Posts by Dan 55

No escape: Microsoft injects 'Get Windows 10' nagware into biz PCs

Re: I am not a fucking product.

Well they pick their targets. What are the chances of any small business winning this one against MS' legal juggernaut?

What are the licensing implications for this by the way?

2015's horror PC market dropped nine per cent

Re: Gartner in back-to-front shock

Yes, they're stampeding to Apple at such a phenomenal rate that Win 10 already has nearly double the market share of all versions of Mac OSX combined.

I imagine that a lot of that is to do with MS pushing updates to old hardware.

there were no mass exoduses (Exodii?) when Vista and Win 8 turned out to be absolute turds.

But there are more options now, especially in the consumer market.

As for businesses, Win 7 is staying until MS stop making it available to OEMs. And again, businesses moving to Win 10 is not a foregone conclusion, there are more options available, especially now that office is available for mobiles, tablets, and OS X is at feature parity.

Gartner in back-to-front shock

Windows 10's arrival in business should help sales to pick up, as should upgrades made by consumers who've been putting it off for a while.

I'm not sure how they've arrived at that conclusion, it's the exact opposite of what's happening... businesses are avoiding it like the plague and customers are stampeding to Apple because putting up with a Windows install slowly disappearing up its own fundament does get old after a while.

Microsoft’s Get Windows 10 nagware shows signs of sentience

Re: Turn off updates - problem solved.

That might work for you but it doesn't work for any family computers you support if you don't have the time to wetnurse the computers.

I don't know why they're dicking about with these entries, they're documented on support.microsoft.com as a way to prevent downloading Windows 10.

So after you've set them, GWX randomly unsets them then presumably shortly afterwards starts the download and after downloading asks you if you want to install now or tonight.

What is that... plausible deniability or a crock of shit? I go with the second.

JetBrains announces Project Rider, a cross-platform IDE for C#

It looks good, but it doesn't do remote development. If you want to do remote development you've got to go back to Eclipse and prod at settings until it deigns to work.

Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick!

Re: Rule 3: Functions should be curried.

As well as regexp, SQL can be considered a functional language.

I certainly wouldn't like to be in any club which lets SQL in.

Yes, well. If you were to believe books about procedural programming then a program would represent a mouth that blurts out "hello, world!" to everyone who passes by.

Try something like this instead...

http://voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen/2013/10/15/c-has-become-a-scripting-language/

Improve, automate, rinse and repeat: All aboard the starship DevOps

I don't know about improving and refining...

... but there's a lot of rinsing and repeating with these DevOps articles.

Windows 10 shattered Remote Desktop's security defaults – so get patching

Re: Go ahead

Your post assumes that Windows is good enough so that users can go 1438 minutes without hating something about it. That's a very optimistic assumption.

Re: RDP with no login?

Passwordless accounts on Windows are quite secure if the computer itself is secure, you shouldn't be able to log into them remotely. Until a little while ago of course.

Eric Schmidt, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords

You have no idea what an AI might do or how it decides that it's perfectly reasonable to do it.

People murder, dogs suddenly attack children, and an AI in a suitable body might one day decide that it or the world would be better off with a few less humans.

What would be the easiest way for 51% of the world's human population to live a comfortable life with sufficient resources?

Exterminate 49% of the world's human population.

That's one possible take on empathy for you.

Open Web Application Security Project issues new secure coding bible

Attn publishers of these esteemed organ

2.16: Verify that credentials are transported using a suitable encrypted link and that all pages/functions that require a user to enter credentials are done so using an encrypted link.

Beware the terrorist drones! For they are coming! Pass new laws!

Re: Every excuse is good...

The "NEW" shark drone... coming soon.

Don't give the SyFy channel any ideas for Sharknado 4, you'll only encourage them...

Switzerland, Spain and France are beating UK at DevOps – survey

Re: DevOps *urgh* deployment

Do firms have to have six business areas now? Five not good enough?

It could be argued Spain's always been doing DevOps, in permanently understaffed IT depts everyone has to do everything, only now it's got a cool name.

EE, O2, Giffgaff, BT Mobile customers cut off as mobile networks fail

Like to be a fly on the wall in 3's call centre

"Yes sir, we know you are having trouble calling everyone but it's all their fault."

Investigatory Powers Bill: A force for good – if done right?

Re: Intelligence & Evidence

How would having no rules for spooks stop politicians from being pressured?

Nvidia GPUs give smut viewed incognito a second coming

Actually, reading up it this, it seems they do if the memory previously belonged to a different process. If it previously belonged to the same process, they don't.

So if this is to be done the same way then nVidia should zero all video memory which belonged to a process when it exits.

Re: I imagine NVIDIA are in the clear

What would malloc do?

I've assumed it's uninitialised on all platforms which could mean you get some passwords or certificates if a password manager didn't zero the memory before freeing it.

This is the same thing isn't it?

Samsung turns to smart home, wearables chips as mobile declines

Re: At CES, Samsung showed off some of the innovations

I propose that wearable should be depreciated and strap-on be added to El Reg's nomenclature with immediate effect.

UK energy minister rejects 'waste of money' smart meters claim

Re: Well DUH!

If instead of putting a British minister to sell the snakeoil and receive the blame, they actually said "it's because EU", we would be quite surprised at how little the British government actually does. There's a directive behind most things they do. I haven't looked but I wouldn't be surprised if they're rushing out new alcohol limits and pushing a fat food tax just because a directive or similar has come out and they want to claim that they're taking the initiative and the rest will follow.

Smartphone hard, dudes, like it’s the end of the world!

Re: Best article ever.

Judging by the new-look El Reg we will have to treasure each SFTW as we do each episode of Sherlock because there's only a two or three every year and a bit.

(Apart from the last one which was a bit too clever for its own good.)

Re: All That's New is Old Again

That's what using cheapy Chinese white-label phones with SAR ratings higher than sticking your head in a microwave does to you. I hope everyone realises that they should stick with Apple, the radio signal can't even get through your hands if you hold it wrong.

Catalan town hall seriously downsizes monarch

Re: Inventive?

Which rule of law? There are so many to choose from...

Re: Inventive?

File under "each fiefdom constantly fighting the rest".

The court case comes up... Another waste of money.

If only they were so inventive when it came to sirving the electorate instead of each fiefdom constantly fighting the rest.

It's looking likely that the both the Catalan and the general elections will have to repeated because nobody can agree with anyone else. Don't worry, there's money for that...

Motorola cut in half! But still alive, and ready to live again

The article linked to at the end brought back the full horror of the UI on millennium-era Motorolas. With hindsight I'm not surprised Nokia ruled everywhere.

It is a great shame about the monolith that was Motorola's legacy being a batwing logo and the first half of their name though.

Microsoft offers pay-as-you-go data SIM for Windows 10 devices

If the app store entry didn't say that Microsoft was the developer, I'd have written it off as a scam from the description.

Devs get malicious root app militia on Play Store, sell pumped up ratings

Did I understand this right?

You, with a rooted phone, download Brain Training Cake Crush or whatever. It detects you have a rooted phone and asks for root permissions to gain persistence.

Please tell me nobody hit OK.

Reverser laments crypto game protection, says wares dead after 2018

Re: Just works

The irony is (if it's that) is that Nintendo lock purchases to consoles, on the Wii and even on the Wii U where on every other system if you log in on another device you can re-download.

If your console breaks you lose the purchases unless you pay Nintendo to fix it, in which case they give you a reconditioned one and transfer the account to the new console. Their Wii to Wii U transfer might not transfer everything if the title was withdrawn from the Wii Shop. You are better off buying the disc version than a full price DRM download.

So they don't exactly do themselves any favours with DRM.

Re: Good

Because as soon as the authentication server goes offline (company folds, title deleted, etc...) then you've lost the game.

Oh UK.gov. Say you're not for weakened encryption – Google and Facebook

Re: Banks

They only dropped MD5 when mainstream browsers dropped it, so as another poster said above, they don't give a shit.

Obama: What will solve America's gun problem? What could it be? *snaps fingers* Technology!

Re: Simple fix - Do what Australia did and ban them

"How do you control guns in a nation where there are a hundred million small arms in circulation?"

Make it very difficult to buy bullets?

"they may have my guns when they pry them from my cold dead hands"

Presumably that's when you've been shot.

Made it, Ma! Top of the world!

Re: In the spirit of Tommy Flanagan (Jon Lovitz, SNL)

Hollywood feedback loop.

To develop a solution and roll it out, replacing everyone's gun trigger with new biometric-o-matic triggers which will also presumably need to be charged up will take years, maybe two generations. It will also get the nutters stockpiling old hardware and create a black market.

By which time education and toughening gun laws would have already done the job.

GCHQ mass spying will 'cost lives in Britain,' warns ex-NSA tech chief

Re: Straws in the wind

Was he disabled at the time? If so, it adds even more class to the proceedings.

FTFY

The power that mass surveillance gives to the spooks over select members of the government...

LogMeIn adds emergency break-in feature to LastPass

Re: KeePass

1) Apparently it can import passwords from LastPass and many other sources...

http://keepass.info/help/base/importexport.html

3) Cloud save via DropBox sync folder or DropBox plugin.

http://keepass.info/plugins.html#kpdatasave

Re: Emergency access to the whole damn vault?

I would imagine the magic is done with the help of the new client which uploads something to LogMeIn after logging in successfully, so if you're going to close your account then don't upgrade your client beforehand.

Re: Dodgy

This is more-or-less what KeePass is, with a GUI on top. You may like it.

Day 2: Millions of HSBC customers still locked out of online banking

Re: Every time I read a story about a huge banking titsup happening...

I don't know if their systems are more modern or not, but I do know that they seem to have more success keeping them running.

They have been a bit silly with me on a couple of occasions, but they haven't made any mistake that has costed me money or left me being unable to pay, which seems to count for something these days.

Every time I read a story about a huge banking titsup happening...

... I think to myself how fortunate it is that I bank with Nationwide and carry on with my day.

Icon is smug face.

HSBC COO ‘profoundly apologises’ for online outage

Re: Does HSBC rely on a private cloud of some kind?

A private cloud... is that newfangled talk for having a data centre?

Dutch govt says no to backdoors, slides $540k into OpenSSL without breaking eye contact

Re: Dutch government and IT (Security) in general

Now that ARM took them over, maybe the backdoors were transferred to GCHQ...

Re: Dutch government and IT (Security) in general

PolarSSL being from a Dutch company can't have hurt either.

Half of UK financial institutions vulnerable to well-known crypto flaws

It's just connecting to each bank website in Firefox, seeing what the Calomel or similar plug-in says (or even Page Info if you like), and compiling a list.

Should that be against the law now?

Microsoft's 200 million 'Windows 10' 'devices' include Lumias, Xboxes

Re: Microsoft watching you viewing your photos?

If I wasn't going to run it before, they've made sure I'm certainly not going to run it now.

Is there nobody left at MS saying stop this travesty?

Here's your Linux-booting PS4, says fail0verflow

Re: Typo?

It can decode hi-res YouTube streams and display them on two different screens with different resolutions, one of them sent over WiFi to the GamePad, so it's not as sluggish you'd think.

My Android devices can't cope with H.265, so it's a common problem.