* Posts by Uplink

194 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2010

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

Uplink

Choose your appeal and thus success

Camelia is a nice, pleasant name, and it can draw people in via the sexual-emotional route.

Raku can bury the language.

Technical merits? They don't matter that much. Would you rather tell people that you do Camelia or Raku? Sounds to me like I'd rather admin to writing Perl than Raku.

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

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Penalising loyal customers - helps competition?

Regarding that super-complaint:

I'm not in any way an expert in economic competition, but doesn't this "penalty" help competition (when people switch frequently), while removing it can create a few big players because people are too comfy to switch or "haggle"?

(It's not really haggling. It's just asking "I can haz discount?" They already have a list of approved discounts on their wall for those who ask)

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If they have discounts available they'll give them to you if you ask. If not, they won't

Sometimes haggling is immediate, other times it takes them 3 days to get back to you.

This time around I didn't need to haggle with Vodafone. They were happy to "upgrade" me from my old plan (30 quid/month) to a new 18 month contract at the same speed (the maximum available on VDSL), plus a new router (23 quid/month list price). There was Sky cheaper by one pound, but I didn't think it was worth it to switch just for that.

But in the past I got Virgin to give me a kicker of a deal by rejecting all their discounted offers that were undercut by regular providers. They came back with an offer I just couldn't turn down: more speed, less cost than everyone on the market at that point.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

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Kensington lock steel cables to be provided in coffee shops

It looks like coffee shops should start providing ready-to-use Kensington lock steel cables.

It should be already built into the table so you can just lock your computer when you sit down, without fondling with your own. These shouldn't necessarily need a key, as they're not supposed to be used to leave your laptop unattended, but to slow down any theft attempt enough to headbutt the douche.

A knob that can be pushed once to lock but needs to be twisted three times to unlock could do the trick.

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

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One way?

OK, so you use lights to transmit data to the devices, which presumably will get quite of bit of the data through reflections. How do the devices send the data back to the light fixture? Signal shadows/eclipses are a lot more likely when you're hunched over your laptop.

I have this feeling we'll get a "dongle" that sticks out so it can see the light bulb.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

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Re: Outlaws

(going offtopic here)

Oh, this epiphany just in: if only outlaws have guns, then the end result is that unless there are many outlaws out there then the number of guns on the streets will dramatically reduce, and so will gun crime as now guns and bullets are a luxury.

I wonder what the gun nut counter-argument is to this logic (besides yelling "2nd amendment!", which is a right, not an obligation, and can be withdrawn if the people agree).

Not the same could be said about outlawing encryption though. The outlaws with encryption might get even more empowered compared to the ones with guns.

Uplink

I have a solution

Mr Barr,

Just have the apps send the messages twice: once encrypted end to end - to keep the regular hackers away, and once encrypted with government keys - to keep the government hackers in the loop. It won't be a secret that you are spying on people, but that's not important.

Keep the government keys in a secure offline vault, under armed guard. Log everyone who checks them out, and the warrant that allows them to do so. Only allow the keys to be used inside the secure facility on a network that isn't connected to the Internet (although you're allowed to use VPN to scale out around the country).

Everyone entering and exiting the facility will have to get butt naked and get every orifice check both going in and going out. Only authorised devices past this point.

Impose fines on anybody who doesn't have this simple^W very complicated and very well thought backdoor in their app.

Possible bug: there's no guarantee that the message encrypted with the government key is the same as the one encrypted end-to-end, and no way to check either.

That will be $10M plus relevant taxes. Thank you.

An Armchair Internet Security Contractor

Brexit? HP Inc laughs in the face of Brexit! Hard or soft, PC maker claims it's 'no significant risk'

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Translation

"We think our competition will get shafted enough that we can use our current level of operations to fill the gap left by them when they go bankrupt". Brexit will be just fine...

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

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I had a laptop where Fn+C would disable the touchpad.

I use the Linux Terminal a lot, I touch type, and Fn was next to Ctrl. It took me ages to understand what was happening.

This is grim, Vim and Neovim: Opening this crafty file in your editor may pwn your box. Patch now if not already

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What took so long?

I remember reading a very long time ago the article that said Debian disabled mode lines because they could be used to execute arbitrary commands just by opening a file. That annoyed me, because it disabled all the other nice stuff modelines provide: setting the spacing and filetype for syntax highlighting was very useful.

March 2020: When you lucky, lucky Brits will have a legal right to a minimum of... 10Mbps

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Re: Unfair comparison

Well, BT is leaving money on the table for the likes of G.Network and Hyperoptic who've been digging around central London for at a while now. Their prices aren't too bad (for London) either.

It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware

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Removing the infection

The article doesn't even touch on how to remove the infection, so while I'm not a security expert by any means, I'll wager an educated guess*:

- Option 1: If it's just in-memory, open the task manager and swipe WhatsApp away, or reboot your phone.

- Option 2: If it does save a patch to the binary and it's not caught by integrity checks, just update it from Google Play, because the sandbox will be cleaned and replaced, wiping the malware in the processes.

How did I do? Am I even close?

* I'm making an ass of u and me here, hoping they didn't find a privilege escalation bug in Android itself to break out of the sandbox and persist a rootkit.

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

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Underground Wi-Fi made up

The article is funny, but...

"At each station en route, the free Wi-Fi becomes available again. Welcome. Cookies. Email. Policies. VPN. Tunnel. Bollocks, I'll have to wait until the next stop."

What are you on about? Did they change things since I've last been in Zone 1?

Once you log in at one station at all the others you either just connect (but it can take a while to get an IP, so you might not get anything done before the train moves again), or you get an interstitial and you have to remember what page you were on. If you travel often enough they don't even log you out.

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

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Expired licence checked only at startup

Expired licence checked only at startup? Sounds like a job for turning back the clock, starting the software, and putting the clock forward again. Mighht be able to get away with a LD_PRELOAD that overrides the time functions (for the first call, or first minute, enough to time to validate the licence) just for that process if the temporary time displacement might affect the other software negatively.

Pants-purveyor in plea for popularity: It's not just any pork push... it's an M&S 'love sausage'

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Re: missed opportunity

They used two eggs in the picture, probably thinking they've dodged a bullet, but the word for "eggs" is used to refer to testes in Romanian, so it's funnier in East EU.

Mobile network Three UK's customer details exposed in homepage blunder

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Three's logs aren't so great

If their website logs are as good as their PAYG balance logs, then good luck.

Here's my train of thought:

I asked them where 24p went, since I never really spend anything* except for a monthly Internet add-on. I topped up 5, I spent the 5 on the add-on, so it's zero sum. They came back with this: I topped up 5 pounds, then spent 0.24 on buying a Internet add-on, and that's why I have 4.76 credit.

Given that it costs 3p/min to call a foreign country, and the nice fit of that in 0.24, I think I know where the money went, but they were unable to tell me.

*My setup: Android phone. Ye olde 3Pay plan. Prefixer app configured to use 18185 via their 0800 number for most calls. Voicemail using Instavoice, with a double redirect through a "Pay as you go on Three" SIM to reduce costs. Why the complicated setup? Because I get 2GB for 5 pounds on 3Pay, and that's not available on the new plan or anywhere else.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

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Remind me of my childhood

I was about 13 or 14. There was a programming competition at another school, and all the computers were booted from a Novell server. I never found out what the problem was, but my compulsive saving of my work kept bringing it the server down. When that happened, my work was saved, but all the others lost theirs. After a few crashes like that, we were basically begged to stop saving (I don't think they ever knew it was just me). It was weird, because it was the old days of DOS and Turbo Pascal, so it wasn't like I was saving seven YouTubes per second.

Unbreakable smart lock devastated to discover screwdrivers exist

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It happens with old school locks too

My front door's dumb locks were installed with the screws on the outside for some reason and nobody who lived in the property before me noticed. And I only noticed because I went to change the cylinders.

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

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Tesco, but without the murder

This sounds a lot like my Tesco Clubcard customer services experience before they updated their website a few years back.

There was a cookie that was messing up the server if I logged in using the correct page, and I was getting Internal Server Error until I cleared cookies. Clearing the cookies and logging in would land me back the Internal Server Error message.

Logging in via Tesco Direct to view my Clubcard took me via a beta version of the site, and that worked just fine.

Tried explaining this to CS, to get a bug reported. That's all I wanted: report a bug to whoever is working on this in India. I ended up with an inconsistently deleted account instead. Yep, I had Schrodinger's Tesco Clubcard - both registered and not registered at the same time. They fixed this too, and now I had a shiny brand new account, but the problem didn't go away.

I did exasperate the CS representative and had to get passed to somebody else, but I didn't need to drive my car to the woods.

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

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Re: Typed 'Reboot' where ... ?

apt-get install molly-guard

Then you get asked: "you want to reboot what?"

Gits club GitHub code tub with record-breaking 1.35Tbps DDoS drub

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Holmes

Re: If you were a chef...

"Who are these dumb-f**ks who expose private infrastructure to the internet anyway?"

Everybody who wants to run a business online but knows fuck all about computers. Individuals or small groups of individuals who want to make money, but not hire IT experts or learn stuff themselves. Or they hire IT "experts", with quotes included, who throw up a WordPress with a Memcached plugin (for performance or something), take the money and go.

I had an epiphany about such a scenario quite recently. My software developer veil is preventing me from even thinking of lots of things "normal" people do without blinking (e.g. write your e-learning content in PowerPoint and attempt to put that online by "embedding" it in WordPress because it works on your computer like that).

Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs have nasty hyper-threading bug

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Kaby Lake and can't disable HT

I happen to have a rather nice* Dell XPS 8920 at work. Last BIOS is from March. There's no option to disable HyperThreading.

So far the only things crashing on me are PulseAudio and bluetoothd, and I have no idea if they crash because of this bug or just because there are bugs that need to be ironed out in drivers or the software.

*It's nice after putting up a good fight when I installed Ubuntu on it. I had to mix and match many Internet forum posts in order to win the battle.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

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Re: @miscellaneous

"It's open source. Quit whining about it and make it possible."

Absolutely - if I had the skills for text integrated with language parsers. Alas, I do not. I fail miserably at that particular topic. I do have something else in mind*, and if I ever get it to MVP stage I'll come here to brag about it.

*What do I have in mind? Something "data-first" based on my need at one point to DRY up my development process regarding data structure design in Symfony with Doctrine while using Doctrine Migrations. I currently suck at GUI and I'll have to get over that hurdle before I can even make an interactive mockup in a browser. It's a steep learning curve (for me), but it will click at some point like every other steep learning curve did before.

Uplink

Re: Code-aware editor and diffs would be nice

I do use 'diff -w' when I want to look at a diff that has a block with changed indentation, but if I removed a line that line is shown with its original indentation. A tool that can detect indentation changes could show the deleted line in the context of the changed indentation so my eyes don't go off the rails when those deleted lines are encountered - especially if there's a lot of missing context because the deleted line and the indented context are far apart.

Uplink

Code-aware editor and diffs would be nice

I would love if we could take a step into the future and edit code however the heck we like.

I would like the editor to have a "presentation" mode where it shows the code as I want it formatted, and a "storage" mode where the code is saved in a standardised format.

I would like diff tools to ignore white space changes while also taking into account rescoping of blocks of code. E.g. I indent a block to b included in a for loop. I'd like the diff to show the block with its new indentation but only tell me that the surrounding for loop was added, not that all of it was deleted and replaced with th same code and some extra indentation.

The stored code could even be in a format that is hard to edit with vim and is not comparable with diff - as long as the language-specific editor does the above right.

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

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Unity gave almost all of the screen to me

I'm a Unity user mainly because besides the top bar it gives the rest of the screen real estate to me. The menus go in the title bar, and I maximise pretty much all my windows. I don't get a bunch of OS UI eating in the space where the apps already eat some more with tabs and their own toolbars. My second option after Unity for this purpose is Cairo Dock - but it's still not quite Unity. Couldn't find a third option.

LastPass now supports 2FA auth, completely undermines 2FA auth

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Re: Better alternatives...

KeeWeb.info is mentioned as an unendorsed alternative implementation on the KeePass website. If it's a nice UI you are after, that one looks quite nice.

'Password rules are bullsh*t!' Stackoverflow Jeff's rage overflows

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NoPassword

I saw something that, while slightly inconvenient, could work well if the SMTP infrastructure is fixed to always use encryption between servers:

Single use limited validity login link sent to your email address

There's no password for the service itself, there's no FacegleIn OAUTH exchange, you can use any email provider you like without being locked in. All you have to do is protect your email account with a strong password and 2FA.

Amazon blackhole?

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As the situation develops it appears to be a Virgin Media issue. Amazon might just be a large target among many. Hurray, my company is on Virgin Media and our stuff is on Amazon...

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Amazon blackhole?

The whole of Amazon (shop, AWS) seems to have become unreacheable in the last hour or so in the UK (people report that using a VPN they can reach it). It would be nice if somebody found out what happened and wrote an article about it.

GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail

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Wipey

YP.... Wipey... He'll never outrun his name now.

Programmer finds way to liberate ransomware'd Google Smart TVs

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Which keys again?

So is it channel down or volume down? The guy reads "channel down" and then says "volume down" when he goes to the TV.

I don't have one of these, but I SO HATE IT WHEN THE INTERNET DOES THIS!

Hololens for biz shocker: Surprisingly, it doesn't totally suck

Uplink

The ultimate portable, wearable computer

Imagine a person travelling by train. They're sitting at one of those shared tables. They wear a Hololens. You're watching the creepiest thing ever: They seem to be typing on the table... but there's no keyboard... and they's moving a mouse that isn't there.

This is what's happening: A full computer in their headset. Holographic monitor, keyboard, mouse.

No need to unpack anything, no worries that some fellow passenger will spill your drink on your laptop when the train rocks to the side too hard. You can add and remove monitors as needed, or even extra virtual computers (running different operating systems too).

Imagine: Coding on your multi-monitor setup, on the train, without having to carry or spread out a full lab worth of equipment.

Add this little printer: http://www.zutalabs.com/ and a stack of A4 sheets of paper and the world is your office.

The only things that I can't figure out how to do are: 1. how to receive mail; 2. get a bank account; 3. car registration, insurance and tax (should you prefer an RV to the train), in a nomad-friendly way.

EE looks at its call charges, hikes a bunch, walks off giggling

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Re: EE and PAYG vermin

"Solution; keep EE existing number on locked iPhone for incoming calls. Put 3 Network SIMM in second phone for outgoing"

Have you thought about unlocking the phone (call EE; they want £8.99 to do this) and porting your EE number to Three? It sounds like just the thing you need.

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Re: EE and PAYG vermin

"With a second mobile sim that has free 0800 numbers"

All 0800 numbers are free from all UK mobiles since 1 July 2015. http://media.ofcom.org.uk/news/2015/call-charges-clearer-from-wednesday/

I can't believe this isn't common knowledge yet. I keep seeing stuff like "Call 0800 xyz free from your landline, or 0300 xyz free from your mobile." I had a small conversation with somebody who insisted that the 0800 number is not free from mobile, but the 0300 is (it isn't, if you're wondering, unless you have bundled landline minutes). After having this "debate" with the person in question, I found out that some of the leaflets she was handing out (but not all of them) actually said "0800 numbers are free to call from both landlines and mobiles."

Kindle Paperwhites turn Windows 10 PCs into paperweights: Plugging one in 'triggers a BSOD'

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Drivers everywhere

Once I changed my AT power supply to a ATX one. I had to install a driver to make ACPI shutdown work. It told this to a Linux pro, and he quipped thus to a colleague of his: "What did I tell you? One day Windows will need drivers for the case screws too."

Baffled Scots cops call in priest to deal with unruly spirits

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Vertical phone footage or it didn't happen

What? No mobile phone recording? It sounds like there was plenty of time to record an episode of <Whatever ghost-hunting TV show you like>, so where's the reel?

Argos changes 150 easily guessed drop-off system passwords

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Revokable, frequently refreshed credentials

As I was reading the article I crossed it with something I've seen in Tesco: they can log into a till and print a barcode that they can then use to quickly log in and give help without entering any passwords.

While I don't think the Tesco system is much more secure than passwords on post-it notes, it gave me an idea:

What if, when the shift starts, or on demand later in the day, a public/private key pair is generated and the private key is printed as a QR that the employee can add to their badge? The key would have limited validity - say, until the employee checks out, and it would be easily revoked and reissued if lost or stolen.

The floor staff wouldn't need much training beyond "Don't lose it. But if you do, go scan your employee badge on this machine in the back and get a new code." Getting a new QR would invalidate the last QR issued to this employee. While not exactly RSA token secure, it's convenient for the employees and it's better than post-it notes and Password123 as the national password, with the benefit of very frequent password changes.

Cats, dogs starve as web-connected chow chute PetNet plays dead

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I stay away from cloud-only devices

If a device requires a cloud to function, and I can't deploy my own server to replace that cloud, then I'm not buying it no matter how many fela^W cooked breakfasts I get from it.

I mean: I'm fine with requiring a central server to achieve magic, but I want the option to deploy my own with ease.

Software bug costs Citigroup $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

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Pocket change

It's like that time when I got fined 7 pence. Yeah... That never happened and never will.

The Reg Coding competition – 10 times as hard as the last one!

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Re: Some of the specs a missing...

From your set of questions, it's only output EOL that I cannot deduce with total accuracy...

> Is the data file supplied on the command line or will it be present in the same folder as the script?

"[...] read its input from a file called Decathlon.dat and send its input to a file called Decathlon.out."

That looks like "files in the same directory" with the given hardcoded names.

Additionally: "Your program must produce no screen output."

> What is the file encoding of the input and output file? ASCII? ANSI? UTF-x? EBCDIC?

I'd go with ASCII encoding ("letters", "hyphenated"), but UTF-8 would probably work with my code too, as I wouldn't care about what non-space bytes they separate by spaces and tabs. And then the numbers are all in the 7-bit part of ASCII. Who uses ANSI and EBCDIC with Node, Java or Python anyway? That means they're not even options.

> What end of line marker can be expcted? \n \r\n ?

For input I'd just assume \n and treat \r as "whitespace", because the specs allow for trailing whitespace. For output... that's a tricky one, given that "extraneous output will cause an automatic failure".

I'd go with \n for output only because except VB all the others can run on non-Windows platforms (Linux, BSD, Mac) and produce \n EOLs in those environments. They're promoting cloudiness, and they mainly run Linux in there... I also just realised that Swift is Mac-only, so... \n it is then.

> Reagan & REAGAN are the same person? Can we expect a unique key of 1 name per event?

"Names and event abbreviations must be treated as case-insensitive"

"You may assume that there will be no more than one entry in each data set for a given event for a given competitor, and that there will not be more than one competitor with the same name."

That being said... the terms and conditions say "[...] the fastest and most accurate code"... so you if submit something in Python you're guaranteed to not win anything since Java and Swift will just smoke you. Node is fast, but still way behind Java and Swift.

Behold the ROBOT RECTUM... medics' relief

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There's another use for that

Stick in a RealDoll(tm). For a little extra you can have one in each orifice.

Prominent Brit law firm instructed to block Brexit Article 50 trigger

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Re: Bollocks

> So who decides if the notice is "in accordance with its own constitutional requirements"?

Well... I'm thinking that the ECJ would. But if I were a judge* of the ECJ I'd probably look at that article and ask: "What does the UK law / What do the UK courts say?" The ball is then thrown to the UK, where it will probably end up with the Supreme Court - civil track. Then the ECJ will take the ball back and say "The UK Supreme Court says this, so that's that." While that was happening, I would probably issue a stay order on the notification too - which would make Farage pull a Lazarus and come back among us to squeal.

*Disclaimer: I have no legal training beyond watching "The Good Wife" and other stuff like that :)

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Re: Bollocks

> The question is whether the rest of the EU decides article 50 has been invoked and from their point of view, a simple statement is sufficient.

It's that phrase: "in accordance with its own constitutional requirements". If the notification is not given "in accordance with its own constitutional requirements", then it's null and void and they have to try again.

There's no indication what can happen while a legal challenge is under way after a notification (that is later declared void) is served. Will the notification run its course until voided, wasting everybody's time? Will it be suspended until the judicial review finishes? What does the UK law say about such things? Because it's the UK law that declares if the notification is valid, and Article 50 proxies that.

Attention, small biz using Symantec AV: Smash up your PCs, it's the safest thing to do

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Easy

Just market it as a pro-virus solution.

Microsoft releases open source bug-bomb in the rambling house of C

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Re: C is not an applications programming language

<quote> Point is: learn to FREAKING CODE. Don't code like a script kiddie. Don't allow script kiddies to commit code that don't check buffer lengths. that kind of thing.</quote>

And what is one supposed to do before becoming master of the code universe? Most people aren't born "senior coder", and to most of those people coding is just a job - a thing that gives them money; a thing they're looking to get away from everyday and not looking forward to returning the next day if it were not for the money.

Luckily for me, I found out about strcpy vs strncpy while still in school, but that's not mentioned in any classes. You learn srtcpy and then move to the next lesson. strncpy is not mentioned.

Applications also have this property: "we need it yesterday!". Even the most seasoned programmer can easily introduce a off-by-one error. I recently had a go on hackerrank at some C issues and while my algorithm was sane, I made a typo: I sized an array using the wrong variable, so it ended up shorter than intended. That meant that, with all the memory smashing, my code passed 10 out of 12 tests. The two that failed segfaulted. It took me forever before I saw the error and facepalmed.

Samsung: Don't install Windows 10. REALLY

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Re: A$$ Backwards?

The way I understand it, your licence for the previous version isn't revoked when you upgrade. If you're past your easy downgrade month period, go to Microsoft's site and get an ISO for your previous version and go back. You may have to backup/format/restore, but that's what you get if you're past your 30 day post-install period.

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Samsung? There's your problem

When a friend comes to me with a computer/phone problem, I ask them if it's a Samsung off the bat. If it's not, I'll have a look at it, because it's unusual. If it is, I tell them that's their problem, and I can't help them.

'I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer'

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Windows Update 1-5 days

"Checking for Windows 7 updates now can take anywhere from one to five days before the list of updates appears."

Oh, is that it? I thought it got stuck in an infinite loop.

I _wanted_ to update from W7 and W8 to W10 on two machines and bleeping WU would just go around in circles. I went through all the troubleshooting steps MS had to throw at me to no effect, so I ended up installing W10 manually after searching Google to see how it's done. Once on W10 WU worked as expected. Both machines were fresh install of W7 and fresh activation of W8, things I did only as a step towards W10 anyway - which I then deleted to install Linux instead. I just wanted to make sure I get the licence for the machines in case I ever need to upgrade my phone software using an .exe from the manufacturer or other similar stuff I can't do on Linux or OS X.

China's Great Firewall inventor forced to use VPN live on stage to dodge his own creation

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Re: please unplug your modem...

"you only felt safe posting anonymous"

It's quasi-anonymous. El Reg still knows who you are (Anonymous Coward had to log in) and can tell on you to any interested parties. This isn't Slashdot.

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