Posts by Dan 55

Entropy drought hits Raspberry Pi harvests, weakens SSH security

Re: There is, potentially, an easy way out

Entropy from a router of all things... Interesting.

Hopefully the router's been on for a while.

Spanish village celebrates Playmobil nativity

Of course she considers it a birthright

Should she play with presents from the 25th till the 7th then go back to school or should she play with presents from the 6th till the 7th then go back to school? Tough question.

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

Re: Somebody's already taken the reigns

Unless FossaMail has de-Morkified the address book and other profile files and added built-in Dav support, it's just window dressing.

Re: Coupling?

Would Mozilla's developers like to pay a tax (work) to do anything or does it interfere with quality ping-pong and sitting-on-beanbag time?

They're jettisoning features left, right, and centre yet they expect people to want to use their software. Not sure how that works.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo good two go

Re: Wow is this slow.

The first test satellite was launched in 2005...

BlackBerry to bug out of Pakistan by end of year

Re: Decryption

Those are Blackberry services over BIS, not BES.

BES is for enterprise, the enterprise has all the keys and everything's encrypted.

BIS is for consumers. With BIS the operator and/or Blackberry have the keys but it doesn't really matter as not much at all is encrypted.

Doctor Who: The Hybrid finally reveals itself in the epic Heaven Sent

Re: Finally it starts to come together.

Do you think Moffat knows the ins and outs of MUDs? :)

After two billion years there's something timely wimey going on as the castle and its contents are still standing. Even if we look just at the non-resetable things that he leaves behind, the painting and the writing are still there after all that time.

Nice idea of what other Time Lords' confession dials could be, BTW.

Re: Ashildr "me" is the hybrid?

The film's canon, McGann was also involved in the audio series and the War Doctor special.

Re: @d3vy

I was going to say that too, one shot in the garden and another on the tower from above I could have sworn were Pertwee.

Re: Finally it starts to come together.

I think there were two shovels, one in the corridor and one in the garden and I don't think he took them away from those two places. There was also the painting of Clara and the "I'm in 12" written on the ground in the garden which were two clues which didn't reset too. How did all of these things get there in the first place and why didn't they reset? Perhaps after realising what was happening in one of the first times around he left these clues in the right places which would mean from then on he knew he would repeat the same behaviour until he got through the wall.

Why would Time Lords carry their own personal hell around with them not knowing what it was, who told Ashildr to teleport him inside it, and why hasn't the confession dial got any other Time Lord to Gallifrey?

But on the whole one of best episodes ever.

Oh, and maybe the first time he climbed out the moat he left his clothes to dry and went round in his birthday suit...

If a picture tells a 1000 words about latency, Google won't load it

Re: Déjà vu

Don't blame them for reinventing stuff from 20 years ago, they couldn't remember something from when they were less than five.

Unfortunately a few weeks back Google said they were going to reinvent WAP. Those that don't remember history are condenemed to repeat it...

All hail Firefox Dev Edition 44 – animations, memory and all

Re: It's great but...

I think people do like using Firefox, which is exactly why there are complaints.

Re: It's great but...

So they made tab groups undiscoverable unless the user knows that they need to fish the right icon out of customisation and put it on the toolbar. Now hardly anybody uses it, it's gone because metrics.

Same donkeys in charge of the user interface as ever, I see.

Italians to spend €150m ... snooping on PS4 jabber

Re: Don't forget...

Alphabetti spaghetti? Ban pasta now!

Amazon's new drones powered by Jeremy Clarkson's sarcasm

Dear El Reg

Change headline, replace "sarcasm" with "hot air".

Make it so.

VW's Audi suspends two engineers in air pollution cheatware probe

Just because flowers aren't wilting and people aren't keeling over when a diesel car passes it doesn't mean there isn't a problem with them. You're probably too busy chain smoking Woodbine's to listen to the likes of me though.

The inhabitants of this city love it, they do.

Another link.

No, because VW suspended two engineers a month or so back and Audi has as well just now, so that makes four suspended engineers according to my admittedly limited maths skills.

Unless they're the same two rogue software engineers that have gone from company to company in the group and fiddled with the software. And given the stories that VW are expecting us to swallow then that might just be the case.

Meet ARM1, grandfather of today's mobe, tablet CPUs – watch it crunch code live in a browser

Personally I think it should have been compared to other desktop CPUs of the day, then a bit of data about ARM8 today and comparing that to the surviving rival CPU (x86), both i7 desktop and Atom mobile versions.

Making El Reg a wiki is definitely the future.

Microsoft rides to Dell's rescue, wrecks rogue root certificate

Re: Wont't stop me hating on MSFT!

About as surreptitious a brass band marching down the high street at lunchtime.

Australian cops rush to stop 2AM murder of … a spider

Re: Sharks

I think I've only managed five minutes of Sharknado, you've sat through three? That's dedication.

Re: Could someone explain the (multiple) phone calls ?

It's an Australian spider, you'd probably have to catch it in a bucket.

Mobe-maker OnePlus 'fesses up to flouting USB-C spec

Sony cables charge at more than 500mA if connected to a charger (or a Sony charger at least).

There's too much downvoting going on around here for something which has already has too many problems with it (missing wires, low spec wires, wires with shorted pins, chargers with non-standard current negotiation, etc...) before OnePlus came along and married a USB 2 controller with a USB Type C socket using non-standard resistors. There's no one right answer.

Cheap cables, often supplied with devices, don't have the data lines or the power lines, depending on what they're supposed to do (or not supposed to do).

So why exactly are IT investors so utterly clueless?

Now Wash Your Hands App

Top tips for washing your hands courtesy of the Now Wash Your Hands App:

1. Do not touch a mobile phone screen, they've got more bacteria growing on them than a week-old petri dish.

2... Fuck, that's £360,000 down the pan.

EU copyright reforms to be 'gradual, balanced and targeted', says Ansip

UK gov said it does not intend to reintroduce proposed new regulations to legalise private copying

More than anything else, the music industry is against change. If they don't prosecute for private copying, why bother to go to court and get this regulation dropped?

Also I suppose the current government also thinks that the current situation where it's illegal but the music industry promises not to do anything about it is fine because that's the way it's always been done, but it just leaves everyone in a legal limbo.

Android on Windows is disruptive because neither Microsoft nor Google can stop it

Re: A testament to Google's expertise

I have, but it was an unstable unofficial build then the author got bored with it. Same story with the three following ROMs. So flashing back to stock with its exploits and all and hopefully it'll at least work...

Is three years too old for a phone?

A testament to Google's expertise

This product only exists because Google can't pull their finger out and sort out their Android emulator.

As for Android itself, it's like the oozlum bird, my phone is slowly disappearing up its own fundament. It's getting more and more slow, crashy, and battery-wasting, now it's decided to miss calls and alarms. It's the Windows of the mobile world. There's got to be a better way than this.

(There was, it was called Symbian.)

MPs and peers have just weeks to eyeball UK gov's super-snoop bid

Re: Thoroughly underwhelming joint Committee

FWIW you can find the boss of AAISP's submission and his impressions while attending the committee at revk.uk.

I'm left with the feeling that there are lots of assurances about what will be done but what matters is the final bill.

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

By that time they'll have slurped your name, address, and CC number by telemetry, the form will be pre-filled in, and Windows 10 will have downloaded and be ready to install. You'll have a floating OK button following your mouse pointer around the screen.

Mozilla annual report shows risky Google dependency now risky Yahoo! dependency

Re: Not surprised they are losing market share

I thought it was the cogwheel icon on the add-ons manager page followed by unsetting "update add-ons automatically".

What they should sort out is properly document the new Firefox sync protocol and maybe put out a reference local server. At the moment using a local server stuck on the old sync protocol is unreliable.

Re: The problem

NPAPI should be sandboxed (it already is, to a degree). XUL should stay as it allows extremely flexible plugins and XUL apps, if only they actually bothered to document it.

They are jettisoning stuff because they are finding it hard to maintain them (one of their blog entries specifically said this about XUL) but Firefox without NPAPI and XUL is little more than a Chrome-like skin with a different rendering engine. The next step would be to change the rendering engine.

It seems Mozilla are slowly turning into Opera, most of the time they spend on Firefox is futzing around with the UI.

Re: How can they possibly spend a quarter billion a year?

Firefox OS for TVs has been quite well received and it manages to be better than Android.

I just don't get on with the Android browser, Firefox is more usable.

Re: Not surprised they are losing market share

If you don't want the Firefox to report plugins back to Mozilla, turn off the plugin auto update.

Thin-lipped chancellor tight-lipped on contractor-nudge-onto-payroll plan

Re: Thin-lipped chancellor announces death of UK contractor market.

With this lot from Eton in charge it's entirely believable that they think there are a bunch of people who are too mobile and earn too much money and it should be stopped.

It's an EU directive, it might even have been passed into a national law already.

Reg forums TITSUP?

Re: Borked again Reg?

In my case, everything is going through moderation. I'm not sure why, my drivel^Woutput doesn't seem worse than usual.

IOCCO: Police 'reckless' for using terrorism powers on journo sources

Guidelines, eh?

Something which strikes terror into everyone.

Not a law, not a technical measure which prevents access, but... a guideline.

El Reg unchains the Vulture Velo cycling jersey

Thank you...

... for not posting a picture of a MAMIL.

Second Dell backdoor root cert found

If they can afford US$10,000 for a ticket...

... they can afford an Apple.

Paris, jihadis, tech giants ... What is David Cameron's speechwriter banging on about now?

There was no encryption used...

... apart from Telegram which is broken anyway. From Schneier's blog...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/paris_terrorist.html

http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/11/paris-police-find-phone-with-unencrypted-sms-saying-lets-go-were-starting/

Now why ever would politicians come out the woodwork and start on about their favourite subject?

Superfish 2.0: Dell ships laptops, PCs with huge internet security hole

Re: anonymous

Are you able to download and flash previous BIOS versions from Dell's site? The idea being you find an old one that doesn't have this in it.

Edit: There are proper removal instructions below.

Superfish 2.0 worsens: Dell's dodgy security certificate is an unkillable zombie

Re: re-installed from one of the other Dell services that starts up?

If it was done like Lenovo, it's the BIOS which does it and no clean version of Windows will help. The BIOS changes autochk.exe on Windows 7 partitions which is executed when booting. It also makes an executable available via ACPI for Windows 8 and 10 to pull from the BIOS when booting.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo-used-windows-anti-theft-feature-to-install-persistent-crapware/

Homebrew crypto in Telegram hangout app full of holes, say security pros

Re: The "attack" described is not on the messaging, it is on initial authentication

Well, where else do you get 'em if not at the initial authentication? That's how you MITM everything AFAIK.

And Moxie says it's crap... http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/

Windows 10 pilot rollouts will surge in early 2016, says Gartner

"Gartner predicts..."

A sacrifice must be placed into the Magic Quadrant. Fetch me some PS/2 keyboard cables and MS-DOS boot disks.

The answer which you did not seek but which we're telling you about anyway is balls... Crystal balls...

Irish electricity company threatens to cut off graveyard

Re: Not only in Ireland

Yes, I do know you can return direct debits. They cut you off though, and you ain't getting an electricity supply again until it gets paid.

Re: Not only in Ireland

Luxury. In Spain the electric companies are judge, jury and executioner when deciding if meters have been fiddled with. Over the past year or so there's been a load of people paying 1,500€ and above in fines, but there's no way they can prove anything because the company walk off with the meter and then start charging your bank account for the amount that they think you have used, which apparently is worked out at 6 hours a day every day for a year using the maximum power that your supply can give.

The big suppliers are not taking deregulation very well.

EU's Paris terror response includes 'virtual currencies' crimp

"the illicit trade in cultural goods"

What's this and what's it got to do with terrorism? It sounds like music and films, again.

Doctor Who: Even the TARDIS key can't unpick the chronolock in Face the Raven

According to Whackypedia she'll be in the last episode of the series too...

Love your IoT gadget but could you keep the noise down?

Re: before 1927 it was not even possible

Seems to start about 5am and goes on until at least 9am. Doesn't sound like a TV scan warble though.

Has a neighbour recently had their central heating done?

Storm in a teacup: Wileyfox does Android cheapie, British style

Re: BQ Aquaris M5

The Aquaris X5 Cyanogen version does have Cyanogen OS and as it's been made for Telefonica, O2 will be selling it in the UK. Unfortunately it's a bit nobbled, the non-Cyanogen version is available in a 3Mb RAM/32Mb storage version, the Cyanogen version is limited to 2Mb RAM/16Mb storage.