Posts by Leeroy

Graphene is actually self-folding origami, proclaim physicists

Crackers

Does anyone else remember the little plastic film fish you used to get in cheap christmas crackers ?

I'm betting bendy fishes v2.0 is going to cost quite a bit more and you will only get them in M&S crackers.

Microsoft wins landmark Irish data slurp warrant case against the US

Well done

Microsoft just got a gold star from me ! Talk about sticking it to the man !

Paper wasps that lie to their mates get a right kicking, research finds

Perhaps

Being poked in the face by a toothpick doesn't sound very nice. Maybe they were so stressed out by the pokey stick they just lost the will to fight.

Detroit Rock(et Fiber) City: Startup brings 10Gb service to Motown

Re: I'd take that.

I'm paying £50 ex Vat for 50 Mb sync service over wifi (big ass antenna and £3k to install) and they have sorted reverse dns properly.

I wish them the best, if they can beat up the big boys over speed and service like my local supplier they will win.

Honey, why are porno apps on your Android?! Er, um, malware did it!

The picture

Where did you get the headline pic from ? I keep thinking of an 80s music video but can't place it grrrrrr.

Brexit-bored Brits back to bashing the bishop after ballot box blues

Wales

Wales is still in !.... the football thing anyway :)

NASCAR team red-flagged by ransomware attack

Millions !

What we did know was that if we didn't get the files back, we would lose years' worth of work, millions of dollars."

A nice tape drive can be had for about £1K, fireproof safe £500 and a monkey to swap them over is essentially free. Maybe next time eh.

Energy companies aren't going to slurp your personal data. Honest

The monitor device

Has a battery compartment for 3 x aaa in the back. They last around 20 minutes if you dare to unplug the thing from the mains.

Nothing more to say really. ..

SpaceX winning streak meets explosive end

RUD

Only Musk could come up with a nice way of saying it crashed and exploded.

Can't fault the achievements of Space X though ! Keep going, I doubt I will ever find this boring !

Judge slams BT for blaming engineer after 7 metre ceiling plunge

Sub contractors

I advised a customer to get BT to complete the data and phone wiring at a new office (they were stuck on contract for 4 more years) including a wall mounted comms cabinet. Around 48 ports over 3 floors with a central 'server room'.

Sub contractor takes 2 weeks to complete the work because they think the customer only needs 30 ish ports ? Wtf was going on in their mind was a mystery to me.

Anyway the BT guy turns up, installs the phone system in the cabinet and it promptly falls off the wall almost killing him and wrecking all the kit inside. BT tried blaming the customer for not having the cabinet fitted properly ? The sub contractor has used one inch plasterboard screws in a brick wall !

The cabinet is now on the floor so it can't fall on anyone else.

In obesity fight, UK’s heavy-handed soda tax beats US' watered-down warning

Re: Yawn

You missed Monster and beer !

England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

Re: Tidal?

Has the Swansea lagoon been canceled, not heard anything about it for ages ?

It looked nice at one point, shame if all that work goes to waste.

Scots denied Saltire emoji

Re: our national animal, the unicorn

Dragon for Wales :) can't believe you missed the best one out !

Re: @ Khaptain our national animal, the unicorn

I though it was the haggis ?

Home Office staff: Over 100 of our work mobiles lost or pinched last year

Obviously

They are all encrypted and have been remote wiped etc.

Or maybe not :/

Geek's Guide to Britain – now a book. Permission to geek out granted

Would you buy the pdf for £5 ?

Take it to any printers and they will probably charge you £10 to booklet print it.

You could anyways DIY but it will probably look crap and fall apart in a week.

Three UK cloudy firms promise CMA they'll be 'fairer' to customers

Re: The heck?

I believe it's called rolling the contract over. I have seen it done a few times to unsuspecting clients.

They go ballistic when they find out they are still paying for something after the initial term and are apparently stuck with the 3 year old kit for another 3 years. Especially when it would be cheaper over the 3 years to replace it with new kit. My best advice to them is to keep complaining and try to piss off the supplier so they can get out of it.

There is only so much I can do to help them but can guarantee that I will contact them before the next 'rollover' date. They throw their toys out of the pram and I have a new customer even if I am slightly more expensive.

Insure against a cyberwhat now? How the heck do we crunch those numbers?

Crime number

Try getting a 'crime number' for an IT attack from the local plod.

They seem to be very careful about their solved crime rate and resist as much as they can to assigning crime numbers to things they haven't got a snowballs chance in hell of prosecuting !

Surrey teen charged over Mumsnet hack attack

Mumsnet

It's as bad as the Jeremy Kyle show from what the Mrs shows me.

1st world problems and all that. ..

60 per cent of Androids exposed by new attack on mediaserver

Av

I'm hoping that Sophos AV protects my users from most of these attacks. Enforced number checking before dial is on as well as app scanning and link blocking etc.

Not had a report of anything being blocked yet so either my users are sensible or sophos is missing the mark.

Fortunately we are due upgrades to new phones from Galaxy S5's in a few months, fingers crossed for an S7 :)

Three UK: Our MMS prices are up. Get around us with WhatsApp or Skype

Re: Can I disable MMS?

On Samsung \ Android you can disable MMS in messages, settings, multimedia and set it to restricted, warn or allow.

Hope it helps :)

Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery

Re: Great article

Great Scott, how many Gigawatts ?

Also great article, we need a facility to up / down vote the article the same way as comments ! This would definitely get an up vote from me.

Woman charged with blowing AU$4.6m overdraft on 'a lot of handbags'

Nice lottery win.

She should have bought herself a small island somewhere and disappeared a bit sooner.

Japan's Hitomi space 'scope bricked, declared lost after software bug

DIO

I wouldn't use DOA as it arrived in orbit as planned. If it had not you could try a warranty return / insurance from the launch provider maybe. .. to get a new one.

Dead In Orbit would probably be better.

5G is looming, but network innovations are needed far more urgently

Can't see this happening

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

Bloody awesome read if you like coke can space ships though !

Furious customers tear into 123-reg after firm's mass deletion woes

Backup

I'm not sure if they offer an unlimited bandwidth vps package but if they do then you should be running an automated backup at least once a week !

I had the same thing happen to me and was backing up the entire Vps every other day. Downtime about 12 hours including phoning every customers and backing up their locally cached email that was outside of the backup window. All I lost was some server logs and sales that may have happened in the downtime. Needless to say the backup is now daily.....

A Logic Named Joe: The 1946 sci-fi short that nailed modern tech

The three body problem

^ was the most recent Sci-fi that I read. Absolutely awesome and keeps you guessing until the last chapter. It's a bit difficult at points especially the VR sequences but well worth the effort.

A bit off topic as it was written in 2006 but if you like Sci-fi give it a go.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem

Dan Kaminsky is an expert on DNS security – and he's saying: Patch right God damn now

CVE-2015-7547

For anyone running WHM \ cpanel the fix was posted a few days ago and takes 30 seconds to implement plus a reboot.

https://forums.cpanel.net/threads/cpanel-security-team-glibc-cve-2015-7547.527651/

I thought this was a new one but checked just in case :)

The paperless office? Don’t talk sheet

Fax to email

Fax to email is probably the biggest saver of paper next to the very expensive equitrac, follow me, secure print, swipe card auth etc.

Dosent matter how hard you try to get people to use the 'fax' printer they still print the thing out, fax it and shred the original....

Like your iPhone, but not enough to touch it? This patent's for you

More

S5 Air view

Kinect

Etc

Microsoft’s Get Windows 10 nagware shows signs of sentience

Re: GWX isn't the problem.

Tried the WSUS thing but have you seen the load it puts on a VM. Sophos patch management is a bit better but meh... I wish they would just gice nice and give a nice easy 'No thanks' button.

Cocky SpaceX will try another sea landing with next rocket launch

X marks the spot

Perhaps a nice regular X would be easier to hit?

Cache-astrophic: Why Valve's Steam store spewed players' private profiles to strangers

Good idea.

At least they had something in place to mitigate the attack that they knew would eventually happen given the past attacks on xbox live etc.

Shame it backfired but as a learning experience I'm guessing others will be using the same cache style system to keep gamers playing so they can ignore the in laws, parents, kids etc

Off topic but got a nice xbox for Christmas from the Mrs. Took an hour to install assassins creed and start playing. Something not right there when you could sick a cd in a ps1 and be playing in less than a minute :/

Facepalm time: MS Office update wipes custom Word autotext

It's coming

I can see a time when we have most machines air gapped with just a few connected to 'the net' you know so you can Google the exploit or fix you were exposed to last week, month,year etc.

Brazil gets a WTF WhatsApp moment

Re: What did the court orginally ask for?

As far as I know the chats are encrypted and what's app can't can't access the contents of the messages.

Is this still the case after being bought by Facebook ?

Drunk? Need a slash? Avoid walls in Hackney

Piss off

Spend it on half decent public toilets that are open 24 / 7 you plonkers !

Windows XP spotted on Royal Navy's spanking new aircraft carrier

Adama got it right.

I will not have any networked computer system on this ship.

UK research network Janet under ongoing and persistent DDoS attack

Mighty big DDOS attack

Must be a huge attack to take out a network with a 100Gbit/s backbone ?

If it is a private network how hard can it be to isolate the points that are being attacked and limit connections in order to protect the rest of the network.

I'm a noob at attacks of this scale.

Would be nice to see an update on the front page.

Part of the world's IT brought down by Azure Active Directory issue

Related issue

They had a small issue with mail sent from their servers having the sent from address as [e-mail]

I think it was related to active directory sync with azure but seemed to sort itself out.

We don't use the cloud so the only complaints I had were from my users getting NDR's for non existent address's

Ofcom spins out Wi-Fi checker app just in time for Christmas

Wifi Anal...

Just tried it.... it's crap.

Told me that WiFi is not holding back my broadband speed but there are other access points using the same channel. I'm round the pub.

WiFi Analyzer is much better and probably didn't cost £££££££££ to develop.

How to solve a Rubik's Cube in five seconds

No screwdriver required

I made a tenner when I was 7 or 8 at Christmas. Bet all the adults I could show them a completed cube in 30 seconds if they handed me a messed up one. I had two that year ;)

'Hypocritical' Europe is just as bad as the USA for data protection

Protect yourself

Stop using American companies to host your data. Host it all either on site or with uk only companies.

Oh hang on..... how do I stop those w7 / 8 machines updating to 10 again :/ I am hoping that WSUS makes it obvious !

ESXi's been borking VM backup and there's no fix yet

Cbt

Says it all really, they have you by the short and dangleys and relying on server 2012 backup to vhdx is not much better.

TalkTalk Business email servers titsup for days after DNS config snafu

Don't make them like they used to

Pipex and Nildram were fine and their customer support was great. The same obviously can't be said for the new owners :/

TalkTalk attack: Small biz customers may also have been targeted

Done over like tesco customers

Pipex were great quite a few years ago, since then a few sell outs have happened and now we are a talk talk business customer :/

Thank god our main connections are via magic wifi type antenna on the roof from a local supplier! The adsl we have with talk talk is just a backup..... will be replaced soon methinks. 50Mb uncontested connection with 5x ip address for £50 a month ain't bad :)

Search engine can find the VPN that NUCLEAR PLANT boss DIDN'T KNOW was there - report

Re: One way data connections

UDP maybe to a static ip but not sure ?

Hell use a blinking led to signal ok and a LDR to read the state. Easy air gap there, you could even stick a bit of fibre optic cable between the two. Not exactly rocket science.

Brit hydro fuel cell maker: our tech charges iPhone 6 for a week

Buyout

Looks awesome but it must be tiny to fit in to a modern smart phone while keeping the existing battery, they must have taken something out to make space ?

I just hope they don't get bought out by Apple preventing the tech from going mainstream in all portable devices.

LA explosion knocks LogMeIn's British customers offline

ScreenConnect

One off payment with unlimited clients and you can host it yourself on a Centos vm. Left log me in and teamviewer 12 months ago and not missed them one bit. The connection for new clients is faster as well.

Spotify climbs down on new terms and conditions

By permission

I guess they mean the bit that shows up before you click install.