Posts by Robert Carnegie

Feeling bad about your last security audit? Check out what just happened to the US Department of Interior

Re: Nice picture

I doubt you would be shot unless "this part of the USA" is a prison, in which case, how are you able to tell us about it...

It also may help in those terms if you are not brown, and not bearded.

They used it in public visitor space at offices, so bags might be not searched, it's not Apple that we are talking about (Apple premises qualify... but I already mentioned prisons). If bags are searched... there are such things as steel toe capped work boots. So if no one notices and cares that your footwear has a USB-C port, you get a clear run at it. A clumpy, clattery run, I admit.

Strap in for the wild ride that is invest.com: A failed legal battle, millions of dollars on the line... and that Yo! app

"I will claim dominion"

Is that a "how lawyers talk" thing, or is it a "weird people and happenings" thing?

Google bans stalkerware apps from Android store. Which is cool but... why were they allowed in the first place?

Re: Great they are doing this...

I interpret the article to say that the child tracker apps are obliged (from now anyway) to run openly, so that a child or adult using a device knows that this software is running and what it does. They just probably need to be able to read. I don't know how blind users will manage though, but then I don't know that generally. iPhones are increasingly haptic...

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

Re: neworange88888888

Do we now know Donald Trump's password that got hacked and that he still uses?

neworange88888888

"My God, he's full of tweets!"

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

Re: Trumps cut

Apparently Donald Trump is not paid salary for being President. I can only suppose that it would be conflict of interest if he was paid.

What the hell is going on with .uk? Dozens of domain names sold in error, then reversed, but we'll say no more about it, says oversight org

www.nhs.uk

is quite a significant brand just now...

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

So far no one's admitted to Bitcoin. But of course that's practical for paying your ransomware fee.

Speaking of which, it's a shame that the SETI people didn't get to buy Richard Branson's private island after all :-) So lovely for the aliens to visit there... which they've been doing since 1996...

In what I'll call my day the craze was "fractal" images, but not secret, they were to look at! Then there was the magic eye stereogram fad, but I never saw anything in that.

What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore

Re: "Floating"? Really?

But anchor came there none?

Some reports put the word "floating" in quotes in the headline. And I found this description in one online: 'The store is completely surrounded by water so that it appears to be floating."

Ghost of Windows past spotted haunting Yorkshire railway station

A special waiting room for people who want to get the waiting over quicker :-)

Here's a sprite idea: PC pokers push pixels to LED displays with Microsoft's new platform for non-verbal comms

Timely, though

Half past six (night not morning?) sounds like past the time that you should fuck off. (But did you?)

Old and busted: Targeting servers and web bugs. New hotness: Pwning devs with targeted poisoned stacks

"a hack on the production system"

Indirectly. Through the company's meatware.

'A guy in a jetpack' seen flying at 3,000ft within few hundred yards of passenger jet landing at LA airport

Re: Dash cam?

The main use of dashcam is to sell footage of the incident to show on TV - or so it appears. Once off the ground (that is a point), an aeroplane isn't going to see much that's interesting and that isn't going to be covered by the accident investigation anyway. And anything on board costs fuel to carry.

I now know what you mean, but I was sceptical of you seeing a whale that can fly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Beluga looks like it's been possessed by a gigantic brain slug. If you don't think so... then slap yourself firmly on the head a few times: just in case.

Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher

Re: What do you get given .....

It's an excellent shovel. It did a fine job.

Engineer admits he wiped 456 Cisco WebEx VMs from AWS after leaving the biz, derailed 16,000 Teams accounts

Re: And the point is...

Yeah, each password that I use at work signs me onto a single system.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: Maybe that was the first time in the UK....

U.S. elections are weird. The U.K. managed pretty well to cover elections with something called a "Swingometer". But I don't see the point anyway in staying up at night to hear results, unless you expect to have to leave the country suddenly and so you need to know.

Clive James wrote U. K. TV reviews for over a decade, and a lot of them were converted to a sort of epistolary history of them medium; I could get mine out to see most of the election TV shows described, and whether and how they had computers in.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

Re: Procedures don't work

I think it's still considered news-worthy when a high omnibus tries to drive under a low bridge, and... doesn't. In the UK anyway. I think we had one in Scotland this month, and a fatal one in Wales some time in the last year...?

It isn't every day, but it does keep happening, at ramming speed, and casualties are pretty much anyone on the upper deck except for particularly short children.

Yes, yes, buses and bridges both have signs on them all saying how high and how low they are. Perhaps that stops a lot of these accidents, but not all of them.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Re: Bezel

...oh, and using zip files - or something similar - so that if serial file transfer across the desk glitched, the zip file checksum error showed there was a problem.

But if you unplug the electric fence all the electricity will escape...?

Re: Why is it always cold in the morning?

No, it was one of the Pet Shop Boys and a Doctor Who, the latter took the former's name actually, awfully modern :-)

...we should have a "dinosaur" icon, not aggressive, brontosaurus maybe, for old person stories like "Our first company cellphone needed the floor reinforced under it" and "I remember when variance from heteronormativity constituted a joke in itself and I don't mind admitting it".

Well, there is IGMC.

Bezel

Outside chance, was it this 1983 Hewlett-Packard job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-150

We had one of those donated around 1989 (?) (we were a non profit or something). MS-DOS yes, compatible disks no. I set it up for word processing (maybe WordStar and may even have used the touchscreen) but had to use I think Kermit on RS232 to move documents to somewhere more useful. Or maybe a program that simply captured bytes from there - OK that would be just "copy filename.doc aux" I suppose. Or maybe it was... print the document, to aux, but the "printer" was my own PC capturing it. Some such thing.

Re: Light sensors!

If we're all telling our optical sensor / intrusive daylight stories again, mine is the one with the whimsical fluffy cover as sold to make the mouse look like an actual mouse of the with fur kind (very very slightly). Did the job, you see.

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

The server in one secondary school was losing power in the early evening. I think we noticed because the log of backups was checked and we didn't have theirs. There was a UPS connected, enough for a short run and graceful shutdown, and the UPS log showed that indeed a loss of external power occurred. Did you think it was going to BE the UPS? It happens.

Inquiries were made in the school, and as far as I remember, it turned out that the janitor had had a bright idea to save the bother of going around turning off lights at night, he just turned off the mains supply.

Normal service was resumed.

Being locked out of a room with stuff left switched on might inspire your night time staff to the same "solution".

Re: Meds Without Hats

That's where the outlet is...?

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

Re: Obviously was not tested

The latest Flash version is 32.0.0.414, released about a week ago.

Really.

Surely you're checking for updates? :-)

Securus sued for 'recording attorney-client jail calls, handing them to cops' – months after settling similar lawsuit

Re: All perfectly integrated

Dickinsonian - Emily?

Or Dickensian - Charles?

Or perhaps a sinister and strange substitution for Kafkafkafkaesque?

Search for 'things of value' in a bank: Iowa cops allege this bloke broke into one and decided on ... hand sanitiser

Re: By the way:

Ah well. I can grow more skin.

The bottle says Garnier, PureActive, Hydro-Alcoholic, presumably legitimate enough, I think it is from Tesco.

I do not recommend this product.

By the way:

Don't drink methanol, no.

If I'm correctly interpreting

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/11/which-lab-alcohols-can-you-safely-consume-without-going-blind/

then also don't drink isopropanol.

And just don't drink hand sanitizer.

By the way why is the sanitizer I purchased recently... sticky? It says on the bottle "No rinse off" but it is really difficult to get the stickiness off my hands.

Maybe it's meant to say "Now rinse off".

What are you gonna do? Give me detention? Illinois schools ban pyjamas in online classes

Re: Hmmm, how the hell?

Singapore-style Bluetooth leg irons maybe? The shackle is in range of the computer, therefore so is the student.

Re: Hmmm, how the hell?

It may have been hereabouts that I recently commented on whether there was a video calling mode that just inserts your face in the body of your choice (I think at the moment no). There is the option of a full-size physical picture board with a hole to put your face through.

I put on trousers for my working-at-home day, even if I'm probably not on camera. Shoes are discretionary.

Re: So long as it's not mixed thread...

Do you still have the red ribbon in your ponytail? Just curious, I may go that way with the lockdown condition of the little hair that time has left me with.

Well, what are we waiting for? Three weeks later, Windows Embedded Standard 7 still didn't have the answer

Re: Remember when there was talk of Windows in cars?

Possible spoiler for James Bond doing most of that at the start of "For Your Eyes Only" last night or thereabouts, did you have that in mind?

Shine on: Boffins bedazzle Alexa and her voice-controlled assistant kin with silent laser-injected commands

Re: List of reasons avoid this thing entirely for the rest of your life gets longer and longer

Did anyone threaten to inject a laser beam in any of your intimate spaces?

You weren't hacked because you lacked space-age network defenses. Nor because cyber-gurus picked on you. It's far simpler than that

Re: re: dictionary and AD

If you're talking about password strength rules, their only effect on me is that after I carefully and securely make up an utterly random letter password, the rule rejects it.

The other day I hit a system which rejects a password that uses any letter twice in a row. So mrmxy zpplx isn't random enough for that. (And because it's an arch enemy of Superman in comics, nearly, but never mind that.)

Also my employer recently subscribed me to an online security tutorial. So I made up a password for that but no! My password is too long!

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Wibbly

Under the desk - I think that groping around below waist level* could lead quickly to rather a long chat with Human Resources.

* To switch the fan off obviously - but it may be not obvious how to do that. There's probably a switch somewhere but where - and by now there's a micro-heater that just squats in a power outlet and glares at you.

That's how we roll: OWC savagely undercuts Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels with bargain $199 alternative

For at least twenty years, there's been talk on-off about putting a fuel cell into a, um, cell phone. Then just add fuel. But most of the market is happy with "just add electricity". And yet the opposite with cars... Anyway, you aren't wishing for a fuel cell, you want to forget Steve Jobs and own a personal computer designed by Charles Babbage. The inventor of "not shipping on schedule".

But his machines were generally operated by a crank.

Well, so were Steve Jobs's.

Re: There's 360˚ of rotation

Shopping carts seem to be slightly cheaper than bicycles, so not a trivial expense, but in the United Kingdom I don't think I've seen a cart that wasn't intended to be four-wheel drive. These days they even all touch the ground - unless you have one with a "Denver boot" built-in and activated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_cart mentions this as a US-Europe difference and related to "smaller retail premises in Europe" where a cart with too wide a "turning circle" would be a problem.

I was going to guess that someone "getting used to" four-wheel freedom had an accident and sued the store.

Though in the time of coronavirus, not allowing customers to turn around may be a boon. In fact, I think I shopped faster when (now discontinued) our large supermarkets converted aisles to one-way travel, with a side effect that to get to everywhere that you wanted in a store, it was simplest to go up and down -every- aisle. In fact... I really, really should just do that.

Lizards for lunch? Crazy tech? Aliens?! Dana Dash: First Girl on the Moon is perfect for the little boffin-to-be in your life

Re: Harry Potter, but with science, instead of magic!

Yes. Perhaps that was meant to be "he was breeding lizards". But who knows. Lungs are vulnerable to nasty diseases and infiltrations, a trained squad of cleaners to go in there and tidy up might be useful.

I think I heard about another book or series about a clever female junior scientist or possibly it was this one, but it was at least a little while ago. I listen to BBC including their World Service, national channel Radio 4, and archive of older programmes on Radio 4 Extra, so something that came past me more than once could be in any of those. But it seems not to be Dawn French or Lucy Hawking or any of this year's guests on "The Life Scientific". For instance, Stephen and Lucy Hawking wrote some children's adventures, but a boy named George seems to get all the title billing.

There are others; Dora the Explorer of course, "Dino Dan" on television was evolved into "Dino Dana", and Marvel Comics has: "Moon Girl" and her T-Rex dinosaur with which she swaps minds INCONVENIENTLY, Nadia Van Dyne and her "Genius In action Research Labs" team who are older, Ironheart the teenage female Iron Man, Valeria Richards of the Fantastic Four, and Squirrel Girl (who mainly knows about computers and squirrels) - though these were mostly paused after a while and then there was COVID-19 and no comics. But I'm sure they'll be all right.

Linux Foundation rolls bunch of overlapping groups into one to tackle growing number of open-source security vulns

Since there are people whose day job is to write the exploit for the latest vulnerability... other people who want to prevent that also need to take the job seriously.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Re: Nope

I thought Windows XP SP2 was adequate, but maybe I have low standards or am forgetting how to count.

Not-so-paltry towers to float: Vodafone reveals IPO plans for mega European masts biz

Re: mega European masts

I meant I tried: paltry float.

So I had to try: paltry gloat.

Also: paltry goat.

But I am still at a loss.

Re: mega European masts

According to "The Lord of the Rings", three towers are more than enough for coverage across Europe. If they're big enough. And if you have the balls. (palantir)

By the way, the headline sounds like a joke reference that I'm not getting. I tried in Google; paltry tower, paltry gloat, paltry vantage sounds Shakespearey, but about all I get back is this story.

Did they actually go with a (Not So) "Fawlty Towers" reference first and then have to change it to pacify Vantage?

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Re: Angels are real

Guardian angels, do they exist? Do pious people seem to be protected? It is a little tricky because if everybody has one from conception then how do you test that. However, according to some (see Wikipedia), Muslims have two each. So you could design an experiment, e.g. a volunteer walks down a roadway on which is placed a banana skin, but that is next to a bush that I am hiding behind with a comedy-type custard pie. If the volunteer has only one guardian angel, then they will be steered past the banana skin but while the guardian angel is doing that, I will get the volunteer when I jump out with the custard pie. If they have two guardian angels then the joke is on me.

Re: Teach your children

It's unusual these days in the UK to die for want of dental treatment. But thanks to the hostile environment, it does happen!

"Not just his own money"

Yes - OUR money. It's all very well being philanthropic now, Microsoft still has plenty of bad karma for sharp practice over a lot of years.

Mind you, when it started, Microsoft hobbyist software had a lot more users than paying customers, you know what we're like. You can understand him feeling that he was owed.

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

Re: Editing

Maybe make any forum post with the word "correction" be not published and sent only to Regquarters?

I would do that.

Maybe

Putting your hard disk next to military-grade radar might wipe it effectively. But they're less sensitive nowadays, e.g. to magnets. And, well, would you rather lose ALL the data on your hard disk, or spend a year in jail? Tough call.

Not always.

They have a powerful trade union though. Getting compensation for an accident at work that WAS your fault.

Brit unis hit in Blackbaud hack inform students that their data was nicked, which has gone as well as you might expect

A pile of university student coursework? Who would want it?

Microsoft wants to show enterprises that Edge means business, rather than the thing you use to download Chrome

You might be able to create your own shortcuts to some Administrative Tools or to the folder, if you want to be able to launch them from somewhere else on your system.