Posts by OchaiThenoo

The Register's guide to protecting your data when visiting the US

I had planned on an extended trip to the US this year to tick some boxes on the bucket list. I'll revisit Mexico and Canada and spend my money there instead.

Now that's a Blue Screen of Death: Windows 10 told me to jump off a cliff

Nothing will beat fortune for inspiration and no graphics required

Renault goes open source with next-gen electric buggy you might generously call 'a car'

Re: LIDAR /RADAR swamping

Can't be any worse than the nuggets I see driving conventionally during the morning commute

Hapless scouser scours streets for lost Crimble drone

You don't have to let it get out of line of sight deliberately or even accidentally to lose it. Out with my mate flying his new drone, vertical to about forty feet and slowly moved it away from us at which point it took off at full speed never to be seen again.

Reschedule the holiday party, Patch Tuesday is here and it's a big one

I still listen to morning traffic reports even although I no longer have to do the nightmare commute and for the same reason I love reading about the patch fuck ups as I ditched Windows for Linux years ago. Satisfaction at having made the right choices.

Cheap virtual box hosters – Amazon's Lightsail is out to destroy you (yes, you, Digital Ocean)

I've been using DigitalOcean for a couple of years. I have a permanent mail server and can spin up a CentOS LAMP stack for testing then destroy when finished. I know exactly what my costs are and that was the single most attractive selling point.

I messed around with AWS last year to see what the fuss was about. A couple of hours was all that was needed and I thought I had switched everything off. Still got billed £50 at the end of the month.

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

Zero guilt. I've never clicked on an ad ever and now I don't see any now they're blocked. Zero chance of malware since ad servers don't bother to check what they're pushing. I pay a subscription to a couple of sites and still ad block them since paying them doesn't switch them off.

I see no change in the foreseeable future.

Tech support scammers mess with hacker's mother, so he retaliated with ransomware

I was lucky enough

To get one of these calls a couple of years ago. Managed to keep the guy on the phone for an increasingly frustrating 2 hours acting dumb, "what's a start button?", "how do I open the control panel?".

Eventually I got bored and told him I was using Linux.

Adpocalypse 'will wipe out display ad growth' by 2020

Nothing unethical

...about blocking a potential vector for malware. Although even if the ad servers could guarantee 100% nasty free ad content (impossible), I'd still block it. I've never deliberately clicked on an ad, I have no interest in ads, nobody I know goes to any site to be tempted by ads.

I've never considered subscribing to any site but I may do in the future if it was sufficiently interesting.

Microsoft boots fake fix-it search ads

I do the same, after wasting a couple of hours of his time.

Microsoft phone support contractors told to hang up after 15 minutes

Working from home

Worked for a US software company working from home in the UK. The company was bought over and the new company wanted to keep me on until all the IP had been moved over. This took a full year which involved me doing about a week's work during that time.

'Apple ate my music!' Streaming jukebox wipes 122GB – including muso's original tracks

Re: What do you do when your live copy breaks?

Almost exactly my setup with the addition of a remote server I rent including backup. If i'm unlucky enough to lose all of that irrecoverably I'm probably not lucky enough to continue living much longer.

The case for ethical ad-blocking

Easy Decision

100% ethical while the risk of being served malware exists.

Game of P0wns: Malvertising menace strikes Pirate Bay season six downloads

Use protection

Linux guest VM on a Linux host, Firefox + Adblock Plus and NoScript. Sorted.

Game of Thrones? Yep downloaded. When the box set becomes available at season's end I'll add that to the collection.

Pirate, thief? WGAS