Posts by Phil W

Microsoft CEO shortlist claim: It's just Elop, Bates, Mulally, Nadella and...

Re: Choices choices choices

"can it really get any worse anyway ?"

Yes, by Elop getting it. Compare track records.

Ballmer while not actually causing much success at Microsoft hasn't actually overseen any complete failures either (Windows 8 doesn't count, some people like it and Server 2012 is good). The company is still intact and profitable.

Elop wasn't especially successful at Microsoft the first time round, and his time at Nokia spelled the end of it's most major division.

Keeping the boat afloat, but staying still.

OR

Deciding the boat doesn't need a hull and throwing bits of it away, and insisting you were right as it sinks.

Forget 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' - how does its rival from EA stack up?

console vs PC

"Why not get the superior experience that the PS4, Xbox One or a top-spec PC will most certainly provide?"

Why not? Simple really, playing an FPS game with a controller pad instead of a keyboard and mouse is rather like having sex while wearing 3 duffle coats. Clumsy, unnatural and imprecise.

Adobe users' purloined passwords were pathetic

Re: I don't get it...

Actually some people do....Adobe didn't but they did store their user passwords in a reversably encrypted way along with password hints.

Please see the relevant xkcd strip and its explain page.

http://xkcd.com/1286/

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1286

Ever been asked fro your Facebook password ?

Legality

IANAL but I would of thought giving someone else your Facebook password ( or any other credentials to a computer system) was actually against the law, under Computer Misuse act.

Your Facebook account is a set of credentials for your own use on a private companies service. Certainly it is a service that allows you to make information public, but the account and the equipment it runs on belong to a third party, and your access to it is at their discretion.

Giving your details to another person without the permission of Facebook would constitute you facilitating unauthorised access to Facebook's systems, and your prospective employers use of said credentials would be unauthorised access itself.

In fact (and even more IANAL here), isn't asking someone to commit a crime for you actually a crime of solicitation? Possibly even blackmail if the situation is actually "commit this crime or we won't employ you".

If I were asked to handover passwords to any systems the person asking did not own, be it a service like Facebook or a more private system, I would refuse to do so on the above grounds.

UK.gov open to hiring ex-con hackers for cyber reserves

Re: Computer misue act ?

"Does doing it while working for the government make it OK ?"

Short answer, yes.

"This is different from going to war and killing people while you do it."

No not really it isn't.

Troops can be on patrol defending an area without being at war, and these "cyber troops" will be conducting defence as well as offense.

Equally, if those troops on a defence patrol see a horde of people with guns coming toward them they aren't going to wait for a government debate on whether to get into a fight or not. They will neutralise the immediate threat, identify the origin of the attack and then wait for higher ups to decide whether to retaliate further.

I see the same happening with the cyber warfare unit. A cyber attack is initiated against some UK based thing, the cyber unit counters and neutralises the source of the attack and passes on details to higher ups. They may then get ordered to carry out an attack against the known perpetrators.

Re: Hiring convicted hackers

I don't think they're necessarily hiring them because of the knowledge and skills they have now, more because they have demonstrated an understanding of the field and can be trained to be better at it.

Not to mention being sufficiently interested in the field to risk going to jail for it.

Ofcom, it's WAR! Mobe networks fire broadside over 2G spectrum pricing

Re: Comeuppance

Regardless of who is at fault, I don't think it counts as being screwed by fine print, when you're a large national (in some cases multi-national) corporation who employees lawyers to read the fine print.

As pointed out in the article, they all knew this was coming years in advance.

Multipath TCP: Siri's new toy isn't a game-changer

Re: TCP/IP has been multi-path from the git-go.

With regards to having wired and WiFi on a Windows machine at the same time....

If you go into control panel to where you see your list of network adapters (not describing the path because it varies by Windows version) then go to the advanced menu (alt and N if you can't see the menu) and then Advanced Settings, you can see the list of connections and the order they are used in. Priority is top down, so the connection at the top is used first if connected.

Presumably a similar option exists on Macs and *nix OSs though I'm not sure of what/where off hand.

Re: @Phil W (was@ Eugene Crosser (was: TCP/IP has been multi-path from the git-go.))

Ummm no. Just no.

Admittedly there are certain situations where the OSI model isn't accurate or doesn't apply, but it is still the fundamental core of networking particularly TCP/IP based networking (which is the majority of all networking).

It is particularly relevant when comparing TCP an Multipath TCP. If you don't see how I suggest you go and get some education/training. I'd suggest a CCNA, but frankly it sounds like you may need to start out a little more basic than that.

Re: @ Eugene Crosser (was: TCP/IP has been multi-path from the git-go.)

I suspect some people here are missing the fundamental difference between an application managing multiple single TCP sessions in software and treating them as one, and actual Multipath TCP in the network stack on the OS presenting a single stream up the stack.

The functional difference is like you putting a conversation together from hand written letters and e-mails that are all intermingled, and someone doing this for you and presenting you with the completed conversation.

In the first case you (the application, or essentially anything above Layer 5 in the OSI model), know who the data came from and that the data has come to you via different routes and you also have to reassemble to the data in the right order.

In the second case you just get handed a complete data set and you know who it's from, but don't necessarily know or even need to know how it got to you.

Asus NV550JV 15.6in full HD notebook - the one we didn't have to send back

Missing ports

Where is the BNC 10BASE2 ThinEthernet connector? How am I supposed to connect this to my network!?!

Virgin Media gives TiVo users access to Netflix

Re: Android App

Both "RCX for TiVo" and "Network Remote for TiVo" worked last time I tried. Perhaps it varies by hardware revision and firmware version.

Re: Android App

While you are correct that Virgin don't have a working app for this I'm not sure why you've resorted to paying? There are several free Android apps for this that work just fine.

Your statement doesn't seem to make an awful lot of sense, may it's just me?

If you don't have time to watch tv much, then why do you have a paid subscription to Virgin Media with a TiVo box? (which costs significantly more than a Netflix subscription).

I watch a fair amount of TV, both through VM and with Netflix on using my Blu-Ray player's smart features, as I rarely actually use it to play discs this is potentially a helpful move to me.

Nasty BOFHses. It burns us! It burns...

Also why is it not prefixed with "BOFH:" as is usual practicr?

Barnes & Noble booked for running out of £29 Nooks

In all fairness...

...I don't think anyone has ever discounted a truely similar product by such a significant amount before so there really isn't anything they could of compared to.

Assuming the figures in the article are correct, perhaps 10 to 20 times normal sales was a bit conservative, but even if they had estimated 50-60 times normal sales it would only have been half the actual response.

Microsoft shoehorns Skype into Outlook.com - we quickly kick the tyres

Re: "one has to wonder"

As I understand it this can sort of be done already, by having some on premises Lync servers, connected to Office 365 externally and a SIP-PSTN gateway internally.

Though why you would do that rather than doing a full Lync on-premises deployment with a SIP-PSTN gateway I'm not sure.

Cost difference perhaps.

Bitcoin blitzkreig as Germans prepare to tax virtual currency

Paid in kind

Next thing you know they'll be taxing charities based on how much they help people, as it is payment in kindness

Joke Alert, although I wouldn't be that shocked to see it actually happen.

'But we like 1 Direction!' Rock gods The Who fend off teen Twitter hate mob

"Directioners" describe One Direction

"WE SPENT HOURS GETTING THIS SONG TO NUMBER 1 IN TURDY SEVEN COUNTRIES, TOUCH IT AND YOU DIE"

Turdy? Like the 'music' that they produce?

OWN GOAL! 100s of websites blocked after UK Premier League drops ball

Re: My attempt at a poor analogy

Isn't it more like posting naked pictures of yourself to your girlfriend/boyfriend at the house they share, but not bothering to put a name on the envelope? Thus exposing yourself (and your massive stupidity) to all the people at that address, and probably everyone they know.

Outcome deeply embarrassing for the sender!

PC market hits the ropes, but Lenovo's still standing

Re: Is it Lenovo?

HP and Dell kit isn't inherently bad but with their kit you either get cheap tat or expensive quality. Lenovo generally seem to manage good quality and good price. I have a Dell XPS which is good but wasn't cheap, friends have Inspirons which are pretty poor.

I've had a couple of affordable laptops from Lenovo that were both exceptional spec for their price and built more solidly than any other major brand at anything close to that price point.

I'm writing this post on a Lenovo a2109 Android tablet which again is a fantastic mix of spec/build quality/price.

NSA to world+dog: We're only watching 1.6% of internet, honest

Re: 1.6% and they want to cut jobs...ok.

@MyBackDoor "2,000,000,000 billion internet users"

Have cats,dogs and other animals started using the internet now to, or is it aliens?

Can't be humans, since there aren't 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 people in the world.

MS gets you hooked on Server 2012 Datacenter, jacks up the price for R2

Software Assurance

I would of thought very nearly all of the people who will want/need Datacenter R2 will be SA subscribers anyway so I can't see how this is going to make them all that much cash.

UK plods cuff another bloke in Twitter violence threat probe

Re: Genuine question...

"And presumably you'll have to report yourself and you'll get defenestrated for wasting police time."

Is it not the case that the police have recently prosecuted people for this due them having become aware of it, without the recipient complaining? I thought I had read that this occured, but I may be mistaken.

Genuine question...

...if I have two twitter accounts and I use one to threaten myself with violence on the other, can I be arrested for it?

"Joke Alert" because while this is a genuine question I would like to know the answer to, it's obviously not to be taken seriously.

Google patents swish, swosh, swoosh pattern unlock app swipe

I beleive in both the case of iOS and Android, these slide into camera functions only work with with the "slide to unlock" type locks i.e. the ones that are to stop accidental button pressing rather than providing any security.

This patent on the other hand is for doing it from a security lock screen.

Another neat spin on this would be to have PIN unlock, with multiple PINs where each one unlocks the phone and launches a different app.

Re: THIS IS NOT PATENTABLE

Seems patent worthy to me, especially compared to some of the stuff that does get patented.

It's a method for making an unlock mechanism do something more than just unlock. It get's you to where you want to be after you unlock.

Like a key lock in a door that when turned a particular way also turns on the lights in your house and puts the kettle on.

While it seems obvious it's more the kind of obvious where once you've seen it doesn't seem that innovative, instead of the kind of obvious where everyone had already thought of it but just not bothered to do it/patent it. Also for a nice change, there is no prior art for this, that I've ever seen anyway.

US feds: 'Let's make streaming copyrighted content a FELONY'

Doesn't sound wholly unreasonable to me.

As far as I can tell from the article they're talking about making it a felony to provide the content without permission, not viewing.

This change in law is to prosecute the people actually distributing something they have no right to, which is a refreshing change to the attempts to change the law or use existing law to prosecute the home user who watches the odd movie online illegally/illegitimately because they can't afford to buy it.

Downloading/streaming copyrighted material should be at worst a misdemeanor. Actually making active efforts to host a site to distribute and stream content you don't own rights to is clearly something that should be a proper crime.

The same approach as is/should be (depending on your locale) taken with drugs. Educate the end user, prosecute the distributor.

I fully expect to be downvoted by freetards here of course.

Buy a household 3D printer, it'll pay for itself in months!

Re: Spoon holder...

"I have a spoon holder. It's made of hand."

Dying of laughter over this. Don't know but it's just hilarious.

The FLOATING mobile phone shop on the edge of the Internet

"full size SIM"

I assume by saying that only full size SIMs were on offer you actually mean mini SIMs (2FF size) rather the business card size SIMs (1FF size). The latter, technically speaking, being full size SIMs.

I am curious to know if phones are still produced that take 1FF sized SIMs. I haven't seen one for years.

You're doing WHAT with friends? Zynga sues Bang With Friends maker

Trademarking/Copyrighting "...with friends"

is the attempt of person/organisation with a lack of both social skills and legal knowledge to force people to be friends with them, surely?

Beam me up? Not in the life of this universe

Bandwidth

I may be being stupid/naive here but....

Could you not use a channel larger than 0.5Ghz? or multiple 0.5Ghz channels?

surely a larger channels or more channels = more bandwidth

more bandwidth = faster transmission.

Feel free to point out to me why that doesn't make sense.....

'It's GOOD we stopped selling the iPhone'

Re: Translation

I have no real knowledge of Finnish, but it's rather odd that when you put "perkeleen" and "vittupää" into google translate seperately they come out as "the devil" and "m****rf****r" respectively, but put in together they come out as "f*****g m****rf****r".

Either Finnish as some really odd rules that change the meaning of a word when it's next to another word, or something is wrong with Google Translate. I've no idea which is more likely.

El Reg Playmonaut soars to 113,000ft

Re: What is this CHARM?

Well no, not that. Since umbilical is spelled with a U and CHARM has no Us in it.

Universities teach us a thing or two about BYOD

Re: Security deserves more attention.

"Without BYOD, home access, etc., lecturers wouldn't be able to put in the overtime necessary to make the system work."

Not sure about that. In most UK Universities the academic staff get any devices they need for their work provided to them, so BYOD isn't necessary.

Remote access isn't strictly necessary either, but I admit it does make working a lot easier.

It's quite amusing and also annoying to see people ranting about how much of their tax money goes to paying for UK Universities an their IT provision without the slightest clue as to what the actual answer is.

Since the advent of the student paid tuition fees going to £6-9k a year, the larger proportion of most Universities funds these days do not come from tax payers via government funds, but directly from students via their tuition and accommodation fees*, not to mention the fact that most Universities operate other commercial elements such as professional qualification training, business incubation centers and the leasing of space to private conferences.

Overseas students also provide a good income to Universities, whose attendance is entirely funded by themselves or overseas organisations.

@DavCrav I'm rather puzzled by your statement "By the sound of it you work in a university, so aren't you not in fact a taxpayer after all, but just one of the people scrounging off the state".

As an employ at a Higher Education institution I pay taxes and national insurance just like anyone in the private sector, at the same rates as everyone else.

In what way does my sector of employment make me "not in fact a taxpayer after all"?

*Admittedly this is usually fund the students acquire through the goverment owned Student Loans Company.

Sky News hack of Canoe Man's email in public interest, Ofcom says

Sources of evidence

Illegally obtained by official government/law enforcement personnel = inadmissable

Illegally obtained by anyone else = admissable.

Of course if evidence is anonymously handed to the police, they are not required to try and identify the anonymous source or how that person obtained the evidence. Apart from personal ethics there's nothing to stop police from illegally obtaining evidence and then anonymously submitting it another officer.

As for Sky News not being prosecuted. One presumes they had some compelling reason to believe they would find the information that they did find, and as is said in the article while public interest is not an actual legal defense for the crime in question, prosecuting them for it would be little different from prosecuting someone for breaking into a house where they believed a murder/assault was taking place even if they were right and saved a life.

Gone

Re: Secure OS

Doesn't really make it secure, it could still be affected by malware injected into the portion that runs in RAM. Some of it has to after all, you can't run an interactive OS purely from ROM.

Judge nixes Microsoft SkyDrive name in BSkyB court ruling

Re: Poor choice of name

Also...

Google Drive is Google's cloud storage, again without looking it up it would be logical to think SkyDrive was Sky's

Re: Poor choice of name

Certainly as an IT literate I would look it up. That was not really my point.

My point was that the name alone does not indicate ties to Microsoft in anyway and since Sky is an ISP I would associate it with them if asked on the spot (without opportunity to google it).

Infringement is to do with the immediate association not whether you can look it up with google to figure it out.

If,without prior knowledge of the product or any way to lookup it up, you would associate the brand SkyDrive with Microsoft please explain to me why?

Poor choice of name

As per title, it is a poor choice of name.

I have to say as an IT literate (not to mention an IT worker and sysadmin) I too would point the finger at BSkyB if someone asked who provided the service called "SkyDrive" or "SkyDrive cloud storage".

No Choice but Windows 8?

Re: No Choice but Windows 8?

As suggested either shop in the small business section or buy a non-Dell machine.

Alternatively if you insist on Dell you could:

A. Order it with Windows 8 and then contact Microsoft to exercise your downgrade rates within your Windows licence.

B. Call Dell and ask for exactly what you want. I know people who have had success with this in the past.

Personally I'd recommend buying something other than Dell. Their build quality has gone downhill a bit in the last couple of years.

Toshiba or Asus would be my suggestions.

Virtualisation: Where are my savings?

Re: Savings from virtualisation ..

The problem with third party cloud solutions from an enterprise point of view is control and accountability. When everything goes tits up and the boss/ceo/shareholders ask what went wrong why are all of our services unavailable, the only answer you can give is we don't know the third party we now pay for all of critical services has an outage.

Never underestimate how valuable it is to be able to point the finger at a particilar bit of hardware and say this thing failed in this way this is how and when it will be fixed.

Re: Savings from virtualisation ..

I think perhaps you're confusing third party cloud services with the general idea of virtualisation?

In many cases virtualisation is done with private internal server infrastructure where the organisation owns and maintains it's own hardware platform, which host the virtual servers.

The cost savings largely come from:

1. Reduced power consumption costs, and saved space in data centers, compared to running every service on separate metal-ware.

2. Reduced administration. Template VMs can be quickly deployed when setting up new servers etc.

When it comes to third party cloud hosting though I'd agree with your last statement, it's definitely over-hyped.

Korean doctors: Smartphones really ARE doing your head in

It's a little misleading to say that smartphones and tablets are responsible for this.

Since they're saying that it's down to the type of brain development that results from usage, rather than any kind of biological damage from radiation etc. Then surely it depends on what you are using your mobile devices for?

Using Facebook, Twitter etc, playing a variety of different games and texting probably aren't great.

But what about reading ebooks and using a mobile device for writing up documents?

Using your smartphone for playing location based games like Ingress that get you moving around outside?

I spend many hours a week using my tablet. But I spend a lot of them reading books with the Kindle app. Does this have different effect on brain development than reading dead tree books?

BT engineers - missed appointments

Re: abysmal

Not excusing BT's poor service in any way, obviously crap response you've got.

Just curious though, are you paying for a business package from an ISP? Or just using a normal home internet package?

I wouldn't like to presume, but the majority of home workers that I hear complaining about their internet being off and needing it for work are paying cheap rates for home user connections instead of forking out business rates and getting SLAs from their ISP.

Passphrase vs Masking

P.S.

There is a really obvious way to make fingerprint scanning more secure though I've never seen it implemented.

Have all 10 of your digits registered, then when logging in the system will ask you to submit a random choice of 2 prints. Even if the reader were vulnerable to duplicated prints on tape etc (which as pointed out before is largely a myth, although can be done with the right tools and extreme care), it would be fairly difficult for someone to lift all of your prints reliably.

As TeeCee says, finger print readers are harder to fool than you'd think. Some testing like mythbusters will show you that.

Admittedly some of the built in laptop ones are of poor quality but I would say that rather than being easy to fool they actually fail to read genuine fingers prints far more often than you'd like. But this is down to them being the swipe variety rather than the type that read the whole print at once which are more preferable I think.

Your argument that obfuscation isn't needed since anyone who can see your screen can probably see what you're typing is massively flawed.

You can (and I have on occasion when being watched) type a password with one hand while cover it with the other much as is done when typing in your PIN at an ATM. Also when typing with sufficient speed it will be difficult to track the exact keystrokes.

If it is displayed on my monitor it is quite easy to see what I type as I type it, regardless of how quickly it is done.

The new trend now, though by no means a new concept, is two factor authentication. You may be aware that both Microsoft and Google now offer it via a mobile app for most/all of their web services.

Using two factor authentication, does make password obfuscation and complexity requirements significantly less important but really any environment or system where you can afford to relax security to the point of having your password visible to all is an environment where you don't really need passwords in the first place.

Re: Passphrase vs Masking

I think that using the word compromise when it comes to password policies and security is an immediate fail.

Passwords should be fully masked, the only reason to implement check-to-unmask is on mobile devices where retyping is hugely inconvenient. On a hard keyboarded device retyping is insufficiently inconvenient to make it worth compromising security.

Biometrics are the way forward, there was a time when many laptops came with fingerprint readers but it seems to have gone out of fashion a bit.

It doesn't matter if your password/passphrase is long and complex if you hardly ever have to type it.

Sure the security of fingerprints is compromised if someone cuts off your fingers, but if your data is so important that you need it secured against the removal of your fingers then you should be using 2 or 3 factor authentication anyway.

Brits' HSBC bank cards, net access goes TITSUP

Re: "We are sorry for ANY impact"

It's not psychological or grammatical trickery it's simply the correct phrasing since the problem affected multiple systems and uses of those systems so had different impacts.

Trying to pay for something by card? You couldn't pay and it's a bit embarrassing.

Wanted to transfer money to a savings account? You've lost out on a day's interest.

Wanted to check your balance? Nope can't do that right now.

The scenarios and levels of impact are various so saying 'any impact' is perfectly proper.