Posts by katrinab

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Re: Facebook was down?

Quote them £500 and offer a 24 hour turnaround time.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

Hotel lighting

"all together filling the room with a blaze of brightness to match the noonday sun."

Which hotel was this? Every hotel I've been to seems to have the room illuminated by a single 0.00005 mW LED, and I have to pack my own torch to have any chance of being able to see anything.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

Bankruptcy sales are a big source of this sort of thing.

I guess I need to get rid of my old IDE drives, now that I don't own any computers that have the appropriate sockets, and also my collection of adapters that would enable me to read them on more modern computers.

Windows XP point-of-sale machine gets nasty sniffle. Luckily there's a pharmacy nearby

Re: Couldn't a Pi do the job these days ?

A lot POS machines these days are Android or iOS.

Carphone Warehouse fined £29m for mis-selling mobile insurance to punters who didn't need it

Re: Apparently

I changed mine about 6 years ago because I moved from a rented house to one that I bought, and I wanted one in a different colour that matched the kitchen decor and other appliances.

I also replaced the microwave for one that has a combination oven/grill, and I actually use that a lot more than the microwave function. Works exactly the same, put it on for the appropriate number of minutes and it beeps when it’s done, but for a higher number of minutes. That cost me about £70 in Sainsburys, who didn’t try to sell me insurance.

The kettle, I’ve had for about 15 years, still works but it does look its age, and I’ll probably replace at some point.

Re: Persistent buggers

Only insure things that are expensive and unlikely to happen.

If it is likely to happen, then put money aside for it, just like you would for eg your holiday.

Re: Apparently

'According to a spokesman "it's a different company now"'

It is now Dixons Retail Group aka Currys PC World. A company known for its very enthusiastic selling of Coverplans.

Like for example a £15 Coverplan on a £20 toaster. If a £20 toaster breaks, you don't think about whether or not you have an insurance policy you can claim on, you throw it in the bin and get a new one.

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

Re: Solving the Windows Issues

Linux had one-click installs long before Windows did. Ximan’s Red Carpet came out about 20 years ago.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

Re: Effects of food import tax

Picking fruit without damaging it is way more difficult. I think the technology required to do that is about 10 years away.

Nobody knows. There's also the issue of what happens to import tax on food. Do we charge WTO rates on everything, good news for farmers, not so good for shoppers. Or do we unilaterally remove the tax in which case we have to do it for food from anywhere in the world. Lots of cheap hormone-fed chlorinated chicken in the shops, not very good for farmers.

How the **** are you supposed to "prepare for Brexit", when, with 17 days to go, nobody has the slightest clue what to prepare for.

I like to criticise government IT contractors as much as anyone else here, but even the most perfect IT developers imaginable can't get the system ready without knowing what it is supposed to do.

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Re: "A terrorist or foreign agent would have been free to plant explosives ..."

A ladder and something to smash a window?

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

Ethiopian Air is a very good airline with excellent maintenance / safety record and so on and not at all like what you might expect from African airlines.

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Re: The devil is in the details

If you go to Portaloo, they would ask you to select one of their standard premanufactured designs.

That marketing email database that exposed 809 million contact records? Maybe make that two-BILLION-plus?

Re: Pawned - or not.

I looked at one my my domains - 78 of the 86 email addresses on it are hex numbers. Does anyone ever use hex numbers as email addresses? Then there were things like sales@ which I guess some companies might have, but I don't.

Re: easy pickings

Cloud - operates over a network connection, this can include a Samba network share

Enterprise - can be used by a company

AI - contains if statements

Remember the OpenAI text spewer that was too dangerous to release? Fear not, boffins have built a BS detector for it

Re: English, bad English and AInglish

If you understand the non-native speaker's native language, then you will usually understand why they made the mistakes they made.

For example, if I have garbled English from an Italian, then I will do a literal translation of the word / phrase back into Italian, and look at what they really mean. For example: Secondary Seat -> Sede Secondaria -> Branch Office

An AI bot speaking in garbled English probably isn't doing a literal translation of something that makes perfect sense in another language, so that is how you would tell the difference.

For now

Now the bot will run its rants through this script and make sure to add loads of purple words, even if it has no idea what they mean or whether they are appropriate.

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

Re: Entertainment system pen testing

Ryanair wouldn’t have an inflight entertainment system unless they could sell access to it at a profit. For the short routes they mostly do, I think most people wouldn’t bother paying.

No guns or lockpicks needed to nick modern cars if they're fitted with hackable 'smart' alarms

Re: Land Rover Defenders

The middle one is a bit younger than me

Re: Land Rover Defenders

The tools required to repair the thing so that it will work.

Put down the cat, coffee, beer pint, martini, whatever you're holding, and make sure you've updated Chrome (unless you enjoy being hacked)

Re: Get off my lawn with your modern browsers and all that!

Mostly it tells you that you will find what you are looking for on port 443

I had to delete my user profile because it would only work in Guest mode.

When Edge takes Chrome as its engine, why would you want to download a Google wrapper for it?

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

Re: You brought up an interesting point

I do, and I cancelled my account with LineOne about 20 years ago.

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

Re: What? The car can't do emergency braking on it's own?

If you look at stopping distances from back when you were studying for your driving test, the "thinking distance" is 1 foot per mph. Do the sums on that, and the thinking time is about 1.44 seconds. That's for someone who has situational awareness which you don't necessarily have in a self-driving car.

UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away

Re: Is it just me ?

The passport gate checks your face against the face on your passport in carefully controlled conditions. It tells you exactly how to look at the camera to get the best image. That system can be considered a success if it is as accurate as a human doing the same thing.

IR35 contractor tax reforms crawl closer to UK private sector with second consultation

Re: Tax loss for HMRC

Collecting VAT from every stage of the supply chain works better than having a sales tax on the final sale to end user. That's why most countries outside the US have switched to VAT.

Re: Tax loss for HMRC

The customer claims the VAT back and reduces their VAT payment by the same amount.

If they had an employee, they would not be able to claim any VAT on that, and so their VAT bill would be higher.

Re: I love the spectacularly timing of it all

Not since Companies Act 2006 came into force.

Even before then, the company formation agent provided the two signatories. You didn't need two actual people.

Re: I love the spectacularly timing of it all

'Maybe it's time to investigate what the minimum number of people is to form a "company"'

The minimum number of people needed to form a company is one.

If your business is running a market stall where you sell vegetables, you are definitely self employed and running a totally legitimate business that HMRC would never challenge.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: Bah!

It is a type of underwear. You'll find them in the men's department as well.

Case not proven

It doesn't prove that all hipsters look alike, because only one hipster called to complain that he looked like the man in the photo.

Two in five 'AI startups' essentially have no AI, mega-survey of nearly 3,000 upstarts finds

Re: Same as the blockchain hype

Or https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-21

Re: Who needs stuff?

Grayling has since given the contract to deliver stuff to NHS hospitals to the company that failed to deliver chicken to KFC.

When 2FA means sweet FA privacy: Facebook admits it slurps mobe numbers for more than just profile security

Re: Sounds like a case for GDPR

If other EU countries do the same, then it is 112% of annual turnover.

After last year's sexism shambles, 2019's RSA infosec bash has upped its inclusivity game

How many men have expressed an interest in you? Maybe one or two gay men, and they probably don't behave the same way as straight men.

My sample size for men who express an interest in women is way bigger than one, and I speak to other women who all share the same experience.

Exactly. You have a sample size of one man, which is nowhere near big enough to determine the prevalence of sex pests in the population.

I have a big enough sample to know that there is a problem with some men, and at a big conference, there will be more than one such man, probably in the low hundreds.

There are a lot of men, not all, but a lot, who don't even bother to ask before they grope you.

"I merely gently turned her down and moved on"

Doesn't work like that when a woman turns a man down.

UK banking was struck by one IT fail every day for most of 2018

They have separate banking licences, and I assume the FCA reports per banking licence even if the same issue affected multiple banks.

Re: The meaning of "major incident"

Also, TSB was one very major incident which lasted about 3 months, whereas Barclays sometimes goes down at the end of the month when most employers are paying their salaries and therefore it has the highest volume of transactions, and tends to be back up the following day.

It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

Yes of course. Block chains solve everything, especially if you put them in clouds and attach "AI" to them.

Otherwise, no, because you can give the passkey to a wallet to someone else, which wouldn't be a problem if the only thing in that wallet is your concert ticket.

They stopped doing that about 5 years ago because people were selling tickets that didn't exist, and by the time the tickets were sent out and people realised they didn't exist, the fraudster had long since gone.

Age checks for online pr0n? I've never heard of it but it sounds like a good idea – survey

Re: April 1st already?

“I remember a time where pretty much all porn sites required a credit card for age verification (or payment). The days of free porn like now were non existent.”

I”m pretty sure alt.binaries.erotica.* was around before websites were even invented.

Re: Age check = ID

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t pass the credit check for Sky broadand if I was a 10 year old, or have anywhere to install it. But I probably live with a grown-up who has broadband and has given me the wifi password. How does that work?

Re: Choices Choices.....

Option B is to use Opera’s free VPN thing. I wouldn’t trust it from actual privacy / security scenarios, but it is fine for getting round blocks.

Correction: Last month, we called Zuckerberg a moron. We apologize. In fact, he and Facebook are a fscking disgrace

Re: Wording Issue

So, I’m a 10 year old.

I set up an email account called [e-mail]. I give that as my parents email address, and log in to read the email and click on the link to give consent.

If a 42 year old woman can figure that out, a 10 year old would have absolutely no problem.

Also, in the UK, you can get a bank account and debit card from age 11, and from age 13 without parental involvement. You can get a prepaid card with parental involvement from age 6.