* Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

3186 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Tor pedos torpedoed again, this time Feds torpedo four Tor pedos – and keep how they unmasked dark-web scumbags under wraps

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Kind of the natural progression of this kind of thing isn't it

It's Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas this week. And yup, you know what that means. Hotel room searches for guns

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Trollface

Oh America

"Imagine living in a country where..."

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

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Happy

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

Bah, details!

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Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

You could even repeat Eratosthenes's calculation of the earth's circumference in c. 100 BCE, and I can't think of a more sensible reason to drive from Sydney to Perth.

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Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

Imagine going through life this stupid

SpaceX reveals chain of events that caused the unplanned disassembly of Crew Dragon capsule

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The Superdracos are now only used for launch escape services, in which case restarting them won't be necessary anyway.

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Mushroom

I bet the moment they realised that high pressure NTO could ignite titanium that easily* was mildly hair-raising...

It's probably a fair assumption that the Superdraco's feed systems weren't primed during Demo-1 but blimey, this thing was attached to the ISS!

* For particular definitions of "easy".

50 years ago today Apollo 11 slipped the surly bonds of Earth to put peeps on the Moon

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Re: Back when men were men...

with parts purchased from the lowest bidder

Money wasn't much of a problem so selecting the lowest bidder wasn't necessary. The major systems were farmed out to different contractors, for some based on expertise but largely to keep everyone involved.

Facebook's Libra is a terrorist's best friend, thunders US Treasury: Crypto-coins dubbed 'national security risk'

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Re: I quickly read the Libra White Paper

They can also control exactly what you do with your money, because it's not really your money, it's theirs and they're just letting you use it.

Yeah nah.

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As always, This Is Good For Bitcoin

New old Windows bug emerges, your 'strong' password is anything but, plus plenty more

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Happy

I wasn't joking, but thanks. As you say, fully patched Windows 7 still reports itself as being SP1.

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Meh

The vulnerable version of win32k.sys is only present in Windows 7 SP1 or earlier. This means anyone running Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7 SP2 is in no danger.

Where do I go to get SP2 for Windows 7?

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

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Re: Three cheers for AMD.

Fair enough, who really knows what they'd have attempted?

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Re: Three cheers for AMD.

IIRC x86 compatibility on Itanium wasn't one of its strong points. The transition would have been too painful to work.

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Re: Three cheers for AMD.

Quad cores?! We'd probably be running some single core descendent of netbust.

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

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Re: Amazing...

Looking at all of your comments, I can't work out whether this is some kind of performance piece.

NASA smacks an Orion into the water with a successful Ascent Abort-2 Test

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Re: Stumpy...

Do you reckon it needs some fins?

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Re: Are parachutes that expensive

This test cost $250m (!!!)

Performing the parachute test separately allows them to pay the contractor another $250m.

Poetic justice: Mum funnels £100 into claw machine to win single Dumbo teddy for her kid

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Facepalm

"Complains attraction was rigged"

Is this her first time?

This is the lesson most children learn the first time they use one.

Suspected dark-web meth dealers caught by, er, 'using real address' when buying stamps

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Paragraph 7 of the article

Spoiler alert: Google's would-be iPhone killer Pixel 3 – so many leaks

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I originally posted this eight months ago but then deleted it when it turned out that none of the EMUI 8-dependent OpenKirin ROMs could operate the goofy dual camera setup without crashing. Quite the fatal flaw. This was corrected following the recent release of EMUI 9, allowing me to finally use the phone, and I haven't had any noteworthy issues since. With the benefit of hindsight, I might have gone for a Nokia 8 instead.

The Nexus 5 was almost perfect IMO. No nonsense, powerful at the time and reasonably priced. It should have had more storage and the speaker and camera could have been better but what are you going to do.

Mine was really showing its age so I gave up and went down the alternative route of buying a cheap(-ish) 2017 model Huawei and putting an OpenKirin custom ROM on it. It was a bit of a faff (edit: which turned into an eight month long wait for one that worked properly...) and involved paying for an unlock code, but now I've got a 128GB (+µSD) ~5" phone with a reasonably modern 8 core big.LITTLE SoC, 50% more battery capacity and yes, a headphone socket for less than the Nexus 5 cost originally. And, importantly, vanilla Android rather than Huawei's EMUI nonsense.

Hot desk hell: Staff spend two weeks a year looking for seats in open-plan offices

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Sounds familiar

Bot war: Here's how you can theoretically use adversarial AI to evade YouTube's hard-line copyright-detecting AI

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Re: Try this the other way around

It's already happened numerous times without any need for AI. Psychostick released an original composition on Youtube and it got flagged and claimed as a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.

23. 712. 3. 608. 45. 89. 11. 332. 841. 255. You want more? Cloudflare and pals are streaming 'em live from new RNG API

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What I want to know is why it isn't called Numberwang.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

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WTF?

How about connecting it to an external monitor? Nope, no good either. They are disabled during boot and login. An external keyboard? Nope.

Wait what?! Macbook Pro users: is this really true?

Protip: No, the CIA will not call off a pedophilia probe into your life in exchange for Bitcoin

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I was thinking more of the prevalence of child abusers in the virtual currency "community" but yeah, that too.

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The scammers really have the target market nailed down though, haven't they.

Northrop Grumman has nozzle nightmare, Soyuz brushes off lightning, and updates on Crew Dragon 'anomaly' probe

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Mushroom

Re: The Aft exit cone...

A forward exit cone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8&t=2m18s

Explosion icon because... well...

Egg on North Face: Wikipedia furious after glamp-wear giant swaps article pics for sneaky ad shots – and even brags about it in a video

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Re: I've got several items of North Face gear...

I bought two items of NF gear about 15 years ago. They're still going, so they're good enough quality, but I never bought any more after discovering very soon afterwards that despite being "50% off", they were still more expensive than the prices Americans were paying for the same stuff.

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

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Happy

Buffalo biscuits!

Tesla's autonomous lane changing software is worse at driving than humans, and more

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Re: "performed worse than human drivers when trying to change lanes automatically"

Sounds like it was benchmarked against Canberra drivers

That magical super material Apple hopes will hit backspace on its keyboard woes? Nylon

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Re: Louis Rossmann

Must be nice to be able to afford to do that.

Activist shareholders to target Zuck with giant angry emoji inflatable at Facebook AGM

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Flame

!#$%*^!$%

The only reason I clicked on this article is to see a photo of the inflatable emoji.

SpaceX takes a leaf from the Microsoft playbook and stands down Starlink for an update

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Headmaster

Apologies in advance...

...onboard Hall thrusters, powered by krypton...

Hall thrusters, of course, are powered by electricity, in this case the craft's solar panels. The krypton is merely the working fluid.

Interesting that they're using krypton as propellant rather than the more common xenon, trading off performance for a substantial cost saving.

Tesla big cheese Elon Musk warns staffers to tighten their belts in bid to cut expenses (again)

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Servicing

Not a Tesla fanatic here by any stretch of the imagination, but have a think about what your traditional ICE-powered cars need servicing for.

Crap band sues crap beer maker: Hair-metal rockers have an Axl to grind over Guns N' Rosé

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Re: Trademark

Beer and music don't fall into the same trademark categories though...

I presume the clothing will give them trouble though. The brewery should probably have trodden more carefully there.

In the claws of a vulture: Nebra AnyBeam Laser Projector

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WTF?

Uhh

Why would you take a projector camping or hiking?

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

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Pint

Cheers

Your articles were often thought provoking and I enjoyed a lot of the (deliberately or otherwise) provocative ones, regardless of whether I agreed. Best of luck.

Mods I have known, Mods I have loved, Mods I have hated: Motorola's failed experiment is now a savvy techie's dream

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Trollface

Is there a mod with a 1/8" stereo jack?

Bitcoin drops 7 per cent on New York Attorney General's allegations of $850m fraud by Bitfinex

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I can't tell if you're joking. I mean, if I'd said that I'd have been joking...

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Re: So does the US apply the same rules to other currencies?

I am not saying that Bitcoin's management are any better than say UK banks
There is no such thing as "bitcoin management". It's the wild west and everyone's out to put one over on everyone else. There are two kinds of people in kleptocurrency: scammers, and marks who think they're the scammers.

The US has been making efforts to discredit cryptocurrencies for years
They've been doing no such thing, and it would be completely unnecessary anyway given the conduct within the industry itself (if you could call it that).

Why Qualcomm won – and why Tim Cook had to eat humble Apple pie

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One shrewd account holds that it was the other way around. Because Intel was getting cold feet about phones, it will have told Apple it couldn't guarantee the product needed, leaving Apple with no choice but to capitulate.

This is where my thoughts wandered as well. It just seems much more plausible that Apple was forced into Qualcomm's arms. Or maybe that's just what I want to be true, either way.

Disclaimer: not an expert in any way, shape or form.

Starz, meet the Streisand Effect. Cable telly giant apologizes for demented DMCA Twitter takedown spree

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Paris Hilton

"Inadvertent"

Is it better or worse to be feckless, rather than malicious?

Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch

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Re: crashed minutes before landing?

I assume that means minutes before the scheduled landing

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Re: Falcon: nice show, shame about the feed

My disappointment was in the fact that at 9am local time yesterday the webcast said the feed would begin in 25 hours, then when I checked at 10am today the mission was already over. WTF SpaceX.

Get the smell out of here! Gaming tournament bans players who raise a literal stink

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I'm surprised it's not more widespread (and still newsworthy)

I remember once finding myself in the gaming room upstairs from a game store, on a night out. I think we'd gone to collect the husband of one of the women in the group. The rules posted at the entry were one long list of stereotypes, from personal hygeine to respecting women.

This is, of course not exclusive to nerd culture. We have to treat our footballers like children and send them to "respecting women" classes too.

Prince Harry takes a stand against poverty, injustice, inequality? Er, no, Fortnite

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I wonder

Is it possible for a public figure to comment on something without being accused of "ignoring" everything else?

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

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FAIL

Gal said the agents did take away his Global Entry pass, which allows express entry through customs, as punishment for not complying with their demands.

No loss apparently, since this story appears to prove that it doesn't allow express entry through customs after all.

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

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Re: A shootout wouldn't be a shootout without some grub.

Funnily enough, on my calibrated monitor at home the Apple photo looks much better than the Huawei. On my uncalibrated (but still IPS) monitors at work it's the other way around.

Both make me feel ill though.