Posts by Jamie Jones

This could be our favorite gadget of 2017: A portable projector

Oh no, you didn't just say that.....

"It weighs about 4.4lb (2kg) but feels lighter."

EU law bods closer to baking new 'cookie law' after battle

It seems some readers would prefer the sort of government that gleefully tries to encourage companies to use and sell as much personal information about you as possible.

It's 2017 and you can still pwn Android gear with Wi-Fi packets – so get patching now

Re: Dear Motorola

Dr Toboggan, ahhh with an attitude like that, I assume you don't enjoy the proper consumer rights laws we have in Europe..

Don't worry though, the BRexiters have ensured we'll all be back to your level of expectancy ! Trump advisors have admitted as much!

ATM fees shake-up may push Britain towards cashless society

Re: muggings

Nah, they are easier since chip and pin.. Mug someone for their cards, and verify their pin in one of those cheap card reading pinsentry things

Re: Theft of cash machines by JCBs

Blimey! Looking at that link, I expect their Michael Caine character to shout "You were only meant to blow the bloody doors off"!

Ye Bug List

Fair enough, I suspected you knew that, being one of the original old timers :-) - but always best to eliminate the obvious!

But typical, eh? computers... never broken when you want then to be! :-) as you say.... bloody computers!

The posts don't update immediately like they used to.. Some server side caching I suspect, did you reload the page from the server again?

Donald, YOU'RE FIRED: Rogue Twitter worker quits, deletes President Trump's account

The president should be nowhere near twitter

I've thought this for some time.

The President (and other officials) should never be using something like twitter. Hell, they have all these secure protocols, official press briefings, secret service agents everywhere... yet some commercial internet company is responsible for (what is, in effect) the official view of the POTUS.

Is there a secure line from the white house to twitter hq? Are there secret service agents in the twitter offices, or at key network points?

The whole idea of using twitter like this is a serious security breach (and twitter themselves are totally innocent in this).

POTUS is breaching security, why can't the courts stop him? Why can't his advisers?

Hell, set up trumptwit.whitehouse.gov securely for him to play with instead - I'm sure it would get the followers.

Tesla share crash amid Republican bid to kill off electric car tax break

Re: Electric grid

"smart grid ready"

I shuddered reading that - it made me think of "internet of things" type balonie being applied to the grid...

USB stick found in West London contained Heathrow security data

But when they are, how would we know?

As for the wider implications, they barely need spelling out: had the chance passerby been someone less kindly disposed towards the UK than the finder of the stick, the consequences could have been seriously bad. ®

But what about the other 3 carelessly abandoned USB sticks that were found by people less kindly disposed towards the UK, which are now being examined by "baddies" without our knowledge?

Whois? No, Whowas: Incoming Euro privacy rules torpedo domain registration system

Re: Problem?

@John Savard:

Some politicians come up with rules to help people maintain their privacy, and you just think ICANN can and should just blackmail them into submission?

This raises a few questions.. Is this amount of "freedom" for Europeans too "commie" for your liking?

Do you run one of those register-by-proxy schemes where people have to pay for their privacy?

As an aside, you obviously don't realise how powerful Europe is, or indeed how the internet works..

If ICANN tried to block Europe, European ISPs would have to set up their own root servers... No biggie. Many are run within Europe already.

If there was *finally* a viable alternative-root, other countries would migrate to it in droves to get away from the ICANN bullshit, draining them of any power they have.

They know this. You even have groups like ORSN who could take over at a 'flick of a switch' - the infrastructure is already in place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Root_Server_Network

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

Re: Can someone offer a TLDR please?

The person/organisation who owns a domain currently has to have their details listed publicly.

After the law, they won't.

Credit insurance tightens for geek shack Maplin Electronics

Re: Hobbyist

2GB/£ for a memory stick?

128GB Usb flash drives have been under 30 quid for ages...

Re: You cant have it both ways

So, Maplin has changed ownership at least 3 times since I started with them in the 80's...

That makes me feel less guilty about the fact I feel they are now like Tandys was at the time... Handy for quickly sourcing some obscure valued resistor, but otherwise hosting overpriced stuff you'd never want... And back then, Tandys didn't have the internet to compete with.

Watership downtime: BadRabbit encrypts Russian media, Ukraine transport hub PCs

Re: Ransom demands in BitCoin again

I think a few of you are missing Kens point:

Encryption is used for all sorts of goodness, but the authorities want to ban that. (Well, backdoor-it, which leads to the same thing)

Remember way back then people were calling for the internet to be banned, because... kids and terrorists. (*)

There need be no logic to it - I'm sure some will call for the evil bitcoin to be banned... It's internet/encryption/techie stuff.. All the best bogeyman things rolled into one... Just wait until the UK tabloids pick up the cause..

(*) Not so long ago in the case of Our-supreme-leader-in-chief-covfefe: "Donald Trump wants to ban the internet, plans to ask Bill Gates to ‘close it up’"

- "Theresa May's Call to Ban "Safe Spaces" Undermines Encryption—And Misses the Point | WIRED"

Hate to break it to you, but billions of people can see Uranus tonight

Re: Uranus's Moon

Notice how some miserable bastard has downvoted all the "anus" posts? !

Re: Could have used an accurate picture

With the ring properly being centered over the equator, rather than the 'lines' of the ring being over the equator - the 'empty' centre of the ring should be over the equator

But what's that got to do with anuses?

Re: Blue-green Uranus from Methane

@Solarflare: You know that temptation you get when someone advises you against something?...

Arrgh, I've been lucky I've never "bumped into" him before.

A troll surely? I mean, surely no-one can be so ignorant on so many topics, and so stupid as to think they know what they're talking about?

Dis you know uranus has a heavy methane presence?

"Recent attempts"? They've been trying to PCise it since the 80's!

I see it worked on J.Cook ... J - it's your anus. be proud of your anus!

Re: Uranus's Moon

Yes, it was one of the classic sketches "featuring" the late Alastair Burnet, I remember it clearly..

EDIT: Ain't the intertube-er-me-jigs wonderful?

Found it: Alastair Burnet, Uranus, and Bumhole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHp9Cakv2Fg

Malware hidden in vid app is so nasty, victims should wipe their Macs

Surely the bigger story is...

No-one seems to be mentioning how they managed to reverse engineer the sha256 checksums that are held on entirely different servers, and are checked before any downloaded software is released?

That's how it's done, right?

EU: No encryption backdoors but, eh, let's help each other crack that crypto, oui? Ja?

Re: The utter fools

surveilance?? real police work? pffft, what century are you in?

As for the proposal, it sound good - my only worry is they start stockpiling/hoarding vulnerabilties they find, ala NSA/GCHQ rather than alerting the people responsible.

Do fear the Reaper: Huge army of webcams, routers raised from 'one million' hacked orgs

How to fix this

Right now, check to make sure you're not exposing a vulnerable device to the internet, apply any patches if you can, look out for suspicious behavior on your network, and take a gadget offline if it's infected., immediately throw away anything that has ever been referred to as "Internet of things"

FTFY

IBM broke its cloud by letting three domain names expire

Re: Redundancy?

What's more, it appears they were relying on an external service for their internal communicatons to work.

If your name expires, or your internet link goes down, or terrorists shut down the .com servers, the only things that should be affected are the external connections.

Your own domain should be anchored in your DNS structure so your internal network isn't potentially vulnerable to an external action by a third party. Simply speaking, if someone "on the internet" can screw up your internal servers, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Pay peanuts, get monkeys!

No, the point is, you don't pay for 10 years and leave it, you STILL pay every year, topping it up so you've always got a 10 year buffer...

No, the FCC can't shut down TV stations just because Donald Trump is mad at the news

Re: Actually

"FCC licensing can be challenged. With some of the "great reporting" by the alleged networks recently those challenges may be interesting."

That's interesting, and it would be about time too. Fox "News" shouldn't be allowed to get away with their constant lies.

The spectrum goes something like this:

truth -> inaccuracies -> propoganda -> lies -> Fox.

About time the "fairness doctrine" was brought back. No, America, "free speech" doesn't mean you can present lies as facts on news programmes (even if you try to wing it as "commentary"), unless you support Kim Jons version of free speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

WPA2 security in trouble as KRACK Belgian boffins tease key reinstallation bug

Re: Uncorrectable Horse Staple Battery

Hmm, I actually upvoted your original post, but was very tempted to downvote this little temper-tantrum!

Re: Firmware update or OS?

I read that as meaning someone already "logged in" via the wpa2 key - surely a Wifi hack requiring someone to be in range of the wifi base station is a given?

US Congress mulls first 'hack back' revenge law. And yup, you can guess what it'll let people do

Re: Femto-poll

When your digital doppelganger is regularly surfing the information superhighway, and conversing with good netiquette with people in this virtual playground, it's easy to forget what's happening in meatspace. As such, who knows if words like 'cyber" still used out in the wild?

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

I agree with most of your post, but question why you wrote "in theory" relating to fake one-time pad keys producing harmless text.

It's easy to do - it's just like a long bunch of XOR operations after all!

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

The annoying thing is that we need to care when we shouldn't.

When did we enter the "alternate universe" where if a company lends people money thinking they are me, is it my problem?

Why isn't it:

"Hey Mr. banker.. Someone fooled you into giving them money? Sucks to be you!"

Because I come from a small community, I could probably get the mothers maiden name, place of birth, and date of birth of many of the people I was in school with (most have their birthday listed on facebook, and I already know the year they were born)

It shouldn't be information I should need to keep private anyway.

If you lend "me" money, you should have no right to force me to pay, or blacklist me, or ruin my reputation, if I say it wasn't me, unless you can get it proven in a court of law. Until then, anything you say or do should be considered slander or libel.

"Mitchell and Webb" put it rather eloquently: https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E

Smut-watchers suckered by evil advertising

Re: Purely in the interests of research...

You may be correct, but unfortunately there are far too many back-doors that seem to be regularly exploited..

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

Re: Is the problem 'game developers' or scammers?

You nailed it.

If I'm watching TV, there may be ads shown at some point.

Nowhere does the person responsible for that ad retrieve my precise location, my address, a unique id assigned to my tv, a list of all tv programmes I have stored on my PVR, or the last few programmes I watched,

Nowhere does the company that made the advert assume it can download code to my TV that runs permanently, phoning home with this uptodate data, whilst slowing down the TV, and using my electrcity to do so, and no where does it try to hide the fact that it is doing so.

By watching the TV advert, the company don't get to know the brand/model/age/version of my TV, or how many other TVs are connected in the house. They also don't get to track a unique "reception id" of all the TVs my various neighbours use.

If any of these companies did do these things, you can bet your life I'd also block/redirect/spoof everything from them too.

Shit, the above is true of just about *ALL* mobile ad companies, and whilst they try to hide it from the end users, just go to their websites and they brag about how much information from users they can get potential customers.

This is why the "app developers don't know how intrusive the ad companies they use are" sounds like bollocks to me. Even if it isn't, ignorance is no excuse.

According to the stats for my google account, I've spent £418 in the last few years on the play store. Produce something useful or fun, and I'll pay for it. If you prefer, you can attempt to fling adverts my way whilst hoping they don't get annoying. DO NOT attempt to grab my data, or you'll be met by my filters.

Incidentally, you know why so many of the ad-sdks grab your network mac address? It serves as a unique id for those times a user attempts to block their unique id being sent.

Honestly, just about all (if not all) of the android ad-providers are scum sucking shisters. I'd be surprised if what they attempt to do is even legal...

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Re: No longer "cool" - but quickly going cold

Microsoft "THE software company"?

Microsoft are famous for creating the low-expectation mindset people have in computers. People now expect computers to require certain things, as if it's some sort of fundamental law of physics:

1) Regular reboots to stop things slowing down.

2) Complete periodic reinstalls to stop things slowing down.

3) "Have you tried turning it on and off again?"

4) Install some software, reboot required!

5) Virus scanners - computers can't be safe without them!

6) Huge processing power to perform simple tasks.

etc.

There was a time that it was correct to call the profession "software engineering" - software went through rigorous checks and was written by competent people.

Since Microsoft took power? More like software cowboys. Who cares. If there's a bug, we'll maybe make a patch. If it's too slow, you need a faster computer/more ram. If it crashes? Well, you saved your work right?

Thank god most SCADA and other critical systems haven't yet succumbed to this influence, and thank god mechanical engineering hasn't either, or we'd regularly here about traffic lights breaking down, power plants rebooting, and buildings and bridges collapsing.

I remember many years ago, someone in his early 20s on a Usenet forum replying to someone else regarding his satellite receivers unreliability. Paraphrased: "You've got to remember, a satellite receiver these days is basically a computer, and as you know, all computers need to be rebooted every few days or they'll slow down, and eventually crash. Just reboot your box every night and you'll be fine."

That was the sign the rot had started to take hold.

Dumb bug of the week: Apple's macOS reveals your encrypted drive's password in the hint box

If you don't "linkify" links, long ones get truncated.

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

Re: Ignorance knows no borders

"JD and coke" was my usual battle cry during my days clubbing in Ibiza.

Not ashamed to admit it!

Russian telco backs up North Korea's sole Internet link

Re: There are some details on Internet in North Korea

Hmmm, I guess the "humour" of that article was lost in translation...

Re: Counterproductive..

1) Most North Koreans realise the propaganda they are fed is a load of crap. https://www.quora.com/Do-North-Koreans-believe-the-propaganda-the-government-tells-them-or-do-they-just-pretend-to/answer/Jieun-Baek

2) They already get food aid from the USA. North Korea spins it as the great leader has so much power, he's forced the evil enemy into providing for them. https://www.pri.org/stories/2011-02-12/does-north-korea-deserve-aid

Oath-my-God: THREE! BILLION! Yahoo! accounts! hacked! in! 2013! – not! 'just!' 1bn!

Re: Unable to collaborate myself...

Not having your account access doesn't mean anything - if the details from 6 billion accounts were exposed, you can be sure at least one or two will ignored!

FreeBSD gains eMMC support so … errr … watch out, Android

Re: Don't Understand....

What special arrangements are you talking about?

Besides, this is talking about backporting to a legacy version (FreeBSD 10)

If you cared about more uptodate features, you'd be using the official release version, FreeBSD 11.

Or, for someone more used to Linux instability, the development version, FreeBSD 12

<cheapshot>By the way, how's the Fedora Raspberry PI3 support going?</cheapshot>

Re: it's well-engineered an unencumbered.

An unencumbered cucumber.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Re: Alabama Pi bill = urban legend

Linkify your links or they get truncated...

Re: Rudd

Being in the UK, I'm not sure what the hell she just banned for us either.

In fact, neither is she!

(acid as in the burny-burny stuff, that's about the level of technical level bring applied)

Patch your Android, peeps, it has up to 14 nasty flaws to flog

Re: Patching....

If someone wants to restrict *my* access to the device I use, they can pay me for the privilege.

Re: If it helps...

.... and still cost you more than if you bought a new android phone every 6 months.... Just saying.

"Patch your android"

LOL!

FCC big cheese given Congressional roasting in reconfirmation bid

I hate to be the one to say it..... ;-)

'Not to forget the ludicrous effort to append the hate-word "Obama" to everything, which resulted in Pai referring to a long-standing program to provide the country's poorest with access to telecommunications as "Obamaphone."'

That would make it PhoneObama.

HTH :-)

Guntree v Gumtree: Nominet orders gun ads site must lose domain

Someone is just showing off now:

"“The Complainant notes that the words 'gumtree' and 'guntree' are identical save for the letters 'm' and 'n', adding that this difference is found in the middle of each word and that both start with the same letters."

Ok, Ok, give him his gold star already!

Nokia updates classic comeback mobe 3310

Re: My new Nokia

Thank-you! So I'm not mad after all (unless you are too!)

I've been using an E63 for many years, but earlier this month treated myself to an upgrade! :-)

Putty for ssh, and UC browser are just about the only add-ons I use.

And you are spot on regarding the keyboard, and size generally. I think iphones and android phones are too big, yet too small for proper use, yet with the nokia you can do everything one handed!