* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

RIP Dr Peuto, Zilog and Sun's bright SPARC

Alister

The very first computing book I ever bought was Rodnay Zaks' How To Program the Z80, when I was 14 or 15.

Ah, nostalgia.

RIP Bernard.

Earth's noggin took quite a clockin' back in the day: Now a second meteorite crater spotted under Greenland ice

Alister

Re: And yet, there is still life on earth ...

for the moment...

NHS needs to pull its finger out and prep staff for future robotics, genomics, data-led healthcare

Alister
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Re: We're all dead

@NE-bot

Ha, beat you to it... :)

It's obvious, if a person is in charge of a company at the time of one of the largest data breaches in the UK, then promote them to look after the NHS digital transformation, let the data flow freely!

Alister
Facepalm

There will also be a workforce implementation plan, led by Dido Harding, which will aim to put the recommendations in the Topol review into practice.

We're all doomed!

What she knows about data governance and privacy could be written on the head of a pin, and still leave room for the manufacturers name...

Not heard owt bad about Huawei, says EU Commish infosec bod

Alister

Re: All thin foil hat chatter about US aside....

At least the Amis don't steal copyrighted information from European companies or engage in state supported piracy, spying and hacking

Oh yes they do, very much so.

Holy planetesimal formation, Batman! Ultima Thule's no snowman – it's a friggin' pancake

Alister

while the smaller lobe (nicknamed "Thule") looks like a disappointingly deflated party balloon (or "dented walnut", according to scientists).

Doesn't look like any walnut I've ever seen, "dented hazelnut" maybe...

Big trouble Down Under as Australian MPs told to reset their passwords amid hack attack fears

Alister

Re: I'm the Next PM

I thought Australia always put their Prime Ministers in prison as soon as they were elected into office?

(Thanks to Sir PTerry)

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

Alister

Re: On BBC Radio 4 this morning

I think you need to, erm, "brush up" on your Carry On films.

Pecker is very much a British euphemism.

Alister
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Re: Right...

Thanks for clarifying... :)

Alister

Re: Something missing here !

Perhaps Bezos still has some morals?

Alister

Re: Something just wrong here, on a visceral level

Does anyone see something wrong about the richest man in the world putting investigators on an organisation (they didnt pull the trigger here) for his personal political ends?

You are talking about Trump, right?

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

Alister

Writhing around on the carpet tiles under office desks is not one of the skills listed on my LinkedIn page

But it so should be...

Pants-purveyor in plea for popularity: It's not just any pork push... it's an M&S 'love sausage'

Alister

My dad once went into a hardware shop and asked the young female assistant if she had any vices...

Alister
Childcatcher

Will nobody think of the parents!

Take pity on all the embarrassed mothers and fathers who are being met by the question:

"Mummy, Daddy, what's a love sausage?"

WeWork restructuring bites El Reg hacks where it hurts as afternoon brew delayed

Alister

Critical Mass?

Surely there is a critical mass of abandoned coffee mugs per desk beyond which it isn't safe to go without serious consequences. In the average cubicle, can you safely accumulate more than about ten empty mugs before causing a tear in the space-time continuum?

Website programming? Pffft, so 2011. Python's main squeeze is now data science, apparently

Alister

Re: Find this bit hard to believe

Yeah, Pythons tend to be bigger than Adders...

Who are the last people you'd expect to spill thousands of student records? A computer science dept? What a fantastic guess

Alister

you have to wonder why sensitive data was stored in a spreadsheet in the first place

Well I don't find it particularly surprising, whether it's correct or not is another matter, but collating and storing student's marks in a spreadsheet doesn't sound wildly improbable, and it's a bit of a stretch to consider that information "sensitive". As noted above, it used to be common for student grades to be posted on a noticeboard for all to see.

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Alister

Re: Prevaricating?

Prevaricating" means "lying"

Is this a US / UK thing? I understand prevaricate to mean evade or dodge the issue, but not out-and-out lying. I see it used in this manner quite often in British news.

Are you perhaps thinking that maybe procrastinate is a better fit?

Amid polar vortex... Honeywell gets frosty reception after remote smart thermostat tech freezes up for a week

Alister

Re: IOT=Crap

We wouldn't trust an IoT lock either; as far as lights go, the auto-on outside lights make things significantly easier for us. The same goes for the motion sensor that turns on the dressing room light when you enter, the Nest thermostat we occasionally turn on and off remotely and the voice control on bedroom lights when we are feeling lazy and can't be arsed to stir ourselves.

it does seem that anything on the forums not condemning the IoT as the corporate tool of Satan, used solely by idiots, isn't very well received.

@Ian K,

I think you are missing the point. It is perfectly possible to have all these conveniences, to control your lights by voice or from a smartphone app, and all the other things, without the need to use the internet or someone else's server.

That is why people on this forum are disparaging of IoT, it is unnecessarily complicated and prone to being made obsolete or unusable at the whim of the manufacturer or service provider, much more so than discrete electronics or equipment based on internal WiFi connections.

If you think that what has happened to the Honeywell thermostat is acceptable, then fine, carry on as you are, but understand that a lot of the technically minded people who post on the Reg have seen this coming for a long time, and it won't be the last time this happens.

Alister

Cloud = held to ransom

A graphic demonstration of why using cloud connected services and appliances is a stupid idea. You are always at the mercy of the provider, and if they go bust, or change focus, or move on to the next big thing, then you are stuffed.

As far as I know you have no legal recourse if a company decides to remove a cloud service they were providing for an appliance like this.

Original WWII German message decrypts to go on display at National Museum of Computing

Alister

Re: Polish plumbers

downvoted for a question?

Nice.

Alister

Re: Terminology

"Metric tonne" is a tautology.

Only for the written word. If spoken there is no way to distinguish a tonne from a ton without specifying "metric tonne". It is therefore acceptable to use it to clarify which unit is being referred to.

Alister

Re: Polish plumbers

Fair enough with regard to Enigma, but they didn't have much influence on Colossus or the Lorenz cipher, did they?

RIP, RDP... nearly: Security house Check Point punches holes in remote desktop tools

Alister

Re: Remote Desktop Protocol you say ?

You mean that thing that is practically the very first thing I disable when I reinstall a PC ?

If you are talking about Windoze machines, that's quite strange, as RDP isn't enabled by default...

Cheap call? Hardly. GSM gateway judicial review to settle whether UK Home Sec can legally push comms watchdog around

Alister
Headmaster

Re: I hope the home office looses

Personally, I'd prefer it if the Home Office loses, but each to their own, what do you want them to loose?

Clever girl: SpaceX's Mars-bound Raptor engine looks like it works just fine

Alister

Re: Are Nasa taking the piss?

I used to have a Land Rover Discovery, and part of it's registration were the letters HAL, I wish I'd kept that plate now...

Alister

Clever Girl

Nice Jurassic Park reference there...

Oh cool, the Bluetooth 5.1 specification is out. Nice. *control-F* master-slave... 2,000 results

Alister

My daughter bought herself a pair of wireless Bluetooth earpieces last week, for use with her phone. I was amused to read, in the small print, the advice "avoid close proximity to WiFi sources".

That rather limits their use, I would have thought...

Techies tinker with toilet-topper to turn it into ticker-tracker

Alister

I wonder if the willing volunteers were a representative sample of the expected target for this monitoring- that is, someone suffering from chronic heart problems - or whether they were a bunch of young undergrads. I would suggest that if the latter, it invalidates the testing, as the ability to accurately monitor blood-flow and ecg will be much more of a challenge in older patients, who may well suffer from poor circulation which will be exacerbated by sitting on a toilet seat.

Using WhatsApp for your business comms? It's either that or reinstall Lotus Notes

Alister

"Internal speaker" so no, the program could drive it directly, without any way of controlling it

Alister

Ah, "Donal' wuar's yoor troosers", I feel better now.

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

Alister

Oh ah, so he is:

règlement général sur la protection des données

Didn't know that, thanks.

Alister

did you mean GDPR?

It's Shodan embarrassing: Red-faced Rubrik blames public-facing DB on developer ballsup

Alister

"I think the lesson is that you can never leave configuration up to humans.

No, the lesson is, don't expect developers to be good sysadmins - or vice-versa. Security should be done by somebody competent in the field, just as development should be.

"The real lesson... is that by turning security into code, it can be built, tested, and managed in a completely automated fashion. To the maximum extent possible we have to get the humans out of the loop.

And what a fucking nightmare that would be, if security was left up to automation.

Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data

Alister

Promise to do better

Unfortunately, what Facebook mean by that is, "We'll work harder at not being discovered"...

Hands up who isn't fighting Oracle in court? HPE, for now, as Solaris support sueball tossed

Alister

Hands up who isn't fighting Oracle in court?

<small voice from the crowd>

Um, hello? I'm not...

Iceland starts planning for new undersea internet cable to Europe

Alister

Re: Mainland Europe

Well we are physically a bit of mainland Europe, we're just a sticky-up bit on the end...

Trying to log into Office 365 right now? It's a coin flip, says Microsoft: Service goes TITSUP as Azure portal wobbles

Alister

Re: The joys of "Computing as a service"

Not for long, I'm sure.

It won't be long before systemd will require network access before it condescends to boot the kernel...

Alister

Re: Remind me again why ...

Such as open source.

There is still no readily available open source alternative which gives you all the features of email, calendars, collaborative working, active directory and single sign-on that Office 365 does.

Sure, you can, at great expense of time and effort, cobble together disparate bits of open source software to do a similar job.

But the time and effort come at a cost to businesses, and require someone with decent IT skills to get working and keep working. Why would any business bother?

I studied hard, I trained for years. Yay, now I'm an astronaut in space. Argggh, leukemia!

Alister

Re: How does this compare?

Bob, I don't know why you were downvoted for that - maybe it's a Pavlovian response... :)

I agree, such a study should be carried out.

Alister

Re: How does this compare?

It sounds like there could be some additional effect but it's strange this new study doesn't mention sleep once in 33 pages.

That's because the scientists carrying out the study are looking for results that are NEW and EXCITING and SPAAAACE and WOO!, and anything so mundane as sleep deprivation doesn't fit into the narrative...

Sorry, I went a bit Bombastic Bob there.

Alister

Re: Virus vs Bacteria

@Mage,

Interesting post.

Forgive me though, but it was my understanding that the Martians in WotW were draining the blood of humans to use for food, so their postulated body chemistry cannot have been far different from our own?

Alister

As mentioned above, it may be the disturbance to circadian rhythms - sleep patterns, as the same impact has been noted in studies carried out on shift-workers.

Europe taps Facebook, Google, Twitter on the shoulder. So about those promises to stamp out lies, bots, dodgy ads?

Alister

With regard to the footnote story, about social media and child suicide, I noticed a BBC headline saying "UK could ban social media over suicide images, minister warns".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47019912

I thought that might cause a bit of a flurry, can you imagine the outcry if the general populace couldn't access FaceGooInstaTwitchat?

Or maybe the UK populace are so cowed nowadays that even that wouldn't rouse them?

Swiss Public Prosecutor will probe WIPO's misconduct allegations against CIO, says his legal counsel

Alister

So let me get this straight, for borrowing a colleague's bank card (with permission?) to withdraw some money, Lei has been suspended and investigated by WIPO, who meanwhile have failed to do anything about Gurry, who used undue influence to award a contract to a friend?

Irish data watchdog to Facebook: Hang about, what's all this about a WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger merger now?

Alister

Re: Creepy

(Can we keep Brexit out of this? I'm already bored to the back teeth of hearing about it elsewhere)

Don't you know that Brexit is the root of all evil?

Or was that Trump, or maybe Clinton, I forget now.

Apple: You can't sue us for slowing down your iPhones because you, er, invited us into, uh, your home... we can explain

Alister

Re: This is factually incorrect

Cutting their head off and boiling it in vinegar is preferred in some places.

And it works on humans too!

Alister

Golly 4G whizz: Vodafone caught using Three UK's spectrum

Alister

"genuine mistake"

One wonders what the alternative would be?

An inadvertent mistake, perhaps, or just a deliberate one?