Posts by Mr Humbug

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

I don't know. I haven't tried for the full 12 months because there are only some times that I want to use Prime. I think I have four accounts with different e-mail addresses* but same name, delivery address, credit card and phone number. When I really need something quickly I just find out which one hasn't had a Prime trial in the last 12 months and sign up, order, then cancel Prime. The trial then lasts for 30 days.

It can also be useful for the occasional "Prime-only-one-per-customer" items too, if you need more than one of them

* For "reasons" I have a few domains so they are all me@somedomain

My most recent 30-day Prime trial started accidentally too - I think because of the same advert. I definitely didn't click 'yes get Prime', I clicked the other option and only then realised it was also 'yes give me Prime'.

Fortunately I've used the 30-day trial often enough that I know where to click 'Cancel Prime', 'Yes really cancel', 'I want to lose my benefits', 'End the Prime trial'.

By the way, if you are prepared to go through a bit of hoop-jumping and have twelve email addresses (and who doesn't) then you can have Prime on a continuaous series of 30-day free trials

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

I see what you mean, but actually the Earth is not a closed system. It receives energy from the sun - which is why the creationists' argument that evolution contravenes the second law of thermodynamics is wrong.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Re: The English language includes support for lists

Ah, but sooner or later you find a reader who is not 'any fule'. Then what flavour are they going to want?

To get to the ultimate conclusion of any grammar argument: 'I'm right and you're wrong, so there!'

Re: The English language includes support for lists

In the first list the Oxford comma is needed to show that 'salt and vinegar' and 'cheese and onion' are individual list items - it shows you which 'and' is before the last list item. In the second list there is no confusion because the items do not contain 'and'.

In other words, use an Oxford comma when the list items include 'and'. Crisps are sold at Sainsbury's, Waitrose, and Marks and Spencer. Cheaper brands are availble from Morrison's, Aldi and Lidl.

PS 'pre' is not a preposition

Re: The English language includes support for lists

The Oxford comma is a device to be used when needed, and not otherwise. For example, we know that traditionally crisps have been available in ready salted, cheese and onion, and salt and vinegar flavours. More recently the selection can include roast chicken, barbecue sauce and prawn cocktail.

Using the Oxford comma correctly requires thought, rather than blindly following a rule. I know this because my job title includes SLASH Proof Reader (although I also have the benefit of full time wage slavery).

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

The government can't create legislation that bypasses parliament unless parliament itself passes it as primary legislation (an Act of Parliament). Government can introduce secondary legislation but the courts can rule that as incompatible with existing primary legislation and therefore unlawful. The courts cannot rule primary legislation to be unlawful (although they can point out that it's incompatible with other primary legislation and tell parliament to work out what it wants)

As an aside, the European Communities Act is an example of parliament passing some of its soveregn power to another body (the EU)

There is a very well-known precedent for dealing with people who shut down parliament for ten years. It goes back to the 17th century and we've only had to do it once

Three UK slammed for 'ripping off' loyal mobile customers by £32.4m per year

> Sure, Three are still getting some of my money,

Actually Three is getting all of your money (well all of the bit you spend on the mobile plan). If you read the Ts and Cs you'll see the company is 'Hutchison 3G UK Limited, trading as SMARTY'.

I use SMARTY too - three SIMs for three family members (including me). I was going to use iD mobile but they said I could only have two SIMs and couldn't explain why.

US government sues ex-IT guy for breaking his NDA (Yes, we mean Edward Snowden)

NDAs that I've seen all say something along the lines of: you can talk about the stuff covered by this agreement if it becomes publicly known otherwise than through your breach of this NDA. Since we know all this stuff because Snowden breached the NDA I guess he's now the only person in the world who is not allowed to talk about it.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

> A recycle bin doesn't really give you any more of a chance to change your mind than an "are you sure" type message.

Of course it does. 'Are you sure?' and any other annoying boxes that appear on screen (such as error messages) only appear to interrupt users and must be dismissed as quickly as possible without reading them, let alone thinking about what it is asking.

Finally! A solution to 42 – the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

If you're referring to Arthur's use of teh scrabble tiles to divine the question (what do you get if you multiply six by nine) then I think you mean 54.

But the programme that ended with Arthur's result was corrupted by the Golgafrincham B Ark, which is why he produced the wrong question.

</pedant>

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Randall Munroe recommends we use migrating butterflies

https://blog.xkcd.com/2019/08/26/how-to-send-a-file/

Teen TalkTalk hacker ordered to pay £400k after hijacking popular Instagram account

My guess was that he socially engineered his way into some Telstra customer e-mail accounts and used the Instagram password recovery feature

Web body mulls halving HTTPS cert lifetimes. That screaming in the distance is HTTPS cert sellers fearing orgs will bail for Let's Encrypt

Re: Follow the money

https://certifytheweb.com/

See above :) (you posted while I was writing)

Re: Follow the money

I've found that

https://certifytheweb.com/

works well on Windows servers. I've only use dthe free version because my servers don't run many sites, but it will even automatically renew and deploy a certificate on an Exchange Server.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

On one April 1st I had all the HP LaserJets saying "OUT OF BEER". Only one person mentioned it and he refused to go and get beer for me to fit to the printer.

Storied veteran Spitfire slapped with chrome paint job takes off on round-the-world jaunt

I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice that.

And then remember Douglas looking at Polar Bears in episode Q (you fill in the full name)

What's the last piece of software you'd expect to spy on you? Maybe your enterprise security suite? Bad news

Yes, you're right. But one rule you will almost always find is

Any user device to destinationTCP ports 80,443 on any destination IP address.

Often this can, and does, go through a proxy, but that's not always the case. And even if it is, the proxy is normally looking for malicious stuff coming back, rather than strange traffic going out.

Our policy makes it clear that anything we do on IT equipment and services provided by the company is not private. We are allowed reasonable personal use, but it's monitored and certain events (such as file uploads to non-company web server - we trust but verify) generate an alert that is then investigated.

I don't mind because I get the alerts and do the investigating, but I've had to remind a few people that there is monitoring and, while their personal use is perfectly acceptable and I'm not going to gossip about their personal lives, they might not be comfortable with me knowing everthing I've seen.

UK PM Johnson spins revolving doors, new digital minister falls through

I can't see how you read that into what I wrote. I was pointing out that the reductions in police numbers did not mean there are plenty of trained people ready to walk back into the job.

<pedant>

Police officers are immune from redundancy (and also not allowed to unionise). So any recently former police officers either chose to go somewhere better or were thrown out for being caught at something they shouldn't have done. It might be difficult to get the first group back and can you imagine the Guardian's reaction to re-employing the second?

</pedant>

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Re: Man has definitely been to the moon.

It was faked. Photgraphic evidence and explanation:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030401130307/http://brainsluice.tripod.com/moonlanding.html

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

I am confused

> because a DC in a VM is easier to move over to another host

But don't the hosts have to be members of the domain in order to move a VM between them? Or would you just copy the virtual disk file(s) and create a new VM to use them?

My Hyper-V hosts are members of the domain, but they will start up OK, allow you to login (with cached credentials) and start virtual machines without a DC being available

For pity's sake, groans Mimecast, teach your workforce not to open obviously dodgy emails

Re: you could do that, but...

It's orders of magnitude higher cost, but it seems it must work. If it did not then "Domain Resgistry of America" wouldn't send out invoices to renew your domain's "internet search registration"

Re: Individual people can be smart.

> tell 'em that opening and/or responding to such emails is a firing offense.

The trouble with that approach is that at some point someone will make a mistake. When they do, would you like them to report it so that you can respond as quickly as possible, or would you like them to keep quiet and try to conceal it?

Of course you then have to decide whether that will work in your company's culture and with the people you have working there. And that will be affected by whether they see themselves as part of the business or as someone who turns up to complete a task and then go home.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

It might be the configuration - not sure whether I've changed the default (you saying it doesn't work for you made me look to see if there was an option). If you look in

File, Options, Save

there is 'Keep the last AutoRecovered version if I close without saving',

which is enabled in mine

It does that if the file was already saved and you tell it you don't want to save changes, but if you create a new file, do something in it then close and say you don't want to save, Word will keep it in the Unsaved documents folder. I tried it earlier and the file is still tehre at the moment.

Ah, but Word does do that - and has done for a while.

When you go to open a file, in teh Recent files section there is a button called 'Recover unsaved documents' which takes you to %localappdata%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles which is where Word autosaves a file until you give it a proper name (they're ASD files, not docx).

It doesn't throw the unsaved file back in your face like Notepad++ does, and I' not sure how long it will keep the files there, but it does at least give you a short opportunity to change your mind about not saving.

It's 2019 and SQL Server can be pwned by an SQL query, DHCP failover server failed by a packet, Edge, IE by webpages...

Chromium based Edge is on preview at the moment. Presumably the EdgeHTML version will still need patches until the last version of Windows (1903/1809 ??) that uses it goes out fo support.

Although it's also conceievable that Chromium will push EdgeHTML out of those versions too - there's a preview of it for Win7 now.

Reach out for the healing hands... of guru Dabbs

Re: Ah, you have "the glare"...

"You took your foot off the 'create fault' button on the floor under your desk"

At least that's what they tell me.

Oz watchdog claims Samsung's leak-proof phones ad campaign doesn't hold water

My daughter had the original Ulefone Armor, which she bought because she kept breaking her phone. She accidentally dropped teh Armor in about 8 inches of sea water while on holiday and it stopped working.

That was the first of three phones she destroyed that summer.

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

Avro. Four engines - either Merlin or Olympus

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

I'da always assumed that was because selling through Amazon costs more than selling through eBay or selling through your own site

Remember the Nominet £100m dot-uk windfall it claims doesn't exist? Well, it's already begun

I had a similar one telling me I should ask my current registrar to register the .uk because otherwise someone else might take it at the start of July. My mail server thought it was a scam and quarantined it

> The automatic assumption that everything unsolicited is a scam unless readily proved otherwise is going to be quite interesting in the medium term...

It's starting to become interesting at work. The accounts address receives invoices (PDF attachments) from companies the accounts administrator has never heard of that later turn out to be the registered name of a company we were expecting an invoice from, but the PO was made out for its trading name. It makes some interesting conversations with the supplier's credit control people.

An alternative scenario is that the purchaser is slow about passing the PO to accounts, so the invoice arrives first - and gets deleted as spam.

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

Re: Age of Consent

Also, they are not allowed to record themselves doing those "naughty" things.

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

I am confused

Using 'leverage' or 'impact' as a verb should be gross misconduct.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

The evidence is mounting up

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/20/japan_finds_long_deep_tunnel_on_the_moon/

It's part of the Dahak's hull of course

DXC Technology seeks volunteers to take redundancy. No grads, apprentices, and 'quota carrying' sales folk

1.5 weeks per year over the age of 41. Only the most recent 20 years' service counts (so if you're 63 with >20 years' service you get 30 weeks' pay). Pay for one week is capped at £525 (I think it's a bit higher in NI). so maximum statutory payment is £15,750 (which is tax free).

Presumably the additional month they are offering is not capped.

I forget the exact details of ROI calculation, but the cap is higher and the number of weeks pay is greater

British Army cyber 'n' psyops unit 77 Brigade can't even brainwash civvies into helping it meet recruitment targets

Recruiting part timers...

... might be affected by this:

https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/formations-divisions-brigades/force-troops-command/77-brigade/apply-to-join-us/

'Thank you for your interest in 77th Brigade. Unfortunately the Brigade is not in a position to assess new civilian candidates until September 2019 – however we are accepting CVs from interested candidates which we will process in due course. This is due to a number of factors including a reorganisation within the Brigade, an assessment of the skill sets required and the processing of existing candidates.'

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

The French do have a habit of revolting: 1792, 1848, 1870, 1946 and 1958. Although after the first time they do seem to have made it less traumatic.

> I'm sure it wasn't that long ago that people had footnotes in their signatures asking the receiver not to print that email.

It's still there in lots of signatures, but you don't notice it because it's buried in the bit that says you shouldn't have read the message if it wasn't for you.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

More than one way to go about this, but the essentials are:

A PXE boot server that your DHCP server can point to

The bootable environment on the PXE server

The image file that you want to install (if this is Windows then you MUST run sysprep on the machine you take the image from)

Any post-image scripts to customise individual machines or to complete the Windows Out Of Box Experience.

If you have Windows Server then MS provides the whole thing in Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

And whatever you use to deploy a Windows image, that image will need appropriate licences and istallation media for reimaging (OEM licences and media don't work properly, you need a volume licence key)

Buying a second-hand hard drive on eBay? You've got a 'one in two' chance of finding personal info still on it

Someone who works in a defence establishment (where they make self-contained combined power supplies and propulsion units) told me that the normal procedure at the end of a project is to remove all the computer drives and bathe them in hydroflouric acid.

My normal procedure for disposing of drives is much easier - it just requires a power drill

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

> A really big workstation machine or an A3 colour laser printer might exceed the 3A limit but that's rare

We have discovered through experimentation that all of our laser printers draw more than 3A on start up. Also, the cleaners have established that vacuum cleaners draw more than 3A.

Although it usually then takes several months for someone else to report their "laptop won't charge from any socket on that strip (that one on the end worked until last week, but now now none of them do)"

Just the small matter of the bill for scrapping Blighty's old nuclear submarines: It's £7.5bn

Starships

If the US can retrofit an SSBN with a hyperdrive then we should be able to do that too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Space_Bubble

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!

It should be the same amount that you get charged if you aren't there when the engineer arrives for an appointment. Last I knew (several years ago) that was £80.

Android clampdown on calls and texts access trashes bunch of apps

Re: Exempt BlackBerry-branded devices

I don't think it's deliberately exempt, but the Hub (now called Inbox) on my DTEK50 is still showing calls and texts. That, however, is still on Android 6

Brexit text-it wrecks it: Vote Leave fined £40k for spamming 200k msgs ahead of EU referendum

If you look at how most modern 'democracies' work, you'll see that they are actually designed to make sure that the 'right people'* make the decisions.

* the way the right people are selected differs between systems and over time within a system - the UK used to decide according to who your parents were, then it was how much money you had and now it's either money, who you went to school with or which trade union you joined