* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Alister

Re: Remain MPs all broke the law and should all be in prison anyway.

David Cameron made it law that the Referendum would be a legally binding vote

No, he didn't. That is a lie.

Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells

Alister

Glow-in-the-dark organs

The latest fashion trend?

Alister

Re: When I was a kid

Wasn't the original Star Trek Enterprise supposed to use optical computing of some sort?

Nine words to ruin your Monday: Emergency Internet Explorer patch amid in-the-wild attacks

Alister

Re: Not showing...

Also doesn't get offered if you manually check for updates - I've tried on Windows 10, Windows 7, Server 2016, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2008 R2 and none of them offer it.

HMRC's HTTPS howler: Childcare payments site cert expired at 1am on Sunday, down for hours

Alister

Despite all the foaming at the mouth, it's worth pointing out that any transactions with the site are still encrypted, you just can't be sure you are connected to the server you thought you were.

However, the chances of someone trying a man-in-the-middle attack with an expired (but otherwise correct) certificate are remote to say the least.

Devonitely not great: Torbay and South Devon NHS declares 'major IT incident'

Alister

Re: What ?

Much more likely an entire political party.

No, just the UK government - of any political shade - over the last 20 years.

In the bag: Serco 'delighted' to grab £450m ferry and freight deal between Scotland and Northern Isles

Alister

before Northlink/Serco it was P&O.

Ah yes, of course it was. Thanks.

Alister

What happened to CalMac?

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

Alister

Re: I believe the word all y'all are looking for is ...

Frankly I wouldn't miss Penistone...

German ministry hellbent on taking back control of 'digital sovereignty', cutting dependency on Microsoft

Alister

Some of the arguments, such as the risk of cloud downtime, seem familiar from years back; and yet it has not impeded cloud adoption.

That's because those making the decision to move to the cloud, in nearly all cases, are blind and deaf to the consequences, and only see the immediate cost benefits.

We trained an AI to predict how bad a forest fire will be. It's just as good as a coin flip!

Alister

built a decision tree algorithm

Let's hope it's fireproof

GitHub gobbles biz used by NASA, Google, etc to search code for bugs and security holes in Mars rovers, apps...

Alister

Re: "Software security is a community effort..."

Did you use the wrong word, or are you tempting LGBTQ retaliation for your choice of word??

Do you know what a levee is?

Well in Europe and the UK, that's a dyke, and has been for centuries.

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Alister
Headmaster

Re: He should have stuck to what he knows

His arrogantness,

Arrogance FFS

Time for another cuppa then? Tea-drinkers have better brains, say boffins with even better brains

Alister

Re: Nah, that can't be right...

Four cups a week

I drink on average 12 mugs of tea a day. that's more than 84 cups a week... I think there must be an upper limit to their research.

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

Alister

A 16.78-carat yellow diamond worth $2 million has been covered in the carbon nanotubes

That seems a rather extravagant way of demonstrating the point.

"Oh yes, we really need to spend $2 million on a diamond for our research"

Cloud, internet biz will take a Yellowhammer to the head in 'worst case' no-deal Brexit

Alister

Re: just a scenario

I'd trust BoJo a lot further than I'd trust any EU politician.

Yes, I agree, Farage is much worse than BoJo.

Alister
Boffin

Re: Transhumanism for the win

uploading my mind to a Sinclair Spectrum.

Um, without wanting to insult you... but you must have quite a small mind...

Alister

Re: How?

The entire UK elected enough Conservatives MP's to give them the majority

Actually, we didn't. They had to make up the numbers with the DUP, if you recall.

Mystery database left open turns out to be at heart of a huge Groupon ticket fraud ring

Alister
Thumb Up

nefarinites

You made that up! But it so should be a word.

Psst. Wanna brush up your supervillain creds? Get a load of this mini submarine

Alister

Re: How would we know?

I was thinking of the Beatles and trying (too hard) to link it in.

Ah gotcha. Sorry, that bit went whooooosh!

I think you're correct, they used to wear yellow oilskins and boots.

Alister

Re: How would we know?

Either I missed something subtle about Roland6's post, or you're talking about something different... The Beatles had a yellow submarine, but they were never in the RNLI as far as I know?

Alister

Re: How would we know?

as long as its yellow

Orange! RNLI use dayglow orange, not yellow.

Alister

systems used by the RNLI

"Take her down, Cock-son... Oh sorry, Coxswain"

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

Alister

"The UK already has more charging points than petrol stations"

No, it doesn't.

The figure of 9500 or so charging points which is often quoted, comes from the Zap Maps website, but they include in that figure many which are not publicly available, and therefore shouldn't be counted against petrol stations.

And of that 9500 locations headline figure, only about 1660 are rapid charger types.

Alister

The Zap Map figure is a lie, it includes hundreds of charging points which are not actually available to the public, and of those that are, only 1686 locations are rapid chargers.

Rolling in DoH: Chrome 78 to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS – hot on the heels of Firefox

Alister
Childcatcher

alt.sex.hamsters.duct-tape

You filthy pervert, you should be locked away.

The NetCAT is out of the bag: Intel chipset exploited to sniff SSH passwords as they're typed over the network

Alister
Headmaster

Re: SSH Timing attacks

Am I loosing my marbles?

Dunno, did you drop them?

Or maybe you are losing them?

Alister
Facepalm

Re: Innocent accidental?

Unless that was an intended pun?

Ya think?

Oops: Rockets lighting their tails is a good thing – but not three-plus hours before lift-off

Alister
Thumb Up

nicely judged use of deflagration

Huawei thanks Uncle Sam for returning its seized comms kit ... two years later, ya jerks

Alister

elsewhere in the world of Huawei today, British politicians are getting tired of waiting for the government's decision on the inclusion of so-called high risk vendors in building 5G networks locally.

You surprise me, I didn't think any British politicians were doing anything now except sit on their hands.

Welcome to The Reg's poetry corner... hiQ once again / beats LinkedIn on web scrape case / more appeals await

Alister

even if some LinkedIn users retain some privacy interests in their information notwithstanding their decision to make their profiles public, those interests did not outweigh hiQ’s interest in continuing its business

That's a loaded statement, right there. An individual's right to privacy doesn't outweigh a business' choice to ignore it.

Now on Amazon Prime: The Amazing Shrinking UK Tax Burden

Alister

etail-cum-cloud

EEEWWWW!

Apple and Google trade barbs over bugs, digital lothario arrested and Bluekeep gets busy

Alister

Obligatory xkcd

No, not that one...

Opal Fruits, Princess Diana and... PowerToys? Microsoft is dragging Windows 10 back to '95

Alister

Command Prompt Here

I think it was part of TweakUI, and was very useful for developing windows services or dlls when you had to manually register them.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Alister

Re: BAUD

Pored does not rhyme with poured.

It does when I say it. What sort of weird pronunciation do you use?

Alister

Re: hmm

It must be a very special diagnostic sequence that manages to progress so far without alerting the techie to elements like that.

Not really. If you are on a computer or internet helpdesk, then you probably start with certain assumptions about the caller: that they have a computer, and that they have (or want to have) internet.

I would imagine (as a random example) that a plumber call out service don't usually start by asking "do you have any water pipes" if you ring them...

You know what the NHS really needs? Influencers, right guys? #blessed

Alister

Wouldn't it be cheaper to prevent people going to the hospital in the first place?

Yes, but as successive UK governments have managed to systematically remove most of the community based alternatives, and made GP services almost impossible to access, it's no surprise that people have to turn up at the main hospitals for minor issues. Having an "App" won't fix that.

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Alister

Does anyone here remember the tedious regularity of having to persuade your terminal software to pick up an interrupted upload/download from where it left off rather than starting it all over again from the beginning?

Yes.

Look, we know it feels like everything's going off the rails right now, but think positive: The proton has a new radius

Alister

Re: Standard units please

London buses, football pitches and Wales

Those are macro measurements, linguine are micro...

Alister

Re: Perhaps they should have run the experiment in Wales!

The Welsh are quite good at lamb shifting, as well, often in the dead of night...

Alister

Re: Can they not just use a micrometer?

You have to hold it really, really still though, or you might end up measuring the wrong proton.

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

Alister

Re: "Auditors bemoan time it takes"

@Pascal

If you read the rest of the article, you will see that the auditors are not commenting on the ability of the pilots, but the availability of resources to train them. Cancellation of 44 out of 369 pilot training courses due to lack of instructors or equipment is not a good way to get a decent pass rate.

Now it's Terrance Dicks' turn to regenerate: Golden-age Doctor Who mainstay dies aged 84

Alister

So, just curious Lucy, when did you read Wyndham's books?

In my case I'd read Wyndham and Wells and various others for quite a while before I came across Dr Who, and I read the books from Target for a long time before I actually saw a Dr Who episode.

However, this may be because we didn't get a television until 1978, so I joined halfway through Tom Baker's reign.

My recollections of Terrance Dicks are therefore mostly as a writer of the books.

RIP.

Yahoo! customers! wake! up! to! borked! email! (Yes! people! still! actually! use! it!)

Alister

It's always DNS

MX lookups are very flaky for most of the European Yahoo domains, no matter what DNS resolvers you use. I've tested with OpenDNS, Google, and a number of other public responders, and they are all having trouble returning MX records for Yahoo domains. Yahoo.com doesn't seem to be a problem.

MAMR Mia! Western Digital's 18TB and 20TB microwave-energy hard drives out soon

Alister

Re: Feeling Old...

Another 20MB HD owner here, double height 5 1/4 managed to squeeze it into an IBM 5150 PC AT case next to the 5 1/4 floppy drives. At the time, 20MB of storage was immense!

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

Alister

Thank the gods for Quantum computing, up until now, bits have had to be one or zero - a clear case of gender typing.

Now with quantum, a bit can be anywhere on a scale from one to zero, and can change that at any time if they choose to. No more binary repression!

Alister

Strict typing is repressing a variable's right to see itself how it wants to be.

Alister

Black tea and white bread are fine, because the colour words there have no particular moral weighting.

Ok, so why then was blackboard considered to have "moral weighting", or "baa baa black sheep" or any of many more terms which describe colour?

Uncle Sam is Huawei out of line with these hacking attacks, patent probes, Chinese mobe maker sighs

Alister

"In all matters, our investigative techniques comply with the law and all subjects of investigations enjoy the same rights to due process afforded by our Constitution and safeguarded by an independent judiciary."

I bet he burst a blood vessel trying not to laugh whilst he said that.