* Posts by Steve Evans

2772 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

BBC’s Micro:bit turns out to be an excellent drone hijacking tool

Steve Evans

16Mhz ? I'd use a pi, only slightly larger, however, so much more ooompf.

That would depend on if you definition of a covert device permitted having a power cable dangling from it for a wall socket!

The baby board sips the electrons at a very gentle rate.

The opsec blunders that landed a Russian politician's fraudster son in the clink for 27 years

Steve Evans

Prisons are full of stupid criminals...

It's the ones the smart ones that are never caught you should worry about!

BOFH: Oh go on. Strap me to your Hell Desk, PFY

Steve Evans

I though lesson 1 was always cut the BOFH in on some of the action.

The Internet of Flying Thing: Reg man returns with explicit shots

Steve Evans

Re: "our wifi antenna"

That would actually be incorrect. That would be their satellite antenna.

The wifi antenna(s) would be inside the passenger compartment.

Giffgaff 'roam like at home' package means £1/min calls in Jersey

Steve Evans

Re: Giffgaff was a MVNO in Jersey

Indeed... I used to visit Guernsey, Jersey and Isle of Man for work quite a few moons ago, and I didn't think twice, my phone just worked and charged as it did back home on the big neighbouring island (GB).

UK ministers to push anti-encryption laws after election

Steve Evans

Re: Known to Authorities.

@Bernard M. Orwell

You forgot - Was mentioned several times to the anonymous tip line too!

Amber Rudd needs to quit the sound bites, she just ends up sounding like a feckin' idiot. As do most politicians the moment they step out of their comfort zone of 5 course meals and floating duck houses.

The UK is about to go it alone from Europe, and the last thing it needs is more companies jumping abroad because of enforced broken encryption schemes.

Huawei Honor 8 Pro: Makes iPhone 7 Plus look a bit crap

Steve Evans

IIRC, the iPhone finger print reader was good when it first appeared, but since then the competition has shot past it.

An iPhone owning colleague of mine recently tried out the Blackberry Keyone, and couldn't believe how good the fingerprint reader was in comparison to what he was used to.

Mozilla to Thunderbird: You can stay here and we may give you cash, but as a couple, it's over

Steve Evans

Re: Pointless interface changes ?

There's only one thing they need to do to thunderbird... Get the filtering to work properly, it's insane... At least on my machine it is.

It worked a few months ago, and then after an update it stopped.

Telling Thunderbird to manually filter a folder works fine, it just won't do it when it collects emails anymore (which it used to do perfectly).

I haven't changed any filters in years either.

Who knows.

It's annoying, but hell, it's still the best email client I've got... Must have a dozen accounts configured.

WhatsApp is more like WhatsDown: Messenger collapsed for millions

Steve Evans

Probably installing all the spy hooks demanded by various governments.

Male escort forgot pregnancy protection, scores data protection instead

Steve Evans

Re: In the UK

It would be either the entire hotel, or everyone called Michael in the UK.

And they'd still fail to find more than three.

Cuffing Assange a 'priority' for the USA says attorney-general

Steve Evans

Re: Deportation

He, probably quite rightly, feared that the moment he was in the custody of any country, he was likely to find himself on a plane to the USA either before or after the sentence.

Manchester pulls £750 public crucifixion offer

Steve Evans

Re: No nails required

All this nails through the hands/wrists business needs to be tested through strict scientific investigation...

Someone fetch me 10 sets of identical twins, 20 crosses, a bag of 6 inch nails and a big 'ammer.

Steve Evans

Re: Ridiculous

"In March 2008, peers voted for the laws to be abandoned. On May 8, 2008, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 abolished the common-law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales, with effect from 8 July 2008."

So scratch the blasphemy angle... This is all down to 'elf and safety, oh, and political correctness.

Bollocks to the lot of em, who wants nailing? I'll fetch me 'ammer.

Drive-by Wi-Fi i-Thing attack, oh my!

Steve Evans

Re: Obsolescence?

Oh, like so many Android devices that get at most 1 or 2 security updates and virtually no OS upgrades despite lots of promises from the manufacturer/network.

Apple has a lot to not like about it, but the length of time that iDevices get updates is generally far better than any Android or Microsoft device.

That's because Apple are the only makers of Apple devices, and they refused to bend at all to the networks. They have complete control over what gets what.

A similar Android device would be a Nexus, which also gets lots of upgrades, because it's Google in charge, and nobody else has any say.

Unfortunately, most Android devices come from the likes of LG, Samsung etc... And they are your bottleneck. They're interested in the money from your next purchase, not the money you've already given for the current.

Someone should make a website with some nice graphs so you can see what kind of after sales service you can expect to get.

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

Steve Evans

Stupid....

This saga brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "blown out of all proportion".

The total amount of dead animal used in the production of *all* the new £5 was less than 1 hoof!

The damn thing could still be walking about... With a limp of course.

UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud

Steve Evans

And all this is justified because some nutter used Whatsapp just before killing 4 people.

What's the betting his highly encrypted Whatsapp message, which is the current excuse, was just a "Goodbye" to his family?

And he "only" killed 4 (no disrespect intended). The average road deaths in the UK is 4.7 a day... Every day... She'd be more justified banning cars.

DNS lookups can reveal every web page you visit, says German boffin

Steve Evans

Re: Add an Ad Blocker on the router too?

https://pi-hole.net

Blackholes many adverts, and caches for 300 seconds iirc.

Doesn't need a Pi, it runs nicely on lots of the little boards.

Got mine running on an old Odroid C1 (Native 1Gb LAN).

Headphone batteries flame out mid-flight, ignite new Li-Ion fears

Steve Evans

Re: Possibly listening to

Billy Joel

Steve Evans

Re: I'm putting a bet....

If the batteries were quality, they would have had protection circuits built in. If the wiring was cheap it would have just melted like fuse-wire (a protection in itself). From the photo I'd say that battery went up properly.

I can't help noticing she was flying from China... If she bought herself a present of some new headphones over there, who knows what she was wearing (she certainly wouldn't!).

Facebook shopped BBC hacks to National Crime Agency over child abuse images probe

Steve Evans
Facepalm

LOL!

Too funny!

Sorry, but that just made me laugh.

I would suggest that in future the reporter just skips Farcebook and their comical operations department, and just create give an anonymous report directly to the cops.

I'll leave them to work out how to create an anonymous tip without being arrested by the cops for sending them the links/pictures, because I'm sure they'll be almost as comical as FB's muppets.

User rats out IT team for playing games at work, gets them all fired

Steve Evans

You can fire people just like that.

You can't just fire people like that.

You can, even in the UK with all the employment rights, and the ones we've gained from Europe.

It's called gross misconduct, and I would suggest that not running the backups and causing a potential loss of 3 days worth of business would qualify.

If you don't believe me, go and punch your boss and see what happens. That will qualify easily.

Palmtop nostalgia is tinny music to my elephantine ears

Steve Evans

Re: I've nothing of value to contribute

Diddo, although after many set which work once, get stuffed in a pocket, and then emerge in kit form the next time they are retrieve, my latest, a set of Sennheisers, are just approaching their one year anniversary of public transport use.

Oh bugger, why did I say that, I'm getting on a plane next week. They're going to disintegrate mid-flight and stab me with bits of frayed copper aren't they.

Google's troll-destroying AI can't cope with typos

Steve Evans

I wonder what it would score "spawny-eyed parrot-faced wazzock"

https://youtu.be/I2AcJSkUw6M?t=1m18s

Alert! The dastardly Dutch are sailing a 90-ship fleet at Blighty

Steve Evans

Any chance we could get that Russian submarine serviceable in time?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_U-475_Black_Widow

How to nuke websites you don't like: Slam Google with millions of bogus DMCA takedowns

Steve Evans

Rate limit it...

Sounds like a job for a ramping up rate limit...

Based on the number of non existent submissions over the previous 24 hours, add a slight delay to the process.

They could make it require an API key. 10 an hour is not throttled and is free, above that start charging, because I'm sure the "lawyers" will be charging their client for submitting x thousand DMCA requests even if 99.9% are complete crap.

Beeps, roots and leaves: Car-controlling Android apps create theft risk

Steve Evans

Car (and IoT) manufacturers really need to be dragged into security training.

Just because you could make a certain thing possible remotely, you need to stop and ask "should I?".

Why would anyone want to unlock the doors via the internet connected ap? It's pretty unlikely that feature will be used by genuine owners anywhere near as many times as it'll be used by someone keen to steal the contents of the boot.

If you *really* must have keyless door opening, only support it over a short range communication such as bluetooth, or RFID.

Next, starting the car remotely... Okay, to prewarm on a cold morning it's nice, but you don't need to disable the interior alarm, or unlock the doors, release the steering lock, or allow the hard/parking brake to be release and a gear engaged... If those happen kill the engine and set off the arm. (Release of rattle snake from glove-box optional).

And don't forget to give the owner of the car a method of deleting previously authorised users/devices without requiring a visit to a main dealer.

Pwnd Android conference phone exposes risk of spies in the boardroom

Steve Evans

Android 2.3?

Good grief... Whatever next, cash machines running windows 3.1.1...

Vivaldi and me: Just browsing? Nah, I'm sold

Steve Evans

if you think that's bad, you should see if via a RDP session! **shudder**

Steve Evans

Re: Developer Tools

Press F12 and you get Chrome-devtools, although the window title very quickly changes to remove the chrome reference.

A bit of further digging (and the fact it has Chromium PDF viewer plug-in pre-installed) revealed it's based on Blink, which is a fork of Webkit used by Chrome/Opera, so it should render pretty much the same.

It seems pretty quick, and I rather like the look of the theme I picked, so I might actually give this a go for a while, although the coordinated tabs between my desktop browser and mobile browser is a bit of a must-have, so I'll have to see if that can be done.

Posted from my Vivaldi browser window.

Hacker: I made 160,000 printers spew out ASCII art around the world

Steve Evans

It's either UPNP being it's usual helpful self (i.e. too helpful and opening up everything), or people with absolutely no clue what they're doing and routing ports themselves.

There is *no* reason 99.9% of the printer owning population of the world would want or need their printer to be visible from the intertubes.

The 0.1% who do should be the ones who have to jump through hoops to do it and have it done properly (VPN).

The IoT is going to be a lot of fun for some people.

LG's $1,300 5K monitor foiled by Wi-Fi: Screens go blank near hotspots

Steve Evans

i think you mean they're looking at it wrong.

Bloke launches twinkly range of BBC Micro:bit accessory boards

Steve Evans

Re: x2 NICs

NIC's really need to have a very fast link to the ARM core, otherwise they're just painfully slow.

Unfortunately most of the little arm chips don't have the necessary fast external bus for this, so they hang it onto something else, like USB (e.g. the Raspberry Pi). This work, but is terribly slow. That's why the Pi is still only 10/100, and can't get anywhere near the 100Mb/s ceiling anyway.

Some board have the required hardware in the ARM silicon, so they *do* have a fast connection (e.g. Odroid C2). They're usually easy to spot as the have gigabit ethernet, and certainly in the case of the Odroid board, really do deliver on network bandwidth.

So for a dual NIC board you ideally need to find an ARM with a pair of MACs built in, with the external connectivity to drive a pair of external PHYs at a good speed.

Yes, I'd love a fast dual NIC little board too.

I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the API key

Steve Evans

Re: Whats the point of an autonomous tractor?

Sensor equipped farm machinery does help feed the planet, and save the planet too.

For example, integrating the yield data during harvesting across a field gives fantastic information about how the soil quality varies within the field, and is used to vary the amount of nutrients put onto the soil at the start of the next growing season.

The result is higher crop yield and less wastage of fertilizer.

Just give up: 123456 is still the world's most popular password

Steve Evans

Re: Don't Just Blame Users

I feel your pain. I remember setting one up on a bank a few years ago... It insisted I used between 6 and 8 characters. No caps, no numbers, no symbols and objected when I had too many letters repeated.

I kept meaning to sit down and calculate the number of passwords that would then be left as valid to their system.

It's probably about a dozen! j/k!

But it's good to see that p455w0rd1 isn't on the list, so I'm still safe!

There are a couple which have me mystified though. On the face of it they don't look "too" bad, I just can't work out the pattern that has made them so popular.

18atcskd2w

3rjs1la7qe

Can anyone enlighten me to the blatantly obvious pattern which has whooshed right over my head?

Terry Pratchett's self-written documentary to be broadcast in 2017

Steve Evans

Re: Clacks

I wonder how many servers are sending that?

Smartphones crashed, Samsung burned: Mobile in 2016

Steve Evans

Re: A fair round up.

I'd like a new tablet. My Nexus 7 (2013 model) is getting a bit long in the tooth, a bit battered and out of the support upgrade window, but I can't see anything to replace it with which isn't stupidly expensive.

So much so that when my mother wanted a tablet last Christmas, I bought her a 2013 Nexus 7, and she loves it. (I'm going to be the family IT support, so I might as well pick one I know!).

All the other tablets round that price point are landfill offerings from supermarkets, or attempted lock-ins like Amazon.

It's a little disappointing that 3 years ago a well made quad core, 2gig RAM tablet with a lovely 1200 x 1920 screen (and stereo speakers) could be bought for so little, and now you just can't get anything comparable.

Plastic fiver: 28 years' work, saves acres of cotton... may have killed less than ONE cow*

Steve Evans

Re: Not much of a chemist then?

What if the tallow was obtained from an animal which had died happily of old age. Surely then it's just perfectly green recycling?

I guess it could also be extracted from various human limbs certain religions deem it acceptable to hack off for various transgressions. I wonder if Saudi Arabia has thought about a possible export market?

Tobacco giant predicts the end of smoking. Panic ensues

Steve Evans

Re: All about the money....

Oh they haven't. You should see all the rules and regs that are about to come into full force.

The tobacco legislation does more to screw small, independant e-cig manufacturers, and juice suppliers, than anything I can think of. I have no idea how that could have happened...

Only huge companies will be able to work in the market... Oh look, here come BAT and Philip Morris.

Steve Evans

Well of course they can now see stopping the burning leaf production, they've managed to push through all the laws required in Europe to push any small players out, and now they can dominate the vaping market.

GET pwned: Web CCTV cams can be hijacked by single HTTP request

Steve Evans

Re: whistle blowers

Well certainly not competent... Honestly...

This is the kind of coding assumption which was laughable twenty years ago, now it's gross negligence.

Rule #1 of C programming is never assume the length of the data you are being given!

(OK, it's probably not rule #1, but it damn well should be!).

50 years on, the Soviet-era Soyuz rocket is still our favorite space truck

Steve Evans

Indeed.

The rocket engineering expertise for both Russia and USA's space programs was provided by the Nazi rocket engineers they managed to grab at the end of the war.

Geo-boffins say 'quake lifted bits of New Zealand by 8 metres, moved at 3km/second

Steve Evans

Re: OT: @Jos V

Or able to read countless signs in a language they are fluent enough to argue in 5 minutes later...

Steve Evans

So that's a fair bit of work for someone at Google maps to move half the country along a bit!

Steve Evans

Re: OT: @Jos V

Don't get me started on the twats who fly on budget airlines... I always get stuck behind the ones in knee-high lace up boots who have failed to notice everyone before them has been asked to remove footware.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person with the common sense to unlace shoes whilst queuing and tuck the laces inside for a quick remove... Not to mention removing my belt and placing everything from my trouser pockets in my coat pockets, bar my phone, for a quick remove and dump into the trays.

I'm still seeing people having litre bottles of water removed from them at security, and they're still looking perplexed (despite walking past two dozen signs whilst queuing).

Blu Vivo 6: Top value trendsetter marred by Chino-English mangle

Steve Evans

That would be the only hope...

Andrew's complete failure to mention which antiquated version of Android it ships with (which you will be forever burdened with) does not fill me with hope for the shipped OS.

Oh, I take that back... It's got Marshmallow according to the manufacturer's website... It'll never get an update mind.

How-to terror manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon, Waterstones

Steve Evans

knee-jerk...

Removing books is a bit knee-jerk TBH, anyone who has paid attention in a chemistry class at school (assuming those haven't also been banned), knows how to make something which will go *bang*.

Given the Chinese made gunpowder for thousands of years, it's obviously not made of anything exotic, which would be hard to acquire.

More exotic explosives are a little trickier, but still within the abilities of a backyard chemist. A few minutes on google and wikipedia would provide plenty of information.

And if all that fails, you could just smuggle a Samsung phone into your hold luggage ;-)

UK warships to have less firepower than 19th century equivalents as missiles withdrawn

Steve Evans

@Mooseman - They'd miss it by some 12 miles...

They're actually aimed at services on the M1...

http://londonist.com/2015/02/why-do-the-guns-of-hms-belfast-point-at-a-motorway-service-station

Fleeing Aussie burglar shot in arse with bow and arrow

Steve Evans

If the cops are going to charge him, he should just withdraw his statement...

And let anyone who wants to contradict him come forward... ;-)

Brexit judgment could be hit for six by those crazy Supreme Court judges, says barrister

Steve Evans

This uncertainty and procrastination is doing more damage to the UK economy than a leave or remain could ever do.

Whatever you're going to do, just get on and do it!

What should the Red Arrows' new aircraft be?

Steve Evans

Re: Sonic BOOOOOOOOM

Just one Typhoon is loud enough thank you!

Pity we flogged all the Harriers off to the US Marines for spares, now that would enable some truly unique formation flying...

Spitfires? Whilst they would sound amazing, they're a bit too rare, old and delicate to start giving that kind of loading on the airframe regularly! They won't even let the BBMF fly formation in low cloud in these days, let alone pull any stunts!