Posts by Bah Humbug 36 posts • joined 14 Oct 2009
What you're describing is looping, and there is a commercial version of this available now by, guess who, Medtronic.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that, now they have a commercially available system, they're trying to get older pumps that can be used to compete with that out of the market.
I've had a few of these emails reported to me today - they've all had different wallet addresses, so just checking the balance of one wallet isn't enough to say how successful the phish has been. I guess by having one wallet per email, they know who's suckered in enough to be persuaded to perhaps pay again in the future.
What's to stop someone enabling 2FA on their accounts (well, those that support it anyway!), and just 'forgetting' to bring their phone with them, or leaving it at home to avoid extortionate roaming fees? So give them your password, knowing(*) that they're not going to be able to get into your account anyway without that SMS code.
* (also knowing that if you're someone of interest, they're probably in your account already anyway!)
How did CD-R drives cope with finicky and slow (in the early days) spinning rust? Many turned to internal buffers to provide a cushion against slow spots. I'm sure a USB tape drive can pack a few megs of RAM as a buffer.
In my experience, most of them coped by producing drink coasters and (sometimes dangerous!) frisbees...
My understanding (and I'm no expert, so correct me if I'm wrong!) is that it is still insecure to load a form over http and then submit over https.
By loading it over http, you can't be sure that it hasn't been tampered with on the way over to you, possibly changing the address the form POSTs to, and adding some additional fields to the form, so you end up submitting a form with your PIN number and mother's maiden name to https://www.plu5net.com for example.
Only by loading the form itself over https can you prevent that initial tampering.
The more I read about Chip & Pin, the more glad I am that I have a Chip & Signature card.
Nowadays, when the till tells them to check the signature, they actually do it quite carefully, because it's out of the norm. I suppose that's the key to this really - chip and pin has become normal, so people get complacent about it. A few years ago, signing was the norm, and people were complacent about that.
Seems to me that there isn't a reliable answer - people will always get complacent over things they do every day.
Clearly none of you have been to Acton - the place is as dead as Dunwich. They were probably just so desperate to produce some news, any news, that they decided this was worth bothering with.
Wouldn't be too surprised if the parish council paid him to do this to get something remotely newsworthy happening there...
Definitely worth going up if you get a chance - views are great, and for anyone with a technical bias (so everyone on here), there's something oddly cool about the visit.
BT used to give certificates out to people a few years ago when they visited (found mine a few days ago, had completely forgotten about they gave them out) - wonder if they'll be doing the same with these visits?
One of the wacky ones reminds me of a night a few years ago. Had a company mobile, as I was always on-call, and went over to a mates house to smoke some possibly illegal substance.
About 4 hours later, I get my stuff together to head home, looked for my mobile, and find my mates dog had been chewing on it all evening and it was now just in pieces. (Can you imagine how amusing we all found this - given what we had been doing for the last few hours??)
Got some very odd looks from the telecoms dept. the next morning, when I took a bag of phone bits to them, and told them I needed a new phone, 'coz a dog ate my old one...issued a new one with no problems - as they put it, if I was lying, I'd at least use a convincing excuse!
I got bored about 1/3 through the article - can anyone tell me if I missed anything interesting??
Mods - On a totally unrelated sidenote...finally figured out how to reply to comments on here - use Firefox... Turns out that Opera doesn't show the 'reply to this post' link, so I've been searching in vain for that option. Any chance of getting that fixed?
Seems like a pretty good summary of the mainstream distro's which are out there at the moment.
Not really sure who the article was aimed at though - most people on this site surely know this sort of stuff already, and already have a favourite distro. Could be useful for those who are new to Unix/Linux though, but I'd say Linux is still not ready for them - when it works it's great, when it doesn't, it can be a real sod.
Recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop - almost defenestrated the thing out of sheer frustration - eventually found a really obscure setting was needed as a boot parameter to get my graphics card to work properly - there's no way someone new to Linux would have had a chance in hell of getting this to work, and Ubuntu is meant to be one of the more newbie friendly ones!
I walked past that building so many times in the '90s (god, I feel old typing this) when I went to Uni in Chelmsford) and always felt a small sense of pride about the history of it. Such a shame it's come to this.
Could be argued that this building is more important to history than Bletchley Park in some ways.
The system will remain weak as long as there are humans anywhere near the payment chain...
Not everyone has a signature card because they can't remember a 4-digit code - some do it so that the bank can't just turn around and say 'your pin was used, therefore it's your fault' when an unauthorized transaction goes through.
I still use Chip & PIN, though my wife has a signature card - I'm thinking about switching back to signature myself though, because I don't particularly care for the way the banks have pushed liability for unauthorized transactions onto us.
Having said that, Chip and PIN can be useful when out shopping - I can just give my card to my wife, say 'you know my PIN', and she can use it...no messing about with signatures!
> Below the belt, Apple envisions giving the all-important shoe
When I started reading that sentence, I was expecting a different word to appear than 'shoe'...not sure if that is indicative of my depraved mind, or if I've just spent to much time reading El Reg.
That's really good news; if you ever get a chance to go up there, it's really worthwhile - the views are spectacular.
Just don't plug your laptop into the non-revolving part, and put the laptop on a table on the revolving part, like my boss did once during a presentation...
The earth used to be flat, and at the center of the universe...
I'm quite convinced he's wrong, as seems to be the consensus of everyone else, but people used to think the earth was the center of the universe, until Copernicus came along, and that the earth was flat'ish, until Magellan circumnavigated it*.
Terribly arrogant to just say "He's wrong, because we don't believe him" - we've made mistakes in the past about physics, are undoubtedly making loads now, and will make even more in the future.
* OK - it was known to be spherical (ish) before that, but he is the guy who conclusively proved it, even though he was dead by the end of the voyage...
Though you could argue the Greeks proved it, or the Egyptians.
I installed 7 a few weeks ago, in the hope that it would improve the wireless reliability on my laptop, which struggled to maintain a connection for > 15 minutes under Vista. So far, it's working well, and the wireless hasn't dropped once, so it seems to have been a worthwhile upgrade.
Anyway, seeing the pictures of Windows 95 made me realise just how old-fashioned I am; one of the first things I do with a new install (after anti-virus, updates etc.), is make my desktop look as similar to the 95/98 experience as possible - Windows 7 can still get surprisingly close. I just find that version of the UI to work better for me - most people would probably disagree!
Still think that 3.11 was the best version ever though...
I feel kinda sorry for the guy in some ways - he must have been pretty desperate to do this sort of thing, and known there was a high chance he'd get caught.
Having said that, looking at this a different way, £58k for 15 months work is a pretty good salary - criminal record screws up future career prospects a little though.
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