Posts by schifreen

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

Re: .NET 4.0.30319

Moving away from port 3389 helps A LOT. As does enabling account lockout on Windows Server, to disable the account for 30 mins or so after 3 unsuccessful password attempts.

Trouble is, you can't set a timeout for the administrator account. Or rather, the administrator account isn't subject to the timeout. So you also need to remember to rename the admin account to something else.

Also, setting an account lockout can have other serious unintended consequences. For example, most SharePoint books suggest that you use sp_admin as your farm admin username. And lots of people do. So anyone who RDP's into a SharePoint server can bring it down by attempting to log in as sp_admin and getting the password wrong a few times. Because, chances are, that'e the account the SharePoint server uses to talk to its SQL Server back end.

Fancy renting your developer environment? Visual Studio goes online

Why?

Just, why? I guess it's all part of Microsoft's plans to make everything even more complicated and unreliable, for no good reason.

American intelligence follows British lead in warning of serious VPN vulnerabilities

Re: NSA should be banned.

Yup. In today's other news, bears crap in the woods and United breaks guitars.

This just in: Pope still catholic.

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

Re: Glad Oracle did this..

I've just moved to Hyper-V, since the latest Win10 update broke VMware Player that I was using until now for a couple of quick test VMs. It does seem to work OK, but its usability is awful compared to things like Virtualbox and VMware Player. Like most Microsoft things, its UI/UX can best be described as poorly thought out.

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

Re: So folks will be adding

Or, you could just write things like "I am pleased to PROPOSE the terms of our settlement", rather than being pleased to CONFIRM.

That was the mistake. Not the signature.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Eh?

They're saving that for when the lawyers become involved.

Have I Been S0ld? Troy Hunt's security website is up for acquisition

Re: I tip my hat

Actually, if he's gone to KPMG then he definitely is after the highest bidder. If he just wanted rid of it, he'd put a little note on the site and see who approached.

But good luck to him, regardless.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Absolutely. A friend of mine has an HP Stream with 32 GB eMMC. With Win10 and Libre Office Writer, the drive is pretty much full. What little space remains, is quickly filled by half-complete attempts by Windows to download updates, which it then doesn't clean up properly.

Although there's no space to add a proper hard disk to the machine, there *is* a slot for a micro SD card. So I stuck a spare 64 gig card in there, and used junctions and symlinks to point all the Windows Update directories and some other junk there. Last time I checked, it seemed to have done the trick and should last for a while until she has the cash to replace the machine.

30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days

Happy anniversary

Congrats on 30 years, Verity. Can't believe it's 3 decades since I commissioned the first column when I was editing .EXE magazine.

OK, so "commissioned" isn't quite accurate. More like "Took one look at this hilarious thing that someone sent in, and immediately decided that it needed to be a monthly column".

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

Contractors don't add to the headcount, so it makes the accounts look better. Simples.

It's 30 years ago: IBM's final battle with reality

Too much credit

You seem to conclude that the problem lay with IBM's poor strategy. You give the company way too much credit. They didn't really have a strategy at all and, if they did, no one knew what it was. Or where they would be working once the latest departmental reorg was complete.

The problem with OS/2 is that it was a solution to a problem that hardly anyone actually had. IBM knew this. Ask senior IBM people at the time (as I did) exactly what problem OS/2 was designed to solve, and why the world needed to ditch the free OS that came with their PC in order to install something that, frankly, never installed properly anyway, and they singularly failed to come up with a sensible answer. Or any answer at all.

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

Anyone know why I can't connect to the ape store?

There's an ape for that.