Posts by iron

Deepfakes, quantum computing cracking codes, ransomware... Find out what's really freaking out Uncle Sam

Re: At least they are thinking the unthinkable already

The fascists reveal their true intentions.

Junior minister says gov.UK considering facial recognition to verify age of p0rn-watchers

Since facial recognition tech is so famously poor this might actually be a good idea. We can all use pictures of Boris to prove we have reached fapping age!

GitLab reset --hard bad1dea: Biz U-turns, unbans office political chat, will vet customers

Re: The only way ...

Dear Bob,

TAKE YOUR LITHIUM! YOUR CARER SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN!

Former TalkTalk cybersecurity overseer rattles the tin to cover costs of equal pay dispute against UK ISP

Paid a basic salary of £110,000... is begging for legal fees.

This new culture of rich beggars needs to stop.

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

Re: Yay!

Maybe legislate that parents pay attention to what their kids are doing instead.

Fixed that for you.

WeWork's Meetup slaps RSVP fees on events ‒ then tells everyone not to panic amid backlash

Re: Popular among techies arranging confabs

Yeah the database conferences and MS training workshops I went to who used Meetup were just recruiters. Hey where's my free pizza!?!

/s

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Fixing the symptom…

In which case the code should ensure they are processed in the right order and not assume they are because they were once on the dev's PC during a full moon.

Oh dear... AI models used to flag hate speech online are, er, racist against black people

Re: Racist AI or offensive and crude slang? You decide...

No one asked you to employ any of these people and the comments are not posted on LinkedIn or similar but on Twitter. So the users involved feel they are talking to their mates, even though they are stupidly broadcasting to the whole world. My circle of friends can be just as crude and profane amongst ourselves yet we have jobs in fields including IT, medicine, journalism, politics and teaching because we can adjust our dialogue to suit the audience.

Re: crafted in the style of African American English (AAE)

That would be an ecumenical matter.

China and Russia join to battle 'illegal internet content,' which means what you fear it does

Re: Could be useful for us in the West?

I was going to give you an upvote, until you compared GDPR to Russian & Chinese internet censorship.

Europe publishes 5G risk assessment; America scrawls ‘Huawei’ on the side of a nuke and goes for a ride

Re: design

You're forgetting that you aren't supposed to use end-to-end encryption because it funds terrorism, pirates movies and eats babies.

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

Re: Let's start with the basics and then work forward from there.

> Bias doesn't equate to facts.

Based on your posts in this thead I don't think you'd recognise a fact if I hit you over the head with it.

Re: Let's start with the basics and then work forward from there.

> Clean drinking water was 1 of many many examples.

Perfect example. The Apollo programme invented water purifiers.

Tell me again how never going to space would have enabled us to improve clean drinking water on Earth.

So I take it you don't think any of these things ever helped anyone:

Artificial Limbs

Water Purifiers

Adjustable Smoke Detectors

Satellite TV

Freeze-dried Food

Space Blankets

Memory Foam

Improved Tyres

Because all of them were invented while pissing away a few billions as you put it.

Are you serious?

How much is your face worth? Google thinks a $5 Starbucks gift card should be good enough

"We’re taking these claims seriously... violation of our requirements..." data would be retained for 18 months.

Surely if the data was collected in violation of Google's requirements (presumably don't get caught?) and without honestly telling the subjects who and what it was for they should delete it immediately.

After 72 hours of recurring outages, you'd be forgiven for wanting to slightly tweak the first syllable of Bitbucket

Re: Cloudy with a chance of missed pulls?

Indeed the beauty of distributed vcs is that you don't need a server, ever. Just nominate a local repo as the authoritative one and sync with it. That is the way it was meant to be done in the first place, Bitbucket, GitHub, etc are trying to force dvcs into the classic vcs mould.

UK ads watchdog bans Burger King Twitter jibe for condoning chucking milkshakes at politicians

Re: Flash John Prescott

> There's nothing flash about John Prsscott...

I don't know, the two Jags were pretty flash.

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Re: I agree but

"living well within the law"

Except for the fact that they are an escaped criminal who hasn't turned themself in. Pretty major crime that.

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

Re: yet again.

I gave up on SO years ago and wish I could stop it polluting my programming searches. By and large the content is low quality and often out of date. The rest of the network seems either pointless or laughable to me.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Re: re: Once desktop processing power became sufficient to crack the encryption

Oxbridge = Oxford & Cambridge (it's pretty obvious from the spelling)

So either say "Oxbridge" or say "Cambridge & Oxford" but never say "Cambs and Oxbridge" because you'll just look like a twat.

Consumer campaign to keep receiving printed till receipts looks like a good move – on paper

My work is currently trying to force everyone on to electronic pay slips. The problem being not everyone has an email address so the board's solution is to provide 2,500 work email addresses to workers who never had them before and based on experience of said workers are incapable of turning on a computer or using a phone for anything more than calls or texts. We're a charity and this will cost a fortune plus they have not added any IT resource to support those 2,500 IT illiterates.

Personally I want to keep my paper pay slips and I'm not happy at being forced to have an electronic one that I will need to forward to an email address I actually own. I forsee a lot of problems when they enforce this.

My reply is usually a stern "you don't need my email address."

Every dog has its day – and this one belongs to Boston Dynamic's four-legged good boy Spot

Their product page for Spot recommends it for inspecting Oil & Gas plants and similar industrial facilities. These facilities run 24/7, at 90 minutes per battery that's 16 times per day that the battery needs to be changed!

Why worry about cost of banning certain Chinese comms providers? Fire Huawei, says analyst

At least that's another Trump shill identified.

EU court rules Right To Be Forgotten doesn't apply outside member states

Re: "I bought the law..."

In this instance the EU court is right, even if the decision does favour the Alphabet gang. In most cases I've seen the right to be forgotten should not exist because it is being used to hide the known past behaviour of criminals and politicians criminals.

Similarly our own Supreme Court made the correct decision in finding the antics of our so called PM illegal. A PM closing Parliament so the people's elected officials can't debate and make decisions is undemocratic, illegal and nigh on treasonous.

Vimeo's Clippy-for-video-bumpf app 'breaks biometric privacy law by slurping thousands of faces without consent'

I get the feeling Vimeo bought Magisto in April this year but I can't quite place why.

Are you a Nim-by? C-ish language, gentler than Go, friendlier than Rust, reaches version 1.0

Re: Unpopular opinion

If they can't be bothered to make another language more readable with indents I would imagine they stand no chance of getting anything to work in a language like Python.

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

Re: The Arch-BOFH?

That would be an ecumenical matter!

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

> "I'm not trying to make a political statement," Vargo told The Register

Yes you are. Your repeated mentions of morals and ethics confirms it.

UK launches online VAT inquiry following fears of Brexit fraudster surge

Brexit happens in 6 weeks and should really have happened months ago but they are only just now starting an inquiry into whether it will have any effect on tax collection? What the hell do Westminster do all day? What have they been doing for the last couple of years? And how do we get rid of every single last one of them from BoJo to the tea ladies?

Scotiabank slammed for 'muppet-grade security' after internal source code and credentials spill onto open internet

Re: You see Dev's

You see Ops it's a shame the devs have to point out you can't handle a simple apostrophe. It makes you look stupid.

Here's a hint, nothing belongs to the devs in your sentence so you don't need it.

I'll leave your incorrect use of commas for another day.

Re: Mean Mr. Mustard

Private repos have been free on GitHub for quite some time and setting a repo private is very easy. Imo either Scotia employ brain dead devs who shouldn't be allowed near code or one of them set these repos public on purpose. Perhaps a disgruntled and now former employee?

Gasp! Google Chrome kills uBlock, Adblock ad filters – grab the pitchfo- no wait, it's OK: They were evil fraud clones

Its also going to have a problem with every single update legitimate devs publish for their legitimate extensions. The mentioned security bod has no idea what he's talking about or is misquoted somehow.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

"product usage data such as"

"Heaton told The Register he hadn't sniffed what his in-laws' printer was beaming back to base"

So actually he has no idea what data is being sent back to HP and is just fear mongering. 'Data such as' does not mean 'exactly all this data' so without actually verifying what is sent you know nothing. Thanks for printing the guy's name so I can be sure never to use him as a consultant.

This image-recognition roulette is all fun and games... until it labels you a rape suspect, divorcee, or a racial slur

Remember folks you have no idea what this software is doing with uploaded images so don't use photos of yourself or your family! I recommend using cartoon or game characters, you can get some funny results.

Google age discrimination case: Supervisor called me 'grandpa', engineer claims

Sorry Mikey but you're wrong. According to the OED not only is performant a word it does not mean what you think it means and its been around for roughly 200 years (as a noun).

performant

/pəˈfɔːmənt/

adjective: performant

functioning well or as expected.

"a highly performant database which is easy to use"

noun: performant; plural noun: performants

a person who performs a duty or ceremony.

Origin

early 19th century (as noun): from perform + -ant; the adjective dates from the 1980s.

Re: "Mendez boasted of his criminal connections"

Or ask if they need their diaper changed every 5 minutes.

UK Home Office primes Brexit spam cannon for a million texts reminding folk to check passports

Re: Passport Renewal

As someone applying for jobs recently I've been asked if I'm eligible to work in the EU (for UK roles). I have been forced to lie by answering 'yes' because otherwise my application can't proceed but I have no idea if I will be eligible to work in the EU in 45 days.

That Telegram feature that let you delete your private messages on recipients' phones? It didn't work properly

The grammar of this guy's quotes is terrible.

This quote doesn't make any sense: "I found that since Telegram takes `read/write/modify` permission of the USB storage which technically means the confidential photo should have been deleted from Alice's device or storage"

Nor does this one: "the word privacy of Telegram fails here again"

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

"I am sure that they will allow you to change in the future to some of the main providers..."

"Interested to know whether the DoH server will be configurable..."

You can already configure which DoH provider you use, Mozilla even suggested alternatives to their preferred partner in the original blog post announcing the feature. You can also set different levels of 'enabled' which include fallback to standard DNS in event of failure.

This is Mozilla, not MS, Google, Apple, etc.

New lows at Bose as firmware update woes infuriate soundbar bros

No sound from a Bose speaker sounds like an upgrade to me!

Now it's Terrance Dicks' turn to regenerate: Golden-age Doctor Who mainstay dies aged 84

I always loved his Who books and read a few of his others too as a teen in the 80s. Thanks for the read Terry.

Let's recap reCAPTCHA gotcha: Our cunning AI can defeat Google's anti-bot tech, say uni boffins

Re: Catcha is the most annoying piece of crap ever

Yup I have no idea what a "crosswalk" is, what constitutes a "storefront" for Google or why they show me pictures of yellow cars when they want me to click on Taxis. There's never a single black cab in any of the pictures! reCAPTCHA v2 is clearly the work of a Trump supporter because they think everyone understands Yank.

Pompey boffin bags €1.3m off EU for dark matter research – shame a no-deal Brexit looks more and more likely

UK gov wouldn't understand how to monetise research if you hit them over the head with it.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, America? Well-rested? Good. Supermicro server boards can be remotely hijacked

And this is why the Bloomberg rice-sized spy chips on mobos story was a lie. Why go to all that trouble when you can just find a flaw in the manufacturer installed management engine.

Oh there it is, Facebook shrugs as Free Basics private key found to be signing unrelated apps

You mean Facebook aren't using the recommended and more secure option of having Google store your signing key? Colour me not shocked.

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Last year the board at my current employer, a charity, decided in their infinite wisdom that we can't have any downtime. At all.

So ops bought enough batteries to power our server room for 8 hours at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds. I'm told we can't have a generator due to proximity to a government office.

A few weeks after they were installed there was a power cut late in the day. My boss and everyone from ops had already gone home so I ended up telling senior management that services should still be up but I couldn't check because like them my PC was off and as a dev I have no access to the server room. Only for us to hear all the fans stop... 10 minutes after the power cut.

Apparently the cooling for the server room uses the same AC as the rest of the office and no one thought to provide backup power for it. So 10 minutes into the power cut everything overheated and shut down.

Since then there have been several meetings and discussions and we were told something MUST be done but they aren't willing to actually fix the problem properly so nothing has been done and our DR policy states the servers have 8 hours battery backup. But, we know they will shutdown after 10 minutes.

Re: Another Place, Another Time

Biodeisel is only 8% bio so even if it hadn't gone off it still wasn't very green.

Ah, this should totally reassure Euro workers: They'll get Brexit EU settled status app on iPhones from October

Re: Priceless ...

So is "I have an iPhone and haven't been able to apply." when there are other methods to apply.

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

Re: Don't trust them

So how do you propose collecting your monthly payments from Google or whoever quicker than on the day they are due each month?