* Posts by cyclical

63 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2012

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The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

cyclical

Re: So...

Yeah, we were in the early throes of a centOS 8 upgrade programme when this was announced. We've now retooled and are going Ubuntu and becoming a paid customer of Canonical instead of red hat. Noone appreciated the EOL rug being pulled out from under us, and the response of everyone from engineers to directors was 'screw redhat' except not as polite as that.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

cyclical

Re: Canonical thanks IBM

I know we are - other parts of the company already have a relation with Canonical and use Ubuntu in production, my department were just stuck on CentOS for historical reasons, and their ops guys have already offered to assist.

What simultaneously sucks and doesn't? This new robot vacuum cleaner

cyclical

Re: Now THIS is the way an advert should be!

My Roomba broke down in around the same amount of time (although it was an easy repair). The problem compared to traditional vacuum cleaners is that these things just about roll around in the dust, and they run for a long time. It does mean they tend to jam up with dust relatively quickly once the seals start to wear out. Still worth it if you can find a good offer though.

cyclical

Re: WiFi, control by app or voice?

I have an Eufy vacuum robot and they aren't bad - flimsier build than a roomba, but do basically the same thing. The remote on mine has controls to configure timings, a spot clean button, an edge clean button, and a return to home button. I rarely use the remote though. Can't imagine I'd use WiFi or voice either.

I've had mine since the start of the year, and it's still going daily. My Roomba started to jam up after this length of time and I had to clean out and regrease the gearbox every month or so, but the Eufy costs half of what a similar Roomba does and it does keep things fairly clean.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

cyclical

I still hope that one day the piss tapes will be released because my very, very niche fetish is US politicians being urinated on and my collection only has 5-6 specimens, none of which are presidents. One day...

Who's using Mueller Report Day to bury bad news? If you guessed Facebook, you're right: Millions more passwords stored in plaintext

cyclical

I'm still not sure what circumstances would require one to log passwords. I've coded a pile of authentication systems and even the highest debugging levels only ever logged username and success y/n - logging the password even to a secure database would be a massive no-no. That shit is salted and hashed into an unrecognisable mass by any dev who know their shit, and then it's stored in a heavily monitored cluster/store/whatever where you check exactly who looks at it because it's highly sensitive data. Right? I mean storing elsewhere as plaintext undoes any other security measures you might have (OK, 2fa defeats a lot of that, but few systems enforce 2fa, facebook does some half-assed geolocating stuff so chinese script-kiddies can't brute force you)

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

cyclical

I previously worked for a huge media company that made some 20% of its income through ads, and part of my job was making sure that those ads were forced down peoples throats. As part of the ongoing war between ad-blockers and ad-slingers we had to include an ad-blocker-detection script inline on each page. This was loaded via a proxy then inserted directly into the code of the page. It was initially about 25k on each page - large but not unmanageable. One day they recoded it and suddenly our lead devops started swearing loudly and copiously that the amount of data we were pushing out that morning had quadrupled - almost 500k of inline javascript, and about 600ms more load time.

A LOT of man-hours went into minimising the impact of ads on load times, but you're tied into contracts with a lot of these advertisers, and if you don't keep up your end of the bargain by including their code where they want, and including their ads exactly where they want then they could and would cut what they paid you. It was a continual balancing act to keep cash flowing in, and trying to minimise the impact of those things on the user experience. At the end of the day we (the developers) were at the mercy of the contracts agreed between our company and the advertising companies, no matter what our opinion was of the negative performance, traffic and privacy implications.

Incidentally we found that during trials, providing subscription/ad-free models was just about as profitable as the advert stuffing route - but only for certain markets. People in the big cities were far more willing to pay a subscription for content, but the rest of the country expected their stuff for 'free'.

Surfacegate: Microsoft execs 'misled Nadella', claims report

cyclical

Re: So the news is ..... ?

But when your mangled facts make your exec look stupid to the competition, you can bet there will be a rapidly resolved witch-hunt going on as we speak.

Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers

cyclical

Re: Why doesn't someone

They still want to dump cookies all over your computer, and a lot of ads actually require the site to physically be there to load. I guess you could load two tabs, and ad-free and a ad-loaded one, but it seems like something that will be slow and unpleasant in the long run.

cyclical

Re: Detecting Wireshark

Most of these things detect wireshark or similar by performing tests to see what does and doesn't get through, and if some things are missing, you assume there is a block somewhere and what exactly is missing can indicate the type of block.

WannaCry-slayer Marcus Hutchins 'built Kronos banking trojan' – FBI

cyclical

There is an in-depth analysis by the Washington Post here - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/03/the-kronos-indictment-it-a-crime-to-create-and-sell-malware/?utm_term=.9b4ed7645cea

tldr version; possible, but they have to prove a lot of things that are hard to prove, i.e was Krono a 'device' capable of 'wiretapping', and a bunch of 'intent' type things.

Nest security camera captures landlord's romp on tenants' bed

cyclical

I actually had this happen to me while I was a student - although this is pre-webcam era stuff. We knew because my girlfriend discovered a pair of women’s underwear in my bed, and a bunch of blonde hairs. Thankfully I did manage to talk my way out of it and was believed (mainly because we had spent the entire day together). Guy was a repulsive little cretin too - only landlord I've ever met who had to take a bodyguard with him when he went to pick up the rent.

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

cyclical

Re: Market research

> Have to disagree there: companies will pay for good, reliable VoIP and conferencing which is why there is Skype for Business (previously called Lync)

Reliable? Good? As someone who uses Skype for Business on a daily basis I would very much disagree with both of those. It doesn't often take the whole OS down, but we frequently have people who can't connect, stupid issues (the ringtone keeps going over the call for instance), video failing completely and various other quality issues. Cross OS support is pretty spotty as well (it never installed on my linux box and I had to run it in a VM, although others did not have issues)

Once Slack video chat starts scaling well enough (the quality is higher than Skype, and the simplicity is already there, but it starts falling apart a bit once you have 6+ people in the chat) we will probably switch to that, since we already use it preference to Skype for all text based chat between departments and offices.

Personally I used Pre-MS Skype very extensively when I worked with companies in Africa and the US, and it was great - slim and lightweight, got the job done. The first thing that MS did was bloat the UI to 3x the previous size. I even had a Skype phone (that lived for about 6 months before MS changed everything and basically bricked the phone).

IBM's contractor crackdown continues: Survivors refusing pay cut have hours reduced

cyclical

Re: Why contract these days?

I did this after 19 years and it was a pretty good decision - less stress, better hours, far less paperwork - the pay is lower but I don't have to deal with mystery fluctuations when someone decides to query my invoices (how can you charge that much for migrating our legacy PERL systems to a new server, the bosses nephew reckons he could have done it in a day!) and you don't get paid for a few months. But yeah, I'm a touch bored too,

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

cyclical

When I first started at my current company, access to all the live environments was firewalled from my IP with the message 'f**k off tom, don't you f**king dare'. I guess my predecessor Tom did some damage at some point.

Microsoft to spooks: WannaCrypt was inevitable, quit hoarding

cyclical

Medical hardware often only gets 'end of lifed' about 10 years after it stops production - and they are rarely on cutting-edge software platforms to start with. There is too much disparity between the lifecycle of the very, very expensive MRI machines, and the software/OS side of things - one of the reasons these machines are so expensive is that the hospital expect to have support and updates for the lifetime of the hardware. If a company goes titsup, then your probably stuffed. Having said that, isolating anything that can't be patched from your main network would be a good idea, but once again - budget restrictions don't allow that kind of undertaking, so the risk will always remain.

cyclical

Speaking to a friend of a friend who works in a relevant department in the NHS, the estimate for patching legacy systems was £15m, and the budget given to them was £750k. There are also a lot of million quid bits of equipment out there with software from bankrupt or disappeared companies that requires XP or similar, and YES they shouldn't be connecting these machines to SMB shares at all, but it's never just been as straightforwards as just patching some computers.

Devs bashing out crappy code is making banks insecure – report

cyclical

I once (a very long time ago, COBOL era code) had a contract conducting third-party QA on a major banks systems. I was handed a long long list of boxes to tick as a spreadsheet. The problem was I couldn't even tick half those boxes because the entire thing was so buggy and unstable - I couldn't even get to the stage where 'Do X changes Y and displays Z' because even going near X caused series of unexpected results. After a couple of weeks I submitted a report detailing how to reproduce the 'pre-bugs' that needed fixing and likely causes. Suggested they try to at least reach alpha stage before paying expensive contractors to conduct beta testing. Nope, contract cancelled immediately, sod off, project was already over-budget and almost complete. They just wanted someone to tick the boxes.

Palmtop nostalgia is tinny music to my elephantine ears

cyclical

Re: A man after my own heart

My own experience of Sennheisers is that the earpads will disintegrate in short order, shedding little black dandruffy flakes everywhere for the next 8 years (which is how long my sennheiser PCX headphones have lasted for).

As for the sturdiest pair I own, AKG 271 headphones seem pretty indestructible - in 10 years owning my pair I've had a little bit of plastic break off (which I fixed in 2 seconds with a paperclip) and they've been bulletproof through plenty of dropping on the ground and heavy usage. Mine came with spare earpads and cables in different styles as well, although I've not needed to swap.

Update or shut up: Microsoft's choice for desktop Skypers

cyclical

We've trialled using Slack video conferencing since we have people on linux (via web), osx and windows spread out over the country, but it's expensive for larger teams, and it doesn't seem to scale quite as well right now - for up to 8 people it's workable, but if enough people are working from home we get a noticeable drop in quality and stability. Skype for Business causes us endless problems however (crashes to desktop, weird missing audio issues, clunky invitation system in outlook that sometimes doesn't work).

UK.gov still drowning in legacy tech because no one's boarding Blighty's £700m data centre Ark

cyclical

Our devops guys are moving legacy systems (from a variety of external teams) to a virtualised, centralised data centre at the moment, and I've never heard such a volume of terrible language (and our devops/sysadmin team of bitter, hateful linux guys are not renowned for being polite at the best of times). 'Which c**t thought this was a good idea?', 'Hey guess how many processes this sh*tty f**king script generates? It only doesn't take the machine down because there is another f**king bug on this mailserver!', 'Why are the comments in this script in Hungarian, how do I say c**t in Hungarian??'

Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'

cyclical

Re: Aaand it's gone

And actually doesn't look like anyone has managed to pwn it yet, at least it's not been defaced yet.

Stay out of my server room!

cyclical

Oh, they also painted over everything in magnolia. Yes that includes cables if they were up against a wall, colour coded ducts etc.

cyclical

I should post a photo of our newly 'renovated' server room. As part of ongoing upgrading of our 'internal spaces' they fitted a brand new suspended ceiling over the existing 60's woodchip and asbestos ceiling. Unfortunately some of the cabinets reach right up to the ceiling so they actually built the ceiling round the cabinets. In each case they actually blocked the cabinet doors from opening. Not only that, but the fire suppression was also boxed in, as were the aircon vents. Not that blocking the fire suppression would matter because although they moved the alarms onto the new ceiling, they didn't bother to actually wire them up. Not that THAT matters because it turns out they also managed to drill through some part of the roof guttering system, and about a week after putting the new ceiling up, the entire thing came straight back down the first time it rained heavily. No hardware was harmed thankfully.

Your new car will dob you in to the cops if you crash, decrees EU

cyclical

Re: A 'dormant' GPS and telephone device in every car

The system only ever activates in the case of a crash with airbags going off - on my own car it sends out an SMS to a call center (location, direction travelling etc.), and then tries to phone them if the signal is strong enough. If I am unresponsive then emergency services are called. The system is not even powered up for external signals except in a crash or if I press the emergency button. The one in my car also has a 'breakdown' button which will connect me to a breakdown service even if I don't have a mobile phone with me - all pretty useful. Reducing the human error in horrendous accidents is definitely going to save lives, the system does not seem open to abuse, and europe has a pretty big thing about privacy, so I'm not terrified that the data will be released to a 3rd party without a good legal reason for doing so (for instance lying about the speed you were going in a crash to avoid liability)

Dear departed Internet Explorer, how I will miss you ... NOT

cyclical

Re: It was crap but...

The problem is that some versions of IE varied SO much from the standard. Basic stuff like IE not interpreting the box model properly (standard created in 1996, Microsoft only partially implemented the correct behaviour in 2001). This required very, very serious CSS-invalidating hacks to fix. And I won't even get started on such CSS horrors as 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)' or horrendous omissions that prevented people from broadly using alpha channeled PNG for over 8 years (supported Mozilla 2000, IE not until 2008).

cyclical

I just wish IE would die gracefully

I seem to remember some point around IE 8(?), Microsoft announcing they would be ceasing development, which never happened, now this (we're going to use OUR OWN interpretation of the standards again because open standards are for people who aren't a monopoly). The nightmare will never end will it? Even when you think it's over it's like the end of a horror movie where the rubber-masked slasher you thought was dead leaps out from behind the sofa and repeatedly stabs some poor web developer in the face. *fade to black*

Australian ISPs agree to three-strikes-plus-court-order anti-piracy plan

cyclical

My experience from living and working in australia is that the main blocker to people pirating stuff was stupidly expensive bandwidth fees - it the first time I've seen people (ok, nerds) going to a party with a hard drive and copying media from each other because your 20Gb a month didn't go that far. Last time I saw that in the UK was 10+ years ago.

The second, most important thing media producers can do to help stop piracy is just do simultaneous releases with the rest of the world. There were plenty of times that australian releases in the cinema were taking place the same time that DVD releases were happening in the rest of the world, TV is somewhat worse.

Do they even have Netflix yet? I heard some rumblings a few weeks ago about that.

Google Talk is dead, long live, er, Google Talk: Chat will survive app zap, flaps G+ chap

cyclical

Slightly off subject - but what are people using for free business chat/video conference these days. I work with a widely dispersed lot of people (Australia, Africa, one hardy lady up in the Scottish highlands on a hill) with very variable connections and we've commonly used Skype, but Microsoft seems determined to make each new version less usable than the previous one (and the Windows 8 versions are about the final straw for a lot of us - phone based versions are getting worse as well). Hangouts actually seemed pretty useful when I last used it a few months ago, but I've only ever used the browser based version, and I've not tried it with the more far-flung folk in Africa who are stuck on satellite internet.

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

cyclical

My company uses what one could describe as 'move fast and break things', but it comes with a few very important provisos including;

* Not for mission critical applications

* Very robust plans and technology in place for fast rollout and rollback

* A very solid automated test procedure so minimal user testing is required for each release

* A very good change documentation procedure (linking client requests, project management and code versioning together into something that makes some semblance of sense).

It works very well in certain markets - we provide technical solutions for very non-technical (marketing and design) clients, and they are guaranteed to change their minds 20 times before the end of the project, demand things go live at a moments notice and generally ignore our advice whenever possible, so we have a development lifecycle that deals with this very well, and we manage their expectations with regards to bugs appropriately.

I can see the point in scrum, but I don't think I've ever seen a situation where it couldn't be handled in a more flexible, slightly less smug/self-satisfied manner. Scrum Master...

The late 2014 Apple Mac Mini: The best (and worst) of both worlds

cyclical

For the last 10 years or so we've been using Mac Minis as development servers, and iMacs as desktops - and I kind of have a soft spot for the Mini. While we're hard pressed to get more than 4 years service out of an iMac (indeed we have a cupboard full of broken ones - mostly overheating issues), the Mac Minis just seem to keep on going. We still have a PowerPC version, and while the plastic is now yellowed and starting to crack a little, it's still gives a solid 24 hours a day, happily running batch tasks and database duty.

The plan going forwards is to transition entirely to Minis with non-apple 27" screens attached - much the same functionality for far less money.

Twitter: La la la, we haven't heard of NUDE JLaw, Upton SELFIES

cyclical

It seems the current best guess for the source of the images is not a single hack or security breach, but a ring of people who have been privately trading hacked images for many many years, probably using a variety of methods (brute force iCloud would have probably been involved, but I imagine most of them would have been via social engineering methods considering these people have a lot of public information to enable this kind of thing). There have been rumours around for ages regarding a 'buy in with new photos only' private ring.

This is backed up by a few accidental leaks of partial photos in various forums in the past, the fact that some of the leaked photos have been confirmed as deleted ages ago, and the wildly varying quality, naming and sources of the various images.

The person/people responsible for the actual leak has probably not been involved in the actual hacking of most of the images released, although I imagine he'll be mercilessly tracked down either by 4channers doing it 'for lulz', or the FBI.

Yahoo! YUI! project! is! no! more!

cyclical

We made the mistake of picking up YUI2 back in the day as the main user interface for various projects; it was Yahoo and backed by a genuine company and looked pretty good compared to the open source competition at the time. Terrible mistake, YUI2 was a horrible library, migration to YUI3 was a pain (and wasn't much better). Regretted it ever since. The very last major project in YUI2 is currently being migrated to jQueryUI (after hobbling along patching the ancient code), and hopefully that will be it for a few more years.

BAT-GOBBLING urban SPIDER QUEENS swell to ENORMOUS SIZE

cyclical

When I lived in Sydney, these things were mainly a threat when staggering drunkenly home, not looking where you were going, and all of a sudden you walk into a giant web and have a pissed-off spider the size of a large grape in your hair. Fond memories. Thankfully their bite is painful rather than deadly.

Euro banks warned off Bitcoin as Canada regulates it

cyclical

Re: Easy out.

Except stocks are tied to something tangible, with physical presence that means even penny stocks usually have some kind of actual 'worth'. Bitcoin value is based on nothing - even the cryptographic proofs are utterly pointless and a massive waste of electricity. They should be treated like what they are, an academic white paper that was somehow picked up by scam artists, junkies, money launderers and libertarians and turned into the worlds most annoying currency.

Weaponised Flash flaw can pinch just about anything from anywhere

cyclical

Now if only the various browser companies could stop having slappy-fights over HTML5 web video & audio formats and DRM and we can give silverlight etc the boot as well, and live happily ever after.

Virtual Africa is the logical target for IP address colonists

cyclical

There's currently investment approaching billions of $ to get africa fibred up - although it's mostly on the coasts right now - while inland areas still rely heavily on mobile, microwave and satellite internet (which of course can be NAT'ed). I can certainly forsee IP requirements shooting up shortly though.

Britain'll look like rural Albania without fracking – House of Lords report

cyclical

Re: If it's really 2015 we're stuffed no matter what happens...

I have a friend who has worked for 2 or 3 different shale companies as a planner, and all these steps;

> a) get permissions for exploratory wells in geologically suitable areas,

> b) drill exploratory wells,

> c) get sample data and analyse it,

> d) if viable economically, attempt to get permissions and agreements for production wells,

Are already in place for a huge number of sites. All they need is for someone at a large drilling company to push ahead and start piling the real money in and start drilling. This is something they are not willing to do in the current environment when the media and large parts of the government are against the concept, and they could have their licenses to frack revoked for political reasons.

Web data BLEEDOUT: Users to feel the pain as Heartbleed bug revealed

cyclical

Re: not older kit?

Having just reviewed all my servers, almost all of the RHEL ones are running 0.9ish versions and one running 1.0.0 . In fact the only box running a vulnerable versions was an internal PowerPC development box for some reason (and it's firewalled off from the general public)

ISPs' pirate-choking blocking measures ARE effective – music body

cyclical

As far as I can tell, licensing music (and movies) to streaming outfits and actually making the content easy to stream is going to make far more of an impact than making Google stop indexing the content. I know people who have access to invite-only piracy sites who don't bother torrenting content any more because it's simpler to just type it into spotify or watch something on netflix. Problem is, they need to make it easier. For instance if I want to watch 'Game of Thrones' on my tablet I can't do it, because the Sky Go won't install on rooted devices (presumably for anti-piracy reasons), and HBO don't license it to anyone else. Because of anti-piracy measures the only way I could watch it on the train to work would be to pirate it, despite having paid for the content via a Sky subscription.

Schoolkids given WORLD'S CHEAPEST TABLETS: Is it really that hard to swallow?

cyclical

I've worked on a similar project in Zambia (iSchool & ZEduPad); cheap tablets pre-loaded with flash-based lessons built around the curriculum and requirements of rural communities - localised into various local languages as well. Complaining about 'Not changing the world'; educating children about subjects like malaria, nutrition, farming as well as mathematics absolutely does make a massive difference on a local level. The sorts of children these projects are aimed towards simply don't care about transferrable IT skills, they care about leaving school with the best, broadest education they can have that can allow them to make better decisions in the real world, not necessarily 'Move the the big city and get a job'.

Tablets offer a lot more than just 'cheap', since they don't have moving parts, are easily secured, easily shipped (because PC's don't like being in the back of a pickup on a desert road for 2 days to get to the school) and are relatively dust/moisture proof they are far more useful in rural and remote communities than the equivalent cheap desktop - I've seen humid conditions in a classroom kill a cheap laptop in under 6 months - the fan pulled in so much mould and moisture the thing looked like a petri dish inside. Ditto with desert dust - PC's don't cope to well with sand, dust & 40c temperatures all day long. On the other hand my tablet tends to work just fine under those circumstances (although I think my model is held together with superglue now, and the battery only holds a minimal charge, but it's had three years of daily use). They can be charged off a car, generator or via solar power. They are fairly 'instinctual' for children of all ages.

Bulls hit city streets after alleged Samsung ad shoot hits the fan

cyclical

I used to go to a pub quiz every thursday just round the corner from here when I lived in Sydney, and this is in no way the weirdest thing you'll see in Newtown

Brit Bitcoin dev: I lost 'over £200k' when MtGox popped its socks

cyclical

Re: Suck It Berkshire Hathaway

Yes, it's uninsurable - because there is no way to differentiate between 'I got my bitcoins stolen by someone guessing my password' and 'I transferred my bitcoins to a new wallet and lied to you'. You could insure the exchanges against failure or theft, but then the risk is such that you'd have to charge a pretty monster fee to cover it, since virtually every exchange out there is fly-by-night, coded by a self-taught nerd, running from a PO box office, and sometimes virtually indistinguishable from a ponzi scheme.

cyclical

Source code

Having seen some (alleged - http://pastebin.com/W8B3CGiN) source code from MTGox, I'm starting to lean more towards a hack of their pretty dodgy code as the source of the leak (structurally it's not bad, but lacks any manner of sensible error logging, or indeed much logging at all, and it's somewhat inconsistent, oh, and coding bank/exchange-lite software using PHP(!)), rather than any issue in the bitcoin source code. There have been accusations that Mark Karpeles vanity may have been to blame. At least they are using transactional SQL, lack of which was blamed for another exchange hack this week.

Bitcoin or bust: MtGox files for bankruptcy protection

cyclical

Re: News just in

When was the last time you heard of a bank giving away half their money because they didn't do proper accounting and only hired blind tellers who would give away £20s instead of £10 by accident, then lose the keys to the vault, effectively sealing away the rest? Then closes down the bank for withdrawals for months, while still accepting deposits, all the while saying 'just technical problems'.

Insider trading, bad investments, insane payouts to bosses, mis-selling yes, but I'm willing to bet we've never seen ineptitude (or criminality) on this level.

cyclical

It's been a long time coming

I've been watching this one for a while, and other interesting tidbits to come out over the last few days;

* A guy claiming to have interviewed for a website UI position with them says that MtGOX up until recently had no development environment at all - all changes were made to the live site

* A large sum of coins directly owned by MtGox have not moved since some time in 2011, yet are have been claimed to be 'hacked', 'lost' or 'inaccessible', opening up the possibility that this isn't a complete theft (although some level of theft is also probable), but involves losing the keys to the virtual safe in a stunning display of further ineptitude.

I wonder if they can go back to trading Magic the Gathering: Online cards after this...

MtGox has VANISHED. So where have all the Bitcoins gone?

cyclical

Re: And yet we're still to believe...

My understanding the the 'hack' relied on the fact that MtGOX had a number of automated scripts for resending failed transactions, and for transferring money from their cold storage wallet to their internet attached wallet, and absolutely no internal audit procedures to check balances. It's like someone asking their bank for £100, then phoning someone at the branch, saying 'I didn't get my money' using a different funny accent each time, and the bank gives them another £100 because there are no checks in place and it SOUNDS like a different person - repeat over several years until the vaults are bare.

Absolutely smacks of bad internal procedures, no consulting with beancounters, and s**tty coding practice. One would hope that at least one or two of the other exchanges would have more competence that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange.

Not that it makes bitcoin any less of a electricity wasting global ponzi scheme.

Reports pump fuel into iCar gossip: Apple in 'talks' with Tesla

cyclical

In an ideal world...

I can see an iCar working if they are willing to throw some of their stacks of surplus cash at it and take some risks. The Tesla is a niche product, but so were mp3 players back in the day - if someone can bring it to the mainstream and throw in some innovation, it will be a hell of a lot better than the current market of poorly thought out ugly 'hybrids' and massively expensive, sometimes on fire electric cars.

Bitcoin blasts past $1,000 AGAIN after Zynga accepts cryptocurrency

cyclical

'Backed by maths' - not really, backed by a large network of nerds running custom hardware and graphics cards consuming (and wasting) vast amounts of electricity, validated by a 13Gb blockchain you have to download before dealing with bitcoins, exchanged by unregulated, mostly unqualified and definitely insecure online exchanges, easily stolen or lost, massively volatile, unscaleable and with a price propped up primarily between people with large amounts of sunk costs, and speculators.

(most of those points are arguable to a certain extent, but noone can argue against volatility and the massive amount of exchanges that have closed or had their bitcoins 'stolen')

Can you trust accounting software numbers?

cyclical

Ditto on raising the issue with the vendor. I once (many years ago) used a very popular bit of accounting software that was written for the US market for my business in europe - it supported multiple currencies, but there were a couple of reports where '$' was hard coded. There isn't any software on the planet that doesn't have bugs, so don't act so surprised - it sounds like they are (erroneously) rounding some numbers too early in the calculation.

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