* Posts by LewisRage

185 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2015

Page:

2017 tablet market trended towards torpor

LewisRage

Re: Google app store on Fire is a cinch

Which is fine if you are looking for it, or even know to look for it.

And frankly not getting people who don't know what they are doing into sideloading APKs they find on the internet is a good thing, having had to technical support clueless family and friends Windows boxes in the 90's/2000's.

LewisRage

Re: Not sure Amazon will keep it up

Father in Law was after a better tablet and had read that the Fire HD didn't have 'full android' and so hadn't bought one, despite enjoying his 8" Fire tablet that also didn't have full android.

I explained that if he wasn't missing it now he won't miss it in the future. And I I think that would be true for most people; they simply won't understand that the Amazon app store is a second class citizen and that there are options, to them it's just the way it is. Different from their phone but still has most of the same apps so who cares or even notices?

It's only us geeks that dick about with custom roms and sideloading APKs.

Ugly, perfect ten-rated bug hits Cisco VPNs

LewisRage

Re: Security appliances memory errors and programming bugs

I imagine that some of what you say is entirely valid, but surely you are missing a couple of points too.

First of all programming 30 years ago may well have been full of exploitable holes that no-one discovered due to the simple fact there weren't as many people looking for them. What we've got now is the infosec equivalent of an infinite number of hackers on an infinite number of laptops, more systems are being prodded by more people and so more problems are being found.

In addition to that is it not the case that the systems that are being released are just that much more complicated? Your programmer 30 years ago might have made tidier, tighter code but chances are it was only doing one small easily tested (relatively speaking) function, compared to a cisco Threat Defense system thats infinitely configurable and can operate in a huge number of ways.

And that isn't to defend the idea that we appear to have a fundamental problem with security in the industry now, but blaming the 'new' programmers is perhaps a little simplistic.

UK competition watchdog: Fox's takeover of Sky 'not in public interest'

LewisRage

In the next 12 months...

... Anne Lambert will lose her job OR Matt Hancock MP (Culture Secretary) is revealed to have been shagging children/pigs/someone else' wife.

China's first space station to – ahem – de-orbit in late March

LewisRage

Reports suggesting that there are still crew on board...

They've been named as

- Captain Sum Ting Wong

- Wi Tu Lo

- Ho Lee Fuk

- Bang Ding Ow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmclgO6w0C0

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

LewisRage

£120 for 4MB

Early 90's I'm pretty sure that £30 per 1MB was about right wasn't it? 72 PIN SIM?

Shazam! Apple chucks £300m at Brit what's-that-song app – report

LewisRage

Re: A very long time ago...

@Slap we did similar, although not to the tune of £400, it took a while to trip it up but I believe a white lable of Mr76ix finally defeated it.

LewisRage

A very long time ago...

...Shazam was only accessible via ringing a 4 digit shortcode. Specifically 2580, straight down the centre of your phone.

This was long before the current short codes, which are all 5 digit, were a thing. They were also the only service that I was aware of that had *any* sort of short code, let alone this superbly desirable number.

I've never been able to track down how that came about, a tiny startup offering this throw away service at 50p a go gets ownership of an extremely desirable and unique number. Someone must have pulled some strings there surely?

Any one have any idea how that might have happened?

Vanity, thy name is: M1SCO company car reg plates for sale

LewisRage

tediously a relevant XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Permissionless data slurping: Why Google's latest bombshell matters

LewisRage

Re: Are we surprised?

"northern farmers"

this from the Tractor Boys?!

User experience test tools: A privacy accident waiting to happen

LewisRage

SessionCam

SessionCam have posted a rebuttal of sorts here : https://blog.sessioncam.com/sessioncam-and-privacy-why-you-dont-need-to-worry-about-session-replay-ce9cabbe52e2

The NAKED truth: Why flashing us your nude pics is a good idea – by Facebook's safety boss

LewisRage

Re: abusive scumbags

And so the /r/incel fallout lands at the register...

Oh Brother: Hackers can crash your unpatched printers – researchers

LewisRage

2 things

First off, who the fuck puts a printer on the open internet? And if you do why do you leave the web interface open?

Secondly, I've got a couple of brother printers here. I find the best method to perform a denial of service is to try to get one of them to print something.

Wowee. Look at this server. Definitely keep critical data in there. Yup

LewisRage

"Okay, how do you exclude all the fake servers from the backups, monitoring and the users?"

remove the little tick from the box next to the fake server name in the configuration of the backup/monitoring solution.

And are you really asking how to hide something from a user?

Capgemini: We love our 'flexible, flowing' spade

LewisRage

Functional and honest, literally the opposite of todays announcement.

LewisRage

"We’ve also introduced a new handcrafted wordmark of our name, humanizing our brand."

What a load of utter fucking wank. I never have and never will be able to believe that people can spout this drivel un-ironically and yet there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint of sstire here.

AWS to Windows devs: Come out of the dark, into the Lightsail

LewisRage

Aidan Finn – a technical sales lead at Microsoft cloud solutions provider MicroWarehouse in Dublin, Ireland – gave The Register... a well reasoned and comprehensive technical breakdown of it's specific merits and failures, before adding 'waaaaaaaaaaaah, i don't like it'.

Ex-Harrods IT man cleared of stealing company issued laptop

LewisRage

I assume IT Worker here means...

...a project manager/business analyst/scrum master who understands fuck all about IT and yet makes the IT decisions.

Clearly anyone who's used a computer for more than Excel and Project and actually works in IT would have just wiped the HD from a live CD if they were genuinely worried about the stored data, or swapped in a fresh SSD if they just wanted to steal the thing.

Ouch: Brit council still staggering weeks after ransomware bit its PCs

LewisRage

Re: "Weeks"?

No automation.

Each desktop needs re-imaging by hand (perhaps a .WIM on a USB stick or a badly implemented WDS) which needs manual intervention to complete the build.

Untested backup recovery. No one has heard of an RTO. There's no spare storage to bring up the backups on and no-one wants to just outright wipe the original machines.

An IT department that consists of 4 helpdesk and 2 'sysadmins' who've never been given the time of money to implement proper systems. Or they are shared services and other councils/departments still need their attention.

Constant internal wrangling because no-one is willing to make the bold decision in case it comes back to bite them.

Essentially invisible: Android big-daddy Andy Rubin's hypetastic mobe 'flops in first month'

LewisRage

Shame it's not available here

It sounds great frankly. I've seen it being marked *down* because it comes only with base android and a single additional app (The camera).

Given the amount of unremovable* manufacturer guff I normally have to deal with on a phone that sounds refreshing.

It's got a nice screen and powerful innards, what more,really, do you want?

*there are always ways of course, it'd just be nice not to have to piss about with it.

Welcome to the future: Bluetooth jackets you can only wash 10 times. Gee, thanks, Google

LewisRage

What a bunch of curmudgeons!

You'd all be the ones standing round saying things like "This fire is a waste of time, if you leave your meat on too long it turns to a cinder and, although it might be able to fend off a wolf or two, it burns my fingers every time I try to pick it up!" and "look at that twat with the DynaTAC, it's so bulky and expensive, one born every minute he he he"

Clearly this jacket isn't particularly useful but any one who thinks that wearable's aren't going to extend into to clothing is short-sighted and, as with lots of technologies, the very earliest examples is a bit rubbish and very expensive.

So this jacket might be shit, but the iJacket 3 we'll all be clamouring over and queuing overnight to spend a months wages on in 5-10 years time probably won't be.

Chap tames Slack by piping it into Emacs

LewisRage

I don't see the point

Slack can do all this natively, notifications can be configured to only alert on a specific @ mention of your name and combinations of /mute and channels would allow him to filter the dross...

>whenever something explodes in the server

Surely just point growl at the native logs?

Best of luck to him if that's how he wants to spend his time of course but the return on effort for this seems pretty low.

Noise-canceling headphones with a DO NOT DISTURB light can't silence your critics

LewisRage

Dual Bluetooth

I feel like this isn't getting enough attention here. Anyone know of any other headsets that have this feature?

Either that or a way to seamlessly swap back and forth Desktop to phone and vice versa.

Giant frikkin' British laser turret to start zapping stuff next year

LewisRage

You'd need it to go to 50 really or you've got a really weird scale there, 1-10 = 1MW to 10MW, 10-11 10MW to 50MW.

In fact I think you'd find the manufacturers of my electric shower temperature control already have a version of that technology.

HSBC biz banking crypto: The case of the vanishing green padlock and... what domain are we on again?

LewisRage

Their personal banking experience is a bit wanky too.

I have a passphrase, something that clearly should be memorable, and a password.

They ask me to enter the entirety of the passphrase (something that I can remember) and then only certain letters of the password.

The password is a randomly generated 42 char string. Working out the 2nd, 5th and last letters is always a pain...

...although it is made easier by the fact that they only ever ask me for the 1st-6th and the last, ignoring the intermediary 30 odd characters in the middle.

So I ended up changing my passphrase to a 42 char randomly generated string and the password is a memorable word. I'm sure next time I have to use their phone system they will ask me for my passphrase and having to read out that random string will be the end of me.

SanDisk's little microSD card sucks up 400GB

LewisRage

Re: It's how big?

LG, since the G4 at least, has been claiming it can address SD cards up to 2TB so in theory this should be viable on one of their phones.

I'm not sure I entirely believe it will work as advertised but the technology is apparently there.

LG teases us with svelte V30 but refuses to say if it's coming to Blighty

LewisRage

They've ditched the removable battery, LG were the last bastion of this convenience I think and they've finally succumbed.

I'm gonna have to pick up an armful of older v20s and eek them out for years to come :/

Vodafone won't pay employee expenses for cups of coffee

LewisRage

I've always found this a bit funny.

When I'm in the office I'll pop out at lunch time and buy myself a sandwich. When I'm on site at a clients for a few hours I pop out at lunch and buy a sandwich, but this now becomes the companies responsibility?

Of course if I'm gone for an extended period and/or I'm forced by circumstance to eat expensively whilst away from my usual facilities that makes perfect sense, but coming back from a 4 hour client visit with a burger king and a receipt just doesn't quite add up to me.

Clearly there are times when the company absolutely should be paying and I don't completely agree with the point I'm making above but I've never quite managed to get my head round it.

Bombastic boss gave insane instructions to sensible sysadmin, with client on speakerphone

LewisRage

So he knew how to fix it anyway?

'Had a third party PST repair tool that worked'

So why didn't he just run that and get out of there in the first place? I guess he was trying to drop the new team leading in the shit but if I was the Lawyer firm I'd be asking why 'Diannes' time was so utterly wasted by the clown on site playing stupid games when he knew how to resolve the situation in the first place.

El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive

LewisRage

Re: I just replaced the HDD in my laptop with...

The solution you really need for a single disk laptop is a hybrid that gives you some of the performance that SSD offers whilst retaining the cheap capacity a spinning disk gives (in fact a 1TB 'SSHD' is on eBuyer for £47 currently, so cost isn't a differentiator).

And this is really the crux of the interview isn't it? SSD technology will be used to provide high performance, low capacity functions whilst spinning rust provides the cheap cheap capacity.

As with everything I'm sure eventually a 9-dimensional quantum nano-cube will appear that will blow them both out of the water but I suspect that we'll retain the current paradigm for a while as yet.

I mean I'm still sending offsite, long term storage out on reels of magnetised plastic and I've been being told that tape storage was dead for years now*, which is odd because there are lots of people selling large robotic tape libraries and we recently saw reported a new record achieved in tape density so it's clearly still relevant. And look at Veeam back tracking and adding in tape support.

*mainly by people trying to sell me backup solutions that don't have the technology to hook into tape drives.

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

LewisRage

Re: Songs.

@Symon

There are at least three songs called Turning Japanese on the Spotify; The Vapours, The Vibrators and 'No Use For A Name'

LewisRage

Re: Parenting

Which is a much cleverer and more succinct way of saying what I was thinking when I read the article, but absolutely accurate.

LewisRage

Re: Obligatory

A Serbian Film

LewisRage

Re: Obligatory

It was ~100 complaints out of at least 7.2 million that watched it.

Some people are dickheads and things will always be thus. They complained and the ASA rightly shot them down.

I'm fine with this, as long as I don't have to meet or spend time with any of those humourless 100 complainants or the 7.2 million who watch BGT.

Norway Quizwall experiment ends with more quizzing than commenting

LewisRage

Re: Interesting experiment but...

Get an A.I. to do it

Your top five dreadful people the Google manifesto has pulled out of the woodwork

LewisRage

Re: asshe but

> Censorship is typing falun dong in a search engine and getting a visit from the secret police.

Surely thats oppression, censorship would be getting zero results.

Programmer's < fumble jeopardizes thousands of medical reports

LewisRage

Re: Markup language

@Shady

...shit!

LewisRage

Re: Markup language

@Doctor Syntax

This stuff amazes me when I bump into it.

LewisRage

Re: Markup language

I did just give up; I changed jobs and stopped worrying about it!

But yeah, thats what I should have done, as it was I was replacing a convoluted set of VB laden Excel docs and one of the functions there 'corrected' the name and I said I'd replicate it without really considering the complexities.

What was there originally just capitalised the first letter of the two name fields so I got much further than it was originally but I'd have probably just given up and fallen back to the original if I'd stuck around to see it through.

LewisRage

Re: Markup language

@J.G.Harston

Ha. Thankfully I specifically looked for the string 'macd', but like I say I'm sure there was loads of stuff I'd missed.

LewisRage

Re: Markup language

I tried to do name normalisation for a client a while back, I naively set of with a 'Capitalise the first letter of the 2 names' rule, then realised that there were O'Briens (which is capitalised differently to D'eath) and so added an element to catch that, then a MacDonald was noticed so I added something to catch that and McD at the same time, then someone points out that there are people with hyphenated names, and people with 'van' in between names and on researching that I find that some people capitalise the Van and some don't.

I quit in the end and never finished it all, so if you receive a marketing email from a British car parking company (a National one...) and your unusual name is mangled you can thank me.

FBI's spyware-laden video claims another scalp: Alleged sextortionist charged

LewisRage

Fingers crossed he rots somewhere horrible for it...

Although I'm really never going to be pursued for anything by an agency like this (due to not being an absolute scumbag) it interests me that they release the specifics of these investigations. Surely the more this gets talked about the less effective it will be?

If I was to become a paedophile extortionist I'd add to my 'list of things to be careful about' : don't use windows media player* and suddenly this technique becomes useless.

I don't know how the system works, do they have to reveal these things to justify the existence of the evidence?

* I mean, if it doesn't play in VLC you don't touch it anyway right?

Google goes home to Cali to overturn Canada's worldwide search result ban

LewisRage

At some point a tech company is going to simply pull out of a territory

At some point we are surely going to see an organisation like Google simply pull all operations out of a territory during a dispute like this.

Canada is almost certainly too big a revenue source and the dispute too small to warrant it here but I imagine that at some point a state will push one of those massive corporations too far, and the corporation will simply choose to deprive that states population their services.

I'd like to see if Canada would capitulate when Google simply blocked it's search functions from being accessed by Canadian citizens. Perhaps people would learn to use Bing and it would backfire but I suspect that the reality is that the uproar would make it very difficult for the judiciary (and the politicians who would be on the hook to the voters).

LewisRage

Re: Extra-territorial control

Won't that screw up their extensive tax fiddles though?

LewisRage

If you follow the trail and read about the Datalink issue itself it's that Datalink have gone off the grid, a one man band currently in a location unknown. Suing them for profits isn't viable, I'm guessing going after google to get them de-listed is their path of last resort when everything else has failed.

Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain...

LewisRage

Re: Webmasters, get your act together!

I believe Speedtest.net have actually moved away from flash (I was presented with the choice of legacy flash or something else last time I visited), but as has been said elsewhere speedof.me is better. It looks like dog poo but works well in a purely HTML5 interface.

LewisRage

Or we'll have to carefully deploy an older version of Firefox and prevent updating to allow the plugin to run, doubling down on the problems that will arise from this.

I'm all for the death of flash and have been purging it where possible but I know of one fairly hefty national UK business who have just invested a fair chunk of cash into a new Learning System that is entirely dependent on flash.

I am sure that their plan for that high 6 figure investment doesn't involve scrapping it in under 3 years.

Microsoft ctrl-Zs 'killing' Paint, by which we mean offering naff app through Windows Store

LewisRage

Re: Take away apps/functionality with an OS update?

Yes, this is a good point I hadn't thought about. Removing full functional, existing features from the OS really isn't something that should be happening.

LewisRage

Re: Notepad: minimal function

Yes, ok, I knew some nerds would pull me up on this! I chose to gloss over Notepad's shortcomings for the sake of brevity but I completely agree, however the point is that notepad is quick and easy for a lot of quick operations (much like paint is) but falls short on some areas (much like paint does).

You wouldn't want to have to use wordpad for your basic find/replace you don't want to have to use paint 3d for your basic image crop/resizing.

Page: