* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

Alister

classic example of the law of unintended consequences.

You there. Person, corp, state. Doesn't matter. You better not shoot down or hack a drone. That's our job – US govt

Alister

Using radar, electro-optical (EO), infrared (IR) or acoustic methods is probably fine, but radio frequency (RF) is a different matter given the tight controls there are over use of bandwidth to prevent interference.

Umm, you do know that radar is RF, don't you?

Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

Alister

Re: Huh?

Och: general interjection of confirmation, affirmation, and often disapproval.

You'd think 1.8bn users a day would be enough for Zuck. But no. Oculus fans must sign up for Facebook

Alister

Re: Not so fast

And one-off mobile numbers are rather not available.

For 11 quid you can buy a SIM with credit, bung it in a feature phone to register and and then forget it.

'Get out of my office, you're being a pest!' Yes, son. Toymaker releases work-from-home-themed play sets

Alister

My Home Office

I was so disappointed, I thought it was so the kids could set themselves up as Priti Patel and manage immigration, security and law-and-order for the neighbourhood.

US senators: WikiLeaks 'likely knew it was assisting Russian intelligence influence effort' in 2016 Dem email leak

Alister

Re: Is this news?

I think the telling point is that the committee in this instance is Republican led, and therefore even rabid republicans can't just pass this off as more Democrat propaganda.

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

Alister

Re: Asset stripper

Just for once, party above country.

I think (I hope) you meant that the other way round.

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Alister

Re: For those that are not aware of who Gimlet is .....

Very good, but for those who don't know, the phrase "a gimlet stare" references a small hand tool similar to a bradawl used for making holes in wood, and is an alternative to the phrase "a piercing stare".

Both Gimlet King and Gimlet the dwarf were called that because of their steely gaze. (And in Gimlet the dwarf's case, because it sounded like Tolkien's Gimli, son of Gloin).

Snortical warfare: Wild boar launches amphibious assault against German beachgoers

Alister

A friend of mine farms wild boar in Derbyshire. He had to go through all sorts of regulatory hoops to get permission to keep them, and there are regular inspections of the 6 foot high security fencing used to keep them contained. If one escapes, he has to notify the police immediately, as they are classed as dangerous animals.

This is node joke. Tor battles to fend off swarm of Bitcoin-stealing evil exit relays making up about 25% of outgoing capacity at its height

Alister

Re: I continue to be surprised

Is there an excuse for not using encryption on every website?

I didn't downvote you, but there doesn't have to be an "excuse".

If all you are serving is informational pages, with no requirement for user interaction or logins, then why not use HTTP, it's a perfectly valid protocol if used correctly.

Steve Wozniak at 70: Here's to the bloke behind Apple who wasn't a complete... turtleneck

Alister

Re: Apple

Woz didn’t do anything particularly special.

Right. Like reducing the chip-count on an Atari game console by designing the board to use DRAM instead of shift-registers, or designing and building the Apple 1 hardware, and writing the software, all by himself.

China now blocking ESNI-enabled TLS 1.3 connections, say Great-Firewall-watchers

Alister

Re: Own goal?

@keith_w

Which bit of "operating systems." don't you understand?

Yes I know the browsers support it. But the OS doesn't. Not even Server 2019.

Alister

Re: Own goal?

I shouldn't worry about that for a while, Microsoft hasn't caught up with TLS 1.3 yet for their operating systems.

Pay ransomware crooks, or restore the network? Guess which way this city chose after weighing up the costs

Alister

Exactly, unless they wipe and reformat the machines, how do they know for sure that those machines are not riddled with other malware.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Alister

Re: Ahh yes the

If you have kit that needs to be operational its always wise to have spares as keeping offline spares is cheaper than an expensive machine not working for however long it takes to procure a spare.

This does not sit well with beancounter managers though. "I want to buy such-and-such as a spare" is met with a resounding NO!

Doctor, doctor, got some sad news, there's been a bad case of hacking you: UK govt investigates email fail

Alister

Re: Change one word for reality

The Russians have been messing with our (and many other nations') social, scientific, economic and political life for over 200 years.

Really? Have you any evidence to back up that claim?

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

Alister

The basic parameters of the initial high speed aircraft design include a targeted Mach 3 certified delta-wing aircraft that would have capacity for 9 to 19 people at an altitude above 60,000 feet

Why? What is the point?

AI assistants work perfectly in the UK – unless you're from Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, Belfast...

Alister

That makes me think of the old advert for Tunes mentholyptus sweets:

A bloke with a cold goes to a railway ticket office and says

"Doo fird clad diggeds do Dottigab, Blead"

And the ticket seller goes "Whut"?

So the bloke goes and buys some Tunes, and has one, then goes back to the ticket window and says

"Two first class tickets to Nottingham, Please"

TUUUUNES!

Alister

Re: Wait ...

Nice try...

:)

As you well know, nobody anywhere sounds like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Alister

Re: Every time

That reminds me of a time when we also noticed some porn sites appearing in our proxy logs. It was only a small company with 15 developers, so identifying the machine used was not difficult, so we thought..

However, the timestamp was from early in the morning, before any right-thinking developer would have dragged themselves out of bed and into the office, so we were curious how it had happened.

It began to happen on a regular basis, a couple of mornings a week, but not always from the same machine, and so we decided to look more closely. The days and times coincided with the hours that the office cleaners worked (06:30 - 08:30, Tuesdays and Thursdays), so we approached the cleaning company and asked them to talk to their staff.

It still kept happening, so we set up a webcam overlooking the desks, but disguised inside a cardboard floppy container. The next morning, we reviewed the footage, and found that one of the cleaners used to bring her teenage son into work with her, and he would wander round the desktops until he found one that had been left unlocked, and would then amuse himself with a bit of porn.

We showed the footage to the cleaning company, and the cleaner was disciplined. We also had a rant at the developers about leaving their machines unlocked overnight.

This investor blew nearly $300,000 on Intel shares the day before 7nm disaster reveal. Yup, she's suing

Alister

WAAAAAAAAAH!

If she bet on a horse and it didn't win, would she sue the jockey or trainer?

Yeah, probably.

Smoke on the Tyne: Blaze at BT exchange causes major outages across North East England

Alister

Re: Numbers Ported to VoIP still not safe

Is there way to escape BT?

Go and live in Hull?

Alister

Fire suppression?

The last time I was in a BT exchange it was still running Strowger, so I don't know: do modern exchanges have inert gas fire suppression like any normal datacentre, or will the nice little fire bodies drown it in water?

51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home

Alister

Re: Bad Joke in Bad Taste

The video has no educational or informative value.

Blimey, you really do have problems, don't you.

It is not intended to be humorous, it is a valid example of the state of the art of deep fakes, and is also an interesting historical document, in that the speech was prepared for Nixon, but he never read it publicly.

It therefore has both informative and educational value.

Incredible artifact – or vital component after civilization ends? Rare Nazi Enigma M4 box sells for £350,000

Alister

you could try typing covfefe into it, and seeing what plaintext it produced?

Google employs people to invent colours – and they think their work improves your wellbeing

Alister

I started my working career in telephone exchanges, where everything was painted a creamy beige colour called straw, except the really old stuff, which was battleship grey.

Alister

Is Quite Mint the same as the institutional green colour they used to use in hospitals and government buildings?

It's handbags at dawn: America to hit France with 25% tariffs on luxuries over digital tax on US tech titans

Alister

Re: If the French law really is carefully targeted to hit only American tech companies....

It isn't deliberately targeted though. It's just a fact that most of the major digital services that the world uses are American based. There is no European alternative to Facebook, Google etc.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Alister

Re: Windows 2000

Would you like to share with us your reason for so much hatred? Or maybe you should just grow up?

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

Alister

Re: Fail

Inconsiderate hacking is arrogant oafishness.

So I guess as a student you never, ever tried to do something to a computer or network, just to see if you could?

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

Alister

butterscotch Angel Delight, is a thing of glory (although we're slightly concerned that happy childhood memories of decades ago might be sullied by the adult experience of today).

Rest easy.

Recently, in a fit of nostalgia, I bought and consumed some, and it is still as I remember it from childhood, truly a glorious thing.

I also bought some sardine and tomato paste for sandwiches, and that too was a nostalgic trip round the tastebuds.

When Facebook says you're not a good 'culture fit', it means you're not White or Asian enough – complaint

Alister

Indians are Asians, they live in the geopolitical area called Asia, as do Pakistanis, Nepalese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Malayan, Mongolian etc, etc.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Alister

I'm curious as to why all this hand waving is only aimed at the English language?

Are we going to ban the Spanish from ever using their word for the colour black in any context?

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

Alister

Re: Liability

If someone hot-links to content on your site, without your prior agreement, then they are fair game, and bear the responsibility.

I once had a government department website which linked to an image on one of my sites without my knowledge or consent. I only found out because the traffic levels suddenly shot up on my site.

So I changed the image to show the text "This image does not belong to <website> and they do not have permission to use it". It took over a month before they noticed and took it down.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Alister

Re: Mondarin?

That's his Chinese uncle

Now that's a train delay Upminster with which London travellers shall not put

Alister

Re: 'feels like March will never end'

@Unep Eurobats

Whooooosh!

It's National Cream Tea Day and this time we end the age-old debate once and for all: How do you eat yours?

Alister

Re: ...delightful cakey accompaniment is pronounced "scone"...

Yes I meant g own, as in OH. not OW

Alister

Re: ...delightful cakey accompaniment is pronounced "scone"...

So you pronounce gone as gown then.do you?

Dems take a crack at banning Feds from using facial-recog tech. Congress will put it on todo list after 'learn Klingon'

Alister

Sadly, in today's hyper polarised society, the mere fact that this is being introduced by Democratic Senators will mean that it gets rejected out of hand by many, without any thought as to whether it is in the public interest.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Alister

Re: Journalist missed the obvious

That would be Fox News, and nobody believes them...

Alister

Yep, we are now seeing the situation round here that tourists walking through a farmer's fields are complaining about cows and sheep being threatening, and asking for the animals to be locked up.

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Alister

They might as well have done the following:

A trio of Republican senators on Tuesday proposed legislation that requires service providers and device makers in America to help the Feds bypass gravity when presented with a court-issued warrant.

Internet Society, remember your embarrassing .org flub? The actual internet society would like to talk about it

Alister

the executives at the heart of the matter, and the boards of directors for both PIR and ISOC, failed to do their jobs.

It was my understanding that there were a number of individuals who were on the boards of both PIR, ISOC and the prospective purchaser.

No conflict of interest though... no, none at all...

When you bork... through a storm: Liverpool do all they can to take advantage of summer transfer, er, Windows

Alister

Re: sigh

fazakerley

Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service

Alister

Yeah, well it's Europe, innit, It's not like it's anywhere important.

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

Alister

Re: Could have been worse

Did you read the Snopes write-up?

Err, yes, I did.

If you read the Snopes write-up it quotes the apocryphal tale that it was Nat-West, however this is not the case: "a small UK-based company" does not equate to "A large bank".

Also:

Only a very small number of “Dear Rich Bastard” missives actually went out, rather than the 2,000 commonly stated in tellings of this event.

Alister

One of our developers wrote a windows service which polled a database once a second, and if for some reason it didn't get the answer it was looking for, he set it to send himself an email. Unfortunately, he didn't put in any code to see if it had already sent a previous email.

He deployed the code on a Friday afternoon (a big no-no in itself).

Later on the Friday evening, some other part of the project wrote an incorrect value into the database. So his bit of cheap and nasty code started sending error emails, once a second.

I got paged on Sunday morning because our SpamTitan spam blocker had finally had enough, and got a bad case of indigestion with 140,000 emails in its queue. It took me a while to identify where all these emails were coming from, and kill the offending service.

The developer was given a royal bollocking on Monday morning.

Alister

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Alister

deader than corduroy bell bottoms

WHAT!

why did nobody tell me?

Hey Mister Prime Minister ... Scott! Can you get off my lawn please, mate?

Alister

GIT ORF MY LAWN

My grumpy old heart is strangely warmed by this...