Posts by Microchip

Russia has a stash of scary malware? We're shocked

Re: Talk about non news.

Scott McNealy of Sun iirc.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: Bollocks statistics

I believe it to be an expression of thorough agreement with the previous post, to be followed by further discussion in context. Self importance doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.

Insurance firm Admiral fails to grab phone location data of 'fraud' claimant's mother

Re: A judge suggested checking with the milkman?

Think mine costs me about 70p a pint delivered. It's not as cheap as a supermarket for sure, but saves me driving there, and is fresh from the farm up the road. Keeps my mate's lad in employment as the local milk boy too, and I feel a bit better about the fact it's being transported about a mile instead of the other side of the country or worse.

Also, as per the above comment, it genuinely does seem to taste better.

Element's latest bridge for Matrix: 'All the good stuff from WhatsApp, without the less good Facebook stuff'

We've been trying Matrix/Element at work for the last few months

... as our internal messaging system. The server seems to run alright, but the Element (formerly Riot) client definitely has a rough-around-the-edges feeling. Stupid stuff like the private messages with my boss having a line at the bottom of that chat window claiming there's an unread message from back in May (which there isn't, it just looks ridiculous), and generally feels like a bit of an amateur interface. I completely get that it's hard to write a messaging client, particularly having to deal with lowest-common-denominator features at times, is hard, but it reminds me of the Trillian vs Gaim / Pidgin days - Trillian was a much more polished client, and while Pidgin had more network support technically, a lot of the chat windows ended up looking fairly awful. (To be fair, Pidgin hasn't changed much visually from the GTK2 look, and I'm beginning to prefer the old-school look to the new-school everything-is-flat look.)

Element feels like it's almost there, but not quite, and suffers like many modern "apps" of being a webapp in an Electron wrapper, on the desktop at least. Can't complain too much with it being free and open source, and I'd love to have the time and energy to do a better client, but the overall feeling with having used it for the last several months is "it's okay as a basic setup, and I like the idea of the various bridges, but the client just isn't quite there". (We still haven't got around to setting up bridges at work.) The video chat support has been bolted on via Jitsi, and doesn't quite work correctly around 50% of the time for people. (Jitsi by itself works fine, it's just the Element-hosted version.)

I reckon, realistically, it needs maybe 12 months work minimum before it's polished enough for mass adoption (or a whole bunch of UX/UI developers stepping in and helping out). Been keeping an eye on the project for a while, and every time I've tried it I've sighed and thought "Almost... nearly there." And until the client is pleasant to use and you don't feel like you're having to fight with something clunky, it's going to struggle to get that - likely somewhat of a chicken-and-egg situation.

I've been watching Beeper with interest, by the founder of Pebble, and been on their waiting list for a while - it's not the cheapest at $10 a month, and is an open source custom Matrix setup on the server side with a custom GUI, but it looks a heck of a lot more like what I'd expect from a chat client - very much the difference between Pidgin and Trillian all over again, and it may actually be worth paying to have one client to rule them all, though I suspect much of my issue could be solved with a commercial well-supported properly native (aka non-Electron or other webwrapper) Matrix client. I'd chuck £20-30 as a one-off for that, or a reasonable amount a year to help support its development. £87 a year (at current USD-GBP rates) is a bit on the steep side for Beeper - though probably costing similar amounts to self-hosting your own infrastructure as well as paying for client development.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Re: AWS Infinitent

Heh, it's alright is Huel. Not winning any awards for being exciting, but some flavours are better than others, and it saved me from Greggs and Subway at lunch. With the exception of the coffee one, which I thought was impressively vile.

FCC urges Americans to run internet speed app to counter Big Cable's broadband data fudging

To an extent. Virgin Media over here are known for it. However, you can't make a 0.5mbps DSL line go faster than 0.5mbit, no matter how much you want to fudge the numbers.

They could give full wireline speed and prioritise the packets, so if congestion is the restricting factor it could give an unrealistically higher reported speed compared to normal Internet usage, but my understanding is that a lot of people are stuck with poor DSL connections. The cable providers are much more likely to be able to fudge figures with their higher available bandwidth over DOCSIS, AIUI.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Re: Put your money where your mouth is

According to the the public benefit website, Tsohost are in the GoDaddy fold, who voted against it. There's a lookup tool on there where you can check.

I've had good experience with Namecheap myself, though a friend said they've a rep for hosting spam domains. I figure any sufficiently large registrar probably has issues with that one. *shrug*

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

Re: Name and shame

CNAMEs have legitimate uses too - e.g. shop.domain.com pointing at a hosted shopping system, who's underlying DNS may change on their backend. Just having a CNAME isn't necessarily evidence that you're doing anything untoward.

CNAMEs that point to tracking domains, on the other hand, should indeed be nuked from orbit. I suspect the answer is in-browser resolving/checking and then referencing a blocklist, to avoid throwing babies out with the bathwater.

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

On the plus side...

... this finally gave me the kick up the arse I needed to pull my mail back onto my own servers, instead of hoping and praying it didn't "accidentally vanish", or at the very least, losing access to it. Free grandfathered G-suite is great, but it does mean absolute trust in the system holding it.

Hopefully roll-your-own-antispam is a lot better than I remember it being with manual SpamAssassin and DNSBL setups.

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

Re: If you do not like this ...

Pizza Hut, as few people on this side of the pond knew what Taco Bell was. Complete with some very bad dubbing.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: Bit harsh

Don't think it was contributed, but the CDDL is compatible with the BSD licenses, so people were free to port the code as they wished from OpenSolaris and include it in the BSD distributions.

Epic Games gets itself epically banned, launches epic Fortnite death match with Apple over App Store's epic 30% cut

Re: Deep Pockets

With Tencent behind Epic, they're pretty deep pockets indeed.

OnePlus Nord is surprisingly fixable compared to earlier stablemates, but common repairs require disassembly

There's guides on XDA, and no doubt custom ROMs will follow shortly.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

What really grinds my gears is the poor quality of most Internet quality streams. I'm looking at you, anything by Bauer Media (aka Absolute Radio network etc) and Global Radio last time I checked. They slowly removed their high quality streams, and now don't offer any direct streams other than via proprietary players. (Research may be out of date, I got fed up of looking a while ago.)

Gone are the 320K MP3 and 128K AAC+ streams, now you get 128K MP3 or 48K AAC+. Both are "okay", but surely the slightly higher bandwidth didn't cost much more to give a hugely better listening experience... but maybe I'm just a consumer that happens to like hearing the music, rather than losing half the soundstage to high compression.

DAB+ should have been mandated long ago for digital, and unless it's a talk only station, a minimum bandwidth set. What's the point in having the nice DAB radios in cars if you get crappy mono audio through it?! I'd happily internet stream it instead, but now it seems everything is dropping to the lowest common denominator quality wise, which is sad considering the generally increased bandwidth available to most people.

Absolute (and back when it used to be Virgin Radio) used to be great, you could have a 320K Ogg Vorbis stream if you wanted that sounded brilliant. But they're long dead.

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

Re: General concern

Okay, now I'm feeling targeted :-P

Don't get me wrong though. We've certainly got our pond life here.

Re: General concern

Sorry, you may be confusing us with Yorkshire. ;-)

(All joking and banter aside, sadly I think there's a lot of people out there who genuinely judge by area, just like the caste judgement above. I make a point only to judge people after I've met them, and can make a reasoned and logical assessment that they are, in fact, idiots/bigots/racists/whatever or not. Unfortunately I do see a hell of a lot of racism out there, and it's downright tiring bringing it up with people who've had it bred into them over many generations, and they can't see anything wrong with it.)

DirectX comes to Linux (via WSL2): Microsoft unveils tricks needed to flash a GPU at a penguin

CUDA is coming...

... according to this blog post from MS and this one from nVidia.

Coronavirus didn't hurt UK broadband speeds in March. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, on the other hand...

Re: Call of Duty.

Setting the region to US or Asia fixed it somewhat at the time, as did limiting the download bandwidth. Wondered if it was some sort of weird traffic mangling going on.

Total Eclipse to depart: Open-source software foundation is hopping the pond to Europe

Re: A long time coming

Pretty sure I read somewhere that it evolved from the notation of writing e.g. May 3rd, 2020, which evolved into the numerical form of 05/03/2020.

Unfortunately, it lost the obviousness of order that went with the text, and the dates evolved independently over this side of the pond.

(Personally, I like my dates little endian.)

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Re: In other news....

I seem to remember a nice little addon for Chrome in the same ilk, called "Don't Fuck With Paste". Does what it says on the tin.

'Non-commercial use only'? Oopsie. You can't get much more commercial than a huge digital billboard over Piccadilly

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

DigitalOcean and Namecheap both do free DNS, I assume you have to have a VPS running with DO to get it, but Namecheap's FreeDNS has done me well, and doesn't seem to come with any strings. I assume IP update clients for it are easily available, as the functionality to update it was built-in to my pfSense box.

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

Re: Descent anyone?

Used to play with a Logitech Wingman Extreme. Brilliant game!

You spoke, we didn't listen: Ubiquiti says UniFi routers will beam performance data back to mothership automatically

Re: "In other words, you ain't got no choice."

For business-grade tech, I can't recommend pfSense highly enough. Needs a PC of some sort to run it on though (or a pre-built box, low power ones with AES-NI acceleration work great including VPNs), I run it on low power i5 and i3 boxes myself that I picked up cheap on eBay. Absolutely rock solid, and far easier to work with than the likes of Cisco ASA kit that I've had to deal with in the past.

DD-WRT works reasonably on consumer grade gear with built-in wifi etc though, it can just be a little quirky, especially if you want to do anything semi-advanced (like most Linux systems, get comfy with the command line if you do), though it does have a reasonable amount of power there when it actually works as documented. Do still have a Netgear R7000 AP running DD-WRT at work just for the wifi and a VLAN breakout though, does the job brilliantly, once I'd beaten it into submission for a couple of days to make it function as it was supposed to.

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

Re: KeePass

Definitely does nowadays - at least Keepass 2 does, not sure about the Keepass 1. Specific configurations for a lot of other password managers, along with a generic CSV option.

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

DD-WRT is good, until you come across something that should work and blatantly doesn't - e.g. multiple VLANs split out into multiple WiFi SSIDs - something I ended up head on up against, and it turned out it was a bug in some of the accompanying software on the Linux distribution. It's good until it's not.

Tomato is pretty solid, if a little limited. OpenWRT is the most flexible, but also seems to lack wireless drivers for a lot of common AP hardware, due to binary blob requirements. Shame, as it seems to be the best out of all three, as far as functionality and customisability goes.

Put on your tech specs: Amazon Web Services has joined the Java Community Process

Re: Does this mean....

AdoptOpenJDK has served my needs well, and the OpenJ9 VM is pretty snappy.

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

Could be worse. Could be BlueSoleil.

Backup your files with CrashPlan! Except this file type. No, not that one either. Try again...

Re: Been using rsync.net for this for a while now.

Just storage. If you set up snapshots, with extra for snapshots if needed. As it's ZFS based, it only occupies as much extra space as an incremental backup would from the earliest snapshot on the account. Can set up custom snapshots too, I go dailies plus 4 weeklies.

Re: Crashplan refugees are always welcome at rsync.net ...

Heh, didn't expect to see you jumping on here, it's a personal endorsement of "I use this, it's reliable and does the job well". You've been pretty reliable, and when I've had a problem, you've jumped on it and got it sorted. And you don't bother with fluffy support either, you answer honestly and get stuff done. I don't want something with pretty GUIs, I want stuff to quietly run in the background and not need me to worry about it.

Like people above said - generally boring and reliable. As a backup should be!

Been using rsync.net for this for a while now.

They're not the cheapest, but they've got ZFS snapshots, rsync / sftp access, and have been quite brilliant for keeping my important files and servers backed up, and they've got technical tech support. Also offer a nice little rsync app for Windows for backups. It's no-frills and no bullshit, with geo-redundancy if you want it. I use it to back up our on-site backups to off-site, and it's remarkably easy to retrieve backups from a month ago if you need them. Clearly aimed at technical users, which I suspect would suit most of the readers here...

rsync.net FAQ if you want a nosey.

Another TITSUP* on this lovely Tuesday: Virgin Mobile takes time out to enjoy the sunshine

Re: Roaming is completely knackered.

Yeah, it all generally routes back home unless you get local breakout (which seems to be sadly missing on most networks). But meant they had a core problem somewhere, rather than at the mast end.

Roaming is completely knackered.

A few of us were out in the Netherlands when some of my mates suddenly found they had no data or ability to make or receive calls. Whatever it is, it's not just national infrastructure.

This is not, repeat, not an April Fools' Day joke: 5 UK broadband vendors agree to pay YOU daily rate for fscked internet

Re: About Time!

To be fair, people doing home-based work probably want to be on a business package with a proper SLA.

That said, 25 quid for taking a day off work for an engineer visit... seems like quite the token amount.

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

chmod was what got me, same problem. Cue a good few hours long past midnight manually chmodding enough back to get the system to function, so I could do a proper restore off a known good set of ACLs... never made that particular mistake again!

Big cable trolls big mobile with '10G' trademark application

Intel's key role here is the silicon supporting 10Gbps full duplex DOCSIS networking

Let's hope it goes a little better than the existing Puma-based kit that many poor sods are saddled with in their cable modems.

Sneaky phone apps just about obey the law, still have no trouble guzzling your data, says Which?

Re: Nothing new, nothing will ever change

I remember using EULAlyzer for the purpose years ago. Looks like it's still around.

https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html

Open-source alt-droid wants to know if it's still leaking data to Google

Duplicated effort?

Pretty sure this is what the Replicant (replicant.us) project was trying to do as well. I'm guessing they've made much quicker leaps by going off Lineage and stripping stuff out than rebuilding from scratch though.

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

I always end up with socks from the Sophos booth. They're usually pretty comical to be fair.

Farewell, Android Pay. We hardly tapped you

Limit - or lack thereof

I paid about £280-odd the other week on my car servicing. Don't think there's a contactless limit nowadays on the Android payments, though you may be limited by the bank or merchant. Phone has to be unlocked for the purpose of payment though, obviously.

UK.gov pushes ahead with legal right to 10Mbps

Re: Wet String,...

There were trials years ago for running broadband over the power lines ( http://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/liverpool-to-trial-200-mbps-powerline-broadband-17089?inf_by=5a3a4b1f671db8d9668b4913 ), in a similar vein to how powerline ethernet works, with kit at the substations for sending it over the last mile. They could possibly revive the tech and put a bid in that way, though I'm not sure how viable it became in the end, though other countries have deployed it successfully. It's all about which is cheaper and causes less interference in the end I suppose.

Pickaxe chops cable, KOs UKFast data centre

According to the emails they've been sending out, the incoming supply was unstable, and the gennies failed to sync up properly, and the UPSs ran out of power before the generators could kick in safely.

Phone fatigue takes hold: SIM-onlys now top UK market

Re: The most annoying thing about having a non-contract phone...

It is just a voice call, but routing it over 4G or wifi, then via the network's own call handling setup. It's what phones normally do when we call/get called over 3G or 2G at the moment. To be honest, it's mainly for receiving calls that I use it, as outbound I often use said whatsapp/hangout/telegram etc myself, but unfortunately most non-techs people out there in the real world seem to want to call me on my actual phone number. Yeah, I could mess about with SIP and all that jazz, but my point was that it comes as standard being able to call over 4G and wifi with carrier based phones (or phones with the carrier ROM), but not if you get them independently (or are running the global ROM).

The most annoying thing about having a non-contract phone...

is that without the carrier bloatware, you often don't get access to the better features (e.g. VoLTE, VoWiFi (wifi calling) without seperate apps that may or may not work, access to certain LTE bands (Band 20 800MHz, I'm looking at you Three). And worse, if you've got a phone they don't officially support, you're not going to get them either. I've got a OnePlus 3 that I'm still really happy with, but I'm basically told I'm SOL when it comes to VoLTE. It's supposed to work via their app, but naturally doesn't.

Course, you take the carrier crap, and you end up with lagging updates, apps and services you don't want ("value added"), if it's an option for your phone.

IIRC Three were using "4G Super Voice" as a marketing tool/gimmick that they were using to sell more handsets. I'm hoping the shift towards SIM only will push towards having some sort of standard operating setup with VoLTE/VoWiFi. And maybe all the networks could try testing the generic firmware models on their network and enable the features if they're supported. In their defense, apparently EE do support VoLTE and VoWiFi on the OP3, but I'm not willing to pay a 50-100% premium on my SIM only contract in order to access them.

UK not as keen on mobile wallets as mainland Europe and US

Re: Define "regularly"

"If I am going shopping shopping then I'll grab the wallet - but that's mostly to be allowed to spend over the £30 limit. It's also a good way to limit expenditure, because I can't buy 'big' things without deliberately going out to do so..."

Varies by provider and acceptance, but as far as I'm aware there's no limit on Android Pay transactions with my bank, as opposed to the £30 on the contactless card, according to their T&Cs. A lot of the terminals seem to have £30 as a set limit though.

I initially found this out by paying a food and drink bill for £36 at a pub using my phone without realising, went through without an issue, then went and checked the T&Cs to see if this was normal.

Brace yourselves, Virgin Media prices are going up AGAIN, people

Re: Is this to fund upgrades so they can fix the horrific congestion?

Yeah, I'm currently with a little ISP called Aquiss for the same reasons, costs me more than your mass market providers, but it's pretty solid, and I don't get fobbed off with "turn it off and on again". Mind you, they're also more than happy to tell me when it's my own kit that's the problem, but they're not averse to providing me with all the info I need to fix it myself.

I think it's just the shiny "oooh, 300mbit" that appeals, but the label doesn't match the service, sadly.

Is this to fund upgrades so they can fix the horrific congestion?

Most of my friends in my local area on VM have serious issues with lack of bandwidth every evening, and they're not exactly hammering it, and they continually seem to "review" the issue without fixing it.

Maybe this is to fund the replacement of all those Puma 6 SuperHub 3 boxes that suffer major latency spikes.

Looking at moving home shortly, and was seriously tempted by their 300mbit offering, until I read that it dropped to about 2mbit to 8mbit between 3PM and 11PM and is utterly useless for online gaming. Guess it's VDSL again then...

Ronan Dunne jumps O2 ship

Re: No more interference

Our competitions and mergers authority didn't want it to happen anyway.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/11/cma_petitions_brussels_against_three02_merger/