Posts by Mike

Worm breeds botnet from home routers, modems

Why do we need strong passwords?

Why on earth is it that ANY system today allows enough password attemps that passwords need to be 'strong' to be secure. It is mostly trivial to implement increasing lockout times depending on number of failed attempts, making any brute-force attack impractical.

Insistance on users having 'strong' passwords is a major PITA just means most people can't remember them, or can;t use things they can remember easily, so write them down.

Sony demos ultra-expensive, ultra-thin OLED telly

New? Saw it a year ago

I saw this on sale over a year ago in Tokyo, ISTR price was about GBP1K.

Yes the display is stunning but who wants a TV that small?

OK it's thin, but the attatched base makes this pointless.

Nice proof of concept that OLED TV may some day be good though.

Sony e-book reader to debut in UK tomorrow

But will it read PDFs?

Unless it will do PDFs, it's another turkey a la Kindle. My money's on it being a DRM-infected piece of crippleware.

DVLA's 5m driver details giveaway

Private parking tickets are scams

Pretty much all these private parking tickets/fines/penalties are scams to fleece the foolish, often run by shady characters hiding behind layers of dodgy companies.

They are NOT enforceable in law and should NEVER be paid. They will send all kinds of threatening letters, but they will NOT go to as they know a properly defended case would be lost. There is no known case of a defended PPC 'fine' being upheld in court.

For the full lowdown on this scam, take a look in the parking tickets forum at www.pepipoo.com

Cops admit CCTV no use in deterring drunken violence

Alternate uses

..which is why a lot of CCTV cameras which were justified on grounds of crime prevention are now bieng pointed at bus lanes and honey-trap parking spots to screw the motorist.

E-government is working for DVLA

Profiting from selling driver details to scammers

Well their system of selling drivers' details to private parking ticket scammers certainly seems to be doing good business - I guess profit is how they define 'working' these days....

Remembering the Commodore PET 2001

Byte Shop Gants Hill

Now that brings back memories of when a few of us kids would pile down there after school to play on PETs and Cromenco Z2 (?) rack based CP/M boxes (with their 8" disc drives..).

Rentokil to set Q Branch on UK's rats

I've seen some of this kit....

A while ago I saw a high-tech Rentokil mousetrap, which detects the presence of the rodent entering when it breaks an infra-red beam, shuts the door behind it, gasses it using a small CO2 canister, then sends a radio signal to a local server, which sends a text message so someone can come get the body.

Apparently the gas is needed as otherwise they eat their way out.

Crypto boffins break car cypher

Crafty Cockney will be out of luck

Capturing & replaying won't work - car keyfobs have been using rolling-code systems for well over a decade. Once the car receives a message, it will ignore any subsequent copies.

The Keeloq crack is about predicting the next code in the sequence.