* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

UK.gov pays four fellows £35k to do nothing for three months

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Re: Pause for thought

Oh you can't beat a Project Approval board for delaying tactics.

You plan a project and work out that it's going to take n months and cost x.

Three iterations of the Project Approval board later, when it finally gets approved, you have n - 3 months to do it in and x - ${large_random_number} to do it with.

You can always spot a good Project Manager. At the drop of a hat he can trot out a perfectly believable and yet entirely fictional set of reasons why his project is over both time and budget, without once mentioning the Project Approval board.....

Huge embarrassment over fisting site data breach

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Eh?

Surely these days the forum of choice for massive arseholes is Twitter?

Prince of pop trash PerezHilton pwned, visitors hit with cryptxxx

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Now I'm confused.

Normally I'm of the opinion that the sort of person who compromises sites to serve up malware should be nailed to the cross and have their goolies blowtorched.

In this case I can't help thinking they should get an award for single-handedly raising the global index of good taste by a noticeable amount.....

French duck-crushing device sells for €40k

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

...how they present that elegantly...

Michelin tread patterns......

Cyber-moolah boss gets 20 years' porridge for money laundering

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Tumbleweeds R us.

No, he can't serve his time in Second Life

Of course not. Solitary confinement for an entire sentence counts as "cruel and unusual"......

Google-backed Yieldify has acquired IP from ‘world’s biggest patent troll’

TeeCee Gold badge
Devil

IIV/Google, do something "not evil" with this patent!

Define "evil". Remember here that, in Google-land, providing you with a more comprehensive advertising experience is on a par with luxury soft-centred chocolates and fluffy kittens on the scale of eviltude.

Facebook image-tagging to be tested in Californian court

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

....something the judge described as “unpersuasive”.

I reckon that's legalese for "utter bullshit".

ww2 airplane geek? ever wondered about mach 1 w props?

TeeCee Gold badge

Re: ww2 airplane geek? ever wondered about mach 1 w props?

Hmm.

Messerschmidt 163 "Komet" pilots probably did go supersonic, but they had the right rocket powered, ogee-winged and tailless aircraft for the job. Unlike the spitfire pilots (and for that matter Yaeger himself), who had to deal with ramming the wrong design through the sound barrier courtesy of brute force and ignorance.

Hey, YouTube: Pay your 'workers' properly and get with the times

TeeCee Gold badge

Re: "it pays out something far more valuable than money: attention"

Of course Google are going to think that attention is worth its weight in gold.

Getting people to pay attention[1] is the holy grail in their business, it's the rest of the world that doesn't give a fish's tits....

[1] To adverts. Obviously.

You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Re: Oh so true (the water feature)

Jesus, you guys are so overthinking this one!

Stick a bloody bucket under the drip and ignore it until it's convenient to do something about it.

A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Re: "We are the engineers"

But this guy decided he wanted an argument instead.

That's not an argument, that's abuse. Presumably arguments are done by different people in a different building....

Facebook bungs 10-year-old kid $10k to not 'eliminate' Justin Bieber

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: I'd kick in

Nah. That won't even buy the platinum trowel it's applied with.

Insurance article

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: Insurance article

Hmm, missed that the first time round. If I'm reading that right, the idea is to insure against being sued into bankruptcy 'cos your advice was shit?

If that's actually a legal possibility, how come the likes of McKinsey and Accenture are still in business? Their PI premiums must be astronomical.

It's 2016 and now your internet-connected bathroom scales can be hacked

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Wrong stress in article.

Embarrassingly simple vuln in IoT device is on a par news-wise with the sun coming up, bears crapping in woods and such.

The fact that the object in question can be updated and a patch has been issued? That one's way into "well, fuck me backwards" levels of surprise.

The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

....only four per cent of the most used internet platforms come from the EU.

....and they're planning to mandate the capture of EU ID by these how exactly?

The EU. The governmental system of the USSR coupled with the delusions of global jurisdiction of the USA.

Screen overlay malware on the rise as bot scum battle for dominance

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Mobile antivirus vendors routinely claim they can detect and crimp this class of threat.

The operative word in there being "claim". After all if they were useless at it they would never say so, that sort of admission is not good for sales figures.

The other slight snag here is that the one thing this sort of scare story does well is to ensure a healthy takeup of any "FREE11!!111 Antiviruz scannur" apps that may be on offer....

Switch survives three hours of beer spray, fails after twelve

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

I prefer "Rugby for big girls' blouses in armour.".

Batten down the hatches! OpenSSL preps fix for high impact vuln

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Re: Maybe we should Open Source Government.

amanfromMars? Is that you?

Heathrow Airbus collision 'not a drone incident'

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

In an appeal for witnesses....

Just in case there was anyone hanging around, minding their own business at 1,700 feet and happened to notice what went on.

One black hole, three galaxies, four BEELION solar masses – found by accident

TeeCee Gold badge
Alert

All well and good as long as one of the surprising things doesn't happen in our bit of it.....

Samsung's little black box will hot-wire your car to the internet. Eek!

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: New ne plus ultra standard?

Or, in other words, while your data will be protected by the latest ultra triple bum-cover encryption, it will also be available, in clear, on an unmarked USB stick left on the 3:15 from Paddington.

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Aha! A sort of NFC 2.0 then?

Adware from French runs away and hides on 12M machines

TeeCee Gold badge

I would suggest that everyone in France who's fallen foul of these bastards look up the addresses of those who own Tut4PC and mail them each a bag of dogshit.

That should get the message across.

Apple man found dead at Cupertino HQ, gun discovered nearby

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: @Jeffrey Nonken hmmm

Yup, he also shot himself.

I've not seen anyone saying what a shame that was or suggesting banning guns to prevent future tyrants killing themselves though.

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Re: Oh goodness how awful

....or they do work for Apple, but only indirectly on the assembly side.

Then they only get a mention post facto, when some journo does a load of digging into the murky practices of their Chinese contractors.

SpaceX: We'll land on Mars in 2018 (cough, with NASA's help)

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

.... if SpaceX can put all of the pieces together...

I don't doubt they can, that's not hard......it's keeping them together that's the complicated bit.

German prof scores €2.4m EU grant to crack software on your bicycle

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: I challenge him to find a software vulnerability on my bike….

So you completely missed the whole "E-bike" thing in there then?

Germans stick traffic lights in pavements for addicts who can't take their eyes off phones

TeeCee Gold badge
Alert

Re: Darwin award??

Oh, but they're good.

Best I saw was in Maastricht. Girl on bike using her phone. Lack of concentration meant she missed the kerb / cobbles change, the front wheel stopped and she went clean over the handlebars.

Bounced a few times on the cobbles, rolled out and was still talking on the phone when she got up.

My view is that the only change we need to solve the problem is a new Coroner's verdict: "Suicide while the balance of their mind was somewhere else.".

30 years on, Chernobyl wildlife still feeling effects of nuke plant catastrophe

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

.......diminished brain size as a result of radioactive exposure......

A few more decades of that and the local wildlife will be appointing Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.

Thunderbird is GO: Mozilla prepares to jettison mail client

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: Still around?

.....why would anyone want to keep their email on someone else's computer?

So Thunderbird's a fully-fledged mail server now, is it?

BlackBerry is pivoting from phones to enterprise software

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Well.

I hate to say I told you so, but.....

Probably too little, too late.

Anonymous whales on Denmark, Iceland with OpKillingBay DDoS

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Can't say I've ever eaten badger, but if it tastes as bad as dolphin and whale do, I can see why you wouldn't want to.

When it comes to the dolphins and whales, my only objection is they taste pretty dreadful. Neither can hold a candle to a decent steak, being much tougher and unpleasantly salty with it.

Irish researchers sweep smartphones clear of super bugs

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Let me get this straight.....

We have here a team of scientists.

Who are also telephone sanitisers.

Which Ark do they go on then?

RIP Prince: You were the soundtrack of my youth

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Grauniad obits.

Surely the answer here is a pull-out, glossy, special edition obits mag?

When life gives you lemons......

BOFH: Thermo-electric funeral

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Too much effort. I'm surprised they didn't just suggest the old standard of leaving it in the freezer overnight. As in:

"Catering have a walk-in unit, just take it in there, put it on a shelf somewhere and we'll come back tomorrow."

SLAM.

KER-CHUNK.

Rattle.

Pub O'clock and come back tomorrow as arranged.

'I hacked Facebook – and found someone had beaten me to it'

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Excuses.

....the password-slurping malware was installed by another security researcher....

Yes, 'cos security researchers do that sort of thing. Not thieving scumbags at all. Oh no.

I have to say that as versions of "It's all OK, you're still safe with us" go, that one has to be the least believable of all time.

'Impossible' EmDrive flying saucer thruster may herald new theory of inertia

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: question

...using a ship's exhaust as a weapon....

Or "the Kzinti lesson" as that is usually known as.

Embattled 123-reg flings six months' free hosting at angry customers

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Shit....

...is still shit even when it's free, you know?

Catastrophic 123-reg VPS cockup deletes Ross County FC website

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: Oh dear

Unfortunately for 123-Reg, neither of those clauses is worth the paper it's printed on.

Damages and penalties for breach of contract are what a court decides they are, not what your weasel clause says. That's only in there in the hope that the customers won't bother sueing when they see them....

US congresscritter's iPhone hacked (with, er, the cell networks' help)

TeeCee Gold badge

Hmm.

If you're looking for a reason that it hasn't been fixed, there's a really bloody obvious one that doesn't require you to wear a shiny hat to believe it.

Fixing it in such a way as to maintain back-compatibility and thus not b0rk 99% of devices out there[1] is on the way too hard pile.....

[1] i.e. Everything that isn't an iPhone or a recent Nexus device and thus doesn't stand a cat in hell's chance of a firmware update.

Furious customers tear into 123-reg after firm's mass deletion woes

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Hmm.

.....this isn't the first time 123 has lost our data in the last few months......

Fool me once.......(!)

This is the sort of thing where you really shouldn't give second chances.

Job ad promises 'Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack'

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: Managed COBOL?

C# really is the new COBOL

Actually I reckon that Java is the new COBOL, as in "the language used by everyone for everything, even when it's obviously bloody insane to use it for that".

Java has actually managed to fill that "enterprise default language" niche previously occupied by COBOL despite being, if anything, even less suitable for the job than COBOL was.

US-CERT advice says kill Quicktime for Windows, quickly

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Yeah.....right.....

If and when HTML5 takes off, HTML5 exploits (especially WebKit ones) will become highly valuable.

I strongly suspect that the gap between it becoming really popular and the first mass pwnage using it as an attack vector will be measured in picoseconds......

I am sending pouting selfies to a robot. Its AI is well buff

TeeCee Gold badge
Alert

Re: modern era’s obsession with misspelt branding

Google buns

Don't, just don't OK?

AMC sobers up, apologizes for silly cinema texting plan

TeeCee Gold badge
Thumb Up

I really wish.....

.....TPTB would allow cinemas, theatres, restaurants and such to use mobile jammers.

I'd even pay more for a "jammed" rather than "unjammed" venue.

BTW, I still can't see why "OMFG!11! Think of the heart attack victim surrounding by idiots too fucking thick to think of moving out of jamming range or using a landline!!111!!" even qualifies as an argument.

URL shorteners reveal your trip to strip club, dash to disease clinic – research

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Hang on.....

I don't ever recall shortening services being touted as a "security feature", only as a method for posting links for others without falling foul of some appallingly badly written forum's or email client's line wrapping.

I guess that if you start using something for a purpose that was not intended, you do tend to find that it isn't very good at it. I'm afraid that obfuscation has never been, is not and never will be a substitute for security.

Next week: Sports scientists conclude that waffle irons are not effective as tennis racquets.

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Re: Beware Pron ahead

That doesn't help at all.

I wouldn't click on anything ending in ".ly" anyway, regardless of what it said it was going to do.

You Leica? P9 certainly is a Great Leap Forward in imaging... for Huawei

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Re: Chinese manufacturers aren't too bothered about their stuff once it's out the door.

At that price I'd like to think you get a member of Huawei's staff personally assigned to you to sort any issues you may have.

They can't charge iPhone prices without Apple's flocks of wealthy sheep crying out to be fleeced....

US anti-encryption law is so 'braindead' it will outlaw file compression

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Just out of interest.......

.....is every piece of US legislation that's named after two people the work of drooling morons?

Google broke its own cloud AGAIN, with TWO software bugs

TeeCee Gold badge
Facepalm

Yes, but the whole point of this "cloud" thing is that it's supposed to have redundancy and a complete lack of any single failure point built in (i.e. "five nines" availability is implicit in the concept we were sold). It should be physically impossible for any human error to break the whole thing.

Using two clouds to make a reliable cloud is like owning a dog and barking for it. More to the point, you've just added a SPOF in the bit that handles which one your traffic's going to (or maybe we're thinking of hosting that on a third service???).

Wake me up when somebody comes up with an offering in this area that's actually bloody fit for purpose.