Posts by frank ly

Re: Trust us with your phone number!

No f**king way! I don't forget my passwords but if I do then they're printed out neatly on a single sheet of A4 paper, which I very rarely have to look at and then only with the rarely used passwords.

If that fails, they can send reset links to another registered email address or use a security question, which is really another password with a hint.

If you feel that you have to use SMS push, for whatever reason, get a PAYG SIM card in a cheap second hand Android phone and use that for SMS push and no other purpose.

P.S. Google look at your IP address when you login and will make you jump through hoops if you use a VPN or login from a different physical location (same thing I suppose). This happened to me and the VPN went down halfway through my verifying my identity. As a result, they told me that my account had been hacked and I was forced to change my password. This hasn't affected my Android phone, as far as I can tell; it probably uses an authorisation key that was loaded when I first signed it up.

@ Red Bren Re: re: former telco lobbyist

Or a wizard's staff, with a big iron knob on the end.

@kb Re: "One solution is to boot a Linux USB stick ..."

I'm very tempted to respond to your comment, almost line by line since I think that you are wrong/misguided in so many ways. It's early on Sunday morning though, so I'll only try a little stab:

"... either a programmer, or someone who ONLY uses the Internet,.."

You're wrong, so wrong. I'll leave it to other people to explain why, if they want to. The fact that other people could easily explain why, even though they don't know me, says a good deal about your limited outlook. (I've just noticed: "limited outlook" is not a sly joke, it just happened.)

" .. that do not run on your OS ...", "... the software required to get our work done ...", ".. Your OS is useless to us ...", "... your OS doesn't run ..."

I believe this is a rhetorical technique called 'othering' and in your case it seems to indicate some kind of bunker/siege mentality. There is no 'my OS' involved here, it's all in your head.

"... software that are mission critical to people's daily work that do not run on your OS ..."

That's because they haven't been written/developed to run on Linux.

"...thanks to the hostility of FOSS to proprietary software ..."

I'm running proprietary software, written and supplied for Linux, on my Linux box. It works. One item of said software needed me to buy a licence afer the free trial period, but I didn't bother because it wasn't 'mission critical'; I was only playing with it out of mild interest. Another item cost me about £10 for a lifetime license, which I paid for because it's so useful.

As I understand it, the APIs and inner workings of FOSS are fully documented and freely available to anyone who has any interest in them, for the purpose of developing proprietary software to use with them. How can this be hostility? You may have misunderstood what 'FOSS' means.

I'm too tired to deal with the rest of it so please forgive me if I don't bother.

Thank you Michael. Re: Lovely!

"Quality control should therefore only be carried out by unconscious personnel."

I used to work in a place which seemed to follow that principle.

Re: big problem with quantum thermometers

If you had a quantum thermometer, you'd definitely know if you needed your coat. Oh, ......

Re: meh

You're not the only one who can't afford a shark.

Re: Quality Control Pedant

The world we make consists of inconsistencies.

Re: 1.5V 20ns transient - I can imagine a coworker...

That sounds like it needed a 'wrangle capacitor' to ground. About 50pF usually did the trick; either that or press your fingertip over the wire/track.

"... single action air weapons over the poundage limit."

If I remember, they needed a firearms license and were only intended for people who killed 'vermin' in a professional capacity. The law may have changed since I Iast had an air rifle.

The thing about the energy limit (13 ft.lb as I remember) was that it was formulated according to how much range/damage-potential it could give to an air gun pellet. This thing would/should have totally different considerations as to how much damage it could cause if misused.

Willing to accept? What does the law say about tax due? Which idiots write the laws? Who benefits from the laws and their arcane formulation? It's not you or me, that's for sure.

At least it wasn't a train wreck of a story.

Re: Tower A, Tower B, Tower C

Would the defence counsel for a 'civilian' be able to get access to the telco records? In a case like that, the investigating officers would look at the telco records and say, to themselves, "Ah well, we know it's not really accurate so we won't put this in the evidence file."

As you can tell when you visit some websites, they know if you're using an ad-blocker. This is usually accompanied by a polite request to stop using it. So, a website owner could, if they wanted to, easily block content from anyone using a blocker. They don't though, hmmmm.

Re: Whats the percentage of Newbury

Sorry, did you say "...the Vodafone whores..."?

Re: If you want bleeding edge

As far as I can tell, the only way to get it onto Debian Jessie is to download the sources and support libraries and compile them yourself. I tend to shy away from that sort of thing. (I'm trying Debian Jessie (8.3) because it has the MATE desktop now.)

Re: "amps up the immune system and detoxifies the liver”,

The cannula should be made from oxygen-free copper and be plated with 99.99% pure silver. The saline + vitamins solution should have been stored for twenty four hours under a green light, to achieve the required activation state for this particular treatment. Unless they've done that then its not going to work properly.

Re: Anyone heard of a "subpoena"?

Compelling a reluctant witness to testify in court is not at all comparable with compelling a locksmith to make a special tool that will open the locks of all his customers or even to break in to the home/office of one of his customers.

If the lawmakers want to save lives, they could compel car manufacturers to prevent cars from travelling faster than the local speed limit or ban the use of tobacco products or severely limit the sale of alcoholic drinks. Why don't they do any of that?

Re: Security defects in the age of ubiquitous connectivity

If we continue your analogy, this is like one version not only not functioning correctly, but producing poison that seeps into the rest of the body. With software security, the more you have running, the bigger the chance of a serious failure happening.

Re: "collosal hospital hack"

Just be grateful it's not a hospital colostomy hack.