* Posts by steogede

456 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007

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Time to ditch the front door key? Nest's new wireless smart lock is surprisingly convenient

steogede

> And I imagine most people have their door key on the same keyring as the car key.

I think most of their target customers already have cars with keyless start and keyless entry.

UK PM May's response to London terror attack: Time to 'regulate' internet companies

steogede

Re: "Does the idiot woman realize how bloody stupid she sounds?"

> This abandoning of the presumption of innocence is a more drastic blow against British values than anything terrorist organisations could manage on their own. It's a major indirect victory for them.

"Indirect victory" you say that like indirect victories aren't their aim. Terrorism isn't direct action, they cannot possible kill everyone who disagrees with. Indirect victory is the only type of victory they can achieve and every indirect victory is a real victory..

steogede

Re: "Does the idiot woman realize how bloody stupid she sounds?"

> Why "since 7/7/05"?

> Why not since 6/7/05?

> Well because the number then jumps from 36 to 82, which doesn't look quite so rosy

@Gif1, 82 vs 36, doesn't look a great deal less rosy. Still pales in significance to the deaths caused by road traffic accidents, smoking, air pollution, domestic violence (probably).

> That's called cherry picking the data to support your argument.

Not as much as picking a 6/7/05 as the start date. Would have been simpler if he just said in the past ten years.

steogede

Terrorists can't win... unless

Terrorists are not fighting a war that they can win.

ISIS are never going to be in control of the UK.

However, if we change our behaviour, policies, laws as a disproportionate reaction to a perceived threat, they can change our society and our way of life.

Besides which, it was a van they used to run people down not an internet connection. We should be calling on van hire firms to do more (obviously we shouldn't, that is just preposterous, almost as preposterous as...).

Pair programming – you'll never guess what happens next!

steogede

Re: Moderation.

> when im looking over someones shoulder your instinct to just take over is very high, (but that can irritate, but not doing it can be like torcher)

I can fully appreciate how it must be torture, not being able grab the keyboard and fix all those mistakes :)

Basic income after automation? That’s not how capitalism works

steogede

Re: Errrm

No, the price of shoes is driven down and people buy more shoes. People can never have enough shoes. The factory down the road may lose out, if they don't buy a machine and can no longer compete.

Unimpressed with Ubuntu 16.10? Yakkety Yak... don't talk back

steogede

Re: Ubuntu version numbers...

It's not Y2.1K compliant, but they'll run it off letters before then. True already on'Y', so they've only got one release left.

Cox stiffed for $25m after letting subscribers pirate music online

steogede

Re: Cars and Roads

Two things:

1. They could sue the individuals, but it would be too costly. So they lobbied for rights to sue the ISP (presumably, but in all honesty I don't know that much).

2. The roads are owned by the 'government' (I don't know if it is local or national government) and they aren't going to write laws that allow them to be sued.

The solution then is either for the ISPs to be nationalized or for the ISPs to get better lobbyists than the RIAA/MPAA

steogede

Re: Piracy, it ain't all black and white in terms of what BMG like to call 'theft'

I cycle to my local Lidl, rather than pay to use the (Council owned) car park (saves me the fuel too).

Man sues YET AGAIN for chance to marry his computer

steogede

Macs that are over 18 years old can't run Windows, to run Windows it would probably need to be no more than 10 years old.

Botnet-powered ballot stuffing suspected in 2nd referendum petition

steogede

The English isn't great, but as I read it, it is calling for a majority of 60% OR at turnout of 75%

When you look at it like that, 50.0001% of 75% isn't that different to 51.9% of 72.2%

London Mayor election day bug forced staff to query vote DB by hand

steogede

Re: WAT?! - software

According to the BBC, you're not far of the mark. Not sure what the world is coming to when the BBC have more technical details than El Reg.

> Staff had to collate discrepancies in a spreadsheet, rather than automatically, when tallying final results, said chief executive Steve Gowers.

> A resulting investigation found that the underlying data, the actual numbers of votes in the database, was correct - but the counting software was not reporting it accurately.

> The decision was then taken to disregard the system's ability to collate results from each constituency - querying this data was instead done by programmers.

> "The manual part of the process meant that we took the output of those queries and put them into a spreadsheet to add them up," explained Mr Gowers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36558446

Barbie-brained Mattel exec phell for phishing, sent $3m to China

steogede
WTF?

> Attackers had harvested open source information on staff, and is thought sources say to have hacked Mattel in order to understand its corporate hierarchy and payment patterns.

What is 'open source information on staff' and what does 'Attackers... is thought sources say to have' mean in English?

Take that, Mom! Turns out Super Mario Bros was all about solving complex math problems

steogede
FAIL

>> Completing a game of Super Mario Brothers is the mathematic equivalent of solving complex mathematical calculations, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

No, it is the video game equivalent of solving mathematical equations.

Shocker: Smut-viewing Android apps actually steal your data

steogede

How does one obtain these apps?

Is this malware in the Play store? Or do you have to go to extraordinary lengths to install it?

UK's internet spy law: £250m in costs could balloon to £2 BILLION

steogede

Estimates

The previous projects were estimated to be £2 billion and £1.8 billion. Had they ever gone ahead, surely they would have been 2-3 times that amount by the time they were completed or cancelled.

'Govt will not pass laws to ban encryption' – Baroness Shields

steogede

Re: No one planned to ban encryption

Is it really necessary to point out that the AC was being sarcastic? Two replies seem to suggest that it is.

TalkTalk CEO admits security fail, says hacker emailed ransom demand

steogede

Re: BBC news just reported it was a SQL injection attack

Do you honestly think that anyone here doesn't know what SQL injection is?

> Sounds like yet another company preferring youth to experience and paying the price yet again.

Just as likely that it was a very experienced lazy idiot, infact probably more likely. If it were written by some inexperienced youngen, they'd probably be using some trendy framework that made SQL injection very difficult.

Bacon as deadly as cigarettes and asbestos

steogede

Five pages of comments and nobody has said it...

Bacon is the cure for cancer.

steogede

Re: Wouldn't be worth it...

> The difference between bacon butties and cigarettes is that you tend to scarf bacon butties now and again at mealtimes smokers always seem to have one dangling from their lips.

Speak for yourself. I'm on 40 rashers a day.

C For Hell – Day Two: Outage misery continues for furious C4L customers

steogede

Women and childrens[sic.] have their own unit?

Wrestling with Microsoft's Nano Server preview

steogede

Re: Add me to the confused list....

> And using 1Gb of memory for an install doesn't exactly sound like "nano" to me - I've run proper Windows server installations successfully on half of that in the past

Windows in 64MB, what was it XP? 2000?

Facebook tips India and Pakistan into NUCLEAR WAR of words

steogede

Re: Zuck, you're out of your element! The Pakis are not the issue here!

Pakistan doesn't have an embassy in the UK. Surely you mean the Pakistani High Commissioner.

Also, as a diplomat, sure he would have diplomatic plates?

Three's 'Home Signal' femtocells fail, restore mobile black spots

steogede

> Is that the same team who volunteered all of their IP addresses to various blacklists and refuse to listen to my complaint that I was not advised of this before taking out my contract? As a result it's basically impossible to run your own outgoing SMTP server on a Three data connection.

I doubt they provided a list to the blacklist providers, more likely the blacklists listed them based either on the rDNS or perhaps the IP whois (the latter is unlikely). You can't really hold Three liable for the actions of various blacklist operators, it's not like they are accountable to Three or anyone else. Do you have a static IP? Can you get the rDNS changed? Without an rDNS that matches your forward DNS and suitable SPF record, your mail is likely to be rejected by a lot of servers anyway.

steogede

DSL?

> it hooks a small mobile phone cell - a femtocell – into a DSL connection.

More accurately, the femtocell connects to Internet connection - doesn't need to be DSL.

DEFCON 23 to host Internet of Things slaughterfest

steogede

Re: Fancy Bosch Oven

True, but surely it would be nice if it could use NTP to get the correct time for those 5 clocks. Also, whilst I can't see how it would help with proper cooking, it might be nice if you had a ready meal and could just snap the barcode with your phone and set the correct time and temperature.

'Camera-shy' Raspberry Pi 2 suffers strange 'XENON DEATH FLASH' glitch

steogede

Re: E.M.P. anyone ?

> Probably unlikely in an English winter

What do you mean? Winter is when we get most sunny days, even with the shorter days there's probably more hours when it is sunny. It's summer when it tends to be grey and overcast.

Speaking in Tech: Android 5.0 Lollipop is a TRAIN WRECK

steogede

Just a comment about the Podcast. One of the parties stated that it would be no good for companies which have email retention policies, in order to meet compliance requirements - as Google *could* delete mail without the companies consent. It kind of misses the point that if your an organisation that is required by law to archive emails, surely you put your archiving solution on your server(s), where no-one except specifically authorized individuals have access.

steogede

Re: Updated my Nexus 4

@Spiracle

> (what happened to silent mode? It seems that vibrate only is the best I can get now).

1, Press either of the volume buttons.

2. You will see a slider, under which you'll see the words: None, Priority and All

3. Press None or Priority - depending on whether you want to hear priority calls and priority notifications (you can set what is classed as 'priority' elsewhere).

4. Leave 'Indefinite' selected, or choose a time limit.

You will still get visual notifications, but you won't get any sound or vibrate.

Data cops in charge of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google get a new office

steogede

At least we know that it is secure and they didn't put it in the cloud... http://goo.gl/maps/5S4oK

SCREW YOU, EU: BBC rolls out Right To Remember as Google deletes links

steogede

Re: Don't often find myself praising the BBC

> You miss the point that Google is being deliberately bloody-minded by smugly claiming to "do the right thing" whilst sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.

Maybe it is my failing, but I don't understand the phrase "sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit". Laws are written in letters. If the law makers make laws, where the letter and the spirit are not one and the same, whose mistake is that? If I wrote a piece of software, would it be reasonable for me to complain that the compiler was following the letter of my code and not the spirit? If I gave an order to an employee, whose fault would it be if they did as I asked rather than what I meant to ask?

Man brings knife to a gun fight and WINS

steogede

Re: I think the use of the term "male" by law enforcement is entirely justified.

I was going to rant about how using the terms 'the victim' and 'the male' - surely it should be alleged victim, and how does 'the male' differ from 'the black person' or 'the muslim'.

That said, if you are correct and there was a copy of the Daily Mail in the house, then I can see that it makes a lot more sense to use 'the victim' rather than 'the alleged victim'. Now that I think about it, the Mail's "weapon" of choice was a knife, which makes perfect sense - after all, there is no more evil and subversive "weapon" than a knife (in the eyes of the Daily Mail).

Like frozen burgers, 'Bigfoot' DNA samples have a touch of horse

steogede

Re: Finds all are extant animals?

The polar bear DNA was from an earlier study of yeti DNA samples. Yeti != bigfoot, one is Asian/European, the other is North American

What a whopper, LG: Feast your eyes on this 77-inch bendy TV

steogede

Re: Off-axis OK, what about from below?

> Not all people who don't kick balls are poor.

Not all people who can't afford to blow £20k on a telly are poor.

Google's self-driving car breakthrough: Stop sign no longer a problem

steogede

Re: I for one ...

> ... would welcom Indian driving in the UK.

You obviously haven't spent much time in India, or Southall for that matter.

OpenSSL Heartbleed: Bloody nose for open-source bleeding hearts

steogede

Re: This explains it

> down vote for using obfuscated link...

You clearly don't know tinyurl.com applies you to preview links, otherwise you would have know his "shortening" was even more pointless - the link points to http://xkcd.com

Target ignored hacker alarms as crooks took 40m credit cards – claim

steogede

Re: Minor correction

> a combination of Tesco, Currys, Argos and Primark.

So like Tesco then?

Yes: You CAN use your phone as a satnav while driving – appeals court

steogede

Re: Not in the UK.....

> Whilst the legal definition of driving is:

>

> "A person shall be held to be driving a vehicle when they have control over the direction and

> speed of the vehicle"

>

> which means basically, if you are sat in the driver seat, engine on or off, you're driving that vehicle

> (Stated cases again uphold this point), it's only an utter bastard who'd do someone for it.

I wouldn't count on that. Certainly in my car, just being sat in the drivers seat could not count as driving, I am confident that I could defend that. Unless the ignition is turned on, the steering is locked as is the 'gear' selector (I can't move it out of park). Can't really be classed as in 'control over the direction and speed' when the car un-steerable and immovable. Being sat in the drivers seat is no more driving a car than being in possession of a set of keys is. That said, given the way that our legislation is going, it won't be long before it is a crime to be in possession of a bottle of beer whilst in possession of a car key.

> However, considering the Police is all about targets and figures now, sometimes it's not so hard

> to use common sense when effectively your job is on the line and bills have to be paid.

>

> In that scenario, it's not the cops fault, it's the heirarchy and the councils and finally the

> government for demanding so much.

I've heard better excuses than that on benefit street.

> (Didn't really make the news that we've just had all our public holidays taken away from us

> without consultation. Two a year, Christmas and New year, that's it.)

You get (got) public holidays?

How a Facebook post by blabbermouth daughter cost her parents $80,000

steogede

Isn't it hearsay?

The father could have argued that he didn't tell her - she knew that he was suing them (that much is public record) and that they were now going on an expensive holiday. She might have deduced that there had been some settlement and she might publish her suspicions. All we know is that someone he knows, has revealed information that happens to coincide with the truth of the situation.

Surely they need proof that the father disclosed the information.

'Bogus IT guys' slurp £1.3m from Barclays: Cybercops cuff 8 blokes

steogede

Re: This is supposed to be a tech site

>> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-396632-001-IP-KVM-CAT5-PS-2-Interface-Adaptor-/200710430091?pt=UK_Computing_KVM_Switches_KVM_Cables&hash=item2ebb461d8b

That's not a KVM, it is a cable for an HP multiport KVMoIP. If there is a KVMoIP on ebay for £10, it'll be second hand, faulty and stolen.

BTW El Reg (I know it been said), KVM Switch, seriously? We expect that nonsense the iPhone loving technophobes at the BBC, you guys really should know the difference between a KVM-switch (http://www.misco.co.uk/product/174751/LINDY-2-Port-KVM-Switch-Micro-USB-VGA) and a KVM-over-IP (http://www.onevideo.co.uk/adderlink-al-ipeps.html). Also you should be able to find a "security expert" who knows that a KVM switch would be no use for remote access, unlike a KVMoIP that is designed for that purpose.

Apple KILLER decloaked? Google lovingly unboxes Nexus 7 Android 4.3 slablette

steogede

Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

I remember my brother had a 15" Dell Laptop that be bought 10 years ago for less than £500 which had a WUXGA screen (1920x1280).

Tax man to take a bite of tech employees' free meals?

steogede

So how does it work?

Would you give the tax man a few chips? I have an idea, rather than pay the tax man money, I'll use a small amount of that money to buy potatoes and oil, make chips, by which time the value of the potato will have increased (after all chips are more expensive than potatoes) and I can give the tax man the chips and keep the rest of the cash. How does this affect soup kitchens? Will the destitute be required to fill out tax returns for the soup they consume?

How about if the tech companies opened up their canteens so that anyone with access to the site could get free food - employees, contractors, customers, tax inspectors. If it is available to anyone, then it is not a staff benefit - at least, not any more than using the loos or breathing the air conditioning is.

You know how your energy bills are so much worse than they were?

steogede

Re: Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear....

Indeed thorium is looking like it will be the technology of the future. Just a shame we (as a planet) wasted so much time and money on uranium.

Sony promises PC-based PlayStation 4 for Christmas

steogede

Re: Re: Price...

>> It was far too expensive for a games console, perhaps yes, but for many it was also the cheapesst

>> blu-ray player at the time, so actually made economical sense to get one.

>>

>> Or at least, that's how I rationalised spending that much money to myself.

That's the key. All they need to do is think of something new that nobody wants or needs, make it really expensive and include it for less on the console. Can't go wrong.

Playboy fined £100k by Blighty watchdog for FLASHING SMUT at kids

steogede

Re: Coming soon...

>> when he accidentally walked in for a pee.

Why would little Jimmy "accidentally" walk into the bathroom for a pee? I could understand if you said he 'accidentally walked into the kitchen for a pee'.

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

steogede

No harm no foul?

He was getting the work done, to a high standard by all accounts and they have sacked him? His greatest sin was giving a third party his access details - he should have setup a VPN on his home system, and had the Chinese connect to via his home VPN into his work VPN.

Pentagon hacker McKinnon will NOT be prosecuted in the UK

steogede

Re: How difficult....?

>> But it's also not very difficult to mug a defence-less little old lady, however that doesn't mean one should get away without prosecution for doing it.

So, when are they going to rename the DoD to DoDLOL (Department of Defence-less Little Old Ladies). Or perhaps they could call it the Defence-less Department of Defence - DDoD

LASER STRIKES against US planes on the rise

steogede

Remember the Ray Gun articles?

Do you remember the 'plane mounted laser/ray gun articles El Reg used to run? Maybe the should combine the two. Give the commercial airliners ray guns so they can fight matches with napalm.

BTW, my take, there are 10 incidents per day, 3,650/year, yet no substantiated reports of real damage. I think this is just something that annoys pilots more than anything, perhaps because it interrupts their sleep.

>> That's wide enough to light up an entire cockpit, with an intensity that's comparable to a camera flash.

So pretty much like drive down an unlit motorway, and having an idiot with full beams on behind you? Or driving down a dark road, when a speed camera flash someone on the opposite side of the road? - except that there is nothing to crash into and you have autopilot to do the real work.

Virgin Media's 'bye-bye to buffering' ad nuked by watchdog - AGAIN

steogede

Re: [no VM customer receives download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s].

>> no VM customer receives download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s

I am sure lots of VM customers get less than 15 Mbit/s. Whether or not they expect to is a different matter. , my 60 Mbit/s connection has dropped to less than 2 mbps on a few occasions - generally fixed after a few weeks.

Perhaps it should be "no VM customer expects to receive download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s". Or "no VM customer receives download speeds of less than up to 15Mbit/s". Or "no VM customer pays for download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s"

steogede

Re: "Could"

Difference between "up to" and "could" is that someone, somewhere, will be getting the "up to" speed. However they cannot say that you will never experience buffering again, as that is entirely out of their control. There will always be at least one streaming service which does not have sufficient bandwidth to meet its users needs. Unless of course they mean 'say goodbye' in the same way that you say goodbye to your kids when you drop them at school in the morning - i.e. in the full expectation that you will be saying hello very shortly.

That said, I often go for days or even weeks at a time without seeing any buffering on my VM connection. But a few hours on the phone to India and a couple of days waiting in for the engineer, usually fixes that.

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