Posts by petethebloke

US Air Force wants $6B to build 2,000 AI-powered drones

When did they become Drones?

They were just called radio-controlled planes 50 years ago, where I were a lad. I know they've changed a bit, but when did all RC flying machines become drones?

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Surely you don't want to open the turnips v swedes can of worms?

Is this a genuine website?

https://apachetribe.org seems to be served by an Apache server

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

If it takes 5-7 days to die, they surely don't need a fecking paper from the literature to tell them whether it's humane?

Mars helicopter to take a breather, recharge batteries

Re: Thanks NASA!

The billions of pounds are still here on Earth. Only a few quids' worth of metal and plastic and silicon are actually on Mars.

JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort

Re: Hypocrisy at its best from github

A leech that caught a disease or parasite from infected blood would get little sympathy.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Ryanair Has Charged For Years

...hasn't it?

Are Amazon not allowed to shaft customers with a fee for using a card they don't like? How come airlines can?

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

Re: Workplace Bullying

> You forgot the joke icon.

I didn't think it necessary in such intelligent company.

Workplace Bullying

Right there.

Was Bob not a human? Did he not have feelings? This is shocking.

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

Scores lol

> Like scores of Britons around the country, Greig, founder of web platform toolkit Creatorsphere, enjoys munching McDonald's meaty produce.

Great stuff. This is why we buy El Reg every morning.

iPhone XR caught fire after getting trapped in airline passenger's seat

Immolation is not burning phones

Immolation is sacrifice. As far as I can tell it only became linked with burning after the Buddhist monk in 1963.

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

Re: Incognito is a farce too

Thanks. That's worth knowing.

Incognito is a farce too

I noticed this ages ago. It's why I use Chrome for my work stuff (the office has G Suite) and Firefox for everything else. The inconvenience is worth it for the peace of mind.

I haven't tested it lately, but I also remember that "incognito" allowed leakage of Google cookies across windows.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

You don't have to be old to hate HTML emails

...but what I *really* hate is HTML emails without a plain-text version included.

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

Re: Cult?

I thought it was for people who can't be bothered to learn Vi.

When crontab says "easier" next to Nano, surely that deters every self-respecting sysadmin?

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

Re: Big African rats

Are they the ones that are trained up to find landmines? There are some great YT videos about them.

I saw a mouse

I used to look after the computers at an Irish Travellers' community centre. I was used to crawling under desks in unsavoury places, but this took the unsavouriness to a new level and the presence of mouse-droppings made me pretty careful to avoid hand-face contact (even in pre-covid days).

One day I heard a lot of rustling from inside the swing-lid bin (well, it would have been swing-lid, if it had had a lid) and I pointed out that there might be a mouse in there. The staff called in Paul, who was a very camp, gay man who couldn't come out due to the fact that the Irish Travelling fraternity would probably have killed him (let's hope thngs are better these days, but I fear they might not be). Paul brought a broom and used the top of the handle to crush the captive mouse - I had envisaged a quick release outside the building, I'm kind like that. He then sat in the seat I had just vacated (remember all that seat-hopping in a room full of PCs?) and wriggled himself down while saying, "Mmmmm, you've a hot arse".

Captain Caveman rides to the rescue, solves a prickly PowerPoint problem with a magical solution

I once got a call-out on Boxing Day to "fix" an installation of some Christmas software on a Windows machine.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, I removed the CD and wiped a fat, greasy thumb print off it (probably turkey-flavoured). Everything then worked fine.

"Twenty-five quid??? For wiping off a thumb print!!!", he shrieked.

"No. Twenty-five quid for knowing how to", I answered.

What would Jesus tweet? Church of England hands down commandments for Anglicans on social media

Re: Wrong about the Pope

I think the point here (if Jesus will forgive me... but thats what he does, so I might be OK) is that the money is not important; the important thing is to be faithful to God. We should not lose sight of what matters in life, and it sure ain't money. See?

Former Oracle product manager says he was forced out for refusing to deceive customers. Now he's suing the biz

"Managing Customer Expectations"

I bet some readers hear that phrase every day. I do.

Mozilla expands bug bounty program and triples payouts for flaw finders for hire

And where's Reynard?

Where's the obligatory photo of a cunning vulpine? Surely you could have found one eating an insect?

Invitation only

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

It does say Provocation

The classification terms were added on Amazon's mechanical Turk. The AI has Trump voters at the foundation... so you get what you pay for.

(Does that offend any Trump voters? I hope so - you offend me.)

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

Re: Chrome is a PUP

Hasn't Opera been sold to a Chinese company? I'd be nervous about that. (I'm nervous about everything).

Whistleblowing saboteur costs us $167m bellows Tesla’s accountant

Re: Are you f**king kidding me?

RIP. I loved my Palm(s).

I couldn't possibly tell you the computer's ID over the phone, I've been on A Course™

Was it Tanker?

Ranker? Lanker?

Security? We've heard of it! But why be a party pooper when there's printing to be done

Physical Security v Computer Security

I've heard a story (maybe apocryphal, probably on the interwebs somewhere, but entirely plausible) about a pen-tester who was contracted by a car dealership for security testing. A few days later, and without much difficulty, he was able to drive a brand new Porsche out of the showroom in the dead of night. The car salesmen were outraged - at him - but I can't remember if he had his contracts all signed and secure. I hope he did.

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Go and have a barBQ

A few years ago I used PHP's mail() function to send a message from the CEO to a few lucky people telling them that it was a lovely day and they could take the afternoon off to enjoy the sunshine and cook up a barbie. One of the idiots replied to him to say thanks very much. I still blame him for the tightening-up on office banter.

Cop a load of this: 1TB of police body camera videos found lounging around public databases

Terror?

Terrabytes? Presumably from an underground operation?

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Elvis

Enough said

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

All the helpful comments/suggestions above make me think my father has come back to life.

Dad - don't tell me you never made a fook-up, because I remember the trip to A+E after the knife-in-artery incident.

Could OpenAI's 'too dangerous to release' language model be used to mimic you online? Yes, says this chap: I built a bot to prove it

In English

I'm vaguely surprised that his conversations are in English.

Customer: We fancy changing a 25-year-old installation. C'mon, it's just one extra valve... Only wafer thin...

Re: Valves!?

Me too. I was seriously impressed by the idea too.

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Google Translate?

It looks a bit like someone in a less-enlightened part of the world used Google Translate. What a fook-up.

After IBM SoftLayer fails to scrub bare-metal box firmware of any lurking spies, alarm raised over cloud server security

Groan

"...grin and bare it".

Honestly. My old man's jokes were better than that.

How AI can help halt human sex trafficking – by identifying victims' hotel rooms from pics

Use EXIF

If the bad-arse perpetrators left the exif data in their photos, it would be easier still.

In fact, they should take the photo as a group selfie.

Et tu, Brute? Then fail, Caesars: When it's hotel staff, not the hackers, invading folks' privacy

Tending his resignation?

Is that what one does?

Yubico snatched my login token vulnerability to claim a $5k Google bug bounty, says bloke

Web Giant?

When did Google stop being "Advertising giant"? Why has El Reg stopped saying it like it is?

You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened

Faustian Pact Goes Wrong

What a feckin surprise

UPnP joins the 'just turn it off on consumer devices, already' club

Thanks GRC

www.grc.com recommended turning this off about a hundred years ago. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I believed them.

Twitter: No big deal, but everyone needs to change their password

Re: (as a best practice you shouldn't be reusing passwords anyway)

That's a good idea if your password is never stored in plain text, but it falls over pretty quickly otherwise. Let's see if I can guess your password for pr0nhub.... um.... Pr0nhub5ucks! ??

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

Re: With all due respect to the family and friends of the deceased

I agree. While we're at it, can we ditch the "battle with cancer" myth as well?

Having said that, RIP Rick Dickinson.

Meet the open sorcerers who have vowed to make Facebook history

Goodbye Emojis?

I 'kin hope so. Colon bracket was so much better than a stupid yellow face.

'There was no monetary incentive for this' = not what you want to hear about your tattoo

Re: what about

I didn't look closely - I just assumed it was his prison number. I used to teach HTML in one of Her Maj's institutions and will forever associate tattoos with baseball caps, rollies, big muscles and bad complexions.

Sky customer dinged for livestreaming pay-per-view boxing to Facebook

Boxing?

I thought it was going to be an article about children filming themselves putting presents back into boxes.

Archive of 1.4 billion credentials in clear text found in dark web archive

Length is Everything

My wife agrees

Ex-cop who 'kept private copies of data' fingers Cabinet Office minister in pr0nz at work claims

If he didn't break the law (and it sounds like he didn't) then the worst offence is wasting time at work. Since MPs are (technically) self-employed, who cares?

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

Agreed. I think there might be other ways of getting the wrong answers in the table (from those suggested in the article) - they don't even follow a progression, which is odd. Monthly is the same as annual.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

Pass? Why not die?

Are we too sensitive for the word 'die'?