Posts by Happy_Jack

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

I love my Eufy doorbell. Do I care if Chinese military intelligence can see who rings my doorbell or walks past my front door? No, not in the slightest.

Ericsson pulls plug on 8,500 workers

You go and get your coat.

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

Re: How busy are the devices ?

I'd be surprised if many organisations still bought spinning rust drives for boot disks. This is an obvious place to use SSDs given the smaller capacities needed.

Larry Ellison mea culpa as traffic cop stops Big Red boss on own island

Re: He only bought 98%

or if he buys an empty garage that could be populated with a second Corvette.

Google datacenters use 'a quarter of all water' in one US city

Re: Closed cooling?

The clouds of steam coming out of those cooling towers were just harmless acid rain.

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

Re: And Turkish Barbers where I live.

Gender-neutral computer pants, no less!

Boeing swipes at Starlink as it finishes two internet slinging satellites

Re: Err....

Yes, the same bunch that made life-saving warning lights a paid-for option.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

No, it's BS, like most El Reg fairy tales.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

Re: Remember only 6 people in your Excel party

or 3 nights in a row.

How does Monzo keep 1,600 microservices spinning? Go, clean code, and a strong team

Re: Banking isn't really a highly computational process

To be fair HSBC and First Direct are at the absolute opposite end of the technical debt scale compared to Monzo, Starling, etc.

Microsoft Teams: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Re: Teams...

Just disable it from the startup tab in Task Manager. Worked for me.

Yes, TfL asked people to write down their Oyster passwords – but don't worry, they didn't inhale

Re: Phone-based tickets

Dashlane can enter your card details into most browsers and other apps for you, then you just need to enter your fingerprint. I don't know if other password managers can do the same? Obviously you need to trust your password manager app, but it's probably safer than waving your card round in public.

Why telcos 'handed over' people's GPS coords to a bounty hunter: He just had to ask nicely

Re: Capitalism baby

What's a "client changer"?

Brit couch potatoes increasingly switching off telly boxes in favour of YouTube and Netflix

Re: Good riddance

The output from the BBC is certainly biased, but it's not as simple as left vs right-wing, or Labour vs Tory. For example there is an obvious bias against Brexit. Maybe it's just a London-centric view of the world? Good riddance indeed.

Privacy? Watchdogs? Fines? Whatever, nerds, more people than ever are using Facebook and filling its deep coffers

Re: "the settlement shields the company from responsibility"

When a criminal is caught stealing he will typically ask for a number of similar offences to be taken into consideration. If he's subsequently found to have committed another offence then he's already paid the price.

IT sales star wins $660k lawsuit against Oracle in Qatar – but can't collect because the Oracle he sued suddenly vanished

Re: Wow just wow.

According to the article it has been stripped of its assets, it hasn't vanished.

Google pholds! Just kidding. But Android Q Beta 2 drop supports those cool bendy mobes

Thanks El Reg for the fake news. You are now dead to me.

China still doesn't want iPhones despite Apple slashing prices, say market watchers

The fact is there are other Chinese-built phones that are much better value than iPhones.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: I've chuckled over these for years

I Can't Get Past The Unnecessary Capitalisation In Those Demotivational Posters.

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

Ironic?

It seems slightly ironic that Chinese consumers are not buying iPhones, but they are buying other Chinese phones instead.

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

Shame

It's a shame it failed for a lack of money, but I can understand people not being too enthusiastic about financing someone else's expensive hobby.

UK taxman told to chill out 'cos loan charge is whacking tax dodgers and whoopsies alike

Avoidance?

Where both parties conspire to disguise payments as loans, with a secret agreement that they aren't really loans and will never be repaid, then surely that's just tax evasion?

Avoidance is not doing the thing that would create the tax liability in the first place. People earning less than the basic income tax threshold are avoiding income tax. People who earn far more but pretend they don't are evading tax.

Washington Post offers invalid cookie consent under EU rules – ICO

You can already "toggle every single checkbox you can find on this page" using Chris Pederick's Web Developer extension on Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Personally I don't care so much about tracking cookies; they are far less intrusive than those stupid cookie confirmation prompts.

Leeds hospital launches campaign to 'axe the fax'

Re: Dangerous

He was probably thinking of shredders. They are easily confused with fax machines. It's easy to see the dangers of trying to send bum pics by sitting on a shredder.

Miss America 'scholarship program' adds Microsoft Azure developer to lineup

Re: Mr Universe Makeover too?

I believe that many scholarship schemes discriminate on the basis of age as well.

MPs reiterate risks of mega £10bn Aspire contract overhaul

Re: Proofreading?

After decades of empire building HMRC has finally been granted statehood.

UK not as keen on mobile wallets as mainland Europe and US

Re: So?

Sounds more like a charge card to me.

Busted Windows 8, 10 update blamed for breaking Brits' DHCP

Re: One solution...

Really? Do you think I (and hundreds of others) never thought to try rebooting? Thanks for your patronising reply.

One solution...

My Windows 10 laptop was unable to get a DHCP address yesterday after powering on, either from my Virgin Media Hub 3 or from the hotspot on my Galaxy S5, so I knew the problem was with Windows. A quick google search (after setting a static IP) turned up the following page: http://www.sysprobs.com/fixed-windows-10-limited-connectivity-not-getting-ip-from-dhcp. The following commands and a reboot got my DHCP working again:

netsh int tcp set heuristics disabled

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

netsh int tcp set global rss=enabled

UK IT consultant subject to insane sex ban order mounts legal challenge

Re: "He was found not guilty, therefore he is innocent"

"A judge looked at details of the case, and based on what he saw, elected to grant the order against this guy, and he did that for a reason."

The story suggests that it was a magistrate that imposed this order and not a judge. There is a big difference. Also it is not stated that the person imposing the order was actually a "he".

Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again

I use Paytag to make contactless payments with my rooted Android...

http://www.home.barclaycard/how-we-work/innovations/PayTag.html

LogMeIn adds emergency break-in feature to LastPass

Re: why trust a third party?

What's wrong with using a Libre Office spreadsheet protected (AES encrypted) using a sentence (upper case lower case and symbols) that one memorises?

1) It's potentially vulnerable to key logging.

2) It's inconvenient.

I do use locally encrypted files for more sensitive stuff, but it doesn't come close to the convenience of LastPass for logging onto less sensitive websites (like this one). For example you can search your LastPass vault by keyword to find a website if you can't remember the URL and it will go straight to it and log you in; your spreadsheet can't do that. Really important passwords, like online banking, I won't write down anywhere.

'Boutique' ISPs: Snub the Big 4 AND get great service

Contract length?

I was curious to see that length of contract hasn't been mentioned. There are three reasons that I have been a Zen broadband customer for several years, in order of importance (to me):

1) It's a rolling one-month contract - I can walk away any time I want. Does any other ISP offer this?

2) I get a block of static IP addresses at no extra cost.

3) They are very quick to prod BT into action when there's a line fault.

The downsides are it's expensive, not particularly fast and there is a usage cap.

SO. Which IS more important to humanity: Facebook, or Portugal?

Facebook FTW

I voted for Facebook, at least I can understand it. Maybe the Portuguese could dumb down their culture and language a bit to level the playing field?

Distro diaspora: Four flavours of Ubuntu unpacked

Ubuntu without Ubuntu?

So "one of the Ubuntu flavours that don’t use Ubuntu might be more agreeable"? Hmmm.