Posts by mr-slappy

iTerm2 issues emergency update after MOSS finds a fatal flaw in its terminal code

It looks like kudos to everyone involved - Mozilla and Radically Open Security for finding it, CERT for publicising it, iTerm for quickly fixing it and El Reg for letting us commentards know about the update.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

Re: borders to be regularised or smoothed out by mutual agreement

Thank you for the reference. However the article concludes (my emphasis):

- The council overwhelmingly decides by consensus, which means the **UK is on the winning majority side almost 87% of the time**.

- The UK government might be more willing than other governments to publicly register its opposition to EU decisions.

- The data does not tell us what went on behind the scenes on each of these issues, and hence how much the UK disagreed with the majority position when it recorded its opposition – perhaps the UK was on the winning side on all the key issues it really cared about in this period.

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

Re: Forget the kiddies

"I thought it was *PERFECT* and a *SOLID* example of how you deal with bullying"

I sincerely hope that you are not involved in any way in dealing with children or young people!!

Of course bullying is a terrible thing and needs to be dealt with robustly, but your proposed solution is ill-informed, unlikely to succeed and frankly barbaric.

The image of the bully as an empowered sadist does not reflect reality in my experience (primary school governor for 20 years). More often than not the bully is him/herself being bullied or abused at home. (Go on a local authority safeguarding training course if you want to hear some truly horrific case studies.)

All they will learn from your approach is how to become even more violent and will likely end up as an adult doing someone some serious harm. A more nuanced approach will still protect the victim but also may be able to turn the bully around from the path they have taken.

I look forward to all the well-informed, courteous and adult and response to this post...

We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit

Re: Repent, repent, the end is nigh

I really struggle with the argument "we got by before we were in the EU, so we'll get by once we're out of it." The world has changed massively since then, and we have changed in step with that (for better or worse). We are now proposing to yank ourselves back in time fifty years over the space of a weekend.

It's like saying that we could travel just as fast around London in the Victorian era as we can now, so suddenly taking all the buses, cars and taxis off the road would be absolutely fine. But we' be knee-deep in horseshit for a start...

Brit ISPs pinky-promise not to overcharge loyal broadband customers

Zen

Or go with Zen Broadband who have the same rate for everyone.

https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/superfast-fibre-broadband

(not associated with Zen other than as a long-standing and very happy customer)

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

Re: Why?

"IMHO, because of this, Chrome should be banned from the appStore until they behave properly"

I'm not at my Mac at the moment, but IIRC Chrome is installed on Mac by downloading a .dmg, not through the MacOS App Store. So the only control Apple has is to somehow remove it from their list of signed software (which is easily circumvented).

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

Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy then?

I, for one, welcome our new roboticanine overlords

TalkTalk's voice-over is writing speeds that its text can't match: Ad pulled from broadcast

Advertising Standards Authority alerter

"The Advertising Standards Authority was alerted after Reg reader Rich Campbell noticed the TV broadcast's voice-over speeds did not match the ones promoted in the text"

I'm guess Reg reader Rich Campbell will start getting speeds of about 500kbps from TalkTalk pretty soon...

Microsoft bungs a billion bucks at biz developing AI that will take our jobs 'for the benefit of all'

Plowed?

"Ploughed," please.

"Plowed" is "N. American or archaic" (possibly the same thing?) according to the Chambers Dictionary on my phone.

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

"If anything it will IMPROVE matters massively for those affected by the racist stop-and-search policies as the AI system won't have the inherent biases of the prejudicial police officers"

Um, how is the AI going to be trained?

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

What happens to the authors?

I've co-authored an IT book and will have received a (small) royalty for every copy sold electronically. Am I now going to have the royalties deducted from my next royalty payment, even though people will have read our book? It's not exactly a life-changer but it doesn't seem fair to me.

Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise

BCCI

I was at BCCI as part of the IT team supporting the auditors who went in to try and find out what happened. BCCI was very different to what seems to have happened at Barings: BCCI's owners were just stupendously, shamelessly, universally corrupt. They were taking millions out of the accounts and putting it into their own pockets and nobody stopped them until the money ran out. They all escaped abroad AFAIK. The less corrupt ones would take money out on a Friday night, invest it over the weekend and put it back in on Monday without anyone noticing.

Weak regulation and a mind-blowing lack of oversight let all this happen.

The saddest thing was that the staff left behind (business and IT) were required to keep all their money in BCCI accounts. These were ordinary people who lost everything - cash, savings, pensions, the lot. Tragic.

Re: and yet

The FSCS limit is actually £85,000: https://protected.fscs.org.uk/

Politically linked deepfake LinkedIn profile sparks spy fears, Apple cooks up AI transfer tech, and more

LinkedIn Scammers

I get a lot of LinkedIn crap (I only use it when changing jobs tbh) and about a year ago I received a request from a young attractive blonde woman who I didn't know.

Nothing particularly unusual there, but her job was as a Geography teacher at my kids' secondary school. I'm also a school governor (elsewhere) so I thought maybe she was a real person who was a staff governor. But when I checked with my kids, they said there was no-one of that name who worked at the school and she didn't appear on the school's website.

It took LinkedIn a good six months to remove her from the site, and bizarrely, I saw that some of my more gullible work colleagues (definitely not connected with the school) had actually connected with her.

I am still trying to work out how the scammers knew which school my kids go to. (They're not connected with me on LinkedIn because, well, they have better things to do with their time)

ProtonMail filters this into its junk folder: New claim it goes out of its way to help cops spy

Re: Snoops

There are lots of other reasons to use a VPN, other than being a spy: I often use mine when I'm logged into a wifi hotspot or other untrusted network, for example. So far the authorities have shown no interest in me whatsoe

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Cash made from Radioactive Isotopes

"I had an Economics teacher who would muse how much fun it would be if cash was made from radioactive isotopes with a short half-life... to see what might happen to consumer spending habits if everyone knew they had to dispose of their pay packet before it blinked out of existence"

I think Germany ended up trying something similar between the wars - it didn't end well IIRC...

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

Unnecessary Donkey is my wrestling name

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Surely [deadline&pub] ?

Key to success: Tenants finally get physical keys after suing landlords for fitting Bluetooth smart-lock to front door

Re: Reluctant

Just because Americans do it doesn't mean we have to https://chambers.co.uk/search/?query=reticent&title=21st

Reluctant

Sorry to be a pedant but you mean "reluctant." Reticent means not saying very much.

Unless you meant you would be out breath after climbing all those stairs...

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

Re: What if you don't comply?

School governor here... we don't have this problem so much but we do have a small stupid minority of parents who dangerously and illegally park their cars on the zig-zag lines outside school. Personally I would set fire to their cars, but our patient and long-suffering head teacher tells me that we're not allowed to do that.

You can get the police to come along once or twice a year (they're pretty busy apparently), you can get patrols of parents and kids to talk to miscreants (avoiding the occasional threats of violence) but after that there's not much more you can do. Until a child is killed or injured (thank God that has not happened yet) at which point the full force of the law will of course descend.

Very depressing that a small minority of lazy idiots can spoil it for the rest of us.

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

It's Just Pattern Recognition

It's not AI - it can't be because we don't even understand what intelligence is in humans, never mind in machines.

It's not Machine Learning, because we don't really understand what learning is in humans either, never mind in machines. (I'm speaking as a school governor who spends a lot of time with teachers, many of whom are excellent, a few not so much. It's really complicated. If you could distill the essence of a really good teacher someone would have done it by now.)

It's just advanced pattern recognition, operating from very large but inevitably biased and flawed data sets.

Dratted hipster UX designers stole my corporate app

The Design of Everyday Things

Upvoted for the book reference. Everyone who works in IT should be required to read and ingest Norman's book.

If you've ever tried to pull open a glass door that has a handle that you actually have to push will know exactly where he is coming from.

Tedious Service Bulletin: No prizes for guessing which UK bank's services are DOWN for business users

Re: Calling Watson!

You forgot "the security and privacy of our customers' data is our utmost concern" and "your call is very important to us" and "we are currently experiencing unprecedented call volumes" and and and...

Office 365 enjoys good old-fashioned Thursday wobble as email teeters over in Europe

Re: And this is why

8. You can lose control of where the data physically resides. If it's personally-identifiable data relating to citizens of various countries (Singapore, Switzerland etc), and has moved out of those countries. you may well find yourselves in regulatory hot water.

Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know

Cow orker

How does one ork a cow? Is this a euphemism or a real thing?

Friday fun fact: If Stegosauruses had space telescopes, they wouldn't have seen any rings around Saturn

Still Cracks Me Up

| there was some process on the planet that the scientists failed to account for. And it turned out to be pretty impressive winds

"And will this wind... be so mighty... as to lay low... the mountains of the Earth?"

https://youtu.be/-hJQ18S6aag

(apologies if the URL is wrong, I typed it in by hand)

'It's like they took a rug and covered it up': Flight booking web app used by scores of airlines still vuln to attack – claim

--- getting in a machine scanning him/ her down to the pubs...

Is nowhere safe from these nefarious machines? Can I not even have a quick pint at my local without being scanned?

Brit hacker hired by Liberian telco to nobble rival now behind bars

Daniel Kaye?

Sounds like a bit of a Walter Mitty character

Error pop-up? Don't worry, let's just get this migration done... BTW it's my day off tomorrow

Re: took the day off

And midwives. (As the husband of a former nurse and midwife, from my experience many women go into labour during the night. And that stuff just can't wait...)

Former headteacher fined £700 after dumping old pupil data on server at new school

IANAL but I am a school governor and I can assure you that he is unlikely to ever get a senior leadership job in teaching again.

As part of standard school recruitment practices (known as Safer Recruitment) every candidate undergoes a background check, including a DBS which would bring up his record.

Given the circumstances of his offence it's unlikely he would even be called for an interview.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave me tea... pigs-in-blankets-flavoured tea

The King of Vegetables

What?? The Brussels sprout is the King of Vegetables. I’m sure my family would back me up on this one.

Unbreakable smart lock devastated to discover screwdrivers exist

Re: Yeah - but if I am a "common criminal" I'll definitely find another non-indiegogo to pawn

"A pair (male and female) of these is as effective as two 24x7x365 guards armed with submachine guns"

Assuming your units are hours, 24 x 7 x 365 is 7 years. Do they get itchy after that time?

If you won't use your brain our machine will use it for you, Nissan tells drivers

Black (rear-view) Mirror

Is Charlie Brooker writing Nissan's press releases now?

10 years of the Kindle and the curious incident of a dog in the day-time

Re: One good reason for the Kindle...

No, it doesn't. I share royalties of about 10% of the cover price with my co-author, irrespective of the format. Most (half?) of the royalties for a physical book go to the bookshop, for Kindle presumably that's Amazon.