Posts by Phil W

It could be a reason to smile, as could photos of a former partner. But as Facebook doesn't know which it is perhaps having a year in review video appear, even if only to yourself, should only happen when you request one not automatically.

Re: So I just take a USB cable with me?

Bluetooth teathering then perhaps?

Re: "it's a chat system within an ad-funded social network site"

My opinion is that it is not the responsibility of the law/government to protect the terminally stupid from their own naivety.

It rather reminds me of a story I heard, perhaps true perhaps urban legend. The story goes that someone places an advert in a newspaper along the lines of "Send £10 to this address now!" and received a surprisingly substantial sum. Nothing illegal about it, the victims handed over money with nothing promised in return.

Re: Comet?

Is the Internet not allowed in your city?

One would hope that the police would require more evidence than the victims accusation to go to court, at the very least records showing the IP used to upload the images and records associating that IP to the suspect. Or perhaps text messages/emails to the victim saying they were going to do it.

I think in many caaes though the ass hats uploading the pictures admit to it when challenged by police.

Re: No one cares...

Not really, since the industry will simply make up statistics to prove that it's still a problem and the draconian laws they want are needed. You can use statistics to prove anything, 40 percent of people know that.

Re: Disparity @Phil W

I agree, perhaps the point I didn't get across was that I think El Reg (and probably other media) are misreporting this as being about pay when it isn't.

Re: ALL YOUR XP BELONG US?

@localzuk presumably to prevent the clients from executing this vulnerability against a DC.

Re: Jeremy Clarkson

That does make me wonder how it might of been with James May presenting though.

Re: Biased?

"They now include quite a few simulations"

As do Cisco qualifications, the problem with these however is the virtual lab tests only support 1 accepted method of achieving the result even if there are other routes or commands that are just as valid to use, in IT there are always multiple ways to do the same job.

Re: For a particular value of 'you'.

"What's happening is the same as with cars - not many people even know what's is under the bonnet these days. There's no need -- many never even check the basics as the annual service will sort it."

I like the analogy but the flaw in it is that most people pay someone with training to service their car annually how many do this for their PC?

Most people will, if their car starts behaving weirdly or doing something it didn't do before, will seek professional advice, how many do this for their PC (before it's too late)?

Most people will, if they get someone knocking at their front door claiming to be from the garage and have come to service their car because it has a fault, when they hadn't called a garage about it, won't just hand over their keys. How many people fall victim to pop up ads, emails or even this spate of phone calls claiming their PC has a virus and needs looking at, just click here or type in this address to let us in to fix it?

The problem is, people don't view the things they access with their PC as "real" be it their email or their bank account, it's just on the computer so it's OK.

The answer to 2,2b and 4 is use something like MailScanner on your edge mail transport, drop all exes and zips, the AV scan it does on the rest should take care of the rest including PDFs but you could drop them to if you want since MailScanner will notify the users when it's blocked their attachments, so they can ask you to release it if it's a false positive.

The answer to 1 and 3 are the same. Who cares? Put the most acceptable AV of your choice on end user machines for some protection but have them keep all their work on a file server. If their PC gets infected nuke it, re-image and away you go.

In a well managed and backed up environment viruses and malware are rarely more than a bit of a nuisance. The bigger security problem is educating and preventing your users for falling for phishing mails and the like.

Re: My Dear Mr. Dabbs,

Are you really accusing the above post of being racist?

Dewey is generally correctly pronounced "Dew ee" or even "Du ee" rather than "Jewy" (there is an audible difference if you enunciate properly, you don't get Jew on your grass on a cold morning). It is a real surname and is Welsh in origin.

Also I'm not sure that playing on the semi-accurate stereotype of Jews working in the legal and financial sectors can be considered anti-Semitic. Unless you consider working in the legal and financial sectors to be a bad thing.

Besides which the entire post is clearly a joke on the theme of phishing email. Reading racism into it says more about you than it does about the poster.

Re: I thought April 1st came early

IANAL but I suspect the legality of this, from a data protection point of view, may be taken care of Twitter's own terms and conditions that you agree to by signing up and using the service, I would imagine there is a clause in their about consenting to third party apps reading and processing your posts.

As far the Samaritans being classified as a data processor, the only information they handle is a Twitter ID which is not necessarily identifiable to a real person and the content of their tweets which again don't necessarily contain personally identifiable data.

Whether they can be considered a data processor for processing publicly published data on the basis that some fool might tweet under their real name and tweet their home address I'm not sure.

Re: Outed?

Not sure it counts as being outed if it wasn't actually a secret.

Tim seems to be more of a "oh yeah btw I'm gay" sort than a "I'M QUEER AND I'M HERE!" sort.

Re: It's So Obvious It's Sad

Is there really much of a market for porn on blu-ray? I'd be very surprised if so, the uptake of Blu-ray very Did in mainstream media is still slow.

Re: Brilliant!

"If it's not on a search engine, it does not exist."

Hardly a 100% accurate statement. It may be true of information on small sites and blogs etc, but if I want to find a story on the BBC news site or on El Reg I don't Google it I go to that website and use their own search feature.

Re: No need to splice fibres to evesdrop

"What you do instead is bend the fibre to tap it."

" you'd likely have to shave off the cladding.

This is not impossible"

Am I the only one who read the article and/or has seen the inside of deep ocean cable before?

Aside from the fact that those heavily armoured, extremely thick, multi-layered cables of fibre, poly and steel will have a limited amount of bend in them (which may not be sufficient bend for this type of tap) you're still having to cut through the high voltage electrical feed to get to fibre pairs where you've bent it.

Assuming that there's redundancy in those electrical cables and cutting them at one side for your splice doesn't take out one or more repeaters you've still got the danger and inherent problems in cutting through a live high voltage cable, whether that be a diver under the water or inside a hypothetical winch equipped submarine.

Don't worry, little Bobby Tables will patch it for you.

Re: Ignore the licence requirements

While I agree with the sentiment of your post, it would be worth pointing out that the article author didn't say to ignore the rules or the insurance, only not to bother getting a licence.

Assuming that you had insurance, and were flying responsibly beyond all the required distances from people, buildings and "congested areas" I think it's highly unlikely you'll be prosecuted.

Unless of course something goes wrong and you crash and injure someone, but I doubt having the necessary CAA licence would make the slightest difference in that event, you would likely be prosecuted with similar results regardless.

As an aside, it would be eminently sensible for the rules (or lack there of) regarding the sale of drones to be changed, depending on what the CAA do with their new regulations on the matter.

It wouldn't seem unreasonable to me that you should have to prove, or at least complete a form stating, you hold the necessary licence before being allowed to buy one.

While ignorance of the law is never an excuse as such, the fact that you can walk into high street stores (Maplin did sell the DJI Phantoms) and buy one would not make the average buy think a licence or insurance are required, anymore so than they would be when buying a toy remote control car.

I recently bought a new car (of the normal road-going variety) and was unsurprisingly asked for my driving licence before being allowed to drive off in it, I'm not sure there's any law requiring that but if not there should be.

Re: Ofcom .. concluding that it would be unfair to make the UK’s then 4.6 million receivers obsolete

Indeed, there are a great many users of analog FM receivers however the vast majority are those listening in cars.

An uptake in mobile manufacturers including DAB in their devices may well reduce that number however as cars with built in Bluetooth music streaming and/or 3.5mm Aux in connectors is on the rise, not to mention replacement head units for older cars with Bluetooth/Aux in being substantially cheaper than those with DAB.

Another good plan for the BBC to increase uptake of DAB would be to produce (ok contract out and re-badge) cheaper DAB units for cars.

DAB has one inherent flaw that digital terrestrial TV didn't, the cost to consumers to upgrade.

There is a difference between the rights of an individual and the rights of a corporate entity. Sometimes this is a good thing, in this case perhaps not so good.

Re: Defender is not AV

Defender is effectively a light and less managed version of System Center Endpoint Protection, a lot of the core file are in fact the same between the two as I recall.

Re: A small step in the right direction

De-authing networks does have it's legitimate uses though. For instance in a business environment where people shouldn't be using their own Wi-Fi or plugging in unauthorised equipment in your buildings but do so anyway.

Re: It's an improvement

Have just installed, with network cable unplugged and no Microsoft account required (obviously need to add one if you want to use the Store)

Re: Default Comment

Quite. It's annoying when they say this so early on, they can't possibly know the impact or scale of the breach so soon.

I'm not a customer of any of their sites but if I were in the event of breach I would be happier to be told "At this time we are confident that no customer data was accessed, but are performing a thorough investigation to verify this. We will inform you if any of your data is affected." than to be told my data isn't affected initially and then told it is later.

"they should not claim it is Open Source"

They don't, and never have.

The Android OS is open source, and is available as such through the AOSP (Android Open Source Project).

Google's app store and other proprietary software is added on top and is quite decidedly closed source.In much the same way as HTC Sense, Samsung TouchWiz or all of Amazon's Kindle stuff on the Fire.

Re: Stop! Take a breath...

Indeed, Windows 2000 was essentially 50% of the development from NT4 to XP, all the nice stable backend improvements and stuff with a rather spartan GUI on top.

Windows ME was the other 50%, i.e. all the bells and whistles and fanciness without the backend and reliability to support it.

If it's not a word it certainly should be. It has far more right to be in the OED than some of the other Internet slang that has been added of late.

I think the BOFH would approve of the term out-bastarded.

AbelSoul I think you need to reread the post you're replying to. It asks why the English don't get on vote on Scotland staying, not on English independence.