Posts by NotBob

T-Mobile US joins suppliers on $2.7B DoD contract for next-gen comms services

T-Mobile has no coverage compared to any other big-name carrier anywhere I've checked. What could they possibly add?

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Dubbed Content

You mean a lease?

Maybe something shorter term. Like a rental?

Nah, it'll never catch on...

Apple settles with student after authorized repair workers leaked her naked pics to her Facebook page

Re: How to tell if you're stupid.

If you take nude pics of yourself, you're probably stupid (and vain)

If you keep nude pics of yourself on your phone / computer / tablet / whatever, you are definitely stupid.

And if you leave them on there when you send it in for repair, congratulations, you just made yourself the poster child for stupid.

As always I am disappointed to see the legal system reward stupidity, it just brings the idiocracy closer..

How to tell if you're stupid, indeed. If you unironically hold these views, it's probably safe to assume you are.

Not so fast, SpaceX: $3bn NASA Moon landing contract blocked by rivals' gripes

Until John Fking Deere started this proprietary/DRM crap.

Please bring your satellite in to an authorized dealer for repairs.

Twitter sues Texas AG to halt 'retaliatory' demand for internal content-moderation rulebook in wake of Trump ban

Re: Have their cake and eat it too

If you're under the impression that only one side is lying, you're not paying attention.

Re: Have their cake and eat it too

Sounds fair, but they've shown an unwillingness to fairly apply their own rules. While the former president's comments hit all the buttons for removal, doing so under the claim of inciting violence on a platform that was perfectly fine (by their inaction, at least) with being used to coordinate not just peaceful protests, but violent ones and looting and general attempts at overthrowing order with the BLM movement seems a bit suspect.

Also, that's twitter. What rules did Amazon use to kick Twitter's competition off AWS?

Huawei loses attempt to rescue CFO Meng from US clutches despite using 140-year-old law in High Court

Re: Don't break my laws but I can break your laws

Wasn't just American law broken, either. International sanctions that Canada, for instance, agreed to.

Recovery time objective missed by four weeks, but Parler is back online

Re: Who's the audience?

You cannot have that aspect of free speech and also the protection afforded a common carrier. The two are mutually exclusive.

Re: Who's the audience?

That statement has not been accurate in a long time

You'll never select all and mark as read again after this tale of peril... Oh, who are we kidding? Of course you will

Re: needing to haul together on a rope to remove a ferrous tool

I have ferrous keys, a ferrous key ring, and a ferrous keychain. None of which are unusual. What are you on about?

If you never thought you'd hear a Microsoftie tell you to stop using Internet Explorer, lap it up: 'I beg you, let it retire to great bitbucket in the sky'

Re: Just as soon as you release a stable alternative...

If your problem is that your layout cannot be done in tables, you either need to simplify your layout or learn to use tables

The time that Sales braved the white hot heat of the data centre to save the day

Except if the heat excursion kills the system, the process still fails and now there's not a system to try again on.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: The problem is Oracle (again)

What's twisted about that argument? It's perfectly accurate.

The soap opera continues. HP again tells Xerox: Show us more money!

Re: Of course HP won't agree...

I'd go further to say that if Carl Ichan wants it, it's a bad idea.

EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott

EA has shown itself far more slanted toward nastiness than Microsoft ever has

NASA boffins tackle Nazi alien in space – with the help of Native American tribal elders

The ADL isn't an authority on anything. They think they are, but no intelligent person pays them any mind.

Radio nerd who sipped NHS pager messages then streamed them via webcam may have committed a crime

It was effectively a public broadcast, as many places would acknowledge emergency dispatches are. Part a falls apart like a toilet paper bikini in a wave pool.

Part b effectively requires that the broadcast was private to begin with, so it falls apart like a poorly designed flaming marshmallow sculpture on a windy day.

Hopefully, stupidity will not prevail and there will be no prosecution.

Hundreds charged in internet's biggest child-abuse swap-shop site bust: IP addy leak led cops to sys-op's home

Per the indictment, .03 Btc was for 6 months of VIP access. There was also apparently an option to pay incrementally for points (they mention .02 BTC for 230 points).

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

Re: set top boxes are a pain in the arse

You've got a second plug to connect, usually a bulky power adapter that doesn't play nicely with the other plugs behind the telly.

Maybe, but not necessarily. Mine uses a USB power supply, and my TV could actually power it. Have you actually looked into it?

You've got to put the set top box somewhere, and its not going to be on top of the set - they don't fit these days.

They're surprisingly small. Have you seen a Roku or a Chromecast, or are you just making unfounded assumptions?

You're using up another HDMI socket - TVs that are going to need a set top box only have a couple of HDMI sockets.

You're grabbing at straws. You could use the old A/V hookup with the three RCA plugs, potentially. Of course, I'm tempted to ask what's plugged into those ports since there's no space to put anything that could plug into them based on your other question, but that would require that you maintain logical consistency.

You've got yet another remote control to lose down the back of the sofa.

So the fact that you're either disorganized or lazy should be the reason, ignoring that Roku, for one, already demonstrates using your phone as a remote?

Should I go on?

Only if you've got a real reason

Criminalise British drone fliers, snarl MPs amid crackdown demands

Re: Make it like owning a vehicle

Think about the damage a tiny stone does to your windscreen doing 70 on the motorway

None at all? I mean, at 80 mph, little stones don't generally do any damage to windshields here in the states, so it doesn't matter if you mean 70 mph or 70 kph, it's not going to damage any half-decent windshield. If they did damage like you seem to think, we wouldn't dump truckloads of them on the highway every winter.

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Sent this guy back to prison for torture (by their own admission) and then shot a protester with live ammo. Those Chinese folks sure know how to party!

Pro tip: Plug in your Tesla S when clocking off, lest you run out of juice mid hot pursuit

CB radio scanners have been available for quite a long time. Police don't generally use CB, but many emergency service dispatch systems are operated off of publicly registered radio frequencies that can be picked up by commercially available scanners. This is nothing new nor unexpected.

EU court rules Right To Be Forgotten doesn't apply outside member states

Re: So GDPR thing...

GDPR deals with moving data out, not data that has already escaped. Lots of data is already out, and more will continue to leak, GDPR or not. If google et all aren't the ones doing the leaking, GDPR need not apply.

The '$4.4m a year' bug: Chipotle online orders swallowed by JavaScript credit-card form blunder

If 25% store their credit card details in autofill, and 4% would decide it's not worth the bother, you're still ignoring the ones for whom autofill works as expected and inputs the correct data. I can pull a similar number from nowhere, but even if it's 50%, the result is significantly off of what this "researcher" estimated.

If you've ever looked at any research on loss of capture through UX issues you would know that the percentages lost can be staggering, even at payment stage. You do not want to give people time to get pissed off, think about if they really want it, or look at the total price again.

Doesn't mean there's any basis for the assumption. You'd have to guesstimate the number of folks with autofill, the number of them that have the autofill improperly storing a 4 digit year, and the number of them lazy enough to give up on the order because of it. The number is pretty much guaranteed to have been made up, just like 87% of statistics in news articles.

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

Re: Shoddyfreude

Yep. Odd that they only chose complaints to mention. I made it a point to explain how little of an inconvenience I'd had.

Sloppy sensationalist journalism.

Fitbit fitness fans furious following flummoxing flawed firmware float, fleeting feedback, failed fixes

Mine had trouble syncing a couple of times, but resetting it and removing and re-adding the doohickey as a bluetooth accessory in the phone seems to have fixed it. Figured it was just mine being persnickety.

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Re: Dubious

Yes, it's never happened.

Not even once.

Four-year probe finds Foxconn's Apple 11 factory 'routinely' flouts Chinese labour laws

Re: $239 a month

Why would a farmer, one who works on a farm that he may or may not own, be considered unemployed? Would you count all entrepreneurs as unemployed? Does self-employed just link to unemployed in your dictionary?

Tesla Autopilot crash driver may have been eating a bagel at the time, was lucky not to get schmeared on road

There was news made when a driver of a motorhome put cruise control on and left the driver's seat while going down the highway. You cannot use the stupidity of a few to say that the tech is bad on the whole.

Re: Because most Tesla drivers are not pilots.

If you and your pilot friends think it ought to be banned, consider yourself welcomed to the club. Unfortunately, you may not be so thrilled when you find the club is of luddites, flat-earthers, and other anti-progress and anti-technology folks.

There's nothing wrong with the tech at this stage if it's used as a driving aid, much the same as old-school cruise control or the autopilot in a commercial aircraft.

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: sad mac

I think it's a windows shortcut, and it still seems to work

Security? We've heard of it! But why be a party pooper when there's printing to be done

Re: What were they doing with an expensive photo capable printer in 1989?

Those numbers might be quite different 30 years ago. Especially when anything photo-grade would probably have been ink, not toner, to boot.

Cloudflare punts far-right hate-hole 8chan off the internet after 30 slayed in US mass shootings

Re: So, since 1961 ...

There is no such thing as rational gun control. There is irrational and unconstitutional gun control, and there is the government addressing things that lead to mass shootings (like mental health) while minding their own business about guns.

Will someone plz dump our shizz on the Moon, NASA begs as one of the space biz vendors drops out

Re: There is no "case for Mars"

That, and the Moon is a harsh mistress. Never heard that said of Mars...

LightSail 2 successfully unfurls its silvery solar sails, prepares to become a truly solar-powered satellite

Re: Lightsail-assisted

The problem, as the other commentard pointed out and y'all keep conveniently ignoring, is that all that the light sail is doing could be done ballistically. Of course, we're hearing they didn't but we're also hearing that the light sail can't get it out of orbit to truly show it's actually moving the darned thing. It can't even keep it in orbit beyond a year, based on the way the article is written.

If you actually read the article, it's much ado about nothing.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Well, assuming all you've said is correct, you still wouldn't actually have anything secure. Either end could still be compromised. Your web host could be compromised. There are legit attacks that could easily neuter your whole big scheme and there's not a blessed thing you could do about it.

OK, it's fair to say UK's botched Emergency Services Network is an emergency now, right?

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Across the pond, the most functional systems for rural areas still use radio. Multiple vendors available, dead simple to figure out, no lock-in. Just some frequency allocated so that it's not used by anyone else. Local dispatch centers make sure everyone is within reasonable range, and ring-downs cover when the wrong center picks up. Mostly works when the phone lines are down, even, although it makes it harder for folks to call emergency numbers. This can be used in urban areas with minimal issues, as well.

Why a country would feel the need to do all this over cellular or via one vendor, I cannot understand.

Accounts whistleblower blackmailed Autonomy for a payoff, Mike Lynch tells High Court

How the lusers must feel

Reading this and not understanding most of what's going on, I got a feeling for how the lusers and cow-orkers must feel when they don't understand technology. I'll have to find a friendly accountant or something to break it down into manageable chunks for me.

Pitch of the week: Helping to stamp out e-cigarettes while removing hurdles to digital learning

Vaping is not the least bit all but imperceptible to non-smokers in the vicinity. Stamp out both.

Oh snap! The road's closed. Never mind, Google Maps has a plan...

Re: The technology is somewhat hit and miss

Tom-tom is one of the few dedicated devices where you can actually fix that, though. Or, at least, it was back when I had one.

Hey China, while you're in all our servers, can you fix these support tickets? IBM, HPE, Tata CS, Fujitsu, NTT and their customers pwned

Re: Huawei

Says the commentard who didn't read the article?

FYI: Your Venmo transfers with those edgy emojis aren't private by default. And someone's put 7m of them into a public DB

Re: Can someone tell me why Venmo is a thing?

Some restaurants may not let you split the bill more than once, but this is not the normal situation in the USA. Capitalism prevails. and they're happy as long as they get their money.

Black Hat USA axes anti-abortion congressman as keynote speaker after outcry – and more news from infosec land

Re: There are now answers to this that will make everyone happy.

That's an indefensibly stupid opinion when babies are being killed and you try to defend it by saying "Is it your body? No? Then you shouldn't get a say." It's not the mum's body being killed, it's the baby's. You show your argument and position as baseless and absurd.

Job done, indeed. Bloody idiots.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Re: For the record ...

I mean, I moved to another browser on several machines, so they lost a user...

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

Re: New???

Ever driven in city traffic? Get out away from those cows and you'll see the other person is speaking for a lot of drivers. Even Paris could see that much.

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

Re: Or maybe...

Except the data was verified in advance, if you read the article.

No plain sailing for Anon hacktivist picked up by Disney cruise ship: 10 years in the cooler for hospital DDoS caper

Re: Crazy people harming the innocent

So the same world as the BCH employees, but he caused less demonstrable harm.

Re: What a hero

To be fair, I followed the case, and the folks involved at the hospital shouldn't have jobs anywhere in healthcare ever again. They should be facing jail time alongside him for kidnapping, and the judge should be flipping burgers.

Techie basks in praise for restoring workforce email (by stopping his scripting sh!tshow)

Re: Root cause analysis?

Anyone wanting a root cause analysis from the BOFH will either be found as the root cause or be found in the next episode...