* Posts by Version 1.0

5376 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Oregon city courting Google data centers fights to keep their water usage secret

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Re: Perspective: Red Oak centre's water

I've been wondering for a while now how much energy is needed for our "easy" cloud storage - creating data locally, transmitting it a distance, storing it and then accessing it instantly means that there's a hell of a lot of storage working all the time somewhere, and potentially backed up somewhere else too ... you think that might need a little energy?

Climate change is coming - maybe the clouds need to move.

Xiaomi has developed a mini heat pipe so your smartphone doesn't get too hot to handle

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This is just climbing away from climate change

It would be better to dig deeper into the phones and make them work more efficiently and generate less heat.

No day in court: US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings will stay a secret

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Re: Tax dollars at work

Yes, Tax dollars at work ... but increasing Malware attacks are making everyone try to be a lot more cautious although I wonder who has the most data, the NSA or Google?

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

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Re: Nobody dares ?

An easy fix to to buy a new laptop that will run Windows 11 and plan to buy another one in a couple of years to run Windows 12 ... but if this is a good fix then you might make more money by investing in Microsoft shares instead of buying a new laptop.

Feeling the pinch? How about a 160% hike in your data centre fees

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Unhappy

Re: Costs are rising everywhere

Sure the standards are not changing much yet but every corporation now needs to create a complete new set of documentation and testing verification to comply with the standards requirements to make products available in both the EU and the UK. You can't just copy a file and rename it.

Your response indicates that you have no clue how regulations in each country require that "standards" are verified and documented.

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Facepalm

Costs are rising everywhere

M247's daily costs are probably mostly energy and wages but hopefully that are also keeping all the data secure and protected which adds a significant cost too.

And now they need to demonstrate compliance with standards everywhere since they are a UK company, not just a European company meeting EU standards - we have taken control of everything so now everyone needs to pay for all the work that needs to be done to demonstrate that products meet all the standards. But tell users that it's related to Brexit and the Brexiters will run around screaming, so it's commercially better to just say it's an energy cost increase.

So it is possible for Jeff Bezos to lose: Court dismisses Blue Origin complaint about Moon contract award to Elon Musk

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I'd rather see NASA do the work

Back in the old days NASA engineers did the work and fixed problems repeatedly very well - but these days the work is sold to private individuals companys so the work gets done and someone's going to make a nice profit. People are complaining about a $2B "bribe" but the contract winner will just "donate" to the next president ... essentially bribes and political donations are pretty much the same thing in the UK ... and the UK too.

Cisco warns 'unintentional debugging credential' left in some network switches can be abused to hijack equipment

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I've been using pFSence at home and at work for years now, pFSense was excellent until NetGate took it over, the last two "updates" have resulted in having to reboot every device connected to it.

22-year-old Brit accused of Twitter SIM-swap heists charged with $784k cryptocurrency theft

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Joke

So what's "FA" mean?

Did he use 2FA so that everyone he hacked believed that they were secure? I expect this will need to evolve to protect everyone more efficiently ... running some checks I'm seeing that 8FA is very secure although it does take a while.

Australian cops find cocaine stash in PS5 from Portugal

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Re: State of the world

"Good mornin', Mr. Benson, I see you're doing well ..." (Candyman).

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Re: State of the world

What we've seen happen locally is the dealer gets busted and the cops then cut the proceeds, charging the dealer with the original weight and making a profit by sell the original uncut 2/3 to their friends.

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Facepalm

Re: State of the world

So that's A$231 per gram ... clearly Cocaine would now be at the same investment level as bitcoin over the years. I always see cops making these ridiculous drug valuations everywhere - the police find it so much more effective to lie about the prices of items than actually tell the truth.

Cops are much smarter criminals than the ones they arrest and jail.

Remember the 'guy in a jetpack' seen flying close to passenger jets? Probably just balloons, says FBI

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Re: More evidence

The pilot is not flying around to identify any other things in the air, the pilots' job is to avoid hitting things in the air and landing safely - so the pilot did a darn good job. Sure hitting a balloon would not have been a big issue but hitting a drone or jetpack guy would be a serious issue - the pilot didn't hit anything.

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

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Unhappy

'Either Google is screwed, or society is screwed'

So where are we going? Fraud is normal these days, should we start prosecuting people who are not sending out phishing emails regularly? I remember seeing a phishing email about 20 years ago ... weird, I got another one later that year. Today my junk folder is full of phishing attempts and every day I see about half a dozen email "from" the mail server administrator telling me that I need to verify my password ... wait a moment, the phone's ringing...

...

...

...

Oh, my cars warranty has expired ... that's odd because it's a 12 year old car.

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Re: Wishful thinking

Effectively Google owns the Internet and Facebook owns the content. Your corporate website must meet Googles' requirements if you want it to be found by users searching for your products and you have to pay Facebook for adverts, otherwise they will sell your referances to your competitors.

So corporations are just food for Google and Facebook - compare this to the world and corporations are cows and sheep, users are just grass.

Real-time crowdsourced fact checking not really that effective, study says

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Re: Forget about the lonely asshat

To the general media out there "Fake News" is irrelevant, what's important to them is generating income from the ads shown to all the users reading the posting, whether it's fake or accurate. In general you see far more users reading fake news than real news so the average news site makes a lot more from stupid people than smart people.

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Re: all the way to the moon and back

No, that was Sopwith Camel singing Monkeys on the Moon, "It used to be so peaceful in space, now there's hard rock all over the place" :-)

Trick or treat? Massive solar storm could light up American skies this Halloween

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Alien

What's for breakfast?

Will they send William Shatner up again with some bread and marmalade to hold the bread to the windows and make some toast?

Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

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The first fax machines were great!

I had it setup on the same line as the modem that I used to remote access PDP-11's to support our customers and every time there was a local lightening strike (this was Florida so lightening was very common) the fax machine died but the modem was fine - that was a very helpful feature for my end-user support efforts.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

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Re: Prediction:

Users are all Meta now, actually that's a typo, we're all just Meat now, Zuck will be having us for lunch.

Renewal chasing as-a-service is now a thing – and vendors love it

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Unhappy

Re: How does that work with spam filters and fraud prevention?

Spam and fraud is normal - our corporate mail-server flags about 95% of all email as potential spam - I expect that the only change we'll see soon is that spam and fraud will increase to 99% and we'll quit supporting telephones because 80% of all calls attempt to tell us about issues with our recent purchase of 10 iPhones via Amazon or notify us that the cars warranties have ended.

First, stunning whistleblower leaks. Now a shareholder lawsuit lands on Zuckerberg's desk

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Initially Facebook monitored all the posts and canceled the ones that they didn't like, but then the Republicans protested that Facebook was just a bunch of left-wingers and were attacking "free-speech". This lead to Facebook abandoning their monitoring of posts and bought us to the current situation but made them a lot more money.

Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims

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Meh

What we never hear about

It would be very helpful if we heard how these ransomware infections were administered - most of the time these days it's done by sending the target lots of emails that they think they must open and read, but we never hear how this is being done, only that it "worked" - one factor that I see is that weather makes us a target. We had a cold front go through yesterday with only a couple of inches of rain and a few tornadoes but our virus deliveries went up about 800% locally ... tons of neworder.pdf.exe files, but if the NRA were a target then they probably started getting emails offering to "provide" details of Biden's sexual corruption and Chinese share ownership.

It might help everyone if the infection attempt methods were documented, not just the results.

Teen bought Google ad for his scam website and made 48 Bitcoins duping UK online shoppers

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Childcatcher

Re: Will he get a job offer?

Were you in a Public School and his parents owned a £12,000 system in the house theater?

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Re: Will he get a job offer?

Remember the earliest documented bitcoin transactions ... the guy who had created a bitcoin used it to buy a pizza!

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Will he get a job offer?

I expect he'll start seeing job offers from Facebook soon - clearly he has a good understanding of the current way the world works.

Yes, he committed a crime but a lot of time kids are just playing on the Internet without any expectation of massive profits like that.

China Telecom booted out of USA as Feds worry it could disrupt or spy on local networks

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Re: Sharing is caring

So all the exploits are Chinese and we're not talking about the Russians doing anything? All these reactions are just politics ... it doesn't matter which country you are - the world is full of countries trying to fiddle around the world.

America's pissed with China but who thinks that American is doing nothing out there?

Facebook's greatest misses: The five nastiest bits from recent leaks

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Meh

So how did this start?

Remember in the early days Facebook was checking all the posts and eliminating post that their monitors thought were bad ... but then a political party started to complain that all their supporters posts were being deleted and that Facebook was being undemocratic. The Facebook response was to fire most of the monitoring staff and replace them with AI ... the political party that started all the complaints was very happy.

Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote AMP, claims new court document

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Re: News at 10.

These days Alphabet owns the Internet and Google owns the advertising industry. All of these changes were sold as "helping users" but they never mentioned it was helping usrs share their lives with Google, Remember the old "Don't be Evil" ... so now it's virtually just "Don't be REvil."

Apple's Safari browser runs the risk of becoming the new Internet Explorer – holding the web back for everyone

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Joke

Re: I have encountered specific instances of Safari not implementing certain standards correctly…

Standards are so helpful, we all need a lot more of them every week.

Facebook sues scraper who sold 178 million phone numbers and user IDs

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Zuck needs to F.O.C.U.S.

Windows XP@20: From the killer of ME to banging out patches for yet another vulnerability

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Boffin

Re: at least in XP you could easily revert to the win 2k interface

We keep being told that it's an upgraded operating system but the major changes are just the GUI - any well written program that runs on Windows XP still runs fine on all the versions up to Windows 10, these days - although often slightly slower than the original operating system environment.

The explanation for this environment is that the early Microsoft Windows operating system (not the GUI) evolved from Windows NT, written by Dave Cutler who had developed the DEC RSX11M operating system which is an amazingly functional, real-time, multi-user, operating system that worked extremely well. and hugely better than virtually every other OS in the 70's.

Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

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Happy

Re: I don't see hardcore photos on the streets ...

LOL, I was on Sand Key Beach in Florida back in the days when you had a walk about a mile up a path to get there and it was always full of naked people. After a few hours on the beach the coast guard showed up just off shore and everyone covered themselves up with towels or put their cloths back on ... the coast guard got on the horn and told us that we were committing a crime because we were all naked underneath our towels so everyone ran off - there was no way the coast guard could get ashore to do anything because the water was too shallow. About half the people showed back again when the coast guard took off to check on another beach.

Recycled Cobalt Strike key pairs show many crooks are using same cloned installation

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Here's a complete list of unhackable software

err ...

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

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Joke

DAB is much easier to use than my first radio-set when I was a kid, fiddling with the crystal all the time was a pain - eventually my dad brought me a transistor and I fixed the problems.

US drops tariff threat against nations who dished out digital taxes to American tech giants as OECD members hash out new deal

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Actually it's companies everywhere - I expect that the new tax agreement will just result in new paperwork that "shows" the companies made no taxable income locally but moves the income in un-taxed areas. I wonder if a universal tax environment will result in the current corporate giants simply eradicating all potential competitors with facebook style takeovers, worldwide. Is this a new "oven-ready" deal?

Research finds consumer-grade IoT devices showing up... on corporate networks

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Re: News at 9....

Excellent - at least they found the consumer-grade IoT devices on corporate networks, I wonder how many are on networks and nobody has even looked for them?

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And the "corporate firewall" vs the home firewall in your access point? Normally a lot more than 20x.

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Re: News at 9....

And when your phone connects to the work notwork? (sic)

Unhappy customers and their own tricks used against them, REvil ransomware gang reportedly pulled offline by 'multi-country' operations

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Joke

Re: REvil's downfall

I'm guessing that law enforcement sent REvil a malware infection to take control of their systems, but I would bet that REvil have backups so let's watch out for the future, will a new gang called livER appear sending out app to run on systems to "prevent" infections called "Ma Lawer" ....

China to crush secondary market providing forbidden gaming accounts to kids

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Happy

Re: been there

I imposed a ban on Computer game playing after spending nearly an entire day every week playing Adventure back in those days ... I totally stopped wasting time at work after my ban went into effect.

I did not impose the same ban on my family but I did tell them about my gaming addiction problems - I thought the weird thing was that I'd grown up inhaling and ingesting a huge variety of fun things (I still remember Orange Sunshine - icon) as a teenager but I never had any addition issues at all until I installed Adventure on my PDP-11 at work in the early 80's.

Facebook fined £50m in UK for 'conscious' refusal to report info and 'deliberate failure to comply' during Giphy acquisition probe

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"This should serve as a warning to any company that thinks it is above the law."

Facebook believes that it is the law - when I tried to sign up and create a Facebook account in 2007 it rejected my attempts so I called them to try and sort out the problem. I was told that Facebook would prosecute me if I tried to create an account again - I was using my real name but they told me that I was a faker tried to create a fake account because my family name was not a real name.

I was pissed off at the time but now I'm happy that social media rejected me.

India's big four services giants wrestle with staff attrition amid COVID-19 pandemic

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Re: So just contract it out

Could this explain why our malware deliveries and server login attempts have dropped so much recently?

Lunar rocks brought to Earth by China's Chang'e 5 show Moon's volcanoes were recently* active

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Re: There is obviously only one explanation:

Each time samples come back from the moon they suggest that the theoretical impact on the Earth by the mystery planet Theia may have resulted in the moon's creation in the early Solar System days.

Not just deprecated, but deleted: Google finally strips File Transfer Protocol code from Chrome browser

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Re: "frankly, Google and pals would rather users opted for a dedicated transfer app"

It's going to be sold as "an upgrade" ... they are upgrading their access to our data.

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

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Re: It doesn’t need a new name

Maybe, but he seems to be very floppy so his "functionality" is limited.

UK competition watchdog unveils principles to make a kinder antivirus business

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Devil

Re: compliance principles to curb locally some of the sharper auto-renewal practices

I continually see emails notifying me that my McAfee and Norton automatic renewing contracts have been charged to my credit card ... normally only about $1200 each. Every email contains a link to follow from the sender(icon) if I want to cancel the payment - I wonder if the UK competition watchdog is getting these emails too?.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

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Joke

Welcome to America

A lawsuit like this is normal in the US, but if you want to laugh and you're in the UK then read the story again and replace "Cannon" with "Brexit" selling a device that was designed by the Tory levelers and doesn't work quite the same way it was sold as.

Microsoft called out as big malware hoster – thanks to OneDrive and Office 365 abuse

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Re: Same for Phishing Attacks

I see items arrive in the Junk Mail folder that the email server has scanned and thought were clean - only a couple of days later when the AV software has been updated about a dozen times it finally detects an infection attempt in the junk mail folder.

We don't blame Facebook for posting stupid social media "information" - we just say that people are stupid for reading it. So we're not going to blame Onedrive for storing malware, we will only blame people for downloading it.

El Reg - can I have a wire-cutter icon for my posts please?

Give us your biometric data to get your lunch in 5 seconds, UK schools tell children

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Technology costs money and always causes problems from time to time.

It would be much easier and cost less if we just returned to the days when the schools just fed all the kids lunch.

If this proposal is a good scheme then do you think that they will use it in Westminster or Downing Street?