Re: "than depicted here."
For various reasons (brevity, legal, etc) we kept it to the court document - if you click through to previous coverage, you'll find some more info.
C.
Posts by diodesign
3261 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
Page:
John McAfee is 'liable' for 2012 death of Belize neighbour, rules court
A new Raspberry Pi takes a bow with all of the speed but less of the RAM
Brexit: UK will be disconnected from EU databases after 2020
Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'
Thursday 15th November 2018 23:52 GMT 
"the mod queue seems a trifle arbitrary"
Some articles have been marked for hand-moderated comments, most not, eg this one, which is why your comment went through immediately.
Articles and users on manual-moderation mode have to wait for someone to be free to clear the queue; certainly I've seen the queue averaging 10-40 posts.
If you find yourself in the queue, it may be because you posted a correction as a comment, or had a comment recently rejected/removed. That'll put you in the queue for a while.
C.
'My entire company is without comms': Gamma's Horizon cloud PBX goes DOWN
Scumbag who phoned in a Call of Duty 'swatting' that ended in death pleads guilty to dozens of criminal charges
Wednesday 14th November 2018 07:59 GMT
Re: Cant they tell where the call was placed?
If you click through to the previous article, and pull up the grand jury paperwork*, you'll see it says Barriss "acquired an assigned telephone number from TextNow so it appeared to Wichita emergency personnel (with caller id) that defendant BARRISS was using a telephone with a '316' area code, the area code that includes Wichita, Kansas."
He used a Wichita number. FWIW US area codes are a little loose. Our San Francisco office has (650) phone numbers, which makes ppl think we are in San Mateo.
C.
* it's still here https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/05/24/barrissindictment.pdf
Bloke jailed for trying to blow up UK crypto-cash biz after it failed to reset his account password
Tuesday 13th November 2018 08:36 GMT
Re: Ledswinger
"I remember when 'biting the hand that feeds it' referred to a lack of reverence for the IT industry, rather than for the eyeballs that pay the staff's salaries."
I dunno, man. I think you're mistaken. I've been reading the Reg since 1999, and it's always been a bastion of tech eggheads who have no time for tedious pedantic bastards. And it still is.
C.
Saturday 10th November 2018 00:51 GMT
Re: A note to USAian authors
"don't assume that the rest of the world is confused about which is the world city and which is the obscure USA town."
If we don't say it's UK/England then we get a load of comments and emails complaining that there's a London, Ontario, or London, France.
So thanks to you, we can't win either way. I almost want to wish you, and other tedious pendants, a most unhappy weekend.
C.
France: Let's make the internet safer. America, Russia, China: Let's go with 'no' on that
Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly
Western Digital: And when I pull the covers off, behold as NAND becomes virtual DRAM
Former Intel love rat Krzanich finds his calling, lands at biz that sells tech to car dealers
Upset fat iOS gobbles up so much storage? Too bad, so sad, says judge: Apple lawsuit axed
Thursday 8th November 2018 02:51 GMT
Re: Crappy SD != internal flash
Please read the next few words in that paragraph ("Given Apple's enormous purchasing power...")
Yeah sure, it's $50 for you to buy a bog-standard 256GB card. Not disputing that. But we're just not buying that Apple really has to charge several hundred dollars for its NAND without some kind of rude margin.
It's standard Apple. It charges $80 for a wireless mouse, FFS - our office has bought enough of them to know. Official RAM upgrades for Macs at least to be eye-watering. We call it the Cupertino idiot-tax operation for a reason.
C.
The Register translates VMware's VMworld Europe 2018 news into plain English – our free guide for every reader
Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea
Tuesday 6th November 2018 18:11 GMT
"there is something truly amazing"
FWIW it is an opinion piece by Andrew.F. Think of it as an antidote to all the hype.
While there is a hell of a lot of nonsense around AI at the moment, there are some interesting, and some rather crap, research projects and products, which we write about on a daily basis.
C.
Fight AI with AI! Code taught to finger naughty deepfake vids made by machine-learning algos
Tuesday 6th November 2018 09:06 GMT
Re: frank ly
"Did they test the final product with real deepfakes?"
Yes, see the paper. They tested it against DeepFake-generated videos including a fake one of Nic Cage as Harrison Ford from YouTube (fig 6). It correctly pointed out the Nic Cage one as fake.
As the article points out, it's not perfect as it's built from their carefully curated dataset, and needs to be tested against a much wider set of forged videos.
C.
'Pure technical contributions aren’t enough'.... Intel commits to code of conduct for open-source projects
Monday 5th November 2018 19:55 GMT
Re: James 47
"the definition of 'being an arse' is entirely subjective"
Well, it's not too subjective - it's about not excluding someone unfairly, and treating each other with civility, etc. I dunno if you've noticed but the laws of the land are also subjective in places.
Where or when does defamation begin? Threatening behavior? Disorderly conduct? Assault? Life isn't black and white; programmers love seeing things in black and white, and, well, there's the rub.
C.
Monday 5th November 2018 19:47 GMT
Re: Some twat
"the same disconnect here between the writers of this publication and its audience"
Well, its audience that likes to comment, perhaps. The number of people who comment on articles is a small percentage of our overall readership. That's not to say we don't appreciate comment posters - we really really do, otherwise we'd just turn comments off - however, they are a vocal subset of overall readers.
I'm confident from earlier reader surveys, and feedback outside the comments, that there is interest among Reg visitors in fostering diversity and inclusion and civility in the tech world. In fact, I have a feeling people are put off commenting positively on the matter because of the strong feelings from a vocal minority who are against CoCs and equal opportunities in hiring. Essentially, if it seems nearly everyone posting comments is against CoCs and diversity, why bother contributing to the discussion?
"the writers utterly despise gamers and seem hell-bent on telling them how fucking awful they are"
I really don't think that was the case - why would you wake up in the morning to write for an audience you hate? sure there are bitter hacks out there, but an entire industry of hateful scribes? - and anyway it's not the case here. The whole point of El Reg is to share info and be useful to its readership in its own unique way. I fucking love our readers, and I think you're jumping to rather unfair conclusions.
Let me give you two personal anecdotes. First, even I've been accused of breaking a CoC and I'm still in favor of them because, on the whole, they are a good idea. They draw a line in the sand that says if you want to participate as a team member, you have to follow the team's rules. And those rules are basically: don't be an arsehole to others. CoCs were introduced because discrimination and harassment was, in some eyes, getting out of hand - and house rules needed to be set down.
And sure, people say it's hard to define exactly what is "being an asshole", however, I don't know if you've been keeping up with current events, but the laws of the land are similarly loosely defined. There are certain things that are fixed - such as the maximum blood-alcohol level allowed for drivers - but quite a lot isn't. Defamatory statements, threatening behavior, disorderly conduct in public, assault, etc, are all kinda up to society and judges and cops to weigh up. It's not so radical to see this in CoCs. If you're unhappy with this language in CoCs, presumably you're just as fired up when folks suffer injustice at the hands of poorly applied laws.
In my case, a particular CoC forbids people from using sexualized language on and offline in and around an event. It's there to stop sex pests from being creepy to others, especially women. I happened to have written some of El Reg's racy headlines that had sex puns in them - we're sex positive, after all. Someone tried to claim I was breaking the CoC with my own sex-based headlines. In the end, the accusations were considered and dismissed. The event went on as normal. I still have a job. My career is not ruined.
Secondly, I bailed out of the world of electronic engineering for journalism for a couple of reasons. One, at 25, journalism looked a lot more exciting than debugging embedded systems. Back then, I had no patience or ability to focus on long-term projects, and 10 years on, I think I could probably manage it.
The other thing was that I didn't want to work in an industry that was 99% blokes with the same interests and same backgrounds. It's not that I wanted to meet women at work; I just wanted to work around different people every day.
So anyway, my point is: El Reg doesn't hate its readers (that's so ridiculous), we see the problems with some CoCs but on the whole, think they're pointing in the right direction, and we appreciate diverse work forces and the mix of backgrounds and insight they bring. That includes us, too. We used to be very white British and blokey, then we started to tip the balance to 50-50 men and women - and it made us better. Some of our rudest and sarcastic headlines are written by a woman.
If this is freaking you out, don't lash out at the things you like. Think about why you're upset. It's on you.
C.
Saturday 3rd November 2018 14:15 GMT
Re: Spurious conflicts within open source projects.
"the feminazi movement"
You kinda destroy any point you make by using this sort of language, like something straight out of a tragic 4chan manual. It makes you sound bitter and nonconstructive - basically, someone others wouldn't want to work with, anyway.
"will end up driving away top developers"
Yeah, nah. No it won't. CoCs lay out what is and isn't acceptable behavior in a project team. The only folks, in my view, getting really upset with them are the types of people who'll regularly break the CoC by being an arse to others.
C.
Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too
It's been a week since engineers approved a new DNS encryption standard and everyone is still yelling
Google logins make JavaScript mandatory, Huawei China spy shock, Mac malware, Iran gets new Stuxnet, and more
Web domain owners paid EasyDNS to cloak their contact info from sight. It was blabbed via public Whois anyway
Behold! Blocks and Files is born again as storage tech website returns
Friday 2nd November 2018 01:23 GMT
Re: Still on El'Reg too?
Most of Chris's writing will be on B+F - that's the site for hardcore storage news followers. A selection will appear on The Reg: mainly articles that are relevant to IT pros and software devs in general, such as hard disk developments, scandals, firings, etc.
A Blocks and Files box is on the homepage with the latest links in case you forget to check B+F while looking at El Reg. Hope to see you again soon!
C.
I'm on the naughty step
Thursday 1st November 2018 23:47 GMT
re: onefang
"not particularly broad-minded"
Look, dude. On a story about NIPS being insensitive for some, cracking jokes about freeing the nipple isn't terribly productive. Kinda makes you part of the problem. There's being broad-minded, and then there's not being a pillock. Some people might want to discuss it seriously. There are or have been plenty of bootnotes stories for that kinda thing.
"not that consistent either"
Report any comments you think are inappropriate, and we'll remove them if necessary.
C.
Friday 26th October 2018 08:36 GMT
"What did I do wrong this time?"
Nothing - you posted in a thread where everyone gets moderated (the Google sex pest one) and your comment was approved.
Some articles are marked for manual moderation on all comments either because: legal issues, or to stop it turning into a shit show with trolls.
C.
Sunday 21st October 2018 22:33 GMT
Re: onefang
"if you don't tell me what I did wrong, there's no chance I can correct it."
It's too much of a time sink to get into discussing it with everyone who ends up being rejected or put into the moderation queue. Maybe one day we'll have a drop down menu of reasons. Our primary goal is writing articles.
"The email I sent asking why didn't get a response."
If you sent it over the weekend, we haven't read it yet. We all need time off at the end of the week.
"I promise to not post corrections as comments"
That'll help you get out of moderation. Generally, people are in the queue until someone cracks and takes them out of it and back into normal auto-moderation.
It's just really annoying having an article sit on the site for a few hours with a mistake it in, especially a mistake others have seen but decided to post a comment about it rather than get it fixed.
It's like getting a 1 star review about a bug that a bug-finder didn't report.
C.
This revolution will not be televised – but it will be sanctioned: Googlers walk out over 'sex pest' executive scandals
Thursday 1st November 2018 22:01 GMT
Re: Chocolate
Definitely "Googly" - it's an internal term. If you're doing things right, it's called being "Googly". What right is, depends on the context - ethical stuff with a project, optimizing for particular use cases, etc.
It's - to our knowledge - typically used when things aren't 'right' - "that's not very Googly", "you're not being very Googly", etc.
C.
People outperform computer programs for 'compressing' pix
Thursday 1st November 2018 20:36 GMT
Re: "the whole thing still makes absolutely no sense."
Ah well, thanks for the feedback. It's just research we thought people would find interesting. To be fair, we do say it is impractical - it's just an amusing way to 'compress' images.
I've added more background to the piece to it's more obvious to folk who don't read the paper or the code.
C.
Wednesday 31st October 2018 17:14 GMT
Re: "Can anyone explain better?"
Here's how it works: take an image, then have one person describe to another person what can be removed or reduced from the image without turning it into garbage. This works better than have a computer compress the image using an algorithm.
Just added a bit more to the piece to explain it.
C.
Veeam holds its hands up, admits database leak was plain 'complacency'
If you saw a Google ad recently, know that it helped pay off one of its 'sex pest' execs $90m
Friday 26th October 2018 08:10 GMT
Re:"That is an absolutely meaningless comparison"
No, it's quite obviously not - it's for context. Compare a company kicking out 48 of 300 employees versus 48 out of 85,000. It gives you an idea of how many people, as a percentage of the workforce, were booted out.
F'king hell. I know it's Friday, but that's no excuse for leaving your common sense in the glovebox after parking your car in the office parking lot ;-)
C.
Intel: You'll get 10nm next year – now witness the firepower of this fully armed cash machine
Amazon is at this point a money-printing cloud machine with a grocery store in the parking lot
Friday 26th October 2018 05:08 GMT
Re: Indeed
Tech stocks as a whole have been generally down this week in the US - although Microsoft was all right.
Witness AMD: sure, small revenue increase (4%, missed estimates) and weak Q4 guidance with GPUs, but +67% profit and whoosh there goes 25% of the company value as traders hit 'sell'.
C.
This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet
Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...
Thursday 25th October 2018 17:14 GMT
"a bit of intellectual masturbation, innit"
Yeah, in the office we were saying: just hit the brake. Stop. Slow down.
It's like saying: you're nosing diving into the ground in a 747 - do you hit the hospital or the school?
Er, pro-tip: don't nose dive into the ground with a 747. It doesn't happen that often...
C.
AI clinician trained to save humans from sepsis – and, er, let's just say you should stick to your human doctor
Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source
Skype bot airport action, Retpolining into 2019, old Kubernetes versions for the chop in Azure, and much more Microsoft
Is the LOHAN project officially dead.
Monday 22nd October 2018 18:19 GMT
Re: Is the LOHAN project officially dead.
Fenke ^ is our project lead on LOHAN, and I echo what she says.
It has been dormant, due to legal and paperwork issues – it's hard getting the permission to fly the thing through multiple airspaces as both a balloon and as a drone-ish rocket.
However, a plan is coming together, slowly, involving a launch site that thinks it can get us the necessary permissions. Stay tuned! Bear in mind we're still trying to run a news website at the same time.
C.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
