* Posts by John Crisp

292 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2008

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Macs, iPhones, iPads to get encrypted DNS – how'd you like them Apples?

John Crisp

Joy

So I can do my own thing if I can build my own apps or have enterprise management etc etc but otherwise it will bypass my network control, ad filters, and slow down my users?

And exactly which DNS providers are they going to force us to use?

Joy.

At least Moz allows a canary domain.

As a small company we don't have the resources to do anything about it eg build apps etc

So we'll just ban all Apple crap. Simples.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

John Crisp

Re: WTF

Not quite so.

I am no guru on this but know enough to be dangerous.

It all depends on your gamut.

We frequently struggle to explain to customers that what they see on their screen is not necessarily what they will see when it is printed.

Pantones were designed for printing and never designed for screens. They would make an awful screen reference as they cover nowhere near what a screen is capable of reproducing. (And they are copyrighted by Abobe as well.....)

There are plenty of colours that won't reproduce accurately in one medium or the other... notably greens I think.

For those fortunate enough to have good eyesight, surprising small changes in colour can make a big difference.

The 'IoT' in Microsoft IoT Hub means Internet of Trying-to-kill-off-whiffy-crypto-protocol: TLS 1.0/1.1 spared axe again

John Crisp

And the rest

Shame they don't shitcan stuff like pptp & l2tp/ipsec v1 and upgrade their encryption levels for ipsec v2 to something that governments can't spy on.

Hey ho.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

John Crisp

Wonder how it will cope with the mounts I have in my home?

Can it also cope with /home/somewhere/local/me - unlike snaps....

https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/+bug/1620771

What a godawful mess.

Dropbox Paper: Handy for collaborating... oh and harvesting email addresses, too

John Crisp

Ooops

Bolloxs dropped.

Great to remind myself of why I don't use them.

Email security crisis... What email security crisis?

John Crisp

Re: Unsecure

>>"PGP is too tricky for many."

>Is it?

'As it stands', I think it probably is, though that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. The question is why?

Why aren't the providers making it simple, and default? Why aren't they devoting some their energies to it?

As I alluded, I wonder if there are some external pressures to keep it the way it is....

John Crisp

Unsecure

It still doesn't cure the flaw that email transport is still allowed in unencrypted format.

Sure you can send securely to your upstream server, but no guarantees after that.

On top of that there is no easy way to genuinely ID the sender. PGP is too tricky for many.

Had a good friend recently scammed by someone intercepting mail and she generously sent them $105k. Banks don't care because they are not at fault, and police don't have the resources to chase it.

Apparently, from a good friend at the pointy end of banking security, this is an increasing problem, house purchasing being a particular favourite with solicitors being intercepted.

Yes I'm sure the spooks don't want everyone using encrypted mail, hence the efforts on login security rather than transport security and ID authentication.

Something needs to change, badly.

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

John Crisp

That'll help....

Been having arguments with Barclays over PCI DSS compliance.

Their mail appeared to come from

barclaycarddatasecuritymanager.co.uk

So I went to that URL which gives a nice insecure cert warning:

https://barclaycarddatasecuritymanager.co.uk/

As opposed to:

https://www.barclaycarddatasecuritymanager.co.uk/

How is Chrome going to help??

This is crazy.

Take a pinch of autofill, mix in HTTP, and bake on a Wi-Fi admin page: Quirky way to swipe a victim's router password

John Crisp

Autofill

Why on earth is it ever allowed?

Mozilla changes Firefox policy from ‘do not track’ to ‘will not track’

John Crisp

Slow page warning

Will they then be able to remove the intensely annoying warning they have introduced?

Bloody thing. Even with uMatrix et al.

Oh, and it you read right to left then please put your Big Mac on the left.

Having it on the right just makes a bad idea even worse.

Mozilla. Where great ideas are slowly throttled.

New Horizons eyeballs Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, its next flyby goal

John Crisp

Respect

and lots of it for all the team behind the project.

Surprise! VAT, customs likely to get a bit trickier in a Brexit no-deal world

John Crisp

Time to buy

A freight forwarding business.

They're going to busy.

Everyone one else is FcUK'd.

Google responds to location-stalking outcry by… tweaking words on its BS support page

John Crisp

Bastards

Complete and utter bastards.

Distro inferno: Debian's still rocking at 25

John Crisp

Devuan +1

Liked Debian, but systemd ended all that (don't even go there with Gnome)

Yet another convert to Devuan.

The Register's 2018 homepage redesign: What's going on now?

John Crisp

Tried again

But no, still horrible.

I don't want images & other mush on mobile.

I don't want suggestions & bright ideas. I rather enjoy exercising the grey cells.

A simple uncurated list that I can choose from. No images. Puts a premium on you writing good headlines.

I tried the 'week' list as suggested above but images are a pain and the text far too small.

If you want to do garish on the desktop then go for it. I almost never use it.... maybe once a year.

Mobile I'd just like a simple, clean, chronological, text only list. So 1990s. So easy to use.

Since messing with front ends over the last few years, particularly when you started going all responsive, the site has become less and less readable and I spend less and less time on it. Sad but true.

I just CBA to wade through crud.

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

John Crisp

Re: Horrible

Actually, to be constructive.

Mainly I read on mobile so.....

I don't want images. They do nothing but waste screen real estate. A decent article title suffices (and I love the funny ones)

I do want a simple compact list of headlines that I can scroll through quickly. My time is more precious than yours.

The new version is far too widely spaced and takes too long to scroll through. Like hunting for a needle in a haystack.

I don't want your suggestions. I like to make up my own mind what to read thanks. Equal weight to stories. Credit me with some intelligence.

I just want a simple chronological plain text list of articles. Simples. For you, and me.

/ends

John Crisp

Horrible

Nuff said.

Scam alert: No, hackers don't have webcam vids of you enjoying p0rno. Don't give them any $$s

John Crisp

Webcam support

I'd pay the cash to see how he got my webcam to work on Linux.

No one else can.

:-)

Privacy Shield under pressure as lawyers back MEPs' call for suspension

John Crisp

Re: Toothless Tiger

That was then.

This is now.

GDPR..

'Nuff said.

Brit privacy watchdog reports on political data harvests: We've read the lot so you don't have to

John Crisp

Re: If you ever wondered

See this article by Carole Cadwalladr who has been like a dog with a bone in her relentless pursuit of this story. All credit to her. If you've followed her for the last few years it has been an amazing roller coaster ride.

Whatever the outcome of Brexit, I sincerely hope that Banks, Wigmore, Farage & a number of others end up with a long stay somewhere unpleasant at Her Majestys pleasure, which is where they belong.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/21/arron-banks-insurance-personal-data-leave-eu

Cops suspect Detroit fuel station was hacked before 10 drivers made off with 2.3k 'free' litres

John Crisp

Re: Pumping Hack Flash

Indeed. My firefighting training for being at sea taught me empty things usually made bigger bangs than full things.

Some scary videos to illustrate the fact.

Always felt more comfortable with 30,000 tonnes of petrol and diesel than without :-)

Tank inspections were not fun...

Sueball claims Apple broke hacking laws with iOS batt throttling code

John Crisp

Consumer protection

Yup I'm all for protecting the rights of the consumer.

Yup. Apple should have given users a clear choice. Maybe a nice little slider for "Battery vs Speed" (can I patent that??!!)

However. Who are the main beneficiaries here?

All I see is an island buying competition between lawyers.

How much are the users going to get?

There's a time and place for a class action. I'm not sure this qualifies.

Tired sysadmin plugged cable into wrong port, unleashed a 'virus'

John Crisp

Common trick

That's a normal one by little shits in schools according to my bro who was an IT manager at one until recently.

I ought to get him to list some of their other interesting experiments in 'how to screw a network in 30 seconds'. Some pearlers that make me howl :-)

Thunderbird gets its EFAIL patch

John Crisp

Re: no love

We use it all the time and it works pretty well.

However, from personal experience I completely agree with this

"Judging by developers' (?) replies to comments about it (why do you find it hard, WE FIND IT EASY)"

Their attitude is frequently pompous and arrogant with a 'lalala' fingers in ears, not listening attitude. That sucks big style. You start by wanting to try and help, and end up walking away.

I'm sure that whatever they produce it will be a pile of spaghetti which they'll think is great, no matter how much criticism they get.

Ah well. Still prefer it to drinking the M$ Koolaid. It could just be so much better.

First A380 flown in anger to be broken up for parts

John Crisp

Re: This underlines one more thing

I recently did the 16 1/2 hours Dubai - Auckland on a Emirates 380 cattle class and would prefer that any day myself.

That was straight after 8 hours Madrid-Dubai on a 380 with only a couple of hours in Dubai.

Got off feeling fresher than I've ever done going down there.

Same thing in reverse a few weeks later.

Microsoft will ‘lose developers for a generation’ if it stuffs up GitHub, says future CEO

John Crisp

Re: Coming soon to github

4 good reasons to leave for starters....

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

John Crisp

Still supported, or not

It's could be a bind if you run say RHEL/CentOS 6 which is still supported by RHEL to which you may be locked for support contracts etc.

Until quite recently there were no Samba 4 packages available for it, apart from Sernet who then pulled their open source packages behind a paywall some time ago.

RHEL slipped out some S4 packages a while back but they are only at 4.2.x and W10 I believe really wants 4.3.x + for SMB 3.1+

Messy. Probably even worse if you run a NAS and rely on upstream firmware.

If I had my cynics hat on I'd almost say 'contrived'

But that would be too cynical, wouldn't it?

John Crisp

Re: so, just activate it again?

No it doesn't for a lot of stuff.

See some of the links etc.

Microsoft commits: We're buying GitHub for $7.5 beeeeeeellion

John Crisp

I'm out

I'll be dumping all my little bits elsewhere as a matter of principle.

Don't trust M$ as far as I can kick them. It'll be yet another clusterfcuk.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Last one out please turn out the lights.

International Maritime Organisation turns salty gaze on regulating robotic shipping

John Crisp

Last of the dinosaurs

Certainly feel one when I think of my sextant training...

My guess is they'll look at deep sea stuff first, and make changes to the Collision Regs to accomodate.

Most crews do little maintenance between dry dock these days compared to years back. Bit like modern cars. So no issues there.

On oceanic trips eg across the bottom of the Pacific, there's not a lot to hit barring the odd berg and albatross. So days of paid crew effectively doing bugger all.

Automate it for several thousand boring miles, get it close enough to land and drop a few crew + pilot to bring her in and job done.

Short sea gets trickier with the volume of traffic. It would be much easier if everyone actually knew the Collision Regs and followed them, but there is no accounting for the stupidity of yachets/ribs, and supposedly trained navigators on ships who clearly don't even know where they are....

Somewhere in the English Channel....

"Ship on my starboard side"

"Yup"

"Do you know your position"

"Yup"

"Can you tell me my position?"

"Lost?"

Occasions to numerous to mention...

And don't ask me about stories from my days in the RNLI..... seeing the worst of the Romford Navy.

I'd put my sextant box and Nories in my sou'wester but they won't fit

IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

John Crisp

Simples

Neither my major UK or ES ISP has offered it to me.

Even if they had, less than friendly backwards compatibility.

Currently no discernible benefits.

Sums it up for me.

IPv8 anyone ?

Facebook Android app caught seeking 'superuser' clearance

John Crisp

Slurp on

Just wondering how the forced acceptance of apps data slurping is going to stand up to GDPR.

Noticeable all the leading contenders are forcing you to accept their terms, or else.

I thought consent to give away your data had to be 'freely given' and not coerced (and what about all your contacts data that gets slurped too?)

Looking forward to some interesting case law....

Domain name sellers rub ICANN's face in sticky mess of Europe's GDPR

John Crisp

Piss ups and breweries

Sorry but how long have they had to sort this out?

Did someone say 2 years?

Sympathy dial down to zero.

IT systems still in limbo as UK.gov departments await Brexit policy – MPs

John Crisp

How much

did they say this is costing?

Bearing in mind they are working up a number of plans of which only one will be selected.

And the same across all Departments presumably.

What a frigging waste of time and cash.

Leave it to Beaver: Unity is long gone and you're on your GNOME

John Crisp

Just say

Gno

OK, this time it's for real: The last available IPv4 address block has gone

John Crisp

Re: I've been trying to get this happening

Feckbook as IPv6 only?

That would be a good reason not to migrate :-)

Running on-premises Dynamics 365? Think you're immune to cloud outages? Think again

John Crisp

Skype

An exercise in reverse engineering.

Making a sows ear out of a silk purse.

:-)

'I crashed AOL for 19 hours and messed up global email for a week'

John Crisp

I remember.... and feeling vaguely smug that I had decided to get a Demon account instead of AOL.

Boring as she goes at Sage? Oh no, no, no! Shares slide as sales slip below forecasts

John Crisp

Re: Sage is a horrendous

Yup. Howling PoC. Best thing we did was dump it (it was also the last Windows thing to get shot of so we could lose M$ too) Double bubble :-)

Database was a 90s relic and a total mess. Broken records you couldn't fix without a complete wipe & start again etc etc. Endless promises of updating it that never happened. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the current versions still use the same db with a prettified frontend.

They are just milking cash for all they are worth.

Most pleasurable thing was phoning them to tell them to shove their support contract.

Twitter whacks 270,000 terror accounts, majority flagged by internal tools

John Crisp

Only

500 million fake accounts to go then.....

They should follow @conspirator0

Seems to be able to spot bots easily enough :-)

As Zuck apologizes again... Facebook admits 'most' of its 2bn+ users may have had public profiles slurped by bots

John Crisp

Of elephants...

I laughed

https://twitter.com/McCollMagazine/status/981670766268723201

The Register Opera Company presents: The Pirates of Penzance, Sysadmin edition

John Crisp

Damn....

fine effort

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

John Crisp

* For we are miserable sinners...

Appropriate for Easter?

https://youtu.be/_ZEEgIti8sM

The old ones are always the best :-)

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

John Crisp

Re: Oh dear

Another anonymous Brexiteer sock puppet. All mouth and no trousers.

Easy to say if it isn't your job on the line.

Chin up, SMEs. You might get crumbs from Big Tech tax clampdown – UK MPs

John Crisp

Ex EU

They'll obviously add it to the £350 million for the NHS....

I'll get my unicorn. I fancy a ride into the sunset :-)

Facebook's inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is

John Crisp

Re: don't worry, our ads aren't as effective as we told you

Most ads are about brand awareness and long term impression than immediate sales. Sure you hook a few with your latest deal (cos we all like a bargain) but it's still about the long term.

The companies advertising don't do it for fun, and have a fairly decent set of analytics to measure the effectiveness.

The problem then becomes in making sure your brand is better remembered than the opposition. The rest is just an arms race. For which Feckbook, Gobble et al are eternally grateful.

The most effective advertising is when people don't even realise they've been had. Which is a large chunk of the population.

Note also how careful shops are in directing you round, and how much companies pay to get a certain product on exactly the right spot on the shelf. A difference of up or down one shelf, or being beside the right or wrong product, can have a large impact on sales. All carefully choreographed.

Always makes me smile when people say none of this has never affected them. So naive. We never like to think we've been manipulated. But the reality is most have been in some way.

(Day job has been in Promotional Merchandise for donkeys years so have a vague idea about the subject)

Zucker for history: What I learnt about Facebook 600 years ago

John Crisp

Re: Shakespeares view on history

And was theatre to entertain the masses and transport them away from tbe drudgery of life for a little while.

Much as theatre and films do today.

OT.

Most boring play of all time (did stage lighting for a fairly serious amateur group for this)

"Much ado about nothing"

When you've run out of good ideas and need some cash in a hurry....

Clue is in tbe title.

BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

John Crisp

Back slap

Been following this for a very long time and nice to see it come to fruition.

Makes a change to see some not quite so Fake News make an appearance. Hope it gets the useless Beeb in a flap.

Congrats to https://mobile.twitter.com/carolecadwalla and all the other journos involved for doing what they do best... exposing the sleazy side of life and dragging some of the reptiles out from under their stones.

Just need to get a few of them behind bars where they really belong.

Now to see if 'Aggregate IQ' pop up somewhere. Be nice to see the smug grins wiped off a few familiar faces.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/863716948357636097

Millionaire-backed science fiction church to launch Scientology TV network

John Crisp

Science

Well, I'll be Hubbard!

Did somebody say Brexit? Cambridge Analytica grilled: Brit MPs' Fake News probe

John Crisp

Smoke & Mirrors

I'd love to see Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore & Dominic Cummings see if they can actually all tell the same story twice without it changing.

None of them have been able to do it yet....

All I have seen from them so far is bluff, smoke, mirrors, contradictions and lies. Exactly like the campaign they ran.

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