Posts by John Miles

Multi-part Android spyware lurked on Google Play Store for 4 years, posing as a bunch of legit-looking apps

RE: The truly paranoid will most probably

will not use a phone for anything important like banking because not only don't they trust the phone, they don't trust the banks app software (or maybe just don't trust the banks)

O2 be a fly on the wall during BT and Vodafone's video calls: Telefónica's UK biz, Virgin Media officially merge

Re: What will the O2 now be known as?

I'd suggest prefixing 02 with a S - to give SO2 aka sulphur dioxide

Remember Tapplock, the 'unbreakable' smart lock that was allergic to screwdrivers? The FTC just slapped it down for 'deceiving' folks

Re: thinking "tech savvy" means working a phone

Another one relevant to over complicating things - xkcd: I'm An Idiot

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

until there are lemon-soaked paper napkins again

now if they only ordered a reboot every 42 days

20 years later, Microsoft's still hammerin' Xamarin: Bunch of improvements on the way for cross-platform coding toolset

Re: "Dual-screen support is coming soon"

My main home PC has had two monitors since 2002 and at work since around 2007 - home is 2x 27" 2K monitors, work is 24" 1920 - I have no idea how I managed to code on 80x25 VGA

NHS websites will no longer burn up your mobile data allowance, say Brit telcos

MOT

If it is off road I believe it is OK for it to be without MOT as long as it is Taxed or SORN, you can't get it taxed without MOT (or less than 3 years old), so would have to SORN it then. If VED is due at end of month and MOT due then, probably worth seeing if you can renew now as I have managed that in past to ensure tax disk arrived in time, even though MOT would expire before new Tax started (though don't know if it will work with new system)

We checked in with the new Windows 10X build, and let's just say getting this ready for late 2020 will be a challenge

Re: MS making proper shut down so difficult

shutdown /s is easier - and something you can explain to an non IT person.

But that still leaves us with MS Windows Team, in an effort to pretend Windows boots faster, mislabelled the action which leads to lots of confusion when full shutdown is required.

Re: anything more than a traditional desktop or non touch enabled laptop

Currently using a two in one laptop with touch screen but using a Bluetooth mouse in preference to either the touch screen or touch pad, though the touch screen can be useful when ****** Windows decides Bluetooth device is unknown/not working and I need to reboot it again (another stupid decision by MS making proper shut down so difficult as sometimes you need a cold boot for it to forget it is broken).

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Re: FizzBuzz

They are looking for something like FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition

Admins beware! Microsoft gives heads-up for 'disruptive' changes to authentication in Office 365 email service

Re: is likely the phone can not be remote wiped by the admins

Unless the company insists on the InTune Company Portal App

Latest battery bruiser Android from budget Moto G range appears ahead of MWC after an Amazon whoopsie

Re: Can't hear you!

Have you tried switching to mono on Android, usually too much effort for when I am out walking and pull one ear bud out to hear the vehicles when doing short stretches on the road (and often doesn't really matter, but can be a pain when people speaking are on different channels)

How a Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25,000 AI contest with hidden code – and was fired from dream SV job

Re: "Harnessing the power of data"

There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode, Critical Care, where care was allocated on a "Treatment Coefficient" in a hospital that looks a lot like how AI could go wrong.

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

Re: Use the historical documentary evidence

Quatermass and the Pit clearly shows insectoid creatures arrived from Mars some millions of years ago

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

There is of course a relevant xkcd

xkcd 530

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: You must have work done by a "certified electrician", even if you don't need them

IEE wiring regulations Part P - however you can still do minor stuff yourself see FAQ (work in Kitchens is specifically excluded) or even do the lot and get it inspected (though will probably cost more than just getting an electrician).

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

£799 does not sound excessive for a phone if you consider how much they can cost now

Sounds like the Decoy Effect ( Trick that-makes you overspend ) or similar kicking in - Phones are only this dear because big manufacturers can get away charging you that for them

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Re: the only option is "I understand" (or words to that effect) ?

I find Firefox's reader mode quite often makes it go away, along with a lot of other rubbish without clicking button (though sometimes kills the bits I want), alternatively deleting some nodes from the DOM using dev tools also often makes it go away but that is more effort

HMRC's HTTPS howler: Childcare payments site cert expired at 1am on Sunday, down for hours

Re: 2. Help Desk faff about with it for an hour

At least it sounds like they couldn't do help desk did on one of my systems - tell user how to bypass check and close ticket, fortunately user contacted me as they felt it worng, but the battle it took to get helpdesk to amended their procedures when a user hit the problem with internal system to send ticket onto the support team.

For Foxit's sake: PDF editor biz breached, users' passwords among stolen data

why have ANY upper limit?

Because if you don't then you will likely be opening yourself up for DoS attacks where someone pushes a few million characters into password field and because password hashing is designed to be slow it will take a lot of resources on the sever if your get a lot of connections passing in very long password.

However it should be possible to find a sensible limit above 20 characters (bcrypt I believe only handles 72 bytes for hashing)

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

Re: Didn't Columbus in 1492 try to prove 'round earth'

I believe Columbus thought the Earth was smaller and thus he could sail the other way to Asia - people just thought he'd run out of supplies well before he got to Asia. He insisted what he found in the Americas was part of Asian continent - see Wiki Entry Christopher Columbus

Big Purple Hat is on as IBM closes acquisition of enterprise Linux firm

Re: It's NOT a Fairy Tale

I am pretty certain most Fairy Tales were rather dark in their origins before becoming Disneyfied by Wilhelm Grimm and of course Disney himself.

Radio-controlled racing car smears some rubber over Goodwood track

Didn't Top Gear Prove

A 13 year girl is best person to control radio control cars - youtube link

There's a scarily good 'deepfakes' YouTube channel that's quietly growing – and it's freaking everyone out

Re: I'll be baaaaack

It wouldn't be so life like then - after all the Terminator is a robot

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Re: "The buck stops here."?

I think it disappeared when the belief you only need to be able to "manage people" to be a manager became popular.

Mystery Git ransomware appears to blank commits, demands Bitcoin to rescue code

Re: CMD commits

probably because most of us "old school" grew up with CLI and found GUIs hugely more productive when they became available

Re: What happened to committing via command line?

Why are you checking in endless diffs you don't care about? That to me seems like a problem to me

Re: What happened to committing via command line?

Depends on how good the GUI is - not all of them are equal.

I can drop to the command line if I need to, but as 99% of the time I don't need the extra cli provides as workflows are quite simple I just stay in preferred GUI as it works well for me.

We are only using GIT because project team wanted it on their CV and never used any of the power of GIT (one conversation went they hadn't check in code yet as waiting for testing to finish )

Re: What happened to committing via command line?

Since I have been using code repositories starting with Visual SourceSafe in 90s, through several others to GIT now I pretty much always use a GUI to check in my commits - I find GUIs make it much easier to review all of the changes I am committing

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Problem is not cost

It is price of coder per hour, because despite all the total cost of ownership, management still think paying less per hour means cheaper development costs.

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

Reminds me of the Cartoon

Bluetooth Found new hardware - Airbus A310

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

re: an evil Robot Algocracy, they’ll achieve it through being thick

See SMBC - Rise of the machines

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

Load Times

I started using adblockers back in 2000, the big reason was the slow load times when on dialup where I was living - now with fast access it is the pure self defence both from visual mess and the nasties from web etc.

Pandas so useless they just look at delicious kid who fell into enclosure

Re: If it was Kodak dna,

Judging by how Kodak, despite inventing the digital camera back in 1975, fell off a cliff by worrying about film business and not the digital one - they probably already have some of its DNA

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

re: and we stopped it?

Now we wouldn't want all of us to die out from a plague spread by dirty telephones would we

NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail

Re: Oh no, I'm stuck

Spirit is sad (Happy endings), but

Opportunity is scary

Then we have Curiosity excuses

Nationwide UK court IT failure farce 'not the result of a cyber attack' – Justice Ministry

Re: designing system

Designing seems a strong word for things less structured and appealing than load of spaghetti dumped into a pile of brown stuff that come out of a cow's backside ;)

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

Re: is it appropriate to have a department of attack?

Ministry of Defence used to be Ministry of War

World's first robot hotel massacres half of its robot staff

So that is why it starts

The robots weren't rebelling against Humans, just upset they'd been fired ;)

Should we fear them though - SMBC rise of the machines

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Re: Running backwards ?

An Integer Overflow - yes a possibility

Re: Running backwards ?

It said they installed "specialised accurate time cards" - it could the microwaves was changing the card's memory/registers and the computer time was being updated according to these new values. It would have to impacted something in the computer, probably clock/interrupts - but that may not have been meant clock going backwards

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Re: Alexa...

Bizarro take on it

Staff sacked after security sees 'suspect surfer' script of shame

Re: warnings that the certificate doesn't match the site.

Not if they have updated the browser to trust the internal certificate authorit's root certificate - it doesn't even complain for sites like Google (use a browser without their interference and it will tell you untrusted)

Re: using https won't make the proxy logs safe,

Especially when the Proxy man in the middles you - which is what happens where I work, with a few exceptions (e.g. Amazon & Bank websites) the certificate is related to the proxy not the one issued to the site.

Scumbag hackers lift $1m from children's charity

Re: Who are the criminals here?

Somewhere a lot of charities have lost direction - once raising money was a means of achieving something worthwhile, now it seems doing the worthwhile thing is a means to aid raising money.

UK spam-texting tax consultancy slapped with £200k fine

Re: Tax Returned Limited, company number 08828062

There is a firm of accountants at that address - small companies often use their accountants office as their registered address, so I'd guess the company uses those accountants.

I was once confused why a recruiting agency was using the address of company that I had worked for (before it collapsed) as their own, then I remembered we had rented space from the accountants who occupied most of the building.

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Been getting them for a while

They started with an email address and password that linkedin leaked, but have been seeing a few from Adobe leak. The so called self described hacker on darknet was so good they sent loads of them with your password is but no password.

Microsoft points to a golden future where you can make Windows 10 your own

Re: I've always been doubtful there was any troubleshooting code

It has solved wifi problems for me a couple of times, after a think it decides to shutdown and restart the wifi-driver and this fixes the issue - but that is the only thing I can recall it fixing.

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Re: "Alpha" means that the devs think the product is ready to release

probably should be renamed to Rockstar or ninjas release as likely deemed ready by someone who replied to a "Rockstar/ninja developer" advert. ;)