Posts by steviebuk

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Ironic....

...considering their annoying "Chromebooks come with anti-virus builtin" bullshit and misleading adverts recently.

Latest sneak peek at PowerShell 7 ups the telemetry but... hey... is that an off switch?

Surely...

....to comply with GDPR they need to make the slurping "Opt-In" and not "Opt-Out" as opt-out is essentially having a box automatically ticketed, like on websites marketing section when you fill in your address, which now, under GDPR, is a breach of GDPR.

Hmm.

I like Powershell, still need to learn it and stop being lazy but I like the fact in CMD I can still do the likes of

gpresults /h a.html & a.html

Which will run the gpresults command AND then open the html after.

Not found a similar command in Powershell yet that does what the & does. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

Re: Tell Apple that..

I was ranting Mr/Mrs/Ms Pedantic!

I should of said "I made 2 broken HP laptops work using parts from one broken HP laptop"

:)

Ignore all the other mistakes due to my insistence on typing quickly and pressing submit before re-reading what I've written. I blame work getting in the way of me proofreading :)

Tell Apple that..

.."He added that people should refrain from upgrading their phones every two years and go for SIM-only deals instead.

Many conflict elements are mined in areas where fierce battles and child labour are often a routine part of their extraction, the RSC noted.!"

Considering they've been, along with some of the other players, fighting "Right to repair" in the hope they can crush it and force you to upgrade every 1 or 2 years. More so Apple with their recent dick move of pairing the batteries in the iPhone 10 range to the devices. Even if you take out a brand new official Apple battery from a brand new iPhone X and put it into your year old iPhone X, the battery health service will say the battery needs attention and replaced. All bullshit. And all an attempt to stop 3rd party repair shops.

The other day I made 2 working HP laptops from one broken laptop by swapping parts. I made one working Samsung Tablet work by swapping the battery from one with a smashed screen. I've fixed about 3 tablets when the screen was dead by popping it open and reseating the screen cable. All because we can, but the likes of Apple and now even Microsoft are trying the hardest to make their shit unrepairable.

Also doesn't help local recycling plants are standardised. One will take plastic bottles with lids, another won't. One will take the cat food pouches, another one won't.

It's all a mess and Right to Repair needs to be enforced world wide.

Overseas investors eat the UK tech sector for Brexit: More cash flung about in 7 months than the whole of last year

Same old

"However, although government has hailed the stats as a vote of confidence, the UK's historically weak pound is also thought to be a major factor."

They claimed selling ARM was a good idea of confidence but they only bought it because the pound was weak at the time, well also so they now can control the ARM chip market. The Chinese that is. The government seem to love selling all our stuff off on the chip, granted they couldn't force the price of ARM but they could of sold the Post Office off at a profit instead of fucking selling it for peanuts. And now that is gonna go down the pan, with our large local that is always busy being sold, because they know they can get a packet for selling the old building its in. Moving the Post Office to the local WHSmith that is way too fucking small to cope with the traffic it will get!

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Not nice

That crappy feeling you get when you realise your "thing" has gone. Like when I came out of work and found some arse had come round the back of our building and stolen my bike, many years ago. The CCTV turned out to be shit and our building manager gave no shits to the fact the CCTV was shit. Nothing was ever done about it. They caught a local thief later I believe who'd been stealing loads, not sure if related to my bike but never got any compensation for it.

Despite I hate Apple, you shouldn't have to NOT sit in a cafe just because of fear of having your stuff stolen.

If you get it back, and I very much doubt you will as has been mentioned, as they know all the locks Apple have, it most likely will be stripped and sold/given to the local bent 3rd party repair store. Which is annoying itself as it gives them a bad name as well. Louise Rossmann reported a Mac that was bought into his store a few years ago that was stolen, he put a video up of it on his channel.

Anyway. When you're back up and running it will give you some good articles to write on securing your laptop. Your loss however, does remind me of this video

DEF CON 18 - Zoz - Pwned By The Owner: What Happens When You Steal A Hacker's Computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwpg-AwJ0Jc

Breaker, breaker. Apple's iOS 12.4 update breaks jailbreak break, un-breaks the break. 10-4

Re: Standard

Unless you're using Lansweeper who, despite being designed as a helpdesk tool. Never, despite it being a key fucking feature in all helpdesk solutions, added the ability to freeze time on tickets, so all calls will always go out of SLA no matter what you set them to.

):o(

Trump blinks again in trade war bluff-fest with China: Huawei gets another 90-day stay of US import execution

Re: Non-optional consequences

We all agree you have freedom to speak but we all have freedom to down vote.

Down vote just means I disagree with you.

America can claim Huawei are including spying tools but then the US gov wants to put backdoors in encryption.

We use Huawei phones are work as they are cheap. That is the real issue. I suspect some companies have lobbied the great orange one because Huawei, in some areas, give a better service than the likes of Apple. For example, we use the Honor 10 Lite because its cheap, fast, comes with a case and comes with a screen protector applied.

'Hey Google, remind Greg the locks have been changed, and he should find a new place to live. Maybe ask his mistress?'

):o(

"software-as-a-servant" ):o( oh fuck off Wilson.

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Re: And they wonder why...

It never used to be. When I got my LG several years ago I discovered it was all over the net that if I wanted NOWTV then only LG had the rights for now. Guess that has changed.

And they wonder why...

...people turn to piracy. When software starts turning into a yearly expense when it used to be a one off. Now you have to budget for a yearly cost. Or better yet, move to Libra Office.

This industry and the movie industry will never learn. Make it simple and easier than having to pirate and people will pay you money. But when I have to fucking search my Netflix sub, Amazon sub and NOWTV sub for The Burbs, a movie that was out in the 80s and find it now gone from all, you know what happens (I buy the DVD but some don't). And when you force me into choose LG TVs because its the only fucking TV that supports NOWTV due to exclusive rights issues its no wonder people fucking hate company practices and will pirate where they can.

What do Windows 10 and Uber or Lyft have in common? One bad driver can really ruin your day. And 40 can totally ruin your month

Re: Driver Signing

Driver Signing has never been a full on certified method of authenticity. Its been known for years you can fake signing. I'm sure it was mentioned in the old Sysinternals Video Library but if not, even Mark Russinovich and I think Aaron Margois have mentioned in their various talks how signing can be forged.

Pentagon makes case for Return of the JEDI: There's only one cloud biz that can do the job and it starts with an A (or rhymes with loft)

Also...

..If AWS are now getting the contract but the government are still using Windows 10 machines or VMs, isn't the MS license changing to disallow Windows 10 VMs to be on anything other than Azure? I could be totally wrong on that.

That's funny...

"the DoD said in explaining its one-provider specification. "It is important for a warfighter in Afghanistan to access the same information as an analyst in Washington, DC or a service member training in California.""

So what happens when that ONE cloud provider has an issue in that "region"?

Crunch time: It's all fun and video games until you're being pressured into working for free

Is that it...

"We urge employers to take action if they want to sustain their economic success as productivity, employee morale and retention can only occur when you treat your workers fairly."

Yeah we'll listen and totally ignore you. I suspect the likes of EA and Rockstar will continue.

Just like Rockstar sticking in the casino in GTA. I've not played that add-on yet, I'm sure it will be good but its worrying when you hear your nephew say he plays it (hard to stop control that, they'll find ways of playing that 18 rated game) and won big so when he's older he's gonna go to a casino. He'll have it drummed into it to him that he'll then lose all his money but you'll have some out there who won't listen and will piss it all away.

And 100% a market is going to open, if not already, to turn in the cash from the casino to real money. Chinese farm shops will be used.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

The time...

...back in Windows 3.11 days there was a free screensaver I believe it was, that came on the front of one of the many disks off a PC magazine, but annoyingly I can't remember the name of the screensaver. More annoying as I've been looking for it on and off over the years.

Anyway. When it would kick in, you'd see your desktop still but with really tiny bugs walking over it and eating the screen. In the "Study room" we had at college I'd managed to load it on one of the PCs in the row of 5. When it would kick in, all you had to do was move your mouse to stop it. But the student a few PCs down to me didn't know that and she panicked thinking her assignment was being destroyed. Being the arsehole I was, I kept quiet. I couldn't come clean now, I do remember thinking at the time "Just move the pissing mouse and it will stop". I do realise now that I could of just claimed "Happened to me as well. Moving the mouse seemed to fix it", but I was simple back then (some would argue I still am) and thought if I got involved at all, they'd know I was the one that put it on there.

Re: That bloody BSoD Screen Saver

Mark Russinovich would like that story. Although David Solomon and him did always say "Never use it on a server" for obvious reasons.

1Gbps, 4K streaming, buffering a thing of the past – but do Brits really even want full fibre?

Where'd they get that then?

"According to Ofcom, speeds of 24Mbps are currently available to 94 per cent of premises."

Go to the Isle of Wight and there isn't even Virgin on the island.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Because it does it with genuine batteries also. As Louis put it on his YouTube channel. If an independent repair replaces the battery, and they struggle to be trusted already, the customer will then complain "Why is the battery health saying I need to change the battery that I just paid you to put in? Have you really changed it?" And so on.

Jeff Bezos feels a tap on the shoulder. Ahem, Mr Amazon, care to explain how Capital One's AWS S3 buckets got hacked?

Re: Whose Fault

Senator Wyden is far from clueless. Look at his response to Trumps shills on encryption.

Microsoft hikes cost of licensing its software on rival public clouds, introduces Azure 'Dedicated' Hosts

What!

"Windows Enterprise will no longer be permitted other than with Windows VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) E3 or E5. As a concession, affected customers "will have until October 1, 2020, to move their existing Windows Enterprise workloads off Listed Providers' dedicated hosted cloud services"."

So you can only run Windows Enterprise on Azure now and nowhere else. Surely, fucking surely that is a MASSIVE antitrust law waiting to happen again. Roll on another Microsoft vs United States case again.

Will it be like last time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE

It's Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas this week. And yup, you know what that means. Hotel room searches for guns

Re: Firearm Justification!

But concealed carry people don't get shot first and that's why they conceal.

Wanted to...

...visit Vegas at some point but don't think I'll bother anymore. I like to relax in my room knowing the sign on the door stops people bothering me like it did in Jamaica (they seem to fucking ignore it in the UK and still pissing knock). But now I'll never be able to relax knowing some security person will randomly barge in when I'm sitting there playing Rimworld with me knob out (its freeing).

Re: Firearm Justification!

There are female firearms officers also.

Re: Firearm Justification!

The firearms issue is a bit of a mess in the US but even I no longer feel banning them will help. It won't. There are so many of them in the wild that if you ban them, I predict more store raids with guns etc. All the bad people will now know there are no more concealed or open carry people around so they'll be free to run riot.

And lack of guns in the UK isn't stopping lots of people over here in London from being stabbed daily.

Phisherman's blues: Bogus Dell support rep extradited from Kenya, admits he conned US colleges out of $900,000

Re: What’s the difference?

And the Apple Genius Bars that, instead of repairing kit, would rather you buy a new laptop.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-accused-of-overpricing-restricting-device-repairs-1.4859099

Take two cornerstones of British life, booze and queues, then squirt them with face scans: AI Bar

Massively open to abuse

They are all queuing calmly and not blocking each other. The amount of people that would start requesting GDPR access to the "Video files you hold on me with your poncy AI queue system" and at some point one system that is created, similar to this, will end up "storing" said videos and what said person purchased and then sell that data to advertisers. All illegally but they'll be like Facebook where they are so big they'll get away with it with just a "Lessons have been learnt" comment.

'Transformation' at Capita: Profits? Down. Revenue? Down. Order book? You guessed it

So...

..they are potentially in trouble yet the government are still giving them contracts. Not learned from the Carillion issue then.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Another idiot...

...moves into the role!

Outsourcing giant Capita handed £145m for UK.gov's Personal Independence Payment extension

Jesus, fucking, Christ

When will the government tearn. Come back in a year or two and The Register will be saying how this is failing.

What's the last piece of software you'd expect to spy on you? Maybe your enterprise security suite? Bad news

Re: Stop spying on me!

Not in the EU then I assume? As GDPR states you shouldn't keep info for longer than needed. So if you were in the EU and I'd emailed you 5 years ago, I could technically do a SAR request on all emails containing my name and then a Right To Be Forgotten request to ask you delete those.

If not in EU and not dealing with EU people then can ignore what I've just written.

Dutch cheesed off at Microsoft, call for Rexit from Office Online, Mobile apps over Redmond data slurping

Well then

"Microsoft has maintained that it would work with customers and governments in EU to get all of its products in compliance. "

Give us some boutons, checkboxes and/or group policies that allows us to fucking turn it off then.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

I'm confused.

Says she was at Amazon in 2015 so assume no longer there? If so how did she still have active login details, best practice is they change when engineers leave. And a $10k computer? Really? Just for hacking? Was it made of gold.

It's official: Deploying Facebook's 'Like' button on your website makes you a joint data slurper

Re: No f in button?

It does relate in that it's not the thumbs up button. It's just a link to their Facebook page so is fine.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Lets start with guns

We can put backdoors in those. Don't ban them, even I know that won't work in America now, too many off them so will end up with just bad people having them. But if you put a backdoor on them, then only the good people will be able to fire them.

;o)

Coming soon...

...on rooted Android phones:

Terrorist2Terrorist

TerroristChat

"These are our chat apps to use from now on. They have end 2 end encryption with no backdoors. When the US government tries to tell us we are required by law to put in a backdoor. We will tell them to fuck off"

This is what will happen. This is what the two fucking idiots in power are incapable of understanding.

I'm already fuming

Just reading the title. What a 100% bellend that man is. You can't be anymore of a bellend.

I also have a feeling he's a shill for the orange one.

As the world secures itself, so do crims: Encrypted malware on the rise, warns Sonicwall

IoT

So IoT attacks up 55, that will increase the more IoT shit is out there with said companies not bothering to put any security on them. And will this give the Orange one and his idiot shills more excused to "ban encryption". If that's the cause then lets ban the cloud or even the Internet considering malware is becoming RaaS, that's SaaS fault.

Phuck off, phishers! JPMorgan Chase crafts AI to sniff out malware menacing staff networks

Someone got suckered into the bullshit

A company tried to sell us bullshit deep learning AI to protect not only our incoming and outgoing mail but also for internal AV. I listened and watched their videos and as always hated the bullshit marketing bollocks and sales pitch bullshit! Said no. They still sent their fucking server for us to "trial". Told them to pick it up. They said they'd send an engineer to set it up for us. Sorry, did do you not understand the words "Fucking not interested".

We were told it relies on patterns and has to sit there for a while as it learns. Fucking useless then isn't it. How do you define a pattern from someone sending out maybe one document a month. "Ooo, look they've now sent two this month, that's breaking their pattern, I'll quarantine it."

I get angry as I can't' stand marketing and sales pitch bullshit.

We're looking at another solution instead. Powerful, can be customised, can see a lot of under the hood stuff and best of all, there has been no sales pitch bullshit. It is real engineers who use it, selling it and being honest along with it.

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

Another perfect example of why I have no sympathy for an arse of an industry

The late and great Bob Monkhouse was taken to court in 1979 for his movie collection.

"Aside from comedy, Monkhouse was also a film buff (he appeared in a dozen films himself) and had a private collection of movies, which on one occasion led him into trouble. In 1978, he was arrested for conspiracy to defraud film companies by illegally importing films for his collection"

He was, thankfully, acquitted of all charges but the cunts never gave him his collection back.

Later, after he died, it turned out if it hadn't been for Bob Monkhouse taping loads and loads of shows off the TV, a lot of series would of been lost due to the big corporations being the greedy cunts they are and not choosing to store them (BBC were notorious for taping over old shows).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykNV4n32KGk

Nice example there

A guy asking at work about a tablet that has a HDMI lead so they can use that to downloaded Amazon Prime movies through their app and then watch them via the tablet, connected to a HDMI lead on the TV (I assume they don't have a smart TV). And to use the tablet on a plane ride, oh and is cheap.

Looking for those requirements is difficult. Most tablets now don't have HDMI. Some don't allow USB to HDMI and even when do you then can't charge at same time. Amazon Prime offline viewing via a laptop was mentioned but it was pointed out that this isn't allowed by Prime apparently, you can only stream on a laptop.

Block after block after block.

I said that is why people end up pirating. As you can simply download the movie you want, for the plane ride at least, stick it on your mobile and using VLC watch it. Like I did with my DVD rips of Columbo from my purchased Columbo DVD collection. Assuming said TV had USB ports you could also stick said videos on a USB stick to watch on the TV.

The industry needs to stop fucking around and make it easier. Granted, it is somewhat now with NOWTV, NetFlix and Amazon but only if Streaming. And if you live somewhere like the Isle of Wight with their lack of fast fibre and no Virgin media at all, then you're fucked. Even more so if somewhere out in the sticks. But then you can buy DVDs and Blu-rays for that. But even Blu-Rays are an arse to get playing on a PC/Laptop. I played one movie once from a Blu-ray and tried to drag the player to the other monitor. It went apeshit and moaned about the monitor not complying with it's DRM bollocks. What a load of shit.

As always, the IT Crowd is thought of when I think of anti-piracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

And we were watching Gavin and Stacey on Netflix the other day, I'd never bothered with it when originally on. It's OK. But got to season 3 and there was a lack there of. I was told there was one. Googled it, appears Netflix only had licence for 1 and 2. What a load of shit.

I took a look at it the other day and now what! Oh season 3 has suddenly appeared despite not being available for years even though its an old show now. But now what, season 1 has disappeared.

It shit like that which is why people pirate.

And then you have sites like this

https://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/releases-netflix-july-593076

Classing old movies and TV series as Big Releases is just annoying.

I like that most of the Star Trek series are on there but I already bought all the Blu-Ray versions of TNG. I wonder how long all the episodes stay up. You can be half way through a season only to find out their license is running out so it will be pulled.

The industry is in a bit of a mess and instead of fixing it, want to blame pirates. Just like they tried to claim the tape would kill the music industry and the home movie tape would kill the movie industry.

Re: Dilution of quality too..

I Am Mother is good.

And with some DVDs that I have, being forced to watch the copyright notices even though I've paid for the fucking thing. Whereas someone who pirates it, doesn't have to watch said noticed.

Not that I condone piracy but they also don't help themselves with the likes of Netflix UK having a lot less content than the America version. Amazon Prime showing adverts now before the video, looking for old movies yet despite being over 20 years old still not available as part of the Prime deal, then finding the DVD is now hard to come by also (can't remember what that movie was now). NOWTV starting to force an advert before the show or movie, why? We pay for your fucking service to avoid fucking adverts!

Then you have the bollocks that is and soon to be was Ultraviolet. What a load of shit that was. i tried once to use it and had to sign up to about 3 other fucking services before getting the movie. I fucking gave up. Now appears they are shutting down the service on 31 July this year. So assume that means you'll no longer have access to them once shut down? You also couldn't move the movies to another device so pretty much shit.

They need to understand, even if its wrong, pirates sometimes give a better service. And not every download can be classed as a lost sale. A lot of people download just because its free and would never purchase said media if there wasn't an illegal free option.

UK cops blasted over 'disproportionate' slurp of years of data from crime victims' phones

Well that's not..

...gonna get leaked is it. When they are incapable of putting 2FA on their Twitter account then won't be long before they allow all that data to be exposed

How does UK.gov fsck up IT projects? Let us count the ways

Cheap but not secure

I had to report to NHS Mail a few months back as one of their mailboxes had been compromised and someone was sending phishing e-mails from it.

BT boss warns 16-min walk from current HQ to new London base 'just the tip of the iceberg'

When you say...

"Between now and moving into the new building we'll be working with architects, designers and – most importantly – our colleagues, to make sure it's the home the business wants and needs."

Don't you mean.

"most importantly - we'll ignore our colleagues opinions. We'll only listen to the over paid architects and designers".

When you play the game of Big Spendy Thrones, nobody wins – your crap chair just goes missing

From what I hear...

...a lot of places had managers like that back in the 70s and 80s when they could get away with jt. The amount of money our local council pissed away back then is shocking. A stairs full of flowers for the mayor making day and the newly elected councillors day.

Cloud makes it rain for Microsoft: IT giant turns green with Azure, cash poured all over investors

Well maybe

Just maybe you can take some of that money and hire proper QA testers instead of relying on all your customers.

Glad going well for Mark Russinovich though. I like him and his Sysinternal tools. I know others have worked on them but if it wasn't for him and Bryan they may never have existed. Enjoy his fiction books as well.

Although he did slightly annoy me a few years but in an interview about Azure and the Cloud where he said some engineers don't like the Cloud as they know it will put them out of work. Well yes and no stopped watching after that comment, as came across a bit smug.

Other than that he seems like a nice and honest guy. Pointed out to MS how UAC was flawed (although still exists) his presentations of Case of the Unexplained have always been good (I think he might of now given them up :( he's not done one this year and said he's so busy with Azure now he's hired someone to take on the Sysinternals development). He's helped a few times when I've emailed him and was kind enough, him a David Solomon, to allow me to upload the old Sysinternals training video library from back in 2006 to YouTube so they'll always be preserved.

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Or Vehicle not realising the H is silent. It's not Ve-HERE-cle as they say (although not all Americans say it wrong)