* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3264 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

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Width

Not only did the El Reg gurus give us threading comments, they also gave us comments with more wifth Thank you!

Any chance we could have a bit more width for article text too?

Yes, yes, I know I'm greedy.

Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary

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Stop

Cancelling Flights

A couple of commentards have suggested cancelling the flights. I suspect that might come under the category of "Fraud".

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Flame

Re: It'll never happen...

I seem to recall onetime one of the budget airlines would charge you for correcting a spelling mistake on your name - even if they made the mistake themselves.

You have to remember that the business model of these companies is to sell the bare minimum product at a rock bottom price and them hit you for any extras. Correcting mistakes is an extra....

New Horizons snaps finish buffering: Ultima Thule actually two dust bunnies that got snuggly 4.5 billion years ago

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Pint

Heck I love science & technology. Beers all round.

Dixons Carphone smarting from £440m loss as it writes down goodwill on mobile biz

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Re: Times change

Before internet shopping really took off, someone once told me that Argos had one of the best customer satisfaction ratings on the high street as they didn't have any high pressure sales staff.

Remember Misco? Staff win protective award at employment tribunal

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Re: Taxpayer?

Companies House don't give a damn

There was an interview with one of the journalists from Private Eye recently. He said that all Companies House have the resources to do is to record information. They don't have the capacity to check anything anyone submits. And if they're told there's something wrong, there's no resource to take action to get it corrected.

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During normal operations, I can understand the need for the 45 day consultation, but if the business is in administration, what's the point? There's no money to pay the employees for the 45 days.

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

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More detail

Was this software administered by O2 or Ericsson? 'Cause one of them needs a huge slap for missing that deadline.

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

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Unhappy

Re: Have to agree....

My phone has a headphone socket.

I have an iPhone 8 and I miss that headphone socket as I don't always have the same headphones with me and the adapter is never with the headphones I currently have.

Shall we have AI judging UK court cases? Top beak ponders the future

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Re: Henry VI, Part 2!

Conveyancing is another area ripe for automation

The whole house buying process in the UK needs ripping up and starting again. It's absurdly bureaucratic.

Pulses quicken at NASA as SpaceX gets closer to crewed launches and Russia readies the next Soyuz

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Mushroom

Elon & Drugs

If Elon (or anyone else at Space-X) were filmed sitting in the control room at Space-X drinking Whiskey and smoking pot, I could understand NASA taking a look at the culture at SpaceX. But as Elon was off-the-clock, doing something legal, what's the problem?

After all, it's not like anyone at NASA would ever take a drugs in the control rooms, it is?

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

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Re: Well, who'd have thought it?

no one thought further than the vote

I think that's being generous. I'm not sure anyone actually understood what "Vote To Leave The EU" actually meant.

Groundhog Day comes early as Intel Display Drivers give Windows 10 the silent treatment

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@Bowlers Re: Can Microsoft Windows Systems Supply Future Greater Service .... or Not?

This must be your first time encountering amanfrommars1

He/She/It is a legend around here.

PS - Welcome to the club.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

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Re: How are these supposed to save energy

The theory is that by seeing how much energy you're using, you'll realize how much energy each appliance uses and will either minimize its use or buy a more energy efficient model.

In practice, people will go "Meh" after five minutes and never look at their smart meter again.

A 5G day may come when the courage of cable and DSL fails ... but it is not this day

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Points to consider

* It may be possible to achieve 20,30 or 40Mb/s over 5G. But it that for all users covered by that cell at once, or just one lucky punter?

* "The average consumer uses 8GB a month". That may be the case on 4G data, but on home broadband (which they're saying 5G can replace) my kids are currently eating 200GB a month on Netflix, Youtube, Snapchat, Facebook, et al. That doesn't include my or my partner's use for work.

* Indoor coverage is getting more important. The problem is that the carriers don't see that as their problem and expect you to pay for your own indoor solution. For an average building, we're seeing quotes of £250k for setup fees. (This is a proper in build solution, not the mickey mouse femto boxes the carriers fob their consumers off with which barely work in corporate environments).

In the past, WiFi was used as a fill-in for 3G. I think that's going to flip now: 4G (&5G) will be the fill in for WiFi.

Washington Post offers invalid cookie consent under EU rules – ICO

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A certain group of UK Newspapers all use the same content platform (How can you tell? All the websites look exactly the same)

When you first visit the site, it invites you to accept their cookies or to manage them. If you select the manage option, you have to untick over 200 tick boxes to switch off all the tracking they've opted into. They deliberately do not have a "Select All" option, just to help persuade you to accept their tracking cookies.

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All that the WP has to do is not offer the $6 subscription option to anyone in the EU.

Want to hack a hole-in-the-wall cash machine for free dosh? It's as easy as Windows XP

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Re: Physical access is quite easy

Amazing what a Hi-Vis vest can do.

There are numerous studies about how if you look like you know what you're doing you're very unlikely to be challenged. Milgram is a good (and scary!) starting point on this.

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

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Re: A paranoid mount option ?

The problem is that some of these attacks are happening within the driver layers of the operating system. A paranoid "Read-only" filesystem mount is too late.

Just a little heads up: Google is still trying to convince everyone that web apps don't suck

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Security...

The File System API, also known as the Writable Files API, which provides web apps with greater access to the native file system.

I can see no future security issues here with apps from a remote server accessing my local filesystem. Nope, none at all....

SMBs: We don't want to spoil all of this article, but have you patched, taken away admin rights, made backups yet?

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The problem with SMBs is in the name: Small. They employ just a handful of people, none of which are employed solely to do IT. You'll probably find the person who does IT is the one who is the least hating of IT.

In the ivory towers of professional IT, we can mock all we want. But is it the fault of the SMBs in not taking IT seriously, or the IT market of making things just too darn complicated?

Dollar for dollar, crafting cryptocurrency sucks up 'more energy' than mining gold, copper, etc

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Why go out and get your hands dirty when you can sit at home at watch Netflix, etc.?

GitHub lost a network link for 43 seconds, went TITSUP for a day

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Joke

Re: Wasn't Split Brain solved 30 years ago?

But hipsters don't need any of your ancient magic. Cloud, DevOps, NoSQL DBs, etc are where it's at.

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Re: Better for democracy

I think you forgot the sarcasm tags...

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Re: Database replication is hard

Database replication is hard.

FTFY.

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Holmes

No s*** Sherlock

The brief outage ... caused problems in the organisation's complex MySQL replication architecture

If you have to define a system as "Complex", you can guarantee that when it goes wrong, it will go wrong in a manner that will take a long time to clean up afterwards.

I know you're operating at scale, but Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple is the only way you stand of keeping big things like this running.

Belgium: Oi, Brits, explain why Belgacom hack IPs pointed at you and your GCHQ

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Really?

Three of those addresses were owned by a British company, indicating that the spy software manager is in Great Britain

Are you sure? Isn't there a chance that these British companies are just fronts for the real hackers. Which means those in control don't have to be British.

Xiaomi waggles Mi MIX 3, the first smartphone packing 10GB RAM

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Re: And you thought...

Many years ago, I remember drooling over a 1GB HDD. (This was a full-height 5.25" HDD!)

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

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Dogfood

MS need to dogfood their own product. They should be rolling out the updates across their entire infrastructure before letting them loose on the wider world. Imagine the s**t storm if Nadella walked into the dev team's building and said: "The latest update just deleted all my data"

I heard a story about an email server product (now sadly passed away). The users kept on complaining that when they did certain maintenance tasks, the mailstore would get corrupted. In the end the product manager made the maintenance tasks run on the devs mailboxes every few days. The reliability went through the roof.

'The inmates have taken over the asylum': DNS godfather blasts DNS over HTTPS adoption

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Re: Who needs DNS anyway?

And what about one IP address hosting multiple websites? If this wasn't an issue, SNI wouldn't have been invented.

Yale Weds: Just some system maintenance, nothing to worry about. Yale Thurs: Nobody's smart alarm app works

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Joke

I think he's suffering from priority inversion...

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Lock contention?

Super Micro China super spy chip super scandal: US Homeland Security, UK spies back Amazon, Apple denials

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Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary proof.

Manchester nuisance-call biz fined £150k after ignoring opt-out list

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Re: ICO information in reports

Why do they not include the phone numbers used by the offending business?

Because they could be withholding their CLI or sending fake CLI data.

'This is insane!' FCC commissioner tears into colleagues over failure to stop robocalls

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Re: I think a lot (if not most) of these calls are from VOIP

You don't need VoIP to trivially spoof caller IDs: Just a connection to a compliant telco. You can get them from UK telcos, but I suspect there are foreign telcos who ask fewer questions...

Who's hacking into UK unis? Spies, research-nickers... or rival gamers living in res hall?

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Timing

Could it be that attacking a Uni during term is likely to cause more disruption (i.e. effect) to a Uni than if you do it out of term.

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

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@Steve Davies 3 Re: Don't let the namby-pambys run the Kernel, Linus!

He could still do the telling off but in private rather than on the kernel mailing list.

Even if he does that, he still needs to do it in a less aggressive manner. Bullying in private is still bullying.

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Re: Don't let the namby-pambys run the Kernel, Linus!

I don't think the argument is that Linux needs to stop telling people off: It's that he needs to do it in a less aggressive/abusive/bullying manner. I can't think of any environment where being so abusive to your subordinates is allowed.

Brit armed forces still don't have enough techies, thunder MPs

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It's an interesting situation which has also been written about in regards to the US forces. Main point is that those who are good at 'cyber' roles, are probably unlikely to be good at doing it for the military.

In our organization, I'd guess over 50% of the IT staff are "on the spectrum". There's no way they'd last in the military.

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Rigid Hierachy

When I was a youngster I was in the Air Cadets and I was looking to being a pilot as a profession. As I spent more time in the Air Cadets, I realized that I didn't like blindingly taking orders from complete idiots just because they were "senior" to me so I never went anywhere with a rigid hierarchy.

I'm lucky that I've had jobs where my bosses encourage me to question them. The outcome is that one of us learns something which allows us to make better decisions.

PPI pushers now need consent to cold-call you

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@aks - Personal Privacy

Invoking "personal privacy" is complete nonsense. They're an organisation, not an individual

Maybe you're thinking of the wrong end of the call. Maybe the person at the receiving end doesn't want anyone else to know that they're in contact with medical, law enforcement, etc?

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@aks

At our place we have a policy that people can either show their individual CLI or the switchboard's number on outbound calls. When people ask why can't they just withhold their CLI entirely, we ask: "What are you doing that you don't want the recipient of your call to know our organisation is calling them?"

make all relocate... Linux kernel dev summit shifts to Scotland – to fit Torvald's holiday plans

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He's happy to abandon his family to go talk kernels?

When I was in my early twenties. I was happy to work far too many hours over far too many days. Now, a tiny fraction wiser, I value my time with my family & doing my hobbies. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy my job, I just realized there's more to life.

Google skewered in ad sting after Oracle-backed bods turn troll

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Re: When you actively go looking for mistakes,....

it's easy to find somebody doing something wrong

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

(Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu but Wikiquotes says this is disputed)

Archive.org's Wayback Machine is legit legal evidence, US appeals court judges rule

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Even DNA tests aren't foolproof and have a certain percentage of accuracy (or chance of mismatch)

The problem is that many people either ignore the error figures, or fail to understand them. Unfortunately, the problem is even worse for fingerprints.

You can buy Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins' mansion for a cool $13m

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Coat

House in California

Pros: Nice climate.

Cons: President Trump.

A decade on, Apple and Google's 30% app store cut looks pretty cheesy

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You have to remember that the 30% of paid for content also covers the cost of Apple/Google distributing free content.

Don't let Google dox me on Lumen Database, nameless man begs

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@Wensleydale Cheese Re: Deed poll to the rescue

I wonder why? My partner has reverted back to her maiden name after divorcing her ex. How's that different?

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Re: Deed poll to the rescue

But somewhere along the line, he'll need to tell Google what name to keep out of their database.

Juniper prepping for a 400 Gbps Ethernet world

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Speed

My random musing is: How do you make the chips that can operate at 400GHz (and over) to drive the optics?