Posts by Dr Paul Taylor

ICO fines PPI claims firm £80,000 over 1.3m spam SMS deluge

Completely useless

without making verifiable caller id mandatory except for domestic callers.

Yahoo! Mail! is! still! a! thing!, tries! blocking! Adblock! users!

Re: Are Yahoo! Experienced? Have Yahoo! Ever Been Experienced?

At Yahoo!, we are continually developing and testing new product experiences,

I don't want an experience from a website, I want information and nothing else.

Please note, sysadmins everywhere.

Looking for a council house in Sheffield City? Meet your fellow tenants

Fault of the mail program

It's easy for those of us with long experience of using computers and email to mock bureaucrats who make blunders like this. However, the fact that this kind of blunder is easy and common does raise the question of whether IT could actually do something about it. It would be easy for mail programs to refuse to send emails with more than a (configurable) handful of addresses in the To: and CC: lines, at least without querying the use.

UK.gov finally promises legally binding broadband service obligation – by 2020

Urban areas too?

Rural areas are to be promised 10 M bits/sec.

What about urban areas, like my house in east London?

I get 4 M bits/sec.

Brussels flings out Safe Harbour guidelines, demands 'safer' new framework ASAP

Re: Spelling

by establishing a connection to a remote site you are sending "personal data" across the ocean

No. Sometimes I may choose to visit an American site. Too frequently, when I visit a British site, it calls in some completely gratuitous javascript from Google or some other transatlantic "cloud" or "analytics" site without ever bothering to ask for my consent.

Spelling

Let's call it Safe Harbor to make it clear where it came from.

Why are all these companies sending my personal data across the ocean?

We have plenty of clouds of our own here in Britain in November!

But I'm certainly glad that I am still a citizen of the EU with the benefit of the Human Rights Act!

Hi, um, hello, US tech giants. Mind, um, mind adding backdoors to that crypto? – UK govt

Do they not have *** advisers in government?

That's why we have the House of Lords, so that some people who actually know about something can quietly stop the most stupid legislation from going through.

As to whether they are competent in technology, unfortunately that may be another matter.

Microsoft offers to PAY YOU to trade in your old computer for a Windows 10 device

Re: MS are idiots

I need to do a soft reboot (Ctrl, Alt, Del) to get it to boot into Linux

Regard this minor inconvenience as a protection against theft. A thief will think the machine is broken and leave it behind, or at least be unable to read the stuff on your disk.

When I installed Xubuntu, I completely trashed the M$ on the laptop that I'm using to type this. So when it boots it shows a blue screen with "your computer needs to be repaired". I have to hit ESC, F9 and scroll down to get to the grub startup.

Euro privacy warriors: You've got until January to fix safe harbor mess – or we unleash hell

Re: Sue 'em all, god will recognise his own

Albigensian.

You'll be senting DPA complaints to every website that you visit.

Whatever the politicians do will be a fudge. What we need is to boycott Silicon Valley and start up similar or preferably superior services in our own countries or continent.

Fingerprints, facial scans, EU border data slurp too tasty for French to resist

Re: Fishing

I thought you were about to go in a somewhat different direction

I was. Originally I just thought of the verb "to google" in its sloppy meaning of "to search on a database, but then the activities of the real Google came to mind.

this tech would allow any of us to present one or more fingerprints to the search engine and have it display the owner's anonymized information

I was told yesterday by someone from Peru that that country had recently gone from ponderous bureaucracy to having a system in which you could indeed present your fingerprints and obtain a newly printed passport a few minutes later.

Anyway, what I really had in mind was that this was a back door to getting ID cards with their associated all-seeing databases, in particular for the police to get easy convictions by fishing.

Fishing

So all of these fingerprints will be copied into police databases, so that lazy PC Plod can sit at his desk and G**gle (there's another horrible thought!) the perpetrator of any misdemeanor, with the risk that some distant unconnected person will be nailed, instead of doing proper detective work.

'Safe Harbor': People in Europe 'can get quite litigious about this'

Let's have some European competition

Why the hell was all this personal data going across the Atlantic in the first place? Europeans (for example El Reg for their lectures) have lazily been using American websites (such as Eventbrite) when it would be easy and entirely in line with the principles of Capitalism for there to be similar sites offering competing services in other countries. We should all take this ECJ judgment as an opportunity. It is time for all sorts of reasons to overthrow the American monopoly of such services. To Hell with Facebook, Google, Amazon and the rest of them!

Shuttle bus firm Terravision belatedly adopts https for credit card sales

Not too harsh please

Terravision at least provides some competition to National Express on airport routes.

Bookworms' Weston mecca: The Oxford institution with a Swindon secret

Magna Carta in Latin

The handwriting is probably rather tricky to read, but the text looks like pretty simple Latin and a great deal more comprehensible than Norman French or Anglo Saxon would be. That is the reason why people continued to use Latin for important documents up to c1800, after which the Tower of Babel took over. In 800 years' time, when people speak some language whose current roots we now consider to be pidgin, they will no doubt complain that 21st century stuff is written in a dead language called "English".

www.thelatinlibrary.com/magnacarta.html

Excellent article nonetheless

Curiosity Rover's OS has backdoor bug

Un gran formaggio?

"Formaggio" vuol dire "cheese" in italiano. Non so la parola "fromaggio" - forse e' un errore francese?

Pro tip: Servers belong in dry server rooms, not wet cloakrooms

£300 per hour for starters

I hope Stuart charged the solicitor at the rate that the solicitor would have charged him for doing something completely elementary. Having recently done probate and conveyancing twice each, it was clear to me that they are money for old rope. However, there is some niggling detail at a level comparable to the questions about computers that are answered for free on numerous websites.

Want your kids to learn coding? Train the darn teachers first

New curriculum

There is a new curriculum for computer science at school, based on an initiative involving universities (especially Birmingham) and various big and small software companies that has been running for several years. I encourage you to take a look and participate.

See www.computingatschool.org.uk

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

Re: Windows only though

This is a question. It would be useful to have a definite answer. Does disabling "secure boot", installing Linux from a USB stick and scrubbing M$ remove the Lenovo rootkit?

Lenovo Euro supremo: Yes, we wrote down PC stock, what about it?

Any good stuff?

To repeat my previous question, does The Channel have anything to recommend amongst the stuff that Lenovo is selling off cheap? Personally I would scrub M$ from it, but others might want to use it as is.

Want to download free AV software? Don't have a Muslim name

Re: 'against the law'

I strongly suspect that filtering out Muslim names is against the law, especially if the company is based in the UK.

And utterly pointless, since most of us on El Reg (and presumably any real Bad Guys) would give false names to such officious websites anyway.

How many Win 10 PCs were in distribution the week before launch?

Any good stuff?

> Lenovo, for example, has written off a substantial amount of stock in Western Europe.

Every word I have read on El Reg about Windows 10 over the past fortnight has made me bl**dy glad that I am a Linux user. There does not seem to have been a single polite comment even from M$'s captive market.

If Lenovo is chucking stuff out because the sheep don't like it, does The Channel have anything to recommend to users of other operating systems?

BT circles wagons round Openreach as Ofcom mulls forced split-up

Smash up BT Retail instead

Better to leave Openreach and Wholesale alone but instead do something about the unfair advantage that BT Retail has because of customer inertia. Retails shoule be sold off in ten bits, with the existing customers allocated according to the last digit of their phone numbers. Then the bits would have to compete with telcos who treat their customers with more respect and are competent in getting faults fixed.

FLASH MUST DIE, says Facebook security chief

BT Wholesale ADSL speed checker

At least the BBC iplayer is delivering sound or video. I complained to (not about) my ISP about my broadband speed and they gave me some testing instructions, in particular to run the BT Wholesale Broadband Performance Test at speedtest.btwholesale.com. This is a crappy program that seems to have been written by some schoolkid and insists that Flash be installed, apparently so that it can show its progress bar, and in the end displays its results in a form that can't be cut-and-pasted back into an email to the ISP. It's all very well refusing to install Flash, permit Javascript, etc, but the Web is increasingly full of this kind of crap programming and some of the stuff is actually essential.

How much info did hackers steal on US spies? Try all of it

Re: Snowden

BBC online news is carrying the same story, citing the Sunday Times: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33125068

Cop in gay porn film advised to put his helmet away

Re: If only...

This video appears to be about Prince Harry. He was a bit of a clown when he was younger, but then he demonstrated that he is a guy with plenty of guts. I am not usually noted as a screaming royalist, but frankly this link is out of order in the context of this story.

Why don't you rent your electronic wireless doorlock, asks man selling doorlocks

Re: Rent a door lock?

Just what I was about to post. The alternative to locking the legitimate person out would be to let everyone else in.

No. No. No.

Macroviruses are BACK and are the future of malware, says Microsoft

Re: Contained within the Microsoft ecosystem

I was about to upvote you until I read "virii". If you're going to use Latin plurals, please get them right.

Top Spanish minister shows citizens are thick as tortillas de ballenas

Re: The Spanish Inquisition

Defending Copernicus during the life of Euler does not make someone a Mathematician. Botany was not a Science until Wallace and Darwin, whom I'm sure the Inquisition would not have allowed on their patch. I made the challenge to smoke out the Exception that proves the Rule. I completely agree with the comments about the Cathar genocide (I have been to Montsegur and pointedly wear a T-shirt with a Cathar Cross every time I go to Leicester). However, my point here was not about the Inquisition as the Crime against Humanity that was but that it also cut Spain out of the game as far as Science was concerned, despite being the Superpower of its age.

Re: The Spanish Inquisition

More seriously, during "la convivencia" of Jews Muslims and Christians under the Moors, Spain was intellectually the most advanced part of Europe. Los Reyes Catolicos put a stop to this. So far as I can gather, in the time until Napoleon abolished the Inquistion, Spaniards were quite good at collecting flowers but had not a single mathematician or physical scientist of note. The Netherlands and Switzerland - much smaller countries - had lots of them. Can anyone contradict me on this?

Cash register maker used same password – 166816 – non-stop since 1990

customers should conduct rigorous penetration tests

How am I supposed to do this in a supermarket queue?

It's official: David Brents are the weakest link in phishing attacks

Re: Time for a Register checklist?

Good list but I don't understand 9 and you may also want to reword (negate) 8 and 10.

Ad-blocking is LEGAL: German court says Ja to browser filters

legal arguments?

We Reg commentards can formulate our own arguments and opinions about this, but it would be interesting to see a synopsis of those that were presented by the complainant and respondent and those that were accepted by the judge.

The Internet of Stuff is a gigantic ultra-perv robbery network – study

What about when you move house?

It's all very well for us smug Reg readers to say that we will never install IoT equipment in our existing houses, but what about when you move house? Recently I moved from an old house (with minor structural problems such as loose plaster) to a modern one (with problems created by its previous owner, such as a leaky shower). In future, we will have to re-fit the IT/IoT in a house when we buy it, but in some cases (eg "smart" meters), this may not be allowed.

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Why do it in the election year?

What moron decided to change the system of electoral registration in the year of a general election?

Telly behemoths: Does size matter?

Cathode rays

My father's career in the 1960s and 70s was the design of the analogue oscillators that drove the electomagnets that were around the neck of the screen and dragged the electron beams across the screen. When I first saw a concave screen I thought, how the hell would he have got cathode rays around that?

Big Data, empty bellies: How supermarkets tweak prices just for the sake of YOUR LOVE

Re: tweaking prices

Exactly: it's the obvious application of RFID "loyalty" cards and "Electronic Shelf Edge Labels".

Hey kids! If you vote Facebook will give you EXTRA LIKES*

Re: How does it know?

I was wondering how far I would have to skim down the comments for someone to ask this important question. Do we understand that the (unedited) Electoral Roll is F***b**k's quid pro quo for handing over its users' information to GCHQ?

Google Translate MEAT GRINDER turns gay into 'faggot', 'poof', 'queen'

Google can't win

The other side of this coin is that it kindly translated Zur Geometrie der Alten as "On the Geometry of the Elderly", when "Ancients" would have been the appropriate word in this context, since it was the title of a journal paper that referred to Archimedes.

Landlines: The tech that just won't die

Re: Call filtering

You can fondly imagine that not giving anyone your number will help, but it doesn't.

Obviously I tell my friends what my number is. I admit that not putting it in the directory or on forms does not completely eliminate nuisance calls, but there are very few of them.

Re: BT bashing

Obviously a BT employee here.

Aside from all the things above, I left BT Retail because they were structurally incompetent.

Specifically, when I had what turned out to be a simple exchange fault (probably the line card had been nudged out of place), for four months they were not only unable to fix it, but prevented me from communicating with any technically competent person. Eventually there was an occasion when the fault only affected the ADSL, which was with another company (ICUK). They got the fault fixed within a few hours and also provided me with a letter of explanation, which I used in my subsequent complaint against BT. Needless to say, the "Ombudsman" whitewashed BT. Since then, ICUK has looked after my phone line too.

Re: Call filtering

The problem with not answering a call from a WITHHELD number is that it may really be important. Once I did not answer such a call because I was being pestered by someone else who was withholding their number. However, that call turned out to have been from the hospital where my father was, to tell me that he had suffered a life-threatening incident. (He actually died six weeks later.)

When companies (hospitals, universities) send out letters they do so on headed notepaper. When they send emails they use their own domain names. How is it acceptable that, as policy, their outgoing phone calls look like scams?

PS The most effective way to stop cold callers is to get a new phone number, not have it in the directory and never write it on forms.

Your anonymous code contributions probably aren't: boffins

students

its techniques could be used to identify plagiarism among computer science students

I found that laying one printout next to the other was an adequate technique!

Though, it is true that the spaces and tabs were a giveaway, when the indentation was, shall we say, merely decorative.

Please use TWO HANDS to access AdultFriendFinder

bank security

"Two of the three banks in the top 500 list did not use defensive typosquats"

No, who who have thought that such a thing could happen?

For pervasive 5G and IoT, prepare for wind turbines on cells

Re: Where are they putting these towers?

Africa, maybe? Sounds like the Next Big Thing after the Wind-Up Radio.

David Cameron: I'm off to the US to get my bro Barack to ban crypto – report

Re: We will try!

> who promptly sold me down the river to a party which I despise

> The Lib Dems are off my list for the rest of my life for their treachery.

Wrong. Gordon Brown had to go. The Lib Dems were in the Coalition to rein in the wild animals of the Tory party, which they have done pretty successfully.

The problem is that the British electorate does not understand what a "coalition" means.

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

Re: Galileo...

I have studied the trial of Galileo but I do not see the connection.

Proxima and Ultima: AI, hard sci-fi and multiverse – All good. Romans – not so much

Also, the Romans (at least the ones who spoke Latin rather than Greek) were never scientists either. Pliny the Elder might have got a job on New Scientist but that's as far as they got - they never did any original science or mathematics for themselves.

97% of UK gets 'basic' 2Mbps broadband. 'Typical households' need 10Mbps – Ofcom

Link please

Please can we have a link to this Ofcom report, and maybe to any other available statements of what ADSL speed it is "reasonable" to expect, because I am getting nothing like what it says here.

Blast-off! Boat free launch at last. Orion heads for space

Re: Typo

I now have to translate from Fahrenheit phrasebook-style, so I happen to know that 68F=20C. I haven't got a clue what 40000F means, I just divide by 2. Negative F temps leave me completely flummoxed. Completely unsuitable for scientific or engineering use.

George.Best walks into a sex.bar, spots a bearded dwarf sysadmin and thinks: Warcraft.cool

ICANN should not be allowed to sell standard English words (.home .book etc) as top level domain names. If we really must have this nonsense then it should be restricted to trade marks that have already been registered in the old fashioned way.