Posts by LeahroyNake

UK's National Audit Office warns full-fibre rollout strategy is leaving rural Britain behind. Again

Better than

The absolute train wreck that the government's superfarce voucher scheme was. Got a grant for £3k for a 100Mbit connection then we had to pay £50 a month.

It was great for I assume the minimum period of 24 months then they degraded the service to the point it was unusable! I checked the kit they used / long range Wi-Fi antenna and a Cisco switch, cost no more that £1k and even that's a stretch. They totally took the government for a ride !

Arsehats like this are the problem! What a waste of money.

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

Lucky

I live a half hour drive from our main site but luckily I have a 'switch flipper' that lives a 5 minute walk away. If they don't answer it's not getting fixed.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Re: CUPS sucks

'With todays ink-jet printers (which have become cheaper in upkeep than laser printers and some even faster) there are a lot of maintenance tasks that are being handled through the driver. Cleaning the print-head(s), cleaning paper feed rolls, aligning the print-head(s), size of the dots, amount of time it takes the ink to dry, etc. pp.'

Ok umm cheaper in upkeep and all this maintenance? You do know cleaning and aligning printheads wastes ink and if you leave most inkjet machines off for more than a week they usually have dried up nozzles / more waste. As for speed.... the pagewide with a huge print head that costs a fortune is very delicate, one or two blocked nozzles and it's awful.

I think I still stick with my MP C305 laser thanks, it's not super fast but a set of toner costs around £160 and it can print over 10k pages for that. Drums last around £60k as well. You can buy a pre-loved one for £250.

Yes I hate ink. (HP, Canon, Kip and Oki certified lunatic / large format engineer)

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: Outlook? Nope

Someone in accounts that looks at the quote to upgrade and than thinks... nuts to that it's working fine. When it hits the fan maybe an upgrade opportunity but it will not be to MS if I have a say. It has become so complex that even renewing am SSL cert can seem to work then stop working after a reboot. So much easier with postfix dovecot and it just works without faffing around on forums for a few hours because the provided tools to not work cotrectly.

Re: Outlook? Nope

Outlook 2007 works fine with Exchange 2013. Would prefer everyone just used OWA but I don't have anywhere to wedge the lever.

Re: "We were caught quite off guard"

If Excel could open .ods files properly and stick to the specification it would be a lot easier to transition to Libre Office. As it is now some moaning bean counters can't fathom a proper menu system....

Facebook doesn't know its onions: Seeds ad banned after machine-learning algo found vegetable pic 'overtly sexual'

How do you like those apples !

Sorry onions...

British Army develops AI shotgun drone with machine vision for indoor use

ReCoilLess

There are designs for rifles that allow a huge reduction in recoil AKA the ReCoilLess rifle. Looks like it involves ejecting gasses to the rear or something. Besides it doesn't matter if this drone gets thrown back and damages itself, I'm guessing that once it fires it's primary mission is complete, send in another one.

Please don't tell Boris about this though. The British Army is there to defend from external threats and not some Covidiots that fail to social distance when a little tipsy.Hardly 'blasting enemies of the Queen' lol

UK mobile network EE plumps for Nokia to provide that all-important 5G RAN equipment

Got to ask the question

What is wrong with 3g ? Works fine for me and i cannot see a benefit of 5g, lower range but better in congested areas ? Massive costs for both suppliers and users / phones. More masts ?

The only thing I can see is Trump having a hissy fit about Huawei and everyone lining up like good children and then going sod you and Cisco, let's use Nokia. Strange times.

Re: Please Sir …

Radio Access Networks. I had to search it as well :)

Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

Nice achievement

I personally think the best version is the Zero W followed by the 3b+

I have the 3b running pihole DNS, mysql and apache for home monitoring temps etc. The zero is in the garden solar powered with a 12v battery and controls the water feature (it's not a pond, I'm lot allowed one of them :) pumps and heaters to keep the fishies happy. It was fun setting it all up for under £100, kept me occupied for several days while on furlough:)

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

Gotta laugh

I am the admin of my company.co.uk address amongst a few others. I tried over the course of a month to get the .UK version with no success.

Contacting Nominet is an exercise in futility unless you want to pay for arbitration or God forbib appeal a decision. My pockets are not deep enough.

As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive

Not enough

'We spoke to five of them, spread geographically across the US, by phone and other means.'

While I am not defending Amazon at all this is a very small sample group. I expect more of ElReg! Did you even try to find someone to talk to in the UK, France, Germany ? Anywhere outside the US ?

Oh sorry I thought I was still reading theregister.co.uk my mistake.

Intel screams Tiger Lake is 'world's best processor' (then quietly into its sleeve: for thin Windows, ChromeOS laptops)

Imitators ?

"The 11th Gen Core processor is the best processor Intel has ever built. It's the best processor on the market. And it certainly rises above all the imitators."

The 'imitators' that are shipping products in volume while Intel is probably going to use TSMC as they can't sort their own fabs out.

I am looking forward to some actual reviews on a retail product by a third party. Until then it's just marketing bollocks to try and keep the shareholders happy.

Google, Amazon pass on UK Digital Services Tax by hiking ad prices, fees at same rate the government takes

Beer, Bread and Bacon

Don't think I have ever clicked an advert to buy any of those but sounds like a nice afternoon snack lol

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Re: Well we all know what the governments concern is...

What about supporting the small business where we live ?

I have been shopping a lot more in local shops / butchers, CoOp, local independent restaurants and even found a hardware store that I didn't know was there. Tesco and ASDA are missing out as are all the large chains.

I do not see that as a problem and now that I have got to meet some of the locals that work and maybe even own their business I will continue to use them. Good quality / the butchers is awesome ! And knowledge / hardware store repaired my petrol strimmer instead of selling me a new one. Garage supplied and installed a new car battery for the same price Halfords were selling it. The money stays more in the local economy. What's not to like ?

Bloody typical

Almost finished turning the loft into an office for the two of us ( dining room is a mess of monitors, docking stations etc and haven't sat at the table to eat since this all started) I just need a sparky to sign off the wiring and connect it to the board.

Now both of our employers want us back in the office 2 to 3 days a week. Better than the hour each way commute every day I suppose. My boss is one of those talker types / talks for hours about crap, all the important work is via email and service system, absolutely no reason for me to be there other than someone for him to talk at :/

COVID-19 tracing without an app? There's an iOS and Android update for that

Re: Future of this

This would be ideal but somehow someone will want to abuse it and add 'undocumented features':/

Someone's getting a free trip to the US – well, not quite free. Brit bloke extradited to face $2m+ cyber-scam charges

Really ?

'For example, one alleged favorite trick of the group was to phone up a bank using a spoofed number and voice-altering software in order impersonate a customer. Once they had convinced the bank of their identity,'

I'm I'm quite sure my bank wouldn't let me change my address over the phone without the security code provided previously to my address, password (parts of) and 3 questions relating to recent purchases sometimes even a text code. It used to require attending the bank in person / card auth and maybe photo ID.

It sounds like some banks need to check and enforce their procedures !

While you lounged about all weekend Samsung fired up its biggest-ever chip factory and started cranking out 16Gb LPDDR5 DRAM

Soccer fields?

El Reg convertor 128900 sqm spits out 31.8 football pitches ?

Is this soccer thing played on a larger American version ?

Maybe it's just the .com effect of the ElReg abandoning it's .co.uk roots :0

'My wife tried to order some clothes tonight. When she logged in, she was in someone else's account ... Now someone's charged her card'

Re: Credit card? What credit card?

How does Amazon get away with it then ?

‘IT professionals increasingly define themselves by capabilities they excel at managing’ says Atlassian chap

Updated CV

I left in the parts that stated Service and IT manager with 15 years experience of on premise IT support (lists multiple IT / Microsoft and vendor qualifications) then added design and implementation of cloud solutions. I have done a few on premise to Office 36~ migrations. It's not hard to do and I charge by the hour so I'm actually making more off the cloudy customers than with the sensible ones that have stayed on premise. Great fun when they go offline for a few hours, just had a look and is working again / send invoice. With the on site jobs I have to 'leave the house and brave the pandemic' :0 WTF leave the house ! That raid array can still function fine with 2 drives down, call me when they arrive and I will stick them in for you, just stay the hell away from me in my hazmat suit lol

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

'a powerful capability that could complicate web security.'

Sounds like a good excuse to block all chromium browsers from running on pc's that I have to look after. I believe multiple security products allow this quite easily, Sophos takes about 5 mins to configure application blocking.

Either that or some genius need to design a better gateway proxy that is as easy to use as a Pi hole.

This'll upset the Apple cart: 1,200 iOS apps downloaded 300 million times a month include 'ad fraud' code

Re: That 30% well worth it

Now that it is in the media expect Apple to ummmm do something, or just maybe look at the revenue it is bringing in and quietly ignore it.a

TalkTalk, Three, and Virgin Media, come on down! You've all won a prize for... not being that great at something!

Re: Virgin Media Internet

'I assume that when I move house I'll just have to cancel the direct debit and that'll be the end of it.'

The bastards sent a debt collection agency after me for doing that but since they couldn't provide any proof that I had signed a contract I told them to feck off. They haven't bothered me since.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

iBackup or don't

"I do photography as a hobby so I never saw a need for backing up photos and I never paid for the subscription (which would include cloud storage) because I didn’t use any of the tools that came along with the subscription."

Just back it up, it's not hard. If you can afford an little i something you can afford a NAS. How hard is it to back up iStuff to a NFS or SMB share. I honestly have no idea, some iTwit can sort it out.

Pass that Brit guy with the right-hand drive: UK looking into legalising automated lane-keeping systems by 2021

Just what they want.

'most car journeys in 2021 would be in driverless cars, heralding the end of private car ownership'

Then home ownership, it's what the government want after all.

I'm not sitting in someone else grotty cab and am lucky enough to be a home owner. Hope I can pass something on to the kids.

It's the same in the UK. Unless you have to drive through a 50 zone (with average speed ANPR) that had been a 70 for 10 years because emissions. Seriously, I thought cars were more efficient now.

Dido 'Queen of Carnage' Harding to lead UK's Institute for Health Protection because Test and Trace went so well

Re: Am I the only one

Dildo Harness so she can been you over, obviously.

Re: Am I the only one

She does seem good at fuc£ing things up.

Huawei Matebook X Pro 2020: Nothing too crazy but at least it's more fixable and cheaper than comparable Apple wares

I prefer melons.

(we wouldn't recommend anyone buys a Mac right now, given that Apple Silicon is just around the corner, but that's by-the-by)......

Should have stopped at the first comma.

Transport for London asks Capita to fling Congestion Charge system into the cloud

Re: 900 more staff?

I recon 850 of those staff will be trying to look at 1.5 Million emails of images between them every day.

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks

Re: How is "visiting a plane every 28 days" a chore?

Have you not read 'On Call' ?

All well and good

I wonder if they are still using them on starliner or have gone back to the real floppy ones to save weight ?

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Reminds me of my mum

My brother gave my mum and all in one Mac thingy so I got to claim ignorance regarding support for about 4 years.... Until it started getting hot any then turning off. Removal of screen and lots of plastic crap to hoover out years of dust and cat hair and it surprised me when it worked after putting it back together.

Hint they have a magnetic screen front so use a sucker to pull it off.

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Why ?

If I can run multiple mail servers while seriously lacking in A levels and no desire for a degree (my partner has one in chemistry and is now a well paid bean counter, i have lots of random technical qualifications over 25 years and we are on a similar wage / just under £100k between us) is it so hard to expect a university to do it...

Read the small print, the student run servers amongst other things include 'lifelong email forwarding after you leave the university' that's nice. I expect the university will still be there long after MS has disappeared. The students will probably invent the next best thing and still be pushed aside because corporate greed.

Anyway since when is it OK for all our email to be read by our American overlords? Huawei are not allowed to do it.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

It can go

On my work phone, if I leave the house I will turn on Bluetooth, need it for the car. No way this is touching my personal devices though.

The biggest problem I see with this app is that younger school children are sensibly not allowed phones in school. My youngsters are all up for wearing PPE but they are still the highest risk of catching it when they go back to school. My partner has been working from home since it hit Spain and I followed a week later. No real reason for either of us to go back to an office environment apart from me visiting customer sites for hardware issues.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Three wheels on my wagon

Awesome idea to use the spare wheel, it's hard enough contemplating how a spinning wheel can balance on a string let alone how four are interacting with eachother. Beers for everyone that figured it out.

Oh-so-generous ransomware crooks vow to hold back from health organisations during COVID-19 crisis

Re: Look at the super markets.

My partner found a local catering supplier had a lot of extra stock that they obviously couldn't shift to their usual restaurants etc. They put it on Facebook (suppose it is useful for something) that they were now open to retail and not just trade customers. The pack sizes though haha we have 36 eggs and enough jacket potatoes for 6 months, I'm delivering them to family and next door neighbours etc for free as the local shops are out of stock.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

Other options

We currently only use RDP for accounts / Sage, it's not supported by Sage but it works fine.

Email is all OWA as we have on premise exchange so no issues there.

Just bought some extra Screen Connect licenses and giving select users access to their office pc, not sure how that stands with MS licensing but they can take a log walk off a short pier.

Our problem is that most of our customers are not sending us the usual level of work as it's split between retail / leisure and office machine support.

Fingers crossed we get paid at the end of this month :/

NHS websites will no longer burn up your mobile data allowance, say Brit telcos

Also why they didn't just add .gov.uk to the list as it is the official location that lists rights for employees etc

On a similar note, my car MOT runs out at the end of the month. I can see the fine coming already but cannot take it to the garage :/ hope they defer the requirement until this crap is over.

HPE celebrated diversity on International Women's Day not with pictures of its own staff but stock images of models

At least

The wording was quite / quote good. It looks like they copy pasted it from some guidelines.

"We believe that everyone, regardless of gender, age, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity, should be given equal opportunities to pursue and obtain the career experiences they want and need.”

They should have added, we had a look at our staff and shoehorned as many as possible into as many of these criteria as we could / he has long hair / she has some stubble / they are not white / maybe they have a same sex partner because they didn't want to go on a date with me Fekkin woo woo. It's none of their bloody business. Just treat people as people based on thier qualifications and experience.

British Army adopts WhatsApp for formal orders as coronavirus isolation kicks in

SIGINT anyone?

"The Register verified from the full screenshot (not published) that the WhatsApp order was posted on the internal Defence Gateway intranet."

First off and somewhat worrying is that a person has access to this when they are no longer a member of the full time Army. FTRS or reserves probably shouldn't have access either. You sign the official secrets act for life and not just until you leave the initial employment period. The idiot that shared this info with you should look at the remaining people that worked at Bletchley Park who still to this day do not talk about what they did there. (You should visit, it's a very good day out and really brings home the efforts of all involved / make sure you visit the radio room first, on the right as you exit the main entrance. Awesome people there and just wow sets you up for the rest of the site if you have no idea about radio etc)

Disclosing internal military communication practice, not a good idea whatever the reason.

Finally using bloody WhatsApp? At least use Signal FFS or maybe Telegram. Fracking WhatsApp! Who the hell thought that was a good idea.

X forces member, they never had my personal mobile number and never will. That's what a work phone is for.

Appareils électroniques: Right to repair gets European Commission backing

Re: It is not just phones.

I'm my case it is the phone.

I really liked my Honor 9 lite. Made the mistake of having it in my back pocket and it dropped into the toilet :0 took it out sharpish and cleaned it with wet wipes but i obviously couldn't remove the battery quickly so just turned it off. Removed the back panel the next day by heating the glue with a heat plate, prising off an edge and gently pulling with a suction cup. Lots of moisture inside so disconnected the battery and let it dry near a radiator for a few days.

Now it takes half hour to charge to 1% and the main board / the top one gets hot and drains charge quickly but it does work absolutely fine. You think I can buy that board ? I know it will be basically a new phone but it is quite easy to replace (I'm lucky I have the numerous tools at hand). Even if it cost £100 I would pay for it then waterproof the bloody thing with a liberal application of non conducting thermal paste over the internals.

Corporate VPN huffing and puffing while everyone works from home over COVID-19? You're not alone, admins

Home working

I wish... while I mostly work remotley / on the road visiting customer sites to fix hardware. The boss really likes people in the office. The sooner the government put in place a recommendation for all workers to work from home where possible the better.

As it is now I have recommended to our engineers that they wear a fresh pair of surgical gloves (part of normal car stock anyway) to each site before they even touch the door handle, clean each machine on arrival and consider their tools etc as contaminated. Clean their vehicle and tools at the end of each day and dispose of the gloves. It's a pain in the arse but better than potentially spreading infections to hundreds of sites.

Google: You know we said that Chrome tracker contained no personally identifiable info? Yeah, about that...

Re: GnuTzu - Proxy

In a company network I believe you can install additional certificates on the users pc's so that the proxy can intercept and monitor / alter https traffic.

Your phone wakes up. Its assistant starts reading out your text messages. To everyone around. You panic. How? Ultrasonic waves

Re: “We did it on metal. We did it on glass. We did it on wood,”

You beat me to it!

For some reason it reminded me of the Sarah Silverman fuc#ing Matt Damon song aimed at Jimmy Kimmel. If you haven't seen it it's well worth a look lol

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-dsBe45PA&feature=youtu.be

Admins beware! Microsoft gives heads-up for 'disruptive' changes to authentication in Office 365 email service

Re: It's all good news except...

I agree with you but as I mainly deal with Ricoh I can confirm that the vast majority of their machines support SSL encryption for SMTP connections.

Enabling SSL for SMTP Connections

PreviousNext

Use the following procedure to enable SSL encryption for SMTP connections.

1Log in as the network administrator from the control panel.

2Press [System Settings].

3Press [File Transfer].

4Press [SMTP Server].

Operation panel screen illustration

5In "Use Secure Connection (SSL)", press [On].

If you are not using SSL for SMTP connections, press [Off].

When "Use Secure Connection (SSL)" is set to [On], the port number changes to 465.

6Press [OK].

7Log out.

If the option is not shown ask a Ricoh tech to update the firmware / takes around half hour. Unfortunately / officially only Ricoh certified techs can get access to the FW files as it is quite easy to damage the machine and can be expensive to rectify if it is not done properly. The most common machine that is still in the field that does not support it from new is the MP C305 but it can be updated. All machines from around 4 years ago should be fine.

Help me understand

This is an honest question, please don't take the piss as I am sure other people here would like an explanation as well.

Firstly Basic Authentication. I take this to mean username and password sent to a server from a device. The username and password are stored on the device / email client or maybe a copier. It's a simple case of entering these details once and the device will remember them. This does not mean that the details are sent in plain text but encrypted during transit if using the correct protocols, TLS or Starttls etc.

How does modern auth improve on this? How is the device initially configured if not with a username / password?

Spider-eyed Lite version of Huawei flagship flies out before actual P40 launch event

Re: Target market

Totally agree especially regarding the camera.

The camera on on Huawei 9 lite is crap even when compared to an old galaxy S7. The 10 lite is much better but still not as good as the ancient by comparison Samsung.

The only other downside is that my S7 is very water resistant, not sure the Huawei would survive a drop in a puddle but I don't tend to drop things that cost £180 very often.