Posts by hamiltoneuk

Stolen OAuth tokens expose Palo Alto customer data

Salesloft Drift Break-In

Salesloft Drift Break-In: better call in Barnaby and Jones.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

brilliant

brilliant and witty article

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

EBYR (Investco) Limited

ebuyer.com has EBYR (Investco) Limited at the bottom of the page now and the site not the same as yesterday. What can you sell to people who have got everything though?

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

Great obit. Thanks Liam. Lehrer was truly a prodigy.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

How to wean Windows junkies off Windows

Tons of interesting comments on this article.

Trying not to be TLDR: Windows has become the Edsel/Model-T Ford of Software. Win11 does not provide the neccessary security enhancements that are essential. MacOS is better but too pricey unless on a near or past end of support machine. Linux with a GUI has improved massively but there is something about it that scares the public off. ChromeOS is great but there is one big obstacle namely you cannot plaster the desktop with links to folders, files and apps like using a noticeboard. This practice has been disapproved of since time immemorial but many of the Windows and MacOS junkies absolutely love it. Instead in ChomeOS they have to grapple with Google Drive and the Files app, both of which are nothing like intuative and in fact are close to plain awful.

What is the poor Windows junkie to do? Answers please on a postcard to...

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

Confirmed!

https://gemini.google.com/app/7f00b8d5bee3e224

14-hour+ global blackout at Ingram Micro halts customer orders

I'd just like to make it clear that even though IM made my account payment with order due to lack of usage (after about 30 years of doing business with them) I am NOT respobible for their online outage. I feel a bit sorry for them really. Tons of stuff on their webshop is never in stock and the lead times can be very long but they do try.

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

NO Easy Anti-Cheat here!

I'm not running Easy Anti-Cheat here but I still got the updated update. The intital update installed after a lot of persuasion by disabling Update Services and deleting the Software Distbution folder. I've seen that happen before.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

With 007 having been bought by the ghastly americans we've not choice but to send in Johnny English to sort out this frightful mess.

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

30 years! Time flies! Bring back Windows for Workgroups! Bring back Novell Netware! Bring back ABIT motherboards with millions of jumpers! Bring back component shortages! It was more like fun then.

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Musk is a modern day Henry Ford. Ford used his influence to peddle crackpot opinions and hate speech. Musk does the same. The medium has changed, the message has not.

Microsoft partners beware: Action Pack to be retired in 2025

£795 ouch. Is Windows 365 Enterprise any good?

Down and out: Barclays Bank takes unplanned digital detox, customers not invited

I can't remember whch Android version update it was but one year when the Android version changed it took Barclays a week or two to update their Online Banking app so that it would function with the new Android. Anybody else remember that one?

Re: Starling

Thanks for the tip. I'm told Starling are very good. Did you have many standing orders and direct debits to move over? If so did that go smoothly?

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

When Tavis Ormandy speaks I listen. I may not understand much of it but I take action ASAP!

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

25 beer tokens per hour median - that's barely worth getting out of bed for these days is it? I suppose if you're over 50 things like morgage payments will be less of a problem and hopefully you're less likely to be paying rent. When I went down the local tech college in good old 1984 to get an HNC at the tender age of 28 we were all looking to boost our qualifications a wee bit to get the magic 5 figure salary. With that sort of money a mortgage on a terraced house was possible even with sky high interest rates. What's the situation in 2022? Please tell.

Government buyers take 22 months on average to procure tech

Interesting article. In the UK now we have Ms. Hecate Hardbroom in charge will public spending be slashed? I hate having to wait and see...

Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content

Thanks!

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

Thank you for turning me on to MJ Hibbett and the Validators maaan!

Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped

Never used email or the internet

Wonderfully Sinclair never used email or the internet and he never owned a computer, he just sold them!

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

I hope they show the BCC Micro Men film again in his honour. I thought it captured the spirit of the age well, I had great fun building and breaking a couple Sinclair match box size radios when I was a kid. When is got my Garrard SP25 MKII turntable it was connected into my homemade Baxendale pre-amp which powered 2 Sinclair amplifier boards and Sinclair bookshelf speakers which looked classy. The amplifiers would blow up if the outputs were shorted for a millisecond or so but they were fun.When the reverse polish calculators came out they looked too complex for me so I avoided them but I am sure they were fun too. When Sinclairs Z80 based computers arrived I didn't swallow the stuff about running as nuclear power station with them. I went for strange things like Tangerine and Oric and the BBC Micro and I realised that i did not understand them much but they were interesting. I remember a girl saying "I thought computers were supposed to make things fast" after her boyfriend and I spent an age labouriously typing in a Basic listing from a magazine. Soon after a Sinclair C5 was seen parked outside the pub down the road. It was all cutting edge and great.

Steam-powered computers: Retro cool or old and busted?

I'm trying to fix a 30 year old HP Vectra 486U PC at the moment. When new it was top of the range with EISA slots on a big motherboard with white footprints screened on the the PCB price tag about $4,000. Anyone out there know how to fix em?

London Greenwich station: A reminder of former glories. Like Windows XP

Greenwich Station and the area are indeed a delight. Good old XP thrown in too. Happy days. Computers were less boring then.

Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again

Intelligent article and interesting comments. From my semi-layperson's viewpoint are we seeing an illustration of Andy Grove's book title Only The Paranoid Survive?

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

We have to be gently with them. THe .xlsx format was only introduced a mere 13 years ago. We have to allow a bit of time for them to catch up. Poor things.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Re: No problem!

Thanks for the tip! I've noticed there are a few Chrome OS alternatives out there. My 6.5 year old Acer is still great. Microsoft let people have Windows 10 updates for longer than that, if you can stand the many hours it takes to install the 6 monthly refreshes on a 1st generation core i3 lappy for instance.

Apple reseller Solutions Inc pulls down shutters, calls in administrators

It's very sad but you have to sell a lot of apples to make a bean.

It was a lit CeBIT see, got teeny weeny, world's biggest tech show yearly party... closed its German fest's doors yesterday

The fat lady must have sung. I went a couple of times in the 90s before internet had really taken off. I remember sitting next to a veternan on the plane going out there. He was fairly dismissive of the thing even back them. It was amazing to see the vast number of vendors and the sheer size of the event. Many of those exhibiting back then have bitten the dust. New vendors have risen up but is there the buzz about the industry that there was back then? Not really. It will take some utterly new marvels to stir up the interest again.

Boring as she goes at Sage? Oh no, no, no! Shares slide as sales slip below forecasts

Re: Perhaps...?

Well said. Folks who use cloud for vital business need their heads examining of course. Yesterday a customer told be that his firm was without internet for 10 days recently when BT cables were damaged. This was on an industrial estate in a large town 10km outside the M25. The temptation to follow the endless trend to de-skill everything with technologies like cloud is very powerful. The service providers always cover up the pitfalls. Caveat emptor.

There are 10 types of people in the world, but there is only one Melvyn

Baron Bragg is cool. If I have 1/2 a brain cell left should I reach his age I'll count myself lucky. Was his screenplay for Michael Caine's Play Dirty film in 1969 any good though?

Five things you need to know about Microsoft's looming Windows 10 Spring Creators Update

Chromebook: updates in under 5 minutes, Excellent value and generally still a joy to use 5 years after purchase.

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

I have installed KB4056892 on 2 Windows 10 PCs, a Core i3 2nd Gen and a 4th Gen. Both show about a 20% slowdown running Octane 2.0. Is this a last ditch attempt by Intel to sell us all a new CPU :)

Intel CEO Krzanich quits Trump's Manufacturing Council over response to Charlottesville rallies

Well done Mr. Krzanich. He is setting a very good example.

Brit prosecutors ask IT suppliers to fight over £3 USB cable tender

Ah yes Basware Holdings Ltd. (formerly Procserve Services Ltd.and some thing to do with the PA Consultancy) run this portal for bits and bobs of government purchasing to give the appearance of opening up the process to smaller resellers and maybe saving the taxpayer a few quid. It is a bit daft really.

Don't install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft

Installed Creators Update here using Windows 10 Upgrade Assistant on to a 4th Gen and a 2nd Gen Core i3 desktop plus a 1st gen Core i-3 lappy and they all work very nicely. Compared with the bad old days when every Windows upgrade was a guaranteed waste of time it's a whole lot better now!

Are you listening, Mr Trump? World's largest tech distie is now owned by the Chinese

Apart from the software most of the stuff Ingram sell is made in China anyway.

Sage advice: Avoid the Windows 10 Anniversary Update – it knackers our accounting app

Re: The important Win7 patch folks is KB3172605.

Good comment. I gave up on Win 7 for that very reason, the updates took forever. I suspect they prioritise PCs that have more recent CPUs. Not sure if that's my paranoia or not. Definitely Sage were always pestering me to buy their pricey upgrade so that it would work with Win 8. Of course I never bothered with that and their old version works fine with Win 10 both with and without the happy anniversary update.

'Faceless' Liberty Global has 'sucked the very soul' out of Virgin Media

Change at VM Long Overdue

If ever there was a company that had an over inflated opinion of itself it was VM. Sorry the service was not good enough for me on their unreliable fibre optic broadband. In this area you often see aged Telco street cabinets with doors flapping in the breeze. Invariably they are VM's. After they have been told about 6 times they fix them. Trouble is VM's funny old co-ax to the premises is just as flakey as BT's copper wire.

Android's latest patches once again remind us: It's Nexus or bust if you want decent security

For those that care Cyanogenmod is still good for security updates, even for Kitkat on an ancient 1st generation Galaxy Tab - if you don't mind slow and heavy!

PM resigns as Britain votes to leave EU

Ghastly Mess

What I ghastly mess. I hope those who voted to leave realise soon that they made the WRONG choice.

Fleet of 4.77MHz LCD laptops with 8088 CPUs still alive after 30 years

NEC's Rival

Reminds me NEC had a similar machine back then. The NEC did not have the floppy drive (pricey item back then). It ran CP/M not the trendy MS-DOS (CP/M with floppy was a nightmare, people made a living transferring CP/M data from one manufacturer's floppy drive format to another and there were loads of them!). With the NEC you just squirted the data down the serial port. NEC used a smaller screen I think. The NEC keyboard was nice but not quiet so not good in meetings. It was a sought after bargain laptop at Morgan Computer in the wild west end :)

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

Good To See So Many Comments...

...the modern gear has no mystique, if that's the right word.

Dave

HSBC COO ‘profoundly apologises’ for online outage

Fixed

They've fixed it. Some card (not me) tweeted: have they tried switching the system off and then on again?? :)

Day 2: Millions of HSBC customers still locked out of online banking

Flakey

IT: flakey, always has been...

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

I have the big Win 10 Pro upgrade invite plastered on the Windows 7 Update thing for the past week. I tried it on 2 machines and it did not work very well. This morning the invite is not there when I go to Windows Update. Interesting.

'Major' outage at Plusnet borks Brits' browsing, irate folk finger DNS

Plusnet have done this before, 6th May 2009 to be precise. When I spoke to their tech people that was the 1st time I heard the term flapping DNS. They advised me to use OpenDNS which I have found to be very good.

C For Hell: Data centre meltdown for irate customers as C4L GOES TITSUP

The hosting firm that I use uses C4L. I was not aware of them until it went wrong. Never heard of a NOC in my life. I still have no idea what BFD/100G issues are. What a clever world we live in.

Snoopers' Charter queen Theresa May returns to Home Office brief

We observed Kelly. George Osborne's lips are waffer thin.

Redmond's Patch Tuesday to kill off the Windows FREAK show

2 reboots for Win7 yes. And did anyone else get these important security updates failing: KB2676562, KB2871997, KB2872339, KB3011780, KB3004375, KB3031432 and this recommended security update KB2882822, all with error code 80090017 sad day?

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Did You Expect Anything Else?

Well done. Keep experimenting. live adventurously. Tech is so BLOODY BORING now something has to be done!!!!