* Posts by SW10

230 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2013

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We checked and yup, it's no longer 2001. And yet you can pwn a Windows box via Notepad.exe

SW10
Devil

Confidence

"It turns out it was possible to reach across sessions and violate NT security boundaries for nearly twenty years, and nobody noticed."

That’s what you think...

If at first you don't succeed, Fold? Nope. Samsung redesigns bendy screen for fresh launch in September

SW10
Joke

Re: Incremental improvements.

If my manufacturing experience is anything to go by (Lego, since you ask) reinforcing one set of weak points in a dodgy design simply brings others to the fore.

Cloudflare comes clean on crashing a chunk of the web: How small errors and one tiny bit of code led to a huge mess

SW10

Yeah, paper’s great.

It’s that transition to ASCII characters that always screws me up.

Literally rings our bell: Scottish eggheads snap quantum entanglement for the first time

SW10

Re: No it's three dimensional

I’d have to assume you’re posting under the AC moniker because you’re doing some breakthrough research in this area and you’re not ready to reveal your hand just yet.

In telling us to “read up”, could you suggest some titles from your bibliography and/or references?

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

SW10

It’s not my sector, but AIUI that would be a tacit admission that it’s not actually a 737 but a new model of aircraft.

Pilots would then have to be trained on the new plane and its behaviour, at a significant cost to airlines in terms of cash and pilot availability.

It may even be that 737 MAX has “inherited” some certs from its “predecessors” (same airframe?) and I don’t know what would happen if the aircraft suddenly became, I don’t know, the 797.

It's 50 years to the day since Apollo 10 blasted off: America's lunar landing 'dress rehearsal'

SW10
Alien

Re: Species angst

...and this one shows how it's done today:

https://xkcd.com/2148/

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

SW10

Re: a Rubix phone

it brings to mind the maps with their folds wrongly folded

Reminds me of the old adage that says:

“There’s only one way to fold a map: Wrongly.”

Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data

SW10

It’s a rotten corporate culture

It can’t be the work of a single ‘maverick’

Someone had the idea, someone else said it was a good idea, another person then approved it without worrying about their boss’s reaction.

Then someone was asked to implement it, and got that signed off and was able to get resources allocated from elsewhere. At no point did anyone think that they should flag or even stop it.

Then the third parties pushed it out and the data started to flow in. Nobody thought that was odd. People were asked to analyse data and write algorithms and produce charts and slide decks. No one paused for thought.

I mean, WTFIGO?

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

SW10

Re: "Apple sees nothing from second-hand trade."

It also keeps people in the ecosystem, buying from the App Store, paying for iCloud, having a reason to stick to Mac OS...

Apple Services is a big line for Cupertino’s Counting Dept.

Moreover, when the punter goes to buy their next phone, they’re mentally discounting what they imagine will be the resale value from the price of the phone they’re buying.

Boeing 737 pilots battled confused safety system that plunged aircraft to their deaths – black box

SW10

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

Looks like your aircraft is stalling. Would you like some help?

[ Yes ] [Cancel]

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

SW10

Re: Unpaid walking advert for someone else's company

“boxes of handbags from Birkin et al.”

Hermès.

Birkin (named after Jane) is a Hermès bag.

Yes I, er...

I er, know a bit about this stuff...

Want to know what an organisation is really like? Visit the restroom

SW10
Alert

Signage

I remember one (government) building that had

DANGER: High signs

on the mirror just above the taps.

It was days before I looked high enough to the top of the wall-to-ceiling mirrors to see the more usual Hot water warning.

It's World (Terrible) Password (Advice) Day!

SW10
Mushroom

Re: What about paper?

This.

Knowing and protecting the password/access-rights to that email account is really really important

I work with a lot of millennials and often tell them that if I get hold of their email password I can control their lives.

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

SW10
Joke

Re: We all recognise HP there...

Intriguingly, the BOFH seems to have switched search engines:

I enter that >tappity< and then >Bing<

Dropbox to let Google reach inside it and rummage about

SW10

Followed by...

Followed by: “Google buys Dropbox”

Then followed by: “Google kills Dropbox”

A certain millennial turned 30 recently: Welcome to middle age, Microsoft Excel v2

SW10

Re: But... (there WAS a flight sim)

If I recall, Excel had a flight simulator tucked away inside it...

Lenovo spits out retro ThinkPads for iconic laptop's 25th birthday

SW10
Happy

Happy days

I was issued a Thinkpad along with a Blackberry and a Nokia 6110i., thus becoming one of the ultimate work-anywhere road warriors.

Have we made progress since?

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

SW10
WTF?

Re: Well, electric cars are much simpler...

Am I the only one thinking

"C5"?

Mobile industry begrudgingly accepts impacts of Apple, Google et al

SW10
FAIL

Do one thing well

Mobile providers need to focus on pumping 1s and 0s through the air as far as possible, as quickly as possible and as densely as possible.

Consumers will decide how they would like to use those 1s and 0s and device manufacturers will tempt the consumers with a range of conduits for doing so.

Whinging about Apple, Facebook and Google is a bit like electricity utilities moaning that many white goods are manufactured by Samsung, Haier and Whirlpool.

Five ways Apple can fix the iPhone, but won't

SW10
Megaphone

Groups and Rooms

Groups and Rooms (yeah, sorry. This comes from Windows Phone 8.)

You don't know how great it is until you've used it. You don't know how useful it was until you don't have it any more.

And I think even Microsoft killed it off...

"Windows Phone 8 Groups allow you to join contacts together so you can more easily follow their social networking status updates, plus easily text, email, or IM a group at once."

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/smartphones/manage-your-windows-phone-8-contacts-with-groups-and-rooms/

Stuff the movement of celestial spheres, let's sit down and watch Bonnie Tyler on TV

SW10
FAIL

Re: Sheer Heart attack

I was on the operating table for a particularly, ahem, delicate operation to ensure the family size remained stable.

The staff had thoughtfully put on some very middle-of-the-road music to take my mind of things, which was great right up to the point where Cat Stevens sang "the first cut is the deepest..."

NYPD head of IT doubles down on Windows smartphone idiocy

SW10
Coat

Body politic

It's also on Ms Tisch's head. NYPD sources have already laid the blame at her feet

Fingered by cops fed up to the back teeth who would give an arm and a leg if they could hand responsibility for watching their back to a different body with more spine and less cheek than this bum.

She's arrived! HMS Queen Lizzie enters Portsmouth Naval Base

SW10

Re: One ship, not two

We bought two ships...

No, you've bought one operational ship for the price of two.

The Royal Navy already know they will only get 50% uptime from their new toy; and that's before it's encountered the real world...

Lordy! Trump admits there are no tapes of his chats with Comey

SW10
Black Helicopters

Clearly a lawyer...

...couldn't even express it in one tweet.

Just so we're all clear on this: Russia hacked the French elections, US Republicans and Dems

SW10
Black Helicopters

There's a May mystery

US Democrats hacked, Macron hacked; scary times for those whose aims and policies are not aligned with Russia's.

Strange that nothing's happened to May. Oh, wait...

iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war

SW10
Coat

Re: Apple Corp predates Apple Computers

Apple Computers made a deal with Apple Records to NEVER get involved in music.

... and supposedly that 'bink' sound made nearly all Apple computers was named Sosumi by Jobs for that reason:

"So, sue me."

Dr Hannah Fry: We need to be wary of algorithms behind closed doors

SW10
Mushroom

It's exceptional when the exceptions prove the exception.

these biases and unintended consequences that can end up having a damaging effect

Modelling the generic case is straightforward; it's the exceptions that cause the heartache. Truth is of course, there are many more exceptions than you ever realize...

The world's leading privacy pros talk GDPR with El Reg

SW10
Megaphone

"Great Repeal Bill"

once Blighty departs from the EU's jurisdiction, we will need “a piece of legislation that mirrors GDPR carefully, so as to leverage the fact that GDPR was already put in place...”

No we won't.

That's exactly the intention of the misleadingly-named "Great Repeal Bill", which will transpose EU law into domestic law on exit day. In other words, GDPR (and all other EU law) will stand until the UK Parliament decides it needs to be changed.

BT agrees to legal separation of Openreach

SW10

That was just the current management undoing their predecessor's idiocy of losing their original place in the mobile market.

It's easy to forget how disastrous things looked back then; BT had monstrous debt following the mobile auctions and its peak valuation was just prior to the dotcom crash. Creating and divesting mmO2 was to essential to keep things afloat.

You could argue it worked - shares were worth a shade under 83p when mmO2 was spun off and Telefonica later bought it for £2. By comparison, Vodafone's price was (about) 220p when mmO2 was spun off and (about) 175p in Oct 2005 when Telefonica's buy-out was agreed.

SW10
Go

Re: legally separated. means EVERYTHING

Legally separated means everything—this is just an intermediate step and the market will love it.

The value of each organization will become clearer for the market over time and within 2-3 years BT will spin Openreach off. In the current environment, pension funds are desperate to get their hands on anything that churns out stable dividends, and Openreach will be just that.

El Reg drills into chatbot hype: The AIs that want to be your web butlers

SW10
Stop

Re: Two Ronnies

A chatbot designed on one side of the Atlantic won't behave naturally on the other.

How do you get a US bot to understand that "Mm, yeah, good idea" means "there's no way I'm doing that" or that "interesting..." means "I really want to be somewhere else."

WINNER! Crush your loved ones at Connect Four this Christmas

SW10
Coffee/keyboard

Re: My lottery strategy

It is estimated that in each draw, 10,000 people choose the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/17/national-lottery-numbers-20-years-katie-price-win-jackpot

Sorry...

TalkTalk hacker gets iPhone taken away by Norwich Youth Court

SW10
Trollface

Re: iPhone...DENIED

Has anyone confiscated Dido Harding's iPhone?

LeEco Le Pro 3: Low-cost, high-spec Droid takes on the big boys with a big fat batt

SW10
WTF?

Inch perfect

the...rear camera does stand out a few millimeters from the casing.

On the basis that 'a few' is more than 'a couple', that's more than surprising.

Or did the El Reg standards Soviet redefined the millimetre while I wasn't looking?

Hacker dishes advanced phishing kit to hook clever staff in 10 mins

SW10

Re: I don't understand

KiwiCon is now AllBlack-hat Con

FTFY...

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

SW10

because I am viscerally terrified that, somehow, he will force his space-indenting ways on me.

The terror is surely that he will force his space-indenting ways on others, leaving you outnumbered and outvoted once the companywide space-or-tab standards policy is put forward for debate.

Nokia crawls towards comeback with new phones announcement

SW10
Pint

Re: "An early Nokia Lumia"

hopefully they don't auto update to WP10.

I seem to have that inadvertently covered. My 3-year old Lumia is stuffed full of photos and doesn't have room for any software updates.

The screen is cracked, the QI charging cover is held on with Blu-Tak and in another 5 years it might just start knocking into 6110i territory...

Can Facebook influence an election result?

SW10

Re: Do the math(s)

The young vote to the left.

I think you're answering a different question.

That's hardly a new concept.

Not at all.

SW10
Holmes

Do the math(s)

Millennials are more likely to vote Clinton:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/540686/choice-of-millennials-between-electing-trump-or-clinton-in-2016-us-presidential-election/

Millennials are more likely to use Facebook:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187041/us-user-age-distribution-on-facebook/

Couple with that the fact that the button could be rolled out geographically in certain states...

(Disclaimer: I am no more than interested observer and have no voting rights in the US election.)

The next Bond – Basildon or Bass-Ass? YOU decide

SW10
FAIL

Re: Where is this poll of which you speak?

First test failed—this is not a poll for Bond but a capability assessment to find the next Q...

Google plots cop detection for auto autos

SW10
Stop

Loop until... Loop until...

What happens when the Google mobile is obediently waiting at a red stop light with an emergency vehicle straining to push past?

Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond

SW10

Here are some outliers...

...just to get you started

Vinny Jones—for the harder edge

Boris Johnson—for the Brexit zeitgeist

James Nesbitt—for the Celtic touch

Renée Zellweger—for the American with a more than passable 'British' accent

O2: Float or flog. What's it going to be, Telefonica?

SW10

Here come the groundhogs

A once national telecoms provider decides to divest itself of its mobile arm in order to reduce debt.

They should float it off into a holding company with a whacky-but-instantly-memorable name.

I think mmO2 sounds terrific.

NHS advertises for digital director at £131k

SW10
Thumb Down

Grab-bag

OK, what do we have from the recruiter's grab-bag of magic words?

experienced - check

senior - check

leader - check

values - check

passionate - check ("I can’t wait to shag a digital")

needs - check

ensure - check

effective and efficient - check

Trick question: Which of these words could not be applied to any other job ad?

Lester Haines: RIP

SW10
Unhappy

Pipes, commandeered kids and Spanish bar-flies...

...that's the way to advance science.

My condolences to the kids and their mother. I'm sure they have extraordinary memories and I encourage them to wallow in the best ones.

I am wiser for much of what he wrote.

12 years of US Air Force complaints lost in database crash

SW10
WTF?

Wait..

The whole of "the Automated Case Tracking System [which] had data dating back to 2004 on complaints, investigations, appeals, and freedom of information requests, covering everything from waste and fraud to sexual harassment" was on one single disk/tape/floppy/punchcard?

All of it?

So presumably at every point during the last 12 years that someone in Lockheed Martin said:

"Hey, why not have a backup? Or RAID? Or printout?" they ran off to check with the in-house lawyers who replied:

"Nah. Nothing in the contract about that. Just leave it as it is..."

Lockheed Martin notified the Air Force after it spent two weeks trying to recover the information.

You can just imagine how much perspiration dripped into that keyboard...

'Massive great big' vulture goes AWOL in Somerset

SW10
FAIL

"massive great big"

Surely you're not quoting from the proper press release. No-one in the West Country would say "massive great big" vulture.

It's a "massive gurt" vulture.

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

SW10
Go

Re: There is *something* somewhere ...

The marketeers have just called. Can we have a range?

Maybe start at black plastic functional and go right through to bejewelled precious-metal status symbols?

US 5th graders have a pop at paper plane record

SW10
Headmaster

Re: LOHAN?

Interestingly, Spring Grove Elementary appears to be planning a "Project Blackbird" balloon/drone launch from Spaceport America.

The only sensible solution is to launch a hostile takeover of Spring Grove Elementary.

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