Posts by Adrian Bridgett

Stop us if you've heard this: Cisco Aironet has hard-coded passwords

Re: They will never learn.

We should stop calling these bugs - they are deliberate security holes. It's rarely "oops, we left that there" it's "oh, this will make our life easier".

Fibre pushers get UK budget tax reprieve

So to confirm - five months ago they were going to quadruple the costs, but now they aren't? It's always confused me how the eff anyone (personal or business) are supposed to do any planning when the government changes the rules so much at such short notice (and then often reverts the change).

BT best provider for 10Mbps USO, says former digi minister Ed Vaizey

Gigaclear

Well if gigaclear can deliver fibre to the home in rural locations, what's BT's excuse? Granted BT have a large area to cover, but they were very late in recognising the internet needed something better than 56K.

Shame given that we could have had fibre in the 80s if the government hadn't blocked it (I think they wanted a 5-10 year monopoly - which they effectively _still_ have).

Chrome 42 breaks vSphere web client thanks to ye olde NPAPI

I reported this to a large vDirector cloud provider 9 months ago. Total lack of any response.

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Whilst I agree with most of this, no captcha is a good thing - they are quite easy to work around, and painful for humans. There _should_ be filtering and fraud detection being done on the backend, but without assisting the bad guys by giving them immediate feedback as to if they've been detected as a captcha would.

Virgin Media only puts limited limits on its Unlimited service

I fail to see why they can't just uphold the definition of the word "unlimited". Either it is, or it isn't. The world won't end if they say "16Mbps broadband (fair usage limits applies)" rather than "16Mbps unlimited broadband*" *fair usage limits applies.

And the ASA might stand a chance of being seen as something other than a toothless waste of space.

Dixons done for dumping customer info in skip

about £35/year

Well it costs my business £35/year to register for data protection act. Yes, a mandatory registration which AFAIK is completely automated and I have to pay that each year. What a rip off.

Mobile broadband: not up to the job?

train coverage

I think it's disgraceful that I'm paying for a service and yet in common use - train from Hampshire to Waterloo, train to Manchester, or just random locations (in the countryside or in the middle of large towns an cities, it's common for it to be next to worthless.

I'd swap provider in an instant to one who provided connectivity when and where I wanted it, rather than just occasionally.

Adobe euthanizes Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux

bin it

Anyone with flash should remove it due to these dreadful (and never ending) security holes.

Anyone who wants it can't get it.

So basically any website which uses it is unusable.

Looks like the (welcome) death of Flash to me.

The Register Guide to improving systems agility

sign me up!

The Agile _Date_ Center? Sounds good to me (albeit a bit American). I've been practicing pilates which should help, however on second thoughts I suspect the number of babes reading the register is pretty low :-(

Labour calls for free Wi-Fi on trains

What about current major train services?

The current situation - where travelling from Basingrad to Waterloo (45mins) 3G "data service" is basically unusable is pretty darn shoddy though.

I'm sure they (mobile phone companies) know where the blackspots are, but then why should they fix it - they'd only be providing the service you had paid them for. If the phones worked better at least I'd only have to listen to annoying twits once, rather then hearing "hello? are you there?" ten times.

Home Office reaches half-way hash in secure data handling

Email?

So they carefully decrypt the data and then forward it unsecured by email unless it it large? Surely they should just force the end-user to either:

a) have a clue and have encrypted software installed and be educated in its use

b) force them to use HTTPS to pick up the data

Security isn't easy, but making such a half-baked approach is pretty crap. I wonder if we'll be able to sue the government for compensation _when_ they lose our data.

Oh, and if the DVD is encrypted, why bother sending it via courier - 2nd class post will be just as good thank you.

World's biggest ISPs drag feet on critical DNS patch

Time to patch

The fact that some organisations take a month to roll out an urgent security patch isn't an excuse. It's just another problem that those organisations needs to sort out.

Taking time to test thoroughly is good, but there needs to be a sliding scale of risk due to not testing and risk due to not patching.

Exploit code for Kaminsky DNS bug goes wild

Eclipse

I patched all our nameservers and customers on the day Debian shipped them.

Today I raised a ticket on both our upstream work DNS servers and Eclipse.

Eclipse replied:

Thank you for letting us know.

We are currently aware of this issue. Our entire DNS platform is currently due

for upgrade, And we will be installing measures to prevent exploitation of DNS

protocols.

--EOF--

Whilst it's not too bad, why does it take _so_ long. It's not that difficult - it needs testing on a test environment (which of course they will have) and then rolling out. 2-3 days tops.

Seagate joins 1TB HDD battlefield

MTBF

IIRC Google's hard disk analysis showed no difference between "desktop" and "enterprise" disks when it came to MTBF.

It amused me when looking at MTBF's of various components for a project - hard disks had an MTBF about twenty times higher than motherboards or any PCI card - which is definitely not my experience and I've seen systems with hundreds of computers so I have a reasonable idea.