Re: It's time people stop buying these things.
How do you know that it's time to do that? Did your watch tell you?
Posts by DJV
2539 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
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5.1 update sends Apple's Watch 4 bling spinning into an Infinite Loop of reboot cycles
£220k fines for dodgy dialling duo who didn't do due dil on data
Bomb squad descends on suspicious package to find something much more dangerous – a Journey cassette
Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons
Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads
Microsoft to staff: We remain locked and loaded with US military – and will keep adding voice to AI ethics debate
Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere
Friday 26th October 2018 13:12 GMT 
Re: Have fun with scammers!
That would be good, but wouldn't work in this particular case as the "From" email address is your own.
One day we may have an unspoofable email address scheme running worldwide, but don't hold your breath in the meantime. And, regarding spam in general, I seem to remember many years ago (14 to be exact) that a certain person was saying that spam would be dead within 2 years. Oh yes, here it is:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/26/well_kill_spam_in_two/
Looks like he may have been a tiny bit out with his predictions!
The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time
Friday 26th October 2018 08:49 GMT
Ethernet 10base2
Yep, when I first worked in IT for the local Training & Enterprise Quango the whole place was 10base2 so each cable from the server room connected a dozen or more PCs together.
It was always fun tracing which of the many connections in the pile of spaghetti behind the desks had fallen apart when half an office had suddenly gone off line. These events were usually accompanied by the manager of said office breathing down YOUR neck because one of HIS/HER staff had moved their desk and brought the whole thing crashing down.
Word up: Embedded vids in Office docs can hide embedded nasties, infosec bods warn
Yer a solicitor, 'arry! Indian uni takes cues from 'Potterverse' to teach students law
Worrying Windows 10 wrecking-ball weapon weirdly wanders wildly on worldwide web
Wednesday 24th October 2018 22:39 GMT 
Security
But... but... but... Microsoft have been telling us for years that their latest OS is the fastest, best, most secure etc.?
I'm beginning to suspect that they derive their levels of fastness, bestness and most secureness something like this:
secLevel = abs (get_security_level ());
if (secLevel > previousWindowsSecLevel) printf ("Hey look, it's more secure!");
Zip it! 3 more reasons to be glad you didn't jump on Windows 10 1809
I ship you knot: 2,400-year-old Greek trading vessel found intact at bottom of Black Sea
'The inmates have taken over the asylum': DNS godfather blasts DNS over HTTPS adoption
Can't get pranked by your team if nobody in the world can log on
Monday 22nd October 2018 10:38 GMT
Rotate the monitor
In another life I was a trainee TV engineer back in the last days of valves and swap-out printed circuit boards. When engineers worked on a TV in the workshop there was always a mirror built into the workbench so that you see the screen while working on the TV's innards - of course, the view of the screen was always back to front but we got completely used to that (which probably explains why I can still write backwards). On many TV sets the scan coils that drove the CRT beam horizontally were connected by a couple of single wire connectors and swapping them around would show the picture back to front, so that it became the right way around in the mirror. Pranking this swap while the engineer happened to not be working on a set was not uncommon situation and there were several instances of a set getting as far as the customer's house before the prank was spotted (usually by the customer who was unused to seeing things the wrong way around).
Is this cuttlefish really all that cosmic? Ubuntu 18.10 arrives with extra spit, polish, 4.18 kernel
Apple to dump Intel CPUs from Macs for Arm – yup, the rumor that just won't die is back
Microsoft points to a golden future where you can make Windows 10 your own
In Windows 10 Update land, nobody can hear you scream
Monday 15th October 2018 11:59 GMT
Installing Windows 7 on Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs
It may be worth exploring a few articles like this:
I haven't tried this myself but I gather people are repoting successful installs.
Monday 15th October 2018 11:37 GMT
"incorrectly"?
According to the software giant, the Intel driver was “incorrectly pushed to devices via Windows Update”
So, which idiot or system allowed non-validated code through onto Windows Update? if a person, then why didn't the system prevent this? Let's face it, the whole WU system is completely borked.
Once more with feeling: Windows 10 October 2018 Update inches closer to relaunch
Scanning an Exchange server for a virus that spreads via email? What could go wrong?
Monday 15th October 2018 11:55 GMT
Yes
Very common! A short while after the ILOVEYOU outbreak I was working for a "famous insurance company" that was (mainly) based in and named after the city I lived in (Norwich). We used remote access from our base in the city centre to the servers in the "lights out" data centre server farms four miles away out on the outskirts. It was fantastic!
Well...
...only for a weird value of "fantastic" that meant that...
...the lights in the server farm were never actualy out because remote access was bloody slow and, for "security", sessions were set to always time out after 15 minutes which, due to the slowness of the network in general and remote access in particular, meant that you barely got more than 20 mouse clicks and 10 fields filled in remotely before the whole thing shut down on you (if it had managed to stay up for the full 15 minutes, itself a rare feat). So, it was often quicker to catch the regular company-provided shuttle bus to the data centre and go and access the server non-remotely (hence the lights never being out as the data centre was full of pissed off people all doing the same non-remote thing).
Huge ice blades on Jupiter’s Europa will make it a right pain in the ASCII to land on
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 owners: So, about that other broken update…
Apache OpenOffice, the Schrodinger's app: No one knows if it's dead or alive, no one really wants to look inside
I find your lack of faith disturbing, IBM: Big Blue fires photon torpedo at Pentagon JEDI cloud contract
UK.gov withdraws life support from flagship digital identity system
Microsoft has signed up to the Open Invention Network. We repeat. Microsoft has signed up to the OIN
Remember that lost memory stick from Heathrow Airport? The terrorist's wet dream? So does the ICO
Which? That smart home camera? The one with the vulns? Really?
Monday 8th October 2018 14:43 GMT
Funnily enough...
...I've just had an email from Which asking me to do a survey. One question was: "If you could pick one consumer issue you would like to see Which? campaign on, what would that be?"
I replied with: "Improve the accuracy of articles on your own website. See: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/08/smart_camera_which_wtf/"
First it came for your desktop, now Windows 10 1809 is coming for your Things
Microsoft yanks the document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 Update
Convenient switch hides an inconvenient truth
Day two – and Windows 10 October 2018 Update trips over Intel audio
California cracks down on Internet of Crap passwords with new law to stop the botnets
Thursday 4th October 2018 16:15 GMT
every device in someone's house beeping like mad
Hah, that reminded me of the "12 o'clock flashers" of (the rather ancient but still funny) "Internet Helpdesk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LLTsSnGWMI
Apple macOS Mojave: There's goth mode but developers will have to wait for the juicy stuff
Google is still chasing the self-driving engineer that jumped ship to Uber
Windows 10 passes 700 million, Office Mobile in a coma and Intune, er, cracks time travel
Sync your teeth into power browser Vivaldi's largest update so far
NASA to celebrate 55th anniversary of first Moon landing by, er, deciding how to land humans on the Moon again
Google actually listens to users, hands back cookies and rethinks Chrome auto sign-in
Wednesday 26th September 2018 13:05 GMT
"tucked away in the Privacy and Security settings"
Crikey, you're not kidding! The other day I wanted to view and delete a particular cookie as I was testing a website I'm building.
On Chrome it took the following steps:
1) Bring up the Settings screen.
2) Scroll down and click on Advanced.
3) Click on Content Settings (no, not the one below that mentions Cookies but only allows you to clear them in bulk from there).
4) Click on Cookies.
5) Click on See all cookies and site data.
6) Enter the site name in the Search cookies field.
7) Click on the site name to show the list of cookies (a further click takes you to the cookie contents).
8) Click on the X to delete it.
Firefox is marginally easier.
1) Bring up the Options screen.
2) Click Privacy & Security.
3) Click Manage Data.
4) Enter the site name in the search field.
5) Select the cookie and Remove Selected.
However, if you now want to see the cookie contents in Firefox you've now got to use the F12/Developer Options instead, which is a tad annoying.
I'm sure these things used to be far easier to get at in the past - so much for "making our lives easier"! Sigh...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
