Posts by mark jacobs

How can you tell if you're affected?

How do you know if a PC is running HP Device Manager?

I've got one word to say to you ..

.. QUETZALS spanning two triple word scores, with the T already on the board! Neh neh!

Spam email

"There's a new way to extend your dong ... try our pythons ..."

We are being fobbed off here.

Corporations are being treated more and more like people with rights, everyday! Now, we must excuse bosom buddies BT and Yahoo their foibles, because of some unknown reason that they can't get their act together. End of September is a promise, and the corporations broke that promise, but we must excuse them, for they are only "human". This society is sick because of the way corporations are treated, quite often, as more important than any one person. Money causes people to do things their consciences wouldn't normally let them do. Ripping off millions of customers is just one of those things. Betraying their confidence is another.

My son has the Huawei P9 and that is a lovely phone, reliable, hard-wearing, fast, best dual Leica camera in the world ... Huawei could easily take on Samsung's business.

I got Windows 10 about 5 months ago (free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8), and I reckon Microsoft have taken one step forwards and 2 steps back with this release. Win10 still has the age old bugs that plagued 7 and 8. But it has accrued new ones. For example, bring up a file open dialog, and use the mouse to click on the pull-down arrow for the "Look in" list (to jump to a different drive or directory). The first time you use it, the drop-down folds back up again, necessitating another click to get it to drop down and stay dropped down! Horrible! And just this morning, I signed into an office PC running Win10, and when I eventually got a desktop, after its "Hi! Getting things ready" shenanigans, the Start button did nothing, no menu, nothing. Win key also did nothing. I had to right-click the Start button to get out! It seems behind every great product is a genius, and when he/she moves on, the product starts to fall to pieces (Apple - Jobs, Microsoft - Gates, Delphi - Hejlsberg).

Urgent! Help needed!

I am doing some in depth research on these devices and was wondering if there were any women aged 18 to 35 who would be willing to help me out... Enjoyment of sex would be a positive...

BBC B Micro days...

I wrote a BBC Basic program to write random values between 0 and 255 to random memory locations in the machine's whole address space. This meant it clobbered code and data areas with impunity, and quite slowly. It was interesting to see how the machine slowly crashed, until I demonstrated it to a colleague. I had just helped him finish a spreadsheet which was now stored on a floppy in the machine. I ran my clobber program and the smiles were wiped off our faces as the disk drive activated and rendered the disk unusable! Laugh? No, we didn't.

The brutes!

"An external forensics company, with hardware capabilities, is likely copying the NAND storage off the [iPhone's chipset] and frequently recopying it back to the device in order to brute force the PIN..."

That's why the FBI have asked to postpone until April - to give them time to brute force the PIN.

Compare this (fiasco) with that in Paris, where the attackers just used unencrypted comms through unencrypted phones bought for use on the day and disposed of immediately after. They even hoiked phones off their victims and used them for some of their calls.

Which goes to prove that breaking encryption has nothing to do with stopping terrorism.

Them's were the days ...

I programmed a stock control system in LocoScript - very hard work! Yes, we could write books in those days. Nowadays, if you tried to write a book on Windows 10 with Word 365, you'd be hard-pressed to have a stable system past 150 pages! And Clippy would be right getting on your nerves!

It's not just GMP. The Met are also awful.

Shortly after the Stephen Lawrence murder, someone went into the police station supposedly investigating the matter, and handed them a hand-written list of likely suspects (from "word on the street"), and the station officer who took the paper it was written on, screwed it into a ball and chucked it into the waste paper basket. That typifies the attitude of the police force we pay council tax for. The murder of Charles De Menezes was filmed on camera phone by someone on the station platform where it happened. Several police officers got on-board the carriage where Charles was (and he did NOT have a backpack on, just T-shirt and jeans), they pinned him down to the floor with their weight, and fired 11 rounds into his head. WTF!?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7nL0A6ASM

Police = FAIL. Who polices the police? The police!

If it feels good, it is denied, until some desperation makes it available for a fee.

For source code, only use home-spun software (after all, you are a developer) and always put it on a VPN, and never a public server. If I want to see my own source code and I'm in Lesotho, I have to RDP to my VPN first. Without that first step, I can't get near it. Git is a bad idea and AWS is a toy. Don't trust third parties with commercial interests. Trust third parties with technical interests.

The "Internet of Things" is going to comprise of things their current architecture would have to be rewritten to use, in the future. Things that we haven't imagined yet. So, we are still going to be paying for Windows 11, 12, 13, ...

I don't get it... ?

This happened nearly 4 years ago. Why are we only just hearing about it now?

I am getting my coat...

... Windows 10 is around the corner, and that patches the OS in real-time! Yikes! For example, working on a 300 page Word document for 3 hrs, and then hitting "Save", and watch as the patch to Word delivered at 2 hours in, renders the document unusable!

Ha ha ha!

That was brilliant! Those poor aliens!

Honestly?

I left Virgin last year, when my 5th "megahub" blew up on me (completely dead). These substandard devices, cheaply made in the far east, always seemed to go wrong on me, so I moved to Plus Net. Not only did I get consistently fast speeds (downloads 3 to 3.5 MBytes per second, 1 to 2 MBytes per second uploads) throughout the day, evening and night, but their support was more personal and immediate. I'd move to them or One 2 One, and stick a finger up to Branson and his drug-fuelled island of depravity that he owns!

Considering FB store your password in a server in Japan somewhere, and it keeps coming back to the browser as soon as you enter your username, no matter how you try to clear all stored passwords in Firefox, I will not be going near this tripe any time soon. FB users beware - your details and passwords are available to those who can pay enough. There is no security on FB. Close your accounts! You have been warned!

Every time our Win XP office PCs updated Windows, they would all switch on the (crap and waste of time) Windows firewall, which I'd have to go round and switch off again (we already have Webroot protecting us). It sounds like Windows 10 is the death knell for all Windows versions.

You can see how much the British public trust our "authorities" nowadays, from the comments above! Having constantly shown how untrustworthy they are in the past, how can such a claim be made that they really will delete your records? This is an idiotic article - and Privacy International are really wasting people's time and their own money.

What a shame!

For a man with octophallic terata, he never did find his octopussy!

I'm so blue, it's making me wail!