Posts by Dan 55

Nest: It's no longer all about you. Now it can recognize your kids, too

Not under my roof you won't

the ecosystem of smart locks, thermostats, lights, doorbells, cameras and so on all starting to work with one another

That's a clusterfuck waiting to happen, but in somebody else's house, not mine.

David Cameron hints at Budget law change to end mobile not-spots

Re: cue the Anti Mast campaigns

Yet there was an O2/T-Mobile agreement, there was national roaming between Orange and T-Mobile, and there is an EE/3 agreement.

I don't think there's any particular law that stops active network sharing, it's just it requires a bit of organisation between the two companies.

Go DevOps before your bosses force you to. It'll be easier that way

I can only assume the hero image for this article is the Reg commentardiat's reaction on seeing a new DevOps article.

State should run power firm spam database, says... competition watchdog

Do not want state-sanctioned spam

If this flies then why not do the same for every utility or service?

It's as if the mail preference and telephone preference services are working too well. Why would that be? People don't want or have time for this crap.

Mozilla burns Firefox on old Androids

Tab Groups

There's an add-on now, but then again I must have at least 5 add-ons already to bring back removed functionality.

And yes, I use it. The alternative is just a row of tabs full of Jira pages.

Don't fear PC-pocalypse, Chromebooks, two-in-ones 'will save us'

There is no economy of scale to make ARM desktop/laptop devices because the dominant OS does not run on ARM, therefore OEMs don't make them just to sell a few Chromebooks.

UK Ministry of Justice secure email system browns out

POP3

Shirley some mistake?

IMAP is too new a protocol?

Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs

Re: Where can I get a good dumb TV?

Samsung screens without Samsung software. What's the downside?

Re: During the meanwhile ...

I don't know, dog leads, poop bags, and bills sounds better than the average US network telly.

Not very smart

What with their inability to work if they can't phone home, the manufacturer's inability to support network services, the data slurping, and 3rd parties getting bored and pulling apps (e.g. Skype) which may make expensive additional hardware worthless (e.g. Skype), the smart money is on a dumb TV with a cheap Chinese Android stick.

We tested the latest pre-flight build of Windows 10 Mobile. It's buggy but promising

This is one of two things.

a) We are looking into the sausage factory and seeing how the sausage is made and it isn't very nice. One day the sausage will be delivered and everything will be fine.

Or

b) Windows 10 Mobile users will be subjected to Agile hell for the duration of ownership of the device, nothing ever really completed and as soon as a new app is thought up then effort will go into that instead of finishing off everything else.

Cloudy stuff is generally b) and they've said that cloud is first, so they're adopting a methodology suitable for cloud products.

Big-screen Skype gets small farewell note

How can DLNA cease working, it's supposed to be a local network thing?

Not doubting you, just wondering how they engineered that piece of built-in obsolescence.

Re: Ahead of the Curve

Perhaps the idea is you'll rush out and buy an XBox. Fucking stupid idea, but there it is anyway.

Accenture leans back, receives £86m Met Police contract

Nice to see that the government are putting their "we're going to outsource to smaller consultancies" plan into practice.

Fail0verflow GitHubs PS4 Linux loader

Re: I just... why?

It is rather a hangover from the last generation of consoles when things like low-powered ARM boxes connected to the telly weren't easily obtainable.

2016: Bad USB sticks, evil webpages, booby-trapped font files still menace Windows PCs

Compare and contrast...

... the CVEs for IE and Edge.

I haven't done it but I bet they're the same again this month.

Clive Sinclair Vega+ tin-rattle hits £300,000

Re: needs native dev kit

You'd have to launch it as a proper console with all that entails. As it is, I'm not sure of the need for this either given that a Nintendo DS with an emulator will do the job.

IIRC there was some talk of something something called a Vega after the QL to rescue Sinclair Research but he ran out of time and had to sell to Amstrad.

Home Office biometrics strategy is three years overdue, despite 'lack of clarity'

Judge Dredd

Lately there seems to be a fashion for letting them get on with it then writing the law to cover what they do.

GCHQ: Crypto's great, we're your mate, don't be like that and hate

Re: These people just don't seem to understand encryption.

Just realised that that's why the Internet Connection Record is so nebulous too. Scare the ISPs and they'll hand as much as they can over and there's no dirty law which says we want it all on a plate.

Re: "Holocaust", "Turing would have this and that" and a "Moral Questions"??

I'm sure Turing would have loved his superiors being able to call up the details of everybody's private life.

Re: These people just don't seem to understand encryption.

They are not addressing backdoors because it's bad PR and it's what China and Russia do. Instead looking at France and the UK, laws are made which threaten heavy fines and jail sentences so that end-to-end encryption or devices with encryption that is too difficult to break are designed-out at the design stage.

El avión de papel del proyecto PARIS aterriza en un libro de texto

Re: Que?

Quiere decir que su aerodeslizador esta lleno de anguilas y su mono ha subido el árbol.

Yelp-for-people app Peeple is back – so we rated Julia, its cofounder

Re: Maybe an opportunity for creative criticism...?

I'd like to think it was the Ghost of the Moderatrix.

Even if she does prevent it from being published, the moment Peeple launches its "truth licence," others will be able to read our thoughts on her personally.

What are the odds on her not having a proper delete button and/or a little person to take care of her profile? Very long I imagine.

Re: Rupert Murdoch

"So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?"

Software dev 101: 'The best time to understand how your system works is when it is dying'

Nope

I'm pretty sure the best time to understand how it works is when they give you proper training/shadowing at the start, instead of "argh, it's gone tits up again, work out what happened".

Microsoft has made SQL Server for Linux. Repeat, Microsoft has made SQL Server 2016 for Linux

Imagine my joy

I'm almost as excited by this development as I was by the news that DB2 was coming to Linux.

First working Apple Mac ransomware infects Transmission BitTorrent app downloads

Re: Not everything is Windows

Rename a file in Terminal and Finder will faithfully treat it differently if the extension changed. That also goes for if you told Finder to show file extensions then rename a file with Finder changing the extension.

Here the malware seems to be an app bundle dressed up as an rtf file, and if you have extensions hidden (as they are by default) then you're not going to know unless you realise the context menu options and properties are appropriate for apps.

Not good design.

Re: "malware's executable was smuggled in an .RTF README file"

Oh lordy, Mac OS followed Windows into hiding extensions by default, and look what happened.

Re: being thick...

The nobbled version of Transmission puts an executable in the Library directory in the user's home directory. That process could encrypt any document the user has read/write access to, it just depends if it's programmed so that it searches other volumes too. Assume the worst.

You'd need to panic if you see kernel_service in activity monitor or in the ~/Library directory (~/Library is now helpfully hidden by default, Choose Go from the Finder menu to find it).

PARIS paper plane lands in Spanish school textbook

Moulding young minds, etc...

But I'm not sure how the PARIS mission suddenly goes off onto a tangent into videogames for the last question though.

Maybe if you're lucky one of the other chapters goes into detail about how to apply for permission from officialdom. Or maybe that requires a whole textbook...

Apple: FBI request threatens kids, electricity grid, liberty

They can't immediately delete all the source code and object code an send the engineers onto other projects as soon as this is finished because, if this works and sets precedent, they'd get another All Writs Act for just this other iPhone. Then another. And so on.

They would also need to testify in court about how the firmware was written, giving more leads to everyone else about how to do it.

Eventually Apple would argue it's too burdensome and they'd get a demand for govtOS instead, arguing TSA luggage keys as precedent or something. And I'm sure the TSA would want a copy of that too, along with the police, FBI, and so on.

AMD to fix slippery hypervisor-busting bug in its CPU microcode

Re: Out of the Darkness Comes Light ‽ .

Today's breaking news from Zerohedge: The apocalypse is coming sometime soon.

French parliament votes to jail tech execs who refuse to decrypt data

Re: Yup, that'll be France.

It's like a race to the bottom... of intelligence.

Re: SIEG HEIL, Monsieur Hollande

Not that much opposed by them, they did pass the temporary emergency powers after the attack which were only going to last three months, honestly, into law after all.

Microsoft wants to lock everyone into its store via universal Windows apps, says game kingpin

Re: All about margin

Yes, he might be understandably annoyed by that... Redmond heavies take an open platform (in the sense that anyone could release anything for it) and then add new features which are available only to UWP and he has to use their crappy store and pay the Danegeld to be able to release UWP games.

Yet because UWP is badly designed he also has to fight bugs and changes caused by MS tinkering with it in an effort to try and fix it, meaning higher costs after release.

All that for 30%. What's not to like?

How the FBI will lose its iPhone fight, thanks to 'West Coast Law'

Re: Hyperbole

"But that's bollocks. The FBI aren't asking Apple to release firmware to them"

But as part of the trial process that's what they'll have to do to anyway show that the procedure they used to get the data off it is reliable.

Re: Ah, but that would involve *logic*

Meanwhile San Bernardino goes one step further and says there's an encrypted virus on the iPhone which could attack the city unless they get the PIN off Apple, or something. The kind of idea that was thought up by writers for CSI Cyber then dropped for being too stupid.

San Bernardino DA says seized iPhone may hold “dormant cyber pathogen”

Even the most sympathetic judge is going to have trouble with that one.

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

Re: The "all work must be rewarded" mentality

"the BBC has been blocked at home in my Firewall and local DNS cache for 14 years!"

Oh that fateful day when you turned on the computer, opened your web browser, and typed www.bbc.co.uk followed by enter by accident. Never again!

Backup bods at Microsoft lose CA audit data after server crash

"Our CRM system suffered a data loss"

They mean Sharepoint had a senior moment.

Everything bad in the world can be traced to crap Wi-Fi

Re: Shit Wi-Fi?

No, Amazon's just using data from your visits to IMDB as part of their product recommendations.

Re: Icon says it all

I thought that was DRM. At least you have a chance of doing something relatively simple to fix broken WiFi, in the worst case moving somewhere else or switching to mobile data.

North Dorset Council hit by ransomware, flips the bird at miscreants

"Some of these organisations do not have the latest backup [systems] installed"

They don't have any, otherwise they could roll back to the day/week before for the affected files.

E-borders will be eight years late and cost more than £1bn

Re: Where's the bouzouki player?

Like the mice's chocolate biscuit factory.

(Accenture tells The Home Office and HM Customs that the e-borders project makes passport control out of breadcrumbs and butterbeans. Accenture run the e-borders project, and it does appear to work, but then they rope off the passport control machines before anyone can go through.)

http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/bagpuss/stories.htm

No more Nookie for Blighty as Barnes & Noble pulls out

Re: All other eBook content distributors in Eu are now effectively dead

Nook and Kobo never even arrived to other countries, it's Kindle or cheapie Chinese Androids sold as e-readers supplied with an Adobe DRM reader.

Re: Calibre

Forgot to mention you also need to install Apprentice Alf's DRM Removal Plugin for Calibre. Icon for me.

Re: They never ever got it, did they?

"they never had an inkling"

I see what you did there.

Agree that the e-book hardware was (is) nice, buy they also failed because went for stores like John Lewis and Argos instead of Smiths and Boots.

Essex cop abused police IT systems to snoop on his in-laws

If you have no in-laws you have nothing to fear?

Rejoice, sysadmins, there's a new glamour job nobody understands

Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

Least of all best security practices which was not mentioned at all.

You can take Gartner's magic rectangle and stick it where the sun don't shine. Sideways.