classic example of the law of unintended consequences.
Posts by Alister
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
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FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC
You there. Person, corp, state. Doesn't matter. You better not shoot down or hack a drone. That's our job – US govt
Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe
You'd think 1.8bn users a day would be enough for Zuck. But no. Oculus fans must sign up for Facebook
'Get out of my office, you're being a pest!' Yes, son. Toymaker releases work-from-home-themed play sets
US senators: WikiLeaks 'likely knew it was assisting Russian intelligence influence effort' in 2016 Dem email leak
Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business
Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!
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
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
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
China now blocking ESNI-enabled TLS 1.3 connections, say Great-Firewall-watchers
Pay ransomware crooks, or restore the network? Guess which way this city chose after weighing up the costs
I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault
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
Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people
AI assistants work perfectly in the UK – unless you're from Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, Belfast...
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!
'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad
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
Smoke on the Tyne: Blaze at BT exchange causes major outages across North East England
51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home
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
Google employs people to invent colours – and they think their work improves your wellbeing
It's handbags at dawn: America to hit France with 25% tariffs on luxuries over digital tax on US tech titans
IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old
Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)
Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's
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
Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'
Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript
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
Now that's a train delay Upminster with which London travellers shall not put
It's National Cream Tea Day and this time we end the age-old debate once and for all: How do you eat yours?
Dems take a crack at banning Feds from using facial-recog tech. Congress will put it on todo list after 'learn Klingon'
CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets
After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors
Internet Society, remember your embarrassing .org flub? The actual internet society would like to talk about it
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
Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service
Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it
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.
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.