Posts by Andy Non

Web-enabled vibrator class action put to bed

Not exactly the way buyers were

expecting to be screwed.

Alibaba: We're no haven for pirates – we'll yank fake goods from our web bazaars within 24 hours

Similar problem on Amazon. Just take a look at highest capacity USB sticks, the price of some of the non-branded ones make alarm bells ring. Either the capacity must be fake or they have a data transfer rate of 1 byte per hour.

Hell desk to user: 'I know you're wrong. I wrote the software. And the protocol it runs on'

Re: Apparently there was a fault with our software

Not that simple to fix. This was a large, custom, partly encrypted binary. Not only had the word processor added characters it had stripped certain ascii values from the file (e.g. 0 to 8 if memory serves correct). In principle it may have been possible to pull a very small amount of data out of it, but it would have likely taken several weeks work with no guarantee of success. In short the file was FUBAR.

Apparently there was a fault with our software

as it would no longer load the client's data file without giving an error message saying it was corrupt. Such was the message relayed to me anyway by my boss. The client was very annoyed and pointing the finger directly at our software, demanding we fix the problem. As the developer of the software, a copy of the miscreant data file was sent to me. It should be a binary data file, partly-encrypted and readable only by our software. On examining the contents of the file, it had mysteriously gained some header data from a word processor and carriage return line feeds had been introduced throughout the file at approximately 80 character spacings. It was immediately apparent that the client had forced a word processor to open the binary data file, for reasons unknown, then proceeded to re-save the file, reformatting and completely wrecking it in the process. When I gave my diagnosis, the client admitted his error and pleaded with me to "fix" the file, as he didn't have a backup copy and it contained six months work. Oops, sorry pal, you've wrecked it.

Foot-long £1 sausage roll arrives

I've picked the wrong day

to start a diet. :(

How can you kill that which will not die? Windows XP is back (sorta... OK, not really)

The OS that won't die

I've still got an XP desktop computer that I use occasionally with some old software. The computer just refuses to die and faithfully boots up every time it's needed. It hasn't seen the internet for donkey's years as that would almost certainly be the death of it (It last saw the Internet via it's internal 56k dial-up modem). At least it does have a couple of those new fangled things called USB ports. I wonder how many more of these ancient XP computers are still in use and not included in the stats?

Google tracks what you spend offline to prove its online ads work. And privacy folks are furious

Re: Jokes on them...

Adverts? Are there adverts on the interwebs?

Hackers can turn web-connected car washes into horrible death traps

As featured on Futurama, just rename them

"suicide booths".

Strong and stable, my arse. UK wobbles when coping with ransomware

The solution

is obviously to outsource all UK IT to France. :P

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

Can't say I'm loyal to Firefox

it just seems to do what I want. It is reasonably fast, secure, doesn't spy on me or my browsing habits and it allows me to download add-ons to block adverts and unwanted scripts. The UI is customisable enough for my needs. I'd be sad to lose Firefox if it fell all the way off the cliffs onto the rocks below, but if there are any other browsers out there that can provide all the same features I'd be happy to give them a go.

Brits must now register virtually all new drones and undergo safety tests

Re: Flying machines?

The RC model flyers I'm aware of tend to be more responsible and better informed on aviation rules and don't fly where they are not supposed to. They take pride in their knowledge of aircraft and aviation in general. They also like to congregate into organised groups too; one such group flies models from a disused airstrip fairly near to where I fly a microlight and there are never any problems. Drones seem to draw a younger, loner enthusiast, typically with no knowledge of aviation law and a different mindset of "it's their drone so they'll fly it wherever they want." I think legislation of drones was inevitable. If there is a serious accident downing an aircraft with loss of life, then I fully expect all drones to be banned in the UK maybe with the exception of those using them for professional purposes (e.g. film crews).

Sleuths unearth 'Panic Mode' in Android, set off by mashing back button

According to the documentation, the button is "mostly harmless".

Hackers able to turbo-charge DJI drones way beyond what's legal

Re: What's the problem? skilled hobbyist can build similar quadrocopter from the ground in few days

A skilled hobbyist can also build a kit car and drive it on the wrong side of the road, "no restrictions at all" ;-)

Sooner or later

Some twat will fly his drone in restricted airspace causing a collision with another aircraft, possibly killing one or more people. Then unlicensed drones will be banned outright with heavy fines imposed on violators. Flight rules are there for very good reasons, just like rules of the road. Just because someone could drive on the wrong side of the road doesn't make it a good idea or a "cool" thing to do.

Samsung stalls Bixby launch because it am English not so good

Hilp!

My buttery is goating too hot. It mite catch fur!

PCs will get pricier and you're gonna like it, say Gartner market shamans

Re: I call bollocks ...

Agreed. I won't replace mine until it dies and then I'll just buy another high spec SSD Linux desktop again directly from the manufacturer.

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

Nepotism and the old school tie can also be problems

Early in my IT career I'd developed several successful small in-house projects for my employer, a multi-million pound turnover company and I was lined up to develop their next specialised stock control system, a system I also had intimate knowledge of. However, the corporate IT director, based elsewhere in the country, stuck his oar in and insisted that they took charge of the project. They outsourced the project to a business software company. The result was software that was late, over-budget, riddled with bugs, couldn't handle all the different types of stock movement and in short a total disaster. The external company spent months trying to rectify the software but eventually it became clear it was going to be unworkable. It all ended up in court with lots of bad feeling around.

It subsequently came to light that the corporate IT director who insisted on taking charge of the project (only to outsource it) was best buddies (old school tie) and on golfing terms etc with the director of the company the software was outsourced too. They had appointed a trainee programmer to handle the project. When I saw the source code I was shocked at how appallingly bad it was. A complete tangle of spaghetti code with numerous coding errors and design flaws. I got the impression this was the first software this trainee had ever written beyond "Hello World" and they were completely out of their depth.

I ended up writing the new software myself and everyone was happy, maybe with the exception of the corporate director of IT who had lost face over his bungling of the project. He managed to keep his job, but he was always somewhat frosty towards me for the following ten years I worked at the company.

Lack of end user input.

I found that lack of end user input was often a major contributor to late projects or projects that never got off the ground. Senior management tended to be the ones driving and specifying what they wanted for their departments but they often lacked day to day working knowledge of how their department functioned at its basic level; so you could end up developing software that did 90% of what was actually required. It was only by sitting down and spending time with the future end users that you discovered what that project killing 10% was; usually special cases or scenarios that the management hadn't considered but the people at the sharp end had to deal with day to day and had to be incorporated into the software for it to function effectively. It wasn't unusual for this 10% to need a substantial amount of coding or a complete re-think of the entire project rather than trying to shoe-horn it in.

Dead serious: How to haunt people after you've gone... using your smartphone

I still occasionally get emails from

a colleague who died ten years ago, from his Yahoo email account. Usually asking me to click a link to what are either spam sites or possibly links to the afterlife.

While I can appreciate the dark humour of this, I doubt his wife and kids would if they still receive such emails.

Crouching cyber, Hidden Cobra: Crack North Korean hack team ready to strike, says US-CERT

Vulnerabilities in Adobe flash player?

That's a surprise.

Amazon pulls snouts from all-you-can-eat cloud storage buffet

Re: Stenography?

Or sonography? Handy if you eat your words. ;-)

Re: Luddite here.

@Dave N. You don't keep an off-site backup too? That's very reckless of you!

Personally I keep a couple of encrypted backups with a relative. ;-)

Re: Luddite here.

LOL, I also keep backups of emails, PDF bank statements, scans of important legal documents etc. Encrypting a drive is so easy, there's no reason not to do it. I'd rather such files are on media fully controlled by me, than in someone else's cloud.

Luddite here.

I'll stick to keeping my photos, data etc on encrypted USB drives. No fuss, no hassle, no downtime, no ongoing charges, no bandwidth hit and no risks of dodgy characters gaining access.

DJI: Register your drones or no more cool flying vids for you

And in this evenings news...

"A drone has been involved in a near-miss with a plane making a descent into Edinburgh Airport.

The pilot was forced to take evasive action during the incident which happened at about 13:10 on Friday. The unmanned craft was flying about 20-30 metres away from a Loganair flight from Shetland at about 4,000ft."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-40019778

IT firms guilty of blasting customers with soul-numbing canned music

"ANSWER THE BLOOD PHONE".

This. If companies keep me hanging on the phone with messages, music, beeps, "your call is important blah blah blah" then I quickly switch to doing business with other companies. I have very little patience for this shit nowadays. Especially so when the music is so loud you have to hold the phone away from your ear and when the call centre person in Mumbai finally answers they are barely audible and can't resolve your query anyway so put you back on hold again to find someone else, who also cannot resolve the query so transfer your call back to the UK again to speak to someone just up the road. Yes Barclays I'm thinking of you. Or rather I'm not, because I closed my account due to your appalling customer service.

Faking incontinence and other ways to scare off tech support scammers

Play along with them...

I kept one on the line for half an hour, pretending to be an old bloke who didn't know much about computers. The computer belonged to my son and was upstairs, so I had to slowly trudge up and down stairs to turn it on, wait for it booting, then do every single thing he instructed me to do. Plus my typing isn't very good, so I tend to make a lot of mistakes and get lots of error messages. After half an hour of this he asked for my card details to which I replied the wife had the card and she was out shopping so he agreed to phone back later. A bit later on he phoned back, but "sorry mate, she's not back yet". He never phoned back again. While I'm wasting their time they aren't scamming someone else. I never mentioned that I'd spent the whole time in my armchair while watching TV and my computer runs Linux anyway.

Ransomware scum have already unleashed kill-switch-free WannaCry‬pt‪ variant

Re: Experts all giving advice how how to stay secure

Went to the doctor's surgery this morning. All the computers were down. I queried if they'd been hit with the malware, but apparently it was as a preventative measure as their main NHS trust has been badly hit, so couldn't bring up any records or even know what the wife's blood test was supposed to be for. Next I'm expecting the wife's hospital appt to be canceled due to the chaos it is causing.

I wonder if we can get a go-fund-me page set up to hire someone to track down this hacker scum and take out a hit on them? A bullet to the brain may give other scumbags something to think about.

Facebook is abusive. It's time to divorce it

Facebook is OK if handled with asbestos gloves

I treat it like a collection of internet forums. In fact facebook has replaced some internet forums (for better or worse) that I used to participate in. The key is to use facebook in this manner, not as a social media. Just like El Reg, I don't use my real name or date of birth and don't post my life story, where I live or any other personal information or photos. I've never met any of my facebook "friends" and have no real interest in doing so, thus keeping facebook at arms length from my real world friends or family. Similarly, nobody else can tag me in photos on facebook because none of my "friends" know what I look like.

Used in this way, facebook is great for talking and sharing information about special interests and hobbies with like-minded people. Just don't blab your personal information away.

It's been two and a half years of decline – tablets aren't coming back

Re: Sales and Marketing reality distortion field

The "lack of privacy policy" has helped to put me off making better use of my Android tablet. In fact I haven't even turned it on in over a year! I like the big screen and better security of my desktop Linux PC in the living room. Having a decent keyboard is also a factor - I'd dislike typing this using a touch-screen. So for me at least, the novelty of the tablet has largely worn off. If I want a distraction while sitting in a waiting room somewhere, I no longer take the tablet (with Kindle app) and take a real paperback book to read instead. As for internet access, nothing is sufficiently urgent that it can't wait until I'm home on my PC rather than looking at distorted, scrunched up versions of sites on a tablet or phone. If I'm out, I'm out, too busy to be thinking about the internet anyway.

I bet there are lots of people with disused tablets sitting on shelves and in drawers now the novelty has worn off.

Heroic stepmum takes one for team, sticks pot pipe up wazoo

Maybe it was a

crack pipe?

What is this bullsh*t, Google? Nexus phones starved of security fixes after just three years

Bye bye Android

When my current smart phone dies I'm seriously thinking of going back to a feature phone. Not only are they much cheaper to buy, but the battery life is far superior. And as for all the apps... I can't think of one that I'd actually miss enough to be a deal breaker. I don't trust my Android now for sensitive uses such as online banking so lack of internet on the phone would be no real loss to me. I'm also sick of all the unwanted bloatware that Google keeps pushing onto my phone. I uninstalled YouTube because Google started pushing recommended videos at me - the first one was in Chinese (with a Chinese title) and I'd no idea WTF was going off and thought my phone had been hacked, especially with the way the phone woke me up to tell me I'd received something important! Enough with the all the crap Google!

Lyrebird steals your voice to make you say things you didn't – and we hate this future

And some banks are starting to use

voice recognition to authenticate your identity and log you into your online bank account. Sounds like a good idea.

PC sales are up across Europe. You read that right. PC sales are up

@anthonyhegedus, I blame the corbinista brexiteers. ;-)

Will the MOAB (Mother Of all AdBlockers) finally kill advertising?

Backlash on Facebook

Despite using Adblock I kept getting an advert on Facebook pestering me to give a review of a company I've never had any dealings with. I kept clicking "Hide" to get rid of it but Facebook behaved like assholes and continued pushing the same advert, over and over again, pestering me to review the company. In the end I gave the company a review. One star and an acerbic write up explaining why I'd done it. Now the company are hacked off too and are putting in a claim to facebook as the way facebook are ramming their advertising down people's throats is being counterproductive and giving them negative reviews and ratings. Fancy that. At least the ads have stopped pestering me to review the company.

Alert: Using a web ad blocker may identify you – to advertisers

Re: Duh

@ Charles 9. If people are using ad-blockers in the first place it likely indicates they are not receptive to internet adverts anyway, so using alternate means to shove them in your face is likely to have a negative brand image effect for the product and website rather than induce a sale. If websites block me for using an ad-blocker I go elsewhere, there are very few sites that have exclusive content that I absolutely must see. Similarly, if adverts manage to sneak past my ad-blocker and make a site too annoying, then I'll simply stop visiting that site.

Note: I also use No-Script too and block third party cookies etc so have even less exposure to advertisers and trackers. I also use a throwaway email address on social media.

Duh

So people using ad-blockers who don't see online ads are vulnerable to advertisers tracking you and putting targetted ads on websites you visit that you still won't see as you are using an ad-blocker. And this is a bonus to advertisers how?

Deeming Facebook a 'publisher' of users' posts won't tackle paedo or terrorist content

Which country's legal jurisdiction to use?

I participate in contentious debates on facebook regarding religion with people all around the world. Almost all anti-religious comments are illegal somewhere in the world. Recently someone in Greece made a joke (pun) about a priests name and found themselves subject to arrest and imprisonment in Greece. In other places just stating you are an atheist is enough to get you arrested and given the death penalty. Making negative comments about Islam in the UK could get you arrested and charged with a hate crime. Just who should police facebook or any other social media site or internet forum and whose laws should apply?

Back to the future: Honda's new electric car can go an incredible 80 miles!

Even if 40 miles out and back trips cover 95% of your journeys

what do you do for the other 5%? Hire a car for other journeys? Spend a fortune on a taxi? 80 miles total is far too limiting. Surely there are very few people with 100% of their journeys within an 80 miles range?

BT's spam blocker IDs accident claims as top nuisance call

I too discovered that the best way to stop nuisance calls was to get rid of the BT land line. I rarely used it to make any calls, so saving myself a significant amount of money each month and stopped the nuisance calls. Win, Win.

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

Well at least the palm oil means...

the new notes will be somewhat environmentally friendly as they'll naturally biodegrade and break down while still in your wallet.

LastPass scrambles to fix another major flaw – once again spotted by Google's bugfinders

Remind me again...

why I don't trust any third parties to hold my passwords?

Plusnet slapped with £880k fine for billing ex customers

That was the final straw for me. I've left BT now and switched to Three's mobile internet, so no line rental payments. Suits me just fine and a lot cheaper than BT's broadband + land line package, especially considering the land line was hardly ever used to make calls.

Now UK bans carry-on lappies, phones, slabs on flights from six nations amid bomb fears

Re: Coming soon....

No one flies with anything. No hand baggage, no hold baggage and not even the clothes on your back.

You aren't getting on the plane that easily, you could still be carrying a bomb... so bend over while they snap on some gloves.

Adobe buddies up with Microsoft for new ways to mine your data

Re: Simple really @Andy Non

Yes, I block all domains by default, only allowing selected ones to function and then only temporarily.

Re: Simple really

Shhhhh! They'll overhear. ;-)

Re: Simple really

As ads are blocked on my computer, it is a mute point anyway.

Beijing deploys facial scanners to counter public toilet abuse

Due to the current toilet paper shortage...

Customers are requested to use both sides of each sheet.