Posts by David Hicklin

Let's roll the 3d6 dice on today's security drama: Ah, 15, that's LG allegedly hacked, source code stolen by Maze ransomware gang

"as long as you don't attack anything in the country where you reside"

or is on friendly terms with the country where you reside..

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Re: Sorry to see them go...

Still got my OM10 up on the shelf, not used it for a very long time but very nostalgic, good solid quality unlike today.

Amazingly the hot shoe flash still works after putting some new batteries in.

Grav wave boffins are unsure if they just spotted the smallest black hole or the biggest neutron star seen yet

Stars between 2 and 5 solar masses

So what happened to them...where did they go ?

'One rule for me, another for them' is all well and good until it sinks the entire company's ability to receive emails

Re: Been There...

Also seen it happen when the home mail account box filled up causing it to bounce messages back until the work account also filled and started sending mailbox full messages. After that they just kept on bouncing back to each other.

Highways England waves around £62m contract for National Traffic Information Service after brief chat with vendors

Re: Utterley Useless

Don't forget the "Reports of Debris" for mile after mile....never seen anything yet.

"Animals" and "Pedestrians" are also available.

Two weeks before the first US commercial crew launch, NASA spanks more cash on an autumn Soyuz seat

Russian

I know they have to learn Russian to rode the Soyuz, is this requirement lifted using the USA rides ?

Serial killer spotted on the night train from Newcastle

"https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/greater-anglia-near-miss-at-level-crossing-video-1-6449119"

Hells Teeth, no-script had a dicky fit there - had to scroll down the list so gave up.

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Re: In other news....

" nice macro language which made changing the password ten times back in a ring a matter of routine."

Which is great until they limit the number of password changes to one a day.

Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house

Re: "the lockdown may encourage more workplaces to embrace remote working"

The biggest issue will be managers who have a "bums on seats in the office" attitude, something that is almost at epidemic levels with UK management.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Re: Read Receipt

Has one where I worked once, someone forwarded emails to home automatically...only home got full and started bouncing messages back...which were forwarded again.....

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

I still want to know how they managed it when my laptop does not even *have* a webcam - they could make a fortune selling that technology.

Aww, a cute mini-moon is orbiting Earth right now. But like all good things, it too will abandon us at some point

"moon's sphere of gravitional influence and be slung back out into interplanetary space"

But could it be slung the other way and come down on someone's head ?

If you're running Windows, I feel bad for you, son. Microsoft's got 99 problems, better fix each one

Re: Not complaining, but...

Did not see a Feb malicious software scan thingy for Win7 but there was an IE Patch plus the usual rollups on WSUS.

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

Re: Good, good.

" increase immigration from Commonwealth countries (such as India) back to pre-EU levels of 300,000 or so per year"

I though it was more a case of "You want a trade agreement? Bend over here please!"

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Re: OpenOffice

"but the other team there had enough shouting arguments that the noise levels were the same as if it was full"

My pet hate of open plan is when conversations start of normally but as more start and the background noise level rises, each group talks louder to hear themselves starting a positive feedback loop that eventually makes a Disaster Area concert sound quiet

The $4.3bn trial of the century is over! Now we wait for judgment

The article does say "taken earlier in the case"

National Lottery Sentry MBA hacker given nine months in jail after swiping just £5

Re: It seems to me

According to the article the tool he was using relied on credentials stolen from other websites - so not reusing passwords would have stopped him in his tracks.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Re: rewarded for failure

He was learning on the job.

$Employer must've known they were taking a risk giving the job to an unqualified PFY,

To be fair that is probably how a lot of people (myself included) got started in IT in the first place

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

"Election manifestos have no legal status"

As I understood the reporting during the election, the manifesto is important when it come to the House of lords i.e anything in it can't be blocked or delayed as the manifesto is the "will of the people", or something like that.

Hence why they contain everything possible..

BBC tells Conservative Party to remove edited Facebook ad featuring its reporters

and that was just the number of 3rd party sites that you have to enable in No-Script just to see it !

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

Re: The senior manager wearing a mob cap and apron

"It's an interesting one - time and motion study with respect to total overall cost, or saving £1 in one go but costing £50 in a thousand instalments."

It depends on how your place is organised but most office based staff are salaried and hence a "fixed cost", so the bean counters don't see any difference on the bottom line, however the cleaners cost does appear.

hence the blank looks....

Irish eyes aren't smiling after govt blows €1m on mega-printer too big for parliament's doors

Re: This May be Apocryphal...

Suspect it happens more than you think, I can remember an engineering firm I worked at in the 80's making diesel generation sets often having huge chunks of steel counter weighing overloaded forks lifts when moving the completed sets in the yard.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

Re: Surely

"So if we see a human on the side of the road we look for subtle clues in body language as well as whether they are looking at us to determine whether they are about to cross the road in front of us, or pull out at a junction."

Not just humans, also applies to other car drivers where by experience I can (nearly always) tell by the way they speed up/slow down or the car "twitches" that they are about to cut across you to the exit slip at the last moment. Something new drivers have to learn which takes time, so they have to rely on faster reactions.

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: Great

"Ok, I'm not aware of any clamp meters that have remote displays "

NPower gave them out free years ago, might even have it in a box somewhere.....

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: They ALL mean Stop...

I can remember seeing traffic lights that had "Stop" and "Go" on the light lenses*, mind you that was the 1980's when I had just passed my test

(* Uttoxeter Old Road/Ashbourne Road, Derby)

UK govt snubs Intel, seeks second-gen AMD Epyc processors for 28PFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer

Re: Gen 2 and Not Gen 3 TR

For some reason I misread the headline as "2nd Hand" not "2nd Gen", which being UK government would be believable.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

Re: Mission Impossible

(including cancelling the ref. result, which would annoy some 17 million voters)

except as I have mentioned before, that 17 million is split between deal and no-deal, so unless one faction of that is less than 2% of those who voted, either leave option is the choice of a minority

TL;DR - there is no Brexit solution that will please a Majority whichever way you cut it.

We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit

Re: Damned if you do...

The problem is that I don't think there *is* a solution to this saga, like the country Parliament is split between remain/leave with leave split deal/no deal - what the ratio of the latter is nobody knows as the question was not asked in the referendum.

Also Parliament voting seems to be just a yes/no, not option 1,2,3 etc, so whenever one of the 3 tribes starts getting ahead, the other 2 close it down.

I am not sure an election which will be just about Brexit will help, and if it does by any chance then we will need another election to get a government voted in on non-brexit issues.

Whichever way it goes about half the country will be happy, the other half hacked off, and it will take a generation or 2 to heal the divisions.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Re: Banning Cyclists

"insurance/VED/MOT problem..."

probably because most of the time they are using cloned number plates as well...

Here's what Autonomy told its salesmen they were allowed to do

Re: as much revenue .... recognised within each quarter

Yup been there, at the other end where towards the end of each month the finance department come round with a begging bowl for "Anything we can invoice for?"

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Cable Length

and for each doubling of speed the maximum cable length will halve..

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Re: No legal requirement to inspect meters any more

although by law they will still have to inspect the meters every two years anyway.

That's no longer the case, the requirement has been scrapped.

That has not reached the guy who read my meters a couple of weeks ago yet - he said they have to come annually to check that the installation was still safe.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

Re: Ah, but

Ah Atari 800XL floppy drives -huge things and I had a pair of them, one would only work after it had warmed up for 10 minutes

Loved my 800XL, even had a 256KB ram pack hanging off the back and got it to print to a Brother thermal typewriter...those were the days, sold it for a good price just before the market crashed for home PC;s to get a IBM PS2 model 30 via the supplier at work for a decent discounted price.

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

Sounds like IoT meets blockchain, now what could possibly go wrong there ??

Disengage, disengage! Cali DMV reports show how often human drivers override robot cars

Re: AI seldom makes mistakes, people do

"Also ask yourself if, given, as you say, it's possible to train human beings to drive safely, why isn't it possible to build a machine that can be trained in the same way as a human with equally good results*. Because it's quite clear that that's not the way self-driving cars are being taught."

I well remember what my driving instructor told me: He teaches me how to pass a driving test - it is only after you have passed that you actually learn how to drive.

Crypto-jackers slip Coinhive mining code into YouTube site ads

Re: We need NoScript for Firefox 57, and WebAssembly's bytecode is more insecure than Flash

"Sadly NoScript isn't supported by Firefox 57 :("

I'm on FF 58 and NoScript is working now, just not as polished as before, even remembered my settings going from 56 -> 58

IT 'heroes' saved Maersk from NotPetya with ten-day reinstallation blitz

Re: 20% drop going to manual

"I suspect that the loss would be an exponential function of time. Another 10 days? Major crisis. 10 more? No company."

Plus some ships could have been at sea during those 10 days, so agree that the loss rate would ride as time went by.

Don't just grab your CPU bug updates – there's a nasty hole in Office, too

Re: don't forget to patch your Android devices

I finally managed to patch my T-Mobile Sony xperia SP phone after 3 years of no OS updates.....

,,,,,Switched to the dark side and got an iPhone. In 3 weeks I have got twice as many updates as the old Sony!

Facebook, Amazon fund new trans-Pacific submarine cable

Cable Management?

At the rate they are laying these cables the seabed will start to look like the underside of the DC floor with a rats nest of cables tangled up with each other.

Microsoft slowly closes Outlook Premium's door while Office 365 winks at you across the street

Re: NeoOffice and WordPerfect

Have an upvote for WordPerfect, I found it a lot easier to use than Word which I still can't indent a single paragraph on without every other one in the document indenting by a random number of tabs...

Using LibreOffice on my other laptop now (with Linux Mint) and found it more than good enough, looks like I'll be jumping that way when windows 7 updates end...

Cancel the farewell party. Get back to work. That asteroid isn't going to hit Earth in October

Re: Aim is improving.

> No, next one will be 6800km the other side. Close, but no cratercigar

You forgot the diameter of the Earth : at around 12,700km it should be pretty close to a bullseye.

Banking websites are 'littered with trackers' ogling your credit risk

Re: I think we need to know...

>> I keep a separate browser, configured to clean itself on quit.

>Why a separate browser? Permanent private mode has been the name of the game for years now.

I have a VM *just* for online banking - it does not get used for anything else, yes it has Rapport + noscript + ublock origin.

Good luck finding some tracking history there

Would you believe it? The Museum of Failure contains quite a few pieces of technology

Re: Kodak Digital Camera

I still have - and use - my DC280, and yes the battery eating was an annoying issue. These days I find that the current rechargeables seem to work much better with it. Got a new memory card recently (8GB!) of which it probably uses just 5%..

Whilst it is a very old camera I find it much easier to use than the modern ones that just seem to cram in as many operating modes as the can.

Ofcom wants automatic compensation for the people when ISPs fail

Re: Go, charge 'em high

As always YMMV - I have been with Sky Fibre for 4 years now and have only had a few minor interruptions, certainly no worse or better than BT and Virgin before them.

Speed has been rock solid at all times.

Now UK bans carry-on lappies, phones, slabs on flights from six nations amid bomb fears

Re: (Travel) Insurance fraud on the rise...

But check your insurance carefully - putting things like laptops into the hold might not be covered...

BT installs phone 'spam filter', says it'll strain out mass cold-callers

Re: answer machine

Same here, and then answer the phone if they start leaving a message and we know (or are at least wish to talk to them). Calls dropped a lot of time, even the 'international' ones.

Now if only it was as easy with spam texts on the mobile...where the text "STOP" to opt-out gives a warning that this might cost you charges - wtf!?

Botched Microsoft update knocks Windows 8, 10 PCs offline – regardless of ISP

OS Web Stats

So next months statistics on which OS's are connecting most to those web sites will show a sudden drop for W10 and all the experts will excitedly jump to the wrong conclusions

Sophos Windows users face black screens after false positive snafu

Re: Solving the wrong problem

AV currently works on the basis of "blacklist" the bad stuff - allow anything else.

To get your solution means turning it on its head and whitelist what is allowed and block everything else. It can be done as long as everything executable on the computer is stable and does not change very often - and that needs planned and tested updates.

Sadly not exactly practicable now unless you wall the OS off from all other software creators/vendors and only allow certified software from a "store"....oh wait..

Windows 10 Anniversary Update crashing under Avast antivirus update

Re: Avast...

Have an upvote for Avira.

Have it on my W10 Virtual Installation where it seems to play OK (have it to remind myself just how bad and horrible w10 is)

Salesforce bins all Android phones bar Nexii and Galaxies

Re: Sony...

Well my Sony Xperia SP has not had an update since May 2014 to the OS and the phone is not *that* old.

Sure apps update all the time, even those I have not intention of ever using.