Posts by Pete B

Keep it Together, Microsoft: New mode for vid-chat app Teams reminds everyone why Zoom rules the roost

Re: Annoys me

"It won't cleanly cut out the user so they'll blend into the background and be missing limps or heads."

I've got a limp I wouldn't mind going missing - didn't realise that Teams had that feature - must try it :)

Macs, iPhones, iPads to get encrypted DNS – how'd you like them Apples?

Re: Good & Bad

Before you go down the pfsense & MITM proxy have a look at Sophos' free offerings which have the functionality already in them - their home use UTM is retricted to 50 IP addresses behind it, whereas the free XG firewall is restricted to some number of cores and memory - you can either spin them up on your preferred virtualisation platform or a small PC as you like.

If you're despairing at staff sharing admin passwords, look on the bright side. That's CIA-grade security

Why did they need an exemption?

If the assumption was that they would have gone beyond the basic requirements then why did they need an exemption from them - you only need it if you're *not* going to at least meet them.

Overload: A one-way ticket to a madman's situation

Testing

I blame any cockup I make as the system having failed under a test. It's even vaguely true ;-)

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

Re: Restructure the Market

Tinkering with VED really makes little difference at least at the upper end of the market - if somebody's going to spend around the £100k mark on a vehicle then they're not going to be bothered about the VED, unless you make it to high as to effectively outlaw them.

I like the rest of your idea about an automatically reducing/increasing allowance/surcharge for the two though.

Dude, where's my laser?

It's always DNS.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

"Who decides what counts as "malicious" use of personal data? The EU? The government? The courts? Google? Facebook?"

The owner of the data gets to decide.

Surge in Zoom support requests was 'unexpected', says tool team as it turns taps down

It seems that user's find it easy to use - we've done some in depth trials with Webex and Gotomeeting over the last few years and virtually everybody said they're too difficult to use. They seem to "get" Zoom without too many problems. Whether this is because they now don't have the option of calling a physical meeting so are being forced into actually putting some effort in to working it out I'm not so sure on.

Vodafone issues a stay of execution for Demon domain hold-outs

Re: Blast from the past

Doesn't surprise me - my bank keep sending authorisation codes to my old mobile number - I changed it everywhere in online banking 12 months ago and wrote to them as well to update their records, so god knows what part of their system still has the old one in.

Citrix snuffs Xen and NetScaler brands

Re: Stupid Marketing Morons

I just wasted 3 weeks of my life with Citrix support trying to get a Netscaler to work - the original one got clobbered by the vuln earlier this year (I was on holiday and nobody thought to apply the published mitigations..) - firign up and configuring a new one it refuses to accept incoming connections from the WAN - it's listening on he interface OK since you could connect to it from addresses in the same WAN range, but totally ignored any traffic from outside. I gave up and moved to a different solution since the license was due soon as well!

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

DR in my current place is a joke, every project incorporates an element of it but its just plain lip service and doesn't do what it should. Heaven forbid we actually need to invoke DR as most of it won't work & requires manual intervention.

Haha -we don't even pay lip service to it - I know what will happen if things ever go pear shaped: we're screwed. I keep paper copies of all the emails I've sent over the years pointing this out!

Re: Cables with labels on

You and me both - I was firmly headed for RAF until I hit that problem.

No I just spend meetings repeatedly asking which cells on spreadsheet of the day are green and which are red - why given a significant % of the population have difficulties telling them apart do people persisit in uing those two colours? There's a reason the green on traffic lights has a lot of blue in it...

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

I used to use them in the early noughties - single channel ISDN + FRIACO gave me a "permanent" connection to the internet for a flat rate each month. Only moved away from them when we finally got ADSL on our exchange.

As Zoom bans spread over privacy concerns, vid-conf biz taps up Stamos as firefighter in totally-not-a-PR-stunt move

Cabinet office decision, not GCHQ.

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

Re: helps to see how people are reacting ... not just ... the current speaker.

I've never seen Webex working well enough to be able to work out what the hell was going on - including on some Cisco demonstrations where the entire time was filled with people saying "can't hear you, you're breaking up etc" and the instructor apologising for the quality!

Saving your battery as well as your privacy? New Brave for Android claims 5% power reduction

Re: Autoplay Videos

With you on that one - happily I'm using firefox at the moment and changing the config has stopped it autoplaying without having to resort to using element zapper. UBO is blocking 22% of requests on this very page though. Seems like El Reg doesn't practice what it preaches.

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

average

You have to remember though that 50% of the population have below average intelligence.

Why is ransomware still a thing? One-in-three polled netizens say they would cave to extortion demands

Govt could help here.

I do wish that Govt would do something useful and make paying ransoms illegal - if nobody had a choice of paying them them then they'd stop fairly quickly. (Other scams would appear instead though.)

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

Jerry

Think I'd have thrown him under a bus, personally.

Google Cloud Engine outage caused by 'large backlog of queued mutations'

Re: "allow emergency configuration changes without requiring restarts."

I used HP servers 10 years ago that let you hot-swap memory (and CPU!), so not impossible. They may equally be talking about adding additional machines into a cluster without having to restart processes though.

Internet use up 40 per cent in San Francisco Bay Area – but you know what’s even higher? Yep, alcohol, weed use

Re: Is this any surprise?

And in 2033 we'll have the quaranteens!

How many days of carefree wiping do you have left before life starts to look genuinely apocalyptic? Let's find out

Re: think out of the box?

Think most of our lot do that every time they get anything out of stores cupboard - either that or most of them must spend all day washing their hands, the number of bottles of hand cleaner that have vanished is asrounding.

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Checks date

Although as others say it might well make sense to go down this road -tried and tested tech!

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: Bitrates and broadcast media.

I drive a wide variety of hire cars on a regular basis, mostly in the North West UK, so well outside London. What makes most difference to cutting out is the car manufacturer - Hyundai are about the worst, followed by Mercedes Benze & Vauxhall - on a regular trip I do VWs don't lose signal anywhere whereas Hyundai there are 4 "not spots" on the route.

So maybe the finger needs pointing at the vehicle manufacturer as well as the broadcaster mechanism.

Mysterious IT snafu at British Airways causes bunch of inbound flight delays and cancellations

Re: Blame third parties

I think you'll find it was El Reg that contacted Lufthansa and Amaedus, not BA.

ICO scammer Maksim Zaslavskiy to miss 2020 Tokyo Olympics over digital currency fraud

Re: "no investments in any sort of real-world asset to back the coins"

You could make the argument that this applies to most fiat currencies as well - are any still tied to eg Gold Standard?

IBM, Microsoft and Linux Foundation link arms to fight patent trolls with 'multimillion' scheme

Re: Didn't Microsoft fund SCO in its Linux patent fight?

Yes and no...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fact-and-fiction-in-the-microsoft-sco-relationship

Who loves Brexit? Irish distributors ... after their sales jump by a third

No - largely what is causing a lot of the problems is uncertainty & delays caused mostly by remainers who hope to overturn a majority vote.

Uncle Sam prepping order to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch from the UK

Re: Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

They haven't finished yet - IIRC verit isn't expected until around May 202/

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: Quite Common

Sounds like that might be my boss!

If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is: Nobody can decrypt the Dharma ransomware

There's one obvious way they can decrypt

That's if they're actually the authors and thus hold the key required.

Tech industry titans suddenly love internet privacy rules. Wanna know why? We'll tell you

Re: re: Tech giants hate this...

Yeah, but "my enemy's enemy" and all that.

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

Pedant Alert!

"...are hidden from the hoi polloi by GDPR..."

Standards are slipping at el reg - "hoi" is the nominative masculine singular form of the definite demonstrative article? Or in order words, it means "the", and therefore "the hoi" is a bit of a pleonasm.

Exploding femtocells: No need for a full recall, says Vodafone

Hmmm

Just had to replace one that went completely dead at my boss's house - no lights on it at all. IIRC it was installed in 2014 - Voda's response was it was out of warranty so we had to fork out for a new one. I use EE and wi-fi calling on my own handset -works perfectly without additional hardware like voda need.

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0

Re: They missed a trick

Is Poettering related to Daniel J. Bernstein - they seem to share the same basic beliefs?

How to secure MongoDB – because it isn't by default and thousands of DBs are being hacked

Re: Cue useless drivel as defence

"...I find it unfair to compare to M$. The latter needed nearly 15 years to figure out the simple fact that security is a must..."

In M$ slight defence here when they launched Windows it was in a world where most PCs were never connected to anything else anyway so there was less need to segregate privileges. Anybody starting to create a system nowadays should assume it's going to be connected to the world at large and configure it accordignly.

90 per cent of the UK's NHS is STILL relying on Windows XP

Re: Security concerns?

"It works for the UK education system ..."

Thanks - I hadn't had a laugh today, but the idea that anything in the UK education system works to any acceptable level gave me a good one.

Hackers actively stealing Wi-Fi keys from vulnerable routers

Re: HOW??!?

@David 132

I see what you did there, but their alternate methods are not as obvious as that.

@asdf Re: interesting

"Don't buy a home router until you check there is open source firmware for it."

Thought everybody on here would use Cisco or Juniper at home TBH?

Any questions? No, not you again at the back, please God no

Re: I know that feeling

"Personally I find the best cure is to silently stand up, walk over to the sales droid and then without a word place a screwdriver on the desk in front of them, and then silently return to your seat."

Think a spanner's more appropriate in this case.

Sony kills off secret backdoor in 80 internet-connected CCTV models

Re: Hardcoded passwords...

"This is Sony. They have form with rootkits and didn't get sued into oblivion then."

No - they just got dropped from my list of possible vendors. I wouldn't consider anything with the Sony name on it since that debacle.

Are your landlines buried in the stone age?

Re: Biased article

"If i only want internet on a line, its impossible without paying a line rental, although I hardly ever use it!"

Not true - have a look into "Metallic Path Facility" vs "Shared Metallic Path Facility" - if your ISP wants to they can offer you exactly what you're asking for.

Hearts, minds and balls: Microsoft's Windows 8 Surface gamble

@kb Re: Poor sales?

I really don't see why the carriers should hate Skype - the contract I have my 920 on has unlimited calls/texts and is only limited on data - at that they should *love* me using Skype since they're likely to get additional revenue when I exceed my data allowance.

If you mean the carriers that haven't woken up to the fact that text/voice isn't going to pay their bills for much longer hate it then maybe...

@AcrylicNumber

I didn't word my reasons for being hesitant to buy very well: I know on paper it does exactly what I want; the apps are there to meet my requirements. BUT what I can't tell without physically holding one are the more subtle nuances of build quality, screen response etc. I would think quite a few people will follow the: got to PCW/wherever, try everything they've got to see what you like then go home and order it online - if they haven't seen one then it won't be on the list. (iPad obviously aside since it seems a lot of people do make the decision based purely on it being an Apple product)

TBH if Surface were stocked in the likes of PCW I'd probably buy one this weekend, assuming that quality/feel etc is OK. I'm quite a way away from Hampshire, sadly otherwise I'd take you up on your offer.

Poor sales?

I've been thinking seriously about buying a surface RT (I have a Lumia 920 and like it and also W8 on desktop), but I refuse to buy one unless I can actually have a ply with one before purchase. So far in the UK I have been unable to find anywhere that I can do so. I suppose I could buy one and return it under distance selling if it doesn't do what I want but that would be a PITA.

It's all well advertising the things, but if retail stores haven't got them on sale to demo then there's no point in spending all of the money on advertising.

Arbitrators side with Foxconn in brain-damaged worker case

Re: Boycott them buy nothing from China!

I was just wondering if it was possible to get a list of manufacturers who used Foxconn, but you're probably right that the only way to boycott them is to avoid buying any electronic goods.

Intel insists Mac Mini HDMI fix inbound

Re: nope

This *is* Apple's problem since they supply the machine; the lack of choice in Apple products is supposed to stop this sort of problem happening.Apple chose which chipset to use, so their problem.

Register readers mostly too ashamed to cop to hideous hoard horrors

Re: what is an empty house a sign of?

"Or an impending divorce. Mine even took the garden shed whilst I was at work."

That was the first hint you got?

Oi, Apple, stick to phones, forget about TV - Time Warner CEO

Re: Apple TV is not really necessary

Ironically Woz started a company making programmable remotes specifically to 'solve' this problem! (CL 9)