Posts by Spanners

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

Re: Korean Spam

That should be OK. It's Chinese cuisine that allegedly includes dogs!

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

Automation

About 25 years ago, I was visiting a customers office and an managerial person told me of his cunning plan.

At that time, they had just rolled out Outlook Express and he was unhappy with the loss in status that this implied for him.

He asked, could I set up OE to automatically print out every email as it arrived. I managed to get out of this because I didn't think OE was that good at automatic things. In retrospect, it probably was possible and certainly its' big sister Outlook could probably. do stuff like that

Microsoft promises to boil down its lengthy and confusing privacy controls… in 1,500-word announcement

Re: Microsoft privacy controls™© - fuss about Huawei.

The main crime that Huawei has committed is not making everything available to the NSA, CIA, FBI and other such criminal groups as well as every branch of the US legal "system".

In fact, I can not see that doing business with Huawei rather than a US company is anything but a bonus to my personal security. If the Chinese want to hack us, they would not need such back doors, whether they exist or not. Making it harder for US spooks to get into things keeps, not only them out. That keeps the US governemnt out and therefore their corporate sponsors.

Daddy, are we there yet? How Mrs Gates got Bill to drive the kids to school

@ds6

going to get a lot of people after her goat...

Anyone who is offended by that statement of fact needs to be wound up until the mainspring breaks!

I have come across people who (incorrectly) try and tell me that contraception is unbiblical. You may not care about that statement but it keeps a lot of people poor.

When I declined to agree with that statement, they equated contraception with abortion. Just remember the Monty Python song "Every sperm is precious"! I think some do feel that way...

Huawei P30: New No-Pro's cameras are flash ... but there are some curious bits

Sicking with Oneplus for now

Despite some interesting items, the camera for example, I am sticking with my Oneplus5 for now.

The price is excessive. I have avoided the Apple gullibility tax for years and don't propose paying someone elses'.

I got a Oneplus when Samsung crudware became unbearable. I do not need things that duplicate what already exists. My photos exist happily in Google Land and I don't need a new cloud to put the new ones in. I don't need another calendar to get mixed up with. Gmail is suitable for email and it could connect to other mail systems if I needed to. That nice Samsung health app does not link to my Fitbit so it is of no interest even if it can do more than the FB app.

Yes, you can make software as well as hardware. If you give me a link to your app store, I will look and see if it seems more useful than what I get from elsewhere.

The camera seems excellent and if they dropped the other junk, it would go back onto my "possible" list.

Loose Women woman's IR35 win deals another high-profile blow to UK taxman's grip on rules

Re: @Phage

"The same public who put hard earned money into a pension because the private business is far more reliable at pensions than the government alternative."

It not that it is more reliable. It is more that it is harder for government 'reforms' to mess up. It is not limited to making me live in poverty once I have opted to live on my savings (old age pension).

I (hopefully) will, one day, collect whatever is left of state pension, occupational pension and a private pension scheme. None of them are adequate - even for someone who is not that far ahead of an average wage. Hopefully all 3 together will mean I can have the heating on sometimes!

Re: Everything

The problem is, not so much, political parties . The problem is "party whips". They force MPs to vote against the needs of their constituents, their consciences and even the promises they got elected for.

For those of us who know it, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a song that says why...

"I thought so little, they rewarded me

By making me the ruler of the Queens' Navy!"

That was true when it was sung in 1878 and it is true now. Get elected to Parliament for shoddy reasons, do what your party whips want, do not think and you will do well.

re: robidy

Tax avoidance is different to evasion.

Legally yes. That is why people get cross about it.

Brit Watchkeeper drone fell in the sea because blocked sensor made algorithms flip out

There is no "black box" on a Watchkeeper.

WTF not?

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Re: Is this the best that the USA can come up with ?

BBC, official mouth piece of Project Fear

The BBC gave huge unfair help to the Brexit campaign,

How? By famously excessive appearances of Nigel Farage on Question Time for a start. They reported everything coming out od UKIP and the like as if it made sense and was more accurate than information coming from those who actually knew about economics etc.

"Project Fear" was a brilliant misinformation campaign from the Brexiteers. As the newspapers were often owned by private individuals with a lot of money to be made in the destruction of the UK economy, it is understandable that the Sun, Mirror and Daily Wail had one unalterable viewpoint. The BBC does not have the same excuse. What was it playing at in supporting the xenophobes?

They don't

The people, apparently, persuaded to make a complaint have retracted.

Uncle Sam wants to tackle bias in algorithms by ordering tech corps to explain how their machines really work

Re: TRaining data

If it's a human with biases, you can at least retrain them.

Human biases and preconceptions are,, often, very difficult to remove. It may be cheaper, faster and more reliable to replace the humans...

US firm wins Oz-backed bid to block Huawei from subsea Pacific cables

Equally big threat

All US companies are legally obliged to let their spooks in. This may be a smaller infrastructure threat but it is a much bigger threat toi personal and commercial data.

China may choose to spy on other countries but the USA is the one that has a track record of spying upon individuals in this country as well as passing commercial data to US corporations.

Apple disables iPad for 48 years after toddler runs amok

Re: Weird

The restore will of course only take you back to the last backup for the device

No. It will show you previous backups and ask you to select one of them.

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

New invention?

Combine a leaf blower with a paint stripper.

Or one of those things they use to strip off old road markings before putting in new ones?

No dice, comrade! Senate floats Russia-busting election law

What about?

As the world is aware, the US has been fiddling with other peoples elections for decades. If they don't like the result anyway, they mess around with the economy until it turns into something like Venezuela.

What sanctions will they take against themselves then?

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Re: Don't travel to the US.

Isn't having an obviously clean and pre-prepared phone or laptop just used as an indication of trying to hide something?

No it indicates that my (GSM) phone is too advanced for most US phone companies and their infrastructure and I need to buy a cheap and nasty throwaway one that will work there. Even if this is no longer the case, it is a reasonable statement.

Brit founder of Windows leaks website BuildFeed, infosec bod spared jail over Microsoft hack

Re: Hacking Microsoft....

Committing crimes upon criminals is still a criminal act.

MS may be a famous recidivist, have criminal contemporaries* and do work for other criminal groups** but doing bad things to them is still illegal.

*Apple and Oracle for example

** NSA, CIA and so on

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Re: The "stiffy" problem

Have your hard discs gone floppy? Have your floppy discs gone hard?

Don't mix up your medications!

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

Rule 4: Users lie.

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

I fully understand that not everyone 'gets' computers, or are interested to the degree that I am.

That would be easy to understand but the thing that irritated me was the attitude that "I am better than you because I don't get computers."

This attitude is, happily, much less common than it was but I still come upon reminders of it. Being (hopefully) good at IT does not make me better than anyone else but neither does it make you superior when you can't confirm that your computer is plugged in

Someone might be better than me because they can make chocolate cake or because they are a nurse but not being able to do something like IT has as much to make "you" superior as my not being able to juggle makes me better than someone who can.

Return of the Glassholes? Relax: Huawei's 'smart specs' aren't Google Glass 2.0

Glassholes were not a real problem.

Real problems included, the high price and astoundingly stupid comments that convinced Google that "now is not the time".

It has been the time for affordable AR glasses for years but the media hostility has stalled it for now and some years to come. When we get article titles like this, it pushes them further away. Instead, we have to use a phone or tablet for the purpose or just not bother.

UK.gov flushed away £15k defending pupil nationality data slurp – then canned scheme

£15k

That is more than half a teacher. If we got rid of all the piddly sums wasted on whiz-bang spiffing ideas, how many more teachers could be paid?

The trouble is getting the figure. Imagine the FOI request "How much money have you wasted on stupid ideas?" The answer would be "£0 because all our ideas are really splendid and the best possible use of money that would otherwise be wasted on snotty kids".

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Re: Too Late.

...Where were you...

I will be able to tell any grandchildren in the future that I was against Brexit from the start, annoyed people by saying this, voted against it and have seen no evidence to make me even wonder about this opinion.

Where I, my children, my grandchildren and beyond will be is the question. I would like to hope we will all be in the UK but suspect I may be in Scotland or even Orkney which has reverted back to Norway or Denmark. At least that last option will mean I am back in the EU.

Have you stopped beating your wife?

Have you stopped beating your wife?

You should read Lewis Carol. I have not stopped beating my wife. Please note, I haven't started to either...

Brexit text-it wrecks it: Vote Leave fined £40k for spamming 200k msgs ahead of EU referendum

Re: Dodgy behavior by Vote Leave?

>The previous one was supposed to be advisory

No it was binding.

No. It said on the first page of the bill that it was "advisory and non binding"

That some MPs had the arrogance to say otherwise is fairly predictable. We have now had years of certain newspapers and rich arrogant sociopaths trying to take us out of the EU on the say of 37.5% of the electorate.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: Plaid shirt?

For the 95% of humanity outside the USA, this actually means Tartan Shirt.

Plaid is not a pattern. It is a large piece of cloth worn over the shoulder. It may not even need to have a pattern on it although I've never seen one that isn't tartan.

You have the right to remain on-prem, but you should really head for the cloud, UK plod told

Re: Cost

If the gov provided a centralised cloud services platform then that would be a different story.

I would still question the security. If you lower the cost of public cloud to roughly the price of existing systems, you will drop the security so low that you might as well give away copies.

Age checks for online pr0n? I've never heard of it but it sounds like a good idea – survey

Get your ID pictures from

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

Not just businesspeople

I sometimes to help at a homeless night shelter. One of the tings that I take with me is a USB wallwart and every type of cable I can think of.

You think that life is bad when your laptop goes down in a meeting???

China's tech giants are a security threat to the UK, says Brit spy bigwig

One Word

Stuxnet

That one word illustrates a good reason to mistrust any pronouncement from the USA about IT security...

The record shows I took the blows, and did it... Huawei: IT titan will start tackling GCHQ security gripes from June

I'm still more worried by the USA

There is much more evidence that various criminal groups from the USA (NSA, CIA and so on) have hacked us and other European countries than there is showing Huawei doing so. Between revelations from Edward Snowden and hearing how the people listening to Mrs Merkel's phone were not from the land of Vlad the Invader but rather from what used to be called the Land of the Free.

It is more worrying that Judges from the US feel they already have authority over me here than that someone from China feels they should.

There's no 'My' in Office, Microsoft insists with new productivity hub

The first thing to do

I run lines like

Get-AppxPackage *phone* | Remove-AppxPackage

Get-AppxPackage *mixed* | Remove-AppxPackage

Through powershell (run as admin).

It clears off most of the rubbish nicely. There are a couple of items to be removed through the control panel and the Get-Office one can be right clicked on and told to uninstall itself. I am aware that this does not stop the data slurp though. That is more a job for the firewall - perhaps SEP.

Roses are red, so is ketchup, 'naked' Huawei tells its critics to belt up

So the US is accused of using their spooks to help their megacorps?

That must be the most unsurprising news of the year. US intelligence (sic) services have been used against British and European companies. Why should a Chinese one be exempt?

The algorithms! They're manipulating all of us! reckon human rights bods Council of Europe

Re: Ha

Politicians can be outvoted. The EU is either full of them or by civil servants who can be fired if they do not do the jobs that politicians give them. Despite the best effort of xenophobes and other idiots to say differently, this is no different from how the UK is supposed to work.

When business lays down the rules and looks after things, the only people that can put them out of work are people who are unhappy that they have not made enough profit.

Politicians are supposed to work for us. Corporations are supposed to make money off us. This should make for different priorities...

OK, Google? Probably not! EU settles on wording for copyright reform legislation

Not Copyright Reform.

The correct way to put it is Copyright "Reform".

This is like the Trade Union Reforms put out by the late Mrs T. They were not always made to reform trade unions or benefit their members. They were to make the unions more useful, or less harmful, to her backers. It has left us with trade unions that need re-reforming.

Yes, UK, EU and the rest of the western world need copyright reformed. It has morphed into a Corporate Profit Enhancement system and needs turned back into something that helps the livelihoods of artists, authors and other content creators. While they are at it, our imaginary experts, could reform that patent system which has had pretty much the same done to it!

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

"Possibly useful to terrorism"

That describes my whole life...

As a teenager, I was in the Air Cadets. I learned a little about flying aircraft, but not landing them...

As a student, I had a couple of happy years in the OTC. I learned how to blow things up and more about firearms than I had in the ATC.

To the uninformed, my work in in IT surely proves that I could get information for terrorists.

Even now, I have many years as a work place first aider. This is very handy if one of my fellow terrorists gets shot!

So although I have never even been arrested for anything, I have been thoroughly educated in many things that could help terrorists, just not conservative ones.

Re: Easy get-out?

(I'm wondering if the anti-FGM laws are inadvertently protecting boys as well.)

No, because this would restrict Muslim and Jewish people and anyone from the USA.

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

I remember when...

When OO made its move from Star Office to Open Source, there was a nice, comment filled load of beta testing.

I remember someone from the US being very unhappy that it was not following their "standards" in date formats, measurements etc. Apparently, it let them change to their preferences but it didn't default to assuming Letter was a standard paper size far superior to A4 because it used units of measurement Henry VIII would have been familiar with...

The only bit they looked like they were getting wrong was they were not interested in spelling "metre" correctly. Have they fixed that?

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Re: LOL

That is precisely how they got into a position of desktop dominance. The people who trained a lot of the readers here would not touch MS products so MS went over the heads of those who knew and MS Windows 3 or less was dumped on the world by a mixture of accountants, Art Grads and MBAs, few of whom knew much about computers.

They are sticking to a proven method.

Techies tinker with toilet-topper to turn it into ticker-tracker

Re: These advances apply only to "Western"-style toilets.

They could possibly get the same results from the reflection of a laser.

The image of that is pretty worrying though...

Re: ballistocardiogram

The ballistics of poo? 250 mg at 3.5 m/s OK but getting maximum range involves sending it at +45 degrees. I am not shure my loo seat is designed for that...

Siri, how do you wipe that smug smile from Qualcomm's face? Apple wins patent skirmish with chip nemesis

Karma

Apple has caused enough spurious court cases to really deserve everything they get done for in this,

Are you a Windows 1 in 10 (1809)? Or a mighty 80 percenter (1803)?

Still waiting for H1N1

Following the update to my Personal Anti Virus(known by our Transatlantic chums as a "flu shot") I think I am safe against Microsoft plans for this year!

Sad relics of UK launch capability returned to Blighty while NASA fiddles with Boeing crew

Re: Galileo

Britain will proudly face in the opposite direction to all other countries!

You already do this on every highway... :-p

We have not allowed the French to dictate what side of the road we drive on so we have just stayed the same.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Re: Squeaking through a more formal sort of PC testing

My problem with the ECDL was that it only acknowledged one way of doing stuff. In a Windows GUI, there are usually 3 or more ways. I just can't remember what they were then...

Mouse cleaning equipment

30+ years ago, I remember being in Glasgow University library and a lady there in a full Muslim Burka dismantled the mouse on her MacSE and cleaned every part of it using her traditional garment. The image of this cross-cultural and cross-era event stays with me.

The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

Re: Typical el Reg

...you are paying for (a) high quality hardware (b) high quality software (c) high quality support.

Historically, you were also paying for a sh**load of lawyers whose job it was to destroy competition and even potential competition.

My introduction to the world of computing was the Mac SE. They weren't mine. They belonged to the university so I had no idea about the price. They were easy to use for someone like me who could type fine but was not doing what we would now refer to as STEM.

After watching their courtroom shenanigans, I will not buy Apple kit even though my employer settle on iShiny things for phones - that's not my money funding lawyers.

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

@TRT

I still have a badge for them.

"Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity"

Colour us shocked: Google in €50m GDPR fine appeal bombshell

@Bottle_Cap

Du merde.