Posts by Overcharged Aussie

Let there be light ... based wireless networks: LiFi spec OK'd as Wi-Fi complement

But tinfoil hats will still work ... right???

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Re: But I DO want to know!

Would it hurt the US to move up a century or two and adopt the metric system?

Sorry, just got carried away with myself, forget I even suggested it. Sigh.

3 years, 17 alphas, 2 betas, and over 7,500 commits later, OpenSSL version 3 is here

Re: So does this mean

Replying for a friend...No.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

1) the people are fools, 2) the help desks are idiots

Happens to me a lot as well, I also have an early Gmail account (back when it was invite) and I get mail occasionally for people who are obviously trying variants of dots or forget to add their numbers, etc.

Often when it is someone trying to contact a friend or contact I reply letting them know their message has gone to me instead and they need to call/contact their relative friend to get the email address corrected. These all seem to work out fine and I often get a message back thanking me.

The problem ones are the help desks or organisations who just can't believe that I am not their customer, etc and simply clam up, refuse to interact or resolve their issue. Occasionally one gets all officious and wants to report me for receiving messages that they sent me (life is too short to try and figure that one out or explain it to the idiot).

One in particular was Greenstar Energy in the UK that kept sending me messages about my account and the overdue bill. Fortunately they were not just sending the bill but giving a link to login so they at least were in some small way protecting their customer, but I could have gone to the link, and reset the password if I was an arse, so not that well protected. I was eventually able to get their Helpdesk to communicate and finally after about 3 months understand that I was not their customer (I live in Australia) that they were sending me the mail messages unsolicited including amounts owing, the name of the account holder, the account number and perhaps that was not correct under GDPR and the messages finally stopped. One month later they were taken over by Shell Energy and it started all over again along with the customer trying a series of 20 or so frantic resetting password messages over two days until he either just gave up in frustration or worked out what his email address was.

Anyway, must move on, as someone in Kansas is trying to order some shoes from Adidas, someone else in Sacramento is trying to renew her Sirius radio subscription, someone else in London is trying to organise some publicity photos and yet another person in Florida is due for a service on her Subaru.

Bloody idiots.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: All Employee Emails

Similar problem, I worked in an Australian office of a global company that had one of their offices in a building called International House. The folks there would often send an email to the alias of international-all about cake in the kitchen or a similarly local event blissfully unaware that they were mailing every employee not based in the US.

Ah good times.

Lockdown endgame? There won't be one until the West figures out its approach to contact-tracing apps

>Until then it's all just posts on flakebook or twatter (oh darn it, auto-correct is not working).

Seems to be working perfectly fine to my eyes. :-)

Blame of thrones: Those viral vids of PC monitors going blank when people stand up? Static electricity from chairs

Chair Cushions?

No cushions on my Aeron Office Chair.

See there is a valid reason apart from comforting my aging and spreading butt while I work on code. Code I might add that all the young folks in the office refuse to work on because, "That is so '90s granddad, no-one writes C with inline assembler code any more."

Scrambling for cloud relevance, Oracle hires... 2,000? Yes, that sounds like a nice round number

Re: Big Red Modus Operandi

They have a bunch of office space they own in Santa Clara (ex Sun)

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

Re: 'Trash' is gone

Mojave on my non US systems say "Move to Bin"

I am in Australia and running the English (Australia) language/region.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

Re: Near Field Implementation....love it

Static nothing, 220 Volts and hooked up to the Identity Management System to be triggered for getting the password wrong 3 times in a row. That will slow down the requests for password resets.

Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'

Re: Contrary to popular belief ...

Yes Minister should have been classed as a warning.

Re: That's nothing

I've had to explain what a memory leak is to more than one government CIO.

I'm sure one of them did not fully understand, especially when he asked if I had OH&S concerns about the storage of the requisite cleaning equipment around all that electricity in the data centre.

Sadly this was a true story.

Probe: How IBM ousts older staff, replaces them with young blood

IBM's loss

One of my most consistent and productive programmers was forcibly age retired by IBM. Knew their work, hired them in a flash, works from home, available at all hours, does great work.

Half the world warned 'Chinese space station will fall on you'

Maybe this act of the US Congress from 1979 needs updating?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/96th-congress/house-joint-resolution/356/all-info

Astro-boffinry world rocked to its very core: Shock as Andromeda found to be not much bigger than Milky Way

Re: Films / TV-shows ever dramatize the collision of galaxies?

No they are all pretty much stupid and I mean all of them from all countries, especially the ones who think that islands will tip over from too many people and the others that think that there is a secure backdoor encryption system that IT people can just turn on.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

And the MacOS Platform?

Since the Mac platforms increased market share over the past few years are they going to release a version on that platform?

IBM kills Global Technology and Global Business Services: It's all ‘IBM Services’ now

Re: Itsy Bitsy Mismanagement

Idiots Become Managers

Apple macOS so secure some apps can't be easily deleted

Re: Broken OS

I have always waited until the .3 release but with a new file system as well I was going to wait for .4 at least. Now with the Intel issue having only been patched in 10.13.2 may have to think about this again.

nbn™ to ISPs: share your speeds or we'll share 'em for you

Re: ADSL2 user here (wave)

Same speed here (3Mbps) when it hasn't been raining.

I suppose I shouldn't expect much, suburb is in Australia's 3rd largest City and only 11 kilometres from the CBD, must be difficult for them to get the infrastructure all the way out here.

Australia approves national database of everyone's mugshots

>But Aussies have done it

I have to admit our current crop of idiots, oops I meant, politicians really are a bunch of duds with only the occasional shining light, but with the current leader who really once wanted to lead the Labor Party moving steadily leftwards in policy and with the rest of the bunch all following him like sheep it is very depressing.

So. Should I upgrade to macOS High Sierra?

>Wow, yours still works? I had all 4 of mine die on me.

Good point, I avoided the problem by just connecting a USB or Thunderbolt drive to the system and let it do it's thing. On my home system just use a USB Drive, at work use a USB and a Thunderbolt drive and let it auto swap. I've had to recover/upgrade several times and this has always worked for me.

I also Sync my MacBook to my iMac and use CCC to backup document/working material on a regular schedule to NAS/File Server. One can never have too many backups. Sometimes my colleagues laugh at me but all of them at some point have come sheepishly into my office asking for a copy of something that has accidentally been lost somehow.

Re: FAT32, what's that?

Understood, I always wait for the 10.x.3 or 10.x.4 release anyway, gives them a chance to fix the bugs they introduced fixing the bugs in the initial release. Certainly worked for me with Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitain and Sierra.

Wowee, it's Samsung's next me-too AI gizmo: The Apple HomePod

Second Home?

Siri's second home?

Someone has forgotten that Apple stuck Siri in MacOS Sierra.

IBM marketeers rub out chopper after visit from CEO Ginni

Re: Just something to think about...

You forgot the cost for the accountant to figure out all of that, the auditor to make sure it's right, the executive review to change it, the accountant's time to revise...

...the Project Manager to prepare the project brief, plan, work packages, budget, project board, status reports, staff impact statements, project gateways, post implementation review, project closure report.

I'm sure marketing would want to be involved as well checking that the font used in the press release was correct, the blue of the carpet was the correct Pantone colour, etc.

nbn™ is installing new hybrid-fibre coax cables

Up until last month the NBN site was telling me that FTTN was being installed in my location and going live in Jul-2017. Going down to the local pillar, there they were installing the node and connecting it to the cable in the pillar.

Now with their updated website I am being told NBN will be delivered by HFC in Jan 2018 in an area that never had HFC installed.

Seems to me that the records that they are relying on are all stuffed up. I am expecting to next get a fellow at my door selling me carrier pigeons as it will be faster. Yes I am well aware of RFC-1149.

SHA3-256 is quantum-proof, should last billions of years

Re: You mean PUBLICLY KNOWN quantum computers

" There's no guarantee about what the NSA might have, or what IBM invented in their basement that they decided is too useful to let people know about."

It is probably being powered by an internal combustion engine that runs on water that is also too important to let people know about as well.

Source: nbn™'s fibre-to-the-kerb will be VDSL at 100/40Mbps

Re: Only Optus customers compensated?

> Why do only Optus customers get compensated for moving to the NBN?

I read that statement as the payment was to Optus as compensation for their customer base. That is Optus is being compensated for their customers being taken away by nbn™.

I don't believe that Optus customers are due to receive any money as compensation.

Of course I could be wrong as I am not an insider, just a poor overcharged ADSL2 subscriber whose suburb keeps appearing and disappearing on the nbn build out plans and whose ADSL tops out at around 4Mbps. :-)

Quiet cryptologist Bill Duane's war with Beijing's best

Re: I'm more concerned

I was in the audience at AusCERT 2016 and heard Bill's presentation. He did say that it did cost them a huge amount and reissued millions of tokens to end users where seed records were suspected of being compromised.

Apple engineers rebel, refuse to work on iOS amid FBI iPhone battle

I don't mind them refusing to work on weakening any security features.

While they are not doing that can they fix the bugs in OS X with USB drives and also get on with the requested features in the finder so that they can display folders then files like every other operating system does. It is so annoying to be working on Windows, Solaris, Linux and then having to work on a Mac and redo mentally where all of the files/folders are.

And before anyone asks, yes the finder add ons used to do this before El Capitan and in adding new security features they broke that.

Let's talk about that NSA Diffie-Hellman crack

Re: Hard coded primes?

Every system developed can have implementation flaws. I used to work for a commercial company in this space and often we would be brought it when the local team found crypto too hard or as part of a review of a design. In most cases you could see where they had really tried to be secure but had failed on some point that they had thought was not worth pursuing as they had limited resources (time or staff) to do everything.

The other problem is that most systems in production don't get touched unless there is a reported problem. Advances in security happen often as researchers uncover new exploits but rarely are old systems updated unless there is a reported problem. Some researcher somewhere who has made an advance that blows a hole in some other company's security coding may go unnoticed if it is not documented in a way that the team now responsible for maintaining the legacy product understand that they now have a vulnerability that needs to be patched now.

New NBN build plan full of linguistic holes that will explain away delays

Well their new rollout plan is a little confusing. Our location (Albany Creek, QLD) like a lot of other locations just dropped off their maps 2 years ago. The new rollout plan has two entries for the Albany Creek Region:

Region..Areas..Est Premises..Anticipated Technology..Expected date to commence

Albany Creek..Albany Creek, Eatons Hill..5600..HFC..H1-2016

Albany Creek..Clear Mountain, Eaton's Hill..3300..FTTN..H2-2016

Only problem with that lot is that most of Albany Creek doesn't have HFC. NBN really have to learn how to explain themselves better. Will the part of Albany Creek without HFC be done along with Clear Mountain and Eatons Hill or are NBN still gazing up their own fundamental orifices? I think I know the answer.

TPG glasses Vodafone with 4,000 km of new fibre

Re: If Vodafone needs Customers...

I used to be with Vodafone and would swap back in a heartbeat if their coverage was better. Their pricing is better than Telstra and their conditions of use are better as well but get outside one of the major cities and everything drops back to poor.

I do a lot of work in country Queensland and for me I can only rely on Telstra.

NBN Co yet to make a single fibre to the node connection but is eyeing off G.fast

NBN, what NBN

Promise after promise, all I know is that every year we look up the NBN site to see that our suburb's expected connection date has blown out another year, until last year when it is just greyed out with no planned dates.

Maybe they should have just sub-contracted it out to TPG.