* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers

Alister

Re: Or they could have just looked at a calendar...

and not been fooled by his regular cameo roles on Discovery Channel

Never mind that, I saw him live discussing computer games here

Alister

Re: Um… Why?

No need to pull out perfectly good ones.

Not as much fun though...

I'm a Dentist

Article Removed

Alister

Me too!

Just to jump on the bandwagon, I'd be very interested in buying this book, and quite happy to pay for it, but NOT if it requires using cryptocurrencies or Facebook. Sorry.

You've really misjudged your audience on this one.

Router admin? Bored? Let's play Battleships using BGP!

Alister

Difficult to get even Doom graphics into 16 bits, sadly.

Primary Data says stop, Hammerspace, Innodisk cooks some SSDs, and Fujitsu goes blockchain

Alister

Stop! Hammer time.

or Hammerspace, then.

The harbingers of Doomwatch: Quist is quite the quasi-Quatermass

Alister

Re: 1977

My parents got a colour set in 1973. I remember it was 1973 because that was the year my parents got the colour TV set.

WARNING! circular reference detected!

:)

Alister

Yay! Stob!

Truly a good day, today.

Slurp up patient data for algos that will detect cancer early, says UK PM

Alister

In a speech in Macclesfield

Ha, I bet she was scared to be there. I mean, who knows what wild and woolly tribesmen exist in the wilds of Cheshire, they still practice ritual sacrifice on Alderley Edge, don't they?

Greenwich uni fined £120k: Hole in computing school site leaked 20k people's data

Alister

You can see why there are so many data breaches nowadays, if even those responsible for teaching future developers have no clue about security.

Is it any wonder that Dev-Ops (Ha) think it's absolutely fine to bung live data into a cloud container and then turn off the default security.

High-end router flinger DrayTek admits to zero day in bunch of Vigor kit

Alister

We also got the advisory on Friday, did the firmware upgrade with no dramas on all our affected routers. My understanding is that the routers were only vulnerable to this exploit if you allowed the external management interface, which by default is disabled, or SSL VPN connections, which again are off by default.

Das blinkenlights are back thanks to RPi revival of the PDP-11

Alister

an obsolete computer enthusiast

I say, that's a bit harsh...

Can't you just call him retired?

Flamin' Nora! Brit firefighters tackle blazing fly-tipped boat

Alister

Re: ...and did he have both his legs?

The boy stood on the burning deck

His lips were all a quiver,

He gave a cough, his leg fell off

And floated down the river.

Alister

Re: What we really need to know is...

did they rescue the boy from the burning deck?

...and did he have both his legs?

Alister

Bully's speedboat

"Let's look at what you could've won!"

Bastard!

Want to know what an organisation is really like? Visit the restroom

Alister
Headmaster

Re: loos at home are notable for their lack of written instructions.

Guns with short barrels loose accuracy over distance, please stand closer

I would hope that the makers of the sign were at least able to spell lose, particularly given the location.

Eye in the sea skies: Insitu flies Scaneagle 3 UAV in first public demo

Alister

trade-in

Maybe if we knock an F-35B off the order, we could get ten of these?

Blighty's super-duper F-35B fighter jets are due to arrive in a few weeks

Alister

PA474 flew over Ladybower today instead, I don't know if there was anybody there to watch.

Trump’s new ZTE tweets trump old ZTE tweets

Alister

The Washington Post and CNN have typically written false stories about our trade negotiations with China...

So factual reporting of his previous tweets is now fake news, is it?

Amazing.

America's forgotten space station and a mission tinged with urine, we salute you

Alister

Re: Pedant's corner

The little wascal has spiwit.

Oh. Ahh, about eleven, sir.

Julian Assange said to have racked up $5m security bill for Ecuador

Alister

Re: Heroes

@felonmarmer

Almost as if there had been a sustained campaign to discredit him by those his organisation exposed isn't it?

Frankly, there doesn't need to be any sort of organised campaign to discredit him, he's doing very well by himself.

I don't recall that he's paid back the poor shmucks who stood bail for him, for instance?

MPs petition for legally binding target of 95% 4G coverage across UK

Alister

Given the goverment's expressed intention to migrate all the emergency services communications to public 4G networks, one would hope for at least 95% coverage, and preferably more. But they probably haven't thought that through...

Hacking train Wi-Fi may expose passenger data and control systems

Alister

but depending on the architecture, it may be possible, like it is with the way they integrated stuff into cars.

No, it really isn't.

Aegon conquered by UK bank holiday IT upgrade: Some users can't log on

Alister

Which reminds me, are TSB back on their feet yet? It's all gone very quiet.

Pinging admins: Here comes your packet of networking news

Alister

Re: unsecured FTP is officially dead

Literally, you're basing your internal security on "nobody uses brass doorhandles any more, everyone uses these modern chrome things".

No Lee, we aren't. It's just used for backups, because it's quicker than any other protocol.

Alister

unsecured FTP is officially dead

There's no way that vanilla FTP should be exposed to the T'internet anymore, but we use it quite extensively inside our network, as it forms an effective barrier against ransomware and cryptoware - particularly recent variants which traverse SMB connections - so for instance the only access to our backup storage is by FTP, we've turned off NFS and CIFS.

It is still the quickest method of file transfer with the least overhead of any protocol.

Facebook misses Brit MPs' deadline, promises answers on Monday

Alister

it will have to finish the homework it's been set over the weekend.

Does Zuck have a dog?

If he does, let's hope it doesn't eat his homework...

Bombshell discovery: When it comes to passwords, the smarter students have it figured

Alister

How about: smarter people may have a larger vocabulary or a greater imagination to come up with and then remember more complex passwords?

Consent, datasets and avoiding a visit from the information commissioner

Alister

Re: Commercial relationship?

You still have the right to retain the details of the sale and the customer details for a set period .

Wrong, you have no rights to any customer details, just purchase time, date and amount.

If you destroyed all records of sale and customer details, how would you handle warranties, returns, recalls etc.

Erm, in exactly the same way as bricks-and-mortar shops do. Unless the purchaser gives you their details for a warranty claim, you have no records except of a sale for an amount on a day and time, no personal info at all.

Alister

Re: Commercial relationship?

I presume (wrongly?) that keeping details of a sale/customer remains legal, provided the data is kept safe.

You presume correctly that you're wrong... :)

For a one-off purchase, there is no legal reason to keep details of the customer, and the old practice of requiring that someone set up an account before being able to buy something will no longer be tenable.

Does entering into a contract to develop a website for someone mean they have given you explicit agreement to remember who they are? And to send them invoices in the future for renewal?

If you have an ongoing contract to supply both a website and future updates, then keeping the customer details on file is fine, but you mustn't use that information for any other purpose.

You love Systemd – you just don't know it yet, wink Red Hat bods

Alister

Re: suggestion for the pillock

PO should go fuck himself with a rusty spoon, what a bellend.

Linus, is that you?

Systemd-free Devuan Linux looses version 2.0 release candidate

Alister

Re: Beowulf

Don't know why you got a downvote for that, I remember playing with a Beowulf cluster back in the day, RedHat 5.1 I think it was we used.

VMware to finally deliver full-function HTML5 vSphere client

Alister

Re: Flash... ah!

or have they actually built a web interface that isn't crippled by a dumb desktop developer's idea that everything should be rammed into one tab, and to hell with standards, usability, accessibility, reliability and maintainability?

Umm... is this a rhetorical question?

Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

Alister

If you'd read my comment three pages back, you would see that the standard Windows edit box does indeed handle Unix-like line endings correctly, but Notepad is NOT a wrapper for that control, and was developed prior to the standard WinAPI controls.

Which makes it even more unbelievable that Microsoft haven't re-written Notepad to be a wrapper for the standard edit control before now.

Alister

Yes, and when you use the standard multi-line edit box, the product is called "wordpad". That's what wordpad is: a wrapper around the standard multi-line edit box.

No it isn't, Wordpad is a wrapper around the RichEdit control, which allows rtf formatting and so on. That's a very different beast to the basic multi-line edit box.

And notepad? The backward-compatible utility for Win3.11 users.

What nonsense, Notepad was present in the Windows 1.0 release, in fact it pre-existed Windows, as it started life as a DOS program with mouse support.

Alister

I've never quite understood why Notepad has this problem with line endings.

To the best of my recollection, the standard multiline edit box in the WinAPI has always dealt with Unix-like line endings correctly, so whatever they did in Notepad can't have used that control.

I'm sure I remember knocking up a rough-and-ready text editor in Visual C++ back in the nineties, using the standard Edit control, in order to edit conf files without destroying their formatting.

Microsoft sees Red ...Hat for OpenShift-on-Azure public cloud offering

Alister
Coat

Embrace, extend, errr, what was the other one again?

Exterminate?

Oh no sorry, that's something else.

HPE makes Nimble nimbler and fatter, its mutants get dedupe

Alister

Nostalgia

I remember when Nimble was a type of bread.

Alister
Headmaster

Re: Two shelfs

FYI, the plural of shelf is shelves.

LESTER looks up, spins its wheels: The Register’s beer-butler can see ...

Alister

Re: Removing rust from Opel Monzas?

I'd have thought if you remove all the rust from an Opel Monza, all that you'd be left with is the paint.

TSB's middleware nightmare: Execs grilled on Total Sh*tshow at Bank

Alister

Re: ‘Middleware’

The old magic (physical) engineer tales no longer apply to the world of software.

Things are much more complex.

My aren't we prideful.

Knowing which bit to hit is as relevant today as it's ever been - except you don't use a hammer, you use a keyboard.

Alister

The problem, Pester said, is that the middleware systems were unable to deal with the number of customers that wanted to access the banks systems

And he's trying to use this as an excuse? "Please sir, it wasn't me, the computer did it"

Can he not see that determining the expected load and planning for adequate resources to deal with that load are what his job is supposed to be?

It's like he's claiming that suddenly there were twice the number of customers from what they expected.

It's not like setting up a normal publicly accessible website, where planning for expected visitor numbers is always a bit of a gamble.

In this case, there are a finite number of account holders, so working out the expected load should be easy, even if, because of the downtime, more of their customers were trying to log in to see what had happened to their money...

/rant

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

Alister

Re: How to

Turn the BOFH stories into a suitable PDF, add a topical cover picture with the title artfully added via your graphical editor of choice, and send it off to a Print-on-demand shop.

Really!! After reading all the BOFH stories over the years, you really want to risk doing Simon out of his rights as author?

Blame everything on 'computer error' – no one will contradict you

Alister
Pint

Build a large edifice on an unstable swamp - and then wonder why one of the twin towers collapses. That asymmetry then becomes a feature.

Classic!

Quote of the week, right there.

Alister

Re: I have always said...

According to Ted Nelson...

"The good news about computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do exactly what you tell them to do."

LG's flagship arrives with <checks script> ... G7 what now?

Alister

ThanQ for your review...

This post didn't contain letters.

New York looks at California, drafts net neutrality legislation

Alister

Maybe because Immigration: Huge Mess

US techies: We want to see Pentagon's defence of winner-takes-all cloud contract

Alister

So if this goes through, we can expect lots of dumps of Top Secret data on unsecured Amazon S3 buckets, I suppose.

Open Government... Just not how we meant it.

North will remain North for now, say geo-magnetic boffins

Alister

Re: There is no pole flip.

We would all turn Japanese

You really think so?

Alister

Re: So what happens if...

@PK

If it's that sort of day, you'll probably get a parking ticket outside the library as well...

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

Alister

Re: Don't understand

Why NASA don't have an archival department

Because money...