* Posts by Mage

9252 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Mage Silver badge

Re: written in crayon.

Trump only uses Sharpies, though I suppose any fine bullet tip felt pen would do. It's Johnson that uses crayons?

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Transition Phase

Also there was Zero obligation to trigger Article 50 on ANY particular date. Any sensible Government would have sat down and figured out what the Withdrawal agreement might look like, what to do about N.I. and Gibraltar and what future deal they wanted BEFORE invoking Article 50.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Ulster becomes an independent state?

The UK has 2/3rds of Ulster and Ireland has 1/3rd. N.I. is 6 of the 9 Ulster Counties.

Scotland being independent is thus more likely than Ulster.

I can't see N.I. being independent unless USA, EU, or UN agree to pay for it. I know the Irish Government has just voted to give €250m to NI, but really it's for a road. Look at where Letterkenny, Donegal (part of Ireland the nation) and Dublin, Athlone, Dundalk etc are.

There is no rail or even dual carriageway up the West, either. Getting to Galway from Cork, Limerick, Waterford or Dublin is easy. Sligo harder. But Letterkenny?

Tech support scammer dialed random number and Australian Police’s cybercrime squad answered

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: if you don't hang up the call

It was so if you answered in the hall, or under the stairs, or the kitchen, you could set down the handset and pick it up in the boudoir, library or study.

Also such phone systems in many countries used a third wire to disable the bell on all the phones when you picked up to dial out.

As the phones, and indeed rural party lines, were in parallel, having two off hook would reduce to volume to about half. Also if someone else on the same internal line or party line picked up you'd hear the click of the extra DC load to power the carbon microphone and the volume would reduce. Seldom agitated, infrequently used carbon microphones would also often crackle.

As kids in the 1970s we used two phones connected via top two wires of the fence with a 6V spring top lantern battery for power. No bell other than a faint tinkle, but good volume.

In the late Victorian era before valves (tubes) they even put a carbon microphone and 2000 Ohm earpiece in a sealed box sharing a diaphragm. Then add two off 3V batteries, external carbon microphone and 2 x 2000 Ohm earphones as a headset and you had a hearing aid not surpassed by valves till about 1927, and even then the valves needed a 90V HT and 2V lead acid. By 1950 the valve hearing aids used 2 x 0.7V filament valves off a 1.5V dry cell and one or two miniature 22V batteries about PP3 size.

Deloitte's 'Test your Hacker IQ' site fails itself after exposing database user name, password in config file

Mage Silver badge

Re: Deloitte is awful

but bigly good compared to Crapita.

Actually many big name Auditors accountants have been found to be less than brilliant. PWC? HP buy of something?

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

Mage Silver badge

Re: Not all is well.

Also how is it Serverless? It's real servers belonging to Amazon.

Also Amazon makes a good profit from AWS.

Like getting rid of most other BBC Engineering, this is simply outsourcing, a thing loved by Accountants and Marketing people, because obviously the only thing that matters is marketing the Brand with the lowest in house overhead..

Though a Government forced the outsourcing of the National Transmitter infrastructure, they'd do it anyway.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

News?

I stopped accessing BBC websites ages ago. Are they doing:

a) Actual News?

b) Letting people close or from the UK access the .co.uk site again?

c) Any innovation.

They used to have a decent R&D dept.

The car you buy in 2025 will include a terabyte of storage. Robo-taxis might need 11TB

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Good luck with that.

That's a different sort of Autonomy. Nothing to do with what the article is talking about. 2025 is only a little more than 4 years away and the issues of genuinely autonomous vehicles on ordinary roads are not solved yet. Ships, trains, aircraft and even trams are easier problems. Aircraft and ships can be autonomous. I'm a bit baffled why people are talking about cars, trucks and taxis when most trains have drivers.

We did NAT see that coming: How malicious JavaScript can open holes in your firewall for miscreants to slip through

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Stars and bucks

This is why you should block all third party scripts, especially ads. Google's Ad service has been used in the past to serve malware on the BBC and CNN and other popular sites.

NoScript, uBlock and uMatrix can be more effective than AV and won't quarenteen your real applications or OS components.

Linux Mint pushes out its own Chromium build to help users avoid Canonical's Snap Store

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Re: Snaps R Us

I'm puzzled. I've had Chromium for ages on Linux Mint, via the Software Manager GUI. It's not the snap version. I use it just for a particular logged in Google service. I use Waterfox with uMatrix and Classic Theme Restorer, Classic Repository and Cookie Swap plug-ins for everyday use.

I also get regular updates of Chromium and Waterfox and Firefox via the Update Manager.

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

Mage Silver badge

Re: ebay cookies

No problems with ANY site, including ebay or paypal or Amazon with totally blocked 3rd party cookies.

Sometimes I have to disable script blocking (uMatrix) for Paypal to work, even if everything is apparently allowed.

Mage Silver badge

Re: reCAPTCHA only issues

So why are eBay.co.uk and PayPal using it on EXISTING Users logging in?

You enter user name, password and then have the stupid multiple picture quizzes.

OBVIOUSLY it's useless as a 2FA. It's supposedly authenticating that it's a human logging in.

There is no valid reason to have 3rd party cookies. I block all of those all the time on laptop and Mobile. They are purely malicious trackers nothing to do with the site. A privacy notice doesn't make them legal in the EU. This can be true for many actual site cookies. A privacy notice with Click Next to Continue is not obtaining consent.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Utter Bollocks

""In my opinion, organizations in Europe that use reCAPTCHA for spam protection now need to move reCAPTCHA behind their consent walls," he said.

No, they need to stop using it. It's abusive even if not used somehow for adverts. Also giving consent or not accessing the resource is toxic. Very many cookie consent forms are actually illegal.

Mage Silver badge

reCAPTCHA only issues

Nonsense.

Problems with it:

Ebay.co.uk is using it as well as login, but denies it. Not always.

Sometimes PayPal uses it, like when you click on a link in an email to confirm a new email.

It's US cultured. Loads of people outside the USA wouldn't know taxis are yellow rather than black or random. Or that a crosswalk is a Zebra crossing.

It's obviously a parasite using crowd funding to train so called self driving cars.

The images can be too small.

***

IT'S ABUSIVE, CULTURALLY BIASED and an INVASION OF PRIVACY. It's all about Google, not genuinely anti-spam.

The real reason for reCAPTCHA

It's also being misused by website operators. It is NOT part of 2FA. Nuke it from orbit!

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Nice but

Why is it WHITE!

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Mage Silver badge

Re: Poor On-Call this week

Some places Whenever means never.

Marriott fined £0.05 for each of the 339 million hotel guests whose data crooks were stealing for four years

Mage Silver badge

Re: To stop it happening again ...

Ofcom may be funded by Mobile Licence fees. Comreg is. Guess how much they care about anything other than Interference to Mobile Bands, or consumers or non-Mobile Spectrum users?

Alphabet thanks ads and AI for its $124m-a-day quarterly profit, and comes out swinging against antitrust action

Mage Silver badge

Re: If you don't log into (google?)

Block ALL google scripts seems to work. For a while only blocking Cookies worked.

SiFive inches closer to offering a true RISC-V PC: Latest five-core dev board includes PCIe, SSD interfaces

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: I wouldn't be surprised if this was of interest to ...

Currently the RISC-V is of more interest as a Server and people investigating RISC-V, rather than very low power general purpose board with a wide range of OS, software, application use and from one-off hobbyists to industrial integrators.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: A CISC is a RISC with specialized microcode

It's more complex than that and RISC is a bit of a misnomer.

Intel's i960 wasn't bad back then. Popular on RAID controllers. They also obtained DEC's Strong ARM family, most of which were sold to Marvell. They might still have an ARM based comms chip and some sort of ARM licence.

They overfocused on x86 and then HPs inspired Itanium which seems to have been illfated. Shortest XP support?

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Valve ? If you don't have a connection, you can still play your games.

Not true for some games, at least to start them.

Also plenty of older XP / Vista games yet they pulled the plug on XP being able to use an already installed game.

Also I hate DVD cased games that have no indication on the packaging that are actually only an Internet installer for Steam or something else you can simply go to directly. Not sure when Steam support ends for Win7. But for a long while it's been a better idea to use a PS4 for gaming. I see the optical drives are option versions of 2020 Xbox and PS5.

Welcome to the 1960s, where you need the connection to a server for anything. Is Office 365 & cloud replacing purely local MS Office? You'd think so searching MS site for Office Patches, Add ons and converters.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Poor Code

Not all poor code is exploitable as such. Some poor programming may make something vulnerable to DOS. Or some feature may not work properly or at all. Or it may crash every <nnnn> period of time.

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

Maybe said by Cardinal Richelieu?

Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: I'd comment ...

See also proven NSA / CIA etc backdoors in Cisco gear. Juniper is a major competitor.

Could Huawei be being banned in USA and UK etc (Five Eyes and friends dominated by USA), because they won't add US backdoors?

GCHQ audit revealed no backdoors in Huawei, but poor code quality.

No surprise as that was well known on Huawei routers supplied by many UK & Ireland ISPs. But also true of almost everyone.

Brave browser first to nix CNAME deception, the sneaky DNS trick used by marketers to duck privacy controls

Mage Silver badge
Happy

Re: Rewards

And can even turn off the Rewards Icon too.

Mage Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Nice Browser

I switched to Brave on all my Androids as Firefox sort of broke their GUI. I switched long ago on 64 bit Linux from Firefox to Waterfox due to stupid changes. I use Classic Theme restorer to make the Waterfox GUI sane, but I think Firefox disabled that and lots of other stuff which is why I switched to Waterfox. Still using uMatrix for blocking scripts, though I used to use NoScript.

Trouble at Skull-Top Ridge: ESA boffins use data wizardry to figure out Philae probe's second touchdown site

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Frothy?

Almost no gravity.

Software engineer leaked UK missile system secrets and refused to hand cops his passwords, Old Bailey told

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Software engineer leaked UK missile system secrets

1) The UK actually has missile secrets?

2) This is already after he lost his job?

3) If they couldn't access his whatever how do they know what he leaked?

4) Is it all simply because he complained about the Police earlier?

I know someone that was brought to court on a minor charge and told by their own solicitor that they had to plead guilty, even though the police where allegedly lying, because otherwise the police would bring a more serious charge. No third party witnesses to the alleged behaviour which involved no theft, damages or threats or anything else. Allegedly the police purely assuming what the person was going to do and then said it did happen to justify their initial bad treatment of their suspect.

There needs to be greater independent oversight of the Police. The current solution of having police from a different group investigate a complaint is totally rubbish.

Touchscreen holdout? This F(x)tec Pro1 X phone with sliding QWERTY keyboard might push your buttons

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

detachable phone keyboard

I have a Wireless one about phone size, though needs a dongle because it's not BT, OTOH it works better than any BT keyboard I ever had. It has a touch pad and mouse buttons.

I've also a pair of 8" folio cases with USB keyboards. One has mini-USB plug (works with a USB2GO micro plug with integral mini USB socket and one has a USB2GO microUSB plug.

But I've stopped going out, so I use the laptop to type on Viber or email and phone answers the "I'm at the checkout, where are you" calls.

I had to get a paid playstore app for decent support of a UK layout, accented letters etc on Android. EKH or something. Though later Androids are slightly better for non-USA keyboards.

Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network

Mage Silver badge
Alert

after you purchased ... login compulsary

At least Personal Skype was free and MS had more or less broken it anyway by the time you could only use an MS account.

See also Minecraft, which MS bought.

When are the so called Tech companies going to be reigned in? Apple and Microsoft are Tech, but really Google, Facebook and Amazon just leverage technology.

These are shocking lists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Amazon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet (Google)

The real tech companies don't have a great look either. Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Qualcomm etc.

Mage Silver badge
Terminator

Standard Borg Procedure.

WhatsApp, Instagram etc.

"Let us buy them and we won't slurp or combine data"

Facebook, one Lord to rule them all.

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: 3 cubic meters of regolith might givee 1 litre?

Best not to be messing up this ball of rock. Besides any program could only export a few elites or maybe criminals. The moon has a harsh environment.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Sunlit side?

Maybe they mean the Far Side, but I'm not sure if it gets more sun.

There is no Dark Side.

Possibly the pole(s) get more sun?

Linus Torvalds hails 'historic' Linux 5.10 for ditching defunct addressing artefact

Mage Silver badge

Ancient Systems

I've installed used UNIX, XENIX (386 only) and earlier CROMIX (dual Z80 /68000) in the 1980s.

MINIX in maybe 1991

Full NT 3.1 and Linux Kernel came out in 1993. I did use NT from about 1994 and briefly 3.5 on a 386. Everything NT since on at least a 486 and I used Linux from 1998. Maybe last installed OpenWrt on a 486 like device (PC Engines SBC for a router maybe using a Geode SoC) in about 2007.

I don't think I've installed a Workstation or Server Linux on less than a Pentium 4 in over 15 years.

I might have a 486 somewhere with WFW 3.11. The 286 did have I think a version of UNIX or XENIX, but I never used it. The main point of it was more RAM on DOS and it was mostly used as an 8086. Pointless in most computers compared to a 68000. Really the 386 was Intel's first consumer 16 /32 bit CPU used as 32 bits usually. The 8088 / 8086 wasn't a real 16 bit CPU at all. At least the 286 had a real 16 bit mode, even if only XENIX commonly used it. Really the 486 was dead by the time Linux was usable. Though I think the PII was inferior to P-Pro for NT and it was the PIII that coincided with rapid rise of Linux on Servers. The Segmented Addressing was an evil fudge to make porting 8080 8bit code automatic?

I've seen Power PCs running MAC OS9 at the latest, maybe 15 years ago? Not sure. What is a PowerPC 601 CPU used in?

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Random

A Roman numerals wristwatch demo in javascript. Designed to use a mask and a very small number of LEDS with PIC18F or ARM Cortex M0. The check box seems to simulate pressing the crown, which might be a rotary encoder that is also a push button. Or maybe USB could be used to set time, simply in terminal mode?

The Romans used scribes that used other number systems and also the abacus. They invented the idea that the day changes at midnight instead of dusk. They also managed to run the Etruscan 8 day week and the eastern Med 7 day in parallel for a while. The Babylonians and Ancient Celts had the more logical 13 months, but the Babylonians changed to 12 as it meant easier arithmetic in some respects. That's why there are 13 Zodiac signs. The Jewish system adds a leap month to keep Solar and Lunar time (months = moons) re-synced. Moslem system seems to ignore Solar - Lunar corrections.

Mage Silver badge

Re: bye bye 2038

Also just kill the mm/dd/yyyy, mm/dd/yy, mm/yy and all the variants <month name><day><year>

I notice ebay Ireland and ebay UK both use the daft USA <month name><day><year> format.

ISO yyyy mm dd at least is unambigious except as to calendar type and the same way round as writing quantities of anything, numbers or time.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: bye bye 2038

I think the HC/HE system is better, none of the no year zero stupidity in the middle. It's currently the year 12020. Also avoids the AD BC CE BCE issues, though doesn't solve ambiguity about British dates after general change from Julian to Gregorian Calendar but much much later in Britain. Other systems are available. China (had about 5 changes), Jewish, Moslem and Hindi apart from largely defunct calendars.

There are different issues:

1) The separate physical clock on some systems with its own battery and usually a 32.768 kHz crystal.

2) A clock on some CPUs using a sleep mode and a separate 32.768 kHz crystal. Some are not limited by a clock register.

3) A clock on some CPUs with no special hardware that relies on the gadget never being powered off.

4) Any firmware or BIOS that might not be easily updated

5) An embedded OS that could be using Linux Kernel that can't be updated or is unlikely to be updated.

6) Many Linux devices and Android things that could be updated, but the makers are either gone or won't update.

7) Different levels: HW / FW clock, OS clock, GUI clock/calendar, application clock/calendar. Spreadsheets seem very limited on the date/time assuming everything is an AD/CE Gregorian date. DIY functions for other systems are hard. Especially timelines for fictional worlds, or even simply Mars.

NASA trying to stuff excess baggage into OSIRIS-REx after too-successful asteroid scoop

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Ounces?

NASA, get with metric. Imperial units are rubbish for engineering, which is why British Scientists refined the metric system.

Samsung to introduce automatic call blocking on Android 11-capable flagships

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: How does it work?

Number spoofing is by design, like email spoofing. Legitimate businesses and users need both because of how phone systems and email systems are designed.

I'm baffled why a particular block-list service should be specific to a particular version of Android. The problem isn't number spoofing as such but lack of regulation and the fact that Telcos make money out of it. There should be a simple reporting mechanism to your service provider, like "The last call was:" and option for type of thing. Cold calling should be illegal everywhere, either on phone, email or the front door. One UK county region saw crime drop by 30% when doorstop cold calling was banned.

The providers should pool the info.

Same should apply to email. I was getting real Netflex spam regularly (illegal in EU) and most of the fake emails are now using Google's Blogspot.com, not even infected 3rd party sites.

I've had about equal unsolictied robo-calling from my bank (they admitted it was them) to the fake MS support calls and scam investment calls (usually using real humans). One even rang back today asking why I hung up! Do not answer with anything that can be taken as an affirmative or negative.

My numbers are not listed.

Email spam has dramatically declined since the end of tinet.ie/eircom.ie free email. I think their database got copied in the tinet days and smarter spammers realised all the same addresses were on eircom.net

Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV

Mage Silver badge

Styling

Curtains or a roller blind that match the room decor in front of TV?

Lounge lizards can even have remote operated ones.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: featuring Hollywood A-listers

Only worth while if you are selling pointless underwear or make-up. These people are mostly boring mannequins, famous for being famous and some are quite good at making money. That sort of content is free or nearly free elsewhere.

So content and CEO doomed it.

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: Kardasians

No, the ones in Star Trek are spelled with a C, though are possibly more entertaining.

Run Windows on a Chromebook: All the details. Not so fast, home user...

Mage Silver badge
Coat

re: so that developers can test things

And what dev has a Chromebook that actually runs ChromeOS as a main machine.

I know plenty with beefy corporate laptops with Windows, with VMs for Windows and/or Linux.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Best of both worlds!

Hoist up your jeans, your sarcasm is showing.

I'd offer you a beer too, but I knocked it over.

I'd not buy a Chromebook, but if I was given one, I'd put Linux on it if possible.

2020 hasn't been all bad – a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module is here

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Interesting

Very interesting.

Here's the new build, Insiders... wait for it... wait for it... Is it Windows 10X's upcoming ... Oh. You can change refresh rate of the display

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Windows Calculator

I hope not the one with the subtraction bug. Maybe that was on WFWG 3.11.

The other "features" sound like stuff Windows did 12 years ago and 20 years ago.

Need a new computer for homeschooling? You can do worse than a sub-£30 2007 MacBook off eBay

Mage Silver badge

ThinkPad like an X61.

Yes. an old PC is far more sensible than ANY old Mac, unless you want to run an old Mac OS.

Non-Apple means cheaper parts, maybe even a replacement new laptop keyboard for under €15. Batteries, RAM. HDD, media bays, screen hinges, even screens or replacement GPU boards on some laptops.

Old Apple gear is for Apple fans and collectors, not for the school kids to run Linux. The kids I know with old computers are using larger netbooks and old thinkpads with Linux. All of them free from offices upgrading.

Top doctors slam Google for not backing up incredible claims of super-human cancer-spotting AI

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Shocked

At the time I expressed sceptism and said all these things are only pattern matching curated by experts.

So even if it worked, you need to keep training the experts.

So are Google trustworthy? Have they ever lied?

IBM famously misled about Watson, which wasn't even the same Watson that won Jeopardy and didn't really work for Cancer diagnosis.

AI is just hyped pattern matching using often biased and usually human curated data. If the so called "training data" (really a special kind of database) isn't expertly human curated confidence should be low.

Samsung aims boot at Apple's decision not to bundle a charger in with the iPhone 12, foot ends up in mouth

Mage Silver badge

Re: Oh Samsung

The ORIGINAL iPhone used a Samsung ARM and bought in GUI. Capacitive wasn't new. It was over 15 years old then, but not used because makers thought scribbling was important (See Palm PDAs) and Capacitive is too low a resolution. The Original iPhone didn't even do 3G in Europe, which other phones did and was NINE YEARS after the first commercial smart phone. A roaring success due to consumer orientated data plans, not innovative HW, SW and package. Most of the iPhone patents should never have been awarded and none of the Design Patents. Till the iPhone only business users could afford data.

Eventually Apple bought in an ARM design house.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

No, everyone didn't copy.

I'm not buying a phone without a 3.5mm jack. Or a stupid notch.

BT earphones are inferior and cost a lot more and need charged.

My last phone was sometime after Apple did both of those marketing gimmicks. It also has a handy SD card slot. As does my newer tablet with it's 3.5mm jack socket, 256 G SD card and no notch.

Also my laptop, tablet and phone and eink ereader are less than the cost of the Apple Fashion brand phone with the most memory. Want more memory on a Apple phone, buy a new one. Want earphones with better quality and no battery to wear out or go flat? You need a dongle on an Apple phone that costs more than decent wired earphones.

You also can't replace Apple earphone's batteries.

Also many other USB chargers don't charge at same higher current as the Apple one as they picked a different charging protocol, originally.