Posts by DuncanLarge

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

Re: What fraction of a gram ? @Duncan

(or do you want to CUT DOWN TREES)

YEEEEEEESSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

Also its a icing on the cake way to say that they are going to upload your data to the cloud, work on it there, then send it back to you.

I'd not like to have a machine like that in our PCI compliance scope.

Re: That's what Plinston said

You also are asked to reboot when you update libc but you can just restart the services most of the time.

Germany mulls giving end-to-end chat app encryption das boot: Law requiring decrypted plain-text is in the works

Re: Industrial espionage

"Passwords to SCADA systems"

There are SCADA systems that actually use password?

Where I work we had a new SCADA system installed. Being the IT guys we demanded certain password requirements. The SCADA guys were like "what? you want passwords?". We really had to put our foot down hard to get them to implement it securely.

It was on its own physical subnet protected by a firewall (both ways). Each machine had only a few whitelisted ports (non default ports) and remote access was only possible from our own machines on certain wall ports.

They didnt like supporting it remotely, kept complaining about having to look up the passwords and using a VPN to connect...

Re: Honey, we're out of

"Seems they would be wasting resources even monitoring my inane chats with the missus."

It amuses me just how blinkered people really are about their "inane" conversations. Ever heard of phishing?

While they are wasting resources watching you ask for cheese, others are eavesdropping on your convo after breaking into their system looking for the passcode you send to your other half when they get a prompt on the phone for the banking app when she logs in to check the balance after the card machine declined the card.

They will be watching when you sent the sort code and account number to your mate who wants to pay you back for that meal he promised to chip in on.

They will be watching when google sends you the reminder about the booking you have made for a trip for two to spain for a week. They will also be watching your house when you leave to catch the plane, hammer at the ready they go up to your empty house to find an amazon smart lock. They look through what they know about you, find the details for your amazon account, reset the password, approve themselves for entry and simply walk in.

Yep, nobody is interested in the little details of your little messages sent back and fourth with your family and friends.

Just like nobody is interested in the contents of your house when you leave the door open and get distracted by one of them when they fake a heart attack. Surely nobody would be interested in the boring contents of your private residence?

Why do you have keys to your car? Honestly nobody would be interested in the old rust bucket. Yet you still lock it? Cant you just keep it unlocked, remove the immobiliser and install a push to start button?

I still lock up my bike :O

I shred post I get that has my name on it. I also shred old documents after a few years :O :O

Yep, you've got nothing to hide.

"They say they only want it for "terrorism""

1984, George Orwell. In the story words have their definitions changed and bent frequently.

Todays definition of terrorism may be different from next years. In a decade my post here may be in breach of terrorism laws. OMG, THEY ARE COMING FOR ME!

Re: So encrypted posts to USENET it is ...

"The thing about encryption is that it's just maths, and end-to-end encryption is pretty easy to throw together using existing published components."

Yep, every child with a raspberry pi has access to compiled encryption libraries that work with almost any language that is in use today plus the very source code for those libraries not to mention OpenPGP and GNUPG.

If you follow the general best practices (i.e dont roll your own crypto) you can add end to end encryption to anything. Oh did I forget to mention OpenSSH? I can encrypt ANY port sending ANY kind of data between ANY machines.

It's all in the hands of kids with raspberry pi's given to them at school. Germany, how are you going to get the cat back in the bag? It had kittens, loads of them, since the 90's!

The irony

I had a good hearty laugh when I read this

"hand over end-to-end encrypted conversations in plain text on demand"

HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAAHAHAHAHHA

HAHAAHHAHAH

HA HA

Its like telling someone to get in a car and fly to paris, without using a plane.

For anyone not getting it: End to end encryotion can only be end to end if the "provider" is unable to access the plain text. Its the very definition of end to end encryption. So in effect they are seeking to ban end to end encryption entirely. As soon as someone in the middle of the connection (the provider) has access, you no longer have end to end encryption.

How are they going to handle people using PGP/GNUPG to encrypt emails? Public key crypto like that HAS no provider. Its entirely controlled by the user, with its own management difficulties due to that. Eventually they will just have to ban end to end encryption in all forms, anyone detected as using it will be targets for the swat teams.

I say they should go further. Ban non self driving cars (do it now, why wait for everyone to have one?) as anyone using a car that is under human control can then be assumed to be a terrorist who will run people down.

Ban knives too. Now. Anyone caught with one will be automatically assumed to be some kind of stabber. Makes sense, if nobidy has a knife legally then only the crims will! How will normal non-crims cut up food? Well thats their problem just like its their problem on how to securely sent bank acount details with no end to end encryption.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

HAHAH

HAHAHA

Really its way too late. Nobody will give up their human controlled cars to be safer when walking, nobody will give up their knives to be safer when telling yobs to pick up the litter and nobody will give up end to end encryption.

Good luck germany, if you pull this off you will be a little island on the internet. The "encryption" nudist colony of the world.

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

Re: The police "fined" him.

Ah. So thats what a citation is.

I was always confused about why the US police were handing out links to verified sources.

Re: Actually not

"very nearly conquering Britain"

You mean when we wiped the floor with their Luftwaffe?

When we steadfastly stood against they only weapon they had left, bombs falling due to gravity?

When we perfected a new technology to decode their transmissions, and then hid that from them while we fed them false information to miss lead them?

When we invented a technology that let us see their planes and their positions, whilst they had no idea?

When we all hunkered down and dug for victory, spurned on by a leader, the likes of which we never had before?

When they were playing with flying rockets that randomly dropped on our people, we were developing super heavy bombs that would slice through the ground and turn a bunker into a crater. Oh, we also made a bouncing bomb that bounced on the water and took out some of their dams crippling their production (at least for a while).

Yep. They really came close to conquering us. The only way they were able to affect us was by bombing us and trying to starve us, till we invented a computer and the yanks turned up. Oh we had a tough time of it for sure. But who won?

Their rockets? Yep we took them too.

Re: Only in Nany State Britain...

They are constantly trying this one also:

Encryption hides <insert crime here> : Backdoor all the encryption, or ban it outright. Then only the crims will be using it and although you dont know what they are saying you can find them using all the cameras and drones.

Lightning speed – how fast is that again? Virgin plugs in another 102k to superfast broadband

Uploads

Does this lightening upgrade fix the disparity with upload vs download speeds?

I have 50GiB of data I wish to archive to Amazon S3. Doing the sums it looks like I will be waiting a while for that to finish at the measly 6Mb/s Virgin currently give me with my "upto 100Mb/s" package.

That 50GiB is really just the icing on the cake as I must also capture many of my HD miniDV tapes, to which I still record home videos to. Each tape is holding about 10GiB of video per hour.

Then there are all the photos I have taken over many years, many more of which are on film and are going to be digitised. This is on top of the new film photos I'm taking plus the RAW images from my DSLR.

I'm backing this all up to HDD and certain files also to BD-R. Amazon S3 is the last stage in this backup process. But my current upload speed from virgin is pitiful to say the least.

Oh and the router is a 6 year old superhub 2 and is crap.

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Re: Why would anyone use it?

As a home user, its linux or nothing. Well ok, I have windows 10 to run a couple of windows games a couple of times a year.

At work, lets see if I can get away installing Linux over the top of win 10 on my company issued, tracked, monitored for compliance laptop.

Trust me. WSL is a godsend when you are in those shackles.

I used to use cygwin. Did it for years. However I never liked its package management and windows never seemed to understand that it had to play nice with the superior environment that cygwin was. Plus as cygwin is a third party product, WSL has the benefit that its released and supported by Microsoft. This means that I'm allowed to justify my need to run WSL on a machine that has to meet several IT security standards such as PCI. Cygwin would have needed me to put a case to the board, yet with WSL I just have to say its a Microsoft supported optional component and bingo its approved.

Re: properly installed and setup

"The only Windows system that works perfectly is one that is shut down."

True. I once had a windows machine that WOULDNT shut down.

Re: But why?

"Just why in holy fuck's name would I possibly want to do that?"

The same reason I do.

Work in IT, must use a laptop which runs windows. Cant be bothered to run the linux VM I installed to keep my sanity all the time as the laptop tends to get a bit hot running a VM all day.

WSL fixes windows. I can now put up with this barebones OS thanks to it actually having useful programs on it in WSL. Heck I can SSH to any of our linux servers while all the other IT guys are stuck trying to locate the installer for putty :)

They were trying to transfer a file to one of the servers. I did it in only a few seconds by using scp while they fiddled about with Filezilla.

Thanks to having WSL, I no longer feel like I'm disabled when I use this windows 10 thing.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Re: Easy work-around for many

Just dont forget to reset it back to true when the issue is fixed! Otherwise you will be unprotected by the certificate signing checks.

Re: For the record ...

You obviously didnt read the comments above, where somebody lost work due to a container addon failing.

Also anyone with uBlockOrigin or noscript lost a lot of their security. People assume that its just annoying adverts that these addons block, what they forget is they block scripts too. The internet is not a safe place. It runs code on your machine, sometimes in your GPU. Sometimes that code is delivered to you hidden in that add banner that ublockorigin WAS blocking yesterday.

I'm sure many antivirus products also have addons to detect and prevent fishing attacks etc that were also conveniently turned off.

Running through the internet with firefox over this weekend felt like running nude through a field in the dark knowing that there are bramble bushes dotted about.

Re: "But seriously, how do you not catch an intermediate cert expiration date?"

"Having someone check the database regularly"

Sorry. Its a database, not a spreadsheet. Why would anyone need to check it? Write a stored procedure that gets executed every week to check for expiry and email or report to the concerned persons.

This is the computer age after all. You only need a human to check its still working every now and then and fix it when its not, Even then that human can be alerted to the fact it aint working by a totally free monitoring solution like Zabbix. Heck you just need Zabbix to ping the database server, check the database service is running, what the hell, have it even run the SP and email you the results!

Thats a moot point.

If you work in IT you know how you can get a computer to remind you when to renew a cert.

Our system constantly emails us till the certs are renewed and anyone can do it using a calendar reminder.

It really aint that hard. Its like putting dinner in the oven and just sitting in the next room till you smell smoke. Then the fireman points out the countdown timer on your smart watch, not including the one on the oven itself. Oh and the Alexa in the corner can set countdown timers too!

Its plain common sense. There is simply no reasonable excuse other than sorry we f*cked up and forgot to set a reminder.

UK is 'not a surveillance state' insists minister defending police face recog tech

Hmm

Lets all buy shirts like these and see how facial recognition handles it:

https://images.app.goo.gl/tKNpWYhb8d4RC8gq8

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

So they cost NASA 700m

They get away paying back a small percentage of it.

I'd sue for the full amount. I dont care if they have to flip burgers and drive a car worth £100 as scrap, I'd want it all.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Re: What's in a name?

"started his talk with "Jaffa Kree" followed by "OK not many understood that one""

What?

Oh god now I feel old.

Re: Hoarding?

Assuming we are allowed to leave on hug a Zombie day.

Re: Save the date!

Its a trap!

Buying a second-hand hard drive on eBay? You've got a 'one in two' chance of finding personal info still on it

Re: I read that the UK MoD has the following policy...

I'm sure the stairs had.

It's an Easter Jesus miracle: MS Paint back from the dead (ish) and in Windows 10 'for now'

Re: Basic, simple tools

I use notepad every day. I browse to a website that is full of adverts,

CTRL+A

CTRL+C

Open notepad

CTRL+V

Read with no flashing distractions. Ok the text sometimes is a bit messy but I dont care, I can read around that.

Re: "34-year-old program"

"We haven't tinkered with this for a while...let's "improve" it"

God that mentality is everywhere! The code works, everything works, it looks good and consistent between the past major versions. But we need to sell it more, to make more money. We cant easily add planned obsolescence to it all the time so lets just revamp the UI! Remove the long used functions, especially the really useful ones that only a small % of users actually use. Add support for Javascript in the file format, we'll worry about a sandbox later, much later.

Lets do it because we can. We can test it when we roll it out to the real users, bye bye in house testers (this happened to me). Its never finished, just like when Lucas had Star Wars. IT CAN NEVER FINISH, IT CAN NEVER BE STABLE AND MAINTAINED.

I remember a scifi story (I think it was a series of books) that were set on some huge starship. The crew were a generational one and maintained/improved the ship over many generations as needed. They had code going back hundreds of years, maintained and running. Unfortunately I cant remember whet the series or author was.

Re: Function over form

"No-one actually uses Paint to paint anything, it's a simple program that loads very quickly (Paint 3D does NOT)"

Totally agree.

It suggests that MS really have no clue as to how users use windows. Hey MS, we are NOT launching paint to make jerky mouse drawn doodles. We did that as kids, and kids may do that with Paint 3D to entertain themselves. As adults we use paint for different use cases and we chose it because it is small and light and loads the moment you need it.

Why I love paint

I press Alt+PrintScr

I click cortana and type paint.

I press ctrl+v when paint is open.

File->Save

Screenshot taken.

I prefer that to launching that slightly annoying snipping tool.

Re: It's good enough

"Leave it alone."

They didnt leave notepad alone. They actually improved it by adding support for UNIX line endings!

No more will you need to launch wordpad and try and convince it to not save in the borked by MS RTF format.

Re: Nostalgia?

Paint 3D

When I fist saw it I was thinking "what the hell is this cr*p". I dont have a 3D monitor, or glasses, so why would Paint need to do anything in 3D?

I started thinking that this was some early 2000's idea that finally made its way out of limbo. Some "advanced" painting app that cant shake a stick at The Gimp but bigs itself up like all that software from Ulead that we used to morph photos with but ended up being ultimately useless.

Windows 10 May 2019 Update thwarted by obscure tech known as 'external storage'

Re: How To Recover Volume Names

"A,"B, and C being dedicated to special uses"

Yes. Thats assuming your A and C drive remain your A and C drive after you install this update.

Assuming your C drive remains your C drive you should be able to boot windows and follow the steps you listed to correct the remapping of your A drive to your internal D drive and your Z F and H drives that have all been remapped and broken several bits of software including the backup software that decided you no longer had any backed up files as your Z drive suddenly had none, so it gets re-inventoried clearing the database thus making you go through your steps and then re-inventory drive Z that takes quite a while.

During your re-inventory your H drive suddenly dies. Simple bad luck. But you need to wait for the inventory to finish before recovering your project files, for a project that needs submitting for approval in 4 hours. After restoring the files, with 1 hour left to go, you discover to your dismay that the 1903 update was forced upon you before your backup software snapshotted your last couple of hours work.

Had the H drive not died it would be fine. Now however, thanks to MS using you as a test case, you must miss your deadline.

Thankyou microsoft.

Re: Oh FGS!!!*!*##

"You might be set for a long wait if you refuse to use any release that has major faults."

Oh dont worry about little old me. I can take it.

I started with Debian 3.0 Woody. Took 3 years to get the 3.1 Sarge update for that. Then 2 years after that till Debian 4 came out.

I'm also getting older. Easter? I still think christmas was a few weeks ago. Trust me, I can wait till 1803 no longer gets patches. :)

Re: An awful lot of software still depends on drive letters?

Try typing "findmnt"

Re: Working fine for me

D: makes no sense, emoticons are read left->right not right->left with some mental twisting to turn the mouth the right way round lol.

Some more examples:

:) is better than ):

:p is better than p:

lol p: looks like someone trying to lick their nose.

D: = Is it crying??

:D

aaaand right at the last min I realise everyone thought it was a miss-spelled drive letter :D

Nope, its an emoticon :D :D :) ;)

Well this would presume you only have 1 internal drive?

I'm not too bothered by the renaming of external drives as I dont necessarily trust them to be static anyway but mixing up internal drive letters just seems a bit much for a mass deployed update to the general population of users.

Corporate users can sit back and watch it all get fixed before they commit. But why, when I actually spent £70 on a copy of win 10 for a brand new build should I have to put up with not being allowed to do the same? MS are going to let normal users chose to defer the updates for a short time but will it be long enough?

You can also set a filesystem label. That can be entered into the fstab and will work fine.

Re: Working fine for me

Lol I noticed that typo after the edit window expired.

I suppose a RV can bake :D

Re: Do you work for "You are holding it wrong" Apple?

"Windows Update has been borked for years."

Oh lol I totally forgot about how you cant install win 7 and update it fully without manually finding a MS KB article with a manually installed update that fixes windows update to download the next several hundred updates.

Re: Amiga days.....

Same here although I did start with DOS and moved to GNU/Linux.

Once I got used to the single directory structure of UNIX like OS' I looked at windows and wondered how I survived.

Sure, you have to do a little more work to identify what physical drives/partitions are mounted where when you need to know but it just seems so much neater.

Re: Can we have a....

419.42

Calculated using GNU date. Assuming 1803 came out on 20180301, which it probably didnt but I cba to google it :D

Re: Working fine for me

"but bad workmen always blame their tools, right?"

Right, how is a normal user (not a windows OS developer) able to improve the OS' ability to maintain drive C: as drive C: when a USB HDD is plugged in when they want to edit the video their mate has just recorded for their youtube channel?

How are their skills able to avoid the mess and resulting blue screen?

So yes, they CAN blame their tools when the tools are faulty and not fit for purpose.

So you would be happy to not blame a hammer that was made out of metal grey painted rock hard stale bread? If it fails as a hammer, its your fault is it?

Do you apply the same logic to the ability of your new car to bake?

Do you work for "You are holding it wrong" Apple?

Oh FGS!!!*!*##

Run, run away!

Stop being their beta testers. They suck up your data, then find out they broke a standard function of every MS OS since the days of DOS by TESTING IT ON YOU.

Ever heard of a regression test? We are their regression test.

They didt even pay you for it. You had to give up your time and enjoy some inconvenience just so they could go "Oh yes! I remember now! Drives have drive letters and every OS we ever released relies on certain drives being assigned reserved letters".

Jesus, this is like having a router supplied by your ISP kill your internet because it didnt reserve its own IP address and decided to assign a DHCP lease for it to your mates mobile phone when he popped round, thus making your mates mobile the strangely silent gateway for your LAN.

Run away.

Go to Linux.

Go to Mac.

Heck try a Chromebook.

I'm using Win 10 1803 now, at work. It works well enough. We have limited ability to control the updates in our corporate environment. I was skipping 1809 as it destroyed data and kept getting recalled. Some of our users were updated to it, but I have steadfastly refused. I'm the IT Systems Technician here and the only way I'm letting 1809 in my laptop is if I'm forced to by external forces such as PCI compliance.

I was going to go straight to 1903. Then I saw this article. I will install 1903 when 1909 or 2003 comes out.

At home I use Debian. So I'm happy to trade bleeding edge features for stability.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

Re: A total failure

Just pointing out that the devices in The Expanse were not like our smartphones. They had limited processing power and storage and were made to be cheap, almost disposable, interfaces to a local network providing all the services etc.

They were basically the handheld/holographic version of a chromebook.

Your data would follow you between networks/ships with some local storage and processing possible on the "hand terminal" when you had no connection etc.

Re: A total failure

"but in the end we might get a foldable phone that works."

Why would I want a fold-able phone? I'd prefer a fold-able car, able to have bits folded away at the push of a button to fit (or drive out of) a tight parking space made tight by the guy who cant park.

However. I WOULD love a fold-able phone that is as thin as a few sheets of A4 paper when unfolded, folds down to a pocket-able size from a fully unfolded A4 size.

Even better would be a fold-able e-ink display in the same format allowing me to have an A4 sized kindle with smartphone functions that folds into a device I can put in my pocket that only is as thick as a standard smartphone when folded.

Re: What happened to testing?

"I thought this was more generally part of the Agile process..."

I really hope that thats not the case and car manufacturers dont start applying (fr)agile development models to new car designs.

I'd rather not be the unwitting alpha tester of the ABS braking system.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

Well

I was going to have a go at them for thinking they could moan about it after peeling off the protective film that the instructions tell you to leave on.

Ok, ok I know people will assume its removable as they can be confused with the factory fitted protected film. But you are a REVIEWER of a device that incorporates new technology. You really dont think you should have read the instructions first? Thats part of the review process isnt it?

If I was suddenly given a flying car I wouldnt assume I could jump into it and drive about, then discover I was supposed to fold the wings in first.

Samsung now know their testing dept need to be told how to think like a person who does not know what dead trees are used for, then they could put a DONT REMOVE ME sticker on it :)

Anyway, the fact that this film does not prevent the failure when left on the device suggests that samsung could do with employing testers that actually know how to use a phone day to day and have them use it as their main personal phone for a whole month with the reward of being allowed to keep it ;)

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

Slippery slope

"We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online"

Who decides whats safe today?

Who decides whats safe tomorrow?

When pr0n is declared non-safe, what will take its place as the latest unsafe "protect the children" emergency?

Knives and their use, dangerous sports like football, cheap Chinese li-ion batteries, civil disobedience, bacon?

Thinking about how dangerous these things are to kids:

1. Pr0n, makes kids learn how humans interact. Makes kids ask questions to parents who cant get over the embarrassment to teach them why its there, why it costs money, how its mostly exaggerated to increase exceitemnt of the viewer (just like in those toy and sweet ads kids).

2. Knives, yes, dont carry one unless you are preparing meat for the dish and when doing so NEVER RUN WITH IT.

3. Sports. Wear the safety equipment when told to. When not told to just dont be stupid. Accidents happen.

4. Cheap li-ion batteries. Dont put them in your pockets.

5. Civil disobedience. Its a bad idea to glue yourself to a DLR train.

6. Bacon. Will ever so slightly increase your chances of getting cancer if you eat it all the time.

Why cant my ISP just block access till I call them and enable it? My ISP knows a lot more about me than I generally would like but at least its limited to them and not some ageid bods employed in china who can see me access blahblah.com for my personal time then call me on my landline when they start work in the other call centre telling me they know that site has infected my PC and they were told by microsoft to log on and fix it.

Did someone forget to tell NTT about Brexit? Japanese telco eyes London for global HQ

Re: Ha

"When Hard Brexit comes, how much will trade slow down now that every lorry will need to be inspected for proper paperwork?"

Why would we want to do that?

Do you think some jobsworth in the gov is going to get away with doing that just because the clocks changed at midnight? They would be strung up.

Honestly think man. They are OUR ports, controlled by OUR say so. Nothing will change the very next second after midnight on the 31st of Oct. Why?

What rules changed between us and the EU at 1am on the 1st of Nov? None. Not a single one. We have already implemented everything they have and have done so for 40 years. Every standard they have is ours. Every truck coming out of the EU and entering our ports is of EU origin so why the hell would any stops need to be done?

Any changes to the process would be implemented over a longer period of time as time moves on our rules may diverge. But not the next day! Not the next 2 months!

Oh and btw, bit of news for you about a new technology you havnt heard of. Its called a computer connected to the internet. A wonderful device. Basically, and try to keep calm when I tell you this, these magical things have eliminated paperwork! Most trucks these days dont carry bits of dead tree to be checked, unless as a backup for when the computer is broken.

Another bit of homework for you. How fast does trade get off the ships when it lands at Southampton? Trade from outside the EU? Hint, those internet connected computers are bloody fast little things.

Only someone who has a death wish would instruct our own ports to check EU trucks the day after brexit. Any delay would have their name plastered in all the papers. Think man.

Easter is approaching – and British pr0n watchers still don't know how long before age-gates come into force

Re: how about a simpler system

But not a landline. The OP is talking about landlines.

Mobile providers disable access to adult sites unless you prove your age by having a credit card. Hence I have no access to such sites on my phone as I cant be assed to give them my details (considering last time I did it they charged £2 to my card and failed to remove the blocks).