Posts by Jim 59

Apple CEO Tim Cook: TV is TERRIBLE and stuck in the 1970s

TV / Panel / VDU

It has been said on here before, TV should be a display only, to which you attach your own boxes depending on what you want to watch. Personally I'll stick to Freeview at normal resolution.

James Bond's metal-toothed nemesis Richard Kiel dies at 74

...his character earned the rare distinction – reserved for just Bond, his good-guy team and Ernst Stavro Blofeld – of appearing in more than one Bond storyline.

And the only Bond villain to have made friends with Bond ?

If there was any justice in the world, he would have had a role in Austin Powers, too.

Infosec geniuses hack a Canon PRINTER and install DOOM

Prolly runs it faster than our 1993 PCs did.

This flashlight app requires: Your contacts list, identity, access to your camera...

Heads up

http://www.howtogeek.com/190863/androids-app-permissions-were-just-simplified-now-theyre-much-less-secure/

Re: Yes most apps want to many permissions

The less convenient antidote is just to use the web page rather then the app. For many apps (timetables, maps etc) there is an associated web site that provides the same functionality with no bottom inspecting. A web page can't interrogate your GPS/wireless/bluetooth/accelerometer/diary/address book. Often the provider's mobile web experience is almost the same as the app.

Or indeed use a PC, which does not even have GPS/accelerometer.

The decline of apps

Agree with all the above. I have been saddened and disappointed at the number of tiny apps that demand absurd amounts of personal information, and at the way larger apps regularly ramp-up their info demands. As a result, I now cannot (ie. will not) use many apps that I previously trusted and enjoyed. Or I am stuck on very old versions because I refuse the upgrade.

I have also been disappointed by the sneaky way that Android now hides an app's increasing permissions. If app X wants to upgrade and add a permission, Andoid won't tell you which permissions are new, as it used to, it just shows you the list of all perms granted to the app, so it is far from obvious which ones are new.

Among the cuplrits:

Backcountry Navigator - excellent mapping app, gives you an OS map of anywhere. Used it for a year before it suddenly ramped up the gouging. Refused upgrade.

Google maps - great but the perms ramp up almost hourly. Refused upgrade for the last year.

Amazon - was great, now too stalky. Refused upgrade.

Ebay - same as Amazon

National Rail Enquiries - a rail timetable FFS, wants to watch me go to the toilet for some reason. Refused upgrade.

Tune-in Radio - was great until it wanted to be my "special friend". Refused upgrade.

Loss of trust is going to be the downfall of apps. Google thinks they can regain our trust by better concealing their shoplifting, but trust doesn't work like that.

Apple's ONE LESS THING: the iPod Classic disappears

Re: On a cloudless day...

Thing is, you are using your £500 smart phone to do the job of a £40 media player. And the media player would have 64 Gb.

Re: So, for people like me that still get good use out of theirs

All in all, everything is better now I'm using my phone as my music player.

Horses for courses. I have a couple of identical Sansa Clip Zips, one always attached to the Hi-Fi, the other for mobile use. Not expensive - the Clip is cheap and expandable, with good sound and supports Rockbox. Music is 2 hard buttons away - amp on, Zip on. The car has a seperate satnav and a USB stick for music. A Perl script keeps the sources in sync. I prefer that setup to constantly plugging/unplugging a single device and fiddling with touchscreen apps to get some music. Many cars now have USB integration: If it weren't for that, using the phone would be more attractive.

The only hole is keeping the Hi-Fi zip charged. It can't charge and play music at the same time. I would really like a full size "tabletop" media player, mains powered. But the industry won't make these, because they don't want you to go off-net. They want you on the net, and therefore offer complicated network based solutions to a simple problem that was solved long ago (listening to digital music).

Re: So, for people like me that still get good use out of theirs

Maintaining a large music library looks a lot less attractive when Spotify, rdio, Pandora or Apple's own iTunes Radio and Beats Music put millions of songs a couple of clicks away.

Indeed? How does that work when you want to listen to that particular song in the car, or a particular band while at the gym, or your favourite conductor doing Beethoven in your lounge, or any situation where you want your own choice of music at hi-fi quality ? If they had a tardis, people from 1974 would love our computer gadgets, and laugh at our terrible music players.

On the upside, Spotify and other low-fi services work well in an elevator situation.

I stuck a 128GB memory card in my Note 3. Good stuff, and miles better than tw*tify, but how does that work when you receive a call, use your Note 3 as a satnav ?

The man who found Atlantis: 14PB of storage, flashy models and Moore's Law

Re: Let's do a deal

IMO, El Reg should retreat behind a paywall. I'd pay. It's one thing carrying a lot of legitimate ads, but another when you stop trusting the articles.

I have now disabled Firefox Adblock Plus on theregister.co.uk, and it won't be re-enabled. If you want the Reg to avoid sliding into advertorial no man's land, unblock and click on a few adverts.

Surf to theregister.co.uk

Click the ABP icon in Firefox

Clock on "Disable on theregister.co.uk"

It's only fair. Ain't nobody got time to do sumptin' for notin'.

Let's do a deal

If I turn off my add blocker will you promise not to feed me disguised adverts?

Are you a HOT CELEB? Think your SEXY PICS are safe? Maybe NOT

So yeah backing up your phone to a stranger's computer, that's totally safe.

This is partly the IT industry's fault, for giving the impression that cloud/remote server/stranger's computer is a safe thing, to be trusted without a second thought, that all strangers' intentions are always good, etc etc etc.

El Reg pokes fun at the cloud fluffers, and they are indeed funny to us. But for the non-technical layman/celebrity, the illusion of safety they peddle is dangerous.

'I think photographers get TOO MUCH copyright for their work'

Actual lol

1/60s work

'Stop dissing Google or quit': OK, I quit, says Code Club co-founder

Re: G00gle is

I dislike Google and its influence as much as the next man. Much more than the next man, in fact. And I sympathise with Sandvik entirely. But, ultimately, if somebody is paying you, you can't publicly slag them off and expect the relationship to continue. Better if Google had not become involved in the first place.

Frustratingly, this story does not include any of the negative words Sandvik has said about Google, only the warning she received in return - basically they wanted to operate her as a glove puppet - so comment is kinda pointless.

HUGE iPAD? Maybe. HUGE ADVERTS? That's for SURE

Re: Backlash

The ad industry is in a bit of a crisis, because we all block browser adds, fast forward through the TV ones, don't read paper magazines etc. I guess it all started when TV remote controls came out.

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

Re: Not to minimize this..

...I do know a person or two who, once they are drunk, if nobody sets them off on a different topic, they'll talk about who they've banged, want to bang, exes and who they are banging...

Lol. Rest assured of this person's virginity.

...I'm sure if they went to conferences, after a few drinks they'd be a real horses ass to any women at the conference while they're at it.

Well you know them and I don't, but confiding your lust to a male drinking buddy and actually chatting to a strange woman are two very different things. He might be a dick at the conference, or he might meet a woman, be tongue-tied, super-polite and awkward.

Re: Surprised..

@qwertyuiop don't be absurd. The story is an account written by one side. The other side might have disputed these events had they been asked. I have no way of knowing exactly what happened because I wasn't there, and I do not know the author or any of the people involved. The author has my polite sympathy. But don't automatically believe that a person is vile just because stranger tells me they are.

Article

The article throws out many accusations with no right of reply, which is a major weakness. It is impossible to make a sensible comment, because we weren't there. In response to a one-sided presentation of events, all we can do is politely assume it is completely true, and sympathise with the author.

The final part of the article warns us strongly against a career in sex crime, in enumerated, super bold text. Well durrr. This does not endear the reader, and seems to wash a political sheen over what has gone before. Perhaps this bit of the article was written first ? But again, there really is no telling.

Re: Surprised..

This is only one side of the story. I am not convinced it happened quite as told. Without hearing from the other side too, it is difficult to comment. Most skilled IT guys wouldn't dare say "good morning" to a strange woman, let alone touch one, even after many beers. This account of the author's suffering such repeated and disgraceful conduct doesn't really make sense unless you allow the other side to answer and defend themselves.

In some people's eyes however, the fact that these men have no right of reply or anyone to speak for them, just proves they are guilty.

ISIS terror fanatics invade Diaspora after Twitter blockade

ISIS has been forced onto an obscure platform nobody's ever heard of. Perhaps amanfrommars should pay a visit over there to keep them company.

Get ready: The top-bracket young coders of the 2020s will be mostly girls

Re: Damn statistics

Lol. The engineers' eternal dream. That girls will one day be interested in what they do, appreciate what they do, and want to do it with them. Give it up. In this sex area, career choices have nothing to do with exam results, or even ability.

Girls will only become top drawer software engineers if they are obsessive - obsessive enough to stay up all night programming, for example, as I have, and maybe you have too. How many women do you know who would ever do that ?

About a third of my A level maths class ('86) were girls, and good at it. And the teacher was a woman. In my engineering degree course a couple of years later, only 2 out of 60 or so students were girls. Why ? Why did the girls, experts in maths and physics, ignore engineering almost entirely ? They weren't refused, or railroaded, or forced. They chose. They chose biology, economics, teaching, humanities, basically anything that wasn't engineering. (Again, it is down to interest and aptitude, not ability).

Try the following experiment. Chat to your wife/mother/niece/milk lady about

- hydraulic rams

- cores structure of the latest Intel chip

- transformer cooling

- horses

See how it works yet ? Sigh. I think this is just the way of the world.

Hello, police, El Reg here. Are we a bunch of terrorists now?

Trollin'

Lol. The Register has trolled its own commentards into a Dave Spart thermonuclear meltdown.

Video of US journalist 'beheading' pulled from social media

Re: Western morality

ISIS has no chance of making it anywhere, but they will probably keep murdering civilians and making videos. Sooner or later, they will bump into a real army, with a real air force and a real navy standing by. At that point, the video chap will realize that perhaps he should have stayed at his job in Slough (or wherever). The ensuing slaughters (of ISIS but also of many innocent bystanders) will be so severe that, 10 years from now, people will be arguing that it was all too much and how we should have not killed so many people just because of a few beheadings.

Re: Yeah, well, like, you know.

Those comparing this to other killings in war etc. The point here is that the killing was an orchestrated murder, filmed and broadcast. As far as I am aware, neither the US or any other country has filmed and broadcast en execution. Even N. Korea has not done this. The US has, of course, killed thousands of its enemies, often deliberately, sometimes by accident, as have most big nations. Sure there are big moral arguments there too, but different ones.

UK fuzz want PINCODES on ALL mobile phones

Re: we need the public to become educated in the tools they are using and what can be installed

Unlike El Reg and its commentards, not everybody devotes their whole life to being a tech expert. IMO, pins set by default would help those normal people.

Saying "people are stupid they should learn" is a bit like saying we should just leave live 240v wires uninsulated and just educate people not to touch them.

Whether a law is needed is doubtful. Better just have the manufacturers set the unique PIN by agreement. It is what they already do with commercial hardware - eg. HP blade equipment always comes with unique admin passwords already set, and detailed in a paper tag. And the customers for this are usually advanced admins.

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

Re: Lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar?

...and the hardware upgrades the monster would require

Quite so. Remove Windows from a modern desktop PC and install Linux, and you are left with vastly overspecified hardware. But do the opposite...

Rupert Murdoch says Google is worse than the NSA

Re: Pots and Kettles

Agree with Mage. The government is accountable to you in at least *some* way. Google isn't, particularly if you live outside the US. Eg. People can issue FoE requests to UK government departments, who must give some sort of answer by law. This has led to the uncovering of several scandals. You can't do that with Google. However, if the guv'mint and Google get together, that is the biggest risk.

Got Android ? Check below to see if Google has been tracking you (they weren't tracking me)

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/17/6025339/google-maps-is-tracking-everywhere-you-go

Top Gun display for your CAR: Heads-up fighter pilot tech

Re: Irrelevant observation number 1:

Have an upvote Smartypants. Don't agree about the speedo though. My last car had a digital speedo. The new one has analogue. It takes much longer to read and absorb the analogue displayed speed, especially if you are trying to stay at 30 mph.

Analogue speedos have degenerated. They used to be a big circular dial going from 0 to 120 mph. Nowadays, they go up to 180 mph, regardless of the car, and the figures are squashed into half a circle or little more. In my car, 90 mph is at the 11 o'clock position, and only every 20 mph is actually numbered.

Oracle reveals 32-core, 10 BEEELLION-transistor SPARC M7

Multi-core

Multi-core is great for parallel tasks, obviously. I can encrypt a huge file on my 8 core laptop and the machine doesn't slow down at all, I can happily continue to do other stuff. In single core days it would have been reduced the whole machine to a crawl.

But there is a downside. Many tasks can't be parallelized by present software. For example, that encryption above. It only gets one core, so only gets about 12% of the PC's compute power. In an ideal world, it would take 6 or 7 cores, run mongo-fast, and leave me with 1 or 2 CPUs read El Reg and play Tetris.

Re: Nice!

Awesome. 10 billion transistors in the headline but the story doesn't repeat that claim - is it true Reg ?

Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

Re: Your dog is more popular than your daughter

Dog's name is maybe more secure because it is slightly harder to obtain that a son's name. Not sure about the daughter thing.

Re: Correct horse battery staple

Hi AC agree if the crims manage to steal a list of hashed passwords they can brute force offline. Some posters say that that, combined with Moore's law, will eventually make all passwords risky but it ain't so. The entropy of a CHBC can easily increase faster than CPU speeds.

For example, if today's GPUs can brute force "correct horse battery staple" in 550 years at 1000 guesses per second, then in 20 years time they will do it roughly 1000 times quicker, reducing the time to 6 months or so. However, just by adding 1 more word - "correct horse battery staple white", you multiply the whole lot again by 2048 (if you are selecting from a list of 2048 words), adding another 11 bits of entropy and extending the compute time again from 6 months to over 1000 years.

In 100 years you will need 9 words in that CHBS password...

Correct horse battery staple

Software authors need to update their code to allow passwords of the above variety, and quick. This "R3g1st3r" stuff is no more.

'N^a&$1nG' could be cracked in approximately 3.75 days using one AMD R290X GPU

Lol. Security fluffers always quote these times assuming 1000 guesses per second or whatever, without mentioning that 1 guess per second is the internet reality, moreover imposed by the target system. Also, I assume Trustwave are all in jail now ? Or did they nor really hack 600000 real passwords?

Totes AMAZEBALLS! Side boob, binge-watch and clickbait added to Oxford Dictionary

OED is trolling you

Some of the OED's annual additions are genuine words that will stand the test of time. A few are just teenage grunts that will be an embarrassing memory by Christmas, put in partly for trolling purposes.

OED should put up a list of annual additions/deletions for each year, so we can go back and see what worked and what didn't. Actually, their site has additions year-by-year, but no mention of deletions. Do they see deletion as a failure ?

What's in your toolbox? Why the browser wars are so last decade

Re: "The pressure to differentiate is more intense than ever"

Don't say "Chrome", say "Iron". Iron = Chrome with stalkware stripped out.

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Re: I solved this a while ago:

@ Suricou Raven great project, well done and will keep your accounts secure. There are a couple of things:

As it is generating, not storing passwords, you still need to keep a list somewhere of the accounts you actually own. So that you don't forget you actually have an account at www.datsundrivers.com

If you lose it, it will need to be replaced before you can re-generate a password and log in somewhere.

If it is stolen, could it possibly be reverse engineered to get the master pin and thus the passwords ?

Certainly fixes the key logging threat though, and ingeniously.

Re: Why trust any third party?

And when you have 78 "memorable" nicknames for 78 sites ? Still memorable ?

Re: Who trusts a third party with their authentication?

I do the same as PhilipJ. Best way.

Re: Similar to where I work a few months back...

In the case of a major outage, customers prefer communication to actually fixing the thing. They are more bothered about being kept informed than they are about the outage itself. Took me many years to learn this.

The customer prefers knowing that the outage will last 3 hours than not knowing how long it will last, and having it come back after 1.5 hours.

Storing your passwords on the Internet

No.

Re: Lastpass

Make sure that .txt file editor is not auto-saving backup copies outside of your encrypted volume.

VMware hangs with the cool kids in the Containers gang

Containers = Ancient tech

Containers might be this week's zeitgeist-chasing meme, but they are also ancient. In computing terms, they date from the last ice age. Mainframes had it in the 70s, unix chroot since the 80s or earlier, and Solaris has had a mature product in widespread use for almost a decade.

Interesting article anyway. With containers being significantly different from VMs on terms of what they offer, it seems that they compliment virtualization rather than compete with it. All that has changed really is that Linux has at last got containerisation, so now you can have it under the GPL.

Microsoft: Just what the world needs – a $25 Nokia dumbphone

Voice recorder

I often used my old clam shell's built in voice recorder to make notes. Open it with one hand, dial #34, speak, stop. My posh Samsung S3 has a recorder too, involving lengthy menu navigation using both eyes, both hands and brain to focus on a screen you can't see in sunlight. Never use it. Smart phones went to far in giving up hard keys altogether.

Oh and sound play back is speaker only, so no privacy in a quiet, open office. Progress!

Hollywood star Robin Williams dies of 'suspected suicide' at 63

Sad. And a shock that the cause was suicide.

eBay bans CD sales of metal band Burzum, citing offensive material

Re: I don't get the complaints about Mien Kampf

Not read the book, but I don't agree that Hitler stated what he was planning to do from the start. The "final solution" was only decided in a meeting of the German high command in 1942.

Ancient pager tech SMS: It works, it's fab, but wow, get a load of that incoming SPAM

Anam

Anam.ie's web page says "You could say that Anam has grown up with SMS.". But in fact the company was only set up in 2012. It seems to be separate from Anam Mobile, which was founded in 1999 and also seemingly has O'Sullivan as CEO. Both Anam Technologies (anam.ie) and Anam mobile (www.anam.com) resolve to the same web page.

According to Alexa et al, traffic to anam.ie is almost non existent, and the site (Drupal) is ranked at over 19 million. It is therefore dwarfed by the theregister.co.uk on 3700 and even my own wretched blog on 5 million. This story by el Reg will certainly give them a slashdotting (unless I have it all wrong - entirely possible). They also have a Twitter account but have not tweeted as yet and have no followers seemingly.

Nothing wrong with that though. It is great to see small/medium sized companies grow. And free coverage in the Reg is fine, so long as it is actually free. I don't agree with others that the article reads like an ad. It doesn't. It is just a little odd that El Reg would have a big story about such an as-yet small firm which has just started up and whose business is still so small.

Brit kids match 45-year-old fogies' tech skill level by the age of 6

Re: Using pre-made services doesn't represent a skill

Nah. 2 of my sisters and one of my brothers are about Big_Ds age, non are in the tech biz, and they all know how to set up a router and have done so without help from kids in their teens/20s. The kids do know how to use Facebook though.

And Dad was updating his community website at the age of 79, and in a big way. Using Dreamweaver IIRC.

Questions

I would ask about the knowledge level of the people who composed the survey. If they are non-technical, they might think listening the Spotify is the last word in being "digitally savvy", and judge others on that level. In order to compose the survey, their own expertise level has to be much higher than the "man in the street", and this might not be the case. In fact their expertise level may actually be below that of the average citizen.

This would explain how they can equate a 6 year old who listens to Spotify with a 44 year old who contributes to the Linux kernel on a regular basis and runs 10 websites including his own tech blog. He does not listen to Spotify because he has built a far better music solution. But the survey and the surveyors don't understand any of that. They questions only ask about noddy internet services.

Might seem far fetched but this happens now and again on BBC TV and Radio 4. On the rare occasions they cover a technical subject, it sometimes becomes apparent that the interviewer's knowledge level is not only less than the expert he is interviewing, but also below that of the average citizen. The interviewer has problems grasping what even laymen already understand, and his questions and reactions reflect that, much to the exasperation of listeners at home.

Re: I call bollocks.

These days, I think teenagers are put off computers and tech purely *because* so many grown ups are so expert in this area.

In the 80s, just having access to a computer was a new and exciting thing. We all knew somehow that it was the tip of a revolution. Nowadays, Tech is a mass employer. There are likely several Software Engineers in your street. Every house has 5 PCs. Even the "man in the street" has a lot of tech knowledge, probably enough to set up his family's router and network. A teenager interested in programming is likely to find he already has 3 uncles who are expert in the latest languages. And that takes the excitement away and he may lose interest.