Posts by phuzz 6732 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
Something along the lines of Password123 is my go-to "I need an initial password to give to the user before they change it" password.
Which of course means it's used as the sole password all over the place. I drove past my old employers recently, and while they've moved offices since I worked for them, it's still the password for their guest wifi.
(Actual password changed to preserve some of my anonymity)
The installer for VLC on Windows is signed (twice actually, sha1 and sha256), and as long as you've not turned off 'SmartScreen', you'll get a warning if the signature isn't trusted. You can also check the sig before running the installer. It's co-signed by "Symantec Time Stamping Services Signer - G4", which may or may not make you feel more secure.
Of course, a nation state might be able to subvert this, but if you've pissed of a country enough that they're creating fake VLC installers just for you, then you should probably not be watching videos right now...
My flatmate is French, and spent a year in Canada. She agrees that Canadians can't actually speak French. Apparently their accent is atrocious, and as this article demonstrates, they have a habit of inventing new words that even L'Académie française thinks are pointless.
Mind you, dare I suggest that the French can be a trifle picky over other people's French speaking? After all, we may not like the way the Americans butcher our language, but at least we don't pretend we can't understand them.
I doubt most people can tell the difference between the audio of a Youtube video, and a CD. I'm sure the streamed version is compressed in all sorts of ways, but unless your computer is plugged into a reall y expensive stereo you're unlikely to notice.
If you can hear the difference, well, sucks to be you, because you're going to have to find a source of quality music, spend loads on separates etc. The rest of us are happy with whatever cheap speakers we have lying around.
"YouTube can automatically and immediately classify a video"
That's kind of the point, they can't do that reliably.
They miss copyrighted material that's been warped slightly*, and on the other side of things, they flag up videos which aren't copyright infringing at all.
Hell, humans have trouble categorising stuff as being about terrorists or freedom fighters**, how do you expect a machine to do any better?
* (for starters, they don't even scan live streams, which is why you see streaming channels like this on youtube playing cartoons all day)
** It depends if you like them or not.
This team aren't working on the "space is really radioactive" problem. Instead, they're working on the "how do we keep people cooped up for years without them killing each other" problem.
Both* need to be solved for humans to go to Mars or the moon, and it makes sense to study them in parallel.
(* and a bunch of other problems)
Well, you know how you decided to save money by buying discount webcams from "Cisko"?
Well, how can I put this, they're all riddled with viruses and currently all of those webcams are mining dogecoin for some Chinese kid in a basement somewhere...
If you ever want to have secrets again, I'd tip every one of those webcams into a landfill. Apart from the one in your boss's office perhaps...
The US DoJ, so that next time they get a warrant for someone's data the can legitimately tell them to do one, rather than dragging it through court for years.
"Holy shit, was that Angelina Jolie?"
You've never watched the majesty that is Hackers? It's one of the best/worst films about, well, hackers, ever made!
The soundtrack is fantastic, and it's got Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller (yes, that's Sickboy with the brolly), who ended up getting married after the film. It's also got the obligatory psuedo VR hacking sequences that every 90's film about computers has to have, oh, and pretty much the first appearance of Wipeout.
"The President's decision to kill the deal had been widely expected since September 1, when the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States advised against approving the merger."
I was expecting him to do the opposite, isn't that what he usually does when he's given good advice?
Also California just banned weed being sold by anything other than a person, so no robot dealers or drone doobies.
Yet again the media are ignoring the real story here:
What's happening with the Wu Tang album?
"I hear the EU got a shock recently when they realised they do rely on our military services"
The main European defence organisation is NATO, and in case you hadn't realised, it's separate from the EU.
There have been plans for military integration across Europe, but they kept getting derailed by one of the member countries, can you guess which country? I'll give you a hint, it's one that wants to leave the EU in 2019...
Agreed, anyone with an interest can convert from UTC to their preferred timezone (of course it's super easy for us Brits for half the year). It would be great if elReg standardised on one timezone for all articles, particularly science ones, and UTC is the obvious choice.
(I can see an argument for using local time for some stories, it makes a difference if someone is going into their office at 3am or 3pm, but it doesn't make much difference to Cassini)
Out of interest, have people getting stuttering problems tried a different web browser (and disabling Flash)?
I used to have lots of problems with iPlayer in Firefox, but it worked fine in Chrome.
(Now it works fine in both under Win10, but my computer is hardly low end, so it's probably not a good example)
"Even if B saves/invests some of their surplus any gains will be taxed"
Right up until they're earning enough to pay an accountant to move their earnings to a company based in a friendly tax haven, so they can stop paying taxes altogether.
Taxation is only a level playing field for the non-rich.
I have some things in Gdrive that i need on my phone (pdfs of tickets etc.), but I don't want all of it on my phone, so being able to pick what's downloaded is useful to me. Equally there's things I need access to at work (like my folder full of useful scripts that I take and repurpose), but I don't need any of the music I have on there.
What happens if you bank calls to tell you you're overdrawn? Mine always has a withheld number, so there's no way to tell who's ringing.
Mind you, I only get about one spam call a month and take great delight in wasting their time, which I assume is why so few of the fuckers try ringing me any more :)
I assume Apple wonn't bothering with Qi, in the same way they've not bothered with a USB charge port like ever single other manufacturer out there.
I don't just mean phone manufacturers either, practically everything I own with a battery in it uses micro USB to charge, but that's not the Apple way.
"Apple's wireless charging is tipped to be incompatible"
And they'll be charging at least £50 for the charging dock which probably won't even come with it's own power supply (and will be incompatible with any power supply you currently own).
Still, someone will queue up all night to buy it, so I guess Apple must be doing something right.
"There is nothing to suggest that pre Oreo devices couldn't be patched"
No one is saying that it's impossible to patch, in fact, that's part of the problem, we know from experience that most Android phones don't get updates for more than a year or so after they're first released.
Personally I'm willing to put up with the occasional flakyness of a custom ROM (Lineage), and so will probably receive a patch for this in the next week or two, but the majority of Android devices out there will never get patched. Despite the fact, as you point out, it's possible to patch older versions of Android.
Oh, and why? Because there's no money in updating an old phone, when you could be selling people new phones.
"Do you really need a few million of the clueless looking head down inside some of those stations?"
They're already looking at their phones, why not give them a nice easy sat-nav type app which tells them exactly where to walk. That way they can point different individuals in different directions, perhaps routing that tourist family on a slightly longer journey so they don't have to get mixed up with all the commuters.
"No homophobia here please. Kindly report to your nearest re-education camp."
Oh AC, you poor sweet soul, when they talk about objects in cavities, they don't mean penises (which, after all, are supposed to fit in another human's body), they're talking about all the random objects that medics have to remove from people after they "slipped and fell".
Actually I guess they might also be talking about removing penises from other objects, like vacuum cleaners.
Chat to someone in an A&E department and you'll be amazed at the number of "naked vacuuming" and "I slipped coming out of the shower and somehow this courgette ended up in my..." type of injuries!
They've been promising to allow non-OSX users to login to multiple accounts from one client for about three years now (when they released it for OSX they said it was 'coming soon' for Linux and Windows).
Aaaaaaaand when I tried to follow the link to the blog post where they announced such functionality:
blog.hipchat.com/2015/06/08/connecting-multiple-accounts-on-hipchat-is-here
it gets redirected to their new Stride announcement.
So no more features for HipChat, and presumably no bug fixes or other upgrades either, how else are they going to get people to 'upgrade'?
I love the long range camera shots they've been getting for the recent landings. You can pretty much watch the stage 1 booster go up, and then come back down.
Here's a good animated one, although this stabilised one is even more impressive.
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