Posts by onefang

President Trump broke US Constitution with Twitter bans – judge

Re: a Landlord can deny you entry to his pub

At least in this country, the landlord can deny you entry on all sorts of trivial reasons, coz it's private property. I've been kicked out of enough offices and shopping centres for being barefoot to know. I rarely go to pubs, but the last two I tried, they wouldn't let me into the first one coz of being barefoot, the other one (being in a very barefoot friendly area) didn't even comment.

And no, health and safety, broken glass, are not valid excuses. I go barefoot for my own health and safety reasons, and when you walk around barefoot for a few decades, your feet get tough. Walking barefoot through broken glass doesn't even slow me down. I even have a medical certificate, which every one ignores.

As for offices, I guess it's well known that feral computer monitors will leap of desks and attack poor unsuspecting people, so wearing thongs (flip flops for non aussies) is suitable protection. It's OK, honest, I'm an experienced sysadmin and computer programmer, I can handle feral computer monitors in complete safety. Maybe this explains why some computer equipment is chained to the desk?

Swiss sausage sizzler 4.0 hits 200 bangers per hour

Re: 1400 degrees?

"Still it does sound impressive if it will vaporize any flies attracted to the smell of cooking sausages."

Do you want flies with that?

Re: "It could be used in the bedroom!"

Reminds me of a certain cyclone we had many years ago. Only one person was killed. He ran a genny in his shed to keep the lights on, in his shed, died of carbon monoxide poisoning, in his shed.

I don't want an industrial sausage cooker in the bedroom, I only keep one sausage in there, and I don't want it cooked.

Intel's latest promise: Our first AI ASIC chips will arrive in 2019

Intel AI ASIC chips will arrive in 2019,

and the first malware abusing the new hardware bugs will arrive in 2020, to be followed by Intel owning up to these hardware bugs sometime after 2030. I expect an exclusive report on this new brand of malware from El Reg a few months before Intel owns up.

Boffins: Michael Jackson's tilt was a criminally smooth trick

Re: skinny and bulky

"How about Marine in a pentathlon? The Marines have the training for everything except the equestrian show jumping."

You might need Canadian Mounties for that.

"Yeah...but what's he done lately?"

Interestingly enough, he was touring Australia not so many years ago, even while dead. At least, that's what the posters where saying, I didn't bother going to see the performance.

FBI's flawed phone tally blamed on programming error. 7,800 unbreakable mobes? Er, um...

Re: Is it significant ...

"Is there a peer reviewed paper out there that proves safe back doors are impossible?"

Considering that on the subject of encryption backdoors, our Prime Minister was widely reported as saying that Australian laws overrule the laws of maths, I don't think any such paper would make the slightest bit of difference. Not to mention various governments have tried to legislate a simpler value for Pi.

"How exactly does counting between 1000-2000 items three times give you 7800?"

First count, 2000, second count 2000, third count 2000. 2000+2000+2000 = 6000. You are right, they must have counted them four times.

We can't decrypt 7800 phones, would you believe it? No? Hmmm, would you believe 1000 to 2000? How about two cans and a lengthy bit of very tangled string? OK already, I still haven't figured out how to use my shoe phone.

'Facebook takes data from my phone – but I don't have an account!'

Re: 'Try "sqlite3 dump <filename>"

"Have Win7/Mint on Desktop. Steps for easy install of sqlite3...?"

Dunno about Win 7, I don't have one of those handy, and even for Mint I'm just guessing, I don't want to turn on my test Mint system just to look that up, but try this on Mint -

apt-get install sqlite3

Or try searching for it in what ever package manager you use on Mint, it'll be there. It might even be installed already, it's a common dependency for Linux packages.

Re: What Facebook app?

I dunno about the Moto Gs, but Motorola has a tendency to not put too much bloat on their phones. Moto Z doesn't have much bloat beyond a large amount of Google Apps.

On the other hand, maybe what you are missing is carrier added bloat?

Re: What Better Reason to Buy ZTE or HuaWei?

"QUESTION: Who pays for the airtime of all the surreptitious collection of data?"

ANSWER: you do.

Re: Checked my phone

"a semi usable voice chat system."

I think those are called phone calls, or used to be. Am I showing my age?

Re: Who knows what the software is collecting and sending back to base?

And the hired goons wont be too upset if you send them back with a black eye. It's all part of the way they do business.

Though usually I just let them bruise their fists on me while I glare at them, until they give up and go away. Or my personal favourite if someone attacks me with a knife, I take it off them, hand it back to them, and say "here try again, that was the first lesson". Only once has anyone found out what the second lesson is.

Re: Misuse act...

I have Android installed on a partition of one of my computers, and Facebook apps, for testing purposes. I don't own any tablets, but I suspect the apps will run fine on them.

Re: Pages rule (again)

You can disable the stupid search bar to, install a different launcher. I've never seen these feeds though, even on my Google infested phones.

Google listens to New Zealand just long enough to ignore it

Re: Too small to hide crimes.

"a television reporter sticks a camera and microphone into the face of a random tourist every second night, asking them what they think of New Zealand."

At least in New Zealand, unlike Australia, the journos wait for the tourists to finish getting out of the air port before asking them how they like the country.

"If we can't get the fappening photos off the net, what right to countries have to expect actual news stories will be removed?"

Coz the fappening photos are waaay more interesting than boring old actual news stories?

I wonder what Kim Dotcom thinks of this?

Finally: Historic Eudora email code goes open source

Re: Old sourcecode! Such reticence. Much lawyer. Wow!

From the number of downvotes, I'd guess the answer to your question is yes. Age does not mysteriously remove code quality.

Re: 460MB of code?!

"Sadly there are no email clients I really like, although claws mail has been the best of the bunch for me for many years."

Have an upvote for that. I've also been using Claws Mail for many years. Thinking about switching though, but I haven't stumbled across anything much better. One day I'll do a proper search, and I'll include venerable terminal based clients like Pine.

MacPaint was written in APL?

GDPR for everyone, cries Microsoft: We'll extend Europe's privacy rights worldwide

'Please excuse my ignorance, but what is an "F-L" entity?'

From the context of that post - Freedom-Loving entity. I think they just made that up for that post, so your ignorance is excused.

Re: Pair-a-Ducks

One obvious secret there, Anonymous Coward.

Re: I'm wary of geeks bearing gifts

"no we don't have to pay the additional tax on our PS3's m'lud as look - that little tick box means a version of Linux can go on and make it a general purpose computer...fast forward and if you want to be able to play online you need to accept this update that turns that functionality off."

I have the worlds first PS3 that was sold in the world with Linux pre-installed on it, and one of the first three that came to Australia (I think it was number 2 from memory, IBM brought in number 1, and an IBM employee number 3, we all met at linux.conf.au and compared notes, the IBM employee had to borrow mine for a talk, coz his hadn't arrived yet, I also gave a talk about it using mine). Been a long time since I turned it on, but Linux still works on it, coz I've not booted into the game OS or connected it to the 'net since Sony pushed out that notorious update.

Mine would have been the first, but it spent a month sitting in a snowed in warehouse before it arrived in Australia.

Amusingly enough, the USA versions (which mine was, coz the Aussie version hadn't been released yet) came with a free movie in the box. The Aussie versions gave you a different free movie if you sent in your serial number. I did so and ended up with both. B-)

Astroboffins, get in here and explain Saturn's odd-shaped balls

Re: It is pretty obvious that those are spaceships...

The give away is this from the article - "making them look like flying saucers". If it looks like a flying saucer, flies like a flying saucer, and quacks like ... OK, that didn't end well.

About to install the Windows 10 April 2018 Update? You might want to wait a little bit longer

Re: Windows Schrödinger edition

"Does anybody know which URLs or IP addresses Windows 10 reaches out to to update from so I can blacklist them on my route?"

I know this wont help you, but my one and only Windows box is a development box, purely coz people where paying me for that. It has a white list of those few IPs I needed for the work, nothing else can get through.

Re: Not Again?

"updated my computer to Win10 and improved it so much that it didn't work at all. I was forced to switch to Linux"

I'd call that a very good update.

Re: Killed my laptop, reinstalled Windows, and now 1803 is in the queue again!

"Please, Microsoft, can't you give us a break?"

They did give you a break, broke your laptop, and they are offering to do it again. What more do you want?

Re: Forced Changes

After my experiences with Windows installs in the '90s, I dual boot by keeping the different OSes on separate hard drives, in disk caddies, and only one in the machine at a time, if one of them is Windows.

Re: Need to change "standard practices" for users.

"I can totally imagine using a hammer (Windows 10) and seeing its head flying off every time I use it. It gets even better when the hammer gets upgraded!"

They upgrade it to a bigger hammer, that does more damage when the head flies off the end. The upgrade after that is a small rocket engine in the head, for those hard to hammer through things, that flies around the room when it comes off. Smart people upgrade their hardware before the third upgrade, stronger walls, strong mesh protecting the windows, full body armour, ...

Re: Always-on updates... not that great an idea after all is it?

'It'll still be there but just called something else, like"Windows 11"...'

Windows 2 Infinity And Beyond? Windows ∞ - 1? Ubuntu Whining Windows? Windows SystemD Edition?

I'll get me coat me hearties, it's the one with the longer left sleeve to cover me hook, and the parrot droppings down the back.

Re: Shiver me timbers.

It took 16 hours?

Re: Windows Schrödinger edition

"maybe every copy of Windows should come with complimentary external storage large enough to back up the system drive"

Yeah, a couple of TB of what ever Microsoft's cloud storage is called, and several months of transferring everything, that'll be what they give you. Oh wait, doesn't Win10 slurp all your files anyway? Then the only need to transfer things back when things go wrong. Or the NSA can.

Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers

Re: on the dark side of the moon

Matter of fact it's all dark.

You think maybe Hitler's brain was digitized, and hidden in recent digital remixes of The Dark Side Of The Moon? Hmmm, looking in my Immersion boxed set of DSOTM, one of the coasters features a picture of a man with a ray of white light going in one ear, and a spectrum coming out the other. The plot thickens. If I invert all the bits and play it backwards, will I hear Mein Kampf?

EU considers baking new norms of cyber-war into security policies

"What? It's open season on IPv4?"

I was wondering about the conspicuous absence of IPv4 as well. I'm also wondering how you specifically attack IPv6?

IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

Re: What are they measuring here?

I was gonna ask the same thing. What are they measuring in that graph? I didn't spot any label for that axis.

Re: Some people want true point-to-point on more than one device.

"What's the benefit of that?"

I can think of one use case off the top of my head, but only coz it's something I've had to deal with. Running an OpenSim server behind NAT sucks, especially if you are not a network expert. On the other hand, I'm not so sure OpenSim supports IPv6.

Re: Privacy issues with IPv6?

"they could have just as well made IPv6 72 bits instead of 128."

But then I'd not have enough for every molecule in my home, and all the cockroaches will move out, taking the ants with them. Oh wait...

Re: "things break"

Internode was one of the first to offer IPv6 in Australia, and are (or used to be) a very geek friendly ISP. Letting you run servers from home on retail connections, etc. That's who I'm with, and IPv6 is working fine for me. And they are generous with it, I think I have enough IPv6 for every single molecule in my entire home. Well, maybe not those hard to reach ones under the 'fridge. The cockroaches living there will just have to put up with NAT, or move next door, it's smaller.

Re: Software

"The monkeys pounding keyboards to write consumer firewall software haven't stumbled on to a working IPv6 version yet."

Shorewall6, the IPv6 version of Shorewall, works fine. Has done for a while. It's open source, and maybe not consumer friendly, but I'm not your ordinary consumer, so it works for me.

Re: NAT

"Move everyone to IPv6 and suddenly many of those devices become directly accessible from anywhere on the internet. Prepare for a huge spike in botnets and other 0wnage."

Just like malware is mostly written for the most popular OSes, coz you get a bigger result with that, the low adoption of IPv6 currently means a lot less nasties on it. If my firewall logs are any indication. Everyday my logwatch report has pages of IPv4 buggers bouncing off my firewall, and rarely one or two IPv6 ones.

Though you are correct once IPv6 overtakes IPv4, if that ever happens.

Re: "...stuck behind a NAT..."

'Everyone (even a retail broadband user) is "stuck behind a NAT".'

I'm not.

Facebook gets Weed-whacked: Unilever exec may axe ads over social network's toxic posts

Re: Advertisers only have themselves to blame

"The Gold Blend ... Ronseal's ... Daz ... Mr Motivator"

Never heard of any of the brands / companies you mentioned. Though perhaps they are not available in my country?

Re: Advertisers only have themselves to blame

'Who doesn't know, "Will it blend?"'

I don't. And if it's advertising related, I don't want to know. Mind you, that's likely due to decades of avoiding advertising like the plague that it is.

Re: What's worse?

"Are 16 year-olds children?"

If I recall correctly, here in Australia 16 year olds can have sex and drive, but not drink or watch porn. So I'd say that's half adult and half child. Though it does leave me wondering how we expect these 16 year olds to learn how to do sex properly if they are not allowed to watch it. Should they wear blind folds, or just do it in the dark? Might explain all those teenage pregnancies if they are accidentally putting the condom on their partners big toe, coz they can't see where it should go.

I don't think they can vote either, which might explain why the laws about drinking and watching porn haven't changed.

Tech support made the news after bomb squad and police showed up to 'defuse' leaky UPS

Re: Obligatory (Units of measurement)

'"Sparrow's fart" might well be a good standard for short timespans - any suggestions for longer ones?'

The amount of time it takes a government to make a good decision. Though that tends to a very long time, or never. Or if you want something shorter, frozen hells. So the average length of time taken for an average government to make a decision that makes the world a better place is 6.4 frozen hells, +/- 0.1.

You love Systemd – you just don't know it yet, wink Red Hat bods

Re: Process 1 IS complicated.

"Why has technology in general gone down the shitter? Why is everything so awful?"

Coz the most important thing in the world is making more profit than you did last quarter. Nothing else is important.

"Will anyone save us from this neverending technohell?"

I try, but every one ignores me, coz I don't have the marketing department of the profit makers.

Get over yourselves: Life in the multiverse could be commonplace

Re: To assume

"Or, rather, that is to say, you're all the figment of my imagination (I'm a sick and twisted bar steward)"

You drink, therefore I am?

Make masses carry their mobes, suggests wig in not-at-all-creepy speech

"I purchased one myself at Signal Tactics Faraday Bags, it works."

Apparently so do old foil chip packets. Reduce, reuse, recycle.