* Posts by quxinot

845 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2016

Five Eyes nations plus Japan, India call for Big Tech to bake backdoors into everything

quxinot

Re: Who decides who is trustworthy?

I just was thinking, if we want to stop the criminals and terrorists, we don't need to break encryption.

We just need to stop electing them.

First-world problems: The pumpkin spice latte is here, but the Starbucks loyalty card app has wiped my balance

quxinot

Re: Starbucks

Speaking as someone who likes coffee, I will categorically state that no good coffee has ever bitten me in the arse. Good coffees don't do that.

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

quxinot

Re: My head hurts

I don't understand why? It's very simple to understand.

"Originally, the brown envelopes went to the wrong people, and the government got upset. This has been rectified, and will now be business as usual."

We want weaponised urban drones flying through your house, says UK defence ministry as it waves a fistful of banknotes

quxinot

Re: ... but with Empire waistlines?

Okay, that's got us Brexit, race, and sex.

Someone mention Trump so that I can yell "Bingo!" and walk out.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

quxinot

Re: Sounds familiar

Anyone familiar with locksmithing will know that there's no such thing as an undefeatable padlock.

Anyone familiar with computing securty will know something very similar.

So the makers are either exceedingly cynical and marketing to those who know no different, or are going into business in an area in which they are terribly uninformed.

I AM ERROR: Tired of chewing up your RAM? Razer tells gamers where to stick its special gum for the RGB crowd

quxinot

Re: Stupid millennials

Have you not heard of beer?!

Desperately seeking regolith: NASA seeks proposals for collecting Moon dirt

quxinot

Re: Confused

Seriously goofy wording, there.

I mean, I'll bid on it if the delivery is on-site. Sure, I went there. I left you all the regolith in space, ready for delivery. I took the trouble of shaping it into a moon-like shape before I left, even.

How do I collect my fee?

What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore

quxinot

Singapore enjoys typhoons instead?

I have to express some concern though, 45m underwater tunnel is in my mental thesaurus as "giant pinch point in case of fire or flooding; see also: single point of failure during emergency evacuation". Which is hopefully more curmudgeonly than prophetic.

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

quxinot

12345

Just like on his luggage.

VMware staff in Silicon Valley can leave a pandemic, wildfire-ridden zone – if they're willing to accept less pay

quxinot

Cost of living adjustments by location are going to go both ways, of course.

DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers

quxinot

Re: Primadonna

>If they all want to be able to shout "Look Ma!!! I rolled my own [fill in here]! and be a primadonna for all of 15', that is certainly not going to happen.

Worked for Pottering, didn't it? "I fixed a problem that no one had!" ....and not just once.

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

quxinot

That's the BOFH limited edition. One keyboard-driven cattleprod.

Digital pregnancy testing sticks turn out to have very analogue internals when it comes to getting results

quxinot

Re: Low tech is too old tech

If you're genuinely concerned about the environmental impact of a small amount of plastic and electronics, then why are you making more children? Human overpopulation is the single largest environmental problem that exists.

Stop blaming plastic, stop blaming the automobile. They're fine, in moderation. Start blaming the people who cannot consider making people in moderation.

Help. The political process is corrupted, full of lies and state-sponsored deep fakes. Now Microsoft's to the rescue

quxinot

Re: Muppet politics - Stop it people

Give thanks for what you have! Brexit wasn't mentioned once!

Until I... shit. Nevermind.

'A guy in a jetpack' seen flying at 3,000ft within few hundred yards of passenger jet landing at LA airport

quxinot

Mental image of a drone delivering a single, bloody arm.

Thanks for that.

(Also a joke about the "real cut-rate!" tickets, but we'll let that one go.)

Someone's getting a free trip to the US – well, not quite free. Brit bloke extradited to face $2m+ cyber-scam charges

quxinot

Re: Crime doesn't pay?

Just depends on the thieving.

Wear a suit to work. Be a politician. Be a banker. Handle or control large amounts of other people's money. Somehow this is vastly more respectable and certainly seems to fill one's own pockets.

Infosys to hire 12,000 more Americans – especially the cheapest ones it can find

quxinot

The sad and quite scary part is that while low-quality code is fine for some things (your chess app crashes sometimes, darn), it's not okay when we're talking about building infrastructure--nevermind security, another entire can of worms.

Pay to do it right, or pay to do it twice. There will always be jobs for those to go through and clean up the wreckage. The question to me is where the balance will lie, somewhere between total trash and overbuilt to a needless extent--e.g., where is the good enough line drawn for a given task or product.

Highways England primes market for £2bn tech spend as part of massive investment in crumbling roads network

quxinot

Re: How about.......

I suspect they could fill potholes in with said money, and accomplish more than they're planning on doing.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

quxinot

Re: Flashback

> Really enjoyed dialing up the horsepower and other vehicle parameters in the game data files of Midtown, leading to such fun as accidentally driving up the sides of buildings and other glitches. :) ...

"Accidentally"?

Oh come off it. :) If memory serves, similar tricks could be played on Motorcross Madness, to hilarious effect.

The best 'adjustment' of game parameters that I ever was party to was a very old game called Deathtrack. If you had missiles or other expendable weaponry, it was quite easy to always have them completely 'restocked' for each track--they were quite expensive. But the better trick was to set them to negative quantities, as the game would subtract 1 from your total each time you fired.... and they never hit zero, so they never ran out. Good times, good times.

Alright! Who's stoked for Windows 10 20H2? Anyone? Well, it's ready for commercial pre-release validation anyway

quxinot

Re: Time for another 6 hours of lost computer time

Not true, Bob. Good updates are wonderful things that increase security, speed, and usability.

I'm not sure how long it's been since I saw one for Windows, though... And not to single MS out, as they are very decidedly not alone in stringing together "updates" that give no improvement to those metrics. At this point, when something updates I'm usually pleased if it doesn't break things too badly.

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

quxinot

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

>Just don't round out the screws by using the wrong size screw driver.

That's very hard on the driver tips.

Just use a drill to create a threaded rivet.

Microsoft is not the enemy, why Google still runs 'Borg', and other insights from Kubernetes founders

quxinot

Re: Microsoft IS the enemy.

*Sponsored by Microsoft.

I hope Mr. Hockin enjoys his newfound wealth.

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

quxinot
Pint

Re: Which is why

I assume the FIRST DNS target is your pi-hole, of course!

So very worth it. Doesn't need to be a pi, either--just create a pretty spartan VM on any appropriate machine and use that as a local DNS. Shocking how much bandwidth is actually saved this way.

(Also saved: Patience with irritanting ads--and at the local network level, so it automatically gets the phone, tablet, etc, as well.)

I detest searching from the address bar. If I wanted to search, I'd search. If I typo, give me a 404 instead of loading some useless and slow-loading nonesensical search screen.

quxinot

Easy fix.

Use a better browser. :D

50%+ of our office seats are going remote, say majority of surveyed Register readers. Hi security, bye on-prem

quxinot

Re: Loss of human contact

I would make the argument that many of the younger generation may consider chatting online or video or whatever to count as interpersonal interaction. They've grown up talking to their friends this way, and it's normal for them.

There are most certainly folks that online interaction does NOT work for, of course--but I suspect those folks are also missing the fact that there's other viewpoints on the situation.

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

quxinot

Re: Inappropriate garb? Me? Probably daily ...

Yes, there should be a return spring. The push/pull setup is in case of binding or a broken spring, as a safety feature. You can also carry screw-together repair kits to replace a broken cable end, but this has a primary function of ensuring that the cable breaks at some other point instead.

Personally, the killswitch is right there, so I've never been too concerned getting stuck with the gas on inappropriately.

quxinot

Re: Inappropriate garb? Me? Probably daily ...

To swap cables (assuming you have a push/pull throttle, not just a single cable type), you just swap the ends at the carb/TB end. That gives you a working, albeit backwards, throttle (roll forwards for more vroom). If you've got a few extra minutes, pop the switch assembly apart (or the throttle assembly, depending on what you're riding--basically, the part that holds the large portion of the throttle tube) and swap there as well. Now you have a normal throttle, but without a return cable.

If you have real foresight, you can just tie a spare cable next to the current one. That way the routing is already done and it's very quick to recover from a broken cable. It's more commonly done on the clutch side for those unlucky enough to not have a hydraulic clutch, but on long trips into the unknown where parts scarcity may become an issue, it's not a bad idea at all.

Some bikes (FJ11,1200's for example) actually have four throttle cables: there's a connector in the middle of both the pull and push sides. This can make getting replacements a hassle, but means you can swap the ends at the connection rather than at both ends. And with luck, you broke the handlebar end, as the airbox on those things is a bastard to get around to access the carb end.

India awards apps that offer citizens Microsoft and Google alternatives

quxinot

Re: Is there going to be a new term..

Are we really so daft to assume that Trump was the first person to demonstrate that strategy?

Dutch Gateway store was kept udder wraps for centuries until refit dug up computing history

quxinot
Coat

Great, another useful discussion being steer'd to puns.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

quxinot

When I was a young schoolchild, I thought I knew more than the teachers.

This just confirms that I was correct!!--not that the following umpteen years didn't also reinforce that beilef, but there you have it...

I remember being pulled out of class when I was perhaps 11ish to fix something on the computers in the library as another class was trying to get them to do something without success. A mix of Apple IIe and IIc's springs to mind, but it was a long, long time ago!

quxinot
Pint

Re: Cola and orange juice

The true danger in computers is not bloody cola being spilled of the keyboard.

It's beer being spilled into the person typing on it. Calamity and hilarity in equal measures! :D

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

quxinot

Re: Amazon.

Rather than showing me adverts for stuff that I'm quite probably not interested in, and spending a bunch of money on researching the best way to advertise...

...give me a decently working search function when I'm shopping, and I'll buy something, instead?

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

quxinot

>I remember using tools years ago to make a custom XP install disk, that had SP1 and SP2 slipstreamed in, several extra drivers (RAID etc), some extra bits of software I always had installed, was locked to UK region and London time zone, and had a fixed name account, so was basically an unattended install.

Nlite I'd imagine is the software you used to do so. And yes, super useful to make custom XP installs that didn't require a crapload of tweaking after the fact.

There was a vista version as well, which....well, I had dramatically worse luck with it.

Google allowed to remember search results to news articles it was asked to forget. Good

quxinot
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Why I love the Right to be Forgotten

Many of us did a large number of stupid things as young people.

Fortunately, digital cameras did not exist in an affordable, ubiquitous form at that time.

Also, I hate you for reminding me that I no longer qualify as a "young person". My shoulders and back remind me of that fact far too often as it is already!

An axe age, a sword age, Privacy Shield is riven, but what might that mean for European businesses?

quxinot

Re: The point of the EU

>The fundamental problem is that the EU wants privacy for its citizens, and the USA doesn't.

The USA wants privacy for its own citizens.

Those citizens have been outbid by the usual suspects.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

quxinot

I wanted desperately to mock this thing.

But that's so cheap that I'm really impressed. Looks like great value for money to me, might be worth having just as a spare.

Ew, that's unsanitary: SEO plugin for WordPress would run arbitrary JavaScript inputs instead of scrubbing them

quxinot

Re: I must admit

Wordpress isn't a winner at all.

But people that try to game the system with SEO? Time to point and laugh!

Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts

quxinot

Re: Cans of Compressed Air, how quaint!

It's easy to have a solid blast of compressed air.

Leave it in the can.

Nvidia watches Brit upstart Graphcore swing into rear-view mirror waving beastly second-gen AI chip hardware

quxinot

>....influencing students who will turn into professionals and be more comfortable going with what they know.

At which point the students (now employees!) will request the current generation of the NVidia hardware. And if the Graphcore stuff is even remotely cheaper in any way, the beancounters will ensure that they get that instead.

Otherwise yes, they have an excellent idea for marketing their products to a whole generation of developers. But beancounters will count beans, and screw everything up. Per usual.

Google gives Gmail's collab chops a good buffing to make it the 'home for work' while we're working from home

quxinot

Gmail isn't the worst email solution out there.

Having all the crap shoved into it just slows it down and makes it worse, and they've been doing that pretty consistently for a long time. Not unlike when they tried to add google plus to every single service they had.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

quxinot

Targetted?

Every ad shown. Period.

UN warns of global e-waste wave as amount of gadgets dumped jumps 21% in 5 years

quxinot

Re: You want to sort

Actually we're getting there. John Deere has made their equipment unrepairable to the best of their ability. It isn't that the owner is unable to fix things, the owner is not allowed to get the specialized tools, parts diagram(s), nor the interface to reprogram the ECU on their equipment.

I'd be shopping for pretty much anything else, nyself. And if my next car is this locked down, it will be getting an aftermarket ECU right away.

Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release

quxinot

Re: Upgrading?

Which I'm running. It's excellent, and lacks the change for change's sake that seems such the fashion in some flavors.

Hey is trying a new take on email – but maker complains of 'outrageous' demands after Apple rejects iOS app

quxinot

If "imbox" is 'innovation', then please keep it away from me.

And wash your hands.

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

quxinot

Re: Free parking for electric cars

>Iam a yank and wish we had a universal health system.

Because Medicare works so well.

Or Medicaid.

Or the VA.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

quxinot

Re: No appliance in my house

^ There's a crass joke about the wife there, waiting to be made.

California emits fine-print of its GDPR-ish digital privacy law, complete with Google and Facebook-sized holes

quxinot

It's worse than that. This sets a precedent for weak laws to be accepted on this subject, where the corporations are favored much more heavily than the citizens. So good luck upgrading to something with a bit of teeth to protect the citizen's rights.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

quxinot

Re: Load?

If you used the heating of a lake and the driving of a fan as your load, you would effectively create little but hot air.

Therefore, you will have created a hot air generator.

And we have enough politicians. Thanks, but no thanks.

Now we know what the P really stands for in PwC: X-rated ads plastered over derelict corner of accountants' website

quxinot

And this, right here, is why adblock is an absolute requirement for any internet-displaying device.

Advertisers say that they've cleaned their act up.... but if it's not every last one, with no bad actors, then they all get painted with the same brush--and for good reason.

Prank warning: You do know your smart speaker's paired with Spotify over the internet, don't you?

quxinot

Re: IoV

I'll cast my vote to the Chinese and Russians, given those choices.