Posts by israel_hands 216 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2016
Like the one on the front page of this very organ?
I've had to use the element zapper in uBlock to kill the bloody thing. Very poor from El Reg here, it's not as if you're unaware of how much people in general (and Reg readers in particular) despise those things.
It's not often I'll slate this site, but things like that just work to make the world a shitter place.
The same shit as always.
The cunts at the top are opportunists who've rigged the game entirely for themselves.
They're not Bond villains, or Machiavellian cabals.
The truth is much more tawdry, depressing and, ultimately, human.
They're Dominic Cummings sat in stained y-fronts and a charity-shop cagoul fiddling with fantastically named spreadsheets full of nonsensical bullshit, mouse-finger clicking incessantly as he mutters to himself, while the mutant biker gangs clamour at the windows and the aides and advisors start throwing nervous glances at each other.
I don't trust companies like this with any of my public data, let alone telling the cunts actual secrets. What sort of moron would do that?
Also, in the interests of this distinguished organ keeping pace with the bleeding edge techbros, could the El Reg Standards Bureau settle on its own sexual predator scale?
Might I suggest rating it in Weinsteins?
Of course, the Dark Forest theory suggests that any civilisation which does broadcast its existence will be quickly annihilated by another, more advanced, civilisation on the off-chance they prove to be dangerous or rivals for limited resources in future. So maybe everyone is staying quiet for a very good reason...
By doing what you're told, peasants.
Fucking cockwombles.
Just seen the "Editor-at-large"* of TechCrunch on the Beeb essentially parroting a lot of Yellow Peril bullshit he's been fed. Pity they couldn't get someone from El Reg on board to actually cut through the smoke and mirrors and point out that this is just another front in Trump's ongoing effort to demonstrate how little he understands about trade (or anything else for that matter). He's already admitted this has fuck all to do with security when he suggested letting Huawei back in if China gives him the trade deal he wants.
*Judging by his appearance I think they gave him that title because of his fondness for Wigan kebabs.
But Trump doesn't put his country's interests first. He puts his own interests prejudices first and then cloaks it in bullshit nationalism and dog-whistle politics.
Just another rich cunt kicking peasants in the face while they cheer him on because it's easier to believe his lies that it's all somebody elses fault than it is to face up to the reality that shit is complicated and can't be resolved by chanting USA! USA! USA! at a problem until it goes away.
More important than the data breach itself, what the fuck is the poor girl in the header image smoking? Why the fuck do yanks insist on smoking their greenery in those brown skins? Are they liquirice flavoured or has someone dropped it in a mug of coffee and then left it drying on the radiator? And don't get me started on those vile flavoured blunt things that are more like a slighlty moist camping mat than a proper Vera.
The only reason to roll anything in a flavoured skin is if the stuff you've been sold tastes like flaming dog shit when you spark up. And if it does, then you need to sort out your supply chain, not attempt to mitigate the taste by wrapping it in a bubblegum flavoured rattan mat. Fucking Philistines.
Have the yanks yet to be introduced to the gold standard of rolling materials, the silver Rizla?
...Stay for the digs at Orlowski.
The article puts the entire case very succinctly, regardless of how much Oracle are determined to extract money from Google, copywriting APIs will benefit absolutely nobody, even Oracle themselves. It would be like way back when before electrical plugs were standardised and each town would have different wall sockets depending on who supplied their electricity. Except worse, in that you couldn't just buy a device and change the plug to match what your home was equipped with.
Orlowski's issue was never with the case at hand though, it was just another way for him to grind his axe against Google. While I intensely dislike Google and their business methods, I'm able to see beyond my personal feelings to judge each individual matter on its own merits.
I sometimes think of trolling Orlowski by sending him a picture of Stephen Fry googling his own entry on Wikipedia.
This story gets murkier with every step. So, Bezos keeps annoying Trump by inconsiderately printing the truth and calling the big orange retard out on his lies. Consequently Trump's mate who runs a shitty little scandal mag starts targetting Bezos, who hits back by getting his security guy to start investigating. Bezos then gets a blackmail attempt from said shitty publisher threating to expose his dick pics unless Bezos specifically states that there was no forgeign involvement in hacking his devices.
Bezos calls their bluff, publishes his own dick pics and tells them to go fuck themselves. His security guy probably takes note of the specific terms of the blackmail agreement and starts focusing his efforts on uncovering evidence of foreign hacking of Bezos' devices. Subsequently he uncovers links from the head of a foreign government who, for a time, was quite friendly with Bezos but is even more friendly with Trump.
Skeptics will immediately wonder why the fuck the Saudi's would be interested in getting involved in this. The obvious answer being that not only was Bezos printing things about Trump but one of the columnists working for the same paper was continually slating the Saudi regime.
Interestingly, Khashoggi wasn't clipped until after the Bezos hack. I wonder if the Saudi intelligence service extracted more than just dick pics and got some juicy info about what Khashoggi was going to do next and this prompted the badly-planned embassy hit?
“We use natural language processing models to look for words like 'buy,' 'sell,' 'discount,' or if there is a phone number or hyperlink included,"
AI involvement why? Don't see anything there that can't be accomplished by running some basic RegEx against the posts, with regular updates to the dictionary to take into account new terms being used.
Or is it just that governments are unlikely to spunk millions on a basic search function unless it's packaged in the emporer's current latest non-photon blocking fashion?
Maybe if they could have crowbarred blockchain in they'd have even more funding.
Not that I'm a particular fan of Amazon or Bozo, but the only gaming of the system here appears to be from Trump.
When they first announced they were looking for a single vendor AWS were far and away the obvious choice, just because they're better at the clouds than Microsoft. The waters then got muddied when Trump and one of his moronic spawn started spouting off about it because the Washington Post keeps winding them up by printing true things about what a pack of cockwombles they are.
Not sure how you think AWS/Bozo "gamed the system", unless you consider them to have unfairly and despicably rigged the entire process by producing a better offering than MS and then, like the underhanded bastards they are, offering to let people use it.
"So you're saying that the SIM can have an effect on the phone's 5G performance ?"
No, I'm saying the handset has an effect on the network performance, so trying 2 SIMs in different handsets means you can't tell whether it's the network that's better or the phone's 5G capabilities.
If they'd used the same handset with both SIMs then they could be reasonably sure it's the network they're measuring as that's the only variable they've changed.
@Ben Tasker
How do they not let you off the bus? There's a button directly above the doors to open them, so even if the driver is being a dick you just hit the button and step off. There's nothing they can do about it. Generally they're only worried that you'll get off and step into moving traffic or get hit by a cyclist or something. Just assure them that you're not an imbecile and they should let you off. I've only had 1 guy ever refuse, so I just opened the doors and got off while he sat in his little plastic cubby and fumed in silence.
I do agree First run a shit, overpriced service though. I'm assuming that they use the same app across all their fleets, so this trick should work for anyone forced to endure their "service". May have to test it out next week.
I've had my eye on RGO for a while now (just waiting for it to come out on Switch). Does look very good, as the article said, a bit of a Firefly feel to it (also reminds me of a small-print tabletop RPG from about a decade ago called Star Thugs).
Much better than the pyramid scheme that is Star Shitizen. I also didn't realise the new Elite was so sparsely populated. I thought part of the reason for forcing it to be always-online was that players would interact (although partly it's apparently the size of the client required to run the universe in the background). The always online bit was enough to put me off though.
Other awesome space sims are the X series (X3 with plety of mods is incredible but you really do need to devote a lot of time to getting good at it and building up your little space fleet).
Colony Wars on the original Playstation was very good, proper Newtonian flight physics and some cool battles. The original X-Wing is really the daddy of them all, such an amazing game. I loved having the ability to divert power between engines, weapons and shields, depending on the situation (I fondly remembering retreating from missions in a damaged ship, shoving all the power to the engines and focusing deflector shields to the rear).
Eve isn't a flight sim, in the same way that World of Warcraft isn't an action combat game. You click to attack then watch your ship orbit the enemy and occasionally you get to activate a special attack.
Everspace looks good, although I've heard it's a bit dull after a while (which is always a risk with procedurally generated content).
Subdivision Infinity DX has just come out on Switch and looks quite good, also has the stupidest name for a space sim ever. Sounds like some sort of dance game.
Starlink was almost an amazing game. Really fun to play but the toys-to-life bullshit killed it completely. Not much in-game progression because that was all locked behind a paywall. Buy the toys to unlock new ships, weapons and pilots. It's annoying because the game is well made and loads of fun. I bought the starter pack on Switch in the bargain bin for £20 (launch price was £60), got myself a cool Arwing model, and then bought some other ships from the bargain bin. Even having got it very cheap, the game just didn't work as well as it would have done if it followed the usual format of letting you unlock ships and weapons as you go along.
Oh, and for the author of the article, the Double Damage FAQ suggests you can turn off all the aim-assist nonsense, if you feel like taking the stabilisers wheels off and flying like a grown-up. ;)
Indeed. Makes for better headlines if they can inflate it by several orders of magnitude by working out the most you could get by stepping on it so hard you'd end up with something about as lively as a sherbet dip.
No-one selling it wholesale will end up with that amount in their pocket.
Either that or the cops are as shit at buying drugs as they are everything else. I know if I was selling something to undercover filth I'd overcharge the pricks too.
Yarp.
Our organisation is boned, no e-mail availability across the board, even via OWA. What's really daft is that my Outlook client runs in cached exchange mode and stores everything offline just in case of something like this but it's now crapping out whenever I try to load it so I can't even look at e-mails stored locally because the bloody thing can't connect to the server.
You're somewhat behind the times. In the UK men get 2 weeks paid paternity leave and both parents can then split the 12 months parental leave between them however they wish.
So it is entirely equal these days.
Source: I'm about to take 6 weeks parental leave with my son when the missus goes back to work. And I already had 2 weeks paternity leave when he was born.
Though the use of the clever recognition technology for home safety – listening for burglars or a baby's sounds – is one thing, the commercialisation of ambient sounds may encounter some resistance.
As everyone knows burglars emit a low-frequency hum when on the rob...
This sounds like exactly the sort of thing the a typical marketing department would love to invest in. Primarily because they're too thick to understand what a bullshit concept it is.
Then again, I suppose an adult entertainment company could get them to map all the sounds associated with having one off the wrist and start pinging tissue adverts at the hapless onanist.
Then they could map the sound of a disrupted vinegar stroke and suggest some higher quality porn. This thing pretty much sells itself.
Nail . Head . Best comment.
Only if you're a tool. Let me use your own example to make it clear what's happening and why it's wrong.
If a woman has an interest in mechanical engineering and such she may well then be a Scrapheap Challenge viewer. If so then she'll see the Royal Navy ad and might be interested in joining up.
The issue here is that Facebook are removing her ability to see the ad, no matter what her personal interests are, simply because she possesses a vagina. That's fucking stupid.
The equivalent would be that during the ad break in Scrapheap Challenge her TV detected the fact she is of the vagina'd half of the population and replaced the Navy ad with one for makeup or shoes or something vagina-bearers are supposed to be interested in.
Associating ads with things that people are likely to be interested in isn't a problem. It's when you remove someone's choice for following their up their interest based on something as daft and arbitrary as which set of genitalia they possess.
Everyone knows Tuc is a cheesy biscuit, and massively inferior to the glory that is the Ritz biscuit and its smaller but tastier cousin, the Mini Ritz.
OT: We have to retain e-mails, internet connection records, phone logs, everything at work. That's due to compliance and it's perfectly acceptable. We don't monitor keystrokes and our firewall only blocks P2P connections and child porn and that's because that's a requirement from our ISP. Anything else is allowed through (and where I work there are some users with legitimate requirements to view porn, the lucky bastards).
What we don't do is expose any of our records to anyone unless there's a) a very good reason and b) written authorisation from both the Director of ICT and the Director of the employee's department. And even then our Security & Standards Manager is able to refuse anything he disagrees with.
We do get the odd manager (aren't they all odd?) asking for web history or e-mail access for one of their staff. They get short shrift. My favourite response to one request (manager was concerned employee was spending too much time browsing the internet) was "This isn't an IT issue. Manage your staff better. If they're getting the job done who gives a shit how much time they spend online?"
With regards to monitoring staff outside of work, I'd kick off massively if I discovered that happening. One manager admitted he checks people's Facebook profiles before interviews and won't hire them if he see's anything he doesn't like. He also stated that if they don't have a Facebook profile he doesn't trust them because "What have they got to hide?"
My response was "Everything. Or rather, I've got nothing about my personal life I want to expose to any twat with a net connection." I've never had any form of social tedia profile and he'd hired me 2 weeks before that so I knew he was full of shit.
OK, I'll bite.
1) They'll do that anyway. Net Neutrality isn't about the government "taking over the internet", it's about stopping large companies abusing their position. Which is exactly what the government should be doing, rather than letting those that are powerless to stop it getting rolled over.
2) De-regulation doesn't work because it takes all the brakes off industry doing whatever the fuck they like to milk customers.
3) ISPs set their own prices, there's no cap on how much they can charge. Further, the ISPs operate as an effective cartel and have carved the map up into separate areas to ensure they don't compete with other too much. That's the opposite of what a free-market economy should promote, but is often the result of it because people like you swallow the corporate bullshit.
4) Net Neutrality categorically isn't about mediocrity of service. It's about providing a level playing field to all content producers. The alternative is that the ISPs impose a speed tax on websites meaning only the larger, established companies can afford to pay. This cements existing market dominance and provides an additional hurdle to new companies as they can't afford to pay for higher delivery speeds and so are perceived to provide a worse service. All you're arguing for is a tax on the likes of Google, Facebook and Netflix that they won't notice but will raise an effective barrier against any who seeks to challenge their position. That's never going to be a win for customers.
The rest of your post is just nonsense from start to finish. Trump's current obsession with tariffs is currently fucking things up across the world, not making things better. Get your head of the right-wing bubble and try looking at facts instead of just repeating what you hear. Fuck's sake man, jut provide evidence you've actually considered this on an intellectual level and analysed the situation instead of spouting off the same nonsensical crap time and time again. You're so partisan it's ridiculous. IF you make your mind up before hearing the facts, and base your opinion solely on whoever is talking then you're a fucking idiot.
Oh, and don't quote Rush fucking Limbaugh as a source of information. That prick wouldn't know the truth if it married his sister. Provide some evidence that download speeds have doubled, at no extra cost to consumers and with no investment in infrastructure. Without evidence it's just more partisan whining.
theft of physical things happens a lot, but stealing a locked phone doesn't get you access to the phone number.
Yes it does. You take the SIM out and swap it into a phone you can unlock. That's just a low-tech version of the same attack detailed in the article.
I agree though that SMS is not a secure form of 2FA. Too easy to compromise, whether through social-engineering, theft or SS7 attacks.
Sort of. I think a better analogy would be the car industry where there are only 3 or 4 basic chassis types that everyone uses but then the body-kit, interiors, and optional extra are bundled on type by each manufacturer to produce their own specific models.
Even that's a bit of a tortured analogy, to be honest.
I think the basic idea is you find a distro you like because of the desktop/packages/icons/random subsystem/whatever and then you take flaming pitchforks to anyone who uses a different distro.
Mine's Mint. Death to heretics.
It's pretty standard, to be honest. Ubuntu itself is based on Debian. Zorin is based on Ubuntu, as is Mint and a hell of a lot of other distros out there.
They use the same basis but maintain their own software repos and often bundle different file browsers, desktops and other standard software packages with them.
I suppose the advantage is you've got a fairly stable codebase (Debian/Ubuntu) but then as a use you can pick which flavour suits you best, rather than having to take stock Ubuntu and then doing all the work of swapping packages in and out for your own preferred versions.
I think most distros out there originate as forks from Debian or Red Hat, with some notable exceptions such as Slackware and Arch Linux.
The Beeb did a series back in the 90's called Weird Nature. Cracking little show and one episode was all about animals getting ripped to the tits on various psychoactive substances.
It included bees getting sloshed on pilfered pints and then showed the drunk bastards bouncing off their own hive when they flew home. The club bouncers at the entrance to the hive would refuse entry to any bee who was too hammered to do the dance properly.
Same episode featured drunk monkeys nicking pitchers of grog, hedgehogs huffing creosote and a jaguar stoned out of its gourd after eating something herbal.
The IP would be one of the assets the administrators would want to realise cash on.
But they've just been stripped of the IP by Sky, so there's nothing to realise.
It was a stupid idea from the start anyway. Nowhere near enough buttons for probably the majority of games, there are Speccy emulators out in the wild already and it probably would have been cheaper to get a custom case 3D-printed for a Raspberry Pi and bolt a screen onto the front of it.
I don't understand some of the things people invest in on those crowdfunding sites. I've seen so many completely boneheaded ideas that will obviously never work from even a cursory glance and yet people throw money at them. I can understand chucking a small amount of cash at something you hope gets made, but I've seen so many fully-funded campaigns flounder, followed by the inevitable radio silence from the producers, empty anger from the backers and complete and utter fucking apathy from the thieving bastards running the sites.
So much of this doesn't make sense. How did they locate the copy of the stolen data? And how can they be sure that was the only copy of it?
If it was an inside job and the data was exfiltrated to a single machine that was subsequently seized during a police raid then it would maybe make sense. Possibly. But even then you couldn't be sure it hadn't been uploaded to a hosting service or distributed to others.
And what's the point of taking out an injunction against the hackers? Their initial action was illegal, so I don't think they're going to be phased by a civil action against them. That's like taking out an injunction to stop someone committing murder.
Also, don't you need to name the respondent in an injunction? If they knew who they were taking an injunction out against then why would they not just let the criminal case proceed?
So much iffy info released by the company.
Or maybe they just don't have a fucking clue how computers or criminals operate.
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