Posts by dougkiwi

iPhone XR caught fire after getting trapped in airline passenger's seat

Air New Zealand usually includes a warning in their pre-flight safety videos like: if you lose your phone in your seat, don't try to pull it out, call for a crew member to help you. So this is why.

How's this for the ultimate gaming achievement? Half-Life 2's Gnome Chompski is going to space – in real life

I'd like to point out that Gnome Chompski shows up as an Easter egg in another Valve game, Left 4 Dead 2. You get him by playing a mini-game, and can use him to kill zombies with a sturdy application of blunt force.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Fujitsu tells 80,000 of its Japan employees: From now on, you work remotely

Don't many Japanese have fairly small abodes? Not sure. Working from home can be stressful if you don't have a suitable desk to work from, or even space for a desk.

Microsoft's on Edge and you could be, too: Chromium-based browser exits beta – with teething problems

Re: Language Issues Indeed

English = 0

Programmer assumed uninitiated variable is set to 0

Test environment supports assumption

???

Fun!

Microsoft: Yo dawg, we heard you liked Windows password expiry policies. So we expired your expiry policy

Re: PCI DSS

Hope might be on the horizon for 2020 ... check out:

https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/pci-dss-looking-ahead-to-version-4.0

Reviews for 4.0 include:

"Authentication, specifically consideration for the NIST MFA/password guidance"

So maybe.

Solid password practice on Capital One's site? Don't bank on it

Terms and Conditions might be the real enemy

Seriously. Some banks, like one near me, have it in their Terms and Conditions that online account passwords must never be written or stored ... which means no very complex passwords and no password managers. Not sure if they hard-limit or truncate ... wouldn't that be funny? No correcthorsebatterystaple then.

So even if they allow pasting, if you have any issue with fraud and they find out you used a password manager, they will be legally entitled to put the entire cost on you.

Banks and PCI DSS are becoming part of the problem, with archaic security approaches.

Microsoft sparks up Ignite with fresh Azure, Office 365 features

So when can I get password blacklisting on my on-prem Active Directory logins, hmmm? Something that might help secure those emails? I'd even be willing to create the bad-password database myself, if the format wasn't too complicated.

Must listen: We've found the real Bastard Operator From Hell

There is a much worse way to torture somebody on hold ...

1) Play a song that is very good, something you can really get into, and ...

2) Interrupt it every 10 seconds to remind the caller how important their call is.

I enjoyed it.

I listened to the whole thing while getting through my morning emails. I spent the first half of it giggling. While listening to the second half, where the deep nuanced message of the artist(s) is revealed, I came to understand the nature of most of the emails that I receive.