Posts by a1exh

Automated payment machines do NOT work the same all over the world – as I found out

WTF?

The register is a site for technologists right? Why didn't you whip out your android phone and use google goggles or something like that to translate?

Linux 4.14 arrives and Linus says it should have fewer 0-days

Re: "Motorola's forthcoming Droid 4 phone"

It *IS* actually the 2012 Motorola Droid 4. That phone was one of the first to have a PWM stepper motor for the vibrator

Western Digital's hard drive encryption is useless. Totally useless

Interesting

I'm curious to how they worked out there was a SCSI command to dump controller SRAM

Alcatel Idol 3: Holding its own with a pretty decent 5.5 inches

Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 wins

The vodafone Smart Ultra 6 is pretty much identical specification but it is £125

Wileyfox smartphones: SD card, no bloatware, Cyanogen, big battery – yes to all!

Vodafone Smart Ultra 6

For £125 you could get a Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 and with the £4 you save unlock it and have a much better phone.

A black box for your SUITCASE: Now your lost luggage can phone home – quite literally

No real market

I used to manufacture a similar product in 2004. Ours were made from recycled mobile phone parts and a custom build of nokiaOS. We had two form factors, a CD-changer for the boot of you car and a shaver for your luggage. Our GPS & GSM aerials worked when the devices were in place no problem. They were very simple. Send it a txt msg and it sent you back the GPS coordinates. Being old skool devices they went days if not weeks without a charge.

When we found it hard to sell these, we tried offering recycled phones which could plug into your heating system so you could switch your heating on/off with a txt msg. Phones which could connect to your home alarm system so you got a txt msg when your alarm went off. Even alarms with cameras which would send you a picture message of the intruded zone.

However even with our bare materials being practically free we couldn't turn a profit enough to pay the salaries of two engineers and closed in 2005.

It's almost impossible to break into this market.

Ten Androids for under 100 quid

Vivacity is now £39.99

The T-Mobile Vivacity is now £49.99 plus £10 cash back with Quidco or TopCashback so £39.99 in total.

I think that makes it the best value for money Android phone on the market today.

Headbanger plays Star Trek theme on floppy drives

All the based on the work of Sammy1Am

The guy who wrote the software this video uses (which is open source) has his own channel :

http://www.youtube.com/user/Sammy1Am

PlayStation Phone spied in China

Encryption re-work?

They are almost certainly going to have to put this product on hold due to the leak of the PS3 (and in turn PSP) master key which will enable any software to be installed.

Either that or put the price of the hardware up to compensate for the loss of revenue they will experience due to piracy.

Short passwords 'hopelessly inadequate', say boffins

Longer time between password entries

Brute force password cracking is only as good (or as bad?) as the password entry system it is used with.

For example you could not brute force passwords below 12-digits (in a reasonable time frame) if you can only try once every 10 minutes after you've got it wrong 5 times in a row!