* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

Faxploit: Retro hacking of fax machines can spread malware

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Details of the mechanism...

are sketchy in reports. It's rather "ooh! look, I can fax this picture to you and pwn all your secrets!" rather than "Using a dial-up fax modem, I can cause a buffer overrun on your machine, which is a potential foothold into an exploit of variable effectiveness."

And over-run the buffer into what, exactly? Just because you can cause a particular category of fault or error condition doesn't mean that the error is exploitable. It take a huge leap of the imagination to go from over-running a buffer in image memory to executing very specific coded instructions which will compromise an entire network.

I call this out as 99.999% bullshit attention seeking. Unless it's just the media portraying this as yet another thing to panic about. I expected better from the Reg, though, in terms of technical details.

Creased Lightning: Profits wobble at Virgin Media while fibre project stays sluggish

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UKTV

Some channels are on Freesat. Not all. Alibi, Eden, Gold and W are all carried on subscription channels.

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Well if some other ISP was able to get me the 200Mbps that I pay Virgin for (it can go up to 350Mbps), then I would gladly ditch the unicorn botherers. F***ing price of it is stupid, and there's hardly anything good on there now. I wish I'd kept the satellite cabling in. In fact, I might run a fresh cable out to the dish... at least I'd get SOME UKTV channels back that way.

Supermicro breathes in, shimmies a PB of Intel flash into one rack unit

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Re: Title Gore...

But the phrase goes "Breathe in!" And I think that's related to fitting a corset or belt where the intercostal muscles contract and lift the rib cage up, allowing bits of viscera etc to squeeze upwards leading to a smaller waist.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

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Geo-loc fail.

Apparently when I got my new iPhone and was putting in my Apple identity details, a new device was signing in to my iCloud account in Manchester. Which is a neat trick, as I was in London at the time.

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Re: Obvious need for..

IPv8. Even numbers are the release versions.

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

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They can go finger themselves.

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Must take an age... scanning all 65,535 of them. Or do they restrict themselves to a handful of well-known ports? And what DO they do if I happen to have a service running one one of them?

'Can you just pop in to the office and hit the power button?' 'Not really... the G8 is on'

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Re: Its going to end badly when

Then there's the explosive charge driven guillotine with the non-conductive blade clamped across the main feed line... a bit unidirectional in its ability to shutdown without the ability to restore the connection remotely, but very effective all the same.

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Re: Riot outside my front door...

Dodgy Dave had a mate who was also a former supervisor at the store. One night, they used the copies of the keys that they had made to empty the booze cage in the stock room. Two stage process - bypassed the window's alarm contacts with a screwdriver and some double sided foam sticky pads (unscrewed the bar magnet and stuck it on top of the reed switch whilst the alarm circuit was off during the day), left the window open, then later on passed the booze out of the window, stacked it up onto the parapet, then shifted it all along the parapet to where the road passed underneath and passed it down through the sun roof into Dodgy's van / lurve wagon. It took internal security and the local gendarme almost three months to track the culprits down, but when they did... well, I didn't see Dave again. Ever.

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Re: Riot outside my front door...

I was working at Tesco in the middle of Salford Shopping City (it wasn't called that then), back when the Salford riots were kicking off.The police tipped off the area manager that the rioters were heading towards the precinct, so they shut the store and turfed out all the evening staff (that was in the days when it shut at 6pm, but restocking took place up until 10pm). Great... there's now a group of 30 people, male and female, aged from 16 up to 65 standing around in the open, in a car park opposite the shops, no mobile phones in those days, no way for people to call their lifts in early, buses suspended due to rioting, watching the red flames flickering in the distance and hearing the angry shouting getting closer and closer... Only Dodgy Dave the shady supervisor's clapped out, badly pimped up Fiesta to shuttle people away from the precinct, 5 at a time squeezed into the dark blue rust bucket... and each of us armed with just a palette cutter and a pricing gun.

The rioters were deflected away from the precinct in the end, thank goodness, but it was a hairy evening. Our hours were cut short for the next week or so whilst they expected repeated rioting, and those that could had to come in early to restock (it was, in those days, considered bad form to restock at full pelt whilst there were customers in store, so they usually only had a few people on, mainly for dairy and other perishables that were kept in the back of store cold room).

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Re: Emoticons...

Always makes me think... (To the Transformers theme tune) Emoticons... feelings in disguise.

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

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Favourite line from Friends has to be "Can you handle it? Hey! Handle is my middle name... well, the middle part of my first name..."

Basic bigot bait: Build big black broad bots – non-white, female 'droids get all the abuse

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Tell me...

do you get a triple Polaroid from looking at an appliance catalogue?

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Re: I can see where this will lead

Was Lal (ST:TNG - The Offspring) given the option of a black female when it was choosing an appearance? Perhaps it knew something we didn't (until now)!

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Re: I'm struggling to think of any black androids in film or television

Movellans.

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Re: Gold?

Well one advantage of shiny white robots is that it's easier to see overheating components and abuse. I mean if your droids had seen a lot of action, you might expect to see some carbon scoring on them. A blaster hit voids the warranty, I bet.

2TB or not 2TB: Microsoft fiddles with OneDrive as competition offers twice the storage

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Re: So. Kicked in the crotch twice, eigh?

Six, six, six was that?

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

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Dave. What are you doing, Dave?

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

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Re: "How to use a barometer to measure the height of a building."

KCL also named a building after him. It is precisely 27.3m high to the roof parapet, not including any additional aerials or rooftop services.

♫ The Core i9 clock cycles go up. Who cares where they come down?

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Re: Hz, not hz

So much fun it Hertz.

How much do you think Cisco's paying erstwhile Brit PM David Cameron?

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It's written on the underside of that bus over there. Now just get him to lie down in the road and we'll drive it over so he can read it.

Sad Nav: How a cheap GPS spoofer gizmo can tell drivers to get lost

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Re: Easy solution

My vehicle already uses wheel rotations and steering wheel angles to work out where it is along with the GPS signal. It increases the accuracy of the system to the point where I found I could drive (albeit it incredibly slowly) using the turn countdown indicator at night in a sudden fog so thick that you could only see a car length ahead. It was enough to get me onto a side road where I knew I could find a space to park up until the fog thinned a bit a couple of hours later.

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

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Re: The 'go back to the old version' thingy

Float it in a div.

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Re: My Comments

Why all the little grey lines everywhere? Pointless boxing out of articles. The brain/eye will create lines and boundaries out of aligned whitespace.

'Fibre broadband' should mean glass wires poking into your router, reckons Brit survey

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Plenty of fibre...

Keeps your bowels regular you know.

Roughage to the cabinet.

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Re: the survey is, at heart, a piece in a PR campaign

Fair comment. The number of times I've been asked a sucker sales question disguised as a survey...

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Re: I suspect that as a percentage of the total the number is quite small.

@commswonk. I didn't think you were asking about how small the numbers were, just where does it make a difference. The survey shows people do understand somewhat the details of how the connection is made, the implications of that, and how it doesn't marry up with the advertising. Do people care if they are getting what they understand the salesdroid is flogging them? Yes, it seems; in the majority at least now.

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Re: Is it important?

Does if you're buying your own modem / router.

Tech team trapped in data centre as hypoxic gas flooded in. Again

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Re: Look I hate to say this lads, but this thing really is going to blow up!

Simple. It wasn't a fuel storage depot, it was a hyperspatial field generator. As it overheated it blew a hole through the space-time continuum and you dropped through like a stone through a wet paper bag…. I hate wet paper bags.

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Re: casually stroll out with one second left on the clock

After that it's an automatic lock in, and it'll cost you a crystal to get you out again.

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Ours has a 30 second stand-off.

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Re: Buncefield

Thought one of the kids had fallen out of their bunk bed. Next door's loft hatch fell in to their bedroom. And that was 12 miles away.

Cancelled in Crawley? At least your train has free Wi-Fi now, right?

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IP over the power lines

You might get a nasty shock. It jumps back up the stream, you see, looking for a path to earth.

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I guess you mean regular public rail, rather than novelty or heritage?

Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch?

Pi-lovers? There are two fresh OSes for your tiny computers to gobble

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Re: PDF viewer...

Annoyingly so, but I only use HTML, SVG and PDF in my displays for reasons of efficiency and resolution.

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PDF viewer...

If Chromium or one of the other supposedly HTML5 browsers for the PI actually handled PDF rendering in-app rather than relying on plug-ins, I'd be a lot happier. The damned loss of just a single pixel width to scroll bars and frame borders and the like makes it annoyingly difficult to render both SVG and PDF nicely within the same DIV.

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

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Re: Sheffield had a water-fountain/sculpture thing...

I remember the fish tanks and aviaries of the old Arndale shopping complexes in Bolton and Manchester.

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Christ on a bike. Cordells? That's a long way back. The council never learned about putting public water features in Watford. You just don't do it. Between 1996 and 2006, they had a circular trough filled with large stone Scrabble letters just near the flyover. Regularly got a box of Sudso thrown into it, and they had to fill the gaps in-between the Scrabble letters with concrete after some kid got their foot stuck in it; so for years it just resembled the aftermath of a fire at a Mattel warehouse. Then there was a drinking fountain outside the nightclubs, which got used as a post for drunks to wee against. And an inverted glass canopy, which filled up with leaves and rain until the grass cracked under the weight. The history of Watford High Street is a sad catalogue of how not to do things, and has so far cost the council around £30-50m in major public work programmes over the last 25 years. As for the cycle lane in the bottom half of the High Street next to Boots... Within a minute of the works van driving away, the lane was full of cars parked up. Now they have divided it off from the road using bollards; it's full of pedestrians instead so cycles still can't use it safely.

Ricky Road is pretty much as it always was, apart from the Bus Green Route sections which were designed by a friend of mine but not properly implemented (they never put in the sensors and emitters to flip the lights on demand by an approaching bus instead of simply on a timing circuit). Yet another half-completed intelligent infrastructure project that failed. The ones that work never get noticed because they work. The ones that don't work get in the news and give the public and councils a bad idea about Smart City technology.

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If it was the Lloyds in the middle of the High Street with the Georgian facade, that facade is all that is left. They've totally removed everything behind it, including the building itself, Charter Place (brutalist two storey concrete 60s open mall), all the way back to the YMCA tower, and all up the High Street to the back of the Palace Theatre. All gone and replaced with a steel and glass canopy and an extension to the shopping centre.

The bank, the roof and everything in it is now probably no more than a pile of hardcore waiting in some depot somewhere to become part of a new roadbed.

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You should see the state of the town centre now!

German researchers defeat printers' doc-tracking dots

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Re: GDPR?

Ghost Dot Printer Recognition?

Geoboffins baffled as Ceres is crawling with carbon organics

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Re: Nuke it from deep space...

Sgt Pinback calling bomb number 20. Are you receiving me bomb? Over.

That was quick: Seattle rushes to kill tax that would mildly inconvenience Amazon

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Re: Not as simple as all that...

Amazon are noted for their ready supply of large, brown cardboard boxes...

Tech rookie put decimal point in wrong place, cost insurer zillions

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Re: Old school

Our electronic ordering system now flags up (to the user who entered the order) any orders to companies that have supply multiples. If they insist the order is OK, it then sanity checks the actual amount ordered using the online catalogues and asks again. Cut the admin workload amazingly.

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As a work experience...

aged 15, several of us doing Computer Studies were assigned to a national bank's office in Salford. There we sat for three days, all day, processing cheques by encoding the amounts handwritten on the front into magnetic/flourescent machine readable amounts printed on the back. Being sat next to a lovely lady, she quickly got me up to speed on all the features of the imprinting machine. When I spoke to my friends after the first day had finished, I discovered that they hadn't had the benefit of such tutelage and had mistakenly used the wrong buttons. The machines had a whole variety of 0 keys, single, double, triple and even quadruple zeroes. There must have been several thousand cheques went to clearing that day with encoding errors measurable in orders of magnitude. Oops. That was the first and last time they took on work experience placements for many, many years.

British egg producers saddened by Google salad emoji update

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Re: zero-width joiner...

You mean the layer of margarine from a Greater London sandwich bar?

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Re: Salad...

Angry fruit salad. Which appears to be the order of the day for the modern UI like TIFKAM.

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Re: They've been...

eggsterminated.