Posts by DrewWyatt

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

ISP T & C's

My new ISP has something interesting in the terms and conditions. By using their service I agree to only access content suitable for all audiences. So technically, if I watch a program rated PG on iPlayer, I have breached their T&C's.

Do I think they are watching me closely enough to terminate my account if I watch an episode of Dr Who? No.

Do I think they will use this as an excuse to terminate my account if they get a request asking "Who was using this IP address at this time" or I become difficult in any other way? Oh, yes.

How not to attract a WSL (or any) engineer

Re: Abort Retry Fail

I had an interview with Canonical a few years ago. It is still the only interview I have ever had where the interviewer called me "Dude" the whole way through...........

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

I can fully understand safeguarding your partner, as that is what I am doing too.

It also doesn't help that during lockdown my commute has gone from a mile to fifty miles, due to the business I was working for got bought and merged.

But why that VPN? How WireGuard made it into Linux

Re: @Deanamore - Your analogy is flawed

I tend to use ClusterSSH for that (cssh)

Texas cops sue Tesla claiming 'systematic fraud' in Autopilot after Model X ploughed into two parked police cars

Re: Tesla's auto-pilot works flawlessley, Smoking cigarettes is good for you.

If you so much as use an aerosol in a manner other than directed.....

- Gone in 60 seconds

G7 countries outgun UK in worldwide broadband speed test

Please wait for a short time

We had CitiFibre dig up our roads at the start of March. The service still isn't available to me, 6 months later. How long does it take to switch it on?

Ex-DJI veep: There was no drone at Gatwick during 2018's hysterical shutdown

Re: Stealth cloak, anybody?

If they have a cloaking device, surely that makes them Romulan?

NSA: We 'don't know when or even if' a quantum computer will ever be able to break today's public-key encryption

Re: "users will divulge their passwords in return for chocolate"

Looks like they did it a few years on the run. Here is what the register wrote about it in 2008:

https://www.theregister.com/2008/04/16/password_security/

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

Re: Bye bye Samsung

As an aside, it looks like if you unlock the bootloader on a Samsung Z fold 3, that will disable the cameras. So you can choose, have your bloatware and a camera, or have control over your device, but no camera.

Chinese auto-maker accused of altering data after fatal autonomous car accident

Re: Accused of altering data

That used to happen regularly where I grew up to the busses on the school routes.

Never trust a bored teenager with a big red button marked "EMERGENCY"

More than half of companies rethinking back-to-office plans amid variant uncertainty and vaccine mandates – survey

Re: Office half full or office half empty?

Yes, same for me. Before lockdown I took a job where the office was within a mile of my house, as that gave me more time with my family. During lockdown my job moved 50 miles up the M1, and I'm not looking forwards to doing that commute every day.

Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

Feature creep, what do you mean?

Just doing a bit of troubleshooting, don't mind me..

Now where was it I needed to go to find out what DNS servers I am using? /etc/resolv.conf? Nope, not there. Now, I'm sure I put them around here somewhere. I'd forget my head if it wasn't bolted on, must be getting old...

Mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble, kids these days, grumble, grump, get off my grey beard....

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

Re: Loss of income? Inconvenience?

The loss could be much more substantial than that. I used to work for a large, multinational company that had as a clause in the terms of employment that being arrested was considered an instant dismissal offence. I asked HR about it and they told me that even if you were innocent, there would be disruption to your working life while you proved it, which would make you less effective doing your job and would involve substantial time off work, so it was in the companies best interest to sever ties as early as possible, especially if it turned out you were guilty.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Re: Hard cheese

It is risky to take Cheesy photos.

China all but bans cryptocurrencies

Re: "And then there’s the Digital Yuan"

How about recording the history of an item where the history affects the value? For example, if you put all MOT test results in a blockchain, along with any accidents, and services done then that might make it more difficult for you to be sold a car that has "Only one lady owner, never raced or rallied, just used once a week to go to the shops" and when you get the V5 find that it has been written off 3 times...

Sure, Dave might seem like he's avidly listening to this morning's meeting, but he's actually doing a yoga routine

Re: Only in my underwear?

Marty McFly:

Calvin? Wh... Why do you keep calling me Calvin?

Lorraine Baines:

Well, that is your name, isn't it? Calvin Klein? It's written all over your underwear.

Google patches WebView component to end unexpected Android crash fest

Re: Which apps? Are thy sure it's fixed?

For me it killed Waze and DuckDuckGo.

Google Maps still worked fine though.

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

Re: Should not have Netherlands VAT ...

From having participated in negotiations for bigger storage arrays, I know that some businesses agree with the manufacturer that they will have a small stock of warranty spares on site. I have also seen agreements where the manufacturer agree to keep a small stock locally, say within 20 miles. That way the spares can cover multiple businesses in the same geographical area.

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Re: Rebulid?

I put my tip of the hat to "Keepass2Android Password Safe" from "Phillip Crocoll (Croco Apps)". Interfaces with my fingerprint reader and auto fills if asked. The way I have set it it up I use it on my phone, tablet, laptop and my wife's phone, and I can add a password from any device, and I get the update everywhere.

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the Developer, this is just my opinion from personal use, your mileage may vary.

This scumbag stole and traded victims' nude pics and vids after guessing their passwords, security answers

Re: Computer++ sentence

A few years ago I was looking in to putting in a CCTV system. I asked the local old bill about it and they told me that they would not accept any images from private CCTV systems as evidence, as there was no chain of custody. Basically, I couldn't prove that the location, date and time were correct. If I wanted them to accept the footage as evidence it had to be installed by a qualified and certified installer and run by an approved and certified company.

In the end I didn't bother.

Borkem ipsum: Supermarket gifts Thailand a tech fail that will echo down the millennia – and probably choke a turtle

Re: Thanks!

I like Bacon Ipsum:

https://baconipsum.com/

It even has a JSON API for automated bacon goodness....

One careful driver: Make room in the garage... Bloodhound jet-powered car is up for sale

Re: Peanuts

Woohoo!

So glad to see we have munged things together so much we needed a category all of our own, "Mixed"

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

Re: How do they justify the costs of SMS?

It has been that way for a long time. From 2008:

https://www.theregister.com/2008/05/14/txts_r_v_pricey/

America says banks can now transact using so-called stable crypto-coins. What does that actually mean?

Re: Backing

This here is a good physical asset example:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55546940

It was a motorhome rental business. When people invested in the business, they were given ownership of a motorhome as security. When the business went bankrupt, fully a 1/4 of the motorhomes were missing.

Trump silenced online: Facebook, Twitter etc balk at insurrection, shut the door after horse bolts and nearly burns down the stable

grep -w

It is just as well that you were not talking about a circumnavigation of Scunthorpe then. That would have got you an instant ban.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Re: "Does this apply to the UK and the EU though?"

Annoyingly enough, I had the popup when I clicked on a notification to open WhatsApp, and the popup displayed for half a second when WhatsApp opened, then vanished when the conversation opened. I can't seem to find any way of reading it from within the App, so for all I know my data will be exported to and processed on Mars.........

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this

I have changed between distro's more often than I want to count. I have used Ubuntu, SUSE, Redhat, Centos, Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Devuan, YellowDog and more, along with HP-UX, Solaris and AIX. Mainly because the distribution was chosen for the task at hand, or was vendor supplied.

I look at the different distro's as different accents. Cockney and Glaswegian are two very different accents, but they use the same underlying language. If you moved from Glasgow to London, you may have some initial difficulties with unfamiliar expressions, but you will quickly become used to the local lingo. Same when swapping distro. It doesn't take long to find your feet.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

The report recommends far more than that.

Reading the report, I can see that it recommends more than that.

In the encryption section, their first test is that new software doesn't make children more vulnerable. That is actually a tough ask, as not only are you are asking for the platforms to prove a negative in advance, you are asking them to certify their code works as expected, and is 100% bug free with no unintended side effects.

The second test is that all children's accounts have e2e disabled, unless you can prove the unprovable above. That will mean any group chat with a child in it will need to be unencrypted, as you can't do e2e on only one end. So no need for surveillance to break the encryption, just have the police sign up with a child account and join the group!

In the Government and regulators section it states that if these conditions are not met, then the platform should be regarded as breaching the duty of care.

In the online harm section it says that those that breach the duty of trust should face GDPR style massive fines, management liability and ISP blocking. That is a pretty big stick to wave.

European recommendations following Schrems II Privacy Shield ruling cast doubt on cloud encryption practices

Re: How does this work?

We store backups in AWS. The way we do it is backup -> gzip -> encrypt -> upload. The keys stay on the server that does the encryption, which is not the server that does the upload. Oh, yes, and the keys also sit in our password management solution.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

Re: Bad User Interface

This one is my absolute favourite example

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20140128

[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say 'Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time'?

And other wireless connections...

I remember when a guitarist I knew got his first wireless connection. He would walk off the stage and have a stroll round the pub.

One day he wandered in to the Gent's while playing, and realised that with a pull door he had to stay in there until either the song ended, or someone let him out.....

Suspended sentence for bank IT worker who broke into his boss's webcam because he didn't get a payrise

Re: I never understand the people who do this

People can be amazingly brilliant and astoundingly daft at the same time.

One chap I worked with demonstrated his brilliance by writing a very sophisticated virus from scratch. He demonstrated his astounding daftness by writing it at work, on his corporate PC, and testing it on the corporate network, and being surprised to be caught.

As they say, there's nowt so strange as folk

Indonesia’s black-market phone prevention plan bricks a whole bunch of handsets

Re: The old lady who lived near me...

I know a professional mechanic who has the opposite idea. The first time he buys a tool, he buys the cheapest that will get the job done. If it breaks, the he replaces it with MAC or SnapOn. As such that means he has a socket set with two SnapOn ratchets, several SnapOn 10mm, 13mm, 15mm and 17mm sockets, and the rest are cheap chrome vanduim.

He told me it also has the advantage that if a bolt rounds off, he has no hesitation about hammering one of the cheap sockets over the head and welding it on.

TCL notices lockdown has made tablet market a thing again, tosses out pair of cheapish 'droid fondleslabs

Re: €299 isn't cheap

I don't think there is enough detail in the story to properly judge if it is cheap or not. The screen size is given, but not the technology or resolution. There is no mention of chipset, RAM or storage. This is fine, as this a news story, not a technical analysis

The details I can find are as follows:

IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors - 1200 x 2000 pixels, 5:3 ratio (~224 ppi density)

CPU - MediaTek Helio P22T (MT8768T) Octa-core (4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A53)

GPU - Mali-G72 MP3

RAM - 4Gb

Storage - 64Gb.

That may help you decide if it is value for money or not.

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

Re: Roof

I remember the flight sim on the BBC B. It gave you points for flying through the town under building height, and for flying under the bridge over the river. You got double points for doing it inverted.

It was perfectly possible to take off, do a half roll, land on the river on your roof, and taxi under the bridge to collect your double points...

Xiaomi turns 10 and celebrates by sitting down to relax in front of its new transparent television

Transparent TV

Transparent TV?

<Looks at the mess of wires, plugs and the wall mount behind my TV>

No thank you.

Android user chucks potential $10bn+ sueball at Google over 'spying', 'harvesting data'... this time to build supposed rival to TikTok called 'Shorts'

Some awards ceremony somewhere

And the award for the best use of the word "pilfered" in a legal filing goes to..............

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

Clean Apps

To my sceptical eyes, point 3, Clean Apps, looks like a call for every American (and foreign) company to remove all their apps from the Huawei store, on pain of upsetting the Government.

It looks like as blocking access to the Google app store didn't stop Huawei selling phones outside China, the plan is to bully everyone they can to pull their apps from the Huawei app store to make the phones less appealing.

I can see the follow up to this one will be "If you are in the Huawei app store, you won't be allowed to be in Google or Apple app stores. Make a choice between CCP and Freedom!"

India drops the bar on e-commerce seller's listings: You want to sell it? Tell us where it came from from then

Re: We need those rules too.

That doesn't always work anyway. I bought something from Amazon that did come from the UK as promised. The quality was useless, and when I contacted the seller to return it, I was told I would have to pay the postage to their returns centre, in Houston, Texas. When I complained to Amazon they said this was a legitimate requirement, so it was cheaper to suck it up and keep it rather than return it and get my refund.

TL;DR:Even if the fulfilment centre is in your country, the returns centre may not be.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

Re: Backup phone

If it is the same as the one my son has, you need to make one call or text every 6 months to keep your credit alive.

Cisco restores evidence of its funniest FAIL – ethernet cable presses switch's reset button

Re: Either way

I got banned from doing any patching at one of my previous roles.

I had 3 servers to patch in, and 3 adjacent ports to plug them in to at the weekend. At least 3 times a day the week before the infrastructure chap warned me that the cabling had to be neat and tidy. So I braided them. Nice and neat and tidy.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

Exactly. How far do you take it?

There has been a big discussion about what term can be used to replace the horrible term "Whitespace" when working on Documents and page layouts.

Blank space was suggested. No-go, as Blanc means white in other European languages.

Text free space was suggested. No-go due to the implication that the rest of the text is therefore non-free.

Intentional gaps was suggested. No-go due to the implication that the rest of the text is not intentional.

Last I checked the discussion was round using the term "Areas included for typographic flow", which is a huge mouthful.

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

Re: Rental vs privately owned

From reading other sources, the rationale is that rental firms will have decent scooters, not just £15 tat off ebay and amazon.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Re: Mind of a teenager

When I was much younger, at the tail end of the 90's, I was working on a help desk. During the night shift we had an amusing little game. Open up your search engine du jour, turn off safe search and enter any two random words. The person who had an "adult" result highest in the rankings won. I think the record was held by "Lawnmower table" or some such nonsense.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Old school laptop!

As a complete aside, I have had more than one of those laptops. They ran Linux quite happily. Although my cats were a lot less keen to use them. I never could get them to format their comments properly.....

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

I don't even buy in to the reduced startup time argument for SystemD. I changed a laptop from Ubuntu 20.04 to Devuan ASCII and enjoyed a much shorter startup time afterwards.

Snapping at Canonical's Snap: Linux Mint team says no to Ubuntu store 'backdoor'

Snap can cause issues

I found that snap can cause lots of issues. I installed keepass using snap, and it installed as a sandboxed app. Very nice for security you would think. Well, a short while later, after 3 upgrades to keepass, it deleted the oldest snap container, which just happened to contain my password file. So secure that even you can't use your passwords now!

Why did I put the kdb in the snap file system? Because the app is sandboxed, so I had no choice.

+1 For Devuan here, running it on my home and work machines, and on my son's laptop, despite his IT teacher telling him to install a proper operating system like Windows 10....