* Posts by Robert Carnegie

4557 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2009

Want to visit your loved one in jail? How about Skype instead?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: A better solution

According to "Marvel Comics Civil War 2", Hawkeye the Avenging Archer was put in superhero jail like that BEFORE his trial for shooting (with an arrow, a special one obviously) The Incredible Hulk. So, that happens. On the other hand, anyone who really wanted to talk to Hawkeye just visited him in his cell, by hypnotising 100 prison guards or walking through the walls or whatever. So it isn't the greatest example.

systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Underscore?

I don't get it. Apparently the bug comes when "international" (non-Western) DNS support is used, it probably includes emojis as well as underscore?... Underscore is perhaps the punctuation for waiting to reveal who won this week on "America's Got Dancing Pets" because it is longer than the usual "...".

Kill something, then hire cleaners to mop up the blood if you want to build a digital business

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

In other news,

The word is that Microsoft is discontinuing Paint...

UK government's war on e-cigs is over

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Why won't the government make money from vaping? The nicotine fluid is still made from tobacco, presumably?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: No vaping in the workplace please

How confident are you that the cheaper vaping liquid doesn't have methyl alcohol in it? For instance. Without regulation, there could be anything in those bottles.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: No vaping in the workplace please

All mammals exhale water vapour. (Pretty sure.)

I'm extremely rarely exposed to "e-cigarettes" considering the number of shops around selling the means. I consider it a regrettable form of addiction, but, obviously, not the worst around. And I worry whether it is really adequately regulated for users' safety. But if I don't mind people doing it out of my near breathing range, perhaps I also shouldn't mind if it kills them.

China censors drop the soap operas, sitcoms

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Inconvenient if

Presumably there are thousands of other people who are named Liu Xiaobo who are finding this very awkward...

Or maybe there aren't, any more?

Mozilla hoping to open source voice samples for future AI devs

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Appy app apps

The late Sir Terry Pratchett latterly wrote novels using computer speech recognition when he couldn't type due to his illness. Although, these being about wizards and goblins and things, maybe you don't count that non-evil.

Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Sublimated Ear and Gaseous Elbow.

Hear Alistair Scream At Technology Peeps.

CoinDash crowdfunding hack further dents trust in crypto-trading world

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Re: So...

I remember one of the short novels for children about the brilliant detective Agaton Sax, who usually used to be called in to help Scotland Yard. To foil a plot to steal money being transported by train, Agaton Sax got the Bank of England to print fake banknotes that were Identical in every respect to real ones, which were to be stolen. Only afterwards did the flaw in this method occur to him. They -were- real ones, and the Bank of England had issued them.

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Accuracy is important.

I knew that factoid but do you know what male mosquitoes eat (if anything)? I don't. So is it true?

OK, Wikipedia says "nectar and plant juices".

But maybe it was edited by male mosquitoes. What are they really up to?

Multics resurrected: Proto-Unix now runs on Raspberry Pi or x86

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Memory mapped files

I'm vague on what this feature is. I hope it wouldn't make it 1000 times easier to write really lethal ransomware??

Software glitch led to London Ambulance Service outage – report

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Oracle "Recycle bin"

We had that in dBase. I've seen people in the 21st century talking about "soft delete". In dBase, you could delete a row (record) from the data table (file), then change your mind and "undelete" it. You could even browse through the data with all the deleted data visible. I think the command to really delete it is "pack". And then it still probably was liable to be left on the disk, in space uncommitted from file use. But I think we also wrote a sub-routine to replace all the fields with blank space, to erase one record - or maybe it was a built-in command of "REPLACE BLANK". Then you'd delete it, maybe.

Huge ransomware outbreak spreads in Ukraine and beyond

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40416611 has someone talking about it attacking the MFT of NTFS - that's a more severe attack than the MBR. So maybe a misunderstanding. Whatever it is, you don't want it. To Ukraine: I feel your pain, but, why not use Linux?

What? What? Which? Former broadband minister Ed Vaizey dismisses report

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

This summer

Information superhighway blocked by parading Ulstermen throughout the marching season.

Report estimates cost of disruption to GPS in UK would be £1bn per day

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: That's why the EU has started Galileo...

Any country which expects to initiate and/or be sole survivor of the War Of Mutual Assured Destruction (WOMAD - although the name is a clue) will want to have its own GPS system, both for use -in- the war, and afterwards when it's the only one left. Thus, the U.S., Russia, China, and, um, France. (The rockets are French named. Do the math. Yes, I know Galileo was Italian, but do you think - ) Or call it Eurovision - then Australia gets to enter.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I wondered if enough Galileo satellites would be behind the Earth's shadow in a Carrington Event or a Gamma Ray Burst to keep the system working when they reappeared. Upon checking - they fly at very roughly 4 Earth radiuses altitude, so the answer to the question is "probably not". I haven't investigated the other systems.

Stack Clash flaws blow local root holes in loads of top Linux programs

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Why am I not surprised to see sudo there?

If the real "sudo" is deleted by the cautious administrator then presumably a script in current directory named "sudo" will run instead.

Facebook tried teaching bots art of negotiation – so the AI learned to lie

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

The question I've asked

"Humans don't tend to be defective in Amazon Mechanical Turk [job market]"

If anyone has used that service, is this what they meant to say about it, and also, is it true?

The original "Mechanical Turk" robot was deceptive, which may be the intended word - there was a man inside to work the machinery. To play chess, which is quite a feat. Possibly we all know that story.

Tails OS hits version 3.0, matches Debian's pace but bins 32-bit systems

Robert Carnegie Silver badge
Joke

NSA

Isn't it a sexual disease?

Pizza proffer punctures privacy protection, prompts pals' perfidy

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Do you want a free pizza?

Maybe the e-mail provided isn't a friend's. complanits.departement@microsoft.com for instance.

And presumably the offer is from an apparently trusted source. If Microsoft bought me a pizza I'd check for broken glass in it - I wouldn't eat it anyway but it would affect which recycling bucket I'd put it in.

Swedish school pumps up volume to ease toilet trauma

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: When I was a lad ....

Agreed, the solution is to play sufficient recorded plops, splashes, gurgles and guffs that the ones that you make yourselves go unnoticed.

Years ago wasn't there a new thing in Japanese electronic toileting, of playing the sound of a waterfall, likewise as covering noise rather than encouragement although it works for that as well.

Jailed fraudster admits running same cold-caller con from behind bars

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Tell me more

Please go into more detail about sticking this guy's phone right up his arse. With the charger plugged in please. And not CE safety compliant.

When can real-world laws invade augmented reality fantasies? A trial in Milwaukee will decide

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Getting an Eiffel

I thought it was reported here... photographing the Eiffel Tower is now out of copyright; however, the lights on the Eiffel Tower at night are a legally protected copyright artwork. Sticking Santa Claus on top doesn't alter that, but you may be able to claim a parody defence. Unless they put a Santa on the real tower first.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: pARkrun

I see that you refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkrun#Conflicts_with_local_authorities

Controversial! :-)

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I rather approve of a ban.

The regulations appear basically to prevent AR games from being set in public park areas at all unless a game company very much wants to go to that place. And that seems to me to be quite a good solution. The game would simply have to avoid putting any game resources in the park geography (probably including other game players).

On the other hand, there are worse places to play these games in - such as public streets.

Ex-MI5 boss: People ask, why didn't you follow all these people ... on your radar?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge
Joke

Re: Why is privacy even considered important relative to security

"I personally don't care about my "privacy". I have nothing to hide."

Except that you're clearly a squakker. And we don't put up with behaviour like yours in this day and age. So watch out sonny, me and the boys will catch up with you one of these days. Probably on Wardour Street, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Detective Inspector R Carnegie (no not really but weren't you starting to worry?)

(Is Wardour Street particularly interesting? I don't actually know.)

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Not the Internet?

A modern "photocopier" is basically a computer scanner with attached printer, and it can probably recognise seditious material, either now or soon. And that will include Up The Workers and Black Lives Matter. It also probably has Wi-Fi built-in and it probably will use that to alert the police.

If instead you want to do your subversion of state power with a hand-built printing press, that's vastly more complicated to build than if you're just campaigning by using the printer at work or by posting videos on Google - which will get you caught pretty quick. Of course there's Wikipedia and How It Works to consult - oh, but they're surveilled too. As are 3-D printers to manufacture an unlicensed press, probably. Certainly now that I've suggested it.

Actual terrorism is sufficiently exciting to be involved in that you probably can persuade a few suckers face to face to join in with you, but it doesn't achieve political change, which is what the establishment really fears. The establishment itself is very well guarded (an MP or a Congresswoman is not "the establishment": it doesn't mind losing a few of those). And having people frightened into giving up their liberty in exchange for apparent security is worth losing some civilians and pretending to care about them.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Not the Internet?

Revolution requires radicalising the unradical, and in 2017 with control of digital media (as presumably in China) that can be prevented. Handing out your political message on cassette tapes today is ludicrous, and if you print handbills or a secret newspaper then the printer puts the date, time, and probably place of printing on every pages in nearly-invisible ink (pale yellow). And by now it probably also reads the thing you're copying and phones the government if it's naughty. So, yes, you can disguise all your plans as fruit cake recipes, but then you have to hand them out to the public and as far as they know it -is- a cake recipe. Maybe that's why "Great British BakeOff" is suspiciously popular......is that what they're up to? :-)

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Incredibly racist comics

What were you doing in a coom?

https://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/ if I've got that right - search for (Blimey! blog) if not - is interested in antique comics (of the funnies on paper sort) as well as the latest doings of Superman and Beryl the Peril (usually in different books). The older material can be extremely off-colour. For that matter, the acknowledged original comic strip is "The Yellow Kid".

Racially insensitive humour apparently considered unremarkable runs up to [The Goodies] in the 1970s, as well as BBC radio productions that are currently being repeated, sometimes with trigger warnings from the continuity voice. A 1960s radio sketch in [Play It Cool] that I heard yesterday featured a businessman's neglected wife throwing brown custard at him and then jeering at the "chocolate coloured tycoon". That's not the worst but I expect it comes as a jolt if it's aimed at you.

Tech can do a lot, Prime Minister, but it can't save the NHS

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I lost my voice from a bad cold

Went to GP, the receptionist said phone for an appointment tomorrow, I said *tht's g'ng t' b' d'ff'c'lt d'n't y' th'nk*"

(Not blaming them, but this actually happened)

By then I had already spent £££ on online chat with some ask-a-professional web site; that doctor wanted me to consider an antibiotic but that isn't how you get those.

I thought A & E probably don't want to talk to someone who lost their voice.

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

If bombs and guns were made useless somehow then the terrorists wouldn't use those either, and maybe would be stuck with writing rude words on walls in public places. So there is a bit of an argument, that depriving the enemy of a tool is a good idea. So let me know if the enemy ever gets better at killing people than, say, everyday road traffic does.

Yeah, the latest London attack didn't use guns or bombs, presumably because the naughty men didn't have them. They were wearing pretend bombs that they may have believed to be real ones. I don't want to tell naughty men their own business, but outrages in Paris show that with guns and bombs and a personal death wish you can kill a lot more people than just with knives.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: You've got a list of people...

They've done the "taking away devices", but now the list of people dangerous to the government is "everyone, including you".

Although, apparently ringing up MI5 and saying "My neighbour / brother / son is a religious extremist" doesn't get anything done (otherwise it would be a great way to prank your neighbour / brother / son). In fact, nationally broadcasting a reality TV show called "The Jihadi Next Door" about that person doesn't get anything done.

So it looks like the solution has to be to stop "knife crime prevention" of the knife-prevention kind and everybody go out tooled up. Make it an even fight. In fact I know how to kill someone with a credit card. Put them on hold on the premium line to the call centre and play Vivaldi Four Seasons at them for 99 minutes.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Apparently 40 million Iranians are using software called "Telegram".

As a trade union member with a quantum of sympathy for differently gendered and differently coloured people, I don't want governments having the means to browse through any of our private business. Tell that to former MP David Cameron and to his former PA.

Russia is struggling to keep its cybercrime groups on a tight leash

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Make it look like suicide.

Yeah, that's done.

The open source community is nasty and that's just the docs

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: I'm not surprised.

I assume everything else that happened in "the JBOSS community", including apparently everyone else sitting back and letting Scott steal credit without comment (it's possible perhaps that third parties discreetly e-mailed Scott to say "Dude, no", but since that didn't work, a time comes for "public" criticism.

Even if "My First Guide to JBOSS" was a ragged bundle of ill-informed fallacies, rewriting ought to be undertaken with credit given and ideally with consent as well.

...Unless that "My Guide" itself was, or appeared to be, largely swiped from someone else's material. Including, and I might have gone about it this way, a work that's an anthology of everyone's forum posts. And if two people go about producing a document that way, they will present the same material, including the same errors.

But why am I not taking the story at face value? I have no reason to distrust. But there is often more than one side.

Incidentally: I just signed up to https://dba.stackexchange.com/ mainly to ask certain questions - one of which, I first searched for previous applicable posts, twice; found something that said "Read this 'white paper' document" - so I did - and then next one - and decided I now don't need to ask about that. Although it might have saved my time to do that - but used up other people's.

So, good documentation is good. (However, I sent a couple of document revisions to Microsoft... no, wait, I didn't, it wouldn't send it. I'll try later in a different web browser.)

Enterprise patching... is patchy, survey finds

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Wrong.

Windows 7 is a current, supported product. Using it is fine. Windows 10 has automatic updating - which by default reboots when it likes and takes you work with it (unless, probably, you use Microsoft Cloudy Office 355 - so, not a flaw, a sales opportunity) - but an enterprise will take control of updating the endpoints anyway. Look at how many Star Trek episodes have the Enterprise's computer taken over by an alien force, or just becoming delusional on its own. (Both Kirk and Picard had to deal with each of these things happening, a lot.) Learn from this and install legitimate updates in phases - make proper use of your phaser.

The nuclear launch button won't be pressed by a finger but by a bot

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Not future - history

I don't remember whether in fact Nancy Reagan had a lot of plastic surgery, but a second wife has to work harder. I believe I recall a "Spitting Image" sketch where Ronnie was surprised when Nancy walked in with apparently two sets of front side ladybumps; she explained the lower ones were her knees, brought up along with everything else presumably but don't think about it.

As an early work, Charlie Brooker made a web site called "TV Go Home" of fictional TV guide listings of increasingly awful programme ideas. Then entirely too many of them got made, but usually without credit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVGoHome

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

"Simple Mail Transfer People"

Is that a song or is it a REM statement?

(a basic question ... s'hell here)

Whoops! Microsoft accidentally lets out a mobile-'bricking' OS update

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Message decoded.

"Today was a great exercise in our whole team coming together to solve a singular problem” - that we ourselves created - by deleting all of our users' data. Solved!

FTFY.

Seminal game 'Colossal Cave Adventure' released onto GitLab

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Pardon?

"A small stream flows out of the building"

Is that a sign of bathroom plumbing gone wrong, or something else? Curious.

Dell kills botched BIOS update that murdered punters' PCs

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Better ask them.

Find out what update is liable to be installed and whether you want it to be. It says they aren't distributing this one any more, but that may not help when you've already downloaded the file.

Presumably if the bad software killed every machine it touches then they wouldn't have released it... but it may be Russian Roulette.

Huawei spied, US federal jury finds

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Who remembers tamagotchi?

A toy, an LCD electronic pet that you had to "feed" and play with to maintain its wellbeing.

In case you didn't have the time, someone invented a machine that pressed the buttons for you.

Many years before this Tappy, I think.

No laptop ban on Euro flights to US... yet

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Pertaining to WTF

Apparently Donald Trump doesn't drink: this is him sober. A sobering thought.

I believe he isn't quite as stupid as he seems - not far off though, but a bit more cunning than you think he is. That's how he survived in business (except when he didn't) and got to where he is now.

Is he up to his job? Well, Republicans apparently like very stupid presidents. The list is long. But if he's really crossed Mossad, that can be a bit fatal.

Presidents in general seem to like a vice-president who is a far worse proposition, and who willingly goes along with creating this impression; in this case Mike "Handmaid's Tale" Pence. But I think he may be insufficiently awful to save Trump's tamales.

Payroll-for-contractors company named at centre of AU$165m tax scam scheme

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Not surprised...

They may have been caught but they had a bloody good time first. Except for the wine that they hadn't drunk yet.

As the poet declares:

There was a young fellow named Sidney,

Who drank 'til he ruined his kidney;

It shriveled and shrank

While he sat there and drank,

But he had a good time of it, didney?

Change it to "a fellow FROM Sydney" and we are about there.

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/austwine.php

"its taste, and its lingering afterburn"

Samsung Galaxy S8+: Seriously. What were they thinking?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Private key

*zip, click* Talk about flash photography...

Also, heaven knows what you'll have to explain being smeared on the fingerprint sensor...

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Perhaps -

If I was designing a login-by-camera routine, I would make it able to tell whether the camera was looking at a bitmap JPEG instead of a face - this doesn't? No? Well then - let it be https://www.etsy.com/market/mustache_on_a_stick . ;-)

HP Inc wireless mouse can be spoofed

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: "They note that the attack isn't operating-system specific"

A Linux desktop has things to click on. If necessary, the hacker can select text characters elsewhere on the screen, one at a time, and copy-and-paste text commands, like composing a ransom note from cut newspaper.

Have we decided that they can't crack this wireless keyboard anyway, or, has someone else done that so that credit can't be claimed? The victim probably has this keyboard as well as this mouse, and they're probably sharing one USB plug-in adapter.

Chrome on Windows has credential theft bug

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Apparently, Chrome downloads an executable file without scanning it for threats. Anyway, they're going to fix it.

Good news, OpenVPN fans: Your software's only a little bit buggy

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Those are bugs?

I think the article means "NOW there's a buffer library API that handles dynamically allocated memory safely", etc.

So, this is strictly not a list of bugs found, but a list of the fixes put in for the bugs that were found.