Posts by katrinab

Twitter mass hacking: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Biden, Obama, more hijacked to peddle Bitcoin scam

Re: Idiots

"The timing of the exploit was also right around when a lot of Twitter employees would be commuting home."

"Commuting home" is so 2019. Nobody does that any more.

Apple and Google, take note: Newly enacted EU law aims to protect developers from arbitrary decisions of tech giants

Re: Sigh.

Aggrieved parties would take Apple / Google to court for redress.

Re: Sigh.

If the implementation date is before 31st December, it will apply in the UK. And continue to apply until such time as the UK Parliament repeals it. I think it is very unlikely that they would repeal it any time soon as they have far more important things to focus on right now.

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Re: but this can't be true

Whereas I am extremely good at getting rid of them

- Good morning madam. I am calling you about the car accident you had recently.

- When did this alleged accident take place?

- Uhm er umh er I er don't er have this er information right now.

Also [applicable only in the UK], if the caller ID shows a 0 or 1 after the area code, it is an invalid number, and I reject the call. That filters out about 80% of nuisance calls.

Note that for the purpose of this test, the area code for Cardiff as an example is 029, not 02920; Reading is 0118, not 01189; London is 020, not 0207/0208.

Re: but this can't be true

Women are about the same[1]on average in their ability to come up with the correct answer as men, but the process by which they come up with the correct answer is not necessarily the same.

[1] Actually slightly better on average than men, but men are less likely to be average, so a group with the best people will have more men, and a group with the most useless idiots will be mostly men.

If you go back to the early years of computing when many of the fundamental things we now take for granted were invented, most programmers were women.

Four years after swallowing Arm Holdings, SoftBank said to be mulling Brit chip biz sale

Re: Just a thought

Apple were one of the founding shareholders in ARM.

Fancy some fishy-chips? Just order one of these sensors: Research shines light on suspect component sources

Re: Not counterfeit, not stolen

I don't think "AA Battery" is a trademark. All manufacturers use it, and there doesn't appear to be a battery standards body that licences it.

Sueball locked, loaded and pointed at LinkedIn over iOS privacy naughtiness

Re: iif clipboard read allowed without user OK

It is certainly better than Android in that respect, but without an operating system that is even more locked-down than OpenBSD, it is difficult to completely stop these things.

Apple: Don't close MacBooks with a webcam cover on, you might damage the display

I use post-it notes.

Digicert will shovel some 50,000 EV HTTPS certificates into the furnace this Saturday after audit bungle

In Safari, you can tell when you click on the padlock

On my self-hosted mail server, I see:

"Safari is used an encrypted connection to mail.mydomain

"Encryption with a digital certificate keeps information private as it's sent to or from the https website mail.mydonain"

On Nationwide, it starts the same as the above, then there is:

"Digicert Inc has idenfified www.nationwide.co.uk as being owned by Nationwide Building Society in Swindon, GB."

On Chrome, when you click on the padlock:

On my mail server, you see "Certificate (Valid)"

On Natonwide, you see

"Certificate (Valid)

"Issued to: Nationwide Building Society [GB]"

How many bank websites will go down this weekend?

At a look at the websites for the largest banks in the UK:

Natwest is fine, they use Commodo. As far as I can see, all other RBS Group companies use the same supplier

Nationwide is affected, they need to replace their certificate today

TSB is affected

Lloyds Banking Group (including Halifax and Bank of Scotland) are fine

HSBC is affected

Clydesdale Bank (+ Yorkshire Bank + Virgin Money + B) are affected

Santander uses Entrust, they are fine

Barclays and Barclaycard use Entrust, they are fine

Monzo uses Cloudflare, they are fine

Revolut don't have an EV certificate.

American Express are affected

So I'm guessing about 40% of the UK population could potentially be without money this weekend.

Email seems lost in the post? You might be a Tsohost customer

Re: SFU

I know the Reg Commentards will get their flamethrowers out, but I have 20 domains hosted at OVH, and I've never had any problems with them. I haven't used any of their other services such as email, I host it on my own server.

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

Re: I won't shop at a small site

It is very likely that the person on the other end of the phone will enter the details into their website.

Re: I won't shop at a small site

The Body Shop is on the list. With 3000 retail outlets in 65 countries around the world, it is definitely not a small shop.

I don't trust Paypal. I look for sites that take Apple Pay.

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

Re: Does the Big D.T. talk to mayors at all?

It almost didn't due to a lapse in their border control, but currently all active cases are people in quarantine.

Re: Does the Big D.T. talk to mayors at all?

The best thing for the economy is to do what the likes of New Zealand and Isle of Man did. A short start lockdown to completely eliminate the virus, then you can relax all measures except border controls.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

zpool scrub pool

Then zpool status to see how the scrub is getting on.

While it is doing it, it will show something like

pool: pool

state: ONLINE

scan: scrub in progress since Tue Jul 7 18:42:43 2020

520G scanned at 1.10G/s, 43.4G issued at 436M/s, 15.25T total

0 repaired, 0.81% done, 0 days 03:28:36 to go

config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM

pool ONLINE 0 0 0

raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0

da1 ONLINE 0 0 0

da2 ONLINE 0 0 0

da3 ONLINE 0 0 0

da4 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

When it is finished it will hopefully show something like

pool: pool

state: ONLINE

scan: scrub repaired 0 in 3 days 22:55:48 with 0 errors on Fri July 11 06:32:59 2020

config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM

pool ONLINE 0 0 0

raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0

da1 ONLINE 0 0 0

da2 ONLINE 0 0 0

da3 ONLINE 0 0 0

da4 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Mind the airgap: Why nothing focuses the mind like a bit of tech antiquing

Sure, my new laptop is about 15 times faster than my old one. But when an Excel recalculation takes 1ms instead of 15ms, it's not really noticeable. If I'm running loads of virtual machines on VMWare Fusion, then I notice the difference.

Macs from this era are Intel, not PPC.

I have a decade old mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro.

I can install Office 2019 on it, connect to modern Wifi networks, and so on. The latest games will get about 1 frame per second, but apart from that, you can do pretty much everything you would want a modern laptop to do, just a bit slower.

It is interesting how little technology has advanced in the last decade, compared to how much it advanced before that.

I am typing this reply on a brand new 16" MacBook Pro. It is a better machine than the 10 year old one, just not that much better compared to any other decade in computing history.

Baroness Dido Harding lifts the lid on the NHS's manual contact tracing performance: 'We contact them up to 10 times over a 36-hour period'

Re: The UK's chief stable door shutter.

Indeed it does.

OCR's certificate in Life & Living Skills Entry Level 1, B1 Communication; is general training, dealing with general things like asking for directions to the bathroom.

Specially trained means job specific training such as which buttons to press on the computer to get the phone number of the next person to call.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

"What do we gain by replacing words today?"

We no longer push the very damaging myth that white=good, black=bad.

Why do you think people originally chose those colours to represent good and bad?

It's not a Windows 10 release without something breaking so here's a troubleshooter for your OneDrive woes

Re: Craig Federighi needs to go, his track record is abysmal. Just works? Catalina anyone?

At least with Catalina, you have to specifically "buy" it from the app store, and Mojave (and High Sierra) are still getting updates.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

"Although yesterday's Ministry of Fun* announcement said digital now makes up 58 per cent of British radio listening, the real problem here is the slow pace of change."

The real problem is that digital doesn't just mean DAB. It also means DVB-A - listening to radio on your TV, and internet streaming (including podcasts). I rather suspect most of that 58% is internet streaming, and not DAB.

Scala contributor: Open source and diversity key to tackling dev skills shortage

Re: The magic 500,000 jobs...

And it means they no longer need to worry about stuff like H11B visas.

NASA did all black women for the team that wrote the software for the Apollo moon landings. May I tentatively suggest that they did a lot better than typical government IT projects today?

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

Already owned by Oracle I think, as in "We [Sun Microsystems] are the dot in .com".

"So to take that in reverse, because most people use the word Hoover as a generic term the company Hoover should lose their trademark."

Yes, that does happen.

"Fanta" is a trade mark even though the company that produces it is the Coca Cola Corporation.

"If someone were to start a company called ‘Washingmachine.com,’ it could likely secure a similar level of consumer identification by investing heavily in advertising. Would that somehow transform the nature of the term itself? Surely not.”

Surely yes? 25 years ago, if you ask someone what they associated with the word "Amazon", they would say it is a rainforest in Brazil. Now they would say it is an online retailer. That means that Amazon is now a trademark in the field of retailing.

Brit MPs vote down bid to delay IR35 reforms, press ahead with new tax rules for private-sector contractors

Re: If you keep poking the pig with a stick

"Is there such a thing as a low paid contractor?"

Yes, very much so. All those contractors who work for Deliveroo, Über, Care Home agencies, and so on. Contractors on average, earn a lot less than employees.

NEC insists its face-recog training dataset isn't biased, but refuses to share details of Neoface system with UK court

What these accuracy numbers really mean

Worth repeating as some people forget:

Lets say you scan a population of 100,000, and you are looking for 10 people

With 98% accuracy you will find 9.8 of the people you are looking for. That bit is easy to understand

You will also get 19,998 false positives. That means that only 0.049% of the people it flags up are people you are looking for.

With 70% accuracy, you will find 7 of the people you are looking for. Again, no surprises there.

You will get 29997 false positives, meaning that 0.023% of the people it flats up are people you are looking for.

If you toss a coin, 0.01% of the people it flags up will be people you are looking for.

LibreOffice slips out another 7.0 beta: Spreadsheets close gap with Excel while macOS users treated to new icons

Re: Input of accents on mac

Easiest way is:

Cmd - Space

Type 2, 3, or whatever in the search box

Select the one you want.

Re: Input of accents on mac

⌥e e - é

⌥u e - ë

⌥I e - ê

⌥` e - è

⌥n n - ñ

In windows, you can use the UK extended keyboard to get similar features

You use Alt-Gr rather than ⌥.

For ë you would use " rather than u

For ñ you would use ~ rather than n

For ê you would use ^ rather than i

For é you would use ' rather than e. You can also do Alt-Gr e, and that applies to the standard UK layout as well as the extended layout, as there are some English words that require it such as exposé which is not the same as expose and some where it is an alternative correct spelling such as café.

Apple gives Boot Camp the boot, banishes native Windows support from Arm-compatible Macs

A lot of publishers have already done that with the move to 64 bit, so there's stuff that will run in Mojave but not Catalina.

Re: So basically

I don't think the percentage is that small. Back in the days when software was sold in boxes on retail shelves, you would see Parallels for Mac, but not anything for running on Windows hosts. There are a lot of Mac users who need to run Windows software for one reason or another. The current set-up gives them the best of all three worlds, a Mac for doing Mac stuff, as well as the ability to do Unix stuff natively and the ability to do Windows stuff.

It's National Cream Tea Day and this time we end the age-old debate once and for all: How do you eat yours?

Re: Even supermarkets do

They do indeed. But I usually don't have it in my fridge.

Usually a thick layer of unsalted french butter, then jam, which of course doesn't comply with any approved recipe.

If I do have cream to hand, and usually I don't, then it goes on top of the jam.

Honeypot behind sold-off IP subnet shows Cyberbunker biz hosted all kinds of filth, says SANS Institute

Re: Not need to know

EU Law doesn't cover criminal matters. You need to look at German law, or possibly state law for the part of Germany they are located in.

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Re: So once the Government gets its way....

Less than 25% of the vote in a multi-party system, as you don't need 50%+1 vote in the winning seat, and in a lot of seats, the winning candidate does get less than 50% of the vote,

US starts sniffing around UK spaceports – though none capable of vertical launches actually exist right now

Re: Why here?

I'm waiting to see which totally inappropriate company gets the contract.

A ferry contract to a pizza delivery firm with c£50 in assets

A c£100m PPE contract to a small pesticide supplier with c£18k in assets.

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

Re: Very dodgy subject

"Certain TV and movie actors also have "the look" and tend to be picked for parts where they play the baddy or psycho."

You probably think people with that "look" are criminals because that's the way they are portrayed in movies.

Features vs compatibility: Google Chrome team promises more 'rigour', but what does that mean?

Blink is a fork of Webkit.

When the KDE project said they intended to Konquer the world. Who would have guessed that their code would form the basis for pretty much all the browsers out there, including Microsoft’s?

Microsoft emits a colourful Windows Terminal preview

Re: Open Cmd Here?

And in Windows 8

Police and NHS urge British public not to call 101 and 111 non-emergency numbers after behind-the-scenes kit failure

Is 119 affected?

That's the number you are supposed to call if you have coronavirus symptoms, to leave 111 available for people with other health problems.

Customers of Brit ISP Virgin Media have downloaded an extra 325GB since March, though we can't think why

Re: It is not the router

Configure the pinhole to use DOH, then they can't intercept it.

Re: you get max 6 Mbps upload

I get about 45 down, 15 up on Plusnet. Slightly faster on O2 4G.

Amazon's not saying its warehouse staff are dumb... but it feels they need artificial intelligence to understand what 'six feet' means

Re: What does 'six feet' mean?

6 feet is 182.88cm.

By the way, I've only ever seen crocodiles in photos. I've no idea how big they are.

Two COVID tests, five-day quarantine, limited expense account abuse opportunities: Taiwan sets new rules for business travel

If for example you catch the virus at the airport or on the flight, you won't test positive straight away.

Not so nice, we investigated them twice: EU opens double whammy of inquiries into Apple's biz practices

Re: The Register has asked Apple, Spotify, and Rakuten for comment.

The bit I was focusing on was "Apple sent us a statement"