* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Windows 10 wipes your child safety settings if you upgrade from 7 or 8

P. Lee
Coat

Re: You assume too much

> I don't give a flip about Microsoft's cloud and mobile ecosystem.

Which is why, Moss, its all turned on by default.

P. Lee
Holmes

>Especially since your operating system has very little to do with encountering porn.

Except perhaps, preventing logins outside of monitored times? Perhaps locking browser preferences preventing browser histories from being deleted and blocking the browser's "porn-mode" or switching on/off proxies.

P. Lee

Re: @Hans 1

Nicely ripped out of context.

> Also told them that that has nothing to do with what you actually do with the opposite sex. After all, porn is just for perverts and the insane.

I'm not sure that watching other people have sex doesn't fall into the category of "perverted" in that I'm not convinced that "watching other people" is the real purpose of sex. Hands up who wants a 12-yo watching them get it on... anyone? As for the insane - well maybe those who think putting porn in the hands of a twelve-yo is a good idea?

"Cum harder .. I like it a little rough" Porn film dialogue or the words from a song performed by a group at the Disney Radio Music Awards? Run along little boy and get your porn from mtv/vh1 like all the other good little consumers. If you don't get the sex-references, don't worry, there's plenty to enjoy while you're learning to like it with x-factor.

P. Lee

Re: How the hell ...

>Simple really, parents want other people to make sure their children are safe. But those other people don't care about other people's children.

Still not reading the article?

This is more like having your swimming pool refurbished and finding they've walked off with the safety-fence.

But no matter, because they are "continuing to roll out safety-fence measures."

P. Lee

Re: Disgracefull!

>disable task manager

Does that work for File->Open too?

I've seen lots of citrix installations where the security fails because its in the GUI, not the filesystem. You can't run explorer from the GUI, but you can do file->open (in say, Word) and get to the C: drive that way. You can't run the command shell but you can copy and rename it and then run it.

Hacking Team Flash exploit leak revealed lightning reflexes of malware toolkit crafters

P. Lee

Re: Adobe Flash and PDF

The PDF idea wasn't that bad.

But then they had to go and try to turn it into a "platform."

Secret US-Pacific trade pact leak exposes power of the copyright lobby

P. Lee

>In order to introduce stronger piracy laws without trying to force Canada to change its laws (something that is never going to happen through a trade deal),

Is that because Canada's largest export to the US is ... oil? Changing other countries laws is exactly what the TPP is about.

Sing it Whitney:

Cos your laws are my laws, and you're sub-ject to my laws

It would take an eternity to break us,

Cos we're funded by monop-olies.

Your laws are my laws, and you're sub-ject to my laws

It would take an eternity to break us,

Cos we got police protection.

Whitney's grieving spouse would have enjoyed not just the benefit of the wealth Whitney left behind, but *new* income from Whitney's work until he's 113. If Bobbi had lived, there would be new income from her mum's work until 2082 when she would have been 87. Can you see how that might improve productivity and creativity? Since both of these ages are beyond the average lifespan, we have State-sponsored monopoly protection for the industry providing *new* income from old work for the grandchild of the artist, possibly the great-grandchild too. And they want to export this abroad.

IP lobbies are strong because there is no "loser" except the consumer. In other negotiations, an orange grower might be pitted against a dairy farmer or corn grower all of whom have their own lobbyists. In IP, there's little focussed and funded opposition, so they run wild.

Sometimes there are grounds for protectionism. Its simple democracy. People should be free to elect a government and say, "we don't want GMO food." Whether you think this is sensible or not is beside the point. There are plenty of places where cheap stuff drives out better quality stuff. It isn't always that people don't want the good stuff, its just that it may be hard for individuals to detect the difference. An example via the Gruen Transfer: take "Sunny D" - the marketing department enforces the rules that it must be sold from a fridge. The idea is to deceive consumers into thinking that its some sort of fresh juice. It isn't and it doesn't need refrigeration. However, pretending coloured sugar-water is juice, results in high profit margins which means real juice is less attractive to vendors and is pushed out.

Take GMO crops resistant to pesticides. You kill all the pests, and you get bumper crops. After a while, the insect ecology collapses and all the plants no longer reproduce. You may go out of business, but the people buying the crops don't care. Your bumper harvest depressed prices and next year they'll buy from elsewhere. Or maybe you'll stay in business, but you'll have to buy new seed from the GMO company every year, where once the crop was self-replicating. I would suggest that the short-term benefit of cheap food is outweighed by the long term damage that capitalism doesn't account for. That's why we have government, to do the things the market would not.

IT security staff have a job for life – possibly a grim, frustrating life

P. Lee

Re: The most important point is - companies must guarantee their products

>If the fault is that their software was not sufficiently hardened then the vendor should be sued to the extent of the damages.

For some value of "sufficient." What you'll find is that the software is sufficient for whatever the vendor says it is sufficient for... nothing. If you use it for something else, then you're on your own.

The problem is the scope of the problem. There are lots of consumer-level router manufacturers who absolutely should be slugged for providing substandard software. On the other hand, OS vendors are writing massive pieces of software with *lots* of different execution paths. There's no way you can test all that. Certainly some errors are stupid, but others are very obscure. All that adding insurance does is hike the price due to premiums - the cost of the breach + a slice of profit for another company. It doesn't actually fix the problem - it may make it worse, witness subprime. Vendors selling dodgy goods but they didn't care because it was insured by people who didn't know better - that's all of us.

Then you have the issue of FLOSS. Well, Tovalds, I had a Linux-based IoT safe which got hacked and all my wife's jewellery was stolen. Here's my bill for the loss. I don't think that's going to work.

Microsoft changes 'Outlook Web Access' to 'Outlook on the web'

P. Lee

>featuring the orange-highlighted ' Action toolbar'

wot no <flash>?

How did they make it so ugly?

Drone delivery sparks Ohio prison brawl

P. Lee
Coat

Re: lower than low

Unreported: The drone was called "Lucy" and the drugs were paid for with conflict diamonds...

Windows 10 Start menu replacements shifting like hot cakes

P. Lee
Coat

Re: There are others available

>Just tried ClassicShell for the first time ( on Win10) superb stuff!

But why just upgrade your start menu when you can upgrade your bootloader?

P. Lee

Re: Hardly surprising

>What did Microsoft think they were achieving with this?

Feeding Bing with your life in an effort to stay relevant.

By "relevant" I mean, desperately adding features because no-one really wants to pay for an OS any more.

Wait, what? TrueCrypt 'decrypted' by FBI to nail doc-stealing sysadmin

P. Lee

Re: id10t

+1

Why was the data not on a USB stick tucked behind the foil of his roofing insulation? Better yet, print that stuff out - its really hard to detect and hack paper.

Asian worries for Samsung and Apple as local brands chop up the market

P. Lee

Re: Apple's market is cyclical

"I don't think Vesuvius will ever blow. It never has done before, ever since anyone can remember!

Meh, Smoke Schmoke."

-- Julius Unredius

Everyone seems to be waving the "China/India" wand around and muttering hocus pocus as if it will save the world. It won't. In the very best scenario imaginable, it puts off the inevitable for a few years. In all likelihood, by the time China/India become large viable markets, the commoditisation of mobile will be complete. I don't know if ARM/MIPS will be making laptops but I'm pretty sure there won't be a buzz of excitement around the release of the latest phone, any more than we have a buzz of excitement around a new Dell.

Apple at least understand that selling devices is a short-term operation - they've gone for the ecosystem to get into your digital life and pick up your day-to-day spend. The question is, what happens when there is no ecosystem? What happens when the latest bollywood star isn't on itunes? What happens when the option is cheap android or nothing? What happens when you don't care about syncing all your devices because you're really lucky to have even one? What happens when you need large local storage because your cloud is *normally* disconnected?

Eventually the privacy abuses of the cloud are going to seep into mainstream consciousness. Someone is going to realise that they don't want to have to choose between Apple, MS & Google owning the entire stack - they would actually like to have layered software with third-party products. They may even tumble to the realisation that IPSEC vpns aren't that hard to do back to your own router. Someone will do a home-server which does their backups and network serving without stupid $400 empty-NAS pricing.

Its going to be an interesting time for Apple. In the 80's they were beaten because their magical Mackintosh was simply outpriced by good-enough Windows. Is history going to repeat itself? Probably not with Windows this time. I wonder how much impact the network-effect of their other products will have.

Mac fans! Don't run any old guff from the web: Malware spotted exploiting OS X root bug

P. Lee
Go

Re: anyone with half a brain

>someone's mom or granny is going to do exactly what is required because they've been told they are safe with their Apple computer.

Someone will but I suspect many, if not most, Mac users exist mostly within whatever was set up for them. "Needing to download and install stuff is what Windows and Linux people do."

Besides, the security hole is handy. I don't really trust my daughter's educational establishment to manage her MBA properly. Turns out, I was right... ;) ... and now at least timemachine works...

Boffins turned off by silicon switch to TILTING MAGNETS

P. Lee
Coat

Re: so, it will reset if you tip it?

>That makes it rather useless...

No, it makes it an etch-a-sketch.

Chechen women swindle ISIS via social media: 'We need roubles to join you xx'

P. Lee
Coat

Re: Why arrest them?

Maybe to force scammers to teach the police how to scam properly, without resorting to violence?

=====> Pickpocket

If you installed Windows 10 and like privacy, you checked the defaults, right? Oh dear

P. Lee

Re: 'Cheap' in terms of food, now means selling your privacy too.

Why not just hand the customer a plastic card to feed into the machine at the exit? Or print a barcode on their receipt?

OS X remote malware strikes Thunderbolt, hops hard drive swaps

P. Lee

Doh!

This is why boot ROMs should be tiny and actually ROM, not flash.

Boot up... "Would you like to continue booting from hard-disk, USB, serial, or network?"

Websites that ID you by how you type: Great when someone's swiped your password, but...

P. Lee

Re: Surely the main issue is informed consent

>Biometrics are not passwords. Passwords change, biometrics don't.

Biometrics are user id's.

Not all logins are equal. Most of my web-logins are inconsequential. If my ElReg account is taken over, I don't care that much. All those websites which require an account before you can download some free (beer) software, probably don't rate a complex password - they simply don't matter.

Banking & finance applications are a different issue.

New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

P. Lee

Re: New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

Could we have fonts moved out of Javascript on Channel Register?

Hey, Apple! 1999 just called and it wants its voicemail avatar back

P. Lee
Coat

Re: Wildfire was a saucy one

Apparently, you are the Special.

Next-gen secure email using internet's own DNS – your help needed

P. Lee

Am I all alone here?

Yes spam is a huge horrible beast.

However... its a crime I'm willing to live with. If this works well, you won't be able to send email without a certificate. I don't want "all your base are belong to us" Verisign to be in control of everything. I don't want the government to be be in control of all communication. If there's no end-to-end encryption, it isn't secure. There may be some benefit to having inter-ISP mail verified, but if ISP's aren't willing to annoy their customers they know to be infected (or spamming) then what chance is there for this? How will it improve things? It just looks like another attempt to set up a toll-gate for the internet.

I walk down the street, people could stop me and talk to me. Yes its usually annoying pollsters, but I'm not willing to swap that for a situation where people can't talk to each other without a government or corporate license.

Nokia sells HERE maps to Audi, Daimler and BMW for €2.8 billion

P. Lee

Re: Not forgetting...

Possibly, but I wonder if Apple were reminding BMW that everyone who buys one has a smartphone already?

I'm wondering if this is aiming at autonomous cars rather than duplicating smartphone functions.

Linus Torvalds warns he's in no mood to be polite as Linux 4.2 drags

P. Lee

>As I recall, Ada is both more memory-intensive and more processor-intensive,

So, do you want it to be stable & resource-hungry or fast & light-weight?

Are users undermining your mobile security efforts?

P. Lee
Coat

Mobile management is easy to achieve

Buy employees a macbook air and a smartphone.

These are for business, not personal use. Additional software must be cleared by IT Security - you can request new software at http://....

A list of pre-cleared software and where you may install it from is available at http://....

If you wish to use your own pc hardware, approved work VM images are available at: http://....

Now was that so hard?

Assessing the power of Intel’s SSD 750 … but check your motherboard before buying

P. Lee

Re: 32.23MB/s for 4K random reads is disappointing

>my inner dinosaur is still trying to rebel - A Hard Disk - on a card?

My inner dinosaur looks at that with a hint of nostalgia.

However, I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper / more standardised to run an SSD RAID array, even if you put multiple sata controllers on an x16 card.

Apple chief Cook cooks up rumours after BMW car talks, factory tour

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: Would you trust ANY Americans in your factory?

>Pretty much all the X vehicles are made there.

<Offensive comment about the X series being pretend off-road cars for suckers deleted>

Apple & BMW are both top-tier brands, but (apart from the X series) BMW do serious engineering. How long does a BMW last? How long does an iphone last? Do you think those two cultures are going to mix? You may as well call in Basil Fawlty to help.

At least the Germans are unlikely to hook up the entertainment system to engine-management, and BMW won't suggest that the driver wear a pair of pink headphones with a big B on them.

There's little synergy between consumer IT and cars. Bluetooth, wireless charging, NFC and external aerials are about as far as you want to go.

Microsoft's Windows 10 Torrent-U-Like updates GULP DOWN your precious bandwidth

P. Lee

Re: Tried to sell this to them nearly a decade ago...

I always thought that BITS updates looked a lot like hobbled torrents.

Maybe I had the wrong end of the stick, I'm not of the Windows Persuasion.

Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software

P. Lee

Re: DirectX

>"it's possible to see foresee Microsoft DirectX suddenly being weaponised as a reason to upgrade to the latest release or charged as an optional extra."

LoL No. Unless they plan on ditching xbox as hardware and rolling up xboxOS and DirectX.

No-one's going to support a graphics standard which isn't ubiquitous.

P. Lee
Linux

>"Dual-core, 2GB ram*, Win-10 Pro 32-bit

Is it way too smug to point at my Suse-13.2-i586 running KDE on a Pentium-m with 1.5G RAM?

Probably.

P. Lee

Re: Windows 365 - DaaS

>I can't remember what the brand of the last hammer was that I purchased, same with the OS,

MS pretty much admits this with its android programme. Pretty much any OS allows you to click icons and run stuff these days.

Office is where the cash is. Desktop Windows is just a "top-up" license fee for Office. It also helps drive the upgrade cycle. E.g. You upgrade Exchange Server to keep in support, you get a new Outlook client, but it doesn't work on Old Windows, so you upgrade Windows. But now the rest of Office was designed for Windows "two versions ago" and therefore isn't supported. So you need to upgrade that...

Stop forcing benefits down my throat and give me hard cash, dammit

P. Lee

Re: hmmmm

The point of all the employee benefits is that for many jobs, they are so low-paid that it doesn't make economic sense to have to employ accountants for each person. Far better and cheaper just to have standard rules. Accountants only make sense for the well-off.

Another point is the possibility that given the option of cash over holiday, the employee opts for cash. The employer then notices that his employees are spending the extra cash on nights-out on the town and other frivolities which aren't strictly required for life and decides to cut wages. The enforced holidays are there to protect the workers from such practises. Remember Catbert's "timebank"? Now someone is seriously suggesting it?

It's enough to get your back up: Eight dual-bay SOHO NAS boxes

P. Lee

Re: RAID-0 FFS?

FWIW, CoolerMaster Force 500 is a midi-tower case with 8 bays and its dirt cheap (I think I paid AUD 42 a couple of years ago) and you can install the ATX motherboard of your choice. I have one in the garage which runs as a media / TV server, backup server, ISCSI, time-machine, dhcp, PXE... etc. It gives quite a bit more flexibility to re-use old drives when you have more bays. I have an old desktop core2duo m/b in it with dual gig-ethernet on board.

Wait, STOP: Are you installing Windows 10 or RANSOMWARE?

P. Lee

Re: Windows 10 is Ransomeware?

That's unfair its free for the life of the device.

Office365, however.... yep, that looks like ransom-ware to me.

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

P. Lee

Re: It's all about the developers

>MS make most of their money from enterprise licensing fees not home users.

^ this.

The freebie is for home users who have a relatively recent MS OS already.

i.e. Likely OEM home users who almost certainly are not going to spend money on a new OS anyway. They would wait until the next hardware upgrade and get the OEM windows from that too.

There's almost zero hit to MS' pocket and all the "opportunities" of the MS shop and a more unified developer target.

Strong ARM scoops up Sansa to boost IoT security

P. Lee

IoT's problem

Doing things badly is very simple and very cheap.

Doing things properly massively increases the resource requirements, management, complexity and chance that something will go wrong. It is also expensive. All these things destroy the market.

IT security is hard, boring and expensive.

Microsoft Edge web browser: A well-presented mea culpa

P. Lee
Meh

So I could upgrade to the latest and greatest

and spend my time disabling all the privacy-invading features I don't want and hope no-one turns them on again by default.

Or I could stick with what I have, using FF's "Search" box when I want to search the web and my local OS' "search" box when I want to search locally.

For a long time I've thought IE just looks like a dog. It is just too ugly for words. Forget the security flaws, quirky rendering, hated unified url/search box etc, I just thought it was kind of ugly and wasted desktop space. I felt as though some horrendous GUI-design errors were made but I just couldn't put my finger on them. Chrome slurps data too, but it was just a bit prettier.

I feel the same way about W10 (and W8). I don't feel the need for the extra features and oh my word how I hate the flat interface. In the interest of balance I dislike IOS' appearance more than I did too. I think we've got to the point where any OS will do the tasks required of it. Perhaps I'm a dinosaur, but I don't feel the need for social media integration, I think application-level and GUI-level file-storage integration is stupid (hello dropbox, hello KDE/SMB) and with a five mb/s net connection and a local server, the cloud holds little or no attraction for me.

So that leaves me with file-storage on a file server and a split-tunnel VPN, imap email (remember when email had its own protocol?) and sshfs. I feel slightly sorry for MS - I'm not sure that there is anything that would tempt me back. KDE is pretty, Steam and MythTV are entertaining, NFS may not be the most secure protocol, but its fast and its just my home network, MariaDB may not be the world's best database, but I've used it for years and never once had a problem. Netatalk provides OSX backups, SAMBA does Windowsy-type stuff, though I usually NFS-share and run Windows in a VM. I don't feel as though I'm missing anything except the odd game, but seeing as I haven't even played all my linux ones, I'm not too fussed. I do feel that if I went with Windows I might get a little more polish on some apps, but I'm likely to lose a lot of features. Its the same with OSX. Still no iscsi initiator, Apple? Work out what is actually important. Live simply, live cheaply.

Its not me, its you. You act as though we're married but we aren't. You're ugly to look at and your character has changed, its no longer my personal computer, you seem to think that just I allowed you to install some software on my hardware, you can take what you like and give it to your boss. Your data-slurping is uncouth. Just because all the other kids are doing doesn't mean you should too. Now, to quote Raymond Stevens, "Get your tongue outta my mouth, cos I'm kissing you goodbye."

Download Fest goers were human guinea pigs in spy tech experiment, admit police

P. Lee

Re: Depressingly...

>I fear we will see a gradual but steady increase in this type of intrusive pish over the coming years.

I doubt it. I hope the organisers did well out of the last Download festival. This is bridge-burning at its very best.

Someone's going to make a fortune taking a picture of a security guard's face and printing it on sweat-shirt hoods.

Giant Facebook SOLAR LASER DRONE to FEED interwebs into YOUR FACE

P. Lee

I so torn

Yay!

but

Oh No!

--

Anyone know how good a laser is going to be through clouds?

What can't sell Galaxy S6s and keeps going down on you? Samsung and its profits

P. Lee

Re: wow. apparently there are a few pissed off ex sammy owners here

It appears that Samsung have internal brand confusion and too many beancounters. You don't get nitpicky with customers over support when they've paid a lot for the phone. Last year's flagship maybe cheap now, but the customer still remembers what they paid for it. Apple have it a bit easier, they don't do cheap, so a good-service culture is easier to fund.

Premium brands need premium support - it should be "fix it with no questions asked." Actually all support should be like that. Let's face it, these phones cost very little to make. A few annoyed customers do enormous damage but happy customers really help you because people like to be able to brag about how they made the right purchasing decision.

I wonder when someone will realise that helping the customer is a good thing? Give them an SD card slot and replaceable batteries. Document that chipset and help the CM and vanilla Android chaps to get their software working well on it. You may not sell a replacement so quickly but you'll build brand loyalty and that's a lucrative thing. If people wanted an idiot-phone they would have already bought, er, something else.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

P. Lee
Linux

Re: Let the arms race begin...

> finders-keepers, losers

Hmm, down Amazon's drone, see if its carrying anything you want and send it back up again.

Better yet, train a falcon (or a penguin) to pick off the payload.

P. Lee
Terminator

Re: It's time

LOIC should work nicely. If it auto-lands you get yourself a nice new drone.

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: 40mm Glock

Its the automated down-voting troll-fairy

SPUD – The IETF's anti-snooping protocol that will never be used

P. Lee

Re: Added value?

You might want VoIP traffic to have higher-priority down your internet link than torrents.

Then you can happily run both simultaneously and have crystal clear calls and max speed torrents.

'Fix these Windows 10 Horrors': Readers turn their guns on Redmond

P. Lee

>Am I the only person who sees this as desperation?

Nope, you're not the only one.

They've messed up and ended up without the monoculture they so badly need. Not only is the world not all Windows, but not even Windows users are all running a platform which is easily targetable by devs. They broke stuff between versions to force application upgrades, without contemplating what would happen if their strong-arm tactics were ignored. Now they have ended up with multiple incompatible Windows operating systems because they didn't actually give their users a particularly good reason to upgrade except "to stay current."

NT4->XP and XP->W7 were reasonably compelling. A better GUI and better memory capabilities. Do you really need a new OS to implement powershell? Do you really need a new OS to implement an additional GUI which is optional? Don't even get the linux chaps involved here. I run SuSE 32bit in 1.5G RAM and SuSE 64bit with 32G RAM. MythTV, VLC, Mozilla and the OS all work without a problem. No application breakages there.

I know MS wants to earn money, but powershell should really be a base item and a new GUI should not be a cost option. Why? W10 is licensed per device. Change your device, you buy new license. All those non-touchscreen business installs out there don't need it. All the new W10 tablets/phones (stop laughing) will have it pre-licensed. Unless you're a desktop user who bought a stand-alone touchscreen (anyone?) you don't need it. MS admit as such by making W8 (touchscreen OS) upgrades to W10 free. The upshot is, there's still not a great deal which MS can argue makes it worthwhile *for the user* to upgrade from W7->W10. Its great for MS, nice for Devs, but for the user - not so much.

Turnbull's transformers plan business access to YOUR GOV ID DATA

P. Lee

One ID to rule them all, and in the Darkenss bind them

Because that's worked so well in the past.

Windows 10: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE to Microsoft's long apology for Windows 8

P. Lee

> That XBone streaming thing is amazingly useful - now I can stream 720p 30fps content to my 1440p 60fps PC!

Now, with added lag!

P. Lee

> "Windows as a service"

Odd idea, considering it's tied to a device.

"Windows as an appliance"?

def: appliance: (in IT) something you pay for ostensibly yours but with a lifespan determined by a third-party, which is never actually yours or designed to work for you. (See, "Vendor thoughts: oh @#$%^ they've bought a license and are never going to buy another one in the next two years", also, "Why don't IT departments want to do any technical IT work anymore?")

P. Lee
Go

Re: Why call it Windows?

Is "Trap-doors" taken?