* Posts by Daniel B.

3134 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2007

Look, can we just forget about Snowden for sec... US-China cyber talks held

Daniel B.
Black Helicopters

Re: Just Scum

Both governments are evil. The difference is that China doesn't really hide much of its evilness, and openly targets those groups they dislike, such as Falun Gong.

The US will spy on all your stuff and not do anything ... until you piss off the wrong G-Man. That's when the spooks act...

Radar gremlins GROUND FLIGHTS across southern Blighty

Daniel B.
Alert

Re: I'm going on holidays in two weeks

Didn't a teen just get jailed because he joked about "going to blow up a school full of kids and eat their corpses" ... even though the next lines said "lol, jk" ???

The security services seem to be going dumber every day...

Apple: Ta for blowing £££s on apps, fanbois. Now we've set them FREE

Daniel B.

Re: Why?

They take potshots at everyone, not just Apple. I quite like El Reg's take on IT, as it is up till now the only IT site that doesn't suck up to any IT vendor. Compare to other "IT News" sites where you can easily spot when Apple, MS, Oracle or similar companies have paid off for articles praising whatever they're peddling out.

Emergency alert system easily pwnable after epic ZOMBIE attack prank

Daniel B.
Facepalm

Missing the point

The image has a private SSH key on the open that has access to the accounts. It would be like having the official Windows Server release have 'password' as the default Administrator account password on it.

Daniel B.
Boffin

Re: Public / Private keys @Bluewhelk

Yes, indeed that's the point. Some lazy admins have been known to run the following commands:

# ssh-keygen

(generate passwordless key)

# cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub > .ssh/authorized_keys

then they copy around the .ssh/id_rsa file. Now if this were the case with said firmware, it means that anyone getting their hands on the firmware gets the id_rsa key, and said key has access to the box. With no password.

Not sure if this is the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was...

Samsung Galaxy S3 explodes, turns young woman into 'burnt pig'

Daniel B.
Boffin

Re: Only a matter of time, and lack of protection.

I prefer to carry my phone on a belt-clip holster. If I hear it pop, I could theoretically just rip the holster off my belt and throw it away, or in the worst case simply unbuckle my belt, drop my pants and run. Ok, that last scenario might be awkward, but rather do that than have myself burnt to a crisp. And I never carry my phone on any pocket!

Also, if I ever feel my phone getting extremely hot, I'm pulling out the battery. If it's starting to do something else (like er... generating smoke) I'll just throw the phone before it blows up!

US public hate Snowden - but sexpot spy Anna Chapman LOVES him

Daniel B.
Mushroom

Re: Dear Mr Snowden

Actually, most of the Central and South American countries have been directly or indirectly fucked upon by the CIA. Pinochet was indirectly supported by the CIA to take over the democratic government in Chile. The CIA helped a lot of tyrant dictatorships in the region, including the secret network they had to kill dissidents who managed to flee to non-tyrant countries. Then there's Nicaragua, El Salvador ... get the idea? The one country which has managed to avoid CIA-backed bloody dictatorships in the 20th Century has been Mexico... and even then, it wasn't because the US didn't try to. A certain General was called upon by er... US agents after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, offering support in pulling off a coup against the government, seizing the opportunity as it had ordered a massacre against the civilian population. Said general declined the offer, as he thought it was worse to do that than to keep with the not-so-evil Mexican Government.

So yes, those governments are offering Snowden asylum as a 'fuck you' to the US ... but in this case, the US earned said disrespect.

French snooping as deep as PRISM: Le Monde

Daniel B.
Facepalm

Re: And in Egypt...

The "former government" had lost a lot of support from the public, nonetheless because they were silently taking over the entire government. It sounds weird, but the consensus seems to be that the Egyptian Army actually saved the country. Of course, it remains to be seen if the Army will actually hand back the country to the next elected gov't...

BBC abandons 3D TV, cites 'disappointing' results

Daniel B.

I must be going to the better cinemas here...

I haven't had the chair kicking problems in years. Or chatty people. At most, someone might be checking their phone but seeing that requires me to actually stop watching the movie and look down, as the angle in which seating is set means that the forward row is at your feet instead of being in front of you.

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

Daniel B.

eeeeeeeee

The French are the ones responsible for the horrible 'ordinateur', which then found its way to the equally English-hating Spaniards who turned it into 'ordenador'. That's why Latin Americans talk about computers, but Spaniards talk about Sorting Machines...

US states: Google making ad money on illegal YouTube vids

Daniel B.
Boffin

Re: MacKeeper! Gah! @LaeMing

Ah, so I see I'm not the only one returning to the Mac. Been 7 months since I switched back, but indeed my previous experience with Macs was precisely System 7. Well, 7.5 to be precise. And indeed, MacKeeper is the same kind of PC scam, except it is the one you will find mostly anywhere whenever you browse with a Mac!

Daniel B.
Facepalm

MacKeeper! Gah!

That piece of crap is actually scamware and shouldn't be installed anywhere! Didn't know that Google was peddling that garbage!

Patriot hacker 'The Jester' attacks nations offering Snowden help

Daniel B.
Meh

Meh.

The Jester is a lamer script kiddie. And to top it off, he's on the wrong side of public opinion, yet again. I do wonder why the FBI isn't going after him, as he has done at least much of the stuff that the LulzSec guys have?

Vulcan? Not on our tiny balls. Pluto moons named Kerberos, Styx

Daniel B.

Kerberos

Great. Now I'm thinking either about the bear thingy from Sakura Card Captors, or an authentication system when I talk about that moon...

Nominet resurrects second-level namespace plan: 'Before you say no...'

Daniel B.
Coat

Re: wot no gb tld?

Political correctness made the UK get UK instead of GB, though I think it is still out there.

Wales did push for a .cymru thingy, though populating that would make domains that look like .onion addresses or autogenerated botnet C&C domains.

PC decline whacks 2013 IT spending projections

Daniel B.
FAIL

Yay Microsoft!

Windows 8 is now responsible of slowing down IT spending as well! Woo!

Lights, camera, action: Snowden movie hits the web

Daniel B.
Trollface

Re: Cor...

I think this is the icon you were looking for. --->

Unlike Assange, the crimes imputed to Snowden can be directly linked to his whistleblowing and thus might be considered as political persecution. Think Deepthroat, not Aldrich Ames.

Dubya: I introduced PRISM and I think it's pretty swell

Daniel B.

Re: Mañana

In Mexico it also means tomorrow or morning; but there's also the "not today" meaning. Like in "not today, maybe tomorrow".

That's how the Spanish joke about the Tomorrow Man came to be: H2's the Tomorrow Man because whenever you ask "when will X be finished?" he will answer "Tomorrow".

Daniel B.

Re: Come on you lot...

Asylum is given to those who have a fear of being persecuted by virtue of race, nationality, religion, political opinions and membership and/or participation in any particular social group or social activities.

Pretty sure that whistleblowing on unethical and potentially illegal snooping is a quite hard political opinion.

And doing a crime doesn't mean you're seen as a criminal everywhere. If this was a universal rule, should the woman who wrote "Not without my daughter" be sent back to Iran with her daughter, for crimes on Iran?

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

Daniel B.
Linux

This is good, but not for MS

Taking away the freebies means that you'll have less people actually getting the MS stuff for free.

Which means they'll probably learn the LAMP stack first. This is already the case for a lot of students, but now it will be the scenario for SMBs as well. So it is good, because it means there will be a large migration within the SMB space away from Microsoft. Good!

Zynga zinger: Xbox chief bagged as new CEO

Daniel B.

Re: "Mattrick no longer has to worry about how that reorg will affect him"

I'm trying to see if MS is the Titanic or the Hindenburg. I'd say MS is the Titanic, as they're slowly taking in water after crashing against a DRM-shaped, Metro-laced iceberg that hit Win8 and XBoxOne. They're taking in water but the boat still seems safe. Meanwhile Zynga is already flaming and crashing so its demise is very much a given...

Firefox OS starts third-place race against Windows Phone

Daniel B.

Re: But... but...

Yup. I'd think that even ailing Blackberry is probably still in that place.

Jiggy Pennsylvania couple busted by 25 bike cops

Daniel B.
Coffee/keyboard

Gah!

Poor cops, why? WHY? Ok, maybe God sent them there to stop it ... but I'm surprised none of the cops barfed right there...

Prince of Persia: Baggy trousers and curvy swords

Daniel B.
Happy

Re: Is it still playable?

I actually have PoP2 somewhere around my backups. I used to have the PoP1 as well, but unfortunately the floppy disk where that lived was also killed by the NATAS virus.

Never could get to finish PoP2 though ... some of the puzzles aren't obvious, you've been warned!

Daniel B.
Coat

Oh so I did get it!

So I wasn't the only one thinking about Maddness when I read that subtitle!

Judge nixes Microsoft SkyDrive name in BSkyB court ruling

Daniel B.

Re: How long ago?

MS killed Spaces back in 2010, but they already used SkyDrive for a while before that. So it has been out there for quite some time...

Windows 8.1: So it's, er, half-speed ahead for Microsoft's Plan A

Daniel B.

Re: MS shilltime! @Mark 65

The switch I mentioned involved the newfangled "web" platform, which only had about 2 or 3 apps at the time, none of them in .NET, but the push involved deprecating the fugly VB6 apps and building 'em new as web apps. One of the few web apps already in use was done in Java, so it did make sense.

Daniel B.
Linux

MS shilltime!

Bing is an ice cream franchise. That's the first thing that pops up in my mind. Ok, maybe the lame attempt MS did to place their not-Google search engine on the Hawaii 5-0 remake. "Bing it!" (and reading the comments "He said Google wrong!" is hilarious!)

I do have a Hotmail account, but that was mostly used for Messenger ... oh, MS killed that.

They also killed Hotmail, only leaving the addys themselves. Outlook is an anti-brand like Windows these days.

But really, anyone claiming "Microsoft" and "love" in the same sentence is either an MS shill, or has bet the cards on the MS ecosystem, like those devs who only knew .NET and were afraid of the Java switch one of my former employers was planning...

Daniel B.
Trollface

Re: restrained, thoughtful and cerebral debate we can expect.....

well, with The MS-Basher Who Shall Not Be Named now properly banished, there is a decent chance we actually WILL see restrained, thoughtful, and cerebral debate. A very, very SLIM chance but a chance nonetheless...

Unfortunately, the MS shills (no, not the ones that he claimed were shills, the real ones) are still here, so it is just time before one of them makes the retarded arguments pushed by MS shills and blowing up the comment section again.

Though it could be that they're basically the evil version of the Eadon troll, as one of them at least has been trolling the space related articles as well...

Ecuador denies granting asylum, safe passage to Snowden

Daniel B.
Black Helicopters

Indeed

... and that's why there has been a recent trend in Central and South American countries with USA-unfriendly peeps being voted into power. Venezuela's Chavez, Ecuador's Correa, Bolivia's Evo, even the dude who was in Honduras until a coup overthrowed him.

And most of Latin America still remembers that other September 11 ... the one when a CIA-backed coup murdered Salvador Allende and put Pinochet into power.

Yahoo! announces last hurrah of ancient AltaVista search

Daniel B.
Unhappy

AltaVista

So the last of Digital's legacy on the internet dies. Babelfish died a couple years ago, during another cull. Sad to see them go, though AltaVista has mostly been a reskinned Yahoo! for a couple of years anyway. And Yahoo! has sucked for searches anyway, especially now that it is itself a reskinned Bing.

Slowly but surely, Yahoo! is dying.

Live or let dial - phones ain’t what they used to be

Daniel B.
Boffin

Re: Pulse dialling?

Anyone else remember spending ages trying to dial numbers by just clicking the handset rest?

Hell, I remember having a phone stored on memory and doing the reverse process: hearing the clicks generated by the phone, then substracting 1 from the click batches and voila! I have the phone number!

(Ok, if you heard 11 clicks, that was 0.)

Boffin's claim: I have found how to get girls into tech

Daniel B.
Alert

Re: What happens when lies meet real world?

Maybe the issue is the media portraying IT people as nerds, think NCIS, IT Crowd, etc.

Oh so very agreed. (Though NCIS's Abby is someone I'd like to see in IT!) In fact, programs like IT Crowd usually get the laughs at the expense of IT stereotypes. No, IT people aren't 30-somethings that still live with mommy. No, IT people aren't nerds or social outcasts. IT people are pretty aware of pop culture, and aren't unaware of Twilight even if we wish that tripe didn't exist (I'm referencing a specific Criminal Minds episode there).

And no, we don't build a VB GUI to trace an IP.

It seems the media is still taking their stereotypes out of Revenge of the Nerds and forgot that a lot of people are now tech-savvy, that videogames are now played by people in their early 40s, and that IT people aren't separated from the rest of the social world anymore.

Microsoft talks up devices, Windows 8.1 at developer shindig

Daniel B.
Trollface

Re: "Customers who have Windows 8 on touch systems are much happier than other Windows 8 customers"

I suggest you check your bank account, the MS payment should be around six figures by now.

Daniel B.
FAIL

Re: INNOVATION

Who makes the Atom? You know the CPU that runs rings around ARM in fair competitions AND still runs 10+ hours in a 10'' tablet PC (Dell, Lenovo)?

... in a competition where the fine tuning and specs used has not been disclosed, and probably has been skewed to Intel's favor?

Daniel B.
Trollface

Re: I dislike windows 8...

Windows 8 works perfectly well without touch anything, I don't know where this "It needs touch" meme comes from.

Gartner. MS has done the impossible: they proved a Gartner prediction correct.

And no, if MS were to scrap Modern, Win8 would probably start making inroads as expected, instead of sinking the PC market faster.

Daniel B.
FAIL

Re: Argh, more microsoft lies.

If you do not need Modern - then simply do not use it.

Except running anything requires using the Start Screen, which is Modern.

Daniel B.
Boffin

If Ms listened to their customers we'd never have got XP, and we'd probably have never got 95.

Win95 was the first one to actually do a decent ripoff of the System 7 UI. Most customers back then were grateful for this, as it uncluttered the screen compared to 3.1's Program Manager. (Incidentally, Metro looks like a return to that clutter with the Start screen!)

XP worked fine, deactivating the Luna UI could be done as well though I never saw the point of doing so. It didn't interfere with the UI, unlike TIFKAM.

touch-screen mobiles were resisted too.

You talk like this is something of the past. It isn't, some of us still resist touchscreen smartphones.

MS did the research, most of the feedback was "get rid of this toy thing" so they discarded it and pushed it on anyway. They even went for the nuclear option, killing the ability of deactivating Metro in the RC version...

Apple threatens ANOTHER Samsung patent lawsuit

Daniel B.
Trollface

@stephajn

Haven't seen his other posts? He's got Microsoft-phillia.

I myself am a Blackberry user. I'd rather have other alternatives like the Elop-murdered Symbian for a replacement smartphone, but as it stands it seems BB is still the only one that gives me both security and privacy these days, and isn't Yet Another Annoying Microsoap Product.

MSX: The Japanese are coming! The Japanese are coming!

Daniel B.
Boffin

Metal Gear!

I have a well loved Panasonic MSX 2 at home on my desk, mainly for the ability to play the original Metal Gear games.

Heh, the only reason I even know about the MSX computers is precisely because of Metal Gear! Somewhere among my backups I have an MSX2 emulator which I originally got only to play the first two Metal Gear games (somehow, I got hold of a fan translated version of Metal Gear 2!) but I later started monkeying around with MSX-BASIC itself. It was definitely impressive what these computers were able to do, taking into account they're from the late 80's!

ICANN puts Whois on end-of-life list

Daniel B.
Boffin

Still useful...

It serves as at least a way to know who owns a domain, useful sometimes for legal reasons. As others have mentioned, it also serves to weed out spammers.

Really, the decision to axe Whois sounds as dumb as axing DNS altogether: what use is to have DNS if we can't know who's responsible for the domains? Also, ICANN seems to be forgetting that whois is also used for reverse DNS tracking: that's where we get who owns which net blocks. That's even more important...

Chinese 'nauts return to Earth after vigorous space coupling

Daniel B.

Re: You came in that thing?

If you have ever seen an Apollo module, you'd notice they were also cramped. And astronauts had to stay a whole week inside those!

The Orion is basically a bigger version of that, so I'm guessing it's still cramped, but only with more seating.

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

Daniel B.
Happy

Re: used to play Quake and UT all night? @Ledswinger

Talking of old, blocky things, and iD software, who round here remembers being impressed by Doom back in '93? And in fact being genuinely scared whilst playing it?

Phobos Lab. Dark. Spooky soundtrack. GAAAH WHAT IS THAT PINK THING! *fire rocket launcher at point-blank range* *die due to splash damage*

Yes, I'd say that game was the first one that genuinely scared me back in the day! I also managed to pass both Doom1 and Doom2 w/o cheat codes, found them on the 'net 'till a year after I had finished both of 'em.

Daniel B.
Headmaster

Re: Is this low framerate why...

It is written artifact in the US. The other spelling makes my brain coredump as it looks like someone sliced an o out of the Spanish spelling. If you're really going to go into Language Pedant mode, I'd likely note that the British spelling of check as 'cheque' is also a Spanish word. Maybe the colonials were able to preserve some words better being further away from Spain?

Daniel B.
Boffin

Oh you had to ruin your argument.

We've already seen things where technically the better solution is generally rejected, even as recent as the Xbox One digital sharing feature that, amongst others, was dropped.

You had to choose the worst example? We've got x86 vs. RISC, 30/60fps vs. 24fps, full dynamic range audio vs. Dynamic Range Compressed loudness, watching SDTV content in 4:3 vs. "stretch-o-vision" grossness, and you choose the draconian DRM thing as an example?

There's also some detractors that don't like the look of the 48fps The Hobbit film.

This is a much better example. I've heard a lot that >24fps movies look too weird to the human eye. Others say they don't like HD because you can see all the imperfections on the actor's skin or whatever. I'd rather have better image/motion resolution, and yes we should be doing real 60fps filming by now!

Play the Snowden flights boardgame: Avoid going directly to Jail

Daniel B.

Re: Treaties smeeties

The same applies for Ecuador as well. In fact, I'm not sure I'd feel safe *anywhere* within Latin America; until recently, that was the CIA's backyard. Then again, that's why a few US-unfriendly governments have popped up there in recent years as well...

Freed LulzSec hacker banned from contacting Anons, wiping data

Daniel B.
Facepalm

Re: This decision is just absurd

You'd rather have the US system, where rapists get "rehab therapy" while one of the alleged hackers that uncovered evidence that burned them gets 10 years hard time?

Windows 8.1 start button appears as Microsoft's Blue wave breaks

Daniel B.

Re: This thing you call windows

Can't attest for others, but at least Symantec's Corporate AV just won't plain run on Win8. My coworker got stuck with that problem after being suckered into the cheap Win8 upgrade.

Windows 8 hype has hurt PC makers and distributors - Gartner

Daniel B.

Re: Windows 8 hype has hurt PC makers and distributors - Gartner

Didn't Gartner actually say that Windows 8 sucked donkey balls on the Desktop?

Oh yes, they did. More like nobody listened to Gartner, especially Microsoft.

Daniel B.
Thumb Down

Re: Win 8 -- Worse than you thought

As much as someone who is trying to switch to Linux after a horrible Win8 experience does baffle the mind as I'd avoid buying any Win8-loaded gear, I can't blame him on not learning it.

I can definitely learn to eat a turd, but that doesn't mean I want to eat turds. Same applies to Win8.