Posts by cb7

When the bits hit the FAN: US military accused of knackering Russian trolls, news org's IT gear amid midterm elections

Why do I feel happy when an Apple device is implicated in a security breach? Am I a bad person?

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

Re: sigh

The point you seem to have missed is that many sites wouldn't exist were it not for the revenue from adverts.

Would you rather have to pay to visit websites? I know I wouldn't.

An analogy would be TV channels like ITV, Channel 4, Film4 et al in the UK.

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

The proof

Firstly, wtf have they waited 8 friggin years to think they'd been shortchanged?

Anywho, the proof of the pudding is in the eating as the old saying goes.

So just run some benchmarks and whilst "8" cores might not yield exactly twice the performance of 4, if it gets remotely close, that ought to be enough to get the case simply thrown out.

Remember Misco? Staff win protective award at employment tribunal

How much work did the administrators actually do to earn that £1.1m?

Budget 2018: UK goes it alone on digital sales tax for tech giants

A tiny step in the right direction

But why only 2%? Google is forecast to generate £5Bn of revenue in the UK in 2019. Why can't I pay only 2% tax on the pittance I make?

And what about Apple?

I just don't get it. Can someone please explain to me why nobody seems bothered by this?

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Does this remind anyone else of Microsoft and having to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows all those years ago?

Looks like things have gone full circle for Google.

And dare I say, probably for MS too soon with Edge/Bing/Cortana being the default in Windows 10. Only a matter of time before they hit a billion devices and they'll get clobbered with another big fine. Though not sure where they'll find the money if they keep fucking Windows up with every update.

Time for a cup of tea me thinks.

Now this might be going out on a limb, but here's how a branch.io bug left '685 million' netizens open to website hacks

Re: Welp, here we go again.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Shopify is an ecommerce platform, so you could be using it when shopping online without even knowing it.

British Airways hack: Infosec experts finger third-party scripts on payment pages

Re: Looking at the JS

"the big question is how did they penetrate their servers"

Exactly.

As someone else mentioned, a server compromised through an outsourced outfit.

Or a laid off ex employee with a grudge to bear who had installed a back door before they left.

A flash of inspiration sees techie get dirty to fix hospital's woes

And then someone polished it up again, just in time for the demo.

Microsoft gives Windows 10 a name, throws folks a bone

Re: Word Perfect 5.1

"WP 5.1 was pretty damn good really, even by today's standards. (I still have a copy, on 5 floppies...."

Better test those floppies, assuming you still have a machine with a floppy drive. They might have developed the odd (fatal) bad sector. Assuming of course your floppy drive still works...

Funny you should mention 'Reveal Codes'. Had a numpty user save their 2 page form they'd been working on for the last 2 days as a PDF from Word 2010. So far so good, except they then decided to delete the original Word source.

Still not the end of the world if that was the final version of the form. Except it never is, is it? And their disk is nearly full so previous version to recover. And no recent backup.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I offered to convert the PDF back to a Word .docx which Office 2013 and later can do.

It did a half decent job with only a few random extra carriage returns inserted in the odd table row.

And one extra large space in one row that I can't for the life of me figure out how to remove. Even after turning on Word's equivalent of 'Reveal Codes'

Muslim American woman sues US border cops: Gimme back my seized iPhone's data!

Intolerant

I hate intolerant people. It doesn't matter what their colour or creed

Your Phone prematurely ejected, Skype texting on the way, and 900 more years of Windows

Ho hum

Now if only I could have unified contacts across Outlook (the Windows program) and Google Contacts...

Vista did it one way, Win 10 does it another. But for some stupid reason known only to Microsoft, they didn't think to have Microsoft Outlook use either and it's stuck doing it its own way.

At least Apple allowed auto sync with Outlook via their Windows iCloud app.

But Google want money for their equivalent. And the poor user suffers. And suffers. Years later

WhatsApp security snafu allows sneaky 'message manipulation'

It was secure once upon a time

But as soon as it came to the attention of uncle Sam, it was bought out by FB.

Now you can bet backdoor access exists. It's even more blatant than that. It's no secret that WhatsApp now backs up chats to Google Drive and we all know how private that is.

Hell there are even free third party apps that will decrypt iPhone backups to allow you to migrate your chat history from iOS to Android.

Migration of chats between platforms is a function WhatsApp should support themselves but they don't currently.

Re: WhatsApp or Signal protocol?

I do.

I'm trying out WhatsApp Business, so use WhatsApp Web with it via the browser on my PC. I use the WhatsApp Windows App for personal WhatsApp.

I find WhatsApp Web launch speed really suffers when the number of chats is very large. Some optimisation is very much needed.

Thinking of saying goodbye to your servers? We'll show you how

Really?

Not so great for a small biz if the existing local server runs bandwidth intensive software accessed over GigE LAN and the fastest broadband you can get is 6.8Mbps down and a fantastic 0.7Mbps up.

When is BT going to offer better broadband to business parks / small industrial estates? I guess keeping their noses in the trough leaves no time for anything else for middle/upper management.

Apple laughing all the way to the bank – with profits of $5.3m per hour

Tax

I wonder how much tax Apple pay on all this wonga? By country

Re: Apple: You WILL like our designs.

I think the point is, if you decide two years hence, you need more storage in your precious little MacBook, you can't have it. You can't just unsolder the old SSD and solder in a bigger one. You have to sell your entire machine and buy one with more storage space. And pay Apple's inflated prices for the privilege.

Ditto the RAM.

Microsoft says Windows 10 April update is fit for business rollout

Wait

"Microsoft said Windows 10 is now “approaching 700 million monthly active devices” which leaves about 450 million now eligible for an upgrade."

What's this all about?

Intel's latest promise: Our first AI ASIC chips will arrive in 2019

Skynet is conceived

Someone pull the plug quick

Brit reseller Aria PC mounts appeal against £750k taxman VAT fiddle ruling

A gangster with a broken system

"Never think you are a better gangster than HMRC"

I think their system is borked.

It's scary to think how dangerous a gangster with a broken system is!

1. I submitted an amendment to my previous year's tax return. Even received an acknowledgement and reference number for the submission.

Their agents on the phone later acknowledged they had received the amendment and I had to speak to a "Tech agent" about it.

5 months later I get a letter from them saying they've got no record of the amendment and I have to submit a letter of appeal.

Wtf

2. I receive a 2nd letter saying they'd received my appeal for a late tax return but they can't process the appeal as they haven't received the tax return. a) I never appealed as b) I submitted my tax return months ago.

I'm recovering from a heart op. I could really do without all this shit.

Still, I guess some poor fucker has to pay for the gold plated toilet roll holders in their toilets.

Wanted that Windows 10 update but have an Intel SSD? Computer says no

Space

"Just think of all the cheap windows 10 tablets with 60 GB SSDs"

Just think of all the cheap Windows 10 tablets with 32GB persistent storage.

TFTFY

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

Spectrum +2

The +2 was my first computer. Probably because my brother, who bought it for me for my birthday, couldn't afford the C64 which had better gfx. But without the original Spectrum, the +2 wouldn't have existed.

I played games on it. Coded simple stuff in BASIC. And then later in college learnt about Z80 assembler before moving on to 8088 including a wire wrap board with a 2K EEPROM chip & 2K RAM. And everyone laughed because my wiring was so neat lol. It did work first time though.

My respects to a man who's efforts helped forged and continues to shape my entire working life.

Brit bank TSB TITSUP* after long-planned transfer of customer records from Lloyds

Re: That £13,000

It was a freakin joke. Lighten up ffs. And since when did joking about something make someone a criminal??? Jeeez

Re: That £13,000

Huh?

That £13,000

That guy who briefly saw £13,000 more in his account than he had:

He should have transferred it out ASAP. With any luck, the bank would lose the record of the xfer out when rolling back the dodgy changes and he'd have been £13,000 better off :-D

Bloke fruit flies enjoy ejaculating, turn to booze when starved of sexy times

Drug addicts

That's it. Just give em sex to wean them off drugs.

BT pushes ahead with plans to switch off telephone network

Voice quality

Almost everyone seems to have missed the fact that VoIP sounds shite or is totally unusable if broadband latency/jitter is too high - doesn't matter how many mbps you get.

Plain old telephony (POT) on the other hand always sounds a lot clearer and without any delays compared to VoIP / mobile.

I've got an Infinity2 line that goes at ~70Mbps down and ~19Mbps up with 15-30ms ping times typically and WhatsApp voice calls often exhibit long delays in transmission to the point where you end up talking over each other as the other party thinks you haven't said anything. Reverting to a POTs line brings refreshing reliability and clarity in comparison.

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

Hahahaha not

Nearly 3 years later and Metro Apps (even the system settings panel) simply disappear from view when they hit a snag.

I mean wtf!! Whatever happened to meaningful error messages or elegant code that deals with little snafus?

Windows is in danger of disappearing up its own jacksie.

Mum? Dad? Can I have a 3D XPoint disk for my birthday?

Re: Quick poll

Not exactly, but I know my Samsung 950 Pro equipped PC feels a lot snappier than an equivalent SATA SSD equipped one. I multitask very heavily and like the way it keeps up with anything I throw at it.

But then I consider myself a power user than a typical consumer.

A .pst file repair (admittedly not very often) runs a lot faster on the 950 Pro than the average SATA SSD. But nothing beats running that in a RAM Drive :-D

Don't like/trust Intel SSDs

After seeing two Intel SSDs get bricked simply due to unexpected power loss, guess what? I purchase only non Intel.

SanDisk, Kingston and more recently Western Digital mainly.

Crucial and OCZ are other makes I actively avoid too.

Reliability rates higher than small differences in performance for most users. A fact that seems to elude some manufacturers.

Mobile phone dealer boss faces 12 years in director limbo

Well done HMRC

Now go after Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon et al with the same vigour

Indian data leak looks to have been an inside job

Re: Corruption should be counted as a capital crime

The bribes will simply move to those who can "tweak" the system to their advantage.

Cashless just means the currency is now electrons and not paper notes.

In a perfect system, movement of those electrons would always leave an auditable trail. In a corrupt place, electrons will mysteriously appear & disappear conveniently.

Ubuntu 17.10 pulled: Linux OS knackers laptop BIOSes, Intel kernel driver fingered

Wtf

What kind of dumb arse OS eff's around with system firmware???

Magic Leap blows our mind with its incredible technology... that still doesn't f**king exist

Re: Or.....

"MS's first foray into the VR world with a pretty compelling product that isn't vapourware or hideously expensive and runs on lower end hardware."

Really? Are we talking about the same beast? I tried running MS' Mixed Reality app that appeared on my Win10 machines recently.

It failed to run on both the desktop (i7-6700K, 32GB RAM & AMD 7850 Gfx) and the laptop (i5-7200U, 12GB RAM),citing inadequate gfx.

Ofcom proposes ways to stop BT undercutting broadband rivals

Re: If only BT would undercut someone else!

I heard they've been silently auto upgrading Infinity speeds to Infinity2 speeds but you carry on paying Infinity prices.

Admittedly the D/L speed difference (~50Mbps vs ~62Mbps) is only really noticeable on large downloads, but upload speeds are pretty much double (~19Mbps vs ~9.4Mbps).

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

With all the slurping going on, by one company or another, is it even possible to develop software that won't get uploaded somewhere in one form or another?

Crown Prosecution Service is coming for crooks' cryptocurrency

Are you telling us you actually have a pension fund that's still growing?

Pray do tell us what it's called?

Stop us if you've heard this one: Russian hacker thrown in US slammer for $59m bank fraud

Crime pays

Til you get caught

Google Chrome vows to carpet bomb meddling Windows antivirus tools

Chrome meddling

Pot calling the kettle...

I use Chrome to manage my Android phone contacts while on my Windows PC. Especially given neither MS nor Google are interested in allowing MS-Outlook to sync to the Android phone book.

Anyhow, Windows Chrome insists on opening gmail every time I click an email address in Google contacts even though the system default email client and mailto: protocol handler is set to MS-Outlook.

Anyone know how I can fix it?

Evil pixels: Researcher demos data-theft over screen-share protocols

Re: So

R Tape loading error

With a Spectrum +2 with its 128KB of RAM and built in tape deck, that was still the last message you'd want to see after waiting half an hour for Outrun to load.

Self-driving bus in crash just 2 hours after entering public service

Re: German Efficiency

"Vehicle to vehicle collisions would be almost non-existent if all vehicles were autonomous..."

Machines may be able to react faster than humans, but a hunk of metal travelling at 70mph still has momentum. And a blow out or other unpredictable event still has the potential for sudden unanticipated movement that's too quick to safely circumnavigate.

Drone smacks commercial passenger plane in Canada

Typing misfire

"and was able to land safely landed safely."

and landed safely.

Or

and was able to land safely.

C'mon Reg. Get with it.

Is that a bulge in your pocket or... do you have an iPhone 8+? Apple's batteries look swell

It's a ventilation feature

The iPhone 8 includes a world first. When the phone detects that the new A11 Bionic cpu might be overheating, it opens up the case to allow the heat to escape.

The allows the A11 Bionic chip to flex its muscles and deliver peak performance.

:-D

Thomas the Tank Engine lobotomised by fat (remote) controller

Ah yes, but a driver could blast the train's very loud horn. Earbuds or no earbuds.

Not saying HAL couldn't do the same thing, but that version would be more expensive.

Bad news! Astroboffins find the stuff of life in space for the first time

I hope

There was no contamination on the instruments that gave rise to false readings...

In a surprise to no one, BT and TalkTalk top Ofcom's whinge-list

Think about it

Let's say there's 20 million copper pairs in the ground in the UK. Most of those were laid donkeys years ago. ie not costing a lot nowadays.

Let's also say (round figures) it's £15 line rental a month per line. That's £3.6Bn of revenue per annum rolling in pretty much for free. Take off some rates and odd bit of maintenance, that still doesn't sound like low margin to me.

Calls and broadband are charged separately and not cross subsidised if we believe Ofcom.

Little wonder they cling on so desperately to Openreach and can't be arsed improving customer service.

Kebab and pizza shop owner jailed for hiding £179k from the taxman

Soft targets

It's a shame they don't give a shit about the Billions Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay etc. avoid paying

Where there's a will, there's a way

HP users moaning over 10-minute login lag during 'Win 10 update'

A few HP's here

But running clean install Win10. No HP bloat. Up to date with all Win updates. No issues to report.

Apple's adoption of Qi signals the end of the wireless charging wars

Race over? I doubt it

I don't know much about the competing standard, but reading between the lines, given Intel's backing and given that Intel sells more CPUs for laptop's than it does for mobile phones, I would hazard a guess that the alt standard is more suited to higher power devices?

I still struggle to picture widespread usage scenarios where wireless charging for a laptop is more practical than wired though.

Microsoft fixing Windows 10 'stuttering' bugs in Creators Update

Fast startup? No thank you

The Fast Startup 'feature' that's been a part of Windows since Win8, is buggy.

I've lost count of the number of machines that get bogged down with some system processes stuck in a loop sucking up all cpu resources bringing the machine to its knees.

Yes you can restart the machine to lift the misery, but it's only temporary relief. Some time later, the problem will return.

Turn off Fast Startup and this doesn't happen. Until the next forced update from MS turns it back on again.