Posts by PB90210 23 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2015
Erm... you've got a mobile with 'location services' and you feel the need to (illegally) install transmitters to communicate with an app on that mobile to tell you what the phone already knows?
Oh, I see... the app is there to track the location of the transmitters in case they get stolen by the parks dept!
(my head hurts)
"Imagine being spied on every day by a large unnaccountable company, just because you implicitly agreed to their terms and conditions when you accessed their terrain!"
Like entering a tube station and your Wi-Fi presence being tracked by TfL
"But you just need to turn off Wi-Fi to 'opt-out'"
"Other add-ons - that didn't deal with privacy - were not disabled. ... I do not believe in coincidences. I definitely see a pattern here"
I had all extensions disabled, even themes, so I see a pattern and it's probably that you have some that didn't rely on the code-signing cert
"since when is Mozilla so certain that they can just disable stuff running on my computer without obtaining my consent first?"
Since they started to take security a little more serious. If code is signed you need to verify the signing and disable the code if you can't. If you simply put up a warning 99.9% of people will simply click OK to get rid of it... as they do with the T&Cs and cookie policies
"The machines were too far away, so had the cable coming out at waist height, over the back of a chair, some disks and into the other machine."
I remember a job where a phone guy was given EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS that a line was to be terminated no more than 2 metres from the router. He mounted the socket half way up the wall opposite the rack. He was about 6ft and if he stretched his arms out he could touch the router and the socket with his fingertips... job done!
(we found it was less hassle to specify the 2m gap for these jobs and order 5m cables to connect them)
Makes things harder for Bond. Previously he just had to run the bathroom tap/shower while he looked behind pictures and in lampshades... now he has to figure out how to disable Alexa/Google Assist in all manner of (non-Q) gadgets.
All this should be a boost for sales of those Japanese gadgets for masking toilet sounds
I was queueing in Sainsbury's last night behind a little old lady. After they had scanned her goods, she presented her Visa card but it was declined. It was Friday night, I'd just been paid and I was feeling generous... so I helped her put all the stuff back on the shelves...
I'll get me coat...
by coincidence, every ad break seems to feature an ad showing just how easy it is to pay for your drinks using a contactless Visa card... or rather for Zlatan Ibrahimovic to offer to pay for your drinks with just a deft wave of his hand over the card reader instead of watching you fumble for the right cash.
Presumably this will be replaced with one showing you arranging a whip-round to cover his slate now his card has been declined
Many moons ago we had a customer, a wine dealer by trade, with a leased-line modem link to his head office.Periodically he would report an intermittent fault that had cleared by the time one of our guys turned up. Just about everything got changed out, but the intermittent problem kept occurring. Then one day he phoned up and said he thought he had the answer. He was next to a coffee shop and the problem seemed to occur just when they were opening. We turn up at the crack of dawn with a test set and some very expensive main monitoring kit from our research people, set the kit up to run round a loopback on the remote modem and sat back sipping a very agreeable sherry at 8:30am. Nothing!! The odd error and minor flicker on the mains, but nothing worthy of crashing the modem link... that was until he got out of his chair and walked around the desk... the error counter went haywire!! Yes folks, the cable between the modem and his terminal ran under the carpet and as he walked over to get the same ledger at the same time every day he was treading on the cable. (pint'o'beer icon 'cos yer out of sherry... the vicar must have been round again!)
Abbey Nat CASH machine - Instructions for use:
1. insert CASH card
2. enter PIN
3. select CASH
4. select amount of CASH required
5. select account to withdraw the CASH from
6. select CANCEL AND RETURN CARD as the machine has just figured it has no CASH
7. move to next machine
8. GOTO 1
You've got one job to do!!!... OK, balances... and payments... and cheque books... but you've just got one job!!!
(got a £25 'Sorry' from them after taking up half a page of their complaints book)
A colleague phoned a school in the wilds of Scotland to diagnose an IT fault and wanted the guy to reset the modem. "Turn the power off, count 5 then turn it on again." The guy puts the phone down then my colleague heard a distant voice "but he told me to turn it off." Luckily it was a small one-room school!
Once worked in a media broadcast centre where everything ran off DC. We got a job to check the float battery was OK. This was a big room filled with bathtub sized lead-acid cells and to check each was giving 2V we first had to isolate the battery from the rectifier unit in a room across the corridor. We had told everyone what we were going to be doing and to ignore the big blue POWER FAIL light... well we thought we had. We had checked a couple of cells when my mate got that "Oh $#!t!" feelings... he rushed across the corridor to discover the rectifier had been tripped! The one guy we hadn't spoken to had seen the alarm, got to the rectifier and, in a panic, pressed everything in site... including the one that took the rectifier offline. At the 'inquest' they said the power had been off for 27s... another 3s and the mega-bucks compensation clause kicked in!
Then there was the day that London Electricity managed to connect 2 phases across live/neutral and we had to go up and down Edgware Rd with the petty cash buying up all their stocks of 20mm fuses
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