Posts by DJO

'R2D2' stops disk-wipe malware before it executes evil commands

This doesn't seem to do much against encrypting malware though

Most data files and all executables have a fixed header, encryption will generally corrupt that so it should be possible to detect most cases of encryption on the fly.

Just look to see if the first few bytes of a file change, if so backup the original and then if there are a lot more similarly affected files stop the operation and ask the user if it was intentional.

The idea needs refinement but it should be possible to make it work pretty well.

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Re: Feeling Old...

the whole development of personal computing was driven by the desire to play games

Only until online porn became available.

Re: Feeling Old...

On DOS5.0 with MS LAN MAN and NETBEUI loaded.

You utter bastard, I'd managed (with considerable effort and chemical assistance) to forget NETBEUI.

Now I'll have to spend another week pissed to try to burn out the afflicted brain cells.

FBI raids home of spy sat techie over leak of secret comms source code on Facebook

Re: Naughtiness?

How's this for technique?

Yes, that's the sort of thing.

In my younger days I went to a lot of gigs but wasn't too enthusiastic about paying or queuing up in the rain so I'd just stride through the stage door as if I owned the place. I doubt if it'd work today but back in the day I was never questioned.

people can't just walk out with large pieces of equipment from somewhere with high security

You'd be amazed. Large kit is far easier to purloin than pocketable stuff, you just wheel it out the loading bay in the middle of the working day and the security guys will hold the door open for you.

They get suspicious at going home time but during the day it's all normal business.

Actually there's a little bit more to it than that but I'm keeping shtum, wouldn't want to encourage naughtiness.

There's a world of difference between "worth $200k" and "costs $200k", especially when it comes to military procurement.

Re: "Weed is also accused of earlier nicking $340,000"

The correct way to "borrow" equipment from work is to stick it in a big box and then get the security people to give you a hand loading it into your car.

In some cases it's worth stashing the kit at the back of a cupboard for a few months first to see if anybody misses it.

Brit MPs chide UK.gov: You're acting like EU data adequacy prep is easy

You say that as if "Tory MPs" are somehow worse than Labour ones

Irrelevant, it's the Tories who are 100% responsible for this mess from instigation to execution. If Labour MPs are equally duplicitous, that is not an issue.

The problem here is that half the government want brexit and half don't

Oh if it was that simple life would be easy.

Half want in, half want out, half want a hard out, half want a soft out, half want an intermediate position and half just want to go on holiday and leave the problems for somebody else to deal with.

Yes that's 6 halves but as Tory MPs are capable of changing firmly held opinions several times over lunch it's probably about right.

It's almost as they are deliberately trying to make it a disaster, mind you as any form of Brexit will be disastrous I suppose there's no real incentive to make it work.

Birmingham UK to Uber: Want a new licence? Tell us about your operating model

Re: Business Model:

Lie, Cheat, Rape and Murder the customers ?

Those are just sidelines, the actual business model is simply to use predatory pricing to drive established taxi firms to the wall.

This is illegal under EU law:

"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect."

It's badly worded legislation because currently Uber does not have a "dominant market position" but is seeking to attain one.

It's also against the anti-trust laws in the USA.

Developers dread Visual Basic 6, IBM Db2, SharePoint - survey

Re: And yet...

There's a stupendous amount of legacy software written in VB6 so they need to support the runtimes for as long as feasible. That does not mean they are encouraging developers to use VB6 for new programs.

There will come a time when Windows will no longer be able to fully support VB6, probably in 3 or 4 versions down the line, that'll be interesting to watch.

Sneaky satellite launch raises risk of Gravity-style space collision

Re: Like they would know about secret military satellites either...

They work with the military and the FCC (or at least staff within the FCC with clearance) know where the mystery satellites are but not what they can do. The military when moving a satellite need to know that their stuff isn't going to be hit by a commercial satellite not because they care about the commercial satellites, they don't, but they do care about their own stuff and don't want to break it.

They should have enough manoeuvring fuel to de-orbit. Otherwise a jolly costly retrieval mission would be interesting to watch.

Of course if they were to develop a way to capture small objects in orbit that technology could be immensely valuable.

Your entire ID is worth £820 to crooks on dark web black market

Re: New business ...

With enough random permutations you will eventually hit on a real identity, sell that and you will be no better than the scum you are trying cheat.

'A sledgehammer to crack a nut': Charities slam UK voter ID trials

Is this voter ID trial more about saving on printing and postage, I wonder, than it is about voter fraud?

No, like in the US the primary function is to suppress the votes of people more likely to vote for left wing candidates.

These actions represent a far more serious voter fraud than anything conducted at the polling booth but as it's being done by the government itself everything is just rosy.

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

Pre-history

Then as a reader of Wireless World I thought the ZX series was for kiddies so when WW published a design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSI_Comp_80) I saved up my pennies and built one, oh the fun of soldering 5k of 1 kilobit chips (with parity) that's 45 x 20 pin chips and then actually getting the bugger to work was a great source of joy (for "joy" read "frustration").

But once it did work it was an interesting machine boasting a calculator chip as a "maths co-processor" which allowed far more complex programs and a novel version of BASIC using reverse polish notation which had the great advantage of confusing the hell out of almost everybody who saw it.

Learned a lot about computer hardware and how to do terse programming, a skill that seems to have been lost now as memory and storage are cheap and abundant.

Boffins discover chemistry that could have produced building blocks of life in space

Re: Oh, the hyperbole

That's why dinosaurs readily turn into coal

Trees turn into coal, marine algae to oil, dinosaurs into fossils (non-combustible rock).

BBC Telly Tax heavies got pat on the head from snoopers' overseers

Re: Why persist?

"the news coverage has gone so far left...

...Farage spouting his hypocritical nonsense at every possible opportunity."

When both sides say you are biased against them you are probably doing something right.

The BBC may (definitely does) have faults but the news coverage is normally reasonably balanced. (although the Brexit coverage has been dreadfully skewed)

The Gemini pocket PC is shipping and we've got one. This is what it's like

WINE would be nice but will probably be quite tricky with the processor in the Gemini, perhaps in a year or so when everything is settled down.

Re: I can't help feeling...

Perhaps a touchscreen (I assume it hasn't got one)

Assumption is the mother of all cock-ups.

Of course it has a touch screen.

Who wanted a future in which AI can copy your voice and say things you never uttered? Who?!

Re: As far as I am concerned

Do they share the same identical fingerprints?

No, fingerprints are not genetic but are formed in the womb and as twins will be in different positions the print development will differ.

Teensy plastic shields are the big new thing in 2018's laptop crop

Re: Webcam Shield?

Hammer & cold chisel

Facebook's big solution to combating election ad fraud: Snail mail

Even better, rather than you send them a postcard get them to send you one. You can't fake a postmark.

Probably not unless you are a government operative then you probably can.

But it's far easier for them to send the postcard in an envelope to a third party in the country they wish to influence who can then post it from there so it has a legitimate postmark.

Realistically it's almost impossible to verify somebodies location if they really want to hide it and have deep pockets.

HomePod, you say? Sex sex sex, that's all you think about

You need Dr Flimflams Miracle Cream.

http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/File:Dr.FlimFlamMiracleCreamBack.jpg

Brit regulator pats self on back over nuisance call reduction: It's just 4 billion now!

Now that could provide an interesting way to limit these calls.

As the telcos record the metadata for all calls through their network it would be relatively simple to identify bulk calling and just switch it off. Legitimate bulk callers (if any exist) would have to register with their telco.

Simple penalty, money raised from each call is credited to the call recipients phone bill.

Make the telcos pay and they'll find ways to stop it overnight.

No, Windows 10 hasn’t beaten Windows 7’s market share. Not for sure, anyway

Re: Numbers of seats or total uptime

I'm just yet to meet anyone in person who doesn't suffer from random "this bit won't work today" issues.

No everything works perfectly here k'l; ';jksdfk#V BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB DFDLKSHDHDJ...../////////////////////////////////ZZZZZZqwqwqwqwqwqwqwqw.o.

Damn it.

UK data watchdog whacks £300k fine on biz that made 9 million nuisance calls

Re: Another one bites the dust....

Even easier solution, make fines exempt from limited liability so penalties can not be evaded by voluntary bankruptcy.

Re: And the amount they will actually pay?

Yep, I make it 3.33p a call.

You malign our hard working ICO.

It was a mighty 3.41p/call, a massive £0.0008 over 3.33p for every single call.

Ever wondered why tech products fail so frequently? No, me neither

Re: original devs

Writing a user manual is another activity that can make the original dev consider their work from a new angle

Devs are generally the worst people to write manuals, you end up with Microsoft style documentation which goes into extreme detail telling you everything except the things you actually need to know. This might one of the reasons that hardly anybody looks at them.

Get a proper technical author and have the dev provide copious notes, of course that note creation can have the same serendipitous benefit for the devs you suggested.

Re: Software testing?

I'd rather spend $100 on a good (if minimal) socket set, than $19.95 on a "197 piece chromed vanadium tool set with fitted case

Actually for socket sets buying the cheapest crappiest one makes sense if when a socket you actually use gets knackered you replace that part with a really good quality one so after a while you have a socket set where the ones you need are of high quality and the ones you never use are crap.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Not always the student

Last time I was "between jobs" I was sent on a compulsory computer course and spent the whole time correcting the coursework.

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

Re: Does Google really not get it?

Even from comments here it's obvious I am far from being the only one who simply ignores adverts

So much so that if a site I visit has the information I'm looking for in a banner that superficially looks like an advert I just don't see it.

Here we go again... UK Prime Minister urges nerds to come up with magic crypto backdoors

Because she was completely incompetent as Home Sec they thought any other position would be an improvement. Wrong.

Supermicro is, like, totally harnessing green energy sources to churn out servers, dude

Re: Without combustion?

Make your mind up, is it "loaded with all manner of impurities" or "cleaned of the impurities first"?

I think we're at cross-purposes here, in a conventional combustion plant the impurities are burnt along with the fuel, the N & S oxides may be scrubbed or vented, for fuel cells they must be removed before "combustion" .

I was comparing the full fuel cycle for both sorts of generation and a fuel cell of the type they are probably using will generate slightly more CO₂ per kWH, admittedly not a hugely significant amount but it's there none the less.

Re: Without combustion?

But natural gas is not pure CH₄ it's loaded with all manner of impurities and other fossil feedstuffs such as coal or oil are even more so. CHP while being overall a more efficient process tends to generate less power per unit of fuel so the amount of CO₂ per KwH will be slightly (almost insignificantly) higher.

For combustion in a fuel cell the natural gas needs to be cleaned of the impurities first if you don't want to trash the catalysts in record time.

Re: Without cumbustion?

And pumping out more CO₂ than simple burning as the Oxygen that would have gone to easily filtered out Sulphurous and Nitrogenous oxides is instead added to the Carbon.

But CHP (combined heat and power, not California Highway Patrol) is definitely a better choice than using grid power so on that front it is a more efficient use of energy.

Twitter breaks bad news to 677,775 twits: You were duped by Russia

Odd how these misogynistic idiots go on and on and on and on about 30,000 emails but never ever mention the 2 million emails the Republicans deleted from their even more illegal servers, I wonder why?

Nice, I like the subtle misspelling of "to", just like real spam, don't know why but they always seem to have one or two mistakes.

Re: "B****" --

Clinton lost the POTUS race because she is part of a criminal family

That is actually a libellous statement, they have never been convicted of a single offence, unlike Trump who has thousands of court judgments against him and his companies.

What probably poisoned the Clinton brand was 30 years of relentless lies about her from the Republicans and the Republican supporting press. Clinton aware of the Streisand Effect chose not to defend herself, probably a mistake.

Cyber-coin crackdown continues: Commission charges couple crypto-currency company chiefs concerning 'conned' customers

"Alliterations are absolutely awful, always, and all attempts at amusing alliterations are assuredly abysmal."

Aaron Aardvark.

Court throws out BT's plans to reduce pension rates

and another £1bn for the pension fund isn't enough anyway.

Of course not but it's not one years payout that's the issue but an ongoing problem. If they paid out dividends at 75% of what they had paid for the last 20, 25 years the pension pot could now be full.

Re: Possible error?

If you press button "B" do you get you 6d back?

With 9,921.83 million shares and a total annual dividend of around 15p per share they are paying out over £1 billion per year in dividends.

When there is a liability shortfall be it pensions or creditors then no dividends (or greatly reduced ones) should be paid until the shortfall is cleared, anything else is just robbing the pension fund by stealth.

Why did I buy a gadget I know I'll never use?

Re: Guilty as charged...

`USB leads! Amateur hour indeed - You should see my collection of SCSI leads at least one for almost every iteration of SCSI from the original vanilla up to ultra wide.

Oh I dumped my last piece of SCSI kit years ago.

Sprouts while being the vegetable from the devils own backside do have one redeeming quality, sprouts and mash make far better bubble & squeak than cabbage and mash.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

Re: This one, every time

I get error reports consisting of a full screen grab, (2 x 16:9 1080 screens side by side) pasted into a email. Outlook trying to be helpful resizes the image to fit so the tiny error dialogue is an illegible blur.

Really helpful. I try to tell them to use Alt+Prnt Scrn but that seems a bit too complicated for some users.

UK watchdog dishes out fines totaling £600k to four spam-spewers

Fine less than fee?

Quite ridiculous "penalty",more like a predictable business expense.

When the fine is so low the company can still turn a profit from spamming where's the deterrent?

The fine should be at least the cost of a 2nd class stamp per call, for the first offence.

It should double for each subsequent offence.

The company should be liable for 50% of the fine, the board of directors should be personally liable for the other 50%.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Apple's password protection in macOS can be thwarted

NOT a bug, IMHO.

Maybe but it is indicative of very lax testing. I have done software testing and we check every dialogue every button, every menu, every bloody thing and then somebody else rechecks in the regression testing phase.

For something as dumb as this to get into the released version suggests their testing is limited to gross functional tests and then releasing it to beta testers who unless you get some really anally retentive types are not going to spend hours systematically pressing buttons.

No wonder Marvin the robot was miserable: AI will make the rich richer – and the poor poorer

The bottom huge chunk of the population, will have negative wealth.

Possibly but you are not including assets, while the poorest citizens may be in debt most of them will own assets (cars, white goods, phones etc) that exceed their liabilities so they have a positive nett wealth.

By your reckoning the mortgaged middle class are even poorer as they will have much bigger debts.

Carphone Warehouse cops £400k fine after hack exposed 3 MEEELLION folks’ data

Oh yes, "lessons have be learnt" and that lesson is that paying the fine is cheaper than securing their data.

Fines should be realistic and punitive, a minimum of £1 per user who has information compromised, doubling for any subsequent offences. After 3 such offences prison time should be an available penalty.