Posts by elaar

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

To be fair, most of the Easyjet flights to europe are a similar price to BA these days, and Ryanair often works out more expensive, from Stansted anyway.

Far-right leader walks free from court after conviction for refusing to hand his phone passcode over to police

What's a left-wing extremist these days?

Re: Would never have happened in my day

"Just ask Tommy Robinson, to whom if we had only listened, we might have prevented the torture and rape of thousands of children by rape gangs in the UK"

He almost derailed the trial, thus actually helping the gang. I'm not sure how listening to him at a late stage would have prevented the actions of people 15 years ago?

All we need to know about him is his previous actions, which is how you can fairly judge people. Multiple counts of fraud,violence and hatred.

Sure, he's most certainly being unfairly picked on isn't he! I can't think why he decided to change his name.

Car crash: Uber axes another 3,000 jobs, closes 45 offices as punters snub app during coronavirus lockdown

So Uber was expecting $100billion at the IPO last year, even though it had never made any money and relied completely on the gig economy and typically less than acceptable labour conditions.

And down they now go after just 3 months of issues, 30% off their actual IPO price. Perhaps companies shouldn't rely on vast amounts of debt and VC funding to carry out stupidly insane expansion goals.

Was it really worth using all that money to fight countries/states/capitals in court? They could have just expanded slower, been a bit nicer, and people may have had more respect for them.

Re: Every job loss is sad

"Yes, evil practices like providing cheap, safe cabs in which rapes of drunk female passengers are no longer commonplace"

Cheap - Because they're not licensed or regulated, and their drivers aren't actual employees (hence the huge number of drivers now on universal credit)

Safe - Nope, actually much less safe than licensed cabs according to actual real statistics.

Their drivers are now screwed due to their business model.

What world do you live on?

FYI: Your browser can pick up ultrasonic signals you can't hear, and that sounds like a privacy nightmare to some

"if a TV advert, for example, emits a sneaky inaudible signal"

This is assuming the cheap and small driver in the TV is even capable of creating that inaudible frequency, and that there's no active/passive low/high pass filtering at the op-amp/amp stages (unlikely).

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

"If your job really isn't necessary, then report your employer to the police, who will have a nice chat with them to find out what they are playing at."

According to Gove this morning on Radio4, building sites are allowed to remain open even though they cannot garauntee 2m distances. Are those jobs necessary? Who deems what's necessary or not?

Gove stated that anything essential to public services is also included, e.g plumbers, electricians, boiler repairers etc.

In the predicament we're in, how many employees do you think really want to get involved in a stand-off with HR, or call the police in (which seems a bit of a waste of police resources)? There should be VERY CLEAR guidelines for employers, so that employees aren't put in difficult positions.

That's all we want.

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

"Stay in your f*cking house, unless you need to get something you need to keep you alive, like food and medicine."

Except that isn't a summary of what he said. There's a lot of ambiguity. What if your employer deems your work to be "absolutely necessary" (like mine)? The same goes for the self employed.

"Travelling to and from work​, but only where this absolutely cannot be done from home."

That's the official quote from the government guidelines, it doesn't quite match your summary....

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

Re: Money back

"who are paying for HD but getting only SD quality."

So how do you and they define HD vs SD? Resolution, bitrate, bandwidth?

You can have SD with a higher bitrate with quality that surpasses HD.

Similarly, they could still deliver UHD, resolution wise, but with a bitrate that would be so low it would look worse than HD, but they would still be delivering on their UHD service according to the resolution.

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Re: Forget the 'Osborne Effect':focus on the "Upton Effect".

Wow, a little over the top. It's a cheap hobby board in it's infancy....

How many GPIO does the NUC have?

Depending on what you're using it for, it's a bad comparison.

Re: Power to the Pi-ple

" and a USB cable is often easier to find than an arbitrary barrel adapter,"

Well it's not that easy though is it? Firstly it needs to be @3A psu, when most that you'll already have that come with USB are 2A, then there's the fact it has to now be USB-C. So how many people have USB-C leads with 3A PSUs lying around? It's not *that* convenient a power interface at the present time.

Don't tell us to go Huawei, Chinese ambassadors tell UK and France

Re: Can I setup a news agency or search engine in China and report freely about Tibet, Taiwan, etc?

If you think we should break the free market and/or embark on protectionism simply because you disagree with a country's government/political makeup, then that's a lot of trade we'd have to stop.

Similarly, should other countries put an embargo on our goods because we're part of the largest spy network in the world, or they don't like us selling arms to the Saudis and countless other unethical actions?

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

Re: "Operating systems don't just rot or break by themselves ffs"

My windows 7 machine has been on for 193 days and is running fine.

We used to have thousands of windows servers running VBAK back in the day, and they would have uptimes of years and run fine.

I suppose it may be different for home PCs, where users are running many instances of different programs, increasing the chances that one of those is going to misbehave at some point, or a driver leaking memory etc.

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

Re: I'm sure they can afford support

"the burger is better than anything Byron, McDs, BK, Honest, GBK or any other burger joint rustles up"

It's a beef pattie for god sake, it's not rocket science to make. Five guys seem to fool people into thinking their food is nice by putting a days RDA of salt into a meal, 2000calories+, and 50% fat.

Definitely better than McD/BK, but that's hardly a fair comparison.

Re: upstart?

They're only very good compared to cheap fast food places.

They're no better than a burger made at home, or one on the bbq.

Their regular fries are 1000calories alone, which is pretty scary. It's never going to taste awful when a normal meal from there comes in at 2500calories

Contractors welcome Lords inquiry into IR35 before tax reforms hit private sector but fear it's 'too little, too late'

Re: Indeed...

"even though I don't so a job similar to anyone else in that organisation (which is why they hired a specialist contractor in the first place) nor am I subject to "control" in terms of the execution of my works"

Is that the only reason you feel you should be classed as a contractor?

I work for an ISP, and yet we have bought out so many companies over the years we have a vast array of employee skillsets.

I found out the other day we have a couple of home-based guys that repair/replace ancient pcbs from old nuclear power stations. A small office that produces parts for Navy submarines. A few guys specialising in old mainframes for a particular large university.

It doesn't really fit in with the roles of the rest of the company, where we specialise in Storage, MPLS, Cloud based ISP type stuff, and yet they're all classed as employees.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: You are confusing EU with Europe

"I think 25 years of trying showed that that's never going to happen."

In what way did we try exactly? What did Tory/UKIP MEPs do that constitutes "trying"?

I think it's fair to say that the EU will be a better place without our representatives.

BT: UK.gov ruling on Huawei will cost us half a billion pounds over next 5 years

5G is getting all the headlines, but no one seems to mind that BT uses Huawei equipment for FTTC and FTTP, and that the majority of the new HSCN rollout is being done with Huawei CE's (it's only our private medical data).

Of course it's multi-vendor and secure, but people don't seem to understand that.

The Tories also haven't been too concerned about the Chinese owning/having unfluence over our water companies, major bridges and power stations.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

USB A

A good few years ago, a friend that designed and built a new modern house took great delight in showing me the ~ 50 power sockets with USB-A connectors, so he could charge "everything". No doubt they're rated for about 1amp, it won't be long until he ends up changing all of those.

Cables always win.

You're comparing bandwidth with ampage.

RJ45 has gone from utilising 2 pairs to 4 as well.

I believe the plan is to use the cable with devices with similar voltage requirements, rather than the 20v x 5amp (100w) capability, which would obviously result in the destruction of a lot of devices.

Realistically, all that's required is a PSU of ~ 3amp+, and that would charge 99% of phones/tablets/SOCs/Controllers/Headphones/Gadgets etc etc.

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

Re: Opportunites, we don't need no steenkin' opportunities!

" and more freedom with the rest of the world."

This is incorrect I'm afraid. More "perceived" freedom, but in reality we won't.

We'll create trading relationships out of desperation (there's very good reasons why the EU/US don't have a proper free trade agreement after MANY years of negotiations).

Brexiters will then realise that when we create trade deals, we will have to take on different rules/regulations to harmonise sectors to enable free and fair trade. In the exact same way we did with the EU and Brexiters argued we were being ruled by the EU.

There's no question that the US has lower food safety standards and animal welfare, do we match that? If so that prevents us trading with the EU and other areas.

We will have very little freedom.

US hands UK 'dossier' on Huawei: Really! Still using their kit? That's just... one... step... beyond

Indeed.

The NHS is full of Huawei kit, with most CCGs opting for Huawei routers for the new HSCN (up to 1/3rd of the price of the equivalent Cisco model).

BT exchanges similarly full of the kit for FTTC/FTTP etc.

Of course it's all part of a multi-vendor design, and presents no security risks.

LG announces bold new plan for financial salvation: Trying to actually make phones people want to buy

Privacy concerns

LG need to sort out their harvesting of private data before I'll ever buy one of their products again (phones and TVs).

Beset by lawsuits over poor security protections, Ring rolls out 'privacy dashboard' for its creepy surveillance cams, immediately takes heat

Re: The Big Question:

I was pondering this earlier today, when I saw that my neighbour has recently had one installed.

I couldn't think of a single occasion where my life had been negatively impacted by not being home when someone rang my door bell.

Most delivery people hide packages around my property (or throw them over the fence if it's Hermes), unless it requires a signature, which I can't do remotely through an e-doorbell anyway.

So all I'm missing out on is the cold-callers and the religious folk, shame.

Security wise, if you live in such a bad area that you need to video your doorstep, wouldn't a cctv camera covering the whole of the front of your house, with better quality video be a better option?

Re: At WhitePines...

"and as long as I wired it correctly and put the correct fuse in"

But even with those safety standards you mention, it still required some level of intelligence on your part and a degree of skill/knowledge to use that "safe plug" in a safe way.

Similarly, adults should be aware of the VERY simple and frequently discussed fact that passwords for anything connected to the internet should be reasonably complex, for reasons so obvious that those that aren't aware of it are the reason why we have "do not drink" labels on Bleach bottles.

Whilst companies should do everything in their power to protect you, in reality they won't.

Long-term Linux Mint: 19.3 release unchains the Gimp, adds HiDPI, is kind to your older, less-beefy kit

Re: My old Dell Latitude D630 laptop

I updated from 17.3 to 19.3 with the help of an online guide, and the process was seamless and completed in an hour.

Hold my Bose, we can do premium: Sennheiser chucks pricey wireless cans at travellers

Re: oh no!

"proven - to - be - unreliable connector,"

It's not unreliable at all. The recepticles on the market are typically rated for 10k cycles.

If you buy £1 cables, or fill the connector with crud then that's not the fault of the standard/connector.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

Re: Killing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs

My personal view is that if you have 3 years worth of work with a company, that should make you a permanent employee.

"I wasn't doing the same job as a permanent employee"

What does that even mean? A permanent employee isn't inherently restricted to certain jobs/work/hours/projects etc.

China fires up 'Great Cannon' denial-of-service blaster, points it toward Hong Kong

Re: Anyone surprised

"demanding greater democracy" - No they're not, they're protesting to ensure democracy isn't bit-by-bit taken from them.

There were 2million protesters, are they all like you suggest are you making a massive generalisation there?

Did they make up being attacked by mobs as well?

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

It's a common issue apparently, I replaced mine with a rocker switch just a few months ago. Great monitors.

Working in Datacentres at a fairly young age, where the on-call rota often mean't I'd be rudely called in the early hours of the morning whilst slightly intoxicated in Fabric/Turnmills, it meant that strangely I made a number of mistakes.

Those that spring to mind involve accidently pressing the "Argon Release" button instead of the "Door Release", (why were they next to each other and the same god damn shape?). And once putting an SFP into a switch upside down, on a particular Cisco model that didn't prevent you from doing so, which shorted something and took down ~ 50 customers.

Re: Wrong Buttons...

I once had a 350mile round trip because someone in our support department clicked "shutdown" instead of "reboot" on a windows server on a customer site. They of course lied to me and told me there was a power issue, assuming I wouldn't check the logs and see a shutdown was requested, because they knew I'd insist that person make the (much longer for them) trip themselves.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

Re: "Proper embedded devices fail a lot less often than windows."

The Pi design suffers due to Sdcard reliability. But with a properly designed embedded system you would use a design similar to Tiny Core where it runs from RAM. Apart from that, I've yet to meet anyone that has come across a proper Rpi hardware failure.....

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: The RPi 4 is a complete fail

To be fair, Arduinos and Rpi's are very different things.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Re: The internet will be privatised

Recently I've been doing some work for a charity organisation in the UK that has a /8, and in the 10 years they've been a customer of ours, they've used just 4 addresses from that pool. Crazy.

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

Their website is written by the typical bunch of marketing morons.

Talking about adblockers - "In response to this climate of mistrust but also to the growing importance of user data protection and the pressure of the European institutions (GDPR)"

Their response to this mistrust is - "using subdomains....increase in the amount of data collected and, therefore, a much more real and accurate view of what is happening"

That will sort out the mistrust!

Perhaps a silly question, but if I select "Do not track" in my browser, and yet companies do track me regardless of the method used, doesn't that break GDPR?

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Re: How many decent products and companies....

I sold my QC35s. The noise cancellation was fantastic, but the drop in audio quality compared to Non-NC open-backed/baffle headphones I've owned was very noticeable.

It was what I've come to expect from Bose, good tech, but losing focus on the main aspect, the sound.

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: Who gets the profit?

To be fair, most energy companies hate the concept of smart meters as much as the public.

AMD sees Ryzen PCs sold with its CPUs in Europe as Intel shortages persist

Re: Intel contraints

"Desktop PC isnearly dead, though really a laptop with external screen, keyboard and mouse is better value than AIO"

Only if someone works from home or on the move. Otherwise it's a more expensive device trying to be a desktop, surely?

Laptops have a pretty dire lifespan in work environments in comparison.

Re: Intel contraints

Indeed.

And if you're using a laptop with an external monitor and other devices, then it's no longer just a laptop and in fact a laptop trying to emulate a desktop PC.

Chinese customers to unfold their Huawei Mate X on 15 November

Bigger pockets please.

Doesn't it make more sense for clothes manufacturers to start stitching in larger pockets into clothes/suits, rather than creating increasingly complex screen-folding phones that cost £2k and presumably are going to be less reliable over many years compared to normal phones?

See you in Hull: First UK city to be hooked up to full-fibre broadband

Re: can we stop calling every internet circuit "broadband"?

Check out the different dictionary descriptions. Whether you like it or not, it seems to have been widely adopted as a generic term for transmitting data at high-speed between computers/internet.

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

The US ranks almost bottom in the world when it comes to family benefts, causing some pretty extreme child poverty.

Likewise the UK austerity has increased foodbank use and a large rise in inequality, with over 4million children in relative poverty.

But both countries seem really concerned about online child abuse (when it comes to encryption) at this very moment in time, strange that.

So, the US argue that Huawei are despicable and are a company that will obey the Chinese government and aid them viewing all of our communications data (ignoring the fact that most ISPs use multiple vendors in their network), and yet the US and now Priti Patel moan at Facebook for their use of encryption because it hinders their ability to view all of our communications, because of erm (what will sound best to the public.....) the safety of our innocent children!!!

Life's certainties: Death, taxes, and Cisco patching more serious vulnerabilities

Re: Still no updates for in-contract non-EOL cisco devices

Okay, so take the 5506X (that I have), any updates now disable Firepower because it requires 8G memory. So a product that is quite some time away from being EOL can't be updated further without losing the main functionality you bought it for. You can't upgrade the ram, so you're stuck with it and any bugs/vulns.

So your argument of them pushing for a 5506X (with the only main benefit over the 5505 being Firepower) would have led down a similar path.

We've had so many issues with Firepower, and bugs/vulns, for kit that isn't cheap, it's no wonder they're rapidly losing market share.