* Posts by DNTP

726 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2014

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Telia engineer error to blame for massive net outage

DNTP

Uhh… I think I found him in my building. He's the guy with his shirt off standing on a desk in the middle of the cube farm while a burning network switch illuminates him from below, drinking from a gallon jug of 200 proof we keep for cleaning purposes. Hang on, he is yelling something at the CIO.

"I DID SOMETHING. I AFFECTED THE WORLD. I AM A PERSON WHO MATTERED TODAY."

Swede who spent 28 years vacuuming in the nude to be evicted

DNTP

Re: The Dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es0JByDppcQ

3:30

DNTP

The Dream

Look, half the point of a studio apartment is having the faculties to live 100% of your personal life naked, without having to worry about being judged in your own domestic situation by small minded roommates and your family.

Partial conflict-of-interest disclosure statement: I live in a studio apartment

Full disclosure: No you don't want to know that, but it's a lot like that "Guardians of the Galaxy" line about a blacklight and Jack Pollack paintings.

It's not us, it's you: Boffins ditch supercomputers in lust for new materials

DNTP

Re: I read this and failed to understand.....

Scientists got fed up trying to simulate quantum computational phenomena on conventional supercomputers that only had ones and zeros, so they set up an experiment using 219 trapped, associated atoms that can be used to represent ones, zeros, and maybes.

Note that their experiment probably falls under some definition of a quantum computer itself. Which they intend to use to study quantum phenomena, thus creating an entangled state out of the concepts of "irony", "paradox", and "amazing!".

Crysis creeps: Our ransomware locks network drives and PCs. Bargain

DNTP

<Strength mode activated>

*Grabs a server and throws it fifty meters to knock a guy off a sentry tower*

Facebook: Your code sucks, and we don't even have to run it to tell

DNTP

Scientific code is often VERY ugly

This is true as heck and I am one of those scientists horribly guilty of this. Code written for a one-off project? Yup. That's completely undocumented? Check. That somehow gets migrated onto the pipeline server as a shortcut for other people who don't know ANY programming? Obviously.

Hello world, I'm sorry for doing this but there was no other way (except hand annotating result tables with tens of thousands of lines).

'Stolen' art found on nearby shelf. Police keep looking anyway

DNTP

Re: Never mis-file on the stacks!

Out of all the misdeeds and rules I've ever broken coming up through the school system a one thing I never ever screwed around with was trying to re-file library books.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/bofh_2008_episode_7/

Librarians ARE vampires, or the very next thing to vampires. You'll accidentally misfile a book and then realize that even though you thought you were alone there was a librarian silently watching from three feet behind you. And according to at least one town librarian, "We know where you, and your family, and your friends, all live."

Apple to tailor Swift into fully open-source language – for Linux, too

DNTP

Re: Tailor Swift...

They've done this at least several times before on Swift headlines. But the good thing is it will never stop being funny.

Your servers are underwater? Chill out – liquid's cool

DNTP

Re: Liquid metal cooling

Just make sure there's plenty of high-def security cameras watching that.

Not to prevent sodium theft, but so when something goes horribly wrong we can see it on youtube.

It's the end of life as we know it for Windows Server 2003

DNTP

Re: FreeBSD

If a company had the time and expertise to implement FreeBSD as a replacement WITHOUT hiring outside consultants or a new IT team for the job (see the "save money" part), they would either have done it already or had the technical foresight to not end up scrambling to emergency migrate off Server 2003.

Bring the Banhammer! Microsoft declares WAR on leaky Gears Xbox users

DNTP

Re: American Offices

This is me and California every week, but hey, from my point of view I always get new Reg content early in the morning.

Starbucks denies mobile app hack, blames careless customers

DNTP

I like my coffee

like I like my commitment to online security.

Overpriced and uselessly bloated on extraneous fat and sugar.

Windows 10 to MELT YOUR BRAIN and TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE

DNTP

Re: Saga

Nope, it just means they can spam lawsuits at everyone else who uses that word in a completely different title.

Hacker 3D prints device that can crack a combo lock in 30 seconds

DNTP

Brings back the memories

The device really is clever, but the same two problems that it exploits have been around forever in Masterlocks. First is that the combination is never truly random, and second is that the shackle-and-dial variability of resistance leaks a great deal of information which can be used to drastically reduce the number of possible combinations, allowing brute forcing. I got pretty good at this back in the university days, where I could open most Masterlocks in fifteen or or twenty minutes. Inexpensive multi-dial locks are a lot easier, key locks (with picks) can be easier or harder (thank you MIT guide).

I would hope no one is actually using a consumer grade Masterlock to protect anything extremely valuable or dangerous anyway, but I'm sure some government paper-pusher who had one in high school just ordered a gross for securing nuclear weapons or something.

Malfunctioning Russian supply podule EXPLODES above Pacific

DNTP

Re: Stressful

Yeah but when you remember to add "IN SPACE" after each of the three problems you mentioned, it becomes awesome unlike the college dorm experience.

Weird ARCHAEAN LIFE FORM found at 'Loki's Castle' DEEP beneath Arctic Circle

DNTP

bottom of the boot

If any human can dive to 2300 meters in something that has "boots", it's going to be one of those giant rounded hardshell suits, and I think those are only made for a third of that depth at best.

The technique you're describing is known as an environmental DNA census, and is starting to gain wider adoption in ecology, environmental science, and related fields, tracking the widespread rollout of Next-Gen sequencing instruments that allow the reliable and (relatively!) inexpensive detection of low-concentration, highly fragmented genetic material. For those who are interested, a fairly readable open paper describing a pilot study may be found here:

Kelly et al 2014. Using environmental dna to census marine fishes in a large mesocosm. PLOS ONE 9(1): e86175

DNTP
Joke

Re: Eukaryon with your research

It's awesome when professionals complete a study and deliver results.

In other words, a Pro Carry On.

(stretchin' it like a tube clam)

Google's 'stale pale males' to be replaced by crack black chick pack

DNTP

Underrepresentation

I was at a daylong biotech conference two weeks ago and during one of the less interesting presentations I counted people in the audience. Out of sixty or so attendees, the rough percentages were 40% white, 40% asian, 20% Indian/middle eastern. Cross-checking with the presentation schedule and people I actually talked to, attendance was split 50/50 between grad students and company reps.

There were no black people in attendance. I doubt that every university and company invited to attend is racist in either their hiring or selection of representation, which actually raises the more disturbing hypothesis that the pool of highly educated people that gets drawn into biotech or graduate school is significantly depleted of black or Hispanic persons relative to the general population. In turn, this suggests basic deficiencies in the equality of early education, and economic priority of public education, that disproportionately affect these ethic groups…

Of course, we know this. But it is disturbing to go to a conference and think, "If my skin color was different I probably never would have had the opportunities to get here regardless of natural ability". This isn't a problem that can be fixed by individual companies spending money on diversity recruitment; it's caused by fundamental inequalities that still exist within American society that pre-emptively hinder members of ethnic groups from entering that talent pool at all.

Online pizza order saves woman and children from knife-wielding kidnapper

DNTP

Help

This weekend I'm going to be held hostage in the equipment room to force a company to release a sum of money. Can someone bring me a pizza.

Dive! Dive! Dive! Imation submarine barrels down toward rocky seabed

DNTP

U-995 (the boat in the picture)

was built by the Germans in 1942, captured by the British, given to Norway after WW2, and later sold back to Germany…

…for one dollar.

Which hopefully will not become the NEXT submarine-story-based-metaphor we find applied to Imation.

Apple MacBook 2015: Twelve inches of slim and shiny fanboi joy

DNTP

Re: Can it run Crysis?

Probably yes, possibly not very well, definitely not an application you'd buy one of these for.

Hey devs! Confused by EU privacy law? Pull out the FLASH CARDS

DNTP

Re: Could someone perhaps explain why

The "your users are women" card is a pre-emptive Roarshach test for the lads on your design team. You measure the deviation in their answers between the "women" and "everyone" situation cards, and then use that to determine who you should have a quiet word with before they blurt out something regressive at a management meeting.

Apple and IBM foist fondleslabs on Japanese elders in Big Data snatch

DNTP

Not as funny

I think when Somethingawful.com did this as a legitimate charity drive in 2007 it was funnier.

Replace the words "fondleslabs" and "Japan's elderly" with "millions of bees" and "African farmers".

What is Apple's idiot tax on Watch these days? 'About $265 or 80%'

DNTP

R. A. E.

OK, let's run this into the ground. If you reduced an Apple Sport Watch (~72 grams) to its component elements of aluminum, silicon, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen plus a smattering of other things, according to my very rough calculation on the bulk commodities markets the Sport Watch probably wouldn't break $2, so Apple is obviously enjoying a $397 profit per unit.

Math check: Most of the mass of the Watch comes from the aluminum ($1.88/kg) case, silicon ($2.11/kg) and oxygen ($2.50/kg, cryogenic liquid) glass face, and ceramic (silicon and oxygen again) bezel. Every other element is irrelevant for this rough calculation simply because they are only present in extremely tiny quantities. You'd do even cheaper by sourcing silicon dioxide as a single chemical instead of high purity silicon and liquid oxygen separately.

Reductio ad absurdam? No, lets Reductio Ad Elementum instead.

Intel has ambitions to turn modems into virtual servers and reinvent broadband

DNTP

Re: no control

Don't worry, the legal, contractual, and technical measures preventing you from having any sort of administrative control over your servermodem don't shield you from the legal repercussions should outside forces compromise the device sitting in your home and use it for illegal acts.

Money-for-mods-gate: Valve gives masterclass in how to lose gamers and alienate people

DNTP

We won

Well, I'm only part of "we" if emailing Valve makes me included, but I feel like I helped. Anyway this was a stupid idea on many levels and I'm glad they shut it down.

If developers believe some mod content is worth monetizing, and mod developers are working at the professional quality level and want to get paid… hire the modders, or pay for the source and rights of their work!

I had the devil of a time getting Skyrim's SKSE kit to work- if I had paid money for it I'd feel justified about being angry, but I feel more tolerant about the product as a labor of love given back to the community.

MAYHEM in ORBIT: Russian cargo pod spins OUT OF CONTROL

DNTP

non-rotational spin

"Uhh… control? We… umm… have optically acquired SAT-1 but it's… I guess, spinning in a non-rotational manner? Over."

"Signals, please clarify the axes of spin, over."

"Control, SAT-1 appears to be spontaneously and continually inverting it's own structure around a point we conjecture to be the center of mass. We can see containers and parcels from the cargo bay ejecting in all directions, over."

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

DNTP

Re: Call in some theologians

If we assume an object described as "heavy" and "stone" has intrinsic mass-per-volume properties typical of the common material, then beyond a certain mass, the stone will start collapsing under its own gravitational force, thus increasing it's density. Since infinitely dense objects of limited size (singularities) are known to exist, and universe-sized objects of limited density are known to exist (the Universe), we must postulate that a stone large enough to approach the so-called "God Limit" of a literally omnipotent being must be both infinitely dense and infinitely large. Such an object would obviously dominate the gravitational reference frame of the known universe, and be incapable of movement without carrying the entire frame in total, thus from any point in the frame it would be unmovable. However, from God's point of view, God could still move that object.

The tie-in to the encryption story, of course, is that even a mythic stone of infinite density and volume can't compare to the density of some of these idiot politicians, and whenever they decide to move on a technological issue they drag everything else around them in stupid directions.

Acer introduces a REVOLUTION in tablet tech: The PENCIL

DNTP

Skilcraft pens- the Ultimate Stylus

The best common pen to double-duty as a stylus is the US Government standard Skilcraft, ballpoint, retractable. They have a rounded metal tip, brass cartridge, and metal fittings so they work on conductive screens, cost less than a dollar each even when bought commercially in individual boxes, look more professional than designer hipster styluses, and there's a whole bunch of in-jokes about these things from people who've been around a bit. And they generally work under extreme temperatures and weird surfaces as well as much more expensive Fisher space pen cartridges.

Close encounter: Apple Macs invade the business world

DNTP

Maybe not a 'typical' business

For my bioinformatics work I have a preference for OSX. I like the easy POSIX compliance which is a requirement for many of the open-source or community developed tools in the field, but it's mainsteam enough that there's OSX versions of general commercial software available. And ninety percent of my development work is basically scripting in bash and awk which is downright convenient and testable. Sure, all these needs could be met on a Windows or Linux box, but for my work OSX is a happy intersection.

China tackles vital strippers-at-funeral problem

DNTP

Are you nervous about being here?

Why, because it's old and full of dead things? Clearly you've never spent any time in Morrowind.

(Or anywhere else in Bethesda-land)

Got a Samsung Galaxy S5? Crooks can steal your fingerprint – claim

DNTP

Technically

you can only CHANGE a fingerprint 9 times since you expended one digit initially. Then ten toe prints and if you're a guy, you get a free extra change if you're willing to shove your phone down the front of your pants to unlock it.

Citrix – Sorry, we didn't realise job cuts would knacker results

DNTP

$28.8m, versus $55.9m last year

Management Exec: "Any job being done here by two people can be done instead by one person for half the money!"

Investors: "You didn't tell us that the 'money' in your proposal was the PROFITS, not the payroll expenditure!"

Exec: *WOOOOOOSH* *CA-CHING* (goldenparachutes to another job before SHTF)

Google guru: Android doesn't have malware, it has Potentially Harmful Applications™ instead

DNTP

I don't like to think of it as me stealing things, in the much better scenario I've been reverse-robbed. In that sense, am I not the victim and therefore entitled to justice and renumeration?

Neurobabble makes nonsense brain 'science' more believable

DNTP

Is it chart

Please! I'm not some green graduate student who can be suckered into believing any old study simply because it has a bar chart pasted next to the words.

You've gotta put ERROR BARS on it before I start blindly accepting your diagrams.

Mortgage data splashed all over the net. Thanks HSBC Finance

DNTP

Nonsense, we can't apply eye-for-an-eye principles here, since all the legal, financial, and insurance authorities are perfectly clear that the value of a CEO or director's refined, discriminating eye exceeds that of a common man's flaccid organ, used for nothing more than the study of infomercials and pornography of the basest order, by tremendous orders of magnitude.

Nuclear fusion simulator among boffinry tools picked for monster Summit supercomputer

DNTP

Re: "Models seismic wave propagation through"

EVERYTHING. All the things get the seismic simulation. That's how powerful this computer is, they are simply going to model every possible seismic scenario with every substance in existence and many that are only theoretical.

Troubleshooting feature on Cisco routers is open to data-slurp abuse

DNTP

Re: tips and icebergs

I just noticed that when I use my computer to delete a file on the server, it can't be accessed any more from ANY computer ANYWHERE, which is super good security.

Then all these people who work in offices near me start screaming things like "where is the inventory spreadsheet".

Verizon to world: STOP opening dodgy phishing emails, FOOLS

DNTP

Scrappers

RAM scrappers are the office workers who get a new computer, then salvage all the RAM out of the old one before sending it on to recycling. This is done without pointless trivialities such as static protection or not damaging the DIMM by yanking it too hard in the wrong direction, so it is a highly efficient process. The scrapped RAM is then recycled, frequently offered in a mating ritual designed to "impress" female co-workers with "technical" prowess by "making their hard disk faster" but is actually a memory install done in the same manner as the salvage but also performed without regard for speed or system spec.

Then you, at the support desk or in proper IT, get the call a day later about "it won't boot, it just sits there beeping".

Council of Europe: Don't spy on your staff, you naughty employers

DNTP

Re: Monitor this....

See, this works until one Saturday you're at a political rally, or a highly progressive nightclub, or taking your child to the zoo for his birthday when you've called in sick, and you've brought your phone with you (as required by management) and it's telling everyone in management where you are, or even covertly recording audio. And if even one senior manager has a problem with anything, he makes enough of a stink that suddenly you're out on your ass, blacklisted in your field, and it's employment-at-will so there's nothing to do. Of course it doesn't happen to YOU you but in one sense you're legitimizing a process that is highly open to abuse and coercion.

So how much is that worth? Give us a number. What do they have to pay you to be a shill for that kind of system?

Project Spartan: We get our claws on Microsoft's browser for Windows 10

DNTP

a FORK called TRIDENT

well played.

Verizon: FINE OK, you can now rid your life of our stalker supercookies

DNTP

I'll confirm this is true, my Verizon 4G service has dropped the header. However I should point out that they make it really, really easy to accidentally opt back into their ad tracking system by, for example, signing up for "rewards points" and not reading the fine print that says you're opting in.

Also it leaves me wondering what they are doing NOW, that we haven't detected yet, but if that's true they've probably been doing it all along.

Finally, customer support reps at the local Verizon store have no idea what a UIDH is, but are happy to tell you that Verizon takes customer privacy "seriously". Incompetence or conspiracy? YOU decide, after these targeted message.

Atmel stoops to an 'all-time low' in Internet of Things battle

DNTP

IoT detection alarm

And THIS device sounds an alarm if, and only if, someone invents an IoT device that's both innovative and practical. Otherwise, it sits dormant.

We expect the battery to last a decade or more.

Put those smartphones away: Google adds anti-copying measures to Drive for Work

DNTP

more secure than traditional systems

Well, you're correct that an ideal cloud setup would probably be more secure than slapdash wild west IT, where every man's got a USB drive in his boot and every woman can fire off an email attachment faster than Annie Oakley, but---

The people who actually have the knowledge, money, and desire to implement your ideal cloud, are the same people who have the knowledge, money, and desire to not handle their traditional IT setups with just a wheelgun and a whiskey. So all things being equal I'd take the option that doesn't let Google eat your data.

El Reg uncages its truly demonic BOFH t-shirt

DNTP

I'm afraid wearing a shirt like that might be inappropriate or obscene-by-default to people who don't understand the IT/BOFH angle because essentially it looks like an acronym and an arrow pointing to the dongular region.

Facebook sued: Data center designs 'nicked' for Open Compute

DNTP
Joke

BRG should have read the terms of service more carefully. After all, they say clearly that anything you put on the Facebooks becomes the property of FB, right?

PayPal settles over WMD sanction-breaking transaction claims

DNTP

Paypal standards:

Nonprofit fundraiser? Shut down, account frozen, interest stolen.

Seller victimized by repeat Ebay fraudster? Funds gone, no appeal.

WMD trafficker barred by the government? SURE, WHY NOT.

I helped Amazon.com find an XSS hole and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

DNTP

altruism

I don't consider "doing free technical work to save someone else's CORPORATION from FINANCIAL consequences" as altruism, you know.

Technological altruism is helping your neighbor with their dodgy connection or reporting a flaw in a medical device that could harm a PERSON. If a company wants help with their bottom line they better damn pay what it's worth.

Blockhead fugitive Snapchats himself into police custody

DNTP

Re: I can't stand burglars

Maybe that's where he stored the propane stove he stole, and then hid there on the rationale that "The cops never search the same place twice" because cops are lightning elementals apparently. Then he posted on snapchat because that was how they found him the first time and see the logic in Part 1 and to be fair he got one out of those two things correct.

Swedish city demands £40,000 to repair teenage hacking spree

DNTP

"Unfortunately we cannot respond to anonymous security tips due to concerns about the validity of such sources and the difficulty of arresting and prosecuting the providers of this information."

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