Posts by Andrew Jones 2

Is no-one else even slightly concerned that they claim to have the ability to frame someone?

While it's devious - there is is at least one good thing about this -

it might encourage Microsoft to do something about the dreaded 32% / 6% drivers and features issues. But then...... as there are now 4 separate KB patches that all aim to deal with Windows Update and SVCHOST hogging the CPU, overheating laptops and Windows Update never actually finding updates - I won't hold my breath that they will be particularly bothered about tens of thousands of people who are forced to upgrade to Windows 10 only to find that half way through the process the upgrade hangs at 32% and rolls back to Windows 7 at which point Windows Update will refuse to find any updates and in some cases Windows 7 has been unbootable. I have spent 5 solid days trying to convince a Toshiba laptop to update to Windows 10 - and in the end I had to give up and install Windows 7 from a retail disc instead of the OEM disc and then immediately update to Windows 10 skipping all the usual 295 windows updates. A quick Google for "windows 10 upgrade stuck at 32" shows lots of people have this issue and all Microsoft can say is that it is a driver issue - one would think Windows 10 would just skip any problematic drivers and complain about them post install, but no - it just hangs with no errors and because the HDD light just flashes periodically - non technical people will probably still think it's doing something..... for about 4 hours until they finally give up.

There is a tiny bit of difference though between being able to lookup someone's license plate and find out if there is anything dodgy about the car or the owner - and being able to type in a license plate and find out every vehicle ever linked to the owner, every location the owner has ever driven and every person the owner has ever had contact with (including a handy lookup to explore the entire history of these people too) - even though the owner doesn't have a criminal record or any involvement ever with law enforcement - what is being suggested is very much more like the latter situation than the former.

Dear El Reg - maybe next time, instead of downloading a Chinese Alpha - which even has CN in the filename, maybe you should try downloading the official international version - which although dated the 11th of January instead of the 12th January, actually includes the Play Store. Of course the Chinese version is going to contain strict legal warnings, and lack of Google Play Store and Google Play Services - it's bloody China - the Jide founders would probably have their heads chopped off if they didn't comply. And in case you didn't see the link to the International version (and not the 630mb one - the 800mb one) - here it is: https://otacdn.jide.com/ota/Remix_OS_for_PC_64_B2016011102_Alpha.zip

I think Microsoft are probably intelligent enough to know that there is no way anyone will actually want to pay to upgrade to Windows 10 after the free year is up. The only way people will be getting Windows 10 after that is on a new machine.

At least 2 mobile operators use the 900MHz band..... I doubt they will be terribly happy about a sudden influx of equipment that could cause interference to their signals.

900MHz - This seems awfully close to GSM frequencies.......

But...... they have to push it out to old hardware - so they can claim that they release an iOS update and 99% of users receive it in days, and obviously the competition (Android) cannot claim that..... They never make claims that the updates are actually usable to all 99% of their users.

And if you are already on Windows 10 - you get to cope with the wonderful joy of EVERY update mucking up settings! I have to reset my screensaver after every update, I've had to reset the power saving features on one laptop after the last round of updates because it is determined to hibernate of several hours of not being used and now - 3 laptops after the last update skip the screensaver entirely and after 15 minutes just revert to the lock screen. It's getting really really annoying - and considering all the laptops are supposed to be synced via the Microsoft cloud - it's entirely unreasonable that settings are being changed even though MY settings should be saved at Microsoft.

I'm glad there is some sense here - yet again we learn that 3 of the terrorists were known and investigated by French security services - if they already knew they were terrorists without needing to access encrypted communications, read peoples emails, snoop peoples voice calls - then clearly they don't need access to those things now. I have yet to hear any country put forward a solid reason they should be allowed backdoor access to well - everything.

"Bootnote: Yes, we are aware El Reg is not always a paragon of purity, and that there is probably a pot-kettle-black mistake in this very story."

To my knowledge a) you aren't charging people to have access to your backend server(s) and associated hardware and b) this is either their 3rd or 4th major TITSUP event this year is it not?

I had no idea that there were 14 HD channels, I've only seen BBC1, BBC2, ITV, CH4, BBC3 - what channels am I missing that are broadcasting in HD?

Sigh, first you are warned when enabling an app that requires accessibility exactly what it could allow a malicious app to do and second - it's not just a case of accepting a permission on the Play Store or a runtime permission with Android 6 - you have to actually enable the specific app that wants access to the accessibility service - by ticking the box next to the name of the app. If an app can't legitimately justify why it wants access, you simply don't allow it - and let's not stop there, the same goes for any app that wants to be a "device administrator" without legitimate reason.

Surely iOS devices will require Microphone permission and as of Android 6 (Marshmallow) apps would also require asking users if it's OK to use the Microphone. It'll be pretty obvious if an app you never expect to need to access the Microphone suddenly asks if it can.

Not a big surprise.

Google+ pretty much as soon as it launched - very quickly became a place to connect with other people who had similar interests - that's what the Circles feature promoted - you add people into different circles so you can share for example stuff about Android with your Android circle and stuff about Space with your space circle. The communities grew up and organised themselves using the tools they had available. But the nice thing about Google+ has always been that Google engineers and staff are actively using the service and are "one of the people" and because of this Google+ has continually evolved in line with what the users have been requesting. Communities came about because people wanted to gather and discuss Android, Space, Photography, Recipes and Science. Collections came about because the Circle idea while a fantastic concept - largely meant that when someone circled you - and you went to their profile to see what sort of stuff they are into - their profile was empty - because everything they had ever shared - unless it was public - you didn't have permission to see. So people reverted to sharing stuff publicly again - which meant the circles idea became redundant. Collections fixes this problem and makes it easier to see what other interests you share with people. It is therefore no surprise to see the service has evolved again to put the 2 biggest use cases of the service front and centre.

If I were a highly cynical person - I might posture that since this prevents people from uploading ALREADY KNOWN images - there is more incentive to create new images that haven't been added to a database yet.

The whole "look how many videos are watched on Facebook every day" claim is bogus anyway, a video starts playing when it comes into view in the timeline even if you scroll past it so it only plays for a few seconds, but this is still counted as a view when clearly that would be like saying that someone walking past someone else's house and happening to see Coronation Street playing on the TV in the house as they walked past the window had watched the whole programme.

What about ex-customers?

What I want to know - so far pretty much everything has focused on existing customers - but what details did TalkTalk hold on ex-customers? Do TalkTalk have bank account details in their databases for people who used to be customers? We only left them about 3 months ago - could El Reg possibly find out how long they retain details on ex customers? (We were a business customer, migrated via Pipex and Opal)

If you don't have to enter your password - then this isn't 2Factor auth - 2Factor auth requires 2 different forms of authentication, traditionally a password and some other form - usually OTP codes or like Twitter uses a push notification - which pretty much works the same way as Yahoo! are now using. As far as I can see - removing the password step makes this less secure - the whole point of a password with 2Factor is that it doesn't matter if some virus on your computer manages to capture your password - as the attacker still needs access to whatever the 2nd factor of authentication is.

First of all it's possible to get an Ethernet adaptor for the Chromecast if you really need to go down that route. Second everyone always misses my absolute favourite feature of the Chromecast which is that it it doesn't have apps that require you to login (by the way El Reg, Google doesn't host the receiver apps - the app developers host them on their own servers). The benefit of not having apps that need to be logged in to - means for example - a friend might rent a movie on Google Play (or in fact they might have bought the movie) and can come to your house, hit cast (they don't even need to be connected to your WiFi if you have enabled guest mode on the Chromecast) and you can be watching a movie that you don't own. The same goes for things like Netflix you personally don't have to subscribe but someone can come to your house who does subscribe and send Netflix straight to the Chromecast, no-one ever has to bother logging in and therefore don't have to remember to log out when they leave.

Hold on Dad, someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them.

Misspent youth -

I took a print screen of the College RM Ware login screen, made it the background of the main form in Visual Basic 5 and added text boxes and buttons where they should of been, it took the username and password entered and appended a text file (disguised as a .dll of course) on the public network share.

Logged in to a computer using one of the various guest accounts that I had become aware of, and left the program running all day - at some point, someone must have complained that they couldn't login to my fake screen and a network administrator tried logging in. Fun times. Though I admit I was a bit worried I might get kicked out of college.

Another fun one - compiled as "Porn 2000" which was run by students an unbelievable number of times, did nothing but create hidden empty directories in the users network drive, and because we had quotas - once you reached your quota the network would start deleting files from your network space - starting with the oldest files and leaving hundreds of thousands of empty folders that you couldn't see. During this fun "prank" I also learned that Windows 95 REALLY didn't like trying to delete hundreds of thousands of folders and would crash explorer.

Finally - for anyone wishing to cause mayhem in one single line of code - "attrib +H C:\*.* /S" would take a few minutes to run and would render the machine unbootable once restarted - it would set the hidden attribute to every file on the hard drive and Windows would attempt to boot and then complain it couldn't find some file - I don't remember which one now. It could be repaired from a DOS prompt by simply running "attrib -H C:\*.* /S"

And presumably the independent artists that are being encouraged to provide their music videos to gain a rating are being offered this service completely free of charge? No.... http://www.bbfc.co.uk/industry-services/customer-news/2015-tariff-changes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bbfc%2Fcustomernews+%28BBFC+Customer+news%29&utm_content=FeedBurner I somehow doubt it will be..... It looks like it will probably cost £22 for the submission + £2.75 per minute which will be rounded up to 5 minutes if the submission is shorter.

Out of interest - has a company managed to (successfully) trademark a hashtag yet? Surely it's something some silly company will try before long?

I must have read or at least interpreted the article differently to everyone else. My understanding from the article wasn't that BT were going to shut down down the copper network the day after OFCOM agree to BT's request - but rather they would phase it out over the next 10 years - and the reason for the request is because OFCOM won't provide BT with the opportunity to make this request again - for another 10 years - by which time the telecoms landscape might look very different. For a start off the top of my head - if voice traffic is VoIP - there is no need for the copper to connect to the exchange - so the phone line would only need to run to the nearest Fibre cabinet and there would be no need for the interlink between POTS to the exchange and Fibre any more.

.....waits for the next article where Germany realises that the only possible way to make this work logically - is if the entire world was on German time - and hence starts insisting that the rest of the world switch to German time...... it's not as if the idea of ruling the world is a foreign concept to Germany after all......

I thought the existing law was that provided that a website never removed or edited comments, they were not deemed to be the "publisher" ??

The problem I see with this is we all whether we are concious of it or not - choose something that forms a pattern. The chances are that the emoji picked will form a story in users brain. It would be interesting for a study to be done with a large number of people - where the emoji picked are recorded - and then find out how many of the full library of available emoji are actually picked as the starting emoji, you could then find out how many real possible combinations there are after the starting emoji.

Use EnPass, has full syncing, has apps for multiple platforms, has no account on a 3rd party server - instead opting to let you control your own data and do syncing via whatever cloud backup provider you prefer - I use Google Drive. The data is obviously encrypted with your master password before being transferred.

Far too many questions.....

I'm not sure even the rather drastic action of simply ceasing operations in France would make any difference, after all the information is already not available (without additional effort) to people in France - simply removing Google from France would still mean the information is available outside of France - which is what France is arguing. However I have to take the attitude of others on this matter - that removing linking to the information is absurd - the information itself is what should be removed. For example - take this example -

What if someone Tweets about someone (say Ryan Giggs) doing something bad, that tweet is successfully removed from search engines worldwide. Now 5 years in the future - someone comes across the tweet on a social network - say maybe via something like Timehop. Someone posts about it on a blog which is indexed by search engines, and that information becomes public again.

Who gets sued? Does Google get sued for infringing? It's not the same information that was originally deindexed - though it is about the same information. Does the owner of the blog get sued for posting about information that is now considered taboo? Does Twitter get sued for not deleting the tweet - even though they were never asked to? Does the social network get sued for not deleting the original post which links to the information that has been delisted? Does Timehop get sued for pointing to a post that points to information that has been delisted?

How does a normal member of the public know what they are no longer allowed to post about? Maybe we need a database of all URLS that have been successfully removed from global search engines - and for handy convenience maybe the search engines could index it - so we could easily find out if something we want to post about - has been subject to deindexing.......

Does the right to be forgotten law carry any legal action for the person(s) who originally published the information? eg - is there anything legally preventing someone (bearing in mind the law doesn't require the person(s) to be informed about the request) from reposting an article that has been delisted again with a new URL? If not - is there anything stopping someone from re-publishing that information over and over and over again everytime they notice the latest copy has been delisted?

A lot of these questions are answerable by simply removing the original source - though the last points still stand. The only things by law you are (currently) forbidden from posting online or offline - are things which are proven to be libellous - regardless of how much damage - financial or otherwise the posting of that information causes -- unless an injunction, super injunction, massively overreaching hyper injunction or equivalent is involved - though I don't believe ANY of these are currently global, and only apply in the country and/or specific region in which they occur?