* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

Page:

ESET uncovers vulnerabilities in Lenovo laptops

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bitlocker?

Oopsie, I forgot the footnote

[*} PIN Number - To trigger certain people :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Bitlocker?

"using a TPM-aware full-disk encryption solution capable of making disk data inaccessible if the UEFI Secure Boot configuration changes."

When working on some customer laptops, if I make changes to the BIOS config, eg disable Secure Boot so I run external diagnostics, Bitlocker has a hissy fit and requires a recovery key entry instead of just the PIN Number[*}. Of course, I put the config back to the original settings after I'm done, and Bitlocker is happy again. So I'm wondering if changes made to the UEFI settings will also trigger Bitlocker. I would assume other disk encryption will be equally paranoid about hardware or firmware config changes.

Funky Pigeon pauses all orders after 'security incident'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Funky Pigeon?

Hipsters with beards, fresh out of university, still running in "student mode".

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If data is public, then I see no problem."

Clearview.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: site stupidity.

"Seriously, it's like posting your nude pictures publicly and expecting that pervs shouldn't be able to see them, only good-looking, educated and wealthy bachelors please! It's either terminally naive or extremely disingenuous:"

On the other hand, collecting every face you can find on the web and then using them as the basis of a facial recognition database isn't on. According to most commentards here anyway, whenever ClearView gets mentioned.

It's not just about scraping publicly accessible data, it's about doing it on an industrial scale and what it's then used for that counts. However, drawing a line which must not be crossed will be an immensely difficult task.

AI models to detect how you're feeling in sales calls

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How can someone in sales not know?

"I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of calls are like this."

I think I read somewhere that at best, 2% of cold calls result in any positive outcome. Positive outcome doesn't necessarily mean a sale and this relates to legit calls only, no using of TPS/Do Not Call numbers.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What a _real_ AI would do.

"John, I'm not sure regular folks would employ their own AI software"

I was thinking along the lines of commercial customers on the receiving end of sales calls. That's what I felt the article was driving at. High value sales.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What a _real_ AI would do.

I was think along different lines based on the same quoted part of the article. *IF* it works, which is doubtful, not only will it help separate the best salespeople from the rest, it'll help separate the good products from the bad if the bullshitting salesperson can be called out on his/her AI emotional analysts. After all, there's no reason why the customer won't have their own AI software at their end too. :-)

Which raises an interesting point. How would that section of the article have read if the author had wrote it from the point of view of the potential customer using it to separate the wheat from the chaff?

An early crack at network management with an unfortunate logfile

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A perfectly natural mistake …

I remember that. I must've got the original imported or UK version because I remember giggling at the word (I was still at school then, probably 12 or 13 years old)

Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Content moderation

It's not as if we've not already seen many examples of what happens on unmoderated "social media". The trolls, morons and extremists rapidly take over. The moderate majority simply don't want to deal with the shit and leave.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"When someone with a big pulpit starts making overtures directly to shareholders, there's a reasonable chance that a significant number of them will go for it despite its being underpriced. When that happens, the 40% or whatever who wanted to hold out - are screwed. They have no recourse but to go along with it, whether they like it or not."

You just described how Governments and Presidents are elected

"When that "someone" has a reality distortion field of Musk's calibre, the risk is much higher."

Trump (A card game reference :-)

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Virtual Friday BOFH

Still no sign of the column for this week. Is Dabbsy taking a week off? Is he still hung over from last weeks 10th anniversary celebrations? Have El Reg decided 10 years is long enough to suffer Dabbsys Drivel and sacked him?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Nah, the BOFH said they can do a serial port based firmware flash that takes hours to do because it usually fails 4 times out of 5 and is slower anyway, rather than the quicker network port based flash because now it's borked the port based flash is no longer an option.

RTFA, as they sometimes say around these here parts :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Virtual Friday BOFH

"But no, we brought BOFH forward for those who want to do other things in an Easter break other than check out IT news and the internet"

Are there other things to do? What other things?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Virtual Friday BOFH

Yeah, I just spent 10 minutes looking for Dabbsy's SFTW and was worried when it wasn't there! Hopefully that will turn up on "real Friday".

Threat group builds custom malware to attack industrial systems

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Meh

I do wish...

...that these TLAs and/or security companies would stop with the "cool" and "catchy" names they give to malware and the groups using them. What's wrong with "Nth Korean Wankers", "Russian BearShitters", and similar derogatory names for these criminal groups?

Infosys quits Russia, ending UK political and tax scandal … maybe

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Perfect timing

Of course they did. Labour, the party of the working calsses, made it an even more exclusive club, making sure the proles cannot join. Sounds like a very Tory idea to me :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Perfect timing

"2. Who says taxes are due in India? She is a UK resident, she is tax resident in the UK, and her status is "non-domiciled" - that doesn't mean she's an Indian tax resident. "Non-domiciled" is just a way of reducing a UK tax bill with a flimsy excuse, basically a hangover from the British empire that is still alive today."

Clearly you've not been reading or listening to the news recently or you'd know that being "non-dom" doesn't mean you don't pay taxes at all. You have to declare *where* you are domiciled for tax purposes. That makes it harder to avoid the taxes where you *are* domiciled. I don't agree with it, but I have bothered to listen to the reports of who the law works currently. And FWIW, Labour have been bleating about this for many, many years, but never did anything about it when they were in power for 13 years.

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Cut once

You still write cheques? How very last century! :-)

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Another dangerous megalomaniac throws a strop."

Unlike the others, he's not planning on sticking around long term. Once he's living on Mars, he'll have a lot less interest in Earthly goods and chattels :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sorry Elon, but what's the point ?

Second Life. Myspace. Friendster. Google+....

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sorry Elon, but what's the point ?

"On the one hand, Musk could start Mutter and fail to get enough users to make it viable."

I'm not sure the build fast, fail fast, learn, rebuild model works in this case :-)

Although to be fair, I'd much rather see a Twitter crash'n'burn rather than a Falcon or Starship.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Strewth !.... How much more evidence do you need fed to you?

Maybe someone with a lot of money has bought the source code to amanfromMars 1?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Money can't buy maturity

"That would be "cave emptor", I believe - Latin being very, very beholden to the endings of words (as any fule kno)."

I didn't kno that! Clearly I'm not a fule!! Oh, wait. You git! Now I know too!!!

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

LOL, the fact he tried to sell tells it all. He thought he was !investing! in something that would give a quick and high return. Clearly the other high bidders who he beat out at the original auction have come to their senses and are no longer interested :-)

Chromebook sales train derails as market reaches saturation

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Every kid in the developed world"

,,,or iPads. A significant number of UK schools and universities went with iPads in a "keyboard cover".

ESA: Fly me to the Moon, just not on a Russian rocket

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If the Ruskies want it...

"A manky, rusty old trampoline is probably better than most of the kit the Russians have now "

Isn't one of the US launch systems wondering where their next engines are coming from now thay can't buy from Russia? I'm all for beating on Russia, especially right now, but lets not forget they still have stuff.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Solo a space-mano

Governments can print money when they need more. That works in the short term, at least. And if they haven't already, Russia is very likely to default on its debts (again!). Also, the USA ran a human Moon landing program while fighting an expensive war in Vietnam.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The joys of Linux

If you're running a "large estate" you DON'T have users PC pulling updates direct from MS whenever they feel like it anyway.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The joys of Linux

Yeah, so rest have to suffer. The large paying customers have the option to use their own patch deployment servers and in the main do that, so can choose whatever patch schedule they want. They don't actually need MS to have a monthly schedule. Of course, it might be lawyers demanding the MS patch release cycle. If they get hacked while sitting on a non-deployed patch, it's their problem. If they are waiting on the MS monthly patch cycle, it's "out of their control" and "unavoidable" because it was MS sitting on the patch.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

"for others it Excel macros"

LibreOffice does macros too. Just not MS ones. So it's not a problem for people wanting to write macros for use on LibreOffice. It's only a problem for people wanting to run other peoples macros from MSOffice. But then those people on MSOffice can't run my macros because they probably never installed LibreOffice. That;s their problem, not mine. On the other hand, LibreOffice run on both Linux and Windows, so everyone can be happy running LibreOffice Macros, but not vice versa. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

"And in my experience it's no less dysfunctional on the Windows desktop than in the browser-based incarnation I'm obliged to use on Linux."

I find the browser based version is very, very different if said browser is running on Linux and not Windows. Even when the browser, Firefox in this case, is the same point release version. Outlook web access functionality on a browser seems to be dependant on the underlying OS, which is something a web app should never do. I have no idea if this is a real thing or if MS are simply being bastards to anyone not drinking the correct flavour of KoolAid.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The joys of Linux

LOL, at least one person didn't get the joke.

On the other hand, I told the scammers one time that I used Linux. They immediately switched scripts and tried to get me to install the Linux version of TeamViewer. I was quite impressed, but still managed to waste a good 20 minutes of their time "waiting for the download" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The joys of Linux

"And Linux has so many patches that practically every day is patch day. And don't deny it."

Worth bearing in mind though that the patches are for your entire installed system, apps, libraries, fonts and all, not just the OS. I'd be worried if my OS of choice only ever got patches on a specific day of the month instead of as soon as practically possible though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"Unless you can't run your application because of something weird."

They are trying. They are trying really hard. I still remember the days when I could sort the Start Menu into the order I wanted it, so even the less frequently used programmes were still easy to find, not just the most often used at the top and the rest buried miles down a long list.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Linux Desktop"

Windows used to have many different desktop configurations, not just from the options in Control Panel, but many 3rd party add-ons that could totally change or even replace the original desktop. That was back in the Dark Ages, before MS took away users choices. Remember the Themes Pack? Good luck trying even that basic level of customisation of a Windows 10/11 desktop.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"And you still haven't accepted it. You keep finding any other reason rather than accepting the truth. In another post on this article there was somebody complaining that Dell stopped selling Linux laptops. I pointed out that nobody (in economically viable numbers) was buying them."

Strangely, when Dell first started doing that, Linux laptops cost more than Windows ones, despite the cost of the Windows licence. Maybe it was because of the all the other "demo" shit that Dell were paid to put on the Windows desktop that simply didn't run on Linux? Or also partly because those Windows licenses cost pennies when pre-installed by the manufactures 'cos MS REALLY want every PC to have Windows on them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"Windows+R type control hit enter."

Yes, but it used to be easy to find from the Start menu. Most average users have little clue about ANY short cuts. Many still type their password in then USE THE MOUSE to select the password box. No one ever told them about the TAB key. Never mind ALT-F-S (save), ALT-F4 (exit), CTRL-P (Print) to mention the most common shortcuts. I've been doing various levels and type of IT support for 30 years and I'm STILL showing the basics to users, both newly minted straight out of school, and users about to retire.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re. Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to use wasn't paying attention

"And then, this: I plug any of my old (10 - 15 yr old) lenovo laptops that run, hell, I'll say it, run WINDOWS (7 and 10) - and the screens _just work_."

Odds are, that old Lenovo will quite possibly run Linux very well, with all default drivers from the install. Lenovo are pretty good with Linux support. Hell, their own bootable hardware diagnostics tool is a bootable Linux distro on USB stick so, by definition, there are Linux drivers for the hardware.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re. Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to use wasn't paying attention

I've had similar issue here too. My wifes Dell laptop is a pain in the arse as to whether or how well it will work plugged into a large screen/TV. On the other hand, my Toshiba "Just Works" on the same large screens/TV. My rouble-free Toshiba is running FreeBSD, her problematic Dell is running Windows 10 and had no issues running Windows 7.

Hardware and software combinations are complex and mostly work, but when YOU are the one with the problem, in isolation, with a specific bit of hardware or software, it's easy to blame whatever is new and unfamiliar. For the non-techy users, that can be a deal-breaker because they don't know what to do about it.

In general though, Windows has fewer issues because most hardware is designed with Windows in mind and thus provides relevant drivers. Linux and FreeBSD often don't have drivers from the manufacturers, relying on open source reverse engineered drivers using the manufactures specs. That becomes an issue when the hardware has bugs which the manufacture resolves by working around the hardware issue in software, often without telling anyone or updating the specs. Not sure about nowadays, but GFX cards were well known for bits of broken hardware being bypassed by changes to driver software behind the API. ISTR a specific ATI chipset years ago that boasted various hardware accelerations, but some specific function was buggy. It came out later, when the v2.0 hardware was released, that at least one of the v1.0 hardware functions was disabled by the driver, which took on the job in software. Texel shading seem to ring a bell.

Intel ships mystery quantum hardware to national lab

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Why are quantum computers so big...

...when quantum particles are so small?

And how big is the FBI one at Quantico? How many Quantum computer builders are pissed that that name is already taken?

Stolen-data market RaidForums taken down in domain seizure

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Coelho

With that name, maybe he should have gone into a legit data centre business?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Why would they ring both of them?

US Army to build largest 3D-printed structures in the Americas

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Happy

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

Yes. Because anything other than "human standard" materials will be unique to the robot supplier and be patented. The robot builder will be cheap, but the new patented modular Brickoids, which will only stick to the patented CemGlue, will be expensive and from a single source, possibly as expensive as printer ink.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

Thanks for that. The Hadrian[1] is the sort of thing I was envisioning. The other one seems more like just a repurposed existing robot arm and very limited.

[1] hah!, nice name!, I live near Hadrians Wall, I can Segedunum from my window :-)

I wonder how many people will "get" the name of the robot system.

Beijing approves first new video games in nine months

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

14,000 games developers wnet under?

So, if 14,000 smaller games dev houses went under, just how original were their products? It's mind boggling! Then again, so is the size of the Chinese home market!

Ex IT chief at Homeland Security watchdog stole US govt software to pirate

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Stealing from Peter...

...to sell to Paul, when Peter and Paul are brothers, or at worst, cousins? Especially when Peter is a security bod. I don't think he thought that through very well.

Zuckerberg gets $26m in 'other' Meta compensation

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Zuckerberg currently sits in 13th place with a fortune worth $79.5 billion.

We don't seem to hear much about what he does with his $billions. I mean, Gates has his foundation, Bezos and Musk of the penis substitutes space programmes etc. Does the Zuck do anything "good" with his money or does he just wallow in it like Scrooge McDuck?

Dell trials 4-day workweek, massive UK pilot of shortened week begins

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I've not even had a cold for two years! Win-Win :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: WFH

"In previous lives I worked in the centre of Manchester,"

I'm with you on that! My job sometimes takes me to Manchester. I'm far enough away that morning rush hour is over before I get there, but sometimes I hit the afternoon rush hour on the way out. What a pig! Even with the completion of the M60 ring road, there are still significant bottlenecks on that motorway in numerous places all around it.

Page: