Posts by Conrad Longmore

Gragh, students and their sodding games

I worked with students for quite a long time. One irritation was that they would insist on playing games on the lab computers which were meant for.. well, work. Back in those days all the games were DOS games, and they almost all used Mode 13h for graphics (320 x 200 pixels x 256 colours).

I knocked together a simple TSR that intercepted the interrupt that changed the display mode.. every time you tried to change to 13h it would display an error and reboot. The TSR was pretty well hidden, I don' t think any of the users ever figured it out.

The other essential DOS tool was an application that replaced the FORMAT command with one that checked to see if the user was trying to format C: (because yes, you could actually do that). If they were it would let off an alarm, which would tend to attract attention. Yes, students actually did this either maliciously or stupidly. If they were just trying to format a floppy disk, it would pass it on to the REAL format command which had simply been renamed.

What always flabbergasted me was when students were working on their dissertations, they wouldn't ever bother to have a backup copy of the floppy disk they had to store it on. Norton Utilities certainly rescued quite a few academic careers.

When we upgraded to a Novell network the problem was that the students would never log out, and students would end up with each others dissertations. Eventually, we wrote a screensaver in VB which would log them out automatically. Unfortunately, it would tend to do it while the students were looking up references in their books and it would shut down.. being not very observant, they didn't notice the GREAT BIG RED timer which gave them five minutes grace.

PABX

We recently powered off an AT&T PABX that had been in service since about 1994. OK, it had been switched off and on a few times because occasionally you DO have to power down the server room. I betcha there are some ancient PABXes out there..

Because

Because folding one OS into another always works so well, for example MeeGo. Tizen. Etc.

If they've taken it down..

If they've taken it down.. then how come the Dridex spam is still running? Just got another malicious Dridex DOC this morning - http://blog.dynamoo.com/2015/10/malware-spam-scan-2015-10-14-52954-pm.html

Just finished reading the new Maddi Davidson murder mystery..

It turns out that the customer did it.

How to detect and stop it..

All our corporate computers are joined to a domain and are managed by WSUS. However, a small number of laptops (about 0.5%) managed to initiate the download despite having policies to block running the GWX component in place. It looks like the process might have triggered when the laptops were outside of our corporate environment. We spotted the unusual traffic before it became a problem.

If you log your internet traffic, then searching for "10240.16384.150709-1700" is useful to reveal who is downloading Windows 10 components on your network.

Microsoft have some new guidance on how you can block the OS upgrade here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3050265

OMG.. Hooli XYZ

'nuff said

The mistake was.. Symbian

I pretty much agree with the article 100% - Elop found Nokia in an impossible situation that was not of his making. He tried a high-risk high-reward strategy with Windows which didn't really work out. Android would have been a low-risk but low-reward approach, as the article says.. Android manufacturers are hardly raking in the cash. Sticking with MeeGo looked very much like a high-risk low-reward approach, so dumping it was probably the best decision. So the choice was really between Android and Windows. Choose one.

I think the crucial mistake was how Elop dealt with Symbian. When he become CEO, I believe that Symbian was still the best-selling smartphone platform in the work. While it lacked the capabilities of main rivals iOS and Android, it was still a very capable and lightweight OS with a ton of applications available for it.

Prior to Elop, the idea was that Symbian would move downmarket into Series 40 territory with Maemo/MeeGo taking the high end. Insteal, Elop announced that Symbian would be phased out which had the Osborne Effect on Symbian sales which collapsed, leaving a huge hole in Nokia's sales book. Then, crazily, they tried to add more features into Series 40 to make it more Symbian-like.. for example the Asha series of devices. That was a lot of effort to re-create something they already had.

Symbian certainly has its detractors, but the final Nokia Belle handsets were really rather good.

Nokia were already screwed..

Nokia were already screwed when Elop joined. Symbian couldn't compete with modern OSes such as Android and iOS, Nokia's escape strategy of moving to Maemo on high-end devices had fatally stalled with the ill-advised merger with Moblin to create Maemo. You can blame Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo for the mess that Nokia found itself in, not Elop.

Elop found himself at the head of a company with no roadmap, but still quite a lot of sales. His infamous "burning platform" memo was pretty accurate, but he was fatally undermined as CEO by whoever leaked that communication.

Getting out of the mess was always going to involve some risk. In the end he took a high-risk approach of dumping everything and going for Windows, hoping that Nokia would avoid becoming a "me too" Android player. In the end, that strategy did not work.

It was always a high-risk, high-reward strategy to tie Nokia up with Microsoft. If they'd have gone down the Android path, I am sure that Nokia would still be an independent manufacturer today.. but not a very profitable one. The low-risk, low-reward strategy.

Of course, since Nokia became Microsoft, more mistakes have been made. The last high-end device launch was over a year ago and the current product range is moribund. It's a shame because Windows is rather good, and Cortana is easily better than Google's offering.

It isn't the 1990s any more..

It isn't the 1990s any more. Java should be long dead, but sadly it isn't. Probably for 90%+ of users this move is probably a great one. But for the rest it is going to be a massive pain in the arse.

I've been saying for years that if you have Java installed on your system then the smartest thing you can do is remove it completely. In the real world hardly anybody needs it. But isn't it awfully prescriptive of the Chrome devs to decide that *nobody* can use it in Chrome? After all, Chrome was written to be a stable platform to run apps.

One thing that will suffer is anything running that antiquated piece of crap known as Oracle Forms. Heck, that even breaks when Oracle update their own Java product. A cynic might say that Google will view any damage to Oracle's products as acceptable damage..

NQ Mobile

NQ Vault is a product of NQ Mobile. A quick bit of searching on them in Google News comes up with allegations that the entire company grossly overstates its user base and income. This is a company where the founder and other senior officers have a habit of abruptly resigning. Draw your own conclusions.

Maybe they got a visit..

Maybe they got a visit from those people in suits and matching black SUVs.

"Here, let us write the press release for you.."

Java is shit

Let's not beat around the bush here.. Java on desktops (not so much on other platforms) is a heap of shit. Anybody who codes still Java applets for web pages needs to be taken out and shot. Basically, it's a slice of the 1990s where much of the functionality can be replaced by quicker, more stable and more secure replacements.

Oracle's products of course heavily rely on Java. Oracle forms is a particularly obsolete slice of twentieth-century technology that still uses it. Except of course for when your particular version of Oracle doesn't work with the latest version of Java which is always fun.

Gitmo

These days the government would probably rendition him out to Guantanamo Bay for such a thing.

A reminder of a simpler time, and probably one of the influences that got me involved in the IT security field. Rest in Peace.

Floriduh

Florida again. Can we just nuke the whole state from orbit? It would make the world a better place.