Posts by Dale 3

Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV

Re: Idiot marketing people at work again

Their marketing looks nice but I'm wondering how their OLEDs are producing black wingtips on the butterfly. I suspect you'll need Samsung's "Black Background" shade of paint to make this work.

Samsung to introduce automatic call blocking on Android 11-capable flagships

Re: How does it work?

Exactly. Until there is a solution for number spoofing, none of these solutions are solutions at all.

I spent last monday playing dumb with a multitude of scammers trying to convince me my internet was about to be disconnected due to "hackers" (my favourite moment was when I asked whether I should plug my internet back in because the plug had fallen out) - the calls were relentless on monday although seem to have stopped now.

But every call came from a different, presumably randomly generated, UK number. If crowdsourced number blocking grows in popularity, eventually the chances are some legitimate numbers will start getting blocked and people will have a hard time why their phone seems not to be working although there is still a dial tone.

It can't possibly by that hard for telephone service providers to eliminate number spoofing.

GSM gateways: Parliament obviously cocked up, so let minister issue 'ignore the law' decree, UK.gov barrister urges court

Re: Here's a thought

Would that make Parliament a type of git-hub?

Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history

Re: Close, but not Glenn Close with a cigar.

Yellow is always the last to run out on my printer. So whatever encoding they're using, is very efficient.

Think tank warns any further delay to 5G rollout will cost the UK multiple billions – but hey, at least Huawei is out

Were you hoping to influence opinion? Because I was exhausted halfway through the first paragraph. Amanfrommars would be proud.

Tesla to build cars made of batteries and hit $25k price tag about three years down the road

Re: Applefying the car

I think that's what he was getting at.

The sun is shining, the birds are singing. You can shut the curtains and tour The National Museum of Computing in VR

Re: Security.

I dunno, I keep trying but it's not working for me.

Battle for 6GHz heats up in America: Broadcasters sue FCC to kill effort to open spectrum for private Wi-Fi

Wait for the NAB to start connecting 6GHz with Covid (though obviously only in WiFi form, the commercial form is naturally anti-viral).

Gone in 15 minutes: Qualcomm claims new chargers will fill your smartmobe in a flash

Imagine being that vapid that waiting an hour or two for your car to fill up with petrol is the worst thing in the world and you need a full tank after 15 minutes so you can carry on driving and being productive.

Some people's use cases may be different from your own.

Shocked I am. Shocked to find that underground bank-card-trading forums are full of liars, cheats, small-time grifters

Re: And there's another

Not sure why he needs to have the same code on all three screens though.

Drupal drops first big upgrade in five years and looks forward by looking backwards

Re: EOL for Drupal 7

Also see https://www.drupal.org/psa-2020-06-24, which updated the PSA-2019 announcement to move the date to 2022.

Note that Drupal 8'd EOL is still Nov 2021.

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

List sorting

The PDF list of sites linked in the article is all over the place in terms of sorting. If you're looking for specific sites, use the search facility rather than looking manually through the list or you may miss them. The list looks to be alphabetical at the beginning, but goes haywire in the second column.

Three UK: We're sending you this SMS to warn you not to pay attention to unsolicited texts

Indeed! It's like the argument that scam emails are deliberately written with terrible grammar and spelling because the types of people who wouldn't notice are also the types more likely to believe they've won an email lottery they never entered, so the scammer receives fewer replies but with better chances of getting some cash out of them - it improves the efficiency of the scam.

Hey, Boeing. Don't celebrate your first post-grounding 737 Max test flight too hard. You just lost another big contract

(Offtopic)

(Sorry for going offtopic, but I'll mention this in case someone finds it useful...)

In the UK, credit cards are covered by Section 75 protection, which is a very powerful legal right. (It basically makes the card issuer equally liable as the goods/service provider so if something goes wrong and the provider doesn't deal with it adequately, the card issuer is equally liable to put it right.) Debit cards are (usually) covered by chargeback, but that is just a feature which card issuers offer, not a legal right and they don't have to honour it. S.75 protection is much stronger, which is why it's usually recommended to use a credit card over a debit card for big ticket items.

Boeing brings back the 737 Max but also lays off thousands

isit737max.com

In the spirit of the multitude of "is it..." websites, would someone please build isit737max.com, so you put in a flight number and it comes back with "YES, you might die" or "NO, you're probably alright". It can't be too difficult, seeing that sites like SeatGuru are already able to identify the plane type by flight number and present the seating configuration.

I for one am in no hurry to fly any route that uses 737MAX, and will be checking before booking in future.

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

Re: Why would anyone use it?

That was you? Dammit!

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Photo

The saddest part of this story is that it happened before the ubiquity of camera phones.

Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

They fixed http://natwest.co.uk, which now redirects to https://personal.natwest.com. But they haven't fixed any of these:

https://natwest.co.uk still has the dodgy certificate and doesn't redirect anywhere else.

https://www.natwest.co.uk is the same.

http://www.natwest.co.uk redirects to https://www.natwest.co.uk, which has the dodgy certificate.

They clearly must own all of these names; I can't understand why they haven't fixed all of them. They're not even getting rid of 15% of their workforce.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: Bless..

Thanks for the video. It explains Oddball's righteous indignation at SODDERING!

UK's internet registry prepares a £100m windfall for its board members – and everyone else will pay for it

Nice bit of racketeering going on there

Generate a bunch of new .uk names for all the existing .co.uk names... be a shame if someone else got hold of it, right guv?

Danger mouse! Potent rodents 'see' infrared after eyeballs injected with nanoparticles

Nano-batteries to go with those nanoparticles. At first, that's what I assumed. Now I'm thinking something along the lines of the mechanism of a self-winding watch. When the IR starts fading, you sweep your eyes side to side a few times to recharge. In the heat of battle there's enough action to keep it going all night.

Sorry, Mr Zuckerberg isn't in London that day. Or that one. Nope. I'd give up if I were you

Compelled?

Is there a legal basis that requires him to appear? If yes, then fine them daily until he appears and send in the bailiffs if they don't pay up. If not, then give it up guys, he said no.

Bloodhound Super-Sonic-Car lacks Super-Sonic-Cashflow

Rolling billboard

Whoever buys advertising space better keep their message short.

A story of M, a failed retailer: We'll give you a clue – it rhymes with Charlie Chaplin

Re: Debt = Bad

"As the A/C said, the [root] cause was cheap credit so why is cheap credit the answer?"

And as Tom 38 answered, cheap credit wasn't the cause, inappropriate lending was. Mortgages being given to people who were at very high risk of not paying them back, then the lenders would take all their high-risk mortgages, package them together into the CDOs that Tom 38 talked about and sell them on to other banks, who treated them as less risky without looking at the contents.

You could argue that the cause of the problem was the CDOs being incorrectly (or fraudulently) rated less risky than reality. Or you could argue that the cause of the problem was the fact that such risky mortgages were being offered in the first place. You can't argue that cheap credit was the cause of the problem. Even if the credit was cheap, these people still couldn't afford to pay it back so never should it have been given to them.

Re: Profitability

Yes, overpriced goods, product range and mistakes in online are usually what everyone talks about whenever Maplin comes up, but what I got from this article is that this author asserts it was problems at the corporate finance level that actually (or additionally) led to the death-spiral. The balance sheet numbers showed increasing sales every year up to 2014 and gross profit being maintained at around 50% which means they were still selling stuff and making a profit from what they sold despite being "expensive", but the whole time corporate debt and increasing liability for interest on the debt were catching up with them.

The buyout by Rutland in 2015 enabled them to reset some of the debt and interest liability, albeit with lower sales and gross profits (though still around 50%), but the years following showed exactly the same pattern - sales and profits going up but debt and interest going up much faster. The debt scared their suppliers into withdrawing credit supply arrangements, and if you have nothing to sell you have no business. So actually, customers were still going in and buying stuff, but the author's contention is that spiralling corporate debt killed them.

Buried in the hype, one little detail: Amazon's Alexa-on-a-chip could steal smart home market

Magic Leap

I guess Magic Leap are providing the hardware.

KFC: Enemy of waistlines, AI, arteries and logistics software

Lenticular

I get the idea of testing slightly altered signs to see whether they might be misinterpreted by an autonomous vehicle, but calling a lenticular sign an "attack" is not much different from hanging an actual stop sign over another road sign and calling that an attack. That's not an attack, that's just showing a different sign and having it classified correctly.

Developer recovered deleted data with his face – his Poker face

Re: I wonder if there will be any poker face stories

Here's hoping whoever's involved at KFC/DHL are regulars here, and their story will be told in due course (with identifiers "redacted" to protect the guilty, of course).

Future of Misco UK hangs in the balance – sources

Re: I wonder....

CPC are pretty good at sending a multitude of thick catalogues, most of which are more or less identical from one week to the next.

Bolsover Cruise Club are incredible. You don't even need to have gone on a cruise, you just need to have walked past their shop or something and you'll be on the receiving end of all manner of letters, postcards and booklets, multiple times per week.

Amazon crowd-sources new HQ location, Bezos tells mayors to woo him

Seattle

Maybe part of the plan is to send a message to Seattle city to give them a better deal for the existing HQ1 facility, otherwise they'll gradually shift more and more operations over to HQ2. Or play the cities off against each other.

Top repo managers clone, then close, a nasty SSH vector

Joern Schneeweisz

Sorry, I was rather hoping for some seven dwarves puns.

Samsung drops 128TB SSD and kinetic-type flash drive bombshells

1 MiB

They usually operate alone but sometimes have been known to work in pairs.

FBI's spyware-laden video claims another scalp: Alleged sextortionist charged

Re: Fingers crossed he rots somewhere horrible for it...

Maybe they already thought of that, and this is the technique they want you to *think* they use, to distract miscreants from the actual technique they use.

Enumeration bug offers five-finger discount on Woolworth Australia loyalty points

Re: Good for you

You may be overthinking this. Rather than kneejerk-reacting to the possibility that loyalty scheme costs might be added to shelf prices, just look at the prices. If they're cheaper somewhere else, go somewhere else. MySupermarket.co.uk is good for comparing before you leave home.

UK mobile number porting creaks: Arcane system shows its age

Re: Why oh why etc.

No, terrible idea. If you have poor network coverage in your home/office/commute/etc, you can't switch to another network with better coverage. The monopolistic network provider is in no hurry to improve coverage because their customers are billing agents, not end users, and they're not losing any customers over this.

Segway hoverboard hijack hack could make hipsters eat pavement

♫

Why do you build us up...

Segway hoverboard hijack hack could make hipsters eat pavement

...just to let us down...

Those dreaming of sending hipsters crashing into the dirt can forget it, though.

(buttercup?)

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, 4G: Tube comms trials for emergency crews

Re: Noooooooooooooooooooo!

I googled it. Turns out, "Progress is an organisation of Labour party members which aims to promote a radical and progressive politics for the 21st century." So I'm not sure what your point was :-)

Don't panic, but your Bitcoins may just vanish into the ether next month

Sounds like they've been taking notes from Microsoft on how to roll out an upgrade.

Elon Musk reveals Mars colony rocket capable of bringing pizza joints to the red planet

What will they do?

I just wonder what all those million people out there will do. Not initially, obviously, as I'm sure they will be building and sciencing and exploring and, well, populating. But after a while I'd imagine a lot of them would get terribly bored. I mean, here on Earth we can go to the beach, climb a mountain, visit beautiful and exotic locations, play golf, do gardening, whatever, literally thousands of different things we can do outdoors and in. On Mars, you're basically stuck indoors all day watching TV. Oh sure you can put on a suit and go explore the planet but it's all basically the same wherever you go and, whereas a holiday to the Namib desert might be exhilarating the first time, if that's the only holiday you can ever have you're going to get tired of it pretty quickly.

I guess a million is a large enough group that there will be incredible diversity of people and skills, and over time they will come up with all manner of entertainment and pastimes, probably even some that cannot be done on Earth, but you're going to have to choose a million indoors-type people because most, I would think, would still occasionally enjoy being able to look out over a different landscape.

Long term I don't worry so much. If they and succeeding generations make it, they could in time build huge structures to contain enough of an atmosphere to replicate some of the outdoor activities we take for granted, but I doubt that could happen for several decades at least. It's those first few decades before you can get the big stuff in place, that I wonder about.

Currys PC World given a spanking for misleading laptop savings ads

Re: Ebuyer / Amazon Hard disk prices

Top tip: Go to uk.camelcamelcamel.com and copy & paste any Amazon URL into their search. It will show you the price history of that item, so you can see how good any bargain really is.

Acronis adds automated ransomware protection to latest Backup version

Re: True Image?

True Image 2014 was the last of the decent UIs. When I built my current Windows 10 PC I had to camp out on Ebay until I found a copy of 2014 to buy.

China's first large passenger jet makes maiden flight

Re: On the plus side, instant familiarity

Plane racism, surely?

User loses half of a CD-ROM in his boss's PC

Allow me to introduce you to Sarcasm.

Sarcasm, meet Mr Baldrickk.

Will the MOAB (Mother Of all AdBlockers) finally kill advertising?

Re: People DO hate adverts

So I trimmed a hefty piece of slate to fit the reply-paid envelope. About a week later, the barrage (which had been ceaseless for months) stopped completely.

Did you write your name and address on it, or are you telling us they abandoned their entire marketing strategy and pulled their outgoing mail pipeline, in the space of a week, on the back of a single piece of slate? Nice story, but I call porkies.

Tesla, Atlassian told to go through front door in effort to save Australian industrial civilisation

Load shedding

A lot of South African expats now living in South Australia must have had a big skrik thinking they had woken up in the wrong SA again. I wonder which is worse, load shedding due to not starting up the quick reaction generator station, or load shedding due to the govenment having forgotten they needed to build one in the first place.

Video intercom firm Doorbird wants $80 for device password resets

Re: Idiots Of The...

£12 gets you a doorbell that you can only respond to while you're at home. I understand the main novelty of this device is that you can respond to a caller when you're not at home - either it makes it look like you are at home and just too lazy to come to the door (maybe it might dissuade a burglar, maybe), or you can let a trusted visitor in without having to be there yourself. Personally I'm not interested in either of those usage cases so I'd be there with you and the £12 bell, but there are probably a few people for whom those novel uses would be appealing.

Re: I have a large paper folder

Or take photo, email it to self. If you use Gmail or a similarly cloudy provider, it's now instantly available even when travelling. Assuming you trust the security of Gmail.

ITU-T wants video sizes to halve again by 2020

Re: Is this even possible?

"Enhance!"

Customer: BT admitted it had 'mis-sold' me fibre broadband

fibre-to-the-premise

A "premise" is a proposition that forms the basis of an argument.

A "premises" is a piece of land and the buildings on it.

"Premises" can also mean multiple propositions that form the basis of arguments, but a "premise" never has anything to do with land and buildings unless you're arguing about them.

Go on, I used the icon and everything.

Bank robber reveals identity – by using his debit card during crime

I call fake

No way someone this thick would have spelled "you're" correctly.