Posts by DaveyDaveDave

Realistic Brits want at least 3 security steps on bank accounts

I mean, I guess there's some kind of logic there - everyone has their own threshold on the convenience vs. security threshold, but I can only assume this means that you spend a large proportion of your time walking around with not-insignificant amounts of cash in your pockets. I would think that's a far greater risk. Personally, I'm much happier only having a piece of plastic which can be rendered useless in seconds with a phone call than a few days' worth of cash to be stolen, lost, put through the washing machine, etc, etc.

So, you have a card that lets someone withdraw cash from your account, secured with a PIN and yet you are inexplicably angry at the concept of having to have a card that allows someone to buy something in a shop, if they know that same PIN?

Yep, sounds like standard bizarre Register comments tin-foil hat nonsense.

UK gov draws driverless car test zone around M40 corridor

Re: "that buyers of driverless cars"

You know that you basically already can, right? OK, I appreciate that we're not quite at fully-autonomous, but 20 years is a very long time.

Revealed: How Nvidia's 'backseat driver' AI learned to read lips

Re: Facial recognition to start cars...

Are you some kind of spy or gangland boss? I'm really struggling to imagine any other moderately likely scenarios where this would be helpful. If I'm incapacitated, I would very much prefer someone to call me an ambulance, than drive me anywhere. If I'm in immediate danger, then being helped to walk (or dragged if absolutely necessary) away from that danger will be fine.

If I'm missing something obvious, and this would actually be necessary, I imagine there would be some kind of emergency override, like all phones have for calling the emergency services.

Just give up: 123456 is still the world's most popular password

Re: Just get a password manager..

town with a reasonable number of actual bank branches ... statements through the post (look at me go!)

It's like a window into the past! What happens if there's a woolly mammoth on your route to the bank? :D

But yeah, if you do want to give a password manager a whirl, I'd recommend Keepass, if you can put up with the typical un-userfriendly-ness of open source software. You keep the file on your machine, but obviously can choose to share it through whatever means you deem secure, if you want it on multiple machines, and you can use a password and/or key file to give you a bit more security. If you want a paid-for, more user-friendly option, 1Password is pretty good, depending on what platforms you use.

Re: Just get a password manager..

"you don't need dozens of strong passwords if you don't actually use dozens of services"

(how do you do italics?)

A fair point; however, I've just reviewed the contents of my password manager (a great side-benefit, btw, being able to see who I have accounts with, when I created them and when I last changed the password), and can see 299 accounts I've got stored in there, of which (from a very quick scan) at least 50 are for services I'd consider worth securing properly. In there I'm including email accounts, financial providers (bank accounts, mortgage, insurance, pension providers, etc), social networking (OK, not an essential one necessarily, but...), my doctor's appointment booking system (probably nothing sensitive there, but still, worth being careful), mobile phone provider, various subscription services who have my payment details for purposes of their subscription model.

Certainly more than I can remember.

Re: Just get a password manager..

@Martin an gof, pretty much exactly that - one very good password is easy to remember, but individual very good passwords for every account you create online (even if you only come up with a good one for the 'important' sites) is impossible. If you're not using a password manager, you're either re-using passwords or using some 'clever' system you came up with, which is probably trivial to reverse engineer if two or more of your passwords are known. To me, both of those alternatives are far worse (not to mention less convenient) than using a password manager.

Granted, I'm trusting the developer(s) of the password manager not to do something stupid, but both of the alternatives above also rely on trusting all the sites I set up accounts on not to do something stupid, so it's a choice of trusting someone who's specifically interested in security, versus trusting many people who are not.

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

Re: Calm Down

Although it doesn't say it explicitly, the report does say "On April 23, 2015, CGMI finally uploaded to SIAC the data omitted from the 2,382 EBS submissions to the Commission", which to me sounds like the missed data has been submitted. Maybe it's yet to be analysed, and then maybe a fraud case will come out of it, but the implication is that there's currently no suspected naughtiness.

Calm Down

To those of you frothing at the mouth about an evil corporation making a huge profit out of breaking the rules, I suggest you re-read the article and the report. It doesn't say anywhere that anyone made any profit, they just failed to correctly report on a relatively small proportion of trades completed by their customers. That reporting was just used to help the SEC in monitoring and investigating problems. Not reporting it didn't help that monitoring, but it also didn't directly hinder it.

They've also subsequently identified and reported those trades, and the fact that there's no mention of them being problematic presumably means they were run of the mill trades, and it wasn't hiding anything untoward. If there were more to it, there'd be a fraud investigation, not a paltry fine for incorrect reporting.

Google turns to codeless tap factor authenticaton

"to allow staff to login"

What? Are you saying this is a feature only for Google staff to log in to internal systems, as the first couple of paragraphs seem to imply, or that it's something for regular Joe, as the rest of the article (and the fact that you're reporting it at all) seems to imply?

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

April Fool

"ground-breaking technology, developed in Wales"

-- brilliant :)

They're alive! Galileo sats 9 and 10 sending valid signals

"I'm angry because something I don't understand might not be ready for me to not use"

Australian test finds robot essay assessors on par with human teachers

Re: In defence of teachers

I don't think anybody thinks teachers only work while in class. We all know that they have lots of planning and marking to do, because every single teacher feels the need to constantly remind us of the fact.

Those of us who are somewhat less sympathetic would tend to point at the fact that they knew this when they took the job, and they still know it now that they are doing the job, and are entirely within their rights to leave, but they don't. OK, I know lots of teachers do leave, but those who are still teaching but complaining about it clearly aren't leaving. Evidently something about the job (the feeling of pride when little Johnny finally learns to count past 3?) makes the cost/benefit decision mean it's worth staying, for that particular person. Exactly the same way everyone else decides whether or not to stay in their job, in every other walk of life.

Of course, the fact that I've already started seeing my teacher friends on Facebook smugly counting down until their 2 week Christmas holiday, while I have to count myself lucky if I get to leave a bit early on Christmas eve doesn't help me feel any more sympathetic.

Top telematics: Black box helps driver swerve speeding fine

Re: Didn't work for me :(

"I was forced to overtake a police car when he deliberately braked"

I'm struggling to visualise how this forced you to overtake, unless you were driving too fast for the conditions and/or tailgating the police car...

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

Re: Hmm

"If I were to put a pound into the lottery each week, would not my chance of winning a fortune also need to be counted as part of my wealth"

I'm not an economist, but I'm guessing the answer is yes. So your wealth would increase by one thirteen-millionth of the average jackpot (about £5 million-ish?), and decrease by £1. No?

(obviously we'd also need to factor in the other prizes, and odds of winning them, but my point is that statistically you'll lose money on the lottery, so your wealth must decrease with the purchase of a ticket, albeit by slightly less than the cost of the ticket)

Google's driverless car: It'll just block our roads. It's the worst

Re: The Disabled, Sitting at Home

@Kurt Guntheroth: Great post, and thanks for introducing me to the term 'temporarily-able-bodied'. As a temporarily-able-bodied person myself, it made me pause and think about the full implication of what it means. I shall do my best to use the same phrase myself in future.

Re: The Disabled, Sitting at Home

@boltar: No offense, but they'd probably start with a simple Google search, like any other vaguely-capable developer encountering a new problem. If you'd done that, rather than poring through your green screen hexdump, line-by-line (are you a character in an 80's sci-fi film?), you'd have found this as one of your top hits:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind

It features lots of very experienced, blind software engineers, detailing their experiences and advice for practical "modern development" with limited or no vision.

Also, if you find you're starting any statement with the phrase, 'no offense', may I suggest you pause for a moment and re-think the wording of that statement.

For your next privacy panic, look no further than vending machines

Cashpoints?

Wow, the tin-foil hat brigade are really out in force on this one, aren't they?

To everybody going on about how they're going to vandalise the machines to prevent the camera from seeing them: why are you OK with the cameras on every cashpoint? They have far more personal data than your soft drink preference, but none of you seem to be panicking about the Link Network posting your current account balance to Facebook, or extorting you based on the locations that you withdrew cash at, or your companions when you withdrew it.

Is it because banks are all trustworthy, decent organisations that wouldn't dream of screwing over their customers for a few quid? Yeah, that must be it.

EBay, you keep using the word 'SECURITY'. I do not think it means what you think it means

Agreed

Yeah, that is a bit of a fail, but good on you for owning up to it. My Account > Personal Settings > Edit Password, from memory of finding it myself in about 30 seconds earlier today...

Apple MacBook Pro 13in

They're on the side, not the back, and they're not enormously useful, except in the case where you just want to quickly check how much power your battery has without opening the screen - "I'm just popping to the coffee shop to pretend that I'm writing a novel, will I have enough power, or should I take my charger?"

Scottish council muzzles 9-year-old school dinner photo blogger

Re: Utter Disgrace...

Umm. I can name at least two fish and chip shops in the city centre of Edinburgh that sell them. I speak from experience having bought one myself, and inflicted another upon friends.

It was delicious, but one is enough for any lifetime...

Evernote

Re: Forgot to mention.....

How did you manage to post this, if you only register for things that are absolutely essential?

I just managed to export all my notes in about 3 clicks File > Export > HTML. I got a pretty neat little index page that links to individual HTML pages of my notes. Not the broadest set of options for exporting, but certainly useful and pretty trivial...

Greenland glaciers not set to cause disastrous sea level rises - study

Re: Another tiresome fingers-in-the-ears tirade

Glad it's not just me who couldn't make the quote fit the story. It's definitely saying "we don't think the glaciers are going to stop accelerating", right?

Official: Britain staggers into double-dip recession doom

Given the choice, I'd rather have unsustainable cutbacks, than unsustainable growth...

Google Drive stalls on LAUNCH DAY

Re: Point?

Well, Google Drive has the syncing, and gives you 5GB instead of 3. So, by your metrics it's obviously the best, stand-out features or not. (And it does have some stand-out features, try reading the blog post...)

NDS says Beeb's Panorama emails were 'manipulated'

Is it just me, or are both of the images of emails in the article saying the same thing?

From: Thoic

Date: Blah

To: radams@...

Subject: 4u

No?

London ambulances on second try with CommandPoint 999 software

Re: Why is it needed anyway?

Well, I'm going to guess that it might be to do with the fact that they're dealing with more than a few ambulances going to more than a few addresses, each ambulance having more than a few different capabilities, and more than a few different permutations of urgent/semi-urgent/non-urgent casualties with those classifications constantly changing (the guy with a sore toe turns out to have had a heart attack).

And of course, they want to pay their staff as little as possible, and save as much as possible on fuel.

'The new iPad' revealed: Full specs, rumor scorecard

Re: I guess we're pretty gullible

"By the time that happens, you probably won't want to watch House Series 5 anymore"

Good point, I forgot that content has a sell-by date. That's why there are no films more than 5 years old, and photos are entirely useless after the memories have faded.

Re: I guess we're pretty gullible

tl;dr, but for me your first sentence sums up exactly why I wouldn't buy an iDevice. You make the point that it all works, so you're happy to be locked in, but do you really believe that things won't change? That Apple won't go the way of Microsoft / RIM eventually? That something that *just works* better won't come along sooner or later? How will you feel about the hundreds of pounds (it really never occurred to me that you could spend that much on apps) then?

iOnRoad Augmented Driving

Re: @DaveyDaveDave

Really? I've done a lot of motorway driving and never once seen a lorry do this. At least not often enough for it ever to register as some kind of problem.

For a start, the speed limit for an HGV on a dual carriageway or motorway is 60mph and (as I understand it) they don't tend to break the speed limit because their speed is monitored by their tachograph (I could well be wrong here - I'm sure I'll be corrected if I am), so I'm not sure how you'd find yourself in a situation with a lorry overtaking you in the first place, unless you were going along at less than 60mph, which I would argue is far more dangerous than what the lorry is doing.

Of course anyone leaving the road *should* be over in plenty of time, but guess what, people make mistakes. I'm sure you're right that some people do it deliberately, and it's a bit annoying, but really no big deal. If you're driving safely yourself, it's no problem at all to lightly tap the brakes and make space for the other guy to pull in. Try assuming that he's simply made a mistake, and only realised at the last minute that that was the exit he wanted (maybe he's used to going that way to work, but today he's off to his Mum's), rather than assuming that they're all out to save a few seconds at your expense; you'll find that you're much happier for it.

Re: The main safety function is a distance-to-the-car-head warning.

I'm not sure what your point is - are you saying that you'd have preferred him to slow down, forcing you to break the law by overtaking him on the left, just so he could pull in behind you?

How much would it have hurt you to be a little courteous, and just slow down briefly to give the lorry a big enough gap to fit in safely, until he left at the exit? Maybe he shouldn't have tried to overtake you, but have you considered the fact that it could have been a simple mistake? Maybe he usually takes a different exit, or hadn't realised how close he was to the exit that he planned to take, so mistakenly believed that he had plenty of time to make the manoeuvre?

Or, and I suspect that this is closer to the truth, given that you're the sort of person who installs a dashboard cam, you decided to speed up as he was overtaking you, just to be awkward, so you could put your shiny new toy to the test, and then rant about it in the comments section of a completely unrelated news article?

SMS compo firms fined £200k for typosquatting, misleading punters

Re: Re: Re: Eh?

I'll try again:

Do you have some condition that prevents you from making up random strings of 11 digits that are obviously not valid phone numbers?

I've never had 01111111111 rejected.

Re: Eh?

Do you have some condition that prevents you from making up random strings of 11 digits?

StreetView disappears Dutch office tower

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=eqnz

Or - you don't even need Google, just think for 2 seconds - some kind of event that has destroyed lots of buildings, possibly something to do with the letters N-Z. Any closer?

Google drive cloud to rain on Apple, Dropbox parade

Excellent point - that's why I never read the Register. I know that when enough people start reading it, they'll start charging.

When that happens, there's definitely no way I'll be able to go back to not reading the Register, so best never to start.

"...online storage for files that can be accessed from any device with a Wi-Fi connection"

Is that *actually* what you mean, or are you using 'Wi-fi' as some kind of shorthand for 'Internet'? I assume it won't suddenly become unavailable if I plug an ethernet cable into my laptop.

iOS 5 'crashes more apps' than Android

"...one of the plethora of awful Android web browsers crashing."

May I suggest you try one of the good Android web browsers?

Funnily enough, I find that the awful applications I install on any OS crash quite frequently. Some would say that it's one of the defining characteristics of an awful application.

So... you always manually update, that way you can be certain you're not getting any malware, right?

Juror jailed for looking up rape defendant on Google

"being pulled for "overtaking a Police car" while being fully legal annoyed me."

So, presumably you won the case easily, when you appealed the ticket in court?

Punters even more dissatisfied by Virgin Media's package

"Satisfaction with Sky’s customer service was significantly above average"

Really? Unless I'm reading the article wrongly, 64% satisfaction (Sky's score) isn't even "significantly" above the lowest (57%), let alone above the average, which must be higher than 57%.

Either way, if the very best customer service still only satisfies 64% of people, that's a pretty damning indictment. This article suggests that Ofcom are using Sky as some kind of shining example of service that all other companies should aspire to - hopefully that's not the case!

Corning launches can-stand-the-heat Lotus glass for phones

Or better 3.39 x 10^-6 WHAT per degree C

No?

Apple plan to rate shops etc by number of iPhones visiting

Seriously?

Sorting data on slightly different criteria is patent-able?

Also, I can't see how this can work well. If you're in a shop, you probably won't have a GPS signal, so it will only be basing your location on cell towers. I'm pretty sure that isn't accurate enough to pinpoint an individual shop, so does that mean that a butcher's shop next to the Apple shop which is 2 miles away from where I am will end up ranking higher in the search results than the butcher I'm standing outside?

How Apple's Lion won't let you trash documents

Re

Not that big of a deal, huh?

Sony Android tablets in-bound

How much did you pay...

for Firefox...?

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

So... let me get this straight...

You understand the very obvious critical flaw with the idea, but still decided to sign the petition?

Some people really don't deserve a voice...

Google lobbying to make driverless cars legal in Nevada

Title

OK, so you'd pay £x0,000 to buy an automated, mobile 'personal storage space', while AlexH would pay £y00/year to rent one, with an agreement that he has to leave it in good condition when he's finished with it (just like any other rental agreement).

It's slightly less convenient for AlexH (unless he pays extra for the luxury subscription which lets him pre-book a car for whatever time he wants it, or bumps him to the top of the queue). Of course, that wouldn't suit everyone, but - if it was done well - I'm pretty sure that the amount of money you'd save would make you rethink how much you really need to keep your tools and manuals in the car...

As for wasting fuel, the car would presumably always try to go to the closest pickup point after dropping someone off, which, in a city, is probably closer than the parking place you would have eventually found... There would also be much more scope for car sharing, which would surely mean a net saving in the amount of fuel used.

Yeah - I wondered about that...

Could it be that the specific wording of the law says that whoever (or whatever) is in control of a vehicle can't send messages, which might include the car sending feedback to Google, it being in control of itself...?

Not very clear, but that's the only thing I can think that would make sense...

Hurry up mods!

I'm anxious to see what the local tin foil hat brigade have to say on this one :)

Motorola Xoom

"costs substantially more than an iPad"

Umm, try, 'costs the same as an iPad'. It even says so in the article, you didn't need to do your own research...

32GB, 3G iPad2 = £579

Also, when you say that 7in is a "more practical size", what do you actually mean? You'd still struggle to fit that in most pockets, so you need a bag, in which case you might as well have a larger screen.