* Posts by Jonski

131 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2009

Page:

Headless man found in lava’s embrace

Jonski

I'm thinking it hit him in the face because he turned to look at the pyroclastic flow approaching, which then threw the stone at him.

Anyway, I'm sure he would have been fine if he'd had his hi-viz on.

Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

Jonski

Re: Old school

And then for shits and giggles, send a file consisting entirely of

10 PRINT CHR$(10)

20 GOTO 10

to a line matrix printer. Wheee!

Boss coming! ^c^c^c CLS

23,000 HTTPS certs will be axed in next 24 hours after private keys leak

Jonski
Flame

It affected me

And seriously, I rank it along with the likes of Trump tweeting the nuclear codes for gross negligence, malfeasance and delinquency. I'll throw in words like espionage, sabotage and malpractice too.

I'm in a time zone where we have about 4 hours from open of business to revocation of cert (although it's now been extended, a bit). Fsck these guys with a pitchfork, sideways.

Their turf war, my neck on the line. I got notified by an email that went to me (not my team) and landed in the Other folder for casual perusal when I got round to it. Luckily, I got around to it only an hour after I got in and caffeinated.

I'll now have to explain a risk mitigation strategy to our compliance team on Monday. I've done due diligence on dos and malware attacks and almost everything else under the sun, but deliberate betrayal by bad actors or rogue employees at the root is beyond my ken.

I'm in the process of replacing the EV certs with a bunch of 30-day ones from different vendors, and I'll not darken their doors again. At least my boss will shout the beer when it's over.

BOFH: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

Jonski

...taking off my trousers in the middle of the office... to do this business-critical backup...

Mooning the office is a different kind of back-up methinks.

Chinese whispers: China shows off magnetic propulsion engine for ultra-silent subs, ships

Jonski

China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation

C-SIC?

Cassini probe's death dive to send data at just 27 kilobits per second

Jonski

Re: Time is an illusion

Probably should be Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), as I understand the signal is primarily being received in Canberra?

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Jonski

Re: That'll confuse users

Flanders: Well... I... I never heard a more ridiculous idea in all my born days. To think that a son of mine should grow up to be a sissy - me, chief assistant to the assistant chief! I suppose you realise, son, if this was to get around, we might never get Brexit.

Hackers can turn web-connected car washes into horrible death traps

Jonski
Facepalm

Instructions unclear

Added firewall, spray from carwash immediately put it out

WannaCrypt blamed for speed camera reboot frenzy in Australia

Jonski

That's really strange, because I had been assured that it was turtles all the way down.

London City airport swaps control tower for digital cameras

Jonski

But what if...?

"Transtellar Cruise Lines would like to apologise to passengers for the continuing delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment and hygiene during the journey. Meanwhile, we thank you for your patience. The cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits again.''

Kiwi cable goes live, and it's nowhere near a volcano

Jonski

"Nowhere near a volcano"

Orly? Go to the google and type in Raglan.

You'll see a nice picture of the harbour next to Mt. Karioi. A volcano. (Yes, I know it's extinct. But still.)

Dishwasher has directory traversal bug

Jonski

That scene from Cherry 2000

Yes that one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6KJtFZoflc

(starts around 0:30)

Jonski

Re: Bewildered. (That's grown-up speak for "wtf")

They can, um, ... Keep statistics about powder usage.

I use those blocks with the dissolving wrapper. My powder usage precisely correlates 1:1 to the number of cycles I've run.

The irony is rich however. This vuln will now let my dishwasher convert Spam to spam.

Facebook shopped BBC hacks to National Crime Agency over child abuse images probe

Jonski

Two can play that game

Could the BBC report Facebook for soliciting these images as well when it was asked to send the samples?

I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

Jonski

Bang whack bang

Panelbeaters are authorised to hit cars with hammers. I don't think this means they can pummel cars to pieces.

Sysadmins are authorised to maintain and administer IT systems. While deleting files and systems is a function of sysadmins, it's not the raison d'etre.

Oh God, here comes the artificially intelligent boss bot – look busy!

Jonski

Re: Sacrificial goat

"We apologise for (getting caught at) our latest mess-up, and we have reprogrammed the director responsible"

FTFY!

Mercedes answers autonomous car moral dilemma: Yeah, we'll just run over pedestrians

Jonski

Identification issues

Considering Tesla vehicles currently can't reliably differentiate between a F Off Big Truck and The Sky, I think it will be quite a while before we encounter the trolley problem to decide between Adolph Hitler pushing a baby in a pram, or Theresa May saving a puppy from Boris Johnson...

But I also think that just like jaywalking only became blameworthy when motorised vehicles became common, we will see that again the preservation of motorists will prevail over all other road users, to their detriment. Let's hope that as technology continues to improve, we also see the development of things like external airbags to protect those outside the vehicle like they protect those within.

FYI: Amazon's corner stores scan your plates

Jonski
Flame

Unimpressed

Can anyone else see a hundred things wrong with this? You'll need to actually drive past the shop, or park outside, and you can't use Uber, you can't walk, cycle, bus, tram, ferry, get a mate to drop you off, or use your personal jetpack to take "advantage" of picking up your parcel a dubious 30 seconds earlier than you otherwise might. In the meantime data is getting collected on the other ten thousand people passing the shop daily who have no business with Amazon. Why not just set up a Stingray cellular site and sniff the mac of the customer's phone FFS? Y'know, while we're overextending and slurping unnecessary data and all that.

Rise of the Machines at Sea: The British firm building robot boats

Jonski
Pirate

ColRegs?

I'm concerned about Collision Regulations- Power gives way to Sail gives way to Fishing etc., so I assume roboboats would give way to everything.

But what day shape should they display? Some vessels have balls, some have diamonds up on display.

I suggest roboboats should have balls and something that looks like a cock up. Because there will be.

Microsoft thinks time crystals may be viable after all

Jonski

Let's see if I've got this right...

If I read this correctly, and there's a very good chance (p->1) that I didn't, what I think will happen is:-

You throw some of the contents of your fridge, pantry and frypan onto a plate. It enters its resting state of a Bacon Buttie.

After a while, with no intervention, no interim state and no eating of said buttie, it will morph into a vindaloo, or a small cat, whatever.

Do not eat the vindaloo- or cat. Nothing in or out please, we're British.

After another while, your comestible again transitions seamlessly into a buttie.

You run screaming from the room.

Unseen, a tardis warps in to remove the time crystal back to its proper dimension.

Apple killed OS X today and binned its $10,000 BlingWatch too

Jonski
Pint

"may show fine micro-abrasions with use"

I read that as "micro-aggressions" and thought it improved the sentiment.

Height of stupidity: Heathrow airliner buzzed by drone at 7,000ft

Jonski
Mushroom

Etops

What if the plane is already down to one engine when it ingests some f*ckwad's prized toy?

Note: Drones and UAVs are cool. Flying them in restricted airspace is f*ckwad material of the highest order.

Pizza delivery by drone 'trialled' in New Zealand

Jonski
Black Helicopters

30m from houses

Bugger that for a game of soldiers- having to walk 30m to get a pizza when everyone else delivers it to your door.

I mean, the only reason one gets delivery pizza is because of laziness*, amiright? It's not for the taste, price or nutritional content that's for sure.

* OK, alright I'll allow drunkenness as well

Watch the world's biggest 'flying bum' go arse over tit in a crash

Jonski

If I HAD to crash

Then I would rather do it ten times like this than once in any conventional aircraft, including gyrocopters.

And I've done it once in a conventional aircraft. Well, glider.

Facebook to forcefeed you web ads, whether you like it or not: Ad blocker? Get the Zuck out!

Jonski

"Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of..." making obscene profits from you providing us with information regarding every bowel movement and facial tick you've ever made.

Fixed it for you Zuck!

Your 'intimate personal massager' – cough – is spying on you

Jonski
Paris Hilton

If the hax0rz pwn your device...

...then you're f***ed

Shakes on a plane: How dangerous is turbulence?

Jonski

Re: Big jets are boring and stable

a glider plane flying through a thermal

We don't fly *through* thermals, we fly *in* them. Feel the bump, wait a couple of seconds and then push the lifted wing down hard to start circling. Pull back to V(min sink). Keep an ear out on the vario and hope you found a good one.

No, Kim Kardashian's plump posterior's pixels did not break the App Store – just this El Reg man's mind

Jonski
Go

Is it time for a Max Headroom revival?

It is always time for a Max Headroom revival.

Car radars gain sharper vision after ITU assigns special spectrum slice

Jonski

Re: sort of repeating others but ..

"...would be interested to know if it is likely to be adversely affected by rain / drizzle / fog etc."

The new system picks up rain / drizzle / fog just fine, but when you've got the wrong kind of snow, or leaves... watch out!

Uncle Sam's IT bods find 2,000 data centers they FORGOT about

Jonski
Go

Re: Down the back of the couch, under the seat cushions, where else?

Re: XP machines

Back in the day, I had a user with borrowed equipment who wouldn't return my calls. After a week I disabled his a/c and my phone rang in under 5 minutes.

If you've got the power, flaunt it.

How TV ads silently ping commands to phones: Sneaky SilverPush code reverse-engineered

Jonski
Black Helicopters

But do they sanitise their inputs?

Should Bobby Tables have the software installed on his smartphone?

https://xkcd.com/327/

TalkTalk plays 'no legal obligation' card on encryption – fails to think of the children (read: its customers)

Jonski
Trollface

To be fair...

...double ROT13 is a form of encryption, innit?

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Jonski

The next design Charles Babbage worked on after his Difference Engine, would (with time and transistor miniaturisation), finally see light as the Hitachi Magic Wand.

Pro tip: Servers belong in dry server rooms, not wet cloakrooms

Jonski

Re: Backup

"Transients from the lift mechanism"

Reminds me of very long (200+ m) cable runs of RS422 Multidrop running Wyse terminals and a bunch of printers to a SCO 3 server (386, 4Mb RAM) in a superyacht shipyard running frikkin big welders. It worked most of the time, only requiring terminal resets a few times each day.

Also, a similar system in an aluminium refinery. Of course, it wasn't the transients that were impressive there, it was shovels standing up by themselves in the eddy fields. I can't remember what voltage they ran the refinery vats at, but it consumed hundreds of kiloamps.

TXT message leaves Corvette wrecked

Jonski
FAIL

'This process contained "unfortunate design choices"'

In other words, incompetence and/or malpractice. Someone, somewhere, deserves an arse-kicking into next year. For god's sake why don't they know by now?

Fancy 10 Gbps home broadband? Broadcom's built the guts of it

Jonski

10 Gig? Erm, no thanks

Having recently gone from 12 Mbps ADSL to 100/20 Mbps fibre at home, I expected all sorts of drinking-from-the-firehose goodness. But TBH I was disappointed. It seems that a lot of websites have limited bandwidth themselves from their servers and I can easily max them out- or at least max out my share of their link.

Also, YouTwitFace still has long laggy periods where I wait for their servers to get back to me.

The upside is my whole family can now simultaneously ignore each other in high definition. I guess that's a win.

John McAfee cuffed by Tennessee cops, faces drug-driving, gun rap

Jonski
Boffin

My first reaction?

The pharmacy really needs to clean the thermal head on their label printer.

Sun? In Blighty? Nah, just build that rooftop data centre, it’ll be fine

Jonski
FAIL

I worked (briefly) for a fast food company with nationwide chain stores, some selling a popular fried chicken and some a popular pizza.

The store "servers" were *purchased* as 4-year-old ex-lease desktops, usually placed on the top of the cupboards in the manager's "office" (a shoe-box annex to the kitchen area). No aircon, no grease filters, nada. It would regularly top 55 degrees up there, and that was outside the PC enclosure.

I had the idea to perform remote WMI queries on the hardware to see if fan speed was low and CPU temp high, which would indicate that the inside of the PC could be rendered down for one last serve of hot chips. But being ex-lease desktops they didn't even have WMI instrumentation built in. We just had to wait for them to fail and the store sell everything via manual transactions for a few days while we built, shipped and installed new 4-year-old ex-lease desktops by way of replacement.

I lasted three months before choosing not to renew my contract.

Edit for speling an grammer [sic]

Obsolescence of food is complete: Soylent now comes in bottles

Jonski
Childcatcher

My happiest food memory

Eating whole spit-roast piglet directly off the spit, ripping the rich dripping cooked flesh off with my teeth, burning my tongue on the hot bits, trying not to singe my eyebrows in the flames.

I have before-and-after photos of the piglet. Firstly, running around my feet in the volcanic highlands of Virunga as sold to me by Johnny Walker (his English name), and secondly a few hours later with a spike up its bum and out its mouth, slowly caramelising and rendering in a circular fashion. An animal that most certainly did not die in vain.

And it was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Soylent. Who am I kidding? Completely unlike Soylent.

Chap mines Bitcoin with PUNCH CARDS and ancient mainframe

Jonski

5x10^14 years eh?

"The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline." - Marvin

SHOCK! Robot cars do CRASH. Because other cars have human drivers

Jonski
Facepalm

Re: "so far caused by human error and inattention"

how much do they depend upon GPS/maps being completely correct?

Good question. I have experience of a road doing a 1 km deviation up a ravine and the road looking like Ω while the GPS said go straight ahead like _. The ravine was several hundred feet deep.

While I'm sure the google cars would recognise the road stopping without falling into the ravine, I'm not sure they would have any idea where actually to go instead. I can imagine them emergency stopped at right angles to the oncoming traffic in the wrong lane and the nav unit melting down in consternation while making meep meep noises.

No, really, that 12.9-inch MaxiPad is totally on the way now

Jonski
Trollface

Re: Tinypad

Soon, I believe it will be called the Microsoft Surface Hub.

ONE BEELLION Windows 10 devices?! OH REALLY

Jonski

Re: What reason is there to upgrade from Windows 7?

Except that there won't be a Windows 11, as such. Microsoft says they'll just keep it up to date as time rolls on.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/553/windows-10-will-free-upgrade

Or something.

Google pulls plug on YouTube for older iPads, iPhones, smart TVs

Jonski
Facepalm

SMART?

SMART:- System Meets Archaic Requirements for Technology.

In the meantime, my free OpenELEC (Kodi (XBMC)) media center and associated 12TB NAS just keeps on pretty much eating the competition. Plus, I can upgrade at will. Come the day I get a UHD TV (purchased as I ice skate across the frozen brimstone lakes of hell) I can just drop in a gruntier video card and presto.

Digital killed the radio star: Norway names FM switchoff date

Jonski

Re: @bill 36: Was kinda with you until...

I think you meant 6kWh, not 6KW which is a different measure altogether if it technically exists at all, but on your point (energy used in refining petroleum) a good understandable analysis can be found at http://greentransportation.info/guide/energy/electricity-to-refine-gallon-gasoline.html. Worth a read.

Hello? Police? Yes, I'm a car and my idiot driver's crashed me

Jonski

In a not-too-distant future...

Hi, this is Eddie, your car-board computer, and it was a pleasure to crash for you today. I hope the airbags went off with a real bang! The extensive deformation of the body panels and chassis in today’s crash were tailored to meet your exacting requirements and personal preferences according to a detailed examination of your current neural pathways. I have now booked an ambulance for you, which is estimated to arrive in approximately the next 37.88 minutes. In the meantime, please use the complimentary first aid kit in the glove compartment to staunch the bleeding from your femoral artery. Have a nice day!! <light music>

March 24th: The day most Australian download allowances become inadequate

Jonski
Pirate

Can't wait

for a price war to erupt among the VoD vendors and their multifarious offerings.

It might almost bring each price down to what I pay currently for torrent and/or usenet access, and I may only have to deal with three or more vendors at that price to achieve coverage of my viewing interests.

Or something.

Windows 10: The Microsoft rule-o-three holds, THIS time it's looking DECENT

Jonski
Paris Hilton

Oops, wonder how THAT got in there?!?

All of the data in these applications will be switched between phones and PCs seamlessly, Microsoft promises, and users will be able to back up and sync their data to Azure. For example, pictures taken on the smartphone will be uploaded to Azure

That'll be interesting. How to keep my family life, my personal life and my business life separate. Nothing worse than a <ahem> "bedroom" photo ending up in the middle of a work presentation, or worse, your partner seeing what really happened at that out-of-town conference.

Music fans FUME over PJ Harvey ticket CHAOS as Somerset House site buckles

Jonski
FAIL

Re: I'll try again to comment

And in your day I expect that while you waited, you had to lick the road clean with your tongue.

Eh, now in MY day...

Page: