Posts by Paul Eagles

OVH: The cloud should be open, reversible, interoperable

Reworded opening line

Can I suggest a change to the first sentence.

Instead of "OVHcloud is perhaps best known for cloud computing, hosting, and dedicated servers in its network of datacenters but the company has also made news in other arenas" I would suggest ""OVHcloud is perhaps best known for hosting scammers & phishing sites, not giving a shit about abuse reports, cloud computing, hosting, and dedicated servers in its network of datacenters but the company has also made news in other arenas.

My version is a little more accurate.

Re: Paulin's "Stay open" == make money off of abuse?

Agreed 100%.

OVH is so slow to deal with abuse reports that they're complicit with the scammers. I've reported a few phishing sites to them and was aghast at how long it took them to deal with it.

You picked the right term - OVH is indeed a cesspool.

Okta acknowledges 'mistake' in handling of Lapsus$ attack

Okta should be ashamed of the piss poor way they've communicated with customers around this. From their initial arrogant "It's all fine, trust us you idiots" statement right through their communication has been woeful.

For a company that states "trust starts with transparency" on their Trust page (https://trust.okta.com) I would like to think they'd be setting themselves higher standards.

I've told one of their senior sales people as such but of course haven't had a response.

Okta now says: Lapsus$ may in fact have accessed customer info

Re: How many humans are there on Earth?

An individual can have multiple accounts in Okta. Let's say your employer uses Okta and you're a member of the Emirates rewards program. That's 2 Okta accounts for you.

Re: Okta's comms have been laughable

Yeah, their communication has been a shambles.

I reminded them earlier today of the wording on the Trust Hub. Words like 'transparency' and 'real-time communication' were quoted back to them.

Re: 2.5%

It's 2.5% of company accounts (so 2.5% of Okta tenants) that have been impacted. That doesn't equate to 2.5% of the total user accounts in Okta. Tenants vary wildly in size, some will be very small and some are enormous.

I've specifically asked Okta how many potential user accounts there are but so far, and as expected, they've declined to answer that.

Authentication oufit Okta investigating Lapsus$ breach report

Come on Okta, talk to your customers!

The silence from Okta is deafening. Other than a single paragraph on their LinkedIn page and the tweets from the CEO I'm yet to see any communication from them.

For a company that, on their Trust Hub (https://trust.okta.com/) claims that "Trust starts with transparency" and "The Okta Trust Page is a hub for real-time information on performance, security, and compliance." I would like to think they would be more proactive. I'm certainly not seeing any "real-time information".

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Yeah, they really don't give a shit.

I reported a fake TV Licensing site hosted on an OVH VPS to them last year and they took nearly 2 weeks and several prods before they did anything about it.

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Oh goody, so that's British Airways and now EasyJet who have let someone run away with my credit card details.

Internet's safe-keepers forced to postpone crucial DNSSEC root key signing ceremony – no, not a hacker attack, but because they can't open a safe

Re: They needed...

He'd probably get the pick that Bosnian Bill and he made, and get picking.

You spoke, we didn't listen: Ubiquiti says UniFi routers will beam performance data back to mothership automatically

Re: Not OK

You can also create a firewall rule within the controller to deny your access points having internet access.

Ubiquiti are really doing their best to piss people off. I don't have an issue with them wanting to collect information but I have a huge issue with them enabling it silently. Twice. There was a lot of backlash when they did it first time around so it's mind boggling that they're doing it again.

To stop them getting any data out of me I've blacklisted trace.svc.ui.com in Pi-Hole, added a firewall rule to block my access points internet access, turned off the analytics and improvements in the controller and further disabled things using config.properties. I shouldn't have to do that. If there were a toggle in the controller that disabled it then I'd be happy enough. Still pissed off that it was enabled by default but making it simple to disable it would stop me moaning.

I like Unifi kit but I'm really beginning to dislike the people that make it.

Heathrow Airport drops £50m on CT scanners to help smooth passage through security checks

Re: if the tech will mean an end to the daft liquids rule – only 100ml per container

It’d save loads of time for Airport security staff if the 100ml rule was binned. It must take ages for each and every liquid product that’s sold airside to be checked to the same degree that my 50ml bottle of mouthwash is. It’d save me too, those 100ml or less bottles are fucking outrageously priced.

The thing that confuses e is that when Terminal 5 opened at Heathrow you were specifically told to keep laptops and what not in your bags as they went through the scanner. I wonder what technology was in use then?

Beer icon because I’ve had a few and can’t remember when the requirement changed and you had to strip pretty much stark bollock naked in front of a stranger to get on a cramped plane for another shitty business trip.

Office 365 enjoys good old-fashioned Thursday wobble as email teeters over in Europe

So my personal tenant doesn't have anything about the incident in the admin centre but email to my peronal domains is getting delayed:

-- 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent connections per resource forest has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel. pod51050ehf.outlook.com. PRX8 [AM5EUR02FT050.eop-EUR02.prod.protection.outlook.com]

I did wonder if that was the case, but my own 365 tenant is affected yet the admin centre shows nothing about the incident.

I'd be nice the admin centre actually did contain any mention of this incident. There's loads of grumbling replies to their tweet saying that people aren't seeing that incident and I'm not seeing it either. At present it shows just 1 incident which is related to Teams. There is an advisory against Exchange Online though but it's nothing to do with this issue.

Thankfully we're not impacted as of yet and hopefully it'll stay that way.

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

Ugh, an awful company. I tried to transfer some domains to them recently and apart from taking payment for the invoice they did absolutely fuck all.

My support ticket was ignored despit enumerous bumps so I opened a claim through PayPal. Eventually they responded and gave me a refund.

Definitely a company I'll never deal with it again.

Skype bot airport action, Retpolining into 2019, old Kubernetes versions for the chop in Azure, and much more Microsoft

I just remembered that I submitted this picture to El Reg some time ago when they were discussing BSOD's.

Nice photo. Where did you get it from? From my Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/RFx0u-IGFS/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet) perhaps?

The reason I ask is that it's a photo I took 6 years ago today. There's plenty of photos taken in Heathrow Terminal 5 but that's definitely my photo. Note the person it the yellow & blue top to the left of the photo and the person with the wet floor warning signs underneath the BSOD.

Video game retailer GAME in email marketing FAIL

Veritas != Symantec

Minor correction - Veritas Hasn't been owned by Symantec since they sold it in August last year.

Syrian Electronic Army: We hijacked FACEBOOK ... honest, guv

So that explains why I had my Client Services Manager at MarkMonitor call me to reset my password for their portal.

Pebble smartwatch app guys! Put your mind at WRIST: New SDK + iOS 7 alerts

Re: About time too!

It does the same no matter if the Pebble is fully charged or not.

Anyway, let's see if the new App improves things.

Re: About time too!

Tried all that, it didn't work.

About time too!

I wouldn't say that Caller ID and email notifications always worked on iOS. Far from it. Email notifications didn't work at all for me and using the email part of the app wasn't an option because I use Active-Sync to get at my email on my phone and didn't want to open 143/tcp to the outside world to get that working.

Caller ID itself was very hit and miss, it would always notify me that a call was coming in but only about 50% of the time would it display the name of the caller, usually it would display just the number even though the phone itself was showing the name.

I'm really looking forward to the new iOS app, it will hopefully make Pebble the device they promised it would be. The fucked up notifications on iOS were a real pain! Not to mention that when you had got Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you wanted working you would then have to set it all up again if the phone and Pebble lost communication.

It's just in time too, the Agent smartwatch is due quite soon and the Pebble was in danger of being put in a drawer and forgotten about.

Smartwatch face off: Pebble, MetaWatch and new hi-tech timepieces

Re: Re:re-setting notifications after loss of bluetooth

BTNotificationEnabler does indeed sort that particular problem but my iPhone isn't jailbroken and I'm not planning on changing that.

The battery life is pretty awesome these days, v1.10 of the firmware was an enormous improvement on the previous version where I was getting < 2 days if I was lucky. Now I'm getting 12-14 days which is great.

Re: Ugh

I can't abide plastic straps on watches either, I've got a NATO strap on my Pebble at present and I'm happy with that. I'm not sure a metal bracelet would look good against a plastic watch.

The Pebble will work with pretty much any 22mm strap and bar the watches that have a micro USB cable in the strap you should be able to replace the plastic strap with any strap you want.t

Re: Micro USB charging

Being unable to change the strap wouldn't appeal to me plus it'd add bulk. Some people like like that idea though.

Re: Micro USB charging

The Agent watch (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/secretlabs/agent-the-worlds-smartest-watch) works with Qi charging which I see as a nice improvement from the Pebble cable.

The downside though is that the USB cable for the Pebble is nice and small so I can shove it in my laptop bag when I go on a business trip but a Qi charger will add a bit more bulk. I'm sure as Qi charging becomes more common place I'll end up carrying one around with me anyway so it'll be moot at that point.

Re: Usefulness of Pebble increasing

I thought the Pebble would be something of a gimmick when I backed the KS project but having had mine for a few months it has shown itself to be an extremely useful thing.

When they get the bugs sorted out it'll end up being a really good product. Right now it's a real PITA to have to setup the notifications again on IOS each time the Pebble and phone lose contact. Sort that and the flaky caller ID and I'll be a happy man.

That said, I've backed the Agent watch on KS today mainly because of the QI charging. That and I like gadgets.

Biz email slinger Mimecast tumbles over

Updates, or rather, lack of.

I suppose I could almost justify this outage to my management if I had some information to give but it has been totally unacceptable for Mimecast to say so little about what's going on. They did send a few tweets but the content was mostly useless fluff. I saw one numpty say on twitter that it wasn't reasonable to expect an update, afterall everyones email was down! I guess he hadn't thought that twitter and the Mimecast website could be given a meaningful update?

The irony is that they've been gloating about their 100% SLA after Google Apps had some issues. It'll be interesting to see how to handle things after this outage.

Barclaycard site falls over, web payments impossible

Changing your DNS servers to the Google public DNS servers wouldn't have helped in this instance. At the time I first noticed the problem I checked 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to see if they had cached the IP address but they didn't have it.

It definitely was DNS, none of the 3 servers hosting the DNS for barclaycard.co.uk were returning an IP address for secure.barclaycard.co.uk:

paul@vm:~:$ nslookup

> server ns1.barcap.com

Default server: ns1.barcap.com

Address: 141.228.140.129#53

> secure.barclaycard.co.uk.

Server: ns1.barcap.com

Address: 141.228.140.129#53

** server can't find secure.barclaycard.co.uk.: NXDOMAIN

I'm told that it is working again now, but I haven't tried yet.

Two UK airports scrap IRIS eye-scanners

Sod it, so I'll have to endure the queues for passport control in future instead of walking pretty much straight up to an IRIS booth and onward. Bollocks.

I've had zero problems getting my eyes lined up in the 5 years I've been registered but have seen loads of people fail to understand that they need to hold their head still to get it to work.

The e-Passport gates are in my experience, shit. The ones at T4 in LHR are always out of order, the ones at T5 were turned off last time I was there and the ones at Stansted failed to let about 90% of people in front of me in the queue through for seemingly no reason.

I'll also be missing out on the confused look on peoples faces who didn't read the sign that clearly stated that the IRISH booths were for registered people only and would then get the arse when they'd get to the front of the queue and realise they'd joined the wrong queue and have to go to the back of the queues at the desks.

Midnight theft left Vodafone users bereft

Fixed? Nope.

Definitely not fixed here in Guildford. I can make calls but anyone calling me is helpfully told that 'the number you have dialled is not recognised'

Data is extremely sporadic too, I had a bunch of emails appear on my Blackberry about an hour ago but the thing has been silent since.

Sony Reader PRS-350 Pocket Edition

Keyboard for reading? No. For purchasing? Hell yes.

True, I don't need the keyboard for reading but I do need it when I'm browsing the Kindle store from my Kindle and choosing what book I want to purchase next.

Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader

In my opinion the 3G one is clearly the better option

If the Kindle weren't available when 3G then I wouldn't have bought one. True, wireless hotspots are not too hard to find but if you're in a hotel that requires you to connect to the network then open your browser to authenticate then you're out of luck as the Kindle can't do that.

I'm a frequent business traveller so I like the way I can get my daily newspaper 'delivered' every morning no matter where in the world I am without having the mess about finding a wireless hotspot. Turn the Kindle on and within a minute or two there's my newspaper.

Even if I weren't a frequent traveller I'd still have goen for the 3G version if only to get around the annoyance of being on holiday, finishing all your books and wanting something else to read. A couple of weeks ago I was in Munich (oh how I love the Oktoberfest) and while waiting for my flight back to Heathrow I finished my last book so without any hassle I went on the Kindle store from my Kindle and downloaded a book.

Global 3G is one of the main differentiators for me between this and other eBook readers.

My only gripe is that the directional keypad has a thin border on it so with my fat fingers I often push the central button when trying to push a directional button. A minor annoyance to what is otherwise an excellent device.

iPhone 4 jailbreak banks on browser exploit

iBooks...

.. isn't installed on my 3GS and the Jailbreak ran first time without any problems.

Google's Postini clogs email in US, UK

Broken, of sorts

Some of us UK people are definitely suffering. I did wonder why I only had 1 email overnight and it now makes sense. I've done a bit of testing and some messages I sent about an hour ago are still to be delivered.

Gollux - only 95% is spam? My company is using Symantec Brightmail (we bought it before Symantec took over and ruined everything) and it reports that about 98% of everything we receive is crap. There are numerous other places that will provide that level of filtration.

I quite like Postini but the spam filters are often overly sensitive for my liking despite tweaking them. I'm getting far too many false positives for my liking.

Vodafone Access Gateway 3G

Nice idea

It's just a shame that they so often don't work!

I've got one at home and one in my office and frequently have to turn the thing off to actually have a working mobile. The Vodafone forums have quite a few similar comments so mine isn't an isolated case.

Just this morning I turned on my Blackberry and had a nice full strength 3G signal but I couldn't make/receive calls or emails. Vodafone tell me to 'turn it off and on again' which is hardly ideal.

Buggy home routers expose O2 customers to hijacking

@James R Grinter

No, disabling the services isn't irrelevant. The CSRF attack relies on the management stuff on the router being available over the WAN interface. If they are disabled then there isn't actually anything to attack.

O2 just can't keep it up

It all becomes clear now.

This would explain why I only got voicemail notifications in the early hours of the morning.

Well done O2. Bravo.

O2 data network falls over again

@pctechxp

Vodafone would be my preference. I know people have had big tales of woe with them but I was a customer for about 11 years and didn't have as many problems in that 11 years as I've with with O2 in 2 months.

Another day, another outage

If O2 can't even run a website (which when it is working is often so slow it's bordering on being unusable) it's no surprise they can't run their mobile network either.

Hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Customer services tell me there is nothing wrong with the network and that I should reboot my phone and so on. *SIGH*

Apple - please, please, please, please let a half decent network sell the iPhone!

O2 leaves travellers in the lurch

Customer services gone AWOL

They're really having a torrid time of it and to make things worse I get a 'number does not exist' message when I try to call them ( on 2302) from my iPhone.

Still at least their customer service are efficient when you get through to someone. Oh no, wait, they're not.

Software update nobbles Sky+ boxes

So I put the box on standby..

As others have said, putting the box on standby buggers it up again. However, I've gone through the 'fix' again and it still doesn't work. So I've got a drive full of stuff but can't watch it. Well done Sky.

Software glitch hits Heathrow T4 baggage system

What's the problem?

It's easier to leave your bags at home than have BA do their usual trick of losing them, at least you know where they are then.