Posts by Steve Graham

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

Re: Just to point out

An acquaintance received the email regarding the exposure of her credit card details. It explicitly states that the information included the CVV, which I think means that Easyjet are not PCI DSS compliant.

Re: Stelios & EGM

I've seen quotes from him that make it clear that he suspects corruption in the procurement of the Airbus contract.

(It was only January this year when the USA, UK and France imposed huge fines on Airbus for bribery in other deals.)

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

You could say "Kick the grue." at any point. It didn't achieve anything, but it worked, and it proved that the grue was always near, just waiting for the dark.

Edinburgh was my alma mater too. What was the programming language? I vaguely remember parallelism in it, and the instruction "***".

(I graduated in Physics exactly 40 years ago.)

Where the hell Huawei? It should be a bit easier to tell now the AppGallery has its first proper navigation app

"utterly feature-crippled, only supporting offline navigation"

That's the exact reverse of my point of view. Google Maps, for example, only really works if you have an internet connection. If you don't, well, you can't even tell if you're up shit creek or not. (You can cache areas in the Google app, but they evaporate automatically after a short time. Got to renew the snooping.)

I prefer a navigation app which is pre-loaded with maps of the places I'm travelling around.

In case you need more proof the world's gone mad: Behold, Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels

not just wheels

I've just checked the small ads, and you can buy an entire 2002 Golf GTi for £500 in my area.

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Re: Shirley!

I guess that nobody wants to commit to the learning curve. It's likely that most users of the package don't have the skills to maintain it.

Hello, support? What do I click if I want some cash?

I'd bet actual money* that there will be active PS/2 ports on the motherboard.

*I'm not a Barclay#s customer, so I have access to actual money.

Samsung cops to data leak after unsolicited '1/1' Find my Mobile push notification

No wipe

It's not necessary to wipe the phone and its system software to remove "system" apps which are pre-installed if you can gain root access. Simply moving the app from the system folder to the general one converts it to a normal app which can be uninstalled.

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

Re: And contrary to "expert" advice ...

My recent experience with Windows is limited, but I'm pretty sure that pressing the power button starts a shutdown (or maybe a suspend to RAM, which is what my Linux boxes do).

Unless you hold the button down until the firmware does a hard power-off.

Latest battery bruiser Android from budget Moto G range appears ahead of MWC after an Amazon whoopsie

Re: Battery life is an illusion

On my 2-year-old budget phone (Nokia 5) the biggest battery drain is wifi. If I turn it off, except, say, for an hour's use a day, a full recharge lasts a week or more. Except if I forget to "force stop" Google Play Store after turning wireless off each time.

Bluetooth and GPS are permanently on. The latter means that Google are lying to us (quelle surprise) when they characterize GPS as high battery drain and sniffing wifi hotspots as low.

(Most of my day is spent with a computer in reach, so I don't need to use the phone so much for internet. Your lifestyle may vary.)

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Doesn't make any sense

I thought this as well. Their "staged" plan doesn't make any sense: first we will block ".exe" files, then we will block ".zip" files, etc.

But, actually, by the end of the year, file name extensions become irrelevant (we're told) so non-Windows platforms shoud be equally protected.

Team China: Nation's biggest mobe makers link arms to battle Google's Play Store

Users couldn't care less if their app (e.g. mail) comes from Google or Huawei, as long as it looks the same and works the same.

I do agree that I can't envisage the Chinese companies being any better than Google at building a store that's secure, efficient and user-friendly.

From WordPad to WordAds: Microsoft caught sneaking nagging Office promos into venerable text editor beta

Re: Many of these ads can be disabled.

Upvoted, but to be fair to the internet's semi-illiterate masses, "lose" is an anomaly in English. Spelled like that, you'd expect it to rhyme with "hose" and "pose". Really, it should be spelled "looze" (as in "booze") or perhaps "luze". The latter would work particularly well here in Northern Ireland.

Shhhhhh: Fujitsu bags another £12m from Libraries NI as bosses fail to bookmark replacement

Re: Loadsa money

1. "Ulster Unionist Party" is the name of a specific political party in Northern Ireland. It was the "Democratic Unionist Party" who were bribed by the Conservatives.

2. The supposed billion has had no visible effect on anything, and even if it really does exist, libraries are not a priority for austerity-obsessed politicians.

3. The Prime Mister was typically evasive when asked about the promised additional funding.

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

Re: I've had .....

I think the plan was for PulseAudio to handle the entire sound stack, but when they found that it was difficult, and that there were many different devices to handle, the scope was reduced, so that it's just a layer on top of ALSA, and further development seems to have stalled. One thing you can do with PulseAudio that you can't with ALSA itself is to adjust volume per process. So that if you are listening to two things at once, you can... actually, why would you do that?

I've always disliked ALSA in that it's stuck on the side of the kernel source, and the configuration syntax is obscure and illogical. However, I've learned to live with it. You can do some powerful things, such as routing or replicating audio, which you might expect to have to use another daemon to do (I mean jackd).

I removed udev once it got eaten by systemd.

In its place I use mdev, which is one of the many faces of busybox. I know busybox smashes the rule of "do one thing well" but it's still small, and it works. In my case, there aren't many things I need after boot. Automounting USB drives; changing the optical drive for a hard disk in the dock of my venerable Fuji; changing a mouse or keyboard.

I did need to add some modules to the set loaded at startup, and I had to change some device permissions and ownership (in rc.local) but everything is stable and trouble-free.

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Green

I'm hoping very much that the "j" at the end of his name is pronounced like the "j" in "justice" and not like "i".

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

Re: Anyone who says they have not done this is lying

You can create a bootable USB stick by something like "dd if=image.img of=/dev/sdb".

One day, I thought "Hah! Better not type 'sda' instead, becuase that's the hard disk! Ho ho!"

I thought it. And then I did it.

Fuming French monopoly watchdog is so incensed by Google's 'random' web ad rules, it's fining the US giant, er, <1% annual profit

Re: Deceptive units.

If I remember correctly, the unit most often used in Tesco for toilet paper is price "per 100 sht".

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

Non optional?

If I understand correctly, Vivaldi will ALWAYS spoof as Chrome from now on? What if I don't want it to?

(I've been using Vivaldi as my main browser for almost 2 years now, and I've never had a website complain about it.)

No, Illyrian, Naqaỹa, Mastika, Automex aren't Hollywood's hottest baby names – they're new monikers for exoplanets

terminological inexactitude

Call me a nerd, but I have to point out that the UK names come from the Isle of Man, which isn't part of the UK.

Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps

Re: Back up your data...

The Android permissions model may make this difficult unless the app developer has taken steps to allow it.

Ex-Twitter staff charged with spying for Saudi royals: Duo accused of leaking account records, including those of critics

Re: What's Sauce for the Goose...

"discreet"

Most watches are discrete.

If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive software development, check out this Google-backed API

Data-slurping is Facebook's core business, but by using a web browser with some useful extensions, I can use Facebook with the snooping at a level I'll accept.

If you try to use Facebook Messenger with a mobile web browser, it refuses to open, and tells you to install the mobile app. (Changing the user agent string still makes it work though.) Facebook would just LOVE a means to get users off the browser and onto the mobile apps.

(The Facebook and Messenger apps have less functionality than is provided by web access, as well as behaviour like hoovering up your contacts.)

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Re: Get over your Filesystem operating systems

"So, what OS have you written that doesn't need files ?"

Both iOS and Android attempted this. They pretended that there were no files, just apps and their data. Of course, files still existed in reality, and over time have made their presence felt.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

IPV4.1

The IPV4 header can have an "options" field of up to 40 bytes, so it would have been possible to kludge on an extension to the address size without breaking the header structure.

Chancers keep buying up dot-UK company name domains: Got a problem? That'll be £750 for Nominet to rule on it

.uk was assigned to Ukraine, while the UK (government) took .gb

It was only the persistence of nerds of the early internet -- people who like terminology to be correct -- that .uk became the de facto domain for the UK.

My local Indian takeaway has a .uk domain. When I saw the new sign go up, I thought it must be a mistake and the ".co." had been left out, but no, it was correct. I'm still not sure if it happened by chance or there's some backroom mastermind nerd setting things up exactly the way he likes it.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

I wrote the code running on forex telecoms consoles, and I had a "maintenance mode" which was called up by an obscure key sequence. At the top of the main maintenance menu, I'd programmed a random, irreverent one-liner to be selected from a short list. (I only had 128kb of EPROM for the whole suite.)

Well, obviously, one of the dealers carefully watched as a tech called up "maintenance mode" to fix something on his console, and then the magic sequence was passed round the dealing floor with great amusement.

They made me take it out from the next release.

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Confused? You will be.

I actually had the reverse experience. I paid for an item and thought "Wait -- did I just sign up to a 'free' trial of Amazon Prime." So I investigated all the available settings in my account, and it seemed that I hadn't. But anyway, I emailed Customer Service to confirm, and had a reply! confirming that I hadn't signed up.

I mostly don't use Amazon now because of their tax dodging; and also because their seach functionality is shit.

Hubble grabs first snap of interstellar comet... or at least that's what we hope this smudge is

It's the second interstellar object to be detected by humans, not "the second interstellar object". They've been flying past for billions of years.

Microsoft changes encryption, another D-Link bug, phishing dangers, and more

Re: Google think it's fine apparently

What is the advantage to Google, Adobe etc of these redirects?

Just harvesting data on user activities.

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Re: Tracking

I'm letting the comment stay, even though it was the result of a momentary lapse into stupidity.

Tracking

How does he think a pager works? By magic, or by communicating with phone masts?

I object to the term "GNU/Linux". You could easily craft a Linux system with no GNU software on it. It makes about as much sense to call your distro "LibreOffice/Linux" or "Mozilla/Linux", because it's a Linux kernel and drivers with some application software from various sources.

Scotiabank slammed for 'muppet-grade security' after internal source code and credentials spill onto open internet

I did some development work for a UK bank back in the nineties. The restrictions, rules and regulations were strict, and were strictly enforced. After all, it was people's money that was at stake.

Clearly. times have changed.

Vulture Central team welcomed to our new nest by crashed Ubuntu that's 3 years out of date

systemd

It's not broken. It's still booting. Come back in another few years.

Rolling in DoH: Chrome 78 to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS – hot on the heels of Firefox

Re: Just How Trustworthy is Cloudflare

It would be a "HUGE WIN" if DNS hijacking happened much. Which it doesn't.

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Client software, such as Firefox, has no business doing its own DNS. That belongs further down the network stack, which is why you're able to configure "host file before DNS lookup" or not at the OS level.

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

I was a happy Firefox user until they broke it on Linux. It now has a dependency on Pulseaudio for sound, and Pulseaudio is Poettering-droppings.

YouTube's radicalizing Alt-right trolls and Facebook's recruiting new language boffins

It's deliberate

I don't retain cookies between sessions, so if I visit YouTube, it's as a virgin user. And the "recommended for you" videos often include right-wing propaganda. There was even a period when Stephen Yaxley-Dickhead's "Tommy Robinson" entire channel of racist bullshit was recommended. Then there was one of medical expert Doctor Jacob Rees-Muppet "being clever" that came up all the time.

Obviously, Youtube promotes paid content. And obviously, the far-right movements pay to get people onto the radicalizing escalator.

Oh there it is, Facebook shrugs as Free Basics private key found to be signing unrelated apps

Re: What's more dangerous

Well, a fake Facebook could steal all your personal information and... Oh, right.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

Re: doesn't matter who hates it...

I'm retired, so no danger of me writing production code. I just tinker on my home systems. I write in C or Perl.

For utility scripts, I use Perl because I don't know shell syntax very well. But all my Perl looks like C, so that the structure of the code is obvious. Well, there's one compact and cryptic construction I've used more than once (I got it off the internet) which, with about 12 characters, reads and parses a text file of name-attribute pairs into an associative array.

My working career involved a lot of regexes, so I mostly get them right, but they're a bugger to debug if they don't work as planned.

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

Re: And so we move on to stage two ..

Yes, Linux has FUSE support in the kernel. I use it to mount my Android phone via MTP (another Microsoft invention).

Recent versions of Android have dropped support for direct USB access to the filesystem (which was of the FAT type) and you have to use MTP, which is a file-based protocol (and hence slow and cumbersome). I think Android generally uses ext4 internally now.

Four more years! Four more years! Svelte Linux desktop Xfce gets first big update since 2015

Yup. I've used XFCE but abandoned it for being too heavyweight. I use Openbox.

I don't have a "desktop environment" or "session manager" because I've nerver worked out what use they are.

Need to automatically and securely verify a download is legit? You bet rget this new tool

Yes, but

How about when web developers call external scripts from the likes of code.jquery.com?

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

"Vivaldi, of course, does not use Google's Omnibox code, preferring its own take..."

As it happens, last night I was tweaking some Vivaldi flags, and noticed that there are many, many settings containing ".omnibox.".

Also, the tab title for vivaldi://flags says "chrome://flags".

Hack a small airplane? Yes, we CAN (bus) – once we physically break into one, get at its wiring, plug in evil kit...

Re: Physical Access

My car has an Android system with wifi connected to the CANbus. Nice and secure!

(It's to interface to the audio controls on the steering wheel, and write stuff to the dashboard display.)

Fix LibreOffice now to thwart silent macro viruses – and here's how to pwn those who haven't

The traditional Unix way of handling files was to ignore all aspects of the name, including anything which comes after a dot (which is just another arbitrary character, except when it's . or ..). A file's "type" was deduced by "magic" (essentially its fingerprint), if required.

Unfortunately, the Windows convention has infected much software.