web features without breaking something; it's nothing more than a nice-to-have, so it can be dropped without issue.

Razer offers freebies to gamers who descend into its coin mine

Some numbers

They offer a deluxe Steam version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider on their silver store for 98000 Razer silver. Assuming 500 silver a day is the average cut like they say it is, that comes out to 196 days to get it. Now, if we assume that getting that 500 requires leaving on a 500W graphics card on for 24 hours(they don't give any numbers there), that's a total of 2352 kilowatt hours. Combine this with the average US cost of residential electricity(13.01¢ per kilowatt hour), that comes out to $306 as opposed to Steam's current price of $70 for the game. If we're more generous and say it only takes 6 hours to get that silver with our hypothetical GPU, we can get it down to $76.50, but that's still a losing proposition.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Facebook apologizes for bug leaking private photos

Re: I wonder how much they were paid

> Yeah, this is how low my opinion of them has sunk.

"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." Really, that comment says everything you need to know about Facebook and privacy. The only reasons they care about data leaks are the risk of fines and the money foregone when it gets out of their clutches. You shouldn't have let your opinion of them get as high as you did.

The curious tale of ICANN, Verisign, claims of subterfuge, and the $135m .Web dot-word

Re: Alternate system

The existence of alternate DNS roots just creates its own set of problems. This is, in my opinion, one of those rare cases where a blockchain just might make sense: nobody has to trust anybody but can still find everybody. This also has some more obvious problems, but decentralization in some form is going to be the only way to put an end to this.

Amazon robot fingered for bear spray leak that hospitalised 24 staffers

"These things happen" is a poor attitude to take to poorly-secured dangerous materials. Even if it means losing the benefits of automation, these things need to be kept in a location and way that utterly prevents this kind of thing.

DeepMind quits playing games with AI, ups the protein stakes with machine-learning code

It's good somebody's doing this

Because it's not like it's ever been done before.

SEAL up your data just like Microsoft: Redmond open-sources 'simple' homomorphic encryption blueprints

Re: Surely the point of encryption...

Encryption is to hide things from prying eyes. If you want to prevent tampering, you need to use signatures. Technically they're both forms of cryptography, but they're still very much different things.

Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don't call back when asked for evidence

Re: Blockchain tutorials

The basic of a block chain is this: you have a start block containing some information(usually of a fixed size); you then add a second block, which includes the hash of the first block's data. A third block gets added, again with the hash of the second block's data(which includes the hash of the first block), and so on and so forth. This means that the value of any block is dependent on the value of the entire chain before it, so it's theoretically impossible to pull a fast one without rewriting the entire chain.

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Re: A few comments

"Why does SI use the kilogram instead of the base gram?"

The kilogram was originally called the "grave", but the name was dropped for various reasons and, in the process, some genius decided to base the default on the centimeter. Unsurprisingly, the original grave was the more convenient measure, but by then "gram" had stuck, so they popped the kilogram in its place.

GDPR USA? 'A year ago, hell no ... More people are open to it now' – House Rep says EU-like law may be mulled

Re: Inquiring minds

"Only when a nation doesnt realise where its border is."

What about companies whose platform is global? In the US, there are "town square" laws that demand that everybody be given their soapbox in places of public congregation(the details vary, but California in particular has some strong protections in its constitution); these haven't yet been applied to the online world, but doing so would be in direct conflict with various European laws demanding Facebook, Twitter, etc take down posts the government deems "extremist". Not privacy-related, but a decent example of how direct conflicts can exist.