Posts by katrinab

Thanks to UK peers, coming to a laptop near you in 2019: Age checks for online smut

Re: There appears to be an assumption

I think the main harm is that they look at porn actors and think that that is what normal people are supposed to look like, and get depressed because they don't look like that.

Anonymous Coward says:

'It should start off with "When a man loves a woman very much..."'

See icon. I try to be as man-repellent as possible.

Dixons Carphone smarting from £440m loss as it writes down goodwill on mobile biz

I'm pretty sure we are the most fertile ground for flagship handset prices. I had a smartphone before most people had any type of portable communication device. If we don't see the benefits of the latest model any more, then nobody does.

Re: I take it

I have bought handsets from them in the past, not recently though. The last one was a Galaxy Note 2 back when that was the latest model. They were fine, cost was about the same as online retailers, I got the box in my hand without having to wait around for delivery and deal with useless couriers, and the product was usual Samsung quality.

For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers

Re: Ban a system that works and is malware free*...

In our office, we moved the photocopier / scanner / printer / fax machine to a different location, and didn't plug it into the phone line. Nobody noticed.

Re: Ban a system that works and is malware free*...

Alexander Bain invented the electric printing telegraph in 1843

The scanning phototelegraph was invented by Shelford Bidwell in 1880.

Latest Google+ flaw leads Chocolate Factory to shut down site early

"You think an even less meaningful name would be better?"

Yes I do. Tesco for example doesn't really mean food shop, but everyone in the UK knows who they are.

Re: Hmm ...

Didn't you hear? The post-brexit Making Tax Digital customs service will be authenticated using a Google+ account.

Have a gander at this: Amazon agrees not to act as Silicon Valley's foie gras dealer

There's worse

They are also selling Kinder Eggs. Yes, that's on the amazon.com site and priced in US$.

Remember Misco? Staff win protective award at employment tribunal

Re: Taxpayer?

"Now it has been proved in court and the precedent set"

The precedent was set ages ago. There are loads of cases like this.

Staff first. HMRC rank at the bottom along with the trade suppliers.

Linux.org domain hacked, plastered with trolling, filth and anti-transgender vandalism

Re: Follow the money.

They are TERFs so almost certainly in the UK.

Re: Login box

You might think that, but TERFs are not the most intelligent people around.

We have Sheila Jeffreys who thinks that trans women are not real women because they have smelly vaginas. Then we have Germaine Greer, a woman with a smelly vagina, who thinks that trans women are not real women because they don't have smelly vaginas.

Re: Using Yahoo! mail for something important?

I use a hotmail account for my domain hosting, because if I have a problem with my domain, my proper email isn’t going to work.

The curious tale of ICANN, Verisign, claims of subterfuge, and the $135m .Web dot-word

Is anyone actually using these new tlds?

Except for spammers and virus writers obviously

I’ve seen a few legitimate domains in .scot, .wales and .london, but most of them, I’ve blocked.

Identity stolen because of the Marriott breach? Come and claim your new passport

Last time I looked at hotel accounts, almost nobody paid for hotel TV channels. That was about 10 years ago, and I guess it is even lower now.

Re: Burden of Proof

And plenty of EU hotels affected, eg Le Méridien range of hotels.

Tech support discovers users who buy the 'sh*ttest PCs known to Man' struggle with basics

Re: It's 2018

Like the hire car I had a couple of weeks ago where putting it into reverse gear reset the volume on the stereo to the default, bearly audible level? And putting it in first gear switched the air conditioning on, when it was a freezing winter morning. And putting it in fifth gear would switch the stereo from off or line-in to radio and the volume to ear-splitting maximum.

Re: I spent two years in tech support

I get that in Windows 7, but not 2012 R2 (aka Windows 8.1) or Windows 10.

Re: The right attitude

Scroll wheels were introduced with Windows 95.

Unless you grew up with Macs, they introduced theirs in 2005 with the Mighty Mouse, that's unlikely.

It is bottom right on every monitor I've ever seen. That makes it easier for right-handed people to use it. Probably this luser didn't know the difference between left and right either.

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Re: But what was working?

I had "no service" all day, so my phone was working as effectively as my iPod.

Re: Days like today are when I'm thankful

"What job do you work in where you can stand to lose so much without data for 1 day?"

Basically any job that involves visiting people to do things

Courier / delivery

Maintenance - where you visit customers to fix their things

Sales

Doctors

Ambulance drivers

Buses (my local bus company doens't use O2, but if they did, their ticket machines wouldn't be able to do card payments)

Taxis / mini cabs

Lots of others I haven't thought of.

Re: Days like today are when I'm thankful

My backup phone is a £10 top-up every 6 months or so.

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

Re: Simple

Yes there is. The Tesco Value "bacon" is particularly vile. Aldi and Waitrose are good though.

Can I suggest Danish, or Irish. British is good too.

As for the American stuff, the Trade Descriptions Act makes it illegal to call that bacon here.

More data joy: Email scammers are buying marks' info from legit biz intelligence firms

Re: At what point...

A lot of scammers advertise on Facebook, Google and so on, so I think it already has. Maybe not the Nigerian ones, but certainly the likes of the fake bitcoin scams. Note, this is an entirely separate issue to the discussion about whether or not bitcoin itself is a scam. These scammers are people who take your money and don't give you any bitcoins in return for it.

Pencil manufacturers rejoice: Oz government doesn't like e-voting

You use a pencil because apparently it is harder to completely remove all traces of a pencil than a pen.

Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

Re: Pffft

32m phones, which is not quite the same thing as 32m people, given that there are more phones than people in this country. I have two phones. TfL has 19,500 bus stops and 8,000 buses, and they have their own phones.

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

Macs do support desktop scaling, but it involves editing configuration files in a text editor, or press the option key in Display Settings to see the hidden settings.

When you consider that my iPhone 6+ with a £25 battery replacement runs just as well as a brand new phone, whereas a Samsung Galaxy Note would have long since fallen to bits and at the time cost about the same, the iPhone actually works out a lot cheaper.

OM5G... Qualcomm teases next Snapdragon chip for phones: The 855 with a fingerprint Sonic Screwdriver, er, Sensor

Seventy cents.

Re: I'll just leave this here...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/5g-cellular-test-birds/

Re: What about AI

AI means, computer program that contains if statements.

Computer-program-with-if-statements acceleration means a faster chip.

Lots of people do make video calls, but they use something like Facetime, Skype or Whatsapp to do them.

UK taxman told to chill out 'cos loan charge is whacking tax dodgers and whoopsies alike

Re: also Christa Ackroyd

How the loan charge works:

You have to either repay the loan, because, you know, normally if you borrow money and don't pay it back, you get big burly debt collectors with baseball bats at the door demanding immediate repayment. Or, if you are not going to repay it, you pay tax on it.

They told HMRC at the time that it was a loan, ie one of these things that you have to pay back, so on that basis, HMRC didn't charge tax on it. If they have no intention of repaying it, and the "lender" has no intention of sending debt collectors in to enforce repayment; then it is not a loan.

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Re: just an idea

If you look at the server versions of Windows, it kind of does again. You can theoretically do everything from Powershell and not install a desktop.

Re: I did use Edge...

Edge doesn't push ads. It doesn't come with Adblock by default, just like many other browsers, but Adblock is available in the Microsoft App Store, and you can actually install Adblock before running Edge for the first time, thus ensuring that your eyes (and ears, and computer) don't get polluted by these ads.

There are lots of reasons to hate Edge, this isn't one of them.

"That would involve them turning Windows into a Linux distro."

Complete with SystemD? No thanks. How about a BSD distro?

Re: I did use Edge...

They are both derivatives of Konqueror. How is that going to make much of a difference?

Microsoft: New icons, new drivers, AI! Everything is awesome!

Re: FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!!!!!!!

Like my 16 y/o printer, which after a bit of prodding, works just fine with 64-bit XP drivers

Re: Office 365 gets more intelligent

No, it has doubled its[*] IQ from 0 to 0.

You think you're hot bit: Seagate tests 16TB HAMR disk drive

Re: Amazing advances

I remember when 1.38MB was an unimaginably large capacity that nobody could ever possibly fill up.

Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don't call back when asked for evidence

Re: FWIW

"but that doesn't mean there aren't some great ones out there. Cryptocurrency isn't going away. If you believe all this negative news nonsense saying it's going to 0, you're just being played again like all the fools that believed it was going to go up forever and bought at 20 grand."

Sure, there may well be use cases for blockchains, but does buying Bitcoin give you exposure to them?

Anyone can write their own blockchain or fork an existing one, and many people have and the alternatives mostly address some of the problems that bitcoin has in terms of speed and scalability.

Another thing. Isn't TfL's Oyster Card a cryptocurrency of sorts? It isn't stored on a blockchain obviously, but it has been very successful. If you had bought £5 of Oyster Credit in 2003, how much would it be worth now? The answer is, it would be worth £5. Buying a bitcoin is exactly the same as buying Oyster credit.

Re: Blockchain tutorials

It is more like ZFS than FAT.

Millennials 'horrify' their neighbours with knob-shaped lights display

Are you sure it is students

And not TERF group known as "A Woman's Place". They've been putting up stickers with penises in a load of places. as they think it somehow advances the cause of feminism.

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

It got to its nearly-finished state a few months ago. My iPhone, and I suspect most phones in circulation at the moment support only GPS and Glonass. Galileo support will presumably come in later models.

Re: Spexit!

"Ignoring the political shenanigans for a moment. Can we not just use the same spectrum as Galileo but use different encryption for the military aspect?"

Even better: why not use the same spectrum that Sky uses for its TV service. I'm sure there won't be any problem with that.

It's nearly 2019, and your network can get pwned through an oscilloscope

Re: FFS

If you want to do stuff without being noticed, that is the sort of place you would work from.

Giraffe hacks printers worldwide to promote God-awful YouTuber. Did we read that one right?

Re: Two thoughts

Were you on your work VPN at the time? Then you can usually print to any printer onthe network, wherever you are. In my workplace this tends to mostly happen when someone visits another office and forgets to change the default printer. However, you should still need a password to access the VPN.