* Posts by phuzz

6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010

RIP ROP: Intel's cunning plot to kill stack-hopping exploits at CPU level

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Silver Bullet

All the technical measures in the world won't protect your OS if the malware can just get the user to click "run".

Not-so Secret Rulers of the World gather to talk cybersecurity, AI and, er, TalkTalk?

phuzz Silver badge
Alien

Re: In the meantime...

Did your "good authority" happen to dribble a bit and talk to walls by any chance?

Conspiracy theories aside, it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility that one of his relatives has attended, the Bin Ladens are a pretty well off Saudi family.

Hatches sealed on ISS pump-up space podule

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

Re: Spot the Russian

That's Yuri "smiling on the inside" Malenchenko to you ;)

DevOps is for all, says DevOps pundit-in-chief. He doesn't have it in for the BOFH, honest

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

I think you accidental cut off the end of one of those quotes, I think it should read:

"The mind boggles at what could happen if HMRC was as efficient at extracting cash from taxpayers as Amazon is at avoiding them."

FTFY

McDonald's says bigger fonts cooked up improved profits

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

When I go into McD's it's not because I want food, it's because I want filth.

A BurgerKing burger tastes like a really bad beefburger, a BigMac tastes like fast food, containing no organic matter whatsoever.

I don't often get the urge, but when I want fast food, I want something that tastes like it's never been near a living creature.

Shit, I'm hungry now :(

Oooooklahoma! Where the cops can stop and empty your bank cards – on just a hunch

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Guilty until...?

From the police spokeman's own words:

"We're gonna look for different factors in the way that you're acting," he said. "We're gonna look for if there's a difference in your story; if there's some way that we can prove that you're falsifying information to us about your business."

Not "the way that they're acting", but "the way that you're acting". And this is how they talk to the media.

It seems like the assumption of guilt is completely ingrained.

Get ready for Google's proprietary Android. It's coming – analyst

phuzz Silver badge

If you're installing Cyanogenmod, you already have to download the Google apps (Google Play, GMail, Maps etc.) separately, so I guess it'll more more of the same.

The commercial Cyaonogen OS will probably buy into GMS like any other manufacturer. Or they'll try and set up their own ecosystem which will almost certainly fail.

Dyfed-Powys Police fined for publicising pervs' particulars

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Why don't we have a register of all criminals?

Well, if you're convicted of a crime, you get a criminal record, but generally if you've been convicted and punished, then you've paid your debt to society.

EU referendum frenzy bazookas online voter registration. It's another #GovtDigiShambles

phuzz Silver badge

Re: I'd imagine it was two groups....

If you turn up at 21:59:59 then you get to vote, even if there's a queue and you can't physically get into your polling station until after 22:00.

It doesn't matter what time you turn up, a vote is still a vote.

phuzz Silver badge

This is one of those rare times when using a cloud based system that could spin up an extra bunch of servers on short notice would have been a good idea.

Marauding monkey blacks out Kenya

phuzz Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Huh?

There's a good background here. on how just a single problem in one part of the system puts so much stress on the surrounding parts that have to take up the load that it swiftly spreads and, well, takes down the electricity grid for millions of people.

The short version is that unless every part of the system can cope with that 3.5% change in load, then candle prices will rise.

Firefox 48 beta brings 'largest change ever' thanks to 'Electrolysis'

phuzz Silver badge

I do have flash installed (click to play only), but I'm sure Youtube has been playing HTML5 video for me for ages. Perhaps I opted into it at some point and then forgot.

Freeze, lastholes: USB-C and Thunderbolt are the ultimate physical ports

phuzz Silver badge

So, do these analysis firms every actually do anything useful, or is their sole business coming up with ridiculous and controversial reports in order to gain press coverage?

US military tests massive GPS jamming weapon over California

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

That's a great idea! I assume you've already thought of a way to stop it from affecting all of the legitimate aircraft flying in and out of the airfield?

European Patent Office blocks staff reading critical articles at work

phuzz Silver badge
Happy

"it might be The Reg that is next in line for censorship"

And if it's not, you're probably being too tame ;)

Letters prove GCHQ bends laws to spy at will. So what's the point of privacy safeguards?

phuzz Silver badge
WTF?

So if I understand you, we shouldn't bother tightening up existing rules, because they'll be ignored anyway, and if we did tighten them up then that would make them looser because, um, actually it was about there I lost you.

Dell finds liquid cooling tech on eBay, now wants you to buy it

phuzz Silver badge

It's surprising how much water you can get on a motherboard before it stops working.

Intel reveals Xeon E7 v4: Is that 24TB in your pocket or are... oh, it is

phuzz Silver badge

Do 128GB DIMMs exist? How much do they cost (an arm and a leg, or your firstborn)?

Microsoft thinks it's fixed Windows Server mess its last fix 'fixed'

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "let us know if the issues are indeed solved"

Does everyone else just get to close tickets when you think it's fixed then?

I have to wait for the customer to confirm that a fix works, and I assumed that's what MS were doing here. (Fortunately I'm not judged for the fact that I'm waiting on a customer to confirm that about twenty different tickets can be closed)

On her microphone's secret service: How spies, anyone can grab crypto keys from the air

phuzz Silver badge
Boffin

Tinfoil hats actually amplify the frequencies that the US military uses for mind control satellite communications.

Computerised stock management? Nah, let’s use walkie-talkies

phuzz Silver badge

Re: 9 1/2 shoes

I have the opposite; long, narrow feet, and it's just as much of a pain to find shoes that fit right. A normal sized shoe will have my toes jammed up at the end, whilst my foot is free to slide from side to side.

BOFH: What's your point, caller?

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

Re: Gaffa tape

I'm sure the BOFH has a few rolls of duct tape around, and that they might well be used to hold the battery securely...somewhere.

Would YOU start a fire? TRAPPED in a new-build server farm

phuzz Silver badge
Unhappy

I can imagine that being trapped in a building with no access to a loo would be pretty bad, because at some point you're going to have to pick which corner to wee in.

However, at least in an office you might have the relative luxury of a bin or pot plant, in a data hall you're going to have to pick a spot that won't end up with you getting an electric shock in a very painful part of the body.

Winston Churchill glowers from Blighty's plastic fiver

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Time to coin it.

£5 will still buy you 500 penny sweets, is there any other measure of buying power that matters?

Science Museum maths gallery to offer the perfect pint

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

And while you're there, try and find your way to the Flight gallery on the top floor where they have the actual Schneider Trophy, one of Frank Whittle's original jet engines, and Alcock and Brown's Vickers Vimy (that made the first non-stop transatlantic flight) among many other things, all seemingly hidden away in an attic.

Lenovo cries 'dump our support app' after 'critical' hole found

phuzz Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Uhh...

Pretty much ever computer now uses UEFI so there's no BIOS in the traditional sense, so no.

Also, AFAIK, no manufacturer has ever tried to store programs in either BIOS or EFI, so, still no.

I suspect you mean the recovery partition which is on the harddrive/SSD, and yes, that recovery image probably contains at least some of the crapware, but as other have pointed out, if you do a clean install you won't have that problem, and no, it can't automatically install software from the recovery partition.

Smartwatches: I hate to say ‘I told you so’. But I told you so.

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

"Give me a wearable that I didn't ever have to recharge, or only needed to recharge once a month, that cost under £20, and that gave reliable notifications of calls or messages received on my phone, and instantly gave me a zoomable map - and maybe then we're talking"

That's not really the most realistic request now is it?

But hey, if you find that magic infinite battery that never needs charging and costs less than £20, let me know, I might have a few uses for it.

Google is the EU Remain campaign's secret weapon

phuzz Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Must be copying the code

It's always fun watching people on both sides of every debate accuse the BBC of bias against whatever their preferred viewpoint is.

If they're pissing off both sides for opposite reasons then they're doing ok in my book ;)

Helium... No. Do you think this is some kind of game? Toshiba intros 8TB desktop drive

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Longevity

The whole point of the article is that these Toshiba drives don't use helium, so consequently, there's no bother about leakage.

Brexit? Cutting the old-school ties would do more for Brit tech world

phuzz Silver badge

I've always thought of myself as a European for what it's worth.

And what's all this about not making many rules but sticking to them? That's not the British way! We have many rules and laws, but there's a tacit understanding of whether they'll be enforced or not, which varies according to the time and place.

Or maybe that's just the impression I got from growing up in the countryside, where things like licensing hours for pubs were regarded more as a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule.

Norks' parade rocket fails to fly, again

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Parade rockets

To be fair I doubt anyone thinks it's a good idea to wheel a fully armed warhead through the streets. And as for showing off a weapons system that's not really operational, well, pretty much every arms company ever has done that (the F-35 has been being pimped out as a photo op since 2007 at least and it's not operational yet).

Rats revive phones-and-cancer scares

phuzz Silver badge

Given how we've gone from pretty much no-one having a mobile phone thirty years ago, to pretty much everyone having one by about ten years ago, if there is a link between mobile phones and cancer then we'd expect to see a massive uptick in the number of cancers across the entire population.

That no increase in cancer rates has been seen shows that there are no effects within ten years, and so if there are any cancers being caused, they must be taking a long time to form, because there's no sign of them yet.

Boring SpaceX lobs another sat into orbit without anything blowing up ... zzzzz

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

SpaceX are saying there'll be a 30% discount for flying on a second-hand booster.

Lets face it, that's 'only' $40M for a flight, they're practically giving it away!

Database admin banned from Oxford Street for upskirt filming

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

You're right, I think Oracle engineers deserve our sympathy more than our contempt.

Who am I kidding, they should bring back hanging!

NASA firms up Space Launch System nanosat manifest

phuzz Silver badge

Re: 20kg payload on a 90,000kg rocket to nowhere.

Actually, the US Congress just bumped the budget for SLS up by another $20M, so your total might be a little on the low side.

As someone who doesn't pay taxes in the US though, I'm all for the idea of bloody great rockets :)

In-flight movies via BYOD? Just what I always wan... argh no we’re all going to die!

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "The very fact that so much stuff in the digital age is bashed out poorly...

Muphry's law: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written"

(and yes, it's Muphry's law, not Murphy's)

HR botches redundancy so chap scores year-long paid holiday

phuzz Silver badge
Pint

Re: January 1st?

You know, in Scotland, the 2nd is a bank holiday as well.

ISS pump-up space podule refuses to engorge

phuzz Silver badge
Stop

Re: Sunlight

They do have a bunch of other jobs and experiments to be getting on with all the time, so it takes a bit of scheduling to find a time when there's an astro/cosmonaut free to supervise it.

Dropbox gets all up in your kernel with Project Infinite. Cue uproar

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I don't need dropbox to be a filesystem

If you're happy using scp/sftp, why even consider Dropbox? The whole point of Dropbox is making internet based file storage really easy to use, so people don't need to learn what rsync is, or have to set up their own file server.

You might as well complain that Cbeebies doesn't contain enough gritty realism for you.

Sweden decides Julian Assange™ 'remains detained in absentia'

phuzz Silver badge
Stop

Re: Time locked up

Actually, I'd take the Swedish prison please. You'd be allowed some time out of doors, even if it would just be shuffling round a yard. There'd be more interaction with other human beings, and most importantly, you would know the maximum time that you'd have to be in there for.

It's also worth noting that re-offending rates in Sweden are low, so they must be doing something right overall.

Hulk Hogan's sex tape, a Silicon Valley billionaire, and a $10m revenge plot to destroy Gawker

phuzz Silver badge

The click-bait sites just took what newspapers had been doing for decades and refined it slightly. Headlines are intended to draw you into reading the rest of the article, whether you do that by clicking on a link, or turning over a page.

Galileo satnav fleet grows an extra pair

phuzz Silver badge
Boffin

It's not just about competition. Gallileo is technically very similar to GPS (and GLONASS and BeiDou), to it's entirely feasible for one device to use all the satellites it can 'see' for navigation, regardless of which network they're part of.

This means that if you're (eg) in a deep valley, there's more likely to be enough satellites to calculate your position, and the more satellites you're using, the more accurate the position will be.

Galileo satnav fleet waxes orbital

phuzz Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Hydrazine. Nasty stuff.

Pretty much every possible choice of fuel for a rocket is generally unpleasant to be around at best because it takes a lot of energy to lob a satellite into orbit, and all that energy has to be locked up in the fuel somehow.

The reason the SupeDraco thrusters use hypergolic propellants (not hydrazine) is so they don't need to have an igniter, the fuels will spontaneously ignite as soon as they mix. This also means they can be restarted, and fired multiple times.

If you think that lighting a rocket sounds easy, here's some actual rocket scientists explaining some of the difficulties.

India launches hypersonic space shuttle precursor

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Good to see the British tax payers money at work...

Read the preceding comments, we're not.

BBC's Britflix likely dead before the ink has even dried on the news

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

Re: re: Government representation on the board

"Could do with fixing the liberal bias too"

In case you'd never noticed, those on the left think the BBC has an unacceptable right-wing and pro-government bias.

UK digital minister denies legal right to 10Mbps is 'damp squib'

phuzz Silver badge

Re: 10 Mbit universal right - Nutter

Is it considered a great hardship to live without any of those things?

I grew up in a village with none of them (except the pub was a ten minute walk away, across some fields, and you can get anything delivered to anywhere in the mainland UK pretty much).

There's plenty of small villages that also have none of these things, but crucially, everyone living there has access to a car, and once you have a car, you can drive to the nearest town to get food, education, public services etc. Otherwise, it's possible to get most things delivered now.

This is what rural life is like, and really, it's not that much of a hardship.

That said, 1MB ADSL would be a nice upgrade for the part of the world I grew up in.

White hats bake TeslaCrypt master key into universal decryptor

phuzz Silver badge
Pirate

Or whoever was running has got a proper job now and doesn't want the risk of running a malware campaign.

I guess replying to all the emails and key requests must have been quite a lot of effort too, it turns out crime is actually a fully time job that doesn't really pay that well.

Inside Project Loon – Google's megaplan to build a global internet

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Helium

It's not impossible to extract helium from the air, just very inefficient.

Exeter Uni (for example) have their own gas liquefying plant out the back of the physics department, in order to produce the liquid helium and nitrogen for their MRI machines. Of course, this produces much, much more liquid nitrogen than anything else, so there was always a ready supply for student high-jinks :)

Vostochny cosmodrome caught on Soyuz rocketcam

phuzz Silver badge
Alert

Re: So, what's with the rumors of money disappearing down the drain for this?

Well, four people have been arrested over alleged corruption, so I wouldn't call it rumours, I'd call it an ongoing investigation.

(Link to Russia Today to avoid claims of anti-Russian bias)

phuzz Silver badge
Flame

Huh, looks like the Russians are suffering from the same bug in MechJeb that I have, where the spacecraft rolls rapidly right after liftoff.