Posts by FrogsAndChips

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

Re: Extra Security...

Interesting how you get vastly different results on Google Images for Treet vs. Treets (regional settings may also affect the results).

90 dBA. Which is pretty loud. Like lawn mower or food blender loud

Time for a new El Reg Standards Unit maybe?

How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

Re: The real question

Because your FB account could be used as a first step in a social engineering attack, using personal data from you or your friends.

ReactOS 0.4.11 makes great strides towards running Windows apps without the Windows

Re: "HMRC's services all offering its own Government Gateway"

Probably no one in this thread, I'm afraid.

You may find more sympathy there.

UK.gov's Verify has 'significantly' missed every target, groans spending watchdog

Re: They make Verify hard to use

How true. I'd already posted some time ago what I thought of Verify. So for my last tax return, I thought I'd use Gov Gateway instead. Alas, failure there too, I'd probably set up an account in a previous life, but the system was utterly unable to let me retrieve my identifiers.

So it was back to Verify. That's when I discovered that RoyalMail had disappeared from the list of providers, and I had to create a brand new account with PostOffice. Miraculously, it worked on first attempt, but I don't know what's in store for the next time I try it.

When 2FA means sweet FA privacy: Facebook admits it slurps mobe numbers for more than just profile security

Re: Possibly Microsoft too

and eBay.

Whenever I login, they ask me to confirm my mobile number (not sure where they got it in the first place). I always reply 'Maybe later' as I don't want to lie 'I don't have a mobile number'. My profile information has no phone number.

Last month I made an order. A few days later, I get a text from DHL informing me of a planned delivery. So DHL got my number from the vendor. Now who did the vendor get my number from?

Re: Sounds like a case for GDPR

108% next month.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

So much for "Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"...

That's a nice ski speaker you've got there. Shame if it got pwned

Re: Why GPS?

Might come in handy when you're buried under the avalanche you didn't hear because of your speakers, if only to recover your frozen body.

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

Train to Edinburgh, not surprising given the rip-off prices of British rail.

I was specifically referring to London<->Paris trips for which you don't have that many direct flights. I just checked on our company travel website, plane tickets from London to Paris are typically 20% to 100% more expensive than Eurostar, so maybe the "much more" was a bit of a stretch, but there's very little reason to prefer the plane for center-to-center journeys between these 2 cities.

Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

And in the private sector

And not just for goods.

A colleague is visiting from India. First London then Paris. We normally (and sensibly) use Eurostar for London-Paris trips. But guess what? The travel booking tool in India only allows air transport for that, no train! So he'll be paying much more for plane tickets, plus taxi to and from airports (no one in Accounting will bother him about Tube being far cheaper), not counting all the wasted time in airport transfers, check-in and luggage collection. But that's ok cause it's all in policy!

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

Re: Make them an offer?

IIRC, the ISS needs constant maintenance, so you can't leave it unmanned for long periods. This was a cause of recent concern as a failed supply mission raised the possibility that the crew might have to abandon the station if a new cargo didn't arrive in time.

So if what you need is a Big Garage in the Sky with no crew on it, the ISS is probably not your best choice.

Re: Ripley and a cuddly earth

Cuddly is really the adjective that, erm, jumps to mind when I think of those eggs...

Huawei 'to sue US' over federal kit block – report

That sub-heading

Thanks very much El Reg for putting that song in my head on a Monday and ruining my productivity for the week!

Correction: Last month, we called Zuckerberg a moron. We apologize. In fact, he and Facebook are a fscking disgrace

Re: Facebook should be one of the first down the plughole.

You mean Sugar-berg, Shirley?

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Future name?

So, if and when it's discovered, will boffins throw a new contest to decide its name? Let's see what the conditions could be this time:

- must be named after a Roman divinity, bonus points if representing a visible minority

- Mickey Mouse's pet dog not allowed

- name must be 8-16 characters long, including at least 1 digit and 1 special character

- name must not be offensive to Donald Trump or Kim Jong-Un

- name can't be translated to Niney Mc Nineface in any terrestrial or extraterrestrial language

- submissions must be filed in a cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"

Eggheads want YOU to name Jupiter's five newly found moons ‒ and yeah, not so fast with Moony McMoonface

Re: Helene and Leda

Leda is already a moon of Jupiter and Helene is a moon of Saturn.

Re: Didn't....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus#Consorts_and_offspring is a good place to start and lists more than 300. -a and -e endings reduce that to about 130, of which you need to remove those already taken as moons of Jupiter or other celestial bodies (found several asteroids).

From those that don't appear to be taken, I would like to see that one Dike:

Dike left Earth for the sky, from which, as the constellation [Virgo], she watched the despicable human race. After her departure, the human race declined into the Bronze Age, when diseases arose and they learned how to sail.

Password managers may leave your online crown jewels 'exposed in RAM' to malware – but hey, they're still better than the alternative

Re: Could do better but not much better

If you're referring to Fig 21 in the paper, KeePass comes out with 2 Green and 2 Amber, that's the best score of the 5 surveyed tools.

Assuming 2 points for Green, 1 for Amber, 0 for Red, you get the ranking: KeePass > 1Password4 > Dashlane > LastPass > 1Password7.

YMMV if you weigh the weaknesses differently.

An 8-character all ASCII-typeable characters (128^8) password is beaten by a 10-character plain A-Z,a-z password (52^10) by an order of magnitude.

True, but how many webistes do you know that will let you enter an [A-Z,a-z] only password?

Easy: just connect your device to your computer via USB, copy the unencrypted file, paste your passwords, and voila!

So we can assume that you never need to use any of these passwords when you're away from your safe?

Re: Keystroke logger

and auto-type obfuscation to defeat them on user/password auto-fill.

Earth's noggin took quite a clockin' back in the day: Now a second meteorite crater spotted under Greenland ice

Re: And yet, there is still life on earth ...

What about the mice and the dolphins?

Lovely website you got there. Would be a shame if we, er, someone were to sink it: Google warns EU link tax will magnify media monetary misery

Re: have you noticed

Yes, I've noticed that every time I change my default search engine to DuckDuckGo or Qwant, it's not long before I revert to Google. Old habits die hard I guess, and I always have that uncomfortable feeling that i'm missing some results, so I switch back to Google just to compare and don't bother to change back.

Maybe next time I'll try harder (famous last words).

Mumsnet data leak: Moaning parents could see other users' privates after cloud migration

Re: not quite a financial institution or communications provider.

Credentials apparently weren't exposed

Not this time, but I was following up on a comment about the Heartbleed attack that hit them in 2014. Even the site's founder got her credentials publicly exposed.

Re: not quite a financial institution or communications provider.

But their users are typically those that would reuse their passwords, so any credentials that were stolen during this breach could have been used to break into more sensitive services.

Google: All your leaked passwords are belong to us – here's a Chrome extension to find them

Re: Keepass - with Tusk - stored in Sync

it's way over the heads of "normal" users

I tend to disagree. Yes, it's highly configurable and extendable, and has advanced features that require some RTFM, but for a standard user all it takes is a few clicks to create a new entry and generate a unique secure password that will be accepted by most sites, which is all they need.

Re: Which password manager to plump for?

Also available on Android as KeePass2Android.

Trakt app users' personal data exposed: We were hit by a 'PHP exploit'... back in 2014

Platform change in Jan 2015

and the data breach would have occurred just one month before the change? Sounds more likely to me that it could have happened anytime up to December 2014.

Also, moving to a "more secure algorithm for storing passwords", probably means the previous algorithm was MD5 hash, so all leaked passwords have been pwned for 4 years.

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch

Re: Same test results, different conclusion?

Well, at least they spared us the usual "We take security very seriously" press release.

Worried about Brexit food shortages? North Korean haute couture has just the thing

"We contacted the UK's Brexit planners for their thoughts"

Haven't the last 2 years convinced you that they have none?

Q. China just landed on its far side, the US woz there 50 years ago – now Europe wants to mine it? A. It's the Moon

Re: Deal with two problems with one solution (no puns intended).

Sounds like a crossover between this and that.

Re: Facing us?

At new moon, the side that faces the Earth is in the dark, hence "dark side".

You must be confusing with the "far side" of the moon.

Edit: Patched Out beat me to it.

Colour us shocked: Google in €50m GDPR fine appeal bombshell

Re: Can the fine be increased?

Yes, appeals can increase or decrease the sanctions.

Look out, kids. Your Tinder account is about to be swamped by old people... probably

Re: 2 years ago, haven't used it since...

That's no way to talk about your girlfriend!

Office 365 enjoys good old-fashioned Thursday wobble as email teeters over in Europe

users lacking the usual “checking my email” work avoidance excuse

Well, they do have the "can't work as I can't access email" excuse instead.

French data watchdog dishes out largest GDPR fine yet: Google ordered to hand over €50m

Re: Apple Turnover

Do you mean Tarte Tatin?

Re: When will this hit Apple?

If you want to fine Apple under GDPR, you'll need to find something else than forbidden jailbreaking and unrepairable devices.

Three quarters of US Facebook users unaware their online behavior gets tracked

Re: No kidding

To paraphrase one of my former maths teachers "Any sufficiently large group of individuals will always contain the same proportion of morons".

Re: FB is a boil on the bum of mankind!

Hey, I make $2303.58 per month on FB just worknig from my home 2 huors per day. It's easy and anyone cna do it!!! If you want to find the same, just click hear -> []

Sorry, couldn't resist!

Happy Thursday! 770 MEEELLLION email addresses and passwords found in yuge data breach

If your offline password manager gets hacked, you have bigger problems.

HSBC suggests it might have found a... use for blockchain?

Re: Truth

That sounds exactly like how Kerviel managed to engage 50 billions in DAX futures - knowing how to bypass weak controls and convincing people to ignore red flags. Granted, that was 12 years ago and banks have learnt from this, but we all know how history is doomed to repeat itself...

Re: Risk Averse?

IB are more and more risk averse. They now prefer the safe and steady revenue streams of sales and arbitrage to the risks of trading for their own. Plus the regulatory constraints make it more and more costly to perform their activities. A lot of IB have been shutting down or reducing their prop trading activities in the last years.

German competition watchdog toys with ban on some Facebook data-slurps

Re: Wow...

I still don't read it as FB admitting that they've breached DP laws - maybe I'm just too thick to read between the lines. Even if we all know they're constantly doing it, that would be PR suicide.

Re: Wow...

Sorry, I must have missed something, where in the article does it say that FB incriminates itself?

Sticking with one mobile provider gets you... Oh. Price rises, big exit fees, and lovely, lovely lock-in

Re: Data Portability

@Gordon 10

You can imagine a use case where your current telco provides your consumption data to your new one so that they can offer you a relevant plan if you can't do the math by yourself.

But generally agree with you, see my previous post.

Re: Data Portability

Sure, but I'm not convinced this is the main obstable to switching mobile providers as the article suggests. Number portability could be a blocking point, although from personal experience I found it to work quite well (PAC number easy to obtain, switch scheduled within a few days, happens on the given date with minor loss of service), but YMMV.

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

Re: Not a shadow phone unless you manage to clone your SIM

Not if done by your operator, that's the initial business model for this phone and why it's locked to a provider. This was explained in the previous article when Verizon launched it in the US:

Inside is a non-removable nano SIM that mirrors your primary SIM, much like an eSIM-enabled Apple Watch mirrors your iPhone.

But from this article it sounds that Vodafone is not offering this feature yet.

Brexit-dodging SCISYS Brits find Galileo joy in Dublin

Re: they haven't left

But the jobs have gone to Germany.