* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3264 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Zombie … in SPAAACE: Amateur gets chatty with 'dead' satellite

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Alien

Let's hope it doesn't burn out its main antenna feed upon starting to receive the commands.

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Happy

Finder's Keeper's

Does Finder's Keeper's apply in this case? Or does he need to touch it before he can claim it?

All your base are belong to us: Strava exercise app maps military sites, reveals where spies jog

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Re: I've never understood

The problem with Strava is by default it shares it with the world. If you're just sharing the data with your friends*, they probably already know where you live.

* This assumes that you only friend people who really are your friends, and not just any random Tom, Dick or Harry who ask to be your friend...

Virgin Media skulks in disused public toilets

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Companies try to hide behind "Security by obscurity", but it's often not too hard to work things out. Chamber covers in streets can easily be lifted to see the routes the ducts are taking.

You had one job, Outlook! Security bug fix stops mail app from forwarding attachments

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Re: "file attachments were getting cut out of messages when forwarded to others"

Can we also have attachments stripped from Reply To All messages ?

Can we just remove the "Reply to all" feature please?

GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort

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Re: The takeaway

Secrets do not belong in version control

LMFTFY: Unencrypted secrets do not belong in version control.

Regpg is a system to allow you to store secrets in version control. It can also hook into Ansible.

STOP! It's dangerous to upgrade to VMware 6.5 alone. Read this

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I'm sure it's scrawled all over the vSphere/vCentre docs: Upgrade vCentre first, then, and only then, do vSphere itself.

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Er, in 6.5 they added the HTML5 client by default (You could always add it manually to a 6.0 anyway via the Fling ) They didn't remove anything. The Flash interface is there in both 6.0 & 6.5.

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At one extreme there's being on the bleeding edge and upgrading as soon as a new version comes out. At the other, there's being on the trailing edge and upgrading in a rush because you're on old, unsupported software and hitting compatibility, reliability or security issues.

Somewhere in the middle the best: Let others find the bugs in the .0 releases, and upgrade at your leisure to keep vaguely current. 6.5 has been out for a while, so now is a good time to start looking at upgrading.

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Too Naive

I think your details on the upgrades of the vCentre environment was way too naive.

Firstly, the upgrade to 5.5 to 6.0 isn't that trivial. (Mine went so horribly badly that VMWare support gave up and said delete everything and start again!)

The upgrade from 6.0 to 6.5 isn't really an upgrade but a migration. New VMs are deployed and the data copied over.

Finally, we get the horrible mess of clients that VMWare has: The fat Windows client, the Flash web interface and the newer HTML5 interface. No one interface can do everything. Nice one VMWare!

Oh, and always know which hosts your PSC & VSC are running on. Just in case you need to login to the hosts direct to restart the VMs.

IT 'heroes' saved Maersk from NotPetya with ten-day reinstallation blitz

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Reliance on computers

But he also warned that in the near future, as automation creates near-total reliance on digital systems, human effort won't be able to help such crises.

That's why when J. Lyons and Son bought their first computer and saw how many people it could replace, they didn't go live with it until a spare was installed ready to take over.

That was back in the 50s...

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Re: 20% drop going to manual

Beancounter: 'How much are we spending on IT?'

That's a good question and IT should always be prepared to justify their costs. It's a shame the same can't be said of management.

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

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Central Kit

Whilst everyone is talking about the pros and cons of TV via broadband, my idle geek mind is thinking about the other end of the IP/TV pipe. How do they stream all that live TV via IP. Are they using Multicast in the core and converting to unicast near the edge? Or something else? Those millions of customers (even if they're not all watching live TV at once) soon adds up to a lot of bandwidth.

(I suppose the question is similar to other services such as Youtube Live, etc)

I thought there'd be more Instagram: ICT apprenticeships down 20% in five years

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Headmaster

@A/C

Even the Russel group as far as CS is nothing to shout about which is demonstrated by their standings in the annual CS university student competitions where only one of them scored top 100 (UCL) and it was BEHIND the university of f*** Bombed out Aleppo. Yes, the bombed out hulk where lectures are punctuated by air raid sirens scored higher than ANY UK University.

The only UK University I saw listed in the results was UCL. I don't see any of the other 23 Russell Group Unis in the competition. (Or any of the non-Russell Group ones) Is that because UCL were the only entrants, or because all the other UK Unis failed to reach the finals?

Looking at the finalists for 2018, I see Oxford & Cambridge listed. Again, I don't know if other UK unis didn't enter or just didn't get to the finals.

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Re: @AC

https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results-2016

That doesn't work for me: "No page found for name "results-2016"."

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@ wolfetone

There's a new building being put up next to my office. As the construction workers go home I think: They know they're not going to get an email or text telling them something is broken later that evening and expected to fix it before everyone gets in the next day.

Lucky bastards!

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using Firefox? All right then, patch these horrid bugs

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@K.o.R Re: Dear Mozilla, there's more to life than security

How about an official MSI package?

www.frontmotion.com/firefox/ But as it's not a Mozilla/Firefox official site, you have no way of knowing if they're putting dodgy stuff into the MSIs.

Job ad for designer proves its point with MS Paint shocker

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Re: Meh...

There are two types of Stackoverflow users: Those who copy & paste, and those who read, think, understand, and re-write themselves.

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Re: Whoosh...

I think your sarcasm detector needs re-calibrating.

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Facepalm

Polygraph Examiner

Why would a city hire someone to administer a test that has been shown to be unreliable and easily fooled?

What other pseudo-science do they use there? Graphology? Lay Lines? Crystals? Dowsers? Tea-leave readers?

Court throws out BT's plans to reduce pension rates

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@diodesign

..we can read every email.. (Emphasis mine)

Doesn't say you do or will read every email, just that you could if you could be bothered.

From someone who does make an effort to email corrections but knows they often end up in /dev/null

Another day, another Spectre fix slowdown: What to expect if you heart ZFS

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Re: Ubuntu patches?

Haven't VMWare pulled their patches?

Heathrow's air traffic radio set for shiny digital upgrade from Northrop

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Unhappy

@Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Re: They should be as secure as ...

I think it's only pedants like you & I that understand the difference between internet & Internet.

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Re: intelligible ATC

My dad used to work in ATC. He could understand human speech in the most unintelligible form. Unfortunately, working for decades with a headset destroyed his hearing and he's almost stone deaf. But in a quiet room, he can still understand garbled human speech.

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Re: They should be as secure as ...

Just because it's running TCP/IP doesn't mean it's connected to the Internet....

'No evidence' UK.gov has done much to break up IT outsourcing

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Mushroom

Re: Why outsource

For small organisations the inside knowledge of how the organisation works and where the staircase with the hidden server is can be more valuable than some twat with a shiny suit and an MBA

In my bitter experience, the clue is in the name: CONsultant, CONtractor....

Either I'm an IT $DEITY, or all the consultants I've come across have been charlatans who only exist to write reports to placate senior management and know naff all about real-world IT. They only know what they read in vendor sales brochures. (Which, as those of us who work at the coal face of IT know, are works of fiction)

(There may be skillful, honest & hardworking contractors & consultants - I just haven't come across any yet)

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Mushroom

Why outsource

If you're a small(er) body (public or private sector) I can see the appeal for outsourcing: You don't need to invest in a (lot) of IT staff to cover a whole host of technologies.

But for the larger bodies, why outsource? It's going to cost an arm and a leg in lawyers fees to negotiate & manage a contract. Surely that could be better spent within the body concerned?

Oh - I know why: It's so government mandarins can get cushy jobs once they've awarded the contract.

Why did top Home Office civil servant lobby Ofcom for obscure kit ban?

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GSM Gateway Usage

GSM gateways are devices that were used to let people make cheap overseas phone calls, back when calls abroad cost tens of pennies per minute to make.

Not quite: GSM Gateways were widely used when it cost 15ppm (& upwards) to call a UK mobile from a landline, but 4ppm to call mobile to mobile.

Many companies used them as a way to save a lot of money on UK mobile calls. The operators disliked gateways as they claimed the gateways hogged cell capacity preventing normal mobiles from making & receiving calls.

ITU aims to to keep the radio on with new satellite regulation fees

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WTF?

1,000 Satellites?!?

Flat fee for a set maximum number [...] of 1,000 satellites

WTF? Why on Earth (Or in Space!) would you need 1,000 satellites in one orbit?

Audio tweaked just 0.1% to fool speech recognition engines

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Terminator

Siri too

Siri on my iPhone suffers from the same problem. I've heard its bong registering it's heard the magic "Hey Siri" command when nothing like "Hey Siri" was said by anyone/thing in the audible vicinity. Yet it doesn't always acknowledge when I say "Hey Siri".

Least realistic New Year’s resolution ever: Fix Facebook in 365 days

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Re: Facebook is a reflection of society...

Here's a thing - why do you have to wait two weeks for the damn thing to be removed?

To be fair to FB (I feel guilty for writing that), as they replicate your data across various servers - some which don't keep their discs spun up all the time, it may take a while to go across all the servers and find & delete all your data. They may even actually over-write your old data to prevent recovery.

Of course, they could just be hoping you decide to cancel your deletion and remain connected to the collective

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Re: Facebook is a reflection of society...

but I'm now viewed by a lot of my friends/family as "the weird one" because I choose not to regularly spunk up my details of what I had for dinner last night for all to see.

Not weird, but sane and free-thinking.

Welcome to the club.

Microsoft offloads networking to FPGA-powered NICs

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Re: Killer NIC

I think it just did some kind of QoS/prioritization on network traffic leaving your PC so gaming traffic was prioritized over, say, BitTorrent.

Unless you've got fibre to your home, I don't think CPUs have much problem keeping up with domestic 'net connections.

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Black Helicopters

Re: Hmmm... programmable?

And certain thee & four letter government agencies too

Woo-yay, Meltdown CPU fixes are here. Now, Spectre flaws will haunt tech industry for years

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"which is built with security first and foremost"

It is a nice mantra but it will not stop products being insecure.

You can't fully protect against all security issues as you don't know all the possible ways your product could be insecure.

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Speculative execution is a good idea: It's a way to keep the CPU busy with (hopefully) useful work whilst it waits for RAM to catch up. The issue is the way it's implemented.

Switching off speculative execution (if it's possible) will kill CPU performance. Some of the reports say that current CPUs can execute several hundred instructions whilst waiting for a single memory access request to main memory. That's a lot of lost CPU performance if you switch off speculative execution.

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@ Tinslave_the_Barelegged

You're missing the point. Unless someone's tested Loongson or PowerPC you don't know if they're vulnerable or not. So far, I've only seen reports on Intel, AMD & ARM processors. That does NOT mean the others are not vulnerable.

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Has anyone actually tested Sparc processors for these vulnerabilities? And what about PowerPC or MIPS? Or a myriad of now obsolete CPUs that have speculative execution?

Personally, I'm going to stick to my old faithful Z80

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

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Intel CEO

And just before Christmas, who sold most of their stock in Intel? Intel's CEO.

www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

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Re: Mixed signals on CPU's

It goes a long way back. If the CPU has:

* a Memory Management Unit

* a memory cache

* a branch predictor

* Supervisor & User modes

It's highly likely to be affected. (and the last one might not even be required)

All of those features have been in CPUs for many, many years.

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Late to the party

Translation: We were gonna say something next week, but those bastards at The Register blew the lid on it early

The speculation had started before Christmas. El Reg was certainly not the first to blow the lid on this.

UK security chief: How 'bout a tax for tech firms that are 'uncooperative' on terror content?

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Re: Costing or saving?

The government think that Google/Zuck/etc al are Spectre and they're waiting for "C" to come along and sign them up instantly.

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Tax Laws

..especially given that various governments are already embroiled in battles to get the businesses to pay what they still owe.

If the companies are breaking tax laws, then they should haul them before the courts. The problem is that the companies are not breaking any laws. They just happen to be using laws not in the manner intended when the laws were written.

If governments want these businesses to pay more tax, they have to change the tax rules.

UK.gov needs help getting folk to splurge on full fibre and 5G

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Flame

Er, how about keeping BT's grubby hands out of Openreach's bank account and giving Openreach a free hand to invest in the network?

HMS Queen Elizabeth has sprung a leak and everyone's all a-tizzy

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WTF?

Though defence commentators are, rather predictably, shouting about this being a non-story – and to a point it is an expected defect – it is very much a matter of public concern

Bollocks. It's a new ship, of new design, and there are some snags and the make will fix them. As the El Reg article says, isn't this the point of things like sea trials? TBH - I'd be very suspicious if there weren't any snags.

And why did El Reg spend most of the article being all calm, and then throw in that provocative statement. I expected better of El Reg.

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

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Holmes

Whodathought it - large individual drives suck at random I/O performance.

I seem to recall this being brought up when 1GB drives were first coming to market: An array of lots of smaller drives has better performance than the same sized array with fewer drives.

Liberating SSH from Logjam leftovers

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Cisco

Cisco need to step up to the plate here: Some of their IOS kit either only works with 1024 bit SSH keys and others have weird bugs if you don't use 2048 SSH keys.

Facebook confesses: Facebook is bad for you

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Sounds a bit like the excuse a playground bully uses: “But Sir, they made me hit them.”

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My other half was encouraged to sign up to FB by the kids after they’d left home a few years ago. She doesn’t spend much time on it, but the amount of videos, ads & dross she has to scroll past. And then the anxiety of “Do I acceppt X’s friend request?”

I don’t want a FB (orTwitter) account myself, but companies (especially small ones) are moving to only have FB or Twitter contact methods. *sigh*

Voda customers given green light by Ofcom to ditch contracts

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And make sure you get them to unlock your phone (Assuming you bought the phone under the contract)