Posts by Fred Flintstone

Re: Security researcher at "Prosecco"

Or they make wine and security research at the same time?

Is there any other way? :p

Re: Kaboom?

Personally, I prefer "Supercapacitors are like batteries, but more awesome"

Seconded :)

Re: surely the lesson here is...

The cloud use that amuses me most is cloud based password safes. There is only one I trust in that regards, and that's because it was screened by people I know personally to do a good job of it - but even then I am NOT using it..

Oh, btw, iTunes backups are also a risk if you don't enable encryption, and I have frankly no idea how good that crypto is - you best enable bootup passwords and full disk encryption if you really want to be sure, and that is assuming you bother to shut down the device after you've used it.

Doing it right is still a lot of work.

Re: Two modes of investigation - you chose

Um, generally the Big Bang theory is immensely popular with ignorant religious folk because it sounds just like "let there be light"

.. briefly :)

OK, QotW material

I hereby nominate yours:

In a flash of insight I realized that this product getting the OK meant there were no adults in charge at Microsoft any more, at least no sober ones.

:)

I think you have pretty much the heart of it here. For those that like the Apple eco system (for whatever reason), the delta with the features that Android was offering may have kept them outside the walled garden. Now they are indeed functionally roughly equal, other factors come into play.

What I see play now is the very big difference between Apple-the-hardware-vendor who uses services to sell more kit and Google-the-data-grabber who couldn't care about the profit in kit because it's really after your data, and Apple has now started to aggressively throw that in Google's face. It's a good play on market sentiment by Apple, and indeed a rather big problem for Google. Especially the upper segment of the market knows that personal data has value, and is willing to pay to keep it safe.

Not only can I see that becoming a problem for Google - it will also become a problem for high value resellers of Android such as Vertu. Oops..

Re: Blame Your Friendless Miscreant?

Interesting, at least four do not value their freedom to chose a functional search engine or device. Nor do they value the chance that they might be free from the risk of being blown apart. Perhaps by someone who feels their desire to kill trumps all other issues.

Interesting, very interesting, I guess they all live in some sort of walled garden where nothing nasty can ever happen, please where is this la - la land?

No, you're seeing a natural reaction to governments pushing things too far re. privacy. No sensible person would get in the way of law enforcement doing its job, but they very well object to having their trust abused by overreaching grabs of data that has zip relevance to urgent threats, and with abuses hiding behind an abuse of "national security" veils. Abuse of power comes at a price, and people can only accept being lied to for so long.

Re: Fill up yer memory

"Fill up yer memory"

That's hardly a practical idea now is it?

It is - TomTom is all you need :)

However, I don't think this update is automatic - too risky by far.

Re: Why? oh Why?

Aren't HP taking the auditors to Court as well?

"HP says it is planning to bring separate lawsuits against [...] the UK arm of Deloitte & Touche, which audited Autonomy for the acquisition.."

It's about bleedin' time - that would have been my first move. The fact that they didn't says all you really need to know IMHO.

Re: Bom bom bomb!

Well, no. The chances of there ever being a bomb at an airport is extremely small. The chances of there being two bombs is infinitesimal. Therefore it makes complete sense for the security forces to take bombs to airports as it vastly reduces the chances of another one being there.

I think we have a winner for QotW, hahaha. Brilliant :).

Re: Left-handers are "left" out with the Apple Watch

You fit the straps the other way around, and tell it to operate in left-handed mode when it restarts. Easy.

The only issue will be that you have the knob* and button in reversed position, but I suspect that will be a less important issue.

(*) yes, knob. Button, winder. Digital crown is far too rich a name for it IMHO.

Re: The IT angle is Fashion

Oh and it's got rounded corners.

But strangely, no sign of that Swiss train clock face they had to cough up for a few years ago :)

Just be careful if you've been eating beans or onions

Are you referring to this incident?

:)

Re: Why?

Plus the subversion of any such system by the state/military.

Imagine the term "Google target with extreme prejudice" being common in future.

That chimes with something I was thinking earlier: what if Google is simply aiming at opening up another revenue stream by selling (more) to Government, this time the military? Bomb dropping drones? We got it. Shooting robots? We're working on it. Spy photos of all the population? Just use our raw Streetview and upcoming Google Glass footage. Wifi grabs? We will make sure we won't get caught again but yes, that's well out of beta now. Population intelligence? We scan every mail received and sent on our platforms (etc etc).

There's a lot of money they can pull in that way if it wasn't for the ethical problems. Oh, wait ...

"Apple 2FA is more like Sweet FA"???? Sweet Factor Authentication? Don't get it...this is why English news media should not rely on localized idioms.

This link at Urban Dictionary may help. Helpful for other such expressions too.

Having said that, yours sounded like "Sweet Factory Authentication", which made me think of Willy Wonka :)

Re: Apple does not limit the number of password entry attempts users could can make

Apple does not limit the number of password entry attempts users could can make

WTF?!?

That is the case in many online services where they don't even implement rate limiting or progressive incremental retry delay on failure, but the risks with an Apple account are much bigger because it's basically SSO - one password to rule it all. /Not/ good..

Re: Historically sound practices

I've been arguing for years that deception should be a standard part of network defence techniques, possibly with added tarpits on unused ports so a port scanner either drains its resources or is left with the high cost of maintaining a modified IP stack that times out quicker (which creates its own problems).

The problem is, however, that deception should mimic local conditions or it'll become easy to detect and ignore, so it takes skills to set it all up. Given that deception has an as yet undefined ROI I guess it may be a harder sell to the bean counters, but corporate lawyers help with estimated costs and impact of a breach.

Excellent research IMHO.

Re: "Now you can deliver highly engaging ads ..."

The ads perhaps won't be quite as engaging as the advertisers want if consumers tick that privacy option in iOS that limits ad tracking. I can't think of any sane person who would leave that option unselected.

But it defaults to "on", of course, so you have to be motivated enough to find it. And reset your Ad ID regularly.

Still, this doesn't have to mean iOS will be suddenly ad saturated - there are also companies that use flat screens of any size as ad displays, I presume this is an attempt to get a fat slice of that market (as you can hook up any tablet to a big screen in various ways). I have been wondering for years why there are no (yes, zero) LCD photo frames that can load images from a network drive so I can change them every so often (or use them as system status display). Now I know..

Re: Bohemian Rhapsody week?

Two references to lyrics in one week. Is that song being played on loop at Vulture Central or something?

It's not unusual..

:)

Re: Brilliant - re:self-education scheme

Which part? Reading BOFH or it's what you tell management as you roll them up in a carpet?

Why choose?

:)

Re: @ Fred Flintstone

An honest question. Do you ever think styling can be included at times, though through verse and other means? This has some effect, does it not?

I think we need to be careful with terminology. I am a great advocate of the use of styles in full blown word processors as well as bare bones writing environments, but only insofar that it marks a section as being of a type (headline, chapter, subchapter, and more locally bold & italics, aka emphasis).

How such a style is formatted (i.e. font, weight, attribute, spacing, colour etc etc) is a later issue and is sometimes not even under your control (epub formats, for instance, can apply the reader's preferences instead).

Where practically all WP packages go wrong is that they permit localised formatting attributes, which means a Godawful amount of work post production because you have to strip ALL of it out and replace the formatting attributes with styling markers before you can start working on the look and presentation of the content. Personally, I think the ability to insert such local formatting should not even exist until the post creation stage, and it is my personal belief that that "feature" alone is responsible for an enormous loss of productivity in places that produce reports and documents for a living. They are genuinely producing documents without style :).

So, the short answer to your question is yes, it is more or less implied in the way I work. I start with a structure, which means I have a pack of lines marked as chapters which I can move around etc. In Ulysses I have some styles set up with highlighting, so I quickly get a visual overview of what I'm doing. Having said that, I am examining Scrivener now as well (thanks to this article and the comments, that's why I hang out here :) ) - just to have alternative options.

Re: Daytime running lights

I think the EU linked to the car's age - AFAIK, new cars must have it.

Re: From the other side of the fence...

Upvote from someone who has come to the same conclusion quite a while back (for the same reason). I had to solve it by going for all these separate bits (and no, Thunderbird + add-on is NOT the same so I abandoned that, nor are web interfaces of any use).

Interestingly, none of the mobile platforms has gone for this integration either, which is a shame. I recall that I could schedule calls in my Sony Ericsson P1i, which was an excellent tool to organise my call schedule in the morning..

Re: A new lightning cable then ?

So the next connector will be called Galileo then?

:)

Re: Password fields need to be bigger.

The other problem is the word 'password' - if we IT savvy people start using the word 'passphrase' consistently instead, more people would understand that punctuation and spaces are allowed, and even welcomed, than trying to fit numbers, characters into a 'word' and still remember it.

Yes and no - the problem is that many outfits actually do NOT permit the use of pass phrases, which is IMHO close to idiotic (and/or damn lazy coding). I agree with the use of pass phrases.

I much prefer pass phrases for users, because you can make dreaming up a good pass phrase fun, which aids memorisation and recall (as it's one of the key techniques for memorising anyway) and thus prevents people writing things down.

Re: Frog Brain

Re: Frog Brain

And at least a hundred times bigger than the clowns in Westminster!

That's engineers for you: always over engineering things :)

Re: Americans are so funny

No more of those messy fraud investigations, the customer is responsible! Never mind those pesky cases where the customer claims that he was half a world away and has never shared his PIN with anyone. Never mind those cases where the it turns out that the bank lied when they claimed that the PIN was used. Minor incidents, nothing to get in the way of a great innovation in liabilityxxxxx I mean of course security.

Yes, they have done a great con job with that in Europe - and not a SINGLE regulator has as much as raised their eyebrows.

However, it's not all bad news: this geographic difference is already used by a number of providers to question transactions. I have had calls about attempted transactions from across the globe when one of these online idiots turned out to retain CSVs and had their whole database stolen, and they picked that up because all my other transactions were elsewhere. I had to switch to another card as the provider barred it as stolen/copied, and issued a new one.

Re: Temporarily bricked ?

:)

There is also the duck problem: if it looks like one (etc) it is reasonable to assume it is one. Good and detailed information can help, but that's not really one of Apple's strengths.

Isn't that termed "business as usual" ?

Re: "Given Microsoft’s huge stake in government, ... "

Not quite a stake yet, it's more like encouraging people to eat more garlic :). It will still take time.

Re: Better but still a bit of a pigs ear

When I try saving a document as ODF, Word 2010 pops ups a dialog warning me that my cat will die a slow, horrible death if I dare proceed.

Not exactly encouraging is it?

Yes, they've been running that scaremongering for quite a while which, incidentally, they have also done for the use of their own older formats. Someone with a sense of humour in the OOo/LOo camp has picked this one up and you now get exactly the same warning in OOo/LOo if you decide to save in MS Office formats :)