* Posts by Phones Sheridan

562 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2020

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'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Bring Back Eadon?

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

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Re: It seems to be an extra mission for SpaceX / Dragon and PR for Musk

I thought it was already too late for Congress and the senate to do anything, because the republicans won both houses with a large enough margin to do whatever his Trumpship edicts.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

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Facepalm

I think we need a new topic called "Trump" on the site seeing as we're going to be reading so much about him in the next 4 years.

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

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A driver hanging, not allowing a task to complete because it's waiting for the driver. When you reboot using safe mode, you no longer use that driver but usually another from MS to be used in safe mode only, and the task completes because there's nothing stopping it.

Upon next boot, the breaking task completed during the safe mode, so all is well.

Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

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"Sage Copilot is presently available by invitation as an early access product"

I call bull on that. I use Sage 50 Professional. Every time I run reports it's there as an "Enable Now" button. Everyone has been "invited".

I won't touch it with a 10 foot barge pole, because it's only 1 cleverly worded query away from providing my competitors with my data by design.

Anyone using these AI Copilots, you're just handing over the blueprints to your business, to someone else... in business.

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

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Re: Schrodingers Starship

Then to solve that problem, we don't observe the cat either" :p

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Facepalm

Schrodingers Starship

I wonder if the 30 cameras had anything to do with the RUD. Had the ship not been under such close observation, the state of the ship would have remained in quantum flux for the duration of the flight, and all would have gone well.

Just need that icon to be adjusted to cover both eyes!

GM parks claims that driver location data was given to insurers, pushing up premiums

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Alert

Re: My old chariot is as dumb as a log

Whilst I fully expect governments at some point to start banning dumb cars, if they have not already started the process or set a deadline, there is the issue of dumb mechanics. Old school mechanics are a dying breed, literally. The newer mechanics seem to be brand and type specific, and only on the latest models. They are coming out of the apprenticeships with a great working knowledge of state of the art hardware, but stick them in front of an 80s, 90s and early noughties engine, and they are lost. Like any industry, there are enthusiasts who keep old tech running, but at some point, your dumb car won't be able to be repaired by the 20-something mechanic down the garage brandishing his laptop and serial cable.

Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Not the first time.

I had a similar issue with Hastings about 10 years ago. They refunded the full amount I paid for my insurance out of the blue. Only thing is, they didn't tell me, so I never noticed the amount going back on my credit card. About 6 months later they started chasing me with letters and debt collectors for an outstanding amount. Each time I wrote to them, showing my (original) credit card statement showing the payment had been taken, and they went away for about 8 weeks, then started chasing me again. This went on for about a year, with me on the phone to them, and them on the phone to me every 8 weeks or so, them demanding money, and me showing them I paid.

Eventually one person on the phone went "...Er.... were you aware we sent you a refund on the dd/mm/yy? The notes don't show any reason why, can you check your credit card statement for that month?". And then slowly we pieced together that they had refunded me about 6 months after I took out the policy, and they never noticed until some spreadsheet somewhere was showing I had an outstanding balance and they passed it automatically to debt collectors.

UK government pledges law against sexually explicit deepfakes

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Re: Wrong move

Your comment of deepfakes being used as evidence reminded me of Joe Lycett and how he handled an issue of what I can only describe as very convincing deepfakes being used as evidence for both parties involved in a parking fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gkiw7zpULo

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

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Re: Important

Is there a treaty governing how much land can be claimed with each landing? Is it like national waters, 12 miles around the ships landing site etc?

If Musk was to make the endeavour privately, could he claim a portion of the moon upon landing? Or even Mars.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

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Stop

Re: What's the weirdest outfit you've worn to a tech support job?

"Note that splitting is perfectly legal here in California."

In the UK, it is.... until it's not. A traffic cop friend explained it to me thus.

If you are filtering, and you are involved in a Road Traffic Incident during a filtering maneuver, you will be prosecuted for dangerous driving (riding). No ifs, no buts, no excuses, you will be charged and it will be dealt with by the courts. The courts usually take the view that you would not have been involved in the RTA if you were not filtering as surely as you would not have been involved in an RTA if you hadn't turned into the path of oncoming traffic.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

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Google's Cloud Vision is a real thing, although the earliest I can find reference to it is 2016, so 9* years, not 10 :p

https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-landmarks

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-identify-landmarks-on-android

I think nowadays we are beyond speculating or requiring evidence if Google have slurped or not. Of course they have, and then some more too!

*I came across this stackoverflow from 10 years ago, discussing using Google Vision to track peoples faces. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38435653/detecting-face-landmarks-points-in-android , so it doesn't take a great leap of imagination that at some point, the pair were combined to track who you are, and where you were from the pic alone.

Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working

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Trollface

40 fold speed increase since WIFI4...

And everything is still connected together by CAT5!

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

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Re: Au Contraire

I don’t think you can blame your bank for that. I haven’t seen a POS for over a decade that has a sign option on the credit card machine anymore.

It's only a matter of time before LLMs jump start supply-chain attacks

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Holmes

Hey, LLM. Analyse all commentard posts on El Reg and identify Anonymous Cowards!

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

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Re: A bit later than that...

Sort of. I was at Salford Tech college in 1991, went from an Amiga 500 to 486 SX25 that year. It cost me £1200 new from PAL computers in Stockport. I got it with DOS and Windows 3.x (and bought Coherent 3 from Grey Matter specifically because Salford was heavily into Solaris at the time and we needed Unix for the coursework). The cost was 5 times what I paid for the Amiga the year before. And it sucked at games. Yes you had Battle Chess, but it had Sinclair spectrum 48 levels of 1 bit sound, until I could afford a Sound Blaster 8 bit a year later. Around 93 when Doom and X-Wing came out was when the tables turned, and the Amiga started to get left behind at that point.

SpaceX rocketeers get fresh FAA license for next Starship launch

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Trollface

Re: Tiles b gone

Can anyone explain to me the point Mach is trying to make?

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

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Re: You can even sign in...

It's not very hard now, but it will get harder. Our latest quote for cyber insurance states a clause that we must use either Google or Microsoft accounts for user authentication. It looks like the pair has successfully lobbied the insurance industry, that true security comes from having M365 or Google Apps.

We're looking elsewhere for insurance, but you can bet that once one does, the others will start to follow.

Ingenuity helicopter's flying days cut short by featureless Martian terrain

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Pint

So class, what did we learn today?

No doubt NASA have used this as a learning opportunity, and thrown the task at the engineers to make sure this can’t happen on future helicopters.

Icon cos it’s 45 minutes from Beer-o-clock here, and NASA deserves one for a job well done!

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

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Re: Shitstorm

"Sure. But the question is, why in law is he required *not* to discriminate against another company in this way?"

Because the judge, has, er, judged that he can't discriminate. It's that simple. Discrimination is not a right.

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: Shitstorm

It's not forcing Mullenweg to open up his website per se, but rather stopping Mullenwegs closing of his website to traffic from WP Engine.

For example

10 if incoming traffic = WP Engine source

20 print "Feck off"

30 goto 10

The judge is ordering that the above is removed. The service is available, just Mullenweg is explicitly denying it to WP Engine by something like the above. If the code wasn't there, then the traffic like spice, would flow. That's the difference. The traffic isn't flowing, because he is going out of his way to stop it.

Good news! You'll soon be able to send faxes again with Windows 11 24H2

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Go

Forget bringing back cassettes, I still have an 8 Track in my attic! Bring back 8 Track!

Go icon, cos this thing ran in a loop forever. Changing side, that was the work of cassette devilry!

Windows 11 24H2 strikes again – Outlook might not start with Google Workspace Sync running

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Just tried the new Outlook again. Functionality regarding shared mailboxes is still missing that is there in old Outlook. For over a year when switching back to old Outlook, the program asks you why you are reverting back. When giving the reason that the shared mailbox functionality is missing, you were prompted with "Missing shared folder functionality - This is a known issue and will be addressed in a future build", now they've stopped even bothering with that message. Looks like in the shiny new world of New Outlook, shared folders are not intended to be a part of it.

I'm assuming that the new (and chargeable) way of getting the same functionality, is to somehow use Flow, and rack up more bills.

M665 also has a security evaluation tool. Now if you use Outlook add-ons, it penalises you, giving you a lower security score. I'm assuming that again, they want you using chargeable Flow, rather than an addon to produce the same results.

It all comes down to they are trying to screw you for more money, to do what you could do last week as part of the software functionality.

Facing sale or ban, TikTok tossed under national security bus by appeals court

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Black Helicopters

“ Then again, he could change his mind.”

Then again, he’s probably more likely to declare all independent media “Fake Press”, all social media to be “election-interfering” and ban the lot, to be replaced with official government approved news outlets and social media of truth unicorns and pixie dust.

It worked for Putin right?

Temporary printable tattoos could be the future of EEGs

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Why don’t we just have a standard cap that can be fitted to everyone when they reach adulthood? A simple procedure to last a lifetime. They could even be applied by mobile fitting stations travelling through the country on 3 legs. Come to think of it, we could use the same cap to send impulses down into the brain to counter aggression, curiosity and creativity!

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said "...

The confusion comes from many teachers saying, but no-one actually showing. If it was demonstrated that all internal LAN machines behind NAT can be probed by a thousand bots on the internet, then people would believe it. But if those people see that their NAT router is being probed by a thousand bots on the internet, but the unsolicited traffic does not get through to the LAN (unless a port forwarding rule is set up), they will continue to believe that NAT is an ingress firewall, despite an endless tide of protestations that "NAT is not a firewall".

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"I have an ISP router which talks Wifi6, and I see many devices pick up an IPv6 address via DHCP.."

Yes, but all you need is the "Deny All" set as your default rule on your firewall, and then you can poke individual holes through to your hearts content. No less secure than a Deny All rule on IPV4.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

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Linux

Full Metal Panic: Wubuntu

Lindows 2?

Musk and Trump to fall out in 2025, predicts analyst

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Re: Thank fortune that Musk was born in South Africa

Don’t they have enough republican bums on seats now to change the constitution, and allow not-born-on-us-soil persons to become president again?

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

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M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

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Re: It's in the Apple DNA!

"Apple hasn't always hated repair."

But they have always hated upgrades. They began to take notice around 2010 when you could buy the most expensive Mac Mini. Fill it as full as you liked with SSD and RAM, and it would be faster than the cheapest Mac Pro, and still less than half the price. Then they started to remove the ability to add your own components.

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info

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Re: The Only Way to Keep Your Personal Data Safe

....because no low paid employee has ever been bribed to open a filing cabinet??

Isn't that what the leopard is for?

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

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Flame

Re: Any metallurgists lurking?

It just means it got hot. Typical colours I work with when welding stainless, brown = it welded, but it could have been hotter, blue = it welded and reached a perfect temperature. Metalic blue, it was too hot and is likely to be brittle. Crystal silver colour, not hot enough and likely to be brittle. Black = who welded mild steel with zinc plating by mistake :p

As someone else said, people make art out of stainless by applying heat, so I wouldn't read too much into it, other than it got hot. It's when it becomes molten you should worry :p

Robot runs marathon in South Korea, apparently the first time this has happened

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Terminator

Re: Great idea

You might be confusing Robot Wars with Techno Games. It ran at the sameish time as season 3 of Robot Wars, and then for 3 more years, with the same teams competing and the same judges.

Enjoy!

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: Slap on the wrist?

“ User permission management wasn't some new concept introduced in the 90s.”

It pretty much was. My uni in 1990 was exactly the same. Network of Suns, and what we discovered as students was pretty much no security at all. It took Sun about a year to lock the network down enough to stop us students from wreaking havoc, but remain useable for us as software engineering grads, because they had no real world experience of an entire network connected to the internet (JANet) either with each machine having a dedicated public IP directly connected to a router. I don’t think I even heard the word firewall for at least 5 more years.

SpaceX Starship moved to launchpad for 6th flight test

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Re: Mach's point

So why didn’t he just say that? >p

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Trollface

Re: Tiles b gone

Can anyone explain to me the point Mach is trying to make?

Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment

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Re: Copilot annual commitment

"anyone who actually gets anything useful out of this monstrosity ?"

I'm waiting for the fraudsters to work out a way to misuse Co Pilot, it's only a matter of time.

"Hey CoPilot go fetch my competitors customer list and sales invoices for the last 12 months, oh and their suppliers and purchase order too!".

Russian spies use remote desktop protocol files in unusual mass phishing drive

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Mind having a stab at my question further down. I would like to know how to lock down the RDP client, because I can only find info on locking down servers under my control.

TYVM.

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Would be interested to know how to control the sessions settings of the RDP client. All the settings I've looked at so far have been to restrict access to servers under my control, not access to 3rd party servers.

The only thing I can think of would be to deny users access to mstsc.exe for members of an AD group.

User Configuration\Administrative Templates\System

"dont run specified Windows applications" = enabled

and add: mstsc.exe

But that wouldn't stop them running a web based client etc. Port blocking can be trivial to work around if you change the server from 3389 to 443 for example.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: One good sanction deserves another

Can't believe I'm going to quote Piers Morgan of all people, in response to Israeli supporters approving of collateral damage against civilians.

"When the IRA were murdering people in England, we didn’t drop 2000lb bombs on Belfast because the terrorists were living among civilians."

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

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Americans have form for rounding when it suits them.

Indiana Pi Bill

NASA's Europa Clipper leaves for Jupiter's moon atop Falcon Heavy

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Flame

Re: Gravity assist

"redo all of their calculations"

Your comment made me think of the movie Hidden Figures. I saw it for the first time about a month ago. Brilliant film, I'd recommend anyone that hasn't seen it yet (i.e. me a month ago), and has an interest in the early space program watch it.

First time's the charm: SpaceX catches a descending Super Heavy Booster

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Mushroom

You had to say it*

"This event reminded me of Karate Kid"

Cue all future streamed booster catchings to be overplayed with Joe Esposito's You're the best!

*I had the same thought each time they said the word "chopsticks"!

Hey kids, wanna clock the ISS? ESA's Astro Pi challenge runs your code in space

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Happy

"The program must not rely on interaction with an astronaut."

meh, there goes my submission.

10 PRINT "Enter the speed of the ISS."

20 GET A

30 CLS

40 PRINT "The speed of the ISS is. " A

A while ago Matt Parker did a code submission stream where he asked people to send him code to run live on his LED tree, the only stipulation was that no code could be submitted that required any libraries other than the one he supplied that interfaced with his LEDs. Loads of submissions didn't run, because people ignored the "no other libraries" part, and the event ended up being a bit of a let down.

Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: Invalid GPS location

Video of said pigeon guidance system can be found here https://youtu.be/QvNwd-gU1sM?si=ApLFqD-sgMoASp52

SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission completes first commercial spacewalk

Phones Sheridan Silver badge

Re: Congratulations

SmarterEveryDay did a good video 5 months ago, that covered suit pressurisation and the decisions underway for Artemis. It's over an hour long, but it was an interesting watch.

https://youtu.be/AiZd5yBWvYY?si=5ulx0uV8rX4Jl7HG

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