Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
"with an amazing 128K RAM, 8086 16 bit processor and twin 2.4Mb 5.25-inch variable speed floppy disk drives".
... would place it in the early 1980s. Except, the size of those floppies has surely been overstated? My recollection is that the later 3.5" discs were, at 800kb (or 720k formatted for msdos), quite a lot bigger than the 5.25-inch ones had been.
It was silly of Assange to wait through the tenure of a US government that was entirely disinterested in him until the current US president, who has a different attitude.
I wouldn't be so sure. In some matters, Trump is smart, and this might just be one of them. And Trump looks a lot less afraid of defying his robo-bureaurats (who would actually administrate an extradition and trial) than other presidents.
Trump, or a smart advisor, might have more interesting ideas. Like the fact that Oz itself is a close ally, and could probably find dirt on him within its own jurisdiction if it were so minded.
The basic idea that algorithms and datasets that affect peoples lives (e.g. those used to determine credit or insurance) should be accountable - and ideally public - makes complete sense and should be uncontroversial.
But I can't help suspecting that talk of prejudices and biases is unhelpful. It certainly muddles the issue with others that are controversial, and introduces suspicions around the motives of those involved. Bear in mind how few journalists - or their readers - can cope with the distinction of correlation vs causation.
@Lee D - this woman's bathroom door might be more soundproof than yours. And maybe there's background noise to drown it out.
I commonly sit upstairs while the roomba does downstairs, and vice versa. That distance is sufficient that I hardly hear it most of the time. And mine is also good at returning to base, so we don't play hide-and-seek.
Doesn't have to lock anything. If it just shuts the door from inside, it can't get out again until someone opens the door for it. The door may have locked itself, or more likely the hysterical woman was mistaken: c.f. the Gatwick drone.
I make sure to wedge doors open when the roomba is running!
Christmas lights now routinely include low-powered lasers.
Interacting lasers accidentally produce momentary holographic display in the dark and wet.
Something is flying out there, and it's not supposed to be there!
And after a drone has first been reported, it takes only the merest hint of a light out there to generate more sightings.
Um, AIUI Microsoft's specs not merely permit but require their vendors to make it possible for users on x86 to install other things - including Debian. The user has two choices: either disable secure boot or insert their own key.
Isn't paying to insert a UEFI key something associated with commissioning custom hardware?
So they've probed in depth into whether Huawei phones home, and they're doing it with Microsoft. Perhaps there should be a permanent team to manage a testbench and apply it to all strategically significant vendors, especially those from countries without a GDPR-equivalent? Keep the team firmly at arms length from any political influence, so it can report independently on any specific allegations/suspicions that might arise, as well as flag up hitherto-unsuspected issues.
The Great Firewall of Blighty has the same problem as the companies themselves: it can only block what someone tells or trains it to block (and spammers continue to demonstrate the limitations of the latter).
Of course, just occasionally we get to point and laugh.
Meanwhile, has anyone ever encountered online contents so horrific as to rival the Bible for blood&gore, massacres&genocide?
The shareholders - the same people who are fighting this time - would have a say. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but in the first instance a new company they spin off would have the same owners.
Likewise they could in principle sell the technology to a company whose business is selling weapons to dodgy regimes. But exactly the same shareholders might raise an eyebrow at that, too.
Competent programmers?
If I was a competent programmer back in my first job after graduating, it was purely by coincidence. Certainly never learned, other than on-the-job.
And a few years later when I returned to academia, I was surrounded by colleagues who had learned the same way, yet we were the ones teaching the next generation of CompSci students. I like to hope they came out competent to program (among other things) when they graduated, despite their lecturers' lack of education in the subject.
Dunno.
And bear in mind, we've only heard one side of the story. As told, it sounds like an accident in a system that wasn't entirely fit for purpose. But if it had been told by the person responsible for that setup, the spin would surely have been different: zac was messing about, overrode safeguards, perhaps gained unauthorised access to a privileged account, or somesuch. And maybe a different angle on what zac calls a 15-minute bathroom break.
Bah. Such blind speculation needs one of these -->
I wouldn't say that.
Where something like ping might have a legitimate role is in some application none of us (reg commentards here) has thought of. Such things may be out there, without us ever having encountered them.
We can draw analogies from the past. For example, when Sun first came out with the (Java) applet in the mid-1990s, they had some silly/pointless demos ("duke" or something?). Lots of third-parties also used it to produce toys and eye-candy and probably cat videos, and it was widely dismissed as fluff. Meanwhile some of us were producing serious applications for the real world: in my case, providing interactive access to explore satellite image datasets, including some quite sophisticated GIS and visualisation tools.
But obviously that's a specialist area, and most web users would never encounter it.
Hence my question above. I can contrive legitimate use cases for this ping. What I struggle to see is a use case that isn't at least open to abuse and more-or-less sure to be used abusively if released into the wild. But I wouldn't dismiss it just because my own imagination ain't what it used to be.
For some of the time I lived in Italy I had a three-compartment Fridge/Freezer/Larder. Compartments at 12, 4, and -18 degrees. The larder was primarily for fruit&veg in the hot Italian summer, but suits many other things like cheese, butter, and those drinks that are neither hot nor chilled..
Here in Blighty those larder compartments have to be bought separately, under the title of "wine coolers".
Horses for courses[1]. A good pint at cellar temperature, nice for more-or-less any day. It's still nice on those occasional really hot summer days, but then a properly chilled Weizenbier becomes the greater pleasure.
And that's in Blighty. When I lived in Italy, I completely lost the taste for English ale. Not just in those hot summers, but all year, including the occasional brief return visit to Blighty. I only re-acquired it when I'd been back long enough for my body re-acclimatise.
[1] and horsepiss for over-dogmatic beer drinkers.
I've met you. Several of you.
Go in to DIY store, not knowing exactly what I can get but looking for a 'best available match' to my needs. Shop assistant takes it upon himself to liven up his day improvising design for something bearing little relation to what I want. By the time he's thrust the helpful design on me, I just want to get away, so take the path of least resistance and thank him for the brilliant design.
... then use a bit of imagination, coin a new and better name. The 'net's biggest name of all came from nothing: who had heard of a google before they appeared?
Thanks for the info on .incriminated. If I ever encounter one, I shall now be able to point and laugh at the mug.
Nothing wrong with delegating his due diligence to people employed (or contracted, in the case of KPMG) for their expertise in such things. If indeed that's what happened.
If that decision went wrong, he's responsible (and he did get the boot), but surely then he himself is of very marginal relevance as a witness. I take it we're due to hear from those to whom due diligence was delegated?
Fol says that the vulnerability is triggered when the host server performs its daily restart routine, usually at 0625.
A startling claim. I don't think a daily restart routine is *that* usual: the default log rotation is weekly! I expect he was describing how he runs his server, and the reporter thought he meant standard practice. The point about the restart is that the vulnerability happens when both old and new processes are running, in the overlap that serves to provide continuity of service for users connecting to the server.
The reporter rightly points out that this relies on running in-process code. Not external code such as CGI or PHP-FPM. Permitting untrusted users to run in-process code is scary on many levels, though not unknown: Fol's demo exploit runs under mod_php, which I don't think anyone recommends nowadays in the era of PHP-FPM.
Never mind regularly, I've been there four times in total (and one of those was just in transit UK to NZ), and I have thoroughly grim recollections of it from three of those visits.
Mind you, entering Blighty was also pretty grim, the one time I arrived driving a non-UK-registered car.
Though I really wouldn't hold "rich and privileged" against him. It takes resources to get noticed, and if he were able to drive some small change, the less-rich[1] and unprivileged could share the benefit.
[1] Not poor. They wouldn't be flying in the first place.
Sick of not being able to go out on walks after dark due to faddy wood stoves belching out smoke
Luxury! Just wait 'til your neighbour gets one and your own home suddenly becomes uninhabitable for many hours a day, six months a year. Extra points if it's a neighbour somewhere between west and southwest and a little downhill from you[1].
[1] Adjust to prevailing winds locally if different to Blighty.
It's hard to think ...
Um, really?
eh? it's server side PHP
doesn't really seem so hard to think.
I love wordpress. That's 'cos I'm just an end-user, and my blog isn't of such value as to lose sleep over risks it might run. It's easy to love when you're not responsible for any of the admin.
I'll get me coat.
I couldn't even tell you if an annoying noise happened to be that particular perpetrator. Speaking as someone who does love music, I avoid pop in general: I concluded at age about 13 or so[1] I'd heard it (the generic pop formula) enough for one lifetime. Pop is for people who don't like music, because if you try to listen to it as music the total inanity will soon drive you up the wall.
Damn, where's the Reg icon for soapbox?
[1] About a year, give or take, after my mother acquired a radio and started playing Radio 2 - the BBC's monument to mindlessness. To her credit, she too later got fed up with it, and moved to real music.
It's a repeat of an old joke. First time round I loved it for its wider effect, and described it as audacious and imaginative.
... But the ingenious thing is that this applies not just to the feeble joke article, but every article, through the history of El Reg. Suddenly the Reg every day is April 1st tradition really comes into its own, as tall stories like yesterday’s one about World Backup Day display all grinning trolls.
And suddenly the seeds of doubt are sown over all the serious stories. This is surreal, and turns it into a brilliant new twist on an old tradition!
Icon in waiting for when we revert.
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