Posts by logicalextreme

Twitter mass hacking: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Biden, Obama, more hijacked to peddle Bitcoin scam

Re: Obviously found a security hole in Twitter

I like to think they just couldn't bring themselves to touch that particular account. They'd have had to set up a completely separate bitcoin address and somehow washed the bitcoins afterwards.

Cornwall councillor suggests authority paid £2m for Oracle licences that no one used on contract originally worth £4m

Re: AC because..you know ..reasons

Yep, the sales pitch normally seals it — every time I've pointed out to anybody the absolute litany of articles, forums and comment sections clearly displaying that Vendor/Software X is literally regarded as a joke among the tech community (and a bad one at that), it's too late because the pitch has been successful. Hell, at my last job we figured out that SAP hadn't even been honest about the product with their own sales staff — presumably some sort of plausible deniability nonsense that had them covered from all angles.

You answered all of your own questions three words from the end of the final one.

Re: Oracle and SAP should be banned in the public sector

Spending a quajillion pounds on broken systems is kinda what the public sector does, though. Taking SAP and Oracle away would be like depriving it of food, and depriving us of snark.

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Agreed that if something like that is gonna be part of the job then it's prudent to get a feel for how they'll be — even if only to make sure you know you need to send them on some kind of communication or presentation training.

Me, personally, I like to be as far-a-fscking way from those kinds of calls as possible, preferably working on the solution.

So kind of SAP NetWeaver to hand out admin accounts to anyone who can reach it. You'll want to patch this

As much as I'd love to snark about SAP

they confirmed the bug the same day and got a patch ready within two weeks without the discoverer having to do anything stupid (we assume). I'm used to seeing vuln disclosures go the other way as of late.

Collabera hacked: IT staffing'n'services giant hit by ransomware, employee personal data stolen

Re: I was the memo leaker

I thought you'd accidentally signed off as "Shaun" there for a second :D

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

Re: Regrets cut both ways

Not the Hüsker Dü—Nirvana crossover covers band we've been waiting for lo these many years?

Re: Adult floppies...

Wow, it's a schooner!

Smile? Not bloody likely: Day 6 of wobbly services and still no hint to UK online bank's customers about what's actually wrong

Re: No technical information

And the question is — is it embarrassing because what has happened is embarrassing in itself, or because they still don't know what the problem is?

Re: "for we like sheep ..."

This is almost certainly the first time I've seen somebody try to win a web tech argument by opening with "My Great Grandfather…".

An email banning our staff from using TikTok? Haha, funny story about that, we didn't mean it – Amazon

What do you think the "update" function on almost every piece of desktop software does? Your beef appears to be with HTTP itself, or possibly the fact that applications can execute code. I've found both of these features of the modern tech landscape almost indispensable over the past few years.

Spotted the ISS in the sky yet? How about pulling out some spare kit and giving it a listen?

Re: Rats

Doing a lot better than Ceefax, then.

The world's nonsense keeping you awake in middle of the night? Good news. Go outside and see this two-tail comet

Re: "the naked eye may do just fine"

I'll save any snarky comeback and just say that this typo made me happy. :)

Re: "For the UK, the comet is circumpolar"

If nobody wants it then maybe the comet could swing by and pick it up before making that return trip to the outer Solar System?

Microsoft to pull support for PHP: Version 8? Exterminate, more like...

Re: Nobody wanted it..

I didn't even know that I didn't want it because I didn't know it existed! Well, I certainly didn't know that Micros~1 produced official builds for it, anyway. But now that I do know that I didn't want it, I don't want it. Nor would I have wanted it back when I didn't know I didn't want it.

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Re: On the care and feeding of manglement

Love this comment. I've been very into the "accidentally" letting somebody steal my ideas tactic the past few years.

Well there's your problem — obviously you need to create your Gmail account before you can enable it.

Re: Late 2000s?

Not the crossover we deserved…actually, not the crossover we needed either.

Re: Multiple tabs doom

You're a lot better with money than me. The only time I had a minor windfall it was gone within six months of purchasing Lego and inebriates. I'm still not sure I understand what money is, let alone inflation.

I've similarly learned not to trust multiple tabs/windows on websites in any day or age, though a lot less scarily than your encounter must have been!

Unfortunately when you do something like that in response to somebody digging their heels in, their response often involves attempting to fuse their heels to the floor as a permanent arrangement and branding you a dangerous troublemaking naysayer.

I've got "Theme from Shaft" stuck in my head now.

Re: Session ID?

I think at the time HTML5 was having five tabs of the same webpage open.

Re: Fault at both sides

And usually if you code defensively for stupid * users, you've done a sizable chunk of the work to guard against those clever users.

* okay, less stupid and more the type that when you look at what they've actually managed to make the system do, you take them to one side and ask them if they've ever considered a career as a tester

Re: Bodging someone else's cock-up

Yep. I started out in support roles, and once you've graduated past password-reset monkey a good chunk of it is just "do what the developers should have done the in the first place". I've still only worked at one place that had decent integration between the support and development functions and I'm five jobs into my IT working life so far. It was probably so good in part because for most of my tenure there were less than twenty people in the company so you couldn't help but be integrated due to physical proximity.

So Darned Kind of you, Facebook: SDK bug sends popular iOS apps crashing earthwards

Re: Not sure this is entirely correct.

That's what I'd expect. Anybody that's worked near web development (I wouldn't say I've worked in it) knows what a bunch of third-party scripts can do to a page load.

Having finally caved and decided to buy a pair of hair clippers yesterday, I found a couple of sites selling what I wanted (okay, not what I wanted because everything's sold out, but the closest thing to what I wanted at only three times the fscking price) and couldn't seem to get the "Register" button to work on the site I decided to go with. No message, no response. Tried all the usual stuff — removed the plus section from my email address, simplified the password down to alphanum, ticked one of the boxes saying they could contact me with marketing guff; still nothing. Tried it in another browser, same thing. Eventually I got a message in the status bar telling me it was waiting for something.facebook.com, and then managed to replicate that a couple of times.

Gave up and went with the other site, who despite not being able to guarantee delivery times have sent it so it'll arrive on the same day as the first site had guaranteed. Despite the vast amount of analytics guff companies do, I'm surprised they don't think of giving a smidgeon of credence to their devs who are probably screaming at them about their pages choking on Facebook's big long nasty scripts.

Soft press keys for locked-down devs: Three new models of old school 60-key Happy Hacking 'board out next month

Re: Alternatives?

Yeah, I think £25–30 would probably be max what I'd spend on a keyboard. I don't even own a functioning computer except for a headless media box, so I'm only considering getting one in anticipation of working from home permanently (I've been doing fine with the laptop but I do miss having a numpad and a Break key). Most interesting-looking stuff in that price range seems to exist solely on Amazon though, which is a shame.

Is "BS" a Backspace key

or does it invoke a customisable macro that inserts a random snarky code/pull request comment?

Oracle tempts users to run its cloud in their own data centres – for a mere '$6 million' commitment

It's a clever name; you can always see the future with Ellison and friends.

Re: Oracle Cloud

I tried to sign up for their free cloud DB offering that they announced a couple of years ago, just to poke around and see what had changed in Oracland since 10g. The confirmation codes they send during the sign-up process simply don't work, and when I tried again six months later it was exactly the same story.

None of their support team could get it to work either, so I told them I'd probably rather not touch a database product made by a company that can't operate an account registration webpage successfully and bid them adieu.

CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor

I don't think we're allowed to say miss-translation anymore

Re: Sad.

I can't really see "Sad." anymore without thinking of Our Glorious Tangerine.

.NET Core: Still a Microsoft platform thing despite more than five years open source

Nothing evokes the image of a warm, welcoming programmers' playground quite like the words "DMZ consortium".

Re: Always seemed an uphill task

At least you get cool error messages.

Keep it Together, Microsoft: New mode for vid-chat app Teams reminds everyone why Zoom rules the roost

Re: ???

I especially like the regular crescendo of the voices on the music at the end of the video, which to me ended up sounding like screams of terror at what Teams was now doing.

Re: ???

Oh wow, I just actually watched the video. I was not expecting that. I think it's probably worth trying it out if only to see some hilarious glitches on the level of what Red Dead Redemption could put out back in the day.

Re: Audio rules ...

Yeah. Aside from anything else, I can multitask if I'm not sat staring at a video (and video quality was invariably poor on any platform, even on business connections, let alone a multitude of home broadband connections). Being able to multitask is especially important in any call with several people, because some stuff you don't need to listen to and some people have a tendency to waffle on. Teams stays minimised for me.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

This is why I live alone. Clearly your housemate's fault that one.

Re: Windows 95 was still new...

I've got a PowersHell script full of 'em, and GP tweaks etc., to put Windows into "barely competent computer user" mode. Labels on taskbar buttons, file extensions shown, all that crap. I like the idea of seconds to easily check for hangs, but I worry that it would use an entire CPU core just to do so.

As long as a side-effect of something amuses me, I consider it a payoff. I'd get my eyes lasered but some of my distance misreadings are particularly hilarious (if you're me).

Re: / tmp

Ah, this probably explains my quick test (in a non-root directory) failing. For some reason it had never even occurred to me that filenames were a perfectly cromulent vector for command arguments (presumably the risk inversely correlates with the prescriptiveness of the argument order).

It's also super-sustainable. Presumably when no more can be gzipped they intend to gzip the gzips à la Xzibit?

Re: / tmp

This seemed like a saner way of handling it to me. If it happens enough that it's the butt of a joke, that's probably reason enough to build a safeguard into the software.

Funnily enough, the first time I learned that backups need to be tested was the same day I learned that maybe keeping magnetic backup tapes inside a fireproof steel safe wasn't the best policy for a company to have.

Misread as "Socrates broke into his flat…". Looks like giving up caffeine is finally starting to pay dividends!

You know you've been reading El Reg too long…

…when the sentence "all fsck knows is the inode number" doesn't scan properly.

Re: / tmp

I like this idea a lot, but it's not working for me on Ubuntu 18.04 so I'm thinking the GNU utils have had some trickery added to prevent this sort of thing.

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

It's was?! Definitely should have gone to bed a long time ago.

Aha! I think you might have nailed it. It's was their "go faster" button — just switch the link and watch the site speed up.

Now they have to invent another one thanks to the party-poopers on Twitter with their whiny little snowflake concerns about "security" and "not putting a nonprofit organisation under unnecessary strain" and "doing things with even the barest semblance of quality".