Posts by stungebag 163 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2015
One of the callers in the article called my TPS-listed landline just this morning to discuss the warranties on my appliances. They don't know what appliances I own and I very much doubt that they'd be of any use if an appliance broke down and I tried to book a service call with them. So they may appear to be offering a real service I'm not sure that they are.
I never got a sensible reading when I (accidentally) tried to measure the resistance between live and neutral of my mains supply. The end result was similar to that of a University colleague who had the bright idea of getting a ~500v supply by putting two adjacent 240v sockets in series.
I'm astonished at the constant claims on here that Windows (only children say Micro$oft, Window$ and so on) keeps feeding ads. I've never seen one - where do they appear?
If I looked at the Bing homepage I'm sure I'd see plenty of ads, and most sites I visit show ads that ultimately lead back to Google, Facebook and I dare say Microsoft, but where does Windows ever display an ad outside of a browser?
I had ISDN at home and a new laptop configured by my employer. I worked from home a couple of days a week, and often left the device switched on at evenings/weekends. After about a month the postman knocked and handed me an A4-sized parcel about two inches thick. It was my itemised phone bill. The laptop had been sent out with IPX/SPX installed which was firing up a data circuit and trying to make a connection every minute. Or perhaps it was every second. In any case it led to many thousands of very short calls, each of them billed at a far higher rate than their length would suggest due to a minimum connection charge.
I can't remember how large that bill was but it was sufficient to get the company to reconfigure networking on that PC very quickly indeed.
I was quite an early broadband adopter, proudly sitting at home marvelling at my 512kb ADSL connection via USB dongle. Streets ahead of my previous 128kb ISDN. But one evening it started getting flakey. No problem, I'll sort it tomorrow.
I pitch up at work the next day and durng a quiet time decide to look at my ISP's website. They were called Bulldog Broadband. I typed an address, possible www. bulldog.co.uk, into my browser. Imagine my surprise when my screen was filled with thumbnails of gyrating naked women! It seems that Bulldog had not checked, or secured, the url. Or perhaps the company was more diversified than I'd realised.
No harm done but by the time I was made redundant several years later Bulldog Broadband had gone. My ex-company put me on a course of handling redundancy and two of my classmates were ex-Bulldog customer service staff. I wished I'd had the ability to talk to them before choosing my ISP. It was, apparently, a porrly managed shitshow.
Oh dear, the memories. I know exactly what you mean. We had to take an annual skills inventory. This was reviewed by my line manager and normally came back with an instruction to raise my reported skill level for most of the categories. It was exactly what you're referring to. I knew quite a lot but was aware that there were others who knew much more than I did.
The reason that drivers' wages are quite high is all down to the traiin operating companies. They ask drivers to work on rest days and Sundays (when some of the companies have ZERO rostered drivers) because it's cheaper than training new drivers and increasing the headcount. A further reason is the habit of poaching staff from other operators, which again tends to increased wages.
The Burroughs Large Systems, dating back to about 1970 but still in use today as the Unisys Clearpath range, were interesting in this respect. Originally character data was 6-bit. 7-bit ASCII support was added and 8-bit EBCDIC which became the normal way of handling character data. Eventually 6-bit was retired in the hardware. The word on these machines was 48 bits so the character size indicated the packing: a word could hold 8 6-bit characters, 6 ASCII or EBCDIC characters (ASCII being padded) or 12 Hexadecimal characters. A word could also contain a real, integer, boolean, complex (over two words) and so on.
Things used in string manipulation, such as Algol SCAN and REPLACE, used character pointers with a length expressed in the appropriate unit for the character size of that string. E.g. you could declare EBCDIC POINTER P then perform operations on it that knew that it was 8-bit units encoded in EBCDIC. Other data structures such as arrays could be SIMILARLY typed.
EBCDIC ARRAY EA[0:79;
HEX ARRAY HA[0:11];
ASCII ARRAY AA[0:131];
An efficient TRANSLATE was supplied.
REPLACE EA[0] BY AA[0] WITH ASCIITOEBCDIC.
Fascinating machines.
I had a company Sierra a while back. It needed a thin physical key with a round cross-section to unlock the central locking. Some oiks tried to steal it one day but the police were on hand and stopped them, leaving me with a dangling ignition switch and nice full-beam-only headlights for my commute home on the M25, the scrotes having broken the stalk.
The policeman told me that to unlock the doors all you need is half a tennis ball. You place it over the keyhole and strike it sharply. The air pressure then unlocks the car.
That's good. So please explain how a mail sender opts out of Spamhaus' service. For the absence of doubt I'm not talking about deliberate spammers, just somebody who, for instance, finds themselves sending from a listed IP block because somebody using their ISP so smarthost has managed to screw up (or got compromised).
You mostly got used to the phone bills, especially if your POP was local rate. I was able to access Chelmsford, about 30 miles away, as local. But Chelmsford went down for a few weeks so I had to use a London POP, also about 30 miles away but A rate. My monthly bills shot up well into three figures.
Another notable feature of Demon was its quirky customer support. Knowledgable, yes, but sometimes very rude. The name Richard springs to mind.
Most bulk SMS senders wouldn't use SS#7 as that's the internal phone network protocol suite (or was, last time I looked some years ago). But this company did. That suggests that either they're being treated as a telco by their peers, or perhaps they aren't doing anything, a real telephone company is doing the work for them.
In the GSM network any call or text causes a location lookup from the HLR. This is perfectly normal and not in any way sinister.
How else can the call/text be routed to wherever the phone happens to be today?
Yes, you're correct. I've seen a suggestion that this is due to the UK no longer being subject to EU regulations. While I'd like to believe it I really don't know.
What I do know is that two of my cards, from seperate banks, have recently been replaced before their expiry date. Both were Visa and have been replaced by MasterCard.
No, they didn't put the answers in the page source code. They used Google Forms. The people setting the exam almost certainly had not the slightest idea, or interest, of how Forms works. It seemed to offer what they needed and even if they'd been told that the answers were hidden in the source they'd have been reassured by their admin telling them that they'd disabled the view source feature (but we now know that the disabling didn't work). They wouldn't have the slightest notion of what Javascript is so suggesting that they hand-craft some js is just silly.
And these are managed machines so almost certainly are in a school. Invigilators are walking around the room looking at screens. Possibly someone's monitoring thumbnails of the whole room using a tool such as Impero. Supervised students doing an exam under time pressure are not in a position to do much in the way of tech-based cheating, even with vulnerabilities such as this.
All police forces find it hard to distinguish between activists, whose policies and methods they may not as individuals support, and criminal behaviour.
Maybe this group had overstepped the mark, but look at the UK's undercover police scandals where police infiltrated activist groups who were not criminals to the point where they formed relationships with and even fathered children on their targets.
It was a server in that it supported client devices, but these machine were not very big. See https://www.blackmoreit.com/b38-mev-unisys-b38-mev-386287-cpu-module.html.
Disks and so on were latched to the CPU. These machines were configured in clusters with a server supporting several diskless clients, botting from the master.
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