Posts by Onid

Flashback trojan targeting OS X shuns virtual machines

so u voice ur concern but fail to upvote...

So I downvote u on principle and give the upvote to the one u raised about...

there...

balance restored... can we have a yin/yang symbol please...hehe..

Gas bill climbed £13,000 after correct online reading given

always wondered ...

if possible to compress gas through some gas safe compressor unit and would resulting liquified gas be the same as LPG that cars run on ...by that could probably reset meter!!!

Solves everything..... run a gas generator for power, plug said generator into grid instead of photovoltaics on roof and not only not pay but actually make money from feed in tariff... hhhmmmm....

and finally run car and not pay for all that stupid tax on the fuel....

Adobe: crashing 100 million machines not an option

I've said before

and I'll say it again...

nah - hate repeating myself!

Mac malware uses Windows-style PDF camouflage ruse

writes new custom malware

then submits it to virustotal... MAJOR FAIL.. duh..

Schoolkids learn coding at GCSE level in curriculum trial

Good but ideally....

Step in the right direction but why just trial it in such few schools? What's going to determine the success of the trial? if they get a job in 10 years? it needs to be done much more urgently and spread out as wide as possible.

From 3rd grade onwards kids should be able to make anything with constructor kits/ lego technic /meccano whatever other brand exists. By 6-7 grade they should then be upgrading to mindstorm or other simple programmable units then from 8-9-10-11 they should be full on in arduino board/ embedded programming/ prototyping and the like.

Also curriculum should look to actually making/augmenting open source software for the use of their own school as an actual project. eventually they'll have best of class software at Zero cost to them and they get full work experience. Get the whole school in a fully automated process to get it's running costs down.

Then you get a generation of robot builders and what not - THEN you can compete against any low cost labour country on the planet - and all production comes back to the UK.

That's what needs to be done... Germany is pretty much doing it already I think - there's so many robotics stuff going around there in their schools with various constructor kits etc...

Also shops should be banned from selling any single use toys - everyone should just be able to make their own - want a toy - make the tool to make it first !!! :-)

'Satnavs are definitely not doomed', insists TomTom man

tomtom? no tom ...

First tomtom was a 700 model(500squid).. Was interested in HD traffic so bought the 720 which was supposed to be able to handle HD with an optional power adapter that would be made available when HD traffic was brought to the UK. The adapter never materialised and generally was happier with the 700. So I sold it..Later got the 750 but found it's interface a bit toyish and HD traffic which finally was on it was a bit naf to be honest. Seems all those negotiations with councils and what not as to how to redirect traffic ended up crippling the system. Worst thing on both 720 and 750 (and all in between) the compass stopped showing heading and distance to target. This the 700 still does and is invaluable - I use it to ignore the map and just follow the needle guessing which roads to take when seeking alternates if there's too much traffic on selected roads. I can't believe they removed that... Sold the 750 a couple of months after I bought it. The 700 doesn't have the hotfix data to assist in cold starting it but I managed to score an external gps antenna on it (which u can't fit on 750 apparently or most of the newer ones even!). Net result in use the 700 has a better fix than the new ones as gets better reception.

Not buying a new tomtom that's for sure... next one will probably get if I need one will be the nuvi range - some interesting features there... but would love it if could integrate gps with car data - maybe plug in to obd data from the engine management!!.

As for using camera phones instead of proper cams? seriously?? I have an old fuji finepix 2800z something (2.0 Megapixels with a 6 X optical zoom ) it's old it's no big winner in megapixels race but takes far better pictures than ANY camera phone bar none.(I'll challenge any phone and any MPs) I have an N95 and seen the crap the iphones take and all other phones.. Some of the photos look like the ccd is just dabling with a paintbrush the rgb elements in a vague general direction of where they should be. Chromatic aberration is just crazy on them and the sensor noise.. oh the sensor noise... by the time you finish cleaning up in photoshop you are left with less than 1 Megapixel even if the cam supposedly an 8MP. Absolute crapola. I want to upgrade my camera now to the HS10 (prosumer with fixed but decent lens).

OK I do take photography as a bit of a serious hobby (still have old film SLRs which pretty much wipe the floor of any digital cam though it is inconvenient to be dealing with film and not seeing what you shot instantly is a major drawback). Seems to me all our gadgets are converging to crap all the time. Can probably now afford hasselblad large format cams from the film area!! though they are being adapted with sensor plates though still so maybe not just yet.. but regular 35 mm film SLRs they are now at incredible prices!! (wondering if can mount old film SLR accessories to new digital versions with a bit of gaffer tape!!!)

I guess it's never been truer "they don't make 'em like they used to" heh..

Attack on open-source web app keeps growing

That's bad...

so the trouble with osc was so bad you ended up divorcing your wife over it???

I can sympathise ... we were nearly there arguing over it... We run a small craft website which since moving to drupal has been a dream in contrast to osc (though I seem to encounter some osc thinking in the forums ... heh)

Yes I agree with Rich 2 also that a lot of the posts I encountered on the osc forums beggared belief and all the shoulder shrugging just drove me up the wall....

Code merging versions ... arghhh.. you're bringing back nightmares I used to have.... arggghh...

Drove me up the wall as well

So I ended up modifying the admin pages and moved them to a different url so instead of having http://website.com/admin/

would then have http://admin.website.com/ - and restricted it through apache so that only our IP could access it through certificate based authentication as the in-built auth mechanism were a joke. Needed a lot of changes to get it working though... Additionally a different process would always run the admin page as a different user on the server. I even started experimenting with not having the admin pages on the server at all and just having the admin pages running on a local copy of apache that would connect to ssh... in the end I figured this isn't worth the trouble and decided to dump it as the mods were just getting too extensive.

I do recall running every vulnerability scanner against it after any code change and I wouldn't store creditcard data inside it all .. infact we re-directed to the payment provider so that we wouldn't handle it at all as wasn't convinced at all at the mess going on inside....

This changed and we now handle cc's directly with ubercart as there is much more significant testing and resilience apparent in this.

A mate was asking me to help him with an oscommerce installation he was starting up and I just said to him... stop - and run as far away from osc as you can hehe..

it's not that they can't be bothered...

oscommerce (at least up until 2.2 MS2) had become such a mess with customisations and plugins and mods necessary to get plugin x to work with plugin y that we decided to drop it around 2 years ago and switch to drupal. trying to manage all the changes from one version to the next and all the breaks in the plugins that the upgrade would cause was a regular nightmare..

I've seen v3 is looking much more interesting and more modular etc but after that trama won't be going back there in a hurry !!

Essex cops slaps cuffs on social media riot crusaders

I'm glad, not glad, glad again - no wait not glad...

Just imagine if they were using true private channels the coppers would have any intel to go on.

Now however the coppers actions might get people (unlikely with this croud) to start thinking setting up more private channels of comms. So by the police advertising that they got their intel from facebook/twitter/etc they may be braking their sources. Possibly they shouldn't reveal their sources and not act in a manner that points directly to their source of information thus destroying it as it pushes the malactors to take further measures. They certainly should not be arresting the "inciters" as it where however counterintuitive it may sound. They should just show up as if they were just ever present to the point that malactors just think they can't get away with anything hoards of cops are just around the corner.

On the other hand if everyone stops using facebook out of all this their might be a silver lining out of the millions/billions of damage being caused..... Might answer the question "what does it take to take down facebook" - Civil riots and looting!!!

Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'

haha

The patent is specific to windows based computers and they are also trying to use it in a wider context?? hahahaha.. they're wanting to eat the cake and have it too.. heheheh...

There's no way this gets very far - if it does then a nuke is needed up all their A****...

Why is it even wasting the courts time even? and apple had deep sleep in powerbooks with mac os 8 or 9 can't remember when it started ...

Scumbags get sneaky with new self-robbery trojan

Does nothing in this scenario

You could have 100 factor authentication and it still won't do anything for this type of fraud. You expect you have to use your authentication to validate the transfer so you would just use it anyway. No authentication system is going to prevent a fool from sending money in such a request. It's not automated It's asking the user to authorise it.

Post Office banking collapses in computer fail

Greeks stitched up using a trojan horse??

I think you'll find the greeks were doing the stitching against the trojans ...

As for windows though - it's funny - Greece did sign up to a blanket microsoft agreement during the last government... Fail in my book as the IT universities are quite strong and have a very strong presence in open source they should be able to maintain and support full OSS setups but this is the least of their worries now... anyway looks like US is next with all their debt ceiling talks etc.. hehe..

Yates of the Yard quits Met over phone-hacking scandal

You've hacked into my brain haven't you??? get out!!

I agree in it's entirety. I was really wound up when this hacking non-sense started up seeing nothing and no one being prosecuted. The only way these tossers aren't guilty was if the resignation was closer to the time of this story breaking out (not now - the original beginning) and they resigned then due to inability to get backing to prosecute. The resignation now is not with full integrity - this is in full shame.

Menezes same, google war driving same and god knows what else that doesn't even hit the spotlight... grrr... but hey all a good laugh... NOT...

Half of Virgin Media broadband ads are wrong, says ASA

re virgin/ntl and all other adsl at multiple locations in south

I have for the past 10 years been mostly on ntl and now virgin in various places in the south - I seemed to be going around the home counties starting from near watford going round clockwise!!! - I'm now at about 8'oclock just off the M25!! for the past 5 years.

Whenever I'd get ntl installed they would test it's performance and take corrective action - in one place they ripped out and replaced the coax from the house to the curb as there was too much signal loss for broadband (at 10 or 20 can't remember now) right from the beginning. This wasn't prompted by me - infact I only knew they were there when they knocked on the door to say they would be disrupting tv service while they fixed the problem and had already been there for past hour already.

In some places cable wasn't available so had do make do with crappy adsl. Even removing everything from the sockets no ringer loops etc just plugging router straight into BT socket have never got better than 6-8 Mbps. In current premises ADSL cannot go over 2Mbps due to aluminum wires here.. Yet you complain and they just shrug their shoulders and say "oh well it is up to 24Mbps means you will get anything from 0 to 24" !!. Not once has BT or ISP even considered to upgrade/replace connectors/cables or troubleshoot and they really don't give an effing toss about what nonsense they'll pass for broadband.

When I upgraded to 50 Mbps in past year or so I was wondering if they could just replace the kit and I do a self install so as to save £50 install charge... instead they chose to wave the fee and still send out engineer. When he came he tested the line and said this won't do it will only go up to 30 Mbps and thus re did practically the whole cabinet! spending at least 3 hours there and then came in to test and was chuffed when the router speed tested at a straight 50Mbps.

So far I've experienced their service in 6 locations and can only say their service is faultless and miles apart from anyone else. The ASA can sit and quible on technicalities all it wants but the reality is VM is a far better consumer* ISP by light years based on my experience and it's not like I'm the MD's cousin or anything!!.

*I've had very limited experience with NTL as a commercial service provider so cannot comment re business services