* Posts by JimmyPage

3213 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010

S/MIME artists: EFAIL email app flaws menace PGP-encrypted chats

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re: Now if I were going to design a secure messaging system ...

You miss the point.

I'm suggesting methods by which the "bad guys" (who aren't so much interesting in building a new computer as blowing up a railway station) could ride a horse and cart through the security services obsession with digital encryption.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Pirate

Now if I were going to design a secure messaging system ...

I'd start with my encrypted message handwritten on a piece of paper flipped in front of a webcam amongst a load of random characters on other pages.

If you've got your tradecraft right, you can use a public webcam that's pointed at a city square or something.

With the killer punch that if there are people doing this today we'd never know, because all the spy agencies are obsessed with digital encryption.

On a similar note, does anyone here know what that postcards in newsagents windows in London *really* say ?

The more the spooks show they rely on using digital technology to "operate", the more ways I could dream up of frustrating them.

We already have an internet dead letter drop mechanism in Usenet and binary newsgroups. Good luck finding any secret communications there. Especially if they were encoded by photographing a handwritten notice (in Farsi) and posting the JPEG.

US judge to Facebook: Nope, facial recognition lawsuit has to go to jury

JimmyPage Silver badge
Flame

IANAL, but this is where UK law fails big time.

The requirement to *prove* a loss.

So police stopped you unlawfully (or even illegally). But you "lost" nothing ?

Jog on, my (poor) friend.

Android devs prepare to hit pause on ads amid Google GDPR chaos

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Thumb Up

Crowdfunding ... as a funding stream for upstart content producers

Having flung a few quid at Richard Herring for his excellent "Leicester Square Theatre Podcast" (or, as the cool kids are calling it: "RHLSTP !") I'm quite happy with this arrangement. Generally an entertaining and occasionally thought provoking hour with a (generally) comedic celebrity, unencumbered with worries about taste and decency.

There are also a few non-comedic gems ... Mary Beard, Ben Goldacre spring to mind. And it's thanks to RHLSTP that Mrs Page and I have been to see James Acaster, Josie Long, Robin Ince, Josh Widdicombe, Sarah Pascoe, Nish Kumar, Romesh Ranganathan, Mark Thomas, Bridget Christie ....

And, famously, it was on a RHLSTP that Stephen Fry admitted to attempting suicide - so real scoop there.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

re: people seem quite happy to both pay a subscription AND watch adverts

and yet pirates not only get the content free, they get it *ad* free ?

Surely some mistake ?

Navy names new attack sub HMS Agincourt

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

History fail ?

For the French, the key fact of Agincourt was the (then) despicable act of the English in killing prisoners of war

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/agincourt/0/steps/8864

As that article opens:

For modern observers, one of the best known and most notorious events during the battle of Agincourt is the massacre of at least some of the French prisoners by their English captors at the end of the first phase of fighting.

Which suggests the choice of name - and it's associations must be well known to the MoD. And if it's not, what does it say for the MoD as a "modern observer" ??????

You'd think the Uk could pretend it gave a toss about being friends ?

Wah, encryption makes policing hard, cries UK's National Crime Agency

JimmyPage Silver badge
Flame

RE: remained a prime destination for money laundering.

Did anyone else catch the story about foreign criminals gearing up to get into business deals with desperate UK companies after Brexit ?

linky

which means any businesses in the EU will be averse to dealing with UK businesses simply by default.

Apple MacBook butterfly keyboards 'defective', 'prone to fail' – lawsuit

JimmyPage Silver badge

Odd strategy from Apple ?

I'm not a massive Apple fan - I think it's overpriced poseur kit. But that said, I would happy agree that - unlike the car crash of Android offerings - Apple kit "just works". It's the one thing that makes it a good recommendation for non-techy (better off) people.

Mrs Page has an iPad pro, and it's an outstanding piece of kit.

So the one thing Apple should be preciously guarding - and proactively stomping on - is anything which contradicts that selling point.

Orchestral manoeuvres in the Docker: A noob's guide to microservices

JimmyPage Silver badge

So how does this fit in with Synaptic and the like ?

And where do frameworks come into it ?

And why do we need all this when Java was supposed to save the world ?

Sometimes I can't help to find myself reaching for the phrase "reinventing the wheel" ....

You've got pr0n: Yes, smut by email is latest workaround for UK's looming cock block

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Are premium rate lines still not blocked by default ?

If so, this is just a load of grandstanding ....

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

Re: all sorts of people will be sent all sorts of P0RN they never asked for,

AKA "The Law of Unintended Consequences"

Sort your spending habits out, UK Ministry of Defence told over £20bn black hole

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re: RE: Come IndyScotland and, hopefully, IndyWales

After all, didn't Wales vote to remain vassals of the ever-broadening powers and increasing direct law making of Brussels?

Er, no, Wales didn't. Wales was a clear Leave majority. Like their cousins the English.

Now Scotland and Northern Ireland on the other hand did vote Remain ....

Shining lasers at planes in the UK could now get you up to 5 years in jail

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

Light, or "laser"

CBA to read the statute, but the article seems to suggest there's confusion between *laser* light, and "light".

Is there a chance a pilot can be blinded by non-laser light, and teh miscreant goes free as it wasn't "laser" light ?

Zookeepers charged after Kodiak bear rides shotgun to Dairy Queen

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Sense of humor

Well yes.

But if they had got away with this "joke", how long before they (or someone else) do it again. And then until someone innocent (personally I don't care when dickheads get what's coming to them) gets killed.

What part of "wild" don't people understand about "wild animals" ?

App devs bewildered by last-minute Google GDPR klaxon

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

re: Do you really think Google cares?

In this case, yes.

Unlike the tissue-paper approach to protecting personal data the UK has got away with for decades, GDPR has a fucking big sting behind it, predicated on a transgressors *global* turnover. Which, in Googles case, is billions of dollars.

And I can't see anyone cutting Google any slack, when they've had so long, and access to so many resources to address the issue.

Trademark dispute by Dr Dre against Dr Drai the gynaecologist dismissed

JimmyPage Silver badge
Coat

Surely there's a joke about

c**nts in there ?

Microsoft vows to bridge phones to PCs, and this time it means it. Honest.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re: how great windows phone was

Here I have to agree. Windows Phone - certainly 7 to 8 was great. Much much cleaner feel than the slightly haphazard android look. And well thought out.

Which makes it even more bizarre MS dumped it ....

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

They'll have to wait

until all the developers that remember

Windows CE

Windows Phone 6

Windows Phone 6.5

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7.5

Windows Phone 7.8 (aka Windows Phone 8 "lite")

Windows Phone 8.0

have died first.

Or the procurement bods who got well and truly shafted by insisting on "Microsoft only" mobile devices to suddenly realise they had nothing to offer staff.

Every major OS maker misread Intel's docs. Now their kernels can be hijacked or crashed

JimmyPage Silver badge
Alert

Segmentation ...

I didn't like it then, I don't now.

It had nothing to do with performance or features, and everything to do with keeping a stranglehold on the market with "backwards compatibility".

We're starting to see the silicon equivalent of antibiotic resistance, as all those cumulative trade-offs make it impossible to secure a processor.

UK age-checking smut overlord won't be able to handle the pressure – critics

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re: What about these things called "parents"

You mean parents that teach you can only get pregnant when raped if you enjoyed it ?

Personally I'd like to see the state offer at least a minimum of scientifically accurate information.

Remember the poor girl that committed suicide when she had her first period - such was the "education" she received at home. You may not have heard of her, but you will have heard of "The Samaritans" ....

NASA demos little nuclear power plant to help find little green men

JimmyPage Silver badge
Pint

Terrestrial uses ?

I am sure there are plenty of projects that could help us here on earth (desalination ?) if we could get a long lasting 10KW to them ...

I bet the military already have there versions .... (I am aware the Russians used to power remote sites with plutonium reactors - a al "The Martian") ...

Well done science !!! Have a --->

Grab your lamp, you've pulled: Brits punt life-saving gravity-powered light

JimmyPage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

RE: Who is the hater downvoting all the comments?

Now you know how AI trollbots work.

It's a serious point. Do you really think all those upvotes for contentious views on various online fora were real ?

Take-off crash 'n' burn didn't kill the Concorde, it was just too bloody expensive to maintain

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: It was spent getting a dozen people to the moon and back instead

Yeah. Trained scientists doing a dangerous job for the betterment of mankind.

Not a bunch of overpaid Z-list "celebs" being subsidised on the taxpayers tit.

Your point would have only made sense if the US had sent "celebrities" to the moon. And it would have been negated if they'd left them there.

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

Article is a bit light on facts.

Surprised no one asked if it was IV, '77 or '95 ? (never believed in 66 ...)

Mannequin Skywalker takes high ground on Bezos-backed rocket

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re: What are they compensating for

Downvoted because I'm not sure why it's the role of the government to develop reusable LEO platforms ?????

By all means encourage and facilitate (via tax breaks and regulation).

But given how good governments are at wasting money, don't let them run the show.

Javid's in, Rudd's out: UK Home Sec quits over immigration targets scandal

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re: "In the world of technology policy, Rudd will be remembered"

Good riddance. Never in my 40 odd years of "political awareness" have I known a politician make so many gaffes and ignorant statements just by opening her mouth. She was reaching the point of being beyond a joke.

Er, Jacqui Smith ??????

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Re:to hit those targets, you need to have the numbers of (illegal?) immigrants.

Same with rape conviction "targets" .....

Who will fix our Internal Banking Mess? TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

promising that no one would be "left out of pocket".

but to what extent ?

When HSBC went titsup there were tales of house purchases which failed (HTF can you recompense that ????) plus business contracts which failed, and (presumably) bargains via eBay etc which were gone - forever.

Admittedly there haven't been any stories from that fuckup about custmers being left out of pocket. But I remain deeply cynical.

Reg writer Richard went to the cupboard, seeking a Windows Phone...

JimmyPage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I assume (hope) things have improved since.

Nope. 10x worse. Trying to google "how do I [x]" or "where is the [y]" returns pages of results which are guaranteed to be for a completely different phone and version of Android than you have.

And never post on a general Android forum ... you'll get loads of replies from people telling you how they do it. On their phone.

UK 'meltdown' bank TSB's owner: Our IT migration was a 'success'

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Stop

Paul Pester

a candidate for nominative determinism if ever there were one ...

Brexit has shafted the UK's space sector, lord warns science minister

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

The key conclusion and recommendation of the committee was that government needs to act quickly to reach an agreement that preserves UK access to EU space programmes.

Good luck with that ...

Brit bank TSB TITSUP* after long-planned transfer of customer records from Lloyds

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Test data ...

the problem with testing in these sort of situations is that the "test data" has been lovingly fiddled with over many years to be perfect.

Unlike the real world.

I have seen a few projects where more work went into fixing the test data than the program that was supposed to use it.

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

JimmyPage Silver badge
Joke

Re: We all know that next time you look there are more cables than were there last time.

In which case some sort of cross-breeding programme with ballpoint pens might be an idea ?

Chinese web giant finds Windows zero-day, stays schtum on specifics

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: IP camera that doesn't require an ActiveX plugin

All of them ?

Suggest you checkout Zoneminders forums, and follow links from there. There's tonnes of data on various no-name cameras. From my experience. they can all be controlled via HTTP querystrings.

(Funnily enough I just got an IP camera that's been off since 2013 working again under Linux. If it helps, you can catch 5 seconds worth of video with:

ffmpeg -i "http://192.168.10.123/videostream.cgi?user=admin&pwd=123456&resolution=640,480" -acodec pcm_mulaw -vcodec copy -force_key_frames 'expr:gte(t,n_forced*5)' -y -t 5 recording.asf

In fact if you Google "videostream.cgi" you should start finding links. Or if you're happy wiresharking or using Chromes debugger, you can see the data structures involved.

HMRC delays digi tax plans amid Brexit customs woes

JimmyPage Silver badge
Flame

So having to deal with Brexit ...

is actually going to hold us back in other - vitally-important-for-trade - areas ?

If only we'd been warned before the vote ???

It was utter insanity to expect a population that struggles with 3-for-2 offers to be able to understand the depths of the economic warnings about pratting about with such an embedded system as the EU.

Still, they broke it, so they can keep it.

Facebook scandal: EU politicians should aim for straight answers, not star witnesses

JimmyPage Silver badge
Headmaster

RE:you may have heard of Joseph McCarthy?

Or to prove a point, Cato and Carthago delenda est from two millennia ago ....

Great Western Railway warns of great Western password reuse: Brits told to reset logins

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

We need a court action

to decide a minimum level of protection below which an organisation is simply negligent (and thus liable) set as a precedent.

Forget pratting around with the ICO - may as well talk to the cat.

Any lawyers care to advise if this is possible ?

Sorry spooks: Princeton boffins reckon they can hide DNS queries

JimmyPage Silver badge
Big Brother

re: Why on earth is this being considered?Oh Good Grief

because the powers that be have repeatedly shown they can't be trusted.

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain

JimmyPage Silver badge
Happy

Re: Just look at the Northern Ireland border

I've been watching a fascinating documentary about how well the Soft Border is working already ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tnc2x/episodes/player

Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?

JimmyPage Silver badge
Windows

So many comments, but does no one remember

when it was called "File mangler" ?

Police chief wants citizens to bring 'net oligarchs to heel

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Not really dispelling the idea that generally the police are a little dim ..

is he ?

Why not sue the Highways agencies, for enabling criminals to move around ?

Or Southern Rail for the same (no, scratch that).

I really don't want criminal law to become "we'll charge the people we can catch" rather than "we'll charge the people responsible"

Ass-troplastic! Printing parts from p.. er... human waste

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Thumb Up

polyhydroxybutyrate

just made me think of

this

2001 set the standard for the next 50 years of hard (and some soft) sci-fi

JimmyPage Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Still Waiting...

The City and the Stars ....

Why a merged Apple OS is one mash-up too far

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Having a common kernel is a good idea,

Is it ?

Single point of failure and all that ?

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

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Thumb Up

HMG (and other governments) take note ..

When you are looking for a needle in a haystack, the old-school real-world approach was top reduce the size of the haystack, not increase it exponentially. Which is exactly what this strategy is.

I have been suggesting for years now, that a good use of GCHQ resources would be to write bots to make phishing completely worthless by generating billions of useless login details.

Are you able to read this headline? Then you're not Julian Assange. His broadband is unplugged

JimmyPage Silver badge
Coat

RE:Any further suggestions most welcome

Papillon ?

McVicar ?

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

JimmyPage Silver badge
Joke

old skool: seen on usenet:

>>>>> 8. The battery is fairly new.

>>>>

>>>> And fucked. Buy a new battery.

>>>

>>> You might be right, but is that the only way you're able to express

>>> yourself?

>>

>> Oh, dear, has the nasty man used a word you don't approve of? Well,

>> tough

>> titty.

>>

>

> You know, there was a time in this country - not a million years ago -

> when certain things were not said, and certain words were not used, in

> general social situations. That has changed, and now this sort of gutter

> language pervades almost all aspects of life. It hasn't improved

> anything, quite the reverse, and all it demonstrates is the inability of

> certain types to respect the language and other people.

History says otherwise

"What the fuck was that?" Mayor of Hiroshima

"Where did all these fucking Indians come from?" General Custer

"Where the fuck is all this water coming from?" Captain of the Titanic

"Thats not a real fucking gun." John Lennon

"Who's gonna fucking find out?" Richard Nixon

"Heads are going to fucking roll." Anne Boleyn

"Let the fucking woman drive." Commander of Space Shuttle "Challenger"

"What fucking map?" Mark Thatcher

"Any fucking idiot could understand that." Albert Einstein

"How the fuck did you work that out?" Pythagoras

"You want what on the fucking ceiling?" Michaelangelo

"Fuck a duck." Walt Disney

"Why?- Because its fucking there!" Edmund Hilary

"I don't suppose its gonna fucking rain?" Joan of Arc

"Scattered fucking showers my ass." Noah

"I need this parade like I need a fucking hole in my head." John F.

Kennedy

UK.gov: Here's £8.8m to plough into hydrogen-powered car tech

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Maybe on the plus side ...

it's a good start to capture that otherwise useless (because of it's unreliability) "renewable" energy. (looks at wind farms).

Surely the best way to store hydrogen is .... as hydrocarbons. You know. Like nature does.

Where's that too-cheap-to-meter energy we were promised in the 70s (or was it 80s. Or 90s ????)

FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Bypass or neutralise the try limit ..

More likely they've POKEd a NOP into the JLE operand ??????

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

JimmyPage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: The One Retailer you want to hear go out of business

Whilst I get your sentiments, it's a shame it'll be the coalface staff that suffer, not their shitlord bosses.

As your Maplins, Comets, (and soon to follow) PCWorld/Dixons/CPW all go, leaving the internet as the prime tech supplier, I have a nasty feeling that general IT literacy in the UK (which, let's face it, is hardly starting from a high point) will simply sink further.

Which is a tragedy, when you consider that for a brief sneeze of time - BBC Micro and compulsory computing in schools - we had the US shitting their pants.