Re: Might have mentioned this before...
I'm so glad I'd just finished my coffee before reading that, jake - or I would have helped quench my keyboard's thirst. I did NOT see that last line coming.
3483 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2009
"So if you're a 123-Reg customer, please check your records to make sure you aren't an unwilling owner of an unwanted domain. If you are, please let us know. ®"
I'm not a customer, but I know one of my clients is - his company's domain is registered through them, with the web hosting managed by one company, and email through me. I've just looked on Nominet's WHOIS and I can see that the .uk equivalent of his .co.uk is marked as registered via 123-Reg - registered October 2017, with a renewal date of October 2024. I'll get him to check his account when I next speak to him.
"Two things I hate the most is when nobody listens and when I end up being right because nobody listened."
I'll drink to that - out of the sheer despair of it!
And what's worse is when nobody listens, I end up being proven right, the affected party's finally take note of what I warned them about in the first place and behave accordingly, and eventually stop doing so because "effort".
I was going to comment about this in the comments of the other article: I'm a little curious that in my case, the latter method (Accounts and lists -> your apps and devices -> your devices) shows my Kindle and Fire Stick, whereas the former method (Your prime -> prime video -> menu -> settings -> your devices) doesn't show the Fire Stick. I thought it WOULD have showed up there, given what it is and what it's for.
Edit: And looking now, Accounts and Settings section of Prime doesn't seem to be working for me. (It initially appears, with the nav bar that includes Your devices, but then the content section immediately disappears to be left by an empty white space. Possibly a Javascript issue - I wasn't using this computer yesterday - or maybe they're tweaking things. I'll look again later; I don't have time to do anything now.)
"I'm not sure about Amazon, but I've experienced many sites that don't let you remove a card unless you replace it with another valid one"
Amazon does allow you to remove all payment methods. I mentioned in the comments on another Amazon story that I recently placed on order on behalf of my mum via her account, and there was swearing due to the Prime trick. After placing that order, as I've done every other time I've done this for her, I removed the card.
One possible gotcha when you do this is that it warns you the card will still be used for any existing orders that have been placed using it but not yet fulfilled - but given that (I assume) the orders placed via a smart TV were videos, they will have been fulfilled immediately.
""Those who stuck with "relic meters" risked "very high" maintenance costs, he said."
BS, my "relic" meter is only about 10 years old, new compared to others I have had and like the older ones HAD NO ANNUAL MAINTENANCE REQUIRED.
I have never hand anyone, in all my life, perform maintenance on a meter."
My interpretation of that "very high maintenance costs" nonsense is: "Once we've reached a certain threshold of smart meter installations, we'll allow companies to charge annual maintenance charges for "relic" meters. That'll teach the smarmy buggers who don't want our new tat!"
Or something like that.
"He's 90 but still uses the internet and Amazon. He's been caught by this a few times now and I've had to remote connect to his machine and cancel it (which is NOT easy)."
My step dad also, some time back. He hadn't even realised he'd done it until the payment was taken. My youngest brother (learning difficulties) has also been caught out by it. In both cases, I got it cancelled and refunded.
A short while back, I was ordering something on behalf of my mum, and it was a case of if I wasn't there and she was ordering herself, she would have been caught. As it was, there was some cursing on my part as I looked for the way to NOT sign her up to the 30 day trial.
Any claim on Amazon's part that people want this is total bullshit.
From the article:
It’s safe to say that the proposed facial recognition would frequently take place through the built-in camera of a laptop or PC ...Which, incidentally, is the same approach used by online blackmailers who view and record the subsequent graphic interactions of porn watchers and then email the unsuspecting victim with screengrabs asking for money if they don’t want the full video posted online, as has happened to one Register hack.
Surely that should say "...online blackmailers who claim to view and record..."
Okay, in the case of the linked article there was a real video of someone enjoying his own company (just not the reg hack), but the general modus operandi is to spaff out these emails claiming such videos exist and demanding money to keep them unpublished to all and sundry in the hope that some recipients will be worried enough to cough up.
As I hit submit on that, I suddenly remembered Amazon and their old forked account problem - which at the time I realised what had happened, they'd already fixed, but I think by accident rather than by design. Written up here, but in summary:
In August 2010 I decided to change the domain I was using for per-site unique email addresses, and in some cases passwords as well. In Amazon's case, the change included the password, and at that time it was possible to change both at the same time.
Thereafter, I started getting spammed by Amazon at the old address, and when I got in touch with them about it they told me the old address was still linked to an Amazon account.
It turned out that when I made the dual change of email address and password, their system actually split my account in two and treated the old one as a new account for the purpose of promotional crap. However, I was able to reset the password on it and log in (no security questions) and it still had my card details etc associated with it.
If that had been a case like this one, the new domain owner would have been able to make purchases from Amazon on my cards. (But an honest one would be able to see my postal address and let me know).
Amazon refused to accept this was a problem - albeit one that had been fixed, possibly by pure luck - by the time I realised what had happened, the email address and password change options had been separated; they could no longer be done at the same time. However, my argument was that there could have been similarly forked accounts out there just waiting to be accidentally discovered by miscreants.
"How hard has this Reg reader really tried?"
Does PayPal include that physical address in emails sent out to users? AFAICR, no, they don't - so the person who owns the domain wouldn't have been able to determine that address.
(Note they deliberately carried out a password reset - which would be by attempting to log-in and clicking on the 'forgot password' link, or however it's done for PP, but that was just to confirm it as an email address genuinely associated with PP; they wouldn't have been able to actually reset the password due to the security questions, so wouldn't have been able to get in and see the postal address.)
"In any case if any company is nefarious enough to devise such a strategy, they ought to at least be clever enough to add just a few quid here and there on some bills, which might be paid without question, rather than 4-figure bills that are certain to be questioned / refused."
Not dissimilar to a suspicion I've commented on before (not sure if here or elsewhere) about my current electricity provider.
Earlier this year, they raised a bill of £x.yz, and a while later they 'revised' that by issuing a credit for the original bill, and a new bill with the revised amount of £a.bc - except that the credit was for £x.zy. That meant I would have been out of pocket, albeit by a small amount (zy being smaller than yz) had I not raised it with them.
You might think that it was probably human error; a typo, but when they later rang me to discuss my complaint (when I spotted it, I was logged into their system to retrieve my bills, so it was almost no effort to go to raise the mistake), the guy was adamant that no human error was involved; the credit and revised bill were raised entirely automatically.
So, it would seem that they apparently have a billing system which at some point, in some circumstances, stores a numerical value as a string, and accidentally reads the pennies in reverse, before converting it back to a number. That's quite a bizarre bug.
I can't help but think the particular set of circumstances are when the first digit of the pennies is greater than the second digit in the original bill, so that the credit is a multiple of nine pence less.
Imagine if they did that to all their customers where the pennies were the right way around for it to work: 27p here, 45p there... all adds up, and many people probably wouldn't even notice the "mistake".
"I just tell them I'm not getting one"
This. When I signed up to my current electricity provider, they offered me one and I said no. That was back in February.
A couple of months ago they rang me "to arrange an appointment to install your smart meter" - not a follow-up question of do I want one; ringing to arrange installation. I said (again) that I didn't want one, but it's quite clear they're doing that to catch out people who don't realise they have a choice.
A slightly less silly reason not to call it "the Camelia Programming Language" is that if it is called that, you can be absolutely certain that some dolt will start abbreviating it to CPL. If the reason this name change has been suggested is to avoid confusing it with another version of Perl, making it possible to confuse it with another language altogether seems a bit silly.
We have asked Lenovo why they changed the EOL date on the Lenovo Solution Centre page to make it look like they were releasing updates for a product they had already EOL'd.
And it looks to me as though the question they answered was "Why are you releasing updates for a product after its EOL?"
"I wish I could find some old shit lying around the house that an idiot would buy for silly money."
I wish my parents hadn't got rid of the things I'd collected as a child and which some idiot might now buy for silly money. (Though probably not as silly money as the silly money mentioned in the article).
The most annoying one was the my first collection of comics when we were moving. I brought them downstairs, ready to be carted off... and my mother decided they'd be perfect for ripping up and using to wrap her ornaments.
"(Or if it's a VOIP solution, inform me of that and arrange a replacement Superhub)."
On that, though, it's worth noting my Superhub is in modem mode anyway. When the installer was here this came up and he thought I was mad - but amongst other things I pointed out the problems with it from way back when, and he said they've long since been fixed.
Hmm...
I was at my parents' place last week. They also have VM broadband. The first day I was there, the WiFi was dropping out. Looking at the hub itself, it was rebooting itself quite frequently. I then discovered other people on the same street were complaining about their VM internet connection dropping out.
So it seems that if their hub loses its internet connection, it reboots - thus taking out the WiFi (and given that it was rebooting, anything connected via ethernet would also be problematic).
That, right there, is a good enough reason to still keep their crap in modem mode and use a separate router. I can print over the network without an internet connection. I can access files on my NAS without an internet connection - or stream movies from it.
But if my network depended on their hub, and their hub depends on an internet connection to work? A loss of internet would be a loss of local network. Sod that.
If that's how they are providing the telephone service on my contract, they would have informed me right at the start, rather than (mis)handle my complaint the way they have so far. (Also my Superhub is one of the older ones, and doesn't have a voice RJ socket. It was a continuation of services - and equipment - from the old address.)
There is some logic to your suggestion, though; perhaps the reason the installer couldn't find a line to bring in is because there isn't one in the block, because VOIP. As I said, the installer had no experience of tower block installations, so it's possible he didn't know. But that then brings me back to my first sentence: they would have told me by now - indeed, right from the start.
FYI, the day after installation, they rang me (on my mobile, obvs.) to ask how the installation went, and I first mentioned the telephone situation then - the person said he'd look into it and get back to me to get it sorted. He never called back.
Solving the problem at that point should have been simple: Confirm no phone line was installed, and arrange an engineer (with the necessary experience) to come out and install one. (Or if it's a VOIP solution, inform me of that and arrange a replacement Superhub).
Six months on, I'm still being fobbed off with "someone will get back to you" type excuses1 - with the latest being a letter from their complaints department to tell me someone would 'take ownership" of my complaint, investigate it, and contact me shortly. That letter was dated 18th July - about three weeks ago.
Just how much investigation is required? It's not rocket science:
1 One exception. A couple of months back I had an email from them dismissing my complaint on the basis that their systems show all three services activated (yes, the line exists on their systems) and that I haven't reported a fault. I've pointed out that I have reported the problem (it's not a fault per se, which would suggest the line was in and something had gone wrong with it) - if I hadn't done, they wouldn't have been sending me that bloody email (etc).
"They already upgrading the bill next month by £3.50. Nearly 9% increase."
As I've just said in reply to someone else in the comments on a different article, it might depend what package you're on, because mine is going up by a different amount: £5
I have three services according to my contract TV (the cheapest package, really just freeview but with their box for recording), telephone line, and 200Mbps broadband. The letter doesn't break things down, so I've no idea if that's a fiver more for broadband, a bit for that and a bit for the mythical telephone line, or whatever.
The telephone line is mythical because it doesn't exist. Their installer had never done a flat in a tower block before and just couldn't find it to bring in. That was in February, and I've been complaining ever since - coming up on six months in about a week.
I know I get a discount that covers the cost of the line, but the point is I want a telephone line, and they are contracted to provide one.
If I have to go to another provider to get one, it'll cost me more on top of what I'm paying Virgin Media - and if I do that, once I have one I could also get broadband over it from someone else; the unnecessary extra cost of a telephone line would motivate me to look elsewhere for broadband. You'd think that small point might motivate them to do something - but nope, not yet.
"Plus Virginmedia are putting the bill up by £3.50 a month from 1st October..."
That might depend what package you're on. Mine is going up by a full fiver - which is a bit of a kick in the teeth given my ongoing (now six month old) complaint with them, and about which I'm told - yet again - that someone will be in touch soon.
The problem is the telephone line - or lack of one, though I do have one according to my contract (and, yes, I know it's cheaper with the mythical telephone line than without).
Microsoft VP and Technical Fellow, Laura Butler, weighed in by tweeting, "I don't wanna rain on the parade" and then did exactly that by pointing out that good old calc.exe had the topmost functionality back in 1994.
And I don't want to rain on Butler's or Microsoft's parade (I want to piss on it), but they should go back a little further and look at the calculator on RISC OS - or indeed any application on RISC OS. (To be fair, it has many problems due to the numbers involved - developers, users, and the money developers can make because of the number of users - but the active window not being forced to the top of the stack is one of its very good points).
"One thing I really want to see (particularly for e-commerce sites) is a list of domains that need to run scripts for transactions to actually complete. (Whether they should actually need to run scripts is another matter entirely)."
This ^.
I'd like to be able to visit a site, see a (non-JS, obviously) link that lists the domains/scripts that need to be run for basic functionality - so I can enable scripting for those domains, and the retailer has the opportunity to take some of my money off me.
But, being a cynical old fart, I just know that there will be sites listing domains from which they earn money (i.e. advertising) as necessary script sources, which puts us right back into square one of enabling them carefully, one by one, until we hit the right ones.
Agreed - this book is recommended, particularly for those of us who are worried about the erosion of privacy through (and by) social networking sites/companies. The book (and the documentary based on it) were the first things that came to mind when reading this article precisely because of the wearable cameras.
I don't think I've seen an option to use the old editor. ISTR when Gutenberg was being trialled there was an option to use the classic editor which, IIRC, was a bit of a fudge, effectively turning a single block into the 'classic' editor, but wasn't as usable.
(Amongst other things, the Gutenberg editor is SLOOOOW on the hardware I normally use - and that fudge was just as slow. It gets tedious typing and then waiting for the words to appear on the screen.)
What I resorted to doing was using a text editor, and typing my posts with mark up in that, then copying and pasting the result into Gutenberg - which is much faster (until I start editing my typos, or adding images, etc). Sometimes I use the code editor, but generally the external text editor covers me - but the point is, if I'm doing that, why do I need to continue with WP? (The answer, of course, is I have a lot of old posts that I'd have to migrate if I moved away.)
[before I submit this comment...]
I've just logged into one of my sites on this computer, and I still can't see an option to use the classic editor.
Installing a classic editor plug in, it looks as though it's as I described above; a fudge by turning a block into the editor - but I won't know until I'm on my slow PC at home whether it's usable or not because of that slow speed.
"While the enormous mass of the finding on the Moon speaks to something somewhat larger and more blobby than Clarke’s neat 1:4:9 object, poked at by a fictional Heywood Floyd, in the interests of whimsy we'll give it a pass. Although the fact it also wasn't found in the relatively youthful Tycho crater either threatens to snap the increasingly tenuous link."
You can't expect the man to be that accurate. Who do you think he was? Agnes Nutter?
Just to clarify, you appear to be correcting me by explaining how DNS over HTTPS works - but I took the question to mean the existing system, not DNS over HTTPS.
(And although I didn't mention caching the IP address, I wasn't implying that every single page visit includes a DNS lookup - at least not intentionally - but you seem to have inferred it.)