* Posts by Aqua Marina

631 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2011

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US Marines seek a few supposedly good men ... who leaked naked pics of a few good women

Aqua Marina

Probably not politically correct of me to say this, but one of my female friends was forbidden (as much as she could be) by her dad from following his footsteps in a career in the army, because (in his words) the female soldiers were treated as beds by the men, and that most of the women didn't mind this. He put it down to the training having a confidence boosting effect on both sexes, where there was no shame felt by what they got up to, until people started getting caught out when they went too far.

COP BLOCKED: Uber app thwarted arrests of its drivers by fooling police with 'ghost cars'

Aqua Marina

Re: tbh, Uber has a point

"If Uber operates in a country where Uber is not legally allowed to operate, then Uber is operating illegaly. Are you able to follow that?".

By your logic if the police set up a speed trap on my way to work, and I decide that day to change my route because of that, I should be arrested for avoiding the speed trap, because I normally speed on my way to work.

You're forgetting innocent unless proven guilty. Uber like most career criminals known to the police, are probably up to something they shouldn't be. But because we live in a civilised society, we just can't round people up based on "They are up to something". Likewise in the same civilised society, you can't set up a trap, then round up all the usual suspects who fail to fall into it. Due process and all that.

Are you able to follow that?

You're Donald Trump's sysadmin. You've got data leaks coming out the *ss. What to do

Aqua Marina

Reminds me of the time a CEO of a UK based chain-store wanted a webcam on his desk, but at the same time the webcam wouldn't be able to allow the person on the other end to read any documents the CEO might have within view of the webcam. "If I hold up a sensitive document in front of the webcam during a conference, I don't want him to be able to read it". It was a real head-banging moment, he genuinely thought that there was a technical way to stop the camera from focusing on anything other than his face. This was in 2001.

'I'm innocent!' says IT contractor on trial after Office 365 bill row spiraled out of control

Aqua Marina

Paper trail

The paperwork trail will ultimately exonerate or lack of will crucify him.

If he has records of sending via some form of recorded delivery, or acknowledged email, an invoice for the service, a statement, a reminder, a 7 day letter and a final notice then he's covered.

If however he has seen red when they have terminated him, and he's shut down the service in spite, it's unlikely the judge will take his side.

Always do things in writing, never by phone.

Dead cockroaches make excellent magnets – now what are we supposed to do with this info?

Aqua Marina
Coat

I for one welcome our future post-apocalyptic magnetic cockroach overlords!

I'd love to know what transpired prior to the scientist getting the idea "I wonder how magnetic a dead cockroach is". It's just so random.

Global IPv4 address drought: Seriously, we're done now. We're done

Aqua Marina

Re: "Let's use a firewall"

"The issue with a firewall is it requires network skills to be properly configured. NAT implies a simple "all inbound connections denied" default rule"

I think the issue is, that you have only ever used domestic / SOHO routers that appear to have merged the NAT and firewall functionality together, blinding you to the fact that they are 2 separate functions. You are blindly trusting the manufacturers of these devices to have made this choice for you and that it works in the manner you believe. Here's the eye opener for you, you are wrong. Many of the SOHO / domestic routers look like they work how you believe, but in reality they have fudged the interface to give you that impression. Have a dig down in the advanced settings, there you will see that the default settings are not configured as you believe (sometimes you have to enter the CLI), and that you have to do do some tinkering to make your network as secure as you think it is now.

TLDR: SOHO / domestic router manufacturers have lulled you into a false sense of security by hiding technical stuff.

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

Aqua Marina

Re: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"

The cynic in me says that the Donald will attempt to issue an EO that allows religious discrimination. That worked out well in Germany, and he seems to be going down the same route.

Trump's cybersecurity strategy kinda makes sense, so why delay?

Aqua Marina

TLA backdoors.

That's actually a good point. Who is liable if an attacker successfully intrudes via a backdoor that you are legally required to leave open, and you are legally forbidden from admitting exists. Someone has probably pointed this out, and it's currently gone for consultation behind closed doors.

Don't worry, America: Elon Musk says he'll have a word with Trump

Aqua Marina

"But both seem to have convinced one another that government is just a big company with too much red tape....."

The funny thing is, that up until some time between WW1 and WW2 many government departments, were companies and corporations that had been given responsibilities via statutes. Local councils were corporations. Someth g came to mind this morning when I read about Trumps decree that for every new law, 2 old laws must be repealed. That's something we could do with in the Uk. We still have many statutes on the books relating to the East India Trading Company that have never been repealed!

College fires IT admin, loses access to Google email, successfully sues IT admin for $250,000

Aqua Marina

Re: Protocol

I thought this was normal for Gmail email accounts.

I have a company gmail account for mydomain.com. When setting up the account I had to use another address (not mydomain.com) for the administrative user account. Google would not accept a mydomain email address as the administrative user, probably because at that point I wouldn't be able to receive the confirmation emails from google during the update of the MX records. Even now, I have to have a non mydomain.com email address as a registered contact on the account in the event that mydomain.com is down, and google need to contact me by other means. With access to this email address I have administrative access and ownership of the company gmail. I can and have set up additional administrative users that do have mydomain.com addresses, but you must have one account that isn't on the same domain.

Why Theresa May’s hard Brexit might be softer than you think

Aqua Marina

2 years?

I'm still not convinced that Brexit should take 2 years. We hold all the cards. The UK simply has to stop the £350 million a week payments, and the EU looses 20-25% of it's funding. You want to keep the money flowing, come to the table now and make a deal like grown ups. You don't want to? What are you going to do to us, we're leaving anyway, oh and we're still not going to pay you. It's ridiculous, May needs to grow a backbone and cancel the direct debit till everything is agreed one way or the other.

*Disclaimer, I'm with the remain camp, but the UK decided democratically that we were out, so I want this done as quickly and efficiently as possible with minimum cost and fuss.

Apple vs. Samsung goes back to court, again, to re-assess the value of a rounded corner

Aqua Marina

*imaginarynumber

"Apple...... they even told the court that they had invented touchscreen smartphones."

Now this is what I find crazy, in the years that have passed, everyone and their dog now knows that there are 1001 examples of prior art (eg. the first iPhone released 2007 could easily be mistaken for the Samsung F700 that first appeared at CEBIT in 2006) for pretty much every one of Apples claims.

With all this now established knowledge amassed in the past decade, why hasn't someone pushed in the courts to persue perjury charges? Given all the documentation that exists now, someone must have deliberately lied in court.

View from a Reg reader: My take on the Basic Income

Aqua Marina
Devil

Talking of daily mail

There's a petition here to get the Daily Mail website classified as a fake news site on Facebook.

https://www.change.org/p/facebook-get-the-daily-mail-reclassified-as-a-fake-news-website

Uh-oh! Microsoft has another chatbot – but racism is a no-go for Zo

Aqua Marina
Linux

Go fish!

I wonder how it will pronounce the word 'Ghoti'!

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

Aqua Marina
Coffee/keyboard

Re: To the 2IC

I'd love to know what financially stable world some of the posters that frequent this forum are living in. A day doesn't go by where someone is suggesting that an actual paying job is simply abandoned because of a disagreement. Can someone let me know where all these replacement jobs are available?

Elon Musk-backed OpenAI reveals Universe – a universal training ground for computers

Aqua Marina
Mushroom

Shall we play a game?

Wonder if they've got Global Thermonuclear War on that games list.

Congrats America, you can now safely slag off who you like online

Aqua Marina

Double edged sword?

Are dishonest and malicious reviews now protected?

Three CEO confirms hack, 133,827 customers were exposed

Aqua Marina
Coat

3 CEOs?

I read the article end to end, but couldn't find anything said about the other 2!

Helping autonomous vehicles and humans share the road

Aqua Marina

Price hikes on the way.

"Volvo has already noticed that some human drivers behave like bullies around autonomous cars."

If this is researched and documented then it will result in premiums being sky-high for owners of non-autonamous drivers all the more quickly. "You're insurance premium is going up this year sir, because we think you'll be acting like a dick!"

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

Aqua Marina

Just keep adding people!

Reply to All was the bane of my life at one of the places I worked a few years ago. It got so bad I was asked if we could remove it from up high because what started off as an email conversation between 2 people, ended up going back and forth with more people added, to the point that towards the end, 30 or mo people were now in the To: / CC: field.

There was no automated way at the time to remove or even displace it automatically without visiting each user, and making all the relevant clicks in their profile.

AI boffins turn to StarCraft to train future neural networks

Aqua Marina

Re: Has been done

Hence the word "essentially". On an equal map, with equal resource allocation and equal starting, the game is reduced to being turn based via mathematics. One of them must be processed first, then the other, and will always win via milliseconds.

Aqua Marina

Has been done

This has been done before. The AIs have the advantage of seeing the full map, whereas the player doesn't. Also many of the maps are not 100% equal for both sides. Initial positioning and first player to take a particular vantage point factors a lot into which bot wins, as does starting race. Certain maps with certain races combinations are a guaranteed win when both AIs are playing fully optimized. Also, even if playing identically on a 100% equal map, one of the AIs is always mathematically ahead of the other in what is essentially a turn based game. And as such one will always win out by miliseconds.

Ex-army sergeant pleads guilty to using private browsing mode

Aqua Marina

So my take on this, is that he is guilty of not understanding that private browsing is enabled by default nowdays, probably not understanding what it is, and of not having the technical skills to turn the default setting to off. Sounds like most of the people coming to me for support on a daily basis. Lock them up too!

Pokemon NO! Hospital demands ban on virtual creatures after addicts invade private wards

Aqua Marina

@Tom 38

"There is no way in the game to see the distance nor direction of Pokemon listed as "nearby sightings""

Almost right, there is a direction you can infer from the nearby sightings using a process of elimination, but you are correct that there is no distance scale.

The sightings tab is a 3X3 grid in the same format as a telephone keypad, 1 to 9. 1 is the closest, 9 is the furthest away. If you walk in a particular direction, and see the pokemon in position 5 move to position 3, then you know you are walking in the right direction towards the pokemon now in position 3. It's very easy by simply walking in 50 yards in each direction to work out the approximate location of pokemon, and even easier if you have a friend with you walking in the opposite direction from your starting point you can confer with.

User couldn't open documents or turn on PC, still asked for reference as IT expert

Aqua Marina
Joke

Re: Lets see

"OL "Oh, I think I'd better get a man in to do that""

Sensible girl!

Microsoft warns Windows security fix may break network shares

Aqua Marina

Re: Nothing to see it will be sorted

The Mac update springs to mind that stopped searchlight from indexing our Dlink NAS's. They have around half a million files on them, and are pretty much rendered unsearchable without 3rd party tools.

Two Sundays wrecked by boss who couldn't use a calendar

Aqua Marina

Re: Powering up in the right order

If you are given the budget and the time to do so, yes*. Unfortunately time and money are very rare things when it comes to IT spending.

*But even then there are always the hacks that spring to the surface that some developer put together to solve an immediate problem, with the intention of doing it properly later. However due to the lack of time and money, the re-writes never occur, and everything comes crashing down at reboot because of one unfixed quickfix.

HSBC: How will we verify business banking customers? Selfies!

Aqua Marina

Simplify the process?

Is this the same HSBC that I had to give up trying to open an account with after 4 months, because their system was so inflexible that they couldn't handle that my passport had my full name of John Jack Smith*, my gas bill had the name John Smith and my telephone bill had the name John J Smith. It was ludicrous. I had to go in every 2 weeks with my documents over and over again, and each time it came back that I had to go in again because the names didn't match.

I tried getting my gas bill and phone bill adjusted, but it was impossible to get my middle name in full on the bills.

In the end I opened the account up with Barclays, took about half an hour and no documents were checked or asked for.

*not my real name

Pixellation popped: AI can ID you, even after PhotoShop phuzzing

Aqua Marina

Haven't people been doing this for years?

So they've taught the computer to slightly cross it's eyes, go just out of focus and then you can make out who it is?

Is it time to unplug frail OpenOffice's life support? Apache Project asked to mull it over

Aqua Marina

Self fulfilling prophecy my ass

For 14 years I've been telling OOo* users to open up any OOo app, go to Tools, Options, Memory, and then multiply any values they see in there by 10. Then their OOo will run like it's been greased and dropped off a steep hill whilst charged up with neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.

The memory requirements for OOo were drawn up when 32MB of RAM was considered excessive and expensive, yet year after year, on and on, over a decade later, even now when my £500 PC comes with 16GB RAM, OOo defaults haven't changed from those back in 2002. It's stagnating, It hasn't moved forward, compatiblilty with MS's offering hasnt improved and simple layout issues documented over 10 years ago have still to this day not been fixed.

Kill it off. Kill it off with fire.

* This also applied to Libre Office too the last time I could be bothered looking.

Samsung's million-IOPS, 6.4TB, 51Gb/s SSD is ... well, quite something

Aqua Marina

Fix it in the firmware

Samsung have lost my confidence at the moment.

I had a dozen or so of the Evo 840, that kept simply corrupting and slowing down to a snail pace. It took about 2 years for the problem to be fixed in the firmware, by which time I'd simply gone out and bought reliable replacements from Crucial.

I don't think I would stick 6TB of data on a sammy drive.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/22/samsung_in_second_ssd_slowdown_snafu/

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... er, Graphene bubbles – 200 times stronger than Superman

Aqua Marina

Re: Tensile strength ?

From memory, 2 of the competing companies in the field that were doing all the research had quite literally bet their owners assets on the technology, and when the economy crashed a few years ago they lost the roofs over their heads. Not due to a failure of the technology or the research. but more to the fact that over the course of days any money and assets they had simply vapourised.

I saw a documentary about these guys recently, one of them still can't afford a car, and the other one quit the field, and went and got another job in marine engineering, ironically where a lot of the research he did on the elevator, could be put into practice.

There was a third guy who at one point had worked for both of the guys above. He was essentially the brains, and he decided to quit completely because he had worked out that the breakthroughs were predictable, and were about a hundred years away, and he would never get to see them in his lifetime, so he would rather work on something he knew he would be able to complete.

Sysadmin sticks finger in pipe, saves data centre from flood

Aqua Marina

Speaking of boarding up things.

A long time ago I had a satellite office down in Dudley, that had several servers located at the side of the main office. Usual story of no budget for anything, and this was before the days of remote admin and email. I had macgyvered together a system that monitored temperatures inside the cases, and if the office got too hot an alarm would sound, and I would be called in to intervene, usually by telling them to turn the heating off and open a window (the girls would turn off the AC and turn on the heating, rather than say wear something longer than a belt of a skirt, or a cardigan over the strappy sleeveless top). This system worked quite well.

One day I get a call that everything had stopped working. I rush the 100 mile or so journey down, and find 2 dead servers, and my alarm wailing away. The server room was like an oven. Hold on.. room? what room, where did this room come from. I queried one of the staff, who told me that some months beeping was coming from the servers. The office manager didn't like this noise, so he arranged for a studded wall to be built around them, and a lockable door.

For months this alarm had been going off, and the office manager had simply been ignoring it when he dutifully went in each morning to swap over the backup tapes because "why would the room being too warm damage anything?"

Watch the world's biggest 'flying bum' go arse over tit in a crash

Aqua Marina

Yeah baby yeah

I was reminded of the road roller incident in the first Austin Powers movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4UFQWKjy_I

Touchy iPhone 6, 6 Plus chips prone to breaking down and giving up

Aqua Marina

Sale of goods act anyone?

In the UK this fault would be covered by the sale of goods act, and anyone with the faulty phone can return ir to the place they purchased it for repair or replacement. Granted they would have to start small claims court proceedings while the retailer sat around laughing, but the courts take a dim view of firms who shy away from repairing documented and well known faults.

Microsoft ordered to fix 'excessively intrusive, insecure' Windows 10

Aqua Marina

Re: I've said it before

"I don't understand why people would ever ask for help on the internet, "

Indeed, I once made the mistake of asking for some help on a Linux related issue I was having trouble resolving. I was universally blasted on the forum as being a noob, and basically told in no uncertain terms to RTFM!

I responded that I had indeed read the manual, and pointed out using screenshots where necessary that the instructions provided didn't match the interface, the responses or the prompts, and that in some some cases, steps were clearly missing, because titles were present, but followed by blank spaces.

I was then informed by the same users who had roasted me earlier and told me to RTFM, that the manual was considered "beta".

That experience tainted my belief that Linux users are somehow more technically competant than Windows users. I now believe that they are a bunch of bullies, who just like to point at the new guy in the room, and pick on him.

EU waves antitrust claims in Google's face, snarls 'You want some?'

Aqua Marina

I wish the EU would hurry up and investigate the impartiality and fairness of the google search ranking and adwords formula. The one that seems to keep pushing you to pay more, without any proof that it's needed.

Tupperware vehemently denies any link to storage containerisation

Aqua Marina

Re: Tsk

"No, you don't have to defend it no matter what".

Or you can defend it to your dying breath like Hornel did, and still lose your trademarked word because everyone else now uses it for something else.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/security/spammaker-wants-us-to-stop-calling-pesky-emails-spam/2006/10/12/1160246238013.html

You can buy Windows 10 Enterprise E3 access for the price of a coffee

Aqua Marina
Alien

In best Kosh voice... and so it begins...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qYbVQu7YAQ

(Alien icon cos they don't have a jelly fish one)

Isis crisis: Facebook makes Bristol lass an unperson

Aqua Marina

Re: Bootnote

Top right of the page in the red bar.

Aqua Marina

Re: Perhaps FB are taking a leaf out of the Icelanic Law Books?

Took a couple of years, but all was ok in the end.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/victory-for-the-siblings-named-girl-and-boy-on-passports-a3283546.html

Is Windows 10 ignoring sysadmins' network QoS settings?

Aqua Marina

Me too!

Me too. When I try to upload a video to my you-tube site, for the duration of the upload, I (and anyone else on my network) am unable to browse the internet. It's as tho Win 10 just floods the router.

Mushroom farm PC left in the dark and fed … you know the rest

Aqua Marina
Coat

Re: Cabinet too tight for the computer?

I'm lichen the puns

(Probably only works in the US)

Lenovo cries 'dump our support app' after 'critical' hole found

Aqua Marina

Re: Clean install Windows or Linux

As I recall, it was Lenovo that used some behind the scenes gubbins, to reinstall their crapware, even when you nuked the hard disk, and installed from scratch.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/08/12/lenovo-used-a-hidden-windows-feature-to-ensure-its-software-could-not-be-deleted/#gref

As US court bans smart meter blueprints from public, sysadmin tells of fight for security info

Aqua Marina

Re: Bah!

"By my reading:"

Your reading is wrong.

1) Man asks public utility for info that should be publicly available.

2) Public utility provides info.

3) Man posts supplied publicly available info to the web, for access by the public.

4) Smart meter companies decide that too much info was given, and some of it shouldn't be publicly available.

5) Smart meter company starts suing.

HR botches redundancy so chap scores year-long paid holiday

Aqua Marina
Pint

Re: Lost in the system

In the recent reprints it was renamed "Meerkat Movies" and the price doubled.

Beer o clock. Time to go home!

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