Posts by Phones Sheridan

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

I actually found this post helpful back when I was deciding to use Cloudflare or not.

https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare#:~:text=Websites%20should%20avoid%20using%20Cloudflare,the%20state%20of%20the%20web.

Internet Explorer 11 limps to the end of Windows 10 road

My photocopiers can only be programmed from Internet Explorer. Cant see me replacing them any time soon, far too expensive and far too reliable.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

Re: Can of worms

I have fallen off the floor on two occasions in my life.

France levels up local video game slang with list of French terms to replace foreign words

Re: E-sports professionals?

Even better if it's a 2 player co-op!

Re: Now that is a fine example of administrative busybodies

I had to do a years computing french as part of my time at uni. Only problem was, the teacher, while thoroughly fluent in several languages (including native English, Russian and French, he was a cross breed) he knew not a jot about computers, and there was no formal curriculum outside of "where is the gas station" and "can I have 100 grams of butter please", so he asked us to bring in anything we could find that was computer related, with an English and French translation printed on it, and he'd then teach us it. By the end of the year, I was fluent in Lemmings, Megalomania, Stunt Car Racer, Speed Ball 2 and many other Amiga games that a couple of us had original boxed copies of. No joke, part of our final exam was the question "Please list the system requirements to play the game "Lemmings".

I did get a B, but now some 30ish years later I can't remember diddly squat.

SEC probes Musk for not properly disclosing Twitter stake

Re: Egon Durban...tried to resign

This is probably mirroring that comic skit

You’re going to be fired!

You can’t fire me, I quit!

You can’t quit it’s in your contract!

What contract? You just fired me!

Ah, but we’ve not served you formal notice yet, just notice that you’re going to be given formal notice of being fired!

Reading between the lines, if he resigns he probably is entitled to a golden handshake. If he’s formally fired, he doesn’t get that. Or it’s the opposite way round depending on the lawyers.

Coinbase CEO says everything's OK after SEC filing gives netizens the jitters

Re: At some stage

"I have a lovely tower you could use to store them in..."

Having a lovely tower is all for naught unless you have a lovely bridge you can cross to reach it.

It so happens........

Another ex-eBay exec admits cyberstalking web souk critics

HIMYM

Sign me up for that job PLEASE!

("Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything")

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Internet goes boom!

Woke up to a Jeffrey Snover tweet, about a The Register article about a Jeffrey Snover tweet!

https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1523992647454498816?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

UK watchdogs ask how they can better regulate algorithms

Re: how they can better regulate algorithms

No I'm not, I've listed both, because both are fraudulent.

how they can better regulate algorithms

Easy, ban fraudulent ones. Take Google's search algorithm. Anyone with a website wholeheartedly believes that their SEO practices have got them onto the first page in Google. Only problem is, so do the other 1000000 owners of the other websites competing with them. There is only 5 slots available, yet 1000000 people think they have achieved to obtain one of them. The same goes for those people paying to appear in the search results. There is only a few slots available, yet thousands of people thinking they have managed to outbid their competitors. It's a con to anyone that can count.

Re: OMG

It does run out. Wind stops blowing, clouds stop sun shining, in fact it stops shining once a day regular as clockwork. Renewable energy runs out more frequently than fossil fuels do. Fossil fuels have been predicted to have ran out by now since when I was at school in the 70s. Bar the occasional power cut the gas is still flowing and the lights are still coming on.

ZX Spectrum: Q&A with some of the folks who worked on legendary PC

Re: Outrun for the win!

That and Afterburner, both with the supplied music tape pumping out my cheap-ass clone Schneider ghetto blaster. I was a bit disappointed with Space Harrier, not that they didn't manage to squeeze it into 48K, but that they got the up/down controls back to front compared to the arcade machine. I had to crack open my joystick and make a modification using spade terminals to switch it round! No music came with that game tho.

Judge dismisses Microsoft's challenges: ValueLicensing case to proceed in Britain

It's also an aptronym too. What a co-incidence!

"Microsoft had hoped to have its UK arm struck off from the claim and suggested that Ireland would be a better place for the claim to be heard,"

This is actually quite an achievement. If you look at the TOS for MS, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Paypal etc for supply into the UK, they all say that the agreement is between the UK customer, and the <insert foreign country here> office of the supplier, not it's UK subsiduary. Every case I've read about prior to this has usually fallen over at this hurdle.

Windows 11 usage stats within touching distance of... XP

Windows 11 doesn't seem to be being pushed out though. I have Windows 11 ready machines, that are still on windows 10, but are not telling me to upgrade yet. It's been this way since the beginning, MS have only been allowing it out in drips. Sure some people can force the upgrade through, and I am one of those (on a couple of machines), but all I've been met with are bugs which have made me glad it isn't being pushed out wholesale yet. Once MS pushes the button that activates the full roll-out, these figures will change.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows

"Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows"

First reason is off the shelf business packages. Until Linux gets off the shelf business packages, that allow you to do business, it isn't going to happen. And by business I mean the buying and selling of physical products, not developing software. In the UK Sage Accounts is probably the most widely used business software, I've only come across 3 companies in 30 years that were using something else. We are talking hundreds of thousands if not millions of companies using it. This software and it's abilities just do not exist on Linux. There are a few packages out there, that someone has wrote specifically for their own business, but it has no real measurable uptake on the market because it requires too much work to get it to work elsewhere, and Sage probably already does it.

Second reason is business presentation. Would you put Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman in front of your customer while trying to sell them a quantity of your product? Not a chance, your customer would take one look at them and walk away, yet in the Linux community, they are gods. Bill Gates in the 80s was a sharp business man, he got attention for the right reason, he was friendly, presentable. You could stick him in front of your customer, and your customers would lap it up and pull out their wallets. He spoke business. Linux people, don't.

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

Genuine question here. Some decades ago, a very technical friend I met at the Uni I went to, and had no reason to doubt, told me they used Z80B processors on the shuttle, because it only had <insert a number here I can't remember> official documented errors and therefore it was approved for "USE-IN-SPAAAAACE". They apparently could not use the then current 486, or previous x86 processors, because too many errors were still being discovered, and NASA liked to work with hardware that had not had newly discovered errors in a defined period of time. To this day I've genuinely believed this, because it made sense, but old me is starting to have doubts. It may not have been the Z80B after all, but is there anyone here that can confirm the essence of what I've believed all this time, or is this one of those urban legends, or something that may have started off as true and got carried away etc.

Microsoft-led move takes down ZLoader botnet domains

History is repeating itself?

And no mention of the clusterfuck that Microsoft made the last time they got a court order to swipe domains and cut off 4 million people.

We were using No-IP as our fail-over load balancing supplier at the time, and Microshaft cut us off for 3 days, all while lying through their teeth that genuine customers were unaffected.

The one thing we took away from it, using Cloud suppliers for any critical service, is an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach.

The march of Macs into the enterprise: Demand is on the increase

Re: Apple don't care for the enterprise

That's exactly what happened with us. Devices that had not had the latest update installed continued to work, updated devices didn't. It took 8 weeks for apple support to confirm this was a post-update problem (which involved lots of screenshots, videos and logs being sent back and forth), and say they were not supporting it. I held off for another 8 weeks, then I decided to bite the bullet and switch to Outlook or the Gmail client depending on the users requirements. We then finished off updating everyone's devices, which broke each one in turn with the Apple client.

As the former Apple employee stated above, this was caused by strong authentication, or the lack of. Apple dropped strong authentication between IOS releases, for reasons only known to Apple but probably in an attempt to push people to their Apple services. If your IMAPs continue to function, great, but they just are not using strong authentication.

Re: Apple don't care for the enterprise

Simple question then, have they resolved the issue regarding strong authentication and IMAP? If not then no amount of calling BS is going to change the fact that the update broke what was working previously.

The solution was to install Outlook or the Gmail client. Both continued to work after the upgrade and still do.

Re: Apple don't care for the enterprise

My last IOS upgrade broke IMAP functionality for me on the apple email client. The solution was to download another email client, but only after approximately 8 weeks when apple care support came back to me and told me that IMAP was business only functionality, and apple do not provide business support. Their products are consumer only.

Straight from the horses mouth.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Re: @AC "what harm does it do me"

An AC saying he doesn’t care about privacy. Yes I see the deliberate irony there.

Re: Let's tackle that by assuming good faith...

Data Mining is the method of finding out what questions you haven’t been asking about your data all along. You’ve got the apocryphal story about how Walmart one day started selling beer on the same isle as diapers initially to everyone’s confusion. What the public didn’t know was data-mining had found a correlation between the 2 products. Purchases of baby’s nappies were accompanied with purchases of beer, so Walmart put the 2 together to nudge more people into buying the same.

Apple notches up ninth €5m fine for ignoring nation's competition watchdog

Re: What to do?

The authorities in a country either apply to a court, or pass legislation allowing them to legally sanction Apple. Once they have this, assets can be seized, bank accounts frozen etc.

In the UK historically Trading Standards used to do this, but they just don’t seem to have the resources nowadays. If their demands were ignored, they’d go get a court order, then turn up unannounced with bailiffs and a police escort, if necessary to enforce a forced entry and confiscation of assets.

Brit techie shows us life in Ukraine amid Russian invasion

Re: War Tourism - yet another disruption opportunity!

My first thought was "how brave, well done", but the more I thought about it, the more I'm thinking "How utterly stupid". For someone working in Infosec I have to call into question their judgement. She was completely unprepared and her actions literally put her into physical danger, possibly leading to death, not only for her but for anyone else that may have had to come to her aid had she been unlucky. Any chance this was done for social media exposure, i.e. being seen to be doing the right thing.

Does she approach her Infosec work with the same amount of level headedness, planning and execution?

Russian chip makers face uncertainty as war drags on

Re: Call me cynical

Reminds me of the japanese manufacturing joke.

"We've completed your order for parts with a manufacturing failure rate of 10%. We've never had a customer specify how many parts they want to fail before so we're not sure how you want them delivered, for the time being we've put them all in this separate crate".

Where are the (serious) Russian cyberattacks?

I did notice a seriously large uptick in the amount of hits my networks were getting from Russia. At first I Geo-Blocked at the firewalls all russian IPs for all services but web servers, Within a few hours came a huge increase from Ukrainian IPs, so I added that country to the blocking rules. I then ended up playing whack-a-mole over the next few days as the surge switched to China, North Korea then Malaysia, Belize and finally Spain. My final solution was setting up a honeypot on an unused IP with nothing on it, that logged the probes and attempted log-ins to things like FTP, MySQL, POP3, RDP etc. A single probe or login attempt and the IP address is added to my firewall blocks network-wide. It seems to be working, the deluge is now a manageable trickle and I'm not constantly looking at the logs all day long.

The most interesting thing I found in the logs, I did lookups on blocked IPs, and found some were registered as belonging to the FSB. So it looks like they are openly and brazenly probing the internet looking for services.

AMD confirms Ryzen chips' stuttering performance on Windows 10, 11

Re: Oh. I thought it was Intel's fault ...

They did fix the previous sucky issues. One fix was a patch, the other a driver update.

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/pa-400

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

Re: So....

That would have been sensible considering the sanctions going on. The new-Cost of Aeroflot's fleet I've just worked out at (all in billion $, the average age of Aeroflot's planes are 6 years old).

B777 9.3

B737 3

A350 0.5

A330 2.8

A321 4.1

A320 6.4

That would have been a serious chunk out of some oligarch's pockets.

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

Re: fingerprint

It can't happen, it's been discussed to death.

In order to get the first imprisonment, the prosecutor (in the UK) has to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the person withholding the password, is indeed in possession of it. They have to prove that the person accessed a device within a recent period, so recently in fact that it's highly unlikely that the person could have forgotten the password. In cases where people have been imprisoned, the prosecution demonstrated using forensic data that the devices were accessed several times over several days all within the time frame leading up to the arrest and they have actual physical evidence proving that. "It's his device, he must know the password" is not and never has been sufficient evidence that has lead to a successful prosecution.

The idea that someone can be prosecuted a second time for the same offence say 2 years after the original prosecution is laughable. Courts have an understanding of the reliability of testimony from memory, and how it becomes more unreliable over days, weeks, months and years. Courtrooms (in the UK) are not like they appear in American TV dramas, where each interaction is tense and full of suspense with sharp back and forth dialogue, each word being met with surprise and an intake of breath from the jury. The prosecution never dramatically pulls out the final piece of damning evidence at the end of the trial that results in an instant "Guilty" from the Judge. No instead courtrooms are dull, methodical tedious places where previous policies, judgements and precedents are all brought up sequentially and legally argued over. Everyone and their dog in the courtroom understands the concept of degraded memory, and none of them would bother to try to argue that someone claiming that they have forgotten a password they last used over 2 years ago is lying. In fact for a prosecution to even begin under section 49 of RIPA 2000 specifically for withholding a password, a judge needs to first give permission to prosecutors to issue the notice of disclosure. Unreliability of memory is already an established and understood precedent so a second prosecution would probably fail at the first hurdle of trying to convince the judge to allow it to happen after such a long time.

So yes, it's a myth, In the 15 years since the law came into force it has never happened or been attempted. Where prosecutions have occurred, it has only been after physical evidence has been presented that has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the person must reliably know the password being withheld.

Re: fingerprint

That’s a myth. It’s never happened.

Deutsche Bank seeks options as sanctions threaten Russian dev unit

> "We have no code and no data housed in the Russia tech centre."

And while we're at it, could I sell you one of the bridges in London?

Amazon Alexa can be hijacked via commands from own speaker

Re: They are "mostly harmless", honest

We have one in our office of 10 people. It does get triggered by non Alexa related conversations, or when several people are on the phone at once (on headsets so they only hear their own conversation). So I think it is both listening at all times, and is set to have a stab at responding with somethng rather than holding back in the event of doubt.

Meta says it's building world's largest AI supercomputer out of Nvidia, AMD chips

You seem to have an issue with random word capitalisation there. Check your keyboard.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Time to buy some more blankets, it’s about to start getting cold as Putin turns on the gas stops in response.

I can see this being used as an excuse to ramp up the fracking.

IBM HR chief insists 'no systemic age discrimination'

Re: Genuine question...

Not to mention leaving his wife to fend for herself.

This data center will be Europe’s first with hydrogen backup power

Re: A Step In The Right Direction

I thought the problem with hydrogen, was that it can't be stored because its atoms are smaller than the atoms making the containers, so it leaks out and is lost?

Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

"The problem is, you can't tell what is worthless so you have to keep it all"

Back in the noughties I worked as IT support to a pharmaceutical company, They too complained that they never had enough space for raw data and that they NEEDED everything. I used to tell them to create a Zipfile from the raw data, and compare the sizes afterwards. The resulting zip file could be 0.1% of the size of the original files. I'd then point out that if maths can determine which data is pretty much redundant, then I'm sure they have the skills to do the same much more accurately. You could see the light-bulb go on inside their heads when it twigged most raw data is incredibly repetitive and can be discarded if you look for and identify it.

A quick example, a single sided DVD can hold just over 6 copies of the human genome. If you zip that, it will span 3 floppies.

The problem you can't solve so easily is the user that sticks a 1gb video into his Powerpoint presentation, and distributes a copy to everyone.

You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual

Re: Best manual

*Seen not seems

Best manual

The best manual I have ever seems was for the Coherent 3 unix clone operating system I used during my time at Uni. The university had Solaris machines, all I could afford was a 486 SX 25 and the $99 OS to go with it. The manual got me through Uni, it covered everything Unix right down to C programming. It was about a thousand pages thick. I’ve never seen anything like it since.

After I left Uni they did release a Coherent 4 which had X11 Windows support in 1992 which I did purchase, but having left Uni I never found a use for it. Windows for Workgroups was taking over the world, and it was another decade before I even came across another Unix implementation of any kind, and that was A Red Hat Linux web server circa 2005ish.

Nowadays any manuals don’t match the product I have in front of me. They don’t seem to keep up. Screen shots and instructions are just plain wrong and you’re pretty much left to fend for yourself.

Microsoft to block downloaded VBA macros in Office – you may be able to run 'em anyway

“ MOTW works by adding an attribute to files as they arrive on a device”

Other attributes are Stam, Spirit, Int and Battleshout!

12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...

Quick, someone give him the idea of creating a new Centos RHEL alternative! He'll have it done by breakfast!

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Re: Will google have to remove

"Will google have to remove the information that we now learn it obtained illegally ?"

Until a plaintiff obtains a legally enforceable judgement or court order against Google, the answer is no, it just wont.

And even then, Google is probably big enough to stall the process indefinitely, and even then once that's exhausted, they probably still wouldn't.

Russia's naval exercise near Ireland unlikely to involve cable-tapping shenanigans

VPN?

Genuine question. The undersea cables do have VPN end-points at both sides in this day and age, don't they?

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Re: A Cool Billion ! Roll Up, Roll Up !

Self certification is certainly permitted, visit https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-the-ukca-marking and scroll down to the bottom section titled "Legislative areas where self-declaration of conformity for UKCA marking is permitted".

In practice if you have CE certification, you can self certify by listing the relevant UKCA conformity that matches the CE conformity you have on a like for like basis.

HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge

Re: Be wary of the word substantially

Reminded at the beginning of the trial when this judge said to the prosecution something to the effect of “are you telling me an 8bn fraud was carried out by only 2 people?”

James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its new home – an orbit almost a million miles from Earth

Re: Partnership

There’s a pretty good video here that explains amongst other things, the position, it’s orbit and why, in layman’s terms too!

https://youtu.be/4P8fKd0IVOs