Posts by R Soul

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: Just gave the attacker her number?

It couldn't have been. A tabloid journalist would have given PC Plod a bung for that info.

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

that's often how it is when you source developers there

There? Surely think you mean everywhere.

And not just for software developers. Pretty much everyone is a senior something-or-other these days.

resulting in even less comfort than a minimum dignity version of the 319

That guarantees Ryanair won't buy the 737-7. It doesn't deliver enough discomfort and loss of dignity for their mug punters.

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

Re: Product placement 101

Isn't that armoured vehicle the shoddily glued together piece of crap?

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: Groups!

Especially if they'd been written in BASIC.

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

No. The court was in Northern Ireland, the code must have been 1690.

Sue the bastards!

"I'd like to see more Linux use where I work, but I've been told, to put it bluntly, that the problem with Linux (and all Open source software) is we didn't purchase it, so have no rights if it fails to work as advertised, and we also have no one we can sue."

Read the small print of any commercial software licence. It'll pretty much say "We make no claims and offer no warranties whatsoever about the functionality of our software. You agree we have no responsibility for anything. Have a nice day." Of course you'd still be welcome to sue M$ or Oracle or Palantir or.... but that'll crash and burn - much like their software - before the case gets near a court.

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

backdoors for fun and profit

"If the US government forces backdoors into Linux they will be detectable and stripped out by distros."

Nope. Those distros didn't strip out the glaringly obvious backdoor in liblzma that created an epic security hole in systemd a couple of years ago.

BTW, a well designed backdoor will be almost impossible to detect. Read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" paper from the 1980s.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: 22 hours feels like a bit of an endurance test

You chose to spend 3 days in Singapore. Twice. WTF? Why? Just why?

Singapore's a less blingy verson of Dubai.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

"The ways of IBM big iron were sometimes mysterious."

Were? They still are.

C'mon, just copy this text string and paste it into your macOS Terminal – it'll fix your computer, honest

Why are you amazed? Our planet is full of stupid people.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

a 100-meter photovoltaic installation on a railway line

Presumably these were electricity meters? Or maybe they're light meters.

EU 'Chat Control' snoopfest returns after vote to kill it falls short

Re: This is so wrong...

And how is that different from any other pariiamentary democracy?

Do you really think our elected representatives draft the legislation they vote on?

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: Without a lander, you can't land on the Moon. It's really that simple

Would there be room to squeeze in Theil?

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

care to provide a counter-argument?

For starters, people tend to make the false assumption automated systems are never wrong. Or aren't prone to bias.

If some minimum wage stooge in the shop calls you a thief, you can do something about that on the spot. That isn't the case when snooopercams are involved. You might not even know they're the reason you've been accused.

Embracing Big Brother and all-seeing pervasive surveillance is unwise.

There's no way of knowing what Sainsbury's does with its snooper database. There's no transparency on its oversight either. Which isn't the case when the accuser is a PFY at the checkout - remember them? - or the front door.

FWIW I think Sainsbury's snoopercams are just security theatre to send thieves to other supermarket companies.

Re: The first but not the last

"We may wind up going to the Soviet practice of everything being behind the counter and one needs to get a slip, pay and then return to the sales counter to get their purchases."

We already have that. It's how you buy tat in Argos. Which is owned by Sainsbury's.

BTW, the places where we buy stuff are called shops, not stores.

Unless you're stupid enough to have a loyalty card.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

What this means for BSDs ?

Nothing.

When AT&T owned Unix, they sued UCB (University of California Berkeley) claiming BSD included AT&T source code from SysVR4, They lost. Bigly. While there was a teeny amount of AT&T code in BSD, it turned out there was far more BSD code in SysVR4 and AT&T was in breach of its licence from UCB. When they countersued, Novell - which by then had bought Unix from AT&T - decided to settle. One of the terms in that settlement was there would be no more lawsuits against anyone using or distributing BSD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.

Hope it bankrupts them with the legal fees and this finally dies

My guess is the latest set of ambulance chasers are hoping IBM will pay them some money to go away because that'll be cheaper for IBM than paying their lawyers to fight (and win) the case in court.

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

renamed as the Light Program

Nope. It was called the Light Programme.

a local DNS for local people

keep UK websites on .uk domains, and keep the authoritative servers for those domains in the UK (where they should already be).

This is profoundly stupid. Most of the important/useful UK domain names have to be accessible globally. Which means their name servers should have a global footprint. There are also many places in the UK where querying authoritative UK DNS servers that are outside the UK will have lower RTTs: Northern Ireland or the Crown Dependencies for instance.

As for web sites, these are generally found in the cloud these days. Nobody knows which bit barn is hosting that content or where it is, far less which country hosts said bit barn - or which bit barn gets used for that content a few minutes from now.

Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

Re: SNAFU

Four words: rail replacement bus service.

And if you're making comparisons, use the Shinkansen as the baseline.

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

Andy Burnham isn't completely a self-serving arsehole

"From what I've heard, he's widely-mocked by many within Labour too, for shifting his principles and beliefs to suit his own career."

Name one politician who hasn't done that. Just one...

Andy Burnham may well be a nasty piece of work who cannot be trusted. But unlike just about every other politician, he has done at least one good thing and acted on principle for something that didn't benefit himself. He lead a long campaign to get some semblance of justice/closure for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster* when the political establishment tried very hard to suppress the truth. And public opinion didn't give a shit. IMO that puts him head and shoulders above every PM we've had since Attlee.

* OK, none of the lying, incompetent bastards who are responsible ever ended up in jail and only the one of them to face prosecution got off on a technicality.

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

Doesn't Donald Trump already have that job?

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

Re: Large scale pilot in 10 forces

The accused (aka Constable Plod): we ran it through AI as many times as it took to give us the answer we wanted. And now you're nicked sonny.

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: Components are manufactured in Guangdong, China.

Not even from the Trumpian levels of shameless grift and spivvery? Those were made in America.

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Zombie Starmer's Victorian internet: An Internet without Things.

Since his dad was a toolmaker, I suppose that makes Sir Keir a man of the (ordinary) people.

UK's top crime agency hamstrung by legacy IT, watchdog warns

Managed by Capita

WTF is Capita? It sounds suspiciously like Crapita, the notoriously shit provider of terrible outsourcing services.

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

Look on the bright side!

At least somebody will get a nice motorhome and a few pricy coffee machines out of it. And maybe a Calmac ferry or two with whatever's left over,

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: There is almost nothing

Or why not go one better and just go direct to BSD?

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

I'm reminded of the (apocryphal?) story about the beancounters in parliament quibbling an MP's expenses claim. [As if they ever did/do that.] The MP was claiming for plane tickets between London and his constituency in Orkney and Shetland. The beancounters told him to travel by train. Until they found out the nearest station to the MP's constituency home was in Bergen.

Tony Blair and the Reform party both want AI in government, though they can't agree on what for

Go back to your cesspit Mr. Bliar

Who cares what this washed-up, lying war criminal has to say about anything?

He should go back to his day job sucking up to dictators and taking backhanders from dodgy plutocrats and oligarchs. Bliar is a morally bankrupt spiv who has nothing positive to contribute to civilised society.

UK MPs slam digital ID rollout as a 'fiasco' after botched launch

Re: Simple solution.

The UK Home Office remains stuffed with EU fanatics, so no surprise that they continue to push forward spurious reasons for enforcing an identity card system on the UK, despite us no longer being under pressure from the the EUC to do so.

Utter bollocks! The Home Office has been stuffed with ID card fanatics long before the EU existed. It still is. Their rabid enthusiasm for Stasi-style pervasive state surveillance began well before Churchill scrapped ID cards in the 1950s. All of this has nothing to do with the EU or the EU Commission.

Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer

Re: who's the bigger liar?

All of this is irrelevant. Bliar told us all of the above was true. It wasn't. He lied. Thousands of people died and got maimed because of his lies. This wasn't done in error. He lied.

The UK bases (GCHQ listening posts) on Cyprus are UK territory. So Saddam's rockets - if they existed - would have been able to hit the UK even if they couldn't get as far as the English Channel. Not that this mattered to UK mass media which was happy to unquestioningly regurgitate Bliar's lies.

BTW, there were/are many in the intelligence world who knew Bliar's bollocks about WMDs in 45 minutes were lies. Remember David Kelly's suicide? Much of the truth emerged in the post-war Chilcott inquiry. Key findings included: "There was no imminent threat from Saddam" and "Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein" - in other words, he lied.

who's the bigger liar?

It was Bliar who said Iraq had WMDs. He also said Iraq had rockets that could reach the UK in 45 minutes.

Brown's lies pale into insignificance compared to that. He didn't make our armed forces take part in an illegal war that was based on lies. Bliar did. Brown didn't enrich himself after leaving office by taking backhanders from shifty oligarchs and dictators. Bliar did. Brown's lies didn't cause the death of thousands of civilians. Bliar's did. Brown's lies didn't lead to the deaths and serious injuries to our armed forces. Bliar's did.

UK government prescribes Single Patient Record for NHS data chaos

It's a good thing in principle. Less so when implementation is in the hands of Crapita, Palantir, Fushitsu, Oracle, etc and overseen by the clueless Dept of Health, aka IT fuckups R us.

Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6

If IPv8 can add gazillions of new addresses, wouldn't that remove one of the incentives for CGNAT?

IPv6 already provides gazillions of new addresses. It hasn't had an impact on CGNAT deployment.

Neither would this IPv8 proposal if it somehow got off the ground. Which is less likely than Elvis winning every lottery for the rest of the decade.

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

Better still, they could write about arithmetic. Because that's what we're actually talking about here - not mathematics.

Re: Ofcom is useless

While I agree Ofcom is useless, GDPS violations are out of scope for them. That rests with another equally useless regulator, the Information Commissioners Office.

ICANN opens applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012

Re: Are TLDs still relevant?

"they also get nearly a quarter of a million from each place that wants to have one"

Nope. That money got spunked up against the wall on consultants, lawyers, beancounters and other oxygen thieves who assessed the applications for new TLDs. ICANN gets/got none of that dosh. The TLD application process is/was revenue-neutral from their PoV. I think (but don't care) the application fees will be considerably lower for the upcoming round of this shit-show. ICANN won't see any of that either.

No matter. Anyone stupid and wealthy enough to apply for a new TLD deserves to be ripped off*. As they surely will. Fools and their money...

ICANN richly deserves criticism for filling up the DNS root with shit - tragedy of the commons and all that. It did that because it's in thrall to broken and corrupt processes. ICANN didn't fill the root with shit to make more money for themselves from domain name registration fees. If money had driven its decision-making this time, there would be no more new TLDs because almost all of the 1500 or so they created last time are loss-making shitfests. And there's no signs it'll be different next time.

* By consultants, lawyers, beancounters, hucksters, snake-oil salesdroids and other oxygen thieves, not ICANN.

Re: Are TLDs still relevant?

The only utility the new TLDs from 2012 or the more new ones we're undoubtedly going to end up with so ICANN can get more money for...

ICANN only gets a cut of ~25c on each gTLD domain name that gets sold. The rest of the retail price of ~$25 or more goes to the registries and registrars. They're the real hucksters and profiteers behind the TLD scam. It's worse than multi-level marketing. Every time the sales of $TLD tail off, these scumbags put the screws on ICANN to create even more TLDs. And the circle of shite starts all over again.

There's no way to stop this or change it because the spivs control ICANN's policy-making machinery. They have the power and resources to shout down anyone who threatens their commercial interests^W^W^W^W disagrees with them. ICANN's board is powerless to intervene. It says and does nothing because they have to respect the "consensus" decisions of the community rather than do what's right for the common good of the Internet. Even when those consensus decisions are fucked up.

top level domains are now useless

Now? They've been useless and have had no meaning for at least 30 years. They just pseudorandom unique identifiers.

Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root

Re: Genuine question: *BSD?

The BSDs have fewer security issues because they don't cripple themselves with the crufty bloatware and complex dependency chains that festoon Linux.

The BSDs are very important. They are the OS for vast amounts of core Internet infrastructure: routers, DNS/mail/web/VoIP servers and some CPE. They're also used for lots of embedded systems and in consumer electronics like games consoles, smart tellies, etc. If they were as flakey as Linux, everyone would know about it, not just El Reg.

They hardly get mentioned in El Reg because security incidents involving BSD are rare. These do exist of course. No OS is perfect. However the ones that do crop up tend to be in third party add-ions like openssl, BIND, etc rather than the base OS.

Re: None of my computers are vulnerable

Is there any other sort of Linux user?

UK.gov's DCMS to new CDIO: Migrate from Google to Microsoft, overhaul ERP, build a team

Re: Cloud Act

"It's a shame that there is no British company that could deliver such software."

Crapita! BT! Fujshitsu! Pissy World! Come on down! Your country needs you!

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

Re: no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public

So people who don't share your world view should be deported? I smell a whiff of hypocrisy here.

I didn't suggest anyone should be deported. Just that those who are in favour of round-the-clock pervasive surveillance by the state should fuck off to a country which offers that. They can do that of their own free will. And there's no need to deport them.

"Is the UK really going to follow the US down the fascism shitter?"

We're far along that road. The Poundland Fuhrer is dangerously high in the opinion polls. Mainstream politicians outdo each other in authoritarian rhetoric. The government is pushing pervasive state surveillance: snoopercams, ID cards, DNA databases, ANPR systems everywhere, etc. Our current Home Secretary *wants* to see the whole population monitored everywhere all the time.

Re: Change of atire will help

Not as much as the cost of getting beat up by Nigel's wannabe stormtroopers.

no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public

WTF!?!? Take your Stasi-style all-pervasive surveillance and sick it up your arse!

It is more than reasonable to expect to be able to walk down the street or cross the road or go into a shop or... without being tracked by PC Plod's snoopercams. Those who think otherwise can fuck off to North Korea or China.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Re: Bad assumption

That guarantees nothing. The only way to be sure your router has no backdoors is to build everything from scratch, starting with the sand used for the silicon. Read https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358198.358210. Here are a couple of snippets from this remarkable paper: " You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. ... No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code." and "A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."