Posts by Dan 55

Patch now: Design flaw in Windows security allows hackers to own corporate laptops, PCs

Luckily the newer guys managed to fix the same bug which affected all the following versions of Windows in exactly the same way. Would you like to upgrade your version of Windows for a nominal fee?

Samsung: Our TVs? Spying on you? Ha Ha! Just a joke of course

Re: Spy TV

The future belongs to cheap no-name Android HDMI sticks flashed with CyanogenMod and loaded with Kodi. They may be smart but they're also deaf, blind, and dumb.

ACHTUNG! Scary Linux system backdoor turns boxes into DDoS droids

In other words...

Scary sounding malware which brute forces systems with administrators silly enough to set things up to allow root to log in remotely on ssh's standard port with only a password and without a certificate or port knocking has to wait in line while other malware does same.

Dissidents and dealers rejoice! Droid app hides your stash in plain sight

Not seeing the point of this

It'll be in the apps list even though it won't be in the Google Play list so much for a special black ninja stealth app.

Also it's Android, use a file manager to move an encrypted file to some sub sub directory and it's never going to be found in a casual inspection by a non-techy cop either. If you're a suspect in a crime then of course all bets are off.

Finally, I hope we never get to the stage where police can legally casually inspect people's phones to see what they can find. That leads to photos being sent around.

Microsoft: Even cheapo Lumias to get slimmed down Windows 10

Re: Wait,,,,What?

Is there a new field on El Reg's sign up page which asks you what phone you've got but due to a sloppy programming error unfortunately has the unhappy side effect of making you post as an Anonymous Coward if you ticked Lumia?

Because that's the only thing I can think of which would generate such unwavering support for Lumias from Anonymous Cowards on this website.

Or maybe they're all embarrassed?

Maybe they could share the reason for this strange phenomenon with us.

Re: Developer... sense... tingling...

It's going to be a new theme. Bet the apps are still Windows 8 apps instead of Universal apps.

Microsoft explains Windows as a SERVICE – but one version remains a distant dream

I should imagine that when people realise that Windows as a Service means MS can pull the rug out from under you whenever they feel like it (you pay monthly, MS push the latest and greatest stuff, and your desktop, browser, office suite, etc... suddenly change to whatever the latest madness from Redmond´s user experience gurus is) they will begin to tire of it.

Would you as a Office 2003 user like it if it suddenly sprouted a ribbon one moring or as Windows 7 user like it if it suddenly went TIFKAM when you turned it on and you were presented with a start screen?

It's not going to work.

Jupiter Ascending – a literally laughable train wreck of a film

Re: Sceptical Mila is sceptical

Even if you can't work Cloud Atlas out (and it's not that difficult), it's got Jim Broadbent in so that makes it worth a watch just for that.

Slurping air passengers' private details not great for privacy, concede EU data bods

Re: No kidding

Since it is difficult to get up and leave a train going at 200mph it is quite prudent to know who is on the train and where they are headed. Those who find this unreasonable should take the car.

Since it is difficult to get up and leave a car going at 80mph it is quite prudent to know who is in the car and where they are headed. Those who find this unreasonable should walk.

Since it is difficult to run away from somebody in the same street as you who might mean you harm it is quite prudent to know who is in the street and where they are going. Those who find this unreasonable should stay at home.

Ubuntu smartphone to go on sale: It'll be harder to get than a new iPhone

There's no reason why it shouldn't be the same price as the Android equivalent, especially if Canonical did the software, bq just rebadge Chinese phones.

'Privacy is DAMAGING to PROGRESS' says Irish big data whitepaper

Looks like the Irish data protection commissioner has got to work on letting Uncle Sam ransack servers in Ireland belonging to companies which have US parent companies and nobody has to have uncomfortable arguments in public.

Exit Interview: Sony Pics co-chair Amy Pascal flees 'Nork' hack studio

Re: ... the latest reboot of the Spider-Man franchise

What's worse, by the third time it's usually rebooted in safe mode so expect nothing remotely interesting this time around.

Major US news organisations to develop ROBOT JOURNALISTS

Listen and understand

That journalist is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until it's got a quote it can quote out of context for Fox News to base an entire programme on.

Assange's cop chaperones have cost £10 MEEELLION to date

I bet they're queuing up to do overtime on that job, it must be the easiest and most uneventful way to earn a bit extra on top of their salary ever.

ALIENS are surely AMONG US: Average star has TWO potentially Earth-like worlds

Those nomadic aliens without any habitable home planets left...

... only come for the change deniers to show them the error of their ways.

RIP Windows RT: Microsoft murders ARM Surface, Nokia tablets

Re: hmm

@h4rm0ny: I'm sure it would, if you didn't use any Win32 API that's not in WinRT. It would also be severely limited compared to Win32 with an interface that looks like a Fisher Price toy.

Re: hmm

On 2, MS chose the wrong software to kickstart the platform off with. The iPad's form was a big iPhone, it made sense to make it compatible with iPhone apps.

Surface RT's selling point was it was a laptop too, so making it compatible with Windows Phone apps and not compatible with Windows desktop was dooming the platform to failure from the start.

MS, falling flat on its face again

Because they wanted to nobble ARM tablets and maintain an artificial reason for keeping the price up on Wintel tablets/laptops, they locked ARM down, didn't give developers a way to compile universal binaries, and didn't provide emulation for event-loop driven x86 software (i.e. what Apple's done twice in the last 20 years). The result was the platform sinking without trace, apart from a highly expensive writedown.

Re: Poor timing for this announcement

They're running an ARM Win 10 kernel for IoT devices, of which the Pi 2 is one. The Pi 2 runs the minimum spec for ARM Win 10 so it seems they expect lightbulbs will be running quad core and have 1Gb of RAM.

Re: hmm

Are you saying that your crystal ball's telling you that ARM's not going to be around in 5 years and MS are right to get out?

Siemens sighs: SCADA bugs abound

Re: Yes, but that's not the point to learn from this

It's SCADA, it's incompetence.

Before SCADA hardware was controlled over its own dedicated network which afforded some level of security (through obscurity) then some bright spark decided it would be a good idea to just to stick it all on TCP/IP. And so a field little prepared for security issues suddenly had to deal with them.

Twin Adam Sandlers shake El Reg's movie unwatchablathon team

Watching it in Spanish

So, did that improve it or make it worse?

Or did you insist on o.v. so you could appreciate Adam's acting abilities to the fullest without worrying about if you were losing the subtle nuance that he brings to his role in translation.

There was no wine in the house. I fired up Kodi.

NASA: Give us JUST 0.5% of the federal budget and we'll take you to MARS and EUROPA

Re: Ted Cruz

Who appointed him? And who appointed the person who appointed him?

Would just like to be sure how this works before deciding that somebody higher up is saying nice things about NASA in public but is still swinging the axe behind the scenes.

Yahoo!'s Firefox search hook-up pays off as it nicks Google's US clicks

Re: Yahoo is the worst search engine

Yahoo uses Bing to provide search results, they should be the same unless MS has flocked a switch to make Yahoo's worse than Bing's.

Breaking news: BBC FINALLY spots millions of mugshots on cop database

Re: Screamed in Despair when this bit was broadcast

Paxman would have destroyed him after that. Can't get the staff these days.

Zimmermann slams Cameron’s ‘absurd’ plans for crypto ban

Re: I wonder...

But there should have been a few Sir Humphreys behind the scenes telling the Cameron that it's an extremely courageous policy decision before he got to the stage of announcing it. Or perhaps everybody's lobotomised?

Enough is enough: It's time to flush Flash back to where it came from – Hell

Re: This type of mentality is irrational, bordering stupidity.

Mozilla and Google run automatic checks against their code to pick up bugs which could be used for exploits in the future and correct them before they are. Every Chrome or Firefox release pre-emptively fixes possible exploit avenues.

Adobe just play whack-a-mole.

See the difference?

Trouble comes in threes: Yet ANOTHER Flash 0-day vuln patch looming

Re: Uninstalled

Click-to-play might help your blood pressure, or disable it completely in the browser but keep it installed for TomTom.

Why Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi 2? Upton: 'I drank the Kool-Aid'

Re: Security...

You mean there won't be enough RAM left to load the malware, the latest malware platform is Windows 10. See, MS have finally made Windows secure at last by removing the memory.

Re: Fwoar! Oh, my.

As well as no Win32 it seems yet have to run VS on another computer, compile, and deploy to the Pi.

For universal apps on kiosk displays I suppose it'll work, I'm not sure about anything else.

And here was me thinking MS had had a funny turn and Win32 on ARM was going to be unrestricted and VS was going to compile ARM.

Google boffins PROVE security warnings don't ... LOOK! A funny cat!

Re: I've seen and bypassed this message.

This is what Firefox says about that page...

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to msdn.microsoft.com. The OCSP response contains out-of-date information. (Error code: sec_error_ocsp_old_response)

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.

Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

Re: I've seen and bypassed this message.

Self-signed certificates should be warned something like this...

This is a private connection but the other party is unknown.

You should never see this message with banks, online shops, or email providers. If you are trying to connect to one of these, your connection has been compromised - go back now (link).

You often see this message with home router administration pages or Intranet sites.

Continue just this time (link).

Continue and don't warn me again about this connection (link).

See? Not that difficult.

Microsoft eyes slice of Raspberry Pi with free Windows 10 sprinkled on top

Wait a minute...

RT slabs don't get Windows 10 but the Pi 2 does?

Turbocharged quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed, global geekgasm likely

Re: Competitors dead in the water?

Better install Windows 8 on it now so you can upgrade for free.

Google Now now SLURPS data from third party apps so YOU don't have to

Re: Apple and Google aren't the same AT ALL

I can see your point but are you suggesting Google didn't make money from Play licences as well as Play Services itself being a data hoover?

Re: Time to cancel ...

The Guardian doing this is a bit odd considering Snowden and Whisper. But wouldn't the right thing to do in this case be to disable Google Now since it's slurping data from all over your phone?

Oh, lordy! 'I do not begin to understand the dark cloud. LEGISLATE NOW'

That's joined up government thinking

Keep people safe so they can die of cancer.

Privacy alert: Outlook for iOS does security STUPIDLY, says dev

Re: Not fit for use….

The problem is the Outlook client, née Accompli. It was just given a lick of paint and plonked into the App Store, which is why it's not using Azure or Office 365 credentials. So much for Microsoft saying privacy comes first.

Re: Uninstall problem is due to Apple

The same is true for Android, Windows Phone, Windows and Mac.

You have to have a delete account menu option. Not too difficult.

Re: /agree

I take it you've changed your password too? It's probably still floating around up there.

Ugly, incomplete, buggy: Windows 10 faces a sprint to the finish

Malware problems? No worse than usual.

Usability? A lot more.

As a way of phasing out the old rendering engine, there are worse ways.

Re: Maps app time estimate

Or the script writer for Robin Hood POS^HT.

What's wrong with checking if there is ActiveX etc... on the page and if so silently switching to the old rendering engine and adding that site to a list so it's rendered with the old engine straight away in the future. Also all local Intranet sites are rendered by default with the old engine.

You can tell it's MS, they never quite manage to get it right. It's always just a bit too fiddly.

BYOD is NOT the Next Biggest Thing™: Bring me Ye Olde Lappetoppe

Re: One down, one to go

That policy will be replaced by a new one, Forbid the Use of Cloud Methodology for Enterprise.

Workers will be heard to mutter "Forbid the Use of Cloud Methodology for Enterprise, they've changed it all again" under their breath. Or something similar.

You must have at least 8 inches for Windows 10 to go all the way

Re: Just stop calling it Windows

It's Windows as far as the eye can see.

If someone in Marketing had had the brains to call the tablet version something else we wouldn't have had all this nonsense because there would have been no customer expectation of the desktop or Win32 apps.

But no, now the phone version is Windows too. Imagine if you could take your phone to a presentation and plug it into an external screen and use a Bluetooth zapper. Or plug it into an external screen with mouse and keyboard to work on the train. But it's not that either.

If they had managed Ubuntu-style support for every device form and input including external screens they would have probably cracked it and it could deservedly be called Windows on everything, but they haven't done that. It's still very different under the hood.

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Re: @ diodesign (was:where did everyone go?)

So is this the official announcement that there will be no more changes to the layout and if anyone doesn't like it then they can go to the mobile site which has no comment icons and doesn't let you edit?

Apple CEO: Fandroids are BINNING Android in favour of IPHONES

Re: Landfill

Isn't it amazing what glue and no user serviceable parts can do?

UK official LOSES Mark Duggan shooting discs IN THE POST

Encrypted with the password which was sent in the accompanying covering letter?

I bet it's happened.

Cash'n'Carrion January sale: Get in there while you can

They're classics, each and every one.

BITE that APPLE if you want to escape the Android garden, Microsoft

Re: Apps are not the product

Exactly, Office itself is free on three mobile platforms and two desktop platforms. Office is supposed to be there whatever devices you're using at the moment, that's what they think is going to make people buy a subscription.

There's more competition on Apple devices as iWork is free, many people might be perfectly happy with that. Locking out suits with Galaxy Notes/Tabs doesn't make sense, it only weakens Office.

Oh, and there was Word for Xenix once upon a time.

Has to be one of the stranger articles I've read recently.