Posts by petef

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

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

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

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'

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

Unicode serves up bacon emoji

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

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'

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

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

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

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.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Valentine's Day means DDoS for you

Roses are #foo

Violets are #00f

All my base

Are belong to you

Oracle confesses to quietly axing its UK software support centre

One thing that amused me about the T&C for Oracle support was that you are only allowed to ask one question.

Me) Hello, am I through to Oracle support?

Them) Yes. <brrrr>

I've lost the remote! Fury as Samsung yoinks TV control from its iOS app

No warning

Removing a feature often causes pain but what really sucks is not announcing the change. Existing users should have the choice of staying with the older version.

Moovit made the same blunder with their Android app earlier this year. A new version removed the widget displaying live travel times. I use manual updating of my apps to guard against such surprises but if the app provider fails to communicate properly then users get burnt anyway. (Their widget has since been reinstated.)

Cyber poltergeist threat discovered in Internet of Stuff hubs

On the Internet nobody knows you're a fridge.

Microsoft: Stop using Microsoft Silverlight. (Everyone else has)

I thought that Silverlight was Microsoft's solution to delivering rich internet applications. So it's just a platform for showing video then. Meh.

Vodafone hikes prices to 37.5p/min – and lets angry customers flee

0800 numbers are free with all operators/plans from July 1 under the Ofcom rules coming into effect then. Vodafone are making some changes then and more on August 10.

Some operators are spinning it as magnanimity from them to be giving us the privilege of making the free calls which Ofcom have mandated. Many are using the changes as justification for raising prices to balance their loss of revenue, as they did when EU roaming charge caps came in.

45p not 37.5p

The figures on Vodafone's web site are ex VAT. El Reg has regurgitated them without comment.

If it were an advert then ASA would mandate that VAT was included.

Metasploit maker Rapid7 gobbles web app security testing firm

Inappropriate image in more than one sense

On most of my devices I have style rules to block the over-large leading image that your web site makeover from Perfect Curve imposed on us. This one slipped through to assault my eyeballs.

Would you mind explaining the connection between web security and the picture you have chosen to accompany the article.

Verizon to world: STOP opening dodgy phishing emails, FOOLS

Shouldn't that be PHOOLS?

'Rowhammer' attack flips bits in memory to root Linux

ECC is not enough

ECC guards against random errors. With more work rowhammer might maliciously set bits that had a valid ECC.

Get off Twitter – and onto Google if you want to find TWITS and tweets

Re: exclude (source=twitter.com) option?

That should be spelled -site:twitter.com

What an ACE-HOLE! This super-software will whip you at poker, hands down

Numbers printed without challenge

I looked at a number of news sources and they all seem to repeat the same misrepresentation of the numbers. It is said that 4000 CPUs were playing 6 billion hands per second for an aggregate of 24 trillion hands per second. Bloomberg manages 28.8 trillion, with all that precision they must be accurate ;-) Those "hands per second" sound awfully like clock speeds, perhaps dual core at 3 GHz.

Similar research reports tens of thousands of hands per second per CPU.

Misty-eyed Ray Ozzie celebrates 25th birthday of Lotus Notes by tweeting about it ...

Tears well in my eyes using Notes as our corporate platform but I think it is for a different reason.

Arrrr GOSH! Argos website goes titsup to make it EVEN BETTER

Some years back I ordered an iron from Argos and reserved it for collection. When I went to the store the next day the price had been jacked up by £10. Unbeknownst to me the new catalogue had started over that night. Had I spotted that I could have had it delivered for £6 on top of the old price. I remonstrated with various people from the cashier upwards to no avail. The only result I achieved was for Argos to promote their small print to medium size. They obviously were not bothered about losing my custom.

'Hashtag' added to the OED – but # isn't a hash, pound, nor number sign

And North Wales customers with extended numeric keypads can Prestatyn.

Europe's shock Google privacy ruling: The end of history? Don't be daft

Shoot the messenger

The AEPD (Spanish ICO) had rejected Mr González complaint against La Vanguardia to remove, alter or exclude from search the original publication. The pages were allowed to stand.

The ECJ judgement is about removing search results but does nothing about their sources.

http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf has the official summary of the judgement.

Reg probe bombshell: How we HACKED mobile voicemail without a PIN

Here's Bruce Schneier in 2006:

"It's also easy to break into a cell phone voice mailbox using spoofing, because many systems are set to automatically grant entry to calls from the owner of the account. Stopping that requires setting a PIN code or password for the mailbox."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/caller_id_spoof.html

15,000 London coppers to receive new crime-fighting tool: an iPad

Surely you mean iPlods

Google lets users slurp own Gmail, Calendar data

Since the start of Google Mail I have used its POP access from my email client to download local copies of messages.

IE 0-day plugged up but TIFF terror continues in November Patch Tuesday

Update failure

My MS update failed to apply one of the patches, KB2888505 security update for IE10. The bundle included an upgrade to IE11. Who could have anticipated that?

NO! Radio broadcasters snub 'end of FM' DAB radio changeover

Traffic info

Traffic updates are only available on FM, not DAB, AFAIK.

Facebook skins Android with Facebook Home

All your face are belong to us

eom

Google goes on the Blink in WebKit fork FURORE

Opera is not going to use WebKit

As you said in the earlier Register article, Opera will use Blink not WebKit.

BIGGEST DDoS ATTACK IN HISTORY hammers Spamhaus

Quite. The bbC reckon that a gigabit is spelt gb.

Don't buy a Google car: They might stop it while you're driving

Downfall

NSFW check out the Hitler Downfall parody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25VgNZDQ08

Review: Britain's 4G smartphones

Frequency band support

The article might have emphasized the support of the handsets for the five frequency bands that may be used for 4G. Any missing frequency for a handset will effectively reduce its 4G coverage. EE use 1800 MHz now, the auction has given them 800 MHz and 2600 MHz for later this year. The variation consultation should give them an option of 2100 MHz too.

Mobe networks bag UK 4G for a steal - £1bn shy of Osborne's £3.5bn

Re: O2

Ofcom are changing the [3G] coverage obligation. From June 2013, 90% of the population with 90% probability of at least 768kbps outdoors in a lightly loaded cell. In order to meet this new 90% coverage obligation, the licensees can use any spectrum available to them.

2G & 3G coverage

Ofcom are also consulting about variation of existing licences to allow all the existing bands to be changed from 2G or 3G to 4G. Responses are due by end of March. EE has of course already been approved to launch their 4G at 1800 MHz.

This presumably will mean that 2G and 3G coverage will suffer as capacity is shifted to 4G.

That is not a problem if you shell out for a 4G phone. It may be if you want to keep an old phone going.

Antivirus update broke our interwebs, howl Win XP users

avast! too

The avast! service failed to start for many users yesterday, including one of my PCs. There does not seem to be much reporting on that outside of the avast! forum.

IP address-tracing software breached data protection law

all web sites affected?

Does that ruling mean that anyone who runs a web site with access logs can have their collars felt?