* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Paper factory fired its sysadmin. He returned via VPN and caused $1m in damage. Now jailed

Alister
Facepalm

"This case is a powerful reminder of the very real threat and danger that businesses and individuals face from cyberattacks and other cyber-related criminal activity," said United States Attorney Walt Green on Thursday.

Or...

This case is a powerful reminder to businesses to take rudimentary security precautions when terminating staff, like removing their access to your networks, for instance.

A webcam is not so much a leering eye as the barrel of a gun

Alister

Re: When squirrels were squirrels and men were men

While the alleged trojan may be able to enable the camera in device manager, putting tape in front of the lens doesn't remove that ability ;)

No, it doesn't, but here's a clue: It stops the camera seeing anything!

In an earlier post, you put:

Using tape is surely a great mechanical way to solve the problem. But it isn't necessary with a basic understanding of how computers work.

I would counter that anyone with more than a basic understanding of how computers work, knows that software lies and therefore hardware (a piece of tape) is the most conclusive solution.

Magic Leap sued for sex discrimination … by woman it hired to stamp out sex discrimination

Alister

he began to dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn't get his way, felt betrayed or was portrayed publicly in an unfavorable light."

I know someone else like that.

Vinyl, filofaxes – why not us too, pleads Nokia

Alister

Selling Point

For me, the one thing that made Nokia my phone of choice in the Nineties / Noughties was the quality of the GUI, not the pixel value or anything like that, but just the intuitive way the menus and settings were laid out, requiring minimum key-presses to get to what you needed and back again.

It was obvious that an awful lot of time had been spent by the UI designers in making it as easy to use as possible.

Any modern Nokia will I suppose, be stuck with the crappy Android UI, but it would be a great thing if a Nokia skin could be developed which followed their old traditions.

King's College London bods recruit members for penis ring study

Alister
Paris Hilton

Limiting the sample size...

"Couples who have been in a relationship for more than six months and who have intercourse at least twice a week".

That should narrow things down a bit...

Roses are red, violets are blue, HMRC confirms Verify can STFU

Alister

can I not just sing in

Two verses of "T'was on the good ship Venus"?

NASA bakes Venus-proof electronics

Alister

Re: Geek note

It has more than 250 polymorphs!

ObRedDwarf: "That's a lot of curries!"

Grumpy Trump trumped, now he's got the hump: Muslim ban beaten back by appeals court

Alister

"However, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest used publicly available information and identified at least 17 individuals from these seven nations that from March 2014 to June 2016 were implicated in terrorism.

Wow, 17 whole people from 7 different nations.

How about this then:

http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7613/CBP-7613.pdf

In Great Britain, between 11 September 2001 and 31 December 2015, 656 individuals were prosecuted for terrorist offences, 542 of whom were convicted.

That's a mean of roughly 38 a year, from one country.

So maybe the UK should be added to the immigration ban as well?

Alister

I would like to congratulate you

...on your correct spelling of loser.

A very rare and welcome sight.

Speaking in Tech: So. Hard-boiled Brexit... will tech firms scramble?

Alister

@spudley

Well I for one got that you were making egg type puns following on from the headline, and not necessarily a serious point. Sadly it seems some people don't get humour unless it has a big sign saying "WARNING! HUMOUR ALERT"

PS. I expect employers to have to shell out more on their workers, it's really no yoke.

Brought to you by UK.gov: 'Most ambitious programme of change of any government anywhere in the world'

Alister
Coat

Unfortunately, we don't have "swamps" in the UK, just "marshes" and "bogs".

Somehow "drain the bog" doesn't have quite the same ring to it...

Mag publisher Future stored your FileSilo passwords in plaintext. Then hackers hit

Alister

Re: Future Publishing

I remember when they used to publish "Your Sinclair".

I remember when they used to publish "PC Plus" magazine.

More tech companies join anti-Trump battle, but why did some pay for his inauguration?

Alister
Joke

Inauguration funding

I'm struggling with that idea too, plus, what's this money being spent on?

It's to pay for all the "Make America Great Again" Made in China Baseball caps and T shirts

Revealed: 'Suicide bomber Barbie' and other TSA quack science that cost $1.5 billion

Alister
Coat

Re: Bah!

Don't forget to email corrections@thereg ah fuck it.

"I'm sorry, that address is not recognised, the domain thereg.ah.fuck.it may be incorrect"

:)

Eee by gum! Aye up, Microsoft, what's tha y' got? Cloud for accents?

Alister

Regional AI

"I'm sorry Dave, but one on't cross beams gone owt askew on t'treadle"

Streetmap loses appeal against Google Maps dominance judgement

Alister

Google denied it was dominant in the online search market,” said Lord Justice Jones.

Either that's a typo, or Google should be prosecuted for contempt, how can they possibly justify that?

UK uni KCL spunks IT budget on 'reputation management' after IT disaster headlines

Alister
Facepalm

Maybe, instead of managing their reputation and depleting the existing IT budget, they should be considering an increase in the IT budget to allow the installation of a robust, tested, verified backup regime?

Oh no, silly of me, this is the real world we're talking about.

Police drones, robo surgeons and chatbot civil servants. What could go wrong?

Alister

Chatbots could shave off around 90 per cent of the total number of Whitehall admin workers by 2030 - and save £2.6bn a year in the process - it claims. A further 90,000 NHS admin and 24,000 GP reception jobs could be automated in the same way, saving around £1.7bn.

I wonder if that £1.7bn saving includes the welfare costs for those 114,000 NHS admin staff and GP receptionists, or the costs to retrain or employ them elsewhere. Or maybe we could just shoot them, as they will be an unnecessary drain on the economy.

Ubuntu Linux daddy Mark Shuttleworth: Carrots for Unity 8?

Alister

Put Ubuntu running Unity 8 on a phone and it'll render as a phone, put it on a PC and it'll render as a PC, put it on a tablet and it'll render as a tablet. That's the idea anyway,

You see this, done properly, would be great. However it is not the same thing at all as " a unified set of experiences across all the kinds of personal computers", which is what Windows 8 and Unity 8 were trying to do.

A vanishingly small number of desktop users want a touch based interface with big buttons or widgets, in the same way that phone and tablet users don't want cascading menus. To try and enforce the same UI on all possible devices is a stupid idea

By all means have an overall architecture which is cross-platform, but the way it renders the UI should be device specific.

Slammer worm slithers back online to attack ancient SQL servers

Alister

Slammer attack traffic came from IP addresses in China, Vietnam, and Mexico.

What we need to do is ban all IP traffic from those countries through our borders, even if they have current visas, and then build a Yuge firewall.

Who do you want to be Who? VOTE for the BBC's next Time Lord

Alister

I wonder if Helen Mirren would consider it?

I think she'd be great as the Doctor.

Alister

Affording the chance for change is new writing talent: Steven Moffat, who's been on board since the 2005 Christopher Ecclestone reboot, is off and in comes Chris Chibnal, writer of ITV's dark crime drama Broadchurch.

Come on Gavin, not one mention of Russell T Davies? If it wasn't for him, there wouldn't have been a revival at all.

Super-cool sysadmin fixes PCs with gravity, or his fists

Alister
Boffin

Did you thump it on the top to fix the horizontal hold?

No, don't be daft, for the horizontal hold there was a little knob you had to twiddle...

(oh gods I'm going to regret typing that)

Alister

The beatings will continue until Morale Disk RPMs improve...

I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

New measurement alerts! Badgers, great white sharks and the Lindisfarne Gospel

Alister
Boffin

You should stop using the jub unit. It's offensive.

Please explain your reasoning?

NHS reply-all meltdown swamped system with half a billion emails

Alister

Those "fucking idiots" are too busy saving your life pal to worry about clicking the wrong button on an email.

Gimme a break, they were probably all admin staff.

Oh and FYI, I used to be one of those that does the life saving at the sharp end, and I still know not to click reply-all to a group email.

Alister

"strict controls must be in place to limit the volume of any one email sent by an individual user or local administrator".

One of these requirements that looks so easy on paper.

"A requirement to put in place compensating controls to limit the impact of fucking idiots who respond with Reply-All to a test message" would be good too.

Where's the tick box in Exchange for that then?

'Grey technology' should be the new black

Alister

Re: Important safety information:

Nowadays, manufacturers seem to design leaflet text to be only read by eagle-eyed twenty year-olds.

I think it's more that manufacturers design leaflet text in the expectation that nobody will actually bother to read it anymore...

Facebook ad biz comes under scrutiny in MPs ‘Fake News’ probe

Alister
Coat

Re: Why tell the truth when a lie will do

All the way back to Jefferson and Adams US presidential elections have been stuffed full of everything from out of context quotes to outright lies. They learnt if from the Brits who have it in the list of "Things the Romans did for us".

I didn't think "Life of Brian" had been released in Jefferson's time?

:)

Alister

Over-egging...

The BBC TV news coverage has the following ticker running:

"MPs call for enquiry into whether "fake news" is a threat to democracy."

I can't help thinking that other events happening at the moment are more deserving of being classified "a threat to democracy"

Corn-based diet turns French hamsters into baby eating cannibals

Alister

Mmmm, corn-fed hamster, lovely!

Ransomware killed 70% of Washington DC CCTV ahead of inauguration

Alister

Ah, this explains the discrepancy between Trump's estimate of turnout on inauguration day, and everyone else's perception - the cameras were rigged!

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

Alister
Facepalm

Re: Numbers

I remember a friend of mine who is an IT teacher being roped in by the school to help cut costs of electricity. He and a Maths teacher who was also head of accounts, decided to work out how many lightbulbs they needed around the school.

They went into the main hall of the school, and the Maths teacher began counting each fixture... 1, 2, 3... Meanwhile my friend clocked that there were 8 rows of 5 fixtures, and said "40"!

The Maths bloke scowled, and said, "No, I want an accurate count, not an estimate"

President Trump tweets from insecure Android, security boffins roll eyes

Alister

Re: But not Facebook

I can just imagine the Department of Agriculture run to reflect Trump's YUGE success at playing Farmville.

Ooh, this could work!

Department of Transport run along the lines of GTA3

State Department as envisioned by Age of Empires

Department of Defence done like Call Of Duty

...

In real life, Q is a woman! Head of MI6 calls for more female techies at SIS

Alister

Vauxhall Cross

I wonder how many tourists are confused when they come to London and see the Vauxhall Cross building is not a smoking ruin, like it was after Skyfall...

I'm deadly serious about megatunnels, vows Elon Musk

Alister
Black Helicopters

So, he's starting to dig a tunnel under his desk...

Or am I reading this wrong?

Gimme some skin: Boffins perfect 3D bioprinter that emits slabs of human flesh

Alister

Just imagine what a printer jam looks like

Well, I would imagine...

Pretty much like Jam, really, with bits in...

Trump's FBI boss, Attorney General picks reckon your encryption's getting backdoored

Alister

Re: Back to MD5, et. al.

All I said was that this encryption was good enough for jehovah.

Lol!

"Are there any women here today?"

<squeaky voice> No! No, no <cough> <deep voice> NO!

China's Great Firewall to crack down on unofficial VPNs – state-approved net connections only

Alister
Facepalm

Expect Theresa May to take this line too.

Fortunately for us in the UK, the government famously identified VoIP as being the technology used to bypass ISP blocking etc, so until they get that right, we are pretty safe...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/27/how_peers_failed_to_sneak_snoopers_charter_into_terror_bill/?page=2

Lord Blair said:

"All the different apps for phones mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord King, along with all the other services, are increasingly being used across the internet via something I now know more about than I ever wanted to – a system known as VoIP, the Voice over Internet protocol.

This makes all those transmissions untraceable. I will not specify them, but they are being used in methodologies that members of this House will be using most days."

Happy Monday, Juniper admins: Get patching

Alister
Boffin

Article image

You've got a nice selection of tools there, however, the one most commonly used on Juniper kit appears to be missing:

The 20lb Lump Hammer.

Assange reverse-ferrets on promise to fly to US post-Manning clemency

Alister

Re: him inside the ecuadors

Swedes may be embarrassed now for playing USA lackey and change their ways also.

Change there ways how?

Not bother to try to investigate an alleged rape?

Alister
Holmes

Well,

No shit, Sherlock...

Seven pet h8s: Verity is sorely vexed

Alister

Re: Stuck-in-time Overflow

Perhaps a special exemption can be made for Delphi.

Ooh, Miaow...

Fancy a saucer of milk?

:)

Fired Ofcom Remainer bod sues UK gov for withholding his payoff

Alister
Headmaster

After Emmott was disinvited to an Ofcom board meeting in July

Disinvited?

What's wrong with uninvited or just plain not invited?

What's the biggest danger to the power grid? Hackers? Terrorists? Er, squirrels

Alister

Re: Misunderstanding

Was it a misguided attempt to cook them?

Yeah, a bird with a bit of class, it wanted proper roast acorns, none of your cheap microwaved rubbish...

Oh, wait...

Meet 'Moz://a', AKA Mozilla after it picked a new logo

Alister
Happy

Re: Synonym

To avoid downvotes, can I point out I am not recommending this as a suggestion.

Too Late!

:)

Alister
Coat

And because anyone can type the logo, Mozilla reckons it is "open and democratic."

but not pronounceable...

Moz colon slash slash A

However, the spoken word is soo last century, dahhling...

Well, that sucks: China's Tencent so sorry after vid emerges of faux blowjob office game

Alister

Re: re: I never said that the AC demanded / suggested that.

@sabroni

Look, I'm old, and grumpy, so git orf my lawn...

:)

Alister

ACs on here demanding that we grovel for being old! I can't believe they've got the cheek to suggest that.

Because they didn't.

@sabroni.

I never said that the AC demanded / suggested that.

I asked if they wanted us to...

This is not the same thing.

Alister

Yeah,. racial abuse, sexual harassment, open discrimination against homosexuals, these are all things that used to be commonplace back in the day. As a straight white male, you probably saw nothing wrong with those things but I'm willing to bet that the subjects of those actions were really not OK with it at all. Hell, smoking in the office used to be commonplace, that doesn't mean you should be lighting up now.

So, do you want all of us over 40 to grovel and apologise for being born and living when we did?

Maybe you should be grateful that the vast majority of us recognised the injustices and put in place a culture which no longer tolerates such behaviour.