Posts by Tim99

Everybody without Android Oreo vulnerable to overlay attack

Everybody without Android Oreo vulnerable...

So is my iPhone OK then?

Google, propaganda, and the new New Man

Re: Lying is always bad propaganda, because it deceives and misleads the people

Propagating the Faith is where the term came from. It was designed to spread the "good word" to the heathen by the Catholic Church and was originally thought to be a "good thing", except perhaps by the "heathens" on the receiving end. The propogators often think that there is a higher purpose to their actions, others might not...

Western Digital has cloudified the NAS and shoved it in a trendy box

WD MyBookLive

I have used the unclouded product for 4 years now. It was very handy for backing up 7 Windows PCs and a MacBook and providing a simple public share across the network. We never opened it up to the internet.

It is very slow so we had to do a couple of tricks like rename folders on the NAS and robocopy new ones from the PCs as copy of the original across the network could take hours. With Windows 10, Windows7 backups across the network were feasible but also very slow. I am waiting for it to die, and probably won't replace it - For light and domestic use a USB drive is OK. For Apple iOS users a way of loading and playing user content from outside the iCloud environment onto a network drive would be handy...

Turnbull's Transformers lash government IT mavens over spend

Re: Many of those old programs

Upvote for the Utopia reference...

$10 Billion

Are we really spending more than 120,000 salaries a year? Just how much are we "saving"?

Australians still buy 100,000 feature phones a quarter

Old Fart Phones

Is what my wife calls them (we are both in that grouping). A number of our friends just want to be able to make phone calls, with days between charges. Most of them are happy to receive text messages, but the keypads are to small/unfriendly for older eyes and fingers. Many of our friends have the cheapest android around (Usually bought because the nice young person in the shop recommended it) and only use it to make calls with a few text messages - The rest of the ecosystem is often ignored.

A couple of days ago I helped a neighbour set up her new phone: One of the last Alcatel Onetouch prepaid available ($29). After it was working she said "Why has it got a radio, camera and music player?" I only want it to make phone calls. Are we getting basic phones designed for developing countries because they are cheap, instead of something designed for older people?

Oracle has to pay top sales rep stiffed out of $250,000, US court rules

Re: Seems high, but around 10% commission is fairly common

I used to buy expensive scientific toys. One of my favourite salesmen visited about 6 times a year. His lead-time for the sale he made to us was 18 months. After the sale had gone through and the G&Ts were flowing I asked him what he would buy with his commission. He told me that his base salary was about 1.5 times mine and his commission was "only 1%". He was in his late 50s and knew the business, and the kit, inside-out. The kit he sold me cost about 20 times that of my house. Commission on 5 sales would have bought my house. He was good at his job and would have sold 5 a year. As technology has got cheaper in real terms, the cost of similar kit would now be about the same as my (smaller) house. In those days a mortgage was ~3 times your salary.

I noticed a few years later that the sales reps that I saw were often young, female and good looking. If asked a technical question, they often would look in the sales literature (I normally had a copy) and if unable to answer (which was often) they "got back to me".

Ad blocking basically doesn't exist on mobile

iOS Safari

I don't see adverts since installing a blocker app: Purify ($1.99). An on/off button on the taskbar would be good (Against Apple rules?).

For particularly troublesome sites, I turn Javascript off.

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

We use base 10 for a reason

We can count off on 8 fingers and two thumbs (alright we can go to 20 in warmer climates if we can use our toes). Some people in the world still count in 60s using the same 8 fingers and two thumbs. If you are predominantly right handed, use your right thumb to count to 3 with the top, middle and lower phalanx of your right hand little finger, then three more with the ring finger joints, then the middle finger, then the index finger to give 12. Extend the little finger of your left hand to count off the first 12, the repeat for another 12 with the right hand and extend the ring finger for 24, then count another 12, and use the left hand middle finger for 36, then the left index finger for 48, and finally the left thumb for 60.

It may be one reason why old farts like me were taught the duodecimal system. We bought things in dozens and paid for them in shillings and pence - Also ten is only divisible by the integers 1,2, and 5; twelve is divisible by 1,2,3,4, and 6; and sixty is divisible by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15, 20, and 30 - So very "handy" when selling items or dividing them up between people. There were 12 shillings (and 240 pennies in the pound), so we could divide a pound by 16, 24, 30, 40, and 60 as well.

"Uphill both ways, in the snow, barefoot" might allow a higher count...

Did ROPEMAKER just unravel email security? Nah, it's likely a feature

Err,

Most of the emails I send are plain text. This is the way emails were in the 1970s, and it still works. The only formatting necessary is normal punctuation and the use of paragraphs, sometimes with 2 or 3 returns between them to break up content into logical blocks.

Generally with the wide variations of OS, mail client, printing, and fonts it is a good way to ensure that the recipient has a reasonable idea of what was written. If you need fancy formatting attach a PDF.

British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

Perhaps, none of the above

Do we really think that governments want to stop malware? The murk allows large players to hide along with the small criminals.

NotPetya ransomware attack cost us $300m – shipping giant Maersk

Re: Easy to mitigate

Did you forget: -Get rid of Windows?

Lenovo thought PC salesfolk could sell servers and was wrong by about $500m

Server Purchases

I don't have to worry about this stuff anymore, but for a quiet(?) life: System i or Sytem z - Or for a bit more excitement, DIY whiteboxes with a limited list of good quality components?

Google paying Apple BEEELLIONS to stay search top dog on iDevices, say analysts

Re: DuckDuckGo is the only option if they want to protect privacy

I don't seem to work the way you do. I try DDG first with something like: my special hitech search; then, if I don't get something useful, I can append the two character !g it to get: my special hitech search !g

Being an old fart who was around on ARPANET, I suspect that my memory may be worse than yours, so, I look for an easy life - I tend to use an iPad a lot. DDG is one of the search engines in Safari; and if I use a contact blocker like Purify, I am spared the one ad from DDG and the four from Google. I do use Google, but generally am not logged in...

Re: DuckDuckGo is the only option if they want to protect privacy

@rssfrd23

You couldn’t pay me to use DuckDuckGo. I’m able to find the answer I need 9/10 times on first search with google.

Use the !Bang -- !g search with Google - !w search with Wikipedia

Raising minimum wage will raise something else: An army of robots taking away folks' jobs

It won't be just minimum wage jobs

Up until the 1980s a number of skilled blue collar jobs were in engineering manufacturing. A workshop might have had 20+ skilled people who were busy driving lathes and milling milling machines etc. Busy businesses ran shifts to keep the equipment running. After the introduction of CNC equipment (Mostly using Data General Nova computers where I was), the same workshop had at most 10 people left on the main shift with perhaps a couple at night. In those days we tried to retrain people or paid for them to retire early - Today market forces drive effected people into the minimum wage jobs discussed. I suspect that we are coming to the end of the economy being based on careers/jobs. Perhaps everyone will become a self employed contractor, with large amounts of "free time" ("unemployment")?

Ancient IETF 'teapot' gag preserved for posterity as a standard

Re: more important than ever

You do know that The Internet of Teapots will become Skynet?

Official: Windows for Workstations returns in Fall Creators Update

Re: What? WFW was only 16bit

The early NT kernel version Workstation distributions had a registry switch that turned them into the Server product. Obviously, as a DAAP Partner at the time, I never took advantage of it...

70% of Windows 10 users are totally happy with our big telemetry slurp, beams Microsoft

Re: No need to change the default settings! Erase all of WIN 10

@Not That Andrew

"At least it was DebianDevuan not that flavour of the month distro, whatever it's called."

FTFY: Debian == Systemd

Parents claim Disney gobbled up kids' info through mobile games

Re: Puzzled

The mouse had his big break with "Steamboat Willie" - The cartoon was "inspired by" (ripped off from) Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill,Jr.

CMD.EXE gets first makeover in 20 years in new Windows 10 build

Re: They are bonkers

@colinsl

Some of us paid extra to get black and amber - Very nice on a VT220.

Got that syncing feeling? Cloud's client-side email problem

Kids, eh?

Despite predictions of its demise, we've been happily using email in business since it first became widespread more than two decades ago. In many ways it's defined the way we compose, reply or send digital messages. A number of technologies have consolidated and extended it to something that became called "collaboration".

Some of us can still collaborate by typing "mail" at the command line - It has worked for decades, the way that $DEITY intended. Now, if I can only find a decent CLI text mail program for my iPad...

How can you kill that which will not die? Windows XP is back (sorta... OK, not really)

@AC - They have parts of FreeBSD kernel mixed in, some FreeBSD user land mixed up with a lot of Linux user land. Lots of it aging out now that they have no strong Unix type leads inhouse.

Really? Citation please. Most Linux stuff that is out there for MacOS needs MacPorts, Homebrew, Fink, etc., to be installed. I don't know very many Mac punters who would install them.

I like liked Linux (Well I did, until Poettering and the RedHat vandals were allowed to screw it over) and have used UNIX based OSs extensively since the early 1980s. If you exclude small amounts of code from things like SELinux via TrustedBSD/SEDarwin, I can't think of too much that came from Linux vs. NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP.

MacOS is a UNIX Certified Product (unlike the myriad of Linux dists) so that, at least, is a box than can be ticked by the corporate types - I think Apple will spend the necessary money on talent to keep that.

For people who care about this, and have good eyesight/access to an A3 printer Éric Lévénez has a good UNIX timeline here that shows how complex and inter-related the history of UNIX and Linux is.

New iPhone details leak: Yes, Apple is still chasing Samsung

Re: Onanism

Was Onan a barbarian? :-)

No, a librarian - You really don't want your books to be overdue.

Re: Wrong Place

Ah, but we/they know that, unlike recent Samsung kit, the jesusPhone will work, and continue to work, and probably won't catch fire...

Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

Re: Please, No!

@Symon, have an upvote.

Prior to 1849, record copies of Acts were handwritten onto animal skin parchment (usually goatskin). From that time onwards printed record copies use high quality vellum (calfskin). Private Acts have been printed on archival papers since 1956. In 2015 The National Archives advised that they do not need a vellum copy of Public Acts and that archival paper was sufficient. Printing on vellum continued for heritage and traditional reasons. In a FOI request the 2008 cost of printed vellum was quoted at £31.08 a page, which seems reasonable.

In churches, records of important events like births, deaths and marriages were handwritten in archive quality paper books; as are the "original" signed copies of these documents. Normally Wills, etc., are on acid-free paper. Early church codices were written onto papyrus or animal skin. Unbleached cellulose fibre paper goes back at least 2,200 years in China. Good quality paper can still be made from reclaimed hrmp, linen and cotton rags.

Re: Please, No!

@dv3y

I was talking about academics and researchers - They, or their assistants, have plenty of time :-)

So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5...

Re: Please, No!

@Adam 52

Use an OS that is contemporaneous wiith the content does not use repressive activation, like Linux, BSD, or even OSX? The system does not connect to the internet.

Please, No!

If academics and researches need to access "orphaned" flash works, they could have an old PC running whatever version of Windows, or a virtualised instance just for this work. It really should not be attached to any other network, and when crap infects it, it could be rebuilt. Then use them to create a new instance of the media with something saner.

How about, as a last resort, playing it through a nice large screen with a decent audio output and recording it onto another device? Although one of the problems is that people, at the time, cannot always recognize what will be important in the future.

We are now in danger of trapping ourselves so that we lose access to older material. The idea that if something is on the internet it will be there forever is rubbish - We have already lost much of the content from more than 10 years ago.

In the early C19th using chlorine bleaching of wood pulp to make paper became common, and by the early C20th was ubiquitous. Unfortunately, the chlorine bleached paper was unstable and could crumble away over a few decades. Before this, most important "paper" documents were on vegetable/linen fibre paper. As a result, many documents since that time have disappeared from record, or are so fragile that they are not available to modern researchers. For important documents, archivists now have them printed onto "acid free" paper, which are expected to last 500-1000 years. This is one reason why old church records are often in good condition and can still be read, but many Victorian documents have disappeared.

In the early 1980s I was involved in having to archive workplace health records which needed to be kept for 60+ years - It was suggested by a major IT supplier that we use "Write Once, Read Many times"(WORM) optical disks as they used a similar technology to CDs which were initially advertised as "Perfect Sound Forever" - They came back to us only a couple of years later when they realised that some of the media was failing. They recommended that we keep multiple copies of the data on hard drives, and move it on to new devices every few years - We did, but made certain that we printed multiple copies of everything using decent ink onto acid-free paper and archived the copies at multiple sites...

Apple removes VPN apps in China as Russia's Putin puts in the boot with VPN banlaw

Re: Thorough

... and some people think that oppressive regimes are all bad.

No time for nap, update your QNAP: RAIDed NAS data corruption bug squashed

Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"

If your data is that important to you, pay the price. For a small system use RAID1 - Bigger ones RAID10. What, that's too expensive? Then your data is not that important/time critical - Use normal backups.

Revealed: 779 cases of data misuse across 34 British police forces

Re: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Even though (Baron) John Dalberg-Acton's quote refers to Vatican 1, a longer quotation is even more relevant: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

The Reg chats to Ordnance Survey's chief data wrangler

Re: Disagree - GPS is the future

@David Harper 1

If you need GPS to tell you where you are when visibility is poor, you should probably stick to parts of the country that don't have footpaths adjacent to sheer drops that can kill you. I hear that Norfolk is nice and flat.

I knew this bit of Norfolk well. The weather can be foul, there are quicksands, dykes and dangerous tides, and there is a long section here with a nice drop that has killed and injured people.

Re: Top o' graphical

"At a minimum if they are going to go cloudy..." As their business is data, I'd go so far as to say ... "Use only your own in-house cloud."

TechnologyOne says City of Brisbane ignored its own reviews

Reinvention?

The $120-million-plus contract at the centre of the dispute is to replace 13 of the council's systems with a single “Local Government Systems” project.

I know that we tend to think that we are special, but similar systems have been done many times - "Buy something that already works".

As an aside: My father was a Senior Local Government Officer - The Treasurer/CFO/Deputy Clerk for a UK rural district council, he put in one of the first "computer systems" in the 1960s to do "the rates" etc. It worked so well the supplier gave them an ANITA Calculator (about 15 weeks wages then) as a "thank you", and used them as a reference site. It was still working well when he grabbed the money and retired when the rolling disaster of the Redcliffe-Maud Commission/Local Government Act was enacted in 1973. He usually preferred to use a manual comptometer instead of the ANITA; but when he retired he gave them £5 for it, and continued to use it for the next 15 years or so.

Alphabet takes Euro antitrust fine in stride, spooks investors with rising Google ad costs

Re: Google is in trouble

Maybe the European Commission could hit them with a large fine every quarter, until they get the message? I believe that the fine is limited to only 10% of the overall annual turnover of the company, but that should get their attention.

Expect the Note 8 to break the bank (and your wallet)

Re: Note 7

You know that you have nearly described an iPhone SE?

They start at "only" £379.00...

User filed fake trouble tickets to take helpful sysadmin to lunches

Re: A university education is wasted...

Many years ago I had a senior scientist colleague who told me that the only really useful things he learnt at Cambridge were how to eat with chopsticks, and how to take his trousers off without removing his desert boots first...

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

Re: @Phil O'Sophical -- I suspect there are quite a few Java devs out there

@Someone Else

But to be really good/bad at it, it should be the first one that you used - Like me, unfortunately.

SQL Server 2017's first rc lands and – yes! – it runs on Linux

Re: Well they want to stay relevant

I was making decisions about this stuff then. The perception was, at the time, that Unix was not as secure, stable or as capable as VMS, and the "UNIX Wars" Had started, so Ken had a point. One of the things that derailed the company was the unappealing DEC Rainbow, which could run DOS, but often needed a special version of vendor software like Lotus 123, it could also run CP/M software and had VT100+ terminal emulation. They were expensive, and it's idiosyncrasies probably forced people into a PC environment. We also had the PDP-11/23 based DEC Professional for engineers/scientists and DECMates for clerical support workers. There was some similarity in software between the models, like they could all run varieties of the WPS word processor and linked to the functional but basic ALL-IN-1 suite.

I thought at the time that a better approach for DEC to sell to their mini customers, might have been to avoid the PC which was still in its infancy and sell MicroVAX Servers with standardized software. Clerical staff could be given terminals - Small office workgroup users were generally doing low level clerical tasks. Networking was easy with DECNet, and the relatively few "high level" engineers/scientists/data crunchers could be given their own networked MicroVAX.

In the end we went with NetWare and 286/386 PCs which could run terminal emulation software into our MicroVAX/PDP/DataGeneral minis, and later tried to replace proprietary mini OSs with Unix, but by that time a lot of our specialist software could run on PCs.

Horror Movie?

Did somebody fight through the cobwebs and go into the necropolis to do incantations over the old Xenix/Data Server/Sybase codebases?

Yes, I am really that old >>===============>

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

Android?

Well, there's your problem.

Want to kill your IT security team? Put the top hacker in charge

Re: Best advice

Many years ago, when I was a UK Scientific Civil Servant, there were "special merit" promotions. Normally by the time you had reached the level of Principal Scientific Officer, much of your work was management/administration. Special merit grades carried on doing science stuff, without having to get involved with administratum. As I recall, a couple of staff in our small establishment were special merit PSOs - With one a Senior Principal Scientific Officer (roughly equivalent to a Colonel or Brigadier then); just as well because although he was one of the brightest people I have met, his lack of management/interpersonal skills were obvious to me, even as a junior staff member.

Truck spills slimy load all over Oregon road – drivers slip in eel slick

I don't suppose the hagfish were too pleased either...

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

Re: You could try this

@ Charles 9

Most of the people that I deal with who use Windows 7 are retirees, like me. They stayed with 7 because they don't see a reason to change, or they have heard about Windows 10 and don't want the hassle. In both cases, after the "forced upgrades to 10" stories, they would probably accept that a Windows 10 upgrade could cause a problem on their machine too....

If they are on a non-Windows machine, they don't have problems :-)

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

Welcome to Microsoft's "new", more obvious, rentier capitalist model...

nbn™ hits the half-way mark – but has more than half of the job left

@CentralCoasty

The killer for mobile data is media streaming like Netflix at ~1GB an hour upwards. The young'uns (and pensioners like me) are not going to give that up unless 4G gets a lot cheaper

Simon

You might be lucky, I think it depends more than anything on your ISP.

I live in a retirement village, with an nbn fibre line into our comms room, and VDSL into each house (max distance <200m). We each almost always get ~75Mbps down and 35Mbs up, this can drop occasionally to ~20Mbps down in the evening with a bit more latency. Doing the sums I reckon our wholesaler buys a $3-4000/month CVC - Which for $33/month, unlimited data, seems pretty good to me. As more houses are built (we have about 170 with another 60 to go) we can buy more connectivity, perhaps at the same cost/house.

Roland McGrath steps down as glibc maintainer after 30 years

Thank you Roland.

That is all.