* Posts by Version 1.0

5417 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Microsoft's underwhelming, underpowered dual-screen Surface Duo phone arrives in the UK this month for £1,349

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Re: Trusting M$?

Sure, there are issues with many current M$ releases but my old XP system still runs great, boots way faster then the Windows 10 system and is far easier to use. I don't run it on the Internet, initially I saw that as a problem but these days it's an advantage!

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Meh

These "smart phones" were built to be phones with the option of running apps and connecting to the internet. Nowadays the "phone" is just an app on a laptop kneetop computer that monitors everything you do.

Two screens? I guess that means that battery will die sooner and the phone will need replacing?

Phishing awareness gone wrong: Facebook tries to seize websites set up for staff security training

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Joke

Every few days I get emails stating that my AmericannExpress account has been locked - so I guess I can't post about this this on Farcebook?

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

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Typo fixed

Those allegations were summarised in UK court documents made public yesterday. Lynch is alleged by the US government to have followed standard American business practices:

Apple, Microsoft, PayPal among 35 organizations compromised by evil twin dependencies attack

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Meh

See curation

This is just modern coding practice, convenience is very high priority while security is something that just gets thought about later - the software management bosses tell the coders that the app's can always be updated later so it's not necessary to check everything now.

I just checked my phone - it's OK, only five apps need updating this morning, it was ten yesterday.

Cisco predicts sunlit uplands after COVID-19. For now, though, sales are flat

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Joke

Re: A couple of weasel words (again).....

The CEO's want us to invest in-cisco and in-security ...

North Korean attacks on crypto exchanges reportedly netted $316m in two years

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Only 316m?

Given the sanctions on North Korea that seems like a small amount when you look at the cost of their rockets and other spending. All we ever hear about from North Korea is guesswork - it would seem that they have a very secure government and corporate environment and are not getting hacked themselves. I suspect they are far better at hacking other countries than we think.

Salesforce likes to play the diversity nice guy in public – Black ex-employee claims the reality is quite different

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Reality is normal

"The company has set itself the target of half of its US workforce being made up of underrepresented groups including women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, veterans, and people with disabilities by 2023."

That sounds better but how does the other half of the workforce feel about it? Typically in the US you hear this sort of thing and the guys at the top of the corporate ladder start hiring women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, veterans, and people with disabilities to clean the toilets and pick up the garbage - one or two will be placed in high viability positions like the Vice President, to make it look good from the outside. No, that is not a political statement but it is the way things go.

UK college courses show decade-long surging interest in computer science – just as new intake was locked down

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Happy

Re: Basically schools need to be fixed in so many ways...

Schools try hard but when the class computer fails to boot the teacher usually has to ask my daughter to fix it for him - she can normally get it done in 30 seconds.

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

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Google is not a search engine

It's an advertising supply house these days.

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Academia has it's own problems - I've been reading papers for years, essentially the writers have a viewpoint that they believe is supported by evidence and while this is normally correct and the evidence is good, it don't mean that their viewpoint is accurate. Academics are not normally engineers or technicians and so things can occur when the data is being collected that they have no ideas about.

NASA offers foodies, boffins $500,000 to find ways for astronauts to make their own dinners on the Moon, Mars

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Happy

Astronaut Food ... I loved that song!

Astronaut food oh astronaut food, Puts me in a mood, Makes me mope and brood, Astronaut food, makes me wish, I was on the moon

- Sopwith Camel, 1973 - The Miraculous Hump Returns From the Moon

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

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Re: It is why I buy Thinkpads

I started using ThinkPads about 30 years ago now - the TrackPoint has always worked extremely well when you are working on an airplane and the entire world is shaking a little.

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Re: Red pointy thing

XKCD documentation, I've always been very informal when I think about it.

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

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Happy

Re: Meh!

Good point - removing those protections would arm the lawyers and make them a lot of money. Getting sued for lying would force both social media and politicians to return to the days of telling the truth, not just trying to get lots of visitors to their websites.

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Re: social media attack platforms

"hardening the approach to harassment is a mistake IMO" - I hear the same arguments when people suggest that we should restrict people with mental heath issues from walking around the neighborhood with an AK-47 slung over their shoulder.

Banning that, and banning posting lies on social media, would be unconstitutional.

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Re: social media attack platforms

Yes, it looks like that because they are being manipulated - there's plenty of evidence that fake posts are made on social media by "Americans" with foreign IP addresses. People share posts and are convinced that they are just posts on social media - I'm not just blaming the Russians for starting this, the CIA were pushing fake news years earlier before social media even existed.

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Alert

social media attack platforms

All of the social media sites started out as friendly little places where people could chat and share things. But after a while foreign agencies started creating fake accounts and posting "free speech" to promote internal divisions everywhere. We call it "fake news" but a lot of people believe it's true and march around exercising their "free speech" ... the West is under attack, this is a friendly little war and we're losing because we haven't noticed that the promotion of racial divisions, EU/UK divisions, right wing promotion and stupid government everywhere is all promoted on social media these days. Creeping into social media is how you mount an attack on another countries that believe in "free speech" with virtually no risk when your country handles free speech by poisoning opposing politicians underpants.

In the US you see the same people who scream that Free Speech must never be inhibited standing up saying that the 2nd Amendment can not be changed and acting like they want the original 13th Amendment restored ... all social media promotions that benefit the attacking entities pushing the US and UK off the cliffs.

Chrome zero-day bug that is actively being abused by bad folks affects Edge, Vivaldi, and other Chromium-tinged browsers

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I just checked, Chrome says

Google Chrome is up to date, Version 88.0.4324.150 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Tomorrows bugs will be moved fixed in a day or two.

Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one

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Re: .tits

tits.not.news would not work, tits.spam is more accurate.

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Re: Thanks for the .spam update

That's normal these days but would do not block real TDLs, I have never seen any spam from .cymru and .wales - and even if I did I would not block them. Diwrnod da!

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Happy

Thanks for the .spam update

I'll keep an eye out from them and add the new ones to the mail server droplist. The majority of these TDLs go to spammers - this makes it much easier to block.

In Rust we trust: Shoring up Apache, ISRG ditches C, turns to wunderkind lang for new TLS crypto module

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Re: FTFY

I agree, but this means that new code is going to be written - airplanes have been flying safely for about 80 years now, but building a new 737 max illustrates that moving a design into a new area can have issues. Sure, Rust is safe but it's new code, that doesn't mean that there are will be no issues.

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Joke

FTFY

"We currently live in a world where deploying a few million lines of code on a network to handle requests is standard practice, despite all of the evidence we have that such behavior is unsafe "

US court system ditches electronic filing, goes paper-only for sensitive documents following SolarWinds hack

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Re: The Internet -- and the difference between public figures and private citizens

So how do you think religion would work if we were sitting on Zoom on Sunday watching a guy in a mask preaching about this unknown dude who got crucified almost two thousand year ago? Anonymous means that we don't know which of the three he's talking about.

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Unhappy

A smart choice

I've loved the internet ever since I first managed to get my 110 baud modem running, and then a BBS setup when we got 1200 baud! But these days the internet is just like sex through a hole in the toilet wall. It feels good but you have no idea what you are interacting with, machines, fakers, spammers, criminals, and occasionally your friends.

We need to upgrade to a secure communications method that means that we know who we are talking to (or having fun with). I like the idea of freedom of speech but we need to make human happiness (outside the toilet) and trust far more important. Free Speech is good, but I should not be able to say that I'm going to kill everyone who down votes this post. If I said that then it would be a terrible thing to say but it's just free speech - the Internet makes it free to be an idiot.

We need to change our world.

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

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Re: The money has to come from somewhere

The Hedge Fund investors will lose money, the people running the Hedge Fund will make money.

Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours

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So what are office hours?

Are they the hours in the main building or are they the hours where you are sitting? Suppose you are doing technical support and they send you to Australia or elsewhere to install a system for a customer ... and if you run into any problems during the installation will nobody be at the home office to talk to?

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

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Joke

Re: They were supplied pre-imaged

Sounds like a good way to teach kids to hack computers, maybe there is an educational benefit at the end of the day?

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Boris the spider

The malware delivery is an example how giving kids laptops doesn't solve the education pandemic problems, all it does is change them.

Parents are now having to be unpaid and often untrained technicians to get the kids using the laptops and solve problems. Not "one divided by three" but eVERYTHING IS IN CAPITALS, the screen has gone dark, the "g" key doesn't work, what's as ESCAPE key? Why No Internet? etc etc

Smartphones are becoming like white goods, says analyst, with users only upgrading when their handsets break

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It's time to upgrade?

I'm sure that the manufacturers can fix this "problem" by making the batteries die sooner. Over the years I've upgraded multiple working Android phones because each new software "update" breaks features. The latest Android is so "secure" that my Pixel-3 is becoming difficult to use but luckily my old Nexus hasn't had any upgrades for a while so I'm thinking I might simply go back to using it when the Pixel battery quits.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

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Re: impossible to access by anyone else..

Maybe a short time in jail will persuade him to behave better when he's released - he will learn that he was stupid and have to live with the consequences so he's likely to try and move on in life, not backwards.

Punishing someones stupidity with a long jail sentence is better than cutting their hands off, but not that much of an improvement in persuading them to reform their behavior.

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Unhappy

Re: impossible to access by anyone else..

It would be best to give Aviles a couple of months in jail, then all the abused users will sue ADT. If they get sued then ADT will have to work hard at making sure this can never happen again. Jailing Aviles for years means that ADT will say that it wasn't their fault and don't have to make sure it doesn't happen again.

This is not an "anti-ADT" comment, it's a universal comment that applies everywhere.

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

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Meh

Re: New worker same old

At least Google Drive prompts you every time you plug a USB stick in to backup the contents to the cloud via Google. But was he an idiot, or was Tesla stupid for having a working environment where this is possible? I wonder where else this is happening... he's a python programmer, he's not stupid but he concentrates on his coding, not the environment - that's normal.

There may be not one but two new air leaks in International Space Station: Russian boss tells us not to panic

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Have you ever seen a 0.2 mm hole?

Maybe they just need to tighten a screw somewhere. The risk is that it's a crack that could start to open suddenly one day although I think that's unlikely.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

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Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

LOL, because users in this area have been coming after me for answers for more than 20 years now (hence my name in El Reg).

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Paris Hilton

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

No problem - it was just a result of me concentrating on user support, not "business" - I've remains friends with the student now that he's a PhD, he wasn't thinking about the results of this either, he just wanted to get his degree and I'm glad to have helped him, regardless of the results on my end.

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Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

I've been writing and handing out source code for more than 40 years now to help people and I have a few commercial apps that cost a lot to build and did well until I helped a student get his PhD by helping him writing code in the same environment. After a year of answering his questions every week he made his PhD code open-source and graduated, it's widely used now and he's working in a different industry so it's unsupported and has killed about 90% of my income. But I keep getting requests to explain the bugs in his code ... I'm not pissed about it, I accept that I created the environment, so maybe I can retire and get a job cutting sugar cane or picking cotton?

All the down votes show that many people think that anyone writing open source code is their slave. They are thinking, "I don't understand the code, you wrote it so you need to fix my problems because I can't be bothered - my problems are your fault, I don't owe you - you owe me."

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Free means somebody is not getting paid

So why did the complainant not sit down and write the driver himself? That would have solved the problem but instead he wanted it for free ...

Open Source programmers tend to be owned by the users. The code writer is considered by end-users as property, or chattel, and is deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by users when they try to install a new operating system (the definition of slavery updated).

Clop ransomware gang clips sensitive files from Atlantic Records' London ad agency The7stars, dumps them online

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A positive option?

I think it might be interesting to create a database that essentially is just advertising (full of fairly fake information) and leave it open online ... when it gets accessed and stolen you would get some free adverts everywhere.

President Biden selects Jessica Rosenworcel to head up FCC as acting chairwoman

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Re: Good

I was going to comment but I'm too busy answering robo calls ...

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

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Facepalm

Back then I was training users who were moving from VT100's to PC's running early Windows. Training them to use the mouse was always fun ... "Please slide the mouse over, don't pick it up and put it down"

Microsoft SolarWinds analysis: Attackers hid inside Windows systems by wearing the skins of legit processes

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Re: Probably was a state sponsered attack

Hackers are much better coders than the average app writer.

UK Prime Minister Johnson knows not when 400k+ deleted records from police DB will be back

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Re: Not yet engineering

Back in the old days programmers understood databases and file formats at a byte by byte level. Code was written to read and write the data at a basic file level - that's the way that FORTRAN, C, Pascal etc work. I work with a public domain file format that is been used for 30 years and these days I keep running into people who think that if they can read the file by writing an algorithm in some modern app language then they can write the file easily with a function and update the format themselves, adding blocks that change the file at a basic level with no thought about the consequences. So when a user opens the "updated" file they start losing data.

Former NCSC chief says US sanctions made Britain strip Huawei from mobe networks

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Big Brother

So what's the risk here?

Is Huawei a security risk ... worse than Google? You would have to be crazy to think that Google doesn't do any of the data revelations that Huawei is accused of doing. So will China now ban all Android and iPhone devices? Maybe not if they have already hacked them.

All data is tracked these days - I'm not going to post anonymously because it means nothing to No Such Agency - if I think it's anonymous then they are all laughing.

FireEye publishes details of SolarWinds hacking techniques, gives out free tool to detect signs of intrusion

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Happy

Something changed today

Mail server login attempts from Russia and China have dropped from one every 15 seconds for the past four years, to one every 8 minutes today. No, I'm not relaxing, I'm just wondering why and checking the server and firewall logs. I wonder if some agency has hacked the servers sending these out?

Could it be that various nations have decided that hacking a Biden run America is actually risky; hacking attempts over the last four year have gone up sky high but America has done virtually nothing about it under the last President.

BT got £106m from £46m contract then won £20m extension on service that overcharged public by £39m

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Joke

Of course no politician's friends own any shares in the companies involved in this (icon).

Samsung tones down sticky stuff in the Galaxy S21 series, simplifying repairs massively

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A revolutionary new idea

The major issue with phones is replacing the battery - this is just a horrible thing to try and do when the phone is glued everywhere and made of thin glass. So why not a new approach to construction - make a small compartment on the rear that can be opened. then pull out the old battery, and pop in a new one? I think I will file a patent on this idea! Oh wait, was this done in the ancient past? Has someone pulled an old fossilized phone out of the recycle bin?

When I was a kid cigarettes were the most profitable products, people would buy them and burn them, nowadays phones are mush more profitable, nice smooth cases so people buy them and drop them.

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

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Re: Touch screen emergency shut off?

The lack of a well designed emergency switch is not that far from the lack of a decently designed database that loses data. This is how we do things these days. I'm sure someone is going to release a drone app update to "fix" this problem in a week or twelve.