* Posts by DJ Smiley

449 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2011

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Two missing digits? How about two missing employees in today's story of Y2K

DJ Smiley

I saw this happen at a workplace myself

They'd been over-billing customers for years, due to the way they measured the length of phone calls, essentially adding the time it'd take a call to get connected, and charging for that.

I don't know what happened about that in the end - one amusing aside was the fact the raid array hosting the old systems (which were kept running, while the company figured out what to do about said issue) was constantly failing into worse and worse state (think not only out of support, but out of manufacturing of the chips used in the thing). It eventually did fall over, costing a pretty penny to recover the data, and then a few weeks later my boss and I discovered it was STILL being run off the old system instead of the new one.

I left shortly after...

OK. We're off. Water ice found just below the surface of Mars. Good enough for us. Let's go. Impulse power, Mr Sulu

DJ Smiley

Re: Brought to you by Elon

To be honest I'd buy some if it wasn't stupidly expensive. If it means he builds something that can take off from mars, he'll have solved the 'we can't get home' issue.

From humble Unix sysadmin to brutal separatist suppressor to president of Sri Lanka

DJ Smiley

That escalated quickly!

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

DJ Smiley

Re: Or

In the UK at least, with a bit of a dim Judge this could be classified as 'hacking' and the various offences that carries.

The same way I think you could technically find someone's front door open and left on the catch by accident, lock it for them, and be done for trespassing.

However, one of these things is likely, and the other is just absurd.

The NetCAT is out of the bag: Intel chipset exploited to sniff SSH passwords as they're typed over the network

DJ Smiley

Re: Wireshark is my shell...

Did you read the comments? There's a whole lot more data than just the SSH data going in and out of the cache.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

DJ Smiley

Re: hmm

Makes me wonder how many Gas engineers get calls from people who's ovens don't work, only to eventually realise they are electric ovens and the fuse has tripped...

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

DJ Smiley

66 comments not one of you noticed the potential fire hazard.

What happens to Li-ion battery's when allowed to discharge over years and years? Oh yes, they go a bit expandy, and then a bit explody, with flames and death and destruction.

How long before we start seeing a state of house fires caused by forgotten devices, with discharging batteries in them?

WTF is Boeing on? Not just customer databases lying around on the web. 787 jetliner code, too, security bugs and all

DJ Smiley

Re: Agree... but

Ok.

Lets dial it back a bit.

There's a consumer facing system, which lets you get to a crew facing system. That's confirmed, and proven. Scared yet?

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

DJ Smiley

So you wasted money, effort, materials all to prove you don't know how to use a map to figure out a distance? Bravo.

The best and worst of GitHub: Repos wiped without notice, quickly restored – but why?

DJ Smiley

There's a problem with giving 'value' to aged accounts....

Plenty of 'aged' accounts - i.e. active accounts for years, for various meanings of 'active' get hacked / have credentials dumped, often long after the user who was using them has forgotten about the account too.

To be fair to github - they restored the account, seemingly without any kind of loss to the user other than some time. He's learnt a lesson (don't rely on free services for something so important) and so I'm not really sure why this is even in the news?

Two weeks after Microsoft warned of Windows RDP worms, a million internet-facing boxes still vulnerable

DJ Smiley

Re: So why Windows?

"The only feasible alternatives have been web based which sucks if you're travelling or on a bad conection, but Outlook is probably the firmest lock-in product that Microsoft has,"

Everything you've said is right, but they seem to be moving away from this with office 365, and I wonder if it'll be part of the downfall

Hate e-scooters? Join the club of the pals of 190 riders in Austin TX who ended up in hospital

DJ Smiley

As texas, i've got to ask - how does this compare to injury's by-self to gun owners by said guns?

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

DJ Smiley

Just last week (thank god for 3 day weekend allowing me to slightly forget) I was debugging a quick script I'd be writing up, which kept choking on a password I was pasting in (yes, horrible copying and pasting passwords but 'reasons').

In the end I sighed, gave in and started to echo back what I was pasting in. It seems for some odd reason, it was only actually being received successfully 1/3rd of the times, the other times it only ever showed the line ending. Very weird, but satisfying to find once the proper solution (i..e no more copy pasting passwords) that it'd work correctly, all the time.

DJ Smiley

Re: Not an IT guy but..

When you're writing stuff into a notepad file; do you not hit return; but instead just keep using; the poor semicolon; because return is too much hard work?

Didn't think so.

NordVPN rapped by ad watchdog over insecure public Wi-Fi claims

DJ Smiley

Exactly!

Their arguement that shared wifi (with a shared passcode handed out to everyone and his dog without wifi isolation (and even with it) IS insecure. But this has nothing to do with https and secure sites.

if I can connect to wifi, and then connect to another device on the same wifi, it doesn't matter if they're going to a https site or not, if they're running outdated windows/osx/whatever then I can get in.

Self-taught Belgian bloke cracks crypto conundrum that was supposed to be uncrackable until 2034

DJ Smiley

Re: Ronald Rivest - Age

What if they open it, and it says 'Gottacha! I knew it'd be done by 2019. You didn't vote Trump did you?' Maybe he knows he'd never need to live to 89...

Google readies Pixel for the masses, but are the masses ready for Pixel?

DJ Smiley

So they deny the problems, just like other manufacturers?

iphones definately don't bend, don't blow up and you're holding them wrong.

I'm sure Samsung have had their fair share of stupid issues too, which too they likely denied.

Admitting a fault is admitting a failure, something no company wants to do. As long as they continue to improve, then hopefully they'll get somewhere eventually. For now I'm happy with my moto g5.

Fake broadband ISP support scammers accidentally cough up IP address to Deadpool in card phish gone wrong

DJ Smiley

Re: Who is to blaim for being taken by scammers?

Well played good sir.

However, while I allow link forwarders, said ner-do-wells wouldn't be able to execute any scripts on my machine had it not pointed to the place it did.

Should we disable all javascripts on unknown sites? I'm tempted to say yes, we should.

Come mobile users, gather round and learn how to add up

DJ Smiley

Re: Itchy Chin

Ah, they used Sony's magic number generator?

'return 4'.

Windows 10 Insiders sent on quest deep into Registry to fetch goblet of Reserved Storage

DJ Smiley

You've plenty of choice, from OSX to Ubuntu and all the other flavours of Linux for a start.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

DJ Smiley

Also government systems? It could be as bad as win xp on 320Mb ;)

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

DJ Smiley

Re: holograraphic love dungeon layout

I think he got the european version: Bears 3.2 ;)

DJ Smiley

Re: Width

Oh god I recall when we had some stupidish comment system which did this at university (10+ years ago). Web....mx? something like that anyway. It was much amusement to the computing students to keep replying to each other constantly on threads they didn't like, causing them to get narrower and narrower until you couldn't see any content anymore.

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

DJ Smiley

Re: Once again this proves

You realise that's EXACTLY whats happened here right?

Millennium Buggery: When things that shouldn't be shut down, shut down

DJ Smiley

Re: Engineers who become managers

So much this.

> You know your manager is good when you feel you've let them down and yet they haven't said anything. A bollocking from an ahole has no effect.

I..... once killed DNS for one of our largest clients, for around 2 days, because of a change which I made, backed out (including stupidly removing the change notes for it, as it "hadn't happened") which occurred over a weekend, while a number of staff were on an entirely different continent.

I walked in Monday without a clue nor a care in the world, my team leader turned to me and told me I'd removed the DNS entry from the firewall, why would I have done this?. My face clearly said it all, as it was hardly brought up, until I started giving myself grief over it (and every time there's ever a DNS issue I immediately announce it wasn't me!).

Open-source devs: Wget off your bloated festive behinds and patch this user cred-blabbing bug

DJ Smiley

Surely it's not a bug, but something that should be noted

After all, if you're doing the wget - you already know the URI and any information it holds.

As for "Hector Martin tweeted that the stored information survives being moved to a different filesystem, so someone wanting to steal stored URLs from can move it from the target's hard drive to a USB key with no trouble."

So? If the attacker has access to my local file system, I'm already compromised, and if I send them files blindly, I'm an idiot.

Canuck couple returns home after night on tiles to gaggle of randomers hanging out in their flat

DJ Smiley

Re: Heard a similar story with cars ....

My Yale key to my parents house would unlock:

my friends house

the tuck room at school

the house head's room at school

The maths stock room at school...

God knows how many other rooms if I'd just tried it, but I didn't because :)

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

DJ Smiley

Do you like making work for yourself?

I mean..... it was a dodgy site, no evidence in anyway of infection.

Uber fined £385k by ICO for THAT hack of 57m customers' deets

DJ Smiley

Re: Peanuts

That's the 2.7Million they admitted getting pinched. Surely they wouldn't lie about the numbers, would they?!

DJ Smiley

Re: Peanuts

My math must be off....

I worked it out as 0.6p/person

A 5G day may come when the courage of cable and DSL fails ... but it is not this day

DJ Smiley

Re: could replace leased line options for sure.

I can tell you for sure. You wont.

DJ Smiley

Any success actually getting 20Gb down in a month, or even hahahaha 100Gb?

Scam or stunt? It's looking like the latter... Xiaomi so sorry for £1 smartphone 'promo'

DJ Smiley

Re: Versus Samsung

Indeed.

This is in fact the first I've heard of it.... almost as if the 'outrage' was also marketed ;)

'The inmates have taken over the asylum': DNS godfather blasts DNS over HTTPS adoption

DJ Smiley

Re: Another step

The rest of the world and I have a differing opinion on 'better'.

Dead retailer's 'customer data' turns up on seized kit, unencrypted and very much for sale

DJ Smiley

Re: Why?

Technically the time of breach was when the Landlords took the items from NCIX.

So.... back to suing NCIX then?

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

DJ Smiley

Well, that's now gone to archive.org

You're welcome.

And I'm not talking the standard crawling by archive.org, but the creation of a warc file by our friendly archivebot we have on IRC, who crawls sites on demand and submits them as part of archive team.

https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveBot

Ex-UK comms minister's constituents plagued by wonky broadband over ... wireless radio link?

DJ Smiley

Re: Openreach treats everyone equally ........

Not easily (read cheaply).

It may be poor man's Photoshop, but GIMP casts a Long Shadow with latest update

DJ Smiley

Re: Forget the geeky stuff, sort out the user experience.

IMP's behind the cameras, gimps in front eh?

It liiives! Sorta. Gentle azure glow of Windows XP clocked in Tesco's self-checkouts, no less

DJ Smiley

Maybe you missed the bit where it was hopeful that the failure that is Tesco's would insist of something better than the cheapest of cheap work when building the PoS?

Techie's test lab lands him in hot water with top tech news site

DJ Smiley

That works until you find that the two companies you brought from are both buying out the same colo space.... (i.e. the cheapest one)

Ad watchdog: Amazon 'misleading' over Prime next-day delivery ads

DJ Smiley

> Amazon was ordered not to let the advert “appear again in its current form”, and to ensure that some Amazon Prime-labelled items were not available for next-day delivery.

Is it me, or does that second bit not make sense? Was it meant to be 'as some Amazon Prime-labelled items were not available for next-day delivery' I wonder?

Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep

DJ Smiley

Re: "...hashland would sound silly."

I'm just trying to figure out what poundbrowns would taste like....

Swiss sausage sizzler 4.0 hits 200 bangers per hour

DJ Smiley

I just did some really bad math, and came out with sausages weighing in at 3.5Kg each?!

200 hr, over 48 hrs, weighing 37 tons....

10 social networks ignored UK government consultations

DJ Smiley

"Data Protection Act’s penalties of up to four per cent of global turnover for non-compliance, with lesser penalties applied first."

Actually I think that's GDPR, and DPA only has fines upto £500,000 which for someone like facebook, is just a drop in the ocean.

Massive cyber attack targets mid-Atlantic nation 'Berylia'

DJ Smiley

Re: Proper simulation

Or if you're Costa Rica, or any country without what we like to think as 'first world services' - years later.

NASA fungus problem puts theory of 'Martian mushrooms' on toast

DJ Smiley

Why not.....

Do the research in space, on the meterorite?

I'm sure there's reasons, mostly being $$$... but would it be possible?

IBM: About those agreed voluntary redundancies ... we were just kidding

DJ Smiley

How many will now leave anyway.... and miss out on redundancy?

How many will now leave anyway.... and miss out on redundancy?

This is worse than the time a large water company took a dump on me, after telling me they were extending my contract, to the next day telling me actually they weren't, and that was my last day.

Google slaps mute button on stupid ads that nag you to buy stuff you just looked at

DJ Smiley

Re: Nice PR

Adverts aren't going away, no matter how much you hate them.

But, if the adverts can at least be relevant (i.e. not the ones I'm never going to click in 1000 years) then this is surely a good thing, even if the point of it is to make more money for google.

Look on the bright side, Pebble fans. At least your gizmo will work long enough for you to get beach body ready

DJ Smiley

In the sky - is it bright? yes - it's day.

You don't need to be any more accurate when you're 50 miles from civilisation.

GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort

DJ Smiley

Re: "github provides many workflow features"

If you're incompetent enough to post your keys to github, what says your competent enough to run a git server, and not accidentally forget to back it up?

The ToS say you get to keep the flaming wreckage in this case, much use it'll do you.

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