Posts by Venerable and Fragrant Wind of Change

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

That's easy. His journalistic urge to find a topic.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: Marx would be proud

There's precedent for that. Roads free at the point of use.

Arguably free broadband makes more sense than free roads.

Re: Marx would be proud

Funny. Didn't happen after Northern Rock or Railtrack.

Not that I'm condoning it, mind. Bet the country on fibre and you'll stifle alternatives, some of which already exist. Not to mention the lessons of history in nationalised disasters.

Re: Ahhh the good old days...

I've been waiting more than two months already.

Thank goodness for 4G - even if it falls regularly to 2G or to nothing and needs rebooting sometimes several times a day.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

I don't follow. What's particularly right about Boris's onanism? I thought that was just another dead cat: it certainly got the BBC talking about a total irrelevance.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Re: failure to think it through

Aha. Your self-training should include thinking through how to perform shutdown blind, using just relevant keystrokes. Login/unlock sequence, "get me into a shell", and shutdown itself. In the case of a server, the absence of any GUI simplifies things.

Now where can I find a keyboard for this server? Damn, no USB?

What a boar! Wild pigs snort and snuffle €20k worth of marching powder stashed in Tuscan forest

Re: "Coldiretti – Italy's largest farmers' association – led protests in Rome"

Why? Humans are far and away the biggest and most problematic pest species.

Trying to scapegoat wild boar for human crimes goes back a long way. See for instance Siegfried's murder.

They terrrk err jerrrbs! Vodafone replaces 2,600 roles with '600 bots' in bid to shrink €48bn debt

Re: 600 bots

More likely it's 'cos 'bots run 24/7.

The headline was rather loose: the quote in the article doesn't imply such a direct relation. But if a human call-centre operator clocks on 8 hours a day, 230 days a year (less time off sick/etc), and takes ten minutes an hour coffee break/loo break, you can see how a bot might do the work of many.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Trouble is, collateral damage to innocent third-parties. Two wrongs don't make a right if you're caught in the crossfire.

Re: food, farts, perfume\cologne... whatever

Nice to hear I'm not the only one. Never mind airports, I've long avoided going into Debenhams 'cos their layout makes you run the gauntlet of a stinks department before you can reach anything I might want. Though it's not as nauseous as an egg, let alone stinkier trad-greasy foods.

I've long said we should have stinky-food-free (or even all-food-free) railway carriages just as we had non-smoking ones back in the bad old days of a more pervasive problem.

Diary of a Nobody

Our prime minister has his Cummings. With luck he'll pick up his Gowings too next month.

Hmmm. A Pooter joke. How apt for El Reg.

Section 230 supporters turn on it, its critics rely on it. Up is down, black is white in the crazy world of US law

Not actually true. Web-based discussion fora were emerging (I put up my first in 1995 run by a set of Perl scripts), and Geocities had become the first big-name freebie host.

Usenet was of course much longer-established, and the experience of usenet trolling[1] presumably informed the debate that led to Section 230.

[1] As misunderstood by the media to give us today's use of the word.

Senior GitLab exec resigns over plan to stop hiring engineers in China and Russia

Re: Security

What the forriner in Blighty needs is Gerard Hoffnung's guide (about five minutes in on that link).

I expect that list is based on the proportion of the population engaged in pure-criminal activity. So those working for, or sanctioned by, government or other recognised employer are excluded.

Thumbs up

... and a virtual pint, for a senior exec prepared to take a principled stand.

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

Re: Exclusive devices need in Schools

My recollection of ink pens is that they were totally messy for right-handers too.

Perhaps cleaner options exist. Maybe if your budget is in the ballpark of an ipad? Hang on ... I don't even know how much that is. Maybe the budget for a macbook pro?

Musing

I wonder just which is the worse,

the void, or the apple's new curse?

The ipad for all,

or no textbook at all,

Like the background that brought you this verse?

Likewise - in theory.

But those textbooks weren't usable. Tatty, soggy, fallen apart, and above all, they stank. Not something you ever wanted to touch, let alone open.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

End of life care

I worked for Sun at the time they died.

Shortly after, Oracle and I parted company, and I had to return my chunky Sun workstation. But first, remove all private ssh and pgp keys that had been used on it. Hack up a utility to zero a file before deleting it, and run with recursive find on sensitive directories. And on the whole of /home for good measure. Oh, yeah, better do /var/ as well. And ... did I ever put anything under /root/ ?

Of course it had been running zfs, so that wasn't enough. Ho, hum. Boot from another medium and zap the filesystem from low level with dd to the device; ship it back with a fresh bare-bones install on a repartition-and-newfs (which from memory was not OpenSolaris but FreeBSD - a minor exercise of the inner BOFH). Feel a low-level bereavement for the workstation. Now even if it falls into the hands of someone evil, I'm not a high-enough-value target to merit searching for the ghost of any residual data.

Aliased rm

I'm fairly certain that everyone who has ever used *nix in anger has an inadvertent recursive delete story of one sort or another. It's almost a rite of passage.

Where I worked for much of the '90s, our sysop knew better. He aliased various 'dangerous' system commands to protect users from ourselves. Hence "rm" became "rm -i".

Whether that saved anyone from a nasty accident is not recorded. My suspicion is it's more likely to have caused accidents, when someone who has learned on the job that rm asks for confirmation finds out the hard way that that was non-standard. But that wouldn't be on the BOFH-in-question's turf.

For those of us who already knew the standard rm, it was just infuriating. I just overrode all such aliases in my .rc. If I wanted an alias, I'd use something that wasn't a standard command name.

Morrisons is to blame for 100k payroll theft and leak, say 9,000 workers

Verdict next year

Isn't Lady Hale about to retire? If the verdict is next year, does that mean it'll be from one of her colleagues, perhaps without the spider?

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Re: Your list

Plumber came. Plumber fixed shower, and I've just enjoyed it for the first time in quite a while.

Once in a while, something goes right. I hope this is one such occasion.

Though I expect a robot plumber might've charged fewer arms and legs for the job.

Re: "Microsoft scammers"

Andy, that sounds like a fine comedy sketch. Are you on youtube or similar, and if not, why not?

Your list

1. Your autonomous coffee could perhaps be describing Costa Express (no intelligence necessary). Or even some of the truly dire machine coffee of earlier times.

2. You know very well many of them do it. That's probably why people warm to any politician who can go off-script. Even a Boris, Trump, or Corbyn.

3. Dammit, I'm waiting for my plumber right now! I wonder if an AI could fix my shower?

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Yeah, I took that for a figure of speech :)

My recollection of the '90s was of Unix boxes with NFS-mounted $home. So "user knows better" wasn't an option.

It was also the era of old-style ethernet connections, where removing one node would freeze the whole network (well, OK, by '98 that era was ending). On a roll with my work? Whoops, everything freezes, lost my train of thought.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some utility that would periodically (maybe we could call it cron) sync up a local drive with a network one (maybe call it rsync) to give users a best-of-both-worlds?

Re: User ignore email

What you describe may be a classic "Everyone does it" syndrome. What sanction was applied to your students who got caught?

Enlisting the Student Union presumably then broke that syndrome. Which suggests that that Union has credibility in your institution, and is good at communicating a message.

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

And if Morrisons' had contracted a BOFH to secure their data, but the BOFH then nicks and abuses everything?

Or the BOFH leaves a backdoor (government-mandated or otherwise) not authorised nor known by Morrisons?

Surely there has to be an element of Good Faith in the argument here!

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

My new house

No, not quite so many power points. But lots and lots of lights: recessed ceiling lights and spotlights all over the place.

I never realised quite how useless they are. In my previous place I had a single old-fashioned ceiling light in each of the main rooms, and they did a better job than 8 or 12 recessed lights here. Worst is the kitchen, where despite nine recessed lights and four spots I struggle to find a spot with sufficient light for regular cooking tasks.

Re: Forget the risk of fire spreading through the holes in the wall

If it's from 1860 (and still standing), it has some structure.

I expect some modern houses might still be standing 100 or even 160 years hence. Firmly away from today's mass-market builders, of course.

Cambridge boffins and Google unveil open-source OpenTitan chip – because you never know who you can trust

Re: I don't know

Jon 37: Exactly.

It's bootstraps all the way down. And Open Bootstraps are Good.

'Peregrine falcon'-style drone swarms could help defend UK against Gatwick copycat attacks

Evil terrorist scum? ITYM regular teenager!

Oh, I see what you did. Bunch of teenagers hatch elaborate plot to make it sound altogether more credible than last year's Gatwick effort.

Re: So you have a drone...

Damn you Ossian, I was going to mention her. Have an upvote anyway!

Before you high-five yourselves for setting up that bug bounty, you've got the staff in place to actually deal with security, right?

She's missing the most fundamental step

I like "Bug bounties make more money the less secure you are." But that already assumes you have the expertise to sort the wheat from the chaff: real bugs from bounty-hunters reporting non-issues.

In at least some open source communities, we have to go one further than that. The developers have that expertise, but as volunteers we really don't want to spend our precious time going through a lot of spurious reports attracted by bug bounties. So when someone sponsors a bug bounty programme on our software, we ask that they take the bug reports and pre-screen them, so that only reports that appear at least credible will make it through to us. Of course people can still report to us directly, but then that's outside the bug bounty programme.

GitLab mulls ban on hiring Chinese and Russian support staff because 'security'

Next Up ...

No hiring from any country that fails to ban Huawei. And maybe Kaspersky.

Baffled by bogus charges on your Amazon account? It may be the work of a crook's phantom gadget

Liability

The banks and creditcard providers must be bearing a fair whack of the cost of this where they're the ones required by law to reimburse consumers.

I wonder if Visa and Mastercard might need to consider/threaten their ultimate sanction - to withdraw their service from Amazon?

If you're going to exploit work's infrastructure to torrent, you better damn well know how to hide it

Re: Bitcoin mining for fun and profit

Could that become a story for this very column?

Re: "he didn't dare put anything into a company calendar"

I hope we all learn from our mistakes.

But don't you think 'Rob' would perhaps have learned more from it if he'd got caught and paid a high price? It's life's big blows that can be really character-building.

Re: i don't know...

Oh, definitely more to the blame side.

Many in this column make an honest mistake, then 'fess up and all is well. 'Rob' didn't: he abused the system, and his every subsequent action was to cover his own unapologetic arse. He put his coverup ahead of backing out of the problem he'd caused and restoring normality at the first opportunity.

But on the upside, one to make this column live up to its name and mission!

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

Re: Tinnitus

You've 'ad it easy. Cicadas may be loud when they're in the trees all around you, but they're positive bliss compared to a neighbour who regularly inflicts a stereo on you!

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: Thank you Lord Duncan

Happily most people can't, and probably never will be able to, afford those newfangled horseless carriages.

Re: None of the mooted advantages need smart meters anyway

A decent freezer can cope with many hours of power cut. As can many systems whose purpose is to maintain a temperature within a confined space. A generation of freezers responsive to smart power management is perfectly plausible.

Though the role of smart meters in that is unclear - unless they're genuinely smart enough to notify the freezer in real time when dynamic power prices rise/fall.

Re: Couldn't have one even if I wanted it

Let me guess.

The assessor gave his honest opinion.

His office was being heavily leaned on by government targets. Hence "it'll do no good" becomes "let's do it".

Re: Couldn't have one even if I wanted it

I've got a river - a source that's continually renewing - yet I can't find anyone who'll quote me for installing a heat pump.

Re: Complete and utter waste of money unless you want to spy on people

Bugger tumble drying. Just hang them in whatever room you have (bedsitter included), with a dehumidifier running. The dry air does the job even when outside is cold, damp and dark.

Re: You learn something new everyday

What does the IKEA cwtch do?

Re: It's about money

There's a long history of 'hacking' power meters for free electricity.

I was talking to my plumber[1] today. He was telling me about when he worked for the Gas Board and one of his tasks was to replace coin-fed meters with regular read-and-pay-quarterly meters. None of the customers wanted the change, cos they'd all figured out how to get their coins back from the meters, for the noble purpose of recycling them.

[1] He's installing a new bathroom for me.

Bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, or where I'm wearing it

Oldfashioned spam ain't targeted

I make no efforts to leave a false trail, nor to hide where I live. A Reg reader who could be arsed will find sufficient information to figure out who I am and where I live, and a fair amount about my interests and activities. Hiding that seems futile: if the Assassins Guild were to get a commission on me, they could already track me down by more traditional means.

I still get spam in a range of languages, some of which I can't even read. In fact I think most of it is foreign and firmly aimed at inhabitants of other countries (indeed, often continents), possibly because my spam filter speaks better English than Russian, Korean, Arabic, or .... dammit, even Spanish. So no surprise when my prize is denominated in OZ$, or any other currency I may or may not have heard of.

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

Re: Where were you 20 years ago?

20 years ago? I was failing to get any interest for my neat ideas of what the Web could bring us. Like my 1997 implementation of the idea that later saw the light in forms like google docs.