Posts by Dan 55

Google probes AVG Chrome widget after 9m users exposed by bugs

Re: IT Crowd

The only virtue Windows Defender has is it doesn't nag which is quite out-of-line with the rest of Windows. The defending itself isn't actually very good...

https://www.av-test.org/en/news/news-single-view/protection-for-windows-81-24-security-packages-put-to-the-test/

UK digital minister asks for input on strategy, lauds 'sharing economy' biz success

Kill it with fire

Vaizey said that over the previous five years "digital fever exploded from the cluster in east London, and has spread to every part of the country, making the UK truly a ‘Tech Nation’."

Because five years ago nobody knew about computers in the UK, certainly nobody outside of East London.

Silicon playgrounds... Delivering digital dividends...

North Korean operating system is a surveillance state's tour de force

Re: Source code?

If not even root is allowed to get at the antivirus pattern matcher, that indicates kernel changes. Sort of like El Capitan's System Integrity Protection which denies access for everyone including root to certain system files.

Password-less database 'open-sources' 191m US voter records on the web

Re: I'm shocked

And you don't actually vote, the electoral college does.

Re: Has anyone besides the guy himself seen the proof?

I assume he's shown his own details because showing someone else's would be rather impolite, it's an SQL server instead of a web frontend which means it's a little more difficult to find, and he's not handing out the server address to all and sundry because 5 seconds later some clown would upload a copy to The Pirate Bay.

Re: What's the concern?

Of all the arguments for "nothing to see here, please disperse"...

- Just because information is available in one database means it's okay for it to be available in another bigger database, just because.

... and...

- Just because it's available in another bigger database, access restrictions don't matter, just because.

... are particularly weak.

Surface Pro 4: Will you go the F**K to SLEEP?

Re: But does it run...

Not with the advent of Windows 10.

Re: Don't think the "F**K" in "Will you go the F**K to SLEEP?" is necessary

It's from the book of the same name. I dare say if the child is young enough the exasperated parent will even have read it to them in an attempt to get them to do that.

Re: But does it run...

It's a good question, it might not due to mandatory secure boot.

Does life as a hostage change your attitude to life as an IT contractor?

Re: It may be an interesting video

In the way that when there's yet another handful or two of zero-day CVEs fixed in Flash the editorial line is that it should be nuked from orbit for the good of everyone.

Software bug sets free thousands of US prisoners too early

"fix this, fix it fast, and fix it right"

Pick any two...

Microsoft halts downloads of new PowerShell power-up

Bugs-as-a-Service

Their QA has gone to pot if an update from PS 4 to 5 wasn't a test case.

OK Google? Firefox to nibble Chrome extensions from 2016

A blog entry a year or two from now...

"Fellow Lizard People,

As you know, it has become very costly to maintain Gecko with Blink (the JavaScript API) due to differences in architecture. We have looked at a number of possible solutions and have decided the most effective method will be to transition Firefox to Blink (the engine) with Blink (the JavaScript API) as they are a better fit for each other..."

Juniper's VPN security hole is proof that govt backdoors are bonkers

Well they've set Q back to the old value, but it seems there's still the bug which leaks 32 bytes, still the bug which means they use plain Dual EC instead of Dual EC with ANSI X9.17, and finally they're still using Dual EC when everyone else dropped that idea after Snowden.

Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence and all that, but the back door is still there. But at least it's the way it was supposed to be.

CIOs, what does your nightmare before Christmas look like?

What review process was in place for the code and documentation?

None as usual, it's just that this time they were in Polish so it looks a thousand times worse.

Cisco cops to enterprise IOS XE vulnerability

"Cisco has issued a software update, warning that there is no workaround you could implement."

And was that bug found before or during the audit that Cisco's carrying out after Juniper's little three-letter problem came to light?

Australian government urges holidaymakers to kill two-factor auth

Re: Blimey

Do Oz carriers charge for incoming SMSs or incoming SMSs while abroad? If they do, do they charge more than the average amount you lose with identity theft?

UK says wider National Insurance number use no longer a no-no

Re: Pros and Cons

ID numbers and social securty/NINo numbers aren't the same, you can have someone who has ID but no social security (a foreign resident) and you can have someone with social security but no ID (a minor).

Doce detenidos en Madrid por robar el dni y suplantar a sus víctimas en bancos

And they weren't particularly clever, they just stole ID cards and someone in their gang who looked roughly like the photo used it to withdraw their money out of bank accounts.

City of London cops in Christmas karaoke crackdown shocker

Re: Why?

I still don't quite understand how it's copyright infringement if it's fan-made CD+Gs (remember those?) of songs which aren't published in CD+G format therefore can't be used for Karaoke, commercial scale if it's three oldsters, or commercial activity if it's made freely available.

Are they a police force or the inquisition? What are they guilty of, attracting their attention while doing something computery?

Re: Why?

Because they've got to come up with something or they look rather silly. Now they've stuck their foot in it, they might as well do it properly.

The ball's in your court, Bezos: Falcon 9 lands after launching satellites

Iron Man vs Bezos

Aren't we comparing apples with oranges in this article? Bezos' vehicle is for taking people up to have a look and bring them back down again, Musk's is rather more complicated.

Congratulations to both of them by the way.

UK ISP Sky to make smut an opt-in service from 2016

the PM and the media mogul are reported to have recently enjoyed Christmas drinks together

As have Osborne and the media mogul the day before announcing that the BBC was going to be royally fucked.

Won't be sorry to see the back of him.

DEAD MAN'S SOCKS and other delightful gifts from clients

So if it's legal, what's part of the payment is VAT that the instructor passes on to the Revenue?

You're so going to need a diet when MS start getting serious about pushing W10 in the new year.

Hello Kitty hack exposes 3.3 million users' details, says infosec bod

Re: Different time, different place

Is my Fisher-Price phone tapped by default?

It's not been proven that Windows Phone 8 uploads private data but there are doubts about Windows Phone 10.

Facepalm time: MS Office update wipes custom Word autotext

Re: All together now!

Bad for firing their trustworthy computing group, yes.

An on-demand video subscription isn't just for Christmas... Oh. It is

I can understand that, just watching Home Alone stresses me out so that puts me in the perfect Christmas mood.

Well, duh

Changing cable/satellite provider implies changing telephone/broadband/cable/satellite dish. OTT has nothing like that to make you stay.

Free Wi-Fi for the NHS, promises health secretary Jeremy Hunt

Silliest thing I've read in a long time

Cash is being made available from a £1bn to improve patchy Wi-Fi services in hospitals, he said.

It claimed turning on free Wi-Fi access across the NHS estate could significantly increase take up of online health tools.

Such a move would allow patients staying in hospital to self-monitor their conditions using apps and reduce admin time for doctors and nurses, claimed the report.

When you're in the hospital it's the NHS staff who are supposed to look after you, not Dr. Google.

There's someone making money rolling out public wifi.

Good job we're in this austerity drive together or it might be 2 billion.

Skilled workers, not cost, lured Apple to China says Tim Cook

Skilled workers

So he can't find anyone skilled with a glue gun outside of China?

Apple changing from producing hardware to glueware happened on his watch, the fucker.

Hillary Clinton says for crypto 'maybe the back door is the wrong door'

Re: Clueless is an understatement

Why would they need to weaken encryption? They'd just need to make a law saying that gov must be able to access encrypted data. Services that offer end-to-end encryption with the server unable to decrypt the data would become illegal.

This seems to be the UK's answer as well in the IPB.

Have we lost Dabbsy this week

His Twitter account says he's not back till the new year.

ICO slaps HIV support group with £250 fine following email blunder

In this case perhaps it would be better if the ICO could constructively help and come back later to see if action has been taken instead of fining them. There are a whole lot of NGOs and small companies for which a carrot is better than a stick.

Windows 10 won't come to old WinPhones until some time in early 2016

Re: Almost as good

all major phone OS's are trying to grab you data and monetise you and encourage you to buy apps etc

Better not hit the update button for Windows Phone 10 then.

Brazil gets a WTF WhatsApp moment

Re: "...sad to see Brazil isolate itself from the rest of the world"

Say that to the expats.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Star Wars Special Editions

Nope

I can live with nicer special effects but they're not essential and are completely unnecessary if we also have to put up with the storm troopers filling a desert when looking for Luke and Obi-Wan, new alien creatures bouncing around in the background shouting "Look at me" in alien speak and everything turning a bright share of magenta in the Death Star.

That's why I stick to the Despecialized Edition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHfLX_TMduY

Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him

Re: Intelligence Overlords

I somehow suspect they know the format of Google and Yahoo disposable addresses and the selector and cope with wildcards...

Google chap bakes Amiga emulator into Chrome

Can't run the emulator at the moment

But Workbench 2.0 was snappier (as they say) than Workbench 1.3. Any slow-to-respondness is the fault of the emulator rather than the emulated. Google needs to add a bit more Na to the Cl.

Also, copyright?

Let's shut down the internet: Republicans vacate their mind bowels

Re: None of you morons

God damn El Reg, quoting stupid things said by a bunch of politicians. How dare they manipulate us this way. If only they had quoted all the well-reasoned eloquent stuff they said too.

At least 10 major loyalty card schemes compromised in industry-wide scam

Re: The Internet...

Good idea, deep packet inspection filtering against the IP header modification proposed in RFC 3514. We have to ask ourselves why there are so many interested parties actively stopping this being rolled out and what action we can take against them.

Re: Ouch

Half of it is PHP-driven SQL injection bollocks. It should basically be illegal for a company to make a site without showing that they've thought about security.

The other half is people using the same e-mail and password for everything. Sites with loyalty cards should ask for the loyalty card number too (something you have).

Rebels defeat the Empire (again) by giving BB-8 an API

That's your trouble right there

If only you'd waited a couple of years for the Big Trak then that itch would hace been scratched.

Grim-faced cosmonaut in ISS manual docking nail-biter

One thing I learned on Elite...

... never rely on the docking computer.

Mozilla looses Firefox 43, including Windows 64-bit variant

Re: First impression

Try setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config, maybe you'll have to close and open the browser afterwards.

This is planned to stop working in Firefox 44 so you'll need to change over to the ESR build before the next update if you still want unsigned addons to work after then.

It seems the old sync protocol has bit the dust

And they haven't deigned to put out documentation or an at-least half working reference server for the new sync protocol, so no local sync server for you.

Brit 'naut Tim Peake thunders aloft

I think so, he said that the schoolchildren seeing this today could be the first to walk on Mars.

Old jet bits, Vader's motorbike gear, sonic oddness: Hats off to Star Wars' creative heroes

Re: Sloppy research El Reg

I suppose you were hinting at The Phantom Edit and Attack of the Phantom which are still out there in Internet land and are much more watchable.

There's also the Despecialized Editions of the Original Trilogy which is the only way to get the non-messed about versions of the OT in HD.

Sloppy research El Reg

"Star Wars didn’t just succeed in that endeavour that once; it did so in five more films across almost four decades"

Had to stop reading to correct the article, it's two more films across six years.

I'll carry on reading now...

How to build a real lightsabre

A lightsaber in the right hand is by far the deadliest weapon to be found in the universe

Careful now, you'll be accused of handism.