* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

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Re: Vile

"...a tree or some clouds."

..or a Macbook.

The flameproof suit please.

Musk see: Watch SpaceX's latest Starship rocket explode while trying to touch down

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Black Helicopters

I reckon they did it deliberately.

This way they can now go to the FAA, thumb their noses and say; "Look. Doing it by your rules makes no sodding difference, so exactly what purpose do you bunch of overpaid, clipboard wielding tossers serve?".

It's what I'd have done.

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

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Re: Well......

The other thing worth mentioning is that the touted alternatives often prove to be mayflies. Go on, put your hand on your heart and state now which of the new hawtness will still be the de facto standard a decade down the line.

If it's done in C, it'll still be maintained in years to come. If it's done in ${hiptrendy_this_week} it may well be more robust now, but good luck finding someone to build on it in 5 years' time.

Google allows 15 more nations to offer gambling in the Play store

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No. It robs from the stupid and gives to the clever.

Plenty of wealthy people have lost their shirts gambling. It doesn't matter who you are, if you're dumb enough to keep chucking the money you'll always find someone happy to take it.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

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...decided to store the date of birth with only two digits for the year.

Dunno about PL/1, but in RPG dates are natively six digit. So, while you can define an eight digit field to hold a date, the system supplied dates are all in six so you were making work for yourself on comparisons.

My bet is that RPG was on a '36 somewhere[1] and not on the mainframe and that's where the core data was coming from.

[1] Because for data entry and validation, 5250 block mode beat the shit out of 3270 and serial for efficiency until quite recently. So, if you gave a rat's arse about your hardware budget, that's what you did.

I was targeted by North Korean 0-day hackers using a Visual Studio project, vuln hunter tells El Reg

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Re: Trust but verify

Hmm, vuln broker, ad broker, marriage broker, arms broker, financial broker....

Can anyone think of a job title that has "broker" in it that doesn't require the person doing it to be an amoral, chiselling piece of shit?

No cards, thanks, we're contactless-less: UK supermarket giants hit by card payment TITSUP*

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WTF?

"No contactless"....

...doesn't necessarily mean Cash only. If you look closely at your contactless card, you'll find a chip in one end and a black stripe on the reverse. These allow you to use a card reader to pay by either swiping or plugging the thing in.

Sheesh. People have such short memories these days...

Seriously though. Contactless payment involves an additional set of exchanges with the payment provider over and above chip 'n pin or swipe 'n sig. Losing the ability to process contactless often doesn't affect the other options.

Clop ransomware gang clips sensitive files from Atlantic Records' London ad agency The7stars, dumps them online

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Re: Good for them not to pay up!

I agree and I'd go further.

Any organisation should be granted immunity from prosecution under data protection laws in such circumstances[1]. It should be a crime, with draconian penalties attached, to pay the useless parasites.

[1] i.e. when a third party has broken in and nicked it for publication. Let's face it, if your house is burgled you do not get done for "aiding and abetting" if you do not have the best locks available installed.

We'll explore Titan with a methane submarine, a methane submarine, a methane submarine...

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Pirate

So it could run out the cannon and prepare to repel boarders? Oh yes. A must have.

BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid

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Re: Am I a Druid?

(it was raining outside)

Hardly surprising. In the same way that every tramp has a small, ugly dog following them around, every Druid has a raincloud.

Apple reportedly planning to revive the MagSafe charging standard with the next lot of MacBook Pros

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Alert

Tempting fate?

Given the EU's current hard-on for "standard"[1] charging adaptors and their proven willingness to fine the living fuck out of anyone who they think might be bending the rules, are Apple deliberately picking a fight here?

[1] a.k.a. obsolete

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Re: I like the Touch bar.

...the Touch Bar is a touch of genius.

So, more like a Genius Bar then?....ah......hang on....

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

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Re: Fluorescents...

Hmm. Guess who Austin Rover bought their OEM in-car kit from?

Guess what always goes wrong first on any Austin Rover / Rover Group car...

Later high-end models have Alpine OEM kit common to contemporary BMWs. That's far more reliable, but the sound quality makes the Philips stuff sound good. This is such a low bar to fail to clear that I have to suspect that Alpine is staffed by limbo dancers.

Attack of the cryptidiots: One wants Bitcoin-flush hard drive he threw out in 2013 back, the other lost USB stick password

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Facepalm

I can see the problem.

Turns out that there are more than ten variations of "P45sw0Rd". Who knew?

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Re: Don't ever write down your password on a piece of paper

You are a doctor and ICMFP!

Boffins store text message inside E coli bacteria using electromagnetic signal – and you'll never guess what it says

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Obvious use case.

You have my resignation, it's somewhere in that turd I left on your desk.

International Space Station scores powerup with solar panels that 'roll out like a tape measure'

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Yeah, stick a cork in it.

Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached

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Willy-waving in 2025:

"I've got more virtual monitors floating above my virtual desk than you have."

OpenAI touts a new flavour of GPT-3 that can automatically create made-up images to go along with any text description

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Re: a Unicorn Argent armed, crined and unguled Proper

Brilliant idea. For the sake of serendipity, I suggest giving it the script[1] of Un Chien Andalou and seeing what it comes up with.

My money's on a blown fuse somewhere.

[1] Yes, I know it's bloody silent.

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

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Facepalm

Re: Printers attached to PC's

To be fair, that is the way of things these days. It's so ${luser}'s iThing can print to it from ${wherever}.

If you can get into the config and change things well, it's not the fault of the manufacturer that ${user} didn't completely run through the setup and SECURE THE BLOODY THING.

It's provided open so $(user}'s iThing can access it wirelessly OOB[1] and then, once it's connected, secure it. The problem occurs when ${user} gets it to print and immediately crashes out of the setup process "cuz it worx nows innit".

[1] You wouldn't believe the number of one-star reviews that requiring a USB connection for setup gets your product. While teh internets allows sheep to post reviews and that, in turn, controls how well it sells, there is no answer to this one.

Everybody's time is precious, pal: Sometimes it isn't only the terminals that are dumb

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This is why you always carry a can of oil.

Then you can ask where the arsehole sits and squirt a goodly amount on his chair.

With a bit of luck he'll be the sort of self-important git who has his suits made for him too. Oil? It doesn't come out with dry-cleaning....

My website has raised its anchor and set sail into the internet oceans without me

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Re: Respect

I have working 5G. I suspect that this is because my SIM is only a 4G one and the fact that the phone often reports a 5G connection is a software glitch somewhere.

However this does mean that I can show people it's on 5G and it'll talk to stuff without falling over which, seeing what's written above, makes me think I may be better off than I would be with "real" 5G.

And you thought that $999 Mac stand was dear: Steve Wozniak's Apple II doodles fetch $630,272 at auction

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"There are 22 more pages like this"

At the bottom of the last one he's written: "Some sequences shortened and steps omitted.".

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

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Re: You read it here first

"Retroactive IP portfolio management". It's the next big thing.

After 11 years, Australia declares its national broadband network is ‘built and fully operational’

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Facepalm

I'm amazed...

...that politicians ever approve state investment in infrastructure.

It doesn't matter what a government builds, there'll always be some bunch of ungrateful tossers to slag it off[1]. They'd be better off just staying out of it and allowing whatever it is to merge into the usual background drone of "We should be doing something about this".

[1] For a start, in any proper democracy there'll be something called an "opposition", who get paid for doing this.

Google says it’s the cleanest cloud, also reveals deal with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company for new cloud region

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Meh

Doesn't make any difference.

Who they work with has no impact on where and how Google source their energy.

"I refuse to work with you because ${stick_up_arse}", is just petulant, childish idiocy.

Hey Presto! Teradata admits its vision is dead by hooking QueryGrid analytics platform up to rival data warehouses

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It always suffered from...

Another inconvenient feature is that it absolutely requires continuous care and feeding by skilled and experienced Teradata types[1], who know and care which, what and how to add/configure as it expands. The alternative is something that looks more and more like a massively overpriced disk array as time goes on.

As a very wise man once told me; Ask anyone in any business what their largest overhead is. If the answer isn't "payroll", they're either an idiot or lying.

[1] Who, when it was trendy, looked and felt like Storage Admins, but were paid in sacks of gold doubloons.

'Long-standing vulns' in 5G protocols open the door for attacks on smartphone users

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Meh

...after the transition [from 4G LTE networks] is over...

I wouldn't hold your breath, there's still plenty of places where 4G is non-existent.

Dodgy procedures doomed Arianespace's Vega before it even left the launchpad

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"inversion of electrical connections"

Sounds like they plugged the left in right and the right in wrong.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

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You need quieter cats!

The fur doesn't stick to your machinery if it has a lower μ.

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

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Aha! You must be right as, every time he unlocks it, you can see his lips moving as he hums along to Manfred Mann.

US aviation regulator issues safety bulletins over flaws in software updates for Boeing 747, 777, 787 airliners

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Facepalm

Updates that break more than they fix?

Who the fuck do they think they are? Microsoft?

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

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Facepalm

Hmm.

Who was it recently who found that their in-house designed, purpose built for cloud, middleware turned out to have a hard scalability limit? For added "blast radius" fun and games, when they hit it, it turned out to utterly bugger their services until they rolled back their server deployments and be unfixable so they'll have to chuck pricey hardware at the problem.

Yes, I wonder who that could have been?

See also: Pots, kettles, stones and glass houses.

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

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Re: Parts of it date back to when fire was invented

..Fluoridate oxygen.

So you'd be dead, but your lungs would be clean and have a minty freshness?

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

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WTF?

Who could possibly have seen that coming?

Rather surprisingly, Shakespeare.

For 'tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard.

Oblivious DoH, OPAQUE passwords, Encrypted Client Hello: Cloudflare's protocol proposals to protect privacy

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Facepalm

Re: HORNET or death

Except the article is nothing to do with blocking / filtering and is, instead all about traffic security. Specifically about denying the servers you are accessing access to data that they do not really need.

Or, in other words, something that HORNET does bugger all about.

Iran to issue license for national bug bounty program to clean up its code base

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Facepalm

Don't understand.

Can't their government just ask ${sky_fairy} where all the bugs are?

If you're going to be a theocratic craphole, you might as well use the only positive feature of the system.

AWS adds a ‘Would you like services with that?’ option to its software Marketplace

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Meh

Can't be long now...

"AWS Prime". This will give you the ability to pick from a wide range of additional services at no cost, you just pay a fixed fee monthly.....whether you use any of them or not.

Every billing cycle you'll have to jump through hoops to not sign up for it.

Four or so things we found interesting about Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888, its latest 5G chip for high-end Androids

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"Qualcomm didn't want to define the O in TOPS..."

Obviously it's "Ovine" and the metric is in vacuum sheep-miles per second.

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

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Science.

I blame Soshal Meejah. Not for the bullshit, but for the massive drop in the standards of the science on offer.

Trouble is that many scientists want to get f1rst p0st on Tw@ter as much as the next ADD-afflicted toddler-alike. After all, the more drooling morons who like or share your post the more famous you are, right? As a result, a large amount of what's been published and reported is half-cocked or unverified.

For a classic example, look up everything that's been written on the subject of post-infection immunity. First it was a Big Thing, then it was effectively nonexistent and now we have vaccines, which sort of relies on this to be effective, it's actually more of a thing than anyone ever guessed. The truth? Answers on a postcard please to...

As for ...the world's top health organisations..., what doesn't help here is that one thing that does seem to have emerged is that the WHO is as bent as a nine-bob note and their actions did as much as anyone else's to ensure that there was a pandemic. Then again, they'd been crying wolf on the subject for so long that I can't help thinking that they really needed one...(!)

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

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Facepalm

I agree:

...to do so create new threads for each of the other servers...

That should have raised a red flag in the bloody design phase for something that was always intended to scale across a metric fucktonne of servers.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

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...fall back to the PC's cassette interface...

I remember a mate telling me of an ICL mainframe they were trying to boot into engineering mode. The problem with doing this was that to get 'em to admit defeat and come up off the internal diagnostic ROM, they had to find absolutely no device attached which it might be possible to boot from.

He and his colleagues were sure they'd powered off every disk, unit, tape device, etc ad nauseum in the computer suite and yet the damned thing was still stopping at Load Boot Media.

After some considerable searching, they found, alone and unloved, hidden behind some cabinets in a dusty corner, an antiquated 800bpi tape drive with its Load Media light flashing away.

Kept "just in case" they ever needed to restore some ancient backup and thus unused for many years, everyone had forgotten its very existence.

Considering the colonisation of Mars? Werner Herzog would like a word

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Well he's dead on trend with the message. Self-flagellation of the human race is where it's at, right down to revising history to denigrate anyone who looks like a good example.

Maybe, one day, we can leave the pessimistic hand-wringing losers behind and just bugger off to do the locust thing.

We really need an "opinionated wanker" icon, the "Twitter bird" would do nicely.

Frenchman who wanted to 'smash a guy's face in' fined €135 – despite correctly filling out paperwork stating why he left home during lockdown

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Re: Bore-out compensation

When young and skint, I made one for LARP. Your local charity shop will give you wire coat hangers for free as long as you take them away.

Snip off hook bit with sidecutters and straighten wire.

Clamp one end in vice with dowel.

Wind wire around dowel (yes, this method does get painful after a while).

Hacksaw through "spring" resulting.

Repeat until gibberingly insane and hands are in shreds.

Assemble chainmail.

'Unmute' named one of Oxford Dictionary's words of the year

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Meh

Zoom-friendly

... used to describe dressing for video meetings...

So, as it's Zoom, that'll be stark naked with a camera pointed at your bollocks I take it?

VMware reveals critical hypervisor bugs found at Chinese white hat hacking comp. One lets guests run code on hosts

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WTF?

Hang on...

So the second exploit described gives privilege elevation, but requires the first to be exploited to use it.

The first exploit requires that you already have admin privilege to use it.

Just what is the second elevating you to? God?

CodeWeavers' CrossOver ran 32-bit Windows Intel binary on macOS on Arm CPU emulating x86 – and nobody died

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Somebody's got to say it...

Does it run Crysis?

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

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Facepalm

Lest we forget.

Win 3.11 ran on top of DOS on a FAT filesystem.

Habitually turning it off and on again was guaranteed to get the Disk Corruption Fairies[1] to sit up and take notice.

[1] As in: "Did you turn it off with the power switch again?".

"No I didn't!"

"Right. Must have been the Disk Corruption Fairies at work then."

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Re: In defence

Are you thinking Clue Stick here?

When humans return to the Moon in '2024', HPE would like us to remember: We built the computer that simmed this

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Re: No protection against fools

Or you could go for the Airbus fuckup going straight from computer design to production: Completely different connectors next to each other, that are supposed to plug together.