Posts by Colin Miller

Passengers ride free on SF Muni subway after ransomware infects network, demands $73k

Re: Design failure

> ' *after* it goes wrong it's "how could you let this happen!"'

> Let's hope someone has the relevant emails backed up. Off-line naturally.

This reminds me of the Abigail Oath, whch goes:-

I am hired because I know what I am doing, not because I will do whatever I am told is a good idea. This might cost me bonuses, raises, promotions, and may even label me as “undesirable” by places I don’t want to work at anyway, but I don’t care. I will not compromise my own principles and judgement without putting up a fight. Of course, I won’t always win, and I will sometimes be forced to do things I don’t agree with, but if I am my objections will be known, and if I am shown to be right and problems later develop, I will shout “I told you so!” repeatedly, laugh hysterically, and do a small dance or jig as appropriate to my heritage.

Your body reveals your password by interfering with Wi-Fi

Windtalker?

Windtalkers was the name give to the US Army's Native Americans who were used as radio operators in WWII. Their Navaho (I think that was the main language used) was totally impenetrable to anyone (ie Japanese and German) who might be listening in.

Finally, that tech fad's over: Smartwatch sales tank more than 50%

Market saturation?

I doubt if the fad is over, I suspect that it has reached near-saturation. Almost everyone who wants to have a smartwatch now has one, and they don't see a good reason to replace/upgrade their current one.

Thunder struck: Apple kills off display line

Re: Apple displays

Actually, The Sale of Goods Act (1968) predates the EU by a long chalk.

A UK digital driving licence: What could possibly go wrong?

Data Proectection Act

Surely the DVLA have a duty under the DPA (or the data protection directive as it is now) (article 6) to

Personal data may be processed only insofar as it is adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collected and/or further processed. The data must be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that data which are inaccurate or incomplete, having regard to the purposes for which they were collected or for which they are further processed, are erased or rectified.

If they accidentally remove someone's license entitlements, then they have breached the directive, and must correct this as soon as they have been notified.

Has there been any cases of the DVLA been taken to court over the DPA?

Compression tool 7-Zip pwned, pain flows to top security, software tools

Re: 2016

Valgrind doesn't work on Windows, and is unlikely to ever do so.

Linux command line mistake 'nukes web boss'S biz'

Only mount today's backup

If you're using NAS for your backups, then in the name of the Wee Man, only mount today's directory.

That way, you can't trash other days' backups.

ExoMars probe narrowly avoids death, still in peril after rocket snafu

Deinococcus radiodurans is resistant to radiation, cold, desiccation and vacuum. An experiment was performed where a microbe, probably D.R, was placed on the outside of the ISS. It was still viable after 1.5 years.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/bacteria-survive-553-day-exposure-exterior-iss

Get lost, Windows 10 and Phone fans: No maps HERE on Microsoft's OS

Re: Without a decent mapping solution...

What's the state of Bing! Maps on WinPho?

If NatWest texts you about online banking fraud, don't click the link

phishing

Is he sure it's not a spoofed sender, anda scatter-gunned SMS.

iPhones clock-blocked and crocked by setting date to Jan 1, 1970

NTP rejects bogus times?

Doesn't NTP, by default, reject anything that is more than 1000 seconds (about 20 mins) different that the current time?

Google DeepMind cyber-brain cracks tough AI challenge: Beating a top Go board-game player

analogy for Warfare

Go makes an interesting analogy for Warfare.

If you play too agresively and spread yourself thinly over the entire board, you will end up being surrounded and be totally annihilated.

If you play too defensively and stay in one corner, your opponent will capture the rest of the board, and you will lose badly.

Turkish carder scores record 332-year jail term

Made-Off

This makes Bernie's Madoff's 150 year sentence for running the largest Ponzi schemes look positively lenient.

Remembering those who logged off in 2015

Leonard Nimoy

I can't believe that the article didn't, and no commentards have, mentioned Leonard Nimoy.

BBC News website takes New Year's Eve break

Re: Auntie Beeb's 500 moment of hell?

Possibly should be 503-Service Unavailable or 504-Gateway Timeout instead.

Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!

Re: What is or who is PHB?

The Pointy-Haired Boss in the Dilbert cartoon. He's the archetypal incompetent clue-less manager

Downloads for Windows 10 November big-bang build axed by Microsoft

caching?

rather than have each computer upgrade to the latest build of Windows 10 via gigabytes and gigabytes of Windows Update downloads

I thought that Win10 Home shares patches between machines on the same network, thus they only have to be downloaded once. Machines on a corporate network will normally connect to a WUS server, which controls and caches which updates will be applied.

Hillary Clinton: Stop helping terrorists, Silicon Valley – weaken your encryption

hilaryclinton.com

uses Encryption By Default, with a 128AES/SHA256 key, TLS v1.2

Is that suitably weak for you Hilary?

Man goes to collect stolen-car court docs found in stolen car in stolen car

He's got a rival in this dim-witted chap who turned up to court, on a charge of supplying cocaine, where he was found innocent. However, he had cocaine in his personal effects at the time, and was up before the beak again, where he plead guilty. http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/16/man-jailed-after-turning-up-in-court-dock-with-large-amount-of-cocaine

v

What's Russia smoking? Kremlin bans Wikipedia for dopey article

Erowid

Erowid's Psychoactive Vaults is only a click away, unless you live under Mother Russian's apron strings.

Ten extreme data centres. OK... nine

Re: If you have nothing to photoshop...

Probably taken from The Church Sign Generator

WHY did NASA probe go suddenly SILENT - JUST as it was about to send pics of remote ice-world?

Flyby is fixed

Closest approach will occur on Fri 14 July, 11:49:57 UTC, regardless if the probe is in safe mode or not. It's not asif it has any friction or Δv.

Heinz cockup sees Ketchup's QR codes spurt saucy sites

QR codes are just plaintext. By convention it's a URL, but that's not required.

The safer thing to do is have the QR contain heinz.de/promo which is a redirect to the real promo site. That way, when the promo ends, the redirect can be changed to a page that reads 'We are sorry, but the promotion has ended. Please enjoy the exciting Heinz Germany site'. The promo site can then be left to expire.

The watts in a box that kept West London's lights on

<quote>If this happened anywhere outside London don't expect any help whatsoever.</quote>

Have you ever heard of Aggreko? They are one of the biggest generator hire companies, and their UK operations based in Glasgow. They provided 200MW of generators when Japan got a bit wet in 2011.

Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

Re: Obscure knowledge got me a job ....

Edlin was in MS-DOS 3.1

New antenna supports all three wireless charging standards

Re: Yet another thought

Isn't it 198 kHz?

Quid-A-Day kids chow down on foraged weed salad

Dandelion leaves…

… are best eaten when they are young; they only get stringy as they get larger. They add a bit of nuttiness to salads.

DRM is NOT THE LAW, I AM THE LAW, says JUDGE DREDD

Re: below is a list where DRM successfully stopped piracy

Is Cowell any worse than SAW were?

Costa Coffee Club members wake up and smell the data breach

Password format

[Costa are going to] implement a "new format" for users' passwords.

Am I cynical enough to read that as "storing it hashed and salted, rather than plain-text"?

Fed-up Colorado man takes 9mm PISTOL to vexing Dell PC

Anti-stress

Obviously, his homoeopathy stress-relef pills aren't worth the sugar they're made from.

Watch: Nasty JPEG pops corporate locks on Windows boxes

extention hiding?

Hold a tick,

does this need the server admin to open what s/he thinks is foo.jpeg, but is really foo.jpeg.apx ? I'd suspect that most admins turn of extension hiding in File Explorer as soon as Windows is installed. Does it still work in that case?

IWF took down over 31,000 child sexual abuse URLs in 2014

Re: I was wrong.

It was The Scorpions Virgin Killer that triggered the block on Wikipedia. However, both Nirvana's Nevermind, and Led Zepplin's Houses of the Holy were discussed in the subsequent fallout.

You’ll be the coolest guy in IT if you ain't got your ID

Seperation alert tags

You get tags that sound an alert if they are separated by too great a distance from their receiver. Keep the receiver attached to your person (not in your jacket, etc!), and the tag on your lanyard. As long as the first secure door isn't too close (might be a problem in a server room), then you will be alerted before you lock yourself out. These ones are to be paired to your phone, but there are also stand alone ones.

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VKX0880

What a time to be alive ... hard and floppy disk drives play Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit

Arduino

There's an Arduino project that does it. You just wire it to the floppies' head and spindle motors, tell how many it has, and then give it a MIDI fie; it does the rest for you.

ICANN urges US, Canada: Help us stop the 'predatory' monster we created ... dot-sucks!

Domain available

.icann.sucks

just sayin'

Idiot thieves walk free after stolen iPad uploads pics of them with loot

Each was ordered to pay court costs of $212, while Walker-Gaines is required to repay Schaefer $9,000 in $175-a-month instalments.

That's over 51⅖ months, or about 4¼ years.

FBI to WordPress users: patch now before ISIL defaces you

1.4.3? The 1.4 series of WordPress was released around 2004/2005. The current version is 4.1.1, which was released around the start of this year.

https://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/ doesn't list all the releases ,

FCC taps CenturyLink on shoulder, mumbles about a fine for THAT six-hour 911 outage

I'd agree with James. There should be automatic systems at the 911 call centre (the bit that asks which emergency it is), that monitors the geographic rate of calls. If an area hass far lower than would be expected for the time-of-day and day-of-week, then an alert is sent, so that someone can look at it.

Likewise, at the subscriber-most exchanges, test calls should be made every, say 15 mins, to make sure that the call connects to an operator. If the call fails to connect, an alert is raised.

If the alerts aren't acknowledged, then it should be sent to another response centre, so they can prod the correct centre to fix it.

WIN a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium sat comms unit

FIST(ing)

Final Integration of Systems Test

Photo finesse: Eyefi Mobi Pro Wi-Fi SD card

Re: In the field

Don't most tablets support USB-on-the-go, allowing it's usb port to work as a master as well as a device?

Met Police in egg/face blunder as shop-a-crim site's SSL cert expires

They seem to have installed a new certificate, which was issued on 8th January 2015, and will expire on 1 April 2016. They are also using mixed https/http, which causes a warning flag (but not a direct message) in firefox.

SPY FRY: Smart meters EXPLODE in Californian power surge

digital dumb meter

Would the digital prepayment or dumb meters survive this type of overvoltage?

PEAK IPV4? Global IPv6 traffic is growing, DDoS dying, says Akamai

Re: Dummy

I'm a total dummy when it comes to this stuff. Can someone succinctly state how 4 and 6 can get along?

The underlying transport protocol (normally Ethernet) has a byte to indicate that it's carrying an ARP, rARP, IPv4, IPv6 packet, etc.

Can your code survive crappy 2G? This open-source traffic controller will test it

Already done?

There are already programs that will simulate slow or unreliable connections. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1094760/network-tools-that-simulate-slow-network-connection for a discussion.

Netem on a linux bridge can add latency, re-order, duplicate and drop packets. It can do this either at a constant rate or in burst mode, which may be useful to simulate dodgy WiFi or GPRS connections. It can also do it to a different extent depending on which way the traffic is going.

Taylor Swift snaps up EVEN MORE pr0n domain names

Re: Office.porn

Scary fact - Clippy porn, sorry, "erotica", actually exists

Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it — no exceptions.

Rule 36: If you've thought of it, then there's somebody out there with a fetish for it.

Hello? Police? Yes, I'm a car and my idiot driver's crashed me

RTFA

It uses the deceleration sensors that trigger the air-bag. If the airbag(s) are triggered, it phones 112 for you. If you are just driving with gusto, it doesn't. Simples.

Hackable media box based on the Raspberry Pi compute module: Five Ninjas Slice

LEDs turn of-and-on-able?

Can you turn off those LEDs? I can see them getting very annoying, very quickly. I normally put stickers over the power-on LED if they are too bright.

Leaked Windows 10 build hints at peer-to-peer patching

Re: Could be useful... if under control

Even better for enterprises with dozens or hundreds of computers all trying to update at the same time every Patch Tuesday.

Enterprises are likely to be running WSUS which caches the patches.

Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

Re: Sadly missed

The Long Utopia, co-authored with Stephen Baxter, is due for release in the middle of June.