* Posts by Version 1.0

5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Apollo 13 set off into space 50 years ago today. An ignored change order ensured it did not make it to the Moon...

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Angel

Free Publicity for Major Tom

Apollo 13 did wonders for David Bowie (icon) after the BBC stopped playing Space Oddity because it seemed to be describing the problems in space. Bowie was popular with his fans before that point but not everywhere, he was seen as "weird" but not a hit artist. However once the BBC "banned" the song from the radio, everyone wanted to hear it and then spent a long time trying to figure out the lyrics.

This machine-learning upstart trained software to snare online drug dealers. Now it's going after fake coronavirus test equipment peddlers

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Unhappy

Re: phone scams any time now?

I see scam calls all the time on the answering machines. I just delete them because when you try and report any of these scams, nothing ever happens. You file all the details and then you are told to talk to your lawyer.

RAND report finds that, like fusion power and Half Life 3, quantum computing is still 15 years away

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Happy

Quantum pros and cons

If quantum computing is powerful enough to break all current encryption, then it's also powerful enough to create "unbreakable" encryption in the future. When it first appears it will be expensive so it will only be available to governments, after a couple of years it will be driving phones and cars.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

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Re: I'm far from an expert, but I declare this unsolvable

It's certainly "unsolvable" but I think it opens a few interesting avenues for discussion - and that's why we're both sitting here (self-isolated of course) reading El Reg everyday. As I said earlier, I think that the possibility of a dynamic ran timing error "might" explain it. I read the story and was scratching my head for a while before remembering the old issues designing and building dynamic ram boards.

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Just a guess, TTL timing?

The screen would have been mapped to memory in those days and the DMA disk transfer would have been software, controlling hardware. Memory hardware is significantly affected by timing and the all the memory would have been dynamic RAM storage which is critically affected by timing so if the refresh pulse lags a few micro seconds then a "1" bit might occasionally become a "0" - potentially placing the clock in a certain location could subtly affect the memory refresh for the DMA causing occasional refresh errors when the dynamic memory bus was being pushed very hard in the disk transfer.

As for how she discovered how to make it work - if you are not a geek then you just observe computers, so you just notice that it always works when the screen is set one way - not knowing about the internals doesn't confuse your brain.

Ransomware scumbags leak Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX documents after contractor refuses to pay

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Pirate

Q: I wonder how they did it?

A: You research the target and send them an email that looks like something that they would expect to see and would open quickly. The email probably appear to be from (or might even have been sent from) Lockheed, SpaceX or another existing customer with a request for a new quote, payment details, a security notification, a spreadsheet, a link to a new project website, etc.

Or you hack an employees computer at home and wait for them to log into work - remember that there have been a lot of information leaks like the Equifax leak that mean that the dark side of the web knows who's working for most companies - so you just pick the company that they want to target.

Signal sends smoke, er, signal: If Congress cripples anonymous speech with EARN IT Act, we'll shut US ops

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Meh

Re: If you follow the money

The most likely effect of this bill will be to improve encryption methods.

China's biggest e-learning company admits deliberately getting its sums wrong when counting sales

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Re: 2+2= Whatever number my boss says it is

This has been going on for years, it's standard business. I can remember watching it while doing my company accounts on a VT100 terminal - no dark web, just a slow 1200baud connection delivering an invoice that moved all my profits for the year into a bill for management services at the end of December. All that's happened this time is that one bunch of crooks has stolen money from another bunch of highly paid crooks.

If there's a bustle in your hedge fund, don't be alarmed now, it's just a spring clean for the bosses wages.

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

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Pint

A send-off to remember

Well he'll never forget that! The other side of this is the excellent performance of the pilot after the incident, definitely a very good and highly trained pilot. I'd be willing to bet that the incident is not something that has ever been programmed into a flight simulator.

Linux fans thrown a bone in one Windows 10 build while Peppa Pig may fly if another is ready in time for this year

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Re: Embrace phase is working well.

Installing Windows 10 is like catching an STD but nowhere near as much fun.

Self-driving car LIDAR stalwart Velodyne sued for sacking a third of its staff claiming coronavirus was the cause

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It's America so this is normal - I agree that it's not a good thing to do but the only "rights" that an employee has are the rights to look for another job and, if they feel they need it, buy health insurance.

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Facepalm

Velodyne is not a big company, the government is promising a lot of financial support in the US but the bulk of the money is going to go to large companies who have a large staff of lawyers and accountants to chase the money, plus they will have a record of political contributions to generate high-level support.

Small companies have lawyers and accountants too, but they are very busy running around in circles at the moment just trying to stay in afloat and will be at the bottom of the pile of applications for the financial support. If you are a small company then selling the company may be the only way to stay alive.

Remember too that this is America, the Republicans have cut back on the California emission laws and electric vehicle rebates. The funds are all going to be applied to support large car/truck companies and the oil industry, so Velodyne are not going to see much new business after this mess is over.

Twitter takes away twits' ability to limit ad data sharing – after telling investors its own privacy settings hurt revenue

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Social network feeding grounds

If you are signed up on any social networks then you are just fish on a hook waiting to be cooked and sold.

COVID-19 is pretty nasty but maybe this is taking social distancing too far? Universe may not be expanding equally in all directions

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Joke

So the Universe is a Klein bottle? Well that explains a lot.

The only certain statement that we can make about the universe is that, while we think we understand the universe, all we have to go on is things that we think exist like the Hubble Constant - what's our best guess for a possible value of that today?

Europe calls for single app to track coronavirus. Meanwhile America pretends it isn’t trying to build one at all

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Joke

Re: Given how long it took them to get Brexit finished...

Boris, you are feeling better and posting anonymously here from your hospital bed?

Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy)

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Re: Audio versions

Audio has it's problems too - I love Burnistoun but my wife needs the subtitles.

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Re: Audio versions

A "sidewalk" is what you do when you see someone walking towards you with a very "crosswalk" and shouting at everyone.

Remember Tapplock, the 'unbreakable' smart lock that was allergic to screwdrivers? The FTC just slapped it down for 'deceiving' folks

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Re: IRL

You can get the same strength magnet out of decent hard drive.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 line has had a good run with four years of security updates – but you'll want to trade yours in now

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Meh

Welcome to the modern world

For the manufacturers crappy security design is a feature - endless updates demonstrating that the phone is being used (updates are not anonymous) and then when they pull the plug, a new sale. They would be stupid to design something that worked wouldn't they.

Revenues up, taxes down: Google UK reports its slice of the Chocolate Factory pie

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Unhappy

Quit blaming big companies!

You can blame Google et al all you like but they are not the people who created the taxation system. It's politicians who create the tax system to benefit themselves. Essentially that talk with the corporations and say, "If you support us then we will create a fair tax system ... for you." So the Tories keep getting elected and when they are in power they create "Austerity" and sell off publically owned sections of the economy to their friends.

Catching a train to work these days? Think how much Richard Beeching improved the rail service. Look at how well the NHS is doing now that large sections have be sold off to private enterprise. Big companies are now paying their workers huge increases ... "median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees in the UK were up 2.2% between April 2016 and 2017, rising from £539 to £550" - of course it's much more if you are only earning £12,000 a week.

Time to brush up on current affairs. Because we're predicting Li-ion batt lifetimes using impedance and AI

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Meh

Re: Whilst on this topic..

Laptop chargers are designed to keep the battery charged, nothing else. A dead battery often means a new laptop sale so there's virtually no reason to design a system that extends the battery life. It makes much more economic sense to predict the end of life.

Mozilla plugs two Firefox browser holes exploited in the wild by hackers to hijack victims' computers

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Self Isolation means getting hacked at home

I'm seeing the daily spam count increasing on the corporate mail server, Spam Assassin is getting a lot of exercise. It will be interesting to watch this, it used to be that the spam counts dropped at the weekend and restarted on Monday but then the counts started dropping as the economy slowed down, now they have started climbing back again now.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

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Happy

COBOL is still running

So they have code written 40-50 years ago running fine but now overloaded and probably running on antiquated hardware - I still have an RL02 in the garage if they need some more storage.

So what's the solution? Rewrite the code in Java or Rust? If they do that with today's coding methods do you think that there's any chance that the code will still be running in 40 years? Does anyone think it would even be running in 4 years?

COBOL has a major advantage that it was created for specific business tasks like this, it is significantly self documenting and flexible so it's probably not going to be a big task to maintain the code and update the hardware to support faster access - and still be running the database in 2080 because training new programmers to maintain the code would not be difficult.

NSO Group: Facebook tried to license our spyware to snoop on its own addicts – the same spyware it's suing us over

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Are there any safe networks out there?

I expect that some people are wondering why they didn't use the TOR network, designed to be perfectly safe and anonymous ... but like everything else, it can be cracked too if you have access to a couple of items on the phone. Essentially I think we need to assume that all network communications are vulnerable these days if you are going to use your phone. Sure, the governments are all complaining that they need access to today's "secure" channels but Mandy Rice-Davies applies.

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

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Joke

Re: Meatball

Had the Apollo 13 mission been un-manned then it would have probably been passing Pluto this week, yes, theoretically more science but with no way to get the science back because that wasn't in the design.

But you have a point, had the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria been uncrewed then it would be a different world today.

Why is ransomware still a thing? One-in-three polled netizens say they would cave to extortion demands

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Re: Ransomware Aftermath

And even if the system is sanitized and the OS clean reinstalled, the criminals may still own a copy of all the data, your account and passwords etc - this is more significant in business than college.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

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Re: Windows Server 2000

I run FreeBSD, occasionally I reboot it ever year to two ... just to check the the machines power supply restarts.

Fitbit unfurls last new wearable before it's gobbled by Google, right on time for global pandemic lockdown

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100% - I've used a Charge 2 for years and the current version of the app is just horrible. My Android phone did an "update" and effectively downgraded the nice working app with an advertising app.

When the Charge 2 battery finally dies I'll be looking at another company - that's a shame because the device itself is nice but the app is crap.

For the past five years, every FBI secret spy court request to snoop on Americans has sucked, says watchdog

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It's not just the FBI to blame

The FBI was a different organization before 9/11, after 9/11 it was blamed for the governments failures and retasked to virtually abandon criminal investigations and instead move into the "terrorism" world, an area where it had little experience. I expect that once the details of these investigations are released, what we will see is standard police procedures for local criminal investigations being misapplied in an attempt to block terrorism and international political interference.

The problem is not the FBI, it's the governments control over the FBI - for example, we have stop and search laws in the UK, giving the police the right to stop and search anyone anywhere, have you ever seem these applied to stop and search an MP in parliament? The governments give the police the powers but would consider it illegal if it was applied to themselves.

Half of organisations willing to be led into the first circle of hell, or what Dante might call upgrading an ERP system

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Re: Ahem...

A survey of more than 80,000 organisations has found that 53 per cent are looking to upgrade early retirement pay (ERP) systems.

Australian state will install home surveillance hardware to make sure if you're in virus isolation, you stay there

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Devil

Let's have a little fun today

Try this trick documented in El Reg - walk around the neighbourhood and see what happens when "the traffic stops" - you will find out who's actually monitoring your neighbourhood.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

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Re: We don't sell your data

The English language is excellent for statements like this, you can say "We don't sell your data" but then you can do a lot of things with it that fall just outside the statement and have been cleared as OK by the company legal team because they don't meet the definitions of "we", "sell", "your" and "data".

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

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Linux is looking better every day

All Linux has to do is sit there and watch Microsoft shave its sheep and then cook them and eat them.

BT providing free meals to coax its healthy customer support staff back into office as calls rocket amid pandemic

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Pirate

The nice thing about a VPN on the home computer connecting to work is that anything running on the home computer has access to the work network. I expect that the Btc price will rise soon....

Official tailored Swift for Windows support promised in 5.3

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Pint

Re: Swift for ML? That ship sailed a while ago, I think

Another language ... how many languages are people programming in these days? Or should that be "this week" - given the rate at which "new languages" appear, I expect that at some point in the future every programmer will have their own personal language ... a couple of billion computer languages by the end of the century, is that a big deal?

These days most new languages look like C rewritten in a bar with free beer over the weekend.

UK Information Commissioner OKs use of phone data to track coronavirus spread

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Re: Phone isolation

Are you wearing a fitbit or other tracker? Is so then relax, they are tracking you anyway.

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Re: Confused

I have many old SIM cards in old Android phones, no accounts, just Wi-Fi connections but they still connect to the mobile network and permit emergency calls so they are on the map for the corporate trackers and Google, each phone has a unique Google account so I guess it looks like I'm having a party.

Yeah, that Zoom app you're trusting with work chatter? It lives with 'vampires feeding on the blood of human data'

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Looks like the BBC reads El Reg too

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52033217 - Coronavirus: Zoom is in everyone's living room - how safe is it? By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter

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Re: Isn't Zoom what our glorious Government is using?

And corporate hackers can buy it too.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

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Re: Problem with learning parrot fashion

Learning how to do it is one level; Understanding how to do it is a much deeper level.

Google warns against disabling websites during Coronavirus pandemic

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Website owners warn Google

Google, now that most people are playing games and watching videos on-line, this would be a good time to fix your crappy search algorithms and actually make google search work again instead of just serving up vaguely relevant adverts.

Lockdown ain't easy. And that's without snoring, burping, hair-shedding seals outside your house

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30 minutes of Thick Air

They should make a recording, then walk to the South pole and record 30 minutes of Clean Air...

From Gmail to Gfail: Google's G-Suite topples over for unlucky netizens, rights itself

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Clouds sometime rain

OK, it went down, but it came back up again - that's normal for cloud services, the reality is that they are generally fairly reliable but occasionally there are problems. If you are going to complain about it then go ahead - but complaining just illustrates that you don't understand the world. Have you never had your home PC fail to boot up or the TV just show a dot in the middle of the screen (or these days just a line from top to bottom)?

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

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Re: This is a common issue with open source and consulting firms

In general, releasing or maintaining open source generates zero income so there's no backup plan when something like this happens. Before open source came along programmers wrote, supported, and documented the whole damn thing - then open source appeared and programmers found their life a little easier, they moved on to new jobs and were replaced by less skilled people who didn't need to understand everything, they just needed to be able to compile it.

It's like calling yourself a "baker" when all you do is pour a box of mix into a bread machine.

HPE fixes another SAS SSD death bug: This time, drives will conk out after 40,000 hours of operation

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For home users, if you are going to buy a NAS, then buy a pair of them and swap the disks to get non-sequential serial numbers to each NAS.

You can then get a safe network backup by making the second NAS invisible on the network and use rsync to pull an incremental copy of all the data from the visible NAS every night.

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Boffin

That's an example of my rule, "Never attribute a bug to malice when stupidity works" - circular buffers are often treated (and coded) as "easy solutions" when in fact they are complex as soon as you start actually using them.

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When I started building RAID systems, I quickly discovered that you should not buy a bunch of disks from the same vendor, always use different batches because otherwise you often get every disk failing within a couple of weeks of each other down the line.

Apple: Relax, we're not totally screwing web apps. But yes, third-party cookies are toast

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I hate cookies

I have Firefox set to "strict" tracking blocking, and delete all cookies and data when I close the browser.

Well, Zuckerberg did promise India it hadn't seen the last of Facebook. How do you say they're BAAACK in Hindi?

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"U/S Help" makes more sense in the UK than the rest of the world, when I started working with yanks and marking all the broken gear sent in for repair as U/S they always got so pissed.

No, the head of the World Health Organization has not emailed you – it's a message laced with malware

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I hadn't thought of that, when I was in China for a month, a year ago, I don't remember seeing a single fly anywhere. The trouble is that these days when you point out something like this, the social mediaidiots will be posting that the reason you don't see flies is because the Chinese eat them.

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us