Posts by Dan 55

How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

Re: Wanting to use 2FA is one thing...

I followed the instructions in the link and was able to use my TOTP client for PayPal. No SMS or mobile number involved.

Re: Wanting to use 2FA is one thing...

SMS is not really 2FA. A TOTP client running on it is.

I believe app passwords are compatible with the "is this you logging on now?" notification on Android and the list of 10 one-time login codes in case the phone is stolen.

Re: Wanting to use 2FA is one thing...

For websites see https://www.turnon2fa.com/tutorials/ and https://twofactorauth.org/.

Even PayPal has it but it's pretty well hidden.

Re: The elephant in the room

Right. I don't trust any 2FA backend run by ads-placement-seller-and-data-slupers like Google or the like. Nor I trust any OS or app offered by the same companies for the same task.

Try FreeOTP+. Allows backup with export/import to/from a file.

Re: Wanting to use 2FA is one thing...

I can read, that leaves cell phones for 2FA, which don't have connectivity in some buildings and areas.

Why should it need connectivity, if they're doing 2FA properly it should base codes on a shared secret.

'Java 9, it did break some things,' Oracle bod admits to devs still clinging to version 8

Well they could use that headline, but not if the story is about Oracle setting up a licensing trap ready for you to walk into.

Everyone can see it from a mile off, which is why nobody is upgrading.

UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away

"campaign group Big Brother Watch"

Be careful with this one. It's another one of those opaquely-funded groups which try to change government policy at 55 Tufton Street.

Their agenda seems to be only jump on government, but the same thing were done by private companies they wouldn't have a problem with it.

Google finally touts $150 pint-sized Linux dev board with Edge TPU AI math copro brains

Re: Another idea

Here is another idea: when such a thing calls you, refuse the booking. Yeah, you are "losing" a customer that way - actually that person would not have booked a table at your place in person anyway.

The thing is, the restaurant actually hears a very close approximation of a human being so, unless the state where they live actually has laws saying the callee must be told they're talking to a robot and the call is being recorded, it's difficult to make a judgement.

So, once again, through their ubiquity meaning people get pulled into the Google way of doing things, Google has found a way to make businesses that opt out lose business.

So Windrush happened, and yet UK Home Office immigration data still has 'appalling defects'

Re: Any chance.....

Yes.

Re: Umm..

It's not just the immigration data, surprise surprise...

MPs condemn Home Office over new Windrush failings

Report highlights failure to support those affected, with systemic problems still evident

[...]

Officials are still unable to say when a compensation scheme will be launched; meanwhile, many of those affected are in dire financial circumstances caused by periods of enforced unemployment, the removal of unemployment benefits, and debts run up trying to pay legal bills and Home Office fees; some remain homeless.

The report also found that:

The Home Office displayed a lack of concern for the impacts of its immigration policies on people without documents, compounding this with a systemic failure to keep accurate records, leaving many people who are British citizens struggling to prove their right to be in the UK.

There were numerous examples of the department doing “as little, rather than as much, as possible to find and help people affected by its actions”.

The Home Office was failing in its duty of care to identify and support everyone affected by the Windrush scandal. Greater attention should be given to large numbers of non-Caribbean victims.

Officials have been “woefully complacent” in promoting the existence of the Windrush scheme, which works to help affected people get their papers, particularly internationally.

British ethnic minorities remained vulnerable to being discriminated against by hostile environment policies that require landlords and employers to check documentation.

The Windrush failures had “major implications for the future as the UK prepares to leave the EU”.

The first ZX Spectrum prototype laid bare... (What? It was acceptable in the '80s)

Re: Just use emulation

If it's not 6502-based or Commodore BASIC he doesn't like it, which is odd as both 6502 assembler and Commodore BASIC are both pretty poor examples of assembly language and BASIC.

Also, the hatchet job he just did on the ZX80/1 was rather uncalled for. Nice to see Jeff Minter put him right in the comments.

There's an easy fix to make 48K machines output composite instead of RF.

128K machines output RGB and can be converted to VGA.

Re: Ah, memories.

Spectrum had a CIRCLE from the start, although it couldn't draw them if they went off the screen. Maybe you did a version which could, or you're thinking of Acorn and having to wait for the Archimedes and BBC BASIC V to get CIRCLE?

Re: Just use emulation

The 8-Bit Guy has just started a project to build an 8-bit computer using modern parts, but if you're a regular viewer you may be unsurprised to find out that seems set on re-inventing a Vic-20 or Commodore 64.

Re: Just use emulation

Don't forget the monitor/HDMI lag you get with an emulator instead of the instant response of proper hardware on a CRT, the lag is of course is the reason why I'm no good at Manic Miner any more.

Re: Penny wise, pound foolish

For some reason I had this nagging doubt so I went back and looked on the net, it seems the ROM was originally socketed but the socket was dropped somewhere through issue 2.

In an age where people updated the memory themselves and transplanted the board into a new keyboard case (I did both), I'm sure early adopters would have paid for a new BASIC ROM if it were objectively better.

And to be honest I was jealous that the Acorn machines had the proper OS...

Re: So it got delivered...

Note that says 28 days, not 28 months which is RCL's take on that.

Penny wise, pound foolish

As for the eventual ZX Spectrum itself, it would launch in April 1982 with unfinished firmware and a BASIC ROM that could charitably be described as lethargic. A plan to ship an upgraded ROM was dropped due to the popularity of the thing, with the finished firmware shipping on peripherals, ready to take over from the Spectrum’s incomplete ROM when needed.

It wasn't upgradable because Sinclair wanted to save pennies (of course) and soldered the ROM to the circuit board instead of pushing the boat out and using a DIP socket, and the ROM software was unfinished because Sinclair wanted to save pennies (again) and fell into a dispute with Nine Tiles. A lot of the functionality which was in the Interface 1 was originally meant to be in the Spectrum ROM.

The closest approximation of what the ROM should have been like is here (Sea Change ROM). Over the years this turned into the Gosh Wonderful ROM.

Of course nowadays there's interpreters for Windows other OSes like this.

Haha! Conformist 'Droids! Yep, that's what's most profitable these days, says Nokia

Re: It is one of the reasons I bought Nokia

The problem is nobody is prepared to make that investment since mobile OSes became free.

HMD's relationship to Google is similar to Dell and Wintel 20 years ago: they want to be the reference platform, with as little divergence as possible, which makes rapid patching easier.

Well they can fix the battery saving then as Nokia phones have a task killer which is a little too keen.

(Who are Evenwell?)

Re: Slight correction

"Nokia's current custodian, HMD Global"

I think that means handset brand custodian.

Civil servants 'Sir Humphrey' their way through grilling on UK.gov's digital transformation

Re: "No need for you to get involved in any specifics, chaps"

I wish.

"No need for you to get involved in any specifics, chaps"

There seems to be an epidemic of that in Whitehall and government lately. I wonder if that has anything to do with the current lamentable state of affairs.

Cheap as chips: There's no such thing as a free lunch any Moore

Re: Nothing new...

Obligatory SymbOS mention (WIMP on Amstrad CPC 6128).

Re: "If only it ran macOS!"

I don't think device drivers are that taxing. Well, maybe they are for Apple.

The threading is the same, the XNU Darwin kernel is the same or as near as makes no difference. The UI might not allow the user to access it, but that's something different.

When 2FA means sweet FA privacy: Facebook admits it slurps mobe numbers for more than just profile security

Re: At what point do the employees wise up ?

You can be damn sure they'll continue monetizing it to whomever will shovel money through their doors.

Aren't they doing that already?

Judging by the downvotes, in case people have misunderstood that, these are names of android apps which allow access to Facebook without the Facebook apps' tentacles in your phone. They are wrappers for the website with no contact or phone number permissions, and do not share cookies with the Android browser.

Hence useful if you 'must' use Facebook from your phone.

Tinfoil/Metal/Folio or another wrapper?

Sounds like a case for GDPR

And a fine for 4% of annual turnover. That'll learn 'em.

Alphabet snoop: If you're OK with Google-spawned Chronicle, hold on, hold on, dipping into your intranet traffic, wait, wait

Of course we can trust Google

I mean, it's not like they've ever stuffed a microphone in a subsidiary's consumer gear without telling anyone what it does or anything.

YouTube's pedo problem is so bad, it just switched off comments on millions of vids of small kids to stem the tide of vileness

Re: One of the YouTube channels I watched got its comments deleted in this manner

So basically no change for the loony videos, YouTube would still need to mod these videos anyway. However the non-loony videos wouldn't be polluted by loony comments.

Re: One of the YouTube channels I watched got its comments deleted in this manner

YouTube (and other platforms) should allow you to moderate replies to your videos/posts/whatever to be moderated by you. The idea being the person most interested in keeping their garden clean is you so you should have the tools to do it.

Obviously that doesn't stop people creating sketchy videos which YouTube's fantastic algorithms completely fail to catch, but I think this is a battle which needs to be fought on several fronts, and this would stop anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, people with political opinions funded by unknown sources, and undesirables of the sort mentioned in this articles rocking up and ruining otherwise perfectly fine stuff.

But, for technology companies, YouTube and others seem to be extraordinarily resident to change, convinced that the model works but they just need to tweak the PHP script behind it.

To be honest I don't think the human race is ready for social media. It might work when geeks blabber on about operating systems but it doesn't scale up to real life, it ends up amplifying and polarising every problem society has.

If at first you don't succeed, you may be trying to install that Slow Ring Windows 10 build

Re: Does anyone bother with Windows anymore ?

Oh. In that case I thought they'd have done what they did with iTunes and stop the rollout to the affected machines instead of stopping the build pipeline.

Which is why I thought it was a built-in Windows 10 problem.

Re: Does anyone bother with Windows anymore ?

Why should game anti-cheat be built-in and hold up an entire OS anyway? I think MS have forgotten what an OS should and shouldn't do.

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

Re: sigh

When I last looked at that it seemed users and content providers (El Reg) have to faff around with crypto currencies though, so I discounted it.

Re: sigh

And yet no browser has a built-in point-and-drool tip jar, all thought so far seems to be towards clobbering ads sometimes followed by 'letting the ads we think are good though' or 'replacing other ads with our good ads'.

If you could pay a few pence if you liked an article by simply clicking a button, that would really challenge the advertising model.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

Re: Morons

Obviously you're one of the violent unreasoning barely-sentient 24% so your views can be easily discounted as worthless.

"A 2017 Stack Overflow survey singled out Perl as the most hated coding language"

At least there is method behind the madness with Perl, the only thing it's guilty of is straying a little too far away from C syntax which for some people is an insurmountable problem. Sticking two keywords together in JavaScript or PHP is like playing Wheel of Fortune, but the familiar squiggles and braces lull you into a false sense of security.

In hilariously petulant move, Apple shuts Texas stores and reopens them few miles down the road – for patent reasons

Re: Perhaps an empty gesture

Wouldn't Apple have to refuse to sell online to addresses in the Eastern District of Texas too?

Long phone is loooong: Sony swipes at flagship fatigue with 21:9 tall boy

Re: No F****ing Notch

I think they should have a notch which brings the inner screen ratio down to 16:9. You'd have all the marketing benefits of 21:9 with all the marketing benefits of a notch. It'd sell loads.

Harassment, hate and bile, suicide instructions for kids... anything else social media's good at? Ah yes, cybercrime

YouTube "Kids"

Unless and until it has a human pre-moderating all videos, I ain't trusting it and will be treating it just like YouTube. I.e. it ain't for kids and mine's going nowhere near it.

Magic algorithms still can't do what one human being can. The fact they won't use a real person for vetting children's videos is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with Silicon Valley culture.

I bet employees who do have children won't let them anywhere near it.

Watchdog asks UK.gov to reissue freedom of information guidance after councils are told to STFU about Brexit plans

Re: Nothing to hide, nothing to fear ...

They have something to hide. What have they to fear?

Concrete written proof that the emperor is stark bollock naked.

If they're Brexiters you could give them Criadillas al Brexit.

I'll let the audience find their own English translation.

'God, Send Mobiles,' the industry prayed back in the '90s. This time, 5G actually has it covered

Three

Maybe the problem wasn't late handsets, but an early network.

They had to allow roaming on other 2G networks so customers could get coverage. I mean, 3/3/03 wasn't a marketing-driven date at all...

Nokia 9: HMD Global hauls PureView™ out of brand limbo

Re: £549 for a Nokia???

Well... the pound isn't what it quite was 10 years ago...

Re: £549 for a Nokia???

More to the point, "the hundreds of millions of new smartphone buyers that will come online in India and China in the next few years" probably wouldn't be either.

This phone, by definition, has to sell in decadent western countries.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Perhaps if he hadn't said "portability is for people who cannot write new programs" and hadn't had a go at MINUX, he wouldn't be in this situation. It took a lot of work to convert Linux from an i386 OS to work on other CPUs, one day he might work out more modular kernels aren't such a bad thing either.

Re: False flag waving?

Apple's OSes are BSD based and are already working on ARM.

Linux love hits Windows 10 19H1 amid a second round of zombie slaying

Re: Uncomfortable

How do you think that MS is going to make money out such a system?

Nobody who buys Windows cares what happens under the hood, it could be Windows NT, Linux, or a hamster in a wheel. What's important is the APIs look the same from the outside and Windows software they have still runs as usual.