* Posts by Mark 85

12880 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2012

SpaceX blast kills Zuck's sat

Mark 85

Re: slippage

According to reports, they were in the process of fueling it. Upper stage oxygen tank appears to be the source. Since the motors hadn't been lit off, there's lots of room for discussion and searching for the answer. Might be something as simple as a spark from static electricity.

Australian geoboffin discovers 3.7 billion year old fossils after ice melts

Mark 85
Devil

Re: 6000 years

I don't recall stromatolites being mentioned... did I miss those verses?

Drama in orbit: Brazen UFO attacks Earth's Sentinel-1A satellite

Mark 85

Just a minor fender bender...

A bit of paint, a bit of body putty and it'll be fine. It's the towing bill back to the shop that will be a bit pricey.

Fake Twitter accounts, coup plots ... Wacky Hyperloop One lawsuit turns it up to 11

Mark 85

I think this will entail some serious popcorn time for those following along. If Hollywood made a movie, the audience would walk out as it's too unbelievable.

FBI Director wants 'adult conversation' about backdooring encryption

Mark 85

This ranks as probably the biggest twit in government at the current time. Did he ever take any mathematics in school? Logic? Reasoning? I guess those "experts" who say "nay" aren't adults. Hell, he won't even listen the NSA.

And while we're at it... have there been any documented cases where the FBI stopped an attack (and not a set-up either)? Or how about any of the terrorist attacks that would have been stopped if they had the keys to encrypted comms? I recall hearing of maybe one or two cases of "stopped" but the perps weren't using encryption. The key is the second question... which ones could they have stopped?

US appeals court slaps down FTC, AT&T walks free, cats and dog living together, mass hysteria

Mark 85

Uh... what it's "supposed" to be and what it "really is" are two different things for the last half-century (or longer depending on the industry). As the US moves to being a government for the corporates instead of the people, this is just another step.

AT&T trash talks Google over Fiber fiasco: Leave ISP stuff to the experts

Mark 85

AT&T, Comcast, CenturyLink... etc..

They're all alike... too much alike it would seem. Where I am other than Charter (true cable, not DSL) the competition is CenturyLink (formerly QWest). CenturyLink only offeres DSL and the price is just a bit better than Charter's but the with slower speeds.

Seems the CenturyLink/QWest people have been promising fiber now for ten years. Usually.. "oh and well have fiber to your house in about a year".. for 10 years now. There's no trucks, no build out going on but they are promising it. There's even ton of dark fiber in many of the newer neighborhoods just waiting... put in when the houses were bujilt as part of the developer's agreement with the city/county. I'd love to see someone actually do something.

Got to dash out for some rubber johnnies? Amazon has a button for that

Mark 85

Re: Yet another IOT "solution"...

We need an 1000 Upvote button....

Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses

Mark 85

F*** knows what goes through the minds of MoD ship planners, but the pea-brained retards have long forgotten that warships need weapons. Was the same story with every other class of warship the poor beggars of the Royal Navy have had for decades

Decades? Think again. Go back to about 1776 and look at what the Navy had and what was proposed. They eventually got what was really needed. Then look again around 1812... I could go on but it gets redundant. Probably because they like to think they're still fighting the last war when the new one breaks out.

And so it goes....

Lawyers! win! millions! in! bonkers! Yahoo! email! snooping! case!

Mark 85

They did put all that studying to good use... who got the money and got diddly squat?

More banks plundered through SWIFT attacks

Mark 85

Re: So SWIFT is not the issue

It seems to be a two-party game... SWIFT blames the banks and won't step up and say something like "find another sucker to do this" and the banks... well, they're banks and since it's other people's money, don't seem to care. The blame game hasn't really started yet and won't until governments have to start bailing out the banks. Once sufficient blame has been tossed about and bail outs in place, all will return to normal* once more.

*Normal being profit and a "let's save money by not spending on security".

Labour's Jeremy Corbyn wants high speed broadband for all. Wow, original idea there

Mark 85

Re: Socialism?

Surely the correct approach for a socialist would be to limit everyone to the lowest speed available?

Except of course there is a higher speed for the elite who need the higher speeds to help in decision making since they are all smarter than rest of us.

Li-Fi with my little eye … a vulnerability

Mark 85

Re: Deja vu, again

Well.... light bulbs.... smells like some IoT type stuff again, doesn't it?

Reports: Autopilot will go on strike if you're not paying attention

Mark 85

@Stoneshop -- Re: eh?

I was thinking The Surfaris and Wipeout... but I'm an old geezer and still upvoted you. PF were great.

Microsoft redfaced after Bing translation cockup enrages Saudis

Mark 85

Re: Easy mistake to make?

It might be a fairly accurate translation given the history... but it's a bad bit of PR for the Sauds who like to play both ends. I'm not sure why the US is such good "friends" with them other than some black stuff that gets pumped out of the ground. There always seemed to be too high a price to pay (and not dollars) for an oil company's profit.

Microsoft Outlook.com redecoration delay rumors: THE TRUTH

Mark 85

If it looks like bafflegab and reads like bafflegab, it is. This just further tells me that MS's left hand hasn't a clue what the right hand is doing... or when it's doing it.

Facebook replaces human editors with McChicken romping, Fox News faking AI bots

Mark 85

Other than getting rid of the human editors and saving money, who would ever think that AI was a good choice for this? Maybe for the initial weeding out process but certainly not for the "published" items.

Then again.. FB and profit....

Tim Cook trousers $135m in Apple shares

Mark 85

Re: One day the tide will turn...

I think it will be a case of the west being the cheap labour and the east being the bosses before too long unless overpaid CEOs get their heads from out of their nether regions.

The CEO's and shareholders don't give one damn about where the cheap labor is located. If the East rises and west falls, they will still make their money.

Google breaks heart, White Knight falls off horse

Mark 85
Thumb Down

You don’t get the broadband you deserve - you get the broadband you pay for.

Bullshit. We pay for "advertised speeds" and get something way less. We pay for service 24/7 and get rolling outages and denial by the companies that anything is wrong with their system and it must be our computers. We have companies playing the game the law allows by defining "high speed" as whatever they freakin' want.

So no, we pay for what they will give us along with paying for the huge profits and the salaries/bonuses of the C-Suite types. I'll add that for most of us, there is no choice of ISP or the choice is copper cable or DSL.

Baltimore cops: We flew high-res camera planes to film your every move

Mark 85

That's why its so dangerous when policing measures are justified purely on whether they work - as though effectiveness is somehow the only criterion we should be concerned with.

Haven't we all been raised to understand that the only that counts is results? It's a corporate mentality but seems to have spread through sports (at all levels), grades in school, etc. Means to an end and all that. Not a good thing though for us citizens.

SpaceX Dragon capsule lands in Pacific carrying 12 moustronauts

Mark 85

Re: What's in it for the mice?

Nothing like clogging up the ventilation system with cat hair... Then again, if the cat coughs up a hair ball, it could be interesting to watch it fly about.

Russia MP's son found guilty after stealing 2.9 million US credit cards

Mark 85

I think we're missing some information. Like "who" did the arresting. If the US knew he was there, then, depending on treaties, the Maldive police could picked him up and and turned him over to the US LEO. I would hope it wasn't the US LEO's who did the arresting which would be a very frightening bit. I would also hope an extradition order was offered to the Maldives.

However, the article does infer that it was the US that picked him up at the airport. This wouldn't be the first time, but I'm wondering what would happen if another country pulled that crap....

OTOH, perhaps now that we have him and the Russians are angry... who can we trade him for to make everyone happy?

Our pacemakers are totally secure, says short-sold St Jude

Mark 85

Re: Let's get this straight

More like market manipulation which can be "pump and dump" but that's something different. I wondering how the SEC will respond to this as this whole scenario does stink to high heaven. While I find it interesting that MedSec would do this, not contacting St. Jude before selling short and announcing really seems unethical to me.

Muddying the waters of infosec: Cyber upstart, investors short medical biz – then reveal bugs

Mark 85

Thinking this through..

Upon further reflection on this... there will probably be lawsuits filed by St. Jude Medical. There's a hint of blackmail by the security people. Could it become the new normal... "pay us for these bugs, or we make a big stink in public and short your stock."? The upside it might work this time. St. Jude might just fix the holes and keep their stock growing which will hurt the security guys.

But what about the next time? What about if someone say publicly "you have serious security holes so were shorting your stock?" when they haven't found any holes.

Or go the other way... "we found no holes, we're going long on your stock"...?

There's a lot of room here for abuse and manipulating stock prices.

Mark 85

Re: Smells of...

Not quite "insider trading"... but more like "market manipulation"... I'm sure there's all sorts of ethics and possibly legal issues from the way they handled this.

Tech fails miserably in Forbes' most innovative companies

Mark 85

Re: "What is the value of the list? Who knows?"

The value of the "list" isn't for the likes of us or even the users of tech. It's for investors, stock-analysts, and those who only look at the bottom line and the size of their bonus. It's willy-waving for the wealthy at best.

Sysadmin sticks finger in pipe, saves data centre from flood

Mark 85

Not my story but I was involved in a round about way. Back 1970ish.. out of the military and in college. I took a job as "the" maintenance man for a 20 story office building in the downtown area of my hometown. The building was built in the very early 1900's and had cast iron riser pipes (those being the pipes that pumped the supply water to the top floor where they then u-turned and went down to feed each floor water. The city changed it's water supply to "soft" water in the early 60's and so the pipes were lined with lime build up. In the two years I worked there, I walked into work a total of 6 times to find that one of the risers blew out when the lime inside had disappeared. I won't go into why management didn't replace them all after the first one blew. Oh.. it started life as a bank building so there was a vault in the basement next to my office in the basement.

Fast forward.. I go to my high school's 40th reunion. One of my former classmates is CIO of a company that now owns the building. After having a great evening, I visited him on Monday and got to see my old office... etc. The old maintenance office in the basement was the NOC. They were using the sub-basement for the datacenter. Nice digs and I told him the tales of the pipes breaking and flooding to midway up the basement wall. We had a few laughs and I returned back to the west coast.

More fast forward... you probably know where this is going. A few years later, I get a call.... "I remember you said you worked there. Facilities want's to know where the sump pumps are?". Me: "There used to be a steel door next to the vault and it's a stairway to the sub-sub basement where the sump pumps are located. Why?". The door had been covered during a remodel and everyone forgot about it, not that it would have helped. They had a riser break (one of the ones I had replaced many years ago) and flooded the sub-basement (DC) and the basement (NOC) and water was pouring out of the elevator shaft into the main lobby and then to street. I advised him to call the fire department and see if they could pump the water out after they hired a diver to go to the sub-basement and turn off the water supply.

All I know now is that the company is still there and their DC and NOC are on the 5th floor. Yes, my classmate is still CIO. I'm going to my 50th reunion in about 3 months and hope to see him.

'Fake CEO' Chinese chap cuffed in $54m fraud probe

Mark 85

Re: Effectively unstoppable

I think FACC took effective action and would hope others follow suit. Firing the CEO and the CFO for allowing one person to control payments is the logical result. Down in the trenches, it takes an Act of God for the troops to spend money on hardware or software, but upper manglement has no oversight. If other companies started doing this (firing) perhaps the rest of the business world would take note and follow along. It might even set some industry standards....

But.... we also know that upper manglement always feels that they can do no wrong and having the ability to shift funds is their providence and a sign that they are the top dog.

Apple is making life terrible in its factories – labor rights warriors

Mark 85
Holmes

"Apple is the real reason working conditions are deteriorating."

Let's also add the rest of the companies putting pressure on factories to lower costs. It's never the manglement/stockholders of the company nor the factory owners who get to take home less pay.

Icon ---> It's just one of those moments.

Notting Hill Carnival spycams: Met Police rolls out real-time live face-spotting tech

Mark 85

@Jason Bloomberg -- Re: Time for some face paint

The interesting (for some value of interesting) part is that those who intend to do evil, bad, wrong, probably won't wear facepaint and thus not be questioned. One of the first rules is "be inconspicuous" and don't draw attention to yourself.

Mark 85

@Kubla Cant

El Reg being international, I'm wondering why that is also.. There's "Carnival" (just Carnival) in many places around the world. Rio and New Orleans come to mind as well as a few others.

New booze guidelines: We'd rather you didn't enjoy yourselves

Mark 85

Re: A problem with modern medicine and government policy.

On the other hand perhaps the real problem is the Daily Mail and its ilk.

I think the real problem is the mentality of way too many people... they think if they eat this, do that, not do something else, they will live forever. Notably the younger folks have this thinking. Us older geezers know that life is relatively short. Make the most of it. Have some fun. Don't sweat stuff because anything can kill you.

Mark 85

Re: The purpose of advice like this

Good point. And are there two sets of "standards" that we're not being told? One for us proles and one for the PM's and government/corporate elite? Where I used to work, there was a ban on alcohol during the working day, except for the C-suite who had a wine cellar (cooler?) in the main conference room in their area. And it was used daily.

Go forth Spitzer! To infinity and....

Mark 85
Pint

This is just damn incredible much like other "missions" from NASA. They go past their "sell by date" and keep on sending us science. Marvelous. Have a cold one NASA..

I fart in your general direction! Comet 67P lets rip on Europe's Rosetta probe

Mark 85

Re: "Some of the dust was moving so fast it registered as trails..."

Beans, beans, the musical fruit... ????

Sprint learns that a 'rebate' includes paying people money

Mark 85

Well... that's a win-win for Sprint then. They get to shill about how great they are and "not guilty" of any wrong doing. At the same time, they save a bundle on not having to sort out who gets paid and how much. I would have hoped that the State would charge them for this 'service'.

IoT manufacturer caught fixing security holes

Mark 85

The scumbags.

I misread that at first and wondered which group were scumbags, the insurance company or the lockmakers.... then realized it was "both". Have an upvote.

WhatsApp is to hand your phone number to Facebook

Mark 85

Re: "I never use FB / WhatsApp"...

Wrong at so many levels. This called "voting with your feet". Letting folks know that you are doing this plants the seed in others minds. There are businesses going under everyday because shoppers/users have voted with their feet.

I'll also add, the best form of advertising is word of mouth. It comes in two forms... good and bad. The same principle applies on such topics as Wn10. The negative tells me that not all is well and cheerful in X(product) Land.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are to blame for terrorism, say MPs

Mark 85

Re: re: and there was me thinking it was mainly down to religion.

Foreign policy, by which I mean invading foreign nations, is surely as much to blame.

Not in this case. Go read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism The seeds were planted a long time ago and the roots run deep.

The Internet of Cows is moo-ving fast … no bull!

Mark 85

Re: IoT meets BS

Ah... such as this: Nirmal reckons connected cows and other down-on-the-farm tech represents “a fresh and solid opportunity for service providers, equipment manufacturers, software vendors, value investors and stakeholders."

Ok.. there's nothing in his statement about the benefit to the farmer. It's all about corporates and bottom lines. Cows and stakeholders... really?

Mars to get Chinese delivery. Estimated time of arrival: 2020

Mark 85

Re: Please consider changing the title

If someone didn't get offended by El Reg everyday, then they did fail. Just my opinion.

Kindle Paperwhites turn Windows 10 PCs into paperweights: Plugging one in 'triggers a BSOD'

Mark 85

Re: is there a comprehensive list of cockups?

Win-10-nic "happy anniversary" edition?

I'm thinking that this "anniversary" is like the ones some couples I've run across have had... there's going to be a large divorce in the near future.

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

Mark 85

Re: Certainly looks like a stall...

Various reports in the media say that a ground handling cable that was hanging down snagged on something.

Stop lights, sunsets, junctions are tough work for Google's robo-cars

Mark 85

Re: processors that were stupidly fast

Why aren't there trains without drivers first?

Passenger mental comfort level type of thing. Union clout notwithstanding, there is a lot of mental comfort just from knowing that there's someone "up front" monitoring and running things.

Mark 85

Re: Under streets ? -- Chinese bus design

That has possibilities as it's not so much a bus but a reinvention of the train/bus for in city use. I rather like it.

The only thing I can see being a problem is human drivers trying to beat it to the next corner to turn while the bus is going straight ahead. Also, you're driving down the street and then you see this thing coming right at you. Some serious retraining of drivers will probably be needed.

Mark 85

@bjr -- Re: Roundabouts...

I think the term "rotary" is a local thing. Depending on where I've lived here in the States, I've heard them called "roundabouts", "traffic circles", and "rotaries". One small town even called theirs the "Mini Darlington".

Nuclear fallout shelter becomes cloud storage bunker

Mark 85

Re: An increasingly popular model

Coincidence? Or is the acquisition of military sites by hosting companies a match made in heaven?

Underground. Has built in physical security with concrete and steel and limited access... maybe some serious concertina wire. Access to power and possibly built in back up power (or at least the facilities. Yep.. made in heaven.

Intel douses Wildfire ransomware as-a-service Euro menace

Mark 85
Black Helicopters

Re: "for an investment of $6000"

Meantime whose got your back?.... Aging Politicians, / under-trained Police, AV firms busy mining your info...

Why all of the national security agencies in various countries and their expertise in tracking such crims down, of course. Oh wait... they're busy elsewhere with citizen monitoring.

Hacked hookup site Ashley Madison's security was laughable

Mark 85

What is surprising is that the company is still rolling along. I guess users don't really care or maybe thinking with the wrong head.

NASA tried turning lost spacecraft STEREO-B off and on again... but it didn't work. True story

Mark 85
Alert

First, they have to call the spacecraft and tell it that they've detected a problem. Then, they have to convince it to install TeamViewer and give them remote access... and then convince it to give them a valid credit card.

FTFY