Posts by BobTheIntern

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Re: Botched Aircon

> TWO heat pumps? You were lucky!

I didn't know that the Four Yorkshiremen worked in IT...

Watchdog urged to sniff out any collusion, deception in rent-setting algorithms

Re: Let's think out side the algorithm....

This one of the serious problems with the practice of Civil Forfeiture in the US: law-enforcement agencies share in the proceeds of any civil forfeiture action their officers initiate.

Former Microsoft UX boss doesn't like the Windows 11 Start menu either

I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!

Sephora to pay $1.2m to settle Cali privacy law claims – and why this is a big deal

Re: I have but one question

Also, what constitutes a Third Party or Partner organization?

I would hazard that Zuck & Co. would argue that InstaBook is FaceGram is WhatsItToYouApp... which is to say it's all Meta.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: £sd

>> And the Beatles used it in a song (Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds), it was all about money, not about drugs.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

Are you referring to "artificial imitation processed cheese food product" or a thin square of yellowish (technically) edible plastic?

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

MongoDB has come out with "Queryable Encryption" which may alleviate that particular issue (while potentially enabling others, of course).

https://www.wired.com/story/mongodb-queryable-encryption-databases/

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

Wasn't it Steve Jobs who said "if your (Apple) device doesn't do what you want, then change what you want", or is that just apocryphal?

Researchers claim quantum device performs 9,000-year calculation in microseconds

Re: light pulses which exhibit quantum uncertainty

I read this years ago and have been searching for a copy of it for some time now. Brilliant!

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Re: Porn's effect on real life

Allowing a legal market for kiddie smut in any form incentivises perverts to risk creating more of it for profit motives beyond their existing sick compulsions. Setting aside for the moment the idea of the minor(s) in a given pornographic image not "minding" (with great difficulty), the poor kids depicted in subsequent batches of child porn will certainly mind!

But it's not as if the monsters creating this filth are out there asking for consent in the first place, are they? The Squick Factor of your thinking on this is off the charts.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

You can live on the edge with a slightly more complex version affectionately known as "bash roulette":

alias roulette='[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -f $(shuf -n1 -e *) && echo "BOOM" || echo *Click*'

US Supreme Court puts Texas social media law on hold

Re: I wonder what would happen if...

> If a state wants to pass such a law, what would happen if all the sites affected by such a law just blocked all the IP's from inside that state from accessing their resources?

The Texas state law also attempts to prohibit social media companies from not allowing Texas-based users to access their sites.

Good luck with that one!

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Re: OpEx vs CapEx

Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ping!

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Re: Strikes me as similar to the case where browsers...

Indeed. For extra measure, they encrypted the data with the highly complex and ever-so-secure Base64 encoding. Our own El Reg covered the whole kerfuffle in a recent (15 Feb 22) article:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/15/missouri_html_hacking/

Cooler heads needed in heated E2EE debate, says think tank

Re: @msobkow - Finding the middle ground in this highly polarized environment

Stay tuned for the possibility of aspiring dictators who didn't figure out how to subvert the democracy and got voted out before they could entrench themselves, but yet somehow managed to secure reelection so that they might have another go at it.

ITC judge recommends banning toner imports that infringe Canon's IP

Re: Epic names

>>> Really, if you see a credit that's Chinese with a little translation, hit pause and see if you can make out what it says. Some are amusing to the point of "is the translator taking the piss?"

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli!

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Re: Dogfooding

Mr. Wiggin: Good morning, gentlemen.

Clients: Good morning.

Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these...

Client 1: Excuse me.

Mr. Wiggin: Yes?

Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?

Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.

Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?

Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?

Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.

Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants. You see I mainly design slaughter houses.

Clients: Ah.

Mr. Wiggin: Pity.

Clients: Yes.

Mr. Wiggin: (indicating points of the model) Mind you, this is a real beaut. None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows incommoding the passers-by with this one. (confidentially) My life has been leading up to this.

Client 2: Yes, and well done, but we wanted an apartment block.

Mr. Wiggin: May I ask you to reconsider.

Clients: Well...

Mr. Wiggin: You wouldn't regret this. Think of the tourist trade.

Client 1: I'm sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

I think Russians know when they're being lied to. They can see the newsreaders' lips move.

I am reminded of the old trope in (usually comedic) film where a news presenter from a communist bloc nation is shown reading news of some event in the film as filtered through propaganda censors while an arm holding a pistol pointed directly at the presenter's head is clearly visible on-camera.

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Calm down, Satan.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Re: Testing 1 2 3

You were lucky!

Age discrimination class-action against HP and HPE gets green light to proceed

Re: Manglement Ducks

> When a company is in bad shape the typical response is to shed money losing groups that cannot be made profitable.

R.I.P. adequate levels of IT department/Help Desk staffing...

Famous Last Words:

----------------------------

We don't really need all of those folks, do we? Besides, we almost never have any major network/technology problems, so that department is pretty much dead weight.

Re: Don't understand

I've seen job postings for "Exciting career opportunities for the new Class of 202x B.Sc. in Computer Science graduates", which is clearly a very small fig-leaf attempting to provide some legal cover for an ugly "Dinosaurs and other extinct/endangered species/40+ years old engineers need not apply" hiring policy.

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Re: ... to be continued ...

One pounds the Marmite....

After a period of deep personal introspection as well as a thorough review of the previous comment to which I have endeavored to reply, I have come to understand that the action clearly specified therein was that the prospective password was "best *read* with a North American interpretation.. ".

Just as clearly, at absolutely no point whatsoever was there the inclusion of even a hint of the suggestion that *anything* should be subsequently *written* after said reading had been completed.

Apologies, etc.

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

Re: Very Thorough

Yank here, arriving fashionably late to this thread...

I was intrigued by the long building with "600 gasbags" by the River Thames, but wasn't finding anything by searching with any combination of those terms. Since I had the geographical hint that it was just down the road from Thames House where MI5 is housed, I opened Google Earth and virtually circumnavigated myself across the pond for a virtual look-see.

MI5's digs were easily located, and I then began to cast my eye north and south along the riverbanks, searching for a long building. The only nearby structure reasonably fitting that description was Westminster Palace. But where would one expect to find "600 gasbags" amongst the trappings of royalty and national symbolism? The penny dropped as I zoomed in closer and saw that the Parliament of the United Kingdom (and more specifically, the House of Commons) is ensconced upon the Palace grounds. Gasbags indeed!

This is of course fairly common knowledge to a majority of residents of the Commonwealth realms, but is not as well known in the States, and thus why I found the reference unfamiliar. Now if someone would like to explain how to quickly understand the true intended meaning of Cockney Rhyming Slang, I would be forever indebted.