Posts by onefang

Google Chrome update to label HTTP-only sites insecure within WEEKS

Re: It's not "browsing" anymore..

"Can you do https to a 192. address?"

"Yes, provided whatever equipment is on that address supports https, but to the best of my knowledge you can't buy a certificate for it from any legitimate certificate provider,"

Certificates are for domain names, not IP addresses. You could for example, hang a web server off an external IP, and a free domain name from afraid.org, for long enough to get a valid free Lets Encrypt certificate, then stick that domain name in your internal hosts file/s, pointing to your internal 192. address. Done, dusted, accepted by all browsers. Probably pointless getting a paid certificate for this sort of thing, but you could do that to.

New Android P beta is 'very close', 'near-final' but also just 'early'

Re: huh... just got Oreo...

Non carrier bloated Moto Z series phones have been getting regular timely updates all along, see my recent post elsewhere for my Moto Z update history. I didn't get mine through a carrier.

Re: Not as exciting as I thought at first

"I will put it on a Pedal Stool."

Pee? Stool? This is gonna be one very messy and stinky release.

Re: Did you say Android Pee?

'That would be an "Emergency Pee"'

Google are dancing around, trying to hold it in, but they are not sure when they'll burst, and are trying to make sure that when they do burst, they don't make a big mess.

"So, developers are going to miss out their (northern) summer holidays"

Not every country has a bunch of holidays during that time. Australia, the Land of the Long Weekend, has a holiday period roughly from shortly before Christmas eve to shortly after New Years, which is summer for us, and obviously not (northern) summer. This is not an official holiday period, other than the usual Christmas and New Years holidays, the rest is simply "Meh, we are closed for a couple of weeks" for the majority of companies / government departments. Or the silly season as it is known. I suspect a lot of other countries also close down most things during that period. We don't have any lengthy mid year holiday seasons though, officially or unofficially.

Other than Easter, the rest of our holidays tend to be moved to the nearest Monday or (not so often) Friday, hence Land of the Long Weekend.

School kids get a longer break at the beginning / start of the year, and if I recall (and it's not changed since I went to school) two shorter breaks during the year of two weeks each I think. Yes, I live within earshot of three schools, you'd think I would have noticed the differences in noise levels during my twelve year stay here. I've not really paid much attention.

I understand Europe has a lengthy period during August, where people bitch about all the tourists coming to their locality, so go to some other European holiday destination to get away from them, and go annoy the locals there.

I may be wrong, but I think USA has their famous school summer holidays, that a lot of movies are made about, which sounds like a lengthy mid year break. The movies are the only reason I know about this. I don't put a lot of stock in the accuracy of anything coming out of Hollywood though.

Other countries, and there are a lot of those, make up their own minds about their holiday periods. May or may not match up with USA, Europe, or Australia, purely coincidentally, or to align with international business needs.

So, some developers are going to miss out on their (northern) summer holidays, and some, even in the north, wont have holidays during that time to miss.

Boffins want to stop Network Time Protocol's time-travelling exploits

Re: Mum

"Some things in life just ain't worth changing. Kinda like, have you ever heard the old home phone ring when the power was out. Yeah, that kinda thing."

All my mobile phones will still ring if the power is out, and I can keep them charged to. Which was important when we had that week long power outage. I even charged my neighbours phone during that blackout a few times. I even have that old style ringing sound. I don't have a landline phone.

Re: One area of concern/complication - long lag time environments such as space

The main problem with your "transfer lags of minutes, hours, or even days" is the two minute timeout of TCP/IP. By the time there have been enough minutes to earn the plural designation, the sending system assumes the packet got lost. Forget about hours or days.

A different base protocol will be needed, possibly based on something that is currently being used in deep space missions. Then all the protocols for the next layer might need tweaking, if they assume TCP/IP timeouts.

I'm guessing these sorts of things are already solved problems in deep space spacecraft, their clocks likely have to be in sync with ground based clocks, so they know to send their collected data at the right time, or miss completely, know to fire their rockets at the correct time, etc.

“in order to succeed in shifting time at a Chronos client by even a small time shift (e.g., 100ms), even a powerful man-in-the-middle attacker requires many years of effort (e.g., over 20 years in expectation).”

Ah, but if you do it often enough, all those 100ms time shifts eventually add up to 20 years, and you can get your attack finished in no time. I refer interested commentards to the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who for two good demonstrations of this principle in operation.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

"A good plan with one flaw. If a pendulum needs winding twice a day....

How are you going to know when to wind the pendulum?"

I was just pointing out that a stopped clock is correct twice per day, seems the perfect solution to your problem.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

"your sundial will always read the same time."

They say a stopped clock is correct twice a day.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

"simply let your pc sit in the sun for an hour or two"

My super powerful pocket computer ... er I mean my two year old flagship smartphone, is entirely solar powered. So I do that all the time anyway.

The Notch contagion is spreading slower than phone experts thought

Re: The biggest problem with Android is this...

"IMHO we should start ranking the manufacturers on timely security updates"

For what it is worth, my Moto Z, flagship from two or three years ago, started life with Android 6.0.1 when I got it out of the box, got 7.0 OTA soon after, monthly OTA updates until end of last year, there was several months delay, then it got 8.0.0 OTA. My last OTA update was a week or two ago, security patches and kernel from May. I fully expect it to keep getting OTA updates every month or two, and perhaps Android 9 several months after that's released.

Likely not the best, but pretty good. Tends to be only a month or two behind for security updates.

I can't give details for my old Galaxy S3, I pretty much rooted it and flashed it shortly after buying it. Moto Z is almost unadulterated Android, Galaxy S3 isn't, which is why I flashed it after giving the Samsung software a brief trial. If Motorola fall behind with their updates, I'll likely put LineageOS on it. Though I understand LineageOS doesn't support Google Daydream, and might not support Moto Mods. Which could be a deal breaker.

Re: Feature or "Feature".

"So when I tell people that my nose is my best feature, I should be shutting up then?"

Only if you put "feature" in scare quotes, feature noses are fine.

"What files are you putting on or off of your phone regularly?"

For me, it's mostly VR porn, which live in the micro SD card. When I give VR demonstrations to seniors, using that phone and a Google Daydream, I keep that card out of the phone. Don't want any of them stumbling across my porn collection, the venue managers might get upset. Some of the seniors might get upset, though some are a raunchy lot.

I do some volunteer work at this seniors place, as their IT guy. Teaching seniors how to use their phones and laptops, helping them with what ever thing they need help with. The whole stumbling across porn thing worked the other way one day. One of the seniors brought his laptop in, his web browser had stopped working. So I fire up the browser, note what error happens, a quick easy fix for an experienced computer guy like me. Then I fired up his browser once more, to show him it's now working. Naturally the browser said it detected it had crashed, should it open up the tabs it was showing before the crash? Being in helpful mode, I clicked on yes, the guy might have some important tabs open he would like to return to. The web site the browser opens up is full of porn, and worse, not my type of porn at all. I say "Oops", close it quickly before anyone pops their head in my office, and we have a bit of a laugh.

Paris, coz she's been known to pop up unexpectedly in porn, my type of porn.

Re: Notch isn't so bad

"Secondly many are designed to look all pretty, but really need to be cased."

My Motorola Moto Z came with a "bumper", plastic thingy that covers the edges. It also came with one of the "style Moto Mods". If you are not familiar with the Moto Z series, the have a modular hardware system they call Moto Mod. One type of mod is called "style", basically just a plastic back that looks fancy, comes in many styles. The one I got in the box is fake wood grain. Together the bumper and the style mod make a reasonably protective case. I've dropped it several times, and it's been dropped by others. Typically one corner of the bumper takes most of the impact, it tends to fall off, as does the style mod. Not a scratch on any of those three items.

Other mods are available, some third party ones, YMMV with those other mods.

I also added a third party screen protector, and camera protector on the rear camera. They have worked well to.

"Thirdly, why must the screen be so naked? Why can't we have bezels that protect the screen?"

Yep, that bumper extends a millimeter or two past the front of the phone, providing effective "bezels that protect the screen". Which brings me back to ...

"Firstly too many phones are made out of horribly slippery materials."

The naked Moto Z is indeed slippery, the bumper and style mod not so much. You can feel the fake wood texture. Nicely matt.

Re: Charge by wire

"wireless charging is only about 75-80% efficient"

Which is a big problem for me, I charge my phones from a solar powered battery, and it's the middle of winter on this side of the planet. At this time of year, due to the position of the large house next door relative to the only useful place I can hang my small solar panel out of a window, I don't get much sun past 3 PM, none at all past 4 PM. During summer, the sun sets further south, where there is empty street, so I get lots of strong sun until the late sunset. So this time of year I sometimes have to be careful with my phone power usage, especially if there's lots of cloud. Wireless is out, too much power loss, I don't like it anyway for the reasons others have pointed out above.

If I was living at the north end of the building, this would not be a problem. I have to move in the next two months, sun position in winter will be one of the selection criteria for the new place.

I have successfully kept three phones entirely solar powered using my little panel and battery for several years. The last two, the only time they where not solar charged was at the factory, they had a charge in them when I bought them new. The same with any Bluetooth devices I use with them.

"I dislike how they allow the phone background to extend up there though, making the notch obvious."

If the notch isn't obvious, how can you show of your fancy expensive new phone with the fancy expensive feature that only 22 percent of flagship phones are copying?

"And I think they should extend the display to the sides, the back, the phone cover, the charging lead and the box it came in. But what do I know?"

Give them time, there's a few technical issues to solve before they can put a decent display on a charging lead. A string of Christmas tree lights is just too low rez.

Bankrupt Aussie Hells Angel scoops £750k lottery jackpot

Re: Huh?

"Quite impressed that the Hell's Angles manage to run these complex tax scams."

People from all walks of life join these sorts of groups. So yes, that includes accountants, stock brokers, bankers, lawyers, computer programmers, police, judges, etc.

Re: Tautology?

"There was a Goldwing with a folding trailer - to act as breakdown rescue to make sure motorways are flowing."

That reminds me of the day I saw a big road bike driving past, with a small kids sized motorbike strapped to it. Not sure if that was an emergency bike in case the big one broke down, or it was being delivered somewhere.

Re: Tautology?

It was a very long time ago, early '80s, and to be honest, now that you ask me, I can't recall if it was my 250 CC dirt bike (Yamaha or Honda, I had a slightly bigger road bike at the time, one of each brand, not sure which was which) or my mates 750 (Honda I think). He had the power, but I had the traction, I've climbed up near vertical rock walls on it. It wasn't towed very far, just had to be moved several meters to the left, and no one had a car handy. It was the oversized caravan type mobile home. Wasn't moving fast enough to get enough momentum going to overcome friction when we cut it loose, it just ground to a stop fairly quickly.

Back to towing 313 kg of meth in a diplomatic bag, I have no idea how much space that occupies, so may need something bigger than a bike trailer. How big do they make diplomatic bags?

Re: Tautology?

For 313kg, your gonna need a bloody big bag, and something a bit bigger than a motorcycle to help carry it. Though considering I have towed a fully furnished mobile home behind my motorcycle once, I guess you could stick it in one of those bike trailers.

Not API: Third parties scrape your Gmail for marketing insights

Re: Selectivity, again...

Yes there's a difference. I never gave the GMail app that came with my phone permission to do anything, in fact I disabled it and installed K-9 Mail instead. K-9 Mail has all the permissions it asked for, I trust it, that's why I picked it. If K-9 Mail starts sending emails to third parties, a permission it never asked for, a lot of people will be very surprised, likely we'll read about it on El Reg, it's quite popular. So the only entities reading my emails are me, K-9 Mail, my email server/s, any email servers between me and the recipient, and the recipient (and what ever software they use), perhaps the ISP / government / Gmail / wife / husband / 12 year old offspring at their end if they are not quite as paranoid as me, and perhaps any nasty people or TLAs snooping on our wires...

Sigh, might as well just tell world+dog these days if its email.

"In the goold old days it was perfectly acceptable to send far-flung friends and family a card every Christmas."

Today that works well enough for my family, birthday emails, unless there's something specific we need to chat about.

"Unfortunately some companies take personalization to an extreme, but an online experience devoid of personalization would feel oddly generic to the average consumer,"

Where can I sign up to feel oddly generic web sites? Considering that dark text on light backgrounds are the current fashion, I much prefer light text on a dark background, and most sites don't offer a dark theme, I do all my web site personalization in my browser. I also personalize my online advert experience, by removing most of them.

It's not a good look to refer to everybody as consumers though.

"Google has argued that nothing is proprietary, and like AMP, it's all based on open-source and open published standards."

Like how their chat system started off being a somewhat well behaved Jabber / XMPP thing, but has drifted away?

Dear Samsung mobe owners: It may leak your private pics to randoms

Re: If anyone was randomly sent my phone photos

"plus bonus that most spending habits are private"

Or where private, if your galleries of shopping photos just got sent to a random from your contact list.

Re: Or you're worried about the bill?

And apparently the bug was sending entire albums of photos, not just one or two random ones. With 64 GB phones, hooked up to 256 GB micro SD cards, that could be a very large amount of photos sent. Bill shock, and maybe something even more shocking if your phone sends GBs of your personal naughty photos to your mother or boss. Photos like this for instance ->

Call your MEP! Wikipedia blacks out for European YouTube vote

Re: Gentlemen (and ladies to)...

Is that the end of cats as content, or cats as users?

Though they say on the Internet no one can tell if you are a dog, I've seen more cats snuggling up with warm laptops than dogs. I guess there's more cats using the Internet than dogs, and it was just the dog loving cat haters that made that quote to be about dogs instead of cats.

As far as I'm aware, only monkeys have had copyright issues, so perhaps our feline masters are not concerned?

High Tech Concern: Struggling HTC to slash a quarter of workforce

Re: Another post to be deleted by a mod...

I fully agree with that, have an upvote. I was gonna comment on the same mistake.

Though I do have an email client, it is a bit of a pain to try to remember which of my almost infinite number of email addresses I used for El Reg. I'm a fairly decent proof reader to.

Recently I have been exchanging some emails with their webmaster over a couple of problems, I might just get the hang of it soonish. On the other hand, it's often fun to wrap the correction, posted as a comment, in a joke, and seems to be a tradition. Likely the tradition is due to most others having the same issues with the current system.

Re: XDA IIs / IIi Today?

"Then navigate to F-Droid and just download non-slurp open-source alternatives to everything"

While that is my plan, I've not spotted any VR apps on F-droid, and there's a few other gaps (no pun intended) in their app coverage. Yes, I do intend to write some and put them on F-Droid, some day, eventually. I have a TODO list that is just a pointer to all my other TODO lists.

Pi-lovers? There are two fresh OSes for your tiny computers to gobble

Re: noob boot

There are install systems that let you do so over ssh, no need for local pointy clicky or typey.

Re: Very nice.

"it has a GPS tracking so somewhere there is a hard drive with all the telemetry of every journey she has made (probably) so her car could potentially be used as evidence against her if she was to be caught speeding !! but you have to weigh the good up with the potentially bad..."

If she's well aware of that fact, it might stop her from speeding, which might prevent an accident. I can't see the bad in that at all. Other abuses of telemetry on the other hand...

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

"Even molly-guard doesn't help when you're local."

I've only recently started using molly-guard, and I haven't delved deep into it's configuration yet, just a quick test that told me "yep, when you try to shut down via ssh, it asks you 'which box do you think this is'". I do believe you can add your own checking scripts though. Say, for example, "Test if this machine is currently running any VMs, then ask - Which VM do you think you are trying to shutdown?", which might have helped you. If you answer "Eddy", being the name of one of the VMs, but the local machine is called "Bob", then Bob's still your uncle, Molly bitches, you slap your forehead, and try telling Eddy to go away instead.

I had a machine sitting on my desk with two hot swappable drive caddies. I don't recall why, but I do recall at one point pulling out the one I thought was not currently in use, but instead pulling out the one the OS was operating from. Luckily no damage, and nothing critical was running at the time.

Re: shutdown silliness

"It enabled us to build in various extras such as inhibit new database connections during the grace period. Good luck doing that with halt."

That's the sort of thing the previously mentioned molly-guard is for, either available in other flavours of OS, or you could roll your own using similar principles.

Re: Long uptimes are a disaster waiting to happen

That is precisely why I reboot computers after anything that is involved in the reboot process is involved in an update. I want to test that right now, not at some random point in the future where it might be important for it to reboot quickly and smoothly coz the boss is breathing down your neck and the customers are waiting for normal service to return after the week long power failure that drained all your UPSes. That's exactly the wrong time to find out you need to reboot into repair mode to repair some random update that happened months ago, and it might take some time to fix.

Re: Halted machine on other side of the planet

"Not a lot you can do about that when you're five thousand miles away."

This is the sort of thing that Intels IME is actually good for, remote control of the power button, even for turning on accidentally powered down servers. Though generally you need a server class computer to use that sort of thing, even if it is in most / all Intel CPUs these days.

When Google's robots give your business the death sentence – who you gonna call?

Re: El Reg asked Google to comment but had not received a response at publication time.

"Did you get referred to a bot?"

Yes, and the computer said no.

I started reading these comments thinking I should make that joke, but a couple of others did already. However, I couldn't resist this time.

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the pocket super computer screaming "NOOOOOooo...!" in the new Australian female accent Google recently released, that sounds more yankie than Aussie.

"* In absence of evidence to the contrary assume O stands for Orifice and you won't go too far wrong."

You can probably assume the C stands for another word for a certain type of orifice.

Re: If its mission critical

"If you don't own the infrastructure that you make money from, then you deserve what you get."

Or as an old boss of mine used to put it - always own the means of your own production.

Re: If its mission critical

"But why do you trust disk drives that someone else has built?"

You don't, which is why things like RAID and backups exist. One thing you can trust is that if a hard drive fails, the other hard drives from the same manufacturing batch are likely to fail soon to.

One thing I can trust is that any type of flash storage will fail sooner rather than later in my home, but that's coz the use cases I have for them are rather abusive of their limitations. Meh, that ones on me.

Stanford brainiacs say they can predict Reddit raids

I knew these things back in the '80s, when I would sometimes be called upon to chase away online trolls and other ne'er-do-wells.

Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino

Re: Yeahh!

At least this sterile neutrino wont be giving birth to other egotistical particles.

"...and your mother as a large mass..."

...who is eyeing off the mess you made on the rubber sheet and shaking her head. Expect a cosmic hosing off soon.

Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

"But who says the sheet is flat in the absence of matter? If is wrinkled,"

So you are saying the universe is a wrinkled sheet like on a recently slept in bed, and we are just waiting for the cosmic housekeeper to make the bed, and straighten out physics until the heat death of the universe makes us all go to sleep once more? So the real question is, will humans be sent to bed without supper, or can we stay up late watching the more confusing episodes of Doctor Who?

Re: This is not making physics any easier

"If there was no on-going radiation pressure Sol would collapse due to gravity relatively quickly, in the order of a few seconds, iirc. We'd get the news about eight minutes later."

And we would begin crapping ourselves nine minutes later. Whether we would finish crapping ourselves coz our crap has frozen, before the panic babies get born, is something I'm not equipped to calculate, but my moneys on no panic baby births. Many other things would kill us all off before that nine months elapses.

Kill the blockchain! It'll make you fitter in the long run, honest

Re: At Vince H, re: FlockChain...

"You don't want to know how much time it takes to proceed through shrubland brimming with ripe raspberries."

You could no doubt get through it quicker if you don't stop to pick and eat the raspberries.

Virtual reality meets commercial reality as headset sales plunge

Re: VR has a fundamental problem

People are working on the vergence / accommodation problem. Light field and projection based systems, like Magic Leap is alleged to be, is one way. Others have working prototypes of multi-plane systems.

Registry to ban Cyrillic .eu addresses even if you've paid for them

Re: ACII stupid question and you get a stupid ANSI...

"I wonder how you do Japanese or Chinese?"

I believe that's what things called "input methods" where invented for. Software shims between your keyboard and applications that allow typing with those sorts of character sets. Some or all of that may be entirely bogus, I've not dealt with them myself, only noticed as others on the development team coded for them. So I can't even enlighten you on how they actually work.

Et tu, Gentoo? Horrible gits meddle with Linux distro's GitHub code

Re: Where's Hardened Gentoo when needed?

My guess is the developer community got split with the Funtoo fork, but I've not been following things in Gentoo land.