* Posts by Tony Paulazzo

1099 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Feb 2008

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Twitter hackers busted 2FA to access accounts and then reset user passwords

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Dodgy

So change the mobile number of Elon Musk to your (burner) number, then issue the password reset request. 2FA kicks in and sends 2FA request to mobile number on file

Thank you for a possible explanation. I can't believe the original article didn't focus more on this bit of the hack 'cause if 2FA is compromised then it's back to the drawing board for basic online security.

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Tony Paulazzo

Re: The laser keyboards (and this) do have one potential application though

Samsung are a bit late to the Game

So were Apple, didn't seem to hurt them tho' :) Sometimes it's not about being first but being better...

DISCLAIMER: I hate Apple with every fibre of my being - but they do <did?> make quality kit.

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

Tony Paulazzo

It won't go into overdraft, no overdraft facility. Strictly a debit account, so cash must be in there.

Tony Paulazzo

*remove all our cards from Amazon*

Or do what I do, have an online only debit account with a limited amount of cash in there, strictly for everything online. Online banking makes it simple to transfer cash from one account to another in seconds.

Point of fact it would take a bank seconds to create an online limited pool in your main account that texts a needed response to you whenever anything gets paid for, even quicker!

But yea, not showing all connected devices in your Amazon account should be grounds for an FTC / ASA investigation.

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Make no mistake - their actions promote what they believe and treasure.

Why so anonymous? You won't get your good citizen points that way, plus, China won't let you be anonymous - or visit many parts of the internet, or read Winnie the Pooh, or watch Southpark <now>. Let me guess, you're tencents, insidiously buying up western companies to ensure they tow the Chinese party line.

Fucking coward!

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Follow the money

I think the kool aid has finally run out. Mickey Mouse destroyed the public domain and your expectations that your great grandchildren be continuously paid for the work you did 70 years previously is turning the tide of public perception.

Piracy is a self induced problem created by the media.

On subject I'm pretty sure all those emails did is generate business for VPNs - oh, you're spying on me, well here's something I'm happy to pay for on a regular basis to give a big fuck you to the corporations.

'It’s not a surveillance program'... US govt isn't going all Beijing on us with border face-recog, official tells Congress

Tony Paulazzo

'We don’t run the scans against any other databases*'

* Yet! (should be a required disclaimer on absolutely every government statement, ever!)

AI can now animate the Mona Lisa's face or any other portrait you give it. We're not sure we're happy with this reality

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Scary stuff

That's amazing, watching Mona Lisa talk has to be a quantum step towards the singularity...

- plus nothing has been real, ever.

The universe is holographic - synaptic responses to electrical stimuli. Humanity has believed in the out there for far too long.

William Blake (who died in the 18th century) said...

“Nothing is real beyond imaginative patterns men make of reality.”

"They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines." — Calvin

Sophos tells users to roll back Microsoft's Patch Tuesday run if they want PC to boot

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Problem confirmed, yet, works

Can you bill MS for the lost productivity?

Install Linux if you want productivity & security...

Waits for responses detailing Ubuntu updates that borked the systems...

We fought through the crowds to try Oculus's new VR goggles so you don't have to bother (and frankly, you shouldn't)

Tony Paulazzo

It doesn't feel like evolution or a side grade, it feels like they shoved it out on the back of brendan iribe jumping ship; a Lenovo frame? one (lower refresh rate) LCD screen, so no physical IPD - I don't know from LCD vs OLED, seems to be arguments favouring both options, loss of the awesome headphones... but it feels more like a cost cutting exercise.

They should've (like DrXym states), just released the Quest (two OLED screens, physical IPD and etc), and a detachable cable for adding it to a PC. It would've made them the darlings of the VR community.

Oh, and the software for both is completely separate unless the game devs themselves let you buy once and use on both.

Looming EU copyright rules – tackling Google news article scraping, installing upload filters – under fire from all sides

Tony Paulazzo

and the people that actually made the content continue to fume and send pointless takedown requests

Maybe if the House of Mouse hadn't utterly decimated the Public Domain we wouldn't be in this mess.

Copyleft lunatics and corporate shills both need a red hot poker shoving up their collective asses.

Three quarters of US Facebook users unaware their online behavior gets tracked

Tony Paulazzo

Maybe stop equating user surveillance with selling ads as people are not worried about advertising, they may not like it, feel they're immune to it or even like being pointed at things they're interested in. Maybe we need to start equating it to secret police, dawn disappearances, the search for model citizens.

Maybe then, people would start caring.

The most insidious is the Chinese get good citizen points for online activities program they're rolling out nationwide - especially as now they're beginning to be every-bodies trading partner.

Chinese rover pootles about... on the far side of the friggin' MOON

Tony Paulazzo

Did the Chinese find the secret nazi base yet?

I wish we (as in the Brits), had a space program, rather spunk a billion quid on that than the DUP. I wanna check out Triton (ammonia lakes) far more than I wanna break up with the EU.

Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time

Tony Paulazzo

Re: !@#$Fsg34=#5^GSHJ+ASdgAE$_wfaewgefH

provided they suspect you of something of course

They always suspect you of something! It's in the nature of their work that no one is innocent...

As sales slide, virtual reality fans look to a bright, untethered future

Tony Paulazzo

You might get to play The Sims - that's about the best level of detail you can get.

We haven't even got that! EA has shown no interest in VR and nor have the other big studios except Bethesda who've just shat out another port of Skyrim and Fallout4 - not even bothered putting Fallout76 in VR and no mention about Starfield / ES6.

So, Farcry 5, Dying light 2, Cyberpunk '77, X4 Foundations, all those shooty games I have no interest in - none have VR planned. Even resident Evil 7 PSVR is no longer being ported to PCVR. The problem is the market will never grow if there's no media to entice the punters and EA, Ubisoft etal are too profit driven to waste money on a customer base too small for their predatory practices.

There are 3 brilliant flight simulators for VR

...

They all have excellent graphics if you drop over £1000 on a GPU, but War Thunder runs pretty nicely on a GTX 1070

So, £320 for the 2070, a decent i5, SSD plus 16GBs RAM, you're still looking at a grand in total.

As for the wireless - Oculus Go / Quest etc, they're basically phone hardware with a resolution / FOV not much better than the Rift etc where the software is even more limited than the wired variants, not much longevity, I guess fun at Xmas showing people cool VR, Porn in more comfortable surroundings - plus, the battery life sucks on those things, barely two hours (you can't even watch a Lord of the Rings SE film) and you're advised against using it whilst it's charging.

High Court agrees to hear full legal challenge of Blighty's Snooper's Charter

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Give.

You missed a bit:

Give until it hurts, then keep giving - Big Brother loves you!

George Orwell, 'If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.'

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

Tony Paulazzo

1) Did Microsoft ever really produce reliable software? If they did, I don't seem to remember it. And, I've worked in IT for 27+ years.

Been here since Windows 3.1 and I do not recall an update ever deleting my files from my computer. I would call that a catastrophic evolution of unreliability. IMHO. And yes, everyone should have backups, but they don't - one job I had was to rescue wedding photo's off a dead laptop because they had no hard copies or thought to save elsewhere.

Even a non booting update can just have Windows reinstalled, a pain but everything is still there.

Well slap my ass and call me Judy, Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 is just as hard to fix as the old one

Tony Paulazzo

I think the real issue is that companies aren't held liable for the quality of the products they sell. These things should come with a 5 year warranty as standard.

Quality control would certainly shoot up.

Tho, here in the UK we actually have a 6 year warranty anyway, you just have to be aware of it when shops refuse to honour it...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/11296784/Shops-accused-of-denying-six-year-warranty-right.html

Oi, you. Equifax. Cough up half a million quid for fumbling 15 million Brits' personal info to hackers

Tony Paulazzo

Ok, I might be being a bit thick here, but why is this shit being held on servers connected to the internet anyway? this and societal infrastructures like nuclear power stations, power grids, NSA snooping et al don't need to google what perversions the latest celebrity has been up to, they should be in company servers not connected to the internet. If they're a world wide organisation have some kind of (oh, I don't know, let's call it a) world wide intranet that can only be accessed physically within the company - they have the money. Nearly unhackable - short of an inside job.

Email security crisis... What email security crisis?

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Who the fuck cares about such semantics in this day and age?

On topic, email security sucks, never trust it, tell everyone you know to assume it's not really from where it purports to be and any company that legitimately asks you to click a link in their email should be sacked for promoting bad online security (this means you Paypal).

Off topic : After years of scientific progress, not once has the answer to any mystery been "magic".

Read up on Quantum Mechanics then tell me gods don't play dice and happily break the fourth wall. Believing in the non existence of something without absolute proof is belief whether you like it or not. Smashing the downvote button doesn't validate your* non belief.

* Your as in general, not you personally.

What... is your favourite colour?

What... is the airspeed velocity of an unladen African swallow?

What... is the breath of life - physiological processes or simple magic?

Chap asks Facebook for data on his web activity, Facebook says no, now watchdog's on the case

Tony Paulazzo

My Windows 10 seems to work just fine with a local user account

But to be fair there's a huge 'sign-in with MS account or create one' and a tiny line near the bottom of the screen with 'local account login' that in no way implies MS is trying to hide the option.

As for the GDPR and tracking details, someone needs to create an 'easy to ask for all my data' website for all Europeans to really fuck MS, Google, Facebook et al.

It would be really funny.

Unpicking the Pixel puzzle: Why Google is struggling to impress

Tony Paulazzo

I think they would be better off going after the mid market in the short term. If they made a £500 mid range phone with average CPU/RAM, removable battery and SD card slot I would be handing over my cash right away.

They don't really need to compromise that much to keep the price low, the Axon 7 was a high end phone with a mid range price (camera maybe wasn't so great), Chinese - so probably they now have a great deal of data about me, but until they invade the UK, not much they can do with it - selling it to UK spooks is probably nogo since they probably share everything with Yank spooks.

The prices are high because the market will pay it. If they'd kept with the Nexus line (reasonably priced) and slowly added a higher end option I'd probably still be a loyal Google customer, but fuck 'em!

Gods' save the Queen!

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Beta?

You should be burned as a heretic and a witch (or warlock depending on your sensitivities / gender fluidities) :) Samsung s9+ is far superior.

It may be poor man's Photoshop, but GIMP casts a Long Shadow with latest update

Tony Paulazzo

Never mind the User Interface, get MS to bundle it as part of windows. The only reason Photoshop is ubiquitous is because it's easy to pirate for kids, they learn the interface, they're locked in for life, they look at the slight learning curve for GIMP as teens then scurry back to the familiar Photoshop which they'll hopefully pay for as students / adults.

Or, y'know, make it more like Photoshop which would also work.

Your phone may be able to clean up snaps – but our AI is much better at touching up, say boffins

Tony Paulazzo

Every one's missing the bigger picture here, this means HiDef versions of all my old classic porn... er, I mean archive footage from the 70's :| all those old 40's / 50's scifi B movies lovingly restored.

And yea, if it can't do that then it's not AI.

Call your MEP! Wikipedia blacks out for European YouTube vote

Tony Paulazzo

Re: The problem I have so far...

Do you object to me, and people like me, actually making a living from our work?

No, it's more like your great great great grand children still earning a living from your work and the utter destruction of the Public Domain.

Get Copyright back in balance and then we can talk, Mickey (the Mouse).

EDIT: Not that I down-voted you, you are more than entitled to earn a living from creating stuff.

USB-C for Surface owners arrives in form of a massive dongle

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Eh?

people who design the Surface should be DAMNED into HAVING TO USE the thing, ALL OF THE TIME. And no special treatment, either.

I'm on my second Surface Pro and I absolutely love it. At home I use the superb SP keyboard, on the sofa it becomes my favorite tablet and in the office a powered USB3 hub connects a decent keyboard, mouse, ethernet, DVD burner & printer effortlessly, plus a decent monitor plugged into the display port.

When shopping around to replace the SP3 I looked at many, many options, then stuck with the Surface, it's a beautiful piece of engineering.

On topic, USB C - meh, don't need it, my phone has wireless charging and MS are taking the piss a bit with that price, but their Surface Dock is also over priced for what it does (IMHO).

Brit reseller Aria PC's appeal against HMRC VAT fraud finding gets under way

Tony Paulazzo

Aria is my goto hardware store, great customer service (brilliant returns policy now too), hope they win - don't care if they're guilty, they probably still pay more tax than Google and Apple et al...

About to install the Windows 10 April 2018 Update? You might want to wait a little bit longer

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Asus Laptop users beware (and Surface Pro 2017)

The Windows 10 April update borks...

Also has been known to update their own hardware SP2017 then blue screen of death a few hours later, (apparently doesn't like the SSD they used).

Why isn't MS holding off on the updates to run a few more tests? How can they have not even tested it in their own line of PCs? Why is no one holding them to account?

They're really starting to piss me off!

Edit: It also borked my Miix310 wifi adapter, have to find a realtec driver to fix it.

'Facebook takes data from my phone – but I don't have an account!'

Tony Paulazzo

Re: 'Where is it?'

WhatsApp

If it's owned by Facebook, and you use it it, so are you...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook

Reg man straps on Facebook's new VR goggles, feels sullied by the experience

Tony Paulazzo

Since you've used the Rift how about a paragraph on the difference in optics and resolution, SDE and godrays, is it $200 better? You talk about the weight, I'm guessing (since you neglected to say) it was heavier than its sibling, the Rift. Watching Netflix / 3D films at imax size with HD resolution or still suffering from pixel envy*?

What about the inbuilt sound, good or bad, 3D positional or stereo? FOV? Comfort?

* Guessing you couldn't answer that with the brief chance you got to play it.

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Tony Paulazzo

Short of subliming they could've retreated into awesome Virtual Realities and stopped advertising their presence in the galaxy.

After all, on Earth, there are plenty of sheep but also not a few wolves.

Us? Reverse engineer HoloLens? No way, not us, nuh-uh – Magic Leap

Tony Paulazzo

Templecloud has the measure of you people, you're clearly not in love with magic leap

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/81clrb/whats_going_on_here_then/

It's like Nessie, you have to believe to see it. I mean, it's got magic in the title, you need to look with different eyes, like, every-time you doubt it's existence a fairy dies.

*Wakes up in Chrome's post-adblockalyptic landscape* Wow, hardly anything's changed!

Tony Paulazzo

Re: What really narks

I'm definitely not going to buy any of that advertised shit

This is what I don't understand, by kicking and screaming about adblockers they're actually advertising adblockers existence. I can't imagine anyone who uses adblockers would ever buy their product (if I saw something I wanted in an advert I would actually open up a new tab, google for it and buy a competing product because I hate adverts so much).

The Hitchhiker's Travel Guide describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:

"A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which conveniently fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:

"A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

Only their complaints department survived the general economic implosion of the company as a whole.

Magic Leap's staggering VR goggle technology just got even better!

Tony Paulazzo

"We're trying to understand what is going on there: what's the physics? What the neuro-technology? What's the neuro-anatomy happening? How do we gently slipstream into that and not disrupt things? We want to talk to your neuro-cortex in a biologically friendly way."

Well, that gives me wood! Course, I wouldn't pay someone to utter them but if someone wanted to gently whisper them into my ear I wouldn't say no :)

However, I do want to watch a 3D film on my coffee table (courtesy of Star Wars Chess game) - or like K's girlfriend in Bladerunner 2049, an external laser array of some description.

UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool

Tony Paulazzo

Only our propaganda is good propaganda. Doubleplusgood! We are at way with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia!

1980s sci-fi movies: The thrill of being not quite terrified on mum's floral sofa

Tony Paulazzo

While modern CGI can be entirely convincing

Like Princess Leia in Rogue1? The autopsy scene in Carpenters The Thing was stomach churning, gross and awesome, the CGI in The Thing '11 was laughable. Apart from CGI spaceships (which always look amazeballs) and the CGI bugs in 97s Starship Troopers it mostly takes me out of the movie.

The recent Apes movies were excellent, the CGI was almost perfect, but it's the almost that takes me out of the story and leaves me marvelling at the FX.

Magic Leap blows our mind with its incredible technology... that still doesn't f**king exist

Tony Paulazzo

...until the headset is as thin as a pair of large glasses with wide FOV and massive resolution at a respectable price.

And I cannot fucking wait! Happy Christmas El Reg - keep up the balanced reporting <3

The killer app for VR is porn, it's always been porn :) The internet wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for jiggly bits.

Mozilla's creepy Mr Robot stunt in Firefox flops in touching tribute to TV show's 2nd season

Tony Paulazzo

[i]Mozilla chief marketing officer Jascha Kaykas-Wolff has posted a mea-culpa on the Mozilla blog. "We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community," Kaykas-Wolff wrote.[/i]

Worst apology ever!

No promises of a review or how it happened nor promises to avoid doing it in the future. Mozilla (and I guess Google Reddit etc), have lived long enough / grown big enough, to forget about their users.

For fanbois only? Face ID is turning punters off picking up an iPhone X

Tony Paulazzo

It's always wrong if Apple do it.

No, it's always late when Apple do it. Copy / Paste, notifications etc. In fact the only original thing Apple ever did was take away the SD slot and charge an extra hundred for minimal storage upgrades. They didn't invent touch screen, rounded corners, slide to unlock etc etc etc...

Indian call centre scammers are targeting BT customers

Tony Paulazzo

Oh for some public PSA adverts warning people about trusting emails, website ads or cold phone calls to not poison their computer.

I'm kind'a surprised people are still falling for it. If a government agent phone me up with my national insurance number, place of birth and known political affiliations (philosophical anarchist), I would still ask that he (or she) send me a snail mail letter with a phone number that I could verify as being a UK gov based number before refusing to let him (or her) near my PC (at least without a warrant).

We experienced Windows Mixed Reality. Results: Well, mixed

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Doomed to fail (again)

[i]I though porn was the killer app for VR[/i]

Graphical fidelity isn't really good enough, Screen Door Effect isn't too bad in fast paced games because you're not focused on the same (groinal) area constantly, it's not even great for simple flat movies or strong black on white (Elite Dangerous star fields) imagery.

I did hear the PSVR uses sub pixel tech which mostly eliminates SDE but I don't think any of these MS headsets uses that, plus their FOV / sweetspot is smaller than the Vive / Rift - seems like wasted potential, it's been over a year and they're worse than Gen1 products (and not much cheaper anymore).

Antarctica declared world's most volcanic region as 91 new cones found beneath ice

Tony Paulazzo

Gateway to the Hollow Earth found! What next, Flat Earth?

Europe-wide BitTorrent indexer blockade looms after Pirate Bay blow

Tony Paulazzo

How long's the Pirate Bay been blocked in the UK, five years? Can still be gotten to with a minimum of effort. And I know Theresa May is attempting to destroy the internet but better men than her have tried, it was designed to withstand nuclear war for gosh' sake!

Senator blows a fuse as US spies continue lying over spying program

Tony Paulazzo

If certain folks keep pushing them, I look for an example to be made of someone disappearing or perhaps a very public and violent end. It's happened before.... allegedly.

I do worry about Ron Wyden, he is always popping up as being for democracy which puts him in an untenable situation (I'm from the UK and apart from presidents that's the only US political name I instantly recognise).

Long may he make waves - o7

Virtual reality headsets even less popular than wearable devices

Tony Paulazzo

The PC tech isn't coming down in price at all and is still high-end gamer-only kit, and it's a lot to pay to "hedge" on yourself enjoying those kinds of games.

MS has teamed up with Lenovo / Dell etal to produce Win10 VR, RRP 3 to £400. Inside out tracking, resolution and refresh pretty much on par with Rift / HTC and coming out this year running on not so high end PCs / laptops. Might ignite some interest but agreed the price to quality ratio is way out of whack.

The bigger problem is no killer app. I love Elite Dangerous and so splurged on a rift (hate Facebook, distrust Oculus, love the headset), but a lot of the stuff out there is either crap or good but short, like 5 hours of content short.

It's also great for driving / flight sim type games but the lens imperfection (fresnel, SDE, FOV) make it less good for movie watching and or desktop use.

Dying for Windows 10 Creators Update? But wait, there's more!

Tony Paulazzo

Re: ugh

My favourite overhaul would be to permanently disable Cortana

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Allows you to disable many of the more unsavoury aspects of Win10.

Two words, Mozilla: SPEED! NOW! Quit fiddling and get serious

Tony Paulazzo

Re: Why I use Firefox

Wasn't really aware of that but after Googling (oh the irony), it seems they're making even more since losing the Google only cord, bundling Baidu in China for eg, it seems Mozilla has a total of 12 search partnerships raising their revenue to $421 million in 2015, looking even better for 2016.

http://www.ghacks.net/2016/12/02/mozilla-is-doing-well-financially/

Mozilla doing well financially is a good thing. Not only for users of Firefox, but also for the web community as a whole. It is the one major browser left standing between browsers maintained by large corporations.

With 2016 looking even better financially, it is fair to say that Mozilla won't crash and burn any time soon.

Mozilla also do a monthly email thing, the last one discussing why you shouldn't overshare on Facebook, instagram etc... and promoting Data Privacy Day (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/01/26/data-privacy-day), which I've not noticed the other browser companies do.

Plus, as others have mentioned, NoScript is always the first extension installed on my Firefox, closely followed by Ublock.

Tony Paulazzo

Why I use Firefox

There are four major web browsers, and three of them are designed to profit the companies that produce them: Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome) and Microsoft (Edge).

Firefox is the only one to put the user’s interests first. Other things being equal, that’s a good reason to use it. (Stolen from the Guardian).

Plus the Firefox sync feature is...

The security goals remain the same: there is still a strong random secret key, and Mozilla's servers cannot decrypt your data. However, instead of using pairing, a “wrapped” version of your secret key, protected by your password, is stored alongside your Firefox Account. (Stolen from Firefox).

It's nice to know when I close Firefox it's really closed, which is why Chrome seems faster at launching, most of it is already running - secretly... in the background... talking to Google*

* Disclaimer: I like Google, it's my home page and primary search engine, but I don't exactly trust 'em.

Tablets become feebleslabs as sales spiral down

Tony Paulazzo

Re: How many tablets does a person need?

padfone

I really like the idea of this, just got an Axon ZTE 7 and would love a slot-in larger screen for when at home (Netflix) or in the office (third PC screen). Someone needs to design a phone agnostic version of this.

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