Posts by DaLo

Google password fill effort could kill Android malware's best tricks

Re: A bit light on details

Your post is full of inaccuracies. Android, since Marshmallow, allows individual permissions to be set for apps. For apps created to the Marshmallow API, it doesn't even need you to grant all permissions to install it. As the permission is first used you choose to allow or deny it and you can revoke it at any time (or from any non-Marshmallow apps). This renders 90% of your post moot.

"...that sniffs the on-screen keyboard" There is also isn't an on screen keyboard. Anybody can create a keyboard, either as a system install one or directly in their app interface. Nobody wants a default Android keyboard that you can't change - look at the poor IOS one that they used to have. You can't run a keylogger on a system keyboard though unless rooted, but you can overwrite it or get the user to install one of the malware authors choosing and then do anything you want with the input - however this is by design and it does rely on the user not installing a system keyboard they don't trust.

Google tests its own quantum computer – both qubits of it

Re: I really didn't properly understand all of that . .

You both understand it and don't understand it. It is only when you ask yourself whether you understand it that you realise you don't (or do). However while you are not thinking about it you are in a situation where you do (and don't).

Rackspace gone dowwwwn?

Re: Rackspace gone dowwwwn?

Could be more than just BT. Some reports are of a 'power incident' at a key London exchange which has partially crippled the UK internet.

Tesla whacks guardrail in Montana, driver blames autopilot

Re: Idiots!

"Stories about drivers (particularly winnebago ones) switching on cruise control and expecting the vehicle to do everything are as old as cruise controls."

But also fake.

Hey cloud lawyer: Can I take my client list with me?

Re: It was so much simpler . . .

Also covered under the DPA...

Re: Linkedin?

Unless there is a different LinkedIn to the one that Microsoft has just taken over then you don't store contact details of others on LinkedIn. The other party creates all their own contact details and information.

As this is a data protection issue then and interrelated contact information is not covered by the DPA. Therefore you are down to a civil case over whether your contract in some way requires you to delete all contacts that you have made via linkedIn during your employment -I would argue impossible to enforce.

So really it would just come down to whether you are disallowed by contract to 'poach' a customer and introduce them to your new company, but this would be generic and unrelated to LinkedIn.

IANAL

E-books the same as printed ones, says top Euro court egghead

Re: 18 languages but not English

_{< sub > I presume< /sub >}

Stopped buying Oracle's kit? You've literally decimated its profit

Re: "[L]iterally decimated"

Hmm, net income is profit.

Let's Encrypt lets 7,600 users... see each other's email addresses

Well at least it was only 7,600, six times less than when this IT news organisation did it >

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24/email_blunder/

Sophos U-turns on lack of .bat file blocking after El Reg intervenes

Re: Hmm

It's still in 32bit Win 7 just not 64bit.

Are they actually saying that you can't add your own custom extensions and rules, you have to wait for a feature to be upvoted and added?

That's a dynamic way to operate in today's security landscape where zero-days are abundant. Reminds me of the good old days where you could opt for quarterly or monthly AV updates to be sent out on disk.

Bloke flogs $40 B&W printer on Craigslist, gets $12,000 legal bill

Interestingly as Costello lost this due to "not responding" you would assume that the judge who he "conspired" with"would also be held to account for his action in the conspiracy.

If you are going to make a presumption of guilt against a defendant in a conspiracy then that conspiracy must be acknowledged as having happened and the Judge, therefore, is also presumed guilty?

If there is no evidence the conspiracy happened then the defendant cannot be guilt of taking part of it?

$10bn Oracle v Google copyright jury verdict: Google wins, Java APIs in Android are Fair Use

Re: Phew...

Of course it can and was argued that the copied code was not significant. It was 9 lines of code that just checked whether either index was below zero or above the maximum size of an array.

It wasn't special or elegant code, just functionary and exactly what would be written by any number of people

Se here for the details: Google’s 9 lines

Compression tool 7-Zip pwned, pain flows to top security, software tools

Re: so....

Updating 7-zip on all your machines sounds like the easy bit. Finding out what other software uses 7zip decompression libraries and updating all of those (assuming they have released an update and detailed the fix) sounds like the harder bit.

Good luck.

Site layout changes

I completely missed them. I came on here to see if there was any comment on why News Bytes had been removed and it was only after your comment that I realised they hadn't.

IMHO I would put News Bytes top right where "Top Stories" is. I don't like that layout and I am never sure whether the Top Stories are shown below in the normal stories or not. Top Stories just looks out of place and awkward up there.

Hacker flogs '42.5m freshly stolen logins' for seventy-five cents

"He stated that he wanted to 'get rid' of them without ever stating the reason for it.

A digital file, and he 'wants to get rid of them' by selling them for a dollar?

Did he realise that once he sold them he still had them, and was stuck in a never ending loop of selling them and them still being there until the day dawned on him that there was a delete button and all his problems were solved in one key press?

Getty Images flings competition sueball at Google Image Search

Re: Try Reading ALL The Words People

Not sure you understand the article completely.

"After the change Google still get everything they had before, plus a bit more on top as having the high res versions made their results richer. Getty on the other had get shafted as people can just steal their images rather than having to pay for them. "

If the hi-res image is available to Google, it is available to anyone to download anyway, they could just follow the thumbnail link to the image and download it.

Getty generally wouldn't show the hi-res image at all to the general public, especially not without a disruptive watermark so it wouldn't matter if Google had indexed it. The issue is with Getty images on a third party site in which there is no reason to believe would lead the member of the public looking at that image to decide to purchase it from Getty.

I fI was to take a stock image from Google for my use then I am just as likely to take it from MegaCorps website who is licensing Getty images. If I wish to work within copyrights then I would go to Getty (and others) to look through their licensed image library.

In reality it is more about the easy nature to search for images that you require using Google rather than having to go to a stock image supplier and a perception that there is okay to use images found on Google image search.

Re: Watermark

Because Google aren't necessarily crawling the image library of Getty. Getty sell the rights to display a picture on websiteX. Google gets the image off websiteX to display in its image search.

Getty could as part of their licensing of the images require that each website ensures a noindex on the images so that Google won't retrieve them.

'Droid Gmail on Exchange

Re: Must be missing something

And yet this story is about the Gmail client on Android, could be the missing bit?

Sneaky Google KOs 'right to be forgotten' from search results

Re: Google on: rtbf "data processing business"

Read the comments you just don't understand the way Google searching works. It's no mystery, if you search for RTBF "data processing business" with verbatim on you still only get a few results (more than the initial two as some sites have added this story.

However the reason you are getting over 1000 results is due to Google deciding to expand the initialism and search for both RTBF and Right To Be Forgotten, which it wasn't before. So it is now allowing more ways to find the information. Bing et al are still ignoring quotes for phrases with limited results.

This really is a non-story with the current 'evidence' provided.

UK authorities probe 'drone hitting plane at Heathrow'

Re: One guy

He's still got his laser pointer though!

@Voland's right hand

"I have actually. I was blamed to be one of the registered DC persons a while back when I was still doing sysadmin for a living."

And yet you don't seem to understand the Data Protection Act? That is one of the fundamentals of being a DC (You're in good company because some ICO employees' don't understand the act either)

However, being a DC doesn't mean you can just use the well worn line "Can't, Data Protection innit?".

Just remember, there is no "privacy law" in the UK (there are certain other laws which involve some aspects of privacy). The Data Protection Act is for the protection of stored personally identifiable information by certain entities in certain circumstances, not a right of privacy.

Music's value gap? Follow the money trail back to Google

Re: Great . .

"Maybe sweets have to be given away too. Or cars and houses."

Whatever the rights and wrongs, this argument is nonsensical and unbefitting. Physical goods have to be produced at a significant cost. Digital goods - assuming they were going to be produced anyway do not have a tangible cost to create new versions (copies) especially as the cost of copying is usually borne by the end user.

That is not to say there is no loss of revenue (although obviously isn't the kind of losses expressed by the various licensing companies and labels) or that it doesn't create certain economic and even social abnormalities around the purchasing of the goods. However to create an equivalence with physical goods does not a good argument make.

How Remix's Android will eat the world

"What matters here is whether Windows 10's App Store is catching up, not just in mere quantity, but in quality apps from major names. And they are."

Citation needed.

Where are the stats that show that Windows 10 is catching up, i.e. more apps each period are being added to the Windows 10 store than the Google Play store or the Apple App Store?

SANS man lists five security things you're not doing but should

Re: Drop attachments from unsigned emails?

True, but they could lock all attachments that could carry executable code (.doc, .js, .zip etc.). These can then only be unlocked by IT.

'plain text' any hyperlinks can also help.

Hey -- what is that oddball box on the left?

Re: Hey -- what is that oddball box on the left?

See here -> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/05/welcome/

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

Re: counterfeit pound coins

It is a pretty significant problem. A handful of pound coins is likely to have a fake or two in it and in some areas they are a lot more common than that.

Elon Musk takes wraps off planet-saving Model 3 vapourmobile

Re: Interesting - Just hope the dates match up.

" I live in the South West of England and if I were to buy one I'd have to travel to London to get it serviced!!"

Or Bristol, bit closer.

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Re: Bloody stupid!

It's done so that large libraries will not need to be downloaded by each visitor to your site as many will already have the library cached from another site.

Therefore, especially for mobile devices, having the various versions of jquery already cached on your device (from visiting a different site which uses the same resource from a central repository) means a much quicker download of your webpage. It can also reduce latency as the CDN is likely to be closer to your users for global queries, reduces bandwidth from your server and helps avoid any browser (or server) limits with parallel requests.

Sites that do this should use fall back of course to serve locally if the CDN is not available. However, as for privacy most sites are using Google analytics any way and for all their worth Google servers are pretty secure (at least from randomers).

There is tradeoffs of course an in an ideal world people would just use specific functions they require written in a pure scripting language (or even just a markup language) and not use libraries at all to minimise bloat etc. However this is the real world and browsers are optimised to run libraries fast and developers are expected to belt out solutions at a high rate of knots.

Adobe will track you across all your devices with new co-op project

Interesting theory but can't see it being that successful.

Firstly, most people use Google Analytics and Google don't let you track across devices even though they could in a moment and even go so far to ban any tracking (if you do it yourself using logins) using personally identifiable information.

Secondly it will require at least one of the co-ops that the visitor visits to be using a login so they can register the visitor as belonging to each device - and if a business has logins then they can generally do this anyway using any other analytics package such as Google's (for their own customers). Therefore why would they want to join just to allow others access to this?

All serious web professionals would like a way of summarizing user journeys across multiple devices but giving Adobe the keys to the data is not one that most would be willing to do (I hope).

Hands on with the BBC's Micro:Bit computer. You know, for kids

Re: @DropBear

Given the article shows things like boxes with "microbit.bearing;" being dragged and dropped to put together a so-called program

From the article:

"... the Micro:Bit ships ready for four development systems."

"Entry level is Microsoft Blocks, which if you haven’t seen Scratch, is drag’n’drop flowcharts where kids simply assemble programs and fill in blanks."

"Microsoft TouchDevelop has been in schools for a while as a simple way to get kids started in mobile app development for Android and WinPhone. The feedback from teachers has been pretty good and again it is helpful and simple."

"Code Kingdom’s JavaScript is the next step towards real programming with the drag’n’drop interface to help kids think about algos more than syntax, but it allows students to move stepwise between simple-but-limited blocks to straight hardcore text-based coding."

"MicroPython can communicate with the host for interpreted debugging and development, which means Y7’s can get started on what are rapidly becoming the most common languages for teaching CompSci in schools (JavaScript and Python).

"As it’s based on ARM’s mBed platform it can also do C++, so the more advanced kids or adults can do hard stuff like drivers for new hardware."

What to call a £200m 15,000-tonne polar vessel – how about Boaty McBoatface?

Re: Two things

You can see the publications who have just repackaged other news articles and not done proper research as they have all called it Usain Bolt rather than Usain Boat and not questioned why Usain Bolt would be an amusing name for a ship.

Re: This is why everyone thinks students are w*****s

Well seeing as that suggestion was from the Communications Manager of The Independent Association of Prep Schools, James Hand, then does that add or detract weight from your theory?

Power outage in Sheffield kills e-commerce at Insight UK

Re: A surge

Quite possibly a bad configuration on their servers and AC which meant that once power resumed they all automatically started up again rather than a phased start up.

All those motors, fans and spinning disks might have drawn too much current all at once causing the failsafes to kick in. This might have been interpreted as the power not stable/another outage and then not resumed until they figured it out later.

Just a guess...

Data protection: Don't be an emotional knee jerk. When it comes to the law, RTFM

Re: ... this will validate EU/US data transfers once more...

The privacy shield has not been ratified and is still currently pending final approval.

Once it has it will then allow data transfers to the US as a trusted international nation similar to how Safe Harbour was previously accepted (i.e. as long as the US company follows the terms and abides by Privacy Shield then they can have data transferred to them rather than negotiating an individual contract).

Open trucker comms lets Shodan snoops alter routes, tap CANs buses.

"He urges hackers to avoid probing active vehicles."

Yeah, that'll do it.

Final Euro Parliament vote on passenger name records delayed

Re: But of course

Or what happens when your name is similar or the same as a known terrorist (or just mistakenly added) and you get stopped from taking your family on holiday and only find out at the airport? However you are not told why, given no right to appeal and may never be allowed to fly again.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/07/politics/no-fly-mistakes-cat-stevens-ted-kennedy-john-lewis/

Dell offers sweet, sweet, free honeypot tool to trap hungry hackers

Re: If this works as advertised, it will be incredibly useful.

Wouldn't encrypting the token stop it authenticating against AD? They'd have to run a decryption engine on your DC to pass through the token.

Uncle Sam's boffins stumble upon battery storage holy grail

@Flashdunce: Tesla Hot Swap

"Or for car batteries, instead of charging there's the concept of hot-swapping - which might make the charge time moot for some drivers"

http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/

Toaster cooks network and burns 'expert' user's credibility to a crisp

Re: Sparky's Magic Fusebox

If you get overload on one of the circuits then the MCB will trip but it needs a very big overload to trigger it.

However each you will also usually have an RCD which will trip the whole CU if it detects an earthing fault or you decide to test if a wire is live with your tongue.

You could also have RCBOs, ELCBs, MCCBs etc in that equation as well.

Like your iPhone, but not enough to touch it? This patent's for you

Re: WTF is this article talking about?

The paragraph from the reg does seem a bit strange...

"The firm pioneered touch for the masses with the iPhone, kicking to the curb earlier puny efforts from Microsoft with its tablets. However, touch on the iPhone is not multi-touch – that is, capable of taking input from more than one source, or person. Pinching and resizing a screen using just your fingertips doesn’t count as multi-touch."

Who says multi-touch has to be more than one scource. Multi-touch is defined by pretty much everyone as more than one point of contact, as DougS said. You can redefine to whatever you want such as saying "normal websites are not true websites, only theregister.co.uk is a true website", doesn't make it real until everyone else agrees with you.

Also, of course, the iPhone didn't pioneer touch for the masses. You could say that the iPhone pioneered a version of multi-touch that was used by 'the masses'*

*depending on your description of masses

However, in regards to DougS I would see that being able to distinguish between two different sources (people) is the claim. If two people point their fingers at a large ipad and move them apart the ipad will interpret that as "pinch to zoom", the same on android. Whereas detecting two different people would interpret it as two sources sliding their finger around independently. I'm guessing multiplayer gaming on a large surface is where it would help, although it could be simulated in software if each player controlled their own specific piece or were only able to play in a defined area of the board.

Mall owner lays blame at Apple's door for dragging down sales

Re: Oh FFS !

I don't think you need to read an article or hack anything, F12 has always been available!

Re: Mall landlords DO know tenant stores' sales

"...on insuring the reported sales are accurate"

Wow you can get insurance for anything nowadays.

What's it like to work for a genius and Olympic archer who's mates with Richard Branson?

Especially in finance and accounts, use Excel for everything (I've even seen it suggested that it could be used for a location map, with all the cells reduced right down each of the hundreds of houses in an individual cell!)

It killed Safe Harbor. Will Europe's highest court now kill off hyperlinks?

Re: Random someone....

Not sure you could be, unless you knew the intention was to rob your friend in which case there could be an aiding and abetting charge. Otherwise the person who would be held liable in law would be the robber, as they should be.

However that does raise an interesting law analogy. If the links are held in the same regard as aiding and abetting - i.e. if you knew, beyond reasonable doubt, they were pointing to 'illegal' material then you are aiding and abetting the 'criminal'. However if you would not reasonably know that or you had legitimate journalistic reasons (in the public interest) then you wouldn't.

When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'

Re: customized codebases

"Then the salesman persuaded Z that it would be a drop-in replacement for their existing system..."

No way, can't believe it. An honest, knowledgeable salesman promising the earth to get a sale and then letting the tech team/customer sort it out afterwards. Scandalous, never happened in the history of the earth.

The monitor didn't work but the problem was between the user's ears

Re: Old IT joke

Yes, I've heard this joke many, many times...

ICO says TalkTalk customers need to get themselves a lawyer

@Terry Re: Hold on a moment

"If I get pickpocketed in M&S I wouldn't expect them to reimburse me unless they could be somehow shown to have been less than diligent."

A better analogy... If you have to leave your wallet with M&S staff to shop at their store and then they put it in an unlocked and unguarded cupboard and someone steals it, would you expect them to reimburse you?

I know I would.