* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 'oh we had the same issue last time we switched machine ranges'.

Only 17 times? That doesn't sound excessive in the eyes of the law, no case to answer, you're free to go.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: I replaced a network cable.

Is that an actual and useful explanation or would you prefer a patronising mansplaining-type one?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Raging handover

Well spotted. I completely missed that. My brain expected to see hangover and that's what I saw until your post made me go back and check it again. This is exactly how many bugs make it into software without proper management and bug checking :-)

UK suit over reselling surplus Microsoft licenses rolls on

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sheesh People

I thought that was Oracle?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ireland

It could also come back to bite them

From the article "Microsoft Ireland is the entity through which the company grants licenses in the UK and EEA."

The UK could theoretically impose import taxes on those "goods" coming from the EU since they are a "third country" from our perspective. Just as the EU like to keep reminding the UK :-) I wonder how long it would take MS to suddenly allocate MSUK as the source of MS licenses to UK customers?

(No, I wasn't in favour of Brexit, but it's something we all have to make the best of nowadays)

Google: Russian credential thieves target NATO, Eastern European military

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The many headed Hydra?

"The web giant calls the Russia-based group Coldriver, and notes it's also known as Calisto."

So why give them a new name if they are aware a name they are already known by? Are they deliberately going out of their way to confuse things?

Modem-wiping malware caused Viasat satellite broadband outage in Europe

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wind Farm Remote access

Local wireless mesh network back the local control shack? Sounds a lot cheaper than sat link for each turbine. On the other hand, the cost of each turbine, the connectivity is probably a blip on the balance sheet.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "modems were commanded by their compromised support servers to run destructive malware"

"Every administrative task should always be actively authorised at the recipient side, so updates should be offered but not automatically installed."

By the owner? Maybe the kit is leased. That make either the ISP or ViaSat the owner.

Russia bans foreign software purchases for critical infrastructure

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: KremlinOS

"with some Basic knowledge."

I initially read that as "some BASIC knowledge". Writing an OS in BASIC? On the other hand, the first iterations of The Last One were written in BASIC and produced BASIC apps.

Zlib crash-an-app bug finally squashed, 17 years later

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ouch

On the bright side, for most *nix users, it will only be the one or two relevant libraries that need updating. Windows users will more likely have a much tougher time of it as "shared libraries" are often statically compiled into each app, necessitating all of those apps to be updated.

EDIT, I see from comments further down this is a bigger can of worms than I suspected and not only Windows users might be in a world of pain thanks to programmers cutting and pasting the code in locally instead of calling the system library.

Yale finance director stole $40m in computers to resell on the sly

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Give back some?

So, that'd be Yale MBA grads then?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Justice?

"In this case the iPads etc were simply vehicles for fraudulently moving money from Yale's bank account to hers and her associates'."

Isn't that the theft component though? Yes, the iPads were the "vehicle" that enabled her to steal $millions. The oddest thing about this case are the amounts involved and the sheer length of time before it was noticed! If she'd just gone for enough for a nicer car and an extra annual skiing holiday, instead of being greedy, she might have got away with it for years longer, or maybe never have been caught.

UK spy boss warns China hopes Russia will help it take over tech standards

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"by banning everything that doesn't conform to their narrative. if anything this shows western hypocrisy - they only want to hear there own voice."

And yet, people in "the West" can still access the Russian side of the story, albeit, depending on the source, often plastered with "FAKE" and some very plausible reasons why it's so labelled, eg demonstrable proof a video was made years earlier in a different country.

Meanwhile, in Russia, if you don't know how to use a VPN you are almost exclusively limited to the Kremilin vision of the the "Truth".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: potential to fragment the internet and allow more central control

"The amount of cost and effort needed when trying to control everything is not going to be small when you try and scale it up to billions of users."

And yet, the likes of Facebook are trying very hard to do exactly that all over again.

Electric Vehicle DC charging tripped by a wireless hack

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Let me get this straight...

"They used an unshielded cable to transmit RF between devices (which must therefore be broadcasting crap all over the place) and didn't protect the same devices from any outside interference?"

Aren't there regulations for RF interference from/to device too? ie, they should not produce (too much) RF interference and also be able to ignore outside RF interference/ This sounds like it might be a major regulatory fail.

GParted 1.4: New version of live partition-manipulation tool

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Drive imaging...

Can't say I've seen that either, although it's something I don't do very often these days, so that's not saying much! But I'm thinking possibly a different SATA chipset might name the physical device differently, or maybe using a different SATA port.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I tend to

"A couple of previous programmers generally used swear words as lables and program names... along with opinions of the manglement/customers in the comments"

Some years back, the suggestion was mooted that customers should have read-only access to their call-outs in our service and maintenance database. It was pointed out that those who came up with the idea should have a read through some of the fault resolutions entered by field engineers. IIRC, the eventual decision was that the time to sanitise the engineers comments would cost more than the projected customer benefits might be.

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

Which illegally parked car? The OP only specified a car "blocking access". Unless where you live, illegal parking is endemic, then a car "blocking access" for the Fire Service is most likely to be legally parked.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

Which pictures? The OP didn't specify any particular incident or even an actual situation.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

You really think running a fire hose over a car bonnet is slower than breaking a couple of car windows then feeding the hose through, hoping it doesn't get snagged? Have you seen firemen unrolling a hose in an emergency? Unless it's just the last few feet, then that's a big and heavy roll of hose to push through a car. It's far, far simpler and quicker to just go over it.

"We'll let the family of four know their house burned down because it would have been "more fun" to break some fool's windows... FTFY

Oh, and exactly why is the person who parked their car there a fool? Was this a marked fire hydrant? A marked emergency access route? The OP didn't say. Maybe the person who parked the car should have been expected to know there was going to be fire and parked in a different town? All the OP said was "blocking access", which covers a multitude of scenarios, 99.9% of of which could be totally innocent and reasonable for the person parking their car.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: There needs to be legislation

Imagine if your car insurence was hiked up because of this or something similar. And then you try to sue the manufacturer for the extra costs due to their cost-cutting on what should be a foreseeable outcome by "an expert in the field", which of course, they surely employ for something as important as the security of what for many people is the second most expensive thing they will buy during their lifetime.

Most modern cars, these days, seem to cost in the region of double what I paid for my current house, admittedly that was about 35 years ago :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

That's just being nasty, because they can. That would take longer than just running the hose over the bonnet or roof, or even around the car.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

"There never was one of those that you couldn't pop the lock in under a minute. Doesn't matter how big and sturdy a security device is if you can open the lock with a ball point pen."

On the other hand, it was a visible deterrent. The casual car thief would more likely go for one without it because there's a known extra time involved. And anyone prepared to take the time to fit it when leaving the car will less likely leave valubales in the car and have an alarm or other anti-theft features.

It might be as much use, practically, as having a fake alarm box on your house wall, but it will most likely cause a thief to look for an easyer target. It won't stop the thief stealing a car, but it will more likely be someone else's car, not your.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: And, horror, does it really suggest adding *cheese*?

Posh welsh yogurt? On toast?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And, horror, does it really suggest adding *cheese*?

Ah, you mean posh yoghurt :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Missing Biog icing:-(

Ah. You put a nob joke in! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ElReg VR

"You need the new Metaverse-for-Office"

Sounds more like Quake to me. Or maybe Half-Life. Or Duke Nukem 3D :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The porridge in that photo looks a bit odd, don’t you think?

Typical! A British company tries to emulate posh European cuisine and forgets to stone the olives! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not sure what level this would measure at...

ISTR that's a "thing" in Japan. By the hour, rather than by the week though. Hire a dog so you can take for a walk in a specially allocated "park". Must be quite a few years ago I first heard of that, possibly decades ago.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Strangely, Hedgehog flavoured crisps sold quite well here in the UK some year back.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Comics in any electronic format...

"> Stuck in a traffic jam? Buy a Maserati!

Now that is a philosophy I can get behind."

Personally, in that situation I'd go for a Challanger rather than a Maseratti. Fuel consumption is similar but the 0-60 isn't quite as good. On the other hand, in a traffic jam, the 0-60 might be considerably better than a Maseratti, abeit still a bit slow.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Armstrong-Osman

I think you missed the point. The idea of calling a pointless idea an Armstrong-Osman isn't what is pointless. It's the idea being defined as an Armstrong-Osman which is pointless? Do you see my point?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Annapurna Fallacy

That came out in 1988, years before these "innovators" were even born. They have no idea :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Annapurna Fallacy

"I'm less sure about the Zuckerberg."

Isn't that one of those things that clog up sewers? You don't usually scale them, more sort of power blast them away.

NASA will award contract for second lunar lander to a biz that's not SpaceX

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If competition is so important ...

There's way more than one moon. Problem is that the next nearest ones in the competition are orbiting Mars :-)

Microsoft accused of spending millions on bribes to seal business deals

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Illegal Bribes?

"Maybe not actually legal, but think of breaking the speed limit on a UK motorway by 1 mph."

In some other countries, you just pay the Police officer who stopped you. Preferably in cash. Even if you weren't speeding. If he says you were, you pay him anyway to go away.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NSDE solved for $50

...and then there'd be the times you had to actually visit site and find the PC full of beer/curry/custard or just years of fat/grease build-up!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I wonder how much beer it takes to unremember a password and exactly which type beer to target just the relevant info? And does the company firing you pay for that beer? Especially considering that said company should have changed the password after the firing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yep. Did a job a couple of months back. Got sent in with minimal info on the client site. PCs would randomly work/not work on the LAN, but all had internet access. Who got on the working LAN and who didn't was random and changed each time machines were booted. In the back of my mind, I'm thing DHCP. Sure enough, when I got there, there were two LANs on different subnets and two DHCP servers. The "emergency" backup provision had kicked in at some stage and not reverted when the main provision came back up. The emergency provision was bare bones hence the lack of connectivity internally and, naturally, had it's own DHCP. And was plugged into the same master switch box as the primary provision. Half an hour to find the kit, 10 seconds to identify and pull the plug. 20 minutes explaining why their failover method was the cause and how to fix it it for the future, half day billable and a grateful customer who will almost certainly call us back to set it all up properly for them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Every week. But no one is tasked with checking the fuel levels in the backup genny at the DR site.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Miracle workers

Well, you could always write your award winning novel on a scroll for writing convenience then cut it into convenient sized pieces and glue them together into a binding for reading convenience. Best of both worlds.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Miracle workers

Video unavailable

The uploader has not made this video available in your country

(No, the downvote wasn't me)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: At Sequin, re: fire safe.

Yeah, it depends on the size and build materials. A small "fire proof" wall safe won't handle the heat dissipation of a cutting torch as well as a floor standing safe big enough to hide a body or two in.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Forget the turtles...

You don't need a key, recursive or otherwise. Just wrap the safe in blockchain and tie it with a Gordian Knot.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Forget the turtles...

"Just make sure you write it down on asbestos."

Fuck no!!!!! H&S would have apoplexy!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Passwords

IIRC, it's been shown that people will use the most easily remembered/guessed password they can get away with within the confines of the defined password policy when said policy forced frequent changes.

On the other hand, people will choose a more complex, less easily guessed password if it's significantly longer but only requires a change every 6-12 months and is, in turn actually more secure.

Irhmbawhwrny1666 is probably more secure than Pa55wo0d26!

(FWIW, I Really Hate My Boss And Wish He Would Retire Next Year 1666 :-)

The initial letters of a long but memorable and personal phrase is easier to handle than a short complex, random sequence and more secure.

Disclaimer: IANAsecurity professional and may be talking bollox.

BOFH: Putting the gross in gross insubordination

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Si-e??

Silicon spray lubricant. An extremely expensive but incredibly useful tool. You spray it inside your server or laptop and the silicon chips will work much faster and generate less waste heat, saving you a fortune in upgrades and power usage. Only available from BOFH Enterprises Inc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I remember posting a few weeks or so back that I thought the PFY was getting a bit old to still be a Y, but could conceivably still be PF. Did I influence they thrust of this weeks episode? Probably not, but I like to think so :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Risks? They ARE the dark side!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Suspense at a whole new level

Yep, absolutely brilliant this week. I always felt the BOFH and PFY relationship was akin to a Sith Lord and his apprentice. I see I was right! :-)

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