Posts by Ynox

Meta picks India for WhatsApp's first e-commerce service

You're thinking WeChat.

Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer

I started swearing at a caller once in Hindi. They said they'd report me to the police.

Both my wife and I enjoy wasting the time of scammers. I tell the insurance ones that I had a load of beer and crashed into a tree (cue most of my colleagues laughing their asses off in the background back when I was in an office).

Interestingly, the last one I had which was an IT one I told I didn't have a computer but just my phone. They were pretty keen to get me to install AnyDesk on it. I guess they're changing with the times to find more victims.

And definitely watch Jim Browning's content. It's great. I've made my 73 year old Dad watch it with me and explained how these scams work.

UK Court of Appeal rules Tiny Computers' legal remains can sue Micron and Infineon over 2002 DRAM price-fixing cartel

I had a Tiny _and_ a Time machine back in the day.

The Tiny was bought in '96 in the early days of them being on the high street. Was a Pentium 133 with 16mb RAM and a 2gb HDD. It required an RMA for a dodgy motherboard which resulted in it going back off to Asia from what I remember. Think from memory it was a broken LPT port. Also required software support after an installation of Flight Sim '96 resulted in Direct X 3 screwing up the ATi Mach 64 graphics drivers. No real complaints on that.

The Time I bought as a result of a review in a PC mag. It was a weird spec machine only available from their business side of the business. P3 500MHz, 128mb RAM, 17.2gb Seagate disk (Medallion I think), DVD ROM drive, Riva TNT2 Ultra graphics card, Soundblaster Live sound card, Supermicro P6SBA motherboard, crap quality software MODEM (replaced it with a hardware MODEM in the end) but also with a Microsoft Sidewinder force feedback joystick, a half decent quality LG monitor and a good set of Labtec 2.1 speakers. I couldn't build this machine for what it cost then and it had pretty good quality parts.

Overall I was happy with the machines. Also heard about some iffy work conditions there though!

Atlassian pulls the plug on server licences, drags customers to the cloud

Wasn't it Atlassian who had the motto of 'don't fuck the customer' ?

Mobile World Congress now none of those things as 2020 industry megashow axed over coronavirus fears

Re: Will someone...

My wife is an analyst. She goes to MWC each year and without fail, comes back with a cold.

It's probably the right thing to cancel this really!

Brit hosting provider tsoHost takes needleful of 'unauthorized code' to the servers, suffers week of outages

Re: So, what's a good alternative...

+1 for TsoHost. They're not perfect, by any means, but for the price I'm more than happy with the service really.

BCC is hard, OK? Quite a lot of orgs blurted your email addresses in GDPR mailouts

My old university computing society did the same. Nice email with 1000 emails in 'To'.

A fairly friendly (but a bit arsey) email later and I got a data breach email from them the next day announcing what they'd done.

And yeah. I also work in a place where 'Reply All' is pretty much the default option. Cue hundreds of email a day.

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

Re: "So you will legally be able to buy a UK Sky subscription from any EU country"

I wonder if Sky will only supply this over Sky Broadband? It's entirely possible I guess. Especially if they're hauling multicast over the network too. No Sky broadband, no IPTV.

As for the other way to geoblock - just use a satellite with a tight footprint on the UK, e.g. Astra 2E.

Re: I told you years ago ...

That's why you use UDP multicast?

I was working on IPTV systems with HD (720p) content back nearly a decade ago!

Spotify cleared of exposing kids to self-love innuendo in TV spot

Re: Songs.

Yep.

And it's been my ringtone for the last few years :)

Sky fattens up broadband subs as it hovers above Fox's open mouth

On a different note - I wonder how this will pan out for Sky's content agreements. Certain stuff (e.g. The Simpsons) they only have rights to for satellite broadcast if I remember right. Guess they've been renegotiating!

I'd be very, very surprised if it's unicast.

Traditional linear TV used to always be multicasted when I worked on (a few) IPTV projects a few years ago.

I'm interested in seeing what the product is. Nothing still beats a satellite really for multicasting large amounts of data though!

Jingle bells, RM tells, some staff to go away... via Skype

Sad for the staffers, but RM machines were crap when I was a kid, and from what I remember horrendously over priced!

North Korea unveils its home-grown Netflix rival – Manbang

Re: Only 50 odd years behind the curve

Was a Mitsubishi Pajero - a Jap import Shogun.

Don't use a VPN in United Arab Emirates – unless you wanna risk jail and a $545,000 fine

WTF. Hopefully 'legitimate' VPN use is OK otherwise it's not great if you need to VPN to an office for network access.

The UAE has had an interesting run with comms. Remember back in 2009 or so I think Etisalat got a company to create an application to intercept emails on Blackberry devices. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/14/blackberry_snooping/ . Turns out it wasn't too efficient (a thread just polled) which killed battery life and rapidly let people know they had this malware installed!

Get ready for mandatory porn site age checks, Brits. You read that right

Re: 10Mbps is easy

8Mbit was ADSL.

(Up to) 20Mbit is ADSL2+ so they switched the exchange over to ADSL2+. Surprised that there's any ADSL exchanges left these days!

Edit - beaten to this comment...

Database man flown to Hong Kong to install forgotten patch spends week in pub

A few years back I ended up in a meeting on a Thursday night where the PM said 'If this isn't fixed by tomorrow, you're flying to the customer (out in the sticks in rural Iowa - I was based in Wales at the time). Got off the call, booked a last minute ticket (full fare Economy - £1.6k or so) out there and flew out on the Sunday (so I was at the customer for Monday).

Got to the customer on Monday morning only to hear that miraculously, the problem they had no longer existed. No one thought to tell me. Rolled back to previous version of code (this was set top box images) and replicated the issue before fixing the actual root cause - a 5 minute job.

Trip wasn't all in vain though. Ended up going out drinking with Avril Lavigne one night in Des Moines when I was out there (I was 24 at the time - this happened in 2010) and I had a load of other stuff to get on with, so the customer kept me on site for a month.

I still miss those days. They were a good customer - as long as we made progress they didn't tend to get too argumentative!

Yahoo! axes! websites! you've! never! heard! of! and! lays! off! staff!

Think it's time Yahoo! was taken out to pasture. And shot.

It's had its day - time to stop flogging the dead donkey.

GCHQ Christmas Card asks YOU the questions

+1 on suspecting some stenography in the image. 500+k for the image does seem like quite a lot...

Second UK teen suspect arrested over TalkTalk hack

Since when has Feltham been in Surrey?!

Pretty poor performance by TalkTalk. If it were a SQL Injection attack it's pretty much unforgivable!

Yahoo! boss! Mayer! promises! shake-up! in! bid! to! save! her! job!

Does *anyone* still use Yahoo!?

Flogging a dead donkey comes to mind.

175,000 whinge to Microsoft about phone tech support scams

Wish i had one of these calls!

It's not broadband if it's not 10 Mbps, says Ovum

Uhh.. Akamai are also a CDN company. They don't just do tracking cookies.

I agree with this really. 10Mbit should be the minimum these days to get a rich browsing experience.

Never trust a developer who says 'I can fix this in a few minutes'

Back out first. Then fix.

Spent a while in a similar industry.

General approach I used to always take used to be to spend 5 minutes or so doing some analysis, then if I didn't know what the hell was going on, revert to a previous version. Allows you time to do a proper fix and apply regression tests etc to ensure you're not even more in the shit than you were at the outage.

That said, I've also had enough angry PMs yelling at me at 11pm. Easier said than done when the shit's hitting the fan!