* Posts by Fred Flintstone

3106 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2009

Suspected crypto-coin crook collared after emailing apology note to the cops rather than victim – shock claim

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Re: If this is first-degree identity theft,

what are second- and third-degree identity theft, inquiring minds want to know.

I suspect this is what you get if you steal the identity from an identity thief (no, not HIS identity, one that he has stolen - just to be clear), a sort of a legal version of the Siphonaptera.

:)

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

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Re: Alternatively,

Just paint all of Britain safety orange--problem solved!

Alas. The Americans did that with their president, and that hasn't helped either..

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

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Re: That's horrible. - Bling status matters!

I vaguely recall a story from Amsterdam where someone locked their bicycle with an expensive, shiny lock, and the bicycle was still there when they returned.

The lock, however..

That rather appealed to my sense of humour :).

US soldier cleared of taking armoured vehicle out for joyride – because he's insane, court says

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Coat

Re: So...

Personally I think arming bears is the more sane option given the current outcomes.

Ah, you may have stumbled upon the reason why there are more and more occurrences of bears coming into town. Ergo, the way to fix that would be to put a gun shop out in the woods.

Wow, another mystery solved. Coffee?

Eighty-year-old US 'web scam man' on the run after pocketing $250,000 in Dem 'donations'

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Re: Mmm, changed name once, how 'bout I change country?

Ah, you mean doing a Monsanto? Yes, not a bad idea.

Call me Smith from now on.

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Re: Profit!

That's what I thought as well, he's still $150k up :).

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

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That reminds me a bit of Psycho the rapist :)

Tor pedos torpedoed again, this time Feds torpedo four Tor pedos – and keep how they unmasked dark-web scumbags under wraps

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Re: Keeping mum

LOL, I haven't heard that once since Gary Glitter :)

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Re: Is it really an issue ?

Because that would expose how they do it?

Plot twist: Google's not spying on King's Cross with facial recognition tech, but its landlord is

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Re: Memo to Self

I'm sure that Google won't be far behind with getting access to the Facial recognition feeds.

I think you can be pretty certain there's already a Cat 7 running from that rack to one that says "Google", there's a strong smell of nudge nudge, wink wink culture in all of this. It may even be why they went there in the first place - yummie live feeds to experiment with..

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Re: "... sophisticated systems in place to protect the privacy of the general public."

Failing that, happy to help out with a pair of side cutters.

It would be interesting to get an official opinion from the ICO in this, and they can't form that until they have investigated in full WTF is going on with the data that is gathered there. In short, it stinks.

If we constrain police operated cameras already (or try to, let's be honest), a private operator should be so tied up in red tape they should not even dare to think about misusing that information but at present they could be reselling it to all and sundry - nobody would know.

Thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening as loo shatters, embedding porcelain shards in wall

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Was that in "Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall"? Wonderful book. I'll have to read it again some day, if I can find it.

Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Docx & Doc support?

I don't see anything about improved docx or ms doc support. There are bugs to do with styles even after conversion on import or on Save As.

You've not been reading the release notes then.

Neuroscientist used brainhack. It's super effective! Oh, and disturbingly easy

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Re: Facebook with brain hacking capability ? Run for the hills.

That is a terrifying concept.

Nah, I'm not that worried. Once you have those interfaces, you also have the means to develop training in counter strategies - after all, that's the very concept behind neurofeedback and the brain is quite plastic when it comes to adaptation to new circumstances.

Yes, it's another arms race, but I for one don't tend to give up without a fight. With my very twisted and dark sense of humour, giving any AI access to my neurons will most likely render it suicidal.

Or addicted :).

I miss him already, says judge as Mike Lynch's court marathon ends

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Re: Thinking of the poor children ..

As this trial is being held in the UK can we have witness box please? I regard "stand" as an imported abomination.

OK, but then someone will definitely have to take the stand. If you don't remove it there will be no space for the witness box.

:)

Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – report

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Re: So...

Owww, that's very dark indeed.

Well done.

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Limited Authority vs Full Authority. They're different.

The MCAS kit as originally specified was allegedly intended to have a limited-authority (maybe 25% of jackscrew travel, or something like that??) one-shot effect on a flight control surface. Perhaps in those circumstances it *might* just about have been acceptable to not have much resilience designed in (but the system might also have not had the authority to achieve the intended effect either).

I may be mistaken, but from what I picked up this is a wider issue than just MCAS - this concerns the overall flight control computers which makes the issue considerably more ugly as it concerns overall flight redundancy.

Thanks for the detailed explanations, by the way, very educational.

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

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Re: Some research is indicated

.. which would immediately get hacked, just to prove a point.

Never tangle with people who combine skill and a sense of humour :).

Pi in the sky as ESA starts testing encrypted comms on International Space Station

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Isn't that a bit drastic?

OK, I know the Pi 4 has a heat problem, but sticking it in spaaaaace to keep it cool is a tad excessive IMHO.

Even in the hallowed tradition of totally overengineering a solution.

:)

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: without subdomains in the omnibox how can I...

Only for picking the right thermometer..

:)

Fix LibreOffice now to thwart silent macro viruses – and here's how to pwn those who haven't

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

In MacOS you have a tickbox "Show all filename extensions" in Finder - Preferences - Advanced which is (if I recall correctly) by default unticked. I don't know this for sure because I always want to see them so that's been on from the day I started with MacOS.

That said, maybe someone can cook up some mischief using the fact that dotfiles (files starting with a ".") are still hidden, irrespective of extensions, something I believe to be true for Linux as well (it's the Unix way of hiding files).

If you try to save a file with a name like .test.odf LO will tell let you, but will also tell you that it will become invisible. On resume it loads fine, but you have to use a command line to mess with it - Finder won't see it.

It's official: Deploying Facebook's 'Like' button on your website makes you a joint data slurper

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This is *news* ?!?

This is not a slight on El Reg, more on the fact that it's taken that long for anyone to flag this in a manner that gets it to court because that's been known for, well, almost as long as FB (and the rest of the asocial bunch) have been spreading these trackers.

There's another fun one floating around: a web developer is selling code that gets you logged with Google Analytics, even if you have it filtered out. In my opinion, that so much misses the point that the idiots deserve an educational court appearance too.

Apple techies analyzing Siri recordings may have heard you unzipping and bonking – plus more

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Re: This!

You can have your own back.

Just encourage people to name their kids Siri or Alexa and sit back wille Apple and Amazon tear their hair out too.

:)

Google pays out $13m to make Wi-Spy scandal go away: Bung goes to peeps and privacy orgs

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Re: Not enough

Nah, paying is too much of a get-out, that just becomes a rounding error in the accountant's spreadsheet.

I'm all for the return of tar & feathers, or, more animal friendly, tar and glass fibre insulation. Without underwear.

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Not enough

Nah, the phrase is simply incomplete.

The full sentence is "Don't be evil to our shareholders"..

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Has anyone told Barr that "going dark" isn't related to skin colour? Just in case?

Chrome on, baby, don't fear The Reaper: Plugin sends CPU-hogging browser processes to hell where they belong

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Pint

Re: Full fat or skimmed

Love it :)

Office 365 verboten in Hessen schools: German state bans cloudy Microsoft suite on privacy grounds

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Re: Has the PATRIOT Act been repealed ?

The Patriot Act is not really your problem, the Cloud Act 2018 is as there are far fewer barriers to application.

The Cloud Act 2018 allows US courts to demand data of US companies, irrespective of which jurisdiction it is stored in. Obviously that totally ignores sovereignty or the fact that the company in question then will be in breach of local privacy laws, but the US habitually ignores the existence of the rest of the planet when it formulates law.

In context it may be important to note that the main Silicon Valley protagonist in the creation of this law ..

.. was Microsoft.

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Just like divorces, there's rarely a good outcome for all.

So now more just a PF then (minus the "Y")?

Huawei website ████ ██████ security flaws ██████ customer info and biz operations at risk: ███████ patched

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Any worse than Cisco?

I think we must be careful to meet every message about Huawei with comments about Cisco.

Yes, Cisco has its own problems and I would not trut them either, but bringing that up every time is whatabouterism that doesn't help the discussion.

I would much rather that some more pressure is brought to bear on Huawei to make them understand why disclosure (post fix) is A Good Thing™ and if they can't do it just yet (for instance, because they suspect there's still a decent volume of unpatched gear out there) they should consider setting a deadline - also because that could encourage the laggards to get on with updating.

They've had a good boost from the US government to move into a controlled disclosure model that makes them more trusted than US gear, but it appears they're still on a learning curve. Talking about the competition is only going to provide excuses for the executive team not to go all the way.

Yorkshire bloke's Jolly Roger flag given the heave-ho after council receives one complaint

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Section B, bullet point 1 - it's a house flag

.. which would be the whole point of this flag.

Nice one :).

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Hang a piece of cloth on a pole and someone will complain about it, I think.

Rats, I need to install a line for my laundry then. Although, it could be fun to see how long it would take for a pair of boxer shorts on a pole to be reported. Hmmm.

:)

White House mulls just banning strong end-to-end crypto. Plus: More bad stuff in infosec land

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Ah, the ever persistent cycle of bad ideas..

Is it 7 years already? That seems to be the average time that bad ideas are taken off the shelf, dusted off, given a bit of polish and presented as absolutely new and revolutionary without ANY, and I mean ANY consideration to the logic behind the idea or why it didn't happen 7 years ago either.

In this case, lowering encryption quality. This is one of the easiest to translate into real world equivalents: are you really proposing that we should use cheap, badly working locks for our houses to help fight crime? Even the fact that it is at least different to the NO locks idea (backdoors) is not enough to make it acceptable, no, wait, let me call a spade a spade: it's utterly boneheaded stupid.

Honestly, the mere fact that some idiot deems it safe to table such an idea again is a red flag.

In certain governments, due to turnover, there is apparently one appointed every minute.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Wrong career...

Yes, you would have made a killing.

No, wait ..

:)

Queue baa, Libra: People will buy what Facebook's selling. They shouldn't, but they will

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Re: Half the population—

Not a problem - I know from experience that it's a lot to take in if this is the first time you're exposed to it.

It took me a while to get over the WTF feeling when I discovered just how good this tech is. I forgot to mention something: molten salt is a critical element of what makes a Thorium reactor so efficient because the resulting liquid is used both to carry the heat and to carry the thorium for recycling - it's that cycle that enables a Thorium reactor to actively use over 99% of its fuel (that's why MSR is certain to be a Thorium reactor, doesn't make sense for Uranium based fission).

The other fun fact with MSR is that it needs the graphite in the core to sustain a reaction, not to dampen it down as in the current reactors. You take the graphite away and fission stops, which is why they are so safe: if something goes wrong, the reactor contents will dump in a lower container. Due to the absence of the graphite required to sustain the reaction, the thing just stops. You just end up with a slowly cooling box in the basement (which, by the way, you could probably put back in use in a new reactor). No radioactive kaboom due to explosively expanding steam (there isn't any in the radioactive part), no meltdown because of a now unregulated reaction, no new hole in the ground where even robots have a hard time going.

I suspect that iiIf it wasn't for the fact that the specific salt in use is the mother of corrosiveness on materials, these reactors would have come online way before, but they have only "recently" (last couple of years) managed to address this.

Anyway, keep an eye on it - there are some seriously heavy political side effects to being able to generate energy on teh cheap without a need for fossil fuel or permission, and some will involve buggy whip manufacturers who may scheme like mad to hang on to their business..

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Half the population—

I did not know about these. Made me very angry to read that cleaner sustainable nuclear was ignored in favour of the dirtier more unstable method for the pursuit of a weapon that arguably ended WW2.

Ah, slow down. That's the cynical view, but there's a bit more to it. At the time, they had to take a decision and the view was that there was already more expertise on the uranium approach. With the knowledge they had at the time, the feeling was that they would have quicker results and it would be safer because they knew more. The kaboom factor certainly counted, but there were more considerations.

However, once this industry had embedded itself it did what all industries do: it protected itself against competition. One of the reasons it is now nigh impossible to run Thorium test reactors for research is because of regulation. If you want a Thorium reactor of a size large enough to get meaningful results in the US, you would get more energy from burning the associated paperwork. They made it pretty much impossible.

European nations are actively collaborating with China and India on research. The latter two see these reactors as a way to cut both pollution and national energy expenditure which will make them even more competitive on the global stage, and Europe is riding along as it too has a power and pollution problem that needs to be solved.

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Half the population—

The molten salt SMRs in the report are Thorium based - you will also find it back in current reporting on international collaborations such as taking place between Europe and China in the Taishan plan which was ready before all the other participants. There's a part of that at Hinkley Point too.

I can't quite see any solid fuel (pebble) based reactors being tested, but I haven't looked that hard.

It's a good thing there's a lot of international collaboration on this, but the harsh reality is that China has presently the best manufacturing capabilities plus a seriously good incentive to get on with it as it helps a lot with their pollution issues. Anything that cuts down on fossil fuels is a win there, also because it cuts costs and dependency.

Where it gets interesting is that these modern reactors start to change the price equation. Nuclear energy has not been cheap due to fuel inefficiency, the need for extreme long storage of waste and all the safety measures that have emerged to barely cope with degradation and calamities.

These new reactors, however, use stupidly cheap fuel that is nigh ubiquitous and cheap to prep (so no natural resource blackmail required), and actually use some of that very dangerous original nuclear waste to get the reaction going, turning it into something with a much lower halflife, and they fail safe due to different operating principles. They're also much smaller, which makes them suitable for point solutions where previously nobody would have even considered a nuclear reactor.

The result is clean continuous energy at a competitive price point, based on a resource that is nigh impossible to exhaust. The one place where this will not be welcomed is in the country that relies on oil sales in their national currency to prop it up: the US dollar. They're *not* going to be happy with that..

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: As a Facebook refusenik I see a time when

Thanks!

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

To me, the line on the bigger Mercedes models all make me think of hearses, which is weird because I haven't see a hearse in ages.

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Half the population—

Judging by the report "Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System" by the IEA, I think power generation is no longer an issue with the first Thorium based reactors coming online as early as late this year..

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Unless FB is in my mattress

This was already doing the rounds when Usenet was still useful and given many recent events, it appears still as true as ever:,

I work for an investment bank. I have dealt with code written by stock exchanges. I have seen how the computer systems that store your money are run.

If I ever make a fortune, I will store it in gold bullion under my bed.

- Matthew Crosby

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: The Day the World Went Away

Now I have an image of Miley Cyrus butchering Cliff Richard in my head.

Sssssh - don't say anything, I'm savouring that one.

Be with you in an hour or so.

:)

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: As a Facebook refusenik I see a time when

all Facebook (and associated domains, over 1,500)

Sounds useful, is there a list somewhere I could access?

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

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Thumb Up

Re: Facebook

And nothing of value was lost.

Need. more. upvotes..

:)

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Six more months of RSI then..

No, no, no, Repetitive Stain Injury, without the "r".

:)

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

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Re: "smarter lighting in every way"

.. aaaaand here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Comment of the Week.

Congratulations!

:)

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Just that Powerpoint doesn't actually improve anything.

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Whale farming

LOL, I was just wondering how we could add a "Price of Whales" measurement, and what it would represent.