Posts by Dan 55

EU digi-chief to meet ministers and sort out the net neutrality thing

That's the mark of a good politician right there

[Thing I don't like] [is|belongs to|is the work of] the (far) [other side of the political spectrum] [pejorative term].

Apple preps summer bonking bonanza for Brits

Re: The tech industry...

You know, while I might shed a tear over the plight of writers and musicians, I don't think the consumer banking sector's woes will drive me to weeping.

There are people outside the US reading this...

"If my recent trip to CO, UT, NV, OR, ID, MT, WY, SD, NE and NM is anything to go by"

Is that an anagram or should I be asking for more consonants and vowels so I can make up a seven letter word?

Spaniard sues eBay over right to sell the Sun

Re: Oh god

Yeah, but as he's a solicitor his word is gospel.

Until you find another solicitor who says its 500 years.

Re: Oh god

She's persistent, she's also registered 24 million combinations of DTMF tones...

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2010/11/26/galicia/1290779270.html

About suing her for sunburn, a local newspaper says that a Manual Sieira from nearby Ribiera was taking legal action against Maria Ángeles because the Sun destroys the ozone layer and caused him red eyes and sunburn. "I went to A&E, I've got the photos to prove it. I will try to arrive at an out-of-court settlement with her or I'll take her to court, I don't mind paying 1000 euros for a solicitor."

In the same article Maria Ángeles replies, "People think they can claim compensation off me but the Sun is not responsible for causing cancer, it's the pollution that destroys the ozone layer. Using their logic, I could claim compensation off them because of the food they eat or they were out in the heat. I believe that people lack basic legal knowledge because things are not like that."

The article goes off on a tangent with the eBay story but comes back to Manual saying that he's given up his legal action because his solicitor advised him that the light from the Sun takes 1000 years to get to the Earth and as Maria Ángeles only became the owner of the Sun five years ago she is not responsible for anything that the Sun may or may not have done before that so any case against her is unwinnable. (That'll be the easiest 1000 euros he's made.)

http://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/galicia/2015/06/04/duena-sol-me-quieren-demandar-quemaduras-culpa-ozono/0003_201506G4P12991.htm

Please El Reg, we need a double facepalm icon.

I blame the Catholic church

If the holy parchment says thus then it must be true, no common sense allowed. And so the same mentality has lasted till this present day.

Microsoft makes Skype beach body ready with web browser beta release

Re: https://appear.in

The thing you can't do with it is have a contact list but Skype can't do that reliably these days either, as soon as someone logs in from a mobile their online/offline status in Skype becomes almost random. No offline messages if they're not online either, but they can take a day or two in coming through on Skype. There is so much wrong with Skype but it's become the de facto standard so people put up with it yet if you limit yourself to what works reliably (basically, videocalls, although not always) then there's a load of alternatives.

What's broken in this week's build of Windows 10? Installing it, for one

Re: Freeze 10

There's also KB2952664 which makes Windows 7 phone home even if you've opted out of CEIP. I've uninstalled both.

Re: This is what's known as a show stopper

Ah, good enough for MS to RTM I suppose.

This is what's known as a show stopper

And as such it shouldn't have any release apart from the developer build.

I mean, what useful feedback are they going to get from it?

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

Re: Some Dutch shops..

"Also, why is it that only people in the UK seem to have a problem with automated check-outs?"

That's some statistical sample you've done there, I doff my hat to your survey skills.

Re: Online buying is sometimes not much better...

I think the complaint is you can't fill in that stuff after browsing and adding food to your shopping cart, you have to fill it all in before.

Dre-stic measures: Apple Beats retreat from iTunes brand – report

You know that a company's got too much money when...

Apparently streaming music files and calling it Apple Music wasn't enough, they also needed to buy Beats in order to not use Beats Music's name.

Spaniards get that cinking feeling

"Balla, no me lo esperava."

In spite of everything, there are still Spanish people who insist on making mistakes in written Spanish.

Re: They not be able to pronounce WhatsApp for love nor money...

People often have a problem with pronouncing Internet too, it's often pronounced as Internésss.

Balconing (balcón + ing)

That's the practise of drunk holiday visitors throwing themselves off their hotel room balcony and misjudging their height above the ground, the distance of the neighbouring balcony that they're aiming for, or location of the hotel swimming pool below.

It's a very specific form of la teoría de Darwin.

New Firefox, Chrome SRI script whip to foil man-in-the-middle diddle

Presumably you could get the browser to look at a hash value stored in a .json file on the same server (so you'd have a .js and a .json next to it) so you'd need to edit two files instead of one, or maybe the server itself could generate it if it's passed to the browser by a header.

We don't know what happens when it the hash check fails. Maybe the .js file is ignored and the cached one is used until it expires.

One USB plug to rule them all? That's sensible, but no...

Re: Just make it coloured coded

They tried that with Scart, it was even an official recommendation. Nobody did it.

Everybody collectively threw away years of humanity finding the right socket on the secondary device, finding the right cable to carry the signal (because cheap cables weren't fully wired up inside), and finding the right socket on the television (because not every input could cope with every display type).

Still, at least I assume that with USB-C you won't be able to fry the devices if you chain them up wrong like you could with Scart.

Those who misunderstand Scart are doomed to repeat it, I tell ye.

Or you could have composite + RGB and composite + S Video and you'd end up in a crappy composite picture because you plugged the cable into the wrong Scart socket on the telly.

USB-C is a big mistake

They've turned USB into a reversible Scart socket.

Smartwatch biz Pebble says smartwatch biz Apple won't approve its new app – surprise

Re: 43 days . .

Cue Pathé music and Bob Danvers Walker's voice.

"And it's all hands on deck at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino as Apple prepares the new Apple Watch. Even the App Store censorship team are picking apart App Store submissions to find out how to get their shiny expensive new watch to actually do something before the battery runs out. The pressure is on... can they reverse-engineer enough smartwatch software so they've got something to announce before WWDC comes round? Their pals across the room at Apple TV certainly couldn't. Never mind chaps, the App Store censorship team are here to save the day. If their reverse engineering isn't quite up to snuff their rejection skills will surely kick out those evil Pebble smartwatches and corner the market all for themselves."

Sysadmins rebel over GUI-free install for Windows Server 2016

Those who do not understand VMS...

MS screwed up the NT4 kernel magnificently to get graphics drivers into it so a server OS could look as nice as Windows 95 and now after flailing about trying and failing to TIFKAMify WS 2012 so it matches Windows 8 they concede defeat and remove the GUI altogether from WS 2016.

You can hear the bellowing from marketing...

"I don't care how you do it, the GUI's going to be TIFKAM."

So the development team made it optional and put it a dark cellar in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.

And thus a VMS-based OS went full circle back to where it came from. Only with a bloated kernel.

Nobody believes you're working for Microsoft no matter how much you put [MSFT] at the end of your name and insist otherwise. You're not posting anonymously.

Dodgy colon bug is a total pain in the butt for Skype users today

Will somebody please make it stop

Send a message with a colon, it crashes (what's that, the parser that CCs everything to Utah)?

Send a message while the other person is offline, it gets there a day or two later.

Call someone who's thoughtlessly let their mobile go onto the standby screen, it might or probably might not get through.

The mobile version of Skype has another bug where a caller can listen but the phone stays on the standby screen with no visible display that someone's call has connected and is listening.

Once a piece of MS software gains critical mass, it gains critical bloat.

What an eyeful: Apple's cut price 27in iMac with Retina Display

Re: Good idea

TRIM Enabler is the point-and-dribble way to sort out TRIM for 3rd party SSD.

Re: Good idea

CPU and graphics upgrade on an iMac? Ahahahaha.

Count your blessings if you can mess about with the RAM and hard drive.

Secure web? That'll cost you, thanks to Mozilla's HTTPS plan

Re: Time for HTTP-ES

No browser supports OE apart from Firefox 37 which did for a few days until a bug was found and 37.0.1 was pushed out. By the time that this change that Mozilla propose is implemented, OE will have been brought back into Firefox anyway.

OE specifically allows self-signed certificates.

And if your browser doesn't support OE life carries on as normal under the http protocol.

Re: Destroying Firefox from within

Has anyone honestly said that Firefox is going to drop HTTP?

And how's that going to work with DHCP? Like it will normally. Why shouldn't it?

And with five upvotes too. I'll tell you where the circle jerk is - the tards are strong in this article.

Re: Embeded Devices

Argh, FFS!

Re: But ...

That's only if your corporate overlord pushes their MITM CA certificate to your browser's certificate store. As most browsers use Windows' certificate store this quite easy unless you use Firefox which will kick up a stink as it uses its own certificate store which won't have been meddled with.

If it's Tuesday it's throw around acronyms and bash Firefox day

Even the article is wrong and this is supposedly a tech publication. There is no cost. You use two or three https technologies with each other and you will end up with a Firefox opportunistically encrypting the connection using your servers' self-signed certificate without complaining.

And the stick? That if you don't update your server's configuration then clients connecting with Firefox won't get new CSS3+/HTML5 features coming in future versions of Firefox. The stuff that the clients wouldn't have anyway because if you can't update a bit of server configuration you sure as hell aren't going to be using cutting-edge CSS/HTML.

And now that I have said my piece I shall flounce off in a cloud of righteousness.

Re: Time for HTTP-ES

HSTS, certificate pinning, and opportunistic encryption more-or-less implement your idea. Well, opportunistic encryption did implement your idea but it's on hold in Firefox while the bugs are being ironed out.

As for the cost, you can use self-signed certificates with opportunistic encryption without the browser displaying any warning because with OE the important thing is the encryption, not the authentication.

So, unfortunately, the article's premise is completely wrong - the cost is a big fat 0, apart from a slightly increased encryption/decryption load at both the client and server end.

Windows 10 upgrade ADWARE forces its way on to Windows 7 and 8.1

Re: AlternitiveOS

Linux Mint.

There are two flavours, MATE and Cinnamon. MATE is the more classic UI based on GNOME 2. Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3 and has newer more shiny features but is still a classic-style desktop.

There are also BSD versions of Mint - GhostBSD, FreeBSD, and PC-BSD.

If you don't like KB3035583 then you're not going to like KB2952664 which is another one of those pre-Windows 10 updates. It makes Windows 7 phone home, even if you've opted out of phoning home in Control Panel > Action Center.

Uninstall and then hide both updates in Windows Update.

Fanbois designing Windows 10 – where's it going to end?

As always, The Simpsons

Well, when it was good.

"Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" In which Homer discovers his long-lost brother, designs the perfect car for him as he owns a car manufacturer, and bankrupts him.

Re: X position

Windex?

Mass break-in: researchers catch 22 more routers for the SOHOpeless list

And it's so easy to sort out

SOHO router manufacturer offers drivers to OpenWRT which makes the OpenWRT community happy because if it's one thing that makes them happy it's drivers. Then all it needs to do is choose the packages for their router, preconfigure them, and change the WebUI from LuCI to something else (I believe it's what marketing call adding value). They could even push fixes to packages for bonus points.

Or they can just carry on flailing around with their own firmware year after year and getting it wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Microsoft tosses Office, Skype portball to 20 Android makers

Yeah, about including Skype...

Perhaps MS could finally fix the bug where the calling party thinks they're calling you but your phone does nothing... Eventually the non-call times out as unanswered.

Skype has never been that good but lately it's a disaster.

Mozilla signing vetted add-ons as thoughts turn to security

Re: This won't apply to me...

Yeah, only you can completely disable the DRM in Firefox if you don't want it.

And you're going to uninstall it and storm off in a huff to Chrome which has a Widevine plugin or Safari which has a Fairplay plugin or IE which has a PlayReady plugin and none of them have any option to disable DRM.

Colour me bad: Kraken time or damp squid with Splatoon

No f-bombs, no being called gay

I am crushingly disappointed. This adds so much to online multiplayer gameplay. What were Nintendo thinking, they know nothing about videogames.

Google spins up 'FREE, unlimited' cloud photo storage 4 years before ad giant nixes it

Re: Nonplussed

There is the kernel which does require manufacturer help (drivers and so on). Google should do its best to make each version of Android work on several kernel versions. The manufacturer should do its best to update the kernel if it offers a benefit (better battery life, better radio, faster, etc...). You being on Android 4.4 because you like it more than 5.0 does not mean you shouldn't be able to get the best kernel as a software update should you want it. It could be called 'performance update' so the customers aren't scared.

There's the Android framework. Use OverlayFS or UnionFS to join two partitions together. One partition is for stock Android and another is for the manufacturer's changes to the original stock Android partition. Any changes to stock Android (a .1 security update) could probably be made without any changes to the manufacturers' partition at all and that would mean you wouldn't be getting annoyed because a tiny but important WebKit bugfix is not being pushed to your phone because your manufacturer doesn't deem it worthwhile to recompile or your operator can't be bothered to okay it.

Manufacturers' and operators' apps could be hosted on Play like normal apps. By apps I mean things that won't bring the phone to a halt if they're missing (photo albums, app stores, camera skin, etc...). If they aren't compatible with a newer version of Android then they are disabled and it's up to the manufacturer or operator to push out an update to Play.

There should be no operator interference apart from okaying the original phone's release. If they are still okaying newer phones by this manufacturer and newer versions of Android, why would they not okay updates? All operator changes are to apps only and their apps should disappear if they become incompatible. An incentive for operators to keep updating and keep adding value or get left behind.

It's going to be more complicated than that but it can be done technically, mostly with a bit of re-organisation of Android but it seems beyond Google.

Re: Nonplussed

Try an old Android phone. Oh, but you can't, cloud services have been axed or the APIs to still-existing services have been depreciated...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/saving-old-software-from-extinction-in-the-age-of-cloud-computing/

And... Androids don't update well. For all the rocket scientists at Google they still haven't managed to separate kernel, generic Android framework, manufacturer-modified Android framework, manufacturer app, and operator app updates.

Such is life on the Google OCD update treadmill.

Request: two-step social media buttons

Request: two-step social media buttons

You need to add this to your article social media buttons...

http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

Remember to make the scripts on-site and not download from Google and github.

If you wanted to make a good job of it could store the social media privacy settings in the user profile so if a user is logged in their preferences are remembered.

Libre Office comes to Android

Re: Finally...

Yeah, you've heard of these things called called buses, coaches, trains, and abroad where perhaps cloud connection is limited and on-device editing would be just the ticket?

Or the other night when O2 and by extension Giff Gaff and other victuals went tits up for the evening? Between an on-device document synced to a service like Dropbox and Office 365 where I believe you have to sign in to get anywhere useful, I know which I'd have been happier with that night.

EU reduces science cuts as Juncker finds €500m down back of sofa

So that's Horizon 2020 which was receiving a €2.7bn cut and is now receiving a €2.3bn cut. Ukraine is not even part of the EU and is now entitled to compete on equal-footing with EU science institutions for Horizon 2020 funding. So that means there is actually more of a cut for EU science institutions and money is being diverted out of Horizon 2020 to prop up the EU's political meddling in a country which has fallen into civil war.

Where is this money going to? Is it just going to be spent on political projects (e.g. The Ukraine as was rumoured before). If so, it's not really science funding, it's dogma funding.

Android M's Now on Tap cyber-secretary is like Clippy on Class A drugs

Fingerprint AND passcode?

"A US court ruled last year that fingerprints aren't covered under the 5th Amendment, meaning police can force you to unlock your phone via fingertip in a way they can't with a passcode."

How about if the phone is unlocked by passcode but it's not you who's unlocked it or it is you who's unlocked it but for some reason you don't wish to supply the right passcode?

You could get a basic phone user profile with no apps or contacts. It is also more secure in that it follows the rules of something you've got (phone), something you are, and something you know.

Re: Android M will also include much finer user controls as to what apps can access

Happily you have a device which has good CyanogenMod support. I don't think you'll regret wiping Samsung's bloat.

SourceForge accused of shackling GIMP in kinky adware

Good monetising plan

1. Add adware installer wrappers to software.

2. Annoy end users.

3. Developers leave SourceForge.

4. Take over developers' accounts.

5. Add adware installer wrappers to newer versions of software now hosted elsewhere.

6. Annoy end users.

7. ???

8. Profit!

Milking cow shot dead by police 'while trying to escape'

Re: Dan 55 Robocop

Since when have the police or highway agency been reticent in closing an A road? And suddenly now they need to bring out 20 armed police and a helicopter to gun down a cow. I hope the farmer's been reimbursed market value.