Posts by MojoJojo

Ah, I see you found my PowerShell script called 'SiteReview' – that does not mean what you think it means

Re: Nickname

"But you f*** one goat..."

Don't mind if I do, says Nokia, taking a €1.7bn chomp out of Apple

Re: Compromise

This is the "original" Nokia - the IP was not sold to Microsoft, just the mobile division.

How to remote hijack computers using Intel's insecure chips: Just use an empty login string

Wii

It was a very similar bug that lets pirated Wii games to be played on the console. Strncmp used to compare the hash of the executable with the some other value (sorry, can't remember the exact scheme). So just need to make sure the hash has a null character as it's first byte.

Omg, that is, like, sooo 2007... Retromania set to grip this year's MWC

Nokia vs. Nokia

I'm not sure how they handled it MWC, but the article could be a bit clearer that the Nokia that owns Withings is different to the Nokia (actually HMD Global) releasing phones.

Zero-day hole can pwn millions of LastPass users, all that's needed is a malicious site

Second Today

Another "all passwords lost" bug reported here https://labs.detectify.com/2016/07/27/how-i-made-lastpass-give-me-all-your-passwords/

Although that one has been fixed and details given to the nature of the flaw. As suspected, the issue is with auto-fill, rather than the cloud.

Honor 7 – heir apparent to the mid-range Android crown

Release date?

Would be useful information - although it doesn't seem to be on their website either, which is a little strange.

They also only have the 16GB version on their website.

Jon

Android in user-chosen lockscreen patterns are grimly predictable SHOCKER

Use for NFC?

Quick and secure way of unlocking. Although I suppose it goes against the 2-factor principal - if they can steal your phone they can steal the tag.

Shame you have to jailbreak android to get it to work at the moment.

Google extends app refund window to two hours

Re: About time.

One of the problems in the early days of google play was it had a 24 hour refund window. Which would be fine if it wasn't for people playing for a day, claiming the refund and then doing exactly the same thing the next day.

Cutting it to 15 minutes seemed like an over reaction. 2 hours is better.

Is this the silicon chip KILLER? Boffins boot up carbon-nanotube CPU

Mistake?

"But the experimental nine-nanometre-size carbon nanotube gates are dwarfed by the 22nm gates on the latest generation of silicon chips"

Other news sources are reporting that the CNT gates are around 9 mircons in size - i.e. about 500 times bigger than current silicon ones. But apparently shrinking them isn't a big challenge.

Australian pub to serve beers for bitcoin

Another UK pub got their first

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Business/Business-News/Use-virtual-currency-Bitcoin-to-buy-a-real-pint-in-Cambridge-pub-20130612060000.htm

Although it's owned by the same brewery as the Norwich one, now I look.

Cisco nearly ready with next giant router

I thought the PTX5000 was a label router - but it turns out Juniper started saying it's an IP router now. Can't find out what sort of rate it can manage IP traffic.

'No discernible increase in piracy' from DRM-free e-books

Re: No surprise here - It is DRM that increases piracy

Hmmm, can't help noticing that 8 and 13-17 onwards only apply to hardcopy books. And this is ignoring that number of tasks!=cost. I imagine distributing a million books and the markup required by bricks and mortar stores is one most significant costs.

Of course the big thing that isn't mentioned is second hand - all big readers I know buy books second hand then sell/donate them on. Many paperbacks probably go through at least 2-3 people this way. With ebooks that's not a problem though.

Did your iPhone 'just stop working' - or did you drop it in your BEER?

They've done this for ages, haven't they?

If you've had the misfortune to drop a ipod in a pond, you can see something has gone red at the bottom of the headphone socket. At least someone told me this after I dropped mine in a pond, and there was something red there but I hadn't checked before.

Kim Dotcom resists password grab

Privacy?

"was violating privacy on a massive scale."

Should that read "was violating copyright" or "committing piracy", or have I completely misunderstood this case?

UK crime-busters knock hiphop site off the Internet

Hoax?

Any confirmation apart from the website itself?

Sounds too over the top to be genuine. Why tell people you're recording IP addresses. And I don't think SOCA have been involved in copyright take downs before, and it's hard to see how it fits into it's remit. Probably chosen because it sound like SOPA.

Nothing on the SOCA website (although wouldn't necessarily be anyway).

Hackers may be able to 'outwit' online banking security devices

Missed the key point

On Barclay's, they may be able to log in to your account, but they won't be able to withdraw any money, unless they somehow trick the user into entering account number/amount and PIN into the PIN sentry device.

You need to authorise a log in, AND authorise a payment to someone you haven't paid before.

They'll still be able to see your account activity/statements, which they could probably use in combination with the other information they have to do something bad.

They could also make a nuisance of themselves transferring money to people you've made transfers to in the past.

Amazon's Kindle Fire burns iPad momentum

iPad general purpose?

"but their usage models are different. The Kindle Fire is a loss-leading gateway into Amazon's content trove, while the iPad is a more general-purpose device."

Well, the Fire has web browsing which is about 90% of what the iPad is used for from what I've seen.

Is Amazon going to cripple the Fire to the extent it will be worse for productivity than the iPad? I imagine you'll be able to share files between different apps, for a start.

Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

Credibility

...sort of goes out the window when something like this is written:

"Why not use Go, the language Ken Thompson helped develop? Or something like it? Or less ambitiously, why not use Gtk and build on it, much as Nokia did with Maemo/Meego? You may have heard of one or two of these."

Go's entire reason for existence is for the cloud - high performance, concurrent stuff. Not a good match for mobile computing. And suggesting that a new language would have been better seems to ignore the key factor that determines a platforms success.

Gtk's problems have already been mentioned.

And finally, holding up Maemo/Meego as a success that google should have copied is just weird.

Most of the article is good, but that paragraph undermines it's credibility.

Google admits Android 'both open and closed'

Has any platform vendor done differently?

The story suggests that Google's actions are somewhat scandalous.

But apart from the pre-release hype about Android being an "Open" OS (open being a phrase the Reg itself has argued is meaningless), it's very hard to see what Google has done that is worth complaining about.

Yes, Google are exerting control over the platform. So has every other platform vendor in existence.

If Google were charging a license fee and never releasing the source code, would that be better?

Game stocks shops with Tesco 3DS consoles

Not as Crazy as CeX

Who for a short while were offering to buy 3DSs for £215 - about £28 more than Tesco were selling them (at the time). They stopped doing it pretty quickly.

Evidence here http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2011/03/26/make-sense-of-this-for-me/

It looks like the retail shops have all been anticipating a big sell out like the PS2 slim or the Wii and were hoping to move in on the enterprising eBay sellers who made a good profit out of it.

Which seems to show they are a bit out of touch - while there are plenty of fans willing to queue up on launch day, the online buzz has been pretty muted (too expensive, only a gimicky upgrade from the DS, battery life not good enough, no good games). It's not surprising that most shops still have plenty in stock.

Without Meyer, what will AMD do next?

ATI mobile

Seems a bit of an oversight to have not mentioned AMD selling off ATIs mobile graphics division to Qualcomm at the beginning of 2009.

Perfect example of AMD balancing the books but missing where the market was going.

The forgotten, fat generation of Mac Portables

Not RISC

The Motorola 68k wasn't RISC, although it was considered a fairly clean design by CISC standards. No pipelining though, so at least 4 cycles per instruction. Can't find any hard figures on clocks-per-instruction for something like a 386 chip. I suspect a 68k might do better, but then again it was quite an old design by this point, so maybe not.

Vodafone upsets customers with upgrade downgrade

Do what I've just done

Got bored waiting for T-mobile to ship me a Desire for my upgrade, so went into Carphone warehouse and did my upgrade through them. Slightly different deal, but I get the benefit of an unlocked and unbranded phone. And I got it in my lunch hour.

Beeb deletes iPlayer app from iPhone

Try the S60 iPlayer App

The BBC isn't bound by content providers to only allow streaming. On my Nokia 5800 and presumable other S60 phones, the BBC iplayer app allows me to download and watch content at a later point. The media is still timed locked - and the only reason I can think a similar function hasn't been put on the iphone is it doesn't support the DRM the beeb want to use.

Nexus One bits and bobs cost $174

Broadcomm is not Qualcomm

The Bluetooth chip is Broadcomm part. Bluetooth is one radio technology Qualcomm don't seem to be very successful with.

Qualcomm will also be taking a % of the wholesale price for their patents too. They're doing well out of it.