* Posts by frank ly

6077 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Ground control to 2014: A year in Space

frank ly
Happy

Re: First time ever? I think not.

You forgot to point out that "out in the depths of the cosmos" is not an accurate description of an object that is well within our solar system.

Universal Pictures told off for scaring kids with nasty vid

frank ly

Re: targeting children....

If I remember correctly, YouTube asks you to sign-in if you're about to see a video clip that is intended for a 'mature' audience. They can determine this by the clip being reported and then moderated by them, or by the author of the clip doing a self-classification. So surely it was up to Universal Pictures to correctly classify their advert?

Stale pizza, backup BlackBerrys, payroll panic: Sony Pictures mega-hack

frank ly

Re: 75% of servers were destroyed

We'll see the dramatic reconstruction when Sony get around to making a movie about it.

"Sony Pictures was starring in its own disaster movie ..."

I wonder how many of the original company executives will still be around when it's released.

UK banks prepare for Apple Pay 'invasion', look to slap on bonking protection

frank ly

Points

1) "... banks concerns over privacy ..."

2) "... a beachhead for an invasion of the banking industry ..."

Point 1 is not the customer's privacy that the banks are concerned with. It's the details of the ways in which customers tend to interact with the banks. The banks regard this as their private information. It's point 2 that the banks are worried about.

*HIC*... tweet: Sloshed birdsh shlur songs, boffins say

frank ly

Correct experimental protocol

Did the researchers send a tweet the next morning to find out if the finches were alright?

El Reg's festive dating app guide, Pt. 2: The FEMALE perspective

frank ly
Pint

A Pint

For the Feat.Ed's Chew-Z comment.

Norks blame U.S. for TITSUP internet, unleash racist rant against Obama

frank ly

Re: Explain!

When I was a little kid, my grandad (and dad, mum, etc) would call me a 'little monkey' when I did something naughty or disruptive. I'm sure they intended no racial slur.

Judge kills Facebook's bid to dismiss private message sniffing case

frank ly

Similarities

Isn't this similar to the way in which Google automatically scans your Google Mail messages and shows you adverts (if you don't have AdBlock) triggered by keywords in your email? Their argument was that it is all done by computer and no record is kept that associates your email account with the keywords, which sounds reasonable if it's really true (and not 'corporately true').

Mysterious STAR set to appear on Christmas Eve above Blighty: The ISS

frank ly

Re: Orientals?

Oriental: referring to the eastern part of the world. (cf. occidental: the western part of the world). Wealthy oriental visitors: a reference to the three magi who came from the east bearing gifts for Jesus. Christmas: the time when the birth of Jesus is celebrated. It all fits.

Privacy-loving boxing kangaroo biffs drone out of the sky

frank ly

FOTM!

Fall of the machines. Wonderful to watch too.

CLOUD-to-CLOUD backup: A chasm-Spanning leap

frank ly

Re: I don't get it. ???

My Dropbox folder is a subfolder inside my synchronised Google Drive folder. That seems to work nicely for me but I doubt if it's an 'enterprise class' arrangement.

Solar-powered bra maker suffers 20,000 TITSUPs all at once

frank ly

Previous developments

This area of development has always been problematic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEfQFD0NMJQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv_8SqM4upo

NUKE HACK fears prompt S Korea cyber-war exercise

frank ly

I would hope ...

... that a nuclear reactor wouldn't have any connection to the internet and any required data link to a separate control/monitoring facility was made using a truly physically private network. I've spent my entire life living in hope and have often been disappointed.

YEAR of the PENGUIN: A Linux mobile in 2015?

frank ly

@AndyS Re: Very pleased with Linux

I've got a collection of very nice empty cardboard boxes in my garage and lots of wood offcuts. I _know_ they'll be useful one day.

You have a 'simple question'? Well, the answer is NO

frank ly

Re: A helping hand

As the 'local expert', once you've touched a computer, you are then responsible for all its actions or lack of actions from that point on.

Good advice from an ex-neighbour of mine: Never let anyone on the local Neighbourhood Watch or Church Committee, etc. know that you have a computer and a colour laser printer.

Google sues Mississippi Attorney General 'for doing MPAA's dirty work'

frank ly

Good point about stolen documents being allowed as evidence. If the truth is illegally copied, is it still the truth?

Staples comes clean: 1+ million bank cards at risk after hack

frank ly

Who will be next ?

I'm just glad that I stopped using my credit card for shopping/petrol about three years ago.

Feds finger Norks in Sony hack, Obama asks: HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA?

frank ly

"any sensible government ... would have ..."

I see your comprehension gap.

The Shock of the New: The Register redesign update 4

frank ly

The masthead is depressing

I don't like Christmas. I'm patient; I'll wait.

Hackney council leaked thousands of locals' data in FoI blunder

frank ly

I think they do that to enable checks on discrimination to be carried out, by themselves and other organisations. I thought that a similar thing was done for ethniciity so that checks could be run to ensure that the tenants represented a realistic mix of the local population, with no discrimination against particular groups of people.

Having said that, how do they know that the tenants answered the sexuality question truthfully?

Edit: Perhaps they could test them ..........

Apple v BBC: Fruity firm hits back over Panorama drama

frank ly

Re: Get it right!

The use of 'refute' to _apparently_ mean 'deny' is (it seems to me) a recent change in language that has been popularised by politicians, who have been loudly 'refuting' accusations for many years. They do this so that if the accusations are proved to be true then they can always say, truthfully, that they never denied it. People have been too lazy to look the word up to establish its meaning and so this incorrect use propogates. Politicians may not be smart, but they're smarter than the average person and they're full of feral cunning.

(A similar thing happened with the word 'obviate', where people said things like, " this new gadget obviates the need to .....". If you know what the word 'obviate' means, then you'll realise what is wrong with that.)

Google swears no search leg up for new dot-word sites: We drill into claims

frank ly
Facepalm

Reshare this (again)

If you're looking for a whatsit shop in Berlin, it's not surprising if whatsits.berlin and thingies.berlin appear high in the search rankings.

ICANN HACKED: Intruders poke around global DNS innards

frank ly

@Khaptain Re: Come on - TheReg should know better

I notice that you are happy to use the word 'colts' in your comment, even though it is highly offensive to some people.

NASA asks world+dog to name Mercury's craters (back off, 4chan)

frank ly

A large crater should be named 'Hermes'.

Sony hackers dump more hunks of stolen data, promise another 'Christmas gift'

frank ly

"... put Sony Pictures into the worst state."

Would North Korea accept Sony setting up an office there?

Pirate Bay admins 'couldn't care less' about police raid

frank ly

"... the original, authentic site ..."

How do you define " the original, authentic site"?

Cool Large Hadron Collider to fire into doubly powerful ring

frank ly
Happy

That's a relative temperature of course. At the new higher energies, nothing is certain.

Hold the front page: Spain's anti-Google lobbyists lobby for Google News return

frank ly

Re: oops

If Axel Springer asked me to do something for their benefit, I'd start a discussion about how much they'd pay me.

REVEALED: Titsup flight plan mainframe borks UK air traffic control

frank ly

@martin burns Re: Failure rates

Have you ever tried useful/helpful explanations? I know they can be difficult and need some thought but ..... oh.

frank ly

Failure rates

"... the machine had never had a hardware failure before so software was more likely."

Is that actually a reasonable assumption? If a machine has never had a hardware failure, then doesn't the probablility of failure increase as time goes by?

Batten down the patches: New vuln found in Docker container tech

frank ly

Pre-flight checks

Maybe they should run it past Tõnis Tiigi before they go public. He seems to be good at this.

Aged star could give us clues to HOT TEEN's behaviour

frank ly
Happy

Re: How big is a Large Millimetre?

It's the array that's large Their millimeters are standard size.

What future is there for UK's Care.data info sharing scheme?

frank ly

Re: The stupid thing was

"... a legislative guarantee that this data will not be sold on to third parties ... "

The entire point was to make the data available to third parties, at a price. Drug companies and insurance companies were salivating at the prospect of getting their hands on the data. After that, it would have passed on to suppliers of incontinence pads, etc.

Euro consumers have TOO MUCH choice – telco operators

frank ly

Re: "EU market while the US does perfectly well with four or five"

Maybe some US based comentards can tell us what it's like with four or five mobile 'players' for such a large region?

Did rock-hard aliens turn young Earth MOIST? New probe data emerges

frank ly
Happy

Re: Some may be further away

If neighbourhood systems receive and observe the 'comments', what will that tell them about intelligent life on earth?

Linux software nasty slithers out of online watering holes

frank ly

@Fibbles Re: Fingerprinting/characterising?

You're quite right. 'ps -A' shows more like 135 processes though my point remains the same.

frank ly

Fingerprinting/characterising?

Right now, I have 35 processes running on my laptop (or so mate-system-monitor tells me). They all have a particular memory size and have other named characteristics. Could this list be regarded as 'normal' (assuming it is normal and my laptop is not infected in any way) and then any future changes be flagged as "alert - strange new process"?

I realise that as a home user I'm likely to install all sorts of stuff to try it out but for a stable commercial or industrial system then the 'normal' process profile should be stable and their characteristics known.

Put me through to Buffy's room, please. Sony hackers leak stars' numbers, travel aliases

frank ly

Just wondering

" ... aliases used by Daniel Craig, Natalie Portman, Sarah Michelle Gellar when they are travelling..."

Can I use an alias when I'm travelling or do the 'authorities' insist that I use the same name as on my passport and other ID documents?

Home Wi-Fi security's just as good as '90s PC security! Wait, what?

frank ly

MAC address whitelist filter

That's what I use on my old router, but I realise that many people wouldn't have a clue where to start. I also realise that a serious and well equiped hacker would be able to sniff my WiFi devices MAC addresses; but there are further layers of protection as well as a 'strong' password.

Manchester festival marketers fined £70,000 over spam ‘mum’ texts

frank ly

This is what happens ....

.... when you give companies your mobile phone number. After a few similar but less distressing experiences, I don't give my mobile phone number to anyone anymore, unless I feel that I need/want them to call me and I regard it as a 'long term relationship'.

'A strong response from Apple would be a lawsuit' – Steve Jobs

frank ly

"... the plaintiffs's legal beak ..."

A 'beak' is a magistrate or a judge.

How HAPPY am I on a scale of 1 to 10? Where do I click PISSED OFF?

frank ly

Better than beep:

When I came back to England from Tunis airport, after a package holiday in Tunisia, back in 2000, lots of people were just standing around looking at noticeboards and waiting for flights. A security man was wondering around carrying what could best be described as a cross between a wand and a mace, about a foot long with a bulbous translucent plastic head. Every now and then he'd wave it around someone and every now and then it would flash coloured lights in the head and make a noise best described as 'beeeee-weeeeee-oooooo-beep'. Then he'd move on, apparently doing nothing about the lights and the sound.

He approached me and I decided the best course of action would be to ignore him. He waved the 'wand' over me as he passed me to my right, then the wand made it's noise. I made no reaction and he moved on. I can only assume that it was some kind of psychological test whereby a person who was feeling guilty about carrying a bomb or drugs would jump out of their skin and make a run for it - or so their security theory would go. The entire thing was surreal and very silly. Has anybody else encountered this type of thing anywhere?

Stupid humans and their expensive data breaches

frank ly

Re: Encryption?

If I am sent data in error and that data is encrypted, how can I see it if I don't have decryption processes and the decryption key? That would be the point of encrypting data for security in the event of sending it to the wrong person outside an organisation.

Within an organisation, there would be less risk in case of accidental sending to the wrong person, but you could compartmentalise by division/department etc. as far as was thought to be needed.

SCIENCE LAB TERROR: MYSTERY of the MISSING BRAINS

frank ly

Zombies?

That would have been my immediate line of inquiry.

Edit: Mark, check out those 'environmental workers', I wonder how they might have disposed of the brains.

GOOAALLL! Back of the net! 'Millions of dollars' score .football gTLD

frank ly

Dotty nomenclature

"dot-rodeo, dot-vodka", " .news, .golf", "dot-spot addresses"

How about .consistent and .convention?

(I remember when Star Wars was released and journalists wrote about those lovable characters called 'Artoodeetoo' and 'Seethreepio'. How I laughed.)

#Gamergate folk load flamethrower, roast own feet over GTA V 'ban'

frank ly

Re: Sigh.

Can a player have the role of a female and/or a 'black' character and do all the things you described? If so, it would be non-discriminatory. (Just trying to be logical here.)

Another lick of Lollipop: Google updates latest Android to 5.0.1

frank ly

Hmmm?

"Problems with the initial release of an operating system are nothing new, especially on existing hardware ..."

Does it usually run ok on non-existant hardware?

Give nerds their own PRIVATE TRAIN CARRIAGES, say boffins

frank ly

Video conferencing

Wasn't that supposed to do away with the need to travel anywhere?

Should you call on comms suppliers when you go for a BYOD setup?

frank ly

What about MAC address filtering?

" ... you have to change the key frequently to prevent the world and his dog connecting from the car park over the road months after they left the company, ... "

Just remove their device from the MAC address filter whitelist.

Man asks internet for $1k for pebbles. INTERNET SAYS YES

frank ly

That would be a series of experiments in which the measuring instrument is affected by each experiment. Not scientifically sound but good fun I'd say.