* Posts by Phil101

21 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Sep 2009

Dodgy dealer on Amazon lures marks towards phishing site

Phil101

Amazon Could (Should) Do More

In this particular case a monitoring system that caught order failures like this and then tried to submit an order that should be accepted could take the merchant offline if that failed.

INVASION of the UNDEAD ANDROIDS: Hackers can pwn 'nearly all' devices

Phil101

Re: "In Windows 8 you don't have a thing that prevents you installing from "Unknown sources".

@Tom 13: Not sure what your point is - unless you'd already run the command prompt as elevated or had changed the default ACLs this would generate a UAC prompt.

Samsung's new Galaxy S 4: iPhone assassin or Android also-ran?

Phil101

Re: When are smartphones ...

Folder Organizer will do that. It was reviewed on El Reg a couple of years ago (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/31/app_of_the_week_android_folder_organizer/).

Siri, will Chrome's new speech features kill you?

Phil101

Re: Strange

Google voice search gave me a link to the Wikipedia entry for "Who is Pussy Galore". Hate to think what I'd get if it mistook Who for What.

Biz barons jumpy over EU draft data protection reforms

Phil101

Are They Really Trying to Say Pre-ticked Is OK...

after saying that the IE tracking opt out being ticked by default wasn't legitimate?

Security bods rip off Microsoft's 'sticking plaster' IE bug fix

Phil101
Stop

Re: A question to hackers or security people

According to the MS advisory (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2794220) this exploit runs in the context of the user and doesn't directly allow privilege escalation.

Google's UK grip slips a bit, brutal dominance basically unshaken

Phil101

Re: Pondering (DuckDuckGo - US centric)

I found that until I clicked that DuckDuckGo defaults to US as your location. You can change this in settings. If you don't want to allow cookies then you can bookmark https://www.duckduckgo.com/?kl=uk-en&kad=en_GB to indicate you're in the UK and want real English.

O2 declares 4G trial success... with 1000 users

Phil101
Headmaster

Re: "which makes one wonder why O2 wants any of the old analogue TV spectrum at all"

The grammar nazi in me says that either way it should be fewer base stations.

Google dumps + from Boolean search tool

Phil101
Windows

Try Ctrl + Right

Or should that be Ctrl "Right"?

Want an untracked Android? Here’s how

Phil101
Stop

Sorry - That Doesn't Wash

Is the Location Data Encrypted For Transmission? If it isn't, or if the UUID is stored unencrypted on the phone, then I can spam with the UUID and Google are none the wiser.

Net boffins plot password alternatives

Phil101

Pass the Salt

This was my first thought - have a per user, cryptographically random, salt. In use (i.e. generating a comparison hash from an input password) the stored salt is itself modified (e.g. encrypted) before being used so that the database itself doesn't hold the information necessary to reverse engineer the password hash.

Cloud gaming storms into the UK

Phil101
Unhappy

Manchester - Too Far From a Server

Tried to play the Spore demo but I'm too far from their servers apparently. Is this a Watford Gap issue?

Tech giants score record patent stash

Phil101

Is it just me ...

who read IFI as iffy?

Google Apps battle spam with auto email signing

Phil101

That's all very well and good but ... but ...

... those e-mails probably are from those accounts, they're not spoofed. The accounts have either been bot generated or hacked. After all, why would a spammer spoof e-mail addresses that are likely to be blocked when they can just as easily spoof @bbc.co.uk?

Malware forces Firefox to save passwords

Phil101

It's A Trojan

It masquerades as something else that the user actually wants and which needs installing as admin. Pwned.

Google's antitrust probe spin answered

Phil101

A Whitelist?

In

If site_being_ranked in (google_preferred_sites)

rank = top

else

isn't google_preferred_sites effectively a whitelist? To my mind the list itself is not part of the algorithm.

Personally, I wouldn't be happy to find that search results were being manipulated in this way.

Firefox, uTorrent, and PowerPoint hit by Windows DLL bug

Phil101

I'm Also Somewhat Confused

The KB article, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264107, states that a DLL load will look in the directory from which the application loaded, the system directory, the 16-bit system directory and the Windows directory _before_ it looks in the CWD. So, unless it's expecting the DLL to be somewhere in PATH (which is checked after CWD), what is it that is causing the application to load a DLL from CWD? On my system, W7, I can't see anything in the PATH that might be relevant to Firefox which is listed as vulnerable.

Apple ranks first in surging security bug count

Phil101
Thumb Up

From the Report: Page 6, Figure 2

<Quote>

Oracle (including Sun Microsystems and BEA Logic) ranked #1 in four out of five years overtaken by Apple in the first half of 2010, with Apple consistently ranking higher than Microsoft.

</Quote>

This seems to justify the headline.

Microsoft presses refresh on Windows Live again

Phil101

Facial Recognition

Photo Gallery already has facial recognition.

Speculation takes flight over 5th generation Velociraptor

Phil101
Stop

More vs As

More implies an increase against a base so the cost is only 2.7 times more expensive (but 3.7 times as expensive). This is something that is increasingly prevalent in advertising - my toothpaste is apparently 2x better than it was. Do they mean that it is 3x as good as it was or really only twice as good?

Google bolts 'stable' Chrome 3 onto interwebs

Phil101
Pint

User Controlled Targetted Advertising?

Would this keep everyone happy? ...

1. Adverts are tagged to indicate the areas of interest, the type of advert (static, Flash, Java etc.), the advertising source and the tag source.

2. Users can subscribe to tag filters.

3. Adblock Plus 2.

The tag source would indicate where the tag had been authorised (e.g. nowhere, the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK or some other A.S.A.).

That way the end user is in control of the types of advert displayed, is more likely to 'click through' but still has the option to disable all ads.