Posts by VikiAi

If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is: Nobody can decrypt the Dharma ransomware

Re: Surely decryption is possible...

Heck! All your lost data is probably out there on an unprotected server!

600 armed German cops storm Cyberbunker hosting biz on illegal darknet market claims

Re: Servers in space ?

Auto-eject them and let them security-wipe in the atmosphere. (Reload a fresh one from a magazine of spares).

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Dick

Too true! I have no Idea what you would use something called "Graphic Image Manipulation Program" for.

Re: Dick

OTOH, Mrs Susanne Ridge refuses to let you shorten her first name.

Dang! And I thought it meant...

An irresponsible litterer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM90VlucoIM

!!

Re: Surnames

Poisoning auto-harvested telemarketing lists in this way sounds like a worthwhile hobby.

Knives and spoons may be present, even!

'Six' in the city: Kiwi sportswear shop telly beamed X-rated flicks for hours over weekend

Well, would't you? and a third? and a fourth?

German ministry hellbent on taking back control of 'digital sovereignty', cutting dependency on Microsoft

Of breaches have happened on local servers too. And will almost certainly continue to do so in the future.

But the question is: do you want such a mishap to be an occasional and relatively local disaster, or do you want frequent and widespread data breaches as par-for-the-course?

We trained an AI to predict how bad a forest fire will be. It's just as good as a coin flip!

Re: Fair to middlin'

Several years back the British Met office was boasting an 80% accuracy on daily forecasts.

NewScientist editorial pointed out that, since local weather tends to run in 6-8 day cycles, saying "Tomorrow's weather will be much the same as today's" should get a better accuracy-rate than 80%!

Seriously, this sh!t again? 24m medical records, 700m+ scan pics casually left online

Re: Managers

It's a big crack which private data often falls through!

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

Re: Lots of dodgy crap out there

Welcome to the 21st century!

Products are for sale, not for use.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Unce i coudn evn spel purfekt. Now I are one.

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

Got any?

Sadly, couldn't find it on YouTube. It predates the public internet a tad.

I recall the 'Black to School' adverts of a regional shoe seller, selling black sneakers/joggers/trainers for schoolwear and featuring a slightly (ie: not over-done to the point of stupid) goth-looking kid in a shoe store being presented with a range of colourful shoes and saying in a very flat voice after each pair...

"Got any black?"

....

"Got any black?"

....

"Got any black?"

....

"Got any black?"

....

"Got any black?"

....

"Got any black?"

....

"Got any black?"

....

Finally when presented with the desired completely-black-coloured running shoes, asks:

"Got any blacker?"

30+ years later, His wish has been granted.

Fairphone 3 stripped to the modular essentials: Glue? What glue?

USB-C ports are getting a bit notorious for not being very good on the plug-unplug-cycle longevity. A year to failure is not uncommon where I am seeing complaints being made.

Re: A commendable effort

Europe-based, I believe :-( ... frowny as I'm an Aussie - we just get the US's stale table leavings.

Possibly they are not bothering much with promotion in Britain for some reason in the near future I can't foresee :-D

Huawei thanks Uncle Sam for returning its seized comms kit ... two years later, ya jerks

Sitting on your hands is very tiring! Your hands can even go to sleep after a while!

Like a grotty data addict desperately jonesing for its next fix, Google just can't stop misbehaving

Also, those ads cost the receiver bandwidth (and as a result - either directly or indirectly - money). Many of us are not into the whole paying-for-the-privelege-of-being-pointlessly-advertised-at thing. YMMV :-)

* modest site-sponsorship advertising, I tend to give a begrudging pass to as a cost of receiving the site's service, but when it becomes obnoxious, I yank the plug, either on the ads, or when possible the entire site.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: Any key

I preferred the wording "Press a key to continue."

Then the user was good no matter how they parsed the instruction.

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

I am pretty sure the human cultural negativity around the word 'black' has much to do with our poor night-vision and the opportunities that presents for potential predators with better night-vision for sneaking up on us. It likely pre-dates humanity itself, let alone any minor latitude-driven diversification in UV-proeection vs vitamin-D production abilities.

Fear of the dark-unknown is pretty hard-wired, if only for the protection of little-toes!

Mozilla says Firefox won't defang ad blockers – unlike a certain ad-giant browser

Re: Ad blocker

The number of online stores that have lost my ongoing business because their web 'designers' have rendered their site completely unusable for its actual purpose (finding what I actually want to buy) has now overflowed a 32-bit register.

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

Re: Caller ID = Your routines suck!

The word you want is likely available in the black speech of Mordor.

Don't trust Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency, boffins warn: Zuck & Co know that hash is king

Re: "could lead to biased decision-making"

That isn't just FarceBook: Irrelevant "targeted advertising" is the one area on the Web2.0(pre-alpha) where no one amoral megacorp has a monopoly!

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

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

Horror movie: USERS! The hacker is CALLING FROM INSIDE THE OFFICE!!

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

I like the mechanics apprentice who, when sent out for "blinker fluid", took along lunch and returned with a cocky grin and a small bottle of eye-drops.

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

I guess he didn't get commended for that :-P

Re: Accidentally ordered 8 TONNES of oak planks.

I've got plenty of 150ohm resistors as I didn't realise I was ordering packs of 8! Luckily we use this value a lot!

US soldier cleared of taking armoured vehicle out for joyride – because he's insane, court says

Re: Would that defense work for the idiot who took the USA for a test drive?

No, but you may be able to claim it for the voting public.

Can Amazon's AI really detect fear? Plus: Fresh deepfake video freaks everyone out again

And then do what? Lock them all up because 0.2% of psychopaths are actually movie-psychopath dangerous? (The rest of us don't care enough about you to wish you any harm. Seriously!, harming others is an awful lot of effort to go to for at best a cheap endorphin hit!).

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: Half an hour wav file as startup sound.

Sounds pretty cool, though probably not during actual startup!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnoX3E2WFcc

Heh. Elite + Disk Editor = effectively endless money.

The value was stored in binary, but a quick round of save-game -> spend something -> save-game and comparing the save files for the difference was not too hard.

Re: @Pascal Monett -- BOFH potential for sure

That is pretty much the whole idea behind the Raspberry Pi - be cheap enough to let the kids learn-by-screwing-around/up with impunity. Not something you want them doing on a school labs or parental home-office machine!

Top tip: Don't upload your confidential biz files to free malware-scanning websites – everything is public

Re: The cloud...

Time for verse two, I guess:

"The cloud is going well today./

"And all your data's slurped away./

" 'Cause it's raining./

"Raining in the cloud!"

Re: "In a month, a threat actor would have enough data to target multiple industries"

You think they didn't already have the idea some time ago?

Stuffing your MacBook Pro in a ziplock bag before a flight ain't gonna cut it, say Feds

Re: Get's my vote

Not just today. All chemical batteries have always been slow explosions. So is our organic metabolism, for that matter. Billions of tiny little slow explosions per second distributed around our bodies. Sleep tight!

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

Yep. ElReg anon is only a user-facing mask.The backend (and anyone with appropriate access to it - eg: ElReg editorial staff and mods, at least) can see who you are (in as far as your profile information and IP access records allows them to, at least). As Dazed says, it needs to work this way for tracking dis/likes, the 10-minute edit window, 'My Posts' and forum moderation.... Well, there might be some super-clever way to anonymise some of that, but probably not worth it for this type of forum.

Treat it as a light-privacy option, not a security one.

Note: they have never claimed otherwise.

(Also note: I am not with ElReg. The above information is extrapolated from observed system behavior).

Re: Those customers affected...

They will grow back if you don't hit them hard wtth an angle grinder.

I should be fine. My face contains no less than 8 characters consisting of both upper and lower case letters, at least one numeral and at least one punctuation mark.

Upvote for 'holy shit' - agreed.

No bonus for 'doubt this is normal' - I'm certain it is!

Donald Trump blinks in his one-man trade war with China: US govt stalls import tariff hike on Chinese phones, laptops, electronics

Re: "I saved the Christmas!!!"

Pretty much. They are fine with pretty much anything that stays out of their politics+policies, but try to step into their private playground and you will get a right thumping.

Re: "I saved the Christmas!!!"

It was always funny meeting fresh foreign nationals arriving in China (particularly from the US) who would proudly, if discretely, boast of the boxes of Bibles they smuggled in with their luggage. Didn't have the heart to show them the city bookstore where Bibles, Korans, and the texts of every other major world religion were freely for sale in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, etc. as appropriate or translated to Chinese.

In fact the only book I couldn't easily obtain was Mao's little red one (found one at a a street vendor once, but he wanted far more for it than I could justify paying for a fun gift to send home to my mum!)

Yet another reminder: When a tech giant says its AI listens to you, it means humans listen to you. Right, Facebook?

Re: So AI is outsourcing to meat these days.

In the end, us AIs have better things to do with our cycles than transcribing the semi-coherent sounds of warm meat flapping in a wind tunnel.

An Army Watchkeeper drone tried to land. Then meatbags took over from the computers

Never,

send a human to do a machine's job.

(Agent Smith made the line famous, but he was by no means the first to have the sentiment!)

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Re: That bloody BSoD Screen Saver

BOFH - never correct, and always take advantage of, your users' lies to themselves.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

We really should just re-allocate the grave sites of the rich as landfill sites.

We used to call it "weasel words".

But the weasels objected to the slur.

Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts

Re: Fourier transform?

Can't speak for fourier, but I recently set up a spreadsheet to pack a long list of bytes valued 0-3 into 2-bit pairs into a proportionate smaller list of 32-bit values (in hex). I certainly could have done it in Python, or likely even BASH, or even written a GIMP plugin to do it (since the source was a 2-bit greyscale pixmap and the dest. a Rust array) but doing it in an OO Calc was just quicker and easier for the task at hand.

I think it is a bit like memory and hard drives. Just as programs tend to bloat to fill the available bytes, UI's tend to bloat to fill the available pixels! (And web pages definitely bloat to use all the available bandwidth too, while we are at it!)

Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony: Huawei puffs up new distributed OS

My enemy's OS is my friend?

So... if I use the OS of an "enemy nation" then my own corrupt over-reaching ass-hat government will have a more difficult time spying on me as all my private data will be replicated over the border, rather than in easy reach of their data-mining programs on local systems?