Posts by jonathanb

Spaniard claims WWII WAR HERO pigeon code crack. Explain please

Re: Howt to heap shit on your own head

Yes, signing the official secrets act makes no difference, you are bound by it anyway. The government only asks people to sign it to make them aware that they are dealing with official secrets.

Why is the smart home insecure? Because almost nobody cares

Well why would you want to control your alarm clock from your phone when your phone already has a perfectly functional alarm clock app?

Apple will reveal new iPhone on Sept 9 – this is what it may look like

Re: Some exclusive features

I think it will be the same price as the iPhone 6 is currently, but other than that, I agree.

Net neutrality: How to spot an arts graduate in a tech debate

Taking the road analogy, you can have things like traffic lights which switch between roads on a junction, giving each one a chance to access the junction in turn, but apply equally to all types of traffic on that road. That's net neutrality. You could also have things like bus lanes which give one type of traffic, buses, priority over other types of traffic. That's not net neutrality.

Today, when driving home, I was delayed for about 20 minutes because a lorry ignored a "no HGVs" sign and went down a narrow road towards a single track bridge that it couldn't get across, when it should have gone about 3 miles upstream to the next bridge. That is an example of where net neutrality would be a bad thing.

Visitors no longer welcomed to Scotland's 'Penis Island'

Re: Proof, (if it were needed)

Some people watch the football in BBC Alba with the volume turned down and listen to the commentary on an English-speaking radio station as it is cheaper than Sky. Apart from that, does anyone watch it at all?

SMEs in the firing line as fake invoice scams skyrocket

Re: Invoices, thousands of em

Those ones are viruses, which is a different thing altogether.

In this scam, they contact the company pretending to be a supplier, and they will make sure it is a real actual supplier to the company, and tell them that their bank details have changed, so that when they do pay the real invoices, they pay them to the wrong bank account.

Vodafone UK rocks the bloat with demands for vanilla Android

Re: @Twilkins - yup, me too...

O2 has TuGo. One of the benefits of that one is you can use it over wifi abroad and pay as if you were in the UK.

If you bought them at Carphone Warehouse, they will be unlocked. I believe Phones4U was the same, but they aren't around any more.

Geeks on quest for world's most pointless YouTube video

Re: A big "plus one" to you...

Some of the tutorials are actually very useful.

Imation now fully under activist investor's control

Re: Is it possible....

I remember the days when Imation were the market leader in floppy disks. Maybe they still are, but the last time I saw a floppy disk was when I was having a clear-out of old junk. When technology moves on, there is no reason why the leading company in the old technology should be anything special in the replacement technology, in fact, they almost certainly won't be.

Second Ashley Madison dump prompts more inside-job speculation

Re: Fake (female) profiles

She may not be the only person doing this for them, and they might duplicate the profiles across multiple cities.

Another dating site, Cupid, apparently had more eligible young ladies in one small village than the entire population of that village.

Re: What theft?

If they do catch the person responsible, they won't be charged with theft, there are other offences that cover this.

Hacktivists congratulate Daily Show's Jon Stewart via Donald Trump's website

Re: @phil dude

There are other parties with presidential candidates. I believe there were 6 of them last time round so you don't have to choose between Democrat and Republican.

Why do driverless car makers have this insatiable need for speed?

First to market isn't usually the winner

The first smartphones to hit the market were from companies like Nokia and Blackberry, and devices based on Windows Mobile. Where are they now? Microsoft and Nokia scrapped all their earlier work and started again, not too successfully, Blackberry are virtually dead, and there were others who's impact on the market was so insignificant that I can't even remember who they are. The winners are Apple, who were very late to the market, and various devices based on Android, particularly Samsung. They were even later to the market.

Those companies looked at what the others were doing, figured out what they were doing wrong, and managed to fix it. Much cheaper and easier to learn from other peoples' mistakes than to learn from your own.

Adulterers antsy as 'entire' Ashley Madison databases leak online

Re: anon obviously

If they have card and billing details, they are more likely to be real.

Amazon UK conditions 'exhausting', claims union

Re: £2bn, 7000, 5 million square feet.

Strangely they stopped selling from the Channel Islands after low value consignment relief (loophole that allowed then not to pay VAT) was abolished.

Choke on it! Brit police squeeze pirate site advertising money trail

This is the City of London, which is owned by business interests. In terms of resident population, it is the smallest city in England with a population of 7,535 as of the 2011 census, though the day-time population is much larger, about 300,000. It is also the only city where businesses have a vote. They vote for 80 out of the 100 representatives on the council.

PALE, MALE AND STALE: Apple reveals it has just ONE black exec

Re: I don't like Apple...

White people generally get a better education than blacks, and that certainly helps. Indians generally do pretty well, their next door neighbours in Pakistan, not so well, but there isn't much if any genetic difference between them, so it is all down to opportunities when they are young.

Apple and Samsung are plotting to KILL OFF the SIM CARD - report

Re: What an embarrassment of knee-jerk reactions

Selected carrier in the case of the UK, as you can have any carrier you want as long as it is EE.

"Only" £3.33 per day according to the ad at the top of this page, which is just over £100 per month, so not a price I would prefix with "only".

Re: About time

They are definitely thinner though.

Take redundancy if you want, Capita IS for turning now, after all

O2 were actually pretty good at answering the phone and having a native English speaker who knows what they are doing deal with the query. Maybe it has got worse recently, I last called about a year ago.

Samsung phablet phrenzy brings mobile payments into the age of WIRELESS TAPE

If the card has a chip on it, the terminal will not accept a swipe transaction.

In the rest of the civilised world, magnetic swipe transactions were phased out about 10 years ago, and everyone uses chip&pin, except for a few pay-by-bonk transactions. In France, it was phased out about 20 years ago.

It's not just antivirus downloads that have export control screening

Re: How do names get on these lists?

They are on the list of "politically exposed persons" which presents a separate set of difficulties.

Labour Party website DDoS'd by ruly democratic mob

Re: @AC - Can someone answer this question?

Now tell the middle-England majority who pay for all these benefits that they should care that a small number of people are worse off because these benefits have been cut.

Apple, Google should give FBI every last drop of user information, says ex-HP CEO and wannabe US prez Carly Fiorina

Re: I'm voting Libertarian

Republicans are more like UKIP or the Democratic Unionist Party.

Bitcoin can't be owned, says Japanese court, as Karpeles sweats in cell

Yes, but you probably wouldn't be charged with theft. There are other offences that cover it.

Re: Japanese banks are going to be so happy !

A bank account is a loan of money to the bank, which they owe back to you. Can you steal a loan?

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

Re: Works 4 me

The biggest terrorist treats in the UK are Irish Republicans (Catholic), Northern Irish Unionists (Protestants), Animal Rights extremists, Environmental extremists and Pro Life (anti-abortion) extremists. Islamists are way down the list and practically no threat at all.

Re: US export rules are enforced.

I believe what you should do is print out the code and send it by post to another country, that's protected free speech. Then the local agent scans it in and compiles it for distribution outside the U.S. PGP used to be distributed that way.

Re: 'against the law'

But should one of these undesirables acquire a centrifuge, they would want to infect it with the Stuxnet virus or similar, and Sophos might stop that from happening.

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

Re: Kudos for the 1970's music reference

I test the bass on headphones with this track - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DeNq3f-rZs . On Beats headphones, I can't hear the Conta Bombarde at all.

Petrol cars are dead in the water, says Tesla CTO waving numbers on the back of an envelope

Re: Is it really cheaper?

Petrol or diesel is about 30%-40% efficient. Electric is about 90% efficient from battery to motor, but there are efficiency losses in charging up the battery. That is where I get my 2x figure from.

Is it really cheaper?

Petrol and electricity both cost about 12p per kWh in the UK. Diesel is about 10p per kWh. An electric car is about twice as energy efficient as a petrol or diesel car so that does make it cheaper. However the only reason it is cheaper is because tax on electricity is 5%, whereas tax on petrol and diesel is about 70%, so the tax is cheaper, not the fuel cost.

Microsoft's Windows 10 Torrent-U-Like updates GULP DOWN your precious bandwidth

Re: Windows can detect metered connections!

On my laptop the network is a Parallels Virtual Network connection, and from there it might go out to the internet via a local cable or wifi connection, public wifi, or bluetooth/USB via my phone. The Mac side of things knows which one it is, the Windows side does not.

UK.gov wants to stop teenagers looking at tits online. No, really

Re: 5 minutes

Would that work? When a card is declined, the merchant isn't told why it is declined, it could be insufficient funds, account closed, blocked or doesn't exist, or bank thinks the transaction is fraudulent. Usually if a company wants to verify a card without taking any money, they do an authorisation-only transaction for £1, $1 or whatever and let it lapse without collecting the money.

Re: 5 minutes

"Credit Card verification. As you can only own a credit card if you are over 18."

That's not strictly true. You can only be required to pay money back if you are over 18, but it is possible for an under-18 to get a prepaid credit card, or garantor credit card if someone over the age of 18 is prepared to guarantee the balance.

Hurrah! Uber does work (in the broadest sense of the word) after all

In London, their equivalent of a medallion is available to anyone who passes the very difficult test, and it can't be transferred or sold to anyone else.

Re: Again?

Not really. Expedia is registered with the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK as a travel agent and complies with the same rules as all other travel agents.

Hurrah! Windfarms produce whopping one per cent of EU energy

Re: Why's this a story?

Denmark can produce more because it is connected to the European Grid and can export it. 10% is about as high as we can go without reliability problems, for Europe and North Africa as a whole. That breaks down as about 1/3 Denmark, 1/3 UK and Ireland and 1/3 for the rest of Europe, mostly along the north coast of France, Belgium and Germany. So there is some potential for future growth, but not much. In Southern Europe and in North Africa, solar has much more potential, because the sun shines when they need the most electricity to power their air conditioning.

Ballmer's billion-dollar blunders: When he gambled Microsoft's money and lost

Re: Sigh

Bill Gates was good at buying up things very cheaply and using his marketing skills to vastly increase sales volumes. QDOS (MSDOS) for example.

Re: No Skype?

$264m profit, on a 33% share of the international calls market, and it is a very mature market with little growth prospects.

Vodafone trades at 11x earnings. Skype, probably less than that, because Vodafone has spectrum licences that other potential new entrants don't have.

$1bn would have been a good price. $1.5-$2bn would have been an OK price. $9bn was way too much.

Skype

What about Skype?

It's a decent enough company, sound business model, makes a profit and so on, but Microsoft vastly overpaid for it. The problem was that there was little growth potential because everyone was already using it, and had the risk of losing market share to new entrants such as Google Talk, WhatsApp and Apple's FaceTime.

So what the BLINKING BONKERS has gone wrong in the eurozone?

Government spending increased in every year of the last parliament, so there hasn't actually been any austerity.

Re: On German Economics Between the Wars

Spain (and Ireland) had budget surpluses before the crash, so clearly their tax departments were collecting enough money to pay for everything. Their problem was that they had a real estate bubble due to too-low interest rates, which then burst, causing a banking crisis which meant they needed a lot of money to bail them out.

Three Estonians jailed for malware spree that infected 4 MILLION computers

Re: Let's do the maths

Is it like the UK where they count the same money multiple times and add it all together?

For example, if the three people jointly received the money, they are each treated as individually receiving the full amount.

If the money passed through multiple accounts before reaching them, they add together all the transfers in to each of the accounts but don't deduct the transfers out.

If they receive an asset other than cash, they add together the value of the asset and the sale proceeds from selling it.

WTO cuts tariffs on $1tn worth of 'IT' gizmos

Re: Missing important information!

Import duties are set by the EU and collected by HMRC. If member states set their own rates, then people would route their imports through the country with the lowest rate.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Southern biscuits and gravy

Re: Gravy?

And biscuits?

In Portuguese, it would be «Scones e vômito», which is much closer to proper English than the language they speak on the other side of the pond.

US State of Georgia sues 'terrorist' for publishing its own laws ... on the internet

Re: It's very simple

The laws may be clear, but if you aren't allowed to read them, you have a problem.

Contactless card fraud? Easy. All you need is an off-the-shelf scanner

Re: banks

It has been reported in the mainstream media as well.