Posts by Blane Bramble

We give up, Progressive Web Apps can track you, says W3C: After 5 years, it decides privacy is too much bother

Re: Optional

Which breaks things such as:

www.mysite.com/my-pwa-app1

www.mysite.com/my-pwa-app2

etc.

We're no longer helping UK Post Office persecute postal workers with our shonky system, says Fujitsu

Standard practise going on here:

PO bod: "We had no reason not to trust the system, we relied on Fujitsu and they said it was all good"

Fujitsu bod: "We only supplied raw data as we were asked to do, we're not responsible for the conclusions"

Jail the lot of them.

Surge in Zoom support requests was 'unexpected', says tool team as it turns taps down

Re: Not surprised

Settings -> Audio -> Microphone

Works for me without being in a meeting.

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

the five agencies “are increasingly unable to rely on local police forces to investigate crimes on their behalf,”

So fix the actual problem, don't give them powers they shouldn't need.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Well I'm glad it's not just me

It's uniform but not washed out. You could also change all the element colours individually to customise the look. Try to do that with Win10.

ZX Spectrum prototype ROM is now available for download courtesy of boffins at the UK's Centre for Computing History

Re: 16KB

"Jupiter Ace had 1 K RAM and could run Pacman written in Forth on that. I had one and even got a 2nd for work to control some test gear."

You are confusing your ROM and RAM.

Let's Encrypt? Let's revoke 3 million HTTPS certificates on Wednesday, more like: Check code loop blunder strikes

Had one (of many) SSL certificates affected. Read the email, forced renewal, ran a script to put the updated certs where they are needed. Restarted a service.

OK, a bit more notice would have been nice, but it took all of 5 minutes.

Mirantis gros fromage quits to start new 'private LTE' biz on open-access spectrum

Shouldn't they be called WiFreedom not FreedomFi?

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Re: Forget the 'Osborne Effect':focus on the "Upton Effect".

And yet the R-Pi is hugely successful.

Maybe it's not about you.

Microsoft to bravely defend US democracy for a slack handful of voters in Fulton, Wisconsin

Re: Anonymity?

"Why would that ever be needed in a true democracy? Oh..."

If the vote is completely anonymous, you cannot verify or audit it, making it vulnerable to fixing.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Re: Did they change the meaning of an acronym again?

"Soon the acronym will be so long it may as just have a "-" to say who isn't in the club"

You might be on to something there. Perhaps we should just refer to the "!S" community.

RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80

Re: File Transfer Potocol

"One of the biggest drawbacks with FTPS is that encrypting the control channel prevents firewalls from eavesdropping on data port commands, which breaks dynamic ACL/NAT logic for those secondary connections."

The usage of data port is one of the biggest flaws in FTP, why you would want to encourage the use is beyond me. The concept was used back when there was a serious limit on the number of socket connections to a specific port, often limited by the size of the bit mask for the select call. This is no longer a restriction. When a web server can handle thousands of connections over a single destination port, why does a file transfer protocol need to change ports on the fly, just use the well-known port like a sensible protocol.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Re: AI with worker drones

"Preferably tarmacced rather than a rolling collection of patched patches."

Good luck with that!

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Seen in the wild

IBM PS/2

10483 error

'nuff said

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: Re-branding exercise

Cherry Max

Max Lite

Max Max?

'Buyer's remorse' drove HP's legal crusade to go after Lynch, High Court told

Re: Buyer's remorse?

I think they did, but the problem is they did receive the goods, so now they're trying to complain it wasn't as described.

Yeah but, no, but... 'Overpaid' Boeing snaps back at NASA's watchdog

"During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value."

Or as they say, it's not the fall that kills you but the sudden deceleration at the end.

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

Re: Point defense?

Carefully

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Re: Selective deafness

"I use Apple computers; they work fine for me and I'm reminded every time I have to fight with my son's plasticky Dell"

You should have bought him a better Dell then. Apple are not the only people who make slim, light laptops, and they did not invent them.

The .amazon argy-bargy is STILL going on – and Uncle Sam has had enough with ICANN

.amazon was so important to Brazil and ACTO that they didn't bother applying for it.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Re: AWS=Amazon WEB Services

"AWS is pretty much Apache Server stitched badly onto a basement-teenager-coded middleware layer ... while Azure is an IBM Mainframe Class of Operating System and Networking infrastructure"

And you call yourself an expert?

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Re: 445 – bikinis – rather than the bicycles in 444

Prepare for MAD

Mutually Assured De-clothing

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

Re: TV ownership fine

You can own a TV without paying the license fee.

There, does that help?

This fall, Ubuntu 19.10 stars as Eoan Ermine in... Dawn of the Stoats

"That said, Train does include live migration extensions,"

You mean like we've been using for the last 4-5 years?

A spot of after-hours business email does you good, apparently

Re: Employer...

"the boss between 10 and 11 and he worked through until 6 or 7 in the evening. Anybody, especially management, leaving before him was a slacker"

Seen it, but it's a sign of poor management. The response is "my guys have been here since 8. You arrived at 10. Of course they're leaving before you".

No ghosts but the Holy one as vicar exorcises spooky tour from UK's most haunted village

Re: As for ghosts (holy or otherwise) ...

So are UFOs real then?

Yes. UFO ...

Unidentified

Flying

Object

It doesn't mean "alien spaceship" you know?

Forget Brexit, ignore Trump, write off today: BT's gonna make us all 'realise the potential of tomorrow'

"BT should have point blank refused to allow other companies into its exchanges back in the 'mercury' days. "

We'd still be waiting for ADSL to be given the green light while BT protected their leased line and ISDN business.

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

Re: I have to thank ken for my passwords

"Coders should have sound proofed booths."

You'll never cope with having kids if you have that attitude to disturbances. Learn to focus.

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

You can't make people take jobs they're not interested in, and it does seem that percentage-wise males are more interested in tech jobs than females are, which means the percentage in the work force will not be the same as in the population at large. There is nothing wrong with this.

What is needed is equality of opportunity. That starts with ensuring that anyone with an interest is encouraged to pursue it, and yes, that probably does mean a shift in techy culture to make it more welcoming.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Re: Doing this in parts of the US too

Having studied the USA for many years, I believe your solution is "moar gunz".

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Re: Well that ruling has a timespan of about 30 days in the UK

"Threatening "No Deal" is going to a car dealership, and saying that if they don't sell you the car you'll steal it and torch it."

No, threatening "No Deal" is going to a car dealership and saying if you can't agree a price you'll walk away. A relatively strong bargaining position.

Removing "No Deal" from the table is going to a car dealership and telling them you have to leave with a car, no matter what. A very weak bargaining position.

It is clear a lot of people have never tried to negotiate anything in their life.

Quic! Head to the latest Chrome version and try out HTTP/3

Great, handover from one device (IP) to another (IP). The cyber criminals are going to love this when they work out how to completely steal your live session and redirect it their device.

Why do cloud leaks keep happening? Because no one has a clue how their instances are configured

New headline

"Companies think 'The Cloud' takes care of all that difficult technical stuff for you, find out it doesn't".

IBM looks to boost sales the same way it has for 65 years – yes, it's a new mainframe: The z15

Re: "In The Box"?

Ahh, but that isn't latency introduced by the network (those wires and switches and routers and stuff).

Hence. no "network" latency.

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

You appear to have "patented" things that other people were doing 10-20 years before you.

Well done.

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

"This will add a free extra 25 miles driving or so on electric"

It won't be free for long, currently it's subsidised by fuel duty. Once a significant proportion of vehicles are electric the government will need to reclaim that money elsewhere. You will be paying for charging, and probably also a tax per mile travelled.

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

This sounds like EBS failed and wasn't even locally redundant though. That is a much bigger problem if true.

A challenger appears: Taiwanese devs' answer to Gemini PDA wraps a Raspberry Pi in a tablet

More interestingly, this could lead to an upgradeable tablet - year or two down the line, pop in a Pi-5 or Pi-6 compute model...

Brit couch potatoes increasingly switching off telly boxes in favour of YouTube and Netflix

Re: Brilliant?

"Top Gear does still have some of that amazing photography that Grand Tour was completely unable to match."

You might want to go back and watch a bit more of Grand Tour then, you clearly didn't see the same camera work I did.

Amazon Web Services doubled its footprint in the UK and will only get bigger, reckon analysts

@Julz

They provide a very nice and flexible tool kit that you can use to build lots of amazing things, and just like any set of tools, if you know how to use them they're great. If you don't know how to use them, you'll need to pay someone who does, or take the risk that your DIY job might turn out more expensive than you thought and still require a professional to sort it out.

Apple loses FaceTime patent appeal again. And again. And again. And again. And again... yes, it's the fifth time

Re: As much as I love bashing Apple...

There is a time and plaice for that sort of humour

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

Re: I like proper cash

You HAVE to accept cash in England, and in Scotland, you have to accept certain coins.

Not true. You have to accept legal tender for a debt, and cash is legal tender.

You don't have to accept cash for a sale.

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Of course your (V32) 9600bps modem operated at 2400 baud.

Please stop regulating the dumb tubes, says Internet Society boss

Wait until they find out you can put letters and numbers in a file on your computer and bypass DNS lookups completely.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Re: Estimating Software Projects

Sounds a bit like a Z80 assembler course I was on, already knowing how to use it. So tasks like "write a sub routine to beep the console 3 times" became "use the most esoteric instructions and logic to beep the console 3 times" - jumps by pushing addresses on the stack and returning to them, using the index registers, that sort of thing.

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

Re: Changed the (IT) world

Or the joys of F15 Strike Eagle on the ZX Spectrum, so much engine power that you could get your wings blown off and fly back to base just by keeping the nose up.

Last year, we joked that Amazon was a cloud giant with a gift shop. Looking at these AWS figures, we were right

Re: Two day delivery?

It's two days in the USA I believe - it's quite a big place.

You know you can set Alexa to simply beep in response to a command, yes?

Great, you've moved your website or app to HTTPS. How do you test it? Here's a tool to make local TLS certs painless

Re: Lol arcane knowledge of memory management

@Zilla "Nobody ever taught memory management to anyone."

Maybe not to your generation.

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

"that we can't even launch without getting permission from the White House?"

Because that last bit is wrong.