* Posts by petef

230 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2010

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IBM thinks Notes and Domino can rise again

petef

I use Notes at work and it is truly appalling. I have been objective and built a list of its faults which currently has 120 entries.What is the worst? Maybe that I cannot read webmail on my smartphone because most on my email is filtered into folders and Notes actively prevents you from reading them.

Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

petef

Obligatory XKCD reference

Exploits of a Mom

From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites

petef

When email introduced security measures such as SPF and DKIM the Bad Guys were in the forefront of adopters in my observations. I expect malicious web sites to be ahead of the game in supporting HTTPS. A green padlock can be used to sell snake oil.

Crypto-jackers slip Coinhive mining code into YouTube site ads

petef

The Opera browser added a blocker for mining a few weeks ago. That is in addition to the built-in ad blocking.

Facebook invents new unit of time to measure modern attention spans: 1/705,600,000 of a sec

petef

Re: That's not news

Indeed, here is a quote from the BBC story:

A flick, derived from "frame-tick", is 1/705,600,000 of a second - the next unit of time after a nanosecond.

Take notebooks: About those new Thinkpads...

petef

In Windows I turn on what they call Toggle Keys in Ease Of Access. That makes the computer beep whenever the caps lock (and num and scroll) key is pressed.

As Apple fixes macOS root password hole, here's what went wrong

petef

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

petef

https://twitter.com/petef4/status/935893902397190144

IBM offloads Notes and Domino to India's HCL Technologies

petef

I like to be objective rather than just saying that Notes sucks. (Others may find different labels for my attention to detail.) I have my own list of annoyances through major defects that runs to over 100 items. Many of those are actions which are unintuitive, the list started as a crib sheet. That compares with Outlook at 21 and Gmail with 4.

Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 arrive, 364 days later than first planned

petef

REPL in Java has been available for years using Jython.

Massive iPhone X leak trashes Apple's 10th anniversary circus

petef

Re: 18.5:9 ?

Actually the simplest integral ratio is 812:375

Two million customer records pillaged in IT souk CeX hack attack

petef

Onliner Spambot

Pah, only 2 million? Onliner Spambot has (some) details of over 700 million accounts.

https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-massive-711-million-record-onliner-spambot-dump

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

petef

I use Opera which not only has a builtin ad-blocker, there is a nifty button you can click to compare the speed of loading a page with and without ads. The result for this page is 9s with and 3s without ads. So how tempted am I to whitelist this site?

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

petef

What self-respecting nerd is going to get worked up about a decimal pattern?

G20 calls for 'lawful and non-arbitrary access to available information' to fight terror

petef

Why stop there?

By the same token sales of kitchen knives should be banned because terrorists use them to kill people.

Bloke takes over every .io domain by snapping up crucial name servers

petef

Re: Never fucking heard of it

Rather less than the ocean, IO is British Indian Ocean Territory, population ~2,500.

Australia to float 'not backdoors' that behave just like backdoors to Five-Eyes meeting

petef
Coat

Will it work against uoıʇdʎɹɔuǝ uɐıʃɐɹʇsn∀?

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

petef

Nah, we’re in the 21st century now: correct horse battery staple

Google to give 6 months' warning for 2018 Chrome adblockalypse – report

petef

Same as now, their parents’ credit cards. ;-)

Avast blocks the entire internet – again

petef

Re: Avast has form for this sort of thing

Avast completed their acquisition of AVG last October.

As of today, iThings are even harder for police to probe

petef

macOS Sierra 10.12.4

El Reg makes no mention of the update to macOS / OS X released at the same time, There are a shedload of security fixes. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207615

eBay dumps users into insecure authentication mechanism

petef

Re: Maybe not about 2FA?

SMS is generally 1½FA. If your smartphone is compromised then its new pwner will get access to your eBay app and SMS. That applies to email too.

Git sprints carefully towards SHA-1 deprecation

petef
Coat

Re: Using a second hash function is no different than using a single hash [twice]

Hah, my scheme applies a second ROT13 to the first 32 bytes which makes it twice as secure.

AMD does an Italian job on Intel, unveils 32-core, 64-thread 'Naples' CPU

petef

Re: But What About Purley?

In that video the unreleased Naples was tested against Broadwell-EP which has been out for about a year. It will be fairer to compare against Skylake-EP when it is released. That will have AVX-512 and presumably the other performance lifts we expect with a new generation.

petef

There is no need to go that far. I use a snippet in the Stylish extension to disable El Reg’s headline pics.

@-moz-document domain("www.theregister.co.uk") {

div.article_head img.article_img { display: none; }

}

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

petef

DVCS

Nobody seems to have mentioned that this is git. All checked out repos have all history so it is intrinsically backed up.

I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the API key

petef
Coat

On the Internet nobody knows you’re a tractor.

Terry Pratchett's self-written documentary to be broadcast in 2017

petef

Clacks

Thanks, El Reg, for your X-Clacks-Overhead.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/18/sir_terry_pratchett_http_header/

Kaspersky fixing serious certificate slip

petef

Browsers vs Antivirus

Avast had a security problem with their SafeZone browser last year too. Comodo’s Chromodo also had a security issue. I personally trust the dedicated makers of browsers over the products supplied by AV vendors. I use Avast on the PCs I look after but use a custom install to exclude SafeZone.

MacBook Pro owners complain of short batt life – so Apple kills batt life clock in macOS

petef

Re: Apple only Hard disks

If you buy a hard disk from Apple then part of the price premium is for their guarantee that it will install okay and continue to work.

I did my own upgrade to a non-Apple SSD and turned on TRIM. Both those actions are unsupported by Apple and if things had gone wrong it would have been my fault. But all is well and my old MacBook Pro is usable again at a fraction of the cost of a new laptop or parts blessed by Apple.

petef

There's an app for that

I use the free app Battery Health 2 from FIPLAB to display more info than the stock Apple control.

Hull surfers cut off by router attack

petef

Backdoor

“ZyXel has developed a software update for the affected routers that will address the vulnerability. In most cases this will be applied remotely and customers will not need [to] do anything”

So ZyXel have a backdoor into the routers they have sold? What happens when (not if) the bad guys get a hold of that?

Google's Chromecast Audio busted BT home routers – now it has a fix

petef

Re: "simple" solution...

Unfortunately BT/PN routers lock down the DNS settings, you are stuck with their servers.

Debian putting everything on the /usr

petef
Coat

mandatory Engrish joke

All your base are belong to usr

Password1? You're so random. By which we mean not random at all - UK.gov

petef

Re: 'Social media' as the same level of importance as banking??

Many sites allow you to log in using credentials from Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.

Living with the Pixel XL – Google's attempt at a high-end phone

petef

Video preview

“someone calls you on Duo you get to see video of them before deciding whether to pick up the call”

Have they thought this through? There is plenty of scope for nuisance calls at the next level.

USB-C is now wired for sound, just like Sir Cliff Richard

petef

Re: I wonder how does electrocution through your ears feel like

The full OED entry has connection and connexion as joint headwords. They both come from Latin. The former comes from co(n)nectĕre whereas the latter is directly from connexiōn-em (in classical Latin cōnexiōn- ).

Let's Encrypt won its Comodo trademark battle – but now fan tools must rename

petef

AFAIK Comodo is the only company other than Microsoft offering an antivirus product that is free for commercial use. (ClamAV does not do on-access.)

BBC detector vans are back to spy on your home Wi-Fi – if you can believe it

petef

So my tin foil hat is insufficient protection. I need to put another over my Wi-Fi.

Bought a GTX 970? Congrats, Nvidia owes you thirty bucks

petef

Baked Apple

The Nvidia GeForce 8600m GT graphics processor on my MacBook Pro failed in that way. However i did manage to fix it myself following the instructions in this link. Basically take the circuit board out of the laptop and bake in the oven for 7½ minutes. Scary stuff but that was over a year ago and the repair has held up fine.

http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-cook-your-mac--mac-45148

Microsoft cancels Remain speech after death of Labour MP

petef

Bill Gates supports Remain

Bill Gates had a letter published in The Times on Friday 17th June, behind a paywall I'm afraid.

He spoke in support of Britain remaining in the EU.

GNU cryptocurrency aims at 'the mainstream economy not the black market'

petef

An outfit called “Inria” has been around rather longer than GNU, so why the disparaging tone?

Unicode serves up bacon emoji

petef

Re: You can have: teacup without handle U+1F375

I just had the same post rejected too.Guess we'll need to stick with the established 2615 ☕ HOT BEVERAGE = tea or coffee, depending on locale

Facebook to kill native chat, bring opt-in crypto to Messenger

petef

Cr-app-y

I deleted the Facebook app from my Moto G 2nd Gen because (a) the battery would not last for a day and (b) the storage used was horrendous. Just how many kittens were filling up 240 MB? Swipe as an alternative to FB+M uses less than 3 MB. I never installed Messenger as it was reputed to behave the same. Unfortunately the relevant reviews have been lost from the Play store as it has been swamped by complaints about the recent release.

I begrudge Facebook their right to hold a monopoly on apps for their services but what really riles is the lamentable quality of the apps.

Linux command line mistake 'nukes web boss'S biz'

petef

I have effectively done this

Some time ago my work group had individual workstations, well 386 PCs actually running Interactive Unix. I had an account on a colleague's machine and they asked me to remove it. So I deleted /home/mydir/ but left myself a login with a home of / (root) and let my colleague know I had cleared my disk space.

They then proceeded to remove my account banging Y to all the questions, including that of remove home directory. The PC was bricked and had to be loaded afresh from floppies.

I filed a bug report to Sun who by this stage had taken over ISC. They did respond to my suggestion that the remove user script could have an extra safeguard but said they were not going to do anything.

Feature-rich Vivaldi rolls out, offering power users a choice

petef

Opera can use Chrome extensions too

The Download Chrome Extension extension allows access to the Chrome store from Opera.

Got a Toshiba laptop? Get it off your lap, then read this recall notice

petef

UK too

The article sort of implies that the battery issue is just a North American issue. I received and fitted a replacement battery from Toshiba a couple of weeks ago.

They provide an app which checks the serial number automatically. My original battery was identified as being at risk.

Confused by crypto? Here's what that password hashing stuff means in English

petef

SHA1

You correctly state that MD5 is no longer up to the job for hashing but do not mention SHA1. That elicits warnings from Google based browsers at the moment and Microsoft say that they will not accept SHA1 after 2016.

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