Posts by dajames

Trend Micro antivirus fails to stop measles carrier rubbing against firm's Ottawa offices

Re: If you are infectious - stay away from work

Most civilized countries would require sick people to stay at home so they didn't spread any infectious deseases unnecesarilly.

FTFY.

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

To readers of a certain generation, this description will be all too familiar: they are styled like games arcade machines.

It's a marketing thing ... when you've bought more than anyone else you get the high score and can see your chosen 3-letter moniker displayed in lights above the till!

Oh, yeah ... infantile.

Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space

Re: Teaching

Many organisations spent a lot of time and money deleting Solitaire from Windows 95 not realising what a fantastic tool it was to help newbies learn mouse skills.

I vaguely recall hearing that the games in Windows -- it may only have been Minesweeper -- were specially commissioned at Bill Gates's request for that very purpose.

Re: *BEER* shouldn't be 'cold cold'

Beer shouldn't be too cold, otherwise you can't taste it. It shouldn't be warm either, of course. As you say, chilled to cellar temperature is ideal.

But you hit the nail on the head with the (American version of) Budweiser remark -- some so-called beers should be served cold, otherwise you can taste them.

The Czech stuff is different.

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

Re: Bah!

I'd never thought of volcanic disposal before. You sir are a genius! I salute your perpicacity!

The trouble with volcanoes is that they tend to spit stuff out, up into the air, all over the place.

It's called an "eruption", from a Latin word meaning "burst forth" ... which -- call me picky -- doesn't sound quite like the sort of controlled disposal technique that the nuclear industry is seeking ...

Former HP CEO Léo Apotheker tells court he didn't read Autonomy's latest accounts before fated $11bn buyout

In 1996, Apple Computer bought NeXT for $429 million. On paper it was far too much for what was essentially a failing software company.

I'd have said NeXT was as much a hardware company as Apple.

Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT cube is on display at the Science Museum in London, I saw it last week, I'd never realized how big that cube was.

FYI: You could make Tesla's Autopilot swerve into traffic with a few stickers on the road

Re: Can you go to the pub and get shitfaced?

A work friend of mine had a pony and trap and she and her husband frequently woke up in their stable having been taken 5 miles home from an absolutely cracking pub by the pony.

Which nicely demonstrates that the AI in a Tesla, or similar, is dumber than a pony.

It's nice to have some sort of scale for these things ...

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!

Retirement plans now consisting of having multiple TalkTalk lines installed in a shed.

I hope you don't end up finding that all those TalkTalk lines terminate at the same exchange cabinet, connected to the same backhaul ... which has just failed!

I'd go for one BT line, one TalkTalk, one Virgin fibre, and one 4G celluar from whichever network had the best signal in the area ... that would give a bit more redundancy ...

Don't be an April Fool: Update your Android mobes, gizmos to – hopefully – pick up critical security fixes

Re: Pixel only

The 3 year security update window ...

... should be much larger. A cut off for feature updates, new Android versions, etc., after three years seems reasonable, but security is more important than that. The window should be at least five years, and maybe as much as ten.

In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you

Meanwhile, in the UK, we can't even stop a drone, real or not, from shutting down our airports.

Of course we can! It's just that we consider it unsporting to do so by unleashing ordnance that might miss and fall on our neighbours' heads, so we don't.

Easy-to-hack combat systems, years-old flaws and a massive bill – yup, that's America's F-35

Re: What use is a secure fighter jet if they haven't even made it work right yet?

Surely it is not a difficult concept to air-gap an aeroplane!

You'd think ... thing is, though, it seems to be a USP of the F35 that it is NOT air-gapped.

DoD really seems to be run by muppets.

If "muppet" is the word for someone who works to transfer tax dollars to private defense contractors in whose business they have a vested interest then I think you've nailed it!

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Re: I smell an old wives tale..

PS: I also recall the times when HDD's were supplied with front bezels and brackets so that once fitted, everyone could see that YOUR PC had a HDD installed, as opposed to all the other dweebs who had maybe one or even two 5.25" floppy drives.

Nice idea, but perhaps a but old-wifey in itself. You don't think that the reason for HDDs being fitted in a front-facing bay with a bezel might be that PCs only had front-facing bays originally intended for floppy disk drives, so that was the only place they could go?

... and, of course, the bezel is the mounting point for the drive access LED, as there wasn't one on the front of the box, and there's nowhere else for it to go.

Re: Large floppies

I seem to recall that only real reliability problems with 5.25" disks occurred when reading a 360k floppy on a 1.2MB drive. Smaller heads vs larger track sizes.

The problems occurred when trying to read such a disk on a 40-track drive after it had been written on both a 40-track and an 80-track drive. The disk's oxide coating would have a wide track written on the 40-track drive with a narrower track written over it by the 80-track drive. This could be read without a problem on an 80-track drive but a 40-track drive would read both the old and new tracks together and get confused.

Moving such a disk between two different 80-track drives could also cause problems if either or both drives were a bit out of alignment ... but when drives start to lose their alignment you're going to get problems sooner or later whatever disk you use.

[5.25" disks] were physically less robust ...

They were still pretty tough, though.

I recall preparing a software update for a rather specialized bit of kit, which (somewhere down the line) was mailed to the customer. The secretary given the job of sending it out folded it in half and put in in an envelope and put it in the post.

The customer returned it, unsurprisingly, and the guy responsible for the product asked me to make another copy of the upgrade. I was a bit busy, and suggested that he try to diskcopy the folded disk just in case it turned out to be readable despite the fold.

To my surprise and his utter astonishment it copied perfectly!

Re: Reliability

... we soon discovered that while the floppies stated that they were single sided and the drives were only single side that careful use of a hole punch to add the required holes in the card cover for the rotational position detector and the write enable notch allowed us to double the amount of stroage available by putting the floppy in "upside down" so the drive used the reverse side.

You could even buy a "flippy disk kit" to help punch the hole and the notch in the right place. I may still have a copy of Byte with an advert for one ...

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

Very few of the secretaries had use the tabulator on the old manual typewriters,...

I rather doubt that ... anyone who'd done a typing course would have been trained to use the mechanical tabulator of a manual typewriter and had to demonstrate that use to get a certificate.

I can certainly believe that the TAB functions of early wordprocessors were not explained well enough (or at all) to secretaries converting from manual typewriters to electronic systems, and I can certainly believe that the electronic analogues of the manual tabulator settings were not sufficiently like them for their use to be obvious.

Anyway, that's all in the past. Now we just type text into a table and set the column widths later, once we know how wide they need to be. Tabulators belong in the manual age.

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

Re: MBRs are not being used anymore

Unless you use 3rd party full disk encryption.

There are 3rd-party disk encryption products that work with UEFI.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

Re: If it happens

Java in the browser died a long time ago.

That was because of Quality of Implementation issues that led to it being a security nightmare -- that doesn't mean it was a bad idea.

Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices

Re: ...memory constraints... ...70 full copies of 4 different OpenSSL versions...

Funniest thing is, if they only wrote

#define SAFE_LIBRARY_memcpy(dest, destMax, src, count) memcpy(dest, src, (destMax) < (count) ? (destMax) : (count))

Then they'd be at least immune to piss-poor stack overflow attacks, even if using plain libc.

Well, no ... Even if the codebase has been tested as it stands (which may be hopelessly optimistic) the values supplied for destMax in the calls have not been tested and may be meaningless. You still need at the very least to manually sanity-check the destMax value passed in every call, and then retest the whole codebase with the new macro.

... and that assumes that the code won't misbehave because you've truncated the result of a copy operation.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Re: Scotland/Wales want increased powers locally

I think that " Scotland/Wales want increased powers locally" must count as the understatement of the year. They want, and will get, full independence and then rejoin the EU, where they will have a lot more influence than they do in the UK.

Methinks they might find it hard to get readmitted to the EU ... other nations (such as Spain) are terrified that their own regions (such as Catalonia) will seek independence from the parent country if they think they will subsequently be allowed to rejoin the EU, and will veto any such application.

Renegade Android apps can siphon off your web logins, browser history. So make sure Chrome or OS is patched, friends

How does this work?

Does this bug enable an attacker to steal credentials as they are entered, or does it just steal them from the "remembered passwords" store that the browser manages?

In other words: If I never allow the browser to remember any login credentials, am I safe from this exploit?

The software isn't the problem, it's the (lack of) updates!

Security on Android is such a sh*tshow that I often wonder if the platform was designed specifically to facilitate such.

Security on pretty-much everything is bad, because most people don't understand the issues so and won't spend the time and money necessary to address them.

I'd agree that Security is worse on Android than on many other platforms -- but that's not because Android has noticeably more bugs or exploits, it's because many Android users are unable to get updates for their devices. Even when Google have fixed a problem the update won't necessarily be made available in a timely fashion (or at all!) on the devices people are using, especially devices running older versions of Android (such as KitKat, as cited in the article).

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

Re: Interesting

... and not very very far from Beamish museum (for the industrial archaeologists among you) just the other side of Newcastle.

(OK, it's 40 miles or so, I wouldn't try to do them both in a day ... so take two days!)

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

Re: Time, gentlemen, please

I'm feeling more smug than ever about my decision to install 8.1. Seriously, it's probably the last "good" Windows version.

For some value of "good".

Generally, Windows has slid downhill from the lofty pinnacle of acceptability that was Windows 2000 towards the pit of ordure that is Windows 10. Windows 7 remains a rocky outcrop on the hillside that has not yet been buried under the encroaching glacier of "end of support", with Windows 8.1 visible as a little ridge between the depression of Windows 8 and the plunge into the festering chasm beyond.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

Re: Seconhand USB sticks?

a) who is stupid enough to sell a stick they've used?

It beggars belief, doesn't it?

I rather assumed that any USB stick sold secondhand would be stolen (and that the original owner would not have been in a position to erase it before sale) ... but I suppose some may cone from house clearances, and the like.

The HeirPod? Samsung Galaxy Buds teardown finds tiny wireless cans 'surprisingly repairable'

Re: Why bother?

"It doesn't matter how durable a device is if the user chucks it in a draw"

Dave, what's a "draw"?

[snip]

I presume you mean 'drawer'?

Methinks he must mean a raffle -- or "prize draw" as they're sometimes known -- probably for charity. There's no other way to make sense of what's written.

It'd be a good way to get rid of kit that someone else might value ...

No guns or lockpicks needed to nick modern cars if they're fitted with hackable 'smart' alarms

Re: Every time...

"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means"

My car's quite safe ... it's protected by dread pirate robots ...

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Re: gates were left open and unlocked.

Better than open and locked... That would really look like incompetence

Not really ... it would stop anyone stealing the lock!

IR35 contractor tax reforms crawl closer to UK private sector with second consultation

Re: Not again!

... make sure you can evidence that you actually have ...

"Evidence"? What's wrong with "prove" or "demonstrate"?

Why verb a noun when you don't have to?

What happens when security devices are insecure? Choose the nuclear option

Protect and Survive

I recall that a friend brought a copy to a party, shortly after it was released, and helpfully read out informative passages for our education and amusement. I can still hear him drunkenly declaim:

Fallout is invisible. If you cannot see anything you may be suffering from fallout!

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

Re: Only 30 years too late ...

There are littery millions of Videos of this on YouTube. ...

Yup, there are an awful lot of littery videos in some places.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

James Earl Jones is not dead

... unless, of course, he is a copy ...

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

... with bluetooth earpieces and wireless charging a design could be completely sealed at least against low-pressure water.

... or, indeed, fairly high-pressure water.

If that were a design goal the inefficiency of wireless charging might even be acceptable.

Galaxy S10's under-glass fingerprint reader, quelle surprise, makes mobe a right pain to fix

Re: Fingerprint/Home button

Yet Apple supply you with a free Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter...

Yes, that's a nice touch. If only they'd build it into the phone so you would always have it with you when you needed it ...

U wot, m8? OMG SMS is back from dead

Re: Or you can just phone me.

SMS is stateless. You only know that it was sent, but this in no way guarantees that the recipient ever saw it ...

Not necessarily. SMS does support delivery notifications, but you usually (depending on your carrier) have to turn them on to get them.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

If we can just break through the idea of having a unique image per arm device and develop a standard "BIOS" for arm, then we might finally get away from Intel.

We have UEFI, which is supposed to be a 'standard "BIOS"' for everything. One of the big drivers behind it was (ironically enough) that Intel wanted a single "BIOS" (and single adapter board ROM images using interpreted code) for both x86 and Itanium, and it can certainly support ARM as well.

UEFI is not known for being clean or simple, and it's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but it does exist and it is increasingly widely used. It's an off-the-shelf solution that can, in principle, support any processor family.

... so let's not pretend that there's no applicable solution for ARM.

Re: Wrong way round

What is the money saving? Is it just electricity in the datacenter?

What do you mean "just"?

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Re: Watch out for geological samples

Turned out that the pitchblende sample was WAY more radioactive than the carefully stored and licensed radioactive sources were!

We had two "official" radioactive sources at school. IIRC one was Cobalt 60 (beta and gamma radiation source) and the the other Americium 241 (alpha source). They were tiny samples -- around 5 microcuries each, I think -- enclosed in little nickel cups with convenient handles that enabled them to be picked up with lab tweezers, and each kept in its own special lead-lined wooden box. Each produced a modest ticking from the geiger counter when the tube was held up to the sample.

The physics master also had an old clock dial with luminous markings painted (we assumed) with a radium sulphide/zinc sulphide paint. As that wasn't officially a radioactive source it was kept in a drawer with the blackboard cleaner. That clock face drove the geiger counter frantic when the detector was anywhere near it.

Then again, so did my watch!

Re: I did that once too...

That depends on which acid you are using, calcium carbonate reacts to give a coating of calcium sulphate which inhibits further reaction when using sulphuric acid. Use aqua regia as it gets the job of getting rid of the skeleton done.

Calcium Chloride is soluble, and won't form a coating, so hydrochloric acid will do the job.

You cartainly don't want to use aqua regia if you're hoping to sell any gold fillings, afterwards ...

Banking in 2019: Sure, we'd recommend TSB's online, mobe banking say cowed customers

Re: Flawed survey ?

I have taken quite a few YouGov surveys where there is no correct answer to the question.

These surveys are constructed to provide "feedback" that supports the conclusion that is desired by the company that commissions the survey. They're not trying to discover what people think, they're trying to demonstrate that people want/like a specific thing.

As such, there is always a "correct" answer -- for a very specific definition of "correct" that has no basis in reality -- but there is never any entirely "incorrect" answer that the responders might inconveniently select as an alternative to the desired fiction.

It's meant to be like that.

Blockchain is bullsh!t, prove me wrong meets 'chain gang fans at tech confab

"There's no reason to know [it's using blockchain]," he said. "Why do you care? It should be that you use an application and it works."

One reason to want to know whether a system is using blockchain is that one might wish to avoid systems built on hype and snake-oil, and one might consider the use of blockchain to be an indicator of just such a system.

Azure Pipelines go Slack while Microsoft frees data breakpoints from the shackles of C++

Re: whoopee, ".Not" got something that C++ already had for, like, EVAR

Trying new things is called "innovation". Sometimes it works, a lot of the time it doesn't (Microsoft seems especially good at this side of the equation), but without it, we wither and die.

True ... but probably unimportant.

.Net was conceived as Java with a Redmondian accent, back when Sun Micrososytems were getting shirty with Microsoft for putting non-portable things in to Java. If there was innovation then it was Sun's not Microsoft's.

Actually, though, I'm not sure there was innovation, as the only "new" thing in Java was that it used an interpreted intermediate code that could be run on any platform -- and, in particular, in a browser ... and the only part of that that was new was targeting the browser, because UCSD did the intermediate code for portability thing with their Pascal P-System 20 years earlier.

Just think what good tooling for C++ we might have today if Microsoft had taken all the resources they threw at .Net and used them to improve the C++ development environment instead! Just think of the fancy debuggers, profilers, refactoring editors, and all the other stuff they might have been able to develop if they hadn't wasted their effort on an unnecessary runtime environment that nobody needed.

Microsoft ended up buying a slice of Sun, anyway, so the spat over Java went away. They didn't need to invent C-Hash and port all their huge codebase of Java to it ... they could have got on with something that produces material benefits for their users, instead!

Q. What's a good thing to put outside a building of spies? A: A banner saying 'here we are!'

Re: That Huawei logo

I wonder if they have Huawei's permission to use their trademark on that banner?

Did you read the part of the article that says that HCSEC is administratively part of Huawei?

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Yay landfill!

I stopped using TomTom after my device with lifetime maps stopped functioning because the maps got too big, and the response from TomTom support was basically "sucks to be you, buy a new device" and they refused to re-section the maps to fit... so "lifetime" ended up being about 11 months.

That is pretty disgraceful. My TomTom did NOT have lifetime maps, so I wasn't quite so shocked as you must have been when they told me, recently, that it was never going to be updated again because the maps had got too big. I just thought "That's why I've been using an SD card instead of the internal storage for the last several years -- I thought that's why they made these things expandable?"

Now I realize that they may have been trying to make me upgrade to one that could count more than 1k weeks, without admitting the laxity of their programming. Time will tell ...

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

Re: Last-decade ?

Hah! Pyramids in Egypt are more than 2000 year old and some still find them beautiful.

They were probably much more beautiful when built, but apparently someone thought they looked too -- I don't know, pharaonic? -- and removed the limestone cladding.

So much for progress ...

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Re: Nothing like having your work day extended a few more hours

Libre Office doesn't work for anything non-trivial. I wish it DID. But it doesn't.

What's the factoid? 90% of Office users only ever use 10% of the features?

LibeOffice works pretty well for most people, just about all of the time.

Re: LOL

Or they want off the upgrade treadmill. Microsoft's traditional model only worked if customers needed to routinely update to the latest version, and so pay for it - but is that still true? Look how many years it took them to drive customers off of XP, and Windows Seven is still in common usage.

There's a piece of wisdom from the Ancients that says: If you want your users to upgrade from version X of something to version X+1, you should try to ensure that Version X+1 is at least as good as version X, that the upgrade breaks nothing, and that using version X+1 will not require re-learning the user interface.

Clever chaps those Ancients.

If version X+1 is widely perceived to be a cartload of turds the users will stick with version X.

Had Vista not been a resource hog requiring a substantial hardware upgrade to equal the speed of XP it wouldn't have been the dismal failure that it was. Had Windows 8 kept the UI of Windows 7 people wouldn't have seen it as something strange and incomprehensible and to be avoided.

Microsoft have only themselves to blame.

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

Re: Kudos

... what was making the upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 freeze at 81% (turned out to be something to do with AVG) ...

Ah! So AVG does do something to improve security. Who knew?