* Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

2711 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

ElReg!comments!Pierre

billion-dollar business that comprises of nothing but others' confidence that it is worth something.

To be honest that is an accurate description of the whole stock exchange system.

Sad SACK: Linux PCs, servers, gadgets may be crashed by 'Ping of Death' network packets

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: So, not great, not terrible

As for me I'm moving to Kolibri. Much cleaner than all this text file nonsense : all you need to tweak the OS is a bit of assembly coding.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

ElReg!comments!Pierre

In a previous life it was more like 80 hrs for each working for 12 years straight (and barely any vacation at all). I've taken more days off in 2018 than in the previous 6 years combined ! Yay for carreer changes.

Captec saps tech from Aleutia to put its tiny PCs back to work

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I'm glad I never heard of them, I'd certainly bought a couple for roles that I now devoted to Raspis with great success.

Nice little machines for sure.

That magical super material Apple hopes will hit backspace on its keyboard woes? Nylon

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Pro

That's not new and not limited to Apple. Pro now means "top tier personal". Good examples include MSWindows (Pro for consumers, Buisness for professional use) or indeed the PS4 Pro.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Flame

Well, they DO make degradable carrier bags

The buggers are a PITA, too, if you are in the habit of reusing your shopping bags as garbage bags.

Here's what Autonomy told its salesmen they were allowed to do

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: It begins with H and ends with E and is 8 letters long:

habitude, hackable, hackette, hairlike, hairline, hairwove, halazone, halflife, halfpace, halfpipe, halftime, halftone, halicore, halidome, halimote, hamulate, hamulose, handlike, handmade, handsome, hangable, hangfire, harambee, harangue, hardbake, hardcase, hardedge, hardface, hardline, hardnose, hardwire, harelike, harplike, hateable, hawklike, hawknose, headache, headcase, headgate, headline, headnote, headrace, headrope, healable, healsome, hearable, heatable, heatwave, hebetate, hebetude, hebraize, hegumene, hellfire, hellhole, hellkite, helotage, helpable, helpline, helpmate, hematine, hematite, hemipode, hemocyte, hemolyze, hemplike, henhouse, hepatise, hepatite, hepatize, herblike, herdlike, heritage, herniate, herolike, hesitate, hetaerae, hexamine, hexylene, hiccatee, highlife, highrise, hillside, hireable, hittable, hivelike, holdable, holesome, holocene, holotype, holydame, holytide, homelike, homemade, homepage, homesite, homicide, hominine, hominize, homodyne, homotype, homuncle, honeybee, hoodlike, hooflike, hooklike, hooknose, hooplike, hornlike, hornpipe, horologe, horrible, hoselike, hosepipe, hothouse, hotplate, huarache, huggable, huisache, humanise, humanize, hummable, huntable, hurtable, husklike, hylobate, hymnlike, hyoscine, hyperope, hypnotee, hypobole, hypogene.

Found it !

The curious case of Spamhaus, a port scanning scandal, and an apparent U-turn

ElReg!comments!Pierre
FAIL

PS: Re: For the love of..

By any chance do you still have the reject message from that? That would be very interesting to see.

No, I don't. I tend not not collect trash for the fun of it. I have no doubt that you would be very interested in a free audit of your broken model. I -and many here, I suspect- can provide test cases, logs and stats from a variety of systems both senders and receivers. At a price.

Anyway, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the matter might tell you, the "reject message" would be of no interest at all since it's configured by the receiver. Unless you're trying to pinpoint which of your clients let slip that you are the cause of an abusive block, with potentially disastrous consequences. I understand that it would be damaging for your extortion-based business model. In my case the message was something about my IP being listed in some SpamHaus blocklist. It wasn't even in any of the many, many, many languages easily understood by "worldwide" SH operatives, like US English, US Ingrish or US English_Indian -optionnally US English_Boston_Litterary, US English_Southern_States or US English_Midwest but these may carry a surcharge. (none of them a problem for me, but still a concern).

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: For the love of..

They must have been sitting there waiting for you

The great thing about over-automation is that noone has to be sitting there at all. The automated system sees a direct-to-mx from a yahoo account to one of their customers, blam, IP blocked.

The main metric used by SpamHaus and their ilk to market their lists is the percentage of blocked inbound mails. A blocklists that blocks 86 % of inbound mails is marketted as better than a one blocking "only" 85 % of inbound mails, regardless of false positives. False negatives are visible to the client (the receiver, who pays SH) so they MUST not have them, but false positives are only visible by the sender, who may not be a client and may not have an alternative way of contacting the receiver to report abusive blocks by SH, so who cares ? I actually suspect that SpamHaus clients are automatically added to a do-not-block list, too, even if they deny maintaining such a list.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
FAIL

Re: For the love of..

If Spamhaus lists something(*) there's invariably a bloody good reason for it

Absolutely. In the case of my individual home IP addy, the reason is that I sent one email from a yahoo-hosted account to a fellow of mine who works at the local hospital ("protected" by SpamHaus) to refer a patient.

There is a reason. It's just absolutely idotic.

Spamhaus are worst than Equifax, because the methods are the same but their reach is far wider and they are more moronically entrenched in their sense of self-righteousness.

Google rolls out Android Easter Egg for Europe – a Microsoft antitrust-style browser, search engine choice box

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Actually I had switched away from Chrome / Google, but I ran out of space at some point, and you can't uninstall Google or Chrome, so the alt had to go... and np*, I'm not terribly happy with that. But I don't do much browsing on my phone anyway.

How'd your servers get that baby-smooth look? Dutch and Brit cool kids dunk Supermicro systems in synthetic oil

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: So they've fixed the problems then?

poor circulation/localised cooling

That's why you should use diesel as the coolant.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/11/bofh_and_the_vax_cluster/

Aussie engineer accuses 'serial farter' supervisor of bullying, seeks $1.8m redress

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Farts are Omnidirectional

Or

"Oh, Majesty, you shouldn't have said a thing. I thought it was the horse."

Linux 5.0 is out except it's really 4.21 because Linus 'ran out of fingers and toes' to count on

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Backward Compatibility

Thou Shall Not Break Userland is one of the few strictly-enforced rules un Linux kernel dev circles, and the origin of much of the famed rants by Linus.

WannaCry-hero Hutchins' trial date set, Microsoft readies Google's Spectre V2 fix for Windows 10, Coinhive axed, and more

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Facepalm

DNSSEC push renewed

Yeah, we saw this one... one of our subsidiaries raised an P1 incident with us -during the WE- over it just to check that we weren't at risk. Of course we rolled out DNSSEC months ago. Hell Oh Hell, as they say. Had to shoot this one down.

Ready for another fright? Spectre flaws in today's computer chips can be exploited to hide, run stealthy malware

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Too many cores

This happens because we have idle cores sitting around doing nothing. If we made faster cores instead of just throwing more of them at workloads that can't use them, we wouldn't need speculative executions and thus, no spectre. I wonder if IBM would <ant to revive the Power phylosophy.

WWW = Woeful, er, winternet wendering? CERN browser rebuilt after 30 years barely recognizes modern web

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Devil

Re: Sigh. Those were the days.

I would like to reserve a special place in Hell for whoever thought it was a good idea to incorporate web elements into email.

I don't know what you're talking about. I will classify this snippet as "nonsense", that's what I do with the various claims I receive stating that the newest info was in blinking red bold MSComicSans as opposed to the superceded info which was in blue strikedthrough boring old Arial, and how can I not have seen the difference?

Email is for text. Information is most efficiently conveyed through articulate sentences.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Alas, more and more websites just don't work on it at all.

My policy for these is pretty much the same as it has been for decades regarding "your bowser doesn't support this website, please switch to [browser]" websites. In 2 words, rhyming with Duck Goo.

When a contact info is available, I also fire off an email to the webmaster to the same effect - phrased in more polite terms.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Not by hand

themes and styles in MS Word.

The features that are consistently inconsistent in large structured documents, almost impossible to re-use between documents of differing sizes and structures ? I've heard of those, used them even. I now stay way clear off them.

If I want kerning and ligatures I will use Lyx

LyX is a front-end to LaTeX, which pretty much negates your whole argument.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
WTF?

Re: Interestingly,

We will have to agree to disagree because I believe there is no shiny (and I did use image search and YouTube just to check and refresh my memory on what was available on UNIX, Mac, ST, Amiga, and even Archimedes) and you believe there is shiny.

OK so you do think I'm unable to change my mind when presented with evidence.

I will gladly admit, in the face of evidence, that my recollection of this era's user interfaces was biased (influenced by previous GUIs and by the fact that I did not interract much with GUIs at the time, mostly command line).

Why do you insist that we will have to disagree ?

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Interestingly,

Note that my intention was not to diss XWindow, in fact I'm (in)famous among my friends for using twm as my default desktop environment (until recently I've been using a Raspberry 2B as my main work machine for over 2 years, because with my settings it was -much- snappier than the MSWindows tower I was given, but that's a story for another day)

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Interestingly,

If you see no shiny, perhaps you don't remember what user interfaces looked like at the time.

On a sidenote, I don't adhere to the passive-agressive "we'll have to agree to disagree" motto. I am able to admit that I am wrong without holding a grudge, just prove me so. Halting a constructive discussion by saying, in essence, "I think you're wrong but I won't bother telling you why" always strikes me as unconstructive and borderly insulting.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Interestingly,

I don't think the Next's GUI was that far way from [the competion]

True, but my point is that Tim went for the Shiny factor (Robert, who designed the underlying mechanisms, did get along with it)

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Not by hand

I don't use LaTEX very much myself, I tend to favor Lout (by Jeffrey H. Kingston from down under) ; despite its limitations, it does pretty much everything I want for print, in a (much) smaller package.

As for "simple html", as you put it, you may want to try AFT from Todd Coram.

On a separate note, in my experience unwanted spaces or newlines are "features" of WYSIWYG tools, I've never seen them in WYSIWYM tools. Unless you deliberately code extra spaces or newlines in, that is.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

You might want to try a current minimalist web browser (qutebrowser is my current fav in the GUI league, but plenty are available).

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Interestingly,

it does look like an effort to demo NeXTCube's capabilities more than a push for unified communication. Fair game, I'd say, but it does show that the www was designed with fanciness in mind, rather than universality or efficiency. Plus ça change...

No yoke: 'Bored' Aussie test pilot passes time in the cockpit by drawing massive knobs in the air

ElReg!comments!Pierre

In the people I personnally know, "penis drawers" are roughly equally distributed between all genders. Mostly because the shapes involved are simple, distinctive, easily drawn with only connected lines, and the conveyed sillyness is immediately perceived by the viewer.

Note that the "symbol" is almost always drawn erect and "upwards", because sideways it woud be an antique gun on wheels, °I° is just a face, and a shrivelled penis is as difficult to render as a vulva - i.e. too much effort. The female equivalent would be (.Y.) , which is again used equally by all genders but VERY difficult to render with connected lines.

Don't assume gender bias until you have ruled out gratuitous silliness and laziness.

What's the frequency, KeNNeth? Neural nets trained to tune in on radar signals to boost future mobe broadband

ElReg!comments!Pierre

In fact, if there are more false negative, it's worst

Black-hat sextortionists required: Competitive salary and dental plan

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Translation?

like %name% in the body

I guess you read your emails as plaintext, like a sensible person would. This %name% thing is the hallmark of an email tool that relies on client-side code execution. In my previous job I received quite a lot of -legit- emails ending with "<signature>". Silly MS.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

there might be also interesting traces in email header) but can't be bothered. Someone will, eventually.

The last series I received were sent from a -most probably miconfigured- server at a foodstuff manufacturing company in Italy. I notified the abuse@ addy as I always do, and I'm not holding my breath as I always don't.

Bored bloke takes control of British Army 'psyops' unit's Twitter

ElReg!comments!Pierre

GCHQ Spokeperson :

"The levels of sophistication involved in this attack indicate the involvement of a foreign State Actor. Russian and Chinese governments in particular are known to have a knowledge of the existence of Twitter. While the attack was promptly foiled by our elite cyber units, it is important to note that most major industries in the UK use Twitter. In order to prevent a massive disruption of the British economy by foreign hostile actors, it is crucial to keep us very well funded."

Cut open a tauntaun, this JEDI is frozen! US court halts lawsuit over biggest military cloud deal since the Death Star

ElReg!comments!Pierre

between a rock and a hard place

IBM just bought Red Hat. DB2 for Open, which was an also-ran to date, may be about to become a Thing. On the Cloud front Oracle can't reallistically compete with Amazon, on the DB front it can't compete with Big Blue and it's newly-aquired fedora. Time to innovate, if you still know how to !

Password managers may leave your online crown jewels 'exposed in RAM' to malware – but hey, they're still better than the alternative

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Remembering long passphrases

Replying to myself to add that I'm using single-use pads 2FA for my online banking. That is reasonnably secure. But I have a pre-shared keypad for that. None if this "SMS code" BS cuts the mustard.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Remembering long passphrases

"Sec 101 : This is my passphrase for El Reg" is

- unique

- easy to remember

- virtually uncrackable by automated means

- tedious to type

- not even close to my actual credentials

- as weak as "password123" as soon as your system is compromised, because keylogger.

The "remembering" part is secondary in this problem. Login security will always be hampered by

- Joe Public's unwillingness to type a 20+ characters password to let the world know of their opinion on May's or Trump's latest tweet (see the success of the oh-so-very-innocuous "login with Facebook" option on various websites)

- the hard fact that once your system is compromised, any input, output or locally stored data (including in RAM) can be snooped on (although the efforts needed to do so may vary depending on your security measures).

Pandas so useless they just look at delicious kid who fell into enclosure

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Freedom is only worth what you make of it. The zoo offers free food and comfy housing, with ample opportunity to make fun of the plebs who pay for it. I will refrain from making a comparison to the Houses but to be honest it's probably too late, that image is already in your brain :p

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: That's how evolution works

just compare Paris Hilton with Bear Grylls.

Both unable to survive without their 24/7 TV prod crew ?

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Their choice

Jack Russells, chihuahuas, and other small yappy rodent-dogs.

Putting the Jack Russell (a very energetic and clever hunting dog) in the same category as useless lumps of furry handbag adornments is a bit, erm, surprising, honestly.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: they have been even known to sit on their new born offspring

Also they, much like turtles, eat anything that gets within range or moves slower than they do.

Very true, and very much like "long pork", too.

Cops looking for mum marauding uni campus asking students if they fancy dating her son

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Great news

I was thinking that campus cowboys are getting a tad ridiculous, but again I did not think of this angle. Although these are campus cops and not high-firepower regular cops, they still do sport pepper spray and sometimes tazers. They do tend to occasionnally over-react with those "sub-lethal" tools of theirs.

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Telewest

"Hello, am I talking to Mr WifeysName?" happens to me from time to time, I don't see the problem. I usually answer someting like "No, but I'm the person you want to talk to". What's the matter ?

It's OK, everyone – Congress's smart-cookie Republicans have the answer to America's net neutrality quandary

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Pint

Re: I've always wondered...

@m0rt : please excuse the kids, they couldn't recognise sarcasm if it hit them in the nether zones with a sign reading "sarcasm" in big, bold letters and a <blink> tag. That's nowaday's Reg forum for you.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: I've always wondered...

it benefits everybody if media streams are treated as high priority while simple page loads are last in line

So my pages should take forever to load so that the kids next door can have their fill of lolcats ? How does that benefit me ?

The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild

ElReg!comments!Pierre

The way systemd has been pushed means that a lot of userland stuff now assumes it's there (even without explicitely depending on it, in some cases). To counter the trend, there needs to be enough systems out there that do not run systemd.

Also, many managers will be reluctant to switch production from RHEL to *BSD. The switch to Devuan is easier to promote.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Why not BSD? I think both of those are equally effective choices.

Sure, but Joe Public -and non-technical management- has heard of Linux and even often tried it /deployed it in production, while *BSD is still confidential outside some IT circles. And Devuan benefits from the rather impressive hardware support and application base of Debian (and to some exxtent, of RedHat)

ElReg!comments!Pierre

By the way, if you do need to patch, you can find the perfect patch at freebsd.org

While I kinda* agree with the general sentiment, the reason why systemd became an issue at all is that it is backed by RedHat, the most trusted *NIX distro in the Big Biz world (unlikely to change since they were just gobbled by the most trusted Big Iron company in the Big Biz world...). That gives systemd considerable traction. I do currently work for Big Biz. Big Biz doesn't care for reliablity, stability or elegance terribly much, these are just bonusses. Big Biz cares for support contracts, monetary penalties, and above all, for "case open with the supplier so it's not our problem anymore" clauses.

Something is rotten in the State of IT. Goodpractices, I knew thee well, etc. But again, I'm old enough to remember that it's always been the case. Same general mindset, same errors, different offenders. The only difference is that some of us here were hoping for an improvement when Linux hit the limelight, and that's only a generation thing. Hope is a renewable resource, disappointment is a constant ;-)

Resistance is NOT futile though. The most efficient way of resistance IMHO is Devuan at this time, not *BSD, because of the trust built around Linux by now-traitors RHEL and Debian (to cite only 2). The path of least resistance is often the fastest. Not that I don't believe in unicorns, mind : I am myself eagerly waiting for -and occasionnally minutely contributing to- the Raise of the Mighty GNU HURD Complete With Its Own MACH Microkernel. Not holding my breath though (renewable resources, constants, etc).

*For personnal -and rather shallow- reasons I prefer dabbling with DragonFlyBSD myself, but that's besides the point

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Pint

Re: Again

This seems to be a direct consequence of the init that's an OS in its own right.

It's not quite ther yet, but certainly struggling to be.

Still, this article comes just as I finally came around to migrating my last machine to Devuan, so cheers to everyone !

Personal data slurped in Airbus hack – but firm's industrial smarts could be what crooks are after

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: China

Yes there've been a handful of dodgy/bullshit actions by the CIA over the last 30-40 years, but it's a handful and were exceeding their authority/remit and were called out when sprung.

I'm sure it could be funny in some way but I'm under the impression that you don't jest.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Boieng is notoriously struggling (to use the weakest possible term) with its space program, suffers very serious reliability issues on some of its latest crafts (even resorting to "the pilot held it wrong", an excuse more often used by peddlers of less-critical pieces of tech) and recently bought Embraer to cover for their inability to develop reliable short-courriers of their own (OK, this last one might be a bit of an extrapolation).

There are also allegations that data seized by three-letters US agencies under various "terrist" acts were at some point fed directly to various US stakeholder, including tipping local authorities on drug smugglers but also giving Boeing details on Airbus tech. That practice allegedely stopped, perhaps leeaving a gap in information-gathering by one or several parties.

Meanwhile, China just successfuly sent a craft where No One had Ever Been Before (no, going to the hidden side of the Moon is no small feat).

Pick the most probable culprit.

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Linux

Re: Kudos

Disk cloning software ? dd works rather well, for those of us who don't edit our config files with Adobe's InDesign either.