Posts by G2 254 posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
this crap is caused by the copyright maximalism culture coupled with planned obsolescence by design and lack of right to repair legislation to provide mandatory schematics and other diagnostic info.
https://repair.eu/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npd_xDuNi9k
let me rewrite those lines:
Stop charging $5 for a few phone calls and $25 for each additional service. Charge what it used to cost back in the early '80s, $800+ a month minimum for that fancy land line phone. Four digits a month for anything resembling mobile phone usage.
Insist that phone users adhere to business attire... no more flipflops, shortshorts, and minimal bra top.
Phone calls will quickly drop to only what's really necessary.
Phone companies will be able to serve decent line quality and provide good services again.
/end of rewrite :p
it has to be said: that's what happens when companies cheap out and use OSs that are designed for CONSUMERS to use. (or, generally, not intended for a particular mode of usage)
A company or a sign is not a consumer, there are dedicated editions of Windows out there that are designed for digital signage... but those people running that Finnish board obviously didn't bother with that.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/windows-iot
@steviebuk: "[...]your clients, are free to install the free[...]"
wrong... unfortunately that's just a dream, but not how TeamViewer licensing is working. Their actual licensing mechanism is more like a virus infection / worm.
If a commercial licensed user, or a free user that's flagged in their system as an unlicensed commercial user connects to a free non-commercial user (or they connect to such a commercial user), then (after 2...3+ sessions from any such users) that free user is also "infected" and their system starts to flag their connections as "unlicensed commercial use".
What happens next is that the former free user that's now infected/flagged as "commercial user", if it uses TeamViewer to connect to other systems, it will now be spreading their "commercial use" virus/worm flag to other TeamViewer free systems.
Ans here's the shitty part: TeamViewer IDs are permanent. You can wipe, reinstall or change your storage drives all you want, your system's ID remains the same, and the "commercial use" infection too. I think they might be using the motherboard serial number or NIC hardware address to build that ID. If you want to change your ID you have to literally beg via a support ticket and pray & hope that they even decide to reply.
All of the above happened to me in February on my home PC that i mainly use to play World of Warcraft on... i dumped TeamViewer and switched to a much better system which supports 2FA with U2F hardware security keys.
too little, too late TeamViewer... i got infected by their 'commercial use detected' on my home pc that i mainly use to play world of warcraft and check up on my work computer and the connection was timing out in less than a minute... decided to try Google Remote Desktop instead... and it's much better imho... a lot less latency and also, since it's tied to a Google Account with OAuth, it can be configured to use FIDO U2F two-factor authentication hardware security keys for accessing the remote desks.
Thanks, TeamViewer, for forcing me to move over to Google Remote Desktop with FIDO U2F.
/sarcasm.
@Pascal: nope, not at all.
All you have to do to is:
-use windows explorer (important because other file managers will not configure the appropriate registry entries in later steps)
- in the location bar type %USERPROFILE% or just manually navigate to the actual folder that holds the Desktop, Documents and other stuff
- use CTRL-CLICK to select multiple folders: Desktop, MyDocuments (or just Documents in newer OSs), Downloads, Music, Videos, Favorites, Pictures.
IMPORTANT: do not touch 'Contacts' or 'Saved Searches', leave them in the default location or you'll get slowness bugs at logon or when searching.
- with those folders selected, right-click on one of them and select CUT (yes, really, CUT. This will tell Windows Explorer that you want to MOVE them to a new location)
- go to the destination drive, make sure you are not in the root of the drive but in a (preferably empty) folder like \Data\ or something, right click inside the folder and select PASTE. Click YES on any notification that appears about files named "desktop.ini".
- after Windows Explorer finishes the move, LOGOFF and then login again. (or just reboot the sytem)
- to check things, if you now make a new text document on desktop and check its properties, you'll see that it's stored in the new desktop location.
@ 6+ hours update....
that was not a normal update, it was most likely an 'edition' upgrade.
Visually there's not much difference between these two, but the upgrade is actually a full Win10 reinstall that migrates all applications and user data to the newly installed OS.
That slow 6+ hours surprise upgrade time is what happens when you install Win10 (and keep it unmanaged with WSUS) on a mechanical slow-as-molasses 5400rpm HDD in a computer that's really designed only for home use, or at best as an office typewriter.
if your time is so critical then please ask your company to at least consider replacing those mechanical HDDs with SSDs.
For replacements, I usually prefer to use 5-year+ warranty SSDs even if the 2-year ones are cheaper. In the long run, it's safer to use higher quality ones.
It's not an u-turn. The key phrase in Trump's statement is "to sell"
So, US Companies are allowed to export and sell things to Huawei but BUYING FROM and IMPORTING Huawei products is still banned. They just want Huawei's cash, not their products.
Trump said exactly that: "One of the things I will allow, however, is, a lot of people are surprised we send and we sell to Huawei a tremendous amount of product that goes into the various things that they make. And I said that that’s okay, that we will keep selling that product. These are American companies… that make product and that’s very complex, by the way, and highly scientific. And in some cases we’re the ones that do it, we’re the only ones that do it. What we’ve done in Silicon Valley is incredible, actually and nobody has been able to compete with it, and I’ve agreed and pretty easily, I’ve agreed to allow them to continue to sell that product. So American companies will continue and they were having a problem, the companies were not exactly happy that they couldn’t sell because they had nothing to do with whatever it was potentially happening with respect to Huawei, so I did do that."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-conference-osaka-japan/
@ Anonymous Coward - you didn't even bother to search and just made a statistical dump of zero numbers on the comment form, did you?
search #1 has some (weird) results about connected circuits and tv
search #2 ...
feniva.eu (around since 2006) and cloud-tech.eu (around since 2010) have a product name tagged exactly like #2 in the extended description - Cloud Circuit TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlYRGSQbEc
video published on 11 Jun 2013
q.e.d.
CCTV = Connected Circuit TV or Cloud Circuit TV
Unless they spell it out as "closed", it can mean anything... usually, in China, CCTV means "China Central Television" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television
Not even ElReg's article bothers to fully write "closed circuit", they just use "CCTV".
ok.. but WHAT is their definition of a "drone"? would a Borg cube starship qualify? What about a Transformer autobot?
Does that mean that they effectively authorized any parking officer / traffic warden / office secretary / etc. to start acts of war against any unidentified flying object?
if you as consumer don't buy directly from Europe then the minimum 2 years warranty does not apply.
Also, that minimum warranty period does not apply to goods purchased by companies, it only applies to purchases by consumers.
if Company X buys a batch of phones from China, with 1 month warranty - it's legal.
if person Y willingly buys a phone from China, with 1 month warranty - it's legal. The sale happens in China as far as the manufacturer is concerned, the fact that the phone is then moved to Europe - that's not their problem.
if person Y, in Europe, buys a phone from Company X, from Europe - then company X has to provide a minimum 2 year warranty.... but this warranty only covers the device "as is" at the time of the sale - it does not include any operating system updates. (unless explicitly included in the sale contract)
This is why many phone manufacturers don't give a crap about OS updates a few months after product release, because it's not their problem from the point of view of warranty laws.
In those contracts the phone manufacturer is often an unrelated third party (from the point of view of the contract), without any obligation to the customer.
When the phone services company purchases phones in bulk to re-sell, it often doesn't give a crap about support past the initial few months.
This is because in China there's no minimum warranty period mandated by law... and it must be specified in the contract. If the contract says that the warranty is only 5 minutes long after they buy a batch of phones, then that's the legal warranty that the phone manufacturer will provide.
If the contract doesn't mention warranty at all then tough luck... there's no warranty and your provider should pay for repairs/replacements out of their own pocket.. and they often don't.
OH GOD, we just bought in december 2017 a crap load of HPE OfficeConnect switches and some ProLiant servers... but even if we have multiple volume licenses for Server 2016 bought directly from MS and we provided them with the license info, HPE REFUSED to even send us a single damned install disk with drivers for the servers and the stupid "HPE Intelligent Provisioning" wizard built in the bios was malfunctioning with the standard MS installers (we download the ISO for Server 2016 directly from Microsoft VLSC).
HPE's "Intelligent Provisioning" was causing this dreadful message to appear when trying to install Server 2016:
"Windows Setup could not install one or more boot-critical drivers. To install Windows, make sure that the drivers are valid, and restart the installation."
NO SHIT SHERLOCK... the drivers were built into the damn BIOS and installed by the installer wizard provided by HPE, how much more "valid" do you want to get?
just tried it now, F1 doesn't do anything in my Firefox. It's as if I didn't press anything.
according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Keyboard_shortcuts
it only works in the developer tools now, and you have to press F12 or CTRL+SHIFT+i to enable that first.
the answer to that is: somewhat.
you still get to choose only between Basic and Full.
The below-Basic, Security-level is only available for Enterprise Editions, the Enhanced setting is also available, but only via GPO because it contains Active Directory-related stuff in addition to the Basic stuff.
In 1803 (or 1804...or whatever they decide call it) they added a visualisation tool for the slurping - there's a Diagnostic Data Viewer added so you can look more easily at what data they are slurping. There's also a "Delete" button for the diagnostic data - pressing it will ask them nicely to delete the already-collected data from their servers, but only the data from the current device.
Version numbers are an artefact of the pre-internet era way of doing software development.
With today's continuous release and cloud platforms (github, etc) they should just dump out the version numbers completely and go for YYYYMMDD-style date stamps.
e.g. "release 20180416-S" has a lot more information included in the version than "release 4.15.whatever-rc3" - it indicates right there in the name WHEN it was the last release and whether it was a Stable or Release Candidate.
you assume that they had systems to test the updates on in the first place... or that they bother to publish updates.
These days if a system is older than 12/24 months then most of them consider they no longer have any responsibility so they shovel out the door any remaining systems to sell as "manufacturer-refurbished".
or, 4) nobody is perfect and you cannot test for the millions of configuration variants out there. Even you used a BIG typo in your comment code up there: s/there/their/
If you want "perfect" code then write your own OS. And drivers. And design and bake your own silicon chips to avoid any potential CPU meltdown or architectural design variations.
Modern systems are in continuous evolution, the old tests are already obsolete by the time the finished, supervisor-reviewed, manager-approved test schedule sheet rolls out of the office printer.
If you want those back then what are you doing on the internet? The internet is a real-time, continuously-changing environment. Someone wants a change in one part of a software to work with a new gadget on the market and then suddenly something else that was depending on the old version won't work as it used to and needs to be brought up to date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery
given that IBM is dealing mostly with companies (or should i say "exclusively"?), i'd say that is standard behaviour in Europe.
You are lucky to have such a consumer law in Australia that allows companies to be considered as "consumers" because here in Europe you're generally fucked if you have a consumer-type issue and you are not a natural person. :(
Under EU law, the notion of consumer does not extend to legal persons (companies), even if they have a non-business character (e.g. non-profit associations). So, if it's not directly written in a contract then it doesn't exist. There are some minor differences from this in some EU countries but generally that's the rule.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:31993L0013
quote: ‘consumer’ means any natural person who, in contracts covered by this Directive, is acting for purposes which are outside his trade, business or profession; /quote
Not even self-employed traders or family businesses can be considered as "consumers" - but there are, again, some minor differences to this rule across EU countries.
try reading the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss... it's set in a binary star system that causes extremely long seasons that last for centuries. The Winter book sounds similar to your description but in Aldiss' book it's the extremely long Great Winter that affects the human civilization, not a nebula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helliconia
(with double "L"s!)
that's an additional explanation why US internet providers are crap at deploying fiber internet access - the import fees for optical fiber equipment and access routers for millions of customers must be horrendous.
In addition, each separate SFP module will have a separate fee applied since it's technically a distinct device, usually shipped and purchased in separate packages too.
yes for each SFP module.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_transceiver
This can lead to having to pay multiple times the same fee for a single equipment that has multiple optical interfaces, one fee for each optical interface. That's crazy.
"We therefore asked Google if it offers service levels for requests to flush its cache. The company told us it wouldn't comment on an individual case [...] Neither really explains how it would respond to a request to remove data from its cache."
well, D'OH... you basically asked if water is wet.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
go to the link where they told you to go, you have to verify ownership of the site and then you can dig in settings to flush cache and pretty much nuke everything related to that site's presence on Google.
Bing and the other major search engines have similar options, so it's a bit of a whack-a-mole to do that with various search engine caches.
The site owner can also add a robots.txt to the website with:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
you can do this: enable advanced protection with U2F keys.
one of the steps when enabling advanced protection is to WIPE ALL application-specific passwords and prevent the use of such application passwords.
Change your main account password after that.
https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
if that application still works after those steps, send a message to security[_AT_]google.com
that "just Gmail" account is not just for email.. if your phone is connected to the account (and it needs to be, if you want email) then the account can be used to enable remote GPS tracking, make the phone ring for 5 minutes in case you misplaced it, or even send a remote WIPE command to the phone, just by logging in to the account on any computer. Email is just a tiny fraction of the functions it has.
https://www.google.com/android/find
Google supports FIDO U2F hardware tokens/keys = no more SMSs needed, and if you enable the Advanced Protection Program setting for your Google Account then U2F keys are mandatory for login.
(you will need minimum 2 keys, just in case one of them malfunctions)
https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6103523
when you enable the advanced protection mode Google will even prevent the use of SMS for authentication or account recovery because U2F is then mandatory for all account operations.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/01/17/space_bounty_hunter.jpg
that's Boba Fett from Star Wars:The New Republic Anthology not from Firefly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzP9gY1GZVw
There are some rumours that a Star Wars film centred on Boba Fett will come out around 2020-ish.
@ElReg: your image was an obvious troll for Star Wars fans... let's call it an article bug :)
http://www.productsecurity.jnj.com/advisories.html
Johnson & Johnson: "January 12, 2017 - Product Security Notification for Meltdown and Spectre"
and in the page footer note:
" All contents © Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Last Updated: 05/04/2016 "
J&J's web developers/redactors are either asleep when coding or amazing time travellers... did anyone check for a Tardis nearby?
re: lightspeed lawyers
those are not lawyers, those are ambulance chasers.
a real lawyer with IT knowledge would have known that there is practically NO SUCH thing as a CPU on the market these days that is not affected by Meltdown and/or Spectre, they all are, even ARM or Qualcomm. It's an industry-wide bug.
Such a CPU has not been seen since speculative execution acceleration was introduced about ~20 years ago. If they want a CPU without speculative/pipeline execution they should go back to 80286, or better yet 8086 processors to be "safe".
Either that or they should wait for the industry to design and release new silicon that's safe, and since silicon development, testing and release cycles take about 2 years, we should have the new CPUs by 2020 or 2019 if we're lucky.
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