* Posts by 0laf

1967 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2009

China's Chang'e-5 lands on the Moon to scratch surface

0laf
Pint

Putting politics aside (very hard with space stuff) congratuations to the hardworking engineers and scientists of the Chinese space programme.

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

0laf

I hear Dido Harding has thrown her hat in the ring as programme director for any new build

As if Productivity Score wasn't creepy enough, Microsoft has patented tech for 'meeting quality monitoring devices'

0laf
Big Brother

One would hope that most senior people would see the BS in this but then you can sell any old shite to a director if you dress that turd in a shiny enough suit.

I'm regularly in lengthy meetings where long sections have little to nothing to do with me, I would have though that I was actually being more efficient by fireing off emails whilst I'm not needed. But possibly MS says 'no' and it's going to tell the big boss I wasn't paying attention enough and I need my probes pushed in further.

Scotch eggs ascend to the 'substantial meal' pantheon as means to pop to pub for a pint during pernicious pandemic

0laf

Re: New products and opportunities

If you frequent your hostelry often enough "The Usual" is quite an acceptable term if you're on good terms with the bar staff.

At one point in my past a mate and I went to the same pub at the same so often that we'd walk in and find our pints on the bar waiting for us.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

0laf
Unhappy

Re: Remember OGC?

I'm a bit sad now. The world was a better place with a big Dong in it.

0laf
FAIL

Remember OGC?

Remember the OGC logo they spent 'a lot' of money on, rotated it looked just like a graphical onanist.

https://www.theregister.com/2008/04/22/ogc_logo/

A mate of mine worked for a Dutch oil company, "Dong Energy". Dong is still around and standing proud with their name.

It cracked me up.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

0laf
Childcatcher

Omitting the 'O' in accountant or accounts was always a common trigger too.

European Space Agency will launch giant claw that drags space junk to its doom

0laf

That'll be why there is that company (in El Reg recently) that has developed electrostatic ribbons (I'm science mangling) that could be extended at EOL and the electric charge was enough to increase drag and bring the sat down much earlier.

For old stuff you'd need a big transporter tug with lots of little rockets that could be attached to dud sats. Sounds feasible on the ground but probably not given how big space is, even in near Earth orbit.

TikTok given another week to sort out how to sell itself

0laf
WTF?

Why

Why would you want to buy this?

It'll be gone in 5yr and in the pile of old shit with MySpace, Bebo and Vine

I guess they think they can make a profit in the short term before the yoof move on to the next app fad.

Sopra Steria: Adding up outages and ransomware cleanup, Ryuk attack will cost us up to €50m

0laf

Re: Training

If training is a mitigation against the fines it's worth doing, considering how large the fines for GDPR are (at least the point of issue). It may only be marginally effective against the attack but even a small number of avoided minor incidents can easily make the training economically worth while especially if it is effective in stopping staff clicking on shit at home then taking days off to fix their mess.

The ICO expects DP training to be given to 95% of staff annually. Right down to your cleaning staff who may encounter presonal informaiton when clearing desks etc.

0laf
Childcatcher

Having an insurance policy isn't the same as insurance paying out in the event you make a claim.

Ransomware taking out a large business smacks of a company paying lip service to the risk, not preparing for a known attack and probably not training staff to not click on phishing emails. Admittedly this may have been a targetted attack with well crafted emails but the characteristics of ransomware are well known, not new and mitigations can be put in place.

I would suspect the insurers will be investigating many ways to get out of paying.

If you have house insurance they won't pay out for a burglary if you don't lock your doors. I don't imagine cyber insurance will pay out if you haven't carried out best practice. TBh I don't know anyone that does, not really.

Privacy campaigner flags concerns about Microsoft's creepy Productivity Score

0laf
FAIL

Re: Design vs Use

If it's anything like the "Secure Score" you get points for taking on risk through new products not minimising risk.

This sounds like your use of 365 tools will be monitored so to get a good 'score' I'd need to hammer Teams, Yammer, Streams etc with fatuous comments and emojis probably contributing nothing and not actually doing my job.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

0laf

Re: "...the Department won't reveal its location "

Some sunburned locals heading out with their God Given firearms to shoot that damn thing to death

0laf
Paris Hilton

Birds

Was it sprung steel?

Was someone tryng to play full sized Angry Birds in the desert

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

0laf
Black Helicopters

We are Legion (We are Bob)

Tenuous link.

We are Legion is a book (audiobook really) about a Von Neumann machine called Bob.

Eventually there are many Bobs.

I guess one Sci Fi author imagine Bob going on into the future...

PS It's quite a decent audio book if that's your thing.

NASA building network cables that can survive supersonic flight - could this finally deliver unbreakable RJ45 latching tabs?

0laf
Pint

Re: Do Fisher-Price do consuting?

" Re: Do Fisher-Price do consuting?

Yeah, but under the brand names Serco and Capita."

Comment of the day to that man!

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

0laf
Angel

All true

It's a right bastard to use but if you get into the way of it eventually it becomes not so bad.

Considering the price of buying full fat photoshop GIMP is a wee miracle.

Kudos, karma and beers for all involved.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

0laf
Flame

Mobile

WinMob 7 was supported by developers but MS kept moving the goalposts then brought out WinMob8 which was incompatible with 7 so everyone's work wa wasted. With MS track record of dropping support for its own products like a fresh turd no wonder developers walked away and put their effort into iOS and Droid.

Back OT I remember Win 3.11 being pretty functional and usable on today what looks like kit no more powerful than a calculator. It was pretty stable for me as well as long as you didn't ask too much of it.

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

0laf
FAIL

Re: It is unclear what President Trump hopes to achieve

Think about how child-like people in position of extreme power act, CEOs, MPs etc.

They have live their lives with eveyone saying 'yes' to them or they have employees to ensure that the answer that comes back is always 'yes'. To not get what they want is a massive slap to a massive ego and they don't like it one bit. Humility is not really a known qualtity in those lofty circles.

Trump got the biggest ego boost ever to be voted in as POTUS. Not only was he handsome, intelligent, rich and famous, he was beloved by the people as well.

Now he's has the biggest slapdown going by being voted out after one term, he's being told he's old, dumb, broke and the majority of voters think he's an ass.

He's a very powerful child who has just had all his toys taken away and he doesn't like it one bit.

At least he can honestly be told he is still famous

0laf
Angel

Parrhesia

An such are the risks of speaking truth to power.

TBH Krebs is probably delighted. Getting sacked by Trump at this stage is probably career enhancing.

Ticketmaster cops £1.25m ICO fine for 2018 Magecart breach, blames someone else and vows to appeal

0laf
FAIL

Just wait. In 6 months Ticketmaster will 'agree' to pay £12.50.

I

Try to avoid thinking of the internet as a flashy new battlefield, warns former NCSC chief

0laf

Re: Is it only government bodies

I'm not up to date with the current pork-barrel name change for what we all once called - "information",

If someone can let me know so I can change my job title and claim my £10k pay rise for being in fashion.

Hyundai announces its own OS for Nvidia-powered smart-ish cars

0laf

Re: “software-defined and constantly updateable vehicles”

Or you crash because you've suddenly been blindsided by a full windcreen popup advertisement for Amazon Prime.

Or more realistically Hyundai doesn't let you star the car until you've watched 3x 2min adverts from their sponsors.

0laf

Re: " relevant services"

We had a Nissan Qashqui rental that did all those things. God we hated it.

It was shit to drive too.

0laf
Stop

Are there support guarantees for this?

Or is a 15yr old car going to be mechanically sound but unusable because support was dropped 18 months after release like they do with TVs?

Tim Berners-Lee asks everyone to do new biz a Solid and let him have another crack at fixing the Web's privacy

0laf
Big Brother

Something like this sounds more like a national utility service.

Nations could invest in the infrastructure where the business case is weak protecting citizens data whilst empowering safe and responsible data sharing.

Although that would require nations to do this altruistically and not try to corrupt the process for their own means.

Fuck all chance of that I suppose.

You can forget your fancy ERP customisations because that's not how it works in the cloud, SAP's Oliver Betz tells users

0laf

Same as most other large SAAS products. One size fits no one.

If you're going to use them (O365 being the hardest to avoid) you have to change your business processes to fit in with what the vendor has built, not the other way round.

Ransomware crims read our bank balance and demanded the lot, reveals Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

0laf

Re: Fine Journalism

You've been unlucky, Dundee is one of the sunniest cities in the UK. The East coast of Scotland is a relatively dry part of the UK (hance all the soft fruit farming) and the dreaded midge isn't really an issue.

If you head along the river from Dundee you'll end up at Broughty Ferry which is the posh bit (fur coat and nae knickers).

Data protection scofflaws failed to pay £2m in fines from UK watchdog – and 68% of penalties are still outstanding

0laf
Flame

Re: Good luck getting the scumbags to pay

It' s not a bot it's just a recording with gaps for you to speak.

If you say nothing the recording continues merrily. I think that's just not fair, at least with a scumbag on the end you get to irritate them and waste their time by spinning them on a bit.

H2? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

0laf

Liquid hydrogen

"It has nearly three times the energy density of petrol ".

Is that comparing liquid H2 with Petrol? Or Molar H2 with Molar petrol/ethanol (petrol being a mixture of molecule types).

Making and storing liquid H2 is non trivial so that's a fairly significant point to brush over and a Mole of gasious H2 is going to need a lot more space than a mole of liquid petrol even at high pressure

Google's home security package flies the Nest, Chocolate Factory pledges software support – for now

0laf

Re: Add it to the list

Is there an equivalent MS series of murdered former golden child products?

WinPho

Zune

Clippy

Kinect

Groove

Bob

0laf
Unhappy

"Smart products" = "short term" products.

Joe Public doesnt understadn when they buy "Smart" they are buying to the commercial world of 3yr depreciation cycles.

People might not be so keen if they know they are having to rebuy their kit every 3yr.

Luke Skywalker used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16 on Tatooine. But Star Wars: Squadrons misses the mark

0laf

Re: Star Wars

Hmm I'd say 3rd after New Hope and Empire.

But still very good.

The new ones were very pretty with little plot or story that could be followed as far as I could tell.

Marriott fined £0.05 for each of the 339 million hotel guests whose data crooks were stealing for four years

0laf
Unhappy

A lot of this comes down to the ICO not having a big enough legal budget. Basically it can't afford to take on these big multinationals so it gives in when they says "how much to make this go away". Remember the ICO doesn't get to keep these fines they go to the Treasury.

Really the ICO should be able to hang onto some of this money to add to its legal fund to makes sure it is not in the same position next time of being unable to defend its own decisions.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

0laf

Re: Executives left in the dark

One of my common quips to IT is - If it plugs in the wall and doesn't make food it's IT equipment

In fairness the guys at IT and their managers seem to like to take on every electrical item. I think there is job insecurity that drives a lot of stuff.

I don't miss the screwdriver side of the work at all.

0laf

Phones too

Used to get this a lot in the 90s/00s when the the admin staff had to swap the phones and modems around depending on the task

Days before the US election, phishers net $2.3m from Wisconsin Republicans

0laf
Trollface

Same story

"using a sophisticated phishing attack".

No one will ever admit they fell for a dumb as a rock phishing scam.

But we never get details of the 'sophistication of the attack'.

So it was probably a Nigerian 419 of 1999 vintage.

Oh, the humanity! Microsoft congratulates itself for Teams inflicted on 115m daily users

0laf

Re: Some way of separating group chats from meeting chats?

You'll have to get an admin to dig in with ediscovery to find shit like that.

PITA to deal with compliance requests

0laf

Teams works well enough. I hate the name since it sounds stupid to have a Teams meeting with your team.

It seem to rely a lot on other people muting and unmuting themselves.

Teams recording is a GDPR bombscare as it Teams chat since MS seem to think it's a good idea for everyone to have everything forever.

If any of this is fixable it is within the fiendishly complex 365 config. And MS move stuff every day.

But it's better than Webex by a mile and it's got flexible enough to let me tell the work Zoom fanbois to piss off and stick to Teams.

Experian vows to drag UK's Information Commissioner's Office to court after being told off for data-slurping practices

0laf
Flame

It's a pretty good strategy right now to threaten to overwhelm the ICO's legal budget.

BA got their fine down to about 5% of the original I think.

Experian can probably the force the ICO to bend over and hand over all our data with a smile.

Report: UK colleges face testing times with ageing kit, iffy connectivity, and some IT staff supporting 1k+ users

0laf

Oh yeah if you're counting students I'd guess 1500/1 would be pretty common

ISS air leakage fixed in time for crew handover, thanks to floating teabag

0laf

Re: Earl grey or english breakfast?

I thnk specifically what you need is anything squidgy or chewable applied liberally by a weaning 6 month old.

0laf

Re: Earl grey or english breakfast?

Hmm dried porridge indeed would give a repair that might survive reentry, I'd suggest dried soft boiled egg yolk as another near eternal repair

Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV

0laf
Trollface

Really?

Is anyone going to buy a paint because some wanky colourist says it'll make your TV feel comfortable or something?

Does it make you feel better about Samsung's continuous data grab and forcefully inserted adverts for anyone that buys their kit?

Vivo Las Blowers: Chinese smartphone brand hops into Europe's crowded mobe market

0laf

A gimballed camera. Sounds interesting. Also sounds like something that might break

Rambo: First Bork. Turns out John Rambo is no match for a bad CMOS checksum

0laf

Re: Please no....

Operation Wolf on my Speccy +2A with the bonus light gun pack.

Heady days indeed

Even if my all time fav games were actually Robocop and Myth - History in the Making.

0laf
Happy

I too spent a lot of time on Rambo First Bloot Pt2 on a Speccy 48k.

Oh the unbridled joy at finding the rocket arrows lying around. Happy days.

I'll need to go dig out an emulator now

Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth

0laf

If you follow the link to the game review it has a bit more detail. Buildings are procedurally generated by an MS AI. Which means that it get a lot right but there are some notable exceptions which stand out.

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks

0laf

A huge company like BA? They'll have had a "Legal fines contingency fund" set up for years, this will barely be a footnote in the accounts

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

0laf
FAIL

Even bloody Amazon gives you a discount to have the ads on the spash screen of their creations (or charges you to remove them depending on your pov).

I do have a SmartTV but I don't use any of it's smart functions at all, TV OSs are too clunky. I've no TV/Sat reception at all where I am so the damn thing is a glorified monitor anyway

But even the idea of this, even if it's only in the US (or probably post Brexit UK) would put me off going near any Samsung kit. Mind you I was already put off by their reputation for bloatware.

It's ont thing to offer a free service in exchange for advertising and tracking, but to make me buy the bloody thing first (I'm studiously ignoring mobile phones in this rant).